Lentils, Just Lentils

Saucyman, I need a summery salad that isn’t potato, pasta or garden salad. Any ideas?

Well panzanella with the bread & tomatoes is a very fine summertime salad, but it doesn’t keep though – great for dinner on a hot day, not so great for picnics. Another option if you are feeling tomatoee/tomatoy(?), is Salad Capri with the fresh mozzarella, basil and tomatoes, it is a winner. Even with the fresh local tomatoes are starting to hit the market, you might want to think about skipping the tomato and going with a nice lentil salad.

Lentils are one of the earliest agricultural crops grown by man and woman. Evidence of lentil consumption has been found in ancient India, the Pharaoh’s Egypt and at prehistoric sites around Europe. At 25%, lentils are second only to the soybean in protein content for a veg. For this reason the lentil is still widely used in vegetarian cultures and was/is a mainstay during the Catholic Lent. Because lentil and Lenten look so much alike and have some cultural overlap, you’d think the words were somehow related but lentil come from the Latin for lens, while Lenten evolved from Lent, which is Latin for Spring.

Years ago at Oregon’s Pinot Festival, I had a still memorable lentil salad made of cooked lentils, beets, chopped arugula and goat cheese. The beets were a killer match; a sweet contrast to the earthiness of the legume, but they aren’t necessary. The foundation of lentils, vinegar and oil makes the salad – because the lentils absorb more flavor, try 2 T vinegar to 3 T oil per cup of lentils. This salad is versatile enough that over the years I have subbed in (and out) bacon, ham, caramelized onions, sautéed leeks, beet greens, mustard greens, smoked salmon, asparagus, tomatoes, carrots, rice vinegar/sesame oil/ginger, roasted garlic, rice/wild rice.

Lentils cook quickly so unlike other legumes, they don’t need to be soaked to speed up cooking times but because they are brown and roughly the size of pebbles they should be rinsed very well and examined closely for debris, rocks and fossilized material. The other issue with lentils is they come with a rather vague cooking time 25 to 50 minutes. I know, 100%. The wee French Puy Lentils take the least amount of time while older brown or green lentils take longer to cook. Just keep testing and checking – they should be cooked al dente like pasta, a little bite.

Chill, serve warm, it doesn’t matter. Toss ingredients together and serve or put in the fridge where it will keep for a week.

What Ales Us

Ale, Lager, Pilsner – What’s the dif?

Ales are made from top-fermenting yeasts. Beers brewed in this manner tend to be fruitier, not in the lambic or berry-weizen, chick-beer type of way where actual fruits are harmed in the production of the drink but along the lines that the scent and taste of an Ale will be alive, reminiscent of an orchard…it is so hard to talk about the flavor of drink without appearing to be either pretentious or compensating for a poor palate with a large vocabulary – in any case, ales tend to be more assertive.

The ale’s flavor is stronger in part due to the addition of hops. Pilsners and lagers have the advantage of being bottom-fermented and stored in a chilled environment – even before the ubiquity of refrigeration – there was nature’s beer cooler – the Alps. Ales are brewed at warmer temperatures, warm things like to spoil, hops rich in resins and oils retard the growth of unwanted microbial growth.

The advent of modernity with its pasteurization, hygiene and chemical analysis means hops are now a flavoring more than a preservative. Beers like India Pale Ale – IPA to the txtrs amongst us – originally used hops to prevent beers from spoiling during the long, hot voyage from England to India. Currently, IPA’s use hops to boldly flavor beer, along with adding a floral scent and a degree of bitterness to help balance out the robust flavor.

As ales are to Anglos and Anglophiles, lagers are to the Saxons. Golden, sparkling and best served chilled it is no surprise that most American beers are lager-style brews. Speculation for our cultural preference for lagers runs from derisive comments attempting to account for taste to the more nuanced conjecture that the US brewing capitals first Albany then Detroit and Milwaukee – are all on the cold-side of the climate with the added bonus of being able to harvest ice from the frozen rivers and lakes in the region making easy to manufacture and store beer 12 months a year.

Michael Jackson – the late beer master, not the bleached hermaphrodite – has a different theory: The arrival of glass drinking vessels (or what we now plainly like to call glasses) meant cloudy, dark, heavily malted beers served in metal, wood or ceramic glasses, which weren’t previously seen, were now being judged on appearance. A golden, clear, bubbly lager that could be seen in transparent glass was a seal of purity. The advent of affordable glassware matches the emergence of the American brewing industry.

