Casey Welsch | The Postrevolutionary Diner
A Note From the Chef
This is an essay, which is to say it is an attempt. Like a meal prepared at a restaurant, this is an attempt to nourish, entertain, and entice the senses, and perhaps make the diner think about ingredients in new ways. This is also an attempt at a new way to approach one of the oldest and most vital of human arts and industries: feeding people.
Today’s menu will be presented over seven courses patterned on a daily meal progression, each addressing a different promise and/or problem posed by an imagined postrevolutionary setting. Each course will also contain a suggested menu accompaniment, which the reader can imagine tasting as they chew on the ideas discussed within. There are also a handful of recipes interspersed in this essay.
It is the chef’s hope that this attempt leaves the reader/diner thinking, salivating, and interested in the idea of postrevolutionary dining. We hope you enjoy the meal.
Welcome to the Postrevolutionary Diner
Congratulations, we did it. The Revolution was fought and won. Whether through peace and love or through blood in the streets, the struggle is over, and the people have emerged victorious. Racial and sexual equality are achieved, there is harmony among the genders, and no worker is alienated from their labor. East, West, North, South, each occupy equal weight on the compass, and all regions enjoy autonomy and self-determination to their fullest possible expressions. Poverty is a memory and prosperity is promised to all. We have achieved Utopia. Now, where do you want to eat?
What follows is one day’s menu at the Postrevolutionary Diner, a dining and drinking establishment that fully embodies and embraces the utopian concepts of this new world we have won together. All are welcome to dine here at all hours. None will be turned away for their dress or demeanor, or for anything as petty as financial circumstance. All who work here are equal in standing. From the cooks to the servers to the hosts, bartenders, dishwashers, quartermasters, preppers and porters, all stand shoulder to shoulder, bonded by a love of good food and drink, and pride in serving it to their neighbors and comrades in this postrevolutionary landscape. Gone is the old hierarchy of capitalist ownership of the kitchen, and the Cult of the Chef. We divide responsibilities amongst each other by volunteering, rotation, and drawing lots. Less-desirable activities such as dishwashing or stockroom rotation are known to be just as important as cooking or serving, and with an acknowledgement of our fundamental equity in mind, we each pitch in where and when we are needed, however we are needed. We’re all just cooks here, because cooking for people is what we love doing. Let us cook for you.
At the Postrevolutionary Diner, we operate with a few core assumptions. The first is the equality of our diners and our workers which we have already discussed. Second, the excess, homogeneity, and decadence of the old capitalist food system are to be avoided. Instead, we embrace the abundance of our land, honoring the great wealth of good and local ingredients available to us, ever-changing with the seasons. And finally, the Revolution did away with the tyranny of the clock. None of us are so rushed by our work and social obligations as to demand constant immediate service and instant gratification from those serving us, merely as a means of coping with our own exhaustion and exasperation. No, you have time to eat, and we have time to prepare the best possible meals for you. Fast food and rushed production are things of the past. Slow down. Lean back in your chair. Smile at the friends around you and please, enjoy your meal.
Morning Perk-Up
What is to become of caffeine in the postrevolutionary landscape? For many people, a morning cup of coffee or tea is essential to their existence. Starting a day without that initial chemical jolt is unimaginable. But there are a few problems between that assumption and postrevolutionary existence.
The affordability and ubiquity of coffee and tea in the contemporary market are the result of centuries of Western colonial domination of East Asia and the Global South. It takes specialized climates to produce coffee and tea, and much of the Western ecosystem is unable to grow enough of these crops to keep up with domestic demand. The importation of these morning staples into Western markets only takes place through rampant environmental devastation and worker exploitation in currently less-privileged parts of the world. Even so-called “fair trade” practices are little more than a bandaid, relying on the same global capitalist distribution structures as every other commodity to keep the caffeine flowing to the West. Without this exploitation there would be no Starbuckses, Scooterses, McCafes, Dunkins, or even cheap black mugs of diner joe. Twinnings, Nestea, Bigelow, hot, iced, or chai, none would be available at $3 for a box of 20, lining entire grocery store aisles. Assuming that the Revolution flattened the global power structure and upended centuries of colonialism, coffee and tea suddenly become much more luxurious commodities in the postrevolutionary pantry.
