Secret Ingredients (17 page)

1968

“It was a good rotting carcass, but it wasn’t a great rotting carcass.”

NOR CENSURE NOR DISDAIN

M.F.K. FISHER

C
asseroles are, I think, an American phenomenon, like Coke and chewing gum, and by many traditionalists they are put somewhat disdainfully into the same category. On the other hand, they are probably well on their way around the world, not far behind the ubiquitous soft drink and pacifier, as more people live hastier lives everywhere.

Webster and Larousse agree that the correct definition of a casserole is an open, deep-sided vessel in which foods may be baked and served. It can also be, in classical cooking, a mold made painstakingly of rice or mashed potato or pastry, filled and baked with vegetables or meats in various sauces. Webster says that
en casserole
can also refer to the food within one of these receptacles of earthenware or more edible starches, but it is in the American edition of the
Larousse Gastronomique
that the nearest approach is made to our own national definition: “In U.S.A. a
casserole
defines a dish made of two or more elements…rice…spaghetti, etc., in combinations with meat or fish plus a sauce or gravy, and often a variety of vegetables. This one-dish-meal can be prepared in advance and cooked and served in a decorative
casserole…
very popular in homes where there are no servants.”

And there it is, neatly summed up! We make them every day, and write books about them, and exchange recipes for our own latest family triumphs of Matter over Time, and manufacturers sell seasonal variations on the theme of ovenproof dishes decorated by famous artists, and electric timers in millions of kitchens are set every morning to guarantee that the evening meal will be correctly crisp and bubbling by exactly six-thirty that night, and it is a good evolution, a healthy institution, an interesting gastronomical compromise.

There are some basic rules about casserole cooking that should be instinctive, but they can be
learned
by the most unskilled beginners. Naturally, such rules are guided by the cook’s own quirks of taste, but they have little to do with actual prejudices. The foods used should never in any way be dubious in either looks or taste, as can happen unexpectedly to a remnant left too long at the back of the icebox—or even overnight, uncovered. One ingredient should dominate, so that the dish is plainly made of chicken, or shrimps, or lamb. There should not be a pointless mixture of flavors and textures, just to use up that cup of pimentos, that saucer of cold steak, those two chicken wings, the sour cream left from last night’s cocktail party, with perhaps some chopped clams in it, all bound together with a bowl of leftover macaroni and two cans of cream-of-something soup. (Oh! Sprinkle it with grated cheese. Put plenty of paprika on top. Harry will be late, and ravenous after golf—he’ll eat
anything
on Wednesdays.)

A good casserole will have clear-cut textures as well as flavor, and tired food can never stand up to the slow baking it should be given. The ingredients should be firm, if not completely fresh, and crispness can be added with thinly sliced green pepper or water chestnuts, chopped nuts, crumbled crisp ham or bacon, according to the cook’s judgment. It is hard to say which is the more displeasing, a casserole made of a dozen indistinguishable hints of exhausted flavors or one that is a noxious mushy pablum resembling the predigested purées fed to helpless infants. I myself believe that it is a good thing to have the backbone of the dish completely fresh, and then perhaps to make whatever holds it together (rice or a form of
pasta
or perhaps potatoes) just before the whole is assembled. Rice, if correctly cooked and stored, will hold its texture for a few days, but most kinds of
pasta
do not improve with age, and I have found that while I am preparing the other ingredients for a dish to be served several hours later I can make fresh spaghetti or noodles or
capellini
for it, with much happier results than if I use the remains of last night’s starch. In other words, it is best not to cook
pasta
with one canny eye on a leftover, although I do that with almost everything else!

The books written about this kind of cooking are interesting, if sometimes a little hazardous for one’s mental digestion. The most unfortunate and at the same time most common expression of enthusiasm for the new-old branch of kitchen art is that “
anything
goes into a casserole.” It is not necessary to say why I find this reasoning actively dangerous. Casseroles are here to stay for a long time, and they are, for good or ill, a part of our living patterns, and I think it is dastardly to reduce them to the botulistic mediocrity such statements condone. Oddly enough, it is our own families who live in the greatest danger, for a casserole which will perhaps serve four or five can be and most often is slapped together from good-to-shameful remnants from the icebox, whereas some truly worthy dishes are made from near scratch for the Whist Club and the Business Buffet, with real care and thought. Perhaps that is why my own personal belief in combining leftovers and fresh ingredients seems valid.

Increasingly, there are such compromises between one’s knowledge of good cooking and one’s harried way of life, and a friend of mine with a large family has evolved her own formula for casserole cooking: three thick layers—first cooked starch at the bottom, then meat freshly and lightly cooked (and cubed if possible), and then a juicy vegetable, preferably tomatoes. The whole is covered with grated cheese and crumbs, all having been generously buttered and seasoned, of course, and is cooked for half an hour or so, until it bubbles and sends out good whiffs. Her theory is that the juices must sink into the bottom layer. The result is pronounced eminently edible by her food-conscious crew. It is preeminently modern American, not neo-in any sense of that prefix.

Casseroles lend themselves all too easily to mass feeding, and many a schoolchild has been forever warped, gastronomically, by the two-by-two slab of stiff macaroni-tuna served him on Fridays in the cafeteria. Macaroni and tuna, prepared separately and then combined in light layers,
can
make a decent casserole marriage, I like to believe, although personally I list the strongly flavored canned fish with bananas and chocolate bars as something safely behind me—a childhood aberration.

