Category: Food

Onion sandwich on English muffin

During the heat of summer, I slacked off on baking. On a shopping trip to Whole Foods, I broke down and bought some English muffins. They were addictive, so I resolved to start making them when cooler weather returned.

The English muffins from Whole Foods were only marginally decent. They were made largely with white flour. At least the texture was right. I was foolish enough, while feeding my addiction, to try Thomas English muffins from a regular grocery store. They were totally not edible. I should have composted them, but I gave them to the chickens. For one, they contained all kinds of adulterants, including fats and emulsifiers (in the form of mono- and diglycerides) to give the bread that horrible brioche-y, cake-like texture that the hordes of non-coastal America seem to like so much. You know, Wonder bread. Or, in these parts, Bunny bread.

As a matter of fact, when we quote Marie Antoinette as saying, “Let them eat cake,” what she really said, in French, was, “S’ils n’ont pas de pain, qu’ils mange de la brioche!” As pure language, that translates to, “If they don’t have bread, let them eat brioche!” Brioche, of course, is bread — a soft cake-like bread. Culturally, this is probably not translatable, but I strongly suspect that the reference to brioche contained an insult to the type of bread peasants preferred, if they could get it.

Anyway, English muffins take a long time to make, and they’re a pain in the neck. But they have many virtues. For one, because they’re destined for the toaster, they can be put in a bag, popped in the fridge, and kept for days. Fresh from the toaster, you’d never know they were made five days ago. For two, if you make them yourself, the best ones are 100 percent fat free, unlike their competitor for breakfast bread — biscuits.

If you want to make English muffins, I’d recommend starting with this recipe from King Arthur Flour and modifying it to your taste. But notice that even King Arthur brioche-ifies the dough with egg, butter, and sugar. Horrible! I make my dough with nothing but whole wheat flour, water, yeast, and a bit of sugar to feed the yeast. For a proper bread texture, you can’t go wrong with those simple ingredients in your dough.

I think I’ll also make some bagels this fall. It’s been many years since I’ve made bagels, but they’re not much more trouble than English muffins.

If you buy something at the mall, it’s only half a thrill — the thrill of acquisition. If you buy something at a second-hand shop, it’s the full thrill — the thrill of acquisition plus the thrill of the hunt. Because you never know what you’re going to find at a second-hand shop. This week, for $5, I found a classic French cookbook.

I have very few cookbooks anymore. Specialized cookbooks (for example, Beard on Bread), sat on the shelf and were never consulted. There’s only one kind of cookbook that I find truly useful — a complete, encyclopedic cookbook. That’s why the 1943 wartime edition of The Joy of Cooking is my favorite cookbook, used regularly. I may page through it looking for inspiration. Or maybe I have too many eggs on my hands, and I’m trying to think of something new to do with them. Or maybe I want something chocolate, but I’m not sure what.

Though for years I subscribed to Gourmet magazine, I’ve never really been a student of French cooking. I have, however, been a student of the French language, and I read French fluently, though I never claim to speak it. So I was thrilled to come across this copy of Le Livre de la Bonne Cuisine. It’s a classic in France, in many ways analogous to America’s The Joy of Cooking. It’s encyclopedic — 770 recipes, 668 pages, 1,200 photographs. Like The Joy of Cooking, it was largely aimed at diligent new housekeepers who wanted to upgrade their cooking. This is the 1989 edition. It assumes that you don’t know a great deal, so it covers lots of basics, things such as how to clean a chicken, how to slice uncommon vegetables, pastry techniques, what to do with a lobster, or how to filet a fish.

I don’t do a lot of cooking in the summer — just enough to survive. But as soon as the air is cool, so that the heat of the kitchen is comforting rather than oppressive, I cook. This fall and winter, I plan to work on my French cooking skills.

I need to get a kitchen scale, though, and metric measuring vessels. Though French recipes use tablespoons and teaspoons as a measure, liquid ingredients are given in metric measures, and many ingredients, including butter, sugar, and flour, must be weighed. Williams-Sonoma, here I come, for a little mall shopping.

One of the many reasons I don’t eat out much is that there aren’t many places to go. One comes across places that you really want to like — like Tuggle’s Gap restaurant near Floyd, Virginia, near the Blue Ridge Parkway — but almost always you’re disappointed.

As late as the 1970s, there were still good roadside restaurants. They had honest foods cooked from scratch. Some of them are still in business. They’re nothing like they used to be. I’m not sure why this is. One possibility is that the food service industry has pushed a lot of labor-saving institutional food off on them, and now every place is the same. The individuality and adventure is lost. Another reason, I think, is that in these parts restaurants compete on price, not quality. When I was in San Francisco, friends visiting from back east were often shocked at the cost of eating out. But there is a big difference. In a good food city like San Francisco, restaurants compete on quality, not price. Price doesn’t matter. In these parts, that’s too small a niche. Take pizza, for example. I had a visitor in San Francisco who, upon taking the first bite of home-delivered North Beach pizza, raved about how good it was and said she’d never had such good pizza in her life. Yep. That pizza probably cost 22 bucks. Around here, pizza is worse than pathetic, because the price point is closer to 10 bucks that 20.

Southern eateries rarely — very rarely — produce edible homestyle Southern cooking anymore. Again, I think this is partly because of the intrusion of the food service industry, partly the fact that they have to keep prices low, and partly because there just aren’t as many good cooks as there used to be. One exception is Hillbilly Hideaway near Walnut Cove, which has done a pretty good job of keeping its standard up. I’ll review Hillbilly Hideaway sometime.

But back to Tuggle’s Gap. Tuggle’s Gap ought to do better, because its closeness to the tourist traffic on the Blue Ridge Parkway allows it to get away with charging higher prices. But I had an enchilada plate there yesterday that was pathetic. The enchiladas were hard and bland. The plate was decorated with sorry-looking iceberg lettuce and sorrier tomatoes. The rice wasn’t seasoned, it was just red. Have I mentioned that Southerners are terrified of spices other than pepper and cinnamon? And you’d think that they’d at least be able to do pinto beans right, but the beans were undercooked. Doesn’t every Southern cook know the blow test? If you blow on a spoonful of beans while they’re cooking, if any of the skin curls, the beans are NOT DONE. The skins must be completely softened, and there will be a soupy broth that is starting to thicken. How thick you make the broth is a matter of personal preference, but it absolutely must not be watery.

I should have known better than to order Mexican, but I was deceived into thinking that because Tuggle’s Gap aims at a fancier standard, they’d know what they were doing. Wrong. It is a common syndrome in these parts. You can get Chinese food that obviously was cooked by someone who has never eaten Chinese food. And you can get Mexican food cooked by someone who obviously has never eaten Mexican food, someone who has never eaten more than 20 miles from home. So what you get is a kind of white trash concept of what those foods would be like. At $9 a plate, there is no excuse.

By the way, when I use the term “white trash,” I speak proudly of my own ethnicity. I’m also thinking fondly of the White Trash cookbook, which I fondly recall was part of the countertop reading at the Lighthouse Restaurant in Sausalito, California. The lighthouse usually had cooks trained at the Culinary Institute of America (or, CIA cooks, as they call them). If you know your stuff, you probably also know stuff about white trash cooking.

Anyway, if you go to Tuggle’s Gap, order a burger with fries or onion rings. They can understand that. They weren’t trained by the CIA. They don’t understand anything else.