Path: bloom-picayune.mit.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!americast.com!americast.com!americast-post Newsgroups: americast.latimes.misc From: americast-post@AmeriCast.Com Organization: American Cybercasting Approved: americast-post@AmeriCast.com Subject: ON THE TABLE Cooking by Ear Date: Fri, 13 Nov 92 06:18:51 EST Message-ID: HEADLINE: ON THE TABLE Cooking by Ear Publication Date: Thursday November 12, 1992 BYLINE: COLMAN ANDREWS Learn to cook! --Julia Child, from "Julia Child's Kitchen" It seems self-evident to me that when the Creator made it necessary for every one of us to eat, He must simultaneously have given every one of us the ability to fix ourselves a little something now and then. I believe, in other words, that anyone can cook--maybe not as well as Fredy Girardet, or even Dinah Shore, but well enough. People who "can't" cook, I suspect, are people who don't want to cook. Not wanting to cook, of course, is anybody's privilege. I just have a hard time understanding why so many people should desire to invoke it. I understand not wanting to be forced to cook. Cooking isn't necessarily hard, but it can certainly be arduous and even tedious. But there are so many kinds of cooking, and so many ways to go about it, that there must be something about the act of making food that virtually everybody would find attractive, if they gave themselves the chance. Popular food culture in the United States today, unfortunately, is madly winnowing down the possibilities inherent in the act of cooking, reducing it to a few automatic, soulless motions: Drop bag into boiling water; remove tray from carton; add one cup low-fat milk; thaw and eat. We are more at home with toaster ovens than with roasting pans, more concerned with shortcuts than with shortcake. We have very nearly abdicated our native sense of flavor, texture and aroma--and why? For the sake of "convenience." Because we want our food fast and easy. Because we've got more important things to do. (Like what?) Well, sure, our food is fast and easy these days. But is it good? Does it bring real pleasure to the palate, real nourishment to the human engine? Family Circle publishes a magazine-sized booklet called "Speed Cooking," whose cover promises that it will reveal "250 Ways to Get Out of the Kitchen Fast." But what's the hurry? What is it about the contemporary American kitchen--so bright and clean and well equipped--that people find so uncomfortable or unwelcoming? Reader's Digest--which has based its existence on helping people get out of the library fast--has a book called "Cook Now, Serve Later," subtitled "More Time With the Family, Less in the Kitchen." Why on earth should family and kitchen be mutually exclusive? There's plenty of room for family (and friends) in most kitchens--even if they have to take turns--and plenty for them to do if they want to help. And even if there isn't, and they don't, the end product of the cook's labors is--or should be--enjoyed communally, at table. Sharing what you've cooked with others is one of the most intimate, authentic expressions of friendship, and even of love, that one human being can offer to the other. (The word companion, remember, derives from the Latin cum , "with," and panis , "bread.") Is it, then, something to be avoided whenever possible, or gotten over with in record time? Maybe speed shouldn't be our goal in cooking. Maybe it's time to re-evaluate--revalue--cooking as a pursuit. Processed and precooked foods are a fact of life in America (and in much of the rest of the world), and most of us resort to them at least occasionally. But every time we use them we rob cooking of its soul, reducing it to the mere act of heating things up and dishing them out. No wonder people don't find cooking fun. Even machines can do it. One afternoon my wife, who seldom cooks, decided to make a bourbon cake, using a friend's recipe. Following the directions, she started heating sugar, water and butter together slowly on the stove. "It's great the way it gets thicker and changes color," she remarked as she stirred the mixture. The next step was to pour a tot of bourbon into the pan, off the heat. She did so. Sssssssssszzzzzzzzzz ! The pan hissed and sputtered and welled up, foaming like some mad scientist's secret formula. My wife jumped back, startled, but then started smiling. "That's amazing," she said, in genuine delight. Well, sure. Cooking is amazing. It's also important: It's life-sustaining, and something to be proud of when done well. In its ritual aspects, and in the way it transmutes raw materials, it has almost a religious (or at least sacramental) aspect. It reconnects us with the physical world, symbolizing the passing seasons with its seasonally changing products, reminding us of our place in the ecology. (A good cook never wastes and never takes his resources for granted.) I spend a lot of time in the kitchen myself. I make dinner almost every night at home. I invite friends over sometimes and put things on the table that they seem to eat up reasonably happily. I cook at other people's houses sometimes too, and I have on occasion overheard my hosts bragging mildly about my abilities to their own guests. People even ask me for my recipes from time to time. Treading that vermicelli-thin line between modesty and its false