Simmering is the step between poaching and boiling, done at temperatures of between 180°F and 205°F. It’s a slow method for preparing stocks and soups, and to soften up tougher cuts of meat—the ones around “the hoof and the horn,” such as chuck, shank, and brisket. To get a proper simmering temperature, bring the water to a full boil, and then turn down the heat until you see tiny bubbles occasionally rising to the surface.
Steaming is cooking with the steam from boiling liquid. It’s considered a healthy cooking technique because it adds no oils to food, and nutrients don’t leach out into the water as they do with submersion techniques. The steam doesn’t have to come from a liquid in the bottom of a steamer—it can come from the food itself. A good example is fish cooked en papillote (“in paper”): Wrap fish in parchment paper and heat it (in an oven or over a fire, for example), and let the fish’s own juices steam it from inside.
Stewing is the simmering of meats and vegetables (cut up into bite-sized pieces) in liquid that covers the food completely. It’s good for tough meats, but any meat or fish can be stewed. Braising is similar to stewing, but the food is browned first (see below), then only half-covered with liquid, and the pot is always tightly lidded to keep the steam in. A classic example of a braised dish: pot roast.
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DRY-COOKING TECHNIQUES
Baking is prolonged dry cooking by hot air—in an open or enclosed oven—at temperatures ranging from 270°F to 450°F. It’s used for a variety of foods, including bread, cakes, pastries, pies, potatoes, beans, and lasagna, just to name a few. (Baking can also be done on heated surfaces, such as on hot rocks.)
Roasting is essentially the same as baking—cooking with heated air in an oven—but the term roasting is used when the food is meat. (Or chestnuts. Nobody seems to know why.) Roasted meat is usually set on a wire rack in a pan, so the bottom of the meat doesn’t get soggy, and the juices collected in the pan are often basted onto the meat while cooking. (Roasting can also be done over an open fire, as in roasting a pig on a spit.) Tip: Meats that have been roasted should rest for 10 minutes or so after cooking. That allows the juices to settle and not run out during slicing.
Blackening is a technique used to cook fish. It’s done on a very hot and very dry cast iron skillet. (If white ash spots appear on the skillet, you’ve gone a little too far.) The fish is dipped in melted butter, rolled in spices, dropped onto the skillet, and cooked for one to two minutes per side. Tip: Don’t do it indoors unless you’ve got really good ventilation. Blackening creates a lot of smoke.
Broiling (called grilling outside the United States and Canada) is cooking food via heat radiating off a flame or element from above. The food sits on a grill or slotted tray, allowing oils to drip away from the food. It’s sometimes recommended to keep the broiler door open a little, to prevent the thermostat from turning the element or flame off, as you want constant heat. Broiling is best for tender meats—it doesn’t soften meat as much as it adds flavor via browning. Barbecuing follows the same basic rules, except that the heat source is under rather than above the food.
Browning, also called searing, is quick-cooking a food’s surface at high heat. It can be done in a pan, in an oven, or on a barbecue. Browning affects naturally occurring sugars and proteins in food, and can change and greatly enhance its colors, textures, and flavors.
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Deep frying is complete submersion of food in oil heated to between 350°F and 375°F. Done correctly, the oil turns the water in the food to steam, which not only prevents the oil from getting into the food (the pressure of the escaping steam keeps it out) but it cooks the food from inside. Deep frying gets a bad rap, but when it’s done properly, it can actually be an economical, safe, and healthy cooking technique.
Sautéing is pan frying on a very hot pan with just a thin layer of oil. It’s meant to be done quickly, to prevent the food from absorbing the oil. The food, which is cut into similarly sized pieces so they cook uniformly, is turned often, causing a slight browning on all sides of the food. (Sauté means “jump” in French, and refers to how the food is moved about in the pan.)
Pan frying is simple pan cooking (as opposed to more-specialized frying techniques like sautéing). Common examples of pan-fried foods are bacon, eggs, pancakes, and hamburgers.
Stir frying is frying at a much higher temperature than sautéing. Chinese in origin, it can be done in a wok, in a regular pan, or on a griddle. The food is chopped into bite-sized pieces and cooked for just a short amount of time.
A FEW MORE BITES
• Velveting chicken is a stir-fry technique in which chicken is marinated for 30 minutes in a mixture of sherry, salt, egg white, oil, and cornstarch. It’s then fried until it turns white and then finishes cooking with other stir-fry ingredients.
• Curing changes the chemistry of food in much the same way that cooking does, but with very little or no heat. This can be achieved by adding salt or sugar to the food, or exposing it to smoke.
• Microwaves cook by exciting water molecules in food, causing them to heat up and steam the food. This means that microwaves can only heat food to 212°F—which is why you can’t brown food in a microwave.
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FONT(S) OF KNOWLEDGE
We see them every day and seldom notice them, but every typeface—from Gothic to Futura to Comic Sans—has a story behind it.
LIVING HISTORY
As you sit there reading the letters on this page, you’re actually looking at symbols from the distant past. Take the two oldest letters in our alphabet, “X” and “O”; they were created by the Phoenicians more than 3,000 years ago. Most of the rest of the “modern” alphabet was created by the Greeks and Romans a few centuries after that. (The term alphabet is derived from the first two Greek letters, alpha and beta, which still look like “A” and “B” today.) Even the younger letters, such as “J” and “U,” are hundreds of years old.
