Food and Footage

This week I was catering with a woman in Berlin, an American who throws these very sumptuous weekly parties and wows her guests with gussied up polenta, carefully braised meats, mascarpone laden desserts and all sorts of delicate nibbles. Well, we got to talking about what we ate regularly, what we craved and served and had the energy to cook once all the work cooking was over and it was surprising how simple and similar our tastes were. I think for me, on a really basic level, my comfort food changes depending on where I live. In LA I always wanted my mom’s chicken curry casserole, you know the stuff that is really grocery store accesible and midwestern. She would bake the chicken first and par-boil broccoli, then she would shred the chicken and mix the chicken and broccoli with this ‘curry’ sauce that was basically curry powder, cream of chicken soup, lemon juice and mayonaisse. She baked it as a casserole and served it over cheap minute rice. It was so good I would get up late at night to take cold forkfuls.

In Boston I became a roast chicken fanatic. It didn’t even have to be good. I was not above the Boston Market carry out chickens although I preferred to make my own at home, rubbing it with goose fat and sea salt, loosening the top skin and sliding garlic slivers and rosemarry sprigs underneath, and stuffing the cavity with a lemon. Sometimes I put carrots and brusselsprouts around the edge, sometimes paprika potato wedges. In the end it was bliss to pull chunks of hot breast meat straight from the bird and munch it standing in my kitchen.

In Baltimore, no longer on my own, I found myself drawn to semi-healthy, vaguely California style burritos. I lived across the street from the Safeway and I loved their selection of whole wheat tortillas. I would splurge on an avocado and set about making a lemony avocado salsa. Then I browned the beef or turkey with cinammon, cumin and chili and eventually added a can of black beans. We used pre-grated cheddar cheese, sour cream and fresh cilantro as toppings. The apartment had an electric stove-top and I would stick the tortillas directly on top of the red hot burners, flip it after 20 seconds or so and then once hot, we would compose our burritos separately and eat 2 or 3 with a Yuengling lager, listening to the NPR station in our too hot or too cold kitchen.

Here in Berlin the ingredients that are easily accesible tend to be best suited toward Italian comfort food. Here the ‘go to’ dish is spaghetti al tonno. I like to buy the Barilla arrabiata sauce in a jar because the thickness is just right and somehow the sauce mixed with the oily tuna and onions and garlic ends up being a real culinary wonder. I like to top it with lots of chopped parsley and scallions and serve it in this (don’t be grossed out) old white metal bed pan thing that fits pasta dishes perfectly. Once I get a serving into my bowl I top it with cracked pepper and parmessan and drink a glass or 3 of Spatburgunder with it, or whatever wine we have in the house.

My catering friend also makes this dish once a week and she says that she tends to make a lot of lentil soups with sausage in them. Berlin makes stirfry asian food a bit of a challenge and Mexican is too expensive and forget about corn tortillas. The tortilla chips they sell here are so miserably salty or seasoned like a pale imitation of Dorritos that the whole endeavor is sort of futile. It would be interesting to know what dyed in the wool Berliners eat for comfort. Probably something meaty and sauerkraut heavy. Maybe I’ll get there in a few years. But for now, I am sticking to my tuna cans.

It’s grey outside. I have no money and many bills. I have projects to work on but no will or inclination. While there is a small part of my brain that realizes self defeat and shame spirals are not going to help, the bigger part is saying, ‘don’t shower…don’t do the dishes…watch a long sad movie…. Stay inside, in slippers, in a robe, make little messes and don’t clean them up. And eat, eat all day. Eat whatever will take the least amount of effort to compile. Combine flavors that stoners would tssk at.

Today the main dish ended up being boiled brown rice with leftover bolognese sauce mixed into it.  Dessert was half a bag of sugar jelly candies. But if I were really to do it right. I mean if I were to not just give in to the pity party inclination but make a grand spectacle of it, I think I could create a sweatpants affair of the highest order.

I’m imagining a windowless room decorated like the set of Roseanne but with way more couches and afghans. Participants would each get a couch to lay on, a liter of soda to drink from directly, and a pot of spaghetti-marinara with plenty of cheese on top. Joints and whisky would also be available upon request.  A series of celebrity tabloids and fashion magazines would circulate to reinforce depression and low self esteem. It would be the opposite of a weight watchers meeting. Just a bunch of sad sacks slurping noodles and staring numbly at the screen together. No talking, no touching each other. Maybe there could be cats and dogs because they have such a soothing warming effect.

