Food Culture Index

Interview with Amorette Dye (a.k.a. Sakurako Kitsa)

2013-01-31T21:53:00.000-05:00

I'm thrilled to present Food Culture Index's first interview—with bento artist Amorette Dye, who works her magic under the name Sakurako Kitsa. There are two previous posts on Ms. Dye's work on this blog (here, and here). She has been featured on Gourmet magazine's website, Geeknews, CBC Radio's blog, Le Monde's website, and elsewhere. She has contributed to the books Face Food by Christopher Salyers and 501 Bento Lunches, from Korero Books (for which she also wrote the forward). More information about Amorette Dye and her creations is available on her flickr page as well as her bracingly honest blog, The Sururako Chronicles. In addition to answering my questions (our exchange took place via email over a few days), she's been kind enough to share one of her most recent creations: a sea turtle made from a mushroom.

You use a Japanese name—Sakurako Kitsa—for your bento box creations. Why is this?

Sakurako Kitsa is just a Russo-Japanese mishmash that sort of loosely means "Cherry Blossom Kitten." I've always loved cherry blossom season and I had just adopted a Siamese kitten when I came up with the name. When I first started doing bento art, it seemed like people liked my work but were really hung-up on the fact that I wasn't Japanese. I'm not as worried about it now, but at the time it was extremely important to me that people just be entertained by my food-art without worrying about my ethnicity. People were satisfied enough by the ambiguity of the name that the focus went back where it belonged: the silly food pictures I was trying to show them in the first place.

bento frog

How did you get interested in the Japanese art of bento boxes?

I was one of those kids who always saw faces in woodgrain and wallpaper patterns, and it kept on right through to adulthood in the grocery store. I'd pick up a strawberry and a cleft in the pointy end would make it look like a bunny's face, if it just had some ears. So I'd get it home and try to make it match what was in my head, and it always neat to see if I could really make it work. That sort of turned into trying to make interesting garnishes, then I'd find myself arranging things a certain way when I packed my lunches for work. When other people noticed that my lunches were pictures, I'd get self-conscious and stop. Later, when I decided it didn't matter whether people noticed or not, I just went ahead and had fun with it.

Obento is an art form that's very friendly to that way of thinking. If you think that your leftover pot roast looks like a gnarled piece of driftwood, you're encouraged to go with it. It's always fun to see what other people come up with, as well. Some people get hypercompetitive with "kyaraben" (making accurate representations of anime characters, etc), and kyaraben can get really amazing, but I always just preferred to keep it casual and fun. The more freeform style I do is referred to as "oekakiben".

I love food, and it's so easy to be creative with food. It's so beautiful and so versatile, and there's an infinite variety of colors and shapes and textures to work with. And food is such a natural fit to Japanese art, the respect for form and the beauty of nature. It all comes together in a very simple way that feels very "right" to me.

bento (tomato) lobster

Your thoughts on how a strawberry can be a "bunny face," and a bit of leftover pot roast a piece of "gnarled driftwood" makes me think of something the photographer Minor White said about how an artist needs to see things for what they are, and also "for what Else they are." Food art, like your bento boxes, are kind of the ultimate "what else," and yet, in the end, it's still food, it's still eaten, and no matter how gorgeous the illusion, the art disappears. How do you feel about the transience of your chosen art form? Are you ever tempted to make more permanent, less edible art?

I've dabbled. But I think the ephemeral nature of food art is really a big part of its charm, and of its attractiveness to me. It's more beautiful because you know it's not going to stay that way forever. But no, I can't say that I could just gobble down a plate of vegetables I spent hours carving with no regrets. That's why I began taking photographs of what I did, so there would be some record of it having existed. It's been a good compromise.

I was invited to do a gallery show a couple of years ago, and it was in an upstairs space in the middle of the summer. I was thinking, "Hmm, how is this going to work?". But we made it happen, with a combination of photographs hanging on scrolls and small, fresh dishes on pedestals so that people could see that it was really food. People were poking at the lobster made from Roma tomatoes, thinking it was plastic. I kept having to put the legs back where they belonged, and by the second day, things were definitely looking a little wilted. But that's okay. It sort of drove home the idea that these things have their moment and then they're gone.

