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The Kitchen and The Cook. Book Excerpts.
Nicolas Freeling.
1970. 1972. Hamish Hamilton Ltd.
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On
BOUILLABAISSE (FISH STEW) - ROUILLE:
...greedy
diggings, slurping...all this is the best possible antidote to protocolaire
false manners, then-whom persons of all sorts, and a certain stiff shyness which
overcomes even nice people when ;they are not quite sure how they are expected
to behave. It is a very democratic dish, and pleasantly aphrodisiac, or should
one say uxorious. It can be eaten any time, on the hottest day of the year on
the terrace, or in the depth of winter in front of the tire. |
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ON
ROASTING OVER OPEN COALS:
When I
was a boy in the kitchen, a fillet was always sent from the larder accompanied
by a thick slice of kidney suet, which was put to grill with the steak, and when
the steak was turned was placed on top of it, protecting , moistening and
impregnating it with flavour. This extremely simple trick, like buttering the
inside of a casserole lid, as been forgot. This is a pity. Well-meaning , but
ignorant doctors, employed as dietetics experts by women's magazines, have
engendered some really detestable eating habits. |
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ON
HUMAN HABITS, FOOD, and COOKS:
The human
being is such a creature of habit that he falls easily into laziness and
monotony. He dislikes both the effort of altering his basic conceptions and the
need for concentration in carry out new or at least unaccustomed movement, and
this applies to cooking and cooks as much as to musicians, politicians, or
physicians.
The cook
falls easily into narrow and hidebound ways, and while the strength of regional
cooking lies in doing the same thing over and over again until it is perfect,
the weakness is that standards are blunted by repetition and rigidity. A country
restaurant loses it reputation, often very quickly, when work on the three or
four dishes in which it specializes becomes listless and mechanical.
Exactly
the converse process takes over in 'international' restaurants, where the menu
is far too big and varied, where there is a high turnover of staff and where
there is great pressure to allow vulgar, luxurious and flashy presentations to
compensate for lackluster food cooked in a slipshod way.
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ON
BREAKFAST:
Miss
Nancy Mitford's frivolous dukes give us keen enjoyment because they have such
delight in life. They have, to be sure, enormous amounts of money and are not
the least neurotic about it, but much more than their extravagance it is their
intelligence, their cultivated minds, and their amiability which fill us with
allegresse: they gild everybody's gingerbread with
real gold leaf.
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ON
MARKETS:
Supermarkets with too much choice are as bad as village shops with no choice at
all. |
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AND
COOKBOOKS:
Gigantic
cookery books with five thousand recipes are bad, because nine-tenths of the
stuff is there just for show. The famous mater Monsieur Pellaprat wrote an
excellent simple handbook for pastry cooks, serious and professional and
beautifully lucid; he also wrote a monstrous encyclopedia which is frankly very
bad. |
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ON
EATING WELL:
One idea
which is at the present very modish in "over-developed" countries is that we eat
too much, especially proteins. I think
that worrying about our cholesterol level is also likely to be a passing phase, but that the immediate effect of this idea will be to make
food even nastier and drearier than it now is. I am convinced that a little more
thought about food, understanding of food chemistry,
and willingness to take more trouble would put many of these ideas
back into their proper proportion.
There is
no need to have fads
about food, and the averagely constituted person, who has no unusual glandular
or physiological imbalance, and takes a reasonable amount of physical exercise,
can learn to digest his food properly and can eat anything. The fashion for very slim women is only
a passing phase. One gets into a habit of dieting, just as one gets into
a habit of eating too much or being constipated.
In Western Europe
or America we can get a very large variety of food and we should try
to renew and rethink our eating habits. Cookery books, as I have so
often said, are not very good guides to good cooking, but they do at
least spur the imagination and encourage us to alter our little ways.
I do not wish - once more - to be dogmatic, but if we eat too much
meat it is easy on one day in the week to eat only vegetables and
fruit. If the cholesterol is too high one can have meals almost without fat, with braised meat, poached chickens and raw vegetables.
