The Man Who Ate Everything (8 page)

Should your butter be very hard or very soft when you beat it in? Do you dare to use a whisk? (Michel Guerard says never.) Do waxy potatoes and new potatoes precook successfully? Is steaming better than boiling?

At present I am at a complete loss for answers to these remaining questions, and I will not be altogether happy with my mashed potatoes until the whole truth comes out. My next set of experiments begins tonight.

January 1989

Author’s Note:

Joel Robuchon’s potato is now the
ratte—
small, waxy, yellow fleshed, and available at some farmers’ markets, including mine. Robuchon uses a food mill to mash his potatoes, then arduously rubs the puree through a sieve.

I love the taste of calcium carbonate, or at least I think I do. Zinc leaves me cold, and I am lukewarm about lithium chloride. But silicate can taste just great—up to a point, of course.

Cool, crisp, pure, crystalline water is my favorite nonalcoholic drink, more than the juice of the blood orange and even more than diet Coke. Most Americans would disagree. One day in 1986 we began drinking less water, from both tap and bottle, than we did soft drinks. In future years this will be viewed as an awesome and chilling event, our final break with the natural world, but as far as I can remember, the moment passed unnoticed. I was probably drinking a Tab.

For the past few months I have been racking my brain, which is 75 percent water, to understand what perfect water should taste like. Several experts in the science of flavor have tried to persuade me that we all simply prefer the water we grew up with. I don’t believe a word of it. If they were right, the 40 percent of Californians who use bottled or filtered water as their main supply—most of them because of the taste of most California tap water—would be content with what they’ve been drinking since they were young. We lovers of water are always in pursuit of that pure, clear, ethereal Alpine spring of our imaginations, and we know how it will taste when we find it.

I’ve been sampling lots of unsparkling bottled waters recently, and several of them approach the ideal. Fiuggi from Italy is one,
and the French brand Volvic is another, though Evian is not—it tastes heavy and unctuous to me. In this, I resemble Farrah Fawcett, who is reported to prefer Volvic to all other still waters. She sets her hair with Evian, which is where we part company. Michelangelo was a great fan of Fiuggi, and I couldn’t agree more.

The Water Centre in Edison, New Jersey, carries more bottled waters than any other place in the country, and I telephoned it the other day at (800) 345-5959 to find out what’s new. The owner, Stanley Siebenberg, was sipping from a bottle of rare Peruvian San Mateo water when I reached him; it comes from a region known as the Land of Longevity. He told me that Lithia Springs is very popular among women who wish to get pregnant; it makes you feel mellow and more receptive to sex. M.G. Voda is rich in free magnesium, which some people say cures headaches and helps them sleep. Stanley himself lost seventeen pounds drinking Hennieze, the best-selling water in Switzerland, which, he said, lifts your energy level. Then, for several weeks, he washed his face in Deliziosa, and the wrinkles on his forehead disappeared. I told Stanley that I had read about a rock formation deep under Louisiana in which water has been trapped, unaltered, for forty million years; so far it is unavailable in bottled form.

The Food and Drug Administration forbids bottled-water companies to make health claims, and unless you drink monumental quantities of the most heavily mineralized waters on the market, you probably eat more of most types of minerals in your food. (A glass of milk has more calcium than a whole liter of the highest-calcium water I could find.) I explained to Stanley that eager as I am to shed both wrinkles and weight, mellow out, and add to my allotted years, I would settle in the meantime for a steady supply of water from an ethereal Alpine spring. He knew just what I meant and the next day delivered thirty-three candidates. Stanley’s forehead was admirably smooth—though, meeting him for the first time, I had no basis for comparison.

When I had tasted half the thirty-three waters and become aware of their dramatically different tastes, I began to wonder
why so few cookbooks specify the kind of water you should use in their recipes. I have seen recipes for lobster steamed in seawater and recipes for matzo balls formed with seltzer to make them light and fluffy. I’ve read that very hard water (high in calcium and magnesium) ruins the color and texture of vegetables and the consistency of bread dough, but that bread made with water free of alkaline mineral salts will fail to form a delicious golden crust. The British and the Chinese vary the variety of tea they brew according to the character of the water in their part of the country.

