Friday, September 23, 2016.
Visiting Newport, Rhode Island.
Our first port of call in our newly inaugurated cruise is at the ritzy harbor of Newport. We visited this same spot about five years ago, when we found the town very pleasant just to walk around. Newport this time isn’t as charming as I remember, we get a nice long walk in. The weather is quite warm, but that will not last much longer. We have seen hardly any trees with fall colors. “A warm, dry summer” opined a nearby Yankee about this.
The cafes we pass have a 1970s flower-child feeling to them. We stop in one of these for an enormous hamburger with boursin cheese (a garlic-flavored fromage that is good with the burger). I order a crab soup which does not come to the table. Lynn has an offbeat deli-style sandwich with avocado, a couple of slices of turkey and several cheeses.
We stroll past an office for sales and repairs of Metro wireless phones. I have one of those, and I had them enter a code for five dollars that will allow the phone to funtion in New England and Canada. I also have my old re-tooled Windows phone. Between the two of them, most of the time I can come up with a phone that actually works.
Tom’s Pre-Dinner Cocktail Club requires all the tables and chairs at Crooners. Problem is, the chairs are hard to move around, and the tables are actually are attached to the floor and immovable. We will have to find another venue for our afternoon drinks.
At dinner, I have an unusual entree: barramundi, a fish which I understand comes from Australia. It’s a slightly off-white fillet that’s longer than it is wide. It comes with buttery sauce and it better than most cruise ship seafood.
Veal chop: looks better than it eats.
Once again, the pastry department in the Coral Room (one of the three large dining rooms aboard the Caribbean Princess) has a hot soufflee for dessert. It’s made with Grand Marnier, and is even fluffier than the wonderful soufflee we had yesterday. The kitchen’s offering for my entree is a veal chop. When will I learn that there is nothing succulent about veal chops?
One of the Eat Clubbers who knows how I like to sing in public alerts me to a talent contest tonight. It begins with a song in the karaoke lounge, which makes me a finalist for “The Voice Of The Ocean.” Ultimately eight singers give it a whirl. We would come back three more times each to choose and practice our songs. Professional musicians from the ship’s very large staff act as our coaches. I sing Cole Porter’s superb “Night And Day,” which makes a big impression on the listeners and the coaches. That alone puts this cruise on a new level of interest from me.
Saturday, September 24, 2016.
Boston.
Today I am visiting Boston for my third time. My sister Lynn and I decide to refrain from following the historic line that runs through the oldest part of the city and its wealth of historic places. Instead we walk though the markets in the middle of town. These a jammed with food stands loaded with almost every known American casual food, from hot dogs through lobster rolls to a great variety of ethnic dishes. Also here is a fresh vegetable market, which strikes me as being more an enormous collection of standard grocery-store produce department than a gourmet offering. If Mary Ann were here, she’d try to buy some of the produce and bring it home.
In the middle of all this is a guy bouncing up on what looks like a gigantic industrial-strength pogo stick. He adds to the pain and skill of his act with a tennnis racquet that he wraps around himself somehow, while continuing to balance himself on the pogo stick. It’s hard to explain, but I’ll bet his parents are proud.
Lynn remembers having gone to an Italian restaurant in the North End of Boston, which has many to choose from. We wind up at the same restaurant where about eight Eat Clubbers and I had a great dinner five years ago. We had a pretty good one there today. I started with a bowl of pasta fagioli soup, followed by a much-too-large bowl of linguine al pesto. Lynn had an equally oversize portion of pasta puttanesca. Missing from the scene was the waitress with the solid Bostonian dialect and a let’s-get-this-done attitude we had back then. Now the service comes from much younger people.
We work our way back to the ship, passing the big market from the prepared-food side. We make a stop in Ye Olde Union Oyster House. That seafood specialist claims to be the longest-open restaurant in America. They have been there since 1826, longer than Antoine’shas been in New Orleans. However, there is some question as to whether the Union Oyster House has been under one continuous family’s ownership since it opened. Antoine’s has, since 1840.
I bought a Union Oyster House baseball cap last time I was through these parts, and I wore it as we toured. I told the hostess at the Union that I wasn’t staying for dinner, but that my hat wanted to revisit its home. She didn’t get it.
The Princess Caribbean, the Eat CLub’s home for ten days in September 2016.
During our cocktail hour this evening, someone reports that the stateroom television has an all-Love-Boat format. That sitcom from the 1980s is credited with reviving the cruise industry. Lynn and I agree that this is at best a lot more corny and simplistic than we remember. The ship appears to have a staff of only ten or so people. The bartender, Isaac, seems to have been the only mixologist on the staff. No matter what kind of alcoholic beverage you want, no matter time of day or night it is, and no matter where on the ship you’re thirsty, Isaac is there, pointing his trademark two fingers at you.
