Would I walk ten thousand miles?
Waddling Thunder at 05:04 PM
The test for me that separates good food and great food is that of memory. Can you feel, remember, and reminisce about a meal or ingredient or sip months and years later? Or did the food immediately slip beyond your reach, remembered only as an event rather than as a taste? My sense is that the more actually memorable meals we eat, the less often, and the less extremely, we have to indulge. And that’s why I pose a single question this Saturday; what’s the furthest you’ve ever gone for a single ingredient or food?
I personally remember fondly a multi-mile jaunt across Paris for a single slice of the famous cake called opera. The steady tread of my feet on the lively Parisian pavement, the gentle rustling of the paper all French bakeries wrap their cakes in, the noisy smoky bustle of the small café I stopped in on the way back for an espresso to accompany the cake – these are the kinds of things that make that particular 12 francs, as it was then, and countless calories, worth so much more than just 12 francs and a number of calories. That cake is something I still I remember and taste – even today, I think I can describe the delicate crispness of the syrup doused almond biscuits that formed its base, or the strikingly chocolate butter cream that made that particular patissier’s effort so famous.
I’m not going to take the time now to describe too many of those memories. The story of my family’s epic quest for a warm knefe b’jbni in Damascus, culminating in a wonderful moment of shared gluttony as we tore apart a warm pound of shredded dough, walnuts, sheep’s milk cheese from a local farm, and honeyed syrup, standing under the canopy of an isolated shop in the countryside, is too long to relate here. And I covered my first taste of real cheese in two years on my own food blog a few months ago, which I almost ran back to my London hotel almost three miles away. But I did want to mention my trip today to the Butcher Shop of Boston, a lovely little butcher and wine bar (a new combination to me, to be sure) on Tremont Street in our still cold city. As soon as I walked in there, I realized that the glistening pork on the bottom rack of the meat refrigerator would have to be taken home. And rubbed simply with lemon, and then singed brutally on my cast iron skillet at the highest possible heat, black smoke billowing into the rest of my microscopic overpriced apartment, windows fully open onto the street, the meat was worth every cent I paid for it. Despite appearances from what I write, I don’t actually eat very much meat. But when I do, I want it to be gamey rather than bland –I want it to taste of something in of itself. And this pork fit the bill in a way I haven’t tasted in months – the fact that I walked four miles to get it only makes the memory that much more vivid.
So if anyone has a story about going a long way specifically for a meal or an ingredient or a food, I’d love to hear it, whether it’s a pizza, or a truffle, or a basket of particularly tasty French fries. I don’t think this is pointless gluttony – I think it’s real appreciation, the very antidote to the impotent face stuffing that was at least my own curse for such a long time.
3/29/2004
Power Breakfast? I'll give you a power breakfast*
The Financial Times tells us that the power breakfast is on its way back, though participation has been slimmed down from the teams that indulged during the profligate 1990’s to a few key players today. This certainly is good news for the embryonic corporate lawyer – more power breakfasts mean more deals, which means more business for all the various parasites that buzz around the pulsing body of American capitalism. But the news, good though it is, leaves a question in the mind of the discerning food obsessive – what exactly is a power breakfast, and can the dedicated home chef do better?
The first part of that question benefits from an examination of one of the most famous venues for that important sounding meal. Michael’s Restaurant in New York offers a selection of typical foods for the spendthrift wheeler dealer – a fruit salad for $13.00, topped with yogurt for $19.00. Eggs Benedict, the traditional poached egg dish, goes for a mere $16.00: for the same price you can get the cured rather than smoked salmon delicacy gravlax, accompanied by what one hopes is a good bagel. As for baked goods, the best Michael’s does is either brioche toast or fresh baked muffins – for $4.50 and $5.50 respectively.
These options all sound perfectly pleasant, of course. One could hardly expect otherwise for so much money, and a very superior gravlax may indeed be worth it. But in case you haven’t closed a deal recently, or can’t envision spending that much money to pretend that you have, I’ve got a few suggestions.
