Cooking Pol Martin

[cooking-pol-martin]

Cooking with Pol Martin

So my kid made me sit down and watch this series of YouTube videos which feature digitized VHS tapes from the 1980s wherein Canada's Premier Cook, Pol Martin, does some absolutely unholy nonsense with a couple of microwaves. Quoting the various horrified responses of the streamers watching the Pol Martin videos happens a lot around the kitchen now. I think my favorite is: "What's he going to do with that banana? What's he going to do with that banana?"

So Christmas rolls around, and I jumped on eBay and bought every Pol Martin cookbook I could find, especially including the microwave one, and then gave then gave them to my kid. (A friend of mine freaked out when he saw the microwave cookbook, because he said his folks had that exact cookbook growing up.) Now that I have several hundred Pol Martin recipes in the house, I decided I should probably do some stunt cooking about it.

The recipes themselves are super dated, which probably isn't surprising. That isn't a bad thing: one of my favorite basic cookbooks is the 1970s Fanny Farmer Cookbook, because it doesn't screw around with multiple bowls and every dish in the house. Yeah, there's always too much sugar and sometimes things are just weird -- I will not be grinding my own hamburger, thanks -- but the recipes tend to be straightforward, without a lot of fuss. The Fanny Farmer also includes information on how to set a formal table, which I have to so irregularly I can never remember where the water glasses go.

So! This is where I'll be documenting my adventures in 1980s French Canadian cookbooks. If you want to watch the YouTube videos of which I speak, you can find them here, here, and here. A fun (?) exercise is trying to determine which recipe is the most horrific.

Bon appetit!

[cooking-pol-martin]

Eating Straight F**kin' Grass: Spinach Burgers

After an incredibly cold and late spring, it is finally full on spring here in Minnesota. The crab apple tree in the front yard is in respondent bloom, and this afternoon I finally put up the last of the winter clothes and took down the summer ones. All this makes a Minnesotan's thoughts turn to grilling. So the kid and I page through Pol Martin's Easy Cooking for Today, and found the delightfully bizarre "Spinach Burgers." Though the recipe called for pan frying, we scoffed -- of course we could just grill the burgers -- but God, and Pol, had other plans.

I regularly have the problem of going into some kind of fugue state after reading Pol's recipes, and utterly miss some deeply funky instruction. Sometimes it's something like "boil leeks for the rest of your natural life"; other times it's magicking up something called "pastry cream" based on nothing but vibes. That wasn't quite what happened here. I did actually clock that I was supposed to pan fry the burgers, but I didn't understand why. The explanation is going to take a hot minute. Buckle up.

If you look through the recipe, you'll see that it's in two parts: the burgers themselves, and then a mushroom sauce to pour over the burgers. (Honestly, the recipe looks a lot more like a Salisbury steak -- which is more or less a meatloaf mix shaped into patties and topped with brown gravy -- than it does like an American-style hamburger.) Naturally, we start with the patties, which consist of a lot of cooked spinach mixed into ground beef and a little seasoning.

I wilt the spinach and fry some onions, and then Pol instructs me to dump it all in the food processor and blend for three fiscal minutes. Now, I have no way of knowing if this is actually true, but I very much suspect that certain kitchen appliances -- namely the microwave and food processor -- are differently powered now than 40 years ago. Microwaves were stronger, I think, like this circa 1990s microwave we had at the cabin which would nuke the wi-fi every time we turned it on.

Pol only very rarely specifies using a food processor, and I'm not exactly sure why. Maybe because they weren't as common a household item back in the day? I've mentioned this before, but when I was a kid in the 80s, my mom thought food processors were the purview of pretentious douchebags* and poseurs. I don't think she has one to this day. Given my experience of blending ground beef and cooked spinach for 180 interminable seconds in my food processor, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that food processors were less powerful in the 1980s. Because the spinach/ground beef mixture ended up looking like this:

The result was light and fluffy -- two adjectives not generally associated with hamburger meat -- and extremely difficult to shape into patties. After wetting my hands and kind of mushing the hamburger mix into roughly hamburger shape, the kid and I realized that there was no freaking way we could cook this shit -- literally! har har -- on a grill. They would just ... ooze, and then slip through the slats and make a godforsaken mess of the burners. Also, they looked like this:

I can't remember where I talk about the cackle-o-meter -- a metric for assessing Pol's recipes based on how much hysterical laughter they inspire from me -- but this made me cackle a lot. It looks like dinosaur dooky! I squealed, and then dissolved into laughter. Just like a straight up brontosaurus coprolite. The kid texted this to his friends and one responded CEMENT. At this point we sour grapes'd it by saying that we should pan fry it anyway, because pan frying the burgers would make a really decent fond for the gravy. This isn't even wrong, and the fond did make a very beautiful gravy.

I'm going to be serious for a moment: the gravy did turn out beautifully. Much as I love gently making fun of Pol, he's a French man trained in France, and he knows how to make a motherfucking sauce. We had a little consternation when I couldn't find the corn starch -- I know there is godamn corn starch in my kitchen somewhere -- but I just used flour as a thickener and it was fine. (Pol uses corn starch as a thickener in situations I would never, but far be it from some Midwestern mom-type to criticize.) Sometimes cooking is alchemy, and that was true here with the mushroom sauce: we went from ingredients to something sublime with the application of heat and some time.

The sauce may have been really lovely, but for real, the burgers were fucking weird. Not bad or anything, just spinach-forward in a way that was confusing. I like spinach and all, but it is kind of bitter, and there was so much spinach in these burger patties that there was a sharp green edge in every bite. I know that Dr Suess has written a modern parable on the matter, but when food is green when you don't expect it to be green, not all of us are going to be Sam I Am about it. The title of this essay comes from one of my son's friends who described this dish as eating straight fuckin' grass. I can't argue.

In my last missive I detailed the five stages of Pol Martin which are as follows:

How do I get this out of my mouth without betraying my cool exterior

What the actual fuck

Sure, fine

Oh damn, I’ve been enlightened, but that's still weird

Nom nom nom

I feel like this was somewhere between what the actual fuck and sure, fine, which seems like a provisional success in my book. I'll never make the burgers again, for sure, but I'm not mad about it, and I might use the pan frying trick to make mushroom gravy in the future because that was delightful.

So. We had this with a potato salad that I got from testing recipes for America's Test Kitchen. If you give ATK your email address, they'll send you about a recipe a month to test in your own kitchen, presumably to know how it'll land with some dumbass from the Internet. The recipes I've tested have run the gamut from excellent to the fuck outta here. Their potato-corn salad is so fucking good I've gone through the most enormous vat of Zatarain's crayfish boil seasoning in the last 12 months, and I'll only go through more. You can find a gift link here if you're so inclined. (This link will expire in like 30 days, so hit me up if that's the case, and I'll send you a new one.)

*There was this gay couple who were part of my parents' circle -- one was the ex-husband of a woman who became my dad's girlfriend much later, when my folks divorced, if that's not too messy to follow -- who threw a "Salute to Asparagus" party every spring, which was like, peak Uptown Minneapolis gay dude in the 1980s. It's funny to think now, but food was much more seasonal back then, so you couldn't get anything but tinned asparagus most of the year, a foodstuff which is the most disgusting thing known to humanity. Though it's true that it was pretty exciting to have non-necromantic asparagus in the spring, my mom still thought the whole "Salute to Asparagus" thing was eye-rollingly lame. I think this sort of thing was in the same category for her as food processors.

[cooking-pol-martin]

Canapés and Microwaves

Now, this missive is going to be a bit of a Franken-post because I'm going to detail two things: a Pol Martin recipe, and a Pol Martin-adjacent recipe. We're going to start with Pol's dish, which was a salmon canapé, and leave the adjacence for the end. Now, I scrolled back through ye olde blogge to see what kind of appetizers I've made of Pol's. There have been four: crab & eggplant coquille, which was fine but not good; mushroom canapés, which were decent; a vegetable sandwich loaf, which was bonkers; and shrimp-stuffed eggs which were fine, but also legitimately revitalized how I make deviled eggs. I am serious about deviled eggs, so this is notable.

Honestly, this declension of appetizer recipes is more or less a miniature of the entire Cooking Pol Martin project. Add in this most recent one and you basically have the five stages of Pol Martin:

How do I get this out of my mouth without betraying my cool exterior

What the actual fuck

Sure, fine

Oh damn, I’ve been enlightened, but that's still weird

Nom nom nom

Thankfully, the salmon canapés ended up inhabiting the grubbing one, which is good, but then also, how wrong can you go with smoked salmon and toast points? I'm sure someone could fuck that up -- raisins?? -- but not this girl. I ended up getting way fussier with this recipe than I meant to, but it still turned out anyway.

The recipe for smoked salmon canapés is actually pretty simple -- there are six ingredients and two optional ones -- but still Pol managed to Lucy-with-the-football me. As you can see from this detail, the first ingredient is 1 lb of smoked salmon. So far so good. But now scroll down to the instructions. The first reads, "Place 4 slices of salmon in food processor." Quick question: is there a unit of measurement called "slices"? For example, how many "slices" are in a pound? This is not a quantity I've ever encountered before, and I had no idea how to deal with this. After some cross-talk with my kid who is my partner in this godforsaken project, we decided four slices was half a pound.

So, okay, I busted out the food processor and got to work. I thought that using butter as the binding agent for the salmon mousse was odd, not bad, just odd. Maybe it's because butter has been smeared as super bad for you that I expected cream cheese or something. This makes me feel a way. Food science is generally a hot mess. There's tons of received wisdom which is either utter bollocks, food fad bullshit, or capitalist propaganda, and that unholy trinity changes from decade to decade. My Grandma Dory, who loved a food fad, was ride or die for margarine because butter was "bad." Many moons later, it turned out that whatever unholy necromancy called "hydrogenation" -- a process which turns a liquid fat into a solid to produce margarine -- is actually significantly worse for you than just regular ass butter.

I am not going to pretend that all food science is bad and we should all go back to soaking our own beans and making everything from scratch -- that's stupid, also I work full time -- but there is a lot of horrible, infernal "advice" out there i/r/t nutrition. My in-laws are dying right now -- and dying badly, in a lot of pain -- and my father in law in particular is wholly committed to the fuckshit supplements and quote unquote vitamins he's bought off of hucksters on Fox News. My husband researched one particularly poisonous one -- it's an industrial solvent -- and it turns out there is one (1) pseudonymous (this means who the fuck wrote it) article on a well known quack site extolling the virtues of this particular poison. When this was pointed out, my father in law pitched a fucking fit, utterly committed to advice doled out by a single unknown person because for whatever reason he wants it to be true with his whole chest.

I'm not going to get into this mess more because that's what my therapist is for, but suffice it to say: food is deep structure stuff, deeper than culture, the literal building blocks of our body and minds. It is no great surprise when food becomes freighted with moral, ethical, and societal worth -- or worthlessness. Like I'm up here on my high horse ragging on margarine based on something I read 20 years ago, based on a barely articulated personal pet theory about what makes food good. It's easy to do. I just hope someone stops me before I start inhaling industrial solvents. So. We followed Po's instructions to the letter, down to randomly sprinkling sliced eggs and capers onto our canapés. Reader, it was good. We basically devoured most of them day-of, and the leftovers I took to work and fucked up the next day. I've always said it's hard to fuck up a nice cut of meat, and that aphorism continues to hold.

So now to the Pol-adjacent part of this essay. I went to the thrift store, like you do, and spent some time in the kitchen section. There's always a lot of goofy waffle irons -- the last time I went, there were Grogu, cake pop, and Christmas wreath options -- plus your usual shitty blenders, toasters, and fondue pots missing key components. But this time there was also a silicon ... thing for making potato chips in the microwave. With a mandoline. After determining it cost $5.99 American, I decided this bitch was coming home with me, and we were going to make some fucking potato chips, hoorah. Best decision I've made in a while, boy howdy. Given Pol's predilections for the microwave, I figured this was in the oeuvre.

Now, I already have a mandoline, which is a kitchen gadget for slicing vegetables quickly and evenly. My mandoline has a thing that allows the user to change the thickness of the cut, even though it's still cheap plastic crap. The cheap plastic crap in the microwave chip maker does not have a way to adjust the thickness. These potato chips -- it's taking all of my power not to type potato "chips" -- are destined to be one thickness and one thickness only. This is fine! It's also dumb bullshit. I cut a bunch of potato slices and arrange them on the silicon thingee. Into the microwave it goes. I should probably mention I was doing this with the kid who is not down with the Cooking Pol Martin Project, overseen by the kid that is.

