The Italian Ministry of Agriculture has a recent history of operating at the curious intersection of neofascism and culinary purism. Zaia’s “zero-tolerance policy” on food fraud became famous with his 2008 bust-up of cheating Brunello di Monalcino producers, which was hailed as a victory for consumers. But in a less-reported crackdown the following year, Zaia, a member of the extreme-right-wing Lega Nord—the political party that has advocated the seccession of Northern Italy—also instituted, with Berlusconi’s backing, a policy banning new “ethnic” restaurants from opening in certain northern Italian cities, including Lucca and Milan. It was a move that the left-wing newspaper La Stampa called “culinary ethnic cleansing.” Reporting on the policy, the Times of London quoted Lucca city spokesman Massimo Di Grazia as saying that “French restaurants would be allowed”; he was “unsure, though, about Sicilian cuisine. It is influenced by Arab cooking.” Continued the Times: “Asked if he had ever eaten a kebab, Mr Zaia said: ‘No—and I defy anyone to prove the contrary. I prefer the dishes of my native Veneto. I even refuse to eat pineapple.’” This, from the country’s Minister of Agriculture.

Sometime in 2001 or 2002, I recall meeting, and discussing pure-ingredient fervence with, Giorgio Alemanno, who was Italy’s Minister of Agriculture at the time (this was two Ministers ago). The man talked about wine with great passion. And like Zaia, he was also an absolute right-wing zealot. As mayor of Rome, Alemanno was famous for praising Mussolini, expelling immigrants, and mowing down gypsy camps. “Upon his election,” reported the Telegraph at the time, Alemanno “was greeted by crowds of supporters, among them skinheads, who chanted ‘Duce! Duce!’ and raised their arms in a fascist salute.” It’s interesting to see Zaia, with Berlusconi’s backing, continuing in this tradition.

Certainly, when we buy mozzarella di bufala—or Brunello di Montalcino—we want to get the real thing. But if we’re enjoying what’s sold as Brunello or bufala, and feel like we’re getting our money’s worth, is the cow/Cab crime really so great?

I’ve previously discussed the thorny issue of the overzealous advocacy of a traditional recipe to the exclusion of all others. In response to Florence Fabricant’s claim, for instance, that “for any pasta all’amatriciana to be authentic, it must be made with guanciale (pork jowl),” not bacon or pancetta, I responded that “too many food writers construct a counterfactual Italy of culinary dogmatism, a population of finger-wagging guanciale zealots, a nation…harrumphing around about how the world is going to shit now that people are making amatriciana with pancetta…People and recipes aren’t anthropological tokens. They’re living things, the products of neural assemblies and proteins and chemicals bouncing across the ages. Narrow your gaze and squint your eyes too tightly in the search for authenticity, and you might miss that whole, beautiful landscape.”

Perhaps I should revise this statement: clearly, there are some finger-wagging guanciale zealots in Italy. They tend to gravitate, it seems, toward the Ministry of Agriculture. The question of whether “zero tolerance,” when it comes to food, is fascist, patronizing, noble—or all three—is certainly one for further contemplation.

As she should.

But with “brine turkey” at #12 on Google Trends today, it’s clear that the turkey-brining craze has hit new levels this year. Is the Food Network driving this bus? Alton Brown (who comes up in the first page of hits) preaches it. Sara Moulton swears by it. Just like roasting your turkey with a wine-soaked piece of cheesecloth was last year, or basting your turkey with orange juice was a few years earlier, it seems as if every Thanksgiving seems to come out with a new line of tools, gadgets, and fool-proof plans for housewives all across America to jump all over like the fall fashion line so they don’t serve the notorious dry piece of poultry to their in-laws. This year, there was an entire section of my local grocery store dedicated to brining needles, brining bags, and other brining accessories.

Don’t get me wrong: brining works. (On why it works, I’m sure the Food Network is running Good Eats Turkey episodes left and right, but Serious Eats really nails it here.) But brining can’t save an overcooked bird. It also takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of space, and there are more important things to be worrying about before Thanksgiving Day (like making sure your fantasy football team is set for the shortened week).

In my case, brining the 28¼-pound turkey that I acquired from Andrea would have required, at the least: (1) a bathtub; (2) a time machine, to go back another day; and (3) cruelty to animals (it’s considered really bad form to brine a turkey while it’s still alive).

