Locally Grown Girl

muerte: dulce y sabrosa

Six years ago today, I was in Ecuador--specifically, the Napo river basin--having an adventure. It came nearly in the middle of my three weeks in the country, but since November 2 is my brother's birthday and Dia de los Difuntos, the precise date is pretty memorable (unlike, say, my wedding anniversary). The day started with sharing our nature guide's thick, cold fruit drink called colado morado (her grandmother had a pitcher delivered out to her at the lodge), along with delicious little pan de muerto rolls. The day ended with stress and sadness, because some guys with guns decided to rob the lodge where we were staying. There were a few hours spent under a table in the dining lodge, alternating terrifying adrenaline rushes with giddy attempts to play whispered "I Spy" (you can't actually spy much when hiding under a table). Two men were shot, one of them killed. At least one other spent the night in the jungle, hiding from the jerks-with-guns, and any number of staff were tied up in the kitchen while the tourists were in comparative comfort and being coerced at one point to eat our then-cold dinners. We lost only cash; other travelers lost passports along with cash. We got out OK, after a number of hours seeing too many people at their worst and developing a long-standing appreciation for certain members of the British Empire, who are fine under-the-table companions if you ever happen to be in need of some. Once we were all back in Quito, we continued hanging around together for a few days--including a night at what I remember as an Ecuadorian Marie Callendar's, watching a teen pop cover band play while their grandparents recorded the night for posterity. 

That particular November 2 has gotten me to observe the day a bit in the passing years. I'm neither Latino nor Catholic; my dead relatives tend to be donated to science, or cremated and scattered, and ritual of any kind makes me preposterously uncomfortable (it's why I got married in the back of a limo). But still, there are a couple of recipes I have that I make annually around this time. They're good separately or together. I hope that neither of them are ever served to you while you're hiding under a dining table, trying not to catch the eye of the guy with the assault rifle. 

Colado Morado
Normally, this drink is made in a large quantity, but my husband doesn't like it all, which means I'm on my own; this makes 2-3 moderate servings. It's thick, dark purple, and sweet in a fruity way, with a lot of depth from the spices. If you're in a river basin near the equator, serve it cold; if you're in Seattle, and it's gray and drizzly, serve it warm. The only naranjilla pulp I can find in Seattle is from Goya; they usually have it at Saar's, the Rainier Valley Viet Wah, and the Mexican Grocery at Pike Place Market. 
1 20 ounce can crushed pineapple, with juice
2 cups water
2 tsp cassia chunks or 1 cinnamon stick, broken into several pieces
2 whole cloves
2 allspice berries
1/4 cup brown sugar
2 wide strips lemon zest
2 wide strips orange zest
2 tbsps corn starch or arrowroot
1/2 cup frozen naranjilla pulp 
3 tbsp seedless blackberry jam 

Combine the undrained crushed pineapple and water in a medium saucepan. Place the spices in a tea infuser, and add the infuser to the pot along with the strips of citrus zest. Simmer over medium-low for about 25 minutes, then remove the spices and zest from the pot. Scoop about 1/4 cup of the spiced fruit mixture into a small bowl, and stir in the cornstarch to make a slurry. Return the slurry to the pot, stirring well to blend. Add the naranjilla pulp and the jam to the pot, and stir to combine. Simmer for about 10 minutes, until it's warm through and slightly thick. Serve immediately if you like, or chill overnight in the fridge and serve cold the next day. 

The buns I bake have the stronger flavors of traditional Mexican pan de muerto, but look more like simple pan dulce. You could certainly mold them into little skulls or babies if you like. I am too lazy. 

Pan de Muerto Dulce | makes about 15 sweet little death buns

2 1/4 tsp instant dry yeast
3/4 cup lukewarm water
3/4 cup sugar
3 1/2 cups flour
3/4 tsp salt
2 tsp cinnamon
3 tbsp unsalted butter, melted and cooled
2 large eggs, at room temperature
very finely grated zest from 1 medium orange

Dissolve the yeast in the water and set aside for a couple minutes while you prep the other ingredients.
Blend the sugar, flour, salt and cinnamon together in the bowl of a stand mixer. In a separate small bowl, beat together the butter, eggs and orange zest.
Pour the bubbly yeast into the dry ingredients, and mix gently with the paddle attachment. Switch to the dough hook and blend in the butter/egg mixture. Beat for a few minutes, until the dough is smooth and pliable. It should be fairly soft and stretchy.
Butter a large bowl, plop the dough into it, cover with a clean towel and let rise for 70-120 minutes, until it’s doubled (I use my proofing drawer, so it’s pretty fast. 90 minutes is a good average time).
Punch it down, and let it rest for a few minutes, otherwise it’s kind of a pain to shape. 

