The Man Who Ate Everything (27 page)

Medrich relies only sometimes on two easy and common but unpalatable solutions: replacing all chocolate (which contains 55 to 75 percent fat calories) with lower-fat cocoa and substituting egg whites for yolks. She also eliminates a good part of the fat in pastry creams and mousses, lightens her sponge cake so that she
can use richer toppings, toasts nuts for more flavor and chops
them
finer so they will go further, and makes an exception to her general principles by including “light” cream cheese in frostings.
B
y the time she is finished, her recipes, through a host of careful and canny compromises, range from acceptable to delicious.

This book is not simply a collection of recipes; it is a manual for the creation of low-fat chocolate desserts and devotes several chapters to theory and general principles. The mixture of smooth and crunchy is fundamentally satisfying, Medrich believes. Some flavors, such as caramel, taste inherently rich, though they contain no fat. Medrich uses meringue as a substitute for some of the whipped cream in mousses and to add lightness, volume, and creaminess. But as she considers uncooked egg whites to be dangerous, she has developed a useful but tiresome procedure for pasteurizing them by raising their temperature to 160 degrees over hot water after mixing them with water, cream of tartar, and sugar. (Without these additions, they would scramble.) Occasionally, I wished that Medrich had aimed for a more varied range of sensory qualities than richness alone. Chocolate wears a hundred faces.

The proof is in the pudding, and I cooked eight or nine of them. On the rebound from my repulsive encounter with the
Butter Busters
brownies, I began with Medrich’s. They were shiny to gaze upon and moist to consume, with a rich, chocolaty flavor—far superior to any of the commercially available low-fat brownies that I receive almost weekly by UPS. Only by tireless eating was I able to detect in them the flaws that mar Medrich’s less perfect recipes (and that destroy the low-fat desserts of less skillful cooks): their texture was slightly rubbery rather than cakelike or gooey, the result of substituting egg whites for eggs; their taste betrayed a hint of the sharp and dusty character of cocoa; and their flavor did not last long enough in the mouth, a common problem with many low-fat foods. These imperfections were all minor in Medrich’s brownies, but they suggest the dangers she continually skirts at the stove. Even more successful
were her Bittersweet Chocolate Marquise, a sensational frozen chocolate terrine, and a low-fat version of her well-known Chocolate Decadence (essentially a flourless chocolate cake). Less admirable were the rubbery pastry cream, the dry chocolate souffles, the uninteresting sugar
tuiles,
and several of the sauces.

Even those of us who understand that low-fat diets are unnecessary should consider Medrich’s thoughtful book. The problem is that the fat in chocolate desserts is mostly saturated, the kind found in butter and egg yolks and cream and to a lesser extent in cocoa butter, the kind that wounds, maims, and kills. Cutting back your desserts to 30 percent fat satisfies nobody’s criteria if most of that fat is
saturated;
both the American Heart Association and the surgeon general limit saturated fat to 10 per-cent of total calories. Oddly, the nutritional data accompanying Medrich’s recipes leave out numbers for saturated fat. I doubt that this was inadvertent.

Martha Rose Shulman has written several books on low-fat cooking, but
Provencal Light
may well be her best—and, along with Medrich’s, the best low-fat cookbook of the past year. It is a warm and knowledgeable appreciation of southeastern France and a fine cookbook in its own right; folklore and food are charmingly intertwined in this well-designed and nicely edited book.

Shulman has lived in Provence and traveled extensively through it, and you will find versions of all your Provencal favorites here—from bouillabaisse (hers is the fabled soup from the restaurant Bacon in Cap d’Antibes) to the wonderful gratins and ragouts of the region. She does not entirely ban eggs, moistens her
brandade
with milk to eliminate some of the oil (a hazardous substitution), cleverly stretches her alternative aioli with mashed potatoes, and bakes her eggplant instead of frying it. But she leaves out bourride (another great fish soup from which she could not artfully remove the fat) and all dishes containing red meat (the region is famous for its fine lamb and often uses a little bacon for flavoring, but Shulman doesn’t eat red meat), and quite unsatisfactorily makes all her tarts with phyllo dough, which has little fat in itself.

