Bifrons

Bifrons refers to Janus — the double-headed Roman god of beginnings and duality after whom January is named.

There's no such author, of course. It was the nom de plume (= pseudonym) for a French art critic who also happened to be a terrific home cook. His name was Jean Bouret.

There's only one book Recettes secrètes de la cuisine française (horribly translated into English as: "Secret Recipes from the (sic) French Cuisine.")

Really, translators? "The (!!!) French Cuisine"?!? From?!? Not "Secret Recipes of French Cuisine"? How unidiomatic!

Every single recipe has a coup de main (= "sleight of hand" or "twist") in French. You will only be able to use this book if you're already familiar with the idiom and then you will be surprised in every single one. There are exactly 200. (They are also neatly numbered in that French style of precision. Please note that the recipes start at 001 and end at 200. Those three digits precisely rendered in gorgeous typography. This is exactly how the CC falls in love!)

They are not strictly speaking recipes. Most are, of course, but there are also general instructions and tricks and all kinds of ups and downs inside. It's quite idiosyncratic and the CC says that with the highest praise possible. (For example, there's a truly exceptional "dessert" omelette. Also, a killer recipe for fish in red wine. That kinda thing.)

The English translation has six of them missing which is exactly the kind of thing that would drive the CC crazy (because now the numbering is all off! Why for the love all that is good in this world? Why?!?)

Since the CC has a completist bent, here are the six missing recipes:

048 - Sanguinette de pigeon
099 - Le poulet au sang
122 - Filet de cheval en venaison
144 - Marmite corsoise
164 - Queues de sarrigues
188 - Les champignons

Most are being omitted to preserve the (supposedly) delicate American sensibilities of the time — chicken blood, horse-meat, pigeon, possum, mushrooms. The original is from 1965 and the translation from 1967.

Ironically, possum is traditionally American as you can clearly find in ol'-school Southern cookbooks.

The most galling one is the last which just translates as "mushrooms". It's rather critical of North American culture in that they don't appreciate mushrooms. Welp, boys and girls, fifty years later, it's a totally different ball game. Even the CC goes mushroom picking!

The French tome is a masterpiece of design. The typography is absolutely gorgeous — the CC happens to be a font geek. The American translation is a crappy paperback. However, from the point of view of translation, it's actually quite decent. It systematizes the French work from the stream-of-consciousness style into the traditional explanation-ingredients-recipe style of modern cookbooks.

The book truly deserves the misused moniker of one-of-a-kind. The CC has never seen anything like it.

If you read French, get the original (very hard to find!) Otherwise, the American translation (dirt cheap!) suffices.

However, it's without a doubt a masterpiece.

How to Make Better Parathas

The CC once bought a large number of books online through a fairly shady Delhi-based bookseller on Abebooks. He wasn't even sure that the books would arrive.

They did however.

One of these books was something called "Indian Bread Basket".

The book seemed slightly dubious even back when the CC ordered the book. It was published in 2000. However, there's no publisher by that name and there's no publisher by that address if you search online. Even the author's name seems to be fake. Seems to be ghost-written. Interestingly, the design was done by some firm which has an address and that seems to be fake as well. They even have emails which are the Indian equivalent of a shady "hotmail" address. Either fake or long since defunct.

None of this would matter but the book itself is pure gold (even Sharbati gold - to indulge in a little paratha-based humor!)

It has a few amazing tips for parathas which the CC will share. (If you don't know how to make them, the CC is not going to go there. You will have to do your homework yourself.)

[1] It is much better to use rice flour rather than wheat flour to roll out the parathas. It's lighter and doesn't stick to the dough.

How did the CC not know this? This seems to be a "standard trick". When he asked around, he got big fat DUH's all over the place.

[2] In order to make tomato juice to knead dough with, take four tomatoes, put them in a blender and strain.

This the CC can guess. It's umami except he's never seen this trick before. Kneading with tomato juice. Totally freakin' works!

