July 4th
The newsletters’ name, the WORLD OF FOOL, derives from the famous Egyptian fava bean porridge pronounced “fool” in Arabic. Fūl is known as the rich man’s breakfast, the shopkeeper’s lunch, and the poor man’s supper. It is a double entendre for those of us who love to cook and eat yet confront daily an assault on our aesthetic sensibilities from food police, food fashionistas, and the foolish. [If you are new to www.cliffordawright.com you may like to read the first newsletter posting in the weekly newsletter archives, July 2007, whose link you will find at the bottom of this column.] July 4th in the Mediterranean. They celebrate July 4th in the Mediterranean? No, they don’t as American Independence Day is an American holiday. But there are many Americans who travel and live in the Mediterranean, probably over 100,000. (I have no idea where I get this figure). Some are military, others are diplomatic or business, thousands are students, and more thousands are ex-patriots of one kind or another especially retirees, not to mention tourists. The two American holidays that present a challenge, foodwise, for American ex-pats are Thanksgiving and July 4th. But July 4th is easier because a barbeque can be done anywhere and Americans have no problem giving up a hamburger and hot dog on the grill for shish kebab. In any case, one hardly needs a reason to pull out the grill. I grill all kind of things but often keep it simple such as a beef tri-tip or a rack of lamb ...
June 27, 2008
Nectarines
June 20, 2008
The Importance of Carapaces
June 13, 2008
Recipe Research
June 06, 2008
Idea for a Recipe 2
July 27, 2007
Premier Issue of THE WORLD OF FOOL
Premier Issue of THE WORLD OF FOOL
The WORLD OF FOOL is a name that derives from
the famous Egyptian fava bean porridge pronounced “fool.” Fūl is known as the rich man’s breakfast, the
shopkeeper’s lunch, and the poor man’s supper.
It is a double entendre for those of us
who love to cook and eat yet confront daily an assault on our aesthetic sensibilities from food police, food fashionistas, and the
foolish.
Welcome to the premier posting of Clifford A. Wright’s THE WORLD OF FOOL, a two-part newsletter-blog-travelogue consisting of FOOL: A Gastronomic and Alimentary Report which is posted weekly and FOOL (Fūl): The Alimentary Peregrinations of an American Pantagruel, Diaries of Gastronomy and Pathos in the Mediterranean, posted monthly.
Fool, you ask? Aficionados of Mediterranean cuisine know that the name of the newsletter derives from the famous Egyptian fava bean mash known as the rich man’s breakfast, the shopkeeper’s lunch, and the poor man’s supper. But it is also a double entendre for all of us whose joyful love of cooking, eating, and breaking bread with our friends and family is assaulted daily by attacks on our aesthetic sensibilities by food police, food fashionistas, food fads, bland corporate interests, and of course the foolish.
Enough’s enough, say I.
This is why I’m launching a newsletter for the gastronomically correct,
for people who watch their happiness before they watch their weight. This is a newsletter for people who love the
story behind the food they cook and eat.
This is a thinking person’s newsletter for readers whose peach comes
from a tree and not a can (most of the time).
In fact, for people whose peach is a Snow Queen, a most amazing peach
cultivar, and not that mealy round red thing in the supermarket. This is a newsletter for people who believe
in slow food nation over the fast food nation, for fresh food nation over
processed food nation. For people who
believe in moderation in all things, including moderation itself (sometimes you’ve
got to be revolutionary, sometimes conservative). This is a newsletter for people who lament
modern civilization’s slow separation from the natural world around us that
provides the bountiful cornucopia that sustains us and provides joy.
In these days of lowest common denominator food magazines (and even lower common denominator TV shows), where safety and risk-free food writing with an eye on total ad pages and the bottom line come at the expense of writing about the joys of cooking and eating authentic foods that are rooted in the cultures from which they derive, one can hardly find that delicious kind of food writing that whets your appetite, explores the culinary cultures, and celebrates the activity of the kitchen, the sharing of food, and the slow tasting of scrumptious dishes made by....YOU!
This newsletter is for cooks and people who love food. It’s for home cooks and it celebrates home cooks. My home food is Mediterranean food in general and Italian food in particular. Mediterranean food is where I find the gastronomic ideals I live by which emphasizes taste over convenience, slow eating over fast eating, local and fresh over processed and refined, seasonal over year-round availability, soulful over soulless, flavor over fear. This is true not only because of a partly Italian heritage but also because I’ve spent so much time in the Mediterranean even before writing professionally about food.
This is an exciting time for me because I have had a relationship with the Mediterranean since I was four years old. I have written several books about the Mediterranean. Since then interest in Mediterranean food has exploded. The Mediterranean diet is held up as a laudable and healthy way to eat and the interest in Mediterranean cooking is finding expression in unexpected places, from the frozen “Mediterranean chicken” TV dinner in your supermarket to The Olive Garden restaurant’s Mediterranean garlic shrimp. Everyone’s talking about Mediterranean food.
