Smart as Hitchcock, incisive as Wilder, and independently minded as Cassavetes, Otto Preminger remained largely peerless during his career. He was one of the first Hollywood auteurs to challenge censorship rules and explore his own vision—one populated with honest studies of drug addiction, sexual deviance, and corrupt politics. As an establishment director, he introduced an anti-cinema subversion that inspired the Cahiers du Cinema crew. Unfortunately, many will only remember him for his role as Mr. Freeze in the original Batman TV show. Film historian Chris Fujiwara’s exceptional biography aims to change that with an analysis that achieves the seemingly impossible: It actually manages to inspire the reader to take another look at Exodus.
Month: February 2008
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Meyer Lemon and Ricotta Cake
1 cup sugar
1 1/4 cups ricotta
3 eggs, separated
2 Meyer lemons, zest and juice
1 1/4 cups flour
1/2 tsp. ground cardamom
2 tsp. baking powderGlaze and Candied Lemon Topping
1/3 cup Meyer lemon juice
1 2/3 cups powdered sugar3 sliced Meyer lemons
2 cups sugar
2 cups waterPreheat oven to 350 degrees. In a large bowl, mix ricotta and sugar. Beat in egg yolks until creamy. Add juice of both lemons and zest from one. Mix in the flour, cardamom, and baking powder. In a separate bowl, whip egg whites until stiff peaks form. Gently fold whites into the batter, taking care not to overmix.
Pour batter into a buttered and floured 9-inch round cake pan. Bake for about 40 minutes or until toothpick comes out clean. Let cool in the pan for 5 minutes, then invert onto cooling rack.
For glaze, heat lemon juice and powdered sugar in a small saucepan over medium heat until sugar is dissolved.
For candied slices, heat water and sugar to a gentle boil, simmering for 5 minutes. Add lemon slices and cook for 5 minutes, until lemons have softened. Remove lemons with a slotted spoon and transfer to parchment paper.
With a skewer or toothpick, poke holes in the top of the cake, then pour warm glaze over it. Some will sink in; continue adding until you’ve used all of the glaze. Sweetly place the candied lemons on top.
STEPHANIE MARCH3 -
Citrus Sensation
Some people have gone out of their way to make a perfectly good Fuji apple smell and taste like a grape. They call it a Grapple. There are also those who feel that plums should taste like apricots and that apricots should taste like plums, hence the booming pluot and aprium markets. Needless to say, when I first heard of Meyer lemons, I assumed they were a breed of fancy Frankenlemons created at some technologically advanced Meyer Institute of Frilly Fruit. Like a fool, I snubbed them.
But they were hard to ignore, as the “Meyer lemon” moniker began popping up on menus everywhere. If chefs were going to pedigree a dish with this name, I figured this citrus was worth a try. It was only when I tasted the faint orangey sweetness and breathed in the floral scent that I understood what a contribution this fruit was.
In 1901, a man named Frans Meijer left Amsterdam for America, where he became Frank Meyer. Working for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, he traveled the world in search of new plants to introduce to his adopted homeland. During a trip to China, Meyer found a common potted ornamental plant that bore a small citrus fruit resembling a cross between a lemon and an orange. While the plant had most likely been cultivated for over four hundred years, this year marks its centennial in America, having been introduced here in 1908 as the Meyer lemon. (Intriguingly, while traveling the Yangtze on a riverboat on a subsequent trip to Asia, Meyer fell overboard and drowned under circumstances that the USDA still notes as “a mystery and source of speculation.”)
Meyer lemons, which are available from November to April, never hit the big time as a commercially viable fruit product. A virus nearly wiped out the trees in the 1940s. Even though a hardier Meyer Improved strain was developed, the fruits remained thin-skinned, and too tender and juicy to withstand rigorous commercial handling and shipping without costly waste. And yet, find me a food that has been deemed lacking in mass appeal, and I’ll show you the next great ingredient with chef-appeal.
