Ave Marcella

Near the beginning of Marcella's Italian Cooking there's a section titled: The Taste of Italian Cooking: Elementary Rules. And then there's one page of short, direct, axiomatic principles. Many of them I will never follow. But I love reading them, knowing what they are, wishing to follow them and relishing the few that describe what I'm already doing anyway, such as: "Do not clarify butter" or "Do not esteem so-called fresh pasta more than the dry, factory made variety." There's something bracing about all that natural authority fit onto one page. It's like The Elements of Style, the United States Constitution or the Decalogue--brevity and authority in close relationship.

Anyway, here they are:

• Use no Parmesan that is not parmigiano-reggiano. (See the discussion of parmigiano-reggiano on page 11.)
• Never buy grated cheese of any kind; grate cheese fresh when ready to use it.
• With exceedingly rare exceptions, do not add grated Parmesan to pasta whose sauce has been cooked with olive oil.
• Use only extra virgin olive oil (Please see Olive Oil on page 7-10.)
• Dress salads with no other oil but olive
• Do not use prepared salad dressings, even if prepared at home. Mix the condiments into the salad when you are tossing it. Toss salads just before serving.
• Use herbs and spices sparingly. Think of them as a halo, not a club.
• Do not confuse stock with meat broth. Meat broth ( 73) is what goes into Italian cooking.
• When ripe, fresh tomatoes are in season, do not use the canned. (Out of season, see the recommendation on page 12-13.)
• Abstain from using frozen vegetables, except for frozen leaf spinach, which can be substituted for fresh in making green pasta.
• Do not overcook pasta
• Do not precook pasta
• Do not esteem so-called fresh pasta more than the dry, factory-made variety. (Please see discussion of homemade and factory-made pasta on pages 90-6)
• Match the sauce to the pasta, taking into account the shape and texture of pasta.
• Do not buy prepared pasta salads, pre-cooked or frozen pasta, or stuffed pasta.
• Do not turn heavy cream into a warm bath for pasta or for anything else. Reduce it, reduce it, reduce it.
• Vegetables and beans are, on occasion, passed through a food mill. Do not process them to a cream. It Italian cooking there is no cream of anything soup.
• Do not serve fowl rare. Italian birds are cooked through and through.
• Do not clarify butter. (See Cooking with Butter at High Temperature, page 16.)
• When making risotto, use only Italian varieties grown for that purpose. (Please see Risotto, pages 153-5.)
• Find a butcher who will cut scaloppine across the grain from the top round.
• Unless you are on a medically prescribed diet, do not shrink from using what salt is necessary to draw out the flavor of food.

Of course I can't afford to use no Parmesan that is not parmigianno-reggiano. It costs $23 a pound, and that’s more than shoes. Still, there's something wonderfully emphatic about the double-negative, no Parmesan that it not. I feel like saluting when I hear that. But I still buy second rate cheese. And yes I usually grate my own, but sometimes I buy the pre-grated in the plastic tub, feeling mildly furtive and ashamed. And as for no Parmesan with olive oil sauces--why not?

My favorite rules describe what I'm already doing anyway. They're like praise without the embarrassment. "Unless you are on a medically prescribed diet, do not shrink from using what salt is necessary to draw out the flavor of food." Three cheers for that advice. And I like the word 'shrink.' People are such cowards about a little salt. They have no idea how much salt is in the store-bought foods they're used to eating, so they get all timid about salting the pasta water, sprinkling in a few useless grains. I salt everything, even hot chocolate (you should try it).

The rule about dressing salads is smart because it encourages simplicity. I used to shake-shake-shake the dressing in a little jar. Or use a whisk and slow-poured olive oil, straining for an emulsion, which always separated. Now my favorite dressing is olive oil, salt and pepper, right on the leaves. Maybe a touch of balsamic or lemon. Maybe.

