Today in Food

Looks like someone on John McCain's staff decided to rip off some Food Network recipes and assert on the campaign website that they were Cindy McCain's family favorites. This is a bit of an odd thing to have happen. Most people, I take it, do in fact have some favorite recipes. Surely Mrs. McCain would have been willing to divulge hers. And if she doesn't have any favorite recipes, it's not as if failing to include a "Cindy's recipes" section on the website was likely to prove a devastating liability in the election.

In other news, Spike from Top Chef is opening a burger joint in DC even though his previous work has primarily been in the Vietnamese genre. That's really too bad, because you know what we could use here in DC? A Vietnamese restaurant! The city's extreme weakness in this category is made all the more galling by the presence of large numbers of Vietnamese people and delicious Vietnamese restaurants right near by in Seven Corners in Fairfax County, VA. I'm pretty sure one of the restaurants from the Eden Center could move to DC, double its prices, and do well for itself. Or Spike could open a Vietnamese restaurant. But someone's got to do something.

Comments

Um, anything wrong with Nam Viet? I ate at the one in Cleveland Park numerous time in the late 90s, and it was always awesome.

p.s. - That guy Spike on "Top Chef" is a pretentious prick, and his food looks like shit.

Posted by tinisoli | April 17, 2008 12:30 PM

The McCain campaign is desperately trying to cover up a fact that if disclosed would clearly disqualify him for the Presidency: his wife does not cook.

Posted by peep | April 17, 2008 12:31 PM

There used to be a bunch of Vietnamese restaurants right across the river, in either Alexandria or Arlington. Are they all gone now?

Posted by Walt | April 17, 2008 12:36 PM

But this is odd - many "family favorite recipes" are actually recipes discovered in some cookbook or the newspaper or online or elsewhere and, golly gee, the family happens to like them. I mean, family cookbooks are often just collections of clippings. Most recipes are not something you discover on your own (or, if they are, you get someone else's recipe and just tweak it a bit). In fact, a good number of my own "family favorite" recipes are from the Food Network. (In particular, Alton Brown's recipes for risotto and for ribs. Yum.)

The real scandal is that they copied a Rachael Ray recipe. Pure evil. And if I weren't already refusing to vote for McCain because of CFR, I'd surely refuse to vote for him on this basis.

Posted by Al | April 17, 2008 12:37 PM

I've said it before and I'll say it again:

The only things Cindy McCain knows how to operate in the kitchen are the in-door ice machine and the martini shaker(in a pinch, if the help is away).

Posted by Woody Bombay | April 17, 2008 12:37 PM

And here I was sure that Spike was going to open a hat-store and become the go-to milliner for douchebags!

Posted by max | April 17, 2008 12:42 PM

On the other hand, DC is pretty lacking in the burger joint department, too, unless you're nine years old, in which case Five Guys is considered pretty tasty.

Posted by Tyro | April 17, 2008 12:45 PM

I remember the National Lampoon's ultimate special interest magazine "Me". It imagined a world in which everyone had their own magazine. The guy in question divulged his secret recipe for hot dogs. He put mustard right there in the water.

I imagine most people's private recipes are something like that. Maybe Cindy's most adventurous turn in the kitchen is putting apple sauce on a Ritz cracker. Maybe it's her secret way of quick chilling champagne in the freezer, "I set the timer on the microwave to beep after 10 minutes. It's easy to forget. Like the time ... no, you don't want to hear that."

Posted by Jeffrey Davis | April 17, 2008 12:45 PM

The real scandal is what the copied recipes were. The McCain-Clinton team are in the midst of denouncing Obama for elitism, and what recipes are the McCains dishing out? Passionfruit mousse! Ahi tuna! Farfalle!

What real American even knows what such things are, much less would be caught dead making them? Shouldn't non-elitists be promoting creatively served hotdogs, Jell-O salad, or something with lots of mayonnaise and/or condensed soup?

Posted by KCinDC | April 17, 2008 12:48 PM

I'd like to see a Vietnamese restaurant that actually serves food like you get in Vietnam. Where's my baguette to go with my Pho? Where's my side of steamed morning glory stems? I can understand Thai restaurants toning down the spice for us Americans. But I really can't see why very common Vietnamese items are removed from American menus. Especially the baguettes, we can handle those.

