Life Is Meals_ A Food Lover's Book of Days - James Salter [83]
The sweet corn found year-round in supermarkets is usually a supersweet variety that converts into starch much more slowly. It is all right, but nothing like the corn that comes from a local field.
You needn’t strip back the husk to inspect an ear as the suspicious city dwellers do. You can feel from the outside if it is a healthy, full ear, and the rare little worm is not dangerous. Corn can even be cooked with most of the husk on and only the tough outer leaves removed. The flavor is even enhanced this way, and after being removed from the water, the ears will stay warm longer.
Corn can also be steamed or roasted, and in the latter case, with the husk off, the kernels tend to caramelize, which is a triumph.
We usually serve summer corn as a separate, complete course with a stick of butter on a plate for everyone to roll it in and nothing else besides salt and pepper. James Beard liked to put butter and bacon crumbs on his corn. Others use olive oil, herbs, and even chili.
DINNER TABLES · PEANUT BUTTER
MAKING TEA · CHATEAUBRIAND
FALERNIAN · SALSA · APPLES
BISTROS AND BRASSERIES · PARMESAN CHEESE
CAHORS · SIMPLE DINNER IDEAS · MUSHROOMS
EN-CAS · BLINI · DATES · MENUS · SEEDLESS
SAMUEL JOHNSON · MICROWAVE
MUSSELS · E PLURIBUS UNUM · CHÂTEAU
HOW TO BECOME A REGULAR · CHAMBERTIN
BROCCOLI · ROMANÉE-CONTI
COLONEL JOHNSON · RAISINS AND PRUNES
BUYING BEEF · WORCESTERSHIRE
AU GRAND COUVERT
MARGARINE
DINNER TABLES
Small rooms or dwellings discipline the mind, Leonardo da Vinci said, and large ones weaken it. Something similar might be said of dinner tables. The smaller the size, the greater the intimacy; big ones are for castles.
If a table is too wide, it is awkward to talk across it; you can speak only to those on either side. If it is too narrow, the opposite is true, and you talk more easily to those across. The ideal is a width of about thirty-two inches. The length varies according to the size of the room.
PEANUT BUTTER
Two tablespoons is about the usual serving—of peanut butter, that is—when making a sandwich. Popular lore is that the average fifteen hundred peanut-butter sandwiches consumed by the time a child is in high school are responsible for the greatly increased height of Americans over the past decades.
Peanut butter is a good source of protein and even fiber, with around 550 peanuts in a twelve-ounce jar. It has no cholesterol, though it is relatively fattening at almost one hundred calories per tablespoon and is required by law to be ninety percent peanuts. The extra bits of nut are added afterward for crunchy style. Hydrogenated vegetable oil, discredited now, maintains the consistency and gives it a shelf life of a year. In natural peanut butter, with nothing added, the oil from the peanuts soon separates from the nuts, and it grows rancid unless refrigerated.
South American Indians and African tribes had eaten a form of mashed peanuts for centuries, but peanut butter was invented in 1890 by Ambrose Straub, a St. Louis doctor looking for a source of protein for elderly patients whose teeth made it hard to chew. He patented his “mill for grinding peanuts for butter” in 1903 and introduced it at the St. Louis World’s Fair the next year. It was an immediate hit, and on average, Americans today eat over three pounds per person per year.
At a lunch in France one day, we remarked that it was hard to find certain things in the local grocery store.
“What can you not find?” asked the hostess.
“Well, baking soda, for one thing. Peanut butter.”
“I het it,” she said simply.
MAKING TEA
Tea is not made by filling a cup with warm or