Best Food Writing 2011 Read online

  I thought about all this as I chewed on Torrisi’s custard cream puff, whose filling is a dead ringer for the eggy custard tarts that I eat in Chinese bakeries. The difference here is not just that the food tastes fantastic, but that it tastes seamless. Growing up with my parents working in Chinatown, I roamed the streets of Little Italy by day and sat down to Chinese food at night; this is the food that reflects that life, made by a couple of Italian guys frying mozzarella in a wok.

  When one of the cooks showed me the thin, curved pan, I asked, “So does using the wok instead of a regular fryer add something to the dish, or is it philosophical in nature?”

  “Well,” he said, “one thing is that this way we can change the oil frequently; it would get expensive to have to change out five gallons of olive oil at a time. But we really just wanted to show people what we’re doing: Chinese Italian food.” Chinese Italian food that can only happen in America.

  I left their stand and jostled my way some more among the crowd. Down the street, I came across decidedly more straight-up Italian food. A stand was doing pizza in the Neapolitan style—soft and runny in the middle, puffy, just slightly crisped around the edges. The pizzaiolo working the oven spun the pies with his peel, smacking it against the oven floor in sharp motions to stoke the fire. He worked quickly, smoothly, expertly, and the pies came out beautifully, with the perfect amount of black-specked char on the bottom, just like in Naples. He turned around to set the steaming pizza on the counter, and the woman taking orders called him “Ming.” He’s Chinese.

  Home Cooking

  PREP SCHOOL

  By Pete Wells

  From The New York Times Magazine

  As editor of the New York Times’s dining section, Pete Wells knows the gourmet drill inside out. But all bets are off, he admits, when you’re a working parent trying to throw together dinner after a day at the office. Mise en place? You’ve got to be kidding.

  I call home as I leave the office each weeknight, and that is Dexter’s cue to begin laying out the ramekins. When I kiss him goodbye in the morning, I hand him the recipes I’ll be cooking for dinner. Although he is only 6, by the time I get home he has minced the requisite number of shallots, blanched and peeled the tomatoes, seeded and julienned the peppers, soaked and blotted the salted capers and plucked all the tiny brown rocks out of the tiny brown lentils. Then he carefully transfers each ingredient to its own small white dish.

  I throw open the front door and march to the kitchen. Dexter stands at attention. “The mise en place is done, Daddy,” he says. I lean down to inspect the neat rows of prepared vegetables, never smiling. If he has done well, I shake his hand. He tries not to show it, but I can tell from his eyes that he is proud. I reflect for a moment on how much easier life is now that I have two small children. And then I cook.

  Or something along those lines.

  Actually, nothing along those lines.

  The whole idea of mise en place tortures me. It refers, as you already know if you have watched any cooking shows in recent years, to the practice of having all the ingredients and tools set to go before you even light the stove. Mise en place (meez on PLASS) comes from restaurant kitchens, where a brigade of helpers spends the day getting everything ready for the dinner rush. It comes from a French phrase meaning “make the new guy do it.” In my mind, it stands as an unattainable ideal, a receding mirage, a dream of an organized and contented kitchen life that everyone is enjoying except me.

  Setting all my ingredients on the counter before cooking is no problem. I’ve learned my lesson from getting halfway through a recipe before realizing that the jar of roasted peppers in the refrigerator is covered in a downy white film of mold. But the next step in a proper mise en place—the knife work—trips me up. I run out of space on the cutting board. I run out of patience. I run out of time. I’m hungry and I want everything to move faster. So with only half the chopping done, I start to heat the pan. With that, the train has left the station, and I am swinging by one hand from the back of the caboose. Ultimately, I get where I’m going, but the trip isn’t pretty to watch.

  This filled me with shame until I opened Sara Moulton’s latest book. Moulton knows her way around a kitchen. She has been the host of several cooking shows, the author of a number of cookbooks and the executive chef of Gourmet for 23 years. And she says, on the second page of Sara Moulton’s Everyday Family Dinners, that mise en place is “a waste of time.” She exempts Asian recipes, where the ingredients spin around in a smoking wok and are ready to eat two minutes later. But in general, she endorses my method of chopping the onion that will go into the pan first, and then doing the rest of the prep as I go along.

