Choice Cuts

by Mark Kurlansky

  Next, the shaping began. With an experienced eye and hand, the bakers divided the large mounds of dough into roughly thirty smaller balls, each weighing about three ounces to make bialys that are four inches in diameter. After rising for one hour, each ball was lightly rolled between the baker’s floured palms and was then gently flattened onto a board. Now the mixing, kneading, and balling are done by machine, with barely noticeable differences in the final results.

  Forming the identifying center indentation is still done by hand. Working at lightning speed, the bakers shape the center well by placing both thumbs on top of the center of each round of dough, with their index and middle fingers underneath. They then press and slightly stretch the dough to form the well. Invited to try my hand, I found the ball of gentle dough almost cuddly to work with, and so delicate that if I pressed my thumb against my fingers too firmly, I tore through the dough. After struggling to shape about six bialys, I gained much respect for the bakers like Whitey Aquanno, who has been at Kossar’s since 1973 and who forms the wells with almost invisible motions at a dazzling rate.

  This hand method of shaping is relatively new to bialy baking, as the well used to be impressed with a small rolling pin. Danny Scheinin recalls that in 1956, when he joined the bakery, his father-in-law, Morris Kossar, bought the wooden rolling pins used in Orthodox communities for making Passover matzohs. Such matzoh baking is done only from January to Passover, and since each year’s rolling pins have to be new, the used ones must be discarded or sold cheaply. Bakery owners used to cut the longer pins into the two- to three-inch lengths they required, or as an alternative, they ordered small rolling pins from neighborhood carpenters. The traditional rolling pin used for bialys in Bialystok had two thin rod handles and a thicker center cylinder, so that the center of the bialy would be depressed while the rim remained high. That rolling pin closely resembled the type still used for making dim sum in China.

  Saving time is one reason for the switch from rolling pin to hands. In addition, according to Danny Scheinin, the brick-lined gas ovens that replaced the old coal- and wood-fired ovens bake so rapidly that the compressed, thick dough formed by a rolling pin cannot bake thoroughly before the onions and the top crusts burn.

  I agree with those who insist that the rolling pins produced a more tantalizing texture, with a firmer, densely packed, and crackly center. As skillful as a baker may be, even at Kossar’s, the center wells are not always compressed enough and so rise in the oven, leaving little or, sometimes, no indentation.

  Thus formed, the bialys are ready for the topping of onions (and poppy seeds when they were used). In the best of all possible worlds, the onions will be large, white, and sweet and will be chopped by hand, not ground by a meat grinder. Understandably, in commercial bakeries, grinding is more practical. To absorb the water in the onions, Kossar’s grinds seven- or eight-hour-old bialys (hard but not stale) into crumbs and mixes them with the onions (one bialy to ten onions) to achieve a spreadable mixture much like wet sand. The onions should be ground no more than two days in advance of use. Freezing them to ensure a steady supply is understandable for a high-volume bakery, but some flavor and aroma will be lost. In any case, the onions should be absolutely raw, never sautéed, steamed, or salted down, despite such instructions in many cookbooks. A common practice in many bialy bakeries is to use dehydrated onions that tend to burn into acrid, black flecks unless they are first soaked in water, in which case, they generally turn unpleasantly pink and have a stale, metallic flavor. I found that all garlic used in bialy bakeries, including Kossar’s, is dehydrated or freeze-dried and, therefore, tastes stale and unpleasantly acidic.

  The onion mixture is quickly smeared by hand into the well and on top of each shaped, unbaked bialy. The kuchen are all then placed on big wooden peels and slid onto the revolving iron shelves of a brick-lined, 500-degree gas oven. Undoubtedly old-timers are right in their claims that bialys had a more richly burnished, smokier flavor when baked in a wood-fired oven.

