Cafe de Boulud
It goes without saying that Daniel Boulud is one of the undisputed dons of New York cooking. Eating at his secondary restaurant, Cafe de Boulud, I can see why. That doesn't mean his performance is spotless, however.
I started my (relatively) reasonably priced meal with a clever amuse bouche - a tiny chinese soup spoon of molded sauteed aubergine topped with a single half of cherry tomato and a little tart yogurt sauce. The meal continued with my second fluke carpaccio of the summer (see Django below), this one draped over an interesting semi guacamole of avacado and apple - the face of the fish was scattered with thin slivers of juicy tangerine, I think. For a main course I chose Sea scallops sauteed in butter and served with a rich lemon-verbona sauce, piled atop a delicous fricasee of green beans and peppers, and topped with an excellent frenchified puttanesca, dotted with tiny salt cured capers. Dessert was an terribly disappointing hazelnut biscuit crowned with chocolate mousse and cream - whoever did this pastry needs to be lectured by Boulud about freshness, though even if fresh I think the dessert would have failed - but the course was saved by the delicate little madeleine cookies served with my cappucino. If I had to pick one thing from the meal that exemplified the magnificence of French cooking, those little lemon zest tinged butter cookies would be it, actually - flour, sugar, butter, egg; those are the four pillars of french cooking. Indeed, it seems safe to say that the kitchen's boulanger is stronger than the patissier, since the bread too was excellent - crunchy, airy, and when slathered with obviously fresh and high quality butter, utterly delicious.
Assuming that Mr. Boulud has cleared up his pastry problems at the main line restaurant Daniel my hopefully impending visit there should be pleasurable indeed. But for a reasonable price, Cafe Boulud is high dining, and standing alone, would probably be the best restaurant in many a city.
6/02/2004
5/27/2004
Django is a modern sort of restaurant with all the usual accoutrements of a New York eatery; sleek tables, trendy wait staff, and patrons (i.e, lawyers from Midtown law firms) who fit neither of those categories. I'm beginning to think thatI can write that about any of the places I'll dine this summer, though, at least until I get to London.
The meal began with bread, especially for many of my companions who eschewed appetizers - unfortunately, the bread was entirely average. If you've ever eaten any of those half baked breads sold at the supermarket that you're supposed to take home and warm, then you know what it tasted like, except that one of the presented choices was supposedly a sourdough (though I couldn't taste any natural leaven to save my life), and the other was dotted with a few desultory olives. Not, I think, the best way for the restaurant to make a good first impression.
I was much more impressed with the clever carpaccio of fluke, though, marinated in red grapefruit. Fluke lends itself to carpaccio - and the restaurant had been very clever in using just a few specks of large crystal sea salt instead of any other seasoning. This way, most of the time you tasted the fish and marinade, an experience interrupted only seldomly, but with great effect, but a deep salty tang. I'd definitely recommend this dish, though my friend's choice of tuna tartare also looked serviceable. The menu also boasted a pissaladiere, which I would have ordered but for the fluke - I wonder, though, if they had given it as aggressively over to anchovies as that recipe demands.
My main course was quite an interesting "tagine" of beef - that is, a beef stew ideally baked slowly in a clay pot, a technique that hails from Morocco and has become trendy recently here. It was served in a stark white faux-tagine, which I thought did something for the presentation at table. If eating at a restaurant is half spectacle, then I think bringing a covered pot to the diner is always likely to increase his or her anticipation, and perhaps pique the interest of others sitting elsewhere (I suppose this is particularly effective if the showy dish happens to be a high profit margin food, which a beef stew generally tends to be). The citrus spiked stew was served, somewhat surprisingly, not with the traditional couscous but with basmati rice, a change I'm not sure works perfectly (couscous does a better job bathing itself in the fragrant sauce) but to which I have no real objection - certainly, if cooking rice is one of the marks of a skilled cook, the kitchen at Django has a few quality technicians working in the back. Also noteable is the fact that the sauce is sufficient to require mopping up with bread afterwards, which has always been one of my favorite parts of any meal - the whole process was made only slightly less interesting by the second rate bread, which obviously was salutorily improved by being doused in pungent gravy.
We didn't have dessert, so I can't comment, though there did seem to be a viable choice or two. All in all, I think I'd spend my own money elsewhere, but on the law firm teat, you'll never find me complaining about a kitchen like Django.
The meal began with bread, especially for many of my companions who eschewed appetizers - unfortunately, the bread was entirely average. If you've ever eaten any of those half baked breads sold at the supermarket that you're supposed to take home and warm, then you know what it tasted like, except that one of the presented choices was supposedly a sourdough (though I couldn't taste any natural leaven to save my life), and the other was dotted with a few desultory olives. Not, I think, the best way for the restaurant to make a good first impression.
I was much more impressed with the clever carpaccio of fluke, though, marinated in red grapefruit. Fluke lends itself to carpaccio - and the restaurant had been very clever in using just a few specks of large crystal sea salt instead of any other seasoning. This way, most of the time you tasted the fish and marinade, an experience interrupted only seldomly, but with great effect, but a deep salty tang. I'd definitely recommend this dish, though my friend's choice of tuna tartare also looked serviceable. The menu also boasted a pissaladiere, which I would have ordered but for the fluke - I wonder, though, if they had given it as aggressively over to anchovies as that recipe demands.
My main course was quite an interesting "tagine" of beef - that is, a beef stew ideally baked slowly in a clay pot, a technique that hails from Morocco and has become trendy recently here. It was served in a stark white faux-tagine, which I thought did something for the presentation at table. If eating at a restaurant is half spectacle, then I think bringing a covered pot to the diner is always likely to increase his or her anticipation, and perhaps pique the interest of others sitting elsewhere (I suppose this is particularly effective if the showy dish happens to be a high profit margin food, which a beef stew generally tends to be). The citrus spiked stew was served, somewhat surprisingly, not with the traditional couscous but with basmati rice, a change I'm not sure works perfectly (couscous does a better job bathing itself in the fragrant sauce) but to which I have no real objection - certainly, if cooking rice is one of the marks of a skilled cook, the kitchen at Django has a few quality technicians working in the back. Also noteable is the fact that the sauce is sufficient to require mopping up with bread afterwards, which has always been one of my favorite parts of any meal - the whole process was made only slightly less interesting by the second rate bread, which obviously was salutorily improved by being doused in pungent gravy.
We didn't have dessert, so I can't comment, though there did seem to be a viable choice or two. All in all, I think I'd spend my own money elsewhere, but on the law firm teat, you'll never find me complaining about a kitchen like Django.
5/20/2004
Asia de Cuba is an interesting fusion of asian and latin flavors, though I'm not sure I buy everything they're trying to accomplish - it's a little too slick and trendy for my very traditional tastes. It's not that I dislike innovation, but I'm extremely skeptical about the claim that two cuisines can be stuffed together with anything but dubious results. Still, it's tasty food, as the description below should demonstrate.
Dining is so called "family style" - that is, you share with everyone else at your table, and portions are ludicrously sized. We started with an excellent tuna tartare spread over fried squares of wonton, an equally good fried calimari salad of frisee and banana, a thai beef style salad, and beef dumplings both steamed and fried - the former was served with a heady soy based sauce. Main dishes included a sort of flank steak served in a lime and jus sauce and topped with jicima slaw, seared tuna sliced and served with wasabi mash, braised pork ribs mixed with bok choi (entirely the stars of the show), and some relatively pedestrian jamaican jerk chicken. Side dishes included the excellent coconut infused sticky rice, a fried rice of plantains topped with guacomole like avocado salad, and two orders of lobster mashed potatoes. For dessert, the group indulged in the utterly preposterous "Bay of Pigs", which consisted of a brownie topped with 7 or 8 scoops of ice cream and decorated with various cookies and a few bananas, all slathered with caramel, and the equally unhealthy "Latin Lover, which is apparently what one calls a flourless chocolate cake these days.
Dining is so called "family style" - that is, you share with everyone else at your table, and portions are ludicrously sized. We started with an excellent tuna tartare spread over fried squares of wonton, an equally good fried calimari salad of frisee and banana, a thai beef style salad, and beef dumplings both steamed and fried - the former was served with a heady soy based sauce. Main dishes included a sort of flank steak served in a lime and jus sauce and topped with jicima slaw, seared tuna sliced and served with wasabi mash, braised pork ribs mixed with bok choi (entirely the stars of the show), and some relatively pedestrian jamaican jerk chicken. Side dishes included the excellent coconut infused sticky rice, a fried rice of plantains topped with guacomole like avocado salad, and two orders of lobster mashed potatoes. For dessert, the group indulged in the utterly preposterous "Bay of Pigs", which consisted of a brownie topped with 7 or 8 scoops of ice cream and decorated with various cookies and a few bananas, all slathered with caramel, and the equally unhealthy "Latin Lover, which is apparently what one calls a flourless chocolate cake these days.
5/12/2004
Here, at the end of all things
The end of a law school year is not the end of all things. But it is the end of at least one thing, and deserves comment for that alone. As a matter of food, though, the last few days of any period present a far more interesting sort of puzzle. How is one to finish off the last bits of food in the fridge and the pantry before leaving for a new home, or vacation, or school? On Sunday morning, I'd be on a train bound for New York, and a summer of hopefully fruitful apprenticeship. But what would I eat till then?
The question is particularly troublesome in my case - there aren't any ready made meals in my freezer, for which the simple remedy involves either the microwave or the garbage, nor are my cupboards full of cereal - to the extent I have anything lying about, it's flour, grains, butter, and other such staples. To be exact, as I realized when I decided to take a look at my thankfully dwindling provender at the start of last week, I had the following items.
1 baking potato, a jar of (store bought!) mayonnaise, a small block of unpasteurized Roquefort, One organic Anjou pear, Flour, Olive oil, honey, Oats, Milk, Butter, A block of cheddar, and a few eggs.
Not, it might seem to someone unwilling to stretch their imagination, the best bunch of ingredients. But that's where so much of the fun of cooking is to be found - it's one thing to produce delicacies with access to mounds of truffles, endless jars of caviar, and a team of busy hands to help you, all subsidized by the wealthy consumer. It's quite another to produce tasty things at home on a limited budget and in the cramped confines of a typical student's kitchen. Though the professional chef is an artist, and a real representative of the best of cooking, the latter cook is a guardian of yet another great tradition of kitchen heroics- It's said, for example, that the French revolutionary chef Dunand invented Chicken Marengo from whatever he had on hand after Napoleon's great victory in that Italian city, and the dish has had a particularly long life for all of that.
In that self-important mood, I set to thinking about the ingredients I had. It occurred to me that the best luxuries one can eat at home aren't the most expensive ones, necessarily. Indeed, the more expensive the ingredient, often, the less the cook's skill has anything to do with the finished product - the freshest raw oyster needs neither lemon nor hot sauce to be tasty, but only a sharp knife and a brave slurp. But to convert the humble potato into a knobly, crunchy, snowy white french fry, that to me takes skill and care. As so I cut the lonely spud, leaving the skin on for both flavor and texture, into thick uneven wands. The delicate crunch of shoestring potatoes or frites are not, I think, for the home cook; rather, it seems to me that the British have the right way of it with their robust chip. Like the best recipes, it is both unpretentious and forgiving, and it's my first choice when left to fend for myself in what is normally the domain of a fast food joint.