  Moulton learned to cook at the Culinary Institute of America, which means she studied classic restaurant technique, mise en place included. Yet when she would make dinner for her family after coming home from work, she told me, she wasn’t readying her ingredients the way she had been taught.

  “I had as little time as everybody else, and I realized I couldn’t wait to measure and slice and dice all that stuff,” she said by phone. “I just wasn’t doing it. I noticed I’d be mincing the garlic while I was cooking the onion. I’d be cooking the whole thing by taking advantage of what was already cooking.”

  So there she was, deep into writing a cookbook about family dinners—structuring all the recipes to call for “3 cups thinly sliced celery” and “1 pound chicken breast, diced”—when she had what she calls a “head-slapping moment.” Why was she telling readers to cook in a way she herself abandoned years ago?

  She started over, retooling the recipes to take advantage of downtime when onions are softening, meat is searing and so on. “It was a very, very hard thing to do, after all those years at Gourmet,” Moulton said. Mise en place has been codified in the recipe styles of countless publications, including this one. It’s so ingrained that when I gave Moulton’s recipe for succotash and grits to my superb recipe tester, Molly Rundberg, she returned it with all the prep work—which Moulton had woven into the steps—transposed back into the list of ingredients, because that’s how recipes are supposed to be written.

  Even more blame for the tyranny of mise en place belongs to television. Those little glass bowls of slivered scallions are all over the cooking shows, and there are few things more combustible than Gordon Ramsay when he spots a “meez” that is not all it should be. Food television is often criticized for dumbing down cooking. It seems to me that a worse sin is teaching enthusiastic but tentative home cooks that they will never measure up unless they do things just like the chefs.

  “That’s what we would say to the home cook: you have to have everything chopped, diced and sliced before you start,” Moulton said of her own time before the cameras. She was an early star on the Food Network, which drew its talent from the ranks of trained professionals. Restaurant values were compounded by television values: a chef peeling and slicing carrots for five minutes is just bad TV. Without the tidy glass bowls, who would watch? (Moulton may find out; she is working on an idea for a new show on which she would prep her ingredients as she went along.)

  It’s time for the amateurs to take back the kitchen. We can start by redefining mise en place for what used to be called “the servantless household.” Simply put, nobody is going to pit olives for me, not even Dexter, so I’ll have to pit them whenever I can steal a few minutes in the midst of the ambient chaos. The recipe, one of the most strictly formulated genres of writing, has to open up a little to make room for real life.

  The most striking anti-mise recipe I’ve ever seen comes from the last source I would have expected, Thomas Keller, one of the most disciplined chefs in the business. Right at the beginning of his “Ad Hoc at Home,” he gives a recipe for “Dinner for Dad.” Dad is Keller’s father, and the dinner was the last one he ate before he died: barbecued chicken, mashed potatoes, collard greens and strawberry shortcake. Keller has you brown the bacon and start chopping and cooking the long-braised collards, then boil t
he potatoes in their skins, stir sugar into the strawberries and put the chicken on the grill. While it’s cooking, you mash the potatoes and then whip heavy cream. Before you season the potatoes, Keller has you do this: “Open a bottle of pinot noir. If you have a back porch and it’s a perfect spring evening, serve your meal there.”

  Sounds like a recipe for happiness.

  HOW TO BECOME AN INTUITIVE COOK

  By Daniel Duane

  From Food & Wine

  Magazine writer Daniel Duane specializes in all the fun lifestyle topics—food, fitness, fatherhood, and wine—writing in an accessible, conversational style. No wonder he’s searching for a cooking mantra that will help him hit an effortless stride in the kitchen.

  First, a confession: I’m a recipe junkie, a cookbook addict so hooked that, for years, I was unwilling to fry an omelet without printed instructions, preferably from either of the legendary talents Alice Waters and Thomas Keller. More recently, though, and largely because of a conversation with Keller himself, I’ve been trying to become more of an intuitive cook, the kind of kitchen wizard who can put together a magical meal entirely by instinct. And I’ve got a plan for how to do it.

