Cooked - A Natural History of Transformat Part 8

Saute them in some fat

Brown piece(s) of meat (or other featured ingredient)

Put everything in a pot

Add some water (or stock, wine, milk, etc.)

Simmer, below the boil, for a long timeAs a practical matter, the virtue of this sort of skeleton recipe, for me anyway, is that it makes cooking any such dish much less daunting-and daunted is how I usually feel when confronted by a multistep recipe. But once you get a feel for the basic theme, all the variations become much easier to master.

Paring away the dense undergrowth of culinary detail from a whole genre of recipes has the added virtue of helping to expose what a particular mode of cooking-of transforming the stuff of nature into the occasion of a meal-might have to say about us and our world. Do it often enough, and you begin to see that cooking with fire implies a completely different narrative, about the natural world on one side and the social world on the other, than does cooking with water. Cooking with fire tells a story about community, and, perhaps, about where we fit in the cosmic order of things. Like the column of smoke that rises from the pit, it's a story that unfolds on a vertical axis, with all sorts of heroic (or at least mock heroic) flourishes. There's a priest, sort of, and a ritual, too, even a kind of altar; death is confronted, and the element of fire is brought under control.

To turn from the bright sunlight of this Homeric world and come into the kitchen of covered pots and simmering liquids feels like stepping out of an epic and into a novel. So, if every recipe tells a story, what kind of tale might cooking with the element of water have to tell?

II.

Step Two: Saute Onions and Other Aromatic Vegetables

I knew I needed some help finding my way in the kitchen, and I found it in a young local cook by the name of Samin Nosrat. As it happens, I was Samin's teacher before she became mine. I met Samin five years ago, when she asked to sit in on a food-writing cla.s.s that I was teaching at Berkeley. She had graduated from the university a few years before and, though working as a chef in a local restaurant, she also had ambitions to write. Samin has a big personality and soon became a figure in the cla.s.s, sharing her deep knowledge about food as well as her cooking. Each week, a different student would bring in a snack for the cla.s.s-maybe a favorite childhood cookie or an unusual heirloom variety from the farmers' market-and share a story about it. When Samin's turn to do snack came around, she showed up in cla.s.s with several hotel pans of piping hot lasagna, both the tomato sauce and the pasta handmade from scratch, and proceeded to serve it to us on china with silverware and cloth napkins. The story Samin told us was about learning to cook, first at Chez Panisse, where she'd worked her way up from bussing tables to prep cook, and then in Tuscany, where she'd spent two years learning how to make fresh pasta, butcher meat, and master the kind of "Grandma cooking" she loves best. Samin's lasagna was probably the most memorable thing about that semester.

That's the first time I can recall ever hearing that phrase, "Grandma cooking." For Samin, this was the sort of traditional food that emerged from her mother's kitchen, which was nominally in San Diego but in every other sense-and especially those of taste and smell-in Tehran. Her parents had emigrated from Iran in 1976, three years before the revolution; as a follower of the Baha'i faith, her father feared persecution from the ascendant s.h.i.+a. Samin was born in San Diego in 1979, but her parents, nouris.h.i.+ng a dream of someday returning, treated their home as sovereign Iranian territory. The family spoke Farsi at home, and Mrs. Nosrat cooked Persian food exclusively. "The moment you come home from school and step over that threshold," Samin remembers being told as a young child, "you are back in Iran."

Samin was definitely not the kind of child of immigrants who could be embarra.s.sed by the old-world dishes her mother would tuck into her lunch box. To the contrary, she loved Persian food: the aromatic rice dishes, the kabobs, the rich stews made with sweet spices, nuts, and pomegranates. "One time at school I was made fun of for my weirdo lunch. But my food tasted so much better than theirs! I refused to be insulted." Her mother, who "definitely wore the pants in our house," would drive all over southern California in search of a particular taste of home: an unusual variety of sweet lime called for in a particular dish, or a kind of sour cherry a.s.sociated with a seasonal feast. Growing up, Samin never gave much thought to cooking-though her mom would occasionally recruit the children to squeeze lemons or sh.e.l.l big piles of fava beans-"but I was very interested in eating. I loved my mom's cooking."

