Category: Food and Drink

I’ll let you all bicker as to whether the stylized fact is true only in the USA, or across the world.  I don’t know if the following explanation is true, but finally I have heard an explanation which might plausibly be true:

…many traditional desserts require a great deal of work to make, at least when compared to stir-frying some shreds of this and that together.  Most restaurateurs are simply unwilling to go to the trouble, particularly since the profit margin on desserts is generally smaller than that on the main dishes.  The same phenomenon occurs in other ethnic restaurants.  In the old country, desserts and snack foods are made in specialized shops where the volume keeps labor costs down [TC: and freshness up…btw, the emphasis is added].

That is from A. Zee’s Swallowing Clouds: A Playful Journey Through Chinese Culture, Language, and Culture.  The author also suggests that the Chinese prefer to eat desserts apart from regular mealtimes; for some reason this is supposed to lower the quality of restaurant-based desserts.  I prefer the first explanation.  Indian sweet shops are fantastic, but U.S.-based Indian restaurants have only so-so desserts.  Comments are open, I am eager to hear your opinions…

Jess tells me that enthusiasm is more important than definitive knowledge, that many diners simply want a server to help them get excited about something.

The article had two good runner-up sentences:

"Some people are interested in having the experience of being disappointed," Tina says.

And:

"People [in restaurants] are hungry, and then they’re drinking," he noted. "Two of the worst states that people can be in."

The article, which concerns a restaurant critic working for a week as a waiter, is interesting and humorous throughout.

I buy dark chocolate when I should not.  But I buy for the immediate moment.  I have no problem buying less than my impulsive self ideally might desire.  I run out of the stuff quickly, even though when I run out part of me wishes I had bought more (this is similar to "gamma discounting.")

I need only make fewer trips to the store.  Each time I go, I should fill the cart with milk, grapefruit juice, and cereal, so I need not return for a long time.  Fewer store trips mean fewer chances to be weak.  Being myopic in my weakness of will, I won’t much adjust using larger chocolate inventories.

Chocolate below 70 percent is not worth my while.

The best solution to my self-constraint problem is to tell my wife where the chocolate is hidden.

Sadly, I know she does not like the 85 percent.

Today we auctioned off the rights to the leftovers.  The winner basically paid the tip so all went home happy.

English cuisine was historically bad in the cities because England urbanised fast and hard in advance of good transport and good food storage – hence corned beef, pickled everything, and mushy tinned peas. After that it’s a matter of lack-of-demand creating lack-of-supply – until recently. Multi-ethnic British cities are a fantastic place to find food these days (it ain’t the 50s any more, folks).

That is from reader comments on Brad DeLong’s blog, do have opinions on why British food was so bad?

Pour into a tall, vertical glass:

If you pour champagne into a tall, slender glass, you’ll probably serve yourself less than if you pour it into a short, fat glass. But the human mind plays tricks, so you’ll almost surely think it’s the other way around.

Brian Wansink, professor of marketing, applied economics and nutritional science at Cornell University, has spent years studying how the shape of containers influences our consumption, and he has weighed in with a new study just in time for New Year’s celebrations.

In the study, published in the current issue of the British Medical Journal, Wansink and Koert van lttersum, assistant professor of marketing at Georgia Institute of Technology, demonstrate that even professional bartenders get the amount wrong much of the time, although their expertise improves with experience.

Three separate studies yielded similar conclusions, regardless of the beverage. Teenagers concerned about their health poured less fruit juice when they were given tall, slender glasses than when they were given short, squat tumblers, although they believed the opposite was true.

What is at work here is how we measure quantities in the mind’s eye, Wansink says. We tend to rely more on a vertical than a horizontal measurement, so it appears at first that a taller glass holds more than a shorter one, even if the short glass is wider. "Elongation," to use the researchers’ word, is the trickster here.

Here is the full story, and thanks to www.geekpress.com for the pointer.

Brad DeLong’s daring but unsound cinnamon gambit led me to wonder what a recipe is intended to do.  I see at least two possibilities:

1. A food recipe is designed to put you on the highest indifference curve possible, taking into account market prices and constraints.

2. A food recipe is designed to taste as good as possible, ignoring market prices and constraints.  Bring on the caviar.

Cookbooks by famous chefs are more likely to fall into #2.  The chef makes money not just from the cookbook but also from TV appearances, endorsements, and other ancillary products and activities.  You might resent having spent so much on the saffron, but if it tasted good you will praise and value the chef.  Few people will visit the restaurant of a man who shows you how to find cheaper potatoes.

Knowing this, how should you adjust recipes?  It depends on the quality/price gradient.  You could cut back on the most expensive ingredients, cut back on all ingredients, or perhaps add more spices and buy a quality of meat lower than suggested.  At the very least you should cut back on your labor input and take shortcuts.  This is in fact what most home cooks do, relative to the recipes they use.  You don’t really peel all those boiled almonds, do you?  Don’t feel guilty, just ponder the first-order conditions, smile, and gulp it down.

If you have a not-very-clearly-branded cookbook, you might be better off following the instructions to the letter.  They are hoping to make money from happy book buying cooks, not ancillary food products.  If the recipe is old enough, it is hard to predict the direction in which relative prices have changed, but at the very least wages have probably gone up.  So you are back to making adjustments and taking some extra shortcuts to stay on your highest possible indifference curve.

If the recipe is from a supermarket, cut back on the high-margin items.  Use more canned goods and less expensive cheese, relative to what is suggested.  (Hey, what about blog recipes?)

Lunchtime Pho with Alex contributed to these ideas; I enjoyed the food but I believe the restaurant followed #1.  I spent $6.45.  Comments are open.

