What a treasure trove of options we have in this great country.
When famed French chef Alain Ducasse asked food writer, cookbook author and cooking teacher David Rosengarten to recommend some restaurants for his visit to New York, Rosengarten took him instead to his favorite barbecue joint in Queens. Ducasse was ecstatic and, licking his fingers, exclaimed, “Je l’adore!”
Rosengarten was one of my favorite TV cooking show hosts (Sara Moulton was the other) back in the early days of Food TV when the programming was all about education, when these luminaries actually taught the home chef how to cook. Rosengarten hosted a show called “Taste” in which he demonstrated, through exhaustive research and clear instructions, a single recipe, providing game-changing tips and strategies for the home cook. If David Rosengarten was baking a brownie, you knew it was going to be the best brownie ever. Today Food TV is all about entertainment, game shows and ratings.
Rosengarten’s cookbook “It’s All American Food” (Little, Brown and Company, $29.95) is a celebration of over 400 ethnic, regional and classic dishes that make up our national cuisine. As Labor Day approaches, what better way to celebrate this most American holiday than with the simple, down-home foods we all love. And who better to turn to than this two-time James Beard winner for menu ideas.
“We’ve got a big country here, and we eat a lot of things,” Rosengarten said from the Cooking Stage some years ago at the LA Times Festival of Books at UCLA, where he demonstrated a few of the ethnic, regional and classic recipes that make up the cuisine we can justly call “American.”
“The ethnic foods of America are hybrids,” he noted. “When Italians came here, for example, they couldn’t find the ingredients they had back home, so they adapted their recipes, and it all became American food. This is the food I grew up on. In fact, I was nine years old before I discovered I wasn’t Italian!”
“It’s All American Food” focuses on the food that Americans really enjoy—from fish tacos, grilled cheese and pecan pie to pad thai, taboulleh and paella. “We don’t know what a treasure we have in America,” he said. “We seem to have an inferiority complex about American food, but people who come from other countries marvel at what we have here.” Take Best Foods mayonnaise, for example (Hellmann’s in the east). Pastry chef Pierre Hermé, whom Rosengarten calls the “chocolate god of Paris,” routinely stockpiles the stuff to bring home to France.
With Labor Day in mind, what could be more all-American than hot dogs? My Chicago friends claim that the Chicago hot dog is best in show, and New Yorker Rosengarten seems to agree. “This is pure genius at play, an absolutely wonderful conglomeration of ingredients that at first seems random, and then, once you get used to it, seems ordained by the gods,” he writes. “It’s a classic example of seemingly commercial American ingredients coalescing into something world-class (if you open your mind and let it happen). And here’s the best news: you can come pretty close to making a dog at home that’s almost identical to what you get in the Windy City. Before you know it, you’ll find yourself inexplicably rooting for the Bears and the Cubs.”
Perhaps you think the apple tart illustrated here, with its precisely fanned slices, came out of a fancy French bakery. “Not so,” chef and TV personality Sara Moulton told a group of food writers and bloggers at a demo and book signing at Melissa’s Produce. “Anyone can do this,” she said. “The trick is to slice them paper-thin, but don’t cut all the way through. If you slice all the way down to the cutting board, the apples will become detached, fly all over the counter and be very difficult to arrange in a pattern. You want them to stay lined up like the Rockettes.”
The apple trick, accompanied by detailed photos, is just one revelation you’ll find in Moulton’s cookbook, “Sara Moulton’s Home Cooking 101: How to Make Everything Taste Better” (Oxmoor House, $35). More than just a collection of soulful recipes, it is actually a teaching manual for the home cook. “Each recipe specifically demonstrates a tip or method that can make you a better and more confident cook while also teaching you to make your dishes taste better,” she writes.
Illustrated instructions show you how to trim an artichoke, mix pie dough, and pit an avocado safely. Even experienced “old dogs” will learn some “new tricks.” One of my favorites: a quick way to clean mushrooms (yes, you can toss them briefly in water!) And, darn, throwing a potato into an over-salted stew doesn’t really work.
You’ve been making hard-cooked eggs the same way for a million years, right? Try steaming them over boiling water, covered, for ten to 12 minutes, and you’ll be a convert for life. “The whites are more tender, and they’re easier to peel,” she explained. Pound cutlets of chicken or veal between sheets of plastic wrap or in a resealable bag sprinkled with water. “The water prevents the meat from sticking to the bag and shredding,” she noted.
