Eating Page 3
Macnamara’s shack occupied a well-lighted grass plot between Lake Maranacook and the old Augusta Road where I spent some boyhood summers during the War. In August, we toiled from dawn until dusk in the hot fields, picking snap beans, which we stuffed into burlap sacks and tossed onto trucks for the cannery that shipped them overseas to the troops. On Fridays, when we were paid at the end of the day, still in our bib overalls and shoeless, we paddled our canoes into town and spent our wages on hamburgers, Nehi, and frozen Milky Ways. Our leftover nickels went into Macnamara’s jukebox: Vera Lynn, Artie Shaw, Glenn Miller, the Andrews Sisters. We were fourteen that summer of 1942, our front teeth still too big for our sunburned faces. Under bare bulbs strung over Macnamara’s outdoor counter, with its neat arrangements of ketchup and mustard bottles, salt and pepper shakers, and paper napkins, we were proud of our war work. Like victorious warriors after battle, we ate our hamburgers in the hazy twilight, and after dark raced our canoes home across the lake.
The memory of those evenings would outlast the century and provoke a futile quest to recapture the fugitive joys fixed in mind’s wanderings by those hamburgers beside Lake Maranacook.
Later, there were other hamburgers, but none so memorable. In the 1950s and ’60s, at the Hamburger Heaven chain in New York, the hamburger was a plump sirloin pillow, and the bun sturdy enough not to disintegrate in one’s hands, as today’s supermarket buns will do unless the burger is cooked through. In those genteel surroundings, where Holly Golightly might occupy the next seat, one was served at the counter or at seats along the wall with hinged trays, like infants’ high-chair trays, by stately black waiters in white coats who delivered our hamburgers like a sacrament with ketchup and bowls of sweet pepper relish and raw onion. After lunch on days when the Queens or Caronia had landed, I would walk across Park Avenue to the Holliday Bookshop to buy the latest Henry Green or Ivy Compton-Burnett.
The Holliday Bookshop and the original Hamburger Heaven chain are gone, but today hamburger bars sprout up all over New York, and even the old Hamburger Heaven chain remains, under a different name, a pale, sad reminder of its suave old self. Today the ne plus ultra of the genre, at Daniel Boulud’s DB Bistro Moderne, has become a tourist attraction. This ziggurat of prime sirloin, foie gras, and short ribs is a cinch to make yourself if you have a kitchen crew to bake the buns, bone and shred short ribs, combine them with foie gras and black truffles, and add these ingredients to the best sirloin, which is chopped, then roasted and placed on a bun sprinkled with Parmesan cheese, toasted and layered with tomato confit and a horseradish mayonnaise. Then all you have to do is add tomato and frisée and serve with pommes soufflées.
For years I would drive past McDonald’s on the way to Sag Harbor, noticing how many millions and then billions of their burgers had been sold. I was not surprised by these numbers, for McDonald’s had stumbled upon an evolutionary defect in the human brain: an insatiable craving for fat and sugar on which primitive survival depended, a craving that has not moderated under civilized conditions, when fat and sugar have become an addictive menace and a marketing opportunity. McDonald’s Pavlovian victims see the arches, respond to the primal need for energizing sugars and stored fat, and millions of stomachs, bypassing the brain, propel their owners toward them, oblivious to the risk of obesity and untimely death. McDonald’s supplies enough calories from fat to sustain a daylong mammoth hunt and enough carbohydrates in its McNuggets, shakes, and fries for a quick sprint should one become the quarry. But with no more mammoths to hunt or saber-toothed tigers to run from, this unused energy simply adds to the gross weight of McDonald’s billions of customers.
If hamburger addicts can control their appetites until they get home, they will save money and calories by buying fresh-ground sirloin or chuck with no more than 20 percent fat, forming it into quarter-pound burgers a half-inch thick, frying or grilling them over medium heat until just cooked through, and stuffing them into toasted supermarket buns with lettuce, tomato, onion, pickle, and whatever else their primal instincts demand. The burger itself may not be much less caloric than a Mac, but the home cook is unlikely to add fries and a sugary shake.
I patronize a quality butcher who trims his own prime beef and grinds the scraps for hamburger, which he sells for only slightly more than the supermarket charges for ground chuck.
