noodsletter #.0017
Recipe cross-testing for my book; early pandemic okra; the limits of complaining.
Hello!
You’ve received this email because you’ve signed up for noodsletter. Thank you. The recipe section is usually at the end, everything else on top. No recipe this week, but I have a suggestion for you, which you can find at the bottom. For the cover photo this week, I’ve picked a bowl of ramen I made recently, a spicy shoyu with lots of nira. It was good!
If any of you want to send over things you find interesting, or that you think I would find interesting, I encourage you to do so!
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Some Book Business
While it may not seem like it to anyone, least of all my editor, I am working on my ramen cookbook—slowly, to be sure, but the work is being done. I am now at the point where I’m worrying not just about whether or not I will be able to meet my initial manuscript deadline; I’m also worrying about the recipe cross-testing. To that end, I want to ask you noodsletter readers if you have any interest in cross-testing some of the recipes I’ve developed for the book.
I’ve put together a Google form with some pertinent questions. I will be collecting the email addresses of respondents, as I will need an address to send you the recipes. I promise I will not share any of this information with anyone. As I say in the form, the reason why I ask for your full name is just to be sure I’m dealing with a real person. If you put in Bob Smith, I will likely think you’re not a real person (although I will try to check first… could be you really are named Bob Smith!).
Needless to say, to anyone who is even remotely interested in cross-testing: Thank you! Hopefully they’re pretty good? If you know anyone who you think would be into cross-testing ramen recipes but probably isn’t interested in noodsletter, please share this form with them.
A Book Bit
From Rosie Revere, Engineer by Andrea Beaty, illustrated by David Roberts.
I read this book to my kid pretty often, and I think I enjoy it more than any of her other books. This page in particular always gets me. The context is that Rosie built a helicopter powered by cheese spray, and it crashed. The rhythm…with the ellipses…is good!
“News”
While you should always be skeptical of “odd-people-in-Japan stories,” this guy is like millenial Bartleby:
“I was often told that I wasn’t doing enough, or that I wasn’t doing anything, so this became a complex for me. I decided to take advantage of this and make it into a business,” he said.
Really excited for this movie, not sure about the noodle simile in its review: “This movie’s plot is as full of twists and kinks as the pot of noodles that appears in an early scene.”
I take personal offense to Pusha T’s anti-Filet-o-Fish diss track for Arby’. As I have written before, the Filet-o-Fish is the perfect fast food offering! That the filet in the Filet-o-Fish is a perfect square puck is PART of why it’s so miraculous! Also, why is quote-unquote spelled out here: “On the surface, it makes for one of hip-hop’s silliest, most corporate quote-unquote beefs…”
“Will Wonders Never Cease? This Bread Is Swirled With Cinnamon And Raisins Both”
Women’s lunch clubs. Some of the language of the time is so interesting: “We don’t want to be rounded up and sozzled over. Not on your Leaflards. The Poor Working Girl draws a line on having a kind-hearted Gentleman pull the Weeps on her”
A Substack success story: Emily Nunn’s Department of Salad.
(Since I have no hope for success on this platform, I can tell you all how many paid subscribers I have: 25. Thank you to those 25 people and those 25 people only!)
Always an instant noodle angle: “In households as well as in the food-services industry, vegetable oils have become indispensable, used for deep-frying instant noodles, making cakes moist and giving pastries their flaky texture.”
The reason pepper and cardamom don’t have a futures market in India.
This list of 12 “unforgettable” food scenes in literature has some…very forgettable food scenes in literature (the Maurice Sendak book is an exception). I also want to point out one of my very boring hobbyhorses, which is that the madeleine scene in Swann’s Way is actually about tea.
Conde Nast Union! Good for them!
Ok, I guess I got a field of nits to pick this week. Pretty sure the miso referred to here is “kanimiso,” which is not, in fact, miso; it is crab guts, specifically the organ that acts something like a cross between its pancreas and its liver:
I don’t know if I’m jaded, but seasonal trash plates just seems like a bad Portlandia sketch to me.
Genuinely curious what the point of a piece like this is, other than an excuse to expense a very expensive meal. What is the value? For whom?
Sounds like someone smoked some very good weed, but what if roots are part of the soil?!?!
I appreciate the sentiments here, and I admire Jaya Saxena’s writing a lot, and as a half-white American I can relate, but I have some quibbles, the main one being the reason you should make things from scratch is because they almost always taste better. (I’m not a big fan of jarred products meant to make cooking easier.)
This magnetic slime robot gives me the heebie jeebies, especially since it’s designed to…go down your throat?
A couple reviews of the new Julia Child show on HBO—Jaya Saxena in Eater, Alicia Kennedy in Gawker—have had me thinking some not very well-formed thoughts, which I will now give to you; the wonders of the newsletter/blog era. Of the reviews, I agree more with Saxena’s; I think it’s just a better review, less concerned with the wish-casting that seems to take up most of the space in Kennedy’s. But both pieces ask the question, “Why more Julia Child stuff?” even as the fact of their publication answers it: Because people want to read about/watch/click on articles about Julia Child.
The audience for both of these websites is undoubtedly mostly white, certainly more upper-middle than lower-middle class. The critique of food media, or food media-adjacent media, as the Julia Child series seems to be, is often that it’s too bourgeois, but that seems to ignore that the entire audience for “food media” is bourgeois, and that “food media” is entirely created by the bourgeois. Most food-related websites are staffed by people who are paid very middle-class salaries in order to write things that appeal to people who make at least double that amount, and who have the leisure to read things about food in their generous lunch-time hours offered by their upper-middle class jobs. Asking food media to do something, anything else is like asking a dog to be a lion at the Circus Maximus; it will be laughed at, and then eaten alive by actual lions.
There are better critiques to be made, I think, ones that are less futile. This Charlotte Druckman review of the Fantastic Fungi Community Cookbook is a good example, and it seems to address a lot of the concerns raised in the Julia Child television show reviews, but in an incisive way, which shows Druckman not only knows how to use a knife, but is also willing to stab her subjects in the chest. (This is a good thing, to be clear, awkward violent metaphor aside.)
I have to cop to also making the same error as Saxena and Kennedy; as you may have noticed, I’ve been harping on and on about why food media publications keep writing up that one restaurant group’s restaurants in New York, as if they were the only restaurants in town. Of course, there’s a reason why; all these publications are housed in New York; it’s the hot new restaurant group; the writers at all these publications want to get in on the action of the coverage of the hot new restaurant group. This isn’t difficult to understand, although it’s very easy to complain about. However, there are ways to cover this restaurant group that aren’t just puffery. I’m not sure if this new piece by Chris Crowley is exactly it, even if he normally frames his articles quite well. While I appreciate the focus on the staff, not just the chefs/restaurateurs, it also feels a little like my tail’s wagging because someone’s stroking my bourgeois back.
Recipe
So…I did not write down a recipe for you this week. However, I made some frozen okra the other night, which reminded me I developed an ACTUAL recipe for frozen okra at the beginning of the pandemic, and we put it up on Serious Eats, even though the photo I took in my home looks like literal…well, it doesn’t look good. The okra tastes very good! Please make it; please laugh at the photo while you do so.
Here it is: Spiced Okra With Tomatoes