Joseph Byrd

“Slow down,” she whisperednow guiding my trembling hands“Turn the key slowly.” Pink tender morselGlistening with salty gelWhat the hell is it? Pink beefy temptressI can no longer remainVegetarian (SPAM haiku collected by Keola Beamer, songwriter and slack-key guitarist)     SPAM, like Coca-Cola, is a uniquely American food. Like Coke, it has a kind of […]

Spam! Spam! Spam! Spam! Lovely spam! Wonderful spam! Spam spa-a-a-a-a-am spam spa-a-a-a-a-am spam. Lovely spam! Lovely spam! Lovely spam! Lovely spam! Spam spam spam spam!             “Spam Song” – from the Monty Python Spam sketch   In 1986 I was given a menu from Mr. Whitekeys’ Fly By Nite Club, a memento from someone who’d […]

Salad at our house in the 1950s was iceberg lettuce with bottled “French dressing.” Seasonally, tomato wedges were added. On special occasions we slathered on Thousand Island dressing, an awful-but-addictive concoction of mayonnaise, catsup and sweet pickle relish, a highlight of childhood memories of vegetables. Mine was the age of Betty Crocker mixes and frozen […]

A couple of years ago, in a column called "Secret Ingredients," I wrote of the crowning touch to my baked macaroni and cheese, revealed to me by Gus, chef of the late Crest House in Culver City: After it has baked, before heating and serving, over the top of the casserole you place slices of […]

I was 21 years old, and had never cooked a thing. There I was in Manhattan, part of the FLUXUS school of avant-garde composers and artists, acolytes to John Cage. And because Cage was into Indian food (in 1960, virtually unknown in the United States), we all were into Indian food. In the New York […]

In the late fall of 1967, the brilliant science writer John McPhee challenged Euell Gibbons (author of Stalking The Wild Asparagus) to a foraging trek along the Appalachian Trail. They would eat only wild food at first. After a week, they planned to gradually add elements of civilization: salt, sugar, coffee, cooking oil. Gibbons was […]

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: The greed of the American pork industry has messed with the modern day pig to the point that almost all available pork is now so lean it has lost the ability to be tender. It isn’t hard to trace the switch to lean pork in the […]

It happens every year about this time, in magazines and newspapers, online: an outpouring of effervescent enthusiasm for holiday sparkling wine bargains. "The best of West Coast bubbly has rarely been better," trumpets San Francisco Chronicle Magazine. The online wine merchant www.novusvinum.com features the "Top 20 American Sparkling Wines," from a modest $19 for Francis […]

In the winter of 2007, my wife Beni began experiencing almost daily migraines. She had tried cutting out such commonly-assumed villains as chocolate and red wine, but nothing seemed to work. So we decided to make a frontal attack on this debilitating illness. Over several months, consulting a local osteopathic neurologist and a doctor specializing […]