But I don’t think I’ve got across why Marcella’s so great. Back when I was an English major I thought the perfect paper would be just my favorite parts of the book, typed, with a big Amen at the end. In that spirit, here is what Marcella says in a section called Cooking: A Language

All that really matters in food is its flavor. It matters not that it be novel, that it look picture-pretty, that it be made with unusual or costly or currently fashionable ingredients, that it be served by candlelight, that it display intricacy of execution, that it be invested with the glory of a celebrated name. Such incidentals may add circumstantial interest to the business of eating, but they add nothing to taste and signify nothing when taste is lacking.

Taste is produced by the expressive use of the cuisines that have come down to us. One becomes fluent in a cuisine as in a language: Expression must be vigorous, clear, concise. There can be no unnecessary ingredient or unnecessary step. A dish may indeed be complicated, but in terms of taste every component, every procedure must count.

Do not strain for originality. It ought never to be a goal, but it can be a consequence of your intuitions. [I love that.] If the purpose of flavor is to arouse a special kind of emotions, that flavor must emerge from genuine feelings about the materials you are handling. What you are, you cook.

Do not arbitrarily shuffle the vocabulary of one cuisine with that of another in an attempt to make your cooking “new.” There is no more use for such a hybrid than there is for Esperanto. The cuisines available to us have all the flexibility we can handle with felicity, and more variety than our invention can exhaust.

I am not suggesting that one must cook in pedantic submission to unalterable formulas. I hope the recipes in this book demonstrate that I do not. I am suggesting that the discipline of a cuisine’s syntax, cadence, native idiom can make invention and improvisation eloquent rather than contrived.

My New Year’s Resolution was going to be: Follow recipes. More or Less. Now and Then. Because I think my fault in cooking is a lack of discipline. I’m addicted to improvisation, and I hate measuring. In my life cookbooks are for reading, not for cooking. But, as with all New Year’s Resolutions, there was a reason you weren’t doing that in the first place—you don’t want to!

So instead I will devote myself to Marcella for a year or so, actually cooking the recipes, not slavishly, mind you, but pretty close. And I think I'll start with cauliflower with pinenuts and raisins, page 256. It’s occurring to me only this moment that discipline and disciple are more or less the same word. And since I already worship Marcella, what could be more natural?

But I want to say more about authority. I’m a lawyer, so I run into unearned authority all the time--judges, stuck up on that pedestal, just as foolish as the rest of us and so few of them know it, god help them. And how true authority is instantly recognizable, whatever the subject.

Marcella teaches you not just how to eat but how to live. But mostly how to eat.

Onion Obsession

I’ve been listening to this weight loss self-hypnosis CD that I ordered online. I’m incredibly embarrassed about this in real life but writing is not quite real life, so I don’t mind talking about it here. In real life humiliation is just humiliation. In writing it’s material.

The soothing voice on the CD says I will be amazed to discover that after eating less than half my meal, I am completely satisfied. It says that every time I eat, before I eat, I will ask myself, is this what a healthy person eats to lose weight? And it says to picture a mirror that says: MY FUTURE IN CONTROL, and then see in the mirror an image of myself at my ideal weight, looking happy and fulfilled. And through it all my mind keeps wandering away to things like: butter--don’t forget to buy--sweet or salted?--both--maybe make bread--whole wheat--try with quinoa--raisins too?

The CD says hypnosis can’t make you do anything that you don’t really want to do. And so I’ve concluded that I don’t really want to stop thinking about food all the time. And besides, what else is there?

Which brings me to the Super Bowl. We had hotdog magic, caramelized onion dip, Fritos (the big ones) and potato chips (the wavy ones). Also other assorted dips. The hotdog magic recipe was from one of my grandma’s handwritten recipe cards, a family heirloom in faded pencil. So we buy the hotdogs and cheese and crescent rolls in a tube, and there on the Pillsbury crescent roll package is the same exact recipe. Not much to it: wrap hotdogs and cheese in a crescent roll and bake. The highlight is really when you peal the paper off the crescent roll package and it goes, POP! and the dough starts to ooze out. Enzo liked that part. Of course he wanted to do it again and again, and it’s sort of a one-off thing. He got over the disappointment by beating on his allotted crescent roll dough with some metal tongs. He’s been into tongs lately.

