Category Archives: Commentary

The Sculpin is the World’s Least Respected Fish

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The current culinary trend seems to be to not just to eat every part of an animal, but to eat all animals, except of course, seals and anything that may be kept as a pet. This trend, though it has dramatically accelerated in recent years, has actually been in place for decades. A century ago in Newfoundland, (where I am from), rich people would eat codfish and serve the hired help lobster. Lobster were (rightly) viewed as marine insects and people who could afford to pick and choose what they ate wanted nothing to do with them. Now, of course, lobster is one of the more expensive types of seafood you will find in your grocery store. In Newfoundland these days any high end restaurant will have all manner of marine insects on their menu and you can even find yourself a seal burger, but there is one fish that has been conspicuously absent from any restaurant menu; the sculpin.

If you don’t know what a sculpin is and don’t like googling things, just walk out on any wharf in Newfoundland on a calm day, look down at the water, and the ugliest, scariest fish you see is a sculpin. It has an oversized mouth, oversized lips, bulging eyes, and has long, sharp spines on its back and fins. With the exception of the past decade or so, Newfoundlanders have been poor for much of the past several hundred years, with many people going hungry. No Newfoundlander, however, has ever been so hungry that he would resort to eating a sculpin, even though they are the easiest fish in the world to catch.

Sculpins just hang around wharves. Salt water is crystal clear compared to salt water, so on a sunny day you can just drop your hook and bait right in front of the Sculpin’s face. They generally put up little fight, so you just reel them in after they take the bait. The first fish I ever caught was a sculpin. I was very proud. Then my buddy’s father took it off the hook and threw it back in the water. It was probably caught 10 times that week. If you live near the ocean you can literally eat them for free, yet nobody does.

My local grocery store sells frog legs and octopus for twice the price of codfish, yet nobody eats sculpin for free. People seem to eat everything these days, but it seems so odd that nobody has ever tried to eat a sculpin. It may very well taste awful, but it can’t be any more awful than half the things people are eating these days.

David Cameron Doesn’t Know How to Eat a Hot Dog

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Today I saw a picture of the British Prime Minister eating a hot dog with a knife and fork. It wasn’t a secret photo of him at home or on vacation published by a tabloid. No, this was a media event organized by David Cameron himself at the house of a regular person who would be benefiting from some changes that his government had made to the tax system. He knew everything he did was being recorded for all the country to see, he ate a hot dog with a knife and fork.

When some people in North America saw that picture, they might have assumed that cutting up hot dogs with knives and forks is some of strange British custom, like soccer rioting and needing a license to watch television. I’m not British, but I did spend a year in England, and during my time there I saw a number of people eat hot dogs. None of them used either a knife or a fork. They simply picked up the hot dog with their hands just like every other person anyone has ever seen eating a hot dog.

There isn’t a politician in North America whose political career could survive a picture of them eating a hot dog with a knife and fork. Bill Clinton’s reputation would be worse today if he had eaten a hot dog with a knife and fork instead of cheating on his wife with an intern in the Oval Office. People can relate to cheating on their wives; they can’t relate to eating a hot dog with a knife and fork.

The problem for David Cameron is that he has never been photographed using the wrong fork during a meal. He has no trouble selecting the proper fork for the salad, the main course, and the desert. He no doubt switches his fork to his left hand for cutting and then back to his right hand for eating. He knows the proper glass to drink Champaign out of and certainly knows that black caviar is better than red caviar, but yet he doesn’t know how to eat a hot dog.

That David Cameron will likely survive this embarrassing photo says a lot about politics in the UK. The British have long been accustomed to being governed by people who were raised in a life of privilege, went to exclusive private schools and, and have little connection to the average person. Ronald Reagan’s father was a salesman in rural Illinois. Bill Clinton’s father died before he was born and had an abusive, alcoholic step-father. Barack Obama’s parents broke up when he was an infant and spent much of his later childhood being raised by his parents.

It is tempting to pass off that hot dog photo and just one of a thousand funny but meaningless pictures of a politician, but it is much more than that. While North American political leaders come from all walks of life, and even have different colour skin, British Prime Ministers almost always grew up in a life of privilege apart from the common person. The hot dog photo explained that much better than a thousand words could ever do.

Who Does Like Ice Cold Camembert?

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Senator Nancy Ruth has taken a lot of heat over her comments about refusing to settle for her free breakfast of ice cold Camembert and broken crackers, but I can’t help but find the criticism a little overdone. Camembert is a soft cheese that is meant to be spread over crackers or a nice bread. If it is ice cold it is impossible to spread. It is unclear whether the senator was served broken crackers or if they were broken when she tried to spread the cold cheese on them. I suspect it was the latter.

