The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [193]
Mr. Lowery told me that Campbell’s vast market surveys have discovered the attributes of the ideal recipe. It must be prepared in thirty minutes or less (including any cooked ingredients within it). It must be a main dish, because homemakers are less willing to try a new recipe for a side dish or a dessert. And it must contain only readily available ingredients, which means that these should not merely be widely displayed on supermarket shelves but, preferably, already be stocked in most people’s homes. I found this ideal in sharp and ironic contrast to the recipes I write. Mine take between four hours and four days to prepare, are always for side dishes or desserts, and contain ingredients that you must either send away for or bring back from a trip to Alba or Kyoto.
Campbell’s most popular new recipe is Chicken-Broccoli Divan, a casserole of fresh or frozen broccoli, cooked chicken or turkey, and a can of Campbell’s condensed cream of broccoli soup, all with a topping of bread crumbs and cheese. “Divan” is a culinary term I have encountered only on the backs of boxes and in traditional American cookbooks like A Century of Mormon Cookery and Joy of Cooking, and Campbell’s had no idea of its source. “Divan” sounds vaguely French, but my old Larousse Gastronomique passes from “diuretic” to “dive” without a pause, and among his 5,012 recipes, Escoffier can’t be bothered. In Webster’s Second, “divan” is a Persian and Turkish word for a book of many leaves, a council of state, the room where such a council convenes, a raised cushioned platform upon which its members (or anybody else) can sit or recline, and, especially today, a large couch without a back or sides. On the theory that the meaning of “divan” had somehow expanded to include the delicacies upon which members of the divan feasted while reclining, Levantine style, on the divans, I combed through my classical Turkish and Persian cookbooks. There was not even a morsel named “divan.”
At last I discovered that a Divan is a creation of all-American provenance. According to Craig Claiborne, the dish was invented in a New York restaurant of bygone days called Divan Parisien, where poached chicken was laid on a bed of broccoli and covered with hollandaise sauce. Thus “broccoli” in the title of Campbell’s recipe is as redundant as its inclusion in the dish is expected. How chicken Divan spread like wildfire into the cookbooks and onto the packages of America’s heartland I will never fathom. My etymological research left me too weary to attempt Campbell’s Chicken-Broccoli Divan.
The star of our first back-of-the-box meal was Ritz crackers’ Mock Apple Pie, which has appeared on the back of the box since the beginning of recorded history and probably forever will. The recipe always sounded like a prank to me, which is why I had never tried it. You line a pie plate with pastry and drop in thirty-six broken Ritz crackers instead of apples. Then you boil up two cups each of sugar and water with a little cream of tartar, add lemon rind and lemon juice, allow the syrup to cool, and pour it over the Ritz crackers. Dot with butter, sprinkle with cinnamon, cover with the top pastry crust, bake for thirty-five minutes, and cool completely.
What emerges is a tasty dessert that cannot easily be distinguished from real apple pie! This has led to a far-reaching and heretical hypothesis: Cooked apples have little taste of their own. We identify them by the cinnamon, sugar, and lemon juice with which they are always flavored in American cooking, along with their characteristic mushiness. I fed this pie to a self-styled apple lover. She could not believe that it contained not one apple molecule.
Why anybody would bother to make Ritz crackers’ Mock Apple Pie more than once