Book Em

Saucy – Are cookbooks necessary in the digital age?

Yes.

For years I told myself what I had is a reading opportunity. After a lifetime of library fines - shelves, tables, desks and dressers stacked with reading materials, I realize I actually have is a book problem. I jones for anything with a binding that is about food.

Currently, Anne Mendelson’s Milk (the liquid, not Sean Penn’s inspiration) is my bedtime reading. These single-word titles – Tuna, Olives, Gin, Salt, Vanilla, Chocolate (The True History of), have become the main focus of my reading and collecting. Books that are not only about the title subject but are also all multi-disciplined - drawing economics, history, anthropology, culture, ecology and other various social sciences to tell a story. It is getting to the point that the thinner the spine and more esoteric the subject, the more irresistible the book becomes. I don’t know if I am attracted to these titles are because I am getting to be a middle-aged fella and the conspicuous reading of non-fiction is a cultural necessity or if this is a natural extension of my passion for all things food.

While tomes about food take up more shelf space, the purchasing of actual cookbooks has slowed. This has nothing to do with the abundance of recipes available on online – I realized I really only use four cookbooks - another 5 or so like Desserts by Pierre Herme, contain one masterpiece (Chocolate Bombe) that gets cooked regularly. Cookbooks such as Alice Waters’ Chez Panisse titles are there not to recreate recipes but for the important ability to inspire kitchen habits.

Due to a collecting habit and low impulse control there are some duds on the shelf. Cookbooks containing clunky writing, bad ideas, dated artwork and inaccurate recipes are too frequent. If recipes are only as good as the author, at least a cookbook allows you to better know a writer. The internet, not so much - as I discovered recently trying to find a recipe for shortbread far away from the Sauctorium. 5 minutes of surfing garnered shortbread variations calling for 1 teaspoon of baking powder, 1 tablespoon of baking powder, no baking powder. I could have baked something with, margarine, butter or Crisco; salt or no salt. Sugar ranged from ½ cup to more sugar than flour and then milk, cream, water and dry were the options for liquid. Who do you trust, who are these people?

I trust cookbooks, especially books I have used successfully. I am grateful to works that have inspired me, helped me through a holiday or walked me through a difficult recipe. So much so, I’ve made the edition mine, it will have photos or old shopping lists marking pages, notes penciled in the margin, whose binding falls open to the pages of favorite recipes, that is just something a Kindle will never do.

It's Not Easy Being Green

A coworker was griping about the usage of the word artisan. In his opinion ‘artisan’ had replaced the word from the days of the Silver Palate Cookbook – gourmet. As near as I could tell from his rather spirited tangent, this was wrong because artisan, used as a culinary buzzword, did not mean the product borne of a skilled trade, practiced craft or made by hand using classic techniques: No, here in the late ought-oughts of the new millennium, artisan implied fancy, expensive and elitist.

I can’t share my colleague’s umbrage to artisan because what other word can you use to convey the sense of small-scale, traditionally made food? For small-businesses that produces or grows food - marketing/packaging isn’t a strength, it is generally a low-priority afterthought. Whether small producers should seek the help of professionals, business school types or undergraduate interns – that isn’t the issue, in practice if they attach artisan to their product, it actually conveys a message about they are selling .

Later, I was asked if there was any culinary word usage that did upset me. The term Foodie is too stupid to get upset about so, I picked up a meme from the late restaurateur, Jon Beckel and began ranting about green salads. Years ago, after discovering I was from the Midwest, Jon asked me to explain (in a J’accuse type of way) why a green salad in the Land of Polite comes with carrots, shredded purple cabbage and cheese. Despite being sympathetic to the point Jon was making, he raked me over the coals about the customs of my people. The last one is easy, cheese gets added to everything in north-central-amercia.

As for the rest of it, the presence of carrots, cabbage, cucumbers, red onions or tomato(ish) wedges transform green salad into a garden salad. Green salad is lettuce and dressing. And no the lettuce doesn’t have to be green – radicchio, endives and other colors are allowed. I suppose that you could even douse the greens with ranch but vinaigrette made of mustard, garlic, pepper, oil and vinegar/lemon juice compliments rather than overwhelms the greens.

