This episode is brought to you by Bend the Table, a monthly food subscription service for avid home cooks focused on delicious and sustainable pantry items. Learn more at bendthetable.com. That's B-E-N-T-O-T-A-B-L-E.com. And when you use code H R N for a new subscription, you get $20 off, and we at HRN get $10. Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues.
This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you actually live, but still from the Lower East Side. And we have Matt in the booth in uh Rhode Island. Nastasia, where Nastasia, where are you? New York. But who knows when we'll be back in Bushwick, Brooklyn, right?
Hopefully never. Whoa. Wow. Wow, all right. How do you really feel about it though, Nastasia?
Nastasia's like, every every dark cloud's got a silver lining. At least I don't have to go over there. Wow. Damn, Stas. Yes.
Well, the thing about Nastasia is that the only time she pulls her punches is when it makes her life easier, right? So, like, like for instance, if I'm working on a recipe and I have like three different iterations, and I'm like, which one's better? She'll just choose so that I shut up. She doesn't actually care about the quality of it because she doesn't care about the quality of the stuff. So it's like.
Yeah, but that's that's my whole life is that five percent. My whole life is that 5%. Which means that you don't respect anything that I'm doing. Right. But the reason why I'm your business partner is because I make decisions and I'm like, you know what?
Let's just do it instead of going over it. You know, what's the what's the term that like people use in the business world? Done is better than perfect. You you're the opposite of that. Perfect is better than done.
What? No, no, no, listen. My my motto, my motto in school was better done than good. Really? Better done, yeah.
Because if I don't care about something, better get it done than good. But if something's a lifelong project, like French fries or something like this, there is no done. And if there is no done ever done when creating products, there has to be a done, or we don't make money. Okay, but you what like I'm gonna do it in other words, like I'm gonna do it again and again and again for the rest of my life. So that's like the the whole idea of choose the whole thing about cooking as opposed to other things like writing a book, let's say, right, is that you you know, unless you're plan on dying tomorrow, you get to do it again.
And so you want to be a little bit better next time than you were this time. So the whereas something that you're going to actually complete and hand off and never look at again, sure, better done, better done than good, especially when it comes to like school essays or you know, or things like this, things that are like tearing you apart from the inside that you have to do, you know, you're like, yeah, at least it's done, right? That's why I used to love tests. So when you're in school, I always used to pray for tests because there's a limited amount of work you can do prior to a test, and then the test is gonna happen and you can't drag it on. There's no dragging a test on because the test happens.
You know what I'm saying? Yes. Yeah, no, no, because due dates are always fungible. You can always show that gone. You worked with me for how long?
I look, here's the thing. Like in college, once you realize that nobody is ever gonna hold you to a due date, that nothing has meaning anymore, and that everything can be twisted around. I always took due dates very seriously. Yeah, well same here. Not me.
When I taught at UConn, I enforced my due date seriously. I did not. And a word of caution to any college students out there. I still to this day have dreams about assignments that I didn't finish, like that I believe I didn't finish, and I'm like not actually graduated from college. So don't do it the day of our way.
Like just do the work, just give it in at the right time. Otherwise, it might haunt you for the rest of your life. Speaking of haunting for the rest of your life, did it have I ever told the story of staying up 72 hours in a row? I don't not to me. Stupid.
Have I told this on the air? Probably. Okay. Uh well okay, do it, do it. So here's what happened.
So uh when I was in college, and Nastasi hates when I just say that, so I went to Yale. I was at Yale, where her sister went. I went to college in New Haven. Um you could do the opposite with where you were born. Did we talk about this already?
No, we have not talked about this. Whenever I go ahead. So I was my mom was an undergraduate at Stanford when I was born, and that's when her parents, my grandparents, who are both now dead, told her that she would never be successful, never reach her dreams, never, you know, never accomplish her life goals. By the way, she started the pediatric heart transplant program at Columbia University, which she still runs and has the best survival, long-term survival numbers of anyone in in the business and has saved countless lives of kids that would be dead, and has transplanted kids that no one else on freaking earth would transplant. So yeah, never never went very far, my mom.
Anyway, um tough, tough being raised by such a degenerate. Yeah, I know, right? Anyway, so uh so yeah, her parents tell her nothing's ever gonna happen to her. But anyway, she's never gonna, you know, do anything. But anyway, I was born at Stanford Hospital, at Stanford University Hospital, and so uh my dad always, you know, for some reason it stuck in my dad's head, and he loved the idea that Stanford University had its own zip code, and so my actual place of birth on my whatever they give you, that piece of paper when you're born, it says Stanford and not Palo Alto.
So you're like, Where were you born? I Stanford. And they're like, You mean Palo Alto? So now I just say it just it's just confusing because everyone's like Palo Alto. I'm like, no, I wasn't born in freaking Palo Alto.
What am I? What do I so my mom like, you know, had me on the street on the freaking street. I was in the hospital. You know what I mean? Anyway.
Anyway. Do they have hospitals in Palo Alto or is it all just at Stanford styles? I think there's an East Palo Alto hospital. I don't I don't know about Yeah, they have yeah, I've been to Stanford, I mean the Palo Alto Hospital before. Why?
STD scare. Yeah, but you couldn't go to student health for that. They always they thought you were pregnant, like immediately. It was just very stupid. Student health is very stupid.
They have tests for that. At Yale, at Yale, student health was just how much did you drink and when did you drink it? Like that's what it was. I didn't drink in college. So all right.
So here's what happened. So at Yale, they had this deal where you you could up to a couple of weeks, you could, you know, um drop a class and nothing, nothing would happen, right? I mean, it's saying, you know what, this class, crap on this class. You could do that. But then uh literally up until the last day of classes, you could drop a class, and it would just show up as a drop, but it wouldn't show up as a grade.
You wouldn't get graded for it. It would just show up, oh, dude drop this class, right? So, you know, I was, you know, whatever, not necessarily going to classes or, you know, what's the word I'm looking for? Doing my homework. Anything else?
