The Woodcuts of Loren Kantor

When I first started carving woodcuts, 

every portrait 

oddly seemed to resemble 

Steve Buscemi.

~ Loren Kantor

Unlike sculpture, it's easy to pack a lot of works on paper — prints, posters, drawings, and like that — into very little space. And so I do. Of all these flat bits of art, I've been mesmerized by woodcuts since I was old enough to turn pages. Old anatomy diagrams, Albrecht Dürer's famous rhinoceros, early 20th century German prints, the Malleus Maleficarum (I was a precocious reader), Hatch Show Prints, and more. Even as a kid, before my parents deemed it wise to allow me access to woodcarving tools,  I learned to make simple prints with crudely carved potatoes and finger paint; flowers, animals, movie monsters, Latin and Cyrillic letters — whatever struck my meandering and occasionally morbid imagination. Alas, as I grew older, I turned to bending copper rather than carving wood.

But I never lost my fondess for those woodcuts. Lately, I've been taken with Loren Kantor's contemporary examples. Kantor lives in Los Angeles and the influence of cinema both old and new shows clearly in his work. His Absinthe is inspired by a 1913 silent film of the same name, an early bit of temperance propaganda.

Food, drink, and mania show up elsewhere in his prints; there's the ruined mug of Charles Bukowski, a bespectacled Colonel Harlan Sanders, the panic-struck face of Peter Lorre from Fritz Lang's 1931 classic M, and Gary Busey who, wild eyes notwithstanding, gets a sympathetic presentation.

Kantor presents these and more on his blog, Woodcuttingfool. Most seem to be about 5" x 7" — a good size for a desk or that blank spot on your office wall. Me? I'm trying to decide between Absinthe, Colonel Sanders, or the Richard Nixon print which uses an actual slogan from his 1972 reelection bid: “You Can't Lick Our Dick.”

Ahem.

Of course, if Halloween is as big a deal around your house as it is in ours, the Boris Karloff print may be just the thing for you.

Email him for pricing and shipping. Absinthe, for instance, is $35 and will ship for $3 in the United States. Loren Kantor: lorenwoodcuts (at) gmail (dot) com

Goes well with:

• Mikey Wild (1955-2011), a nod to Philadelphia institution Michael "Mikey Wild" DeLuca whose art, while very different, I hold onto with great affection. 

I Woke This Morning Thinking of Tits

I woke this morning thinking of tits.

"So what?" you may ask. "I myself think of tits no less than 329 times a day." Yeah, ok, fair enough. You and a bunch of my friends. But bear with me. This is noteworthy for several reasons. I do not recall ever, in the last forty-some years, greeting the day with thoughts of tits. Oh, I can appreciate a nice rack when I see one. I'm gay, not blind. But I spend just slightly more time mulling them over (even in passing thoughts) than I do thinking about which kosher wine I'll serve with breakfast, what's in this month's issue of Cat Fancy, or whether this is the weekend I'll finally crochet a cover for my oven.

To clarify: I do none of that.

Bardot and her, um, raccoon eyes

But here's the thing: I was thinking specifically of Brigitte Bardot's tits — and this despite the fact that no concrete image of Brigitte Bardot came to mind as I stretched under the sheets. Some European sex kitten, I vaguely recalled, whose popularity peaked before I'd learned to walk. Blonde, perhaps.

They were being talked about in my mind in the gravelly, booze-worn voice of British actor Michael Gambon. Though Gambon is known to younger generations as Professor Dumbledor in the Harry Potter movies, his roles as dangerous, dastardly men are what stick in my mind. Albert Spica, for instance, in The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover or Eddie Temple in Layer Cake. The voice, though I could not make out particular words, had a distinctly lascivious tone. Not wholly unexpected, given that these were, after all, tits being talked about, but the voice was overbearing, boorish. I pictured him pawing at me while explaining something...something that clutched at the edges of my memory, then slipped away. This had to do with dinner. I was sure of it. Did Bardot, perhaps, pen a cookbook? And it wasn't jugs, or hooters, or headlights; it was...

My eyes snapped open. I had it! In my best Michael Gambon voice, I barked out "...roast chicken like Bridget Bardot’s tits." A muffled hrrmpf came from the other side of the bed. Not everyone was awake yet.

