Flags of Our Fathers, 00:15:12

Those white boys sure come out dark.

I write to you today a different man than I was scant more than a week before. I have grown. I have matured. I have expanded my horizons and waist size. I have consumed a whole bayou’s worth of crawfish. I have, my friends, eaten my way through Acadiana.

Looking out towards the Gulf at Big Lake

My friend John, a Cajun-bred college chum for whom I played the drums in an alt-country band that spectacularly imploded under the weight of several aged-19-years egos, and who will allow me talk his ear off about cooking in exchange for home-cooked food, had the bright idea a couple months ago to go on a gustatory pilgrimage from Austin to the homeland around Lake Charles. And so it was that the weekend before last he, his girlfriend Kristen and I set out on a voyage to the crawfish-scented heart of Cajun country for a three-day binge on the fried, buttered, drowned and smothered Continental-cum-crustacean cuisine of those long-expelled French Canadians. In southern Louisiana, God bless it, the roux is dark, the people are Catholic and the arteries explode by 55. We were determined, kike and swamp kike alike, to sacrifice our circulatory systems on the altar of étouffée and andouille. And we did. Lord, we did. I would have taken pictures, but I’m unable to bring myself to take pictures of food anywhere outside my own kitchen. It’s tacky. So use your imagination, kids.

I should note that despite their frequent confusion in the popular imagination, Cajun cuisine (originating among the exiled Francophones of south-central and southeast Louisiana) and Creole cuisine (originating among the culturally and ethnically mixed Creoles of New Orleans) are fairly distinct, even though they share several dishes. Creole cuisine draws heavily from aristocratic French haute cuisine with distinct Spanish and African influences; Cajun cuisine evolved out of peasant French cooking traditions, and was insulated from the pernicious influence of the yellow-bellied Spaniard while picking up foods, cooking techniques and culinary vocabulary from the local Indians. It’s easy to spot the differences: if the dish in front of you has tomatoes, hot peppers or beans, it’s Creole. If it has something that was recently clubbed to death in a swamp before being heavily cayenne peppered and served over rice, it’s Cajun. If it features blackened anything, it’s Emeril food, and thus neither Cajun nor Creole. Know the difference and you’ll never utter the phrase “spicy Cajun red beans and rice” again.

The trip marked both my first time in Lake Charles and my first time back to my old southern Louisiana stomping grounds since 2005; my planned return back then was forestalled by the series of unfortunate meteorological occurrences which precipitated my luckless Israeli odyssey. The landscape had changed a bit thanks to a couple of lovely Cat 5 ladies, but the feeling of content stagnation that hangs over Louisiana like August humidity hadn’t changed a bit. I was surprised to realize that I had missed it.

We stayed on the shores of Big Lake in a nicely-appointed beach house on stilts (called, modestly, a “camp” in the local argot) owned by John’s rarely-glimpsed father, a prominent local attorney and sports novelist who spent the weekend tourneying about the immaculately manicured artificial hills of the Lake Charles golf course with the son of Bing Crosby. Bing himself showed up in the form of a vinyl copy of White Christmas John’s stepmom had perched on the end table in the living room; Son-of-Bing remained unseen, although John’s grandmother, an eccentric of the very finest variety, told us over her restaurant water glass-sized vodka on the rocks that we hadn’t missed much, as she had always preferred Frank Sinatra anyway. She also invited the three of us back next month to witness the creation of her crawfish bisque, an event of apparently quasi-religious significance in the family.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Our first order of business upon arrival was to attempt to eat our weight in crawfish. The local seafood shanty obliged with enormous steaming platters of the ugly little bastards. It’s a lot of work to eat five pounds of crawfish; a fat specimen still only yields about a cocktail shrimp’s worth of meat, and you have to pry off the tail to get to it. But put down enough beer and, like most everything else, what started out arduous quickly becomes a good deal of fun. So between us John and I dismembered ten pounds of Acadiana’s finest edible aquatic bugs. For dessert, we each had a big plate of crawfish étouffée. Kristen, a vegetarian who had, at least for the weekend in confirmed meat country, essentially given up the green-conscious ghost, went experimental with a dish of oysters in a heavy yellow cheese sauce, which almost managed to transcend the oddness of its conception and arrive at “good.” Ten pounds of crustacean, half a dozen bottles of beer, good company and a view on the water at sunset all conspired to create a ferocious dinner. And that was only the first night.