I dried the starchy batons carefully, as anyone making chips should, and then lowered them tremulously into a bubbling pot of olive oil. Yes, indeed, I said olive oil - anyone who hasn't ever used it to make fried potatoes is missing out on some deep flavor, and the last week before vacation is the best time to experience the difference free of wallet induced guilt. I let them fry slowly for a number of minutes, until soft but uncolored (just pinch them with tongs to find out if they're ready), and then rolled them out onto a great swathe of kitchen paper to dry before tossing them back into the now furiously hot oil until golden and crunchy. I know that some of my friends can produce great results with only one frying - and some recommend starting the chips in actually cold oil instead. But for whatever reason, I've only been able to produce the starkly contrasted pillowy interior and crisp exterior that commercial french fry makers so tawdrily try to duplicate by using dried mashed potatoes, with a double frying, and in my opinion the result is worth the extra effort. Almost painfully hot, and sprinkled with the barest few large grains of salt, I dipped them mischievously into refrigerator cold mayonnaise- I like ketchup too, especially since Mark Bittman of the New York Times has recently shown us that it too can be a noble condiment - but in this case the mayonnaise was both available and appropriate, and really very good.
The second meal was equally obvious to me. As I've said before, cold Roquefort isn't worth eating just like that. But I'd also never throw it away, and if I had had some pasta, perhaps the solution would have been to crumble it into a pot of fettucine with a few squares of ice cold salty butter. But there wasn't any pasta, and I had no puff pastry to stuff it in and paint lightly with egg wash either, so none of my usual uses for a spare end of cheese were available. But I did have oats and self rising flour, both of which ingredients literally scream the word biscuit to me at the highest possible pitch. So the Roquefort was crushed indelicately, and mixed with some of the rolled oats, and flour, a little salt, some butter cut into the flour with two knives, an egg or two, and just enough milk to bring it all together into a crumbly, potentially flaky dough. I then rolled it all out, cut out considerable rounds with a sharp knife (since I don't own a biscuit cutter, and a sharp cut is necessary to ensure even rising), and put them quickly into the oven until they were golden brown. Cut into halves and served with the juicy, room temperature Red anjou pear, and I thought to myself that I had found a new candidate for primary cheese rescue option, appropriate for the block of cheddar as well. My only regret was that I didn't have some crisp, tart, green apples, or some grapes or a melon to go with the biscuits also - though someone with more time could well provide those worthy accompaniments.
Made in sufficient quantity, the dishes above were enough to finish off my stores of food, and to provide me with admittedly repetitive lunches and dinners for the rest of the week. When I leave New York later this summer, I'll be able to play this same game again, hopefully with new and different ingredients. But my point in writing this is to show that cleaning out one's fridge shouldn't be a pain, but an opportunity - less of a chore than a chance to eat some very simple but interesting food. I certainly enjoy the challenge, and if I convince someone else to try it as this year ends for most college students, and vacation season starts up, I'll have accomplished most of what I set out to do. Enjoy!
The end of a law school year is not the end of all things. But it is the end of at least one thing, and deserves comment for that alone. As a matter of food, though, the last few days of any period present a far more interesting sort of puzzle. How is one to finish off the last bits of food in the fridge and the pantry before leaving for a new home, or vacation, or school? On Sunday morning, I'd be on a train bound for New York, and a summer of hopefully fruitful apprenticeship. But what would I eat till then?
The question is particularly troublesome in my case - there aren't any ready made meals in my freezer, for which the simple remedy involves either the microwave or the garbage, nor are my cupboards full of cereal - to the extent I have anything lying about, it's flour, grains, butter, and other such staples. To be exact, as I realized when I decided to take a look at my thankfully dwindling provender at the start of last week, I had the following items.
1 baking potato, a jar of (store bought!) mayonnaise, a small block of unpasteurized Roquefort, One organic Anjou pear, Flour, Olive oil, honey, Oats, Milk, Butter, A block of cheddar, and a few eggs.
Not, it might seem to someone unwilling to stretch their imagination, the best bunch of ingredients. But that's where so much of the fun of cooking is to be found - it's one thing to produce delicacies with access to mounds of truffles, endless jars of caviar, and a team of busy hands to help you, all subsidized by the wealthy consumer. It's quite another to produce tasty things at home on a limited budget and in the cramped confines of a typical student's kitchen. Though the professional chef is an artist, and a real representative of the best of cooking, the latter cook is a guardian of yet another great tradition of kitchen heroics- It's said, for example, that the French revolutionary chef Dunand invented Chicken Marengo from whatever he had on hand after Napoleon's great victory in that Italian city, and the dish has had a particularly long life for all of that.
In that self-important mood, I set to thinking about the ingredients I had. It occurred to me that the best luxuries one can eat at home aren't the most expensive ones, necessarily. Indeed, the more expensive the ingredient, often, the less the cook's skill has anything to do with the finished product - the freshest raw oyster needs neither lemon nor hot sauce to be tasty, but only a sharp knife and a brave slurp. But to convert the humble potato into a knobly, crunchy, snowy white french fry, that to me takes skill and care. As so I cut the lonely spud, leaving the skin on for both flavor and texture, into thick uneven wands. The delicate crunch of shoestring potatoes or frites are not, I think, for the home cook; rather, it seems to me that the British have the right way of it with their robust chip. Like the best recipes, it is both unpretentious and forgiving, and it's my first choice when left to fend for myself in what is normally the domain of a fast food joint.
I dried the starchy batons carefully, as anyone making chips should, and then lowered them tremulously into a bubbling pot of olive oil. Yes, indeed, I said olive oil - anyone who hasn't ever used it to make fried potatoes is missing out on some deep flavor, and the last week before vacation is the best time to experience the difference free of wallet induced guilt. I let them fry slowly for a number of minutes, until soft but uncolored (just pinch them with tongs to find out if they're ready), and then rolled them out onto a great swathe of kitchen paper to dry before tossing them back into the now furiously hot oil until golden and crunchy. I know that some of my friends can produce great results with only one frying - and some recommend starting the chips in actually cold oil instead. But for whatever reason, I've only been able to produce the starkly contrasted pillowy interior and crisp exterior that commercial french fry makers so tawdrily try to duplicate by using dried mashed potatoes, with a double frying, and in my opinion the result is worth the extra effort. Almost painfully hot, and sprinkled with the barest few large grains of salt, I dipped them mischievously into refrigerator cold mayonnaise- I like ketchup too, especially since Mark Bittman of the New York Times has recently shown us that it too can be a noble condiment - but in this case the mayonnaise was both available and appropriate, and really very good.
The second meal was equally obvious to me. As I've said before, cold Roquefort isn't worth eating just like that. But I'd also never throw it away, and if I had had some pasta, perhaps the solution would have been to crumble it into a pot of fettucine with a few squares of ice cold salty butter. But there wasn't any pasta, and I had no puff pastry to stuff it in and paint lightly with egg wash either, so none of my usual uses for a spare end of cheese were available. But I did have oats and self rising flour, both of which ingredients literally scream the word biscuit to me at the highest possible pitch. So the Roquefort was crushed indelicately, and mixed with some of the rolled oats, and flour, a little salt, some butter cut into the flour with two knives, an egg or two, and just enough milk to bring it all together into a crumbly, potentially flaky dough. I then rolled it all out, cut out considerable rounds with a sharp knife (since I don't own a biscuit cutter, and a sharp cut is necessary to ensure even rising), and put them quickly into the oven until they were golden brown. Cut into halves and served with the juicy, room temperature Red anjou pear, and I thought to myself that I had found a new candidate for primary cheese rescue option, appropriate for the block of cheddar as well. My only regret was that I didn't have some crisp, tart, green apples, or some grapes or a melon to go with the biscuits also - though someone with more time could well provide those worthy accompaniments.
Made in sufficient quantity, the dishes above were enough to finish off my stores of food, and to provide me with admittedly repetitive lunches and dinners for the rest of the week. When I leave New York later this summer, I'll be able to play this same game again, hopefully with new and different ingredients. But my point in writing this is to show that cleaning out one's fridge shouldn't be a pain, but an opportunity - less of a chore than a chance to eat some very simple but interesting food. I certainly enjoy the challenge, and if I convince someone else to try it as this year ends for most college students, and vacation season starts up, I'll have accomplished most of what I set out to do. Enjoy!
5/03/2004
The menu of a harried student
A lot of my friends excuse poor food by saying that they're stressed - with exams around the corner, the argument goes, there's just no time to bother with cooking. So they end up at one disastrous fast food joint or another - and in Cambridge, that usually means some kind of locally run eatery without even the guarantee of uniform mediocrity that a Mcdonald's provides. Not for this area the kind of fresh food focused burger eatery that the New York Times recently described in Oregon, complete with made to order seasonal blackberry shakes.
To some extent, I sympathize with my friends' reluctance to insist on good food right now. Exam time is not the best moment to make the Bouillabaisse below, for example. I certainly have never felt any compulsion to make something like croissants a few days before a test, and even a relatively simple but necessarily time consuming dish like risotto isn't first on my list of meals when I'm really pressed for time.
But none of that means that I stop preparing and eating good food. Indeed, there's an entire range of food that fits exactly the niche that exam time requires. None of these "recipes", and I hesitate to call them that due to their simplicity, requires much time, and usually I've tried to keep even the number of dishes, pots, and pans to a minimum as well. Indeed, I fear that if I didn't eat like this, I wouldn't be able to handle the other things in my life, even if the second semester of the second year at law school is hardly the test the first year was.
Potatoes, for example, are ready made for stressful occasions. Not only does their floury heartiness inherently make them a comfort food, but they lend themselves to a variety of simple dishes, and rarely require much hassle. Of course, one can bake potatoes, if you happen to be studying at home. All that really requires is a few shreds of quality farmhouse cheddar dropped lightly into the punctured tuber, and perhaps a few grindings of pepper - though if you have a little more time it's always good to scoop out the fluffy insides, mix them with smoked mackerel, dijon mustard, and cream before stuffing the mixture back into the potato and leaving it under a broiler with cheese for a minute or two. If you don't have time to let a potato roast for an hour, though, that doesn't mean the potato is off limits - as odd as it sounds, I've been known to take cold new potatoes to school with a sprig of thyme or two, and dip the peeled and boiled portions into an elegant pot of creme fraiche or refreshing yogurt. With a little more time, furthermore, you can always make a potato salad - either in the french style with lemon, vinegar, and chives, or like the Germans do across the border with mayonnaise, mustard, and pickles. Both make great lunches, or good accompaniments to grilled fish at dinner.
Of course, pasta is a friend of the harried student as well. One hardly needs my advice to buy a jar of pesto and mix the cold sauce into newly boiled ribbons of wide pasta. But I think store bought pesto is too salty, and the home variety too complicated, too finicky while such arcanities as the 1933 Exchange Act occupy significant and unwelcome portions of my mind. During times like these, then, I'm much more likely to throw together a sugo crudo : that is to say, just a sort of raw salad of still hot pasta mixed into a bowl of olive oil, fresh, uncooked tomatoes, olives, basil, and anything else you can think of, along with generous shavings of Parmesan or Pecorino Romano. For a bit of variety, you can even substitute a ball of fresh mozzarella and a little proscuitto for the hard grated cheeses, which makes for just as delightful a meal. And if you're happy using the same pot to boil the pasta as for making the sauce, I've found that a simple dressing of olive oil and hot chili flakes, with or without anchovy fillets melted nuttily into the mix, is a real pleasure, especially with two handfuls of hastily chopped or torn flat leaf italian parsley throw into the bowl at the last minute.
If even these preparations take too much time, however, don't feel as if you're left nothing but greasy takeout pizza to eat. As bad as the cheese situation is in the US these days, Trader Joe's has managed to bring in relatively cheap and authentic Roquefort - the greatest of the french hard cheeses, and a worthy competitor to brie and camembert. With a box of scottish style oatcakes at your side, and a healthy bunch of green seedless grapes, a generous slab of the salty, powerful cheese makes a terrific dinner and takes all of twenty seconds to unwrap the cheese and wash the fruit. It's made even better if you remember to leave the cheese out all day to come to the proper temperature. Cold Roquefort is like warm lager: an utter waste of time, and a worse sacrifice of needed calories. Stress also brings other high quality ready made meals to the fore, like smoked salmon, also at home on oatcakes, or as a sort of flat salad with capers and cornichons, or tossed over some more pasta with cream. Alternatively, it's true that the considerably and unalterably gluttonous side of me that's in love with the fruits of the worthy pig has had luck recently with the better italian hams and salamis, tomatoes, and fresh cheese like ricotta or mozzarella. Any of those things served with a decent end of bread would shame few people's tables.