It was during college in Berkeley that the seed of the idea of cooking as a vocation was planted-in the course of a single memorable meal eaten at Chez Panisse. Samin told me the story one afternoon, while we were standing around the island in my kitchen, chopping vegetables. I had asked her if she would be willing to teach me how to cook, and we had started having lessons once or twice a month, four- or five-hour sessions that invariably began around this island, each of us at a cutting board, chopping and talking. Conversation, I soon came to realize, was the best way to deal with the drudgery of chopping onions.

As usual, Samin had a white ap.r.o.n tied around her waist, and the thicket of her black hair raked partway back. Samin is tall and st.u.r.dily built, with strong features, slas.h.i.+ng black eyebrows, and warm olivey-brown skin. If you had to pick one word to describe her, "avid" would have to be it; Samin is on excellent terms with the exclamation point. Words tumble from her mouth; laughter, too; and her deep, expressive brown eyes are always up to something.

"I had never even heard of Chez Panisse! In fact, the whole concept of a 'famous restaurant' was totally alien to me, because my family never went to fancy restaurants. But my college boyfriend had grown up in San Francisco, and when he told me all about Alice Waters and Chez Panisse, I was like, dude, we have to go! So, for that entire school year, we saved our money in a s...o...b..x, throwing in loose change, quarters from the laundry, money from bets we made between us. And when we had collected two hundred dollars, which was just enough to pay for the prix-fixe meal downstairs, we set the alarm on a Sat.u.r.day morning to make sure we'd get through the minute they started answering the phone, so we could make a reservation for the Sat.u.r.day night exactly one month later.

"It was an incredible experience, the warm and glittering dining room, the amazing care they took of us-these two kids! They served us a frisee salad with 'lardons of bacon'-and I remember thinking, What is this?! The second course was halibut in a broth, and I had never eaten halibut before, so I was really nervous about that. But what I remember most vividly was the dessert: a chocolate souffle with raspberry sauce. The waiter had to show us how to punch a hole in the dome and pour in the sauce. It was really good, but I thought it would be even better with a gla.s.s of milk, and when I asked for one, the waitress started laughing! Milk was a total faux pas, I now realize-you're supposed to drink a dessert wine, duh-but the waitress was so nice about it. She brought me my gla.s.s of milk. And then she brought us a gla.s.s of dessert wine-on the house!

"The food was beautiful, but I think it was the experience of being totally taken care of that evening that made me fall in love with the restaurant. I decided right then that, someday, I wanted to work at Chez Panisse. It seemed so much more special than a normal job. Plus, you'd get to eat all this amazing food all the time!

"So I sat down and wrote a long letter to the manager. I talked about how I'd had this life-changing meal, and could I please, please, please work as a busser. And by some crazy fluke, they called me in and I was hired on the spot."

Samin reorganized her schedule at school so she could work several s.h.i.+fts a week at the restaurant. She remembers her first one vividly. "They walked me through the kitchen, and everyone had on these immaculate white coats, and they were making the most beautiful food. Someone showed me where to find this old-school vacuum cleaner, and I started vacuuming the dining room, and I remember thinking, 'I can't believe they're trusting me to vacuum the downstairs dining room at Chez Panisse!' I felt so honored. And that's the way I felt every day I went to work there.

"I'm sort of obsessive-compulsive, in case you haven't noticed, and this was the first place in my life where everybody seemed just as OCD as I am. Everyone there was seeking perfection in whatever they were doing, whether it was the way they tied up the trash or made the best souffle they could ever hope to make, or polished the silver just so. I could see how every task, no matter how trivial, was being done to the fullest, and that's when I began to feel at home.