Lastly, a pilsner is a style of lager. Purists will claim pilsners are 4% alcohol by weight, a specific gravity near 12 on the Plato system and use only Saaz hops. Sure, maybe, I guess. I am not sure how centuries old Bohemian guild standards apply to a style of beer brewed on 6 the 7 continents in the new millennium but the words and their definitions change, evolve, flex and expand – you can rally against it like a beer Luddite, doomed to defeat or you accept the world changes and acknowledge that a pilsner is a golden, bubbly lager while maybe not the most complex beer in the world is a good one for a hot day.

St Helens is the Patron Saint of Cakes?

If Angel Food Cake is so easy, how about a recipe –

While answering a question about strawberry shortcake, I implied that Angel Food Cake was like Saucyman, quick and easy. Quick and easy implies that the cake should (also like Saucyman) be relatively simple. Most instructions want to make this recipe far more complicated than needs to be. As much as I want to mock the cookbooks for adding a degree of difficulty to something that is pretty straightforward, I don’t have the energy because I am too busy fighting the instinct to over-explain myself. If you are into food, egg whites are endlessly fascinating. Today is about the doing, not the understanding, so we will skip 700-word digression on egg foams that would have gone right here.

Most authors issue dire warnings about 4 potential problems:

1. The presence of fat
2. Cream of tartar
3. Whipping the eggs properly
4. Type of pan

All these things are potential issues, but this really isn’t brain surgery/rocket science/structural engineering, it is a cake. The biggest caution you’ll receive – is that if so much as even a drop of fat gets in the egg whites – it will be MacArthur Park, with the cake in the rain, tragedy and metaphor rolled into a really long song. It isn’t that bad, a little yolk will inhibit the how high the cake will rise but in the age of electric mixers, the worst that will happen is a little yolk will make the cake a kind of chiffon/sponge hybrid, it will still be good.

Actually, for all the caution about fat inhibiting the rise of the cake, I find a bigger variable is cold v. room temperature eggs. Cold eggs take longer to whip. If you are worried about food safety or forgot to plan ahead, put the eggs – still in the shell - in bowl with very warm tap water for 2 minutes before separating the yolk from the white. Save yolks, you can freeze them for your next custard/pudding.

Another contentious issue is cream of tartar – a salt of tartaric acid, a byproduct of wine casking. Cream of tartar, because it is acidic, lowers the pH of the eggs, which in turn makes for a stable egg foam. Acid also inhibits browning, keeping the Angel Food white and tender. If your kitchen, like the Saucykitchen doesn’t keep cream of tartar around, a teaspoon of lemon juice will work.

After the fear of fat, the biggest issue is whipping & when to add the sugar in the whipping process. If you under-whip your cake won’t rise, if you over-whip your cake will be dry – not the worst thing in the world for a cake that is going to get buried in berries. For this I advise the tale of 2 mountains – Whip your eggs until they are soft peak, that is they look like Mt. St. Helens (top). Add the sugar and continue whipping until the egg foam looks like Mt. Hood (left).

Finally, type of pan. There is such a thing as an Angel Food Cake pan – A round pan with a removable insert and a chimney for even heat distribution. A loaf pan works fine. Just make sure to coat any pan with butter and flour for easy release. The cake comes together very quickly so preheat the oven and ready the pan before even separating eggs.

Sift together and set aside -
¾ cup flour
¼ c sugar
½ teaspoon salt

12 egg whites
1 teaspoon cream of tartar or lemon juice
1 teaspoon vanilla
¾ c sugar

Add whites, tartar/lemon juice and vanilla into a mixing bowl and whip the whites, whip them good on a medium speed. Stop on occasion to see if you have reached the Mt. St. Helens summit. Once you are there, resume mixing at medium speed and add the sugar, the ¾ cup sugar not the sugar flour combo, in a slow stream. Continue whipping on medium and take the trip to Mt. Hood. The travel time depends on the speed of your mixer.

Once your egg whites are nice and foamy, you are done mixing. Fold in the flour mixture 1/3 at a time. And by folding I mean spread the flour evenly over the top of the egg foam and gently mix it in with a rubber spatula. There is a balance here, the more you fold, the more air you knock out of your cake. But if you don’t fold well enough the flour won’t be distributed properly. I find plunging the spatula to the bottom and lifting the bottom towards the top works effectively. 3-4 turns for each addition of flour should do the trick.

Once the flour is folded in transfer to cake pan and bake for 30 – 40 minutes until the cake is set – toothpick/skewer/knife tip comes out clean. Invert pan on a cooling rack (so air can circulate around the pan) and let rest for at least 90 minutes before removing from pan. Top with berries and enjoy.

