Best Food Writing 2010

by Holly Hughes

  Getting Inside the Fluffy Interior

  Now that I’d perfected the crust, the final issue to deal with was that of the interior. One last question remained: how to maximize the flavor of the interior. In order to stay fluffy and not gummy, a lot of the interior moisture needs to be expelled in the cooking process, so my goal should be to make this evaporation as easy as possible. I figure that so far, by cooking it all the way to boiling point, I’m doing pretty much the right thing—the more cooked the potatoes are, the more the cell structure breaks down, and the easier it is for water to be expelled. To confirm this, I cooked three batches of potatoes, starting each in a pot of cold, vinegared water, and bringing them up to various final temperatures (170°F, 185°F, and 212°F) before draining and double-frying them. Not surprisingly, the boiled potatoes had the best internal structure. Luckily, they were the easiest to make as well.

  But was there anything more I could do? I thought back to those McDonald’s fries and realized a vital step that I had neglected to test: freezing. Every batch of McDonald’s fries is frozen before being shipped out to the stores. I always figured this step was for purely economic reasons, but perhaps there was more to it?

  I tried freezing half a batch of fries before frying them and tasted them side-by-side against the other half. [ . . . ] The improvement was undeniable. The frozen fries had a distinctly fluffier interior, while the unfrozen ones were still ever-so-slightly gummy. It makes perfect sense. Freezing the potatoes causes their moisture to convert to ice, forming sharp, jagged crystals. These crystals damage the cell structure of the potato, making it easier for them to be released once they are heated and convert to steam. The best part? Because freezing actually improves them, I can do the initial blanching and frying steps in large batches, freeze them, and have a constant supply of ready-to-fry potatoes right in my freezer just like Ronald himself!

  I know it’s bad form to toot your own horn, but I’m simply amazed that these fries have been coming out of my own kitchen. I’ve been eating fries in various shades of good or bad constantly for the past few days, and I’m absolutely sick of them, yet I am still eating them even as I sit here and type. I really hope my wife doesn’t mind greasy keyboards. You never know what’s gonna set her off.

  For instance—she gets mad when I say things like that about her on completely public forums. Go figure.

  Perfect French Fries

  serves four

  Note: Potatoes can be frozen after step 2. To freeze potatoes, place entire sheet tray in freezer. After fully frozen, place in Ziploc bags, press out air, and freeze for up to 2 months. If cooking straight from frozen, do not cook more than ¼ batch at a time unless you have a large vessel for deep frying, as oil temperature will drop too precipitously.

  Ingredients

  2 pounds russet potatoes (about 4 large), peeled and cut into

  ¼-inch by ¼-inch fries (keep potatoes stored in a bowl of

  water)

  2 tablespoons distilled white vinegar

  Kosher salt

  2 quarts peanut oil

  Procedure

  1. Place potatoes and vinegar in saucepan and add 2 quarts of water and 2 tablespoons of salt. Bring to a boil over high heat. Boil for 10 minutes. Potatoes should be fully tender, but not falling apart. Drain and spread on paper towel-lined rimmed baking sheet. Allow to dry for five minutes.

  2. Meanwhile, heat oil in 5-quart Dutch oven or large wok over high heat to 400°F. Add ⅓ of fries to oil (oil temperature should drop to around 360°F). Cook for 50 seconds, agitating occasionally with wire mesh spider, then remove to second paper-towel lined rimmed baking sheet. Repeat with remaining potatoes (working in two more batches), allowing oil to return to 400°F after each addition. Allow potatoes to cool to room temperature, about 30 minutes. Continue with step 3, or for best results, freeze potatoes at least over night, or up to 2 months.

  3. Return oil to 400°F over high heat. Fry half of potatoes until crisp and light golden brown, about 3 ½ minutes, adjusting heat to maintain at around 360°F. Drain in a bowl lined with paper towels and season immediately with kosher salt. Cooked fries can be kept hot and crisp on a wire rack set on a sheet tray in a 200°F oven while second batch is cooked. Serve immediately.