I telephoned Paula Wolfert
(Couscous and Other Good Food from Morocco, The Cooking of South-West France, World of Food,
all Harper & Row), who opened up the culinary encyclopedia that inhabits her brain and added to my short list. Carbonated water is used by the Yugoslavs to form
cevaptici,
sausage-shaped hamburgers grilled on a spit and served with onions; by the Serbs in their
proja,
a corn bread; and by other Mediterranean peoples to lighten their meatballs. The Four Seasons restaurant in New York City insists on San Pellegrino in its chocolate sherbet, and Paula herself includes a recipe for spring vegetables in
World of Food
that works only with Evian or Volvic.

The one world-famous recipe that depends on the water you use is carrots Vichy. Vichy water is salty, sparkling, and brimming with sulfates, bicarbonates, chlorides, and calcium from springs in central France where Julius Caesar once built a spa. Its bitter, salty taste is thought to balance the sweetness of carrots. You barely cover thin rounds of young carrots with Vichy water, add big pinches of sugar and salt, and cook gently until all the Vichy water is absorbed. Then you dot the carrots with butter, sprinkle with parsley, and eat.

Bottled water costs more than gasoline, even at a discount supermarket; despite the frightening facts you read these days, there is still lots of fine, free tap water left in America. If New York City water were not treated with chlorine, it would taste as delicious as anything from a bottle, and even with recent ecological threats to the city’s upstate reservoirs, tasters from all over the world seem to concur. Chlorine is a greenish yellow gas with a
powerful smell. It violently irritates the nose and throat, but it violently irritates bacteria even more, and so it has become a nearly universal disinfectant in public water supplies in America. Chlorine smells like Clorox bleach, and after you bathe in it, it reacts with your sweat and leaves you smelling like a boiled ear of corn, which some experts describe as the odor of human semen. An article in the
Tea and Coffee Trade Journal
considers chlorine the mortal enemy of coffee taste and aroma. Europeans (and most bottled-water companies) disinfect their water mainly with ozone, which does not dissolve in water the way chlorine does. Europeans apparently care more about the pleasure that delicious water can bring than about its germicidal sterility, and now some American cities are experimenting with ozonation.

My water is piped four miles down Fifth Avenue from Central Park, and after I’ve drunk my fill, it continues all the way downtown. Chlorine is introduced at Ninetieth Street, and because it dissipates as the water travels, enough chlorine must be added uptown so that some is left to disinfect the people on Wall Street, who are probably drinking Perrier anyway. In order that Wall Street may thrive, I must put up with water that tastes less perfect than it should.

This is just one example of the principle that bad-tasting water is not necessarily hazardous to your health and good-tasting water can possibly harm you. Too much iron or manganese makes water taste unpleasant; iron leaves rusty stains on your clothing; calcium and magnesium, the minerals that make water hard, turn soap into a sludgy mess, leave deposits on glasses and pots, and clog up your automatic coffeemaker. But none of these can hurt you in normal concentrations. On the other hand, many harmful or suspect chemicals can’t be tasted or smelled even at dangerous levels.

That’s why I sent off my water to be tested.
Consumer Reports
recommends a company in New Hampshire called WaterTest; I telephoned them at (800) 253-3506 and ordered up as many home tests as they have to offer. Within a few days I received a series of kits, snug Styrofoam containers filled with half-frozen plastic cold packs molded around little bottles with color-coded caps, some of them containing chemicals. I filled half the bottles at 7:00 a.m., before anybody else had drawn water, and the other half in the afternoon. The idea was to see whether the “first draw” of water lying in the pipes all night was more contaminated than the “full flush,” freely flowing water that has been coursing under the streets and through my building all day. Tap water in older cities on the East Coast and in the Northwest can become polluted with lead as it passes through lead pipes (banned in 1986), joints soldered with lead mixtures, and brass faucets containing as much as 8 percent lead—and the longer water lies in the pipes, the more lead it collects. Even low levels of lead can cause permanent learning disabilities in children and peripheral nerve damage in adults. Some people think that lead-lined aqueducts and pewter goblets caused the fall of the Roman Empire. Some people will believe anything.

