by Holly Hughes
“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 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 god 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 sauté 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 sautéing 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 multitasking, 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 Japanese 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 Japanese food scientists and titled, fetchingly, “Flavor Enhancement of Chicken Broth from Boiled Celery Constituents.” 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 considerable 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.
COOKING WITH FRIENDS
By Katie Arnold-Ratliff
From Tin House
Most cookbook reviews come out when a book is first published, yet the real test may be how much it gets used over the years. Katie Arnold-Ratliff–a novelist (Bright Before Us) and senior editor at O: The Oprah Magazine—testifies to the staying power of one not-so-obvious cookbook.
Among the gifts awaiting me on Christmas morning 1995 was a cookbook entitled Cooking with Friends—“Friends” as in Friends, the former Thursday-night NBC tent pole now in weeknight syndication, which the most honest of us will admit to watching when nothing else is on. (Or when emerging from a bad trip: a friend of mine once successfully reoriented herself to reality by watching an episode and repeating the mantra “Monica is the clean one; Chandler is the mean one.”) I liked the book in 1995 because I liked the show (I was thirteen), but I like it now because its recipes are low-impact and surprisingly good. It’s full of meals that are doable on weeknights, or when you have a bad cold. This food is not splashy or innovative. It’s solid. It’s the toothsome coffee cake you eat in pajamas, or the sturdy lasagna you serve your brother-in-law. It’s the leftovers you actually eat the next day, nothing being lost in the reheat.
CWF arrived under the tree just as I was getting really serious about food, the way some girls get really serious about boys or ponies. I watched the entire Great Chefs franchise on PBS, nerded out hardcore on my Julia Child: Home Cooking with Master Chefs CD-ROM, and developed an enduring nonsexual crush on Susan Feniger. Right there with me for all of this was my Aunt Karen—the woman who exposed me to both high-end kimchi and fried-baloney sandwiches, the woman who taught me to like sashimi at eight years old but who kept Frosted Flakes around for when I stayed over. She taught me to appreciate the highbrow stuff and the trashy crap in equal measure.
So I knew enough to discern that CWF’s recipes were exceedingly basic. What I didn’t know yet was that, whether or not we food snobs want to admit it, it’s simple fare and not fancy-pants cuisine that lingers most indelibly on the tongue. For example, I had a spectacular meal at Daniel two years ago, but when I say “spectacular,” I’m just queuing up a mental reel of each dish. I remember the sweetbreads and duck terrine and oysters with seawater gelée in my head, not my mouth. But I can instantly taste the eight-dollar plate of arterially apocalyptic food I had at Cracker Barrel a while back—the mouthfeel of the Dumplins™, the juicy give of the fried okra, the shattering crust of the Chicken Fried Chicken. Ask yourself what means more to you, what you can most easily conjure—Le Bernardin’s buttery black bass or your aunt’s stuffed bell peppers (and my aunt makes a mean stuffed pepper)—and you’ll get my point.
The Friends cookbook lands squarely in the middle of these two extremes and draws inspiration from both sides, which is why it’s great. I’ve moved from apartment to apartment, relocated across the country, sold off God knows how many tired old books for cash—but I’ve hung on to CWF for nearly two decades. (Though I will admit to having thrown away the dust jacket, lest anyone see the title.) I’ve made the pine nut cookies, and the Onion Tartlets à la Monica, and the dated but tasty Peaches Poached in Red Wine with Lemon and Fennel. I’ve baked Marcel’s Banana Bread (named, of course, for Ross’s capuchin) at least a dozen times, and—God help me—the Trendy Tiramisu. I doubt I told my husband this, but for our first Thanksgiving together, I re-created the book’s entire holiday menu, from the cranberry-orange relish to the apple crisp. And each time I used a recipe, I sifted through background blurbs about each star (“Lisa Kudrow, who has a degree in biology from Vassar . . . ”), ancient cast photos (one nearly weeps to see the young, larger-nosed Jennifer Aniston and the poignantly fresh-faced Matthew Perry), and, in the margins, quotes from the first season (“Ugly Naked Guy’s got gravity boots!”).