  Now, another choice is necessary. Obviously, the longer the bialys bake, the darker brown and crispier they will be. As someone who likes very well-done bialys with nice dark brown blistered tops and crisp toasted bottoms, I find myself increasingly frustrated by the mostly whiter and softer bialys sold today. The choice appears to be generational. Customers over fifty-five or sixty generally choose the dark rolls, while the younger customers prefer the light. Danny Cohen and Juda Engelmayer, Kossar’s new owners, also prefer the light bialys and caution their bakers to stop “burning” them. They feel, probably correctly, that the lighter ones keep longer and also that the younger clientele they must attract shares their preference. Recently they must have reconsidered, because they now always seem to have a batch or two of the crisp, dark-brown beauties that I cherish.

  —from The Bialy Eaters, 2000

  CHAPTER NINE

  The Mystery of Eggs

  A BAGHDAD RECIPE FOR ONIONS AND EGGS

  Cut up onions well, then strain away their juice, then throw them in the tajine, and pour over them a sufficiency of fresh sesame oil, then fry them in that sesame oil. Then pour eggs upon them, after beating them well until the yolks are mixed with the whites. Put a little salt and spices with them, and do not stop observing the fire and stirring until it is pleasing.

  —from Kitab Wasf al-At’ima al-Mu’tada

  (The Description of Familiar Foods), 1373,

  translated from the Arabic by Charles Perry

  HANNAH GLASSE ON MAKING EGGS LARGE

  Hannah Glasse (1708–1770) was the best-known and most influential English cookbook writer of the eighteenth century. Her 1747 The Art of Cookery, Made Plain and Easy; Which far exceeds any Thing of the Kind ever yet Published was kept in print for decades, both in England and America. But the cookbook was also famous because in the more famous Boswell’s Life of Johnson, Johnson erroneously suggests that she did not write her book. In fact, she did write it, though her subtitle seems an exaggeration, since a good third of her recipes were taken from other books.

  Still, Glasse did improve English cooking by replacing suet with butter. And although her cooking seems heavy by today’s standards, she did do much to make the cooking of the period lighter.

  —M.K.

  To Fry Eggs as round as Balls.

  Having a deep Frying-pan, and three Pints of clarified Butter, heat it as hot as for Fritters, and stir it with a Stick, till it runs round like a Whirlpool; then break an Egg into the Middle, and turn it round with your Stick, till it be as hard as a poached Egg, the Whirling round of the Butter will make it as round as a Ball, then take it up with a Slice, and put it in a Dish before the Fire. They will keep hot half an Hour, and yet be soft; so you may do as many as you please. You may serve these with what you please, nothing better than stewed Spinage, and garnish with Orange.

  To make an Egg as big as Twenty.

  Part the Yolks from the Whites, strain them both separate through a Sieve, tye the Yolks up in a Bladder, in the Form of a Ball; boil them hard, then put this Ball into another Bladder, and the Whites round it; tye it up oval Fashion, and boil it. These are used for grand Sallads. This is very pretty for a Ragoo, boil five or six Yolks together, and lay in the Middle of the Ragoo of Eggs; and so you may make them of any Size you please.

  A Grand Dish of Eggs

  Break as many Eggs as the Yolks will fill a Pint Bason, the Whites by themselves, tye the Yolks by themselves in a Bladder round; boil them hard, then have a wooden Bowl that will hold a Quart, make like two Butter-dishes, but in the Shape of an Egg, with a Hole through one at the Top. You are to observe, when you boil the Yolks to run a Pack-thread through it, and a quarter of a Yard hanging out. When the Yolk is boiled hard, put it into the Bowl-dish; but be careful to hang it so as to be in the Middle. The String being drawn through the Hole, then clap the two Bowls together, and tye them tight, and with a fine Tunnel pour in the Whites through the Hole; then stop the Hole close, and boil it hard, it will take an Ho
ur. When it is boiled enough, carefully open it, and cut the String close. In the mean time take twenty Eggs, beat them well, the Yolks by themselves, and the Whites by themselves; divide the Whites into two, and boil them in Bladders the Shape of an Egg. When they are boiled hard, cut one in two long-ways, and one cross-ways, and with a fine sharp Knife cut out some of the White in the Middle, lay the great Egg in the Middle, the two long Halves on each Side, with the hollow Part uppermost, and the two round flat between. Take an Ounce of Truffles and Morells, cut them very small, boil them in half a Pint of Water till they are tender, then chop a Pint of fresh Mushrooms clean picked and washed, chopped small, put into the Truffles and Morells; let them boil, add a little Salt, a little beaten Nutmeg, a little beaten Mace, and add a Gill of pickled Mushrooms chopped fine. Boil fourteen of the Yolks hard in a Bladder, then chop them and mix them with the other Ingredients; thicken it with a Lump of Butter rolled in Flour, shaking your Sauce-pan round till hot and thick, then fill the round with Whites, and turn them down again, and fill the two long ones; what remains, save to put into the Sauce-pan. Take a Pint of Cream, a quarter of a pound of Butter, the other four Yolks beat fine, a Gill of White Wine, a Gill of pickled Mushrooms, a little beaten Mace, a little Nutmeg, put all into the Sauce-pan, to the other Ingredients, stir all well together one way, till it is thick and fine; then pour it over all, and garnish with notched Lemon.

