2023: The Year in Review, rev. ed.

Now that we’re 10 days into 2024, I can finally muster the courage to try to look back at 2023. This list will likely be shorter and less involved than recent lists, like THIS ONE or THIS ONE or even THIS ONE. I’m not sure I have the energy to live up to those standards. Then again, 2024 marks the 20th anniversary of “…an endless banquet” (!!). There are traditions to uphold, right? Anyway, without any further ado, here’s a list of things that quickened the heart (in a positive way) this past year.

Audio: Song

Altin Gün, Ask

Altin Gün, On

Tim Maia, Nobody Can Live Forever: The Existential Soul of Tim Maia

Destroyer (“solo”), Higher Ground, Burlington, VT & Levon Helm Studios, Woodstock, NY

Rosalía, “Tuya”

Fleetwood Mac, “Rhiannon (live 1976)”

Jimmy Scott, The Source

Mavis Staples, s/t

Mavis Staples, “You Are Not Alone”

The Staple Singers, Be Altitude: Respect Yourself

Sandy Denny, The North Star Grassman and The Ravens

Lewsberg, Out and About

ODESZA, “The Last Goodbye (feat. Bettye LaVette)”

Petula Clark, “La Nuit n’en finit plus”

Felixson Ngasia & the Survivals, “Black Precious Color”

Ibrahim Hesnawi, “Never Understand”

Sudan Archives, “Selfish Soul (ODESZA re-mix)”

Sudan Archives, “Nont For Sale”

Sudan Archives, Natural Brown Prom Queen

Latto, “Big Energy”

Coi Leray, “Players”

Vusi Mahlasela, Norman Zulu, and Jive Connection, Face to Face

Bob Dylan, “Murder Most Foul”

Bob Dylan, The Bootleg Series, vol. 9: The Witmark Demos, 1962-1964

Bob Dylan, Great White Wonder (bootleg)

Lightning Dust, Nostalgia Killer

Meg Baird, Furling

Mary Lattimore, Goodbye, Hotel Arkada

CFCF, You Can Live Forever (Original Motion Picture Score)

Audio: Podcasts

This American Life, “The Call”

This American Life,”Eight Fights”

The Ezra Klein Show, “A Revelatory Tour of Martin Luther King Jr’s Forgotten Teachings”

The Kids of Rutherford County (The New York Times/Serial Productions)

The Retrievals (Serial Productions)

The Coldest Case in Laramie (The New York Times/Serial Productions)

This American Life, “The Show of Delights”

The Ezra Klein Show, “What a Poetic Mind Can Teach Us How to Live”

Rumble Strip, “Finn and the Bell”

The Daily

Moving Images

Anatomy of a Fall (2023), dir. Triet

The Red Angel (1966), dir. Masumara—Thank you to Cinéma Moderne for this one!

Saint Omer (2022), dir. Diop

Tori et Lokita (2022), dir. Dardenne Bros.

Le Pupille (2022), dir. Rohrwacher

Geographies of Solitude (2022), dir. Mills

Women Talking (2022), dir. Polley

The Pigeon Tunnel (2023), dir. Morris

Showing Up (2023), dir. Reichardt

Killers of the Flower Moon (2023), dir. Scorsese

Oppenheimer (2023), dir. Nolan

Stop Making Sense 4K (2023/1984), dir. Demme

May December (2023), dir. Haynes

Reality (2023), dir. Satter

Blackberry (2023), dir. Johnson

Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret (2023), dir. Fremon Craig

Narcos: Mexico, seasons 1-3

The Crown, seasons 5 and 6

Print

David Grann, Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI

Noah Gallagher Shannon, “The Genius Behind Hollywood’s Most Indelible Sets,” The New York Times

Greil Marcus, Folk Music: A Bob Dylan Biography in Seven Songs

Peniel E. Joseph, The Sword and the Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King

Martin Luther King, Jr., The Trumpet of Conscience

Doreen St. Felix, “How Sudan Archives Became the Violin’s Domme,” The New Yorker

Rebecca Solnit, Orwell’s Roses

Nastassja Martin, In the Eye of the Wild

Rachel Corbett, “The Inheritance Case That Could Unravel an Art Dynasty,” The New York Times

Robert MacFarlane, Landmarks

Josiah Thompson, Six Seconds in Dallas

Josiah Thompson, Last Second in Dallas

Robert Kolker, “The Botched Hunt for the Gilgo Beach Killer,” The New York Times

John Branch, “Ghosts on the Glacier,” The New York Times

Michelle Sterling, Camp Zero

Maggie Nelson, On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint

Questlove, Music is History

Jon Mooallem, “Michael Stipe is Writing His Next Act. Slowly.,” The New York Times

