Here's something you might be interested in.
Ask a Hipster — Advice you didn't know you needed
Big Screen — Movie commentary
Blurt — Music's inside track
Booze News — San Diego spirits
Classical Music — Immortal beauty
Classifieds — Free and easy
Close to Home — What it’s like on the street where you live
Cover Stories — Front-page features
Drinks All Around — Bartenders' drink recipes
Excerpts — Literary and spiritual excerpts
Feast! — Food & drink reviews
Feature Stories — Local news & stories
Fishing Report — What’s getting hooked from ship and shore
From the Archives — Spotlight on the past
Golden Dreams — Talk of the town
The Gonzo Report — Making the musical scene, or at least reporting from it
Letters — Our inbox
Movies@Home — Local movie buffs share favorites
Movie Reviews — Our critics' picks and pans
Musician Interviews — Up close with local artists
Neighborhood News from Stringers — Hyperlocal news
News Ticker — News & politics
Obermeyer — San Diego politics illustrated
Outdoors — Weekly changes in flora and fauna
Overheard in San Diego — Eavesdropping illustrated
Poetry — The old and the new
Reader Travel — Travel section built by travelers
Reading — The hunt for intellectuals
Roam-O-Rama — SoCal's best hiking/biking trails
San Diego Beer — Inside San Diego suds
SD on the QT — Almost factual news
Sheep and Goats — Places of worship
Special Issues — The best of
Street Style — San Diego streets have style
Surf Diego — Real stories from those braving the waves
Theater — On stage in San Diego this week
Tin Fork — Silver spoon alternative
Under the Radar — Matt Potter's undercover work
Unforgettable — Long-ago San Diego
Unreal Estate — San Diego's priciest pads
Your Week — Daily event picks
Judith Moore's food stories
White trash diet, pickling, pies vs. cakes, Hemingway food, apricots, chickens, turkeys
Detail from the cover of Moore's food memoir Never Eat Your Heart Out
Judith Moore came to the Reader in 1982. Moore, awarded two NEA Fellowships for literature and a Guggenheim Fellowship, wrote feature stories for the paper until she died in 2006.
From 1986 onward she served as features editor and was a close advisor to the editor Jim Holman. She urged the hiring of future editors Ernie Grimm and Matt Lickona.
Among her stories she wrote about food. We will run two of her longer stories this Wednesday and Friday.
Excerpts of her food stories:
The farm goes on forever 6-20-85
On the red-checkered gingham tablecloth, Grammy sets down meals that stick to the ribs and do not hide the hard facts of the heavy thingness of things. Her cooking does not conceal being born, hard work, and bloody death; it does not deny its roots, does not smother its origins with sauces. It smells like itself. It uses lard, thick cream, the fatback off the hog, and butter, yellow cornmeal, and flour that comes in cloth sacks from which tea towels and children’s nighties are made. It is mixed with the hands and fried in iron skillets.
The white trash diet 10-30-86
When Priscilla Presley first started dating Elvis, she was a 14-year-old high school student in Germany. Years later, she recalled how Minnie Mae — or "Dodger," as Elvis called her — would cook for the many friends and fans who gathered at Elvis's off-base home. The first meal Dodger cooked for Priscilla was an Elvis favorite: wieners, black-eyed peas, and coconut cake.
You eat in the world 6-8-89
Back home in Del Mar, after he’d eaten his last meal at Korea House, Weinstein, a little bit drunk, sat down with a legal pad and began to write. "I just didn’t know what it was — a restaurant review. Obviously, you had a responsibility to the reader, that was clear. I knew I had to describe the food, I had to say what it cost. But I knew a review had to do something else
Putting up pickles, fruit, relishes is women's work 8-8-91
More than thrift spurred me some summers to fill jars with pickles, fruit, and relishes. I was not the only one. You could walk down our alley and, through open windows, see bare-armed women sweating in kitchens, muscles popping up as they lifted hot jars out of the canning kettle, and you could smell the sharp vinegar and deep sweet fruit. These were women with whom I picked huckleberries along rivers and peaches in nearby orchards. We shared recipes for chow-chow and blueberry conserve
Judith Moore bakes a pie 5-21-92
I felt as a child rolling out mud crusts much as I feel now, wearing an apron in my kitchen, that making a pie I’m handmaiden to a miracle. I will begin, let’s say, with pale green and ruby rhubarb stalks, sour red pie cherries, Macintosh apples, butter, sugar, flour, salt, and shortening. I peel the coarse strings off the outer blade of rhubarb, I pit cherries, peel and core apples. I spoon the raw fruit into the bottom pie shell, daub the fruit with chunks of butter, I dribble sugar and strew flour, the latter for thickening.
