Kitchen Chick

Copyrighting Food

A friend tossed this tidbit of news my way. Meg Hourihan of megnut.com responds to the Food & Wine article where Steve Shaw from eGullet.com proposes copyrighting recipes as a response to copycat chefs plagarizing recipes from other top chefs.

Says Pete Wells of Food & Wine: "Shaw told me he hoped to convene a summit meeting with some of the smartest people in the food world to hammer out a workable model for copyrighting food. First, he’d propose changing the copyright code, possibly by making cuisine a subdivision of the existing category for sculpture or acknowledging recipes as a form of literary expression. For enforcement, Shaw leans toward creating a system like ASCAP, an association that collects composers’ royalties for public performances of songs—on the radio, in nightclubs and so on."

Although this is not meant to copyright grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup, I do hope this will pass as an interesting thought-experiment but not actually implemented. (Even Steve Shaw admits it's unlikely to work.) As Meg at megnut.com wrote, "Copyright goes against the whole spirit of what we all do and love. Cooking is all about giving so others feel good!"

Check out the complete Food & Wine article for the full scoop.

eGullet 2006 Heartland Dinner

Clockwise, starting from the top: Squash blossoms waiting to be stuffed, peaches grilling, zucchini roulade.

The most anticipated event of the weekend was the big Saturday night dinner, where eGullet members displayed their culinary prowess and cooked a multi-course feast fit for royalty. With time a-wasting, after the wine tasting, Steven Shaw and Tammy put together a timeline for the courses and everyone got to cooking.  Well, most of us. I just got in the way with my camera.

The craziness reminded me of some of my and Joe's early group Thanksgiving dinners, where nine chefs stuffed themselves into our kitchen. The turkey's roasting in the oven, three more dishes are on the stove top -- each with its own chef -- more prep work is happening on the counters, and everyone gets elbowed and stepped on everywhere... until the last moment when the dishes are done, the turkey is resting, and the gravy chef shoos everyone out, out, out-of-my-way, out to the dining room! (Making gravy is serious business.)  And the craziness collapses to one stove top burner where the gravy chef is whisking frantically and swearing (just a little) while her mom hovers, with words of assistance just a breath away. Then some unlucky person gets pegged to carve the turkey ("unlucky" because none of us knows how to carve a turkey), and the feast begins.

Except there's a lot more room at Great Oak, and thus there was correspondingly less elbowing. And with lots of last minute cooking for the dishes, there was plenty of space between the courses, giving this meal a leisurely quality and creating a memory of a dream-like moment stretched and suspended in time.  (The absinthe may have helped.)

eGullet 2006 Heartland Gathering Wine Tasting

Saturday afternoon brought everyone together in the Great Oak Co-housing common dining room to taste an amazingly wide array of wines under the guidance of Ric Jewell, sommelier and front-of-the-house manager at Zingerman's Roadhouse. Operating under instructions to find interesting, less well-known wines that anyone could afford, Ric walked us through 21 bottles from all over the world, many of them wines made from relatively unknown (at least in the U.S.) grapes such as savagnin, pedro ximenez, verdejo, and counoise.

21 wines! Even with dump buckets, we were a rather rowdy bunch by the end...

An Afternoon at the Clements

The 2006 eGullet Heartland Gathering kicked off with a tour of the Janice Bluestein Longone Culinary Archive at the Clements Library at the University of Michigan. 

If you attended the University of Michigan, as I did, the Clements Library is one of those mysterious buildings that all students look at but most never dare to enter. The beautiful Italian Renaissance style building set on its spacious lawn is home to the American history and culture collections that span from the fifteenth to the early twentieth century, including the Culinary Archive.

Janice Longone herself gave us a tour of the current exhibit. Jan is a well-known food historian and antiquarian culinary publications dealer. She donated her extensive collection to the Clements and has, appropriately, become the Curator of American Culinary History. Her passion for our history from past through present shone as she shared stories about building her collection and the fascinating history and cultural context around each item.

eGullet Heartland Gathering 2006

We had a fabulous food-ful weekend with the eGullet Heartland Gathering 2006. We kicked off Friday afternoon with a tour of the Janice Bluestein Longone Culinary Archive conducted by Jan Longone herself. The current exhibit is titled "Patriotic Fare: Bunker Hill Pickles, Abe Lincoln tomatoes, White House Coffee & more" and shows a fascinating collection of articles, ads, and cookbooks that used food and cooking as a means to express American patriotism.

Saturday afternoon Ric Jewell, currently of Zingerman's Roadhouse but formerly the sommelier for Tribute, guided some thirty of us through twenty-one wines from all over the world. A marathon wine tasting of unusual and lesser-known grapes. Wow.

Evening was the big group-cooking event with a nine-course meal, with some really amazing foods. I can't really do justice to them in this short space. If I mention one, I'll feel compelled to mention another, and so on.

I'll be writing up each event as quickly as my time permits.

eGullet Gathering in Ann Arbor

Clockwise from upper left:  Green Beans with Bacon, Guajolote's Beet Salad with Bacon, Roasted Red and Purple Fingerling Potatoes with Rosemary, Zucchini Blossoms stuffed with Caramelized Zucchini ready for dipping and frying.

Our friend Tammy hosted an eGullet gathering in Ann Arbor.  They toured Zingerman's Bakehouse and the Creamery, shopped for many tasty goodies at the farmers' market, Kerrytown, and Zingerman's, and retired back to Tammy's place to cook up a fabulous meal. 

I had planned to join them on the tours, but yesterday started on a bad note when the construction zone in front of our house came roaring to life at at the indecent hour of 7am and continued downward when they accidentally cut the gas main, which left us without hot water or the use of our stove.  The local gas company sent a guy to check our house to make sure it wasn't being flooded with gas.  I thought about cooking breakfast outside on the grill, but then the skies opened up and a flood of biblical proportions poured from the heavens.  Well, so much for that plan.  At least we managed to fetch the new Harry Potter book.  But I did make finally make it over to Tammy's at Great Oak Co-housing in time to chop squash and stuff zucchini blossoms.

The squash blossoms were the big hit of the night.  Tammy wanted to recreate a carmelized zucchini dish that she had at Jose's Minibar in D.C., but she wanted to dress up the presentation a bit.  She spotted squash blossoms at the farmers' market, and it just all came together.  A big thanks to Steve Shaw for calling Jose's Minibar and getting the carmelized zucchini recipe.  You can find the recipe for the blossom stuffing, and read others' write-ups on eGullet in the topic Heartland Gathering in MI.

Tempura Zucchini Blossoms Stuffed with Caramelized Zucchini

There were some 26 people cooking, drinking wine, and having a general good time.  Some 15+ dishes were prepared and savored.  Along with the squash blossoms, I also particularly enjoyed the couscous salad with butternut squash and green beans and mint.  It was served with a yogurt dressing on the side that was nice, but I didn't think it was needed.  The green beans with bacon were also a delight to me.  I'm rather picky about my green beans.  My childhood experiences with canned green beans were traumatic, and I'm still recovering.  But these were wonderful, with plenty of bacon. The muscian's tart was my favorite dessert. I tend to think that most desserts are too sweet, and tarts often seem to fall into that too-sweet catagory, but this one was perfect -- full of nuts and just enough sweetness to balance the nuts.

And here we are, just sitting down to the soup course...

The full menu is in the extended post.