So the dumpling how-to I planned for today will have to wait until I figure out how not to rip them apart while trying to put them together. But luckily I, too, planned for this contingency. I cadged Winnie's rib recipe.

First, a few words on buying ribs and marinade ingredients

The timing guidelines (and remember, they're always just guidelines -- you gotta get acquainted with your meat!) here are for baby back ribs; spare ribs are a little bit of a different game. (Depending on your philosophy, you can cook them longer to get them tender, or blast them quickly in a broiler to accent their pleasant chewiness and fattiness.)

So what's the difference between the two? Baby back ribs come from -- shocker! -- the back of the pig, that is, near the spine and the top of the animal. Ever have a rib chop? Those are the back ribs. They're attached to the loin meat, which is lovely stuff, but can be somewhat lean, more meaty and less fatty. Spare ribs are those same bones, but cut from underneath, near the belly. That means they're primarily belly meat; that means they are fat-tastic. (The belly is where bacon comes from.) For a good discussion of pork cuts, check this out.

By the way, if you're getting your ribs shrink-wrapped from a grocery store, check the label to see if it says something about containing up to X percent super-duper flavor solution or something along those lines. I'm a big fan of brining pork for flavor and juiciness, which is, in fact, a super-duper flavor solution that the meat absorbs, but these industrial brines always skeeve me out a little - for me, the meat becomes unnaturally tender and tastes weirdly tinny and artificial.

Finally, since the recipe is so simple, the quality of your marinade ingredients can make a dramatic difference -- try to use nice honey, and really try to get some good soy sauce (ditch that La Choy stuff!). Even really good soy sauce only costs a little more per use than the cheap stuff, and if you are near an Asian market, ask around for the best stuff. Really good soy sauce tends to be darker, a bit thicker than water, but not necessarily saltier. Its true magic is in the complex, fermenty, umami flavors. Japanese tamari-style soy sauce tends to be nice, and reasonably available. Kikkoman and Yamasa brands are nice.

Sticky soy sauce ribs

Serves ... well, only you know in your heart how many ribs you can eat; this recipe easily multiplies

4 fat cloves of garlic, chopped
¾ cup honey
½ cup soy sauce
½ teaspoon salt
black pepper, to taste
2 racks of baby back ribs (about 2½ pounds each)
2 scallions

1. Put everything save for the ribs and the scallions into a blender and blitz them into submission; you want the garlic to pretty much disappear into the murk. (An immersion blender also works. In a pinch, mince the garlic very fine with the salt until it's a paste, and whisk it into the honey and soy sauce.) Give the marinade a taste. Try not to smear it all over your face. How is it? What you want here is balance: It should be sweet and it should be savory, but you shouldn't be able to say if it's more one than the other. The flavor should change a bit and be a little confusing, especially with that garlic wafting through. If it tastes more one way than the other, adjust with more soy sauce or honey, accordingly.
2. With a sharp knife, slash the ribs all the way through between the bones but don't actually take them apart. Preferably in a flat container like a roasting pan, or in a plastic bag, pour enough of the marinade over the ribs as you need to cover all surfaces; you should have ¼ to ½ cup of the marinade left. Rub it in, and marinate at least two hours in the fridge, up to one day.
3. An hour before cooking, take the ribs out of the fridge to let them come to room temperature. Heat the oven to 325. With the marinade, wrap each rack separately in a double layer of aluminum foil and set them flat on a roasting pan or rimmed baking sheet. It's important that the marinade not escape, or it'll scorch and smell black as sin.
4. If your ribs are at room temperature before going in the oven, take them out after 1 ¾ hours. Be careful opening the foil; steam is hot! Poke and prod the meat -- it should be tender, but with a bit of pleasing chew left. If you like it more tender, wrap it back up (don't break the foil!) and put it back in the oven, checking on it every 15 or 20 minutes until you're satisfied.
5. When the meat is cooked and tender to your liking, pour the sauce (now commingled with sweet, sweet rib juice) into a pan with the leftover marinade and set over high heat to boil and thicken it. Raise your oven to 450 and lightly rewrap the ribs while this happens so they don't steam off and dry out.
6. Look in the pot. When the marinade is thick and sticky and forming big, weird bubbles, take it off the heat and brush or smear it all over the ribs. Ditch the foil, and set the ribs directly on the roasting pan and roast them just to slightly char the glaze around the edges, about 10 minutes, but check after 5.
7. Cut the ribs apart, finding the space between the bones with a sharp knife. Thinly slice the scallions and sprinkle over the ribs. Serve alone, or with white rice and cucumbers dressed with salt and vinegar to taste. 

