Best Food Writing 2011 Page 4
And one day as I was wandering around the rough but striving working-class neighborhood of MacArthur Park, admiring the carnicerias, the taquerias, and the stores that sold plaster statues of Jesus and the Virgin Mary, it struck me that this area had a lot in common with the place I grew up. More than that, I began to suspect there must be some strange, deep connection between pork, class, and Catholicism. Why, I wondered, do Catholics seem to like pork so much?
Apparently I’m not the first to have asked this question. An online resource called the Catholic Answers Forum tells me god revealed to the apostles that the dietary laws of the Old Testament did not apply to Christians. It’s there in Acts 10:9–16, where Peter is told that if god made an animal then by definition it can’t be unclean, and is therefore OK to eat, which I think has a nice logic to it. And again, in Colossians 2:16–17, Paul says, “Let no man therefore judge you in meat, or in drink.” In other words, just because the Jews don’t eat bacon, that’s no reason for you not to eat bacon.
Of course you don’t have to be Catholic to love pork, any more than you need to be Latino or Irish, but coming from a working-class culture that tries to stretch its money, and its food, to the limit seems to be a large part of the equation. And in rural society, it’s possible to imagine a poor family owning a pig, keeping it in their back yard and feeding it on household scraps and leftovers. Owning cows and sheep, even a goat, is a trickier proposition, requiring at the very least access to grazing land.
There’s a shady area in my own front garden, under an oak tree, where a pig could live very happily indeed, but frankly I think the chances of my successfully getting through LA’s zoning variance process are close to zero. It remains a warm, recurring fantasy, however.
By far the most influential food writer in Los Angeles is Jonathan Gold, the only man to win a Pulitzer Prize for food writing, and also incidentally the only Pulitzer prizewinner with whom I’ve shared pickled pigskin. He currently writes a column for the LA Weekly called Counter Intelligence, and it’s one of those things you often tear out and save even if you have no intention of going to the restaurants he describes. I have held on to a piece he published a few years back with the title “Jonathan Gold’s Top 12 Manifold Gifts of the Pig,” which would have you running off to a Chinese restaurant in Orange County to sample cubed pigs’ blood or to a Korean barbecue on Beverly Boulevard to grill your own pork belly. Elsewhere in his writing you’ll find a taco stand in East LA where, as he puts it, you can eat “pig parts you’d never expect to find outside a charnel house.”
Gold subscribes to the very attractive idea that some of the best food is to be found not in five-star white-tablecloth establishments but in hole-in the-wall joints located in mini-malls, places that favor Formica tables, fluorescent lighting, and gruff, non-English-speaking waiters. Certainly there are moments in Los Angeles, when you find yourself in some grittily cheerful cantina alongside working stiffs, off-duty security guards, groups of secretaries having a night out, guys who’d like you to think they’re gang members, and you’re all there together devouring carnitas, puerco asado, or burrito Jalisco (and yes, OK, there may be a few lightweights who aren’t eating pork), and you think to yourself, yes this is democracy and equality in action. Such classlessness is of course a one-way street. As yet the security guards and would-be gangbangers aren’t regulars at the Ivy and Spago.
Somehow this all ties in with the current food trend that’s been called (I kid you not) the “nouveau truck scene.” Street food is surely the most classless food of all, and once this was very straightforward. There’d be a taco truck parked outside your office building at lunchtime or outside a club after a gig and you’d buy a pretty good grease bomb of a burrito, swallow it down, and damn the cholesterol. If some of these trucks weren’t strictly legal, and were sometimes hassled by the cops, well that was all part of the fun.
But now the scene has mutated, and some would say gotten too fancy for its own good. Alerted by Twitter, hipster foodies now drive all over town chasing down the latest truck selling Guatemalan/Korean fusion cuisine (or whatever), hoping to get there before the cops move them on. At the same time, cutting-edge restaurants that have never had the slightest connection with the street now operate their own trucks to make themselves appear authentic. If you think this is less like egalitarianism than highly self-conscious slumming, you’ll get no argument from me.