But the true star of the Super bowl is the dip. Enzo and I made the caramelized onions the day before. Slicing five pounds of onions with a sharp knife is not an ideal kitchen chore for a two-year-old, so I prepped them in advance by pealing off the dry outer layers and them cutting into quarters, or even smaller. Then I adjusted my swim goggles to fit Enzo, and let him run the food processor while I fed the onions through that ridiculous little feed tube.

The goggles didn’t work that well, and he and I both started to cry. I explained how onions hurt your eyes, but it would go away, and for the rest of the day he kept rubbing his eyes and saying, “Onion eyes! Onion eyes!” and looking sad and dramatic.

But the onions turned out great: about ten yellow onions, a cube of butter, a sprinkle of brown sugar, salt of course. Cook on low in the slow cooker for about seven hours. Stir it a few times. Oh, and no lid because you have to let all the onion juice cook off. For the first five hours it perfumes the whole house with raw onion, and it seems unlikely that it will ever be anything but raw onion slush. (Come to think of it, maybe Enzo really did have onion eyes all day, and it wasn’t just drama.) But gradually the onions get golden and soft and syrupy.

And here’s the genius part. When the slow cooker is done with whatever time you’ve set it for, it automatically switches to the warm setting. So I accidentally left the onions on warm overnight, and they got darker and sweeter and more fabulous. I think I must have cooked them almost 24 hours total, using the warm setting for most of it, and by the end they were dark chunky brown sludge, like industrial waste, only delicious. We may all die of botulism, but god they were great. And easy. The dip part is—mix caramelized onions with equal parts sour cream and cream cheese.

We had a lot of onions left over, so I keep thinking of more things to eat with caramelized onions. Caramelized onions and hotdogs (obvious but fabulous); caramelized onions, black beans and scrambled eggs; peanut butter and caramelized onion sandwich; and what about risotto?

Also, variations on the onions themselves. Next time I’m going to add some nice hot peppers or maybe fresh ginger to the onions just to add a little kick to that sweetness. Any why not try frozen pearl onions? It would be so easy, and maybe even pretty.

Is this how teenage boys are with sex, thinking about it all the time with endless interest and variation? And what about caramelized onion upside down cake? Hmmmm... .

Laziness Is Next To Godliness

I want to write something about luck and laziness and the openness to possibility that comes with true sloth.

Organized people never get the satisfaction of lying on the couch reading, then wanting to write something and just reaching down into the couch cushions and finding a pen right there. Hurrah! It’s rare, but all the more wonderful for that.

They also don’t get to make the following discoveries:

Last weekend I threw out some garam masala that had been stored in a Tupperware for a few years. I washed the Tupperware, but not vigorously. A yellow tinge and scent of Indian spice clings to it. This morning, I put my oatmeal in it and took it to work. And so I discovered the complicated deliciousness of steelcut oatmeal with raisins, dried apples, almonds and a hint of garam masala.

Last month we visited friends. Their wonderfully civilized custom is he cooks, she cleans up the next morning. Or afternoon. For dinner one night he cooked an amazing couscous with fresh mint and lot of other stuff. The next morning I sliced up an apple for Enzo. I could have washed the knife and cutting board first. But I didn’t, and that’s how I discovered that apples with a touch of mint—just what was left on the knife and cutting board--are delicious together.

A couple of nights ago, Enzo and I were cooking together. He still sucks at it, but we both enjoy it. And it’s the only interest we share. I gave him a cooked Japanese sweet potato to hack at, but of course he wanted what I was hacking at: a red bell pepper. So I handed one over, partly cut, seeds still inside.

I was making fried sweet potatoes, which are pretty much a dessert. I invented this dish in my mind a long time ago, and finally I decided to cook it. We usually have cooked sweet potatoes on hand in the winter: two and a half hours in the slow cooker on low—no water, just wash them, put them in wet, and that’s plenty of moisture. Anyway, I sliced some cold cooked sweet potatoes, sauted them in a lot of butter, sprinkled them with salt and the spiced sugar that I use for toast. (Sugar, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, ginger, cardamom—your basic fall baking spices.) Oh, and I put some walnuts in there too.

