Written by Lambert Strether of Corrente
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Everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about. Be kind. Always. -External, attributed to robin williams
This is a very serious week for Naked Capitalism, so here’s what we wanted to convey to our readers: Amuse BoucheIt’s like an old-fashioned blogging post where you start off with no idea where it’s going.
Not to disparage my mother’s cooking, but it was very much the American cooking you see in 1950s women’s magazines (meatloaf, creamed peas, Jell-O): well-planned and nutritious, but not. cooking. I learned to eat late in Montreal in my mid-30s.EI was at the X conference at McGill University. I worked as a desktop publisher a few years ago. After a day of work, I was walking down the hill to St. Catherine Street and happened to stop by a steakhouse. I wanted to treat myself to something.
The steakhouse was Alouette Steak House. The warm room was filled with solid local bourgeois. From the menu – written exotically in French (large print) and English (small print) – I chose: Steak au poivre With ~ French fries, snail Appetizers and a bottle of red wine (considering the room, “I’ll drink what they serve”). The air outside was crisp, but the windows inside were steamy. A plump chef in a white hat was grilling steaks on a rotating grill, probably to speed things up. Bread, wine, and snail Arrived. I have never seen a hemispherical convex plate to hold snails. The snails tasted like garlic and were soaked in oil, so they were not hard. I cleaned the snails, soaked the bread in garlic and oil, took a sip of wine and cut the oil and garlic. The steak arrived, peppered and covered in a cream sauce. I cut a chunk…
My whole mouth was happy. My whole mouth was happy. body I was happy. I don’t know why this didn’t happen before, but it did. As you can see, this is Madeleine It was a moment for me. Bourdain, unlike me, is a real food writer and much better, and here is his madeleine moment. It happened to him when he was much younger than me. Kitchen Confidential (2000), pp. 18-19:
We had already finished our Brie and baguettes and emptied our Evian, but I was still hungry, and characteristically so said. Upon hearing this, as if challenging an American passenger, Monsieur Saint-Jour asked in his thick Gironde accent whether any of us would like to try oysters.
My parents hesitated. They probably didn’t realize that we might actually be eating one of those floating, raw, slimy things. My brother cringed in horror.
But in the proudest moment of my young life, I stood up smartly, smiled defiantly, and volunteered for the first time.
And in that unforgettably sweet moment in my personal history, a moment more vivid to me than many other “firsts” that have followed—my first joint, my first day of high school, my first published book, or anything else—I was honored. Monsieur Saint-Jour called me over to the deck, and he bent down, thrust his hand out until his head was almost underwater, and came out clutching in his rough, claw-like fist a huge, irregularly shaped, mud-stained oyster. He opened it with a blunt, rusty oyster knife and handed it to me, while everyone watched, and my brother shrank from this still-dripping, almost-alive, shiny, vaguely sexual object.
I took it in my hand, and, following the now smiling Monsieur Saint-Jour’s instructions, I tipped the shell into my mouth, took a bite, and swallowed it in a gulp. It tasted like seawater… saltwater and flesh… and, in a way… the taste of the future.
Now everything was different. Everything.
Not only did I survive, I enjoyed it.
I knew that this was the magic I had only vaguely and maliciously known until now. I was addicted. My parents’ trembling, my brother’s uncontrollable disgust and surprise only reinforced the feeling that I had somehow become a man. I had taken an adventure, tasted the forbidden fruit, and everything that followed in my life, whether food, drugs, sex, or some other new sensation, the long, often foolish, self-destructive chase for the next thing, all stemmed from this moment.
I learned something. Viscerally, instinctively, spiritually—even in a small, pioneering way, sexually—and there was no going back. The genie was out of the bottle. My life as a cook, as a chef, had begun.
Food had power.
It could inspire, surprise, shock, excite, delight, and move. It had the power to delight me… and others. This was valuable information.
I only experienced aesthetics because I ate in solitary splendor. strengthSo did Bourdain (for better or worse). Sadly, Alouette Steak House is now gone.
Like many other things downtown, it was gone. I moved to a much more upscale restaurant, but I don’t think there were any celebrity chefs back then. Everything was still naive, and it was still about the food. I found a tasting menu, seven courses of small, delicious bite-size dishes, and a menu that listed ingredients like “Monsieur Fortier’s greens.” It was great because it was local! I supported the farm! (In fact, one of the best meals I’ve ever had was made by a chef in his hometown of Maine. slow food Dinner was all made with local ingredients (so you could do it in any town). I also learned to dislike the American custom of surrounding a large piece of meat with side dishes. Back then, at least in Montreal, meat and vegetables were equally important on the plate, designed to complement and enhance each other.