Florian Gadsby, By My Hands

Jody Williams and Rita Sodi, Via Carota: A Celebration of Seasonal Cooking

Bricia Lopez, Asada: The Art of Mexican-Style Grilling

Natasha Pickowicz, More Than Cake: 100 Baking Recipes Built for Pleasure and Community

Hettie McKinnon, To Asia, With Love

Hettie Lui McKinnon, Tenderheart

Rick Easton w/ Melissa McCart, Bread and How to Eat It

Irina Georgescu, Tava: Eastern European Baking and Desserts from Romania & Beyond

Food & Drink

Ernesto’s, NYC

Bread and Salt, Jersey City, NJ

Vin Mon Lapin, Montreal

Etna Pastificio, Montreal

Carlota Boulangerie, Montreal

Kitano Shokudo, Montreal

Son & Seigle Boulangerie, Montreal

Eventide, Portland, ME

The Honey Paw, Portland, ME

Famiglia Baldassare, Toronto

Pasquale Brothers, Etobicoke, ON

Casavant, Montreal

Alma, Toronto

Tapisserie, Paris (flan!)

Parcelles, Paris

Mokonuts, Paris

Bar Cravan, Paris

summer strawberries

Canal House Station, Milford, NJ

Kitty’s, Hudson, NY

Quinine's Good Food, Hudson, NY

Churchtown Dairy, Hudson, NY

Oaxaca Fest, Calais, VT

Poppy Café, Burlington, VT

San Fu, Montreal

ongoing experiments in homemade pasta shapes of all kinds

Bonci panbriacone

Tandem Coffee Roasters & Bakery, Portland, ME

Island Oysters, Toronto

OXO Cold Brew Coffee Maker

Lawson’s Finest Liquids, Waitsfield, VT, including Lawson’s Scragarita

AEB Spanish-themed Holiday Extravaganza

Miscellaneous

A.THERIEN, Cairo, NY

S.W. Welch, Montreal [R.I.P.]

Rabelais Books

Musée de la chasse et de la nature, Paris

The Monkey’s Paw, Toronto

Heath Ceramics

Baba Yaga, Littleton, NH

Stanley Swain, 10-year-old artist

“Leonard Cohen: Everybody Knows,” Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto

Pinhole Camera Workshop, Niagara Artists Centre, St. Catharines, ON

YMC sweaters

Yosukata carbon steel woks

Terry Fox Run 2023, High Park, Toronto, ON

R.I.P.

Sinead O’Connor

Daniel Ellsberg

Tina Turner

André Braugher

Rodriguez

Tom Verlaine

Robbie Robertson

David Crosby

Adolfo Kaminsky

Michael Balga

and thousands of other innocents

CEASE FIRE NOW

aj

"Japanese Home Cooking" For a Year of Cooking at Home

Our good friend Joanna Fox has a timely rundown of great cookbooks from this past year in today’s Montreal Gazette, as contributed by a number of local Montreal chefs, food writers, and other tastemakers. Of course, this was a year when home cooking took on increased importance for so many people. Luckily, there were quite a number of new cookbooks that were released in 2020 to help inspire us, in addition to all the newspaper and magazines, the YouTube tutorials, the TikTok videos, the Instagram posts, and all the rest of our contemporary multi-platform culinary universe.

Joanna’s contributors include such luminaries as Meredith Erickson (Alpine Cooking: Recipes and Stories from Europe's Grand Mountaintops, Friuli Food and Wine: Frasca Cooking from Northern Italy's Mountains, the Joe Beef cookbooks, and others), Janice Tiefenbach (Elena), and Jonathan Cheung (Appetite for Books), as well as our very own Michelle (!).

If you’ve had any contact with Michelle over the last 8-9 months, her choice should come as no surprise. She first picked this book up from our local library late in the winter of 2020, and when the pandemic hit and the library was closed for weeks on end, the book was stuck with us for an indefinite length of time. We all got to know each other pretty well! And when the library reopened again, and they asked for all their books back, Michelle promptly made a point of returning this book to the library (what did you think?) and picking up her very own copy. Since then, she’s continued to cook from it with passion and abandon, and she’s talked about it at length with anyone who’ll listen, including Joanna, apparently. That book, of course, is Sonoko Sakai’s Japanese Home Cooking: Simple Meals, Authentic Flavors.