I hardly can imagine a really good breakfast without baked goods and sweets. These, to me, are the cornerstone of the morning indulgence, even more so than the ever-present panoply of egg dishes. Certainly, an elegant rolled omelet is wonderful if you’re careful about the quality of the butter and the egg– but even it bows in my mind before the shapely blonde twins Challah and Brioche. The latter is sweet, rich, deeply indulgent, and in its most extreme forms veritably groans under the weight of some 200 grams of good butter and three pure eggs per bread. Its Jewish sibling is rather more austere, and yet no less delicious for all that, sweetened at its best with honey rather than sugar, devoid of the butter that gives the brioche its pillowy softness and yet endowed with a more formidable texture in return. Either one of these alone, with a steaming bowl of coffee or cup of tea, would serve as a perfectly excellent breakfast for me. And when I say either one of these, I do mean the whole thing – I’ve rarely succeeded in stopping after a few slices, though once in a blue moon I will remember how nice stale brioche French toast tastes the next morning, or that toasted brioche goes particularly well with a rough country pate and pickles.
I admit, though, that some eaters of good taste might prefer a more varied beginning, even if they prefer to stay within the bounds imposed by flour, eggs, butter, and sugar. In the fall, you wouldn’t go wrong with thinking about pumpkins in the form of this densely sweet pumpkin and orange syrup, though I doubt that ice cream or what we seem to call yogurt really has any business accompanying an already satisfying cake. Moderation is the acme of cooking, it seems to me – if adding more butter or sugar or cream made a better dish, then our greatest cooks would need to learn nothing more. That’s why some people might prefer a hearty date bread for breakfast, served warm and perhaps spread with the thinnest drizzle of your favorite topping, just to add the faintest hint of flavor.
But baked goods alone do not a power breakfast make. I can already hear the winged perpetrators of Atkins’s folly complaining, with some justification. These are all carbs, they say. And certainly, we shouldn’t stop with merely the items I’ve listed. Many people have bad memories of scrambled eggs as a lumpy disaster of institutional cooking, but this hardly needs to be the case. Either cooked three per person for a few moments in a hot pan with singing fat, or slowly nursed to gentle curds in a double boiler, and finished luxuriously with rich cream, scrambled eggs served with sturdy oatcakes and perhaps a naturally smoked kipper simmered gently in milk for a few minutes are one of the best breakfasts. As the great food writer Richard Olney has written, “correctly prepared, . . . scrambled eggs number among the very great delicacies of the table”.
Nor do I automatically discount the stranger entrants to the world of morning eating. My favorite among this motley band, however, is the imperial Kedgeree, a fragrant, delicious rice of eggs, smoked fish, and threads of vibrant saffron (or powdered turmeric, if your aesthetic sense demands yellow but your wallet dare not), all turned enthusiastically in either bought or home made ghee. As for Michael’s “Benedict”, I frankly prefer my poached eggs perched atop day old French bread toasted lightly with a little oil, and anointed first with mushroom puree flavored with sherry or vermouth, light cream, thyme, and lemon, and then finished if you’re feeling particularly indulgent or successful with a hollandaise of more butter whisked into three whipped eggs over a light fire.
Obviously, this rather long post hardly exhausts the possibilities for the dealmaker or the serious eater. It’s with some trepidation that I leave out beignets, a recipe for how to make gravlax, a stab at bagels and bialys, some suggestions about cream cheese, and recipes for waffles and pancakes. I shudder to think that some deprived soul might forget about cinnamon rolls because I’ve forgotten to mention them, and if I had more time I would delve into the vexed questions of the precise type of butter, brand of coffee, or leaf of tea. But for the moment I’ll leave the topic content, for it’s night again – and well, I’m hungry.
The Financial Times tells us that the power breakfast is on its way back, though participation has been slimmed down from the teams that indulged during the profligate 1990’s to a few key players today. This certainly is good news for the embryonic corporate lawyer – more power breakfasts mean more deals, which means more business for all the various parasites that buzz around the pulsing body of American capitalism. But the news, good though it is, leaves a question in the mind of the discerning food obsessive – what exactly is a power breakfast, and can the dedicated home chef do better?
The first part of that question benefits from an examination of one of the most famous venues for that important sounding meal. Michael’s Restaurant in New York offers a selection of typical foods for the spendthrift wheeler dealer – a fruit salad for $13.00, topped with yogurt for $19.00. Eggs Benedict, the traditional poached egg dish, goes for a mere $16.00: for the same price you can get the cured rather than smoked salmon delicacy gravlax, accompanied by what one hopes is a good bagel. As for baked goods, the best Michael’s does is either brioche toast or fresh baked muffins – for $4.50 and $5.50 respectively.