This isn’t a gourmet thing, or in the new parlance, a foodie thing, where a salad is ever only green, only served after the main course and only topped with a dressing made of 5 or fewer ingredients. Potato Salad, Tuna Salad, Egg Salad, Pasta Salad, Fruit Salad, Bread Salad are all legitimate salads. And I am not the only one thinking about what is a salad – perhaps, especially if you have watched any playoff basketball, you have seen the Taco Bell Ad; where two attractive men sit poolside discussing the very essence of salad – don’t worry though they are totally heterosexual because:

• They aren’t waxed-chested, nor clad in swimsuits, oddly they are fully clothed poolside.
• The salad they are eating has more meat than lettuce.
• A woman enters to clarify finer points about salad.
• They are, after-all eating Taco Bell & how ungay is that?

Even that deep-fried, cheese-laden concoction can be a salad – it isn’t artisan and it looks like a mega-taco but if it really wants to be a salad it can be a salad, just don’t call it green.

CardaYUM

Saucyman, what can you tell me about Cardamom? - Spicy

Native to India, the spice was brought to Guatemala 100 and some years ago and the Central American country is the worlds still the largest producer or not. India likes to claim that mantle as well. In either case, the fruit travels far from the tree - 10% of the world’s crop goes to Northern Europeans, Scandawhovians, Danes and other Baltic facing countries who love the flavor in their baked goods but it is the Arab world who consumes 80% of the crop, used mostly to flavor coffee.

Its scent is described as floral, pepper, gingery, piney it is a seductive smell – Sri Lankan born poet and author, Michael Ondaatje wrote a poem called the Cinnamon Peeler, a work so blatantly sexual, it would have made Neruda blush. Cinnamon peelers have little on Cardamom huskers, who must wait until the fruit is ready; each pod develops at a different rate so the plant must be worked by hand, pickers returning again and again looking for ready pods. This intensive labor helps make cardamom the 3rd most expensive spice in the world, behind saffron and vanilla. Once the small papery globe is picked, it is dried releasing the seeds that reside in one of the pod’s 3 chambers.

Different varieties carry designators like ‘true’, ‘false’ and a special label of ‘bastard’ for Thai Cardamom. A more useful classification for cardamom, for the exterior husk anyway, is to sort by color and here the seeds which are used as the spice as are sorted into green, brown or black for sale. Color and lineage aside, all are relatives of the ginger family and like ginger spice has a warming effect. The word cardamom means to warm in Arabic – this warmth is credited to terpene and a eucalyptusy compound called cineole. Whether spurious, true or false, green, brown or black - the seeds are closely related, the main difference is how they are used culinarily.

Green is the cardamom of sweets and coffee. Gwaha is a boiled coffee made of cracked green cardamom and ground coffee. Brown and black, whose scent is as unsubtle as a Banana Republican’s cologne, are used for savory foods like pilaf, pickles and meat. Both black and green cardamom are used in the Indian spice mix called garam masala - a fluid interpretation of what is commonly thought of as curry.

At the store a shopper can buy pods, seeds or ground. I like the seeds, extracting the seeds from the pods is laborious and ground packaged spices are always pricey (cardamom or not) and come in sizes that would take years to use. I have the luxury of purchasing the seeds in small quantities. At home in the Saucykitchen, they get used in boiled sweetened coffee, ground for garam masala or occasionally heated in milk or cream before being strained out to give the subtlest hint of seduction in a custard or pudding.

You Say it's Your Earth Day, Well it's My Earth Day Too

In reality, each and every day is Earth Day. Not counting leap years, there are 365 Earth Days a year, but 22nd of April, the day we call Earth Day is the hardest one to get through. With all the ecological awareness seemingly forced down our throats with public service announcements, overly-earnest people triangulating Al Gore-Paul Krugman-Dali Lama with an air of smug superiority and like it or not - Indigo Girl songs. Once the glow of the day passes and people go back to believing that driving their Prius 15 blocks to yoga class is actually good for the environment (instead of less bad), that is when the actual work of using our resources wisely needs to get done.

