Rattle Those Pots

“Too many cooks may spoil the broth, but it only takes one to burn it.”
Madeleine Bingham, The Bad Cook’s Guide

“If the skill of the artist had failed, if he had served some ill-prepared dish, the cook was put in irons on the spot, or else was led to the triclinium (dining-room) by two henchmen and severely flogged in the presence of the guests.”
C. Dezobry, Rome au siecle d’Augus

Cooking, I am told, teaches timing, patience and fortitude. On the less lofty side, it also teaches plenty about First Aid, as I am rapidly discovering.

Chef Ludovic, a French master pastry chef at the school, is filling in for Chef Philippe, our regular chef instructor, while he is at the CB campus in Peru this week. Just to give an idea of Ludovic’s approach, quotes from his demonstration classes have included “Do not disobey or I will turn my blowtorch upon you,” and “The water should be bath temperature, as for children. Do not boil the baby.”

For our practical class with Ludovic, we each needed to make a frozen orange soufflé, which involves an Italian meringue, fresh cream and a boiling sugar mix. During his demonstration, Ludovic matter-of-factly informed us that a sugar burn is one of the worst burns we could get in cuisine. “The sugar, if it jumps from the pan to you, will stick to your skin – ‘The Dreaded Burn.’

“You see the skin now?” he went on, holding up a finger. “You will no longer see the skin when the sugar comes off.”

Right after this Advil-inducing safety warning, Ludovic proceeded to inform us all that the way we determine whether our gooey sugar and water mix – which will have been bubbling for several minutes by that point – has cooked long enough to add to the meringue is by first putting our fingers in a bowl of cold water for a few seconds, then sticking our fingers into the pan to grab some of the thick, boiling sugar, and then plunging our fingers with the sugar mix stuck to them back into the cold water. (The point is to be able to make a soft ball with the sugar once you have it in the cold water; if it’s too hard, the mix has overcooked, and if it won’t form a ball, the ratio is off or it hasn’t boiled long enough.)

“Do not worry,” Ludovic loftily intoned. “The heat is all in your head. If you do not think it is hot, it is not hot.” There was a little nervous tittering in the classroom…until he demonstrated the technique, and we realized to our growing horror that we would actually have to repeat this stunt later that day. Maybe he should have left out the part about losing skin.

So we all warily ambled up to the practical kitchen to boil our hands in 250° sugar. The feeling for all of us was about the same as if someone had just told us to press our palms on our red-hot stovetops, with the helpful advice, “just imagine it’s cold.”

Now we come to why I’m a shoe-in for this week’s Sheer Stupidity Award. I’ve got my sugar mix boiling, and I’ve made my pitiful little bowl of water as cold as I’m able to in the whopping 6 minutes of prep time available. I can’t procrastinate once the sugar mix has been boiling for several minutes, because if I do, the mix will overcook and can’t be added to my meringue (ruining the dish and earning me a big “F” for that day’s class).

Ludovic strolls over to my station, examines my bubbling pot and says, “Yes. It looks ready for testing.” Being the smoothie I am, I blatantly stall, saying “Cold water first, then the pan, then cold again, right?” and earn an impatient “Oui, oui.” I stick my fingers in the cold water, take a breath, and plunge my fingers into the pan – and I luck out! Because I’ve gotten enough of the thick boiling goo the first time around, and that means I don’t have to do this madness more than once (that day, at least). Where I did not luck out, however, was when I stood there examining the amount that I had with my hand up in front of my face, completely forgetting Step #3 – the one where my fingers were supposed to immediately race back to the cold water, carrying the gob of boiling sugar. “Wow,” I actually sat there thinking, looking at my sugary fingers, “it really does stick.”

“Into the bowl! Into the bowl!” I’m rapidly snapped out of my idiotic reverie by Ludovic’s holler and a simultaneous intense burning. It couldn’t have taken more than two complete seconds, but because the sugar is so hot and sticky, it was long enough to give me several burned, swollen fingertips. “This is good news,” Ludovic cheerfully informed me. I looked at him as though he’s grown a second head, and he added, “because your texture is correct. And you will never make this same mistake again.”

It had not been a good class for me – a whole other problem involving needing to roll fragile dough just out of the oven around a knife sharpener to make “cigarettes” for part of a dessert. For this one, we only have 3 seconds before the dough cools and will wind up cracking when it’s rolled. My fingers, rapidly forming huge blisters, couldn’t seem to do anything right by this point. Does it count if I scored well on my Apple Charlotte on Monday? “NO” is the answer. Because nobody eats Apple Charlotte, do they??

At the end of class, I glumly dragged my bruised ego to the door. Ludovic just winked and smiled. “Don’t worry,” he said. “You are not the only person missing skin today.”