Like prosciutto -- or the currently more ballyhooed Spanish jamón serrano -- American country ham is the uncooked, salt-cured leg of pig, hung to mature for months and sometimes years. The long curing was originally meant to let the salt work into the meat and preserve it from rot, but for eaters in the age of refrigeration, time-consuming chemistry is where the action's really at. Slowly, enzymes naturally in the meat will break proteins down into our coterie of tasty friends, the amino acids, which give us the satisfying, blooming taste of umami. The fats in the meat slowly change, too, creating beautiful compounds that Harold McGee describes as "characteristic of the aromas of melon, apple, citrus, flowers, freshly cut grass, and butter." Wait, did you catch that? Pork fat that tastes like butter.

But there are two vital distinctions between country ham and its European relatives. One, it's often smoked, giving it different layers of flavor. But even more important is the stark difference in the culture of its fans. Americans have learned to savor European hams, acknowledging them as delicacies -- the finest examples can command well over $100 per pound. But country ham in America doesn't have the same kind of reputation among gourmets, and it remains a deeply democratic food. Allan Benton, who makes one of the true gold-standard country hams, charges $6.50 for a 15-ounce package.

John T. Edge, one of the great food ambassadors of the South, told me that he once took a superb chef to breakfast in the Mississippi Delta. Blown away by his plate of country ham and eggs, the chef asked the waitress where they got it, expecting a romantic story of the artisan ham curer down the way. "The Sysco truck brings it by," she said. Even Waffle House serves it.

Where did it come from?

Salt-curing meat for preservation is nearly as old as raising animals for food, but American country ham was almost certainly "invented" in Smithfield, Va., where colonials took the pigs they brought from England, fattened them on peanuts slaves brought from Africa, and salted and smoked them according to local Indian methods. According to another of the great Southern food ambassadors, John Egerton, in "1737, William Byrd complained in his Natural History of Virginia that the people of that colony ate so much pork that they were becoming 'extremely hoggish in their temper ... and prone to grunt rather than to speak.'"

Smithfield ham became one of the world's most famous, but it eventually ran with the wrong profit-mongering crowd, and is now made in the typical industrial fashion -- fast, cheap and not nearly exciting enough to be out of control. And, as Peter Kaminsky points out in "Pig Perfect," "the fine old Smithfield Company has the biggest operation in the country of environmentally ruinous hog factories."

Happily, the tradition of country ham spread throughout the South, and is still being made today by a handful of traditional curers, though they are, admittedly, aging. Allan Benton is (deservedly) a darling among hamficionados, but others, including Colonel Newsom's in Kentucky and Burgers' Smokehouse in Missouri, are doing amazing things.

Who's eating it?

This is where the cultures of high and low cuisine get interesting. Country ham has never left the Southern table, whether soaked overnight and then baked like a fresh ham or sliced, fried and served with biscuits and redeye gravy at breakfast.

But as high-end chefs around America have fallen for it, many have taken to presenting it through the European ham-filter. At the super-sleek Modern in New York, Gabriel Kreuther makes food of uncommon finesse, and uses Allan Benton's ham in his beer-based Alsatian Country Soup, infusing it with deep, funky, smoky complexity. Having grown up near the French-German border and therefore no stranger to amazing pork, chef Kreuther said to me, "I grew up on a farm, and this ham ... it reminded me of the hams that we made when I was growing up. These are the tastes you remember."