I know more about The Love Boat than I would like to admit. When David Letterman began hosting his own show, Channel Six inserted The Love Boat as a time-killer between Johnny Carson and Letterman–my two favorite TV shows of all time. I would catch parts of the Love Boat at the beginning and te end. Then I got a crush on the cruise director Julie McCoy, and I found myself watching the whole thing every night.
So, dumb as the show could be, it was nostalgic to watch it again. Amazing how anyone got lured into cruising when the ships depicted in the show were so much smaller than the ones sailing today.
Crabmeat Louie
Crabmeat Louie (or Louis) is a popular way to serve cold Dungeness crab in San Francisco, where the recipe originated about a hundred years ago. It’s excellent with jumbo lump blue crabmeat, too. The sauce is similar to white remoulade or ravigote sauces in that it’s built out of mayonnaise, mustard, lemon juice, and green onions. The added touch is chili sauce, a relative of ketchup found in the same section of the supermarket in a slightly different bottle. Crabmeat Louie can be served as a salad or as a stand-alone appetizer. It’s especially good with deviled eggs, thick slices of tomato, or avocados.
Sauce:
2 Tbs. Creole mustard
2 egg yolks
3 dashes Tabasco
1 tsp. Worcestershire sauce
2 Tbs. chili sauce
1 cup vegetable oil or olive oil
1 Tbs. lemon juice, strained
1/4 tsp. salt
Generous pinch white pepper
3 green onions, tender green parts only, snipped into thin rings
1/4 tsp. celery seed
1 lb. jumbo lump crabmeat
1 large ripe tomato
2 ripe Hass avocados
Tender lettuce leaves
1. Combine the mustard, egg yolks, Tabasco, and Worcestershire in a bowl. Whisk briskly until the mixture gets noticeably lighter in both color and texture. Whisk in the chili sauce until blended.
2. Add the oil a few drops at a time while whisking briskly. When the sauce begins to thicken, add the lemon juice, salt, and white pepper, and increase the rate of adding oil. Don’t add oil faster than in a thin stream, and keep whisking.
3. When all the oil is incorporated, add the green onions and celery seed and stir until well distributed. You can make the sauce ahead to this point and refrigerate in a closed container.
4. When ready to serve, put about three tablespoons of the sauce into the bottom of a bowl. Add the crabmeat and pour half of the remaining sauce over it. With a rubber spatula, gently (so as not to break the lumps) toss the crabmeat to coat it generously with the sauce. Add more sauce as needed, but save some of the sauce.
5. Place a thick slice of tomato on each serving plate. Arrange avocado slices and lettuce around the tomato. Spoon the crabmeat atop the tomato. Serve with the extra sauce in a server. (Most people want more of it for the greens and the avocados.)
Serves four to six.
Shrimp Gumbo @ Grand Isle
The seafood gumbo in this slightly-touristy seafood specialist leans almost entirely in the direction of shrimp. Which is not a bad idea, if you’re going to make a nice fresh shrimp stock and add some big, firm shrimp at the end of the cooking process. Which is exactly what they do here. They also have an excellent oyster bar, and a design that captures the look of those middle-of-the-swamp cafes along the disappearing Gulf coast.
Grand Isle. Warehouse District: 575 Convention Center Blvd. 504-520-8530.
This is among the 500 best dishes in New Orleans area restaurants. Click here for a list of the other 499.
October 6, 2016
Days Until. . .
Halloween 25
Today’s Flavor
Today is National Seafood Chowder Day. In the Northeast, this means clam chowder, so widely available in restaurants that, with a New England sound, it’s known as “cuppachowdah.” Here in New Orleans, we don’t have good clams (despite the millions of them in Lake Pontchartrain). So when we make chowder, it’s usually with leftover fish and shrimp and crabmeat. I like it and think it’s an underutilized idea, because it’s good and contrasts with gumbo, bouillabaisse, and bisques.
A chowder contains, in addition to seafood, three essential ingredients: potatoes, bacon (or something like bacon–pork cracklings, for example), and fish stock (or something like fish stock). I make mine with oyster water, which I beg from my friends in the oyster business. The rest is easy. The recipe is in today’s newsletter.
When I find myself in New England, I eat clam chowder at almost every meal. They make it very thick. One cookbook says it should be almost as solid as mashed potatoes. I don’t go along with that. Nor do I like the very mild seasoning you find in New England chowder–but that’s a New Orleans palate talking.
