sweetspot

In Praise of Sugar

2012-01-10T12:42:00.001-05:00

Health obsessions come and go. You will recall the successive demonization of fat,cholesterol, trans-fats and the great anti-carb crusade. The last of these caused perfectlyrational people to convince themselves that a diet of bacon cheeseburgers wasperfectly OK as long as you abjured the bun. I suspect 2011 will be recalled as the year when demon sugarcaught the fancy of the nutritional exorcists. And don’t think this is an isolated American phenomenon, Ijust read a long article about how sugar is leading us to damnation in theCzech Republic’s foremost financial paper, HospodarskeNoviny (here’s the linkif you happen to read Czech). Nonetheless, the American health-advice industry still leads the world:just read Gary Taubes “IsSugar Toxic?” New York Timesarticle from last April. Thatpiece was largely devoted to examining claims made by Robert Lustig, aspecialist on pediatric hormone disorders and childhood obesity at UCSF. Lustig makes no bones about it: sugar is poison and it is evil. By the end of the article Taubesappears largely convinced. “Sugarscares me too,” he writes and worries about giving it to his sons.

Lustig’s argument is not that too much sugar is bad butrather that any amount of refined sugar is bad. It’s like saying that because rhubarb contains oxalic acid(which can cause health problems) strawberry rhubarb pies should bebanned. Americans have a tendency,though, to label food “good” or “bad.” If you eat the good stuff you will be svelte and fabulous and never dieand if you eat the bad you will go straight to hell wearing XXXL sweats fromWalmart. Subtlety does not makecareers or sell newspapers.

That said, Americans undoubtedly do eat too much sugar andother sweeteners, probably about twice as much as is healthful according to aFDA study quoted by Taubes. Butwhat exactly does that mean? We’reeating some 90 pounds per year. Which works out to about a half a cup a day or 24 sugar packets. A quarter cup would be probably be finethough, according to the FDA study, and just in case you’re wondering, that’s theequivalent of 8 Toll House cookies, 4 glazed donuts or about 3 slices ofpumpkin pie. The problem, ofcourse, isn’t that people are eating too much dessert but rather drinking toomuch soda. But telling people toeat a sensible quantity of sugar rather than abstaining altogether just isn’tthe American way. It’s like theadvice American teenagers are given about sex: just say no. It’s no wonder our teenage pregnancyrate is one the highest in the developed world and our obesity rate is just asbad.

So why can’t we just be sensible about all of this? I think it has a lot to do with thefundamentally puritan nature of our culture. At the root of this is the idea that pleasure issinful. Abstaining from pleasure(especially such sensual pleasures as sex and food) will ensure you a place inheaven while self-indulgence will send you straight to hell. Sometimes the vocabulary makes thisself-evident. Sugar is“demonized.” It is “evil.” Sometimes it’s more subtle thanthat. There is a widely heldbelief that it is up to you to determine how long you live. The more discipline you have, thebetter you are able to control your natural urges, the closer you can get tolife everlasting. The good (thosewho haven’t succumbed to their instincts) get to play golf in the Elysianfields well into their nineties, while the bad (who lived on Coke and KFC) arepunished with an early, painful end. This is the secular answer to heaven and hell but there is the same moralizingquality. When citing various studies on the effects of diet, journalists oftenwrite that eating or not eating ingredient X lowered the study participants’death rate. Of course what theymean is the death rate from a particular disease but that’s not the way itreads. To the best of myknowledge, our death rate remains 100% no matter what we do or eat.

We are hard-wired to like sugar much as we are designed toenjoy sex. Pleasure has anevolutionary basis. In nature,foods that are sweet are invariably not poisonous whereas bitterness signalsdanger. In many cultureschildren’s first taste of real food is something sweet and kids naturallygravitate to sweet foods. Doesthat mean that they should be indulged with a diet of Cocoa Pebbles andsoda? Of course not, but neithershould they be told that those things are “bad.” They need to learn that pleasure has its time and place;otherwise they will only associate it with being drunk in the back seat of aborrowed car—and regret it the next day. There is a twisted logic at work here: if pleasure is sinful you can only get pleasure from sinfulactivities and thus the greater the transgression the greater the pleasure. You will notice that the term “sinfullyrich” does not occur in Catholic Europe, but to us “sinful” is just a synonymfor “pleasurable.”

Sugar has long been a natural target for those who wish tosave our souls. Well before thecurrent sugar-bashing fad, sugar was associated with the miseries of the slavetrade and, while it is undoubtedly true that European sugar consumption habitsin the 17th and 18th centuries were the primary cause of the transatlanticslave trade and its associated horrors, it does not follow that sucrose issomehow malevolent. Was the sugarproduced by peasant farmers in India during this time more virtuous? Or the beet sugar produced after 1800 morallysuperior? Certainly 19th centuryabolitionists thought so (there was a movement to boycott slave-grown sugar inthe early 1800s). Some made thisexplicit, describing consuming slave-grown sugar as partaking “of other men’s sins”and the need to refrain from the pleasures of the tea table to safeguard theirown virtue. (See Lectureson Slavery, 160).

More recently (in the 1970s) sugar was linked with hyperactivity in children thoughthe consensus among researchers is that no such link exists.

Undoubtedly the current sugar witch hunt will come and goleaving people ever more conflicted and confused about what is on their plateand ever guiltier about each and every pleasure. But in the meantime I have every intention of enjoying mynext donut or that slice of tarte au citron and feeling virtuous pleasure withevery bite.

Punch

2011-12-09T11:26:00.001-05:00

Finally, as some approximation of winter settles in here in New York, I am reminded of visiting Vienna in its pre-Christmas cheer a couple of years back. I was doing research for Sweet Invention, traipsing from pastry shop to pastry shop. (Yeah, I know, it's a tough job.) And I kept running across groups of people standing around, their cheeks rosy and their fists filled with steaming mugs. Needless to say, I had to investigate, and discovered one of Vienna's winter wonders: punch (pronounced "poonch"). No this isn't the cold, spiked Kool-Aid you find at office parties but more like a rich, mulled wine. There are dozens of variations: some spiked with brandy, others with schnapps (aka eau-de-vie). They're delightfully warming and, given their alcohol content, they are highly conducive to holiday cheer. There was a punch craze all over Europe about two hundred years ago but whereas the taste for it faded in places like France and even England (its birthplace, thus the name), here the tradition held on.

Here's a recipe I put together by combining a few online sources. Great after a skating party, a day on the slopes or the most dangerous sport of the season, competitive holiday shopping.

Punch

makes about six, 6-ounce servings

1/2 cup brandy
1/2 cup golden rum
2/3 cup raw sugar or to taste
3 cloves
1 small cinnamon stick
2 pods cardamom
2-inch piece of vanilla pod, split lengthwise
4 slices orange (preferably organic)
4 slices of lemon (preferably organic)

1 bottle red wine (Beaujolais works well or if you want to be more authentic use something like Blaufrankisch)

Combine brandy and rum with sugar, spices, orange and lemon slices in a small pan. Heat to about 150°F. (Do not allow to boil!) Remove from heat, cover and let stand for several hours. Combine wine and brandy mixture and heat until very hot but not boiling.

Happy Holidays!

The Origin of the Bûche de Noël

2011-11-30T12:18:00.001-05:00

I was recently contacted by a journalist from Saveur about the origins of bûche de Noël, the “traditional” FrenchChristmas dessert. (For thearticle and a recipe, see Gabriella Gershenson, “A Slice of Christmas,” Saveur, December 2011) Today, you’ll seethe cake in every single French pastry shop around the holiday, made in theshape of a yule log. It isgenerally made in the form of a sponge roll cake frosted and filled withbuttercream. The idea derives froma folk celebration of Christmas where a log, large enough to burn for 3 days,is ceremoniously placed on the fire. The Brits have a similar tradition. (For the log, not the cake.)

