Anthony Bourdain III: Why You Don’t Want to Make Restaurant Food

Les Halles Cookbook

A cookbook may not seem like a natural successor to a book about the culinary underbelly. I mean if you thought the blood spatter in the last entry was unhygienic, consider the hijinks he and his fellow sous-chef at Works Progress got into.  “One night, with his full cooperation, we stripped Dimitri naked, spattered and filled his ears, nose and mouth with stage blood and wrapped him in Saran Wrap before helping him into a chest freezer in the dark, rear storage area of the restaurant, his limbs arranged in an unnaturally contorted pose—as if he’d been rudely dumped there postmortem.”  They taunted the manager telling them that Dimitri was missing, and asked him if he could pick up a box of shrimp from the freezer—they being short-handed at all.  There he found “the nude, fishbelly-white corpse of our missing comrade staring up at him with dead eyes through a thin layer of plastic wrap”.  Sure, I can admire a practical joke like that, but I’m not saying to myself, “Wow, I really want to eat at Work Progress”.  I mean frozen shrimp?

But it works well, because if you thought you liked being an observer in his kitchens, now you get to feel like a participant without being in one of his kitchens. Sure, he’s going to make you cook your own stock, and if you don’t he’s going to treat you like mal carne. But it’s okay somehow, because he’s over there, and I’m over here, and if a tincture of blood ends up in the crème brûlée, at least I know where it came from. And who are we, really, to think that a cookbook is going to help us to even approximate what can be made in restaurant kitchens? We don’t have Bourdain’s years of experience or the CIA education. We don’t have the Ecuadorian line cooks tourneeing vegetables.  We don’t have the equipment, the suppliers, or even the time to do what restaurants do best. But he also begrudgingly obliges us, knowing that we don’t want to know this.  “What you’d like to know is how t o make your next dinner party look as though you’ve got the Troisgros family chained to the stove in your home kitchen.  Maybe you’re curious about the tricks, the techniques, the few simple tools that can make your plates look as if they’ve been prepared assembled and garnished by cold-blooded professionals”.

The opening of Les Halles contains many of the same suggestions as “How to Cook Like the Pros” in Kitchen Confidential: get a good knife, use heavy-weight pans, score good ingredients, make your own stock.  When I bought the cookbook, I already had a Global chef knife. I bought it because it was shiny and said on the box that it was made by the same forging process as a Samurai sword. But apparently, it is also a good knife, the knife that Anthony Bourdain recommends, so I feel vindicated by that little vanity purchase. Unfortunately, I never followed the next part of Bourdain’s advice that was that you really only needed one good knife.  So now I have five global knives, and I can never keep the heavy magnetic holder properly screwed to the wall.  I won’t lie.  I use them.  But if you really want to get two Global knives, just get another Global chef knife, in case the first one needs to be washed, or your spouse wants one too.

I firmly agree with the heavy pan rule. I once owned Circulon pans because I foolishly trusted a Consumer Report recommendation.  CR apparently, doesn’t test cookware at ridiculously high temperatures, doesn’t test for longevity or for Bourdain’s criterion: “A proper sauté pan should cause serious head injury if brought down hard against someone’s skull.”  If you can’t afford top of the line stuff, a Lodge cast iron skillet will do well by most of Bourdain’s recipes.  If you can afford the good stuff, though, be as selective with pots as you are with knives.  Get a Le Creuset Dutch oven and maybe an All-Clad sauté pan. But stop there. I bought my Dutch oven as part of a sale package with a baking dish, a skillet, and a saucepan with a reversible lid that works as a skillet.  It’s all pretty useless. These things just take up space. (If you’re compulsive, if nothing can stop you from buying more Le Creuset cookware because you’ve decided it’s a decorative motif, get yourself one of these: http://www.amazon.com/Old-Dutch-60-Inch-Cookware-Graphite/dp/B00005Q5GB).

Why heavy? Most of Bourdain’s cooking capitalizes on the flavor that comes from the browned bits of food that ends up on the bottom of a pan.  Browning is important, not just because it’s ‘more cooked’ but because the high heat transforms the juices that comes to the surface of the meat.  Complex molecules unfurl, break down, and recombine to form flavors that don’t exist otherwise. I remember when I was a kid I always put butter on toast before putting it into the toaster-oven, because every so often it popped out tasting like Worcestershire sauce.  Somewhere between melted butter and burnt butter, there’s a magical zone where it tastes completely different.  Same idea here. Heavy pans tend to cook through radiant heat rather than through the direct heat of the stove.  Turn the heat off under a cast-iron skillet—it’s still hot enough to cook an egg. It’s not going to cool down when you throw a slab of meat on it, and at least in my experience, it can get pretty hot before it actually turns the fond to carbon.  They usually all have metal handles too, so once you’re done searing something you can throw it in the oven where the temperature will be more controlled.

Ann bought me an All-Clad sauté pan for Christmas and I’ve enjoyed it so far. But never, under any circumstances, by All-Clad in non-stick. Yes, you need a non-stick pan, but anything heavy will do. There’s no point in buying a really expensive non-stick pan because it won’t last.  All-Clad is meant to last a lifetime and is perfectly designed so you can sear a roast and then pop it in the oven. Non-stick coating isn’t any of these things.  You might as well pay to have your wood floors stripped, sanded and polished just so you can put shag carpet on it.

Taking Stock

Most readers will probably follow Bourdain in the suggestions from Part A and Part B of the General Principles section, but they might struggle with Part C: Make your own Stock.

What’s missing in your home cooking? Why doesn’t that dish you painfully re-created from the chef’s recipe taste like it does in the restaurant?  What’s wrong with your soup, your sauces, your stews?  The answer is almost certainly ’stock’.

Bourdain’s stock making boot camp isn’t fun, and you may never want to do it twice, but it certainly clarifies why so many sauces in restaurants are richer and more concentrated than the stuff we make at home.  Stock is not “broth,” not “bullion,” nor anything that comes in a can or a box that says “stock” on it; real stock is made from bones and is loaded with collagen, nature’s thickening agent. When stock is reduced, it deepens, turns dark and glossy, and tastes like highly concentrated meat. When store-bought “stock” is reduced, it tastes like concentrated salt.

Here’s the point though where you really need to ask yourself, do you really want to make restaurant food, or are you happy just going to restaurants.  Following Bourdain’s instruction I spent two days, one simply making beef stock, and the next reducing half of that stock into demi-glace.  Demi-glace made me a bit giddy, because I saw that episode of Northern Exposure where Adam, the local chef and Bigfoot makes a recipe for demi-glace that involves reducing forty cows into a few spoonfuls of sauce. (Alas, I can’t find the video–so I’ll just randomly insert one of my favorite NE clips here).  Demi-Glace it turns out, is not quite that wasteful, but stock alone involves using bones that still has a good deal of meat still on them, so it’s going to seem wasteful.  And Demi-Glace is basically just stock reduced and reduced and reduced until it becomes a thick glaze. It’s miraculous stuff, but it’s clear that there’s a reason why you usually only find it in restaurants. It’s only practical to make if you make a lot of it. Again, it comes down to the fact that we don’t have the equipment, the suppliers, or the manpower to really do it well.

Equipment:  Most people if they have a stockpot, get one that’s about eight quarts.  That’s the minimum size that you would want to use to make stock, but the problem is 1) some stock recipes call for almost half that volume to be taken up by meat, bones, and vegetables so you’re really only getting about four quarts of stock, and that in turn may well end up being reduced. 2) You really need another eight quart pot or container (some people use a bucket) because you’re going to have to strain that stock into something when you’re done. Even with this equipment, however, the amount you’re going to end up with is still probably only enough to make soup a couple of times.

Supplies:  In a restaurant, people have all sorts of bones and odds and ends left over from entrees that they can throw into the stockpot. Bourdain and other cooks always suggest that you can go to your local butcher and ask for bones, but I don’t have a butcher, or at least, the guys that I see regularly working down at the local grocery store probably aren’t what they have in mind.  They don’t seem to do that much of the boning themselves, and the ones at Whole Foods or Foodsource seem to know that they can charge good money for bones. I’ve recently discovered however that if nothing else is handy, you can hit up Asian grocers.  Our local H-Mart sells all manner of bones straight from the meat counter so you don’t have to ask if you’re feeling shy.  Rib bones, neck bones, ox-tail, you name it.

Manpower: All that stock + meat + bone + vegetable weighs a lot, and so it’s hard for one person to carry the pot over the sink and strain it.  It’s easily a two-person job, and it might be better if you owned a bigger sink. Better still if you had one of those pot filler faucets at the stove so you don’t need to carry it there in the first place.  Bourdain actually didn’t have much useful information on how to deal with this challenge, so I turned to Alton Brown instead. Alton says siphon.

