Best Food Writing 2010 (28 page)

To solve the first problem, my initial thought was to start the potatoes in cold water, and slowly bring it up to a simmer. My hope was that by doing this, they’d spend enough time under the 170°F cutoff point to improve their structure adequately. No dice. The potatoes were certainly better than ones dunked straight into the fryer, but they didn’t come close to the originals. Next I tried adding a measured amount of boiling water to a pot containing the cut potatoes. I calculated exactly how much water I’d need in order for it to equilibrate to 170°F. It worked a little better, but the water temperature dropped off too quickly for it to be effective. Was I gonna have to break out the beer cooler for this one? There had to be another way.

That’s when I thought—perhaps there is another way to strengthen pectin without having to rely on some fickle enzyme (I’ve never liked enzymes anyway), and it struck me: apple pie.

What’s this got to do with french fries? Well everyone who’s ever baked an apple pie knows that different apples cook differently. Some retain their shape, while others turn to mush. The difference largely has to do with their acidity. Thus super tart apples like Granny Smith will stay fully intact, while sweeter apples like a Macoun will almost completely dissolve. Just like a potato, apple cells are held together by pectin. Moral of the story: acid slows the breakdown of pectin.

What if rather than trying to fiddle with temperature, I just relied on the use of acid to help the potatoes keep their structure?

I tried bringing two pots of cut potatoes to a boil side by side, the first with plain water, and the second with water spiked with vinegar at a ratio of one tablespoon per quart. [ . . . ] The fries boiled in plain water disintegrated, making them nearly impossible to pick up. When I added them to the hot oil, they broke apart even further. On the other hand, those boiled in the vinegared water remained perfectly intact, even after boiling for a full ten minutes. When fried, they had fabulously crisp crusts with tiny, bubbly, blistered surfaces that stayed crisp even when they were completely cool. As for the flavor, if I tasted really hard, I could pick up a faint vinegary undertone, though I wouldn’t have if I didn’t know it was there. Even knowing it was there, it wasn’t unpleasant at all. After all, I’m used to putting my fries in ketchup or mayo, both of which contain plenty of acid. [ . . .]

Getting Inside the Fluffy Interior

Now that I’d perfected the crust, the final issue to deal with was that of the interior. One last question remained: how to maximize the flavor of the interior. In order to stay fluffy and not gummy, a lot of the interior moisture needs to be expelled in the cooking process, so my goal should be to make this evaporation as easy as possible. I figure that so far, by cooking it all the way to boiling point, I’m doing pretty much the right thing—the more cooked the potatoes are, the more the cell structure breaks down, and the easier it is for water to be expelled. To confirm this, I cooked three batches of potatoes, starting each in a pot of cold, vinegared water, and bringing them up to various final temperatures (170°F, 185°F, and 212°F) before draining and double-frying them. Not surprisingly, the boiled potatoes had the best internal structure. Luckily, they were the easiest to make as well.

But was there anything more I could do? I thought back to those McDonald’s fries and realized a vital step that I had neglected to test: freezing. Every batch of McDonald’s fries is frozen before being shipped out to the stores. I always figured this step was for purely economic reasons, but perhaps there was more to it?

I tried freezing half a batch of fries before frying them and tasted them side-by-side against the other half. [ . . . ] The improvement was undeniable. The frozen fries had a distinctly fluffier interior, while the unfrozen ones were still ever-so-slightly gummy. It makes perfect sense. Freezing the potatoes causes their moisture to convert to ice, forming sharp, jagged crystals. These crystals damage the cell structure of the potato, making it easier for them to be released once they are heated and convert to steam. The best part? Because freezing actually improves them, I can do the initial blanching and frying steps in large batches, freeze them, and have a constant supply of ready-to-fry potatoes right in my freezer just like Ronald himself!

I know it’s bad form to toot your own horn, but I’m simply amazed that these fries have been coming out of my own kitchen. I’ve been eating fries in various shades of good or bad constantly for the past few days, and I’m absolutely sick of them, yet I am still eating them even as I sit here and type. I really hope my wife doesn’t mind greasy keyboards. You never know what’s gonna set her off.

