Parlez Vous Toastae?

Hey Speaking of the French, is French Toast really French?

No.

Dipping day-old bread in batter has been going on long before there was a France or for that matter toast.

The English have called the concoction poor knight’s pudding or poor knights of Windsor. That was for the Anglo, onto the Saxon: the German name for a similar dish is arme Ritter or poor knights/soldiers. The invocation of knights is a clue to just how long this preparation has been around.

In early America, toast hadn’t quite adopted its Franco identity. It was also known as Mennonite bread, especially when it was deep-fried, because you know what is more indulgent than a French Papist, other than a Mennonite. 

The batter hasn’t been a consistent recipe over the centuries. Dipped bread hasn’t always been this egg rich, spice infused coating. For instance, milk toast, a dish consisting of hot buttered bread dipped in milk or buttermilk existed. If butter and milk weren’t available frying hard bread in a skillet with suet or lard and topping with powdered sugar or jam would have fallen under the rubric of French toast. Soaking bread in wine or dipping it in either honeyed water or orange blossom water – the vanilla extract of the medieval ages, would have counted, as would have brioche sautéed with butter and cinnamon.

How the dish came to be designated as en Français is a bit of a mystery. They don’t call the dish ‘Our toast’, instead call batter-dipped day old bread, pain perdu – or lost bread: either because day old bread is considered lost or because the bread is lost in a batter and spices. Here the word choice is a bit of a mystery, pain isn’t just bread but is a usage that invokes companion or one who shares bread. Perdu isn’t an exact translation of lost as much as it is loss, as in perdition. So what does that say about the dish? If it were Italian Toast, Dante might warned all those who eat to abandon hope, especially when served with maple syrup and a side of bacon.

I like my French Toast topped with lemon curd which isn’t all that French. Or topped with fresh fruit quickly warmed with butter. That is when I eat breakfast, long time readers know I am rather unconvinced of breakfast’s boast that it is the most important meal of the day. First of all what does breakfast’s purported significance say about lunch and secondly, I am all for carbloading and sweets but sausage, egg and potato sounds like such a better way to fuel up for a morning of work.

For Sirtin

Help. A few years ago I had a steak that was called top sirloin on a menu. My grocery store doesn’t package steaks with that name, just sirloin steaks. Is this a restaurant cut, a style or preparation or fanciful language one finds on menus. Pulling Steaks

PS – the internet didn’t help narrow it down, only confused the issue more what do your books say?

Well, books are like the internet on Paxil, they are just a calmer, not always clearer. My farmers market rancher will sell me top sirloin, my grocery no. However they sell top loin, which is a different cut altogether. Author of Good Meat, Deborah Krasner, writes in her book, a farmer’s biggest complaint about selling directly to consumers is explaining the different cuts. The fact she calls them farmers rather than ranchers, might be a western bias, but it does cast suspicion on her otherwise authoritative book.

Here are the basics…there are 8 primal cuts recognized by the USDA: Chuck, brisket, rib, short loin, sirloin, round, plate and flank. So sirloin is a primal cut, that is if a cow were a nation, these would be the states. Sirloin has 3-4ish parts, again map; think regions: Sirloin, top sirloin, bottom sirloin and depending how you divide it, the tenderloin. Like a river on a map, some of the muscles that are mostly in the sirloin, flow into other cuts, so that a sirloin tip steak/roast, actually comes from the round.

Ready for more, the English, who have been casually linked to beef-loving, have a few more primal cuts (their 10 to our 8). The roastbifs, as the English are sometimes not lovingly referred to, call their sirloin what we call the rib/short loin, so any seller packaging English style steaks and roasts, can pretty much call anything from the rib sirloin or English sirloin.

Not Cool

Finally, the top sirloin is located under the sirloin and tenderloin but above the bottom sirloin. The cut is chewy and tender with a nice piece of fat adjoined, good for grilling or searing – just a little salt sprinkled on top. Top sirloin is sometimes packaged as the culotte, but not always because of the sad connotation to the skirt like shorts.

I have seen people working the meat counter get flummoxed by questions, since they tend to know the cuts only as their employer packages them, so the ask your butcher advice regularly advised in print and broadcast doesn’t always work, for who among us actually has a butcher? Even though I don’t always see the top sirloin, I usually can spot a top sirloin roast in the case or I can order one, and one for a small capital investment, one can cut the steaks out themselves.

