butter

Jonathan Franzen and Joël Robuchon-inspired Rutabaga Purée

Posted by Margot | Filed under:
Mar 26 2010

the coloring can be so gorgeous, almost like some sort of alien sunrise

“I love rutabaga,” said Gary inconceivably.

—The Corrections,  Jonathan Franzen

The Root Vegetable of Revenge

Rutabaga isn’t especially well known in the U.S. I had never encountered it before my first Thanksgiving with Brian’s family, who eat it mashed with a little butter and salt, just like potato. The flesh is pale orange and especially when it’s cooked, you wouldn’t be wrong to describe the color as “golden.” The flavor is mostly potato-ish but slightly sweet and a little sharp—about what you’d expect from a cross between a cabbage and a turnip. Like most root vegetables, they’re large and inexpensive and nutrient-dense and can be stored for months at cool temperatures. Also, if you happen to be in Ithaca on the last day of the farmer’s market in the fall, you can you can use them as stones for curling:

So I really didn’t understand why they weren’t more popular until I read The Corrections.

the picture on the cover isn't actually a representation of the Dinner of Revenge, but it evokes it anyhow with the older, smiling good son and sullen younger son and the same sickly coloring of everything in the Gallery of Regrettable FoodThe novel centers around a middle-class, middle-America, suburban family with an inflexible, distant father named Albert and gratingly chirpy, long-suffering mother named Enid. At one point, Albert leaves for an eleven-day business trip without kissing Enid goodbye, and when he returns, he greets her by asking, “What did I ask you to do before I left? What is the one thing I asked you to do while I was gone?” Then, without even waiting for an answer, he disappears into his lab in the basement and smashes the jelly glasses he had asked her to move away from the top of the basement stairs. Enid channels her rage into the Dinner of Revenge. The menu, clearly meant to be a culinary manifestation of spite and passive-aggressive domestic squabbling, is liver and onions, boiled beet greens and mashed rutabaga. It’s designed specifically to be nutritionally and economically beyond reproach but gastronomically torturous.

Liver is clearly the prime offender:

Cauterized liver had the odor of fingers that had handled dirty coins…. Enid knew that Alfred hated liver, but the meat was full of health-bringing iron, and whatever Alfred’s shortcomings as a husband, no one could say he didn’t play by the rules.

But the rutabaga is definitely accessory to the crime: 

Thukkety thukkety thukkety went Enid’s masher round the pot of sweet, bitter, watery rutabaga….

A dollop of mashed rutabaga at rest on a plate expressed a clear yellowish liquid similar to plasma or the matter in a blister.

It has precisely the intended effect on Albert, who chews and swallows bite after bite mechanically, telling himself he’s lived through worse. And their older son Gary either genuinely likes rutabaga or at least puts on a good show of it because he’s fiercely protective of his mother. But poor Chip improvidently eats the scant bits of bacon and onion accompanying the liver and then he’s left with plate full of bitter, soggy, gag-inducing horror. Dutifully filling the role of family disciplinarian, Albert demands that he eat his dinner, and it’s actually the rutabaga that’s singled out as the source of special revulsion: 

He [Chip] actually picked up his fork and made a pass at the craggy wad of rutabaga, tangling a morsel of it in his tines and bringing it near his mouth. But the rutabaga smelled carious and was already cold—it had the texture and temperature of wet dog on a cool morning—and his guts convulsed in a spine-bending gage reflex.

Finally, Albert eats most of the rutabaga for him, which is portrayed as an act of great paternal love:

Alfred leaned over Chipper’s plate and in a single action of fork removed all but one bite of the rutabaga. He loved this boy, and he put the cold, poisonous mash into his own mouth and jerked it down his throat with a shudder. “Eat that last bite,” he said, “take one bite of the other, and you can have dessert.” He stood up. “I will buy the dessert if necessary.”

But Chip still can’t manage to eat the last bite, and not only does he go without dessert, he’s not allowed to leave the table. Albert disappears back to his lab and Enid and Gary do the dishes and play ping pong and eventually go to bed, with Enid carefully avoiding the dining room and rationalizing her way out of taking any responsibility for the situation because, as she tells Gary, it’s “between Dad and Chipper.” But Dad forgets about Chip entirely until late that evening, when he finally emerges from the basement to find the boy asleep at the table with his face on his placemat, the victim of revenge in the form of rutabaga. Read more

Cheddar-garlic Biscuits: In Defense of Garlic Powder

Posted by Margot | Filed under:
Mar 8 2010

Lobster not included 

I have been carefully trained to look upon garlic powder with great disdain.

