Skip to main content

Delta One

A trip to Europe gave me a chance to try some food that I normally don’t get to eat---Delta One’s food service. Sleep is an important commodity on long flights but when I saw that the menu had been prepared by Linton Hopkins, I knew that I had to stay up long enough to eat. I wanted to see how he presented Southern food for this very international audience. I also wanted to see how he designed the food to handle the long hold times and reheating inherent in airline food. (Sorry, I’m a nerd and I can’t help thinking about these sorts of things.)

We started with a dish of Georgia pecans. They were very nicely spiced with a bit of heat.

The next course included several small items. The salad was an interesting exercise in minimalism: two large leaves and pickled red onion. But it was good. The charcuterie, including beef salami and potatoes, was tasty as well. The squash soup was wonderful, with outstanding spices and a dollop of collard greens as an unusual garnish. The roll was excellent.

I had to try the chicken pot pie for my main course. The vegetables had been only lightly cooked and presented a lot of veggie flavor. The meat was very tender and juicy. The filling was held together not by a white gravy, as is typical, but by mashed potatoes. I’m sure that the potatoes are easier to transport and reheat than the gravy would have been.

For the big finish, I had both cheese and sweets. At this point, the stewardess was my active accomplice in enjoying the meal. “Everyone else is asleep and all this will go to waste!” she said. The Georgia cheeses were very nice; I particularly enjoyed the hard cheese. The toffee cake was very sweet and moist. I ate only a little bit (this was essentially the fifth course, after all) but it was very enjoyable.

At this point, I could finally go to sleep, deeply satisfied with a meal that would have been very enjoyable even on the ground, let alone in the air.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Asheville NC: Luella's BBQ

Luella's is a nouvelle BBQ outfit on the north side of Asheville. It is nestled among the trees in a lovely neighborhood. The restaurant has lots of windows for inside seating and plenty of outside seating. Service was courteous and amazingly fast. This is a combination plate with pork and brisket. Both were very moist and tender. For the pork, I tried both the mild and hot vinegar sauces. To my surprise, I preferred the milder one because it didn't assert itself too much. I enjoyed the spicy tomato sauce for my brisket. The hushpuppies were very good. The fried okra was fresh out of the fryer and excellent. The slaw was of the vinegary variety, which I usually enjoy, but this version is heavy on the white stuff and didn't have quite enough variety in tastes for me.
Post a Comment
Read more

Pressure Cooker Candied Ginger

I made candied ginger a few years ago. It's not something I would do every day but I had a lot of fun doing it. I recently acquired a pressure cooker and it inspired an interesting idea to me: why not make candied ginger in the pressure cooker? It should be very soft and flavorful. Here is the result. I peeled two large ginger roots, cut them into small cubes, and put them in the pressure cooker with heavily sugared water. The traditional method first boils the ginger in plain water to soften it and then again in sugar water to candy it. The resulting candy was very tender but still with the characteristic ginger texture. It was also sweet without being overpowering. The traditional method leaves a lot of sugar crystallized around the ginger. The pressure cooker gives a much more subtle result. The ginger stays moist even after it cools but you can dry it in the oven at 350 degrees for about 10 minutes. That inspired me to dip it in chocolate. While I was in the b...
2 comments
Read more

Everybody's Pizza

Everybody's Pizza is across the street from Emory University.  It was founded in 1971 and has a seventies college feel.  But it isn't musty or dated---you don't feel like you are eating in a museum.  It's just pleasantly funky.  They played a Big Bird song while I was there.  What's no to like? The pizza is college-style as well, as contrasted to the Italian neighborhood style that is (or should be) the goal of a New York style pizzeria.  I think that the cheese is the ingredient that most leads me to this feeling.  In a New York pizza, the cheese would be central (even if it came from a low-grade Mob supplier), while in more suburban pizzas, the cheese is seen as one in a medley of ingredients that form the topping.  (I think that cheese-centrism should be the essence of pizza.  Remember that the modern pizza was created by adding cheese to traditional tomato sauce-covered bread.)  I think the biggest fault of this pizza is the crust, which I found to be just a lit...
Post a Comment
Read more