BALANCING FOODS:
One can learn to balance different kinds of food. It is not very difficult
if one enjoys food and enjoys the kitchen.
To get the best out of vegetables - and avoid the burden of buying huge
quantities of Vitamin C capsules - they should be peeled as
little as possible, washed as little as possible (we absorb anyway huge
amounts of very vile and doubtless dangerous insecticides and artificial
fertilizers, but luckily we are very adaptable) and cooked as littie as possible. One can eat two vegetables or more instead of meat
without being a food-faddist. Vegetables, even the commonest and
most banal, have considerable therapeutic value. This cannot
replace synthesized pharmaceutical chemicals, but can go a long way
towards having fewer pills in the bathroom cupboard. Thus a digestive upset, such as cramps or
diarrhea, can be relieved and often
cured by going without a meal and having a large salad of raw carrots.
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THE REACH OF A
CHEF.
Michael Ruhlman. 2006. Penguin Group.
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ON
EGGS:
We completely upended the food pyramid we'd always accepted as undeniable
and good common sense. Ours is a country that for years held out a silver cross
at eggs. Eggs are bad for you! Eggs! The most natural food on earth, a symbol of
life and fertility, a compact package of proteins, fats, and carbohydrates whose
versatility in the kitchen, pleasure at the table, and economy at the store is
unmatched by any other food. We learned to hate the egg!
Do you
need any further proof that something is seriously wrong with this country that
teaches people to avoid eggs? Only when they became a good strategy for slimming
down did we reverse ourselves on the egg quandary.
But in addition to inept thinking about the egg, we've also
managed
to debase our eggs on a massive scale, to contaminate them so that they
may actually make you sick if you don't cook them till they're hard, and
downright dangerous for the very young and the very old.
ON
DEGRADATION OF OUR FOOD:
We've done the same to our animals, too, by pumping them full of
chemicals and feeding them crap they wouldn't naturally choose in generations of
evolution. Our major commercial hog producers are breeding the fat out of hogs
to try to please the knuckleheaded consumer, who doesn't know anymore what's
good for him or not—how could he? he's been taught to fear the egg!—degrading a
once-fine animal beyond recognition, and yet we think nothing of supersizing our
French fries and burgers and Cokes.
We're breeding chickens without feathers. Most people scarcely
know
anymore what their food looks like when it's alive. They get grossed out
at a proper pig roast. They wouldn't know what to do if they saw an
asparagus growing wild—you can't eat that, it's gotta come in a bundle
with a rubber band around it. If food doesn't come in a package or a box
or wrapped in plastic, we aren't comfortable with it, don't trust it. It
might hurt us. Gotta be processed. Gotta have an expiration date. It's some
times hard to remember that what comes out of our boxes and packages
first comes out of the earth.
Chefs, thanks to their celebrity, now have the clout and the
passion,
as well as the knowledge, to point us back to the things that matter—to
sustainable farming, to raising animals naturally in fresh air, rather than
inside cement barracks pumped full of antibiotics. We're slowly, too slowly
recognizing the scary results of chemical-laced livestock m overcrowded spaces-not merely inferior beef and tasteless chicken, or unpleasant bacteria such as Salmonella and Listeria, but also the evolution
of truly deadly bacteria such as E. coli 0157-.H7. |
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ON FOOD random thoughts
j. c. brittain |
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It is important that
we take the time to prepare our own food...the more work we put into it, the
more we appreciate it, and the less apt we are to waste it. |
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Grant Achatz on the making of good food
...if you take a
product (food) and wrap it around itself, it has nothing to dilute the flavor
you are trying to express...(so the essence of the food stays pure.) |
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ON ENTERTAINING
j. c. brittain |
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To entertain perfectly
is to be perfectly entertained.
Always entertain at a round table, never a rectangular one. At a round
table, everyone has to share, there are no secrets, and
no one gets to be king. |
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