The Man Who Ate Everything (55 page)
Read The Man Who Ate Everything Online
Authors: Jeffrey Steingarten
Tags: #Humor, #Non-Fiction, #Autobiography, #Memoir
The
truite au bleu
did not turn blue and was watery and dull. Bluefish with fresh fennel worked better, if you like steamed bluefish. Fillet of sole amandine was tasteless, decomposed, and swimming in broth, and the almonds had not browned. Whiting
en colere
(biting its own tail) was delicate and moist itself, although the cream sauce never thickened and the parsley was overdone. Swordfish, dry and mushy, lacked taste and, though cooked without liquid, was surrounded by a pool of pungent fish broth; apparently, the flavor of the fish ended up in the dish. Whole trout with lemon butter was quite good but unevenly cooked. Paupiettes of sole and salmon were gray, rubbery, dry, and almost tasteless, the very defects the recipe had railed against in oven-baked paupiettes; possibly I had the timing wrong, but I do not like paupiettes enough to give it a second try. Medallions of salmon were firm and tasty, but much of the taste came from the marinade of mustard, olive oil, and lemon, which was so good that, having grown weary of steamed fish, I broke the rules and grilled a salmon steak smeared with the marinade in my powerful salamander broiler. The results, I regret, were wonderful, better than anything my microwave had produced.
Step Five: The making of a microwave chef.
The
Wall Street Journal
reports that 40 percent of the efforts of this country’s largest food and flavor company will be devoted in 1988 to making microwavable convenience foods taste like real food. So you can expect to spend much of your time figuring out how to
adapt your favorite recipes. Salt in the microwave leaves brown spots on vegetables and leaches out water, withering them. Flour or cornstarch must be used to thicken sauces because shorter cooking times make for less evaporation, and intensity of flavor never develops. Quantities of garlic, ginger, scallions, fresh herbs, alcohol and wine, and spices like coriander and cardamom should be increased because their essential flavors are volatile. Pepper, dry herbs, nutmeg, and cinnamon should be reduced because their flavor has less time to mellow. Pieces of food should be cut into regular shapes (ideally three-inch cubes) and cooked with pieces of the same density, or you can mix smaller high-density pieces with larger low-density ones. Pieces should be arranged in a ring and separated from one another with thicker parts to the outside. By the way, did I warn you not to put recycled paper plates and towels in the oven? They may contain metal particles and cause a nasty fire.
Cooking times are very tricky. A recipe will need more or less time in the oven if your baking dish differs in size, shape, or composition from the one the recipe writer used or if the dispersion pattern of energy in your oven differs or if your line voltage varies (common in urban areas) or if you cook more than 3,500 feet above sea level or if your fishmonger has a two-pound sea bass today instead of the one-and-a-half-pounder the recipe calls for. A thirty-second error can ruin your masterpiece.
Cooking time can pose a problem with conventional methods, but then at least we are in closer contact with the food. We feel the heat, watch the surface of the food change in texture, color, and moisture, touch it, smell the changes. One or two microwave cookbooks suggest that you watch the food carefully, but the interior bulb is dim, the door is sealed, the window is small and shielded, and the food is covered with paper towels or waxed paper or steamy plastic wrap that seems to melt into the glass of the sizzling dish.
Undaunted, however, I pursued three favorite fish dishes that should do quite nicely in the microwave.
I sometimes steam flounder with a sweet and spicy sauce for fifteen minutes in a sixteen-inch bamboo steamer set over a large wok filled with boiling water, heat the thick dark red sauce o
f
hoisin, bean paste, soy, garlic, and ginger on a burner, pour it
over
the fish, and decorate it with slivered scallions. This time microwaved the fish for seven minutes on a tightly wrapped plate with no liquid other than the
shao-hsing
wine rubbed into the flounder and let it stand while microwaving the sauce. It took three flounders to get it right. The results were more than merely edible, but no matter how I varied the microwave time, the flesh of the flounder never achieved that firm but tender consistency it does in a real steamer. Almost every microwave cookbook writer marvels at the pool of delicious stock that miraculously forms around a piece of fish cooked without liquid. Some consider this yet another free bonus from the microwave, but any child can tell you that when flavor leaves the fish, the fish loses flavor. Recipes that have you microwave a fillet or whole fish loosely covere
d
with paper towels or waxed paper produce a drier, firmer, but evenly cooked result than when you seal the dish tightly with plastic wrap. Odd as it sounds, how you cover the fish may be key to how it comes out.