These options all sound perfectly pleasant, of course. One could hardly expect otherwise for so much money, and a very superior gravlax may indeed be worth it. But in case you haven’t closed a deal recently, or can’t envision spending that much money to pretend that you have, I’ve got a few suggestions.
I hardly can imagine a really good breakfast without baked goods and sweets. These, to me, are the cornerstone of the morning indulgence, even more so than the ever-present panoply of egg dishes. Certainly, an elegant rolled omelet is wonderful if you’re careful about the quality of the butter and the egg– but even it bows in my mind before the shapely blonde twins Challah and Brioche. The latter is sweet, rich, deeply indulgent, and in its most extreme forms veritably groans under the weight of some 200 grams of good butter and three pure eggs per bread. Its Jewish sibling is rather more austere, and yet no less delicious for all that, sweetened at its best with honey rather than sugar, devoid of the butter that gives the brioche its pillowy softness and yet endowed with a more formidable texture in return. Either one of these alone, with a steaming bowl of coffee or cup of tea, would serve as a perfectly excellent breakfast for me. And when I say either one of these, I do mean the whole thing – I’ve rarely succeeded in stopping after a few slices, though once in a blue moon I will remember how nice stale brioche French toast tastes the next morning, or that toasted brioche goes particularly well with a rough country pate and pickles.
I admit, though, that some eaters of good taste might prefer a more varied beginning, even if they prefer to stay within the bounds imposed by flour, eggs, butter, and sugar. In the fall, you wouldn’t go wrong with thinking about pumpkins in the form of this densely sweet pumpkin and orange syrup, though I doubt that ice cream or what we seem to call yogurt really has any business accompanying an already satisfying cake. Moderation is the acme of cooking, it seems to me – if adding more butter or sugar or cream made a better dish, then our greatest cooks would need to learn nothing more. That’s why some people might prefer a hearty date bread for breakfast, served warm and perhaps spread with the thinnest drizzle of your favorite topping, just to add the faintest hint of flavor.
But baked goods alone do not a power breakfast make. I can already hear the winged perpetrators of Atkins’s folly complaining, with some justification. These are all carbs, they say. And certainly, we shouldn’t stop with merely the items I’ve listed. Many people have bad memories of scrambled eggs as a lumpy disaster of institutional cooking, but this hardly needs to be the case. Either cooked three per person for a few moments in a hot pan with singing fat, or slowly nursed to gentle curds in a double boiler, and finished luxuriously with rich cream, scrambled eggs served with sturdy oatcakes and perhaps a naturally smoked kipper simmered gently in milk for a few minutes are one of the best breakfasts. As the great food writer Richard Olney has written, “correctly prepared, . . . scrambled eggs number among the very great delicacies of the table”.
Nor do I automatically discount the stranger entrants to the world of morning eating. My favorite among this motley band, however, is the imperial Kedgeree, a fragrant, delicious rice of eggs, smoked fish, and threads of vibrant saffron (or powdered turmeric, if your aesthetic sense demands yellow but your wallet dare not), all turned enthusiastically in either bought or home made ghee. As for Michael’s “Benedict”, I frankly prefer my poached eggs perched atop day old French bread toasted lightly with a little oil, and anointed first with mushroom puree flavored with sherry or vermouth, light cream, thyme, and lemon, and then finished if you’re feeling particularly indulgent or successful with a hollandaise of more butter whisked into three whipped eggs over a light fire.
Obviously, this rather long post hardly exhausts the possibilities for the dealmaker or the serious eater. It’s with some trepidation that I leave out beignets, a recipe for how to make gravlax, a stab at bagels and bialys, some suggestions about cream cheese, and recipes for waffles and pancakes. I shudder to think that some deprived soul might forget about cinnamon rolls because I’ve forgotten to mention them, and if I had more time I would delve into the vexed questions of the precise type of butter, brand of coffee, or leaf of tea. But for the moment I’ll leave the topic content, for it’s night again – and well, I’m hungry.
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.
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.
What is the difference betwixt a soup and a stew?
I’ve found that much of the hard doctrinal work of the law student is in learning to draw lines. What makes something obscene? Is a professorial corporate director whose university depends on donations from his company independent? What, exactly, does the word substantial mean?
I don’t do well with these questions. By the end of even my first year, though, I certainly could recite the various un-resolvable arguments in my sleep – bright lines and factors, the crystal and the mud, the functionalist and the formalist.