Finally, one can't ever forget meats and fish as the paradigmatic quick foods - what could be better than a piece of fresh tuna seared for no more than a minute on each side, still ruby red beneath a crunchy charred exterior, served with a few spears of quickly broiled asparagus annointed with tart vinaigrette? And I've got a personal soft spot for steak au poivre- made simply by rubbing a good steak into crushed rather than ground peppercorns (ground pepper burns in the pan's heat), and then quickly sauteed to be placed along a salad of frisee and lemon, perhaps followed at some length by my restorative banana bread - made by mashing three ripe fruits with between 1/2 cup and a full cup of sugar, two egg whites, a quarter cup of melted butter or oil, vanilla, and enough self rising four to get a thickish batter - it's better if you then slowly cook it in a relatively cool oven for about an hour, though it can always be baked more aggressively as well.
In other words, stress shouldn't push you towards the fast food restaurant, though an occasional stop there doesn't hurt. It certainly shouldn't suggest raiding the frozen food bins at the supermarket, where one is served as much artifice as aliment. Rather, take some of the suggestions above, and put your own twist on them; studying hard into the night, the virtuous quality of good food ought to sustain you longer than any unnatural substitute, and give you a little more wisdom than you might otherwise have - and if it does neither, at least you'll have eaten well. Life is made up of small victories.
A lot of my friends excuse poor food by saying that they're stressed - with exams around the corner, the argument goes, there's just no time to bother with cooking. So they end up at one disastrous fast food joint or another - and in Cambridge, that usually means some kind of locally run eatery without even the guarantee of uniform mediocrity that a Mcdonald's provides. Not for this area the kind of fresh food focused burger eatery that the New York Times recently described in Oregon, complete with made to order seasonal blackberry shakes.
To some extent, I sympathize with my friends' reluctance to insist on good food right now. Exam time is not the best moment to make the Bouillabaisse below, for example. I certainly have never felt any compulsion to make something like croissants a few days before a test, and even a relatively simple but necessarily time consuming dish like risotto isn't first on my list of meals when I'm really pressed for time.
But none of that means that I stop preparing and eating good food. Indeed, there's an entire range of food that fits exactly the niche that exam time requires. None of these "recipes", and I hesitate to call them that due to their simplicity, requires much time, and usually I've tried to keep even the number of dishes, pots, and pans to a minimum as well. Indeed, I fear that if I didn't eat like this, I wouldn't be able to handle the other things in my life, even if the second semester of the second year at law school is hardly the test the first year was.
Potatoes, for example, are ready made for stressful occasions. Not only does their floury heartiness inherently make them a comfort food, but they lend themselves to a variety of simple dishes, and rarely require much hassle. Of course, one can bake potatoes, if you happen to be studying at home. All that really requires is a few shreds of quality farmhouse cheddar dropped lightly into the punctured tuber, and perhaps a few grindings of pepper - though if you have a little more time it's always good to scoop out the fluffy insides, mix them with smoked mackerel, dijon mustard, and cream before stuffing the mixture back into the potato and leaving it under a broiler with cheese for a minute or two. If you don't have time to let a potato roast for an hour, though, that doesn't mean the potato is off limits - as odd as it sounds, I've been known to take cold new potatoes to school with a sprig of thyme or two, and dip the peeled and boiled portions into an elegant pot of creme fraiche or refreshing yogurt. With a little more time, furthermore, you can always make a potato salad - either in the french style with lemon, vinegar, and chives, or like the Germans do across the border with mayonnaise, mustard, and pickles. Both make great lunches, or good accompaniments to grilled fish at dinner.
Of course, pasta is a friend of the harried student as well. One hardly needs my advice to buy a jar of pesto and mix the cold sauce into newly boiled ribbons of wide pasta. But I think store bought pesto is too salty, and the home variety too complicated, too finicky while such arcanities as the 1933 Exchange Act occupy significant and unwelcome portions of my mind. During times like these, then, I'm much more likely to throw together a sugo crudo : that is to say, just a sort of raw salad of still hot pasta mixed into a bowl of olive oil, fresh, uncooked tomatoes, olives, basil, and anything else you can think of, along with generous shavings of Parmesan or Pecorino Romano. For a bit of variety, you can even substitute a ball of fresh mozzarella and a little proscuitto for the hard grated cheeses, which makes for just as delightful a meal. And if you're happy using the same pot to boil the pasta as for making the sauce, I've found that a simple dressing of olive oil and hot chili flakes, with or without anchovy fillets melted nuttily into the mix, is a real pleasure, especially with two handfuls of hastily chopped or torn flat leaf italian parsley throw into the bowl at the last minute.
If even these preparations take too much time, however, don't feel as if you're left nothing but greasy takeout pizza to eat. As bad as the cheese situation is in the US these days, Trader Joe's has managed to bring in relatively cheap and authentic Roquefort - the greatest of the french hard cheeses, and a worthy competitor to brie and camembert. With a box of scottish style oatcakes at your side, and a healthy bunch of green seedless grapes, a generous slab of the salty, powerful cheese makes a terrific dinner and takes all of twenty seconds to unwrap the cheese and wash the fruit. It's made even better if you remember to leave the cheese out all day to come to the proper temperature. Cold Roquefort is like warm lager: an utter waste of time, and a worse sacrifice of needed calories. Stress also brings other high quality ready made meals to the fore, like smoked salmon, also at home on oatcakes, or as a sort of flat salad with capers and cornichons, or tossed over some more pasta with cream. Alternatively, it's true that the considerably and unalterably gluttonous side of me that's in love with the fruits of the worthy pig has had luck recently with the better italian hams and salamis, tomatoes, and fresh cheese like ricotta or mozzarella. Any of those things served with a decent end of bread would shame few people's tables.
Finally, one can't ever forget meats and fish as the paradigmatic quick foods - what could be better than a piece of fresh tuna seared for no more than a minute on each side, still ruby red beneath a crunchy charred exterior, served with a few spears of quickly broiled asparagus annointed with tart vinaigrette? And I've got a personal soft spot for steak au poivre- made simply by rubbing a good steak into crushed rather than ground peppercorns (ground pepper burns in the pan's heat), and then quickly sauteed to be placed along a salad of frisee and lemon, perhaps followed at some length by my restorative banana bread - made by mashing three ripe fruits with between 1/2 cup and a full cup of sugar, two egg whites, a quarter cup of melted butter or oil, vanilla, and enough self rising four to get a thickish batter - it's better if you then slowly cook it in a relatively cool oven for about an hour, though it can always be baked more aggressively as well.
In other words, stress shouldn't push you towards the fast food restaurant, though an occasional stop there doesn't hurt. It certainly shouldn't suggest raiding the frozen food bins at the supermarket, where one is served as much artifice as aliment. Rather, take some of the suggestions above, and put your own twist on them; studying hard into the night, the virtuous quality of good food ought to sustain you longer than any unnatural substitute, and give you a little more wisdom than you might otherwise have - and if it does neither, at least you'll have eaten well. Life is made up of small victories.
4/20/2004
Bouillabaisse
A ce plat phoceen, accompli sans defaut,
Indispensablement, meme, avant tous, il faut
la rascasse, poisson, certes, des plus vulgaires.
Isole sur un gril, on ne l’estime guere,
Mais dans la bouillabaisse aussitot il repand,
de Merveilleux parfums d’ou le success depend
To make this phocean dish without fault
Indispensably, even before all, you need
The rascasse, a vulgar fish, of course
Which on the grill we think little of
But in the bouillabaisse it exudes
A marvelous perfume on which success depends
Some people doodle in class. Others play snood, or surf the web, or chat on instant messenger. A small group might even drift away in the lewd embrace of the more salacious range of mental speculations. But me? Well, I dream about food. I dream about what to cook; and how I’m going to cook it; and where I’m getting the ingredients to cook whatever I’m going to cook; and how I’m going to eat it. I might dream about a specific food, or about all foods – in the morning about what I’m going to eat for lunch, after lunch what I’ll eat as a snack, and later what I should make for dinner. The only constant is that the moment the class demands less than all my attention, food is extremely likely to be the topic of my distracted meditations.
The weather has turned here in Cambridge, for the past week or so. Today, on the day of the Boston Marathon, we’re supposed to hit the eighties. Emerging from a grim winter of long nights and colder days, this to me says spring, in the loudest possible voice. And so, for the past week or so, I’ve spent my time in class thinking about bouillabaisse, the glorious champion of fish stews, one of the greatest contributions of provencal cuisine to the expanding waistlines of the world’s gluttons. How much fennel? Can bouillabaisse be made without the paradigmatic rascasse, as one of my friends points out – certainly the French writer Mery, quoted above, doesn’t think so? Which fishes should make the stock, and which the stew?
But one doesn’t need to engage in all this pretentious navel gazing in order to eat bouillabaisse. It’s a complicated soup, in some ways – I’ll grant you that. But in the end it’s just a soup – and it can be made with mostly simple ingredients, and in not much time. Nonetheless, people seem intimidated by recipes like this – whether it’s the prospect of the fish, or the straining, or the saffron, I’m not sure. So I’ll be a little more specific than usual, and perhaps I’ll expect a few more people to actually make this when they need something really magnificent to eat.
What you’ll want to do first is get some fish – among the three types most people start with, you should aim for those less rather than more oily (I’m not sure mackerel is the best idea, for instance). Most importantly get at least one whole fish, to get you the head and bones you need to make a flavorful stock. Of course, if you’ve been saving fish bones and shrimp shells in your freezer like any sensible home cook, you don’t need to worry about this – but if you know to do that, you hardly need to read my amateurish blabberings here. Manfully cut the head off the fish (you need at least two if you’re cooking for four people), and turn the heads, cracked open with a sharp knife, and all the fish bones you can find, in a large pot with olive oil, along with fennel, tomatoes, thyme, onion, garlic, and any other herbs you like, all chopped roughly. After just a few moments in the heat, add water and white wine to the pot, and bring all that to the boil. At some point, you’re going to have to add saffron to this mix – and no, don’t try to skimp and use turmeric in a desperate effort to get the same colour. You’re spending a lot, presumably, on the fish. Don’t ruin the effort by being cheap with what is essentially the main ingredient.
Once forty minutes pass the stock should be powerful, fragrant, and colorful, both from the saffron and the tomatoes. Strain the liquid, and set aside – as wonderful as fish brains are for the taste of the soup, you don’t want them in the finished product, though I don’t suppose I have to warn most people about that. Boil a few new potatoes in salted water – peeled. Given the fish base of the soup, you really only need two of the waxy tubers per person, but you’ll regret not making more to dip sinfully into the aioli, which you’ll make by grinding a few cloves of garlic in a mortar, adding an egg, and then whisking in either pure vegetable oil or a combination of fats including some olive oil until you have something that looks like mayonnaise. Finally, toast a few pieces of French bread rubbed with yet more garlic – and if you’re now thinking that this isn’t the most convenient of dishes for the busy professional, I will admit that even in France it’s usually saved for what I can only imagine are some mightily odiferous Sunday afternoons.