They certainly do not disappear entirely. The end of colonialism and capitalist exploitation of foreign resources does not mean the end of global trade or the sharing of resources between self-determining cultures. The end of capitalist modes of mass production and distribution will mean, however, a new paradigm in the ways such commodities are supplied and how their values are determined. In short, we may need to say goodbye to any expectations of a daily cup of good, real coffee, instead reserving such luxuries for special occasions and gatherings, much as was practiced in leaner times in our history.
Depressions, world wars, and other times of rationing have occurred in the past, and each led to tighter supplies of coffee, tea, and the like. Many alternatives to these imports have been proposed by various communities. In the American South, chicory is used widely as a coffee alternative, or additive to stretch out the supply. While providing no natural caffeine of its own, chicory is nonetheless a healthful beverage, loaded with fiber to support good digestion and promote the growth of beneficial gut bacteria. Naturalist communities have also used roasted and powdered dandelion roots as a bitter brown alternative to coffee, albeit still without any naturally occurring stimulant properties. There are even legends from the Depression-era Midwest about rural church congregations who, in need of something coffee-like to make their Sunday morning fellowships more bearable, would take slices of white bread, remove the crusts, burn the slices black in a hot oven, and grind them into powder. The burnt powder mixed with hot water was said to be close enough to the taste of coffee to tide the congregations over until the Depression lifted, at least with plenty of cream and sugar. And all of this is to say nothing of the extremely wide variety of herbal teas that are locally cultivable and available at various seasons of the year.
Still, none of this addresses the caffeine problem. Nothing grows natively in the Midwest that produces caffeine. Two plants grow on the North American mainland that produce caffeine, varieties of holly called yaupon and dahoon (the latter also called cassena). These hollies grow in the coastal Southeast, and their leaves have been brewed and drunk by Native American communities there for many years. There are even reports of white colonialists using these leaves as a caffeinated alternative to tea during the American Revolution, though widespread cultivation never really seemed to catch on once tea imports resumed following that revolution. Synthetic caffeine is also available, and currently widely used in all manner of canned, commercially available energy products. But will there still be factories producing this commodity in any great quantity after the Revolution? It’s an open question.
Perhaps a better question is will people still need caffeine in the same way following the Revolution? Why do so many need so much caffeine now? For many, it’s to counter the mental and physical exhaustion caused by their adherence to the tyranny of the capitalist workday. For workers under this mode of production, their time is not their own, but rather strictly regimented by the needs of production schedules they have no control over. They wake up at the same time every day after too little sleep every night, to work too long hours in a system of production that only profits a privileged and private few by extracting more value from the worker than they are reimbursed for. No wonder these workers need a little chemical incentive to keep participating. Will they still when they are in full ownership of the value of their labor and full control over their own time? Perhaps the Revolution will decrease demand for caffeine proportionate to its decreased supply, and there is no need to worry. And isn’t today a special occasion anyway? Alright, fine, let’s have a coffee.
Espresso Tonic
A double-shot of espresso with choice of milk, fresh-squeezed blood orange juice and seltzer, served in a tall glass over ice.
Breakfast
Now that I’ve had my coffee, it’s time for a proper breakfast. For modern America, that means a pile of cured pork (ham, sausage, and/or bacon), fried eggs, toast and jelly, some kind of fried potato (tots, hash browns, homefries, etc.), and maybe a bowl of cereal or oatmeal with a piece of fruit to round out This Balanced Breakfast®. At 1,100 calories of 60% saturated fat, yeesh, it’s already time for a nap. Why is this what breakfast became?
The 20th Century saw the commodification of breakfast as a mass-produced, industrial product in the hands of marketers, advertisers, public relations men, and quack doctors. Factory-made cereals in boxes covered in advertisements, sausages you can cook in a toaster, piles of bacon and eggs as a “healthful alternative” to mere coffee and a roll, exclusively Idaho potatoes, etc., all are the legacy of hucksters and salesmen, looking to make a buck off people first thing in the morning. It doesn’t have to be this way.