  RATHER SPECIAL AND STRANGELY POPULAR: A MILK TOAST EXEMPLARY

  By John Thorne From Rather Special and Strangely Popular: A Milk Toast Exemplary

  John Thorne generally practices his culinary archeology—resurrecting old recipes while spinning a kitchen yarn or two—in his homey newsletter Simple Cooking. This essay, however, was published in an endearingly old-fashioned format: a tiny hand-printed limited-edition booklet.

  Elspeth’s Milk Toast

  This recipe is rather special and strangely popular. Toast a few slices of very thinly cut bread. Butter lightly and dust with salt and pepper. Put in a soup plate and keep hot. Add enough hot milk to soften, but not to swamp. Serve at once.

  —MOLLY KEAN’S Nursery Cooking

  Molly Keane is a noted Irish novelist and playwright. I had bought her book on nursery food for a lark, and was leafing through it in that idle way one does, nodding to familiar friends and sizing up potential new ones, when my eyes fell on “Elspeth’s Milk Toast.” I read the introductory sentence, then the short recipe, then faltered as I moved to turn the page.

  Whatever, I wondered, could she mean by “rather special” and, more, by “strangely popular”? I had never eaten milk toast, but I was aware of it—as one is, I guess, growing up in New England . . . or, at least, spending time with old New England cookbooks. I certainly understood enough to know that this recipe was exactly—no more, no less—what I would expect a milk toast recipe to be.

  On the other hand, I had no reason to think that Molly Keane was deluded. Maybe, I thought, she was onto something that I was unaccountably missing. I put the book down and went over to the bookcase that holds our not insignificant collection of English, Scottish, and Irish cookbooks, to see what they had to say on the subject.

  Then came my next surprise. I looked through old ones and new ones, books as magisterial as the original Mrs. Beeton and as specialized as The English Breakfast, Kaori O’Connor’s fascinating collection of facsimile Victorian cookbooks on that subject, to find . . . nothing.

  The closest I came was a recipe in Miss Allen’s oddly conceived Breakfast Dishes for Every Morning of Three Months (1884).

  Bread and Milk

  Cut the bread into dice, put them into a basin; boil the milk, and when boiling pour it over the bread. Cover the cup up for five minutes, and then stand it by the fire for five more. Sugar to taste.

  This recipe, unappealing as it is (not only doesn’t it sound very good, but one gets the feeling it isn’t meant to be so. Analeptic, maybe; tasty, not at all), gave me a hint, and some further searching confirmed it. The British have always eaten milk-sopped bread, and it doesn’t need be so punishing. Samuel Pepys, for instance, writes in his diary about happily dining on “Creame and brown bread.” 16 However, when it comes to milk toast, we are speaking pure American. 17

  milk toast n. U.S. Toast softened in milk.... Martin Amis, London Fields: Milk toast, thought Guy. An American dish, served with honey or syrup.

  —Oxford English Dictionary

  According to Stuart Berg Flexner in I Hear America Talking, his popular history of our linguistic ways, the phrase “milk toast” is American and began appearing in the 1820s. Our collection of old American cookbooks doesn’t really start until the mid-1800s, but milk toast does turn up in those, and continues to do so with increasing frequency right through the rest of the century.

  Unfortunately, these recipes are uniformly nasty and would have killed my interest in the dish permanently—had it not been for Google Books and a bit of good luck. One of my early “milk toast” searches there ferreted out a passage from The Wabash: or Adventures of an English Gentleman’s Family in the Interior of America (1855). In it, the author tells of encountering milk toa
st at a breakfast served at Congress Hall (a hotel) in Saratoga Springs.

  Hot rolls of every description and numberless little dishes of sausages covered the table, together with large platters of milk toast. This delicacy is made of slices of toast, buttered and sprinkled with pepper and salt, and laid in a dish of warm milk, which serves as a sauce to the rest: most of us were very fond of this American toast.

