cooking-pol-martin

[cooking-pol-martin]

Osso Buco: It's not as funny when it's good

It seems like an odd thing to say, but when you read cookbooks -- which are largely instructions to do stuff, not anything personal -- you can still get a real sense of the writer. I always liked the vibe I got off of Beatrice Ojakangas's cookbooks, because she reminds me of my grandmother: her food is Scandinavian with a lot of regional Midwestern fare thrown in, plus she seems so practical and accomplished. I also have cookbooks that I rarely use because something annoys me about persona behind the recipes. Stunt cookbooks are guilty of this more than most, though I find whoever wrote the 90s edition of The Joy of Cooking pretty annoying. Why so many bowls???

I've been reading a lot of Pol Martin cookbooks, and I'm starting to get a real sense of the man behind the meal. Thankfully for my continued engagement with this stunt-cooking project, I feel like Pol is kind of a mensch. Some of his cookbooks have whole sections dedicated to cooking on a budget or weeknight-friendly recipes, something I think general cookbooks should have as a matter of course, but are often absent. Accounting for the audience's potential restrictions of time and money is just a kind thing to do, and Pol does it.

He's also not overfussed about the reader adhering to the recipe exactly, especially when it comes to substitutions. He'd rather you get the freshest, most economical food than slavishly follow his recipes. Plus, and this is harder to back up with examples because it's mostly based on vibes, he seems genuinely good-natured and sometimes funny? Like you can see when he gets all excited about something, like a section called Kebab It! -- which must have been a late 80s fad -- or a deep dive into Cajun cooking. I mean, even the dreaded microwave recipes are evidence of his willingness to experiment with new things. I'm into it.

What I'm winding up here to say is that for my most recent foray into the Poliverse, I decided to go hardcore European regional cooking with Osso Buco. It's a Milanese dish which, like the French Coq au Vin, has its roots in peasant food designed to extract every godamn calorie from otherwise tough cuts of meats. I love recipes like this, because I utterly dig when, due to shifts in culture & history, what started out as peasant food transmutes into something perceived as fancy.

The other reason I decided to try my hand at his Osso Buco is that Pol adores veal. Like full blown crescendoing make-out music loves veal. This is another aspect of a lot of these cookbooks that feels dated: no one cooks much with veal anymore. Mostly I just live with the cognitive dissonance of eating meat when I'm aware of how unethically produced a lot of it is, but veal's a bridge too far for me. But I wanted to try one of his veal dishes, but with a substitution Pol himself said was okay.

Osso Buco is traditionally made with veal shanks; indeed, osso buco translates to hole in the bone, referring to the marrow round at the center of the cut. I did some googling and found I could substitute with either beef shanks or short ribs. Beef shanks are hard to find, but I've recently discovered beef short ribs and how ridiculously delicious they are, so off to Costco I went. Also, from what little I could find, it seems like veal shanks are stupid expensive.

Though I objected to and changed the order the ingredients went into the braising sauce, the sauce itself is well constructed, balanced, and complex. (It should go fond -> onions -> spices -> flour -> deglazing element -> sauce medium, which is not how the recipe is written.) There's some goofy things in the recipe, like the call for a 1/2 cup of beef gravy without an inset or other description of what exactly he means. I just used a McCormack mix for brown gravy, which is kinda basic, but I figured Pol wouldn't mind. Also I used some anchovy paste in addition to the tomato paste because that shit rules. Then I braised the whole mess in the oven for four hours.

Legit, this turned out fucking amazing. Pol's recipes tend to have a light touch, but usually recipes for this cut of meat advocate pouring off the fat at the end, which I don't do. Why would I waste the fatty goodness? But there was so much fat shed off the short ribs that I more or less had to, or the dish would have been unpleasantly greasy. The meat fell off the bone, the sauce was complex and flavorful, and everyone was well pleased. Despite the occasional fucking weird recipe, Pol absolutely knows what he's doing in the kitchen. It was nice to have such an unqualified success after a couple unqualified failures.

[cooking-pol-martin]

One Step Closer to "Microwaved Trout For One"

My stunt-cooking of a bunch of Pol Martin recipes kicked off because of a series of instructional videos produced in the 80s wherein Pol does a bunch of unholy nonsense with a microwave. So I got a whole mess of Pol cookbooks -- two more just arrived yesterday -- and started perusing them for potential recipes. Almost every Pol Martin cookbook has a dedicated section for microwave recipes, and one entire volume made up solely of instructions for nuking food. (Tellingly, Chef Pol Martin's Favorite Recipes does not.) The real showstopper of a recipe is "Trout for One."

