Dice some aromatic plants
Sauté 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 time
As 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: Sauté 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 class 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 class, sharing her deep knowledge about food as well as her cooking. Each week, a different student would bring in a snack for the class—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 class 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 Shia. Samin was born in San Diego in 1979, but her parents, nourishing 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 embarrassed 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 associated 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 shell 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 apron tied around her waist, and the thicket of her black hair raked partway back. Samin is tall and sturdily built, with strong features, slashing 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 shoebox, 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 Saturday morning to make sure we’d get through the minute they started answering the phone, so we could make a reservation for the Saturday 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 frisée 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 soufflé 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 glass 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 glass of milk. And then she brought us a glass 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 sche
dule at school so she could work several shifts 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 soufflé 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 space 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 apron, 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 quantities 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 apron around her waist. “Today, you are going to learn how to brown meat.” Or make a soffritto. Or butterfly 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 banal, deserved to be done with the utmost care and attention, and so with passion. 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, dashi (a Japanese 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 ragù (or ragoût), 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 sautéing onions, another operation I wrongly assumed 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 o
f 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 god figures in her personal cosmology.
Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation Page 14