Alice Waters and her ilk regarded this small zesty fruit as a gem, and the rest is all talk shows and cookbooks. Chefs and home cooks have found it to be an amiable companion to many dishes that a regular lemon might overwhelm. Although no one really knows, it’s the suspected cross with a mandarin orange that gives this citrus a new depth of flavor. Personally, I can’t help but think of cardamom whenever I cut into a Meyer.
To get over the shame of my initial snubbing, I threw myself into a wholehearted culinary exploration of this fruit. Starting simply, I squeezed a tiny section onto a Malpeque oyster and discovered a new balance of coppery, salty, tart, and sweet. Marmalades and baked goods made with Meyers were beautiful, but almost too easy, too girl-next-door. So I tossed zest into pasta with salmon; I braised chicken and artichokes with whole quarters; I made a zippy version of gremolata, which I proceeded to eat on pork and beef—and then bread and anything leftover in the fridge.
In the end, what I have added to my larder is a flavor that is tart but not sharp, luscious but edgy, and able to play to both savory and sweet dishes. Hardly worthy of a snub.
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Survival of the Fattest
Dr. Charles Billington divides his obese patients into two distinctly different groups: those who have choices, and those who don’t.
“Demographically, we know that people in lower socioeconomic areas are greatly, disproportionately affected by obesity,” he says. “Folks in those lower-economic, lower-education situations have little or no access to whole foods. They also have a lack of options.”A tall, lean, full-bearded man, Billington is laconic, more like a North Dakota farmer than a famous research doc. “When it comes to entertainment and reward, people with more money can go to the theater or to concerts; but the lower you go on the socioeconomic scale, the more important eating becomes relative to other affordable activities. We in the privileged class can join a gym, whereas lower-income people who want to exercise will probably end up at a community center, where there isn’t much. What it boils down to is this: Highly educated people with money tend to know how to change their lives. But people from a lower income and education bracket often feel a lack of self-efficacy, which means they feel like they have less ability to affect their own situation.”
In other words, it’s not simply the lack of grocery stores full of affordable fresh produce and whole foods that makes it harder for poor, inner-city residents to stay fit (though this remains a significant factor). It’s also lack of empowerment: Poor people have been conditioned to accept their circumstances—which all too often include growing fatter with every passing year. Billington is working to change that.
As an endocrinologist, a professor of medicine at the University of Minnesota, the team leader of the obesity program at the Minneapolis VA Medical Center, associate director of the Minnesota Obesity Center, and a nationally recognized expert on weight-related disease, there’s no question that Billington has an impressive track record. What makes it even more so is that he was warned early on (he is now fifty-four) that his chosen career path was a dead end.
Thirty years ago, when he graduated from medical school, Minnesota’s obesity rate was less than ten percent and “real” doctors didn’t think of obesity as an important area of study. Medicine had perfected drug therapies for treating chronic weight-related illnesses such as type 2 diabetes. When then-young Dr. Billington began telling his diabetic patients to reduce their body mass through diet and exercise rather than simply inject more insulin, he was branded a bit of a nut.
Today, however, his concerns are shared by leaders from the National Institutes of Health and the American Medical Association. More than twenty-three percent of Minnesotans are now considered obese (that is, they have a body mass index greater than thirty), and nationally—especially in urban, low-income, Southern communities—it’s ticking even higher. The rise in obesity has caused a subsequent surge in everything from high blood pressure, heart disease, and sleep apnea to arthritis, non-alcoholic cirrhosis of the liver, gallstones, infertility, incontinence, and certain kinds of cancer. On top of that, approximately twenty million Americans now have type 2 diabetes. The problem has officials in sectors ranging from public health to education to government casting about wildly for answers, coming up with some that appear to be taken directly from Lord of the Flies. For example, legislators in Mississippi, which has the highest rate of obesity in the U.S. at 29.5 percent of residents, actually drafted a bill earlier this year that will—if it is passed—make it illegal for restaurants to serve obese people.
