Matt Yglesias

Neo-Hooverite Cuisine

At the farmer’s market on Sunday, I bought a nice-looking pork loin. Only problem was, I didn’t know anything about cooking pork loin. Fortunately, Ezra Klein had bought me Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything as a housewarming gift so I looked it up. But the book made the odd-to-me claim that the problem with roasting pork loin is that you can’t do it with vegetables because they wind up soaking up too much pork fat. That, to me, sounded more like a feature than a bug. Indeed, I’d also picked up some potatoes at the market and potatoes roasted and flavored with pork loin drippings sounded really good. Arguably potatoes aren’t vegetables, though, so maybe he didn’t think of that.

Fortunately, the internet brought forth a recipe for roast pork loin with potatoes, though I had to use dried spices since, like a normal person, I didn’t have any fresh sage on hand. The recipe observes that “covering it for the first two hours is the secret to tender arista” but their proposed method is to put it in a roasting pan and then cover “loosely with foil.” Much easier to use a big ovenproof lidded saute pan and cover stuff by just putting the cover on. Long story short, too much pork fat is rarely a problem — listen to Yglesias and McConnell and reject the counsels of McCain and Bittman.

Today in Food Facts

A. Serwer brings to light some pertinent information about America’s favorite mark of elitism: “consider that arugula, which is available to the rich and famous at any local McDonalds, is ‘exotic’ while moose is now as American as Thanksgiving turkey.” I was kind of hoping it would turn out that there’s no McDonald’s in Wasilia but there’s one right in what I assume is the downtown area. Of course I bet people who own eight houses don’t know a great deal about what’s on the menu at McDonald’s so I suppose McCain can be forgiven his ignorance of this point.

Meanwhile, like normal people I usually encounter arugula as part of a mix of salad greens. Consequently, it wasn’t until this presidential campaign that I ever really had an opportunity to consider my view of arugula in isolation. But I’ve been thinking about it, and I have to see that it’s really not the best thing out there.

Meanwhile, how is it that nobody seems to sell moose meat? There’s a whole elk meat website but I’m seeing nothing on moose. Doesn’t seem fair.