To serve the great soup, just pour the reserved stock back into a pan, and bring to a fast and roaring boil. Drop your fish into the stew, and once the base comes back to the boil, drop a little more saffron into the pot if you like (and can afford it), turn down the heat, and cover the pot. While the fish finishes cooking, put a couple of potatoes on the bottom of each person’s wide and shallow bowl, and make sure there’s plenty of toast on the table sitting near a large bowl of aioli and a few spoons. Once the fish seems done, place each person’s share in their bowl with the potatoes, pour the steaming broth over the fish, and take the bowls to what I hope are your hungry guests. It’s vital that at least some of the toast gets smeared with too much of the garlicky sauce and floated in the soup like a sort of crouton – the dish is meager, if fragrant, and the combination of the oil and the bread put the finishing touches on the meal. Add a chilled glass of good white wine, or, dare I say it, champagne, to the table, and you’ll have something that you can serve to anyone on any occasion. It’s true that the dish is expensive, and that it takes a little effort – and I’m aware that in Provence itself, those outside Marseille sometimes scoff at the dominance of bouillabaisse in the face of so many great fish stews. But I think the effort and the cost are worth it – and as long as your guests haven’t been to a small town in Provence, the secret of your creation’s competition is safe with me. So enjoy. I certainly did.
A ce plat phoceen, accompli sans defaut,
Indispensablement, meme, avant tous, il faut
la rascasse, poisson, certes, des plus vulgaires.
Isole sur un gril, on ne l’estime guere,
Mais dans la bouillabaisse aussitot il repand,
de Merveilleux parfums d’ou le success depend
To make this phocean dish without fault
Indispensably, even before all, you need
The rascasse, a vulgar fish, of course
Which on the grill we think little of
But in the bouillabaisse it exudes
A marvelous perfume on which success depends
Some people doodle in class. Others play snood, or surf the web, or chat on instant messenger. A small group might even drift away in the lewd embrace of the more salacious range of mental speculations. But me? Well, I dream about food. I dream about what to cook; and how I’m going to cook it; and where I’m getting the ingredients to cook whatever I’m going to cook; and how I’m going to eat it. I might dream about a specific food, or about all foods – in the morning about what I’m going to eat for lunch, after lunch what I’ll eat as a snack, and later what I should make for dinner. The only constant is that the moment the class demands less than all my attention, food is extremely likely to be the topic of my distracted meditations.
The weather has turned here in Cambridge, for the past week or so. Today, on the day of the Boston Marathon, we’re supposed to hit the eighties. Emerging from a grim winter of long nights and colder days, this to me says spring, in the loudest possible voice. And so, for the past week or so, I’ve spent my time in class thinking about bouillabaisse, the glorious champion of fish stews, one of the greatest contributions of provencal cuisine to the expanding waistlines of the world’s gluttons. How much fennel? Can bouillabaisse be made without the paradigmatic rascasse, as one of my friends points out – certainly the French writer Mery, quoted above, doesn’t think so? Which fishes should make the stock, and which the stew?
But one doesn’t need to engage in all this pretentious navel gazing in order to eat bouillabaisse. It’s a complicated soup, in some ways – I’ll grant you that. But in the end it’s just a soup – and it can be made with mostly simple ingredients, and in not much time. Nonetheless, people seem intimidated by recipes like this – whether it’s the prospect of the fish, or the straining, or the saffron, I’m not sure. So I’ll be a little more specific than usual, and perhaps I’ll expect a few more people to actually make this when they need something really magnificent to eat.
What you’ll want to do first is get some fish – among the three types most people start with, you should aim for those less rather than more oily (I’m not sure mackerel is the best idea, for instance). Most importantly get at least one whole fish, to get you the head and bones you need to make a flavorful stock. Of course, if you’ve been saving fish bones and shrimp shells in your freezer like any sensible home cook, you don’t need to worry about this – but if you know to do that, you hardly need to read my amateurish blabberings here. Manfully cut the head off the fish (you need at least two if you’re cooking for four people), and turn the heads, cracked open with a sharp knife, and all the fish bones you can find, in a large pot with olive oil, along with fennel, tomatoes, thyme, onion, garlic, and any other herbs you like, all chopped roughly. After just a few moments in the heat, add water and white wine to the pot, and bring all that to the boil. At some point, you’re going to have to add saffron to this mix – and no, don’t try to skimp and use turmeric in a desperate effort to get the same colour. You’re spending a lot, presumably, on the fish. Don’t ruin the effort by being cheap with what is essentially the main ingredient.
Once forty minutes pass the stock should be powerful, fragrant, and colorful, both from the saffron and the tomatoes. Strain the liquid, and set aside – as wonderful as fish brains are for the taste of the soup, you don’t want them in the finished product, though I don’t suppose I have to warn most people about that. Boil a few new potatoes in salted water – peeled. Given the fish base of the soup, you really only need two of the waxy tubers per person, but you’ll regret not making more to dip sinfully into the aioli, which you’ll make by grinding a few cloves of garlic in a mortar, adding an egg, and then whisking in either pure vegetable oil or a combination of fats including some olive oil until you have something that looks like mayonnaise. Finally, toast a few pieces of French bread rubbed with yet more garlic – and if you’re now thinking that this isn’t the most convenient of dishes for the busy professional, I will admit that even in France it’s usually saved for what I can only imagine are some mightily odiferous Sunday afternoons.
To serve the great soup, just pour the reserved stock back into a pan, and bring to a fast and roaring boil. Drop your fish into the stew, and once the base comes back to the boil, drop a little more saffron into the pot if you like (and can afford it), turn down the heat, and cover the pot. While the fish finishes cooking, put a couple of potatoes on the bottom of each person’s wide and shallow bowl, and make sure there’s plenty of toast on the table sitting near a large bowl of aioli and a few spoons. Once the fish seems done, place each person’s share in their bowl with the potatoes, pour the steaming broth over the fish, and take the bowls to what I hope are your hungry guests. It’s vital that at least some of the toast gets smeared with too much of the garlicky sauce and floated in the soup like a sort of crouton – the dish is meager, if fragrant, and the combination of the oil and the bread put the finishing touches on the meal. Add a chilled glass of good white wine, or, dare I say it, champagne, to the table, and you’ll have something that you can serve to anyone on any occasion. It’s true that the dish is expensive, and that it takes a little effort – and I’m aware that in Provence itself, those outside Marseille sometimes scoff at the dominance of bouillabaisse in the face of so many great fish stews. But I think the effort and the cost are worth it – and as long as your guests haven’t been to a small town in Provence, the secret of your creation’s competition is safe with me. So enjoy. I certainly did.
4/11/2004
A feast of Heterodox Delights
The best religious symbols are the tasty ones. Lamb is at the forefront of them – amply laden with Christian theology and yet delicious at the same time. Certainly, there’s much to like about celebrating spring with a large leg of the docile beast, dotted with fragrant full cloves of garlic and lovingly rubbed with thyme and olive oil - or with little cutlets of lamb stuffed with a bare slice of strong sheep’s milk feta and doused in freshly ground black pepper. Served with a robust puy lentil salad that’s dressed simply with lemon and oil or perhaps with a few boiled and then roasted potatoes, and you’ve got yourself a dinner fit for the occasion. Or you might use lamb as my relatives do on Easter, and make shells of ground meat and bulghur wheat, filled with more lamb and cubes of fat, and then gently simmered in a yogurt soup of rice and stock.
But this year Easter has turned my mind to Italy, and to simple dishes of homely fare. Don’t get me wrong – the pharaohs may have died content in the knowledge that their pyramids survived them, but I shall be happy if the untold generations of pigs, cows, and sheep to come tremble in horror at my name. But for some reason I don’t feel like eating the usual things this time. Perhaps it’s the knowledge that spring is upon us after a grim winter, and the cultivated delights of the summer season finally within reach. Or maybe there’s something about the poignant simplicity of the Resurrection story that has turned my stomach towards the Roman heartland. Or maybe I’m just feeling fat. Whatever it is, I have no desire to hew a great joint of flesh on that most holy of Sundays.
Instead, I find myself walking to my local deli for Alici marinati – that is to say, marinated anchovies. Before you recoil, these aren’t the tinned terrors of pizza fame – though even those are wonderful melted in oil with garlic and parsley as a pasta sauce, or draped over dough with olives for a pisalladiere. These are lightly preserved fish, with much more substance and bite than their desiccated cousins. When chopped roughly, combined with mashed and boiled potatoes, raisins, garlic, parsley, pecorino cheese, bread crumbs, and an egg or two, and then shaped into rough balls fried in extra virgin olive oil, they become real delicacies fit for the Easter table, and with just as much symbolic legitimacy as lamb has ever had.
But fritters alone aren’t enough for Easter – it is, after all, a celebration. And so I’ve got a stuffed pizza as well, with dough made of salt, water, flour and yeast kneaded until substantial enough to stretch until almost transparent, and then filled with broccoli stewed in copious olive oil and garlic mixed with the freshest, fullest fat ricotta I could find. And if even that wasn’t enough (and to be clear, I’m eating all this myself), I also filled little dough paunches of cornmeal, flour, olive oil, and milk with good mozzarella, imported proscuitto, and a few dices of sun dried tomato and parmesan, before folding in a half moon shape and frying in yet more olive oil. It’s true that none of these are as sublimely dramatic as a glorious leg of lamb coming out of the oven, but they’re wonderful all the same.
No Easter meal is finished without dessert, and in this case a plate of cheese or a few ripe fruits won’t do, I’m afraid – those are good enough for the normal table, or even Sunday lunch, but not for such a feast. Of course, brioche is perhaps the most symbolic of Easter foods, traditionally representing the triumphant return of eggs to the diet after the Lenten fast. Many people I know make types of cookies, rich with butter and sugar, for the feast. But for my family, Easter has always meant ghadayif. This famed and usually home baked sweet of the middle east and Greece is simple and rich – it’s made by rubbing shredded filo dough in melted and cooled butter, and then sandwiching a mix of walnuts, cinnamon, and sugar between two layers of the dough in a casserole before baking until golden, and then dousing while warm in a heavy sugar or honey syrup until all the sweet liquid is absorbed. When cut into crunchy and sodden squares, and piled onto plates with yet more syrup and honey, it’s a real effort not to eat the entire casserole yourself. And I’ve failed that test of self control many a time.
So stuffed, happy, and with sufficient leftovers for the week, let me wish everyone out there (Christian or not) a happy Easter. Though we might not be able to share the religious holiday, the great thing about most foods is that they’re usually ecumenical – and gladly, even if our minds disagree, are stomachs can be in joyful communion. So happy Easter, and good eating – I’ll be back next week with a less festive menu.
The best religious symbols are the tasty ones. Lamb is at the forefront of them – amply laden with Christian theology and yet delicious at the same time. Certainly, there’s much to like about celebrating spring with a large leg of the docile beast, dotted with fragrant full cloves of garlic and lovingly rubbed with thyme and olive oil - or with little cutlets of lamb stuffed with a bare slice of strong sheep’s milk feta and doused in freshly ground black pepper. Served with a robust puy lentil salad that’s dressed simply with lemon and oil or perhaps with a few boiled and then roasted potatoes, and you’ve got yourself a dinner fit for the occasion. Or you might use lamb as my relatives do on Easter, and make shells of ground meat and bulghur wheat, filled with more lamb and cubes of fat, and then gently simmered in a yogurt soup of rice and stock.
But this year Easter has turned my mind to Italy, and to simple dishes of homely fare. Don’t get me wrong – the pharaohs may have died content in the knowledge that their pyramids survived them, but I shall be happy if the untold generations of pigs, cows, and sheep to come tremble in horror at my name. But for some reason I don’t feel like eating the usual things this time. Perhaps it’s the knowledge that spring is upon us after a grim winter, and the cultivated delights of the summer season finally within reach. Or maybe there’s something about the poignant simplicity of the Resurrection story that has turned my stomach towards the Roman heartland. Or maybe I’m just feeling fat. Whatever it is, I have no desire to hew a great joint of flesh on that most holy of Sundays.
