The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [190]
Finally a scallop mousse microwaved in individual ramekins, unmolded, and surrounded by a sauce Joinville made with shrimp and tomatoes, also microwaved: I had the naive idea that custards and timbales would cook to silky perfection in the microwave without scrambling or stiffening. Not true. The waves concentrate on the sides of the dish, leaving the center cool.
In my forthcoming monograph “Microwave: Cult or Culture?” I shall demonstrate that microwave fanatics share a culture—in the anthropological sense of a “trait complex exhibited by a tribe or separate unit of mankind”—that borders on a cult. Its members huddle around the values of progress, speed, health, and freedom from dishwashing. They are prophets of the twenty-first century; we are “unregenerate stove cooks” indulging in the “luxury” of conventional cooking with our archaic equipment. They ignore the fact that progress brought us ultrapasteurized cream and processed-cheese spread, and they ignore recent findings that conventional steaming keeps in as many vitamins as microwaving, which depletes phosphorus, iron, and riboflavin from meat. They are right, though, about dishwashing. Most microwave recipes are mixed, cooked, and served in one glass dish and some on paper plates or towels.
At its best my new microwave oven is a nifty tool to have at hand. Paraphrasing what the great eater A. J. Liebling was fond of saying about his writing, my microwave cooks better than anything that cooks faster and faster than anything that cooks better. In the pantheon of kitchen equipment it stands just below the food processor and just above the pressure cooker. To microwave fanatics, this may sound like faint praise. To my pressure cooker, it is praise enough indeed.
March 1988
Author’s Note:
This was the first food piece I ever wrote.
Back of the Box
I spent last week cooking strictly from the back of the box. It all started one fatal evening when my wife came home from work and found me standing in the kitchen, a melting slab of raw bacon in each hand and briny tears of defeat welling up in each eye. Every surface in the kitchen, my clothing, the open pages of a brand-new cookbook—all were covered with slices and shards and strips and scraps and shreds of oozing bacon.
The cookbook was an important and opulent new work of delicious and fanciful modern French food. I had waited several days for a free evening to cook from it. For starters I had chosen a seemingly simple but dreamy-looking potato, cheese, and bacon cake in which layers of thinly sliced potatoes and sprinklings of cheese are all wrapped up in bacon and baked in a hot oven until the potatoes are tender, the cheese melts into them, and the bacon is crisp and crackling.
You begin by slicing six ounces of slab bacon very thinly. Then you line a nine-inch round cake pan with the bacon slices in “spiral fashion” so that their ends drape naturally over the edge of the pan, add the layers of cheese and potatoes, then gather the ends of the bacon to enclose the potatoes.
I know better than trying to slice a slab of bacon at room temperature. It bends and wobbles and won’t hold its shape, and the slices come out thick and irregular. But I have a policy of slavishly adhering to another writer’s instructions, at least the first time. And I love following orders. Nothing makes me happier than curling up with the ninety-seven-page instruction book for a new VCR or making an elaborate recipe that demands exacting labor over several days or weeks.
It was lucky that I had bought an entire side of bacon because I wasted two pounds of it before managing to extract six ounces of reasonably thin slices. My arm ached, disorder and grease were spreading throughout the kitchen, and the estimated time of arrival for dinner was pushed back to nine o’clock. I moved on to interpret “spiral fashion.”
My dictionary says that a spiral begins at the center of a circle and curves out toward the circumference. This is what I tried to make my six ounces of bacon slices do, first flat and then