Oxford Companion to Food; Sono & Madiba restaurants

[Bapopik at AOL.COM]

     I'll be going to Vietnam and Cambodia in about ten days, so you'll have
to hold off on my Saigon noodles reports.

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OXFORD COMPANION TO FOOD

    The OXFORD COMPANION TO FOOD (892 pages) has recently been published.
The author (Alan Davidson) thought he'd spend five years on it, but spent
about 25 years.  In the New York Times Book Review, 5 December 1999, pg. 20,
col. 1:  "But, ah, the British glories.  They start with meticulous attention
to botany, taxonomy, and etymology, in addition to history and continue with
prose that is often delightfully prejudiced and wry..."
    Here's that meticulous attention to etymology--"hot dog" comes "from
newspaper cartoons of around 1900 by T. A. Dorgan."
    This book looks like some fossil from the 19th century.  Why was it
written?  Twenty-five years this took?  Mariani's book of American Food &
Drink had both scholarship and focus.
    It's much simpler to just go to your PC and type in
www.globalgourmet.com.  Unfortunately, you won't find much in the way of food
and drink etymologies there.
    The following two restaurant reviews show why a good etymological food &
drink web site is needed.

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SONO
106 E. 57th Street; (212) 752-4411
***

     This is from the New York Post, 8 December 1999, pg. 34, col. 1:

_Sono runs on_
_fusion power_
     "This doesn't work for me," my colleague Andrea declared of her "Yuzu
cosmo," a cosmopolitan made at Sono with juice of the sour Japanese citrus
fruit.
     "Try the shiso margarita," I said.  "It's atomic."
     At Sono, even the cocktails are "fusion."  In their lust for culinary
cross-pollination, chefs from the Battery to Harlem are hitching miso to
guacamole with promiscuous abandon.  Sono is the rare place where
fusion--here blending French, Asian and American influences--is practiced by
a chef, Tadashi Ono, with the right stuff.

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MADIBA
195 DeKalb Avenue, Brooklyn
718-855-9190

     This is from the Village Voice, December 14, 1999, pg. 18, cols. 3-4:

_Bunny Chow_
     (...)  Madiba is New York's first South African restaurant, and rarely
has the energy and culture of a foreign country been so dramatically evoked
in one tiny space--like an Epcot Center diorama, only good.
     (...)  ...umgqushu stambu ($3), a tasty samp of crushed hominy and
kidney beans that, for many cash-strapped South Africans, constitutes an
entire meal.  There's also a tribal homemade bread called useque, sliced on
the kitchen counter from a steaming loaf and strewn with parsley.
     (...)  ...biltong...and crumbly sticks of droewors, which taste like
Slim Jims buried underground a few years.
     (...)  Sometimes you'll also be given a free bowl of pap, a farinalike
millet porridge fondly known as "mealie-meal," pleasantly clumped and
smothered in a limp relish of onionsand tomatoes.
     (...)  Reflecting the Huguenot heritage, oxtail poitjie dumps prodigious
hunks of bony meat in a red-wine gravy loaded with vegetables and garlic.
     And who could ignore a dish called bunny chow?  Though it sounds like an
invention, it's a favorite fast food of KwaZulu-Natal, featuring a vegetable
curry poured into a hollowed-out loaf of bread.