Hello!
And here we are.
Actually, it seems like more than that because it’s been one long blur. We hope you are well and there’s a light at the end of the tunnel for you and yours.
This is the thirty-third edition of EAT.DRINK.THINK., a weekly survey of the most interesting food media on the web along with notes on what we’ve been eating and drinking.
By the way, I'm Bruce Cole, Publisher of Edible San Francisco. If you’re new, welcome! You're getting this email because you subscribed. If you'd like to hop off anytime, simply unsubscribe. I appreciate you reading this newsletter. Let’s eat!
EAT
Isn’t this a great cover? You’d never see an American cookbook published with such a bold and intriguing design. Sadly, U.S. publishers are known for their lack of creativity and willingness to take risks. Although Lorena Jones (no relation), Senior Vice President and Editor in Chief of Ten Speed Press notes: "A lot of us who are doing the work are in the position of having to acquiesce [to the market], and by ‘market,’ I mean consumers but also the retail buyers.” And the view from across the pond: “I’m consistently told by sales teams that U.S. audiences are far more literal—that you need to reinforce the fact that it’s a cookbook with a picture of food,” says Sarah Lavelle, Publishing Director of Quadrille in the U.K. “Is this an erroneous perception or is it fact? I’m not sure.” 🤔
But back to One: Pot, Pan, Planet with a big congrats to Anna Jones on the publication of her fourth book of vegetarian recipes. We’re always turning to her A Modern Way To Cook (U.S. 2016) for recipes and inspiration and can’t wait to dig into this one. Nigella Lawson has this to say: “It’s true to say that Anna Jones always delivers: reading any recipe of hers is like receiving a promise of dependable deliciousness. With this book, however, she has given something deeper of herself…it is so full of encouragement, of understanding, of joy; it’s like being led by the hand by a smiling, kind reveler, who wants only for us to enjoy food as much as possible, without wasting it, or missing out on everything it brings.”
Try a recipe from One: Pot, Pan, Planet: Sticky Sesame-Baked Cauliflower.
Watch Anna make her favorite recipe from the book: Tamarind Glazed Sweet Potato Dal Bake (for best results, tap the ☐ icon to view full screen on your desktop).
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DRINK
Florèz Wines, 2019 The Pope's Smoke, Grenache Noir, Santa Cruz Mountains
One of the challenges of shooting wine is to get the color in the glass right. It’s difficult with red wine in particular, at least for amateur photographers like us, as they tend to appear darker and more opaque. This wine is actually light in color and very translucent. So although it may look like your prototypical ultra-ripe, over-oaked and boozy grenache, the opposite is true.
This Florèz Wines, 2019 The Pope's Smoke, Grenache Noir is ridiculously fragrant in the glass, bursting with bright aromas of strawberry which match its luminous red hue and goes down silky smooth with just a touch of tannins. Basically, we couldn’t stop drinking it.
Florez Wines is a Santa Cruz-based winery founded by James Jelk in 2017, who works exclusively with sustainable and organically farmed vineyards, some of which he farms himself. Per an email conversation, he noted that this Grenache comes from a vineyard in Yolo County located in the foothills on the eastern side of the Northern California Coast Ranges. It’s CCOF certified organic and “meticulously tended by Sergio Villanueva,” with Steve Matthiason consulting along the way too.
From Jelk’s winemaking notes: “The wine is produced with two separate ferments: one entirely destemmed and the other entirely whole cluster, with a fairly short maceration (10 days). It’s then sent to neutral oak, sur lie, to rest undisturbed until a single racking pre-bottling. The whole cluster fermentation showed pronounced spice character and tannin, while the destemmed showed notably more fruit and Grenache varietal character. The two were blended for bottling. Unfined & unfiltered with no additives or sulfites used during vinification. 14ppm SO2 added at bottling.”
We purchased this bottle at Gus’s Community Market on Noriega.
THINK
When My Authentic is Your Exotic: “You need to rethink food in your novel, an American editor once told me. Would my Pakistani-American family really be eating so much pizza?” Literary Hub
The Quesadilla Chronicles: a brief history and the never-ending debate over authenticity. In other words, cheese or no cheese in between your tortillas? This 133-year-old definition of quesadilla states cheese is not required, but a folded maíz tortilla is. Andrea Aliseda Newsletter
🎂 Not So Fast With Your Perfect Instagram Cake: Jane Black on the myth of cool cakes. “People have always used food to mark their place in society, but it’s important to remember why food became “cool” in America over the last twenty or so years. A $25 cake mix that leverages the “coolness” of food to sell commonplace ingredients (the flour’s organic, but c’mon) to aspirational home cooks is what happens when that superficial elitism meets the curated reality of Instagram.” Taste
🎣 The Stripers Are Coming: we have this fantasy of throwing our fishing line out at Ocean Beach and reeling in a big striped bass (the water is just starting to warm up so they’ll be prowling the surf soon). We’d dispatch it quickly with a spike to the brain, bleed it out, and then slide an ikejime wire up the spine, which severs the nerves and delays the rigor mortis process, which helps to preserve the meat. At least this is the ideal technique perpetrated by hundreds of YouTube videos, but after reading this encyclopedic dissertation by Dave Arnold, we’re not so sure. What we’re really after though is the most humane way to dispatch our catch. The age-old method of whacking a fish in the head is literally hit-or-miss. And while some combination of the two may best serve us with the fish on our line, what about the millions of fish caught in nets or harvested from farms around the world that are left to suffocate and die out of the water? Imagine the public uproar if standard practices at meat processing plants were to whack a cow in the head and leave it to die? Part of the reason we’re so ambivalent about the method of harvesting fish is that we don’t have active relationships with seafood. You can pet a calf or cuddle a chick, but you don’t snuggle up to a salmon. There is apparently a large body of research that shows fish do feel pain, after all, and this evidence has inspired a fish welfare movement. A new report from Vox has the details: fish are farmed in higher numbers than any other animal, but they haven’t gotten much attention from the animal welfare movement — until now.