The problem, Billington says, is that he and his colleagues spent decades trying to develop pharmaceutical and surgical solutions to type 2 diabetes and obesity. Now, however, the problem is too pervasive for that.
“We thought twenty years ago, and I still think now, that the key mechanisms are in the brain,” he says. “But that idea normally is interpreted as the need to find a drug that would allow us to control appetite or metabolism. I no longer think this will be the answer, because at this point about seventy percent of the American population is overweight or obese and that means a drug as the primary strategy would be fantastically expensive.”
Instead, Billington advises his patients to cook at home as often as possible. He helps them find ways to obtain fresh, wholesome ingredients, tells them to avoid fast food, and teaches them about NEAT: non-exercise activity thermogenesis.
The theory behind NEAT, which was developed at the Mayo Clinic, is that people with so-called “fast metabolisms” burn up to a thousand calories a day through spontaneous movement, such as fidgeting, pacing, and gesturing. But these things are governed both by genes and by girth. The fact is that heavier people move less than skinny ones, probably because their bodies have settled into stasis due to weight—it requires greater effort to move their bodies around. Studies show they sit an average of a hundred and fifty more minutes each day than people of normal weight. So Billington is training his patients, one by one, to twitch.
He admits, however, that the problem goes well beyond basic health care. Obesity is the natural outcome of a world in which foods that are cheap and plentiful are also calorie-rich and processed.
“Evolution dictates that we seek out energy-dense foods,” says Billington. “And it’s not just humans. Rats like them, dogs like them. All God’s creatures do. It’s a matter of survival—there are biological cues telling us to get calories when we can. But now we have access to energy-dense foods all day, every day, in the gas station and the break room at work. Their value biologically hasn’t diminished; in fact, it’s been enhanced by repeated exposure. People are just doing what their bodies tell them to.”
When caring for patients who do have means and options, Billington makes two additional recommendations. He likes Volumetrics, the diet plan conceived by Barbara Rolls (a Ph.D. nutritionist from Penn State) that advises people to eat satisfying portions of low-density foods, such as fruits, vegetables, and whole grains. The caveat, of course, is that these foods tend to be more expensive and quicker to spoil than Hormel cold cuts and Hostess pies.
“Rolls is the only diet book author I know who bases her writing on actual evidence,” he says. “Her theory is that you can train yourself to choose whole foods, and on average they will be low-density. The truth is, people who are doing well with their weight tend to eat quite a large volume of food, but it’s all of very high quality.”
An at-home chef who used to belong to a local gourmet dining club, Billington also advises his patients who can afford to dine out to choose places such as Meritage and Heartland, rather than steak houses or high-end restaurants where the entrées are swimming in butter or cream.
“Heartland is a perfect example of the way people should be eating,” he says. “The food is really good, of extremely high quality, and the vegetables are often the star of the plate. There is protein—which is an obligatory dietary requirement—but the portions aren’t huge. People tend to feel satisfied with this sort of meal.”
But that doesn’t solve the problem for people who cannot afford to shop at the Wedge or pay fifty dollars per person for dinner. Even educating people and telling them to avoid French fries and convenience store burritos won’t help those most at risk.
“If you learn to cook and you live in south Minneapolis, you can eat pretty well for not a lot of money,” says Billington. “But if you’re living in north Minneapolis and your only option is the local market because you don’t have a car, you’re not going to be able to eat well. We tend to frame this as an in
dividual choice, but for a very large number of people it’s not. Rampant obesity is, in this sense, simply an outcome of poverty.” -
Other Fish in the Sea
We seem to be in the midst of sushi mania. Two new restaurants—Seven and Musashi—opened recently, barely a block apart on Hennepin Avenue, which means that downtown Minneapolis now boasts at least a dozen sushi outlets. (The others; Koyi, Nami, Origami, Martini Blu, Wasabi, Ichiban, a sushi counter at Macy’s Marketplace, Zen Box, and two Tensuke Sushi locations.)
