The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [199]
Put a bay leaf in flour to discourage bugs. Put an unwrapped stick of spearmint gum in flour to discourage bugs. (I have bought a PlenTPak of Doublemint and a bottle of bay leaves and await the results.) A sugar cube in olive oil keeps it from getting rancid. (I feel a little silly, but I’m trying it.) Freezing nuts makes them easier to crack and to extract the meats whole (slightly easier or not at all). Marinating meat does not tenderize it because the marinade does not penetrate very deeply. Add bread to boiling cauliflower or cabbage to inhibit the odor; add rye bread to broccoli. (The effect seems slight.) The combination of butter and oil does not burn as readily as butter alone. (Another source: The butter part of the mixture burns at the same low temperature as it always did.) Open oysters with a screwdriver instead of an oyster knife. Open oysters with a beer-can opener instead of a screwdriver. Open oysters only after freezing them for fifteen minutes. Do not open oysters by smashing them with a hammer. Give frosted cakes that sultry, molten, silky look with a hair dryer.
Alas, my own coconut cake was still in the embryonic, separated-batter stage. The only thing keeping me from starting over was that I had no eggs. I turned to books and charts specializing in the subject of substitutions. For croutons, substitute popcorn. If you run out of frozen strawberries, resort to fresh fruit! For whipped cream, follow this scientifically intriguing suggestion: slowly add baking soda to sour cream until it reaches the desired sweetness as the acidity is neutralized. (When the crisis was over, I tried it. The combination fizzed unpleasantly in my mouth, then made me gag and choke as it reached my throat.) I much preferred mixing a smashed banana with one stiffly beaten egg white plus sugar to taste. This was less an equivalent or facsimile of whipped cream than a fluffy white alternative topping that tastes reasonably good if you don’t mind risking salmonella.
Of the thousands of substitutions in my collection, only four referred to eggs. If you need to make cookies and lack eggs (and baking powder and milk), you can try one writer’s handy recipe for eggless potato-chip cookies. If you lack whole eggs, simply substitute two yolks plus a tablespoon of water (thanks a million). Grated carrot is a good substitute for eggs in boiled puddings. (I cannot imagine what this means.) The best suggestion of the four was the last: “Snow is an excellent substitute for eggs; two large spoonfuls will supply the place of one egg.” Be sure to take the snow from a clean spot.
A happy thought struck me. Why not turn my catastrophic cake into a triumphant innovation?
On August 26, 1837, King Louis-Philippe and Queen Amélie of France were aboard the first train to run from Paris to Saint-Germain. A banquet was planned at the destination, and the menu included fried potatoes. When the train was late, Chef Colinet removed the slices of potatoes from the hot oil. The potatoes shrank and wrinkled, and Colinet considered joining the great Vatel. But later when he plunged the potatoes again into the sizzling oil, the slices magically puffed up into crisp and golden balloons! These pommes soufflés were Colinet’s greatest triumph. Robert Courtine has called them “the poetry of the potato.”
And I have read that fudge was created by mistake in Baltimore in 1886 when somebody overmixed and undercooked a pot of caramel.
And that tarte Tatin was discovered when the two unmarried Tatin daughters, in the town of Lamotte-Beuvron, just south of Orléans in France, dropped a pie. (The mechanics of this story make no sense; and a similar tarte was already popular throughout the Orléanais.) That Ruth Wakefield invented Toll House Cookies,