In Bad Taste? The
Adventures and Science Behind Food Delicacies, by Dr. Massimo Francesco
Marcone, Key Porter, Toronto,
2007 199 pp. HB $29.95

I’m one of those people who occasionally wonders about the
moments of conception —and cultural motives for—the books that get written
these days. What was it, for instance, that set off Barbara Gowdy to write The White Bone? What triggered Javier
Cercas’ Soldiers of Salamis? With books as good as these two, wondering
instantly transports you to the stratosphere of human imagination and moral proclivity.
Such books derive from a nexus of causes too complicated to parse without
writing a book of one’s own, and that’s why they stay with you and become part
of your own intellectual and moral cogitation.

But then there are the books that you get in a single roll
of your eyes, because the motives behind them are transparently and more or
less exclusively entrepreneurial and mercantile: books, like, say, In Bad Taste? The Adventures and Science
Behind Food Delicacies, which was recently foisted on readers by Key Porter.
Here is a book almost certainly occasioned by a novelty television news clip
about an ultra-pricey Indonesian coffee that has to be collected from the nether
byproducts of the palm civet, which are animals renowned for having the
skankiest behinds in the animal universe this side of the baboon family. The book
project was almost certainly conceived by the marketing department of the
publisher, and it takes only the lightest touch of malice to script the
in-house dialogue between senior and junior flak that led to its commissioning.
It likely began, glancingly, in the vicinity of the coffee room, thus:

“Did you read that item in the paper this morning about this
coffee called Kopi Luwak?”

“No. What’s special about Kopi Luwak?”

“Well, it’s about $600 a pound, for one thing. And for
another they make it from some sort of catshit in the Far East.”

“Coffee from cat shit? That’s truly gross.”

“Yeah, really. Worse than eating deep fried bugs, or
whatever.”

Then, scene II: twenty minutes later:

“I’ve been thinking about this catshit coffee of yours.
Maybe we can get a book out of it. I mean, whoah, just think about all those
Foodies running around these days with that disposable income. There’s got to
be a market for a book about all the weird and gross food around the world and
how it gets to our tables.”

“Who would know anything about that in this country?”

“Well, they do a lot of cutting edge stuff on food
production up at the University of Guelph.
And didn’t I see some guy from there on television recently with Jay Ingram? Why don’t you make a few calls and see if
they’ve got anyone with the expertise and the right sense of adventure. Make
sure he has his own travel budget, though. Meanwhile I’ll assign a research for
a day or two, and we’ll see what she can find.”

The “find” turned out to be Dr. Massimo Francesco Marcone,
who is a former University of Guelph
technician and now adjunct professor (it means “part-time”) and PhD noted by
the university’s website as a “co-investigator” of biodegradable soy-polymer delivery systems for slow release of
micronutrients and biologically active compounds.

Now, I really don’t
know much about Dr. Massimo Francesco Marcone because as an adjunct professor
the university’s website doesn’t bother to list him or his credentials. He’s
done some on-camera work for Discovery Canada, and Jay Ingram, the Discovery host, enthusiastically
endorsed the book. So did one of the TV shopping bags, Anna Wallner, along with
several other media figures who aren’t famous for their reading habits. I
haven’t seen Dr. Massimo perform on television, so I can’t comment on his
performance abilities. Nor, as a layman, can I offer expert testimony on the
quality of his science, except to note that although he seems to have a fairly
hard time distinguishing between scientific fact and belabouring the obvious,
whenever he actually gets down to offering serious analysis of matters
scientific, he’s pretty interesting.

That said, I’m
always a little suspicious of non-medical doctors who insist on the honorific,
and I harbour similar suspicions about people who have long names that they
insist on others pronouncing. Seems to me in both cases that this constitutes
pumping oneself up in public, and one should thus be vigilant that there’s either
a too-volatile ego in the vicinity, and/or a shortage of substance being
covered up.

Not that we should
all have names like “Sting” or “Shakira” or live our professional lives by the
“aw shucks” code, but I’m sure you get what I’m driving at. And really, I have no strong opinion as to
whether any of this applies to Dr. Massimo. My counter-suspicion is that he is,
in his frantic way, a likeable character I just don’t want to hang out with
personally. What I can say with a little bit of authority is that Dr. Massimo
writes the most over-excited prose I’ve read in many moons, and that his prose is a problem. In fact, his prose style
is so over-the-top that it’s worth taking apart a couple of passages from the
book—which I’ll chose more or less at random—to see what’s going on.