Line a giant baking sheet with parchment or a silicone mat.
Pull the dough into 15 equal-sized little balls, perhaps 2.5 tbsp of dough each. Let the little dough balls sit on the counter and think about their sins while you make the topping. 

The Topping
1 stick unsalted butter, melted
1 cup sugar
1 cup flour
1 tbsp orange juice
1/2 tsp vanilla
1 egg white

Stir the sugar and flour into the melted butter, until the mixture is smooth and forms a loose lump in the bowl. Stir in the orange juice and vanilla until they’re completely incorporated. Beat in the egg white. What you’ll have is pale yellow, somewhat grainy and buttery, but more of a dough than a batter.

Now, return to your contemplative little dough balls. Flatten each one firmly—not smashed, but reasonably flat—with the palms of your hands. Place them on the lined baking sheet with a couple inches between them on all sides.  Once all the little buns have been flattened and lined up, scoop about 1 tablespoon of topping onto each bun. I The topping is fairly soft, but I still pat it out to mostly cover the top of the bun. You want maybe 1/4-1/2” thick layer of sugary topping. Cover the buns with a cloth and set the pan in a warmish spot, so they do a quick final rise while the oven preheats.

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.  Bake the buns on the center rack for 10-13 minutes; the buns will be light brown around the edges and the topping will be bubbly but not browning. 

Let cool briefly and start gobbling. If your family doesn’t eat all 15 at the very moment, let them cool to room temp and pop them into the freezer, where they’ll last at least a month. To reheat, wrap them snugly in foil and pop into the oven at 300 for 15-20 minutes.

Dreaming of Sushi

I finally saw Jiro Dreams of Sushi earlier this week. It's wonderful. It was also harder to watch than I expected. There are several scenes at what I assume to be the giant, famous Toyko fish market. Some of those scenes, a couple times throughout the course of the movie, are in a giant warehouse partially filled with frosty, headless bluefin tuna carcasses. For me, that warehouse was as devastating as those terrible photos of faceless dead elephants, killed for their tusks. Or, terrible but in a different way, those PETA videos of downer cows at the slaughterhouse. The things humans to do our planet's other inhabitants. 

When it's first shown, the bluefin auction is in the context of excellent fish, of the importance of beautiful tuna to what's considered the finest sushi place in the world. When Jiro talks about the differences of lean and fatty tuna, and the shifting preferences he's seen in his lifetime, I felt like I was listening to someone remember how delicious the dodo was, or how much prettier hats were when they featured Carolina parakeets. I was totally, and not very silently, judging this 85-year-old man...and his entire culture, too. Enjoy that government-sponsored humpback whale steak while you're at it! You might as well have a trash can made out of an elephant's foot! Etc. 

The story moved on to other things (I also have a hard time with the octopus bits; on the rare occasions when I have eaten it, I feel like I might be eating Einstein, or Monet, or Garcia Marquez.) and I calmed down. Then in the last third of the movie, there's a return to the tuna auction, this time with commentary from Jiro about how there are so many less tuna than there used to be, and he rattles off several other species that are very hard to find these days. He says that chefs have to find replacements for many things, but that there isn't really a replacement for bluefin. He says that fisheries shouldn't take so many. He says that when he was a young adult with kids, sushi was expensive enough that they did not eat it. Then somebody invented the California roll in the early 80s, and now there's minimart sushi and conveyor belt sushi and it's a terrible thing. 

Other than rejecting crappy grocery store sushi and pestering friends to do the same, I had never really considered the relation between the California roll and today's decimated bluefin population. These days, the roll is usually made with fake crab, which is made from pollock, which has its own problems. 

My attitude about fish is essentially the same as my attitude about other meat: it's OK to be expensive. It's OK to not eat it very often in order to afford the higher prices. It's something that should be amazing, if you're going to eat it all--otherwise, what's the point? A meal at Jiro's is about $300, or it was when the movie was completed. That is a crazy amount of money. But that's also one way of keeping bluefin from going extinct. At the same time, I hope there is at least one up-and-coming genius who's doing such brilliant things with all-vegetable sushi that maybe it'll be the next big craze.  

