I'm Just Here for the Food (49 page)

• Rolled roast needs to be cooked to 130° F and should be held here for at least 1 hour before being served.

• Fish should be cooked to 140° F.

• Ground beef should be cooked to 155° F.

• Ground pork should be cooked to 160° F.

• Ground turkey should be cooked to 170° F.

Cross Contamination

The leading cause of food-borne illnesses in home kitchens, cross contamination happens any time you give bugs a way to get from one place to another. Following is a possible scenario:

You come home from the market and the only place to put that raw chicken is on the middle shelf in the fridge. Unbeknownst to you, there is a small hole in the bag and some of the juice runs out. It pools at the back edge of the shelf, then a few drops run down the wall of the refrigerator, into the crisper drawer, and onto a loosely wrapped head of lettuce. Since your refrigerator’s running at an average of 45° F, this meager collection of bacterial pilgrims sets up a village, which within a few hours becomes a thriving metropolis. You take the lettuce out of the fridge, cut it into wedges on your cutting board, and build a salad, which you then set on the buffet half an hour before your guests arrive. Meanwhile, you cook the chicken to an internal temperature of 165° F, killing any
salmonella
or
campylobacter
that may be present. But you then cut it up on the very same cutting board with the very same knife you used for the lettuce, thus recontaminating it. Two or three days later, you start getting nasty letters from your friends written on hospital letterhead.

Unless you’ve tested it with a
thermometer
.

THAWING

Thawing’s a funny thing because it’s just like cooking inasmuch as it’s all about bringing a piece of food into thermal equilibrium with its surroundings. All the principles of cooking apply: temperature, conduction, convection, radiation, and density. When I tell folks that a block of ice will thaw faster under cold running water than in a 200° F oven, they think I’ve been in the nutmeg again (see Toxins). But it is indeed true. Cold water may be cold, but it’s dense, it’s a good conductor, and if it’s running it’s got convection on its side. The hot oven has temperature and radiation on its side, but unless you have the broiler on, that won’t be enough. So in order to keep thawing food (say, a frozen Cornish game hen) in the Zone for the shortest time possible, either thaw it in the refrigerator (slow but safe) or tightly wrapped and submerged in cold water up to 70° F that’s circulating somehow.

Had you placed the raw chicken in a container (say, a baking dish) and placed it on the bottom shelf, you wouldn’t be forced to wear a giant red S across your chest.

Human Contamination

Consider the strange case of Mary Mallon, a cook who worked in households from Long Island to Manhattan in the early years of the twentieth century. Mary gave a nasty form of salmonelosis to dozens if not hundreds of people without actually getting sick herself. Mary is known to history as Typhoid Mary not because she had the audacity to touch food with her hands (something I’m a big fan of), but because she didn’t wash her hands well enough or often enough. This drama repeats itself in homes and restaurants across America with alarming frequency. And all because we fail to do something most of us should have learned in kindergarten.

Hand-washing is a really big deal, and you should do it often while handling food, but there are a couple of other things you can do to keep your mitts in sanitary condition.

• Make sure you can turn the water on (hot and cold) at your kitchen sink without touching the taps with your hands. Touch the chicken, touch the tap, wash your hands, turn off the tap with your hand—you might as well have skipped the whole darned thing. If you have a single-lever model, make sure you can work it with the back of your wrist or your elbow. If you prefer a separate knob for both hot and cold, go with wide paddles that can be operated by the forearms. Or you can do what many restaurants do and install foot pedals or waist-level “lean-in” buttons.

• Make sure your soap dispenser can be pumped without direct hand contact.

• You can get latex gloves at any drugstore. They’re great for handling raw meat or for cutting chile pods or garlic, which can leave some nasty compounds on your skin. When you’re done working, just throw them away. (Make sure you get the ones that contain talcum powder for easy on and off.)

TOXINS

Toxins are poisons that cannot be neutralized by heat (or sanitation practices, for that matter). Aside from the aforementioned
botulinum
toxin, there’s scrombrotoxin in fish and cheese, which causes scrombroid poisoning, a nasty, itchy, vomity kind of thing that usually isn’t fatal. Not so for tetrodotoxin, which one might encounter in even a small nibble of a badly prepared piece of fugu, or blowfish. I like the Centers for Disease Control description:

“Tetrodotoxin is heat-stable and blocks sodium conductance and neuronal transmission in skeletal muscles. Paresthesia begins 10 to 45 minutes after ingestion, usually as tingling of the tongue and inner surface of the mouth. Other common symptoms include vomiting, lightheadedness, dizziness, feelings of doom, and weakness. An ascending paralysis develops, and death can occur within 6 to 24 hours, secondary to respiratory muscle paralysis. Other manifestations include salivation, muscle twitching, diaphoresis, pleuritic chest pain, dysphagia, aphonia, and convulsions. Severe poisoning is indicated by hypotension, bradycardia, depressed corneal reflexes, and fixed dilated pupils. Diagnosis is based on clinical symptoms and a history of ingestion. Treatment is supportive, and there is no specific antitoxin.”

I especially like the “feelings of doom” part. Granted, you’re not likely to stumble across bad fugu completely unaware (although three California chefs nearly died in 1996 when a co-worker brought some prepackaged fugu back from Japan), but many common plants contain poisons. Apple seeds and peach pits contain a chemical of the cyanide family and can flat out kill you if you chew up and swallow enough. (Don’t worry: swallowing an apple seed or two won’t hurt you. A couple hundred maybe, but what are the chances of that happening?) Raw or undercooked fresh red kidney beans can deliver a dose of phyto-hemagglutinin to the system and reward you with 4 to 6 hours of extreme abdominal distress. Nutmeg contains a toxin that is also a powerful hallucinogen; it produces very bad headaches in those who try to take advantage of it.

