Baking Bread in Our Kitchen

This month, Len has been trying bread recipes, especially from Flour Water Salt Yeast by Ken Forkish.
I've mentioned Len's bread in a couple of previous blog posts.

Most recently he made a baguette and a Pain d'Epi (shaped like an ear of wheat).
For shaping these loaves, he used the instructions in Julia Child volume 2.

We enjoyed several round loaves over the past few weeks.

A round loaf is baked in a dutch oven. Because we have a lot of
kitchen stuff, we are trying to use what we already have.
However, we did buy a new spray bottle to add steam during baking.

And we bought a new, better kitchen scale
(shown in front of the older one).

The recipes he's tried so far use a pre-ferment or sponge, using a portion of
the flour and water with a very small amount of yeast that's fermented
for 12 hours or more before adding the rest of the flour, water, and yeast.
He's tried two called biga and poolish, which I wrote about earlier.
* See Baker's Words. *

Another addition to our tools for baking: the dough scraper shown here.

Our extensive collection of tea towels comes in handy for use
holding the dough while it rises.

My tea towels tend to have British themes because my friend Sheila in London sends them to me. Thanks, Sheila!

Here are a few bread-y things we have eaten this month.

We tried making focaccia with part of one batch of dough.
Topped with fennel seeds and sun dried tomatoes, and spread with lots
of olive oil, it tasted very good, though the tomato bits were very dark.

Using up the bread is also a challenge sometimes. One night I stuffed
some carnival squash with bread cubes and various veggies --
essentially the same as sage and onion stuffing for a turkey.

Bread makes good toasted garlic croutons for salad to eat with baked potatoes.
Bread pudding, French toast, and strata will also be on the menu soon.

Then of course there are always sandwiches. And home made bread with butter and jam.

Trader Joe supplies the lemon curd, strawberry jam, and hot pepper jelly
that are currently in my kitchen. I need some Bonne Maman preserves.

That's about it for new activity and a few new gadgets in my kitchen this month. I'll be sharing with other bloggers who routinely post about their kitchens. Sherry at the blog Sherry's Pickings hosts the blogging event called "In My Kitchen This Month." Check it out to see what people have been doing!

"The Name of the Game is a Kidnapping" by Keigo Higashino

"Keigo Higashino (東野 圭吾) is one of the most popular and biggest selling fiction authors in Japan—as well known as James Patterson, Dean Koontz or Tom Clancy are in the USA." (source: Goodreads)

Higashino's suspense novel The Name of the Game is a Kidnapping (Japanese publication 2002; English translation published 2017) has the same fast-paced psychological interest as the four of his other novels that I have read. It also has a surprise ending, which I will not give away. The others were police procedurals, but with an emphasis on the suspects, their position in society, and how they behave in extreme circumstances.

In The Name of the Game is a Kidnapping, the entire focus of the story is on a man, Sakuma, who is almost randomly drawn into a convoluted plot by other people.  He is the narrator, and thus his point of view is the only one we receive. From the publisher:

"Battle-tested project leader at a PR firm and slippery bachelor, Sakuma sees himself as a player. His smug self-regard doesn’t seem entirely unfounded, both in love and at work. When is idea for a mini-theme park is dismissed as too costly and vacuous at the last minute by a major client he seems to have met his match.

"Katsuragi, an heir and executive at the global car maker, Nissei Auto, is back from a marketing stint in the US with an authentic conviction that everything is a game. Once the man’s daughter by a former mistress teams up with Sakuma so she can come into her inheritance in an expeditious manner – Juri is indeed her father’s flesh and blood – the game is good to go!

"And the name of this game is a kidnapping!" (source)

Juri and Sakuma team up to deceive her father -- and as a result, she hides out at Sakuma's bachelor apartment. One of the only things she can do while passing away the time there is cook, so as in other Higashino novels, there are some very interesting food descriptions used to emphasize the situation of these two people. For me these highlight differences between Japanese food preferences and those in America -- even when the food is supposed to be western style. For example, she makes a dish called cream stew, which I had never heard of; it turns out to be chicken and many vegetables cooked in a white sauce, often using a packaged sauce. It's based on western food, and became popular partly because it was served as Japanese children's school lunch. From the novel:

Cream stew from Wikipedia.

"When I got home, Juri was cooking something in the kitchen. I tried to guess what she was making based on the smell.  

"'Did I have the ingredients to make cream stew?' I asked standing at the kitchen entrance. 

"'I scrounged through your fridge. Your vegetables were going bad, but I got to them in time.' I remembered I had bought them intending to make gratin." (Kindle Locations 1344-1348).

As it happens, not foreseeing the cream stew, Sakuma has brought home a bento box for dinner.

"She looked into the bag and then at me.  

"'A bento from Yasuman. Wow. The chef there sometimes goes on TV. Then I’ll have this instead.' 

"'What about the stew?'  

"'Who cares now?' Juri returned to the pot and turned off the burner." (Kindle Locations 1356-1359).

Well, what does happen to the stew? They eat it for brunch. Several other instances of what they eat for breakfast or brunch also suggest his tastes in food. For example, in the first scene, we see his bachelor life, and we also heard why the vegetables for cream stew were in his refrigerator. It strikes me that this is the type of attention to detail that makes the suspense build so effectively! The passage:

"I fried some ham and eggs, toasted bread, and warmed up canned soup for my breakfast. 

"Lately, I was lacking vegetables. There had to be some cauliflower in the refrigerator so I decided I’d have a gratin with a lot of that in it tonight." (Kindle Locations 76-77).

Staying with him at his apartment, Juri sleeps in his bed, he on the living room couch, and he has to fix her breakfast:

“Just wait. I’ll make something now.” I got up and went to the kitchen. The morning menu I decided on was toast, boiled eggs, and vegetable juice. Putting on coffee was a bother." (Kindle Locations 1178-1179). 

