Squished sandwich!

Paper-thin red onion, roasted red pepper, arugula, Genoa salami, provolone, Black Forest ham, tomato, and brown mustard on a whole wheat baguette


“But why are they squished?” someone asked me today as I rambled on about my lunch.

The truth is, I don’t know the historical reasons to press a sandwich. A cursory search of the Internet and a few cookbooks turned up nothing except the well-known fact that sandwiches do get pressed and that you can buy devices to accomplish this feat.

From my own experience, I can tell you that

• The filling gets denser and the sandwich is much less likely to fall apart.
• The bread does not merely teeter atop a pile of fixings; it is molded precisely to them. Like with German engineering. But you can’t eat German engineering.
• You can have a good time slicing the sandwich with the panini knife your brother gave you for your birthday, if that’s how things happened in your family too.
• Plus it is just a lot of fun to say “squished sandwich.” Squished sandwich!

The foundation, of course, is good bread. It needs to be substantial enough not to break apart, yet soft enough to give a bit, during the squishing process. Choose flavorful fillings, but avoid ones that will weep copious amounts of juice. Use a lot of thin-sliced items rather than equal volumes of thick-sliced items. Wrap the sandwich tightly in waxed paper or plastic film and weight it down overnight.

And, finally, make two of them at a time. The pressing involves balancing a weight on top of the sandwich. This is liable to topple off as the sandwich compresses. I made a little pontoon boat out of two sandwiches and a cutting board. Then I stacked on a case of sparkling water, three ears of corn, a bunch of carrots, some cucumbers, and a sweet potato. The whole pile stayed rock solid!

To serve your sandwich, just bring it up to room temperature, unwrap it, and slice it. Easy and fun!

Menus Stand Still

I had occasion to take a meal to someone, and I decided to see what it was like to be inside Mollie Katzen’s head. I got out her Still Life With Menu Cookbook and opened it to somewhere in the middle.

Menu #21 is a tribute to southwestern cooking: eggplant relish with roasted peppers and ground pepitas; lentil chili; corn and red pepper muffins. (And, randomly, chocolate chip peanut butter cookies for dessert.) The food sounded simple, comforting, unfussy. It would be easy to reheat, would hold up well as leftovers, and would do OK in the freezer. I could double the batches and feed myself, too.

The food did everything it was supposed to do: taste good, fill the belly, comfort and nourish. The startling part was my recognition of the meal as a snapshot of food trends past. I don’t mean this as a slam, but I can’t think of a nice way to phrase it: this food is out of date.

I realized that the cookbook and the menu were put together at a time when the flavors of America’s southwest were new and unusual. Chiles, especially, were novel. Katzen’s recipes specify bell peppers and crushed red pepper, especially for cooks who are not “lucky enough to have access to fresh chiles.” Now it is not unusual, or even worthy of comment, to find dozens of kinds of fresh, dried, or canned chiles in grocery stores all over the nation. One recipe introduces pepitas as an exotic ingredient. Now I can buy them in my local big-box grocery store.

It’s just so... brown

Thinking a little more, I considered how this meal still has a foot in the vegetarian cooking of the 1970s and 1980s—which defined food in a context of meat. Meat’s conspicuous absence was everywhere. Menus still had a main dish and supporting sides. Dinner items had a protein-rich substitute for meat, often intending to echo its taste or texture. Chefs defined their food not by what it was, but by what it wasn’t: recipes titled “meatless” and “dairy-free” abounded. These things do still happen, but vegetarianism has evolved. Vegetables do not need to play supporting roles to a bowl of something brown.

The fact that I can, in 2011, call a menu unremarkable is a tribute to Mollie Katzen and the Moosewood Collective. Katzen’s adaptable and conversational approach to food, coupled with the reach and appeal of her bestselling cookbooks, made vegetarian cooking accessible for cooks across the nation. The fact that southwestern flavors are not news simply means that everyone has tried them and liked them well enough to cook and eat them all the time. And just because they are commonplace doesn’t make them any less delicious.

Swiss Seitan

I’ve just come home from vacation, and my kitchen looks like this:

See what I got? A problem! See what I don’t got: no stove, no sink, no countertops, no nothing. I’m tired; I’m crabby; I have to go to work instead of gad about all day in the sun with my girl. And now I have nothing to eat and nowhere to cook it.

But look! The workmen had to move some stuff out of the storage room to get at the electrical panel. Look what they unearthed!

It is my mom’s electric fry pan. She got it for a wedding present in the late 1960s. I drew the yellow lines around it to show off its majesty.

Well if this thing is here, then I am halfway to a good dinner. How about if I get out Mom’s Better Homes New Cookbook? It’s appropriate to the era.