  The Alice Waters obsession came first, purely because of a funny biographical link: Waters had been my preschool teacher at the Berkeley Montessori School back in 1970, right before she opened Chez Panisse and became the most influential cook in America. A kid’s parents don’t let him forget that kind of thing, and as a result, I’ve been telling people about the Waters connection all my life. So when my first daughter was born in 2002, monopolizing my wife’s attention and forcing me to cook our nightly repast, it felt only natural to study the works of my old teacher.

  It helps to understand that, in the years prior, I was about 75 percent burrito by body mass, with the remainder consisting almost entirely of Trader Joe’s. I couldn’t even identify most of the stuff at a farmers’ market. So, over a two-year period, I taught myself to cook by working my way through all 290 recipes in Chez Panisse Vegetables (I swear, this was way before Julie & Julia).

  I started with gimmes like Garden Tomato and Garlic Pasta. Then, as my cooking compulsion intensified, I began banging out multiple recipes night after night. This bore a vague resemblance to normal life as I plowed through dishes like Chickpea and Farro Soup and Greek Salad, but things got weird when I had nothing but sides left, and I began turning out antisocial dinners like the one my wife still calls “Cardoons Five Ways.”

  I followed up with Chez Panisse Fruit to cover all the essential plant-based foods. Then it was time for meat, fish, fowl and sweets, so over the next two years, I ripped through all five of the remaining Chez Panisse cookbooks, braising short ribs, grilling quail, baking bread, roasting whole sardines and even grinding my own sausages.

  It wasn’t all puppy dogs and butterflies, though. My wife has forever sworn off rabbit and pigeon, and we’ve discovered through trial and error that she has a near-fatal crustacean allergy. Also, after the 11th ice cream recipe in Chez Panisse Desserts, I faced a decision between buying a whole new plus-size wardrobe and eliminating dessert cookery. I chose the latter.

  About this time, I began to hear from professional-chef friends that recipe addiction was uncool, that no self-respecting chef would admit to using cookbooks. But there’s a lie tucked inside that attitude: Pro chefs, whenever they’re dissing recipes, forget to mention that they’ve all cooked other chefs’ recipes thousands of times while coming up through the ranks. At a certain point, sure, home cooks can easily improvise on dishes they’ve mastered. But they can’t get there by roasting a single chicken every other Sunday. So I marched onward. Then, I got a miraculous phone call: Alice Waters’s personal assistant had heard about my project through mutual friends. She’d told Waters, and Waters wanted to hire me for some in-house writing. In person, Waters seemed a little mortified by me. First, she had to deal with the fact that a middle-aged father had once been a preschool student of hers; and second, I believe she found my devotion to her books akin to stalking. So I kept quiet for the first few months, doing my work without trying to get to know my idol.

  Then I took a risk: “Just out of curiosity,” I said to Waters one day, standing in her home kitchen, “What would you cook if you had fresh peas, asparagus, fava beans and artichokes? Just as a for-example?”

  What I did not tell her was that, only the night before, I’d found the very same ingredients in my own fridge. Having already cooked every relevant Chez Panisse recipe, and still opposed to repetition, I realized I would have to improvise. Sweaty with fear, I began by cooking each ingredient in the manner most common in the Chez Panisse books: For the peas and asparagus, that meant blanching in boiling water; for the artichokes, it meant low-temperature stewing in extra-virgin olive oil; for the favas, it meant a little bit of both. And then, because I had seen recipes with similar conclusions, I tossed everything together, moistened it with a little chicken stock, and declared the result my first “spring vegetable garbure.”

  The question I’d asked Waters, therefore, was a test—or rather, a covert request for the correct answer to a test I’d already taken, the one called “What would Alice do?”

  Waters, utterly unaware she was making my day—my whole year!—outlined precisely the steps I’d taken on my own.

