Best Food Writing 2012

by Holly Hughes (ed) (epub)

  3. Chop the cabbage roughly into pieces about 1 inch square.

  4. For the soup: Bring the broth, scallion greens, and crushed ginger to a simmer. Add the wontons. If the broth doesn’t quite cover them, add a bit of water. Salt to taste. Add the cabbage, and any extra wrappers if you have them, atop the broth and return to a simmer. As it simmers, tuck the thickest bits of cabbage into the broth with a wooden spoon to help cook them through. The wontons should be cooked through, with the wrapper puckering around the filling, and the cabbage tender within about 8 or 9 minutes at a steady simmer (if you had more broth, you would see the wonton float to the surface, but I prefer a less brothy soup). Serve immediately, with Special Sauce.

  Special Sauce

  1 tablespoon finely minced ginger

  1 clove garlic, finely minced

  1 tablespoon finely minced scallions

  ½ teaspoon white sugar

  ½ teaspoon black vinegar (Chinkiang vinegar)

  A few drops white vinegar (rice vinegar)

  1 teaspoon dark sesame oil

  ⅓–½ cup dark soy sauce (e.g., Kikkoman)

  1. In a small bowl combine the ginger, garlic, and scallions. Add the sugar, vinegars, and sesame oil. Crush the mixture lightly with a fork or chopsticks to help release the flavors. Let it rest for at least 5–10 minutes.

  2. Add the soy sauce gradually to taste. Less soy makes for a thick, pungent sauce; more for a milder dressing.

  CURIOUS COOKIES

  By Eagranie Yuh

  From Edible Vancouver

  Vancouver-based Eagranie Yuh teaches classes about chocolate—a logical focus for a pastry chef with a master’s degree in chemistry. As a copywriter, blogger, and freelancer, she is a frequent contributor to Northwest Palate and Edible Vancouver and edits IACP’s newsletter Words.

  Here’s how most chocolate-chip cookie recipes go: in a mixing bowl, cream sugar and butter until light and fluffy. Dribble in eggs and vanilla. In a separate bowl, combine flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. Fold the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients, then sprinkle in chocolate chips and stir just to combine. Drop identical dollops of cookie dough onto a baking sheet, leaving gaps between neighbours. Bake into perfectly golden-brown cookies, evenly studded with chocolate chips.

  Here’s my mom’s method for making cookies: In a saucepan, melt margarine and sugar. Crack in an egg, and stir furiously to minimize scrambling. Dump in a mixture of whole-wheat flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. Toss in a few handfuls of miniature carob chips, then mix roughly until the batter comes together. Slap the batter onto an ungreased cookie sheet, glossing over instructions like “place the cookies two inches apart” and bake one enormous frankencookie that covers the entire pan. Snap off the blackened edges, and divide it into rough squares.

  I was the only kid at school with square cookies, but it didn’t bother me. I didn’t know the difference between creaming and melting the fat, that butter and margarine have different properties, or that whole-wheat flour can make baked goods dense and heavy. And I certainly didn’t know that carob is a legume masquerading as chocolate.

  For every recipe that begins, “cream the butter and sugar,” there’s someone who looks confused. It simply means to mix the butter and sugar vigorously until light and fluffy, but it might as well be secret code, because there’s no way for you to figure that out. By creaming, you incorporate air, thereby creating a lighter, fluffier cookie.

  When my mom melted, rather than creamed, the margarine and sugar, she set things up for flat, dense cookies. Even worse, the melted margarine resulted in a warm, fluid batter that gave the cookies no choice but to smoosh into each other as they baked into a crisp carob-chip pancake.

  Hydrogenated vegetable fats—like margarine and shortening—lead to crisper, crumblier cookies with little flavour. When it comes to chocolate chip, I prefer butter. Aside from being tasty, it results in a cookie that spreads slightly when it bakes, leading to crispy edges and soft centres. So why did she use margarine?

  In the ’80s there was a backlash against saturated fats. Consumption of red meat plummeted, prompting pork to advertise itself as “the other white meat.” Sales of skinless, boneless chicken breast shot through the roof. And well-meaning people, like my mom, eschewed butter in favour of margarine. And not just any margarine—hard margarine, sold in bricks, full of trans-fatty acids that have since been linked to heart disease. Whoops.

