Someone needs to fill one of those glossy, image-driven cookbooks which live, barnacle-like, around cash registers in book shops, with a collection of all the meal-in-hand street foods of the world. It would be all croque monsieurs and falafel rolls and tacos and crepes and pupusas and meat pies and pastizzies and hot dogs doughnuts and tamales and the like. I say “someone” because I'm not going to do it. Whoever does make the book should call it “Hand-held” and make the spine look like the layers of a hamburger, and the two covers like a bun. There, I've done most of the work for you. I'll buy the book when you've finished. I do so love me hand-held street food.
Risks
Over-sharing
Menus are excessively verbose. That, in a uncharacteristic burst of straightforwardness, is the thesis of this week's post. Reading a modern menu is an absolute onslaught of adjectives and ingredients and verbs and animals and adverbs. The whole experience of sitting down and choosing a meal is wrought with a veritable avalanche of information about origin and method and accompaniments. It all serves only to confuse, and I say this both as a chef and a diner. No one is really to blame, these things often have a life and momentum of their own. I have to list most of the ingredients in a dish, when I write a menu, because the customers expect it; customers expect as much because every other menu they read has the same. Every menu is crammed with information because it is the new convention. Some of my patrons, after reading a dish description which might include only (only!) half a dozen items, ask the waitress: “What else comes with the Snapper?”
On Recall
It seems as if every food writer who wishes to address the subject of culinary nostalgia is somehow obligated to to mention Proust, his Remembrance of Things Past, and madeleines. I intend to do almost no such thing. You, if you find yourself at all interested, can look up what the hell I am talking about. There is such a broad literary tradition of igniting childhood memories through the medium of food you might nearly call it a genre. The convention even exists in kids films: the penultimate scene in Ratatouille involves the antagonist, upon taking a bite, jolting loose a memory of his own childhood and subsequently being completely won over. My childhood, in contrast, holds nearly no like examples of formative food experiences, of nibble-triggered, emotional food bombs. I remember, rather, only an endless stream of processed foodstuffs, just-add-water dinners, and 70's hold-overs. Not much to grow teary-eyed about. Still, I find myself occasionally nostalgic.
Green Goo
Learning to cook, whether it be at home or professionally, is really a process of collecting a set of skills and methods and recipe which can be called upon again and again. I'm sure the cooking industry isn't alone in this, but we refer to this collective knowledge as a “toolkit.” It's an apt metaphor, as each skill, or method, or recipe is something which might be applied to a novel ingredient or situation or meal – much like testing wrenches against an unknown bolt. The greater the tools in your arsenal, the better the cook you are. The obvious tools are the ability to sear and roast and bake and sauté, to understand the basics of braising, of why cakes fail, of how to truss a bird. Less obvious are the little memorized recipes for basic foods – a perfect salad dressing, a simple custard, a succulent roast pork belly. More than any of the other tools, these are the little bits of knowledge which differentiate a good cook from a great one.
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