Instead, I find myself walking to my local deli for Alici marinati – that is to say, marinated anchovies. Before you recoil, these aren’t the tinned terrors of pizza fame – though even those are wonderful melted in oil with garlic and parsley as a pasta sauce, or draped over dough with olives for a pisalladiere. These are lightly preserved fish, with much more substance and bite than their desiccated cousins. When chopped roughly, combined with mashed and boiled potatoes, raisins, garlic, parsley, pecorino cheese, bread crumbs, and an egg or two, and then shaped into rough balls fried in extra virgin olive oil, they become real delicacies fit for the Easter table, and with just as much symbolic legitimacy as lamb has ever had.
But fritters alone aren’t enough for Easter – it is, after all, a celebration. And so I’ve got a stuffed pizza as well, with dough made of salt, water, flour and yeast kneaded until substantial enough to stretch until almost transparent, and then filled with broccoli stewed in copious olive oil and garlic mixed with the freshest, fullest fat ricotta I could find. And if even that wasn’t enough (and to be clear, I’m eating all this myself), I also filled little dough paunches of cornmeal, flour, olive oil, and milk with good mozzarella, imported proscuitto, and a few dices of sun dried tomato and parmesan, before folding in a half moon shape and frying in yet more olive oil. It’s true that none of these are as sublimely dramatic as a glorious leg of lamb coming out of the oven, but they’re wonderful all the same.
No Easter meal is finished without dessert, and in this case a plate of cheese or a few ripe fruits won’t do, I’m afraid – those are good enough for the normal table, or even Sunday lunch, but not for such a feast. Of course, brioche is perhaps the most symbolic of Easter foods, traditionally representing the triumphant return of eggs to the diet after the Lenten fast. Many people I know make types of cookies, rich with butter and sugar, for the feast. But for my family, Easter has always meant ghadayif. This famed and usually home baked sweet of the middle east and Greece is simple and rich – it’s made by rubbing shredded filo dough in melted and cooled butter, and then sandwiching a mix of walnuts, cinnamon, and sugar between two layers of the dough in a casserole before baking until golden, and then dousing while warm in a heavy sugar or honey syrup until all the sweet liquid is absorbed. When cut into crunchy and sodden squares, and piled onto plates with yet more syrup and honey, it’s a real effort not to eat the entire casserole yourself. And I’ve failed that test of self control many a time.
So stuffed, happy, and with sufficient leftovers for the week, let me wish everyone out there (Christian or not) a happy Easter. Though we might not be able to share the religious holiday, the great thing about most foods is that they’re usually ecumenical – and gladly, even if our minds disagree, are stomachs can be in joyful communion. So happy Easter, and good eating – I’ll be back next week with a less festive menu.
4/05/2004
Restaurant Reviews in the guise of an essay
It might surprise my readers to hear that I don’t like restaurants very much, as a general rule. They’re often expensive and pretentious, or bad, or crowded, or too trendy. In most cases, I can make a version of whatever they’re serving that’s better than theirs, or at least more suited to my tastes and for far less money. And yet, I do occasionally eat out, and it’s not always a mistake.
I’ll happily eat out, for example, when I think that the chef has a special expertise with ingredients I’m not familiar with cooking– this tends to happen with pricier French style restaurants. In this vein, I recently visited Bistro 123 in Vienna, Virginia, a decent little Parisian type restaurant that tastes much better than its strip mall location suggests at first glance. And though most of the meats are probably best avoided, the grilled boar being saved only by generous slatherings of a juniper tinged butter sauce, the kitchen does a commendable number on its sweetbreads cooked a la meuniere – that is to say, dipped in flour and fried in flavorful butter until crispy, and served simply with a lemon sauce and capers. Even if the bread I greedily mopped up the dish with wasn’t the best, and the restaurant desperately needs a more classical baker (key lime pie after a menu of escargots and sweetbreads?), this is the kind of meal I don’t mind heading out for. It’s very unlikely I’ll find sweetbreads I can trust in a supermarket, or anywhere else, and once I find them I’m not entirely sure how to clean them – hiring a chef to do the work for me seems like the best plan.
I’ll also eat authentic ethnic foods out with little guilt. To be sure, I’ve grown a little tired of normal Americanized Chinese food, which also has a tendency to be exceedingly greasy for some reason, but I still love the spectrum of flavors that cuisine relies on. A neat solution in the Virginia suburbs can be found at a real hidden gem – A&J’s restaurant in Annandale, which serves cooked to order dim sum all day. As far as I could tell, A&J make few compromises for the American palate, given the menu full of pig’s ears and beef tendon, and their cooking is better for it. And while those items are exotic, as far as Americans go, their best dishes are actually quite accessible – a stingingly spicy cucumber salad, laced with hot peppers and half cloves of garlic, was delicious for example, as were their scallion pancakes, handmade vegetable dumplings, and pan fried vegetable rolls, all of which needed just the tiniest enlivening drops of soy sauce for full effect. A&J also caters to those interested in soups – I found both the pork and radish broth and the cabbage and bean curd soup to be unexpected and diverting surprises, especially when eaten with one of the aforementioned fried doughs, or with their pungent smoked chicken and a few seasoned peanuts. With prices per plate averaging something around 3 dollars, you’re hardly likely to go broke trying everything out ; none of my visits broke 20 dollars for two.
Similar inexpensive pleasures await the hungry luncher at Amma’s Vegetarian Kitchen, also in Vienna, Virginia. Though the affable host’s English seems to only extend to the words “lentil” and “spicy”, his tiny kitchen in the back turns out really quite amazing meatless Indian food, including the absolute jewel of his menu, a giant crepe like dosa stuffed with spiced potatoes for just $4.99. In fact, the dosa is so good that it fulfills both reasons to eat out I’ve mentioned so far – none of my efforts to recreate the lentil and flour crunchiness of the Indian speciality have been very successful, and with the cooking lesson so inexpensive, I think it’s folly to turn it aside. But if you’re not up for dosa, the restaurant prepares a wide range of pulses and beans in a variety of pungent stews, pastes, and patties, all characterized by real, substantial, heat. Of those, though, my favorite was definitely the chick peas, especially when accompanied by a large round of freshly baked bread and a cup of salty yogurt lassi. Simple, yes, but also well under $10, honestly made, and delicious.
Finally, I’ll eat out when I have to. Most often, this happens at airports – I get incredibly hungry while waiting for things to happen, and with airport quality trending dramatically upwards in the past decade, these hunger pangs no longer have to be assuaged with furtively crunched bars of inferior chocolate. Ronald Reagan Airport in DC is a great example of this dramatic recent improvement. Once the province of institutional style cooking, the airport now boasts a series of quite decent restaurants at locally acceptable prices. By far the best I’ve seen so far, though, is the Legal Seafoods tucked next to the entrance to gates 35 (or so) to 45. Sure, it’s important to be skeptical of chain restaurants, , but when a chain can produce the first oyster po’boy I’ve ever had that was more about the powerful taste of shellfish then about the comforting savor of batter, I can have no objection. And when that sublimity is accompanied by some entirely respectable French fries, so rarely found in restaurants, my potential objections turn necessarily to praise. Barring a duty free shop, money and caviar, or a few boxes of European chocolate and perhaps a cognac at a Continental airport, I’m not sure you can eat much better before flying - and after all, is there anything more amusing then smiling benevolently at your fellow passengers while they desperately gnaw at their gummy meals in the plane, stuffed to the brim with quality vittles?
Of course, I’ll sometimes eat out from laziness. I’ll be tired or unimaginative. I’ll get a pizza from Pinocchio’s, just outside my front door. I’ll go fetch some sushi late at night, or perhaps a putatively Mexican style wrap filled with beans and inexpensive cheese. But usually I keep my dining out to the occasions I mention above. There’s been a certain banalization of dining out, I think, that makes home meals less exciting and restaurants less memorable, and I think it’s bad for both sides. If I can work on reversing the trend, at least in my life, that’ll be a victory for food – and it’s rules like the above that might make it happen.
It might surprise my readers to hear that I don’t like restaurants very much, as a general rule. They’re often expensive and pretentious, or bad, or crowded, or too trendy. In most cases, I can make a version of whatever they’re serving that’s better than theirs, or at least more suited to my tastes and for far less money. And yet, I do occasionally eat out, and it’s not always a mistake.
I’ll happily eat out, for example, when I think that the chef has a special expertise with ingredients I’m not familiar with cooking– this tends to happen with pricier French style restaurants. In this vein, I recently visited Bistro 123 in Vienna, Virginia, a decent little Parisian type restaurant that tastes much better than its strip mall location suggests at first glance. And though most of the meats are probably best avoided, the grilled boar being saved only by generous slatherings of a juniper tinged butter sauce, the kitchen does a commendable number on its sweetbreads cooked a la meuniere – that is to say, dipped in flour and fried in flavorful butter until crispy, and served simply with a lemon sauce and capers. Even if the bread I greedily mopped up the dish with wasn’t the best, and the restaurant desperately needs a more classical baker (key lime pie after a menu of escargots and sweetbreads?), this is the kind of meal I don’t mind heading out for. It’s very unlikely I’ll find sweetbreads I can trust in a supermarket, or anywhere else, and once I find them I’m not entirely sure how to clean them – hiring a chef to do the work for me seems like the best plan.
I’ll also eat authentic ethnic foods out with little guilt. To be sure, I’ve grown a little tired of normal Americanized Chinese food, which also has a tendency to be exceedingly greasy for some reason, but I still love the spectrum of flavors that cuisine relies on. A neat solution in the Virginia suburbs can be found at a real hidden gem – A&J’s restaurant in Annandale, which serves cooked to order dim sum all day. As far as I could tell, A&J make few compromises for the American palate, given the menu full of pig’s ears and beef tendon, and their cooking is better for it. And while those items are exotic, as far as Americans go, their best dishes are actually quite accessible – a stingingly spicy cucumber salad, laced with hot peppers and half cloves of garlic, was delicious for example, as were their scallion pancakes, handmade vegetable dumplings, and pan fried vegetable rolls, all of which needed just the tiniest enlivening drops of soy sauce for full effect. A&J also caters to those interested in soups – I found both the pork and radish broth and the cabbage and bean curd soup to be unexpected and diverting surprises, especially when eaten with one of the aforementioned fried doughs, or with their pungent smoked chicken and a few seasoned peanuts. With prices per plate averaging something around 3 dollars, you’re hardly likely to go broke trying everything out ; none of my visits broke 20 dollars for two.
Similar inexpensive pleasures await the hungry luncher at Amma’s Vegetarian Kitchen, also in Vienna, Virginia. Though the affable host’s English seems to only extend to the words “lentil” and “spicy”, his tiny kitchen in the back turns out really quite amazing meatless Indian food, including the absolute jewel of his menu, a giant crepe like dosa stuffed with spiced potatoes for just $4.99. In fact, the dosa is so good that it fulfills both reasons to eat out I’ve mentioned so far – none of my efforts to recreate the lentil and flour crunchiness of the Indian speciality have been very successful, and with the cooking lesson so inexpensive, I think it’s folly to turn it aside. But if you’re not up for dosa, the restaurant prepares a wide range of pulses and beans in a variety of pungent stews, pastes, and patties, all characterized by real, substantial, heat. Of those, though, my favorite was definitely the chick peas, especially when accompanied by a large round of freshly baked bread and a cup of salty yogurt lassi. Simple, yes, but also well under $10, honestly made, and delicious.
Finally, I’ll eat out when I have to. Most often, this happens at airports – I get incredibly hungry while waiting for things to happen, and with airport quality trending dramatically upwards in the past decade, these hunger pangs no longer have to be assuaged with furtively crunched bars of inferior chocolate. Ronald Reagan Airport in DC is a great example of this dramatic recent improvement. Once the province of institutional style cooking, the airport now boasts a series of quite decent restaurants at locally acceptable prices. By far the best I’ve seen so far, though, is the Legal Seafoods tucked next to the entrance to gates 35 (or so) to 45. Sure, it’s important to be skeptical of chain restaurants, , but when a chain can produce the first oyster po’boy I’ve ever had that was more about the powerful taste of shellfish then about the comforting savor of batter, I can have no objection. And when that sublimity is accompanied by some entirely respectable French fries, so rarely found in restaurants, my potential objections turn necessarily to praise. Barring a duty free shop, money and caviar, or a few boxes of European chocolate and perhaps a cognac at a Continental airport, I’m not sure you can eat much better before flying - and after all, is there anything more amusing then smiling benevolently at your fellow passengers while they desperately gnaw at their gummy meals in the plane, stuffed to the brim with quality vittles?
