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A great bowl of pho requires 14 hours of charring and simmering with loads of bone marrow, and a superior soup uses toppings of high-quality cuts of beef that aren’t sinewy or gristly, he added.

Some of the best food we enjoy today started as “peasant meals” — made out of cheap, discarded ingredients treated with love, often braised or smoked until they transform from gristly to glorious meats.

Yet with a little sugar, and a simmering dembow beat, Towers’ gristly timbre elasticized into a warm, caramelized tone all his own.

His “White Noise” is a credible adaptation and a notably faithful one — what an earlier Baumbach character might call the filet of DeLillo’s bristling, gristly book.

There is strength in it, and cleverness and nearly unbearable honesty, yet the enduring aftertaste of such gristly tidbits produces little more than an intense desire to give Ball a big hug.