Category Archives: food

uborka szezon

My affection for gustatory exotica is, well, a byword. Among the food-oriented (or even -orientated) blogs I follow is Dumneazu: Ethnomusicological Eating East of Everywhere, and today’s posting, on half-sour pickles, would be wonderful even if it didn’t include this bit of lore:

Readers of this blog already know my attachment to Katz’s, the only place in the world where I would not think of complaining about paying $15 for a pastrami sandwich. The sandwich is really only a vehicle for the mustard and pickle. And the New York half-sour garlic pickle is the perfect food for the summer, hardly defined someplace between a raw veg and a salad. At Katz’s you should tip the counterman a dollar – he’ll cut your meat more generously, but more important, he’ll dump a half kilo of mixed pickles on a plate for you. It pays to tip your man at Katz’s.

Almost enough to entice me to New York. Not quite…

Who Knew? the Wet Pet Food Recall

Connoisseurs of the Baroque in the North American food system are surely slavering over the “pet food” scandal, but I have yet to see anybody commenting on the remarkable scale and concentration revealed. Here’s a bit of the San Jose Mercury News coverage:

The recall now covers dog food sold throughout North America under 51 brands and cat food sold under 40 brands, including Iams, Nutro and Eukanuba. The food was sold under both store and major brand labels at Wal-Mart, Kroger, Safeway and other large retailers. The recall covers the company’s “cuts and gravy” style food, which consists of chunks of meat in gravy, sold in cans and small foil pouches, from Dec. 3 to March 6…

So the North American market seems to run on what’s basically commodity pet food, despite the differences in labelling and price… and the Canadian Menu Foods seems to be a pretty big player. Here’s how investcom.com summarizes:

Menu Foods Income Fund is a limited purpose trust established to hold approx. 51% of the partnership units of Menu Foods L. P., which will, in turn, acquire all the securities and assets of Menu Foods Ltd. Menu is a leading North American manufacturer of private-label wet pet food products, selling its products to supermarket retailers, mass merchandisers, pet specialty retailers and other retail and wholesale outlets. Menu currently produces more than 800 million containers of wet pet food per year and is focused on the manufacture and sale of premium private-label wet pet food products.

I saw a news story this morning suggesting that the Problem was thought to be in the wheat gluten used as a “filler”, and snopes.com says that a Menu Foods spokesperson

…said that recalled products were made using wheat gluten purchased from a new supplier, a change that coincided with the onset of complaints about pet illnesses. Since discovering the problem, the company no longer uses that supplier and has instead turned to another source for its wheat gluten (but it is not yet known whether that ingredient was related to the reported pet illnesses).

I have yet to see a story about Senior Citizens made ill by eating pet food paté, but I’ll bet there will be one sometime soon…

EatingAsia again

Really the most mouth-watering food writing AND food photography (surely this complex vice needs a name… gustopr0n?). Today’s episode, on a Hokkienese Hideaway in Kuala Lumpur, is paradigmatic, no doubt about it. Just drink in the poetry:

Her wide, stubby yam strips go all sticky-chewy in a dark soy-soused stir-fry with cabbage, pork, and shrimp. White cabbage, Chinese celery, and pork cracklins add crunch, but the overriding flavor here is a wonderful char from the high-fired wok

That last phrase is the chorus of a foodie chantefable that I aspire to write someday.

I did not know that

Jess Nevins at No Fear of the Future takes us through various historical Lords of the Grain and lands with both feet on Gustav Vasa, and (in a tale that diverges into lutefisk, takes in the surprising [albeit alleged] origins of Madame du Barry’s passion for chocolate, and Diderot’s bon mot that “the potato is righly held responsible for flatulence. But what is flatulence to the vigorous organs of peasants and workers?”) links to a Swedish cuisine summary that includes this delightful factoid:

In one year people all over the world in 40 countries buy 60 000 tons crisp bread. Sweden is the biggest consumer and every Swede consumes 4 kilos of crisp bread every year.

I’m one of the addicts of knäckebröd, plowing through a few cases of the stuff every year (a case of Siljans has 14 units, each with 6 rounds). Great all by itself, even better with cheese or smoked salmon…