  While she was substituting margarine for butter, my mom also swapped out all-purpose flour for whole wheat. Whole-wheat flour, as the name suggests, is milled from the entire wheat grain and so contains the bran, germ, and endosperm. All that added stuff can throw off the balance of dry and wet ingredients in a recipe, so simply substituting whole-wheat for all-purpose flour can be risky. Dry, crumbly cookies weren’t the only result; I also ate my share of hockey puck muffins.

  Finally, let’s be clear: carob is not chocolate. It’s a legume. In some countries, carob is a legitimate food, used as a sweetener and in hot drinks. When I was growing up, carob was faux chocolate, synonymous with health-conscious hippies. It came from a bulk food store that smelled like stale spices, and it tasted like dirt—with a hint of cumin and coriander, common carob neighbours in the bulk food section.

  To this day, my mom hates to cook and baking mystifies her. Still, my childhood memories are punctuated with a steady stream of square chocolate-chip cookies. When I was small, my mom sat me on the kitchen counter while she made them. From my perch, I stared intently at the kitchen floor, lost in the kaleidoscope of orange, brown, and avocado blotches on the linoleum.

  One day, I was old enough to unwrap the pre-portioned bricks of margarine from their waxed paper. And when I could see above the counter, we made square cookies together. I remember scraping a spoon across the bottom of the saucepan, the crunch of the sugar, the smell of the margarine. Those cookies may have broken all the rules, but to me, they were perfect.

  Sneaky Whole-Wheat Chocolate Chip Cookies

  These handsome cookies are crispy on the outside, chewy on the inside, and full of melty chocolate goodness. You’d never guess that they contain whole-wheat flour, which lends a pleasant chewiness and nuttiness without being heavy or dense.

  Patience is a virtue, especially where these cookies are involved. First, to avoid scrambled eggs, make sure your butter-sugar mixture has cooled to room temperature before you add the eggs. Second, chill the cookie batter for at least two hours before baking, to give the butter enough time to re-solidify. And if you are saintly enough to wait for the dough to rest overnight, the cookies are even better.

  Makes 24 cookies.

  ½ cup (114g) butter

  ¾ cup (150g) brown sugar

  ¼ cup (55g) granulated sugar

  ¾ cup (95g) all-purpose flour

  ½ cup (80g) whole-wheat flour

  ¾ teaspoon (4g or 3mL) baking powder

  ½ teaspoon (2g or 2mL) baking soda

  ½ teaspoon (2g or 2mL) salt

  1 egg

  ¾ teaspoon (3g or 3mL) vanilla

  3 oz (81g) dark chocolate (70–80% cocoa solids), coarsely chopped

  In a medium saucepan, heat butter, brown sugar, and sugar over low-medium heat. Stir occasionally until the butter melts. Remove from the heat and set aside for 15 minutes or until it cools to room temperature.

  In a medium bowl, combine all-purpose flour, whole-wheat flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and chocolate. Set aside.

  When the butter-sugar mixture is room temperature, add the egg and vanilla to the saucepan. (CAUTION: If the butter-sugar mixture is still warm, you will cook your eggs.) Using a spatula, stir to incorporate. Add the flour mixture and stir just until there are no flecks of flour remaining. Transfer the batter to a sheet of plastic wrap, wrap tightly, and chill in the refrigerator for at least 2 hours until firm, and preferably overnight.

  Preheat the oven to 350°F. Lightly grease two cookie sheets, or line them with parchment. />
  Break off teaspoon-sized balls of dough and roll them into balls, allowing at least 10cm between nearest neighbours. Flatten each ball to a thickness of 1.5 cm. Bake for 12–14 minutes until golden brown on top. Let the cookies cool for one minute on the cookie sheet, then transfer to a cooling rack.

  Note: Refrigerated cookie dough will keep for three days. Alternately, you can bake and cool all the cookies, then freeze the extras.

  CHICKEN BRICK

  By Henrietta Clancy

  From Fire & Knives

  South Londoner Henrietta Clancy writes on food, drink, and travel for various publications such as Imbibe, Square Meal, Fresh Escapes and DrinkBritain.com. A sometime beekeeper and hard cider fanatic, she trained at the Ballymaloe Cookery School in Ireland.

