Choice Cuts

by Mark Kurlansky

  Go to bed about eleven o’clock on ordinary days, and not later than one in the morning on special occasions.

  If you follow this plan with care and determination, you will soon repair the ravages of nature; your health as well as your beauty will improve; sensual pleasure will profit from the two of them, and the Professor’s ears will ring agreeably to the music of grateful confidences.

  We fatten sheep, calves, oxen, poultry, carp, crayfish, and oysters; and from this fact I have deduced the following general maxim: Everything that eats can grow fat, as long as its food is sensibly and suitably chosen.

  —from The Physiology of Taste, 1825,

  translated from the French by M.F.K. Fisher

  MARTIAL ON NOT BEING FED

  Last night, Fabullus, I admit,

  You gave your guests some exquisite

  Perfume—but not one slice of meat.

  Ironic contrast: to smell sweet

  And yet be desperate to eat.

  To be embalmed without being fed

  Makes a man feel distinctly dead.

  —from Epigrams, first century A.D.,

  translated from the Latin by James Michie

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Rants

  PELLEGRINO ARTUSI AGAINST FRYING SALT COD

  Pellegrino Artusi was an affluent nineteenth-century silk merchant from Florence. He collected recipes and thoughts about food from a lifetime of entertaining, but no one would publish it. Unlike Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, he was willing to publish it himself, which he did in 1891. Since then, La Scienza in Cucina e l’arte di Mangiar Bene, The Science of Cooking and the Art of Eating Well, has had 111 printings. The American edition was titled simply The Art of Eating Well.

  —M.K.

  The frying pan can be put to many wonderful uses in the kitchen, but I feel that baccalà comes to a horrid end in it: Since it must first be boiled and then dipped in batter, there isn’t a sauce on earth capable of giving it a pleasant flavor. This is the reason that some people, perhaps because they don’t know of any better techniques, do the following. To boil the baccalà, put it in a pot of cold water on the stove, and remove it as soon as the water comes to a boil. (It can be eaten as is, at this stage, if you just season it with oil and vinegar [mayonnaise and lemon are also quite good].) However, we now come to the technique I mentioned above, which you are perfectly free to try, and then damn to hell both the recipe and the person who wrote it. After boiling the baccalà, marinate it whole in red wine for several hours. Dry it with a cloth, clean it, removing the scales and spines, and cut it into pieces. Lightly flour the pieces and dip them in an unsalted batter made with water, flour, and a drop of oil. Fry the baccalà in oil and dust it with sugar after it’s cooled somewhat. The taste of the wine is barely perceptible if the fish is eaten hot; remember—you wanted to prepare this dish against my best advice.

  —from The Art of Eating Well, 1891,

  translated from the Italian by Kyle M. Phillips III

  ELIZABETH DAVID AGAINST THE GARLIC PRESS

  According to the British restaurant guides, dining at John Tovey’s Miller Howe Hotel on Lake Windermere is an experience akin to sitting through the whole Ring cycle in one session. Perhaps, but in Tovey’s latest book, Feast of Vegetables, there is little sign of excess or eccentricity. His recipes are basically conventional, the novelty, and it is a useful one, lying in the seasonings. Carrots may be spiced with coriander or caraway seed, or green ginger. Orange juice and rind go into grated beetroot. Marsala and toasted almond flakes give courgettes a new look and a new taste. Chicory or Belgian endives are braised in orange juice, the grated peel added. A celeriac soup is again flavoured with orange juice and the grated rind. A celeriac, courgette and potato mixture is cooked in a frying pan into a flat cake—a useful recipe for non–meat eaters. Another in the same category is for individual moulds of cooked carrots and turnips, whizzed to a purée with hazelnuts, egg yolks, cream and seasonings of onion salt (something I can myself at all times do without) and ground ginger. Whisked egg whites are folded in, the mixture is transferred to buttered ramekins lined with lettuce leaves, baked in a water bath in a hottish oven, and turned out for serving. All oven temperatures are given in Fahrenheit, centigrade and gas marks, and timing is always carefully worked out, in many cases with three alternatives, according to whether you want your vegetables crisp—Mr Tovey steers clear of the idiotic term crispy—firm or soft.

