Oh dear. I’m beginning to be afraid to read the newspaper. Three deaths within a few days; Sheila Lukins, Cafe des Artistes and today, as reported in the New York Times, Sylvia Schur. Dead.

Relativity (1953) by M.C. Escher

I first met Sylvia in her gorgeous townhouse with the sun roof perched on the top floor. She was a major figure in the food world back then. Her business was thriving. There were many slim young women looking frantically busy and racing up and down stairs like an M.C. Escher drawing. Barbara Kafka was at that meeting and so were several others who became lifelong friends and acquaintances.

I was invited to the gathering on the strength of having written dozens and dozens of little single subject cookbooks. Several million of them were sold in so-called “gourmet” shops at the beginning of the right worshipful Julia Child era.

I learned the purpose of the meeting with Sylvia and Barbara and six other women was to create a new organization to be named Les Dames d’Escoffier. It was the brainchild of Carol Brock who was then food editor of The New York Daily News. The charter was to stipulate a membership limited to 100 carefully vetted women who earned their living as food or wine professionals.

Carol Brock was the first president of the group. Sylvia, the second. I was elected the third president.

Sara Moulton was then president of the Women’s Culinary Alliance, a vibrant gathering of young women. This organization had no limits on membership and no rules beyond getting together to expand their food knowledge.

I proposed to the Board of Directors of Les Dames that we merge the two groups. My idea had been we “old broads” could lend our mentoring acumen to the young folk. The suggestion received a unanimous and resounding NO vote.

I stayed with The Dames for a while, but ultimately decided to join the founding members of IACP (International Association of Culinary Professionals). This organization started with a handful of cooking school teachers and grew to an association of nearly 4,000 mostly women from 39 countries. Its numbers have declined in the last couple of years but it remains a powerhouse of media-minded professionals.

Les Dames meantime maintained its original exclusivity and has also become an international organization.

Sylvia’s was a wise voice throughout the expansion of women’s roles in the food industry. I greatly admired her.” The only fault she had was always, always being late for absolutely everything: meetings, dinners, events of all kinds. I once waited for her for an hour and a half in a restaurant to which she had invited me for dinner. I left as she was arriving, breathlessly hurtling through the entrance. She seemed astonished that I was so p…d off.

We never arranged to have dinner together again though we stayed in touch for several years. Whenever the phone rang after 11:30 P.M., I always knew it was Sylvia calling about an urgent matter.

Looking back, it seems in character that she stayed on earth late enough to celebrate her 92nd birthday. She really was a grand old “dame.”

Share & Enjoy

Hide Sites

Coffee Tasting Chart

You might think it would be a gift from the Godz to be a supertaster but there is a distinct downside to this genetic endowment.

If you are a supertaster, you’ll hate sugar and all sweet foods and most fruits and vegetables. For a  supertaster, tasting broccoli is like tasting it multiplied by a factor of 10. So if you hated broccoli at the outset you would hate it 10 times as horribly.

To be a supertaster, regular milk tastes like heavy cream. Supertasters don’t like fat or greasy foods because they contain large molecules that press heavily on the nerves found in their taste pores. Supertasters are thus deprived of the joys of KFC, and even an occasional banana split. (This is no small tragedy.)

The American Association of Advanced Science tells us that the tongues of thin people are more likely to be packed with thousands of taste buds, the exact number of which is genetically determined like inheriting curly hair or brown eyes. Having a bunch of extra sensors on your tongue can be compared with having extra mini microphones in your ears. Sure you can hear what that person is saying about you, but you might not like what you hear.

Humans are unable to control appetite, unlike all other creatures on earth. Almost everyone can detect sweetness in 1 part in 200, salt in 1 part in 400, and bitterness in 1 part in 200,000. Odor can be detected by taste buds even when diluted to 1 in a trillion. The bad news here is that 64% of everyone’s taste buds are lost by age 30. The good news is that our ability to taste outlasts all the other senses. If it tastes good we keep eating it.

