A little lesson on food and cooking
Leftover roast salmon with pasta.
So good!
Mymother made bread by instinct. When she taught me, her caution was, “Don’t usetoo much flour or your bread will be tough. Knead it until it feels right.” Sheknew just how much to knead, how long to let it rise. She had a big old woodenboard on which she pounded that dough. Her bread came out in beautiful goldenloaves. No recipe needed.
Ihave a friend whose grandmother made “the world’s best” biscuits in a shallow,white enamel pan she also washed her dishes in (on the kitchen table: there wasno sink). She dumped in a couple of coffee cups of flour, “measured” bakingpowder and salt with the spoon out of the sugar bowl on the table, pulled aglob of soft lard out of the lard bucket with her fingers and worked it intothe flour. Added milk until it looked right, kneaded a bit, rolled it out witha rolling pin her husband carved from a chunk of maple, and cut the biscuitswith a water glass. I still have the old, metal orange juice can that mygrandmother used to cut biscuits. Nobody cooks that way now. I call itintuitive cooking.
Jordangets frustrated when she asked me how long to cook something, and I say, “Untilit’s done.” Or when she wants to know how much flour to use, and I say, “Untilit feels right.” She wants a printed recipe, complete with amounts and detailedinstructions in front of her, and I don’t think she’s unusual in this day andage. Many young women have lost or never had instincts about cooking. (I dowonder if I somehow failed in that aspect of raising her.)
Manyof the women of my generation—we old ladies of the Silent Generation—mixinstinct with recipes when we cook. We can size a recipe up when we read it,judging whether or not it will work, and then we can adapt it to our taste andneeds as we go along. (Christian cooks that way too.) And we can make a pie orrolls without a recipe, because we’ve done it so often—and we learned from ourmothers.
Thewomen of the 1950s, that decade when American foodways changed so dramatically,may be the last to base their cooking purely on instinct. They had cooked withtheir mothers and grandmothers, and they cooked the way they learned. Not allwomen of the fifties, though. During that decade, food manufacturers switchedtheir attention from supplying the military, since the war was over, tocourting housewives. Advertising departments decided women hated to cook, andso the food industry set out to simplify cooking, make it easier and quicker.They did this with prepared food and new gadgets. By the end of the fifties youcould buy an angel food cake mix or a tube of prepared biscuit dough. All youhad to do was bake.
Mytheory is that having most of the work done for them by manufacturers, womengradually lost touch with the food they were cooking. They didn’t have tomeasure and judge the texture and feel the dough to see if it was right. (Ihope I get a lot of indignant responses to this.)
Onanother food note, I read a Ruth Reichl column today which convinced me thatI’ve found my niche in studying the plain, traditional food of the fifties.Reichl is writing from Marseilles this week and sending pictures of the food.Beautiful pictures—and probably not a dish that I, a fairly experimental eater,would touch. Blue soup that is fish broth with chard floating in it (no ideawhat makes it blue); sliced bottarga (I had to look that one up: a cured fishroe pouch) with caviar; a “garden of fish” floating in a green, seashell jelly;a carabinero (had to look that up too: a large, deep sea shrimp) servedsomewhere between raw and cooked, with fennel; ravioli filled with clams andmussels in an “intense” fish soup. Absolutely gorgeous pictures, smashingphotography. But I don’t know that I’d have eaten any of it. I love readingabout it, and about the old French restaurants with lots of atmosphere, but Isomehow can’t translate that to my life in Texas.
Soif you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go make a pasta dish out of last night’sleftover roast salmon. The simple life. (This is me, trying out material forthe cookbook/memoir I hope I’m writing. I’d love feedback.) Just for fun,here’s what I did with the salmon (without a recipe):
Cookenough pasta for one. Drain and put aside.
Meltsome butter in the skillet. Add a garlic clove and cook it briefly.
Addsalmon and some frozen green peas. Salt and pepper.
Putin a glob of sour cream, enough to make a sauce.
Adthe pasta and stir until dish is warm. Do not let it boil or sour cream willseparate.
Putin a pasta plate and top with grated pecorino.
