Port Bistro

I was excited about the opening of Port Bistro when I learned it is the sister restaurant to Sintra in Braintree. The hospitality and the food were worth the trip, but now I have only to drive to Kingston where Jenkins has taken over the space that housed La Paloma at 14 Main Street near KFC and the Purple Building. http://www.portbistrokingston.com/

I was first impressed by the wine list, and when I remarked upon it, I was introduced to Melani St. Pierre, who put in great deal of work selecting wines for the restaurant and is proud of the result.  Her title is Wine Director; she says sommelier is a masculine term. No matter your wine expertise or lack of same, your experience at Port Bistro will be enhanced if you place wine selection in her hands.

Served with a square of polenta, the long island duckling was tender, juicy, and unctuous without being greasy. The spiced orange glaze was a little sweet for my taste, but not so much as to spoil the total experience. To go with it, Ms St. Pierre recommended Bedell Merlot from North Fork, Long Island, NY. That‘s certainly a terroir I’m not familiar with, and the wine reached heights to which I didn’t think the variety capable. I decided then and there this Wine Director has a great deal to teach. I see the bar at Port Bistro is convivial with winebibbers, and I suspect that the place is becoming a destination for those who appreciate wine.

When visiting Port Bistro on a weeknight, I often choose a half portion of pasta.  I like the baked rigatoni served with chorizo sauce, roasted peppers, melted fresh mozzarella and topped with crisp basil-scented crumbs. It’s a treat for $11, and I spend the savings on wine. On a recent visit I selected a half order of braised beef short rib cannelloni. The meat was removed from the bone and served with a béchamel sauce enhanced with porcini mushrooms, tomato confit, and a demi-glace with truffles. With it I enjoyed a 2012 Castello Di Nieve pino nero. This is a Spanish pinot noir and an outstanding example of the variety, which can sometimes be a little thin.  It was graced with velvety tannin that elegantly balanced the sprightliness of the grape. 

Annette had baked haddock, which was perfectly fresh and moist from vigilant cooking. “This is good fish,” she exclaimed, “This is as good as I would make!”  (Having learned the art from her mother, Annette is famous in our family for her baked haddock.)

On that evening she and I split a salad of arugula elegantly dressed with lemon and extra-virgin olive oil and garnished with shavings of parmesan cheese.  The greens were fresh with the characteristic hint of bitterness.  I get so many bad salads in restaurants, it was a delight to have one so thoughtfully conceived and carefully made.  

We finished up with crème brulee, and I had a piece of chocolate cake with a rich molten center and a scoop of coffee ice cream.  It was more food then we require on a Wednesday night, and next time we hope to manage a little restraint.

Port Bistro is a rising star upon the area’s restaurant scene. I look forward to further exploration of the menu, and just contemplating the wine list makes my future seem bright.

Casablanca

Much blood has been spilt,

but I have the letters of transit.

They are in perfect order

and actually quite beautiful –

fine paper, crisp print, legible handwriting.

Neither high officials nor brutish border guards

dare question them.

Possessed of incredible privilege,

I trudge the desert alone.

Soylent

I just got the latest New Yorker and read “The End of Food” by Lizzie Widdicombe.    http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/05/12/140512fa_fact_widdicombe?currentPage=all It tells of the invention by a Californian named Rob Rhinehart of Soylent, which is a food substitute. Like most of his friends, Rhinehart had been living on McDonald’s dollar meals and five-dollar pizzas from Little Caesars. He and his friends thought eating food was expensive and an interruption of their work. 

He is quoted as saying, “You need amino acids and lipids, not milk itself. You need carbohydrates, not bread. He said fruits and vegetables provide essential vitamins and minerals, but they’re mostly water. He decided that nutrients – the things you need from food – could be reduced to a powder which could be dissolved in water and drunk.  For him the problem was solved.  He claims that for the past year and a half he’s been living almost exclusively on Soylent. Widdicombe reports that he looks healthy. 

Soylent is nerd food and has gained a following among computer engineers and other bright young workers.  Rhinehart claims that his discovery will eliminate the need for agriculture, which he says is an inefficient use of resources.  Of course some agricultural products are used in the production of Soylent, but Rhinehart dreams of a time when farming will be made obsolete by Soylent-producing algae that would turn out the product using only sunlight and water.

This is the opposite of the Whole Foods philosophy.  Instead of removing chemicals from food, you remove the food and ingest chemicals. If you protest that you can’t live without rocky road ice cream you can have it.  Rhinehart calls this recreational eating, which he condones and occasionally indulges in. 