Or later when she is still with him, she gets up and says:

"'I just woke up. It looks like you prepared breakfast for me.' ... 

"Ham, eggs, vegetable soup, toast, and coffee made up the menu. It wasn’t what you’d call cooking, but considering the contents of the refrigerator, she couldn’t have done any better."(Kindle Locations 2094-2098).

 Are these typical Japanese breakfast foods? Well, to my knowledge, they lean more western than the older traditional Japanese breakfasts of miso soup, rice, pickles, and other savory and fermented things that don't seem like Breakfast to me! I think these details are characterizing Sakuma as leaning very much toward a western lifestyle.

In any case, breakfast in a suspense novel always means one sure thing: the author uses meals to punctuate time going by and to emphasize the need of characters to stay in the moment. Higashino does this with mastery. It's a very readable and enjoyable book.

"Ugly Delicious" -- New Netflix Series

David Chang and friends make a freewheeling tour of the world in the newest Netflix food series "Ugly Delicious." I have watched the first two episodes: "Pizza" and "Tacos." The photo above captures Chang trying out tacos with two famous LA food writers: Jonathan Gold and Gustavo Arellano, whose writings I have enjoyed in the past. Both episodes are very focused on the vexed question of authenticity. Chang is pretty cynical about assigning any meaning to the term: food makes its own rules, would be my summary of his view, which I share. Is it good? That's the important question.

The series features beautiful images of many exotic places, people, food, and kitchens.

Two of the featured Mexican chefs have had serious trouble with American immigration. This very gifted owner of a restaurant in Mexico spent 27 years in the US, but can never return to his family here. In this episode, I found the treatment of the very unjust and cruel situation in our unfortunate country to be very impressive and somewhat surprising in its condemnation of how we are treating productive and hardworking individuals.

Both episodes emphasize the wide variety of interpretations of the two featured classics: pizza and tacos. This pizza is from a pizza maker in Naples. Despite his successful pizza, he has been blackballed by an organization that sets standards for Neapolitan pizza because he's too innovative. Interviews with the head of the standards organization verge on the disrespectful, probably with justification. Nobody owns pizza!

So where's the best pizza in the world? Evidently, it's in Tokyo.

Netflix just released this series, which has 8 episodes. The style is edgy and quirky! It might take a while to watch the other 6, though I watched the first two in one sitting without ever getting up from the couch! Images here are screen shots from the two episodes that I have watched.

A World at War

The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food by Lizzie Collingham contains the most horrifying collection of statistics and historical details that I can recall. In the following few paragraphs, I'm reviewing the most memorable facts about the global horror of nearly world-wide hunger and death from starvation that I read in her book. Understanding the vast range of disruptions and disasters of the war is complicated, but Collingham's presentation makes it almost comprehensible.

Year by year, country by country, Collingham documents mass starvation throughout Europe, China, Japan, the Indian subcontinent, South Asia, the Pacific Islands, the Middle East, and both North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa. She delves into the Nazi policies of intentional starvation of Russians, Slavs, Jews, and others, and the unintended consequences of acts of war and devastation in Poland and Russia. She shows how a motive of the Wansee Conference that ordered creation of Nazi Death Camps was to do away quickly with the Jews, labeled as "useless eaters" -- kill them immediately, don't just starve them to death. Starvation was the fate of many others that the Nazis deemed surplus human beings, especially Russians in the besieged cities and occupied territories during the Nazi invasion of their country.

Collingham explains how British policy protected the residents of Britain from starvation, but victimized their colonies. A major famine in Bengal was the most extreme. Before the war, people in Britain and British colonies, Germany, Japan, and many other countries had come to depend on foods imported to their countries. Prioritization of feeding large armies, consequences of blockades and attacks on commercial shipping and land transport, and other acts of war all disrupted supplies or cut them off entirely, leaving many people throughout the world without the foods they depended on.

Agriculture in countries at war was disrupted by direct battlefield activity or bombings, by transfer of needed labor away from farming to industry, and by wartime conscription. The military required heavy equipment of the same type as farm equipment, as well as drawing on the same fuel supplies used for tractors etc. Further, essential nitrates for fertilizer were required instead as components of explosives needed for war, thus reducing farm productivity. Coordination and well-planned policies were not always adequate.

During the early years of the war, the Nazis were able to improve German food production despite the multiple demands on labor and equipment. They also maintained a policy to loot the food from conquered lands. Decent nutrition was thus available for their own people. However, as the war turned in favor of the allies, these practices failed and starvation also affected the formerly privileged German people. The "hunger winter" at the end of the war resulted in yet more mass starvation, when a combination of bad harvests, cruel policies, and the aftermath of bombing and destruction occurred in Holland and other parts of Europe.

Much detail about the Japanese treatment of their own troops illustrates that even their soldiers often starved to death. Why? Because Japan's official policy was that troops should live off the land, but no actual study was done to see it this was possible -- the troops were just dropped off on one remote Pacific island or another with a few days' worth of rations. The Japanese didn't put supply lines into place the way that other military regimes did, it was every man for himself and blame the victims. Both intentional policies and also errors contributed to starvation of both their own troops, their own civilians, the people they conquered, and enemy troops. Japanese victims included people in China, the rest of Asia, and the South Pacific. Their prisoners of war also starved, including of course many American troops.

Long and detailed analyses and statistics about food supplies and production show just what happened. In many chapters, Collingham develops much more comprehensive information than the few sentences I have written. Most people who have read about the war at all are aware of some of the events and consequences Collingham describes, but I doubt if most people have squarely faced the incredible numbers of people who died of starvation: far more than on the battlefield. I doubt if most people ever think about the suffering of a human being starving to death -- even just one human being, much less millions. I found it really tough to read the many chapters in this book!

