I am always so hopeful that young cooks with a lot of passion and talent will write books that help to transform the North American diet in a positive way. That is why I have to admit that I am more than a little disappointed in the two finalists for this year's Piglet. Not because the authors are not talented, both obviously are, but because both books seem to contribute to feeding our addiction to sugar and fat. I am predictable and I always want to celebrate books and cooks that are helping people to fall in love again with fruits and vegetables. It will then come to no surprise that I hoped that Nigel Slater's wonderfully thoughtful Tender would make it to the end.
Both books — Momofuku Milk Bar and The Art of Living According to Joe Beef — have forewords by my friend David Chang and I enjoyed the personal reflections on the characters behind the restaurants. Christina Tosi's introduction and personal story about how she came to Momofuku Milk Bar is refreshingly matter of fact, unaffected and concise. In her words you begin to get a sense of an organized mind at work, something that is reflected in the precision of her recipes. All pastry chefs have that same kind of focus but the truly clever ones are also creative, a quality that Christina has in abundance. Sadly, it is in the ingredients that Milk Bar really loses me — it seems that they don't have real ingredients in their pantry. I understand the creative appeal of turning something bad into something surprising but I can't support the choice of highly processed ingredients when fresh and organic ones are increasingly so readily available. Across the board the Milk Bar recipes are too rich, too sweet, and just too intense for me. The fact that "Crack Pie" is their most famous recipe is quite telling.
When I first opened Joe Beef the page I landed on was Smoked Cheddar with doughnuts, an ominous sign. Many of the recipes in The Art of Living According to Joe Beef are heavy-handed and high in fat, but not all of them. As I leafed through the pages I came to be charmed by their story and the unconventional way the book is laid out. There is a sense of history to the book and their deep love of Montreal is evident throughout. There is richness in detail and usually a lovely idiosyncratic story for each recipe that makes the book as much of an engaging read as a straightforward cookbook. I loved the story of "Building a garden in a crack den" and the recipes that accompanied that chapter like Pickled Rhubarb, Carrots with Honey, and the lovely Herbes Salees. They speak with such affection about how they have replaced "pop cans, plastic bags, and cigarette butts that littered our yard with tomatoes, kale, and turnips." They say that building their garden was "not an environmental statement" but whether they want it to be or not, to me and I am sure to many who read this book, it is.
Appropriately, the decision between who wins the Piglet award this year between Joe Beef and Milk Bar came back to crack, and ultimately, I would rather be building a garden from a den than to be an addict.
It is my honor and pleasure to announce the winner of this year's Piglet is...The Art of Living According to Joe Beef.
The Piglet / 2012 / Final Round, 2012
VS
The Art of Living According to Joe Beef
David McMillan, Frederic Morin, & Meredith Erickson
Judged by: Alice Waters
Alice Waters, owner of Chez Panisse Restaurant in Berkeley, California, has championed local, sustainable farms for over four decades. She is also the founder of the Edible Schoolyard at Martin Luther King Middle School in Berkeley, a model public education program that brings children into a new relationship to food with hands-on planting, harvesting, and cooking. Waters is also the author of ten books including 40 Years of Chez Panisse: The Power of Gathering, The Art of Simple Food: Notes and Recipes from a Delicious Revolution, and The Edible Schoolyard: A Universal Idea.
Photo by Brigitte Lacomb
60 Comments
As to Alice Waters' comments, she was asked to judge between these cookbooks and this entails giving her honest review of each book. What else would you honestly expect her to say? At least she was candid. The only pettiness I detected was inserting mention of her favorite (which she has blurbed all over the place) into a judgment that did not concern it.
I have to say I was probably quite sold on Joe Beef's cookbook because of 2 absolutely wonderful and unforgettable evenings at the restaurant. Fred Morin even came to salute us. I could feel how much he cares about food, his restaurant, his people and his town.
That love for Montreal was then confirmed in a recent interview he gave following the announcement of the prize winner. About Montreal, he said "It's important to us to get the message across to people in North America that Québec exists. That our francophone culture is an old one, and the history of dining in Montréal is very old and food is generally really important to the people of Québec City and Montreal. Dining in America I feel sometimes is not so old. Like dining in Las Vegas didn't exist really twenty years ago. Dining in the boroughs of New York City didn't really exist 25 years ago. Dining in Philadelphia is relatively new. Whereas French food in Montréal, in the old port, there are restaurants there that have going strong since the twenties or the thirties. We're just trying to communicate our love for French cooking in Montréal, somehow". I can't agree more. Vas-y Joe!
Sorry the vegetarian in me couldn't help but comment.
Nothing to do with cooking skills involved. Stictly the symbolic coincidence involving the names.
I'd be fascinated to understand how the cow actually "wins" in the beef scenario. :-)
I wish people wouldn't criticize Ms. Waters as being elitist or out of touch. Health is dependent on the nutrition available from good food, and how we continue to produce and distribute the food we eat will determine the fate of the earth, for better or worse. By eating bad food we are poisoning our bodies, and by growing it irresponsibly and sending it thousands of miles away, we are poisoning the planet. We need people like Ms. Waters to wake us up and show us the way.
Still, given the Piglet as a competition involving many different kinds of books that might not, on the immediate face of it, appeal to Ms. Waters, I think her inclusion as judge was misguided: I'm a HUGE fan of Tender, and I don't go near much of the ingredients in the first place and second place books. That said, in the spirit of competition, the authors should be applauded for their success, as opposed to scolded. Perhaps that's not the way Ms. Waters intended her response to come off, but unfortunately, it did. That said, these comments take absolutely nothing away from who Ms Waters is, and what she's done.
We're not electing a president here -- you can go out and buy any book you wish, and you will!
No harm, no foul. But let's hope there's a lesson learned here.
What a disappointing end to the wonderful Piglet Tournament of Cookbooks!
This morning I was wondering who would win, but then I remembered that Alice Waters was judging so I was pretty sure it would be Joe Beef. I figured a cookbook about super sweet desserts where glucose is a common ingredient wouldn't really rank high with her.
Don't get me wrong -- there is certainly a time and place to have spectacular ingredients that have been minimally manipulated, and Chez Panisse may still be doing a fine job in this regard. But that is NOT the be-all-and-end-all of cooking, it is NOT the only style of cuisine that one may want to experience forever more, and it is clearly NOT the aspiration of the two cookbooks that made it to the final round. For Ms. Waters to unbendingly bring her singular frame to this task and then forcibly apply it to cookbooks that strive to be so much more is, frankly, preposterous. It was a mistake to have her participate in this tournament as a judge.