The Man Who Ate Everything (56 page)
Read The Man Who Ate Everything Online
Authors: Jeffrey Steingarten
Tags: #Humor, #Non-Fiction, #Autobiography, #Memoir
The star of our first back-of-the-box meal was Ritz crackers’ Mock Apple Pie, which has appeared on the back of the box since the beginning of recorded history and probably forever will. The recipe always sounded like a prank to me, which is why I had never tried it. You line a pie plate with pastry and drop in thirty-six broken Ritz crackers instead of apples. Then you boil up two cups each of sugar and water with a little cream of tartar, add lemon rind and lemon juice, allow the syrup to cool, and pour it over the Ritz crackers. Dot with butter, sprinkle with cinnamon, cover with the top pastry crust, bake for thirty-five minutes, and cool completely.
What emerges is a tasty dessert that cannot easily be distinguished from real apple pie! This has led to a far-reaching and heretical hypothesis:
Cooked
apples have little taste of their own. We identify them by the cinnamon, sugar, and lemon juice with which they are always flavored in American cooking, along with their characteristic mushiness. I fed this pie to a self-styled apple lover. She could not believe that it contained not one apple molecule.
Why anybody would bother to make Ritz crackers’ Mock Apple Pie more than once—except for the sheer miracle of it—is another matter entirely. Most of the labor in making a pie is spent on the pastry. Apples cost no more than Ritz crackers, apples are not fattening, and the surgeon general has not yet said that you will die if you eat apples. In her
Fannie Farmer Baking Book
(Knopf), Marion Cunningham includes a version based on soda crackers that, she writes, antedates the Civil War; American pioneers could transport and store sugar and crackers more easily than apples.
As our week of back-of-the-box cooking raced happily on, a new dessert favorite quickly emerged: Milky Way Bar Swirl Cake. A Milky Way bar is the only food I know that is equally delicious frozen, at room temperature, and, as I have now discovered, at 350 degrees. The Milky Way was created in 1923, and it is the best-selling candy bar in the world; everywhere outside the United States it is labeled “Mars Bar,” though everywhere it consists of the same malted-milk nougat topped with a layer of caramel, all dipped in milk chocolate. The Mars company is best known for its M & M’s recipes. When it first printed a recipe for Party Cookies (really Toll House Cookies with M & M’s replacing the semisweet chocolate chips) on the twelve-ounce supermarket package, sales doubled! Less renowned is the eight-page four-color recipe booklet that Mars slipped into its six-pack of full-size Milky Ways in 1986.
I have obtained a copy.
The main attraction is Milky Way Bar Swirl Cake, a delicious yellow Bundt cake made from a commercial mix with two Milky Ways swirled inside and another two melted and dripped over the top, where they magically harden into a glossy glaze. The only problem we encountered in making the Swirl Cake was another flagrant case of furtive downsizing. The recipe calls for four 2.23-ounce bars. Milky Ways now on the market weigh 2.15 ounces, a shrinkage of 3.6 percent. Obsessive recipe followers will buy an extra bar, as I did, slice off one-seventh of it, and eat the rest either frozen or at room temperature.
Milky Way Bar Swirl Cake (adapted)
4 Milky Way bars (2.23 ounces each), sliced
1 cup plus 2 tablespoons plus 2 teaspoons water
1 package (18 1/2 ounces) pudding-in-the-mix yellow cake mix
l
/3 cup (5 tablespoons) melted butter, cooled
3 eggs, at room temperature
2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
Confectioners’ sugar
2 tablespoons butter, for the glaze
Stir the slices from two Milky Ways with 2 tablespoons of water in a medium saucepan over medium heat until smooth, and remove from the heat. Meanwhile, generously butter and flour a 12-cup Bundt pan. Using an electric mixer, prepare the cake batter with the 1/3
cup melted butter (even if the package specifies oil), 3 eggs, and 1 cup of water. Scoop out
2
/3 cup of the cake batter and stir it, along with the flour, into the melted Milky Ways. Pour the rest of the cake batter into the Bundt pan, and spoon the Milky Way mixture in a ring on the center of the batter, avoiding the sides of the pan. Swirl the batters together with a knife. Bake at 350° F for 40 minutes and let cool in the pan on a rack for 25 minutes. Invert and unmold the cake and sprinkle lightly with confectioners’ sugar.