Posted by fostert | April 17, 2008 12:51 PM

The best Vietnamese food is actually just outside of the Eden Center, down Wilson next to a Jiffy Lube. Little Saigon. They do fried seafood particularly well -- not greasy. The crispy rockfish is a delight and their calamari appetizer is big enough to be a meal by itself. The depth of the menu is almost overwhelming. Their pho is also among the best I've had.

Posted by Bragan | April 17, 2008 12:53 PM

But this is odd - many "family favorite recipes" are actually recipes discovered in some cookbook or the newspaper or online or elsewhere and, golly gee, the family happens to like them.

True. Except, of course, that they were not called 'family favorite recipes,' but rather 'McCain Family Recipe' and reprinted word for word without attribution to their original source. Any way you look at it, that is pretty tacky (although it is also probably copyright infringement). If she had pointed to these recipes, and just said that she enjoyed them, there's no there there.

What is interesting about this is not the relatively minor goof, but the fact that they went with the 'Damn Underlings/Bad Apples' approach, which seems just a wee too familiar these days. I yearn for a day when someone can actually control what gets printed under their own name, or take responsibility themselves.

Posted by Brad L | April 17, 2008 12:56 PM

There is a decent Vietnamese restaurant just down the road from this place. It's called Pacific Cafe I believe, and it's on Penn around 12th or 13th street. It's not run by a hipster TV chef with a stupid name, but you may want to check it out anyway.

Posted by JDS | April 17, 2008 1:02 PM

The whole McCain family is just feeling burnt since that time Cindy thought she was buying cookies at Nieman Marcus and was really charged $250 for the recipe.

Ever since then, they've been on a crusade to steal and disseminate all proprietary recipes just so this never happens to anyone else.

Posted by PaulC | April 17, 2008 1:07 PM

When I look at Cindy McCain, I don't really see RayRay as the ideal inspiration; Sandra 'Semi-Ho' Lee, on the other hand...

Shouldn't non-elitists be promoting creatively served hotdogs, Jell-O salad, or something with lots of mayonnaise and/or condensed soup?

And that, curiously, is the SLop metier.

Posted by pseudonymous in nc | April 17, 2008 1:10 PM

Recipegate is dumb. McCain disagrees with the Social Security policy posted on his own website and that story gets cricket noises. A few recipes are borrowed and it's a scandal. Isn't the whole point of recipes to share them? I believe recipes even have their own exception under copyright so you can't plagarize 'two slices white bread, add peanut butter, add jelly, assemble' and call it your own recipe. It belongs to everybody.

This isn't a telling anecdote about the McCain campaign. It's a telling anecdote about our moron press. More on McCain not knowing his own SS policy on his website below...

http://online.wsj.com/article_print/SB120451614688707083.html

Posted by joejoejoe | April 17, 2008 1:10 PM

DC could probably support an upscale nouveau Vietnamese place, like Green Papaya in Bethesda (or even better, The Slanted Door in San Francisco). But if any restaurant currently in the Eden Center moved to DC, it would be faced with higher rent and further distance from its most likely customers. Authentic ethnic restaurants always tend to cluster around immigrant neighborhoods.

Besides being a douche, Spike can’t cook either. I’m sure his Vetnamese food would suck anyway.

Posted by RC | April 17, 2008 1:20 PM

Yeah, what D.C. really needs is yet another place the washington elite can go to have rich lobbyists buy them Lunch! It most definately does not need a place that caters to the need of the other 80% of the population.

Thats just absurd

Posted by Soullite | April 17, 2008 1:37 PM

Why is it that the spouses of the presidential candidates are supposed to pretend that they cook for themselves.

I think it's possible that Michelle Obama might have cooked at home sometime in the recent past, but I can't imagine that the Clinton have cooked for themselves anytime in the past 20 years or that Cindy McCain has cooked for herself ever.

And, for the record, my recipe box is full of stuff I copied off the internet or my favorite cookbooks. The only thing that's creative is my chili recipes, which are an amalgam of the different recipes written by others that I've found success with.

Posted by Tyro | April 17, 2008 1:37 PM

To the trolls: There is a huge difference between taking a few recipes from here and there and then making them your own, and taking a few recipes from one place and posting them verbatim.