But what of the cake? The earliest recipe of the cake shows up in Pierre Lacam’s 1898 Le memorial historique et géographique de lapâtisserie. The earliestmention however is a couple of years earlier in Alfred Suzanne’s 1894 Lacuisine anglaise et la pâtisserie where he notes in passingthat it is (was?) the specialty of a certain Ozanne, presumably his friendAchille Ozanne (1846-1898). Ofcourse we have no idea of what this looked like. An article in the French newspaper Figaro adds an interesting tidbit (see Pierre Leonforte, “Labûche de Noël : une histoire en dents de scie,” Figaro, 17 December 2000): according to Stéphane Bonnat, of chocolatier Félix Bonnat her greatgrandfather’s recipe collection from 1884 contains a recipe for a roll cakemake with chocolate ganache. Admittedly she makes no claim to this being the firstbûche de Noël.

It makes sense that the cake, like so many other Christmastraditions (think Santa, decorated Christmas trees, Christmas cards, etc) datesto the Victorian era, to a time of genteel, bourgeois domesticity. In France, in particular, a certainromantic image of peasant traditions had become part of the story the Frenchtold themselves about themselves and while the average Parisian bourgeois could hardly beexpected to hoist logs into their 4th floor apartment, they could at least showsolidarity for their country cousins by picking up a more manageable bûche at the local pâtisserie. That the result was a little kitsch fit the middle class sensibilitytoo.

If I had to guess, I would date the cake to the 1880s thoughit seems not to have taken off until the following decade. For an early recipe that begins toresemble today’s version see Joseph Fabre’s1905 Dictionnaireuniversel de cuisine pratique (This is the secondedition of the book—the first was in 1894—but I haven’t been able to locatethat particular edition), or look for Gershenson’s article.

Ladurée Comes to New York

2011-11-28T17:08:00.001-05:00

Despite my considerable curiosity, I held off some months before visiting Ladurée's new outpost on Manhattan's Upper East Side. Quite frankly, I didn't want to deal with the lines of macaronophiles eager to plop down $2.70 for each little cookie. And then there was that little snooty voice inside of me that kept saying, well it couldn't be as good as Paris.

To give a little background here, in Paris, Ladurée is the high temple of the macaron. Perhaps Pierre Herme's macarons are better and more inventive, but it is Ladurée that put these almond meringue cookies filled with buttercream on the map. They claim that the idea of creating the little sandwich cookies came from Pierre Desfontaines, a distant cousin of the Parisian shop’s first owner, some 60 years ago. While the claim is difficult to corroborate I'll take their word for it until something better comes along. Not that the idea of macarons is in any way new–in France it dates back to at least 1643. Even the idea of filling them was around in the 1800s, though the filling was jam in those days.

But today Ladurée is the last word on macarons and they've turned the little cookie into a world-spanning empire with outposts all over Europe, the Middle East and Japan. It's a little surprising that it took them this long to get to America. Needless to say, Ladurée is far from a small artisanal operation, it's more on the order Tiffany's or Louis Vuitton, though admittedly the French confectioner's luxuries are a lot more affordable. But can they keep up the quality while manufacturing macarons by the ton? Surprisingly, the answer seems to be yes, at least if the cookies at the Madison Avenue branch are any indication. A friend and I split four of them and here's my brief review (the texture on the cookies themselves was perfect, crisp yet barely resisting to the tongue):
Coconut: these were perfect, a delicate distillation of coconuttiness
Lemon: great flavor though I was a little surprised that the lemon buttercream was a little broken, this happens to me all the time, but I expect better than that from the Parisian masters

Raspberry: brilliantly intense flavor though I'm not convinced that leaving in the raspberry seeds does anything to the flavor
Violet-cassis: this was perhaps the one dud, any violet flavor was swamped with the cassis and, while the texture of the cookie itself was exemplary, the filling seemed, well, gummy

That said, they are likely the best macarons in New York. Though if you have the option, get on that plane to Paris.

Nun's Breasts

2011-11-16T15:25:00.001-05:00

Well I just couldn't resist sharing a brief article that appeared in Centro, a local paper in the southern Italian town of Pescara, brought to my attention by Luca Colferai (a Venetian and the primum movens of Il Ridotto). To see the photo gallery associated with the article see this link. The following is a rough and ready translation of the abridged version that comes with the photo gallery, the full article is here:

photo: Federico Deidda

Nuns' Tits, Abruzzo's wicked dessert celebrates 125 years.

A simple but delicious dessert made with just a few quality ingredients: sugar, flour and eggs to make the sponge cake; fresh milk, eggs, lemon zest and flour for the pastry cream. These were created in Naples between 1884 and 1886 by a native of Abruzzo who had come to Naples to learn the secrets of pastry. As for the rest, such as the quantities of the ingredients, this remains a secret passed down from generation to generation, unknown outside pastry shops. The origin of the name of what is now the sweet symbol of the town of Guardiagrele [a town in Abruzzo] is also a mystery. The first theory is that the original term was "tre monti" [three mountains], which referred to the mountains of the Maiella [now a national park], but was then transformed into nuns' tits by the popular imagination. The second hypothesis originates in the common belief among the laity that nuns, to make their feminine shape less evident, placed a lump of clothes (the third breast) between their breasts. The third theory has it that nuns of the Order of Saint Clare simply invented this sort of sponge cake and thus the association with the sisters. The colloquial name was simply a malicious play on the dessert's shape. Article: Rossano Orlando.

If you're interested in a recipe you could give this one a shot.

Pastry Jeremiad

2011-11-15T11:13:00.001-05:00

Like just about everything that happens in New York, theopening of Dominque Ansel’s new pastry shop in Soho was accompanied by a greatdeal of hype. And truth be told, Iwas excited too, because ever since François Payard closed his patisserie onManhattan’s Upper East Side, the city hasn’t had a decent French pastryshop. Ansel has good pedigree.Most recently he was the pastry chef at Daniel which has the reputation ofserving up some of the best French cuisine in town. So my hopes were high as weweaved and darted through the stream of Soho shoppers on a Sunday afternoon.

The pastry shop is modest, with a small glass-enclosedkitchen at the back that reveals a couple of banks of convection ovens. There is a very pleasant back yardwhere you can take the pastries, something of a rarity in New York.

We came on a Sunday afternoon so thefull assortment wasn’t out, though looking at the board there appear to be nomore than about a half-dozen pastries available at any given time. There is also a selection ofViennoiserie and Ansel has to be lauded for selling that Breton specialty the kouign amman, a disk of butter, pastryand caramel. Can’t report on thatbecause they were sold out. I didtry a palmier though, which isn’tmade so differently. It was OK,more dense and doughy than buttery and ethereal. So let us return to the pastry. Which was fine. About the level of a provincial French pastry shop without too muchambition or technique. In otherwords just about the level of other New York French-style pastry shops.

Take the “bunny cake” which exhibited about as much finesseas a Crumbs bakery or the gingerbread which looked like something sold atZaro’s.

My wife had the mini tartetatin which seemed like the beginning of a good idea. An individual thick round of apple nestled on a cookiebase. But it’s as if there was nofollow through. Somehow for $5.50you expect a flight of imagination, or at least a modest leap. Like Starbucks you’ll find the cups andplates are paper, the forks plastic.

It’s an interesting question, why French-style pastry shopshere are so mediocre. Obviously ithas something to do with an undiscerning clientele weaned on Twinkies andDunkin Hines. But that can’t beall of it. After all we have goodItalian restaurants which is clear evidence that we can overcome ChefBoyardee. Real estate may be partof it too as well as the wage structure. After Payard closed his wonderful pastry shop uptown he opened Francois Payard Bakery,which is all about mass production. My suspicion is that he just can’t get the workers with the necessaryskill level to make genuinely artisanal pastry.