  It is when we get to the subject of garlic that I really warm to Mr Tovey. What he has to say about its preparation is alone worth the price of his book. The passage should be reproduced in large type, framed and sold in gift shops for the enlightenment of gadget-minded cooks the length and breadth of the land. In the manner of those pious thoughts which once adorned the walls of cottage parlours, proclaiming that God is Love, or Drink is the Pick-me-up which lets you Down, Mr Tovey’s text is concise and to the point. Readers, heed him please: “I give full marks to the purveyors of garlic presses for being utterly useless objects.”

  I’d go further than that. I regard garlic presses as both ridiculous and pathetic, their effect being precisely the reverse of what people who buy them believe will be the case. Squeezing the juice out of garlic doesn’t reduce its potency, it concentrates it and intensifies the smell. I have often wondered how it is that people who have once used one of these diabolical instruments don’t notice this and forthwith throw the thing into the dustbin. Perhaps they do but won’t admit it.

  Now here’s John Tovey again. The consistency you’re looking for when adding garlic to a dish is “mushy and paste-like.” Agreed. It is quickly achieved by crushing a peeled clove lightly with the back edge of a really heavy knife blade. Press a scrap of salt into the squashed garlic. That’s all. Quicker, surely than getting the garlic press out of the drawer, let alone using it and cleaning it. As a one-time kitchen-shop owner who in the past has frequently, and usually vainly, attempted to dissuade a customer from buying a garlic press, I am of course aware that advice not to buy a gadget which someone has resolved to waste their money on is usually resented as bossy, ignorant, and interfering. At least now I am not alone.

  Now a word of dissent. If there’s one thing about expensive restaurant cooking which to my mind spoils vegetable soups, it’s the often unnecessary and undesirable use of chicken or meat-based stock as a foundation. John Tovey uses just one basic chicken or turkey and vegetable stock for every one of his soups, from asparagus, courgette, fennel, Jerusalem artichoke, to parsnip, sweet corn, tomato, turnip. I suppose that passes in a hotel restaurant where you’re feeding different people every day, but in household cooking such a practice soon results in deathly monotony.

  That’s one, just one, of the reasons stock cubes are so awful. They give the same underlying false flavour to every soup. It can’t be sufficiently emphasised that many vegetable soups are best without any stock at all. It’s not a question of lazy cooking. Donkeys years ago I learned from Boulestin not to diminish and distort the indefinably strange and alluring flavour of Jerusalem artichoke purée with stock. A year or two ago, when Raymond Blanc was still at the Quat’ Saisons in Oxford, I had there a creamy pumpkin soup which I’d be happy to eat every other day. He told me he used a very light vegetable stock as a base for his delectable creation. The information seems worth passing on.

  —from Tatler, February 1986

  ALEXIS SOYER IN DEFENSE OF THE FRYING PAN

  Alexis Soyer, born in the cheeseworthy village of Meaux-en-Brie, France, was an original man. He not only became London’s most celebrated chef, especially from 1837 to 1850 when he was head chef at the Reform Club, but he was also an inventor and social activist. He believed that an interest in food should be more than the development and preparation of great dishes. It should be an interest in taking on the world’s nutritional problems and in ending hunger. And he did more than write about these ideas. When he heard of the Irish famine he went to Dublin with a portable kitchen he had invented
. Though a cook for the wealthy, his book Soyer’s Shilling Cookery for the People was one of many projects to reach poor and middle-class people.

  —M.K.

  This useful utensil, which is so much in vogue in all parts of the world, and even for other purposes besides cookery—for I have before me now a letter, written, at the Ovens’ diggings, on the back of a frying-pan, for want of a table; but in your letter you suggest the necessity of paying particular attention to it, as it is the utensil most in vogue in a bachelor’s residence. I cannot but admire your constant devotion to the bachelors: you are always in fear that this unsociable class of individuals should be uncomfortable. For my part, I do not pity them, and would not give myself the slightest trouble to comfort them, especially after they have passed the first thirty springs of their life. Let them get married, and enjoy the troubles, pleasures, and comforts of matrimony, and have a wife to manage their home, and attend to more manly pursuits than cooking their supper when they get home at night, because the old housekeeper has gone to bed; or lighting the fire when they get up in the morning, because the old dame has a slight touch of lumbago and should he require something substantial for his breakfast, and want that utensil of all work, the frying-pan, finds it all dirt and fishy, not having been cleaned since he last dined at home.