But back to Enzo and our discovery. Of course when he saw me sprinkling the spiced sugar from a little shaker thing, he wanted it. So I gave it to him, and he shook and shook and shook the spiced sugar into and around and on the red bell pepper. Then he mashed it in. I let him do it---let him complete the mess to its fullest, and when the sugar was gone that was the end of that project.

We ate dinner. The sweet potatoes were great—buttery crisp caramelized sugar on the outside, soft chestnut-like savory-sweet on the inside. I think blue cheese would have been good with that, now that I think about it.

We cleaned up. I cleaned up. Of course the red pepper was a mess, but I’m not about to throw away food because it’s been mashed around a bit. I rinsed the sugar-spice off and sliced it lengthwise for my lunch the next day. And it was wonderful—just a little sweeter than your usual bell pepper, still crisp, with a hint of winter spices.

Besides the luck of these combinations, what I learned from all this is that subtly isn’t all bad. My general philosophy is More is Better, and I’m not saying that’s wrong, God forbid. But it turns out that a tiny hint of garam masala is all you really want in your oatmeal. A whiff of leftover mint is enough for a fresh crisp apple. A remembrance of sugar and spice is all a red bell pepper needs.

As my yoga teacher used to say, back when I went to yoga: Do Less. I can only Do Less by accident, it seems. But just being open to accident is something. It’s a start. Oh happy Chance—my personal domestic goddess.

Wonder Bread

Is there a Nobel Prize for baking? If not, why not? Splitting the atom was nice, but you can't eat it.

Since there probably isn’t a Nobel Prize for food, I nominate Jim Lahey of the Sullivan Street bakery for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Also for the Nobel Peace Prize, which seems to go to whoever has most improved human existence in some tangible way. Move over Al Gore. This man is a hero and a national treasure.

In case you’ve been preoccupied with electioneering matters for the last two years, Jim Lahey is the guy who invented the famous no-knead slow-rise bread that has swept the globe. The recipe first came out in the New York Times two years ago. It has since been featured in Vogue and been re-printed in the food sections of most decent newspapers. It is on U-tube. It is easy as pie (way easier actually) and freakishly delicious. The original New York Times article is at http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/08/dining/081mrex.html.

Everyone knows that gluten is what makes good bread good. Gluten gives bread chewiness and texture and makes those big holes in the crumb possible. Conventional bread baking develops gluten mechanically, by kneading. Mr. Lahey figured out that you can skip the kneading and develop gluten chemically by letting the bread rise slowly, slowly for about 12-18 hours. I say “chemically” in the breeziest possible meaning of that word. The gluten molecule lengthens and strengthens and complicates itself in some marvelous way if you just leave it alone to rise slowly. Mr. Lahey’s recipe calls for just a pinch of yeast to slow the rising. His genius was to get out of the way and let nature do its work.

Then there’s the crust. Mr. Lahey’s dough is very wet. You put this wet, slowly risen dough in a ceramic or cast iron lidded pot pre-heated to about 450 degrees, and the wetness of the dough and the super-hotness of the pot create the crustiest, chewiest crust you ever saw or tasted. I’m sure there’s chemistry to that part too, but I don’t know what it is. I do know that it works. It is not just like the best old world artisan bread, it IS that.

The technique is radical. The product is classical. This bread is what Jesus ate. Make that Moses. It is ancient, basic, staff-of-life stuff. It’s as if someone discovered a simple and significant improvement in the design of the wheel. How surprising. How wonderful. It lights up the world a little bit.

(Photo credit, Todd Anderson; baking credit, Annie Anderson.)

New & Improved (NOT!)

Remember the early Quisinart food processors? You could push a whole (small) russet potato through the feed tube and get thin, perfect rounds. You could also julienne your whole forearm. Those were the days. Now they’ve added so many safety features that the machine is useless for slicing and dicing. You pretty much have to julienne the carrot in advance just to fit it in the feed tube.