And it might sound a little strange, but I get tired of looking at my own work after a while. If I worked in a medium that stuck around, it would all pile up and overwhelm me with sameness. I like to just take the photo and move on. From what I've seen, that's a pretty typical view among people who work with food creatively. It's there to be eaten, and the photograph is enough for me.

bento Marie Antoinette

On your blog, The Sakurako Chronicles, you write quite frankly about living with a lot of incredibly difficult health issues, including spinal cord cancer and a broken neck. Do you think your bento box creations—and, more generally, your apparently deep interest in both food and art—are in any way a response to those health issues?

I was born with my spinal cord cancer, and the 70s-era radiation I received saved my life but left me with lasting problems. I was paralyzed as a toddler, and I didn't regain use of my legs until I was around four years old. My mother jokes (well, she jokes now) that I was the easiest toddler in the world to raise because I stayed wherever you put me. A toddler who can't walk around getting into things has to find other ways to stay entertained, and I read very early. Some of the books I loved best had vivid photos of life and art in Japan. I would just sit there and take it all in, the colors and that wonderful combination of the simple and serene with the ornate, and how perfectly nature became art. A lot of my love for the Japanese aesthetic probably started then, with those beautiful photographs.

My health issues always made a lot of decisions for me. Instead of running around in gym, I'd be helping the art teacher get ready for her next class. Instead of recess, I'd be reading or drawing. So there was the enforced sedentary thing influencing my interests, and also the fact that I was constantly trying to find ways to work around my physical shortcomings. I think that working around my physical issues validated the general creative process for me. I don't hold back, because I know by experience how useful creativity can be.

Geisha bento

Have you ever been to Japan?

I haven't been to Japan yet. Maybe someday. I've always wanted to, for hanami (cherry blossom season). Cherry blossoms are ephemeral, too...the beauty is all around you, raining down on you, but it's so delicate and it's gone so soon.

garden bento

You are the mother of a toddler. What's your policy on letting your daughter play with her food?

I encourage it. She eats well, so I'm not worried about that. When she was a little under two years old, we took her to an Italian restaurant and she had a little piece of ravioli and a spoonful of minestrone on her plate. On her own, she picked up two pasta shells from the minestrone and put them on the ravioli as eyes. Then she thought for a moment and put a little sliver of carrot underneath, slanted downward like a frowning mouth. She told us that this was Problem Face. Then she looked down and said, "What's your problem, Face?" It was great to see because it's such a simple, natural thing to do. She saw a face and she went with it. I would never want to stifle that sort of creativity.

sea turtle bento

Clazy, Glape, and Lacist—1950's Food and Drink Commercials

2013-01-13T13:15:00.000-05:00

Actually, more like "clazy, glape, and highry steleotypicar." However socially reprehensible the attitudes, there is a certain old-fashioned charm to these hand-drawn cartoons. Hard to image such a simple visual approach to television advertising these days. In the first of these commercials, a Chinese baby tries to eat jello with a pair of chopsticks, in the second, a Caucasian man orders beer with a side of fortune cookies, and in the third, three "black currants" done up in blackface sing about the charms of Ribena brand juice. I couldn't locate any information about the artist(s).

Elegant Abstracts from "My Jello Americans"

2013-01-07T15:51:00.002-05:00

Wow. Who knew there was so much jello art out there? Not I. But a recent internet wandering led me down a very long and twisty trail of jello art ventures. Here is a sampling from the remarkable blog "My Jello Americans," which posts pictures and recipes for "jello shots"—that is, small gelatin creations made with various alcohols. Everything they invent is pretty fascinating, but some things are downright beautiful, particularly in the "abstract" category. A few of my favorites:

"The Transubstantiation"
Ingredients: "just water and gelatin, but with a little faith,
our favorite party god can turn it into wine. Let us pray."