In France pastry cooks have to go through a multi-yearapprenticeship (with little pay). Why would anyone bother to do it here when you can just open up anothercupcake bakery and hire workers with the skill set of twelve year olds. Another reason why French pastry seemsto be holding on in France in ways that it can’t here was pointed out to me by Emmanuel Hamon a talentedpastry chef in Brest. In Francepeople visit their neighborhood pastry shop virtually every day because theybuy their bread there as well. Asa result buying pastry isn’t some sort of esoteric, once a month activity it isa quotidian reality. This, inturn, supports numerous pastry shops which increases competition leading tobetter quality and variety. Ofcourse those conditions don’t exist here but still, you'd think a city like NewYork could support at least one stellar patisserie.

Pumpkin Macarons

2011-10-28T13:45:00.000-04:00

Macarons can be made in dozens of flavors but given theseason, I thought it would be fun to do a pumpkin version. I have a bit of a pumpkin obsession,having authored a whole book on the subject: The Great Little Pumpkin Cookbook. Macarons do require a certain degree of precision but theyare not as hard to make as some people would have you believe.

You will need some almond flour. If you can’t buy it, you can make yourown, just make sure the almonds are really dry. Separate the eggs at least 1 hour before using or preferablythe day before. And if you want toensure all the macarons are the same size draw circles of the desired size onthe back of the parchment. Anddo use a scale, it makes a huge difference here. And, oh yeah, don’t make them on a rainy day! (The pictures below were taken on a rainy day which is why the macarons didn't rise as evenly as they would otherwise.)

The recipe makes about 2 dozen 1 ½-inch macarons

215 g (7 ½ ounces) confectioners’ sugar

140 g (5 ounces) almond flour or sliced almonds

½ teaspoon ground cinnamon

100 g (3 ½ ounces) egg whites (about 3 large) at roomtemperature

pinch salt

25 g (2 tablespoons) castor or superfine granulated sugar

orange food coloring preferably paste or gel

Pumpkin buttercream (see following recipe)

1. Line two 18- by 13-inch cookie sheets with parchmentpaper adhering them to the sheets with a little butter.

2. If sliced,grind the almonds very fine in a food processor with about half theconfectioners’ sugar, scraping regularly. Add the remaining confectioner’s sugar and cinnamon and process until very fine. Pass through a medium-coarse sieve andregrind the remaining almond bits if necessary. If using almond flour, sift together with the confectioners’sugar.

3. Beat thewhites and salt with an electric mixer until soft peaks form. Add the granulated sugar and beat untilstiff and shiny. Add enoughcoloring for an attractive orange color and beat until homogenous. Using arubber spatula fold in the almond mixture in two additions until justhomogenous. The mixture willdeflate.

4. Fit a piping bag with a 3/8-inch (1 cm) round tip. Pipe the batter onto the baking sheets in circles about 1 inch in diameter.

Let the macarons dry about 20 minutes (alittle longer is OK if you need to cook them in two batches) so a little skinforms on the outside.

5. Preheat oven to 425°F.

6. Set the macarons in the center of the oven andimmediately lower the temperature to 350°F. Prop the door slightly ajar with a wooden spoon or somethingsimilar. For small macarons, bakeabout 8-10 minutes, larger ones will take about 12-15. They are done when shiny and hard on the outside. When you pry one apart it should be alittle moist in the middle. Set ona cooling rack and cool briefly. Remove from the macarons from parchment while still warm. Cool on coolingracks.

7. Sandwich themacarons with 1-2 teaspoons of buttercream. Set in an air-tight container and refrigerate overnight.

PUMPKIN BUTTERCREAM

makes about 2 cups (enough for about 4 dozen macarons)

2 large egg whites

2/3 cup raw sugar

pinch salt

6 ½ ounces (13 tablespoons) unsalted butter, slightly coolerthan room temperature, cut into 1-inch pieces

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

½ cup canned pumpkin puree (at room temperature)

½ teaspoon ground cinnamon

¼ teaspoon grated nutmeg

large pinch ground cloves

orange food coloring, preferably paste or gel.

1. Beat the eggwhites in a stand mixer until they form soft peaks.

2. Meanwhilecombine the sugar and about 3 tablespoons water in a small saucepan overmoderately high heat. Bring to aboil and cook to the soft ball stage (235-240°F) on a candy thermometer.

3. Graduallypour the syrup into the egg whites with the mixer on low speed.

Scrape down the sides and beat on highspeed until the meringue is at room temperature.

Gradually add the butter and salt, scraping down the sidesof the bowl regularly. Beat untilcompletely smooth and fluffy.

Gradually beat in the remaining ingredients adding enough orange foodcoloring to give the buttercream an attractive pumpkin color. If the buttercream seems to be separatingbeat on high until it comes back together.

A Little Cookie Detective Work

2011-10-11T19:33:00.000-04:00

Among the many desserts that I never covered fully in Sweet Invention because I just ran out of time and space was the humble drop cookie, perhaps one of the defining recipes of the home-baked American repertoire. What I mean is all those doughs make with sugar and butter that spread in homey, irregular rounds: chocolate chip, oatmeal, peanut butter and their kind.

The word cookie is undeniably Dutch in origin (from koekje=small cake) and began to be used English-language American cookbooks by at least the 1850s. Still, what it seemed to mean at this point was a small cake, a kind of muffin, rather than what we would think of as a cookie. In those days drop cookies were mostly called drop cakes. These little cakes came here from England. The eighteenth century cookbook author Hannah Glasse has a recipe (she calls them drop-biscuits). These, however, resemble lady fingers in texture rather than what we would think of as a cookie. Closer to the idea of a cookie is something called a “rout cake.” Mary Eaton, a British cookbook writer gives a recipe in The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary (1822):

ROUT CAKES.

To make rout drop-cakes, mix two pounds of flour with one pound of butter, one pound of sugar, and one pound of currants, cleaned and dried. Moisten it into a stiff paste with two eggs, a large spoonful of orange-flower water, as much rose water, sweet wine, and brandy. Drop the paste on a tin plate floured, and a short time will bake them.

(For an explanation of the name, see http://www.lynsted.com/html/georgian_-_rout_cakes.html.) Most drop cakes are what would consider a “cake”. And the same is true of early drop cookie recipes. The first real drop cookie recipe that I’ve been able identify (though the rout cakes do seem to be a distant ancestor) is something called “Boston Cookies” which begin to show up in the 1880s. These are essentially the earlier rout cakes but with less liquid and flour but more sugar. The Household: A Cyclopedia for Modern Homes (1881) gives the following recipe.

BOSTON COOKIES.
One cup butter, one and one-half sugar, two and one-half flour, one and one-half raisins chopped fine, one-half teaspoonful soda dissolved in a little warm water, three eggs, a pinch of salt and nutmeg and other flavoring to the taste. Mix well, roll thin, or better still, drop into the pans with a spoon and sprinkle granulated sugar over each.

When you look at the original Toll House cookie recipe, the proportions of butter, sugar and flour are identical (Nestlé later altered the proportions slightly.) This then may the direct ancestor of the drop cookie. Now to figure out whether it really did originate in Boston!

Bashing Wedding Cakes

2011-10-05T11:34:00.002-04:00

So I was in a taxi cab with an NPR reporter (busy shilling Sweet Invention, my new book on the history of dessert) when he told me a story that I find just fascinating. He was originally against the idea of having a wedding cake at his nuptials but he eventually relented, but in a rather singular way. He and his bride to be decided to replace the usual multistory extravaganza with a wedding-cake-shaped piñata and fill it with small bottles of booze and Twinkies. To top it all off, the couple placed sugar day of the dead skulls on top. I have to say that I was equal parts fascinated and horrified.

Having spent the last couple of years delving into the symbolic baggage of desserts (chocolate money, Barbie cakes, bone-shaped cookies, and so on) I couldn’t but stop and rejoice at all the symbolism inherent in bashing apart a symbol of wedding bliss filled with toy-sized bottles of booze and sweet relics of childhood.

Let me very briefly note the symbolism of the more ordinary wedding cake (or bride’s cake as it was sometimes known in the 1800s). In those days there was a kind of parallel between the virginal bride and the white-frosted cake, sometimes made explicit by the orange blossoms placed on both the bride and cake. The fashion for these white cakes originates with multi-story confection created by (mostly likely) Alfonse Gouffé for the wedding of the future King Edward VII and Princess Alexandra of Denmark. The idea caught on and white wedding cakes (they used to be pink or even red) became de rigueur.