I was going to the library and spending like a good three or four hours a day sifting through the stacks, which is what the you know, the where the library books are called. So, like, for instance, I would hit certain sections. I went through a thing where I was looking up uh uh British um kind of early modern execution practices. Surprising amount of information on British, like early modern execution practices. Anyway, so like at any one time in my room, I would have the maximum allowable number of books out, which is 50.
I know I've told the story on the air before about how I committed uh postal uh internet, you know, like uh postal fraud uh to not pay my fines at the Yale University. By the way, the obscenely high fines at the Yale University Library. Um, but that's how I got interested in Russian absurdist literature, etc. etc. Anyway, so I spent most of my time because there was no internet the way that you found random information was to go into a giant library and wander around and pick up books.
So that's what I did with most of my time. And I listened to a lot of stereo my room listening to stereo quite a bit. And I spent 50 hours a week to pay for my tuition. Well that's what I did in my free time. Sounds awesome.
Sounds fun. What did you work as I was a lifeguard at the pool. I was a research assistant to this pervert. I was a waitress research assistant where you you fuzzed for a pervert and then I was a waitress downtown in Palawan. Huh yeah what kind of restaurant?
It was called Empire Grill and Tap Room. So it was like an American American place. You think that place is still there? Uh no I asked and I searched it's not there. So you can't go back and be like I would not want to go back you wouldn't go back and do all sorts of crazy stuff?
No. So my wife Jen had a job at a at some sort of place like that like a Ramada like a restaurant at a Romata or something like this where she had like the terrible polyester like you know skirt thing that she had to wear and she took told me the story that she because you know she lived in Germany in high school and so she um because her you know her dad was Air Force that she they had no one had trained her how to bring a tray of uh glass glasses out to you know drinks out to a table. So she goes out to the table, you know, and she lifts up the glass on the edge, and the whole tray goes boom boom and like falls on the table all over everyone, right? Which is classic. Although I don't know how Jen got the job because she's not a she doesn't lie.
I mean, everyone out there who has ever been a server knows that the only way to get that first service job is to lie, right? I mean, is there is that still the truth? John, is that still the truth? Say that. You never lied.
The only way to get your first server job is to lie. My mom was my reference as a fake person, yes. Right. So you lied. Yeah.
Like, I don't, I don't think, like, I think it's like you can't go into the service industry unless you're willing to make that first lie. It's like it's the bargain of the food service industry, right? It's like you can't, you have to be a little bit of a degenerate enough to lie to get that first job. And if you're not willing to lie to get that first job, maybe, just maybe, this business is not for you. Do you know what I mean?
Yeah. Yeah. Because I mean, let's be honest. Like, you're gonna have to lie to uh your guests all the time. Like when Booker was working for you at Pasta Flyer, Booker hates pasta.
And so we had to go through a lot of training with him on what to say when people ask what they should get. Like, he's not allowed to say, like, it's all gross, I hate it all. It's pasta, I hate pasta, right? So you have to be willing to do a certain amount of kind of I like to think of them as helpful lies. You know what I mean?
To people, anyway. Uh, so anyway, so she dumps this whole tray of of uh drinks all over these people. And this is the only time, no offense to our European friends, but this is the only time that she was lucky she was serving a table of Germans because she realized that they were Germans and started instantly apologizing to them in German. And they were like, Oh, you know, it's you know, everything was okay, everything was forgiven because here's this American person in you know in America speaking German to them and apologizing. So she ended up actually getting a good tip out of the situation, which is crazy.
It's great. Yeah. Anyway, so to a less pleasant story. So you're allowed to drop your classes at Yale up until the very, very, very last day. By that I mean end of day, last day of classes, 5 p.m.
Now, when you drop a class, right? What you do is you just hand in a piece of paper saying, I am dropping this class, and you hand it to the dean's admin, right, person before 5 p.m. on the last day of classes. That's all that's required. So I was taking this class called Math 301 Complex Analysis.
Uh, by the way, for those of you math people out there, we were using uh Rudin as the textbook, which I still own on complex analysis, and uh and about three weeks, so I couldn't quite drop it without it showing up on my on my transcript. But I was like, you know what? No, I'm not no, no, no, no, no, no, no. And I I I left the class, I never went back, I never did the homework, I never went to class. I I never took the tests, I didn't do anything.
And I'm like, I'll just drop it, I'll drop it. But classic me, guess what? I never did. I never dropped it. I never handed in that one piece of paper.
I had I had 11 weeks, 11 weeks of knowing I wasn't gonna take this class. And all I needed to do, and by the way, the dean's office, the dean's office, it's not like it was like, oh my god, it was snowing and it was like two miles away, and I didn't have a car. No, I did not have to leave the covering of my college building. I could have gone entirely in an underground tunnel in a matter of three minutes and made it to the dean's office to hand in this piece of paper, right? I just didn't do it.
So this will give you an idea kind of of me, right? So uh so there I am. I'm like, hey he, and then I'm at my one of my philosophy professors. I'm at like his house, right? Because he's having an after, you know, like a whatever, like, hey, you know, school year's over, blah, blah, blah.
And then someone's like, oh yeah, uh, it's officially over, it's five. And I was like, oh my god, I didn't drop the class. And so then I was way the heck far away because I was at this dude's house, right? And so I just start running I'm running full speed, and like I had and like I have a piece of paper, I like scroll that I think, and I and like I collapse on the on the on the dean's office, which is closed, even though it's like only 15 minutes afterwards, and I slip the paper underneath that's saying, please let me drop this class. 15 minutes late.
And my dean was a professor of military history. And my dean, his only my first dean, my his only thing that he really enjoyed doing was making people cry in the dining hall. Just like rancid, rancid dude. You know what I mean? Like, loved making people cry.
He's probably dead now, so I'll call him out. His name was Seleski, Dean Seleschi. Anyway, so he um he was like, nope. And he had this weird, like pursed lip situation. Oh, sorry.
