Man With a Pan (9 page)

I learned by trial and error. Friends who were serious about cooking would have us over for dinner. I’d sit in the kitchen, watching, getting enthused about it, and then go off and try something on my own. I throw myself into things. I have seven carbon-steel knives I bought on eBay over two or three months. It goes in cycles. Lately I’m into air-drying steak for a week in the refrigerator. I guess I just threw myself into the kitchen and never came out of it.

My parents divorced when I was young, and I was raised by my dad. We lived in a place that didn’t have hot water. This was the seventies, and there were still cold-water flats. The kitchen was barely equipped. It had a toaster oven and at one point a camping stove. I cooked for myself a fair amount, but it wasn’t cooking. It was making egg noodles or opening a Campbell’s soup can. Swanson Hungry-Man dinners were a big part of growing up. I met my wife in high school. We’re basically both type B personalities, though when I’m cooking I can be type A.

My Farberware convection oven is a pretty serious gizmo. It is not a homeowner’s model. It’s professional. I got it from a friend, the former headmaster of my high school, who is a serious baker. It cooks faster than a normal oven and sometimes drier, which is not always a convenience. My equipment may be primitive, but it goes to show that you don’t need to be too sophisticated to do a fairly good job. We’ve had Thanksgiving for nine here.

Sometimes my eyes are bigger than my stomach. I’ll go to the butcher, to Fairway, and to some other stores and end up with four different types of meat. And then I get jammed up, with life or with work or with something, and I don’t get the time in the kitchen. I find a chicken I was supposed to cook five days ago, sitting there. I hate to throw out a whole chicken. If I am too busy, my wife will do the whole spaghetti and jar-sauce thing. Or we’ll eat egg noodles. I always have about four bags of egg noodles on hand, ready to go, just in case.

With both parents working, there’s been a whole generation of neglect in the kitchen. Guys are going to have to learn what fifties housewives must all have known—how to plan a menu and feed a family week by week.

Recipe File

Milk-Braised Pork

I first learned of this dish in Marcella Hazan’s Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking. It is unbelievably simple and good. Anthony Bourdain also has a nice variation in his cookbook. I prefer to use the Boston butt as Hazan recommends (she likes the vein of fat that runs through it), but I often use a pork loin. This dish always goes over well with roasted potatoes, and if you prefer not to simply reheat leftovers, combining the pork and the potatoes and frying them up in a hash with the gravy on top is terrific.

1 3- to 4-pound rib roast of pork, Boston butt, or pork loin
Salt and pepper
3 cups milk
½ cup water

Season the meat with salt and pepper and brown in a heavy roasting pan over medium heat on the stove top.

Brown the meat as much as possible without burning it.

Turn the heat down to medium low, add 1 cup of milk, and braise on the stove top, flipping the meat occasionally, until the milk reduces and starts to break down.

Add another cup of milk and repeat. This can be repeated once, twice, or even three times. The meat should cook for 2 to 3 hours, depending on the size of the cut. An ideal internal temperature is 145°F to 150°F.

The milk will reduce and become a rich, brown gravy.

Remove the meat and let it rest 10 minutes, then slice.

Skim some fat from the gravy, add ½ cup water, boil for about 3 minutes, then serve with the sliced pork.

Anthony Bourdain’s recipe adds diced carrot, onion, garlic, leek, a bouquet garni. He also suggests straining the gravy and pureeing it before serving. I’ve tried it and it is great, but nothing beats the simplicity of Hazan’s recipe.

Double-Crispy Roast Chicken

I can’t narrow down where I got the idea for flipping the chicken. There are so many different variations. Some recommend starting it on its side and flipping it three times, a quarter turn each time; some say to start breast side up; some say keep it upside down the whole time. I’ve found that, for my oven at least, starting it upside down and flipping it breast side up works best. As for how long to cook it, this is what I’ve found works best in my oven (a small convection one). There is no end to recommendations about how to cook the perfect bird. Just find out what works best for your oven.

½ stick butter
Salt and pepper Herbes de Provence
1 3- to 4-pound chicken
2 onions, chopped
2 stalks celery, chopped
1 tablespoon flour
1 cup water
Milk or half-and-half (optional)

Preheat the oven to 425°F.