In slower-moving, less-moneyed parts of the world, breakfasts are simpler, more healthful, more communal, though no less hearty. The breaking of one’s fast is done all over the world with the goal of providing energy in the morning for the day’s labors ahead. In Haiti, the historical location of one of the truest revolutions in world history, and today one of the poorest and least developed nations in the Western Hemisphere (according to contemporary capitalist metrics of such things), breakfast is a communal affair. The meal is lean, healthful, often vegetarian, and extremely flavorful, prepared mainly by a corps of village women who rise before dawn to prepare the food in giant rondeaus over wood-fired ranges to serve to lines of workers heading out to whatever jobs they can find. The menu is almost universally composed of a scoop of rice and beans (flavored with tomatoes, chilies and sometimes pork fat), flattened slices of fried plantains, and a delightfully unique table condiment/coleslaw that is a ubiquitous feature on every table in Haiti: pikliz. Pikliz (PEEK-leez) is a simple combination of thinly sliced cabbage, white onion, bell pepper, carrot, and scotch bonnet chilies (accept no substitute), preserved in a light brine of salt, cane vinegar and lime juice. The vegetable mixture is heaped onto the plantains and can even be eaten as a salad, full of vitamins and fiber, while the brine is a sweet and fiery hot condiment for the rice and beans, or anything else you can pour it on (you can pour it on everything). The extreme heat of a good Caribbean scotch bonnet combines with its unique sweetness to create a morning jolt that gets the eater ready for anything the day can throw at them.
With the exception of the plantains, everything in the Haitian breakfast grows in the Midwest, even the scotch bonnets. And since it’s always a good day when you get cooked a breakfast with no hog, we’re honoring the spirit of the Haitian Revolution at the Postrevolutionary Diner, and offering you the classic Haitian breakfast to start your day. We hope you can take the heat.
Breakfast Menu
Rice and beans
Red beans prepared in vegetable stock with serrano chilies, tomatoes and kale
Fried sweet plantains imported from Mexico
Pikliz, a fiery, sweet Haitian slaw (recipe follows)
Griot (gree-OH), a braised and broiled pork shoulder in chili and orange sauce. Optional for those who need their morning meat.
Pikliz
- 1 head of cabbage
- 1 large carrot
- 1/2 white onion
- 1 bell pepper
- 6 scotch bonnet chilies
- fresh thyme
- whole cloves
- whole peppercorns
- 3 cups cane vinegar
- 1/4 cup fresh lime juice
-kosher salt
Core and quarter the cabbage and slice one of the quarters into the thinnest strands possible. Jullienne a large carrot, a whole shallot (or half a white onion), and a whole bell pepper, again as thin as possible. Mince 6 scotch bonnet chilies, stemmed and seeded (or leave the seeds in if you think you can take the heat, but be careful, this can make your pikliz extremely spicy).
Mix all these ingredients together and pack into jars or other tight-sealing containers. Add 1 sprig of fresh thyme, 4 whole cloves and 8 whole peppercorns to each jar. Combine 3 cups cane vinegar, a quarter cup fresh lime juice, and a teaspoon of kosher salt (more or less to taste) in a bowl or pitcher.
Pour the brine mixture into the jars until all ingredients are completely covered. Seal the jars and keep refrigerated for at least three days before serving, shaking once or twice a day. The pikliz are now ready to serve, and will keep for about a week on a tabletop, or up to a month in the fridge.
Brunch
What about our late risers, leisure eaters, and those who just aren’t hungry first thing in the morning? In the postrevolutionary world, no one really has to work if they don’t want to, at least not all according to the same daily rhythms as the old world. For those rolling out at 10 a.m. to maybe get a soft start around noon, that’s what brunch is for, and we’re happy to serve it at the Postrevolutionary Diner.
For this course, we’re focussing on the localest possible ingredients. Hyperlocal. Think food that’s traveled a block or less from where it was grown to your plate. From our backyard to your plate.
