Best Food Writing 2010 (29 page)

AS SOON AS I STARTED to assemble the ingredients for my own first batch of milk toast, these same qualities began to assert themselves, starting with the loaf of bread. The artisan bakery where we get ours makes several wonderful loaves, but none of them seemed the thing for milk toast.

I had in mind the sort of old-fashioned loaf that grandma’s grandma used to make, rectangular below and puffed out above, with a thin brown crust and a soft but chewy (and flavorful!) interior. This, of course, is what store-bought bread generally looks like, but never really is. Besides, it’s all sliced, and I wanted to cut my own to just the right thickness.

I went to our local supermarket and, for the first time in years, moseyed down the bread aisle. The variety was simultaneously astonishing and depressing. What was once, all on its own, considered the staff of life was now scattered with flax seeds and sold as a nutritional supplement. Most of it was sheer fakery—but, even worse, a few dense and sprout-riddled loaves might have been exactly that.

Matt suggested that I try the other, more conventional bakery in town. There I found what they called a “French loaf,” although I doubt any bakery in France offers anything like it. This was a lazy sort of
pain de mie,
baked like ordinary bread rather than in the traditional closed pan that produces a loaf with a perfect rectangular shape and very tender crust.

However, “mie” means “crumb”—
pain de mie
has an interior that is tasty, tender, and moist, yet firm enough for slicing—and so had this bread, too. It was, essentially, a loaf of good old-fashioned white bread, meant for slicing, not pulling apart with your fingers, and just the thing for making milk toast.

As to the milk, we live in an area that still has local dairies, including one with all Jersey cows. Getting first-rate milk is no problem at all (if we wanted, we could get it home delivered in glass bottles!)

It was time to fire up the toaster.

By now, of course, I had perused many, many milk toast recipes, all of them similar but few of them the same. There were those who sweetened their milk toast and those who salted and peppered it (or both). There were those who buttered their toast—some on one side and others on both sides—and those who buttered their toast
and
melted butter in the hot milk. There were a few who included a hot oven as part of their method, most elaborately by bake-toasting pullet-sized morsels of bread and then sopping them with the hot milk.

I decided, however, that being naturally fussy about my milk, my bread, and the method of toasting it was plenty enough without any fancy flourishes (although the careful reader will note that some tagged along anyway).

SETTING THE SCENE. I didn’t invite Matt to join me when I made milk toast for the first time, fearing the whole exercise would teeter over into paralyzing self-consciousness. In the future, when she is in a blue mood, I can surprise her with a bowl of it. Or, even better, hint around that, when I’m in a similar condition, she might surprise
me
with it.

In any case, I made milk toast on a morning when she was away at work. I laid my place at the table, set out the (unsalted) butter and sliced some of it into pats so these could soften a bit while I made the toast. Next to it, I put a small bowl of coarse sea salt and the pepper grinder.

MAKING THE TOAST. I sliced the bread as thick as I could and still have it fit into the toaster slot. I then set the toaster at its lowest setting and pushed the toast down three or four times, rotating it a quarter turn before each descent. This got the slice toasted evenly all over, something no toaster seems capable of doing on its own.

HEATING THE MILK. I have bad luck heating milk on the stove. I close my eyes for
one second
to moisten my eyeballs and, when I open them, the milk has boiled over and burned on the stove into a plaque of unremovable scum. So I poured the milk (about one cup) into a small pitcher and heated it in the microwave in thirty-second increments. It was plenty hot after three rounds. To further things along, I put the pitcher into the shallow bowl in which I planned to eat the milk toast, and heated this as well.

ASSEMBLING THE DISH. I sat down at the table, put one of the precut pats of butter onto the center of the piece of toast, and slowly poured the steaming milk over it, thus melting the butter and letting it spread over the top of the toast (and leaving a nice soft mass of it in the center, perfect for dipping). I did this a splash at a time, waiting until the toast had completely absorbed it. I wanted my milk toast to be sopped to perfection, but still capable of being eaten with a fork. The last thing I wanted was mush.

With pepper, I was prodigal; with salt, a miser. Despite the unsalted butter, I needed the merest pinch, sprinkled on each bite after I neatly cut it out with the edge of my fork.

THE EATING. It is tempting to become dewy-eyed at this moment—the steamy scent of the hot milk mingling with the toasty, wheaty aroma of the toast as the golden pat of butter liquifies, the fork tines slip into pulpy softness—tempting, because all these things are true.