  Unidentified photographer, Pancake Race, Shrove Tuesday, c. 1950

  No, my dear Eloise, I assure you I do not feel at all inclined to add to their comforts, though you may do what you like with the following receipts, which are equally as applicable to them, as to the humble abode of the married fraternity.

  You will also find, in these receipts, that the usual complaint of food being greasy by frying, is totally remedied, by sautéing the meat in a small quantity of fat, butter, or oil, which has attained a proper degree of heat, instead of placing it in cold fat and letting it soak while melting.

  I will, in as few words as possible, having my frying-pan in one hand and a rough cloth in the other, with which to wipe it (considering that cleanliness is the first lesson in cookery), initiate you in the art of producing an innumerable number of dishes, which can be made with it, quickly, economically, relishing, and wholesome. But I must first tell you, that the word fry, in the English language, is a mistake; according to the mode in which all objects are cooked which are called fried, it would answer to the French word sauté, or the old English term frizzle; but to fry any object, it should be immersed in very hot fat, oil, or butter, as I have carefully detailed to you in our “Modern Housewife.” To frizzle, sauté, or, as I will now designate it, semi-fry, is to place into the pan any oleaginous substance, so that, when melted, it shall cover the bottom of the pan by about two lines; and, when hot, the article to be cooked shall be placed therein. To do it to perfection requires a little attention, so that the pan shall never get too hot. It should be perfectly clean—a great deal depends on this.

  I prefer the pan, for many objects, over the gridiron; that is, if the pan is properly used. As regards economy, it is preferable, securing all the fat and gravy, which is often lost when the gridiron is used.

  All the following receipts can be done with this simple batterie de cuisine, equally as well in the cottage as in the palace, or in the bachelor’s chamber as in the rooms of the poor.

  1st Lesson. To Semi-fry Steak.—Having procured a steak about three quarters of an inch thick, and weighing about one pound, and two ounces of fat, place the pan on the fire, with one ounce of butter or fat; let it remain until the fat is melted, and rather hot; take hold of the steak at one end by a fork, and dip it in the pan, so that one side is covered with fat; then turn the other side in it, and let it remain for two or three minutes, according to the heat of the fire; then turn it: it will take about ten or twelve minutes, and require to be turned on each side three times, taking care that the pan is not too hot, or it will burn the gravy, and perhaps the meat, and thus lose all the nutriment; in fact, the pan should never be left, but carefully watched; on this depends the advantages of this style and mode of cookery. If the object is not turned often, it will be noticed that the gravy will come out on the upper surface of the meat, which, when turning over, will go into the pan and be lost, instead of remaining in the meat. Season with a teaspoonful of salt and a quarter of pepper; then feel with the finger that it is done, remove it with a fork, inserted in the fat, and serve very hot.

  So much for the first lesson, the details of which must be learnt as it will then simplify every other receipt.

  2nd Lesson.—Remember that the thickness is never to exceed one inch, nor be less than half an inch, and to be as near as possible the same thickness all over. A good housewife will object to one cut in any other way; but if it cannot be avoided, press it out with the blade of the knife, to give it the proper thickness. When done, wipe the pan clean, and place it on a hook against the wall, with the inside of the pan nearest the wall, to prevent the dust getting in.

  Now, dear Eloise, you will perhaps say that the foregoing lessons are too long for so simple a thing as a steak, as everybody think themselves capable of cooking it without tuition, but having now given these directions, I hope those who fancy they can cook without learning will know better for the future, and pay a little attention to so important a subject.

  The above lesson may be varied by adding to the pan, with the seasoning, a few chopped onions, or eschalots, parsley, mushrooms, pickles, semi-fried at the same time or after, and poured over the steak; or when the steak is dished up, a little butter, or chopped parsley and butter, or two spoonfuls of either Relish, Harvey’s, or any other good sauce that may be handy. Pour the fat of the steak into a basin for future use. Some fried potatoes may be served with it, or the following additions made: after the steak is done, slice a quarter of a pound of onions to each pound of steak, and a little more fat; fry quickly, and when brown place round the steak; pour the gravy over.

