Food, Fads, And Sous Vide–How Cooking Has Gone Way, Way Beyond Baroque

A colleague of my cousin Alfred recently bought a Garth X50-500 Outdoor Grill, light years from the rolled newspaper and briquette operation Uncle Harry used to grill the flank steak on Saturday afternoons.  The trick in those days was to soak the briquettes with just enough lighter fluid for them to light and then to let them burn to an ashy ember-like grey until the smell of gasoline and linotype was gone and the coals were red hot; then to dampen the flames that flared from the fat that dripped into the fire, to turn the steak every so often, eyeballing the doneness with a thought to thickness and spread; and never, ever to overcook it.

It was a guessing game at best.  Since the winds off the Farmington River could pick up unexpectedly; the steak might have a higher or lower percentage of fat; the amount of lighter fluid squeezed on the charcoal would vary with the steadiness, patience, and of course attentiveness of Uncle Harry who sometimes paid more attention to the Red Sox game on the radio than to the fire, no one knew exactly how the steak would turn out.

 Precision was never an issue nor was it ever expected.  Firing up the grill on Saturday afternoons was what one did in New Brighton summers and was as routine and predictable as the aphids on the tomato plants, the Japanese beetles on the roses, the sprinklers on the front lawn, the Sox game, and Uncle Harry’s flank steak.  Approval was measured not in the tenderness and succulence of the meat, the freshness of the corn on the cob, or the size of the tomatoes from Lavinia’s, but whether the familiar, indispensable elements of time, family, bushes, flowers, and trees and food were in place.



When it was time to eat, the sprinklers turned off, the smaller children called, dried off and dressed; when the table was set, grace said, and the potato salad and corn passed around; and when Uncle Harry’s flank steak, sliced into perfect 4” slices, some medium but most well-done, looking delicious covered with gravy and garnished with sides of horseradish and mustard, was served, no one fussed about cuisson, architecture, or presentation.  There was milk for the children, Bud for the grown ups, nothing for Aunt Mary and Uncle Dave, and some Chianti for Harry, Leona, and Uncle Max.

So when Bill Mavis bought the Garth X50-500, Alfred wondered how this space-age, Star Wars-looking grill could possibly outdo Uncle Harry’s steaks; and even if it could, how would its user-friendly, plug-and-play operation ever replace the fond inaccuracies of Uncle Harry’s fire up, fire down, flip, baste, and serve London Broil? Or the Red Sox games? Or the distractions of the youngest cousins under the sprinklers?



Nothing doing, said Bill, igniting his 500, calibrating it for meat thickness, porosity, salinity, weight, fat and water content, and desired doneness all of which were assessed by a battery of electronic sensors which, without jabbing the meat with thermometers or hygrometers, could determine to a hundredth degree of accuracy the relative importance of over 25 variables.  ‘Medium rare’ took on a whole new meaning with the 500.

There is an excellent steak house in Columbus, Mississippi not far out of town on the highway to Tupelo which serves only steak, baked potato, and salad.  The only choice is the doneness of the meat and the type of dressing on the salad.  ‘Rare’ has three options – warm on the inside; cool on the inside; or blackened on the outside and raw in the middle; and after tens of thousands of steaks cooked over hot wood fires summer and winter, there is no fuss, no bother, no pairings, and no sending back.  No one leaves Henry’s dissatisfied.



So what has happened between Henry’s Steak House, Uncle Harry’s London Broil, and the Garth 500?

Bill Mavis said that steak was no test of the 500, but duck and especially ostrich was.  Anyone could cook a steak, and after enough martinis, no one would care much about cuisson and pairings; but duck was another story.  How many amateur chefs have overcooked duck breast, trusting an oven - even a modern, circulating, heat-distributing, convection oven – to produce the classic, rare, pinkish, succulent, tender meat, only to find a greyish, flaccid, insipid, fish-looking something come out of the oven?

Lamb was another case in point.  Most people of Alfred's generation grew up on leg of lamb baked to a shrivel, fatty, and served with green mint jelly; and no matter how they might revile this ‘Fifties’ roast, when they cooked it themselves, they could still not manage anything less than well-done.  However those who had moved beyond their mothers’ pot roasts and desiccated Sunday dinners, said Bill, appreciated the delicate precision of the 500 – lamb done exactly and precisely to an internal temperature of 142F, allowed to sit, managed by the 500 for no more than 12 minutes, sliced to a thinness of 1/4 inch, and served on a warming dish heated to 125F.