Savage breast 11-25-93
Previous to World War II, most of our domestic turkeys’ breastbones rose in a high arch. On a 25- to 30-pound turkey, this lofty Romanesque arch of bone tended to make the bird too large to fit modern ovens. Breeders set about developing a bird with a lower arch to its breast.
Making rice pudding 1-6-94
Then came, what's for me, the scary part: combining the egg-sugar mix with the hot rice and milk. Why this always scares me is if the rice and milk are too hot, over 150 degrees F, the eggs may curdle in the rice, leaving you with bits of scrambled egg in your rice pudding.
No one could recall how to make salt-rising bread 2-3-94
I stumbled along on my own with bread baking, experimenting with flours and recipes. Whole-wheat bread made with half whole wheat and half white flour produced loaves more dense than my husband and children liked. But they regarded with pleasure the Parkerhouse roll recipe made with one-third wholewheat flour and two-thirds white flour.
Company dinner 3-3-94
Because my mother had kept me out of her kitchen, fearing I’d make “messes,” almost every cooking implement I’d received as shower and wedding gifts felt unfamiliar.
Hemingway food 5-12-94
“He is to food what D.H. Lawrence is to sex,” another critic noted, about Hemingway. In “Big Two-Hearted River,” Part I, written early in his career, Hemingway dawdles lovingly over preparation of a campfire meal.
Rabbit stew, rabbit casserole, dumplings 6-23-94
People who travel in France and Italy, where hare and rabbit appear on family and restaurant menus, usually cheer a rabbit dish. They tuck right into rabbit napped in a mustard sauce or rabbit sauteed with paprika and mushrooms or rabbit stuffed with wine-soaked prunes whose seed you replace with chopped rabbit liver.
Sweet-and-sour pork-u-pines... 11-10-94
Mrs. Frederick brought one of two dishes to our church potluck. They were spoken of as “Mrs. Frederick’s famous Swedish meat-balls” and “Mrs. Frederick’s famous sweet-and-sour pork-u-pines.” The pork-u-pine’s “pines” or “quills” were rice Mrs. Frederick blended into ground pork. As the pork cooked, fat melted; pork shrank away from the rice, which left rice grains sticking out of the meatballs.
Barbarian pie plant 3-9-95
From the rhubarb plant’s fist-size heart, red-veined green leaves unfurled out of membranous sheaths. The sheaths that covered the leaves looked almost like skin that covered some internal human organ. I expected to see thumping, hear a slow steady heartbeat.
Spinach not all that successful in San Diego 3-30-95
“it should be planted from October through to March; it should do best at that time. Certainly, it’s not advisable to plant during warm weather. We don’t consider San Diego to be spinach country, not like Salinas and Watsonville and the Bay Area."
The night we served Mighty Dog 12-14-95
Our notion of a foreign meal was La Choy chicken chow mein. We thought canned black olives exotic; if almond slivers were poked into the olives’ hollows, we’d likely say, “What will they think of next?” Garlicky food was exotic (with the exception of garlic bread), as were wines other than Gallo. Game hens were exotic. Eggs Benedict was exotic.
Ice cream is the very promised land 7-24-97
I love to think about ice cream perhaps as much or even more than I like to eat it.You can toss yourself down on the couch, scuff one hot bare foot against the other, and imagine opening your mouth to fresh banana ice cream or pinky-tip-sized fraises des bois ice cream, or apricot-ginger, or cantaloupe, or lemon custard littered with lemon peel threads.
Apricots: Floragold? Goldrich? Moongold? Moorpark? Wenatchee Moorpark? 8-21-97
When my father-in-law telephoned us or dropped by our house to tell us the apricots were ready, we went with boxes and two small buckets. The stepladder waited under the tree. That ladder must have been 20 years old. It was metal and every year showed more rust.
How far we came to be here 11-26-97
A gorgeous bulimic’s fork strayed from broccoli to corn bread dressing and then, suddenly, she ate like one possessed. Her teeth bit down hard on warm turkey and her eyes narrowed.