Curiously, they don’t tell us what it is. What is Mediterranean food? Well, after all, I did write a book about all this. A Mediterranean Feast, is my magnum opus, a book which won the James Beard/ KitchenAid Cookbook of the Year and the Beard Award for the Best Writing on Food both in 2000 and which is the philosophical and gastronomic foundation and source for the web site. To quote from my introduction in that book, I said that “[T]he Mediterranean is composed of many different cultures, and there seems to be no single image that represents a “magical” unity. Even with the shared trinity of ingredients (olive oil, wheat, and the vine), Italian food is a world apart from Egyptian food, yet both are Mediterranean.
It says volumes that Americans will cook “Mediterranean” food, while a real Mediterranean cook, whether a Sicilian, Syrian, or Greek, would never dream of cooking any food but his or her own. In fact, I’ve met Syrians who have never heard of bouillabaisse (a Provençal fish stew), French who’ve never heard of kafta (grilled ground meat), and Moroccans who have never heard of Tunisian brīk (deep-fried egg-stuffed pastry) even though they have their own variety called brīwat.”
In A Mediterranean Feast I proposed that by understanding the countries of the Mediterranean in context– in terms of their history, environment, and trade– a diverse Mediterranean unity emerges that can be reflected and demonstrated in the kitchen. This web site will follow in that theme and be a web site of food and about food, informed by a history of the environment, an ecology of the Mediterranean, the lives of ordinary people, the importance of trade and transit, the development of towns and capitalism, the beginnings of the nation-state, and the familiar story of great men and wars.
The first thing to remember is that the Mediterranean is not one cuisine. There is no such thing as “Mediterranean cuisine.” But we do seem to understand what that means, don’t we? I will use the expressions “Mediterranean food” or “Mediterranean cuisine” as a generic catch-all category to refer to all the cultures and regions that have a Mediterranean littoral. Second, remember that the Mediterranean of today is entirely different than the Mediterranean of the classical world. In classical times there were no oranges nor lemons, no spinach and eggplant, nor potatoes and tomatoes, which had yet to arrive from the East or the New World. Asiatic rice, called “the blessing brought by the Arabs,” did not exist, nor did chiles and green beans from South America, maize from North America, or coffee from East Africa.
I believe one of the major reasons that Mediterranean food is so popular in America today is because American cooks are naturally drawn to the world of flavors and tastes that emanate from Mediterranean kitchens. Think about it– without a second thought as to their origins, we enjoy spaghetti and meatballs, pizza, hummus, moussaka, gazpacho, paella, couscous, feta cheese, and pita bread– all Mediterranean foods now firmly ensconced in the American culinary pantheon. This willingness to experiment and accept new foods has long been a hallmark of American culinary openness.
Every week I will be writing about the things I care about when it comes to food and as time goes on a format and theme will become evident. Welcome to Fool where we will eat well.
Food of the Week
Early Girl Tomatoes
The best food you’ll find this week will be at your farmers market. Find yours by visiting http://www.ams.usda.gov/farmersmarkets/
If you see Early Girl tomatoes you’re in for a treat. They are so-named because they reach maturity earlier than other tomatoes. You will not find tomatoes listed by cultivar name in a supermarket, and in fact you will never find a tasty tomato in a supermarket. There’s a reason for that: supermarkets buy tomatoes for redness and roundness and their ability to withstand rough handling. They are stored at temperatures far to cold, effectively killing off their taste, if they had any to begin with. (Supermarkets buy from growers who grow tomatoes with very thick skins so they can be mechanically picked).
Now, Early Girl tomatoes are another story altogether. They make for a wonderful antipasto and an incredibly easy one if you have guests. Unless you’ve got some growing in your garden, go to the farmers market and buy two pounds of these tomatoes that are juicy with a delicious slightly sweet taste, perfect for making what the Italians call a marmellata. So here’s how to make a savory tomato marmalade. Make sure the tomatoes are no larger than two inches in diameter and cut them in half. In a saute pan, heat about six tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil over medium heat, then add the tomatoes and cook until they are bursting and breaking down and very soft in about 15 minutes, then add two tablespoons of good balsamic vinegar (you don’t have to use the very authentic and expensive one) and season with salt and pepper, then let cool and serve at room temperature. That’s all there is to it and people will ask you for the recipe. Just remember it won’t work with supermarket tomatoes
Egypt “Good for You”
After a grueling, interminable flight and thousands of miles later, not to mention time zones, and God knows what else, Boyd and I arrived in Cairo touching down at 9:50 pm on October 5. I was in Egypt to research Egyptian cuisine for my book A Mediterranean Feast: The Story of the Birth of the Celebrated Cuisines of the Mediterranean from the Merchants of Venice to the Barbary Corsairs. Boyd Grove, who calls himself a state bureaucrat, had somehow managed to take off a month from his job in Maryland as a state health inspector to come with me. Only later would he come to understand that the proposition of studying cuisine in Egypt has as much logic as studying penguins in Guam. But there is food in Egypt and I had to find out about it. I had read everything, I had met every Egyptian I could, and now I had to go to Egypt and eat and cook. It was going to be an exhausting trip because not only did I have to meet people and collect as much as I could about food, but we also wanted to visit all the tourist sights, and we knew, vaguely, that there would be a huge culture shock, and lastly, I’m infamous for traveling on the cheap, on the real cheap (according to my travel companions).
