Prick With A Fork

Won’t somebody think of the children?

So the Prick just ran across, a week or so too late for Christmas, Buzzfeed’s list of the fifteen best cookbooks of 2012. Honestly, not a helluva lot there of interest, save for April Bloomfield’s A Girl and Her Pig: Recipes and Stories, written by (as Buzzfeed puts it) “a very particular cook who did not compromise too much here in terms of simplifying her recipes for the home cook, so they do require a lot of ingredients — and often they require a lot of steps. But when you have at your fingertips the secret to making her UNBELIEVABLY ADDICTIVE gnudi, her famous chopped chicken liver on toast, or even her recipe for roasting a whole suckling pig, it is most certainly worth it.”

Sounds like just the thing, so over to Amazon to see about getting a copy: Whoa, just 3.5 stars from readers. What gives?

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A friend recently put me on to – trust me on this one – a wonderful episode of The Dick Cavett Show in which Cavett talks with both John Cheever and John Updike at the same time.

For lovers of post-war American literature and culture, this is a gem. Set aside an hour. Go watch. The Cavett-Cheever-Updike trio covers everything from writing to politics to God to anti-Americanism and much else in between and beyond.

I also note this bit in Cavett’s essay reflecting on the episode:

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… or he’ll start putting cyanide in the salt shakers:

Frustrated that people continued to consume so much alcohol even after it was banned, federal officials had decided to try a different kind of enforcement. They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States, products regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare people into giving up illicit drinking. Instead, by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people.

Now that’s what the Prick calls a war on booze! Seriously, though, read the whole thing. It constitutes yet another chapter in the never-ending collection of reminders that the state is not your friend. As an example of how even a government whose founding principles include the pursuit of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness will trample all three when it thinks it in its (or, even more chillingly, your own) interest, it is pretty hard to beat.

“Fail not to call to mind, in the course of the twenty-fifth of this month, that the Divinest Heart that ever walked the earth was born on that day; and then smile and enjoy yourselves for the rest of it; for mirth is also of Heaven’s making.” — Leigh Hunt.

Merry Christmas, everybody! Lotsa posts stacked up for post-Boxing Day, provided I don’t lose too many typing fingers playing with the new santoku Mrs Prick left me under the tree…

… can be found here.

I made a batch last Christmas, and it was stunning. Mrs Prick’s father took one sip and declared, “I won’t be right to drive for a week!”

Booze. Smokes. Sprouts?

They are the vegetables that split opinion and now doctors say Brussels sprouts should come with a health warning after a man was hospitalised by eating them.

The leafy green vegetables contain vitamin K, a chemical the body uses to promote blood clotting, and it counteracts the effects of anticoagulants (blood thinning medication).

The man, from Ayrshire, Scotland, was prescribed anticoagulants after suffering heart failure last year and his dose was monitored once or twice a week to prevent blood clotting.

When his blood started to clot close to Christmas last year, the man was admitted to a specialist heart unit of the Golden Jubilee Hospital in Clydebank.

Doctors could not work out why the medication was not keeping his blood thin until they discovered he had been eating too many sprouts.

The Prick actually doesn’t mind sprouts, and there’s a lovely way of doing them in a mustard sauce with duck confit in Thomas Keller’s Bouchon cookbook. But maybe there’s a wag-the-dog strategy in here somewhere: if we get CRAP Health and the rest of the regulators het up enough about Brussels sprouts they’ll leave the rest of us with our other, more agreeable, pleasures alone for that much longer.

UPDATE: A friend of the site writes, “I prefer a multi-stage approach: first an education campaign, employing many public health researchers and activists. Next, a series of production, promotion and consumption regulations, oversight of which requires employing many public health researchers, activists and bureaucrats. Last, a major push for banning, which requires a coalition of bandwagonning and unthinking politicians with public health researchers, activists and bureaucrats (including household garden inspectors to ensure no domestic production). Ta Dah! Because it costs so much, it also qualifies as stimulus.”

And so Tuesday night turned into an impromptu date night, with Mr and Mrs Prick ducking across to Annandale to check out the new Sede restaurant which has just opened up in the old Vicini space on Booth Street. That’s Sede, pronounced seh-DAY, by the way, not “seed”: Think somewhere between seedy and the singer Sade. Say “sedate” and drop the “t” and you’re almost there. It’s Italian, and our waitress told us she thought it meant “venue”, though our friend the Vodka Mogul tells us it’s actually a form of the verb sedere, “to sit”. Anyway.

Downstairs at Sede. It’s small. It’s a bar. It’s a small bar!

Sede is at least two, and quite possibly three, restaurants in one. Sitting in an old corner terrace/shop building, the downstairs is gourmet pizza and wine bar snacks with a proper pizza oven blasting away behind the bar. Upstairs is a more refined, modern bistro: warm, soft, colours, a lovely timber ceiling, a couple of big modern canvasses on the walls, with tables also set out on the balcony to watch the passing parade of hipsters and yummy mummies and Audi Q7s as they glide around the roundabout. While downstairs is decidedly Italian, the upstairs menu only hints at these roots: a bit of pancetta on some quail over here, a bowl of linguini over there.

Now the Prick can never go past scallops, and so was tempted into trying the “seared Canadian and popcorn scallops, textures of cucumber, pickled daikon, apple, salmon roe”. The concept of the dish is great, with the big and little scallops – “sea” and “bay” scallops as we call them back home – tied together with what sound like some pretty natural accompaniments. The presentation was very attractive and thoughtful. Sadly, the dish was let down by overcooked scallops – especially the “popcorn”  numbers, which had been left searing on the heat for far too long – and there wasn’t enough differentiation between the cucumber(s), daikon, and apple. This could be a good to great dish, but it needs some refinement. As well, what’s with the “Canadian” designation for the scallops? Again, huge potential here, but at the moment more “meh” than “eh?”.

