[Sca-cooks] Winter comfort food...
Jeff Gedney
gedney1 at iconn.net
Mon Dec 5 10:31:50 PST 2005
>
>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
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