Life Is Meals_ A Food Lover's Book of Days - James Salter [117]
In Indian cooking, “curry” simply means a sauce, which can be fiery or mild. Adding coconut milk makes a spicy curry mild. Recipes are handed down over generations, but common ingredients include turmeric, cardamom, chilis, coriander, cloves, ginger, nutmeg, and fenugreek, a cloverlike plant with pungent, aromatic seeds. The spices are dry roasted, then ground on a special flat granite stone with another stone, rather like a mortar and pestle. Curry powder available in Western stores is an approximation of this mixture.
It’s not uncommon anywhere in India for food to be served on a simple metal plate called a thali or on a banana leaf plate. With a banana leaf, you simply fold it over when finished. Traditionally, food is eaten by hand, but only with the right hand since the left is considered “dirty,” with lowlier uses. It’s considered offensive to greet anyone or even to pay with the left hand.
The universal beverage is chai—the Hindi word for “tea”—boiled with milk, water, and spices such as cardamom, ginger, cinnamon, and cloves, and served with plenty of sugar. It is often poured into a glass from a great height to cool it more quickly.
ASPEN WINTERS
1993. One of a score of winters spent in Aspen and among countless dinners, this one from the annals:
“So the season is beginning. Very little snow so far. A bunch of movie stars—Bruce Willis, Don Johnson, others—are opening a restaurant and pleasure palace called Planet Hollywood a few steps toward the mountain from the Ute City Banque. The rent they are paying is $25,000 a month—just a benchmark. Lorenzo and Joyce [Semple, very close friends] came to dinner. He uncharacteristically drank a couple of bottles of wine and wouldn’t go home. The wine was Ruffino Chianti Classico 1989. He had denounced it before tasting it, saying that 1990 was known to be the good year, but then the glassfuls began to disappear. We watched a movie afterward, a French movie called Blue, made by a Pole. Stunning images, limited content—very Aspen.”
CLARENCE BIRDSEYE
On this day in 1886, in Brooklyn, Clarence Birdseye was born. Dropping out of college at Amherst for lack of tuition money, he went to Labrador on a fur-trading expedition and saw there that fish, frozen in the bitter cold after being caught, lost nothing in texture or taste when later cooked. In 1916, together with his wife and young child, Birdseye returned to Labrador. They brought with them several barrels of fresh vegetables and, dipping them in seawater, successfully froze them in the icy arctic wind.
The first mechanical freezing plant in the world had been built about fifty years earlier in Sydney, Australia, and insulated ships had been carrying frozen meat across the oceans, but it was Birdseye who would pioneer the sale of frozen food to retail customers. He formed a frozen seafood company in New York City that failed, but in 1926 started another in Massachusetts. It was called General Seafoods but then, more broadly, General Foods.
By 1929, he was able to sell the company for the then huge sum of twenty-two million dollars, and by 1937, fifty-seven different frozen vegetables, fruits, and meats were being shipped and sold in individ ualized waxed cartons under the Birdseye brand, which became synonymous with frozen food.
Fresh and frozen food have virtually the same nutritional value. Frozen peas, in fact, have more, since they are usually frozen immediately after being picked, while unfrozen peas make their slower way from the farm to the wholesaler to stores, losing vitamins en route.
Almost any food can be frozen, although not eggs when they are in their shells. The more quickly the freezing is done, the better—the ice crystals that form within the food are smaller and affect the structure less. Smaller quantities thus give better results than larger when freezing at home. A year is usually the maximum recommended time for storing frozen food, although many—milk, bacon, hamburger, soups, fish, stews—are better if not kept