But what kind of chemical reaction? It turns out a comprehensive scientific investigation of mirepoix remains to be done; even Harold McGee, when I wrote to ask him about it, was uncharacteristically vague on the subject. The obvious but incorrect answer is that the sugars in the onions and carrots become caramelized in the sauté pan, thereby contributing that whole range of flavor compounds to the dish. But Samin (like most other authorities) recommends taking pains not to brown a mirepoix, whether by reducing the heat or adding salt, which by drawing water out of the vegetables serves to keep the browning reaction from kicking in. The caramelized-sugar theory also doesn’t account for the prominent role in mirepoix and soffritto of celery, a not particularly sweet vegetable that would seem to contribute little but water and cellulose. What all this suggests is that there must be other processes that come into play in sautéing aromatic vegetables besides caramelization (or the Maillard reaction), processes that contribute flavors to a dish by other means not yet well understood.
One afternoon in the midst of slowly sweating a mirepoix, I risked ruining it by doing some Internet research on what might be going on in my pan just then. I know, I was multitasking, failing utterly at the “p” of presence, possibly patience as well. I found a fair amount of confusion and uncertainty about the subject online, but enough clues to conclude it was likely, or at least plausible, that the low, slow heat was breaking down the long necklaces of protein in the vegetables into their amino acid building blocks, some of which (like glutamic acid) are known to give foods the meaty, savory taste called “umami”—from the Japanese word umai, meaning “delicious.” Umami is now generally accepted as the fifth taste, along with salty, sweet, bitter, and sour, and like each of the others has receptors on the tongue dedicated to detecting its presence.
As for the seemingly pointless celery, it, too, may contribute umami to a pot dish, and not just by supplying lots of carbohydrate-stiffened cell walls and water to a mirepoix. My Web surfing eventually delivered me to an article in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry written by a team of Japanese food scientists and titled, fetchingly, “Flavor Enhancement of Chicken Broth from Boiled Celery Constituents.”* These chemists reported that a group of volatile compounds found in celery called phthalides, though completely tasteless by themselves, nevertheless enhanced the perception of both sweetness and umami when they were added to a chicken broth. Way to go, celery.
Abstracted soul that I am, patiently cooking a mirepoix became much more interesting, or bearable at least, now that I had a theory. Now, knowing what was at stake, I paid close attention to the satisfying sizzle—the auditory evidence of water escaping from the plant tissues—and then, as it subsided, to the softening of the vegetables, indicating that the scaffold of carbohydrates that held the cell walls rigid was breaking down into sugars that it was up to me to keep from browning. I now understood that, even before I introduced the meat or liquid to the pot, the depth of flavor in my braise, the very savoriness of it, hung in the balance of these gently simmering onions, carrots, and celery.
One more scientific fact contributed to my deepening admiration for mirepoix and soffritto, and especially for the onions in them, which this fact single-handedly rendered considerably less irritating. It seems that adding onions to foods, and to meat dishes in particular, makes the food safer to eat. Like many of the most commonly used spices, onions (garlic, too) contain powerful antimicrobial compounds that survive cooking. Microbiologists believe that onions, garlic, and spices protect us from the growth of dangerous bacteria on meat. This might explain why the use of these plants in cooking becomes more common the closer you get to the equator, where keeping meat from spoiling becomes progressively more challenging. Before the advent of refrigeration, the bacterial contamination of food, animal flesh in particular, posed a serious threat to people’s health. (In Indian cooking, recipes for vegetarian dishes typically call for fewer spices than recipes for meat dishes.) Purely through trial and error, our ancestors stumbled upon certain plant chemicals that could protect them from getting sick. Onions happen to be one of the most potent of all antimicrobial food plants. That the flavors of such plants “taste good” to us may be nothing more than a learned preference for the taste of molecules that helped to keep us alive.
What this suggests is that cooking with these aromatic plants may involve something more than simply overcoming their chemical defenses so that we might avail ourselves of a source of calories other creatures can’t. It’s much more ingenious than that. Cooking with onions, garlic, and other spices is a form of biochemical jujitsu, in which the first move is to overcome the plants’ chemical defenses so that we might eat them, and the second is to then deploy their defenses against other species to defend ourselves.
I was beginning to appreciate how the marriage of plant and animal foods in a liquid medium offers a great many advantages over simply cooking either kind of foodstuff by itself over a fire. Now the cook can improve meat by incorporating the flavors (and antimicrobial properties) of aromatic plants such as onions, garlic, and spices, something difficult, if not impossible, to do when cooking directly over a fire. In a slowly simmering liquid, vegetables and meat can exchange molecules and flavors, in the process creating new end products that are often much more than the sum of their humble parts. One such end product is a sauce, probably the richest dividend of pot cooking.
Cooking in a pot is all about economy. Every last drop of the fat and juices from the meat, which over a fire would be lost, are conserved, along with all the nutrients from the plants. Pot cooking allows you to make a tasty dish from a third-rate or over-the-hill cut of meat, and to stretch a small amount of meat so that, with the addition of vegetables and sauce, it might feed more mouths than that same meat ever would by itself. It also allows you to dispense with meat altogether, or use it simply as a flavoring.
