Hot Wieners, Ratios, Shakespeare ... and knee surgery (ugh!)

An appreciation of RI's eccentric culinary scene, ratio redux, what they can't tell you about knee replacement surgery, plus books, watching recs, links!

The day after my Tonight Show appearance, I took a train to Rhode Island to rejoin Ann, who had been running her MFA program at Salve Regina University. She had to return to our Providence loft to attend to some business and she’d promised her faculty she’d bring back an Olneyville New York System lunch for all.

As everyone knows, they are “R.I.’s BEST HOT WIENERS.”

When Ann introduced me to the culinary eccentricities of her home state, the first place she brought me was the above diner, just north of Providence. They really do serve the best hot wieners anywhere.

A hot wiener is this: a very soft, short, veal-beef-pork wiener (not hot dog or sausage), boiled or steamed, on a steamed bun, topped with mustard, a chili-like ground meat mixture whose dominant spice is allspice, onions, and celery salt, aka “hot wiener all the way.”

They’re typically served in threes straight off your server’s forearm. The top photo is of George, who is preparing the first 10 of 30 hot wieners all the way. He’s proud of the place, and describes why this RI staple is called a New York System (below video; please enjoy a bit of Rhode Island local color midway through).

For better or worse, perhaps inevitably, the fourth generation owners, with no offspring to take over, have just sold the Olneyville’s New York System to the Heritage Restaurant Group, which is buying up Rhode Island classic restaurants like Old Canteen in Federal Hill and Flo’s Clam Shack just outside Newport (to mixed reviews). I pray they don’t fuck with this one. I’d eat a few of these wieners for breakfast every day if I could.

Happily, you can almost recreate them using a Rhode Island Saugy hot dog and a ground meat mixture using their spice mix, though it may be lacking the local color. Make it a true Rhode Island meal by serving it with coffee milk.

God, it makes me hungry writing about it.

London Chef Will Murray, my ratios, his ratios . . .

Eighteen years ago, I published a book about exploring recipes via ratios rather than ingredient lists. The book has done well over the years, and I’m proud of the impact it’s had on chefs and home cooks. But it got a serious boost in sales this week when a London chef, Will Murray, called attention to it in a Youtube video (see below).

I might not have known about this video but for a couple of followers calling my attention to it, and had

Ann Hood

not begun to check my books’ rankings on Amazon, wondering if last week’s The Tonight Show appearance had resulted in any uptick in sales for From Scratch or Egg (um, nope: #141,178, #114,168, respectively). But she also checked Ratio and it was #167 on the overall bestseller list and was #1 in Food and Cooking. Yikes! What had happened? A book, no matter how popular, doesn’t typically break 100,000 after 18 years.

Obviously, Chef Will’s Youtube has some serious influence. Chef at Fallow, he and his colleague, Jack Croft, have been called social media darlings for their outstanding cooking videos. And they are! Thank you, Chef!

What I love about these chefs’ videos is that their technique is spot on, they love the classics as much as innovations, and they’re both naturals cooking in front of a camera. They have a good-natured confidence, humor, outspokenness and, well, they know what the fuck they’re talking about. Watch them fry eggs 12 different ways.

What I love about Chef Will’s video is that he has taken the concept introduced in Ratio and created his own ratios. (I’ve got to try his hot sauce ratio.) He’s taken the ratios farther. He’s taken my work and moved it forward.

A couple days ago I got an alert on IG that a 27-year-old materials science researcher at a laboratory in the Bay area and Ph.D. candidate, Matt Villena, had posted a few of his own ratios.

mattvillena

A post shared by @mattvillena

I commented on the post and Matt responded immediately: “The man himself,” he wrote back.

There was a time when chefs used to hoard their recipes and special techniques. I think we’re long past that, recognizing that sharing all information is fundamental to our getting better. What could be a greater honor than having a younger generation of restaurant chefs and passionate home cooks embrace a book I wrote almost 20 years ago.

