Does This Taste Funny? A Half-Baked Look at Food and Foodies (25 page)

By the way, the other
side of this is a recipe for rabbit pie, from a booklet called
How to Dress,
Ship, and Cook Wild Game
, published by  the
Remington Arms Company
! It’s
really too bad that 
weapon
manufacturers
got out of the cookbook industry.

.My favorite discovery
in this book was stuck between pages 77 and 78, and it’s Mae’s personal recipe
for ‘Apple Crisp.’ It’s exactly what a recipe
should
look like.

You
can tell that Mae was experimenting every bit as much as today’s hot shot
chefs. Did you notice she changed the amount of oatmeal at the last minute?
Brilliant, and no doubt based on years of empirical evidence.

I wish Mae had told us
what makes up the ‘crumbly topping,’ but that secret may have, sadly, died
with her. Whatever it was, I’m almost sure you didn’t need protective goggles
or hazmat gloves.

Anyway, enjoy the apple
crisp, in memory of Mae, and all the other Farm Women who didn’t need a
digitally calibrated thermometer to tell when something was done.

I think one of the few
‘typically male’ pieces of my personality is my unwillingness to read the
instructions. To anything.

If everything is in the
box that should be there, I should be able to assemble it or program it or hook
it up without reading a  freaking manual. I’ve assembled, programmed, and
hooked up other things, how hard could it be?

I have a hunch that if
I ever used a GPS device, I would end up arguing with the recorded voice that
was giving me directions, or just get passive aggressive.

”Fine.
I’ll turn left at Oak Street. You’re probably right. But you should know that
when
I turn, I will
not
be happy about it.”

I’m
the same way with microwave dinner instructions. The box may ‘suggest’ that,
after four and a half minutes with the plastic covering ‘vented’, I remove the
cover, stir the meal and then cook on medium for another minute and a half.

But
instead, I’ll just nuke the whole thing with the covering off for a total of 6
minutes
(I’m crazy, I tell ya!)
, because I’m hungry, and the entire meal
cost two bucks!The truth is, when I was younger, I probably went two or three
years without eating anything that
wasn’t
irradiated, so I’m willing to
take some chances.

Given my aversion to
instructions, it’s probably no surprise that I substitute pretty liberally when
I see a list of ingredients. The only time this is a bad idea is if you don’t
really know what a listed ingredient
is
(
I suppose I
could
use
cinnamon instead of turmeric—same number of syllables . . .)

I’ve always had a
problem with ‘no substitutions’ at restaurants, too. Now, I get that, at a
steak joint, I can’t substitute braised perch for the top sirloin, but if
you have what I’m asking for in the kitchen, and you cook said item on the
other
days of the week
, you can make me a fish sandwich even if it’s not the
special for today!

The Girlfriend and I
went to a restaurant a while back, and the ‘vegetable of the day’ was green
beans. I’m sure all the veggies there were canned, but the day before, it was
carrots, and I wanted carrots. My server told me:
“We can’t do that.”

“So,
you’re telling me that, overnight, you guys
threw out
whatever carrots
you didn’t sell? Or is the guy who knows how to
heat up
the carrots
only
available on Monday
?

I
think what I lost at video poker should buy me a few carrots, don’t you? OPEN A
CAN OF CARROTS, YOU PUNCTILIOUS BASTARDS!”

Sorry for the
digression. Getting back to recipes, the earliest ones wouldn’t have had much
room for creative substitution. The very
first
recipes were probably just
drawings of an animal, a knife, and some fire.

The first
published
recipe book is believed to be the Latin collection called
De re coquinaria
,
and attributed to Apicius, who was known as ‘the Guy Fieri of ancient Rome.”

I figured a Roman
cookbook would simply consist of the words “Take food from people you’ve
conquered. Reheat their food.” But there are some detailed recipes, for example,
this lamb stew:

“Put
the pieces of meat into a pan. Finely chop an onion and coriander, pound
pepper, ‘lovage’
(leafy, green, tastes like celery)
, cumin, ‘liquamen’
(a
thick fish sauce, tastes  like fish sauce),
oil, and wine.

Cook,
turn out into a shallow pan, thicken with cornflour. You should add the
contents of the mortar while the meat is still raw.”

Sadly, my grocery story
doesn’t carry liquamen, or I would have given this a try. As willing as I am to
substitute, everyone knows that there’s nothing quite like liquamen. Ask for it
by name!

I try to be careful with
recipes I find online, because unfortunately, there isn’t a National Internet
Recipe Oversight Commission. And sometimes the problem with an online recipe
isn’t the ingredients, but the instructions.

Especially if they’re
too precise, because then I feel like I’m just recreating that person’s cooking
success. It’s like doing culinary karaoke.

I found a chicken
recipe by someone named Joy Beeson, and although I’m sure she’s a lovely woman,
she seems a little . . .  demanding in the kitchen. Check out these steps:

“Put half of a Knorr
chicken-flavor bouillon cube into a #5 iron skillet (8″/20cm dia.). Have
ready another #5 skillet or an oven-proof lid.”