One anthropologist has noted that the act of the newlywed husband and wife plunging a knife into the cake represents the consummation of the marriage. If that is the case what does the smashing of the piñata represent?

The next step is, of course, to share the cake among the guests. They are, in effect, the witnesses of the marriage act. The cake, quite literally embodies this. You can draw a parallel to the sharing of the host in a Catholic mass. So what does it mean to consume a plastic-wrapped, industrially-produced mélange of chemicals? Moreover one that is associated with childhood? Are we bearing witness to the creation of a new consumer unit with child-like impulses born out smashing apart a traditional symbol of marriage. Then there are the toy-sized bottles of booze. In the nineteenth century, candy manufacturers used to make sweets in the shape of gin bottles, guns and cigars so that kids could play at being adults. Like so many of candy-like cocktails popular today, the little bottles seem to point to the fact the line between child and adult is little more than a blur. But what should we make of the sugar skulls? An ironic reminder that all, including symbols and marriage, are as dust to dust? Or just more spooky candy, no more threatening than Jack-o-lanterns on Halloween. Well I guess kids will be kids…till death do us part.

Gelato on a Stick

2011-09-26T10:40:00.007-04:00

As a rule, I’m usually not fond of downmarket desserts go upmarket. You know, the fancy restaurant smores, the French pastry chefs making ring dings but while I have some principles they tend to get weak-kneed when it comes to gelato. Which brings me a little hole-in the wall in Greenwich Village called Popbar. The conceit here is that the place makes it’s own popsicles/ice cream bars which you get to dip in one of several chocolate coatings, sort of good humor on an expense account. The gimmick wouldn’t be much more that cute if it weren’t for the quality of popsicles which are either made with gelato or sorbetto (sorbet). On a cool September day, the ones made with fruit sorbet didn’t seem quite as inviting as the gelati, so we went for the chocolate, gianduia and pistachio gelato. All were yummy: the chocolate was terrific, the pistachio only a trace less so. Only the gianduia seemed a little wan. The friendly lady behind the counter dipped them in melted chocolate and rolled them in nuts. Worth a detour if you’re shopping at nearby Murray’s Cheese Shop or the other worthy stores of Bleecker Street nearby.

The Infantilization of American Taste

2010-09-14T15:54:00.002-04:00

Increasingly, Americans are eating like children. The most recent bit of evidence comes from an article in The New York Times about milkshakes served at fancy New York bars (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/08/dining/08shake.html?scp=1&sq=milk%20shakes&st=cse).

Americans have a fondness for drinks containing ice cream that goes back to the nineteenth century when soda counters were a respectable alternative to bars and taverns. In that abolitionist era, milk and milk products were the antithesis of the devil’s brew, associated with mother’s milk and purity, though not necessarily with childhood. The first ice cream-laced beverages were often carbonated “ice cream sodas” or “malts” made with malted milk and ice cream. (Malted milk is dry milk powder mixed with malted barley.) Shakes as we know them didn’t come along until the invention of the blender in the 1920s, which happily coincided with the beginnings of American road culture. Soon enough these calorie bombs became a favorite treat at roadside ice cream stands like Dairy Queen. Today’s “large,” (almost a liter) Dairy Queen chocolate shake is over 1100 calories. While ice cream sodas tend to have a Frank Capra small town association milk shakes evoke images of roller-skate outfitted waitresses in California drive-ins à la American Graffiti. They elicit early adolescence rather than childhood, an age of furtive kisses rather than teen pregnancy.

And after that excessively wordy digression, let us turn to The New York Times’ article which reports on the reinvention of the milkshake as a cocktail. In Brooklyn, now New York’s coolest borough, a reimagined bowling alley serves bourbon-spiked milkshakes. The rest of the menu, according the owners was designed with “childhood memories of birthday parties” in mind—but with booze. The trend has jumped the East River into creaky Manhattan where milkshakes have been spotted at the ultra-trendy Momofuku. In one recipe, the pastry chef Christina Tosi takes cereal milk (that is milk left over from eating dry cereal) and spikes it with Kahlua and vodka. There’s ice cream in there too. In Los Angeles where cool is always much cooler, chef Maria Swan, serves milk shakes based on such combinations as añejo tequila with dulce de leche (a sort of caramel), and Cherry Heering with lavender vanilla ice cream. She readily admits her inspiration is Bob’s Big Boy. While in and of itself, the trend is little more than a clever conceit, when you begin to see it as part of a wider phenomenon it heralds a significant shift in culinary culture. Some years ago, American restaurants and bars came to be afflicted by a plague of cocktails. It started with frozen margaritas but them moved to increasingly more complex mixtures. The result is invariably sweet. Moreover the drinks often share the palette of Crayola crayons. Foods associated with childhood, especially mac and cheese, now have restaurants dedicated to them. A place down the street from me offers a version with “Brie, Figs, Roasted Shiitake Mushrooms and Fresh Rosemary” along with more conventional offering. “Sliders,” small hamburger-type sandwiches are now filled with sophisticated fillings like duck confit and braised venison. Childhood desserts like cupcakes have turned into a global phenomenon. This is reflected elsewhere too.

Fancy restaurants offer deconstructed s’mores, the campfire dessert made with packaged graham crackers melted Hershey’s chocolate and marshmallows. Of course in the white-tablecloth version, the biscuits are home-made, the chocolate is French and the marshmallows are made with Tahitian vanilla. But the result is a little like the ten year-old smearing her face with her mother’s lipstick. Or perhaps the forty-five year old buying a toy car for fifty thousand dollars? Is this kid food masquerading as grown up food, or adult food pretending it’s child’s play?

Recently, social scientists have postulated that we should add another stage to the development of the human animal. In much the way that adolescence was invented in the 19th century, they propose a period of life called young adulthood that spans the period between the teenage years and “real” adulthood, which now seems to arrive at thirty. If this is indeed true then these childhood foods offer a sort of the booster seat to the grown-ups table. Or do they? Do the thirty-year olds then advance to a more adult phase of taste. Or do they simply continue eating more highly sweetened foods you can pick up with your hands for breakfast, lunch and dinner?

American brides now often turn to cupcakes instead of wedding cakes to celebrate their nuptials. It’s an interesting shift in symbolism. Whereas the white wedding cake so clearly stood for virginity devoured, the cupcakes seem to indicate that a wedding is just another childhood birthday party. I’m all in favor of parties but does the food have to cater to the tastes of a six-year old?

Cupcakes and Macarons

2010-05-30T10:01:00.008-04:00

I was recently in Paris, in part to interview the master pastry chef Pierre Hermé. In case you haven’t leafed through a Paris Match in the last dozen years, Pierre Hermé is one of those French culinary hypercelebrities, appearing regularly on television programs to deconstruct the state of French cuisine today. All the same, his celebrity is of an older more glamorous variety. He has not yet degraded himself by appearing on

Iron Chef. He is a recipient of the Légion d’Honneur, his nation’s highest honor. He brought a new spirit of inventiveness to French patisserie and as a consequence the French press has branded him with the rather dreadful moniker of the “Picasso of pastry.”

Macarons at Ladurée in Paris

I mention all this simply to contrast his fame with his personality which is entirely generous and free of any pretension. Hermé has the easy grace of the truly successful. We met in his miniscule office above his boutique in the ever fashionable Faubourg St.-Germain. The boutique is tiny and resembles an ultra-trendy jeweler more than a pastry shop. Each sweet sparkles under the carefully arranged spot lights. You can only fit in about a half-dozen customers at a time so naturally the line snakes out the door and down the block. (Hermé is a master of PR.) Upstairs, our conversation inevitably led to the macaron for this is the maestro’s claim to fame. Displaying no false modesty, Hermé admits to having started the macaron fad that swept pastry shops across the world in the last decade.