  This is a grand Dish at a second Course. Or you may mix it up with Red Wine and Butter, and it will do for a first Course.

  —from The Art of Cookery, Made Plain and Easy, 1747

  LYDIA MARIA CHILD ON POACHED EGGS

  Lydia Maria Child’s The American Frugal Housewife was published in Boston in 1829. She believed that no cookbooks existed for the middle-class American housewife. In the tradition of Le Mésnagier de Paris, her book was a guide for setting up the home with recipes, and it became the book of the nineteenth-century New England woman working, for the first time, in the textile mills. In what has become a New England cliché, she emphasized frugality, not wasting a scrap of anything.

  —M.K.

  The beauty of a poached egg is for the yolk to be seen blushing through the white, which should only be just sufficiently hardened to form a transparent veil for the egg. Have some boiling water in a tea kettle; pass as much of it through a clean cloth as will half fill a stewpan; break the egg into a cup and when the water boils, remove the stewpan from the heat and gently slip the egg into it; it must stand until the white is set; then put it over a very moderate fire, and as soon as the water boils, the egg is ready; take it up with a slice, and neatly round off the ragged edges of the white; send them up on bread toasted on one side only, with or without butter.

  —from The American Frugal Housewife, 1829

  PELLEGRINO ARTUSI ON DRINKING EGGS

  After meat, eggs are the most nutritious food. Maurizio Schiff, the famous physician who held a chair at the University of Florence, showed that the white is more nutritious than the yolk, which consists of fats, and that raw or barely cooked eggs are harder to digest because the stomach has to perform two operations simultaneously: first, coagulate them, and second, absorb them. It is therefore best to avoid extremes, i.e., eat them neither raw nor overcooked.

  Eggs taste best in the spring. Fresh eggs are given to young mothers to drink, and popular wisdom holds them to be good for newlyweds too.

  The son of an innkeeper I once knew, a big, foolish young man who ruined his health in the pursuit of vices, went to a doctor, who told him to drink two fresh eggs every morning. He was both lucky and unfortunate that the inn had a large henhouse where he could go drink freshly laid eggs, for after a few days he got to thinking. “If two eggs are good, four are better.” Then the simpleton decided, “If four are better, six are better still.” Following this line of reasoning, he got to twelve to fourteen eggs per day, which brought about a gastritis that kept him in bed for I don’t know how long, hatching the eggs he’d drunk.

  —from The Art of Eating Well, 1891,

  translated from the Italian by Kyle M. Phillips III

  JAMES BEARD ON SCRAMBLED EGGS

  When people invite you in for a quick meal, or if something goes wrong in the kitchen, they are apt to say, “Oh well, I’ll just scramble some eggs,” as if “just scrambling some eggs” couldn’t be simpler. As a matter of fact, scrambling eggs is one of the more complex kitchen processes, and there are various schools of egg scrambling. There are those who believe eggs should be scrambled in a double boiler over simmering water, those who believe they should be scrambled quickly, and those who believe that it takes slow and most accurate timing to make the curds tender, delicious, and of varied sizes. Every person regards his particular fashion of scrambling an egg as a mark of his culinary skill, and so it is. My good friend Julia Child once demonstrated her theory of scrambling eggs on television. She lifted the pan from the burner and then lowered it, to adjust the heat and the scrambling process, then as the final moment arrived, she accelerated her tempo to make the eggs come to just the right point. Hers is an extremely good method, provided you have the patience and dexterity.

