The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones

by Anthony Bourdain

It was once said that this is the land of the free. There is, I believe, a statue out there in the harbor, with something written on it about "Give me your hungry . . . your oppressed . . . give me pretty much everybody"—that's the way I remember it, anyway. The idea of America is a mutt-culture, isn't it? Who the hell is America if not everybody else? We are—and should be—a big, messy, anarchistic polyglot of dialects and accents and different skin tones.

Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell

Nicolas Freeling's The Kitchen

I diced up the complementary platter of tropical fruit, tossed the mix in balsamic with a little fresh mint and sugar, and served macerated fruit salad for dessert.

Cooking professionally is a dominant act, at all times about control. Eating well, on the other hand, is about submission. It's about giving up all vestiges of control, about entrusting your fate entirely to someone else. It's about turning off the mean, manipulative, calculating, and shrewd person inside you, and slipping heedlessly into a new experience as if it were a warm bath. It's about shutting down the radar and letting good things happen. When that happens to a professional chef, it's a rare and beautiful thing. Let it happen to you.

I sat for hours, perfectly content for a brief time at the center of the world.

I have found in my travels, a certain degree of dirtiness, lack of refrigeration, and close proximity to livestock is often a near-guarantee of something really good to eat. If you see a crowd of locals lined up to eat at a filthy-looking little dunghole on the edge of town, it is often a sign of good things to come.

Gabrielle Hamilton