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May. 19th, 2009
(no subject)
May. 19th, 2009 08:34 pm*sigh*. So, Julian has been sick since yesterday (caught it from his sister the day before). 102F fever, that sort of thing. No flu, just the thing kids pick up and work on to build their immune system and torture their parents.
So I'm home with him as Christey and the kids watchmy stepson in Peter Pan in the school play, and I'd like to be there, especially as I'm kinda obliquely named after Peter Pan and it would be great to see my stepson in the play. Officially I'm named after a) the apostle, and b) my great grandfather. But, my mom has always said the Disney Peter Pan movie was her favorite of all the classics, and I could say that's because her oldest son (me), is named Peter, but I think it's the other way around since the movie pre-dates me by over a decade.
Julian is a lot better tonight, though. He ate well, and was his charming self, and after I put him to bed, I had a huge, stacked BLT with a huge, vine-ripe Florida tomato (and ate the rest of the tomato sliced with some balsamic and olive oil and kosher salt).
And it's all quiet in the house, so I settle down on the couch with a cold martini and I'm reading a Thomas Keller cookbook that I've been browsing lately, and I'm thinking, I've read this a year or so ago, and I grasped the concepts, but it's amazing how much more this makes sense after some serious study of technique in the last year. I mean, I understood a bit a year ago, but now I understand about 3000% more, mostly due to experience and not theory.
So comes the *sigh*. I'm sitting, and sipping, and enjoying the concepts and techniques and just stunned how Keller has really grasped something in his understanding and interpretation of refinement, and this spider the size of a quarter crawls out of the spine of the book and sits on top of the pages.
Only in Florida.
So I'm home with him as Christey and the kids watchmy stepson in Peter Pan in the school play, and I'd like to be there, especially as I'm kinda obliquely named after Peter Pan and it would be great to see my stepson in the play. Officially I'm named after a) the apostle, and b) my great grandfather. But, my mom has always said the Disney Peter Pan movie was her favorite of all the classics, and I could say that's because her oldest son (me), is named Peter, but I think it's the other way around since the movie pre-dates me by over a decade.
Julian is a lot better tonight, though. He ate well, and was his charming self, and after I put him to bed, I had a huge, stacked BLT with a huge, vine-ripe Florida tomato (and ate the rest of the tomato sliced with some balsamic and olive oil and kosher salt).
And it's all quiet in the house, so I settle down on the couch with a cold martini and I'm reading a Thomas Keller cookbook that I've been browsing lately, and I'm thinking, I've read this a year or so ago, and I grasped the concepts, but it's amazing how much more this makes sense after some serious study of technique in the last year. I mean, I understood a bit a year ago, but now I understand about 3000% more, mostly due to experience and not theory.
So comes the *sigh*. I'm sitting, and sipping, and enjoying the concepts and techniques and just stunned how Keller has really grasped something in his understanding and interpretation of refinement, and this spider the size of a quarter crawls out of the spine of the book and sits on top of the pages.
Only in Florida.
(no subject)
May. 19th, 2009 10:19 pmOther than Thomas Keller, who is somewhere in the strata of Stephen Hawking when it comes to cooking these days, my favorite cooking author is a decidedly non-celebrity chef named James Peterson, who wrote an amazing book called, simply, Sauces. This book outlines the French concept of mother sauces and their derivatives (Peterson was an American instructor at a French culinary school, with all the baggage that entails), but he also gives some pointers as to the intuitive interpretation of sauces of which the classic French would recoil from, nearly as strongly as they would from the concept of a free-market economy.
Here's a quote from his section on emulsified egg yolk sauces, yet it has little to do with eggs:
Improvisation requires an ability to imagine in gustatory rather than visual images -- a kind of thinking with the mouth and stomach. The technique of recalling tastes, textures, and colors takes practice, but once mastered, it allows the chef to review mentally a variety of flavor combinations, checking and discarding until some exciting juxtaposition begins to form. Because the art of cooking relies on an aesthetic invariably linked with appetite, this technique works best on an empty stomach. The stomach and salivary glands are quick to respond to mental taste images and, when it comes to cooking, are far more reliable than the intellect.
The modern urban chef is often overwhelmed by the variety of available ingredients, and finds it difficult to cook in a cohesive way, with a kind of natural culinary logic underlying his or her cuisine. Many a chef has made the mistake of inventing for invention's sake in this era when something seemingly new and outlandish is revered more than a well-prepared classic. The best way to keep this wayward tendency in check is to work within limits. Regional cooks have always had the natural advantage of working with a limited variety of ingredients, restricted by what nature provides.
