I would invite a friend or friends for Saturday night. Three people could fit comfortably in my house, but not four, although one famous evening I actually had a tiny dance party in my flat, much to the inconvenience of my downstairs neighbor, a fierce old Belgian who spent the afternoon in the courtyard garden entertaining his lady friends. At night he generally pounded on his ceiling with a broom handle to get me to turn my music down. My upstairs neighbor, on the other hand, was a Muncie, Indiana, Socialist with a limp. I was often madly in love with him, and sometimes he with me, but in between he returned my affections by stomping around his apartment on his gimpy leg—the result of a motorcycle accident—and playing the saxophone out the window.
On Saturday mornings I would walk to the Flavor Cup or Porto Rico Importing coffee store to get my coffee. Often it was freshly roasted and the beans were still warm. Coffee was my nectar and my ambrosia: I was very careful about it. I decanted my beans into glass and kept them in the fridge, and I ground them in little batches in my grinder.
I wandered down Bleecker Street, where there were still a couple of pushcarts left, to buy vegetables and salad greens. I
went to the butcher, then bought the newspaper and a couple of magazines. Finally I went home, made a cup of coffee and stretched out on my bed (which, when made and pillowed, doubled as a couch), and I spent the rest of the morning in total indolence before cooking all afternoon.
One Saturday 1 decided to impress a youth whose mother, a Frenchwoman, had taught him how to cook. A recipe for pot roast with dill presented itself to me and 1 was not old or wise enough to realize that dill is not something you really want with your pot roast. An older and wiser cook would also have known that a rump steak needs to be baked in the oven for a long time and does not fare well on top of the stove. The result was a tough, gray wedge with the texture of a dense sponge. To pay me back and show off, this person invited me to his gloomy apartment where we ate jellied veal and a strange pallid ring that quivered and glowed with a faintly purplish light. This, he told me, was a cold almond shape.
The greatest meal cooked on those two burners came after a night of monumental sickness. I had gone to a party and disgraced myself. The next morning I woke feeling worse than I had ever felt in my life. After two large glasses of seltzer and lime juice, two aspirins and a morning-long nap, 1 began to feel better. I spent the afternoon dozing and reading Elizabeth David's Italian Food. By early evening I was out of my mind with hunger but feeling too weak to do anything about it. Suddenly, the doorbell rang and there was my friend from work. She brought with her four veal scallops, a little bottle of French olive oil, a bunch of arugula, two pears and a Boursault cheese, and a loaf of bread from Zito's bakery on Bleecker Street. I would have wept tears of gratitude but I was too hungry.
We got out the card table and set it, and washed the arugula in the bathtub. Then we sauteed the veal with a little lemon, mixed the salad dressing and sat down to one of the most delicious meals 1 have ever had.
Then, having regained my faculties, I felt I ought to invite
the couple at whose house I had behaved so badly. They were English. The husband had been my boss. Now they were going back to England and this was my chance to say good-bye.
At the time I had three party dishes: Chicken with sesame seeds and broccoli. Chicken in an orange-flavored cream sauce. Chicken with paprika and brussels sprouts. But the wife, who was not my greatest fan, could not abide chicken and suggested, through her husband, that she would like pasta. Spaghetti alia Carbonara was intimated and I picked right up on it.
Spaghetti is a snap to cook, but it is a lot snappier if you have a kitchen. I of course did not. it is very simple to drain the spaghetti into a colander in your kitchen sink, dump it into a hot dish and sauce it at once. Since I had no kitchen sink, I had to put the colander in my bathtub; my bathroom sink was too small to accommodate it. At this time my bathroom was quite a drafty place, since a few weeks before a part of the ceiling over the bath had fallen into the tub, and now as I took my showers, 1 could gaze at exposed beams. Therefore the spaghetti, by the time the sauce hit it, had become somewhat gluey. The combination of clammy pasta and cream sauce was not a success. The look on the wife's face said clearly: "You mean you dragged me all the way downtown to sit in an apartment the size of a place mat for this?''
