Eyewitness Cook

Some time in 2008, when I was at the height of my Mississippi powers, living part-time on the Gulf coast and chatting up cooks and shrimpers and such, a group organizing a conference panel on culinary tourism asked me to come speak. Flattered and hubristic, I said yes. And only then did I proceed to ask myself, “What the hell do I know about promoting culinary tourism?”

The answer, of course, was, “Not a whole hell of a lot.” So I talked about it with my friend Google, jotted down some notes about magazine advertising rates or something, and showed up confident I could avoid sounding like I was just there for the free drinks at the reception.

I took my place at the panel, flashed a flirty smile at the (very beautiful, it turns out) woman who invited me, and heard the introductions of the other speakers. One was a culinary tourism promoter who’d been in the game for roughly three quarters of my life. The next was a woman who’d basically invented the term culinary tourism, who could tell you the name of every person to visit the great states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, Florida and Montana from the years 1984-2007. And then there was me. With my notes. From a 20-minute round of Googling.

The rest is a little too painful to go over, but suffice it to say that I learned a few very important lessons that day:

1. If you actually, literally ask the audience to laugh at your next joke, they will. But they will not actually be amused.
2. Self-deprecating jokes from the stage are funny. Unless you’re bombing. Then they’re just depressing.
3. No beautiful woman will be impressed with a flirty smile if you are obviously, appallingly incompetent.

Anyway, my time finally ground to an end, and I booked it out of that conference like my house was on fire.

On my way out, though, one of the organizers caught sight of me and, bless her heart, made sure I took home one of the thank-you gift bags. I wanted to protest. I wanted to give it back. I didn’t deserve it. I got home and opened it up, full of all manner of shameful reminders of my humiliation. I wanted to put them all out of my sight — the tumblers, the cooler bags, the aprons. But then I pulled out “Screen Doors and Sweet Tea,” Martha Foose’s cookbook.

A proud daughter of Mississippi, Martha left for a spell to train with some of the most renowned pastry chefs in France, and then returned home to cook, bake and teach up in the Mississippi Delta. I knew her from a random, wild-eyed moment years earlier, when I ran up to her after having a taste of her signature Sweet Tea Lemon Chess Pie, a pastry that will forever change the way you think about Mississippi, France, iced tea, pies, unicorns and ligers. I don’t even remember our conversation, but that there was some wary smiling and the word fraisage floated in the air (which is French for “smearing the crust dough in little circles and then stacking them all back on one another so it’s ridiculously flaky”), and I walked away hoping that I didn’t scare her too badly.

So then, in the comfort and social-awkwardness safety of my home, I opened the book to smashing success. The first page I opened to was banana pudding, which is as good a sign as there is in cookbooking. Four pages later, and I was in the promised land — “Lemon Icebox Pie: The Wonder of Sweetened Condensed Milk.”

I am a great lover of lemons, any food that includes the word “icebox,” and most of all, of the gooey ambrosia that is sweetened condensed milk. My feelings of shame and embarrassment gave way. I fired up the oven. I ground up graham crackers to make crumbs. And soon, spoon deep in its tart, creamy goodness, I started to thank fate for sending this recipe my way.

Martha Foose’s Lemon Icebox Pie

From “Screen Doors and Sweet Tea.” Used with permission, except for the stupid commentary, which is my own.

Makes one 9-inch pie

I realize that sounds kind of laughable. But then again, how is it that a man whose signature dish is, essentially, a salad can be regarded as one of the greatest chefs in the world?

I think it’s because of his compelling sense of wonder, of his endless fascination with his ingredients — what they taste like, what they feel like, what they smell and look like. What he might be able to do with even the simplest food to make it seem new again, to reveal more of its character. I recently had the opportunity to watch him peel a carrot. (Yes, that sentence is for real, and the experience was spectacular.) He did this utterly pedestrian thing with such focus and care that when he’d cleared off all the peel and continued shaving into the carrot, beautiful, noodley ribbons curling onto his board, I could imagine the first time he did this, the first time he noticed this gorgeous shape, the first time he realized he could present carrots in a form so delicate and elegant.

So much of the soul of cooking is learning to open your eyes to the possibilities of anything in the kitchen. In my copy of his book “Essential Cuisine,” he wrote an inscription: “Nature speaks; experience translates.”