The 500 costs $8200, retail, next day delivery with a special sous vide accessory, and wi-fi enabled ‘cuisine curation’ monitor.  ‘Perfect meat every time’ is the company motto, and thousands of consumers have attested to the claim.  Cooking with the 500 is truly ‘not your father’s BBQ’.

All well and good. Technological advances are a result of consumer demand, and American consumers with money to spend on trips to Greece, Porsche SUVs, remodeled living rooms and bumped out decks-turned-conservatories; and still not having drawn down on a fraction of earned income and well-invested capital  would naturally turn to items such as the 500.

Alfred’s mother many years ago, tempted by late-night television ads, bought an all-purpose food processor, a machine not unlike the low-end Veg-O-Matic of the early 50s, which was promised to do everything – chop, dice, grate, puree, blend, and combine, saving hours of housework.  Of course to make any kind of use of a new food processor, one had to know what to do with finely julienned fennel, blended turnips and anise, spiced pureed carrots with ginger once they came out of the device; and Alfred’s mother knew nothing beyond pot roast, meatloaf, frozen peas, and mashed potatoes.



‘Nonsense’, replied Bill Mavis ‘We have all evolved since then’, and, he implied could all do with the 500 – a combination of newly refined good taste and modern technology.

Perhaps.  Who wouldn’t want a steak done to perfection and even, possibly, pheasant or peacock?

But what about the other revolutionary advances in cuisine?  The‘Grilled Grouper with Uni and Beluga Caviar’, the offering at La Rotonde, the newest restaurant on the Washington DC Wharf, was certainly more than a few steps up from Mama’s meatloaf and pineapple. Or her all-day pot roast. Or liver and onions.  We had come a long way, Bill insisted, and that technology was part of the food revolution.

At the same time it seems that American cuisine, happily evolved from meat-and-potatoes, fried fish, and hamburgers to something far more elegant and sophisticated, has entered a Baroque phase.  Look at the offerings of the best San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles. An entry from the menu of La Barracuda, a trendy new restaurant in West Los Angeles, suggests pieces of New Zealand lamb centered and encircled by infusions of sea grass, puree of Iowa sorrel, and ‘Lazy Susan’ Frenesi (an Artie Shaw-inspired medley of Cajun herbs and Brooklyn roots), and a dollop of ‘playful’ black beans-and-coriander.

And pairings? A Napa blend with hints of blackberry, elder, Sonora sage, shiitake, and Golden Delicious apples to match the taste of free-range  goats and geese, slowly cooked sous vide sounds right.

Could anything be more Rococo? And more remote and farther from the tastes of the three-job, Walmart greeter, Target checkout clerk - collards, grits, ground meat, side of mashed or sweet, bacon and corn syrup – than ever?



Food which has been ethically sourced, environmentally grown, designed, developed, and presented as high art and high culture is a plaything, a Rubik’s cube, an algorithm, and a flight of disposable income fancy.  Food is after all,  nourishment, and if handled properly and correctly can be delightful.  The ancient Romans understood this and created the ‘cuisine matrice’  - the mother of all Western cooking, the finely balanced sense of combination, complementarity, and uniqueness.

American cooking could have been as great as the great cuisines of Rome and its subsequent European derivatives if chefs had stuck to basics – the essential complementarity and fascinating contrast of tastes, texture, color, and flavor.  Yet it went Baroque before it had even gone through the Renaissance, the cart before the culinary horse.

How does it taste?This nostrum has always been the byword of cuisine, and while the French have gone overboard on architecture and presentation ( French pastries  look far better than they taste); and while California chefs have outdone each other on architecture , array, and display, few  people care much for such needless excess. There have been some resistance movements.  Some California restaurants have 'gone back to their roots', eschewed post-modernism and returned to old favorites prepared with care and particular attention to quality.

Yet the culinary world remains as divided as anything else in America - fey Coastal chefs and their Tiepolo ceiling creations on one end; the meat-and-potatoes, cornmeal-and-fatback, and fast food thousands who can afford little more on the other; and in the vast middle, a mess made of 'haute cuisine' - a scattering of a few bits and pieces of under-cooked vegetables and tough meat on a large plate dusted with salsify.