One useful method of checking the regionality of a dish can be used when devising modifications to a classic sauce béarnaise. Perhaps the béarnaise is to be served with a grilled steak, and the more assertive fresh marjoram is used to replace the tarragon. Marjoram is a Mediterranean herb. In traditional Mediterranean cooking, butter is rarely used; rather, extra virgin olive oil is the cooking fat most often used. So perhaps the butter in the "béarnaise" can be replaced by olive oil. Technically, it would no longer be sauce béarnaise but rather a hot mayonnaise or a kind of sauce tyrolienne, but in the realm of improvisation, these designations become cloudy.
This! This is what I like about cooking. I love the classic concepts of cooking, especially French techniques, because they have been refined in the last few centuries in much the same way that spirits are refined from almost paleolithic meads, beers and wines. On the other hand, creativity and improvisation are the beating hearts of improvisation, and just because there is no French derivative sauce using New Mexico chile pods, doesn't make that sauce less appropriate to a dish than a classic sauce aurore would be.
Sure, there is still a lot of hard work involved. Someone who dabbles may stumble across a wonderful sauce, but Peterson's point is this: someone who has worked through the mother sauces and their derivatives, and has experimented with a wide variety of ingredients, has stored that experience in their mind in several ways, so when it comes to that improvisation, a sauce is created from two fronts -- the experience of classic sauce techniques (perhaps the technical yang), mixed with the different tastes, aromas, and visceral experience of ingredients (perhaps the emotional yin).
It has taken me over two years to appreciate this book, and I'm still learning things when I come back to it every month or two. It is a textbook and an archive, a museum and an inspiration.
Here's a quote from his section on emulsified egg yolk sauces, yet it has little to do with eggs:
Improvisation requires an ability to imagine in gustatory rather than visual images -- a kind of thinking with the mouth and stomach. The technique of recalling tastes, textures, and colors takes practice, but once mastered, it allows the chef to review mentally a variety of flavor combinations, checking and discarding until some exciting juxtaposition begins to form. Because the art of cooking relies on an aesthetic invariably linked with appetite, this technique works best on an empty stomach. The stomach and salivary glands are quick to respond to mental taste images and, when it comes to cooking, are far more reliable than the intellect.
The modern urban chef is often overwhelmed by the variety of available ingredients, and finds it difficult to cook in a cohesive way, with a kind of natural culinary logic underlying his or her cuisine. Many a chef has made the mistake of inventing for invention's sake in this era when something seemingly new and outlandish is revered more than a well-prepared classic. The best way to keep this wayward tendency in check is to work within limits. Regional cooks have always had the natural advantage of working with a limited variety of ingredients, restricted by what nature provides.
One useful method of checking the regionality of a dish can be used when devising modifications to a classic sauce béarnaise. Perhaps the béarnaise is to be served with a grilled steak, and the more assertive fresh marjoram is used to replace the tarragon. Marjoram is a Mediterranean herb. In traditional Mediterranean cooking, butter is rarely used; rather, extra virgin olive oil is the cooking fat most often used. So perhaps the butter in the "béarnaise" can be replaced by olive oil. Technically, it would no longer be sauce béarnaise but rather a hot mayonnaise or a kind of sauce tyrolienne, but in the realm of improvisation, these designations become cloudy.
This! This is what I like about cooking. I love the classic concepts of cooking, especially French techniques, because they have been refined in the last few centuries in much the same way that spirits are refined from almost paleolithic meads, beers and wines. On the other hand, creativity and improvisation are the beating hearts of improvisation, and just because there is no French derivative sauce using New Mexico chile pods, doesn't make that sauce less appropriate to a dish than a classic sauce aurore would be.
Sure, there is still a lot of hard work involved. Someone who dabbles may stumble across a wonderful sauce, but Peterson's point is this: someone who has worked through the mother sauces and their derivatives, and has experimented with a wide variety of ingredients, has stored that experience in their mind in several ways, so when it comes to that improvisation, a sauce is created from two fronts -- the experience of classic sauce techniques (perhaps the technical yang), mixed with the different tastes, aromas, and visceral experience of ingredients (perhaps the emotional yin).
It has taken me over two years to appreciate this book, and I'm still learning things when I come back to it every month or two. It is a textbook and an archive, a museum and an inspiration.