Esperanto Cuisine

Our back yard butts up against three other back yards (one of them on a hill above our retaining wall), and the neighbors to the north sit snug against two small apartment buildings of perhaps 5 units apiece. The neighbors to the south are also next to an apartment building, of maybe a dozen units. So our house has a lot of "neighbors" even if we really only have 2 "next door" neighbors. 
Off the top of my head, I can think of 5 countries of origin for these neighbors, including a broad assortment of racial and geographical backgrounds of the United States. I regularly hear languages that I am pretty sure are Turkish and one that is likely Somali, along with Spanish, Chinese, Tagalog and (American) English.
There is only one regular cooking smell. I know that smell. It is chicken-flavored Top Ramen.  

allergens

When I was a kid, I would get hives if I ate strawberries. That went away, and I got hives from eating chocolate. That also went away. I know that these went away because I ate the food again. Then the itchy mouth that I would get from pecans and walnuts turned into anaphylaxis. That has not gone away. Then I ate some amazing oysters, and ended up with violent vomiting for 36 hours and very painful weeklong rash that covered more than half my body. It clicked that an earlier bout of what was thought to be food poisoning might have been a reaction to some cooked mussels. 

I'm careful about such things, but I'm also more informed than most. I've done a lot of research and know that there isn't really such a classification as "tree nut"--there are drupes, like almonds and pistachios (related to stone fruits), and hazelnuts are related to birch trees, while chestnuts are closer to oaks and beeches. Cashews are their own weird thing, as are coconuts. Pine nuts are the seeds from any number of pine tree species. I can eat all of these with nothing but delight. Brazil nuts, pecans and English walnuts send me into anaphylaxis. No idea about macadamia nuts; I've never had one. When I first ate a pistachio, I did so when I had my epi-pen in hand, and a clear schedule for the evening, and the consent of my husband, who was up for rushing me to the ER if necessary. I totally get that I'm the weirdo with this attitude. Life is a gift, and life is also a short-term problem. I wear my seat belt, but I don't live in a bubble. 

I also know a lot of people who lie about allergies. Being allergic is a socially acceptable way to get out of eating something you don't want to; this is not a secret. It's seen as more polite than just saying you don't like something, chefs in particular here it all the time. There are also a lot of parents, some I know well and some I only read about, who claim life-threatening allergies in their kids, when what they really mean is "when I took my kid to be tested, the doctor scared the crap out of me." The kid has never actually had anaphylaxis, they simply had a very reactive test done. Allergies being as changeable as they are, a test when they're 5 could be irrelevant when they are 6; in my experience as a patient, allergists are not always forthcoming about this, because they don't want to be liable in case of a horrible incident.

As a non-parent, there are days when "life-threatening allergies" sounds not unlike "my kid is a genius." Some of what I hear presented as fact--like a kid can't even be in the same room as a peanut--I really wonder about. I find it interesting that I can physically handle walnuts with no problems at all, but any sort of contact between nut juice and those oh-so-absorbent tissues in my mouth has my gums bleeding, my eustachian tube on fire, and my mouth exploding in pain within seconds. An actual piece of nut, chewed and swallowed, equals a visit from an EMT.  Yes, you over-protective parent folks, your kid will also get into Hogwarts, win an Olympic medal and play Carnegie Hall--assuming they're not killed by a nearby peanut in elementary school. When parents get into those absurd one-upsmanship conversations about how special and/or fragile their darling child is--well, as someone who is generally an eavesdropper in those conversations, they sound like idiots. Today's parents tend to be a fearful bunch. And when you combine this fear with the nationwide tendency to dumb down the food our kids eat--chicken nuggets, pre-cut apple slices, mac-n-cheese--well, it looks like another form of helicopter parenting, and as such deserves no approval. 

This sounds like I am a cruel and compassionless jerk, which I am not. I go to great lengths to feed people food they can eat, and that they will like, even though I have friends and family members who are variously low-carb, low-fat, low-salt, low glycemic index, vegan, vegetarian, pescetarian, soy-free, dairy-free, gluten-free and sugar-free--or just run-of-the-mill picky eaters--and it is absurdly complicated to feed them all. I also hope that my cavalier attitude about my own allergies provides a different perspective. Having a food allergy is not like having cancer. It's easy to work around, it's not a death sentence, it's not a "fight" to "win" sort of idea, and for the most part it's not even that big of a deal. It's more like being a natural redhead--you're a bit of a freak of nature, and you should live with it for a while, until your body changes again. And yes, I just called myself a freak of nature, and I do not hate myself or those I know with allergies. It's not a great evolutionary tactic, you know? 