“What I love about cooking is that after a hard day, there is something comforting about the fact that if you melt butter and add flour and then hot stock, it will get thick! It’s a sure thing! It’s a sure thing in a world where nothing is sure; it has a mathematical certainty in a world where those of us who long for some kind of certainty are forced to settle for crossword puzzles.”
Nora Ephron, American journalist (1941-)

“When helicopters were snatching people from the grounds of the American embassy compound during the panic of the final Vietcong push into Saigon, I was sitting in front of the television set shouting, ‘Get the chefs! Get the chefs!’”
Calvin Trillin, American writer (New Yorker magazine)

Strange Observances

Today (April 13), I’m not kidding, is “National Peach Cobbler Day.” (Google it, no joke.) Some of these things make me laugh out loud when I see them. April 7 was “National Coffee Cake Day.” I hope you remembered to celebrate. I also hope you didn’t forget to observe the pivotal National Egg Salad Week earlier this month.

I’m becoming a fan of food news headlines. From just-food.com’s weekly briefing: “Wendy’s offers reward in finger in the chili case” (the reward is $50,000); “Denmark begins Vitamin D campaign” (whoa, those crazy kids in Denmark!); and, my personal favorite, “Does rapeseed oil deserve its poor image?” (According to the article, no, it doesn’t, and the oil is apparently a healthy fat.)

“We never repent of having eaten too little.”
Thomas Jefferson

I’m reading Ann Cooper’s “Bitter Harvest,” which goes into detail about what’s being put into the everyday foods we’re eating and why, what this is meaning health-wise, and the amount of industry money going into political pockets to maintain status quo on this front. Definitely a good, interesting read. For comic relief, though, a related Top 10:

Top 10 Tip-Offs Your Food’s Been Genetically Altered

10) Your pancakes just fetched their own butter and syrup.
9) Flintstone Vitamins have started chatting up your kids in the morning.
8) ArtiRind: Looks like an artichoke, tastes like a Pork Rind.
7) When you sing while doing dishes, something in the breadbox is providing harmony.
6) Carrots just aren’t supposed to giggle.
5) “Meatcake,” once a George Carlin joke, has moved to the 2-for-1 bin at Safeway.
4) You’ve discovered those processed potato leftovers double as a handy kitchen sponge.
3) Every time you peel a banana, your garage door goes up.
2) You spot the mini Fruit of the Loom guys hiding underneath the fruitbowl grapes.
1) The devilled eggs on the picnic table just winked at you.

Foodie Trivia

In 1937, Margaret Rudkin established what would become Pepperidge Farm Bread. Rudkin had never baked, but was looking to earn additional income after her husband was injured in a riding accident. She set up an oven in her husband’s old polo stable, began with 24 loaves of bread per day, and within a year was cranking out over 4,000 loaves per week.

The first cookbook written for an American audience by an American author was written in 1796 by Amelia Simmons of Hartford, CT. Her recipes included specialties that still appear on regional New England menus today, including Johnny-Cakes and Maple Syrup Pie. The book’s title (honestly) is: “American Cookery, or the Art of Dressing Viands, Fish, Poultry, and Vegetables, and the Best Modes of Making Pastes, Puffs, Pies, Tarts, Puddings, Custards, and Preserves, and All Kinds of Cakes from the Imperial Plumb to Plain Cake Adapted to this Country and All Grades of Life.”

Mickey Rathburn writes in Northampton, MA’s Daily Hampshire Gazette: “Open hearth cooking was not only time-consuming but hazardous for the [colonial] women who did it, often setting fire to their cumbersome long skirts. In fact, fires were a leading cause of death to women, second only to childbirth.”

The stove was invented in 1800, by scientist Count von Rumford. (Rumford – aka Benjamin Thompson – was a schoolmaster, an innovative scientist and inventor, a Casanova, and a spy, among other things. At the outbreak of the American Revolution, Rumford sided with and fought for the Brits, and lived the rest of his life in exile in Europe.)

Great Photos

I stumbled on a big online collection of historical photos from the U.S. Farm Security Administration’s collections of the 1930s and 1940s. I don’t think you can click it directly, but if you just paste http://desktoppub.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http%3A%2F%2F
www.usda.gov%2Foc%2Fphoto%2Fopclibra.htm and then scroll about 2/3 of the way down that page, you’ll come to half a dozen black and white photos; if you click on any of these photos, you’ll find a fantastic collection of farm and domestic scenes, landscapes and business photos, etc. These are incredibly interesting, and definitely worth a look.

Take care, everybody. Hope everything’s peachy down south!

Jen

“A smiling face is half the meal.” – Latvian proverb