If all this is confusing, the French have 33 primal cuts. While that sounds like just another thing to make fun of the French for, because multiplying basic beef cuts by a factor or 4 is so Français, but that is specific enough to avoid any confusion like we have with finding something as basic as a top sirloin steak consistently labeled that way.

Most Popular Post

The most popular post of the last 12 months has been this one, on Peeps. 

I still think putting them in the microwave is far better than eating them. But a person needs both Peeps, a microwave and a willingness to scrub for that to be a successful endeavor.

Also fun is the Washington Post's annual Peeps Show, which can be seen here.

Have a good weekend. Farmers Market and work are my 2 big events and unless the Market has organic, local peeps, I might just pass up on the birdy confection this year.

Matzo, Matzo Man

Matzo man, this is the best you can do?

If you eat it, you know about matzo –  the unleavened bread, baked quickly so that the chosen could flee the Pharaoh and captivity. It is the only food Jews are commanded to eat – how do you like that – a long list of stuff that was forbidden and the one thing you have to eat is as dry and flavorful as a ration, which in a way it was/is, both in the biblical sense and well in the practical sense as well.

But what else do you know about matzo, not spiritually, but as it gets to the table? One company makes half of the matzo consumed during Passover in the US. Jeopardy style - What is Manischewitz? True and I really wouldn’t know what other company to guess. Manischewitz was founded in the late 1800s by one Rabbi Abramson, who either fleeing a pogrom in Germany or avoiding conscription in Lithuania emigrated to the US. The rabbi, like so many of our progenitors was not a legal immigrant. He came to the US via false papers, having purchased the passport of one Dov Behr Manischewitz, deceased. Abramson/Manischewitz landed in Cincinnati, where he worked for a few years performing ritual slaughters. He began baking matzo in his basement because it was hard to find matzo in Cincinnati at the turn of the 19^th century, a statement that I would also have to believe is true.

His market wasn’t limited to the small southern Ohio Jewish population, matzo, because of its keeping properties, became a popular item for people moving west with the wagon train. An estimated ¾ of his matzo being purchased by people fleeing the east for the P/pacific promised lands. So popular, that within a dozen years, Manischewitz was able to build a new factory with (at the time) the biggest oven in the world. His mechanical factory lowered the price of matzo, changing the food from a labor-intensive Passover food, to an ingredient of frugality - matzo ball soup being the best example.

Matzo, as most people know it, is a thin, rectangular, cracker like bread, but that incarnation has more to do with the commercialization of the product than scriptural instruction. Although matzo itself derives from the word, mootz, literally meaning pressed or squeezed, it more figuratively means flatbread. Ethnofoodstorians believe for most of its history the matzo might have been like a pita bread, a fact backed up by communities that still produce their own matzo by hand use this shape. And there is no proscription against size either; some believe that matzo may have traditionally been up to 4 inches thick.

In recent years, people have been breaking one of my kitchen commandments, fancifying a simple food. The matzo is now packaged as artisan, eco, chocolate-dipped, with sun dried tomatoes. For a food occasionally referred to by the practicing as “the bread of our affliction”, a food that shares the same ingredients as paste, flour and water, I am not sure how much it can or should be fancied up.

Sundown, You Better Take Care

It is Passover week. Passover is the most observed Jewish Holiday, and Seder, Aramaic for order, is the most practiced of all Jewish rituals. It is a dinner dominated by pesach – an offering and maror; a bitter herb. For the more hardcore, Passover extends beyond the meal and watching Charlton Heston play Moses, it kicks off a week spent forgoing the usual and familiar foods.

To really oversimplify things, Jewish immigration in the US consists of 2 groups: the Askenazi, who are generally of Eastern European heritage, came to the US en masse in the late 19^th Century during regional Pogroms. Comprising of 80% of the Jewish population, Askenazim bring us the Deli culture and many of the foods we think of as being Jewish. Sephardic Jews generally spent time in the Levant, North Africa or the Iberian Peninsula. Sephardim foods feature rice and legumes, which Askenazi customs prohibit the cooking and eating of legumes, rice, corn and some seeds during Passover.

For Passover, both branches go with chametz. What or what isn’t chametz is complicated and its definition seems to split already split hairs - often described as yeast or starter or sour, but at least according to my big book of Jewish foods, it is food that is in a state of decay or degradation. This is why the yeast in wine is cool, but yeasty beer is forbidden (not because of the yeast, rather the barley) yet yeast and barley-free pasta, not allowed. I don’t understand, but rest assured, at this point, the subject has been talked over and written about enough that I feel comfortable enough accepting what the experts have decided.