Taking cues from the culture of prosciutto, David Chang's ever-fawned-over Momofuku Ssäm Bar opened in 2006 with a country ham service, slicing it paper thin and serving it raw, highlighting the meat's silky texture and subtly sweet complexities. (Remember: pork fat that tastes like butter.) DG Strong, Salon's own Nashville boy and a bit of a country ham himself, was beside himself with the news: "Lawzy! (putting cool compress to forehead) The thin ham thing will certainly get purists' dander up."

But purism or no, high-end chefs are hooked. As Edge said, "We're in the third generation of country ham obsession among chefs. First they fell for it. Then they lionized Allan and the other honest curers of hams. Now they're curing their own. At the City House in Nashville, I saw Tandy Wilson hugging a 27-month-old ham like the proudest kid in the world. Sean Brock and his sous chef at McCrady's in Charleston, S.C., trotted out their ham like it was their child's bride."

Longevity rating: 10 (out of 10)

Country ham is one of those foods that is endlessly romanticized but, in the wailing ballads of its partisans, seemingly no one ever eats anymore. Like so many traditional, time-intensive crafts, the bells have been tolling for country ham since at least the '70s., when James Villas wrote "Cry, the Beloved Country Ham" for Esquire. It's always about to be ground under for good by modern industry. But the culture of American country ham has fought the good fight and kept it alive for this many centuries, and it might just be bourgeois foodie culture that's going to sweep in and save it for good.

Rejuvenated by the respect of chefs and food media, and inspired by the artisan- and heritage- food movement, master curers like Allan Benton are making their hams even better, experimenting with heritage pigs and better sourcing. As chefs take to curing their own product, some of their acolytes will likely branch off and specialize in the craft. And, given the bacon fad's vampire-like ability to just ... never ... die, it's not hard to guess that Americans will always like themselves a touch of cured pig. "This art's got legs," John T. said to me. "Two hind legs, at least."

"My Irish family never ate corned beef," the letter began. I'd just written a story about new immigrants in Queens, called "Where Curry Replaced Corned Beef and Cabbage," and a reader was gently protesting my mention of that stereotypical dish.

"My grandmother was perplexed that Americans associate corned beef with being Irish. In Ireland, most people ate pig. Lots of bacon, lots of sausage (lots of trichinosis).

…Corned beef was made popular in New York bars at lunchtime. The bars offered a 'free lunch' to the Irish construction workers who were building NYC in the early part of the 20th century. But there's no such thing as a free lunch. You had to buy a couple of beers or shots of whiskey to get that free lunch. And that's how corned beef became known as an 'Irish' food. My grandmother hated the stuff and wouldn't allow it in her home. I myself first tasted corned beef when I was in my thirties at some non-Irish-American person's 'St. Paddy's Day' party."

Dismayed, I sent that letter to a friend from Dublin. "Every word of that post is pure gospel," she wrote back. "We NEVER eat corned beef and cabbage. We mock Americans and their bizarre love of that 'meat'."

Irish people denying corned beef and cabbage! Shocking! Like if Italians denied pizza and Chinese denied General Tso's Chicken. Wait, they have? OK, well, let's move on.

Theories abound as to why Irish Americans wear the corned beef and cabbage mantle. There's the "Irish drink a lot in bars" theory, above. And then there's the "they got to New York and couldn't find their beloved bacon, so they started eating their Jewish neighbors' corned beef instead" theory.

First, let's settle one thing: Ireland knew how to rock the corned beef. According to Irish food experts Colman Andrews and Darina Allen, corned beef was, in fact, a major export of Cork from the 17th century, shipping it all over Europe and as far as the sunny British West Indies, where they still love their corned beef in cans.

Most of the Irish who came in massive waves to America during the Potato Famine in the late 1840s were from around Cork, so they probably knew corned beef well enough. But, as the historian Hasia Diner argues in "Hungering for America," they may have been trying to forget altogether what they were and weren't eating back in Ireland.

By the 1900s, she writes, there was a movement in Ireland to revive Irish culture, flagging after decades of emigration and centuries of English colonial rule. The Irish were embracing their language, their dance and music, but there was little mention of traditional cuisine. "Food lay at the margins of Irish culture as a problem, an absence, a void," Diner writes. "The Irish experience with food -- recurrent famines and an almost universal reliance on the potato, a food imposed on them -- had left too painful a mark on the Catholic majority to be considered a source of communal expression and national joy."