When I was alone, I lived on eggplant, the stove-top cook's strongest ally. 1 fried it and stewed it, and ate it crisp and sludgy, hot and cold. It was cheap and filling and was delicious in all manner of strange combinations. If any was left over I ate it cold the next day on bread.
Dinner alone is one of life's pleasures. Certainly cooking for oneself reveals man at his weirdest. People lie when you ask them what they eat when they are alone. A salad, they tell you. But when you persist, they confess to peanut butter and bacon
Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant
25
sandwiches deep fried and eaten with hot sauce, or spaghetti with butter and grape jam.
I looiced forward to nights alone. I would stop to buy my eggplant and some red peppers. At home I would fling off my coat, switch on the burner under my teakettle, slice up the eggplant, and make myself a cup of coffee. I could do all this without moving a step. When the eggplant was getting crisp, I turned down the fire and added garlic, tamari sauce, lemon juice and some shredded red peppers. While this stewed, I drank my coffee and watched the local news. Then I uncovered the eggplant, cooked it down and ate it at my desk out of an old Meissen dish, with my feet up on my wicker footrest as 1 watched the national news.
I ate eggplant constantly: with garlic and honey, eggplant with spaghetti, eggplant with fried onions and Chinese plum sauce.
Since many of my friends did not want to share these strange dishes with me, I figured out a dish for company. Fried eggplant rounds made into a kind of sandwich of pot cheese, chopped scallions, fermented black beans and Muenster cheese. This, with a salad and a loaf of bread, made a meal. Dessert was always brought in. Afterwards 1 collected all the pots and pans and silverware and threw everything into my pan of soapy water in the bathtub and that was my dinner party.
Now I have a kitchen with a four-burner stove, and a real fridge. I have a pantry and a kitchen sink and a dining room table. But when my husband is at a business meeting and my little daughter is asleep, I often find myself alone in the kitchen with an eggplant, a clove of garlic and my old pot without the handle about to make a weird dish of eggplant to eat out of the Meissen soup plate at my desk.
HOW TO FRY CHICKEN
AS everyone knows, there is only one way to fry chicken correctly. Unfortunately, most people think their method is best, but most people are wrong. Mine is the only
right way, and on this subject 1 feel almost evangelical.
It is not that 1 am a bug on method—I am fastidious about results. Fried chicken must have a crisp, deep (but not too deep) crust. It must be completely cooked, yet juicy and tender. These requirements sound minimal, but achieving them requires technique. I have been frying chicken according to the correct method for about ten years, and I realize that this skill improves over time. The last batch fried was far, far better than the first. The lady who taught my sister and me, a black woman who cooked for us in Philadelphia, was of course the apotheosis: no one will ever be fit to touch the top of her chicken fryer.
I have had all kinds of nasty fried chicken served to me, usually with great flourish: crisp little baby shoes or hockey pucks turned out by electric frying machines with names such as Little Fry Guy. Beautifully golden morsels completely raw on
the inside. Chicken that has been fried and put into the fridge, giving the crust the texture of a wet paper towel.
I have also had described to me Viennese fried chicken, which involves egg and bread crumbs and is put in the oven after frying and drizzled with butter. It sounds very nice, but it is not fried chicken.
To fry chicken that makes people want to stand up and sing
"The Star-Spangled Banner," the following facts of life must be taken seriously.
■ Fried chicken should be served warm. It should never be eaten straight from the fryer—it needs time to cool down and set. Likewise, fried chicken must never see the inside of a refrigerator because this turns the crisp into something awful and cottony.
■ Contrary to popular belief, fried chicken should not be deep-fried.
■ Anyone who says you merely shake up the chicken in a bag with flour is fooling himself. (More on this later.)
■ Fried chicken must be made in a chicken fryer—a steep-sided frying pan with a domed top.
■ It must never be breaded or coated with anything except flour (which can be spiced with salt, pepper and paprika). No egg, no crumbs, no crushed Rice Krispies.
Now that the basics have been stated, the preparation is the next step. The chicken pieces should be roughly the same size—this means that the breast is cut into quarters. The breast is the hardest to cook just right as it tends to get dry. People who don't quarter the breast usually end up with either a large, underdone half, or they overcompensate and fry it until it resembles beef jerky.
The chicken should be put in a dish and covered with a little water or milk. This will help to keep the flour on. Let the chicken stand at room temperature. It is not a good thing to put cold raw chicken into hot oil.
Meanwhile, the flour should be put into a deep, wide bowl.
with salt, pepper and paprika added to taste. I myself adore paprika and feel it gives the chicken a smoky taste and a beautiful color.
To coat the chicken, lay a few pieces at a time in the bowl and pack the flour on as if you were a child making sand pies. Any excess flour should be packed between the layers. It is important to make sure that every inch of chicken has a nice thick cover. Now heat the oil and let the chicken sit.
And now to the frying. There are people who say, and probably correctly, that chicken should be fried in lard and Crisco, but I am not one of these people. Fried food is bad enough for you. I feel it should not be made worse. The lady who taught me swore by Wesson oil, and 1 swear by it, too, with the addition of about one-fourth part of light sesame oil. This give a wonderful taste and is worth the added expense. It also helps to realize that both oils are polyunsaturated in case one cannot fry without guilt.
The oil should come up to just under the halfway mark of your chicken fryer. Heat it slowly until a piece of bread on a skewer fries as soon as you dip it. If it does, you are ready to start.
Carefully slip into the oil as many pieces as will fit. The rule is to crowd a little. Turn down the heat at once and cover. The idea of covering frying chicken makes many people squeal, but it is the only correct method. It gets the chicken cooked through. Remember that the chicken must be just done—juicy and crisp. About six minutes or so per side—and you must turn it—once is probably about right, although dark meat takes a little longer. A sharp fork makes a good tester.
When the chicken just slips off the fork, it is done inside. Take the cover off, turn up the heat, and fry it to the color of Colonial pine stain—a dark honey color. Set it on a platter and put it in the oven. If your oven is gas, there is no need for any more warmth than that provided by the pilot light. If electric, turn it up a little in advance and then turn it off. You have now made perfect fried chicken.
And you have suffered. There are many disagreeable things about frying chicken. No matter how careful you are, flour gets all over everything and the oil splatters far beyond the stove. It is impossible to fry chicken v^ithout burning yourself at least once. For about twenty-four hours your house smells of fried chicken. This is nice only during dinner and then begins to pall. Waking up to the smell of cooking fat is not wonderful.
Furthermore, frying chicken is just about the most boring thing you can do. You can't read while you do it. Music is drowned out by constant sizzling. Finally, as you fry you are consumed with the realization that fried food is terrible for you, even if you serve it only four times a year.
But the rewards are many, and when you appear with your platter your family and friends greet you with cries of happiness. Soon your table is full of ecstatic eaters, including, if you are lucky, some delirious Europeans—the British are especially impressed by fried chicken. As the cook you get to take the pieces you like best. As for me, 1 snag the backs, those most neglected and delectable bits, and 1 do it without a trace of remorse. After all, I did the cooking.
Not only have you mastered a true American folk tradition, but you know that next time will be even better.
POTATO SALAD
There is no such thing as really bad potato salad. So long as the potatoes are not undercooked, it all tastes pretty good to me. Some potato salads are sublime, some are
miraculous and some are merely ordinary, but I have yet to taste any that was awful.
One of my earliest childhood memories is of going to lunch on a summer Saturday to Conklin's drugstore on the main street of Lake Ronkonkoma with my parents and sister. In those days, drugstores had booths, fountains and grills. They made bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwiches, fried eggs, egg salad, and hot fudge sundaes. What I remember most was the potato salad.
It was the standard American kind: potatoes and onions in a creamy mayonnaise dressing spiked with vinegar and black pepper: no chopped eggs, no celery. I still make this variety myself, with scallions substituted for onions and dill as an addition.
When I was young, potato salad was considered summer food. My mother made her mother's version, which included chopped celery and catsup in the dressing. It was known as
pink potato salad and was served at picnics and barbecues as an accompaniment to fried or grilled chicken. No one would ever have thought of serving it in a formal setting.
Once I was out on my own and could cook to please myself, I figured that since I loved potato salad so much, other people did, too. I began to serve it to my friends at dinner parties.
"Oh, potato salad," they would say. "1 haven't had any homemade in years!"
I gave it to them with thin sliced, peppery flank steak, and with cold roast chicken in the summer and hot roast chicken in the winter. It was always a hit.
For a while I turned my back on the old-fashioned kind and began to branch out. The possibilities were endless, since for every cook there are at least three potato salad recipes. I stole shamelessly from my friends. I made potato salad with funghi porcini, and with curried mayonnaise, and with chopped egg and walnut. But time after time I returned to my old standby: potatoes, scallions and dill. I must confess that I have never used homemade mayonnaise for this. I use Hellman's, cut with lemon juice.
Among cooks there is always discussion about the right potato. When in doubt, the new red potato comes close to being all purpose, but it does not absorb dressing the way an Idaho or russet does. The new red potato allows itself to be delicately coated with dressing. The mealier varieties soak it up like a sponge and thereby take more dressing. The result is creamier, but both are very good. Totally useless, in my opinion, is something billed as a salad potato: a soapy, greenish-looking creature which when cooked is waxy and watery at the same time—an unfortunate combination.
If you can find them, the tiny potatoes of spring are delicious. They are the size of quail's eggs and are wonderful steamed, cooled and eaten with a French olive oil, salt, pepper and a drop of lemon juice.
I have a friend, a man in his seventies who fled Vienna on the eve of World War II and ended up in Bogota, who once every
two years comes to New York. When I first met him, I invited him for dinner.
"What would you like me to cook?" I asked him.
"1 am a meat and potatoes man," he said, 'i want hamburgers and that wonderful American potato salad."
I said I did not approve of cooking hamburgers at home—that they were strictly restaurant food—but that I would make meat loaf. I told him that I made an especially good potato salad.
He app
eared one July evening, dressed in a woolly sport coat. We begged him to take it off and he did, revealing a pair of snappy-looking suspenders. Thus liberated, he sat down to dinner. I watched anxiously, wondering what this feinschmecker would make of my potato salad.
"What do you think?" I said. 1 thought it almost perfect: creamy, oniony with just a jolt of vinegar.
"This is not at all what 1 had in mind!" he said forcefully.
"What do you mean?" I said. "This is A-plus American potato salad."
"I did not say it wasn't delicious," he said. "It is just not the potato salad 1 was thinking of."
"And what potato salad were you thinking of?"
"What they serve in the delicatessen around the corner from my hotel," he said. I knew the place. It was a Greek coffee shop.
"But Dr. Hecht," 1 said, "that stuff is made in five-hundred-gallon drums and sent all over the city."
"Exactly!" he said. "It tastes the same wherever I go. That is its charm."
He ate three helpings of mine, which mollified me enough to get me to admit that I liked the coffee shop variety myself.
The following are recipes stolen from friends.
KAREN EDWARDS'S WARM POTATO SALAD WITH STRING BEANS
serves 4
6 Idaho potatoes
V2 pound string beans
% cup olive oil
1 teaspoon Dijon mustard
lemon juice (from one or two lemons)
garlic to taste
salt and pepper to taste
V2 bunch chopped scallions
1. Boil the potatoes and steam the string beans.
2. Keep the potatoes warm. Cut the beans into longish pieces. Cut the potatoes — some of the skin will come off and some will stay on.
3. Make a vinaigrette — lots of it: combine olive oil, Dijon mustard, lemon juice, lots of garlic, salt and pepper to taste. The secret of this salad is lots and lots of dressing.
Home cooking Page 3