Fried Butter by Abe Opincar 6-19-03
Having lived in France a couple of times, I knew that walnut oil and crime fraiche (a kind of sour cream) were common in French kitchens and that the French didn’t attach any particular significance to eating them. I also knew that, ounce per ounce, calorie per calorie, walnut oil and crime fraiche weren’t magically more fattening than vegetable oil or plain old American sour cream.
Chicken: The Dangerous Transformation of America’s Favorite Food 10-20-05
You can settle down. It makes the family possible in a way that it wasn't in California. They have indoor jobs year-round, and they're able to bring their wives who are able to get jobs in the poultry plants as well. You have two incomes in an area that has a cost of living a fraction of what it is in most places in California.
Here's something you might be interested in.
Judith Moore's food stories
White trash diet, pickling, pies vs. cakes, Hemingway food, apricots, chickens, turkeys
Judith Moore's food stories
White trash diet, pickling, pies vs. cakes, Hemingway food, apricots, chickens, turkeys
Detail from the cover of Moore's food memoir Never Eat Your Heart Out
Judith Moore came to the Reader in 1982. Moore, awarded two NEA Fellowships for literature and a Guggenheim Fellowship, wrote feature stories for the paper until she died in 2006.
From 1986 onward she served as features editor and was a close advisor to the editor Jim Holman. She urged the hiring of future editors Ernie Grimm and Matt Lickona.
Among her stories she wrote about food. We will run two of her longer stories this Wednesday and Friday.
Excerpts of her food stories:
The farm goes on forever 6-20-85
On the red-checkered gingham tablecloth, Grammy sets down meals that stick to the ribs and do not hide the hard facts of the heavy thingness of things. Her cooking does not conceal being born, hard work, and bloody death; it does not deny its roots, does not smother its origins with sauces. It smells like itself. It uses lard, thick cream, the fatback off the hog, and butter, yellow cornmeal, and flour that comes in cloth sacks from which tea towels and children’s nighties are made. It is mixed with the hands and fried in iron skillets.
The white trash diet 10-30-86
When Priscilla Presley first started dating Elvis, she was a 14-year-old high school student in Germany. Years later, she recalled how Minnie Mae — or "Dodger," as Elvis called her — would cook for the many friends and fans who gathered at Elvis's off-base home. The first meal Dodger cooked for Priscilla was an Elvis favorite: wieners, black-eyed peas, and coconut cake.
You eat in the world 6-8-89
Back home in Del Mar, after he’d eaten his last meal at Korea House, Weinstein, a little bit drunk, sat down with a legal pad and began to write. "I just didn’t know what it was — a restaurant review. Obviously, you had a responsibility to the reader, that was clear. I knew I had to describe the food, I had to say what it cost. But I knew a review had to do something else
Putting up pickles, fruit, relishes is women's work 8-8-91
More than thrift spurred me some summers to fill jars with pickles, fruit, and relishes. I was not the only one. You could walk down our alley and, through open windows, see bare-armed women sweating in kitchens, muscles popping up as they lifted hot jars out of the canning kettle, and you could smell the sharp vinegar and deep sweet fruit. These were women with whom I picked huckleberries along rivers and peaches in nearby orchards. We shared recipes for chow-chow and blueberry conserve
Judith Moore bakes a pie 5-21-92
I felt as a child rolling out mud crusts much as I feel now, wearing an apron in my kitchen, that making a pie I’m handmaiden to a miracle. I will begin, let’s say, with pale green and ruby rhubarb stalks, sour red pie cherries, Macintosh apples, butter, sugar, flour, salt, and shortening. I peel the coarse strings off the outer blade of rhubarb, I pit cherries, peel and core apples. I spoon the raw fruit into the bottom pie shell, daub the fruit with chunks of butter, I dribble sugar and strew flour, the latter for thickening.
Savage breast 11-25-93
Previous to World War II, most of our domestic turkeys’ breastbones rose in a high arch. On a 25- to 30-pound turkey, this lofty Romanesque arch of bone tended to make the bird too large to fit modern ovens. Breeders set about developing a bird with a lower arch to its breast.