While the cake is cooling, wipe out the saucepan, add the other two sliced Milky Ways along with 2 tablespoons of butter and 2 teaspoons of water, and stir over medium heat until smooth. Let cool until it reaches the consistency of a glaze and drip it over the cake.
I cannot count the number of boxes of Domino light brown sugar I rotated last week on supermarket shelves in search of the simple and delicious recipe I remember for Butterscotch Nut Ice Cream. Neither of my back-of-the-box anthologies seems to have heard of it. A call to Domino exposed my recollection as only partially correct. A recipe did appear for a brief period, but unlike my adaptation of it, the original employed an ice-cube tray instead of an ice-cream freezer and required the annoying use of a double boiler. When I described my variation to the lady at Domino, she offered to have it reformulated and tested by one of their home economists, which I thought
would be fun, though I then meddl
ed with their version, in part because it did not contain enough pecans. I tell you all this so that you can blame me if it does not please you. But it surely will.
Butterscotch
Nut
Ice Cream
2 eggs
1 1/4 cups firmly packed Domino light brown sugar
2 cups milk
2 cups heavy cream
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 cup shelled pecans, coarsely chopped
2 tablespoons butter 1/2 teaspoon salt
Lightly whisk the eggs in a 2-quart saucepan and stir in the brown sugar and the milk. Stir constantly over medium heat until the mixture thickens and coats the back of a spoon (180° F. on a candy thermometer). Strain into a bowl, cool to room temperature, add the cream and the vanilla, and chill overnight in the refrigerator.
The next day, toast the pecans in the butter in a large skillet for 5 to 10 minutes over medium heat, stirring often. Toss the pecans with the salt and spread them out on paper towels to drain and cool. Stir the pecans into the ice-cream mixture right before freezing in an ice-cream machine. Makes 1
1
/2
quarts.
Packages today are so cluttered with nutritional information, ingredient lists, health claims, and environmental sermons that hardly any room is left for recipes. And the endless list of chemical additives on most packaged foods is enough to send me back to slicing slab bacon at room temperature. Yet food labelers seem able to keep pace with the changing American palate: every yellow winter squash at my vegetable shop has a recipe printed on plastic in English and French and glued to its side. The public is still ceaselessly enthusiastic about back-of-the-box recipes— “multiuse soups” are the fastest-growing sector of Campbell’s business. When manufacturers remove a favorite formula from their boxes, as when Domino dropped the butter-cream frosting from its confectioners’ sugar, consumers flood them with calls. When Milky Way inexplicably changed the name of its miniature fun size bars to “snack size,” and home Milky Way cooks could no longer find the precise product called for in the old recipes, the outcry was so thunderous that Mars was forced to change back the name to “fun size.”
Just before my back-of-the-box mania went into remission, I resolved to prepare the very first recipe ever printed on the back of an American box. Unearthing it was not as simple as it sounds. Until the Civil War, grocery stores presented and sold their food in bulk—mounds of butter and cheese, bins of sugar and flour, barrels of crackers. (As late as 1928, only 10 percent of all the sugar sold at retail came in packages.) According to Waverley Root, the first machine-made, collapsible, foldable cardboard boxes did not appear until 1879, the achievement of a New York manufacturer named Robert Gair, who had previously produced paper bags (which in their useful square-bottomed incarnation were not invented until 1870). And I was looking for a recipe much older than that.
After a long and winding quest, I finally hit pay dirt. The recipe dates from 1802, and it is, as you might expect, a macaroni-and-cheese casserole.
There was a great vogue for Italian pasta among the upper classes in both France and the United States at the end of the eighteenth century. Most pasta was imported from Sicily by way of London until Lewis Fresnaye, an emigre from the French Revolution, hired some Italian pasta makers and set up shop in Philadelphia. But cookbooks were scarce. The first one originating in this country,
American Cookery … By Amelia Simmons, an American Orphan,
was not published until 1796, when the average book cost the equivalent of ninety dollars. So Fresnaye wrapped each bundle of his dried vermicelli and macaroni in a wide sheet of paper printed with recipes for their preparation.