After all, this cookbook isn’t really a cookbook—or at least, it is one only incidentally. It’s a marketing conceit, designed to provide an easy holiday gift for a niece or neighbor (or daughter, evidently). In fact, its whole raison d’être seems to have been the Christmas season of 1995, for which the book was rushed into print. So says Bryan Curtis, who green-lit the project as the vice president of marketing at Rutledge Hill Press (and who was charmingly unfazed by my barrage of questions about a tie-in to a show that ended eight years ago). “We’d done a number of TV-themed cookbooks,” Curtis told me. “Aunt Bee’s Mayberry Cookbook, Mary Ann’s Gilligan’s Island Cookbook, Alice’s Brady Bunch Cookbook. We also did ones based on The Young and the Restless and The Beverly Hillbillies.” Amy Lyles Wilson, now a theologian and a columnist for a Nashville magazine, was the Rutledge Hill editor asked to write the text—which involved reading the scripts sent over by Warner Bros. to find story arcs that could translate into menu items. (Ross being dumped by his pregnant lesbian wife = a chapter on comfort foods.) Wilson doesn’t remember much about the project, other than the process being “a delight”; to her, it was just an assignment. But Curtis recalls that it was a bona fide bestseller; that it inspired two moments of levity on latenight talk shows (Leno monologued about it on one, and David Schwimmer dissed it on another); and that he himself used it for years (“The pepper jack crackers and the cherry tomatoes marinated in pepper vodka are great for parties.”). “Some of the food was from the show,” Curtis told me. “After all, Monica was a chef. And the rest Jack Bishop came up with.” Bishop, who developed the recipes, has all but scrubbed his involvement with the book from his bio—which reveals that he helped launch Cooks Illustrated and set the tasting protocols for America’s Test Kitchen, the venerable lab in which food scientists work toward a more perfect pancake and the like. In other words, Bishop is legit, and it would seem that he believes Cooking with Friends is not.
It’s a shame Bishop doesn’t embrace CWF in his CV. He ought to claim it proudly. Whatever lameness or cynicism may be inherent in its packaging, it’s a worthy cookbook, as evidenced by many incredulous Amazon.com reviews (“My wife and I still make the macaroni and cheese . . . it’s just the perfect recipe for some reason”; “The recipes are more complex and refined than you would expect.”). This cookbook should have sucked, because it didn’t need to be good—all it needed to do was exist, to be visible in various B. Dalton outlets in various malls that winter, to sell enough to cover its production costs. What it’s done instead is sit on an improbable number of bookshelves for sixteen years, doing its part to bring people sustenance and joy.
Maybe that sounds overblown. But how often does a cleverly timed piece of merchandis
ing really last, and really mean something to someone? These things are born to die, created only to be discarded as tastes evolve. Yet this artifact of the mid-nineties remains, and even, in the case of a half dozen recipes, transcends. (Despite the name, I’m especially devoted to the Monkey Lovin’ Mocha Mouthfuls, the recipe for which appears here.) If, in our throwaway culture, that doesn’t move you, I don’t know what would.
There’s a parallel fickleness in the food world—we eager eaters jump wholeheartedly onto the bandwagon du jour, and then claim to tire of our pastel-colored iced cupcakes and braised pork belly and authentic ramen once the new new thing arrives. But we’re not actually tired of cupcakes and bacon and noodles. (If you are, I suggest you undergo medical testing.) We’re leaving behind the fad, not the food. Your mouth is a fundamentally stable environment: you will always love to eat the things you love to eat. It’s not 1991 anymore, but that doesn’t mean I don’t still like sundried-tomato pesto. And I’m no longer ten years old—I’ve eaten all kinds of crazy, wonderful things in the twenty years since I was—but that doesn’t mean I don’t still love those simple, homey stuffed peppers. When it comes to food, what matters, what lasts, is the good, middle-of-the-road stuff like that found in Cooking with Friends. That’s the stuff people crave. I’ve never thought to myself, I could go for some seawater gelée, but I’ve sure as hell wished I could come home to a platter of Mrs. Tribbiani’s Roast Chicken.
Before that Christmas morning, my preoccupation with food and cooking had been a solitary one, explored while holed up in my bedroom, making lists of restaurants to visit and poring over Martha Stewart’s collected recipes, but more than that, it had been wrongheaded in its estimation of what constitutes worthy cuisine. I thought good food had to be complex and intimidating, but the Friends cookbook widened my perspective: it showed me that eating well is mostly about simplicity, about approachability and inclusion. And with its focus on, well, friendship, the book makes it plain that cooking is not solitary at all. Food is about enjoying the company of those you care about—those who’ll be there for you, because you’re there for them, too.