"It clicked for me the first time I was taught how to load the dumbwaiter. You had to load the dishes in it just so: Keep the hot plates away from the salads, use the s.p.a.ce superefficiently, and arrange things in such a way that the china would make the least amount of noise. It's a tiny, rickety old building that has to feed five hundred people every day, and give them the best possible experience, so everything has been carefully thought through over the years, and developed into a system. Which means that if you take a shortcut it can mess things up for everyone else.

"When, eventually, I started cooking, this whole approach translated seamlessly into how I approached food. For me, cooking is about seeking the deepest, farthest, richest flavors in everything I make. About extracting the absolute most out of every ingredient, whether it is a beautiful piece of salmon or a plain old onion. And that way of thinking about food started the day I was taught how to load the Chez Panisse dumbwaiter."

Sundays with Samin-our usual day together-always began the same way, with her bursting into the kitchen around three in the afternoon and plopping a couple of cotton market bags onto the island. From these she would proceed to pull out her cloth portfolio of knives, her ap.r.o.n, and, depending on the dish we were making, her prodigious collection of spices. This notably included a tin of saffron the size of a coffee can. Her mom sent her these eye-popping quant.i.ties of saffron, which whenever a recipe called for it Samin would sprinkle as liberally as salt.

"I'm soooo excited!" she'd invariably begin, in a singsong, as she tied her ap.r.o.n around her waist. "Today, you are going to learn how to brown meat." Or make a soffritto. Or b.u.t.terfly a chicken. Or make a fish stock. Samin could get excited about the most mundane kitchen procedures, but her enthusiasm was catching, and eventually I came to regard it as almost a kind of ethic. Even browning meat, an operation that to me seemed fairly self-evident if not ba.n.a.l, deserved to be done with the utmost care and attention, and so with pa.s.sion. At stake was the eater's experience. There was also the animal to consider, which you honored by making the very most of whatever it had to offer. Samin made sure there was also a theme undergirding each lesson: the Maillard reaction (when browning meat); eggs and their magical properties; the miracle of emulsification; and so forth. Over the course of a year, we made all sorts of main course dishes, as well as various salads and sides and desserts. Yet it seemed our main courses always came back to pot dishes, and we probably cooked more braises than anything else.

Much like a stew, a braise is a method of cooking meat and/or vegetables slowly in a liquid medium. In a stew, however, the main ingredient is typically cut into bite-sized pieces and completely submerged in the cooking liquid. In a braise, the main ingredient is left whole or cut into larger pieces (with meat ideally left on the bone) and only partially submerged in liquid. This way, the bottom of the meat is stewed, in effect, while the exposed top part is allowed to brown, making for richer, more complex flavors as well as, usually, a thicker sauce and a prettier dish.

Samin and I braised duck legs and chicken thighs, roosters and rabbits, various unprepossessing cuts of pork and beef, the shanks and necks of lamb, turkey legs, and a great many different vegetables. Each of these dishes called for a braising liquid, and at one time or another we used them all: red wine and white, brandy and beer, various stocks (chicken, pork, beef, fish), milk, tea, pomegranate juice, das.h.i.+ (a j.a.panese stock made from seaweed and flaked bonito), the liquid left over from soaked mushrooms and beans, and water straight from the tap. We also made dishes that were not, technically, stews or braises, but were built on the same general principle, including sugo or ragu (or ragout), bouillabaisse, risotto, and paella.

More often than not, the general principle called for a foundational dice of onions and other aromatic vegetables, which I would try to get ready before Samin showed up. And more often than not, Samin would take one look at the neat piles of chopped onions, carrots, and celery on my cutting board (the height of said piles conforming to the prescribed ratio of 2:1:1) and tell me to rechop them, because my dice wasn't fine enough.

