Best Food Writing 2010 (30 page)

You see a progression if you compare the classics of the past century: Escoffier’s culinary dictionary, Julia Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” Julee Rosso and Sheila Lukins’s “The New Basics,” and Bittman’s recently revised “Everything.” The standard kitchen bible, the book you turn to most often, has evolved from dictionary to encyclopedia, and to anthology and then grammar. Escoffier’s book was pure dictionary: quick reminders to clarify a point or make a variation eloquent. Escoffier lists every recipe for tournedos and all its variations. His recipes are summaries, aidemémoires for cooks who know how to make it already but need to be reminded what’s in it. (Is a béarnaise sauce tarragon leaves and stems, or just leaves?) This was the way all cooks cooked once. (In the B. & O. cookbook, one finds this recipe for short ribs: “Put short ribs in a saucepan with one quart of nice stock, with one onion cut fine, steam until nice and tender. Place in roasting pan and put in oven until they are nice and brown.” That’s it. Everything else is commentary.)

In “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” as in Waverley Root’s “The Food of France,” which came out at around the same time, the turn is encyclopedic: here’s all you can find on a particular kind of cooking, which you will master by reading this book. Things are explained, but, as in an encyclopedia, what is assumed is the need for more and deeper information about material already taken to be essential.You get a list not of everything there is but of everything that matters. Julia gives you only the tournedos recipes that count.

You didn’t want to master the art of French cooking unless you believed that it was an art uniquely worth mastering. When people did master it, they realized that it wasn’t—that no one style of cooking really was adequate to our appetites. So the cookbook as anthology arrived, open to many sources, from American Thanksgiving and Jewish brisket through Italian pasta and French Stroganoff—most successfully in “The New Basics” cookbook, which was the standard for the past generation. The anthology cookbooks assumed curiosity about styles and certainty about methods. In “The New Basics,” the tone is chatty, informal, taking for granted that the readers—women, mostly—know the old basics: what should be in the kitchen, what kinds of machines to use, how to handle a knife.

THE COOKBOOKS of the grammatical turn assume that you don’t know how to do the simple things, but that the simple things, mastered, will enable you to do it all. Bittman assumes that you have no idea how to chop an onion, or boil a potato, much less how chopping differs from slicing or from dicing. Each basic step is tenderly detailed. How to Boil Water: “Put water in a pot (usually to about two-thirds full), and turn the heat to high.” How to Slice with a Knife: “You still press down, just with a little more precision, and cut into thick or thin slices of fairly uniform size.” To sauté: “Put a large skillet on the stove and add the butter or oil. Turn the heat to medium-high. When the butter bubbles or the oil shimmers, add the food you want to sauté.” Measuring dry ingredients, you are told to “scoop them up or use a spoon to put them in the cup.” And, “Much of cooking is about heat.”

This all feels masculine in tone—no pretty side drawings, a systematic progression from recipe to recipe—and seems written mainly for male readers who are either starting to cook for friends or just married and learning that if you don’t cook she’s not about to. The old “New Basics,” one recalls nostalgically, was exclamatory and feminine. “The celebration continues,” reads the blurb, and inside the authors “indulge” and “savor” and “delight”; a warm chicken salad is “perfection when dressed in even more lemon,” another chicken salad is “lush and abundant.” The authors’ perpetual “we” (“We like all our holidays accompanied with a bit of the bubbly”), though meant, in part, to suggest a merry partnership, was generous and inclusive, a “we” that honest-to-God extended to all of their readers.

Bittman never gushes but always gathers up: he has seven ways to vary a chicken kebab; eighteen ideas for pizza toppings; and, the best, an “infinite number of ways to customize” mashed potatoes. He is cautious, and even, post-Pollan, skeptical; while Rosso and Lukins “love” and “crave” their filet of beef, to all of animal flesh Bittman allows no more than “Meat is filling and requires little work to prepare. It’s relatively inexpensive and an excellent source of many nutrients. And most people like it.”
Most people like it!
Rosso and Lukins would have tossed out any recipe, much less an entire food group, of which no more than that could be said. Lamb is a thing they “fall in love with again every season of the year,” and of pork they know that it is “divinely succulent.” Bittman thinks that most people like it. His tone is that of Ed Harris in “Apollo 13”: Let’s work the problem, people. Want to thicken a sauce? Well, try Plan A: cook it down. Copy that, Houston. Plan A inadequate? Try Plan B: add roux. And so on, ever upward, until you get to the old one, which they knew on the B. & O.: add a little cornstarch. The progressive pattern appeals to men. The implication, slightly illusory, is that there’s a neat set of steps from each point to the next, as in a Bill Walsh pass pattern: each pattern on the tree proceeds logically and the quarterback just has to look a little farther upfield.

