The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [79]
One of the most offensive phrases used by nutrition buffs is “empty calories,” applied to such culinary triumphs as the frozen Milky Way bar. I, for one, would rather eat an empty calorie than a toxic one. And what could be emptier than a bowl of bound and blocked raw spinach, cabbage, or peas?
As you might expect, raw vegetables that would otherwise be alluring as rich sources of protein or starch may be equally rich in defensive chemicals that render the protein or starch indigestible. Protease inhibitors in raw turnips, rutabagas, chickpeas, bamboo sprouts, cashews, peanuts, and most beans counteract the enzymes in our bodies that digest protein. In a similar fashion, amylase inhibitors in raw red kidney beans and navy beans make their carbohydrate content unusable.
1990: The Bar-and-Grilling of Gotham
Wood-oven pizzas and grilled everything are now pandemic. Some call it bistromania, but it has nothing to do with bistros. A bistro is not an expensive hamburger-and-chicken joint with shoestring potatoes, red-pepper puree, and five French words on the menu. A bistro is not a bar and grill. (In New York, a bar and grill is not a bar and grill. The Gotham Bar and Grill, for example, is no more a bar and grill than I am.) If there are fewer than, say, fifty true and honest bistros in Paris, how many would you expect to find in New York? Five? The real mania since 1985 has been trattoriamania, the proliferation of informal Italian-style restaurants specializing in pasta, pizza, salads, and postmodern decor. (Nationally, over the past five years the number of Italian restaurants has grown 50 percent, more than any other category.)
“Bistromania” was always just a muddled slogan. What’s really happening now is the Grilling of Gotham. In 1989, according to the National Restaurant Association, nearly half of all restaurant entrées nationwide were broiled, charbroiled, or grilled. Frying, the favorite cooking method five years ago, has been demoted to a weak second. Simmering, poaching, baking, braising, boiling, steaming, and roasting—every one of these classical cooking techniques is now history. New York, for over a century the great center of cosmopolitan cuisine, has finally succumbed to the suburbanization of the kitchen. This is the food of the fifties, of the Eisenhower years, of the nuclear family and the single-family house, of Dads grilling steaks and chickens in backyard America on Moms’ well-deserved day off. It is a democratic kind of cooking that needs no professional training, teeny amounts of hand-eye coordination, a few moments of mise-en-place, even less time upon the flames. The little booklet that came with the grill tells you how to do it. Just don a silly, floppy grease-stained toque and pour a can of kerosene over a pile of charcoal briquettes. Everything tastes terrifically the same—the acrid tang of burning fat and blackened muscle fiber, the haunting scent of the gas station.
Now fish has been added to the grill and sometimes vegetables; potato chips have grown into pancakes, shoestrings, and hash browns. That’s how far we have come in thirty years.
September 1990
The careful reader will notice that each of these salad ingredients acts as an antinutrient only in its raw state. Like some of the toxins we’ll come to later, antinutrients are destroyed by proper cooking. Boiling water dissolves or dilutes chemicals that are soluble in water; high heat denatures many proteins, including most nutrition blockers and some toxins; other toxins quickly oxidize into harmless compounds at high temperatures. It is important to know the right method, temperature, and cooking time for each perilous vegetable. Consult your old wives’ tales for further instructions.
This year we celebrate the forty thousandth anniversary of the miracle of cooking. Current anthropological thought suggests that modern Homo sapiens rapidly displaced the Neanderthals in Europe because Homo sapiens could cook