Don't Kill the Birthday Girl (15 page)

Gilding the Gouda

L
uring the average American into becoming a “foodie” is now a multibillion-dollar industry. I have taken the bait, after years of eating in a manner that was at best ascetic and at worst disordered. There is no other explanation for my decision to wake up at eight on a Saturday morning, catch a taxi downtown, and find myself at an event populated by men like Mike. Mike, whose chest hair froths beyond the top button of his Hawaiian shirt. Mike, who will be handling our loin today.

“That's good,” Giada De Laurentiis says. She moves her hands in small demonstrative circles, encouraging him to massage salt and pepper all over the pork's surface. While the rest of the undercaffeinated audience blinks owlishly from our seats, Mike has jumped up to share the stage with De Laurentiis, host of the show
Everyday Italian
. Confident and beaming, in
his midfifties, he knows his way around a loin. I'm transfixed by the feisty tuft of silver chest hair above the collar of his dark shirt. Does he comb it out each morning?

A large crowd has settled into the 2,700 seats that occupy one section of one room in the gargantuan Walter E. Washington Convention Center. This is the kickoff cooking demonstration of the fourth annual Metropolitan Cooking & Entertaining Show. There will be standing room only for Paula Deen and Guy Fieri later this afternoon. But we have come to watch Giada “because,” as my friend Amy puts it, “she is so beautiful.”

Giada is a slim-hipped waif, dressed in clingy layers of gray silk fit for a ballet dancer. A black scarf loops loosely around her neck, lending bulky modesty to an otherwise bare collarbone. Her amber hair sits in a high bun on top of her head. On me, the style would look like junior-year homecoming. On her, it looks perfect.

Because Mike is so gung ho in his meat prep, Giada is free to step to the front of the stage and take a round of questions. Question one is “How do you stay so thin?”

“You can eat anything,” she says, “if you eat it in moderation.” She will claim this three more times during the course of the hour.

Our host's petite beauty emphasizes the surreal, dollhouse efficiency of the cooking setup that surrounds her. It's as if the producers chopped a kitchen in half: a gleaming fridge, two ovens, a stovetop, a sink with running water, a food processor, and a blender, all wired and ready to go in a “room” with only one wall. Whatever it costs, the organizers can afford it; this convention has just been named one of the fifty fastest-growing tradeshows in the country.

I missed the first wave of Food Network enthusiasm in the midnineties, when housewives flocked to Emeril Lagasse's dynamic broadcasts. A second wave of cooking-show love crested around 2002, washing over my fellow graduate students and other underemployed twentysomethings. Friends debated Mario Batali versus Bobby Flay, but I stayed out of it. My knowledge of cooking shows consisted of dim childhood memories of whatever came on PBS after
Sesame Street:
Julia Child,
The Frugal Gourmet, Louisiana Cookin'
with Justin Wilson—all of whom worshipped at the altar of butter, cream, and fat, or, as Graham Kerr of
The Galloping Gourmet
called it, “hedonism in a hurry.” Even Martin Yan of
Yan Can Cook
was always throwing a little chopped egg into the stir-fry. Why taunt myself?

Then came Rachael Ray. Love her or hate her, Ray raised the profile of extra-virgin olive oil (“EVOO”) right as a number of health studies began touting the benefits of the Mediterranean diet. Even before catching her show, I'd noticed her impact in restaurants. Turning down salad dressing, which used to puzzle waiters, now solicited a cheery if initially indecipherable “Eeeveedoubleoh, then?” The acronym became so pervasive that it was indexed by
The Oxford American College Dictionary
in 2007.

So here I am on a Saturday morning, another convert. Giada twists the cap off the big green bottle of oil, readying her vinaigrette. She charges Mike, his hands already slick, with dropping any pungent ingredients into the blender. He asks if he needs gloves.

“No, you don't need gloves,” Giada says. Then she reconsiders. “Unless you do. Are you allergic to garlic?”

