back
54 comments
I always felt like she downplayed her WW2 service, which is fine. The article does the same.

My Life in France was a fascinating book. At one point she describes dangling raw chickens out of her apartment window for three days before roasting. I guess we’d call that “dry aging” now but it repulses every fiber of my food safety being.

However, it did not stunt her growth or shorten her lifespan.

> it repulses every fiber of my food safety being

A lot of American food-safety guidance is needed because we sterilized away the food's natural defenses. Go to most parts of the world and you'll find meat and eggs left safely on the counter for hours, or even consumed raw. We can't do that in America, because we've bleached and washed the good stuff away.

Global South here, is this a new conspiracy? Food poisoning is very common, you should be thankful of your safety standard.
Like a lot of stuff like this, it’s not that simple one way or the other.

Eggs are the usual example. US regulations require eggs to washed, removing a protective coating, which is why Americans refrigerate eggs. Many other developed nations forbid washing eggs with solutions that would remove the same protective coating, so eggs are frequently not refrigerated there because they don’t really need to be. The motivation in the US was avoiding salmonella, but other places have avoided that by improving cleanliness practices of the farms rather than washing their eggs.

Kind of different, but recent requirements to label foods containing sesame as an allergen led to more foods having sesame intentionally added, since it’s cheaper to add it intentionally and then label it than to prove the production facility and ingredients are 100% sesame free. It’s not removing some natural defense from a food, but that’s a regulation intended to help people with allergens stay safer which inadvertently decreased their options (and maybe made it more likely they’d buy something containing sesame by mistake if it was a product they’d been safe with before but had recently added sesame).

So I very much agree with you that the food regulations of the FDA and similar institutions in other countries are largely a blessing and huge boon to human welfare. It’s great to be confident my bread isn’t 50% sawdust and there probably isn’t melamine in my milk and stuff. But like any big regulatory environment mistakes have been made, and also sometimes regulations that made sense at one time outlive their usefulness.

> removing a protective coating, which is why Americans refrigerate eggs.

The egg thing is oft repeated, but not actually true. The coating is not magic, it's just oil, and America does wash the eggs, and then applies some oil. I have not refrigerated my eggs in the US in decades with no problems at all.

> The motivation in the US was avoiding salmonella, but other places have avoided that by improving cleanliness practices of the farms rather than washing their eggs.

This isn't true either. Other places avoid salmonella by immunizing their chickens. It's not required in the US (mainly because since the US refrigerates its eggs, immunization doesn't help much), but more and more farms are immunizing chickens, eventually the reason for refrigerating eggs will vanish - but I'm sure they'll still require it. (The circular relationship between these two things is not lost on me.)

Farmers in the UK value cleanliness not because of Salmonella but because dirty farms make for dirty eggs as seen by the consumer, since they aren't allowed to clean them.

Speaking of things that aren't true

> The coating is not magic, it's just oil

To say it is "just oil" is to say that breast milk is "just formula."

Yes, the cuticle has oil in it and is an oily substance, but it's a complex mixture of proteins, lipids,some of which are oily. The starkest difference of course being that mineral oil, the usual post-wash coating, would not allow the egg to remain viable, irrespective of whether it had been sanitized. It is less permable to gases than the natural cuticle, and less effective at preventing bacterial growth. As you have discovered, less effective does not mean not at all effective, and I store both my unwashed and store-bought eggs on the counter as well, but even discounting supply chain timings, the natural eggs keep longer.

> but that’s a regulation intended to help people with allergens stay safer which inadvertently decreased their options

Having eating restrictions / allergies, or even being handicapped, is a nightmare in the global south. I don't think it's a problem to restrict options out of an abundance of caution.

It wasn't an abundance of caution, it was things (that you might previously have eaten and enjoyed as a sesame allergee) newly having non-trace amounts of sesame added deliberately, to save having to qualify the previous possible trace amount as low enough once it was recategorised.

Well-intentioned change, unintentional bad outcome for those affected.

> recent requirements to label foods containing sesame as an allergen led to more foods having sesame intentionally added, since it’s cheaper to add it intentionally and then label it than to prove the production facility and ingredients are 100% sesame free

Why do they need to add the sesame? can't they just say "might contain sesame" without having to explicitly add it?

Wait why is the expense of adding unnecessary sesame oil less than simply adding “produced in a facility that processes sesame oil” or “may contain trace amounts of sesame” or similar on the label?

That doesn’t ring true to me.

Yes you can. I haven't refrigerated eggs, in America, in decades. There's no problem at all. You can leave them out for at least 3 months, if not longer.
Also because our factory farms produce disease-ridden animals, our urban environments are polluted, etc. etc.
Not that anyone in here is likely to be looking for cooking tips, but it is a fairly common practice to air-dry the skin of chicken meat to get it substantially crispier.

My wife is more like you in the respect that she will not let me air dry chicken in our house. Even though she knows it is delicious, and even if I just keep (e.g.) chicken thighs uncovered in a refrigerator in accordance with a recipe, she won't eat the finished product because of that visceral response.