The next day our ragged and insatiable party was joined by John’s little sister, back in town from college, and we swung by a popular 24-hour diner to shovel down the world’s most Southern breakfast, to which any written description does not do justice. Imagine, if you will, a baked potato. Then imagine that said baked potato had been buried under a mountain of grilled chicken and melted cheddar cheese. Then imagine that the grilled chicken and melted cheddar cheese were really only theoretical constructs anyway, because they had been rendered completely invisible by a Biblical deluge of cream gravy. Then imagine there were some grits, and also that your heart stopped out of spite for your brain. Simply breakfast.

The day meandered towards a vague plan to go mucking about in the wetlands, or at least on the paved trails leading through the wetlands, in order to see some of the native game, known in the common parlance as “alligators.” Such dangerous business demanded further dietary fortification, so we stopped at a roadside shack to pick up some cracklings (gratons), deep-fried cubes of pork skin with meat and gristle still attached, a Church-sanctioned form of mass suicide on the part of the Cajun people. Those were good, although perhaps not good enough to justify the three months every single one removed from my life expectancy. The same shack also equipped us with crawfish pistolettes, sweet and flaky rolls filled with stewy crawfish goodness, essentially a portable version of crawfish étouffée.

Southern Louisiana wetlands, it turns out, look essentially like wetlands everywhere else, although they are significantly hotter and full of large relict reptiles. I mused that if Purgatory existed, it must look much like a Louisiana wetlands state park: endless expanses of marsh grass and cattails on either side of an asphalt path leading to nowhere to in particular. It’s not Hell, but it ain’t like there’s a Ramada neither. The gators were disinclined to put in an appearance, much to the dismay of John’s sister, so we piled back into the car and turned back towards relative civilization. Then we saw some out of the car window, sunning in the little canal by the road. So let that be a lesson: if you want to see nature in Louisiana, be it alligators or neon-clad canal-fishin’ locals, stay in the car.

On the way back, we hit up a gas station - America! - for yet another local delicacy, boudin, a delicious goo with aspirations to sausage status made out of swiney mystery meat, rice and herbs stuffed into a casing. And then? Well, then we went to dinner. John’s aforementioned grandmother treated us all to a grand feast at a seafood restaurant, which made up for its inferior crawfish with great deadly piles of fried shrimp, fried catfish, fried oysters and fried stuffed crab. We washed it all down with Abita, which if memory serves may well have been fried.

Heading back on Memorial Day, which locked up Lake Charles solid, we chanced upon an open restaurant/game animal processing facility a town or two over for what would be our last Louisianan hurrah: jambalaya, gumbo and an armful of local sausage and filé powder to stock the kitchens back home. A fitting and gut-busting end to three days of unrestrained binging.

Necessarily, my first order of business upon returning was to track down a source of live in-season crawfish, Louisianan andouille and tasso in Austin. Louisiana isn’t that far away, but it’s enough of schlep that I worry all that plaque might start to clear up if I don’t learn how to make Cajun suicide cuisine myself. It’s pretty easy: you just gotta start with a whole stick of butter and go from there…

I’ll admit it: I like beer. I’m not making a bold statement; pretty much everyone in the world, except for people in those countries that cut off hands for minor criminal offenses, is fond of the stuff. When even the Turks have a national brand, you have a popular beverage on your hands. But while everyone likes beer, some drinkers are bound and determined to turn beer from a pleasant and universal diversion to a grim and sober ratings game in which beers are ruthlessly lined up and measured, after which any found to be somehow deficient or not Western European in origin are scorned and summarily eliminated.

I know, the concept sounds German, but this growing beer snobbery seems to be chiefly an American concern, a way of overcompensating for the grave sin of allowing our very worst beers to take over the world. The Germans are not beer snobs, because they don’t have to be: their tap water is 8 proof and their children are weaned on Löwenbräu. The first word of 48% of German children is “Reinheitsgebot” (the first word of the other 52%, of course, is “lebensraum“). In America, though, we have as little use for subtlety as we do for A-cups and open borders. We discovered a few years ago that much of the world’s beer isn’t pale amber and made from rice, and goddammit, we’re gonna buy it all and we’re gonna like it better than anyone else likes it. Because we’re the best.

