#stunt cooking

[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]

Osso Buco: It's not as funny when it's good

It seems like an odd thing to say, but when you read cookbooks -- which are largely instructions to do stuff, not anything personal -- you can still get a real sense of the writer. I always liked the vibe I got off of Beatrice Ojakangas's cookbooks, because she reminds me of my grandmother: her food is Scandinavian with a lot of regional Midwestern fare thrown in, plus she seems so practical and accomplished. I also have cookbooks that I rarely use because something annoys me about persona behind the recipes. Stunt cookbooks are guilty of this more than most, though I find whoever wrote the 90s edition of The Joy of Cooking pretty annoying. Why so many bowls???

I've been reading a lot of Pol Martin cookbooks, and I'm starting to get a real sense of the man behind the meal. Thankfully for my continued engagement with this stunt-cooking project, I feel like Pol is kind of a mensch. Some of his cookbooks have whole sections dedicated to cooking on a budget or weeknight-friendly recipes, something I think general cookbooks should have as a matter of course, but are often absent. Accounting for the audience's potential restrictions of time and money is just a kind thing to do, and Pol does it.

He's also not overfussed about the reader adhering to the recipe exactly, especially when it comes to substitutions. He'd rather you get the freshest, most economical food than slavishly follow his recipes. Plus, and this is harder to back up with examples because it's mostly based on vibes, he seems genuinely good-natured and sometimes funny? Like you can see when he gets all excited about something, like a section called Kebab It! -- which must have been a late 80s fad -- or a deep dive into Cajun cooking. I mean, even the dreaded microwave recipes are evidence of his willingness to experiment with new things. I'm into it.

What I'm winding up here to say is that for my most recent foray into the Poliverse, I decided to go hardcore European regional cooking with Osso Buco. It's a Milanese dish which, like the French Coq au Vin, has its roots in peasant food designed to extract every godamn calorie from otherwise tough cuts of meats. I love recipes like this, because I utterly dig when, due to shifts in culture & history, what started out as peasant food transmutes into something perceived as fancy.

The other reason I decided to try my hand at his Osso Buco is that Pol adores veal. Like full blown crescendoing make-out music loves veal. This is another aspect of a lot of these cookbooks that feels dated: no one cooks much with veal anymore. Mostly I just live with the cognitive dissonance of eating meat when I'm aware of how unethically produced a lot of it is, but veal's a bridge too far for me. But I wanted to try one of his veal dishes, but with a substitution Pol himself said was okay.

Osso Buco is traditionally made with veal shanks; indeed, osso buco translates to hole in the bone, referring to the marrow round at the center of the cut. I did some googling and found I could substitute with either beef shanks or short ribs. Beef shanks are hard to find, but I've recently discovered beef short ribs and how ridiculously delicious they are, so off to Costco I went. Also, from what little I could find, it seems like veal shanks are stupid expensive.

Though I objected to and changed the order the ingredients went into the braising sauce, the sauce itself is well constructed, balanced, and complex. (It should go fond -> onions -> spices -> flour -> deglazing element -> sauce medium, which is not how the recipe is written.) There's some goofy things in the recipe, like the call for a 1/2 cup of beef gravy without an inset or other description of what exactly he means. I just used a McCormack mix for brown gravy, which is kinda basic, but I figured Pol wouldn't mind. Also I used some anchovy paste in addition to the tomato paste because that shit rules. Then I braised the whole mess in the oven for four hours.

Legit, this turned out fucking amazing. Pol's recipes tend to have a light touch, but usually recipes for this cut of meat advocate pouring off the fat at the end, which I don't do. Why would I waste the fatty goodness? But there was so much fat shed off the short ribs that I more or less had to, or the dish would have been unpleasantly greasy. The meat fell off the bone, the sauce was complex and flavorful, and everyone was well pleased. Despite the occasional fucking weird recipe, Pol absolutely knows what he's doing in the kitchen. It was nice to have such an unqualified success after a couple unqualified failures.

