The Food Maven Diary
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Some Boasting
I suppose my end of the year letter was sad, so I thought I should make my first letter of the New Year more upbeat. To that end, let me blow my horn for a moment.
My website, this website, The Food Maven, is included in a new book called "99 Fabulous Food Websites You Can't Eat Without!" by Jim and Peter Spellos, brothers who are both computer and food aficionados. You can buy a copy by going to www.lulu.com, a self-publishing website. (Use the search box to find the book.)
A recipe you can find here on my website, Manly Meatballs, which I know has become a favorite of many of you, as well as my own family, is included in The 150 Best American Recipes, which was edited by Fran McCullough and Molly Stevens, two highly respected food writers and editors.
And I have been quoted here and there all year in the New York Post, in the Daily News, in The New York Times, in the Record (of Bergen County), and many other newspapers, as well as in a new book called What To Drink With What You Eat by Andrew Dornenburg and Karen Page, who have written several books about and for chefs, wannabe chefs, food professionals and serious amateurs, including the best-selling Becoming a Chef and Culinary Artistry.
Whenever I hear about food and wine pairings I remember a simpler time. My dear, witty and urbane friend the wine writer Alexis Bespalof, who also died this year, was one of the first people in New York (maybe anywhere, ever) to have a phone answering machine. I'm talking about 1970. His message was: "This is Alexis. I'm not home now. But if this is an emergency, it's red with meat, white with fish." Just the other day, I heard someone on TV say that this advice was from some "prehistoric" time. Oy vey is meer! I am officially an old fogy.
By the way, that advice still stands as far as I am concerned, although there are many exceptions, as there always have been. On that note, here's another little story: About 30 years ago, I went to a new and trendy restaurant in Paris with a few wine-writer friends. The captain was unbearably haughty, as only Parisian captains can be. "We'll win him over," said John Walker. "I see they have the only red wine a Frenchman would ever drink with oysters – a red from the Loire Valley. We'll see what his attitude is after I order a bottle with oysters for all of us."
It was a costly way to gain the guy's respect. But it worked.
To continue my boasting, here's something about me that you may be amused to read, a story called Arthur Schwartz Eats in a newish magazine, a quarterly, called Edible Brooklyn. It even has a current picture – me in all my fatness, and not looking too neat, either. I had no idea the magazine was going to photograph me that day. I suppose I should have tucked in my shirt. All I was supposed to do was drive around Park Slope and a few kosher shopping streets in Brooklyn with a reporter and her boyfriend. Who knew the boyfriend takes pictures. My nephew says the story makes me sound like I am anti-Manhattan, a Brooklyn snob. Well, so be it. I do really feel that Brooklyn is a better, more interesting place to live and eat these days.
I must add that for some reason the pdf file with the story about me does not open on my AOL, although I have reports that it opens on other computers with AOL. I suggest you use internet provider, for instance MSN Windows Internet Explorer. One can, by the way, subscribe to the magazine, but it is also handed out free at key Brooklyn locations. I got my copy in the lobby at BAM, which is also known to us old-time Brooklynites as the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
