Milk (19 page)

This beautiful quasi-cheese would be a cinch to make if one could find the right sort of cream—which
isn’t
a cinch. Plain heavy cream when chilled yields a result I don’t care for, clayey rather than silky. Most half-and-half won’t set up. The best choice would be cream with about 20 to 25 percent milkfat, nonultrapasteurized and if possible unhomogenized. Some old-fashioned “light cream” fits the bill. Otherwise, use a combination of heavy cream and half-and-half matching the consistency of light cream. I use 2 cups each of half-and-half and heavy cream. (But note that the name “half-and-half” covers products of varied milkfat percentages in different areas; depending on where you live, you may have to experiment with other proportions.)

The uses of mascarpone, beyond the familiar tiramisù, are legion. I love it with dried or fresh fruit, but even more in savory contexts. Try eating it on bread with salt. Or put a dab each of mascarpone and Gorgonzola on bread or crackers for an improvement on the commercial version called
torta.
In
The World of Cheese,
the late
Evan Jones described mascarpone in the Trieste region being given something like the
Liptauer cheese treatment
. This sounds like a wonderful avenue to explore.

YIELD:
About 2½ to 3 cups mascarpone, 1 to ½ cups whey (Proportions will vary with the milkfat content of the cream.)

You will need a double boiler or an equivalent arrangement such as a stainless-steel bowl fitted over a saucepan of water. Start the water warming over medium-low heat. Pour the cream into the top part or bowl and let it slowly heat to about 185°F, checking the temperature at intervals on an instant-read thermometer.

When the temperature reaches 185°F, turn off the heat. Stir in the citric acid and let stand until you see the cream turning decidedly thicker. If this doesn’t happen, very gently stir in another pinch of citric acid.

Have ready a colander lined with tight-woven cheesecloth or a large cotton handkerchief, set over a large bowl. Carefully pour the contents of the top vessel into the colander, and let drain until the whey is barely dripping. Refrigerate the colander arrangement for 8 to 12 hours—having, I hope, first removed anything smelly from the refrigerator.

Turn the mascarpone out into a mixing bowl and beat it smooth with a wooden spoon before packing it into a clean container. It will keep, tightly covered, for 4 to 5 days in the refrigerator.

A
ny claim to present an “authentic” New England clam chowder is a sure way to start a fight about a dish that has had some serious career changes over the years. Today we all associate it with a soul-satisfying hot milk–based
soup enriched with salt pork and full of clams and potatoes. But American chowder in general—the word “chowder” probably comes from a Norman-Breton fish soup called
chaudrée
and the idea seems to go back to eighteenth-century English, French, and North American coast dwellers—seems not to have started off as either a milk-based soup or a soup at all.

Early versions suggest a one-pot meal made by arranging layers of sliced salt pork, cut-up fish, and ship’s biscuits (for thickening) in a pot with some seasoning like onion, adding enough water to cover the ingredients, and simmering the whole thing for an hour until the elements melded into a hearty dish. In the course of the nineteenth century two innovations appeared: the addition of potatoes to the layered ingredients and, starting around the middle of the century, the use of milk to replace all or part of the water—eventually, enough milk to convert the dish into a soup.

I would guess that milk came into the picture in this dish—as it did in much of our cooking—along with the nineteenth-century rise of a specialized dairy industry in the northeastern United States. In any event, the layering idea gradually disappeared along with the ship’s biscuit; New Englanders came to understand “chowder” as a soup made of milk; and the hand-cranked meat grinders that appeared in many households after about 1880 were called into play to grind up the salt pork, onions, and clams before they went into the pot. Awful things happened a few generations after that, eventually leading to the sort of restaurant incarnation that may be almost any hot soup with a clam or two, enough milk to make it white, and enough flour and potatoes to make it nearly solid enough to walk on.

My favorite clam chowder is simply the kind that was considered old-fashioned in my youth. It should have a certain rockbound plainness; I like it more milky than
creamy, and innocent of any seasonings fancier than maybe a bay leaf or some thyme. I thicken it with nothing but the potatoes. If you feel strongly about having it thicker, make up 2 to 3 teaspoons of beurre manié (see
this page
), whisk it into the hot milk, and cook for a couple of minutes until it thickens.

YIELD:
About 6 servings

Shuck the clams or have them shucked by the fishmonger; save the liquor. Rinse away any grit, coarsely chop the clams, and strain the liquor through a cheesecloth-lined strainer.

Put the salt pork in a small soup kettle or large, deep saucepan over medium heat to render out the fat. Cook for 8 to 10 minutes, stirring occasionally, until browned and crisp but not burnt. Scoop the fried bits out of the hot fat and drain on paper towels.