While many Irish Americans found livelihoods running inns and groceries, few sold any food they called "Irish." Her research turns up many early Irish American St. Patrick's Day banquets that celebrate Irishness with menus tricked out with "harps, shamrocks, Celtic-style lettering, Celtic crosses, all potent reminders of Ireland. [But] the Irishness of the food amounted to little." The dinners featured French-sounding dishes, like "Cotelletes de pintades a le Reine." Even potatoes got washed through the de-Irishizer: "Pommes de terre persillade," which anyone could tell was just boiled potatoes with parsley.

So there was a culinary hole in the culture of the Irish immigrants, one partially filled with that great filler of food holes: bacon.

"Only 'Irish bacon and greens' appeared yearly as a food meant to convey the homeland. Bacon may have been the perfect food vehicle to link their Irish and American selves. Americans, on the one hand, had been savoring [exported] Irish bacon for a century or more. On the other, Irish farmers who had long produced massive amounts of it, only began to regularly eat it themselves by the end of the 19th century. By the time these menus were being printed up, bacon had become a ubiquitous item on the dinner tables of modest Irish farm families. Hence, unlike potatoes, bacon carried no stigma of shame. It rather announced the successful progress of Ireland…"

So why aren't we all getting sloshed on green beer and eating bacon and cabbage today? The problem, according to Marion Casey, clinical assistant professor of Irish-American studies in the Glucksman Ireland House of New York University, was perhaps that the Irish loved their pig a little too much. (Yes, food blogosphere: This is apparently possible.)

Many farmers in Ireland raised pigs for sale to help pay the rent, but somewhere along the line in America, that tradition mixed with the bitter cocktail of prejudice and xenophobia to turn it  into a slur: "Paddy with his pig in the parlor." The phrase may have had rhythm, but it wasn't pretty. (I mean, the postcard in the picture above is hardly flattering, now is it?)

By the 1910s, pigs were all over St. Patrick's Day cards and novelties, including a game called "Pin-the-Tail-on-the-Pig" for kids. "Irish Americans," Casey wrote me in an e-mail, "vigorously protested an alignment of their ethnicity with an animal that carried all sorts of connotations about dirt and disease."

But "by this time," she continued, "much of Irish America had moved beyond mere survival. They ate pork and beef, salted or not. It was just as easy to claim corned beef as their choice for holiday meals as it was to claim pork. When the latter became stigmatized, one became preferable to the other." Of course, by this time, old memories of the corned beef back in Cork may have bubbled back to the surface. In 1960, we had the first St. Patrick's Day card reference to corned beef and cabbage, and before we knew it, little Chinese boys in the suburbs would be pretending to be Irish in the middle of March.

But is that any weirder than Irish people pretending to be Irish? Each of the experts I spoke to would agree on one thing: that there isn't really a point in arguing about authenticity, because authenticity always changes. People make up traditions all the time, so why is it that only traditions old enough for you to forget how they got made up in the first place are the "real" ones? This year, instead of corned beef, I'm going to serve bacon and cabbage stir-fried. But I'm keeping my name. 

 

Oh wait, sorry, I meant this one:

I often come across recipes that say things like, "use a medium onion" or "a large leek." But what do "medium" and "large" mean? The organic onions at my Whole Foods are enormous; the red onions are the size of soft balls. It's a frustrating thing, especially when it comes to ingredients like onions, an overdose of which can really kill a dish. Do you have any advice on how to handle these ambiguous instructions?

— Beans&Greens

Dear Beans&Greens,

Recipes are a bit of a paradox. We want to think of them as the definitive word on a dish — if you have a great chef's recipes, you can make a great chef's food. But deep down inside, all recipe writers know that's not really true: Reading a recipe doesn't give you a great chef's hands, eyes, nose and palate. True precision, fixed in print, just isn't possible in a world full of variables. If the recipe writer's stove is different from your stove, maybe that ends up being the difference between a good dish and a marry-me-now kind of dish.

