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These Cookbooks Are Pretentious, But With A Purpose

These Cookbooks Are Pretentious, But With A Purpose

By Daniel Neman, St. Louis Post-Dispatch (TNS)

I’ll admit it, my first instinct was to laugh. Or at least to scoff.

Two cookbooks crossed my desk recently, and they were, individually and collectively, the most pretentious things I’ve ever seen. It is as if they were competing for some sort of international award for affectation, and they were both tied for first place with nothing else even remotely close.

The first is called Sea and Smoke: Flavors from the Untamed Pacific Northwest. It is a cookbook from the Willows Inn restaurant on Lummi Island, off the coast of Washington State near Canada, about 100 miles and a ferry ride north of Seattle. On the book’s cover is a picture of what appears to be a twig, some seaweed, a few leaves, a crab claw, a clam shell and a dried up, dead fish.

The second book is called Atelier Crenn: Metamorphosis of Taste. This is the cookbook of a San Francisco restaurant called Atelier Crenn. On the cover is a bird’s nest.

The book explains that the restaurant uses a bird’s nest as its logo “because it symbolizes the juncture of art and nature.” Me, when I see a bird’s nest on a cookbook, I think “I don’t want to eat that.”

The Sea and Smoke book is full of recipes such as A Porridge of Lovage Stems and A Stew of Stinging Nettles. One recipe takes clams, wraps them in halibut skins and then rolls them in powdered seaweed. Another pairs fermented turnips with “very aged duck” (you allow the duck carcass to age for a month, “using a damp towel to wipe off any white mold as it appears”).

These are recipes I am not going to make at home. These are recipes you are not going to make at home. These are recipes no one on earth is going to make at home.

It’s not just that they require ingredients that can be difficult to find, such as woodruff and caraflex cabbage and lamb marrow. Other unlikely ingredients you need to make yourself, such as smelt stock and rhubarb wine.

For me, the final straw is the chef-author’s recommendation that you always use eggs purchased from Riley Starks. Starks turns out to be the owner of the inn where the restaurant is located, so to get the appropriate eggs you would have to fly to Seattle, rent a car, drive more than 100 miles, take a ferry to the island, buy the eggs, take a ferry back to the mainland, drive more than 100 miles back to Seattle, stay overnight and catch a plane back home.

Total cost: About $520 — not counting the cost of the eggs — and that is with great deals on the plane and the car. Those had better be really spectacular eggs.

The other book, Atelier Crenn, is also full of recipes that no one, but no one, is ever going to make.

Take, for instance, the recipe for pintade, which is also known as guinea hen or guinea fowl. The pintade itself is cooked sous vide along with some cabbage chips dusted with nori powder (nori is a type of seaweed). It is served with preserved lemon puree, fermented baby leeks and an umeboshi glaze (umeboshi is a pickled Japanese plum). The recipe requires 32 ingredients and 45 separate steps.

That’s nothing. A recipe for something called Birth — a nest made from corn silk filled with corn “eggs” flavored with duck fat and garnished with dark chocolate branches — requires 38 ingredients and 51 steps.

Atelier Crenn is a bastion of molecular gastronomy, that branch of cooking in which science is used to take familiar foods and turn them into unfamiliar forms. It had a brief spasm of popularity a few years ago, but failed to catch on in most of the world, including St. Louis. When done right, it can be pricey.

At Atelier Crenn, each meal costs $220, plus drinks. And thinking about that is why I changed my mind about both books.

These cookbooks are not meant to be used for cooking. They serve rather as a snapshot of the current state of high cuisine and cooking techniques. They are representative of what the best culinary minds are producing, given unlimited budgets and access to ingredients.

Dominique Crenn, the chef-owner of Atelier Crenn, is a trail-blazing, up-and-coming chef; she was the first woman in North America to earn two Michelin stars. Blaine Wetzel of the Willows Inn has a couple of James Beard Awards under his youthful belt and has taken the notion of hyperlocal sourcing of foods to its logical extreme.

Their books take us to their restaurants if we can’t go ourselves and show us what the state of the art of cooking is like right now.