Little Black Briquette

Saucy, what are charcoal briquettes and how do they differ from charcoal – Grillentino

Charcoal is fuel made by igniting wood– wood, bone or other organic matter (here organic means carbon-based not vegetable-based from Whole Foods) in the absence of air, so it doesn’t actually burn. This tempering process drives out sap, resin and other impurities, leaving a blackened lump of porous carbon. The advantage of burning charcoal over straight wood is consistent predictable heat.

Briquettes are made from sawdust, coal and/or charcoal dust, wood scraps and binding agents. On one hand, this process uses leftovers from the pulping process in the best reduce, reuse, recycle tree hugger type of way, except for pulping wood and hugging trees might not be compatible activities. Also on the same hand, briquettes were invented here in Oregon – props for the home state innovation. On the other hand is the presence of the intentionally vague sounding binding agents. This could mean Borax, industrial salts/sodas, limestone, graphite, petroleum products and/or unpronounceable additives – at least the addition of Borax explains why my fire burns so white and clean.

Charcoal is a universal absorbent. While it is not ground up briquettes in your water filtration system, gas mask or your home’s air filter, it is still charcoal, which has an ability to soak up odors of all kinds. Meat drippings might be just type of odor you would like the charcoal to absorb, recycling meat flavor into the smoke. Lighter fluid, a petroleum liquid somewhere between straight-out-of-the-ground-crude and the gasoline that fuels your auto, soaks into the charcoal and never leaves, which helps explain why some cookouts smell a little more fine, actually refinery than others.

For grilling the game is heat and controlling said heat. Briquettes, because of their uniform size and manufacturing standards, produce an even more consistent predictable heat. Lump charcoal is lighter, denser, burns longer and produces fewer toxic emissions than wood. Gas burns cleaner than either lump or briquette charcoal. In the States 70% of all so called barbeques, which are actually high heat, quick burning grills, are gas (natural or propane) powered, so the decision about briquette v. lump really isn’t much of an issue.

As for the rest of the world, charcoal and wood are still primary sources for fuel for everyday cooking. The United States is 71st in world charcoal consumption, immediately trailing Afghanistan, Bulgaria, Morocco, Haiti and Laos. We are ahead of the ‘throw a shrimp on the barbie’ Australians, and predictably use more charcoal per capita than the Dutch, Norwegians/Swedes, Brits and Iranians but only use half as much charcoal as the North Koreans, only because they might not have food to cook and we only burn about 1/20 of what the top ten charcoal using nations go through in a year. Put that in your Weber and smoke it or something to think about when you are picking up your charcoal for your holiday cookout this weekend.

Good Old Boys Drinking Whiskey & Rye

What are you drinking these days?

A beer is good, especially with the days warming up. In addition to a self-evident argument for homeostasis, cold beer/hot day, possess a near mystical yin-yang balance in its combination. Even if beer = good, I enjoy cocktails - mixing them together relaxes me, drinking them does better and when the weather heats up I look to places that get really hot for inspiration.

Nothing says drunkenness like New Orleans; the city might even have the drop on Vegas for alcohol fuel debauchery. When Las Vegas was still a neon-free crossroads in the desert, New Orleans was establishing itself as the birthplace of the American Cocktail.

Much like Silicon Valley became a ground zero for computer and internet innovations, 19th Century New Orleans was the transforming drinking. Post Reconstruction, Henry Ramos began shaking up a gin fizz that ultimately would bear his name. Before Ramos and his pernicious gin began fizzing, a Haitian apothecary named Antoine Peychaud, mixed a concoction of bitter oranges and herbs that would become the foundation of many whiskey cocktails. In either 1853 Sewell Taylor or more likely in 1859, John Schiller a distributor for French brandies of Sazerac de Forge et Fils, opened a bar at 13 Exchange Alley, right off of Mr. Charles Street - I don’t think Charles had been promoted to sainthood at the juncture, called the Sazerac Coffee House.

The establishment originally promulgated Cognac and Cognac drinks but over time rye and bourbon would replace the brown French liquor. Other substitutions/evolutions would take place, notably absinthe would be replaced by the local, Herbsaint when absinthe became a no-no.

