What Einstein Kept Under His Hat: Secrets of Science in the Kitchen (48 page)

Chapter Ten

A Few Lagniappes for the Insatiable Inquiring Mind

....

T
HE CUSTOM
of giving someone “a little something extra” permeates all societies in one form or another.

In restaurants and taxis, we routinely pay, in the form of a tip, more than the bill requires. And for reasons I have never been able to fathom, employees of many corporations—but regretfully not of universities—are occasionally handed perks called bonuses. (“Oh, by the way, here’s some extra money.”)

In the days before supermarkets, a baker’s dozen meant thirteen rolls instead of twelve, an 8.33 percent increase in the amount of goods for what a cynic might suspect was covered by a hidden 8.33 percent increase in price. It was a brilliant way of selling more rolls by taking advantage of the customer’s ingrained concept of “a dozen” as a rigidly fixed unit. For if one bought a dozen and received thirteen, it was not just receiving thirteen instead of twelve; it was a dozen plus a “free” one. A faker’s dozen, I call it. But it sure made the customers feel good.

Also making customers feel good is the habit in some restaurants of presenting a
lagniappe
, a small, unexpected treat that appears neither on the menu nor on the bill. (
Lagniappe
is the Creole spelling of the Spanish
la ñapa
, meaning . . . well, something extra.) Every time I am offered one in a restaurant, my cynicism vanishes in a flash and I think, “Oh, how nice!”

In that tradition (and because I couldn’t find a better place to put them), I offer in this final chapter a few lagniappes for your insatiable inquiring mind: sundry items about language, cookery, and science with which to cap off the information feast that I hope you have been enjoying.

To borrow a famously ungrammatical slogan from Sara Lee, nobody doesn’t like chocolate. So as we began our shared repast with something to drink, I will end it with two chocolate desserts that I hope will leave a pleasant, long-lasting aftertaste in your inquiring mind.

Dear Dr. Wolke: Can you please write something about the misuse of technical words in relation to foods? Your devoted reader, R. L. Wolke.

....

I
’ll be glad to. Thanks for giving me an excuse to do so, because a discussion of language in a food-science book might otherwise appear to be out of place. But the English language is one of my most precious treasures, and I welcome the opportunity to reply to your request and set a few things straight.

I’m the kind of guy who upon being handed a menu in a restaurant scans it for spelling errors before beginning to think about the food. But even though the other day I actually saw “tuna tar tar” on a menu (honest!), this section won’t be about spelling. Anybody can slipp up on that once in a while.

Well, maybe just one gripe about spelling. The word
restaurateur
does
not
have an
n
in it. In eighteenth-century France, before the word came into general use for the operator of an eating establishment, it referred to the proprietor of a stopping place along the road at which a traveler could rest his horse and perhaps score a meal, which might include an energy restorative, or
restaurant,
such as a bowl of rich broth. The soup chef or proprietor, often the same person, was afforded the honor of being called the
restaurateur
, the restorer.

Okay, one more spelling gripe. The name of the
shiitake
mushroom is spelled with two
i
’s. It does not begin with an Anglo Saxon four-letter word.

Now on to gripes about misused words. I am well aware that nothing I say here will change the world’s misuse of the words that follow. But I must do my duty to the language I love by recording the following distinctions. Call this the Department of Lost Causes.

•
 
High heat:
Cooks often talk about “a higher heat” when they mean “a higher temperature.” I can understand the convenience of saying, “Cook such-and-such over a high (or low) heat,” meaning a high (or low) setting on the range dial, when the objective really is to produce a higher (or lower) temperature in the food. But please, folks. Butter melts at a low temperature, not at a low heat.

Here’s the distinction between heat and temperature: A pot of hot soup may have a certain temperature—that is, it may contain a certain amount of heat per ounce. When you remove a spoonful of soup from the pot, the temperature of the soup in the spoon is the same as that of the soup remaining in the pot, but the spoon is holding a lot less heat because it contains a lot less soup.