  Up until that moment I had associated milk toast with the nursery and sick bed of yesteryear. As a toast lover, I welcomed any dish that put it to good use, but curiosity and appetite are only occasionally twins. When I set out on this search I had no intention of trying milk toast, and certainly no plans to write about it.

  However, there was both a contagious relish in the description of those platters of milk toast, as well as an element of complete surprise. Where we today would have expected this foreign visitor to fall into rapture about our griddle cakes or hoe cakes or flap-jacks, here he was ecstatic over . . . milk toast?

  This fascination was enough to not only make me want to try the dish myself but carry me through the profound disappointment of discovering that all the early “milk toast” recipes in those aforesaid old cookbooks were for toast sopped in white sauce—milk thickened with flour or cornstarch.

  This is a terrible thing, and why it should be the case here, I simply don’t know. I suspect the perpetual and tiresome gentility of most period cookbook authors, forever preferring the luscious thickness of a sauce, however faux, over honest plain milk or, more to the point, pricey and perishable sweet cream.

  So it is that flour is added to the milk toast recipe in every edition of The Fannie Farmer Cookbook until Marion Cunningham, newly at the helm, removed it from the 12th edition. Years later, in her Breakfast Book, she would lament: Why in the world did we ever abandon milk toast? Although it sounds deceptively bland and dull, it isn’t; and as the Victorians discovered, it can revive the peaked or sad. Nourishing and soul-satisfying, milk toast will banish the blues.

  I suggest she turn around and point an accusatory finger at her predecessors—then give them a rap on the knuckles from me.

  The earliest recipe I found for milk toast without this fiddling was in Mrs. Rorer’s New Cook Book (1902). Her version is simple and to the point, and—see the caution—gives the dish the right sort of attentive respect.

  Milk Toast is made by pouring scalding hot milk over dry toast. A tablespoonful of butter may be added to each quart of milk. To prevent scorching, heat the milk in a double boiler. Caution.—The main point is to pour the milk over the crisp warm toast at the very last moment, and serve quickly.

  If Fannie Farmer had been so wise, this American classic might not have become the forgotten dish it is today.

  EVEN SO, real milk toast was never lost. Search the vernacular records and you will find such memories as those recorded by the Southern herbalist A. L. Tommie Bass, born in 1908. In Plain Southern Food, he recalls that when his father had “a bad stomach,” he’d ask for some milk toast to soothe it.

  Mother would first brown the bread and then she would put it in a bowl or something, and pour the milk over it, and add the sugar. Now, the way they made it in the army, why, they toasted the bread and dipped it in honey and milk, and put it back in the stove and browned it, you know. They didn’t add spice, but some folks does.

  If you think about it, you can’t imagine Tommie Bass’s mother making a white sauce to cover the toast—not because it would be too much trouble, but because it would be frivolous and wrong, for the same reason that a child prefers a mug of chicken noodle to one of cream of chicken soup. There is comfort and pleasure even in canned noodles, but there is none in murk.

  Consider, from that perspective, the version of milk toast that Tommie Bass remembers from the army: toast dipped in honey and milk, then crisped up in the oven. The recipient can relish each step of its making, as that slab of toast gets tastier and tastier. By the time you sit down to eat it, you’re already half in a swoon.

  When President James Garfield was shot by an assassin in 1881, he lingered on for months, for most of that time with a bullet lodged in his spine. He had a hard time keeping down solid food, so he was fed various meat broths, scraped raw beef, breast of woodcock, koumiss (fermented mare’s milk), rum and other spirits, and, almost always, milk toast. At one point, the President said to Mrs. Garfield, who was sitting by his bedside, that he would like a piece of milk toast . . . Mrs. Garfield thereupon prepared the toast carefully herself, and the patient ate with apparent relish and enjoyment a piece about half as large as a man’s hand....

  Once you’ve shaken off that last odd image, let your mind step away from dish to the scene itself: the failing patient and the comforting wife who prepares for him a dish that is easily and quickly made, soothing to eat, and preceded by the primal aromas of hot milk and toast.