I can still remember the
loup en papillate
at a restaurant near Antibes. Steam-baked instead of steamed, the whole fish—a type of sea bass—was stuffed with aromatic herbs and vegetables
,
wrapped in parchment paper, and baked until the paper hac browned and puffed and the fish was infused with the perfumes of Provence. In my microwave version the paper remained ghostly white, but the fish was good. I unsuccessfully tried t
o
concoct a browning liquid from soy and sugar just for the parchment, with the excuse that it would never touch the food. Mor
e
purity disintegrates quickly at 2,450 megahertz.
Finally a scallop mousse microwaved in individual ramekins, unmolded, and surrounded by a
sauce Joinville
made with shrimp and tomatoes, also microwaved: I had the naive idea that custards and timbales would cook to silky perfection in the microwave
without scrambling or stiffening. Not true. The waves concentrate on the sides of the dish, leaving the center cool.
In my forthcoming monograph “Microwave: Cult or Culture?” I shall demonstrate that microwave fanatics share a culture—in the anthropological sense of a “trait complex exhibited by a tribe or separate unit of mankind”—that borders on a cult. Its members huddle around the values of progress, speed, health, and freedom from dishwashing. They are prophets of the twenty-first century; we are “unregenerate stove cooks” indulging in the “luxury” of conventional cooking with our archaic equipment. They ignore the fact that progress brought us ultrapasteurized cream and processed-cheese spread, and they ignore recent findings that conventional steaming keeps in as many vitamins as microwaving, which depletes phosphorus, iron, and riboflavin from meat. They are right, though, about dishwashing. Most microwave recipes are mixed, cooked, and served in one glass dish and some on paper plates or towels.
At its best my new microwave oven is a nifty tool to have at hand. Paraphrasing what the great eater A. J. Liebling was fond of saying about his writing, my microwave cooks better than anything that cooks faster and faster than anything that cooks better. In the pantheon of kitchen equipment it stands just below the food processor and just above the pressure cooker. To microwave fanatics, this may sound like faint praise. To my pressure cooker, it is praise enough indeed.
Buying Fish
· Fish should never smell fishy. The skin and gills should smell like fresh seaweed. As time passes, the seaweed smell disappears, then a sour odor develops, followed by the stench of ammonia or sulfur.
· The skin should look lively and iridescent, and the slime (or mucus) should be transparent and bright. As time takes its toll, both slime and skin become less lustrous; finally the mucus grows milky and opaque and the skin’s pigmentation becomes dull and, at its worst, mottled and off-color.
· In most species, the eyes should be convex and bulging, with transparent corneas and bright black pupils. Then the cornea changes to opalescent and finally to milky; the pupils become dull black and then gray; and the eyes become slightly sunken, then flat, and finally concave in their center.
· The gills should be brightly colored with no trace of mucus. (Lift the stiff gill cover to see the gills.) As the days draw on, the gills become dull, then discolored and yellowish; clear mucus appears, then becomes opaque and milky. · The body should feel firm, elastic, and smooth, bouncing back when you press it. As the flesh grows increasingly soft, the scales detach more easily from the skin and the surface becomes wrinkled. Inside, the color along the backbone changes from neutral to slightly pink, then full pink, and finally to red.
Incidentally, the best way to store a whole fish is by keeping it under slowly melting ice, not on top of it (as many reputable fish markets do, though it’s next to useless). The melting ice keeps the entire fish at 32° F. and helps wash away bacteria.
Microwaving Your Sneakers
Just because you have finally admitted that your microwave oven is useful only for popcorn and reheating leftovers, this is no reason to throw it away. Think up new uses for it. When I read recently that a large appliance manufacturer is developing a microwave clothes dryer and the next day tripped into a puddle in front of my house, I decided to experiment.