Um, sorry, that those are the rules. You have to uh take the class. I was like, take the class, take the class. And I now bear in mind, you're speaking to a guy, a kid, really, who already you realized that all he had to do was hand in a single piece of paper and this wouldn't have been a problem, and he didn't do it. Now, do you think that I had planned ahead so that I didn't have to do all of my semester's work in that last week and a half before exams?
Or do you think I had already planned on pulling a bunch of all-nighters to do all of my work that I hadn't done during the year because I was too busy reading about uh early modern English execution practices? It was the latter. I didn't have any extra time because I had already been like, oh my God, I already have three 20-page papers I need to write in the next week and a half. I already have, you know, I already have this test and this. So basically, I went to the math professor and I said, Listen, you don't know me.
He's like, Yeah, I don't know you. He's like, Yeah, I didn't take your class, right? He's like, No, you weren't in my class. I have no idea who you are. Well, guess what?
I'm taking the class. And he was gracious enough to let me take the midterm and the final, waive the homeworks that I hadn't done, right? And but I had to stay up for 72 hours straight just to do the extra work to study to take the midterm and final so that I could get a grade in in that class. And I was told what'd you say? What'd you get?
In that class, he mercifully gave me a C in that class. That was the most merciful C ever on the face of the earth. But I was told by my friends and colleagues that I was not, I was able to do, I did well in the rest of my classes, thankfully, right? But I was not able to speak. I was not able to speak to people because I was so incoherent from lack of sleep.
And that this is when I learned that a shower is two hours worth of sleep, that if you if you need an extra two hours of sleep, a shower will do that. And I remember very distinctly, I didn't drink coffee at the time. I was drinking uh liters and liters of tea. I would bring soda bottles in, fill them with tea, and then walk around uh drinking tea. And I remember around hour like 58 or 59.
When I was pouring the tea into my bottle, I poured the hot tea all over my hand and completely scalded it, like a really bad, like a like a really bad burn all over my hand. And my I remember to this day, I was like, sweet, the pain will keep me up. And that was it. But I did well. My God.
So anyway, as Matt says, probably don't be like me. Probably don't be like me. That is actually the nightmare scenario that I have that I'm like enrolled in a class and that I've completely forgotten about entirely, and that's past the expiration that I cannot get out of it. Yeah, so you lived it. Great.
Yeah, well, as as usual, Matt, I'm living the dream. Yes, you are. Yeah, living the nightmare. That's that should be our motto, Stas. Living the dream?
Live live in the nightmare. Living the nightmare. Here you go. All right. Did you hear that?
Cuomo is leaving CNN. The brother, Chris? Yeah. He, by the way, was at Yale with me a year a year above me. Oh wow.
Yeah. So that tell this story. So when I started going out with my wife, uh, I went, okay, so we're going out. I had this room, but I wanted to put the bed up against the door, right? Because I wanted to rearrange my bedroom.
And this guy, John Morning, who was, you know, he was a senior. I was a junior, he's a senior. He was next to me. I had the good computer with the video games. I wanted to move my bed over, but then there was no way that he was going to be able to go through our fire door and use my computer.
So I took a circular saw and Dutch doored my door so that you could and added an extra hinge so that he could come in and out and walk over my bed in his sneakers to play my to play my computer. And one day, Chris Cuomo, who was friends with John Morning, was banging on that door looking for somebody else. Anyway, Chris Cuomo. So why is he leaving CNN? He realized that he um couldn't be himself and that everyone should call Trump out, and he's sick of like pretending that Trump isn't a problem and all this other stuff.
I thought CNN was very openly anti-Trump. Not enough for Chris Cuomo. Also, some guy like attacked him in his driveway. Well, like started saying crap to him in his driveway while he was on coronavirus shutdown, and he was like, I really wanted to tell this guy off, but I couldn't because I have to keep up this, you know, nice guy personality for CNN, and I just don't care anymore. Wait, so you're saying if he quit two days earlier, he could could have clocked this guy?
Yeah, he's like he basically said I was clocked this guy. Nah, you know, those are the kind of regrets you don't want to be like when you're like, you know, you're on your you're on your deathbed, you got the death rattle. You know, you're like, I should have clocked that guy. You know what I mean? That's not the not the kind of regret you want, you know.
Yeah, but now he's gonna look back and he's gonna be like, Well, at least I was able to clock the next one. Yeah. But there's never gonna be a next one. There will. There was like a Oh, there will.
He was having a fight on the internet with some guy. Remember, he was like taped having an argument with some guy at a bar like two months ago. Yeah. Really? I don't know.
Here's the thing is like for me. I figure at this point, I'm like 49 years old. I just don't get into fights with people. It's just not gonna come up. You know what I mean?
It's just like I guess there's certain people that get in fights and certain people that don't. If you were a public personality like him, I think you'd have a lot more opportunity to get in fights with people, Dave. Like, listen, my whole life, I am I am generally abrasive, and I don't get into physical confrontations with people. I think there's just like there's like people who get into physical confrontations and people who don't. I don't agree.
I think if you had a national show, you would undoubtedly excuse me. Cooking issues is an international show. Don't come on now. Yeah, Matthew, you ever been in a fight? No, man.
Look at me. No. What about you, John? You ever been in a fight? Uh kind of.
I went to a boarding school, which for purposes I leave their name out of this, but uh we were I was a sophomore and I was rounded up at three in the morning to participate in what was called a cock fight. So me and other sophomores and freshmen were padded up with lacrosse gear and football helmets, and we had to kick the crap out of each other. Oh well, yeah. That was that's more of a sport than a fight, though. There was no animosity.
You didn't you weren't like I want to beat the crap out of this person. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, but I didn't also know. Okay. Yeah.
I mean, like about you, Stas? Fights, fights? Yeah, and in high school and middle school. Like knockdown, drag eye fights? With other girls, yeah.
Did you win? Uh I remember it being broken up before there was like a winner. That's kind of the best, right? Then everyone can walk away. Because he said something to me, and then he started bleeding, but I had just it looked bad that I had just popped his pimple, and then I had a little detention because they thought that I had like broken his forehead open, literally just burst his pimple.
