SHELFDIVER: DIVE 5 - June 5, 2024
DIVE 5 - June 5, 2024
Changing up formats a bit this week, if only because I started gathering links for a main section on my favorite stuff related to food and cooking…and found so much I was excited to share that it became a dive’s worth of content on its own. (If you want something other than food this time, go check out Animal Well, or Death and Other Details.)
What I don’t include are any cookbooks, so feel free to share your favorites in the comments below the online archive version.
Before we dive into the meal, a quick round up of some of the links I’ve enjoyed this week:
Wikipedia: The Seikilos Epitaph
Wall Street Journal (ungated): “Flood of False Science Forces Multiple Journal Closures”
Uncanny Magazine: “The Year Without Sunshine” (short story)
Soderblog: Raiders: Raiders of the Lost Ark, with the sound and color removed by director Steven Soderburgh.
Medievalists.net: Geoffrey Chaucer’s Day Jobs
Okay—hungry for some fun food links? Let’s look at the menu:
BOOK COURSE
Whet your appetite with some great books about food and cooking.
BOOKS: The Art of Eating / How to Cook a Wolf: There are great writers on any topic, and when it comes to food, M.F.K. Fisher is one of the best. I was drawn to How to Cook a Wolf by its title, but it’s the words inside that keep drawing me back over and over again. And it’s not just me—she was one of poet W.H. Auden’s favorite writers, too.
BOOK: The Making of a Chef: I like to cook. But it’s Michael Ruhlman’s book, read in parallel with Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential, that confirmed that I don’t have what it takes to be a professional chef—not just the skill to make a given dish, but the drive to make it perfectly, economically, and repeatedly on demand in relentlessly high-pressure environments. And yet it’s also an inspiring book, one that I can only think draws many people toward culinary school when they see themselves reflected in its pages.
BOOK: The Penguin Companion to Food: Before we had the Internet to look up things we didn’t know, I had this book on my shelf to help me understand cuisines and ingredients I hadn’t encountered before—and to teach me new things about food I’ve been eating my whole life. When I lived in only 188 square feet, it was one of the essential references I brought with me.
BOOK: On Food and Cooking: Before Alton Brown and Kenji Lopez-Alt and America’s Test Kitchen there was Harold McGee, who brings an incredible level of insight and science to the kitchen. Have I read the whole book? No. Do I learn something new every time I dip into it that makes me think I probably should? Yes.
BOOK: Relish: My Life in the Kitchen: An entertaining and often funny autobiography in graphic novel from cartoonist Lucy Knisley, her story of how she grew up around, with, and through the food around her.
VIDEO COURSE
A selection of quality online food content, with some suggested related pairings.
VIDEO: Old Style Ramen Cart [YouTube]: A chef that’s been making ramen for more than 50 years, pulling his mobile kitchen and restaurant through the nighttime streets in search of hungry customers—and finds one who films his meal. A video that perfectly captures an experience I wish I could have.
CHANNEL: FrenchGuyCooking [YouTube]: Alex does a terrific job dissecting recipes and dishes all the way back to their most basic ingredients, elements, and techniques. Check out his “Path to Fried Rice” series, and his journey digging into dry pasta.
CHANNEL: Babish Culinary Universe [YouTube]: Andrew Rea named himself after a minor character from “The West Wing” and launched a channel recreating food from movies & television, but his channel (now 10 million subscribers strong) is so much more these days, with a number of partner chefs and a series of great basic cooking videos. Check out his recreation of Il Timpano from the movie Big Night, and his quest to remake the ‘food’ from a ludicrous SNL “Taco Town” commercial.
CHANNEL: Tasting History [YouTube]: Max Miller digs into old cookbooks and older historical sources to recreate food from the past. Check out when he made the Roman condiment garum, or his hardtack and ‘Hell Fire Stew’ from the American Civil War, or the jelly he brewed up based on a recipe from Nostradamus.