In contrast, Collingham also describes the impact of the war on agriculture and the food supply in the US. Once the US declared war, we were committed to try to feed the allies as well as to avoid hunger at home. We had to increase agricultural production and develop the means to deliver food to the allies, as well as to offer troops and military supplies. The US government quickly and effectively mobilized to do so. American manufacturing expanded to enable both military and agricultural equipment production. With new equipment and support for farmers, output of grain, meat, and other agricultural products increased and became more efficient. Despite rationing of some scarce resources, Americans were able to obtain an ample and fully nutritious diet, and American troops were fed vastly better and larger rations than any other armies. Among other things, Collingham describes the favored status of the Coca-Cola company, which received special sugar rations to supply Coke to all American troops. Statistics for all of this are included, along with some of the negative response that American superiority inspired.

The Taste of War is an amazing book; also overwhelming. The specter of millions of starving people, the memory of the millions who died from hunger, and the suffering that spread throughout so much of what was thought to be the civilized world is nearly unbearable. I've only presented the elements of the book that most stick in my mind.

One of the questions that the book suggests is this: What were Americans fighting for? I want to end this depressing summary of the impact of the war with the mention of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's January, 1941, State of the Union Address. His vision of a better world was often considered important in understanding the commitment of Americans during the war. He said:

"In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms."

Norman Rockwell's famous depiction of the Four Freedoms for the War Bond Campaign motivated Americans in World War II. (Wikipedia)

UPDATE: This book was the subject of a very interesting Culinary Reading Group discussion on September 19, 2018.

"Spoonbenders"

Spoonbenders, a novel by Daryl Gregory (published June 2017) bends the all-too-common dysfunctional-family stereotype into something new, strange, and highly readable. Maureen, the mother of the family at the center of the book has been dead for 21 years. In her 31 years of life, she had been a truly amazing and talented psychic. Her three children and her grandchildren inherited various forms of her gift.

Unfortunately, as the novel opens in 1995, not a single member of this family has ever found a comfortable or productive way to apply the unbelievable things they can do. Maureen's husband Teddy -- who has no psychic gifts at all -- had been a con man when she had met him, in the early 1960s. He mainly made a living playing cards with suckers or compulsive gamblers.

In the course of the novel we learn that while Teddy had worked for the mob, Maureen had been employed by a top-secret government spy service -- but I won't spoil the novel's revelations with more about this. Like much of the plot, which is full of revelations, surprises, and reversals, their activities in slight-of-hand and also in authentic psychic actions are all very amusing -- or as Mattie, the grandson with his own psychic powers realizes at the end: "Everything he knew about his family was not wrong, exactly, but turned sixty degrees." (pp. 393).

With their gifted children, Teddy and Maureen for a while had a vaudeville-type "magic" act combining Teddy's con-man skills with the very genuine psychic tricks the rest of the family could do. (Note: it's a fantasy novel!) Their near-success as performers ends with a disastrous TV appearance where they are shown up by one G. Randall Archibald. As I was reading, Archibald constantly reminded me, in an off-beat way, of the real life "Amazing Randy." In the acknowledgements, in fact, the author says:

"I owe an apology ... to one of my heroes, James Randi, aka the Amazing Randi. His lifelong crusade to investigate psychics, faith healers, mediums, and frauds of all paranormal stripes inspired a story that might provide aid and comfort to the enemy. ...  There are no mind readers, no remote viewers, no water dousers, no one who can warp kitchen utensils with the power of their mind— except in fiction. But isn’t that enough?"

As in many books I've enjoyed, I found that food often played a kind of grounding role in the very complicated, emotionally dangerous, and sometimes violent fantasy story. Chop suey, "an ultra-bland dish" their mother made sometimes; Greek lamb sausage, also a favorite childhood memory; hand-made pizza, associated with the unsavory mob associated with their father's card-sharking and their brother's dangerous debts ... the family eats pretty standard stuff. And somehow it becomes significant, thanks to the memories of their mother overseeing the children cooking her favorite recipes.

For example, in a hectic scene almost at the end of the novel, all the characters in the entire book gather in a single place: the family back yard and house, where Buddy, the clairvoyant brother is preparing a barbecue and where all the strands of the plot are somehow about to be wrapped up. Some quotes that characterize this assembly, which are interspersed with the exciting finale --

"'Could you make Mom’s lamb sausage?' Irene asks. 'You know, the ones with the feta and the mint?'" (p. 338) 

"Buddy had turned the back patio into an outdoor kitchen. Ground lamb sat out in big stainless steel bowls, and a plate held a mound of freshly chopped mint. God he loved Mom’s lamb sausage. Buddy was at the grill, wrapping potatoes in aluminum foil." (p. 349) 

"With Joshua’s help he managed to chop all the garlic, and on his own blended four pounds of ground meat and another pile of the mint-feta mixture, but now he’s almost out of time, and he has to make all the patties." (p. 352)

"Of course there could be no such thing as a normal picnic with her family." (p. 362). 

Finally Buddy, who had been tormented by his clairvoyant visions of both his past and his future, ends up with a normal restaurant meal: "He turned the plastic-coated pages in a slow simmer of panic. Each picture was more luscious than any pornographic photo he’d ever seen: seductively crossed chicken strips; gleaming pot roast; wet, juicy quesadillas; steaming piles of spaghetti. Too many choices. Far too many. The Build Your Own Burger section made his heart race. ... remembered meals were the ultimate comfort food. But to be set loose in an environment where not only could almost anything be ordered, but if that failed, could be assembled from a vast number of ingredients? Madness." (p. 396)

Dysfunctional families in popular lit these days are kind of a dime a dozen. Kids have problems with developing a sense of identity and understanding their rapidly changing minds and bodies. Parents have problems with kids, jobs, and money. Grandparents have problems with growing old and seeing how the next generation turned out. MEGO: "My Eyes Glaze Over." You can find it in Urban Dictionary. When I used to write management presentations, my most boring customer, who knew he was boring, brought up MEGO often when worrying about his impact.  It doesn't fit Spoonbenders, but it sure does fit a lot of other books!