And so we now have the cerevisaphile, a new class of connoisseur created when the overflowing barrel of national wine pretension sloshed over into the beer aisle. These are men - and make no mistake, this is an entirely male pursuit - who gingerly decant their beer, time the duration of its head with a stopwatch and make elaborate tasting notes between sips. (”Hoppy character, smells of wheat with distinct notes of yeast and an overwhelmingly liquid mouthfeel.”) But our boy Newton wasn’t wrong, and unsurprisingly the American beernaissance has given rise to a vociferous cadre of counterrevolutionaries, clinging with grim determination to the boozy soda water that slaked America’s thirst throughout the century of its ascendancy. For every dude who wants you to know that he can tell a weizen from a weizenbock, there are three who think he’s a fag for not drinking Old Milwaukee.

In a perfect world, these types would be relegated to bars, liquor stores and automotive sporting events, but unfortunately, our noticeably imperfect world has Tim Berners-Lee in it, and so every single one of these people has migrated to the Internet. Especially to beer ratings sites, where they gleefully share tasting notes and accusations of pansy-assedness. And it is those sites - specifically, RateBeer.com - that are the focus of this series of posts.

The idea is simple: I pick a terrible but much-loved American beer, the kind churned out by our major breweries and enthusiastically consumed at barbecues, sports games, pool halls and racialist power rallies all over our fair land, and then I scour RateBeer.com’s review pages for the beer for both a pretentious, overcomplicated cerevisaphile takedown and an indignant, often barely coherent glowing 5-star endorsement. Basically, I’m looking for the worst possible way to express two very basic ideas: in the former case, “It sucks”; in the latter case, “WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!”

We start, fittingly enough, with Pabst Blue Ribbon, a beer of aggressive mediocrity which has not only retained its faithful following among the blue collar but entered the anemic embrace of those trendy Williamsburg types, who think pretending to be poor is the very apogee of arch irony (it’s funny, you see, cuz they’re not). So without further ado, the best of RateBeer.com on the most middling of American beers:

Overweening Cerevisaphile Sez:

Pours a clear straw sort of color with a quickly dissipating head leaving no lace, bubbles flying up from the bottom. Mostly a grain smell, pretty clean, with a hint of floralness. Grainy in taste, but not in a bad way, a little bit of corn, and only a touch of hops. Taste almost dances on your tongue with the amount of carbonation. I imagine this as a great beer with many different foods. Higher carbonation, but seems to be a nice addition to this one. Light to medium body, I expected very light body, but having a little something there is nice. I usually don’t save any room for macro’s in my fridge, but I may be able to squeeze a little room for this.

I’m not sure if the PBR demographic, or anyone else, is concerned with how much “lace” the stuff leaves. Or at least, nobody goes to the mini-mart and carefully considers the optimal lace-to-price ratio of all the beers sold in individual tallboy cans out of the cooler full of crushed ice.

Overburdened Cracker Sez:

Okay so you’re layin on a beach, minding your own buisness when all of a sudden…BAM!!! you get hit in the crotch with something…it’s an ice cold PBR. You crack it open & take a sip and all of a sudden the Doobie Brothers show up and they’re playin “China Grove” and it rocks…hard. You’ve just experienced Liquid Cold Sunshine that gets better each and every time. Natty Ice and Genny Cream Ale are for fratboys…Pabst is for the distinguished alcoholic.

Okay, that’s actually kind of funny, but…maybe I’m conceited, maybe I need to get the redness of my blood checked, but a product that interrupts a pleasant reverie with testicular pain and an appearance by the Michael McDonald Clearinghouse Players doesn’t get five stars in my book. That is such a beer commercial conceit, though: a man pops a beer in the overbearing drabness of the real world and is magically transported to a hoppy carnival land where real men play some real MOR rock while fake blondes shake some fake tits. That, son, is America. It’s too bad that doesn’t really happen. It would force the hipsters to move on to a new beverage of choice (Olde English eight hundos? Molson Lite? Pulque?), unless of course they find the Doobie Brothers somehow ironic.

Next up: Schlitz!