For those who haven’t visited a pastry shop in the last five years I should explain that the macaron is a confection of sugar, egg whites and almonds and goes back to at least the seventeenth century. I had always assumed that it was one of those Italian imports that arrived with Marie de’ Medicis or one of her crowd, but I have begun to have my doubts. I just can’t find any use of the term in Italian that doesn’t refer to pasta (or an idiot). (How “maccheron,” meaning pasta in both its meanings would become almond cookies is baffling to me—nevertheless the Académie française dictionary insists this the French word’s origin.) But whatever its origin it became a classic of the French pastry repertoire. There were lots of variations, including macarons stuffed with jam but it wasn’t until the 1940s (?) that someone had the bright idea of sandwiching two of these delicate cookies together with buttercream. And it wasn’t until the late 1990s that they became a multinational phenomenon and for this we have to thank M. Hermé. Bored of plain old chocolate and vanilla he started infusing his macarons with flavors of roses, green tea, licorice but also with such things as wild rose, fig and foie gras (that’s one in one macaron, mind you). Next thing you know, pastry shops in Los Angeles, New York, Brussels and Vienna had leapt onto the idea. Today you can walk into Picard, the French frozen food chain and pick up a selection of macarons with flavors like basil-lime, white peach-rose, and yuzu praline!

So why the obsession? I have a couple of notions about that. At their best the macarons are genuinely delicious. The intensity and clarity of the flavor translates into pure, uncomplicated pleasure. They are also small so that they are a practically guilt-free dessert, so important in this day and age when we give up pleasure so that we may prolong our joyless lives as long as possible. The flavors are often exotic but safe. They’re difficult to make so that we can exercise our connoisseurship by finding the very best producer—yet they’re informal. You eat them with your hand. It’s all so very 2010 (or perhaps 2005).

Cupcakes at Gerstner in Vienna

Now even as macarons have swept the French-style pastry shops in the United States there has been a local fad that is oddly analogous, mainly for cupcakes in an equally wide panoply of flavors (bacon, “chai-latte,” tiramisu, peanut butter...). For years it was a staple at children’s birthday parties, and like the macaron of old, in no more than two or three flavors. However unlike the macaron you need virtual no culinary acumen to make a cupcake. Most people make it from a cake mix. And like macarons, cupcakes have gone global.

The two desserts aren’t strictly analogous but I do think they give you insight into the state of European and American culture today. Increasingly, the old bourgeois structure is breaking up in on the old continent to be replaced by something at the same time more cosmopolitan yet attached to some hypothetical Europeaness. Luckily so far it has only been nationalism lite (if you set aside the Balkan conflagration). It would be interesting to analyze the exotic flavors of the macaron and where they come from. I bet it isn’t Africa or the Muslim world. In France the flavors often come from herbs or those extra-safe foreigners, the Japanese. Yet even while the macaron may be informal it is still a very adult-sort of treat. There is still a line drawn between childhood and adulthood by most Europeans.

But in the United States a youth culture has been dominant ever since the baby boomers hijacked the nation. In America, the ideal age is about 16. Old enough to drive and screw but as yet with many of the tastes of childhood. When not at work, the average American man dresses in sneakers, jeans, tee shirt and a baseball cap, the uniform of a twelve-year old. To an enormous extent these tastes apply to food as well. Sweet is the favorite flavor in America, whether in pasta sauce, bread, ketchup, breakfast cereal or 90% of all beverages. American’s love eating food by hand. Think of sandwiches, hot dogs, hamburgers, burritos and, naturally, cupcakes. The cake you don’t need to eat with a fork with a gooey uncomplicated appeal to childhood, much like the rest of American mass culture. It is the perfect dessert.

Yet as different as the two cultures are we all know how they are gradually turning into one. Walk through a typical European airport and it’s hard to tell anyone apart by dress alone any more. The fashion-makers across the world are using the same media to set their trends in motion. The most recent trend out of France seems to involve marshmallows (guimauves) a treat that seems almost as binational and infantile as Jerry Lewis.

Carnival Donuts in Innsbruck and Venice

2010-04-13T12:00:00.010-04:00

A few weeks back I happened to be in Innsbruck just as the Carnival celebrations were coming to a close. The holiday is decidedly more low key here than in Rio or New Orleans and has none of the pomp of Venice. In the Tyrol, which claims Innsbruck as its capital, fat Tuesday, or Fasching, is celebrated with a parade of the good burgers hidden behind grotesque masks straight from a Hansel and Gretel nightmare. Kids opt for princesses or Power Rangers, or whatever Disney dishes out that year.

Faschingskrapfen at Café Diglas in Vienna

But mostly, the imminent arrival of Lent is marked by an Alpine-sized avalanche of Krapfen. Krapfen filled with jam and cream. Chocolate Krapfen and vanilla Krapfen but also the eggy, boozy Eierlikor Krapfen filled with an egg-based liqueur. Of course Venetians would hardly be surprised that Carnival should be a time to gorge on fried dough balls, the city has its fair share of pre-Lenten fritters and for much the same reason as Catholic Austria. Doughnuts are an indulgence that used to depend on animal fat: clarified butter if you were really hoity toity but lard for most of the rest of us. Great cauldrons of simmering lard, something that would be strictly forbidden for the next forty days and forty nights. Thus the donut orgy before the fast.

Of course donuts are hardly limited to the catholic world or even Europe as any fan of Homer Simpson is well aware. They are certainly as old as the ancient Greeks and any civilization that has figured out how to fry food has its version. In India there is the dayglow tangle of dough called jalebi, Arabs have Luqmat al qadi, a ping-pong- size fritter that translates as “judge’s morsel,” Spanish speakers have churros, the Dutch have olie bollen which, according to some historians later turned into American donuts. And, of course we mustn’t forget zeppole served on St. Joseph’s Day, right in the middle of Lent, proving once again that Martin Luther was right about the Italians.

Roughly speaking there are historically two ways of making fritters. In the case of churros and at least a some of the fritters that go by the name bignè in Italy (from the French beignet). The dough is made by mixing flour into hot water. You often find egg in there too. There’s recipe for this sort of thing in the ancient Roman cookbook of Apicius. Scappi, the renaissance maestro, calls a much enriched version of the same thing frittelle alla Veneziana (sic). The other kind of fritters, the ones that are called fritelle alla veneziana today are essentially made with a bread dough, leavened with yeast. And this is the category to which the much-beloved Krapfen belongs.

The origin of a fritter called Krapfen probably goes back to the middle ages in Central Europe. A recipe from 1531 has you mix in honey and wine as well as the usual eggs, flour and yeast. These early recipes seem to have been unfilled. Instead there is some evidence that they were dipped in honey or possibly some sort of fruit butter (apples and plums were traditionally boiled down in Central Europe without the addition of expensive sugar). In this they may have resembled honey-dipped Levantive fritters or, for that matter, the fritelle di Chanukà of Venice’s ghetto.

Filled Krapfen seem to have come along only when they moved to the big city. In Vienna these filled donuts came to be called Faschingskrapfen, because of their association with Carnival (Fasching) though Krapfen were by no means limited to the holiday. The Florentine Gazetta Universale reported that in Vienna April 7 1790, Leopold II distributed 300 pounds of prosciutto, 3000 pounds of roast veal, 3000 bread rolls 2000 Krapfen after annual ceremony when vows allegiance were exchanged between him and the representatives of his domains. Rather skimpy if you ask me but the Hapsburgs were known to be skinflints. And Krapfen weren’t cheap. They ran one to two Kreutzers unfilled and double that with a filling. That would have cost an ordinary workman one or two hours of wages. The really fancy ones were even more. You could tell good quality Krapfen by the tell-tale ring around the edge. It told you the doughnut was light enough not to sink in the cooking fat. She as pretty as a Krapfen was high compliment. And when a gentleman was to intimate with a lady that they would share a Krapfen you knew that a proposal had better be in the works.

