A Hamburger Love Story

I am a confessed carnivore. Even more, I am addicted to hamburgers. If I don’t get a good hamburger at least once a week, I go into a decline. The key is the word “good.” For that, I now have to make them myself, due to the e. coli phobia running rampant through the population. I used to be able to get good ones away from home.

The History channel recently broadcast one of those food shows featuring hamburgers from all over the country. It got me to thinking about Hamburgers I Have Known.

I once worked with a girl from Hamburg, Germany who ate raw chopped beef on sliced pumpernickel bread. It had finely chopped raw onion and something else in it and wow, was it good! Steak tartare is raw chopped beef with onion, raw egg, Worcestershire sauce, hot sauce, and black pepper and may have preceded the Hamburg chopped-beef sandwich, which may in turn have been the origin of the ground beef burger we eat on this side of the pond. We changed it by cooking it and putting it on a white-bread bun.

The best standard short-order hamburger I ever ate I had in a dumpy little diner in Quince Orchard, Maryland when my father was teaching me how to drive. He didn’t trust the Drivers’ Ed course at school to teach me correctly and he was working nights when I got my learner’s permit. I would get home from school and he would take me out driving, through all kinds of weather, on all kinds of surfaces, and even finding “impossible” parallel parking spaces. He was tough, but I really, really learned to drive.

On one of our outings, we stopped in this little dump. The hamburger was juicy and medium rare and luscious. I don’t even remember what I had on it, but I suspect chili, onions, and mustard. Those were my druthers in those days.

When I got my first job, as a sales clerk in a paint and wallpaper store for the summer, there was a hamburgers-only short-order restaurant about a block away. That’s where I started experimenting with toppings. They had a lightly smoky barbecue sauce I haven’t had the equal of since; a Swiss-and-mushroom that was to die for; and another reddish mushroom topping I haven’t tasted since. Always, of course, rare to medium rare.

Some white-tablecloth restaurants used to offer a good burger. Hamburger Hamlet was pretty good, though pricey. I’ve had a few other good burgers in that sort of place, but I don’t get out much any more. They won’t cook it rare, either.

Roy Rogers restaurants used to make a good hamburger. They served it medium rare unless you requested well done. You could put on your own toppings from the toppings bar. I sort of segued to tomatoes-and-mayonnaise with lots of pepper. Then the e. coli panic started and they now cook them well done. The bacon cheeseburger is still OK, and even better on sourdough bread, but the few remaining franchise outposts of the chain just aren’t as good overall as they were before McDonald’s bought out the company-owned stores. We won’t even discuss the tough, dry hockey pucks one gets at other fast-food places, and good luck finding a short-order restaurant anywhere any more. How does one make hamburger tough? Its very nature is the antithesis of tough.

That leaves the home hamburger to reign supreme in my life. I prefer ground chuck, which is about 80% lean. Any leaner and they sort of singe in the pan, they don’t brown, and they’re tasteless. I don’t buy packing-house hamburger. It must be ground in the store the day I cook it. That takes care of the e. coli problem. I warned Giant when they quit grinding in the store, and it wasn’t more than a couple of months before there was a recall of their packing-house ground beef. I laaaaughed and laughed. Freezing ruins the texture and diminishes the taste.

I cook my hamburger so it’s crusty on the outside and warmed through to make the juices flow. I always pepper heavily. When I have enough time, I make a sauce with lightly cooked scallions and Dijon mustard with the pan juices. That one I eat on a plate with no bun. When I was still working, I would take a lunch of cold cooked hamburger with a topping of mixed Dijon mustard and mayonnaise. It’s surprisingly good.

Buns really aren’t particularly important, though I prefer a potato or egg bread bun. The best I ever had were served at a science club meeting when I was in high school. The science teacher held the meeting at her house and her cook made homemade rolls for the hamburgers. I don’t remember the hamburgers, just the buns.

When I’m putting it on a bun, I like tomato and mayonnaise, sometimes with a thin shaving of sweet onion. I’ve added sliced avocado at times. If I add cheese, I like Dijon mustard, sweet onion and tomato. I haven’t eaten or bought yellow mustard in many, many years and I reserve spicy brown mustard for hot dogs. I don’t put ketchup on anything, anywhere, any time, any how. Yech. That is, of course, personal taste. I know people who actually like ketchup. Everybody I live with, as a matter of fact, and they’re otherwise bright people with good taste. Go figure.

