But if the backstory of the ingredients in dashi is complicated, the recipe for making it is fairly straightforward and, for a stock, quick and easy—less than ten minutes from start to finish. Sylvan dropped a sheet of kombu into a pot of cold water, heated it to a point just shy of the boil, and then removed the now green and floppy length of kombu with a pair of tongs. If the kombu reaches a full boil, he explained, the dashi will turn out bitter. At this point, the liquid gave off only the faintest scent of brininess. Unlike the kombu, the bonito flakes need to be boiled to release their flavor, so, as soon as the pot began to roil, Sylvan dropped in a big handful. The pinkish shavings danced crazily on the surface and then, as they rehydrated, began to sink to the bottom. They had only been in the water five or six minutes when Sylvan poured the stock through cheesecloth and discarded the residual flakes. The resulting liquid resembled very weak tea, an almost perfectly transparent pale gold. As the liquid cools, you have the option of adding a dried shiitake mushroom. But that’s all there is to it.
I bent over to smell the finished dashi. It reminded me of a tide pool: briny, with the faintest suggestion of decay—the beach at low tide. I dipped a finger into the cooling liquid. It had very little taste to speak of; some saltiness, but not too much—sort of like a freshwater version of the ocean. Brackish. Compared with a real stock, it was pallid stuff; you would never think of sipping it as a soup. But the pale liquid contained large amounts of the three main umami chemicals—glutamate from the kombu, inosinate from the bonito, and guanylate from the mushroom—each of them extracted by the water.
Sylvan gave me some bonito flakes and kombu to take home, and over the course of the next several days I made my own dashi and experimented with it. The first thing I tried was a dipping sauce. To a small bowl of dashi I added a tablespoon each of soy sauce, mirin, and rice wine vinegar, as well as a small handful of chopped scallions and ginger. It was remarkable stuff: Anything dipped in it—a chicken breast, some soba noodles, a piece of pork—received an uncanny boost in flavor, somehow tasted more platonically itself. (And more platonically Japanese.) Next, I tried the dashi as a braising liquid, for beef short ribs and then for a pork loin, combining it, again, with some soy sauce, mirin, vinegar, and sake, as well as some miso paste. The result in both cases was a rich and satisfying dish, somewhat lighter than the braises that Samin and I had made, though no less intensely flavored. I have not yet tried dashi in a non-Asian dish; that might be crazy, I don’t know, and Samin would probably flip if I proposed it. But dashi itself is not a flavor principle, exactly—it’s more like an italicizer of flavors—so it might well work with another cuisine. Nothing about dashi, when tasted by itself, prepares you for what it does in concert with other flavors. I’m starting to think of it as magic water: hydrogen and oxygen and amino acids and something no one knows.
One curious fact I stumbled on in my umami research was that human breast milk is rich in this particular taste, and contains relatively large amounts of glutamate—as it happens, nearly the same amount of glutamate as an equivalent amount of dashi. It stands to reason that everything in milk is there for an evolutionary reason; since every chemical compound in it comes at a metabolic cost to the mother, natural selection would quickly dispense with any constituent of milk that didn’t do the infant some good. So what good does all that glutamate do?
There are a couple of possible explanations. Bruce German, a food chemist at the University of California, Davis, who analyzes human milk in order to better understand our nutritional needs, believes that the glutamate supplies an important nutrient to the growing infant. Besides being a flavor, this particular amino acid is a cellular fuel and molecular building block of special value to the stomach and intestines of the growing infant. In the same way that glucose is an ideal food for the brain, glutamate is a perfect food for the gut, which might explain why we’re born with taste buds in the stomach that can detect it.
All that glutamate in breast milk might be doing something else as well: conditioning the baby to like the taste of umami, that being (along with sweetness) one of the first and most abundant tastes it encounters in mother’s milk. This preference is highly adaptive for Homo sapiens, since we require a diet rich in the proteins that umami helps us to recognize and seek out.
But could it be that, for us, the taste of foods rich in umami also sounds deep Proustian echoes, bearing us back to memories, however faint, of our very first food? Is it merely a coincidence that so many of the things we think of as “comfort foods”—everything from ice cream to chicken soup—traffic in tastes of either sweetness or umami, the two big tastes first encountered on the breast?
This bit of speculation was very much on my mind during a recent Sunday afternoon with Samin, when we set out to make an ancient Roman dish called maiale al latte—pork braised in milk. I was skeptical about this one, and not only because it was so radically unkosher. The fact that I eat pork should by now be well established, but there does seem something slightly perverse about cooking it in milk, and I wondered if there might not be some good practical reason behind the Old Testament’s taboo on mixing milk and meat. But apparently not: The rabbinical commentators say that particular taboo falls under the heading of “hukkim,” which are laws for which there is no obvious explanation.
My guess? The kosher laws are all about drawing and defending crisp lines of demarcation between various realms, and what line is sharper than the one between life and death? You don’t mix a symbol of death, such as animal flesh, with a symbol of life as powerful as mother’s milk. Also, cooking meat in milk mingles the male realm of the hunt with the female realm of nurturing—a taboo in many cultures. As the anthropologist Mary Douglas has written, a rule against mixing meat and milk “honors the procreative function.”
