Bundling a Wiki Search: Choice Cuts

What an appropriate day -- Thanksgiving -- on which to review Mark Kurlansky's Choice Cuts: A Savory Selection of Food Writing from Around the World and Throughout History. This is the last of a bunch of Kurlansky's books I read, none really measuring up to his history of Salt and Cod: 1968, Oyster and now Choice Cuts are all really grade B. CC is such an amalgamation that it reads as disjointedly as if it were prepared by a student who search Wiki for "food" and copied down snippets of every primary, secondary and tertiary hit he got. Until Oyster, CC is not overloaded with repetitious recipes. It is more like an all you can eat buffet, sometimes showing the quality of the cheese grater hotel in Montreal, but more often like the Golden Corral.

I have a closet full of cookbooks on shelves next to the kitchen, some are old reliables, some more souvenirs of other times or places. I subscribe to Food and Wine and probably have too many old Gourmets in the basement, magazines I thought my sons might clip for history or geography of Europe projects in school that never materialized. Like my recent review of why I, or anyone, assemble jigsaw puzzles, I refer to the last entry in Kurlansky's book, by MFK Fisher on why she writes about food: "It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the other."

I have been working in the kitchen today since 6:30 AM, putting together a meal that will make memories for my son, attest to my willingness to adapt the menu to his favorite foods, and express my creativity and signal love and appreciation. I cannot put together a Thanksgiving menu without recalling my mother's or the ones I cooked for her first in my apartment and then this old house. There always was an homage as well as a tease: always a side of Brussel sprouts which she detested. Dessert must be a pie, often sweet potato instead of pumpkin, and more recently chocolate pecan, a pie John would sell his soul for. Very infrequently a turkey, more often a goose when there were enough of us around the table to do it justice, and this year a duck for the three of us. (A duck that will always remind me of setting the oven on fire in my apartment and dowsing it with the glass of beer I happened to have in my hand when I opened the stove.) Always seasonal vegetables, this year replacing the dreaded sprouts, maybe never to be served on holidays again since my mother died this summer, are roasted kohlrabi with butternut squash. Stuffing more like hers, with sausage, since no one here likes chestnuts, and John won't eat oysters ... sorry Kurlansky.

Proust was right ... and a neuroscientist ... that certain food bring unsolicited, pleasant memories. Yet, a chef, as I fancy myself, is also conscientiously intentional about creating those memories. We all recall the year I decided the pilgrims must have tried lobster and we cooked an eight pounder, too big for all our pots, and beyond the reference of friends in Maine who had no idea how long to cook it. Or the year Nana drank so much champagne before dinner that several parts of it were missing or undercooked, but she didn't care at all. Bill is making his own memory today, doing a variation of mac and cheese, gnocchi with Gruyere, as a gift to his friend's parents' supper.

Strangely today on Epicurious was a quick survey about how people regard chocolate: do they share it with a spouse, a friend, or keep it for themselves. I checked off option two, and found myself in the small minority. I always have good chocolate in my desk drawer at work, and people know that and stop by asking for a taste or two. When I get my favorite Vosges chocolate at The Fresh Market, I buy enough to give my college roommate a bar when she comes trick or treating. Finger sticky chocolate is best licked off by another.

Kurlansky delves not only into home cooking but the meaning of dining out. He cites the common reaction of a diner who wants to rush home to try to replicate a meal enjoyed in a restaurant, something I inevitably want to do, with the possible exception of cooking sweetbreads. He does not give enough credence to the importance of one's fellow diners. I select a restaurant with complete regard to the person with whom I am going out to eat: certain places are marked in my mind for special friends and no one else need attend them. I scout new restaurants not only for their specialties or ambiance, but as setting for table mates.

Again, towards the conclusion of his book, Kurlansky cites Balzac on the politics of food: "Just as the first enthusiasts of abstinence were undoubtedly maladjusted, the first enthusiasts of moderation were surely people lacking in appetite ... Aristippe observed that philosophers who distrust wealth are penniless. Diogenes was broke when he was a cynic ... That is the way it is with detractors of appetite, of the tendency that is inherent in well-born men of happy constitution. It is not the first time that charlatans misguided and well spoken, have come to consider a virtue, that which is a well-organized vice." I never want to be abstinent, or even do most things in moderation. I am not a glutton, but an epicure; I am not a trollop, but a sensualist.