Early on in the Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking (p.14), Marcella Hazan tells us about Italian meat broth:
“The broth used by Italian cooks for risotto, for soups, and for braising meat and vegetables is a liquid to which meat, bones and vegetables have given their flavor, but it is not a strong, dense reduction of those flavors. It is not stock, as the term is used in French cooking. It is light bodied and soft spoken, helping the dishes of which it is a part to taste better without calling attention to itself.”
Hazan’s broth is made from a mix of chicken, beef, veal and vegetables and is part of the foundation to create truly outstanding Italian dishes. For most of my cooking life I’ve been kind of beef or chicken stock kind of guy, as in either or, but not a combination of the two. I only recently bought Hazen’s cook book. It was recommended by my son, who said it would open new doors in approaching Italian cuisine.
And he was right. While homemade Italian meat broth isn’t an everyday option unless a large quantity is made and frozen in small containers for future use, an ersatz version with canned chicken and beef broth is. To do so combine and bring to simmer:
½ cup chicken broth
½ cup beef broth
2 tablespoons V8 or tomato juice
Onion powder, ground celery seeds and a few pepper flakes to taste
This broth is, among other things, a wonderful foundation for vegetable soups. Soups that can be the centerpiece of delicious light late summer and early fall dining when vegetable are in full season. If vegetables are braised in this broth, not only are they enhanced but the remaining liquid is wonderful au jus to ladle on a grilled chop or steak. The simple stew pictured with this post was made from left over vegetables braised in meat broth to which bite sized pieces of a left over grilled lamb steak were added. It was delicious.
Before I move on to Hazan’s homemade recipe for this broth, I’ll caution you on what might ruin it and nearly everything else. It’s a tablet – the mobile device. I just bought it for my wife as a digital photo album for our 1st grandchild. Initially I was amazed and delighted. Now, it’s starting to scare the hell out of me.
I wound up with more than I bargained for. Maybe we all have.
The device was not simply a harmless digital photo album, but a very powerful and almost limitless digital information portfolio for photos, audio and video recordings, books, newspapers and magazines, recipes if you like to cook, and only God knows what else. The next generation of devices will be even more powerful.
The digital age has been creeping upon us for decades. The mobile device made the meaning of this advancing digital age clear. In an epiphany, Marshall McLuhan rose from the grave and violently clobbered me over the head with hard bound copy of The Medium is the Message.
All of the information, all of its digital content are a distraction to the times in which we now find ourselves.
The light bulb, after all, was a device without content, yet by bringing light to the night it fundamentally reordered the fabric of society, and the ensuing sea of bulbs, by blurring our everyday perception of the heavens, has altered our existential perspective. Just the light bulb was a game changer, so are mobile touch screen computers.
Like it or not, we are fully immersed in the digital age.
I should have seen this coming. Increasingly, I see people engaging with their mobile devices regardless of the social and/or physical environment in which they are present – either dangerously talking or texting on a phone while driving, or rudely doing the same while socially engaged, or constantly distracted at work. We’ve allowed ourselves to be connected everywhere except to the place we actually are. As our digital social networks grow we find ourselves more and more socially sterilized.
Kodachrome is gone. Record shops and bookstores have left the malls. A few retreated to low rent storefronts where they cater to a small bands of aficionados. College students no longer go door to door selling encyclopedias. Broadcasting companies and publishers of every sort are searching for a profitable pathway to justify their relevance. Game changer.
McLuhan’s The Medium is the Massage is framed in quotes by Albert North Whitehead. It begins with Whitehead’s observation, "The major advances in civilization are processes that all but wreck the societies in which they occur." It closes with, "It is the business of the future to be dangerous."
The future is dangerous, indeed. Our digital economy and its technological foundation leave us one huge electromagnetic pulse away from tumbling horribly back into the 19th or early 20th century. (Link. A new TV series hinges on that premise.) But short of an economic/technological collapse, our digital information presents far more personal and subtle dangers.
