Gotham Diary:
Why We Eat
The bacon at breakfast this morning was extra-delicious, doubtless because it had been cured by a special twenty-minute session in a cold oven.
Or, you could say that breakfast was twenty minutes late, because I forgot to turn the oven on when I slid the pound of bacon onto the middle shelf. In this alternative interpretation, the bacon was delicious because Oscar Meyer’s Hearty Thick-Cut is always delicious, even when the pieces are structurally unsound.
I got the trick of baking bacon from the Silver Palate girls. It’s very simple: line up the strips on a rack in a roasting pan and bake them in a 400º oven for forty minutes, turning once after twenty. When people ask me for this “recipe,” I say, as slowly as I can, “Forty. Minutes. at Four Hundred. Degrees.” The rule of fours, no? Of course, the advantage of cooking bacon the regular way, in a frypan, is that you know right away if it is “benefiting” from the “cold cure.” And you get your cooked bacon a lot faster, too — once you turn up the heat. But these are not advantages that the true bacon connoisseur will savor. Baked bacon is magnificently evenly-cooked and crisp, and there’s hardly any need to “drain” it on paper towels. Though of course I always do. Even when the bacon is twenty minutes late.
I coped with the delay by prepping a bunch of leeks and a packet of mushrooms for a quiche. And when the breakfast dishes were running through the dishwasher, I composed the tart, filling the sink with fresh dirties in the process. I baked the crust, purchased at Eli’s not long after Agincourt (and probably a “sweet,” rather than a “savory” shell), and let it cool. Then I tossed in the filling, beginning with the boring stuff, the mushrooms and the leeks. After this, I took a scissors to three slices of thick-cut bacon, and grated a passel of cheddar over the top. Then I stirred these ingredients, thinking how much easier it would have been to stir them in a bowl. Finally, hunted down a print copy of the recipe. I have most details of Julia Childs’s Quiche Maison in my head, but owing to age, and to the creation, by means of eminent domain, of vast new brain regions devoted to adoring my grandson, I couldn’t remember a) how many eggs or b) how hot or c) how long. (Answs: 3, 375º, 35-40 minutes.) Yes, the mushrooms are my interpolation, and, yes, I know that a proper quiche Lorraine has no cheese. Lots of places have no cheese. We don’t have to be like them.
Then I made lunch. It is my settled philosophy that Sunday lunch ought always to be grander than Sunday dinner. Not lunch but luncheon. My current idea of Sunday lunch is a salad of chicken or fish dressed with mayonnaise, avocado, curry and lemon. My ultra-current idea of additions to this mixture involves sautéed corn and steamed poivron (that’s “Bell pepper” you, bub). Today’s fish, which I poached on Friday, was salmon trout — a fish that always made me want to fret, “Make up your mind!” until I bought a piece by mistake two weeks ago, and found that Kathleen preferred it to just plain salmon. It makes a delightful, rather sweet, salad. The only thing that a cook needs to know, beyond what I’ve already rattled off, is that I blend half the avocado into the dressing and cube the rest. Avocado two ways, as they say in the garde-manger.
Along the way, I refilled the ice-cube bin. The bin holds six trays of ice cubes — it holds more than that, actually, but the freezer won’t take more than six trays. If you want to know how I’m doing on the domestic front, all you need do is check my ice-cube bin. If it’s full, I’m on top of things. If it’s half-full, I’m still fine. If it’s empty, I’m tired. If it’s full of items that are not ice cubes, I have abandoned domestic economy (temporarily, at least) and cannot be asked to do anything out of the way. That’s the freezer test. The refrigerator test, which is much easier, calls for a bottle of good Champagne. I’d fail that just now, but only because there is no room for a bottle of Champagne. This isn’t because the icebox is stuffed with incipient garbage. It’s because I’ve arranged things in neat bins that don’t allow for the deposit of a bottle of beer, much less something bigger.
We’re going to have the quiche for dinner, on trays, while we watch Rubicon and Mad Men. Comfort food! In contrast to which, the salmon-trout salad sparked a conversation that kept us at the table for an hour and a half. We talked about Mary (as in “BVM”), Augustine, and why college is so expensive these days, and a bunch of other things. When Kathleen left the table (to run an errand), I thought how odd and peculiar and absolutely wonderful it is that we two old married folks (29 years this October) can still have the kind of animated dinner-table conversation that two people have when (as it seems) they’re finding one another to be very interesting conversation partners but when (in fact) they’re also falling in love.