food museum blog

Small Town Caterer Continues To Make Good

Martha Stewart is launching new products at a dizzying pace of late. Announced in May, a fresh and frozen line of foods for Costco under the label Kirkland Signature by Martha Stewart.  ( Her Mega Martha Macy's "home products" line was just launched nationwide.)

And soon, a wine deal with Gallo. ( I remember when this was the schlockiest of giant bottle vino...)Martha Stewart Vintage, at about $15 a pop, rolls out in some markets next January.

AP reported: "The initial launch of 15,000 cases will include three wines: 2006 Sonoma County Chardonnay, 2005 Sonoma County Cabernet Sauvingon and 2006 Sonoma County Merlot. The wines will be offered in Atlanta, Boston, Charlotte, N.C., Denver, Phoenix, and Portland, Ore."

A San Francisco Chronicle article noted that the hooch is aimed at Martha's female fans. Wine industry analyst Jon Frederickson stated: "They say, 'Gee she's endorsing wine, she's my role model, maybe I'll step up and try this product. "

Not when I can get a decent red for $7 at Trader Joes, thank you!  But am I a fan? I am impressed indeed by her biz and style acumen. And a very high end, aesthetically-driven pal of mine in San Fran swears by her curtains.

No, I am more arrested by quirky wine labels on very drinkable wines --like the blended red produced by the Goats Do Roam people in South Africa. ( Martha has no discernible sense of humor when it comes to her products, so............)

"( Charles) Back ( of Fairview Winery) is proudly South African and has a deep-seated belief in the potential of Cape wines and a strong sense of integrity. But he also has a quirky, irrepressible sense of humour, which led to the creation of the first Goats Do Roam label, which many with great amusement interpreted as a friendly jibe at the French – and in this case, the Côtes du Rhône growers’ – sense of proprietary right when it comes to branding the source of a wine.

‘Not so’, says Back, though with the barely disguised air of a naughty schoolboy delighting in his own mischief. The ‘legend’ goes that some errant members of Fairview’s long-established goat herd, supplier of milk for Fairview’s internationally award-winning cheeses, took the gap when Charles Back’s young son Jason and buddy Justin had left open the gate to the paddock containing Fairview’s famous goat tower. The little group happily roamed among the vineyards, showing rare discernment by selecting the ripest berries off some of the choicest vines…"

Is Nothing Sacred? Pizza Boxes Defiled

A few years ago advertising mavens in Long Island, NY, decided to put ads for their clients on the wide open spaces that once were pizza boxes. ( In the beginning the company was called Mangia Media, as in "eat" in Italian, but since then they have ceased to have a fun name, alas...)

Recently a community in Ohio took the milk carton "lost children" ad idea and began plastering the faces of "deadbeat Dads" on local pizza boxes.

Now people in Hull, England  are hoping that putting a message from the  Primary Care Trust, the local entity that administers "national health" to all in Britain, on pizza boxes will rouse eaters whose mouths are stuffed with cheese and dough to ponder their dietary choices.

My business henceforth will go only to pizza emporiums whose boxes shriek Lousy Luigi's in red, green and white.

( Thanks to about.com for pizza box schemata.)

In memoriam: R.W. Apple, Jr.

R.W. Apple, Jr. has died. Though lauded for his political writing and editing over a long career at the New York Times, Mr. Apple's appreciative food writing, barely mentioned in today's obit, will long remain with me.

The blog Take Back the Times  featured this a year ago:  "Apple is not one of these restaurant critics who sneaks into the restaurant, wearing a false beard and no one knows who he is. No, his arrival is often set up well in advance, and he goes, as he did at Uglesich's, for a special meal where the proprietor has put on all his best efforts.

Apple does not appear at lousy restaurants. He only goes to the best, and the NYT sends him and his wife, Betsy, who is usually present, all over the world at its expense. It falls into the category of a public service of the first water."

On a trip to Shanghai  that Apple wrote up  for the NYT in October 2005, he reported that after a morning sampling goodies from food stalls, "...I felt fat as a Strasbourg goose, but my eating buddies insisted that we stop at a 24-hour noodle shop on Shandong Zhonglu, behind the Westin, to watch a particularly deft cook do his stuff. "No need to eat," said Mr. Leung, a Hong Kong-born Chinese. "Just watch." Sure. We watched, all right, as a huge ball of dough was kneaded and rolled and tossed and hacked into ragged little squares that reminded Mr. Vongerichten, an Alsatian, of spaetzle, and twisted and stretched and flipped and folded into long, supple noodles. But of course I had to sample a bowl of beef noodle soup, lightly curry-flavored, before we left, and of course that spoiled my lunch."