PRIME BEEF HAMBURGER
From the same shop I buy four-inch rolls and toast them lightly under the broiler. Then I shape the meat, which requires no seasoning, into six-ounce disks about three-quarters of an inch thick, grill them slowly in a ridged pan or beneath a slow broiler for four or five minutes per side, so that the outside doesn’t burn before the inside cooks, and serve them just beyond medium rare—with only a trace of pink at the center—at which point the meat will be warmed through and won’t crumble on the bun. Don’t succumb to the temptation to squeeze the burgers with a spatula. Test them for doneness by pressing them lightly with a finger. The firmer they feel, the more they’re done. I add a slice of sweet onion cut from the center and serve ketchup—sparingly, for it is full of corn sweetener—on the side. That my prime-beef hamburgers are less dangerous than Macnamara’s is small consolation for the fact that I am no longer fourteen, beside a lake in Maine at dusk, with my friends at an outdoor counter under a string of colored bulbs, listening to Artie Shaw and the hum of crickets.
THREE
SUMMER SCHOOL
Later, during college summers, I cooked in a restaurant on Cape Cod, drawn to that gritty work, I suspect, in preference to languid teenage days at Craigville Beach with friends, by memories of those aromatic mornings beside my grandmother’s stove in Maine. One morning I made breakfast for a troupe of actors on their way to the playhouse at Dennis. A waitress told me that one of them was Gertrude Lawrence, but I had never heard of her and had no way of knowing whether or not it was she who had eaten my bright-yellow scrambled eggs, which I had beaten and cooked slowly in a buttered pan over hot water. I served the eggs with bacon, grilled flat and crisp under a weight, with a sprig of thyme, accompanied by one of my own blueberry muffins. Since I have been scrambling eggs over low heat for years, I must assume it was a kitchen colleague that summer who taught me to strain very fresh beaten eggs and scramble them over an improvised bain-marie rather than an open flame.
SCRAMBLED EGGS AND OMELETTES
Now I use a Teflon sauté pan over a pot of simmering water and stir the amazing eggs from Iacono’s farm on Long Lane in East Hampton with the back of a fork until the small curds mound up bright yellow and just firm. Usually I serve them simply scrambled, but with two or three shoves of the fork I sometimes roll them up as omelettes, holding the rolled omelette in the tilted pan over a high flame just long enough to brown the surface slightly, but leaving the inside slightly undercooked, before rolling it onto a warm plate and glazing it with butter from the pan. When I’m in the mood, I fill the omelettes with salmon roe or bits of smoked salmon or a few poached oysters. I no longer make and cannot recommend Devon Frederick’s buttery, sugary, irresistible blueberry muffins, each one a day’s worth of calories, but intrepid muffin fans will find a good approximation in the Gold and Fizdale Cookbook, now out of print but available secondhand.
My first restaurant assignment was the hot-dog-and-hamburger grill. The owner advertised that these were broiled in “creamery butter.” They were not: they were fried in rendered beef fat, dyed yellow and packed in cardboard tubs marked “Stearin,” probably the same lethal stuff that the big hamburger chains were using until recently for their fries. I was told to keep a brick of “butter” beside the grill, where the customers could see it. I did not feel good about this deception, but butter was scarce in that postwar summer, the owner wanted his “butter” on display, and I liked my job.
Restaurant cooks in those days were nothing like today’s celebrities. Most of them, especially those who worked in seasonal resort towns, were drifters, who may have learned their trade at sea or in the service or prison.
I liked to watch them dice vegetables fast and with precision, scoop them into a sauté pan, then, without looking, flip them and let them fall flawlessly back into the pan. These itinerant cooks tended to be childishly touchy and thought nothing of walking out on a busy weekend if their feelings were hurt or if they heard of a better job or got drunk. That first postwar summer, the kitchen was run by a rawboned, red-faced father-and-son team wearing identical red baseball caps. The son, who spoke Spanish, resented my status as a Columbia College freshman and called me the perro-caliente professor. The loquacious father told me about a one-legged hotel chef from Newark, New Jersey, who proved that oil floats on water by soaking his hands in ice water and then plunging them into hot oil without hurting himself, an improbable story but a useful demonstration that wet ingredients won’t caramelize in hot oil because oil floats on water, so that the oil doesn’t touch the food, which steams rather than browns. He and his taciturn son made their own potato chips, which they called Saratogas: russet potatoes sliced almost paper-thin on a mandoline, soaked briefly in water to get rid of the starch so that they wouldn’t stick together as they fried, then drained and thoroughly dried in the cooler before they were plunged into hot oil. When I make these at home, I sometimes think of George’s hands and wonder, against all reason, if that story could possibly have been true. Nevertheless, the fact that oil floats on water is an important lesson for deep-frying and caramelizing generally, and especially for salads. Unless you are using an oily emulsion or the greens are bone dry, add oil to the greens first, vinegar second, or both oil and vinegar will end up at the bottom of the salad bowl.