[3] Flour should be kneaded at least 30 minutes in advance so that the preparations turn out softer and smoother.

This the CC knew. It's ol'-school. It's just time for the protein (gluten) to unwind when the water hits the flour.

[4] Parathas should be roasted (baked) on both sides first and only then should they be fried in ghee.

This the CC did not know but it totally makes sense. It allows for uniform cooking because they are cooked through and only afterwards are they pan-fried.

This ain't no Delhi Paranthe-wali gali style paratha's where they deep-fry them in a vat of ghee but they will definitely improve your technique!

Making Lemonade Out of Lemons

If you find yourself with a bunch of slightly hard lemons, you aren't going to be able to ripen them since they are not climacteric fruits but there's still something you can do about squeezing juice out of them.

Just stick them in the freezer for an hour or two while they freeze. Pull them out, de-freeze, and they will yield a ton of juice without a lot of effort.

What's the reason?

The water content inside the cellular walls turns into ice shards which in turn puncture the cellular walls breaking down the structure. When unfrozen the walls are ready to give up the juices much more easily.

Elementary, my dear readers!

Official Status

In a historic vote, aligned with another historic bill, the New York Senate has voted "sweet corn" as the official vegetable of the State.

Which is ironic since corn is a grain not a vegetable. If it were a vegetable then we should probably debate whether Medicare vouchers, and "pulling the cord" apply to it.

(No corn (or corny) jokes please, we're skittish.)

It's probably a good thing that they didn't have to debate over the official "fruit" (which already has been deemed to be "apple") since that would've been just way too weird!

Butter Massage

From the inimitable Julia Child:

"Not everything I do with my roast chicken is necessarily scientific. For instance, I always give my bird a generous butter massage before I put it in the oven. Why? Because I think the chicken likes it -- and, more important, I like to give it."

Defending Molecular Gastronomy

The CC is aware that the world shits upon this stuff on general purpose in the name of "tradition". The CC could argue at length about why this is wrong but there's a far simpler way of arguing.

Take flaked salt, and mix it with fine olive oil.

Slice tomatoes, and drizzle the above mixture over it. Add strips of basil.

Salt is a polarized molecule. It will not dissolve in non-polarized liquids like oil. That means the crunchy salt will still remain crunchy, and not dissolve in the tomato's watery juices nor will it make the tomato "sweat".

You can use your finest fleur de sel this way, and it will work. The reason it works is science.

You haven't seen this in any book you own because they simply didn't get it.

If this were so obvious, why is this not there in Julia Child, Marcella Hazan, and the zillion others that make a fetish out of tomatoes, olive oil, and salt?

Why is this not present in four hundred years of Italian tradition?

So, fuck you, "tradition"!

Tradition, which can be useful can also be rank superstition. It's done this way, why, well because it has always been done this way. Kinda silly sometimes.

Facts and evidence (= science) matter more.

Asparagus Advice

Asparagus season will soon be upon us.

From Jane Grigson's Good Things:

How would you describe the best asparagus? Thick, certainly. Fresh certainly, as, whatever kind is grown, its flavor will deteriorate with delay. No argument here.

But after that, would you prefer it to be blanched white? Or white with a yellowish head? Or green and white streaked with pinkish purple? Or as green as possible?

The answer will tell me more about you than about absolute standards of asparagus perfection. Italians like white asparagus with a yellowish head. The French like their violet and green and white spears. And the English and Americans like unblanched, tender greenness. In our favor, I will modestly add that European chefs working in England have said, do still say, that our fresh asparagus beats all for flavor.

That’s the theory anyway. In practice, your answer would more likely have been curt, rather than considered: “The best asparagus is the asparagus I can afford — when I can find it.”

The CC bows in all humility to the wisdom of the sensei.

Sane Snail Advice

From Jane Grigson's book Good Things:

If you are likely to eat stuffed snails regularly, it's worth investing in snail tongs and forks (as well as in snail plates.) One can manage quite efficiently, though, with a pile of paper napkins, and a set of needles stuck into corks.