I learned something today. I learned that Tony Chachere’s, the seasoning blend of salt, salt, salt, salt, salt, cayenne pepper, garlic and salt which is, along with Crystal hot sauce, de rigueur on every Louisiana table, was actually invented and marketed by a guy named Tony Chachere from St. Landry Parish.

This came as a surprise. I had always assumed Tony Chachere was an imaginary corporate focus group food mascot, like Ronald McDonald, Aunt Jemima or Rachael Ray. I thought that somewhere deep in the bowels of ConAgra marketing research drones had built the perfect ersatz Cajun, cartoonized and outfitted with a chef’s hat and glasses scientifically proven to drive consumers to heavily season their food with the company’s proprietary lab-tested spice blend, which they then could spin off into a whole product line of similarly branded food-type products.

But I was wrong. He’s real, man. He’s real. Look at him:

Once upon a time, somewhere deep within the dark beating heart of the swamp, specifically Opelousas, the real live Tony Chachere stood whisking a skillet of dark brown roux, plotting and waiting for the moment when he would convert it into a container of no-fuss just-add-water powder and in so doing conquer America (Note: Soul and Gone does not recommend making roux out of powder, unless the powder happens to be flour which you then add to heated oil, drippings or butter.)

But really, what next? Is someone going to tell me that Paul Prudhomme is real too?

(More on Cajun food coming up…)

Kasha Varnishkes/קאשה וורנישקס (כוסמת עם אטריות)/קאשע ווארנישקעס
каша варнишки/Kasha Varnishkas/Kasha Varnishka

Mmm. Childhood food. I don’t think anyone ever acquires a taste for kasha varnishkes as an adult; for the dish to be truly appreciated, the earthiness of the kasha and the fleeting sweetness of the caramelized onions have to be augmented by recollection, by the sense memories of your grandmother’s kitchen as experienced from your below-the-countertop vantage point. Eating kasha varnishkes without ever having had an Eastern European Jewish grandmother is like eating hummus without tehina.

Kasha varnishkes is a heavyweight of Ashkenazi Jewish cuisine in America, familiar to probably every American Ashkenazi with roots in Eastern Europe. I grew up eating it in my Baba Larisa’s little apartment, where it was usually followed by her airy, moist apple cake, but until not so long ago, I was under the impression that it was a Russian dish. My mother’s parents, from the Austro-Hungarian/Romanian/Ukrainian/Romanian/Ukrainian/Russian/Ukrainian city Chernivtsi (isn’t 20th century European history fun?), had their Jewishness, or at least their willingness to talk much about it, effectively beaten out of them by the lightning jab and cross of the Nazis and the Communists, which is why it took me so long to realize that many of the foods I had grown up identifying as Russian, kasha varnishkes among them, were actually Ashkenazi Jewish.

Kasha is the Slavic word for any kind of cereal porridge, a basic staple of Eastern European cuisine - but in Yiddish, which adopted the word from the Slavic languages, and in English, which adopted the word from Yiddish, it refers pretty much exclusively to buckwheat groats. The etymology of varnishkes is murkier. It means “bow-tie noodles,” but it appears (to my knowledge) only in the context of this dish. It’s a Yiddish word, at least in structure and phonology, but the Yiddish word for “noodles” is the unrelated lokshn. Obvious cognates don’t appear in the main source languages of Eastern Yiddish (medieval German, classical Hebrew, and the surrounding Slavic tongues). The Italians, who probably invented bow-tie noodles, call them farfalle (butterflies), so much as in World War I, they’re little help. I couldn’t even find a consensus on how to spell varnishkes in Yiddish. I was beginning to think, after much research (even, vey is mir, reading Yiddish newsgroups), that like General Tso, tikka masala, and the global success of Domino’s, varnishkes would have to be consigned to the great realm of culinary mystery. But then I asked my mother, who knows everything.

“It’s from vareniki,” she said. I was skeptical. Filled dumplings seemed a fairly far cry from bowtie noodles and kasha. But then she started making sense: she explained that “varnishkes” was a Yiddish corruption of “варенички” (varenichki), the diminutive of vareniki, and that the dish arose as a quick and easy version of those significantly more arduous stuffed pasta dumplings. Those lazy Jews. It makes sense; varnishkes sounds pretty damned close to varenichki. Reigning lady of Jewish cooking Joan Nathan mentions a kasha varnishkes recipe dating back to 1925 that was “basically a kreplach-type noodle stuffed with kasha, buckwheat groats, and gribenes” - which implies that, at some point in its history, kasha varnishkes was literally kasha vareniki, that is, noodle dumplings stuffed with kasha. So there you have it: a mystery even the Internet had no answer for, solved in thirty seconds by my mother. And they give Joan Nathan the million-dollar ethnic cookbook deals. Feh.

