For those of you dropping by who are not from DC and are curious as to what an average DC resident thinks of the snow storm, let me just show you where we are as of noonish today:
And we haven’t reached the grand finale yet. Trees are getting heavy with a mixture of wet and dry snow. This leads to power outages, a huge problem because road crews can’t get out to fix them. The city promises to have us up and running by Monday. There’s new vocabulary floating about – “Snowmageddon” “Snowpocalypse.” The unofficial snow ball fight in December that rowed up an off-duty policy officer has now gone legit and official in Dupont Circle. The Washington Post reported that Mayor Fenty showed up of course not to take a lickin’ or to show off a pitching arm. (Taking the advise of Loose Lips to be seen as the out-and-about on-the-scene guy in his early campaign days). I wonder if the organizers realize 5,000 doesn’t make a good snowball fight in a city circle. Hopefully only two to three hundred actually showed up. The National Mall should be better for the crowds. Meridian Park even better for a neighborhood crowd. Here’s a schedule. They’ve started already.
I made sure I charged my batteries on the laptop and the cell phone. I always keep a ground phone for emergencies though one friend reported that the Verizon service is down in his home. I’m also stocked with a flashlight and candles. The refilling of the ice trays is a “just in case” the power goes out and I need to put something on ice to prevent spoilage. There’s always the snow outside the window (an old college trick for those of us too strapped to afford refrigerators).
Oddly, I don’t feel the need to make this a catch-up-on-work day. I’m playing Sting’s “If On a Winter’s Night” even though Christmas is over. He says winter is his favorite season. Maybe I can appreciate the situation more from his perspective. A neighbor stopped by to borrow milk. Fortunately I got in the Safeway lines early yesterday for an extra half gallon. Snow emergencies in DC make for great grocery cart theater. You sort of get a picture or narrative of shoppers or you can make one up. I’m milk and butter – indicates a baker, someone who does cook and needs the staples. Pop tarts – someone who doesn’t cook or eat a decent breakfast (I’m commenting there). The most interesting check out was a packet of ham hocks, a 6 pack of Milwaukee beer, and a bouquet of lilies. Oddly, the blizzard is clashing with the Super Bowl, so I saw a lot of tortilla chips, beer and other munchies in the check out lines.
There’s an odd quiet, but lots of delicious smells in the hallways. The network affiliates seem to think everyone’s interested in watching snow covered reporters dip their measuring sticks into the mound and point to stuck vehicles while delivering the message “Don’t go out if you don’t have to.” Oddly after the digital switch, I thought the local news outlets would move these special reports to one of their extra digital channels like the one that broadcasts the weather radar report. The world hasn’t stopped turning because it’s snowing here. DC is a lot like LA in the way we handle weather.
I think this snow exceeds even President Obama’s Chicago expectations. But the White House doesn’t have to worry about a thing. Life goes on. The President recorded his weekly on the topic of small business, and a White House Super Bowl party is still on the schedule. All part of doing the nation’s business. Could the Super Bowl party turn into a slumber party? After all members of the Congress and Senate have been invited. For some reason I find it hard to concentrate on the nation’s business today. And I do want to touch the new snow before it’s tainted by business as usual.
In Freetown, fried chicken was a very special dish.
— Edna Lewis, The Taste of Country Cooking 1976
This week’s Black History month moment appears to be the flap over the menu in NBC’s cafeteria at the Rock in New York City. Questlove, a member of The Roots (Jimmy Fallon’s house band), took a pic of the menu and posted it on his Twitter feed. Apparently, Questlove took offense with the menu prepared by another NBC employee, Leslie Calhoun, whom, like Questlove, is black and works as a chef in the kitchen.
I just wish Questlove had talked with Calhoun before he tweeted his followers. [This is where all food conversations begin.] This video with Leslie Calhoun, posted on the NBC hosted site the Grio (an African American news and entertainment zine) explains her thinking behind the menu…and it’s personal:
I may have said this before on this blog. “Talking about somebody’s food is like talking about their mamma.” I wouldn’t call this black-on-black crime, but I definitely can say the dividing line between north and south still stands out in the African American community when it comes to culture especially food. And we thought it was the east coast/west coast thing. That’s called rivalry. This one seems to have its roots in shame.
Even in the film Precious, which garnered 6 Oscar nominations including Best Picture, we see the main character stealing a bucket of chicken and binge eating it before throwing it up in a trash can. Is she purging the shame of the fried chicken; or does eating fried chicken lead to criminal and erratic behavior? Precious’ story (based on the novel Push by Sapphire) takes place in 1980s Harlem, one of the stops of the Great Migration of African Americans in the early 20th century from the rural or small town segregated south to the industrial north. Surely there were chicken boxes in their laps to make the journey. Even coming back home, you had that chicken box in your lap because few restaurants welcomed black customers in those days. I’m sure the southern migrants had no clue their fried chicken eating would lead to criminal behavior among their descendants. I guess the glasses of wine Precious’ tutor enjoys in the evening wouldn’t lead anyone on the road to ruin as fried chicken would. There’s more I could say about this film’s class and north/south issues just on the handling of the food alone.
