I am not a chef. I’m a decent home cook, but I’m not a chef.
Never have been, never will be. The word chef gets thrown around far too freely
these days, largely due to an
influx of “TV chefs” from the Food Network. But a chef is not just a good cook;
a chef is a trained professional who runs a restaurant kitchen. This is
something I have no experience with—from everything I’ve read, I would be
reduced to a gibbering wreck after ten minutes in a restaurant kitchen.
Chefs and professional cooks don’t worry about how many
pans, pots, platters and bowls they use, because washing dishes isn’t part of
their job. The ambitious ones are under a lot of pressure to innovate, to come
up with new ideas (or new takes on old ideas), whereas a home cook is more
likely to be pressured to make somebody’s favorite dish every other night. And
of course, professional chefs have access to a whole slew of ingredients and
equipment that no home cook has. Cookbooks written by a professional chef (even
those with ghost writers) can often include lines like “put 5 quarts of brown
veal stock into a 20-quart stock pot” or “sauté the shallot-mushroom-truffle
mixture in 6 tablespoons of clarified butter.” There are exceptions, of course, most notably Jacques Pépin; but many chefs are unfamiliar with home cooking and therefore do not understand the limitations of the home kitchen.
Of course, many chefs' cookbooks are not meant to be used;
in the last decade or so, they’ve morphed into coffee table books to impress your
friends while you nuke something you bought at the Whole Foods mega-prepared-food
deli section for dinner. If you want an example, check out the books of Thomas
Keller, who is an incredibly talented chef, but is not creating dishes that can
be wrangled out of the home kitchen. But there was a time when these chef books
were sold to us home cooks as actual, practical cookbooks.
Why am I telling you all of this?
By all accounts, Barbara Tropp was a lovely human being who
died before her time (f*ck you, cancer) in 2001. She wrote a brilliant book
called The Modern Art of Chinese Cooking
back in 1982, and I recommend it wholeheartedly. Three decades later, it remains a fantastic introduction to Chinese
cooking. She started a restaurant in San Francisco called The China Moon Café which received rave reviews for its innovative and fresh take on Chinese food.
But a week or two ago, I came across Tropp’s second book, The China Moon Cookbook, at the library,
and it rang a bell. I owned a copy of it when it came out back in the early
90s. I knew I had gotten rid of it at some point, but I didn’t remember why.
But I thought I should try it again, so I checked it out.
As I thumbed through the book, I remembered why I no longer
owned it. The Modern Art of Chinese
Cooking was directed at home cooks, and it still works well. It’s better
(obviously) if one has access to an Asian grocer, but even if you don’t, the
recipes are still feasible.
The China Moon
Cookbook is another matter. The first chapter, called "The China Moon
Pantry," is a gatekeeper for the rest of the book. Among other things, it
contains recipes for eighteen different spice blends, infused oils and
vinegars, sauces, and vinaigrettes. This would be all well and good, except that
every subsequent recipe requires at least one of these pantry items. In other
words, you can’t make any actual food until you’ve replicated Tropp’s pantry.
Of course, many other chefs do the same thing. And
it’s perfectly fine for a high-end restaurant to make its own special
infused oil and vinegars, but it’s not practical for a home kitchen. At first,
I thought, no big deal, I can find substitutions. But only up to a point. The
actual dishes in this book often call for three or four different pantry
ingredients, each one requiring its own (often time-consuming) preparation.
That leads one—well, me—to ask “if I have to figure out five substitutions for
one stir-fry, why am I doing this?” I’m certainly not replicating the original
dish at that point.
So while this posting isn’t exactly about a failure, it is a
chronicle of a pair of recipes I’ll probably never make again.
With winter coming on, I thought something cabbage-based
would be nice, and I’m fond of most of the members of the cabbage family. So I
chose Tropp’s Ginger-Pickled Red Cabbage Slaw. And the result was quite good.
But it was involved.
For starters, before you can make Ginger-Pickled Red Cabbage
Slaw, you have to make China Moon Pickled Ginger. This is not difficult (the
recipes are below)—you steep some fresh ginger in boiling water for a couple of
minutes, drain it, and then add rice vinegar, cider vinegar, white vinegar,
sugar and salt. But it has to be refrigerated for at least 24 hours before you
can use it. The result is quite good, though, and much fresher than the stuff you buy in a jar.
So the next day, you can tackle the cabbage. Tropp calls for
a pound of thinly sliced red cabbage. The smallest red cabbage I could find
weighed three pounds, so I hacked about a third of it off.
She suggests using a mandolin for the slicing, but I made do
with a sharp knife.