[extreme Kitchen Nightmares noise]

Of all the words on tongue or pen,

There's none more sad than "Trout for one, again?"

I'm on the fence about whether I actually make this recipe for a number of reasons: I don't want to be a decadent American pigdog wasting food; that's probably a crime against humanity under the Hague; that poor fish; &c. But if I do, I'm going to have to work up to it. So we pored through Microwave: 15 Minutes or Less for the least emotionally devastating option. We came up with "Creamy Tomato Soup." I went and got down the 1970s Corningware and got to work.

Now I've made tomato soup from fresh tomatoes, and it is rich, savory, delicious, and an utter pain in the ass. Pol's recipe is basically what I would do to make a quick and dirty tomato soup by using canned tomatoes instead of fresh, but he uses a microwave instead of a stovetop. We started with onions, celery, spices, and butter. It felt really weird to just ... toss them on the bottom of the casserole dish.

[I have a drawer microwave which is why this looks so strange. I push a button, the drawer pops open, and then slides back closed for the ennukening. It's very Star Trek.]

Three minutes of that, and then I was instructed to add flour, the tomatoes, and a pinch of sugar. Round it went for another ten minutes. After that, the soup is finished with cream. Pol then wanted me to run this through a food processor, but speaking of pains in the asses, cleaning the food processor is one. So I used a stick blender.

At this point, the remains of the "Banana-Filled Omelets" were still cooling in the trash from where we spit them out, so I was understandably trepidatious about putting this in my mouth. I dipped my grilled cheese into the soup, took a big bite, and then ...

The soup was totally fine. Sorry for the letdown.

Because the primary ingredient, by far, is canned tomatoes, there was the slightly tinny aftertaste you get with canned vegetables. The spices -- tarragon, rosemary, and garlic -- weren't enough to cover. My husband and kid and I all decided this was better than Campbell's, which has the slight tinniness but doesn't have any seasoning, but not better than those tetrapack boxes of tomato soup from Pacific or Imagine, which just taste fresher overall.

So was this terrible? No.

Would I do it again? Also no.

Because here's the thing: this recipe would be better cooked on a stovetop. I doubt it would take much longer: while the cookbook touts these recipes as 15 minute dishes, that's not exactly true. Yes, the soup spent 15 minutes in the microwave, but overall there was the chopping, stick blending, and screwing around that's an unavoidable part of cooking. Sauteing the vegetables over actual, legitimate flame creates a richness that's simply not possible when throwing high frequency electromagnetic radiation at them.

So! I'm not sure what the coda to this is, or even if there is one. You can't make a proper roux in a microwave oven? Of course fresh ingredients are better than canned, but you don't always have time? The 80s were weird? I do think this was instructive on which Pol Martin recipes might turn out versus those that get spit out, i.e. don't screw around with "unusual" dishes. Lesson learned, Pol, you sly fox.

[cooking-pol-martin]

What's he going to do with that banana?

I'll tell you what. Nothing fucking good.

When I started this here endeavor to stunt-cook a bunch of Pol Martin recipes, I honestly was doing it with a spirit of inquiry. There's enough mean-spirited dunking on stuff in the world, and I don't need to add to that. I'll get out my poison pen if I need to, but that's not the primary goal. Plus, I don't want to waste a bunch of food and my time. Life's just too godamn short, and eggs are too expensive.

With that said, "Banana-Filled Omelet" was easily the worst thing I've made in the last decade. Maybe even the last two.

And look, I know: with a name like that, what was I expecting? I honestly chose it because it sounded interesting and unusual. Later, after spitting everything in the trash and recovering with grilled cheese sandwiches, I even said to my husband that I thought it would be fine because banana pudding has milk, eggs, sugar, and bananas. At which point he began laughing at me with the same level of horrified confusion as I did when making this cursed repast. I'm beginning to realize the amount of involuntary cackling I do while cooking these recipes correlates strongly with how bad they are. This was like cackle one million.

So let's get into this catastrophe, shall we?

The first thing that Pol has me do is fry sliced bananas in butter and brown sugar. Here's where the recipe really seems dated, because there's only the barest of instructions about how to accomplish this task. Fine, okay, I'm a big girl. I'll muddle through. The bananas were actually just fine at this point; like there's nothing wrong with bananas cooked in butter and brown sugar.

But if you've ever made caramel, you know what happens next: the brown sugar and butter fused into the hardest substance known to humanity. So I madly try to scrape out the banana-caramel crust while it's still hot, and then scrub at the pan for an inordinately long time to get it ready for the making of the omelet.