On the flight I sat next to a jolly Egyptian fellow, Dr. Tarek el-Sharkawy, who was a professor of dental surgery at Cairo University. He asked me why I was going to Egypt and was quite surprised when I told him I would be there a month to research Egyptian food for a book I was writing. He was immediately delighted and fascinated and began giving me his list of Egyptian food I must seek out. He lit up and said “you must have fool.” I already knew about fūl, pronounced FOOL, because I was familiar with much of Egyptian food already, and because I had had an amazing Palestinian-Lebanese version at a wedding party for me and Najwa, my ex-wife, and I knew that the Egyptian version was quite different than the Levantine one. On the other hand, Egyptian food is considered by other Arabs the way we consider British food: just garbage. My Arab friends thought me a fool for even wanting to go to Egypt for food.
But the conversation with my dentist friend was
enlightening and stimulating as he enumerated the repertoire of dishes I needed
to discover, such as the veal ankle stew called qawarja (or kawāric). He said that it is “very different” and a “must
eat.” It is usually made, he said, with
the joints of a forty-day old water buffalo.
Kushary is also a specialty I should try, he said, often sold as
a street food from either itinerant vendors in donkey-drawn carts or from
hole-in-the-wall cook shops. All it is
is a bowl of rice, lentils, and macaroni with a spicy tomato sauce and crispy
brown onions. I was also instructed to
seek out Umm cAlī, a dessert pudding that came about, so the
apocryphal story goes, in the Middle Ages when the sultan was riding in the
Delta and stopped with his hunting party at a little village to have a
meal. At that moment the village didn't
have any food for him so one woman, Umm cAlī, the mother of cAlī
(pronounced AH-li not Ah-LEE), pulled out a special pan and filled it
with stale gullash, wheat flakes like phyllo, sultanas (golden raisins),
some shredded coconut, and covered it with sugar and milk and then baked it in
the village oven. It was so good that
the sultan asked for Umm cAlī’s dessert the next time he was in this
village.
I mentioned to him that my first born was named Ali. The good doctor was quite pleased and called me Abū cAlī (the father of cAlī, but also a real nice nom de guerre, and God knows traveling in Egypt was to be a war of sorts, or maybe nom de voyage is better). He gave me his mother’s recipe for Umm cAlī which I diligently wrote down. He mentioned fatta, which is actually two things, one, crumbled stale bread with broth poured over it, and the other is a lamb stew. As we descended in the night sky I could see the twinkling lights of Cairo in the surrounding blackness of the desert.
Now it was to begin... our adventure.
Within a second of leaving the ramp from the plane into the waiting lounge, we were instantly hijacked by an excited, staccato-speaking woman dressed in neat Western-style skirt and blouse with an official-looking badge. She looked like the person who would take our passports and landing cards, so we gave them to her. We headed towards customs and noticed on our right huge lines snaking through passport control. We, on the other hand, were led by this woman to “currency exchange.” She told us to get on line to change money, which we did. We changed two hundred dollars and then went back to her.
Anxiously, I began to suspect that she was not a real official. We were still inside the so-called “secure” area, which I was now suspecting wasn’t secure at all. She had others working with her, and the “real” authorities seemed to condone these activities, whatever these activities were, but they seemed clearly to be one of private enterprise and not one of the government. Already there was a high degree of confusion and we were completely unclear as to who we should believe, where we should be going, what we should be doing, and to whom we should give our landing cards and furthermore who the hell was “official” and not. Virtually no one looked official, except maybe the bored guy in the booth stamping passports, except for the fact that people seemed to be randomly going in and out of passport control or I should say passport “control.” I couldn’t tell who was running things, but in any case there were three very long lines to get through passport “control” and apparently nobody in charge. The whole airport had a dusty free-for-all look about it and it inspired virtually no confidence. Confusion reigned supreme and all was uncontrolled and we hadn’t even left the secure area of the airport yet. Welcome to Egypt.