You then add minced pickled ginger, some of the juice from
the pickled ginger, sugar and salt.
Give it a thorough stir—I used my impeccably clean hands.
And once again, you have to refrigerate this mixture for 24 hours.
The result is a brightly colored, sprightly flavored slaw.
And at the risk of turning this blog into Grant’s Braised Pork Extravaganza, it
does go very nicely with the braised pork of two previous posts.
But you know, after a fair amount of shopping and two days
(most of them labor-free, admittedly), I had two pickles. And rather a lot of
each. I like pickled ginger, but I don’t use it often. And even then, one doesn’t
use a lot of it at a time. Likewise, for a single bloke living alone, a quart
of pickled cabbage goes a long way. And yes, I could use both of them as ingredients in her other recipes, but this was starting to feel like an awful lot of hoops to jump through before I got to a main dish.
Now, to be fair to Tropp, I probably could’ve purchased a
jar of pickled ginger and eliminated the first day of prep. But even as someone
who enjoys cooking, I don’t relish the idea of having to prepare three or four
pantry items before I can make an actual meal. And I’m enough of an egotist
that I don’t want to replicate someone else’s pantry; I already have a pantry
with various spices and vinegars and the like; I don’t want to create a new one
from scratch to make dinner.
I don’t mean this as a swipe at Tropp—as mentioned before,
her first book was outstanding, and I have no doubt that the food at her
restaurant was incredible. But this is where so many chefs' cookbooks come a
cropper. In order to make a decent-sounding dish, you need multiple specially-prepared oils, spices, and sauces before you can even begin. This has been true of chef’s books
as far back as Escoffier, and it’s indicative of what I said at the
beginning of this post—restaurant cooking is very different from home cooking. Hell, that's one of the main reasons we go to restaurants—to experience a level of cooking that we can't replicate at home. That’s
not Tropp’s fault. But The China Moon
Cookbook is going back to the library, and I shall return to my own less
elaborate but familiar home pantry.
Bon appetìt,
y’all.
From Barbara Tropp, The
China Moon Cookbook
China Moon Pickled Ginger
Small Batch*
½ pound peeled fresh ginger, sliced crosswise against the
grain into paper-thin coins
1 ⅓
cups unseasoned Japanese rice vinegar
3 tablespoons cider vinegar
2 tablespoons distilled white vinegar
½ cup plus 1 teaspoon sugar
1 tablespoon plus 1 teaspoon kosher salt
1. Cover the ginger with boiling water. Let stand
for 2 minutes, then drain in a colander. Put the ginger in a large, impeccably
clean glass jar or plastic container.
2. Combine the remaining ingredients in a
non-aluminum pot. Stir over moderate heat until the sugar and salt dissolve.
Pour over the ginger.
3. Let cool completely, then cover and refrigerate
for at least 24 hours before using.
Ginger-Pickled Red Cabbage Slaw
Makes about 4 cups
1 pound head of red cabbage or half a 2-pound head
1 cup juice from China Moon Pickled Ginger
1 tablespoon finely minced China Moon Pickled Ginger
2 tablespoons plus 1 teaspoon sugar
1 ¼ teaspoons coarse kosher salt
Toasted black sesame seeds and/or thinly sliced green and
white scallion rings, for garnish
1. Discard any limp leaves from the outside of the
cabbage. Cut the cabbage into wedge-like fourths and remove the core. Using a
mandolin or a Benriner,† shred each wedge crosswise into long fine strands.
2. Combine the pickled ginger juice, minced pickled
ginger, sugar and salt in a large non-aluminum bowl. Add the cabbage and toss
well to mix. Set aside for 10 to 20 minutes; toss again.
3. Transfer the mixture to a square or rectangular,
non-aluminum container. Press the cabbage lightly to flatten and expose as much
of it as possible to the juice. Seal and refrigerate for at least 24 hours. The
cabbage keeps nicely for up to a week. Toss several times during the first day
and occasionally thereafter to redistribute the juices. A the cabbage “cooks”
in the acids, it will turn hot pink.
4. Serve chilled in small mounds as an
accompaniment. Garnish with a dusting of the sesame seeds and/or a sprinkling
of the scallions.
*One thing I neglected to mention: there are two versions of
the pickled ginger recipe: a small batch and a large batch. The small batch makes
¾ cup of ginger and 2 cups of juice. The large batch makes 1 ⅓ quarts of ginger and
2 ½ quarts of juice. As the larger amount makes no sense for a home cook, I
went with the small batch, which I reproduce here.
†An inexpensive slicing gadget that Tropp describes in the
book.
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