Yeah,
because I have plenty of ‘#5 skillets.’ And does the brand of bouillon
cube really matter?

“Add a generous crank
of black pepper.”

Oh,
so you know the model number of the skillet but can’t be more precise than a
‘crank’ of pepper?

“Add one tablespoon
(1/16 cup) of cornstarch to the milk, cover tightly, shake vigorously, pour
over the bouillon in the skillet. Heat to boiling point while stirring
constantly, scraping the sides and bottom of the skillet with a spatula.”

Well,
after all that covering, shaking, pouring, heating, stirring (constantly!) and
scraping, I’ve now forgotten what I’m cooking.

“Do not dally between
adding cornstarch and shaking, nor between shaking and pouring.”

So
what you’re telling me is, I can’t dally at all. I suppose there’s no
lolligagging in your kitchen either.

“The cornstarch will
settle out if it is given half a chance.”

Because
all know how vindictive cornstarch is.

“When the foam has
settled to the bottom of the jar, pour that in with one hand while continuing
to stir with the other. After five minutes, turn the thighs over, spoon gravy
over them, cover tightly again, put skillet in oven. Immediately turn the oven
to 200F.”

Okay,
I’m not having fun anymore. This with one hand, that with the other, turning,
spooning…and what if I want to wait a minute or two before turning the oven
down? No—do it “immediately.” Jeez.

“Ignore until serving
time
.”

The
meal? The guests?

“One half hour before
serving time, zap one large or two small potatoes and throw them naked onto the
oven rack.”

For
God’s sake, don’t dally if you’re zapping! And this meal would be WAY more fun
if you could throw the potatoes on the rack while
you’re
‘naked.’

At one
point, this book was going to be filled with recipes that express
my
unique vision as a cook, but based on feedback I got from publishers, I went in
a different direction.

The
rejection letters all droned on about the same supposed ‘problems’ with my
recipes. For example
—
even though I’m not
into the whole ‘precision’ thing in
my
cooking, I knew I had to be precise
in a real cookbook. Apparently, though, you can be
too
precise, like
when I specified

“Place
casserole in 22.6 cubic-foot oven at 213 degrees Celsius for 47 minutes, 18
seconds.”

I also thought it would
be fun to have a section where the recipes all had blanks where temperatures
and timings would normally be:

“
Bake
for _______ minutes at ______ degrees. Now
—
can you solve the recipe?”.

One last note might be
helpful to anyone thinking of writing their own cookbook. Apparently, publishers
don’t want you to use
too many
endangered species in your recipes. That’s
unfortunate. My
‘Spotted Owl Stuffed with Snail Darter’
is really quite
good.

To be
honest, I guess I’m just not a recipe kinda guy. Too confining—stifles my
creativity, and the joy of discovery, and blah blah blah.
Sure, I’ll
borrow
some ideas here and there, but if you ever have dinner
at my place, you can be certain that some element of the meal will be a direct
result of improvisation. And guessing.

In physics, fusion is
the process by which two or more atomic nuclei join together to form a single
heavier nucleus. Or, it’s how you turn lead into gold. I can’t remember. In
music, ‘fusion’ refers to a blending of styles, like the jazz-rock fusion of
Pat Metheny, or the jazz-crap fusion of Kenny G.  

Not really sure what my
point was. but ‘fusion’ is also used to describe food. Tex-Mex. Afro-Cuban.
Kosher-Asian. And sometimes, cultural cross-pollination works.

On the other hand, I
had to give up my dream of opening a chain of British-Korean restaurants (to be
called
Kimchee-dilly Square
) when our market research showed that people
didn’t really want bland food that also smells bad.

My first ‘fusion’ dish,
like most of my truly inspired creations, came about because I was out of
something. Here’s the backstory:

The
Girlfriend wanted pizza. I had, unfortunately, eaten the last slice of pizza.
We also had no pizza sauce, and not much in the way of potential pizza
toppings.

What
we had, was a box of frozen na’an that I think had been in the freezer since
‘Slumdog Millionaire’ came out. Then it occurred to me – our na’an was already
cut into pizza-slice shaped pieces!

Once again it was all
coming together—ingenuity, inspiration, the ability to recognize simple shapes
. . . I would make
Na’an Pizza!
Or I could call it ‘Non-Pizza.’

So I had a box of na’an
(which sounds like the name of an alien on “Star Trek”—“
I am Box of Na’an
—
fear
me!
”). We had lots of fresh veggies, and some chicken breast from the
previous night’s dinner, along with some homemade gravy.

I’m all set to assemble
my Chicken Non-Pizza when I remember I have no sauce. I could
make
a
sauce, but I had no tomatoes. No
stewed
tomatoes, no
diced
tomatoes—not even a tiny can of tomato paste.

Here’s where it gets a
little weird. To recap, I had chicken, vegetables, and the aforementioned
gravy. That’s a pot pie waiting to happen!