For instance—she gets mad when I say things like that about her on completely public forums. Go figure.

Perfect French Fries

serves four

Note: Potatoes can be frozen after step 2. To freeze potatoes, place entire sheet tray in freezer. After fully frozen, place in Ziploc bags, press out air, and freeze for up to 2 months. If cooking straight from frozen, do not cook more than ¼ batch at a time unless you have a large vessel for deep frying, as oil temperature will drop too precipitously.

Ingredients

2 pounds russet potatoes (about 4 large), peeled and cut into
¼-inch by ¼-inch fries (keep potatoes stored in a bowl of
water)
2 tablespoons distilled white vinegar
Kosher salt
2 quarts peanut oil

Procedure

1. Place potatoes and vinegar in saucepan and add 2 quarts of water and 2 tablespoons of salt. Bring to a boil over high heat. Boil for 10 minutes. Potatoes should be fully tender, but not falling apart. Drain and spread on paper towel-lined rimmed baking sheet. Allow to dry for five minutes.

2. Meanwhile, heat oil in 5-quart Dutch oven or large wok over high heat to 400°F. Add ⅓ of fries to oil (oil temperature should drop to around 360°F). Cook for 50 seconds, agitating occasionally with wire mesh spider, then remove to second paper-towel lined rimmed baking sheet. Repeat with remaining potatoes (working in two more batches), allowing oil to return to 400°F after each addition. Allow potatoes to cool to room temperature, about 30 minutes. Continue with step 3, or for best results, freeze potatoes at least over night, or up to 2 months.

3. Return oil to 400°F over high heat. Fry half of potatoes until crisp and light golden brown, about 3 ½ minutes, adjusting heat to maintain at around 360°F. Drain in a bowl lined with paper towels and season immediately with kosher salt. Cooked fries can be kept hot and crisp on a wire rack set on a sheet tray in a 200°F oven while second batch is cooked. Serve immediately.

RATHER SPECIAL AND STRANGELY POPULAR: A MILK TOAST EXEMPLARY

By John Thorne From
Rather Special and Strangely Popular: A Milk Toast Exemplary

John Thorne generally practices his culinary archeology—resurrecting old recipes while spinning a kitchen yarn or two—in his homey newsletter Simple Cooking. This essay, however, was published in an endearingly old-fashioned format: a tiny hand-printed limited-edition booklet.

Elspeth’s Milk Toast

This recipe is rather special and strangely popular. Toast a few slices of very thinly cut bread. Butter lightly and dust with salt and pepper. Put in a soup plate and keep hot. Add enough hot milk to soften, but not to swamp. Serve at once.

—MOLLY KEAN’S Nursery Cooking

M
olly Keane is a noted Irish novelist and playwright. I had bought her book on nursery food for a lark, and was leafing through it in that idle way one does, nodding to familiar friends and sizing up potential new ones, when my eyes fell on “Elspeth’s Milk Toast.” I read the introductory sentence, then the short recipe, then faltered as I moved to turn the page.

Whatever, I wondered, could she mean by “rather special” and, more, by “strangely popular”? I had never eaten milk toast, but I was aware of it—as one is, I guess, growing up in New England . . . or, at least, spending time with old New England cookbooks. I certainly understood enough to know that this recipe was exactly—no more, no less—what I would expect a milk toast recipe to be.

On the other hand, I had no reason to think that Molly Keane was deluded. Maybe, I thought, she was onto something that I was unaccountably missing. I put the book down and went over to the bookcase that holds our not insignificant collection of English, Scottish, and Irish cookbooks, to see what they had to say on the subject.

Then came my next surprise. I looked through old ones and new ones, books as magisterial as the original
Mrs. Beeton
and as specialized as
The English Breakfast
, Kaori O’Connor’s fascinating collection of facsimile Victorian cookbooks on that subject, to find . . .
nothing
.

