Holidays are a great time to get back into cooking – food has so many associations with happy holidays, warm times at home, and basically familiarity and comfort that it becomes more evocative than in everyday life. (Getting three cookbooks for Christmas didn’t hurt, either.) Christine and I got into a discussion last week about what it is that entices me about cooking. She’s a great cook, but for her cooking is as simple as following a recipe that looks good. I’m much more interested in understanding techniques and their effects on food; what is searing, what is roasting, what is the difference between pan frying and sauteeing, and why we do any of these things. Having a knowledge of ingredients and of techniques, to me, means that I can walk into a store, decide that the tomatos (or bell peppers, or oranges, or sirloin, or tuna, or…) look wonderful and build a meal from that. I don’t want to just follow a recipe, I want to understand the recipe.
Beyond that, though, is the field of culinary anthropology. Look at regional or ethnic foods and see the ingredients that are used. Think about the history of coffee or of beignets. What happened when the coffee bean was introduced into Europe? How about when the peanut spread eastward from the New World? Flavors and techniques are driven by the ingredients at hand as much as they are the evolution of techniques and tools. The history of food itself lends to this kitchen intuiti0n, both in understanding ethnic foods as well as creating new ways of applying one culture’s techniques to another’s ingredients.
Anyhow, like I said, holiday times are great for traditional or special foods. For me, the holidays always meant bourbon balls – a mixture of pecans, chocolate, vanilla wafers, surgar, corn syrup, and bourbon, formed into a sticky paste, rolled into balls and dredged in granulated sugar.
What foods make up your holiday memories?
5 Comments
These days, holidays are excuses to brine and cook turkey (Hezzy calls brined turkey “heroin turkey” and for good reason ;^).
I’m to the point that I never make the same brine twice but it’s always good bird. (Try some grated ginger in your brine. It’s amazing!)
As far as nostalgia goes, it’s all about the pies: pumpkin and pecan and more pumpkin.
And then New Year’s Day (my birthday) is all about cheescake.
I still don’t get what there is to understand about a recipe. You decide the tomatoes look good, you buy them, you buy the rest of the ingredients… you make the food. Sometimes even without a recipe. (I don’t always require a recipe to cook, for the record and all that…) I guess I’m the type that can see the yummy tomatoes (gag!), buy them, and before you know it … have a meal.
I still prefer to bake though. Mmmmmm…
See, in my mind, baking more or less requires a recipe… It’s more scientific.
Do you watch Good Eats on FoodTV? If not, I highly recommend it. My husband Ryan loves to cook, but he also loves to learn the “science” behind it; Good Eats is definitely a great show for that.
Jake – Baking certainly does require a recipe and one that is followed exactly. So may complex chemistry is going on there that the proportions are important. Cooking, on the other hand, can be much more forgiving. While I can bake, I have much more fun cooking (and besides, Christine likes to bake, so s’all good).
Michelle – Yup. Love it, and have one of his cookbooks that I need to finish reading.
Post a Comment