Make the Bread, Buy the Butter - Jennifer Reese [60]
2. Strain the vinegar and discard the berries. Store in a jar or bottle, tightly capped in the cupboard.
Makes 2 cups
BURGERS
When I was growing up we ate hamburgers once a week, served bunless with a side of steamed broccoli and a green salad. My mother made memorable burgers, moist and salty and flavorful. And rare. But that was then. I would choose a rare hamburger as my last meal, but I’ve read Fast Food Nation, and my children have never eaten a rare hamburger and may never know the primal pleasure. I cook burgers until they are thundercloud gray all the way through.
My husband thinks I am neurotic. Once, early in our marriage, he bought a bag of premade beef patties. I flinched when I came across the sack in the freezer. I think packaged beef patties resemble Gaines-Burgers and I suspect that they’re made from the worst of the worst scraps of meat and gristle and cartilage swept from the slaughterhouse floor at the end of every shift.
I said, “These are the burgers that give people E. coli.”
“Once every ten years,” he said. “I’ve never gotten E. coli.”
“How hard is it to just shape your own burgers?”
“Well, you make it hard,” Mark said. “Before I met you I didn’t realize you couldn’t mix the hamburger meat on the same cutting board where you slice the tomatoes. And you have to wash your hands. I used to like making hamburgers but now it’s a pain in the ass.”
About that he is correct. But I am not the reason. Industrialized food is the reason.
One day I decided I would try grinding my own hamburger from grass-fed Whole Foods beef so I could serve the burgers rare. I bought a chuck roast that cost more per pound than the house-ground beef, which made me feel silly, but a rare hamburger is worth it. First, I tried to chop the meat in the food processor and the result was an unevenly ground amalgam of smeary beef paste and sinewy chunks. I pulled out the meat grinder. Always a mistake. The meat was extruded from the die in a pinkish goo and emitted a bloody aroma. The cooked patties were simultaneously chewy and pasty and no one liked them at all.
I probably would have given up on burgers entirely, if Isabel hadn’t asked to make dinner one night. She took a twenty out of my wallet and walked to the supermarket where she bought ground beef, and while I sat on the sofa reading magazines, she cooked. She told me she had decided to “be creative” and had mixed seasonings into the meat, and, being Isabel, she had written down precisely what she did so it could be repeated in case it worked out well, which it did. These are the only burgers we make anymore, and they are fabulous even when cooked to a uniform thundercloud gray and served bunless with a side of steamed broccoli and a salad.
For every pound of ground chuck:
1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
Pinch of cayenne pepper
⅓ cup bread crumbs
¼ teaspoon kosher salt
Pinch of freshly ground black pepper
1 large egg
1. Mix all the ingredients together with your hands. Form into patties. Wash your hands with lots of soap.
2. Fire up the grill or heat a skillet over medium-high, then add the patties. Brown on one side, then turn down the heat to cook for about five minutes. Flip and cook for about 10 minutes more. You can tell a burger is done by breaking into one with a knife—these burgers are supposed to be gray inside.
A pound of ground chuck serves 4
PASTA
My mother was an Italophile and one year for Christmas she gave me a pasta machine. Thereafter, every Wednesday night she came over and we made pasta. In almost all the photos I have of her from the last five years of her life she is posed with one of my children, triumphantly draping a swale of pasta through the machine. Sometimes she has hair, and sometimes she is bewigged; sometimes she is thin and sick, and sometimes she is plump and radiant. But on Wednesday nights, we made that pasta.
The great, imperious Italian cookbook author Marcella Hazan writes: “There is not the slightest justification for preferring homemade