The kitchen is a great place to start; how we purchase, cook and store food has a profound ecological impact. Not to get all Harper’s Index on you but here are two stats to help give you an idea of what it takes to get food to the table:

20% of all domestic fossil fuel consumption is tied to the US food chain.
Refrigeration uses 18% of that energy. (Transportation accounts for 2.5%)

Since the fridge is a big energy user, keep those condenser coils free of dust (Biannual cleaning is recommended), make sure the fridge is pulled away from the wall so air can circulate around those coils and open and close the door quickly – opening the door and staring at the contents not only allows energy to escape - it is the culinary equivalent of a slacked-jawed yokel standing mute, mouth agape, trying to formulate a sentence. If you are in the market for a new fridge freezer – top/bottom models are more efficient than side-by-side units, and since home fridges are generally filled to 50-80% of their storage capacity you’d think that size matters, but it really doesn’t: It doesn’t take that much more energy to cool an extra couple of sq. ft, it is about efficiency and even larger high-efficiency models use less energy than smaller traditional fridges.

After the food leaves the fridge, there are simple/painless ways to save energy cooking. Lids on pans – cover pots use ½ as much energy. Once that watched pot starts boiling, turn down the temperature to a level that will keep a consistent boil – high heat doesn’t make water boil faster and hotter, it just generates more steam.

Crock-pots and electric teakettles use half the energy of their stovetop equivalents. A pressure cooker, uses 1/4 of the energy that regular pans do. Each time you open the oven, you’re letting out 25ºƒ of hot air – leaving things alone will improve the results and use less energy. Your oven doesn’t need to be preheated for an hour, 10-15 minutes will do. Using clear glass (pyrex) pans will allow you to drop the oven temp by 25 degrees. Let that stored heat work for you – you can turn off the oven before the cooking is done and let the residual heat carry you home – ovens will keep temp for 10 minutes.

I don’t drive and haven’t reproduced, so there are days when I feel entitled to a coal powered SUV, but it isn’t like that. Using resources wisely, whether to save the earth or save some money, it is an every day goal – this isn’t a lifestyle change that means you’ll soon be downloading Indigo Girls songs, this only is a change in cooking habits.

Cold Cut Chronicles Goes to the Movies

The intersection of film and food is an inevitable topic for anyone absorbed by both. Who can forget the succulent indecencies of Tom and Sophie's famous meal in Tony Richardson's TOM JONES or the redemptive rituals of the table in BABETTE'S FEAST? Searching my own memory and with input from a host of Saucyfriends, the quest for cold cut moments in cinema yielded a bevy of unanticipated results.

THE FLIM-FLAM MAN (1967) is a little seen comic gem starring a mephistopholian George C. Scott and introducing Michael Sarrizan. Just after their first caper, Mordechai (Scott) reclines with a pint of whiskey and Curley begins to construct a herculean sandwich from chubs and hunks of cold cuts laid out on his mentor's suitcase. He squeezes a globe of braunswieger from its casing onto a slice of white bread and slathers it with mayonnaise. He follows this with an inch thick piece of baloney which he paints with mustard. The scene is beautifully played. Curley's manner is both ritualistic and reverential, conveying his youthful absorption and anticipation. One great bite into the sandwich, Mordechai hears the rubes they had earlier cheated at cards, grabs his suitcase and dumps the food. Curley's disbelief is just momentary. He snaps up an unopened log of salami and escapes with the old man. As they run down the railroad tracks, the Mordechai begins to lag behind and Curley saves day, wielding the salami like a club. Later, safely tucked away in an abandoned shack, the exhausted Mordechai falls asleep using the salami as his pillow. The sequence ends with Curley carefully extricating his treasure and, pocket knife in hand, resuming his meal. Curley, a young man who is both an orphan and a deserter, has scored. He can have his cold cuts and, finally, eat them as well. It is rather uncanny how in saving this portion of his ill-gotten gains, he preserves, even elevates his sense of self.

Images of cold cuts in cinema have a complex life in matters of personal status, class and ethnicity. In GOODFELLAS, one of the duties the youthful Jimmy is entrusted with is making sandwiches the way the guys like them and, in a later scene, Pauly greets the arrival of salami in prison with the same enthusiasm as the box of lobsters. They can get anything they want, in or out of prison, but their palates never leave the neighborhood. The young Vito, in GODFATHER II, is savoring a plate of salami and pickles in the deli where he works when the local don walks in and he is forced out of his job. It is a subtle tipping point. Vito murders the don and the reign of the Corleones begins. If salami is taken away from his family, the Family will own the salami.