Stop being stupid. It really doesn't help your case.

Posted by Soullite | April 17, 2008 1:42 PM

Surely Mrs. McCain would have been willing to divulge hers.

Perhaps they were afraid of repeating the dread Pumpkin Spice Cookie Debacle of the Kerry campaign.

Posted by Glenn | April 17, 2008 1:44 PM

Cindy McCain used to have her own recipes, but she forgot them all back when she used to steal prescription drugs from charities so she could get high.

Posted by Brian | April 17, 2008 2:03 PM

Where I come from, a "family recipe" is almost always a recipe of unspecified origin, typically written on a much-splattered index card and received from an elder family member either as an original or else transcribed by hand. It was probably not invented in the family, and may not even have been modified significantly from a standard, but unless you're from a very new family it predates the Food Network web site.

The McCain family may be very different, and my own impression may be hopelessly out of date in an age when moms are far too busy teaching their daughters to bowl and hunt deer to pass on recipes, so they when the inevitable "Ahi Tuna" discussion comes up, they just direct their kids to the nearest web page.

Look, probably some careless junior staffer just thought it would be cute to put up "family recipes" and found it easier to crib Food Network than to ask anyone in the McCain family. It's not exactly a huge scandal, but if these are family recipes, they're like no other family recipes I've seen.

Posted by PaulC | April 17, 2008 2:25 PM

I wonder which Vietnamese dishes are John McCain's favorites? Probably the recipes are simple..er basic enough for Cindi to carry off herself.

Posted by wren | April 17, 2008 2:36 PM

"I wonder which Vietnamese dishes are John McCain's favorites?"

He probably ate yam soup, just like the rest of North Vietnam at the time. Yams were pretty much the only crop that could survive a napalm attack. I'm sure that, like the Vietnamese, John wouldn't think of yam soup as a 'favorite.'

Posted by fostert | April 17, 2008 2:45 PM

Where is the outrage?

Makes me bitter. Makes we want to hunt, or go to church, or something.

Posted by DHN | April 17, 2008 2:50 PM

It is quite possible the heiress Cindy has never had to cook a thing.

When the intern turned up empty-handed asking for family recipes from Cindy, the just should have gotten John's barbeque recipes.

The press would have been impressed. They thank him daily.

Posted by gimmeabreak | April 17, 2008 3:37 PM

"The real scandal is that they copied a Rachael Ray recipe. Pure evil. And if I weren't already refusing to vote for McCain because of CFR, I'd surely refuse to vote for him on this basis.

Posted by Al | April 17, 2008 12:37 PM"

I suggest form a bipartisan consensus to behead Rachael Ray and make Alton Brown eat it.

I'm not sure that recipes, even in cookbooks, can be copyrighted (unless you have jokes or something in them).

It was probably a staffer who put this up on the site. However, you have to wonder what they were smoking by 1) not just changing some words around and 2) choosing stuff like falafel and ahi tuna. Now, I love those things, but I'm a New England multicultural liberal.

Posted by Reality Man | April 17, 2008 3:45 PM

The McCain campaign is desperately trying to cover up a fact that if disclosed would clearly disqualify him for the Presidency: his wife does not cook.

That might just be it.

Posted by Bengt Larsson | April 17, 2008 4:21 PM

I suggest form a bipartisan consensus to behead Rachael Ray and make Alton Brown eat it.

With a little know-how, the right tools, and some basic science, even Rachael Ray's head can be good eats.

Posted by Al | April 17, 2008 5:18 PM

Catch some of Cindy's real recipes via Attaturk.
http://haloscan.com/tb/attaturk/8646007074060371352

Cindy McCain's special recipe for fillet mignon.

1. Turn in direction of Consuela.
2. Say "I would like filet mignon".
3. Emphasized "NOW!"
4. Wait 10 minutes.
5. Enjoy

Posted by rapier | April 17, 2008 8:26 PM

It is quite possible the heiress Cindy has never had to cook a thing.

When the intern turned up empty-handed asking for family recipes from Cindy, the just should have gotten John's barbeque recipes.

The press would have been impressed. They thank him daily.

Posted by gimmeabreak | April 17, 2008 9:14 PM

What, then where the hell do you guys get your pho and banh mi?!

Posted by Jack | April 18, 2008 3:14 AM