On Error

I make a lot of mistakes while cooking. Sometimes, I admit I get frustrated. It’s incredibly annoying to spend a lot of money (relatively, given my negative $50,000 in annual income) on ingredients I’m really looking forward to eating, and then have them fall apart (usually figuratively, though at least once literally), in my hands. As annoying as mistakes are, however, I always learn from them. Of course, I often learn specific lessons about specific dishes. For example, after some particularly disastrous blueberry muffins, I discovered that replacing butter with half as much oil in baked goods because you’re too lazy to go out and buy butter is definitely a bad idea. Just as often, however, I learn more universal lessons.

1. Ingredients matter : The carrot bread looked especially delectable from outside. Golden brown, obviously crunchy, and especially fragrant. Nor was this a surprise; I had worked really hard on the damned thing, and it deserved to be tasty – I don’t know if any of my readers have tried hand-grating a pound of carrots, but it isn’t the most pleasant of tasks. Because I’m an unrepentant glutton, I wasn’t able to wait for the cake to cool down, but rather took my serrated bread knife to its thick exterior immediately, at which point a flood of cinnamon and nutmeg laced carroty liquid gushed out the side, burned my hand, and incidentally collapsed the entire loaf. You’d think, then, that the lesson I learned from this apparent disaster was patience, both in baking and cutting.

But the reason I remember the great carrot bread debacle of 2004 is that I still enjoyed that loaf. Sure, I wasn’t going to be able to slice and freeze it for snacking throughout the week. Indeed, I ended up with a box of the most appalling Quaker Oat cereal bars, about which I’m still annoyed. But I saved as much of the molten cake as I could, found some relatively convincing vanilla ice cream, and proceeded to make what turned out to be a really delicious sort of bread a la mode. The reason it was still good after all those disastrous mistakes on my part, though, was that I had used only ingredients that taste good on their own. Wholesome butter, fresh carrots, nice eggs, whole rather than ready ground spices, King Arthur’s quality flour – all these things can’t help tasting good. Every time I’m tempted to use low fat cheese or fake sour cream or chemical margarine, experiences like that pumpkin bread waft into my mind. Good ingredients are an insurance policy for the second rate cook.

2. Kitchen Equipment isn’t always a Crock : I used to be rather skeptical about the difference good kitchen equipment made. “Eh”, I said, dismissively of the kitchen weekend warriors flashing their fancy pants All-Clad steel and copper pans, “my collection of standard department store steel and aluminum can take them all on”. Still, I bought a decent sauté pan, made with a particularly thick base and a metal handle – it was a sort of housewarming gift for my arrival in Boston.

I learned to make spaghetti carbonara near the beginning of 1L, with the nice pan. Being one of my favorite dishes, I thought I would make it at home for my family over that Christmas, and whipped out my mom’s old cookware confident it would all work perfectly. I slowly fried the scant cubes of pancetta, releasing their eminently flavorful fat, poured in a little vermouth to deglaze, and then tossed in the pasta, all at high heat with a little knob of butter. Once the pasta was well coated with all these delicious accoutrements, I turned off the heat and added the eggs and imported parmesan that form the base of any carbonara - the idea, of course, is that the steady latent heat in the pan ought to turn the eggs creamy as you frantically turn the noodles in the fatty mixture. It certainly had always worked before.

This time, however, I was left looking at a pan full of badly scrambled eggs, pasta, and bacon. The thin carapace of my mom’s pan had got too hot, which I hadn’t noticed, so the moment I added the eggs to the pan they had given up the ghost entirely. In accordance with the first lesson I mention above, the dish still tasted good – the ingredients were all tasty on their own, and there isn’t anything wrong with scrambled eggs and bacon. But it definitely wasn’t carbonara. Since then, when making that particular dish divorced of my pan, I’ve plumped for the Italian way with it by adding the egg raw after tipping the pasta into a wide and shallow bowl. But until I become a better cook, I’ll leave my usual method here in Boston – for some recipes, I rely on equipment for help.

3. Ignore seasons at your peril: I love strong tastes, whether it be spices, or meats, or butters or drinks. Bland rarely does anything for me. That’s why I’m a big fan of the Italian radicchio, a sort of red tinged chicory relative. At its best, radicchio has an astringent bitter taste, strong enough to be interesting but not overwhelming. Tossed into a soup with broad beans, a chili, parsley, garlic, and the juice of a generous lemon, the leaf makes for a hearty winter meal. Conveniently enough, its season runs from mid-winter to the beginning of spring – just the thing to get an often overwhelmed law student through the worst of a long, dark, couple of months.

But modern supermarkets have made it available year round. Thinking myself clever last summer, I decided to take advantage of this fact to make the soup in the middle of August. Sure, the radicchio might not be at its absolute best, I figured, but it would still be ok, and surely boiling it in the soup would soften its harder edges in any case. It’s not a time consuming or complicated meal to prepare, so in twenty minutes I had settled down at the table with a snowy white slab of my favorite goat’s cheese, which I think goes well with anything involving broad beans, and a large bowl of the steaming, delicious smelling soup. This, I thought, would be a pleasant noontime.

Alas, what I had neglected to notice was that radicchio outside its season is incredibly bitter, unless you get especially lucky. In fact, even to a mouth used to strong flavors, it was almost inedible – just sour and bitter, almost beyond belief. Nor could any of the soup and beans be saved by removing the leaf – summer had so ill treated the European delicacy that it had destroyed everything else in the soup save the chili, which I rescued and ate with the eagerly waiting cheese. I certainly didn’t go hungry, and I’ll still happily eat radicchio in the right season. What I wonder about, though, is all those people who might only have eaten radicchio at the wrong time, and now think they don’t like it. It’s possible that they like radicchio, but the grey, limply flavored shadow of it they ate in ignorance. And often enough, there’s no one to tell people otherwise. No, I don’t envision a return to a pre-industrial world where we eat everything exactly in season, for lack of alternatives. I’m an avowed capitalist, and our present range of choice is what the market has delivered and people demand. But I would like people to promise me that before they exclude a food from their diet, they’ll try the best version of it they can find. Giving something another try has changed my mind more than once, and I hope others think the same.