The closest I came was a recipe in Miss Allen’s oddly conceived
Breakfast Dishes for Every Morning of Three Months
(1884).

Bread and Milk

Cut the bread into dice, put them into a basin; boil the milk, and when boiling pour it over the bread. Cover the cup up for five minutes, and then stand it by the fire for five more. Sugar to taste.

This recipe, unappealing as it is (not only doesn’t it sound very good, but one gets the feeling it isn’t meant to be so. Analeptic, maybe; tasty, not at all), gave me a hint, and some further searching confirmed it. The British have always eaten milk-sopped bread, and it doesn’t need be so punishing. Samuel Pepys, for instance, writes in his diary about happily dining on “Creame and brown bread.”
¹⁶
However, when it comes to milk
toast
, we are speaking pure American.
¹⁷

milk toast
n. U.S. Toast softened in milk.... Martin Amis, London Fields: Milk toast, thought Guy. An American dish, served with honey or syrup.

—Oxford English Dictionary

According to Stuart Berg Flexner in
I Hear America Talking
, his popular history of our linguistic ways, the phrase “milk toast” is American and began appearing in the 1820s. Our collection of old American cookbooks doesn’t really start until the mid-1800s, but milk toast does turn up in those, and continues to do so with increasing frequency right through the rest of the century.

Unfortunately, these recipes are uniformly nasty and would have killed my interest in the dish permanently—had it not been for Google Books and a bit of good luck. One of my early “milk toast” searches there ferreted out a passage from
The Wabash: or Adventures of an English Gentleman’s Family in the Interior of America
(1855). In it, the author tells of encountering milk toast at a breakfast served at Congress Hall (a hotel) in Saratoga Springs.

Hot rolls of every description and numberless little dishes of sausages covered the table, together with large platters of milk toast. This delicacy is made of slices of toast, buttered and sprinkled with pepper and salt, and laid in a dish of warm milk, which serves as a sauce to the rest: most of us were very fond of this American toast.

Up until that moment I had associated milk toast with the nursery and sick bed of yesteryear. As a toast lover, I welcomed any dish that put it to good use, but curiosity and appetite are only occasionally twins. When I set out on this search I had no intention of trying milk toast, and certainly no plans to write about it.

However, there was both a contagious relish in the description of those platters of milk toast, as well as an element of complete surprise. Where we today would have expected this foreign visitor to fall into rapture about our griddle cakes or hoe cakes or flap-jacks, here he was ecstatic over . . . milk toast?

This fascination was enough to not only make me want to try the dish myself but carry me through the profound disappointment of discovering that
all
the early “milk toast” recipes in those aforesaid old cookbooks were for toast sopped in
white sauce
—milk thickened with flour or cornstarch.

This is a
terrible
thing, and why it should be the case here, I simply don’t know. I suspect the perpetual and tiresome gentility of most period cookbook authors, forever preferring the luscious thickness of a sauce, however faux, over honest plain milk or, more to the point, pricey and perishable sweet cream.

So it is that flour is added to the milk toast recipe in every edition of
The Fannie Farmer Cookbook
until Marion Cunningham, newly at the helm, removed it from the 12th edition. Years later, in her
Breakfast Book
, she would lament:

Why in the world did we ever abandon milk toast? Although it sounds deceptively bland and dull, it isn’t; and as the Victorians discovered, it can revive the peaked or sad. Nourishing and soul-satisfying, milk toast will banish the blues.

I suggest she turn around and point an accusatory finger at her predecessors—then give them a rap on the knuckles from me.

The earliest recipe I found for milk toast without this fiddling was in
Mrs. Rorer’s New Cook Book
(1902). Her version is simple and to the point, and—see the caution—gives the dish the right sort of attentive respect.

Milk Toast is made by pouring scalding hot milk over dry toast. A tablespoonful of butter may be added to each quart of milk. To prevent scorching, heat the milk in a double boiler. Caution.—The main point is to pour the milk over the crisp warm toast at the very last moment, and serve quickly.