One night the red hats drifted away in the middle of dinner when the owner, having told them to stop stealing Four Roses from the bar, found them drinking his vanilla extract instead. They retaliated before they vanished by stuffing four boned loins of black-market beef into two ice-cream freezers, where the meat froze solid and could not be removed through the round openings. Rather than dismantle the freezers, the owner defrosted them, so that after two days the tops were turning green while the rest of the meat remained stuck. Only then did he dismantle the freezers. When he insisted on making hamburger from this mess, I quit, but was lured back with a new job as fry cook a week later, after he had thrown the spoiled meat away.
POTATO CHIPS
You can make excellent potato chips at home in a domestic electric deep-fryer, but I use an old-fashioned fry pot with a long-handled wire basket, sold in restaurant-supply stores. Whichever you use, you will also need a mandoline or a similar device for cutting the chips. It is impossible to cut them thin enough by hand. If you are using an electric fryer, follow the manufacturer’s instructions. Otherwise, pour about three inches of corn, soy, or canola oil—any of them will do, though canola is said to be less harmful—into a stovetop fry pot with a basket. Then peel four russet potatoes and trim the ends and sides to fit the carriage of your mandoline. Adjust your blade so that your potato slices are almost transparently thin but not so thin as to collapse in the oil. Then put the potato slices into a bowl of cold water to remove the starch so that the slices won’t adhere as they fry. Meanwhile, heat the oil to 350 degrees. As the oil heats, drain the potato slices and spin them a handful at a time in a salad spinner. Finally, pat them dry with paper towels. If you have time, chill the slices in the refrigerator for an hour or so, until they are dry to the touch. Because oil floats on water, the drier the potatoes, the more they will be exposed to the oil, the faster they will brown, and the less your oil will bubble up when wet potatoes hit the hot oil. Add a few slices to test the oil. The potatoes should rise to the surface, where the oil will bubble gently as the chips brown. As soon as they have browned slightly and become crisp—you can feel the crispness with a wooden spoon or chopstick—remove them with a slotted spoon or Chinese strainer and drain them on paper towels. Do not overcook them or they will darken and become bitter. Salt them lightly. If the chips clump together in the oil as they brown, separate them gently with tongs or a chopstick. Then add the rest of the slices, a dozen or so at a time, adjusting the flame to compensate for the drop in temperature as you add each batch. I keep a sheet pan with some crumpled paper towels beside the fry pot on the stovetop and simply dump the fried chips from the basket onto the pan to drain.
HOT OIL Hot oil is dangerous. If you are using a stovetop fry pot and basket, put the handles where you can’t inadvertently bump into them. Oil is slippery, so if you spill some on the floor, wipe it up at once. If you splash some on your hand, rinse it off with cold water, then dry your hands and apply cortisone cream. If the oil begins to smoke, lower the flame at once. If it catches fire, cover the pot until the flame subsides. DO NOT USE WATER! Use a fire extinguisher if necessary. Let used oil cool, then pour it into an empty tin and throw it out or strain it and use it in your diesel. Do not pour hot oil down the sink. It will melt the PVC drains.
You may prefer to adjust the shredding blade of your mandoline to cut the potatoes into matchsticks rather than chips. Rinse, dry, and fry as above. Chips and matchsticks, unlike conventional fries, remain crisp for days, look better on the plate, are less starchy, and in my opinion taste better, since they offer more crunchy surface and almost no mushy interior.