[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]

W.A.P.: Wet Ass Pol

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah Yeah, you fucking with some wet-ass Pol Bring a bucket and a mop for this wet-ass Pol Give me everything you got for this wet-ass Pol

Let's start at the beginning, way back to when I first watched the series of YouTube videos in which a bunch of streamers recoil, plead, and beg Pol Martin to stop doing unholy shit with a microwave. Later, after the eye-bleeding stopped, my family and I would discuss both what was the most horrific recipe, and what the funniest response to said horror was. I was always partial to "What's he going to do with that banana??" Now, after making "Sausage and Bean Cheese Casserole," the quote "It's not enough! That's not done!", as screamed by WayneRadioTV, is rapidly rocketing up to my favorite.

Before I put the knives in, I want to say some good things about Pol Martin, and also semi-justify my choice of this recipe, which is not auspicious sounding in the least. The good thing: this recipe is part of a section of Easy Cooking for Today, vol 2 called "Rush Hour Cooking." One of the things I appreciate about Pol's cookbooks is how accommodating they are for the reader's time and budget. We don't always have the time or money to mess around with slow food*, and I dig that he devotes whole sections of his cookbooks to weekday meals.

While Noam Chomsky once famously declared that a native speaker of a language cannot make a grammar mistake -- something I think is true, especially when talking about dialects like BEV that get maligned as "slang" -- there's something seriously wrong with the phrase sausage and bean cheese casserole. So, the cheese is made from beans? Is that the takeaway? Because no, there isn't bean cheese, and also this isn't a cheese casserole with sausage and beans in it. Also, it's not a casserole in any way I understand the term. But the ingredients weren't horrifying, and I felt like I should take another run at his microwave recipes after the non-failure of the tomato soup.

There are words I don't want associated with my food. A short, non-exhaustive list: seepage, turgid, moist, quaggy, pulpous. This recipe checks alllll of those boxes. Watching the videos again, it struck me how wet ass Pol's recipes consistently are. Like he puts flour or corn starch into the sauces he's microwaving, presumably to thicken them, but that shit doesn't fucking work in a microwave. So then he just pours a bunch of salmonella over microwaved chicken livers or whatever. Here's your disease sauce on top of rough-chopped wet pepper chunks and chicken tartare! Another potential favorite quote from the YouTube series: Chunks of oversized bell pepper and wet make this much better.

I fucking love the use of wet as noun.

Except in food. I don't love that.

Okay, so let's start into the recipe. It opens with vegetables, which is legitimately fine. I chopped up celery and onions, drizzled them with oil, and popped it in the nuker. Next came a shittonne of meat. A hallmark of Pol's recipes is a weird mixture of different meats. The recipe for lasagna rolls had veal and ham, a combo which must have made sense in the 80s but is madness now. Here, it was ground beef and sliced smoked pork sausage, which is honestly fine though.

Now, I've had success with recipes that microwaved ground beef, but it was almost always as a prelude to actually cooking that shit in the oven. Unlike cooking with radiant heat like a normal person, cooking vegetables in a microwave only makes them shed liquid which then just sits there and doesn't boil off. But cooking meat? When I pulled out the dish after four minutes on high it looked like this.

That's not enough! That's not done!

I don't actually want to get trichinosis, so I put this back in for another four minutes. I am willing to stunt-cook 1980's recipes, but I'm not willing to die for it. Also, can you see the accumulation of wet? The meat sweat seepage? The turgid suppuration, like from a fleshy gash? Dear reader, bring a bucket and a mop for this wet-ass Pol, because it's only going to get wetter.

Now comes the enwettening. Pol had me pour two whole ass cups of clamato juice over this cursed concoction, making it inextricably wetter. There is no coming back from this. We're deep in eldritch levels of wetness. Give me everything you got for this wet-ass Pol.

Before I wind up this wetness though, I want to tell an anecdote about Canada. I had never heard of clamato juice -- which is tomato juice with a hint of clam -- until I went to the Winnipeg Folk Festival in the mid-90s. The legal drinking age in the US was 21; it was 18 in Manitoba. I was of legal drinking age in the States, but my two friends with me were not, so they made some choices. One of them was to order a Blood Caesar, an apparently Canadian drink like a Bloody Mary, but with clamato juice instead of tomato. (Coincidentally, I just watched the Letterkenny episode with the Caesar contest -- in which they competed to make the best Bloody Caesar -- and everything on that show is super Canadian.)

