Wednesday, March 16, 2011.
Three Rooms. On Creativity.
My broken ankle has me confined to little more than three rooms: my office, my bedroom, and the bathroom. I am at the mercy of Mary Ann for my morning orange juice and coffee. She drinks neither. She is understanding about the coffee, and has followed exactly my instructions on making it. With one exception, which she admitted today: she is using one percent milk for the café au lait, not the two percent we've always had in part. If there has been a noticeable difference, I have ascribed it to its being made by someone else. Like handwriting, everybody does the same things a little differently.
She refuses to juice oranges my way, using a standard rotating reamer. Instead, she is intent on getting some use out of the commercial juice press she bought for me a couple of years ago for something like $125. It looks good, but it only gets about two-thirds of the juice out of the orange, and very little pulp (I like pulpy juice). It also injects a certain amount of orange oil from the skin, which is a good taste, but not in orange juice.
I would do my juice and coffee myself, but she refuses to allow it. One has to choose one's battles very carefully when one's opponent is one's caregiver.
Among the few advantages of my current situation is that I am getting a lot of work done at my desk. Not having to drive into town every day bequeaths me three hours right there.
I'm using some of the time in reading. I'm coming to the end of Pops, the book about Louis Armstrong. It is a fine piece of work. And, in an unexpected way, it's relevant to the food culture I write about. (I'll get to that in a minute.)
Two of the book's main points are a) Armstrong had a talent and intelligence even greater than what's usually accorded him, and 2) playing his music was almost all he cared about. Even to the point of letting his managers get away with far more of his income than he should have. He didn't care whether he made a half-million or a million, if it meant not having to worry about such details. "I just want to blow my gig," to use his words. Which he did with almost ridiculous persistence. No musician ever worked harder.
Another matter the author analyzes is the kind of music Armstrong played in the second half of his career. By then, Louis knew the kind of music he wanted to play, and that's about all he played for the rest of his life. He was such a unique original to begin with that he easily stood out from everybody else--even the legion of trumpeters who copied aspects of his style. There was no mistaking him for anyone else.
But he was criticized for this, from two different directions. A lot of other jazz musicians thought he was backward, an embarrassing throwback to bad old days for black people. They couldn't understand why he dismissed new jazz like bebop out of hand, and never even tried to play it. Meanwhile, another faction (mostly made of jazz critics) said that Armstrong betrayed the purity of his early music by playing a lot of music that couldn't be considered jazz at all. They thought he shouldn't play Tin Pan Alley standards, among other things.
Armstrong responded to such criticism by pointing to the continuing popularity of his records. (It was greater than most people think. "Hello, Dolly" in 1967 went to number one, knocking the Beatles off.) And he saw the response of the crowds who can to see him wherever he went. They loved what he did, and he loved doing it. Why mess with something like that?
I think about that very issue as it regards food all the time. Especially in the past few years. I question whether the food of current chefs is as good as what their predecessors did doing ten or twenty years ago. What I usually come up with is that the 1987 model chicken Pontalba (half a roasted chicken with fried potato cubes, green onions, ham, mushrooms, and bearnaise sauce) is a much more enjoyable dish than organic chicken breast with wild foraged mushrooms in a light broth with fresh herbs.
Yeah, the Pontalba would be better if the chicken were free-range, the mushrooms were other than standard white, and the herbs in the bearnaise were fresh instead of dried. But the old-style Pontalba is still the better dish to my palate. And it drives me nuts that not a single restaurant in town has it on the menu as a regular item. While the likes of the organic breast with wild mushrooms is on many menus.
I'm troubled by the way many chefs address the mind and the eye instead of the heart and palate. Which ravioli would taste better? The black ones with foam and vegetables raised at Covey Rise Farms, from Restaurant August, above? Or the straightforward trio stuffed with crabmeat and sage with Alfredo sauce at Carmelo?
To which my younger readers--en route to a bowl of pho instead of a bowl of chicken-andouille gumbo--respond that I have let time pass me by, and that I no longer get it.
I know I can't just say phooey to all of that, for two reasons. First, when I was coming up as a food writer, I made fun of the restaurants that seemed to be stuck in a cuisine that was more about following time-tested rules than about creating great food. And I cheered on the 1980s arrival of the gourmet Creole bistros and their exciting new menus and recipes.
Second, I cannot ignore the interests and tastes of my potential readers and listeners, lest I lose touch with them and get stuck with an aging audience that shrinks by attrition. I've seen that happen to too many successful restaurants (La Cuisine, for example) and media (WSMB Radio in the decade before I started there) to let myself get caught in that trap.
I could write about this issue interminably. Which is the way I've thought about it, without any resolution showing itself. Maybe it's the inevitable effects of getting older.
I don't remember anything I ate today. I think it was just leftovers from MA's inexhaustible stash.