I tied a bit of cheesecloth to the end of some clear plastic hose.  I put the end with the cheesecloth into the pot and ran the other end to a large bowl on the floor. You can suck on it to get it started, but you don’t want hot stock going into your mouth, so if you prefer you can put the whole length of hose into the pot, cover the end with your thumb, and pull it out.  You did this trick with a straw when you were a kid, right?  As long as your thumb covers the free end, the whole length of hose remains full, and when you let go near to the floor, transpiration will carry the stock the rest of the way.

Theoretically, it’s a great idea.  The cheesecloth should strain the stock, and gravity does all the work. In practice, well, at least in my practice, it was a mess.  The cheesecloth was a moot point, too because the suction was so strong that it still drew in meat and vegetable fibers to block the end. When it wasn’t blocked completely, the stock chugged out with such force that it sloshed over the edges of the bowl.  Note to self:  bowls are the wrong choice here, even if you have a gigantic one.  Get yourself a bucket.

Subsequently, I’ve learned to just put most of the ingredients in by stages. I made a David Chang recipe that called for putting all the bones in, cooking them for several hours then taking them out with a strainer or spider.  Then you put in all the vegetables, and so on and so forth.  It takes longer, but it’s easier, and the ingredients take up less space in the pot so you can end up with more in the end.

Is it all worth it?  Depends on what you mean by worth it.  If you want to know why your food doesn’t taste like restaurant food, and if you want to just get a sense for the difference that a rich meat stock will make, then by all means do it at least once.  If you think you’re going to use it regularly for making soup, though, I’d say think again.  I still make stock occasionally, but I’ve basically decided that it’s too precious for soup.  I save it for pan sauces and recipes that only call for a cup or two at a time.  That way the little store I have in my freezer lasts longer.

Bourdain II: Kitchen Confidential, Les Halles, and the Care and Feeding of Sourdough

Blogs, I’m told, are all about the moment, all about what people are cooking right now or thinking right now.  I tend to write in long loops, spooling out material based more on memory than the moment.  But I have a short-attention span, so I understand the pleas of those who read like hummingbirds:  make it shorter.  So I’ll offer three shorter entries on Bourdain this week rather than one long one. I’ll also use subheadings, so if you what to flit away to another site and come back, you’ll be able to find your old perch.  Buzz, buzz, buzz.  If you like the old format or have remembered to take your Adderall, you can come back at the end of the week and read all three entries together, as intended.

It may seem odd that I’m willing to unreservedly back Anthony Bourdain’s Les Halles cookbook.  I recently dismissed Thomas Keller as overly fastidious, and Keller is one of Bourdain’s heroes.  Keller once made Bourdain a twenty-course tasting menu at the French Laundry, which included a “coffee and cigarettes” course with foie gras and a tabacco-infused custard. I see why he likes the man. But I never used Bouchon as much as I have the Les Halles cookbook, so I’ve learned less from it. Same goes for Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, which is more comprehensive, and Paula Wolfert’s The Cooking of Southwest France, which is beautiful, authentic, regional, and rigorous. I like Bourdain because he scales it down to classic, homey French dishes and he does them well. It’s perfect for people who have made French Onion soup or Beef Bourguignon a couple of times and still wonder why they don’t taste as good as in the local Brasseries. You may not like the answer, which is invariably “make your own stock or demi-glace,” but at least you’ll know.

Bourdain is also funny. You don’t see many funny cookbooks. Publishers are clearly aware that cookbook sales are driven by personality.  They like family anecdotes, old sepia-toned photographs, sentimental memories, pleas to protect the culinary traditions, rants about factory farming, but humor?  They haven’t found humor yet. The only writer in Bourdain’s class is probably Calvin Trillin, but Bourdain isn’t hampered by Trillin’s sense of social justice or common decency.

Beginnings

I first discovered Bourdain as most do, through Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly.  I have Jason to thank for that. I was going through a sourdough phase at the time, cultivating a starter that needed weekly care and feeding.  Making sourdough isn’t that much different from making regular yeast dough, but you don’t start with little packets of instant yeast.  You have to cultivate yeast from the air in your kitchen. This is why distinctive sourdoughs are known by regions, like Paris and San Francisco, and why there will probably never be a truly famous Philadelphia sourdough.  Our unicellular bug excretions don’t taste as good.  But I figured if I was going to cook bread, I wanted to know to make the rustic, old-fashioned stuff, and I wanted to know what Philadelphia tasted like.

Sourdough is a commitment, not just because it takes a few days to bring flour and water to life, but because you want to keep it that way. Each week you pour off the excess starter before it gets overripe, and you feed it more flour and water to keep it going.  It’s like owning a pet, only it’s a pet that sheds most of its body weight each week and you get to eat it.  Like a pet it demands attention. It must be fed, and if you’re not making baguettes, you end up pouring that precious bubbling goo into the garbage can.  That’s sad. If you go two or three weeks without making bread, you still feel some moral imperative to keep the starter alive. You’ll miss the opportunity for a weekend in the Poconos because you can’t find a local kid who will feed both the cats and the sourdough.  That’s also sad.

I was bemoaning this fact to Jason, and I suggested I needed a name for the starter. A warm, bubbly name, might help me to bond with the creature that was taking up all my time.  Jason suggested “The Bitch,” which is not what I had in mind at all. I went from puzzled to disturbed as Jason chanted, “Feed the bitch or she’ll die!”  No, it wasn’t early onset spongiform encephalitis.  I just wasn’t clued in to the Bourdain reference, and the 250 pound “foaming, barely contained heap of fermenting grapes, flour, water, sugar and yeast” that shows up as a character in Kitchen Confidential.  Apparently, not recognizing Anthony Bourdain references if you cook is like not recognizing Star Wars references if you’re a sci-fi junkie, or references from Monty Python if you’re socially awkward.  So Jason took it upon himself to fill the Bourdain sized hole in my culinary consciousness, and Bourdain has been living there ever since.

(In the interest of leaving no plot conflict unresolved, the solution to the sourdough problem was pancakes.  Most weeks for several months we made sourdough pancakes on a cast iron skillet, and they were glorious).

Sex, Drugs & Roquefort

Kitchen Confidential is an unsparing tell all about the restaurant industry. If you’ve seen Bourdain on A Cook’s Tour or No Reservations, then you know he has an eight-year olds fascination with eating repellent things on a dare:  cobra heart , fermented Icelandic Shark, and sand encrusted warthog rectum are among the many highlights.  But television offers a watered down version of the Anthony Bourdain we see in American restaurants through Kitchen Confidential. The book follows his education and his rise in the restaurant industry, from a providence, RI coastal restaurant and the Culinary Institute of America, to mob-owned restaurants, dying restaurants, restaurants he works at mostly to help him make drug connections, and restaurants where he witnesses all kind of deviant behavior and unsanitary food handling. One of the more vile incidents involves a cook who partially amputates a finger while cooking, and then decides to lop off the rest of it because the workman’s comp benefits will be better.

Logic dictates that if you write a tell-all about the restaurant industry, two things should
happen to you:  you should be excommunicated, like a magician who has given up too many secrets, or you should stir up outrage and reform like some modern day Upton Sinclair. Yet somehow, Kitchen Confidential did neither. Kitchen Confidential just made a generation of cooks want to be more like Anthony Bourdain. Sure we’re revolted by what he does and what he sees, but he writes about it with such relish that we’re somehow convinced it’s fun. Like if you watch Pirates of the Caribbean, you know that all that scurvy, sodomy, and seasickness of the 18^th century wasn’t a good time, but every eight year old boy still wants to be Captain Sparrow.  Piracy actually turns out to be a significant motif in Kitchen Confidential.  Thewhole book is laden with references to that “subculture whose centuries-old militaristic hierarchy and ethos of ‘rum, buggery, and the lash”.  One of Bourdain’s first jobs is in Providence, RI was at “The Dreadnaught;” a seaside establishment in “Early Driftwood” décor, and when he settles in his own restaurant, he chooses a skull and knife logo that looks suspiciously like the Jolly Roger.  The perspective is also unabashedly and unapologetically male.  The communities are ones which value bravado, one-upmanship, trying to cook something that has never been cooked before, and trying to eat things that have never been eaten before. And above all, they honor their war wounds.

We considered ourselves a tribe.  As such, we had a number of unusual customs, rituals and practices all our own.  If you cut yourself in the Work Progress kitchen, tradition called for maximum spillage and dispersion of blood.  One squeeezed the wound till it ran freely, then hurled great gouts of red spray on the jackets and aprons of comrades.  We loved blood in our kitchen.  If you dinged yourself badly, it was no disgrace; we’d stencil a little cut-out shape of a chef knife under your station to commemorate the event.  After a while, you’d have a little row of these things, like a fighter pilot.  The house cat—a mouse killer—got her own stencil (a tiny mouse shape) sprayed on the wall by her water bowl, signifying confirmed kills.