I have a drawer microwave which is very Star Trek -- it slides into and out of the cabinet very coolly -- but it's touchy. You'll notice there's a glass full of water in the photo. This is because when we first started using the drawer microwave to do things like melt butter, it kind of set on fire. Turns out, microwaving very small amounts of stuff was more than this dumbass could handle, and it would immolate. We could avoid immolation if we just included a glass of water. After almost burning the house down, we sent a strongly worded email to the manufacturer. This was a known problem, they said, and they would send us a new one if we promised not to sue. Sure, fine, we said. So now I always include a glass of water so my house doesn't burn down and I don't have anyone to sue. Late stage capitalism is the best.

After a couple go-rounds -- actually, more go-rounds than indicated in the instructions -- the "chips" were more or less "chip"-like. (I have no way of knowing this, but I think ye olde microwaves from the 80s and 90s were significantly more powerful than the microwaves you can get today. We had this microwave at the cabin that somehow destroyed the wi-fi and heated water to boiling in 30 seconds. I'm glad I was past my childbearing years because I suspect my gonads were/are toast.) The younger kid and I started into the "chips". They were chewy and bland, but we were hungry and hunger is the best pickle. We ate them all while the older kid looked on, horrified. The "chips" were not good; do not recommend. I'm going to re-donate this bullshit to the thrift store. It was a good time tho.

So! How to end this here outing? Like this post, I don't feel very coherent these days, which makes writing hard. I have spent a lot of time in the kitchen because I find it soothing, I just find it hard to structure my thinking. It reminds me a little of when I was pregnant with the older kid, and I found it hard to articulate my fears about the coming delivery. One baby book I was using had a drawing exercise for expectant mothers to do, to try to reach past the linguistic block, and boy did it work. I produced an enormous page of newsprint entirely covered in scissors: I was terrified of being cut open.

My therapist pointed out today that a lot of things in my life look like grief, even if they aren't about death, per se. I'm going to have to sit with that a while, but I feel a truth to it. My response to grief is to cook a lot -- it's a Midwestern trait reinforced by personal predilections -- we have to nourish our bodies as the spirit grieves. Grief is messy and non-linear, and doesn't abide to timelines, but it does have rhythms, quick as thought and slow as healing. I have a bruise on my shoulder that I don't know where it's from, and I watch it change from bright red to livid purple to the fading purple-green. That's a decent metaphor for the rest of me, amen.

[cooking-pol-martin]

Adventures in Sauces: Mayonnaise

There are a number of foods which are worlds apart in their store-bought and homemade incarnations. Applesauce from the store is totally fine, not bad or anything, just fine. Meanwhile, homemade applesauce is so insanely good it's almost a different thing. Same with canned beets. By contrast, tinned asparagus is so fucking vile I have no idea why it's still commercially available, while lightly steamed fresh asparagus is delightful. I do not have any gripe with store-bought mayonnaise, but I've always heard the homemade kind is worlds better. I've always wanted to attempt to make my own mayonnaise, and when the kid and I found a recipe -- two recipes -- for mayo in one of Pol's cookbooks, I thought, let's fucking go.

Now, the kid and I have been chatting about Pol's expertise in old school traditional European dishes for a while now -- we have had a number of unqualified successes with dishes like Coq au Vin, Boeuf Bourguignon, and Osso Buco -- and sauces are about as French as you can get. Pol may have spent most of his life in French Canada, but he was born in France and trained as a chef there, and the French know themselves some sauces. i can't think of another culture that has a robust, complicated, and contested taxonomy for a slightly thickened liquid you pour over other food. There are something like six mother sauces which can be combined with various herbs or seasonings to result in myriad daughter sauces. That said, there is no real consensus on what constitutes a mother sauce. Observe this chart the virgins at Wikipedia ginned up:

As you can see, there is no real consensus, other than Espagnole, Béchamel, and Velouté -- which English speakers might describe as brown sauce, white sauce, and light brown sauce -- but it's nonetheless shaken out to those three plus Tomato and Hollandaise. I regularly make Béchamel and Velouté because white sauce is the basis of everything from Mac & Cheese to potatoes au gratin, and Velouté is basically chicken gravy. Hollandaise I attempt every year at Christmas to go with beef tenderloin, but there's been a lot of trial and error. Probably more error than anything, because Hollandaise is tricky. You have to emulsify egg yolks, melted butter, and lemon together, largely though whisking, and the chemistry of that is touchy. The trick for me has been to use an old school blender: blend the yolks and lemon until it's nice and light, and then slowly, carefully pour in the melted butter. The last three years my Hollandaise has been fucking excellent.

Looking at Pol's recipe, it seemed to me that Mayonnaise isn't so different from Hollandaise. Both emulsify eggs with a fat and an acid. For Hollandaise, the fat is butter and the acid lemon, while for Mayonnaise, the fat is vegetable oil and the acid vinegar. I figured my tricks with Hollandaise could be transferred to Mayonnaise. So I got out my avocado-colored blender with wood paneling which I got at that thrift store. (For shore this motherfucker rolled off the line some time in the mid-1970's, and the lights dim a little when you turn it on. I love it.) In went the eggs, then I slowly poured in the oil.

It was a complete disaster. I must have poured in the oil too fast, because it never thickened even a little. Pol says to incorporate it one drop at a time, which I apparently didn't do. Even turning up the blender to 11 -- and blenders of this era have an 11 button -- didn't do anything to thicken the sauce. While it kind of killed me, I dumped the whole mess out and tried again. I even consulted an ATK recipe to see if there were pitfalls Pol wasn't telling me about, which there were. So fine, for the second attempt I was very careful to be as slow as possible when pouring in the olive oil, and at first things seemed to gel the way they should.

You can see how nicely thickened the mixture was. Yay, I thought, and then began pouring the olive oil in earnest. Which only served to break the emulsion and make a huge mess. Hollandaise is tricky, but because it's a heat process, you can always break it down, reheat, and start again. Mayonnaise is a cold process, so that's not an option. Round number two went down the drain, at which point I was out of olive oil and had to give up entirely. Just an utter fail.

This is the funny thing: I'm not even mad. Like I was almost gleeful about this result, and not because I'm some weird dummy who has a humiliation kink -- which is just fine if that's your bag; no judgement -- but because this is just part of the process. Many moons ago, I shed bitter tears over failed pie crust, but after however many times fucking it up, I eventually figured it out. I can make a damn fine pie crust in my sleep at this point, which I can do because I made it wrong so many times that making it right is the only option left.

So, after cleaning up after that disaster, the kid and I successfully made one of Pol's salads. We'd been hoping to make it with the mayonnaise from the failed recipe, but that wasn't in the cards. The Salmon Salad was very simple -- basically flaked salmon, cut veggies, diced eggs, a little seasoning, and the aforementioned mayo, and boom, done. I was slightly irritated that Pol just assumes you have cooked salmon on hand without any instructions on how to cook such a thing, but I'm a big girl and capable of googling how to bake salmon, so whatever. It ended up being the kind of dish that was good the day of, but much better the next day. It didn't last longer than that.

So! What to take home from this experiment? I'm definitely going to try again making Pol's mayonnaise, because failure is part of success, and given enough attempts, a thoughtful, engaged person will get it right eventually. I already know what I'm going to do differently, and while that iteration might not work, something eventually will. Not to get up on a soapbox -- too late! -- this is one of the many reasons I hate LLMs. Writing is a process like cooking, and you learn more from your failures than your successes. Sure, I can get the plagiarism machine to shart out grammatically correct sentences, but I can't learn anything from that.

I could give up and use store-bought mayo for the rest of my life -- which, yeah, that's mostly what I'm going to -- but the process of learning something new is cool and fun and good for your brain in a way that resigned complacence isn't. Once I master it, I'm not going to make my own mayo every time I make a sandwich or anything because that's nuts and I don't have the time. I don't even make my own pie crust all the time, even though mine is better than store-bought, because I'm not going to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Sometimes you have to do the needful, and that's okay.

[cooking-pol-martin]

Coq au Vin the Second

It's been a hot minute since I did anything Pol Martin related. I fully intended to write some kind of year end roundup, given that I just passed the one year anniversary of the Cooking Pol Martin project. But when I sat down at the end of this January to write up Pol's Pasta Puttanesca which I made a while back, the post ended up being a jeremiad about all of the horrible fuckshit happening in my hometown of Minneapolis -- they teargassed my dad -- and not about cooking at all, so I scrapped it. Then I curled into a ball and gave myself over to a really quality depressive episode.

So, well, even though ICE most emphatically has not stopped abducting people off the streets of my hometown, I managed to pull out of the despair and start cooking again. One of the most rewarding aspects of this here ill-advised project is how these historical recipes -- I can barely admit that recipes from my childhood are historical, but I can admit it -- invoke for me both the politics and the culture of my youth, and the late 70s and early 80s weren't exactly great, geopolitically speaking. Pol's recipes often surprise because they almost accidentally show how much has changed in the intervening decades since I was a child in the 80s. Food is not decoupled from politics -- they are all part of the same cultural stew -- but the ingredients of that stew change from decade to decade. (Just to overwork a metaphor.) We are all living out the curse, "May you live in interesting times." I've apparently lived through a lot of interesting times.

One of the last recipes I made for the Cooking Pol Martin project was Coq au Vin, which I chose after learning that Pol really shines when he's making hardcore traditional European dishes. After looking though the myriad Pol Martin cookbooks I have on hand, I was delighted to learn that he has written not one, not two, but three recipes for Coq au Vin. The first Coq au Vin recipe I attempted was chosen solely because I had all the ingredients on hand, which isn't necessarily a good thing. Traditionally Coq au Vin includes the following: salt pork (or bacon), chicken, red wine, pearl onions, and mushrooms. The first recipe didn't include salt pork or pearl onions -- I can only find pearl onions in one local grocery store, and who keeps salt pork around -- which is kinda odd, tbf. The recipe was good but not great.

While I don't want to reiterate too much of what I've already said on this kind of dish -- my missive after making Pol's Boeuf Bourguignon covers the history -- a little chit-chat about this kind of dish is in order. There are more than a couple traditional European dishes which take a tough cut of meat and then braise it forever in a dry red wine. (That's what bourguignon refers to: a dry French wine from the Burgundy region of France. It's pronounced burg-in-nyon.) There's usually something salty -- salt pork, anchovies -- some kind of onion -- shallots, pearl onions -- and, uh, mushrooms? (I don't know why all the mushrooms. Maybe they keep their shape better than green vegetables?) The acid of the wine breaks down the toughness of the meat, and, after slow cooking, the red wine and spices alchemize into a rich, thick sauce. So, after stocking up on pearl onions and salt pork -- which, I learned, can be found in the freezer section -- I was ready to tackle Coq au Vin the Second.

Now is the part of the essay where I lovingly make fun of Pol. The kid and I watched all the videos that started this ill-advised project again, and I was amused to see that Pol is capable of a normal-sized dice.* He regularly does the thing where he chops veggies without even looking and doesn't end up with his hand gouting blood and wrapped in a kitchen towel. Because one of my evergreen bitches about his recipes is how freaking big his dice. You can see in the above picture -- a detail from his easy-to-follow step-by-step instructions -- he doesn't even cut up the mushrooms at all. I pointed this out to my kid and he said, "Never change, Pol."

Honestly, at this point, it is so bizarre to see Pol Martin fuck up a bunch of food in the microwave in those tapes, given how long I've been marinating in his whole oeuvre. Like I've legitimately grown to respect him as a cookbook writer, and that despite some really fucked up recipes. (Let's all commune with the awfulness which is a banana omelet.) Some of the weird stuff can be attributed to changing tastes -- the veal -- and some is just personal quirks -- the nutmeg. But he's generous with his descriptions of technique, and cheerful in his embrace of new things, be it the microwave or Cajun food.

For this recipe, I followed his instructions more or less to the letter, even though I think he's a little wrong here. Given my success with his weird order of operations -- at least when it comes to traditional French dishes -- I was willing to trust the recipe. I'm used to starting by searing the meat, then adding the veggies, and then the braising liquid. Pol instead had me start with the onions and salt pork, then the veggies, then sear the meat, which, fine. He also did the thing that drives me nuts in recipes: there is no flour in the ingredients list, but then he had me dredge the chicken pieces in flour. I know I have a problem misreading his recipes -- I have no idea why I do this -- but this time it wasn't on me. Thank fuck I had flour.