If Fannie Farmer had been so wise, this American classic might not have become the forgotten dish it is today.

EVEN SO, real milk toast was never lost. Search the vernacular records and you will find such memories as those recorded by the Southern herbalist A. L. Tommie Bass, born in 1908. In
Plain Southern Food
, he recalls that when his father had “a bad stomach,” he’d ask for some milk toast to soothe it.

Mother would first brown the bread and then she would put it in a bowl or something, and pour the milk over it, and add the sugar. Now, the way they made it in the army, why, they toasted the bread and dipped it in honey and milk, and put it back in the stove and browned it, you know. They didn’t add spice, but some folks does.

If you think about it, you can’t imagine Tommie Bass’s mother making a white sauce to cover the toast—not because it would be too much trouble, but because it would be frivolous and wrong, for the same reason that a child prefers a mug of chicken noodle to one of cream of chicken soup. There is comfort and pleasure even in canned noodles, but there is none in murk.

Consider, from that perspective, the version of milk toast that Tommie Bass remembers from the army: toast dipped in honey and milk, then crisped up in the oven. The recipient can relish each step of its making, as that slab of toast gets tastier and tastier. By the time you sit down to eat it, you’re already half in a swoon.

When President James Garfield was shot by an assassin in 1881, he lingered on for months, for most of that time with a bullet lodged in his spine. He had a hard time keeping down solid food, so he was fed various meat broths, scraped raw beef, breast of woodcock,
koumiss
(fermented mare’s milk), rum and other spirits, and, almost always, milk toast. At one point,

the President said to Mrs. Garfield, who was sitting by his bedside, that he would like a piece of milk toast . . . Mrs. Garfield thereupon prepared the toast carefully herself, and the patient ate with apparent relish and enjoyment a piece about half as large as a man’s hand....

Once you’ve shaken off that last odd image, let your mind step away from dish to the scene itself: the failing patient and the comforting wife who prepares for him a dish that is easily and quickly made, soothing to eat, and preceded by the primal aromas of hot milk and toast.

All this becomes more potent still, when the recipient is present during the ritual of actually making the dish. And this is especially so if that person is a sleepy, hungry child.

Small matters often seem great to children. Now, I would not willingly forget how, when I was a little girl, dear Grandma Wayne used to tempt my poor appetite, of mornings, with
such
milk-toast as no one else, I was very sure, could ever make. I have never, to this day, outgrown the taste thus cultivated for it, and of- ten when I am feeling out of sorts, and nearly sick, my thoughts turn to the blessed time when “grandma” made milk-toast in a pint basin for me in the mornings of long ago....

—Arthur’s Illustrated Home Magazine (1874)

Even Mr. Toaster, who teaches the young heroine of Jane Eayre Fryer’s
The Mary Frances Cook Book
(1912) to make milk toast for her ill mother, seems to have had the same childhood experience. When Mary Frances has the toast ready to bring upstairs, he exclaims, “That’s right! That’s the way my grandmother made it,” and adds longingly, “That milk toast would taste awfully good.” (She politely offers him a bite, but he declines, confessing that anything he puts in his mouth falls right out behind, which is why he is so thin.)

Maggie Waldron, in
Cold Spaghetti At Midnight
, a book devoted to all sorts of spell-casting food, captures the milk toast ritual from the mother’s perspective.

The very name of milk toast brought comfort to my daughter Sara. Especially when I suggested it might hit the spot. She always had it in the same bowl, made exactly the same way. The bread had to be white and dense and nicely toasted, two slices for a serving, well buttered and sprinkled with cinnamon, with whole milk heated to simmering, and seasoned with salt and a generous grind of pepper. I watch in amazement as she goes through the same ritual with her own little girl.

For an experience to become a ritual, or at least possess the properties of one, the things involved must be few, so that their meaning is not diffused, and they must somehow assume a perceptible weight. They attain this partly from the reassurance that comes of being “ just so,” and partly by already possessing the solidity of the absolutely familiar.