Dilled Butter

For dinner tonight we had one of Rice-a-Roni’s whole grain options, roasted green beans (fantastic!), and sautéed Salmon fillet. I hadn’t been planning on having salmon, but this morning at the grocery store I accidentally made eye contact with the fish monger. Salmon it is then.

As I have learned from my library of cookery guides, it truly is worth it to snip up your dill, mash it with some butter, spread it in a thin layer, chill it and then use cookie cutters to make shaped butter pats. That’s how you show you care.

By the way I took this picure with my Panasonic DMC-FS7 point and shoot.  It has 25 Scene Modes in addition to Normal. Of course, its got the  usual Portrait Mode, Scenery Mode, Sports Mode.  But it also has modes like  Transform (it squishes the picture to make your subject look thinner), Baby 1, Baby 2 and Pet, and Food.  I guess a lot of people take pictures of their food.   I don't really know what Food mode does (increase the color saturation?  decrease depth of field?)  Maybe I should have taken several pictures in different modes and compared, but the butter was melting and it was time to eat.

Comfort Food

When I look through my collection, I like to breathe deeply the scent of glamour that still lingers about recipes for rarebit or Beef Wellington.

But dinner is about getting a meal on the table, and glamour is not always on the menu.  Dinner can't always be a big production.  Some nights are canned soup nights.  Some nights are ham steaks and boxed mac-n-cheese.

But when you do enough vintage cooking, something glamorous can become glamorous and simple. You don't need to study the recipe and carefully write down the list of ingredients and scour the aisles of the grocery store to find them.  You don't need to read the recipe twice  and array your herbs in a complex mise en place before you begin.

You throw some cheese in a pot, you cut up some bread, you slice some ham (thinly) and voilà ! Fondue for dinner.

Matt and I had a wonderfully satisfying dinner.  Fondue was, after all, just a way to use hard cheese and stale bread, back when it was Swiss peasant food.  If you have to be a peasant, why not a Swiss peasant?

Take him to The Four Seasons

In last week's episode of Mad Men, when he learns that an important client is coming to the low-budget Christmas Party SCDP has planned, Lane Price tells Roger: "Take him to the Four Seasons. He can have three entrees." Alas that option, which might tempt any other client, is not going to work on the Lucky Strikes heir: "This man doesn't care about food!" says Roger, explaining that Lee Garner, Jr.  will be coming to the party and that it will be a real blow-out.

It's too bad. I would have liked to see Lee and Roger having three entrees at The Four Seasons. As Vincent Price wrote in his section on this iconic restaurant:

If there is one restaurant that epitomizes New York today it is The Four Seasons. Sophisticated, urbane, expensive, its stark geometry reflects that city of skyscrapers.  Nature is permitted to intrude, as it does on the city itself, in seasonal plantings that scarcely affect the austere architecture.  New Yorkers who dine at The Four Seasons know which season has arrived by the plants in the window baskets.  Who needs a calendar?

He goes on to wax rhapsodic on the food, especially the vegetables: apparently a basket full of baby vegetables would be brought to your table for you to make your selection.  Also brought to the table: a cart of hors d'oeuvres and a dessert wagon.   Above you can see the hors d'oeuvres (which seem to be heavy on the charcuterie) in front of a quiet pool of water and the backdrop of Manhattan skyscrapers.  I have no idea what the twisted red thing is rising from the cart.

As for all of his highlighted restaurants, Mr. Price provides a facsimile of their menu.  This one must be from summer 1964. (The menu changing with each of the four seasons.)

In comparison with many other menus in the book, the design of this one is beautifully understated.

You can click on the menu to bring up a larger copy, and perhaps consider what you might order for an appetizer (I'd try the Ham Mousse in Whole Peach) or salad (Julep of crabmeat in Sweet Pepperoni, anyone?), but let's zero in on those entrees.

'Jersey Poularde'  does not sound as sophisticated to my ear as it might have to the New Yorker of '64.   I believe I would have ordered the Twin Tournedos with woodland mushrooms. The Côte de boeuf, Bordelaise is the most expensive thing on the menu, even taking into account that it it for two.  Its more expensive than anything at Luchows, the Pierre, or Sardis. I imagine Lee Garner, Jr. would have had three of those, all for himself.

Kitchen Science

After conferring with my esteemed colleague, I made some adjustments to my bread baking protocol.


That is to say that one afternoon at work my office mate and I started talking about food. Which we pretty much do every afternoon at some point, and most mornings, too. We listen to KCRW’s Good Food with Evan Kleiman almost religiously. We inspect most of the cookbooks that come through the office. For my birthday, she gave me a copy of the Silver Palate New Basics Cookbook. Anyway, I was telling her how my No-Knead Bread always came out good, but too crusty. She asked a series of questions taking her through my baking process: cooked in a pot or on a stone? Covered or uncovered? Then she made her diagnosis.

“Sounds to me like it might be too hot.” Ah ha! I was baking it at the prescribed temp, but it’s been a long time since I calibrated my oven, and the oven thermometer has since been repurposed as the cabin’s woodstove temp gauge.

So I tried again, this time reducing the both the baking temp by 50 degrees. Success!