Of course, I’ll sometimes eat out from laziness. I’ll be tired or unimaginative. I’ll get a pizza from Pinocchio’s, just outside my front door. I’ll go fetch some sushi late at night, or perhaps a putatively Mexican style wrap filled with beans and inexpensive cheese. But usually I keep my dining out to the occasions I mention above. There’s been a certain banalization of dining out, I think, that makes home meals less exciting and restaurants less memorable, and I think it’s bad for both sides. If I can work on reversing the trend, at least in my life, that’ll be a victory for food – and it’s rules like the above that might make it happen.
3/29/2004
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.
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.
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.
3/22/2004
Brioche
Make a dough starter as below,but with 2 tablespoons of water, 1 of sugar, and only 1 egg and 1/2 cup of flour. Let this sit for a day and a night.
Add 1 cup of flour, 2 TB of sugar, some more yeast, 2 large eggs, cold, and 8 tablespoons (113 grams) of very soft butter. (you can go up to 200 grams of butter with no problem, though I think this is overkill). Combine it all at once by hand, making sure everything is well incorporated, and beat with a spoon until smooth. You're not going to be able to knead this dough, because it will be very soft, so you'll have to just beat it until the glutens are developed. Let rise for two hours, deflate, and put in the fridge for another hour. Deflate again, and bag it in an oiled bag, and age for 6 hours to 2 days, to develop more flavor. Deflate again, shape into whatever form you like (I like braids on these things) and bake in an oven at 350 for as long as the challah. Make sure the brioche is glazed with egg beforehand.
(both challah and brioche recipes are from Beranbaum's "The Bread Bible"
Make a dough starter as below,but with 2 tablespoons of water, 1 of sugar, and only 1 egg and 1/2 cup of flour. Let this sit for a day and a night.
Add 1 cup of flour, 2 TB of sugar, some more yeast, 2 large eggs, cold, and 8 tablespoons (113 grams) of very soft butter. (you can go up to 200 grams of butter with no problem, though I think this is overkill). Combine it all at once by hand, making sure everything is well incorporated, and beat with a spoon until smooth. You're not going to be able to knead this dough, because it will be very soft, so you'll have to just beat it until the glutens are developed. Let rise for two hours, deflate, and put in the fridge for another hour. Deflate again, and bag it in an oiled bag, and age for 6 hours to 2 days, to develop more flavor. Deflate again, shape into whatever form you like (I like braids on these things) and bake in an oven at 350 for as long as the challah. Make sure the brioche is glazed with egg beforehand.
(both challah and brioche recipes are from Beranbaum's "The Bread Bible"
Challah
Make a dough starter with 1 cup of flour, 1 teaspoon of yeast, water, 2 tablespoons of honey, and three large eggs. Mix all these together leave for a day and night in the fridge. It should look like very thick batter - not dough.
The next day, combine 4 2/3 cups of flour, more instant yeast, salt, 2 large eggs, 1/3 cup corn oil, 6 tablespoons honey, an 1 tablespoon cider vinegar, as well as the dough starter. Knead for about five minutes, and let rest for 20 minutes, so that it becomes easier to handle. Knead for five more minutes until the dough is almost rubber like.
Let the dough rise once. Deflate, and let it rise again. Deflate again, and shape into three long ropes. Braid the ropes, and glaze the whole thing with lightly beaten egg. Let rise this way for an hour, preheat the oven to 350, and bake the challah for about 50 minutes, with the last half hour protected by a tent of foil to keep it from burning. Make sure to glaze again before putting in the oven.
Make a dough starter with 1 cup of flour, 1 teaspoon of yeast, water, 2 tablespoons of honey, and three large eggs. Mix all these together leave for a day and night in the fridge. It should look like very thick batter - not dough.
The next day, combine 4 2/3 cups of flour, more instant yeast, salt, 2 large eggs, 1/3 cup corn oil, 6 tablespoons honey, an 1 tablespoon cider vinegar, as well as the dough starter. Knead for about five minutes, and let rest for 20 minutes, so that it becomes easier to handle. Knead for five more minutes until the dough is almost rubber like.
Let the dough rise once. Deflate, and let it rise again. Deflate again, and shape into three long ropes. Braid the ropes, and glaze the whole thing with lightly beaten egg. Let rise this way for an hour, preheat the oven to 350, and bake the challah for about 50 minutes, with the last half hour protected by a tent of foil to keep it from burning. Make sure to glaze again before putting in the oven.
3/21/2004
Date and Walnut Bread
2 cups whole wheat flour
2 tsp baking powder
2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp ground cloves
pinch of salt
6 tbs butter
1/2 cup dark brown sugar (again, the raw cane variety that's still full
of molasses)
2 eggs, beaten
1/2 cup milk
1 cup chopped dates
1/2 cup chopped walnuts
2 tsp orange zest
Sift together the flour, baking powder and spices. Beat the butter with
the sugar, then add the eggs. Gradually add flour and milk. Mix in nuts
and orange zest. Pour into a buttered and floured cake tin and bake at
160 Celsius for 60-75 minutes (depends on your oven). You can eat it
plain or with butter (or peanut butter), and you can even toast it if
you have any left over that's getting stale.
2 cups whole wheat flour
2 tsp baking powder
2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp ground cloves
pinch of salt
6 tbs butter
1/2 cup dark brown sugar (again, the raw cane variety that's still full
of molasses)
2 eggs, beaten
1/2 cup milk
1 cup chopped dates
1/2 cup chopped walnuts
2 tsp orange zest
Sift together the flour, baking powder and spices. Beat the butter with
the sugar, then add the eggs. Gradually add flour and milk. Mix in nuts
and orange zest. Pour into a buttered and floured cake tin and bake at
160 Celsius for 60-75 minutes (depends on your oven). You can eat it
plain or with butter (or peanut butter), and you can even toast it if
you have any left over that's getting stale.
Pumpkin and Orange Breakfast Cake with a Fresh Orange Syrup
Recipe courtesy of Regan Daley's In the Sweet Kitchen (Artisan, 2001)
Cake:
1 cup unsalted butter, at room temperature
1 cup granulated sugar
2 tablespoons finely grated orange zest
3 large eggs, 2 of them separated, all at room temperature
1 cup pumpkin puree, homemade or pure canned solid-pack pumpkin (not
"pumpkin pie filling")
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 cup cake flour (not self-rising)
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
Syrup:
Juice of 1 large juice orange, such as Seville
1/2 cup granulated sugar
Additional unsalted butter, at room temperature, for greasing the
pan
Thick vanilla yogurt or vanilla ice cream, to serve
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Butter a 9-inch fluted tube pan
and set it aside. Cream the butter, sugar, and orange
zest together until light and fluffy. Add the whole egg and the two
egg yolks, one at a time, beating well and scraping
down the sides of the bowl between each addition. Beat in the
pumpkin puree.
Sift together the flours, baking powder, and salt. Add to the
pumpkin batter in three or four stages, blending gently but
thoroughly after each. Stir in the final addition of dry ingredients
by hand if you have been using a mixer, so as not to
overwork the batter. In a clean small bowl, whip the egg whites
until they hold soft peaks. Fold into the batter, then
scrape the batter into the prepared pan and smooth the surface. Bake
in the center of the oven for 50 to 60 minutes, or
until the top of the cake is springy when lightly touched, the sides
are beginning to pull away from the sides of the pan
and a wooden skewer inserted in the center of the cake comes out
clean. Cool in the pan for 10 minutes, then invert
onto a wire rack and cool completely. This cake keeps very well for
several days, well wrapped, and it freezes
beautifully for up to 2 months.
For the syrup, combine the orange juice and sugar in a small
saucepan over low heat and stir until the sugar has
dissolved. Increase the heat, bringing the syrup to a boil. Boil
without stirring for 2 minutes, then use immediately, or
allow to cool and refrigerate for up to 3 days (reheat gently).
To serve, place one slice of the pumpkin orange cake on each plate.
Spoon a few tablespoons of the warm syrup over
each piece, and accompany with a scoop of thick vanilla yogurt (for
breakfast) or ice cream (for dessert).
Yield: Makes 10 servings
Recipe courtesy of Regan Daley's In the Sweet Kitchen (Artisan, 2001)
Cake:
1 cup unsalted butter, at room temperature
1 cup granulated sugar
2 tablespoons finely grated orange zest
3 large eggs, 2 of them separated, all at room temperature
1 cup pumpkin puree, homemade or pure canned solid-pack pumpkin (not
"pumpkin pie filling")
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 cup cake flour (not self-rising)
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
Syrup:
Juice of 1 large juice orange, such as Seville
1/2 cup granulated sugar
Additional unsalted butter, at room temperature, for greasing the
pan
Thick vanilla yogurt or vanilla ice cream, to serve
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Butter a 9-inch fluted tube pan
and set it aside. Cream the butter, sugar, and orange
zest together until light and fluffy. Add the whole egg and the two
egg yolks, one at a time, beating well and scraping
down the sides of the bowl between each addition. Beat in the
pumpkin puree.
Sift together the flours, baking powder, and salt. Add to the
pumpkin batter in three or four stages, blending gently but
thoroughly after each. Stir in the final addition of dry ingredients
by hand if you have been using a mixer, so as not to
overwork the batter. In a clean small bowl, whip the egg whites
until they hold soft peaks. Fold into the batter, then
scrape the batter into the prepared pan and smooth the surface. Bake
in the center of the oven for 50 to 60 minutes, or
until the top of the cake is springy when lightly touched, the sides
are beginning to pull away from the sides of the pan
and a wooden skewer inserted in the center of the cake comes out
clean. Cool in the pan for 10 minutes, then invert
onto a wire rack and cool completely. This cake keeps very well for
several days, well wrapped, and it freezes
beautifully for up to 2 months.
For the syrup, combine the orange juice and sugar in a small
saucepan over low heat and stir until the sugar has
dissolved. Increase the heat, bringing the syrup to a boil. Boil
without stirring for 2 minutes, then use immediately, or
allow to cool and refrigerate for up to 3 days (reheat gently).
To serve, place one slice of the pumpkin orange cake on each plate.
Spoon a few tablespoons of the warm syrup over
each piece, and accompany with a scoop of thick vanilla yogurt (for
breakfast) or ice cream (for dessert).
Yield: Makes 10 servings
Kedgeree
2 hard boiled eggs eggs
680 undyed smoked haddock
2 fresh bay leaves
170 g long grain or basmati rice
110 g butter or ghee
ginger
1 medium onion
1 clove garlic
2 tablespoons curry powder, or a tiny bit of saffron, or turmeric
1 tablespoon mustard seeds
2 tomatoes, deseeded and chopped
juice of 2 lemons
coriander
1 red chili.
The fish should be boiled for a few minutes with the bay leaves in a little water - when it cools, just pull the meat off the fish and flake into chunks. Cook the rice however you like, though I prefer to boil quickly in salted water, and then let steam in a closed pot for twenty minutes. If you're using the saffron or the turmeric, throw it in with the rice. Then melt the butter or ghee in a pan, sofften the ginger, onion, and harlic, and add the mustard seeds and curry powder. For for a few more minutes, and add the tomatoes and lemon juice. Add the quarter eggs, fish meat, and rice to the pan, toss, and eat with the chopped coriander.