If you haven’t brined, don’t worry about it. Forget brining. Get rid of your brining guilt. Just don’t overcook the thing. The trends come and go, but in reality, your turkey is dry because it’s very lean meat, and more often than not, you, your mom, and your great aunt cook it too long, perhaps because you follow some misguided FDA directive, a recipe from cookbook from too long ago, or (wince) the directions on the turkey wrapper or supermarket pamphlet about minutes per pound.

So instead of buying another gadget that will inevitably sit in your kitchen drawer for the rest of eternity, I suggest buying a temperature-alarm thermometer that will let you know to pull the turkey at around 160 degrees Fahrenheit. Unlike whatever trend may hit next year, this kitchen tool will be your friend year after year. Or you could go the old-school route and separate the legs from the rest of the body and roast them separately, as the breast cooks a bit faster. Either way, you don’t need to be scouring the web for the next big answer when the answer is pretty simple—plus it makes gravy all the more viable.

Let’s just hope, for humor’s sake, that home sous-vide-ing is next year’s trend.

Housewives with immersion circulators fretting over sealing numbers?

Oh hell yes.

[Guest post by chef Justin Yu]

Florence Fabricant, in a recent article, embodies a common attitude amongst American food writers when she reveals the results of an exhaustive search for the true recipe for bucatini all’amatriciana, one of Italy’s most beloved pasta dishes: “After half a dozen plates of it during a recent trip to Italy, one detail became clear: for any pasta all’amatriciana to be authentic, it must be made with guanciale—cured, unsmoked pig jowl.”

Although it would be a difficult hypothesis to test empirically, Andrea and I had the same immediate reaction to this statement—his from growing up in Italy, mine from living there for a while: in Italy, almost nobody would care in the least bit whether pasta all’amatriciana were “authentic.” People would care whether it tasted good.

Now, just because people in Italy wouldn’t care whether amatriciana were authentic doesn’t mean we shouldn’t. The preservation of culinary history, lest old recipes be lost in time, is a noble endeavor. But historical documentation doesn’t seem to be the purpose of the food writers who go around enforcing amatriciana’s authenticity. It’s more the idea that there’s one, and only one, way to make this dish—a blend of I’ve-been-there-and-you-haven’t self-righteousness with cultural/culinary naïveté.

To wit: “Italians take guanciale for granted, but it’s fairly new to American kitchens. Almost all the recipes in American cookbooks,” continues Fabricant, “call for ordinary bacon—which is too smoky—or Italian pancetta, which is too lean…‘Good guanciale makes all the difference,’ said the actor Michael Tucker, an accomplished cook, who, with his wife, the actress Jill Eikenberry, has a house in Umbria. In his book, ‘Living in a Foreign Language’ (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2007), he describes buying guanciale from Ugo Mazzoli, the butcher in Campello sul Clitunno, near his house.”

Guanciale is lovely in amatriciana; few would dispute that. But Simone, the Genoese guy who taught me to make amatriciana, does it with pancetta—like his mother did. Would Simone love a well-made amatriciana with smoky American bacon, too? Of course he would. He’s not a lever-pulling lab rat. He’s just a dude who, like many other Italians, likes good food.

Is amatriciana made with guanciale? Yes.

Is it made with pancetta? Yes.

Is it made with Tyrolean speck? With French lardons? Probably, somewhere in Italy, yes.

To illustrate the absurdity of Fabricant’s point of view, Andrea offers the following hypothetical: imagine an Italian food critic undertaking a careful investigative journey through the American pastoral hinterland in search of the authentic hamburger. She tries a half-dozen burgers, reads a few cookbooks, and concludes, in her article in Corriere della Sera, that “for a hamburger to be authentically American, it must be made only with Wisconsin cheddar cheese, lettuce, and tomato, and it must be served with french fries.”

Fabricant is not wrong, exactly, about how to make a good plate of bucatini. But she, like too many food writers, constructs a counterfactual Italy of culinary dogmatism, a population of finger-wagging guanciale zealots, a nation full of Ugo Mazzolis harrumphing around about how the world is going to shit now that people are making amatriciana with pancetta.

