The Kitchen Counter Cooking School (34 page)

 

 

 

1
tablespoons olive oil
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
Two 4- to 6-ounce pieces of fish or thinly sliced chicken breast
Few sprigs of a fresh herb (dill, basil, thyme, rosemary, or cilantro)
Few thin lemon or lime slices or a dash of vinegar
cup white wine, water, or stock

About
cup finely chopped or sliced vegetables (such as shallots, onion, garlic, zucchini, carrots, broccoli, fennel, mushrooms) for flavor and garnish

 

Preheat the oven to 400°F. Start with two pieces of parchment paper (or aluminum foil), about 10 by 12 inches each. Fold the pieces in half. On one side of the middle crease of each piece, drizzle the olive oil and add a pinch of salt and a couple grinds of pepper. Add the fish or chicken and turn over to coat. Place the herbs, lemon, wine, and vegetables on top of the fish. Fold the parchment or foil over like a book and crimp the edges securely to avoid allowing any liquid or steam to escape from the package during cooking. Place the package on a baking sheet and bake for 15 minutes. Allow to sit at least 2 minutes. Open carefully by unraveling the edges to ensure the fish or chicken is cooked through, then serve.

CHAPTER 11

 

A fancy KitchenAid stand mixer dominates the kitchens of most food writers I know. In an online tour of her kitchen, famous food author Amanda Hesser introduces her handsome gray model by saying, “I sometimes think of this as my third child. I use it for everything.”

By contrast, we have a simple yet heavy chrome 1960s-era Hamilton Beach stand mixer. No pasta hook, no paddle, and certainly no pasta-maker attachment. Ours is limited to a set of standard beaters; its capabilities peak at “heavy mixing.” The mixer is one of Mike's most cherished possessions and one of the few items inherited from his late mother. He fondly recalls scraping batter from the bowl forty years ago as the two of them made chocolate chip cookies or—his favorite—yellow cake with chocolate frosting. He cracked the eggs into the bowl. She gave him the spoon to lick. (Yes, with raw eggs. As a nation, we used to be less fastidious about such things.) It was their special time together and remains a sweet memory. Sure, the cake came from a box and the frosting came from a can, but the cake itself wasn't the point: His mother set aside time for him. His emotional connection outweighs any of the functionality that we might gain from fancy attachments. As a mixer, it works great. Although Hamilton Beach gave up on the model two decades ago, Mike lovingly maintains it, sourcing replacement parts from an obscure outpost in Ohio. So we won't be replacing the mixer, and that's absolutely fine by me.

One night after Mike got a little too worked up watching his alma mater's football team take a sound drumming, he snapped off the TV. He abruptly arose from the couch where I sat sifting through a stack of food magazines and announced, “I'm going to make a cake.”

This did not surprise me. Whenever he's upset, Mike needs something constructive to do with his hands. He might disappear to rebuild a carburetor, replace a light switch, or, as in this case, bake a cake. He started to ransack the cupboards. “Hey, don't we have any cake mix?”

“We have all the stuff for cake,” I replied without looking up. “Just look up a recipe.”

“Really?” Mike asked. “You mean you can make a cake without a mix?”

A few minutes later, after looking up a recipe, Mike called out, “So what's in the box?”

“What are you talking about?”

He brought a printout of a recipe for yellow cake into the living room. “You've got to see this. So get this, it's just flour, eggs, baking soda, milk, sugar, and butter. But with a box you already add eggs, milk, and oil, so what's in the freakin' box?” He was agitated. “Just flour, sugar, and baking soda?”

A fundamental truth had hit him: You don't need a box to make a cake.

For the first time in his life, Mike made a cake from scratch with his mother's forty-five-year-old mixer. “So that's it? This doesn't take any longer than doing it from a mix.”

As the cake baked in the oven, he had another revelation. “That's ALL that's in frosting? Seriously?” Another first for Mike with the mixer: chocolate frosting from scratch, made with confectioners' sugar, butter, vanilla, cocoa, and milk.

I'm among the minority of women who aren't keen on chocolate and cake isn't my thing, but I had to try the results. The flavor and texture of the cake were more interesting and varied than the onenote sugar sensation from a mix. “It's good, don't you think?” Mike asked as we stood at the counter contemplating the flavor. His voice had a spark of pride, and for good reason. His cake
was
good.

But that led to a great question: What
is
in the box? I went back to the supermarket.

Curiously, in the boxed version, sugar is the ingredient in the largest quantity. Compare that list to the ingredients from the recipe Mike used for his cake:

The label for the frosting was equally unsettling:

Mike's frosting contained only five ingredients:

Again, there's no oil and no corn syrup in the recipe. The cost for the raw ingredients is roughly the same. Cake mixes aren't even big time savers. Multiple studies conducted from the 1950s onward comparing the time it takes to make a cake from scratch versus a boxed version have found that the average time savings ranges from one to six minutes. So why make cake from a box at all? As it happens, cake illustrates an interesting story about what we think about food and cooking. After World War II, food manufacturers had to figure out other ways to market all the food-science technology developed during the war for army rations. The end of the war meant the loss of a massive market. So instead they focused their sights on our mothers and grandmothers, starting a not-so-subtle decades-long campaign to convince people that at least some elements of cooking were not worth the effort, says Laura Shapiro, author of
Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America
.

“The food industry created a basic assumption about cooking generations ago, and it's now fully settled into place as reality. Cake mixes exist, therefore they are easier than real baking, therefore real baking is hard,” Shapiro said. “Another factor might be that we have frozen and boxed versions of things that really
are
hard—frozen croissants, for instance—so perhaps the very fact of packaging something gives it that aura of being out of reach.”

The difference between a real cake and a cake-mix cake was apparent to most women baking for their families in the fifties. “But as generation followed generation, the number of home cooks recognizing that difference dwindled,” Shapiro added. Bluntly put, consumers not only get used to but prefer the flavor of the artificial version, not the real thing.