But law students aren’t alone in these thankless games of mental gymnastics. Rather, food enthusiasts too can sometimes be left staring at categories without answers. And though the controversies of the food world rarely disturb the august ponderings of the Supreme Court, the questions remain interesting. Late last night, in the company of nothing but a quick soda loaf combining a pound of flour, a few tablespoons of butter, a little sugar and enough buttermilk to make a dry dough, all overspeckled with dark chocolate and baked till it sounds hollow on the bottom, that realization led me directly to the topic for the last food post of my exceedingly pleasant stay here at Crescat Sententia. The great American food pioneer, Richard Olney, once tellingly wrote that “the line dividing a soup from a stew is often infirm”. Infirm though it sometimes is, I’d prefer if we now made an effort to find it – and perhaps enjoyed ourselves in the process.
One Supreme Court justice said of obscenity that he knew it when he saw it. Some stews and soups are the same way – no devious lines or clever tests are necessary to understand that if you boldly sautee chunks of tough beef in butter and oil, and then simmer them gently for a few hours in a strong red wine, and thyme, pearl onion and garlic, with perhaps the faintest tinge of rich double cream at the end, you have a stew. Nor does it need to be said that a light chicken broth, skimmed of fat and made from nothing but a free range bird, a few robust herbs, and a lot of time, is a soup – either eaten just as it is, or perhaps with a few squares of pasta (or if you’re feeling inauthentic, easily available wonton wrappers) stuffed with a mixture of pork, beef, lemon peel and parsley to make tortellini in brodo,
But not all cases fall so obviously into one camp or the other, and “I know it when I see it” is hardly a satisfying test in any case. What of bouillabaisse, the emblematic dish of seafood simmered in flavorful stock and garlic that exists in one form or another across France, whether with potatoes and mussels as in Toulon, or with cuttlefish in Martigues, or most appropriately for someone stuck in New England, with butter, hake, sole, and cod, as along the hardy Atlantic coast? In many ways, the heady, aromatic dish is quite exactly a stew, especially if you’re smart and have a generous hand with the fish, cheap or otherwise. It is, after all, merely the maritime cousin of the beef stew above, and the brother of a white wine chicken stew, one of my favorite weekly meals. But for me, bouillabaisse is a soup – not because it’s insubstantial, but because it demands nothing but crusty bread spread thickly with honest butter as an accompaniment. One reason that stew is stew is because you enjoy both the rich sauce on its own, which incidentally only gets better the next day, but also its slow impregnation of a healthy puddle of some delightful starch– whether butter rich mashed potatoes, or fluffy shards of basmati rice, or any one of the other dozens of possibilities. A stew’s gravy is there both to flavor the meat and to flavor a base- and the unthickened broth of France’s culinary pride does much, but not that.
Stew doesn’t always need to be eaten with starch, though. There must be some other line, and the versatile champion of Eastern Europe, Borscht, straddles it completely. Made meagerly, with more water than beets, with onions and a few carrots all boiled till tender, borsht is clearly a soup- and an excellent soup at that. But made with a few chunks of the cheapest beef, perhaps, or some spicy sausage meatballs, and with substantial servings of fresh beets just scrubbed and halved and then finished with any good sour cream, borscht really is a stew, even without any carb-rich base. The line isn’t the starch in this case – it’s the emphasis of the dish. In the former case, the soup’s taste is in the purple depth of the liquid’s flavor – but the latter relies on its more substantial ingredients. The former, I think, I’d serve to begin a meal – the latter might be the whole meal itself on some incredibly cold night when I have to work, but would rather eat.
Having seen my grandmother fend off appalled accusations from people who would have been entirely sated by one dish served as a stew, but claimed starvation when she called it a soup, I think people would be surprised at how important these lines are sometimes. But even if you’re not convinced, I hope most people would agree with me that pondering these kinds of lines is much more fun than wondering what the Court might be doing. After all, I don’t know what the sordid films the Supreme Court used to watch in its obscenity cases were like, but I do know that the recipes above are delicious – given the choice, I’d say pass me the spoon and the fork. Potter Stewart, wherever he is now, can keep his films, and with my blessing.
I’ve found that much of the hard doctrinal work of the law student is in learning to draw lines. What makes something obscene? Is a professorial corporate director whose university depends on donations from his company independent? What, exactly, does the word substantial mean?
