Author: Nick Bergus

Metaphors: Porn

The Adult Entertainment Industry
Jessica Pressler’s What the Newspaper Industry Can Learn from the Adult Entertainment Industry

A recent story in the L.A. Times takes a look at the struggling porn industry, which, like the newspaper industry, has been deeply affected by both the downturn and the changing technological landscape. DVD sales of porn have ground nearly to a halt, pay-per-view is down by nearly 50 percent, and websites behind pay walls are suffering as more and more amateur pornographers offer their work on the Internet for no cost. “We always said that once the Internet took off, we’d be OK,” the co-chairman of adult-industry giant Vivid Entertainment observed. “It never crossed our minds that we’d be competing with people who just give it away for free.”

Metaphors: Hummer, 1996 Honda

1996 Honda
Jim Barnett’s Why NYT Co. might not be as quick to sell the Globe as you might think at Nieman Journalism Lab

The Globe does cost a lot more than my Honda to operate. But the really big bucks — the $1.1 billion purchase price — is money long since spent. Just like the cost of a new car bought 13 years ago, there’s no way to recover anything close to the purchase price. I can tell by checking the Blue Book value.

General Motors’ Hummer
Steve Buttry’s AP contradiction: Move forward but restore

When I read the Associated Press “Protect, Point, Pay” plan, I think of the Hummer.

General Motors thought it was moving forward when it trotted out the massive sport-utility version of a military vehicle. The Hummer represented a lot of smart work by a lot of engineers and GM sold a lot of Hummers. It carried on a GM tradition of massive vehicles under the Cadillac, Buick and Oldsmobile brands. But how did the Hummer work out in the long run? How’s GM doing today? In a world threatened by climate change and in a nation dependent on oil from unstable regions, the Hummer was simply the wrong move.

On holiday: the “Garden State” is so appropriate for New Jersey, but not in a good way

I’ve been in southern New Jersey since Saturday, but even before then I was debating the merits of the state’s claim to the “Garden State” moniker. By which I mean I was disagreeing with an aunt, via Twitter, about how Jersey corn compares to Iowa corn (sweet corn, not the stuff we produce for animals and ethanol).

I didn’t even need to try this year’s vintage of Jersey corn, I said, to know it was inferior to Iowa sweet corn, even in an admittedly down year for Iowa sweet corn.

But now that I’m here again, I understand why calling New Jersey the “Garden State” is completely appropriate. Let me explain.

When I have had a garden in years past, the idea has always been grand: a plethora of fresh, amazing produce that can be fantastic eating and then bounty enough to be canned for fall and winter. This is the dream that is also “Jersey fresh.”

Reality is much different: beetles, rabbits and squirrels render inedible whatever meager fruit appears  on our plants. Some never ripens, others cross pollinates to produce some freakish hybrid, and it’s never in a good way. Always extreme disappointment.

And so it has been with New Jersey produce: nice idea, poor execution. I’ve had some hard “Jersey fresh” tomatoes and starchy “Jersey fresh” corn that isn’t even in the same league as Midwestern fare. (The wife reports that the peaches have been good. The blueberries aren’t bad, either.) But this isn’t the Heartland. It’s just the Garden State.

At least they have scrapple. And cheese steaks.

The affectionate slapping of ingredients

In Michael Pollan’s recent Times piece on how we Americans have stopped cooking for ourselves and now just watch people cook on TV, he mentions Julia Child, the cooking-show pioneer. It was one line in particular that caught my attention: his mention of Child’s “deep sensual delight” in the “fondling and affectionate slapping of ingredients in their raw state.”

I have affectionately slapped ingredients and witnessed other cooks doing the same on many occasions, though almost always meat. (I apologize in advance for what, at least to my immature mind, are unavoidable, snicker-inducing descriptions of meat rubbing.)

When I was turning a pork belly into bacon, I spent an inordinate amount to time flipping and massaging the 12-pound hunk of pork.

When I hung out with the Lincoln Café crew as they broke down whole pig, I noticed both Matt Steigerwald and Andy Schumacher rub the pig lovingly and absentmindedly.

And there was the serrano ham hanging in a Barcelona market that I felt compelled to smack, leaving a stench that was nearly impossible to wash off my hand. (I assume because of the hindquarter’s age or cheapness or both.)

What is it about ingredient slapping that is so pleasurable?

Perhaps it’s because cooking and food are, by their natures, sensual experiences, even though there is clear science to it. Cooking well means recognizing fine differences. A good sense of touch can be difference between perfect and overcooked steak. Or under-kneaded and perfect dough. Or a perfect or broken emulsion.

Touching seems, at least to me, one way a cook reinforce the art in the science that is cooking.