As you can see from the above photo, once I was ready to pour in the entire fiscal bottle of wine, things got pretty exciting. Honestly, one of the reasons I love dishes like this so much is that they're pretty pyrotechnic. Like I can see the wine hit the fond and transmute to steam and a beautifully thickening sauce. Cooking is magic in a way, a form of alchemy that takes humble ingredients and turns them into something exalted. After a couple of minutes of pouring and scraping up the browned bits as fast as I could, I was ready to slide the whole mess into the oven and let it braise.

I also cooked the dish a little longer than Pol specified because I know from experience I want the chicken to straight up fall off the bone, and I didn't think that 45 minutes in the oven was long enough to achieve that. Plus one me, because it really turned out. After pulling out the bouquet garni -- this is a fancy term for a bunch of herbs tossed into the braising liquid -- and the bones, we ladled the dish over mashed potatoes. Reader, this dish was sublime. The younger kid -- the one not on board with anything Pol Martin -- was grubbing on this dish, and when I told him it was a Pol Martin recipe, he kind of didn't believe me.

I'm not sure how to wrap up this installment. I keep wanting to rage about the [gestures at everything] but this is not the forum, and it probably isn't good for me anyway. These last couple months and all their depredations and upheavals have felt like the beginning of lockdown for me. I typically read a lot, and widely, but, just like during early Covid, I've retreated to reading only cheerfully quippy romance novels and rereads of zombie novels I love. (Highly recommend Colson Whitehead's Zone One or Courtney Summers's This is Not a Test.) I just don't have the bandwidth for anything more challenging. It's been the same with food; we've had a lot of Chinese takeout and random shit from the fridge meals since the new year.

It's really nice to get back to it and rediscover the things I enjoy doing. It's a good time hanging out with the kid making food and having a wide-ranging conversation about Pol Martin's quirks, the Mother Sauces, and the cultural history of food. It's fun to sit down and write some nonsense about this stupid project I have making dishes from a French-Canadian chef who peaked in the late 1980s. There isn't much I can do about [gestures at everything], but I can make something that nourishes my body and mind. It's something like a gift that I can turn some words on a page into a meal I can share with those I love.

*We also found a small clip of Pol Martin speaking English with long brown hair. Chat, I may never recover.

[cooking-pol-martin]

Semi-fail: Roast Loin of Pork with Figs

It's been a hot minute since I did anything Pol Martin, so I spent a chunk of my day off paging through his cookbooks to plan for my next outing. After a discussion with the kid, I decided I was going to do Pasta Puttanesca if I could find a Pol Martin version. I did find one -- though he'd renamed it something stupid like "Pasta with Anchovies" -- but I decided I'd do it the next day because it seemed relatively quick, and I had to work. So today I decided to make pork loin with a fig sauce.

Now, I've made pork loin with peaches before to good effect -- the secret ingredient, of course, is bacon -- and figs seemed adjacent enough to be a good bet. Pork in general pairs pretty well with fruit. Also, the pork loin I got was really cheap, something which became moot when I found out the cost of figs. JFC those things are expensive. But in for a penny, in for a pound.

The recipe ended up being decently easy to follow, if a little perplexing at points. Pol calls for six shallots and ten pearl onions, which I totally don't get: why both? (Also, how those numbers??) I get shallots because they're milder and sweeter than most other onions -- which would pair well with both the pork and figs -- but pearl onions are almost exclusively included in stews (like Coq au Vin) because they impart a nice onion flavor while staying self-contained. I was unable to find pearl onions in the two grocery stores I tried, so lol, shallots only it is!

The recipe was pretty straightforward. The pork loin and onions went into the oven to start cooking; meanwhile, I was to make the fig sauce. This is one of those places where some cookbook writers fall down: there's an order of operations for what goes into the dish when, and I become wroth indeed when I hit a point in the recipe where the writer basically says, "Go back in time and start this sauce 20 minutes ago when I should have told you to start it, lol." So points to Pol there.

The sauce itself was a little odd, I think partially because I was using dried figs not fresh. I did the thing to reconstitute the figs by soaking them in boiling water for 20 minutes, but dried fruit never is going to be as supple as fresh. Once the compote came together, it went onto the pork loin, and I finished up the roasting. I plated it with some quinoa dish I was trying out, and it was time for dinner.

It looks pretty nice, yeah? Well, the pork loin was aggressively mid and the quinoa was straight up bad, the latter of which isn't Pol's fault at all. I did like the fig compote. (I've been trying to figure out quinoa because it's super good for you and all, but I've always been kinda hatery about it. I know so many douchebags who extol its virtues, and I'd prefer not to be one of them.) The loin was tough and pretty dry, and I didn't love how the shallots were just ... there. Like maybe they should have been in the fig compote? I think I'm also used to cooking pork tenderloin not, um, regular loin? Because I suspect I needed to cook it longer to break it down a bit more.

But! I did end up reclaiming this dish, almost by accident. A few days later I made a couple pizzas, and for one of them I chopped up the pork, shallots, and compote and used that as the toppings, with a little blue cheese. Reader, that shit was amazing. The recipe is well balanced and interesting, but it's better in a slightly different context. I'm also not going to ding Pol for what I suspect was user error; I just fucked it up a little. I'm not sure I'd try the recipe again, but if I did I'd sous vide the meat and use fresh figs.

Ok, Pol, you win this round.

[cooking-pol-martin]

Coq au Vin the First

In my last Cooking Pol Martin outing, I spent a lot of time poring through his cookbooks after my discovery that two of Pol's cookbooks were actually the same cookbook, just with a different cover. In addition to being hilarious, it also gave me time to really sit and commune with Pol's oeuvre, such as it is. Despite his enthusiasm for things like shish kabobs and barbecue -- which are not, strictly speaking, French -- all of his cookbooks unsurprisingly include a fucktonne of French and Old World European dishes. This includes three different Coq au Vin recipes.

I feel like I've been working up to a Pol Martin Coq au Vin for while now, especially since I've had a run of successes with his traditional European dishes. I liked his Osso Buco -- though I'm predisposed to like anything with beef short ribs -- and I really liked his Boeuf Bourguignon. My go-to recipe for Coq au Vin is made with white wine and cooked in a crockpot, which I know is philistine shit. I was excited to try a version more in line with the traditional dish.

I don't want to reiterate too much of my missive about Boeuf Bourguignon, but some explanation is still in order. Both Coq au Vin and Boeuf Bourguignon are of a class of French cuisine which, while not that old, nonetheless have come to define French cooking, at least for non-French people. Both dishes can be found in print first in the mid-19th C, and were considered kinda trashy. Both include tough cuts of meat which are then braised in wine -- usually a light red like Burgundy or Beaujolais -- with pearl onions and mushrooms. Julia Child, who more or less single-handedly introduced French cuisine to post-War America, had for her signature dish Coq au Vin.

So after perusing all three Coq au Vin recipes in Pol's cookbooks, I perversely decided to use the one that eschewed pearl onions for the regular kind. I really love pearl onions, but they are a fucking pain in the ass if you use actual pearl onions and not the kind that you find in the freezer section already peeled and trimmed. I have actually gone through the process of peeling and trimming pearl onions exactly once, and I swore by all that was both unholy and holy that I would never do that again. I did not want to be confronted with a recipe that suggested I do so. (Imagine a regular onion. Shrink it so it's incredibly hard to work with. Now trim the ends off, plunge that shit in boiling water, painstakingly remove the paper skin without ruining the onion. Now do that twenty more times. Absolutely not.)

Per usual, there was some Pol Martin-specific fuckery. I continue to have my feelings hurt by how insanely large his dice is. His instructions are to halve the mushrooms, which is too big by half. I mean, maybe it's because there's been mushroom inflation since the 1980s, and my Costco caps are actually larger than those in Quebec when he was cooking, but I don't actually think so, given his photos. I cut the mushrooms into quarters, which was still too big but I learned to live with it.

He also includes, as an ingredient, "2 cups light beef gravy." The inclusion of various forms of gravy in Pol's dishes is ubiquitous. This is one of my pet peeves in recipes: when writers specify an ingredient that in and of itself requires a recipe. Double demerits if there isn't a recipe for said ingredient in the cookbook itself. As per usual, I went and got the most generic-ass packet of McCormick-adjacent brown gravy, whipped it up with some water, and called it a day. But this was the first time I got to thinking: what if this was a translation issue?

If you spend any time at all messing around with French cuisine, you'll become aware of the five mother sauces of French cooking: béchamel, espagnole, tomato, velouté, and hollandaise. These are the base sauces from which all other sauces are made. Add cheese to a béchamel and you get a Mornay sauce; add shallots, tarragon, and black pepper to an hollandaise and you get a Béarnaise sauce; and so on. Béchamel -- which is made by thickening milk or cream with a roux -- is almost always referred to as "white sauce" in English. I wonder if Pol's "light beef gravy" isn't an inexact translation of espagnole, which is a beef reduction sauce which often includes roasted bones, bacon, and other delights. I'm still going to ding him for not including a recipe for "light beef gravy," but I feel like I understand better what he was getting at due to my potentially bullshit headcanon.

So! How was it?? Reader, it was fine. Like a lot of Pol's dishes, I didn't think it had enough seasoning, both of the salt and herbal variety. I really liked the chives and parsley, but, as usual, Pol is too parsimonious. He calls for 1 tbsp each for five fiscal pounds of chicken, which seems like a ridiculously small amount. I admit the lack of salting might be my fault: Pol calls for "seasoning" the chicken at various points -- which I take to mean salt and peppering -- and I regularly forget to do that if the recipe isn't like, salt the fuck out of this.

I don't think I'd make this specific recipe again (without significant tweaking), but I don't think it was a failure at all. The dish was good, and then better the second day, and you can always add salt but you can't take out again. I'm looking forward to trying the next two Coq au Vin recipes Pol has on the books.

I won't be using anything but frozen pearl onions, just be clear.

[cooking-pol-martin]

As American Modern as Apple Pie

I live in a part of the country that is very serious about seasonal tourism. At about this time of year, starting in September and through October, there are all manner of festivals devoted to apples, fall vegetables, or the majesty of turning leaves in the area. The town of Bayfield on the south shore of Lake Superior had a huge apple festival last weekend -- it's more or less a cottage industry -- but both the north and south shore have a steady stream of leaf peepers, ecotourists, and randos looking to get out of the city and commune with nature or whatnot.

Of course, being a local, I won't get near any of that shit for love or money, because locals are a bunch of jaded assholes who have become immune to the beauty of nature. I had a good friend come up to visit and she showed me the dozens of photos of deer in her camera roll and I was like, okay? Those are very nice deer? But I would never actually photograph deer because they are an ubiquitous nuisance. We have a literal deer path through the yard, which I do think is cute, but I don't think it's cute when those ungulate dickheads eat all the leaves off the apple tree I planted in the spring, killing it.

Anyway, long story long, despite the fact that I have close to zero patience with apple festivals, leafers, and the rest of it, I ended up with close to fifteen pounds of cooking apples in the house. The older kid got a bunch of apples from the local socialists -- don't worry about it -- and the younger kid and I went to my mom's house and knocked a bunch of apples off the apple tree in her back yard. Previous owners let the tree bolt -- apple trees have to be trimmed down so they grow over, not up, so you can get at the apples -- but you can still get a lot of apples off a tree that big and old. After using up six or seven pounds making apple butter, I still had apples to use up.

It's been a minute since I made a Pol Martin recipe, so I brought down one of the seven (7) Pol Martin cookbooks I own and flipped it open to the index. Now, I've bitched about Pol's indexes before. I'm of the opinion that cookbooks live and die by their indexes, and even cookbooks with well-written recipes can get on my shit list due to bad indexing. I really love Beatrice Ojakangas as a recipe writer -- she is very good at detailing Scandinavian-American food with an almost academic rigor -- but her indexes suck. Like I couldn't find krumkage -- a very common Scandinavian Christmas cookie -- because she'd renamed it something stupid like "sugar cones" but didn't include the original Norwegian name anywhere. One of Pol's cookbooks doesn't include "chicken" as a category, which is several magnitudes of order stupider.

