Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation (21 page)

Whether you “sweated” your
onions at a low temperature or “browned” them at a higher one yielded a
completely different set of flavors in the finished dish, Samin explained. Her ultimate
authority on such matters was Benedetta Vitali, the chef she had worked for in Florence,
who wrote a whole book about soffritto, called—what else?—
Soffritto
.
“Benedetta makes three different soffrittos, depending on the dish—and all of them
start with the exact same onions, carrot, and celery. But it can be made darker and more
caramelized, or lighter and more vegetal, all depending on the heat and speed you cook
them at.” (In fact, the word “soffritto” contains the key cooking
instruction: It means “underfried.”)

Spend half an hour watching onions sweat in
a pan and you will either marvel at their gradual transformation—from opaque to
translucent; from sulfurous to sweet; from crunchy to yielding—or go stark raving mad
with impatience. But this was precisely the lesson Samin was trying to impart.

“Great cooking is all about the three
‘p’s: patience, presence, and practice,” she told me at one point.
Samin is a devoted student of yoga, and she sees important parallels in the mental
habits demanded by both disciplines. Working with onions seemed as good a place to
develop those habits as any—practice in chopping them, patience in sweating them, and
presence in keeping an eye on the pan so that they didn’t accidentally brown if
the phone rang and you permitted yourself a lapse in attention.

Unfortunately, not one of the
“p”s came easily to me. I tend toward impatience, particularly in my
dealings with the material world, and only seldom do I find myself attending to one
thing at a time. Or, for that matter, to the present, a tense I have a great deal of
trouble inhabiting. My native tense is the future conditional, a low simmer of
unspecified worry being the usual condition. I couldn’t
meditate if my life depended on it. (Which—believe me, I know—is the completely wrong
way to approach meditation.) Much as I like the whole concept of “flow”—that
quality of being so completely absorbed in an activity that you lose the thread of
time—my acquaintance with it is sorely limited. A great many boulders get in the way of
my flow, disturbing the clarity of the mental waters and creating lots of distracting
noise. Occasionally when I’m writing I’ll slip into the flow for a little
while; sometimes while reading, too, and of course sleeping, though I doubt that counts.
But in the kitchen? Watching onions sweat? The work just isn’t demanding enough to
fully occupy consciousness, with the result that my errant, catlike thoughts refuse to
stay where I try to put them.

One thought I did have, watching the onions
sweat before we added the carrots and celery to the pan, took the form of an obvious
question. Why is it that onions are so widespread in pot dishes? After salt, I
can’t think of another cooking ingredient quite as universal as the onion.
Worldwide, onions are the second most important vegetable crop (after tomatoes), and
they grow almost everywhere in the world that people can grow anything. So what do they
do for a dish? Samin suggested that onions and the other commonly used aromatics are
widely used because they are cheap and commonly available ingredients that add some
sweetness to a dish. When I gently pushed for a more fulsome explanation, she offered,
“It’s a chemical reaction.” I soon discovered that that’s her
default answer to
all
questions about kitchen science. Her second is
“Let’s ask Harold!” meaning Harold McGee, the kitchen-science writer
who, though she had never met him, nevertheless serves as one of the god figures in her
personal cosmology.

But what
kind
of chemical reaction?
It turns out a comprehensive
scientific investigation of mirepoix
remains to be done; even Harold McGee, when I wrote to ask him about it, was
uncharacteristically vague on the subject. The obvious but incorrect answer is that the
sugars in the onions and carrots become caramelized in the sauté pan, thereby
contributing that whole range of flavor compounds to the dish. But Samin (like most
other authorities) recommends taking pains
not
to brown a mirepoix, whether by
reducing the heat or adding salt, which by drawing water out of the vegetables serves to
keep the browning reaction from kicking in. The caramelized-sugar theory also
doesn’t account for the prominent role in mirepoix and soffritto of celery, a not
particularly sweet vegetable that would seem to contribute little but water and
cellulose. What all this suggests is that there must be other processes that come into
play in sautéing aromatic vegetables besides caramelization (or the Maillard reaction),
processes that contribute flavors to a dish by other means not yet well understood.

One afternoon in the midst of slowly
sweating a mirepoix, I risked ruining it by doing some Internet research on what might
be going on in my pan just then. I know, I was multitasking, failing utterly at the
“p” of presence, possibly patience as well. I found a fair amount of
confusion and uncertainty about the subject online, but enough clues to conclude it was
likely, or at least plausible, that the low, slow heat was breaking down the long
necklaces of protein in the vegetables into their amino acid building blocks, some of
which (like glutamic acid) are known to give foods the meaty, savory taste called
“umami”—from the Japanese word
umai,
meaning
“delicious.” Umami is now generally accepted as the fifth taste, along with
salty, sweet, bitter, and sour, and like each of the others has receptors on the tongue
dedicated to detecting its presence.

As for the seemingly pointless celery, it,
too, may contribute
umami to a pot dish, and not just by supplying
lots of carbohydrate-stiffened cell walls and water to a mirepoix. My Web surfing
eventually delivered me to an article in the
Journal of Agricultural and Food
Chemistry
written by a team of Japanese food scientists and titled, fetchingly,
“Flavor Enhancement of Chicken Broth from Boiled Celery Constituents.”
^*
These chemists reported that a group of volatile compounds found in celery called
phthalides, though completely tasteless by themselves, nevertheless enhanced the
perception of both sweetness and umami when they were added to a chicken broth. Way to
go, celery.

