Number of times I have had Japanese food in Japan: 1. (Bad katsudon at Narita airport, 2000. $12.)
Number of times I have had Chinese food in China: 2, if you count the Republic of China (i.e., Taiwan); otherwise, 0. (Skewer of chicken and green peppers on the street in Taipei; congee for breakfast at Taipei airport, 2001.)
Not the highlights of our brief world traveling phase, perhaps.
I’ve recently read two nice books about fish.
The Zen of Fish: The Story of Sushi, from Samurai to Supermarket, by Trevor Corson
Let me tell you the history of sushi. We begin in feudal Japan, where…zzz…
Corson does not begin in feudal Japan. He begins in modern day LA, where Kate is beginning an intensive sushi class. It’s not going well. Her knives are dull. She has no skills. She thinks dead fish is kind of gross.
It’s obvious how this story is going to end, but the way Corson weaves in the history of sushi–including, yes, feudal Japan–is inspired. The fun facts pop up like nigiri pieces at an omakase session. Did you know that sushi rice is made with vinegar because the rice was originally fermented, and the vinegar emulates the fermented tang? I didn’t.
Corson and his characters are dismissive of American-style sushi: big chunks of fish, tightly packed rice, dipped rice-side down in a slurry of soy sauce and fake wasabi, plus big, creamy inside-out *uramaki* rolls so no one has to touch actual seafood. But by the end I found myself appreciating it as an art form in its own right, with its own forms and rituals.
“The Young Man and the Sea: Recipes and Crispy Fish Tales from Esca”, by David Pasternack and Ed Levine
[Esca](http://esca-nyc.com/) is Mario Batali and David Pasternack’s Italian seafood restaurant in New York. It’s most famous for crudo, basically Italian sashimi: a piece of raw fish with olive oil, maybe a squeeze of citrus, a bit of vegetable accompaniment.
I have no desire to cook from this book–there’s a lot of east coast fish that’s hard to get here, and they’re restaurant-style recipes, albeit simpler than, say, an Alfred Portale book. It does make me want to eat at Esca.
More to the point, though, I’d like to see chefs in other cities use this book as an instruction manual. Seattle and seafood are forever linked in the popular imagination, but we don’t have a seafood restaurant like this, one with an overriding philosophy and singleminded focus on fish. There’s the Oceanaire, which is part of a chain and does good basic stuff, and Flying Fish, which I like, but the menu is freewheeling in a way Esca’s isn’t, and it’s starting to feel a bit, well, 90s.
I don’t know if Seattle can support a place like Esca, but I’d like to see someone try.
This week in Culinate, I tear Christopher Kimball a new piehole.
[Real men use cookstoves](http://www.culinate.com/read/bacon/cooks_illustrated_christopher_kimball)
> But I don’t accept all his advice as gospel. If I hewed to the wisdom of his page-one editorial column in Cook’s Illustrated, I’d move to the country, cook on a wood-burning stove, kill my television, and eschew Southeast Asian fish sauce. Modernist and traditionalist, he’s a microwave and slow cooker rolled into one. The contradictions he presents make me wonder: *Which version is the real Christopher Kimball?*
The podcast of my appearance on Tom Douglas’s Seattle Kitchen is now online:
link (MP3)
The topic was fats and oils. I explained how to render lard. I have also explained how to do so on this blog and in the newspaper. I’m not sure I’ve convinced one single person, but I will press on.