Dry Sneakers
1 wet athletic shoe, about 20 ounces, Nike or similar brand 1 full-size microwave oven
Place your shoe on the oven floor, sole up. Set the power level to about one-third for
5
minutes. Repeat, checking each time for hot spots on the shoe. Remove if you find any or when the shoe is almost dry. If you try to get it bone-dry, the rubber parts will bubble up and the instep will smoke and smolder.
December 1988
March 1988
Author’s Note:
This was the first food piece I ever wrote.
Back of the Box
I spent last week cooking strictly from the back of the box. It all started one fatal evening when my wife came home from work and found me standing in the kitchen, a melting slab of raw bacon in each hand and briny tears of defeat welling up in each eye. Every surface in the kitchen, my clothing, the open pages of a brand-new cookbook—all were covered with slices and shards and strips and scraps and shreds of oozing bacon.
The cookbook was an important and opulent new work of delicious and fanciful modern French food. I had waited several days for a free evening to cook from it. For starters I had chosen a seemingly simple but dreamy-looking potato, cheese, and bacon cake in which layers of thinly sliced potatoes and sprinklings of cheese are all wrapped up in bacon and baked in a hot oven until the potatoes are tender, the cheese melts into them, and the bacon is crisp and crackling.
You begin by slicing six ounces of slab bacon very thinly. Then you line a nine-inch round cake pan with the bacon slices in “spiral fashion” so that their ends drape naturally over the edge of the pan, add the layers of cheese and potatoes, then gather the ends of the bacon to enclose the potatoes.
I know better than trying to slice a slab of bacon at room temperature. It bends and wobbles and won’t hold its shape, and the slices come out thick and irregular. But I have a policy of slavishly
adhering to another writer’s instructions, at least the first time. And I love following orders. Nothing makes me happier than curling up with the ninety-seven-page instruction book for a new VCR or making an elaborate recipe that demands exacting labor over several days or weeks.
It was lucky that I had bought an entire side of bacon because I wasted two pounds of it before managing to extract six ounces of reasonably thin slices. My arm ached, disorder and grease were spreading throughout the kitchen, and the estimated time of arrival for dinner was pushed back to nine o’clock. I moved on to interpret “spiral fashion.”
My dictionary says that a spiral begins at the center of a circle and curves out toward the circumference. This is what I tried to make my six ounces of bacon slices do, first flat and then on edge, sometimes starting from the center and sometimes from the rim. Nothing worked. Another hour had passed.
I reinterpreted “spiral fashion” to mean “spoke fashion.” Slipping my electronic calculator into a Baggie to protect it from the grease, I determined that a 9-inch potato cake requires 184 square inches of bacon to enclose it—at least twenty-two slices if none of them overlap by more than a millimeter. I resumed slicing. When my hungry wife found me an hour later, everything in the kitchen glistened, and I had lost the ability to speak. My wife read the recipe and shrugged. “This thing will never work,” she said. It was the first recipe that had stumped me in fifteen years. It was ten o’clock.
As we cleaned up the kitchen, my voice returned, and we reminisced about those recipes on the back of the box—simple, hearty formulas for good, solid, fail-safe American food—the dips and meat loaves, the quick cakes and no-cook fudge, the casseroles and bakes and instant puddings of our innocent youth. My wife’s favorite was her mother’s version of Campbell’s Tuna Noodle Casserole. Mine was Nabisco’s Famous Chocolate Wafer Refrigerator Roll. On special occasions my mother would spread whipped cream on the wide, thin cookies, assemble the layers
into a long log, and chill it until the cookies grew soft and moist, like dark-chocolate cake. When the roll was sliced diagonally, the narrow white and brown stripes formed a festive, elegant pattern. How I longed for those guileless days when whipped cream and chocolate wafers made for gastronomic bliss.
Together my wife and I ravenously read the packages, bottles, and cans on our shelves to find something to cook for dinner. We were not in the mood for Argo Cornstarch Classic Lemon Meringue Pie (which has become the standard American recipe), Quaker’s excellent Oatmeal Cookies, Karo Syrup Easy Caramel Popcorn, or any of the five pecan pies on various other packages. The truth is, our kitchen is not well stocked with packaged foods, canned vegetables, frozen chicken parts, or preformed hamburgers. For years I have done my food shopping nearly every day and cooked everything from scratch. In the process, I may have lost touch with the modern American tabletop.