—S.J. Sebellin-Ross

At the third Ann Arbor Ignite last Thursday, the audience cheered and applauded when the last speaker exhorted us to use fresh garlic instead of dried or powdered (about 41:40 here). And sure, in a recipe like the bolognese he was describing, I’d probably use fresh garlic, too, but that’s hardly a reason to cheer. The crowd’s reaction instead seemed symptomatic of the emblematic status fresh garlic has achieved. Its superiority has become one of the central commandments of the “food revolution,” and no wonder, it hits all the right notes: seems more “natural” and more “authentic,” supposedly better-tasting, and possibly healthier (although, as that site notes, it’s possible to dehydrate garlic without deactivating the enzymes with therapeutic value, which cooking can destroy). It also has the added bonus of a built-in villain in the form of its dehydrated, powdered counterpart, which for many people is associated with the industrial food system, bland mid-century midwestern cooking, and laziness.if you're afraid of losing foodie cred, click on the picture for instructions on how to make your own powdered garlic (assuming you have a dehydrator) from The Deliberate Agrarian

But aside from being slightly more convenient for busy or novice cooks, garlic powder really works better for numerous applications—it dissolves in dips and gravies, it keeps dry rubs dry, and it can be sprinkled to taste on popcorn or pizza or whisked into the dry ingredients of any bread recipe. Instead of thinking of it as a bad substitute for the fresh stuff, I prefer to think of it as a pedestrian version of the powders made by bleeding-edge chefs like Alinea’s Grant Achatz and WD-50’s Wylie Dufresne. Sure, they often taste different than the non-powdered versions, but they open up a whole array of different uses. Of course, you could make biscuits with a garlic-infused fat or stud the dough with chunks of raw or roasted garlic, but neither of those options is going to give you the same intensity of flavor or evenness of distribution as garlic powder. And these biscuits definitely challenge the notion that powdered garlic can’t be delicious.

Most recipes for cheddar-garlic biscuits, even Paula Deen’s, simply suggest adding garlic powder and grated cheddar to a baking mix like Bisquick. That would probably be pretty good too, but I don’t have enough uses for Bisquick to keep it around (especially given that rumors about toxic molds developing in expired pancake and biscuit mixes turn out to be true, if somewhat overblown). So instead, I added garlic powder and grated cheddar to the recipe I use for rich, buttery biscuits. The recipe has a higher proportion of fat : flour than most baking powder biscuit recipes, so it makes biscuits that are rich enough to eat plain (and too rich to make a very good vehicle for gravy or butter). Whatever fat you use, it must be solid so chunks of it will remain in the dough. Those chunks melt during baking to create the flaky layers. Lard or shortening work slightly better than butter or margarine because they don’t contain water. However, butter is delicious, so I used half butter and half lard. If you don’t eat butter or lard, margarine or vegetable oil shortening should work equally well (although if you’re avoiding trans-fats, you should stick to ones composed largely of palm oil or produced by fractionation).

Recipe: Cheddar-garlic Biscuitsfats cut into pieces before chilling

  • 1/2 cup solid fat—I used 4 T. butter and 4 T. lard
  • 9 oz. all-purpose or cake flour (about 2 cups)—I used bread flour with 2 T. replaced by cornstarch
  • 2 1/2 t. baking powder
  • 1/2 t. baking soda
  • 1 t. kosher salt
  • 1 pinch sugar
  • 1 1/2 t. powdered garlic
  • 1 T. dried parsley and/or chives (optional)
  • 4 oz. grated sharp cheddar (about 1 cup)
  • 3/4 cup buttermilk (or regular milk soured with 1 T. lemon juice)
  • extra flour for dusting
  • extra milk for brushing biscuit tops

1. Preheat the oven to 500F. Cut the fat into pieces and chill while you prep the remaining ingredients.

2. Whisk together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, sugar, garlic, and herbs if using.

3. Toss the chilled pieces of fat with the flour and and combine them with a pastry cutter, crisscrossing knives, a food processor, or your bare hands—just don't melt the bits of fat. You want the largest pieces of fat to be about the size of small peas.

Criss-crossing knives = less dishwashing even if it takes a little longer than the food processor. My hands tend to be too warm for the bare hands method. Just a minute or two later: big chunks of fat remaining, but fat relatively well distributed throughout the flour

4. Mix in the grated cheddar and the buttermilk or milk. Stir just until most of the flour is moistened—you don’t want gluten to form so the goal is to handle the dough as little as possible once you’ve combined the wet and dry ingredients.

the sharper the cutter, the less it will squish the edges, which can prevent rising brushing with milk isn't strictly necessary, but it does promote nice browning

5. Dust a table or countertop with flour, dump the dough onto it and press or knead together just enough to form a dough. Flatten the dough to between 1/2” and 1” thick and cut desired shapes—if you don’t have a biscuit cutter, a glass or empty jar will work, or you can just cut the dough into squares or triangles.

6. Place on an baking sheet (ungreased) and brush the tops with buttermilk. Place in preheated oven, and reduce the oven temperature to 450F and bake for 7 minutes. Rotate the baking sheet and bake another 5-7 minutes, or until the biscuits are golden brown.

neglected, sprouting rutabega in the background warm, garlicky, cheese-studded biscuits. kind of hard to beat.