I’m thinking about this today because I hope that in my own, tiny, nongenius way, I’ve been able to help inspire your own cooking in this column. I’ve tried to share simple concepts and techniques to demystify new-to-you ingredients, or to make old ones taste new again. (For some reason, I also found it necessary to describe these “simple concepts” in 1,500-word columns. Sorry, I’m a yapper.) Whether it was to rediscover the aromatic pleasures of ginger and scallion by splashing them with sizzling oil, or to concentrate summer vegetables into a dense brick of pure flavor, to brulee and caramelize your Easter Peeps or to share the recipe for the greatest roast beef sandwich I have ever met, I hope you’ve enjoyed reading, talking and cooking with me.

If all this sounds a little bit like a soft-focus flashback montage sequence, it’s because, well, it is. Cue the waterworks: This is my last column for Salon.

What we’ve planned here is food coverage for curious people, for people who care about people, for people who are passionate about finding new ways to look at the world, whether they are “foodies” or people who think foodies’ main contribution to our society is allowing us to call wine dorks “winies.”

That’s what I said when I started, and I’m proud of the stories, essays and conversations we’ve shared here. For the last year and a half, I’ve had the pleasure and privilege of discussing the issues of food with you, big and small, from wondering about the ethnic politics of shark’s fin soup bans to the taste of things too horrible to enjoy in polite company. (Wait, this is going to turn into another montage sequence. Somebody stop me!)

It’s been a wild, educational, gratifying, infuriating, thrilling, humbling, exciting time. And so it’s with gratitude and sadness that I’m leaving Salon, but I won’t be going too terribly far. I hope to still contribute some meandering thoughts, and I’m excited by what’s coming up. I’ll be easy to find, on Twitter at <strong>@francis_lam, and on the web at about.me/francis_lam. I hope you’ll say hello!

But one more thing before I go — a recipe from Michel Bras. It’s for a long potato crisp, crackly and browned like the best chips, but with a softer, more mellow heart. In his truest spirit, they’re simple, delightful and just odd enough to get you wondering what else you might do with them … other than mow them all down before dinner’s served.

Michel Bras’ crispy potatoes

Adapted from “Essential Cuisine” by Michel Bras

Aren’t you sad you didn’t get an invitation to the World’s Most Sanctimonious Dinner Party? I am. I want to know what gets served for dessert at a soiree like this.

But my Fancy Brooklyner self-hatred aside, the lady had it right, for sure — mussels are the jam. They taste great, are cheap, are ridiculously easy to cook, still pack some heat on the impress-the-guests scale, are seriously versatile and are, yes, sustainable. Calling seafood “sustainable” is usually tricky business because there are so many variables, but with mussels, you’ll almost always get responsibly farmed shellfish that actually clean the water they’re grown in. (They’re a “best choice” on the well-respected Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch list.)

For too long relegated to “mixed-seafood pasta” jumbles or clichéd steams with white wine and herbs, it’s time for mussels to get shown a little love. They can seem intimidating for home cooks, but really, I can’t think of anything easier to prepare. And I love how sitting there with a big pot of them, slurping them out of the shell, soaking up the broth with bread, turns dinner into an event of conversation and juice-slicked hands.

How to clean mussels

Most mussels come pretty clean, actually, and there’s pretty much never a problem with grit or sand, as you might have with clams. If there’s a beard coming out of one — you’ll know it when you see it — just give it a yank to pull it off. Some chefs want you to scrub them afterwards with a stiff brush or pad, but I never do. Your call.

How to store mussels

You don’t want to hang on to them for too terribly long, more than a couple days, but they’re fine in the fridge. Especially if you keep them in a bowl lined and topped with a moistened towel or paper towel. Whatever you do, don’t keep them in water; fresh water will kill them.

How to cook mussels

Get them hot. They will open. They are cooked.

How to cook delicious mussels

OK, this is the fun part. Mussels have a flavor that’s unmistakably oceanic — salty, briny, minerally. They’re not as saline or meaty as clams, not as clear and ringing as oysters, but they’re a little earthier, a little down-and-dirtier. And they pair beautifully with anything you can think of that would do well with that salty, earthy bass note.