This detail of Apple's packing was in today's NYT obit: "To the end of his life, Mr. Apple kept a small black bag packed with essentials, including a personal pepper mill, ready to be whisked away on a moment’s notice for a big story, or for a little one that caught his fancy."

(Ah, this touches my heart---  my mother, too, never traveled without her black pepper, along with coffee-making gear and decent wattage light bulbs.)

Another favorite of mine, Calvin Trillin, profiled Apple in The New Yorker in 2003.

( Top: Gerald Scarfe's Falstaffian caricature of Mr. Apple.)

A Nourishing Journal

If you like your foodie literature short and sweet, neatly contained in a journal suitable for insertion in pockets,  and you'd rather not wait for the New Yorker's special issue on food, Alimentum is for you. The New York-based journal was launched by writer and caterer Paulette Licitra soon after she had the notion that food had not yet been honored by a dedicated lit mag. Her husband, Peter Selgin, a writer, painter, editor, teacher, shares editing duties with Paulette, the publisher. Evidently they are already backlogged on submissions--the first two editions, Winter and Summer, have just emerged--so expect a wait on your poem about the armadillo that refused to cook up tender. Ultimately Alimentum hopes to pay its writers but for the moment the reward is seeing your work in elegant print.

On Sunday Foodie caught the Alimentum crowd at a reading at a restaurant in Brooklyn to note the publication of Summer. (Night and Day in Park Slope hosted the event.) While some material "reads" well and its authors have a gift for same, other does not, alas. We think that the best presenters should take the mike---Foodie assumed, incorrectly, that she would find the authors in the magazine, after the fact. Alas, she does not know the name of the fellow who did a funny riff on the food references missing from Lawrence's Women in Love, nor the young woman who read some poetry with memorable lines like, "the fish in the window are taken already," and "Keep the taste of your sandwich closed, in your mouth," and something about the bottoms of feet, as "flaky as whitefish." Lynn Levin read with delayed amusement about her attempt to eat guinea pig in Peru, and Angus Woodward wondered what the "tomato as a fruit or not" controversy was all about.

Foodie was about to launch into a didactic explanation of the whole affair settled by the Supremes in 1887---the government wanted tomatoes taxed as a veg, the importers wanted it untaxed as a fruit--and of course we all know technically that it is a fruit, botanically...but since this entire explanation would have been utterly unliterary, Foodie shut up and ate her nicely prepared fried baby artichokes.

Mad Cows and Englishmen ( The Blokes Who Test Them)

' "There is no risk whatsoever," he ( Mike Johanns, US Secretary of Agriculture) told reporters in a hastily organized conference call Friday night. '  One always releases bad news to the distracted American public on Friday night, as they happily head home  focussed on weekend plans or this month fixated on Michael Jackson's fate...The story, reported by Alexei Barrionuevo, appeared in the NYTimes Saturday, June 11.

Yes, Virginia, we have  a mad cow or two or three or more  in the USA. 

"The beef cow, which was nine years old and could not stand, was first tested last November and passed three initial tests. Then the Agriculture Department's inspector general, in reviewing the department's mad cow testing program, requested that the cow and two other previously suspect animals be tested again with a different technology that is used in Europe. The one cow tested positive on Friday.

Agriculture Department officials said they did not yet know which state the cow came from.
A sample of the animal's brain tissue will be sent to a laboratory in Weybridge, England, and results should be available in a few days, a spokesman said."

There is no risk, absolutely none, dig into your prime rib, but we, uh, the government, have no clue as to where the latest damned maddening cow came from.

Blame Canada! ( Can we?)

( Cow pictured is not known to be mad, and appears content to be near its fodder, if not its mudder. As for its udder, well...)

Hidden Kitchens

Hidden Kitchens is a new series on USA's public radio network NPR.  The idea of the twelve week  series airing each Friday is to uncover threatened food traditions and rituals.  The series is also about the impact of globalization on regional foodways.  How America is changing.   There's an extensive and attractive website connected to the project.  Past programs are archived.  Two women called the Kitchen Sisters are behind the traveling microphones.  Here's more about them.