But that would make milk toast seem like something you eat because it’s delicious, and you don’t, really. If you let the weight of the moment rest on that idea, you’ll be disappointed. Milk toast is not a gourmet fantasy. It is about something else.

Usually, when I like what’s set on my plate, I can’t stop eating until it’s all gone. I don’t like that this is so, but there it is. Milk toast, however, is as nothing if eaten like this. You surrender to it and not the other way around.You don’t step into a grove of cedars and huff and puff to get your lungs full of that vivifying resinous smell. Gasping spoils everything; the point is to just stand there and quietly breathe.

Milk toast is, at its best, quietly absorbing sustenance. It comforts; it gently sets you adrift in a pleasant, contemplative mist. In fact, it’s like having a cat sleeping in your lap—you only really enjoy it when you’re in the mood, but then there’s nothing quite like it.

That, I think, is why the dish is “rather special”; it is “strangely popular” because those who aren’t on its wavelength will never get what it’s all about. We each have to find our own way to milk toast, and so no two recipes for it will ever be exactly the same.

Rôties À la Crème ou au Lait

Picayune Creole Cook Book
(1901)

6 slices of Bread.
1 Pint of Hot Cream or Milk.
1 Tablespoonful of Butter.

Toast the bread nicely, and butter well on both sides. Lay in a dish, and pour over hot milk. Serve hot.

Or, heat one pint of cream, add one large tablespoonful of butter, and pour over the hot toast. Slightly stale bread may be utilized in this way. This is a great supper dish among the Creole plantation homes of Louisiana.

Milk Toast

Child Care Part 1. The Preschool Age,
Mrs. Max West (1918)

Put on the table hot crisp toast or twice-baked bread (see below) and a pitcher of hot milk, slightly salted. One-fourth teaspoonful of salt to a cupful of milk is sufficient. Pour the milk over the toast as needed, using hot bowls or deep saucers for serving. This is the easiest way of serving milk toast, and, if care is taken to have all the dishes hot and to salt the milk, it is usually acceptable.

Twice-Baked Bread.
Bread cut or torn into small pieces and heated in a very slow oven until thoroughly dried and very delicately browned is good food for children.... The advantage of tearing instead of cutting the bread is that it makes it lighter in texture and easier to eat. The crust should be torn into pieces about 2 inches wide. The inside of an ordinary loaf of bread will make 16 pieces of conventional size. Tear first across the loaf and then tear each half into eight pieces.... It is well to keep the crusts separate, as otherwise they are likely to get too brown.

Milk Toast

Stillmeadow Kitchen,
Gladys Taber (1947)

I am one of those queer people who really like milk toast. Toast bread lightly, spread it with butter, and pour over it 1 cup of hot milk, add a big piece of butter, salt and pepper. Eat in a thoughtful mood. By tomorrow, you will want a poached egg dropped on it too.

Baked Milk Toast

Marion Harland’s Complete Cook Book
(1906)

Trim off the crust from slices nearly half an inch thick; toast to a uniform light brown. Have on the range a pan of boiling water, salted. As you remove each slice from the toaster dip quickly into the boiling water and lay in a well-buttered pudding dish, buttering the toast while smoking hot and salting each slice. When all the soaked toast is packed into place, cover with scalding milk in which has been melted a tablespoonful of butter. Cover closely and bake fifteen minutes.

This is so far superior to the usual insipid preparation of milk toast that no one who has eaten the first can enjoy the poor parody.

Corn Bread Milk Toast

Maggie Waldron,
Cold Spaghetti At Midnight

When you have a stray piece of corn bread, and the world is too much with you.

Split 1 large square of corn bread or 1 corn muffin and toast under the broiler. Spread with 1 tablespoon of butter and place in the center of a big warm bowl. Add 1½ cups of hot milk and sprinkle with nutmeg. (Serves 1.)

Milk Toast

M.F.K. Fisher, “The Midnight Egg and Other Restorers,”
Bon Appétit
(1978)

To make a restful, nourishing, delicious Milk Toast, on a cold night or any time at all when solitude seems indicated, warm a generous bowl while making two slices of toast. The bread should be firm and hearty, but not strongly flavored as is rye or pumpernickel.