Let’s start with
this one, drawn from a passage where he’s traveling with an Australian coffee
entrepreneur and a couple of German journalists to see where and how Kopi Luwak
coffee is produced. “Water and mud flowed
down from the hillside, making it even more difficult to see where the debris
ended and the road started. We kept edging farther over to the right, until I
could se that our wheels were just inches from going over the escarpment. I
nervously shouted out to Albert to be careful, lest we go over the side and
plunge to our deaths in the darkness of the night. Albert, in a nervous but
controlled voice, told me not to look as he had everything under control. He
informed me that as a ship’s captain he was prepared for every eventuality and
that this would be no different just because we were on dry ground. Albert was
confident—I was anything but!

Slowly we moved further ahead, my heart
pounding all the more as I waited for us to roll off the side of the
escarpment. Finally, our wheels spun faster and we were catapulted forward,
clear of the rocks, mud, trees, and other assorted things that tumbled down
into the darkness. Albert turned to me; his face covered in sweat, and asked
how I was doing. I told him I had been praying all the way and, thanks to God,
my prayers had been answered. I looked behind me and noticed that Nunu and
Detlef were sleeping in the back, totally oblivious to what had just occurred.”

This passage is a
slightly hilarious demonstration of emotional hyperactivity. Somewhere fairly
far in the background it does serve as a description of a vehicle making its
way across a mudslide in the Third World. More
important than either of those considerations, it is a passage of prose that contributes
nothing to our understanding of Kopi Luwak, which is more about slightly
over-sized felines squatting on the jungle floor and grunting than about high
drama. From a narrative view, this is much ado about nothing much, and that’s
likely why the German journalists slept through it. It’s an overwrought
description of what was going on inside Dr. Massimo’s hyperactive brain. After I’d
read another 50 pages of this sort of stuff, the thing I was clearest about was
that I wouldn’t get into a car with this guy unless a couple metres of duct
tape had been wrapped around him and a gag stuffed in his mouth, because he back-seat
drives everything so relentless he’d drive any normal person off the road and
possibly off their rocker.

As writing, the
problem is more serious than a penchant for backseat driving. Mr. Massimo
fusses and fabulates throughout the book, worrying about 9/11, the general
threat of terrorism and volcanoes and asteroids as if such things were threats
exclusively aimed at him, not to all of us.
He is, I suspect, one of those guys whose on/off switch is permanently
in the “on” position, and thus he’s perpetually on everything, and perpetually
ragging on everyone.

This falls,
methinks, more in the realm of “irritating” than “evil”. It’s almost certainly
the energy source that got him onto Discovery,
and to the exotic and occasionally stressful locations the books takes its
readers to. For that, more power to Dr.
Massimo. But with everything being on permanent overdrive, it makes for
exhausting reading, at best. At worst, it makes you think that someone has maliciously
handed Dr. Massimo a manual of how to do personal journalism, and that he’s misread
the dictim that he’s supposed to be part of the narrative to mean that he has
to provide constant iteration of his emotional states as the narrative
backbone.

A page onward from
the one I quoted, there’s another telling passage—one that is also repeated in
different formulation dozens of times along the way—which brings us to stand,
metaphorically, in front of Dr. Massimo’s curiculum vitae and be reminded that
all this is happening in the name of science, and that he, Massimo Francesco
Marcone, is the scientist of record:

“Finally, we had reached the land of the
luwak, or palm civet. I had shed my distinctive white lab coat for camouflage,
mystery, and subterfuge in the dead of night. I could barely contain my
excitement, and my work had only just begun.”

Several pages later,
we get a similarly self-inflating descriptor: “There at the door stood the village chief whom we had seen earlier in
the day. In his hand he held the leg of a wild deer caught earlier in the day
and this was to be our evening meal. I took the leg, still covered with the
brown fur of the recently slaughtered animal, examining it with the eyes of a
scientist and the same skepticism that I would have brought to bear in my
laboratory thousands of kilometers away. But this was my dinner, so I put away
my scruples.”

