More on pasta and water
Following up on Adam’s latest comment, here’s a link to the eGullet discussion on pasta since it’s sometimes complicated to find your way around eGullet. If you don’t know eGullet, it’s worth getting to know as there are lots of knowledgeable people there.
There are also lots of people who love to throw around their culinary authority as in this discussion. Always a dangerous thing to do, in my opinion, because I think attempts to dictate or police taste are tricky. Yes, the grading of textures in pasta al dente is pleasing. But it’s not handed down from heaven. And there were periods in Italian history (can’t find the reference right now) when people liked their pasta meltingly soft.
Well, that off my chest, how interesting that a pasta box in Italy in the 70s would suggest boiling the pasta for a few minutes and then leaving it off the boil to finish cooking. Seem to me the whole issue of the range of methods of cooking pasta is worth more investigation. Adam, I can see you coming up with one of your long pieces on this. I suspect it was a much more varied matter than culinary gurus now would have us believe. After all, a lot of experimentation must have gone on after the invention of (say)commercial dried spaghetti.
I’ll try to look in my Mexican cookbooks to see how they dealt with the larger pastas in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
“Culinary authority” is a hugh part of the foodie/fine diner scene. It would make an interesting topic to discuss….
Regarding my own personal tastes. We eat a lot of pasta in our family, mostly in the modern Italian manner. 90% would be make from dried durum wheat pasta. For me personally the texture is hughly important. There are some brand of pasta that I will not buy, as no matter how carefully I cook it, the texture is not good. My Tuscan brother in law takes this a step further and will not eat certain pasta shape/dimentions unless they are combined with specific sauces. Linguine with oil based sauces or seafood for instance, but never with ragu.
I recognise that this is very 20th century. I’ve been collecting information on pasta for a long time and I know of many ways that it can be cooked and that there are many different preferences in texture, historically and regionally. I actually eat a lot of different pasta styles, but I’m not sure this is common. So even thought he “boil pasta in a lot of water until al dente” seems to be only common in the last 100 years, I wonder how difficult it would be to change this?
Getting back to culinary authority, pointing out that this is often simply personal preference and that peoples personal preferences are just that and not some how better or more correct then other models is a Sisyphean ordeal that I haven’t the energy for. It is complicated by national identity, lack of personal confidence, over confidence, ignorance, over education, neo-Darwinism etc etc. Never work out how to address is in other or myself.
my husband hates al dente pasta – he refuses to eat what he believes is undercooked. i dont mind al dente pasta myself, but it’s all clearly a case of what you prefer to eat, not what the recipe says
speaking of recipes, i simply cannot stand those telling you that the meat in a particular dish needs 15 minutes (for example) till it’s done: there is no consideration in those countless internet recipes for the different varieties of the same kinds of ingredients available, or the preferences of each individual eater
I love it, Adam! I’ve been thinking about the pasta discussion and am reminded of the proliferation of arrogance in art and wine in the last 50 or so years and the bourgeois comeback, “I can’t tell you what is GOOD, but I know what I LIKE!”
And to maria v — I’ve thought about these “precise” instructions, which very often don’t work because the conditions cannot be replicated, and wondered if it was brought about by the trend in the last century to try to make a hard science out of everything, especially cooking, when the skill in question is really a soft and variable art.
“speaking of recipes, i simply cannot stand those telling you that the meat in a particular dish needs 15 minutes (for example) till it’s done: there is no consideration in those countless internet recipes for the different varieties of the same kinds of ingredients available, or the preferences of each individual eater”
I’ve written recipes for publication and these kinds of precise directions are required by a lot editors.
Another obvious problem is that there can be huge variations on the amount of water meat can give off during braising or stewing.
I gave directions to add 2 cups of water for a lamb tagine to a test kitchen (major American newspaper), they claimed that all the water evaporated following my directions and the tagine burned. Um, so nobody was watching the dish?
When I tested it there was more than enough water. I had to reduce the sauce at the end. Obviously a simple way around it is to suggest that the dish actually needs to be monitored occasionally during cooking and that the liquid should be at a certain level. Editor said no go, seems too hard.
“when the skill in question is really a soft and variable art.”
Yup, and this is something that comes up often when I teach a cooking class. You have to watch what you’re doing, get a sense of your ingredients, understand that heat sources vary tremendously, etc…
Ji-Young Park: the reason i have found that cooking instructions dont work is because of the different preferences of eaters and the different ways of raising animals and growing vegetables for food here in crete.
In new zealand (my birth country), sheep were raised exclusively on grass; in crete (greece), sheep and goats are raised on wild shrubs and and animal feed in the winter. meat in crete is much tougher than new zealand lamb. beef is the worst example of this, basically because crete does not have a tradition for cow breeding (which is why i prefer imported beef as i find it becomes tender more quickly when cooked)
As you said, dishes need to be monitored – recipe instructions should not be so rigid because not everyone who uses recipes from newspapers, magazines or the internet is an experienced cook to know that ingredients can vary in cooking times because of the way they are produced.
Now that is funny as I don’t add liquid to my tagine (the liquid that comes out to the ingredients is enough) and get annoyed with published recipes that treat it as another stew. A tagine is technique as much as ingredients etc. God everybody is stupid except for me (see above discussion, “culinary authority”).
Solipsism.
I read the linked discussion last night and bits of it were running through my mind as I fell asleep.
When I awoke the word popped into my mind. Solipsism.
It is a necessary thing to have if one is to be an Authority on food.
Which reminds me, Adam was the first person ever to tell me that smilie faces were good things to add to posts sometimes.
Now I scatter them somewhat around like too much cheese on pasta.
:)
There. Restrained elegance, I call it.
maria v (2nd post)
… and the whole ingredient thing — how much water in the tagine? how much flour in the bread? how much salt anywhere?
About 30 years ago I spend several weeks in NZ mostly camping and staying in efficiency units in campgrounds. I LOVE lamb and bought it from the local butcher the first night. I cooked it according to my habit with USA produced lamb and it was so salty that we couldn’t eat it. The whole time I was there I never again put a grain of salt on the lamb, no mater the sauce or method, and it was delicious. My surmise was that most of the sheep grazed on grass constantly blown by ocean breezes and, thus, had an accumulation of salt. Whereas, much of the lamb I got in USA grazed hundreds of miles from the ocean and in winter their diet was augmented with commercial feed.