The party would go on for as long as people were there. The world would be waiting outside but the Pity Party would never let on that it knew.

For about a year I’ve been wanting to see 32 Short Films about Glenn Gould again. I remember the impression it made on me when I saw it for the first time about 5 years ago and afterwards in situations where I felt particularly stifled by excess human contact, I would often think about a line from that film in which Gould says, ‘For every hour that you spend with people you need X amount of time alone.’ Coming back to the film now, after the first real snow has fallen over Berlin and the city has that particular hushed whiteness about it, I realize how integral this Gould film was to my obsession with the north and with isolated places. Gould represents a northern archetype on so many levels that are attractive to me- He is tall and pale and moves in a very considered way. He is extremely polite, to the point of eccentricity, his eccentricity itself is a sort of beautiful manifestation of the time he spends alone working and creating music, and his use of language is stunning in a precise and icy way, his voice sounds like an ice-cube mellowing in a glass of water.

It’s also very touching to me that he felt himself to be such a part of (and spokesman for) the northern community. He believed in this ‘northness’ and he was able, through his radio plays, to coax that meaning out of other northerners and create a symphony of words from it. The result is like word pictures and music simultaneously playing for the mind.

I would very much like to do this with food. The concept I have in mind is to use an existing line of latitude to separate the north from the south and then to combine culinary offerings from all of the countries that exist above that line. In Berlin where the food is so heavily Mediterranean, I imagine a restaurant that would draw food from Scotland, Canada, Mongolia, Sweden and Russia–just to name a few places. Ideally I’d like to concentrate on a northern pallate of flavors which for me evoke things like horseradish, smoked meats, sour/sweet vegetables, gamey meats, heavily spiced sweets, caviar, small oily fish, roots and forest flavors, and clean austere liquids.

When I was a kid I had a fantasy of bringing a beautiful brass bed covered with furs and warm woolen blankets into the middle of a frozen lake and sleeping on it. I think this dream had something to do with Snow White and her glass coffin and I think, even now, the allure of the north is somehow tied to death and stillness for me. To wake up in that fantasy and observe the play of light on snow; the snow has that metallic rainbow of color trapped in it which is so mesmerizing and thought-provoking. I think the silence and the subtlety of that landscape has a lasting effect on some people. It certainly did for Gould. He wrote about ‘The idea of North’:

‘Something really does happen to most people who go into the North - they become at least aware of the creative opportunity which the physical fact of the country represents and - quite often, I think - come to measure their own work and life against that rather staggering creative possibility:they become, in effect, philosophers. ‘

Recently I stumbled on Ed Ward’s last post from his longstanding blog Berlin Bites. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Ward here is the link: http://berlinbites.blogspot.com/

Ed Ward is the kind of person I immediately think of when people ask that question about your dream dinner party guests. He loves soul music, is a cultural correspondent for Fresh Air, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, and he loves good food.  I would like to be Ed Ward when I grow up, minus the innability to attract a suitable mate. So I find it really interesting that just as I am starting my blog, he is ending his. He is also ending his 15 year residency in Berlin while I am celebrating my second year here. His last post made me think about what attracts people to Berlin and what bogs them down after the initial rush has worn off.  Berlin, like Baltimore (the city I moved here from) promises a very particular brand of freedom. It isn’t the LA freedom of making it big and attracting lots of attention. It’s more like the freedom to exist in whatever capacity you like amidst the scattered decomposition and regrowth of a city that will never be centralized. Getting people to pay attention is very difficult here but finding like-minded enthusiasts is pretty easy. The possibility for projects and ventures can feel almost overwhelming at times. I have been able to wiggle my way into food circles and film circles that I never dreamed would be open to a fledgling German speaker like me. In the first 3 months after moving here I had met the top food, wine and film journalists in Berlin and I can count many of them among my good friends still.

And yet, while your social life flourishes and the opportunities for collaboration pour in, longevity, stability and especially financial stability stay far behind.

