Back in the kitchen

"Tony explained to the cooks the types of ingredients he was using and why he had chosen to have them cooked in certain combinations. He talked about the seasons, his choice of purveyors, the differences between types of oysters, how kitchen equipment worked, and how to create balance in a dish. Throughout the time that they met, the cooks handed him tiny white plastic spoons to taste the food. It was a hushed atmosphere punctuated by nervous laughter.

"The cooks, all of whom were fifteen to twenty years younger than Tony, were in awe of him, and for good reason. They were years away from acquiring his knowledge and might never be able to do so."

Scott Haas in "Back of the House: The Secret Life of a Restaurant"

For the food

"It was a very odd sight, especially in a country as tightly controlled as Vietnam, and I wanted to ask someone - anyone - about it. Was the man a gangster? A cop? This was a mystery that needed solving.

"Then my food arrived. I hadn't known quite what to order, but something on the menu caught my attention: lu'o'n nu'o'ng mia. A variation on chao tom nu'o'ng, the popular dish of shrimp paste wrapped around sugarcane and grilled over charcoal, this was made instead with freshwater eel - held in place with a chive tied into a bow - and as I bit in, I fell in love.

"The eel was rich and oily, caramelized from the charcoal heat, infused with garlic, fish sauce, and the raw sweetness of the cane. And the cane itself, when I gnawed it, released a burst of sugary juice tinged with the meaty slick of the eel.

"This, I knew, was what I couldn't get back at Chez Trinh, the only Vietnamese restaurant in Williamsburg. This was why I'd picked up stakes and moved to Vietnam - for the food. The eel, in fact, was so great that I wanted to tell strangers about it, to turn to my neighbors and tell them - in English if they were tourists, in pidgin Vietnamese if not - that it justified everything."

Matt Gross in "The Turk Who Loved Apples and Other Tales of Losing My Way Around the World"

Girl hunter

"They say you always remember your first time. For me it was that turkey hunt four years ago, early on a Saturday morning deep in the Arkansas Delta, in a place they call the Village. It was after a spring night spent drinking aged Scotch and smoking cigars on a wide veranda with some of the most gregarious and unpretentious Southerners I had ever encountered. 

"They were well-heeled country folk who liked to live large and take no prisoners when it came to what they stood for and the life they prized. Good food was a huge part of that life, and on that particular evening before the hunt, there were rows of silver-haired men smoking cigars, mud caked to their leather boots, before a granite table bearing endless stacks of cheese and freshly baked bread, and a mound of salad that could feed a regiment.

"Meats - cacciatorini, salami, ham, pork belly, catfish, and other delectables, too - were piled high on platters, and, of course, we had collard greens with white macaroni, and chips and dips. 

"And there was plenty to wash it all down: red wine, beers in large tubs with ice spilling out over the edges, and then the whiskey before the meal and after, too, when everyone moved gradually into the smoking room by the fireplace and the guitars emerged, and the loose, hard notes of the blues drifted beautifully overhead in a haze of Cuban cigar smoke, a sort of bacchanal to welcome in the warmth of spring and summer and, more important, the start of turkey season."

Georgia Pellegrini in "Girl Hunter: Revolutionizing the Way We Eat, One Hunt at a Time"

Fundamentalists

"I come from a family of cake fundamentalists.

"We are people of the Cake. A baby is born and welcomed with cake; there's cake for anniversaries, cake for graduating high school or college; cake for passing the bar or the CPA exam, cake for winning Second Runner-Up in the Miss Peanut pageant; cake for getting out of prison, cake for visiting kinfolk, cake for Christmas and Easter and the Fourth of July; cake when you marry, when you're sick, when you die."

Diane Roberts in "People of the Cake" in the book "Best Food Writing 2010"

"Consider the Fork"

In the cabinets, there are chopping boards and mixing bowls, a colander and a salad spinner. Drawers contain wooden spoons, slotted spoons and spatulas. There are knives, measuring cups and can openers.