Raw fish is making new inroads into the neighborhoods as well, with Bagu at 48th and Chicago, and Obento-ya at 15th and Como. In St. Paul, the Korean restaurant KumGangSan recently added Sushi World to its name and installed a sushi bar and lunch buffet, following the lead of King’s Korean in Fridley. As the central cities get saturated with raw fish, new outposts of sushi open up in far-flung Woodbury, Maple Grove, Apple Valley, and Edina.
The tidbits of vinegared rice and seafood are everywhere these days—in supermarket delis, Chinese all-you-can-eat buffets, and even on giant party trays at Costco. But as sushi has made the passage from sophisticated and exotic delicacy to mass-market merchandise, something has gotten lost in translation. Most of the local sushi restaurants have little connection to Japan: The owners of Kikugawa, Musashi, Wasabi, and Mount Fuji (the last in Maple Grove) are Chinese; the owners of Koyi Sushi, Bagu, and Zushiya (the last also in Maple Grove) are Thai; and the sushi chefs themselves are from all over (but rarely from Japan). The food may look and taste the same—indeed, most local sushi restaurants serve the same varieties of fish and seafood, purchased from the same suppliers—but the little rituals that are part of the traditional sushi experience are missing.
So how do you go beyond the ordinary and find something more interesting, and less generic, than the stuff that’s offered on every sushi menu in town? You ask for it. In Japanese, the word is omakase, which translates roughly as “I am putting myself in your hands” or as we might say here, “chef’s choice.”
My top choice among the new sushi restaurants is Giapponese Sushi in Woodbury. When I asked for omakase, chef-owner Henry Chan immediately understood my request, and proceeded to serve up a delightful series of courses: raw scallop, Tasmanian salmon, halibut rolled in a thin ribbon of cucumber, a whole small mackerel presented as sashimi, and a roll of tempura shrimp and avocado topped with tuna.
Chan, who grew up in Wisconsin, recently moved here from Eau Claire, where he owns the town’s only sushi bar, the Shanghai Bistro. He clearly has a passion for sushi, and listening to him, he sounds truly committed to bringing in the best quality and most interesting varieties he can find. The selection is still pretty limited, but he says that as his sales volume grows, he will be adding more varieties. He sends an email to customers when he has something unusual to offer, like houbou (blue fin sea robin) from the Tsujiki fish market in Tokyo; to be added to his mailing list, send him an email at twinscroll@gmail.com.
I’d also return to Giapponese Sushi to try the Kobe beef steaks—a sixteen-ounce, bone-in New York strip and a fourteen-ounce rib eye are each $55. This isn’t the original Kobe beef from Japan, where the cattle are massaged daily and fed rations of beer, but it’s the same breed, Wagyu, reportedly with a lot more marbling than even USDA Prime. Chan gets his beef from a friend who has a herd of Wagyu near Augusta, Wisconsin. While $55 for a steak sounds pretty steep, compared to what other restaurants charge, it’s a bargain. Locally, Cosmos has imported Japanese Kobe beef on its menu for $17 an ounce (which works out to $272 for a sixteen-ounce steak), and even that’s a steal compared to Craftsteak in Las Vegas. There, you’ll pay $105 for a fourteen-ounce American Wagyu rib eye, $184 for an eight-ounce Australian Wagyu rib eye, and $240 for an 8-ounce Japanese Wagyu steak (yes, that’s $480 a pound).
Next stop, Musashi in downtown Minneapolis. I asked for omakase, and the sushi chef gave me a puzzled look. “Teppanyaki?” he asked—or something that sounded like that. (They have teppanyaki tables in back.)
“No,” I said. “Omakase.”
“We don’t have that.”
Just then, a second sushi chef, Noua, overheard our conversation and stepped in: “I can do that. How many courses do you want? How much do you want to spend? Four courses? Five?”