"In some dishes, a rough dice like that is fine." I tried not to take offense, but I didn't think of my neat cubes as "rough" at all. "But in this dish, you don't necessarily want to be able to see any evidence of the soffritto," she explained. "You want it to melt away into nothingness, become this invisible layer of deliciousness. So ... keep chopping!" And so I did, following her example of rocking a big knife back and forth through the piles of diced vegetables, dividing and subdividing the little cubes until they became mere specks.

On the subject of sauteing onions, another operation I wrongly a.s.sumed to be fairly straightforward, Samin had definite opinions. "Most people don't cook their onions nearly long enough or slow enough. They try to rush it." This was apparently a major pet peeve of hers. "The onions should have no bite left whatsoever and be completely transparent and soft. Turn down the flame and give them a half hour at least." Samin had been a sous-chef in a local Italian restaurant where she had sixteen young men working under her. "I was constantly walking down the line, turning down their burners, which were always on high. I guess it's some kind of guy thing to crank your flame all way to the max. But you need to be gentle with a mirepoix or soffritto."

Whether you "sweated" your onions at a low temperature or "browned" them at a higher one yielded a completely different set of flavors in the finished dish, Samin explained. Her ultimate authority on such matters was Benedetta Vitali, the chef she had worked for in Florence, who wrote a whole book about soffritto, called-what else?-Soffritto. "Benedetta makes three different soffrittos, depending on the dish-and all of them start with the exact same onions, carrot, and celery. But it can be made darker and more caramelized, or lighter and more vegetal, all depending on the heat and speed you cook them at." (In fact, the word "soffritto" contains the key cooking instruction: It means "underfried.")

Spend half an hour watching onions sweat in a pan and you will either marvel at their gradual transformation-from opaque to translucent; from sulfurous to sweet; from crunchy to yielding-or go stark raving mad with impatience. But this was precisely the lesson Samin was trying to impart.

"Great cooking is all about the three 'p's: patience, presence, and practice," she told me at one point. Samin is a devoted student of yoga, and she sees important parallels in the mental habits demanded by both disciplines. Working with onions seemed as good a place to develop those habits as any-practice in chopping them, patience in sweating them, and presence in keeping an eye on the pan so that they didn't accidentally brown if the phone rang and you permitted yourself a lapse in attention.

Unfortunately, not one of the "p"s came easily to me. I tend toward impatience, particularly in my dealings with the material world, and only seldom do I find myself attending to one thing at a time. Or, for that matter, to the present, a tense I have a great deal of trouble inhabiting. My native tense is the future conditional, a low simmer of unspecified worry being the usual condition. I couldn't meditate if my life depended on it. (Which-believe me, I know-is the completely wrong way to approach meditation.) Much as I like the whole concept of "flow"-that quality of being so completely absorbed in an activity that you lose the thread of time-my acquaintance with it is sorely limited. A great many boulders get in the way of my flow, disturbing the clarity of the mental waters and creating lots of distracting noise. Occasionally when I'm writing I'll slip into the flow for a little while; sometimes while reading, too, and of course sleeping, though I doubt that counts. But in the kitchen? Watching onions sweat? The work just isn't demanding enough to fully occupy consciousness, with the result that my errant, catlike thoughts refuse to stay where I try to put them.

One thought I did have, watching the onions sweat before we added the carrots and celery to the pan, took the form of an obvious question. Why is it that onions are so widespread in pot dishes? After salt, I can't think of another cooking ingredient quite as universal as the onion. Worldwide, onions are the second most important vegetable crop (after tomatoes), and they grow almost everywhere in the world that people can grow anything. So what do they do for a dish? Samin suggested that onions and the other commonly used aromatics are widely used because they are cheap and commonly available ingredients that add some sweetness to a dish. When I gently pushed for a more fulsome explanation, she offered, "It's a chemical reaction." I soon discovered that that's her default answer to all questions about kitchen science. Her second is "Let's ask Harold!" meaning Harold McGee, the kitchen-science writer who, though she had never met him, nevertheless serves as one of the G.o.d figures in her personal cosmology.