Wow, that's gross. But I was trying to everyone listening, everyone listening is still processing this. And we were in the swimming pool, like in the Oh Jesus. Oh no! Is this is this why you hate swimming pools?
Yeah, and it was like bleeding all over, and they were like, You're going to detention. And I was like, pimple. Because of poly pimples. That's why you hate swimming pool, because of poly pimples that you popped in the in the floorhead. Like during swim practice, there was so much disgusting crap in that pool.
Oh my god. I forgot you just said you were lifeguard. So you used to be a lifeguard, so you're in high school and college. So your inability was so at some point after college, you're like, I'm never going back to one of these places again. Yeah, it's real gross.
Real gross. Real gross. Wow. Wow. Alright.
Uh so Marco's listening in and had a question in the chat. All right. Uh it says, Hi Dave, another oven question. I recently moved to a new apartment and the oven is real crap. It is a gas oven, not too old, but the heat comes only from the body um bottom with a gradient that is much steeper than any other oven I have had.
I tried to blind bake a tart shell and the bottom was almost burned while the sides still pale, even with the double tray. Veggies get a weird texture, hard and dry exterior. There is no craping apart from where in contact with the baking tray. You have any solutions in mind putting a baking steel on the top shelf or something like that. I thought about getting a small convection oven on the counter, but that would be quite inefficient.
Uh actually they're not that inefficient. Uh maybe space-wise inefficient, but uh in the summer, but by the way, they gave it to me for free. So the Breville Smart Oven, but like I try to only cook things that will fit in that in the summer summertime because it doesn't heat up the house as much. And I've done the math on it and it's not that inefficient from a power usage standpoint. Although it is electric and not gas.
Now, uh wait, did he say it was a gas oven or an electric oven? I believe you said it was gas. So most gas ovens that I've used, home gas ovens that I've used, have a um the the the heat the gas element is underneath the floor of the oven, and then that flame impinges directly on you know, usually what amounts to an enamel plate on the bottom. And so you're gonna get a a pretty big gradient from the bottom to the top. I'm wondering why it's so bad in this particular oven.
There's no way that putting a baking steel on the top is gonna help you because um if it's an actual temperature gradient, you will load that thing with heat, but it will load at the wrong temperature, right? It'll i in other words, like if if you're if your oven's underpowered and it can't get the whole box to the correct temperature, then adding more mass to it will just make make it longer to to to to get up to whatever temperature it was gonna get up to. So, like, I'll give you, I'll give you a uh uh an example. So, like uh I found an oven on the street once in the in the mid-90s, and I brought it into my apartment, which I wasn't allowed, it was my loft. I wasn't allowed to have you know cooking implements there.
So I f literally found it on the street, and it and uh it was it was from the I think 20s or 30s, all white enamel, kind of nice, but no thermostats, no nothing. And I would just crank it. And then this was back in the days when everyone was talking about you know baking stones for kind of like the first time. So I was just loading fire bricks in, and what you realize is is that after a while, it it just it takes a lot of time to load all of that extra mass up to the temperature you want, which is why when you're doing a retained heat masonry oven, they heat it for a long time, like hours, because you have to fill all of that mass with heat energy before you can start using it as a retained heat uh oven. So, anyway, if your oven is underpowered, adding extra thermal mass to it isn't a way to kind of help it out.
It can maybe can even it out, but it's not gonna help if you can't get up to the temperatures. You might want to look into just getting an electric element and like suspending it from the very top of your oven and having independent uh top and bottoms. I've done that relatively effectively, and that will add just a little boost of energy at the top, but it doesn't have to be a lot. Like, you know, if you a couple of hundred watts at the top can just take it, you know, that couple of extra degrees and help even you out. I don't know of a way of turning a non-convection oven into a convection oven reliably.
Notice I add the word reliably. I have done it, but I wouldn't call it reliable. Anyway, I don't know. Was this helpful at all, guys? What do you think?
I mean, yeah, that makes sense. It would be silly of them to try the baking sheet thing at load it up with heat at the bottom and then move it up to the top after it was heated to the correct or above the correct temperature, right? They they can they could totally do that. It's just the the problem is then, you know, how long is it going to stay at that temperature and then it's going to go to a relatively lower temperature. So it's just a question of how long you're cooking something, right?
So like most of the tricks people do with um with pizzas, right? So that people are using like those, those when they're cooking breads or pizzas, my question to them always is, well, how many are you doing? You know what I mean? Because, you know, any recipe that tells you heat, so like let's say your oven takes 15 minutes to heat up, right? So if you have an oven that takes 15 minutes to heat up, if you look at most recipes that involve baking stones or baking steels, the heat up time for them is substantially longer, right?
And they'll always say put it in for a substantially longer period of time. And the reason they tell you that is because you're loading it up with the energy that you need. Now then when you add stuff to it, the whole point of like a baking steel, for instance, is that you've stored energy into it and now you unload it into your pizza or whatever, right? So then the thing is is that if you put something on it again right away, then you're that's it. You know what I mean?
Like you have to wait a certain period of time. So it's all a question of you can you can do anything, it's a it's a question of how long can you do it for and how many of that thing in a row in a row can you do? So, like for instance, my crepe maker, my gas crate maker, like if you you have to throttle it almost down to zero if you're not gonna be cooking with it, because you're expected to put a huge, a huge thermal mass of like crepe is basically it's the same as pouring water almost on the entire thing. And that takes a huge amount of energy to heat up really quickly. So then you have to crank the crate maker all the way up, right?
So that you get the right amount of uh heat input. Right. And so getting this kind of heat input versus kind of output to be the same is the trick of someone who's doing high volume cooking. This is the reason why most tacos al pastor are no good unless you go to a place that makes tacos al pastor constantly, because the way that an al pastor, so an al pastor, you know, is the vertical spit, sometimes with the pineapple on top, it rotates, you cut off the Al Pastor into the taco, and then you take a bunch of pineapple. What'd you say?
Tell them the story. Which one? The most famous one. Which one? Jeremiah.
