This is a term I just encountered today, shorthand for “food dood.” Credit for it seems to go to Jessica Pressler at New York Magazine, who devoted a long piece to the topic in 2014:
You know the type. Has > Heat o> r Fergus Henderson’s > Complete Nose to Tail > on his bookshelf. Can sustain a remarkably long conversation about knives. Is super into his grill. Likes pour-over coffee. Is, at this moment, really excited about ramps… You can find them stalking around Smorgasburg, attending knife-skills classes at the Meat Hook, writing lengthy, tumescent odes to the Bo Ssäm Miracle in the paper of record.
Hmm. Sorry to say, I check a couple of those boxes (pour-over coffee, ramps in season). I’m relieved to say that I don’t check off more. And I’ve never attempted sous vide – one of the main topics of the piece – but I hang out with people who are dedicated to it. At the least, I guess I’m a doodie hanger-on.
“I feel like these are the guys who invite you over for dinner and you end up waiting five hours because they read some blog post by J. Kenji López-Alt about the Only Way to Sous-Vide Porchetta or whatever,” says my friend Emily. “And you end up ready to gnaw your own arm off because doodies never remember to put out cheese or snacks.”
I always have food out when guests arrive, I use sous vide for some specific preps, I love pour over coffee, I don’t buy ramps but treasure my spring invite to friends who do. Have neither Heat nor Complete Nose to Tail. Sounds like just another excuse to make generalizations about people who are devoted to a hobby.
Guys who write articles like that (or was it a woman, I didn’t even notice) can go fck themselves in Macy’s window through a rolling donut. Let’s see him make grilled ostrich in a raspberry sauce over risotto, all from scratch, in a snow storm in a parking lot using only a Weber kettle. Is that anti-doodie enough for you? I guess you have to belch and fart and drink Coors Light to avoid such a moniker. You know why Coors Light is like having sex in a canoe? Because it’s fcking close to water!
But no one has ever starved to death waiting for Jay to cook anything… while the ribs are slow cooking a turkey is being deep fried… and the pork shoulder started cooking two days ago and is already pulled…
What is pour over coffee, by the way? having had one cup of coffee in the last 49 years, and that was at a coffee plantation in Kona, I don;t even know what pour over coffee is.
I just suffered through the whole article. I admit to having had a wonderful conversation with Dario Checcini at his butcher shop in Panzano. After discussing lard and other exciting issues to gain his trust, I asked him whether he was the best butcher in Tuscany. He smiled and candidly said, “No, not at all, there are better, but I am the best showman.”
But to be a real fanatic, you have to have photographs:
The lard sculpture at the entrance to his butcher shop.