So I open up Pol's A Guide to Modern American Cooking to the apple section of the index. There's a couple baked apple recipes -- one of which is to be made in the microwave schwink schwink schwink -- and one for an apple galette. (A galette is like a free-form pie without the pie pan.) I'm not getting involved in microwave nonsense right now, but I do love the concept of an apple galette. So I go to page 375, where the galette recipe is supposed to be, and I find a recipe for "Party Cookies" instead. Okay, fine, maybe there was a typo. I go to page 275, which ends up being "Chick Pea Salad" (which honestly seems kinda interesting.) I page through the entire dessert section. No galettes, apple or otherwise.

Fine, I think. I get out the next Pol cookbook in the stack, which is A Guide to Modern Cooking. I page to the apple section of the index, in which there are two recipes for baked apples and ... one for an apple galette on page 375. I page to 375 and, lo and behold, there's a recipe for "Party Cookies". On page 275 there's a recipe for "Chick Pea Salad." I get out both A Guide to Modern Cooking and A Guide to Modern American Cooking and set them side by side. (Hmmm, I think, those titles are awfully similar.) I page to the title section. Identical. I page to the contents section. Identical. I page to the copyright page. Identical, except for a section in bold that reads: Special edition published for Cobra Importing and Distributing Corp.

Ope. These are the same exact book except one's been retitled for an American audience, up to and including a mistake about an apple galette in the index. Turns out, I don't have seven Pol Martin cookbooks, I have six.* So then I get down the next Pol Martin cookbook, this time Easy Cooking for Today, volume II. FINALLY there is not but one but TWO recipes for apple pie. (Which seems hilarious to me, because shouldn't the American cookbook have an apple pie recipe? But, as I've already established, it's not really an American cookbook, but a Modern one, whatever that means. Boo.) One was a typical two-crust apple pie, and the other used streusel instead of the top crust. I decided to make the later.

I've already had good results with Pol's baking recipes, but especially his pies, and this was no different. Like the rhubarb pie of his I made -- which I loved -- Pol uses brown sugar instead of white, which is fucking genius. I legitimately don't know why I haven't been using at least half brown sugar in my pies until now. The brown sugar adds an almost smoky caramel flavor, plus the color is pretty. But there were two things I didn't think were quite right about the recipe. One is that Pol calls for lemon juice but not lemon zest, which I remedied; you always want a tart edge on the sweetness. The other is that the streusel had too much butter and not enough crunch to it. I even added some minute oatmeal for density, and the streusel still wasn't crumbly enough. When I make this again -- which I will -- I might even go crazy and add nuts.

So! I still have six or seven pounds of apples left, so I might give Pol's apple cake recipe a try. I'm feeling considerably more chill about his baking recipes, now that I've had some successes under my belt. Which is interesting, in a way: usually chefs don't bake and bakers don't chef, because they're almost different disciplines. Like I've noticed my younger kid start getting into baking, which is how I learned my way around a kitchen. Baking both doesn't require and almost discourages improvisation, so the quality of the baked goods is much more dependent on the quality of the recipe. Cooking is much more beholden to technique, which has to be learned. (Of course this is a major generalization, and doesn't account for the amount of crying I did when learning how to make pie crust, for example, or any recipe that involves a candy thermometer.) But Pol Martin is obviously a Renaissance man. C'est magnifique!

*I know there's another Pol cookbook out there which I cannot get my hands on called Kebab It! Pasta & Budget Cooking. If anyone can find that shit on Ebay or whatever, please let me know. I need it.

[cooking-pol-martin]

[peach emoji]

I've made this joke a couple times -- because jokes are always better when they're repeated -- that if you fed Pol Martin's recipes into an LLM, you'd get something made with veal, veal, Gruyère, veal, mushrooms, veal, eggplant, veal, veal, veal, and a white sauce with too much nutmeg, inexplicably. I'm beginning to realize that, unfortunately, if you fed my posts from Cooking Pol Martin into an LLM, you'd get something like:

When I was a child in the 1980's, some bullshit that is only glancingly relevant happened to me. Meltdown about Reagan. Unnecessary literary reference, with link to Wikipedia like a boomer. After boiling the eggplant for two hours, I had a nervous breakdown. Why doesn't he specify what kind of vinegar? Nutmeg. I read through the recipe and failed to comprehend I was to microwave a single celery stalk for twenty five years. Something racist, because LLMs are all agents of fascism, and you can't convince me otherwise.

The relevant part for the purposes of this essay is that I habitually -- and one might even say pathologically -- read Pol's recipes and then miss a key detail or ingredient like I've been mind-wiped. I honestly have no idea why or how I do this. I have a literal degree in the English language and I've worked as a professional writer for years; you'd think I could read and comprehend a hundred word recipe. I mean, maybe I miss ingredients all the time, but because I'm using ATK or whatever for my recipes and they're not full of 80s weirdness, I don't notice. Maybe not.

Which brings me to today's Cooking Pol Martin outing: "Individual Peach Tarts." Much like when I made Pol's strawberry sauce, I was trying to use up something which was about to go off. We'd gotten something like two dozen peaches from a friend of the family, and most of them were eaten immediately, but there were a half dozen sad lonely peaches left. The funny thing was I paged through three of Pol's cookbooks before I found a recipe that included peaches. Lots of papaya, weirdly, but no peaches.

But I eventually found the peach tart recipe which, even with my incomplete comprehension of what was involved, seemed doable. This was the part I missed: Pol includes in his ingredient list "pastry cream of your choice" to use as filling. Now, maybe my brain just slid over this because it is a serious fucking pet peeve of mine when cookbook writers include an ingredient that in and of itself requires a recipe. I become doubly wroth when there isn't a fucking recipe for said ingredient. For real, what in the actual fuck is pastry cream.

After going to the store on two separate occasions -- once buying these weird phyllo cups which were never going to work, then getting puff pastry tart shells -- and spending as inordinate time considering what product might potentially work as "pastry cream," I was ready to go. (Turns out, "pastry cream" is Jell-O vanilla pudding made with less than the specified amount of water. Who knew?) Oh, but this is the really funny part: Pol has absolutely zero instructions on how to deal with the peaches.

Okay, so we've come to the 80s reverie part of the essay. I come from a long line of resplendent pie makers. My great-grandma -- the one I was named after -- was known for her peach pie. I never got to experience one of her pies because she died long before my time, but my mom's cousin Grace -- great-grandma's niece -- also made sublime peach pie. I have experienced that, and that shit is amazing. (Grace is 99 years old and still trucking.) According to my mom, Grace would get bushels of peaches when they were in season, and then process and store them so she could make peach pie so fucking beautiful it hurt.

But this is this thing: peaches are upsetting. I don't know what the term is for misphonia of the mouth -- I suspect it's mouthfeel; shudder -- but I know so many people -- and count myself one of them -- who find the fuzz on peaches subtly disturbing.* Like I'm thinking now of biting into the fuzz of a ripe peach, and it gives me the screaming fantods. So to make a dessert with peaches, you have to get the fuzz off. I did the blanch and peel thing, which didn't work as well as I'd hoped, but it did work. (To be fair, I think the almost overripeness of the peaches was the issue.) Did Pol tell me about this process? Non.

So I assemble the individual tarts, which are then to be brushed with a glaze made of melted jelly and water. Pol does not specify what kind of jelly, much like he never specifies what kind of vinegar, but I went with apricot because it seemed adjacent. And you know what? Despite all the lamentations and rending of clothing, they actually turned out good. The whole household ate one, and the leftover was gone by morning. If I ever had a fancy dinner party in the middle peach season, I'd consider making this again. Which is about as conditional a recommendation as you can get. Bon appétit! Etc.

*So here's your unnecessary literary references: One of my favorite poems is TS Elliot's The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock. It's a dramatic monologue of sorts, wherein the unexceptional Mr Prufrock squanders his life in fear. Which is an altogether flippant way of describing how Elliot sketches the mind of a man eaten by inaction and regret in short, neat strokes, while doing some truly masterful shit with the poetic form, down to the way he uses tenses. Seriously, if you read it, pay attention to when it shifts from future to present to past tense, and the conditionals in between.

The part of the poem that is relevant to this essay is how Prufrock gets all freaked out by the fact that woman have body hair. He talks about the women he's known in this dissociated way, describing them as arms that are smooth, white, and ornamented, but then also "downed with light brown hair!" (Pay attention to that exclamation point; poets don't use them often.) It's like he can't understand how people he has partitioned into attributes and idealized can also be living in the animal body that even he inhabits.

And I have known the arms already, known them all— Arms that are braceleted and white and bare (But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)

When I read this, it made me realize how often hair stands in for our sexual nature and/or our animal bodies in literature and folklore. There are a number of female Medieval saints who, due to being captured by heathens or forced to marry dickheads, avoided being raped by miraculously breaking out in fur all over their bodies. The werewolf gives in to its bestial nature in (menstrual) cycle with the moon. How this has any relevance to the subject at hand is the fuzz on peaches, which makes the peach this subtly sexualized fruit. I don't think it's an accident that the peach ended up as the emoji for the female sex.

I don't want to overstate or drive my late model third wave feminist rubric over the cliff. (This is all very 90s feminist interpretation. It's not wrong, just maybe a little cringe at this point with its weird obsession with bodies and dis/ease and such. To digress within a digression, I kind of wonder if this emphasis on The Body in turn of the millennium litcrit isn't what put some feminist types on the road to TERFism. Like I haven't read Camille Paglia since the mid-90s, but that she's a TERF now is no shock, given how she roots gender differences in biology. She writes so much more about peeing that seems wise, for example.) Peach fuzz makes it feel like you're biting into cold animal flesh, and it doesn't have to be more complicated than that. Any time I think the word flesh I get the jibblies.

[cooking-pol-martin]

Putting the French in French-Canadian: Boeuf Bourguignon

Most North Americans are pretty cut off from the seasonality of food, the supply chain being what it is, but there are still rhythms to the regional menu. Here in Minnesota, the produce at the farm stands shifts and changes as this vegetable comes into season, and this other fades out. I've spent time in New Mexico, and this time of year every grocery store parking lot has a barrel roaster full of Hatch chiles. Last weekend I could really feel the change of the seasons coming. The evenings have that chilly edge to them, and the late summer flowers are waning into reds and browns. So when I was dithering trying to come up with a menu for this week, my kid suggested we make stew. Two weeks ago stew would be unthinkable -- in this heat?? -- but now it's just perfect.

So I decided to page through stew and roasts section of one of Pol's cookbooks. I eventually landed on Boeuf Bourguignon, which is a French dish I've heard of but never made. I looked up the history of the dish, which is where things got interesting. The dish itself is one of those dishes, like Coq au Vin, which is designed to use up tough cuts of meat, and/or extract every last godamn calorie from food. Stew meat is seared and then braised in red wine -- Bourguignon refers to wine from the Burgundy region of France, but really any dry red wine will do -- and then garnished with mushrooms and pearl onions. Coq au Vin is basically the same, but with chicken. And sometimes white wine.

Both Boeuf Bourguignon and Coq au Vin are relatively recent dishes, first found in print in the mid 1800s, and at their origins were considered kinda trashy because of the tough cuts of meat involved. Coq refers to the rooster, not a roasting hen, and roosters are tough as shit. But as food culture shifted with increasing urbanization, people became decoupled from the rhythms of rural life -- I don't have to kill & eat the old rooster anymore -- these more peasant-y dishes started to seem exotic. (I'm sure the French names helped. Coq au Vin sounds a lot more fancy than its English translation: Cock in Wine. Lol.) As much as I talk shit about food in the 70s and 80s, food in the 50s and 60s was so much worse. Everything came out of cans if it wasn't in season that minute. While some canned veggies are fine, some things, like tinned asparagus, are so vile I have to assume necromancy is involved.

But speaking of shifts in culture, The 1940s were the first, last, and only time a very large number of North Americans left America to go off to war in Europe and Asia (mostly). My working class great-uncles who fought in WWII would never have experienced European anything in Homestead PA or Cottage Grove MN. They came home with those experiences of food and culture, and, as the country settled into the crushing conformity & unprecedented prosperity of the 1950s, a real hunger to recreate those experiences took hold. But most of the recipes available to Americans for French or European cuisine were aimed at the professional cook, and I know from experience how infuriating a recipe that assumes knowledge I don't have can be.