On the other hand, the safety features are so intense (you cannot turn the thing on until you’ve locked it down like a safe) that once I’ve got it set up, I let Enzo pretty much do what he wants with it. What he wants is to turn it on-off-on-off-on-off-on-off. Ooooooooon. Off! Ooooooooooooooooooooon. Off! He likes the pulse feature.

But the best cooking tools haven’t changed. Early Man (or Early Woman) braised mastadon shanks in a Le Creuset enameled cast iron pot. The design hasn’t changed since. I inherited my grandma’s, which we all think of as her bean pot, though she cooked many other things in it. The pot is persimmon colored, nine quart. The handle on the lid is a little melted, and in a few spots the enamel is almost worn through. How many millions of pink beans have simmered in that pot with onion, carrot, celery, and a big ham hock? Those beans are not complicated, but mine never turn out as tasty as hers. Maybe I’m over-complicating them. I can never resist adding coriander or forty cloves of garlic or some other innovation.

Speaking of over-complicating things: new and improved kitchen gadgets. They hold such promise, don’t they? The rocky path will be made smooth, the pits will practically jump out of the cherries, and you’ll conquer the world armed only with a mini-blow torch and a battery-powered vegetable peeler, as seen on Oprah. What a total lie. And yet I just went online to look for absurd and baroque gadgets to use as examples, and I almost bought an herb spinner. It was so adorable!

New cooking gadgets will not make your life easier. They will only clutter up the drawer and make it harder to find the tools you actually use. You don’t need a special gadget for making a perfect helix of citrus rind. You do need a wooden spoon, but you can’t find it because it’s buried under the helix gadget. You don’t need corn zipper, a tomato slicer or a mango pitter. You need a ten-inch chef knife. You don’t need an avocado masher or a fruit muddler. You need a two-year-old with a fork. You don’t need a Crockpot. You need my grandma’s bean pot on the back burner of a 1940’s O’Keefe and Merritt gas stove on low.

That brings me to my stove—that chrome curvaceous beauty. It’s older than I am and far more functional. It’s the opposite of a gadget. It’s more like a tank. When all the pilots are lit, it’s warm to the touch even when you’re not cooking anything. In the wintertime, before we had Enzo, I would toast my toes at the open oven door, as if it were a crackling fireplace. I would read about cooking and sometimes actually cook, and I would drink hot chocolate and be warm.

This winter I want to learn to make good beef stew. Mine never turns out right, I think because instead of browning the meat, I grey it. Maybe if I use grandma’s bean pot the patina of a thousand rich stews will rub off somehow and change my luck. Having that bean pot simmering on the back burner with rich meaty stew scenting the air seems like the definition of safe and warm.

When I launch Enzo into the world, I would like to send him with that bean pot. I hope he knows what to do with it. And I hope it keeps him safe and warm.

Food In Books

Two of my favorite books are Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast and Farmer Boy by Laura Ingalls Wilder. They’re full of hunger and weather and wonderful food. There seems to be something about being honestly physically hungry that goes with being young. And so nothing gives the feeling of young vital life in a book like food and a lot of it.

In Farmer Boy there’s that scene where mother makes pancakes, and on each pancake she puts butter and brown sugar and then stacks on another and another, and the melted butter and brown sugar drip down the sides. There are great slabs of ham and sausage. There are homemade donuts—simple twists, not those new-fangled circle-shaped kind. And then they have pie.

And in A Moveable Feast there’s that day when he stupidly tries to save money by not eating, and then he walks through the cold Paris streets and ends up having cold beer and potatoes and probably something else, but the part I remember is how he uses the potatoes to soak up the olive oil. And on another day he has oysters, the cheap Portuguese kind, with cold white wine. And what about the eau de vie at Gertrude Stein’s—liqueurs that are the essence or raspberry or pear.

The books I read as a kid are lodged in my mind in a way that feels biological. The trance-like reading of childhood is different from anything else. I read Farmer Boy many times. Our mom read it to us many times. I re-read it recently, and it was still good. I first read A Moveable Feast in college. It was assigned for a class, and I read it right through and then right through all over again. I was nineteen or twenty. Already it was rare for me to fall into a book the way I used to as a kid, and I fell into this one. It was wonderful.