PS -- This is a hilarious book. I'm not sure I was clear that it was really funny and fun to read!

Quark!

"Invented in the 1920s, quark was a cross between yoghurt and cream cheese," I read in Lizzie Collingham's book The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food (p. 354). My attention was riveted: this very late date for such a traditional product really surprised me. Because Collingham's excellent and challenging book seems very reliable and has lots of footnotes, I tried to find out more.

A quick check of online sources assured me that quark -- both the word and the dairy product -- dates back to the fourteenth century; more about that later. Still curious, I went to Collingham's footnote to her description of how the German authorities promoted quark as an excellent food to support their developing (and horrifying) economic and social policies. I found an article with the somewhat off-putting title "Marktordnung and Autarkic Housekeeping: Housewives and Private Consumption under the Four-Year Plan, 1936–1939" by Nancy R. Reagin. Here, I found that what took place in the 1920s was more like a discovery than an invention:

"Quark was unknown to many German consumers before the mid-1920s, when bourgeois housewives’ organizations (working with the German Dairy Board) began small promotion campaigns for the product. NS [Nazi] women’s organizations mounted a much more extensive effort: distributing Kostproben (samples); offering public cooking demonstrations and special cookery courses centred on Quark; trying to persuade local merchants to stock the product; and distributing millions of Quark recipes. The shortage of butter and margarine no doubt aided their attempts to persuade housewives." (German History, Volume 19, Issue 2, 1 April 2001, p. 171)

Quark consumption in pre-war and wartime Germany increased under the influence of these promotions, continuing in popularity until the present. Recently, quark has also been introduced to American cooks and consumers, though it's still something of a specialty product. The Whole Foods website describes it thus:

American-made quark.

"Funny name. Delicious stuff. Quark can be classified as a sort of curd cheese somewhere between yogurt and small-curd cottage cheese. It's quite low in fat, versatile in the kitchen and, like yogurt, is sometimes sold blended with fruit."

Many products -- including quark -- are generally known as white cheese or non-aged cheese. You surely know some of them: French fromage blanc; Greek, Turkish, Israeli, Polish, Russian, and other white cheeses; maybe Icelandic skyr; Italian ricotta; and American cottage cheese and farmers' cheese. These differ in fermentation times and agents, in size of the curds (if any) and ultimately in taste and texture. Interchanging them in recipes doesn't necessarily give consistent results -- and could be a big mistake!

This is very nerdy -- a screen shot of the "quark" entry from the
Etymological Dictionary of the German Language by Kluge/Seebold,
which has gone through many editions in well over a century.

But let's get back to the question of the history of quark and of the wonderful word itself. According to the etymological dictionary I consulted (see image), the word came from Russian "tvarogü" and Polish "tvarog" through late Middle High German, other German dialects etc. In other words, both the word and the cheese have a long history -- even if they only became popular because they fit into Nazi ideological food ways. Fortunately this part of the history is well forgotten in the more recent use of quark in German cuisine and the introduction of quark to American consumers!

A word as wacky-sounding as "quark" has a lot of appeal, so another chapter in word history is its use by two impenetrable and charismatic twentieth century intellectuals: James Joyce and Murray Gell-Mann. Joyce's book Finnegan's Wake is famous for its incredibly opaque word play. Gell-Mann, a Nobel-prize-winning physicist is noted for his discovery of a family of elementary particles which he named quarks. He found the name in Finnegan's Wake. Gell-Mann, who is not only a physicist but also a lover of words, describes his choice thus:

 “In 1963, when I assigned the name "quark" to the fundamental constituents of the nucleon, I had the sound first, without the spelling, which could have been "kwork." Then, in one of my occasional perusals of Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce, I came across the word "quark" in the phrase "Three quarks for Muster Mark." Since "quark" (meaning, for one thing, the cry of a gull) was clearly intended to rhyme with "Mark," as well as "bark" and other such words, I had to find an excuse to pronounce it as "kwork." But the book represents the dreams of a publican named Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker. Words in the text are typically drawn from several sources at once, like the "portmanteau words" in Through the Looking Glass. From time to time, phrases occur in the book that are partially determined by calls for drinks at the bar. I argued, therefore, that perhaps one of the multiple sources of the cry "Three quarks for Muster Mark" might be "Three quarts for Mister Mark," in which case the pronunciation "kwork" would not be totally unjustified. In any case, the number three fitted perfectly the way quarks occur in nature.” ― Murray Gell-Mann, The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex, cited in Goodreads.

Not all Joyce scholars agree with Gell-Mann's interpretation of the Joyce quote. Here's an alternative way to see it:

"Joyce scholars suggest that it may have been an altogether different cry that had inspired Joyce in this fragment of the Wake - a one heard at a German market place. The vendor’s cry, according to this theory, was something like ‘Drei Mark für muster Quark!’ which can be translated as 'Three Marks for excellent curd cheese!'" (source)

Well, that seems to be enough for another Wordy Wednesday. I hope to write another blog post here about the wonderful book The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food. (Update: here is a link to the blog post about Collingham's book.)

Thoughts on reading "The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry"

The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry: Love, Laughter, and Tears at the World's Most Famous Cooking School in Paris by Kathleen Flinn (published 2007) is the selection for my next culinary reading group discussion. I'm going to make notes on my impressions as I proceed through the book, since I know it's a feel-good book, a type the group has hardly ever chosen for our discussions, and definitely a type that normally does not at all appeal to me. (And yes, I know I'm pretty much alone in my views; the amazon reviews for example are highly adoring.)

After reading 20 pages: This author's problems would be a luxury even for most first-world ladies. Poor thing, she lost her very high-powered management job. Her mother says find another job. Her upstairs neighbor and her boyfriend tell her to go to Paris and spend tens of thousands of dollars going to the Cordon Bleu cooking school because she always said she wanted to. Yes, the one where Julia Child went: you saw it in the movie with Merrill Streep. Their message: "You should do exactly what your spoiled brat entitled snowflake personality tells you to do." (That's a quote from me, not from the book.)

