Prick With A Fork

Fairfax Media trades on the Australian Stock Exchange under the symbol FXJ, but it could be more properly be known by the initials FFS. The company’s share price is in a death spiral and its lack of capital means that the only way is south as its remaining staffers spend their days frantically scrolling through the pages of Gawker and Feministing looking for the sort of click-bait that might generate three-figure comment threads dripping with middle-class angst and outrage.

“FFS” is also pretty much the only reaction the Prick has each week to the increasingly advertorial-driven “Good Food” Tuesday supplement (hang on, didn’t it used to be “Good Living”?). Take this week’s Jill Dupleix cover story, “10 essential tools for every modern cook’s kitchen”, a near pitch-perfect parody of bobo gastronomy. From the Himalayan pink salt blocks to the iPad (huh?) it’s all there. What kitchen would be complete without an “oat miller” which, according to “eco-preneur and zero-waste evangelist Joost Bakker” (!) apparently “makes the best porridge, with sun-dried raisins, banana, honey and biodynamic milk”?

Also indispensable – who knew? – for any hip 21^st century chef is a Mexican tortilla press. Irony is in short supply these days, but the Prick cannot be the only one in the Herald’s shrinking readership appalled by the image of rich white luvvies making peasant food in their Gaggenau-stuffed Balmain kitchens.

This site will concede that the PolyScience sous-vide machine, coming in at #8 and selling for $600, does sound pretty cool and probably does a better job of keeping temperatures stable than the home-built jobby in the kitchen at Stately Prick Manor – a hint in case the Three Little Pricks are reading and looking for something to pool their pocket money on for Christmas. What would be really great, of course, is if someone could build a proper chamber-sealer that’s affordable for the home. Hang on, it seems somebody has.

So I’ve been a bit of a busy Prick lately, tied up on a number of fronts and working on a project which I can’t share the details of just yet, and posting has been subsequently light. In any case today it was a train down to Bowral, first class no less (it’s hardly the pointy end of an A380 to London, but we do what we can), where I was confronted with yet another example of the lowest common denominator infantilisation of our society:

Piss-weak dishwater beer in the bar car was the strongest stuff they’d serve. Why? In not so many words, the Country Link guy told me out was to prevent problems with bogans getting on the piss and acting up.

You know what? I’m sick of policies and policy makers using this sort of thinking, if it can be called that, as an excuse to make life marginally less pleasant and more expensive and difficult for the rest of us. If someone acts up on a train, put him off or cut him off. Otherwise, we’re all adults. Let’s act like it, and treat and serve each other similarly.

The Prick, 25 September:

It should also be noted that the Koreans have an awesome cuisine which has been ignored for far too long by the fooderati: it’s bold, spicy stuff that grabs you and doesn’t let go. Nor is it just bibimbap, as great as that may be. This may be an early call, but I’m tipping Korean food as one of the big food trends of 2013.

News.com.au, today:

First it was Gangnam Style, now Korean food is tipped to be the next big thing:

Food trend forecasters and supermarkets are predicting dishes such as kimchi, bulgogi and bibimbap will be up there with favourites like pad thai and laksa as Australia’s exploration of the Asian food map continues.

“It’s delicious and really good for you. The Koreans eat for both taste and health.”

The healthiest thing the Prick ate all week…

Forget what the song says (and for my money, Nina Simone always sang the best version): Do go to the Rising Sun. Just make sure it’s the beachside café in Palm Cove, not the brothel in New Orleans. We’re still catching up with the backlog of posts from our trip north, but the Rising Sun – part of Nick Holloway’s mini-Nunu empire along Williams Parade – deserves a special mention. The weather wasn’t entirely crash hot or balmy our week away, and so Mrs Prick and I spent a fair bit of time camped out here, largely on the lovely little wicker sofa up the front (no picture, we were sitting on it). Anyway, those of you – and you know who you are – contemplating Palm Cove could do worse than to spend some time at the Rising Sun. Great burgers, fish and chips, and the like, plus more exotic offerings (goat stew with polenta dumplings; soft shell crab with a Vietnamese-style salad). Normally shooting so widely at so many different cuisines, from pub grub to Italian comfort food to mod-Asian, is a recipe for disaster, but here it works. Also, they make a helluva classic margarita, with the good stuff too. Check it out. Repeatedly. Our only complaint: would it kill them to offer breakfast as well?

The Prick commits double-plus ungoodthink, but has his faulty logic corrected by helpful tweeter @jot_au:

UPDATE: @jot_au isn’t Julia Gillard’s only fan. The misogyny-fighting PM also has the convicted rapist community in her corner.

So it’s been a little while between posts, but holidays will do that to a Prick: First there’s the torpor of the time away that makes putting pen to paper unattractive (except in extremis), then there’s all the real-world work to catch up with on return. But while not much posting was done, a lot of reading was accomplished, including knocking over Bob Spitz’s new biography of Julia Child, Dearie.  For Australians unfamiliar with the name, Child revolutionised the way Americans – and eventually the world – eat. Born into a wealthy California family, her life took a number of remarkable twists and turns (a stint in the forerunner to the CIA in Sri Lanka and China during World War II, for example) even before she enrolled at Paris’s Cordon Bleu cooking school, wrote Mastering the Art of French Cooking, or made her first TV appearances in the early 1960s, appearances that would usher in the era of the celebrity chef and spark a national (if not international) obsession with food that has, through ebbs and flows, lasted five decades.