Several years ago Mary Anne Hines of the Philadelphia Library Company discovered one of Fresnaye’s broadsides from 1802 in the library’s culinary collection, and food historian William Woys Weaver recognized and researched its momentous significance. You can prepare this recipe as easily as if you had found it on the back of a package of Kraft’s.
Lewis Fresnaye’s 1802 Macaroni and Cheese
Take six pints of water and boil it with a sufficiency of salt, when boiling, stir in it one pound of paste [pasta], let it boil [about eight minutes], then strain the water well off, and put the paste in a large dish, mixing therewith six ounces of grated parmisan or other good cheese; then take four ounces of good butter and melt it well in a saucer or small pot, and pour it over the paste while both are warm. It would be an improvement after all is done, to keep the dish a few minutes in a hot oven, till the butter and cheese have well penetrated the paste.
It may be rendered still more delicate by boiling the paste in milk instead of water and put a little gravy of meat, or any other meat sauce thereon.
It’s a Fact
Q. When was the pressure cooker invented? A.1680.
February 1992
How can I ever forget that fresh coconut cake? There were six layers in all, each brushed with coconut-milk syrup and spread with a luscious filling of fresh coconut, butter, and cream. When the layers were stacked on each other, the cake was taller than it was wide, and then the outside was covered with silky vanilla frosting set with crunchy coconut curls. I had stumbled across a generous wedge of it at K-Paul’s New York, Paul Prudhomme’s onetime northern outpost, and it was the most delicious southern cake any of us had ever tasted. The people at K-Paul’s New Orleans headquarters swore that the recipe had already been published in
The Prudhomme Family Cookbook
(Morrow). It looked like a six-hour project.
Thanksgiving arrived, a day when everybody’s culinary dreams are meant to be realized, and it seemed the perfect moment to re-create the Prudhomme family’s Fresh Coconut Cake and carry it in triumph to a friend’s house for a grateful feast. Six hours remained until dinner.
Recalling that I had once struggled for two days with a stubborn coconut before it yielded up its meat for a special ice-cream project of mine, I consulted my vast kitchen library and particularly my two linear feet of kitchen manuals. Among what I estimate to be twenty thousand kitchen tips bound between their covers was lots of advice about the
best way to drain, shell, peel,
and shred or mince coconut meat. The best method, even including my hand-cranked, ten-dollar grater from southern India, where coconut is as common as salt or pepper, is to put the coconut in a 400-degree oven for fifteen minutes until it cracks all by itself and then peel off the tough brown skin with a vegetable peeler, with occasional assists from a small paring knife honed on my Chef’s Choice model 110 sharpener—despite warnings in several kitchen manuals that oven heat will ruin the meat. Elapsed time: nearly two hours for four coconuts.
Everything went smoothly until I got to the cake batter. I combined the sugar and eggs in my electric mixer, added the softened butter, and beat in the milk. It was then that I suddenly began to have trouble breathing—the batter had become completely separated! Firm yellow spheroids the size of small peas floated in a thin translucent greasy soup. Things turned ugly when I increased the speed of the mixer, and the soup began to slosh onto the counter. Dinner was now three hours away, the six layers were not even close to being baked and cooled, I was out of eggs, and the stores were closed.
I turned again to my kitchen collection. The minutes flew by as ten desperate fingers flipped through manuals, cookbook chapters, and magazine articles, searching for “cake batter, separated,” “separated cake batter,” “batter, cake, separated,” and so forth. One of the earliest cookbooks in existence,
De re coquinaria
(ascribed to one or more cooks of ancient Rome named Apicius), devotes its very first chapter to food repair and kitchen tricks. Did you know that you can clear up badly muddied white wine by mixing it with bean meal or the whites of three eggs? And that you can make ordinary Spanish olive oil taste like costly Liburnian oil by adding Cyprian rush, elecampane, and green laurel leaves? But Apicius has nothing to say about curdled coconut cake.