A favorite domestic animal for self-sustainers and apocalypse preppers, quail are indigenous to our area, and can easily be bred and propagated in captivity. The Postrevolutionary Diner has a rookery of them out back, and while fattening them up for an eventual feast of succulent birdflesh, they daily lay eggs all the while. Their eggs are tiny, speckled, and delicate, while being every bit as nutritious and versatile as chicken eggs. We’ll be poaching them.
Surrounding the quail coop is a small patch of hard winter wheat, one of their favorite grains, which we also harvest to grind into our own house flour. Using a long-lived sourdough mother, we make our own bread in-house, which we will be cutting into wedges and toasting as a base for the poached quail eggs.
The patch of grain is dotted with abundant dandelions which, far from being the noxious weed they are often regarded as, are actually very good for the soil. Their long taproots aerate the soil and pull nutrients from deep in the soil toward the top, helping nourish the shallow rooted wheat, and every part of the little flowers is edible. We will be using their bitter, peppery green leaves to make a pesto.
What else do we have growing out back? A tight bed of garlic, some potted Hungarian paprika, and a little patch of radishes. This is shaping up to be a fine course indeed. What else do we need? We need cheese and butter, and while we don’t have our own dairy set up at the diner (even if there are no more state health inspectors after the Revolution, we respect our patrons too much to raise bovines that close to where their food is prepared), there’s a dairy on the outskirts of town, offering daily deliveries of fresh butter, cream, and even their own cheeses. The only thing left is a little olive oil from the grocer, and pine nuts for the pesto, and one of our cooks has a bagful they foraged from the evergreens in a local park last season, that they are more than happy to share. Let’s eat.
Quail egg toast
Poached quail eggs with dandelion pesto (recipe follows) on sourdough toast points, dusted with Hungarian paprika, with radishes, salt, and cultured butter.
Dandelion Pesto (makes 1 qt)
- 8 oz freshly foraged dandelion greens, well washed (pick as
young as possible, as they get bitterer as they get older)
- 4 oz pine nuts, lightly toasted in a 350º oven
- 6 (or more!) cloves fresh garlic, finely minced or mashed to a
paste
- 1 tbsp salt
- 12 fl oz oil, preferably olive, but any oil will do
- 8 oz grated or shredded parmesan cheese, or any other very hard,
strongly flavored cheese
- Salt to taste
Rinse the dandelion greens and poach them in boiling water for about a minute. This step is technically optional but will make the deep green color really pop and help prevent oxidation of the finished product. Drain, cool, squeeze out excess moisture from the leaves and let dry. Transfer the greens to a food processor with garlic, salt and toasted pine nuts (a mortar and pestle will also suffice). Grind these ingredients together, gradually adding the oil until a thick paste is formed. Stir in the cheese and add salt to taste if needed. The pesto is now ready to use or may be refrigerated for later use. It will keep for up to two weeks in the fridge.
Luncheon
The day is fully underway, and all of us in this postrevolutionary world are bound to be engaged in whatever activities or endeavors best suit our own interests, at our own paces. Lucky us. The Postrevolutionary Diner supports everybody in whatever arts, crafts, industries or leisures they undertake, and sometimes that means getting food out to the people, wherever they are, rather than enticing the people to the food. I’m talking about delivery, and yes, we do that here.
Food delivery has a rollercoaster history. It has taken many forms in many different cultures the world over, and has come and gone in many forms in our own Western paradigm. In the days before suburbia, individual automobile ownership, and supermarkets, fresh ingredients like milk, eggs, butter and flour would be delivered right to people’s doors straight from the farms and cooperatively owned processors. Dry grocers would receive weekly orders in the mail from their customers, and package them in crates to be delivered right to people’s doors, long before the advent of Instacart and like services. Chinese American establishments in the early 20th Century would deliver 2-gallon tin buckets of chop suey to apartments on the West Coast via foot, bicycle, trolley, or however else they could travel. Cars and supermarkets put an end to a lot of food delivery for a while, until pizza establishments in the 1980s began offering hot delivery as a method of competing with rival chains. These days you can have independent contractors pick up food from practically anywhere and deliver it hot(ish) right to your door, so long as you’re willing to pay through the nose for it in fees to DoorDash, GrubHub, Uber Eats, etc.