©2015 St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Photo: Nana B. Agwei (via Flickr)

NRA Rips ‘Open Carry’ Rallies In Texas

NRA Rips ‘Open Carry’ Rallies In Texas

By Chuck Lindell, Austin American-Statesman

AUSTIN, Texas — In a blistering criticism of “open-carry” rallies in Texas, the National Rifle Association said gun enthusiasts who bring loaded rifles and tactical long guns into restaurants and public places are putting the pro-gun movement at risk with “downright weird” behavior.

The gun-toting gatherings are scary, thoughtless and counterproductive “hijinx,” causing alarmed bystanders to question the motives of gun advocates and potentially generating support for restricting gun rights, according to a statement on the NRA Institute for Legislative Action website.

“Using guns merely to draw attention to yourself in public not only defies common sense, it shows a lack of consideration and manners. That’s not the Texas way. And that’s certainly not the NRA way,” said the post, titled “Good citizens and good neighbors: The gun owners’ role.”

The statement, posted Friday but distributed Monday, drew a pointed response from open-carry advocates.

“The more the NRA continues to divide its members by attacking some aspects of gun rights instead of supporting all gun rights, the more support it will lose,” Open Carry Texas said on its Facebook page, adding that several members cut up their NRA lifetime membership cards in protest, posting photos of the result.

Open Carry Texas said the NRA concerns were overblown, noting that gun-toting members have begun asking permission before entering a business and typically send an unarmed person to alert customers and staff in advance.

“It is unfortunate that an organization that claims to be dedicated to the preservation of gun rights would attack another organization fighting so hard for those rights in Texas,” Open Carry Texas said.

Texas law allows gun owners to openly carry rifles. Concealed handguns also are allowed with a permit, but openly displayed sidearms are not legal in most situations.

Advocates in Texas for allowing holstered handguns — a practice most states permit — have drawn attention by bringing long guns to demonstrations in restaurants, coffee shops and store parking lots. A noon parade down Austin’s East Sixth Street turned heads last March during the South by Southwest event.

The goal, advocates say, is to educate Texans about the right to carry firearms and show that armed and responsible gun owners are not a public threat.

But the events have drawn fire from gun-control groups, particularly Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, which said patrons and employees should not be forced to determine if an armed group is dangerous or law abiding.

“Assessing an (armed) person’s intent would be difficult for law enforcement,” said Stephanie Lundy with Moms Demand Action’s Texas chapter. “It’s certainly not something that my teenager should be asked to do. It’s also not something that I as a civilian should be asked to do.”

After recent open-carry gatherings in several Texas restaurants, Moms Demand Action pressed corporate officials to create a national policy banning guns in all outlets. Officials with Chili’s, Jack in the Box, Chipotle and Sonic responded by asking gun owners to leave their weapons at home but stopped short of an outright ban.

A Chipotle spokesman, noting that a recent gathering caused “many of our customers anxiety and discomfort,” said company officials “are respectfully asking that customers not bring guns into our restaurants, unless they are authorized law enforcement personnel.”

The statement from the NRA, the nation’s largest gun-rights group and a political powerhouse, showed that not all gun advocates are sold on the tactic as well.

Bringing long guns into restaurants is “downright weird and certainly not a practical way to go normally about your business while being prepared to defend yourself,” the NRA statement said.

“Just because something can be done doesn’t mean it should be done,” the statement said. “If we exercise poor judgment, our decisions will have consequences … such as turning an undecided voter into an anti-gun voter because of causing that person fear or offense.”

But Jason Orsek, vice president of Come and Take It Texas, said organized open-carry rallies will continue. Armed members of the group were in downtown Austin last Saturday distributing food, clothes and toiletries to several hundred homeless people — and like most rallies, the event was held without incident, he said.

“It looks like the NRA caved into pressure from anti-gun groups,” Orsek said. “I’m of the opinion that you either believe in and support the Second Amendment or you don’t. You don’t pick and choose parts of it. The Second Amendment’s very clear.”

Elvert Barnes via Flickr