The author doesn't want to be a chef, she just wants to have the experience. The first scene at the cooking school, she's excoriated in French (which she doesn't quite understand), runs away from the mean instructor and the classroom, and ends up crying uncontrollably in the bathroom. I always finish book club books if I possibly can. This will take some self-discipline.

After reading 100 pages: I have learned, for one thing, that the title about crying is actually a warning about how to chop onions properly... the sharper your knife, the less you cry because you won't release the tear gas in the onion cells. But I still suspect, based on how hard it was to force myself to keep reading, that my instinct is right: I should never read a book with the word "cry" in the title.

I'm sick of the author's perfect boyfriend, both before and after he joins her in Paris. Their nightlife adventures drinking in bars were probably overworked in literature by the time Hemingway got around to them (though he presented them vividly, never mind.) I've read too many accounts of the search for an apartment in Paris. I'm not impressed by references to Audrey Hepburn movies or feel-good French movies either.

The constant cliches about food are the most unlikeable feature of this book. Does anyone know so little about French cooking methods to find her descriptions interesting? Ho hum: rabbit heads with eyes, fish guts and scales, web-like caul fat, splatters of blood, sausages made of tripe, and other things that freak out her fellow students. Ho hum: instructors demanding conformity with the Cordon Bleu rules. Ho hum: after each chapter are very ordinary recipes that aren't necessarily from the Cordon Bleu but from her free association with the things they cook. Who needs a recipe for her mother's minestrone soup or for chicken cordon bleu which doesn't have anything to do with the school? Or a recipe for bog-standard Boeuf Bourguignon or a soufflé, recipes that might or might not come from her class?

Two quotes that make me say puh-LEEZE --

"The week makes me appreciate that love is a fragile thing. It can be as precarious as those steps on the Sacré Coeur or as unpredictable as the eggs in a cheese soufflé. And in love, there are no handrails or any safe recipes to keep your heart from falling." (p. 89) 

"That afternoon, I nurse my consommé and finish yet another round of disappointing puff pastry. As I do, I consider how wonderful it would be to toss some hamburger, egg whites, and tomatoes into the soup of life. Suddenly everything would be clear and the purpose of it all would be revealed." (p. 95)

After reading 200 pages: My reactions haven't changed. As the author's cooking lessons at Cordon Bleu continue, she seems to find less to say about them and more to say about her life in Paris, about her perfect boyfriend who becomes her fiancé and then husband, and about their travels. And it's pretty standard stuff. She mentions her emotions constantly, but without depth or convincing descriptions.

When she adds bits of history or culture -- say, about regional French cuisine or about learning a language -- it's usually pretty superficial and predictable. She continues to mention gross-out food preparation challenges -- dealing with lobster death, more fish guts, guinea fowl tendons, and watching as a baby lamb gets "hacked into bits." (p. 144) Frankly, I'm bored.

The recipes that follow each chapter continue to be only peripherally related to her cooking school lessons -- virtually no French haute cuisine. I suspect, moreover, that her recipes are not very good. For example, Flinn includes a recipe for grilled pizza that I am certain could not work well if followed as she wrote it, unless you were already experienced at open-fire grilling of pizza.  She says "Spray grill with cooking spray. Grill dough two or three minutes per side." She doesn't mention the challenge of flipping or sliding the floppy unbaked pizza dough onto the fire -- the tricky part! (We learned to do this from barbecue expert Steven Raichlen, who gives detailed instructions.) Otherwise it's a very unimaginative pizza recipe. Pathetic. (p. 156-157)

The rest of the book: Well, I guess I didn't hate the author enough to be sorry that she passed her final exam and received her Cordon Bleu diploma, which is the not-surprising end of the story. Trying to be positive: I did admire Flinn's description of the Cordon Bleu class trip to Rungis, the wholesale market outside Paris that after 1973 replaced the famous market at Les Halles. For once, she managed a relatively vivid description of the fish market which had already run out of fish, the busy meat market, the bounty of the produce markets, and "the world's largest cheese shop, where nearly one hundred thousand pounds of cheese are stacked in virtually every corner of the stalls." (p. 227)

But she can't resist a cliche when it comes to the recipe for the Rungis chapter: it's for French Onion Soup. As you no doubt know, onion soup was the traditional post-midnight supper for visitors to the old Les Halles. It was already a predictable part of any Les Halles story when it appeared in the film Irma La Douce in 1963, and was probably already inevitable in The Belly of Paris, Zola's classic Les Halles novel published in 1873. I suspect that Julia Child's onion soup recipe is better than hers.

She gives us a few more superficial and hackneyed Paris stories as well: like her attempt to find designer-clothing bargains in Paris thrift shops, where she sees "an aging, rail-thin transvestite wearing a sequin-studded denim jacket and leopard miniskirt." (p. 206) I didn't like this snide stereotype. Similarly, I was somewhat uncomfortable with her stereotypes of her Asian fellow students at the Cordon Bleu.

She also adds several tales of difficult house guests who invade her various Parisian apartments and take advantage of her and her husband -- these tales appear throughout the entire book. This theme is at least familiar to me: when we lived in Paris we had houseguests almost every week, but we were lucky -- they were all lovely! However, I was sympathetic to her for being somewhat challenged in this area.

All in all, my low expectations for this book were completely fulfilled. I would not have chosen to read it, but nevertheless, I persisted, and I don't expect to get a medal. Or even an inspiration for something good to cook.

Oh yes, one more thing. How did she have the nerve to introduce one of the sections of her book with the Ernest Hemingway quote that Paris is a moveable feast? Puh-LEEZE.

What did Mona Lisa Eat?

Leonardo and Mona Lisa at the Table.