In some parts of the world, food delivery isn’t just an added feature, but a way of life. In India, the extreme religious and cultural diversity makes it difficult for employers to provide daily meals to large workforces. The Hindus don’t eat beef, the Muslims don’t eat pork, the Buddhists don’t eat meat at all. They all have different cultural tastes, expectations of when and what to eat, even different ways to approach the table. And doesn’t everyone prefer the taste of good home cookin’? How, then, to get each cultural and religious community the lunches they desire, when so many of them are laboring at construction sites, factories, or offices away from their homes, unable to travel back and forth in the crowded urban conditions in time with the working day?
Enter the dabbawalas. The Indian city of Mumbai has an entire class of dedicated meal deliverers, numbering around 5,000 workers, men and women, whose job it is daily to ferry a diverse menu of meals from homes and neighborhoods in one part of India’s major metropolis to wherever large workforces are toiling. Started in 1890, the dabbawala meal delivery service is generational, unionized, and absolutely entrenched in the working culture of Mumbai. They deliver an average of 200,000 lunches every day, and academic analyses have indicated they make less than one error in every 6 million deliveries, utilizing an analog system of colors, numbers, abbreviations and symbols.
The dabbawalas use reusable containers to deliver meals, made from plastic, metal or ceramic, moving soiled containers back and forth for cleaning and reuse with each daily delivery. The reusable lunch boxes, called tiffin, are moved in large crates via foot, car, bicycle, motorcycle, wagon, and train, back and forth every day. Since all the containers are reusable, waste is minimized, and a culture of sustainability is encouraged, even in the midst of one of the world’s most populated cities. The dabbawalas have been around for more than 125 years, and their industry is still growing at a rate of 10-25% per year, according to New York Times analysis. All members of the union are paid the same, regardless of role, and are guaranteed a living wage for life. A far cry from the working agreements of independent, competitive “dashers” in our culture. A better way already exists, and we’ve imported it right here to the delivery area of the Postrevolutionary Diner. Delivery guaranteed by lunchtime to wherever you are in the city! Please have any used containers ready to trade with your dabbawala in exchange for fresh ones. Enjoy your meal!
Lunch Delivered
White jasmine rice, steamed.
One of three curries:
Japanese style with beef (mild, sweet, homey).
Chicken Tikka Masala (rich, red tomato, medium spice).
Vegan Green Thai (fiery, bright, fresh).
Baby green salad with tomatoes and lychee vinaigrette.
Garam masala coffee cake (recipe follows).
Garam Masala Coffee Cake
For the cake:
- 1¼ lbs Yellow cake mix (see below)
2¾ cup cake flour
1½ cup sugar
4 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
- 1 large egg
- 1 cup sour cream
- ¼ cup softened butter
- 1 tsp vanilla
- ½ cup whole milk
- 2 tbsp garam masala (see below)
13 cardamom pods (green or black)
4 tsp coriander seeds
4 tsp cumin seeds
1 cinnamon stick, broken into small pieces
1¼ tsp whole cloves
2½ tsp whole black peppercorns
¼ tsp ground nutmeg
3 bay leaves
Extract seeds from cardamom pods. Combine these seeds with coriander, cumin, cinnamon, cloves and peppercorns. Roast in a 350º oven for about 5 minutes until fragrant.
Let cool. Combine roasted spices with nutmeg and bay leaves in a clean spice or coffee grinder. Grind to a medium fine powder. Store in a tightly sealed container and use within 1 month.
For the crumb topping:
- ½ cup light brown sugar
- ½ cup sugar
- ⅓ cup all purpose flour
- 1 tsp garam masala
- ¼ chilled butter
Afternoon Snack
We’ve had a few meat courses to taste today, but the question must be asked. What is the status of meat in the postrevolutionary landscape?