If I were teaching this book I would no doubt want students to question the representation of men and women in the workplace.  There’s really very few references to women at all, and the one who stands out the most is a co-worker who has to earn her bones by forcing a male co-worker down on a table and threatening to violate him.  As a reader however, I find it all deeply refreshing. Because while the world of cooking and even the world of cookbooks is dominated by men, the target audience of cookbooks is not.  Sure, an occasional cookbook panders—usually in an obvious way—to guys who grill, guys who like to play with fire, guys who make their obesity seem socially acceptable because they want to share their love of pork ribs with the world.  But I’m no more willing to inhabit this avuncular Paul Prodhomme like subjectivity than I am a bubbling Rachel Ray.  But who wouldn’t want to be Anthony Bourdain?

(To Be Continued)

Anthony Bourdain I: Fail, Fail Again, Fail Better.

Somewhere down the line, my dad decided coq au vin was going to be one of the few dishes that he cooks.  There are pancakes, and there’s coq au vin.  He has a special braising dish just for it.  He uses his scientific acumen to test and retest his methods and ingredients.  He uses chicken thigh meat, browned lovingly in bacon fat. He uses whole button mushrooms, pearl onions.  Then he drowns the whole thing in a bottle of Charles Shaw Two Buck Chuck.  Okay, so this, and the use of chicken stock is not for the purist, but it’s still tasty.  And while he has perfected his recipe mostly in my absence, I still think of coq au vin as a special meal I ate growing up.  It’s comfort food, food I associate with home.

It’s also something I rarely make myself.

Perhaps it’s because roast chickens seem like perfection to me, because I have a mild allergy to wine, or because when I do make coq au vin, some desire to improve upon it always leads me astray.  Even restaurants seem like bad luck. Ann and I went to the Happy Rooster for its much-praised coq au vin, but it wasn’t even on the menu.  It’s like the perfect coq au vin has always been out there, taunting me, until I make it again and screw it up again.

Most recently, the urge to try struck me in the meat section at the Ardmore farmer’s market.  In honor of the holidays the Amish carried fresh capons.  The “coq” in coq au vin is rooster, and a capon is a rooster, albeit a castrated one, so that seemed like a step toward authenticity. Apparently, farmers don’t believe that gender is a social construct, so castrating roosters is supposed to make the birds less “aggressive,” and so less active, less gamey and more fatty. Just the thing to improve on perfection.  And at only 3$ a pound I told Ann, how could we resist?  But when the Amish guy heaved the bird onto the scale, we realized the smallest bird weighed fourteen pounds.  We only had our two mouths to feed, so we took a pass.

It was probably all for the best.  I couldn’t find any coq au vin recipes that called for capon, or for that matter rooster, or even just a bird larger than four pounds.  Not long after however, Ann consulted with her parents about food for the holidays, and suddenly I’m back on again, now making coq au vin for six on Christmas Eve.  Ann’s mother had even poked around and found a local butcher that carried capons.  Ann’s parents, Newt and Marge, live out in the country so I imagined some impeccable local bird that roamed free, probably in the butcher’s own backyard.  It led a happy life on organic feed until the butcher’s deft axe separated it from its life just as it previously separated it from its testes.

So there we were, driving up to rural Pennsylvania for the holidays, with my red Le Creuset pot and dreams of the perfect coq au vin simmering away in a country kitchen.

When I first met Ann, she told me she lived in “Montrose . . . or really Elk Lake, twenty minutes outside of Montrose”. She seemed to anticipate a blank stare, and I wasn’t about to disappoint her. “Montrose is thirty minutes from Tunkhannock,” and after another theatrical pause: “You’ve heard of Scranton, right? Its about an hour from Scranton”. In my defense this was just after I had moved east, and Scranton was not yet associated with “The Office,” or Joe Biden indelibly linked “Scranton” and “hardscrabble” in the nation’s consciousness.  So the only landmark I recognized was “Pennsylvania”. But now I know.  That’s where Ann’s from.  An hour outside of hardscrabble, on a rural road that has no name.

Ann’s parents live on a no longer functioning dairy farm. Most of the private farms in the area have closed down, so there isn’t much in Elk Lake other than a school.  Its one of those single-level affairs that houses everyone from K-12 under the same roof where kids huff glue and dream of one day making it to the bright-lights, big-city atmosphere of Hazelton or Carbondale. But during the winter, none of that matters.  Snow covers up the town’s imperfections, leaving a landscape of Norman Rockwell’s imagination, dotted with grain silos, little chapels, walls of stacked slate and the timid deer who have narrowly survived hunting season. It looks like Christmas, more like Christmas than any storefront display or suburban nativity scene re-enacted by inflatable snowmen and animatronic reindeer. And it’s just the kind of place I’d want to make a bubbling coq au vin.

And just the kind of place I’d want to bring Anthony Bourdain.  Foul-mouthed, enfant-terrible, Travel Channel shill, Anthony Bourdain, smuggled in through a cookbook with a brown paper-bag cover. Ann encouraged me.  She downloaded Kitchen Confidential from audible.com so we could put ourselves in the mood during the drive.

Bourdain is that unique incarnation of the French paradox, the slim French chef.  How does one run a meat-centric, fat-loving Brasserie, and yet stay fit and fashionable as a television celebrity? If you’ve read Kitchen Confidential, you know the answer: French cooks do lots of smack. Lots of other drugs too.

We were high all the time, sneaking off to the walk-in at every opportunity to ‘conceptualize.’ Hardly a decision was made without drugs.  Pot, Quaaludes, cocaine, LSD, psilocybin mushrooms soaked in honey and used to sweeten tea, Seconal, Tuinal, speed, codeine and, increasingly, heroin, which we’d send a Spanish-speaking busboy over to Alphabet city to get.

So the real question is, why wouldn’t you want to bring him along for Christmas at the in-laws?

I turned to Anthony Bourdain’s “Les Halles” Cookbook, because French food sounds fancy enough for an occasion like Christmas Eve, but as Bourdain reminds us, most French food is born out of the country. Its not made by chefs of haute cuisine but by ingenious farmers who made the most of what they butchered, right down to the offal.  Dishes like campagne de pate make us think of the Cordon Bleu, and we’re used to Food Network ingénues making people feel like they deserve a blue ribbon just because they manage to make a little cold meatloaf.  But not Bourdain. “Oooooh . . . pate, I don’t know.’ Please.  Campagne means “country” in French—which means even your country-ass can make it.”

It also seemed to fit.  Anthony Bourdain is all about meat and butter.  Northeastern Pennsylvania (NEPA) is also all about meat and butter.   At the family breakfast, there is no either/or fallacy when it comes to choosing bacon or sausage for breakfast; it’s always bacon and sausage, often ham, and sometimes a pork chop.  It all comes from the same wonderful, magical animal, so really it’s one kind of meat. Cooked in butter.

Best laid plans and all that. Turns out that “Marge’s butcher” was just the meat section of the local chain store.  And while yes, they did carry capon, it was lodged in the back of the freezer where it probably got caught in the great chill of the late Pleistocene era. It was frozen solid and would have to be chiseled out carefully if one were to keep the specimen intact. It was also one of the same commercial capons that I could get from the Superfresh back home, and as I have subsequently learned with research, commercial capons are “castrated” through hormone injections (not by a deft axe). So you wouldn’t want to feed it to a foodie or a farm family. In addition, the “bacon ends” I bought in lieu of slab bacon ended up being tufted with blue mold, and the closest thing to a pearl onion I could find was about the size of a tangerine with a thyroid problem.

NEPA Garde Manger

The bird was only seven pounds, but it was still a problem when it came to thawing and marinating. The fridge in a NEPA kitchen is always full.  The local grocery store, after all, is twenty minutes away, and during the holidays you want to make sure that you’re well stocked in case you’re snowed in.  Even so, Marge tends to go a little overboard.  For example she has fourteen bottles of salad dressing, many of which are well beyond their expiration date. One year, Ann went through and threw them all out.  Marge seemed appropriately thankful, but as soon as we went out, she went through the garbage and put the bottles back in the fridge. Even after they’re all cleaned out, the Marie’s Bleu Cheese dressing bottles will find new life in the cabinets as recycled glassware. Fortunately, the NEPA family home also comes with a traditional NEPA garde manger, also known as the garage. Given the recent snow, it held an almost perfect 36-38 degree temperature for both thawing the bird and letting it marinate in a magnum’s worth of Beaujolais. (The only french wine I could find. Probably not the best choice, but I have seen recipes use almost any kind of wine, including a Riesling white for Alsace coq au vin).

