I've been noticing an increasing frenzy here in the northern Virginia area about the imminent opening of the grocery store Wegman's in Fairfax. For those who don't know, and can't be bothered to follow the link, Wegman's is a large scale, high end, supermarket that hails from New York state. Like many other supermarkets these days, it boasts a wide range of fresh food, and adds a sit down cafe as well. Intrigued, and realizing that I won't be anywhere near here when the local branch opens on February 13, I spent the afternoon today in the Sterling store, about 30 miles from my family home. Here's my report.

There's no question, on the whole, that Wegman's is an extremely impressive supermarket. Its astonishing range of food is supported by relatively high quality across the board, with particular strengths in produce, meats, and fish. I was able to pick up some extremely out of season baby artichokes for a mere $2.99, for example, while the blue fingerling potatoes I found (relevant later) were a steal at $2.50 for a filling package. Though I didn't purchase any, fruits looked equally strong, and decently priced. Yes, the more exotic the food got, the higher the prices reached, but on basic products I would say that Wegman's is quite competitive with even lower end supermarkets. Though the range of organic produce isn't quite as wide as Whole Foods, in other words, Wegmans' broad quality and lower prices more than make up for the difference.

Much the same can be said for the selection of meats and fish. There was wild King salmon from Alaska, priced at a staggering but understandable $21.99, and cheaper but still impressive choices down the line. The lobsters looked active and uncrowded, and the eyes of whole fish glistened. The full scale butcher was more than adequate, with obviously knowledgeable people behind the counter - I spent a good couple of minutes eavesdropping when I heard someone ask for advice. Even those meats presented outside the butcher area (such as vacuum packed Virginia Kobe Beef - obviously not the equivalent of the Japanese thing, but well marbled and only $13 for a steak) were interesting. I'm also a great fan of Wegman's excellent adjuncts to their meat selection - I was able to find, for example, a magnificent package of duck fat, alongside some fresh foie gras and a plump breast of duck. I bought the fat, and sitting here basking in the glow of its healthy effect on roasted fingerling potatoes (boil for 15 minutes first, then tip into sizzling duck fat for an hour), I'm glad I did.

Despite all these positives, Wegman's has serious deficiencies, many of them in vaunted cafe set up. Just as a test of basic cooking, I mistakenly picked up a slice of pizza from their supposedly wood fired ovens - I could describe it, but the less said about the thick, uninteresting mess the better. There were some stronger breads on offer (I've yet to see anyone make a better fougasse - a pizza like bread usually studded with olives sort of in the shape of a christmas tree - in America), but others were confused and unconvincing - cherries and chocolate have no place in bread. I'm sorry.

Finally, I'm sad to report that the good folks over at Wegman's have no more clue about the higher arts of baking than anyone else in this country. As I was walking by the aforementioned fugasse, chewing thoughtfully on some ciabatta someone handed me, I noticed an opera cake in the pastry display. As those who have really pedantic memories might remember, I'm so obsessive about this cake that I've walked miles for it on occasion, so I immediately bought it, added a decent coffee, and went off to taste. Unfortunately, the almond biscuit at the bottom was too thick and unsoaked by sugar syrup as required, and though the intermittent creams were good (surprisingly, it seemed like coffee had actually been involved in creating the coffee cream layer), the topping chocolate cut creamily rather than cracked - betraying the fact that the pastry chef had simply layered a ganache on top of the waiting layers instead of tempering the chocolate/heavy cream mix beforehand. For $5, a 2 inch by 2 inch cake simply has to be better - this one would have been thrown out of even a French convenience store.

On the whole, Wegman's should be welcomed by people in the DC area. It's a worthy competitor to Whole Foods on almost all levels, and much superior to most other choices available.

So while I'm a fantastic fan of the Mangu-Wards in general, Katherine's article (and the documentary it features) on Vesuvius' destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum leaves me a little cold. Admittedly, Ms. Mangu-Ward does include the disclaimer "horrifying loss of life notwithstanding," but let us withstand for a second. I suppose I have difficulty seeing why our response to this documentary should be so casually cool. It's not that this documentary isn't educational, but it isn't quite fair to describe it as especially edifying when it is loaded with horrific, ratings-inducing ephemera:

The people on the beach died of thermal shock. At such high temperatures, their skin vaporized and their bones were incinerated. Their brains boiled, then exploded. Even today, their skulls are still stained from the red cerebral matter that poured out. Like glass that shatters under boiling water, their bones snapped in half and their teeth disintegrated.

That the History Channel is committed to the spotlight of realism, I have no doubt. Less light, then.

More relevantly, I don't see why the same people who find this documentary so engaging also seem to find the recent tsunami so morally pressing. The big bad VN sums it up nicely in Sebastian Knight:

He could perfectly well understand sensitive and intelligent thinkers not being able to sleep because of an earthquake in China; but, being what he was, he could not understand why these same people did not feel exactly the same spasm of rebellious grief when thinking of some similar calamity that had happened as many years ago as there were miles to China.

Well, exactly. Which is not to say that the cruelties and infelicities of the world should not cause us discomfort, should not give us pause at rejoicing in the grotesque suffering of man, whether swallowed by the sea or in a sea of fire, but that our outpourings of specific shock when that suffering makes the evening news are as blithely incoherent as our usual moral blindness.

Via Amber Taylor, I see Kameron Hurley's criticism of Casablanca (whose plot I will spoil below for those poor souls who haven't seen it yet). In a nutshell, Ms. Hurley complains that Rick is a drunken brute, Ilsa is a weak flake, and if this is love, no wonder everybody gets divorced.

Let me try to set the record straight.

1: Rick and Ilsa do not, in fact, end up together, so it's not quite clear how Ms. Hurley's lines about divorce factor into the picture. Indeed, Rick even maintains (though perhaps he is lying) that Ilsa would not be happier with him than with her husband.

2: Ms. Hurley suggests that Ilsa is the only woman who will put up with Rick's "treating her like shit" but there is no reason to believe this is true, especially given the limited evidence of Yvonne, who is clearly willing to be maltreated and keep coming back for more.
3: Ms. Hurley wonders, without juggling or Kant, what they could possibly see in one another. The possibilities are too many to inumerate, but the question hints at a bigger and more important confusion: what sets Casablanca's love story apart from other similar Bogart flicks (like To Have and Have Not or Key Largo) is that Rick and Ilsa have a history of (we are told) serious, intense, and meaningful love, and we are only made privvy to small bits of it. We don't know what happened then that made them fall in love, but surely they do.

4: For that matter, a viewing of the play ("Everybody Comes to Rick's") that was turned into Casablanca makes it more clear that Ilsa's "you have to think for me, Rick!" act may in fact be an act, not an actual abdication of all moral decisionmaking. I'm not sure if this understanding is to be imported into Casablanca, but it should at least provide extra cause for humility and caution in supposing that we can declare Rick or Ilsa unfit for one another without actually knowing as much about them as they do.

He disappeared in the dead of winter
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day....