GRAMMARS TEACH FOREIGN TONGUES, and the advantage of Bittman’s approach is that it can teach you how to cook. But is learning how to cook from a grammar book—item by item, and by rote—really learning how to cook? Doesn’t it miss the social context—the dialogue of generations, the commonality of the family recipe—that makes cooking something more than just assembling calories and nutrients? It’s as if someone had written a book called “How to Play Catch.” (“Open your glove so that it faces the person throwing you the ball. As the ball arrives, squeeze the glove shut.”) What it would tell you is not that we have figured out how to play catch but that we must now live in a culture without dads. In a world denuded of living examples, we end up with the guy who insists on making Malaysian Shrimp one night and Penne all’Amatriciana the next; it isn’t about anything except having learned how it’s done. Your grandmother’s pound cake may have been like concrete, but it was about a whole history and view of life; it got that tough for a reason.

The metaphor of the cookbook was long the pet metaphor of the conservative political philosopher Michael Oakeshott in his assault on the futility of thinking that something learned by rote was as good as what was learned by ritual. Oakeshott’s much repeated point was that one could no more learn how to make good government from a set of rules than one could learn how to bake a cake by reading recipe books. The cookbook, like the constitution, was only the residue of a practice. Even the most grammatical of cookbooks dies without living cooks to illuminate its principles. The history of post-independence African republics exists to prove the first point; that Chocolate Nemesis cake that always fails but your friends keep serving anyway exists to prove the second. Unsupported by your mom, the cookbook is the model of empty knowledge.

All this is true, and yet the real surprise of the cookbook, as of the constitution, is that it sometimes makes something better in the space between what’s promised and what’s made. You can follow the recipe for the exotic thing—green curry or paella—and though what you end up with would shock the natives, it may be just as good as or even better than the thing intended. Before I learned that green curries were soupy, I made them creamy, which actually is nicer. In politics, too, where the unwritten British constitution has been turned into a recipe—as in the constitutions of Canada and Australia—the condensation of practices into rules can make for a rain of better practices; the Canadian constitution, for instance, wanting to keep the bicameral vibe of a House of Lords without having a landed gentry, turned it into a Senate of distinguished citizens by appointment, an idea that can rebound back as a model for the new House of Lords. Between the rule and the meal falls the ritual, and the real ritual of the recipe is like the ritual of the law; the reason the judge sits high up, in a robe, is not that it makes a difference to the case but that it makes a difference to the clients. The recipe is, in this way, our richest instance of the force and the power of abstract rules. All messages change as they’re re-sent; but messages not sent never get received. Life is like green curry.

HOWEVER WE TAKE COOKBOOKS—grammatically or encyclopedically, as storehouses of craft or illusions of knowledge—one can’t read them in bed for many years without feeling that there is a conspiracy between readers and writers to obscure the ultimate point. A kind of primal scene of eating hovers over every cookbook, just as a primal scene of sex lurks behind every love story. In cooking, the primal scene, or substance, is salt, sugar, and fat held in maximum solution with starch; add protein as necessary, and finish with caffeine (coffee or chocolate) as desired. That’s what, suitably disguised in some decent dimension of dressup, we always end up making. We make béarnaise sauce by whisking a stick of melted butter into a couple of eggs, and, now that we no longer make béarnaise sauce, we make salsa verde by beating a cup of olive oil into a fistful of anchovies.The herbs change; the hope does not.

Mark Peel, in his Campanile cookbook, comes near to giving the game away: “We chefs all lie about our mashed potatoes,” he admits. “We don’t tell you we’ve used 1½ pounds of cream and butter with 1¾ pounds of potatoes. You don’t need to know.” (Joël Robuchon, the king of his generation of French cooks, first became famous for a purée that had an even higher proportion of butter beaten into starch.) After reading hundreds of cookbooks, you may have the feeling that every recipe, every cookbook, is an attempt to get you to attain this ideal sugar-salt-saturated-fat state without having to see it head on, just as every love poem is an attempt to maneuver a girl or a boy into bed by talking as fast, and as eloquently, as possible about something else. “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? / Thou art more lovely and more temperate” is the poetic equivalent of simmering the garlic with ginger and Sauternes before you put the cream in; the end is the cream, but you carefully simmer the garlic.