Evolution is forever ongoing - a smart cocktail made with attention the type of thing that New Orleans was noted for - is nothing to the flash of frozen ice cream machines converted to serve ice and rum Hurricanes for tourists in the French Quarter in a hurry to get their party started. Here on the west coast, where it doesn’t even really get all that hot, we import good southern whiskeys and use the internet to get Peychaud’s Bitters delivered to our door, and make a good approximation of a Sazerac –

1 old fashion glass, chilled by packing it with ice

1 tablespoon simple syrup
3 drops Peychaud’s bitters
1-2 oz Rye

1 teaspoon anise flavored liquor – Ricard or Pernod are very good
Lemon Twist

In a cocktail shaker or sturdy bar glass - combine syrup, bitters and rye with two ice cubes. Stir together.

Dump ice out of the old fashioned glass, then much like you would pour vermouth into a martini glass and shake out the excess liquid (leaving a hint of flavor) do likewise with the anise flavored liquor. Strain rye mixture into the now chilled, anise flavored old-fashioned glass, garnish the rim with the lemon twist and enjoy your drink.

Strawberry Shortcake Forever

Saucyman, I have the strawberries, now what exactly is shortcake? - Holly Hobbie

Shortcake is not one legally defined, specific thing. Made in the home kitchen, shortcakes run on the dry side, resembling more of a sweet scone or biscuit. Bought in the store, shortcake is cakey-ier, moist and spongy, on occasion packaged and looking suspiciously like a twinkie. Despite the dissimilar appearance, both homemade and store-bought shortcakes are legit, thanks to the eponymous ingredient, shortening.

Like a shortcake, shortening isn’t one particular thing – it can be butter, animal fat, vegetable shortening or even ingredients like cheese, sour cream, cream cheese. Shortening is better defined by what it does: It shortens the composite wheat protein known as gluten. Gluten, besides being the current dietary bogeyman, is the backbone of baked goods; it is formed when two separate wheat proteins, glaidin and glutenin are mixed with water, creating long strands of protein. Prolonged mixing/kneading forms these long strands into a matrix of elastic chains that trap air and give body and lift to baked goods.

A chemist, food scientist or a tradesman like a baker would be able to explain shortening with precise technical sophistication…I am going to go with a simile here, likening shortening to our corporeal selves - If we work our muscles, take in plenty of water and get long periods of rest, we would be like gluten - long, strong and lean; able to bounce back quickly from stress and trauma. Instead if we were to absorb fats to the point of saturation and consciously shorten our workout times as to not to get overly conditioned, we would be on the rollie-pollie side of things, slow to recover, easily malleable – soft in form and probably in spirit. This is why bread dough bounces back when you poke it with a finger and cookie dough, the ultimate shortened food, would just remain dented, lethargic and indifferent to getting poked.

Shortening, be it animal, vegetable or butter coats gluten, inhibiting its development: The flour protein never develops long interconnected strands that would form a chewy bread-like loaf texture, Instead, the proteins are coated, shortened in length and as a result shortcake’s consistency is tender and soft. This is true for biscuit/scone type of shortcake and it is true for the sponge cake type of shortcake.

Biscuit style shortcakes are pretty traditional and as an added bonus are quick and easy to make. Personally, I like a little cake in my shortcake and I will go with a butter-rich pound cake or the easiest cake to make in the world, an Angel Food Cake. Even though Angel Food is great cake with strawberries – soaking up the juice and offering a nice contrast to the whipped cream that generally accompanies strawberry shortcake, Angel Food Cake is pretty much fat free, so it is definitely not a shortcake, just a cake and not really under the purview of this inquiry.

Vanilla Isn't Really all that Vanilla

Saucyman, what kind of dessert would you make for a woman you would wanted to [woo]?

Careful with the desserts, yes they sweet and rich and because of this - easy to like but they can also be all flash and no sustenance. Don’t make some over the top dessert. Go with a something straight forward, confident and vanilla. I would go with vanilla custard.

Vanilla does have a reputation of being plain, without special features, ordinary. The kids use the descriptive form of the word to label sex without adventure or imagination as vanilla. This is unfair to vanilla. The fruit of a climbing orchid native to Central America, is actually comprised of hundreds of flavor compounds. It is the most prominent chemical in this mix, vanillin (C8H8O3 for all you chemists) that causes the problem. Because the demand for vanilla constantly exceeds supply and because vanillin is easily and cheaply synthesized from wood pulp and alcohol (about 1/7 of the cost; without pesky suppliers and unstable governments) it is synthetic vanillin that is used in industrial food processing, perfumes and room fresheners that ultimately devalues true vanilla.

