Waiter Rant: Thanks for the Tip

by "The Waiter" (now known to be Steve Dublanica)

My review: 3/5 stars

High stress, high turnover job with demanding customers, where you kinda get hooked on the money. Hmmm.... sounds like a job I used to have.

Maybe it's place I am in my life right now, but I found this book to be less about restaurants, and more about the bigger questions of life, love and career that we all face.

All in all, not quite as entertaining as Kitchen Confidential but worth a read. Happy to lend you my copy, which I found secondhand myself.

"The crowds pile in the door, and my section fills up instantly - two six tops, two deuces, and a four. I take care of the two tops first. The six tops are chattering away, so I have time to get to them. I cocktail and special the deuces, head over to the four, ask what they want from the bar, then loop back to the two tops and grab their dinner order. I walk briskly to the POS computer, key in the data, make the four top's alcoholic chemistry experiments, and drop them off. The six tops' heads are swiveling on their necks looking for the waiter. I hit them next. I take all their drink requests - wine and martinis - and take the four's dinner order on the return trip. The bell rings. The deuce's apps are up. The door chimes. It's a reservation. The hostess is gone, probably in the bathroom. I drop off the apps, greet the new arrivals, and seat them. Racing to the wine cellar, I grab two bottles of wine, return to the service bar, make six martinis, deliver the drinks to the first six top, run back, grab the bottles of wine, one red and one white, and pop them open at the other six. I tell the bus girl to bring an ice bucket. The kitchen bell rings furiously. The four's apps are up. The door chimes. More reservations. Where the hell's the hostess? The deuce signals for more bread. The lady at the four top needs another cosmo. Do you take Discover? What are the specials? I'm allergic to rosemary. Does this have to have garlic? Can you make me a veal Parmesan? It's hot in here. Can you do something about the AC? The phone rings. I glance at the caller ID. It's Fluvio. I decide to ignore it. He spent thousands of dollars installing video cameras; let him see what's going on for himself.

Suddenly, I feel a tug on my shoulder. It's Beth. She has tears in her eyes.

"What's the matter?"

"The computer's not working."

"Oh shit," I say, my sphincter achieving maximum compression."

Martha Stewart's Cookies

by the Editors of Martha Stewart Living

My review: 4/5 stars

I'm SO not a baker, but even I'm mesmerized by this cookbook. Gorgeous photographs and mouth-watering ideas.

A bunch that caught my eye on a flip-through: Gingersnap palmiers. Cream cheese pinwheels. Cornmeal thyme cookies. Cashew caramel cookies. Whole wheat date bars. Oatmeal applesauce cookies. Chewy molasses crinkles. Apricot windows. Pistachio lemon drops. Iced hermits. Hazelnut orange shortbread. Maple pecan shortbread. Lime meltaways. Bourbon currant cookies. Rocky Ledge bars with butterscotch chips, mini marshmallows and chocolate chunks. Lemon madeleines. Pumpkin cookies with brown butter icing. Carrot cake cookie sandwiches with cream cheese frosting. Raspberry honey financiers. Peanut butter whoopie pies. Fresh peach drop cookies. Chocolate pretzels. Earl Grey tea cookies. Chocolate black pepper cookies. Butter twists. Cassis crisps. Alfajores de dulce de leche. Rugelach fingers.

YUM! Yining, when's the next cookie bake-a-thon?

Salt

by Mark Kurlansky

My review: 3/5 stars

Finally finished! The main problem I had with this book was that it was at the same time too interesting to do a speed skim, yet too slow and meandering for me to want to pick it up for fun reading.

There are lots of great novelty recipes, some hundreds of years old, for things like making salt beef or pickles by the barrel. I wasn't as interested in economic, legal, anthropological or engineering tidbits. Kurlansky obviously did a lot of research - the bibliography is 13 pages long - but did all of it need to go in the book? The sheer breadth of time and subject matter covered, plus the lack organizing principles or a central thesis, made this a hard book to stay focused on.