This was on the way back from the folk fest, so we were strung out, hung over, and well sick of one another. My friend who ordered the Bloody Caesar swore up and down it was amazing after we razzed her about it. It was only later, when we'd gotten showers and hydration, that she admitted she actually hated it, at which point it turned into something of an inside joke. So I was amused to see the dreaded clamato in one of Pol's recipes, because its inclusion is both dated and extremely regional. I love regionally specific idioms, the kind of thing that people from a boutique in-group use without knowing it's not legible to anyone outside that ethnicity/region/interest group.

Once this egregious shit came out of the microwave, I got a slotted spoon and poured this over spaghetti noodles. We legit talked about whether to use a slotted spoon or a normal one, because we had to contend with the wetness. I went slotted. Also, I'm going to admit the noodles were gluten-free noodles, because I had a medical thing a while back and had to avoid gluten. Since my recovery there's been a lot of gluten-free stuff in the house that I need to use up. Then I rolled up a forkful of this not-casserole.

I'm going to be honest: it took me a hot minute to put this in my mouth, despite the fact that I was super hungry. It just doesn't look good. But I did and it was ... fine. 100% ok. Bland and uninteresting, but not spit-it-in-the-garbage terrible. I even had a few bites before deciding to be done with it. Like so many of Pol's recipes, it reminded me of my childhood, not in a good way or a bad way, just in a way. The impression I had was of grade school lunch rooms. Not salty, not seasoned, just an uninteresting mix of starch and protein designed to be wolfed down by a bunch of kids in a too-short meal time.

I'm on my 11th recipe in my cooking Pol Martin project, and I realize I keep grappling with the concept of nostalgia this whole time. I'm a Gen Xer, a tiny, in-between generation that has often defined itself by a weird kind of oppositional nostalgia. We were all-in with the post-punk grunge thing and pretending like we weren't corporate assholes in our 20s, but I think that ended up being mostly a bunch of posturing and bullshit. The most relevant things the Xers have given to the world are the Karen -- I graduated high school with four people named Karen Johnson -- and Elon Fucking Musk. It's probably not a surprise that a whole generation raised on Reaganomics ended up being mostly awful.

Pol's recipes have been redolent of a certain time, and I love that about them. I love that I've been transported to memories of my childhood, of people and places that are dead and gone, that I didn't know I remembered. I've had really intense memories of my beloved Grandma Dory, and she's been gone long enough that that feels like a gift. I feel like nostalgia is perfecting, smoothing out the jagged edges so you only remember the experience of being a child, which is itself a wonder, especially at a remove. And that perfection is a danger, especially on a generational level, because those times weren't actually good times: like everything in a life, both the sweet and the bitter season everything.

But nostalgia can be fucking dangerous. It is memory without shame, reverie without accountability. I was born the year Nixon had to step down as president for doing things not half as awful as the current administration has done this afternoon, and something worse will happen tomorrow. But just because things are worse now, doesn't mean things were good then. We lived in real fear, and the fear I feel now has the same bitter truth: our leaders do not have our best interests at heart, and in many ways are specifically trying to hurt us.

Don't even get me started about Reagan. I lived through that shit so don't come at me with some bullshit hagiography unless you have receipts, and you don't. You can't; they don't exist. He was awful and a lot of people died. I sat in hospital rooms while family friends died of AIDS, and I legitimately don't want to talk about their horrible fucking families of origin because it's too depressing. That's Reagan's legacy: and entire generation of gay men decimated. For a start.

Phew.

You know, a lot of these little write-ups of stunt-cooking some French-Canadian chef's recipes end up with me frothing at the mouth about something or other in the past. I'll admit, some of this is me: I like a good mouth-frothing. But there's also something about food, about preparing, cooking, and eating together that allows me to access a deeper, non-linguistic substrate of memory. And all of that is inextricably bound up with my larger experience of culture and history. I ate a table with my parents and sister, and we inevitably discussed our days, from the prosaic to the political. While I don't love remembering the bad things, those bad things sharply define the boundaries of the good. To quote my beloved Ursula K. Le Guin: "Light is the left hand of darkness, and darkness the right hand of light."

So. Where do we go from here? The funny thing about this recipe is that is has such potential. Clamato juice in a casserole is actually really interesting, and I could see using it as a liquid for some starch -- like rice or noodles -- that would soak up all the wetness. (In fact, that's what I did -- added some rice -- because with a little starch, this makes perfectly balanced dog food. That's how bland this was.) Honestly, I'm half-tempted to restructure this recipe to be actually good, because the ingredients are all there, it just doesn't come together. We'll see what I get up to in the days ahead.