ALL APPETITES HAVE THEIR ILLUSIONS, which are part of their pleasure. Going back to our own primal scene, that’s why the husband turns those pages. The truth is that we don’t passively look at the pictures and leap to the results; we actively read the lines and internally act out the jobs. The woman who reads the fashion magazines isn’t passively imagining the act of having; she’s actively imagining the act of shopping. (And distantly imagining the act of wearing.) She turns down pages not because she wants to look again but because, for that moment, she really intends to buy that—for a decisive imagined moment she did buy it, even if she knows she never will. Reading recipe books is an active practice, too, even if all the action takes place in your mind. We reanimate our passions by imagining the possibilities, and the act of wanting ends up mattering more than the fact of getting. It’s not the false hope that it will turn out right that makes us go on with our reading but our being resigned to the knowledge that it won’t ever, quite.

The desire to go on desiring, the wanting to want, is what makes you turn the pages—all the while aware that the next Boston cream pie, the sweet-salty-fatty-starchy thing you will turn out tomorrow, will be neither more nor less unsatisfying than last night’s was. When you start to cook, as when you begin to live, you think that the point is to improve the technique until you end up with something perfect, and that the reason you haven’t been able to break the cycle of desire and disillusion is that you haven’t yet mastered the rules. Then you grow up, and you learn that that’s the game.

MY INNER CHILD

By Charlotte Freeman From
culinate.com

Novelist Charlotte Freeman (
Place Last Seen)
blogs about the quotidian joys and challenges of her scaled-back life in Livingston, Montana, at
http://livingsmallblog.com
. Tragedy and comedy are often intermingled—as in this essay, where conquering a new recipe is one way to mourn her brother’s death.

L
ast summer—nearly half a century after its initial publication—Julia Child’s classic cookbook
Mastering the Art of French Cooking
hit the top of the national bestseller charts. The phenomenon was, of course, driven by the late-summer (and now video) release of the movie “Julie & Julia,” which I confess I have not yet seen, although I was an early and ardent supporter of Julie Powell’s blog, the Julie/Julia Project.

A flurry of articles immediately ensued: about how difficult it is to cook out of
Mastering
, and about the panic ensuing among ordinary cooks when confronted with the amounts of butter and cream called for in Child’s classic French recipes.

On the one hand, Regina Schrambling warned
Slate
readers not to buy the book, because “you’ll never cook from it.”

On the other hand, the very
New York Times
article in which Child’s bestseller status was announced also quoted a Florida woman who, horrified by the inclusion of salt pork in the famous boeuf bourguignonne recipe, decided that a can of cream of mushroom soup, a can of French onion soup, and a can of red wine were acceptable substitutes.

“Yes, Julia Child rolled over in her grave when I opened the cream of mushroom soup,” Melissah Bruce-Weiner told the paper. “But you know what? That’s our world.”

Perhaps. But it’s also a world in which everyone seems to be missing the point of both
Mastering the Art of French Cooking
and of the Julie/Julia Project. Both were about mastery, not about everyday ease.

Child set out to not only master the art of French cooking for herself, but to translate that precise tradition for an audience of “servantless American cooks” who had only the grim supermarkets of the 1950s from which to shop.

Two generations later, Powell set out to save herself from despair, not by inventing “30-Minute Meals” but by daring herself to cook each and every recipe in Child’s exacting and daunting book.

These are not tasks taken on by women who are seeking to make their lives easier. These are tasks taken on by women seeking to test themselves, to see whether they can create something beautiful and delicious while hewing to a set of exacting standards.

Sometimes, the only way to save yourself is to take on a project, and for some of us, the projects by which we seek to do that involve cooking. I know, because it was four years ago that I set out to survive the first horrifyingly lonely Christmas after my brother died by cooking an enormous, elaborate croquembouche.

It was my first Christmas at home after Patrick was killed in a car wreck, and since I had no one to cook for any more, I decided I needed an elaborate cooking project to take with me to the several parties to which I’d been invited.