It's sweet and well-intentioned when parents go to lengths to provide kids' classrooms with "allergen-free food" but I wonder--how are the kids who can't eat almonds cleared to eat apricot fruit leather? What about kids like me, who got hives from strawberries, or the guy I know in England who's allergic to pears, of all things, or the kid who thanks to a rough start in life has oral aversion and eating is a real struggle? How do veggies and a bowl of hummus help a woman who can't eat garlic? The made-up term "allergen-free" relieves some parents, but it certainly doesn't mean it's all-inclusive. If the US suddenly got an influx of SE Asian or Japanese immigrants, whose populations have a much higher rate of rice allergies, then suddenly the gluten-free mixes would be a big problem. And meanwhile, Seattle's in the midst of a whooping cough epidemic because we've lost our herd immunity, and I've read that Vashon Island has lost its herd immunity to polio. You don't get your kid immunized against polio, but you worry about peanuts? Your theoretical priorities are utterly fucked up. 

What I would love to see: a culture where medical science helped people cope with fear, rather than inspired fear. Inclusiveness without smugness, and celebratory group activities that didn't revolve entirely around food. A balance of personal responsibility and societal support. A new way of talking about food, so people didn't have to lie about allergies to be served food they liked. An agreement that there is no such thing as perfect health, and that minor ailments like diarrhea, a rash or a headache are both avoidable and not the end of the world if they do happen. 

Columbia City: 2012 update

When we moved down here in 2009, and were living in the house while we were gutting it, we ate out a lot. We eat out less often now, but it's no less thrilling. Columbia City in specific, and the Rainier Valley in general, is really delicious. I wanted to update my original list. Some of the original listings are on this list, too. 
From north to south along Rainier, I've tried:
Pho Bac: pho shouldn't taste strongly of peanut butter. 
Thien Phat: Awesomely good tofu bun. Acceptable pho. 
Pho Rainier: It makes the neighborhood smell like pho on some days, which is nice. The actual soup is nothing special--a little bland, a little salty.  
Taco truck in Columbia Plaza: Not certain of the name. Good carne asada, no pork, really delicious  champurrado, which has been nice given our colder-than-usual weather. 
El Sombrero: Sometimes, you just need a big plate of cheese. And/or a mango daquiri. Sweet servers. 
Geraldine's Counter: My favorite French toast in the world. Served all day! 
La Medusa: Terrific pasta, tons of seasonal changes. Not all experiments are successful, but usually very, very good. 
Columbia City Bakery: I get hooked on different offerings. Love their ham/pickle sandwich, their savory breads, their morning buns and their apricot-hazelnut cookies (I even got them to give me the cookie recipe for the cookbook.)
Island Soul: Great happy hour fried snacks, not so crazy about the rest of the menu--like the entrees. Awesome po'boys at lunch; they use CC Bakery potato rolls, which is a very good idea. 
Lottie's: The food is pretty bad, but it's a nice hangout for a drink or two. 
Columbia City Ale House: Exceptionally good chicken sandwich and Reuben. Also, no kids, which can be wonderful. I like the schooners of beer, too. (It comes in pints?)
La Teranga: My first experience of Senegalese food. I am crazy for it--yapp, baobab juice, broken rice, tangy flavors, tons of lamb and beef and vegetables--it's also tiny. Like, 5 two-tops and no way that there's room for all 10 butts at once. 
Wabi Sabi: I had a great spicy tuna salad here, and perfectly terrible sushi rice. I also went on a bluefin rant, because on my last visit, they were still serving it. Don't eat bluefin, people! 
The Spice Room: Thai that's a bit more elegant than the usual. The "adventurous" menu has some particular favorites, but I like quite a bit of the menu as a whole--nice curries, good noodles, a few cocktails. 
Tutta Bella: I can get take-out bottles of wine with my pizza. Oh, happiness. Maybe even better: they open at 6am and serve Macrina pastries with what I find to be the best, most consistently excellent, espresso in the city. 
The Royal Room: I've only been in to this new jazz club for happy hour. Nice fries, kind of odd mezze plate. It's OK, not great, but they keep making changes to the menu to hopefully make it all better. 
Full Tilt Ice Cream: Their ice cream is awesome, and cheap, and there are weird flavors and basics. Coffee Oreo is my overall favorite so far, but I like 'em all. A friend calls this "vegan deluxe", too--they do tons of non-dairy flavors on a regular basis, always 3 and sometimes more. 
Afrikando Banadir: Famous-ish chef Jacque Torres is back in the kitchen. More Senegalese food, which I really like. It's halal, and there's a delicious pineapple yogurt drink that I could have every day. Haven't been in for breakfast yet, but soon. 
El Pilon: Tiny little Puerto Rican place with a rather limited, and generally tasty, menu. Love the pork chop. 
Kawali Grill: Ate coconut fried chicken while listening to a bilingual live band cover Patsy Cline in English and Tagalog. I might move in. 
Los Padrillos Taco Truck: Some of my favorite carnitas in town. 
Mawadda: I've had the best falafel of my life, and the worst. Best: tiny sesame seeds for extra flavor, rich, soft texture, crispy-hot outsides. Worst: heavy hand with cinnamon, undercooked, dense/wet texture. Nice man, good chai, excellent use of garlic. 
Pabla: Vegetarian Indian. Fluffiest naan ever; food tends to blandness. 
Torero's: Mostly a plate of cheese, but they make hot, fresh flour tortillas all day long that are very good. Worth going just for those, if you like flour tortillas. Also worth going if you like listening to a man order a few too many martinis and argue with his wife. It's in Renton. 

