Life Is Meals_ A Food Lover's Book of Days - James Salter [91]
He had started growing tomatoes on his own farm a dozen years earlier from seeds he brought back from South America, but had never been able to convince his neighbors that tomatoes were good for anything but decoration. New Jersey is now famous for the quality of its tomatoes, and even a hundred years ago there were more than two dozen canning plants in the area, including the Heinz ketchup plant in Salem City itself.
RAISINS AND PRUNES
Sometimes a rose by any other name sells better. When a California drought in 1873 shriveled grapes on the vine, an imaginative retailer called them “Peruvian Delicacies” and created the raisin market. More recently in an effort to improve the image of prunes, millions have been spent to rename them “dried plums.”
BUYING BEEF
Man has been eating red meat since about 10,000 B.C. and learned early on that it tasted better and was easier to chew and digest if it was cooked. Until recent times, dining on beef was a sign of wealth and position because of the relative scarcity of meat. Even with revolutionary mobs pursuing him, Louis XVI managed to carry a supply of short ribs in his coach to comfort him as he fled.
The Department of Agriculture ranks beef in five grades of quality, though only three are normally found in grocery stores: prime, choice, and good. Good actually refers to meat with less fat, while prime beef—the top classification—is expected to have the marbling of fat that adds to tenderness and flavor.
In addition, there are a few useful guidelines for buying beef:
• It should be a bright to medium red, though meat darkens the longer it’s aged.
• It should be firm enough to the touch to spring back when pressed with a finger.
• For maximum flavor and tenderness, it should have white or pale yellow flecks or streaks of fat between the muscle fibers.
• Tenderness is determined by a number of factors, including the age and breed of the cow and what it has been fed. The famous Kobe beef of Japan, probably the most expensive in the world, is given rice, beans, and beer, along with a daily massage. The muscles that have gotten the least exercise during the life of the animal make the most tender cuts, especially those past the shoulder along the back called the rib and the loin that include rib roasts and steaks. The least tender are those containing not only muscle but connective tissue, such as those in the shoulder, the front leg, the haunch, and the underbelly. These provide ground meat, stew meat, briskets, and pot roasts.
Ways to make tougher cuts more tender include grinding the meat; cutting it against the grain, which makes the muscle fibers shorter and therefore easier to chew; or cooking it for a long time in liquid. Dry methods of cooking—roasting, grilling, and frying—are best for more tender cuts. It’s not true that meat will retain more juiciness if it’s seared or browned as the first step in cooking.
Even those limiting their consumption of red meat admit to its pleasures. As the great chef Carěme said, “Beef is the soul of cooking.”
WORCESTERSHIRE
Worcestershire sauce was already such a standard at meals by 1938 that it was on the dining table in Munich on this day when Adolf Hitler forced Mussolini, Chamberlain, and French premier Daladier to accept disastrous terms. By then, its formula was one hundred years old, created for an English lord who missed the sauce he’d enjoyed as a governor in Bengal, India.
Back home in England, he asked his local pharmacists, John Lea and William Perrins, to try to reproduce the recipe that included anchovies, tamarinds,