I've mentioned before that professional cooking is about numbers. How many portions of fish did you get from that salmon? How many olives per chicken garnish? Have we enough beef cheeks to last the weekend? All this purposeful counting leads to unintentional counting. I find myself counting along as I peel potatoes, or shell prawns, or dice tomatoes. This habit is mostly annoying, especially when I do it aloud, because no one, myself included, cares how many carrots I've peeled. I would definitely rather not know how many gnocchi I've made in my cooking career. (In case you are wondering, it's a shitload.)
On Dumplings and Cousins
House Dressing
I was recently reading an article in a trade mag which gave pointers on setting up the perfect, trendy bar. The focus was mostly on decor and good staff and what not, but one tip stood out: develop a house cocktail. That's brilliant. A simple, eponymous, concoction that people will remember you for. While I'm not exactly in the business of making drinks (consuming them is more my style), it got me thinking. What's the kitchen equivalent? Signature dishes aren't exactly it... that's a level above. I'm thinking of some sort of flavor shorthand; a little, punchy bite that says: “Damn, I'm good.” A great house dressing is the sort of thing I have in mind. This, in turn, has got me thinking about the house dressing at a little Italian dive in my college town, which was nothing short of legendary.
Because it is There
There exists, in certain corners of the world, a culture of eating exotic and strange animals simply for the sake of eating them. Most of these foods started out as necessity driven by poverty and can now be lumped into two categories: those that have been elevated to “delicacy” status (shark-fin soup) and those eaten out of tradition (fried tarantulas). Anthony Bourdain, in A Cook's Tour encounters more than a bit of this in his travels, most notably swallowing a still-beating cobra heart. It is a Mallory-esque attitude towards food; eat it “because it is there.”
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