Abstracted soul that I am, patiently cooking
a mirepoix became much more interesting, or bearable at least, now that I had a theory.
Now, knowing what was at stake, I paid close attention to the satisfying sizzle—the
auditory evidence of water escaping from the plant tissues—and then, as it subsided, to
the softening of the vegetables, indicating that the scaffold of carbohydrates that held
the cell walls rigid was breaking down into sugars that it was up to me to keep from
browning. I now understood that, even before I introduced the meat or liquid to the pot,
the depth of flavor in my braise, the very savoriness of it, hung in the balance of
these gently simmering onions, carrots, and celery.

One more scientific fact contributed to my
deepening admiration for mirepoix and soffritto, and especially for the onions in them,
which this fact single-handedly rendered considerably less irritating. It seems that
adding onions to foods, and to meat dishes in particular, makes the food safer to eat.
Like many of the most commonly used spices, onions (garlic, too) contain powerful
antimicrobial compounds that survive cooking. Microbiologists believe that onions,
garlic, and
spices protect us from the growth of dangerous bacteria on
meat. This might explain why the use of these plants in cooking becomes more common the
closer you get to the equator, where keeping meat from spoiling becomes progressively
more challenging. Before the advent of refrigeration, the bacterial contamination of
food, animal flesh in particular, posed a serious threat to people’s health. (In
Indian cooking, recipes for vegetarian dishes typically call for fewer spices than
recipes for meat dishes.) Purely through trial and error, our ancestors stumbled upon
certain plant chemicals that could protect them from getting sick. Onions happen to be
one of the most potent of all antimicrobial food plants. That the flavors of such plants
“taste good” to us may be nothing more than a learned preference for the
taste of molecules that helped to keep us alive.

What this suggests is that cooking with
these aromatic plants may involve something more than simply overcoming their chemical
defenses so that we might avail ourselves of a source of calories other creatures
can’t. It’s much more ingenious than that. Cooking with onions, garlic, and
other spices is a form of biochemical jujitsu, in which the first move is to overcome
the plants’ chemical defenses so that we might eat them, and the second is to then
deploy their defenses against other species to defend ourselves.

I was beginning to appreciate how the
marriage of plant and animal foods in a liquid medium offers a great many advantages
over simply cooking either kind of foodstuff by itself over a fire. Now the cook can
improve meat by incorporating the flavors (and antimicrobial properties) of aromatic
plants such as onions, garlic, and spices, something difficult, if not impossible, to do
when cooking directly over a fire. In
a slowly simmering liquid,
vegetables and meat can exchange molecules and flavors, in the process creating new end
products that are often much more than the sum of their humble parts. One such end
product is a sauce, probably the richest dividend of pot cooking.

Cooking in a pot is all about economy. Every
last drop of the fat and juices from the meat, which over a fire would be lost, are
conserved, along with all the nutrients from the plants. Pot cooking allows you to make
a tasty dish from a third-rate or over-the-hill cut of meat, and to stretch a small
amount of meat so that, with the addition of vegetables and sauce, it might feed more
mouths than that same meat ever would by itself. It also allows you to dispense with
meat altogether, or use it simply as a flavoring.

“This is food for when you’re
poor,” Samin pointed out one afternoon, while we were trimming a particularly
gnarly piece of lamb shoulder. “Braising is a wonderful way to cook, because it
yields powerfully flavored food from relatively inexpensive ingredients.” In fact,
the tastiest braises and stews are made from the “worst” cuts. The older the
animal, the more flavorful its meat. Also, tough cuts come from muscles that have worked
the hardest, and so contain the greatest amount of the connective tissues that, after a
long, slow cooking, dissolve into succulent gelatin.

The covered pot—covered to conserve moisture
and heat for the long haul—symbolizes the modesty and economy of this kind of cooking.
By comparison, roasting a big piece of meat over an open fire—Homeric cooking—looks like
an extravagance: a form of conspicuous display of one’s wealth, generosity, or
hunting skill. And so it has been, at least until our own era of extravagantly cheap
meat. The British, famous for roasting impressive joints over fires, traditionally
looked down on the “humble pots” of the French, with their plebeian cuts
hidden beneath dubious sauces. Prosperous and blessed with good grass for grazing cattle
and sheep the year round, the
English enjoyed access to high-quality
meat that required little more than fire to taste good. Whereas the less well-to-do and
well-provisioned French were thrown back on their wits in the kitchen, developing
techniques that allowed them to make the most of meat scraps and root vegetables and
whatever liquid might be handy.

That we now think of such peasant fare as
fancy or elite, while regarding the tossing of pricey filets of meat on the grill as
simple food for the masses, represents a complete reversal of the historical situation.
There has always been a trade-off between time and technique in the kitchen and the
quality of the raw ingredients. The better the latter, the less of the former is
required to eat well. But the opposite is equally true. With a modicum of technique and
a little more time in the kitchen, the most flavorful food can be made from the humblest
of ingredients. This enduring formula suggests that learning one’s way around the
kitchen—knowing what to do with the gnarly cut, the mirepoix, and the humble pot—might
still be a good recipe for eating delicious food without spending much to make it. These
are skills that confer a measure of independence.

But there are ethical implications here as
well, about the way to approach the eating of animals, and the environmental issues that
practice raises. If we’re only going to eat the prime cuts of young animals,
we’re going to have to raise and kill a great many more of them. And indeed this
has become the rule, with disastrous results for both the animals and the land.
Nowadays, there is no market for old laying hens, since so few of us know how to cook
them, with the result that much of this meat ends up in pet food or landfills. If we are
going to eat animals, it behooves us to waste as few and as little of them as we
possibly can, something that the humble cook pot allows us to do.