🎧 What We're Listening To: “I've been thinking a lot about what makes a restaurant good. Can a restaurant be good if it doesn't have wheelchair access? Can a restaurant be good if the farmers picking the tomatoes are getting sick? How much do we consider when we talk about if a restaurant is good or not? … If people are being exploited at every single point possible along the way, how good is the restaurant, really? Tejal Rao, the California restaurant critic for The New York Times in the Longform Podcast.
Edible Pursuit #4: Celebrating National Women’s Month
This week's questions are drawn from the book Why We Cook: Women on Food, Identity and Connection by former Bay Area author and illustrator Lindsay Gardner. The book features stories and recipes from 112 women in food, including Joyce Goldstein, Preeti Mistry, and Celia Sack. "This book is a beautiful object, but it’s also much more than that: an essay collection, a trove of recipes, a guidebook for how we might use food to fight for and further justice. The women in its pages remind us that it’s in the kitchen, in the field, and around the table that we do our most vital work as human beings—and that, now more than ever, we must." –Molly Wizenberg
How to play: read each question to yourself and any foodie friends nearby, then proclaim your choice before tapping the answer to see if you guessed correctly. Alas, bragging rights are the only prize we can offer at this point
This chef was a former runway model who attended culinary school, started a catering company, trained in professional kitchens, and in 2008, launched her television career when she competed on Bravo’s Top Chef. She's also a motivational speaker and is on the Board of Trustees at Helen Keller International, Pajama Program, GenYouth, and 4H.
Deborah Madison was decades ahead of her time when she opened her influential restaurant in San Francisco in 1979. One of the first farm-driven restaurants in the Bay Area, this restaurant is often credited with transforming vegetarian food into sophisticated cuisine. What was the name of the restaurant?
This woman began her legendary career as a food writer in 1972, when she published Mmmmm: A Feastiary, her first cookbook. The following year, she moved from New York to Berkeley, California, where she lived in a commune, became co-owner and cook at the Swallow restaurant, and contributed to the area’s burgeoning culinary revolution. In 1978, she became a restaurant critic, eventually contributing to the LA Times and The New York Times.
As the first woman guest chef to collaborate on a state dinner at the White House, in 2015, this woman prepared a four-course, Chinese-inspired meal for President and Mrs. Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping and his wife, Peng Liyuan. She also founded Annisa (Arabic for women), a contemporary American restaurant in New York City’s West Village, where she applied classical French techniques to globally inspired flavors. She has also appeared in numerous films and television shows, including Top Chef Masters and Iron Chef: America.
After accidentally burning down her parents’ Brooklyn kitchen at age twelve, this best-selling cookbook writer did not cook again until she became a parent. She immersed herself in cooking, baking, and later, writing about food, expanding her affinity for French cuisine, and even scoring an apprenticeship with Julia Child.
One More Thing
"The Changing Light"
The changing light
at San Francisco
is none of your East Coast light
none of your
pearly light of Paris
The light of San Francisco
is a sea light
an island light
And the light of fog
blanketing the hills
drifting in at night
through the Golden Gate
to lie on the city at dawn
And then the halcyon late mornings
after the fog burns off
and the sun paints white houses
with the sea light of Greece
with sharp clean shadows
making the town look like
it had just been painted
But the wind comes up at four o'clock
sweeping the hills
And then the veil of light of early evening
And then another scrim
when the new night fog
floats in
And in that vale of light
the city drifts
anchorless upon the ocean.
–Lawrence Ferlinghetti - 1919-2021
If you’re on Spotify, we’re sharing the EAT.DRINK.THINK. playlist we listen to while cooking dinner every night. This month’s list starts off with a snappy tune from emerging South East London rapper and singer Enof, slides into the middle with a little pleasure, joy, and happiness, and ends trailing off in fond farewell to Daft Punk with a side of Thelonius Monk.
That’s all for this week.
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We’re outta here. Be well and take care,
–Bruce
"Everything will be okay in the end. If it's not okay, it's not the end" –John Lennon