Eating - Jason Epstein [11]
My first restaurant assignment was the hot-dog-and-hamburger grill. The owner advertised that these were broiled in “creamery butter.” They were not: they were fried in rendered beef fat, dyed yellow and packed in cardboard tubs marked “Stearin,” probably the same lethal stuff that the big hamburger chains were using until recently for their fries. I was told to keep a brick of “butter” beside the grill, where the customers could see it. I did not feel good about this deception, but butter was scarce in that postwar summer, the owner wanted his “butter” on display, and I liked my job.
Restaurant cooks in those days were nothing like today’s celebrities. Most of them, especially those who worked in seasonal resort towns, were drifters, who may have learned their trade at sea or in the service or prison. I liked to watch them dice vegetables fast and with precision, scoop them into a sauté pan, then, without looking, flip them and let them fall flawlessly back into the pan. These itinerant cooks tended to be childishly touchy and thought nothing of walking out on a busy weekend if their feelings were hurt or if they heard of a better job or got drunk. That first postwar summer, the kitchen was run by a rawboned, red-faced father-and-son team wearing identical red baseball caps. The son, who spoke Spanish, resented my status as a Columbia College freshman and called me the perro-caliente professor. The loquacious father told me about a one-legged hotel chef from Newark, New Jersey, who proved that oil floats on water by soaking his hands in ice water and then plunging them into hot oil without hurting himself, an improbable story but a useful demonstration that wet ingredients won’t caramelize in hot oil because oil floats on water, so that the oil doesn’t touch the food, which steams rather than browns. He and his taciturn son made their own potato chips, which they called Saratogas: russet potatoes sliced almost paper-thin on a mandoline, soaked briefly in water to get rid of the starch so that they wouldn’t stick together as they fried, then drained and thoroughly dried in the cooler before they were plunged into hot oil. When I make these at home, I sometimes think of George’s hands and wonder, against all reason, if that story could possibly have been true. Nevertheless, the fact that oil floats on water is an important lesson for deep-frying and caramelizing generally, and especially for salads. Unless you are using an oily emulsion or the greens are bone dry, add oil to the greens first, vinegar second, or both oil and vinegar will end up at the bottom of the salad bowl.
One night the red hats drifted away in the middle of dinner when the owner, having told them to stop stealing Four Roses from the bar, found them drinking his vanilla extract instead. They retaliated before they vanished by stuffing four boned loins of black-market beef into two ice-cream freezers, where the meat froze solid and could not be removed through the round openings. Rather than dismantle the freezers, the owner defrosted them, so that after two days the tops were turning green while the rest of the meat remained stuck. Only then did he dismantle the freezers. When he insisted on making hamburger