Warm two cups of creamy milk, just to the simmer point. Butter the toast generously and cut into cubes. Season the milk with salt, pepper and paprika if desired. Put the bits of buttery toasted bread in the warm bowl, pour the seasoned milk over them, and walk gently to wherever you have decided to feel right in your skin.

Cream Toast

Margery Taylor and Frances McNaught
, The Early Canadian Galt Cook Book
(1898)

Cream toast is a delightful, old-fashioned supper dish, not at all like its modern substitute, milk toast. Heat the cream by setting the dish containing it in a dish of boiling water. When the cream is thoroughly heated, salt it and drop thin slices of delicate brown toast in it. When all the toast is dipped, serve what hot cream remains in a gravy boat. As the toast is served, pour a little cream from the boat over it. This toast must be served very hot.

The Recipe File

WHAT’S THE RECIPE?: OUR HUNGER FOR COOKBOOKS

By Adam Gopnik From
The New Yorker

New Yorker
cultural essayist Adam Gopnik is a wonderful companion for armchair travels through the food world. Something tickles his curiosity—a stack of cookbooks, say—and before you know it, we’re off on an enthusiast’s joy ride.

A
man and a woman lie in bed at night in the short hour between kid sleep and parent sleep, turning down page corners as they read. She is leafing through a fashion magazine, he through a cookbook. Why they read these things mystifies even the readers. The closet and the cupboard are both about as full as they’re going to get, and though we can credit the fashion reader with at least wanting to know what is in fashion when she sees it, what can the recipe reader possibly be reading for? The shelf of cookbooks long ago overflowed, so that the sad relations and failed hopes (“Monet’s Table,” “A Drizzle of Honey: The Lives and Recipes of Spain’s Secret Jews”) now are stacked horizontally, high up. The things he knows how to make that are actually in demand are as fixed as any cocktail pianist’s set list, and for a clientele of children every bit as conservative as the barflies around that piano: make Parmesan-crusted chicken—the “Feelings” of food—every night and they would be delighted. Yet the new cookbooks show up in bed, and the corners still go down.

Vicarious pleasure? More like deferred frustration. Anyone who cooks knows that it is in following recipes that one first learns the anticlimax of the actual, the perpetual disappointment of the thing achieved. I learned it as I learned to bake. When I was in my early teens, the sick yearning for sweets that adolescents suffer drove me, in afternoons taken off from school, to bake, which, miraculously, meant just doing what the books said and hoping to get what they promised to yield. I followed the recipes as closely as I could: dense Boston cream pie, Rigó Jancsi slices,
Sacher Torte
with apricot jam between the layers. The potential miracle of the cookbook was immediately apparent: you start with a feeling of greed, find a list of rules, assemble a bunch of ingredients, and then you have something to be greedy about. You begin with the ache and end with the object, where in most of the life of appetites—courtship, marriage—you start with the object and end with the ache.

Yet, if the first thing a cadet cook learns is that words can become tastes, the second is that a space exists between what the rules promise and what the cook gets. It is partly that the steps between—the melted chocolate’s gleam, the chastened, improved look of the egg yolks mixed with sugar—are often more satisfying than the finished cake. But the trouble also lies in the same good words that got you going. How do you know when a thing “just begins to boil”? How can you be sure that the milk has scorched but not burned? Or touch something too hot to touch, or tell firm peaks from stiff peaks? How do you define “chopped”? At the same time as I was illicitly baking in the afternoons, I was learning non-recipe main-course cooking at night from my mother, a scientist by day, who had long been off-book, as they say in the theatre, and she would show, not tell: how you softened the onions, made them golden, browned them. This practice got you deeper than the words ever could.

Handed-down wisdom and worked-up information remain the double piers of a cook’s life. The recipe book always contains two things: news of how something is made, and assurance that there’s a way to make it, with the implicit belief that if I know how it is done I can show you how to do it. The premise of the recipe book is that these two things are naturally balanced; the secret of the recipe book is that they’re not. The space between learning the facts about how something is done and learning how to do it always turns out to be large, at times immense. What kids make depends on what moms know: skills, implicit knowledge, inherited craft, buried assumptions, finger know-how that no recipe can sum up. The recipe is a blueprint but also a red herring, a way to do something and a false summing up of a living process that can be handed on only by experience, a knack posing as a knowledge. We say “What’s the recipe?” when we mean “How do you do it?” And though we want the answer to be “Like this!” the honest answer is “Be me!” “What’s the recipe?” you ask the weary pro chef, and he gives you a weary-pro-chef look, since the recipe is the totality of the activity, the real work. The recipe is to spend your life cooking.