In fact, much as I hate to say it, there are times when mainstream fast food chains seem far more genuinely classless. You see the line of vehicles waiting at the drive-through window of a McDonald’s or a Taco Bell or a KFC, and there’ll be a dented old pickup truck waiting behind a minivan full of a mom and her kids, waiting behind some movie guy in his Porsche, and you think, yes, this a version of the American dream; all classes and types sharing the same appetites, buying the same products, eating the same food. And if the food is bland and generic and constructed to satisfy the lowest, least interesting tastes, well, maybe that’s the price you have to pay for democracy. Not much point going up to people in the line and telling them they should eat pigs’ trotters. No point whatsoever telling them they should eat more like peasants.
I BELIEVE I CAN FRY
By Katy Vine
From Texas Monthly
Senior editor Katy Vine has a knack for profiling larger-than-life Texas characters—a reclusive folk singer, a homecoming queen turned hooker, The Birdman of Texas—and here, the surprising grand master of an esoteric art: deep-frying at the Texas State Fair.
Abel Gonzales Jr., age forty, is the high priest of frying at the State Fair of Texas, which is to say, the world. Since 2005, when the fair introduced the Big Tex Choice Awards, a kind of Oscars for excellence in frying, four of the little statuettes have gone to him. He has fried Coca-Cola and cookie dough and pineapple rings, among other offerings that profit dentists. Followers taste his commitment and reciprocate with enthusiasm. It is not unheard of to see groups of girls screaming as he walks through the fairgrounds. A few years back, a couple found his talents so moving that they asked him to officiate their wedding. Once, a devoted fan requested that the master deep-fry his vinyl wallet. After Gonzales reluctantly complied, the young man looked at his girl and, in what must have been a serious turning point in their relationship, held the crispy billfold in the air and whooped.
Since the advent of the Big Tex Choice Awards, extreme frying has become a seasonal rite. Every fall, the crowds venture out of the comfort of the air-conditioning, drawn by the hiss of the Fair Park fryers. Media outlets rack their brains for puns, such as “Come Fry With Me” (the Economist) and “It’s Oil or Nothing” (Dallas Morning News). The past few years, a good deal of their attention has also focused on Gonzales. From television (Oprah, Today) to the farthest corners of the blogosphere, Gonzales’s work has been featured and dissected. Andrew Zimmern, the host of the popular Travel Channel show Bizarre Foods, declared him “the Willy Wonka of the Texas State Fair.” Oprah simply referred to him as a “guru.”
I met Gonzales in March at his temporary test kitchen in the Episcopal Church of the Incarnation, in Dallas. He would not share with me his concept for this year (the judging is on Labor Day), but he had agreed to cook for me what many people consider to be his masterpiece: fried butter, which won last year’s Big Tex award for most creative food. For a man about to place frozen balls of dough-wrapped butter into a vat of oil, Gonzales was surprisingly trim, with only full, dimpled cheeks attesting to his occasionally unhealthy diet. A Vandyke beard and jumpy, expressive eyebrows gave him a mischievous appearance. That day, he wore jeans, cowboy boots, and a classic white chef’s jacket that he was quick to downplay. “I’m not a chef. This whole coat thing really makes me uncomfortable,” he said. “I wear them a lot because I’m in the kitchen and blah, blah, blah. But I’m not a chef. You know, I never claimed to be a chef.”
Since he works only during the three-week duration of the fair (this year it runs from September 24 to October 17)
and takes off the rest of the year to travel and hang out at home with his dog, the best way to describe Gonzales’s professional life is to say that he’s a “concessionaire,” though the term undersells him the way “band” does the Beatles. His imagination never rests. Three years ago, for example, a beer distribution company asked him to concoct a deep-fried beer. He was able to turn the product around quickly and easily, and even if he didn’t see a market for the result, the commission did get him thinking about beer. Over a six-month period, he experimented and came up with a potato chip that tasted like beer. “I soaked kettle chips in this beer solution, and then I fried them,” he said. “When they come out of the fryer, they’re really crisp, and I use the salt-and-beer-flavoring mixture to spread on top.” And he didn’t stop there. “I was really going crazy at the time, pushing the envelope,” he told me. “I made a oneounce liquid that, when poured into a beer, would completely change the taste of the beer. So you could start out with Coors Light, pour this one-ounce shot into it, and it would turn into a piña colada, a margarita, a cosmopolitan, whatever. It would remain fizzy, but the whole taste complex would completely change. You take a creamy beer like Guinness or Negra Modelo, and the root beer shot made it out of this world.” One can argue the merits of these concoctions, but the fact is that all of Gonzales’s creations sound pretty gross at first. They must be tasted to be judged.