Oh, yeah, I can tell that. So anyway, so like the point is is that is that the way that an Al Pastor rig is set up is it wants to be on heavy blast all the time, so that you get a nice outside crust on your on your on the on the meat, right? So you can cut it off and you have that nice kind of you know, crust not crust thing, right? But you yeah, and if you don't do it all the time, you have to turn it way down, and it's not the same, right? So it's it's all about heat input versus output.
So Jeremiah uh and fabulous from Contra Wild Air came and did a Mofad uh Museum of Food and Drink um kind of getting to know you event at the Harry Houdini house in California, you know, this is before all the COVID last year, and they rented or borrowed a like a portable pastor unit, right? So it's like this like portable thing. And Jeremiah was like, hey, this is not cooking fast enough. And so he tried to move it, but didn't kind of, I guess, realize that the way those things are set up is it's all just kind of friction and luck that keeps it kind of vertical. It's not like pinioned into a hard place because the idea is you might have to move it back and forth.
So you literally, there's a block in the bottom that the vertical spit sits in, and that block can slide back and forth, and then there's an arm over the top, and that arm moves, but you have to be very careful and slide it without letting it tilt, or as we found out, all hell breaks loose. So he tries to move it like right before guests show up, and then the Al Pastor falls over. Did it actually hit the ground, Stas or no? No, it hit the grill part or whatever that is. No, Fabulous had been riding uh some form of scooter.
Fabulous is Fabian von Howski. He'd been riding some sort of scooter the week prior, and I don't know whether he was scooting well, well in bibing or what, but he busted his arm up real bad. Like his arm was like, you know, kind of like Robocop, like full traction, like pins and metal and all this crap, right, Saz? Yeah. Yeah, it was like totally messed up.
And so Fabulous couldn't help Jeremiah write the thing. I'm in a full, what was I dressed in, Stuzz? I had my full jacket and everything on, right? And there's Al Pastor meat everywhere. So like we're all running in, we're stripping down to our like t-shirts and like grabbing this giant hunk of meat and trying to write it.
And then we turn around, and there's Harold McGee sipping champagne in a Zoltar outfit, watching the whole proceedings. Chasing his head, shaking his head slowly. Yeah, best best cooking moment of my life. Best cooking moment of my life right there. Yeah.
So anyway, so the point the point is you want to get you like any situation, you can do one of two things. You can either have enough heat it input into something that you can do it constantly, or you can admit that you don't, and you can store up enough heat to do one or two things, and then you has then you has to quit. That's how it works. Is that is that uh that answer your your point, Matt? Yeah, no, he's at uh Marco said thank you.
And um we should go to break, actual break. Uh so mute yourselves for a second. Are we doing uh classics in the field afterwards? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, cool.
All right, here we go. All right, right back. This episode is brought to you by Bend to Table, a monthly food subscription service for avid home cooks, focused on delicious and sustainable pantry items. Well, when we got our first boxes from Bend to Table, uh, you know, we Nastasi and I shared stuff from from our boxes, and in her Spanish box, she gave me the Las Hermanas uh Pimenton, the smoked uh paprika. And Dax actually we was making green beans because he's trying to make vegetables.
He's like, I want to put paprika into the green beans. I was like, whatever. How about you use this one? The smoked paprika from uh Bent to Table. And he was like, okay.
And he put it in. He's like, Dad, these are the best green beans I've ever had in my life. Go to Bend to Table.com to start your own monthly subscription. Use the discount code HRN to get $20 off a new subscription, and Bend a Table will donate $10 to support cooking issues and all of HRN's programming. By the way, we're back, right?
We're back. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Dax does not talk like that.
Again, I always had to like people like don't know me. Like, I only have like one or two voices that are used to imitate other people. Everyone in your entire world doesn't sound exactly the same. That's for explaining that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, you know, you never you never know. You never know. Some people might not know. I mean, uh, yeah, all right. Anyway.
Uh, so by the way, on the uh on on the on the flip, uh if you somehow have not had enough of uh you know yakking today, uh I'm going to be what time, John? 5 30. 5 30 on Mofad's, that's at MOFAD's Instagram. We're gonna have our unhappy hour where in which I will use milk syrup, which is a technique that's not in liquid intelligence because I came up with it afterwards, uh, to make a drink called Soft Cell, which yes is named after the Tainted Love Band. And uh yeah, what else?
Because what what are we pushing there? The membership drive? The membership drive, yeah. Which is going up through Friday. Going up Friday, yeah.
Going to Friday, so it ends on Friday. Yeah, if you if if you still if you're one of the people who's lucky to still have their job and you have some money, right? You should you should support us here at Heritage, but you should also support Mofad uh so that we can get through this kind of terrible, terrible period. Um yeah, we'll talk more about the membership drive on the when you when you tune in to watch the Mofad unhappy hour in which I make the soft cell cocktail with milk syrup at 5 30. You said 5 30 out of the end about the memory, right?
Definitely check out uh the MoFad website and their Instagram account. Every day they're giving away something different. They uh cocktail books. Is it true the Downton Abbey book is actually one of them? Dave's book and the Downton Abbey cocktail book.
You'll get one of them, not I don't think them together. You'll get one of those three books. Nastasia. I saw your book and the Downton Abbey cocktail book, and I was like, oh that's now listen. What I have heard.
I want one of those. Listen, I don't know. I I have not seen this the Downton Abbey cocktail book, but what I am told is that it is an excellent book. I'm not even I'm not messing around. Yes, I've I hear that it is a very well-written book.
Oh yeah, they came and did a talk at MoFad when the book came out. Who wrote it? Really well intended, yeah. John, who wrote it? Uh I can't remember their name.
It was a couple of different people. There was one cocktail. Lyndon, New Jersey. London, London. Also, John, don't move away from the mic.
Like a cocktail historian from Linden? What the hell? Like it's so random. You know what I mean? Uh now I will uh there is also so there is a I wouldn't say long and storied, but there is a history of people who write cookbooks around movies, media, and books.
