Eating - Jason Epstein [0]
Book Business: Publishing Past, Present, and Future
Gratitude to the Unknown Instructors
What they undertook to do
They brought to pass;
All things hang like a drop of dew
Upon a blade of grass.
—W. B. YEATS
CONTENTS
Preface
ONE · COOKING AS STORYTELLING
TWO · THE PERSISTENCE OF MEMORY
THREE · SUMMER SCHOOL
FOUR · LUNCH IN A WORLD TURNED UPSIDE DOWN
FIVE · A BACKWARD GLANCE
SIX · THE OWL AND THE PUSSYCAT GO TO SEA IN A BEAUTIFUL FRENCH LINE BOAT
SEVEN · AVE HOMARUS AMERICANUS
EIGHT · WHY THEY ARE CALLED CHOPSTICKS
NINE · PUBLISHING BOOKS WITH KNIFE AND FORK
PINOCCHIO AT “21”
JACKIE O AT LUTÈCE
ADVENTURES WITH ALICE AND OTHER GREAT COOKS
TWO COUNTRY INNS
TEN · LAST RESORTS
ELEVEN · WHY WE EAT
PREFACE
I greatly admire Michael Pollan for his brave campaign to detoxify the American diet, but I lack the puritan fiber to be a true disciple. Of course I worry about the personal and environmental hazards that he and others have identified, and I mean to avoid them. Often I do, but not always, for though my will is strong my temptations are stronger, as they were on a lovely late-summer day recently on eastern Long Island at the height of the blueberry season.
With Michael Pollan in mind, I promised myself that this year I would not make a blueberry pie with its simple sugars, animal fats, and refined flour, as I had been doing for years at blueberry time, which coincides with my birthday. This year, as always, my children and grandchildren were coming from far away to celebrate the occasion, and that morning I stopped at the Pike Farm Stand to pick up some vegetables for dinner: tomatoes, sweet corn, cauliflower, and so on. I included two and a half quarts of blueberries, just the amount for a pie, but vowed not to pour them into a bowl, as I had done on so many previous birthdays, and mix in a cup or a little more of sugar, some lemon juice, or, better yet, the zest, and enough powdered cinnamon so that its faint aroma rises as the pie bakes, and then shower the mixture with arrowroot to hold the juice without making the berries gummy, as cornstarch does. On previous birthdays I would roll out on a marble slab two very thin sheets of the simplest pastry, the one for the bottom slightly smaller than the one for the top. To make the pastry, I cut a quarter-pound of unsalted butter in the food processor into two and a half cups of all-purpose flour with a little sugar and less salt, until the butter was incorporated but still a little lumpy. Then very carefully I added a half-cup of cold water a little at a time until the dough began to form. Though most cookbooks suggest letting the dough rest awhile to relax the gluten, I have never found this step necessary. I fitted one sheet of pastry into a black ten-inch pie tin with holes in the bottom, poured the filling onto it, and topped the berries with the other sheet, into which I poked a few slits, then sealed the edge and brushed the top with egg wash. After forty-five minutes or so in a 375-degree oven, the egg-glazed pie with its rivulets of blueberry syrup would be ready. But this year I vowed to serve the blueberries plain, or perhaps with a little crème Chantilly and a plate of cookies.
Instead I made a pie. I served it still warm beneath vanilla ice cream hand-cranked by my friend Billy Leonard in his old White Mountain freezer. This followed a dinner of ripe local tomatoes and fried chicken from Sal Iacono’s farm, with a bowl of steamed cauliflower picked that morning. I let the glorious cauliflower speak for itself, with neither salt nor butter.
On the other hand, I would not dream of making the French toast that my daughter, Helen, recalled when I asked recently about her childhood culinary memories. This monstrous concoction I learned to make when I worked many years ago in the kitchen of a boys’ camp in Maine, from a cook named George who worked winters in a logging camp. He showed me how to dip a thick slice of homemade pain de mie in pancake batter with a little extra baking powder, fry it in deep