Now that's the kinda practical advice that the CC loves rather than the modern purveyors of flim-flam devices!

Omnivore

Something about growing plants and snipping parts off them appeals to both my inner carnivore and my inner vegetarian!

The Hamburger

Book by Josh Ozersky about the cultural history of the hamburger. Needless to say, the artifact is a lot more complex than one would've assumed. Who knew that White Castle was the original chain but for very complex reasons (both franchise-related and financial) lost out to the McD?

Great info on the reinvention of the burger in the 1970's as a 50's concept even though it was nowhere near as ubiquitous in the 50's. Rather, it was more of a 60's thing.

To put it differently, the nostalgia for the burger 'n shakes in the 50's never existed. It's a 70's marketing campaign imposing a false structure on past memory that never was.

And kudos to the author for compressing the entire narrative into a compact, well-edited, comprehensively-documented 133 pages!

Julia Child

It seems customary to report on the subject thanks to the movie made by the idiotic-beyond-idiotic, border-line retarded "chick-flick twit". No, the CC has not seen the movie but we're gonna talk about the cookbook author and not the persona or the chick-flick or the twit.

It is no great secret that most foodies have read Julia Child.

Opinions differ on the subject, and the CC has definitely besmirched the woman's reputation on her favorite subject of omelettes (with perfectly good science and reason.)

Arguably, you would do better to learn French cooking by consulting Anne Willan or Richard Olney.

And she was no more "authentic" than Paris Hilton. She wore wigs during her show and had two face-lifts. Chances are they don't tell you those things during the movie. Nor do the asinine foodies bother with such blunt brute facts during their wild adoration bordering on hagiography.

But there would never have been an Olney or a Willan without a Julia Child. Plus, we're here to judge her on the basis of her books not her vanity.

What matters is the sheer joy of food as well as pure unabashed joie de vivre that leaps off every page. It's opinionated, detail-oriented, definitely old-fashioned. It's not "pitched" to a "marketing control group". It's tone is friendly if bossy; accurate if opinionated.

Certainly, some of the equipment has dated. We can do better in that domain, and she'd agree herself. But her dictum that happiness is as much in the doing as the final result is completely on target.

Above all, there is the sensual love of food and life. She was sui generis and so are the books.

It shows. It shows in spades. You can't fake this.

If ever there were books that just by the sheer forceful power of the author's personality could dispel the blues, it's these ones. There are few better things worth doing in life that spending an afternoon on the couch with Julia. (And yes, she'd howl in mirth at the smuttiness of that pun!)

She was right about butter too.

I ♥ Kuhn-Rikon

The most expensive piece of equipment in the CC's kitchen. The Rolls-Royce of pressure cookers which you may only pry away from the CC out of his "cold dead hands".

Raffetto's

This is the best place to buy fresh pasta in the city. They supply half the restaurants. Those lucky few who've had it know what the CC is talking about!

Besides, endorsing them heartily (not that they need it - they've been in business since 1906!), the real purpose is to put their hours online. Seriously, they are nowhere to be found.

Raffetto's
144 W Houston St, New York, NY

Hours:
Sun-Mon closed
Tue-Fri 9:00am - 6:30pm
Sat 9:00am - 6:00pm.

Least Counts

Whenever the CC reads a cookbook with the phrase, "This makes one cup of the spice mixture. It can be stored for future use", he rolls his eyes, and contempates ordering takeout.

Yes, we love cooking; yes, we are perfectly capable of spending hours to perfect a fine dish; and yes, we are willing to spend hours and days traveling great distances to find obscure ingredients.

But no, we do not wish to eat the same thing for the rest of the year, or even for lunch the next morning.

Shouldn't this be freakin' obvious?

So one cup of a complex spice mixture which takes an hour to make where the recipe calls for two tablespoons is a bit more than the CC's patience can endure.

