noodsletter #.0001
I'm sorry for /everything/ is terrible.
Welcome to noodsletter, a newsletter that won’t focus on noodles. I know! It doesn’t make sense! And it’s not that it doesn’t make sense in some cool, ironic way; it literally makes no sense at all!
But there are reasons for it: namely, that it’s a silly name and a pun. No matter how you feel about puns as literary device, you must agree that a person who uses puns can’t be taken seriously, which justifies both the name and the url attached to this exercise in mass bloggy emailery. (If you want semi-serious reflections on noodles, the best place for that, from me at least, and some other users like the one below, is Instagram.)
So, if not noodles, what? If not ramen, who?
A few years ago I got to interview Adam Kuban, the pop-up pizza-making savant and former managing editor of Serious Eats. He observed that a lot of the best stuff old food blogs used to do—tips on good things to eat, odd home-cooking experiments—are now the bread and butter of social media platforms like Instagram and Twitter. I don’t use Twitter, and I try to limit the stuff I post on Instagram to stuff that doesn’t make me want to die with embarrassment, so noodsletter seems like a good place to put stuff like that—you know, tips on good things I’ve eaten, odd home-cooking experiments, stuff that makes me want to die with embarrassment.
Having thought this over for a couple of weeks, an email-based blog with that kind of stuff seemed like weak tea served cold, so I’ll try to offer some useful or at the very least interesting things. Links (some will be paywalled, sorry), excerpts from books and articles I find interesting, a recipe or two (mine, probably, others [if I can afford to pay them], very casual, not rigorously tested!, tasty, very salty). The general theme is, of course, food and cooking.
Publication frequency will be every two weeks. Paid subscribers seems very unlikely, but if I ever want to be like this legend,
I shouldn’t dismiss the possibility out of hand. If you’ve got ideas for what I could offer an entirely hypothetical paying subscriber, I’m all ears. All I’ve been able to come up with is buying things home cooks don’t usually buy and demonstrating how to prepare them—live abalone, squab, sweetbreads, that kind of thing—or paying some of the many talented people I know to do something wonderful for you.
Speaking of ears, I’d like to hear from you. Really! Let me know what works for you and what doesn’t; what you’d like to see; how much you dislike my terrible, awful recipes. I just ask that you be polite; you don’t have to be nice.
A Bit of Book
At the end of the 1970s, at family meals, a tradition maintained in spite of the distances that had to be travelled, memory grew short.
Over coquilles Saint-Jacques and a rosbif from the butcher - not the hypermarket - and a side dish of pommes dauphines, frozen but as good as homemade, we assured them, the talk turned to cars and brand comparisons, projects for building a home or buying an older property, our most recent holidays, the consumption of time and objects. We instinctively avoided topics that awakened the old social longings and cultural differences, and instead examined the present we shared: the bombings in Corsica, the terrorist attacks in Spain and Ireland, the diamonds of Bokassa, the pamphlet written by a certain ‘Hasard d’Estin’, Coluche’s candidacy for president, Bjorn Borg, E123 food dye; La grande bouffe, which everyone had seen except the grandparents, who never went to the cinema, and Manhattan - just the mainstream. The women managed a sidelong exchange on domestic issues - the folding of fitted sheets, the wear and tear on the knees of jeans, the use of salt to remove wine stains - within a conversation where the men retained the monopoly on subjects.
…
And we, on the threshold of the 1980s, when we would enter our fortieth year, were suffused with a weary sweetness that came of accomplished tradition, and gazed around the table of faces, dark against the light. For a moment we were struck by the strangeness of repeating a ritual in which we now occupied the middle position between two generations. We were overcome with a kind of reverse vertigo, brought on by immutability, as if nothing in society had moved. In the hubbub of voices, which we suddenly perceived as detached from the bodies, we knew that a family meal was a place where one could go mad without warning and push the table over, screaming.
From The Years by Annie Ernaux, translated by Alison L. Strayer
The Way We Take Photos of Food We Eat Now
I think this the first vada pav I’ve had in years. From the Chote Miya stand at the Time Out food hall in Dumbo, Brooklyn. It was good.
Tofu skin salad at Western Yunnan Crossing the Bridge Noodles. This is delicious, and, so far, for me, inimitable. I could eat this by the bucket. The noodles are good, too!
Excellent, on point, go find it, amaze, wow.
I made this. Did you know daepa, a.k.a. Welsh onion, a.k.a. naga negi, a.k.a. “Tokyo negi” (why?) is also called “Chinese leek” in Chinese grocery stores? It’s also cheaper, and better quality than from other sources.
Yes, it’s a little burnt. But it was good.