Off Rainier, I've tried:
Saint Dames: Vegetarian place on MLK and Alaska. Great pepper-onion-cheese sandwich, great cocktails, sometimes they miss the bar for my ominvorous self but lots to like. 
Bananas Grill: I like their crunchy falafel very much. Good tea and excellent (free) lentil soup. Haven't explored the menu much--it's Somali mixed with fries and halal burgers. 
Awash: Ethiopian bar/restaurant. I've rarely disliked Ethiopian food, so my preferences are more like "is this a nice place to eat, and does the food take forever to arrive?" This is a big, plain, slightly dusty, room, so it works for groups but less that perfect cleanliness might be off-putting if that's how you roll. The food took long enough that I was grumpy about it. 
Rookies: A sports bar I actually like. Terrific service, comfy booths, a kid-friendly side and a bar side, great burger, waffle fries, and delicious gorgonzola dressing. Also, their breakfast potatoes are tater tots, which are crispy-delicious--and I usually hate tots.
Empire Espresso: Bad vegan doughnuts, generally good coffee and the panini are nice for breakfast. People lose their minds over the waffles; they have a bit of cornmeal and are very light. 
Jones BBQ: First meal I ate in the new house, thanks to friends bringing takeout. I do love that brisket, but I think the quality used to be better than it is now.
Solom: A small Eritrean place at the corner of 39th/Pearl/Rainier. I've only had the vegetarian platters, and it's good and cheap. Nice spicy tea, too. Nice, small room, with lots of windows and a few booths. They just added a lunchtime buffet, which is smart for Ethiopian stew-y dishes. 

 

grumbling

I should apparently change this to the food/grammar blog. But please, bear with me a moment: Refrigerator is a fairly modern word. I know my grandmothers both had iceboxes. My dad might've been a teenager before getting one (he's now 80-something), and they were becoming slowly more common through the 20s and 30s as different types of cooling systems were invented. (If you really care, go enjoy this Timeline of Low-Temperature Technology at Wikipedia).

Anyway. The fridge didn't really come into being as ubiquitous until post-WW2. So the word "fridge" is quite recent. 
So why the hell does it have a d, and word refrigerator does not?
I think since it's so recent the general excuse of "English is a terrible language" doesn't really fly. This is more like willful idiocy.  

sugar in my bowl

Recently, Schultzie at Starbucks gave a very nice speech, making sure that the world knew that the company he heads up is in favor of Washington's marriage equality law--the one that's coming up for a popular vote in November. It was a good speech, and a great corporate policy. And, duh, some conservatives I strongly disagree with promptly tried to get a boycott going (that is not a link to their site. That is a link to The Advocate, writing about the org that is trying to create a boycott). 

