The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [96]
Even those of us who understand that low-fat diets are unnecessary should consider Medrich’s thoughtful book. The problem is that the fat in chocolate desserts is mostly saturated, the kind found in butter and egg yolks and cream and to a lesser extent in cocoa butter, the kind that wounds, maims, and kills. Cutting back your desserts to 30 percent fat satisfies nobody’s criteria if most of that fat is saturated; both the American Heart Association and the surgeon general limit saturated fat to 10 percent of total calories. Oddly, the nutritional data accompanying Medrich’s recipes leave out numbers for saturated fat. I doubt that this was inadvertent.
Martha Rose Shulman has written several books on low-fat cooking, but Provençal Light may well be her best—and, along with Medrich’s, the best low-fat cookbook of the past year. It is a warm and knowledgeable appreciation of southeastern France and a fine cookbook in its own right; folklore and food are charmingly intertwined in this well-designed and nicely edited book.
Shulman has lived in Provence and traveled extensively through it, and you will find versions of all your Provençal favorites here—from bouillabaisse (hers is the fabled soup from the restaurant Bacon in Cap d’Antibes) to the wonderful gratins and ragouts of the region. She does not entirely ban eggs, moistens her brandade with milk to eliminate some of the oil (a hazardous substitution), cleverly stretches her alternative aioli with mashed potatoes, and bakes her eggplant instead of frying it. But she leaves out bourride (another great fish soup from which she could not artfully remove the fat) and all dishes containing red meat (the region is famous for its fine lamb and often uses a little bacon for flavoring, but Shulman doesn’t eat red meat), and quite unsatisfactorily makes all her tarts with phyllo dough, which has little fat in itself.
This is real food made entirely with natural ingredients. But many of Shulman’s lightened recipes can be vastly improved by the addition of a little olive oil. And the only reason for leaving it out is a pathological, if remunerative, fear of fat. “Like the other cuisines of the Mediterranean, the cuisines of Provence are inherently healthy,” Shulman writes in her introduction. But if this is true, then why monkey with the food?
Take Shulman’s Vegetable Soup with Pistou. You boil together a bouquet of vegetables for one and a half hours; add cooked white beans and some fresh vegetables for crunch; cook for another ten minutes, ladle into bowls, and stir in a tablespoon of intensely aromatic pistou, the Provençal paste of basil, oil, garlic, and cheese. The broth itself is hardy, bland, and slightly sweet; the magnificent pistou transforms it into one of the world’s great soups. Shulman’s recipe is much like those in traditional Provençal cookbooks—three fine versions were published recently, one by Robert Carrier and two by Richard Olney—except that she leaves out most of the olive oil, about a tablespoon in each serving. Without this, her broth lacked flavor, the garlic was caustic, the basil harsh and minty, her beans and pasta bland—until, like the conductor of an orchestra, a good dribble of golden olive oil brought these instruments together into warm and rousing vegetable concerto.