As for macaroni, it will remind me always of the catered salad a group of us sold to our classmates in boarding school, to raise money for a new swimming pool. I have tried to find a recipe for this monstrosity in at least twenty books, mostly about American regional cooking but also in a few culinary dictionaries and manuals, and
it is not listed.
This in itself is commendably sinister. The fact remains that it is often to be found in delicatessens—a kind of cold casserole, in the slant-sided glass counters where food is kept cool in large pans that look like unmentionable hospital equipment. My surmise is that the hollow, bent
pasta
is cooked past the
al dente
stage but not to a glue, and is then cooled and tossed with a mayonnaise made of very old eggs. My interest in this salad is plainly clinical, but in 1927, when Lindbergh was loning it over the Atlantic, I was battening on the dish in Miss Harker’s School. It sold well, and I loved it, and we never had it at home.

By now, somewhat more mercifully, macaroni is one of the standbys for our national hot casseroles; it does not deteriorate as fast as other Italian-type pastes, and it feeds a lot of people with little effort. A big pan of macaroni and cheese, plain or fancy, will provide a lot of tender, tasty nourishment, as any experienced member of the Whist Club will agree, and when it is prepared with ham and tongue
alla milanese,
or with eggplant and mozzarella cheese, it can appear at the most sophisticated buffet. And I will still take any other kind of
pasta
ever invented, in or out of a casserole.

Although I subscribe frankly to the somewhat outdated ways of combining a few freshly cooked things shortly before serving them or even at the table, I often make dishes ahead of mealtime, and from so-called leftovers, which I think meet all the requirements for our national dish. It is family history that once when my father wanted to carve more meat for a guest, he begged him fervently, “Help me finish this, for God’s sake, or she will make a casserole of it!” And I probably would have, for in times when I have combined going to an office and running a decently nourished household I have evolved many ways to cook more than will probably be needed for a meal, so that something will be left, to challenge what I prefer to think of as my inventiveness rather than my lazy penury.

I kept house in Whittier, California, for my father for several years after my mother’s death and before his, and I came to recognize, and then fairly skillfully to cheat, his conditioned opposition to leftovers. He was very snobbish about them, and about several other kinds of food. One evening, he surprised me by spurning a tender and artful kind of patty of chopped beef that I had devised for him after he had a double set of false teeth installed and found it difficult to chew the prime sirloin steaks he was used to. When I asked him why, he said that “hamburger meat” was for roadside stands and economy measures. “I realize that times are hard,” he said bitterly, “but are we reduced to
scraps,
made of God knows what?” I proved to him that I was buying his accustomed cuts of beef, boning them, and chopping them myself to make his little entrées, although, of course, I avoided my real reason for this dietary hazard. He ate the next one, but I could see that it was more with pity than pleasure, and I moved on to further disguises.

Once, in an almost unconscious protest against the ingrained snobbishness of people in general and my father in particular, I bought a low-priced beef heart. It was a young one, my slightly astonished butcher assured me. In my cookbooks it was more often than not listed as an economy meat, and I decided that I would make it into a luxury dish, to amuse myself at least. I studied every method for attaining this goal, which from the first was labeled an impossibility if I had read between the lines. I combined the results of my research, and for what seemed several days as I look back on them I turned, marinated, parboiled, skinned, soaked, and otherwise tried to change the beef heart’s muscular nature. There was a tedious roasting at low heat, with too much attention demanded to baste the thing enough to keep it from becoming thick leather on the outside.

I served it on a bed of watercress, with a sauceboat of its juices alongside, and a newly sharpened knife. My father, always the carver, attacked it with only a quick glance at me on his right. My two little girls sat on his left. We were deftly served, and, according to family custom, the children got a puddle of the gravy in the pit my father made automatically in their whipped potatoes. Then, perforce, I was hoist on my own
cafard,
for nothing could be done about our cutting the slices he had so neatly hewn off. He took the carving knife, made one thin bite for himself, chewed at it, and then, while we sat watching, he asked me gently, “Just what is this?” I was damned if I would tell him, so I looked at the girls, who were aware of all my preparations, and I countered by saying, without impudence, of course, “Well now, Father, tell
me.
” He put the carving tools back on the handsome platter, so brown and green, and said, “Dinosaur.” And that was one of the times that happen rarely in human lives, when a wave of maniacal laughter, the kind that verges on tears or hysteria, engulfed all of us, and we lay back in our chairs from it, and then sighed, and then went howling off again. Finally we quieted, like the ocean after a storm, and we put the watercress behind our ears and ate all the whipped potatoes and decided I had found the longest way in the world to make really delicious gravy. I have read that in Paris, in 1848 or so, some gastronomers ate elephant meat from the prehistoric deep freeze of the Russian steppes, and once in Whittier, in about 1955, we ate dinosaur.

But I did not dare to make a casserole of its near petrifaction. Time has drawn its kind veil again, and I cannot remember what happened to the large dark boulder so cunningly prepared and served forth. Instead, I probably roasted or poached some little chickens the next day, and the next day made a casserole from
them.

1968