2 hard boiled eggs eggs
680 undyed smoked haddock
2 fresh bay leaves
170 g long grain or basmati rice
110 g butter or ghee
ginger
1 medium onion
1 clove garlic
2 tablespoons curry powder, or a tiny bit of saffron, or turmeric
1 tablespoon mustard seeds
2 tomatoes, deseeded and chopped
juice of 2 lemons
coriander
1 red chili.
The fish should be boiled for a few minutes with the bay leaves in a little water - when it cools, just pull the meat off the fish and flake into chunks. Cook the rice however you like, though I prefer to boil quickly in salted water, and then let steam in a closed pot for twenty minutes. If you're using the saffron or the turmeric, throw it in with the rice. Then melt the butter or ghee in a pan, sofften the ginger, onion, and harlic, and add the mustard seeds and curry powder. For for a few more minutes, and add the tomatoes and lemon juice. Add the quarter eggs, fish meat, and rice to the pan, toss, and eat with the chopped coriander.
3/14/2004
Professor Bainbridge has this intriguing recipe for lamb in puff pastry. I should note that replacing the lamb with beef would yield the much maligned Beef Wellington, which I actually enjoy very much. Maybe this is the Professor's sneaky attempt to rehabilitate the old stalwart.
Cooking for one is a real challenge. More accurately, it's a challenge if you care at all about being efficient. If cooking 5 separate meals per work week doesn't bother you, then cooking for one is theoretically simple - you find five meals you're interested in eating, and cook them in turn. However, it's clear that cooking in this kind of ad hoc way presents several problems. You end up buying too much food, it's hard to think of five discrete meals every single week, and it takes a lot of time. Unless you happen to be home all day, and few people who are cooking for one can afford to do that, there has to be a better answer. Otherwise, it's all to easy to stumble out of your front door in the direction of the nearest pizza joint, which for me happens to be exactly 5 yards due west of my apartment.
I organize my cooking around a theme dish or ingredient every week. Quite often, it's a recipe I've just learned, or a recipe I've recently read something interesting about. Other times, I chose an old favorite, a food I know backwards and forwards. In keeping with a few recent posts, a common "week centerpiece" for me is a roast chicken. Indeed, a chicken is one of the most versatile of core ingredients. Well stuffed with thyme, and rubbed with olive oil, salt, pepper, and lemon, a chicken yields not only a hot, crisp, delicous skin, to be stuffed unceremoniously in my mouth just as the unfortunate bird emerges from the oven, but also a fragrant and considerable flesh, which can be used in sandwiches, pot pies, risotto, rice, pasta, and even pizzas. The roasting juices are almost unholy when used to dress pasta along with pine nuts and raisins in the jewish fashion, or tipped into a pan to roast crispy deeply flavorful fingerling potatoes. The carcass, now stripped clean, should be boiled for a couple of hours along with a carrot, onion, and bouqet of strong herbs, which yields a wonderful stock with which to make your risotto, or provides a particularly tasty base for an invigorating vietnamese style soup, spiked with roughly chopped chilis, ginger, and coriander. Since there ought to be some thyme left over, and since there is probably an extra mushroom or two post risotto, weeks like this usually end for me with a large portabello stuffed generously with thyme butter, roasted for ten minutes, and then jammed into a soft roll lined with spicy mustard and sopped in the buttery mushroom juices left in the oven pan. Of course, the fact that there are some potatoes likely around means that a sort of omlette with diced oil-softened tubers is a back-up possibility on Friday night, if I've run out of other things to eat. The goal, in other words, is to be left with an utterly empty refrigerator by the end of the week, except for a few condiments and other staples.
My menu for this week is not quite so complex, but I think it happens to be equally good. As previous posts have shown, I rather enjoy bread. But man can't live by bread alone, it's been said, and actually I agree that even the best crispy hand made fugasse or baguette can become tiresome if you eat nothing else all week. But a good bread, accompanied by a soup, perhaps, can really be a treat. Of course ,it's even better if the bread is a substantial player itself, especially if you're unable to make a really first class loaf in your home kitchen (I certainy can't). A prosciutto ring, I think (which I much prefer called "lard bread"), is the perfect answer - forgiving, easy, and bold. In a large bowl, just combine 2 cups plus 3 tablespoons of flour, 1 tablespoon of honey, some instant yeast, coarsely ground black pepper to taste, 3/4 teaspoon of salt, and 3/4 cup of prosciutto, the Italian ham. Add about a cup of water and knead the dough aggressively for about ten minutes, until quite elastic. Roll into a long rope, about 18 inches, and shape into a ring (my cookbook says that the ring will be about 7 inches in diameter with a 3 inch hole in the centre, but I never take such measurements seriously). All the bread to rise for an hour, and glaze with four teaspoons of bacon fat, which you've acquired by frying two rashers of thick bacon in a pan for a few minutes. Put in a preheated oven, and bake for about about 30 minutes, monitoring the heat to make sure it isn't burning. Once you pull the beautiful ring out of the oven, glaze it again with fat, and leave to cool entirely.
The main part of the week's food made, it's now important to pair this with the right things. Of course, you should make a BLT with the bacon you rendered: no one else in your workplace or school will have such a nice lunch, and you're saved from wasting perfectly good food. To go with the ring, however, I'd think you need to think hard about the prosciutto and the bacon - you need soups that work with those ingredients. Thankfully, there are dozens. My favorite, though, is a shocking bright green pea soup, best made with frozen petit pois, chicken stock, a head of garlic roasted in the oven for an hour with oil, and maybe half a pint of cream or half and half, all cooked together for about ten minutes and then processed in either a machine or by one of those wonderful hand held puree-ers. While you're at it, of course, the remaining cream can be salvaged by using it to replace the sour cream in the blueberry muffins I've posted just below, for which you should have enough flour from bread leftovers, or simply as a delicious replacement for milk in the morning oatmeal, which of course should be made even better by directing the remaining few berries into the service of a coulis. In case the pea soup isn't enough, though, I've had great success throwing a handful of lentils in a pot with some water, spinach, and lemon juice - as even the French know, the earthiness of lentil is a perfect match for smoked pork, though if lentils aren't your thing a simple tomato soup or gazpacho would work perfectly, especially if you've been clever enough to remember a little basil in your soup.
The really astonishing thing with all this is that it won't cost me more than $40 for the week, and I can make all the food I need in a couple hours on Sunday, supplemented with a few minutes of effort during the week. Sure, I could eat out all the time - but that would be expensive and time consuming, and certainly not healthy. I could also buy ready to eat foods, but I hate spending money on food I can make better myself, if I even could be sure what was in that stuff to begin with. So yes, part of all is comes from the fact that I'm both poor and cheap - but it's also a good idea, I think, especially since the effort required isn't all that much.
I organize my cooking around a theme dish or ingredient every week. Quite often, it's a recipe I've just learned, or a recipe I've recently read something interesting about. Other times, I chose an old favorite, a food I know backwards and forwards. In keeping with a few recent posts, a common "week centerpiece" for me is a roast chicken. Indeed, a chicken is one of the most versatile of core ingredients. Well stuffed with thyme, and rubbed with olive oil, salt, pepper, and lemon, a chicken yields not only a hot, crisp, delicous skin, to be stuffed unceremoniously in my mouth just as the unfortunate bird emerges from the oven, but also a fragrant and considerable flesh, which can be used in sandwiches, pot pies, risotto, rice, pasta, and even pizzas. The roasting juices are almost unholy when used to dress pasta along with pine nuts and raisins in the jewish fashion, or tipped into a pan to roast crispy deeply flavorful fingerling potatoes. The carcass, now stripped clean, should be boiled for a couple of hours along with a carrot, onion, and bouqet of strong herbs, which yields a wonderful stock with which to make your risotto, or provides a particularly tasty base for an invigorating vietnamese style soup, spiked with roughly chopped chilis, ginger, and coriander. Since there ought to be some thyme left over, and since there is probably an extra mushroom or two post risotto, weeks like this usually end for me with a large portabello stuffed generously with thyme butter, roasted for ten minutes, and then jammed into a soft roll lined with spicy mustard and sopped in the buttery mushroom juices left in the oven pan. Of course, the fact that there are some potatoes likely around means that a sort of omlette with diced oil-softened tubers is a back-up possibility on Friday night, if I've run out of other things to eat. The goal, in other words, is to be left with an utterly empty refrigerator by the end of the week, except for a few condiments and other staples.
My menu for this week is not quite so complex, but I think it happens to be equally good. As previous posts have shown, I rather enjoy bread. But man can't live by bread alone, it's been said, and actually I agree that even the best crispy hand made fugasse or baguette can become tiresome if you eat nothing else all week. But a good bread, accompanied by a soup, perhaps, can really be a treat. Of course ,it's even better if the bread is a substantial player itself, especially if you're unable to make a really first class loaf in your home kitchen (I certainy can't). A prosciutto ring, I think (which I much prefer called "lard bread"), is the perfect answer - forgiving, easy, and bold. In a large bowl, just combine 2 cups plus 3 tablespoons of flour, 1 tablespoon of honey, some instant yeast, coarsely ground black pepper to taste, 3/4 teaspoon of salt, and 3/4 cup of prosciutto, the Italian ham. Add about a cup of water and knead the dough aggressively for about ten minutes, until quite elastic. Roll into a long rope, about 18 inches, and shape into a ring (my cookbook says that the ring will be about 7 inches in diameter with a 3 inch hole in the centre, but I never take such measurements seriously). All the bread to rise for an hour, and glaze with four teaspoons of bacon fat, which you've acquired by frying two rashers of thick bacon in a pan for a few minutes. Put in a preheated oven, and bake for about about 30 minutes, monitoring the heat to make sure it isn't burning. Once you pull the beautiful ring out of the oven, glaze it again with fat, and leave to cool entirely.
The main part of the week's food made, it's now important to pair this with the right things. Of course, you should make a BLT with the bacon you rendered: no one else in your workplace or school will have such a nice lunch, and you're saved from wasting perfectly good food. To go with the ring, however, I'd think you need to think hard about the prosciutto and the bacon - you need soups that work with those ingredients. Thankfully, there are dozens. My favorite, though, is a shocking bright green pea soup, best made with frozen petit pois, chicken stock, a head of garlic roasted in the oven for an hour with oil, and maybe half a pint of cream or half and half, all cooked together for about ten minutes and then processed in either a machine or by one of those wonderful hand held puree-ers. While you're at it, of course, the remaining cream can be salvaged by using it to replace the sour cream in the blueberry muffins I've posted just below, for which you should have enough flour from bread leftovers, or simply as a delicious replacement for milk in the morning oatmeal, which of course should be made even better by directing the remaining few berries into the service of a coulis. In case the pea soup isn't enough, though, I've had great success throwing a handful of lentils in a pot with some water, spinach, and lemon juice - as even the French know, the earthiness of lentil is a perfect match for smoked pork, though if lentils aren't your thing a simple tomato soup or gazpacho would work perfectly, especially if you've been clever enough to remember a little basil in your soup.
The really astonishing thing with all this is that it won't cost me more than $40 for the week, and I can make all the food I need in a couple hours on Sunday, supplemented with a few minutes of effort during the week. Sure, I could eat out all the time - but that would be expensive and time consuming, and certainly not healthy. I could also buy ready to eat foods, but I hate spending money on food I can make better myself, if I even could be sure what was in that stuff to begin with. So yes, part of all is comes from the fact that I'm both poor and cheap - but it's also a good idea, I think, especially since the effort required isn't all that much.
3/07/2004
A Leavened Life
I really hate the Atkins diet. In all honesty, I dislike all diets that rely on a gimmick. To me, there’s just something terribly myopic about cutting entire swathes of food out of your life because you blame them for your own fatness. Of course, when your health has got so bad that the cabbage soup diet represents a choice between life and death, you might be forced to comply, but in the general case I much prefer moderation to abstention. The Atkins Diet, however, is one of my particular enemies. I don’t have any problem with eating lots of meat – I do it myself, occasionally. But how far have we sunk that the supposed path to health is to cut out breads, pastas, grains and rice, and honeys and sugars from our lives? These are not just good foods – they’re the universal foods. They are the foods upon which human society has been painstakingly built for thousands of years, which are eaten in every part of the world, which represent, to my mind, the very foundations of civilization. Bread especially is how we know we’re civilized, I think – as others have noted, there’s just something special about the very idea of mixing some wheat with water and getting bread.