The biggest surprise: “Forget about mis en place,” that once sacrosanct admonition to prep and measure all your ingredients before cooking. “While heating up the pan, you can chop the onions. While the onions are cooking, I mince the garlic. You could waste up to 20 minutes with mis en place.” (The one exception: stir-fries.) Most important of all: “Read the recipe first from start to finish, so you don’t miss ‘chill overnight.’”
French Apple Tart
If you are using store-bought pie dough, let it warm up a little bit on the counter so that it is malleable, then lift it out of the tin and lay it on a lightly floured surface. Roll it out slightly and transfer it to the tart tin.
Yield: 1 (10-inch) tart, about 8 servings
1 recipe Pie Dough (recipe follows), or 1 (12-ounce) store-bought pie dough
All-purpose flour for rolling out dough
6 Golden Delicious apples
3 tablespoons sugar
4 tablespoons cold butter, sliced thin
1/2 cup apricot jam combined with 2 tablespoons water, heated, and strained
Vanilla ice cream or sweetened whipped cream, as an accompaniment
1. Preheat oven to 375ºF. On lightly floured surface, roll out dough to a 13-inch round and fit it into 10-inch tart tin with removable fluted rim, trimming excess. Prick dough all over with tines of fork. Cover and chill 1 hour.
2. Meanwhile, peel, halve, and core apples. Arrange apples, cut side down, on cutting board and use very sharp knife to slice them crosswise, but not all the way through.
3. Arrange 8 apple halves like the spokes of a wheel on pastry and remaining slices in diminishing concentric circles in middle of spokes. Sprinkle sugar evenly on top of apples and top with butter slices. Bake in middle of oven 45 to 50 minutes or until crust is cooked through and apples are golden brown. Brush with heated apricot jam while tart is still hot. Serve each portion with small scoop of ice cream or small spoonful of whipped cream.
Pie dough
How you measure your flour can make a huge difference. That’s why you should weigh, not measure, your flour.
Yield: enough for a large (10-inch) single-crust pie
180 grams (about 1 1/2 cups) unbleached all-purpose flour
1/4 teaspoon table salt
10 tablespoons cold unsalted butter, cut into 1/2-inch cubes
2 to 4 tablespoons ice water
1. Stir together flour and salt in large bowl, add butter, and, working quickly with your fingertips or a pastry blender, mix dough until most of mixture resembles coarse meal, with the rest in small (roughly pea-sized) lumps. Drizzle 2 tablespoons ice water evenly over mixture and gently stir with fork until incorporated. Gently squeeze a small handful: it should hold together without crumbling apart. If it doesn’t, add more ice water, 1/2 tablespoon at a time, stirring 2 or 3 times after each addition until it comes together. (If you overwork mixture or add too much water, pastry will be tough.)
- Turn dough out onto clean work surface and divide into several portions. With heel of your hand, smear each portion once in a forward motion on work surface to help distribute fat. Gather smeared dough together and form it, rotating it on the work surface, into a disk. Wrap in plastic wrap and chill until firm, at least 1 hour.
Chicago Hot Dogs
The proper bun is a standard hot dog bun, but it has poppy seeds on the outside. You can make a facsimile at home by steaming the bun and, while it’s still warm, sprinkling poppy seeds on the exterior.
Yield: 4 hot dogs
4 hot dogs
4 hot dog buns
Prepared yellow mustard
Bright green sweet relish
Thin tomato slices
Green pickled peppers
Chopped onion
4 thin cucumber spears, peeled
4 long thin slices dill pickle
Celery salt
1. Steam or grill hot dogs. Steam buns. Place dogs on buns and slather with mustard.
2. Top dogs with relish, tomatoes, peppers, onions, cucumbers, and pickle. (Some ingredients fit alongside the dog.) Sprinkle with celery salt. Serve immediately.
Source: “It’s All American Food” by David Rosengarten
Jlife Food Editor Judy Bart Kancigor is the author of “Cooking Jewish” (Workman) and “The Perfect Passover Cookbook” (an e-book short from Workman), a columnist and feature writer for the Orange County Register and other publications and can be found on the web at www.cookingjewish.com.