But for now, less inherent unfairness of life, more kasha varnishkes recipe. Read on:
Read the rest of this entry »

My musical taste these days usually plies a fairly reliable course between reggae and jazz, with frequent calls at R&B, hip-hop and MPB, but occasionally it will drift a bit off course and I’ll stumble upon something uncharted that commands my attention for a time. Lately? The Isley Brothers. Obscure? Hardly. Outside the realm of my normal musical affections? Not at all. But somehow, to me, overlooked. No other group was able to keep abreast of every major development in black American pop for as long. They could sear nearly as hot as Funkadelic, and then turn it around and quiet storm hard enough to break Smokey Robinson’s windows. But despite all my explorations of bygone generations of black pop, I only recently figured that out.

Oh, I was familiar enough with the early part of Isleys’ career. “Shout,” “Twist and Shout,” and “It’s Your Thing” are as imprinted on my consciousness as they are on every other living person’s. I’d even heard some of their very early, basically doo-wop material…

“Angels Cried”

…and of course I was aware that the Isleys had once employed (and lived with) a very young, pre-fame Jimi Hendrix…

“Move Over and Let Me Dance” (ft. Jimi Hendrix)

(Isn’t it odd how an Isley Brothers song that happens to feature Jimi Hendrix as a sideman sounds like nothing other than a Jimi Hendrix original? The man had a signature sound and gone.)

Somehow though, mea maxima culpa, I had overlooked the group’s post-’60s efforts. I really don’t know how.

I began to realize the error of my ways when, by chance, I heard the blistering “That Lady (Pts. 1 & 2),” a remake of a song from the Isleys’ earlier days, which despite being a fairly major hit in 1973 had escaped my usual awareness of the pop culture of yesteryear. A massive oversight on my part, I know.

“Who’s That Lady?” (1964 original)

“That Lady (Pts. 1 & 2)”

So I began acquiring and soaking up their albums from the Gaye-and-Hayes era, getting particularly into 3 + 3, in which the Brothers traded in their snazzy R&B suits and pompadours for the fringe, leather, velvet, chrome lamé and open shirts worn by any self-respecting band of ’70s Afro spacemen, and brought on the younger generation of Isleys as full-time instrumentalists and official band members - including Strat-slinger Ernie Isley, who had obviously paid close attention during the period of his cohabitation with Mr. Hendrix. 3 + 3 and the few albums that follow it demonstrate the Isleys’ unparalleled ability to toe big-name funk’s finest line: aiming for the charts without sacrificing the groove. A few dance hits aside, Parliament/Funkadelic’s 40-odd members were - God bless them - too busy snorting their way through a Chocolate Milky Way of cocaine to make a concerted effort at freeing America’s mind and pop charts, and for all Earth, Wind and Fire’s success, we must remember that basically only a few tasty guitar solos separated them from being the black KC and the Sunshine Band. No, when it came to the R&B and pop chart-toppers in the ’70s, it didn’t get much better than the Isleys. By the middle of the decade, they had even begun, in classic Isley fashion, to smell what Sly Stone and War had been cooking up the past few years, i.e. fist-in-the-air, brick-through-the-Man’s-window protest funk:

“Fight the Power (Pts. 1 & 2)”

But their compelling funksmanship aside, perhaps the Isleys’ greatest (and most surprising) strength is taking drecky MOR ’70s pop songs and stapling balls to them. Even James fucking Taylor.

See, now here is, ahem, sweet baby James’s “Don’t Let Me Be Lonely Tonight,” culled from the greatest hits album I downloaded for the purposes of this post and then immediately deleted before it could make me find Carly Simon, and by extension Steven Tyler and Seabiscuit, attractive.

