Vinegar, Fruit Cake, and Bagels

Ketchup contains vinegar. And as we all know, ketchup is the staff of life, as well as the only appropriate condiment for fried potatos.

Er, bottles OF vinegar.

The Currywurst man across from my office routinely offers chips with ketchup and mayonnaise (as does every other Currywurst man in Germany). But my guy now offers vinegar as well!

[A]nd my east coast friends tell me I’ve never even had real bagels.

Most likely, your East Coast friends haven’t either. The “real thing” is hand-formed, boiled in honey-water, and then baked, in small batches, in a wood-fired oven.

The machine-formed, conventional oven-baked, counterpart is a pale imitation.

Currywurst! Oder ein bosna! Mit semmel und semf!

Yay!

You definitely don’t want to know what these wurst are usually made of, though.

On the frightening side, i heard rumors from the unfortunate albion about fried mars bars. But this just can’t be true, right?

Jacques — agreed about the relative merit of hand- vs. machine-rolled bagels. But hand-rolled bagels are not nearly extinct; I can think of a couple of places to get them in Manhattan — off the top of my head, Barney Greengrass, and Kossar’s; I am sure that list is not exhaustive. The unfortunately named La Bagel in Brooklyn was still all-hand-made last time I checked, as was the place in Williamsburg that I can’t recall the name of. In my home town of South Orange, NJ they are available at Sonny’s. It is also not an all-or-nothing distinction, there are shops which use some degree of automation without sacrificing the ultimate bagelness of their product. H & H (for instance) is still pretty damn good (or was last time I ate one of their bagels, a few years ago) despite being machine-aided.

Real bagels are also available in Montreal, and in Los Angeles.

Oh and yabonn, the fried candy-bars thing is all too true. You can get them on Mulberry Street in NYC, at the festival of San Genaro; and surely by now at the rest of the NYC street fairs. Also breaded and fried oreo cookies, alas! I understand they are a Scottish innovation.

Yes, yabonn, there is such a thing as battered, deep-fried Mars Bars. I prefer Toffee Crisp, though.

This one time I had a bagel jones in the UK, I tracked down this joint in the East End that was so old, it apparently never received the memo about standardized spelling – the Brick Lane Beigel Bakery. It was no H&H.

Also, British baked beans in tomato sauce do not compare to the complexity and flavor of New England baked beans, with their hints of molasses and salt pork.

The most disgusting meal I’ve ever eaten is still my own dear mother’s boiled chicken.

I like malt vinegar with my fries/chips, I mostly find that available at fish fry joints.

And real bagels are most definitely not-extinct in CT, West Harford has lots of bagel places that brag about boiling their bagels.

I’m aware of at least one place in Philadelphia that offers fried candy bars. Doughy, gooey, warm, and delicious.

They even have a wide selection of candy bars, along with a staff that’s eager to share its opinions about the best ones to choose.

danny, where is that? I’m going to Philadelphia next week, and I love fried food.

Jeremy,

Real bagels are also available in Montreal, and in Los Angeles.

In Los Angeles? Where? But I can vouch for Montreal. By far the best “real” bagels (wood-burning ovens, honey water, etc.) I’ve tasted anywhere. From a recipe brought over by Romanian Jews after WW1. Nothing like them, and I’ve sampled “bagels”, or whatever goes by the name, across North America and Europe, even in Israel (no good at all). As for vinegar, although it’s getting rare in ordinary restaurants, most Montreal delis have the stuff available for the asking – a lingering colonial influence, I suspect.

And speaking of Montreal deli, there is nothing–absolutely nothing–to compare with Montreal (really another Romanian-Jewish recipe) old-fashioned “smoked meat” (essentially spiced, slowly-cured and smoked brisket). Think of the best pastrami you’ve even tasted in New York or Chicago or Los Angeles or (my hometown) Boston, and multiply by ten. An obligatory component of every trip I take to Montreal is a sampling of the above delicacy (try “Schwartz’s” or “The Main” deli on the “the Main”) and some St-Viateur bagels “to go”. For a city renowned for its French restaurants (naturally), there is a remarkably wide and refined range of ethnic cuisine.

I eat fries with balsamic vinegar, but that probably isn’t what you meant.

MM — actually I spoke a bit beyond my expertise when I said real bagels were available in L.A. — what I actually meant was more like, “I remember eating good real bagels as a child when We visited my grandparents in L.A.” Could not name a bakery for you, or affirm that this state of affairs persists.

