Quackers in California

Closing out the week on food and drink, all the news here in California is about the End of Life as We Know It.

That is, if you’re a gourmand with a jones for foie gras. Back in 2004 the Lege passed a law banning the production and sale of this particular type of goose or duck liver. That is, the extra-fatty sort that requires the animal be force-fed with a tube for some time before it’s slaughtered.

The ban goes into effect on Sunday.

As you might imagine, the foie gras lovers are not waddling gentle into that good night. In fact, there’s been quite a run on the delicacy in both restaurants and specialty shops. Also—this being California—a lot of protests.

One thing I find interesting is that although the foie fans have had a whole lot of time to prepare for—or try to overturn—the law, they only appear to have started marshaling their forces in the last couple of months. There was a spate of hoo-ha around here in May, with chefs holding fight-the-ban” (or, in one chef’s term, “FU Foie Gras Revolution”) foie gras fundraising banquets that were picketed by the PETA set. As though they suddenly woke up and realized they were going to have to start serving regular poultry livers. I don’t know what they’ve been doing for the past eight years.

I expect people to start smuggling the stuff across the state’s borders in luggage. Will they have paté sniffer-beagles in the airports? Well, no—that would be silly, since the ban is on producing or selling the product in-state, not possessing it or eating it.

So we may see the practice of “foie-kage”, or maybe BYOF—restaurant patrons toting a brown paper bag (uh, well, no—that would be a crime against recycling, as would plastic; maybe it’ll be wrapped in a banana leaf) of foie gras into their favorite eatery and; paying a fee for the chef to serve it.

Or perhaps the restaurants will have $75 bagels on the menu, with the option of a schmear of foie gras instead of the usual, pedestrian, chopped liver.

If this ban follows the pattern set by the 18^th Amendment to the US Constitution, we’ll probably see high-end restaurateurs turn into scoff-laws, offering bootlegged foie gras on verbal menus; you’ll have to give a password and a secret handshake to get the “special” meal.

They’ll call the establishments "quackeasies”.

Foaming at the sushi bar

Back on the food and drink theme de la semaine: NPR reports that Kirin, the Japanese beer company, has developed a “soft-serve yogurt-like” dispensing machine that’ll freeze the foam on your glass of beer.

They claim it’ll keep the beer cold for 30 minutes, though I can’t imagine it taking half an hour to drink a glass of beer.

Anyhow, if you’re anywhere but Japan, you’re going to have to drink it the old-fashioned way. The machine is only available there.

Farewell to Nora

I’m interrupting my weekly theme about food and taste trends to reflect upon the death, at 71, of Nora Ephron. Ephron was a well-known screenwriter, director, produced and writer of novels and essays.

She gets most press over such romcoms as Sleepless in Seattle, When Harry Met Sally and You’ve Got Mail. No one’s going to forget the deli scene from WHMS or the whole Empire State Building thing from SIS.

(You’ve Got Mail didn’t click with me perhaps because I so clearly had The Shop Around the Corner in my mind and heart. Although I did get a real kick out of the love of Jean Stapleton’s life being Francisco Franco. “He ran Spain,” as a throwaway line—that’s class.)

No—my favorite of Ephron’s films is My Blue Heaven—an entirely different view of the federal witness protection program than you saw in In Plain Sight. In this classic fish-out-of-water WitSec world, mob informant Vinnie Antonelli (Steve Martin) is relocated to San Diego, given the name of Todd Wilkenson and left to fend for himself.

“Fending” includes hooking up with a posse of Mafia informants (including William Hickey as a strip mall pet shop owner), engaging in various scams and writing his autobiography. In the process he opens up the world for his nebbishy FBI minder (Rick Moranis) and sparks a romance between the latter and a DA (Joan Cusack) whose baseball-player husband just dumped her for his psychotherapist.

Only a woman writing for her own sensibilities would pair Moranis and Cusack—or their characters, Barney Coopersmith and Hannah Stubbs—as a romantic duo. Only a woman with Ephron’s sensibilities would make that work for the audience.

There’s a lot to love about MBH—the baseball sequence where, during the playing of the national anthem, Vinnie teaches one of the DA’s boys how to guard against getting his pocket picked; the scene where Hannah buys a turtle from Hickey to replace the one she accidentally ran through the garbage disposer; or Vinnie’s matter-of-fact testimony about a mob murderer, “Richie loved to use .22s because the bullets are small and they don’t come out the other end like a .45. See, a 45 will blow a barn door out the back of your head and there’s a lot of dry cleaning involved; but a .22 will just rattle around like Pac-Man until you’re dead.”

Two of my favorite bits involve the transformation of Barney Coopersmith through…dance. In the first one, Vinney teaches Barney how to merengue:

And in the second, under the influence of Vinnie’s confidence-boosting emoluments, Barney applies this knowledge to sweeping Hannah off her feet:

(The music also affects Barney’s partner.)

The whole thing is a delight. and you don’t find movie writing or setups like that anymore. I’ll really miss Ephron.

Will you have wine with your chocs?

Hmm, I’m seeing a theme developing this week, a theme around food, studies, taste and tastes.

Hot on the trail of the Israeli study supporting the practice of eating cake for breakfast, and the University of Michigan study on how the last chocolate you eat tastes best, here’s a study on wine. Specifically on how consumers are inclined to rate the taste of a wine higher in inverse proportion to how unpronounceable its name is.

So—the more you struggle with the name in the wine list, the better you’re going to think it tastes. Also—you’ll be willing to pay more for it.

Especially if you’re a “wine geek”.

Those of us with less sophisticated palates are not neglected, though. “low knowledge consumers” tend towards wineries with cutesy names—Fat Bastard, Toad Hollow, Cupcake—because they connote comfort with a dash of difference. Wine from a toad’s abode? I’ll drink to that.

Chocolate coating

Following on my post yesterday about the Israeli study on the benefits of chocolate for breakfast, there’s another study indicating that…well, that people in Michigan think the last chocolate they’re offered tastes best.

In this study, subjects were offered, in random order, five kinds of Hershey’s Kisses: milk, dark, crème, caramel and almond. One group wasn’t told when the supply of chocs was going to run out; the other was informed when the fifth was brought out that it was the last.

In that second group, when asked to rate which Kiss they liked best, they tended to pick the last one--to the tune of 64%. (The first group rated the last chocolate best only 22% of the time.) And researchers concluded that if you think something is the last to come your way, you’ll choose it as the best.

Here’s my response:

I’m not sure I’d have eaten any of the Kisses, because Hershey’s? Please. Second, I’m going to choose dark chocolate no matter what order it comes to me. I definitely wouldn’t have ingested the milk chocolate one at all.

So, I don’t know what’s up with those Michiganders, but this is one study that I'd send back for rework.

Let them eat cake...at breakfast

So, it turns out that eating dessert at breakfast is an effective way to lose weight.

No kidding—researchers in Israel ran a 32-week study in which two groups of dieters ate the same number of calories per day, but one group had a cookie or cake or something sweet at the morning meal. And that group lost on average 40 pounds more than the Spartan eaters.

To be honest, it’s not clear to me what kind of breakfast you can have that amounts to 600 calories and still has a slice of chocolate cake. According to one site, a slice of commercially-made chocolate cake with icing weighs in at 235 calories. That leaves you 365 calories

Here are some 400 calorie possibilities. Or you could have an Egg McMuffin for 300 calories. And then have your cake.

Bon appétit!