And it isn’t just cooking with chametz, it is getting caught with chametz on your person or worse in your household. Out of all the religions I could convert to, Judaism would be the hardest. Issues of theology aside, I think I could go without the pork; shellfish, now that would be really hard, and by extension never eating Asian food again, beyond difficult. But it is doing things like packing up flour and beer and putting in the garage for a week, because the garage is okay? It is all a little too much, casting God as not only one who dispenses judgment, but a detail obsessed lawyer as well.

If you are thinking about whipping up a Sederish meal. You can try brother Carl’s Parsley Salad recipe here. If you use the Scalloped chicken breast, dredge it in matzo, not flour. Other popular Passover include foods, fish, horseradish, roasted chicken, kugel (matzo and potato) carrot, the mortar-like apple and nut mixture of charoset and possibly special blintzes but made with matzo.

Speaking of Matzo, more on that later in the week. 

Wee Daniel

In my previous post, I confessed to having a thing for/with yogurt: Fage and Nancy’s in particular. For the latter, early delivery man Huey Lewis, helped build a market by bringing the yogurt to the populated Bay Area and during the dark financial days of the 70s, a series of Grateful Dead benefits helped Nancy’s turn the tide to being a successful entity. Mr. Lewis, Jerry (so much bad music, for such a good yogurt) aside, the reason I even know about yogurt, let alone eat it every morning, can be traced almost to one person.

Isaac Karasu was Sephardic physician driven out of his homeland due to the Balkan war, these were the Balkan wars of 1912, the ones where the Greeks and Serbia took control of territories from a declining Ottoman Empire. Fleeing war, an uncertain Greek rule and regional pogroms, Karasu settled in Barcelona. Opening a medical practice, Karasu, who had changed his name to Carasso, noticed that many of his patients suffered from digestive issues. Looking back towards the old country, Carrasso imported cultures from Bulgaria and began producing yogurt first as a medicine.

By 1919 he had become the first industrial producer of yogurt in Spain, he named his company after his son, Danone is the Catalan diminutive for Daniel. Little Daniel grew up, studied in France and eventually took over the company’s French operation. Fleeing Nazis with family friend, Joseph Metzer, they settled in the US, opening the US operation of Dannon in the Bronx. Early product was as low as 648 half pint jars a day of plain yogurt, distributed to the very same Greek and Turkish communities, whose European warring had driven his father to Spain.

Two important innovations took place. One, the company began distributing their product in wax containers, allowing for greater distribution, since packaging was not dependent on returnable glass bottles. Second, Dannon began adding strawberry preserves to the bottom of these yogurt containers, a move that was insanely popular. Blueberry, raspberry and lemon were soon added. In 1951 Carrasso the younger returned to France to reclaim his confiscated factories and by 1960 had sold off his modestly successful American branch to the Beatrice Corporation.

Danone went on at the end of an improbable run: Yogurt became extremely popular in France, remember almost 50 lbs. per year per person, the popularity was enough to help propel the company’s expansion to 150 countries including Turkey, Greece and Israel. At the end of the decade, Metzger’s son, Juan, took over the helm of the company.

Back to the US, in the 70s Dannon, began airing a series of commercials featuring centenarians from Soviet Georgia. These commercials, using the exact opposite of models, became the template for yogurt as a health food because pretty people don’t grow old? The parent Danone, promotes itself as health company and yogurt to this day no matter how sugared, how refined, how many additives is still viewed as a health food. As readers know, I feel diets are either healthy or unhealthy, not individual foods. I am not opposed to the idea of probiotics, but despite Jamie Lee Curtis sincere belief they keep ladies of a certain age regular, there is so little proof, probiotics are really a matter of opinion, not fact. I like my yogurt, the taste, that whole milk creaminess, who needs to worry about health.

