Eli's Cheesecake

Eli's in Chicago crafts a 500-lb. cheesecake for the Staff Inaugural Ball

President Obama is a firm advocate of universal healthcare. He cares about gun control. He's passionate about seizing moments together. He does not, however, seem to care about calorie-counting. And, despite her anti-obesity campaign and her hipster bangs, neither, apparently, does First Lady Michelle Obama.

As Fox News points out, today's Inaugural Luncheon menu weighs in at a hefty 3,027 calories, not including the wine, as calculated by the website DietsInReview. There isn't even a bacon milkshake involved. There is, however, lobster with clam chowder sauce and hickory-grilled bison with red potato horseradish cake. Dessert is, of course, apple pie with sour cream ice cream, topped with maple caramel sauce. And just to be really classy and Frenchified, the whole thing is topped off with an artisan cheese plate with fancy honey.

See the full menu, with links to recipes provided by the White House, plus details of the 500-lb. cheesecake being served tomorrow night and an epic Lincoln Second Inaugural feasting frenzy, after the jump.

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W. W. Norton

Gran Cocina Latina

What happens when you combine a culinary pedigree that includes a Latin American/Spanish market and pastry shop (Ultramarinos) and two restaurants (Zafra and Cucharamama in New Jersey) with a doctorate in medieval history? Gran Cocina Latina: The Food of Latin America, a 900-page homage to Latin American cooking by chef, restaurateur and historian Maricel E. Presilla, our Cookbook of the Year.

Other notable 2012 titles: Burma, The Art of Fermentation, The River Cottage Fish Book, The Art of the Confectioner. We could go on.

But we keep flipping back to the Latin American recipes in Presilla's cookbook, her "magnum opus" as the book jacket flap aptly describes. It serves as the kitchen culmination of 30 years of research and travel throughout Latin America.

Get more, and a recipe for spicy Bolivian peanut sauce, after the jump.

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Sven A. Kirsten

Peter Moruzzi

Peter Moruzzi is on a crusade to save fine dining. An admirer of classic, historic restaurants since his youth, Moruzzi, an L.A.-based writer, started to become alarmed in recent years over the ever more rapid disappearance of America's dining history. So he decided to write a book about it.

Classic Dining: Discovering America's Finest Mid-Century Restaurants isn't just a history textbook, but also a living guidebook to the venerable old places that are still around today. "My hope was that a book focusing on the value of classic restaurants might inspire people to locate and frequent those survivors in their areas," Moruzzi says. "It was also to debunk the notion that white tablecloth establishments were deserving of extinction in favor of trendy restaurants with their hard surfaces and minimalist interiors."

Recently we sat down in a cushy vinyl booth with Moruzzi to learn more about his project.

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SansPoint via flickrtd>

Get? Olde English!! Ha ha.

Last month, we brought you 5 archaic booze words that should be revived. Boy, that was fun. So, this month, we thought we'd repeat the fun with food words. Here are 5 words we'd like to see brought back into usage, if only perhaps as the name of some hipster restaurant (in Silver Lake, of course).

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Luis Manuel Guaida

Diana Kennedy

Have you checked out Diana Kennedy's 2010 cookbook Oaxaca al Gusto: An Infinite Gastronomy? Because if you have, and you really should, you'll notice it feels a little more academic than most cookbooks: It was commissioned by a governor of Oaxaca in order to catalog the state's regional cuisine. Oaxaca al Gusto contains some 300 recipes, most adapted for home cooks, for traditional Oaxacan dishes. There's little more satisfying when grinding seeds for a mole verde or cabeza de res -- that's barbecued beef head to you -- then knowing that what you're reading from is equal parts historic document and kitchen guide.

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Food Book Fair

The food intellectual is not a new phenomenon, but it is a new cliche. The glut of rant-prone gonzo restaurant critic bloggers, armchair sustainability experts and urban chicken farming gurus reminds us that the importance of caring about food, where it comes from and who makes it has soaked deep into our collective psyche (and Twitter feeds) like milk into bread for meatballs. In less than two weeks, the first Food Book Fair will celebrate thinkers, writers and artists who make food their focus in a fairly massive marketplace of ideas set to go down at the new Wythe Hotel in Brooklyn.