Here’s what Michelle had to say about the book in her own words:

This is hands-down the book I have used the most in the past year. It hits the right tone of home cooking without shying away from more technical projects for those looking for a challenge. Every single thing I have made from this book has turned out perfectly. When I suddenly had reams of time, but no ability to focus, I threw myself into hand-making soba noodles. Her method and recipe are spot-on — all you need is practice to get the thickness and cutting right. (Check out her soba noodle-making webinars.) Bonus: the book features a recipe for rustic buckwheat dumplings (sobagaki), which are much easier to make than soba noodles and give you the same great taste when you use fresh sobakoh flour.

And here are some shots of Michelle making Sakai’s soba noodles for the first time, back in late March:

If you’re curious about the method, here it is in Michelle’s own words:

I had ordered specially milled buckwheat flour to make soba noodles before the madness began. My cutting leaves a lot to be desired but believe me when I say that this flour has a texture and flavour absolutely unparalleled by anything I have ever had. In case your self-isolation needs soba noodles, here is the recipe:

200g soba flour
50g all-purpose flour
120g water, more or less
Sift the flours together in a large bowl, add water and mix until dough starts to come together. Add a bit of water if necessary and knead until smooth. Lightly flour your work surface with tapioca starch and roll dough out to 1/8” thick. Sprinkle with more starch, fold, and cut into thin noodles. Not as easy as it sounds!

Boil in salted water about 1-2 minutes and rinse noodles with cold water. Serve.

[The soba flour in question came from Soba Canada, Inc. If you live in the United States, another phenomenal option is the “ni-hachi sobakoh” from Anson Mills.]

So, has Sonoko Sakai largely been responsible for eight or ninth months of particularly inspired Japanese home cooking? You tell me.

Long live the cookbook! Long live home cooking, Japanese and otherwise! Thank you for a great year, Sonoko!

And it should go without saying, but, if at all possible, please support your local bookstores in this period of economic crisis, stores like Appetite for Books, Drawn & Quarterly, and others.

aj

Hot off the Presses: Les Carnets de Rhubarbe

fig. a:  pâtisserie + pineapple + pastèque

Our favourite Montreal pâtisserie has just come out with our favourite new food publication of 2015, and it's perfectly geared for the summer.  

The concept is brilliant.  Start with Stephanie Labelle and her exceptional Pâtisserie Rhubarbe.  Assemble some stories, some clever ideas, and a few dozen enticing recipes:  some of them sweet, some of them savoury; some of them simple, some of them more involved.  Pair this material with the work of three talented local artists to bring it all to life.  And, finally, get Montreal publishing & design phenoms La Pastèque to design, package, and, yes, publish the project.  The result is Les Carnets de Rhubarbe and it was launched yesterday evening.

If you're wondering what the launch looked like, well, it kind of looked like this,

fig. b:  the urban uncanny

if you added about 100 enthusiastic people, an alleyway cocktail bar, some snacks, and some beautiful decorations.  It's hard to tell from this image, but the books were being sold and signed inside the store.

The collection itself consists of 3 themed carnets--little notebooks--that are each 16 pages long, that fold up nicely accordion-like, and that fit perfectly into a stylish cardboard case.  

The first one tells the story of Pâtisserie Rhubarbe and features Stephanie's favourite rhubarb recipes, including everything from compote de rhubarbe to galette rhubarbe et framboises.

The second--Fête de Ruelle--provides instructions for how to throw a successful neighbourhood alley party--one that features homemade popsicles and ice cream sandwiches.  

And the last one, Fête de Jardin,

fig. c:  garden party 1

provides  helpful pointers and recipes to help you throw a great garden party:  cocktails, juices, sandwich bread, sandwiches, cake--it's all in there.  And it's really cute.  I mean, get a load of these illustrations by the multi-talented Ohara Hale.

fig. d:  garden party 2

I have to say, I love everything about this project:

the stories

the recipes

the style

the illustrations by Marianne Ferrer and Cyril Doisneau, in addition to Ohara Hale

the sense of whimsy

Les Carnets de Rhubarbe captures so many of the things "...an endless banquet" believes in:  food, drink, art, sociability.  In fact, in many ways it's a microcosm of all the best that Montreal has to offer, of Montreal at its spirited best.

You can find Les Carnets de Rhubarbe at Pâtisserie Rhubarbe (5091 de Lanaudière, Montreal, QC), and anywhere that's wise enough to stock La Pastèque's fine editions.  

OUT NOW.  In a French edition only.

aj