Sort of. I did get a less crusty loaf. In fact, not crusty enough. After about two hours there was no crispness at all to the crust. It was barely even chewy. Still, Matt liked it, and the inside was still tasty. At least I seem to have discovered the key variable. Back to the lab!

What's Going On Here?

As he leafed through the pages of Snacks & Sandwiches, Matt kept saying: “That’s not a sandwich . . . that’s not a sandwich . . . that’s not a sandwich!”  He doesn’t believe open-faced sandwiches are sandwiches.

As a long time fan of the open-faced hot turkey sandwich, I have no such quibbles.  But even so, this page stopped me in my tracks.  In fact it was the deal closer, in deciding whether or not to add this book to my collection or to give it a pass.

It’s not just the attention to detail.  Although it is impressive. Sigh. Look at the way the meat is trimmed to exactly fit the bread, the repeated groupings of three, the radishes sliced to translucence. Such artistry!

It is another translucent ingredient that made me realize this was a keeper.  An ingredient I have long been fascinated by, though I’ve never eaten it.   It is used here in a way I had never seen before. From the caption:

A coat of clear aspic is spooned over French gourmandises. […] Chilled until firm, the aspic will provide a shining surface for the open faced sandwiches, and will hold the elaborate garnishes in place.

Who knew aspic could be so functional?

A Play of Geometry

This is the latest addition to my collection.  It came out in 1980, but it was one of a series of Time-Life books.  If you remember the Time Life music collections advertised on television around that time, you know that the “time” usually focused on was “the past”.  This book seems to be looking back over a glorious past where precision in presentation was prized above all,  where you could get pretty far on piping skills alone, and everything was arranged like an Annie Leibowitz photo shoot, even if, or especially if, it was supposed to look natural.

Isn’t this loaf amazing?  Things are sandwiched between slices of bread, but this is like no sandwich I’ve ever seen. It’s built like a Murano glassworker builds a milliefiori cane.  The assembly must take forever, and then you’ve got to slice it without distorting the gorgeous cross-sections, no easy task especially since the dots in between the pink squares of ham are pistachio nuts. By the way the green is asparagus.

At first I assumed the binding agent was some sort of cream cheese, but when I turned to the directions for this dish I found that it was butter.  Butter! Each slice must contain like half a stick.  I like butter, don’t get me wrong. But that’s a little too much, even for me.

Then I looked even closer.  It’s not plain butter. Its beure fermière: butter flavored with wine and egg yolks.  So, no problem.

The Secret Skewer

Even if it’s a grey, chilly, kind of rainy day, the Fourth of July really ought to involve grilling. So yesterday I made chicken spiedies and grilled corn. I don’t know if I can call spiedies vintage cookery since I got the recipe from the June/July 2009 issue of Cook’s Country, but hey, Wikipedia says the spiedie got its start back in the 1920’s. Plus it’s obscure enough to qualify. The introduction in Cook’s Country called them “upstate New York’s best-kept secret”. I agree, since I grew up in upstate New York and I’d never heard of them.  They are skewers of grilled chicken that you slide off into a bun for a sandwich.

Cook’s Country is the slightly larger format magazine with color photos from America’s Test Kitchen, the same people behind the decidedly black and white Cook’s Illustrated. Cook’s Country features a bit more down-home fare: more BBQ ribs, less Chicken Kiev, but it still has the signature Christopher Kimball introduction about catching fireflies and chatting with crusty old Vermonters, and the OCD level of testing : Vanity Fair paper plates are better at weight bearing, but Solo has the advantage in spill prevention. The recipes follow the inevitable Cook’s Illustrated pattern. There’s an introduction outlining the glorious history of the dish, then the slightly longer section detailing what has gone wrong and how all the recipes they’ve found fall short: “I wasn’t surprised that my first batch of spiedies tasted pickled. Worse, the chicken was grainy and chalky, as if it had been overcooked.” Next the goals are laid out and the steps in the testing process, including the dead ends are described, before the recipe itself is presented.

The spiedie recipe is relatively uncomplicated for the Test Kitchen people. It does call for fresh basil and dried oregano. Most people just use dried herbs because it’s easier, while some people insist that fresh are always superior and should be used whenever possible. The Test Kitchen goes further to assert that fresh and dried are two different things and thinks of each distinctly. I wouldn’t argue with them, but my basil plants are still only knee high to a grasshopper, so I reached for the jar of dried basil. On the other hand, we were out of dried oregano, but had plenty of fresh, so I chopped up some of that, and some parsley, why not? Actually there might have been a jar of oregano in the cupboard, but I couldn’t find any. Matt, for some reason, refuses to alphabetize the spices.

In any case their recipe has it all over one I found on the internet which just called for marinating the chicken chunks in a bottle of spiedie marinade. I’m not against store-bought marinades, but if I could find spiedie marinade in the store, I’d bet my set of skewers it’s got directions printed on the bottle. Plus where’s the sauce? I don’t know if it’s traditional, and I don’t care, but the mayonnaise based sauce you make in step one of the Cook’s Country recipe is the best part. Even sauce averse Matthew loves it. And it gives me a chance to use one of my collection of small pitchers.

To sum up: Chicken Spiedies have a New York History, are cooked on the grill, let me use specialized dishware, and make Matt happy. What more could I ask for? Oh yeah, they’re also super delicious.