There is a poignant and extended scene when young Athos, on a quest to understand the father he never knew, meets with his father's old friend Gaibazzi in Bertolucci's SPIDER'S STRATAGEM. Gaibazzi is tasting pig rump salami- hundreds, seemingly, are hanging from the rafters- and Athos is home. Food plays out in this film as Athos unravels the complications of Fascism and his past. That other great Italian, Antonioni, uses a cold cut moment in ZABRISKIE POINT as a counterpoint to the free-wheeling, communal sensibility of the film when the cop-killing anarchist idealist Mark tries (and fails) to score a free Italian cold cut sub while he is on the lam. No dice. Paying customers are already grousing that there is not enough meat on the sandwich. You want more, you pay.

In another key, George Bush's affection for baloney accounts for a very funny exchange in Oliver Stone's brilliant W and Josh Brolin is brilliant. Bush is getting debriefed on the anthrax threat as he enjoys a presidential lunch: baloney and lettuce on white bread. One of the ways, he is told, that anthrax can be spread is through food, like the lettuce on his sandwich. And W cannot bring himself to let go of that sandwich. He takes a bite, repeatedly looks at it, fidgets with it, tugs at the lettuce. Enveloped in struggle, his lunch is ruined by images of plague and this wayward child of privilege abandons his lunch.

Cold cuts, it appears, are even associated with matters of the heart. The president's look-a-like in DAVE woos the president's wife with a a little shop's signature submarine sandwich during a moonlit picnic. In COALMINER'S DAUGHTER, just when cold cuts seem lose their allure and Loretta Lynn slaps a piece of baloney down, complaining that she sick and tired of stuff, Doolittle answers,"You know what they say about baloney, don't you?" "No, what?" "It makes you horny." In BAD SANTA, a debauched and alienated Billy Bob Thornton turns a corner and expresses his affection, in a manner of speaking, for the little kid whose house he has invaded by preparing his signature dish: a fried baloney tostada. Frying baloney, he tells the kid in a lucid moment, make it taste like a hot dog.

And cold cuts get creepy, really, really creepy, in Lodge Kerrigan's terrifying CLEAN, SHAVEN. Peter, schizophrenic and a suspected child serial killer, returns to his mother's house. She asks him if he is hungry, he says 'no" and she pulls out the sandwich fixings. We start to understand why Peter is so crazy. Peter enacts his tortured script, pulling the plastic wrap off of the baloney, slicing a tomato like he is butchering a cow. It's not happening in slow time, just very slowly, punctuated with staccato moments of frustration and rage. The sound track amplifies every moment; we inhabit Peter's paranoid delusions, every horrifying moment. And that sandwich never makes it to the plate.



Charles Seluzicki

Fire, Good

Saucyman, Gas or Electric? – Flamer

Gas burners emit a heat of 3000ºf (1600 C), about 1000 degrees hotter than traditional coil electric burners. Unfortunately, neither gas nor electric is that efficient – according to the Department of Energy, gas ranges transfer only about 30 - 40% of the energy to the cooking process. Electric burners are about 70% efficient. (The electric-powered induction cooking surfaces are the best of all - using 90% of the consumed energy for cooking. Since induction ranges are infrequent, we will talk about them on another day.)

After accounting for energy efficiency, electricity provides more consistent, cost-effective heat. This fact does little to deter high-end ranges, the ones with 6 burners delivering over 800,000,000 BTUs of flamage. They are the SUVs of the kitchen. People can talk all they want about the 4-wheel drive, hauling capability and safety features but seriously if you drive on flat streets that are well maintained - do you really need something that gets the mileage of a tank? Just as an insane amount of heat doesn’t matter when you microwave stuff most of the time.

Wolf or any other conspicuous appliance, no matter how well made, delivers too much. It is good to know your stove is capable of burning a hole directly into the ozone but how often do you need that much cooking capability at home – I cook all the time and I could get by easily with 2 burners and a teakettle. The one thing these gas ranges provide is an abundance of heat when you need it.

It is called recovery time - it is how quickly your pasta water returns to a boil after the noodles are dropped in or how quickly your wok/stir-fry returns to a hot temperature. This is where gas heat pays dividends; it is the reason the expression is cooking with gas. Because it burns hotter, gas heat quickly restores cooking temperatures to their rightful place – a quick recovery time for potatoes means fries cook in rather than absorb it: Crisp warm fry v. greasy fry.

This ability to heat pans up quickly is only a superpower up to a point, once water is boiling, all gas in the world isn’t going to raise the water above 212º; you are either over heating your pan or that heat is escaping from under the pan and warming the room.