Here's a delightful book: Pass The Pandowny, Please: Chewing on History with Famous Folks and their Fabulous Foods by Abigail Ewing Zelz, illustrated by Eric Zelz.

If you often read this blog, you know that I love to explore what famous people ate. Most recently, I read two food-centered biographies of Abraham Lincoln and Benjamin Franklin, but I've had many more encounters with famous people and their food. If you have been following me forever, you know that one of my first such blog posts was:

Mona Lisa: By Request

Renaissance Pasta or, What Did Mona Lisa Eat?

Well, here is a book that follows up 13 famous men and 3 famous women, checking out what they ate. It looks like a children's book -- but really it was written just for me (and maybe you).

For a fantastic review, check this blog post by Jama: 

[review + recipe] Pass the Pandowdy, Please by 

Abigail Ewing Zelz and Eric Zelz

FEBRUARY 6, 2018 

I'm totally grateful to Jama for this post. I ordered a copy of the book for myself as soon as I read her
review. I might even make her pandowny recipe. If you don't know what pandowny is, that's another
good reason to read her post.

Baker's Words

An overnight-fermented poolish, also called pre-ferment or sponge, ready to use as an ingredient in bread dough.

"Biga and poolish are terms for pre-ferments used in Italian and French baking, respectively, for sponges made with domestic baker’s yeast. Poolish is a fairly wet sponge (typically made with a one-part-flour-to-one-part-water ratio by weight), while biga is usually drier. Bigas can be held longer at their peak than wetter sponges, while a poolish is one known technique to increase a dough’s extensibility." (source)

Technical words are fascinating. Baking bread is fascinating. In our family, experiments with bread are ongoing: my daughter in Virginia has been raising a couple of sourdough starters (blogged here) and my husband has been trying out various recipes for non-sourdough bread. Thus we've come across the two words biga and poolish.

While biga is an Italian method and Italian word, poolish is a French word, which is said to mean "Polish," because this particular bread-baking method originated in Poland. A credible history that supports this origin is elusive, but there's enough information to conclude that French bakers adopted the poolish method in the 1840s when baker's yeast first became available, and that they learned from Viennese bakers who were influenced by a method already in use in Poland. Prior to the introduction of baker's yeast, French bakers had used brewer's yeast or used the levain method; that is, sourdough starter, which uses wild yeasts. The poolish method was a dominant way to bake in Paris from the mid 19th through the early 20th century. More modern, automated, faster methods of baking French bread replaced this method during the 1920s.

The bread that Len made by the poolish method.

Here are a few references to the history of the poolish method and of the word itself.

Poilâne's book, which I bought at his
bakery on Rue du Cherche Midi in
Paris years ago.

In Lionel Poilâne's book Guide de l'Amateur de Pain (published 1981) the use of a poolish is recommended to home bakers as being easier than the use of levain -- which means sourdough starter. M. Poilâne doesn't have much confidence in home bakers, so he doesn't think they can manage to keep a sourdough starter alive. He says that bakers (presumably meaning French bakers) commonly used the method during the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. (p. 32)

The Atlantic ran a story by Betty Suyker about Poilâne in 1972, which contrasted his very retro baking method with modern French methods and also with the poolish method. She credits an Austrian army officer named Zang, who founded a bread-baking business in Paris in 1840 ("A la Recherche du Pain Perdu" by Betty Suyker, The Atlantic Monthly, July 1972, p. 90. A wonderful article with many other facts about the history of bread in France.)

The Taste of Bread by Raymond Calvel offers additional detail about the origin of the poolish method in Poland in the 1840s. He points out the use of baker's yeast in poolish in the 19th century, though says it was less common than the levain method. Starting in the 1920s, he says, direct use of baker's yeast as the main fermenting agent became the method of French bakers. (p. 45. This book, translated from French, provides a great deal of information about the chemical processes of making bread.)

Many of the online references state that the word poolish means Polish. Some French sources name Marie Antoinette or Marie de Medici in association with the introduction of this method, but this doesn't hold up to other known historic facts, especially the fact that baker's yeast, used in a poolish, wasn't available until the 19th century. These writers are apparently confused because the use of brewer's yeast, which had been known in ancient times, was reintroduced to France in 1665 -- a date not relevant to either of the two French queens. There's also been an effort to find a Yiddish origin of the word, but there's no evidence for that either (source).

From a web search: a "Viennoiserie."

More knowledgable writers narrow down the introduction of the poolish method to post-Napoleonic Paris. Views differ about Zang, whose Paris bakery and large staff of bakers introduced the method in the 1840s, and whose history explains why many French bakeries were called Viennese.

In the very exhaustive Handbook of Dough Fermentation, Ronald L. Wirtz writes: "Austrian bakers who emigrated to Paris around 1840 initiated the production of Vienna breads and other luxury products. A Polish nobleman, the Baron Zang, introduced the use of the poolish, a multistage fermentation method based on the use of prepared yeast that is still practiced by specialists today." (Ronald L. Wirtz, "Grain, Baking, and Sourdough Bread: A Brief Historical Panorama")

Many currently-popular baking books now use the terms biga and poolish, and have very detailed explanations of how to use both of these methods, including Flour Water Salt Yeast by Ken Forkish, whose recipe, "White Bread with Poolish" was used for the bread I pictured. American sources began to use the term some time in the late 20th century.

Ordinary English and French dictionaries that I've looked in have no entry for the word poolish. This includes the Merriam-Webster online dictionary, the Oxford English Dictionary, the Petit Larousse, the Robert (French), and other online English dictionaries. It's a purely technical word, I guess.

Happy Valentine's Day and Happy Wordy Wednesday!

Chinese Food in the US: A More Nuanced View

Haiming Liu's book From Canton Restaurant to Panda Express: A History of Chinese Food in the United States (published 2015) is unusual because it looks not only at the US, but at the Chinese cultural background and food ways of several waves of immigrants to the US. It thus goes deeper into Chinese-American history than two other books that I have enjoyed: The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food by Jennifer 8 Lee, and Chop Suey. A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States by Andrew Coe.