If the adjective form does no justice, it is easier to understand the subtle powers of the noun vanilla. A brown, leathery pod, that has been fermented and cured - barely gives you barely a hint of what is stored inside. Split a vanilla bean down the middle and the aroma - stored in the tiny seeds and sticky resin that clings to inside of the walls of the pod, comes alive. The overt flavor of the vanillin is rounded out with floral, tobacco, honey, wood and clove tones, the scent, like the taste is intricate, subtle and exotic.

Because vanilla’s flavoring agents are more soluble in alcohol than water, vanilla usually comes bottled as a pourable 80 proof extract. But, if you are pitching woo, you’ll need a whole vanilla bean. Cooking can be a bit of theatre: the sight of the dark vanilla seeds suspended in a light custard is visually alluring. An even better show would consist of breaking the bean open, scraping down the sides in front of your intended, but considering the mixing, the cooking and the cooling unless you already are planning spending the weekend together, the dessert will never be ready in time.

Vanilla Custard

1 Cup cream
4 egg yolks
¼ C. sugar
1 vanilla split lengthwise and scrape the seeds and resins off with a knife - reserve.

Before any cooking begins, you will need 4 – 4oz ramekins and a water bath. A water bath is hot water in an ovenproof dish that helps insulate the custard from the direct heat of the oven – the oven will heated to 350, the water surrounding the ramekins will remain about 180-200. Heat water to a boil in a kettle, fill a pan big enough to hold 4 ramekins full half full with hot water, place on a rack in the oven and preheat to 350.

Once the water bath is in the oven - Warm the cream and spent vanilla bean on stove or microwave until barely simmering. Remove from heat and vigorously whisk in egg yolks, one at a time and then add sugar. Remove bean and whisk in scraped vanilla, pour mixture into ramekins, then place ramekins in water bath and cook for 1-1 1/2 hours until about 2/3 of the custard is set but the inside is still quivery. Remove ramekins from water bath onto a cooling rack. Let cool for 20 minutes, cover in plastic (this prohibits a skin forming on the surface), then refrigerate for 8 to 48 hours.

If you are really pitching woo it will take more than a custard. Place two ramekins on a dinner plate with two spoons and the other half of the vanilla bean and serve – If you are really pitching woo it will take more than a custard or a nice presentation, try conversation, while you could talk about anything, from how your day went to how the compound vanillin appears in charred wood, which is why barrel aged red wine is said to have vanilla flavors. Or you could pick up the half of a bean that is on the plate as a garnish and a guide and tell the tale of how vanilla cuttings were smuggled out of Mexico and taken to potential plantations across the Indian Ocean but the orchid would not bear fruit. Long before science had realized the plant needed insects which had coevolved with the plant to fertilize it - on the isle of Reunion, a slave named Edmond Albius figured out how to self-pollinate the plant by gently touching the anther the stigmatic surface together; knowledge that would earn his emancipation.

At this point, I’d make the obvious joke about self-pollination but after all your effort you might not want to risk spending the evening alone, so ask if your dessert companion if she has ever used a vanilla bean before.

Are you cooking, Brother John?

It is a network that presents tv shows where being unrehearsed is a badge of honor rather than a shame for professionals. There is an institutional belief at PBS being didactic and educating/informing are the same thing. And seemingly for 6 months a year they schedule Yani concerts and baby boomer bands only to interrupt them to have people who make more money than I do beg me for money so they can continue to produce shows with low production values, delivered with smugness by people who make too much money. Yet every time I decide to hate at Public TV, they do something to stop to stanch the loathing. It is really hard to hate any institution that gives a forum to Jacques Pepin: Friend of JC (Julia Child) who houses over a half century of professional skills that he has drawn upon as an author, restaurateur, cooking instructor all delivered with a nearly unintelligible accent. If you haven't seen his show, I On-COUr-Aig you to do so. In the meantime Charles Seluzicki takes time out from writing about sausage to sing the praises of Mr. Pepin...

Kitchen technique, honed by rigorous early training and years of experience, settles, in the best scenario, into the unconscious, wordlessly wed to intuition. I flick on the TV and watch Jacques Pepin slice an eggplant. His recipe calls for rounds, one-half inch thick. He begins to slice. Perfect, perfect, oops. Does he stop? No. As he finishes the last slice, he begins talking about male and female eggplants. Lordy, I say to myself, he should know better. We meet his eyes as he speaks into the camera but his hands and knife move to the errant, overly thick piece which he perfectly divides. The program is a rerun. Still, the demonstration holds my attention. Like that other great Jacques- Jacques Tati- somehow there is always more embedded in the running steam of image and patter.