“Don’t Let Me Be Lonely Tonight” (James Taylor)

God, what on Earth would ever make any woman want to let him be lonely? No, really, do you realize how many white children were conceived to this song, how many drape-haired and mustachioed ’70s-sensi-dudes let fly their seed to the sound of the hacky saxophone solo? No wonder the resulting generation was so into depression and flannel. My advice: don’t shake hands with any white American 35-year-olds - you might catch the Taylor.

But now here are the Isley Brothers doing the very same song, the song penned by the bony alabaster fingers of James Taylor:

“Don’t Let Me Be Lonely Tonight” (Isley Brothers)

How the shaw ’nuff did they do that? I mean, in a way, it’s justice; Taylor gained much of his fortune by turning in limp, colorless interpretations of black pop classics (see, or on second thought don’t, “How Sweet It Is”), and to have black artists take his limp, colorless, aggressively insipid originals and render them somehow awesome seems like sweet revenge. They can even do a number on “Fire and Rain,” which is an even worse song.

“Fire and Rain” (Isley Brothers)

It makes one curious to see if dewhitening device that apparently came into the possession of the brothers Isley circa 1972 could be applied to other contemporary shlockmeisters - say, Seals & Crofts. Hey, of course it could:

“Summer Breeze”

Still, for all their skill at resuscitating the hypoxemic hits of the early ’70s, even the Isleys can’t make the concept of imaginary jasmine sound any less dumb.

And their ballads? Yes, wonder of wonders, even those are alright.

“Let Me Down Easy”

“For the Love of You (Pts. 1 & 2)”

Still, in funk music, the ballad, which by its very nature requires a band to step back from a wrought-iron funk groove, is fraught with peril. No amount of Fender Rhodes warbling can save a song like “At Your Best (You Are Love)” from a terrible lyric.

“At Your Best (You Are Love)”

At your best, you are love
You’re a positive motivating force within my life

Not only does it reek of couples counseling (”You need to be a positive motivating force within each other’s lives!”), it begs the question: what is she at her worst? One imagines the Ron Isley family dinner parties culminating in impromptu booze-soaked renditions of “At Your Worst (Goddammit Woman Shut the Hell Up or So Help Me I Will Sell You to P-Funk) (Pts. 1 & 2).”

Perhaps songs like “At Your Best (You Are Love)” were an ill portent. Any period of creative fecundity must eventually wither away, and by the beginning of the 1980s, the Isley Brothers had become a textbook case of that sad artistic truth. The less said about their post-’70s career the better, especially once they discovered hip-hop, although I must profess a certain affection for timely “Sexual Healing” rip-off “Between the Sheets,” partly because it was on the soul station in GTA: San Andreas, and partly because ’80s-era bedroom freakin’ music is always somehow so honest.

“Between the Sheets”

So take my musical oversight, and the resulting Isleycation, as a lesson: when flipping through the stacks for the best of the obscure, one shouldn’t overlook the best of the popular. And remember, no matter how bad a song is, someone out there armed only with a Stratocaster and an elaborately embroidered double-breasted velvet suit has the power to make it kick ass. And that’s a comforting thought.

This post brought to you by:
Sly and the Family Stone

Let’s say - and maybe I’m reaching here - that you love food. What do you call yourself? Are there not words in this English language of ours that can fully capture the depth of your affection for delicious victuals? Have all our legion of poets failed to come up with a means of expressing that most basic of loves?

Of course not.

Does your love of fine food extend to any of the other arts of man? Do you like a glass of wine at the gallery, steak-frites at the supper club? If so, you are an epicure.

Do you love to eat so much that you find gluttony a frequent guest at your table? Do you just shovel it down and let God and your colon sort it out? If so, you are a gourmand.

Or do you simply love the simple pleasures of a finely-prepared meal? If so, you can be either (your choice!) a gourmet or a gastronome.

You see? Four words, possessed of various shades of meaning, to describe someone who shares one of humanity’s most fundamental affections.

But you may have noticed that I haven’t included a certain other word, and for good reason.

Seriously: stop fucking using the word “foodie.”

It is childish. It is déclassé. It reduces a great art to the level of spit-up and uncontrolled bladder function. “Foodie” comes pureed in little jars. “Foodie” is marshmallows and sprinkles and quivering little grocery store jello molds, full of suspended colonies of canned fruit-product. “Foodie” is a Mickey Mouse pancake. “Foodie” is a Ben and Jerry’s specialty flavor. “Foodie” is Rachael Ray and her Christmas hams licking chocolate off a spoon in a lad mag.