Well, not today. “This is one of my all-time favorite dishes,” Samin said, when I expressed my doubts about it. “I know, it sounds really weird, and I have to prepare you: it looks sort of gross when you’re cooking it. But I promise, it will be the most delicious, succulent comfort food you’ve ever tasted in your life!”
As a cooking liquid, milk presents special challenges. Of all the pot dishes we cooked, this one had to be watched the most closely, lest the sugars in the milk begin to burn on the bottom of the pot. Yet, at the same time, maiale al latte was also the very simplest recipe we’d made. In fact, it can be written out in a sentence: Brown chunks of pork in butter; add some milk, a few cloves of garlic, a handful of sage leaves, and the juice (and peel) of a lemon; simmer for several hours. That’s it. No soffritto? I asked Samin. No chopped onions?
“Nope. Weird, I know. But I think this dish must be even older than soffritto is. It might even go back to Etruscan times.”
The biggest challenge is keeping the milk at a gentle simmer just below the boil—the braising liquid should merely “smile,” as the French say, rather than bubble. So we peeked in at regular intervals, taking advantage of the established fact that a watched pot will never boil. (Probably because in order to watch you lift the lid, which drops the temperature.) After a while the milk began to yellow slightly and form curds—and to look very much like baby vomit. Which is not at all unlike what it was: warm milk that has curdled after having been exposed to an acid. The age-old conceit of the cauldron as an external organ of digestion had never seemed so apt, but that of course was precisely what was going on here, the proteins in the milk being broken down and rearranged by the acids.
“I know, it’s sort of disgusting,” Samin allowed. “But this is exactly what we want. You’ll see, those curds are going to be super-delicious.”
And so they were, eventually. After several hours the cooking liquid tur
ned a gorgeous shade of ochre, and the golden curds no longer looked like mistakes. The lemony milk had gone to work on the proteins in the meat, breaking it down until it was so tender it fell apart at the prodding of a fork. The meat was as succulent and tasty as Samin had promised, but it was the sauce that was most incredible, with its creamy layers of savory and sweet. Actually, all five tastes were represented in that silky liquid: besides the savory-saltiness from the meat and the sweetness from the milk, the sauce bore traces of sourness and bitterness contributed by the lemon peel and sage leaves, all of it harmoniously dispersed in the milk. To concoct so much flavor from such a small number of ordinary ingredients—pork, garlic, lemon, sage, and milk—seemed like a miracle of transubstantiation. “The transformation which occurs in the cauldron is quintessential and wondrous, subtle and delicate,” wrote a Chinese chef named I Yin in 239 B.C., no doubt moved by a similar eating experience. “The mouth cannot express it in words.”
Gaston Bachelard, the somewhat obtuse French philosopher of the elements, wrote a book called Water and Dreams, in which he attempts to “psychoanalyze” water and other liquids in much the same way he attempted a psychoanalysis of fire. “For the imagination, everything that flows is water,” Bachelard writes in a chapter called “Maternal Water and Feminine Water.” Water is always feminine in the imagination, he contends, just as its opposite, fire, is always masculine. But he then goes a step further, suggesting that, to the imagination, “all water is a kind of milk,” though a moment later he confines this claim to the kinds of water we like: “More precisely, every joyful drink is mother’s milk,” and, a bit farther on, “water is a milk as soon as it is extolled fervently.”
As an example Bachelard offers an image of the “nourishing waters” of the sea, in which the resident fish effortlessly feed themselves from the particles of fat and other nutrients dispersed in the liquid medium, floating along without care as if in amniotic fluids. “For the material imagination, water, like milk, is a complete food.”
Bachelard has little else to say about food in Water and Dreams, and nothing at all about stews and soups, but my guess is that they would all qualify in his imagination as “milks”—as a medium much like the nourishing sea, in which the fish, like babies on the breast, never want for anything they need or desire. The nourishing liquid that forms in a pot dish starts out as thin and transparent as water, then clouds and colors as it absorbs and disperses substance and flavor, ending up eventually as a more or less complete and milklike food. In the imagination, at least, this kind of cooking qualifies as a transubstantiation of matter, in this instance not of water into wine but of something no less miraculous: water into milk.
“Stone Soup” is the ancient parable of this everyday miracle, of turning water into food. In the story, which has been told for centuries in many different cultures (sometimes as “Nail Soup” or “Button Soup” or “Ax Soup”), some poor, hungry strangers come to town with nothing but an empty pot. The villagers refuse them food, so the strangers fill their pot with water, drop a stone in it, and put it on to boil in the town square. This arouses the curiosity of the villagers, who ask the strangers what it is they’re making.
“Stone soup,” the strangers explain. “It’s delicious, as you’ll soon see, but it would taste even better if you could spare a little garnish to help flavor it.” So one villager gives them a sprig of parsley. Then another remembers she has some potato peelings at home, which she fetches and drops into the pot. Someone else throws in an onion and a carrot, and then another villager offers a bone. As the kettle boils, one villager after another comes by to throw in a scrap of this, a bit of that, until the soup had thickened into something nourishing and wonderful that everyone—villagers and strangers—sits down to enjoy together at a great feast.