I can sometimes exploit when she is away for work to air dry my chicken, then cook them before she can see that they've been air dried. She loves it so long as she does not know how it was prepared, and still loves it after she is told, but weirdly (to me, anyway) will not eat it if she knows it was air dried.

I can understand not air-drying outside the fridge but why is she fearful of chicken air-dried in the fridge? I always, if time allows, salt and air-dry in the fridge my chickens for at least a day.
Despite how much they tend to shape our patterns of thinking, I don't know if there's ever a good explanation for a visceral response.
It’s standard practice to air dry most wild game. I have a deer hanging right now.
And it should be standard practice to air dry any sort of steak before grilling it. We season the steaks, and put a desk fan on them till the skin is dry before grilling. Patting them dry with a paper towel doesn't cut it.
Hanging birds is a very old practice. Wait till you learn how long people hang pheasants.

Brillat-Savarin: “the peak is reached when the pheasant begins to decompose; its aroma develops, and mixes with an oil which in order to form must undergo a certain amount of fermentation, just as the oil in coffee can only be drawn out by roasting it.”

In french they even have a verb derived from this process of hanging a pheasant to develop its aroma: "faisander", which comes from "faisan", the french word for pheasant.
That's... so French. Thanks for adding this bit. I'm always in need of culinary history ammo when I am confronted with having to feed people who only trust industrially processed food. Such as many of my relatives.
Was always told it was ready when you could pull it's flesh off with two sticks. Then to be eaten bloody rare. It's delicious in that style but you don't see high pheasant served much anymore unfortunately.

That said, you hang pheasants prior to plucking and gutting, so they are still sealed; feels odder hanging a plucked bird like a chicken. I'm not sure if the former is in fact safer?

Hanging it prior to gutting sounds gross...organs go bad much quicker I would think.
I think it is a different story because of the size of the animal. They do not retain as much heat as a larger animal like a goose or turkey.
"I like cooking with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food."

-- Julia Child

“If you're afraid of butter, use cream.”
It's interesting to see her with Jacques Pepin. Jacques is a master chef and an absolute beast in the kitchen, but his recipes often skip steps or "cheat" in order to get something about as good with less time and work. Julia insists on doing it the "right" way and is more opinionated. Both are master chefs, but they each have a different approach to cooking, and both are great. I don't take this as a cooking lesson but as a life lesson.
Jacques worked in, and ran, commercial kitchens in restaurants prior to being in the media.

Julia learned "proper" French cuisine and wanted to bring that authentic experience to Americans.

The thing about cooking at home is that each dish can be a labor of love. On the other hand, when you're cooking for a large crowd over the course of an evening, each dish must be consistent in both quality and execution time, and can't afford to spend all day in the kitchen working on it.

Two different approaches, for two very different audiences. Neither is right or wrong, in the context of what they are trying to achieve.

Ehhhh- Mastering the Art of French Cooking though opens up with "This is a book for the servantless American cook who can be unconcerned on occasion with budgets, waistlines, time schedules, children’s meals, the parent-chauffeur-den-mother syndrome, or anything else which might interfere with the enjoyment of producing something wonderful to eat."

Today we tent to view Mastering the Art of the French Cooking as fussy (and her forward does acknowledge that ones schedule must be free), in no small part due to works like Julie & Julia, but the opening lines in the forward are counter to that (Key phrase being "servantless American.")- on the contrary _not_ fussy but demonstrative of good foundational technique. Pepin's La Methode and La Technique are comparable, if not more formal, though of course very much aimed at a different audience. Both chefs published more casual, everyday recipes later in their career.

I loved seeing his technique. This is a 2 min video of him cutting up a raw chicken https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfDsNRXPKE8. He's going slow because he's explaining, but it's so smooth he's still fast.
I have thought about that balance. I usually strive to find the shortcuts, the ones that cut the time and steps and produce a result that is maybe 90 percent of perfect. For example, what is the shortest time to make pizza dough? According to many recipes you should start the day before. But what if I realize in the afternoon that I want to have pizza tonight? I have tried one hour of rising, and while that has worked, I think it is not close enough for the "right" balance. But I will continue to experiment.
You can go the exact other way, plain pizza dough is best after anywhere from 2 to 7 days in my experience. You can push it to 10 or 14 days too, which will taste different but still very good and the dough will be quite weak by then for thin crust pizza.

You still have to think of it ahead of time but this removes need for coordination and lets you do it in batches.

Also I just make one kind of starter bread dough in batches and then make everything out of it, some things as-is (bread for first ~4 days, bread dough pizzas for 14 days), some by mixing it with fresh dough (bread afterwards, everything else). But i'm specifically after the heavily fermented dark dough taste.

It freezes well, 14d would be way over-fermented even in the fridge IMO.

Doesn't really save having to know in advance because it needs to defrost and prove, but it does save having to be in the mood again within just a few days for another one. (It's difficult/annoying to make so little dough as for one pizza, IMO.)

I keep them in the fridge, yes, should have mentioned that.