All of this blah,
blah, blah, leaves us with a book that should have been about 48 pages long.
It’s about Kopi Luwak plus some add-ons: Cazu Frazegu maggot-riddled cheese (from
Italy), birds nest soup ingredients (from Malaysia and Indonesian), argan oil
(Morocco), escamoles (red ant pupae caviar from Mexico) and Can-Am morel
mushrooms, (on the subject of which I knew, at the end of the chapter, exactly
as much as I did going in: that they’re expensive; that they taste better than
button mushrooms; and—in lieu of the
only truly useful information Dr. Massimo might have delivered—that morel
gatherers don’t give out the location of their picking sites.) I was kind of
puzzled that the morel chapter was even there, since there’s nothing gross
about morels and their harvesting, except maybe the secrecy about where to find
them. There are, of course, mushroom that will make you vomit or even die, so
maybe this is gross-by-proximity.

Here as elsewhere in the book, you easily see how
television-thin the materials are, and the degree to which Dr. Massimo and his
vision of himself in a white lab coat is interfering with what he does have to
deliver to us. At one point, he conducts
“organoleptic tests”, which consist of frying up the morels in butter, feeding
them to his friends, and judging the relative quality on whether they say “um”
or “ugh”. I’ve been running organoleptic
tests for years without knowing it, I guess, thinking I was merely entertaining
my friends.

This sort of thing can get, well, irritating after awhile,
particularly if you’re a dedicated Foodie, and really do want the goods Dr.
Massimo is supposed to deliver, and mostly doesn’t.

But then this is a book manufactured by a marketing
department, and its level of moral cogitation, for all the science in it, is a
lot closer to zero than it is to, say, a Barbara Gowdy novel. It’s not completely
fair to blame Dr. Massimo for what in the end, is a dog’s breakfast of a book,
and a deluge of blah, blah, blah. Both he and the subject matter deserved a lot
more editing than either got, if only to ensure that the subject of the book
really was weird food, and not the weird author.

September 5, 2007 2104 words. (an earlier version of this review appeared in Books In Canada)

*** 

White Slave: The Godfather of Modern Cooking, by Marco Pierre White (with James
Steen), Orion Books, HB, 306 pp. no price given

 

When
Anthony Bourdain appeared on the scene a few years ago, he was a breath of,
well, redolent
odours of serious cooking. He took food out of the dining rooms of swish
restaurants and suburban bungalows and put it where it should be first and
finally-in our mouths. But every revolution has its side effects, and those from
the revolution Bourdain started have some unexpectedly stinky aromas.

 Among the
several things Bourdain did was to turn food preparation into a high level cultural
activity. He did this, oddly enough, by giving us, in Kitchen Confidential, more of the grungy details of life in
restaurant kitchens than most of us want to know. But the book was successful
enough that it transformed chefs into genuine culture heroes.

 Alas, everyone
forgot that in the real world, culture heroes are almost always dreadful assholes.
That's why every fifth rate short-order cook in the Western World has now read his
Kitchen Confidential and is acting
like Marlon Brando and demanding to be treated like Maria Callas. This is not
what you want from people who are generally badly educated and carry large,
sharp knives.

Bourdain's best book-the one that didn't
inflict collateral damage-is A Cook's
Tour, his private narrative of different food cultures around the world. He
was able to write the book while television's Food Network was paying him more
money than either a book publisher or restaurant owner could dream of affording
so it could follow him around with a video camera. The tour made decent
television, because Bourdain is an entertaining guy. But A Cook's Tour-the book-liberated Bourdain's culinary curiosity from
the Darwinist follies of the restaurant kitchen, and the result was ultimately more
interesting than Kitchen Confidential. I think it's the best book I've ever read about food that doesn't
contain recipes.

But then
the other shoe dropped. The recipes in his cholesterol-caked 2004 Les Halles Cookbook revealed that
Bourdain is a better food writer than chef. Then in 2006, he published The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts,
Usable Trim, Scraps and Bones, which
reads like a series of blogs from a man being taken over-and oppressed-by the
media persona created for him. The book consists of a raft of rants so
"Bourdainesque" it's overly polite to call them self-parody. It left me and
more than one person I've talked to wishing Bourdain would just shut up and
leave us all alone.