It was eleven o’clock. We ordered in a very large Chinese meal from the place around the corner and did a week of menu planning. To refresh our memories of the classics, we turned to Ceil Dyer’s
Best Recipes
(Galahad Books) and Michael McLaugh-lin’s
The Back of the Box Gourmet
(Simon & Schuster). The first has an endless number of recipes; the second is more discriminating, amplifying its recipes with photographs and lore.
The next day, we toured the local supermarkets and returned home with a taxiful of shopping bags. Even before removing our coats, we had fished out an envelope of Lipton’s Onion Recipe
Soup Mix and a pint of sour cream, stirred them together, and opened the bag of Ridgies potato chips shown in the serving suggestion on the box of Lipton’s. It took us just fifteen seconds to prepare the dip, Lipton’s California Dip, purportedly invented by a California homemaker who told Lipton about it in 1963. No mess, no bother, no dishes to clean (we mixed everything in the sour cream’s plastic container), and sheer perfection on the palate.
For the next hour we assembled a feast that could have fed a family of ten, while investigating whether Ridgies or smooth potato chips are the ideal vehicle for conveying California Dip from package to mouth. Our main course was Quaker’s Prize-Winning Meat Loaf, accompanied by Campbell’s Green Bean Bake with Durkee french-fried onions. Our desserts were various and many—Ritz crackers’ Mock Apple Pie and Kellogg’s never-fail Rice Krispies Marshmallow Squares to begin with—and as we cheerfully rinsed off the tiny number of utensils these recipes required, my wife whipped up her excellent variation on Nestle’s Original Toll House Cookies.
Most gastronomes would agree that the recipe on the cheery yellow bag of Nestle’s Semi-Sweet Toll House Morsels (either the Original Toll House Cookie recipe bought in the 1930s from Ruth Wakefield of the Toll House Inn in Whitman, Massachusetts, or the slightly altered post-1970 version, which Nestle also calls the Original) has made all other recipes for chocolate-chip cookies superfluous. Everybody fiddles with the Original, but my wife’s fiddling is, quite frankly, the best, producing thin and crisp yet chewy treats. I have recently received permission to reprint her formula. Only the quantities have been changed.
1 extra-large egg
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1
2
/3 cups all-purpose flour (measured by the scoop-and-level method)
1 teaspoon (scant) baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
l
l
/2 cups (3 sticks) softened butter
2
/3 cup white granulated sugar
3
/4 cup firmly packed light brown sugar
l
/4 cup firmly packed dark brown sugar
2 cups (12-ounce package) chocolate chips 1 cup coarsely chopped walnuts
To make the cookies, follow the mixing and baking instructions on the back of the Nestle’s Semi-Sweet Toll House Morsel bag.
I cannot say that our paradise was without its serpents. Quaker’s Prize-Winning Meat Loaf, which predictably substitutes Quaker oats for the usual bread or cracker crumbs, may have won a prize somewhere for oat cookery, but it does not compare with either of our mothers’ meat loaves or hypermodern variations like Paul Prudhomme’s Cajun recipe in
Louisiana Kitchen
(Morrow). The aggressively dull flavor of the oats becomes distasteful after a few bites. And Quaker’s makes you chop a quarter cup of your own onions, which to my mind violates the spirit of convenience cuisine. I was still feeling phobic about intricate knife work.
Campbell’s Green Bean Bake is, with the probable exception of Nestle’s Toll House Cookies, the most popular back-of-the-box recipe ever created. You microwave up some frozen green beans and mix them in a casserole with a can of Campbell’s condensed cream of mushroom soup, milk, soy sauce, pepper, and half a three-and-a-half-ounce can of French-fried onion rings. Bake for twenty-five minutes, top with the remaining onion rings, and bake for five minutes more, whereupon the onions become golden and crispy.
