The Man Who Ate Everything (51 page)
Read The Man Who Ate Everything Online
Authors: Jeffrey Steingarten
Tags: #Humor, #Non-Fiction, #Autobiography, #Memoir
This is a wonderful time to eat in Paris, to which I sneak away as often as I can. But ruminatively chewing on my savory
jarret de pore
and
joues de veau
over the past two years, I have wondered whether the trend Yves Camdeborde started may be self-limiting.
His talent, and that of the Crillon Four and the other young chefs, were recognized, polished, and disciplined in the vast, well-staffed kitchens of the haute cuisine. Where will the next generation of cooks get their advanced culinary education if the haute cuisine becomes just a sad thing of memory?
I’ve spent many happy afternoons in the tiny kitchens of my favorite
bistrots modernes,
learning tricks, techniques, and recipes. Here is one of my favorite dishes, from Eric Frechon.
Roast Squab with Green Lentils
La Verriere
4 squabs, about 1 pound each 6 tablespoons cooking oil
2 tablespoons coarsely chopped garlic
1/4 cup sliced shallots
3 sprigs of fresh flat-leaf parsley
3 sprigs of fresh thyme
1 bay leaf
8 cups homemade or canned chicken broth
Salt and freshly ground pepper
1 cup (about
l
/2 pound) lentils, preferably the small, green
lentilles du
Pu
y
from France
1 medium-large onion, peeled and halved, each half stuck with a clove
2 carrots, peeled and halved crosswise
3
slices (about 2
1/
2 ounces) smoked bacon
2 tablespoons softened butter
4 branches of fresh thyme, as a garnish
Wash the squabs under cold running water, reserving the neck, gizzard, and heart. Butterfly each squab as follows (or ask the butcher to do it for you): With poultry shears or a sharp knife, remove (and reserve) the backbone by cutting on both sides of it. Cut off and reserve the first two joints of each wing. Skin side up, press down on the squab to flatten it. Turning the squab skin side down, remove the ribs and breastbones by inserting a sharp, thin knife between the bones and breast meat. Using your fingers, twist off any bones that were attached to the backbone. Wash and dry the squabs, wrap them in plastic, and refrigerate.
At least 4 hours before dinner, make the squab
jus:
Chop the reserved backbone, neck, tail, wing joints, ribs, bones, and innards into 1/2-inch pieces. In a 3-quart saucepan over high heat, darkly brown the squab pieces in 2 tablespoons of the oil for 10 or 15 minutes. Pour out the oil (without discarding any of the little browned bits in the pan, which are the point of this entire procedure), add the garlic, shallots, parsley, thyme, bay leaf, and 4 cups of the chicken broth, bring to a boil, and simmer, partly covered, for 2 hours, skimming any foam and adding boiling water to prevent the liquid from reducing by more than half. Pass through a fine strainer into a 1-quart saucepan and reduce over medium-high heat to a cup. Season well with salt and freshly ground pepper. The squab
jus
should now be incredibly delicious.
An hour and a quarter before dinner, preheat the oven to 500° F. Remove the squabs from the refrigerator and season them well on both sides with salt and pepper. Cover and let them warm to room temperature.
Meanwhile, prepare the lentils: Wash them under cold water, pick out any visible stones, and place them in a 3-quart pan with the onion, carrots, and bacon. Add the remaining 4 cups of chicken broth, bring to a boil over high heat, reduce to a simmer, partially cover,
and cook for 40 minutes to an hour, stirring every 10 minutes. The lentils are done when they have absorbed all the liquid and are soft to the bite; they should not be al dente. Remove and discard the onion halves, the carrots, and the bacon. Stir in the butter and half
(1/2
cup) of the squab
jus.
Season with salt and freshly ground pepper. Simmer over low heat for 5 minutes more; then keep warm, covered, over the lowest flame. The lentils should be unbelievably savory.
Fifteen minutes before dinner, cook the squabs: Place a small heavy metal roasting pan (or two large ovenproof skillets), just large enough to hold the squabs in one layer, over high heat on your stove top. Add the remaining 4 tablespoons of oil and begin browning the squabs, skin side down, flattening them with a spatula. After half a minute, transfer the pan to the preheated oven and roast for 8 minutes (rare) or 10 minutes (medium), with the squabs still skin side down. Check after
5
minutes: if the skin is a perfect, deep shade of brown, turn the squabs; otherwise, leave them as they are. The French and I prefer squab breast meat just this side of very rare, like red meat. It is most delicious this way, and its texture is wonderful. Cut into the breast meat if you need to check—the juices should run a deep pink.
To serve, warm four plates. Warm the squab
jus.