It brought to mind … Shakespeare.

From the fairest creatures we desire increase

That thereby beauty’s rose might never die

That’s his sonnet #1, and it’s written to a beautiful young man who is too devoted to his own self to think of procreation:

But thou, contracted to thine own bright eyes,

Feed’st thy light’s flame with self-substantial fuel,

Making a famine where abundance lies,

The sonnet goes on to claim that the child is his own enemy—his beauty will fade, to be eaten by the gluttonous grave, never to be seen again. The final couplet:

Pity the world, or else this glutton be,

To eat the world’s due, by the grave and thee.

The sonnet reminded me of those old French chefs who hid their recipes, kept them secrets. To what end? I’ve always wondered. To take their knowledge to the grave? I know several Italian cooks who say they can’t recreate their nonna’s recipes because she wouldn’t teach them. That’s not how we move forward. What distinguishes humanity from the rest of the animal kingdom is our collective consciousness.

My mentor Chef Thomas Keller spoke recently at a conference. He said of teaching and mentoring, “If the cooks you’ve trained don’t become better than you are, you’ve done a shitty job.” A rare and passionate expletive from the typically decorous chef.

But ‘tis true, in cooking and in love.

It’s important to note that I didn’t create ratios or recognize their importance. They were given to me—then a 33-year-old journalist writing about the Culinary Institute of America—by an old German chef, Uwe Hestnar. To my knowledge, he was the first person to try to categorize general ratios. Hestnar’s ratios still hang on our kitchen wall.

He passed them on to me. I passed on my version to the next generation, Will Murray and Matt Villena (and hundreds of thousands of Youtube and Instagramers). And what a joy it is, a generation later, to see the idea of Ratios growing still.

Total left-knee replacement …

Must be these pain meds! Moving from cooking ratios to Shakespeare and back again. Ann did say I was loopy. But, well, it’s all one thing in the end. Which is why I love ratios. They describe how everything is connected.

Except for my femur and tibia, which are now connected by who knows what. But no one told me how painful knee surgery recovery would be! Or, rather, no one could convey the agony to anyone who hasn’t experienced it or something like it. One thing I especially didn’t hear was that, bad as it is when you reach home, it gets worse during the next few days as the nerve blockers wear off.

Which meant that on my first morning, after a difficult night of pain—metal and plastic inserts over freshly ground bone, quad tendons sewn into a resurfaced patella—I had the will and wherewithal to put something in my stomach in order to take more pain pills.

It was lovely, a one-egg stir-fry with a half carton of leftover Chineses rice.

• 1 egg

• 1/2 teaspoon each soy sauce, rice vinegar, sesame oil (or more as needed)

• small pat of butter or teaspoon vegetable oil

• 1/4 cup leftover rice, reheated

Whisk the egg, soy, vinegar, and sesame oil with chopsticks till mixed.

Over medium heat in a small, non-stick pan, add the oil then the egg and cook till the egg is half curd and half custard. Add the rice, stir, return it all to the egg bowl and eat (whilst supporting yourself on your walker).

A simple, lovely breakfast.

What we’re drinking …

Well, actually, not a lot given the circs. But we did receive a gift of an aperitif and an Amaro from Doug Yacka, an owner of Astor Wines, and his husband (and Ann’s and my YA publisher) Francesco Sedita: Day Trip Strawberry Amaro and Jenny Aperitif by Matchbook Distilling Co., a distillery on the north fork of Long Island, “an R+D facility dedicated to production of spirits that champion agriculture, anthropology, tradition and science.”

The amaro is made from strawberries and has a rich, raisin-y flavor with a solid amaro bitterness. And the aperitif is made from a resuscitated heritage melon, the Jenny Lind Melon, grown in New Jersey; the aperitif has a rich, sweet, honey-melon flavor, a perfect summer quaff. And low ABV for the one on the pain meds! Thank you, Doug and Francesco!