So, I do something I never do: I went to Starbucks and bought a drink. With Cap'n, who barely ever buys any sort of drink from any sort of espresso bar. The last time I bought from Starbucks, it was in an airport. And it was possibly 2006, in Atlanta--Cap'n and I still make fun of the barista saying "howa aybayout a nahca care-a-mell lah-tay?" I know I don't like their coffee--my dislike goes back to the 1989 and hasn't changed--so I ordered chai. Cap'n, who has a fondness for the milkshake sort of sugary treat now and again, ordered a mocha frappacino. We went to the Starbucks down the street, the one that was put in by Magic Johnson, back when my 'hood was one of the areas he was investing in as part of his Take Back The Hood campaign, or whatever it was called. There are nice murals inside, and it's always busy, and has a black-to-white customer ratio that is basically the opposite of the 2 nearby independently owned coffee places (Empire Espresso and Columbia City Bakery). I absolutely would enjoy sitting here. There is more floor space, more quiet, and more comfy chairs than in the indies.

The drinks were horrendous. I've never had chai so sweet in my life--it was sweeter than the butterbeer I made using cream soda and butterscotch syrup, for god's sake. I sipped a bit, as it was warm out, and this was cold, and I was thirsty, but almost all of it was thrown away/recycled. Later, I compared it to making a $10 political donation, so I wasn't as pissed off at the badness of the drink.

Cap'n made a point of telling the barista why we were there, and she gave us a big smile and some adorable awkward mumbly confessional bits, and said she was really happy about that speech, too, and that she'd had a number of customers come in and say the same. It felt like our own little It Gets Better project moment. According to what I read in political news, brown folks of various shades are statisically more likely to not be down with gay civil rights. All I can say is: at least one multi-race barista will be damn sure voting to approve marriage rights this fall. And I hope that her regulars at Starbucks vote with her. I will vote with her, but my coffee dollars have returned to Tutta Bella--who, by the way, is a huge supporter of basically every awesome Blue State cause (and official) that we have, including marriage rights. 

It's a different way to vote with my dollars than I normally do. I'm glad I did it once, and I think it's especially worth doing if you don't live in Seattle's urban core--just tell the barista why you're there. Something like "I've read about a boycott after Howard Schultz's speech on marriage rights, and I wanted to get in here and support that speech." Your verbal support might really mean something to someone who hears you say the words.  

Cap'n, frowning: I don't think I like this. This ham tastes really weird. 
Me, puzzled: That is corned beef. You big dope. 

It is times like this that I remember Cap'n's utter horror when I said something like, "oh, there was more than one moon walk? I had no idea."  And then secretly amuse myself by thinking how it's totally reasonable to miss a few decades of the space program. But how on earth can someone confuse ham and corned beef?

Priorties, people!  

Baking: A Manifesto

I want to lay out my arguments for something I've been insisting on for years to individuals. The conversation goes something like this:
Friend: I'm intimidated by baking. You have to be so precise. It's not like cooking. Cooking is art; baking is science. 
Me: You are wrong. Stop justifiying your fear and/or willful ignorance. Take this warm, freshly baked cookie and shut up.

Depending on the person, I may be slightly more polite or encouraging, but that's only on the outside. 

This whole "baking is a science, cooking is an art" idea is one of the biggest myths of the food world. They both have absolute rules, and they both have basic techniques that allow tremendous flexibility within a framework. Both are based on chemistry and physics and a touch of botany and biology (microbiology, in the case of yeast baking). Both, in the hands of the right person, are an art. 

What are the origins of this myth? It all got going around the turn of the 20th century, when numerous baking-related shifts were happening in this country, coupled with the world-changing scientific developments of the Industrial Revolution. Between the 1860s and 1900s, the "domestic arts" became the "domestic sciences." As part of the efforts of first wave feminists to have women's work recognized as having equal value with men's work, schools were springing up all over the East Coast, concerned with teaching future cooks and housekeepers about germ theory (first presented to the world by Pasteur in 1864) and how and why to use measuring cups (invented in 1879). Precision was key, and imprecision could be deadly--that's how critical women's work became. Louisa May Alcott fans should recognize these ideas--just think of Rose learning how to make "a wholesome loaf" for her beloved uncle, or the patty pans of Little Men. 

The American Women's Home (1869) by Catherine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe is a great example of this--suggesting that Mother's bread was frequently a blackened and inedible blob, and possibly unhealthy to boot; bread baked by immigrant maids was likely to cause the family to drop dead on the spot. The book refers to "savages" boiling lumps of flour and water and saying "Man eat dis. He no die." In the same chapter, they write "the unknown horrors of dyspepsia from bad bread are a topic over which we willing a veil." By turning to science, poor ignorant mothers and even poorer maids everywhere could spare their families or future employers malnutrition, disease, and those unknown horrors of dyspepsia.