The environmental and labor considerations of the Revolution suggest that most forms of industrial mass production will be done away with in the postrevolutionary landscape. This includes industrial meat production, which is the primary source of a huge proportion of daily protein in the contemporary Western diet. While the Revolution for some will ideally include a total abolition of meat consumption, I do not believe that eating meat is something that will ever go away entirely. The hunting and eating of meat is rooted deep in the bedrock of human existence. Before there was human history, there were artists in caves depicting images of the hunt, and the ensuing feast. Humans are naturally omnivorous, and animal protein is more easily digested and complete than its vegetarian counterparts. Meat is also simply delicious, and animal fat takes up and carries flavors in cooking better than most vegetable fats can ever hope to. In short, I think some of us will be eating meat, even after the Revolution. The questions are when, how much, and from where?
Throughout human history, across cultures and regions of the planet, eating meat has often been a form of celebration. An entire animal carcass butchered and prepared for the entire community following a successful hunt. A whole hog killed, bled and spit-roasted until crackling for the entire family and all the farmhands in an autumn festival celebrating the bountiful harvest, stockpiling preserved meats, grains, vegetables and communal goodwill before the cold, isolating winter ahead. A single animal produces a lot of food, especially when the entire carcass is properly utilized. One pig is enough to furnish a feast for an entire village, not to mention months of rendered cooking fat. This chef can say from experience growing up on a farm with cattle that one cow can keep a family of five well fed for an entire year with proper refrigeration, to say nothing of the leather and gelatin that can also be extracted from the carcass for other uses. Add hunted game such as deer, raccoon, turkey, pheasant, squirrel, rabbit, quail, dove, duck, goose, etc. to the pantry, and suddenly it’s a question of why we ever needed industrial meat production in the first place, with such bounty at our disposal. And we haven’t even dipped our toes in the water yet.
In the postrevolutionary landscape, isn’t more leisure time one of our primary goals? For many, nothing spells leisure more than a whole day spent at the fishing hole. Growing up in rural Nebraska, there were individuals who spent their entire weekends pulling carp, bass, and catfish out of rivers near the town dam with the intention of cleaning and eating them, providing all of their protein for the week without having to spend a dime at the grocer. With more leisure time afforded to all individuals in the postrevolution, I can only assume even more people will be spending their days at streams and ponds, angling their days away for protein and passtime. Catfish in particular is an extremely versatile freshwater protein, and we’ll be utilizing some locally fished channel cat later in our menu. But for now, let’s remember that not every meal needs to be meat-centered, even if its traditional preparation calls for flesh.
In French Canada, as the year gets cold and the holidays approach, the locals prepare a traditional mincemeat pie, using offal cuts, scraps and fat from the end of the harvest season’s slaughter. Cooked in a hearty gravy with warming winter spices and baked into a warm pie crust, the result is tourtière, a delightful meat pastry that signals the arrival of the holiday season for Nord-Américains. And joyfully for the rest of us, this holiday delight doesn’t have to be prepared with meat. An equally blissful dish can be prepared utilizing a natural bounty of meaty mushrooms, vegetable stock, and pie crust rolled with frozen avocado oil instead of butter. Available year-round here at the Postrevolutionary Diner, thanks to advancements in basement mushroom cultivation. Enjoy.
Vegan Tourtière
Minced shitake, chanterelle and morel mushrooms, cooked in reduced vegetable stock with onion, garlic and holiday spices (thyme, sage, cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, allspice, mustard, cloves and pepper), served hot in a vegan avocado pie crust. Available all day, but delightful in the afternoon with herbal tea.
Dinner
Here at the Postrevolutionary Diner, daily tasks in the kitchen and dining room are drawn by lot, rotation, seniority, or just given to whomever has the best idea of the day. Most of us want to cook most of the time, but no dining establishment runs without its entire cast. This includes servers, bartenders, preppers, stockers, food buyers, people to tend the garden beds and quail coop out back, etc., table bussers, porters, and perhaps most importantly dishwashers. Literally no kitchen runs without a constant supply of clean dishes, pots, and pans, and though in contemporary kitchen cultures the dishwasher (aka dishie, dishpig, scrubbie, etc.) is often the least-respected and conceivably most-replaceable position, at the Postrevolutionary Diner we recognize the extreme value of this absolutely necessary labor. It’s hard work, but someone has to do it, so it’s the position that is filled first in each day’s labor lot. We may be anarchists, but secretly the dishwasher is the first among equals, long may they reign.