Yeah, it was new back in the day, but not anymore. This might also have been a wedding present. What are these doing in my house?! Who can remember, and right now, who cares. These things are my ticket to some not-microwaved meals. Look at this goofy book:

“Men’s favorite?” With all due respect, men, who cares? I don’t need your approval to decide whether it’s good. And, in men’s defense, why does the Better Homes and Garden’s New Cookbook presume to know the salad preferences of half the human race? As my feminist scholar sweetheart would say, “It’s problematic.”

Oh get a load of this one:

This picture both co-opts, and eviscerates the potency of, the 1960s ethic of drugged-out spiritual exoticism. Nothing could be squarer than Susie Homemaker here, but she is all Lord Shiva on your ass with her Jiffy Cooking. Her dance both creates a meal from canned and frozen foods in 20 minutes and destroys any chance you might have had of enjoying home-cooked flavors from fresh ingredients. As an added ironic bonus, many people (possibly including the editors) may have missed the significance of this visual reference.

Enough ripping on Mom’s book. It is, along with its friend Electric Fry Pan, going to feed my ungrateful face. I deem Swiss steak to be a properly kitschy thing to cook. Also it has few ingredients and I have no prep space. Here are the directions.

As you see, it’s not a recipe. It’s truly just directions.

I don’t want to be as meat-tastic as things were in the 1960s. So I’m substituting seitan for beef. I’m not pounding in any flour or seasonings because seitan is already made of flour and seasonings. I’m also not going to simmer it until it’s tender because it’s already tender. I’m just going to whip it up and then steam a few potatoes in the microwave. No problem!

Look at it! It’s cooking like gangbusters, and it is starting to smell decidedly midcentury here in my basement.

And in twenty minutes, it’s food. I am just like Jiffy Cooking Lord Shiva Apron Lady.

Is it any good? Mmmehhhhhh… it’s problematic.

Julia Child, and Beef, in Real Life

Skip straight to the photos if you hate essays.

I was at the airport, in desperate need of something to read on the flight home, when I spotted Julia Child’s My Life in France. Now, I get that Julie & Julia has renewed people’s interest in the book, but still. The cover is plastered with images from a movie made from a book about Julie Powell’s one-sided relationship with her concept of a mentor that she knew only from books and television. By my count, that’s at least five layers of embroidery between the reader and Julia Child, and all of them are about some other book. Is anyone else bugged by this?

While reading, I recognized sections of the book that had been source material for the Meryl Streep scenes of the movie. It was tempting to visualize Streep’s Julia Child romping through antebellum Paris, good-naturedly exclaiming over everything, winning the hearts of everyone, and marching clear-eyed toward her preordained success as an author and television personality. But I put this temptation aside. I didn’t want Meryl Streep’s Julia Child, or Nora Ephron’s, or Julie Powell’s. I wanted Julia Child’s Julia Child. And even though it is filtered through the lens of her great-nephew and coauthor, Paul Prud’homme, My Life in France is the closest thing the world will ever get to Child’s authentic self-account of her life.

The film did show some things that jive with My Life in France. Julia Child was a scientist in that all outcomes were equally valuable sources of knowledge. She was an engineer who relentlessly applied knowledge and technique to a problem until she achieved her desired result. There’s no question that she was an artist. She understood the world and herself through experiences with food: cooking it, eating it, talking about it. Child connected to other people through shared culinary truths.

Anyone who has seen a scrap of The French Chef found Meryl Streep’s physical portrayal spot-on. But in the film, Streep/Child is unfailingly forward-thinking, gregarious, attractive, and lovable. Her perfect life is a product of Julie Powell’s (as rendered by Amy Adams and Nora Ephron) imagination: an ideal to strive for and a foil highlighting Powell’s self-perceived shortcomings as a cook and a human being. Child’s own recollections reveal a much different person.

Child was, by her own account, stubborn. She sometimes missed opportunities by failing to heed the nuances of personal politics. She was not a graceful handler of conflict, especially in intimate relationships. On occasion, she did the easy thing and kept silent when she should have spoken up. She sometimes made up her mind without consulting, or notifying, the affected parties. Quite often, she let the perfect be the enemy of the good. In short, despite doing her best, she sometimes screwed up. Like every other human being on our planet, she was flawed… and still lovable, and much beloved.

I am one of the other human beings on our planet, and so is my much beloved Beth, who is having a flawed winter semester. A thousand little things have turned out wrong, and they are all stressing her out. So I asked her to let me cook for her in the coming weeks. When she said yes, I turned to Mastering the Art of French Cooking and Julia Child’s boeuf bourguignon.

Child’s stated goal for her recipes was that they be foolproof: a typical American cook, using American equipment and ingredients, should produce accurate and consistent results by following her clear, well-tested instructions.

Thank you, Mrs. Child. You made all the big mistakes for me so that in recipes, if not in life, we can do everything perfectly.

Bouef Bourguignon
Knopf Doubleday has posted the recipe here.

This is my mother’s old copy of Mastering. It is some goofy pirated version from Taiwan. It looks to me as though someone shot very poor stats of the pages, then reassembled them in a smaller format on fewer pages. The colophon is in Chinese, though. What a lot of nerve!