*I once went to dinner at the house of a relative who is a devotee of the slow food movement, my small children in tow. While I appreciates the general sentiment behind slow food -- traditional recipes, done in the time they need -- I don't fucking appreciate having my kids freak out because they've been waiting two hours for some nonsense to come out of the oven. After that horror show, I always made sure to bring enough snacks to keep the inevitable hunger meltdown at bay. I hate when ideology gets in the way of practicality.

[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]

You are on an Adventure: "Hearty Pasta Salad"

I'm beginning to realize there's a process like the stages of grief when undertaking a Pol Martin recipe. First, you read through a recipe, and if it isn't completely bonkers like "Chicken with Grape Sauce" or "Banana Omelet", you think Other than that one thing, this is pretty normal. The recipe you come across is called "Hearty Pasta Salad." You head to the grocery store with a photo of the recipe in order to pick up ingredients. You read through it standing in the produce section, and you realize you've completely missed an ingredient so obscure you have literally no idea what it is. For the purposes of this essay, let's call that ingredient "Chinese lettuce."

After a web search, you determine that "Chinese lettuce" is referred to as "Celtuce" in the US, and it sounds like it would be delightful but utterly impossible to source. You are smack in the middle of the continent and the closest Asian market is 150 miles to the south. (You also wonder where Pol got such a thing in Canada in the 80s.) You decide you'll sub with iceberg lettuce because they both have lettuce in the name and that's where you are emotionally. You're tired. Eggs are still $9 for a dozen, but you've been chicken-sitting for a neighbor, and her ladies are laying unlike your own chickens who are lazy bullshit.

You get home and you and your kid -- you have an adult son, in this scenario -- read through the recipe again while laying out all the ingredients in preparation. You put on water to boil for both hard-boiled eggs and bow-tie pasta, and start cutting things up. Both you and your son have a crisis when you realize that Pol's instructions have you doing something so incomprehensible you wonder if it's written in natural language or if it's some dream anomaly. You remember you read somewhere that you cannot reread the same thing twice in a dream because what you're reading has no objective reality, so you reread the recipe again. The words stay stubbornly the same. Fine, you think. I already have dinner in the oven so fuck it, I'm not going to starve or anything. You have learned your lesson.

You begin to assemble the salad, which consists, like most salads, of a sauce and the things you pour the sauce on. The sauce is where the madness lies: after whisking together an egg yolk, garlic, and mustard, Pol directs you to press a hard-boiled egg through a sieve into this mixture. You think back to how your kid gave a friend of his four Pol recipes to choose from for this attempt at Cooking Pol Martin, and when they chose this one, they said, Oh, this is dire.

While you stand over a sieve with an egg in it holding a pestle, you consider the series of life choices that ended in this exact moment. You think about the vast randomness of history and genetics, the way life has braided and twisted through circumstance from the beautiful alchemy of the primordial soup through hundreds of millions of years to your existence, standing in a kitchen. You are related to the original animal of this dark earth. We all are. You are one with the universe.

You smash the hard-boiled egg with the pestle. It doesn't seem to work until it miraculously does. Pushing the egg through the weave of the wire renders it into a fluffy, fine-grained emulsion that will mix beautifully with the yolk-mustard mixture. You feel both exultant and chagrined, exhilarated and a little freaked out. Your kid texts his friend that it worked so much better than expected. The friend texts back, Don't like that.

You finish up the sauce with lemon juice and olive oil, and begin to assemble the dry ingredients. You are cautiously hopeful but wary. You don't like the idea of beans and pasta together. You think back to the Wet Ass Pol situation and how the mix of kidney beans and spaghetti was one of the many, many reasons that dish was the hottest of messes. You hope that the iceberg lettuce isn't a titanic disaster. You pour the sauce over everything and toss.

You fill up salad bowls and sit down at the table. Actual dinner is still in the oven, but you're hungry, so this seems the most auspicious way to experience this Hearty Pasta Salad. You take a bite, and then another. You keep eating. Hunger is the best pickle, but this salad is objectively good. The bright sourness of the lemon with the slight olive tang of the oil and the creaminess of the egg is perfectly, delicately balanced. Even the beans add a smooth density to the crunch of the various vegetables and the lightness of the pasta. Your husband goes back for seconds.