Upon reflection, rereading my experiences in Montreal, I realized that the fact that “the bread had arrived” had led me to idolize bread and turn it into an activator. Serve He brought me food. He took us into one of Bourdain’s many reflections on staff. Again Kitchen ConfidentialPages 208-209:
I think it was a historic moment.
[Steven] He showed up looking for a sauté dish, only to be accompanied by his even more depraved friend, Adam Real-Number-Unknown…
When Steven and Adam were in the kitchen together, I couldn’t turn my back for a second. They were hyperactive, destructive, and when they weren’t fighting or throwing food at each other, they were two evil energizer bunnies who always seemed to be escaping from the kitchen to run various criminal errands. They were noisy, thieving, and endlessly curious. Steven couldn’t help but look at a desk and see what was inside. They played pranks and built a network of like-minded colleagues. Within weeks of his arrival, Steven had already connected the entire club from top to bottom. The office assistant told him how much everyone else was getting paid, the security guard gave him some of the drugs they had confiscated at the door, and the techs let him play with the computers… Maintenance gave him a portion of the lost and found and a gift bag filled with the loot left over from the promotional events: cosmetics, CDs, T-shirts, bomber jackets, and wristwatches. The maintenance manager gave Steven a key to a closed office on the third floor of the Supper Club. The office was an old janitor’s storage room that, unbeknownst to management, had been turned into a carpeted, furnished, and fully decorated pleasure pit, complete with a working telephone. It was the perfect space for small meetings, drug dealing, and empire building. [The room] It was furnished with remnants of carpet and furniture stolen from the Edison Hotel. The place was up a long back staircase strewn with trash, behind a stinking dressing room, and down a dark, unlit corridor where spare china was stored, so the management never visited. The young man could be sure that whatever dark work he was doing, however loud, messy, or vicious, he would be unlikely to be disturbed.
The boy could do it Cookbut.
Something like the delicious office politics I learned from my father…
Kitchen Confidential Bourdain became a celebrity and a TV star, but I’ll skip all that and show you three short video clips that show how much he loved food (and, unlike my overpriced tasting menus, delicious food that locals can eat for not much money). In San Francisco, Swan Oyster House:
“All the good stuff. Brains, fat….”
Donkey’s Place in Camden, New Jersey:
The “Really!” reaction after learning that Bourdain serves this cheesesteak on a Kaiser roll is priceless.
Food cart from Vietnam:
“Everything you need to be happy.”
I think the common thread running through all of these videos is Bourdain’s respect for the people who made the food. Kitchen ConfidentialDespite the bravery of the Hunter Thompson-esque passages I quoted about office politics, let me quote Chris Arnade from his column (and book): Walk the worldHere, it seems that Master Bourdain’s words continue.
During my two weeks of walking around Lima, I ate a lot of ceviche and drank a lot of Pilsen callao (sorry, Pilsen is tastier and cheaper than the famous Cusqueña).
Because everyone in Lima is on the move, and because the city hasn’t been taken over by franchises, you can find hundreds of places to eat, each a little different. Street vendors, food stalls, carts, storefronts all serve food made that day or the night before.
Franchises lower the risk of what you eat, but they lower the quality. You know what you’re getting, but it’s going to be pretty mediocre.
It also destroys the transcendent. To steal from Walter Benjamin and his “Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” when a chain restaurant assembles a burger in minutes, the whole mood about making and eating food disappears.
But not when you’re sitting just a foot away from three women making ceviche from fish from two fishmongers.
Everyone gets a great sense of pride in doing it. The dignity of work is an overused phrase, but the meaning that comes from making something special, even if it’s “just” ceviche or aguardito de pollo, is real.
So I prefer to gamble on a few bad moments, find something truly sublime, and capture some of that aura in a small way. I also prefer to give my money to people who create.
I’m sure Bourdain would agree with this. And so do I!
I was wrong on the lead. We all know where we are going later rather than sooner. Sadly, Anthony Bourdain ended his life. It’s strange for someone who is so full of life (especially when he eats as you can see in the video). Fame is bad for people. Wealth is bad for people. But we don’t know and can’t know what kind of inner conflict Bourdain went through, no matter how much he went through. chat We try to dissect the mystery (most of what is important in life is, after all, mysterious). With Lambert Strother of James, I would say, “Live as best you can, or else it’s a mistake.” So eat as well as you can, respect the workers who made the food you eat, and try to be kind.
Appendix Seafood Stew
Since this clip is famous, I’ll show you how Bourdain oversimplifies collateralized debt obligations (CDOs). Big Short. Terrible book, terrible movie (at least for those who don’t know much about finance):
For a candid look at CDOs, see the precise technical explanation by Yves in 2010. That is, “It’s not old fish, it’s completely new! And the best part is that you’re eating 3-day-old halibut.” This seems to apply to the financialized economy, and not just to financial products. For example, you can think of an AI training set as a seafood stew.