The person who can be most credited with bringing these sort of dishes to the American table is Julia Child. Julia Child is a little before my time -- her major work Mastering the Art of French Cooking was published in 1961, with a splash -- but I do remember her show being on in the afternoons after school in the 80s. Julia Child was a great populist who strove to demystify French cooking for an American audience. While she wanted to be as authentic as possible, she tailored her recipes to American tastes and kept an eye on the economy of the dish. Some things that were relatively easy to source in France, like black truffle oil, are hideously expensive here in the States. Some critics thought she got into technique too much -- her recipes are very detailed -- but she intended the book's use by laypeople, not chefs. Hmm, does this sound like anyone we know? A certain French-Canadian chef, say?

Like my experience making Pol's Osso Buco, a traditional Milanese dish of similar vibe to the dishes discussed here, making his Boeuf Bourguignon was basically flawless. Nothing was wet ass -- or it was appropriately wet ass for a stew -- the timing and order of inclusion was all just right, and the sauce was sublime. Now, I've dinged Pol in the past for building his sauces weirdly, most specifically in the Osso Buco recipe, but none of that weirdness was in evidence here. In fact, I learned a couple things making this recipe that I'm going to incorporate into my sauces going forward.

For example, a sauce usually goes thusly: sear meat -> soften veggies in the browned cooking residue, called fond -> add flour -> add a deglazing element, usually an acid like wine or vinegar to scrape up the fond goodness -> add the base, be that stock or milk or whatever -> simmer. Usually I throw in the flour and then immediately start pouring in the liquids. Pol had me cook the meat & veggies with the flour for five minutes. This seemed nuts at first, but as the flour browned to a pretty caramel color I thought, you sly fox, Pol. Cooking the flour deepened the fond in a super good way. He also recommends heating the stock before pouring it in, which doesn't shock the sauce and makes it mix better.

I'm going to be real: I did make some changes. Or rather, one big change: I cooked the stew in an Instant Pot because I fucked around too much watching the most ridiculous conflict go down in this gaming guild I belong to -- Leroy, why did you open 20d, that was not in the game plan!!! -- so I didn't have the requisite two hours to properly braise the meat. That aside, I basically followed the recipe to the letter. I served it over mashed potatoes, and it was rich, thick, and utterly right for a evening tending to the crisp edge of fall.

Before I made this dish, I hadn't really considered Pol Martin in the larger tradition of cookbook-writers and chefs localizing dishes for an American audience. While there can be only one Julia Child, the arrow of time being what it is, Pol does sit comfortably in her legacy, with clearly written step-by-step instructions for sometimes tricky techniques, an eye towards economy and local availability over slavish adherence to some blinkered notion of authenticity, but still detailing recipes that come out of a specific culinary tradition. Even though I first encountered Pol Martin perpetrating absolute fuckery with a couple of microwaves, it's in his more traditional recipes he really shines.Sure, yeah, he also microwaves trouts, but everyone's gotta have their thing.

[cooking-pol-martin]

"Barbecued Pork Chops": Somehow Both Wet Ass and Dry

So, I've been out of town most of the last month. First, on a road trip to a family reunion on the east coast and back, and then out to the west coast for a wedding. Each time I'd get back home, I would toss all the perfectly good leftovers the kids eschewed for ramen or whatever, and then dug around in the crisper drawers and pantry to pull something together. Because fucked if I was going to drive to the store three blocks away after being in a car for a thousand miles. It's legitimately amazing what you can do with sad looking parsley, desiccated garlic, vinegar, and olive oil.

While I have gone shopping for the staples necessary for existence -- I replaced the quarter gallon of spoiled milk that ruined my coffee for example -- I hadn't given much thought to meal planning. Add in the fact I've been working long hours to make up the vacation time, and I got in tonight after work and thought, fuck it, I'm going to find some Pol Martin nonsense I can make using whatever's in the house. The cookbook which was on top was Supreme Cuisine, which I happen to use more often the others. (If you decide you want a Pol Martin cookbook in your life, go with that one or the American one. They're like $5 on eBay.)

I paged through the index looking for chicken wings, which is when I discovered that Pol does not include the basic category of chicken in his cookbooks. This is very regular bitch of mine: I believe cookbooks live or die on their indexes. You should be able to look in the fridge, see you have dry-looking carrots and frozen chicken thighs, and look up a recipe or two with those things. Every single last recipe should be cross-listed by major ingredients for sure, like vegetable or meat type, but there should also be broad categories like vegetarian or cakes.

I have literally never encountered an index which didn't include an ingredient as basic as chicken in the index. Hilariously, when I looked up veal, which is Pol's very favorite, there was an entire whole ass page. And yes, I did look through the cookbook and found several recipes with chicken as an ingredient. So no, it's not just that there was no such thing in the cookbook. Point being, after determining the index was stupid, I paged through Supreme Cuisine's barbecue section and landed on "Barbecued Pork Chops." I didn't have pork chops, but I did have all the stuff for the sauce, and I've been home long enough I'm willing to walk to the store.

Having already made one of Pol's barbecue sauces to imperfect results, I knew I was going to make some changes. I put in a tablespoon of corn starch as a thickener, for example, because Wet Ass Pol's gonna wet, and this barbecue sauce was thin. I also ran the sauce through this little food processor that I have because I'm of the opinion barbecue sauce should not have chunks. (I believe this is a fairly universal opinion.) You can see how much like a dog's breakfast this sauce looks in the above photo. Hilariously, I think that little blender is so old that the blades are dull as shit, so it was still pretty chunky.

But this is when I realized that zero of Pol's recipes that I've encountered so far call for the use of a food processor. Which made me remember that my mom -- who is a better than average cook, even in the 80s -- always disparaged food processors back in the day. I can't really remember why, but my impression is that she thought they were pretentious or douchey or something. Which I kind of get? They're fucking annoying to clean, that's for sure.

I suspect the food processor wasn't that widespread when Pol was writing his cookbooks, even if he used one personally. Even then, he uses a food mill a couple times in the cursed videotapes, which would be the old school analog way to grind up food. I feel like I regularly encounter food processors in recipes now, so this is just another thing that changed from then to now: the expectation that the average person has various kitchen gadgets. While Pol embraced the microwave with his whole heart, he apparently didn't have the same enthusiasm for other, potentially more useful kitchen tools. C'est la vie.

So we marinated the pork chops, admittedly for less time than the recipe called for because we were so hungry, then tossed them on the grill with some squash and new potatoes, the latter of which Pol recommends as a side. My husband followed the cooking instructions to the letter, which ended up being a mistake. When cooking meat, it's always better to cook to temperature, not time. By which I mean, 10 minutes a side was way too long, and the pork chops ended up on the dry side of well done. Meanwhile, despite the cornstarch and blending, the sauce was so thin it basically fell off into the fire, lol.

Despite everything, the meal turned out pretty decent. Sure, the pork chops were dry, and it felt like all the sauce vanished, but they actually had a nice flavor. The new potatoes, which were just a tossed off recommendation at the end of the recipe, turned out really great. I parboiled them and then tossed them on the grill to get some char and smoke flavor, and they were way better than anything so simple has a right to be.

So! Another adventure in cooking Pol Martin comes to a close. I'm not sure what the takeaway is here. Maybe something like, Wet Ass Pol and Dry Ass Pol -- the latter I only just encountered for the first time recently -- can exist in a superimposition of moisture states. Maybe it's that barbecue sauce is both deceptively simple -- I had all the ingredients in my sad, empty fridge -- and devilishly difficult to get right. Either way, until next time, bon appétit.

[cooking-pol-martin]

Black Swan Stuffed Tenderloin

Westerners have used the metaphor of the black swan as far back as antiquity. Black swans were presumed not to exist, so the metaphor meant an impossibility; a modern analogy would be "as rare as hen's teeth." The oldest known instance dates back to the Roman satirist Juvenal sometime in the second century: Sabine maidens who stopped the war----a prodigy as rare upon the earth as a black swan! (I presume the meaning of this sentence is something along the lines of bitches, man. Boy, but the Western canon is misogynous.)

But then in the late 17th century, Dutch traders encountered actual black swans in Australia, and the term morphed to a black swan event: something that no one saw as likely, but could -- especially after the fact -- be explained fairly neatly. Most animals come in both albino and melanistic versions; if there are white ones, there are probably black ones. Sure, Bush was briefed on how Bin Laden was determined to strike the US AND there had been a terrorist bombing of the World Trade Center eight years previous, but no one could have predicted 9/11. (Also, you can get hens -- ok, chicken embryos -- to have teeth, but it's completely fucked and not ok.)

So what does all this have to do with stunt-cooking recipes from a French-Canadian chef of minor and boutique infamy? I'm glad you asked.

[image description: detail from step-by-step instructions featuring a copper pot with diced onions and completely whole rosemary and basil leaves. Seriously, why is his dice so large?]

So, by this point, I'm made dozens of Pol Martin dishes, enough that I'm hip to his quirks. He loves Gruyère, veal, and white sauce with too much nutmeg. He's fond of both kebabs and the microwave. His dice is so big it hurts my feelings. And, more often than not, his dishes are absolutely swimming in liquid, earning him the juvenile sobriquet Wet Ass Pol. As we just learned in the discussion of black swan events, given the existence of Wet Ass Pol, we can assume their exists his equal and opposite. I should not have been so surprised when Dry Ass Pol made his entrance.

And for real, I prefer this moisture level of Pol. You can add it in, but you can't take it out.

The recipe which marked the entrance of Dry Ass Pol was "Grilled Stuffed Pork Tenderloins." I chose this recipe because I like a stuffed tenderloin -- they're a little fussy, but look real fancy -- and he did something unusual with it: Pol had me grill the tenderloin instead of baking it, which I thought was intriguing. The fussy part of the recipe is that you have to cut open the tenderloin, lay it flat, and then smash it with a mallet until its of an even thickness. Then you lay on the stuffing, roll it up, tie it up with string so it doesn't fall apart, and grill. It ended up being the stuffing which was aridly Pol Martin.

The stuffing was basically mushrooms and onions fried with seasonings and some bread crumbs to make it cohere, and then tossed in a food processor to make a paste. Even though I'd already added extra oil in the form of truffle oil -- not technically part of the recipe, but adding truffle oil to any recipe with mushrooms is highly recommended -- the mushroom paste was way too dry. Maybe it was because I used store bought crumbs instead of making my own? Idk, but either way, I had to add even more oil to get the mushroom filling not to be crumby and sad.

Though I've made stuffed tenderloins before, I'd never cooked them on a grill. I was worried about it, but I probably didn't need to: a heat source is a heat source. (Sort of. Notwithstanding microwaves.) Everything went swimmingly and we settled in to grubbing. With added truffle oil, everything was juicy and delicious. As is usual with sort of thing, the tenderloin was good day of, but day two was when the flavors really melded to be just perfect. I wished I'd made more so there would be more leftovers, something that isn't unheard of during the Cooking Pol Martin project, but is definitely uncommon enough to be a major win.

So! What do we take away from this experience with Dry Ass Pol? Part of me wants to anticipate what black swan event is in my future, given my experience so far with Pol Martin's oeuvre. But then, the whole point of the black swan event is that it's unpredictable but not inexplicable; if I can predict it, it's not a black swan event. In terms of the Cooking Pol Martin project, the fact that this recipe worked was not a huge surprise: As I've said before, it's hard to fuck up a good cut of meat -- barring microwave fuckery -- and this is a simple enough recipe ingredient-wise that there isn't much to get weird. Here's hoping the next goes so well!

[cooking-pol-martin]

You're Letting the Cold Out: Grilled Back Bacon and BBQ Sauce

We're lucky enough to live on North America's icebox, Lake Superior, so we haven't had to contend with the nightmarish temperatures like the rest of the country. (And the world: I feel so bad for Europe right now.) But because we so rarely have to deal with hot weather, very few people actually have air conditioning; we don't, anyway. All of this has been made exponentially worse because of the dangerous levels of smoke from Canadian wildfires. Typically we open the house at night to cool it off, then close it back up in the morning, but we can't do that now, the air quality's so bad. Anyway, all of this is winding up to say: I do a lot of grilling so I don't heat up the house.

