I don’t know about you, but when I’m in my kitchen preparing a meal this is the image that I have in my head, even though I could never wear a hat like that. My foray into cooking and meal prep started fairly early, at around twelve, when I took over making my lunch to take to school. The reason for this goes back much further to when, after my mother went back to work parttime, we were left in the capable hands of two older women (they would alternate), Miss Stewart and Miss Whig. The fact that I still remember their names sixty years later should tell you something. Growing up Jewish in Montreal, the smoked meat capital of the universe, I quickly learned that sandwiches (thank you John Montagu, the 4th Earl of Sandwich) were supposed to be these gigantic structures filled with thinly sliced, mouth-watering meat, served between two pieces of rye bread. Salivating yet? These sandwiches are traditionally served with mustard, a condiment to this day that I do not like, although I now cook with it, so you can imagine how many sandwiches I had to return back in the day. Telling your server, no mustard, apparently does not translate to the line cooks who could not fathom skipping that step in the process.
Sorry, where was I? Oh yeah, Miss Stewart and Miss Whig. When they were in charge and it was lunch time, they would often make us sandwiches, if you can call one very thin slice of processed “meat,” between two slices of Wonder Bread a sandwich. Unfortunately, my mother adapted this practice, and by the time I turned twelve, I had had enough and took over the reins. When I opened my lunch box at school and unwrapped my beautifully constructed “thick” sandwich, I became the school lunch rock star…well, that’s at least how I remember it.
My foray into sandwich making, in some way, planted the seed for my increasing interest in food preparation, that and the fact that my mother was not, shall we say, adventurous when it came to the kitchen. Some of the blame needs to be placed at my father’s feet, as he was the fussiest eater I have ever encountered. There were a few things that my mom made that I have fond memories of. Her Sherard’s Pie was to die for (I still make it the way she did with a few additions), and she made this apple cake that was amazing. Over the ensuing years, I was given permission to make some fairly easy things like scrambled eggs, pancakes, and other breakfast and lunch items, gradually inching my way towards the evening meal. It was some years later (I was in my late teens), and my parents were away, and I decided to make them a “gourmet” meal upon their return. I had, at some point, purchased or was given a cookbook by the renowned French chef, Pol Martin, and leafing through it I decided to make his Chicken Kiev, accompanied by a wonderfully rich (given that it is French cooking, that is redundant) tomato sauce, which was recommended to serve with the Kiev recipe. Making this dish for my parents was both very satisfying and educational, especially when it came to working with recipes. It was satisfying because they both loved it, even my father, who for once didn’t ask what was in it and just dove right in. The education came while making the dish, learning that one must always – no exceptions – read a recipe through at least once or twice before starting to cook.
I quickly glanced at the recipe for the chicken, deciding that I could easily make it the day it was to be served, but at around 8PM the evening before, I thought it would be a good idea to make the sauce to go with the dish. While it was good thinking on my part, if I had read the complete recipe for the sauce beforehand, I would have known that I needed to start it much earlier in the day. One of the things that I learned that fateful evening was that French chefs are known for layering recipes into one another. So, when I was gathering the ingredients to make the sauce, I came across something like this: 1 cup of something or other, refer to recipe #12 on page 48. What? I read further and found another item that referred to yet another recipe. The kicker was, when I found those recipes, although I miraculously had all the ingredients to make whatever it was, one of them had a chilling time of 4 hours. Needless to say, it was a long night. Ever since that day, whenever I’m looking at making something new from a recipe, I read it through very carefully so there will be no more surprises. I almost forgot, all that prep and waiting yielded 1 cup of tomato sauce!
Since that near fiasco, I make it a point of reading, very carefully, the entire recipe days before I am going to prepare whatever it is, and while this is certainly helpful, what it does not prepare you for are recipes that leave you scratching your head and saying: “What?” This is especially true if you happen upon a recipe that originates in another country, like that one that I used recently to make Italian “holiday” cookies. I got the recipe from a website by two sisters from Tuscany who run a cooking school out of their home near the small town of Gaiole. The first hurdle one has to overcome is that the ingredients are all measured by weight, not volume, which is not that big of a problem except for the fact that the weights are metric. So, you need to have a scale in your kitchen that can switch to metric, from the U.S. system of measurements, and you would also need to know that while the U.S. system is based on the British imperial one, it differs when it comes to “volume.” For example, an imperial gallon is larger than an American gallon. Having fun yet?
The first ingredient on the list for these cookies is flour, and this recipe calls for 550 grams. Now, if you have one of those handy apps on your phone that converts grams to ounces/pounds, you’re in business. However, most recipes for baking measure the flour in cups, which is a “volume” measurement not a “weight” one. In most instances, this is not that big a deal, but when one is “baking”, which is much more exacting than “cooking,” especially when it comes to the ratio between wet and dry ingredients. And it is because of this that measuring your flour by weight is important because there are many different types of flours out there and they all have different weights. One cup of all-purpose flour is going to weigh differently than one cup of whole wheat flour. Yes, we are still on the first ingredient!
Next up are sugar, chopped pecans, candied citron, candied orange peel, honey, and water, all measured in grams and pretty straightforward. Then come the spices with the recipe reading as follows: 10 grams powdered spices (50% coriander, 8 anise seeds, 20% cinnamon, and 10% nutmeg, cloves [optional]. Wait, what? Trying to figure out what all those percentages work out to, to get to 10 grams is asking a bit much just to make some cookies, right? And what if you want to use the cloves, which just say “optional,” but have no weight associated with that ingredient? Are you still with me? Good. Next up: 5 grams of ammonium bicarbonate. Although this might just seem like a fancy way of saying baking soda, there is more to it than that. The former is supposedly less bitter than baking soda, which I felt was not going to be a huge problem given all the spices, so I didn’t order it online for 4 times the price of baking soda.
Now comes the fun part. Got everything together, basically winging it with the spice measurement’s, followed to directions for mixing and adding wet to dry, which brought me to the step of shaping the cookies: “Working with floured hands, form 12 balls (about 5cm in diameter and 2.5cm thick);” “Flatten them in the center with two fingers.” By this point I had had enough with metric measurements, so I just eyeballed the lump of ingredients in the bowl, figuring how big they needed to be to make a dozen. I made the first ball, placed it on a parchment paper lined baking sheet as directed, chose two fingers and gently pressed down the center, only to have the cookie disintegrate on the parchment paper. Way too dry. I do have an advantage here seeing that I did work in two commercial bakeries as a baker, so I just kept adding more water a little bit at a time, until I could depress a ball of dough without it crumbling. Problem number two: The directions tell you to make sure the balls of dough are “well-spaced” on the baking sheet. What I ended up with after making the twelve cookies was absolutely no space between the because they were huge! How big? The finished product after baking them were roughly the size of 18 Oreos, in two rows, three deep.
The good news. They were delicious, but next time there will be 24 of them, not 12! I can almost feel you reaching for that take-out menu!
Los Angeles 2024
