The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [191]
I reinterpreted “spiral fashion” to mean “spoke fashion.” Slipping my electronic calculator into a Baggie to protect it from the grease, I determined that a 9-inch potato cake requires 184 square inches of bacon to enclose it—at least twenty-two slices if none of them overlap by more than a millimeter. I resumed slicing. When my hungry wife found me an hour later, everything in the kitchen glistened, and I had lost the ability to speak. My wife read the recipe and shrugged. “This thing will never work,” she said. It was the first recipe that had stumped me in fifteen years. It was ten o’clock.
As we cleaned up the kitchen, my voice returned, and we reminisced about those recipes on the back of the box—simple, hearty formulas for good, solid, fail-safe American food—the dips and meat loaves, the quick cakes and no-cook fudge, the casseroles and bakes and instant puddings of our innocent youth. My wife’s favorite was her mother’s version of Campbell’s Tuna Noodle Casserole. Mine was Nabisco’s Famous Chocolate Wafer Refrigerator Roll. On special occasions my mother would spread whipped cream on the wide, thin cookies, assemble the layers into a long log, and chill it until the cookies grew soft and moist, like dark-chocolate cake. When the roll was sliced diagonally, the narrow white and brown stripes formed a festive, elegant pattern. How I longed for those guileless days when whipped cream and chocolate wafers made for gastronomic bliss.
It’s a Fact
Q When was the pressure cooker invented?
A. 1680.
Together my wife and I ravenously read the packages, bottles, and cans on our shelves to find something to cook for dinner. We were not in the mood for Argo Cornstarch Classic Lemon Meringue Pie (which has become the standard American recipe), Quaker’s excellent Oatmeal Cookies, Karo Syrup Easy Caramel Popcorn, or any of the five pecan pies on various other packages. The truth is, our kitchen is not well stocked with packaged foods, canned vegetables, frozen chicken parts, or preformed hamburgers. For years I have done my food shopping nearly every day and cooked everything from scratch. In the process, I may have lost touch with the modern American tabletop.
It was eleven o’clock. We ordered in a very large Chinese meal from the place around the corner and did a week of menu planning. To refresh our memories of the classics, we turned to Ceil Dyer’s Best Recipes (Galahad Books) and Michael McLaughlin’s The Back of the Box Gourmet (Simon & Schuster). The first has an endless number of recipes; the second is more discriminating, amplifying its recipes with photographs and lore.
The next day, we toured the local supermarkets and returned home with a taxiful of shopping bags. Even before removing our coats, we had fished out an envelope of Lipton’s Onion Recipe Soup Mix and a pint of sour cream, stirred them together, and opened the bag of Ridgies potato chips shown in the serving suggestion on the box of Lipton’s. It took us just fifteen seconds to prepare the ur-dip, Lipton’s California Dip, purportedly invented by a California homemaker who told Lipton about it in 1963. No mess, no bother, no dishes to clean (we mixed everything in the sour cream’s plastic container), and sheer perfection on the palate.
For the next hour we assembled a feast that could have fed a family of ten, while investigating whether Ridgies or smooth potato chips are the ideal vehicle for conveying California Dip from package to mouth. Our main course was Quaker’s Prize-Winning Meat Loaf, accompanied by Campbell’s Green Bean Bake with Durkee french-fried onions. Our desserts were various and many—Ritz crackers’ Mock Apple Pie and Kellogg’s never-fail Rice Krispies Marshmallow Squares to begin with—and as we cheerfully rinsed off the tiny number of utensils these recipes required, my wife whipped up her excellent variation on Nestlé’s Original Toll House Cookies.
Most gastronomes would agree that the recipe on the cheery yellow bag