Humble Yet Exotic

Posted on March 8, 2012 by Carol

Eggs are more versatile than we give them credit for being.

Most of us associate eggs with just two things: breakfast and baking.

That’s giving them remarkably short shrift, for the egg is one of the most basic and versatile items in the larder. Just about any chef will tell you that the most challenging of all foods to cook is the egg. Sure, anyone can cook an egg, but I’m referring to how well it is cooked, not to its simply having been rendered non-raw.

Legend has it that the pleats in a chef’s toque represent all the ways in which that chef is able to cook an egg. Auguste Escoffier enumerated 256 in Le Guide Culinaire. Crack open Larousse Gastronomique and you’ll find more than 400 dishes involving eggs. This just boggles my mind.

How many pleats are in YOUR toque?

I recently read White Truffles in Winter, by N.M. Kelby, a novel I asked Himself to give me for Christmas. It’s a sensuous and intriguing glimpse into the life of Escoffier, the man who, whether or not we give him the credit, taught us how to eat. It is fictionalized, for sure, but based on research. In it is a touching scene in which his ailing wife talks the servant through the steps needed to make eggs for the family’s dinner. This is done behind the back of the aging chef, who has forbidden anyone but himself to cook eggs in his house, so particular is he about their treatment.

So I tried the method outlined in the novel one night while Himself was out and I was home alone, already in my jammies. Rather than recount the scene from the book, I’ll just tell you how I did it. This method is what Escoffier referred to as frying, although to me it seems more en cocotte, but without the bain-marie:

I melted a couple of tablespoons of unsalted butter in a small crock, then poured two eggs into it, taking care not to break the yolks. I salted and peppered it, spooned over a tablespoon of cream and grated some Gruyere over the top, although Parmesan would have been just fine. Then I popped it into an oven preheated to 350°F for about 15 minutes, enough time for the whites to just barely set.

Eggs-coffier

The dish was predictably good, but more than that it was luxurious and utterly satisfying, much more so than if I’d simply eaten two cheese-topped fried eggs from a plate. Maybe they were better because the crock holds the heat longer than a plate can. Unless they’re hard boiled, cold eggs just don’t have much going for them. And of course, anything with butter, eggs, cheese and cream in it is going to be decadent. In the novel, cook tops the dish with shavings of fresh truffle after pulling it from the oven. Next time I can get my hands on a truffle I will certainly do that. I could try a drizzle of truffle oil, but while truffles themselves are delicately flavored, truffle-infused oil can be overpowering. Maybe I’ll try cooking it in a half-and-half combo of butter and truffle oil, or maybe just sprinkle on a bit of truffle salt and see how that works.

I mopped up every bit of butter and cream and softly set egg with slices from a loaf of crusty bread. And then I purred like a milk-sated kitten for the rest of the evening, cozied up on the sofa beneath a wool blanket and flanked by a couple of sleepy cats, and resumed my reading.

When Himself got home, I told him all about my egg discovery. He was intrigued, so I made it again for us both a few nights later when we were popping the cork on a bottle of champagne to celebrate milestones in our respective careers. Honestly, I think champagne is the best thing to drink with eggs. Well maybe not at breakfast time–no good could come of that! But considering that a classic presentation of eggs is with osetra caviar, toast points and champagne, I know I’m not the first person to believe this to be true.

There is something about the egg that is both familiar and exotic. It’s nice to be reminded of this every now and then and not take it for granted. I think I’m going to not take it for granted for dinner tonight.

I think I’ll call this dish Eggs-coffier.

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A Cornbread Confession

Posted on February 10, 2012 by Carol

Southern cornbread

Bread is the most basic and satisfying of foods, rightfully called “the staff of life.” While loaves, buns, rolls, baguettes and all the rest are wonderful, still I’m a Southern girl. And that means Southern-styled quick breads like biscuits and cornbread are what I crave.

I stand pretty firmly in the cornbread camp. While I love a good biscuit, unless I need a wrapper for my country ham or a bed for my sorghum, I’ll reach straight for the cornbread every time.

Wedges of gold: baked in cast iron, they're crunchy on the outside, pillow-soft on the inside.