Melt the butter, pour it into a bowl, and combine it with salt, pepper, and herbs.

Using your fingers, slather the mixture all over the chicken and under the skin.

Loosely stuff some of the onion and celery inside the cavity.

In a roasting pan, place the rest of the celery and onion and enough water to cover the bottom of the pan.

Put the chicken on a roasting rack, breast side down. Make sure the rack keeps the chicken above the water and allows heat to get all around the chicken.

Roast the chicken until the skin on top begins to brown and crisp, about 45 minutes.

Remove the pan and flip the bird (the chicken shouldn’t stick much because of the butter on the skin, but if you like, wipe some oil onto the rack before putting the chicken on it). Return the chicken to the oven and cook until the skin is nicely browned and crisped all around and the internal temperature of the thigh is 165°F, about 1 hour.

Carefully upend the chicken so that any juice that has collected in the cavity drains into the roasting pan.

Lift the chicken and place it on a cutting board. Let it rest for 15 minutes, then cut up and serve.

To make the gravy, remove and set aside as much of the celery and onion as you can.

Spoon off most of the fat.

Place the roasting pan on a stove top over low heat.

Sprinkle in 1 tablespoon of flour and stir to blend the flour and fat.

Press out any lumps of flour with a spoon, or mix with a whisk.

Add 1 cup water to deglaze, stirring and scraping up all the remaining browned bits from the bottom of the pan.

For added richness, you can add a bit of milk or even half-and-half to the gravy.

Note: Herbes de Provence is a classic mixture of dried herbs from the south of France. It is readily available in the spice aisle of large supermarkets.

When coating the bird with the herb-butter mixture, for complete coverage there’s no substitute for fingers. This is a bit of a messy process, but it ensures that the butter and seasoning get all over the chicken.

Also, a bunch of sliced potatoes placed beneath the chicken makes for a greasy yet popular side dish with the chicken. But it makes it impossible to make gravy from the drippings.

After serving the chicken, there is inevitably a lot of meat left on the carcass. Use your fingers to strip it off and make chicken salad. What’s left of the carcass can be frozen to make stock at a later date.

PAUL GREENBERG

Heads Up!

Paul Greenberg is the author most recently of
Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food
and a contributor to the
New York Times Magazine,
the
New York Times Book Review, National Geographic, Vogue,
and many other publications. A National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow as well as a W. K. Kellogg Foundation Food and Society Policy Fellow, he lives and works in New York City and Lake Placid, New York.

My current family food budget is governed by the convergence of two troubling and important phenomena:

1. The global decline of oceanic fisheries

2. The rapid and imprudent spending of my book advance

For the past three years I have been writing a book about the global decline of oceanic fisheries. I have spent tens of thousands of dollars uncovering the truth but have been sent back to the drawing board by my editors no less than four times, rewriting, researching, respending more and more money that I don’t have. It is all my fault. I should have read my contract. Before I can get the second half of my book advance, the editors must vet. The lawyers must vet. The proofreaders must vet. Everyone must vet. But with a family to feed, I can’t offer up “vetting” as an excuse for not putting food on the table.

Which is why I ended up having to contribute directly to the global decline of oceanic fisheries.

On a bone-chilling day in February around 3:00 a.m., I stepped aboard the party fishing boat
Sea Otter
out of Montauk, New York, with the idea of trying to catch some cod. Cod, in case you’re not aware of it, used to be the most astoundingly bountiful source of wild food in the world. Jesus, there were a lot of cod. Those stories of colonists lowering buckets over the rails and pulling up fish? Cod. But like me, humanity blew its advance. If humans had just had a little restraint and caught the majority of the cod every year instead of building the biggest boats ever made and then catching almost all the cod, we and the codfish would be in much better shape. Seriously, if you go to a fishing ground and catch 60 percent of the cod and leave 40 percent of the cod in the water, generally you’ll have enough cod for next year, because your average cod lays millions of eggs and the population can replace itself pretty quickly. But humans didn’t do that. In Atlantic Canada, for example, they caught 95 percent of the cod, and now the cod that are left are runts compared to the behemoths that used to dominate. Humans have artificially selected a whole new race of minicod by catching and eating all the big ones. As a result of all this bad behavior, a pound of cod, which used to cost a few bucks, now retails in New York supermarkets at around fourteen dollars—way out of the ballpark for my food budget.