Lovely presentation …

It should be said that the kitchen did nail it with Mrs Prick’s salt cod-stuffed zucchini flowers, which weren’t particularly fancy but which hit the brief perfectly. Now the Pricks are both salt cod brandade connoisseurs (hey, everyone needs a hobby, right?) and this was almost as good as it gets. Special mention to the caponata as well, which both packed a lot of flavour and avoided being oily.

Zucchini flowers. Awesome.

On to mains, and here the Prick did something he never, ever does, namely, went the vegetarian option. But there can be a first time for everything. And just as it is sometimes tempting to vote for the Greens in the Council elections because for all their nuttiness they do a good job of keeping local populations down and property prices up, it is also hard to go past a menu offering like “pan-seared potato and spinach gnocchi, tokay-steeped sultanas, pine nuts, crisp sage, burnt butter, and truffle pecorino”. The Prick succumbed, and was glad he did.

Vegetarian is no longer a super-dirty word at Stately Prick Manor.

Seriously, vegetarians, VegeTARAians, and vegulons alike: if you want to win converts to your cause, this is how you do it. Elegantly presented, the contrast between the sultanas (great idea with the tokay) and the pine nuts and the sage from the restaurant’s own little kitchen garden, a helluva good burnt butter, light, pillowy gnocchi (though too big – one should never have to use a knife with gnocchi), shavings of cheese, it fired on all cylinders. This was the first time in years the Prick had finished a main that didn’t involve meat without feeling like we’d lost a war.

Yet sadly, in the swings and roundabouts of eating out, it was Mrs Prick’s turn to experience a touch of menu envy: Her pork belly was good, but not quite as melting and unctuous as she would have liked, and the polenta was a bit grainy. If the scallops seemed a bit over-engineered for the dish’s own good, the pork just needed a bit of tarting up.

The photo wasn’t the only thing a bit grainy about this dish…

Nevertheless it is clear that Sede is already hitting the mark in a suburb that is quickly becoming Woollahra West. Annandale is becoming a bit of a hub for this sort of relaxed but classy fare (the lovely Booth Street Bistro being the local ground-breaker, of course). On the Pricks’ Tuesday night, normally doldrums for the trade, Sede was doing probably twenty covers upstairs and a good business down, consisting of a mix of families and locals of both the trendy and establishment variety. One fellow who looked like something out of the Bondi Hipsters had brought his new girlfriend along to meet a swag of his WASPy elderly relatives and it wasn’t clear who were the locals and who, if any of them, had come over from the East; it was a bit awkward but happily for everyone concerned they discovered they all liked dogs, which provided safe space for conversation (“Yeah, I’ve got a friend? She’s got a Labrador? And … yeah.”).

While there were a couple of missed notes, the Pricks understand that Chef’s wife has just had a baby which has him off doing the home front thing for a little bit (would a chef use an immersion circulator and water bath to warm bottles to precisely the right temperature? The Prick would). This leaves his number two in charge which, along with the newness of the format, makes such teething wobbles forgivable. (And in number two’s defence, he straight-up took the pineapple curd tart off the menu when he couldn’t get the sugar balance right – a bit of honesty that deserves kudos.) The upstairs-downstairs format seems to work, though would be nice to see some of the small bar offerings upstairs and vice versa. The Pricks might well have had a bit of that chicken liver pate to start, but alas it’s only served at the bar; likewise, a bottle of chilled white and plates of those zucchini flowers would be a lovely early evening snack downstairs. Still, Annandale and surrounds is clearly the sort of market that can sustain this sort of thing, and Sede is a welcome thing to have in the near-ish by. Verdict: The Pricks shall return.

The Australian has picked up the Prick’s thoughts on Prof. Rachel Davey of CRAP Health:

The University of Canberra’s Professor Rachel Davey’s got the obesity problem sorted:

During the second world war (1939–1945), the British government introduced food rationing with a point system in every household. Everyone was allocated a number of points a month and certain food items, such as meat, fish, biscuits, sugar, fats, and tea, were rationed.

Every adult was given a total of 16 points a month and could choose how to spend these points. Special supplements were available for young children, pregnant women, and people with certain diseases. Wartime food shortages and government directives forced people to adopt different eating patterns. They ate considerably less meat, eggs, and sugar than they do today.

Rationing was enforced in Britain for 14 years, and continued after the war had ended. Meat was finally derationed in June 1954. Petrol was also rationed, so people stopped buying and using cars, and public transport was limited. There was no “obesity epidemic” as food supply and travel was limited, meaning people ate less and did more physical exercise (walking).

Interestingly, during the years when rationing was enforced, the prevalence of obesity was negligible in the United Kingdom. And waste was minimised as both individuals and government agencies were busy finding new ways of reducing the waste of food resources to a minimum (sustainable consumption).

Is it conceivable that some form of food rationing and portion control may help address the dramatic rise in obesity and the sustainability of our foods supply?

Well, er, I suppose so, Professor Davey. After all, short of Kim Jong-Un, you never see a fat North Korean, do you?

Professor Davey, despite holding a Ph.D., seems unable to tell the difference between correlation and causation: Britons weren’t terribly fat before or after rationing either, as the source of this piece points out. One might as well propose rationing to increase the quality of Australian novelists; after all, Kingsley Amis wrote Lucky Jim during rationing, so if it worked for the Brits, why not us?

Deliciously, she also runs something called the Centre for Research & Action in Public Health … but it is probably better remembered by its shortened name, CRAP Health.