This is problematic now that I live in Los Angeles, because what passes for cornbread here is way too sweet and cake like–and usually as dry as the road into the high desert. Granted, every region has its own take on cornbread, but whatever you grew up with tends to be what you gravitate toward. So if I want a good piece of cornbread, I have to make it myself.

Learning at the side of a mother, grandmother, aunt or older sister is the way such knowledge and technique are usually acquired (let’s face it, in the rural South it was seldom a man doing the teaching or the learning to cook). But as with those cultures that pass down their lore and traditions orally, few ever took the time to write anything down. I didn’t realize until well into my adult years that I’d ever be interested in cooking Southern food, so to my shame, this was not something I absorbed in my youth.

Going...

A few years ago at an International Association of Culinary Professionals conference I met Adam Reid from America’s Test Kitchen, and he was astonished when I told him the best, most authentic recipe I’d yet found for making cornbread as we know it in the South–at least in my part of the South–came from ATK’s cookbook. I applaud these folks for figuring out and recording the measurements and method required to accomplish this feat.

So here’s my confession: My recipe for authentic Southern cornbread comes from ATK’s Yankee kitchen in Boston. Please don’t hate me or judge me a fraud. I think it’s pretty gutsy of me to make this admission.

I hope you’ll give this recipe a try, and don’t shy away from the call for bacon drippings. They make it taste so much better than it would with any other type of fat. And unless you eat the entire skilletful of cornbread by yourself in one sitting (although that could happen) you’re not going to ingest that much dripping.

going...

A note on the bacon drippings: I’ll save my diatribe on bacon drippings for a separate blog entry, but let me just say that the better the drippings, the better your cornbread will be, so collect them from good, smoky bacon.

Southern Cornbread

from The America’s Test Kitchen Family Cookbook, with my asides

4 tsp. bacon drippings (there are 3 teaspoons in a tablespoon, so I just use a slightly rounded tablespoon)

drippings: pure porky nectar

1 cup yellow cornmeal

2 tsp. sugar

1 tsp. baking powder

1/2 tsp. salt

1/4 tsp. baking soda

1/3 cup rapidly boiling water (don’t be lazy & try to get by with hot tap water)

3/4 cup buttermilk

1 large egg, lightly beaten

Position the oven rack in the lower-middle of the oven. Put the bacon drippings in an 8-inch cast iron skillet, set the skillet in the oven, and preheat the oven to 450ºF.

Whisk 2/3 cup of the cornmeal with sugar, baking powder, salt and baking soda in a small bowl and set aside. (Sift the baking powder and baking soda if needed so you don’t get tiny pockets of rising agent in the final product.)

Put the remaining 1/3 cup of the cornmeal into a medium-sized bowl, add the boiling water and stir to make a stiff mush. Gradually whisk in the buttermilk until smooth, working out any lumps. Now whisk in the egg and then gently fold in the dry ingredients until just combined. (Gently fold, because what gives cornbread its rise is the chemical reaction of the buttermilk’s acid with the base of the baking soda and baking powder. If you stir aggressively or dawdle between this point and oven time, you’ll lose that rising power, and the cornbread will be heavy and dense.)

When the oven has fully preheated, the skillet and drippings will be “rippin’ hot,” as ATK’s Julia Collin-Davison likes to say. Carefully remove the hot skillet from the oven, pour the melted drippings into the batter and stir, then pour the batter into the skillet. Bake until golden brown, between 15 and 20 minutes, depending on your oven.

Turn the cornbread out onto a wire rack and let cool a few minutes before falling face down on it.

Gone!

 

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Fruitcakes and Evening Gowns: An Awards Season Musing

Posted on February 2, 2012 by Carol

I used to have this theory that all those evening gowns actresses wore on the red carpet were like fruitcakes, in that there was a finite number of them being traded in perpetuity amongst those well-dressed women in between award shows and seasons. Now that I have a friend who’s participating in this annual entertainment industry ritual, I decided to see if my theory was correct.

All dolled up for the Golden Globes (we're going with a low-res snapshot from home, so I don't get into copyright trouble with any of those red carpet photogs!)

