The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [196]
Lewis Fresnaye’s 1802 Macaroni and Cheese
Take six pints of water and boil it with a sufficiency of salt, when boiling, stir in it one pound of paste [pasta], let it boil [about eight minutes], then strain the water well off, and put the paste in a large dish, mixing therewith six ounces of grated parmisan or other good cheese; then take four ounces of good butter and melt it well in a saucer or small pot, and pour it over the paste while both are warm. It would be an improvement after all is done, to keep the dish a few minutes in a hot oven, till the butter and cheese have well penetrated the paste.
It may be rendered still more delicate by boiling the paste in milk instead of water and put a little gravy of meat, or any other meat sauce thereon.
February 1992
* Starkist tuna and Kraft macaroni and cheese
Repairman
How can I ever forget that fresh coconut cake? There were six layers in all, each brushed with coconut-milk syrup and spread with a luscious filling of fresh coconut, butter, and cream. When the layers were stacked on each other, the cake was taller than it was wide, and then the outside was covered with silky vanilla frosting set with crunchy coconut curls. I had stumbled across a generous wedge of it at K-Paul’s New York, Paul Prudhomme’s onetime northern outpost, and it was the most delicious southern cake any of us had ever tasted. The people at K-Paul’s New Orleans headquarters swore that the recipe had already been published in The Prudhomme Family Cookbook (Morrow). It looked like a six-hour project.
Thanksgiving arrived, a day when everybody’s culinary dreams are meant to be realized, and it seemed the perfect moment to re-create the Prudhomme family’s Fresh Coconut Cake and carry it in triumph to a friend’s house for a grateful feast. Six hours remained until dinner.
Recalling that I had once struggled for two days with a stubborn coconut before it yielded up its meat for a special ice-cream project of mine, I consulted my vast kitchen library and particularly my two linear feet of kitchen manuals. Among what I estimate to be twenty thousand kitchen tips bound between their covers was lots of advice about the best way to drain, shell, peel, and shred or mince coconut meat. The best method, even including my hand-cranked, ten-dollar grater from southern India, where coconut is as common as salt or pepper, is to put the coconut in a 400-degree oven for fifteen minutes until it cracks all by itself and then peel off the tough brown skin with a vegetable peeler, with occasional assists from a small paring knife honed on my Chef’s Choice model 110 sharpener—despite warnings in several kitchen manuals that oven heat will ruin the meat. Elapsed time: nearly two hours for four coconuts.
Everything went smoothly until I got to the cake batter. I combined the sugar and eggs in my electric mixer, added the softened butter, and beat in the milk. It was then that I suddenly began to have trouble breathing—the batter had become completely separated! Firm yellow spheroids the size of small peas floated in a thin translucent greasy soup. Things turned ugly when I increased the speed of the mixer, and the soup began to slosh onto the counter. Dinner was now three hours away, the six layers were not even close to being baked and cooled, I was out of eggs, and the stores were closed.
I turned again to my kitchen collection. The minutes flew by as ten desperate fingers flipped through manuals, cookbook chapters, and magazine articles, searching for “cake batter, separated,” “separated cake batter,” “batter, cake, separated,” and so forth. One of the earliest cookbooks in existence, De re coquinaria (ascribed to one or more cooks of ancient Rome named Apicius), devotes its very first chapter to food repair and kitchen tricks. Did you know that you can clear up badly muddied white wine by mixing it with bean meal or the whites of three eggs? And that you can make ordinary Spanish olive oil taste like costly Liburnian oil by adding