Often he chops onions, shallots, leeks. Nothing surprises us about his approach to onions and shallots except his enviable facility and speed. But I had not seen his leek technique demonstrated before. Instead of lopping off the top below the dark green of the leaves, he trims up the root a bit, leaving it intact, inverts the stalk and shaves away the dark green leaves along its length, preserving perhaps a third more tender interior of the vegetable. Then he sends the point of his knife through the base of the leek, runs it vertically through to the top, rinses it and chops. The technique is clearly directly evolved and adapted from the classic approach to mincing onion yet there is nothing initially familiar about it. Only repeated exposure reveals the obvious. I am mesmerized by Pepin's understanding of the structure of the leek, the eloquence of his knife work and his respect for the economies of the kitchen.

Watch him wield a simple vegtable peeler as he skins a cucumber and then instantly adapts it to creating long, mandoline thin, seedless strips of cucumber flesh in a single motion. Witness his facility as he approaches an apple with his paring knife. The skin falls away in a single unbroken strip and then he trims, cores and slices it. The little knife does not leave his hand until he finishes his task; its relationship with his hand, however, is a petite ballet of edge and point, the seamless articulations and interplay of the finger, the palm, the thumb.

The greatest cookbooks in the world cannot convey such knowledge. It has always been learned by demonstration, imitation and practice. Even with the wondrous flood of food programming, even in the instance of an articulate and witty guide such as Jacques Pepin, there is always more. We are left with a dual sense of both the subtleties of the simplest tasks in the kitchen and our need to surrender to their mastery with fearless abandon, reconstructing our failures and successes at each turn


Charles Seluzicki.

Land of the Free, Heinz of the Brave

Last week President Obama ordered a burger with mustard instead of ketchup. This is was offered as proof that our president is an elitist, a socialist and possibly just plain mustarded. Media Matters has tracked the comments under a tab called Dijon Derangement Syndrome here -

While President Obama did not run on a platform of mustard versus ketchup, that alone would have garnered my vote, for I, an adventurous eater; a born and raised Midwesterner - too polite to refuse food placed in front of me, hate ketchup with such a passion that I will not touch anything that has the condiment on it.

Culinary historian Andrew F. Smith wrote book on the subject called Pure Ketchup. Mr. Smith spends hundreds of pages and thousands of footnotes documenting the history of ketchup. Ketchup is a modern version of a centuries old vinegar and spice condiment found in one form or another in almost every food culture: possibly beginning with the Roman fish sauce, garum, a modern analogue is the Thai fish sauce, nam pla.

While now ketchup is red ostensibly from tomatoes, historically that hasn’t always been the case, walnuts and mushrooms have been popular ingredients for ketchups, but the tomato that won out. To the point that in free market loving America, only a condiment thickened by tomatoes can be legally labeled ‘ketchup’.

The story of tomato ketchup hegemony is a classic American story of economy of scale and utility. The tomato, originally shunned in colonial times, first as poisonous and then as a food that aroused passions (like it did in those hot-blooded Mediterranean types), slowly grew to become a major domestic crop in the years following the Civil War. Cheap, easy to grow, abundant and acidic – the latter a trait lent itself to preservation in the burgeoning canning industry. Tomato ketchup was the byproduct of canned tomatoes: Bits, pieces, seeds and juices being cooked down into a heavily spiced sauce, making a marketable product out of otherwise unwanted parts of the tomato.

By the turn of the 19th century, ketchup was already the most popular sauce in the country. A survey in 1915 counted over 800 different brands of tomato ketchup. Nearly 100 years later that that number has been whittled down to Heinz and maybe a dozen nationally distributed brands. While selection is down, intake is nearly universal, the condiment is found in 97% of homes, each American consuming on average about 3 bottles of tomato ketchup a year.

But not in the Saucykitchen, here it is thought of derisively as red corn syrup, a cloying sweet flavor that is excluded from the pantry because it overwhelms all food rather than helps build flavor. But that is just me, people who take food seriously aren’t exclusively anti-ketchup, Professor Dale Huffman points out ketchup, “is tart and slightly acidic, so it counteracts the fatty buildup…from meat and fried potatoes”. If that commentary is too practical, especially coming from an elitist academic, researcher Ernest Dichter deconstructs for us; theorizing ketchup satisfies our hunter instincts by claiming, “Pouring ketchup on cooked meat makes it look raw.”