  Before Dad married Mum, he lived in what he now refers to as his “bachelor pad” in Ealing; a place that I’ve painted a vague picture of from the small snippets I’ve gathered about his premarital existence. In the living room there was a moleskin sofa and a dark wooden bowl of walnuts with a nutcracker; in the bedroom he’d done a bit of late 70s man cave decoration and fashioned himself a waist-high mustard-brown border. This last piece of info is a fact that’s often volunteered by my mother—I gather she was quite impressed at the time, what with being 20 and still living in the parental home in Enfield, amid fake flowers and floral carpets.

  In the kitchen, among some obligatory kitchen paraphernalia of the era—most of it orange, brown or cream—there was a chicken brick, not hidden behind the doors of a Formica cabinet, but proudly sitting on a Formica surface. This chicken brick got so much use that storing it in a cupboard out of arm’s length would have been plain silly; however, that’s not why it was on the surface.

  No, it lived perpetually beside the oven because it was always cooling down having perfectly cooked one tender chicken—presumably a hormone-munching monster of a thing, because being kind to edible livelihood hadn’t been invented yet—and awaiting the raw carcass of the next one. That’s how much use it got: it literally never stopped. He fed moist chicken to the masses, and they were all impressed. The more he used it the better it, and consequently he, became. As that layer of chicken fat coating the brown clay interior of the brick developed and mollified, so he, by doing nothing more than staying faithful to his brick, became a better cook. Armed with the brick, there was nothing my father couldn’t do.

  That was until my mother moved in, and everything changed. She was a graduate of Leith’s School of Food and Wine, and a maker of directors’ lunches. Naturally she brought her tools with her. I can see her now, whirling around the kitchen brandishing a piping bag—she had at least seven different nozzles—whipping up all manner of decorative toppings for pâtés and pavlovas. Anyone could use a brick, you see—she had qualifications. Prue was lapping up the ways of her contemporaries and showing my mother the ways of the International Kitchen; there was duck à l’orange, bœuf bourguignon, steak au poivre. When they ate chicken it was in goujons, or as Kiev; perhaps the occasional coq au vin.

  No doubt there were some roast chickens in there too, but by that point, Dad had handed over the reins, relinquished his kitchen power. Roast chicken was cooked the way mum wanted it—on a tray, basted with lard, cavity filled with mushroom stuffing, sitting on the shelf above some courgettes, also stuffed. The chicken was separate from the veg, not inappropriately nuzzling them, and most importantly it was exposed to the crispifying roof of the oven.

  The brick lay dormant for many years, in the back of a never-used utility room cupboard, sharing space with Tupperware lids who’d lost their better halves and things that looked like they might belong to a piece of kitchen equipment, but in reality didn’t. Not that I ever saw it, nor seemingly ever did my father, but one post-millennial day its absence was noticed.

  I was but a fresh-faced fresher at the time, not long flown the nest, when I missed a phone call from my father, and beheld a voicemail that contained a roaring accusation: “You have stolen my chicken brick!”

  I listened to it several times. Breathless, outraged, desperate and confused, he was indeed talking about a chicken brick.

  I had done no such thing, of course; the brick was, to me, a mythical piece of kitchenware that was only referenced once every three years when, on the rare occasion that the subject of my father’s cooking skills came up, it was put forward as evidence. I had never clapped eyes on the thing.

  I’m the eldest of five children and the pattern repeated itself: child left home, child received out-of-the-blue chicken brick accusation, Mum located brick in never-used cupboard, cupboard door was closed again.

  The situation became farcical, but it did give me time to consider dad’s perplexing relationship with the chicken brick. My mother’s prowess in the kitchen had rendered the brick comatose, yes, but where did the brick burglary accusations stem from? I began to brew theories. Was this a flirting tool—something he could fall back on if he was left alone? Was it sitting in our cupboard to keep Mum on her toes, silently reminding her that it had seduced many a fine lady before she came along, and if she misbehaved it was quite capable of doing it again? Or was it simpler than that: the brick represented independence for him, so maybe he assumed that in order to properly grasp ours, we’d need a tool?