After that, there is no hierarchy among the diner staff. Gone is the Cult of the Chef, we call each other by name instead of title, and responsibilities are entrusted to the roles, rather than to the individuals occupying them. Every role is as important as any other. The entire operation grinds to a halt without cooks to make the food, preppers to continually supply them with ingredients, buyers and stockers to continually supply the preppers with raw materials, porters to clean and maintain the establishment, gardeners and tenders to keep our fresh food stocks productive, servers and bussers to bring food and dishes to and from the tables, bartenders to keep diners refreshed, hosts to ensure the efficient movement of people into and from the establishment, etc. Every role needs to be filled every night. Any unfilled role will have to be assigned by lot, and if someone really takes a shine to anything in particular (serving, bartending, buying, etc.), they can have it more of the time. Everybody wants to cook, however, so a clean rotation needs to be enforced here among the Postrevolutionary staff. You have to be willing to do anything in the diner if you want to cook at it.
The menu at the Postrevolutionary Diner is in constant flux. We have our favorites, and our staples, but specials and features are prepared and offered at the whim of the seasons and the tastes of whomever is working the line on a given day or time. It takes at least a few cooks to crank out dishes for the entire diner, an each one may be in charge of a different part of the menu every day. For dinner tonight we have two cooks, one picking an entree, and the other its side dish.
Today our buyer was hanging out with the fisherpeople down by the river, and came back with a haul of fresh channel catfish. Our entree cook loves their Southern fare, and whips up a batch of blacken and creole sauce to really spice up the feline fish filets. They spend most of the day cleaning the fish for evening service. Meanwhile our side cook, who embraces the heresy of combining south-of-the-border flavors with continental preparations, spends their day preparing tray after tray of little hand-rolled marbles of sweet potato, chipotle, herbs, and rich Swiss raclette cheese coated with panko bread crumbs to be deep fried and served on a smear of salsa verde. Unfortunately there was a bit of a communications breakdown between these two cooks, as there often is between humans working in close proximity, even in our utopian postrevolutionary world. They each conceived of their culinary creations without consulting the other, and the resulting plate is of two dishes that, while delicious individually, are over-heavy and too spicy when combined in a single course. The resulting plate is oily, highly piquant, too richly creamy, with each half competing with each other for space on the tongue and in the stomach. Not an ideal dinner pairing. But each cook has spent their entire day working on these dishes, and the dinner rush fast approaches. What is to be done to remedy this over-rich pairing without wasting an entire day’s worth of labor and ingredients?
The bartender overhears the back-of-house workers discussing this conundrum, and becomes the hero of the evening. They are a gardener in their free time, and this late in the season, they have a bumper crop of fresh watermelon. They brought in some this evening with the intention of juicing the succulent pink flesh for inclusion in a special end-of-summer cocktail. That’s why they were in the kitchen in the first place, using the food processor to pulverize the fruit flesh, squeezing the resulting pulp through a cheesecloth to produce gallons of deep pink liquid. They have several fruits worth of cleaned green rind, which they were just going to compost, but don’t they slice and brine the rinds in parts of the American South?
“Eureka!” proclaim the entree and side cooks in unison. By cutting these leftover rinds into thin strips and combining them with a lightly salted, vinegary brine and leaving them in the cooler for just an hour, the result is a quick pickle that is equal parts sweet, bright, and just acidic enough to cut through the heaviness of the rest of the dinner special, providing much needed balance and the perfect avenue for pairing it with the bartender’s special cocktail for the evening. Dinner is not only saved, but elevated, and it’s all thanks to the nonhierarchical flow of ideas, ingredients, and inspirations in the Postrevolutionary kitchen. We hope you enjoy this evening’s special.
Dinner Menu
Blackened Catfish with Creole Remoulade (sauce recipe to follow). Spicy blackened channel catfish cooked in butter (oil can be substituted for those with dairy intolerances). Served with a drizzle of rich Southern remoulade sauce.