Thanks to Yining for the (very extended) loan!

"I bought the rock in Spanish Catalonia, in the rundown hillside mining town of Cardona. An irregular pink trapezoid with elongated, curved indentations etched on its surface by raindrops, it had an odd translucence and appeared to be a cross beween rose quartz and soap. The resemblance to soap came from the fact that it dissolved in water and its edges were worn smooth liked a used soap bar.

I paid too much for it - nearly fifteen dollars. But it was, after all, despite a rosy blush of magnesium, almost pure salt, a piece of the famous salt mountain of Cardona. The various families that had occupied the castle atop the next mountain had garnered centures of wealth from such rock.

I took it home and kept it on a windowsill. One day it got rained on, and white salt crystals started appearing on the pink. My rock was starting to look like salt, which would ruin its mystique. So I rinsed off the crystals with water. Then I spent fifteen minutes carefully patting the rock dry. By the next day it was sitting in a puddle of brine that had leached out of the rock. The sun hit the puddle of clear water. After a few hours, square white crystals began to appear in the puddle. Solar evaporation was turning brine into salt crystals.

For a while it seemed I had a magical stone that would perpetually produce brine puddles. Yet the rock never seemed to get smaller. Sometimes in dry weather it would appear to completely dry out, but on a humid day, a puddle would again appear under it. I decided I could dry out the rock by baking it in a small toaster oven. Within a half hour white stalactities were drooping from the toaster grill. I left the rock on a steel radiator cover, but the brine threatened to corrode the metal. So I transferred it to a small copper tray. A green crust formed on the bottom, and when I rubbed off the discoloration, I found the copper had been polished.

My rock lived by its own rules. When friends stopped by, I told them the rock was salt, and they would delicately lick a corner and verify that it tasted just like salt.

Those who think a fascination with salt is a bizarre obsession have simply never owned a rock like this."

The Man Who Ate the World

by Jay Rayner

My review: 3/5 stars

A decent enough food book, but a thought struck me early on and only became more reinforced as I read: Jay Rayner is a journalist first and a foodie second. His first love is clearly words; the book takes place too much in his head and not enough in his mouth.

Some distractingly bad copy-editing. For example, there's a hotel, the name of which is spelled two different ways on successive pages. Oh, and if there's one word you need to get right in a book about food, that word is "palate."

Worth borrowing from the library if you're into food porn (as I unapologetically am) but not a keeper for the permanent shelf.

An excerpt below from my favorite chapter - on New York City, natch. (I clipped and reformatted liberally, too much to faithfully use ellipses or any other notations. Just imagine they're scattered throughout.)

"I go straight to a food discussion board called Opinionated About. The thread I want, the one I have been waiting for, is finally there. It's located exactly where it should be: in the 'Formal Dining' part of the website, under 'New York.' The first post had gone up about an hour before and is by a man called Steve Plotnicki.

There are a couple of dozen photographs, all of them of plated food: an egg in an egg cup with a turban of cream piled high with shiny black caviar; slices of fish, fanned across the plate and drizzled with a sauce in a funky shade of yellow. There is a duck dish and a foie gras dish, and a whole bunch of other things besides. Plotnicki has invited the members of this site to identify where the meal that these dishes were a part of, was taken.

The first response had been posted just twenty-four minutes after the original. Samantha's message says simply "Per Se." I note that Samantha hasn't bothered with a question mark. She is certain she is right.

She is. "That was one of the places we ate at," Plotnicki replies.

A few minutes later someone called Ian chips in. "Eleven Madison Park and WD-50." Again, no question mark.

"That makes three," Plotnicki says. "Two to go."

Ian is on a roll. "Jean-Georges."

"You're a clever lad," Plotnicki says. "One left."

Now the first note of disbelief creeps in, from a poster called Scotty. "Five dinners in one night? Respect."

"How does one logistically eat that many meals @ dinner?" asks another.

"Some serious eating there chaps," says a third. "I applaud your bravery and your gluttony."