What's the real problem? It's one of least counts really. To accurately render a recipe, you need to get down to fractional quantities which is not always possible.

What to do?

Scale down the recipe.

The CC has no problem down to 1/4th or even 1/8th of a tsp. He is perfectly capable of smashing an appropriate spice with his trusty pestle, keeping the appropriate amount, and discarding the rest.

However, scaling down is trickier than it sounds. To "correctly" scale down a "suitably large" spice recipe, one cannot just divide everything by 4 (or whatever.) Typically (but not always!), to do a good job, if you scale the largest stuff by 4 then you must scale the "intermediate" stuff by 3, and the smaller stuff by 2, and the smallest stuff not at all.

There is an intrinsic non-linear twist in the scaling down (the reverse for scaling up.)

Amateur chefs make this mistake all the time. They don't understand this.

And no, inspite of the CC's ultra-rational bent, he does not know why this is the "right" way to do things. He just knows empirically that this is the thing to do in many (but not all) cases.

Does the CC contradict himself? Very well then, the CC contradicts himself. The CC is small, and yet he contains multitudes.

Maybe the molecular gastronomy people would like to weigh in?

What to do after you've made the spice mix and used some but not all?

[1] Store some, and dump the rest, and call it a boredom tax. Yes, this is wasteful but eminently rational. (The spice mix will lose its potency before you ever reuse it.)

[2] Make the 1 cup version, and hand out as gifts to all your friends who will never make the recipe anyway. It will assuage your soul while it languishes in their spice cabinet, and they will toss it out at a future date. (You can short-circuit this process by tossing it out right away.)

[3] Buy a micro-scale (although it just might be cheaper to do the tossing because micro-scales are more expensive than spices. Yep, the CC is rational.)

[4] Have an array of powders some refrigerated and others not (as appropriate.) This assumes you don't live in Manhattan, London, Hong Kong, or San Francisco where space trades at a premium.

[5] Some pastes/powders freeze well. This actually works out in practice.

Anybody have better ideas on the subject?

Everybody loves bacon

You can buy a bacon air freshener. Nope, the CC is not making this up.

Bowls

Possibly the most silly thing to write about on this blog but its summer which means silly, so here's a rave disguised as a rant. How's that for true inversion?

If you want to be a good chef, and the CC knows you do ("why else are you here?") buy lots of bowls.

Lots of glass bowls. Deep glass bowls. With rims.

Rims. Rims. Rims. Rims. Rims.

Did you miss it the first few times? Rims; glass bowls with rims.

You also need bowls of different sizes. Mostly for the mise-en-place (but that's obvious, right?)

The glass part is obvious. It's non-reactive, blah-blah-blah. All the chemists understand this , and so should you from your high-school chemistry beakers and pipettes and burettes, etc.

Rims. Now there's technical practice triumphs over theory.

The appreciation of the fine rim is subtle. It is in the the realm of the connoisseur not the amateur.

Let's enumerate the most obvious:

[1] covering with plastic wrap to store,
[2] filtration using stuff on top so you need a "grip" (e.g. food mill),
[3] cheese cloth cover tied with twine under the rim (porous but clean)

The list is endless. You will rue the day you refuse the rim.

The difference between a good and a great chef is whether they understand the need for a good rim.

Labor of Love

Ever had a cookbook which while not that compelling is impossible to throw away? Perhaps, it's the book you learnt from, or a book so heavily annotated with your notes that there's no replacing it? There are even cookbooks which you absorb completely but are completely unable to discard for sentimental reasons.

The strangest category must be cookbooks that are clearly labors of love. They may be far from perfect; they are almost certainly filled with historical nonsense; they may even be variations on a single theme that could easily be condensed into far fewer pages. And yet, try as you might to get rid of them, you can't help holding on to them.

Maybe next time.

And next time comes and goes, and then the next, and the next, and you know in your heart of hearts you're never going to discard this tatty old book but you keep putting it on the discard pile, and just as impulsively removing it before the cull.