That's
unlikely, but it's even more unlikely that the monsters he let loose are going
to leave us in peace, whether we're eating or just reading about eating. Witness
the truly abusive and loathsome Gordon Ramsay, the pock-marked Beelzebub of
reality-television-meets-the Food-Network. Ramsay is a kind of caricature of
Bourdain's worst flaws with none of his wit or charm. Then there's Marco Pierre
White's ghost-written autobiography, White
Slave.

Marco
Pierre White is apparently the role model for Ramsay, and to a lesser extent,
Bourdain. Now, I'm sure that Mr. White is a wonderful cook, as witnessed by the
three Michelin stars his British restaurants have earned (which fact he
reiterates on roughly every third page so we won't forget it). But he's not a
writer and he's not a very deep thinker. Nor, unfortunately, is his
ghost-writer, James Steen, whose other accomplishments include editing the now
celebrity-addled Punch and writing
gossip columns. Neither of them seem able to impart any of the secrets truths
about food beyond glorifying the Darwinian violence of restaurant kitchens, and
Bourdain has already overdosed readers on that count.

 Distressingly,
White/Steen have even fewer insights concerning the world beyond the kitchen.
White seems to think, occasionally with a simple-mindedness that's hilarious
and depressing at the same time, that everything bad or difficult in both his
character and his daily life is explainable by his Italian mother's death when
he was six, and his subsequent Feelings of Abandonment. White has done some psychotherapy,
and his therapist was evidently a doctrinaire Freudian-the paint-by-numbers kind.
"Following my mother's death," White/Steen intone as an explanation of why White's
first marriage crashed, "I hadn't been encouraged to talk about the burden of
grief and because I was severely underdeveloped when it came to sharing my
emotions I mustn't have been the most communicative husband. I'm not asking for
sympathy, that's just the way I was."

Freud is
also the culprit in the selection of the book jacket's photographs. The front
cover features a fairly recent photograph of White posing with a fat cigar in
his right hand and an expression on his kisser so over-the-top pretentious it
is impossible not to giggle. On the back jacket for contrast is a 1990 photo of
White dressed in his kitchen togs with a cigarette dangling from his lips. The
implication, I suppose, is that the years (and the Michelin stars) have made
his, er, cigar grow bigger and fatter.

Doesn't
sound promising, does it? It isn't, mostly. But there are compensations, particularly
if you have a weakness for Visigoth slapstick. You get a subtle but substantial
whiff of that in the book's subtitle: "The Godfather of Modern Cooking". The celebrity-addled Steen and whoever edited
the book clearly believe that human history began somewhere around 1975, and
that the "modern" age commenced somewhere in the 1990s.

There are
lots of other Visigoth pratfalls in the text, even though White and Steen seem
to have little idea when their protagonist is doing his silliest ones. My
favourite is the passage in which he describes what happened when the interior
decorator who designed the hamburger joint White turned into his first
restaurant showed up and demanded to be given a free dinner. White, who looks
like a helium and steroid-inflated version of the boxer Jake LaMotta, loathed
the restaurant's décor and so refused to serve the interior designer at all.
When the designer was informed of this, he tried to storm the kitchen to
declare his displeasure, and White beat the crap out him.

Then
there's the celebrity name-dropping: "…the very next day I got a call from
Madonna's assistant, asking me if I would like to join the icon for afternoon
tea." White/Steen write. "I accepted. It would have been rude not to. We had
tea at the Hyde Park Hotel, where she was staying, and have been friends ever
since. She and her husband, Guy Ritchie, have been very special people in my
life. They come to my restaurants and we go shooting together. They are exceptionally
kind." His description of getting to know Paul McCartney's ex Heather Mills is
only slightly less ridiculous than his story about being prevented from cooking
a $10,000 a head celebrity lunch for Princess Diana by her fatal car accident.
"Needless to say," the authors feel compelled to point out, "the lunch was
cancelled."

This sort
of stuff can be quite entertaining if you're perverse enough to enjoy witnessing
people making asses of themselves. But when it comes down to it, Marco Pierre
White is the sort of human being you might be gratified to know is alive and
cooking, but he's also the sort of person you'd never want to meet in person. As
for White Slave, the best that
be said about it is that it's an entertaining example of a genre-restaurant
kitchen Darwinist mysticism-that we can do without. The only place in the book where I was really
convinced White and his ghost writer were knew and were able to tell the
straight truth was in a late-in-the-book description of how to fry an egg
properly. Unfortunately, White's method is illegal in most Canadian provinces. The
rest was the brown stuff Bourdain has been slinging, except not high enough
quality to be digestible.

