Probably the most anticipated food-related news around Louisville for the next week — aside from the millions of dollars expected to be made at local restaurants during the Breeders’ Cup — is the debut of the latest season of “Top Chef.” As you may already know, 610 Magnolia Executive Chef and Owner Edward Lee was picked to compete on “Top Chef: Texas,” filmed in the Lone Star State over the summer. If you haven’t seen his really rather goofy audition video, you can watch it here: http://www.bravotv.com/top-chef/season-9/videos/casting-videos?id=99284#selected. Needless to say, we’ll be watching every night it’s on from the season opener, which of course is Wednesday, November 2nd at 10 PM.
(Photo of Sean Brock by Gabriele Stabile, from The New Yorker.)
Though it happens to be the annual cartoon issue, last week’s New Yorker has an excellent profile by Burkhard Bilger on Charleston, South Carolina Chef Sean Brock, known for his restaurants McCrady’s and Husk. Entitled “True Grits,” the piece goes into some detail not only about Chef Brock’s efforts to re-invent Southern cooking while staying true to heirloom ingredients, but also provides a lot of information I didn’t previously know about how Southern foodstuffs have changed over the centuries. For instance:
“You know how many strains of rice they tried to grow in this area?” Brock asked me, when we visited the farm northeast of Charleston where two-thirds of his produce is grown. “One hundred. One hundred different strains of rice. That’s crazy. So what happened? Why did that change? If they could pull it off in the nineteenth century, why can’t we do it today? Because we’re lazy, that’s why.”
…If the South was a [food] laboratory [in the nineteenth century], Charleston was its test kitchen. The city sat at a cultural and agricultural crossroads. It was home to Europeans, Africans, Native Americans, and Asians. It had ocean and farm, pasture and rice paddy, tropical fruit and temperate grain. A housewife wandering through its market stalls could find Italian olives, Seville oranges, Jamaican sugarcane, and Mexican chayote, all from local orchards and farms. Along the docks, she could choose from oysters, terrapins, sheepshead, and bastard snappers, among more than fifty kinds of fish.
Makes you wish someone would invent a time machine, no? The article definitely draws the reader into Brock’s world quite well, as well as the world of Southern food before World War II. Which is not to say that Chef Brock seems like a throwback, at all. Indeed, like Chef Lee, and, well, most chefs, Brock’s a-ha moment was inspired by elBulli’s Ferran Adria. And much like Lee, Bilger writes:
Brock’s genius is to have it both ways. His restaurants are like cleverly argued revisionist histories: they appeal to your nostalgia while reversing your expectations. McCrady’s, housed in an eighteenth-century brick tavern, is devoted to the arcane craft of molecular gastronomy. The dishes are laced with local oddities like cattails and pokeweed but inspired by the high-tech wizardry of chefs like [MOTO’s] Grant Achatz. Husk, which occupies a matronly Victorian four blocks away, is a more rustic affair. When Brock opened it, last year, he vowed to use no ingredient from north of the Mason-Dixon Line… At Husk, Brock is re-creating what Southern food once was. At McCrady’s, he’s showing what it could be.
Another fascinating read I bought this week, though by far less ephemeral than a magazine article, is the new Oxford Companion to Beer, edited by Brooklyn Brewery Brewmaster Garrett Oliver. At 868 pages, it’s a monster of a read, and I expect it to be something I can return to over and over again, much like Hugh Johnson and Jancis Robinson’s The World Atlas of Wine or Dave Broom’s The World Atlas of Whisky. Though I admit that I still haven’t read Oliver’s The Brewmaster’s Table, he seems like an inspired choice for editor of the OCB. If I have any small quibbles so far, it’s that it seems like Midwestern craft breweries are underrepresented: of course Goose Island‘s in there, as they should be, but what about Bell’s? Founders? 3 Floyds? Though GI is sort of the granddaddy of the modern Midwestern craft movement (which ultimately was recognized by their purchase by AB-InBev), I do think those three I mentioned are important (not to mention much smaller local brews, like the New Albanian or the BBC here in the Louisville area). Nonetheless, I’m excited to dive in.
Last but not least, you may not think of Soviet-era Russian literature when you think of food. Or at least you probably don’t think of anything positive regarding food. The Soviet prison system of GULAG — so aptly illustrated by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s work, including The Gulag Archipelago and A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich — wasn’t a place where I’d expect to find a decent food writer, since most prisoners were limited to barely enough bread and soup to survive (neither of which tasted at all well, according to Solzhenitsyn). Understandably, you may be a bit puzzled why the last food-related read I’m mentioning is the new posthumous collection of short stories by Solzhenitsyn, Apricot Jam and Other Stories, even despite the title. Well, as I’ve learned from being on a major Soviet history and literature kick this year, the absence of good food does actually lead some writers to be wonderfully descriptive concerning food. For instance, in the title story, apricots become the prime ironic device linking the two main characters — a GULAG prisoner and an unnamed writer — in Solzhenitsyn’s “binary” storytelling method:
As long as anyone can remember, our family lived in the village of Lebyazhy Usad in Kursk Province…. The first thing in the orchard was a spreading apricot tree, and there would be heaps of apricots on it every year. My younger brothers and I would climb all over that tree. Apricots were our most favorite fruit, and I never tasted any as good as ours. In the summer kitchen in the yard my mother would make us apricot jam, and my brothers and I just couldn’t get enough of that sweet foam.
In “Ego,” the climax of the story takes place at a feast for partisans fighting the Bolsheviks after the Russian Civil War:
They met in a large house of a prosperous family that stood in the middle of the village, near the church and where the lines of houses met. The imposing woman of the house, not yet old, and her daughters and daughters-in-law had set up a row of tables to seat twenty. There was mutton, roast chickens, new cucumbers, and potatoes. Bottles of home-brewed vodka were set along the tables, together with some cut-glass tumblers….Glasses of vodka were poured, raising the mood and the fellowship of the meeting. Mutton and ham were sliced with long knives; smoke from the bracing homegrown tobacco rose here and there and spread across the ceiling. The hostess floated about the room while the younger women fussed, served, and cleared away the dishes.
I don’t know about you, but that reads like good food writing to me! I suppose that sometimes deprivation really leads to new descriptive heights. I’m only a few stories into Apricot Jam so far, but I highly recommend it.
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