We never did agree on a price, but a series of off-the-menu dishes began to arrive, starting with a pair of martini glasses filled with chunks of raw tuna and salmon with thin slices of cucumber in a soy marinade. At the bottom of each glass was a fake ice cube with a little blinking light that changed colors from blue to green. (Actually, mine was stuck on blue.)
Round two was four pieces of raw salmon wrapped around spears of fresh mango, partially cooked with a blowtorch, served over leaves of aromatic Japanese chrysanthemum. The decorative centerpiece was another light-cube, flashing red, blue, and green, buried under a pile of shredded daikon. Then came a seafood medley covered in a spicy mayonnaise the color of Thousand Island dressing, dappled with orange flying fish roe. The flashing ice cube made its final appearance in round four, alongside four little rice balls wrapped in eel and white tuna. This was, the sushi chef informed us, “French-style sushi.”
I have never seen anything like it in France, but the phrase rang a bell. French-style sushi is also how the Chinese chefs at Mt. Fuji in Maple Grove described their neon DayGlo fantasies on the theme of sushi, festooned with red, green, orange, and black flying fish roe.
“Are you all from China?” I asked the Musashi chefs. “We’re from Asia,” sushi chef No. 3 offered, helpfully. “Not me,” shouted Noua, in perfect English. “I’m from St. Paul.”
Overall, some of the off-the-menu omakase dishes were pretty good, some of it was just okay, and mostly it was kind of weird. I did see a lot of “normal” sushi come out of the sushi bar while we were dining, and it looked the same as it does everywhere else.
The most stylish of the new entries in the sushi sweepstakes is Seven, on the second floor of the new r.Norman’s steak house at Seventh and Hennepin. The sushi counter is translucent marble, and white-curtained columns throughout the sushi bar and lounge bathe the otherwise dim space in diffuse colored light that cycles through shades of blue, red, and green—sort of like the fake ice cubes at Musashi, but on a grander scale.
Seven’s menu offers an impressive selection of sakes and a fairly standard assortment of sushi. I wanted to order omakase, but quickly discovered that omakase is already offered on the menu. We chose the sushi-for-two ($40): the chef’s choice of two specialty rolls and ten pieces of “sushi grade” nigiri sushi.
Omakase is a chance for a sushi chef to show some imagination and creativity, but this time around what we got was generic versions of the most popular sushi available: a tempura roll, a spicy tuna roll, and two pieces each of shrimp, tuna, salmon, yellowtail, and flounder. Our waitress mostly ignored us, as did our sushi chef.
Last stop: Obento-ya Japanese Bistro, a little storefront with a low-budget décor that suggests the minimalist aesthetic of Japanese interior design. The owners are a young American-born husband and his Japanese-born wife, and the place just feels more Japanese than most of the glitzier places around town. I splurged and ordered the most expensive item on the menu, the deluxe sushi bento ($12.95), which included six pieces of nigiri sushi and a California roll, plus green salad, Japanese potato salad, sautéed burdock, little wedges of Japanese omelet, and miso soup.
The sushi turned out to be pretty standard, but the rest of the menu is more impressive. First of all, it’s really cheap—most of the basic ben
to boxes are under $8, and udon and soba noodle soups are $4.95-$6.50. Second, there are a variety of traditional Japanese dishes that you can’t find at most of the other places—not just the variety of bento boxes and the noodle soups, but also a big selection of robata—skewers of meat, fish, or seafood, grilled or deep-fried ($1.50-$4.50 à la carte). The only thing that was missing was wine, beer, or sake, but I am told that should be fixed by the time this story is published.Giapponese Sushi, 10060 Citywalk Drive, Woodbury; 651-578-7777;
www.giapponesesushi.comMusashi, 533 Hennepin Ave. S., Minneapolis; 612-332-8772
Seven Sushi Ultralounge, 700 Hennepin Ave., Minneapolis; 612-238-7777; www.7mpls.comObento-ya Japanese Bistro, 1510 Como Ave. S.E., Minneapolis; 612-331-1432;
www.obento-ya.com -
Workingman’s Blues
I read Tom Bartel’s article “Discounting the Value of Work” (February). I would like to comment on it:
I have worked for over forty years in the baking trade, with a lot of six-day weeks and Sundays. I also worked twenty years as a part-time janitor for a church.In the coming election, I hope we can elect some people who can work for the average guy and not for corporate white-collar people.