Interested in intersections between food and art? Curious about how people living in cities are reaffirming their connection to the land they rarely see? Eager to tackle the concept of "food porn?" From May 4-6, the Food Book Fair will oblige with panels featuring Harold McGee, Colman Andrews, Ed Behr of The Art of Eating, Gael Greene, Peter Meehan and Dr. Marion Nestle, among the many confirmed gastro-sages, and representatives from such publications as Lucky Peach, Diner Journal, Edible Brooklyn, Gastronomica, Laphams Quarterly: The Food Issue, Meatpaper, Put a Egg on It, Remedy Quarterly, Swallow Magazine, The Runcible Spoon, White Zinfandel and Wilder Quarterly.

We know Brooklyn is pretty far away, but with a lineup like that (it's like the Coachella of writing about eating, though we doubt Prosper Montagné will be appearing via hologram), you may want to at least tell your friends to go.

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T. Nguyen

The Godmother sandwich at Bay Cities

Depending on where you live in this great big country, a submarine sandwich might be known as a Dagwood (Colorado), a wedge (parts of New York) or a poor boy (in the Gulf States, where, we once discovered, a banh mi sandwich is known as a "Vietnamese poor boy"). This is but one of the fascinating entries in D.A.R.E. -- no, not the attempt to war on drugs, but the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Dictionary of American Regional English, a multivolume dictionary that shows that there are many, many ways of looking at a sandwich, among other foods. The fifth volume, from Sl to Z, was just published last month.

The dictionary was compiled based on exhaustive interviews conducted by University of Wisconsin-Madison scholars between 1965 and 1970. According to The Wall Street Journal, chief editor Frederic Gomes Cassidy compiled more than 1,800 survey questions covering 40 topics, from the weather to tobacco to foods; researchers in "word wagons" then were dispatched to interview 2,777 people in more than 1,000 communities across the country. After the 2.3 million responses were collected, editors had the daunting task of analyzing and organizing the data into something manageable and meaningful.

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amazon

On first read, we didn't believe it ourselves when we decided to include a hybrid cookbook/anthology from an academic publisher, The World in a Skillet, and what boils down to a promotional cookbook from a cast-iron skillet maker, The Lodge Cast Iron Cookbook, in the same post. But give us a second to make our cornbread case.

The Lodge Cast Iron Cookbook, compiled and edited by Pam Hoenig, landed on our desk first. We pushed it aside as soon as we saw the "author" is Lodge Manufacturing in Tennessee, a company that has been making cast iron cookware for 116 years and has published numerous cookbooks on the subject over the decades. Sounds like yet another promotional supper.

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Kathy A. McDonald

Butterscotch pudding at the Getty Center's restaurant

Banners for the Getty's Pacific Standard Time (P.S.T.) initiative appear to be on every light pole citywide. There are 60+ exhibitions covering every aspect of Los Angeles' postwar art scene from 1945 to 1980 at art museums and galleries across Southern California. That post-war fixation extends to the Getty Center's restaurant where a special themed Pacific Standard Time menu is an ode to culinary history.

Remember the days of Steak Diane or Brie Fondue? Doubtful, but those dishes were all the rage in the 1960s and 70s -- someday those will be archival recipes too. Until then, here's a taste of the past provided by the Getty restaurant's chefs.

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Speaker, Charles Perry

Los Angeles is turning 230 years old. No, really. But what do most of us know about our city's history dating that far back? This is a town that didn't really boom until movies started getting made. Or was it? Perhaps there was life here before film. At least one aspect of that life, the food life, will be explored in Saturday's Culinary Historians event, "Dinner in the Exploding City," a lecture led by food writer, and president and a co-founder of the organization, Charles Perry.

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