Considering the number one issue facing home cooks is too much heat I would normally say that electric is the way to go, but getting the contents of a pan back to the proper cooking temp can make the difference in a craft where a 5 degree difference can dramatically change the results. Unless you can get an induction cooktop, I vote for gas.

The Tax Man Cometh

April 15th, tea, in particular, teabags are an important symbol to Americans of the conservative stripe. Colonial residents of the nascent United States dumped tea into the Boston Harbor objecting to ‘taxation without representation’. Today, spurred on by talk radio, conservatives will wave tea bags as act of civil dissent. This group, who are both dismissively derided and surprising, earnestly self-promoted as 'teabaggers’, will ostensibly be protesting the same colonial beef – You know except there is representation and the objection isn’t the manner in which tea is taxed - so both the privileged and less fortunate pay the same rate on a common household commodity; no today’s outrage is that income taxes are being restored to Clinton-era rates, raising the tax on the top earners about 6%.

While tea has symbolic meaning to Americans, historically, salt has been one of the most taxed items in humankind’s history. The Greek Republic taxed salt, Rome’s relationship with salt was more intricate, both accepted by the state as a tribute and paid out to soldiers with such regularity, the Latin sal, would become the basis of the word salary. The doubling of the salt tax did not endear the people of China to the Emperor’s rule in the days leading up the revolution. While on the subcontinent, a combination of monopolistic tactics, heavy taxation and severe penalties for salt scofflaws would inspire a 60 year-old Gandhi to walk over 200 miles in his ‘March to the Sea’ in order to set up a small salt works - defying British Authority and setting in motion events that would lead to Indian democracy and self-rule.

But it is the French, the mortal enemy of American conservatives, who set the standard on salt taxation. The salt tax, or en françois, the gabelle – a duty on salt that began as a modest 1.66% value added tax but would ultimately grow to become a leading source of revenue for the French crown. In addition to the gabelle, there was mandatory salt consumption, not like a salt gavage, but a sel du devoir, a requirement that anyone over the age of 8 purchase 15 ½ pounds of salt annually, an amount that would absolutely pickle even a modern convenience food junkie. By the time the Revolution rolled around, 3,000 people would annually be imprisoned or put do death for cheating the salt tax. Revolution, The National Assembly would annul all salt offenses and would put an end to the gabelle.

My taxes have been prepaid through employee payroll deductions, not salt. Considering the national deficit, it might be time to think about an American gabelle: Societally, we average of 7 pounds of salt annually, (This sodium intake is believed to be 80% greater than what our hunter-gather progenitors ingested, not because they lived a life idyllic, because if they had been hunter-gathering Doritos, anthropologists would be reporting different things about sodium intake of ancient people). With 75% of our dietary salt coming from processed food - by taxing salt, we would be mimicking the European Union’s value added tax on ‘junk foods’, inching us ever closer to the European socialism the teabaggers are always warning us about.

Oeuf Oeuvre

Saucyman – Hardboiled eggs, 18 of them, many with decorative shells. How long before they go bad and what can I do with them before they go bad.

The general rule of thumb is cooked food will make it 7 days with proper refrigeration. That is 7 days from when the eggs were boiled, so you might be down to as few as 5 days to use up your eggs and you really don’t want to push the envelope on this: Because the eggs were hardboiled, they were cooked at a temperature that placed them on the good side of the food safety zone. The problem is that they probably weren’t cooled down fast enough and they definitely weren’t stored at proper temperatures with all the decorating and the hiding on the lawn and other Easter traditions. I’m not calling them germ grenades, but you want to use your eggs quickly.

Because they are hardboiled you can’t do things with the eggs, like repurposing them in cake batter or even more practically - egg people’s houses with them, here they are little grenades and if tossed hard enough they could actually break a window but mostly hardboiled eggs aren’t that effective in minor acts of property damage – no mess, no sulfury stink, no viscous residue. The Saucydogs get lots and lots of eggs, so if your dogs don’t have food allergies or a restricted diet, it is possible Fido can take some eggs off your hands.

Dog chow and vandalism aside you could devil them, but that might not give you the relief you desire. So, hardboiled eggs are pretty much relegated to the salad genre. New cookbooks like to suggest using hardboiled yolks to make egg-based dressings like Caesar. Sure, the recipe produces a grainy texture and the eggs have lost most of their emulsifying power but the publisher has reduced their liability in case of food borne illness and isn’t that better than explaining the risks to people like adults?