The phrase that had been haunting me was from A.A. Gill's essay Tour De Gall in last April's Vanity Fair. The piece is so good, so anchored in my memory, that it seemed to have had me wondering whether I'd switched teams in my sleep. In it, Gill wrote about the Paris restaurant L’Ami Louis, frequented by titans of state and screen and which he excoriates, in devilish detail, as the Worst Restaurant in the World. I like the passage below dealing with the recommendation best in the Michael Gambon voice. Try that bit in Michael Caine's if you like, but not soft, velvet Old Michael Caine: Young Michael Caine, all loud and nasal and vaguely threatening.

In all my years as a restaurant critic I have learned that there is a certain type of florid, blowsy, patrician Brit who will sidle up and bellow, with a fruity bluster, that if I ever happen to find myself in Paris (as if Paris were a cul-de-sac on a shortcut to somewhere else) there is this little place he knows, proper French, none of your nouvelle nonsense, bloody fantastic foie gras, and roast chicken like Bridget Bardot’s tits, and that I should go. But, they add, don’t bloody write about it.

If you missed it the first time around, read Gill's essay. L’Ami Louis may or may not be the worst restaurant in the world, but Tour De Gall is the most enjoyable restaurant review I've read in a long time.

And if you still can't quite place Gambon, here he is as Albert Spica in Peter Greenaway's The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover. Not entirely Safe for Work, but, then, you're sitting there reading about tits, so either you're not at work or you suffer from the delusion that nobody knows what you're doing on company time. That's Helen Mirren with the hair and a very young Tim Roth at the table.

 

A Smooth and Creamy Pâté

My introduction to Nigel Slater’s writing was at Kitchen Arts & Letters, Nach Waxman’s cookbook store in New York. Its manager, Matt Sartwell, understood my tastes and my interest in titles from Europe, Latin America, and Asia. He also understood that I was willing to pay more for such imported books because they were often more interesting than so many of the latest American offerings. Or, at least, the titles in that particular store were.

Once, nearly ten years ago, I was browsing the shelves and making a small pile of books to take home when Sartwell asked me if I’d heard of Slater. The name was only vaguely familiar. British was all I could come up with, perhaps a columnist. “His earlier books weren’t anything special,” I recall him explaining as he took a book from the shelf “But his latest one” — and here he pulled an old clerks' trick by placing it in my hand — “is quite good. He writes like you talk.”

I wasn’t at all convinced that anything resembling more of me was something the world needed.

But I humored Sartwell and flipped through the book. The more I plucked through its pages, the more I realized that this guy did write a lot like I speak. Not entirely. Maybe a bit more floral and breezy than I might be. His ingredients, tastes, and methods of cooking, though, as well as a casual style that puts less emphasis on exactitude than on appropriateness, was uncannily similar to my own. He wrote of “enough” butter, glugs of brandy, and splashes of wine. Commonsense in a way that made me appreciate just how uncommon sense truly is.

I added the book to the pile. Some books in my library I don’t open for years on end. Not a month goes by, though, that I don’t crack open Slater’s Appetite for inspiration. Still on my Braunschweiger high, I was craving a bit of liver sausage. For wont of a proper smoker here at the house, though, braunschweiger was out. Chicken liver it was, then.

The milk was whole, the brandy from Jepson (which I wrote about here), and the schmear photo is mine. The rest of this is all Slater (sounding freakishly like me):

A Smooth and Creamy Pâté

There is a constantly recurring lunch in my house that consists of little more than deli shopping laid out on the kitchen table, eaten from its wrappers and cartons. It is a Saturday morning thing, really. Hunks of bread, either freshly baked sourdough or a crisp ficelle, some tiny, purple-black olives, miniature gherkins, a knobbly salami, and a couple of fat wedges of cheese are pretty much what we seem to have. Yet it is a favorite meal, one I enjoy as much as any other, I like a pear with mine, too, or a huge bunch of sweet, muscaty grapes. The star of such a meal is often a white china dish of homemade pâté to go with the little gherkins, or cornichons as they seem to be called nowadays. It is so difficult—almost impossible—to find a commercial pâté that is both velvety and pink enough that I think it worth making your own. The method that follows may sound pedantic, but it is small points such as the sieving after the initial blending that make the difference between a good pâté and one that is truly sublime. Some swamp-green canned peppercorns, hot, soft, and addictive, to scatter on as you eat will bring untold rewards.