I’ve never been able to duplicate that diner burger but it doesn’t matter. I make a really, really good hamburger at home and I’ve learned a lot about toppings and preparations from places I’ve been and hamburgers I’ve eaten. Let me have my weekly hamburger and I’m a happy eater.

(c) Katherine DeWitt

… And the Rest is Gravy

The title saying means that whatever you have left is extra richness. Not necessary but very nice to have. But what, exactly is gravy?

Gravy is a sauce made with the cooking juices of the meat it accompanies. Most are a velouté type, thickened with a roux and using stock or water. Béchamel (white sauce) uses milk instead of stock.

My first gravy memories are the ones my mother and grandmother made with great fried chicken gravy. They would pour off most off the fat from cooking the chicken, leaving the crispy bits in the pan. They then added flour and browned it. When it was the perfect shade of golden brown they would pour in cold water and stir like crazy. The result was heavenly – rich, golden brown, and full of chicken flavor with the extra texture of the crispy bits. Not lumps, crispy bits.

When it came to turkey gravy both of them forgot what they knew about gravy, forgot about cooking the roux, forgot everything. They would stew the giblets for a couple of hours, add a lump of butter-and-flour roux, and wind up with a kind of grayish, pasty mess. They would chop the giblets and add them back. The overcooked liver gave an interesting bitter edge to the substance. I took what they had taught me about fried-chicken gravy and what I had learned elsewhere and developed a really, really good turkey gravy. I use the same techniques for roast chicken gravy.

First, while the fowl cooks I make a cooked roux in a small skillet, cooking it until it’s that perfect golden color. I set it aside to cool. I remove the roast fowl from the pan and deglaze the pan with water, not neglecting the rack itself. That gives me an unbelievably rich stock for the base of the gravy. I pour it from the roasting pan into a saucepan – sometimes straining it if there are big pieces of skin stuck to the pan or rack -- and make sure it’s up to boiling, then add the cooled roux and stir. This allows the roux to melt into the stock gradually, and you don’t get lumps. I correct the seasonings, making sure to add lots of fresh-ground black pepper. The gravy is perfect on everything from the turkey to the sweet potatoes.

I once made a superlative gravy with the drippings from chicken cooked with barbecue sauce. That extra oomph with simply wondrous.

Southern cream gravy is a little different. It’s a béchamel, or white sauce, type made with milk. The really affluent will add actual cream.

Whether you use water, stock, or milk the proportions are the same: 1 tablespoon of flour, 1 tablespoon of butter or meat fat, and one cup of liquid.

Unlike gravy from roast meat, red-eye gravy is a different sauce. It’s made by using coffee to deglaze the pan you fried ham in, and left unthickened. It’s the only thing that renders that old southern standby “grits” edible. Butter doesn’t do it, milk and sugar don’t help. Only red-eye gravy can add enough flavor to make grits enjoyable.

I don’t confine my enjoyment to fried or roast fowl. I love French fries with gravy. I love country-fried steak: coat cubed steak with salted and peppered flour, fry it until golden brown, remove from pan, fry a mess of onions in the fat, add flour and brown it, then add water to make a thin gravy. Put the steak back into the gravy and simmer for an hour to get it properly tender. Serve with rice or boiled potatoes to soak up the gravy.

As much as I love gravy, I do reserve it for special meals. I don’t eat gravy every day. If I did, it wouldn’t be nearly as special as it is now, when the taste of fried-chicken gravy reminds me of summer Sunday afternoons with my mother and grandmother, the steam of the kitchen adding more heat to the day and giving real meaning to the word “summer.”

(c) 2008 Katherine DeWitt

The Quest for the Perfect Cup of Coffee

I’ve been drinking, tasting, and exploring coffee since I was twelve years old. I love coffee. I’ve been through all those periods when coffee was supposed to be bad for a person. I’ve just kept on drinking my high-test full caffeine coffee. I enjoy my last cup of the day at around 11:00, but I do make it café-au-lait by cutting it with an equal amount of milk. Recently, some researchers discovered that six to eight cups of coffee a day can halt the progress of multiple sclerosis. Who knew?

