I have been cooking a bit of late. Not much interesting about that say about half of you. ( Yes, I know that I am famous for the phrase 'Ninety per cent of statistics is made up on the spot,' but bare with me.) I am going to recommend you listen to a podcast called Fear of Frying. Fear of Frying is a piece I heard on WBEZ wherein Nina Barrett interviews Ina Pinkney of Chicken Fat Chocolate Chunk Cookie fame.
Ina is apparently the chicken fat doyenne of New York. For those of you lucky enough to have been raised on 'gribenes' I need not say more. Of course I wouldn't eat this stuff on a daily basis, but to have just a taste of gribenes on a rare occasion turns on my nostalgia machinery. For the uninitiated this is like a chicken skin crackling sort of thing, like a kosher pork rind, buried under a dusting of kosher salt, and caramelized onions, (okay, sometimes burned to a crisp onions) and fried, (there! I said it!) in rendered chicken fat. This sounds pretty tasty to some of us if accompanied by liberal doses of Slivovitz. This culinary delight has probably killed more Jews than Hitler. But now we are all taking drugs for hyperlipidemia and hypertension, so maybe once in a while isn't so bad, and we have angioplasty now too, (though only as a last resort).
So I recommend Nina's podcast and encourage you to turn on your own nostalgia machinery and think about all the bad things you ate, that mean so much to the person you have become. After all, you are what you eat. Now a days I am eating stuff like baby bok choy from the farmer's market, grilled on the Char Broil with New Zealand Lamb shoulder and quinoa from Peru with aji molido. But next month when I go to Montreal I will stop in at Dunn's Famous for a medium fat, hold the guilt!
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