Enough for 6

chicken livers—about 14 ounces
milk—enough to soak the livers in
butter—½ cup, plus ¼ cup at the very end
whipping cream—6 tablespoons
brandy [Jepson Rare Alembic Brandy]

Trim any dark or green bits from the livers, cover them in milk, and leave them for thirty minutes. This will rid them of any bitterness. Soften two-thirds of the ½ cup butter, not so far as to melt it, but just so it takes a finger easily. Melt the remaining third in a shallow pan. When it starts to foam, drop in the livers, drained of their milk [and blotted dry on paper towels]. Take care—they will spit at you. Let them develop a pale, golden crust on one side, then turn them over and do the same to the other. It is essential that the butter is hot enough for this to take only a few minutes, otherwise, the center will not stay pink and the pâté will lose its magic.

Now tip the livers, their butter, the softened butter, and a generous seasoning of salt and black pepper into a blender or food processor with the cream, and blitz to a smooth puree. Pour a couple of good glugs of brandy into the empty pan, put it over the heat, and bring to a boil so the alcohol burns off (some people ignite it at this point, but I have never found it makes that much difference). Pour the brandy into the creamed chicken livers and continue to blitz. No matter how much you whiz the pate there will still be some graininess, but it should remain pink.

Now, using a rubber spatula, push the mixture through a stainless steel sieve into a bowl. I know this is deeply boring, and the sieve is yet another thing to wash up, but it really does make a crucial difference to the pâté, turning the grainy and the mundane into the blissfully velvety. The point is to have as smooth a texture as possible, and you can only get that by sieving. Scrape the whole lot into a terrine or bowl, smooth the top, and put it in the fridge to set.

Half an hour later, and no longer because the mixture will discolor, melt the ¼ cup of butter and scrape off the froth that rises to the surface. Pour the butter over the pate and return it to the fridge to set. I tend to leave mine for most of the day or overnight, but it should be ready in three or four hours. It will keep for a day or two.

Details for the American edition:

Nigel Slater (2002)
Appetite: So What Do You Want to Eat Today?
448 pages (hardback)
Clarkson Potter
ISBN: 0609610783
$35.00

Goes well with:

• A trip to Kitchen Arts & Letters (1435 Lexington Avenue, New York City, 212.876.5550, www.kitchenartsandletters.com)
• Jepson made the brandy I used to great effect in our quince-infused brandy.  At $19.99, it was a steal. Peel your eyes and keep 'em peeled for that price at Trader Joe's in case they ever score a great deal on it again. 
• Jennifer McLagan's new book on offal cookery, Odd Bits. I recommend this one less because there's any particular resonance between the writing styles of McLagan and Slater than because of the odd bit recipes I yoiked from each.

Pok Pok's Chicken Wings

I've lost my goddamned mind: 

just conducted an interview 
of the chicken wings I'm frying at home. 

Surprisingly, they have a voice a lot like mine, 
only higher.

~ Facebook post from me last night,

an increasingly rare occurrence

Last month, I spent the better part of a week in Portland, Oregon. Like so many before me, I was smitten. Can you blame me? I’m from San Diego, a desert town on the coast. It’s hard not to be taken with Portland’s lush greenery and air so moist you can feel it even on a sunny day (or, rather, during sunny parts of most days). Add to that the breweries, the distilleries, the Bookstore, hiking out in the gorge, the cocktails, and the food…oh, sweet Jesus, the food.

We ate. When someone asks me what we did in Portland, my answer is simply: we ate. Bacon macaroni and cheese from a food truck, sour cherry water ice, bulgogi tacos, truffled popcorn, pickles, ice cream sandwiches, fried-to-order chocolate donuts, pork ribs, chicken fried steak, boar, an amazing red pork stew, cured meats, cheeses, biscuits, fried chicken, berries, cherries, lefse, blue cheese burgers. I didn’t feel right for a week afterward. It was glorious.

A plate of spicy chicken wings at Andy Ricker’s restaurant Pok Pok, though, was so good that we ordered another round even though there wasn’t one single hungry person at the table. I’m not the first to write about the wings. I won’t be the last. The have a fame of their own. When my friend Barry sent directions for making them from a 2008 Food & Wine recipe, I bought three kilos of flappers and broke out the fryer.