So, in order to keep sane, most recipe writers accept a certain level of imprecision, a range of acceptable variation, and they'll write their recipes with that range built in. What I'm saying is: Almost every one of the thousands (OK, eight) recipe writers I contacted for you — from Gourmet (RIP), Food & Wine, Saveur, Bon Appétit, and Cook's Illustrated — had pretty much the same idea of what a small, medium and large onion means, but they all also said some variation of, "It kinda doesn't matter too much."

So knock yourself out! Be the master of your own kitchen! But in case you'd like a little guidance, here's what the pros said anyway:

Small onion = 4 ounces by weight or about ½ cup chopped

Medium onion = 8 ounces, or about 1 cup chopped

Large onion = 12 ounces, or about 1½ cups chopped

Jumbo onion = 16 ounces, or about 2 cups chopped

Small and medium carrots = These are the size, generally, of the carrots that come in bags at the grocery store, unless the recipe specifically calls for baby carrots. (The precision-obsessed Cook's Illustrated defines "medium carrot" as weighing six to a pound.)

Large carrots = Also called "horse" carrots, presumably because they're the kind you might feed a massive animal, these are the kind usually sold in bulk — thick old boys sometimes with cracks down the side.

And if the quantity of these ingredients really matters to the final outcome, often the recipe will give, in addition to the descriptor, the specific weight or chopped volume to drive home the "pay attention!" point.

But even still, it's impossible to get it perfectly right. As the ever-fabulous Maggie Ruggiero put it: "Obviously, as everyone chops differently. It's like asking people to measure chopped mercury. At Gourmet we called for medium leeks and didn't specify ... I guess that's why we closed. The jury remains out on whether size matters."

If you have any food questions we can sleuth out for you, send them to food[at]salon[dot]com. Or just leave them in the comments while you make fun of us.

All you need is salt, pepper and olive oil and two things to keep mind: HEAT and SURFACE AREA. Heat and surface area. Heat and surface area. There are no more typographical ways for me to emphasize this, but imagine there are, and imagine I'm using them. Because the relationship of heat and surface area pretty much define 75 percent of cooking, and 100 percent of the time you're talking about browning something.

Heat: Heat, of course, cooks your food. At a very high temperature, sugars will caramelize (and proteins will brown), which is really what you want out of roasting vegetables. (And at an even higher temperature, of course, they will burn, which is what you really don't want out of roasting vegetables.)

Surface area: The more surface area you have directly touching the roasting pan or the hot air of the oven, the more caramelization you're going to get, because it's the outside of a piece of food that gets the most intense heat. So this means two things: 1) don't pile your vegetables on top of one another — lay them out in one layer. And 2) how you cut your vegetables really matters. Tiny pieces will have more exposed surface area relative to their insides than big chunks. And an elongated shape, like a domino, for instance, will have more surface area than a cube.

So, keeping these two things in mind, you can always adjust what you need to do get the results you want. You'd like more browning? Turn the heat up or cut your vegetables smaller. You'd like your vegetables more cooked and tender? Cut your vegetables smaller and turn the heat down. Like that roasted flavor, but not too much? Cut your vegetables bigger and/or turn the heat down. You're smart people. You're picking up what I'm puttin' down.

OK, so what vegetables can I roast?

I really think most any specimen likes a nice, high-heat zap in the oven. Very few come to mind that don't: mainly very watery ones like celery or leafy greens, or dense, tough ones that need extended cooking time, like mature beets. And potatoes kind of deserve some special attention and particular tricks I'll get into another time.

But here's a list of some of my favorites, and how I like to cut them for optimal browning and tenderness:

Asparagus: Leave whole; peel if necessary.

Bell peppers: If not roasting over an open flame, cut these into 1-inch chunks.

Broccoli: Cut into 1- to 1½-inch diameter individual florets, the tips of which get charred beautifully crisp. Peel, then halve or quarter thick stems (which are delicious!).

Brussels sprouts: Halve them.

Cauliflower: Treat like broccoli.

Corn: Cut into kernels; will cook very quickly and you may only want to brown one side.