Earlier, I knocked on the combination of mussels with garlic and shallots, white wine, herbs and butter, but there’s a lot to be learned in the basics. You have garlic and shallots (and usually butter or olive oil) as the aromatic base; an acidic liquid to help the steaming and to lighten the flavor; a bunch of fresh herbs towards the end of cooking to add a nice top note, and a finishing stir-in of butter to enrich the broth.

Using this framework, you can start improvising your way to limitless combinations. Basically, if you can imagine a bunch of flavors tasting good together, they will probably be good with mussels. Like a version with leeks or onions (aromatics), bacon (just because) and dark beer (liquid), and finished with a stir-in of crushed or ground nuts for more richness. (And maybe a final splash of malt vinegar or something if it wants a little brightness.)

The handsome chef Barton Seaver (who once chipped the hell out of my cleaver when I was in culinary school with him, and no, that’s not a euphemism) has a new, excellently named book, “For Cod and Country,” and it’s got a bunch of fantastic mussel pairings: mustard in the classic white wine version, with scallions instead of herbs. Shallots, roasted until soft and caramelized, with red wine, finished with butter and rosemary. Roasted garlic and IPA or another strong beer, also finished with butter. A fistful of spices, finished with chorizo. (That one’s called Mussels Saint-Ex, and it’s probably worth buying the book for.)

Steamed mussels

This isn’t a recipe so much as a basic method for steaming mussels; please do improvise with different flavor combinations, liquids, finishers, etc. Serve with big hunks of bread, crisp toasts, French fries, rice, pasta or whatever floats your boat. Allow about 1 pound of mussels per person for a main course, or half that for an appetizer.

Anyway, the point is this: There’s a lot in butter that’s not butterfat. The vast majority of that is water, and then there are milk solids, which are mainly sugars and proteins. Normally, all those elements are emulsified together, but you see them break apart when you heat it — ever notice how butter sizzles in a hot pan? That’s the water boiling furiously out of it. That foaming? That’s a mix of proteins trying to hold onto water that’s desperately trying to escape. And then, of course, there’s the browning.

Remember that the milk solids in butter are mainly sugars and proteins?

That’s the key. See, where there’s sugar, there can be caramelization. Where there’s protein, there can be meaty browning. Where there’re both of them, there can be THE BOMB.

Brown butter is a wonderful, wonderful thing. Evocatively called beurre noisette (hazelnut butter) in French, it gives God’s own grease a sweet, nutty flavor, turning in its smooth richness for one more liquid, dark and complex. It’s a classic “sauce” nearly on its own when splashed with a little lemon juice or vinegar to brighten it, maybe with some shallots and capers to bring it up even higher, or some chopped nuts to accentuate its fatty goodness. Herbs like parsley, thyme or rosemary get all happy in there, too, chopped and tossed in at the last second. Spoon some on sautéed chicken, fish or pork, and you’re in business.

But brown butter is one of those things that can turn on you in a second. It just gets more and more flavorful as it browns, until it hits some evilly magic point that turns it black, bitter and nasty. (There actually are uses for “buerre noir,” but I tend to leave that napalm alone.) So for beginners, it’s best to brown your butter slowly.

The safest way I’ve found to do it is this: Put a heavy, light-colored pan over medium heat. (Black-bottomed or nonstick pans make it hard to see the color.) Cut the butter into one-inch pieces, so that they melt and color evenly — you don’t want a big lump of butter still sliding around solid while stuff is already burning around it.

If you’re using just a small amount of butter, there’s really no mystery. Just let it get hot, foam and settle, and keep a close eye on the color of the milk solids at the bottom. Like caramel, the darker they are, the more complex the flavor, but the jump from dark to burnt is a shockingly quick one, so err on the side of safety. If you’re using this is as a sauce, add your lemon juice or capers or whatever else immediately, as it will help to cool it down and set the color.