Should one criticize or even laugh at the new owner of the 500? Or at the tacky cupcake, supreme taco, surf-and-beach offerings of LA? Or the San Francisco, Alice Waters-inspired five-course Redzepi seaweed ‘n’ fishy things menu at her latest restaurant? No.  This is America where things don’t last, where imitation is the rule, and while innovation is part of today, few care to which graveyard new ideas are buried.

Leave Bill Mavis alone with his grill. He will soon tire of the effort, return to comfort food like the rest of us, stop photographing every chop, duck slice, and swordfish steak that comes off the fire, and slow down to the pace of institutional retirement.  No matter how much Spring Gardens advertises their high-quality, California-inspired kitchen, serving two hundred old folks at five o'clock means steam trays.

Present Tense And Past Lovers– Ineffable Romance And Throwing Good Sense To The Wind

All lovers have thought that their romance was durable and permanent; and no matter how much reality might intrude, it could be squeezed out between the chinks of palm-and-palmetto or simply ignored.  Yet all these lovers – if they were to pay attention – should have known that the cold, practical fingers of wives and priests would meddle and disrupt all idylls.  Yet they paid no heed.  Trysts under the Victorian eaves of the Oloffson, in Transylvanian castle resorts, or in Slovakian Bolshevik spas were time-irrelevant, meaningful, and permanent., or so they thought.

Such was the affair between Robbie Landers and a young Romanian doctor whose name he never did ever remember – Popescu. Donescu, or Moraru.  Her name mattered less than her past – refugee from Ceausescu's  last military incursions in Timisoara, doctor to the wounded in the streets of Bucharest, and a lonely, single, ambitious woman from the east who saw Robbie as an attractive, potential American husband.  He knew very well her intentions, signals as obvious as  storm pennants on a rough sea, but he pursued nonetheless, for he was at a delicate point in his life where decisions about what mattered and what didn’t seemed both relevant and irrelevant. Desire being what it is, and pursuit being as counter-intuitive and illogical a bad decision as it ever was, Robbie went where he knew he shouldn’t go.



He knew that the Carpathian Mountains, the Black Sea, Sibiu, and the new hip neighborhoods of post-Soviet Bucharest were only her trading quarters, trial runs, check-out points to validate his Western credentials; but he couldn’t resist.  She was a so deeply-dyed blonde, so sensuous, and so exotically harem-bred Turkish that he could not have resisted.

Reality intervened – money for her aged grandmother, a loan to finish medical school, the final rent payment of the year, sponsorship for an American visa – and Robbie was left feeling like a john. He had been taken, used, rolled, and  discarded as if he had been a paying customer on Dinca Street – but he paid, suspending his disbelief because of her indelibly blonde hair and, like it or not, her bucking, unexpectedly unreserved sexuality.  Men are suckers for sex, he knew, but only when the affair was clearly over, and after she had taken up with an Englishman with a booking on the next boat to Southampton, did he leave off, left on his own again. 



One would think that poor, sodding, Robbie would have learned his lesson and nevermore been taken advantage of;  but he was not made that way, logical, perceptive, and self-protective; and so he, so soon after Bucharest, fell hook, line, and sinker for a disconsolate Quebecoise in Haiti, bleeding her heart out for the disenfranchised and homeless after the hurricane, recently divorced, alone, and feeling her biological clock ticking.  Yes, it probably was the rum punches on the veranda of the Oloffson, the sound of tom-toms in the hills above Kenscoff, the ship horns in the harbor, the heat, and the cadre of the Splendide, an old Victorian hotel, fixture for decades in Haiti through the Duvaliers and their coup plotters; but who was analyzing?

Martine had no overt ulterior motives.  Unlike Romania, a desperate country emerging out of the enforced penury of autocratic rule, Canada was progressive, wealthy, and promising.  There could be no suspicious backstory of visas, citizenship, or residency.  Her desire for Robbie could only have been for the best intentions.

Be that as it may, Robbie again misread the circumstances.  Martine was near 30, unmarried, with few current prospects, a demanding, traditional Catholic family, and a bourgeois fidelity to marriage, children, and right living.  Her ‘accidental’ pregnancy should not have been a surprise, and he should have paid more attention to her flaccid, indeterminate attentions to ‘my time of the month’, basal metabolic temperature, and fertility cycles.  Snookered once again by an unwitting virago, he, disappeared.  If she didn’t mention ‘it’, neither would he, life would go on, and he would be out of a mess not entirely of his own making,



The issue was not the pregnancy, but the prosaicness of it all – he, the potential father of an illegitimate Quebecois baby to be raised, if Martine had her way, in Baie de James, far up the Gaspe Peninsula and as far from civilization as anyone could possibly imagine. Never.