But what kind of chemical reaction? It turns out a comprehensive scientific investigation of mirepoix remains to be done; even Harold McGee, when I wrote to ask him about it, was uncharacteristically vague on the subject. The obvious but incorrect answer is that the sugars in the onions and carrots become caramelized in the saute pan, thereby contributing that whole range of flavor compounds to the dish. But Samin (like most other authorities) recommends taking pains not to brown a mirepoix, whether by reducing the heat or adding salt, which by drawing water out of the vegetables serves to keep the browning reaction from kicking in. The caramelized-sugar theory also doesn't account for the prominent role in mirepoix and soffritto of celery, a not particularly sweet vegetable that would seem to contribute little but water and cellulose. What all this suggests is that there must be other processes that come into play in sauteing aromatic vegetables besides caramelization (or the Maillard reaction), processes that contribute flavors to a dish by other means not yet well understood.

One afternoon in the midst of slowly sweating a mirepoix, I risked ruining it by doing some Internet research on what might be going on in my pan just then. I know, I was mult.i.tasking, failing utterly at the "p" of presence, possibly patience as well. I found a fair amount of confusion and uncertainty about the subject online, but enough clues to conclude it was likely, or at least plausible, that the low, slow heat was breaking down the long necklaces of protein in the vegetables into their amino acid building blocks, some of which (like glutamic acid) are known to give foods the meaty, savory taste called "umami"-from the j.a.panese word umai, meaning "delicious." Umami is now generally accepted as the fifth taste, along with salty, sweet, bitter, and sour, and like each of the others has receptors on the tongue dedicated to detecting its presence.

As for the seemingly pointless celery, it, too, may contribute umami to a pot dish, and not just by supplying lots of carbohydrate-stiffened cell walls and water to a mirepoix. My Web surfing eventually delivered me to an article in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry written by a team of j.a.panese food scientists and t.i.tled, fetchingly, "Flavor Enhancement of Chicken Broth from Boiled Celery Const.i.tuents."* These chemists reported that a group of volatile compounds found in celery called phthalides, though completely tasteless by themselves, nevertheless enhanced the perception of both sweetness and umami when they were added to a chicken broth. Way to go, celery.

Abstracted soul that I am, patiently cooking a mirepoix became much more interesting, or bearable at least, now that I had a theory. Now, knowing what was at stake, I paid close attention to the satisfying sizzle-the auditory evidence of water escaping from the plant tissues-and then, as it subsided, to the softening of the vegetables, indicating that the scaffold of carbohydrates that held the cell walls rigid was breaking down into sugars that it was up to me to keep from browning. I now understood that, even before I introduced the meat or liquid to the pot, the depth of flavor in my braise, the very savoriness of it, hung in the balance of these gently simmering onions, carrots, and celery.

One more scientific fact contributed to my deepening admiration for mirepoix and soffritto, and especially for the onions in them, which this fact single-handedly rendered considerably less irritating. It seems that adding onions to foods, and to meat dishes in particular, makes the food safer to eat. Like many of the most commonly used spices, onions (garlic, too) contain powerful antimicrobial compounds that survive cooking. Microbiologists believe that onions, garlic, and spices protect us from the growth of dangerous bacteria on meat. This might explain why the use of these plants in cooking becomes more common the closer you get to the equator, where keeping meat from spoiling becomes progressively more challenging. Before the advent of refrigeration, the bacterial contamination of food, animal flesh in particular, posed a serious threat to people's health. (In Indian cooking, recipes for vegetarian dishes typically call for fewer spices than recipes for meat dishes.) Purely through trial and error, our ancestors stumbled upon certain plant chemicals that could protect them from getting sick. Onions happen to be one of the most potent of all antimicrobial food plants. That the flavors of such plants "taste good" to us may be nothing more than a learned preference for the taste of molecules that helped to keep us alive.