VIDEO: POV Head Chef at a Top London Restaurant: The channel for London restaurant Fallow has been posting a ton of great videos like this that give a look into the intensity of working at a busy high-end restaurant.
VIDEO: How to Feed 6000 Mongolian Miners: Sometimes a chef’s goal is to make fancy food, and sometimes the goal is just to make a lot of food. That not enough for you? Try cooking for 100,000 people a day at the Golden Temple in India!
VIDEO: How to Butcher a Pig: When my kid was young, she wanted to know where our food came from, and we walked her slowly back from the table to the kitchen to the store and eventually to farms. This video was a step along the way, and while it thankfully isn’t bloody it doesn’t shy away from showing how, if you’re going to eat an animal, to properly use everything but the oink. Related: this video of Bluefin Tuna Cutting, where chefs use a mighty array of large blades and implements to carefully partition an enormous 200-kilogram fish.
VIDEO: How to Make Pizza on a Submarine: A few years back the Navy invited a bunch of YouTubers to travel aboard a nuclear submarine, giving me a look into an undersea workplace that’s always fascinated me. This video about cooking for hungry sailors in cramped and shifting quarters was especially interesting.
VIDEO: Playlist: A Week of Husband Bentos: Tight-in videos of a woman in Japan preparing lunches for her husband to take to work over the course of a year. Watching them with my kid, we’ve found new ingredients to play with, new dishes to try and make, and fun techniques.
VIDEO: Tiny Kitchen: Tiny Grilled Cheese & Tomato Soup: A fun video from a fun channel making tiny portions of food. No, not single-person portions—literally tiny versions.
VIDEO: A Day with a Dishwasher: It’s not just about the cooking; here we get to see how a seriously competent dishwasher keeps a large restaurant running (not least by doing lots of running himself, much of it up and down stairs.)
VIDEO: Lightning Fast Udon in Osaka: I love udon, and watching this video of a master udon chef making everything from scratch is amazing. The final cook may indeed be “lightning fast”, but this video also shows how it’s an all-day process. Related: this video of a Japanese baker working overnight to prepare his bakery for the day, which reminds me of the extremely early-morning shifts I worked as a baker’s assistant in high school, and a Korean Street Toast Master at work.
CINEMA COURSE
Television and films for your discerning palate.
SHOW: Chef’s Table [Trailer; Netflix]: Great chefs and great food, yes, but its impeccable cinematography and production values, born of creator David Gelb’s wonderful documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi, that makes this ‘docu-series’ worth watching. There are 6 main seasons and four themed side-seasons now; check out the first season—it’s arguably the best, but it’s hard not to be hungry for a lot more.
SHOW: Iron Chef OG: I can only assume that most people have watched an episode of Iron Chef at some point, but these days it’s increasingly likely they’ve seen one of the American descendants. The Japanese original is online, and it’s still as wonderful a watch as it was when it first started showing up late at night on the Food Network 20 years ago.
MOVIE: Big Night (trailer): No movie makes me hungrier than this one, but it also features terrific jazz by Louie Prima and a great story wonderfully acted by Tony Shaloub and Stanley Tucci as a pair of brothers.
SHOW: Samurai Gourmet (Japanese trailer): There’s nothing better to wrap up this dive than this show about a retired man rediscovering the joys of food and eating…with a bit of help from his samurai alter-ego. Know ahead of time that the show is subtitled in English; if you need something in English to convince you to give it a taste, here’s a short and spoiler-free video by someone who fell in love with the show.
BACK TO THE SURFACE
Thanks for coming along on this food-focussed dive. Next week Shelfdiver will be on hiatus as our household makes the transition from schooltime to summertime. But after that I’ll try to get back to a more balanced format, starting out with a bit of magic!
“Mens mutatione recreabitur sic ut in cibir, quorum diversitate reficitur stomachus, et pluribus minore fastidio alitur.”
(“Our minds, like our stomachs, are whetted by change of food, and variety supplies both with fresh appetite.”)– Quintilian