If I read on the menu that the lasagna had four cheeses, I could be totally fooled. I wouldn’t be able to tell if it had three or five. A supertaster would be able to identify each cheese and every herb or spice and every other nuance of flavor.

A sommelier can differentiate between literally hundreds of wines. A chef is as dependent on taste perception to earn a living. A great chef is as skilled as a great painter in arriving at a taste palette to please the palate.

Nestle and Cadbury employ chewing gum tasters. A good living can be had by tasting cheese, olive oil, coffee, tea, ice cream, cookies, strawberry jam, barbecue sauce, chocolate, yogurt and dozens of processed foods.

There has been a boom in employment for research chefs who develop tastes. And they now have an association to call their own. It is the Research Chefs Association or RCA. Nation’s Restaurant News trade magazine reported: “You may think it’s fairly intuitive to bring chefs on board when you’re make food but doing just that has become standard practice. More and more chefs are being hired by big business because the companies need a culinary edge as they walk that fine line between being able to mass-produce foods and keeping with what’s going on in the culinary world.”

You can make a lovely juicy salary as a supertaster–providing you first choose your parents carefully.

Share & Enjoy

Hide Sites

Here’s some astonishing news: a small town in Australia has just voted to get rid of water. Bottled water. The riled up community has declared that all the bottled water on all the shelves in all the places that it is sold, has got to go.

This declaration may be the beginning of another great rethinking of our priorities. What’s starting as a tiny trickle could become a tidal wave, a ‘just in time’ return to common sense. The idea of getting rid of plastic bags began like this with a few voices and several fingers pointing to the environmental impact of hauling water from one part of the universe to another. The cost of littering the landscape with millions of non-biodegradable plastics is pretty much incalculable.

The odd thing is most of us can’t tell the difference between bottled and tap water. This is possibly because bottled water comes mostly from municipal supplies. Some folk think if they dip their crust of bread in virgin olive oil and drink bottled water, they will live for ever. Only plastic bags and bottles live for ever. There’s absolutely no health benefit from drinking straight from a bottle.

The Archive of Family Medicine discovered nearly 1/4 of bottled water from Cleveland had significantly higher levels of bacteria, yet it can cost between 250 and 10,000 times as much as a glass of water from the faucet. Add the cost factor.

Ounce for ounce water in a plastic bottle with a fancy label costs more than gasoline. We’re spending $15 billion a year on it.

I’m not a believer. I don’t believe Wayne Enterprises’ claim that drinking their product, Holy Drinking Water, will be “a daily reminder to be kind to others.”  Nor can I entirely swallow the marketing message from the bottled water sold under the brand name of OM (OMMMMMMM). Its “manufacturer” says the product contains enough energy to  promote a positive outlook that is reinforced with the striking of a very large gong (GONGGGG) that causes Tibetan bowls to vibrate. (Ummmmm)

This whole deal with bottled water, though, has gotten terribly out of hand.

Here’s some good news: Americans flush 4.8 billion gallons of water a day. New urinals contain a few wood chips. No water. No odor. Nearly 100,000 are already in use. Each waterless urinal can save enough water to fill three swimming pools a year.

Here’s some more good news: Japanese scientists are now able to convert seawater into drinking water and produce electricity by exploiting the difference in temperatures between the surface of the sea and the depth of the ocean. The technology depends on producing condensed steam. It has no environmental impact, and costs less than $1 to produce 250 gallons–roughly the same cost as producing (rigorously tested) city tap water.

You might have noticed, in the unlikely event you go to a bar and ask for a glass of imported water, the bartender adds a couple of ice cubes made from water that came right out of the tap.  Add a wedge of lime and it’ll cost you as much as a martini.

Here’s something else to think about: It is said that French people drink wine rather than water. This is because frogs live in water and if you drink the stuff, you will eventually die while making little croaking noises…

Could this also be true?

Share & Enjoy

Hide Sites