Off the Bone

Two centuries ago, taste had a certain mystique. Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin - a French lawyer who chose ponder the subject in his old age and produced a lovely pamphlet called The Physiology of Taste - believed that “the number of savours is infinite,” composed as they are of “an indefinite number of series of radical savors, all capable of combination in infinite variety of proportion. For Monsieur Savarin, the common designations of taste - “sweet, sugary, acid, bitter” were merely convenient general terms, concealing the universe that was much richer, and that could eventually be revealed and acquire a language of its own. For us, the primaries of taste are all there is. Sweet, salty, bitter, sour, and perhaps umami (the savory, meaty taste of some amino acids - glutamate, most famously) are not just in language - they have a chemical basis, each basic taste generating a unique identifiable response in our taste receptors. Had Monsieur Savarin lived to learn of it, he would have been heartbroken.

While primaries are what we taste, they are not what we experience. No combination of sweet, bitter, salty, sour, and umami will ever make an apple - or an apple crumble, or an apple stewed with some ginger and lemon and just a sprinkle of brown sugar and cinnamon (a lovely variation on apple sauce). But how is an apple sauce to be described - assuming that it is an unusually good apple sauce and worthy of description?

Our vocabulary of taste - in English, at least, and Russian as far as I know - is very poor compared to the vocabulary of color and sound. There is a reason for this, of course, and that is that we don’t talk about taste very much. It is a private experience - and perhaps shared meals are so meaningful because the knowledge of a meal cannot be conveyed to anyone who was not there. Nonetheless, a vocabulary of taste could be a useful thing, if only to let some overeducated - or very proud - cooks analyze their food to death. Such a vocabulary, oddly enough, has already been developed for smell, although it remains rather specialized.

Unlike colors and tastes, smells are composites of an enormous number of elements. Some textbooks on sensory perception will tell you that a human nose can distinguish between ten and forty thousand smells, but the number of smells that exist is effectively infinite. Perfume makers manage this multitude by working with some already-complex compounds. Vanilla and isobutyl phenal acetate (which does not smell of anything foody) together smell like chocolate. Vanilla, cinnamon, orange and lime smell like Coca Cola. Green mangoes smell like carrots, apricots, and grapefruit, as well as nail polish remover.* Recognizing shared elements can also be a way to think about taste. Kiwis, as we know, share something with strawberries. Jonathan apples share something with grapes. Almost everything has something in common with chicken. Discovering secret affinities between ingredients - or making, say, an orange-themed meal without any oranges - are only some of the games one could play with this knowledge. A new concept for Iron Chef, perhaps?

*See a lovely article in the New Yorker about the creation of perfumes: Chandler Burr, “The Scent of the Nile.” (3/14/2005, if they take it off the web).
Also, read Patrick Suskind’s Perfume if you haven’t yet.

And now with a picture =)

Toscanini made ginger and beet ice cream. They used two kinds of beets - the take-over-the-world purple, and the deep deep orange, whose pretty little specks you don’t notice at first, and then cannot take your eyes off. So beautiful. So clever. There are also translucent little pieces of candied ginger - purplish from the beet juice, barely visible, but bursting with flavor in your mouth. The combination is glorious - warm and spicy and creamy and a little vegetal and several different kinds of sweet.

Wow.

This is not the first time Toscanini has tried a vetegable ice cream. There was an experimental batch of cucumber sorbet, which I would sell my soul for if only they made it again. There was an avocado ice cream - which tasted exactly like avocado, but a little sweet. I wonder if it was inspired by an M.F.K Fischer story about a man who came alone daily to a small cafe, I don’t remember where, and was served a halved and pitted avocado with a bit of brandy and a bit of sugar, which he carefully mashed in before eating. Every fall there’s a pumpkin number, which is mild, round, and not too sweet, and tastes like pumpkin rather than spice. With the exception of avocado they were lovely ice creams, which highlighted the artificiality of boundaries we erect around food. Haute cuisine restaurants do it as a matter of pride. Ice cream parlors rarely bother.

Flavors I’m still waiting for are carrot and roasted bell pepper (perhaps with some chili pepper added for spice). And black pepper. Oh yes.

And while we are on the subject, I shall report on the fate of some of the leftover buttermilk cake from the wedding: It was cut, with a pastry blender, into vanilla ice cream. Bliss.

It is our good fortune to work with ingredients which are inherently alchemical. Flour, eggs, milk, and leavening – these, transmuted, are the foundation of every dessert ever made, and this is why I bake. Beef is fundamentally and always beef on the plate, and this is very much the point of cooking – yet the crème brulee cake had three distinct components, and all three started out as eggs, milk and sugar. Differentiating them takes time and care, and is in every sense a much more architectural endeavour than hot cooking. I bake far more than Stakhanovite does, because I have always found the complexity of the results to be worth the effort – everything is shades of the same, each dessert is a mille-feuille of similar flavours, and it was on this principle that the wedding cake was constructed.