And so Booker, my son, uh, will only cook recipes out of one of the three different Star Wars cookbooks, which are all done with like Lego figurines and also so he has like a Yoda soda, he has uh like they're all named after things like that. Like there's uh uh forget they're all like Darth Maul this or you know whatever bar in the entire world is the entire Star Wars bar, apparently until the Star Wars bar in Anaheim, yeah, at the Disney, yeah. Um so anyway, so so Booker only cooks out of Star Wars cookbooks, and then um there the Master and Commander series, which is best known for I guess that Russell Crowe movie that was out there. There's a whole series of books, and and whoever wrote it, I don't know who it was, is uh extremely interested in kind of period nautical accuracy, and there is a cookbook uh having to do with all of the period kind of both nautical and non-nautical food items that are in Master and Commander, and it was written by historians, and they went to a bunch of historical kind of boat areas to figure out how to write it, including the one at Mystic, so there's that, and then uh apparently the Downton Abbey cookbook. So, you know, this is a this is a well-known genre of cookbooks that Nastasia is not to be sneezed at.
I'm not sneezing at it. I thought I was interested. You were being sarcastic, you're a bad person. No, I was just surprised about the classics. Classics in the field.
Well, so before we do classics in the field, uh hey, I will say this. Uh we uh a couple weeks ago or a week ago, whatever it was, we asked people for their suggestions and we had some suggestions in. I'm gonna mention them. Uh so John wrote in, no relation to our John, wrote in. Oh, by the way, uh John, you want to get in touch with uh Matt at Kitchen Arts and Letters and see whether he wants to do a COVID callin' classics in the field of his own?
Yeah, I can certainly do that. Alright, cool. So uh Dave uh requested uh listener recommendations for classics in the field. Here are three of John's The Art of the Cake by Bruce Healy and Paul uh I guess because it's French it would be bouga and not boogat. What do you think, John?
Bugat or bouga? Bugat bug. I'm gonna say boogats, poly bougats. Anyway, uh John says, Great for learning the architecture of cakes. Healy, this is what caught my interest.
Healy, the main author, was an American theoretical physicist before becoming taken with French cooking, and there's apparently no information about Bruce Healy on the internet. Now, I uh I also was not able to find anything. However, I found out that Shirley Corheer wrote the introduction to that book. So I did, John, put a text into Harold McGee to see whether he would contact Shirley to find more information about Bruce Healy, assuming that I know I know uh McGee's doing well. I hope Shirley's also doing well.
Um second suggestion was La Cuisine, Secrets of Modern French Cooking by uh I'm gonna call him in the American Raymond Oliver. Give me some French on that, John. Raymond Olivier. Oh, yeah, yeah. Do that again.
I want to hear that again. Raymond Olivier. Yeah, yeah, baby. Anyway, uh so he says it's like similar and slightly more modern than the uh Pelop. I'm gonna call it Pella Pratt give me the Pella Pratt in Enconsé.
Pellaprat. Ah, yeah. It's just like having my boy. So there was a um in uh I forget what was his name. Uh Pierre Pierre Capretz was the guy's name.
He was a very well-known uh teacher of French, and he did a system uh of it of teaching French that and he was from Yale. And so, like, I lived in the language lab one year, like our dorm was in the language lab. And so we would hear all the language la lab stuff, and so I always had to hear his tapes, and he would say, you know, New Zealand enventé une histoire. And then he would say, Qu'est-ce que nous allons inventer? And you'd be like, Le Professeur, and he'd go, No, no, no, no, une histoire, une histoire!
Like that. And it was like, and so you're like, uh, I always have like the Pierre Capret's voice in my in my head. But I think they stopped using it because he unnecessarily used a like a good looking. Well, I won't I won't talk about it. But anyway, I don't think that they teach the Capretz method anymore.
But anyway, they're they uh New Zealand Enventé une histoire. Anyway, it's good to have someone who can bust out the real French, because you know, Peter won't do it. Peter Kim, uh, you know, everyone on this show's favorite punching bag would come on and I would try to get him to do the French stuff, and he would never do it for me, right, Stas. I don't know why. I don't know why.
Anyway, uh so uh La Cuisine Secrets of Modern French Cooking, uh I it looks really it looks really interesting, and the the pitch is similar to and slightly more modern than uh uh Peleprot Peleprat. Um and it has like a bun anyway, I ordered it just as you know, John. I ordered it, I'll take a look at it, and we can come and take a look at it when it is. By the way, you can get those are both still available on they're both over well over a hundred dollars if you buy them on Amazon new. Uh, but both are available for under $10 if you buy them used, which is how I do everything.
I buy all this stuff used. And his third recommendation was Gourmet's old Vienna cookbook, which you have as 1982, but it actually came out in 1959. I've also ordered a copy of that because I have to say, although you're calling out the art of the cake, which is like saying that French cakes, so the whole premise of the art of the cake is that French cakes are good. And we all know that's false. We all know it's Viennese cakes that are good.
So it's interesting that you bust out an old Vienna cookbook and then a French book about cakes. Because John, back me up on this. I mean, I love French cooking and French people know how to make cakes, but if you were going to say name a nationality with a cake, you wouldn't be like the French, right? Yeah, yeah. I mean, the French make excellent cakes, but you're right, when you do trace them all back to where they come from, it's mostly out of Vienna and Austria and things like that.
So yeah. Because that is the epicenter of cake technology is Vienna, is Austria, right? I mean, like, that's like if I had to choose a European place, right, for like continental, in quotes, which was a thing back in the day, continental cuisine, like like continental, like pastry, uh it would be Austria for sure. Like, without any question of a doubt. Like the French have the savory side on lock, and the Austrians have the pastry side.
I mean, that's all there is, right? Yeah. The croissant even comes through Austria to France. Yeah, if it is something that is uh like uh, you know, a pâtisserie situation, then odds are the Austrians do a good job. You know what I'm saying?
Which is why, you know, Chef Jürgen at the French Culinary Institute was an Austrian guy. You know what I mean? Like, and he was, you know, he actually worked at the Hotel Zacher. So do you guys know about the Zachertort? Yeah.