But if you’re using a larger amount of Paula Deen’s best friend — as in the recipe below — you can work it a little more precisely. I like to use a lower heat, more medium to medium-low, to get a nice even color. As the water in the butter eventually comes to bubble up and boil, be careful — it has a tendency to splatter. Gently swirl the pan so that those bubbles dissipate a bit, and use a heatproof rubber spatula or spoon to clean up any early-browning bits along the side of the pan. (Don’t throw them out — just start adding them to whatever you’re going to put the butter on or in.) Stir often while cooking. Eventually, you’ll cook off the water, the milk solids will settle at the bottom, and the foamy proteins will look like a scum at the surface. You can skim it, if you’d like.

At this point, what you’re doing is clarifying the butter, and if you keep the heat pretty low, all the water will eventually evaporate without the milk solids browning. What you’ll be left with is crystal-clear pure butterfat. (It’s great for sautéing and high-heat cooking that you can’t normally do with butter.)

But let it keep going on the flame, and the solids will brown after a few minutes. Watch the pan. Once they turn a medium brown color, take them off; they’ll keep coloring from the residual heat.

The brownies below are from a recent issue of Bon Appetit magazine, and are fantastic. Instead of using chocolate, the recipe calls for cocoa, letting you use brown butter as the fat, which flavors them with that subtle, round nuttiness. I’ve modified the recipe to crank up that brown butter flavor, using the milk solids from twice the amount of butter — and you get to keep the extra!

Brown butter brownies

Modified from Alice Medrich, published in Bon Appetit, Feb. 2011

Makes 16 brownies

Well, imagine for a minute a better place, a happy place, where cream-ofs are lively and vibrant, where they have real flavor and a texture that’s smooth and satisfying, not leaden and semisolid. That happy place is in your pot, and it’s easier than you might realize. You don’t really even need a recipe.

The key is knowing the procedure: You sweat some aromatics and the main ingredient (the part that comes after “of”) in a little butter or oil, sprinkle on just enough flour to pull it together, add some stock, simmer, puree it and finish with a shot of cream. The sweating brings out flavor, the flour mixes with the fat to form a quick, thickening roux, the simmering marries all the ingredients, pureeing smoothes and thickens, and the cream, well, the cream is the power move, of course.

Fundamental cream-of-anything soup

Adapted from “The Professional Chef,” 7th edition, Culinary Institute of America

Serves 4-6 as an appetizer (about 1 quart of soup)

The first of these ideas came to me from Gabrielle Hamilton, the chef of the brilliant, beautiful and peculiar restaurant Prune, where I had one of the greatest lunches of my life eating chicken hearts, lemony beans and an omelet stuffed with fried oysters and served with powdered sugar and Tabasco sauce. Prune has the magical charm of being just slightly odd, just outside of sense-making, but it feels utterly unaffected and the food is always filled with subtle surprise. One day, while watching Hamilton lead a cooking class for high school students (more on that another day), I looked twice when she had the kids “butter” the outsides of the sandwiches with … mayonnaise.

But it makes perfect sense when she explains it: unlike butter, the mayo doesn’t threaten to burn in the pan before the bread is crisped and the cheese melted. It’s thick, so it spreads on evenly, unlike oil. And it imparts a slightly tangy flavor in addition to richness to the bread, so it makes for a more balanced sandwich. (I don’t know where she came up with the idea, but she hails, like me, from New Jersey, where we cook our hotdogs in deep fryers and know every emotion but shyness. So I think of this as a move from the Dirty Jerz playbook.)

The other idea is for the inside of the sandwich: You lightly toast walnuts to bring out their creamy flavor, shave them fine as snow on a grater (the Microplane is awesome for this), and pile them on the cheese to add another dimension of richness to the sandwich. I stole this idea from a dish I once had at the restaurant Jean-Georges, back when there was such a thing as editors with expense accounts to take out scribblers like me. The grater does a neat little trick — stripping crunch from the nuts, turning them into feathery shards of pure flavor, it lets you integrate their fatty goodness into dishes without disturbing the texture. I tried it one day on a sharp cheddar grilled cheese, and loved the way the nuts seemed to bolster the richness of the cheese while otherwise melting away.

In the sandwich below, I’ve taken these two techniques and brightened them up with a little bit of sauerkraut, for crunch and tartness to liven things up and keep it from seeming heavy. And a handful of greens, because, well, why not?

Super-cheffy grilled cheese

Feel free to change quantities or types of ingredients, of course. It’s your sandwich. Makes one sandwich. Duh.