•
 
Melting:
Have you ever heard a person protest when going out in the rain without an umbrella, “I won’t melt”? And how many times have you heard that sugar melts in hot coffee? Wrong!

Melting is the conversion of a solid into a liquid caused by heat. And neither tea nor coffee is nearly hot enough to melt sugar. Every solid has its melting point, the temperature at which this solid-to-liquid transition takes place. Ice melts at 32°F (0°C), salt (sodium chloride) melts at 1474°F (801°C), and iron melts at 2800°F (1538°C). Sugar (sucrose) will melt if you put it in a saucepan and heat it to about 350°F (177°C), as you might do when making caramel, peanut brittle, or other candies. But it does not melt when you add it to hot water, which cannot exceed 212°F (100°C).

•
 
Dissolving:
What happens to sugar in coffee and to salt in your stew is not melting but dissolving, from the Latin
dissolvere
, meaning to come apart. The crystalline structures of solid sugar and salt do indeed disintegrate or come apart, the resulting submicroscopic fragments (molecules or ions) being liberated to swim freely around among the water molecules. In water, sugar and salt do not become molten lumps, as if liquefied by heat. They are present invisibly in dissolved form: “in solution.”

Now don’t write to tell me that
melt
is defined in your dictionary as “1. to change from a solid to a liquid state, generally by heat; and 2. to dissolve; disintegrate.” Lexicographers compile dictionaries with the express purpose of reflecting the current use of our changing language, not of ordaining what is right and what is wrong. The latter responsibility must be borne by sticklers like me.

•
 
Leaching:
Whenever a nutrient or flavor component dissolves out of a food into the cooking water, odds are that it will be said to be “leached out.” No, it is simply
dissolving
in the water. “Leaching” is a highly specific type of dissolving, and it doesn’t often happen in cooking.

True leaching is a liquid passing through a porous solid and extracting soluble substances along the way. For example, when you pour hot water through a heap of coffee grounds in a cone filter, the water will leach out many water-soluble components as it passes through the grounds. Rain will leach minerals out of the soil as it filters downward. And an underground stream will leach calcium minerals from the rocks as it passes through their cracks. That’s how hard water is made.

On the other hand, when you’re simmering spinach in a pot of water, some of the vitamin C in the leaves may well dissolve in the water. But the water has simply extracted, or dissolved (not leached) the vitamin out of the spinach.

In brief, any old dissolving is not leaching.

•
 
Melding:
Similar to but distinct from melting is melding. Cookbooks tell us to combine ingredients—say, for a sauce, dip, or salad dressing—and then refrigerate them for several hours to let the flavors “meld.” Well, do they?

Meld
is what is known as a portmanteau word—a word invented by fusing two words. (Lewis Carroll’s poem “Jabberwocky” in
Through the Looking Glass
is a masterpiece of portmanteauism: “’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves / Did gyre and gimble in the wabe . . .”).

The word
meld
was melded (if I may say so) from the words
melt
and
weld
, and means to blend, merge, or unite—but
not
to melt. It could be used quite accurately as a synonym for
dissolve
, because dissolving is a true merging of one substance (the
solute
) into another (the
solvent
, which is usually water).

A computer search turned up 843,000 web pages on which
meld
is used, with more than 8,000 of them accompanied by the word
flavor
. Example: “Cook for another few minutes until the flavors meld.” (Does a bell ring when they’re melded?)

Flavors can certainly change, and in many cases improve, upon standing or mixing. Everyone knows that a ragoût tastes better on the second day. And of course many wines mature with age.

But when we blend ingredient X with ingredient Y and detect the growth of a new flavor, it may be forever beyond our ability to identify chemical A in ingredient X that has reacted with chemical B in ingredient Y to produce the new product C with a new flavor. If we find empirically that the overall flavor improves, let’s just make the most of it. Melding is probably as good a word as any. Although some romantically inclined food writers prefer to say that the flavors “marry.”