So I quizzed my buddy Missi Pyle, who is currently appearing in this season’s awards frontrunner, The Artist (Woo-woo! Yeah, Missi!). That’s her on the left, wearing a gown that’s the color of my jar of tarragon mustard. Incidentally, the dazzling young woman with her is her sister, Meredith, who is also actress, hint-hint to anyone looking for not one but two lovely and talented actresses to hire.

Missi confirmed my suspicions, admitting that yes, those dresses are borrowed. (She added that after the ceremony, she turns into a pumpkin at midnight. And I’m betting that at midnight her limo driver morphs into an unemployed screenwriter.) Gone are the days of Joanne Woodward sewing the gown in which she collected her Best Actress Oscar in 1958. Today’s actresses and assorted Hollywood red carpet striders are essentially wearing the equivalent of sparkly fruitcake.

When you think about it, neither evening gowns nor fruitcakes spend very much time in any one person’s possession. This is not a problem as far as I can tell. Who wants to wear fancy gowns and eat fruitcake all the time? There are more comfy clothes to wear, more enjoyable foods to eat.

For your nibbling pleasure I suggest panforte, which is the Sienese take on fruitcake, but much better than fruitcake ever dreamed of being. Made of nuts, dried fruits, honey and spices, it’s what Tuscan soldiers carried to fortify themselves as they headed into battle. Think of it as the medieval version of the Cliff Bar. Here’s a recipe for a panforte I developed while I was a culinary student interning in the Los Angeles Times test kitchen. I devised this recipe based on local foods that I could find in area farmers’ markets.

It makes a wonderful holiday treat, great for gift giving, too, but recently Himself and I realized that panforte is just as healthy as high-protein, high-energy sports bars, but without the high price. It tastes better, too. I’ve decided to start making it throughout the year, not just during the holidays.

I think we're both rockin' those pink blankies!

As for comfier clothes, Missi and I are in agreement: Wrapping up in fuzzy blankets as we hang out on a chilly night is the only way to await the stroke of midnight, when we both turn into pumpkins.

I wonder which sparkly fruitcake she’ll wear to the Oscars this year…

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Banned From Crate & Barrel

Posted on January 26, 2012 by Carol

…or maybe I should be.

Most of us think things we have the good manners not to say out loud. I tend to vocalize those thoughts more often than I should. Sometimes hilarity ensues. Sometimes it doesn’t.

It all started so innocently.

Himself and I were on the way to Intelligentsia to take a load off after running errands, and as we passed Crate & Barrel we decided to pop in and have a look at their dining tables. We have a nice, big table, and we really like it, but it’s in a room that is so tiny it’s challenging to seat more than the two of us. Essentially, if you want to gather at our dining table, you have to be either pencil thin or coated in butter. Preferably both.

Blaze is the only one who fits comfortably in the dining chairs next to the wall.

A lovely Crate & Barrel employee–I’ll call her Susan–showed us some tables and explained their various attributes and features. She was helpful but respected our space. No hard sell, which I truly appreciate. We thanked her and wandered on to another part of the store.

A little later she finished up with a customer close by and came over to check on us. We made some small talk about how comfy the furniture was and which pieces we fancied. Emboldened by our easy rapport, she volunteered a story to illustrate the cushiness of their comfy chairs:

“A lady came in one time with lots of shopping bags, and she sat down in this really comfortable chair and fell right asleep, with those bags on the floor all around her.” We laughed, so she continued: “After awhile we decided it was a little odd and we had to wake her up. We were actually kind of afraid that she might have died!”

Instead of smiling politely and saying something innocuous like, “Oh my!” “Isn’t that something?” or “Who could blame you?” I instead blurted out, “Wow! If she’d died in that chair, I bet we could have gotten a great discount on it!”

Susan’s happy, storytelling face fell, and she looked positively stricken. She took a step back, clearly convinced that she was making nice with a deranged woman. Somewhere a cricket cleared his throat for the solo.

“Carol!” Himself sort of half-scolded me and tried to usher me away.

“But she didn’t actually DIE,” I protested a little too loudly, my voice echoing through the furniture department. “She was just ASLEEP!” He tried to act put out with me, but he was laughing his ass off, his annoyance completely unconvincing.

A sputtered excuse me/gotta go/bye now, and Susan scrammed, leaving behind one of those little “Susan” shaped figures in the air just like in the cartoons when a character dashes away.