Then there’s honey intoxication, which results from eating honey containing rhododendron nectar. Said nectar contains grayantoxin, which can play havoc with your central nervous system for a day or so (it’s rarely fatal, if that makes you feel any better). Then there are mushrooms. Think that’s a chanterelle in your yard? Be sure—very sure—because if you’re wrong, you may end up with your liver dissolved into a pool of goo, which I’m told doesn’t feel very good. Or maybe you’ll be lucky and latch onto some ’shrooms containing muscarine, in which case you’ll probably just sweat out several pounds of water in a few hours, throw up, and take a nap. Either way, never gather wild mushrooms unless you’re operating under the guidance of a skilled, educated, experienced, and preferably old mushroom hunter.

• Never wipe dirty hands on a kitchen towel—you might as well blow your nose on it. By the same token, never use a dirty towel to dry clean hands—you might as well blow your nose on them.

Speaking of your nose, sneezing and blowing are two of the best ways to introduce unwanted germs into your food. Coughing is good, too. And I hope I don’t have mention the bathroom, right?

Organically Challenged

It’s become clear in recent years that microorganisms inside livestock can become resistant to the sub-diagnostic doses of antibiotics that are often (in fact, usually) given to livestock in this country. Now this doesn’t mean they become super-bugs, capable of shooting webs or turning into rubber—they still die at proper cooking temperatures. The problem is cross-contamination in the kitchen. If you’re not diligent, you could end up with a strain of bug that won’t respond to the first few drugs that are tried. This is not good news. As a result, I’m starting to look seriously at switching to organic and naturally raised meats whenever I can, not for flavor as much as for safety.

Want to keep up with developments in food safety? check out
www.fda.gov
. They’ve got it all.

Sources

U.S Food & Drug Administration, Center for Food Safety & Applied Nutrition: Foodborne Microorganisms

and Natural Toxins
(informally known as the “Bad Bug Book”). Available for downloading at
http://www.cfsan.fda.gov/~mow/badbug.zip

The Educational Foundation of the National Restaurant Association: Applied Foodservice Sanitation
, 4th Ed. (1992) McGee, Harold:
On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen
. New York: Fireside, 1984.

The Top 5 Activities to Be Pursued by a Cook

Number 1 : Keep up with Family

Food is heritage. It’s what makes “me” into “we.” Besides, even if you don’t like your family, everybody likes food. I keep a book of family recipes. They’re not all good, but a few of them are classics for my clan and I’d hate to lose them.

Number 2 : Travel

Whether you drive to the next county or the next hemisphere, nothing says where you are like the food you find along the way. When it comes to eating, beware the tourist guidebooks. Seek out the local favorites.

Number 3: Cook

Yes, this is fairly obvious, but the truth is, most of us cook as a means to an end: eating. What I’m suggesting is that you cook to cook. And keep a record of what you cook and what you thought of it before, during, and after the process.

Number 4 : Taste

Remember, flavor is a noun, taste is a verb, and it’s one we often forget to bother with. We’ll spend hours preparing food that we gulp down in minutes as if we’re afraid a band of hyenas might pass through and wrestle it away from us. So chew your food and taste it. If you’re with other people, stop talking for a minute and just taste. If you’re by yourself, turn off the TV, put down the book, and enjoy your interface with planet Earth. And I’m not just talking about fancy fare here. I’m talking about that ballpark frank, that cup of coffee, that Milky Way bar. Heck, if you’re going to have to work off the calories, doesn’t it make sense to enjoy them to the fullest?

Number 5: Read

Cooking and food connect to everything: history, art, literature, physics, chemistry, math—you name it, food’s got it. So, the more you read about food, the smarter you get about everything.

A Selected Reading List

Although I’ve never counted, I’d guess I have more than 500 books dealing with food. These are the titles that never seem to make it from my table back onto the shelf.

Outlaw Cook
, John Thorne

For my mind and money, John Thorne is the best American food writer alive and
Outlaw Cook
is the
Physiology of Taste
of our time. Part cookbook, part meditation, Thorne’s book looks at everything from appetite to meatballs to the virtues of not being a very good cook. This is the book I reach for when the thrill is gone.

Cookwise
, Shirley O. Corriher

Shirley is a hero and a friend and not only is her book full of delicious and reliable recipes, the text and illustrations explain exactly why they are delicious and reliable. Applicable food science for the cook who really doesn’t want to look at electrospectrographs (not that there’s anything wrong with that).

On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen
, Harold McGee

Scholarly, scientific, badly dog-eared. This is the book cooks are talking about when they refer to the “bible.” Until McGee got his nerdy self into the kitchen, cooks did things for no other reason than that they had been trained to do so. McGee changed that by explaining ingredients and methodologies via science. His sequel,
The Curious Cook,
is a companion piece that takes a close look at specific issues, from poaching to the perfect sorbet, which no one but McGee would ever have the patience to quantify. At nearly 700 recipe-free pages, this is not an easy read, but it is an indispensable one for any cook who wants to know “why.”

Gastronomic Me
, M.F.K. Fisher

The first time I saw Fisher’s photo on the back of her wartime treasury
How to Eat a Wolf
, I fell into a heavy crush. She could cook and eat and write—and she looked like Grace Kelly. Boy, do I wish I could have shared just one meal with this woman and then sat around to talk about it. Not only was Fisher the first modern food writer, she was a woman, not a chef, which makes her writing even better. Her work reads as if it were written yesterday afternoon. Nobody before or since has written as thoughtfully about eggs.