Life Is Meals_ A Food Lover's Book of Days - James Salter [103]
This was during the Depression. After two years, it had sold just two thousand copies, but a publisher, Bobbs-Merrill, took it on in 1936, and it continued to sell modestly until a revised and enlarged edition with answers to almost every possible question appeared in 1943. It has now sold over fifteen million copies, and its popularity remains unrivaled.
CHESTNUTS
On Manhattan street corners in the fall, the smell of roasting chestnuts is one of the pleasures of the city. A partially gloved hand, fingers blackened by charcoal, fills a small paper bag with seven or eight chestnuts, the curled-back skin crisp and revealing delicious, yellowy insides. Rich in energy and nutrition, chestnuts have been a food of both the rich and poor since earliest antiquity. Xenophon describes the children of noble Persian families being fed chestnuts to fatten them, and they were an important food for the populace in the harsh years following the destruction of the Roman Empire. They were a staple in France until the arrival of the potato. Chestnut meal was the ingredient of the original polenta, and chestnuts were boiled into soup and ground into flour.
There are wild chestnuts, not as tasty, with two or three nuts per shell, and the cultivated, European chestnuts whose shells contain only one. Nothing is easier than to gather them, which was also important for their popularity—when ripe, they fall to the ground.
Chestnut trees are long-lived. One, said to be two thousand years old, planted by the Romans, stood at the foot of Mount Etna until destroyed by an eruption in 1850. There were once great chestnut forests in America that spread from Maine to Florida and west to Arkansas with majestic trees that could reach a height of one hundred feet. All were attacked by a blight at the end of the 19th century; by 1940, they were completely gone.
As a food of the poor, chestnuts have mainly vanished. Instead there is crème de marrons, used to fill crepes and cakes, and chestnut stuffing for roast turkey. Finest are the marron glaces, chestnuts poached in syrup until they are infused with sugary vanilla flavor and then glazed, translucent—a slight, uneven color is normal. The process, which the French may have invented in the time of Louis XIV or the Italians before that, involves sixteen separate steps. Nowadays, frozen chestnuts are shipped from Italy to France, where they can no longer be obtained in sufficient quantity.
When buying chestnuts, choose those that are heavy, hard, and shiny brown. To roast them at home, first cut an X on the top of the shell to allow it to open and expand. On a baking pan covered with a thin layer of salt to prevent the bottoms from burning, roast them in the oven at 400‑425 degrees F for twenty minutes or so.
CRAYFISH · RESTAURANT GUIDES
SANDWICH · RISOTTO · SIEGE OF PARIS
ROYAL PROGRESS · CHINESE FOOD
SALICE SALENTINO · BÉCHAMEL SAUCE
TAMALES · OYSTERS · ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA
OLIVE OIL · INUIT/ESKIMO
CABBAGE · JASON EPSTEIN ON COOKING
FONDUE · CRANBERRIES · PASTA SHAPES
GRIMOD · THE BEST COOK
CROISSANTTURKEY · ROASTING A TURKEY
CARVING A TURKEY · THANKSGIVING
WISHBONE · CANDY · GROS PLANT
CHURCHILL
CRAYFISH
Popular in Europe as early as the Middle Ages, crayfish, or ecrevisses, were scooped from the Seine by local citizens as late as the 16th century. By the 19th century, they had become fashionable, in short supply, and expensive. A dish of crayfish was also widely recognized as a preamble to seduction when a man ordered them for a woman in a restaurant.
RESTAURANT GUIDES
There are restaurant guides and restaurant guides, and then there is the Zagat, now spread coast to coast in the United States and with foreign editions. The idea behind the Zagat is simple and democratic: let the public decide, informed or ill-informed and regardless of taste or standards. The result is unreliability. The listings are breezy, imprecise, and often conflicting. Frequently the restaurant turns out to be the opposite, in one respect or another, of what is described. If there are high marks