People and recipes aren’t anthropological tokens. They’re living things, the products of neural assemblies and proteins and chemicals bouncing across the ages. Narrow your gaze and squint your eyes too tightly in the search for authenticity, and you might miss that whole, beautiful landscape.

Worth a thousand words?

With taste and smell—the so-called “chemical” senses, which are more complex (humans have about 400 different types of olfactory receptors) and less well understood than the others, we don’t have the luxury of those points of reference. That’s why we so often resort to loose analogies—“tastes like chicken”—and it’s also why reproducing tastes and smells is so difficult (grape soda doesn’t taste much like grapes, and nobody’s yet synthesized a bottle of 1945 Pétrus—an activity that would surely yield tremendous profit).

To challenge this barrier, we resort to analogy. Coffee tastes like nuts and chocolate; Sauvignon Blanc smells like grapefruit and cat pee. In a Sauternes, you might sense the brine of the first green olive you tasted in Italy; in a Pedro Ximénez sherry, the viscous maple syrup that your grandmother once drizzled on your pancakes.

But how carefully are we really choosing these adjectives and analogies? How often do they correspond to real chemical commonalities? Does that matter? Do the analogies more frequently serve a more poetic (or at least suggestive) purpose, forging new neural assemblies that connect relatively arbitrary taste and smell memories with each other—connections that, reinforced over time, turn into sensory reality?

Two papers at last month’s meeting of the American Association of Wine Economists in Reims (this is my second of two articles about the conference) investigated this question with respect to the wine industry, which is, if not a microcosm of all consumer-products industries, at least an increasingly apt caricature of them. While creative adjectivism has long characterized in the wine world, the practice in other taste industries—chocolaty coffee, metallic fish, grassy honey, peaty whiskey—is now ascendant.

The canonical work in the wine-adjective field is Princeton economist Richard Quandt’s “On Wine Bullshit” (a riff on his fellow Princetonian Harry Frankfurt’s “On Bullshit”). Writes Quandt:

Two things have to be true before wine ratings can become useful for the average wine drinker. Since there are many wine writers, and there is a substantial overlap in the wines they write about (particularly Bordeaux wines), it is important that there be substantial agreement among them. And secondly, what they write must actually convey information; that is to say, it must be free of bullshit. Regrettably, wine evaluations fail on both counts.

At the AAWE meeting, Coco Krumme of M.I.T., who is also a Fearless Critic food writer, studied data from critical descriptions of more than 3,500 wines from recent vintage years, ranging from $4.99 to $137.99 in retail price, and employed a Bayesian filter to “find those words that best predict the price category of a bottle” (abstract here). She found that “about 65% of commonly occurring words are non-overlapping.” Words like “old,” “elegant,” “intense,” “supple,” “velvety,” “smoky,” “tobacco,” and “chocolate” predict expensive wines; “pleasing,” “refreshing,” “value,” “enjoy,” “bright,” “light,” “fresh, “tropical,” “pink,” “fruity,” “good,” “clean,” “tasty,” and “juicy” predict cheap wines. As for suggested pairings, “steak” and “shellfish” predict expensive wines; “chicken” predicts cheap wines.

Perhaps most amusingly, Krumme reports that “words with the same meaning are preferentially used for expensive over cheap wines: for example, ‘vintage’ is six times more likely to describe an expensive wine; ‘harvest’ is used for cheap wines.”

Economist Carlos Ramirez of George Mason University, meanwhile, ran a regression (abstract here) on a data set of 800 Wine Spectator descriptions of Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon wines from for wines from the 2004, 2005, and 2006 vintages, and found a length-of-review effect—that is, “longer wine descriptions are associated with higher prices—a 10 percent increase in the length of a wine description (adding about 23 characters) is associated with a statistically significant increase of 4 to 13 percent to the price of the bottle.” Like Krumme, Ramirez also found some particular wine descriptors (about 20 of the 208 he looked at) that, controlling for other variables, signal higher wine prices.

If you’re familiar with wine ratings and reviews, neither of these results might surprise you. But the interesting, unanswered question is: which way does the causality go?

Here are three potential theories:

(1) Expensive wines are generally fairly similar to each other, and their particular properties lead critics to refer more frequently to certain flavors (e.g. chocolate) and to write longer reviews of these wines. That is, there’s just a specific expensiveness to expensive wines that explains these differences. (Quandt would likely doubt this, and the empirical evidence, as described in The Wine Trials, would be against it, too.)