You do, but do you guys know Matt? You know, Nastasia? Oh, I have no idea what that is. So the Hotel Zacher in Vienna makes a famous thing called the Zaker tort, which is basically translates as the Zacher cake, right? And so it's this famous kind of chocolate cake, and and it's one of those things like Colonel Sanders' recipe where no one person, only actually only one person knows the entire recipe for Zacher tort, and they they rip all the labels off, have the deliveries come at different times, and only one person knows how to do it.
So nobody, but nobody who has printed a Zacher tort recipe has the actual legitimate recipe. So Chef Jurgen David, our friend, who is uh one of the you know, um pastry or is one of the pastry teachers at the French Culinary Institute, right? He worked at the Hotel Zacher, and somebody said that he had given an actual recipe for Zaker tort, and he got an angry letter from his old compati, you know, his old pals at the Hotel Zacher, being like, you must not say this, you did not have the actual Zaker tort recipe, no one has the Zaker tort recipe. He's like, I never said that, I never said that. But anyway, he got like painted with the brush of saying that he had said that he had the authentic recipe for the Zaker tort, and nobody does.
Anyway, um, I mean, okay, John, as a as a as a francophone, be it Belgian, but not I mean, the Genoise is a is is a weak cake, right? I mean, like the Genoise is not a good cake. It's a good base. No, it could be better thing. I mean, it's not a good cake.
Right? Yeah, no, it's yeah, yeah, no, it's not. It's not. I mean, what do you think, Snell? Just weak.
Would you have a Genoise or would you have any American cake? I don't know what a Genoise is. It's like a sponge cake with no flavor. You have to soak it in booze to have it have no flavor. It's it's also it's also like has the benefit of being kind of dry.
Yes. Sound delicious. Now, every and then you speak to a French person, and the French person's like, ah, we're but you soak it in brandy or whatever, liquor, and now all of a sudden it's good, or you soak it in syrup, and it's all of a sudden good. Well, why don't you just make a cake that tastes good without soaking it in syrup and brandy? That's all I'm saying.
That's all. Agreed. I don't know. Am I being wrong about this? We got eight minutes.
Classic field. You guys are the worst. Hold on a second. Hold on a second, hold a second, hold on, all right. So what?
How are we the worst? I think people know how you're the worst. Seven minutes and 45 seconds. All right. So listen, I know I promised to do the uh the book of edible, and maybe I'll mention a little bit about that, but as I was going past by by my boy, uh, by my boy Frederick Roden Rosengarten Jr.
Um, while I was passing my kitchen, uh my uh bookshelf today, something caught my eye that I haven't picked up in in a couple of years. And I picked it up, I was like, oh snap, I have to do it. Uh there's a book called The Mary Francis Cookbook. Adventures, get this. And this one you can get online, by the way.
It's it's it was it's from 1912, and it's public domain, so you can get the entire thing online, unlike the Rosengarten ones, which you can't. Um Adventures Among the Kitchen People. Adventures among the kitchen people. So this book was published in the U.S. Uh, the person who wrote it, uh, her name was uh Jane Eyre Fryer.
Uh and it's just an amazing document. It was published in 1912, and she was at the time a teacher in New Jersey of um kind of whatever they called home ec at the time, domestic science or whatever they call at the time. And this was the first, the Mary Francis Cookbook was the first of a whole bunch of Mary Francis things. There was Mary Francis knitting, Mary Francis, like you know, sewing, whatever. Mary Francis this, Mary Francis that, all home ec stuff.
But the the conceit is uh that it's a children's book, an actual story, and the story's got its own craziness, and it's printed in in almost like uh it's printed in in two colors, like a red and black, and the printing is kind of amazing. And if if you're ever a fan of those kind of like woodcutty looking early 1900s um books, it is quite amazing, and the illustrations are amazing. But the conceit is is that it's a children's story contained inside of another story that is also a cookbook. And so what happens is that the mom, and this is it also has all the weird gender garbage of the time, and also some weird like race and vagabond garbage of the time, but not too heavy enough to make it so that you don't have you can't not read the book. So the the idea of it, and and here's my my favorite touch, one of my favorite touches, is in the front where you would normally write a dedication to a book if you were giving it to a member of your family or a friend, she printed, right, with a wood block cut this inscription a book for all girls who love to help mother, Jane Eyre Fryer.
And that's printed as though she's inscribing the book to you, which is kind of a sick move. Um anyway, so like here's here's how crazy it is. The mom, right, is sick, in quotes, and needs to go out to the sea to get rest and get well, end quotes. Now, in 1912 talk, this means that they're hyping the mom up on drugs, and they think that she's quote unquote hysterical and are sending her to a sanatorium. So this is like classic like anti-woman movement of the day.
Remember, this is right at the height of the reform movement, right before Prohibition took place, before uh women's suffrage has happened. So there's this whole undercurrent of the mom is taken away, right, to go heal herself in quotes at a sanitarium. And then uh the aunt who starts out mean but turns out nice, right, shows up and is gonna cook breakfast and dinner for the brother and sister, because of course the dad's not gonna do jack squat about it, right? And then uh, but she's not gonna cook lunch. And so Mary Francis is gonna learn how to cook lunch, but she doesn't know anything, and her mom's last thing she does before she goes off to the loony bin is to uh write a cookbook for her, which is contained inside of this cookbook, and from that Mary Francis is gonna learn, quote unquote, how to cook and how to become a woman, which is the whole idea of this book.
So it's all different levels of crazy. And but it gets even better because what happens is that she shows up down in the kitchen, doesn't know what to do, and much like Toy Story, the entire kitchen comes alive and learn and helps her try to learn how to cook. So you have a talking toaster, you have a talking fryer, you have Auntie Rolling Pin, you have all of these characters that are introduced in woodcut blocks in the beginning of the book as the characters you're gonna have. So it's got like uh who's your favorite guy, uh uh John from uh the the one from um Be Our Guest, Be Our Guest, Let Your Magic to the Test. Oh, Lumiere.
