Section 101.58(2) of the “Regulation of Industry, Buildings and Safety” Chapter of the Wisconsin Statutes, titled “Employees’ Right To Know,” expressly exempts lutefisk from consideration as a toxic substance.

[via Wikipedia]

–State Senator John W. Lyle, on the occasion of coffee milk being named the state beverage of Rhode Island.

(Further reading.)

I don’t get it. It’s easy to imagine who might have lobbied for June to be named National Dairy Month, but it’s less clear who benefits from the designation of August 12 as National Julienne Fries Day. The Consortium for Intricate French Knife Cuts? Or was this a joint venture between the Potato and Mandoline Councils of America?

There is no end to this tripe. I recently learned that every state but Wyoming–a state I now look upon with renewed respect–has at least an official fruit, if not an official muffin and dessert. (Jell-O, if you’re wondering, belongs to Utah.) There are even official state beverages, although the laureates betray a real failure of the imagination: 19 of the 28 participating states–even Kentucky!–picked milk. The only state with the gumption to choose booze was Alabama, which, against the strenuous objections of teetotaling governor Bill Riley, who really picks his battles, named Conecuh Ridge Whiskey its liquid emblem in 2004.

While “state” foods have to be written into state law, “national” food commemoration days are a free-for-all. Make a check out to Chase’s Calendar of Events, send out a few press releases, and, hey presto, a day just like Crabmeat Newburg Day (September 25) or National Baklava Day (November 21) can be yours! As you ponder the dish or ingredient you’d like to commemorate (don’t let me influence you, but monosodium glutamate is probably due for some loving), let’s take a moment to appreciate the visionary who made February our National Snack Food month. If not for this important nutritional campaign, our notoriously abstemious citizenry might long since have wasted away.

I don’t know about you, but if I see one more food-commemoration press release masquerading as web content, I might just need a few of those whiskey sours. So I’m dedicating this post to the late Harold Coffin, a humorist who, for thirteen years, emitted topical one-liners in his Associated Press column, ‘The Needle.’ (“It’s not the heat OR the humidity,” he wrote, at the height of the Vietnam War. “It’s the draft.”) In 1973, fed up with the daily hijacking of the calendar by frivolous interest groups with fatuous agendas, Mr. Coffin named January 16 National Nothing Day, at the same time establishing a National Nothing Foundation to promote his cause. Promote, that is, by example: “Total number of members is unknown. Publishes nothing. Holds no meetings or conventions.”

“The only regret of the negative thinkers in the Nothing Foundation,” a spokesperson for the organization lamented, “is that in order to combat the proliferation of special days they were forced to create an additional special day.”

Despite these noble efforts, January 16 would go on to be co-opted by both the Fig Newton and the Hot & Spicy Food lobbies. The declaration of a National Printing Ink Day was the last straw for Harold, who voluntarily retired his festival in 1980.

I’m bringing it back, Mr. Coffin. Who’s with me?

Enter this baby:

My Black & Decker 3-Cup Rice Cooker may or may not turn out to be a piece of junk, but it only cost me twenty bucks. In fact, if I’d bought it on Amazon, I would have paid $12.99 for it. Still, it’s worked fine for about a month now, and in addition to making the perfect amount of rice for a couple (enough for two, with leftovers for a packed lunch), it’s the perfect size for a New York kitchen.

The best thing about this purchase, though, is the boost it’s given to my relationship with rice. (Yes, I have a relationship with rice; I’m half Chinese.) I’ve been eating a lot more of it, and I’m treating it right.

I came late to the world of rice cookers because I grew up in a household with terrible rice. We ate a lot of short-grain white rice, for some reason, which is sticky as it is, and which we made stickier by cooking it in too much water. Short-grain rice is fine in the right context, but that context is Japanese food. I spent my childhood mealtimes yearning for the slender-grained and fragrant rice that I only ever seemed to eat in Chinese restaurants.

Short-grain, long-grain; more water, less water. The variables seem simple now, but I managed to grow up believing that good rice, like good pizza, was something that restaurants had and homes didn’t. So after I left home for college in Scotland, far from missing my daily rice bowl and trying to recreate it, I was downright promiscuous with my carbohydrates. I did find it questionable that the cafeteria lunch ladies not only salted and peppered but buttered the rice, and I raised an eyebrow each time my sophomore-year roommate boiled rice in salted water and drained it in a colander, but, for the most part, I looked away and ate my fusilli. Or couscous. Or curly fries.

Lately, though, as I’ve heard can happen as one grows older, I’ve been looking upon the foods of my youth with a new fondness. Not the rice we had at home, which even through the soft-focus lens of nostalgia still looks pretty bad, but the rice in Hong Kong’s ubiquitous faan hup (polystyrene lunch boxes filled with 1 part roast meat to 3 parts rice), or the rice my mother could never keep from ordering during the fish course of a Chinese banquet. (Chinese people don’t eat a lot of starch on festive occasions, preferring to glut on pricier proteins, but the sweet soy sauce ladled over a scallion-strewn grouper wants white rice the way pâté wants a cracker.)