What has changed a lot over the centuries is how these letters have been chiseled, written, and printed. Yet the desired effect is the same—to convey a specific message. When people speak, their words make up only a portion of what they’re trying to communicate. Additional information is conveyed by their tone, volume, posture, and even the setting. This principle works for reading as well: The font acts as the word’s “body language.” The study and creation of this language is called typography, from the Greek typo (“impression”) and graphy (“writing”).
FONT OR TYPEFACE?
The terms typeface and font are often used interchangeably, but technically they’re not the same thing. A typeface is a lettering style that was created by a designer (called a typographer), whereas a font is a set of guidelines for how a specific letter, symbol, or number within a specific typeface should appear. Helvetica, for example, is a typeface. An example of a font might be “Helvetica 10-point bold italic,” which looks like this. Today, typefaces are primarily created on computers, but their history goes back more than a thousand years. There are an estimated 100,000 typefaces in existence. Here are the stories behind a few of them.
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WHOCARESABOUTREADABILITY?
In A.D. 781, a scholar named Alcuin of York was tasked with creating a uniform script to be used throughout Charlemagne’s empire, which covered most of Europe. Lettering had changed very little since the fall of the Roman Empire in the 400s, except that it had become even more difficult to read. There were no lowercase letters, no breaks between words, and no punctuation. Everything was hand-written by scribes, each of whom added his own flair. Alcuin’s style of script, which we now call carolingian minuscule, helped put an end to that. Here’s a sample:
This typeface remained the standard long beyond Charlemagne’s rule and into the 1200s, but
as time went on, it too became increasingly difficult to read as new scribes added new embellishments. The strokes of the letters got thicker, and the ends of the strokes got spikier. Result: carolingian minuscule went from what you see above to something resembling this:
Gothic Blackletter (1400s)
Variations of this style of lettering, also called Old English and Textura, were used by monks who toiled away with ink and paper in small rooms called scriptoriums for months or even years just to make a single book. That was the norm until the mid-1400s when a German goldsmith named Johannes Gutenberg (1398–1468) realized that he could make a lot of money printing Bibles that appeared as if they were lettered by hand, but were made in a fraction of the time. There were a few rudimentary printing methods in use in Europe and the Far East, but the most popular one—block printing—was really only useful for printing pictures, not words. Utilizing his metalworking skills, Gutenberg created the movable type system in which individual letters and numbers could be carved out of soft metal, cut out with a punch-cutter, and then placed (in reverse) to form a page of text. Then, using new oil-based inks, these letters could be transferred onto pages.
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The impact of Gutenberg’s printing press cannot be underestimated—it effectively ended the Dark Ages and ushered in a new era of literacy in which books became available to the average person. (And his basic method of printing was the norm until the 1970s.) Yet Gutenberg was equally important to the world of typography: The 270 individual letters and numbers he created at different sizes are considered the first true fonts.
Why is his typeface called “gothic”? It was the Italians who gave it the name. In Italy in the 1500s, the word gothic was an insult meaning “barbaric.” Because the Italians blamed the fall of the Roman empire on the Germanic tribes—called Goths—who sacked Rome in the 400s, anything resembling Germanic culture, from their spiked architectural building styles to their hard-to-read, spiked letters, was considered “gothic.”
Garamond (1550s)
Claude Garamond (1480–1561) was a French bookmaker who refined Gutenberg’s movable type system to make it even easier to operate. He’s also one of the pioneers of roman type, so named during the Renaissance because it harkened back to the letterforms used in ancient Greece and Rome. Back then, because each letter had to be chiseled by hand, the carvers created typefaces that required few strokes. The Latin alphabet (which consisted of only capital letters) mirrored the Greco-Roman ideals of symmetry, proportion, and geometry—thin lines with rounded tops, akin to arches. Garamond brought back a unique feature of roman text: serifs, the little notches and hooks at the ends of letters. During his lifetime, Garamond was most famous for his Greek typestyles, which he designed on commission from King Francis I. Today, however, he’s known for the typeface family that bears his name. Garamond has been a favorite font of book printers for nearly 500 years. (Italic type, a slanted version of roman type, was created by Italian Francesco Griffo in the early 1500s.)
Caslon (1722)
You may not recognize the name, but Caslon—designed by Englishman William Caslon in 1722—is widely considered to be the first typeface created in English. When British foundries started shipping the metal forms of Caslon to presses in the New World, they had no way of knowing that American revolutionaries would one day use this “British national type” to print the first copies of the document that would free America from British rule:
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After that, Caslon fell out of favor in the United States for decades—mostly because of its ties to England, from which the new nation wanted to distance itself. In the mid-1800s, old type-styles started to become fashionable again and Caslon staged a comeback. (Playwright George Bernard Shaw insisted that all his works be set in the typeface.) By the early 20th century, the mantra among typesetters on both sides of the Atlantic was, “When in doubt, use Caslon.” More-contemporary fonts would soon take over, but in recent years Caslon has been making another comeback.