Krapfen at Pasticceria Tonolo

Yet just when the Krapfen craze reached Venice isn’t recorded. Or at least I haven’t been able to track it down. Presumably it came with the Austrian occupation after 1797 though I am skeptical that the locals would have leapt on the invaders’ fritter all that quickly. But sooner or later the German donut’s very obvious appeal overcame any nationalist reservations and the locals adopted it as their own. I am tempted to ascribe Florence’s bomboloni to the Austrians as well but here too I have no proof other than the very obvious similarity of the recipe.

Who could argue with the appeal a sweet snack endorsed by both Homer Simpson and John F. Kennedy. Well, OK, in both cases we’re dealing with fiction. A cartoon character in one case and an urban legend that when Kennedy stood in front of the Brandenburg gate and declared himself a “Berliner,” he made a grammatical faux pas and inadvertently declared himself a jelly donut. Well it turns out his grammar was actually just fine. A pity, it would have been a much more universal statement of the unity of humankind, if you ask me.

Monastic Sweets in Barcelona

2009-07-17T11:11:00.001-04:00

Spain isn’t the first place you think of when you contemplate dessert. Just why is a little unclear, the next-door Portuguese are dessert obsessed. Lisbon has more pastry shops than Paris, with a much smaller population. So why are the Spanish so lukewarm about dessert? Perhaps there isn’t really a place in it in the Spanish meal system. The Spanish eat a small breakfast but given the late meal times there is the national institution of snacking—tapas. You eat tapas at eleven to get you to lunch at 2 or 3 and you eat tapas in the early evening so you’re not starving by the time the 10 PM supper hour arrives. It’s hard to fit in a leisurely coffee and dessert somewhere in there. Perhaps equally important, the savory snacks end up doing the jobs of sweet snacks in places like Vienna and Brussels. Instead of a doughnut and coffee there is a slice of tortilla española and a glass of cava. Portugal, on the other hand, has much more of a coffee culture (the Portuguese seem to have as many words for coffee as the Inuit do for snow) so that a late morning snack will most likely be some sort of pastry washed down a sweet slug of caffeine. This is all theory mind you generated by a visit to Barcelona.
Barcelona is one of my favorite towns. It has the perfect location, right between the beach and mountains. It has wacky architecture. It has great food. Not only are there the ubiquitous tapas but the Spanish explosion of innovation is mostly centered here. The Boqueria is the world’s finest and largest covered market. But dessert? The pastry shops tend to be few and far between and vaguely French. The ice cream is expensive and either a pale imitation of Häagen Dazs or gelato. Still, there is at least one sweet spot worth seeking out. Located deep in the Barrio Gotíc, Caelum (c/De la Palla 8, tel. 933026993) specializes in serving and selling Spanish monastery sweets. You can taste them upstairs but it’s more fun to go to the downstairs cellar that once served as a Jewish baths. It’s all gloomy and candlelit in the best possible way. There are cakes of various kinds which seem just a little too homemade (and the ubiquitous brownies) but there is also a wide selection of packaged monastery sweets you can taste. Many seem to be based on some sort of almond paste which is fine by me. The lunitas, for example are a kind of half-moon of very thin pastry enclosing a moist marzipan-like filling. The pastel de piñon is much like an Italian pinoli cookie but somehow denser, chewier and more intense. Pestiños (also called borrachuelos on the package, presumably because they’re made with wine—borracho means drunk in Spanish), on the other hand resemble tiny doughnuts little bigger than a wedding band. There’s also something distinctly medieval about them, tasting, as they do, of honey and olive oil. The fourth monastery sweet I tasted was something called a polvoron, a kind of cookie that is the shape of a very large sugar cube. As you bite into it, it shatters into a powder (thus the name which comes from polvo—powder), it's barely sweet with perhaps just a hint of cinnamon. This is one of those cookies, like biscotti, that cries out for some hot chocolate, or perhaps a sweet monastic liqueur?

Chicken Pudding

2009-07-08T18:56:00.003-04:00

Every culture has its own taboos and rules about what is edible and inedible. There are also rules about what may or may not be combined: “thou shall not seethe a kid in his mother’s milk” in the Jewish tradition, Italians have a taboo about combining cheese and fish and most Europeans (with the huge exception of Spaniards) do not mix fish and meat. The great majority of the citizens of the EU also can’t abide meat that is sweet more than savory. The idea of dessert based on meat is fundamentally repugnant. Of course this was not always the case. In the UK mincemeat has traditionally been made with meat—though nowadays the only animal product it contains tends to be suet. Medieval Europe used to be obsessed with blancmange, a pudding typically made with chicken, almonds and sugar. Today, if you want to taste anything vaguely similar you’ll need to travel to Turkey.

In Istanbul, I had arranged to meet Mary Isin in front of Haci Bakir, the city’s most famous confectioner. Mary has written a book on Turkish sweets and like every good Brit (she has lived in Turkey for ages but still…) she adores a good custard. Haci Bekir is renowned for it’s Turkish delight but there’s nowhere to sit down, and no custard, so Mary dragged me across the street to Hafiz Mustafa Şekerlemeleri (Hamidiye Caddesi 84-86), a café that dates back to the 19th century. After a brief conversation with the owner her face lit up with a triumphant smile and she dragged me upstairs to the pastry maker’s café, a low-raftered affair—so low that the beams are covered with foam to prevent the customers from inevitable concussions. What she had been after arrived in a few moments. Tavuk Göğsü is about the closest thing to medieval blancmange. It is a milk-based pudding, thickened with rice starch and chicken. Yes chicken and plenty of sugar. As you bite into it, it has a texture that is oddly both chewy and smooth with little shreds of chicken breast in it. When the pudding is made, the bottom is caramelized to give it that contrasting bitter dimension. It’s very good, really. And if you don’t like it there’s always baklava on the menu.

All in the Name of Science

2009-06-01T16:44:00.007-04:00

So I thought I would test out the hypothesis whether you could make a Sacher Torte in 1832, or at least whether the chocolate was up to snuff. The first trick, of course was to get chocolate that would have been made the same way it was back then. Mexican chocolate is, sort of, though the brands typically available have cinnamon and sometimes almonds added to them. Luckily Taza Chocolate in Somerville, MA is making a stone-ground chocolate that is made, as best as I can figure out, much the way Baker’s and other companies would have made their chocolate a couple of hundred years ago.

I spoke briefly to one of the Taza owners, Alex Whitmore, and he explained how the chocolate is ground, mixed with sugar and then passed through granite rollers to smooth out the texture. No conching. And that’s critical because it is the invention of conching that created the really smooth texture we’re all used to now. Alex describes conching as a little like a long (mechanical) process of kneading the chocolate base which, rather than making the particles of cocoa smaller, smoothes their edges. It also mellows the flavor—you apparently loose the sour edge that chocolate naturally has. I have to say that I find the sour, almost spoilt milk flavor, of Taza off-putting. But then I grew up on Lindt and its likes. Americans who grew up on Hershey’s—which most European chocolatiers criticize for exactly this sour milk flavor profile—would probably like it. It is gritty though.

At any rate, if there is a chocolate that resembles the chocolate circa 1830, this is probably it. And how did it work on the Sacher torte, or more specifically the glaze? I can report that it did just fine. It melted a little more unevenly than normal but otherwise it behaved perfectly adequately. The resulting glaze was shiny and smooth, just as it should be. (I did overcook the glaze a little—I find it hard to get right when I’m making just a little glaze—but it still worked.)