Yes, the insistence on science in the kitchen affected cooking, too--resulting in generations of tough, overcooked meat. But bread was more than half the diet for most of America (the Beechers considered bread to be the fundamental item for their chapters on healthy food and good cooking), and baking benefitted more directly from the use of measuring cups, so science took over baking to a larger degree than in cooking. Good Housekeeping began publishing in 1885, and opened its test kitchen in 1900; I dug up a fine GH lesson in breadmaking from 1912 that manages to be funny, helpful, guilt-inducing and vaguely terrifying all at once. 

In 1906, the Pure Food Act came into being. Today, we think of this as devoted to the meatpacking industry, but there's another broad component: the PFA made it illegal to make, move or sell adulterated food. Today, that means melamine from China--but in 1906, it primarily meant shoddy bakers making their bread cheaper by adding chalk or sawdust or whatever was cheap and vaguely flour-like in composition.

There was plenty of public fury over cheating bakers, but rather than encouraging city riots against neighborhood bread shops, the more general tone tried to be one of education, tied to everyone's favorite teacher, consumer-driven shame. Good Housekeeping created its Bureau of Food, Sanitation and Health in 1913. Today, a word association game would add in the words "meat" and "bacteria"--but again, Americans ate drastically less meat a century ago than they did today. Their word association would lead them to add "germs", "canned goods" and "bread." 

The PFA also affected flour companies. A 1920s cookbook from Salina, Kansas that belonged to my great-grandmother (it's too fragile to scan, or I would supply images) includes several ads for flour. There's "the old reliable family flour" versus "scientifically milled from select Kansas turkey hard wheat" versus "success in your kitchen is assured if you use Robin's Best Flour". There's also a "scientific rotary fruit and vegetable press" (it's just a food mill)...and in the realm of irrelevant oddities, there's an ad for "milk-fed poultry." These ads laid the groundwork for my last point in the myth building. 

We can't escape baking mixes. The earliest were for custard, followed by pancakes and biscuits; cakes were later, kicking off in the 1930s but not really taking off until after World War II. For comparison, Hamburger Helper--the closest cooking version of a baking mix I can think of--wasn't introduced until 1971! I've read that the removal of bad-tasting powdered eggs were key in making the baking mixes popular, in part because of the taste but also because, supposedly, women wanted to feel like they were doing more than just adding water to a mix. The interesting thing that is tied to these mixes is the decades-long ad campaign targeted towards promoting their convenience and reliability--which nicely followed up on the earlier messages from the flour companies. By the time women began working out of the home in larger numbers (around the time that Hamburger Helper came into being), cake mixes got the missing touch of guilt--you might work, but you can still show your kids you love them with a cake, which is just as perfect and capable as you are yourself. 

What we've got is 130 years of baking-related fear, driven in part by genuine food safety issues, but primarily by advertising campaigns. It's absurd, and certainly not what the creators of "domestic science" schools intended. It's time to get over it. 

I've baked nearly my whole life; when I begged for an Easy-Bake oven, mom told me to use the stove. My brother and I were very early readers, and when I was about 4, we shared his Betty Crocker kid's cookbook--I loved making snickerdoodles. Around the age of 10, we had a discussion about why most of the jars in mom's spice cabinet didn't show up in our cookie recipes; the result was god-awful oregano cookies. The holiday classic Chocolate Crinkles, we still call Chocolate Glop Cookies, because the first time we baked them, we missed the line about "refrigerate for at least 3 hours." They were still tasty--just thin and chewy, and not very pretty. I still have accidents, like the time I used double the salt in my regular (very brown sugar heavy) chocolate chip cookies and everyone went nuts--so hello, salted caramel chocolate chip cookies. 

The rules that exist in baking are no more difficult or stringent than those for cooking. The technique for puff pastry is no more complicated than properly butterflying a chicken. Sauces are flexible, and can be adjusted at the last second for flavor--so can cookies, right up to the point that you put them in the oven. More vanilla or salt? A bit more flour? Not lemony enough, needs more juice and/or zest and/or oil? I do that all the time. Just like cooking, you can't actually undo what you've done, but there's plenty of tinkering. And pie crust? Good lord, it's a little different every time you make it. So is marinara sauce.