At the beginning of this project, I declared I was going to follow the recipe as closely as I was able, either emotionally or physically. (I will never boil leeks for thirty godamn minutes again, for example. My feelings still hurt from that.) I was apparently so discombobulated by the banana-caramel slash pan fusion, that I utterly forgot to add the milk and rum -- yes, you read that correctly -- to the eggs. I have a friend's grandma's recipe for pie crust which calls for vodka, and is pretty good. But I legit can't see how rum would improve eggs, so I'm just fine with having forgotten it.

So then I melt a staggering amount of butter, pour in the eggs, and arrange half of the bananas down the middle. I tried to follow his instructions for cooking eggs, but they were so vague I wasn't exactly sure what I was supposed to be doing. I'm not going to ding Pol for this though, because I think how people cook eggs is weirdly personal? Both my husband and I can cook a mean omelet, but I think his method is madness and vice versa. And really, the omelet part, in terms of general coherence and presentation, turned out just fine.

My response to the first bite was, "This is confusing." My kid took a bite, somehow missing a banana chunk, so that was just eggs and not terrible. My husband took a bite and then spit it directly into the trash. I took another bite and then the true horror of the thing in my mouth hit me, like a cut with a sharp knife that only hurts when you see the blood welling.

The counterpoint of the consistency of the bananas and the eggs ... like I'm trying to come up with a word that means "aggressively mushy" because "mushy" on its own does not connote aggressiveness. I think these two thesaurus recommendations come close:

quaggy: resembling a quagmire; marshy; boggy; soft and flabby

pulpous: soft, yielding, and fleshy, or resembling pulp.

I am always happy to add funky words to my vocabulary, but honest to god, I could have forgone the method.

So! That was that. I scraped the remains -- maybe I should use the word carrion -- into the bucket for the chickens. They will for sure enjoy it because you can literally cut their heads off and they'll just keep on pecking.

[cooking-pol-martin]

Green Bean Time Machine

There's this literary concept of a madeleine, which is a metaphor for something that causes you to be mentally transported back to a moment in time. It can be a taste, a smell, a sound which provokes an involuntary memory. The concept comes from Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu (or In Search of Lost Time)*. The main character takes a bite of a madeleine dipped in tea -- a madeleine is a small cookie -- which overwhelms him with memories of his childhood, the recounting of which fills seven volumes and became a Modernist classic.

There's something of a visual joke about this at the end of the movie Ratatouille -- yes, I mean the cooking rat cartoon -- when the antagonist-critic takes a bite of the titular dish and you see a series of flashbacks of his childhood. (Arguably, the way our cooking rat links experience to memory is one of the theses of that movie, such as it is.) Smell and taste can be deeply, personally evocative, bound as they are to cultural identities individual, familial, and societal.

Which is why I say with some horror that Pol Martin's "Fresh Green Beans with Sour Cream Sauce" transported me back to the 1970s, an involuntary reverie of a particularly turgid period in American cooking. I didn't even know I had those memories.

Before I get into the way-back machine and start working through my generational trauma, I should probably detail the cooking process. First off, Pol had me get out a big pot, fill that bad boy with water, and then boil the ever living fuck out of a pound of green beans. It wasn't as horrific as the boiled leeks, which. I then was to make a roux and pour in reserved water from cooking the green beans, which resulted in a thin, unpleasantly gray gruel. The sauce was finished with not enough sour cream to ungruelify it. Serve over the beans, etc.

So I served this nonsense up, and the family set to eating. My first bite and I started to feel things: the almost overdone-ness of the vegetables married to a dairy-based sauce with virtually no seasoning transported me back to a place I can barely articulate. This dish isn't something my mom would ever make -- she could actually cook, even in the 70s -- but I have the phantasmagorical sense of church potlucks and luncheons after funerals of relatives I can't even remember. It was firmly disquieting.

My youngest kid, a senior in high school, piped up: "Can you take constructive criticism?" You bet your ass, kid. I'm already way ahead of you.

Meanwhile, sitting next me at the table, my husband was grubbing. "This is just great!" he cried. What the actual fuck.

After a fair amount of crosstalk, arguing, and shuddering from yours truly, the family decided that the longer you were alive during the 1970s, the more likely you were to enjoy this Pol Martin green bean abomination. My memories of that decade were created when I was largely prelinguistic, and feel broken and dark, unformed. My husband has a couple years on me, apparently long enough that unpleasantly gray gruel transported him to a place that made sense.