The pages are onionskin-thin, there is broken type everywhere, and the index was not adjusted for the new pagination. But the recipes, advice, and opinions of the Trois Gourmandes are all here.

My ingredients: onions and carrots, blanched Tollefson’s bacon, and beef chuck. I didn’t even have to dry off the beef chunks. The meat from The Wedge is that good.



You are supposed to have a casserole, e.g. Le Creuset, that can go from the stovetop to the oven. I make do with a cast-iron skillet and my big Emeril covered casserole. Emeril and Mrs. Child cooked together when she was alive, so I figured nobody would mind.

First you brown the bacon...



Then the beef...

Then the vegetables.

Into the charméd pot they go. They get tossed with flour and then toasted for a bit in the oven.


In real life, next you would pour wine into your casserole and start things simmering on the stovetop. Instead I put wine and stock in the skillet. This gets all the browned deliciousness out of the pan so it can go in my stew.


The pot full of meat, vegetables, and sauce gets to hang out in the oven for four hours. Meanwhile, it's time to sauté mushrooms in butter. When you do this, you can expect three stages. First, the mushrooms will soak up all your butter and you will think you didn't use enough. Don't be tricked. Keep stirring, even though the pan looks dry. Second, the mushrooms will lay down the treasures of their bodies, and the pan will fill with mushroom juice. Third, the juices will cook off, leaving tender and flavorful mushrooms.



By this point the kitchen smells like heaven and neighborhood dogs have lined up on my front sidewalk to beg. Now I get to make braised onions. Peel them, brown them, and braise them in stock. All this only takes another hour and a half.

It's possibly time to take that bourguignon out of the oven. I must pour off the sauce, reduce it, put the onions and mushrooms in the pot, and pour the sauce back on. I don't know about you, but I am starting to have some predatory feelings toward this dish. I am starting to leer at it and sing to it. Hey, pretty, don't you wanna take a ride with me?

The dish is getting uncomfortable with my attention.

I served it with wide noodles. Mrs. Child would have said, "Bon appétit!"

Open Letter to a Star Prairie Trout

Dear Splashy:

Do you mind if I call you Splashy? It’s a little familiar, I know. But I would like to think of you as someone, and I never knew your name—assuming trout have names.

You don’t know anything about me. Well, you don’t know anything at all—not in the state you’re in. But I know a few things about you. I know that a mere five days ago you were swimming in fresh, cold spring water with thousands of other trout. I know that you were sleek and lovely, well-fed and healthy, and almost certainly happy.

Such is life for a fish. I understand; I have kept your kind as pets for more than ten years. Give you the proper water chemistry and temperature, the proper food, the proper companions, and the proper underwater landscape, and you thrive. That’s what Star Prairie Trout Farm did for you in the time it took you to grow to marketable size.

I can’t say I didn’t feel a little ambivalent bringing you home all filleted and labeled “Smoked 7/30.” Oh, Splashy, I would just as gladly have watched you swim around. To have admired your torpedo body, your untouchable quickness, your translucent and shimmering color—ah! A fish is one of the most beautiful and efficient creatures on earth. In other circumstances, our relationship could have been much different. A little sad, that.

The real tragedy, though, Splashy, is that you will never know how delicious you are. You will never understand how fantastic you taste baked into a tart with a flaky crust and served with some braised greens, roasted potatoes, a salad, and a nice glass of fume blanc. Your firm, smoky richness is why I can just get over it and eat you. You’re absolutely scrumptious, and you’re one of the many reasons I will never become a vegetarian. It’s good to be on top of the food chain.

So, my small friend, perhaps we will meet again in another life. But I hope not. If we do, I hope your memory is short and you don’t hold a grudge.

Smoked Trout Tart

Pastry:

1 ¼ cups flour
½ cup butter or shortening
½ t salt
3-5 T ice water

Mix flour and salt, cut in fat, and sprinkle with water. Stir a few times until it clumps together. Form into a ball and chill for as long as you can—at least an hour but better overnight.

Roll out the pastry and line a tart pan with a removable rim. If you don’t have that, you can use a pie pan. Make sure to patch up any holes in the crust! Chill again for ½ hour.

Now, the tart:

2 smoked fillets of trout, i.e. one fish – Star Prairie is perfect.
4 eggs
1 cup milk or cream
¼ t freshly ground black pepper
A dash of freshly ground nutmeg
Salt to taste

Take the skin off the trout and tear or chop the meat into ½-inch chunks. Scatter across the bottom of the pastry-lined tart pan. Whisk together the eggs, milk, and seasonings. Pour them over the trout. Bake at 375 degrees for 25 to 30 minutes, or until the center of the tart is just firm. The tart should still be a little quivery. Remove from the oven and let stand 5-10 minutes. Serve to acclaim.