Lost Foods of New York City: Brooklyn Blackout Cake (w/ a recipe!)
Dessert’s up! Check out Leah Koenig’s latest Lost Foods of New York City column, which features Biscuit Tortoni! Read more.
What is your favorite PPI (pizza point of interest)?
Lost Foods of New York City is a column that celebrates the food and drink that once fed the city, but have disappeared. This week, chef Leah Koenig investigates the history of Charlotte Russe, and offers a recipe!
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I wrote about Pok Pok Wing for Capital New York. If you live in NYC and eat poultry, you have to go, srsly.
Chef Andy Ricker:
“Every Thai restaurant in America uses the words ‘authentic’ and ‘traditional,’ either in the name of their restaurant or on the menu. We don’t do that all, because it’s such a loaded term. How can you argue with somebody that the kind of pad kee mao [drunken noodles] that you get here is traditional? There is such a thing as pad kee mao in Thailand, but it bears very little resemblance in the true form to what you get here. So you start using the words ‘authentic’ and ‘traditional,’ you’re fucking around with stuff.
“But I would say this: I’m very much a traditionalist in I don’t feel like the Thai food needs to be fucked with.”](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lyd4cvQiLQ1qb0720o1_400.jpg)
I wrote about Pok Pok Wing for Capital New York. If you live in NYC and eat poultry, you have to go, srsly.
“Every Thai restaurant in America uses the words ‘authentic’ and ‘traditional,’ either in the name of their restaurant or on the menu. We don’t do that all, because it’s such a loaded term. How can you argue with somebody that the kind of pad kee mao [drunken noodles] that you get here is traditional? There is such a thing as pad kee mao in Thailand, but it bears very little resemblance in the true form to what you get here. So you start using the words ‘authentic’ and ‘traditional,’ you’re fucking around with stuff.
“But I would say this: I’m very much a traditionalist in I don’t feel like the Thai food needs to be fucked with.”
Lost Foods of New York City: Butter cakes from Childs Restaurant
At the turn of the century, Childs’ customers could order a lunch of corned beef hash or creamed oysters on toast for 15 cents, try the 10-cent bean soup or Graham cracker and milk combo, or order a glass of thick, cool buttermilk for a nickel. And then there were the butter cakes. The phrase butter cake may conjure up images of dense, sunshine-colored loaves worthy of a Paula Deen cookbook. But Childs’ take on the butter cake was decidedly humbler—thick rounds of griddled yeast dough that fell somewhere between a biscuit and an English muffin on the baked goods spectrum. The name is something of a mystery, considering butter cake dough contains just a small amount of its namesake fat. One hint comes from another downtown eatery, Butter-cake Dick’s, which predated Childs’ by several years. There, according to the late and great Michael Batterberry and Ariane Ruskin Batterberry’s On the Town in New York, “an army of sharp-faced adolescents gathered every midnight, hoarse from news-hawking, to consume a butter cake, ‘a peculiar sort of biscuit with a lump of butter in its belly…’” It would seem, then, that “butter cake” stems from its requisite topping, rather than the cake itself.
If matzo balls are the proverbial nice old lady of Jewish cuisine (warm, squishy and endlessly nurturing), then latkes—the golden, lacy-edged potato pancakes eaten during Hanukkah—are the enchanting ingenue. And last night at the third annual Latke Fest and Cook-Off held at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the ingenues were out in full force.
French chef and author Stephane Reynaud knows how to roast | by Tamar Adler | Capital New York
“Roast” is one of those strange cooking words, like “stew,” that has enough blur to it to keep you outside: “a stew” is a thick soup, to stew is to slow cook in liquid (though not always to make stew), and “stew-meat” can be turned into thick soup, and can be slowly cooked, but can just as well be chopped up finely into hamburger, or made into shepherd’s pie. So with roast. Samuel Johnson’s English dictionary defines “roast” as “to dress meat by turning it around before the fire” and “to impart dry heat to flesh,” as well as “that which is roasted.” “Roast” also refers to anything you intend to roast—and it continues to be a roast, whether you follow through with your plans or not.
But the word rôti is different. It ends amused, in a feminine smile, and Reynaud’s take on them is similarly welcoming. “You don’t need to do anything difficult, or make any decisions!” he told me. “How do you make a roast? You go to the butcher, you say: I have eight people, it is for Sunday, I have two hours. He gives you the right roast, you go home. Done!” He wiped his hands against each other, as though he was dusting flour off them.
"But the best meal I had on the job? It was in the garden of Frankies 457, on Court Street in Carroll Gardens, on a summer evening with my wife, my children and my brother. We had what everyone always has at Frankies: crostini and some romaine hearts, beets, cold rib-eye salad, cavatelli and sausage and brown butter, meatballs, braciola marinara. The kids hovered while the adults talked family over cold red wine, and a little breeze moved through the trees, and around us other people did the same. There was bread as we needed it, water, more wine. The food was simple and elegant. The children behaved as they do when they are starving, and in love with what they are eating. Nothing was wrong. Everything was right. It would have been nice if it could have gone on forever."
— Sam Sifton’s last food column. (via bzcohen)
A tour of the New York City farm-to-table food chain, with guest-star onions from Texas or Mexico
But the distributor that supplied this pallet of onions had confessed to Forster they’d come from growers in Texas and Mexico.
“This is the beginning of the season and we were like ‘what’s the deal with this?’” Forster said.
He said the distributor told him it would soon replace them with onions grown locally, but Hurricane Irene had ruined the crops.
Forster said the other producers with wares to sell at the market wanted the onions to stay anyway: What if buyers skipped the market altogether for a lack of onions?
“We kind of felt that our hands were tied,” Forster said.
THE MEATBALL SHOP
LOCATION: 84 Stanton Street, NYC
NEIGHBORHOOD: Lower East Side (LES)
WEBSITE: http://www.themeatballshop.com/
Paid a visit here the other day for a quick dinner. Still great. The Meatball Shop is opening two more locations, one in Williamsburg and another in the West Village. As we mentioned in December, the owners and chefs are chasing after a little Shake Shack success.
Last year, in sensational fashion, Del Posto earned a fourth star from The New York Times, making it one of just seven restaurants in New York to have earned such a distinction. The people who run the place have been reckoning with the consequences ever since.
Jeff Katz, Del Posto’s general manager, in an interview in the bar area of the restaurant: “Any moment there’s something the guest doesn’t particularly like, the first sentence is, ‘This is not a four-star experience.’ Immediately. It doesn’t matter what it is, it’s the first thing that comes out of anybody’s mouth. Right or wrong, it’s now the first comparison.”
Del Posto’s executive chef Mark Ladner hasn’t had it any easier, from an expectations perspective. Asked whether the fourth star has made his job less fun because of the additional pressure, he responded without hesitation: “Yeah, I would say so.” Read more at Capital New York——>