"Lavender-Ginger Aperitif"
Ingredients: Granulated Gelatin, Lavender Lemonade
Vodka, Domain de Canton (Ginger liqueur), Agave

"The Digestif"
Ingredients: Knox, Plum Vodka, Prune Juice, Bitters,
Red and Blue Food Dye, Ginger Syrup, Edible Glitter, Clove

"Rosello"
Ingredients: Knox, Home-made Lemoncello, Edible Glitter,
Yellow food dye, Gin, Rose Syrup, edible rose petals

"The CityWide"
Ingredients: Knox, Pabst Blue Ribbon, Heaven Hill

"Mt. Fuji"
Ingredients: Agar Agar, Plum Vodka, Almond Paste, Food Coloring, Bacardi 151

RELATED POST: Sakurako Kitsa's Bento Boxes

Flower Foodies

2013-01-01T11:47:00.002-05:00

Both down with colds, my husband and I brought in the New Year watching the original Diary of a Chambermaid. This is the 1946 Jean Renoir film (Bunuel did a remake in 1964 with Jean Moreau). There are a few great food scenes in the movie, but the most memorable is certainly that in which Burgess Meredith, as the disturbingly loony Captain Mauger, starts chomping his neighbors' roses. (Full scene containing rose-eating can be found here).

Later, the Captain explains his food philosophy to Celestine, the beautiful chambermaid (played by Paulette Goddard), as she feigns fascination:

"Everybody in the world except me gets into a rut about food. They have no pioneering spirit. Possibly the first man who ate an oyster, they called him crazy or eccentric. Now the same with me. I've discovered new foods that nobody ever heard of before. I'm willing to eat absolutely anything. Keeps me young and vigorous."

The startling image of an older eccentric eagerly gobbling a rose was possibly borrowed by Agnes Varda in her amazing L'Opera Mouffe (1958). That film deserves its own post (I'm working on it), but here is a salient clip in gif animation form, created by Hristos, via his flickr channel (click on gif for best quality).

A post-script to this post, prompted by the comment regarding Harpo Marx's habit of eating non-edibles: I looked through some U-tube clips of Cocoanuts, and though I couldn't find the telephone-eating scene, I did find Harpo munching on some buckwheat flowers:

Related Post: The Little Fellow Is Appetizing (Charlie Chaplin eats a shoe)

Fruity Underwear Ads

2012-12-23T13:58:00.001-05:00

A silly post, I admit, but I need an excuse to publish the first image, which is as beautiful as it is wacky. I don't know anything about it, except that it seems to be advertising slips, corsets, and bras, though why the models faces are covered with enormous papier maché fruits, I can't imagine. Perhaps it was an early prototype for the familiar Fruit of the Loom ads, which are just as wacky, but not a bit beautiful. Two versions of that underwear company's advertising efforts from the 1970's follow: a print ad for women's pantyhose, and the television commercial with a squeaky-voiced old lady and several large gentlemen prancing about in rubbery looking fruit costumes.

Women's fruit themed-lingerie ad—no further info available

1970's Fruit of the Loom pantyhose ad (via Vintage Ad Browser)

"Fruit makes the best pickings!"

RELATED POST: Can Someone Help Me With This?

Chantal Rens' Collages

2012-12-16T16:24:00.000-05:00

If you spend any time on Tumblr (and I do, with my Scrapbook project) you've probably run across one of Chantal Rens' collages as she's something of a Tumblr darling. It's understandable. Her collages all share an unusual, slightly magical, slightly spastic, slightly menacing quality, as if they were put together by a brilliant but mildly distracted 3rd grader with asocial tendencies. This childlike naturalness of style provides a refreshing counterbalance to Rens' essentially hardcore surrealistic imagery. Every collage seems governed by an unsettling, vaguely shocking, but nevertheless just barely emotionally decipherable dream logic.

As far as I can make out, Rens' works are untitled, which explains the lack of captions in this post. They also run a wide gamut of subject matter, though predictably, my favorites are food-themed. More info on Chantal Rens' Blog.