cousin, though, I'm never quite sure how to respond when people ask me if I'm a good cook. I would certainly never call myself a chef or anything close to it. But "good cook"? I don't know. I'm not a good cook in the sense of a dedicated amateur of the culinary arts who studies, codifies and reproduces things consistently. I just riff in the kitchen. I cook by ear. I've never made a beurre blanc , much less pate feuillete , in my life, and probably never will. My culinary imagination far outstrips my practical abilities. I think about food a lot, and I often have ideas for dishes that I know full well I'll never realize--but that doesn't particularly bother me. The thinking alone is enough for me most of the time. You can learn to cook, after a fashion, by studying cookbooks and following their instructions faithfully; you can learn to cook by taking lessons or, if you're really serious about it, by apprenticing at a restaurant or catering company. Or you can learn to cook--at least by ear--by simply doing it a lot. That method has its advantages: You can proceed at your own pace and follow your instincts--and concentrate on the foods that interest you, instead of those on somebody else's menu or curriculum. There are disadvantages to the learn-by-doing method too, though: The principal one is that you'll almost certainly make an awful lot of mistakes. That's fine if you're just fooling around at the stove some afternoon by yourself, but less fine if you're making dinner for your family (or, worse, your dinner guests). I started really learning to cook (by doing) myself, I think, when I got married for the first time. Because I worked at home and my wife worked at an office--and because I enjoyed cooking more than she did--I was the one who made dinner almost every night that we stayed home. I never used recipes. I never cooked to themes. I'd just try stuff out. Every once in a while, I'd come up with something vaguely brilliant--good enough that my wife would ask me to write down exactly what I'd done so that I could reproduce it. More often, we'd simply eat what I'd cooked without comment. I probably was wondering what would have happened if I'd used tarragon instead of rosemary, and she probably was wondering whether tomorrow we shouldn't maybe bring home a pizza for a change. And sometimes what I cooked was so terrible that we simply threw it out and headed for the nearest Thai place. And, of course, in keeping with the cliche, I learned more from my failures than I did from my successes. I learned, for instance, that yogurt tends to curdle when you stir it into hot liquid (though not always--some day I've got to track that one down), that garlic turns bitter if you let it burn, that imitation Parmigiano clumps into stringy wads instead of melting smoothly into a sauce. I learned that spinach, leeks, mushrooms and clams nearly always have a bit more sand in them somewhere. I also learned that butter browns very quickly, but that a few drops of added oil will slow the process down, and that a bit of tomato paste stirred into a sauce will thicken it and add a hint of acidity and sweetness without turning it red. And I learned unforgettably one day that one should never, ever, flambe alcohol into a pan full of hot olive oil and lard. (Luckily, I wasn't leaning over to inhale the aromas of the dish at the time. I did look kind of funny without eyelashes for a few weeks, though.) I'm still learning, of course, and have still got a lot to learn. Here's an example of how I sometimes think up dishes: One winter Saturday in 1983, I had some wine-trade friends of mine over for lunch. I planned to grill plump mullard duck breasts like steaks, in the Bordeaux fashion, and as a first course I wanted to make something equally straightforward, but also something at least vaguely wintry in spirit--and something I could make up ahead of time. Browsing through some of my cookbooks, I came across a recipe that sounded perfect in "The Four Seasons Cookbook" by Charlotte Adams (the original cookbook from that august New York restaurant): sweet potato vichyssoise, which was basically sweet potatoes pureed with beef stock and cream. It turned out to be a very simple soup to make and was a great success with my guests. Four or five years later in a restaurant in Atlanta, I was served a classic leek-and-potato vichyssoise, which was thick and creamy but under-salted. As I seasoned it, I found myself wondering, for some reason, how it would taste topped with a bit of good caviar. (Don't some chefs serve caviar on roasted potato slices, after all?) A few months after that, planning a dinner at my friend Betty's house in New York, I thought I might make the Four Seasons' sweet potato vichyssoise again. Then I remembered the caviar and thought I might try it with this soup. It worked. The pearlescent gray of Petrossian sevruga played beautifully against the faint salmon-pink color of the soup, and the soup's smooth sweetness framed the salty snap of the caviar exquisitely. Another dinner, back in Los Angeles, not long afterward: Sweet potato vichyssoise again. With caviar? Well, no. The woman at whose home I was cooking didn't like the stuff. All right, then, I thought, I'll do the same sort of thing with one of caviar's partners in luxury--smoked salmon, cut into very thin strips and scattered