#97 | End Of An Era 😢
Cooking As An Essential Life Skill
Hello!
lessons
My mother says: When Mama tried to teach me to make collards and potato salad I didn't want to learn. She opens the box of pancake mix, adds milk and eggs, stirs. I watch grateful for the food we have now—syrup waiting in the cabinet, bananas to slice on top. It's Saturday morning. Five days a week, she leaves us to work at an office back in Brownsville. Saturday we have her to ourselves, all day long. Me and Kay didn't want to be inside cooking. She stirs the lumps from the batter, pours it into the buttered, hissing pan. Wanted to be with our friends running wild through Greenville. There was a man with a peach tree down the road. One day Robert climbed over that fence, filled a bucket with peaches. Wouldn't share them with any of us but told us where the peach tree was. And that's where we wanted to be sneaking peaches from that man's tree, throwing the rotten ones at your uncles! Mama wanted us to learn to cook. Ask the boys, we said. And Mama knew that wasn't fair girls inside and the boys going off to steal peaches! So she let all of us stay outside until suppertime. And by then, she says, putting our breakfast on the table, it was too late.
—Jacqueline Woodson, from Brown Girl Dreaming
By the way, 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!
👉 ICYMI: The most-clicked link from last week’s newsletter was the recipe by Nichole Accettola of Kantine for Royal Party Cake.
Do you know someone who loves Korean corn dogs? Send them this newsletter!
Hong Kong Style Egg Sandwiches: Lucas Sin is back with another one of his inspiring tutorials. This time he recreates the egg sandwiches of his youth and introduces the Hong Kong scrambled egg technique (we made them this morning, and they come as advertised, producing a thick, stacked layer of custardy eggs). Food52
Whole Roasted Eggplant with Tahini, Crispy Chickpeas and Sumac: It’s the height of the eggplant season at farmers markets, with every shape, size and variety available, so now is a good time to try out this recipe from former 18 Reasons culinary director Michelle McKenzie, who describes it as such:
Whole eggplants cook until slightly charred on the outside and meltingly tender within. Tahini adds much-needed richness and creaminess, crispy chickpeas add texture (and protein), and lemon and sumac bring brightness. I consider this a lovely vegetarian main course, but it could also serve as a side dish for chicken, lamb, or fish.
It’s a pretty simple recipe to put together, it comes down to four easy steps (full recipe here), and as you can see from the photo, it’s a pretty stunning dish:
Peel and roast eggplant
Drain a can of chickpeas and pan fry until crisp
Stir some tahini with lemon juice
Spoon the tahini sauce over the roasted eggplant and garnish with the crispy chickpeas and serve
End Of An Era: In a huge loss for the SF food community, the San Francisco Cooking School will close its doors at the end of August. One of San Francisco’s culinary benchmarks, with its bright orange awnings anchoring the corner of Van Ness and Turk, SFCS graduated more than 500 students over a ten-year run who went on to become cooks, chefs, food entrepreneurs, and creators. Besides the staff instructors, countless food community members, including numerous Bay Area chefs, contributed to helping students prepare for culinary careers. In an email, founder Jodi Liano shared reasons for the closure:
"We set out to reinvent the way cooks are prepared to enter the business and I’m so proud of our team and our alumni. While restaurants and related businesses are desperate for cooks, the amount of students who want to pursue these paths has diminished dramatically. In addition, San Francisco has become a less desirable destination for out-of-state students.”
Another Restaurant Struggles With No-Tip Policy: Zuni Cafe replaced tips with a 20% automatic “fair wage” surcharge to raise wages for the kitchen staff kitchen whose wages ended up increasing by 35% to 58%, but the front of-the-house wait staff revolted and most left the restaurant to look for other work. Now there’s talk of unionizing, but owner Gilbert Pilgram said in a San Francisco Chronicle story that returning to tips is “not on the table.”
Ranch Water? A West Texas thirst quencher, a simple combination of tequila, lime juice, and Topo Chico, is sweeping the nation; you can even find it now in cans. An ice-cold Ranch Water sounds pretty good right now, except that we’ve been buried under a wall fog here in West Portal for the entire month of July. Here are six easy drinking variations for those who live in the warmer microclimates of SF. Punch
Meanwhile, On TikTok: The viral “Pink Sauce” debacle. The #pinksauce hashtag racked up over 80 million views overwhelming the creator of the questionable brightly-hued culinary elixir. TechCrunch
Cooking As An Essential Life Skill (Or Be A Slave To Their Offerings): We stumbled upon this beautifully written Substack published by farmer Tara Couture who also raises beef for her family’s consumption. In this post (which we just want to publish in full here, but alas), she talks about the disconnect of consumers from the source of what they eat as a result of the industrial food system:
Do you still owe the food you eat, the gifts of creation on your plate, your reverence even if you don’t know where it came from or what kind of life that animal had? I think you do. I think we all do. I think the gifts given to us as our birthright are worth preserving and fighting for. We open our mouths and accept a foreign substance into our bodies, hoping it will fill us, nourish us, help us to live a vibrant, healthy life. Shouldn’t such a profound act, such an intimate act be considered thoughtfully and with reverence? They have normalized the slow demise of the vitality of our species and we willingly participate, one bite at a time. Don’t participate. That power is yours to wield. Do so with wisdom and decisive intention. Slow Down Farmstead
Would You Swap Pork For Beef? Tamar Adler’s latest column for the Washington Post posits that if you want to cut the carbon impact of your diet by about 23 percent, you can swap out the beef you’re eating for pork (and swapping out chicken is even better) Adler notes: “beef is the single biggest dietary contributor to climate change and global beef demand is projected to almost double by 2050.”
Substack has introduced a nifty little poll feature; let's try it out:
Oh Yeah:
Listen: On repeat this week Savanne from the album Ali, by Vieux Farka Toure with Khruangbin. “On Ali, his collaborative album with Khruangbin, Vieux pays homage to his father (Ali Farka Toure) by recreating some of his most resonant work, putting new twists on it while maintaining the original’s integrity. The result is a rightful ode to a legend.”
That’s all for this week.
We’re outta here. Be well and take care,
–Bruce
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"Despite its artistic intentions and its many accomplishments, humankind owes its existence to a six-inch layer of topsoil and the fact that it rains." —Anonymous