Making rice pudding 1-6-94
Then came, what's for me, the scary part: combining the egg-sugar mix with the hot rice and milk. Why this always scares me is if the rice and milk are too hot, over 150 degrees F, the eggs may curdle in the rice, leaving you with bits of scrambled egg in your rice pudding.
No one could recall how to make salt-rising bread 2-3-94
I stumbled along on my own with bread baking, experimenting with flours and recipes. Whole-wheat bread made with half whole wheat and half white flour produced loaves more dense than my husband and children liked. But they regarded with pleasure the Parkerhouse roll recipe made with one-third wholewheat flour and two-thirds white flour.
Company dinner 3-3-94
Because my mother had kept me out of her kitchen, fearing I’d make “messes,” almost every cooking implement I’d received as shower and wedding gifts felt unfamiliar.
Hemingway food 5-12-94
“He is to food what D.H. Lawrence is to sex,” another critic noted, about Hemingway. In “Big Two-Hearted River,” Part I, written early in his career, Hemingway dawdles lovingly over preparation of a campfire meal.
Rabbit stew, rabbit casserole, dumplings 6-23-94
People who travel in France and Italy, where hare and rabbit appear on family and restaurant menus, usually cheer a rabbit dish. They tuck right into rabbit napped in a mustard sauce or rabbit sauteed with paprika and mushrooms or rabbit stuffed with wine-soaked prunes whose seed you replace with chopped rabbit liver.
Sweet-and-sour pork-u-pines... 11-10-94
Mrs. Frederick brought one of two dishes to our church potluck. They were spoken of as “Mrs. Frederick’s famous Swedish meat-balls” and “Mrs. Frederick’s famous sweet-and-sour pork-u-pines.” The pork-u-pine’s “pines” or “quills” were rice Mrs. Frederick blended into ground pork. As the pork cooked, fat melted; pork shrank away from the rice, which left rice grains sticking out of the meatballs.
Barbarian pie plant 3-9-95
From the rhubarb plant’s fist-size heart, red-veined green leaves unfurled out of membranous sheaths. The sheaths that covered the leaves looked almost like skin that covered some internal human organ. I expected to see thumping, hear a slow steady heartbeat.
Spinach not all that successful in San Diego 3-30-95
“it should be planted from October through to March; it should do best at that time. Certainly, it’s not advisable to plant during warm weather. We don’t consider San Diego to be spinach country, not like Salinas and Watsonville and the Bay Area."
The night we served Mighty Dog 12-14-95
Our notion of a foreign meal was La Choy chicken chow mein. We thought canned black olives exotic; if almond slivers were poked into the olives’ hollows, we’d likely say, “What will they think of next?” Garlicky food was exotic (with the exception of garlic bread), as were wines other than Gallo. Game hens were exotic. Eggs Benedict was exotic.
Ice cream is the very promised land 7-24-97
I love to think about ice cream perhaps as much or even more than I like to eat it.You can toss yourself down on the couch, scuff one hot bare foot against the other, and imagine opening your mouth to fresh banana ice cream or pinky-tip-sized fraises des bois ice cream, or apricot-ginger, or cantaloupe, or lemon custard littered with lemon peel threads.
Apricots: Floragold? Goldrich? Moongold? Moorpark? Wenatchee Moorpark? 8-21-97
When my father-in-law telephoned us or dropped by our house to tell us the apricots were ready, we went with boxes and two small buckets. The stepladder waited under the tree. That ladder must have been 20 years old. It was metal and every year showed more rust.
How far we came to be here 11-26-97
A gorgeous bulimic’s fork strayed from broccoli to corn bread dressing and then, suddenly, she ate like one possessed. Her teeth bit down hard on warm turkey and her eyes narrowed.
Fried Butter by Abe Opincar 6-19-03
Having lived in France a couple of times, I knew that walnut oil and crime fraiche (a kind of sour cream) were common in French kitchens and that the French didn’t attach any particular significance to eating them. I also knew that, ounce per ounce, calorie per calorie, walnut oil and crime fraiche weren’t magically more fattening than vegetable oil or plain old American sour cream.
Chicken: The Dangerous Transformation of America’s Favorite Food 10-20-05
You can settle down. It makes the family possible in a way that it wasn't in California. They have indoor jobs year-round, and they're able to bring their wives who are able to get jobs in the poultry plants as well. You have two incomes in an area that has a cost of living a fraction of what it is in most places in California.