“News”
For migraines, fish fat > vegetable fat. But… what if you fry fish in vegetable oil?
You or someone you know needs to know how to use your dishwasher better.
Can’t wait ‘til they require vaccination proof at restaurants in NYC, which is happening this week, even if I won’t be able to get noodles with my kid.
This article on the bacon wars to come is interesting, but do people really buy pre-cooked bacon from Costco and like it? What the hell.
More bacon shortage coverage.
The US Navy used to have an ice cream barge:
The floating factory was able to make ten gallons of ice cream in just seven minutes, meaning one shift on the barge could produce approximately 500 gallons of frozen dessert for sailors. To accommodate the large amount of ice cream made, the barge could hold 2,000 gallons at a time.
“Ice creams should exist for one purpose and one purpose only, and that is to be good.”
Pandemic cooking fiction, huh.
This is a little more my style:
An interesting piece on the ethnic aisle in grocery stores. Really! For what it’s worth, the ethnic aisle in the closest grocery store to my house is excellent; it’s not just “Asian/Mexican”; there’s some good Eastern European stuff, for example, like smoked pike mackerel (sanma, the best fish).
The shooting at the King Sooper.
My feeling is we should abolish tipping.
A piece about literary criticism, yes, but it could easily apply to cookbooks and books about food; in fact, the situation seems worse with cookbooks and books about food. The corollaries to “did they read this book?” are thus a little more broad: “Did they cook from it?” sure, but also, “Can they cook?” (There is, too, “Have they ever eaten food?”)
Speaking of: on the rise of the Instagram novel.
Everything we consume is killing the planet, coffee edition.
A good observation about cultural appropriation.
“Authentic” is an entirely meaningless word to me now. Just a bunch of letters signifying nothing.
This soba places seems all right. Continuously mystified by the way critics review Japanese food. “Austere noodles”!
Continuously mystified by Japanese-Americans, too!
“We are owning our Japanese heritage and making it as Japanese as possible with anime, manga, and all the familiarities of Japanese culture.”
Chigaimasu.
Not food, but I thought this, about Robert Downey Jr.’s blackface in Tropic Thunder, was worth your time.
All those Instagram cookware and tableware and -ware brands are using the same dang manufacturing service, how fascinating and lame!
Everybody’s like Chinese invented gunpowder but what about podi.
Lydia Davis is one of those excellence-per-inch writers:
A Single Sheep and a Doorway
Because we have photographic evidence, in a postcard photo of a flock of sheep filling the rue du Quatre Septembre many decades ago, and because we can recognise, in the photo, a certain doorway that still exists, we can walk up to this doorway, in the now empty street, look at its threshold, and know that on that spot, many decades ago, a single sheep, out of a flock of several hundred, paused to turn her head and look back at the rest of the flock coming up behind her.
I realize we live in the end times, but did we really need this many pieces about Paris Hilton’s Netflix show? (I didn’t read any of them! Not one!)
Recipe - I Have Ground Pork and I Need to Eat
Ingredients:
Condiment:
Bunch of fresh chilies, sliced
Equal parts white vinegar and fish sauce
Pork:
1 lb ground pork
2 tablespoons sugar
1 tablespoon Diamond Crystal kosher salt
1 teaspoon fermented shrimp paste
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
3 cloves of garlic, minced
2 hot green chilies, sliced
1 dried red chili, toasted and ground
10 scallions, sliced, green and white parts divided
1/2 teaspoon white pepper
1 tablespoon fish sauce
1 bunch cilantro, tender stems and leaves, chopped
1 tablespoon lime juice
Mix condiment ingredients together. Set aside
Combine pork, sugar, and salt in a medium mixing bowl. Using clean hands, mix ingredients together thoroughly until mixture is tacky. Let sit at least 15 min, preferably 30-40 min.
Heat oil in wok over medium-high heat. Fry shrimp paste briefly, about 30 seconds. Add pork and break it up with wooden spoon or wok spatula, until it resembles small clumps of sausage, about 3 minutes. Cook, stirring a couple of times, until clumps of pork are evenly caramelized, about 6 minutes.
Reduce heat to medium-low. Add garlic, sliced fresh chilies, ground dried chili, scallion whites, and white pepper, and cook, stirring once or twice, until it smells good, about 2-3 minutes.
Add fish sauce, stir to distribute, and cook for 1 min.
Add sliced scallion greens, turn off heat, and stir to distribute. Add chopped cilantro and lime juice, stir, and serve immediately with white rice, passing the condiment alongside.
If you make this, let me know how it goes. Send pics, please.
Doooope. I’ll be making this ground pork tonight. Thanks Sho!
this is excellent :-)