Really: if you like a well-mixed martini, are you a “drinkie”? If you rock Monk and Mingus, are you a “soundie”? If you never miss the Met when you’re in New York, are you an “artie”? If you sigh longingly every time you see an Art Deco facade, are you a “designie”? If you think the world would be a more beautiful place if everyone were a grim, high-cheekboned statue draped by gay men in transgressively angular raiment, are you a “fashionie”? Or are you too fucking smart for that?

Or, to further simplify, here’s William Safire:

After eating, an epicure gives a thin smile of satisfaction; a gastronome, burping into his napkin, praises the food in a magazine; a gourmet, repressing his burp, criticizes the food in the same magazine; a gourmand belches happily and tells everybody where he ate; a glutton embraces the white porcelain altar, or, more plainly, he barfs.

A foodie Twitters “eating tacos al pastor at casa pendejo - about to take the first bite!”, takes an ostentatious couple of pictures for his blog, and then writes, “Meh. Casa Pendejo was totally overrated!” on Chowhound.

So maybe you realize that “foodie” is the stupidest fucking buzzword for an extremely venerable concept since “intelligent design,” but “epicure,” “gourmet,” “gourmand” and “gastronome” aren’t right for you. Perhaps you don’t want to sound like you’re putting on airs with your fancy eighth grade vocabulary. That’s fine too, because there’s an even simpler way to say what you mean: “I like to eat.”

The hamlet in which I live was battered last night by a series of storms, bruising thunderheads igniting the day-bright sky with great incandescent arcs of violet lightning, hail paradiddling on the roof, rumbles of thunder luxuriantly crescendoing towards mighty percussive barrages that rattled the windows and doors.

What was my reaction to all this elemental bluster? To lie in bed, wide awake, in my pitch-black room, my increasingly concerned dog beside me, responding to every thunderclap by yelling “OOOOOOODDDDDIIIIIIIIIIIIIINNNNNNN!” and improvising beatboxed death metal riffs before losing it in a fit of cackles.

Then I had an idea for a teen sitcom called “Poe Boy” which concerns a high school Edgar Allen Poe and the social awkwardness caused by his inability to go anywhere without the weather immediately turning into a violent, ambience-fostering thunderstorm.

The mind, when steeped in hermitage, is a consistently surprising place.

Sourdough Starter/מחמצת שאור/Levain

Once upon a time, when men were men, and women were ostensibly women (but who knows since nobody ever talked about them), bread was leavened not with packets of Fleischmann’s but with sourdough, a sinister froth comprised of wild yeasts and bacteria kicking it symbiotic in a mix of flour and water. Yes, in those heady days of yore, yeast was not something you bought, but rather something you dearly cultivated, giving it far more love and attention than all those children you put to work at six and married off at twelve. We’ve lost something since then, and it’s not just an uncomplaining pool of nimble child workers: it’s the taste of our bread. In this era of pre-sliced uniform bread product, we’ve forgotten that bread should be rich and complex, nourishing and fortifying, the staff of life and not the densely wadded ball of Wonder. Take my hand (briefly, because I don’t much like being touched) and let me guide you to the old school flavor.

First, to lay some background: a sourdough starter is a symbiotic colony of wild yeasts - microscopic fungi which can be found zinging about everywhere, from the air on down to the nether regions of Monistat users - and a certain strain of bacteria, the lactobacilli. In an active starter, water breaks down the starch in flour into simple sugars, which just so happen to be a yeast’s favorite food. The yeast digest the sugars, and subsequently poot out what just so happens to be a lactobacillus’s favorite food. Nature: gross in tooth and claw. With regular additions of fresh flour and water, the starter will chug on indefinitely, denying access to any nastier microorganisms, and happily leavening all your bread.

