Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation (26 page)

This bit of speculation was very much on my
mind during a recent Sunday afternoon with Samin, when we set out to make an ancient
Roman dish called
maiale al latte
—pork braised in milk. I was skeptical
about this one, and not only because it was so radically unkosher.
The fact that I eat pork should by now be well established, but there does seem
something slightly perverse about cooking it in milk, and I wondered if there might not
be some good practical reason behind the Old Testament’s taboo on mixing milk and
meat. But apparently not: The rabbinical commentators say that particular taboo falls
under the heading of “hukkim,” which are laws for which there is no obvious
explanation.

My guess? The kosher laws are all about
drawing and defending crisp lines of demarcation between various realms, and what line
is sharper than the one between life and death? You don’t mix a symbol of death,
such as animal flesh, with a symbol of life as powerful as mother’s milk. Also,
cooking meat in milk mingles the male realm of the hunt with the female realm of
nurturing—a taboo in many cultures. As the anthropologist Mary Douglas has written, a
rule against mixing meat and milk “honors the procreative function.”

Well, not today. “This is one of my
all-time favorite dishes,” Samin said, when I expressed my doubts about it.
“I know, it sounds really weird, and I have to prepare you: it looks sort of gross
when you’re cooking it. But I promise, it will be the most delicious, succulent
comfort food you’ve ever tasted in your life!”

As a cooking liquid, milk presents special
challenges. Of all the pot dishes we cooked, this one had to be watched the most
closely, lest the sugars in the milk begin to burn on the bottom of the pot. Yet, at the
same time,
maiale al latte
was also the very simplest recipe we’d made.
In fact, it can be written out in a sentence: Brown chunks of pork in butter; add some
milk, a few cloves of garlic, a handful of sage leaves, and the juice (and peel) of a
lemon; simmer for several hours. That’s it.
No soffritto?
I asked Samin.
No chopped onions?

“Nope. Weird, I know. But I think this
dish must be even older than soffritto is. It might even go back to Etruscan
times.”

The biggest challenge is keeping the milk at a
gentle simmer just below the boil—the braising liquid should merely “smile,”
as the French say, rather than bubble. So we peeked in at regular intervals, taking
advantage of the established fact that a watched pot will never boil. (Probably because
in order to watch you lift the lid, which drops the temperature.) After a while the milk
began to yellow slightly and form curds—and to look very much like baby vomit. Which is
not at all unlike what it was: warm milk that has curdled after having been exposed to
an acid. The age-old conceit of the cauldron as an external organ of digestion had never
seemed so apt, but that of course was precisely what was going on here, the proteins in
the milk being broken down and rearranged by the acids.

“I know, it’s sort of
disgusting,” Samin allowed. “But this is exactly what we want. You’ll
see, those curds are going to be super-delicious.”

And so they were, eventually. After several
hours the cooking liquid turned a gorgeous shade of ochre, and the golden curds no
longer looked like mistakes. The lemony milk had gone to work on the proteins in the
meat, breaking it down until it was so tender it fell apart at the prodding of a fork.
The meat was as succulent and tasty as Samin had promised, but it was the sauce that was
most incredible, with its creamy layers of savory and sweet. Actually, all five tastes
were represented in that silky liquid: besides the savory-saltiness from the meat and
the sweetness from the milk, the sauce bore traces of sourness and bitterness
contributed by the lemon peel and sage leaves, all of it harmoniously dispersed in the
milk. To concoct so much flavor from such a small number of ordinary ingredients—pork,
garlic, lemon, sage, and milk—seemed like a miracle of transubstantiation. “The
transformation which occurs in the cauldron is quintessential and wondrous, subtle and
delicate,” wrote a Chinese chef named I Yin in
239 B.C., no
doubt moved by a similar eating experience. “The mouth cannot express it in
words.”

Gaston Bachelard, the somewhat obtuse French
philosopher of the elements, wrote a book called
Water and Dreams
, in which he
attempts to “psychoanalyze” water and other liquids in much the same way he
attempted a psychoanalysis of fire. “For the imagination, everything that
flows
is water,” Bachelard writes in a chapter called “Maternal
Water and Feminine Water.” Water is always feminine in the imagination, he
contends, just as its opposite, fire, is always masculine. But he then goes a step
further, suggesting that, to the imagination, “all water is a kind of milk,”
though a moment later he confines this claim to the kinds of water we like: “More
precisely, every joyful drink is mother’s milk,” and, a bit farther on,
“water is a milk as soon as it is extolled fervently.”

As an example Bachelard offers an image of
the “nourishing waters” of the sea, in which the resident fish effortlessly
feed themselves from the particles of fat and other nutrients dispersed in the liquid
medium, floating along without care as if in amniotic fluids. “For the material
imagination, water, like milk, is a complete food.”

Bachelard has little else to say about food
in
Water and Dreams
, and nothing at all about stews and soups, but my guess is
that they would all qualify in his imagination as “milks”—as a medium much
like the nourishing sea, in which the fish, like babies on the breast, never want for
anything they need or desire. The nourishing liquid that forms in a pot dish starts out
as thin and transparent as water, then clouds and colors as it absorbs and disperses
substance and flavor, ending up eventually as a more or less complete and milklike food.
In
the imagination, at least, this kind of cooking qualifies as a
transubstantiation of matter, in this instance not of water into wine but of something
no less miraculous: water into milk.