There is a bowl I like to use for breakfast, whether I am having cereal or oatmeal or yogurt. There is a mug I like to use for coffee in the late afternoon. And a spoon with which I like to stir that coffee. There just is.

I have favorites – pans and pots, bowls, cups and utensils I pick up often and prefer over others for certain foods. We all do.

In "Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat," well-researched and thoroughly engaging, British food writer Bee Wilson looks at relationships between the tools we have and the things we make. She explores the ways in which "the implements we use in the kitchen affect what we eat, how we eat, and what we feel about what we eat."

She compares old-school diets with modern-day sensibilities. She gives us a highly accessible yet comprehensive assessment of the evolution of our cooking habits, tracing, for example, our integration over the years of fire and ice.

Wilson ("Swindled: The Dark History of Food Fraud, from Poisoned Candy to Counterfeit Coffee") delineates in broad terms our great reliance on heat.

Once upon a time, a single fire from an open hearth "served to warm a house, heat water for washing, and cook dinner. For millennia, all cooking was roasting in one form or another. In the developing world, the heat of an open fire remains the way that the very poorest cook."

To work effectively with that fire, we forged "a host of related tools," including spits, spit-jacks to rotate meat, tongs, pot hooks, drip pans, trivets, and flesh-forks for pulling pieces of meat out of a pot. These usually had long handles and were made of heavy metal.

If we tried using short-handled stainless steel tongs or nonstick silicone spatulas - staples in our 21^st-century kitchens - in that environment, she suggests cheekily, we "wouldn't stand a chance. The utensils would melt. I would fry. The children would howl. Dinner would burn." Her wit is subtle but wonderful.

These days, we are able to utilize different heat sources. We can control fire more easily. I can adjust the flame on my stovetop with a knob, for instance, turning the temperature up to boil a kettle of water or down to effect a slow braise. Inside ovens, "vast communal chambers" in ancient and medieval Europe used to bake bread for entire villages, we make cookies and cakes for ourselves.

We also now have microwave ovens. Invented by Raytheon engineers working originally on military radar systems, they were first sold in the 1950s. They did not hit mainstream markets, however, until about 1967 when manufacturers got the price of a unit below $500.

By the '80s and '90s, microwaves had become indispensable. We use them to reheat leftovers or to avoid food prep altogether, popping in store-bought frozen entrées when we eat alone or cannot cook. What we gain in convenience we lose unfortunately in connectedness.

Like fire, ice matters, the author says. "The efficient home refrigerator entirely changed the way food - getting it, cooking it, eating it - fitted into people's lives."

It changed what we ate. Rather than rely on salted meats or preserves because we had to, we could enjoy fresh meat, milk and green vegetables whenever we wanted to. It changed how we bought food. "Without refrigeration, there could be no supermarkets, no 'weekly shopping,' no stocking up the freezer for emergencies."

And it affected other industries, giving rise to products such as Tupperware, first sold in 1946, and Saran Wrap, introduced in 1953, as well as frozen foods and beverages. Orange juice concentrate, for example, was the most successful commercially frozen product in post-war America, selling 9 million gallons in 1948-1949. We increased our eating and drinking options.

What sets Wilson's discussion apart from those of her contemporaries, though, is her additional focus on simple hand-held tools. Like Steve Gdula ("The Warmest Room in the House: How the Kitchen Became the Heart of the Twentieth-Century American Home"), she examines the overall design of our cooking spaces. But to her credit, she details seemingly ordinary items, too, making her book all the more appealing.

She pays significant attention to smaller things, what we generally would not even think twice about, what we have on dish racks or countertops and pick up mindlessly every day.

Take, for example, the wooden spoon. It is at heart a low-tech gadget. "It does not switch on and off or make funny noises," Wilson writes. "It has no patent or guarantee. There is nothing futuristic or shiny or clever about it." Yet it is amazingly versatile.