But in some places, humanity may have started to learn its lesson. In U.S. waters, some cod breeding grounds have been closed to fishing for nearly twenty years. And slowly cod have started trickling back south, down the coast of Massachusetts and Rhode Island, and finally within range of Montauk, Long Island. A cod-fishing trip on the
Sea Otter
costs $140. I reasoned that if the cod really had returned and I could scrape together a decent catch, I could put fish back on my table without taking out another advance on my credit card.

The
Sea Otter
was cheaper than the other Montauk boats and it showed—there were no tables, no seats to speak of, just two long, narrow benches girding the cabin. But despite the discomfort and the fact that it was a Wednesday—a day when the usual working-class clientele of a party fishing boat should be otherwise engaged—word had gotten out that “the cod were back,” and the boat was “railed,” that is, so full that the rails were going to be packed shoulder to shoulder when we finally got around to fishing. I settled down on the narrow prisoner’s bench on the boat’s port side and eventually nodded off on the shoulder of a large plumber from Lindenhurst. Two hours later, the engines slowed and the plumber sprang up, leaving my head to slam onto the bench. Zombielike, I put on my rubber coveralls and Glacier Gloves and stumbled out to the rail in the predawn gloaming.

There, ten miles from Block Island, wedged into a stretch of water that was maybe a single square mile, was the entirety of the Montauk fishing fleet. I knew all the boats from my childhood fishing days: the small black
Vivienne,
the trim white
Montauk,
and the massive
Viking Starship
. It was like a return of old friends. And yet enemies, too. Because when there are this many boats crammed into such a small space of water, one or two boats will often get lucky while the rest will go home fishless.

But as we got closer to the
Viking Starship,
I came to see one, two, four, ten rods bent under the weight of serious fish. When I finally got my gob of clams to the bottom, within seconds my rod was bent double. I reeled three cranks, and
snap,
my line broke when the big cod below made a lunge bottomward. I quickly retied and sent my hook down again. Wham! Another big cod on. This one made it to the surface and into my milk crate. Meanwhile the Lindenhurst plumber to my left already had four codfish. He seemed to have some kind of special method. He would flip out his line at a forty-five-degree angle from the stern of the boat, let it drift around, and then, watching the tip of his pole twitch with the first tastings of a codfish, mutter to himself, “C’mon, you motherfucker. C’mon, you son of a bitch. Take it, you fucker.” And then, rearing back on his heels and setting the hook, his pole bending deeply, he’d exclaim with the full capacity of his lungs,
“HAVE A NICE DAY!”

The “bite” continued all morning, although, thanks to bad technique and faulty equipment, I dropped 75 percent of the fish I hooked. The Lindenhurst plumber meanwhile accrued codfish after codfish.
“HAVE A NICE FUCKING DAY, YOU MOTHERFUCKER!”
he screamed again and again, setting the hook on more and more cod—savagely, terribly, with a rising chaos of blood thirst in his voice. I was using a medium-size plastic milk crate to keep my fish, but the plumber had brought along a garbage can four times its size, and it was brimming with the tails of dying fish.
“HAVE A NICE DAY, YOU STUPID COCK-SUCKER!”
Fish after fish. A second garbage can. The beginning of a third.

In the course of my twelve hours at sea I caught about a dozen five-to-seven-pound cod, giving me a total take-home “round weight” of about seventy pounds. I paid $140 for the fishing trip, which meant that all of my delicious fresh cod cost only two dollars per pound. A tremendous savings! The only problem is that cod have a low “fillet yield,” meaning that a lot of their body is devoted to their huge heads and not to the pearly white boneless fillets that extends from pectoral to the caudal fin. So I really only had thirty-five pounds of fillets. That meant something like a four-dollar-per-pound cost. In order to bring the price back down again, I would have to resort to more drastic cost-saving measures …