As to smoked meat, it’s good, sure, but my troth is already pledged to Katz’s pastrami in NYC. There is none better.

I’ve tried the Heinz Malt Vinegar on fries, which I’ve actually seen a quite a few places, just not fast-food chains. It’s pretty good, but it is actually much less flavorful than other options.

Ketchup + Mayo is the way to go.

Very enjoyable bit, Harry! We’re a binational household, and the food differences between the US and UK are a constant discussion topic. In general, we’ve concluded that Brits do dessert far better than Americans, lamb in the US sucks unless you pay exhorbitant prices, duck isn’t much better, our bread here has waaaay too much sugar and preservatives and stuff, even what you buy in a health food store (Robin’s fond of saying that bread should have as few ingredients as possible)… the US doesn’t really win out anywhere except maybe in the beef department. And you can’t beat our bison! He’s developed a taste for bagels, though, but he married a Jewish New Yorker, it can’t really be helped…

Elayne, if you want good bread and you’re in NYC there are at least a dozen excellent options available, and none of them involve visiting a health food store. Amy’s Bread is probably the best (but then I’m biased in its favor), she has locations in Hell’s Kitchen, Chelsea, and the east side. Tom Cat is good and is sold all over the city, mainly by gourmet-type groceries. Sullivan Street bakery definitely worth a visit if you’re downtown, and there is a french restaurant on Spring Street that has a bakery next door with phenomenal baguettes. I could go on but the notion that good bread free of sweeteners and preservatives is hard to get in America, is about 10 years out of date.

“mm” is correct.

Montréal is the center of the bagel universe (at least in North America). While religous wars are fought on the subject, I concur that St-Viateur offers the best.

Given the popularity of wood-fired pizza ovens, I’m still hoping a taste for the real thing will develop here in the US.

Deep-fried Mars bars are a novelty, and basically for the tourists. The deep-fried pizza, on the other hand, is a long-standing Glasgow tradition.

Imagine the cheapest, crappiest frozen pizza you can possibly buy, little more than a bready base with some tomato-flavoured sauce and something which looks almost like cheese on it. Now picture this item being flung into the sizzling chip-fat, and cooked so that it soaks up fat all through its base until it is pulled out, swollen and saturated. It is then folded in half and huge, soggy chips shovelled into the fold. Then, after a generous sprinkling of salt and vinegar, it is served up to you, wrapped in greasy paper. Enjoy.

On the bright side, Glasgow does have the finest pakora in the Western Hemisphere.

At the Amherst Brewing Company, one can order oreo cookies coated that are in beer-batter and then deep fat fried. They are served with vanilla ice cream and chocolate syrup. I don’t like oreo cookies, beer, or fried food, but I find this mix irresitable.

Oh, and for the record, I take BBQ sauce with my fries. In Chicago it is possible to find vinegar-and-salt potato chips alongside the BBQ varieties.

What’s pakora?

Fried vegetables. It’s an Indian thing, or possibly Indo-British.

Where in the Western Hemisphere is Glasgow located?

Scotland.

Robin’s fond of saying that bread should have as few ingredients as possible

Flour, water, and yeast. Anything else is of questionable necessity.

I’ve taken to eating Arnold’s Low-Carb bread, not because I’m low-carbing but because it’s the only thing on the supermarket shelf that neither contains high-fructose corn syrup nor goes bad in two days.

C,

…that Canadian stuff with cheese curds and gravy! YUK!

You’re referring to “poutine”, an utterly vile, fairly recent (reportedly invented by some rural Québec restaurateur in the late 1950s) French-Canadian concoction of French fries slathered in gravy, cheese curds and whatever might be rotting in the refrigerator. The only stuff I’ve ever tasted that was nearly as revolting was some ersatz haggis (no one admitted preparing it so we never learned what it contained) at a Robbie Burns dinner in Boston a few years back.

No one has commented on the whole fruitcake aspect. Americans can, too, make good fruitcake, they just don’t do so very often. As with so many things, you must go to Dixie to restore the maligned honor of American cuisine. Here is a good recipe:
http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2003/12/fruitcake_isnt_.html
(Sorry for wonking out the margins.)