I agree with his article one-hundred percent. He tells it right!
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Love the Sinner
I enjoyed my niece’s observations on “evangelicals” (“Do You Really Believe?” February) and attended the church she speaks of in Phillipsburg, Missouri. when I was her age. I don’t recall a fervor for a literal interpretation of the Bible particularly espoused, but I know many of the church members there did have those views. I did not hear anyone say that the farmers and wives attending the Presbyterian church across the unpaved road were definitely bound for the Lake of Eternal Fire—although again, it’s no doubt that some in the church felt that way. The belief in God, the proper view of His plan, and the correct way to worship Him, were of high importance to most of the community—so much so that a local church was divided over the picture of the church founder hanging in the auditorium. Half the church split away and built their own church, without any portraits of founders. One town had no less than four different kinds of Baptists. Despite the fractious appearance, however, the members of all these small rural Missouri churches were united in their certainty about one thing: Atheists like Alyssa (and me) were definitely going to Hell. Even a Catholic, a Mormon, or a Muslim had a better shot at the Pearly Gates than a godless heathen.
Me, I liked going to that church growing up, because of the friends and family that went there. The people there are warm, generous, and giving to a fault, and love me even though I don’t profess to love their God.
Keith Ford, Fort Mohave, AZLetter -
Against a wall
Lowell Pickett might want to downplay the Dakota’s beginnings at Bandana Square (“Planet Pickett,” February), but for many of us the club’s move was the lamented end of a lovely era
And not just due to the loss of that family feeling, either.
The Bandana site was cozy and intimate, with nary a bad seat in the house. Such cannot be said of the new location. Sit in the balcony and you have to look over/through/around the annoying railing, and if you don’t choose your seat extremely carefully on the floor you’ll end up looking at the drummer’s back all night … by all means never sit by the brick wall!
While the A-train membership used to be a great deal, ever since the move it has become far more restrictive, with a disturbingly increasing number of less-than-A-list national artists excluded from the ticket advantages contained as a member perk.
I’m glad the move has solidified the club’s financial stability, but for my money more was lost than gained.
Letter -
The Rakish Pause
Last fall Erik Bergling made a pilgrimage to the jungles of Vietnam to visit the army base where his father served during the war. Needless to say, his devotion is admirable. But so, too, is his curiosity. This photo he sent us shows him across former enemy lines, where he took a moment to peruse The Rake while touring the Chu Chi Tunnels, the network of tiny subterranean arteries that played such an important (and frequently devastating) role in the Viet Cong’s strategy against U.S. troops.
Red Handed -
You’re My Favorite Kind of Pretty
Recent conversations with Jon Ferguson,
that rising star of the local theater scene, revealed a topical theme:
The man is headlong in love. Since he and his partner, performer Megan Odell of Live Action Set,
recently welcomed a baby boy into the world, Ferguson—formerly an
itinerant, couch-surfing bachelor—finds himself an unlikely inhabitant
of a state of domestic bliss. His latest show, fittingly, explores the
gradations of romantic relationships: from love at first sight to (with
any luck) a committed coupling. A cast of fine, crush-worthy
collaborators lent their own romantic histories to the project,
including Jennifer Davis,
whose vivid paintings Ferguson finds distinctly feminine and beautiful,
and Sara Richardson, a stellar (and dismayingly under-used) performer
who somehow manages to be both physically lovely and goofy as all
get-out.Southern Theater, 612-340-1725.