Dude, also, legitimately not an attempted viral marketing campaign; we actually do this (not always with Doritos — previous iterations have been Cheez Whiz, Spam, and, much less compellingly, pork tenderloin), and we take it fairly seriously, to the extent that it’s no longer judged, as certain people had a tendency to get a little out of control with the bragging rights winning bestows. [us via eater and videogum]

Rupa Bhattacharya, Culinary Writer

Image courtesy Michael Sofronski/NYDN

Which is sort of oddly reminiscent of old careers available in the culinary world, by virtue of this shot from former ICA challenger Ludo Lefebvre’s cookbook:

Image courtesy Stephen Wayda/Crave

Rupa Bhattacharya, Culinary Writer

I immediately zeroed in on an appetizer that Rupa had been singing hymns to for months, the dish that in truth, though unbeknownst to anyone else at the table, had landed us there in the first place: braised, breaded, and fried duck necks. Not legs, not breasts, not even livers. Necks. Rupa had described it in its crispy, bony, messy glory as a sort of ennobling of the Buffalo wing, which was more than enough to sell me on it. My mother scanned the menu and honed in on the same. Somewhere a needle spun wildly.

My mother, you must know, is a woman of strong opinions, strenuously expressed. Her moral compass is nothing if not a sensitive instrument. I have known this for 38 years. I have also known that it can chart some very odd courses. And yet somehow one is prone to forgetting. Until something comes up. In a restaurant. Something like duck neck.

I was on the verge of ordering the vertebral morsels when my mom got wind of it and went…BALLISTIC. It was as if the chef had put the contents of his shower drain on the menu under the cynical supposition that someone would be idiot enough to pay for it-and that someone turned out to be her own flesh and blood.

“Ridiculous! $8.50 for DUCK NECK!? There’s no meat in it! This is Depression food! No, worse, shtetl cuisine!  Your great grandparents did not come to America for you to eat duck neck. Leave the duck necks in Kiev! Blechhh!!!”

The notion that a restaurant would show such little regard for its customers as to attempt to serve them the NECK of a DUCK; and worse, the idea that her son would show such little self-regard, would actually encourage the practice by ordering a DUCK’S NECK, produced paroxysms of maternal indignation that nearly derailed the entire evening and resurfaced in blood pressure-raising spasms throughout the weekend. I’ve long been fascinated by the ways different cultures value types and cuts of meat, the ways meaning gets inscribed in meat, such that animal anatomy can be read as a kind of map of a culture. But tonight was not the night to engage in a discussion of cultural relativity, sociology, or the ethics of offal-eating. The duck neck would have to wait.

Until last night, that is, when I returned with Rupa. This time around the menus were unnecessary. We sat at the bar, we drank good ale, and we gnawed our duck necks with extreme relish, in peace and without compunction. They turn out to be extremely, um, skeletal. And delicious.

Mom, you missed out.

Jonathan Milder, Research Librarian

The difference, I think, is not in the uses the cookbook is put to; it runs deeper and relates to how a cookbook is, or rather is not, read. Because in a way we don’t read cookbooks so much as we reread cookbooks. Unlike other forms of printed matter, we return to cookbooks again and again. And in the process a relationship forms, an intimacy results. We need cookbooks on our shelves because their presence matters, because their materiality is a form of companionship, and because nothing the digital age has come up with confers presence, offers a person something they can form an attachment to. Respected newspapers my close, beloved magazines may shut down, but cookbooks, I suspect, won’t be going away any time soon.

Jonathan Milder, Research Librarian

Jonathan Milder, Research Librarian

From Jarrett Wrisley’s piece in today’s Atlantic Food Channel:

And this: “Black pepper, cumin, soil and leather. Elegant. A hint of fruit, but not a lot…Cherries. They’re playing ‘Paranoid Android’, which is also nice.” I wrote that about the Meerea Park Terracotta 1998, which an iPod at the wine bar decided to pair with Radiohead’s best album. Welcome to the New World.

Then there was a Thomas Wines Kiss 2007 that was aggressively oaked and very fruity, and finally the Brokenwood Graveyard 2005. The Graveyard Shiraz is probably the Hunter’s most celebrated red. That wine, which was equal parts red fruit and savory earth, tasted like it would age wonderfully, but it was admittedly strange at first. Sort of like OK Computer.

Which is all completely fine, and understandable on the face of it, but in the context of my recently having seen this in McSweeney’s, I have to wonder.

(Unrelatedly, Daniel Maurer over at Grub Street had a whole analogy comparing David Chang to Fugazi-era Ian MacKaye, which I can totally get behind, though if it were my metaphor, I’d probably err on the side of Minor Threat-era.)

Rupa Bhattacharya, Culinary Writer

photo courtesy Rent-A-Ruminant

Meanwhile, The Onion provides the goat’s side of the story.

Rupa Bhattacharya, Culinary Writer

Rupa Bhattacharya, Culinary Writer

Everyone looks glum. “I must console myself,” Marcella says. She orders a Jack Daniel’s.

[via]

Rupa Bhattacharya, Culinary Writer

I would suggest that Ruth Reichl was not a snob, but — at her best — an egalitarian badass. She is a lover of food in all its sensuous, unruly glory. She put haute French chefs like Daniel Boulud in line for a food cart on the street. She ran features about politics and poverty — the life of a tomato laborer, a brilliant Chinese cook serving $7 entrées in Toronto, the travails of a restaurant parking valet. She asked Dominican novelist Junot Diaz to wax poetic about his Bronx childhood and sent readers from all corners of Gotham scurrying onto the 4/5 train to eat crunchy arroz con gandules (rice and pigeon peas).

The brilliant Julia Langbein, writing in New York magazine, has similar to say:

But what makes me sad about Condé Nast’s decision to shutter the magazine isn’t the death of this iconic American image of the good life, but rather the end of the kind of work done behind that image.

Me, I’m just sad. I’m sad for my friends who no longer have jobs, I’m sad for the industry that saw Gourmet as unsupportable, and I’m sad for the stories that won’t get told.

Rupa Bhattacharya, Culinary Writer