What this suggests is that cooking with these aromatic plants may involve something more than simply overcoming their chemical defenses so that we might avail ourselves of a source of calories other creatures can't. It's much more ingenious than that. Cooking with onions, garlic, and other spices is a form of biochemical jujitsu, in which the first move is to overcome the plants' chemical defenses so that we might eat them, and the second is to then deploy their defenses against other species to defend ourselves.

I was beginning to appreciate how the marriage of plant and animal foods in a liquid medium offers a great many advantages over simply cooking either kind of foodstuff by itself over a fire. Now the cook can improve meat by incorporating the flavors (and antimicrobial properties) of aromatic plants such as onions, garlic, and spices, something difficult, if not impossible, to do when cooking directly over a fire. In a slowly simmering liquid, vegetables and meat can exchange molecules and flavors, in the process creating new end products that are often much more than the sum of their humble parts. One such end product is a sauce, probably the richest dividend of pot cooking.

Cooking in a pot is all about economy. Every last drop of the fat and juices from the meat, which over a fire would be lost, are conserved, along with all the nutrients from the plants. Pot cooking allows you to make a tasty dish from a third-rate or over-the-hill cut of meat, and to stretch a small amount of meat so that, with the addition of vegetables and sauce, it might feed more mouths than that same meat ever would by itself. It also allows you to dispense with meat altogether, or use it simply as a flavoring.

"This is food for when you're poor," Samin pointed out one afternoon, while we were tr.i.m.m.i.n.g a particularly gnarly piece of lamb shoulder. "Braising is a wonderful way to cook, because it yields powerfully flavored food from relatively inexpensive ingredients." In fact, the tastiest braises and stews are made from the "worst" cuts. The older the animal, the more flavorful its meat. Also, tough cuts come from muscles that have worked the hardest, and so contain the greatest amount of the connective tissues that, after a long, slow cooking, dissolve into succulent gelatin.

The covered pot-covered to conserve moisture and heat for the long haul-symbolizes the modesty and economy of this kind of cooking. By comparison, roasting a big piece of meat over an open fire-Homeric cooking-looks like an extravagance: a form of conspicuous display of one's wealth, generosity, or hunting skill. And so it has been, at least until our own era of extravagantly cheap meat. The British, famous for roasting impressive joints over fires, traditionally looked down on the "humble pots" of the French, with their plebeian cuts hidden beneath dubious sauces. Prosperous and blessed with good gra.s.s for grazing cattle and sheep the year round, the English enjoyed access to high-quality meat that required little more than fire to taste good. Whereas the less well-to-do and well-provisioned French were thrown back on their wits in the kitchen, developing techniques that allowed them to make the most of meat sc.r.a.ps and root vegetables and whatever liquid might be handy.

That we now think of such peasant fare as fancy or elite, while regarding the tossing of pricey filets of meat on the grill as simple food for the ma.s.ses, represents a complete reversal of the historical situation. There has always been a trade-off between time and technique in the kitchen and the quality of the raw ingredients. The better the latter, the less of the former is required to eat well. But the opposite is equally true. With a modic.u.m of technique and a little more time in the kitchen, the most flavorful food can be made from the humblest of ingredients. This enduring formula suggests that learning one's way around the kitchen-knowing what to do with the gnarly cut, the mirepoix, and the humble pot-might still be a good recipe for eating delicious food without spending much to make it. These are skills that confer a measure of independence.

But there are ethical implications here as well, about the way to approach the eating of animals, and the environmental issues that practice raises. If we're only going to eat the prime cuts of young animals, we're going to have to raise and kill a great many more of them. And indeed this has become the rule, with disastrous results for both the animals and the land. Nowadays, there is no market for old laying hens, since so few of us know how to cook them, with the result that much of this meat ends up in pet food or landfills. If we are going to eat animals, it behooves us to waste as few and as little of them as we possibly can, something that the humble cook pot allows us to do.

III.