The best cup of coffee I ever tasted I enjoyed on November 22, 1963. I remember the date because it was my first wedding anniversary and the day Kennedy was shot. We had reservations at Trader Vic’s and thought about cancelling but didn’t. The restaurant was nearly empty and we had excellent service. Trader Vic’s later got a bad reputation and the Tiki figures outside were kind of cheesy, but at the time it was one of the best restaurants in Washington. The food was prepared in the French manner and excellently done. My after-dinner coffee was served in a French press pot. I had never tasted anything so good, and I’ve been trying to duplicate that rich coffee taste with chocolate overtones ever since. It was probably Kona, grown on the Kona coast of the big island of Hawaii.

At that time I was still using a percolator. I very shortly changed to a Chemex pot, a filter system that has gone out of fashion, to be replaced by the easier-to-use Melitta filter system.

My next move was to try various coffees. Most of the really good coffees are grown on high volcanic islands. Blue Mountain, which isn’t to my taste, is grown on Jamaica. There are other Caribbean coffees as well. I know the Brazilians would argue, but don’t pay them any mind.

I settled on coffees grown on the volcanic islands of Indonesian and other southeast Asian islands. The For a while I bought full city roast Sumatra Mandheling. Mandheling is Arabica variety, full flavored with a rich chocolate undertone. When the store where I shopped changed suppliers, the Sumatra they offered wasn’t Mandheling, it was only Robusta variety, and was over-roasted. There was no longer any point in spending the extra money. I went back to my old standard Mocha Java.

The same islands also produce the world’s costliest coffee. The berries are eaten by a civet, and excreted. The beans are harvested, lightly roasted, and sold for an exorbitant amount of money. The digestive enzymes of the civet neutralize some of the acids and the bitterness, and the result is, they tell me, a coffee of unsurpassed depth and richness of flavor. I’ve never tasted it. I would have to hit the lottery before I’d spend that much for coffee.

I usually like filtered coffee, but I also like Turkish coffee. It’s made by putting powdered coffee into the tiny cup (or pot) and filling it with boiling water. It’s heavily sweetened. The drinker lets the foam settle, then drinks it in tiny sips. Don’t drink the sludge on the bottom. I don’t like espresso, probably because it is always made with over-roasted beans.

In my explorations and experimentations, I may have matched that great coffee of 1963. I’ve made coffee from beans of many countries, both varieties, and varied roasts. I’ve drunk many coffees in many places. It may be that the circumstances and my inexperience enhanced the impact 45 years ago, and I may never actually have that rush again. I still yearn to match that cup of Kona at Trader Vic’s.

(c) 2008 Katherine DeWitt

Peas ‘n Carrots, Carrots ‘n Peas

In 1986 I had occasion to visit the U.K. The trip was to celebrate the founding of an organization to which I belonged. Those of us from the States and Canada stayed a few days in London at the beginning and end of the trip, but the main accommodation was at Wadham College, Oxford. The organizers had planned a series of day trips to the surrounding area and we had set meals in many of those places.

The season was the end of September/beginning of October. Let me say right off that it was a great trip with friends and fellow club members. It was well planned and well executed and went like clockwork.

Except…every meal featured peas-and-carrots. I hyphenate because we didn’t get peas in one pile and carrots in another – we got mixed peas and carrots. They all looked and tasted alike, too. I had visions of a vast peas-and-carrots factory somewhere pumping out bags and boxes and cartons of frozen peas and carrots.

I have clear memories of the four main meals: The black tie dinner at Wadham College, the Scottish banquet in Edinburgh, the medieval banquet at Warwick Castle, and the Welsh banquet in Cardiff.

The black tie dinner at Wadham didn’t have peas and carrots. It opened with smoked salmon and closed with profiteroles. It was nicely formal and quite good. The breakfasts were buffet style and featured those weird fried eggs found all over U.K. The Full English Breakfast is another blog entry in itself.