These are the kinds of challenges I’m accustomed to, the kind that I feel good about solving. I was also prepared for Marge’s electric stove, which usually only had one or two elements that really got up to full temperature.  I had visions of taking the pot down to the basement and McGuyvering something on the woodstove, the way Newt has cobbled together his own custom smoker and deep-fat fryer out back for cooking turkeys.  I mean, if nothing has to be jerry-rigged during the process, it wouldn’t be cooking, would it? But when I walked in to the kitchen, I discovered that it had been thoroughly de-rusticated. The orange Formica countertops were still there, but a new glass induction stove had been set in it.  It looked like something used for making airline food on a stealth bomber.

I should be pleased with this development.  No, I am pleased with this development.  But having a modern stove turned out to be the one contingency I couldn’t work around.  I’ve never actually used an induction stove before.  I didn’t even know if you could use cast iron pots on it.  Would it scratch?  Break?  I remembered something in the Le Creuset instructions about not using pots on induction stoves, though it turns out that’s just for the pottery ones. I also didn’t know what the temperature settings were like. The fact that there was a separate dial for “simmering” probably should’ve been an omen of things to come, but I didn’t pay attention. I was confident after browning the bird that I had it all figured out, because at least there, you don’t need points on a dial:  you just turn up the temperature as high as you can without the steam turning to smoke or without the sizzle turning to spatter. And at that point, the bird was glorious. It was a nice purple-bronze with pale crescent moons from where the bird had rested on top of chopped celery.

But I got cocky.  I had a nice conversation going in my head with Anthony Bourdain, who was commiserating about the local grocery store, and admiring the bird, and so I left him to go take up my other favorite holiday past time, couch-surfing.  By the time I came back to the room, my steadily simmering braise turned into a steady boil. I didn’t bring a probe thermometer with me, so I waited through the recommended cooking time hoping that it was “tender, the juice from the thigh running clear when pricked”.  But the juices were not only clear, they were invisible. There were no juices.  And imaginary Bourdain was turning surly, telling me how 95% of chickens in the country are “clearly the result of insensitive and murderous overcooking by food-hating orangutans”.  I quickly pulled the bird out of the pot and set it aside to cool, but it was too late. Imaginary Bourdain rattled on, like R. Lee Ermey in Full Metal Jacket. (link)

If you can’t properly roast a damn chicken then you are one helpless, hopeless, sorry-ass bivalve in an apron.  Take that apron off, wrap it around your neck, and hang yourself.  You do not deserve to wear the proud garment of generations of hardworking, dedicated cooks.  Turn in those clogs, too.

I hung my head in shame, but I didn’t resort to hanging.  I left the apron back in Havertown with the thermometer.

The “pearl onions,” also fell short of perfection.  The one thing that struck me as an interesting innovation in the Les Halles recipe was the pearl onions. They were cooked separately in a saucepan, covered with water and a disc of parchment paper rather than a lid.  The parchment paper, I gather allows the water to slowly evaporate away while still keeping the little onions in a sauna so they don’t get dried out.  The onions are supposed to be done when the water is all gone and the onions are thoroughly caramelized.  Throw some red wine into the pan, deglaze and dump the contents into the pot.  But as I said, I had no pearl onions, and simply quartering them didn’t do the trick.  They were still too large, so covering them in water meant too much water.  I cooked and I cooked, but the water never drained fully away.  It made a nice onion broth, which I added to the pot, but there was none of the good brown bits on the bottom of the pan to give the sauce a little extra depth.

Beckett says “Fail, Fail Again, Fail Better“. I’d like to add to that “Fail Glorious,” because if you’re going to go down in flames, you should be doing something really ridiculous. But this wasn’t glorious.  This was a run-of-the-mill failure. Edible but a little tough, rich in wine flavor but not much else, just damnably ordinary.

Truth be told, the mission was probably doomed from the start.  I’ve done a little more research on capons since then, and I realize that they are decidedly not a “more authentic” choice for coq au vin.  The whole purpose of coq au vin is to mask the gamey flavor of a rooster with red wine and to let the connective tissue of an old bird simmer down to make a sauce that is thick and glossy.  It’s about turning weaknesses into strengths.  Caponization takes away the very qualities that make braising necessary in the first place. So I wasn’t being “more authentic,” I was just being more expensive.  In retrospect my dad’s coq au vin is more appropriate to the spirit of the dish.  Using all chicken legs gives you all the dark meat and connective tissue that you need.  And while the mix of Charles Shaw and chicken stock may seem sacrilegious, it still tastes like home.

Recipe Here

The Ortolan Eaters

After I was freed from the prohibitions of thesis writing, I continued to buy cookbooks. Since I was gainfully employed, I no longer depended on used bookstores, mega-mart cut-out bins, and promotional discounts from The Good Cook. I could buy whatever cookbooks I wanted. By the time Ann and I went on to the market for a home in Haverford, it became clear that we not only needed a bigger kitchen for cooking, we needed a bigger house for storing cookbooks. Ann’s father, Newt, made us bookshelves for the dining room, and I filled it, and then a second. I thought I would stop there, but I already find myself keeping books “in circulation,” out on the dining table, in the kitchen, by the fireplace, or in my office, because I can’t get them all on the shelves at the same time.

My mother thinks my cookbooks and eating habits are decadent. When she says “decadent” she doesn’t mean decadent as in “Oh, isn’t this flourless chocolate cake decadent.” She means fall of Rome decadent. I told her all about this weekend’s Christmas party at Saint Joseph’s University, co-catered by Ann and Madame Fromage with all her wonderful cheeses. And there was that word again, decadent. I think she imagined me sitting at a table eating Delice De Bourgogne and Trugole with my head under a napkin, like Francois Mitterrand eating songbirds. (It is said that Ortolan eaters cover their heads not just to capture the aroma of these thumb-sized tweeties, but also to hide their shame from God).

Mom may have a point. I wasn’t raised this way. I didn’t acquire these indulgences from my parents.  Its part self-indulgence and part simply the changing state of the gourmet food “empire”. Cheese is the perfect example. We grew up with cheddar, jack, and swiss and most of us didn’t like swiss. “Brie” was adult food, slightly repellent and as much a status symbol as steak was in the 50s. I was born in 1971, the same year as Chez Panisse, the first restaurant to serve goat cheese on salads. Now, even our local Trader Joe’s has started carrying Valdeon, a cow and goat’s milk bleu cheese wrapped in sycamore leaves. According to Steven Jenkin’s Cheese Primer, when Dean and Deluca got started in 1977, there were no authentic European cheeses in the U.S. But now? I’ve never stepped foot in a cheese store, but I’ve bought Basque de Bleu, Joyeaux, and Idiazabal one small slice at a time from the farmer’s market in Ardmore. Who knows? Maybe one day soon, even something like Madame Fromage’s Cheese Creche will no longer seem unusual or eccentric, just sacrilegiously tasty.

That said, few of my cookbooks are really about voluptuary excess. Most are about serving good food simply, healthily, and ethically. The more complicated recipes are less about how much you pay for food, and more about how much time you pay in deference to the food. When I get new books, I insist that they must be “useful,” in some fashion, though I admit my definition of utility has been growing as quickly as my collection. One Marcella Hazan cookbook, for example, is very useful for cooking Italian, but I suppose it isn’t four times as useful to own four of them. Everyone should probably have Chinese, Spanish, Italian, and French cookbooks, but no one needs a Swedish cookbook unless they think fish pairs well with the flavors of lye or birch ash. Even if I am Swedish, I recommend against food that comes with warnings about poisoning or “saponification” (If Lutefisk is soaked for too long, the fish fat literally turns to soap). But I read Swedish cookbooks the way priests read heretical texts, so that I can better understand the enemy.

I use the Larousse Gastronomique very little, but in my defense I bought it scandalously cheap from a used bookstore on the main line. Its harder to explain Ali-Bab’s Encyclopedia of Gastronomie, which I bought for its footnotes on cannibalism. I will probably never make a dish from The Fat Duck cookbook, even if I had the equipment necessary for molecular gastronomy. One Heston Blumental recipe, for example, describes a Christmas themed dish, where an “ingot” of frankincense bullion is wrapped in gold leaf. The diner is supposed to dissolve the bullion in water by stirring it with a myrrh branch.  The same page refers to a communion wafer “infused with the smell of a baby” designed by perfumer Christophe Laudamiel to accompany the equally creepy movie Perfume. I suspect even a devout transubstantiationalist would agree that wafer shouldn’t taste like Jesus, and even if it did, it shouldn’t taste like him as an infant. I’d much rather eat my way through a cheese crèche than this kind of strangeness, but how can one resist a cookbook that talks about such things? That is illustrated by comic book artist Dave McKean?  Entertainment is a utility, too. As is gawking at carnival freak shows.

(For more gawking, See Heston Blumenthal’s “Perfect Christmas Dinner” video).

