The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [16]
I briefly entertained the notion that I could solve my subsistence problems by doing all my shopping at Gourmet Garage, a new outfit at 47 Wooster Street in the SoHo section of New York City. Then I visited Gourmet Garage for the first time. The bargains were terrific. Pied de mouton mushrooms and yellow-footed chanterelles were being given away for $8.50 a pound, a 50 percent savings; Eli Zabar’s two-pound Manor House Loaf, sold by the baker himself at E.A.T. on Madison Avenue for $5.00, went for only $3.95 here; and free-range chickens cost only $2.85 a pound.
When I came to a shelf holding rows of five-kilogram bags of basmati rice, my mind drifted back to an evening several months ago in a Moorish garden in the south of Spain. I was with the beautiful Indian actress and food writer Madhur Jaffrey. The air was soft with the scent of night-blooming jasmine. I leaned toward Madhur and whispered, “What brand of basmati rice would you recommend?”
“Tilda,” she replied. And now, months later, as if by divine intervention, I find Tilda on sale at Gourmet Garage for only two dollars a pound.
But no matter how hard I calculate, I can’t fit many pieds de mouton and yellow chanterelles into my low-cost cooking. And even at two dollars a pound, basmati rice runs four times as much as the regular long-grain American rice at my local A&P. When I lose interest in subsistence, I plan to shop at Gourmet Garage on an hourly basis.
The United States Department of Agriculture publishes a near-subsistence diet called the Thrifty Food Plan, calculates its cost every month, and uses this number to determine how many food stamps to issue to poor families so that they can cook and eat according to the Thrifty Food Plan. (That’s how it is supposed to work; advocates for the poor argue that food-stamp allocations are insufficient for those following the Thrifty Food Plan.) Last October the cost was $49.40 a week for a family of two and $82.50 for a family of four. This comes to $3.53 a person a day for a family of two. The amazing thing to me is that the average American on his or her $4.50-a-day food budget spends only about 25 percent more than the cost of this subsistence diet!
I decided to follow the Thrifty Food Plan for a week and took the USDA’s booklet Thrifty Meals for Two: Making Food Dollars Count to the supermarket, reading it as I wandered the aisles. I will neither confirm nor deny whether or how often I cheated in the days that followed. Food-stamp recipients do not have a choice.
On Day One, the Thrifty Food Plan required me to eat a breakfast of toast, milk, cereal, and an orange. This fueled a long morning of planning and cooking. Many of the recipes in Thrifty Meals for Two are made from other recipes in Thrifty Meals for Two, so precise and long-range planning is vital. I began by creating six cups of Biscuit Mix (a homemade form of Bisquick, which would later grow into both Drop Biscuits and Peanut Butter Snack Loaf) and five cups of Pudding Mix (sugar, cornstarch, and nonfat dry milk to which I would later add cocoa and water to produce Chocolate Pudding). Then I began preparations for lunch by braising three turkey drumsticks in water in a covered pan, discarding the bones and skin, turning the flavored water into gravy, setting aside three ounces of the meat for lunch (I fortunately possess an expensive electronic scale), and saving the rest for Days Two and Three. Whereupon I baked a potato, cooked up some collard greens, made Drop Biscuits from my Biscuit Mix and a truly repulsive Chocolate Pudding from my Pudding Mix, and ate all but the Chocolate Pudding. Dinner was a bacon cheeseburger on a roll and a disappointing banana. But only an hour later snack time arrived—peanut butter on toast.