The recipe I used was loosely adapted from Rick Rodger’s Kafeehaus, probably the best Viennese dessert book in English. His history is shaky but the recipes work. I wanted to make a 7-inch cake so I beat 6 tablespoons butter until smooth, beat in 2 3/4 ounces of bittersweet chocolate and 4 room yolks. Then I beat 4 whites until semi-stiff, beat in 7 tablespoons sugar until meringuish. This I folded into the yolk mixture, then folded in a half cup flour. That was baked in a (buttered and floured) 7-inch springform for about 45 minutes at 350°F. This was chilled to room temperature and flipped up-side down. Then there was the apricot glaze made by boiling down apricot preserves until thick and syrupy (make sure you buy preserves made with sugar not corn syrup!) then strained and brushed all over the cake. Finally I took a 3-ounce bar of Taza 60% Stone Ground Chocolate, combined it with 3/4 cup sugar and about a third cup water. This was simmered until glaze consistency. Rick says to cook it to 234°F which is all very well, but try getting an accurate measurement from a half-cup of glaze! I usually test it by dropping a few drops on a frozen ceramic plate. You want the consistency of fudge, more or less. Finally, I spooned the glaze over the cooled apricot glaze. Incidentally, the cake shouldn’t be refrigerated. It will keep fine, covered, for a couple of weeks. In a sense that’s the whole point of it. And yeah, you have to serve it with Schlag—whipped cream. Did the 15-year-old Sacher really invent this on the spot? My guess is that it took some years to get it right. But there is no reason to think that he couldn’t have due to the ingredients on hand at the time.

The Sacher Story

2009-05-26T14:59:00.004-04:00

I returned recently from a quick weekend trip to Vienna—a few too many tortes for two days—not that I’m complaining. But between bites I had a conversation with Ingrid Haslinger which got me thinking about stories and history, or at least about the kind of tales that are told about food.

Dr. Haslinger is a food historian and probably the most knowledgeable person in Austria (or elsewhere for that matter) on the culinary habits of the Hapsburg court. She’s written books about it and if you visit the jaw-dropping collection of Imperial Silver (the so called Silberkammer) in the old imperial palace (the Hofburg) she’s the one who wrote the labels that explaining what’s what.

At any rate we got to talking about the story of the Sacher Torte. The legend—as it is told in repeated retellings —is that the young Franz Sacher was once in the employ of Prince Metternich. (This was the string-pulling, reactionary chief minister of Austria in the early 1800s, the guy who is generally credited with setting up the post-Napoleonic European order. ) One day, the prince had a few of his chums over for dinner for which the fifteen-year old Sacher whipped up the first Sacher Torte. The noble-blooded diners applauded and the world’s most famous cake was born.

You have to admire the narrative: the adolescent wunderkind struck with the spark of genius, recognized immediately by the savvy old diplomat and his cronies. It’s a great story. The only trouble is, it’s probably not true. At least that’s Dr. Haslinger’s very credible hypothesis. Other than the rather incredible age of the young Sacher there is the date when this was all supposed to happen: 1832. The Sacher is a chocolate cake which is coated with apricot preserves and then a fudgy chocolate glaze. The problem is that chocolate smooth enough to form the glaze hadn’t been invented yet—that would come in 1879 when Lindt developed a way of making chocolate super smooth by processing it with a conching machine. But the other bit of damning evidence comes from an interview with the old Sacher himself that appeared in 1906 where he says he came up with the cake in 1840s. So what about the Metternich story? It may well originate with his son Eduard who recounted it in a issue of the Wiener Zeitung in 1888 (or supposedly did according to Franz Maier-Bruck's Das grosse Sacher-Kochbuch—I haven't been able to find the article in the actual newspaper). Did Eduard misunderstand something his father might have told him or did he simply put two and two together and get five? Hard to say. He had run a hotel since 1876 and a little publicity probably couldn’t hurt. It's interesting to note that the first recipe for it appears two years later though!

Let’s say for the sake of argument that the Metternich story is inaccurate. Isn’t it still of enormous interest, especially to a food historian? Certainly that it was widely circulated gave the cake inestimably more cachet than the more probable story that Sacher invented something like this cake (even if the glaze was later refined) in the 1840s to use in his catering business for ships on the Danube. If it was indeed first promulgated in the 1870s, the Mettenich origin myth tells something about the era of increasing industrialization and the PR potential of a good story in an era of increasing mass media. Dr. Haslinger tells me that we Americans are too prone to overemphasize the role of public relations in the history of food. Perhaps. But I would make the argument that the fable has had a greater influence popularizing the torte than any real history. Stories matter.

Oberlaa

2009-05-17T22:05:00.010-04:00

After long resisting Vienna's Oberlaa chain (how could they be good if they have so many branches?) I succumbed. You see I had coffee with the founder yesterday and he is/was by all accounts altogether brilliant when comes to pastry.

The Neumarkt branch spills out into the square, packed with a mixture of locals and a smattering of foreigners on a sunny Sunday afternoon. Oberlaa is probably the least traditional of the best known Viennese Konditerei. True to their reputation, the table menu features the "neu, new, nuovo, Mango-Schokolade Torte:" think layers of flourless almond cake (with a little praline perhaps?), Pariser Creme (chocolate mousse) and mango puree. And, oh yes, a thin layer of whipped cream. It's light and fruity, a nice balance of creamy chocolate and bright, tropical intensity.

There's a bit of Paris there in the mango—maybe even a little Guadelope—but it works. Perhaps because the chocolate isn't too strident.

Their chocolates are good too if a little sweet for my taste. A little like a Whitman sampler but one that actually tastes good.

Sluka

2008-12-13T17:00:00.000-05:00

Sluka, another of Vienna’s famed Zuckerbäckers is holding up less well under the Christmas onslaught. Admittedly, its location next to the Rathaus puts it just a few steps away from the ginormous Christmas market that takes over the square in front of City Hall. The market is great fun in a hokey, carnival kind of way. Seemingly, there are miles of stands selling kitsch and wurst. And Sluka does not bear the overflow with grace. The service is more brusque than efficient, the harried waitress demanding payment even as she drops my order on the table. Looking over the shop-worn desserts I had selected the strudel, thinking it a safe bet. Not so, it turned out to be soggy, mushy and overly sweet. No need to go to Vienna for this!

Demel

2008-12-12T21:20:00.000-05:00

Two weeks before Christmas, Demel is a madhouse. At five in the afternoon, the waitresses cut through the swaying shoals of tourists like sharks on a mission. The customers barely take heed though, transfixed as they are by so much towering confectionery. Demel’s is easily the city’s most picturesque Café-Konditerei with fittings that date back to the late 1800s. Admittedly, the design is just about as chaotic as the crowd with a confusion of styles that comes with a century of decorative accretions. The latest change came in 2002 when DO & CO the catering corporation that bought the storied confectioner added an open kitchen to the mix. Here, the curious can ogle the Sacher-Tortes being iced and chocolates receiving their final flourishes. I am of two minds about this. I love seeing the meticulous workers carrying out their métier, but it does turn the café into an even more Disneyesque production that it already is.

All the same, the cakes look damn good—not merely the tortes but also the strudels, tarts, and other more homey confections. I stick to the cakes though, ordering a slice of Maroni-Torte, a four layer affair of chocolate and chestnut cream robed in an infinitesimally thin coating of marzipan and an overcoat of chocolate glaze. Textbook perfect and the little “kiss” of chocolate dipped chestnut cream on top just adds to the delight. Demel’s at least seems to be surviving the corporate takeover rather well.

Gerstner

2008-12-11T18:59:00.000-05:00

Though Gerstner dates back to 1843, the Café-Konditerei on Kärtner Strasse, one of Central Vienna’s main shopping drags, is of much more recent vintage. No Gemütlichkeit here, rather a contemporary urban vibe keeps the room humming with conversation, the steam-engine hiss of the large, utilitarian espresso machine and the constant timpani clink of china on marble counters. The cakes are picture perfect though my Dobostorte —admittedly a dense confection of chocolate buttercream and some eight layers of vanilla cake—is perhaps a little denser than need be. And the coffee is thin.

And I’m a little put-off by the display of French-style macarons in the window. It makes me wonder if the management’s heart is really in the right place. I’m probably being unfair though, who am I to deny the Viennese these delightful Parisian treats.