I should also mention that sourdough in this context does not refer to the actual flavor of the dough, but rather to the entire category of naturally leavened bread. Technically, what I’m talking about here should probably be referred to as levain, after the French, but that strikes even me as too pretentious. In short, you shouldn’t confuse sourdough the concept with its most recognizable application: San Francisco sourdough. San Francisco sourdough gets its flavor from a particularly gnarly local lactobacillus and a long fermentation time. The bread you make with a sourdough starter can range from not sour at all to sourer than any San Francisco loaf, depending on how long you allow the dough to ferment before baking - and depending on the particular bacteria in your starter, which vary enough to give each starter its own unique flavor. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

So, to get back to the topic, how do you start a starter? Read on.
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When I get bored - or have something more important to do - I like to kill time by browsing through jazz videos on YouTube. Whereas today every note sung, latte bought, thought expressed and vagina exposed by our vapid pop stars is recorded for posterity, live videos from the jazz’s heyday are relatively few and far between, mostly due to the difficulty of video recording in the sort of venues where great jazz transpired. But there are always exceptions, and among the most sterling is 1957’s The Sound of Jazz (available on DVD here), a TV broadcast gathering luminaries of Dixieland, swing and bop onto one stage for a combined concert. The standout of the evening, which has been uploaded to YouTube, is Billie Holiday’s performance of her song “Fine and Mellow,” notable not only for its quality but for the fact that it marked the musical reunion - and last performance together - of Holiday and the brilliant, influential tenor saxophonist Lester Young.

After forming an exceptionally close musical and personal partnership during the ’30s and early ’40s (giving each other the nicknames “Prez” and “Lady Day”), Holiday and Young drifted apart, and by the time The Sound of Jazz was taped they apparently hadn’t seen each other or spoken in years. Wikipedia relates the story of their reunion per jazz and social critic Nat Hentoff:

Hentoff, who was involved in putting the show together, recalled that during rehearsals, they kept to opposite sides of the room. Young was very weak, and Hentoff told him to skip the big band section of the show and that he could sit while performing in the group with Holiday.

Years of alcohol abuse had ravaged Young’s famously smooth tone and seriously eroded his chops, but his melodic sense and good taste remain beautifully, and thankfully, intact. He can’t stand up through an entire song, he looks terrible, and he doesn’t have the stamina to play for more than a few bars, but he still manages to turn in a masterful blues solo (beginning 2:39 into the video). Holiday’s reaction is heartwarming and heartbreaking in equal measures.

I’ll be a man. I’ll admit it. It makes me mist over a lot a little. And I’m not the only one. Hentoff again:

Lester got up, and he played the purest blues I have ever heard, and [he and Holiday] were looking at each other, their eyes were sort of interlocked, and she was sort of nodding and half–smiling. It was as if they were both remembering what had been—whatever that was. And in the control room we were all crying. When the show was over, they went their separate ways.

Little more than a year afterwards, Young died. Attending his funeral, Holiday said “I’ll be the next to go.” She was - only four months later, she joined him.

There’s plenty to recommend the rest of the video. Here’s the order of the solos, if you like what you hear and want to look into the musicians:

1) Ben Webster, swing tenor saxophonist
2) Lester Young, swing tenor saxophonist
3) Vic Dickinson, Dixieland/swing trombonist
4) Gerry Mulligan, bebop baritone saxophonist, token white boy and representative of the school of Cool
5) Coleman Hawkins, swing tenor saxophonist
6) Roy Eldridge, swing trumpeter, who seems to be having a lot more fun than anyone else

The historically-minded should note how nonexistent production values were in the early years of television, especially in the obvious editing. The emcee (John Crosby, I think), who appears to have been produced, vitamin-enriched, and shipped out in stiff plastic wrapping just in time for the broadcast by the Continental Baking Company, dips deep into the cultural lexicon of 1950s America for an adjective to describe the incomparable Billie Holiday, and dredges up “really great.” He could have at least tried “spiffy keen.” Then he turns away from the camera and reads the names of the musicians off a clipboard. Imagine if Ryan Seacrest did that shit. He would be off the air faster than you can say “flagging numbers among females 18-49.”

To send you off, here’s Billie and Lester in happier times (1941), burning through “Let’s Do It” (in all its politically incorrect glory) and “All of Me”:

UPDATE:
And since we’re on the topic of Lester Young’s tragic early demise, here’s Charles Mingus’s eloquent requiem for the late saxophonist, “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat,” recorded in 1959, followed by Joni Mitchell’s vocal version of the same, from her Weather Report-backed album Mingus, recorded in part with the dying bassist in the ’70s.