Some things are perfectly fine served a little cold; pizza, cheddar, revenge. Camembert is not one of them. If it is too cold to spread on the crackers, what the hell was this woman supposed to do with it? Pick it up in her hand like a Pizza Pop and just start chowing down on it? In these days of camera phones and airplane Wi-Fi, a picture of a senator gnawing on big Camembert disc would have gone viral before the plane even landed.

I will confess that I am biased by the fact that I don’t much care for Camembert myself. If I want cheese and crackers I generally stick with plain old cheddar. I never know quite what to do with the rind. I know it’s edible, but edible and appetizing are not the same; they aren’t even synonyms. If you don’t eat the rind, you end up making a god awful mess of things trying to just get at the soft cheese. It’s just not worth the trouble. Nancy Ruth may well be a typical senator’s sense of privilege and entitlement, but I can’t blame her for taking a stand against cold Camembert.

Why Can’t Americans Make Gravy?

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I am a Canadian, but unlike most Canadians, I don’t dislike Americans. I don’t feel threatened by them, I don’t envy them, and though I don’t find them any more arrogant than Torontonians. Many Canadians have made a living criticizing the United States. Lord knows Americans have their flaws, and pretty much every one of them has been pointed out a thousand times over, but there is one flaw that has not received nearly enough attention; their ability to make gravy.

Growing up, I took gravy for granted. My mother, my aunts, all my friends’ mothers, all of them could make gravy. Even the fathers and uncles could make gravy in a pinch, so I assumed that anyone in the civilized world who could cook could make gravy. Then I got a job that required me to frequently travel to the United States.

I will never forget my first encounter with American gravy. I believe it was in Nashville, and I had some mashed potatoes with gravy. At first I thought they forgot to pour the gravy on the potatoes, but when I looked more closely I could see that the gravy was the same colour as the potatoes. I thought someone was playing a joke on me, but I could see that everyone else at the table had the same horrifyingly pale gravy. This came as a shock to me as Americans always seemed to talk about gravy a lot, so I naturally assumed they took great pride in their gravy. I first heard the expression “everything else is just gravy” in an American movie, Platoon.

It isn’t just that Americans don’t use gravy browning. Proper gravy is still someone dark in texture before the gravy browning is added, and even the lightest turkey gravy isn’t white. It’s as if Americans add bleach to their gravy. It’s so strange that Americans have such a light coloured, bland gravy, when their cooking is generally known for being heavy and rich. How is it that Canadian gravy could possibly be so much thicker, richer, saltier, and tastier than American gravy? American cooking has always been open to embracing the cuisine of other countries, most notably China, Mexico, and Italy. Perhaps it’s time for them to steal a gravy recipe from their Canadian neighbours.

When Did the Debate Over GMO Food End?

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About 15 years or so ago there seemed to be a raging debate about whether genetically modified food was going to solve the world’s hunger problems or destroy mankind. I was living in England at the time, a place that seemed to have a particularly acute preoccupation with food safety, no doubt due to the presence of both mad cow disease and Paul McCartney.

I was never really that concerned about genetically modified foods. I always figured something else would kill me long before genetically modified canola, so I never really paid that close attention to the debate, but I was always at least vaguely aware of its existence.

In recent years, as I became a father to a couple of kids and started taking a serious interest in food, I couldn’t help but notice that there didn’t seem to be anyone talking about the dangers of GMO foods anymore. It seems that for most people gluten is a much bigger worry than GMO foods. Organic and locally grown foods, which tend not to be genetically modified, are growing in popularity, but most of the interest in those foods more to do with the lack of toxic pesticides than alterations to the food’s genetic makeup.

To be honest though I don’t really understand what is different about organic fruits and vegetables other than that they are more expensive and have more spots on them. I wonder if scientists were to someday be able modify an apple such that the apple actually developed the ability to eat its pests, thereby eliminating the need for pesticides, would the apples then be considered organic? But I digress…

Did the opponents of GMO foods simply give up or were they just soundly beaten by the giant food companies? I suspect it was some combination of the two. Large multinationals have an admirable track record when it comes to doing battle against concerned citizens, so the result was probably never really in doubt. But after a couple decades of eating all these GMO foods, humanity doesn’t seem any worse for wear, so perhaps the right side won that war.

Beer Snobs Are Worse Than Wine Snobs

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For many years now, wine snobs have been unrivaled as the most notorious and annoying in the realm of snobbery. Wine bottles were the perfect vessel for conveying ones superiority over the common man. There are a seemingly endless amount of small and exclusive wineries that allowed someone with only an upper middle class income to drink wine that a neighbor or friend had never seen. By contrast, the barriers to entry into the world of car snobbery are prohibitive to most people, as you would have to spend some serious money to drive a car that none of your friends had ever seen up close before.