The CC has an Iraqi cookbook. Horribly edited, and endlessly repetitious, this is clearly the work of an amateur. And yet, it has all the hallmarks of a life lived. Flipping through the pages, you get the sense that this is nothing more than a notebook of a truly excellent cook, hurriedly edited and published, quite possibly with private funding.

Another is a book on Indian breads. What little there is to know about the variety of Indian breads can be taught in an extended afternoon or two. Perhaps three. What matters is the stuffings, and one doesn't need to list the basic technique repetitiously just the elaborate insides. Also, clearly, a modest personal notebook but badly edited, this time by an editor trying to expand modest material into a whole book.

Strange beings these works.

What makes these books so compelling? They are not failures; far from it. Perhaps they are reminders of a journey of knowledge that we once embarked upon, that we too were stupid and naïve once.

Or the strange leap of the heart when you flip through one and an old favorite reappears. Haven't made that in years, must do that someday soon, and look here's the one we made back then when ...

Most likely, it's the realization that cooking for all its flairs and fancies is ultimately rooted in the physical reality of people cooking for other people. And what could be more lovely than that?

The Food Business in America

While walking towards a Midtown Indian takeout (Kati Roll), the CC tried to pre-order using his cellphone:

CC: I'd like ...
Her: Sir, we'd need your number. Please may we have it.

(The CC tried to give his number. She's clueless.)

Her: ...
CC: I'll be there in less than 5 minutes. You won't lose any money.
Her: ...
CC: Just take down the damned order. I'm walking there.

(She takes the order.)

When the CC gets there, he watches the boss berate her for not understanding "anything".

SUCCESS!!!

Transforming the Indians into capitalists. One storefront at a time; it's your own friendly neighborhood CrazyChef.

WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!

Alan Davidson's Seafood Trilogy

Completely indispensable. For seriously whacked-out food geeks only.

Line diagrams (!) not pictures. All good academics understand why, of course.

Many moons ago, the CC knew a wonderful line artist who was fought over by both the Paleontology and Egyptology Departments(!) She could go places in Egypt that few others were allowed to. Eat your heart out, Indiana Jones!

The CC bonded with her on the obvious need for line art (you can "highlight" certain details and "suppress" others in a way that a photograph cannot because it gives equal importance to everything.) We bonded over the obviousness of the argument, and that it didn't matter that the world refuses its obviousness as long as she gets paid a lot, and tons of ice-cold Polish vodka.

But back to the trilogy. Completely indispensable guide. Everything you ever wanted to know about edible seafood.

Salt

A post on salt. Ridiculous or relevant? You decide.

The CC is rapidly coming around to understanding the view that controlling salt is a key to controlling perception of taste.

Try this next time. Make a soup/stew without the salt. Taste it. Add salt. Taste it again.

Even y'all will find it obvious. Even fairly obvious flavors (like acidity) will reveal themselves only in the bold light of salt.

First up, we talk about commercial salt.

Drop it. NOW.

Iodine?

You get plenty of iodine, my love. You eat out enough, and they use plenty of iodized stuff. This is not our forefather's generation. So skip it. You don't need that much, anyway.

Next up, the cost.

The cheap sea salt (far from bad, incidentally) is a dollar cheaper than the commercial crap at the CC's local store.

So you don't live out here in New York, you claim? So drop two more dollars and skip a coffee, fer cryin' out loud!

Next up, the need for powder v. crystals.

This is the first serious objection that the CC will actually entertain because it matters. It's all good and dandy to drop sea salt crystals into a broth, or a soup, or a stew but what happens if you need to eat steak? Or popcorn?

This is serious no-messin' around territory. The CC is serious about his popcorn.

You need to invest in a "pepper grinder" and then fill it with salt. Or keep the commercial crap around anyway (this is a bit of a cheat but we're OK with that on this blog here as you might have noticed, just as long as it's not too egregious.)

At any rate, upgrade your salt.