Oh, and another thing i should have mentioned is that if the dough is older i make sure to fold it few times more and work a bit more fresh flour into it. And i use high hydration (as high as i can make it, about 72~75%), when i pull it out from the fridge it's _wet_ so even when it's as old as it should be (2~7 days) the crust will be mostly fresh flour.

The trick is that there is no trick and you just let it overferment but pick style that will work well with it. You need savory toppings to go with the taste, e.g. salami and maybe sharper tasting cheese. Making very thin pie will be difficult with dough so weak so don't do that, it won't rise very high so don't make it too thick either.

And 14 days is the furthest i recommend taking it. As i wrote above two to seven days is best, of course it tastes differently after seven than after two days but both are good and perfectly within the canon of 'pizza' and you can prepare it anyhow you want.

Beyond that you're pushing it, but since the topic is what shortcuts you can take i'll still recommend more than you need and using it longer than you'd think to over trying to make it the same day. 30~40 minutes from a decision to a pizza, it does taste right too.

I assumed it was in the fridge, I meant that's pushing it imo even so, I'd keep it maybe a day outside absolute max.

And I find high hydration such a pain with pizza especially, which seems only to get worse over time in the fridge (some things seem to dry out, others to get wetter, what a machine!), 75% for 14d, I don't know how you do it. It must take on a lot of extra flour when you get it out to stretch it out to shape?

14 days is long but if you use a minuscule amount of yeast it might be fine. Temperature matters too. A very cold fridge found make it work.
The shortest time to pizza dough is the one you pick up from the grocery store in 10 minutes. No difference from whatever you'll make at home, and makes a great pizza. I've brought it with me in a cooler when camping and made pizza over the campfire. Next time to avoid having to ice it down, I'll just start a no-knead one the first night I make camp. Whatever works, works
There are some really good doughs out there. Whole Foods has a really good one. However I can make a better dough at home. I use a higher gluten flour (14%), diastatic malt powder and cold ferment for a few days. To my taste it’s better than any dough I’ve purchased. But yes, unnecessary.
May as well buy the whole pizza at the supermarket then, no difference from whatever you'll make at home.
Never thought I’d have to say this but: putting a whole pizza in your backpack seems harder than putting pizza ingredients in your backpack
Certainly. But I prefer making food myself over buying premade.
https://www.brianlagerstrom.com/recipes/1-hour-pan-pizza

Has a 1 hour normal pizza recipe as well. Haven't tried his pizza recipe but he used to work at a bakery and his bread recipe worked well for me.

I find it fascinating going back and watching some of her cooking shows. I like when she isn't afraid when she makes a mistake and can just carry on.

I somewhat regularly cook from the art of French cooking (or the way to cook and baking with Julia) and some of the recipes have not aged particularly well (for my taste at least) but many of them are still fantastic.

A lot of butter yeah... a stick of butter to make burgers, something that I never used butter for before, sure stuck out to me but it was really good. I just don't do it every day.

It has been helping me improve my cooking skills as well.

I still love the variants that the cookbook focuses on. I have a ton of cookbooks, and I have not seen such a focus on variants on the same recipe as is this book. I am sure there are others out there and this isn't unique to her, but it is my favorite part of her book.

> A lot of butter yeah... a stick of butter to make burgers, something that I never used butter for before, sure stuck out to me but it was really good. I just don't do it every day.

Cant remember which TV Chef Personality said this (probably Gordon Ramsay) but they made a big distinction between restaurant cooking and home cooking at one point. In restaurant cooking stuff like basting a burger in butter is often the norm because it's flavor country and flavorful food is what keeps customers coming back. When you're cooking for yourself it's a bit overkill and if you do stuff like that all the time you're going to need to see a heart doctor at some point.

Anthony Bourdain? "In the world of chefs, however, butter is in everything. Even non-French restaurants—the Northern Italian; the new American, the ones where the chef brags about how he’s “getting away from butter and cream”—throw butter around like crazy." https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1999/04/19/dont-eat-befor...
Her Coq au Vin is a bit of work but it still tastes fantastic. A lot of those variants are a bit weird today, but I like to see them as ideas. I could see them being standards in the post-war mileau.

What I really don't care for are her treatments of vegetables. She famously couldn't stand non-soft (al dente?) vegetables. Also I guess it's "French" but she puts a lot of effort to make some recipes white, eg Poulet a l'Ancienne. Eh, I can't be bothered.

Still my hardback Vol 1 of MTAOFC is looking pretty ragged from steady use over the last 30 years, sniff.

Would you recommend any of Child's books to a vegetarian home cook today? (If not, would you happen to have other recommendations for French vegetarian cooking, leaning toward seasonal produce, for the soft of home cook/baker who prefers to weigh their dry ingredients?)
That's the main secret to all the food you eat when you eat out: tons of salt, butter, and sugar.
+ the command of high heat. The above 3 without command of a stainless steel skillet is almost pointless.

Non-stick cookware and convenience has ruined the "art" or rather practise of getting just enough crap stuck to the surface/deglazing. Or the art of letting stuff like eggs/fish fillets sit undisturbed until they crust and easily slide off.

Charming post -- and a gem of a substack!