Mike shakes his head and goes to work. This is a new era;
Julia Child never asked about food allergies. As Giada loads the raw tenderloin into the oven and—the magic of television—pulls it out, fully cooked, from the other oven, I sigh in satisfaction with the rest of the audience. Not only could I make this meal, I could actually eat it.

“Next up, rigatoni with shrimp,” Giada says.
Damn
. This will not be a recipe I can use. She walks over to the shiny stunt fridge and opens the door with a flourish to reveal … an empty shelf.

“The shrimp are not in the fridge,” she announces, looking offstage for help. The young crewman shrugs. This is the peril of being the first demo of the day. “We are improvising!” Giada says. “No shrimp!”

Her next audience assistant is Linda, a twentysomething woman in thick-rimmed glasses and an olive green cardigan. Linda swears she is the biggest fan ever.

“Do you cook?” Giada asks.

“I clean vegetables,” Linda replies.

“What about pasta?”

“I clean vegetables,” Linda says again, firmly.

With no shellfish handy, Giada has decided to fix rigatoni with butternut squash. The squash is already peeled and diced, meaning there are no vegetables to clean. Linda tenses her shoulders at this news. Giada is held captive behind the counter, guiding her step by step, while the lineup of audience members with questions grows longer.

Giada hands Linda the box of pasta. Linda dumps it in.

Giada asks her to grind the pepper. Linda turns the knob over and over, robotic, until our host places a hand on her arm to stop her.

“Otherwise,” she says, “we'll be serving a plate of pepper with pasta, not pasta with pepper.”

Giada tells Linda to cut some basil. When she picks up the correct herb, one of only two bunches on the counter, Giada cheers, “Good for you!”

The pace is tedious, but at least it is easy to follow. I could re-create this later. Then, as the squash is sautéing, a carton of milk materializes in Giada's hand. Where did that come from? And why is she—
Noooo!

“You see how it's coming together?” she asks Linda, pointing her spoon into the pot. “Loosening up, becoming nice and creamy?”

Giada picks up a big, firm triangle of cheese and a long, thin grater. “Lots of Parmesan,” she says, grating it in. “Then grill the shrimp and throw 'em on.”

This often happens when I watch cooking shows. I'll sit patiently, taking notes for fifteen minutes, only to realize some clutch ingredient renders the whole recipe useless to me. My salt-water pasta lacks creaminess. It will always lack creaminess. I am doomed to a life of lackluster, shrimp-less pasta.

Giada, on the other hand, lives with a gourmet's passion. She clasps her hands to her chest and swoons at the mention of squash blossom fritters. A bona fide swoon; her body mic booms. She lights up when an audience member asks how to fix
struffoli
, telling him to lift the deep-fried dough out the moment the honey begins to crystallize, rhapsodizing that it is a favorite treat in her hometown.

Did I mention how perfectly thin she is?

The dessert is something involving ricotta and crumbles of biscotti, neither of which I can eat. The volunteer assistants
have been increasingly starstruck and decreasingly helpful, and by this point the stage is crowded with the next generation of foodies: five girls ages ten to twelve, a five-year-old whose eyes barely clear the demonstration counter, a pregnant woman who introduces her protruding belly as “Megan,” and one other extremely sheepish-looking grown-up.

As Giada spoons cheese into a food processor, I have no useful reference point for how this would or could taste. Maybe this is the true definition of pornography—being invited to take satisfaction in images devoid of larger meaning. My mind wanders back to college days, when one of my guy friends would pop into another's dorm room and announce, “I got a Shakira video off Napster.” I loved that these guys had broadened their musical horizons to include Latin girl-pop. Then I realized they were watching Shakira with the sound turned off.

Up onstage, in response to repeated pulses of the blades, the espresso powder blending into the ricotta makes for a sexy, sultry brown cream. But it's an empty pleasure for me. There's no future in it. I feel an urge to shower.