Carrots: Cut a 1-inch chunk off the top end at a 45-degree angle. Roll the carrot a quarter turn and repeat. This weird oblique shape gives you lots of surface area to caramelize its abundant sugars. ½-inch coins or half-moons also work well.

Eggplant: Cut into 1½-inch chunks.

Fennel: Cut into 1-inch pieces.

Green / string beans: Really! They're great. Just make sure they're tender; old, tough ones get tougher in the oven. Leave whole, stems removed.

Onions: Cut into 1½-inch wedges, and break apart into individual layers.

Parsnips: Treat like carrots.

Radishes: Leave whole if small, about 1 inch in diameter; otherwise cut in 1-inch pieces.

Sweet potatoes: Cut into 1-inch pieces.

Tomatoes: Cut 1-inch-wide wedges or ½-inch slices. They won't really brown well but can have a nice concentrated flavor.

Turnips: Cut into 1-inch chunks.

Zucchini / summer squash: Cut into 1-inch chunks, or oblique-cut like carrots.

OK! Get to the method, already!

1. Preheat your oven to, say, 425. Again, you can go hotter or cooler, depending on what ratio of browning-to-tenderness you want, but this is a good temperature to get started with.
2. Cut your vegetables
3. In a big bowl, toss them with plenty of salt and pepper and good extra-virgin olive oil. Taste a piece. There should be enough salt for you to taste it fairly sharply, enough pepper to your liking, and enough olive oil to give every piece a nice sheen and for you to really taste it. The oil will conduct heat, giving you an even browning rather than little dry, scorch-y bits.
4. Spread the vegetables out on a baking sheet, making sure they're all in one layer. You don't necessarily need a lot of space in between pieces, but definitely don't crowd them on top of each other. Use multiple sheets if necessary.
5. Put in oven, in the middle or top rack. Hang out. After a while, you should hear sizzling, and it should get pretty intense after about 10-12 minutes if your pans aren't fully loaded and if you cut you according to my sizes above. Quickly, take your pan out and close the oven door to preserve the heat. Lift a few pieces and check the undersides to see how they're browning. If it's a light color, stick them back in and let them go. But if they're nicely browned, flip them over on the pan before returning them to the oven; most of the browning will take place on the side that touches the pan.
6. Listen again for the sizzle to build back up; you want to check on the vegetables while they're still sizzling — if the sound builds, then slows down, it probably means that the liquid is all sizzled out ... and you might be burning. But as long as you're checking on them about every 5 minutes after the flip, you'll be great.
7. Taste a piece. Is it tender and cooked through? Is the browning lovely? If the vegetables are softened but not brown enough, take them out, fire up the broiler and stick them in there to get good color. If they're as brown as you want them to be, but not yet tender, turn the heat down to 350 and sprinkle on some water, maybe a few tablespoons' worth, to cool the pan and to help create a little steam. And next time you can adjust your heat or surface area.

And to serve:

Mostly I'll just serve roasted vegetables as is, but you should feel free to fancy it up. A sprinkle of good vinegar is always nice, a brightness to contrast with the deep, dark caramelized flavors. Or toss in some toasted nuts for richness, or maybe some raisins for a little sweet-tart action. Fresh hearty herbs, like thyme and oregano, are killer; adding them while the vegetables are still hot will help to bring out their flavor. And shaved Parmigiano, of course, is a strong move.

Biggie's rhymes hum with complicated life. He took the invisible details of his world -- the cry of a killed rival's baby daughter; a lover's orgasmic shouts of "You chicken gristle eatin' motherf**ker!"-- and made them glow so that, in between head-nods to sick beats, anyone could see his stories. And for me, never having killed a man, never having had sex good enough to require that kind of name calling, it was the little things Biggie shared that invested me in the lives lived in his rhymes. "Born sinner, the opposite of a winner, remember when I used to eat sardines for dinner," he rapped in his breakout hit "Juicy." The scenes and characters he crafted were vivid and real.