He learned his lesson finally and absolutely after his liaison with Berthe, a Danish princess on leave from the palace in Copenhagen, travelling to the Subcontinent, freed from the confines of royalty and court, and of the generation that sought exploration and adventure and social confines be damned.

She never let on as to her patrimony and heritage.  She was just a backpacker in Islamabad on her way to India and the East without encumbrance. Unfortunately for Robbie she was exactly the woman for his emotional garden – intelligent, indifferent, independent, and sexually fey – she could or could not be bothered with sex, and if she chose to mate it would be because of some Lawrentian perception of complementarity and epiphany.  Robbie had no idea of such intentions when she asked him to go walking in the Murrie Hills, where she despite the murderous conservatism of the Pakistani worshipers who walked there after prayers at the al-Akaba mosque to continue their praises of Allah while taking the evening breezes from the west, went every evening.



He should have sensed something – an indifference, a desuetude, a distance – but he did not.  He, despite a string of hopeful lovers, fell hook, line, and sinker for a woman who never, had it not been for the mercilessly hot, dry, parochial Pakistani summer, would have given him a second thought.  Their affair was temporary, temporal, and convenient.  What was he thinking?, he thought when when she had left Islamabad to fight with the rebels in Eritrea.  She was out of his league, and he had never known about her royalty until her death notice in The Times.

So, he went back to America, chastened, repentant, but never compromised.  He had not been an ideal lover and mate and had never given in to obedience in perpetuity.  Sex might not be the be-all and end-all of a man’s life, but it certainly was a part. When all was said and done, in the Barcalounger, the chaise lounge, and by the barbie in the sunset years, and in life's last, final moments, one turns first to old lovers, then to family, and then to God. 

Fidelity, responsibility, obedience, and due respect are overrated and never more so exposed than in the final accounting.  Nietzsche was right when he said that the only validation of a man’s life is the expression of individual will; and few realize that one need not be a Superman to realize it.  Exploring the limits of sexuality and sexual adventure might not be much within the existential context of eternity, but can anyone think of anything better?

Idealism - The Faint Heart Of American Democracy

Not only is the Earth heating catastrophically, black churches burning, economic equality increasing, home-grown terrorism a real threat, campus rape at epidemic proportions, say progressives; but all these destructive trends are linked. Capitalism is at the heart of America’s evils. Our market-driven, free-enterprise system has always been a predatory, savage system of injustice. Industry has always exploited labor, squeezing the last bit of dignity and honor from the working man.

Corporate money rules Washington and statehouses, and right-to-work laws, spreading to over half the country, are emasculating the labor movement. The inner cities have been forgotten and dismissed by investors who cannot look beyond profit and see the pain and suffering of poor, marginalized communities.  Greedy land developers, venture capitalists, and multinational corporations have ignored the planet, seeking only short-term profits regardless of the environmental impact of their investments.



Not only that, the incarnation of evil is in the White House – an incubus, a social and moral reactionary, a sexist, homophobic, racist ignoramus.  If there were any worse times in American history, it is hard to find them.  The Robber Barons, laissez-faire capitalism, and the accumulation of wealth in a few hands? Hardly, living when they did, when America was still open, free, unexplored and unexploited land.  Their railroads, steel mills, and oil wells were the instruments of the rapid growth of the economy.  Yes, they made millions and kept most of it within their own private treasures, but all in all, they were not all bad. 

The corrupt administrations of  Harding, Grant, Jackson, and Garfield? Blips on the radar compared to Trump’s crassness and unholy, illegal, immoral dismantling of liberal society. 



So progressives have a lot to worry about; but the issue is not about domestic and foreign policy, political appointments, social programs, or taxes – those every American is concerned about.  It is the derailing of the train of social progress, one which has been on the way to its final station for years, but now stopped at a rail head, unable to go on, that is the issue, a wholly unexpected break of a destined journey.  However, despite occasional glitches in world peace and the liberal social order, things, progressives insist are getting better.

Women have finally gotten their due and have reached the top of the ladder.  LGBTQ Americans have seen their stock rise to unexpected levels.  Who would have thought two decades ago that gay marriage would be common, that men and women could change their birth sex, and that the very idea of male-female binary sexuality would be dismissed in favor of a fungible spectrum?