Mickey's Inventive Slicing Technique

2012-12-11T16:16:00.001-05:00

Wedding Feast scene from 1933 Disney Mickey Mouse cartoon called "Ye Olden Days." Keep an eye out for the salmi-slicing guillotine, and the page's—um, syncopated—technique for feeding the salami through the lunette. My jaw actually dropped. Full video available here.

The Kerouac Diner (Menu and Recipes)

2012-12-06T08:06:00.000-05:00

Found this fascinating webpage titled "The Kerouac Diner Menu and Recipes" at Jack, an online literary magazine that deals primarily with writers of the Beat generation, and describes itself as "small but interesting and imperfect."

Recipes at the imaginary Kerouac diner include: Burroughs' Rhubarb Pie; Desolation Angels Breakfast Special; Desolation Peak Casserole; Kerouac's Green Pea Soup; Lonesome Traveller Breakfast; and Pate de Porc Gras. The recipe for this last intriguing item runs as follows:

2 pounds of ground Boston pork butt (with all the fat)
2 onions
2 garlics
teaspoon dry mustard
Simply immerse the ground pork butt till water just covers it, in pot, with onions & garlic chopped in, and salt and pepper, and dry mustard. Let simmer slowly (say, 5 hours). Spoon & level into bowls; chill bowls in ice box. Next day, use as sandwich spread on crackers (preferably good French Bread)--from letter to Jacqueline Stephens, late December 1961, Selected Letters: Jack Kerouac, 1957-1969.

This webpage/menu is worth a close look (click on link above to go there).

Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsburg and Jack Kerouac's grave

RELATED POST: That Pan-Fried Chow Mein Flavored Air

Goethe on Gardening

2012-11-27T11:40:00.001-05:00

Botanical - Cabbage - Chou blond
Georg Dionysius Ehret . 1736-1748.

From Book One of The Sorrows of Young Werther:

How happy I am that my heart can feel the simple, harmless bliss of the person who brings to his table a cabbage he has grown himself, not just the cabbage alone but all the good days, the beautiful morning he planted it, the lovely evenings he watered it, and as he had his joy in its advancing growth, he enjoys it all again in one moment.

Moolah Tempura

2012-11-24T17:13:00.002-05:00

I know nothing about this image—who made it or why... Political statement? Drunken creative act? Mid-brow irony? One thing's for sure—it's a deep-fried dollar bill.

Jimmy Stewart Says Grace

2012-11-20T11:29:00.002-05:00

Jimmy Stewart gets his cynicism on in this Thanksgiving prayer scene from Shenandoah (1965). Amazing monologue—transcription below.

Lord, we cleared this land. We plowed it, sowed it, and harvested. We cooked the harvest. It wouldn't be here, we wouldn't be eatin' it, if we hadn't done it all ourselves. We worked Dog-bone hard for every crumb and morsel. But we thank you just the same anyway, Lord, for this food were about to eat. Amen.

(written by James Lee Barrett)

RELATED POSTS:
John Currin's "Thanksgiving"
Carl Larsson and Norman Rockwell

Ouroburos and Autocannibalism

2012-11-18T10:17:00.000-05:00

Ouroburos... the serpent that eats its own tail, a creepy but elegant image symbolizing eternal recurrance or the endless cycle of life and death. An ancient mythological symbol found in many cultures, it's a favorite of Goths and New Agers alike. Sort of yin-yangy, but not really, because it's a closed circuit, a single unit.

(drawing of Ouroburos from the 1700's)

The ouroburos is engaged in an act of auto-cannibalism, or self-consumption—a completely irreconcilable idea, as we eat in order to live, but if we eat ourselves, of course we destroy the very body we feed. Painting below of a human auto-cannibal by Bartolemeo Passerotti (who also did some not quite as creepy paintings of butcher shops).

Man Eating His Arm (16th c.)

Another ouroburus, somewhat more mammilian—
what with the ears (3?) and that foxy looking tuft of a beard...
Apparently from an illuminated ms. Sadly, no other info available

An interesting Wiki discussion on Ouroburos (including how to form the plural of that word) can be found here.