(2) Tasting is not done blind, and thus critics are influenced to write more and refer to certain flavors when they taste expensive wines.

(3) Tasting is done blind, but the sensory reviews of expensive wines are edited after the fact by editors who know what the wines are.

Regardless of which of these theories is correct, what’s highly likely is that the descriptors are self-fulfilling—reading an expensive wine description primes the drinker to have a more typically expensive wine experience. That is, the adjectives and analogies we read in wine reviews fuse with our experience of drinking the wine in such a complete way that the liquid’s intrinsic and extrinsic properties become inseperable.

Is this why it’s so difficult to undermine the conventional wisdom that very expensive wine is worth the money?

Maybe we just synthesize whatever we seek, creating value as we go: search for chocolate, and it will magically appear.

It’s one thing for a food writer to opine about which pizza style is his or her favorite—everybody seems to do it, whether in New York, New Haven, or Naples.

But it’s a breathtaking mistake for a seasoned food writer like Alan Richman, in his widely read new GQ evaluation of the top 25 pizzerias in America, first to completely misstate the definition of Italian DOC pizza; then to imply, without evidence, that the whole Italian population supports that misstated definition; and, finally, to use that misstated definition as the basis for a condemnation of the entire pizza culture in Italy. He writes:

“ITALIANS ARE WRONG. Not about cars or suits. About pizza, and they’re not entirely mistaken about that, only about crusts and buffalo-milk mozzarella…the Italians are proudest when they can substitute fresh mozzarella from the milk of buffaloes and label their pies Margherita DOC…In my opinion, buffalo mozzarella is pizza’s second-worst topping, exceeded only by whole anchovies… All that excess liquid has to go somewhere, which is why the bottom crust turns to mush, not that it was ever particularly crispy…this is why Italians need a knife and fork. This is why our pizzas are better than theirs.”

“The Italians are proudest” when they can substitute in buffalo-milk mozzarella and “label their pies Margherita DOC”?

The Italians aren’t wrong—Mr. Richman is, about just about everything. First of all, Margherita DOC doesn’t require buffalo-milk mozzarella. The rules set out by the Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana allow for either (1) mozzarella di bufala from Campania (water-buffalo-milk mozzarella); (2) mozzarella STG fior di latte appennino meridionale DOP, (a regular cow’s-milk mozzarella that can come from Campania, Molise, Basilicata, Calabria, Puglia, or Lazio); or (3) another cow’s-milk fior di latte. This from the statutory definition:

“Mozzarella: mozzarella di bufala campana D.O.P., mozzarella S.T.G. fior di latte dell’appennino meridionale D.O.P. o altro fiordilatte certificato.”

Ditto for the rules for pizza Margherita as set out by the Italian Ministry of Agriculture, which not only states that either bufala or fior di latte is acceptable, but even gives a different name to a bufala pizza. Under the Italian Ministry’s definition, the regular “Napoletana Margherita” has fior di latte, not bufala; then there’s “Napoletana Margherita Extra,” which calls for bufala:

“Agli ingredienti base devono essere aggiunti, per la «pizza Napoletana Marinara», l’aglio e l’origano; per la «pizza Napoletana Margherita Extra», mozzarella di bufala campana DOP, basilico fresco e pomodoro fresco; per la «pizza Napoletana Margherita», la mozzarella STG o fior di latte Appennino meridionale e basilico fresco.”

But Mr. Richman doesn’t stop at getting the definition wrong; he also suggests that all Italians, if offered the choice, would choose bufala—implying that they embrace, or somehow aren’t bothered by, the sogginess of the crust. Is Mr. Richman—who has “traveled 20,000 miles” in researching this extensive set of pizza rankings—unaware that the fior di latte-vs.-bufala crust-moisture debate is a raging, unsettled controversy in Italian gastronomical circles, both inside and outside of Naples? This is one of the world’s great food cultures we’re talking about, and its culinary community deserves better than the naïve assumption that they all just like their crusts soggy.

“I’ve eaten in Naples,” explains Mr. Richman. But he must not have eaten at (arguably) the city’s most famous pizzeria, Da Michele, which uses only fior de latte d’Agerola, and never mozzarella di bufala; they don’t like the excessive liquid that drips from bufala. And although there are many pizzerias in Naples that do put bufala on pizza, just about all of them also offer fior di latte, and customers are divided between the two options. In other regions of Italy, in my experience, the use of bufala is even less common.

