#118 | The Scent of San Francisco
Virginia Woolf's Coffee Cup
Hello!
I'm Bruce Cole, Publisher of Edible San Francisco. If you’re new here, welcome to Eat.Drink.Think., a newsletter spotlighting seasonal recipes, the latest SF Bay Area food news, poetry, and more!
As usual, our latest issue has been stuck at the railyard in Stockton and who knows when we’ll get delivery. We even offered our professional forklift driving skills (we drove one 8 hours a day way back when) to expedite things but they declined (okay, they laughed). So here’s a sneak peak at the cover (photo by moi):
Keep an eye on our Instagram as we’ll be posting locations where you can grab a copy, hopefully by the middle of next week sometime. In the interim, get yourself some Rize Up Sourdough! We’re fans of the masala loaf btw.
👉 ICYMI: The most-clicked link from our last newsletter was the YouTube video of Crosby, Stills & Nash playing Just A Song Before I Go in 1989 at the Cow Palace. (Betting this week’s most-clicked link is Reina del Cid’s cover of Hotel California 👇)
If by chance a friend shared this newsletter with you (thank you friend!) you can tap this button to get it delivered to your inbox on a regular basis:
We’ve been looking for “poetry” in other places…
A Nod to the Tatin Sisters: “Pie dough, apples, sugar, butter, some vanilla - a poem really, in its basic appeal.” Grab an 🍎 and join Lisa Donovan, pastry chef and author of the James Beard Award-winning Our Lady of Perpetual Hunger, in making a tart tatin, first conceived in the late 1800s by Caroline and Stéphanie Tatin.
Julia Turshen’s Salad Charts: Genius!
🥚 Eggactly! In the ongoing scrambled egg wars, Sarah Jampel (via Tyler Kord) one-ups Kenji Lopez Alt’s latest (and this one too), with a genius #protip you’ve probably never considered. Food52
🐣 “Everybody Wants the Heavy Layers:” The spike in egg prices has driven up the demand for egg-laying chickens as consumers take the plunge in becoming full-time farmers (chickens don’t take vacations) to raise the birds in their backyards. While the convenience of fresh warm eggs may triumph over a trip to the grocery store, once you factor in the cost/investment of housing (preferably a coop), the inevitable vet bills, and the rising price of grains needed to feed the chickens, those theoretically, less-expensive eggs may become just as pricey after all. The New York Times
Economics vs Eggonomics: The price of eggs has risen more than the price of almost anything else in the economy but eggs are an inelastic demand, people will them buy no matter what the price (like gasoline). Even at Back Forty Farms in Nampa, Idaho, where the price of eggs has jumped to $20/dozen, they sell out instantly. What makes these eggs so special? They’re freeze-dried, don’t lose any nutritional value, and have a shelf life of decades. Like money in the bank. KQED
Price Check On Aisle Three: Whole Foods is asking suppliers to lower prices as consumers continue to spend less because of inflation. Axios
Skip the Stuff Bill: “New York City Council has approved a bill that prohibits restaurants and delivery services from including condiment packets, napkins, disposable utensils and paper plates in to-go orders unless the items are requested.” Restaurant Business Online via Expedite
👉 We need a bill like this in SF, there’s so much waste in to-go orders.
Nordic Cuisine Comes to Downtown SF: The sister company to Ikea, Ingka Centres, is planning to open a food hall at 945 Market Street by the end of the year, with a menu focused on sustainability and plant-based foods. Eater
“Scent-a Fe” (kudos to the copy editor at The Guardian for that one): Senator Bill Soules proposes that New Mexico become the first state to have an official aroma—the smell of roasting New Mexican green chiles that permeates neighborhoods everywhere in the fall. “It’s very unique to our state, I have tried to think of any other state that has a smell or aroma that is that distinctive statewide, and I can’t think of any.”
Official scent for the state of California? Impossible. But from our location here in West Portal, we’d say the fog/marine layer might qualify as the official scent of San Francisco. Because no matter where you live in the city, it will creep in through the cracks of your window sills sooner or later.
What do you think SF smells like? Leave a comment below and we’ll mail you a copy of our next issue when it arrives. In the meantime, we asked the oracle (ChatGPT):
🦀 Don’t forget to help support our local fishermen and pick up some fresh Dungeness crab this weekend! Here's a link to the San Francisco off-the-boat sales Pier 45 and Pier 47 Facebook Group. The current price is $8/lb. We’ve been buying a couple every weekend, feasting on the legs and claws, while making crab cakes out of the rest for the freezer. 👉 Crab-dispatching techniques and recipes from our newsletter last month.
Rolling With the Punches:
One for the road:
On repeat this week: Yeah, you’ve listened to and probably regrettably heard the Eagle’s Hotel California a million times, but this sultry and languorous riverside version from Reina del Cid will no doubt enchant you just the same.
Says Rachelle Cordova, better known by her stage name Reina del Cid: “While the original Eagles version will always be definitive, the crew and I wanted to do our own take on this song while we were in Bern, Switzerland on our European tour. Off camera, a small crowd gathered around us as we performed, and it was truly a magical moment in a beautiful city, so far from the place Don Henley is singing about in this song.”
Related 😉 Reina del Cid’s Virgina Woolf rap.
That’s all for this week.
We’re outta here.
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The only people for me are the mad ones: the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who... burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow Roman candles.
―Jack Kerouac