  

Dropping Acidophilus

I have yogurt nearly every day – unsweetened, live cultured, whole milk, no binding agents. My favorite, the Greek Fage, is priced a little out of my league. Instead I opt for my second choice, Nancy’s which isn’t a horrible sacrifice, they blur the line between tart and acidic. Both local and national - Oregon made near Eugene at the Springfield Creamery but it is distributed nationally, reaching all 50 states. There is an actual Nancy (Hamren), but the creamery is run by the Kesey family, yes as in Ken’s brother. The yogurt is called Nancy’s because retailers placed their orders with Nancy on the phone and in the days before product launches and branding studies, the yogurt was referred to as ‘Nancy’s’ yogurt. Huey Lewis used to regularly drive the route between San Francisco and the Kesey ranch in Eugene, Nancy’s yogurt was one of the ‘products’ he brought back to Bay Area co-ops. One can only wonder if Lewis, the deliveryman, had better pay & benefits, if the 80s would have been spared a whole bunch of music.

US citizens eat 7.9 pounds of yogurt a year, which is amazing because in the pre-Beatles era, outside of a few immigrant subcultures, no one in the US would have known a thing about yogurt. Or maybe not that amazing at all, at the other end of the scale, the average Frenchman and femme eat 49.1 pounds annually, which sounds less indulgent when expressed as 25 kilos.

Most of those 7.9 pounds of yogurt is sweetened and flavored. Sugar, stevia, honey are popular sweeteners. Surprisingly, but not all that surprising, not everyone enjoys yogurt’s natural sour taste, so fruit is used to flavor of yogurt. There are 2 different ways to do this; there is the fruit on the bottom ‘sundae-style’ and the homogenized, ‘Swiss-style’. Sugar, honey and either sweetened or unsweetened fruit raise the caloric content of low-fat yogurts above that of their non-sweetened whole milk counterparts. Low and reduced fat yogurts are offered because fat is often seen to be the culprit in well, getting fat. So, the cute 1-cup, single serving portion of low-fat blueberry yogurt is more calories than a candy bar, it is healthy, right?

Maybe. Healthier than smoking anyway. Yogurt has been linked to health for about a 100 years, when a Russian biologist promulgated a theory a healthy colon – If a person’s GI contained the right type of bacteria, they could avoid the autointoxicating side-effects of germs and increase their lifespan. The best way to keep the bad stuff out was put the good germs in, and with yogurt cultures and this was not always by eating. Health promoters & yogurt lovers like John Harvey Kellogg, who because he abstained from sex with his wife, had time for a daily yogurt enema given by a muscular male attendant (issues). The healthy colon argument is one that is still echoed today by probiotic enthusiasts. Problem being, the thermophilic bacteria used to thicken yogurt, can’t survive in the human gut, so one that can, Lactobacillus acidophilus, is added to the mix of live cultures. I don’t know if yogurt is healthy, healthier or if like Jamie Lee Curtis claims it keeps you regular. I actually like the taste of it.

 

Do-Over

This week I was asked to explain a bergamot in one paragraph or less. Without the aid of reference books or the safety net of double-checking facts, I answered, but here is the response I would have given if I hadn’t been restricted to a paragraph and my memory.

A bergamot is a small bitter orange, the fruit is pear shaped that is nearly impossible to grow, utterly inedible and if it weren’t for the one half of one percent of essential citrus oil found in its skin, the variety would either be extinct, a curiosity or a backyard ornamental. It is this .005 of oil that scents both tea and people that keeps the plant thriving and well tended by humans.

Its discovery, can be credited it to Christopher Columbus, who apparently brought the variety to Spain from the Canary Islands or the West Indies. From there it seems to have jumped to the Italian peninsula from the town of Berga, located outside of Barcelona. Or perhaps the tree landed in Italy, arriving from the opposite direction – Bergamotta, an Italianization of the Turkish beg-armudi, or the lord’s pear. Or maybe the word has something to do with the French bergamotte, which is a variety of pear that predates a written record of the orange by a century and a half. 

Portrait of an Orange in green

While the mystery of how the bergamot orange made its way to Europe is convoluted, the use of its oil according to former chemist and citrus book writing, Pierre Laszlo, is usually attributed to “monks, pirates or wise Asians”.  Two things –

1)    This implies that the fruit was purposefully cultivated, yet no one had thought to press oranges for their oil.

2)    Monks & wise Asians, sure. But Pirates? “Darg, swab the deck with some bergamot you scallywags so this ship smells as good as it is evil.”