What we’ve been watching …

The night before surgery, we didn’t want to begin a series, so we watched a documentary on Jayne Mansfield, My Mom Jayne: A Film by Mariska Hargitay. A great picture of Hollywood and the choices actresses had to make back then and likely still do today. We didn’t see the extraordinary plot twist coming three-quarters through the film. (HBO)

We binged the 5-episode series Sirens on return from the hospital. At first I thought, this is just too ridiculous, until I realized I couldn’t stop watching. It’s kind of a cross between White Lotus and All About Eve. Great performances by the three female leads, led by the ever excellent Julianne Moore, and Kevin Bacon. (Netflix)

And we’re halfway through Mr. Loverman, about a 75-year-old gay man in an unhappy hetero marriage, as he reevaluates his life and attempts to change it in order to be with his longtime love. A fascinating narrative of flashbacks and regrets. We often say, “Life happens.” This eight episode series shows how. (Britbox)

What we’re reading …

I’m digging into Niall Williams’s latest novel, Time of the Child (a follow-up of sorts to This Is Happiness); full report on completion.

And I’ve found that if I read Philip Larkin poems during my physical therapy exercises, the relentless sadness of Larkin’s words cancels out, to a small degree, the physical agony in my leg. Philip Larkin: Collected Poems.

And from

Ann Hood

, our Promiscuous Reader:

I cannot think of a better escape from the heat here in NYC than reading about a hotel full of people stuck in a hotel in Switzerland during a blizzard. True, some of them are getting murdered, but The Sanatorium by Sarah Pearse is just what I need. It’s full of secrets and betrayal, avalanches and architecture. And lots and lots of snow.

I’m also listening to Maggie Smith read her memoir, You Could Make This Place Beautiful, which is about the disintegration of her marriage and her journey to reclaiming herself. Written in vignettes, the format works for my short walks to Gourmet Garage or the post office. What I’m liking best is Smith’s exploration of writing memoir. I will definitely share some of the questions she raises with my students when I next teach memoir.

Links we’ve been loving …

• I won’t forget the summer of 1975, in part, because that was when the movie Jaws changed the movie-making landscape. The NYTimes looks at how this movie created the template for the summer blockbuster.

• And another film anniversary: Back To the Future’s 40th, a movie that couldn’t be made today because, and I don’t know what to make of this, America in 2025 doesn’t look all that different from 1995, whereas the difference between the 1980s and the 1950s is extraordinary. (The Guardian)

• Having just returned from Europe, Ann and I have been watching the misery that has set in in these cities with a truly dangerous heatwave. (Travel + Leisure).

• This headline says it all: The Worst Sandwich Is Back. Wraps are popular again.

• While Ann is playing nursemaid to me, her laid-up husband, barely ambulatory on his new knee and moaning with every step, I appreciated David Sedaris’s essay on taking care of his husband, Hugh, post hip replacement. (The New Yorker, possible paywall.)

• Watch this lovely profile of the novelist Anne Tyler, from CBS Morning.

Finally, the table-side omelet at The Golden Swan …

As readers of this newsletter know, I was on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon week before last. They had originally asked me to demo a proper French omelet. I was anxious about it because it had to be a perfect pale yellow and also cooked through on top; but I’d be using unfamiliar pans and an induction burner. The day before the show, I decided to stop by a relatively new West Village restaurant, The Golden Swan, a few blocks from out apartment, because I’d read they did table-side omelets for weekend brunch and I wanted to see how they did theirs.

Happily, Doug Brixton, chef and partner of the restaurant, was there and said—this was in the middle of a blazing hot Tuesday afternoon—“Want me to show you how we do it?”

I said, “Hell, yeah—thank you.”

And so he did. Herewith the video of his pitch-perfect, 4-egg, table-side omelet. Thank you, Chef!

And that’s all folks! Will see you back here in a couple of weeks, hopefully in a little less pain! Feel free to *heart* this, leave a comment, or share it! Happy cooking, everyone!

—Michael