1300 words May 28th, 2007

There’s at least two things of interest at this modest east side Japanese Restaurant: very good sushi (not hard to find in Vancouver ) and a story that’s seminal to the city’s cuisinal history.

Food first. Koko is typical of Vancouver’s artisanal sushi, which is unique in North America for its primary use of albacore (or “white”) tuna, and the general availability of wild sockeye salmon (in most cities, you’ll get farmed Atlantic salmon, not something your liver wants a whole lot of). There are other specialities generally available at Koko, ones that are rarer now than a few years ago: geoduck, which is the muscle of a giant clam that was once plentiful along the coast’s tidal flats; and abalone, along with the extensive use of locally plentiful Dungeness crab, which is served cooked and has become a favourite for people who really don’t like eating raw fish. I should probably mention uni, or sea urchin roe, much of which comes from B.C.’s coastal waters but is still flown to Japan for processing and then flown back. Uni, or sea urchin roe, should only be eaten if it is very fresh—which means that you shouldn’t eat it in cities like Toronto at all unless you get to watch a fresh container opened in front of you. In Vancouver, you have a little more leeway, but not much.

Albacore tuna is superior in taste if not appearance to the red yellowfin tuna that is now the most widely available tuna in North American sushi restaurants today. The almost-extinct giant blue fin is superior to both, but is rarely to be found nowadays. Many restaurants will claim that their yellowfin is the real deal and will charge accordingly. The two will seem hard to distinguish—at least until you get the fish into your mouth. Yellowfin is rubbery and fine grained, with a flavour that is weak and slightly tinny. Bluefin is buttery and rich and will cost you about $50 a piece or more. It’s worth trying as a novelty if you trust the restaurant isn’t fobbing off yellowfin on you, but the flavour of albacore is comparable to bluefin,  it won’t have been caught in a drift net, and it won’t cost you an arm and a leg, not even the toro, which is especially rich and buttery.

Koko isn’t a beautiful restaurant. The lighting is too bright, the décor is pedestrian and the ceilings are too high. But its sushi is good; on balance the selection available is wider and fresher than most Vancouver restaurants, and the portions are generous. Make sure you sit at the 10 seat sushi bar, so you can be sure you’re getting the best they have. Order your sushi from the master, and be respectful. If you must have tempura and other cooked dishes, order those from the waiter, and never ask the sushi master for your bill or for anything he himself won’t have to make with his knife. It’s actually a solecism to eat anything but sushi and sashimi while you’re sitting in front of a sushi master, but everyone does it even though it affects the quality of the sushi you’ll be served.

Then there’s the story of Koko, which is extraordinary, and has several chapters. Koko, you see, is the last restaurant of Koji, Vancouver’s first sushi master, who started serving sushi in the mid 1960s in a tiny second floor dive above a Japanese grocery just east of Main Street on the north side of Hastings Street . I discovered the place around 1970, and so, eventually, did a lot of other people, including Chris Dikeakos, a visual artist and entrepreneur who realized how authentic and skilled Koji was, and arranged the financial backing to build him a sumptuous restaurant in a new building on West Broadway that opened somewhere around 1975.

There were problems more or less instantly with the new place. Koji, you see, was a character. He never learned to read and write English, and he had a drinking problem. More than once while I was at the old place at Hastings and Main, he got drunk—one of the customs was to buy him a beer when the food was especially good—and when that happened, off he would go. Sushi in increasingly strange and delicious permutations appeared in front of everyone, unasked for. It was good enough that it set the drinks flowing even more freely, and that made the sushi still more creative and better and at 1:00 a.m., I’d find myself stumbling out of the place on the tail end of a tab that was a quarter of what I should have paid. I learned to be scrupulous about this—more than once I left a tip that was larger than the bill. I knew that I’d been treated to something amazing, and I didn’t want to take advantage—or maybe I just didn’t want Koji to go broke. But of course I did take advantage of him, and so did many of his customers.

At the new restaurant, Koji’s drinking spun out of control. Part of the problem was that his inability to read and write English forced him to keep his customer’s tabs in his head, and his head emptied as his gut filled with booze—which at the new place was Japanese whiskey and cognac, not Labatt’s Blue. By 9:00 p.m. he rarely knew what he’d served anyone, and those working around him learned not to ask—he was the man with the sharpest knife, after all, and by 11:00 p.m. he was usually waving it in the air.