It was too much. None was left.

Ike’s Vietnamese Fish Sauce Wings
(aka Pok Pok Wings)

The menu calls them Ike’s Vietnamese Fish Sauce Wings. No disrespect to Ike, but most everyone I spoke to in Portland called these crispy glazed chicken wings Pok Pok wings. In brackets are my adjustments and notes. You’ll notice that I like garlic and heat. To add some spice to the glaze, I added a healthy dollop of sambal oelek, an Indonesian crushed chile paste that’s widely available even in whitebread grocery stores.

½ cup Asian fish sauce [Viet Huong brand nuoc mam]
½ cup superfine sugar
4 garlic cloves, 2 crushed and 2 minced [8-10, 4-5 and 4-5]
3 pounds [whole] chicken wings
2 tablespoons vegetable oil, plus more for frying
1 cup cornstarch
1 Tbl chopped fresh cilantro
1 Tbl chopped fresh mint [chiffonade]
[2 Tbl sambal oelek, Huy Fong brand]

In a bowl, whisk the fish sauce, sugar, [sambal oelek, if using], and crushed garlic. Add the wings and toss to coat. Refrigerate for 3 hours [more than that and they become oversalted from the fish sauce], tossing the wings occasionally.

Heat the 2 tablespoons of oil in a small skillet. Add the minced garlic; cook over moderate heat until golden, 3 minutes. Drain on paper towels.

In a large pot, heat 2 inches of oil to 350°F. Pat the wings dry on paper towels; reserve the marinade. Put the cornstarch in a shallow bowl, add the wings and turn to coat. Fry the wings in batches until golden and cooked through, about 10 minutes. Drain on paper towels and transfer to a bowl.

In a small saucepan, simmer the marinade over moderately high heat until syrupy, 5 minutes. Strain over the wings and toss. Top with the cilantro, mint and fried garlic and serve.

Salty? Yes. But not too much so as long as you don’t overdo the marinating time. Cook a pot of plain white rice, crack open a beer, and make sure you've got plenty of napkins.

Bookshelf: Sri Owen's Indonesian Food Adds Fuel to the Tiki Fire

A new book by Sri Owen is a matter for celebration.

~ Alan Davidson
Petites Propos Culinaires

Sri Owen, a one-time BBC broadcaster and now one of the grande dames of Britain’s culinary scene, may not be well known to Americans, but she is a dogged sleuth at the very top of her game. Framing it for the cocktail crowd, she’s Ted Haigh, David Wondrich, and Jeff Berry rolled into one.

She has traveled to far-off villages in Bali, Java, and Sumatra with notepads and a camera. She was hip to Batavia arrack long before American cocktail enthusiasts knew what it was. She has tracked down endangered recipes across social, religious, and linguistic bounds, and presented her findings in a dozen books, various articles, and presentations at scholarly symposia. Her field? Indonesian cookery. Others have written about the foodways of these Pacific islands, but when you want to get right to the source, read no further than Sri Owen’s books.

Of what interest is Indonesian food to American drinkers? Think tiki.

Her latest book, Sri Owen's Indonesian Food, contains a 29-page spread on satay alone. Forget those “Monkeys on a stick” from mid-century tiki bars. A tiki enthusiastic looking for fresh ideas for backyard/basement luaus or a refreshed bar menu would do well to study Owen’s latest book. Here, she presents satays of minced beef, of pork, prawns, sweet potatoes, fish, ox tongue, and tripe along with an entire chapter on sambals (condiments akin to salsas or, more closely, chutneys) for giving them a tropical kick. Ok, maybe your guests won’t cotton to tripe-on-a-bamboo-skewer, but the rest have broad appeal.

In clear, engaging prose, Owen introduces ingredients, techniques, and dishes of the Indonesian archipelago. Recipes for braised beef ribs, tamarind lamb, stuffed wontons, steamed plantains, fish cooked in bamboo segments, grilled catfish, stuffed and poached prawns, and ice creams (of kaffir lime, durian, avocado, and black rice, to name a few) blend familiar and novel tastes and textures. Lumpia—fried spring rolls—will be familiar to tiki enthusiasts, but the book is packed with fresh takes on Pacific islands cookery. Well, fresh to Americans, anyway.