But when I heard him rap about cookies in "Sky's the Limit," Biggie Smalls became to me something truly greater than a just a wit and storyteller:

Here comes respect:
His crew's your crew, or they might be next
'Look at they man eye! BIG, man, they'll never try.'
So we rolled with 'em, stole with 'em.
I mean loyalty: n**gaz bought me milks at lunch.
The milks was chocolate; the cookies, buttercrunch.

He was bragging about being harder than you, tougher than you, even when he was a child in school. But he was still a child. He loved his chocolate milk. He remembers the flavor of his favorite cookies. The Notorious B.I.G., this spinner of murder rhymes and playboy fantasies, made himself vulnerable. "Sky's the Limit" is a song about how far he'd come from the street life, but it's also a song about the innocence he lost even when he was trying hard to never be innocent at all. Under all his bluster, under the killer braggadocio of "Hunt me or be hunted: I got three hundred fifty seven ways to simmer, sauté" ("Unbelievable"), he still had his throat exposed to the world. Usually you couldn't tell because he was rapping, straight-spittin', but sometimes, you could see underneath and it was fleshy and soft.

There's much more in that song -- stories of how he sewed fake Izod logos onto his shirts to seem richer than he was -- but it was the cookies, buttercrunch, that made me understand food's potency as a symbol, its ability to bridge enormous gaps between him, his characters, and the listener, whether that listener hustled on his corner or was a Chinese kid from the suburbs. Everyone can imagine the horror of hunger, the anger it can engender. Everyone, no matter how hardened, can remember the foods that defined their childhood. And everyone knows, whether you are eating sardines or lobster, that what you eat and what you want to eat says much about you.

For years, I tried to listen to other tapes in my little suburban family sedan, but I would just keep going back to the Black Rhinoceros of Rap, listening to him drop unexpectedly like bird shit. He died 13 years ago today. He was 24. I knew then I would never get to see him grow as an artist, and only years later would I realize how I'd learn from him. I just kept playing him in my car, and I let my tape rock until my tape popped.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . .

A collection of Biggie's finest food rhymes

Biggie was a funny man, and he mastered the silliness of sex and food. Back to "Juicy":

The Moet and Alizé keep me pissy
Girls used to diss me
Now they write letters 'cause they miss me
I never thought it could happen, this rappin' stuff
I was too used to packin' gats and stuff
Now honies play me close like butter played toast
From the Mississippi down to the East Coast

And he built a legacy in masterpieces of carnal seduction like "Big Poppa":

We can rendezvous at the bar around two.
Plans to leave, throw the keys to Lil' Cease.
Pull the truck up front and roll up the next blunt,
So we can steam on the way to the telly. Go fill my belly –
A T-bone steak, cheese eggs and Welch's grape.
Conversate for a few, 'cause in a few, we gon' do what we came to do.
Ain't that right, Boo? (True.)

I mean, if he can make your girl leave you for that level of romance, what couldn't he do? Outside of sex appeal (when "b**ches used to go, 'Ewww!'") Biggie also rapped often about his fabulous wealth, invoking culinary luxuries, like here, in "Hypnotize":

I can fill ya wit real millionaire shit: escargot.
My car go
160, swiftly. Wreck it, buy a new one –
Your crew run run run; your crew run run.

And just imagine him, all 300-plus pounds, lazy eye and top hat, rollin' through his English gardens, contemplating seafood as he does in "I Love the Dough":

Country house, tennis courts, and horseback
Ridin', decidin': cracked crab or lobster?
Who says mobsters don't prosper?

His language was his weapon against the world, and so he bragged with ferocious skill. No detail, no material, ever escaped his eye or its place in his quiver. He was a rapper who didn't have to rely on street slang because his eye for detail in the larger world was so acute. This is from a freestyle with DJ Mister Cee:

All it's taking, is some marijuana and I'm making
MCs break fast, like flapjacks and bacon.

But he was always clear on his relationship with hunger. This is from "Things Done Changed":

If I wasn't in the rap game
I'd probably have a key, knee deep in the crack game
Because the streets is a short stop
Either you're slingin' crack rock or you got a wicked jumpshot
Shit, it's hard being young from the slums
Eatin' five-cent gums not knowin' where your meal's comin' from.