by Mary Jo
Such are the intoxicating effects of handing in a book (Done, done, done!!!) that I couldn’t even read the calendar properly. Or perhaps it’s because I had it firmly in mind that my blog was a day next to Thanksgiving, and since I’m mildly dyslexic, my mental hard drive naturally translated that to the day after, not the day before. (Urk!)
So I went off to have my hair done (finished a good book while under the hair baker, hence fun), then stopped at a grocery story (double urk!). And have only just cottoned to the fact that I have failed in my wenchly duty today.
Ah, well. I’d been ruminating on the differences between being a good cook and a good baker, and Thanksgiving might be a good time to talk about that. Because really, though most of us know the basics of cooking and baking, mastery of the two skills does represent different personality types.
A cook can be more improvisational. If you lack mushrooms for that interesting chicken dish, you can probably do without, or maybe substitute bacon bits or something quite different.
Bakers, however, can’t generally improvise as much, at least not without courting disaster. You can add chopped walnuts to a cookie recipe and it will probably be just fine, but fail to have the basic ingredients—flour, eggs, baking powder, et al—and the results may not be pretty. Much less edible! So following a recipe fairly carefully is usually advisable.
I always liked baking, mostly because I liked eating the results. As a Yankee, I’m a pie person, as was my father. (One definition of a Yankee is someone who eats pie for breakfast. Guilty! <G>) My father used to pay me a bit of extra allowance for each pie I made, so Saturday nights, I’d make two for Sunday dinner.
I’ve been meaning to watch the movie Julie and Julia, which is about Julie Powell, a frustrated young New Yorker who decided to jazz up her life by cooking her way through Julia Child’s landmark Mastering the Art of French Cooking. She blogged about the results, and got a book and then a movie out of it.
The movie, I understand, intertwines the life of young Julie (Amy Adams) with Julia Child’s, the latter life based on the book My Life in France, which was compiled by Julia Child’s nephew from her letters and memories. I listened to that book in audio, and loved hearing Julia’s stories.
What struck me most about My Life in France, though, was the realization of how modern cook books are. Yes, recipe books been around for a couple of centuries, but at the same time, cooking was also an apprenticeship system. You trained with a professional cook, or much more often, learned from your mother. If you bought a cookery book, it was usually more for the recipes and it was often assumed that you knew the techniques. (For example: “Elk Stew. Take one elk. Skin and dress. Make stew.”)
What made Mastering the Art of French Cooking so remarkable was the way Julia went through the steps of creating a classic French dish so she could describe exactly what was done. She cooked each dish over and over and OVER until she could describe each step clearly. All of a sudden people around the world could work their way through the recipes, and learn a whole lot about good cooking.
I’m one of the people who did exactly that. The book had been out for several years when I picked up a copy. I was living in England, and while I certainly didn’t try to work my way through all the recipes, I learned how to make good stock by starting with bones and clumps of fresh herbs. I made coq au vin, and chocolate mousse, and beef burgundy and lots of other dishes.
These days I can buy first rate croissants at the local bakery, but then they were a rare and exotic treat. So I followed Julia’s instructions to make croissants, which required layering dough and butter, rolling, flattening, folding, rolling again. There were frequent resting periods in the refrigerator since the dough toughened too much to roll without more rest. (I understood the resting part perfectly by the time I was done. <G>)
My croissants weren’t even remotely crescent shaped, but they had all the yummy flaky layers and were delicious. Yet it wasn’t until many years later that I realized how much what I know about cooking came from those forays into Julia Child. (My mother had many interests but cooking was not on the list. Hence, not much of an apprenticeship for me.)
I haven’t seen Julie and Julia yet, though I will. These days, my cooking ambitions are to have tasty, reasonably healthy food with the minimum of effort. Here’s an example of the kind of cooking I do now. I love making soup, and have a whole file folder within my recipe folder which is just soup.
My Easy but Inelegant Italian Wedding Soup was inspired by visiting the café at the fabulous Missouri Botanical Gardens with Pat Rice in October. The cup of Italian Wedding Soup that I ordered used beef stock, not the more common chicken stock, and I loved the cute little round balls of Israeli couscous, which is a baked pasta about the size of a BB in its dry form.
So I came home, threw this together, and found it good. It’s inelegant because the bits of meatball are chopped from larger commercial ones rather than made individually, but it sure tastes good. And I did mention easy, didn’t I?
Easy but Inelegant Italian Wedding Soup
Ingredients
4 quarts of beef stock
1 - 1 ½ lbs. pre-made Italian meatballs, cut into small pieces (Traditionally, Italian meatballs are made of a blend of beef, sausage, and veal. My local grocer sells them cooked and made on the premises, but frozen bags should be in most supermarkets. At least, they are in Baltimore, which has lots of Italians who like good food.)
about ¾ lb. of carrots, chopped fine. (Not essential, but they add color.)
9 oz. package of fresh spinach, sliced. (I sent it through the slicing attachment of my food processor. Frozen chopped spinach would probably work pretty well, too.)
1-2 cups Israeli couscous or other small pasta like orzo (but the little spherical bits of Israeli couscous look awfully cute.) Vary quantity for desired thickness—two cups is a very thick, hearty soup.
Directions
1) In a big soup pot, bring beef broth to a boil and toss in chopped carrots and cut up meatballs. Simmer half an hour or so until carrots are well cooked.
2. Toss in pasta and sliced spinach and simmer for 10 or 15 minutes. (Longer if you use a larger pasta that takes longer to cook; in that case, you might want to add the spinach a few minutes after the pasta.)
When all is tender, serve hot with grated Parmesan sprinkled on top.
Makes about 16 servings. Good the first day, better the second. Freezes well.
So have a lovely Thanksgiving. hope you have a warm and rewarding ime, abundant blessings to give thanks for, and not so much hassle that it isn’t a good time.
And if you have to do most of the work of preparing a feast—remember that you can always make a nice easy pot of soup at some later date. <G>
So—have you seen Julie and Julia? And is it as much fun as I’ve heard it is?
Mary Jo