Food for Eating
Welcome to our Thursday edition, where we feature a great new recipe. Tuesday is for features.
IN THIS ISSUE: Another recipe that calls for a lot of whole milk and takes more than three hours to make, a Taiwan travel dispatch from our own recently returned (and badly jetlagged) Sam Dean, and the latest Bari/de Boer gossip from our readers.
Appetizers
Letter from Luye
In the far southeastern corner of Taiwan, near where the East Rift Valley pours its gray and meandering rivers into the sea, there is a little town called Luye, once a colonial Japanese sugar plantation and now a green grid of tea farms and soursop orchards. Take a few rights off the main road and you’ll find the Treehouse Inn (樹舍民宿), the home of Jacky Chen, Sky Li, and the only wood-fired bread oven in the district. Jacky grew up nearby, but moved to Taipei for college (where he met Sky, a city kid) and stayed to work in finance. By age 35 he was sick of the rat race and quit to apprentice at Taipei’s only famous German bakery. Five years of toiling over pretzels and brötchen later, he convinced Sky to move back to the country and open this place in the middle of a former jackfruit orchard, brightened by bursts of pink bougainvillea. They’ve been happily hosting for a dozen years since.
Jacky doesn’t make German bread anymore—Taiwanese guests don’t like the dark stuff or anything too crusty, he told me—but he stokes the oven every week for a big bake of impeccably fluffy Japanese-style white bread, followed by cookies, and finally cake, when the fires cool down. Jacky’s non-leavened loves include whiskey, hifi stereos playing 1950s jazz records, and the New York Yankees. When I asked Sky if she ever missed the city, she said no. —S.D.
De Moer Theories
The Gourmet inbox is already overflowing with delicious gems of gossip. We love it! So I’ve returned with another dispatch hypothesizing about the social network connecting Stissing House owner Clare de Boer and CBS News Something-Something Bari Weiss, who apparently will soon be working together.
None of this is confirmed, and all of it pure conjecture. Here you go:
- A Friend in the Food Media World (FiFMW) said that Bari had been making the rounds, trying to find anyone to take the gig. This person hypothesized that perhaps de Boer, U.K.-born, simply didn’t know the implications of the job. “I’m guessing she went fishing for a food person and clare bit.”
- Another FRiend of Gourmet (FRoG) reached out not with a solid theory, per se, but with the fact that de Boer’s beau (the Casper co-founder) is listed as “unaffiliated” on his voter registration.
- The most solid lead we’ve gotten is from yet another FRoG who says that a pre-CBS professional confidante of Weiss’s was known to be, quite simply, obsessed with de Boer, and would almost always make one of her recipes when she hosted a dinner party. Is that how Bari got the bug?
Perhaps we can let this specific thought experiment rest for now (and I promise that the next thing I write will not be on this subject!). But if you have any other juicy culinary thing to prattle on about, you know where to find us: tips@gourmetmagazine.net. —C.G.W
Food for Eating
By Alison Roman
Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Pork Cooked in Milk
I hate to say it, but I must: I’m bored of Nice Looking Food. Delicate leafy herbs scattered over every plate, a little chili crisp-esque something swirled into every bowl, sliced meat shingled just so. I’m guilty of all of these practices, of course, but… we get it. In my Old Age, I find myself more attracted to monochrome bowls of soup and beautiful beige beans and deeply browned meats cooked a little messily by someone who loves eating food. “Come as you are,” I want to say to each naked roast chicken and pile of perfectly cooked lentils in front of me. “No need to dress up for moi.”
The grumpy, jaded part of me says that these days food looks Too Nice because of the increased pressure for everything to PERFORM. Obviously, this isn’t about beauty in any kind of objective sense, but in a specific, homogeneous, Internet-y sort of way. We aren’t just cooking recipes anymore, we’re designing them. We’re adding bells and whistles on auto pilot, scattering parsley not because its green bitterness gives a jolt of something fresh to an otherwise-heavy pot of braised beef, but because without it we know someone will comment that the plate “looks a little brown :( ,” or, remind us that “we eat with our eyes” (though I eat…with my mouth), or maybe out of habit, or maybe out of fear, because everything on The Internet is an invitation to comment.
Though what if something looks… bad? Not “bad” like “oh gosh, it doesn’t look like the photo” but like, so bad actually, where you think “this looks…like a mistake.” Can it be delicious? Can it be intentional? Can it be popular and fabulous, worthy of being published by a resuscitated legacy food magazine? I think so, yes.