Study it. What is it made of? Beech or a denser maple? How is it shaped? Is it oval or round? Cupped or flat? Has it got a pointy part on one edge "to get at the lumpy bits in the corner of the pan"? Is the handle short, for children first learning to cook perhaps, or longer for adults to keep spatters at bay?

Wood, she tells us, is a nonabrasive material, too, gentle enough on pots and pans. It is nonreactive and won't leave a metallic taste in our food. "It is also a poor conductor of heat, which is why you can stir hot soup with a wooden spoon without burning your hand." Above all, it is familiar. We cook with wooden spoons because we always have.

That our workspaces contain mishmashes of old and new tools should not surprise us, Wilson says. On the contrary, eclectic collections reflect our changing personalities. Chopping boards sit alongside food processors. Melon ballers can be popular one year, handheld blenders all the rage another.

We don't necessarily want to reinvent cooking; we only want to make it easier. We learn to adapt and improve our skills over time. In most cases, "whisks, fire, and saucepans still do the job pretty well. All we want is better whisks, better fire, and better saucepans."

We might inherit some things from parents, grandparents, aunts or uncles, and receive some from friends. Others could be gifts to ourselves. As it is with the utensils in my kitchen. As it is, I suspect, in all our kitchens. So the food we make is not only a combination of ingredients, she reminds us. "It is the product of technologies, past and present." It is the result of a compendium.

(A version of this review appeared originally on www.culinate.com.)

Feasting

Cooking without meat in no way means cooking without flavor. 

In her sixth volume, "Indian Vegetarian Feast: Fresh, Simple, Healthy Dishes for Today's Family," BBC presenter Anjum Anand ("Indian Food Made Easy") concentrates on sensible vegetarian dishes. 

A London resident who visits Delhi and Calcutta regularly, she prepares mostly vegetarian foods for her husband and children. She offers ideas for meals throughout the day that privilege herbs, spices, rice, beans and whole grains. 

Her "desert island ingredient would be humble Bengal gram (chana dal), a type of lentil," she writes. Highly versatile, "it can be made into a curry, stir-fried with spices into a protein-rich side dish, even used to make a dessert." 

Anand combines yellow lentils with ginger and chilies to create "fluffy, spongy, savory" steamed lentil cakes, served in a spicy rasam broth. 

For appetizers, she makes tandoori baby potatoes — twice-cooked potatoes with cumin, garam masala, coriander and paprika — and tops them with herbed yogurt. 

To griddled zucchini carpaccio, she adds an Indian-inspired chickpea salsa "based upon a roadside chaat," drizzles pistachio dressing and scatters feta cheese. 

That none of the recipes here appears excessive or inaccessible is a testament to Anand's ability to simplify ingredients and techniques. Emma Lee's bright and evocative images add class to the presentation.

(A version of this review appeared originally at Publishers Weekly.)

Throwing fish

Anyone who has been to Seattle's bustling Pike Place Market has probably seen the Fish Guys, boisterous men who "throw (and catch!) a lot of salmon," and who "give a lot of hugs (and) mug for a lot of snapshots..."

Tourist attractions to be sure, these fan favorites describe the work fishmongers like them do regularly in their book "In the Kitchen with the Pike Place Fish Guys: 100 Recipes and Tips from the World-Famous Crew of Pike Place Fish." 

They discuss their livelihoods and provide handfuls of go-to recipes as well as "tips and tricks and shortcuts for busy folks." 

At the shop, the crew promotes sustainable seafood, eschewing farm-raised salmon, for instance, because it is such a "resource-intensive food to produce," taking three pounds of feed to create every one pound of fish. 

They don't belabor their food politics, however, and keep the overall discussion light, including recipes for festive gatherings like crab quesadillas, crab cake BLTs, gumbo and paella. 