  All this becomes more potent still, when the recipient is present during the ritual of actually making the dish. And this is especially so if that person is a sleepy, hungry child.

  Small matters often seem great to children. Now, I would not willingly forget how, when I was a little girl, dear Grandma Wayne used to tempt my poor appetite, of mornings, with such milk-toast as no one else, I was very sure, could ever make. I have never, to this day, outgrown the taste thus cultivated for it, and of- ten when I am feeling out of sorts, and nearly sick, my thoughts turn to the blessed time when “grandma” made milk-toast in a pint basin for me in the mornings of long ago....

  —Arthur’s Illustrated Home Magazine (1874)

  Even Mr. Toaster, who teaches the young heroine of Jane Eayre Fryer’s The Mary Frances Cook Book (1912) to make milk toast for her ill mother, seems to have had the same childhood experience. When Mary Frances has the toast ready to bring upstairs, he exclaims, “That’s right! That’s the way my grandmother made it,” and adds longingly, “That milk toast would taste awfully good.” (She politely offers him a bite, but he declines, confessing that anything he puts in his mouth falls right out behind, which is why he is so thin.)

  Maggie Waldron, in Cold Spaghetti At Midnight, a book devoted to all sorts of spell-casting food, captures the milk toast ritual from the mother’s perspective.

  The very name of milk toast brought comfort to my daughter Sara. Especially when I suggested it might hit the spot. She always had it in the same bowl, made exactly the same way. The bread had to be white and dense and nicely toasted, two slices for a serving, well buttered and sprinkled with cinnamon, with whole milk heated to simmering, and seasoned with salt and a generous grind of pepper. I watch in amazement as she goes through the same ritual with her own little girl.

  For an experience to become a ritual, or at least possess the properties of one, the things involved must be few, so that their meaning is not diffused, and they must somehow assume a perceptible weight. They attain this partly from the reassurance that comes of being “ just so,” and partly by already possessing the solidity of the absolutely familiar.

  AS SOON AS I STARTED to assemble the ingredients for my own first batch of milk toast, these same qualities began to assert themselves, starting with the loaf of bread. The artisan bakery where we get ours makes several wonderful loaves, but none of them seemed the thing for milk toast.

  I had in mind the sort of old-fashioned loaf that grandma’s grandma used to make, rectangular below and puffed out above, with a thin brown crust and a soft but chewy (and flavorful!) interior. This, of course, is what store-bought bread generally looks like, but never really is. Besides, it’s all sliced, and I wanted to cut my own to just the right thickness.

  I went to our local supermarket and, for the first time in years, moseyed down the bread aisle. The variety was simultaneously astonishing and depressing. What was once, all on its own, considered the staff of life was now scattered with flax seeds and sold as a nutritional supplement. Most of it was sheer fakery—but, even worse, a few dense and sprout-riddled loaves might have been exactly that.
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  Matt suggested that I try the other, more conventional bakery in town. There I found what they called a “French loaf,” although I doubt any bakery in France offers anything like it. This was a lazy sort of pain de mie, baked like ordinary bread rather than in the traditional closed pan that produces a loaf with a perfect rectangular shape and very tender crust.

  However, “mie” means “crumb”—pain de mie has an interior that is tasty, tender, and moist, yet firm enough for slicing—and so had this bread, too. It was, essentially, a loaf of good old-fashioned white bread, meant for slicing, not pulling apart with your fingers, and just the thing for making milk toast.

  As to the milk, we live in an area that still has local dairies, including one with all Jersey cows. Getting first-rate milk is no problem at all (if we wanted, we could get it home delivered in glass bottles!)

  It was time to fire up the toaster.

  By now, of course, I had perused many, many milk toast recipes, all of them similar but few of them the same. There were those who sweetened their milk toast and those who salted and peppered it (or both). There were those who buttered their toast—some on one side and others on both sides—and those who buttered their toast and melted butter in the hot milk. There were a few who included a hot oven as part of their method, most elaborately by bake-toasting pullet-sized morsels of bread and then sopping them with the hot milk.