The Man Who Ate Everything (54 page)

Just in the nick of time Nora Pouillon arrived home from Austria with six pounds of rendered horse fat carried in her suitcase next to her most intimate apparel. My excitement was difficult to restrain. There were seven white plastic containers, each labeled
l. gumprecht pferdbfleischere. pferde-fett.
(Gumprecht is probably the most popular of Vienna’s remaining horse-meat sellers, and he occupies stands 58 and 59 at Vienna’s Naschmarkt.) Inside each was a white, congealed fat that resembled lard. Nora had glided through customs. One month later she was named 1996 U.S.A. Chef of the Year.

I poured the horse fat into one deep fryer, some home-rendered beef tallow into a second, and peanut oil into a third, and cooked ten batches of French fries, using the Arabian-Passard recipe. The peanut-oil version was good, but the beef- and horse-fat fries were exceptional, especially after I had diluted the animal fats by half with peanut oil. The potatoes were extraordinarily crisp and tasty, and they stayed that way much longer than usual. It is easy to see why McDonald’s and the other fast-food chains once cooked their famous fries in beef fat—until the public’s concern about cholesterol forced them to change to pure (though dangerously partially hydrogenated) vegetable oil.

Just as I was about to compare and contrast in fulsome and appropriate detail the precise aromas and tastes of horse fat and
tallow, the horse fat began prematurely to go rancid and dark. (When frying fat takes on a fishy aroma, it is not yet rancid but is about to become so.) I am afraid that Nora had neglected the fifty pounds of dry ice I had requested to protect my Pferde-Fett on its odyssey from Vienna to Washington to New York City. I apologize.

I have just learned that Alain Dutournier, the excellent Parisian chef from southwest France, cooks his French fries in goose fat. He uses an unusual combination of temperatures: after a first low-temperature frying, you wait two hours, start the second frying at 280 degrees Fahrenheit, and slowly increase the temperature to 392 degrees. The idea is intriguing, and I would like to try it immediately. But my wife has just passed through the kitchen and slipped into bed, leaving me alone, surrounded by four white bubbling-hot electric deep fryers and piles of unpeeled Idaho potatoes. “Smile and the world smiles with you,” she said as she disappeared. “Fry and you fry alone.”

April 1996

Author’s Note:

Alain Passard has been awarded a third Michelin star. His horse-fat French fries cannot have been irrelevant to this decision.

When this article appeared, an avid horsewoman organized a campaign against
Vogue
for verbal cruelty to horses.
Vogue
mollified her by publishing, unedited, a letter abusing the author.

I replied: “The United States is the largest horse-meat exporter in the world (as many as 400,000 animals a year are sent to slaughter) because it has the largest recreational horse population. These animals become ‘surplus’ when horse lovers unnecessarily breed their pets, owners sell their racehorses after only a few years, and recreational riders trade up. Slaughter and export become inevitable when this surplus drives down resale prices below about $600 an animal. The object of Ms. ————‘s rage should be the inhumane practices of a good part of the horse-slaughtering industry. And the unwillingness of most horse owners to care for their discarded pets until they die a natural death.”

For the past two months I have eaten nothing but microwaved fish. My adventures in bistro cooking are on the back burner— the plump, crisply roasted chickens, the garlic sausage and potatoes browned in goose fat, the sauerkraut braised for hours with pork, apples, onions, and juniper berries. Gone is the week I spent with twenty pounds of Idaho russets and five quarts of heavy cream, trying to recapture the gratine potatoes we ate last summer in Avignon. Perfect potatoes will have to wait.

It all began some months ago when the most stylish woman I know informed me that my cooking habits were hopelessly out of date. “We,” she announced, speaking as always for a fashionable world that the rest of us can imitate but never enter,”
have been doing oceans and oceans of microwaved fish. It’s lite, it’s qwik, it’s E-Z, and it’s …” She searched for the perfect word. “It’s
fish.”