Early risers are offered breakfast recipes for a Dungeness crab and bacon quiche, and something they call Grits and Grunts. And fancier items such as Salmon Rillettes on Croustade and Calamari Persillade come courtesy of market neighbor Café Campagne, making this fun volume all the more appealing. 

(A version of this review appeared originally at Publishers Weekly.)

Spring peas

Spring Pea Salad

from Michelle Obama's "American Grown: The Story of the White House Kitchen Garden and Gardens Across America"

2 1/2 cups shelled fresh green peas
1 small shallot, thinly sliced
1 small leek (white part only), cleaned and thinly sliced
zest and juice of 1 lemon
1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil
1/2 cup shredded fresh mint leaves
salt
freshly ground black pepper

Bring a large pot of salted water to boil. Pour the peas into the water and cook for no more than 2 minutes. Drain and immediately plunge the peas into a bowl of ice water. Drain and pat dry with a towel. Puree 1/2 cup of the peas in a blender.

Place the peas, pea puree, shallot and leek in a medium glass or stainless steel bowl and toss gently to combine.

Add the lemon zest and juice, olive oil and mint. Season with salt and pepper and toss gently until the vegetables are coated. Serve immediately. Makes 6 to 8 servings.

Cheesy

Lemon poppyseed

Consider it a bit of sunshine on a Wednesday afternoon.

Distinction

"After another five years of magazine and newspaper writing, cookbook work, and tasting menus, I had acquired an additional fifteen pounds. My heart, my gut, and my blood sugar were unimpressed by the four-star pedigree of many of those extra calories. To them, there was no distinction between a Ferran Adria tasting menu and a Colonel Sanders Variety Bucket."

Peter Kaminsky in "Culinary Intelligence: The Art of Eating Healthy (and Really Well)" 

Chill-y

Benefits of broth

When the weather cools, I think about soup. Not the tomato-based soups I tend to make, the ones I have with oyster crackers or crusty French bread. But the Asian broths my mother makes, the ones that simmer on the backburner in her Chinatown kitchen.

She starts a pot from scratch, building flavors with each step, each new ingredient, adjusting seasonings along the way. One day, it is a pot of watercress soup, for example. On another, it is seaweed. Some days, pressed for time, my mother works with handfuls of ground pork, slivers of tofu and cans of store-bought broth. She improvises.

In "Classic Chinese Cuisine," Nina Simonds describes the prominent place soup has on dinner tables in traditional Asian households.

"Whereas soups seem to play a rather restricted role in western cuisine," she tells us, "in China they have a much broader calling... In a family-style meal, soup is served along with the other dishes to provide nourishment and to function as a beverage."

According to cookbook author Fuchsia Dunlop, in Guangdong and other parts of southern China, it is usually eaten at the beginning of the meal and helps to whet the appetite.

Growing up in Oakland, my sisters, brothers and I were always instructed to finish our bowls of soup first. Only then could we proceed with the rest of dinner. Like classmates who had to eat their vegetables if they wanted dessert, we needed to empty our soup bowls if we wanted rice.

But in Chengdu and other parts of southwest China, Dunlop explains in "Land of Plenty: A Treasury of Authentic Sichuan Cooking," soup is generally "served at the end of the meal, and its function is to cleanse the palate after the intense, heavy flavors of a typical Sichuanese meal."

Soup, Simonds says, aids digestion and improves circulation. "Some soups have been used for centuries to treat certain ailments... Stocks simmered with assorted Chinese herbs were administered for a number of maladies."

Even now, she notes, new mothers often have a "chicken soup flavored with ginger in southern China and sesame oil in Taiwan" every day for a month after childbirth in order to restore balance and energy in their bodies.

Teresa M. Chen further examines the benefits of broth in "A Tradition of Soup: Flavors from China's Pearl River Delta." She provides substantial background information.

"The Chinese soup tradition started back in the old country where people knew many lean times," she writes in the introduction. "With humble ingredients, the Cantonese prepared a flavorful soup stock, to which practically anything on hand could be added."

