August 31, 2008
REGRESSION/ ATAVISTIC EATING
It engulfs me from time to time, often at life-changing moments, like moving to a new home or the weepy end of an important relationship. I return to the foods of my youth. In a big way.
Now you might not necessarily consider the Democratic convention a sufficiently significant moment for me --- 3000 miles away in deepest France – to warrant such culinary backtracking. You would be wrong.
Like many, I have been obsessing about this election. So much so that, enamored of sleep as I am, I was determined to adopt American hours during the course of the Democratic convention, watching CNN (for want of better options) until 6AM CET.
I brought a blanket downstairs, rearranged the pillows on my couch, and stocked the fridge and pantry with foodstuffs that could only be called a dietician’s worst nightmare.
Herewith, the sickening details:
THE SOLIDS:
Dippas Tortilla chips: I’d have preferred the lime-flavored ones but either Dippas has stopped making thse or Leclerc, my local hypermarket, has stopped carrying them.
Chopped beefsteak tomatoes with Sadie’s Russian dressing. Sadie, my grandmother on my mother’s side, lived with us when I was growing up in South Orange, New Jersey. She was a good but a haphazard cook, too impatient for fine points, like filling her blintzes so that they looked like something more than empty envelopes. (More on Sadie’s blintzes later.) Anyway, this Russian dressing is surely not unique to Sadie but it is through Sadie that I came to know and love it: you simple mix good commercial mayonnaise (Hellmann’s is just fine) with Heinz ketchup to taste. Voila! Easy. Delicious. On one of the convention nights I think I was actually energetic enough to get off the couch, cut some chives from the garden and snip them in to the dressing. It’s pretty good. Try it.
Roast Loin of Pork: Like many single people I often cook a dish on Sunday that will carry me through a couple (or more) meals during the week. I have a really good butcher in the neighboring village and love to shop there. Having bought and roasted the loin of pork before the convention started, my culinary exertions were essentially over. I used a James Beard recipe. I often turn to James Beard when I want to find some normal, unfussy, tried-and-true, back-to-basics recipe. This was practically effortless, very delicious, and fed me for most of the week – sometimes reheated, more often sliced and made into a sandwich with that good commercial mayonnaise and seven-grain bread.
Southern Fried Chicken: I have tested many recipes – calling for milk, marinating in milk, eggs, etc – but not one of them had the Proustian effect I was after. I grew up on Tessie’s southern fried chicken. Back in the ‘50s you didn’t have to be rich to have a live-in maid. Tessie lived with us and was more, much more, than my surrogate mother. I still feel she and her daughter, Ernestine, were the only people who ever understood the child that was me. Let’s give the lie to stay-at-home moms. My mom was often out playing bridge or mah-jong. Tessie raised me. She was an amazing cook – both Jewish and Southern soul food -- and, basically, a farm girl, with mostly afro-American but partly Native –American bloodlines.
We are talking suburbia of the 1950s. Tessie had turned our backyard in to a vegetable garden: tomatoes, cucumbers, and more. She stuck one of my brother’s plastic rifles vertically in a vegetable plot to scare off birds. She made ice cream out of snow. I always pulled up a kitchen chair to the stove to stand on and watch her cook – apple pies, greens, latkes, Jewish chicken soup, kugel, and, yes, fried chicken. (We also opened up Sadie’s skinny blintzes and really loaded them with filling.)
This was the fried chicken my soul was searching for and, again James Beard came through. When I read his recipe I thought, this is Tessie’s method. Nothing more than shaking the chicken pieces in seasoned flour (in a bag), patting off the excess flour but rubbing the rest into the flesh, then letting the chicken rest for about 30 minutes before essentially deep fat frying it.
Finger lickin’ good doesn’t even come close. I remember once eating an entire chicken. This event brought an end to my boycott of chicken. Back in the 50s, when food was food, there was a neighborhood grocery in which the owner used to kill and defeather the chickens in the back of the shop. Once I happened to witness this operation and swore I would never eat chicken again. I can’t remember how long that lasted but I do remember watching tv with Tessie one night after she’d cooked her basic fried chicken recipe. I ate one piece, then another, until I’d finished the entire chicken. ( I will get to the wine pairings later.)
Ice Cream: Anyone who grew up in South Orange, New Jersey knew we had the best ice cream in the world: Grunings. No going home again. Move on. For years I’ve been making “Jean Hewitt’s Lemon Ice Cream”, the recipe for which I found in Maida Heatter’s Book of Great Desserts. (Another standby for me, as anyone who reads FrenchFeast will know.) But that didn’t last forever.
French industrial ice cream is an insult to the genre. I settled for the oxymoronic mini-Magnums, sort of wee Dove Bars. I ought to have bought the full size bars because the mini-size evidently did not meet the needs brought on by the Democratic convention. So I generally followed the mini-Magnum with the least awful industrial vanilla ice cream I could find. And into the bowl I broke specoloo cookies – crunch, and flavored (I’m guessing) with cinnamon, clove and mace.
THE LIQUIDS:
Gin & tonic with a slice of fresh lime.
Diet Coke with a recycled slice of fresh lime.
Wine: The choice was daunting. I’m still tasting for Loire #2 and had, earlier in the day, delected in the 2005 Sancerre blanc “Edmond” from Alphonse Mellot. Much too elegant for the fried chicken. I thought maybe a Sancerre rose from Henry Natter would be just the ticket. Nah. Too pretty.
I had just tasted a bunch of really nice, peppy Muscadets and one of them might have been perfect with the chicken. Alas, they were no longer in my house as I had just effectuated one of my customary wine exchanges with my neighbor , Jean Teillet.
I get a lot of wine samples. As I’m not always home, Teillet often accepts my wine deliveries and stores them in his basement. When I taste wine, I generally consume very little. I hate waste. So I give the remainders to friends, much of the time Jean and his wife. If it’s only six bottles, I’ll deliver them myself. When it tops twelve, I call. Jean comes over with a wheelbarrow filled with cartons of wine I haven’t yet tasted. He returns home with the wines I’ve put aside for him. I think he recorks most of them.
So the Muscadets were gone. But I had a pleasant light red, a Cote Roannaise chilling in the fridge, and, if it wasn’t the dream match, it went down just fine.
But after ice cream, I like something dry and searing. A single malt, for example. I had already gone upstairs, put my contact lenses in their soaking case, and put on my pjs. I wasn’t going downstairs for the whisky. Closer to hand, however, was a bottle of nice Bourbon. (On my night table, actually. In my defense, it’s been there for over two years.) I poured myself a finger – yes, just a finger – drank it and so to bed.
And now I’d better get on a diet.