As for President Obama, I respect your decision to taste the flavor of the burger rather than drown it in ketchup and acknowledge if it wouldn’t have been ketchup it would have been something else – Although, I am curious how ordering a big bowl of Pho would have been commented on, to see what parallels the chattering classes could have drawn between tripe, purple basil, noodles, chopsticks and democracy.

While its funny to listen to the talk radio types and the cable news people, a group of elite earners (who most likely aren’t spending their paychecks on drive-thru food and iceberg lettuce); people who simultaneously espouse the greatness of the market for its ability to offer a myriad of choices and actually worry (or just constantly talk) about Obama style socialism - these people are surprisingly very Maoist about the proper way to order a burger. Here there is no room for individualism, only burgers with ketchup or renounce your citizenship.

π ≠ R(hubarb)2,

The last Saucyman left off repeating the wisdom of cookbook authors that rhubarb and cranberries are interchangeable. In the intervening days, I hope no one ran out to make the oxymoronic Rhubapoltian – lime, vodka and rhubarb juice. Actually, that doesn’t sound all that horrible – in a chilled, slightly bitter aperitif on a summer day type of drink. If only they drank it on Sex in the City, little leafy stalks garnishing out of old-fashioned glasses like paper parasols shading mojitos, it could have been popular, it could have been a trend. Although the Rhubapolitan will remain a figment of my imagination, Italians infuse a nominally alcoholic liqueur, Rabarbaro with rhubarb, quinine and other purportedly medicinal herbs, claiming it is a restorative rather than a cocktail – usually it is people from the States who justify their habits with testimonies of health benefits.

But if setting up a still is a little too onerous for a few pounds of rhubarb, there is the single most proffered rhubarb recipe in the Saucitorium, compote. Compote is just another word for nothing left to do (with fruit). Or non-lyrically, compote is fruit preserved in syrup, it makes a good topping for ice cream, French Toast or cake.

Simmered with sugar, water and ginger until soft then passed through a foodmill rhubarb makes for the loveliest rose-colored fruit jam ever. Julia Child and Dorie Greenspan recommended that jam (with vanilla instead of ginger) for the sandwich layer of the Hungarian Shortbread recipe in their Baking with Julia volume.

The pound or so of rhubarb that I was recently gifted was turned into jam. Rather than shortbreaded, it will be mixed with cream cheese and baked into the interior of brioche, a little spring treat to share with my coworkers and my rhubarb-giving neighbor.

Either a jam or compotes can be used in constructing a fool, a dessert that is layered like a trifle but without cake or custard. Fools, the dessert, are thought to be an Anglicization of the French word, fouler, meaning to mash. Or the name evolved as the dish evolved - what was once a spiced custard, slowly changed into one featuring mashed fruit and cream, fooling some of the people some of the time but not all of the people all of the time.

There are buckles, crisps, cobblers and Bettys – No, that isn’t the second Sex in the City reference of the post, well now it is, but that wasn’t my intention. Here, I am referring to the family of baked desserts that rely on a topping for texture and body. Rhubarb, which is both bitter and acidic tasting would be a good foil for a sweet, salty, rich topping.

Or you can come full circle, realizing that not only do strawberries and rhubarb arrive to market at the same time of the year, the sweetness of strawberries compliment the tartness of rhubarb. A rich, buttery crust contrasts and highlights both ingredients, leaving little wonder how it is the strawberry-rhubarb pie is a springtime fixture.

Rhubarbian ken

2 questions - Do people really like rhubarb? Besides pie, what else is there? Stalker

Rhubarb’s annual springtime appearance in the market is an oddity across the board. A fibrous vegetable that is bought & sold as a fruit - usually as with avocados and tomatoes, fruits masquerading as veg are far more common. Rhubarb's flavor profile is odd for any food, but especially for a fruit – it is acidic, about 2.5% acid by weight – a lemon, not really an eating fruit is 5% acid. On top of being acidic, the plant particularly the leaves, are full of the bitter, potentially toxic oxalate compounds.

Perhaps because of its bitter, acidic flavor for most of its history the plant was used medicinally: Being known primarily as a medicine is never a ringing endorsement of an easy, palatable flavor…Take rhubarb’s frequent companion the strawberry, no one ever talks about its history in the apothecary (If you get anything other than the straight-forward goodness of strawberries, it is symbolic Bergman recollections of the lost sweetness of youth). It isn’t until the 16th century that rhubarb made its way to the table. Around this time in England, it was compared (favorably) to sorrel. Although rhubarb is used primarily as a sweet ingredient in the States, in other parts of the world it is used as a savory – stewed with spinach in Afghanistan and cooked with potatoes in Poland.