Stock ingredients might include pork neck bones, for example, or chicken rib bones. For vegetarian soups, bases can be made with soybean sprouts, white turnips or Napa cabbage. These items are naturally sweet.

Frugal – and smart – cooks know instinctively that seemingly ordinary things can be useful, too. "Leftovers such as the carcass of a roast duck or a roast turkey, trimmings from a lobster or shrimp shells can all be turned into soup stock," she continues.

"Wealthy households and restaurants expanded the possibilities by using a whole chicken, a whole fish or a whole hunk of pork to make stock. After cooking for hours on end, with medicinal herbs and complementary ingredients, the broth would be strained and served hot."

Chen talks also about technique and kitchen equipment, and offers a comprehensive guide to both fresh and dried soup ingredients, including seafood and seaweed, oxtails and watercress, and a variety of Chinese herbs. She makes these accessible.

She interviews senior citizens at a community center in California's Central Valley, women and men who, like my mother, understand and appreciate the nutritional value soups afford. She collects and highlights their time-tested recipes.

Nursing a head cold and a seriously sore throat not long ago in Las Vegas, I look to hot and sour soup for comfort. Miles away from my mother's extensive home cooking, I rely on a restaurant at the hotel in which my friends and I stay. I make do.

Like sweet and sour pork, for example, or beef and broccoli stir-fry, hot and sour soup has been on menus in Chinese restaurants across the country for decades. Unlike other Asian broths, though, it is relatively heavy, thickened with cornstarch. It contains slivers of meat, shiitake mushroom and tofu.

The soup, Chen explains, "was brought to Hong Kong in the 1950s" by the Sichuanese and by those "who had been in Sichuan during the eight-year Sino-Japanese War, which ended with the end of World War II." It was subsequently "brought to the United States by those who passed through Hong Kong in the 1960s" and shortly thereafter captured the American palate.

At the table, when my friends select noodle dishes and rice plates for lunch, I ask for hot and sour soup. I have one bowl and another bowl and another slowly and deliberately. It is potent and works wonders. The ginger acts as a recuperative tonic while the white pepper and vinegar deliver a heat and intensity my body seems to need.

With over-the-counter medicine my friends swear by, the cough drops I suck on throughout the day like candy and the tall cups of chamomile tea I drink religiously, they help to shock my system back into shape. They set me straight.

(A version of this essay appeared originally on www.culinate.com.)
 

Sweet chocolate

It is a frog of a chocolate cake. But dang if it doesn't taste pretty good.

"Behind the Kitchen Door"

For all its talk of organic foods and sustainability, the restaurant industry pays little mind to the health and welfare of its own low-wage employees. 

In "Behind the Kitchen Door," Saru Jayaraman draws attention to servers, bussers, runners, cooks and dishwashers across the country "struggling to support themselves and their families under the shockingly exploitative conditions that exist behind most restaurant kitchen doors." 

 

Jayaraman, co-founder and co-director with Fekkak Mamdouh of the advocacy group Restaurant Opportunities Center United, recalls instances where wait staff at eateries in Washington, D.C., for example, or New York City handled food when they were sick. 

One woman had pink eye; another man had contracted H1N1. Neither had sick days to use or medical insurance. Not only did they prolong their illnesses by working, they put their customers' health at risk. 

Though the author cites studies and statistics aplenty, it is stories like these that effectively illustrate her points. 

She also addresses racism in restaurants, where "workers got darker – literally! – as you walked from the front door to the kitchen, and the darker the workers' skins, the less money they were likely to earn." 

In this persuasive volume, Jayaraman champions employee causes and argues fervently against discrimination, giving restaurant owners, diners and readers considerable food for thought.

(A version of this review appeared originally at Publishers Weekly.) 