Add the onion to the fat and sauté it over medium heat, stirring occasionally, until translucent. Add the diced potatoes and the strained liquor from the clams. Bring to a boil and cook over medium heat until the potatoes are almost soft enough to disintegrate, about 15 minutes. Mash the potatoes slightly with a wooden spoon (most should still be intact; some will half-dissolve into the cooking liquid).

Heat the milk and cream to a boil and simmer a couple of minutes over very low heat. Add the chopped clams, let the milk return to a boil, and pour it over the potatoes in the soup pot. Taste the chowder for seasoning and add a few grindings of pepper (it probably won’t need salt). Serve at once, garnished with minced parsley and the reserved salt-pork bits.

R
eal cream of tomato soup isn’t worth making with anything but dead-ripe, sweet, juicy local tomatoes in season. Even good canned tomatoes will lack the right summery sprightliness. If a batch of tomatoes is a little wan-flavored, I sometimes resort to a small dollop or two of homemade tomato paste or a combination of regular and sun-dried tomato paste.

Cream may curdle, though not as badly as milk, when heated with an acid solution such as tomato broth unless the mixture is stabilized with some kind of starch. A small amount of beurre manié does the trick here.

YIELD:
About 7 cups

Melt the butter in a medium-sized saucepan over medium heat; when it foams and sizzles, add the shallots and sauté until translucent and tender. Cut the tomatoes into wedges, add to the pan, and simmer, covered, until they are swimming in their own juice, 20 to 25 minutes.

While the tomatoes are cooking, bring the cream to a boil in a small saucepan and let it reduce over low heat to about ½ cup. Heat the stock in another saucepan.

Pour the cooked tomatoes, with their juice, into a heatproof bowl, then work them through a food mill into the pot they cooked in. Discard the skins and seeds. Heat the purée just to a boil and add the hot stock. Whisk the beurre manié into the reduced cream, then whisk into the soup along with the salt; cook just until slightly thickened. Taste for seasoning. If you think it needs a little enrichment or some softening of the acid, add a dollop of tomato paste or, as a last resort, a pinch of sugar. Serve hot, garnishing each serving with a little minced scallion, chives, or parsley.

C
ream soups are best when they have something more than creaminess going for them. A good cold-weather example is this robust sweet-tart combination of apples—use a good local fall variety in season—and onions with some crisp bacon for counterpoint. It’s best when made with a strong, full-flavored beef broth.

YIELD:
8 to 9 cups

Cook the bacon slowly in a heavy skillet to render out all the fat. When it is crisp, scoop it out of the fat and drain on paper towels. Sauté the diced apples over medium heat in the same skillet, stirring occasionally, until cooked through. Scoop out a few spoonfuls of the apples for garnish and set aside.

Melt the butter in a large heavy saucepan. When it foams and sizzles, add the chopped onions and sauté very patiently over low heat, stirring frequently, for 15 to 20 minutes, until the onions are well softened and starting to brown. Scoop out a few spoonfuls for garnish and set aside with the reserved apples. Add the rest of the apples to the onions, pour in the broth, add the allspice, and simmer until everything is nearly dissolved, 10 to 15 minutes.

Fish out and discard the allspice. Purée the soup in batches in a blender or food processor, making sure to leave the texture slightly coarse. Return the soup to the pot, heat to a boil, and stir in the cream. Let it come to a boil again, add the salt and a grinding of pepper, and taste for seasoning; if it seems too bland, squeeze in a little lemon juice. If it is too thick for your taste, thin it with some hot water. Serve garnished with the reserved bacon, apple, and onion. I like a scattering of caraway seed as well.

C
hilled cream soups do not go back very far in the annals of either
French or American gastronomy. Before modern refrigeration, the whole business of chilling food at any season but winter was expensive, difficult, and almost wholly reserved for fancy aspics and ice creams.
Crème vichyssoise glacée,
the best-known chilled cream soup of the twentieth century, saw the light of day in or around 1917 as a summer cooler, the international hybrid offspring of a simple French leek-and-potato soup and a developing American enthusiasm for new dishes based on refrigeration technology. The soup’s inventor was
Louis Diat, chef at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in New York, who designed his brainchild for the summer menu of the hotel’s rooftop-garden restaurant and named it for the city of Vichy, close to his Bourbonnais home.

The idea struck a chord with American cooks and diners. Recipes for Diat-inspired vichyssoise had been published even before he officially set down his version in the 1941
Cooking à la Ritz.
The new soup became the prototype of innumerable chilled puréed concoctions that people kept “discovering” over at least the next thirty years;
Gourmet
magazine’s mailbox was regularly filled with readers’ offers to share family improvisations on the theme (puréed cooked something, mixed with a lot of cream and served ice cold) using any vegetable from asparagus to zucchini. Electric blenders made it possible to invent more elaborate mixtures—there is no telling how many people independently stumbled on “Fishyssoise”—at the push of a button.