I have however come to terms with any embarrassment coming from my cookbook addiction. It was all put aside when I visited Fritz Blank’s restaurant with Ann and my parents a couple of years ago. My parents were visiting during their anniversary, and I steered them toward dinner at Deux Cheminees, a restaurant as well known for its cookbook library as it was for its food. The French restaurant was a little too elegant, even for a closet Petronius like myself. It required men to wear coats and ties. It made you worry about your pronunciation of French dishes and which fork you used to eat the salad. But mostly what I remember was the quiet. It was like the eerie episode of Buffy, “Hush,” with no dialogue, just eerie waiters gliding between tables, putting pepper on things and silently disappearing back into the kitchen.

The food was great, but I prefer to eat where diners can share plates at the table, or even with an adjoining table, and not get the other patrons hackles up. In fact, I prefer to avoid restaurants with “patrons” even if they don’t have hackles. I like diners, customers, and other grubby individuals who lick their fingers while they eat. But it was well worth going for the opportunity to sneak off to the library. The room was hidden away from the carefully constructed scene in the dining room. It was in an unadorned hallway, behind a door that might as easily have led to a broom closet or a boiler room. I felt like an intruder, so I didn’t turn the lights on. I just stood with Ann and my parents on the promontory, trying to make out the titles on the wall of books visible from the hall.

We probably wouldn’t have ventured further in, if not for Bobo. Most people don’t know this, but Ann is often shy around strangers. She is talkative out of a sense of obligation or duty, but she only has a natural affinity for talking to pet owners. If she sees a cat, she’ll follow it until she finds its owner. And she’ll strike up a conversation regardless of whether the owner is a neighbor or a stranger, a catholic nun or an ex-IRA bomber, or—as it turns out—a two star Michelin chef named Fritz.

Bobo the cat came out of the cavernous dark to greet us, rubbing up against Ann’s legs. We followed Bobo in past one dark bay after another filled with cookbooks, cookbooks, and more cookbooks. The room was long and narrow, like one aisle of the warehouse in Raider’s of the Lost Ark. It seemed to go on forever, but eventually ended in a pool of light, where we found Fritz Blank himself taping up a box of books. Wearing a black t-shirt and jeans, he was probably the only comfortable person in the establishment. But sadly, he was packing up for good. Having run Deux Cheminees since the 1970s, he was retiring to Thailand and taking little with him other than Bobo. Most of his restaurant’s belongings would be liquidated—sold off to customers—including many of his books, with the exception of the 10,000+ that were being sent to the UPenn library as a permanent collection.

I’ve always wanted to go to a restaurant sale, so I’m sad I missed that one. Who knows? I could’ve added to my book collection, or finally bought a copper saucepan or pot. I could put white figurines in my living room and start referring to my own cats as “patrons”. But I have no regrets because we had one of the last grand tours of the library before it was dismantled. Even my parents got to get in on the fun, because Chef Fritz took an interest in their genetics background. Turns out he was a microbiologist for the military before he turned to the restaurant business. He told us stories of his days in Southeast Asia, and his current designs for a cookbook constructed around the appetites of musical composers. While doing so, he showed us the ins and outs of a collection that contained everything from a “1627 banquet book written by a papal household steward” to a “2001 Hooter’s pocket menu and cooking menu for Navy cooks”.

This was one of my favorite nights out, even though I don’t remember what I ate. It was here that I finally understood: here was a guy who owned thousands of cookbooks, a guy who also had a collection of chicken stock cans that would cause any shrink to diagnose him as a hoarder, and yet he seemed positively buoyant even as he was giving it all up. So why should I feel any different? I’m not an Ortolan eater or an omen of a falling empire. I’m just a collector who still has a long, long way to go.

Tom Colicchio, Part II: tradition is what’s left in your fridge.

My promise for a unified theory of sandwich making may have been premature. Turns out, unified theories of anything are hard to formulate. Even rigorous ones tend to be abstract, general, and difficult to apply to workaday kitchen scenarios. For example, Aristotle’s Ars Ruebenica declares that the essence of the sandwich must be understood in terms of the four causes of aition. First there is the material cause of the sandwich, which is bread and other stuff; he doesn’t list essential ingredients, but he’s pretty sure it starts with bread. Then there is the formal cause, which dictates that the filling goes between the bread, or sometimes on it or in it. The efficient cause is the hungry person making the sandwich, and the final cause, the satiation of said hungry person. This is why Aristotle didn’t get invited to many luncheons. His theories couldn’t account for onion marmalade, pickled mustard seeds, or lemon confit. Plato also took issue with his bloody marys.

It’s hard to formulate a theory of sandwich making, because most sandwiches are a product of convenience, not science. When I bought Tom Colicchio’s ‘wichcraft, I assumed that sandwich making was a fallen art, another byproduct of the current eras rage for efficiency, factory farming, and the reckless slaughter of innocent Velveeta. But as much as I can figure, sandwiches have been about convenience all the way back. In the dark ages, people snacked on “trenchers,” large rounds of stale bread used in lieu of plates, because they didn’t have Martha Stewart to help them pick out china patterns. The name sandwich is associated with John Montagu, the Fourth Earl of Sandwich, who was either too busy gambling or too busy being a magistrate to eat with both hands. Then came the industrial revolution in Spain and Italy and with it a beehive of busy, busy people, all eating sandwiches because they needed something convenient to eat when they were busy getting mercury poisoning at the local mill or black lung at the bottom of a coal mine.

So what motivates Colicchio’s sandwiches? The same thing that motivates your mother brown bagging lunches or Cuban immigrants experimenting with ham: they’re busy, and they’re using up leftovers. After a hard day of restaurant cooking, “You grab two slices of bread, nab the odds-and-ends of the short ribs that were too uneven to be served to patrons, add a slice of cheese, round it out with a swipe of onion relish, and, standing up, enjoy your meal”. But this is also where Colicchio departs with tradition, because what is easy for Colicchio is not necessarily going to be easy for the rest of us. Most of us don’t have beer-braised beef short ribs lying around in the kitchen, let alone the right combination of pickled vegetables, aged cheddar, and homemade horseradish.

But the recipes are mighty tasty, and isn’t time that we rescue the sandwich from the shackles of convenience?

Tom Colicchio’s theory of sandwich making starts with idea that good sandwiches come from good meals. “Why is a sandwich made from Thanksgiving leftovers so good? Because everything in it was originally crafted for a great meal.” So now you’re thinking to yourself, that’s all fine and good for Turkey sandwiches, but how would that apply with French onion soup? Okay, smartass, it doesn’t necessarily mean that every meal can be made into a sandwich; it has to be something that you can make hold together. Which leads us to Colicchio’s second axiom, it has to be something you can hold with one hand. And just to set the record straight, Colicchio does make a Gruyere and caramelized onion sandwich that pretty much is French onion soup broken down and reconstructed. There’s just more bread, less onion, and about the same amount of molten, cheesy goodness.

I started cooking through the recipes that seemed most familiar to me. Gruyere with caramelized onions was easy enough, if a little time consuming for self-important grilled cheese. From there I went to progressively more complicated fare:

1. Cheddar with smoked ham, poached pear, and mustard
2. Chicken breast with roasted peppers, mozzarella and spinach-basil pesto
3. Sicilian tuna with fennel, black olives, and lemon
4. Cured duck breast with caramelized apples and endive
5. Roasted turkey with avocado bacon, onion marmalade and mayonnaise
6. Chicken salad with walnuts, roasted tomatoes, pickled red onions and frisee

Chicken salad may not sound complicated, but it has more ancillary recipes than almost any other in the book: homemade mayo, pickled mustard seeds, roasted tomatoes, and pickled red onion. I skipped the mayo, this time, out of deference for Jim Spring, but not being one to try and make things easier, I substituted Alton Brown’s slow roasted tomatoes for the Colicchio version, even though it takes about twice as long to cook. (Just cut tomatoes in half, sprinkle them with a little olive oil and salt, lay them out, cut-side up, on a baking sheet, and leave them in the oven overnight on the lowest setting. You get to wake up in the house to the overwhelming smell of tomatoes. Or maybe to fire. Cooking is about taking chances.)

I used to despise all things pickle. I associated them with jars of noxious, soggy things that looked suspiciously like embryonic aliens in formaldehyde. But it’s quite different when you make your own, and Colicchio’s “pickles” are often just things given a quick dip in vinegar. He doesn’t explain this, but soaking onions in vinegar “deflames” them, one of my favorite words, though Word 2008 spellchecker refuses to recognize it. The same principle applies to the pickled mustard seeds. I had to buy two bottles of mustard seed to fill out the recipe, but it was worth it. After a five minute simmer in 1 cup white wine vinegar, 1 cup sugar, and 1 tablespoon dry mustard, the seeds swell up or “bloom,” grow fat in the vinegar syrup, and they take on a texture a bit like caviar. It seems like a lot, but it disappeared from the fridge more quickly than any of my other condiments.

After Colicchio had earned my trust, I made some more exotic recipes from the “breakfast” section of the book—though I still fed them to Ann as dinner.