Eventually his financial backers got tired of the nightly festivities, and obtained a court order to remove Koji from the restaurant that carried his name. But that’s not quite the end of the story, and it isn’t even the best part of it.

At the original Koji, there had been a young, red-haired busboy who was working there because he’d fallen in love with Japanese culture and cuisine, and, I think, with Koji. He was, despite the red hair, the most Japanese of anyone around Koji, in manners, dress code and sensibility. I saw him at the new restaurant—now waiting tables—and got to know him a little. I think I learned as much of what I know of sushi etiquette from him as from anyone, and I also learned that he was frantic with worry at the train-wreck-in-progress at the new digs.

After Koji was barred from the new premises the place went slowly downhill even if it was more profitable, and Koji himself disappeared for several years—presumably to dry out. I moved over to the Kamei Sushi on the second floor of a building at Thurlow and Robson. The sushi there was good, the master competent, but the fun and the free food was done.

I’m not exactly sure when Koko opened—somewhere between 1978 and 1982, I think. The red-haired kid—now grown up—was running the place, and it was rumoured that he’d put up the money to open it. He’d also devised a complicated system for Koji that involved coloured plastic tokens on hooks for each customer, and it worked fairly well even when Koji got drunk. Despite the out-of-the-way location, the place did quite well. Koji, even when he was sober, made the best sushi in the city, and a lot of people knew it. But his health had begun to fail, and more and more frequently as the 1980s passed, he wasn’t able to work.

When I left Vancouver for Toronto in 1991, I hadn’t seen Koji for more than a year, and the red-haired kid had disappeared as well—who knows why? Today, the place is run by Koji’s son. He doesn’t quite have his father’s panache, but likely doesn’t have his demons, either. He does know what he’s doing with a sushi knife, and the restaurant stays alive. I still think that it’s among the top sushi joints in the city, but then, I’m a traditionalist. I wouldn’t, for instance, list the over-the-top Tojo, which is outrageously expensive and always seems to be filled with loud-mouth out-of-town movie dorks, in the top five.

Next time you’re in Vancouver, check Koko out. It won’t cost you an arm and a leg, and you’re be keeping one of the better pieces of old Vancouver alive. But if you sit at the sushi bar and want to order cooked food from the menu, don’t order it from Koji’s son. And don’t tell him I sent you.

.

1424 w. October 16, 2006

My neighbours and I are arguing over how to make the best tomato sauce for pasta, and how long to cook it. I heard that you’re the expert in Toronto, and that you cook it for only a very short time. What’s your recipe?

Signed: Foodlover in Toronto

Graz answers:

If you’re making your sauce with fresh tomatoes, they shouldn’t cook very long. I use Romas (or other paste-type tomatoes) because their flavour cooks out well, and because they contain less water to begin with, and therefore require less cooking to reduce. If you’re using salad tomatoes, it will take longer to reduce the sauce, and this may affect the flavour. Scald them to remove the skins, chop very roughly and add to the completed soffrito. Personally I don’t like onions in a tomato sauce unless there is also meat, so I tend to use just garlic, basil, and olive oil for my soffrito. I think the secret to really good tomato sauce is the amount and quality of the olive oil you use, and I tend to use more rather than less—at least half a cup for a litre/quart of tomatoes. If you’re sauteing garlic for your sauce, don’t let it brown too far because it will make the sauce bitter. Remove it when it is a pale golden colour and add it again with the tomatoes. Put your basil into the sauce only within the last two or three minutes or its fragrance and flavour will be submerged in the other flavours.

Most of the time, my mother made tomato sauces containing meat, and these she would cook for at least two hours, often cooking them early in the day, and reheating them before serving. She preferred chopped veal shank rather than ground beef, which always has more fat in it than is healthy. She’d begin with a soffrito of olive oil, fresh chopped garlic, onions, a bay leaf, basil, sometimes rosemary or oregano, all of which she would saute with the meat for about fifteen minutes before adding (depending on the season) the tomato sauce or the chopped fresh tomatoes. This she’d cook, covered over very low heat to tenderize the meat and blend its flavour within the tomato medium.