So for my most recent outing for Cooking Pol Martin, I chose two grill-adjacent recipes: "Back Bacon with Garlic" and a barbecue sauce. The first was the back bacon recipe, which is slightly goofy: why not start with barbecue sauce? Now back bacon is kinda weird and hard to find these days. It's a cut of bacon that also includes pork belly or loin, or both, and is typically less fatty than either bacon or side bacon. It was also impossible for me to source, so I just went with side bacon. I like fattier cuts on the grill anyway. Pol has you make a fairly simple marinade -- garlic, oil, Worcestershire, and honey -- brush it on, and then grill.

Everyone really liked the side bacon, but I'm going to be real here: you really couldn't taste the marinade. And that's because Pol doesn't direct you to use the sauce as a marinade, so there's not enough time for the flavors to soak in. All of this reinforces my belief that it's hard to fuck up a nice cut of meat -- barring microwave fuckery -- so I'm pretty safe with any Pol Martin recipe that involves a grill. If I had to do it over again, and I'm decently sure I will, I'll use the sauce like a marinade, and then "Back Bacon with Garlic" will go from good to great.

So the next thing I tried was a barbecue sauce recipe. But before I get into that, I want to talk a little about Midwestern grilling. Now, this is a subtle distinction, but note that I used the term grilling not barbecue. Of course there are going to be barbecue enthusiasts in the Midwest, but that's not really what the average Midwesterner does with a grill. You're not going to find those dudes with a smoker in a gas station parking lot selling barbecue so good it'll make you weep, like you can find all through the South.

Instead, it's more brats boiled in beer in a Folgers can on the grill and then seared and served with a mayo-drenched salad. (Which I fully endorse, for the record.) I'm just going to assume that French Canadians have a more Midwestern relationship with their Webers than a Southern American one, so I didn't go into this expecting face-meltingly awesome sauce. The page with the barbecue sauce I made had three recipes: two which were tomato based, which I have the most experience with, and one which had as its base red Bell pepper. Being perverse, I went with the red pepper one. I feel like most people can make a decent tomato-based barbecue sauce -- judging from the ingredient lists, Pol's would be fine but basic -- so I wanted to see how something a little different worked.

So, recently, I've been discarding Pol's cooking instructions and adding ingredients in the manner that feels right to me, but I didn't feel like I needed to do that here. Hilariously, as is usual with Pol, the sauce ended up being way too wet. Wet Ass Pol's gonna wet! Like everything would have been fine if he hadn't included that cup of water, for absolutely no reason I could discern. I ended up boiling it off as much as I could, but that only goes so far. The sauce could also benefit from running it through a food mill or roughing it up with a stick blender too, as it's pretty chunky. Maybe that's preference, but honestly I don't think so. You want a barbecue sauce to be thick enough to stick, without chunks falling off into the grill.

In terms of taste, the sauce ended up better than decent, which is good, because boy does that recipe make a lot. The red pepper base seemed mellower and less acidic than tomato-based sauces, which I like. The sweet/sour/acid/heat balance was pretty good, but the sauce was also more vinegar-forward than I would prefer. That really is a preference, not a ding. And while the jalapeño I used added a nice amount of heat, their inclusion was a guess: Pol's ingredient list only specified "chili pepper," which covers a whole gamut of different ingredients. This would be a very different sauce with Ghost peppers or Serranos or something. This lack of specificity is a quirk of Pol's recipes, for better or for worse. Like he always specifies "wine vinegar" which absolutely sends me: literally all vinegar is made from wine, Pol, do you mean red or white or balsamic or...?

So! Here we are again, at the end of another foray into Cooking Pol Martin. I haven't managed to work myself into a froth, as is my wont, but honestly, it's too fucking hot for frothing anyway. I'm going to be out for a couple few weeks due to road tripping, but I'll be back for more adventures in unspecified wetness in August.

[cooking-pol-martin]

Don't Look at the Microwave: Strawberry Sauce

When I was a lass, I knew this guy called Todd. He told me this story once about visiting a friend of his -- I can't remember the exact situation, but it was something like going over to this other person's house because they were working on a school project together. So Todd didn't know the guy that well and had never been in his house. He's let in by the dad, who is flanked by an enormous mean-looking dog. The dad informed him that the dog is indeed mean, but, quote, it'll be fine as long as you don't look at him, unquote. So of course the whole time Todd was in the house, the dog sat directly at his feet, looking up at him, daring him to look down so that the dog could RIP HIS FUCKING FACE OFF.

Meanwhile, Todd spent the whole time both trying to do whatever bullshit he was there for and chanting don't look at the dog don't look at the dog don't look at the dog in his head as his eyes kept dipping involuntarily before being pulled straight in a rictus of fear.* The phrase don't look at the dog ended up in the general lexicon for use in any situation that called for not reacting to obvious fuckshit. If you've ever worked retail, this phrase comes in handy a lot, the general public being absolutely made out of obvious fuckshit.

Which, inevitably, brings me to Pol Martin. In the beginning, I had some gauzy idea that I would recreate something Pol made in the videos of his microwave fuckshit -- even going so far as researching the weird plate Pol uses to seer chicken livers or the hearts of his enemies or whatever. (Turns out, they are indeed a thing; they're called crisper plates and they're material proof that capitalism was a mistake.) When I got roughly one grillion Pol Martin cookbooks, this goal shifted to working up to microwaving a trout for four minutes a side, a recipe which is easily the silliest/least advisable in the whole Pol Martin oeuvre.

That said, I've only attempted two (2) of Pol's microwave recipes, out of the two dozen plus that I've attempted. The first was a tomato soup, which was a qualified success: it was fine, better than Campbell's, but certainly not better than the more high end grocery store tomato soup brands like Pacific or Imagine. Unless I desperately need tomato soup and have run out of Campbell's, I won't be making that again. (I cannot imagine how such a situation would come to be; writing prompt.) The other microwave recipe, an ostensible casserole, was such a miserable failure that it spawned all the boomer-style joking about Wet Ass Pol. After that hot mess, I decided that I was done with microwave recipes for the foreseeable.

Which is where don't look at the dog comes in. I have been steadfastly not looking at the dog, which in this scenario is Pol Martin's microwave recipes. I haven't even paged through them semi-casually, trying to look at them out of the corner of my eye. The microwave was dead to me. Instead I just blundered into a microwave recipe for strawberry sauce by accident on a Tuesday, with absolutely no build up or trepidation, in a no-stakes situation. I forgot there was a dog, and so didn't need to not look at it. 100% the way to go.

So. Here was the situation I found myself in: we had a party last weekend and therefore had a bunch of odd things to use up: a baggie of cut peppers, some lunch meat, half a watermelon. I also found a little less than half a quart of scared-looking strawberries in the basement fridge. So I busted out some Pol cookbooks and scanned through the indexes looking for recipes that used a lot of strawberries. I found the recipe for strawberry sauce in Pol's American cookbook. As per usual with Pol Martin, I looked through the recipe and just didn't clock that I'm to use a microwave to make the sauce. (I swear he does something to my reading comprehension.)

The ingredients all seem normal though. I was amused by the inclusion of booze, but this is Pol we're talking about, so fine, I'm into it. I go out and gather the ingredients other than the stawberries, an activity which included me standing in the liqueur section of the liquor store wondering if I should spring for the Contreau or say fuck it and get the Triple Sec in the plastic bottle. After having flashbacks to a particularly ill considered night of drinking fuzzy navels when I was in college, I went with the plastic bottle.

I come home, start chopping up the strawberries, and after the second read-through of the recipe, realize it's cooked in the microwave. I don't even bother dithering over whether to use the range because, fuck it, these strawberries were so desiccated they were going into the guinea pig cage otherwise, so it's no big deal if I wreck them. In they go with currant jelly and the liqueur. They don't look great after the first go round, and kind of smell weird. Observe:

Fine, whatever. Let's fucking go. I mix in corn starch dissolved in water and send the strawberry mixture for another round of nuking. Now, I have basically zero faith in this. Pol really likes cornstarch as a thickener -- I know for sure he uses it in his rhubarb pie and the disastrous microwave "casserole" -- but it absolutely did not work in either of those recipes. I legit thought cornstarch couldn't work as a thickener in a microwave because blah blah something food science. So I was gobsmacked when the sauce came out of the microwave with beautiful color and a perfect consistency. It didn't smell weird either, it just smelled like strawberry sauce. Like I even made my husband come in and look at this which was confusing for him because he was like, yeah, I see, strawberry sauce. Do we have any ice cream?

I got out the parfait glasses and called in the household. Even the younger kid -- who isn't nearly as on board with the Pol Martin project -- didn't make suspicious noises before digging in. I don't particularly like strawberries, but the tart of the currant jam and the hint of citrus from the booze really worked. This was my biggest microwave success so far, hands down. Dammit, Pol, you win this round.

So what to take away from this outing? That one should always accidentally on purpose sidle into microwaving a trout? I had this trout innocently, officer, and the microwave was right there? No, because while general insouciance on my part because there were no stakes and I didn't care certainly helped -- I was not not looking at the dog -- but then also the recipe was dead simple. Like how hard is it to make a sauce with three ingredients, and a heat source is a heat source. Simplicity can confer success.

Uh. But you know what's even simpler than that?

[focus in, dolly out]

*I had a similar situation when I worked on this horrible painting project for a family which had a Airedale terrier -- no terrier should be that big -- that would fucking attack you if you turned your back to it. I had to back out of the house every time I left. There was so much wrong with that project that I have dozens of stories.

[cooking-pol-martin]

Mythbusting Pol Martin

When you have little kids, you have a delicate balance to walk with media. While I'm not terribly censorious -- I don't think any given kid is going to be traumatized by hearing the f-bomb, plus largely it was me dropping them -- but there's plenty of media that can be upsetting with no cusses at all. I don't think the kids ever saw the sketch on Robot Chicken called "Tooth & Consequences", but I do remember vividly thinking, whelp, make extra sure they never watch THAT shit. While I think The Family Guy sucks, it was more that the one kid would repeat the most annoying punchlines for days that got that show banned from the house.

But then the grownups in the house also had to contend with children's media, which runs the gamut from awesome to the fuck outta here. I loved Yo Gabba Gabba!; tolerated Dora the Explorer; and absolutely banned both Calliou and Barney. All this is winding up to say there were two shows (for lack of a better word) that everyone in the family could absolutely agree on: Homestar Runner and Mythbusters. If you've never watched Mythbusters, the format is thus: they find a myth and then try to recreate the conditions. If they can't -- if it's busted -- then they try to make the myth happen by any means necessary.

Which brings me, inevitably, to Pol Martin.

I made two Pol Martin recipes this week: "Braised Rib-Eye Steaks" and "Pepper Rice." (They were for different meals, because I've learned my lesson about ruining dinner.) When I started the Pol Martin project lo, these many months ago, I declared I was going to follow the recipe as closely as I was able. This resulted in me doing things like boiling leeks for half a godamn fiscal hour which I will never do again, thank you very much. I was in my recreating conditions phase, to put it in terms of Mythbusters. This resulted in a lot of busting.

Since then, I've decided to cut myself some slack sometimes. (Not always, because I followed the ridic instructions for "Fish & Vegetable Salad" to the letter, to Wet Ass Pol results.) But for the two recipes that are the subject of this essay, I decided to hew to the ingredients list and proportions as closely as I could -- with some minor deviations -- but I more or less chucked his cooking instructions. I'm a better than decent cook with decades of experience in the kitchen, and I'm just going to say it: sometimes his recipes are wrong. So I'm just trying to make them work, like the Mythbusters do once the myth gets busted.

The first recipe I tried was "Braised Rib-Eye Steaks." I'm of the opinion that it's difficult to fuck up a good cut of meat. To be fair, I've seen Pol give it the college try, like when, in one of the digitized video tapes, he goes to the market for a salmon steak and then microwaves that bitch to death. I suppose the amendment to my declaration being: it's difficult to fuck up a good cut of meat, except if there's a microwave involved. Like I've never made scallops because I'm terrified of screwing up something that's roughly $30 a pound. But I got some nice rib-eyes from Costco, and was ready to get to it.

The major change to this recipe was that I made it in the Instapot. Braising requires time, time which I didn't have. The Instapot, with its pressure cook setting, can cut two hours of braising down to 20 minutes. (My mom, who was a working single mother, used a pressure cooker all the time to get dinner on the table, so this feels really regular to me.) I also rearranged the order the ingredients went into the cooker. Pol almost always puts the spices in too early, which makes the volatile aromatics in, say, garlic cook off. I also cut the ... everything smaller than Pol directs. One thing that drives me crazy in his videos is how enormous his dice is. No.