This is real food made entirely with natural ingredients. But many of Shulman’s lightened recipes can be vastly improved by the addition of a little olive oil. And the only reason for leaving it out is a pathological, if remunerative, fear of fat. “Like the other cuisines of the Mediterranean, the cuisines of Provence are inherently healthy,” Shulman writes in her introduction. But if this is true, then why monkey with the food?

Take Shulman’s Vegetable Soup with Pistou. You boil together a bouquet of vegetables for one and a half hours; add cooked white beans and some fresh vegetables for crunch; cook for another ten minutes, ladle into bowls, and stir in a table-spoon of intensely aromatic pistou, the Provencal paste of basil, oil, garlic, and cheese. The broth itself is hardy, bland, and slightly sweet; the magnificent pistou transforms it into one of the world’s great soups. Shulman’s recipe is much like those in traditional Provencal cookbooks—three fine versions were published recently, one by Robert Carrier and two by Richard Olney—except that she leaves out most of the olive oil, about a tablespoon in each serving. Without this, her broth lacked flavor, the garlic was caustic, the basil harsh and minty, her beans and pasta bland—until, like the conductor of an orchestra, a good dribble of golden olive oil brought these instruments together into warm and rousing vegetable concerto. By my calculations, her Vegetable Soup with Pistou is only 12 percent fat; adding two teaspoons of olive oil to each serving would still keep her fat calories below 30 percent. Why did she leave them out?

I do have a question about Shulman’s title. According to the FDA’s regulations regarding packaged foods, “light” may be used on a label only when the food inside the package contains 50 percent less fat than the standard version. I think
Reduced-Fat Provencal
would be more accurate because this means 25 percent less fat than usual, a more fitting characterization of many of Shulman’s recipes. Or considering that she avoids the merest trace of red meat, traditionally used as an indispensable condiment in a host of essentially vegetarian Provencal dishes, Shulman should have called it
The Pollo-Ovo-Lacto-Vegetarian Reduced-Fat Provencal Cookbook
(Bantam Books). Anomalously, her nutritional analysis of each dish leaves out the percentage of calories devoted to fat. Could she have been motivated by the desire to sneak in what looks like a magnificent recipe for Rich Fish Soup, perhaps the crowning glory of the Provencal cooking of the Mediterranean coast, which in Shulman’s low-fat version is a whopping 60.4 percent fat, more than you find in French fries? I can’t wait to try it.

April 1995

According to recent surveys, more American consumers are worried about sugar than about anything else in their diets except cholesterol. Our national fear of refined white sugar reached a febrile peak in 1979 and has remained on a plateau ever since. That was the year that Dan White, on trial for shooting and killing San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, was convicted of manslaughter instead of first-degree murder after his lawyer raised the Twinkie Defense, the claim that Dan White’s brain had been so deranged by Hostess Twinkles and other sugary junk foods that he should not be held fully responsible for his actions. Twinkles, the argument went, made him do it.

White sugar has also been blamed for heart disease, obesity, diabetes, anemia, and hyperactivity in children. These claims have always made me suspicious. Humans are born with only one innate taste preference—an attraction to sweetness, to sugar. The idea that nature designed us to be powerfully drawn to what harms us most strikes me as perverse and godless and extremely unlikely. So I recently tracked down the medical facts about sugar and happily discovered that nearly every accusation is groundless.

Simple sugars are the building blocks of all complex carbohydrates, and all complex carbohydrates are broken down into simple sugars in our digestive tract before being absorbed into our bloodstream. In this sense, one carbohydrate is more or less nutritionally equivalent to any other because they must all be converted to glucose, the simplest sugar of all, before we can use them. Glucose is blood sugar, the principal source of energy in the body; without it our muscles and brain have no use for pasta or candy or fruit or milk, for starch or sucrose or fructose or lactose If it isn’t glucose, it isn’t food.