There's a reason my folks largely checked out of popular culture during that period -- beyond the way that having small children ruins your cultural engagement -- and that's because the 1970s sucked. I can see how my dad shakes his head when he talks about the 70s: the American people felt betrayed by Watergate, and the hard-fought successes of the Civil Rights movements bled out, literally, into a dozen political assassinations, domestic massacres like Kent State and the fucking horror shows of the Vietnam war and the illegal and immoral bombing of Cambodia. The first political event I remember was Carter being voted out of office in 1980, God rest his soul. The relationship with the current cultural moment feels grimly parallel.

Phew.

I didn't mean to get so serious in this here blog where I lightheartedly cook some nonsense recipes from a French Canadian chef, but here we are. Food culture is culture, and I suppose it's inevitable that one of these recipes would act as madeleine for memories that have whatever the inverse of nostalgia is.

*I know that reading seven volumes of a 100 year old French novel isn't on anyone's to-do list, but I'm telling you: that shit is some massively entertaining grandiloquent bitchiness.

[cooking-pol-martin]

A Wet Day in Leek Hell

When I was a teenager in the 80s, we had friends from England come to visit. My mom has always been a good cook, and because she wasn't cooking English-style food, they ended up putting on like ten pounds in two weeks. One of things they really loved was how she made asparagus.

And you have to understand: asparagus in the 80s and earlier was generally fucking horrific. The only thing anyone had any experience with was tinned asparagus, which is one of the most vile things known to humanity. So when Mum sauteed fresh asparagus in some butter and a little garlic, they just couldn't believe how amazing it could be. They asked for the recipe, such as it is, and duly wrote it down.

Fast forward a couple years, and Mum went to visit our English friends in Birmingham. "We're going to make that amazing asparagus!" they cried. Then the host got out a pot of water, brought it to a boil, and boiled the asparagus until it was grey mush. It's like they couldn't even fathom not boiling the ever living fuck out of vegetables, so Mum's instructions just slid off their minds like moist, boiled leeks.

This anecdote is something like the reverse of my experience cooking my most recent Pol Martin recipe, "Baked Leeks and Mashed Potatoes," only this time, I literally could not comprehend the instructions to boil five leek stalks for an entire half hour. I had to read the recipe multiple times to come up with a grocery list and plan the timing of the meal, and I still did not clock that Pol wanted me to boil vegetables for thirty whole ass minutes.

I even went into the living room, told my kid what the recipe entailed, and announced I would not be doing that necromantic nonsense on perfectly good vegetables. He said I had to follow the recipe as closely as I could. I dragged ass back to the kitchen, and felt my soul die as the minutes ticked down to zero. The leeks started out like this:

And then ended up like this:

Do you see how they glisten? Can you smell the acrid horror? The tactile nightmare of slicing through leek flesh that slips under the knife with its moistness? To misquote Hamlet, "O, most wicked speed, to post with such dexterity to viscostuous leeks! It is not nor it cannot come to good." At some point during the fugue state of the leeks boiling away for an eternity of eighteen thousand seconds, I said I felt like I was having a psychotic break. Reader, it did not come to good.

This is what it looks like when hope dies.

Once I spread the moistest allium ever over the bottom of the casserole dish, I was to cover with mashed potatoes. I did as instructed. By the time Pol directed me to pour several tablespoons of melted butter over the whole mess, I went down to the basement, selected a lovely bottle of wine I'd been saving for a special occasion, and started in. There's absolutely a reason Pol is drinking through those videos. And I haven't even started on the microwave recipes.

I'm not sure there's enough booze in the world for "Microwaved Trout for One."

[cooking-pol-martin]

Adventures in Butter

For my second attempt at Pol Martin recipes, I decided to make Anchovy Butter. The recipe states it is good on all kinds of steaks, which checks out. Butter is always good on just about anything, and I feel like anchovies are unjustly maligned. Yeah, I wouldn't eat them straight out of a tin, but they impart a salty, fatty, umami vibe to sauces. I collected the four ingredients -- butter, anchovies, chives, and lemon juice -- and got to it.

Like my first Pol Martin recipe, I began with the best intentions of following the recipe exactly. When I first read the recipe, I could have sworn it said a half cup of butter, which is a single stick. I was derailed when I realized this recipe calls for a half pound of butter. That is two whole ass sticks. Even with a Costco amount of New York strip and a full house for dinner, I was not going to make that much anchovy butter.

So I decided to halve the recipe. Then came my next problem: the butter to anchovy ratio seems just nuts to me: a half pound of butter to four little anchovy fillets? The directions are to mash up the fillets in a mortar and pestle, then strain out the chunks. I even bought fillets, but then I found a tube of anchovy paste in the pantry and decided that was easier. I probably used a teaspoon in one stick of butter. The chives and lemon juice seemed similarly stingy, so I more or less doubled everything but the butter. Sorry, Pol. I just couldn't do it.