Maybe it’s the innability to really ‘make it’ here that leaves so many doors for friendship open. I think no one is worried about competition here. The market is just too loose for roaring personal success. This reality has to sink in if you want to stick it out here. Big money and big success is just not in the cards. This is evident when you visit the apartments of your fresh of the boat American friends who scramble to get by on babysitting and art-modleing jobs, then visit the apartments of professors, published authors and music video producers and find that everyone has the same shitty Ikea furniture, drinks the same heat-vacuumed milk, and uses the same scratchy recycled toilet-paper. And actually, that’s oddly comforting to me, especially when I think about the small townhouse of two successful Psychiatrists I recently visited  in San Francisco. Their living-comfort level was not so far from mine in Berlin but the money it would take to have that comfort in San Francisco is so far from what I will ever make  that it makes me immediately defensive and edgy.

The other reality that is still sinking in for me is Berliners themselves. As language improves, my ability to recognize culture progresses as well and I predict that there will be some rifts there. What Ward says about Germany is something I just cant know  right now. He writes;

‘The picture Berlin was painting of itself to the world, emphasizing the negative, emphasizing death over life, always twisting the narrative to avoid mentioning things the city should have been proud of.’

That opinion is earned only through slow and careful study. I recognize, in a limited way, the unwillingness Berliners show when it comes to talking about their past–or maybe a better way to put it is, I recognize their relief when they sense that I don’t want to delve into those subjects and press them for opinions. At the same time I have heard amazing accounts of the fall of the wall and the intricacies of living in a pre and post wall Berlin are so complicated and fascinating to me because I can feel their effects even now. The East Berliners I meet often never learned English, for example, while the West Berliners did. Their accents are different as well as their fashion sensibilities.

On a more daily level, I can identify with Ward when he says, ‘The weather, of course, could be brutal in the winter, and the winter seemed to last for seven months. The food, for most of my stay, was awful, although I have to say that’s one thing which was definitely on the upswing in my last couple of years there. The architecture was relentessly grim.’ This seems like a particularly profound triumvirate. Weather, food and architecture are integral to quality of life and in Berlin the landscape in winter can be garish. I think the way Spielothek’s (mini casinos) look in winter is so bleak. The brightly lit signs with dice and coins dripping and the stale, smoky red interiors of the places are cinematically depressing. But again, coming from Baltimore, I have a soft spot for ‘ugly’ cities. They just seem more important than beautiful ones. I grew up in Van Nuys,  a suburb of Los Angeles, and I think weather has very little to do with how depressing a city is. Van Nuys was numbingly sunny but so empty seeming most of the time. All those little lawns and dried out roses. The billboards and the shopping carts on the sidewalks. I much prefer cold climates where more care is taken with interiors. Walking into a bar is like leaving the world behind here. The atmosphere has this quality of making you feel like you’re in a snapshot, it can be a little disembodied but it’s also like floating above the city and sensing the millions of other bars and other snapshots taking place at the same time. In LA, you just feel sweaty and alone.

And as for food here, well, I consider it a personal and professional challenge to make it better. And I am thankful I’m not in Paris or Barcelona where the dialogue about food is closed and they are just resting on their culinary laurels.

Mostly this Ward piece has made me wonder what the future holds for me here. He says that he never meant to settle here, that the past 15 years were an improvisation. I think about my friend Sabrina Small (we became friends when I googled my name in 2004), she lived in Berlin for 6 years and worked as an artist;http://www.sabrinasmall.com/–and she had a similar experience to Ward. At some level she just felt beaten down by Berlin. She complained, as he did, of the pinched faces she saw all around her, the struggle to make ends meet, and the transitory nature of the place. Now she is in Florida where she found love with and American race car mechanic after dating cheap and neurotic Germans for 5 years. But while she seemed convinced that Berlin was bad for her health, both mental and physical, she also found it hard to leave the place behind and was resolute about coming back here every year. I met up with her on her latest visit back and she still seemed proud to show me hidden bars and restaurants, introduce me to her friends and forge connections. Maybe, as Ward says, you always leave a suitcase in Berlin just in case you come back. I’d like to think of myself as a human embodiment of that suitcase for Sabrina and perhaps eventually for Ward as well.