Both Questlove and “Precious” director Lee Daniels are from Philadelphia. That’s considered north. They are not the first to translate southern cuisine (which became “soul food” in African American urban communities in the 1960s) or culture into racial stereotyping. I blame it on fast food. No one eats homemade chicken the way they eat it from the fast food chains. Who’s hands prepare it? The NBC moment came right on the heals of the Australian “KFC Cricket Survival Guide” commercial featuring a white man who makes friends with drum rocking black people when he pulls out a bucket of fried chicken pieces. This is how fast food corrupts.
If the only fried chicken you’ve eaten was from a box or bucket, you’ve probably missed that labor intensive process for Sunday only dinner, family reunions, 4th of July picnics, or the repast after a funeral. You missed people claiming their favorite pieces, i.e. one piece per person. Frying chicken is work; work that must be appreciated. You couldn’t and didn’t sit on it to have it. Edna Lewis, in her landmark book The Taste of Country Cooking writes:
The first fried chickens were served at Sunday morning breakfast when the outside work was finished. It was leisurely enjoyed with hot biscuits and delicious browned gravy.
Lewis was born in Freetown, Virginia in 1916, a farming community whose first residents were free persons after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed by Lincoln. Frying chicken was a time consuming task, as well as seasonal in Lewis’ Freetown. Lewis also migrated to the north where she was the chef at the Cafe Nicholson in Manhattan, frequented by southern writers Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams, and other writer and artists in search of real Southern food. You can watch Lewis in action in “Fried Chicken and Sweet Potato Pie” by Bailey Barash featuring Edna Lewis and Alabama chef Scott Peacock here. Alert – there’s a whole pig prepared for cooking in this film. Lewis spent her last years with Peacock who became her close friend and culinary collaborator. She died in 2006.
Food always has a story, and memory gives it breath. Let me be clear. Fried chicken’s been around for a long time in the USA. It travels well and it tastes good hot or cold. Who wouldn’t like it. It’s a labor of love in Ernest J. GainesA Lesson Before Dying. Miss Emma sends food to her godson, Jefferson on death row for a murder he didn’t commit. Grant, the teacher, brings the food to him and hopefully will teach Jefferson to read at Miss Emma’s request. Jefferson has been unresponsive to the teaching and the food. Grant tells him:
I’m going to tell her that you and I sat on the bunk and ate, and you said how good the food was. I won’t tell her what you did. She is already sick, and that would kill her. So I’m going to lie. I’m going to tell her how much you liked the food. Especially the pralines.
Ms. Calhoun reminds me of Miss Emma or even Grant’s Tante in A Lesson Before Dying. You can hear the hurt in her voice having her food rejected by “one of her own.” I remember my aunt who looked after me as a child, asked me to visit her when I got home from college. She made me fried chicken wings from Murrays in a stainless steel pot.
Camille Akeju, director of the Smithsonian Anacostia Community Museum and former director of the Harlem School of the Arts, shared her stories about growing up and having fried chicken for Christmas or other special occasions with her family in Virginia during Eatonville Restaurant‘s Food and Folklore event on African American holiday celebrations and traditions. Part of the prix fixe meal included…you guessed it… “fried chicken.” I was also one of the panel judges to choose Eatonville’s chef. The entree for that competition was fried chicken.
Zora Neale Hurston, who had a talent for raising the ire of a few New Negroes and black intellectuals of her time, collected stories that became part of her folklore collections. In Mules and Men she describes a dance she’s taken to in a Florida town not far from her childhood home in Eatonville. Fried chicken is the life of the party:
Then the men would stick their arms out with a flourish and ask their ladies: “You lak chicken? Well, then, take a wing. ” And the ladies would take the proffered “wings” and parade up to the long table and be served. Of course most of them had brought baskets in which were heaps of jointed and fried chicken, two or three kinds of pies, cakes, potato pone and chicken purlo. The hall would separate into happy groups about the baskets until time for more dancing.
The NBC incident is probably about more than just food. The fact that it took Ms. Calhoun and her colleagues several years to have a Black History Month menu says something about the organization and perhaps deeper employee tensions that may have a tight lid on for now. Other than that, make me a plate with Ms. Calhoun’s fried chicken, black eyed peas and rice, collard greens with smoked turkey (the healthier alternative to ham hocks), cornbread, or any food made by loving hands. I think Ms. Calhoun is owed or at least deserving of some kind of appreciation for her effort, and an opportunity to tell the story of why she chose these foods. There’s no need to jump from the frying pan into the fire.
