Eat This Podcast

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There’s supposed to be this whole mystique surrounding “proper” pasta: how to cook it, which shape with what sauce, how to eat it, all that. And if you’re not born to it, you’ll never really understand it. Well, maybe not, but with a little effort you can get a whole lot closer to authenticity. Maureen Fant, a writer and scholar who has lived in Rome since 1979, has a new book out with her collaborator Oretta Zanini de Vita, making their Encyclopedia of Pasta a tad more kitchen-friendly. Sauces and Shapes: Pasta the Italian Way is a curious blend of the constrained and the relaxed … just like Italy. One of the things they’re relaxed about is shapes for sauces, which came as a bit of a surprise. One of the things they’re not relaxed about is overcooked pasta, which did not.

There was so much else we could have talked about, and the book is a one of those cookbooks that is as much a good read as a manual of instruction. As for my beloved cacio e pepe, fashionable or not, I am greatly encouraged by the the news that “[t]his is not a dish to make for a crowd … The smaller the quantity, the better the result.” That’s all the encouragement I need.

Notes

1. Sauces and Shapes: Pasta the Italian Way is available from Amazon and elsewhere.
2. I’m not too sure what to make of the whole mathematical pasta trope. It smacks to me of an answer in search of a question.
3. Maureen Fant recently gave a great little interview on spaghetti carbonara that tries to set the record straight on this canonical dish.
4. Cover photo by Stijn Nieuwendijk.

Special treat

If you listened to the podcast and made it this far, you know I promised you a special treat. Here it is. Little Richard sings On Top of Spaghetti.

’Nuff said?

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Karen Coates is a freelance American journalist who writes about food – among other things. She emailed to ask if I would be interested in talking to her about a book that she and her husband, photographer Jerry Redfern, have produced. It’s called Eternal Harvest, but it isn’t about food, at least not directly. Its subtitle is the legacy of American bombs in Laos. Some of those bombs are 500-pounders. Lots of them are little tennis-ball sized bomblets, which are as attractive to farm kids as a tennis ball might be, with horrific consequences. The story of unexploded ordnance in Laos was an eye opener, for me. But I also wanted to know about food in Laos, and so that’s where we began our conversation.

Over the course of nine years and a bombing mission every eight minutes, round the clock, more than 270 million cluster bombs – or bombies – were dropped on Laos. The cluster bombs were a small part of the 2 million tonnes dropped on Laos, almost half a tonne of ordnance for every man, woman and child in the country. Some was aimed at breaking the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The rest was jettisoned by pilots who had been told not to return to base with any bombs left in their planes. The failure rate, as Karen said, was around 30 percent. Unexploded ordnance remains an ever-present threat, and not only during the business of farming. About half the people killed, according a a 2009 report, were going after scrap metal. A scrap metal collector can make $5 a day, compared to the average wage of about $1 a day. And that’s not the only way the bombs are “beneficial”. Many farming families use craters – created by bombs that did explode – as fish ponds, improving both their income and their nutritional status.

Casualties have dropped, from about 1450 a year in 1975 to about 350 a year in 2009, but less than one per cent of the land has been cleared.

Notes

1. Eternal Harvest: the legacy of American bombs in Laos has a website and is available from Amazon.
2. I started reading up about bomb crater fish ponds at Nicola Twilley’s Edible Geography. Fascinating accounts of individual farmers bring an otherwise dry FAO field manual on common aquaculture practices in Lao PDR to life. The maps in this online post by Xiaoxuan Lu about her thesis give some idea of the scale of the problem.
3. Karen writes online at The Rambling Spoon and elsewhere. There’s plenty there about restaurants, Lao cookbooks and that nine-day field trip we talked about.
4. The music is a Lao folk tune called Dokmai (Flower) by a group called “Thiphakon (roughly, resonance of angels)”. I found it online.

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Ah, the self-indulgent joy of making a podcast on one of my own passions.

“They” say that turning cooking from an enjoyable hobby into a business is a recipe for disaster, and while I’m flattered that people will pay for an additional loaf of bread I’ve baked, there’s no way I’m going to be getting up at 3 in the morning every day to sell enough loaves to make a living. But there are people who have done just that, and one of them happens to be a friend. Suzanne Dunaway and her husband Don turned her simple, delicious foccacia into Buona Forchetta bakery, a multi-million dollar business that won plaudits for the quality of its bread – and then sold it and walked away.

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Suzanne was also one of the first popularisers of the “no-knead” method of making bread, with her 1999 book No need to knead. Using a wetter dough, and letting time take the place of kneading, has been around among professional bakers and some, often forgetful, amateurs for a long time, but it was Mark Bittman’s article in the New York Times that opened the floodgates on this method. Since then, as any search engine will reveal, interest in the technique has exploded, both because no-knead is perceived as easier and because the long, slow rise that no-knead usually calls for results in a deeper, more complex flavour. I’ve had my troubles with it, and had more or less given up on the real deal. But I’m looking forward to seeing how a quick no-knead bread turns out, especially now that I know that in Suzanne’s case it was the result of a delicious accident.

Notes

1. If you created the graphic riff on Breaking Bad, or you know who did it, please let me know. I would really like to give proper credit.

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The first episode of 2014 is a look back to some of the topics I covered in 2013, and for what I hope is a good reason. With a podcast, unlike a piece of writing or an image, it is very hard to decide quickly whether this is something I want to pursue further. Of course some things are an instant turn-off: really bad audio quality will usually send me packing, as will a pile of unedited ramblings no matter how good the audio quality. Aside from that, though, it takes time to listen to a podcast and decide whether I want to hear more. With that in mind, I put together this tasting menu from 2013, to give new listeners an idea of what Eat This Podcast is about.

So, what is it about? I’m not exactly sure. Looking at the world through a food lens, I sometimes say. As I was putting this selection together, though, some other themes emerged. I’m not really ready to share those in detail, but they might colour my selection of topics in the future. I should add, too, that I welcome any and all suggestions.

If you’ve been listening since episode 1, you have my permission to ignore this one. Or you could share it with someone who isn’t yet a listener. That would be good. And here’s to 2014.

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Apologies for the delay in publishing this podcast. One of the joys of not being tied to “proper” radio is the freedom to give a story the length it deserves. The downside is that nobody is cracking the whip to whip things into shape on time, so that sometimes, even with the best will in the world, the schedule slips. Maybe if this were my day job …

Bread, yoghurt, pickles: I do love my domestic microbiology. So does Ken Albala, of the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California. His enthusiasm outstrips mine, though, not least because he probably has more space for his experiments. One manifestation of that enthusiasm is a Facebook group dedicated to The Cult of Pre-Pasteurian Preservation and Food Preparation. For Ken, sterilising fermented food is a no-no. Who better, then, to explain how it is that “pickled” has come to mean “boiled in vinegar” rather than “naturally fermented”.

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Of course, the whole business of home fermentation has reached fever pitch, manifested by the pickle trend being the number one sketch on a trendy comedy series. Let us not, however, throw the baby out with the brinewater. It really is remarkably easy, and if you want to start, there are endless reams of advice on the internet. Just ignore anything that suggests you boil the proceeds. Emboldened by Ken, I do plan to try sausages some time in the New Year.

Notes

1. If you’re on Facebook, do check out Ken Albala’s Cult.
2. The current main man on fermentation is Sandor Katz; here’s what he has to say on facultative anaerobes (i.e. Lactobacillus species) versus obligate anaerobes such as Clostridium botulinum, and why you really have nothing to fear.
3. Katz also did a great interview with NPR’s Fresh Air.

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