Our hour with Giada is up. She thanks us and retreats backstage. Amy and I follow the crowd toward row after row of sponsor displays and vendor tables, each offering a little taste of something. It's dizzying: FunniBonz Barbeque, BelGioioso Cheese, Belmont Peanuts, Pestos with Panache, Red Rocker Candy, McNulty's Chutney.

Cutting a wide berth around the cheese, I focus on the possibilities. I've never seen so many salsas. Each proprietor sizes you up as you pass the table. Are you a potential sale? Sample mooch? Food journalist? They don't appreciate me
spinning jars around to examine labels. I am messing with their display.

For every dip or sauce I decide I can try, there's the consequent challenge of getting it to my mouth. The only serving utensils are in the form of unmarked chips and pretzels. I have to be careful. A pretzel used to consist of flour, yeast, and salt, but now even mainstream varieties use buttermilk. Some tortilla chips use a lime flavor that is bound with a milk derivative.

“May I ask what kind of chips these are?” I ask one seller, hoping he'll produce a bag I can check for ingredients.

“The cheap kind,” he says. “What do you want to know about my salsa?”

I'm impeding the flow of valuable traffic. Most of these vendors don't have national shelf presence; they rely on Internet sales, bulk orders, and the hope that some enthused blogger will set their product on the path to viral popularity. As entrepreneurs, they know that lack of everyday access is a deal breaker for many customers. People who smile over a free sample will ultimately choose a cheap Trader Joe's variation or something they can get delivered to their house by Peapod.

Many will choose those routes. Not all. Not the foodies, and not the parents of food-allergic children, for whom stalking brands across time and distance is everyday housekeeping. When Duncan Hines pulled the one Sandra-friendly, store-bought oatmeal raisin cookie from the shelves of local grocery stores, my mother made a special deal with the distributor to buy cookies by the case until the manufacturer's supply ran out. We became proselytizers, giving a pack to any parents who had a house I might visit to play with their kids.

Somewhere in between the fifteenth spicy salsa and the
twentieth hot sauce, I begin to feel tingly, with what is either a glimmer of hope or an overdose of capsaicin. What I'm thinking is, what makes someone a foodie? A pickiness toward brands; an obsession over provenance; a curiosity about cooking technique? What are traits common to a food-allergic adult? All the same ones. Maybe my genetics haven't cursed me to a lifetime of boring meals. Maybe they have made me a natural-born foodie.

I see a large crowd huddled around a demonstration, and walk over to find Carla Hall, of cable television fame, making peanut soup. Hall is a longtime Washingtonian who teaches at CulinAerie, one of D.C.'s newer catering service/cooking school ventures. She became a fan favorite during the fifth season of Bravo's
Top Chef
in part because of her positive attitude (“cook with love”), and in part because of her refusal to fix anything that didn't truly nourish the body.

Hall's competition highlight, for me, was when contestants were asked to serve a cocktail pairing for their food. A non-drinker herself, the “chef-testant” didn't compromise her ethics by using spirits. She didn't fake it with a mocktail masking the lack of alcohol. Instead, she made a cranberry and ginger spritzer based on key lime soda, a drink not trying to be anything other than what it was—delicious.

Now she is ladling out tastes of the soup to the hungry crowd. Someone asks about avoiding the calories of heavy cream, and Hall mentions using tofu to thicken the consistency of her broth. An older man asks if she ever wants to open her own restaurant, and she says no. I ask if CulinAerie has ever thought about offering classes for those with food allergies. She looks at me.

“I think it's a really good idea. The class would be all about substitutions, right? If you have milk,
use this
. If you can't eat peanuts,
use this.
”

I should be happy at her enthusiasm, but my heart sinks. All about substitutions? There are so many worthy dishes. She could have said that one could program a gourmet cooking class without ever needing to use (or substitute for) milk, peanuts, eggs, or wheat. Instead she articulated the allergen-centric mentality I am trying to shake. The one that whispers,
You'll never really be one of us
.