Sugared sugar

As an avid consumer (and sometimes a harsh critic) of the DC cupcake scene, I was intrigued to see this Slate article by Daniel Gross predicting a cupcake bubble. Unfortunately, this article is an example of a great idea and terrible execution. Yes, lots and lots of cupcake places have opened recently and there is reason to wonder how many people will become regular cupcake consumers after the novelty is less charming. But after dressing up this basic observation in several needlessly long paragraphs, Gross concludes:

I've tried a bunch of these new cupcakes and find them to be way too sweet—sugar on top of sugar.

Okay. Now it is true that nearly every cupcake does consist of sugar (in the form of icing) on top of other sugar (mixed into a cake). But this sentence made me wonder if the fault lay not in the cupcake enterprise, but in the cupcakes themselves-- or at least the ones that Gross has tried.
To take just DC as an example, there is a big difference between Baked & Wired's sugar-loaded (though yummy) monstrosities and the much less sweet and more perfect specimens at Georgetown Cupcake. If the real problem is just that most of the new companies make their cupcakes too sweet, then plenty of good cupcakes should survive the creative destruction of the marketplace.

Technique

Commenters to the previous post and Raffi at Waddling Kitchen point out that while recipe compendiums may well be rendered obsolete by the internet, serious cooking techniques (like most serious things, I guess) are still learned from books. Here's Raffi:

They are studied, pored over and mimicked by professional cooks across the country. They are the avenues through which the cutting edge is transformed into the quotidian. In other words, if you're eating sous vide short ribs in your local upscale restaurant in Oklahoma City, say, it's either because the cook there did a stage at Per Se (or the equivalent) or because they read and studied Under Pressure. That kind of cookbook simply isn't in competition with epicurious.

Best Two Sentences I Read Today

I hope to get back in the kitchen as soon as humanly possible after the baby is born, and the only way to get me back in the kitchen is to let me get hungry for something that nobody makes the way I want them to. It is the only reason I cook, it’s the only reason I’ve ever wanted to cook and it’s the only thing that’s going to get me to cook when feasting on pudgy baby cheeks no longer cuts it, as impossible as that is to imagine.

This is the source. This blog will soon be re-titled "Crescat reads Smitten Kitchen."

Are Cookbooks Dead?

One of CrescatK's other two readers says, in a comment below, "it would seem now, more than any time else, cookbooks are dead." I'm not so sure.

It's true that 5 nights out of 6, I cook dinner from memory, instinct, or necessity without cracking a cookbook. (As I have been dodging gainful employment for weeks, my mind is not currently on these weeknight-I'm-starving-and-lets-get-it-on-the-table dinners, but they'll surface on this blog sooner or later.) And it's also true that when I do turn to a recipe-- or (rarer still) feel inspired by a recipe to actually go out and acquire the ingredients to make it-- it is just as often one I found on the internet (almost always SmittenKitchen). But I still have a stock of cookbooks I use regularly.

To wit: How to Cook Everything, How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, Fish, and, more recently, The Perfect Scoop. (The clever reader will notice what those first three books have in common.) I hope that someday Julia Child's book goes on that list, and at some point I intend to finally conquer my twin fears of baking and of desserts, but I don't yet have a cookbook I fully trust on baking. [N.B.: I feel as if total trust is required to conquer this new and feared area of cooking-- I'm not yet in a position to glance at a cake recipe and know that I should cut the sugar in half, add an egg yolk, and expect the finished product to be better. Thus far, I trust Deb and my wife and no one else.]

Now, the commenter still makes a very good point-- that serious cooks are much more likely to use the internet rather than a cookbook much of the time. Even if cookbooks are not yet dead, the genre is sure dying. Just look at the cookbook section in your local Barnes & Noble. Nearly every one in the store is either pointlessly gimmicky ("95 vegan things you can make in a pressure cooker") or full of too many pictures and too little cookery (aka "food porn"). These items should be moved to "self-help" and "art" respectively.

But I'm not sure how much worse the world of cookbooks is than it ever was. I recently read Julia Child's retelling of her attempts to publish Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and even then she and her co-authors were being pressured by their publishers to make their books more like mainstream mass-market American cookbooks. Maybe we only notice because blogs are finally providing some competition.

