The New Yorker Food Issue.

A nice change of pace from the usual recipe driven crap we have to endure in most food magazines (yes, I'm treading lightly since I now edit one). Malcolm Gladwell continues his fascination with tasting ("Pepsi's Challenge"/Blink) in an article titled "Project Delta", the search for the perfect cookie (pg. 125). This would be incredibly boring and riddled with cliches in your typical foodie rag, but Gladwell could write about toothpick sculptures and I'd be thrilled.

Adam Gopnik talks to Fergus Henderson. Fergus talks about squirrels: "Squirrel is delicious--like an oily wild rabbit." Stately, plump Fergus Henderson came from the kitchen, bearing a bowl of lambs brains... Gopnik gets away with channeling Joyce because Fergus is just that tight. Gopnik also talks to Alain Passard, the Parisian chef (who more or less invented one of the most copied amuse bouche's in the world, the topped off egg with maple syrup - recipe here), about his conversion of L'Arpege to an all vegetarian menu. No meat? Just imagine what kinda profit margin he's got for those prices...ok, so he trucks his veggies in on the TGV, subtract a few Euros (pg. 91).

By the way, that thick-stock Starbucks ad page complete with the coffee filter GWP touting the "virtues of their personal relationships with farmers" is seriously annoying and gets in the way of easily flipping through the mag. Not nearly annoying though as those Tar-jay ads that polluted the entire issue a couple back.

Calvin Trillon on fanseca, what ever the heck that is (pardon-nay-moi, I haven't read the entire issue yet). You know what, I really don't give a shit about tofu (pg. 66). And come on, not to dis Robert Bly, even though his bouzouki plucking gets on my nerves (pg. 73), but Kinnell's Blackberry Eating just cries out for a reprint right about here.

Pic of NY chef David Pasternack with a plastic great white shark (pg. 79). Bet he found it on EBay. Joel Eckerson and Martin Nanez Moreno were part of a line cook brigade that cracked over a million eggs at the Flamingo coffee shop in Las Vegas (pg. 111). Oh my, those eggshells would make some mighty fine compost.


Blackberry Eating
"I love to go out in late September
among the fat, overripe, icy, black blackberries
to eat blackberries for breakfast,
the stalks very prickly, a penalty
they earn for knowing the black art
of blackberry-making; and as I stand among them
lifting the stalks to my mouth, the ripest berries
fall almost unbidden to my tongue,
as words sometimes do, certain peculiar words
like strengths or squinched,
many-lettered, one-syllabled lumps,
which I squeeze, squinch open, and splurge well
in the silent, startled, icy, black language
of blackberry -- eating in late September."

- Galway Kinnell


Tough to top that, I'm out.