  Or was it more of a practical thing: maybe on a subconscious level he assumed that, without our mummy around to fill our belly, we would need a brick to take care of us. He viewed it as the provider, the caretaker, the other.

  I theorized, but perhaps I overtheorized. Essentially he could have bought us all brand new bricks as “off to uni” presents. No, it was this specific brick to which he had a personal attachment.

  I paid an unannounced midweek visit to my parents’ house not too long ago. I had hopes of being fed, but there was no car in the drive when I arrived and only a single kitchen light on. As I put my key in the door I half expected an alarm to go off, but no, I could hear the hubbub of sports noise coming from the TV room and the sound—comforting and infuriating in equal measure—of a happy dog’s tail slapping kitchen cabinets.

  In the kitchen, dinner had been started, just—there was a whole chicken still hugged by plastic wrap, an unnecessarily large and perpetually blunt Sabatier, and a mess of onion and carrot—but the cook was missing. And there it was, the brick, sat on the central unit. I don’t think I’d ever actually seen it before, and it looked smaller, less able than the legacy that rested upon its shoulders. Almost like a sleeping woodlouse. I stopped suddenly: no car, no mum, a forlorn brick. . . .

  Oh right, I thought, she’s left him, and he’s coping with it just how he always knew he would; he’s following his well-made plan and he’s dealing with it. Just as I began to seriously envision the painful and uncomfortable chicken dinner I was going to have to chew my way through, staring at a man who’d sadly and swiftly replaced the woman he’d loved for 36 years with a piece of insect-like terracotta, my apron-clad mother trotted in—she never walks—and amidst her salutations resumed chopping.

  “So you’re actually using the chicken brick?” I said, unable to mask my intrigue.

  She looked confused.

  “The brick,” I said.

  Nothing.

  “The chicken brick!” I wailed, pointing.

  “This!” I slapped my hand on its lid.

  She registered it, and promptly reeled with the sheer absurdity of the idea. “NO! No, no, no, no, no. . . . No, I’m doing this new recipe from my, you know that book you bought me with all of the nice, different recipes in it, I’ve used it loads . . . the one with the caramelized garlic and goa. . . .”

  “Ottolenghi.”

  “That’s it. It’s a roast chicken dish from there. It’s with honey, saffron and hazelnuts. . . . I just really fancied it. So, anyway, let me tell you, I was teaching that lovely little boy today. . . .”

  “Hold on, back to the brick—why is it out?”

  “Erm. . . . Daddy was looking for it so I just le
ft it out for him. What was I saying before?”

  Of course, how silly of me. My youngest brother had recently left for university and the coming-of-age accusation had been hot on his heels.

  Televised match over, dad sailed in and registered me en route to a wine bottle, poured three glasses and handed them out, then started searching for a music video on YouTube (a fairly recent and incredibly odd phase my parents have found themselves in, eating dinner to a backdrop of pop ballads), settled for Adele and spotted the brick.

  “Ah, great, you found it.”

  The time had come to ask him the question that had been perplexing me and my siblings for over a decade.

  “Dad, why is it that you always think we’re after your chicken brick?”

  He smiled, wiggled his eyebrows up and down on his face for a while, picked up the brick and did a little Irish jig or sorts (cue some silly laughter from mum) and just before placing it back in the cupboard—presumably forevermore, the nest is now empty—he said, “It doesn’t matter. It’s mine.”

  ANGRY BREAKFAST EGGS

  By Elissa Altman

  From PoorMansFeast. com

  Award-winning blogger Elissa Altman does a lot of things well: She’s a humorist, political commentator, cookbook editor, and food columnist whose work has appeared everywhere from the Huffington Post to GiltTaste to Saveur. Her book Poor Man’s Feast: A Love Story will appear in 2013.

  She has never slept, for as long as I can remember. First, there was the hair, which, when I was very small, was very tall; these were the days of teasing, and to keep her updo in place, she climbed into bed every night next to my father with three feet of toilet paper wrapped around her head, a six inch tail of Charmin hanging off the pillow, blowing in the air-conditioned breeze like a Coppertone banner dragged behind a beach plane. She lay there stiffly all night, immobile and exhausted, and sat up the next morning, her hair perfect.