I do not as a rule seek advice about food from thin people, but my friend’s words had chastened me. I felt like a vestige of some gladly forgotten age. Worse, I felt like an outsider. It was then that I resolved to eat nothing but microwaved fish until I had learned to love it. But where to start?

Step One: T
h
e hardware.
Judging from the last five years of
Consumer Reports,
a jungle of features and options awaits the
first-time buyer of a microwave oven: cooking power and power consumption, digital readouts, temperature probes, moisture sensors, programmed defrost cycles, programmed roast cycles, programmed combination cycles, and devices like reflective blades, waveguides, and carousels to smooth the irregular energy pattern. All for two or three hundred dollars.

The microwave salesman in the department store sat forlornly amid fifty ovens arrayed on carpeted shelves. He telephoned other salesmen to negotiate his lunch hour. He was unable to explain the range of features, sizes, and power levels or even to remember their names. Doesn’t he know he is part of a nationwide revolution in taste, texture, and time management? I relied on
Consumer Reports
and ordered two top-rated microwave ovens, the compact from GE and the giant size from Amana.

Solid facts are hard to come by in this brave new world. The Toynbee of the microwave has yet to set pen to paper, but it is generally agreed that in 1945 or 1946 a radar scientist at Raytheon labs in Massachusetts noticed that a Hershey bar had unaccountably melted in his pocket. If he had remembered that cocoa butter is liquid at 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit, we might all still be living in caves and cooking over peat fires. But our scientist guessed that radar waves had caused the mess in his pocket. He proceeded to pop some corn in a galvanized garbage can and then applied for a patent. There is no record of how the stain was removed.

Since then the garbage can has been reshaped into a metal box, and the FCC has assigned a frequency of 2,450 megahertz (million cycles a second) to microwave cooking, somewhere between marine radar and channel 69 on your UHF television dial. Dividing the speed of light by 2,450 million cycles per second yields a wavelength of about four and three-quarters inches, which is supposed to explain why microwaves penetrate your food by about an inch and a quarter, unlike infrared radiation in conventional cooking with a wavelength only one-fourth as long
,
which is pretty much absorbed at the surface, where it causes the delicious browning reaction, which microwaves don’t.

In both cases, the absorbed energy agitates the food molecules, which we call heat, and the heat is then transferred to the rest of the food by conduction. Infrared waves agitate almost all types of molecules. The books disagree about whether microwaves agitate only polar molecules, principally water, or whether their energy is imparted most effectively to salts and fats. The distinction is crucial to understanding what happens to your dinner in the microwave oven, but I can safely say that the Newton of the microwave has yet to publish his findings.

Sixty percent of American homes have microwave ovens, more than have dishwashers; half of these acquired their ovens since 1984. People in the western states buy them more often than people in the East. Everybody in the West refers to microwave ovens as “nukers” and to cooking food in them as “nuking” it. This metaphor is imprecise because microwave radiation is nonionizing, meaning that it leaves the electron rings in food atoms unaltered. Otherwise your food would emit radiation on your plate and in your stomach.

Step Two: The software.
While my ovens were in transit, I assembled a representative pile of twenty current microwave cookbooks, all that I could find with substantial sections on fish. For the most part, these are not books to curl up with on a wintry evening. There are no literary excursions to that perfect little microwave shop near the market in Lyons. The recipes are short and telegraphic with apologies preceding those that require much explanation. The books are unanimous: “Once you have tried microwave-cooking fish, you may never cook it any other way… . The fish stays moist and cooks through absolutely evenly.” “Fresh fish is so tasty when cooked simply that a sauce may seem unnecessary.”

