April, 2009

Tuesday, 31 March 2009

In an essay called “A Plea for Culinary Modernism,” published in a journal called Gastronomica, the food historian Rachael Lauden points out that processed foods have been with us for at least as long as the written word and probably longer. She compares the demand that we stay away from processed foods to the demands of the Luddites, English handworkers who protested woolen mills in the eighteenth century because the factories would undo their traditional way of life. The modern credo takes it for granted that fresh, whole and natural are good, while preserved, processed and treated foods are bad. But this is a pretty new idea, and one that upon close examination doesn't make good sense. To our grandparents and thousands of generations of our ancestors before them, fresh whole and natural meant dirty, unrefined and labor-intensive. As long ago as the second century BC, a Chinese philosopher sated that the most important foods were rice, salt, vinegar, soy sauce, oil and black tea. Four of these foods are highly processed, barely recognizable as products based on distilled and fermented grains and pulses, the fat pressed from the seeds of the plant in the mustard family and the oxidized and pressed leaves of a camellia bush. In the Mediterranean, people deliberately fermented dairy products and pressed the oil from olives, salted their fish and transformed juices into wines because these foods were more stable, more easily digested and involved less work in the home.  In pre-Columbian times, Meso-Americans bred their grain to the point where it could not reproduce without human assistance and they processed their corn with alkali to make it easier to cook and incidentally more nourishing. In fact, every culture on earth has enthusiastically embraced food processing with the same glee that the earliest humans embraced cooking because most forms of processing food result in a product that is in some way more nourishing and or more delicious than food in its natural state. In short, I’m all for processed foods, but I want the foods themselves to be chemical free and humanely raised and I want the processing they undergo to be conducted in a way that does not damage the world in which I live. Frankly, I am very glad we live in a modern industrialized world where I have easy access to the rich and culturally diverse array of processed foods I enjoy every day like rice noodles to make my favorite pad Thai, or pre-made tortillas and cheese to make a quick burrito dinner for my family, not to mention simple pantry staples like processed olive oil and vinegar to make a quick salad dressing for greens from my own garden. Dead Head Pad Thai Before he settled down and became a stock broker and financial planner, my wife’s cousin Bob, who stood up for me as a groom’s man at our wedding, worked at various odd and colorful jobs. For years, he was housepainter. And for a while, during the early 1980’s, he used to follow The Grateful Dead concert tours pulling a trailer equipped with a rudimentary kitchen. In the trailer, he made and sold Pad Thai noodles which he served with Bob’s Hot Habañero Shake. Bob’s noodles were my introduction to the phenomenon that is Thai Food. I never got his recipe, but, after years of carefully dissecting the dish and studying other recipes, I have finally developed a recipe that comes close. I decided to forgo the habañero shake in favor of a few crushed red chilies. Crispy Bean and Cheese Burritos Cooking my way through college as a dinner cook at a family-owned Mexican restaurant in Bellingham, Washington, I became something of an authority on burritos. The burritos we served were not “soft;” instead, they were fried in oil until they were crisp. The frying took place either on top of the griddle or in a shallow pan of oil (depending on which of us cooks was in charge that night), and instead of simply turning the burritos over once too fry the second side, we developed a technique for rolling the filled burritos as they fried so that they took on a three-sided log shape, something like the famous Toblerone chocolate bars.  A quarter century later, the restaurant, which is still in operation under new owners has long abandoned the three-sided burrito, but I still follow the procedure when I make burritos at home. Serve the burritos hot on a bed of shredded lettuce with homemade salsa and sour cream passed separately. Chile and Tomato Salsa Salsa made in big, commercial batches is usually composed of vegetables that have been smashed as well as chopped. What distinguishes a really fine salsa from an ordinary one is the care that's taken in how the vegetables are cut. Use your sharpest knife and take your time to make fine dice that burst with flavor in every bite.   Mixed Green Salad In the last quarter of the twentieth century when young cooks first started localizing elements of country French cooking, finding good salad greens presented an almost insurmountable hurdle. These days, the mixed baby greens known as mesclun are available ready-to-eat in most supermarkets, making what was once a labor of love into an easy-to-prepare element of any weeknight dinner. This French-American Salad may be the quintessential accompaniment to a casual entrée.

 

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