Besides salad dressing, there are salads. Use the eggs as an ingredient in a mixed garden salad or as part of a composed salad – where all the different components are arranged on a plate, like a Cobb Salad. That could take care of a few eggs but you can clear the fridge of all Easter Eggs with one batch of Egg Salad.

As a mayonnaisephobe, I am not a huge fan of the Egg Salad. Back in the day, I’d make Egg Salad at the café and to my surprise it was a good seller. But this was a fine line – people liked Egg Salad, but not too often and it had to be slightly different than what they would make at home - Egg Salad made of mayonnaise, piquant cornichon pickles, tarragon, salt and pepper mixed with hardboiled eggs was popular. If the Egg Salad was too fancy or I'd make a recipe that I would eat – egg salad flavored curry and yogurt, my sandwiches would languish, an expensive mistake. People like the classics. And people have better appetites when they can choose the foods they want as opposed to having to eat them. On that last point, there is little I can do to help you, but you are four sandwiches away from not having to worry about this again for another year.

The Brunchies

½ Breakfast, ½ Lunch and all about Easter (Mother’s Day too), brunch is actually a pretty good word. An amalgamation of breakfast and lunch, brunch has been in use since the 1890s. Both in definition and practice, it is not a meal that combines foods from both breakfast and lunch into a new meal: experience tells us, brunch leans heavy on the breakfast items, the term refers to a meal that replaces both breakfast and lunch.

As many bad stand up comedians have asked, why not lupper? Two points come to mind: First, thank you Larry David, without you Seinfeld would have been a show about a guy from Queens with a mini-mullet, making unfunny observations about life - I mean what is the deal with the track shoes and sport coat, are you running to a sales meeting? Secondly, not be all factual and stuff over a bad joke - there is no lupper because we currently take our main meal later in the day than our Victorian counterparts. With our evolving eating habits, increasingly nocturnal, means within a few generations we could be search for a word to describe dinner-breakfast.

Some historians feel that brunch began as people found it increasingly difficult to find and fund live in domestics, so that as cooking duties shifted to homemakers, brunch was a leisurely breakfast on weekend days. Other research contends as a heavier meal taken later in the evening, supper displaced the energy/calorie rich food is fuel - noontime dinner of workers and farmers. As a result people were less hungry when they woke, breakfasts became lighter, consisting of fruits and cereals and that brunch became the first meal of the day for an emerging middle class that liked to sleep in on their days off.

Brunch is also a bit odd because it is one of the few occasions where AM drinking is encouraged, mostly in the form of mimosas or Bloody Marys - why 2 oz of vodka becomes socially acceptable when it is served mixed in juice, while a breakfast of Guinness and cereal is just pathetic is unfair, or perhaps very fair. One of my happiest memories of a visit to Spain, was waking up especially early in Valencia and watching workmen eating calamari sandwiches and washing them down with beer before heading off to work. I don’t know how much work they accomplished - all the coffee in the world won’t help you recover from a 2-drink, 2500-calorie morning meal.

Happy Easter.

4 Drink Minimum

At sundownish tonight, I will be a guest at Seder - the communal meal held at the beginning of Passover, the week-long holiday commemorating the Hebrews flight from Pharaoh and Egypt.

Like Easter, this celebration is a movable feast, occurring on the first full moon after the vernal equinox. Although the day might change, the meal is static – seder as a word means order and the menu is locked in place, each food an allegory. A bitter herb, usually horseradish, signifies the bitterness of slavery, a bone – generally lamb represents the sacrifice at the start of Exodus; similarly, a betza - a roasted egg symbolizes an offering. There is sweet herb, parsley, to remind people of the sweetness of life, a bowl of saltwater reminds guests oftears, matzo – unleavened bread – there was no time to let the bread rise, haroset – a mixture of apples, honey, almonds and wine represents the mortar the slaves used to bind bricks and four glasses of wine.