And on and on. Many of these books are tall and thin, like skinny people with no time to read about food. Most were written by home economists with a minor in microwave, appearances on a local television show, or a consulting contract with amicrowave manufacturer. Nowhere could I find a book called something like
Cuisine Electromagnetique
by Michel Guerard or Fredy Girardet. Next best is Barbara Kafka’s admirable
Microwave Gourmet
(Morrow), which tackles tricky classics like risotto,
confit de canard,
and country pate and includes an exhaustive dictionary of ingredients, techniques, times, and yields, which alone is worth the price of the book. On a more quotidian level but no less comprehensive is
Mastering Microwave Cookery
by Cone and Snyder, with seventy-five introductory pages of guides, charts, and other sometimes useful information. The lower-end books teach you to create in your own kitchen sombrero party dip, casseroles of tuna and potato chips, fiesta burgers, and shrimp trees, “an attractive Christmas holiday centerpiece” in which peeled micro-waved shrimp are pinned to a large green plastic cone. I could hardly wait for my ovens to arrive.

Step Three: The shakedown cruise.
The minute the GE compact model was delivered I felt a powerful urge to toss everything into its cavity. The bratwurst split after thirty-seven seconds and burst after fifty-eight; a Dove bar was successfully brought to eating temperature in its own little carton; cold coffee reheated less repulsively than usual. In preparation, I had picked up some convenience foods, I think they’re called, made just for the microwave. I tried two competing brands of popcorn, which come in individual popping bags. The Orville Redenbacher Natural Flavor won hands down, tender and crisp if much too salty. A prewrapped stack of frozen buttermilk pancakes, which you immerse in your own choice of syrup and breakfast spread before microwaving, disintegrated on the fork, and the side of the box read like a chemistry set.

There were two pounds of leeks and some chicken broth in the refrigerator. What better way to conclude my shakedown cruise than hold a bake-off between my two favorite microwave cookbooks. Their recipes for braised leeks are nearly identical but for cooking times. Barbara Kafka’s forty-minute recipe produced
a delicious platter of tender leeks swimming in too much liquid, which I drank as a soup after adding a little cream and reheating it in the microwave; the other leeks, ready in half the time, were tough and stringy. Compared with conventional cooking, Kafka had spared me only ten or fifteen minutes of unattended baking and one pot to clean.

This led me to the dirty little secret of microwaving: many dishes take longer in the microwave! The more food you put in, the longer it takes. The magnetron (the vacuum tube that produces microwaves) sends a fixed amount of energy into your oven’s cavity, where it bounces off the metal walls until absorbed by food. An entire baron of beef absorbs only a little more energy every second than a little morsel of veal and, consequently, cooks that much more slowly. One baked potato takes five minutes to microwave, two take twice as long, and a dozen almost an hour. In a conventional oven, which circulates hot, dry air around each potato, one takes as long to bake as twelve—about forty-five minutes. Microwaving a twelve-pound turkey requires four and a half hours of cooking and twelve ears of corn fourteen minutes, both considerably longer than with conventional cooking. That’s why most microwave recipes serve only one or two people—perfect for today’s subnuclear family—and warn you against simple-mindedly doubling or tripling the quantities for larger groups.

Step Four: New-wave fish in earnest.
Picture the most delicious fish you have ever eaten. I can still taste the spicy, deep-fried fingers of speckled trout on a drive through Cajun country, the mountain of tiny grilled fish—without an English name— that we ate, head and all, on the Adriatic coast, the barbecued bluefish at the end of a Long Island summer, the little yellow perch we caught at sunset in Vermont and crisply panfried a few moments later. If this is your idea of goodness, too, use your microwave for melted-cheese sandwiches. It does not panfry or deep-fry acceptably or grill or barbecue at all. It hardly roasts or even toasts, and it only sort of bakes. For dishes you expect to be browned, some recipes make you brush the food with soy sauce
and paprika or Kitchen Bouquet fluid or, in a stunning number of instances, dehydrated onion soup or dried spaghetti sauce mix. The other recipes try to persuade you not to care.

The one kind of cooking a microwave oven does, and often does quite well, is boiling and its cousins—steaming, poaching, braising, and stewing—and most microwave fish recipes use one of these techniques. So I chose what looked like the best recipes from the best cookbooks in my microwave library and went to work.