Note: The Big Read DC will conduct a city read of A Lesson Before Dying in April/May. More information in a future post or update.
Update: In all fairness, I’m posting this clip with Questlove (from Gawker.com) who says the twitpic he posted was intended to be a joke. I’m still confused as to where the joke lands. Was it supposed to be funny to feature a menu like this for Black History month (which is still a put down)? Or was the menu a fake (still a put down). But I’ll let the brotha have his say. He also treated Ms. Calhoun to a bouquet of flowers and a spa certificate.
I’m glad Questlove and Ms. Calhoun are cool. But I still stand that there was nothing wrong, funny or ironic about the menu from the beginning.
A few of my readers are aware that the blogroll on this site has been shrinking. Since launching eclectique|916 I removed two links from my Sites, Sounds, and Bytes roll and placed them on a line-by-line “editorial merit” basis. I still read them, but rather than take the whole bunch, I’ll pull out a few good apples or link to specific useful, relevant, and interesting perspectives as they catch my attention. Amusing gets some play too. I haven’t had time to articulate the specifics of my decisions, but Jon Stewart comes close:
I’m still baking chocolate chip cookies from the Christmas batch. Great idea to scoop the cookie dough, plop the balls into a plastic bag, then toss them in the freezer. I bake as the craving hits me.
This year I hope I can indulge in the National Museum of the American Indian’s annual “Power of Chocolate“ Valentines Weekend (February 13 and 14). Let’s face it, the world would be a dull place if it weren’t for the Americas.
Here’s a little factoid blurb from the website:
Theobroma cacao was for the Maya and the Aztec peoples, as its Latin name indicates, a “food of the gods.” .
Here’s some video from last year:
REALITY RESTAURANT AUDITIONS
This was in the Slow Food DC newsletter (February). I sent it to my sister. We had this idea of opening a cafe featuring homemade cakes, desserts, with something savory on the side. We don’t do food fights.
24 Hour Restaurant Battle-OPEN CASTING CALL
Food Network’s new restaurant competition series from the producers of The Next Food Network Star is currently casting the very first season and is holding an open casting call
on Monday, February 22, 10am – 3pm
Zentan Restaurant/Donovan House Hotel
1155 14th Street NW, Washington, DC
They are looking for:
Two to five person teams with pre-existing relationships (brother and sister, mother and son, husband and wife, etc.) who would love the chance to prove that they can run a restaurant.
A dynamic front of house and back of house duo. One person on the team will run the front of the house and the other person on the team will be the chef and run the kitchen. All levels of experience (culinary school trained to home cook, little or no restaurant experience to a lifelong career in restaurants) will be considered.
Lots of energy and charisma, personalities that pop!
If you have any questions or need further information, please feel free to contact:
Alena Jemas, Casting Producer,24 Hour Restaurant Battle
Food Network/CBS News Productions
Office: 212-975-4125
Mobile: 201-415-8843
Email: jemasa@cbsnews.com
or visit www.24hourrestaurantbattle.com.
If most people have never heard of the brand of vodka or rum you drink, then you’d enjoy reading Dori Bryant’s The Polished Palate newsletter. Polished Palate readers are not amateurs when it comes to fine and refined spirits and cocktails. There’s a lot of history in a glass of rum as we learned at the January Food and Folklore event at Eatonville Restaurant (mentioned in the recent issue). Hat tip to Daphne Muse, our Zojito mixologist who hipped us to Dori’s newsletter. Polished Palate’s 5th Annual International Rum Festival in St. Petersburg, FL is March 27th.
This is one year I wish I was in New Orleans for Mardi Gras. The city’s already pumped about the Saints being in the Super Bowl. And as UndercoverBlackman told me “The city really needs this.”
But I’m working Fat Tuesday on another Mardi Gras celebration at Eatonville Restaurant for Food and Folklore. I asked John Franklin from the National Museum of African American History and Culture, and a culinary griot in his own right (someone I just love to hear talk), to be our guide through the foods of the Americas that somehow found their way on the Mardi Gras supper table; that’s where Nona Martin takes over, a native of New Orleans and also a member of the Smithsonian team (like John) at the American Art Museum. She’s going to give the real deal about the Mardi Gras meal. And of course there will be food and Hurricanes to drink. Mardi Gras attire encouraged.
I’ll update this post with the final menu. Price still $45 (plus tax and tip) and includes a 4-course prix fixed themed menu. Reservations required. Email foodandfolklore@gmail.com or call 202-332-3264 (ask for Michael C.)
How ’bout this graphic? That’s Zora Neale Hurston. She wears the mask.