• Stewed apricots and fennel with ricotta, pistachios, and black pepper
• Smoked salmon with avocado, green mango and basil
• Bucheron with grapefruit and crispy olives

The last was the only disappointment, but even that introduced me to one of my new favorite cheeses. I’d probably even still serve Bucheron with grapefruit slices, but I’d alternate between eating the two rather than heaping them on canapés.

Working through the recipes, it’s easy to see what some of the guiding principles are, beyond “making a meal into a sandwich”. They are in a sense, entailments of the first principle.

1. By local, buy fresh, and buy in relatively small quantities. Don’t use your sandwich as an excuse to get rid of something in the fridge that’s “a little bit funky”.
2. Buy bakery bread, but not diva bread. “It is literally a supporting role; the bread should be gracious enough to take second billing to the inner ingredients.” Think ciabatta for sloppy sandwiches, multi-grain bread or country bread for general all purpose sandwiches, baguettes for squiggly multi-textured stuff like fried calamari or the tuna with fennel fronds, and pullman white bread for soft ingredients or delicate flavors. Bread is usually only toasted in the oven on one side, the inside, or grilled lightly, because Tom Colicchio is a dainty fellow and worries too much about his soft palette.
3. Don’t include more elements on your sandwich than you would on your plate. Keep your salad on the side; forgo “such ‘fillers’ as lettuce and tomato”. The sandwich should be compact enough that you can hold it with one hand.
4. The items you do choose should be full of contrasts, so you get the full registers of sweet, sour, salty, bitter or savory. Think of a Mondrian painting, where each field of color shines brighter because of the contrasting color beside it. This goes for texture too. Sometimes you need crunchy things. If you don’t like pickles, or even pickled onions, try the green mangoes soaked in orange juice and cut into matchsticks.

How do you know what goes well together? I don’t think anyone looks at a stewed apricot and says, that’ll go well with fennel fronds. Pork sausage? I know, ricotta and arugula. But that’s why it’s called ‘wichcraft and not ‘wichscience, and why Colicchio probably gets invited to more lunches than Aristotle. Because some of it will still always be about what you have lying around, and some of it will always be about improvisation and experiment. This week, I made sandwiches from left over Mock Porchetta ala Judy Rodgers.

It was a bit overcooked, but the leftovers made a perfectly serviceable sandwich with piquillo peppers and manchego. Sure, I’m probably just assuming things will taste good together if they all sound Spanish, but I’m doing this one step at a time. I genuinely believe that working through this book has not only made me more aware of what might make a good sandwich, but what might go well together on a plate generally. What goes well with cassoulet? And how can I make cassoulet into a sandwich?

What meals do you make into sandwiches?

Tom Colicchio’s ‘Wichcraft, Part I: Turkey Sandwich Logic (TSL)

The traditional Fristrom family holiday is split between eating and playing all manner of games:  video games, board games, puzzle games, and on occasion head games, particularly if they involve our adorable five-year old niece, Sofi.  My brother designs and programs video games so it should be of no surprise that Sofi is already a first rate slayer in Popcap games instant classic “Plants vs. Zombies”.  It should be of no surprise too, that my brother was less enthusiastic about my introducing Sofi to the live-action version of the game that involved throwing crocheted vegetables at her father.

It is a well known fact that Seattle is named after the Chief Seattle of the Suquamish tribes, but I still insist that “Seattle” is Suquamish for “Moist”.  Why anyone wanted to name the promised chief-child “Moist” is beyond me, but there you have it.  Seattle is moist, and everything in it is moist, including much to my surprise my brother’s turkey.  I still stick to my assertion that turkeys are inherently inferior birds compared to chickens, ducks, geese, ostrich, and possibly swan. But turkeys can, like all things, be made to taste good under duress, and isn’t this the test of a good cook or recipe? Jamie did well this year with a kosher turkey.  Kosher turkeys are, like kosher chickens, generally juicier and more succulent due to the Hebraic belief that anything is kosher so long as you put enough salt on it. Pre-brined birds, however, have two strikes against them in the gravy department. 1) The drippings will be too salty for a pan sauce, and 2) Giblets aren’t kosher, so you can’t fall back on them either.  I had gravy duty, so I made a passable chanterelle gravy from a ½ pound of those loopy yellow, Dr. Seuss inspired mushrooms.  Jamie convinced me to include at least a modicum of the blackish, brackish glaze in the bottom of the turkey pan, and we were all the better for it.  Had Native Americans brought this to the pilgrim table, I’m sure they would’ve avoided any poultry inspired genocide.  My efforts to jerry-rig a steamer to make Broccolini was less successful, but the less said about that the better.

The second Turkey challenge is figuring out what to do with the leftovers.  I am not the most tactful houseguest, so I insisted that since Jamie and Cathy took on the lion’s share of the Thanksgiving cooking, I should get to take over their kitchen the following day.  They had other things in mind, because it was Sofi’s birthday, and there would be only a brief calm before fifteen small people descended upon the house to celebrate the following day.  The house had been cleaned and was now festooned with crepe paper flowers and other five-year old friendly décor for the occasion.  But I already promised my faithful readers, all three of them, that I was going to make Tom Colicchio’s recipe for turkey sandwiches on my blog. So what’s a guy to do?  Beside, I had to repair my pride after the Broccolini incident.

I agreed to make lunch instead of dinner and to clean whatever mess I made.  Much to my dismay, the rest of our still food comatose party didn’t really seem to want a large, complicated, ciabatta sandwich for lunch, particularly the five-year old variety of people who have not yet developed a taste for the finer things in life, and by the finer things of course, I mean onion marmalade.

Turkey sandwiches aren’t that bad in their traditional form, though I suspect every ingredient has been featured on Christian Lander’s Stuff White People Like.  There’s a logic to turkey sandwiches.  Turkey is lean, lean on fat, and so necessarily lean on flavor.  Turkey sandwiches try to make up with this fact by including plenty of mayo for moisture, leftover cranberry sauce for flavor and sweetness, and extra gravy if the bird is dry. Cranberry sauce might be a problem for some people though.  At least one Philly friend of mine insists that any form of meat + fruit is sacrilege, but it’s a good pairing with things that are smoky, gamy, or dry.  Cranberry sauce isn’t really a far cry from chutneys, nor for that matter, BBQ sauce.  So there’s a logic here, even if the best the logic can strive for is to taste like Thanksgiving warmed over. Even the traditional white bread makes a certain amount of sense, because it’s absorbent. Anything denser would cause the goop to come squirting out the sides, and even a robust wheat bread could overshadow what little flavor the turkey has brought to the table.

I’ll sing the full praises of Colicchio’s ‘wichcraft next week, but for now, lets just say that his turkey sandwich stays true to the original sandwich. It still includes mayo, but its importance is negligible compared to the bacon and avocado.  Bacon in this case helps to accentuate the smoky flavor of the turkey—or add it when there really isn’t any to begin with. Bacon and avocado go pretty well on any sandwich, an alchemical pairing of crisp and chewy, soft and smooth, that is as vital to sandwiches as ham and Comte or homemade peanut butter and jelly, even if a certain five-year old has yet to realize it.

Some people feel clumsy around avocado because it has the texture, consistency, and probably the fat content, of butter.  But you wouldn’t worry too much about cutting off perfectly sized pats of butter and lining them up on a sandwich, so why should you here?  You can just mash the avocado into the bread if you like. If you insist on forming perfect little slices, however, it isn’t that difficult.  The sticking point is usually the pit or stone.

1. Cut around the avocado length-wise.
2. Hold one side in each hand and twist them apart.  The pit will slide right out of the flesh on one side, and remain thoroughly lodged in the other.
3. Holding the offending side in the palm of one hand, gently whack the stone with a good-sized knife. Think of an axe going into wood:  as long as your aim is true you won’t have to worry about lopping off a finger.  The stone is hard and the knife will just get lodged in it. Gently rotate the knife as if you were unscrewing the pit; it pops right out.
4. Scoop out the flesh with a spoon and slice.

The only real problem is getting the d*** stone off the knife when you’re done with it.

While Colicchio insists that the turkey sandwich is an “ensemble cast” with no real star, I disagree.  The flavors are balanced, but the onion marmalade stands out because most people have never had onion marmalade. Turns out there are a wide array of different recipes for this tasty goo on the web. You can even buy it in stores that have a well-stocked section of jams and jellies.  Williams-Sonoma carries the ‘wichcraft stuff, which is the least like marmalade that I can find, and that’s a good thing.  It’s just onions, balsamic vinegar and sugar. It doesn’t include pectin. It doesn’t include raisins or dried apricots or even wine just to justify the family name of “marmalade”. The absence of fruit means you don’t have to worry about picky dinner guests with fruit + meat phobias.  It has all the tart and sweet flavor of cranberry sauce with none of the health benefits that might otherwise taint a perfectly good sandwich. You can find Colicchio’s recipe for it at Leite’s Culinaria if you want to make it yourself.