The importance of measuring cups has lately been overtaken by people insisting that scales are vastly superior to measuring cups. This is simply a sign that nerds rule the world, not that you can't bake delicious things without a scale. Case in point: I tested a doughnut recipe for a friend, and didn't quite get that her flour measuring instructions weren't the dip/sweep method. What I ended up with had too much flour--more like a deep-fried cinnamon roll. Obviously, this is not a bad thing to eat; my neighbors happily gobbled what my own household couldn't finish. Many people might even prefer my accident to a doughnut; it had a lovely tender crunch rather than the soft, light cushion that is a Pershing. Is it what the recipe developer intended? Not at all. Was I lazy, confused and imprecise? Yep. Was it delicious? Absolutely. 

And really--isn't the goal of all bakers to make delicious things to eat? It's no more a precise science than all cooking. Learn the minimal basic rules, follow a few recipes, come up with your own ideas, and go from there. Just don't put oregano in the cookies. 

unfair

I tend to think about my food intake only in terms of what tastes good, and what I'm in the mood to eat. There will be an occasional week when I live on candy; there might be another week when all I eat is tea and homemade half-wheat bread. I go on Thai food binges, Tastykake binges, potato salad binges, granola binges, shakshouka binges, kale binges, or even sugar pea and fresh cherry binges. Every week is likely to bring at least one day of a 90% cheese diet. It's been this way for a long time, although the dishes vary on what I've newly discovered and (commonly as a young adult), what I can afford. 

For more than a decade, I've been what I think of as a too-regular user of restaurants. I was a food critic back in 2000-2002, and since then much of my job has revolved to some degree around professionally-cooked food, with all its secret butter and salt, and frequently giant portions and generous amounts of booze. I've come to realize in the last couple of years that in comparison to my slightly younger friends, I really don't eat out that often. It's weird to me that people I like would rather eat grocery store sushi than stir-fry some vegetables in about 10 minutes, but that's how it seems to be. 

It was 2002ish that a physician's assistant and I had an entertaining exchange about my job and my body. Me: I'm a restaurant critic. Her: So how come you not fat? Me: Well, I weigh more than I should. Her, with the pursed mouth, tilted-down chin and raised eyebrows that signify Truths Getting Told: Honey, we allllll weigh more than we should. How come you not fat? That bit of awesomeness was about 20 pounds ago, give or take. I'd be surprised if she said that today; that extra 20 pounds pushes me into the realm I think of as officially fat. I don't fret about it; when the sun shines again, I'll be walking more and gardening more and most of that 20 will fade away and all my pants will be saggy once more. But as I get older, I have stopped to consider that perhaps it's time to think about the details of nutrtion a little bit, rather than assuming that I can--Tastykake binges aside--trust my cravings to steer me towards whatever my body happens to be in need of. 

So, having a new doctor and it being a couple years since I went through the medical basics, I just went in for a thorough set of blood tests, checking my liver, cholesterol, glucose--all those things that based on my diet, one would expect to find troublesome. Nope. Cholesterol's awesome, with nearly ideal division of hdl/ldl/triglycerides. Glucuse is smack-dab in the middle of a very broad range of acceptable. All the little minerals are right where all the little minerals should be. I do note that my total cholesterol, while still completely fine, has gone up slightly over the years, so I think I might stop using half-and-half in my tea every morning. Will it destroy my quality of life to switch to whole milk? I doubt it. And if that little change keeps the number steady from year to year, then awesome. 

Considering that Cap'n's in great shape--no "I weigh more than I should" quotes from him--and has cholesterol that's more than 100 points higher than mine--and he eats vastly more regularly and more sensibly than I--and gets regular cardiac exercise--I have to believe that the genetic luck of the draw is key. Sure, a totally lousy red-meat-based diet and carrying more than 50 pounds "more than I should" will likely screw with anyone, regardless of their genetic luck. And even though I eat really erratically, I very rarely drink soda or juice, barely eat commerically processed food (oh, those Tastykakes), switched to grass-fed beef 12 years ago, and eat a big variety of fruits and vegetables throughout the year. I have come to believe that these are generally good things to do, but that's in part because they're choices that make me happy and comfortable. 

Still, this makes me want to write a book called the It Doesn't Fucking Matter Diet. I already have a follow-up title in mind: Finding Health Through Idiocy (and Tastykakes).