Dishing - The Boston Globe

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October 10, 2007

Food snobbery, defined

Out yesterday: "The Food Snob's Dictionary," which runs from "Acme Bread Company" to "Zingerman's," with plenty of stops in between. It's by David Kamp, the "United States of Arugula" guy, and Marion Rosenfeld. The tongue-in-cheek reference offers definitions such as:

Cepe. Cloying French synonym for porcini mushroom, used on menus to confuse diners who think porcinis are old news. Truly pretentious chefs use the term boletus mushrooms for cepes/porcinis, a shorthand allusion to the fungus's Latin name, Boletus edulis.

and

Reichl, Ruth. Prodigiously maned gastro-sensualist and writer. ... Though prone to onanistic, self-aggrandizing prose and batty flights of fancy -- wearing unnecessarily elaborate disguises while visiting restaurants, frequently invoking her dead mother as a speaking character in reviews -- Reichl has more than creditably served as the editor of Gourmet since 1999.

You get the picture. There are also interludes with titles such as "A pronunciation guide to food snob-esteemed personages" (Grant ACK-etz etc.) and "The food snob filmography" (#1: "Spartacus").

This is thinking ahead, but it has stocking stuffer written all over it.

Posted by Devra First at 05:32 PM

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Turducken in a can

Turducken is a Cajun specialty in which you stuff a chicken inside a duck, then stuff the duck inside a turkey. Making it is a very involved process, which Paul Prudhomme details nicely here, with helpful step-by-step pictures.

I admire the effort, and I'd love to try turducken made by someone else, but I'm not going to go to the trouble myself -- much less go to the trouble and then feed it to my dog, who would be just as happy eating peanut butter stuffed inside an unidentifiable object she found on the road stuffed inside an old gym sock. (Peanobjock? Anyway, I'm pretty sure she's eaten it.)

Fortunately, when your dog demands turducken, you can just serve it to her out of a can. The pet food company Merrick offers turducken dog food. Their recipe includes the requisite turkey, duck, and chicken, as well as green beans, carrots, apples, sweet potatoes, thyme, sage, and rosemary. You can order it from them, or pick some up at the Polka Dog Bakery in the South End, which is where I spotted it.