[Sca-cooks] Winter comfort food...

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

On Dec 5, 2005, at 12:19 PM, Jeff Gedney wrote:

>>
>> Question: If you put maple syrup on it, are you allowed by
>> International Law to call it polenta and not mush?
>>
>> Hey, I'm up for it in concept; don't get me wrong. My question is
>> purely one of nomenclature.
>
> I' 'spose. I dont care much either way.
> I just love the soft creamy inside flowing out of the
> crisp outsides, mixing with the melted butter and
> maple...
>
> You have a feeling inside like you are eating pancakes
> and oatmeal at the same time... Damn I cant explain it.
> its good. that's all

There's a difficult-to-quantify-but-impossible-to-ignore lusciousness  
factor at work here.

>
>>
>> I was talking to my mother about this yesterday, and she said that
>> _her_ mother (she who had singlehandedly defeated a group of KKK
>> riders -- well, walkers, maybe, with a broom and invective at twenty
>> paces) used to make a thick macaroni soup from only milk, flour,
>> butter, onion, nutmeg, salt and pepper, and a cooked macaroni product
>> that resembled soda straws, like perciatelli, but with a larger
>> diameter opening.
>>
>
> Wow, I will have to try that. Thanks for the idea.
> No cheese in that? just a cream type soup?

Apparently. This was my grandmother's (a German orphan raised by an  
Irish family) concept of Lenten food. No cheese. She also used to  
make creamed hard-boiled eggs, which someone, at some point in the  
evolution of creamed eggs, dubbed "lollipop sauce"

> wow. the nutmeg is inspired... If a judicious amount it
> will round out the flavor profile nicely, but too much
> might make it too, er, "noggy".  A light hand with it
> would be key, expecially if fresh.

Yes, and it takes on a different character in the presence of onions  
or garlic than in the presence of sugar...

> Have you made it? Any pointers?

I haven't made it, sadly. I'll get around to it eventually. I'd say  
what separates flour-and-butter-and-milk from a real cream or white  
sauce is proper seasoning, with *just* the right amount of salt.  
People often leave it out entirely or just throw some in  
indiscriminately, but any powerful chemical needs to be used with care.

Another thing to do is use the best milk you can get, and either chop  
your onion and sweat it in your butter without browning, then add  
flour and do the white-sauce thing that way, or you can go all out  
with the halved onion stuck with cloves and placed in the milk to  
scald, cooking it in your sauce, then removing it later. I like  
chopped onion, myself.

See, this is one of those dishes that lives or dies on its essential  
simplicity (kinda like polenta ;-)  ), so you need to have each  
ingredient make its statement, if you follow me. If a chain is only  
as strong as its weakest link, you need to be careful when there are  
only three or four links.

>> Ah, the healing power of bechamel... ;-)
>
> Too true, too true.
> Seems that bechamel is the most nurturing of the "mother
> sauces".
>
> I wonder what "motherly" attributes one might ascribe to
> the others?

It seems to me that bechamel is most often associated with comfort  
foods (and y'ever notice how comfort foods are so often white?). I'm  
not sure how maternal are the other mother sauces (espagnole and its  
variants tend to strike me more as some kind of secret mistress than  
as a mother, dark, mysterious, and just a bit intimidating).

No, I have never seen a shrink in my life...

Adamantius



"S'ils n'ont pas de pain, vous fait-on dire, qu'ils  mangent de la  
brioche!" / "If there's no bread to be had, one has to say, let them  
eat cake!"
     -- attributed to an unnamed noblewoman by Jean-Jacques Rousseau,  
"Confessions", 1782

"Why don't they get new jobs if they're unhappy -- or go on Prozac?"
     -- Susan Sheybani, assistant to Bush campaign spokesman Terry  
Holt, 07/29/04