The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [20]
Parboil the rice by bringing 2 quarts of water and 2 tablespoons of salt to a boil in a 4-quart pot (nonstick is best), adding the presoaked rice, and boiling for 3 to 5 minutes, stirring every so often, until the grains just lose their brittle core but are still quite firm. Drain the rice and rinse it in several cups of warm water.
In the same pot, melt the butter. Pour half of it into a small bowl and set it aside. Take 2 cups of the cooked rice, mix it in a bowl with the yogurt, and spread it on the bottom of the pot over the butter. Sprinkle a layer of lentils on the rice, then a layer of raisins, dates, and onions, then another layer of rice. Continue until all the ingredients are used up, sprinkling the remaining teaspoon of Persian allspice mixture between layers. Fluff the rice as you add it. Reduce the diameter of each layer so that the ingredients taper into a pyramid in the pot.
Cover and cook over medium heat for 10 minutes so that a delicious crust will form on the bottom of the rice. Then uncover, pour the reserved melted butter over the rice, put a dish towel over the pot, cover again, and cook over low heat for 50 minutes. Remove from the heat but do not disturb the cover; place the pot on a cold, wet dish towel for 5 minutes (which is meant to help loosen the crust). Then uncover the pot and transfer the contents by the cupful to a serving platter, mounding the rice and other ingredients into a fluffy pyramid. When only the crust remains on the bottom of the pot, dislodge it with a knife and spatula, and serve in one or two pieces (if you’re lucky) on a separate plate. Surround the rice and lentils with the meat mixture and serve.
April 1993
Why Aren’t the French Dropping Like Flies?
Last year, while browsing through the latest government report on diet and health, I came across a graph that left me flabbergasted.
In little black bars across the page it traced the incidence of deaths from coronary heart disease in twenty-seven industrialized countries. Japan did the best, which is no surprise because the Japanese eat lots of fish, rice, and little green things. But the identity of the runner-up astonished me. Right behind Japan, with the second-lowest rate on earth—lower than Italy with its olive oil cuisine, half of Scandinavia with its high-fish diet, and a mere fraction of the United States, the most finicky country in the world about what we put in our mouths—was, incredibly, France!
Impossible, I gasped. Everybody knows that the French wallow in butter, cream, and egg yolks; gobble pork, cheese, goose fat, and sausages; and guzzle wine like fish. If the French have the second-lowest rate of fatal coronary heart disease in the world—and the lowest in the Western world—then everything the U.S. surgeon general, her predecessor, and their battalions of government doctors want us to believe about saturated fats and cholesterol must be dead wrong. And if this is so, the surgeon general would have resigned in disgrace long ago, which she didn’t.
I telephoned a doctor friend of mine, an expert in nutrition who never tires of frightening people about the devastating effects of dietary fats, and asked him the obvious question: “If you’re so smart, why aren’t the French dropping like flies?”
Maybe the French actually eat more austerely than we think, he suggested. Or maybe it’s genetic. Perhaps the French government collects health statistics differently from the way we do. He feverishly proposed every excuse that came to mind, while avoiding what for him would be an awful truth: that we may not need to give up sumptuous food to stay healthy.
The genetic argument is hopelessly feeble because the French are not a homogeneous people like the Japanese. But do the French eat as richly as tourists imagine? After only twenty telephone calls to U.N. agencies here and in Europe, I found a statistician in Rome who was willing to send me the most recent Food Balance Sheets of the Food and Agriculture Organization.