I keep trying to say something about being young and how touching it is to look back on some parts of it. (I’d rather hang myself than actually be young again.) For me reading and eating are two things I did better then than I do now. I did both with true hunger, and I miss that.

I am writing this from memory. I haven’t looked up the food scenes in those books, and I probably got a few things wrong. But the food is what I remember best. In A Moveable Feast there’s such a strong feeling of memory and sadness—nostalgia, I guess. There’s that scene where Hemingway’s older artist friend asks him if food still tastes good. Hemingway says that it does, and you know that for his friend it doesn’t. The food all through the book seems to be remembered with such vividness and also sadness, as if he’s remembering when food still tasted good. It sort of breaks your heart, but in a good way.

Quesadillas

One of my earliest memories is of a quesadilla. I am in the steep sloping back yard of our house in Guatemala. I am playing near a swing and eating a warm corn tortilla filled with cream cheese. That’s all. Nothing happens. I eat the quesadilla.

Another memory from that time: the tortilla lady, who I remember as enormous, but who probably wasn’t, comes to the house with a huge basket of freshly made corn tortillas on her head. The basket comes down. A transaction. My mom gives me one right away, and I eat it, plain, warm and wonderful.

Fast-forward about 37 years…

*


Every other month I get my Fine Cooking magazine in the mail. It resembles my real cooking life about as much as the models in Vogue resemble me, and I adore it.

In my real cooking life I have an outside-the-home job and a toddler, and I make a lot of quesadillas, which I love eating while reading about how to cook a crown roast of pork with Asian ginger glaze or how to braise a pear in marsala, honey and fresh thyme. It brings together my two favorite things, reading and eating, in the closest possible way.

Another advantage to reading about food: it’s highly interruptible. You’re not going to miss some crucial plot turn if you’re reading about how to get the lumps out of gravy. And let's face it, I only get to read for a few minutes at a time before HE needs or wants something. So I make and eat easy food and read about hard food, and it all works out pretty well.

Enzo loves to help in the kitchen, but he has no sense of moderation.
You give him something to stir, and he stirs it onto the counter and
floor and himself, all with great joy. So the trick is to give him
something to do that doesn't involve liquids or sharp knives, and then
cook dinner really fast while he's occupied with his own project.

So I'll give him a butter knife and a cooked whole sweet potato, and he
cuts it up. 'Cuts' is a generous description. 'Hacks' might be more
accurate. There's also a lot of mashing. Sometimes we eat the results.
Sometimes I secretly throw them away.

Meanwhile I'm cooking whatever we're actually going to eat, usually
quesadillas. Cheddar, flour tortillas and butter pretty much do it
for us. But you can branch out: mozzarella, store-bought pesto and a touch of tomato paste = instant pizza. Goat cheese, leftover caramelized onions and halved cherry tomatoes are good in the summer. (I make caramelized onions in the slow cooker, which is the only way you can possibly do it in my circumstances.) Feta, some other meltier cheese, and chopped kalmata olives make a sort of Greek quesadilla, especially if you dip it in yogurt-lemon-garlic-mayo-dill sauce. And of course you can put cooked chicken with pretty much any cheese, and it works.

A few months ago, or maybe years, Fine Cooking actually had an article on quesadillas. The premise of the article was, anything with melted cheese in a tortilla counts, so use your imagination. There was a recipe for four-cheese quesadillas fried in garlic butter and for fontina and mushroom quesadillas fried in parmesan butter. Of course it feels good to have what you’re already doing described officially in a magazine. You feel less a slut when your endless quesadillas get this kind of dignified treatment. You also feel like they stole your ideas, but of course there is no originality in cooking. All recipes are just variations and reminders of good things to eat. (I just looked up the issue, July of 2006, which predates my own quesadilla jag. This means I have been stealing from them, not the other way around.)

Anyway, Enzo and I both really like quesadillas. It’s one of the few things we agree on. When I’m cooking, I sometimes pause for a moment and watch him hacking at his sweet potato with such pure concentration, and I wonder if his first memory will be a food memory. It seems likely. I hope it’s a good one.