The redistribution of wealth and economic value is a sure thing, idealists say, and the harsh free market, free-for-all days long past.  Finally, small wars don’t really count in the balance sheet of world peace.



The point is that despite all the evidence to the contrary, if one actually believes that a better world is not only possible but a certainty, the journey will be difficult indeed.  The ‘small wars’ are wars nonetheless.  Thousands have been killed in Somalia, Yemen, the Congo, the persistent aggression and retaliations in the Middle East not to mention the civil wars in Syria, the separatist movements in the Caucasus, Indonesia, and Spain, the religious fanaticism of ISIS, al-Qaeda, and al-Shabab, and all the rest.  There is no evidence that the world is becoming a more peaceful place, especially after the brutality of Mao, Stalin, Hitler, and Pol Pot last century.  How to square progressivism with this sorry history?



To make matter worse, country after country is rejecting its progressive, socialist past and turning to more conservative, nationalist governments.  Lula, Correa, Morales, Maduro have been or are being tossed aside by populations tired of taxes, corruption, government inefficiency, stifling of private and individual enterprise, and indifference.  Even Scandinavian countries are rethinking their overbearing neo-socialist welfare states, and Western Europe is making a hard turn to the right.   In other words, the liberal, progressive, Utopian dream so desperately longed for, seems only that – a fiction, whisked away by the realities of human nature, the perennial demands of human society, and the weight of history itself.

Ah, social reformers insist, the changes that we have helped to effect, especially the creation of a new, ‘inclusive’ society are more indicative of the continuing path to full justice, peace, and equality than any more temporal issues such as wars.  While many may pooh-pooh the gender spectrum, it is perhaps the best expression of true social integration, the foundation of a Utopian society.

Wrong again it turns out.  As many Americans are upset with the attempted rejiggering of human sexuality as those in favor of it.  Identity politics – the secular philosophy of  race, gender, and ethnicity, and the assumption that it is the be-all and end-all of human valuation – is finally running out of steam.  Enough people are returning to the early Christian, Enlightenment principles of the Founding Fathers and rejecting cultural and moral relativism, to make progressives take notice.



Conservatives of course have a much easier row to hoe.  They understand that human nature is, has been, and always will be self-interested, protective, aggressive, traditionally sexual, and territorial. History is only the retelling of familiar stories, repeated ad infinitum because of the hardwired, inbuilt, innate structure of the human being.  If one were to lay out the Histories of Shakespeare in chronological order, one would see that history always repeats itself; and that the only interest in history is the fabulous characters that populate it.   So for conservatives there is no such thing as progress, no Utopia, no better world.  They are Rabelaisians, for whom ‘the best of all possible worlds’ is as much of a joke as it was for Pangloss.   And if this is the case, ‘What, Me Worry?”



While many conservatives are upset at the railroading of Donald Trump, media hysteria over impeachment, the witch trials in the House, and the coming tar-and-feathering in the Senate, most others are simply enjoying the show.  When has life ever been different, they ask?  The Donald Trump show is simply the most entertaining in recent memory, and better to sit back and enjoy it.  It is hard to watch the goings-on in Washington without laughing – the bald-faced, impossible chicanery, the tall tales, the righteousness, the presumptuous, and the sheer silliness of smarmy attacks and counter-attacks that have always gone on here but are somehow more fun to watch now.

Nothing has changed about political life because human nature hasn’t changed.  Why should anyone suppose that politicians once they accept the mantle of public responsibility will become better men?  The contrary in fact is more true.  Once politicians finally win office, they become even more greedy, self-centered, and venal than they were before.

It is hard to feel sorry for frustrated idealists who keep seeing promises of a better world slip out of their hands.  They should know better.  Whatever changes they effect will either be rejected and overturned or folded into the larger American ethos of freedom, enterprise, religion, and the free market; never to be noticed or thought of again – footnotes in history, addenda, interesting anecdotes about transgender bathrooms and queer sex; images of BLM banners, peace symbols, and retro-hippy Idaho communes; but little more.

The good news for conservatives is that human society is conservative; no matter how many engineered changes, it still remains fundamentally unchanged.  No matter how many changes may be promoted and instituted, and no matter how the configurations of family, community, and nation seem to have been altered, we will always, invariably, and inescapably be the same.