“I CAN NEVER SHOW MY FACE IN CRATE & BARREL AGAIN!” I howled as we headed down the stairs, shoppers on two floors glancing our way and then quickly pretending we weren’t there.

There’s something about a good laugh that stirs up the giddy in me and makes everything funny. It’s probably more of an intoxicant than alcohol. I think I’m funny, but others just give me an uneasy look that says they really hope I’ll go away soon. Just like you do when some happy drunk wanders up and tries to make conversation. It’s the look that was on our coffeemeister’s face in Intelligentsia five minutes later when I started cracking wise about making my own change from the tip jar. Himself shooed me away from the counter and sent me to look for seats before things could get any more embarrassing.

(I plead that there is a practical aspect to my whacked thinking. Once a colleague returned from the police station after her stolen car was recovered. They found that the car was filled with dozens of purses, none of which belonged to her. So my question was, “Do any of the purses match any of your shoes?” She didn’t find my line of thinking nearly as helpful as I did.)

If we’d been stopped by police on the way home for erratic driving on the freeway, I’m not sure we could have explained to their satisfaction why we were laughing so hard as to be a menace to others on the road. A breathalizer would have shown only coffee in our systems, so we’d have no doubt been hauled off to the psych ward for observation.

Now I’m thinking that out of sheer guilt I should return to Crate & Barrel and buy a table and chairs and that I should buy them only from Susan. She clearly earned her commission. I’m just sorry that she’ll never again feel free to tell the sleeping shopping-bag lady story. Or maybe she will, and she’ll even include the part about the crazy woman willing to go to disturbing lengths for a bargain.

Poor Himself. It’s so very hard to take me out in public.

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A Mean Mess of Greens

Posted on January 19, 2012 by Carol

Collard greens are one of those foods I learned to appreciate only after I got grown. I’m not sure why I didn’t like them as a child, although I suspect it had something to do with their odor, which I still don’t care for. In fact, I think I’ll start setting up the camp stove in the backyard whenever I decide to cook up a mess of collards so it doesn’t stenchify the house. (Funny thing about Southern expressions–they only work with our indigenous foods. Have you ever heard a Southerner talk about whippin’ up a mess of escargot or sushi?)

collards cooking with hamhocks

As with so many Southern dishes, this one is cooked more by instinct and personal taste than with a recipe. I use two bunches of collard greens to make about four servings. Greens are deceptive–you think you have way too many when you start out, but they always cook down to nearly nothing. So put on your biggest pot and throw in as many greens as you can.

As with any type of green, rinse them well, so you don’t get those dastardly gritty bits caught in your teeth. I start with a generous dollop of bacon drippings melted over medium high heat, to wilt the greens before adding about three cups of water, a little salt and some red pepper flakes and tossing in some hog jowl, hamhocks, ham bits, bacon or whatever pork you have lying around. The pork additions are salty, so add salt judiciously. Simmer for about 40 minutes, or longer if necessary, until the chewiness is gone. While spinach cooks up quickly, collards are thicker and more leathery, and they take considerably longer to cook. Sprinkle on some pepper vinegar if they seem a little gamey and set the bottle on the table so everyone can fine tune their own serving.

collards & hard boiled eggs

I put on some eggs to hard boil while the collards simmer. One of the classic Southern presentations (now there’s a prissy expression you don’t often hear at the Southern table!) is to serve them topped with slices of hard boiled egg. If your only source of protein for the meal is just a few bits of ham or bacon in the greens, it’s good to get a little extra from the eggs. And it looks pretty, don’t you think?

pot likker

What’s left behind after you get all the greens out of the pot is healthier than the greens themselves. This is the pot likker, and it’s where all the Vitamin A go during cooking. Well, I say it’s healthier, but there’s a fair amount of pork fat in there. That’s okay if you’re about to go plow the back forty. Some people like the pot likker best of all, spooned over cornbread or biscuits. Never throw this stuff away! You can at least keep it and use it as a soup base.

I’ve had really good collards in Ethiopian restaurants, where they’re steamed and served sprinkled with olive oil, garlic and spices, but for me, preparing them in a pork fat spa is still the way to go. As they say, you can take the girl out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the girl.

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