Every authority in nutrition, from the National Research Council to the American Heart Association, recommends that we increase our intake of carbohydrates to 55 percent of total calories—especially complex carbohydrates like starch. These are favored over simple sugars because they are usually found in foods rich in fiber, vitamins, or minerals, such as pasta, potatoes, beans, and bread. White sugar delivers nothing but calories and acute pleasure. But to consider it dangerous is another thing entirely.

The odd thing about the claim that eating sugar makes people hyperactive or even violent is that eating any carbohydrate will reliably do just the opposite. Carbohydrates raise the level of the amino acid tryptophan in the bloodstream, which the brain uses to synthesize serotonin, a neurotransmitter associated with sleep, analgesia, calm, and even the lifting of depression. This is the best-documented (and perhaps the only) example that scientists have discovered of the way a food can change the functioning of our brains. Twinkies make us glad.

Some parents believe that their children become wild and unmanageable after eating sucrose; they have been known to send their offspring to another child’s birthday party carrying his or her own little cake made with fructose or aspartame. Yet most studies that have tested such children in the laboratory—away from their parents—have refuted the parents’ claims.

The mechanism purportedly at work here is a condition known as reactive hypoglycemia. The theory is that the body may overcompensate for the consumption of large amounts of sugar by releasing too much insulin, which drastically lowers your blood sugar, causing confusion, anxiety, muscular weakness, and personality changes. The idea that unruly children and prisoners are generally afflicted with this condition seems to have arisen in 1977, when an Ohio probation officer, Barbara Reed, told a U.S. Senate Committee that, after reading a pamphlet entitled
Low Blood Sugar,
she had changed the diets of the probationers under her care and accomplished remarkable improvements in their behavior.

But reactive hypoglycemia is a rare condition, and most scientifically controlled research has failed to document its presence in hyperactive or violent people. A 1986 study at the National Institute of Mental Health was unable to find any cognitive or behavioral consequences of eating sugar. A study of hyperactive children at the University of Toronto found that they reacted the same to sucrose, aspartame, and saccharin. And in 1990 a team of researchers at the University of Wisconsin found that a breakfast full of sucrose actually improved the performance of the group of fifty-eight white and fifty-seven black juvenile delinquents they studied.

Does white sugar make you fat? A gram of sugar has the same four calories in each gram as any other carbohydrate or any gram of protein. All carbohydrates have a substantial advantage over dietary fats, which, with nine calories in every gram, are more energy dense and can be effortlessly converted into body fat. The conversion of excess carbohydrate calories—
simple or complex—
into fat is energy intensive, using up as much as 20 percent of the carbohydrate calories in the process. But complex carbohydrates have only a minor caloric advantage over simple sugars; the additional energy you burn away as your body breaks them down is extremely small.

There is an idea floating around that white sugar somehow bypasses the body’s regulatory mechanism and tricks us into overeating. This has been repeatedly disproved. In one study, Kool-Aid was prepared in two ways, one sweetened with sugar and the other with aspartame. Both were given to children an hour before lunch. Those who drank the sugary Kool-Aid compensated for the extra calories by eating less at lunch than those whose Kool-Aid contained the noncaloric sweetener. The body sees sugar for what it is.

Do chubby people have a sweet tooth? No. Obese adults actually consume less sugar than skinny adults. And taste tests have shown that neither group craves sugar more strongly than the other.

Does white sugar cause heart disease, diabetes, anemia, and other degenerative diseases? No.
Diet and Health
(1989), the National Research Council’s compendious review of everything that was then known about nutrition and disease, summarized hundreds of studies on the subject and concluded that “sugar consumption (by those with an adequate diet) has not been established as a risk factor for any chronic disease other than dental caries in humans.” Population studies in Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and Framingham, Massachusetts, found that healthy men consumed more carbohydrates than men who developed coronary heart disease; the type of carbohydrate did not matter. Most authorities recommend that added sugar be limited to 10 or 11 percent of our calories; our average intake today is only slightly higher. But in people with elevated triglycerides, especially diabetics, too
much fructose
eaten alone can aggravate their problem; sucrose consists of one unit of fructose and one of glucose.