The recipe calls for ciabatta or country bread.  Logic dictates that ciabatta would be the right choice, but only if you can find it in the right size. Ciabatta is the bread of choice for sloppy sandwiches–pulled pork, BBQ, turkey, etc.—because it’s soft and airy on the inside but has a sturdy crust that never gets soggy.  The interior is also soft enough that it doesn’t force any of the gooshy ingredients out the side.   The Leite’s Culinaria’s picture goes against recipe and includes the marmalade on top, but that makes sense with ciabatta.  If you go with country bread though, you’ll probably want to stick with the avocado on top, cutting down on sogginess.

I’ve made this recipe three or four times now, often substituting chicken for Turkey.  In future though, I will try the country bread, because it’s hard to find a ciabatta the right size. Single-serving loaves are often taller than full-sized loaves and with the extra crust it can be just too much bread. Ciabatta literally means “carpet slipper,” so it should rise no higher than what you would comfortably wear around the house. Trader Joe’s offers relatively large, flat loaves that are the right size, though not always the freshest.

Colicchio’s book doesn’t explain everything as I have tried to here.  On the surface, it’s just another restaurant inspired cookbook, all recipe, little theory or instruction.  But each recipe has useful tips, and there is a clear theory to how to build sandwiches that is easy enough to deduce from example.  I’ll try to outline this general theory of sandwiches in my next entry, because they are fast becoming a staple part of my diet.

Tip:  There’s more than one way to carve a turkey, and the traditional one isn’t always the best.  I like to just carve the whole breast off the bird the way most people recommend when deboning a chicken.  Then you can cut the breast like a loaf of bread, leaving a strip of skin on every piece.

Thomas Keller – Ad Hoc at Home

Since we’re always travelling for the holidays, I’m rarely in charge of cooking for Thanksgiving.  But two years ago, I cooked my first, and for the time being last, Thanksgiving turkey.  I bought myself an All-clad roaster, and had a heritage turkey shipped fresh from a small farm. While the turkey browned in the oven, drippings collecting over autumnal roots, I felt a sense of pride welling within me. This was not just a meal.  It was a heritage, a rite of passage, and I wanted it to be a statement.  I wasn’t going to let Thanksgiving be tarnished by those wobbly, genetically engineered Butterballs that can barely walk, let alone copulate. I wanted a lean, dark-meat, gamey bird that tasted like turkeys should have a hundred years ago, back when they still had noble names like Bourbon Red, Narragansett, or White Midget.

But when it came out of the oven, all glistening and gold, guess what?  It still tasted like turkey.  A good turkey, but still turkey, and the sad fact is that turkey doesn’t taste all that good. To quote Jeffrey Steingarten, “The true meaning of the Thanksgiving menu lies in the garnishes, not in the main course—in the uniquely New World cranberry, pumpkin, sweet potatoes, corn, beans, and other treasures the Europeans found growing here.”  And for those dishes, a few of my favorites are Frank Stitt’s pumpkin cheesecake and Susanna Foo’s ginger cranberry relish. But turkey?  If the Virginia colony even ate turkey, it was undoubtedly served alongside a variety of other protein including ducks, geese, venison, and lobster. Why has history remembered the turkey?  I keep thinking that the colonists wanted to escape the repressive yoke of English cuisine, but I guess I should know better.  The Puritans were not gourmets.  They probably found the Virginia harvest and game too sensual, too venal for their parochial tastes. I can only assume that turkey is a kind of penance.

Which brings me to another big ado that lends itself to vague feelings of disappointment: Thomas Keller’s new cookbook, Ad Hoc at Home.  I feel the same way about his cookbooks as I do about my first heritage farm turkey.  It’s good, but is it worth the trouble?  Ironically my best impressions of Keller were probably of his most humble contribution to the culinary world:  a DVD extra attached to a mediocre Adam Sandler comedy.  Keller consulted on the movie, Spanglish where he explained to Sandler what a chef might eat after a long day of work: a BLT. He explains briefly how to make The World’s Greatest Sandwich so that the tomato doesn’t make the bread soggy.  More importantly, he adds a fried egg on top, cooked to lava-like perfection.  When cut, the yolk flows down into the rest of the sandwich. I don’t know which was more of a revelation, the egg, or the thought that Michelin starred chefs spend their free time eating BLTs.  But I was hooked.  I have never made a BLT any other way.  Jennifer McLagan’s recipe in Fat tempted me, but even its substitution of “bacon aioli” for traditional mayonnaise just seems like gilding the lily.

So when I saw the early ads for Ad Hoc at Home, this is the Keller that came to mind. The chalk pig on the cover made promises to me of more porcine goodness, and in some ways the book didn’t disappoint. There are many fine, homey recipes in the book, my favorite so far probably being the Crispy Braised Chicken Thighs with Olives, Lemon, and Fennel.  But be wary of the marketing campaigns for cookbooks.  Advertising, even when it isn’t outright lying, is designed to soften public opinion. Nobody sells soft drinks by saying, “Buy me, I’m really sweet,” because you know that already.  Instead, they invent diet soft drinks for the calorie concerned.  Those who worry about the taste, hear “Just for the taste of it.” Those who worry about carcinogenic sweeteners, hear “Coke adds life”. So it is with Keller.  Keller’s reputation as a purist and perfectionist precedes him and may rightfully intimidate most home cooks.  His recipes are as exacting as his restaurants are expensive. So I see first Bouchon and now Ad Hoc at Home as part of an ongoing effort to correct that image, and it only sort of works. The title Ad Hoc at Home does not refer to spontaneous improvisation or the comforts of your home kitchen.  It refers to another Keller restaurant of the same name. So the title could just as well be “domineeringly precise instructions on how to cook in a restaurant”.  Admittedly, both the recipe and the cookbook are a bit more “down home” than previous Keller efforts, but its an odd pairing of rustic dishes with Keller’s fever-pitched perfectionism.

Take, for example, his recipe for Chicken Pot Pie.  It’s easy to think the man has changed by his unassuming intro:

I grew up eating Swanson’s frozen potpies—that kind of food is how a big family with a working mom survived during the week in the 1960s and ’70s.While it may have reached icon status due to the ingenious convenience food industry, its origins as a wonderful dish are why I value it now.  I wanted to include it here because of its powerful association with home meals, and to show how good it can be when made at home.

This is a fine homage to the American working class, and the food they eat.  It promises to return us to the comfort foods of our youth, but to rescue them from the automated traditions of convenience foods.  But when you get into how he prepares a potpie, you begin to see early and often what separates Keller from someone like Betty Fussell or Fannie Farmer. Its not enough that the potatoes, carrots and celery should all be cut to ½ inch dice, they must also be segregated for cooking.

Put the potatoes, carrots, and onions in separate small saucepans with water to cover and add 1 bay leaf, 1 thyme sprig, and 8 peppercorns to each pan.

That’s right, eight shall be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be eight.  Nine shalt thou not count, neither count to seven, excepting that thou then proceedest to eight.  Ten is right out. By this point you have all the burners going on your stove and you’re wondering what you got yourself into.  This is not your mother’s potpie recipe. Unless your mother was a highly functioning OCD patient who had a live-in staff of Puerto Rican dishwashers.

In retrospect, I can understand why the celery was singled out for blanching.  Blanched celery taste less like celery, and in my book, that’s a good thing. But I can’t see the rational for simmering each vegetable in a separate pot when they will all be enjoying their Jacuzzi for exactly 8-10 minutes.

To be fair, the potpie was delicious, but I think it would’ve been fine to just say, “Dice vegetables evenly and cook until fork tender.”  But the book seems to be of that school which believes that precision is about quantification. I admire some kinds of fussiness, like the recipe for Black Rice, Farro and Squash that ended up taking me to three separate stores for ingredients.  There are three different kinds of squash involved alone: Butternut, Delicata and Kobacha.  But most of the step-by-step instructions are geared toward quantitative outcomes, and the desired outcomes often aren’t even that clear.

The instructions for Delicata are typical:

“Cut off the ends of the Delicata squash and peel it.  Cut lengthwise into quarters and remove the seeds.  Cut each quarter lengthwise into 3 pieces.  Put each piece seed side down on a cutting board and cut on a sharp diagonal into 3/8-inch thick slices about 1 ½ inches long; discard the end pieces.  You need about 1½ cups squash for this recipe (reserve any extra for another use). ”

Its hard for me to visualize this, and it strikes me as a bit odd to have to peel the

Delicata squash, since the Delicata’s is the only winter squash that you can eat with the skin on. Delicata’s raison d’etre is to be cut up into colorful crescents or rounds.  But Keller wants 5/8″ dice, and so that’s what Keller gets.