The last Seder I attended was an ecumenical affair in a college town, the organizers tried so hard to make it something for everyone, it ended up being nothing to anyone. The event was memorable only for its earnest attempts to rewrite 1000s of years of tradition, ritual and history for early 1990s sensibilities. Before that, my previous Seder, where a rural Catholic boy gets invited to a Jewish girlfriend’s home for a holiday that little was known of beyond what Charlton Heston had conveyed in the 10 Commandments, was nerve racking: The meal was long, if I remember properly, it took up at least half of Passover – food was on the table not to be enjoyed but because this is the way it had always been done. There was no conversation, only arguments, long standing family grudges being played out against cultural ritual and sweet syrupy Manishevitz being guzzled to blunt the tension. It was, according to most of my Jewish friends/girlfriends, a pretty accurate experience of Seder.

Tonight, I am optimistic. Not only because my hosts are roughly my cohort - skipping the generations that did things because they had to be done that way, instead embracing holidays and customs with a respectful sense of discovery and intrpreting rituals for themselves. Nor is it because the hosts are on the clock, promising to get people home by 10, an IronSeder of sorts. It is because the food sounds good, NPR recently posted a story about food that attempts to be both good and relevant and I think I am in for a similar approach to the meal tonight - I have heard talk menu and ingredients. And while little can be done about haroset, you can only do so much with a food created to mimic the qualities of ancient cement, but as for the wine, it will be kosher and it will have a cork.

Don't Be An Ass

Saucyman, What do donkeys have to do with Burritos, please don’t tell me the filling, please don’t tell me the filling, please don’t tell me the filling. – Saucito

Burrito is the diminutive of Burro, Spanish for donkey. Burrito first appeared in newsprint in 1934, but had been on the menu at LA’s El Cholo since 1931. Other than denoting when the word was first used, the etymology is fuzzy and again the creation story seems to have been retrofitted to explain a food that has probably been consumed in one form or another for centuries. Here you have a choice: Burritos are little donkeys because the original vendor sold his antojitos – little whimsies – from the back of a cart pulled by a donkey in Juarez. Another account explains that when it is rolled, a burrito looks like the blanket under the saddle on the back of a donkey. I guess. My experience with saddled asses is pretty much restricted to filtered cultural representations of Poncho Villa, so, I guess a burrito could look like that – Agnolotti, the Italian ravioli, means little lamb, I don’t see that resemblance either.

Innocently, the word could have its origin in some forgotten pun or play on words, like refried beans, which are fried neither once nor twice but are definitely beans. Malevolently, it is possible the food’s name suggests something untoward about its contents – a heavily spiced, unrecognizable meat hidden underneath an edible wrapper. More than one culture’s food has been slandered for not being English Beefsteak, urban legends of cats and curry, dogs and dim sum, rats and the chicken fryer still abound. It is easy to speculate, easier than applying for research grants and actually studying the phenomena, that burrito/donkey meat speculation is another example of labeling the food of the poor as suspect, tainted & unwholesome.

Before there were burritos, there were tortillas de harina – wheat tacos, a strange bastardized food of arid northern Mexico. As tortillas de harina migrated into Texas, they morphed into something different - They grew in size, because as anyone who has ever changed planes at the Dallas airport and witnessed the mass of humanity can testify, everything really is bigger in Texas. And it wasn’t only the size of the burrito that changed, meat became the dominant filling, sour cream, cheese were added. Occasionally deep-fried or smothered, the food became something it previously wasn’t .

Should the name change as the food evolves? Because there is nothing diminutive about a half-pound of beef and 4 oz of cheese rolled into a tortilla the size of a beach towel. Even so, it is a little too late in the game to start calling the food gran asno. Even if eating burritos as big as your head might be the cause of big asses.

Who You Calling Simple?

Saucepants – What is Simple Syrup and why is it simple?

Simple Syrup is simple because it has only two ingredients, sugar and water. More specifically, white table sugar. The majority of table sugar comes from two main sources – sugarcane, which accounts for about 65% of the world’s sugar or beets making up about 30% of the supply. Both are essentially sucrose, 99.85% sucrose to be exact.

Sucrose is an important ingredient in keeping syrup simple: It is extremely soluble, becomes more viscous than other sweeteners in a solution, the sugar will not caramelize unless heated to a moderately high temperature (340ºf – 171C) and sucrose doesn’t develop an off or aftertaste even when concentrating its flavor.

Simple Syrup is also simple in the chemical sense. The more complicated syrups - inverted syrups, like corn syrup, have an acid added to them. An acid, like cream of tartar, breaks down sucrose into two smaller sugars – glucose and fructose. The presence of glucose and fructose inhibit crystallization – nothing is wrong with crystallization, sucrose naturally bonds with itself to form orderly crystals. The only issue is when you wish to avoid sugar crystals. This, along with lower cost, is why soda makers love corn syrup. On a less industrial level, undissolved sugar at the bottom of iced tea makes for some sweet tea that isn’t so sweet.

