DICTIONARY MANIA

We are bombarded with baby talk.

The dictatorship of ‘y’ on anything handy.

Crunchy

Creamy

Juicy

Juicy should be said only of anyone in heat, a mango right off the tree, or scooping up with your fingers the flesh of a low-acid white pineapple in Hawaii, with the juices running down the underside of your wrist.

We won’t go into “redolent.” Not only because it doesn’t have a ‘y,’ but it seems to be endangered in the texts of food magazines.

Fortunately.

So when to use these favorite (with some people) words?

Baby

As in vegetables, but it is time that some of them (like squash) become teenagers.

Fresh

“Fresh” has become everyone’s cool mantra. As it should. But as we adopt the idea and practice it with our usual rushed intensity, it is possible that we sometimes miss the point.

One evening at a restaurant I smelled the fish on its way to the table while it was still a few feet away. And was horrified enough to challenge the chef.

“But it’s fresh,” he said.

Meaning that it had not been frozen.

“But can you eat it?” I asked. “It would have been far better to use tuna that had been frozen right after it was caught that to use so-called fresh tuna, if this was the inevitable result.”

In other words, fresh ingredients are supposed to produce a certain result and mean little or nothing as a concept when they don’t.

Garnish (Garniture)

In that great French reference book from the beginning of the twentieth century, Larousse Gastronomique, there are hundreds of listings under garnishes. In Charles Ranhofer’s monumental American cookbook, The Epicurean (1893), there are almost as many, but by 1972, James Beard, in his comprehensive American Cookery, lists not a one.

Perhaps it would have been better if he had, then maybe we would not have sprigs of fresh herbs sticking out of the top of every dish today. What are we supposed to do with these little herb stems? Pluck off each little leaf of fresh thyme and scatter the leaves around the dish? If that is the case, the chef should have done it for us. Or serve us tweezers (plenty in the kitchen) to pick up the micro greens single leaf tottering alongside my piece of fish.

Let’s decide that garnishes, from the old-fashioned chopped parsley or crayfish tails to the currently favored spiced salts and flavored oils and powders, should be edible and an integral part of the dish.

They are there not just for visual stimulus but rather to enhance the flavors of the food as well. And, for the garnishes to accomplish this role successfully, let’s also decide that they be put on or next to the food, leaving the rims of plates pristine and clear of any last-minute flurry from the kitchen. I also ask that all cooks eat some of the garnish themselves and make an honest, fad-free evaluation before using it, so that things like deep-fried angel hair leeks and artichoke leaves will never again be seen.

Ice Bath

You will see many recipes that call for an ice bath, usually for plunging vegetables into after they have been blanched or parboiled. I beg you to ignore this command. It compromises the flavors of freshness, so much that you might as well save yourself the time and trouble and buy frozen ones instead, since the company packaging already has them blanched and iced the vegetables for you. If you must ice down hot cooked vegetables or herbs, put ice on top of them in a sieve or colander.

But I do think a bowl full of ice and water (equal parts) is the only way to go when you are making egg thickened sauces, such as hollandaise or sabayon, because it instantly stops their cooking. An ice bath is also useful for cooling down delicately flavored vegetable soups and purees that would otherwise oxidize and keep cooking, consequently losing a lot of their fresh color and flavor. Simply place a metal bowl of the sauce, puree, or soup in a bowl half full of ice and water until cold.

Keep in a Warm Place

This command occurs in many of the recipes, and as I wrote this simple instruction so often, it occurred to me that what it means when and how to do it are not so obvious as they might seem. I had a disaster once when the “warm place” was a turned-off electric wall oven (my first use) and the insulation of the oven kept all the heat in, turning my beautiful medium-rare beef into a well-done mess.

So here are some good “warm places:” on the open door of the turned-off oven (keep dogs, cats, and children away); under the lid of a big Dutch oven or lobster pot; under a couple of layers of aluminum foil; in a microwave oven (if the dish cools off too much you can give it a quick blast of microwaves to heat it up); and in or over hot water, as with a chafing dish or hot-water bath.

Latin Names

I include Latin names for wild mushrooms, fish and shellfish, tropical fruit, and anything picked from the wild.

Obviously, there are health concerns with harvesting wild things such as mushrooms. The only way we can be absolutely clear about what is meant is to use the Latin botanical names, especially since the English or American names may change from country to country and the regions within them. Those regional changes seem to occur every hundred miles or so with fish and shellfish, so I believe that when using a word like “crayfish,” for example, it is best to use the Latin name as well to avoid any confusion.