Gourmet Gazetteer
Baker is six miles on the Idaho side of the Montana state line. That’s also the Continental Divide, putting Baker barely inside the western side of North America. It’s 152 miles southwest of Butte, Montana. Baker is a cluster of farm headquarters in a high (4376 feet) plain laid out by the Lemhi River between mountain ranges. Enormous irrigated fields of potatoes and other crops surround the town. The nearest restaurants are nine miles north in Salmon, where you”ll find a place with the intriguing name The Burnt Bun.
In a way, Baker has two food references in its name. One is to the person who bakes biscuits, cakes, bread, and all the many other edibles that come from the oven. The other meaning is a large, starchy potato specifically raised for baking.
Deft Dining Rule #860
No matter what anybody tells you, New England clam chowder is incomparably better than the tomato-based Manhattan clam chowder.
Edible Dictionary
sultana, n.–A white, seedless grape grown for eating rather than winemaking. It was originally developed in the Middle East, hence the name (the grape of the sultan). When it came to this country, the fresh grapes took on the name Thompson seedless (for the man who introduced them). The word sultana in the United States has come to mean the golden raisins made from these grapes. Sultanas have a subtler flavor than black raisins, and so they’re preferred in some dishes. They’re especially well-suited to include in bread pudding, particularly where some eaters might not like standard raisins.
The Old Kitchen Sage Sez
The two methods for lessening the work of shucking clams are exactly the opposite of one another. Either put them into the freezer for a half-hour, or drop them in boiling water for ten seconds. With way, they give up a lot quicker.
Annals Of Food Marketing
Cream of Wheat was introduced today in 1893. It was a desperate effort to save a near-bankrupt flour mill in Grand Forks, North Dakota, during the financial panic of that year. Thomas Amidon, the head miller, used the “middlings”–the prime part of wheat grains, also called farina–to make a hot cereal that could be packaged dry and sold in stores. The owners of the mill sent a sample of it to their broker in New York. The broker famously responded, “Never mind shipping us any more of your flour, but send a car of your ‘Cream of Wheat.'” The original logo with its cartoonish black cook was used because the printer of the label found it in a pile of old printer’s plates in his plant. Cream of Wheat is a bigger deal elsewhere than in New Orleans, where we’re more likely to fill that space on the menu with grits.
Music To Eat Crawfish Pie By
Today in 1952, Hank Williams had the top country hit with Jambalaya, which forever united that dish with crawfish pie and filé gumbo. Not a bad combination, really, and one found on more than a few Cajun menus.
Lounges Through History
Today in 1889, the original Parisian song-and-dance bar opened. At Moulin Rouge (“red windmill”–the building really was one) one could not only have a glass of wine or an absinthe, but also see a live show. It spawned an entirely new genre of hangout in Paris. Its fame continues not only because it’s still in business, but because of the many posters advertising its shows. The most famous were drawn by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, a seminal figure in Art Nouveau graphic design. There’s hardly a French bistro anywhere that doesn’t have a Toulouse-Lautrec poster for the Moulin Rouge somewhere on its walls.
Food Namesakes
Actress Anna Quayle hit the Big Stage today in 1936. . . Singer and songwriter Matthew Sweet was born today in 1964. . . Mets pitcher David Cone struck out nineteen batters today in 1991, tying the National League record. . . Olympic marksman Lloyd Spooner was born today in 1884. . . Long-time South Dakota Congressman E.Y. Berry was born today in 1902. . . New Hampshire Congressman Perkins Bass, whose son Charles also held that post, was born today in 1912. . . Movie and television actor Jerome Cowan was a big hit with his mom today in 1897. (“Cowan” is a French-Cajun word for an alligator snapping turtle, the kind used to make soup.)
Words To Eat By
“Clam chowder is one of those subjects, like politics or religion, that can never be discussed lightly. Bring it up even incidentally, and all the innumerable factions of the clam bake regions raise their heads and begin to yammer.”–Louis P. De Gouy, French chef and cookbook author of the early 1900s.
Words To Drink By
“A man that lives on pork, fine-flour bread, rich pies and cakes, and condiments, drinks tea and coffee, and uses tobacco, might as well try to fly as to be chaste in thought.”–Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, early health nut, brother of the cereal magnate
But who wants to be chaste in thought?
How Chinese Cooking Affected American History.
The Chinese came to America to help build the railroad. They brought with them their unique cooking style. An important historical figure was deeply affected.
Click here for the cartoon.