[image description: a photo from one of Pol's cookbooks. Very wet looking sliced beef with vegetables that are diced too big on a pink and green plate. The caption reads "Braised Rib-Eye Steaks (serves 4).]

"Braised Rib-Eye Steaks" turned out good, not amazing, but good. Per usual, the recipe was way too wet. He had me pour a cup of clamato juice and two cups of beef stock over two pounds of meat, which is a ridiculous amount of liquid. But Wet Ass Pol's gonna wet. I was intrigued by the inclusion of clamato juice -- and even added some anchovy paste to punch up the umami -- but honestly I don't know that it added much more than vibes. I liked the turnips which soaked up all the flavor of the broth but still had a little crunch. Usually I think turnips are boring. I had the whole thing over mashed potatoes, which was the right call.

Honestly, my biggest criticism is that braising a rib-eye is kind of a waste of a rib-eye. Like it'll be good, but braising is usually reserved for tougher, more fibrous cuts of meat. Braising is when you sear something to get a nice crust, and then basically poach it in some kind of liquid -- broth is common, but you can do use anything from wine to coconut milk, or a combo -- in an enclosed dish. The low and slow cooking breaks that structure down and makes the meat tender, but the meat isn't submerged so it doesn't go to mush. The rib-eye basically tasted like stew meat, which is obviously delicious, but stew meat is also like half the price of a rib-eye. I liked this enough to do again, but I'd chill on the braising liquid and use a shittier cut of meat.

Oh also? I added a bunch of flour as thickener trying to get the braising liquid to approach something like gravy-like consistency, but there's no overcoming this amount of wetness.

[image description: sliced beef and diced turnips & tomatoes served over mashed potatoes in a dark blue bowl. There's an awful lot of liquid.]

The next recipe I tried was "Pepper Rice." You might think pepper refers to black pepper, but he means bell peppers, just to get that out of the way. I needed a side for this chicken shish kabob recipe I've been wanting to try since my newest collection of sick fucking antique skewers showed up. (Pol has a lot of kebab recipes, and his skewers are all immaculate. The fact that I can't find the sword-shaped ones that aren't a grillion dollars still makes me mad.) I'd run across the "Pepper Rice" recipe and filed it away for a rainy day: it's simple, has normal ingredients, and cooks fast.

[image description: grilled chicken on sick fucking antique skewers with birds and stuff for handles sits on a silver tray.]

I'm going to admit that like the braised rib-eyes, I utterly disregarded his instructions. I've run into this with Pol's recipes before -- notably the "Fish & Vegetable Salad" -- but he often pre-cooks ingredients. I simply don't get this. "Pepper Rice" isn't so different from my go-to Spanish rice recipe, which involves softening the vegetables and then pouring in both the dry rice and chicken broth so that everything cooks together. Instead, Pol wants us to fry up the veggies and then mix in already cooked rice? Why? This is a terrible idea.

[image description: pepper rice and grilled chicken in a dark blue bowl on a bright red tablecloth.]

Hilariously, I didn't get the ratio between the rice and cooking liquid quite right, so I kind of ended up with a Wet Ass Pol situation inadvertently. I just boiled it off. I though the pepper rice was kinda bland, but then my husband waxed all philosophical about letting the subtlety of the pepper's mild sweetness become the focus, without distracting with stronger flavors. Maybe he was humoring me slash Pol, but it's also an interesting way to start thinking about the meta-philosophy of preparing food.

I'm a Midwesterner, so I'm not ever going to go too crazy with spices, but I almost automatically double the garlic in any recipe, add fish sauce, anchovy paste, or capers at every opportunity, and otherwise garnish with soy sauce, sriracha, or whatever condiment seems appropriate, and some that don't. On some basic level, I must value a certain kind of complexity of flavor ... or that's not the right way to put it. Fresh ingredients cooked right without much seasoning can be complex, but they're subtle. It's more like I want the flavors to be more forward.

The best articulation of this is in the cookbook Salt Fat Acid Heat which, like it says in the title, argues that the best dishes balance those four attributes, but then also really digs into the various ingredients that contribute to that balance. The recipes in that book aren't amazing, ironically, but articulating a philosophy of cooking and writing a decent recipe are two different skill sets. I think the author is onto something there, at least in the ways flavors interact. Pol's recipe has all the attributes in pretty decent balance: salt from the broth, fat from the oil, acid from the tomatoes, and heat in the browning. But I want something that explores other registers: sweet, hot, green, bright, any of a dozen flavors I can't describe but nonetheless enjoy. I want those four attributes to be a base I can build on.

So. I've made a couple dozen Pol Martin recipes so far. There have been high highs and low lows, and everything in between. I've followed recipes exactly and not so much. I've attempted everything from appetizers to main dishes to desserts. I've used a microwave. But I feel like this is the first time I've really understood that he and I have sometimes fundamental differences in what we value in cooking. So if I take an ingredient list from Pol, which is balanced in one way, and cook it the way most makes sense to me, which is balanced in another, I can really get the most out of his recipes. I think I've really begun to vibe on our differences, Pol and me.

Woof, did that gummy kick in or what? Yeah.

[cooking-pol-martin]

The Art of Food Photography: Kebab It!

I started this ill-considered Cooking Pol Martin project because of some videos where Pol does unholy nonsense with a microwave. Most of his cookbooks have a microwave section -- tellingly, Chef Pol Martin's Favourite Recipes does not -- and he also has a whole ass cookbook devoted to microwave recipes. The microwave is his thing, for better or for worse. That said, he also has a pretty serious thing for kebabs. At least three of his cookbooks have "Kebab It!" sections, and I just now discovered he has a whole cookbook of kebab recipes -- also called Kebab It! -- that seems so utterly out of print that I despair of ever getting my mitts on it. Long story long, I decided I should attempt some of his kebab recipes.

The two recipes I decided to try were "Cocktail Sausages on Skewers" -- which consist of bacon, cocktail sausages, and mandarin orange sections -- and "Pineapple Chunks and Water Chestnuts" -- which are made up of pineapple, bacon again, and water chestnuts. The former was basted with barbecue sauce, and the latter lemon and maple syrup. Everything about these recipes is so delightfully dated, from the cocktail weenies to the water chestnuts, and I love that about them. I can absolutely see my Grandpa Ed making something like this for fancy. Both ended up tasting okay, but were so infuriating to make that I will never make them again. Especially the one with water chestnuts.

I don't know if you can tell from the photo, but most of those water chestnuts are split in half. Trying to skewer something as inflexible as a water chestnut with a decently large blade ends in significantly more broken water chestnuts than skewered ones. The mandarin oranges were also annoying, but more because they were too soft and ripped instead of too brittle and snapped. I could sort of shove the orange sections in place though, unlike the water chestnuts. I honestly liked the lemon-maple marinade, and can see using that as a sauce for less infuriating ingredients.

But also, I'm going to be real here: the main reason I decided to do some kebab recipes is because Pol has these fucking sick sword-shaped skewers that I became utterly obsessed with. Observe:

[image description: sausage chunks and shrimp skewered on a sick sword-shaped skewer sits on a plate with pink and green lines on the rim]

I immediately jumped onto Ebay and tried to find something like this, and I was completely shut out. I did find tons of very cool skewers -- just stupid sweet antique Turkish stuff -- but the single sword-shaped offering was some antique French skewers that were $150 for four. Absolutely not. What is wrong with the world?? I cannot be the only person who thinks that sword-shaped skewers are dope as shit; why aren't there any made in this century? I did find some pretty brass ones for my attempt to kebab it(!), but they are not nearly as badass as I would prefer.

So here is where I would like to spend some time talking about Pol's food photography. This didn't occur to me until very recently -- like yesterday -- but it is notable how many photographs are in Pol's cookbooks. I have several cookbooks of this vintage, and exactly none of them have photographs of the included dishes. Sometimes there are line drawings -- like for tricky techniques or table settings -- but no photography. Some of my contemporary ones do, but even then, they tend to be more sparse, coming at chapter headings or for signature dishes. Pol not only uses photographs for almost every dish, but he also includes dozens of photographs with step-by-step instructions, so you can know exactly what the recipes look like. Here's one for making crêpe batter:

[image description: a series of six photos with the heading "Technique: Basic Crêpe Batter" which shows step by step instructions for making said batter.]

I've always said Pol is kind of a mensch, and this sort of thing is exhibit A: so often when I'm making a dish, I'll get freaked out because I don't understand how things are supposed to look or work, and this careful documentation is really helpful to me. Cookbook writers not detailing the steps properly is a huge annoyance for me, so I like this. Amusingly, Pol often isn't as careful with specifying ingredients -- the fuck is pepper cream cheese? what do you mean wine vinegar? Literally all vinegar is made from wine -- but we'll take what we can get.

I also really appreciate how egalitarian Pol's photos can be. Both my kid and I would swear on a stack of bibles that there was a photo in one of these cookbooks -- I have seven Pol Martin cookbooks; no, I don't have a problem -- that included a bag of Doritos, but I was unable to find it for this missive.

[image description: tomato and rice dish on a black-rimmed white plate sits in a yellow mesh tray with a can of Coke in the background.]

I was able to find many examples of food photography that included chips, cans of Coke, or other everyday foodstuffs that are not considered fancy enough for your average cookbook. Say what you will about Pol Martin, but the man is not a snob. I mean, can you imagine an Ina Garten photo spread with a Redbull in the background? ATK knocking back a can of Diet Coke? Gordon Ramsay garnishing a recipe with some Hot Cheetos?

[image description: brown earthenware plate with a burger, sliced tomatoes, and a handful of ruffled chips.]

That said, I know from my own inexpert food-blogging how tricky food photography can be. It's super easy to make food look gross, and if the food is gross, it's doubly hard to make it look good. I've dinged Pol many times for how wet and moist his recipes turn out. That wetness is in evidence in so many of his photographs.

[Image description: tomatoes and pineapple in some sort of kebab situation, glistening.]

I have already spilled enough ink on how sopping Pol's recipes can be, so I will refrain. But this is not an appetizing photo of food. I do kinda love the random plastic-looking forks in the background, potentially for scale? I can see the photographer zooming in, thinking this needs something so the red background doesn't merge with the tomatoes, and then Pol digging through the utensil drawer for something and coming up with that. Be happy it wasn't corn holders, I guess? Corn holders would be hilarious though.

[Image description: artfully arranged triangles of sweaty pastrami dotted with god knows what all rosettes of maybe also pastrami? And also a pickle on a skewer. On top of a bed of lettuce, of course.]

I didn't make note of what the recipe this photo illustrates, sadly, because what the actual fuck is that? Oh and this next photo doesn't really work for the category of moist that I'm trying to illustrate, but it's so weird you should check it out.

[image description: one inch sections of crêpe rolls affixed all over two oranges with toothpicks.]

The instructions on this recipe for crêpe rolls finishes with: "Use oranges for creative presentation, if desired," which lol. I'm trying to imagine my family's response if I plunked down something this weird on the dinner table. And they've even been broken in on Pol's particular weirdness. (Though I do have to say I take uncharitable delight whenever the younger kid -- who is not part of the Cooking Pol Martin project -- tremulously asks me, this isn't a Pol Martin recipe, is it? when I make something new.)

After you look past the glistening, you start noticing auxiliary materials, like the dishes, cutlery, and arrangements. I've already mentioned the sick fucking skewers. There are also dozens of strange plates.

[Image description: beef and eggplant on a dish with line drawings of birds -- which appear to be some sort of heron or crane -- with text that reads "The Falconer" in a chinoiserie style.]

I wish I could see what is pictured in the middle of the plate, because I do not understand this crockery at all. I don't think those are falcons painted on the rim; they don't have the hooked bill that all raptors have. Is the food covering a drawing of a falconer? Who is going to ...what, sic his falcons on the cranes? Because I don't think falcons are big enough to fuck up a heron. The script is also strange, like something I'd expect from a circa 1970s playbill for The Mikado or something equally culturally sus. I find this plate confusing.

[Image description: Some sort of egg and mushroom canapés on a plate which appears to have a line drawing of a cow sectioned into a butcher's cut chart. Two wine bottles and a cork are in the background.]