As a person who has found good food one of the blessings of life, I’m somewhat appalled, and yet I’m not outraged at the idea. I lunched today on a ham salad roll from a supermarket deli.  The roll was sweet and cottony, and the main flavor of the ham was salt which remains on my palate as I type. I was able to get it down with the copious lubrication of cheap mayonnaise – sugar, salt, and fat. I’m embarrassed at this confession, but I was tired from my morning chores and didn't feel like rustling up a better meal.  Rhinehart in his dollar meal days was a fellow sufferer.  Considering the number of Americans who subsist mainly on fast food, he may have invented a godsend.

But I continue to seek out new foodstuffs, and am trying to tempt the Foodie Pilgrim into undertaking with me an excursion to Boston to explore the bizarre foods of Chinatown. I was there a short while ago and sampled a dish of tripe and tofu at the Great Taste Bakery & Restaurant. 

http://www.bostongreattastebakery.com/  These are two foods I've long striven to learn to like.  I had been making progress with tofu, but tripe had defeated my attempts to achieve appreciation – until then. Perhaps my self-congratulation at my new ability skewed my judgment as to how good it actually was, but it sure wasn't bad.  If I've mastered tripe, can the conquest of duck feet be far behind?

A History of Chowder

Robert Cox is a robust man who looks more like a lumberjack than a scholar, but his wit, assortment of degrees, and ornamented prose belie first impressions.  His recent lecture at Pilgrim Hall was full of information and humor, and its topic was chowder.  Having heard it, I bought The History of Chowder; Four Centuries of a New England Meal, which he co-authored with Jacob Walker.

Both my grandmothers made chowder.  They used salt pork, milk, potatoes, fish or clams, and served it with crackers.  They seasoned it with pepper and sometimes floated a pat of butter on top.  My mother made it the same way, and I’d come in wet and cold from sledding and tuck into a steaming bowl that spoke to me of family and home. Like all New Englanders, I thought this chowder had been passed down from time immemorial, and I couldn't imagine eating it any other way. 

As I grew to manhood, I learned the world is not as innocent as my mother’s kitchen. In Rhode Island they leave out the milk, and in New York they add tomatoes! But these were traveler’s tales from beyond the outskirts of civilization. Now my eyes are opened. The History of Chowder is packed with information that takes the reader on a fascinating journey through the past.  The authors write: “This most comfortable of comfort foods carries a subtle aftertaste of international conflict, of conquest and enslavement, of the blood and tears that made Europe imperial and shaped the modern world.”

Now I find Rhode Island chowder is the oldest version made today.  It was born aboard fishing boats and was built from ingredients at hand.  The ocean teemed with fish.  Salt pork kept well in barrels and was a staple of seafaring life.  So were crackers in the form of hard tack.  Onions would survive on board if kept in a dry place.  You cooked them in pork fat, added a layer of fish and a layer of ship’s biscuit and kept alternating the ingredients in the pot.  Fresh water was scarce on shipboard so they only used a little, and they had no milk. In the days when chowder came to be, potatoes were not popular in New England.

This hearty pottage was cooked by men for men, but chowder came ashore, and women civilized it.  When I make stock from fish bones and freeze it so a cod filet from the fish market will make quick and flavorful chowder, I’m tinkering with a dish that has been tinkered with from the time Europeans reached these waters and these shores.

I often read about food, but this book taught me things I didn’t know about local history.  It seems pigs were agents of colonialism and had almost as much to do with the displacement of the native people as the diseases harbored by the newcomers.  Pigs are easily transported and pretty nearly raise themselves.  They can be released into the wild and live off the land. The Pilgrims fenced their fields, but the Indians didn't so the invading swine devastated native crops. Pigs also rooted in the clam flats that were mainstays of Indian sustenance.  The white man salted pork and packed it away, and it became a basic ingredient of chowder.  

I enjoyed the appendix of chowder recipes that starts with one for diet chowder from the seventies that made my blood run cold. It’s made with skim milk, onion flakes, parsley flakes, and either butter flavoring or a teaspoon of oleo. How far we've descended from the time when hearty chowders were built and devoured on the ever-moving sea. I liked the reproductions of recipe cards, but I have to say most of the images in the book are badly reproduced and a lot of them are just plain lame. Never mind, A History of Chowder is a short, but fascinating treatise on local history centered around one of our most iconic regional dishes.  After you read it, you’ll never look on a bowl of chowder the same way again.