I don’t do well with these questions. By the end of even my first year, though, I certainly could recite the various un-resolvable arguments in my sleep – bright lines and factors, the crystal and the mud, the functionalist and the formalist.
But law students aren’t alone in these thankless games of mental gymnastics. Rather, food enthusiasts too can sometimes be left staring at categories without answers. And though the controversies of the food world rarely disturb the august ponderings of the Supreme Court, the questions remain interesting. Late last night, in the company of nothing but a quick soda loaf combining a pound of flour, a few tablespoons of butter, a little sugar and enough buttermilk to make a dry dough, all overspeckled with dark chocolate and baked till it sounds hollow on the bottom, that realization led me directly to the topic for the last food post of my exceedingly pleasant stay here at Crescat Sententia. The great American food pioneer, Richard Olney, once tellingly wrote that “the line dividing a soup from a stew is often infirm”. Infirm though it sometimes is, I’d prefer if we now made an effort to find it – and perhaps enjoyed ourselves in the process.
One Supreme Court justice said of obscenity that he knew it when he saw it. Some stews and soups are the same way – no devious lines or clever tests are necessary to understand that if you boldly sautee chunks of tough beef in butter and oil, and then simmer them gently for a few hours in a strong red wine, and thyme, pearl onion and garlic, with perhaps the faintest tinge of rich double cream at the end, you have a stew. Nor does it need to be said that a light chicken broth, skimmed of fat and made from nothing but a free range bird, a few robust herbs, and a lot of time, is a soup – either eaten just as it is, or perhaps with a few squares of pasta (or if you’re feeling inauthentic, easily available wonton wrappers) stuffed with a mixture of pork, beef, lemon peel and parsley to make tortellini in brodo,
But not all cases fall so obviously into one camp or the other, and “I know it when I see it” is hardly a satisfying test in any case. What of bouillabaisse, the emblematic dish of seafood simmered in flavorful stock and garlic that exists in one form or another across France, whether with potatoes and mussels as in Toulon, or with cuttlefish in Martigues, or most appropriately for someone stuck in New England, with butter, hake, sole, and cod, as along the hardy Atlantic coast? In many ways, the heady, aromatic dish is quite exactly a stew, especially if you’re smart and have a generous hand with the fish, cheap or otherwise. It is, after all, merely the maritime cousin of the beef stew above, and the brother of a white wine chicken stew, one of my favorite weekly meals. But for me, bouillabaisse is a soup – not because it’s insubstantial, but because it demands nothing but crusty bread spread thickly with honest butter as an accompaniment. One reason that stew is stew is because you enjoy both the rich sauce on its own, which incidentally only gets better the next day, but also its slow impregnation of a healthy puddle of some delightful starch– whether butter rich mashed potatoes, or fluffy shards of basmati rice, or any one of the other dozens of possibilities. A stew’s gravy is there both to flavor the meat and to flavor a base- and the unthickened broth of France’s culinary pride does much, but not that.
Stew doesn’t always need to be eaten with starch, though. There must be some other line, and the versatile champion of Eastern Europe, Borscht, straddles it completely. Made meagerly, with more water than beets, with onions and a few carrots all boiled till tender, borsht is clearly a soup- and an excellent soup at that. But made with a few chunks of the cheapest beef, perhaps, or some spicy sausage meatballs, and with substantial servings of fresh beets just scrubbed and halved and then finished with any good sour cream, borscht really is a stew, even without any carb-rich base. The line isn’t the starch in this case – it’s the emphasis of the dish. In the former case, the soup’s taste is in the purple depth of the liquid’s flavor – but the latter relies on its more substantial ingredients. The former, I think, I’d serve to begin a meal – the latter might be the whole meal itself on some incredibly cold night when I have to work, but would rather eat.
Having seen my grandmother fend off appalled accusations from people who would have been entirely sated by one dish served as a stew, but claimed starvation when she called it a soup, I think people would be surprised at how important these lines are sometimes. But even if you’re not convinced, I hope most people would agree with me that pondering these kinds of lines is much more fun than wondering what the Court might be doing. After all, I don’t know what the sordid films the Supreme Court used to watch in its obscenity cases were like, but I do know that the recipes above are delicious – given the choice, I’d say pass me the spoon and the fork. Potter Stewart, wherever he is now, can keep his films, and with my blessing.
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