The Scottish banquet opened with an “appetizer” of haggis, tatties and neeps (potatoes and turnips, both mashed into tasteless pureés). For an amusing and fictitious account of haggis, go to www.electricscotland.com/haggis. Haggis is a really dish made of the innards (aka offal) of a sheep, cooked together with oatmeal and spices, stuffed into a sheep’s stomach and boiled. It is piped to the table by bagpipers and toasted with fine whisky. Before you tell me I misspelled it, “whisky” without an “e” always means Scotch. Whiskey with an “e” can be Irish, Bourbon, corn, rye, Canadian, or just about any flavorful distilled spirits made from grain. The haggis tastes like good dog food smells – not bad at all. After the haggis course, we had lamb and peas and carrots. Of course.

I really don’t remember the medieval banquet all that well. It had been modernized from real medieval recipes, which all feature honey, and made to suit twentieth century tastes. I do know that it featured lamb and peas and carrots, because we all remarked on it. There were “minstrels” and other entertainment, all sort of touristy and not all that medieval.

The Welsh dinner featured lamb, as did the others. Accompanied, of course, by peas and carrots. We were treated to harp music during a dinner that could have taken place any time between 1946 and the present. The second-best part of the meal was the waitress, who piled my large son’s place high with – wait for it – peas and carrots. She explained that she had brothers and home and knew how much they ate. It’s a good thing he liked peas and carrots. The best part of the meal was the mixed berry pie at the end. The crust was so flaky it was hard to get out of the pans. The filling was hot and just sweet enough and so flavorful I’ve been trying to duplicate it ever since. No luck.

Just about the only dinners that we ate as a group that did not include peas and carrots were the black tie dinner at Wadham College and the Chinese meal in London.

I am very fond of the Brit Com As Time Goes By. I have noticed that they eat a lot of peas and carrots, too. Large peas and large carrots cut into discs.

It was more than a decade before I voluntarily ate peas and carrots again. Even then I have made sure to have petit pois and baby carrots and have flavored them with various herbs, a touch of onion, and butter. I don’t think I could face those giant peas and big, aggressively orange carrots ever again.

(c) 2008 Katherine DeWitt

The Delights of Ginger, Crystallized and Otherwise

Crystallized ginger has a lot of sentimental meaning for me. When I was twelve my family moved to the Washington, DC area from North Carolina. Two things impressed me about the area: It was so green, and there was such a variety of food I had never heard of.

Crystallized ginger symbolizes that variety. Both my parents worked downtown and when we had days off from school, I would ride down with them. I’d spend the morning in one of the museums, then walk up to Woodward and Lothrop to eat at the lunch counter.

The candy department at Woodie’s was several steps down from the G Street entrance. The Metro station occupies that corner now. Anyway, a young girl from the country was very impressed by the big department stores. And that candy department…

I don’t remember too many of the different candies that were available, but there was crystallize ginger. It is a parade of sensations starting with the crunch of the sugar crystals on the outside, moving into the firmness of the sugar-soaked ginger itself. The taste starts sweet and fragrant and finished with a spicy bite. I love it still.

Other forms of ginger have their uses. Fresh ginger is great in oriental dishes and many deserts. Ground ginger is a must in pumpkin pie and some cookies. And there’s Chinese preserved ginger.

Chinese preserved ginger and crystallized ginger start the same way. Slices of fresh ginger root are cooked slowly in heavy syrup until almost all the liquid is absorbed or cooked away. The Chinese then pack the syrupy ginger into lamp-base shaped ginger jars.

Crystallized ginger goes a step further. The candied preserved ginger is dried, then when still sticky is rolled in coarse-grain sugar. From there, the drying is completed so that one gets those chunks of ginger that look like the inside of a citrine crystal geode. It’s as beautiful as it is tasty.

Another of my favorite ways to enjoy ginger is Japanese pickled ginger: that paper-thin pink delight that accompanies sushi and sashimi. The preparation is simple: it is treated with salt, then “put down” in a sugar and light vinegar mixture and refrigerated. The ginger turns a rosy pink. It used to be dyed red, but when the red dye was outlawed, they just left it the pretty pink. When on a plate with sushi or sashimi and the Japanese green horseradish wasabi, the color contrasts are quite lovely. And the fragrance – when I describe sushi and sashimi to people who have never enjoyed them, I say they taste like flowers. That, of course, is dependent on the scent of the ginger and the wasabi.