I Knew I Should Have Been Born in Japan

2012-11-14T19:38:00.000-05:00

Amazing characters in pastry form. Gorgeous 3-D cookie art from the Japanese Bakery Henteco. It's incredible how much personality this baker (or these bakers) has put into these creations—the eyes sparkle on many of these animal-sweets. The little owl looks vaguely as if it's just been caught with its hand in the cookie jar. The purple cat looks Parisian and blasé. The rabbit, disgruntled. The bulldog perfectly dopey. I especially love how the the two chipmunk-y cookies in the last image have slightly different facial expressions—brings to mind Diane Arbus' famous photograph, Identical Twins, Roselle, NJ 1967.

RELATED POST: Sakurako Kitsa's Bento Boxes

Vintage French Sausage Ad

2012-11-11T20:03:00.000-05:00

Weird in more ways than one. Vintage ad for pork sausage, via Found in Mom's Basement, which notes that "there's actually an industry term for spokesanimals that encourage consumers to eat them: traitors."

RELATED POST: Surreal Salami

Sometimes, the Art is in the Cooking

2012-11-08T15:19:00.000-05:00

Unbelievably riveting—yes, I think that's the right word—12 minute video of two Hiroshima line-cooks creating seven servings of Okonoymiyaki. According to Wikipedia:

Okonomiyaki (お好み焼き o-konomi-yaki?) is a Japanese savoury pancake containing a variety of ingredients. The name is derived from the word okonomi, meaning "what you like" or "what you want", and yaki meaning "grilled" or "cooked" (cf. yakitori and yakisoba). Okonomiyaki is mainly associated with Kansai or Hiroshima areas of Japan, but is widely available throughout the country. Toppings and batters tend to vary according to region. Tokyo okonomiyaki is usually smaller than a Hiroshima or Kansai okonomiyaki.

—

As far as I can make out, the ingredients of these particular okonomiyaki include a pancake, herbs, cabbage, sprouts, green onions, noodles, bacon, oysters (or squid?), eggs, and various dressings. The whole thing is layered and perfectly timed. This, I think, is what makes this video fascinating, what makes these men's actions art—the timing. They are as coordinated as dancers. And the fact that this preparation goes on and on and on—as do the precisely layered ingredients–only adds to the magic:

That Pan-Fried Chow Mein Flavored Air

2012-11-05T09:07:00.000-05:00

Jack Kerouac Alley in San Francisco

A passage about the food of San Francisco from Jack Kerouac's On the Road. (The bit about the menus being "soft with foody esculence" always gets me good.)

I smelled all the food of San Francisco. There were seafood places out there where the buns were hot, and the baskets were good enough to eat too; where the menus themselves were soft with foody esculence as if dipped in hot broths and roasted dry and good enough to eat too.

Just show me the bluefish spangle on a seafood menu and I'd eat it; let me smell the drawn butter and lobster claws. There were places where they specialized in thick red roast beef au jus, or roast chicken basted in wine. There were places where hamburgs* sizzled on grills and the coffee was only a nickel.

And oh, that pan-fried chow mein flavored air that blew into my room from Chinatown, vying with the spaghetti sauces of North Beach, the soft-shell crab of Fisherman's Wharf — nay, the ribs of Fillmore turning on spits!

Throw in the Market Street chili beans, redhot, and french-fried potatoes of the Embarcadero wino night, and steamed clams from Sausalito across the bay, and that's my ah-dream of San Francisco.