Stir the lentils and divide them among the plates, in a 5-inch or 6-inch circle in the center of each. Place the squabs on the lentils. Season them with salt and freshly ground pepper. Dribble the remaining squab
jus
in a concentric circle around the lentils and decorate with a sprig of thyme.
Serves 4.
Proof
of the
Pudding
September 1996
I was eighteen when I tasted my first fruitcake, which may explain why I liked it so much. My family never celebrated Christmas, except by watching the first fifteen minutes of
Amahl and the Night Visitors
on television every year, and nothing in my grandmothers’ repertory had prepared me for that first wondrous mouthful of fruitcake at the house of a friend from college. It was a moist, alcoholic plum pudding, full of dark, saturated medieval tastes and colors—currants, dates, and black raisins, aromatic orange peel, mace and allspice and nutmeg, brandy and molasses—aged for a year and then set aflame at the very last minute, carefully spooned out like the treasure it was, and topped with an astonishing ivory sauce made only of butter, sugar, brandy, and nutmeg. They called it, simply, hard sauce. No more belittling name has ever been conferred upon so massive a culinary triumph.
Nowadays mail-order companies advertise fruitcakes for people who can’t stand fruitcake, which makes no more sense to me than concocting an inferior version of foie gras for people who can’t stand foie gras. I’ve ordered several of them over the years; Most are loosely cemented blocks of nuts and hard, dried fruits (no sugar added) with barely any cake in between; one is baked in the shape of the state of Texas. Cookbooks inexplicably offer creative alternatives to hard sauce, and a few years back, Hall
mark
issued a series of antifruitcake greeting cards. I’ll bet the
most widely published food joke in history is Calvin Trillin’s libel that there is just one fruitcake in the world, never eaten but simply passed on from year to year.
Many Christmas customs still puzzle me. Why, for example, would you want to celebrate a joyous event by going out and killing an innocent pine tree, draping it with shredded aluminum foil and dyed popcorn, and throwing it in the garbage a week later? But fruitcake is another thing entirely. By now I have eaten as many fruitcakes as any God-fearing Christian, and I can’t imagine what everybody is complaining about.
Fruitcake entered my life on a permanent basis twenty years ago, when the woman who was to become my wife moved in, bringing with her all the edible mores of a Mormon upbringing. (Her family abounds with members of the Daughters of the Utah Pioneers, though an errant granduncle once joined the Butch Cassidy gang in Baggs, Wyoming.) Every year, right after Thanksgiving, her mother, Marjorie Smith, mailed us several small white fruitcakes neatly wrapped in waxed paper and meant to be aged and ripened in the refrigerator until Christmas. We would observe this rule with only one of them and polish off the others, paper-thin slice by paper-thin slice, long before December arrived. Two weeks later Aunt Vivian from Salt Lake City would send a large, dark, spicy fruitcake suspended in a shoebox with her patented protective caramel-popcorn insulation. Sometimes the shoebox was large enough to hold another little package containing delicate sugar cookies decorated with red and green sprinkles. In keeping with Mormon religious rules, none of the family’s fruitcakes included any alcohol.
Marjorie’s white fruitcake quickly became my favorite. The recipe was created by Aunt Esther in Twin Falls, but Esther never sent us fruitcake and Marjorie never failed to, which is why I always think of it as Marjorie’s. It is, at bottom, a rich yellow lemon pound cake, unleavened, slightly underbaked, and filled with a volume of fruit and nuts equal to that of the cake batter— green and red candied cherries and pineapple, walnuts, and yellow raisins. When you have kept it in the refrigerator for a week
or two, it becomes dense and less cakelike, and when you slice it thin, the result is a translucent, frolicsome mosaic of yellows, reds, and greens, two of which, I believe, are the official colors of Christmas. Marjorie collected her candied fruit and her packing boxes by Labor Day to avoid the year-end rush.
The other day, as I was thumbing through women’s magazines from Christmases past—searching for good advice on making and mailing edible gifts and finding nothing better than a recipe for chocolate-chip pretzel bread—I came across several warnings not to use popcorn or breakfast cereals as the filler in your Christmas packages. They are thought to entice insects and absorb noxious fumes. But let me assure you that the candied popcorn protecting Aunt Vivian’s fruitcake never attracted the tiniest insect or the merest wisp of a noxious fume. The magazines suggest using crumpled newspaper instead. That works fine if you mail your gift from Salt Lake City and crumple up a copy of the
Deseret News,
but if you live in New York or Los Angeles, your hapless recipient is likely to read “Store Santa Slashes Tots, Self, on Sleigh” before he or she reaches the delicacies within.