This is the best thing you've made out of a Pol Martin cookbook. This precipitates its own kind of crisis. You are used to going though the stations of Pol -- incredulity, anticipation, resignation, confusion, revelation, fuck it, and so on -- but you are also accustomed to standing over either the dog dish or the trash at the end of this cycle. The next morning you wake up and put the leftovers in your bag for work. You eat the salad in the break room, and the salad is even better on the second day. You have an out of body experience. You do not understand this life you're living, but you're alive, and in this one moment, life is good.

[cooking-pol-martin]

Green Bean Time Machine

There's this literary concept of a madeleine, which is a metaphor for something that causes you to be mentally transported back to a moment in time. It can be a taste, a smell, a sound which provokes an involuntary memory. The concept comes from Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu (or In Search of Lost Time)*. The main character takes a bite of a madeleine dipped in tea -- a madeleine is a small cookie -- which overwhelms him with memories of his childhood, the recounting of which fills seven volumes and became a Modernist classic.

There's something of a visual joke about this at the end of the movie Ratatouille -- yes, I mean the cooking rat cartoon -- when the antagonist-critic takes a bite of the titular dish and you see a series of flashbacks of his childhood. (Arguably, the way our cooking rat links experience to memory is one of the theses of that movie, such as it is.) Smell and taste can be deeply, personally evocative, bound as they are to cultural identities individual, familial, and societal.

Which is why I say with some horror that Pol Martin's "Fresh Green Beans with Sour Cream Sauce" transported me back to the 1970s, an involuntary reverie of a particularly turgid period in American cooking. I didn't even know I had those memories.

Before I get into the way-back machine and start working through my generational trauma, I should probably detail the cooking process. First off, Pol had me get out a big pot, fill that bad boy with water, and then boil the ever living fuck out of a pound of green beans. It wasn't as horrific as the boiled leeks, which. I then was to make a roux and pour in reserved water from cooking the green beans, which resulted in a thin, unpleasantly gray gruel. The sauce was finished with not enough sour cream to ungruelify it. Serve over the beans, etc.

So I served this nonsense up, and the family set to eating. My first bite and I started to feel things: the almost overdone-ness of the vegetables married to a dairy-based sauce with virtually no seasoning transported me back to a place I can barely articulate. This dish isn't something my mom would ever make -- she could actually cook, even in the 70s -- but I have the phantasmagorical sense of church potlucks and luncheons after funerals of relatives I can't even remember. It was firmly disquieting.

My youngest kid, a senior in high school, piped up: "Can you take constructive criticism?" You bet your ass, kid. I'm already way ahead of you. Meanwhile, sitting next me at the table, my husband was grubbing. "This is just great!" he cried. What the actual fuck.

After a fair amount of crosstalk, arguing, and shuddering from yours truly, the family decided that the longer you were alive during the 1970s, the more likely you were to enjoy this Pol Martin green bean abomination. My memories of that decade were created when I was largely prelinguistic, and feel broken and dark, unformed. My husband has a couple years on me, apparently long enough that unpleasantly gray gruel transported him to a place that made sense.

There's a reason my folks largely checked out of popular culture during that period -- beyond the way that having small children ruins your cultural engagement -- and that's because the 1970s sucked. I can see how my dad shakes his head when he talks about the 70s: the American people felt betrayed by Watergate, and the hard-fought successes of the Civil Rights movements bled out, literally, into a dozen political assassinations, domestic massacres like Kent State and the fucking horror shows of the Vietnam war and the illegal and immoral bombing of Cambodia. The first political event I remember was Carter being voted out of office in 1980, God rest his soul. The relationship with the current cultural moment feels grimly parallel.

Phew.

I didn't mean to get so serious in this here blog where I lightheartedly cook some nonsense recipes from a French Canadian chef, but here we are. Food culture is culture, and I suppose it's inevitable that one of these recipes would act as madeleine for memories that have whatever the inverse of nostalgia is.

*I know that reading seven volumes of a 100 year old French novel isn't on anyone's to-do list, but I'm telling you: that shit is some massively entertaining grandiloquent bitchiness.