“Stone Soup” is the ancient
parable of this everyday miracle, of turning water into food. In the story, which has
been told for centuries in many different cultures (sometimes as “Nail Soup”
or “Button Soup” or “Ax Soup”), some poor, hungry strangers come
to town with nothing but an empty pot. The villagers refuse them food, so the strangers
fill their pot with water, drop a stone in it, and put it on to boil in the town square.
This arouses the curiosity of the villagers, who ask the strangers what it is
they’re making.

“Stone soup,” the strangers
explain. “It’s delicious, as you’ll soon see, but it would taste even
better if you could spare a little garnish to help flavor it.” So one villager
gives them a sprig of parsley. Then another remembers she has some potato peelings at
home, which she fetches and drops into the pot. Someone else throws in an onion and a
carrot, and then another villager offers a bone. As the kettle boils, one villager after
another comes by to throw in a scrap of this, a bit of that, until the soup had
thickened into something nourishing and wonderful that everyone—villagers and
strangers—sits down to enjoy together at a great feast.

“You have given us the greatest
gift,” one of the village elders declares, “the secret of how to make soup
from stones.”

Braise
: the sound of that lovely
word itself suggests a certain slow unfolding, the final “z” sound trailing
off with no hard consonant to stop it. And in fact nothing is more important to a
successful braise than allowing it to take its sweet time. This period of simmering is
in many ways the easiest step of the process, since it requires nothing of the cook but
patience. As one wise cookbook advises when one is making a braise, “If you wonder
whether it’s done, it’s not.”

Yet most recipes try to rush the process,
promising to wrap things up and get the dish on the table in a couple of hours. These
days, recipes are steeped in the general sense of panic about time, and so have tried to
speed everything up, the better to suit “our busy lives.” In the case of
braises and stews, this usually means cranking up the cooking temperature, often to
325˚F or 350˚F.
Not
a good idea—in fact, not really braising at all. At those
temperatures, all but the fattiest meats will dry out and toughen, and the gradual
transformations and meldings of flavors, the chemical reactions and synergies of taste
that make so many slow-cooked foods so delicious, simply won’t have a chance to
unfold. Time is everything in these dishes, and in most cases, more is more. (The word
“braise” comes from a “brazier,” a metal cook pot sort of like a
Dutch oven that, since it is heated by placing a few coals on top of and below it, never
gets very hot.)

Harold McGee recommends never allowing a
braise to exceed the boiling point—212˚F. Even at 300˚F, liquid in a covered pot will
boil, and likely damage the meat. You want the cooking liquid merely to
“smile”—hatch a tiny bubble now and then, but never boil. McGee goes so
far as to suggest starting a braise at 200˚F with the lid off, which should bring the
liquid to around 120˚F, scarcely warmer than a hot tub. But two hours at such a
temperature “amounts to a period of accelerated aging” that tenderizes the
muscle by allowing enzymes to break down the connective tissues. (It also preserves the
reddish pigmentation of the meat even after it’s been completely cooked—a color
that the pit masters I met prized as proof of low and slow cooking.) After that, cover
the pot and bump the temperature to 250˚F, and keep it there until the meat has reached
180˚F. At that point, which could take three or four hours, all the collagen will have
melted into succulence, and the meat should tremble at the approach of a fork.

The first time I asked Samin how long some
dish we were cooking should cook, she offered this slightly gnomic answer: “Until
the meat relaxes.” Here was one way that slow cooking with water or fire had the
same effect. “When you’re cooking a muscle, which is basically what meat is,
first it tenses up like this”—she scrunched her shoulder, drew in a breath, and
grimaced—“but then, at a certain point, it suddenly unclenches”—she released
her shoulders and her breath—“so that when you touch it you can
feel
that
it has relaxed.
That’s
when slow-cooked meat is done.”

Time is the missing ingredient in our
recipes—and in our lives. I’m not going to pretend that the Ur-braise I’ve
described here can be made in just twenty minutes of “active cooking time,”
as the recipes now like to promise. There’s at least a half hour of that (chopping
onions, sweating the mirepoix, browning the meat, etc.), and probably more if you cook
the onions as slowly as they should be cooked. On the other hand, once that work is
done, you can put the pot on
low (or just throw everything in a
Crock-Pot) and do something else for the rest of the afternoon—make the sides and a
dessert, check your e-mail, take a walk—while the pot works its leisurely magic. But
unless you make your braise in a Crock-Pot (which is always an option), you do need to
be around to keep an eye on it, which for most of us today is a lot to ask, at least
during the week. In households where both partners work outside the home, it is
difficult, if not impossible, to weave this sort of cooking into the rhythms of weekday
life.

Yet even on the weekends, most of us are
moving too fast for slow cooking, even unattended slow cooking. So if we cook at all we
clip ten- and twenty-minute recipes from the newspaper and throw expensive filets on the
grill. This is certainly what Judith and I do most nights, and it took me awhile to get
accustomed to the idea of spending several hours at a time in the kitchen, even on a
weekend day. Coming into the kitchen, I always felt divided against myself, torn,
because there was always something else, something more pressing, I could be doing with
that time—household errands, exercise, reading, watching television. But knowing Samin
was going to be here for four hours of cooking, I eventually found that I could (like
some of the meat we were cooking) relax into it, clear my mind of competing desires, and
give myself over to the work.
When chopping onions, just chop onions.