“This is food for when you’re poor,” Samin pointed out one afternoon, while we were trimming a particularly gnarly piece of lamb shoulder. “Braising is a wonderful way to cook, because it yields powerfully flavored food from relatively inexpensive ingredients.” In fact, the tastiest braises and stews are made from the “worst” cuts. The older the animal, the more flavorful its meat. Also, tough cuts come from muscles that have worked the hardest, and so contain the greatest amount of the connective tissues that, after a long, slow cooking, dissolve into succulent gelatin.
The covered pot—covered to conserve moisture and heat for the long haul—symbolizes the modesty and economy of this kind of cooking. By comparison, roasting a big piece of meat over an open fire—Homeric cooking—looks like an extravagance: a form of conspicuous display of one’s wealth, generosity, or hunting skill. And so it has been, at least until our own era of extravagantly cheap meat. The British, famous for roasting impressive joints over fires, traditionally looked down on the “humble pots” of the French, with their plebeian cuts hidden beneath dubious sauces. Prosperous and blessed with good grass for grazing cattle and sheep the year round, the English enjoyed access to high-quality meat that required little more than fire to taste good. Whereas the less well-to-do and well-provisioned French were thrown back on their wits in the kitchen, developing techniques that allowed them to make the most of meat scraps and root vegetables and whatever liquid might be handy.
That we now think of such peasant fare as fancy or elite, while regarding the tossing of pricey filets of meat on the grill as simple food for the masses, represents a complete reversal of the historical situation. There has always been a trade-off between time and technique in the kitchen and the quality of the raw ingredients. The better the latter, the less of the former is required to eat well. But the opposite
is equally true. With a modicum of technique and a little more time in the kitchen, the most flavorful food can be made from the humblest of ingredients. This enduring formula suggests that learning one’s way around the kitchen—knowing what to do with the gnarly cut, the mirepoix, and the humble pot—might still be a good recipe for eating delicious food without spending much to make it. These are skills that confer a measure of independence.
But there are ethical implications here as well, about the way to approach the eating of animals, and the environmental issues that practice raises. If we’re only going to eat the prime cuts of young animals, we’re going to have to raise and kill a great many more of them. And indeed this has become the rule, with disastrous results for both the animals and the land. Nowadays, there is no market for old laying hens, since so few of us know how to cook them, with the result that much of this meat ends up in pet food or landfills. If we are going to eat animals, it behooves us to waste as few and as little of them as we possibly can, something that the humble cook pot allows us to do.
III.
Step Three: Salt the Meat; then Brown it
The other task I usually tried to get done before Samin arrived on Sunday was to salt the meat we were planning to cook, an operation she regarded as absolutely critical and urged me to tackle early and in a spirit of shocking extravagance. “Use at least three times as much salt as you think you should,” she advised. (A second authority I consulted employed the same formulation, but upped the factor to five.) Like many chefs, Samin believes that knowing how to salt food properly is the very essence of cooking, and that amateurs like me approach the saltbox far too timorously.
Before we learned to cook food in pots, humans never had to think about adding salt to their food. Animal flesh contains all the salt our bodies need, and roasting meat preserves most of the salt in it. It was only with the advent of agriculture, when people began relying on a diet of grain and other plants, and took to boiling much of their food (leaching the salt from it in the process), that deficiencies of sodium became a problem. This is when salt—the only mineral we deliberately eat—became a precious commodity. Yet in a modern diet completely saturated with sodium, deficiencies are not exactly a problem, so why would we want to salt meat at all, let alone so extravagantly?
Samin prefaced her defense of the practice by pointing out that the salt we add to our food represents a tiny fraction of the salt people get from their diet. Most of the salt we eat comes from processed foods, which account for 80 percent of the typical American’s daily intake of sodium. “So, if you don’t eat a lot of processed foods, you don’t need to worry about it. Which means: Don’t ever be afraid of salt!”
Judiciously applied, Samin explained, salt brings out the intrinsic flavors of many foods and can improve their texture and appearance. But it is not only the amount of salt that matters; the timing of its application is important, too. Some dishes (like meat) should get salted early, some in the middle of the cooking process, some only immediately before serving, and still others at every step along the way. In the case of meat that will be stewed or braised, you can’t salt too soon or too liberally. At least one day before cooking was good; two or three days were even better.
But doesn’t salting dry out a piece of meat? Yes, it can, if you don’t salt it far enough in advance. Initially, salt draws moisture out of the cells of muscles, which is why, if you haven’t salted your meat well in advance of cooking it, you’re probably better off not doing it at all. But as the salt draws water out of the meat, a kind of osmotic vacuum forms in the cells. Once the salt has been diluted by the water it has attracted to it, this salty liquid is drawn back into the cells (along with any spices or other flavorings present in it), greatly improving the meat’s flavor. Put simply, salting early helps meat later absorb flavors, including but not limited to the flavor of salt.