Ultimately, the true blending and combining of the profusion of taste, smell, and texture senses that we experience when chewing a food takes place in the brain. Individual molecules of foods act upon our taste and smell receptors, which send messages to the cortex of the brain. There, the messages are combined with physical texture and mouth-feel signals from the nerves in our oral cavities to produce that consummate sensation of “Mmmm, good!”

That’s true melding.

Many packaged food products say “natural flavorings” in the list of ingredients, but when I consult the table of nutrients no specifics are given. What are they adding and why don’t they have to say what it is? Is it salt, enzymes, or what?
Natural
is not the least bit enlightening as an adjective! My chemistry professor used to protest that everything on Earth is natural.

....

T
his chemistry professor agrees. If it isn’t natural, what would it be? Supernatural?

My dictionary lists fourteen meanings for the adjective
natural
, ranging from “not adopted” (for the parent of a child) to “neither sharped nor flatted” (for a musical note). So your confusion is perfectly . . . uh, natural.

Many consumers appear to believe that
natural
is a synonym for good or healthful, as opposed to anything made or processed by humans. But Nature hides many decidedly unfriendly chemicals in our foods. Many of the trace-amount chemicals responsible for the natural flavors of foods are so toxic in larger amounts that they would never be approved by the FDA as additives.

Consider also that the chemical amygdalin, a “natural” glycoside found in apricot and peach pits, reacts with an enzyme in the stomach to produce prussic acid (
hydrogen cyanide)
, the lethal gas that has been used to execute convicted criminals. A close chemical derivative of amygdalin called Laetrile has been promoted as a cure for cancer by certain alternative-medicine clinics. The fact that the American Cancer Society has labeled Laetrile quackery hasn’t stopped many Americans from traveling to Mexico for “treatment.”

Prussic acid is also present in the cassava tuber, a.k.a. manioc, yucca, and tapioca root, which when grated has to be thoroughly washed to remove the poison before it is made into flour and other products. I have bought flat, eighteen-inch discs of crisp, dry yucca bread from children on the roads in Venezuela, hoping that the raw material had been adequately washed, and I have survived.

To control the rampant use of the word
natural
on the labels of food products, the FDA has come up with a definition, at least in the context of flavor additives. The ubiquitous
all-natural
, which manufacturers use to sell everything from cosmetics to toilet cleaners (heavens!—you wouldn’t want an unnatural toilet cleaner, would you?) is not regulated and probably cannot be, because it can mean almost anything the manufacturer wants it to mean—including nothing at all.

The official FDA definition of natural flavoring is published in the Code of Federal Regulations (21CFR101.22) in the form of more than a hundred words that meticulously plug every conceivable loophole and that would put a permanent wave in the brains of most lawyers, even if they knew what “hydrolysate” and “enzymolysis” meant in the definition.

In simple terms, a natural flavor is defined as a substance extracted, distilled, or otherwise obtained from plant or animal matter, either directly from the matter itself or after it has been roasted, heated, or fermented. Note the inclusion of “animal matter” in this definition, a revelation that would shock vegetarians to their carrot roots and send those who adhere to the kosher segregation of meat from dairy products running to their rabbis for elucidation. But animals are just as natural as plants, are they not? Note also that a natural flavor does not have to come from the food it is flavoring. For example, a natural flavor chemical derived from chicken—which needn’t necessarily taste like chicken—can be used to flavor a can of beef ravioli.

An artificial flavor, on the other hand, is defined straightforwardly by the FDA as any substance that does not fit the definition of a natural flavor. Ironically, such synthetic flavoring chemicals, though unabashedly unnatural, are acceptable in all restrictive diets from vegan to kosher, because they are neither animal nor vegetable. (You will search in vain for any philosophical or religious injunctions against 2,6-dimethylpyrazine, the prominent artificial-flavor chemical in chocolate.) Furthermore, most of the chemical compounds in both artificial and natural flavors are not recognized as food by our digestive systems and are not metabolized. That’s why you won’t find them listed in the Nutrition Facts chart; they are not nutrients and are at any rate present in only trace amounts.