Dearie itself is breezily written, just right for poolside lounging, even if Spitz piles his sentences as high with similes as the corned beef on a sandwich at the Carnegie Deli. Child, eight years after her death at the age of 91 (she kept on going nearly to the end), remains a fascinating character, even for those with no more than a passing interest in cooking and this book gives her her due. She didn’t get serious about cooking until she was 40, when she began – with co-authors Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle – the decade’s work that would form the basis of her masterwork. She didn’t become a TV star until her 50s. Encouraging news for anyone who’s ever wondered if it’s too late to swing for the fences. Of course, she worked like hell to make it happen, and with family money at her back and no pram in the hall she could cook endlessly, scientifically, and perfect her many hundreds of recipes. Child was a woman of dogged determination whose life was finally transformed when she found something to be doggedly determined about, yet at the same time always insisted on having fun, believing that if it wasn’t fun, and if it didn’t taste good, it wasn’t worth the bother.

Dearie is also full of great anecdotes: funny, sad, and everything in between. The relationship with her husband Paul is a book in itself. Also illuminated are characters from the food scene of the era: Craig Claiborne, James Beard, Alice Waters, and the like. Child’s principled determination to build her career and profile without compromise also comes through loud and clear – she knew who she wanted to speak to, and the mass market, initially at least, wasn’t it: no “Happy Homemaker” TV  segments for her, though there was no holding back the tide when thousands of fans would line up from dawn to see her cooking demonstrations or get a book signed. Nor could she really abide later nouvelle cuisine movements. Still, she couldn’t keep away from a TV deal either, and was a tough businesswoman who kept churning out series after series: as an aside, it was daytime viewings of Dinner at Julia’s that planted the seed of entertaining in a young Prick many years ago (though it was surprising to read in Dearie that the series was widely panned). Child also had a wicked sense of humour: the book is almost worth the price of admission for the routine she ran on a British TV producer over her mischievous mispronunciation of croque monsieur.

…but if there are, I can’t think of any.

Regular visitors to these parts know of this site’s ongoing interest in Sydney Morning Herald restaurant critic and man-about-town Terry “14-out-of-20” Durack, who lately has developed a bit of a knack for turning up wherever the Pricks have decided to go to dinner.

Today Durack reports on the new Rocks bistro Ananas (his verdict: 13/20), leading the Prick to wonder, where have all the 14/20s gone? Along with Ananas, in the past few weeks since our latest run-in, Durack has hit the new Sailors Club (to which he gave a very generous 15/20; the Pricks’ experience was decidedly more mixed and the crowd-sourced reviews over at Urbanspoon would tend to agree) as well as Petersham favourite Blancmange (which received 13/20, though his review read far more positively than the score would indicate). Has Durack gotten self-conscious about what was once his go-to rating?

In any case, the Herald’s point system for restaurants is all but meaningless. Hard-working chefs and restaurateurs on the receiving end of a 13/20 (“good if not great”, according to the scale) must wonder where the line lies between that score and a 14/20 (“solid and enjoyable”) and even a 15/20 (“very good”). The answer, of course, is that differences are likely as attributable to chance as to effort: the fine texturing of the 20 point scale creates an illusion of precision where the critic’s vocabulary falls short. If ratings must be used, less rather than more is the way to go. At least with more traditional “star” systems, i.e. the New York Times zero-to-four scale, the difference between a two or a three or a four-star establishment should be pretty clear and understood by all. The way the Herald does things, it’s pretty much throwing darts at the fat bit of the bell curve.

At one particular school in Sweden, students were spoilt for choice come lunchtime. Can’t have that, can we?

A talented head cook at a school in central Sweden has been told to stop baking fresh bread and to cut back on her wide-ranging veggie buffets because it was unfair that students at other schools didn’t have access to the unusually tasty offerings. Annika Eriksson, a lunch lady at school in Falun, was told that her cooking is just too good.

Pupils at the school have become accustomed to feasting on newly baked bread and an assortment of 15 vegetables at lunchtime, but now the good times are over. The municipality has ordered Eriksson to bring it down a notch since other schools do not receive the same calibre of food – and that is “unfair”.

Michele Obama was unavailable for comment.

It is popular to say that to survive the ongoing economic turmoil of the age, we all need to be more like the Chinese – by which it is generally meant that the supposedly sclerotic democracies of the West should think more along the lines of Beijing’s supposedly-enlightened despotism which can, for all its faults, “get things done”.

They may be right about the Chinese bit, but wrong about which Chinese. Liberty and prosperity rely on us not thinking less like technocrats and despots and more like humble pastoralists: From the US’s National Public Radio*, an amazing, if cautionary, tale of farmers in the little village of Xiaogang who, impoverished by years of forced collectivism at a time when such activity could mean a grizzly death, gathered in secret in a mud hut to sign a contract that would return to each of them a bit of the fruit of their labours:

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