Wine also give snobs much more opportunity to revel in their snobbery, what with books and courses that explain how to properly drink and appreciate wine as well as a huge vocabulary of adjectives, most of which are completely devoid of actual meaning, to describe wines. You don’t need to do a course to learn how to enjoy a Ferrari. You put the top down, find an open road, and stomp on the gas pedal. For snob points per dollar, nothing could compare to wine. Until now.

Snobby wine drinkers have long looked at beer drinkers with disdain. While the image of the wine drinker was one of culture and sophistication, a beer drinker was symbolized by the guy in the sports bar watching football and washing down 4 pounds of hot wings with a gallon of light lager, English soccer hooligans, Homer Simpson, and middle aged slow pitch softball players. Then just a few years ago, hipsters starting mobilizing themselves and created the rapidly growing world of beer snobbery.

I don’t know why but I personally find beer snobs exponentially more annoying than wine snobs. It was always accepted that if you drink enough wine with people you would eventually cross paths with a wine snob, but beer drinking was always a pretension-free oasis, where you could simply relax with friends and enjoy the beer of your choice or whatever your friends were offering. Then all of a sudden you had these stocking cap wearing, bearded zealots popping up everywhere who look down on anyone who didn’t stand in line for two hours in rural Vermont to drop $20 on a six pack of beer.

I actually enjoy most of the beers that beer snobs love, I just don’t feel the same vitriol at the types of beers they hate. While I generally prefer more flavorful beers, I have no problem drinking you average light lager. Those who turn their noses up at mainstream beer brands have clearly never gotten drunk on their neighbor’s home brew.

How Anthony Bourdain is Fueling the Rise of Pretension in Cooking

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A few months ago I read Anthony Bourdain’s “Kitchen Confidential”, the book that transformed him into a celebrity chef. Though I had never actually watched a full episode of one of his shows, I had heard a lot about him and had seen enough bits and pieces of his show to know that it involves him travelling around the world and eating all kinds of things that I get nauseous just thinking about.

Usually when I read a book I either like it or don’t like it, but I found that I loved certain parts of the book and hated others. The parts that I found very interesting were the first hand, behind the scenes accounts of what is involved with running a restaurant and the stories of the characters he had come across in his years in the food business. What I hated was the contempt that Bourdain seemed to have towards so many of his customers. He repeatedly uses the word “rubes” to describe customers, and seems to look down on anyone who orders the special, goes to Sunday brunch, dines on the wrong day of the week, or god forbid, likes their steak well done.

While I found it informative when he talked about why many restaurants fail, I didn’t feel it necessary for him to use up half the pages in the book with a seemingly endless series of detailed examples of how so many of the restaurants he had been involved with had failed. It almost seemed like his was reveling in the failures of these restaurants.

The most striking thing about the book, knowing what I know about Anthony Bourdain the TV star, is how he talks about how he wouldn’t order the special or eat at the Sunday buffet because restaurants use both to get rid of not quite so fresh food. This is the same guy who in recent years has been filmed eating live warthog rectums. It is not clear whether he at the rectum on a Thursday evening or if it was a Monday special.

For the purposes of full disclosure I will admit that for someone interested in food and cooking I am a relatively picky eater. I don’t eat shellfish. I look at eating lamb the way others look at eating dog. For me, cooking is about making eating as enjoyable as possible. I am more adventurous than some meat and potatoes people I know, but less adventurous than others. That is neither a good thing nor a bad thing. I believe that people should eat dishes that are (more or less) healthy and that they enjoy. Cooking should be about you, not about how you appear to others.

For me, Anthony Bourdain symbolizes how pretension has infiltrated the world of cooking. For far too many people, cooking and dining has become a game of one-upmanship. Cooking is no longer just about preparing food, but about proving how sophisticated you are. When he is not busy traveling the world, Bourdain spends his time feuding with pretty much every celebrity chef on the planet.

Pretty much the only chef that Bourdain has not criticized is Julia Child, but had she been alive today I am sure he would have found some fault with her. I should point out that some of his criticisms are both creative and hilarious, such as wishing he could travel back and time and bully Jamie Oliver, but they are still part of the overall problem of viewing cooking as some sort of competition. Cooking is not about image or competition; it is about the enjoyment of food. It is ok to order the special. It is ok if you like your steak well done.

I’ve Never Tried Fish Sauce but I Know I Don’t like It

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“How do you know you don’t like it if you’ve never tried it?”

That is the question that millions of parents have asked to millions of finicky children. I have posed the same question to my children many times, my daughter in particular. The other day, my daughter, who likes both chicken and cheese, refused to try my fantastic homemade chicken quesadillas. I know that if she would have just taken the tiniest little bite that she would have loved them, but she somehow convinced herself that they were disgusting. It is futile to attempt to explain to a 4 year old that she has no way of knowing whether she likes something without ever tasting it.