'On the Road' | Jack Kerouac

RELATED POSTS:
The Kerouac Diner (Menu and Recipes)
Eat the Menu
Laurie Anderson's TV Lunch

Communist Munchies

2012-11-01T09:21:00.003-04:00

Below, two food-metaphorical illustrations by Madrid artist Fernando Vicente for a new Spanish-language edition of The Communist Manifesto. More information at brainpickings:

A Trippy Crumb

Seriously Expensive Food from Serendipity 3 in NYC

Depression Spaghetti (contributor post)

2011-12-13T11:57:00.003-05:00

Bill Drain from NYC writes in about a photograph in the December 2011 issue of Saveur magazine (no.143):

The picture on page 53 . . . captures a moment in time, the spaghetti (they didn't have "pasta" back then) lifting from the boiling water, steam rising, the cook looking at the men gathered outside of the window who are, for the most part, eyeing the spaghetti. Expectantly? It was taken in New York City in 1937 during the Great Depression. Why are they gathered there? Are they going to get free food? Did they eat that day? Are they enjoying some no cost street theatre? Their dress really doesn't tell us much. Men from all walks of life lost their livelihoods back then and would daily get dressed in their suits, maybe to maintain some self-respect, while they spent the day looking for work that didn't come. There's a Norman Rockwell feeling to the picture, some accidental warmth in a time of upheaval and desperation.

(Saveur doesn't attribute this photo, but I think it may be by Ida Wyckoff—KA)

Norma Duffield Lyon, Butter Sculptor (special guest post)

2011-11-17T18:44:00.003-05:00

This post comes to FCI from Nell Haynes, a Doctoral Candidate in Anthropology at American University. Nell's full bio follows the post.

Norma Duffield Lyon, affectionately known as “Duffy,” passed away on June 27, 2011. She was an 81 year old Iowa woman; both a farmer and an artist. Though her name never appeared in New York galleries, magazines like Artforum, practically every Iowa native gave pause at hearing of her death. For 46 years (from 1960-2006), Duffy sculpted the Iowa State Fair’s Butter Cow.

Norma Duffield Lyon with one of her creations, AP photo via Politico.com

In 2003, after meeting Duffy the first time, I wrote these notes about her process:

Duffy starts with choosing a dairy cattle breed, then works from sketches or photographs. Inside of the display case that is refrigerated to 35 degrees, she places 500-600 pounds of butter (about 2,400 sticks) on an armature made of wood and chicken wire. At first, she adds large handfuls to the frame to approximate the shape of the cow, and eventually fine-tunes the form with smaller additions of butter. Working both with her hands and sculpting tools, the process takes about two weeks.

armature for the Butter Cow, photo by author

Duffy would usually schedule her work to be finished in the first days of the fair, so that attendees could see her in process. Many fairgoers consider the Butter Cow to be the definitive fair experience. Information booth volunteers told us that the most common questions they are asked are, “Where are the bathrooms?" and "Where’s the Butter Cow?” (in the dairy building, of course). Some life-long devotees of the Butter Cow travel from the west coast, or will pay hundreds of dollars to assist with sculpting the tail through the fair’s Blue Ribbon Foundation. When the film crew stopped at a local sandwich shop for lunch, the twenty-year-old cashier told us, “Oh the Butter Cow. That thing used to make me so happy when I was a kid.”

Butter sculpture made its premiere in the United States in 1908 at the Iowa State Fair with the first Buttercow. The sculpture was sponsored by the Beatrice Creamery, who wished to display the success of the local dairy industry and promote local products. The Butter Cow as advertisement worked, with a six percent increase in sales the next year, but it also came to occupy an iconic position for locals. In essence, the Butter Cow came to symbolize enthusiasts see as Midwestern values. When former Midwest Dairy Association spokesperson, Katie Miron speaks of the Dairy industry she uses words like “hard work,” “dedication,” “wholesome” and “nutritious.” She connects these concepts to longstanding “American Values” and suggests that dairy farming, in many ways, represents the long held ideal of hard work leading to success. Butter art, for her is a way to both promote these values within the community, and communicate the values to outsiders.