When the test results came back, I breathed a sigh of relief and took a cool sip of Quibell, a delicious bottled water from West Virginia, to replenish the water that had left my body in the exhale. (We lose three quarts of water a day from breathing, perspiration,
and elimination.) All eleven metals, all coliform bacteria, all twelve pesticides, and all forty-nine organic compounds (solvents, petroleum derivatives, and by-products of chlorination, with names like isopropylbenzene and bromochloromethane) occurred at only small fractions of the EPA’s Maximum Contaminant Levels, and most of them were below the lowest levels that WaterTest’s sensitive instruments are able to report. The only difference between the water lying around all night and the fresh water in the afternoon sample was that the first contained more iron. Lead was no
problem.

If I were more nervous about my health, the reports from WaterTest might not have been so reassuring. Critics blame the federal EPA for leaving hundreds of contaminants unregulated and for not pressing local water systems to comply with the rules. Critics of the critics say that our ability to detect these chemicals in incredibly small amounts has outdistanced our knowledge of what it all means for the public health. Those who drink bottled water to sidestep these controversies will be horrified to read studies by McKone and Andelman showing that the amounts of organic compounds you absorb through your skin in the bath or inhale in the shower can exceed the amount you drink. Think of your shower as a gas chamber.

I am grateful that so many people are worrying about the safety of my water, because they leave me free to worry about its
taste.

The first problem to solve was this: How do you describe the flavor of an ideal water? I telephoned Arthur von Wiesenberger, author of two books about bottled water
(H20,
Woodbridge Press, and
The Pocket Guide to Bottled Water,
Contemporary Books), and he generously faxed me a professional rating sheet. Water should be clean tasting, colorless, odorless, refreshing (not heavy or stale), and thirst quenching (without a residue). Water is downgraded if it is cloudy or smells metallic or musty or like chlorine, plastic, sulfur, or chemicals. Other professional testers add that water should not taste soapy, salty, waxy, muddy, or sour. By
these standards, the pristine quality of an Alpine spring is nothing but the absence of flaws.

If this were true, then totally pure distilled water (there is no such thing, but you can come pretty close) would be the ideal. Yet almost everybody agrees that distilled water tastes awful—except for people who sell home water distillers and some friends of mine who are clinically paranoid about chemicals in their environment. I bought a gallon jug at the drugstore, took a few sips, and swallowed them reluctantly. On the theory that the water simply needed to be aerated, I whirled a cup of it in the blender for a few minutes. The taste was still unpleasant in a way that is difficult to describe—certainly not sulfurous or chemical or any of those adjectives, just stale and unrefreshing and slightly bitter. It was obvious that perfectly pure water does not come close to the ethereal Alpine spring.

I telephoned two scientists who have done important research on the taste of water, Linda Bartoshuk at Yale and Michael O’Mahony at the University of California at Davis. They explained that distilled water tastes bad because it doesn’t taste anything like saliva. Yes, saliva.

Saliva is salty. But we lose our awareness of its constant presence as our taste buds adapt to the level of salt it contains. As a result, we perceive less salty things as having a subzero kind of taste. Bartoshuk describes this as a kind of bitterness (one of the four basic tastes—bitter, salty, sweet, and sour); if we wash the saliva from our tongue with distilled water for several minutes, we lose our adaptation to saltiness and no longer perceive pure water as bitter. O’Mahony refuses to categorize this taste as bitter; he will not go further than calling it “distilled water taste.” Here I discovered a deep fissure in the academic world of taste: the O’Mahony school finds no physical basis for the existence of four basic tastes. After I have found the perfect water, I will return to figure out what this means for the world of string beans and creme brulee.