As to the monk origin story, in the mid to late 17^th century, Giovanni Feminis learned of the oil from a monastery and began mixing and selling, ‘wonder water’ – a mixture of the oils of bergamot, lavender and rosemary. Although Feminis was a Piedmontese, Europe’s borders and territories looked different in his lifetime and he sold this elixir from his base of operations in Cologne. A wise Asian, a nameless Chinese mandarin showed Charles Grey future Prime Minister of England, how to add bergamot to tea leaves to make Earl Grey tea, although I don’t think it was called that from the get go.

Bergamot is also the name given to a subset of herbs used in N. America. Known better as “Mexican oregano”, this family of herbs has nothing to do with flavoring tea or people and might be known better as bees balm.

A hectare of the trees, 2.4 acres or 1000 x 1000 meter plot of land, can bring in a tidy sum of $20,000 to 30,000. Shame the trees are picky about where they grow and thrive, they are only grown commercially in Calabria, Italy’s toe, and Sierra Leone. Because my rudimentary grasp of math and economies tells me there is 5000 bucks waiting to be made on my 1/4 hectare.   

30 (ish) Ways to Cook Your Asparagus

Asparagus has been at the grocery for a few months now. You can follow its extended season on a map as it winds its way up the pacific side of the Americas. The first crop arrives from Chile around Christmas. The trade moves up to Peru in the first month of the year. By early spring, asparagus is getting trucked in from Mexico – lowering the price and expanding the availability from west coast urban centers to, you know those other places people live.

This is good/bad. Food miles divided by availability minus undercutting local growers ability to grow and price competitively – food has gotten to be a hard math. Although it makes locavores weep each time I say things like this, I like having, fresh, affordable asparagus in the markets from early spring to the end of Michigan’s season in late summer. Mexican asparagus is a buck-ninety-ninety per pound at the store. This morning it was 39 degrees and raining, the local crop hasn’t arrived even though I know today’s asparagus undercuts the regional grower’s premium for being first to market.

This geographical extension of the season means I get to eat my favorite veg a little more often and gone are the days when the season was so short that I’d get 3 to 5 meals out of the veg and move on. NowI have to stretch the culinary horizons. I start the season the same, saffron risotto and chopped asparagus. Spears folded in the center of an omelet made of really good farm eggs, then there is the annual blini’s topped with tips, morels & garlic shoots that have been sautéed in butter. Good years always see a few spears making there way for an asparagus sandwich - tossed in baguette with melted brie and red onion that has been macerated in vinegar = pretty good. Even though I haven’t made this in a few years, Marcella Hazan’s asparagus bundled in a slice of prosciutto with fontina roasted in the over was a spring favorite for a long time.

Now with the extended season there is time for grilled with polenta wedges, sautéed with sesame oil and black sesame seeds, steamed with butter and lemon zest, or not as horrifically wrong as it sounds; microwaved, then served with a vinaigrette – mustard or sesame ginger. Not to get all eggy about stuff, there is the option of the egg sauces of aioli, hollandaise or mayo? Or hard boiled eggs, cumin and paprika, rolled in crepes

The trick to serving asparagus as a main course is finding flavors that hold up to the vegetable’s bold flavor without overwhelming it. Like red Thai curry, beef and asparagus; with or without peanut sauce and rice, rolled in a flattened (scaloppini’d) chicken breasts or same idea but instead roll the asparagus in a thick slice of ham and top with a mustard sauce.

Because a life without carbohydrates is no life at all, asparagus can be part of creamy garlic sauce and fettuccini, orzo with lemon dressing, soba, bulgur, sweet potato or rice vermicelli or not from a box mac & cheese - Cheddar is a cheese but not all cheeses are cheddar…

On the fishy side, asparagus can go with crab cakes, trout and asparagus, sauce tuna, shrimp, ginger and asparagus, smoked salmon, asparagus and corn. And if need be, there is soup and salad: Chicken soup, rice and asparagus soup with lemongrass, wild rice salad or lentil, asparagus & goat cheese salad.

Now I must cook some lunch. 

April is National Poetry Month

There should be a month about food or something. 

Sorry, I haven't blogged at you too much recently, but the creative energy and time, just time has gone into Carl Adamshick dot com. 

You might remember Carl from such posts as this one, The Poetry of Poems. Well his book is set to be released and there will be a party with beer, head shaped cakes and poet themed cocktails. That is in 2 weeks Sunday April, 17th.

For Portlanders there is a chance to enjoy, beer, food and to a certain extent poetry.

For the rest of you, there will be a chance to read about it.