John Sloan, "Chinese Restaurant," 1909. One of the art works that Liu cites
to illustrate the development of Chinese restaurants in the early 1900s.

By using both English-language and Chinese-language sources, the author provides a fascinating history of Chinese food and its global history -- beginning with a Chinese restaurant tradition dating back to the Song Dynasty which lasted from 960 to 1279. This provides a much more nuanced appreciation of social and economic history of American Chinese communities, as well as of the restaurants they have founded and the various inventions of food to please both themselves and their American customers. The descriptive information about Chinese restaurants in the US from the 19th to the 21st century is fascinating, though I will not try to reproduce it here.

These words from the beginning of the book capture one of the main themes that the author explores:

"In the shadow of its success, we ponder the question of who owns culture. Culture seems hereditary or primordial and is often considered as a genetic soft power of a community or an ethnic group. In reality, culture, especially restaurant culture, is a 'public domain' in which every participating agent, organization, or corporation could have access to or even own it. Chinese Americans have no controlling power or patent rights to their own food in the American restaurant market. When food becomes a commodity, it is no longer an inherited culture. Corporate America could easily appropriate it. Food is both a culture and a commodity." (p. 5)

A very important theme of Liu's book is the major racial prejudice and discrimination that Chinese immigrants faced during the 19th century. He explains the ways that they dealt with it and the ways that it affected their choices of how to make a living. Chinese restaurants run by immigrants first appeared in California during the 1840s gold rush, when numerous Chinese businessmen and ambitious workers came -- "they were a different kind of pioneer in California. They were interested in making money through trade rather than digging gold. (p. 10).

Imogen Cunningham: "Chinatown, New York City" --
another art work discussed in From Canton Restaurant to Panda Express.

Although Chinese immigrants were hard-working model citizens by any reasonable standards, racism and legal limits on what they were allowed to do meant that a majority of the immigrants worked either in restaurants or laundries. Prejudice was so strong that the U.S. Congress voted in 1882 to ban all Chinese immigration -- The Chinese Exclusion Act, which was not rescinded until 1965.

Despite prejudice and exclusion, many of the original Chinese immigrants remained in the US, most notably in the China Towns of New York City and San Francisco. In the late 19th century, Chinese restaurateurs introduced Chinese-style food, notably chop suey, to Americans. It became more and more popular for at least a century. Liu refers to the introduction of this dish as "creative assimilation" as it was exotic, very popular, but not really a Chinese dish. By World War II, "Chop suey was also used as a food for American soldiers. Joining spaghetti and tamales as 'ethnic' dishes listed in the 1942 edition of the U.S. Army cookbook, chop suey and chow mein were staples of the military mess hall. The biggest fan of chop suey in the army was Dwight D. Eisenhower." (p. 63).

Several chapters of From Canton Restaurant to Panda Express deal with special topics which are very interesting, such as the chapters titled "Chop Suey and Racial America: The Origin of Chop Suey" (p. 49) and "Kung Pao Kosher: American Jews and Chinese Food An Unlikely Ethnic Romance" (p. 71). Liu really packs a lot of information into a relatively short book!

"The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 was another turning point in Chinese migration to the United States. When the law was passed, the annual immigration quota for the Chinese jumped from 105 to 20,000." (p. 90). This new wave of immigrants created another major change for both the Chinese culture in the US and for the introduction of an entirely new American attitude towards Chinese food, thanks to the vastly broader range of cuisine brought by these immigrants.

Late 20th century Chinese immigrants, who at first were primarily from Taiwan, represented a vast range of Chinese ethnicities and regional cuisines because the population of Taiwan actually had come from all over China as the Nationalists fled from the victorious Communists in the 1950s. One restaurant dish that epitomizes the way Chinese food has moved from Mainland China to Taiwan to the US is General Tso's Chicken, which was invented in Taiwan by a Hunan-native cook who adapted it once for Taiwan and again when he brought it to New York. Liu writes: "This contradictory character of General Tso’s chicken or other Hunan dishes made in Taiwan helps us understand the nature of Diaspora Chineseness. Chinese food does not exist in a social vacuum. Authenticity in food culture is often a flexible concept."  (p. 101).

Liu's conclusion:

"Contemporary Chinese immigrants and their families are a new generation of Asian Americans. Congregated Chinese restaurants, grocery stores, and other retail and service businesses in the San Gabriel Valley, in Southern California, or in Flushing and Queens, in New York, are visible examples of their transnational lifestyle, which does not prevent them from making America their home. Across the country, thriving Chinese restaurant businesses have considerably enriched American food culture. The rapid growth of P. F. Chang’s as a full-service Chinese restaurant and Panda Express as a fast-food Chinese restaurant reflects Americans’ constantly changing and often multiethnically blended eating habits. Chinese food is an indispensable part of the American restaurant market today." (p. 158). 

What did Benjamin Franklin Eat?

"In 1718, twelve-year-old Benjamin had been working for his father for two years and was well versed in all aspects of the candle business," writes Rae Katherine Eighmey in her recent book Stirring the Pot with Benjamin Franklin. To show the reader how Franklin and his father Josiah worked, she imagines a vignette where they bring a heavy handcart full of suet from Boston's Butcher's Wharf to their combined home and candle-making business. Besides the suet, which was to be rendered and made into dipped candles, she suggests that the Franklins could have purchased two ox cheeks to be made into a soup or stew for their dinner. Eighmey continues with a description of the way that Benjamin's mother Abiah and his sister Jane may have prepared an Ox Cheek Stew:

"Abiah hangs one of her brass kettles on the bottom trammel hook, directly over the coals, drops in a bit of butter, or salt pork, to melt, then adds the meat to brown. Next she pulls a couple of 'middling' carrots from the root cellar, each about a foot long and two inches in diameter, and chops them into chunks. In like manner she cuts up other root vegetables -- onions, parsnips, beets -- and celery and adds all to the pot. She gives it a quick stir, raises the pot to the middle hook, and leaves them to 'roast' along with a small chunk of ham for seasoning. ...  