Having said all that, I think it’s all our duty to fight the Atkins craze until it’s gone the way of all the other crazes of times past. One way to do this is to really understand the astonishing versatility of a loaf. Many people just see bread as something you use in a sandwich, or, sometimes even more depressingly, as merely a way to convey meat and cheese to their mouths (Subway corporation, I’m looking at you!). But a good loaf – a loaf made with real yeast, and good flour, and a little salt, and clean water and nothing else, is something special in of itself. It has a lifespan. It changes over the days. And its uses change too.
So next time you get your hands on a decent loaf of bread (and they’re getting easier and easier to get hold of these days), don’t worry about it slowly going stale. There are uses for it still. On the first day, when it’s still fresh and soft, use it for whatever you want. Recently, I’ve been on a kick of roast chicken sandwiches, though, and made properly, I’m not sure there is a lot that’s better. Usually, after roasting the chicken, of course, I make some mayonnaise by slowly drizzling a mixture of olive and vegetable oil into a beaten egg, whisking all the while with a little salt. It take a lot of oil, but the taste is definitely worth it, especially if you’ve been wise and purchased a fresh ( as possible) free range egg. Then I’ll layer the chicken between two enthusiastic slices of bread (and any kind of good bread will do here, whether it’s a crusty French pain de compagne or an American loaf), slather on giant helpings of the homemade mayonnaise, and top with a sliced tomato and small cornichon pickles. A couple of sandwiches later, there’s often not enough bread for the rest of the week.
If there’s any left, though, the inevitable next step is a Welsh rarebit. By the second day, the bread is drying out a bit. It’s not as fresh, and won’t make as good a sandwich. That’s why it needs some help, and the Welsh version of grilled cheese provides plenty. Unfortunately, there are thousands of recipes for rarebit. Most involve making a roux thickened cheese sauce, with beer, locally made cheddar cheese, butter, milk, and hot English mustard, all of which gets piled on the bread and grilled till charred and sizzling. If you’ve not got the time to mess about with rouxs and sauces, though, I’ve found that just mixing the ingredients, with our without the milk, and pouring over the bread before grilling provides almost as good an experience, and many times faster. Sure, the beer might make the bread too soggy, but I’ve found that some moderation with the beer solves that problem neatly.
If it was a particularly big loaf, you’ll have reached the third day. But now, surely there’s no use for the bread, right? It’s dry. Inedible, surely even too stale for rarebit, and thus for life? Nope. Today is when you whip out your milk, cinnamon, eggs, and maple syrup for some French toast, like I had this morning. Again, there are a lot of recipes for French toast, or what the French (minus the maple syrup), call “lost bread” (pain perdu), but I tend towards the simple by combining the milk and egg, dipping the bread in the mixture, frying it in a good bit of oil or butter, followed by a generous slathering with sugar, spices, and syrup. Sure, there’s all sorts of complications you can go through, but in my life French toast is the quick and easy substitute for pancakes, so I hardly want to muck around with ingredients longer than I have to.
By day four, however, we really are getting desperate. I’m not even sure French toast can revive the bread now. Thankfully, though, God invented breadcrumbs and fish. Just whiz some of the bread in a food processor until it becomes a pile of course crumbs. Tip the bread into a bowl, add freshly grated parmesan, a little cheddar, and a tablespoon of oil. If you’re feeling slightly adventuresome, add a few flakes of red chili. Make sure all the crumbs are damp with the oil, and then spread over the flesh side of a fish filet (I would recommend a thinner kind of white fish, like flounder) before tossing in a warmed oven for about ten minutes, or until the crumbs are golden and crispy. Serve with potatoes of some kind – I like to cut a baking potato into thirds and just roast it in about a tablespoon of oil for an hour, in an desperate and increasingly successful effort to get something close to a French fry without all the accompanying fat.
Finally, you’ve probably got just a little nub of bread left. It’s hard and unappetizing. Even the dog might look at it with considerable suspicion. But it’s still bread. If it was honestly made, it’s still healthy and filling. But what can be done with it? Of course, some might recommend a bread and butter pudding. It certainly would work, but I find that you need to layer on a little too much butter and cream to make it really tasty. No, I’ve recently discovered a simple, fitting end to a loaf of bread, drawn inevitably from the countryside of France. The answer is soup; any soup, in fact. Obviously, the most famous is the French onion, made in my book by frying loads of onions in butter slowly for an hour until caramelized, then tipping into a casserole with filled halfway with water. This then simmers for half an hour before being baked for twice as long in a pan layered with very stale bread, gruyere cheese, and the onion soup mixture. But you can also make something much simpler, which takes about five minutes: just boil a little water, throw in chopped spinach, cook for two minutes until the spinach is well wilted, and pour over a large bowl lined with the bread and garlic. Not only is it healthy, but you’ll be reaching back into the very depths of the 19th century for your meal, and for a solution to your bread’s final day.
This clearly is not the only progression possible for bread. Even in this short essay, I’ve noted alternatives, diverging little paths on the road to taste. The point remains, despite these different roads. Don’t give up on bread because a diet book says so. Don’t give up on bread because it looks to have gone stale. And definitely don’t give up on bread if you’ve spent the extra fifty cents and gotten good honorable bread. Bread, to mock the prison bound Ms. Stewart, is a good thing, and it shouldn’t be jettisoned for the sake of a week’s worth of weight loss.
I really hate the Atkins diet. In all honesty, I dislike all diets that rely on a gimmick. To me, there’s just something terribly myopic about cutting entire swathes of food out of your life because you blame them for your own fatness. Of course, when your health has got so bad that the cabbage soup diet represents a choice between life and death, you might be forced to comply, but in the general case I much prefer moderation to abstention. The Atkins Diet, however, is one of my particular enemies. I don’t have any problem with eating lots of meat – I do it myself, occasionally. But how far have we sunk that the supposed path to health is to cut out breads, pastas, grains and rice, and honeys and sugars from our lives? These are not just good foods – they’re the universal foods. They are the foods upon which human society has been painstakingly built for thousands of years, which are eaten in every part of the world, which represent, to my mind, the very foundations of civilization. Bread especially is how we know we’re civilized, I think – as others have noted, there’s just something special about the very idea of mixing some wheat with water and getting bread.
Having said all that, I think it’s all our duty to fight the Atkins craze until it’s gone the way of all the other crazes of times past. One way to do this is to really understand the astonishing versatility of a loaf. Many people just see bread as something you use in a sandwich, or, sometimes even more depressingly, as merely a way to convey meat and cheese to their mouths (Subway corporation, I’m looking at you!). But a good loaf – a loaf made with real yeast, and good flour, and a little salt, and clean water and nothing else, is something special in of itself. It has a lifespan. It changes over the days. And its uses change too.
So next time you get your hands on a decent loaf of bread (and they’re getting easier and easier to get hold of these days), don’t worry about it slowly going stale. There are uses for it still. On the first day, when it’s still fresh and soft, use it for whatever you want. Recently, I’ve been on a kick of roast chicken sandwiches, though, and made properly, I’m not sure there is a lot that’s better. Usually, after roasting the chicken, of course, I make some mayonnaise by slowly drizzling a mixture of olive and vegetable oil into a beaten egg, whisking all the while with a little salt. It take a lot of oil, but the taste is definitely worth it, especially if you’ve been wise and purchased a fresh ( as possible) free range egg. Then I’ll layer the chicken between two enthusiastic slices of bread (and any kind of good bread will do here, whether it’s a crusty French pain de compagne or an American loaf), slather on giant helpings of the homemade mayonnaise, and top with a sliced tomato and small cornichon pickles. A couple of sandwiches later, there’s often not enough bread for the rest of the week.
If there’s any left, though, the inevitable next step is a Welsh rarebit. By the second day, the bread is drying out a bit. It’s not as fresh, and won’t make as good a sandwich. That’s why it needs some help, and the Welsh version of grilled cheese provides plenty. Unfortunately, there are thousands of recipes for rarebit. Most involve making a roux thickened cheese sauce, with beer, locally made cheddar cheese, butter, milk, and hot English mustard, all of which gets piled on the bread and grilled till charred and sizzling. If you’ve not got the time to mess about with rouxs and sauces, though, I’ve found that just mixing the ingredients, with our without the milk, and pouring over the bread before grilling provides almost as good an experience, and many times faster. Sure, the beer might make the bread too soggy, but I’ve found that some moderation with the beer solves that problem neatly.
If it was a particularly big loaf, you’ll have reached the third day. But now, surely there’s no use for the bread, right? It’s dry. Inedible, surely even too stale for rarebit, and thus for life? Nope. Today is when you whip out your milk, cinnamon, eggs, and maple syrup for some French toast, like I had this morning. Again, there are a lot of recipes for French toast, or what the French (minus the maple syrup), call “lost bread” (pain perdu), but I tend towards the simple by combining the milk and egg, dipping the bread in the mixture, frying it in a good bit of oil or butter, followed by a generous slathering with sugar, spices, and syrup. Sure, there’s all sorts of complications you can go through, but in my life French toast is the quick and easy substitute for pancakes, so I hardly want to muck around with ingredients longer than I have to.
By day four, however, we really are getting desperate. I’m not even sure French toast can revive the bread now. Thankfully, though, God invented breadcrumbs and fish. Just whiz some of the bread in a food processor until it becomes a pile of course crumbs. Tip the bread into a bowl, add freshly grated parmesan, a little cheddar, and a tablespoon of oil. If you’re feeling slightly adventuresome, add a few flakes of red chili. Make sure all the crumbs are damp with the oil, and then spread over the flesh side of a fish filet (I would recommend a thinner kind of white fish, like flounder) before tossing in a warmed oven for about ten minutes, or until the crumbs are golden and crispy. Serve with potatoes of some kind – I like to cut a baking potato into thirds and just roast it in about a tablespoon of oil for an hour, in an desperate and increasingly successful effort to get something close to a French fry without all the accompanying fat.
Finally, you’ve probably got just a little nub of bread left. It’s hard and unappetizing. Even the dog might look at it with considerable suspicion. But it’s still bread. If it was honestly made, it’s still healthy and filling. But what can be done with it? Of course, some might recommend a bread and butter pudding. It certainly would work, but I find that you need to layer on a little too much butter and cream to make it really tasty. No, I’ve recently discovered a simple, fitting end to a loaf of bread, drawn inevitably from the countryside of France. The answer is soup; any soup, in fact. Obviously, the most famous is the French onion, made in my book by frying loads of onions in butter slowly for an hour until caramelized, then tipping into a casserole with filled halfway with water. This then simmers for half an hour before being baked for twice as long in a pan layered with very stale bread, gruyere cheese, and the onion soup mixture. But you can also make something much simpler, which takes about five minutes: just boil a little water, throw in chopped spinach, cook for two minutes until the spinach is well wilted, and pour over a large bowl lined with the bread and garlic. Not only is it healthy, but you’ll be reaching back into the very depths of the 19th century for your meal, and for a solution to your bread’s final day.
This clearly is not the only progression possible for bread. Even in this short essay, I’ve noted alternatives, diverging little paths on the road to taste. The point remains, despite these different roads. Don’t give up on bread because a diet book says so. Don’t give up on bread because it looks to have gone stale. And definitely don’t give up on bread if you’ve spent the extra fifty cents and gotten good honorable bread. Bread, to mock the prison bound Ms. Stewart, is a good thing, and it shouldn’t be jettisoned for the sake of a week’s worth of weight loss.
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