To misunderstand the cultural norms of a foreign country is forgivable; we’ve all been guilty of that at some point or other. But to flippantly trash another country’s food culture on the basis of a set of statutory rules that one hasn’t even looked up is irresponsible journalism.

I think a retraction should be in order.

Wine is still the thing to accompany a family dinner or elaborate restaurant meal in southern Europe, which is why their per-capita wine consumption remains higher than ours. But because Americans increasingly tend to order wine at bars, and Europeans generally don’t, this gap is closing rapidly. The US now beats Italy in total wine consumption.

In Italy, amongst young professionals, a far more popular nighttime endeavor than going to the sort of upmarket (or so-called “gastronomic”) restaurant where you’d order wine is getting a big group together at a pizzeria. And contrary to US stereotypes, the Italians actually almost never drink wine with pizza—it’s strictly beer (or Coca-Cola).

In most of Spain, it’s the cervecería—not the wine bar—that defines the nighttime casual-eating-with-groups culture, and there, draft beer (“caña,” typically poured in tiny glasses) is beautifully paired with what’s often eaten: raciones of fatty jamón iberico and sweet pan con tomate; marinated fish, garlicky shellfish, and vinegary vegetables; boiled octopus drizzled with olive oil and sprinkled with paprika; or pinxtos/canapés (bites of food served on slices of baguette), which often come free with each round of drinks.

When Spanish or Italian beer comes fresh from the tap, its elegant taste profile can yield extraordinary pleasure. Mahou, Nastro Azzurro, Estrella Damm, Forst, and Cruzcampo may not be dissimilar from each other, but they’re all models of balance, clean, bright, and refreshingly bitter. They’re usually poured properly—allowing the head to collect into something creamy and dense—and, like dry Basque sidra, they’re well suited to the occasion, which is precisely what seems to have been lost in translation in America’s rapid adoption of wine as a cocktail.

Even at Spain’s expensive restaurants, beer is often offered as an apéritif—an alternative to dry Manzanilla or Oloroso sherry, before you start with the wine—something I’ve rarely seen elsewhere.

Because Spanish and Italian beer doesn’t have the sort of hopped-up, boozed-out complexity that caters to critics—it’s not trying to be Belgian or Oregonian—you won’t see them much at, say, New York’s beer bars, and there’s a popular misconception that these countries just don’t do beer well. (That misconception is backed up by the fact that when you order, say, Peroni by the bottle at a bar in the US, it almost always turns out to be something skunky and/or honeyed and legitimately disgusting. Don’t ever order Italian beer when it’s imported in bottles. But that’s an article for another day.)

Yes, the wine bar concept is spreading through southern Europe, and that might be applying a gentle upward pressure on wine consumption amongst the trendsters there.

But the wine bar is still really an American thing, and it hasn’t really yet permeated mainstream yuppie culture anywhere across the Atlantic. Generally speaking, in Europe, the words “wine bar” signal a New York fetish nightclub, or a restaurant with terrible pan-Asian cuisine and an overpriced list of Champagne magnums and Grey Goose bottle service. These places typically serve crappy imported beer, and often don’t even run a tap—the ultimate fuck you to the country’s authentic beer culture.

Why must hot bodies and a well-conceived drink program so rarely overlap?

On culinary televangelism and the Parkerization of cuisine

In the introduction to his book La Cocina al Desnudo (roughly “The Kitchen Laid Bare”), the chef Santi Santamaría writes: “one of the greatest challenges faced by today’s chefs is to avoid becoming the court jesters of the snobs and the posh.”

One of the highlights of FENAVIN, Spain’s national wine fair, was a spirited hour-long debate on the status of Spanish cuisine between Mr. Santamaría (Santceloni, Racò de Can Fabes, EVO, Tierra; on the right end in the photo), one of Spain’s great culinary traditionalists, and José Carlos Capel (on the left end), a well-regarded food critic for El País who, generally speaking, embraces the avant-garde.

It was a debate to which Ferran Adrià, one of the pioneers of molecular gastronomy (the culinary movement to which Santamaría alternately refers as “cocina de la vanguardia,” “tecnoemocional,” and “cocina del laboratorio”), was surely invited—and didn’t come.

