#119 | I'll Have An Obituary Please
✊🏿 Rize Up Bakery
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The Beautiful Sandwich
She could always make the most beautiful sandwich. Laced swiss cheese: sliced crossways, folded once. Ham in rolls like sleeping bags. Turkey piled like shirts. Tarragon. Oregano. Pepper. Herb dill mayonnaise the color of skin. On top: the thin, wandering line of mustard like a contour on a map in a thin, flat drawer. Or a single, lost vein. The poppyseeds hold on, for now. Placed on a plate like isolated driftwood or a large, solemn head. The spilled chips in yellow piles are like the strange coins of tall, awkward islanders. The thin dill pickle: their boat slides into the green-sour sea.
—Brad Ricca, “The Beautiful Sandwich” from American Mastodon, © Black Lawrence Press. Shared from the Writer’s Almanac email, Wednesday, February 17, 2021
Have you grabbed a copy of the latest issue? You can find it at all the farmers markets in the city including the Ferry Plaza, Fort Mason, Stonestown, Clement St., Noe Valley, Sunset Mercantile, and more. As well as Gus’s Community Markets, Omnivore Books, Gemini Bottle Co., Millay, Rainbow Grocery, Le Dixt Sept, Bernal Cutlery, Black Jet Baking Co., Equator Coffee, The Mill, Verve Coffee, Ballast Coffee, Green Apple Books, Pizza Place, Alimentari Aurora, Heath Newsstand, and more.
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We got lots of responses to the query what do you think SF smells like, in our last newsletter. One of our favorites: “Potrero smells like weed and rosemary if the sun is out.” And it’s always sunny in the Potrero, right?
Citing our scent-themed missive, John Birdsall (in his Shifting the Food Narrative newsletter) mentioned a 1961 copy of the travel magazine Holiday, where the writer Eugene Burdick (co-author of The Ugly American) tells us how San Francisco's odor was segregated by gender and class:
He draws an olfactory map that shifts according to the clock. “The day odors are commercial and bustling: the stench of tannic acid and hides {from the slaughterhouses in the Bay View, the neighborhood then known as Butchertown}, the rank odor from chemical plants, the coffee and spice fumes, the sweet and heavy odor of gardenias from the sidewalk florist stalls.” And at night, the class divisions erode, at least a little, in the smells of “…red wine and pizza of Columbus Avenue and North Beach, the salami and sourdough of a hundred restaurants…the rice and curry and soy sauce and grape leaf and Pimm’s Cup and pork chops and grits and greens and hot fat and pastrami from the open windows of a thousand apartments and houses.”
Black Sourdough Rises in San Francisco. Read Becky Duffett’s cover story from the latest issue: Rize Up Bakery promises to be one of the biggest bakery openings this year, reimagining the colors and flavors of our quintessential sourdough. Edible SF
Black Power Kitchen: The culinary collective Ghetto Gastro wants to dispel the myth that Black food in America, is rooted in unhealthy habits. “There's a lot of history in our community of eating clean and eating well, especially when you think about what our ancestors were consuming before they were brought over to this side of the world.” GQ
Black Power Waffles: Download the Ghetto Gastro recipe from our latest issue.
Justice for Black Farmers Act: “Last year, with the passing of the Inflation Reduction Act, $2.2 billion was put forward to compensate farmers who have faced discrimination by the USDA. However, the act fell short of specifically naming and compensating Black farmers.” Now, during Black History Month, legislators are reintroducing the Justice for Black Farmers Act as part of the upcoming Farm Bill. Foodwise
Orange You Glad We Shared This? Jennifer Latham’s Orange Galette with Ricotta and Pistachios. “I love whole oranges. There’s something about the combination of sweet, sour and bitter that is irresistible to me. The citrus has been gorgeous lately and I wanted to create a recipe that used it in it’s entirety, front and center. Baker’s Notes
☕️ What’s In Your Cup? A new study says coffee won’t actually give you extra energy in the morning (or whenever you drink it). It’ll just borrow a bit that you’ll pay for later. The Conversation
What Are You Supposed To Do With the Onion? Marcella Hazan’s classic tomato sauce features four ingredients, a can of tomatoes, five tablespoons of butter, a peeled onion, cut in half, and salt. You simmer it for 45 minutes and then toss the onion (so says Hazan). Or do you? Personally, we’d save it to chop up and stir into a frittata. But Tamar Adler has other ideas. The New Yorker
How The Woks of Life Helped a New Generation of Chinese Americans Learn to Cook: “We learned to cook from Rachael Ray and Ina Garten and Giada DeLaurentiis, but we learned to eat from our parents.” Sarah Leung, co-author of The Woks of Life: Recipes to Know and Love from a Chinese American Family for KQED
Don’t Throw Out Your Old Spices Just Yet: The warship Gribshunden, of King Hans of Denmark and Norway, sank off the coast of Sweden in 1495, and scientists recently recovered a “substantially complete royal medieval pantry.” Among the finds were 13 ounces of saffron which retained its distinctive aroma after 527 years beneath the Baltic Sea. Smithsonian
What’s In Your Stock? Noah Galuten takes a deep dive into the stockpot for Eater to find out what exactly you are paying for when you buy chicken stock at the store. “Why is chicken broth the first ingredient in chicken broth?”
#Protip: We keep a jar of Better Than Boullion vegetable base in our fridge when we need stock for a recipe. Way easier than defrosting a jar of stock from the freezer. In fact, we don’t even freeze stock anymore.
Job Opening Alert: Soleil Ho trades in her food critic’s pen for a chair at the opinion desk. Why San Francisco’s Top Restaurant Critic Is Resigning After Just Four Years. Grubstreet
👶👧 Where’s the High Chair? If you don’t like it when parents bring their kids to restaurants, you should just stay home, says Jessica Blankenship for Bon Appetit: “I’m not denying how objectively annoying kids in restaurants can be, but perhaps it’s an annoyance worth tolerating. After all, the restaurant is a perfect place for parents to teach their kids how to be people around other people, and the perfect place to teach parents how to shepherd their kids through the world.”
✍️ Sign On the Dotted Line: More on the fast-food industry’s push to dismantle the new California labor law AB257, or the Fast Recovery Act, which was set to go into effect Jan. 1, 2034 (the law would have brought significant wage increases for California’s fast-food workers). Petitioners gathering signatures to overturn AB257 falsely told signees that their initiative would actually help to raise wages for workers. LA Times
The Bottom of the Bottom Line: Restaurants are in dire straits and they can’t find new employees because workers have found better-paying jobs in the post-pandemic world. “Nearly 2 million hospitality and leisure jobs remain unfilled in what economists call a ‘deep, profound’ shift in the labor market.” The Washington Post
Steve Sando: The Emperor of Beans
l’ll Have An Obituary Please
Frankly, we’d drink anything you poured us out of a glass like this, but the Obituary, a roughly 3:1 Martini calling for Hayman’s London dry gin and Dolin dry vermouth with six dashes of absinthe, will do just fine. “Typical of the city of its birth, which practically has absinthe running through its veins, the Obituary differentiates itself from other dry Martinis through its inclusion of the French wormwood spirit where there might otherwise be bitters.” Punch
#Protip
🍕 We always slide a slice into the toast oven, but this method looks like it delivers a superior result. Then again, we do like a cold slice straight outta the fridge.
🍰 ICYMI:
Dear James:
On repeat this week: Brad Mehldau plays the Beatles. I mean…
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