"Duffy" Lyon in 1961
with her second solo Butter Cow. Photo via TravelIowa

And, like all icons, the Butter Cow adapts to symbolize prevailing social issues and political perspectives. What was once a symbol of progress, now has come to be a nostalgic representation of a disappearing way of life. As family farms disappear and Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations replace them, the Butter Cow stands as a testament to the idealization of the past and the values associated with it.

both photos by the author

With intimate knowledge of dairy farming and cows declining, those with the expertise to sculpt accurate likenesses in butter are disappearing as well. Duffy sculpted a Butter Cow for the Illinois State Fair as well, from 1969-2001. In 2003, many people felt the new sculptor’s work did not live up to the standard Duffy had set. I overheard numerous dairy farmers and others experienced in bovine anatomy talk of the sculpture's shortcomings. Duffy, who had earned a degree in Animal Science from Iowa State University, had an intimate knowledge of bovine anatomy. She sculpted specific breeds, and even the veins on her sculpted udders were anatomically correct. However, when the new sculptor’s cow was unveiled, a long time Dairy Association employee scoffed: “This one just looks like a mule with tits!” As lifeways change, old customs become endowed with new meaning. Butter sculptures may act as a reflector of the agricultural community. As knowledge of small family farms disappears in the wake of the rise of factory farms, these artworks lose part of their realism. However, as contexts change, art and tradition take on new implications and their relevance becomes increasingly valuable as symbols for examining the past and considering the future.

More about the author:

A doctoral candidate at American University with a concentration in Race, Gender, and Social Justice, Nell Haynes holds a Bachelor of Science Degree from Northwestern University in Anthropology and Theater. Her research addresses themes of violence, performance, audience interpretation, and gender and ethnic identity in Latin America. Her dissertation, "Chola in a Choke Hold: Discourses of Violence and Audience Interpretation in Bolivian Lucha Libre," explores the ways indigenous women represent violence, resisting, incorporating, and shifting cultural discourses. She is the recipient of the 2010 Roseberry-Nash Award for best paper in Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology from the American Anthropological Association.

All Stuck Together Pickles

2011-11-08T16:17:00.001-05:00

Two awesome stills from Ozu's 1949 film Late Spring that prove more or less definitively that really, it really is, really all about subtext:

actors: Jun Usami and Setsuko Hara
Arigatou — Ozu's Teapot

Two Interesting Sites About African Food

2011-11-04T09:04:00.004-04:00

A beautiful website clearly made with love, African Chop documents dozens of traditional and popular foods from throughout the entire continent. Here's one example—a fried dough recipe from East Africa.

Maandazi
Every culture seems to have thier own version of fried dough! This East African version has a sweet taste and pleasant chewy texture. You might eat maandazi for breakfast in a Kenyan cafe.

2cups white flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
2 tablespoons sugar
¼ teaspoon cardamom
¼ teaspoon salt
1 egg
¾ cup water
4 cups vegetable oil, for frying
1. Combine flour, baking powder, sugar, cardamom and salt in a large bowl.
2. Whisk egg and water together in a small bowl. Make a well in center of dry ingredients and add egg mixture. Mix together gradually with a fork until mixture forms a soft dough. You can add 1 or 2 tablespoons of flour (one at a time) if it is too sticky. Cover dough with a wet towel or plastic wrap and leave 30 minutes or longer.
3. Heat oil in a deep, heavy pot (cast iron is preferable) until is reaches 360° F. While oil is heating, roll dough out on a floured surface into a rectangle ½ inch thick. Cut into 2-inch rounds with a glass or small biscuit cutter. You can also use a knife to cut rectangles. Form ball again with remaining dough and repeat process until all of dough is cut. You should have about 20 rounds.
4. Fry maandazi in batches of 5, for about 5 minutes per batch, turning to brown both sides. Hint: Turn the mandaazi before it gets too puffy, or the air bubbles will prevent you from turning it at all. I usually turn them several times during frying process. Remove from oil when both sides are golden brown. Serve warm, dipped in powdered sugar if desired.
Yield: about 20 maandazi

The travel site South African Tours and Travel has a wonderful page on traditional South African Food. Here's a small sample:

Umngqusho
A favourite among the Xhosa people and said to be one of mr. Nelson Mandela’s favourites. It is "samp", broken dried maize kernels mixed with beans. After boiling for three hours butter, onions, potatoes, chillies, lemons salt and some oil are added after which it is allowed to simmer on low heat until all ingredients are tender and done.