Perhaps Mr. Adrià felt no need to defend himself. In late April 2009, his restaurant, elBulli, was named the best in the world for the fourth year in a row in the annual survey of the World’s Top 50 restaurants, by the British Restaurant Magazine, while Santamaría is absent from the list entirely. Fellow molecular gastronomy houses The Fat Duck (UK), Noma (Denmark), Mugaritz (Spain), and El Celler de Can Roca (Spain) round out the rest of the top five. (The chefs of Noma and Mugaritz studied with Adrià.)

Santamaría, without being so immodest as to suggest that he, too, deserved at least some ranking in the top 50, hinted at the absurdity—and it really is an absurdity—that food critics and publications from the US and UK, regions mostly devoid of complex food traditions of their own, should be the judges of whether fideua, bollito misto, and blanquette de veau are now hopelessly passé, and whether a kitchen need be outfitted with a centrifuge, liquid nitrogen tanks, and stockpiles of sodium alginate and calcium chloride in order to be considered one of the world’s best.

That question is at the crux of a crisis in modern cuisine—a culture war. Although these men that have learned to make human beings breathe like dragons have been anointed as philosopher-kings by America’s culinary televangelists and food bloggers, what exactly is the composition of this jury? Does it represent any depth of food education? Any geographical breadth?

Restaurant’s top 50 list, which is determined by more than 800 food critics from around the world and sponsored by S. Pellegrino, is clearly influential—influential enough, at least, to come up in the discussion between Messrs. Santamaría and Capel.

But what are we to make of the fact that, the entire continent of Asia, home to the world’s greatest culinary bounty, has only two restaurants in the top 50—Les Creations de Narisawa in Tokyo (#20) and Iggy’s in Singapore (#45)—and they’re both French? Even more preposterously, the list tells us that the three best actual Asian restaurants in the world are in Sydney (Tetsuya’s, #17), New York (Masa, #27), and London (Nobu, #34).

As the wine guru Jancis Robinson has indirectly asked, what does it say about the composition and wisdom of the food media elite if this is their jury verdict?

Is this the Parkerization of the food world?

Yes, chemical pyrotechnics and scattered plating make for good food porn in magazines. And yes, it is interesting, at least intellectually, to watch the arcs of cuisine and modern art intersect in molecular gastronomy. Yet the notion that one must be a molecular gastronomist to be truly great restaurant—and that is, increasingly, the consensus view—is poisonous. It devalues both subtlety and directness. It devalues terroirs of all different sorts. It devalues the commitment to any one culinary tradition. It devalues the multi-generational emotional and even theoretical structures that define many great restaurants. And above all, it devalues pure deliciousness.

Are the world’s greatest chefs and restaurants—as many of its greatest winemakers and wineries have irreversibly done—being forced to reinvent themselves as pretentious pleasure pumps for the adolescent palates of an army of camera-wielding tourists who write for food blogs and lifestyle magazines?

Court jesters, indeed.

Apparently Stephen Colbert was amused by our paper investigating whether people could taste the difference between pâté and dog food.

His conclusion was pretty funny.

The article has just been posted as a working paper (pdf) with the American Association of Wine Economists.

You can pre-order the book on amazon.com, which should receive stock within the week. The book will soon arrive at DC area stores, including Politics & Prose, Kramerbooks, B&N, Borders, and Books a Million.

In putting together the book, I worked with a team of critics and editors that included Alexis Herschkowitsch, Erin McReynolds, Rebecca Markovits, Justine Chiou, Coco Krumme, Sandra Di Capua, and Christina Dahlman.

The Fearless Critic Austin Restaurant Guide, Second Edition (Fearless Critic Media, 592 pages, paperback, $15.95, distributed by Workman) has been released. The book’s scope has been vastly increased, from 390 to 480 restaurants in the greater Austin, Texas area, including Round Rock and the Hill Country. It’s now available on amazon.com, and here’s a list of the Austin-area bookstores and retail stores that sell the book.

My devoted and patient team of editors and critics includes Rebecca Markovits and Monika Powe Nelson—the co-authors of the First Edition (released in 2006)—along with Alexis Herschkowitsch, Erin McReynolds, and Nat Davis.