“You have given us the greatest gift,” one of the village elders declares, “the secret of how to make soup from stones.”
VI.
Step Six: Simmer, Below the Boil, for a Long Time
Braise: the sound of that lovely word itself suggests a certain slow unfolding, the final “z” sound trailing off with no hard consonant to stop it. And in fact nothing is more important to a successful braise than allowing it to take its sweet time. This period of simmering is in many ways the easiest step of the process, since it requires nothing of the cook but patience. As one wise cookbook advises when one is making a braise, “If you wonder whether it’s done, it’s not.”
Yet most recipes try to rush the process, promising to wrap things up and get the dish on the table in a couple of hours. These days, recipes are steeped in the general sense of panic about time, and so have tried to speed everything up, the better to suit “our busy lives.” In the case of braises and stews, this usually means cranking up the cooking temperature, often to 325˚F or 350˚F. Not a good idea—in fact, not really braising at all. At those temperatures, all but the fattiest meats will dry out and toughen, and the gradual transformations and meldings of flavors, the chemical reactions and synergies of taste that make so many slow-cooked foods so delicious, simply won’t have a chance to unfold. Time is everything in these dishes, and in most cases, more is more. (The word “braise” comes from a “brazier,” a metal cook pot sort of like a Dutch oven that, since it is heated by placing a few coals on top of and below it, never gets very hot.)
Harold McGee recommends never allowing a braise to exceed the boiling point—212˚F. Even at 300˚F, liquid in a covered pot will boil, and likely damage the meat. You want the cooking liquid merely to “smile”—hatch a tiny bubble now and then, but never boil. McGee goes so far as to suggest starting a braise at 200˚F with the lid off, which should bring the liquid to around 120˚F, scarcely warmer than a hot tub. But two hours at such a temperature “amounts to a period of accelerated aging” that tenderizes the muscle by allowing enzymes to break down the connective tissues. (It also preserves the reddish pigmentation of the meat even after it’s been completely cooked—a color that the pit masters I met prized as proof of low and slow cooking.) After that, cover the pot and bump the temperature to 250˚F, and keep it there until the meat has reached 180˚F. At that point, which could take three or four hours, all the collagen will have melted into succulence, and the meat should tremble at the approach of a fork.
The first time I asked Samin how long some dish we were cooking should cook, she offered this slightly gnomic answer: “Until the meat relaxes.” Here was one way that slow cooking with water or fire had the same effect. “When you’re cooking a muscle, which is basically what meat is, first it tenses up like this”—she scrunched her shoulder, drew in a breath, and grimaced—“but then, at a certain point, it suddenly unclenches”—she released her shoulders and her breath—“so that when you touch it you can feel that it has relaxed. That’s when slow-cooked meat is done.”
Time is the missing ingredient in our recipes—and in our lives. I’m not going to pretend that the Ur-braise I’ve described here can be made in just twenty minutes of “active cooking time,” as the recipes now like to promise. There’s at least a half hour of that (chopping onions, sweating the mirepoix, browning the meat, etc.), and probably more if you cook the onions as slowly as they should be cooked. On the other hand, once that work is done, you can put the pot on low (or just throw everything in a Crock-Pot) and do something else for the rest of the afternoon—make the sides and a dessert, check your e-mail, take a walk—while the pot works its leisurely magic. But unless you make your braise in a Crock-Pot (which is always an option), you do need to be around to keep an eye on it, which for most of us today is a lot to ask, at least during the week. In households where both partners work outside the home, it is difficult, if n
ot impossible, to weave this sort of cooking into the rhythms of weekday life.
Yet even on the weekends, most of us are moving too fast for slow cooking, even unattended slow cooking. So if we cook at all we clip ten- and twenty-minute recipes from the newspaper and throw expensive filets on the grill. This is certainly what Judith and I do most nights, and it took me awhile to get accustomed to the idea of spending several hours at a time in the kitchen, even on a weekend day. Coming into the kitchen, I always felt divided against myself, torn, because there was always something else, something more pressing, I could be doing with that time—household errands, exercise, reading, watching television. But knowing Samin was going to be here for four hours of cooking, I eventually found that I could (like some of the meat we were cooking) relax into it, clear my mind of competing desires, and give myself over to the work. When chopping onions, just chop onions.
This time became a kind of luxury, and that is precisely when I began truly to enjoy the work of cooking.
You could argue that this sort of cooking was a special case, and it was. Our cooking was luxuriously optional, not obligatory. It didn’t happen every day, either. It was also not time spent alone, which I’ve come to think is a big part of the “drudgery problem” with cooking, and one of the reasons so many of us happily abandoned the kitchen as soon as that became a real option. Cooking can be isolating in households where one person is expected to do it all—typically the woman in a nuclear family. Yet it’s worth remembering that it is cooking alone that is the historical exception. Historically, cooking has been a much more sociable activity than it became after World War II, when so many people moved to the suburbs and the nuclear family with a wife who didn’t go off to work became the norm.
Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation Page 18