[Sca-cooks] Winter comfort food...

[Jeff Gedney]

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

Yes... 
Luscious is exactly the word. 
the feeling is not exactly in the mouth though, it is more 
like a warm hearth has been set just behind the top of 
your sternum.
It is very hard to quantify the feeling.

>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"


???
Now you HAVE to elaborate.

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

yeah... I wonder if it is the sulphur mixing with the 
aromatic benzines in the nutmeg

>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.

You know I have often run afoul of this.
For a while I was always salting too early, or too late 
and as a result it was always too salty or too flat.

I have hit on what I suppose should have been obvious.
Put in half the salt you think you'll need durign cooking 
and then add 1/4 the salt at the end, and then adjust at 
the table. 


>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.

Right. That is exactly how I make cheese soup. 

For pumpkin soup I use the methopd to launch a veloute using turkey stock, though, even though I whisk in sour cream just before serving.

>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.

Un hunh.
I gotcha completely.


>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).
>

I dunno...
Here's how I am seeing them:

Bechamel Sauce
Comforting, easy, nurturing - the "June Cleaver" mother sauce

Veloute Sauce
Healing, nursing, wholesome, filling - the "Jewish Grandmother" 
mother sauce 

Espagnole Sauce
moody, imperative, can make you popular (or completely embarass 
you in front of your friends)  - The "Soccer Mom" mother sauce 

Hollandaise Sauce
Rich, Fragile, flighty, but will always impress your friends - 
The "new Stepmother you did not want to like but your friends 
thought was cool, and you do too" mother sauce

Tomato Sauce
Tart, snappish, but resourceful and throughly reliable - the "Den 
Mother" mother sauce


>No, I have never seen a shrink in my life...
>
(Who needs a shrink when you can cook?)

Capt Elias
Dragonship Haven, East
(Stratford, CT, USA)
Apprentice in the House of Silverwing

-Renaissance Geek of the Cyber Seas
- Help! I am being pecked to death by the Ducks of Dilletanteism! 
There are SO damn many more things I want to try in 
the SCA than I can possibly have time for. 
It's killing me!!!

-----------------------------------------------------
Upon the hempen tackle ship-boys climbing;
Hear the shrill whistle which doth order give
To sounds confused; behold the threaden sails,
Borne with the invisible and creeping wind,
Draw the huge bottoms through the furrow'd sea,
Breasting the lofty surge: O, do but think
You stand upon the ravage and behold
A city on the inconstant billows dancing;
For so appears this fleet majestical,
Holding due course to Harfleur. 
  - Shakespeare - Henry V, Act III, Prologue