The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [185]
Just as I was about to compare and contrast in fulsome and appropriate detail the precise aromas and tastes of horse fat and tallow, the horse fat began prematurely to go rancid and dark. (When frying fat takes on a fishy aroma, it is not yet rancid but is about to become so.) I am afraid that Nora had neglected the fifty pounds of dry ice I had requested to protect my Pferde-Fett on its odyssey from Vienna to Washington to New York City. I apologize.
I have just learned that Alain Dutournier, the excellent Parisian chef from southwest France, cooks his French fries in goose fat. He uses an unusual combination of temperatures: after a first low-temperature frying, you wait two hours, start the second frying at 280 degrees Fahrenheit, and slowly increase the temperature to 392 degrees. The idea is intriguing, and I would like to try it immediately. But my wife has just passed through the kitchen and slipped into bed, leaving me alone, surrounded by four white bubbling-hot electric deep fryers and piles of unpeeled Idaho potatoes. “Smile and the world smiles with you,” she said as she disappeared. “Fry and you fry alone.”
April 1996
Author’s Note:
Alain Passard has been awarded a third Michelin star. His horse-fat French fries cannot have been irrelevant to this decision.
When this article appeared, an avid horsewoman organized a campaign against Vogue for verbal cruelty to horses. Vogue mollified her by publishing, unedited, a letter abusing the author.
I replied: “The United States is the largest horse-meat exporter in the world (as many as 400,000 animals a year are sent to slaughter) because it has the largest recreational horse population. These animals become ‘surplus’ when horse lovers unnecessarily breed their pets, owners sell their racehorses after only a few years, and recreational riders trade up. Slaughter and export become inevitable when this surplus drives down resale prices below about $600 an animal. The object of Ms. ———’s rage should be the inhumane practices of a good part of the horse-slaughtering industry. And the unwillingness of most horse owners to care for their discarded pets until they die a natural death.”
Fish Without Fire
For the past two months I have eaten nothing but microwaved fish. My adventures in bistro cooking are on the back burner—the plump, crisply roasted chickens, the garlic sausage and potatoes browned in goose fat, the sauerkraut braised for hours with pork, apples, onions, and juniper berries. Gone is the week I spent with twenty pounds of Idaho russets and five quarts of heavy cream, trying to recapture the gratiné potatoes we ate last summer in Avignon. Perfect potatoes will have to wait.
It all began some months ago when the most stylish woman I know informed me that my cooking habits were hopelessly out of date. “We,” she announced, speaking as always for a fashionable world that the rest of us can imitate but never enter, “have been doing oceans and oceans of microwaved fish. It’s lite, it’s qwik, it’s E-Z, and it’s …” She searched for the perfect word. “It’s fish.”
I do not as a rule seek advice about food from thin people, but my friend’s words had chastened me. I felt like a vestige of some gladly forgotten age. Worse, I felt like an outsider. It was then that I resolved to eat nothing but microwaved fish until I had learned to love it. But where to start?
Step One: The hardware. Judging from the last five years of Consumer Reports, a jungle of features and options awaits the first-time buyer of a microwave oven: cooking power and power consumption, digital readouts, temperature probes, moisture sensors, programmed defrost cycles, programmed roast cycles, programmed combination cycles, and devices like reflective blades, waveguides, and carousels to smooth the irregular energy pattern. All for two or three hundred dollars.
The microwave salesman in the department store sat forlornly amid fifty ovens arrayed on carpeted shelves. He telephoned other salesmen to negotiate his lunch hour. He was unable to explain the range of features, sizes, and