Our increasing disengagement with our physical and social environment is only one. Years ago a writer friend complained that the now ubiquitous Microsoft word processor not only controlled how we write, but the way we think. There is truth to it.
But more, in an environment of instant access to information, intellectually we are like cattle now no longer allowed to leisurely graze in a pasture, but instead have been moved to the feedlot. The fourth or fifth grader when assigned their first research paper no longer turns to Britannica or some other hard bound set of encyclopedias. They no longer by chance stumble upon an article that is completely outside the project at hand, but is so much more interesting – the sexual rituals of Borneo aboriginals for example.
The sexual rituals of Borneo aboriginals aren’t important. The environment, which by chance allowed us to learn of those rituals, is. Like the printed encyclopedia, the book store, record shops and even the Readers Digest, when it was fat and eclectic, provided lush pastures for intellectual browsing.
The mobile device is closing a circle in on how we learn, what we know, how we think, and how we socialize and with whom. In time, it might all but preclude cooking with an Italian meat broth.
What becomes of cookbooks when an unfathomable library of recipes is quite literally at our fingertips? Will cookbooks devolve into a searchable database of recipes and disappear from our kitchens? Maybe, if we’re not careful.
More than collections of recipes, cookbooks place the foods we eat into a specific context. It’s a context that is important in learning to cook well. If one wishes to make a magnificent ragout, a recipe is useful, but the knowledge of Italian meat broth is probably more important.
The context in which information is presented is as important as the information. In a digital age, I am arguing for cookbooks. The argument extends to other books, home libraries no matter how modest, hand written letters and diaries, for vinyl phonograph recordings, and beautifully crafted everyday items. The argument is simple. Context matters and we have too much to lose.
That something can be digitized doesn’t mean it necessarily should be. The printed bible for example, has an integrity, a fullness and physical presence that when digitized is lost. Those very qualities are crucial to understanding the information it presents. The same can be said for Leaves of Grass and many, though certainly not all, of the volumes lining my book case.
It’s also true, for example, of a vinyl recording of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. Digitized it is a collection of musical tracks to choose among. Yet heard alone and out of context the final movement loses much of its depth and power. The very format of the vinyl recording tells the fourth movement is not a singularity, even though it is resolved with a hymn, but instead is a musical conclusion to a much larger work.
The digital mobile device places a world of information at our finger tips. That is good and useful for most of the information we need or desire, but not all. Most of information, while useful or entertaining at the time is ultimately trivial. In its proper context, on the other hand, some information is the foundation for true knowledge and wisdom. What’s important here is in its proper context. Our digital age forces us to know the difference.
Now in returning to Italian meat broth, context is key. Like water and wine it is fundamental and frequently employed liquid for soups, sauces and braising. Here is how Hazan says it should be made:
Basic Homemade Meat Broth 1 ½ to 2 quarts
Salt
1 carrot, peeled
1 medium onion, peeled
1 or 2 stalks celery
¼ to ½ red or yellow bell pepper, cored and stripped of its seeds
1 small potato, peeled
1 fresh, ripe tomato, or a canned Italian plumb tomato, drained
5 pounds assorted beef, veal and chicken (the last optional) of which no more than 2 pounds may be bone
1. Put all the ingredients in a stockpot, and add enough water to cover by 2 inches. Set the cover askew, turn to medium, and bring to a boil. As soon as the liquid starts to boil, slow it down to the gentlest of simmers by lowering the heat.
2. Skim off scum that floats to the surface, at first abundantly, then gradually tapering off. Cook for 3 hours, always at a simmer.
3. Filter the broth through a large wire strainer lined with paper towels, pouring it into a ceramic or plastic bowl. Allow to cool completely, uncovered.
4. When cool, place in the refrigerator for several hours or overnight until the fat comes to the surface and solidifies. Scoop up and discard the fat.
5. If you are using the broth within 3 days after making, return the bowl to the refrigerator. If you expect to keep it any longer than 3 days, freeze it. . . .
No comments:
Post a Comment