Gonzales lifted the fry basket out of the oil, tossed the five balls of dough on a plate, drizzled them with honey, and dusted them with powdered sugar, coaching me all the while in the ways to avoid a squirting mess. He waited a few seconds as they cooled, then dived in, motioning for me to hurry. I popped one, bracing myself for a coating of grease followed by a mushy, slightly salty lard ball. Instead, it was the most majestic breadstuff I’d ever eaten, sweet, then doughy, then warm, with a twist at the end: a tiny pat of butter, just barely starting to melt, like an opiate at the center of the world’s most scandalous doughnut.
The process of cooking food in hot fat is only slightly less ancient than roasting a carcass on an outdoor fire. The Egyptians used goose, pork, and beef fat for frying. Arabian cooks preferred the unique flavor of sheep’s tail fat. Worldwide, the victuals endorsed for submersion varied, but the general tenet down through the ages seemed to be that just about anything was better cooked in oil. (Jerry Hopkins, the author of Extreme Cuisine: The Weird and Wonderful Foods That People Eat, suggests that rats rubbed with garlic, salt, and pepper and then dunked in hot vegetable oil for six to seven minutes are, if not delicious, at least edible.)
But deep-frying didn’t find its ideal showcase until the fair phenomenon caught on in America in the late-nineteenth century. Fair cookery was a way for inventive American cooks to demonstrate creativity and resourcefulness. An exhibit of an immense pumpkin or an eleven-ton wheel of cheese was impressive to look at but ultimately invited a very practical question: How do you eat it? According to Warren Belasco in Meals to Come: A History of the Future of Food, cooking contests arose as a solution. They were also a way of celebrating the great abundance of American farms, a kind of culinary brag. Popular demonstrations riffed on American staples such as corn, a grain that the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair featured in three hundred preparations, including cream of cornstarch pudding, hominy Florentine, pilau, Brunswick stew, mush croquettes, cream pie, Boston bread, Victorian corn gems, and corn dodgers.
Unfortunately for those present, the selection did not include a hot dog dipped in cornmeal batter and deep-fried. That future treasure of the fair circuit would belong to Carl and Neil Fletcher, brothers who came to Dallas in 1930 and decided to augment their income as vaudevillians by inventing the “corny dog,” made famous at the 1942 state fair. “We have heard some fellow had used a mold to put cornbread around a wiener, but that was too slow,” Neil told the New York Times in an interview in 1983. “So my brother started thinking and said, ‘Why not mix a batter that would stay on a weenie?’ So we started experimenting in the kitchen and finally came up with a batter that would stay on. It tasted like hell. When we got one that tasted okay it wouldn’t stay on the weenie. We must have tried about sixty times until we got one that was right, and we spent another twelve years improving it. We haven’t touched it since.”
The corny dog is unquestionably the finest concession ever created in the state of Texas. Though both Fletcher brothers have since died, the fortunate Fletcher descendants who now run the business sell about half a million of their inventions during the run of the fair. Corny dogs routinely outsell all other fair foods, such as funnel cakes, nachos, turkey legs, sausage on a stick, roasted corn, cotton candy, and anything else dispensed from the roughly two hundred food booths and carts at the state fair. Around eighty vendors control these concessions, which are leased on a year-to-year basis and often held onto fiercely by a family (like the Fletchers) for generations. Lots of luck to the outsider who wants in. Hundreds of applicants fight for the two or three locations that become available each year.