Plotnicki explains: these dishes were part of a restaurant crawl taking in five of the very best restaurants in the city - no more than two or three small, tasting-menu-sized courses in each place - that it was prearranged and that the two diners involved were't always served the same dish, which explains the large number of photographs. Not that any of this is news to me. I know all the details. I know all the dishes. As he has already said, Plotnicki was not alone in this adventure. He had an accomplice. That accomplice was me."

Martha Stewart Living Cookbook Vols I and II

Martha Stewart Living Cookbook Vol I: The Original Classics
Martha Stewart Living Cookbook Vol II: The New Classics

My review: 4.5/5 stars

These are my other stalwart cookbooks. I picked them up used at The Strand a few years ago. I paid something like $12 apiece, and they've since proven themselves invaluable. Say what you will about her morals or her personality, Martha Stewart know how to cook and she runs a tight ship at MSL. I'm sure their test kitchens rival DuPont's labs for method and precision. And while my own cooking style might generously be labeled "freestyle," I appreciate that level of attention to detail.

The very thorough and descriptive indexes are a large part of the reason these two books make such excellent reference sources. Use the index in the second (blue) volume; it cross-references all of the recipes in the first.

How to Cook Everything

How to Cook Everything: Simple Recipes for Great Food

by Mark Bittman

My review:  4/5 stars

First recommended to me by Elan. Since learning about it, I've spied its bright yellow spine on lots of my friends' bookshelves. When I was in Chicago and Karen was wondering what ratio of water-to-lentils to use, this was the book she reached for. When I was contemplating lobster stock, this was one of the two books I consulted (don't let my failure with that one deter you).

It's a great cookbook for everyone. If you've just mastered toast and canned soup, the recipes and instructions are straightforward and easy to follow. Even if you know what's what in the kitchen, you'll still find it a handy reference. I docked it the one star for not having any photographs.

Thanks for the hardcover upgrade, Ben!

Julie & Julia

Man, they are advertising this movie up the wazoo! Since it's topical, I thought I'd paste in my Goodreads book review from last year:

Julie & Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen
by Julie Powell

My review: 3/5 stars

Not enough about the food - Powell really only describes making about 25 of the 500+ recipes she refers to in the title. Granted, she didn't start out as a very good cook but she seemed to have a lot of difficulty with the simplest of tasks. As I recall, not one person in my culinary school class had problems making mayonnaise by hand, even the first time around. Powell doesn't master mayonnaise until almost the very end, but somehow managed to de-bone a duck easily on her first try. I'm not sure how that works.

Powell notes that she wrote a blog during the year of cooking (the book came after) and it really shows. Lots of minutiae about her everyday life, her marriage, her crappy New York apartment, etc. She comes across as a Bridget Jones-type, by turns adorably inept and inexplicably insane.

My two favorite passages are below:

"If I had thought the beef marrow might be a hell of a lot of work for not much difference, I needn’t have worried. The taste of the marrow is rich, meaty, intense in a nearly-too-much way. In my increasingly depraved state, I could think of nothing at first but that it tasted like really good sex. But there was something more than that, even. What it really tastes like is life, well lived. Of course the cow I got marrow from had a fairly crappy life – lots of crowds and overmedication and bland food that might or might not have been a relative. But deep in his or her bones, there was a capacity for feral joy. I could taste it."

"I baked David Strathairn absurdly complicated pecan-cornmeal cookies… I can’t imagine anyone - a few of the more repressive Islamic societies aside - who would consider baking an act of adultery. Still, for Eric, knowing what he knew of my proclivities, watching me roll out thin layers of cornmeal dough, sprinkle them with chopped pecans, cinnamon, and melted butter, then lay another layer of dough on top, and repeat over and over with infinite patience, must have been a little bit like noticing I’d gotten a bikini wax and a tight red dress the day before leaving for some business convention in Dallas. He didn’t do anything but roll his eyes and grumble with careful good humor, but he knew what I was doing."