The woman, it turned out, worked for a quasi-government sanctioned, maybe, tourist agency that–and I’ll always remember her turn-of-phrase–“tells you about what to do in Egypt and confirms that you have a hotel,” in other words, gets a kick-back if they hook you up to their hotel. When she saw my confusion and resistance to her, she smiled in a knowing way and nodded “its good for you, yes.” This has now become a refrain Boyd and I use even today when one of us resists a suggestion. “But, Cliff, it is good for you, yes.” (Remember, the accent is on YOU). She took our passports and brought us to a very short line on the far left of the smoky, dust-clouded terminal, gave our passports to an “official” who stamped them and then led us through a portal with a sign over it “staff only, no admittance.” Many people were going back and forth through the “No Admittance” portal without anyone paying attention. On the other side of the portal our passports were handed back to us, without the official, or any official having seen us, although somebody had perfunctorily stamped the passports. Or, as I properly should say, “any ‘official’ having seen us.” I asked someone about the Currency Form D that I had heard about on the airplane from some British know-it-alls and this “official” said “don’t worry, that’s only for people with a lot of money.” It all sounded rather unconvincing, but in any case he pegged us as people without a lot of money.
Now that we were officially in Egypt, I guess, our “guide”–and who isn’t a guide in Egypt (and incidentally, anyone who keeps a diary in Egypt will use quotations marks with liberal abandon) brought us over to a dingy counter surrounded with five or six men doing nothing but lounging around and smoking cigarettes, looking like they were waiting for the sixth race to start at Aqueduct. They smoked. Everyone smokes. Let me make this clear– EVERYONE SMOKES!
This scene of languorous groups of smoking men was a scene similar to our very first one when we came down the ramp off the airplane. The very first Egyptians we saw were two military types, very unkempt and unprofessional looking, carrying automatic weapons, smoking, one of them sleeping standing up and the other almost asleep sitting down. It was like a 1940s Looney Toons cartoon of Mexican soldiers.
On the other hand, I couldn’t quite believe we were
through this incredibly long and slow moving line, although I was feeling very
much like a tourist mark, a real fool.
This woman did save us about an hour or more of waiting on line. We began making noises that we were glad they
helped us through but we were anxious to get to our hotel.
They were quite persistent but polite and did in fact convince us to call the Capsis Palace Hotel to confirm our reservation which we did. These people were all very nice. The government, I guess, supports this activity by looking the other way. They gave us a driver whose name was Hisham. Off we went, first having dropped a few pounds in baksheesh here and there. As we were looking worried an obviously experienced British traveler standing near us said, laughing, “don’t worry, it’ll work.” This was somewhat comforting.
The collusion between government officials and this “tour operator” was blatant. But more than that there seemed to be a total breakdown of order. Many people hanging around without really anything to do. We had been in Egypt thirty minutes and I was already exhausted.
Hisham, the cabbie, put us in his car and for 25 LE ($8.75) drove us the thirty minutes to our hotel, although we then spent another thirty minutes looking for it, passing burning trash drums and guys working on broken down old cars in the middle of the night using lanterns. It looked like a scene from that Kurt Russell movie Escape from New York. We arrived at 11:30 pm and were completely kaput. I didn’t quite understand why the driver couldn’t find the hotel as it was on the major thoroughfare Shari’ Ramsis. The hotel looks like it was built in the fourteenth century although it was probably built in the 1960s. In fact, every building, no matter when it was built, looks like it was built in 1324. But like everything else here there is much disrepair and general filthiness. No one sweeps or dusts, and why would you, the desert rules.
We took this rather dingy, not-to-clean room for 50 LE, about seventeen dollars. The room had two small cots that were actually very comfortable (or was I really, really tired?), and ripped carpeting apparently woven out of filth and pubic hair that looked like it was swept but not vacuumed for several hundred years. No sheets, but the beds were clean. The room had all the charm of a prison cell, but we didn’t mind, as we were only going to sleep there. We returned to the lobby and when I asked the manager if he had a cheaper room, he laughed like I was a lunatic as did the group of nearby “smoking men.” Boyd thought I was out of my mind since the seventeen dollar room was already a real pissant room. On the top floor was a bar and restaurant where we went for some bottled water. By now it was 1:30 am and when we returned to our room we collapsed into our beds in utter exhaustion.
Continued next month with Part 2: Egypt “Blade Runner Revisited”
Part 11: Egypt: "Kushary and the Bus"
Part 10: Egypt "King Tut"
Part 9: Egypt "Step Pyramid of Zozer
Part 8: Egypt “Children’s Art”
Part 7: Egypt "Finally, the Pyramids"
Part 6: Egypt “The Pyramids...whoops, Not Yet”
Part 5: Egypt “Under Attack”
Part 4: Egypt "My Mission"
Part 3: Egypt “Khan al-Khalili”
Part 2: Egypt "Blade Runner Revisited"
Part 1: Egypt “Good for You”