Spite Mail

Dear Michael Chiarello,

I’ll admit that I’ve hated you for a long time. I watched your PBS show, Cooking For Yuppies With Too Much Money And Not Enough Sense. Okay, that was not the real title, but that’s what it should have been called. Despite the fact that I hated you, I watched your show so I could hear you say things like, "The only honey you should use in this recipe is lavender honey. It costs seventy-five dollars an ounce, but it’s well worth the price. It’s a price difference that you can taste." I would get all mad and scream at the television, and then tune in the following week to see what ridiculous dish you were preparing. Call it a love/hate relationship.

Today, I stumbled across your new show on Food Network, Easy Entertaining With Michael Chiarello. I would have skipped right past, but I heard you make the outrageous claim that you would be preparing an authentic southern barbecue in fifteen minutes. I knew I was headed for trouble when you called it your "Singing the Blues Picnic". You told me that I should absolutely only use unfiltered apple cider for my barbecue sauce. You said my fennel seeds needed to be ground in my spice grinder. You put honey mustard in your potato salad. You claimed you had the best recipe for southern iced tea, and proceeded to make a simple syrup for the sweetening, and simmered loose leaf black tea in a sauce pot. You wrapped your brisket in tinfoil and baked it in the oven.

You have it all wrong, you yuppie fuck. A quality barbecue can NEVER be prepared in fifteen minutes, and it doesn’t use fancy ingredients. Southern food is prepared using simple ingredients that are readily available at the grocery store, because the recipes were created by POOR people, using what was at hand. Honey mustard should not even be in the vicinity of potato salad, period. And brisket at an authentic southern barbecue should be smoked all day long until it falls apart. It should have a smoke ring on the outside, juicy and pink on the inside. You should also know that I have been making sweet iced tea for over twenty-five years, and I have never made a simple syrup to sweeten it. The proper way to make sweet tea is to throw some Luzianne (or Lipton) orange pekoe tea bags into a glass sun tea jar (the kind with the spigot), and sit that sumbitch on the front porch for a few hours, until the sun has worked it’s magic. Then, you take the lid off, remove the tea bags, pour in the sugar, and shake it. Do you know why we do that, Michael Chiarello? Because it is so fucking hot and humid in the south that we avoid turning on the stove in the summer. But you wouldn’t know anything about that, would you yuppie chef?

I have not been this pissed about a cooking show since Martha Stewart advised me that radishes were a traditional garnish for tacos, and I’m still holding that particular grudge. So, easy entertainer, how about you stop stealing my cuisine (so I don’t have to start paying $150 for a brisket) and I won’t kick your nuts if I run into you in public.

Sincerely,

Rebel, a proper southern cook