Sweet potato chipotle croquettes with raclette cheese and salsa verde. Deep fried balls of sweet potato, rolled in panko bread crumbs with chipotle puree and raclette, served over salsa verde with fresh herbs.
Pickled watermelon rinds. Cool, refreshing watermelon rinds in a sweet brine.
Suggested cocktail pairing: Salted Watermelon Collins. Fresh watermelon juice shaken with gin, ginger syrup and a pinch of salt, served over ice in a tall glass, topped with club soda. Garnished with a watermelon chunk.
Creole Remoulade (makes one gallon)
- ½ gal mayonnaise
- 4 tbsp finely chopped fresh parsley
- ½ cup chopped green onion
- ½ cup finely chopped celery
- ¼ cup prepared horseradish
- ¼ cup fresh lemon juice
- ¼ cup creole or brown mustard
- ¼ cup worcestershire sauce
- ⅛ cup tabasco or other hot sauce
- ⅛ cup finely minced garlic
- ⅛ cup finely minced capers
- 4 tsp paprika
- 4 tsp cayenne pepper
- 4 tsp salt
- 4 tsp ketchup
Combine all ingredients and mix well. Sauce will be thick and keep in this state for up to a month in a refrigerator.
Dessert
Every day is a celebration at the Postrevolutionary Diner. The struggle is won, why shouldn’t we celebrate? That’s why for dessert, we’re offering every flavor of shaved ice. When was the last time you had a snow cone? Perfectly cool and refreshing on a hot day, thrillingly bracing on a cold one. Flavorful syrup melting around the cup, sticking to your hand and face. An ideal childhood memory, preserved here in a dish. The Revolution is over. We won. You deserve a snow cone. Any flavor you want. Every flavor you want. We can make a syrup out of anything. Just give us a little time. There are no limits except your palate and your imagination. Go nuts. A world with every available flavor of snow cone is the true Utopia. We are in that world now. Welcome to the promised land.
After-dinner mint
There are problems with this Utopian vision.
In today’s menu, the chef has posited an environment that exists in an ideal, utopian, postrevolutionary setting with no barriers of access to ingredients, labor, time, etc. In this world, the hard part (namely, the Revolution) has already been accomplished. Clearly this world does not yet exist, and probably never will so long as human beings are involved. The question that emerges is can any of what was explored today be implemented in the contemporary landscape? Can kitchens be run non-hierarchically, with minimum barriers to access, maximization of creativity, egalitarian service, etc., without having to wait for the Revolution first? Can building this environment be part of the Revolution itself?
Here has also been imagined an environment in which decisions are made collectively, in which the entire shape of the organization and what it produces is a reflection of the totality of all the individuals involved. But the author of this essay is not a collective. I am one man, imagining what shape this collective action might take. The Postrevolutionary Diner in reality may be something completely different than anything foreseen here by a single mind, in possession of a singular perspective. I hope this lack on my part does not invalidate the vision I have shared.
And if what we offered today at the Postrevolutionary Diner doesn’t seem possible or appealing to you, there is good news. The Postrevolutionary Diner is not the only diner post revolution. In fact, such establishments are numerous. Pick a direction up or down the street. There are more Postrevolutionary Diners no matter which direction you choose, and they do things completely differently there. You’ll find something you like. You have the time. You have the resources. You have the freedom. The world is a banquet, friend. Come to the table and eat.
I hope reading this was interesting and illuminating for you. I hope the imagined flavors were delectable. I hope you paired your reading with a fine beverage of your choice. Whatever it was, I’m sure the combination was exquisite. Thank you for dining with us today. We hope to see you again soon.
Casey Welsch is a working class writer, cook, journalist, and organizer. Born and raised on a dryland Nebraska farm, he now lives and works in central Omaha. As a multimedia journalist in southeast Nebraska, Casey started a community news service at KZUM radio in Lincoln, was a founding member of the Dandelion Network mutual aid group, and was a regular contributor to Hear Nebraska and Perfect Pour magazine. These days he is focusing on his other life's work as a cook, working at Methodist Hospital, feeding the sick and those who care for them.