Organic

Sometimes it seems that in America “organic produce” just means that the vegetables are unwashed and unrefrigerated. How many times have we seen expensive lettuces sitting on the shelf or open-air markets wilting away—but at least they are organic.

The point is, with lettuce like that, who cares?

Like “fresh,” the use of the word “organic” is fraught with the peril of rushing to embrace a good concept without taking into consideration the result it is meant to produce.

Organic does not mean only “free of dangerous chemicals and residual pesticides.” Organic procedures play an important role in the creation of a sustainable agriculture and aquaculture, and when this approach is followed along with the use of heirloom varieties and seed banks, it is, in my book, the best path to quality of flavor and health.

Even though I have had a vegetable garden of my own on and off over the years since my first in Australia when I was six, it has now been a while since I planted onions. So I looked up “garlic” in a dictionary of food, and promptly fell into that pit of dictionary mania: every listing was fascinating.  After several hours I still had not made it to garlic.

Of course, “Gallimaufrey” caught my eye, as it always does, probably because it is obsolete. Or at least it is to those who do not live in a “hodge-podge” world which is what it means, if only for a dish of odds and ends. But I promise not to get carried away -- not even so far as one of culinarian’s most superb books, Kettner’s Book of the Table. Now that is bedside table reading! 

Galamatias, salmagundis, salmis, and even mulligatawnies will not put you to sleep. Nor will Hamlet’s ‘milching malicho,’ all of which the good doctor says are connected by the etymological root of “ma,” going way back to the origins of language, some say to Sanskrit. The Chinese might not take exception to that. And I will not go near all the “ma” in Chinese. Cecilia Chiang where are you when we need you? Do any of them mean ‘chicken?’ Kettner thinks “ma” is if you are Sanskritian. 

Time to move on. 

I passed over “Gammelost” fairly quickly, seeing it was just a hard Norwegian cheese of exceptional moldiness and, for some, a rank perfume. 

Photo Courtesy of Glacier Tour

And there’s one for you: is it “mould” or “mold?” 

But “Gaper” caught my eye. For a minute I thought the book had flipped back a few pages to “Caper,” and I was going to go off on a diatribe about the horror of bottled capers stored in vinegar as opposed to the delight of capers stored in salt. But that’s just a prejudice. Gapers are bivalves that cannot close their shells, or don’t want to. Off the California coast is the king of gapers: Tresus nuttalli, weighing in at 4 pounds. 

The entry says it is “highly prized.” And I cooked all those years in California within mere miles of this critter and never saw one!

“Garum” we all know about, and I am not going to become involved in fish sauce insult slinging, or all that fish sauce you hear about how offal Roman cooking must have been. People in love with southeast Asian food just love to go off on this subject even more than the entrails of anchovies and grey mullet do when put out into the sun to ferment, forming a base for garum or “liquimen.” 

But that’s under “L’ and I dare not go there. I might find entries like lablab bean, or laddu, lagoon crab, lark tongues, and lizard fish.

There are alternatives to the overwhelming smells and taste of sun-ripened and fermented shrimp (and other seafood) sauces.

Here is a recipe for oysters (not the sauce) from chef Ian Benites. I do not know him, but since: “I was working at Gramercy Tavern in Manhattan. I have also worked at a number of great restaurants such as Marea in New York City,” two of my most favorite restaurants. I feel as if I do.

In his words “Nam Jim Seafood (Thai seafood sauce) is usually based on garlic, chilies, cilantro, lime juice, and fish sauce. The resulting sauce is tart, salty, garlicky and spicy; an amazing compliment to grilled shrimp, squid, clams and really any type of seafood. Or one just about anything. I could easily drizzle some on a grilled skirt steak or on some grilled chicken.”

2 grams minced Thai bird chili, red or green 1/2 teaspoon

4 grams finely minced garlic 1/2 tablespoon

8 grams minced shallot 1 tablespoon

3 grams finely chopped cilantro, stems and leaves 1 tablespoon

40 grams fresh lime juice 3 tablespoons

20 grams fish sauce 1.5 tablespoons

10 grams palm sugar (or white sugar) 1/2 tablespoon

Combine all seafood sauce ingredients and stir until sugar is dissolved.