Obsessed with the Best
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IN THIS ISSUE: A cookbook store correction, figgy pudding lightning round, and the search for the Mona Lisa of meatballs.
Appetizers
Dept. Of Corrections
In our last issue, we highlighted the sad news that Brooklyn cookbook store Archestratus was soon closing up shop. A sentence in the piece erroneously stated there were only three cookbook stores left in New York.
But I want to emphasize that that is NOT the case. There are others in the city, including BEM in Bedstuy, which is focused on Black food, and the home cooking-focused Wild Sorrel, which is slated to open in the East Village in a few months. THIS list too may not be exhaustive. If there are noteworthy cookbook stores either in New York or elsewhere, all this closure talk has made me want to highlight the ones still around. Send me a note! —C.G.W.
Anarchy in the UK
Forever known for their highly particular, arguably misanthropic cookery, UK kitchens have appetized few for centuries. Our friends across the pond also have a habit of giving dishes funny names. Test your knowledge of the most bizarre regional UK indelicacies below (and if you’re on our website, tap the name of the dish to reveal its description). Ready… Set… Spoot!!! —A.T.
Fat rascal
Northern England. A small, cracked, domed cake similar to a scone, filled with currants and candied citrus peels. Close relative of the equally tempting “rock cake.”
Yarmouth bloater
East Anglia. Cold-smoked herring usually only made in autumn, when the fish’s oil content is at just the right level to be expressed via a brine cure. Diva behavior!
Good King Henry
East Midlands. “Poor man’s asparagus,” a wild spinach of the goosefoot variety. Often considered a weed.
Scratchings
West Midlands. Pork rinds, cracklings, chicharrones, but not spoot.
Puggie bun
East Central Scotland. A teatime pastry stuffed with a treacly ginger filling. Eaten primarily by old people and “deliberately baked until rather dry.”
Spoot
Scottish Highlands and Orkney Islands. The Orcadian name for a razor clam, a horny-looking little bivalve that’ll cut you just for looking at it wrong.
Faggots
South Wales and British Midlands. Offal meatballs wrapped in the membranes that line the organs of livestock. Subject of a banned ad campaign by now-defunct UK supermarket chain Somerfield, in which a guy tells his wife, “I’ve nothing against ___, I just don’t fancy them.”
Mixed boilings
Scotland. Assorted colorful candies. Might include strippits, soor plooms, or horehound toffees, if that helps.
Clootie dumpling
Scotland. A sweet alternative to haggis: a pudding steamed in a breathable cloth, instead of a mammalian stomach. The Wonder Ball of Scottish desserts, often used to hide choking hazards like lucky horseshoes or wedding rings.
Kentish cobnut
Southeast England. A local filbert (hazelnut) variety.
Cornish Yarg
Cornwall. A cow’s milk cheese wrapped in nettle leaves before maturation, and a late ’70s adaptation of a 1615 recipe.
Mendip wallfish
Somerset. Snails. From Bath Chaps to Bara Brith: The Taste of South West Britain: “The use of snails as food is generally regarded by the British as curious and outlandish—more specifically, French.”
Mothering bun
Southwest England. A plain pastry covered in icing and a thick layer of hundreds-and-thousands (Britishese for spherical sprinkles). This [second word] is absolutely [first word], baby!!!
Obsessed with the Best
In search of the superlative
We here at Gourmet are thrilled to present the following excerpt and recipe (scroll waaaaay down) from Obsessed with the Best, Ella Quittner’s just-released cookbook. This is a uniquely smart book, at once critical of our contemporary food culture’s fixation on perfection and giddily indulgent of it. (The writing rips, too.) We hope you enjoy it as much as we have, and our Epicurean-and-above readers can look forward to a bonus essay this weekend as well.
There is no such thing as “the best.” I spent more than a year traveling around America and beyond to try to understand the urge so many of us have to rank and to qualify, to compete, to win. To consume as many meatballs as we can while doubled over a plastic folding table on the steps of a historic church as an emcee who calls himself “Lil Mo Mozzarella” screams “nobody moves, nobody gets hurt” into a megaphone over and over and the rapid artillery fire of a tee shirt gun punctuates the crowd’s cheers.
I was, by the way, not immune. Who among us could scroll past a headline promising “the best” way to do anything? Who could walk past a billboard without glancing up when it blared a guarantee that the person pictured was “the best” in any class; who wouldn’t want to know what that was like? Who could ignore advice about “the best” place to visit, “the best” deal for wagyu at Costco, “the best” way to look 10 or 15 percent hotter without trying, “the best” business plan to get rich from the couch? Who could commit to one of the two dueling ramen fests unspooling concurrently in different parts of Tokyo during the same week without first pressing local experts to learn which one was “better”? Who could look away from Lil Mo’s gang of motley meatballers before a victor was crowned and the prize money of $111 changed hands?
It’s human to want to get the most, at least the way that I was raised. (One of my grandfather’s catchphrases was “free is free,” and he was known to retrieve used golf balls from the course adjacent to his yard, scrub them with a toothbrush, and resell them in packs of three labeled “vintage.”) And that can be true whether it applies literally to squeezing value from cost (the revenue from my grandpa’s sales paid for his greens fees), or to courting the richest possible human experience. Like when “the best” is the least, as in the most exclusive. Or when it offers the mirage of value, delivering instead choice. It can be a community organizing principle or an algorithmic output.