The Cantonese expression heung pun pun is often used to describe warm rice. Heung simply means “fragrant,” but the pun pun part is as close to onomatopeia as any scent is likely to come, each pun a puff of aromatic steam. In the fantasy etymology that is my consolation for not knowing how to read Chinese, this is the lid of the rice cooker rattling as that steam crescendoes, or a rice-carrying freight train that whistles pun! pun! as it approaches your belly.

Every rice cooker is different, and everyone’s heung pun pun is, too; it took me three weeks to get mine the way I like it in my Black & Decker. It came, as all cookers do, with a measuring cup for the rice and corresponding markings for the water level, but those markings are only suggestions. I now know that, for every 1 1/2 cups of uncooked rice, I need to fill the container to 1/5th of an inch under the appropriate fill line. The rice is still edible if I add the officially sanctioned quantity of water, but it’s too mushy, and useless for fried rice.

Since I bought the rice cooker, I’ve been making sure I rinse my rice, and I mean really rinse it: eight times, ten times, or until the water it soaks in stays clear. I used to skip this step, but I shouldn’t have, because it removes excess starch and keeps the cooked grains separate and distinct. I make better fried rice, too, always using twice as much oil as I’m comfortable with, with an extra tablespoon for good measure. And some nights I’ll put in a length or two of laap cheung (Chinese sausage) to steam with the rice, infusing it with the sweet scents of star anise and Shaoxing wine, or add a handful of frozen salted mustard greens in the final minutes of cooking.

You should really buy one, too.

Until my friend Nishta introduced me to this song, I hadn’t listened to much Dusty Springfield beyond the inescapable “Son of a Preacher Man.” It was then that I really understood her renown as an interpreter: with warmth and wit, she teases out the song’s essential brattiness but keeps it just this side of cabaret. (Compare it with Diana Krall’s flat, oversexed version.)

This one goes out to all you freaky men with your madonna/whore complexes: Raquel Welch and Cher dress up like Vegas showgirls and threaten to “fill you full of grits.” Raquel isn’t quite Cher’s match, but she does her best.

2. Search for pictures of hyraxes–small mammals whose closest relative, surprisingly, is the elephant. This is a good one. So is this.

3. Read the Wikipedia entry for Metal Umlaut, a.k.a. Röck Döts.

4. Challenge a Russophile friend to a round of Find The Ugliest Seledka Pod Shuboj–a frankly terrifying Russian appetizer of pickled fish, beets, hard-boiled eggs and mayonnaise that translates to “herring under a fur coat.” (They must be referring to an early-stage fur coat–that is, a clubbed seal.) Here’s one example; here’s another. In a pinch, this game can also be played alone.

A piece from my miniature food collection, showing Hong Kong iced tea as it ought to be served.

There is only one correct way* to serve iced tea: tea, ice (preferably crushed), lemon slices, a long-handled spoon to smush the lemon slices, and an accompanying juglet of simple syrup to sweeten (or not sweeten) as desired. Everyone in southeast Asia accepts this.

There are, by contrast, a handful of incorrect ways to serve iced tea, all of which the United States of America has thoroughly mastered. These include:

1. No lemon. What is wrong with you?

2. No simple syrup. Don’t roll your eyes and hand me the Splenda. Splenda isn’t some magical form of sugar that miraculously dissolves in cold liquid–it’s a sugar substitute, and it tastes like one. If you can’t make a solution of equal parts water and sugar, it’s time to get out of the caffeinated beverage business. (This goes for iced coffee purveyors, too.)

3. Terrifying amounts of simple syrup, a.k.a. “sweet tea.” I am trying to cool down, not get high. Who came up with this stuff? It hurts my mouth.

4. Uncaffeinated herbal tea. I don’t care how many fruits it invokes on the teabag, this is colored water.

5. Out of a can. It’s not that this stuff is awful, though it kind of is–I’m just not sure it’s tea.

N.B.: special dispensation for the Very Good Thing that is the Arnold Palmer.

–

*This is not strictly true, since there is also iced milk tea, but that’s a whole other thing.

I am reminded of Mr. Bourdain’s thoughts on vegetarians:

I don’t care what you do in your home, but the idea of a vegetarian traveler in comfortable shoes waving away the hospitality — the distillation of a lifetime of training and experience — of, say, a Vietnamese pho vendor (or Italian mother-in-law, for that matter) fills me with sputtering indignation.

I hate this attitude, I really do. It is so profoundly condescending, even imperialistic–as though the infantile natives would crumble beneath the rejection of the worldly-wise and comfortably-shod. Say no in Phnom Penh as you would in Philadelphia. They can handle it.

One might justifiably remark on the discrepancy between the form of the miniature food (pizza, say) and the flavor (fondant).

One ought to be less of a pedant.