Times New Roman (1932)
Stanley Morison (1889–1967) was among the 20th century’s most influential typographers. Employed by the Monotype Corporation, he was responsible for the resurgence of several nearly obsolete fonts—including Bodoni, Garamond, Baskerville, and Bembo. In 1931, while serving as a consultant to The Times of London, he criticized the newspaper’s outdated typeface. So Times bosses commissioned him to come up with a better one. Morison based his design on the roman serif font Plantin, sometimes referred to as Times Old Roman, but he made it much easier to read. A year after its 1932 debut, The Times gave up its ownership rights to the typeface, making it freely available to any newspaper that wanted to use it. However, because Times New Roman prints best on white paper, few other newspapers used it. Why? Because most newspapers used a darker grayish stock. Instead, Times New Roman became the preferred typeface for books and magazines. A close derivation of Times New Roman is used for the title font of TIME magazine. But don’t go looking for that font online; the title was created by a graphic artist by hand. And he only created the word Time.
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Goudy (1915)
Frederic William Goudy (1865–1947) was an American artist, publisher, teacher, and typographer. He designed more than 100 typefaces, the most lasting of which bears his name. Its main benefit: The small descenders (the part of a letter that falls below the baseline) allow for more lines per printed page. Goudy spent much of his career creating scripts for advertising purposes, but that pursuit felt hollow to him, so he spent his later years working as an instructor; he mentored some of the 20th century’s most influential typographers. But what Goudy really wanted to do was create the “perfect” roman script, so he built a foundry at his New York home to experiment with new designs. Sadly, it was destroyed by a fire before he could finish.
BRI history note: In 1988, when Uncle John was putting together the first Bathroom Reader, he asked the BRI’s go-to designer, Michael Brunsfeld, to suggest a font for the book’s title. One of Michael’s picks was Goudy. Uncle John liked it so much that we decided to use it for both the title and the text you see on our pages. This is Goudy!
Courier (1956)
Technically, Courier is a “monospaced slab serif” typeface (each letter takes up the same amount of horizontal space), but it’s commonly known as the “typewriter font.” That’s what Howard Kettler had in mind when he designed it for IBM in 1956. Because of IBM’s dominance in the typewriter market, Courier (and dozens of subsequent imitations) became very popular. One place you may recognize it—on de-classified government documents with blocks of text blacked out. The U.S. State Department used Courier because it was monospaced, making it more difficult for snooping eyes to identify the blacked-out letters. In 2004 the State Department switched to Times New Roman, which has consistent spacing and is much more readable (except the blacked-out parts).
Palatino (1948)
German typographer Hermann Zapf, born in 1918, is one of the most prolific (and copied) type designers in modern history. His most famous typeface is Palatino, which he designed in 1948. He named it for the Italian writing master Giovanni Battista Palatino, a contemporary of Michelangelo and Claude Garamond. Zapf didn’t just copy a Renaissance script, though; he used it as inspiration for a roman serif font that’s legible and attractive—suitable for both title and body text. In the 1990s, Monotype released a Palatino-look-alike for computers called Book Antiqua. Here’s that same name in Palatino: Book Antiqua. Notice the subtle differences? Probably not. (Palatino has thinner strokes.) But Zapf noticed. He was bothered by this and other derivations of his work, so in 1999 he created a new, official version of Palatino licensed especially for use in Microsoft’s computer systems.
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Since writing began, scribes have used “non-letterform glyphs” to add visual pizzazz to their work: stars, flowers, scrolls, borders, toilet paper rolls, etc. By the 1800s, these glyphs were known by so many different names—including ornamentals and fleurons—that printers simply called them dingbats, the 19th-century equivalent to “thingamajigs” or “whatchamacallits.” Today, there are hundreds of symbol fonts to choose from, the most famous of which (printed above) is Zapf Dingbats, created by Hermann Zapf in 1978.
Futura (1928)
The French word sans means “without”; hence, sans serif letters lack notches and hooks. (This T has serifs; this T does not.) Although the sans serif style dates back to ancient Greece, it didn’t really catch on among designers and printers until the 19th century. And even then, most European typographers thought letters without serifs were ugly (which may explain why they’re also called grotesque fonts). The style got a big boost in the 1920s thanks to the German Bauhaus movement of modern art, which stressed function over style—no unnecessary elements. The most famous sans serif typeface to come out of this movement is Futura, created in 1928 by German typographer Paul Renner. His goal was to combine the strength of gothic type with the elegance of roman type, all while staying within the strict boundaries of the Bauhaus movement. Futura was revolutionary for its time: Advertisers used it to show that their products were clean and refined (as a contrast to the dirty coal-burning technology of the day). Futura and the other sans serif typefaces that followed were mainly used in titles and headlines. Aptly, the commemorative plaque that Apollo astronauts left on the Moon in 1969 is set in Futura. Also, the floating title of the TV show LOST is set in the type-face. And if you spend a lot of time browsing the Internet, you’ll see that Futura is used for the body text on many websites because of its readability.
Uncle John’s 24-Karat Gold Bathroom Reader® Page 59