When my wife moved in, she had twenty-two living aunts and uncles, and you never knew whether Aunt Melva would send a box of her taffy or Aunt Frances a jar of her jam cooked from berries she had picked the summer before near her house in Olympic National Forest. Some years Aunt Evelyn in Salt Lake City would send us a tin of her famous butter mints, a delicate, creamy candy arduously made from hand-pulled sugar. At the age of eighty, Evelyn recently supplied butter mints to the four hundred guests at her granddaughter’s wedding (two per customer), and once a year she makes them for the twenty-eight widows living in her ward and put under her charge, but she never sends enough to us. Evelyn also does cookies, including Date Swirl; fruitcake, light and dark; and Million-Dollar Fudge. Evelyn is one reason why Utah is called the Beehive State.
If I detect a competitive or compulsive edge to the food giving of the Salt Lake City area—I once observed two women frantically trying to force platters of fudge on each other as though they
contained toxic waste—it is a contest from which the observer can only benefit. But as the years pass and Christmases come and go like clockwork, fewer of my wife’s relations are able to bake as much as they would like, and most of the younger generation seems more skilled with the can opener than the canning jar. Marjorie and Aunt Vivian kept the fruitcakes coming until the end. Five years ago, after an illness, Aunt Vivian substituted what people in Salt Lake call TV Mix or TV Crunch, which is a melange of Wheat Chex, Corn Chex, Rice Chex, peanuts, and pretzel sticks tossed with onion salt and soy sauce and intended, presumably, to be enjoyed while watching television. Trying not to sound ungrateful, we phoned Vivian to let her know how much we missed her fruitcake. The following Christmas she came out of retirement at the age of eighty-eight.
Now Vivian and Marjorie are gone. Last year, as Christmas approached, I finally acknowledged that no matter how many times I ran down to the mailbox, the fruitcakes would never arrive. The idea of baking them myself did not instantly occur to me. Real men do not bake fruitcake.
One night I could stand it no longer. My kitchen was well stocked with flour, butter, eggs, raisins, and walnuts but sadly lacking in the lemon extract and candied fruit departments. Unlike Salt Lake City, New York is a twenty-four-hour town, so I hopped in a cab and traveled from one all-night bodega and Korean grocer to another in search of red and green candied cherries and pineapple. By midnight I was desperate. I toyed with the idea of buying thirty boxes of Jujyfruits and removing the licorice ones. But at last some candied fruit miraculously appeared, plastic tubs of bright candied cherries, sufficient even without the pineapple for my immediate needs, and by two in the morning the fruitcakes were done. I aged one of them for nearly five minutes and cut it open, and it came close enough to Marjorie’s white fruitcake to pacify us until the stores opened in the morning. Since then I have baked the cake many times, using Aunt Esther’s advice to clear up various ambiguities in the recipe and add some new ones. My wife can’t tell it from her mother’s.
Smith Family White Fruitcake
Marjorie Smith, Aunt Esther, and Aunt Vivian
3
/4
pound candied red cherries (Aunt Vivian increased both the
cherries and the pineapple, below, by 1/4 pound each)
1 pound mixed green and red candied pineapple
1 pound yellow raisins
1 pound walnut halves
1 pound unsalted butter, at room temperature
1 pound (2
l
/4 cups) granulated sugar
6 large eggs
4 cups (1 pound) sifted all-purpose flour
l
1/2
ounces (3 tablespoons) lemon extract (Aunt Esther uses twice this amount)
Halve the candied cherries and cut the pineapple into 1/2-inch pieces. Put all the candied fruits in a strainer and wash them under cold water. Mix them thoroughly with the raisins and walnuts in a bowl with at least a 6-quart capacity.
Beat the butter in a standing mixer or with a hand beater until it is light, add the sugar, and beat until fluffy. Beat in 3 of the eggs, half the flour, the other 3 eggs, and finally the remaining flour. Beat in the lemon extract. Pour the cake batter over the fruit and nuts and thoroughly fold everything together with a large spatula. Butter two large loaf pans and line them with parchment paper or brown paper. (The Smith family uses brown paper, which they feel prevents the cakes from becoming dark and crusty on the outside, a fatal flaw.) Butter the paper. Pour and scrape the batter into the pans, leaving at least 1/4
inch for the cakes to
expand.
Bake the fruitcakes in a preheated 300° F. oven for
45 minutes, cover tightly with aluminum foil (leaving space above the top of the cake), and bake for another 45 minutes. Do not overbake. These fruitcakes should be slightly underdone and very moist; remove them from the oven as soon as they resist the pressure of your fingertips or show the barest sign of pulling away from the sides of the pan. Let the fruitcakes cool in their pans on a rack, unmold them and remove the paper, wrap tightly in plastic, and refrigerate for at least a few days and as long as 3 weeks before cutting them into thin slices while they are still cold. This recipe makes 16 cups of cake batter, enough for two 8-cup loaf pans. Or you can make a dozen small fruitcakes in miniature nonstick loaf pans; decrease the baking time accordingly.
December 1991