I thought of each cake as an individual project, and, knowing that it would be a cake of two distinct halves, wanted each half to carry, as tightly and intensely as possible, the same set of flavours. Thus the white cake was, essentially, about milk.¹ Buttermilk in the cake, for its richness and the undefinable tenderness of crumb fermented milk gives baked goods. Crème brulee, because the process of boiling then baking gives the cream a distinct cooked flavour, which I find beautiful. It reminds me of home and childhood – sweet condensed milk, and hot boiled milk at bedtime. I hoped that the crust would crackle in the mouth when people ate it, and provide a whisper of caramel, but it seems it was too thin to really come through – it shall be heavier next time. And buttercream, because Stakhanovite wouldn’t simply let me butter the whole cake. Good butter tastes almost clean – bright and faintly sour, but this is generally subsumed when the butter is made into a cake. Buttercream, on the other hand, tastes like butter, and butter tastes like bliss.

This recipe is not for the faint of heart. Each of its components is easily doable, however, and good on its own. The whole, however, will require two evenings to make, because you need to freeze the crème brulee overnight. But I did get asked for the recipe. =)

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So along with these good people, Stakhanovite and I just finished baking a wedding cake for a couple of friends. If you read this, you’ve probably done so already, but pop by their journals and congratulate them anyway. They go together like a burger and a bun (and I’m not saying who is which), and while I wish they’d managed to get cake on each other at the wedding, I’m glad they’re married.

And I’m glad to have helped, along with at least 50 other people, to make them so. I could call this an epic undertaking, and I would not lie. The simplest way to prove this is to post the spreadsheet showing the ingredients we used. And then, we took it and invaded Boston. Very, very carefully. Ignore the numbers on the crème brulee, by the way – they prove nothing except that I cannot do math.

By the way, crew:
“Amazing” etc – several people
“Can I have the recipe?” – 1 person
Took the name of god in vain in the Hillel – 3 people
“Best wedding cake I’ve ever tasted” – 2 people

Having tasted a number of wedding cakes recently, I honestly think these last two may have been speaking in complete, unforced earnest. The secret ingredient, of course, was l-o-v-e, and may I be covered in cheese-whiz and thrown to the beavers for having said so. I’m still pretty giddy about the whole thing – I like to make people happy, but absolutely nothing makes me happier than when I’ve done something that makes people happy, and done it well enough that I’m proud of it.

I’m somewhat surprised Maas and Kleene-star still consider me a friend (though I hope we’re better friends for this) – there was an appreciable amount of stress involved, a good part of it due to my having ideas which didn’t work. Baking, when you do enough of it, in a small enough apartment, and for enough hours straight stops being much fun, especially when you don’t get to eat the cake right away. I wish I could’ve thought of a better way to do things, but I do think drafting plans for this cake in Vectorworks was a pretty nifty idea. I was also quite proud of the crème brulee cake idea – it didn’t execute as well as it could have, but I do think the basic concept is sound, and plan on perfecting the recipe – for y’all, of course.

Hakamadare and Chaiya had cake for breakfast this morning, and have a box in their freezer, for the 10th of April next year. And now I’m all fired up to do it again, and, armed with the lessons from this one, to do it right – so someone had better get married soon. Preferably early in fall, or during Christmas break.

A photo album is behind the cut, and more posts will follow – including recipes!

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By way of journaling, belatedly, a food-related activity.

I cooked with Foodie, a food and wine tasting series, a couple weeks ago, and it was pretty darn good. While there were the usual benefits – gastronomic and emotional – of working through a service, possibly the best thing about the day was the sense of having found some kindred spirits. Joe, the madman who started Foodie, showed up with a closet-full of equipment, and several fridges worth of food, and said, “the worst part of this is really just getting here,” and I knew that it would be a good day.

The concept, in brief, is that every couple of months, we (perhaps I use the term presumptuously, since I’ve only been involved once) take over a loft with a kitchen, and serve a wine tasting dinner for 50. This is a slightly complicated undertaking, but seeing as other people were doing the logistics, my involvement was basically stress-free. The people doing the cooking were, like me, all amateurs, but one of us was a retired line cook, and the only one of us who hadn’t been in a professional kitchen was our dishwasher, this amazing guy called Wing, a student at UConn (I think), who was more efficient than many machines.

Food on this scale – and this is what originally made me think I might want to do this as a career – requires an attitude much like that needed to work in professional theatre. You show up (early). You work hard. You’re polite to everyone, and helpful, and respectful, and you try to make people laugh. You serve a large audience. Some of them might not know how to eat, but you serve them anyway. This is both promiscuous and deeply satisfying, because some of your audience does know how to eat. And there are deadlines – courses have to go out, lamb is done when it is done – and stress rather than angst. Much easier, in a way, than Aht. And if you’re all careful, if you’re all good to each other, and make the kitchen a mellow, healthy place, everyone will have fun, and the audience will leave sated and provoked.

The evening made me want to work in a kitchen again.

This is the menu from that evening, ripped off the official website. =)

Braised Lentil Spring Roll
truffled gruyere fondue

Pistou Bizarro
vegetable ham stock, garlic confit, glazed veggie spoons, mint tarragon pesto

Skate and Mushroom Paupiote
curry mushroom broth, mushroom puree, haricot vert, charred yellow peppers

Coq Au Coconut
coconut lemongrass braised chicken, celery root remoulade, almond corn cake

Cassoulet, Sort of
braised pork shoulder, braised flageolets, merguez sausage, duck breast, carrot reduction, fried parsley

Homemade Tarragon Ice Cream
Reeses Pieces Madeleine

A rather detailed set of tasting notes on the food and impressions of the three wines I got to try (we were serving 12 that night) follows…

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