The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [91]
Most low-fat cookbooks contain long self-congratulatory passages claiming that the author’s revolutionary new way of cooking actually tastes better than real food. This is only rarely true. Sure, many traditional dishes should have been lightened years ago. But the vast majority of low-fat and nonfat makeovers sacrifice at least something in texture, taste, and satisfaction. That is indisputable. The key questions are: What do you give up for what advantage? What do you gain for how much pain? Butter Busters, America’s second most popular cookbook, gives up more than a bit of taste and texture. It gives up food itself.
It could have been called How to Shop for and Throw Together the Trashiest Food on Your Supermarket Shelves into a Low-Fat, Low-Sodium, and Low-Sugar Imitation of High-Fat Junk Food (Warner Books). Pam Mycoskie, who wrote and published the book all by herself in 1992 and then sold it to Warner Books in 1994, leaves nothing to chance. Forty pages are taken up by a shopping guide to the many artificial, chemical-laden, low-fat supermarket ingredients demanded by her recipes. (The guide is divided up according to which stores in the vicinity of Arlington, Texas—her hometown—carry which brands. As this information is of passing interest to most Americans, Warner Books must have been in a great hurry to reach a public voracious for junk food, or was loath, for scholarly reasons, to tamper with the original manuscript.) Pam’s picks include Butter Buds, Egg Beaters, Egg Mates, Better’N Eggs, Pillsbury Lovin’ Lites cake mixes and frostings, Old El Paso fat-free refried beans (doesn’t “refried” mean anything anymore?), ENER-G egg replacer, Texas B-B-Q Seasoned chicken strips, Peter Eckrich Deli “Lite” roast beef slices, Sea Pak Cooked Artificial Crab, Auburn Farms fat-free toaster pastries, and nonfat cheeses from Alpine Lace, Borden, Kraft, Polly-O, and Healthy Choice. There must be a law against calling them cheese. Have you ever tasted this stuff?
With these and other ingredients you can make Sloppy Joe Casserole, Mashed Potato Shell Taco Pie, and Pam’s Sweet Trash. Her Pineapple Salad Surprise contains ketchup, fat-free Miracle Whip, lobster tails, and Cointreau. I baked Pam’s Rich Fudge Brownies because the more opulent Easy Fudge Brownies on the facing page began with a box of Lovin’ Lites fudge brownie mix, which I deemed a form of cheating. As it was, the Rich Fudge Brownies included Sweet ’n Low, Sweet ’n Low brown sugar substitute, Egg Beaters, our old friend Promise Ultra Fat-Free nonfat margarine, and Braum’s Lite fudge topping. Finding most of these ingredients proved tricky for somebody residing so far from Arlington, Texas, and required a tour of nearly every supermarket in lower Manhattan. In the end, the brownies turned out sticky and rubbery and would have had no chocolate taste without the lite fudge topping. Even mediocre brownies have a brief half-life in my house; five days on, the pan of Pam Mycoskie’s Rich Fudge Brownies sits lonely on the kitchen table, nearly intact. These brownies are infinitely shelf-and-table-stable.
I did learn a handy trick from Pam, though it is apparently common in microwave cookbooks: you can cook an entire head of cauliflower in one piece by wrapping it in plastic and microwaving on high power for just six to eight minutes. The results were perfect, ready to sauté in plenty of real olive oil with a little real garlic, not part of Pam’s recipe. Her Egg Beaters Benedict was completely inedible, and her Cherry Cheesecake Delight suffered both from a crust made by crushing one and a half boxes of SnackWell’s Fat-Free Cinnamon Snacks and from a thick layer of Philadelphia fat-free cream cheese, one of the gummiest affronts to the name of cheese ever concocted. Pam’s Potato Pancakes are made from nearly all real food—potatoes, onions, flour, pepper—and were delectable if slightly undersalted when I fried them in olive oil. But sautéed in liquid Butter Buds as the recipe instructs, they are blotchy and grossly undercooked, lacking the fat that would evenly convey the