across the top of the soup. It turned out very well too--though I did miss the textural contrast caviar would have added. Bringing things full circle, about two years after that meal, I again cooked lunch for my wine-trade friends--and again the sweet potato vichyssoise seemed like a good dish to serve. This group loves caviar, but in this case the budget wouldn't cover it. I had the idea of trying smoked salmon again, but with a bit of salmon caviar added? Unfortunately, the member of our company who was assigned to obtain the smoked salmon misunderstood and came back with a little piece of fresh salmon fillet instead. Why not? I thought. Thus, the dish became sweet potato vichyssoise with salmon caviar and little cubes of lightly poached fresh salmon. Yet again the combination worked. The next time I make the soup, maybe I'll use salmon caviar, smoked salmon and fresh salmon. The time after that, I might go back to plain sevruga. And the time after that--who knows? Maybe I'll try making regular vichyssoise, and not put anything in it at all. Except enough salt. SWEET POTATO VICHYSSOISE WITH 3 KINDS OF SALMON 1 onion, coarsely chopped 2 leeks, white part only, coarsely chopped 2 tablespoons unsalted butter 1 tablespoon corn or canola oil 1 1/2 pounds sweet potatoes, peeled and sliced 2 quarts strong beef stock Salt White pepper Half and half, optional 1/4 pound salmon fillet, cut into 1/2-inch cubes 1 to 2 slices good-quality smoked salmon, cut into very thin strips 2 to 3 ounces salmon roe (salmon caviar) 1 bunch chives, minced Saute onion and leeks in butter and oil in large pot until tender, then add sweet potatoes, stirring well. Add 7 1/2 cups stock, bring to boil, then simmer, covered, until sweet potatoes are very tender, about 40 minutes. Cool soup to room temperature. Puree in blender or food processor and season to taste with salt and white pepper. Chill in refrigerator at least 3 hours. If too thick to pour fluidly when cold, thin with half and half. About 15 minutes before serving, poach salmon cubes briefly in remaining 1/2 cup beef stock. Remove gently from liquid and drain on paper towels, blotting carefully to remove white residue. Divide salmon cubes, smoked salmon and salmon roe evenly among 6 chilled wide, flat soup bowls, arranging salmon in attractive pattern. Scatter chives evenly over bowls, including rims. Then ladle soup into them. Makes 6 servings. Each serving contains about: 331 calories; 1,289 mg sodium; 105 mg cholesterol; 19 grams fat; 21 grams carbohydrates; 23 grams protein; 2.13 grams fiber. CRAB MEAT AND MASHED POTATO ENCHILADAS IN SWEET RED PEPPER SAUCE 5 large sweet red peppers 1 red onion, minced 3 cloves garlic, peeled and finely chopped Olive oil 3/4 pound Idaho potatoes, peeled and cut into 8 pieces Salt 3/4 cup creme fraiche or crema Mexicana (Mexican-style sour cream) 1 pound fresh crab meat 4 green onions, trimmed and finely chopped Juice 1/2 lemon 1 cup heavy whipping cream Freshly ground pepper Spicy Spanish or Hungarian paprika 12 (8- to 10-inch) flour tortillas 1 pound fresh green peas, shelled, or 1 cup frozen peas 3 ounces firm young blue cheese such as Cabrales, Danish Blue or Maytag Blue Char peppers on gas grill, over gas flame on range or in broiler, turning occasionally, until black on all sides. Allow to cool slightly, then core and halve peppers, remove ribs and remaining seeds and scrape off skin. Set aside. Saute onion and garlic in 1 tablespoon olive oil until onion is very tender, then drain. Meanwhile, place potatoes in saucepan with cold salted water to cover. Bring to boil over high heat and continue boiling until potatoes are done, about 20 minutes. Drain, allow to cool slightly and mash well in large bowl. Add creme fraiche and mix well. Then fold in crab meat, green onions and lemon juice. Bring cream to simmer in saucepan. Meanwhile, puree roasted peppers with sauteed onion and garlic in blender or food processor. Stir puree into hot cream and return to simmer. Remove from heat and season to taste with salt, pepper and paprika. Pour olive oil to 1/4-inch depth in medium skillet and heat over high heat. Using tongs, dip tortillas 1 by 1 in oil and fry briefly on each side to soften. Drain tortillas and stack between paper towels to keep warm for ease in rolling. Add more oil to skillet and reduce heat as necessary. Brush both sides of each tortilla with red pepper sauce and spread about 1/4 cup crab mixture in line in center of each. Roll up tortillas and place seam-side down in lightly oiled 11x9-inch baking dish. Spoon remaining red pepper sauce over tortillas, cover loosely with foil and bake at 350 degrees about 25 minutes, or until hot. Meanwhile, cook peas in boiling salted water until al dente. Drain and set aside. Remove foil from enchiladas, crumble blue cheese on top and continue baking, uncovered, until cheese is just melted. Serve enchiladas on individual plates scattered with peas. Makes 6 servings. Each serving contains about: 677 calories; 830 mg sodium; 123 mg cholesterol; 39 grams fat; 55 grams carbohydrates; 27 grams protein; 2.36 grams fiber. This article is copyright 1992 The Los Angeles Times Home Edition. Redistribution to other sites is not permitted except by arrangement with American Cybercasting Corporation. For more information, send-email to usa@AmeriCast.COM