Chris’s preference for pizza cut in squares shows that he knows nothing on the subject, as does his belief that you can’t get good pizza on the west coast, when in fact the best pizza I’ve ever had comes from (if you can believe it) a place near the campus of UC Irvine. The pizza/lasagna hybrid one finds in Chicago pales.

And even though I claimed in the IA thread that vinegary hot sauce is the best accompaniment for fries, I’m going to recant and admit that tzatziki goes pretty damn well with them (especially when mixed with some salt-n-spices mixture that a gyro place whose name I never knew in the Varnava plateia in Athens put on them).

Currywurst ! If there’s a more disgusting dish known to man or beast I’d like to know about it.

Holodetz, a Russian dish that, at least when served to me at an otherwise lovely banquet, consisted of chipped beef in a gelatinous goo, with little olive bits on top in the shape of a smiley face.

Thank god for vodka.

As the original author of the quoted comment [ ahem ;-) ], I have to say I was a bit brusque in my dismissal. In addition, I used the word “crap” twice, where once should have sufficed.

It was a total memory lapse that led me to forget that malt vinegar is available in many restaurants I frequent, even though I have eaten in them daily over the last few weeks. That said, it’s still relatively artificial stuff — as is a good deal of the “balsamic vinegar” available in grocery stores in the US.

For the truly pretentious (which is a state I merely aspire to), I’d recommend reading Zingerman’s co-founder Ari Weinzweig’s Zingerman’s Guide to Good Vinegar (available through a number of obvious outlets).

Caveat lector: There’s a strong regional folkoric component to this whole, “You’ve never had real X until you’ve tried Y!” trope. In many cases of my experience, Y is an abhorrent concoction which is considered “authentic” by the locals simply because it’s also local. Just off the cuff, I can recall several incidents in which I’ve had to commend a mouthful of some local delicacy without spitting it out: ice cream (Hanover, PA), local fresh seafood (Eastern Shore, MD; Turin), dessert (over-priced Toronto Chinese restaurant), “sausage” (Utrecht; “Mmmm… is that, umm, allspice or nutmeg!?”), &c &c.

Thus, my advice should be treated with skepticism.

Ari’s however pricey, seems pretty good, though. And if you come to the store or any other Zingerman’s location, they will give you free samples of anything.

Try it for free, first.

I tend to prefer Fairmount bagels to St-Viateur, but will easily accept either. Best in the world, by far. Montreal bagels are the epitome of bagel.

Fresh mayo is much better than what you can buy, and not that hard to make, but it’s not always worth the trouble. Just like most things, except desserts, because making your own cake/cookies/brownies is always worth the trouble.

(actually that’s L.A. county only, but I’m sure you can get good ones somewhere within the city limits. It’s not as if we’re short of Jews).

My tuppence-worth about comfort food: American grocery stores have an aisle full of baked beans, but nothing to rival a British can of Heinz. Maple syrup? Brown sugar? Bacon? Yeugh.

Belle reminds of that we are ignoring fruit cakes and we promptly continue to ignor fruit cake. Yet, like Belle and Harry, I think they deserve more attention that they get. My mother, a Kentucky girl, somehow came up with a recipe for what she called a Rum cake that was absolutely transendental. It matches quite well the discription Harry gives the British fruit cake and was quite beloved by me.

Well, I hate to contradict jw mason’s NY-centrism, but double-fried french fries with malt vinegar (or ketchup or cheese or gravy) has been a staple at the Original Hot Dog Shop in Pittsburgh, PA forever. In fact, PNC Park (America’s best place to watch baseball, unless the Pirates are in town) even has malt vinegar bottles with the condiments. Of course, Pittsburgh also has a mighty fried fish fetish – I think that your liquor license actually arrives bundled with a “Burgh’s Best Fish Sandwich” sign.

On a side note, when my mother in law made gulasch the other night, she couldn’t locate our white vinegar because we keep it not in the pantry, but in the cleaning cabinet.

Oh, and back on topic: as someone noted, ketchup is astringent, and plays essentially the same role to fries as vinegar. I love mayonnaise, but I find that on fries, it just adds to the existing richness. It’s better with thinner fries, which have less grease and less fluffy insides, but still doesn’t have that great counterpoint of ketchup. I think this may be a rare food preference where the Yankee way can be argued as objectively superior to (or more sophisticated than) the Euro way. But I really shouldn’t say such a thing.