I legitimately think dishes that have ostensibly living animals apportioned into the chunks of them you eat is fucking serial killer-y. I've said this before: I live with the cognitive dissonance of eating meat when so much of meat production is unethical -- both to the animals and the people who raise and slaughter the animals -- but I don't need to see a happy cow with dotted cut lines on its body like yay! eat me! This is probably also a dated thing, because while I have the vague sense I encountered such a thing in my youth *cough cough* years ago, I don't think I've seen anything like this recently.

You'll also notice that there are two wine bottles and a cork in the background. This brings us to the third layer of Pol's photography: the items around and behind the plated food. A big sub-category is booze, as one would expect from Pol Martin.

[Image description: the very edge of a dish of unknown meat and scallions. In the background and taking up most of the photo is a wicker-wrapped bottle of Chianti. I did not crop this photo for effect.]

The wicker-wrapped Chianti bottle is another super 70s thing: that kind of bottle used as a candle-holder was the height of fancy at a certain kind of Italian restaurant. (The one I went to as a kid was Casalenda's in Minneapolis. That place was dope.) Like unsliced bread, I don't think you can find this sort of bottle produced in the last 30 years. I don't even like Chianti, but all the bottles I run across in the liquor store are just regular bottles of wine.

[Image description: some sort of green olive pasta on a shell-shaped dish in the foreground. In the background -- which is 2/3 of the photo -- are not one but two glasses of Chardonnay, in addition to a full bottle of wine and a bottle opener.]

This picture has all the elements of a classic Pol photo: super moist looking food, massive amounts of booze, and a weird plate, in this case a shell-shaped dish. I've previously freaked out about the shell-shaped dish because it, like sword-shaped skewers, seems very hard to find in the year of our Lord 2025. Pol refers to these dishes -- both the plate and recipe -- as coquilles, which means shell in French, natch. You can find vintage ones on Etsy or Ebay, but I don't think they're produced anymore.

[Image description: stuffed mushrooms on a white china dish, behind which are no less than four glasses of red wine.]

I think this is the ne plus ultra of Pol Martin food photography: booze, booze, booze, booze, sketchy canapés, strange garnishes, a china plate on a silver charger, and really trashy looking napkins. It's such an odd mix of fancy and a little trashy, which is a decent description of the 70s in general and of Pol's whole oeuvre in specific. He's a French chef trained in France, but he's also unafraid to microwave a trout.

Once you journey beyond the alcohol, you find stranger things. Some are whimsical; some are cursed.

[Image description: stuffed tomatoes in a white dish with a prone nutcracker in the background.]

Why does this photo have a nutcracker in it? How did he get here? Why is he lying down? Are you prepared for the answers to his position and existence? I'm decently sure I'm not. I also don't understand what that ... tin? with ... potpourri? is doing in the background. Like, who looks at a dish of pretty decent looking stuffed tomatoes and thinks what this needs is a haunted doll and dried plants?

[Image description: some sort of baked fish with mushrooms and artfully arranged snow peas. In the background there's a cane with a brass handle shaped like a duck, and a newspaper.]

Is this Pol's cane? I feel like this whole photo is a writing prompt: what kind of lunatic enjoys their supper with a newspaper and a cane? Like the previous picture, I don't understand the thought process behind the collection of objects assembled here. Ok, what can I do with this? I've got my duck cane? and ... uh, a newspaper? and a lemon and some snow peas. Obviously, I'm going to use my fake Zen-looking plates. Let's fucking gooooooo... (Only Pol probably wouldn't cuss in English. Tabarnak!)

[Image description: two very normal looking half-sandwiches with a pickle and some potato chips, as well as a glass of beer. Behind which hulks a black mask with red nostrils, lips, and eye outlines.]

what the actual fuck

But seriously, I don't even know a) what the fuck that is b) what minstrel show nonsense ended in that being a good thing to put in the background of a pastrami sandwich on rye. I can't put my finger on why, but I feel like this is vaguely racist; maybe it's the oversized red lips and gaunt cheeks? It feels like a caricature. All I know is I don't want anything that freaky sitting on my table while I eat. Why does Pol own this? Where do you get something that cursed? Whhyyyyyyy?

So, here we are, at the end of another exploration of It's Pol's World, We're Just Living in It. I think the amount of food photography in any given Pol Martin cookbook is notable. He even uses it as a selling point: Over 620 photographs in full color! the cover to A Guide to Modern Cooking announces. Full color photography is not cheap even now, but it would have become much more approachably priced in the 70s and 80s than previous decades. In terms of production, that many color photos is an indicator of quality, if not in the culinary sense, then in the lithographic.

I suspect that Pol's use of that many full-color photos is an outlier the way that his embrace of the microwave is: other cookbook writers at the time -- and even now -- didn't embrace new technology. He's trailblazing in a way, trying out new things. Obviously, not everything new can be a success, she said, gormlessly. It's getting increasingly hard to find a good recipe on the Internet as LLMs regurgitate half-chewed slop as fast as they can hoover up our data.

I've developed a grudging respect for Pol for many reasons -- his willingness to try new things, his populism, his attention to detail, and, yes, even his fucking weird shit. But in a world where humanity's greatest repository of information is being degraded by the day by bullshit capitalist plagiarism machines, having an honest to god paper cookbook written by a person with quirks and personality feels like a bastion against the tide of enshittification.

[cooking-pol-martin]

Methods to Madness: Shrimp-Stuffed Eggs

While I have long declared that my goal in this ill-advised Cooking Pol Martin project is not to pick recipes that will obviously fail so I can dunk on them, I will admit I do sometimes pick recipes because of a high level of WTF. So it was with "Shrimp-Stuffed Eggs," a dish which seemed like deviled eggs, except for the inclusion of tiny potted shrimp. Like I didn't know if I could find potted shrimp in an American grocery store in the year of our Lord 2025. After the fiasco with trying to find a loaf of un-sliced bread, I'm not taking anything for granted.

Choosing a recipe that is deviled eggs adjacent is potentially unfair for another reason: I made fucking excellent deviled eggs. I have no less than three plates made specifically for deviled eggs -- an Easter themed one, a yellow melamine one, and one made out of fancy china with a gold rim -- in addition to several dedicated Tupperware-style carriers for eggs of the devil. I could make literally dozens of deviled eggs and have something deviled egg specific to house them.

Which reminds me, while my kid and I were driving around getting ingredients, I wondered why they're called deviled eggs. My kid looked it up, and the reason ended up being so much funnier than I expected. Quothe Wikipedia:

The English word "devil", in reference to highly seasoned food, was in use in the 18th century, with the first known print reference appearing in 1786. In the 19th century, the adjective "deviled" came to be used most often with spicy or zesty food, including eggs prepared with mustard, pepper, or other ingredients stuffed in the yolk cavity.

So first off, I never want to see the term "yolk cavity" ever again. Ever. That disquiet aside, I think it is so unbelievably funny that the English thought something made with pepper or mustard was spicy or zesty. Like the British more or less conquered the world to capitalize on the spice trade, and then never fucking used them. Colonialism is stupid.

Potential unfairness aside, I'm beginning to trust that Pol knows what he's doing -- barring horrifying microwave-themed disasters -- and I can learn from his expertise. It's not like I have any training in the kitchen; all of my knowledge comes from trial and error. The rhubarb pie I made this weekend from a Pol Martin recipe, for example, definitely taught me a trick or two for a dish I've made dozens of times. Maybe I could learn some tricks to make my deviled eggs better.

Turns out, 100% true. I didn't boil the eggs to his specifications because I do not believe that 10 minutes is nearly enough to result in a hard-boiled, or even a soft-boiled egg. I have this useless theory that everyone has a slightly different way of hard-boiling eggs that works for them, but if you try someone else's method, it'll go to hell even if you follow their instructions exactly.

But I did follow his instructions to mash the eggs yolks through a sieve. This is an instruction I'd seen before in one of Pol's pasta salads. While I thought this was madness, it worked a treat. I've always had trouble getting the yolks to mash completely, without lumps, and pressing them through a sieve makes the filling smooth and uniform. The sieve does look super gross though.

After the egg yolks got sieved, I was to puree a can of potted shrimp. Now, the only context I'd ever seen canned shrimp in is the Bad Sex in Fiction Award given out by the literary magazine Literary Review for the "most outstandingly awful scene of sexual description in an otherwise good novel." The prize for this ignominy is a year's supply of potted shrimp, which I assume is no more than a single can. Past winners include such luminaries as Stephen King, Morrissey, and Haruki Murakami. But we ended up finding potted shrimp easily in the local Cub Foods, right next to the canned tuna like you'd expect. Hilariously, the can was labeled "tiny shrimp."

What we did not find easily was a jar of caviar, which Pol recommends as a garnish. Now, I know that caviar is more or less a metaphor for rich asshole stuff, but that's kind of unfair. There are so many kinds of fish roe. While you can absolutely drop bank on beluga caviar -- like thousands of dollars -- other fish roes are much more reasonably priced, plus it's not like you're using much anyway. I found a jar for $7 at the grocery store by my house, which is a lot of money for an ounce of anything, but not so ridiculous I couldn't cough it up. I did not buy the salmon roe for $25, just to be clear.

After sieving the eggs and pureeing the shrimp, I was to mash in a couple tablespoons of butter, and then more than a couple tablespoons of mayonnaise. The butter legitimately seems nuts to me, because I cannot understand how that makes any sense in a filling for eggs. But whatever, this is Pol's rodeo. But as a Mayo-American, I really took issue with how little mayo I was to include in the egg filling. I solidly doubled the mayonnaise because that makes the filling light and creamy. Pol had me finish with dashes of paprika, lemon juice, and Worcestershire sauce. I approve of all of that.

Here's where the real goofiness ensued: Pol directs the reader to spoon the shrimp filling into a pastry bag with a star nozzle in order to fill the egg white halves. I went into the basement to try to find a box of kitchen shit I know ended up down there in the move, but that was not a success. So the kid and I got those plastic nozzles you can find in the cake aisle. I was going to use that and a Ziplock bag with the corner cut off to pipe the filling into the egg halves -- despite knowing that was going to go to shit fast -- but then my husband somehow magicked a Spritz cookie press out of the basement instead.

I don't think anyone much makes them anymore, but I remember making Spritz cookies during Christmas as a kid. You put cookie dough into what is basically a caulk gun with different shape-holes, and then extrude said dough onto a cookie sheet. (I apologize for using the word extrude.) The one I have currently -- which I found at a thrift store, natch -- has like a dozen possible shape plates, everything from stars to gingerbread men to camels. I found a star one and got to it.

Once I got the hang of it, the Spritz cookie press actually worked really great. Maybe a real pastry bag would be better, but then I've also never had a pastry bag do anything but break halfway through whatever I was doing, so maybe this was the best possible timeline. I topped everything with a small spoonful of caviar. Because this is not my first rodeo, I had an extra two egg halves that I'd ripped when shelling the eggs, so my kid and I ate those after filling the fancy china deviled egg dish.

Reader, that shit was sublime. I am not fucking around: these were so stupid good.

That said, I don't think that Pol's "Shrimp-Stuffed Eggs" are better than my own deviled eggs, though I do believe that my deviled eggs will get better as a consequence. Sieving the eggs is brilliant; no lumps. And I really love the caviar garnish because it's the right kind of salty and fishy to work with the filling. I've always used capers as a garnish on deviled eggs -- which I will continue to do because they have an almost citrusy saltiness which works with the fattiness of the eggs -- but I'm going to use fish roe too. It's super pretty, plus it's delicious.

I began this essay talking about how I'm not trying to pick terrible recipes and then dunk on Pol for them. But that's the kind of double negative that often turns out to be passive-aggressive bullshit. (And I'm a Midwesterner; we learn passive-aggressiveness at the knee.) So I want to say again, full-voiced and without innuendo: Pol Martin knows what he's doing. His cookbooks include carefully laid out and illustrated techniques, and there's joy to his experimentation and exploration. Sure, the Pol's recipes can be dated and regional in ways that make them ... not successful, but, as I've said before, I believe Pol Martin is a mensch.

Which is why it's so ironic that the Cooking Pol Martin project started with some videos detailing deeply unholy microwaved nonsense perpetrated by our titular French-Canadian chef. I did not have "learn grudging but honest respect for the dude who microwave-seered chicken livers" on my bingo card. While drinking. (Both him and me.) Honest to god, this project has been a journey. Who knows what'll happen next?