The Food Almanac: June 23, 2011
In The Food Almanac, Tom Fitzmorris of the online newsletter, The New Orleans Menu notes food facts and saying.
Eating Calendar
Today is National Vichyssoise Day, which always sounds good this time of year. It's a rich soup made with potatoes, leeks, cream and sometimes sour cream. Its most distinctive quality, however, is that it's served cold — Ice cold, in fact. Restaurants used to serve vichyssoise in a round-bottomed bowl resting in a bigger bowl, usually made of silverplate, filled with crushed ice. You almost never see that now.
The original vichyssoise was neither French nor cold. It was created in the United States less than 100 years ago by Louis Diat, a famous French chef in New York. He said it was a chilled version of a soup his mother made. There is no doubt about its goodness.
The idea of a cold soup tricks up some would-be vichyssoise eaters. Although such a thing might seem immensely popular in the summer, cold soups never sell very well. It marks you as a gourmet if you do order it, which is reason enough right there.
The potatoes and leeks are completely puréed, and there shouldn't be even little pieces of anything solid, save for snipped chives floating on the surface. My friend and fellow cookbook author Kit Wohl came up with a great variation: sprinkling Roquefort cheese onto vichyssoise at the table. It may be the greatest advance in the history of the dish.
Gourmet Gazetteer
Leek Creek flows south from some hills in northeastern Texas for about 18 miles. Through intermediate streams its water flows into the Red River, then all the way across Louisiana into the Gulf of Mexico via the Atchafalaya. Lee Creek winds through swampy land near its southern end, with pine tree farms and hundreds of gas wells. The nearest restaurants are 12 miles away across the Louisiana state line in Vivian. Outlaw Bar-B-Q sounds logical.
Food On The Air
On this date in 1933, Don McNeill took over as host of a radio show called The Pepper Pot. He renamed it The Breakfast Club. He and the show remained on the air every weekday until 1968. It was a variety show with a band, comedy bits, guests, audience involvement, and the daily "walk around the breakfast table." It began on the NBC Blue Network, which split off later to become ABC. It was carried in New Orleans on my station, 1350 AM. It survived years after all other network radio entertainment shows (except Arthur Godfrey's) were gone.
Edible Dictionary
souvlaki, Greek, n. — Souvlaki is to Greece what hamburgers are to the United States, but with much more variety of form and flavor. Souvlaki is a sandwich on pita bread of grilled or roasted meats, usually served with tsatziki — a thick white sauce made primarily of yogurt and cucumbers. The meat can be almost any kind, but beef and lamb are the most common — along with a kind of "mystery meat" made by grinding two or more meats together and forming them into a large roast.
This is best known in this country (and in Greece too) as gyro. That's also the name for the vertical roaster with a revolving spit from which souvlaki is sliced. But the word also refers to meats cut into chunks, run up on skewers and grilled to result in what's also known as kebabs. These too wind up on pitas with tzatziki, lettuce, tomatoes, and whatever else sounds good to the buyers, who can be seen eating these things all over Greece. One interesting note: they almost never have cheese on them.
Turning Points In Dining
In 1960 on this date, the Food and Drug Administration approved the sale of Enovid, the first birth control pill. It may seem strange, but the widespread use of The Pill was a tremendous boost for the restaurant business. Within a few years, casual new eateries and drinkeries were opening at a pace never before seen and single people began dating with new urgency.
Eating In Cartoons
The Disney animated feature movie Lady and the Tramp, whose most famous scene depicts the most romantic possible way to eat spaghetti, premiered (in CinemaScope, yet!) on this date in 1955.
Disquieting Moments In Food
Today in 1998, some 4,500 Chicago people got sick with an E. coli infection. The main suspect: a bad batch of potato salad. . . Here's other bad news: On this date in 1993, Lorena Bobbitt used a knife from her matched kitchen set to perform what became a famous operation. I don't think it ever came out what brand of knife it was. Would that be a good thing or a bad thing for its maker?
Food Namesakes
Irvin S. Cobb, for whom the Cobb salad was not named, was a writer and humorist in the early 1900s. Born today in 1876, he became a popular after-dinner speaker, and left behind many good quotations. I like this one: "If writers were good businessmen, they'd have too much sense to be writers." . . . Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger was sworn in on this date in 1969. . . Professional golfer Dottie Pepper won the Rochester International Golf Tournament today in 1996. Did she have a brother who was a doctor of some kind?
Words to Eat By
"A bearnaise sauce is simply an egg yolk, a shallot, a little tarragon, vinegar, and butter, but it takes years of practice for the result to be perfect." — Fernand Point, one of the classic French chefs in the first half of the 1900s.
Words to Drink By
"The health of the salmon to you: a long life, a full heart and a wet mouth!" — Irish toast.