Explaining how a fibrous stalk native to Asia ended up being as American as pie, might be easier than theorizing if people actually like the taste of rhubarb. Home canning, cheap industrial sugar and transportation that could extend the availability of produce are all relatively recent developments. 100+ years ago, not all were universally accessible, so after a long winter of potatoes and cabbage, crops that would be ready early in the season were a premium. Something that was sweet and could be harvested months before tree fruits, all the better.

Rhubarb was important enough crop that plant entrepreneur (plantrepreneur?) Luther Burbank worked on breeding a cultivar that would be both sweeter and ready for an early harvest. Burbank imported seeds from Australia and worked on ‘improving’ the plant, selecting thinner, sweeter, redder, quicker-growing stalks until he marketed the very popular Crimson Winter variety. As plant breeders raised the sugar content, growers worked on getting the plant to market quicker - forcing the plants in hot houses, warmed beds and indoor starts – the combination of improved flavors and aggressive growing tactics meant rhubarb was the first sweet produce available to consumers. People who study such things call this time period the rhubarb boom, which lasted until the period between the wars, when cheap transportation and ubiquitous refrigeration largely negated the importance of early fruit.

More than one cookbook suggests that rhubarb and cranberries are interchangeable. Both are acidic, tart, not overly sweet, it makes sense they could be substituted for one another. The fact they are proxies for one another also helps explain rhubarb’s seasonal appeal. Like the Thanksgiving cranberry relish, rhubarb is not universally appreciated but is never the less expected at least once a year in the annual ritual that is strawberry-rhubarb pie.

The next edition of Saucyman will answer part two today's the question - other uses of rhubarb.

Who are you Calling a Gastrosexual?

Last week, The Guardian, published an article that defined the newest member of the millennial generation: the Gastrosexual. Half Metrosexual, half food-enthusiast = all man. Tim Lewis’ article invokes molecular gastronomy, the testosterone fueled Gordon Ramsey and writer Nick Hornby’s obsessive-compulsive, list making, poorly socialized beta males to explain the XY approach to preparing dinner. According to Lewis, modern man in the kitchen needs to compete, categorize and make rules as much as he needs to prepare food.

It is a good article, a quick read, a clever thesis (weakly) supported by a combination of facts and opinions but I am not sure how well Mr. Lewis delineated the gastrosexual. That isn’t really the point, the ability to introduce new cultural buzzwords trumps the subsequent definition – that isn’t sarcasm; I really like neologisms.

Accurate of not, the essay does have valid points, especially with observations about shopping or what Mr Lewis calls sourcing - “If two ingredients look similar (even identical), choose the more expensive one. You know you are on the right lines if you leave the supermarket having spent £40 on a "peasant" soup.” The willingness to morph foods that need little more than knowledge and time into something that only require income (or credit) isn’t a gender issue, it is a way of demeaning craft while extolling the ability to pay for it. Like the $1000 fishing reel/rod makes the fly fisherman or for that matter makes the trout taste better.

If there are gender issues in the kitchen, it might be guys are only preparing 20% of all meals. When dudes do take to the kitchen, maybe they worry more about what is authentic than what is good. And men who cook infrequently, the ones who stage a weekly production involving food, do tend to go over the top - more heat/chili, wrap it in bacon and deep-fry it - I wouldn’t call this cooking any more than I would call speeding on the Interstate competitive racing, it is a combination of show boating and insecurities. Who can blame a guy – the message has never been trust your ingredients and methods, we’ve have only been encouraged to kick it up a notch.

Ogden Nash, AJ Liebling, the fictional Nero Wolfe, James Beard, Galloping Gourmet, Charles Kuralt, Waverly Root, Calvin Trillin, Roy Blount Jr. are some fellas who have been rather particular about food in the last few 100 or so years. In 2002, Neil Gaiman’s Coraline, was nearly seduced by other mother’s roasted chicken (that tasted like chicken), she objected to her father’s fussy ‘recipes’ - this trend isn’t new. What the gastrosexual is really about is surrendering the kitchen to a breed of men who previously only cornered you at parties to hold one-sided conversations about alternate takes on obscure albums or less publicly - spend hours on managing fantasy sports teams: The guy who once was more concerned with who placed bass on an 1972 Steely Dan b-side is now focused on heirloom purple spring garlic and cheese produced from ewes under 4 years old fed exclusively on clover – the question is are we eating any better?