You can argue the semantics of whether I truly made this recipe, given how much I changed, but I thought it turned out just great. I slathered this over both the New York strips I made and the smashed potato sides. I suspect that all of Pol's sauces are going to be similarly good, given the French relationship to gravy: I don't know another cuisine that has codified things like the five mother sauces. Admittedly the Canadian part of French Canadian might throw a wrench in that, but I'm cautiously optimistic.

[cooking-pol-martin]

The Descent Begins: Ratatouille Hot Dish

When I first decided I was going to stunt-cook my way through the copious number of Pol Martin cookbooks we have in the house, I had to make some decisions about how to go about this. I feel that going immediately to "Microwaved Trout for One" is like suddenly mainlining heroine before going through whatever gateway drug: you're just going to overdose, not get comfortably baked and watch old Barbie cartoons. [Sidebar: "Microwaved Trout for One" is an even more tragic sentence than "For Sale: Baby Shoes, Never Worn." If not, then more compact, for sure.] Plus I feel like I have to work up to ruining up a perfectly nice piece of expensive fish.

So I decided to start with recipes that seem like they might actually be good, or if not good, then at least interesting. Pol seems to like eggplant a lot -- there are at least as many eggplant recipes as mushroom recipes, another Pol favorite -- so I decided to start with one. I haven't cooked much with eggplant, so I thought it would be illuminating to see what Canada's Premiere Cook™ did with one.

This recipe is called "Eggplant & Tomato Casserole." It has all of the ingredients of ratatouille, but it ends up in a casserole dish.

I had the best intentions of following the recipe to the letter, but I found I just couldn't do it. It already hurt my feelings to cook the vegetables to mush; I couldn't bring myself to cook the garlic for 6 minutes instead of blooming it at the end like a normal person. I also put in probably double the cheese the recipe called for. As a native Minnesotan, 1/2 cup of cheese total isn't nearly enough.

There are some question marks -- Pol doesn't specify what kind of tomato, and different strains of tomatoes require different techniques. I decided he probably meant a beefsteak or similar because he specifies "large," and Romas don't come in large. He also calls for 1/2 tsp basil, which I presume means dried, because that's not nearly enough fresh basil to make a difference. I used fresh basil and put in at least a tablespoon.

Despite being more mushy than I prefer, the recipe turned out just fine! For sure not ruining the garlic helped, but the recipe was well-balanced, relatively easy to follow, and pretty tasty. This is concerning. Pol knows what he's doing in the kitchen, and is capable of writing a recipe which is easy and delicious. How do you go from this to microwaved trout? Microwaved trout you eat alone?

How does that happen? Pol isn't my mom's Uncle Eddie, who microwaved the Thanksgiving turkey sometime in the late 70s to show off he had the hot new appliance. Pol is, legitimately, a good cook. What breaks a man? What unholy gastromancy ends in a lone fish turning slowly in the wan light of a microwave oven?

Special thanks to @socpens, without whom this madness would not have happened. God save us all.

[cooking-pol-martin]

Cooking with Pol Martin

So my kid made me sit down and watch this series of YouTube videos which feature digitized VHS tapes from the 1980s wherein Canada's Premier Cook, Pol Martin, does some absolutely unholy nonsense with a couple of microwaves. Quoting the various horrified responses of the streamers watching the Pol Martin videos happens a lot around the kitchen now. I think my favorite is: "What's he going to do with that banana? What's he going to do with that banana?"

So Christmas rolls around, and I jumped on eBay and bought every Pol Martin cookbook I could find, especially including the microwave one, and then gave then gave them to my kid. (A friend of mine freaked out when he saw the microwave cookbook, because he said his folks had that exact cookbook growing up.) Now that I have several hundred Pol Martin recipes in the house, I decided I should probably do some stunt cooking about it.

The recipes themselves are super dated, which probably isn't surprising. That isn't a bad thing: one of my favorite basic cookbooks is the 1970s Fanny Farmer Cookbook, because it doesn't screw around with multiple bowls and every dish in the house. Yeah, there's always too much sugar and sometimes things are just weird -- I will not be grinding my own hamburger, thanks -- but the recipes tend to be straightforward, without a lot of fuss. The Fanny Farmer also includes information on how to set a formal table, which I have to so irregularly I can never remember where the water glasses go.

So! This is where I'll be documenting my adventures in 1980s French Canadian cookbooks. If you want to watch the YouTube videos of which I speak, you can find them here, here, and here. A fun (?) exercise is trying to determine which recipe is the most horrific.

Bon appetit!