Mostly at home, simple syrup is kept around to sweeten cocktails. Occasionally a bar professional, you know the type, they refer to themselves as mixologists a little too self-consciously, will recommend 2 parts sugar to 1 part water, arguing the more concentrated sweetness will not water down a drink. Fair enough, not the way I shake but there is nothing to argue with. Some recipes will recommend flavoring the simple syrup, vanilla, chili, ginger - these additions make for syrup-syrup, not simple syrup. Even though sugar inhibits microbial growth, sometimes even the addition of the smallest additive can cause fermentation, which you would think would be cool because we are talking about alcohol, but sometimes what inadvertently grows in a glass container isn’t potable.

To make Simple Syrup, add one 1 sugar and 1 part water in a pan, usually a cup of each is enough to keep the Saucybar stocked with Simple Syrup for weeks on end. Whisk together, bring the two ingredients to a boil, count to 10, and remove from heat. Once your newly co-joined syrup is cool store it in a clean container. Even though sugar dissolves in liquid, the heating part makes things much easier - the alternative is shaking sugar and water together for at least 10 minutes, this does bypass the need to cool the syrup down before using but 10 minutes of constant shaking requires some serious arm strength. While Saucyman may not have the Arms of Steel to pull that off, he does have a stove and a fella has to work with what he has.

Stirred, not Shaken

Saucyman, My polenta never turns out as well as when I order it in a restaurant. My husband suggests this is because I don’t stir properly. What do you think. Stir Crazy

There are people who swear you need a proper mescolare, a wood, many times olive wood, stirring stick used to make polenta. Old school Italians will say it is all about the Paiolo, a cooper pan specifically for cooking polenta. Others aren’t as attached to the stirring medium as much as the method is the message, claiming you have to stand at the stove for 45 minutes and stir, stir, stir. While I have never heard of someone stirring improperly, I suppose it is possibility, but I don't think that is the issue, so, I’m going to make some guesses to what is going on:

1. You are using the wrong kind of polenta.
2. Your stirring is fine.
3. You aren’t employing all the options professional kitchens use to make polenta rich.
4. Your husband has a wry sense of humor.

Polenta comes in different sizes - instant, fine and coarse. The old school Italian cookbooks will tell you that fine polenta is good to use with delicate sauces and the coarse polenta is good with heartier applications. Most of my cookbooks, including my 3 favorite Italian cookbooks give recipes for preparing instant polenta. There is no shame in using a quick-cook polenta, a friend makes instant polenta that I adore. The Saucypantry stores the traditional course polenta – but I am not adamant about it, the way some people get about Irish or Scotch oatmeal. I like the way the course polenta holds up when it gets heated or when cut it into small cakes and then fried/grilled – great with asparagus and butter.

Even with the coarse polenta, it isn’t about the stirring, either the technique or frequency. Once the polenta started is incorporated into the liquid; I set the temp on med-low cover the pan and give the contents a stir once every 10 minutes for the next 40 to 60 minutes – clockwise, counterclockwise, stainless, wooden, mescola, how you stir or what you stir with isn’t all that important. But here, the pan is- it needs to be really thick and you have to be prepared to let it soak overnight rather than clean it immediately.

Rest assured restaurants aren’t cooking polenta from scratch each time it is ordered – it isn’t like the fryolator station at a drive through window – there isn’t a full-time employee cooking polenta to order. Polenta is pre-cooked and held at a low temperature in a warming oven or steam table until it is ordered. In restaurants, it really isn’t about the stirring either or the cut of polenta, as much as it is about what goes into the polenta – stock, cream, butter, fontina, mascarpone, mild Bel Paese cheese, gorgonzola, or blue cheese, even something like extra salt, rosemary or pureed corn kernels add extra flavor to polenta. What is sacrilege to traditional Italian cookbooks is fairly standard practice in restaurants. Try experimenting a little and find out what works for you – start with a little Bel Paese or butter and see what happens.

As for your husband, I suspect he is being funny but he probably not as funny as he thinks he is – since I suffer from the same malady, there is absolutely no advice I can give for that behavior.