Oh, my wagashi

I wrote the "Source" column for the March, 2009 issue of Saveur about a Japanese pastry shop in New York City that my Dad frequents.

Read the piece at Saveur.com→

Meat of the Future

I'm working on an essay about death of one of one of the installations in the Museum of Modern Art's Design and the Elastic Mind exhibit. 'Victimless Leather' -- a tiny jacket made of living tissue -- kicked the bucket last week.

[WARNING: clicking the above exhibit links may make your mind go all wobbly like the elastic in old underwear. The site is WAAAY over-designed. You've been warned.]

At the center of the installation was a Barbie-sized garment made of pink biodegradable material suspended inside a glass chamber. The chamber was small, and spherical - think Christmas at Dr. Frankenstein's. The fabric served as scaffolding for skin tissue (engineered from mouse stem cells from Columbia University) to grow upon. A peristaltic pump kept the jacket saturated with rosé nutrient-rich fluid (numnum), and also removed waste. (Cell poo? Dead cells? Not sure). The glass container kept germs away and the humidity constant, and a heat lamp held the temperature at a steady 37 degrees Celsius, whatever that means. All of this made for an environment that was maybe too hospitable. Apparently, the skin grew too fast, clogging up its environment. So the curator killed it.

I'm at the tail end of too many hours of link-clicking in the name of research. Here are some of the weirder things that I found:

• Bovine Myology and Muscle Profiling. video clips of how muscles of the cow are cut into discrete "steaks."
• New Harvest. Meat of the the Future.
• The In-Vitro Meat Consortium. Recently held an international conference on the Meat of the Future
• PETA is offering a $1 million reward to the first scientist to produce and bring in vitro meat to market. The most awesome thing about this reward is that it only kicks in after the entrant has been able to "manufacture the approved product in large enough quantities to be sold commercially, and successfully sell it at a competitive price in at least 10 U.S. states,” which pretty much guarantees that whoever wins won’t actually need the million-dollar prize by the time they are qualified to receive it.
• My last item is also PETA related: Ionat Zurr, one of the "wet biology" artists behind Victimless Leather, describing reactions to Disembodied Cuisine, where she and Catts grew little frog steaks in the lab: "At that time we received an e-mail from People for Ethical Treatment of Animals.... The organisation's leader had a project proposal: that we should take a biopsy from her and grow from her tissue a steak that she would eat. The idea was to protest the eating of animals, but this would be an act of cannibalism, which we did not like, and we refused." more→

That is all.

For now.

Comfort me with potatoes

“It is easy to think of potatoes,” wrote M.F.K. Fisher, “and fortunately for men who have not much money it is easy to think of them with a certain safety.”

Indeed. A potato looks and smells like a double handful of dirt, and is almost as cheap. Lately, I am too busy to shop often, and too aware of my checkbook's bottom line to shop as expansively as I would like when I do hit the grocery store. Kitchen thrift makes me feel pinched and mean. Happily for me, when I have cooked and eaten my way to a bare refrigerator, there are usually one or two Idahos still rolling around the recesses of the vegetable bin.

There are few things that I love more than a baked potato. They have a sturdy, secure heft in the hand, like a hot stone. Under a fat pat of butter and a little salt, a baked potato tastes of simple, subtle contrasts: the muddy flavor of the rough, dusky skin against the steaming, yielding white flesh underneath.

In English, potatoes in their skins are “in their jackets.” In Italian, they are in veste da camera — ‘in their nightshirts.’ If potatoes are cooked out of their jackets, many of their vitamins and vegetables leave them. (If potatoes are not cooked at all, we cannot digest their starch.) I love the autumnal crackle of baked potato skin between my molars, and a warm jacketed potato is as instinctively comforting to me as a warm bed in winter.

When I bake potatoes, I puncture each potato’s protuberant jacketed flanks with the tines of fork so that it does not explode. (This may be superstitious — I am not sure. A scene in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Farm Boy — where want of ventilation sends steaming spuds rocketing from a campfire — made me a religious piercer of potatoes at an early age.)

Letting them bake at 350F for 1 hour warms the kitchen. The smell of hot starch is primordially soothing; it sits in the hot air like the aroma of bread baking at a distance . When the potatoes are done, I split them cross-wise with a knife, push the long ends of the potato towards each other to make an origami opening, smear in a finger of butter and a pinch of salt, and eat. And while the meal is plain, it is very, very good.

* * *

• The United Nations has designated 2008 International Year of the Potato. (Potatoes: For the truly hungry)
• Historic Potato recipes

Snow Tang Clan

I was hoping that it would snow in New York this winter. Today, it finally did. The snow was hard and granular, and crackled like Pop Rocks when it landed. The candy sound of the snow puts me in the mind of Tang. I wish I had a canister of it, the snow looks tasty.

Have you ever eaten powdered Tang* on snow**? It's the best. Every winter, my brother and sister and I used to eat heaps of the first snowfall under shovelfulls of artificial orange Instant Breakfast Drink. During the same phase of our childhood when we were eating a lot of instant ramen (and I do mean a lot — to break up the monotony of noodle soup, we took to pouring hot water over the dry noodle rafts and eating them al dente with the dehydrated broth sprinkled on top), we used to scoop up a bowl of clean snow, bring it inside, and chop powdered citrusy sugary orangeness into it with a spoon. It always made a horribly lurid puree, but it tasted sublime: icy and refreshing, piquant and tart and sweet. If you've ever dipped into a can of frozen orange juice concentrate, you've experienced the essence of Tang on snow. (Bizzarre, how both these horrible drinks are best at their most dense.)

In Vermont, syrup shacks will, for a couple of bucks, serve you warm maple-syrup and a bowl of snow, with a pickle, a donut, and a cup of coffee on the side. Although I loooove tree sap with my coffee, I'm not mad about the rest. Give me the florescence of tart astronaut orange juice any day.

Afterthoughts

*Tang was patented in 1957, first sold in supermarkets in 1959. No one really went for it, until in 1965 someone at NASA, noting that Tang Instant Breakfast Drink met all the requirements for space travel, sent Tang into orbit with the Apollo and Gemini missions. In outer space, Tang was available in additional flavors: chocolate and grapefruit, as well as the more earth-bound orange.

**It's probably not a good idea to eat snow. The last time I melted some — I think this must have been in Sighnaghi sometime when the pipes had frozen — the water from the snow was cloudy and unappetizing.