Not exactly soup from a stone, but along those lines

We were going to have pasta for dinner, use up some leftovers: an open jar of pasta sauce and some shitake mushrooms mostly. But we stopped by the store on the way home to get some bread to fill the meal out. Then we got some cheese. And some pesto. And olives.

By the time all was said and done, we scrapped the pasta.

An additional note: I’ve decided that unlike my friend Emily, whose photos taken at home always have attractive, clean and hip-looking things in the background, I just don’t live that way. Hence this morning’s coffee mugs and the laptop and various papers in my photos. Luckily I was able to crop out most of the crap on our dinning table.

A Six Pack Of Beer For Summer

When I asked for the summer beer recommendations, one friend simply suggested “a lot.” Yes, very clever. Here are six beers particularly good for summer.

Anchor Steam Beer, Anchor Brewery
When I worked at the New Pioneer Co-op as a bagger and cashier so many years ago, I was intrigued by this bottle. This was before the huge rise in microbrews (which then grew so popular that they were bought by major brewers and the brews became not-so-micro), so there was novelty to a beer you couldn’t buy at a gas station.

Steam-style is the only beer style native to America, invented, at least the story goes, by European immigrants living on the West Coast (it uses a lager yeast yet doesn’t ferment under refrigeration the way a lager does). Anchor is the only brewery that produces it commercially, mostly because they own the trademark.

Oberon, Bell’s Brewery
Last summer, when I was working for The Tampa Tribune, I covered a craft beer expo. It was a popular event to cover; Jeff Houck, the paper’s food writer, and Rommie Johnson, editor of the paper’s Friday Extra entertainment section, had press credentials, too. And cover might be the wrong word since it ended up getting about a single paragraph in the paper.

So while it might just have been an excuse for the three of us to drink on the job, we did get some great beer out of it, including Oberon, from Michigan’s Bell’s Brewery. I did spend much of my afternoon elbowing drunk Floridians wearing “beer wenches want me” T-shirts out of the way to get more of this this fruity and well-hopped wheat ale out of the freebie Samuel Adams glasses. Still, it couldn’t make up for the number of times I overheard someone say they were “just here for the beer.”

Odd that I had to go to Florida to try this Midwestern brew.

Dogfish Head 60-minute IPA
Dogfish offers three different IPAs, short for India Pale Ale because it was traditionally produced to last the long ship voyage from Britian to India and so needed to be heavily hopped. Each version is named for the length it is boiled when still raw wort (the state before it is fermented). The 60-minute version is the least alcoholic (since less water is boiled off than the 90-minute and 120-minute brews).

Boulevard Ales Smokestack Series Saison
I like all four of Boulevard’s Smokestack Series ales but because of Iowa’s arcane alcohol laws, which treat high-alcohol beers like hard liquor despite having alcohol content similar to wine, makes them harder to find.

The brewery’s Saison is light and wheat-y and therefor the most summer-y. But really, if you find a place that has all four you should buy one of each.

ESB, Red Hook
Readily available, reasonably priced and reliably decent, Red Hook’s ESB (which the brewery used to label “Extra Special Bitter” until it learned was a turn off to mass-market beer consumers) is as good a stand-by as any.

Pabst Blue Ribbon
Everyone — even beer snobs — have a favorite cheap beer. PBR is the beer of my childhood. OK, teenage years.

It was the beer of choice for us hard-core punk-rock kids. (One night, drinking under a train bridge, I impressed my future sister-in-law with my ability to vomit and then return to drinking. Classy.) So it’s nostalgic for me.

What else do you like for summer?

Breaking down a pig at Lincoln Cafe

There’s a reason Matt Steigerwald and the Lincoln Cafe crew won the pork extravaganza that was Cochon 555 in Des Moines: they know how to deal with a whole pig.

Recently, I witnessed Steigerwald and his sous chef, Andy Schumacher, break down a 250-pound pig (that’s on-the-rail weight, or the pig less guts, hooves and blood).

While they are certainly no master butchers (they occasionally would stop and double check with each other before making key cuts), they have more practice than most cooks in Iowa.

The restaurant started buying whole hogs last fall, Steigerwald said, because he wanted to learn how to break them down and Schumacher was interested, too.

“It’s given me a greater respect,” said Schumacher.

Steigerwald points out that the financial risk is pretty low, too. The scraps, turned into sausage and served as a lunch special, for example, can pay for the $330 pig.

But it’s also the only way to get a lot of specific pig parts. Want to make head cheese? Pork-liver pate? You better buy yourself a whole hog and then figure out what to do the rest of it.

“There are a lot of good parts that aren’t being utilized,” said Steigerwald. Well, at other restaurants, anyway.

Update
The story I wrote about Lincoln Cafe for Corridor Buzz has been posted.