Yeah, yeah. So it's all like this and like Toy Story, but in the kitchen, teaching, and it's also got this weird undercurrent of don't tell adults, because they say if you tell any adult that we talk to you, we can never talk to you again. So it's kind of got all levels of creepy in it, but also all levels of awesome. And it starts out the very first recipe she makes is toast, right? And so she walks up to this toaster, and then uh she says, Um, all right, here's the here's the recipe, and this is what's important.
Cuts because the other amazing thing about this is it gives insight into what it was like to cook on wood and coal-fired ovens back in 1912 in kind of a run-of-the-mill, like middle, like mid-income mid-level house in the United States, which is an amazing window to kind of look into. Um, and furthermore, because it's written from the perspective of old cooking implements and from the aunt, it also gives insight into what the cooking was like several generations prior, back into the 1800s. So, from that standpoint alone, interesting. So it's like many levels where you can re read this document. Anyway, plain toast.
And this puts it to a line by the way, someday I'll do uh I'll do uh the Thorns book, uh uh, whichever one it is, uh, the main writers who have a whole section on toast, which was quite influential to me. But this shows how our idea of toast is not anyone else's old idea of toast. Toast. Cut stale bread into slices about half an inch thick, remove crusts, put into wire toaster, hold over fire, moving to and fro until golden brown color, turn and brown the other side. And the key thing here, aside from cutting off the crust, is the fact that they're using stale bread to make the toast.
So most of the time when people were talking about these toasts back in the day, they were talking much more about rusk style things, like softer but rusks, not what we would consider toast, which is fundamentally fresh bread in the middle and crusty bread on the outside, which is a whole different mentality. Our current mentality of toast has nothing to do with anything that people would have called toast back in the day. So anyway, so Mary Francis goes, let me see if there's any stale bread. I should think so. A whole loaf.
I'll cut two slices, and since I want it to be very nice, I'll cut off the crusts. I guess that will be enough. Oh, I do wish somebody was here to help me. There is somebody. I'll help.
This is the toaster talking now. Mary Francis looked around in amazement. Seeing no one, why, where? Why? Who are you?
She asked. I'm Miss Tea Kettle, said the tea kettle, lifting uh oh, it's the tea kettle, uh, lifting his lid very politely. Uh, I'm I'm gladly at your service. And then the saucepan and everyone else. But then the toaster comes forward and teaches her how to make toast with his own body.
So, Mary Francis leaned over and gravely put a slice of bread in toaster, capital tea toaster. He looked so funny standing there that she wanted to smile, but thought it wouldn't be polite uh to so helpful a friend. But when he said, slide up my collar in a thick, smothery sort of voice, she laughed aloud before she could stop, but turned the sound into a cough so quickly that toaster man looked up at her queerly, only a moment, and she pulled the ring up until it held the bread tightly in place. Now lift me over the fire, he demanded. Mary Francis hesitated.
She couldn't tell where to take hold of him. Never mind my this is where it gets creepy again. Never mind my legs, he said, as though he read her thoughts. I'll see to them. And he folded his legs up so close that when Mary Francis lifted him up, she could find no sign of them.
Oh, you'll be burnt, she cried, as she held what Toaster Man had called his head over the bright fire. Not I, he laughed. Not I, I like it. It's the toast that'll be burnt if I'm not soon turned over. So anyway, he trains her how to make this toast and then tells her to make what is called milk toast.
Now you might have heard of milk toast as any jerk that's boring, right? But back in the day, and we're right in the throes of when people thought that when you were infirm, read the mom, who's about to be shipped off to quote unquote get well. When you were infirm, you needed to have uh stuff that was super mild. So they took this toast that they had just made. This is the anathema to anything we would do now, and make a roux, add milk into it, and not like a rare bit with cheese or anything, pour it directly over the toast and resog it out.
And to modern years, this is like what kind of lunacy is this? But that was the height of sick person food back then. So you gotta read this book. There's also like a good section where uh there's a lot of anti-vagrancy, anti-Irish vagabond thing going on in one of the chapters. There is a uh mild racial slur used as the name of a pastry, which by the way, still happens in Europe for those of you that travel to Europe.
So there's a like there's a lot of uh there's a lot of good stuff to unpack in this book, and it's worth looking, looking at. You can pick up a real copy for about a hundred between eighty and a hundred dollars, uh, and there's reprints, and you can get it on the internet. Uh do I have any time left at all? No. Oh man.
Someone wanted to know, oh man, I'm all out of cash. Someone wanted to know, um, someone wanted to know uh whether they should get an excalibre or whether they should get a um a Zojirushi rice cooker, because they're primarily interested in doing uh chicken wing garum, which is from the Zilbers book, and uh black black garlic. Uh if that's all you're really gonna do, I guess get the Xcaliber. They're very different. Like, I use my rice cooker at least twice a week.
And I use my Xcaliber like three times in a row, and then I don't use it again for a year. So, you know, the the Xcaliber is gonna have temperature control, whereas the Zoji Rushi just does what it's gonna do. Um, so for that I would say get the X caliber. It's quite wide. Um, but you you're never I mean, like, you're never ever my wife regrets that I have the Xcaliber because it's so big.
It's on top of the fridge, but it's kind of big. You know what I mean? No one ever regrets having the Zoji Rushi rice cooker. No one ever. No one.
No one. No one. Uh so I didn't get to read about, unfortunately. Uh I was gonna tell you people that I already mentioned this that Brazil nuts, and this is from Rosengarden's book. Brazil nuts grow on wild trees that are over a hundred feet tall.
They weigh four pounds, and in high winds, they fly down and have like every year people get killed foraging for Brazil nuts when one falls, which is why you never collect Brazil nuts in wind or rain. So if you're ever in Brazil nut area and you're like, hey, these are Brazil nut trees, wear a hard hat, watch out, and if it's windy or rainy, get the the F out of there. Cooking issues. Cooking issues is powered by Simplecast. Thanks for listening to Heritage Radio Network.
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