"Abiah has the help of youngest daughter Jane.  She is six years old. Abiah will keep an especially watchful eye over her youngest children in the kitchen area. Fifteen years earlier, the family lost a son, Ebenezer, who fell into the tub of washing suds and drowned at the age of three.  By the time Abiah has finished cleaning up the porridge dishes from breakfast, set the kitchen area to rights, and made up the beds, the soup will be ready for the next step. She returns to the hearth, raises the kettle to the top hook, and adds ten quarts of water brought from the backyard well. Now it can simmer away all day, with an occasional check and stir." (pp. 21-22)

Colonial soup pot.

This quote illustrates the methods that Eighmey uses to create a detailed and vivid picture of Franklin's era to modern readers who probably have little knowledge of cooking over a hearth fire in an early colonial kitchen. She explains that the cooking technique described here is based on a contemporary household management book from 1717, and for the benefit of really curious readers, offers a recipe for Ox Cheek Stew -- the image of a large cooking pot is an illustration from the recipe. She suggests using beef shanks in case you can't find ox cheeks. (I once did try to find them, and it's difficult; the butcher at Whole Foods pointed out to me that each animal only has two cheeks!)

Stirring the Pot with Benjamin Franklin follows him throughout his 84 years and his several careers. Eighmey explores what he ate at each stage of the way -- including his brief time as a candle-making helper, his training as a printer, his development as a businessman and publisher in Philadelphia, his marriage, his fame (especially for creating "Poor Richard" and his famous sayings), his second career as an experimenter with electricity, his third career as a politician and diplomat in London and Paris, and finally his participation in the Constitutional Convention that gave us our current system of government. What a life!

Another illustration
from the book.

I especially enjoyed reading about Franklin's dining experiences during his very long diplomatic stays overseas. Eighmey shows that he enjoyed London and Paris dining experiences, but also that he very much missed the American foods of his early life, especially the American varieties of apples and the many types of products made with corn. His wife Deborah, who never accompanied him, was often asked in letters to send food; for example, in one letter from London he mentioned that he seldom saw roasting apples: "I wish you had sent me some... Newtown Pippins would have been the most acceptable." Deborah did send him food, including apples, cranberries, and ham; in 1760 he wrote her: "The apples are a great comfort to me." (p. 161) Later, she also sent dried venison, smoked beef, specially prepared cornmeal called nocake, and other American products. (p. 187)

During the American Revolution, Franklin was extremely important in his mission to Paris, where he arranged crucial military and financial support for the American cause. He ran a large household, which eventually became the US Embassy. For this reason, he employed a professional cook; thus Eighmey was able to find ledgers of food purchases for his kitchens and details of meals prepared during that time. His chef, named Finck, in his employment application, provided a list of simple daily fare and also more elegant dinners that he agreed to prepare for the household and guests:

"He agreed to supply a lunch, a dinner -- the main meal of the day served in the middle of the afternoon -- and an evening supper. The early meal consisted of porridge, bread and butter; sugar and honey, with coffee and unsweetened chocolate as beverages. For dinner, ... Finck  specified hors d'oeuvres of butter, radishes, and cornichons -- pickles; a large entrée of beef, veal, or mutton; followed by a poultry course; a small 'in between' course, two 'plats d'entrements'; then two vegetable dishes. For dessert the menu suggested two plates of fresh fruit in the winter, four in the summer; two compotes -- cooked fruit frequently served warm in a sugar syrup; a selection of cheeses, cookie-like biscuits, and bonbons. Finally, a frozen dessert was to be served twice a week in the summer and once in the winter. So it appears that Benjamin Franklin ate ice cream, a popular eighteenth-century Parisian treat, less well-known in America or England." (p. 225)

Some specific foods in Finck's repertoire: "soup and porridges, fat hens, roast pigeons, baby peas, fried artichokes, small pâtés, and chops, along with fruit -- peaches, plums and apricots." Also mentioned: turkey, the American native bird which Franklin was backing as a national symbol rather than the bald eagle.

Recently, I also read Eighmey's earlier book about what Lincoln ate (blogged here: What did Abraham Lincoln Eat?) The Lincoln book to me was slightly more lively and vivid, but I find both to be very valuable food and history books.

Retro Baking: Velvet Spice Cake from the "Joy of Cooking"

Just out of the oven!

My copy of The Joy of Cooking is dog-eared, broken-spined, and full of splatters from past cooking experiences. I also own the Joy of Cooking iPad app, which I actually used to make this spice cake. Baking from scratch is kind of a retro thing to do involving beaten egg whites and many steps to completion. Not at all like a cake mix!

My also-antique bundt pan is coated with Teflon, but it still works. (Note that Teflon is not considered harmful, that's kind of a myth.) The printed book I used is so old that the recipe version there only mentions a tube pan. Bundt pans became popular in 1966, which is probably when I received mine as a gift from my Aunt Bernadine, though she may have given it to me even before that. The app -- being entirely twenty-first century -- says to use a bundt pan, which I did.

Here's the cake after it cooled a bit, shown in front of my very-not-retro stand mixer.
The spices I used were ginger, nutmeg, cinnamon, and cloves: a bit more than the recipe suggested.
Also, I used Kefir in place of the buttermilk specified in the recipe, as I often do these days.

I greased the pan with my secret hoard of original Crisco. I use it only for greasing baking pans, so I don't think it will harm us too much even though it's trans fat. I used butter as the shortening in the cake itself -- butter, the great and wonderful and vindicated fat that isn't anywhere near as dangerous as they once told us. Greasing the pan with Crisco does make a very crisp and brown exterior on a cake!