Yet the cookbooks keep coming, and we continue to turn down their pages: “The Asian Grandmothers Cookbook,” “The Adaptable Feast,” the ones with disingenuously plain names—”How to Roast a Lamb: New Greek Classic Cooking” (a good one, in fact)—and the ones with elaborately nostalgic premises, like “Dining on the B. & O.: Recipes and Sidelights from a Bygone Age.” Once-familiar things depart from their pages silently, like Minerva’s owls. “Yield,” for instance, a word that appeared at the top of every recipe in every cookbook that my mother owned—“Yield: six portions,” or twelve, or twenty—is gone. Maybe it seemed too cold, too technical. In any case, the recipe no longer yields; it merely serves. “Makes six servings” or “Serves four to six as part of an appetizer” is all you get.

Other good things go. Clarified butter (melted butter with the milk solids skimmed and strained) has vanished—Graham Kerr, the Galloping Gourmet, once used it like holy water—while emulsified butter (melted butter with a little water whisked in), thanks to Thomas Keller’s sponsorship, plays an ever-larger role. The cult of the cooking vessel—the wok, the tagine, the Dutch oven, the smoker, the hibachi, the Tibetan kiln or the Inuit ice oven or whatever—seems to be over. Paula Wolfert has a new book devoted to clay-pot cooking, but it feels too ambitious in advance; we have tried too many other modish pots, and know that, like Elvis’s and Michael Jackson’s chimps, after their hour is done they will live out their years forgotten and alone, on the floor of the closet, alongside the fondue forks and the spice grinder and the George Foreman grill. Even the imagery of cooking has changed. Sometime in the past decade or so, the actual eating line was breached. Now the cooking magazines and the cookbooks are filled with half-devoured dishes and cut-open vegetables. Michael Psilakis’s fine Greek cookbook devotes an entire page to a downbeat still-life of torn-off artichoke leaves lying in a pile; the point is not to entice the eater but to ennoble the effort.

WITH THEIR TORN LEAVES and unyielding pages, cookbooks have two overt passions right now: one is simplicity, the other is salt. The chef ’s cookbook from the fancy place has been superseded by the chef ’s cookbook from the fancy place without the fancy-place food. David Waltuck, of the ever to be mourned Chanterelle, started this trend with his “Staff Meals,” and now we have Thomas Keller’s “Ad Hoc at Home,” and, from Mark Peel, of the Los Angeles hot spot Campanile, “New Classic Family Dinners.” (“Every single recipe was tested in Peel’s own home kitchen—where he has only one strainer, just like the rest of us, and no kitchen staff to clean up after him.”) The simplicity is in part a reaction to the cult of complexity of Spain’s Ferran Adrià school of molecular cooks, with their cucumber foam and powdered octopus. Reformations make counterreformations as surely as right makes left; every time someone whitewashes a church in Germany, someone else paints angels on a ceiling in Rome. But simplicity remains the most complicated of all concepts. I have in one month stumbled over six simple recipes for making ragù or Bolognese—plain spaghetti sauce, as it used to be known, when there was only one kind—with chicken livers or without, diced chuck roast or hamburger, white wine or red. Yet all movements in cooking believe themselves to be movements toward greater simplicity. (Even the molecular gastronomes believe that they are truly elemental, breaking things down to the atomic level.) Curnonsky, the greatest of the interwar gourmands, was famous for preferring the cooking of the provinces and of grandmothers to the cuisine of restaurant chefs, and the result was such monuments of simplicity as Tournedos Curnonsky: filet of beef with grilled tomatoes, poached bone marrow, and cognac-port-and-black-truffle sauce.

Simplicity is the style, but salt the ornamental element—the idea of tasting flights of salt being a self-satirizing notion that Swift couldn’t have come up with. The insistence on the many kinds of salt—not merely sea salt and table salt but hand-harvested fleur de sel, Himalayan red salt, and Hawaiian pink salt—is everywhere, and touching, because, honestly, it all tastes like salt. And now everyone brines. Brining, the habit of dunking meat in salty water for a bath of a day or so, seems to have first reappeared out of the koshering past, in
Cook’s Illustrated
, sometime in the early nineties, as a way of dealing with the dry flesh of the modern turkey, and then spread like, well, ocean water in a tsunami, until now both Keller and Peel are happy to brine everything: pork roasts, chicken breasts, shrimp, duck.