Fresh ginger is used in many Asian dishes from a variety of cultures. Ginger perfumes even the most mundane stir-fry. It’s just peeled, sliced and grated or sliced and added to a quick dish.

The ginger I knew as a child is ground dried ginger. It’s put into cookies, cakes, pumpkin pie, gingerbread, and other sweet deserts. It’s an ingredient in some curries and some savory dishes. We all know ginger snaps, made with ground ginger. Ground dried ginger is yet another dimension of this lovely root.

The last form of ginger is beverage. Ginger ale is pleasant, but a good strong ginger beer from the Islands is a kick in the palate and a lasting pleasure.

Ginger has an ancient and revered past. It has been used in mysticism and medicine, food and beverages. It is a specific for nausea. A strong ginger beer is a great stomach tonic and straightens out nausea quickly. Ginger snaps help prevent car sickness in dogs.

There are recipes for all ginger preparations, and recipes including ginger, all over the web, so just search and click. You’ll enjoy.

My favorite may be crystallized, but only because it symbolizes my introduction to a world of food I didn’t know until I left North Carolina. It was one reason I thought I had died and gone to heaven when I moved to this lush, green, metropolitan place.

(c) 2008 Katherine DeWitt

Scrmbled Eggs

That seems such a simple title. The truth is that there is nothing simple about scrambled eggs. They can be large-curd or small-curd, soft or hard, with milk or without, plain or with additions. Most omelets start out the same way as most scrambled eggs. The difference is in the cooking.

I’m from the beat-the-hell-out-of-the eggs, beat the fresh-ground pepper in well, and salt after pouring into the pan school. No milk. Most short-order cooks break the eggs onto the grill and stir like mad with the spatula and let the customer salt and pepper to taste. The best restaurant scrambled eggs I ever ate I enjoyed at the Williamsburg Inn in the late 1960’s. They were perfect. They had been pre-beaten and cooked to the exactly correct consistency with enough butter to enrich the flavor. I understand that cooks in British country houses had a trick to keep the scrambled eggs on the sideboard from getting hard and dry over the warmers: They would add one last beaten raw egg to the cooked product just before sending it out to the dining room. With the salmonella phobia we all enjoy so much, this is probably not an option.

The addition of milk makes a softer but not runny product. The addition of cheese also makes a softer product. I love extra-sharp cheddar, grated finely so it melts into and amalgamates with the eggs. Yum. An old favorite from my childhood is adding canned herring roe. The roe has a mild fish flavor that gives you enough variation to be extra tasty without being overpowering. I haven’t noticed canned herring roe on store shelves lately, but I haven’t been looking. I live with people who say, “Eeew.” I suppose you could add cooked shad roe but that seems such a waste. Shad roe’s worth another blog entry all by itself. I’ll probably do that one day, but today it’s chicken eggs.

Eggs are cheap, nutritious, satisfying and, when cooked to individual taste, a gastronomic delight. When made into omelets they become luncheon or after-theater supper mainstay with the addition of fillings, and can be anything from rustic to haute cuisine.
Conventional omelets can be filled with sautéed chopped sweet and hot peppers and Southwestern spices. They can be stuffed and topped with grated cheddar cheese (I like to beat chives into the eggs first for this one). They can be filled with sour cream and topped with sour cream and caviar. Speaking of sour cream, that’s a filling that cries out for shredded smoked salmon. There really is no end to the variation you can get with an omelet. I recently used sautéed scallions, leftover baked salmon, and cream cheese to make a filling. Exquisite!

My father once described the way his stepmother made omelets. She was New Orleans French and her method was to separate the eggs, whip the whites almost into a meringue, beat the yolks, fold them together, and bake in the oven. There is a region of France, but I forget what region, where there is a restaurant that makes almost nothing else but that style omelet. Other variations include the Spanish frittata and Chinese egg foo yung, and those are just the better-known permutations. Almost every culture that keeps chickens for eggs does omelets.

There is no end to the taste sensations you can get with scrambled eggs. There’s nothing simple about them, from the scrambling technique, to the cooking technique, to the flavoring technique. Start experimenting in your kitchen, and don’t forget, “Hot pan, cold fat, food won’t stick.” It’s a trick that works.

Bon Cuisine

(c) 2008 Katherine DeWitt