I-95

Posting will be scarce for the next few days because I am driving a fully-loaded compact car with my wife and dog down the I-95 corridor. On the other hand, we are armed with some internet information and a copy of Roadfood and hunting for the best barbecue in the I-95 corridor, so some Yelp! reviews will be going up soon.

I think this blog has only two readers who aren't on the road with me, but there you go.

After Julia, what?

As I was talking to my mother on the phone about the delightful Julie & Julia, she asked what book somebody would choose now if they were going to attempt a Julie-Powell-esque cookbooking project. It's a difficult question. Mark Bittman is out, even though he is the best cookbook writer alive today, because his recipes are too simple. Indeed, it is almost antithetical to his minimalist cooking philosophy to treat his recipes as a self-actualization marathon.

Maybe it's my limited imagination, but the best sequel I could come up with was The Best Recipe. It's also big, hard, and encyclopedic. But even so, a "Best Recipe" project would hardly compare to the Julie/Julia Project. The Best Recipe lacks the same personal myth, and the book just isn't designed to teach you to "master" cooking the same way Julia's book is. Am I missing a good one? Or maybe there is no comparison.

Resolved

Next time we roast a duck, we will follow Julia Child's direction.

Pizza Resurrected

The Craving: "Hey, doesn't a pizza sound really good tonight?"

The Supplies: A mix of white and whole-wheat flours. A little bit of creamy chevre in a plastic tub. A handful of leeks. A Brandywine tomato.

The Obstacles: We had no yeast. I had remembered that even without yeast, you can get a little rise out of a basic flour dough by keeping it pretty wet and making sure your baking surface is blazing hot. As the water in the dough turns to steam, it bubbles up, like naan. But that left the dough a tacky mess.The dough managed to get stuck all over the rolling mat just as I getting ready to stick it on the pizza stone.

The Intervention: My wife exercised her household prerogative over baking floury doughs and commandeered the project. This meant taking my messy smear of dough, adding flour, rolling it out with a rolling pin, and using a handful of olive oil to keep it from sticking. A pizza peel transferred it to the oven for 5 minutes of pre-cooking. Then we layered on thin-sliced tomato, little crumbles of goat cheese, and a bunch of sauteed leeks (plus coarse salt), and gave it another ten minutes or so.

The Results: Delicious. The dough did indeed get up a little bit of a naan-like puff, and the gooey goat cheese and crunchy leeks made for a perfect summer supper. Yes, it would have been better with twice as much goat cheese, and yes the dough still slightly resembled hardtack, but it was either that or no pizza at all.

Tomato-Corn Pie

I am never actually going to cook this. But I still think about it almost every day since it's been posted on Smitten Kitchen.

A tale of two fruit salads

Once upon a time, when serving fruit salad for a large brunch party, we used to make two-- both with the fruit lightly macerated and dressed in lemon juice, and one with the addition of mint. [N.B. The best way to add mint to a fruit salad is to treat it as a giant mojito. Julienne/dice a large amount of mint, then toss it with sugar. Then muddle (i.e., smash) the sugar against the side of the bowl until the oil in the mint leaves starts to make a paste with the sugar. This is easier than you think! Then add lemon juice. Amounts to taste, but 1/2 a cup fo sugar and the juice of 2 lemons was pretty good for half a watermelon, a canteloupe, and a quart of strawberries.] We figured that some people wouldn't want such a fancy addition to a simple fruit salad and would prefer the simpler version.

Every single time, we ran out of mint fruit salad long before the plain one. We learned from experience, and feel unabashed about adding mint now.

Recently, I've begun to think about adding crumbled or diced feta cheese to our basic mint fruit salad. "And yet," I thought to myself, "some of our guests are vegan, or don't like briny cheese. So we should make two. . . ." [I haven't tried it yet.]

Pictures

Another thing that has changed since I started blogging is the prevalence of pictures. Indeed, I can't think of a top-shelf food blog (Tyler Cowen doesn't quite count) that doesn't have a lot of pictures. When I find my camera cord, expect posts like "what I ate for breakfast this morning," and "how to puree an entire watermelon." (The latter is a lot easier if you use a stick blender rather than the Cuisinart.)