  Some mushrooms, if small, whole, if large, sliced, put in the pan and fried, are excellent.

  Two tablespoonfuls of mixed pickle, put into the pan after the steak is removed, fried a little, then add two tablespoonfuls of the liquor and two of water; when on the point of boiling pour over the steak. The same may be done with pickled walnuts and gherkins, or two ounces of tavern-keepers’ butter rubbed over, or half a pint of oyster sauce, or mussel sauce, or horseradish sauce; or a little flour dredged over the steak, and a little water added in the pan, when the steak is done, and a little colouring or ketchup, and then poured over the steak.

  —from Soyer’s Shilling Cookery for the People, 1860

  GRIMOD DE LA REYNIÈRE AGAINST PEACOCKS

  Of all the two-footed creatures that live in this lowly world, the peacock is, without exception, the stupidest and the most vain. No technique of killing or tiring out renders it usable. It is good neither boiled nor roasted and it is so denounced in Paris that it cannot be put on a table in good company. The peacock is to cooking what is to literature a hopelessly ignorant journalist who lacks tact, taste, manners, and salt.

  —from Almanach des Gourmands, 1804,

  translated from the French by Mark Kurlansky

  LUDWIG BEMELMANS AGAINST PARIS WAITERS

  My first visit to Paris depressed me. I hated it. I was then a bus boy in a New York hotel and my mortal enemies were waiters, waiter captains and headwaiters. I worked my way over on the old S.S. Rotterdam and dutifully made my way to Paris. It seemed filled with battalions of my enemies. I left after two days and swore never to return. (I even circled around it to get back to New York.) I fled to my native Tyrol, got into buckskin shorts and a green hat with the shaving brush. A photograph taken of me at that time is referred to by my daughter Barbara as the “Bing Crosby picture of Pappy.” The buckskin pants have got too tight for me, the mood has changed. I have developed a tolerance for hotel personnel, and now my favorite city is Paris.

  —from La Bonne Table, 1964

  GEORGE ORWELL ON PARIS COOKS AND WAITERS

  Und
oubtedly the most workmanlike class, and the least servile, are the cooks. They do not earn quite so much as waiters, but their prestige is higher and their employment steadier. The cook does not look upon himself as a servant, but as a skilled workman; he is generally called “un ouvrier,” which a waiter never is. He knows his power—knows that he alone makes or mars a restaurant, and that if he is five minutes late everything is out of gear. He despises the whole noncooking staff, and makes it a point of honour to insult everyone below the head waiter. And he takes a genuine artistic pride in his work, which demands very great skill. It is not the cooking that is so difficult, but the doing everything to time. Between breakfast and luncheon the head cook at the Hôtel X. would receive orders for several hundred dishes, all to be served at different times; he cooked few of them himself, but he gave instructions about all of them and inspected them before they were sent up. His memory was wonderful. The vouchers were pinned on a board, but the head cook seldom looked at them; everything was stored in his mind, and exactly to the minute, as each dish fell due, he would call out, “Faites marcher une côtelette de veau” (or whatever it was) unfailingly. He was an insufferable bully, but he was also an artist. It is for their punctuality, and not for any superiority in technique, that men cooks are preferred to women.

  Sylvia Plachy, Cappuccino, 1987

  The waiter’s outlook is quite different. He too is proud in a way of his skill, but his skill is chiefly in being servile. His work gives him the mentality, not of a workman, but of a snob. He lives perpetually in sight of rich people, stands at their tables, listens to their conversation, sucks up to them with smiles and discreet little jokes. He has the pleasure of spending money by proxy. Moreover, there is always the chance that he may become rich himself, for, though most waiters die poor, they have long runs of luck occasionally. At some cafés on the Grand Boulevard there is so much money to be made that the waiters actually pay the patron for their employment. The result is that between constantly seeing money, and hoping to get it, the waiter comes to identify himself to some extent with his employers. He will take pains to serve a meal in style, because he feels that he is participating in the meal himself.