My wife cannot abide the infinite-shelf-life flavor of canned
soup, but the onion rings alone redeem Campbell’s Green Bean Bake for me. Therein lies the problem. The only national brand of canned French-fried onion rings is Durkee, and sometime after Campbell invented the recipe, Durkee went and downsized its can to 2.8 ounces, a full 20 percent shrinkage. I suppose there is nothing that Campbell can do about corporate policy at Durkee, but I resented having to buy two cans of Durkee’s and waste most of the second. To my taste, 2.8 ounces of canned French-fried onion rings is simply not enough for a proper Green Bean Bake. Three and a half ounces is perfect.
I telephoned Campbell headquarters to complain. Its exemplary spokesman Kevin Lowery quickly mesmerized me with details of the company’s side-of-the-can recipe ventures. Every evening in America, one million cans of Campbell’s soup are used as an ingredient in dinner, about a third of all the soup they sell. Thursday night is the most popular. Cream of mushroom, introduced in 1934, is still the clear winner. America buys 325 million cans of it every year, 80 percent as a sauce or flavoring in quick main courses and side dishes. Three of the five top-selling supermarket foods are Campbell’s soups. Can you guess the other two?*
*Starkist tuna and Kraft macaroni and cheese
Six years ago the company published
Campbell’s Creative Cooking with Soup.
It has sold two million copies (making it one of the most popular cookbooks of all time) and contains nineteen thousand recipes, each tested three times. Marcella Kazan once told me that Italian cuisine encompasses sixty thousand recipes. How much more rich and abundant is American cookery with its nineteen thousand ways to use condensed soup alone! That’s a different recipe every day of the year for fifty-two years, far longer than the life span of the average marriage. And I haven’t even told you about
Campbell’s 75th Anniversary Cookbook,
published at the beginning of 1991. It sold 750,000 copies the first month. Campbell’s research understandably demonstrates that it was they who invented the Classic Tuna Noodle Casserole, their
second most popular recipe of all time. My own research is silent on the subject.
Mr. Lowery told me that Campbell’s vast market surveys have discovered the attributes of the ideal recipe. It must be prepared in thirty minutes or less (including any cooked ingredients within it). It must be a main dish, because homemakers are less willing to try a new recipe for a side dish or a dessert. And it must contain only readily available ingredients, which means that these should not merely be widely displayed on supermarket shelves but, preferably, already be stocked in most people’s homes. I found this ideal in sharp and ironic contrast to the recipes I write. Mine take between four hours and four days to prepare, are always for side dishes or desserts, and contain ingredients that you must either send away for or bring back from a trip to Alba or Kyoto.
Campbell’s most popular new recipe is Chicken-Broccoli Divan, a casserole of fresh or frozen broccoli, cooked chicken or turkey, and a can of Campbell’s condensed cream of broccoli soup, all with a topping of bread crumbs and cheese. “Divan” is a culinary term I have encountered only on the backs of boxes and in traditional American cookbooks like
A Century of Mormon Cookery
and
Joy of Cooking,
and Campbell’s had no idea of its source. “Divan” sounds vaguely French, but my old
Larousse Ga
s
tronomique
passes from “diuretic” to “dive” without a pause, and among his 5,012 recipes, Escoffier can’t be bothered. In
Webster’s Second,
“divan” is a Persian and Turkish word for a book of many leaves, a council of state, the room where such a council convenes, a raised cushioned platform upon which its members (or anybody else) can sit or recline, and, especially today, a large couch without a back or sides. On the theory that the meaning of “divan” had somehow expanded to include the delicacies upon which members of the divan feasted while reclining, Levantine style, on the divans, I combed through my classical Turkish and Persian cookbooks. There was not even a morsel named “divan.” At last I discovered that a Divan is a creation of a
l
l-American provenance. According to Craig Claiborne, the dish was invented
in a New York restaurant of bygone days called Divan Parisien, where poached chicken was laid on a bed of broccoli and covered with hollandaise sauce. Thus “broccoli” in the title of Campbell’s recipe is as redundant as its inclusion in the dish is expected. How chicken Divan spread like wildfire into the cookbooks and onto the packages of America’s heartland I will never fathom. My etymological research left me too weary to attempt Campbell’s Chicken-Broccoli Divan.