Although brining is defended with elaborate claims about tenderness, what it really does is make food taste salty, and all primates like the taste of salt. That’s a feature, not a bug; we’re doing what our peasant ancestors did, making meat into ham. Salted food demands a salty sweet, and we read that in Spain recently one connoisseur had “a chocolate ganache coated in bread floating in a small pool of olive oil with fleur de sel sprinkled on it,” while we can now make pecan-and-salt caramel-cheesecake chocolate mousse with olive oil and flaky-salt sticky-peanut cookie bars for ourselves.

THE SALT FETISH HAS, I think, another and a deeper cause: we want to bond with the pro cooks. Most of what pro cooks have that home cooks don’t is what plantation owners used to have: high heat and lots of willing slaves. (The slaves seem happy, anyway, until they escape and write that testimonial, or start that cooking blog.) But the pro cooks also
salt
a lot more than feels right to an amateur home cook; both the late Bernard Loiseau and the Boston cook Barbara Lynch have confessed that hyper-seasoning, and, in particular, high salting, is a big part of what makes pro cooks’ food taste like pro cooks’ food. But the poor home cook, without hope of an eight-hundred-degree brick oven, and lucky if he can press-gang a ten-year-old into peeling carrots, can still salt hard, and so salt, its varieties and use, becomes a luxury replacement, a sign of seriousness even when you don’t have the real tools of seriousness at hand.

The urge to meld identities with the pros is tied to a desire to get something out of a cookbook besides another recipe. For beneath those conscious enthusiasms and trends lies a new and deeper uncertainty in the relation between the recipe book and its reader. In this the Great Age of Disaggregation, all the old forms are being smashed apart and their contents spilled out like piñatas at a birthday party. The cookbook isn’t spared. The Internet has broken what once seemed a natural tie, between the recipe and the cookbook, as it has broken the tie between the news story and the newspaper. You can find pretty much any recipe you want online now. If you need a recipe for mustard-shallot sauce or boeuf à la mode, you enter a few search terms, and there it is.

So the old question “What’s the recipe for?” gives way to “What’s the cookbook for?,” which turns it, like everything else these days, toward the memoir, the confessional, the recipe as self-revelation. Barbara Lynch begins her book “Stir” with a preface that sounds like the opening passages of “GoodFellas”: “We were poor, fiercely Irish, and extremely loyal. The older boys I knew grew up to be policemen, politicians and criminals (often a mix of the three).... If I ever had thoughts at all as to what I might be when I grew up, they were modest ones. I might have pictured myself running a bar (in Southie) or opening a sub shop (in Southie). But having a restaurant of my own on Beacon Hill? No way. In fact, if a fortune teller had told me at fourteen what good things were in store for me, I would have laughed in her face and told her where she could shove such bullshit. . . . I marvel that any of us made it out of there without winding up in jail or the morgue.” Michael Psilakis, in “How to Roast a Lamb,” includes his own childhood traumas: “As I sat on top of the lamb, watching it struggle to free itself, as if in slow motion my father came up behind me, reached down over my right shoulder with a hunting knife, grabbed the lamb’s head and ears, and, in one swift motion, slit the lamb’s throat.... Blood shot out of the lamb like water from a high-pressure hose.”You never had a moment like that with Julia Child or Joseph Wechsberg.

ANOTHER ANSWER TO THE QUESTION “What good is the cookbook?” lies in what might be called the grammatical turn: the idea that what the cookbook should supply is the rules, the deep structure—a fixed, underlying grammar that enables you to
use
all the recipes you find. This grammatical turn is available in the popular “Best Recipe” series in
Cook’s Illustrated
, and in the “Cook’s Bible” of its editor, Christopher Kimball, in which recipes begin with a long disquisition on various approaches, ending with the best (and so brining was born); in Michael Ruhlman’s “The Elements of Cooking,” with its allusion to Strunk & White’s usage guide; and, most of all, in Mark Bittman’s indispensable new classic “How to Cook Everything,” which, though claiming “minimalism” of style, is maximalist in purpose—not a collection of recipes for all occasions but a set of techniques for all time.