  Scrambled eggs can be so delicious, so creamy and rich and eggy, if I may use the word, that it is too bad we don’t use them more. They combine well with many things—chopped sautéed mushrooms, finely chopped ham, crisp bacon bits, little slices of sausage, freshly grated Parmesan or Gruyère cheese, chopped herbs, finely chopped peeled and seeded tomatoes—as well as being perfectly splendid on their own.

  Depending upon the number of eggs to be scrambled, I like to use a small or large Teflon-coated pan. I have a cast-aluminum Teflon-lined 9-inch omelet pan with rounded sides that I use for up to 4 or 5 eggs and a 10-inch pan for larger quantities, which are much harder to make. I disagree completely with those who say you can scramble one egg well. It is an impossibility.

  For scrambled eggs I think you should gauge at least 2 eggs per person. Add salt, freshly ground black pepper, and 1 or 2 dashes of Tabasco, and then beat lightly with a fork. For lighter scrambled eggs, I beat in 1 teaspoon of water for every two eggs. I don’t like cream or milk added to scrambled eggs, but if I want them extraordinarily rich, I mix in softened butter, as I will describe later on.

  If I am adding ham or bacon, I would use 2 slices of Canadian bacon about 3 inches in diameter and 2 pieces of ham of the same size and ¼ inch thick, precook it lightly, cut into thin shreds, and toss into the pan with a tablespoon or two of butter. Let this warm over low heat, then add, for two servings, 4 beaten eggs and, as you do, increase the heat to medium high. As soon as the coagulation starts, make pushing strokes with a rubber or wooden spatula so you get curled curds. I’m not quite as definite in my movements as Julia Child. I lift the pan off the burner from side to side with sort of a circular motion, while pushing with the spatula. As the heat in the cooking eggs increases, the curds form much faster, and there you have to remove the pan from the heat and work faster with your pushing. That’s the ticklish point. You have to know the exact moment to cease applying any heat and rush your eggs from pan to plate, or they will be overcooked, hard, coarse-textured and disagreeable.

  Now, if you want very rich eggs, as you push curds in the pan add little bits of softened butter, which will melt in and give you delicious, heavily buttered scrambled eggs such as you have seldom experienced. In some places, they are called “buttered eggs,” and that’s a very good term.

  If you are adding chopped herbs or mushrooms, lace them in as you scramble the eggs so they become a part of the amalgamation of the creamy curds. Of course, there is nothing wrong with adding chopped parsley or chives or other bits and pieces after you have transferred the eggs from the pan to a plate or platter.

  If you have never tried the combination, try scrambled eggs with sliced smoked fish for your next Sunday brunch or luncheon. A platter of smoked salmon, smoked eel, smoked sturgeon, or smoked whitefish, with lemon wedges, good rolls or bagels, and a huge pile of cre
amy eggs—that’s good eating. If you like, you can scramble the eggs at the table in an electric skillet or chafing dish, guiding them to a perfect conclusion as you chat with your guests.

  I have had, in my time, memorable meals of scrambled eggs with fresh truffles, scrambled eggs with caviar and other glamorous things, but to me, there are few things as magnificent as scrambled eggs, pure and simple, perfectly cooked and perfectly seasoned.

  —from On Food, 1974

  ANGELO PELLEGRINI ON CHICKEN INTESTINE OMELETTES

  M.F.K. Fisher described her first meeting with Angelo Pellegrini with typical Fisher suggestiveness: “Although I have known few men of letters intimately, excluding my husband, of course, Angelo Pellegrini is the only one I have ever shared a spit-bucket with.”