Typical Xhosa or Zulu dish consisting of samp, rice, beans,
pumpkin and cabbage, almost like Umngqusho.

Blue Rice and Unfamiliar Fishes: Sarah Vowell's Hawaiian History

2011-11-01T20:59:00.002-04:00

A fun audio excerpt from Sarah Vowell's latest book Unfamiliar Fishes provides a brief history of Hawaii illustrated with bento-box style arrangements of Hawaii's traditional and apparently ubiquitous "plate lunch."

Smutty Sweets—Will Cotton's Paintings

2011-10-29T15:53:00.001-04:00

I've read Will Cotton say in a few interviews that he paints landscapes that just happen to be composed of whipped cream, cotton candy, soda, cake, and icing. He claims to feel more akin to the Hudson River School of landscape painters than to someone like Wayne Thiebaud. Now, I get it, but before reading those interviews, I saw in Cotton's paintings pretty much the same thing I see in Emily Eveleth's gigantic, slouching donuts: big, soft bodies, oozing, sensual, id-drenched. Well, truthfully, that's still what I see.

Sometimes Cotton puts actual bodies in his work, though if I had to hang one of these paintings on my living room wall (had to?—I'd kill to, or maybe not kill but lightly maim) I'd prefer one of the obscene smears, muddy pools, or messy piles of soft, sweet matter that imply whole bodies, but hide them from view. The sly ambiguity of a painting like Root Beer Swamp is, to my mind, so much funnier and more mysterious than the fairly clear and unsurprising, though gorgeously executed, goings on in paintings like Frosted or Appenine.

But the most deeply engaging element of Cotton's work is, I think, how he treats time. The bubbles in Root Beer Swamp are on the verge of popping and the custard-slick landslide of Creamy Dream is about to give way again. It's this tension between what is and what is about to be (or, in the post-orgasmic scenarios of paintings like Frosted or Appenine, between what is and what just was) that transcends the surface simplicity of Cotton's sugary subject matter and delivers some serious meat and potatoes of artistic significance.

Root Beer Swamp (2002)

Chocolate Wave (2002)

Frosted (2002)

Summit (2002)

Custard Cascade (2001)

Creamy Dream (200)

Fog (2008)

AppeninPPENINE (2009)

Candy Curls (2005)

Will Cotton's website is here. An interesting interview is here.

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Seriously Expensive Food from Serendipity 3 in NYC

2011-10-25T18:56:00.007-04:00

"Haute Dog"
Price: $69
Ingredients: beef, white truffle oil, salted pretzel bread, white truffle butter, duck foie gras, carmelized Vidalia onions, heirloom tomato ketchup, Dijon mustard, black truffles.
Note: must be ordered 24 hours in advance.

"The Golden Opulence"
Price: $1,000
Ingredients: vanilla bean ice-cream, edible gold leaf, chocolate sauce, exotic candied fruits, gold drageés, truffles, marzipan cherries, all topped with a tiny bowl of "Grand Passion" caviar (golden, salt-free eggs sweetened and infused with passion fruit, orange, Armagnac).
Note: served in a Baccarat goblet with gold spoon; caviar is served with smaller mother-of-pearl spoon, topped with a gilded sugar flower.

The Frrrrozen Haute Chocolate
price: $25,000
Ingredients: 14 rare cocoas, milk, ice cubes, whipped cream, chocolate truffle, truffle shavings, edible gold.
Note: served in a Baccarat crystal goblet with a $14,000 jewel-encrused spoon attached to a gold and diamond bracelet.

More info available on Serendipty 3's website.

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Sakurako Kitsa's Bento Boxes

2011-10-22T14:53:00.005-04:00

Amorette Dye is a complicated person. I figured this this from a brief google search and a look at her pull-no-punches blog, which chronicles her life as a mother and cancer fighter-survivor—as a tough cookie, basically. It doesn't mesh with how I think of tough cookies, but Dye (under the name Sakurako Kitsa) also makes bento boxes. Kick ass bento boxes. Here are a few examples from her enchanting flickr stream: