The Bread and the Knife

by Dawn Drzal

  Urab Sayur

  You can get all the ingredients except kencur easily in New York City, so I found and adapted a recipe that gets around it. I make this dish once in a great while when no one else is around, just to remind myself that I do understand what all the fuss is about—whether it was real or not.

  Vegetables:

  ½ pound bean sprouts

  ½ pound long beans

  Spice paste:

  ½ inch piece of peeled ginger

  ½ inch piece of peeled turmeric

  ½ inch piece of peeled galangal

  1 chile pepper

  1 shallot

  3 cloves garlic

  Remaining ingredients:

  1 cup dried, unsweetened coconut

  1 kaffir lime leaf

  1 bay leaf

  1 stick of crushed lemongrass

  2 cups vegetable stock

  salt and pepper to taste

  1. Blend all of the ingredients for the spice paste in a small food processor.

  2. Mix the spice paste with the dried coconut, kaffir lime leaf, bay leaf, 2 cups of vegetable stock, and lemongrass. Simmer and reduce until almost all of the water is gone. Add salt and pepper to taste. Remove from the heat and allow to cool.

  3. Blanch the long beans and bean sprouts separately in a large pot of water. Remove and drain.

  4. Just before serving, toss the seasoning mixture thoroughly with the vegetables.

  Although this can be served hot or cold, I eat it at room temperature because that’s how I remember it.

  Serves: one if you’re me; four if you’re not.

  is for

  “Vegetarian”

  My former husband was not a vegetarian, although he claimed to be. Technically, I suppose you would call him an “ovo-lacto-pescatarian” because he ate (within certain very limited parameters) eggs, dairy products, and fish. “Vegetarian” was wrong on two counts: not only did it suggest that he refrained from eating animal products, which he didn’t, but it also suggested that he ate vegetables, which he rarely did. Although he tried to conceal it, he wasn’t very fond of them. Needless to say, he was not pleased when I pointed this out, although his avoidance was so obvious that one night at dinner, after glancing at his father’s plate, our young son announced, “Maybe I should become a vegetarian so I won’t have to eat my vegetables.”

  Vegetables, however, were the least of the problems I faced when trying to decide what to cook for dinner. I used to fantasize about intercepting the New York Times in the morning and surreptitiously snipping out all the articles about health studies and food safety. I came to loathe these articles because I held them responsible for relentlessly reducing, over a period of decades, the number of foods my ex-husband considered safe to consume—to about five. Eventually, I came to think that “nutritional attritionist” was perhaps the most accurate way to describe him. When we first met, food was both my career and my avocation, and he was an avid diner-out. Our courtship took place over restaurant tables, and after we married, we entertained lavishly and often. Eating, both at home and abroad, was our primary shared recreational activity. But gradually, almost imperceptibly, our omnivore’s Eden narrowed to a rabbit hole without the rabbit, which had gone the way of the lamb (scrapie, a variant of Mad Cow Disease), the veal (too cruel), the venison (parasites and prions), and the pork (trichinosis, vague religious scruples, and a horrifying New York Times story about a new disease transmitted by aerosolized pig brains at a meat processing plant). In a sort of reverse Noah’s Ark, all were jettisoned, replaced by TVP (textured vegetable protein) in the shape of patties, meatballs, links, and riblets (in a box illustrated with a piglet holding a sign between its front trotters reading “Thanks!”). I started to feel like Charles Wallace Murry in A Wrinkle in Time, the only person at the table who can tell that the “delicious turkey dinner” served up by IT, the giant brain, is a sham and really tastes like sand.

  Sushi had been a casualty of the late eighties, courtesy of a wedding my ex-husband attended with a bunch of gastroenterologists before I came on the scene (doctors being the only other source of reputable information besides the Times), and canned tuna had long been barred because of the high mercury content, but these were hardly encroachments on home cooking. Although there had been early signs of trouble in paradise, like the time he pronounced, “Eating a hamburger is like playing Russian roulette and waiting twenty years to find out if there was a bullet in the chamber,” I still believed cooked fish and poultry would remain safe territory. Ah, love. Fresh tuna fell next—also a victim of mercury levels. Swordfish soon followed, verboten because of overfishing. Then farmed fish because of the PCBs. Oysters were deemed too risky because of the Norwalk virus, but once in a while, in a really good restaurant that he believed would test for it, he would still live dangerously and order half a dozen. Chicken was next, owing to the antibiotics used in raising them. (“What about antibiotic-free chicken?” I asked, when that became available. But once a food was banished it was never restored to grace.) It then became inevitable that turkey, as a matter of principle, would dwindle to a token serving at Thanksgiving. Duck, oddly enough, held on to the bitter end because he liked it, finally getting the boot only when he discovered “mock duck” made of—you guessed it.

  The seas were calm during the early nineties until sustainability spread beyond swordfish. After that, I could prepare only seafood that had been given the little blue seal of approval by the Marine Stewardship Council, and since my ex-husband would only eat seafood that was both wild-caught and sustainable, that generally meant I had two choices: Alaskan wild salmon or Pacific (not Atlantic!) halibut. I did not inform him when Pacific halibut failed to make it onto the Monterey Bay Aquarium Super Green List of 2010. On the other hand, in double-checking the Marine Stewardship Council website the following year, my heart quickened to see a newly approved entry: krill, a delicacy I had, in my ignorance, believed was reserved for whales. But it was the humble sardine, he claimed, that was the perfect food: high in protein, low on the food chain, and never consumed by him despite his enthusiastic endorsement.

  That my ex-husband generally followed recommendations as religiously as warnings posed its own set of problems. Was his permanently elevated blood level of mercury the result of faulty fillings or of eating fish four times a week for fifteen years after the Times reported that omega-3s were good for your heart? No matter which it was, we lived with the repercussions: Japanese food ceased to be a refuge from the food wars. California rolls had been a staple of his diet for decades since they are made with fake crab. Unfortunately, the fake crab is made from real fish, and the real fish is not always the relatively innocuous pollock. Some nosy reporter had to dig around and discover that it is sometimes made from shark, a predator high in mercury. Even the miso soup my ex-husband used to drink with the California roll was eventually banned: the dashi base is made from dried bonito flakes. The bonito is a small relative of … the tuna. And those tiny tofu cubes floating in the soup are not as innocuous as they seem: studies show that excess soy consumption increases estrogen production. A blood test was ordered to ascertain if they were safe to ingest.

  The veggie patties that formed the staple of my ex-husband’s diet, consumed in bulk and considered the ultimate “safe” food, contain the following ingredients:

  TEXTURED VEGETABLE PROTEIN (WHEAT GLUTEN, SOY PROTEIN CONCENTRATE, SOY PROTEIN ISOLATE, WATER FOR HYDRATION), EGG WHITES, CORN OIL, SODIUM CASEINATE, MODIFIED TAPIOCA STARCH, CONTAINS TWO PERCENT OR LESS OF LACTOSE, SOYBEAN OIL, HYDROLYZED VEGETABLE PROTEIN (WHEAT GLUTEN, CORN GLUTEN, SOY PROTEIN), AUTOLYZED YEAST EXTRACT, SPICES, NATURAL AND ARTIFICIAL FLAVORS, SODIUM PHOSPHATES (TRIPOLYPHOSPHATE, TETRAPYROPHOSPHATE, HEXAMETAPHOSPHATE, MONOPHOSPHATE), SALT, DISODIUM INOSINATE, CARAMEL COLOR, CELLULOSE GUM, WHEY POWDER, MODIFIED CORN STARCH, MALTODEXTRIN, POTASSIUM CHLORIDE, DEXTROSE, ONION POWDER, DISODIUM GUANYLATE, VITAMINS AND MINERALS (NIACINAMIDE, IRON [FERROUS SULFATE], THIAMIN MONONITRATE [VITAMIN B1], PYRIDOXINE H
YDROCHLORIDE [VITAMIN B6 ], RIBOFLAVIN [VITAMIN B2 ], VITAMIN B12), SUCCINIC ACID, ASCORBIC ACID, LACTIC ACID, BREWERS YEAST, TORULA YEAST, SOY LECITHIN.

  The mind boggles at the number of logical inconsistencies here, given that he preferred to exclude from our home any fruit or vegetable raised by conventional agricultural methods, to say nothing of the house ban on nitrates, nitrites, hydrolyzed vegetable protein (which, along with autolyzed yeast extract, he called “stealth MSG”—perhaps he missed those in the fine print above), trans fats, and any food packaged in plastic. But I never seriously entertained calling him on the MSG, or all that soy, or the little plastic bags the patties were wrapped in. It just didn’t seem fair to cut his daily caloric intake in half for the sake of making a point.

  Of course, we owned no nonstick cookware (volatile compounds released at high heat), and he would not use the hot water from the Poland Spring dispenser in the kitchen (might have harbored harmful bacteria). Even the beloved Nalgene water bottles (#7 plastic) were tossed along with their special cleaner and brushes. He then switched to metal Sigg water bottles, which had to be ditched because of their BPA linings. Staying hydrated was a serious dilemma. Unfortunately, one can make even graver mistakes in the attempt to avoid chemical hazards. The hard plastic Aveeno bottles we insisted upon for our infant son turned out to be more dangerous than the classic soft ones we so assiduously avoided, causing us years of needless worry about early puberty.

  To deflect the oft-repeated question, “Is it organic?” I perfected an extremely useful noncommittal grunt, inspired by a friend’s father who, upon moving to Paris without learning which French nouns were feminine and which masculine, cleverly devised a sound exactly halfway between “le” and “la.” But the day arrived when it no longer sufficed for fruits and vegetables to be merely organic. They had to be both organic and domestic. If imported from Mexico, news reports revealed that they might be contaminated with E. coli from improper hygiene or sanitation; if imported from farther afield, like Australia or South America, the huge carbon footprint offset any gains from the avoidance of pesticides. Recently the New York Times reported that rice—solace of invalids and sustainer of babes for centuries—readily absorbs toxic metals like arsenic and cadmium from the soil. The next day my ex-husband sent me a plaintive email that read, “See, there really is nothing left to eat.”

  One day toward the end of our marriage, I stood with my hands on my hips before an open cupboard trying to work up some enthusiasm for a box of quinoa and some raw cashews. I didn’t hear him come in behind me. “Why don’t you cook anymore?” he asked wistfully. I turned to face him, tempted to reply, “What do you expect me to serve, air sandwiches?” But I had lost my taste for tart ripostes. And really, by that time there was nothing left to say.

  is for

  White Truffles

  When I was a young editor, I was charged with revising one of the most famous series of plays in English literature. It was a monumental job, and I was terrified, but I did manage to ascertain which scholar should be the series editor. The only problem was how to convince him to take it on. I flew to New Mexico to meet him at a conference, allowed him to dictate his terms, and drafted a contract that he dragged his feet about signing for months despite my obsequious and increasingly desperate letters and phone calls. Finally, the publisher told me to “get him in the office,” even though it meant flying him and his chosen aide-de-camp across the country.

  This scholar, a giant in one of the most snobbish fields in literature and a professor at one of the most illustrious universities in the country, was both brilliant and judgmental—the sort of person who makes you hear your own voice in your ears and find it nasal, inarticulate, and philistine. Like many such figures, however, he was engaged in a running battle with a rival—a Moriarty to his Sherlock Holmes—who corroded his soul with envy. The mention of this person’s name caused a visible shudder to pass through his body. He was second to him, and only to him, and he and everyone else knew it. It didn’t help that they shared a first name. Only because this other scholar had edited a similar project did we have any hope of getting him to undertake such a massive task.

  On a crisp blue October day of the kind New York does best, the city air charged with promise and energy like negative ions after a thunderstorm, we walked the few blocks to Da Silvano, a deceptively simple Tuscan restaurant in Greenwich Village. Now shuttered, Da Silvano was a sort of celebrity canteen whose ocher and brick walls, tile floor, and windowed front wall opened onto a sidewalk café, the better to be seen behind enormous dark glasses. We sat inside, at a round table covered with a simple white cloth, in the sunny front room by the bar. The professor was unimpressed with our offer of a glamorous bottle of Ornellaia, which he turned down with a sniff, saying he wasn’t interested in wine. I was starting to panic that I had wasted the publisher’s money and everyone’s time when the waiter announced the specials. “And this is the beginning of the season of tartufo bianco, the white truffle from Piedmont, which we will be serving over fresh tagliatelle.” I don’t remember what white truffles cost then, but now they are $3,000 a pound. I heard a sharp intake of breath and looked over at the professor, who, not wanting to appear greedy, tried to mask the excitement in his face. The publisher had noticed the same thing and gave me an all but imperceptible nod. “Go ahead,” I said. “You should order it.” (I was already rationalizing in my head that the price couldn’t be much more than the bottle of Super Tuscan wine he had already turned down.) He demurred politely. The publisher insisted. He capitulated, happily defeated.

  He was a hard man to talk to, even for the publisher, an urbane Englishwoman with exquisite taste in literature. Although he had not been willing to turn down a free trip to New York for himself and his colleague, he was determined not to be pleased. One conversational gambit after another petered out into awkward silence as we sipped Pellegrino and tried not to eat too much bread.

  We smelled the waiter before we saw him. The white plate heaped with buttery golden tagliatelle that he set before the professor was beautiful. But we were transfixed by the enormous, odiferous, misshapen potato-like lump he picked up, along with a silver shaver, from the tray. Petals of truffle began to fall over the professor’s plate, mixing with the steam of the pasta to form an aromatic cloud so overpowering it was almost obscene—those pheromones that drive the truffle pigs so wild made us steal glances at the other tables as if we were up to something shameful. The waiter seemed to go on forever, as when time slows almost to a stop during a car accident, joy and pain being so similar at the poles, he having looked inquiringly at the publisher and she having given him the nod to continue. Finally, he wished us a good appetite and we were able to exhale. The spell, the crazy suspense of the moment, was broken. The professor gazed at his plate for a long time. When he raised his head, his eyes were unfocused, blind to all of us. He looked down again quickly, and when he raised his head for the second time, his face was positively transfigured, his smile beatific, full of good will for the world and all its creatures, his eyes brimming with what looked like tears.

  “I’m … so … happy,” he said, his voice choked with emotion.

  Later that afternoon, he signed.

  is for

  Xanthan Gum

  When I was a cookbook editor, people often exclaimed, “Oh, I love cookbooks! I read them in bed, like novels.” They expected me to be pleased, but the comment irritated me. I’m all for using one’s imagination in bed, but my job was to ensure that the books I edited, especially those by chefs, were good for something besides escapist reverie. It was hard work protecting brave souls who actually ventured into their kitchens from the hidden pitfalls of these elaborate productions. How were they to know that one second of chef time equals one minute of civilian time, or that the ease with which a recipe can be imagined (helped along by drool-inducing photographs) is not at all proportional to the ease with which it can be executed?

  I believed myself immune to these tric
keries until, years after I left the business, I encountered an entirely new beast: the six-volume Modernist Cuisine. Nathan Myhrvold, the brains behind this leviathan, graduated from college at fourteen and collected a PhD in mathematical physics along with a couple of masters degrees by the time he was twenty-three, eventually retiring as Microsoft’s first chief technology officer at forty. Then he founded his own company and settled down to produce his magnum opus. I was delighted to receive his coveted behemoth from my husband for Christmas in 2011. Risking a herniated disc, we heaved it onto the digital bathroom scale, where it weighed in at forty-three pounds. As soon as the holiday hubbub quieted down, I put Volume 1 on my lap and started reading until my legs fell asleep. While I didn’t really hope to plow straight through the set’s 2,438 pages, it seemed disrespectful to flip through the Larousse Gastronomique of a parallel universe as if it were a glossy magazine. History and Fundamentals was heavy on food safety, and Myhrvold nearly lost me midway at the chapter on Parasitical Worms, with its revoltingly enlarged photos of tapeworms and live flukes emerging from pieces of halibut bought at the fish store, but the survival instinct propelled me forward to the charts on thermal death curves. The day I started Volume 2, Techniques and Equipment, I got a call that my mother was in the ICU, the catalyst in a series of events that would explode my family, both nuclear and extended. The glossy tome lay open on the floor where it had fallen, collecting dust, before someone finally slipped it back into its plexiglass case. It would be four years before I took it out again, from a different bookshelf this time, in a different apartment.