It took me awhile, but eventually I got comfortable salting meat to Samin’s ultraliberal specifications. “Sprinkling” does not do justice to the practice she taught me, though “pouring it on” might be putting matters a bit too strongly. She taught me how to pick up quantities of kosher salt by dipping all five fingers into the box like a crane and then, with a rhythmic rubbing together of thumb against fingers (a bit like sowing tiny seeds), I found I could spread a nice, even layer of salt all over a piece of meat, making sure to coat any crevices and cavities. Sowing this much salt felt all wrong, I have to admit, and yet, when I discovered the meat didn’t come out tasting particularly salty, I succumbed. Now I, too, am a proud, indulgent liberal with the salt.
The last important step before putting the ingredients of a braise or stew into the pot is to brown the meat in a little fat. This is done for two reasons: to add another layer of flavor to the dish by incorporating the hundreds of tasty compounds created by the Maillard reaction and caramelization, and to make the dish more appealing to look at, browned meat being more attractive than gray. Without browning, Samin explained, both the flavor and color of the meat would be paler.
The problem is that meat won’t ever brown in a liquid that consists mostly of water. In order for the Maillard reaction to take place, meat needs to reach a higher temperature—250˚F at least—than water can ever attain, since water can never exceed the boiling point—212˚F. To caramelize the sugars in meat requires an even higher temperature, in excess of 330˚F. Because oil can reach these temperatures that water can’t, the best way to brown meat is in a pan with a little fat. (Browning can be accomplished in a hot oven, too, and often is in restaurants, but at some risk of drying out the meat.)
Many recipes recommend patting dry the exterior of the meat to promote better browning. Some are particular as to what kind of fat to brown meat in: Julia Child liked to use bacon fat, which adds another layer of flavor to a dish. Sometimes, Samin and I would brown the meat while the mirepoix or soffritto cooked in another pan; other times, we’d brown the meat first, leaving us a pan coated with flavored fat and browned bits of meat in which to cook, and enrich, the mirepoix.
A few of Samin’s tips for browning: Big chunks of meat are better than small; bone in is better than out. Use just enough oil to coat the pan and conduct heat evenly; too much, and you’ll be frying the meat, too little, you’re apt to scorch it over patches of dry, naked pan. Cast iron is best. Watch carefully to prevent any blackening, which can render the whole dish bitter. But brown every surface you can reach, the sides included. Take your time to do it thoroughly. And stop as soon as the color is “toasty beautiful.”
In short, another straightforward kitchen procedure improved by patience and presence.
Whether we were browning a duck leg or a lamb neck or a shoulder of pork, this was the point when the kitchen would begin to fill with the complex and captivating aromas of the browning reactions: savory and meaty, but also earthy, floral, and sweet, the precise mix and balance of them all depending on the type of meat being browned. Outwardly, browning looks like a fairly simple operation, but at the molecular level it adds a great deal of complexity to the dish, hundreds of new compounds and, taken together, a whole other layer of flavors. And there was yet another layer still to add: After we removed the browned meat from the pan, we would deglaze it with a little wine, boiling off the alcohol while freeing up the browned bits stuck on the bottom of the pan with a spatula. This liquid would end up in the braise, too, adding “one more little layer of deliciousness”—this on top of the mirepoix layer and the Maillard layer we had already laid down. I was beginning to understand what Samin meant when she talked about “building” the flavor of a simple dish by extracting the deepest, furthest, richest flavors from even the humblest of ingredients. And that’s before we put anyth
ing into the pot.
IV.
Step Four: Place all the Ingredients in a Covered Pot
In 1822, a German art historian and gastronome by the name of Baron Karl Friedrich von Rumohr published a book called The Essence of Cookery that, among other things, sought to elevate the prestige of the humble stockpot, and see it for the revolutionary development in human history that it was. “Enough of the fire,” the Baron declared. “Innumerable natural products were rendered edible by the invention of the cooking pot,” he wrote, a method of cooking he deemed more highly evolved and richer in possibilities than cooking over a fire. “Man had finally learned the arts of boiling and stewing and was now able to combine animal products with the nutritious and aromatic products of the plant kingdom, creating a new end product. For the first time, it was possible for the art of cookery to be developed in all directions.”
Perhaps because a German is bound to have less credibility on matters of gastronomy than a Frenchman, Rumohr is not nearly so well known or widely read today as his more flamboyant contemporary, Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin. But in some ways The Essence of Cookery holds up better than The Physiology of Taste, in which much of the science and history is pure fancy. Compared with Brillat-Savarin, Baron Rumohr has his feet firmly planted on the ground, or, rather, on the floor of the everyday domestic kitchen, a place where water commands as much respect as fire. In fact, his definition of cooking includes it: “To develop, with the aid of heat, water and salt, the nutritional, refreshing, and delectable qualities of those natural substances which are suitable for the nourishment or restoration of mankind.” Rumohr’s aim in writing The Essence of Cookery was to return cooking, which he felt had fallen into a “state of over-refinement and exaggeration,” back to basics, and nothing symbolized straightforward, honest cooking better than the stockpot.