This Taylorist approach to quantifying everything puts me less in mind of the chef in the Adam Sandler clip and more in mind of Phil Hartman’s chef on SNL. “People try to tell you that the secret to peppersteak is the seasoning, but we know differently don’t we?  It’s getting all the pieces the same size”. It’s a misconception to assume that recipes will be more scientific or more foolproof if only you can add more precise measurements. Even if the average home cook had the knife skills necessary to make 5/8″ dice quickly and evenly, other variables would get in the way.  The age, moisture levels and starting temperature of the squash will make a difference, as will the relative temperature of your stove. Since Keller likes cooking a great many things on “low” these differences tend to be exaggerated. In my kitchen, most of the times ended up seeming off by anywhere from 20% to 50%.  And this is frustrating when the book usually calls for cooking aromatics for 20 minutes, and letting bacon render its fat for up to 45.  I know that describing cooking in other terms is difficult. Keller himself admits that you have to learn to use your senses.  You have to touch a steak or a filet of fish to know how “done” feels.  But he also goes on to say that “No one can tell you how to do this. This is something you can learn only by cooking, by touching and remembering.”  But that’s a cop out. This is the challenge that I think good cookbooks should really strive to address. Poets strive all the time to capture fleeting impressions that they will never be able to fully realize on the page, but that doesn’t make it any less worthwhile to try.

That said, if you can overlook the excesses of Ad Hoc at Home, there’s a lot in it that is genuinely worthwhile.  Just know what you’re getting into.  Keller’s a purist, which means that he doesn’t really experiment much with the main entrees. He just gives you a slightly fussier version of what you might get from a dozen other cookbooks. The side dishes were more exotic than the main dishes, though and the “life savers” is full of mouth watering little things in jars: preserved whole lemons, cured lemons, oven-roasted tomatoes, soffritto, or champagne grapes to be steeped with yellow curry. This must be where Keller put all the flavor that he took out of the main dishes. I used to shy away from these sections in cookbooks, because they almost always require you to coomore than you need.  But I’d much rather have left over roast tomatoes than the odds and ends of three different squashes that are now sitting in my fridge. It’s with those leftovers that you really get to improvise ad hoc.

I also liked the cheese primer. I love cheese, but I’m usually afraid of spending a lot of money on something like Humbolt Fog, when I don’t know what to do with it. But now I know.  Serve it with fresh figs and honey.  Even just honey is amazing. This probably isn’t a revelation to framagiophiles, but it was to me.  And yes, there was, much to my great pleasure, a section on grilled cheese sandwiches, made with crustless brioche and Comte. They didn’t top the World’s Greatest Sandwich, but it’s good to know that there’s more to a grilled cheese sandwich than cheddar or Velveeta, but more on that next week.

In the end, as I shelve Ad Hoc for a while, I think what surprises me most is I actually followed these instructions to the letter.  If I’m frustrated with this book, perhaps it’s because I approached it with too much reverence, but Keller is intimidating that way. After several weeks of cooking with Ad Hoc, I’ve come to have a recurring dream that

Thomas Keller is on Iron Chef, battling it out with Jose Garces. I’ve always liked Jose Garces, and I wish him well with tonight’s Next Iron Chef, but if for some reason he loses, he can still be a star in my Thomas Keller nightmares. On television, Garces is supremely confident and amiable to a fault, but in my nightmares, pitted against Keller, he’s understandably nervous. For some reason, Keller was allowed to bring not only a single sous-chef, but also a whole army of prep cooks who are endlessly slicing and dicing. “What’s he making over there?” Garces asks, pushing himself harder that he ever has before. Garces completes all the required dishes, and somehow manages to make a perfectly delectable dish out of a live peacock. The clock runs down, the buzzer goes off, and everyone’s eyes lock on Keller.  In one hour, he has managed to make only mirepoix, and he hasn’t even plated it. Yet somehow, the judges find this perfectly acceptable and Keller wins anyway.

This is cooking with Thomas Keller.  This will always be cooking with Thomas Keller.   Don’t expect otherwise.  Do not buy this book because you think it’ll be the “more accessible” Thomas Keller book.  Buy it because you liked his other books and you’re prepared to put up with his fussiness.  Or better yet, you’re prepared to stare him down in kitchen stadium and say, look damnit, it’s just mirepoix, and I’ll cook it all in one pan if I want to.

Intro: Midnight’s Chicken

I am an adequate cook. I got by through graduate school with hand-me-down cookware, in a studio apartment in Albany.  I was pleased to find a place with on the bus route to school, but I didn’t think about how I might get to a grocery store.  Winter was hard that first year, because I didn’t own a car. Eventually, I offered to exchange cooking services for rides to and from the grocery store. That’s how I met Ann, and how I convinced her that I should continue to do most of the cooking after I married her.

By the time I was working on my dissertation, Ann and I moved to Havertown, just outside Philadelphia.  Little had changed in my cooking habits.  We had a loft apartment with a galley kitchen.  I didn’t have much room to cook, but I continued to operate under the assumption that school writing is a bit like sensory deprivation. If you spend your day at a computer, you starve your nervous system, and it ends up heightening sensations so that even a Milky Way bar is a revelation.  What happened then was simply an accident.  I was a year into the dissertation, when I realized that my reading habits were getting in the way.  It was bad enough continuing to read new books that related to my dissertation, but I would try to shoehorn in anything I was reading—stuff about comic books, about psychological experiments performed on cats, about complexity theory.  The draft was hemorrhaging badly, and I needed to stop it.  So I called for a year of no distraction, a Year of No New Books. No scholarly books.  No fun books.  No any kind of books.

Except cookbooks.

Cookbooks were allowed because I needed something to do at the end of the day, and I couldn’t really see them as being a distraction.  No one really reads cookbooks. They don’t curl up on the couch for hours on end only to find themselves wondering where the day went.  They browse, they skim, and they leaf through pages to look at pictures.  Worst-case scenario, I’d be up in the middle of the night, drinking a shot of Bushmills, waiting for sleep to come, and Judy Rodger’s The Zuni Café Cookbook would give me a sudden urge to roast a chicken. But then I Ann is asleep in the other room, and I don’t actually have a chicken—so I’d let it go.  That’s the kind of distraction I could live with. So the cookbooks came steadily in, for a year, then two or three. I finished the dissertation and the prohibition, but the cookbooks keep coming in at an alarming rate. The only difference is that now I have more disposable income, so I don’t have to limit my searches to used bookstores, cut-out bins in megastores, or promotional offers from thegoodcook.com to sate my appetites.  I can read and eat what I want.

You say you never wanted to cook chickens after midnight?  You’re not reading the right cookbooks. Wait until midnight and read Zuni Roast Chicken with Bread Salad. Think of tucking a plump, little chicken into an 8″ cast iron skillet and popping it into the oven on high roast.  Think of the sizzle it makes after ten or fifteen minutes to tell you that the temperature is right.  Think about the smell.  Everyone talks about the smell of herbs and spices, but an unadorned chicken has its own distinctive order. It’s a smell that you can live in like a house or be buried in after you die.  Think about the weight and the warmth of the cast iron in your oven mitt when you pull it from the oven and about the sprinkling of kosher salt still visible on the blistered skin like a flurry of snow.

Still don’t want to roast chickens after midnight? There’s nothing I can do for you. I hear there’s a whole world of blogs out there, and perhaps another will appeal to you.  Try scrapbooking or dog fighting. Try reading about how to add a spoiler and new rims to your 1992 Volkswagen Jetta. But I’m writing for people who would gain inspiration from cookbooks, and would at least entertain the thought of chickens after midnight. People who believe that digestion is not just about turning chicken into calories but culture. People who believe that cookbooks are not about recipes, but origin stories, histories, family lore, kitchen anecdotes, the science, anthropology and philosophy of food, all the stuff that shapes the ways we think about food.  I know you can get a finer grained education from growing up in a family with a rich culinary tradition or shucking oysters in a school where everyone wears poufy white hats.  But for those who are born without these privileges, there will always be cookbooks.

This week’s tip(s):  most cookbooks treat chickens the way factory farmers do.  They’re all about big birds and predictable results.  They recommend cooking at a median temp of 375 degrees to cook evenly, and they recommend cooking for way too long.  The results will never be like the kind of roast chicken you get at a restaurant, which is often a “high roast” designed for an extra crisp skin and moist interior.  Once you cook chickens on a high roast, you might never turn back, but you must use a SMALL bird. Otherwise, it won’t cook all the way through.  If you don’t feel confident about doneness, use an instant read thermometer to make sure–testing the temperature near the thigh bone and breast bone. If you’ve ever bought an organic chicken and didn’t think it tasted that much better than a Perdue chicken, try again with this method.  I think it tends to magnify the differences.  Kosher chickens are also good, but remember that they’re pre-brined, so you won’t need to use the full allotment of salt JR recommends.