I, on the other hand, at 38 years of age have the experience and knowledge that allows me to know that I won’t like something without ever having tasted it. Take fish sauce for example. Fish sauce is made by fermenting raw fish in a barrel with some salt. I often eat fish and enjoy it, but I am not what you would call a seafood lover. Generally I like fresh fish, cooked with a few herbs or some seasoning. I don’t like the smell of fish that has been lying around for a while. Given that I don’t like fish that has been sitting around for a while, I know that I definitely would not like raw fish that was crammed in a barrel and left out in the hot sun to ferment for a month.

My favourite chef, Michael Smith, likes using fish sauce in some of his recipes. He says even though it sounds odd, that I should trust him; fish sauce adds lots of “savoury flavour”. I love almost every recipe that I have seen on his shows, but in this case I trust my own instincts more than I trust Michael Smith. I have never tried fish sauce and I have absolutely no intensions of ever doing so. I do know I don’t like some things even if I have never tried them.

Why Don’t Veal and Lamb Evoke the Same Outrage as Baby Seals?

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A little over a week ago, professional hockey commentator and human controversy generator, Don Cherry, caused a stir when he expressed his outrage on hearing that his partner, Ron McClain had eaten a seal burger for lunch at Mallard Cottage in St. John’s. Cherry called McClain a “barbarian” for eating a “little baby seal”. After the immediate backlash from Newfoundland, a place close to the former coach’s heart, he clarified that he has no problem with eating seal; just that he found it odd to be eating seal for lunch.

It was interesting is that Cherry didn’t just talk of seals, he talked of baby seals, the image of which has long been used as an emotional appeal against the seal hunt. The picture of the newborn white coat seal was the focal point of the single most successful animal rights campaign ever, which resulted in an outright ban on the harvesting of white coasts in the 1970s.

Those in favour of the seal hunt often rail against the continuing myth that baby seals are still hunted, but to be fair, it is more of a gross exaggeration than a myth. Seals usually molt their coats after three weeks or so, after which it is fair game to kill them. Many anti-seal hunting camp use this as justification for their continuing to state hunters are still killing baby seals. I’m not going to attempt to classify whether a 3 week old seal should be more accurately described as a toddler, an infant, or simply in the spring of its life, but it is fair to say that three weeks is a very young seal

What I find baffling is that so many people who were so appalled at the notion of eating a baby seal, as opposed to an adult one, have absolutely no problem eating lamb, veal, or pub style chicken wings. Seals are no doubt cute, but nothing is as adorable as a little baby lamb. A crying lamb actually sounds a little like a crying baby, but when have you ever heard anyone suggest that you should boycott a restaurant that serves baby sheep?

Whether you are someone against the killing of young animals, or just young, cute animals, either way the serving of lamb on menus should be sparking a little outrage. Perhaps a lot of people who support animal rights just really like the taste of lamb. Maybe if they tried a seal burger they wouldn’t be quite so outraged over the seal hunt.

lamb

A Modest Proposal for Interrupting Waiters

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Why is it that even in the fanciest restaurants servers feel the need to interrupt conversations or ask you questions when you obviously have your mouth full? How is this supposed to enhance the dining experience of your customers? Pretty much every member of civilized society has taught since childhood not to talk with your mouth open and not to interrupt others while they are talking. Yet many high end restaurants essentially teach their employees to walk up their customers and both interrupt their conversations and pressure them into talking with their mouths full.

What is even odder than the fact that this practice is so common is that it has so many apologists. Many seemingly intelligent people have attempted to justify these rude intrusions by suggesting that the alternative to interrupting would be to ignore or neglect the diners. That is absurd.

If a server wanted to know if the customer required some assistance, he or she would simply need to walk by the table and make eye contact. A customer who required assistance would need only raise a hand or speak to the waiter. If you walk up to a table, and all of the diners are busy cramming food in their mouths, chances are they are pretty happy with their food.

Any experienced server, or even a halfway intelligent inexperienced server for that matter, should be able to tell if a customer requires assistance without having to barge in on their conversation. For example, if a customer’s glass is empty, he may need another drink. If a customer has barely touched the dish while the rest of his or her dining companions have almost finished, there may be some problem with the food. The same would also be true if a customer is holding up his tenderloin in the air and staring at it or holding it in front of the face of one of his dining companions.

I have a suggestion for high end restaurants. When the customers are seated, the server should explain that the restaurant’s policy is to not interrupt conversations or as questions when the customer is eating, and that the server will pass by from time to time and make eye contact and nod and it is up to the customer to signal whether assistance is needed. At that point the customers will either tell the server how happy they are with that policy or they will say that they are perfectly ok with being interrupted and don’t mind talking with their mouths full.