Category: On ingredients

I’ve never understood margarine. I do know what it is, I just don’t understand how it came to be accepted as food you would feed to yourself or someone else. Friends of mine remember when it came as a lumpy white mass with a red capsule in the center. The idea was to mash the red dye into the fatty stuff, massaging it so that the result was an orange-ish color something like real butter.

By the time I started doing most of the grocery shopping, they had solved the yellowing problem and there was little else advertised or on the market shelf. Just various variations on fake butter, butter-like sticks made with milk-like derivatives, spreads with lovely names like “I can’t believe it’s not butter,” (I can’t believe it’s not lard, said my former business partner, a witty man).  The real stuff was relegated to a small shelf corner, if available at all.

I understand the economic rationale. Margarine is cheap to make, doesn’t easily spoil, can be made with a variety of oils and processes, can sit on shelves longer, and is a great profit generator for factories that produce food and ad agencies that make happy-kitchen commercials. I just don’t understand why someone would prefer something fake when the real thing it’s trying to imitate is sitting right next to it.

Though I have vague memories of butter that my grandmother made from cows she milked herself, on Guernsey this past summer I had a taste of absolutely transcendent butter. Guernsey butter is a deep, yellowish orange (and not from red dye out of a New Jersey chemical plant but from the diet of the cows). It is rich, deeply flavored, extraordinarily itself, and it makes everything it touches taste better. Like a fresh egg from a local hen, or the crust for a fruit tart, or just spread on a piece of good bread.

Good butter has been part of diets for thousands of years. Exchanging it for a chemical facsimile makes no sense.

Transformational Food – Carrots

I’ve always been fascinated with how food can be transformed from something common to something magical.

Here’s a carrot. And here’s an almost unlimited number of things you can do with it.

-Wash it and eat it raw.

-Peel it and eat it raw with some kind of dip.

-Peel it, cut it up, boil it, stir in some butter and salt and serve it as a somewhat innocuous side dish.

-Peel it, cut it up, boil it. season it with a vinaigrette and serve it as a more interesting side dish.

-Peel it, cut it up, boil it. season with a vinaigrette and roast it in a hot oven until slightly charred, serving it as a dish that may get a smile from your guests.

-Or get lots of carrots (10 – 20 lbs), juice them, boil the juice slowly with star anise until a gallon plus of juice is reduced to foam in the bottom of the pot. Remove the anise and puree, adding spices and grape seed or canola oil to make a sauce that is so rich, so intense, and so good with scallops and shrimp that you want to squeal with delight.

That’s a transformation.

I urge you to try it, and offer a little blessing for Ming Tsai, who thought it up, or who passed along the formula from someone who did.

I’ve been a fan of Paul Prudhomme since he opened K-Pauls on Chartres Street in New Orleans, published his first cookbook, and started the almost total depopulation of the lowly (until-then) redfish in the Gulf of Mexico – his most famous early recipe was blackened redfish.

Paul cooked what he knew, what he had learned watching his mother and relatives cook, and turned it into great food. I particularly love his gumbo. There are scores, maybe hundreds, of recipes for this versatile and robust dish, but few more exciting than Paul’s. My favorite doesn’t use okra or file powder for thickening, just a really dark roux.

Prudhomme wants a deep black roux for many of his gumbos. Now a roux, for those of you who don’t know, is simply vegetable oil and flour cooked over a high flame and stirred constantly until it turns from whitish to pale brown to reddish brown to dark red to black. You can stop it at any stage and use it for a particular soup or stew. But at the point when it’s dark red to black, and there is so much smoke coming off the pot that you have to blow into it to see the bottom of the pot and judge the color of the roux, then it’s ready for the gumbos I like to cook. And it’s important to see the roux because the color tells you when it’s ready.

When the color has just turned a shade darker than the darkest red, it’s at the proper temperature and it’s time to cool it off – instantly – by tossing in a few cups of chopped onions, bell peppers and celery. This causes something like an explosion of boiling oil and vegetables, but it cools the roux. The vegetables cook quickly as you stir the pot. You add more, along with spices and garlic, and later, a chicken or seafood stock. The result is a dark, smooth base into which you add the meats and fish: andouille sausage, chicken, beef, pork shrimp, oysters, crab, crawfish or other fish. You serve the result hot over rice or grits.

Wonderful, wonderful, filling and satisfying. I’ve made it for years and enjoy it every time.

Food chains that specialize in chicken wings generally have a limited repertoire. You order wings with various degrees of spice and heat (habanero sauce at one end, ketchup-like at the other), different coatings (barbeque, teriyaki) or rubs (jerk, garlic) and the same dips – ranch or blue cheese with a stalk of celery. They are not without character, unlike chicken fingers that set the standard for bland, but it’s hard to find anything interesting about them once you’ve had them once or twice. Nothing new, as Ecclesiastes says, under the sun.

Well, here’s a variation to consider: wings that come from the Chinese dim sum tradition. In this preparation, the wings have had the meat forced to the end, baring the bone. In the case of the double-bone section, one bone is removed first. These are lightly seasoned, battered and deep fried. For lunch today, I used a bit of garlic as the seasoning, made a light batter and served them – to myself – with a roasted tomato salsa and a homemade mayonnaise. They’re not messy, since the edible portion is all at one end, and the light batter gives them a richness lacking in a plain wing.

I noted in my last newsletter that these would be a good addition to a football party, since they retain their bar-food character, ease of eating and ability to go well with a variety of drinks. I still believe this to be true, but would urge you to get someone else to make them for you. Preparing the wings, removing the bones, etc. is tedious.