Au chocolat

"Time passed, and my courses arrived. On a typical night at the Pudding, I might order an appetizer of shrimp rolled in brown-butter bread crumbs on skewers, so the oil wouldn't spread on your hands. For an entree: squab with black lentils and bacon, only in the pink light of the dining room the lentils weren't black, but blue - a deep, inky blue. And for dessert, I might ask for my favorite treat: candied violets on a lace doily. My teeth cracked open each crystalline blossom, and I could smell the sheets of wax paper they came in mingled with the sugar."

Charlotte Silver in "Charlotte au Chocolat: Memories of a Restaurant Childhood"

Hot dog diggity

In the cleverly titled volume "Man Bites Dog: Hot Dog Culture in America," Bruce Kraig takes a look at the American hot dog phenomenon, giving the history and folklore behind the foodstuff that became "quintessential public dining treats - long before the rise of hamburgers - sold on streets, at fairs and festivals, at picnics (weenie roasts) and in fast-food venues."

Not surprisingly, sections on how hot dogs are actually produced, with descriptions of "high-speed choppers" used to blend meat trimmings, spices and other ingredients "into an emulsion or batter," can be less than appetizing. Talk of industrial sausage machines and the "hazards of butchery" also proves difficult to digest. 

But chapters on the simple pleasures of eating hot dogs and the ways they can be served pull readers back in. 

A fully-loaded Chicago dog, for example, "has mustard, bright green relish, chopped onions, tomato slices, pickle slices and small sport peppers jammed onto the bun." And currywurst, first popular in Germany, is "covered in a sweet-hot sauce" and "served on paper plates." 

Photographer Patty Carroll includes numerous images of old-school hot dog stands and pushcarts, helping to illustrate this sometimes disturbing but always bright tribute to an American food classic.  

(A version of this review appeared originally in Publishers Weekly.)

Second-term pie

Whether we are better or worse financially, philosophically, socially or emotionally, we still need pie. And pie is what we have, without the meringue.

Sweet Potato Pie
from White House executive chef Cristeta Comerford

Dough

1 cup butter
1/2 cup sugar
1 tsp. salt
1 tsp. vanilla extract
1 tsp. lemon zest
2 egg yolks
2 1/2 cups flour

Filling

3 sweet potatoes
4 sticks cinnamon
5 star anise
1 orange, quartered
2 Tbsp. melted butter

Custard

3 cups crème fraiche
4 whole eggs
1 Tbsp. vanilla extract
2 tsp. cinnamon
1/2 tsp. nutmeg
1/2 tsp. salt

Honey meringue topping

3 egg whites
2 cups honey, reduced by half

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.

For the pie dough: Cream the sugar and butter. Add the dry ingredients and gently mix. Incorporate the vanilla extract, lemon zest and egg yolks. Form into a ball and let rest in the refrigerator.

Roll the dough to fit a 12-inch tart pan. Top with parchment paper and cooking beads and bake blind for 12 minutes. Set aside to cool.

For the sweet potato puree: Bake the whole sweet potatoes and all the aromatics on a sheet tray at 350 degrees F until tender. Scoop the meat and pass through a chinoise. Set aside to cool. In the meantime, mix the custard base and fold into the cooled sweet potato puree.

Pour into the cooked tart shell and finish cooking until set, about 35 minutes.

For the honey meringue topping: Whip the egg whites until stiff and incorporate the hot reduced honey. Top the cooked sweet potato pie and broil until the meringue gets a toasted color. Makes 8 to 10 servings.

Lemon cake

"The room filled with the smell of warming butter and sugar and lemon and eggs, and at five, the timer buzzed and I pulled out the cake and placed it on the stovetop.

"The house was quiet. The bowl of icing was right there on the counter, ready to go, and cakes are best when just out of the oven, and I really couldn't possibly wait, so I reached to the side of the cake pan, to the least obvious part, and pulled off a small warm spongy chunk of deep gold.

"Iced it all over with chocolate. Popped the whole thing into my mouth."

Aimee Bender in "The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake"

A cupcake day

Any day when cupcakes are involved is a good enough day.