POTATO CAKE
For a potato cake, peel and shred three pounds of all-purpose potatoes on the coarse side of a four-sided grater, then vigorously twist the shredded potatoes in a clean white towel to squeeze the water out. Barely film a nine-inch steel or well-seasoned cast-iron pan with vegetable oil. Heat the oil almost to smoking, then, with tongs and a spatula, pile the potatoes neatly in the pan or skillet, forming a cake about a half-inch thick. The potatoes will shrink as their water evaporates. Shake the pan once or twice to loosen the potato cake; lower the flame so that the bottom won’t burn before the center cooks. Loosen the bottom, if necessary, with a spatula. When the bottom forms a brown crust, and before it blackens, remove the pan from the flame, hold a plate tightly over the potatoes, and invert the pan, pouring off any excess oil. Then replace the potatoes in the pan, brown side up, and brown the other side slowly, to be sure the inside cooks. If all goes well, the outside will be crisp and the inside creamy. You can add snipped chives, green onion, grated nutmeg, salt, pepper, and/or whatever else pleases you to the shredded potatoes before you cook them.
There are lots of other ways to fry potatoes as cakes or hash browns—for example, by using day-old mashed or baked potatoes, or raw potatoes shredded on a mandoline or diced, but the basic procedure is the same. Unless they have already been mashed or baked and are therefore dry, remove as much water as possible, heat a little oil or butter or a combination in a smooth pan, and cook them slowly with your choice of extras. Then turn them over and brown the other side. For hash browns, don’t form a cake but hash them up, flipping or tossing them with a spatula as they brown.
The restaurant where I worked that summer was an ambitious Howard Johnson franchise with a full dining room, table linens, and a bar opening onto an outdoor dance floor under a canopy with live music on weekends. That first postwar summer, I came of age, believing along with everyone else that we had won the war to end all wars and looking forward to a peaceful future in the best of all possible countries under the world’s wisest rulers. I had learned the rudiments of a craft that I have never forgotten and, even more important, learned to respect the skills and the wisdom of my fellow workers—even those who plundered the boss’s bar—who showed me, in the days when stainless steel couldn’t hold an edge, how to care for my carbon-steel knives, which would turn black at the merest hint of acid and rusted in the humid kitchen. I learned that summer to make emulsions, to reduce veal stock for demi-glace, to sear and sauté fish and meat without having it stick in the days before Teflon, to use arrowroot to keep a blueberry pie from leaking without making it gummy, and to test a steak for doneness with my thumb until, by the end of summer, I could tell just by looking when a steak was rare, medium, or well. At midnight, after w
ork, the cooks and waitresses would drive down with a case of beer to the stone breakwater at Hyannisport to cool off, and when the nights were too hot for us to sleep indoors we would spend the night on the flat rocks until awakened by the dawn. I also fell in love that summer, with a witty girl whose picture was on the cover of the August issue of the Woman’s Home Companion, and wonder still from time to time what became of her.
FOUR
LUNCH IN A WORLD TURNED UPSIDE DOWN
For much of my life, I worked in the book-publishing business, mostly as editorial director at Random House, content to let others do the writing while I served them as banker, midwife, valet, and press agent. I also published a number of cookbooks by famous chefs and wrote several articles on cooking for various magazines. This probably explains why my friend Billy Norwich, who was working at The New York Times, called me in the summer of 2002 and asked if I could write a food column appropriate to the first anniversary of 9/11 for the Style Supplement of the Times Magazine. New York was still in pain from the attack, and Billy did not have to explain that his readers needed encouragement rather than another batch of recipes for autumn vegetables or turkey stuffing for the fall holidays.
I was intrigued by this assignment, and as I wondered how to approach it, I remembered that the late food writer M. F. K. Fisher had in her twenties written bravely about food during a similarly grim period, midway through the 1930s in Europe, when the so-called civilized world was working itself up once again into a paroxysm of self-destruction and she was caught in the gathering chaos. So I thought it might interest readers of the Times on the first anniversary of 9/11 to learn how Fisher confronted her own world as it prepared to destroy itself. The volume called The Gastronomical Me, in which she collected her culinary reminiscences during these years, is preceded by this little prayer borrowed from a man named J. T. Pettee: “Pray for peace and grace and spiritual food, for wisdom and guidance, for all these are good, but don’t forget the potatoes.”