Life Is Meals_ A Food Lover's Book of Days - James Salter [106]
A famous Seven Necessities that no Chinese, even the poorest, could do without were listed more than a thousand years ago as firewood, rice, oil, vinegar, salt, soy sauce, and tea.
SALICE SALENTINO
The owner of a New York shop that sold cookbooks once gave me the name of a favorite Italian wine. It was an inexpensive one that came from southernmost Italy, from Apulia, the long, narrow province that runs along the Adriatic coast. He wrote it down: Salice Salentino, the single c pronounced, as usual in Italian, as ch.
It proved to be a wonderful recommendation. Salento is the peninsula in Apulia that is the very heel of the Italian boot. The entire province is filled with vineyards, and the production of wine is the second greatest of all regions of Italy—Sicily being the first—though most of it is used anonymously in blending, and only a small percentage ends up in its own bottles. Salice Salentino is one of these, robust but somehow velvety, and normally easy to find in wine shops, where it stands modestly in the crowd.
J.S.
BÉCHAMEL SAUCE
Béchamel, the delicious white sauce for creamed vegetables, soufflés, and croquettes, first appeared in France during the reign of Louis XIV (1643‑1715), though it may have been created earlier and elsewhere. It was named for Louis de Bechameil, a handsome, corrupt financier who served as the king’s majordomo. He had all the luck, complained an old duke who said he had been serving chicken in a cream sauce since before Bechameil was born, and no one had named any kind of sauce for him.
Béchamel is simple to make and takes only about five minutes. There are a number of variations using more or less butter and flour, depending on the desired thickness, but the foundation for all of them is the same:
BÉCHAMEL SAUCE
2 tablespoons butter
3 tablespoons flour
2 cups milk heated to a boil in a small saucepan
In a saucepan, melt the butter over low heat. Add the flour slowly, stirring until they are smoothly blended without browning. Remove from heat. Add the milk and stir vigorously with a wire whisk. Set over medium heat, stirring until the sauce comes to a boil; then cook for another minute, stirring constantly. Makes two cups.
TAMALES
The great Aztec lords sat down to tamales, according to Bernardino de Sahagún, who accompanied Cortés in 1519, and tamales were offered as annual gifts to the gods, although this was somewhat less often than it sounds, since the Aztecs had an eighteen-month year.
Not only Aztecs but Mayans and Incas also ate them, often while at war with one another, since tamales could be made in advance and were easily transported for the armies. They were made of essentially the same ingredients used today—corn flour called masa, meat or fish, beans, rice, vegetables, fruit, and nuts, though there might also be gopher, frog, and even insects. Then as now, the fillings were wrapped in corn husks or banana leaves and usually steamed.
In Mexico today, tamales are sold by street vendors everywhere—with cheese and chilis replacing the more exotic ingredients—and are also made at home, often for gatherings of family and friends.
OYSTERS
The unknown and courageous soul who first ate a raw oyster was followed by such fanciers as Nero; Seneca; Casanova, who ate fifty a day; Henry IV, the “Evergreen Lover,” who ate as many as three hundred at a sitting; Louis XIV, who consumed nearly as many and had a royal preserve of them; Abraham Lincoln; and innumerable others.
In antiquity, oysters existed in a continuous band four thousand miles long from Scandinavia down past Britain and France, around into the Mediterranean, circling Italy, all the way to Greece. That rich vein survives only in fragments today, and everywhere the abundance of oysters has diminished.
It used to be a rule that raw oysters should be eaten only in months whose names included the letter r, that is, September through