To accompany and enliven the dishes, readers learn how to make a variety of condiments and bumbus—seasoning pastes with exotic spices such as galangal, fresh tumeric, lemongrass, shrimp paste, candlenuts (careful: they’re toxic if eaten raw), and more. A useful glossary explains the ingredients and pronunciation.

One of my favorite recipes—and she’s printed it elsewhere—is for rendang: chucks of beef (water buffalo if you want to stick to the taste of the islands), simmered in spiced coconut milk that permeates the beef until the water evaporates, leaving coconut oil to collect which the cook then uses to fry the chunks in the same pot. Rendang is time-consuming and rich, but delicious, and perfect for heating the kitchen and belly in the ungodly cold weather the rest of the country is having.

Owen applies a similar technique to fried chicken. It’s not the same as the Southern fried chicken so familiar on these shores, but it has become part of our yardbird repertoire. For Ayam Goreng Jawa, Owen cooks chicken in seasoned coconut milk until it absorbs the sauce, then briefly cools and deep-fries it. Imagine the same recipe applied to a batch of chicken wings and served alongside a mai tai, a fogcutter, or a cinnamon-spiced nui nui.

As the Brits might say, it tastes rather more-ish.

Ayam Goreng Jawa
Central Java Special Fried Chicken

One chicken, about 1.5 kg/3.25 lbs), cut into 8 pieces
Peanut oil for deep-frying

For the bumbo (paste)
390ml/14 fl oz coconut milk
6 shallots
1.5 tsp ground coriander
3 candlenuts (or macadamia nuts), chopped
1 tsp fresh galangal, chopped
1 tsp fresh turmeric root, chopped
1 tsp fresh lemongrass, finely chopped
1 tsp sea salt (and more to taste, if necessary)

Using just three tablespoons of the coconut milk, blend all the other ingredients for the bumbu to make a not-too-smooth paste. Put the rest of the coconut milk in a saucepan, and add the paste. Mix thoroughly, add the pieces of chicken, and boil for 45-50 minutes until all sauce has been absorbed by the meat. Allow to cool, then deep-fry the chicken four pieces at a time until golden brown [at 300°F, about ten minutes, a bit longer for breasts].

Notes: We ate with this with sambal ulek, a bright and lively chile paste widely available in Asian grocery stores and easy enough to make at home. If using candlenuts, be aware that they are toxic if eaten raw and must be cooked. Another tiki connection: the oil of candlenuts (so-called because they could be lit for light at night) was sometimes used as a coating for outrigger canoes so often seen suspended from the ceiling of tiki joints.

My notes are for the UK edition of the book published by Pavilion. Interlink has published an American version titled The Indonesian Kitchen: Recipes and Stories. I haven’t read that one, so I can’t comment on its contents. Owen herself, however, writes that the differences are minimal.


Sri Owen (2008)
Sri Owen's Indonesian Food
288 pages, hardback
Pavilion
ISBN: 1862056781
Price: £25.00

Chickenshit Afternoon, Part II

If you have never had a "Goombay Smash"
you have been missing out,
but I don't recommend them in 95 degree heat
standing over a 5 gallon vat of hot oil.

~ Brooks Hamaker

Last week, I wrote about the Chicken Drop in a post I called called Chickenshit Afternoon. The Chicken Drop, a bettors' pastime involving chickens and the trajectory of their last meal, is not as common as it once was, but it's still so well known among New Orleanians that even the erudite bar professor Chris McMillian at the Bar UnCommon took once glance at my photos of a yardbird on a Twister board behind chicken wire strapped to a plywood platform on a pool table in a bar and declared authoritatively "Well, that's a Chicken Drop."

Of course, McMillian is a master bartender and there's a certain correlation between alcohol and the Chicken Drop. I'd put it somewhere near 1:1. One also hears of variations with other livestock, including swine. Not in a bar, of course. Or maybe I just don't know those bars.

Brooks Hamaker—Mayhaw Man for years on eGullet.org and former distiller—also knew the story. In fact, he'd written it for eGullet, complete with a turkey variant. He was also kind enough to send on a link to the follow-up in which a big ol' Tom turkey goes into the fryer.

Brooks' 2003 essay, The Turkey Terror of Oak Street, Part II, takes us to the end of the story.

.