For decades the Fletcher brothers’ awe-inspiring invention did not attract any challengers from the other sellers. That all changed in 2005. “You always want to have some things new and different at the fair,” explained Ron Black, the fair’s senior vice president of food and beverage. “New cars, new shows, new booths.” Apparently while visitors still looked forward to their annual gastronomic overload, even the most charitable confessed that their encounters had grown stale. So Black and his people devised a contest designed to prod the concessionaires’ imaginations: the Big Tex Choice Awards. The process would begin with a letter sent to all State Fair of Texas concessionaires, inviting them to mail in a description of a new and audacious dish. Next, a committee of anonymous judges would wade through the submissions and choose the finalists. Finally, on Labor Day, the fair would host a big tasting, with three or four judges rating the dishes on a scale of one to ten in two categories: Best Taste and Most Creative. Winners would be awarded a golden statuette, the body resembling an Academy Award, the head a bobbling likeness of Big Tex.
As a result, the past five years have been a kind of golden age for our state fair concessionaires. Since the gauntlet was thrown down, complacency has been replaced by an extreme-sport version of frying: Witness the Fried Banana Split, the Crispy Fried Cantaloupe Pie, the Zesty Fried Guacamole Bites, the Country-Fried Peach Cobbler on a Stick, the Fernie’s Fried Mac ‘n Cheese, the Fried Praline Perfection, and the Fried Italian Meatballs.
It may be that the Big Tex Choice Awards simply awakened a killer esprit d’fry lurking in the genes of the concessionaire population. Gonzales’s two biggest challengers, Christi Erpillo and Nick Bert Jr., are both from fair families. Erpillo’s mother was the first person to bring funnel cake to the Texas fair, in 1980. (“Abel, my mother, and Skip Fletcher [the owner and president of the state fair’s corny dog stands] are all Woodrow Wilson High School graduates,” she told me meaningfully.) Bert, who has been a Dallas County sheriff’s deputy for 27 years, is the grandson of Samuel Bert, the inventor of the snow cone machine. These people were raised around fair food; 350-degree oil pulsed in their veins.
Gonzales is not like them, not exactly. His introduction to the miraculous powers of a fryer did come by way of his father, but not in a booth. Abel “A. J.” Gonzales Sr. owned A. J. Gonzales’ Mexican Oven, a successful eatery in Dallas’s historic West End. The business required the customary grueling hours. “My father was busy all the time. My mother worked nights. So actually my grandmother pretty much took care of us,” he said. The family had just a few days off each year, to attend the state fair. They were freakishly loyal about this tradition. “We are a fair family,” Gonzales explained. “We were the kind of kids who used to get new outfits for the fair. I mean, it was a big deal for us.” He has never missed a fair and says he would never even consider it. Gonzales was born in November 1969 and has been to every fair since then. It is safe to assume that had he been born in October 1969, he would have made it to that
year’s fair as well.
By the time he had his own booth, Gonzales was familiar enough with the traditional fair menu that he felt himself an expert by proxy, but his outlier’s confidence led to strange gastronomic experiments. One of his favorite creations, used to top off a deep-fried pineapple ring, is banana-flavored whipped cream dipped in liquid nitrogen. One bite and you can literally blow smoke through your nose. “My thing is something new, something that nobody’s done before,” Gonzales said. He is aware that this philosophy has made him something of a novelty himself. “I would think a chef would look at me and kind of go, ‘Pfft, move on with your little fried self,’” he said.
He’s right. The search for the next corny dog probably would not fulfill the romantic dreams of a graduate of Le Cordon Bleu. But many would kill for a concessionaire’s profits. For each $4 or $5 item, Gonzales pays the fair a 25 percent share. After he subtracts taxes, staff wages, and supplies, his most successful items leave him with a profit of about $1 per plate. Now consider that in the three-week run of the fair he can sell about 10,000 orders on a Saturday and 5,000 to 7,000 on a weekday. “People always go, ‘You must be making a million at the fair,’” he said. “Honestly, I am not. I make enough money so I don’t have to work the rest of the year, but if I had kids or a wife, there’s no way I could get away with that.” Having your creation declared a finalist can increase business by 30 percent; a winner can increase his initial figures at least six times over. In 2009, after winning the award, Gonzales sold about 35,000 orders of fried butter, or 140,000 total balls.