I needed something difficult. I needed something delicious. I needed something very, very festive. And a croquembouche—a tower of cream-filled puff pastries shellacked in hot caramel, traditionally served in France as a wedding cake—fit all those bills.

I think I must have seen a rerun of that hilarious Martha Stewart episode in which she and Child make dueling croquembouches. Stewart’s is all tidy and neatly stacked, while Child’s is sort of a festive pile.

“Ooh,” says Child in her warbly voice, as she flings hot caramel strands in the direction of her dessert, “I like yours.”

A croquembouche seemed right for Patrick. For several years running, he had made the Paris-Brest pastry out of a Jacques Pépin cookbook. The first time he’d piped out the
pâte à choux
for it, he thought it didn’t look right, and so he threw it out. When he followed the recipe a second time, only to get the exact same result, he put it in the oven despite his doubts.

“I should have believed Jacques,” he told me when I came home from Christmas shopping. “Look! It’s gorgeous!”

And Patrick had loved Julia Child. As a very small child, her show was his favorite thing to watch on TV. He was so devoted to the original “The French Chef ” that we used to tease him that he could make a perfect
bûche de Noël
by the time he was five.

It was Patrick who discovered that Pépin and Child would be in San Francisco, signing copies of their latest cookbook, and who insisted we go into town and get copies. There we were, the youngest people in the line by at least 15 years, and there Child was, poohpoohing our hero worship, signing away while Pépin ushered clusters of star-struck ladies behind her for snapshots.

It was a lovely afternoon. Patrick’s copy of that book was one of the things I made sure to keep when I had to clean out his things.

And so, the croquembouche. It took three days. On the first day, I made the cream puffs—dozens and dozens of cream puffs. Ninety-six, I believe. Then I made two flavors of pastry cream—Grand Marnier and chocolate. On the second day, I filled all the cream puffs. Finally, on the third day I made the caramel and started to assemble the thing.

The caramel was kind of scary; it’s very hot and you need to keep a big bowl of ice water nearby in case of burns. And the directions said to dip the cream puffs in the caramel, which was also sort of daunting. But little by little, the thing started to set up.

I’d bought some of those pretty little silver balls to decorate it with, but the caramel set up so quickly that they mostly just skittered all over my kitchen. And I had a near-disaster toward the top. The first couple of caramel batches went pretty well, but as they started to thicken up, I thought I could lighten it by adding some of the sugar syrup that had melted but hadn’t yet caramelized.

This was not a good idea. It looked like shiny brown caramel, but when it cooled on the cream puffs, it looked like the opaque, matte, dried sugar solution it was.

I was horrified. It was four o’clock, and the Christmas Eve open house was starting at six, and I hadn’t made any plans for a backup dessert.

This is when I remembered Julia Child on Martha Stewart’s show. What Would Julia Do? I cleaned out my saucepan and started a fresh batch of caramel. I was patient. I waited for that wonderful toasty smell, and then I carefully swirled the caramel until it was a clear medium-brown.

Then, still following the spirit of Julia Child, I dripped the new caramel all over the top of the croquembouche. As the caramel started to set up, I tried pulling strings of caramel out, so it’d get that nice spun-sugar kind of look.

It was still a little lumpy, and there weren’t as many stringy glistening strands as I would have liked, but overall, it was beautiful. It was a beautiful croquembouche.

It was also nearly three feet tall and weighed close to 30 pounds. I had to get it out into the car, then drive across town, and then maneuver it past the sweets-loving, 125-pound golden retriever at the door.

All of which I managed. I’d finished my project. I hadn’t cried all day. I had arrived at a party like a person who can survive disaster with aplomb. I’d called on my inner Julia Child, and she hadn’t let me down.

That’s what
Mastering the Art of French Cooking
is really all about. It’s about poaching your salt pork for precisely the right amount of time it takes for American salt pork to resemble French lardons.

And that’s what Julie Powell’s project was about. It was about being determined enough to figure out how to split a marrow bone, or kill a lobster, or learn to make a perfect
pâte brisée
.

It’s not about easy. Triumph never is.

I can only hope that all those new copies of
Mastering
will not go home and languish on cookbook shelves. But even if they do, there’s another generation coming up, one who might, as my generation did, pull their mothers’ copies off the shelf, start paging through, and discover the deep joy that comes from following Child’s exacting directions in order to produce something delicious, and elegant, and—as the French would say—correct.