Food and Drink

"Snack bar,” “coffee shop” and such phrases once signified small eateries where customers sat on stools at a counter or in simple booths. Their orders were taken and served by waitresses in white aprons, and prepared by a short-order cook in a white paper cap. Hotel lobbies, railroad-station waiting rooms and airports all had them: private enterprises in public spaces purveying a cup of coffee and a donut, bacon and eggs, ham and cheese on rye, a hot dog, a hamburger, maybe a milkshake or an ice cream sundae. Little of this (for most were mom-and-pops) traveled well into the age of industrialized, assembly-line, eat-on-the-go feeding signified by the phrase “fast food.

I have become a pan handler — a handler of cast-iron pans. I can think of few hobbies that are as rewarding as collecting and cooking on cast iron. Skillets, griddles, muffin tins, Dutch ovens, waffle irons, corn-stick pans and much else: there was a time when America produced the finest cast-iron cookware in the world. The iron ore was abundant. So was the coal to melt it. Foundries went up across this great land. American cuisine developed around it. From fried chicken to cornbread, the American menu should still be cooked on cast iron. Southern cooks never forgot this. The same goes for soul food; black America has always prized its cast-iron inheritance. Now I find I have little need to cook on anything else.

Marmite is one of very few manufactured foods to have become an idiom. British people think of the black stuff as a national idiosyncrasy, entirely unknown to horrified foreigners: there are many videos on YouTube in which outsiders have Marmite inflicted on them for the first time. In fact, there are a large number of pastes based on yeast extract in different countries, each with its passionate devotees. British Marmite may have been the first to go into production, but it did not stay unique for long. A German chemist, Justus von Liebig, influential in the propagation of meat essences, discovered that yeast could be concentrated.

However else we may criticize the late 90s and early 00s — its politics, its fashion, its music — this was undeniably the golden age of the celebrity chef. Barefoot Contessa, 30-Minute Meals and The Iron Chef franchises all debuted in the first decade of this millennium, minting stars like Bobby Flay, Guy Fieri and Nigella Lawson. I once found a collection of my brothers salivating over Giada de Laurentiis making meatballs on Everyday Italian, though they’d never demonstrated more interest in cooking than microwaving the odd Hot Pocket. The mid-aughts brought on the glory years of the “hands and pans” videos: the aerial-view clips of disembodied hands assembling cheeseburger pretzel balls or eighteen-layer taco dip.

One of the more curious habits of the British is their tendency to publish opinion polls in national newspapers about their own food habits. Which way round, for example, are you meant to dress your scone? Is it clotted cream first, then jam — or jam first and cream second? Well, the Queen does it jam first, so that must be the way. Or that other national debate, tea and then milk, or the opposite? When I first arrived in the UK thirteen years ago, I was amused to see how worked up the British get about such questions. Try asking them sometime and see what happens. A new poll reveals that 58 percent of the British public admit to preferring roast potatoes over turkey. “How could you?” we’re supposed to gasp. “Everyone knows Christmas dinner is about the turkey!

It was late November when Diana called, telling me her butcher would soon kill the “fatted calf.” Sharing a butchered calf once a year with a Swiss friend meant you both had a freezer-full of veal at half price. Being asked to share a calf was also a sign of a deep friendship — akin to using tu instead of vous and locking arms in a toast over shot glasses of white wine. Both could take ten years, which was about as long as I’d known Diana. I had long since gotten over what butchers did. I liked meat — most meat. But I didn’t want to see lots of blood. Growing up, I always asked my father for the outside slice of a roast or his charcoal-grilled steak. Now, I drew the line with rabbit. Rabbit is not normally on an American menu.

Hannah Moore’s June Spectator piece on sandwiches made me hungry. Then it made me think. Ms Moore makes a sound distinction between modern Britain’s plastic-boxed, triangular ‘sandwich’ and the custom-made, piled-high, endlessly imitated, seldom-matched product of a good New York or Chicago delicatessen. Why, one wonders, do the Brits put up with it? Landing in countless foreign ports over the years, for business or pleasure, I’ve always wondered, pretty much before wondering about anything else, ‘What’s the food like?’ Almost always, I’ve liked what it was like. In the age of real borders and undiluted ethnicities, food was a powerful expression of locality.

In early October I bought three chrysanthemum plants to brighten my front doorstep during the gloomy days here in Montecito, California. The outdoor plant stand at Trader Joe’s, overflowing with a panoply of colored mums, reminded me how I love seeing French flair flourish when decorating with these seasonal blossoms. How, for a decade, I’ve been sharing and creating recipes with my daughter, a wine executive, with chrysanthemum flowers from her local organic épicerie and leaves discovered in a Burgundian marché. In Burgundy, as in the rest of France, mums are displayed for Toussaint (All Saints’ Day) on November 1, and for Armistice Day, to mark the end of World War One.