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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Tamar Adler
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February 1 - May 20, 2014
On the subject of eggs: “Eggs should be laid by chickens that have as much of a say in it as any of us about our egg laying does.”
In 1942, M. F. K. Fisher wrote a book called How to Cook a Wolf.
How to Cook a Wolf is not a cookbook or a memoir or a story about one person or one thing. It is a book about cooking defiantly, amid the mess of war and the pains of bare pantries.
Cooking is both simpler and more necessary than we imagine. It has in recent years come to seem a complication to juggle against other complications, instead of what it can be—a clear path through them.
It doesn’t contain “perfect” or “professional” ways to do anything, because we don’t need to be professionals to cook well, any more than we need to be doctors to treat bruises and scrapes: we don’t need to shop like chefs or cook like chefs; we need to shop and cook like people learning to cook, like what we are—people who are hungry.
In her first book, Serve It Forth, M. F. K. Fisher wrote that its recipes would be there “like birds in a tree—if there is a comfortable branch.”
cooking is best approached from wherever you find yourself when you are hungry, and should extend long past the end of the page.
Then, whether you are hungry or anxious or curious, you can at least weed through and decide what seems right. I only mean to show what cooking is: an act of gathering in and meting out, a coherent story that starts with the lighting of a burner, the filling of a pot, and keeps going as long as we like.
When is water boiling? When, indeed, is water water? — M. F. K. Fisher, How to Cook a Wolf
Julia Child instructs tasting water periodically as it climbs toward 212 degrees to get used to its temperature at each stage. Her advice might be overzealous, but it teaches an invaluable lesson, not about boiling, but about learning to cook: if there is anything that you can learn from what is happening, learn it.
Once your water reaches a boil, salt it well. The best comparison I can make is to pleasant seawater. The water needs to be this salty whether it’s going to have pasta cooked in it or the most tender spring peas.
Add salt by hand so that you start to get a feel for how much it takes, and as you do, taste the water repeatedly. This may at first feel ridiculous, and then it will start to seem so useful you’ll stand by the pot feeling quite ingenious.
When you find yourself tasting your water, you are doing the most important thing you ever can as a cook: the only way to make anything you’re cooking taste good, whether it’s water or something more substantial, is to make sure all its parts taste good along the way.
Vegetables are done when a sharp knife easily pierces a piece of one.
Buy a whole chicken at a farmers’ market if you can. They’re much more expensive—up to three times as expensive—as chickens raised in factories, which most, even the ones labeled “free range,” are. The two are completely different animals. As soon as you boil a chicken that was raised outdoors, pecking at grubs, you’ll notice that its stock is thick, golden, and flavorful. When it cools, it will thicken. Chickens that’ve led chicken-y lives develop strong, gelatinous bones, which contribute to the soup you get from them and to how good they are for you. If you’re getting more meals out of your
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Salsa verde 1 shallot, finely chopped 1/2 teaspoon salt red or white wine vinegar 1 bunch parsley, leaves picked from stems and roughly chopped 1/2 clove garlic, chopped and pounded to a paste with a tiny bit of salt in a mortar with a pestle or on a cutting board 1 anchovy fillet, finely chopped 1 teaspoon capers, finely chopped 1/2 cup olive oil Put the shallot in a small mixing bowl. Add the salt and then enough vinegar to cover. Let it sit for 10 to 15 minutes. Drain the shallot of its vinegar, reserving it for a future vinaigrette. Mix the shallot and the rest of the ingredients together.
Everyone has something to say on the subject of eggs. M. F. K. Fisher is the best: “Probably one of the most private things in the world is an egg until it is broken.” The egg industry drones that eggs are incredible and edible. The French philosopher Diderot noted that all the world’s theologies could be toppled by one.
I boil eggs by putting them in a pot of cold water, bringing the pot to a boil, then, as soon as I see the first bubble, turning the burner off. I let the eggs sit in the water for about four minutes, meanwhile setting up a bowl of water with ice in it nearby. When four minutes are up I remove one egg, drop it into the ice water, crack the shell a little, peel some off, and check for doneness by pressing on the white. I think the perfect boiled egg has a firm white and a yolk that’s just cooked enough to hold together when the egg’s cut in two. If the white’s not firm when I check, I leave the
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Beat two or three eggs in a bowl, adding a pinch of salt and a teaspoon of heavy cream if you want. This is not a trick, but an expression of the fact that things taste good with cream added. Heat a tablespoon of clarified butter or olive oil in a small nonstick pan over medium heat. Lower the heat slightly before adding the eggs. Give them about three seconds to set. Once they have, use a rubber spatula to move everything toward one side of the pan, then tip the still unset eggs into the empty space. Lower the heat if things seem to be coming together too quickly. Do the same thing again at a
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If we were taught to cook as we are taught to walk, encouraged first to feel for pebbles with our toes, then to wobble forward and fall, then had our hands firmly tugged on so we would try again, we would learn that being good at it relies on something deeply rooted, akin to walking, to get good at which we need only guidance, senses, and a little faith.
As for what else you need in order to cook, there are too many equipment lists in the world already. A meal is cooked by the mind, heart, and hands of the cook, not by her pots and pans. So it is on the former that I recommend focusing your investments.
Unless you are an aspiring laser beam, your microwave won’t teach you anything. Use
There are times when I can’t bear to think about cooking. Food is what I love, and how I communicate love, and how I calm myself. But sometimes, without my knowing why, it is drained of all that. Then cooking becomes just another one of hunger’s jagged edges. So I have ways to take hold of this thing and wrest it from the claws of resentment, and settle it back among things that are mine. The first is remembering