Brad DeLong’s biggest mistake.

Read the comments as well, and do always use freshly ground cinnamon or cinnamon stick when you cook.  Discard any recipe which calls for previously ground cinnamon.

That is the Society for Quantative Gastronomy.  Here is the conference, coming up this spring in southwestern France.  Thanks to Rebecca Jarmas for the pointer.

Like to shop? [In Lexington] you’ll find North Carolina’s largest True Value Hardware store, the largest dealer of Boyd Bear® Collectibles, and a dress and quilt fabric shop.

Here is the link.  But no, I want barbecue, and your recommendations are most welcome.  I am hoping that Kevin Grier, now visiting at Duke, will drive out to meet me for some pulled pork.

Here is the restaurant:

Here is the menu and phone number.  Here is my previous post on Lockhart, Texas.

Here is the transportation:

Kevin Drum asks:

What’s the scoop here? Why is it that even with lots of money and chefs who clearly know how to produce three-star food, American restaurants still can’t measure up to their French counterparts?

The context is the new Michelin guide, and whether four New York restaurants deserved three stars.  (BTW, even if you think they were deserving, as I do, count the relative number of stars in NYC vs. Paris; NYC does top San Sebastian, Spain, but not by so much).  His commentators make many good points, most of all about differences in ingredient supply networks. 

The better pure ingredients in Paris include amazing cheese shops, perfect bread, and fresher strawberries.  On the macro scale, this translates into superior haute cuisine.

America, in contrast, excels in multi-dimensionality.  Move away from refined Michelin-style cooking, and New York City is usually better than Paris.  We have better Indian food, Columbian food, Afghan food, Chinese food, sushi, burger joints, street pretzels, and so on.  Yet there is probably no single cuisine where NYC is #1 in the world, precisely because American ingredients are not up to scratch.

It is no accident that France specializes in uni-dimensional food competition, whereas the United States scatters its culinary energies in many directions.  By choosing food networks which emphasize speed, reliability, and cheapness over perfection, the U.S. makes possible many more ethnic cuisines, and it also guarantees a better shot at cheap prices.  In short, New York offers more choice. 

…Americans are not consuming more carbohydrates and trans fats because McDonald’s is super sizing our dinners.  Nor is our diet changing because Uncle Sam is subsidizing corn.  Rather, Americans are eating poorly because of a much more fundamental change in how we eat, specifically, the rise of snacking.  In fact, the amount we eat and drink between meals accounts for nearly all the growth in our consumption of carbohydrates and fats over the past thirty years.  Perhaps the biggest source of America’s recent weight gain and sugary diet is not so much the value "meal" but the simple snack.

…the free market has caught up with American food culture…With snacking, food is no longer about sustenance or even sociability: it is about amusement and self-medication.  We now eat to relieve our stress, to alleviate our boredom, or simply make ourselves feel better.  Food, in short, has become our drug of choice.  And the types of foods that are best suited for these psychological tasks are the very ones that cause us so many health problems, that is, sweets, fats, and refined carbohydrates.  In other words, the ultimate source of the changing American diet goes beyond McDonald’s, corn syrup, or the food pyramid; the ultimate source is the American way of life.

That is from J. Eric Oliver’s excellent Fat Politics: The Real Story Behind America’s Obesity Epidemic.  Here is Steve Levitt’s positive review.  Here is an LA Times review.

What about me? I am not going to exercise beyond my current levels of tennis, basketball, and walking are enough.  So I could become thinner in three ways.  First, I have recently switched from Raisin Bran to Spelts cereal in the morning.  Second, I prefer mineral water to Coke, but Szechuan restaurants do not serve the former.  I am waiting for Markets in Everything, and in the meantime I am not willing to give up Dan Dan Noodles or eat them with plain ice water or tea.  Third, in the last year I have started snacking on high-quality dark chocolate.  I have yet to decide whether I wish to fight this new source of additional calories…

Addendum: Comments are now open…

Lockhart, a town of about 11,000, has a hollowed out core, perhaps due to the local Wal-Mart.  The architecture dates from the 1890s.  The large County Courthouse is in the style of the French Second Empire.  German names such as Vogel are stencilled on the buildings, although mostly Mexicans hang around downtown these days.  In both look and feel, it reminds me of the more obscure German parts of southern Brazil.  Yet it is only half an hour from Austin.

The best barbecue places in Lockhart open between 7 and 10 a.m..  The pitmasters tell me they have to be there anyway, to look after the meats.  They can close as early as 4 p.m.

The ingredients are simple: salt and pepper rub and meat to die for.  Slow cooking in open pits.  Schmitty’s lets its pit spill over onto the restaurant floor; be careful not to step or fall into the fire when you walk in the door.  Did I mention that town fire and safety regulations are lax and they have a friendly insurance agent with a taste for barbecue?

Barbecue came from the Caribbean to the Carolinas and then to Tennessee; Tennessee migrants brought it to Texas, where it mixed with the indigenous Mexican barbecue tradition.  Germans set up meat markets in Lockhart (drawing supplies from the Chisholm trail cattle drives) and shortly thereafter attached barbecue pits, circa 1900.  The food owes as much to German sausage-making and the Schlachtplatte [slaughter plate] tradition as to traditional barbecue.  Sauce is frowned upon.  In Kreuz Market the food comes on plain paper and you eat with your fingers.  Sauerkraut and German potatoes are the two most prominent side dishes.

All other barbecue will now taste worse.  At what discount rate, or at what implied rate of memory deterioration, am I better off for having been there?  Or do seek something other than happiness through food?