  I could have considered myself fully educated, ready forever to eschew cookbooks and live the way Waters exhorts all Americans to live, buying everything in season at the farmers’ market and cooking by intuition. For a few weeks, I did just that, but then my wife’s sister gave me The French Laundry Cookbook, by Thomas Keller. I had never eaten at the French Laundry—it’s above my pay grade—so to me, the book looked like an expensive, haute-cuisine slab of food porn that was less like a cooking manual than a coffee-table status item, letting guests know that you’ve been to the mountaintop.

  Then I read Keller’s instructions for boiling asparagus. Before I share them, here are the directions from Chez Panisse Vegetables for the same job: “To boil asparagus, plunge it into boiling salted water.”

  Keller, by contrast, turned this into a stand-alone essay, “Big-Pot Blanching,” a bravura explication of a critical technique. His method depended upon a giant pot of heavily salted water at a rolling boil, and a commitment to blanching only small batches of vegetables, so the water would never stop boiling. As a finishing touch, the vegetables are plunged into ice water, to stop the cooking and fix their color.

  It worked; instantly, I became the guy whose every green vegetable turned out tasty, tender and electrifyingly vivid in color. But I also saw with absolute clarity that my culinary kung fu was not yet strong; Waters’s books had taught me much, but if I abandoned cookbooks right then, I would never learn all that Keller could teach.

  The French Laundry Cookbook intimidated me too much, so I spent several months with Keller’s Bouchon instead, turning our house into a veritable Lyonnaise bistro. Later, I tackled the Americana of his Ad Hoc at Home and found precisely what I sought: minor dissertations on why canola oil beats olive oil for searing (its higher smoke point allows a much hotter pan, and therefore a darker crust on meats); the trick of placing a towel beneath your cutting board so it won’t slide around; the cool move of using paper towels to rub the skin off roasted beets.

  The list goes on, and it kept me in recipe-addict heaven until I got my next miraculous phone call. This time it was Keller’s assistant, telling me that “Chef” would be happy to participate in a magazine assignment I had landed, creating five dishes that every man ought to master.

  A week later, I was standing in a sunlit Napa Valley cottage next door to the French Laundry—at which I had still never eaten. Before we began cooking together, however, Keller asked me to clarify the recipe format I wanted.

  Exactly the one he’d always used, I told him, seizing the opportunity to say what a gift he’d given in the books he’d written thus far.

  But this didn’t satisfy Keller; it didn’t jibe
with his own sense of what kind of recipes were most helpful in a cook’s journey. Reaching up to a shelf, Keller flipped open the cookbook he personally found most inspiring, Fernand Point’s Ma Gastronomie. The recipes were off-putting in their sheer Frenchness and frighteningly imprecise. Oeufs à la Gelée, for example: “Poach 2 eggs for each person to be served, and prepare a jelly with pigs’ feet and some veal and chicken bones. In the bottom of a mold, arrange a little foie gras and the poached eggs ... Pour in the jelly, allow it to set, and serve chilled.” I broke into a cold sweat just thinking about all the unexplained techniques. (Now, OK, wait, does he really want the pig’s feet and the chicken bones fixed inside the jelly?)

  Keller turned to a less disturbing example for Salade Truffes: “Brush and clean thoroughly some fresh truffles from Périgord. Slice them on a mandoline and marinate them for 10 minutes in a mixture of lemon juice, salad oil, salt and pepper. Serve immediately with some foie gras on the side.”

  “See, I love that,” Keller said. “You have to have confidence to be able to do that. That’s like two sentences! But it becomes yours precisely because it’s not, like, ‘Take 500 grams of truffle, add, you know, 15 centiliters of lemon juice’—it’s none of that stuff. That’s why this book was so beautiful to me; it allows you to be the chef.” Keller told me that when he began The French Laundry Cookbook, he actually hoped to work in the same vein, creating a cookbook without recipes. But his editor wouldn’t have it.

  Together, Keller and I produced recipes in the more explicit style, but I went home haunted by that Fernand Point exchange, and especially by Keller’s remark about how a recipe “becomes yours.” As I understood it, he meant that a cook never quite absorbs a hyper-detailed recipe, always having to return to the book and its precise measurements. In that way, a cook never breaks a recipe addiction, never trusts himself to create.