Heiner Café-Konditerei

2008-12-10T20:49:00.000-05:00

A short walk from St. Stephen’s cathedral, L. Heiner is on Wollzeile 9, more or less cattycorner, from Hans Diglas’ café. Heiner has more Gemütlichkeit than class, the waitresses, outfitted with folkloric costume and orthopedic shoes, bustle with a slightly frenetic efficiency handing out fractions of cakes and sections of tarts. The Sarah Bernhardt Torte (€3.50) I order is a happy surfeit of cream upon cream; three layers of chocolate buttercream and two of mocha sandwiched by thin layers of walnut cake. All this is covered with a chocolate glaze. Yes, it’s a little over the top but what would you expect from a cake named after the famed actress.

Café Diglas

2008-12-10T19:24:00.000-05:00

I met with Hans Diglas at his family’s café at the height of Jause, the Viennese ritual of coffee with a little something on the side. The tables were filled with scowling, grey-haired men cemented into corners, protected from the world by their daily paper; young Frauleins in jeans inhaling cigarettes and exhaling gossip; tourists with lust-glazed gazes eyeing the Apfelstrudel and jam-filled Krapfen (doughnuts). Diglas is one of the few cafés that make their own desserts. Made fresh everyday, Herr Diglas boasts—as opposed to so many of the city’s Konditerei (pastry shops), he tells me, that freeze their cakes and defrost according to need. He declines to name names. Hans Diglas is hospitable to a fault, signaling to the waiter to bring over four desserts, “just to taste,” he assures me. Nevertheless he is quick to disabuse me of any illusions I may have about Viennese cafés and dessert. Not only did cafés here not serve desserts until very recently, he assures me, they were prohibited by law to do so. Though not every dessert was outlawed. For example the Nusskipferln (nut-filled horn) he insists I try was allowed. But forget the tortes for which Austrian metropolis is renowned. Those came later, at least to the kind of café Herr Diglas owns.

There is another sort of café, the so-called Café-Konditerei where desserts are the star attraction. These are the ones where ladies of a certain age traditionally linger throughout the afternoon nibbling on the endless permutations of butter, sugar and flour that the Austrians refer to as Mehlspeisen, (literally flour foods). The long history of the more typical café is of a place where men have congregated and consumed drug beverages, not merely the stimulating varieties but also wine, punch and other spirits. But sweets? Well European men are traditionally not supposed to have a sweet tooth. In Vienna the Café-Konditerei owners were so concerned that they were losing out on the male traffic that they petitioned the authorities to allow them to serve savory foods so that the coarser sex might have something to eat if they accompanied their lady friends to the confectioner’s shop.

Originally those confectioners set up shop to cater to the upwardly mobile bourgeoisie who couldn’t afford their own Zuckerbäcker as these artisans are know in Austria. When a lady wanted to host an afternoon tea, she would contract one of these shops to supply the necessary sweets. The fashion for a sweet afternoon Jause seems to have arrived with a fashion for all things French around the turn of the nineteenth century. Eventually, the sweet shop would add a few tables and respectable ladies had a place to chat and nibble on Torten while their husbands cut deals in a smoke-filled Kaffehaus.

But back to those Torten. Don’t image for a moment that there is some antique origin to those delightful strata of sugar and fat. Even that delectable lodestar of Viennese confectionary, the buttercream, dates to the end of the nineteenth century. Jószef Dobos is credited with inventing it in the 1880s. It’s worth remembering that it is virtually impossible to produce buttercream on a commercial basis unless you have dependable refrigeration. So we can thank the industrial revolution not only for flush toilets and espresso but buttercream as well.

At Nakur

2008-11-01T01:17:00.000-04:00

Kolkata sweet makers have a weird life, like bakers the world over, they sleep while the rest of us work and make themselves busy into the deep hours of the night. When you visit the sweetshops in the afternoon—at least those where the workshops are in the rear of the store—you see the workers sprawled on benches and any other elevated spot, tossing and turning in an effort sleep. As best as I can figure out, many of them live here much of the time. If you want to see the action, you need to wait until dark. Most of the confectioners don’t start production until six, seven o’clock so the sweets are fresh the next morning. Remember, there are no refrigerators here.

The best example of one of these small confectioners is Girish Chandra Dey & Nakur Chandra Nandy, one of the best loved and oldest sweetshops in North Kolkata. Nakur, as everyone calls it, is on a busy commercial lane in the skein of densely trafficked streets that make up the old Shyambazar district. The shop itself is little more than a grated hole in the wall but the locals who line up at the window and the connoisseurs who have braved the traffic across town, know that this is where you can find some of the finest sandesh in Kolkata, delicate and creamy with a subtle grain that melts gradually and unevenly in your mouth.

This is probably the spot to discuss Kolkatans’ most beloved sweetmeat. Whereas rossogolla seems to incite controversy and reactions that I associate with soccer hooligans [see http://www.shantanughosh.com/2007/06/rshogolla-from-orissa.html for a little sample] sandesh seems to be primarily on object of affection. There is controversy, no doubt, but little bloodlust. I had the good fortune to have Joydeep Chatterjee my Kolkata sweets guru open the door for me at Nakur. Here there is no secret (or not much) to how sandesh is made. In fact, regular mortals can see right into the workshop as they shop for their sandesh. The workroom is astonishing simple. A large gas burner or two with a giant karai (Indian wok) set on top. A couple of sinks. And that’s about it. The workers mostly work squatting on the floor assembling the confections.

The process of making sandesh is easy enough to describe—the finesse comes in the execution. And the ingredients. In the early hours of evening, milk trucks pull up to the front of the shop, buckets of fresh, raw cow’s milk are carried inside and then pasteurized. Then a worker adds a small amount of the sour whey from the last batch of chhana. This curdles the hot milk. Then the milk solids, called chhana, are scooped out and allowed to drain. This is, incidentally, exactly the same process as making ricotta. Now the milk curds are set on a wooden board, set at an angle over a sink, allowing the whey to seep out gradually. Then comes a light squeeze in a linen cloth and finally the critical step where the chhana is kneaded, by hand, to achieve just the right texture. I am introduced to the master kneader, Uchit Narayan, the one Joydeep told me he would adorn with jewels and honors, if he had the power. Uchit grins at me and gets back to work.

Once the curds are the perfect consistency, they are cooked with a sugar syrup. Depending on the desired result, you will cook them more or less time. Cook the mixture briefly and the sandesh is the consistency of a light delicate cheesecake. Longer contact with the fire and the sandesh is drier so it can be molded and filled—much like Belgian chocolates. At Nakur the fillings vary from lemon to black currant to even vodka!

So what makes Nakur better than the great majority of Kolkata sweetshops? First the milk. Protap Chandra Nag, who runs the shop, quips that K.C. Das uses pasteurized milk for their confections and so his sandesh has no flavor. Another reason is the slow process of draining the chhana which maintains the fat content of the milk. Joydeep tells me that a lot of sweetshops weigh down the [warm] chhana to extract the whey, losing a lot of butterfat along the way. They can render the fat and sell it for ghee but the sandesh is poorer for it. Finally, the apostates will the knead the chhana in a machine. A horror, my guru assures me.

So what is my favorite here? I think it is one of the simplest: a sandesh filled with a mix of soft chhana and evaporated milk. It’s like an edible haiku on the many forms of creaminess.

Visiting K.C. Das

2008-10-30T01:26:00.000-04:00

The morning after Kali Puja, the atmosphere is even thicker with the air-borne particulate from what must have been tens of thousands fireworks and crackers that blew up last night. It’s a little ironic that the city has banned smoking just about everywhere but in your home. I’d hard enough to imagine what the lungs of a non-smoking Kolkatan look like, the smokers must be in dire state indeed. But I don’t have much time to ponder the public health concerns from nicotine in the developing world. My crash course in Indian desserts is about to accelerate.

Today I made an appointment with K.C. Das, or to be more precise with Dhiman Das, one of the partners in this venerable institution. K.C. Das is like Vienna’s Demel, an urban icon that people like to grouse about: “It’s not as good as it used to be….you can find better sandesh…rossogolla…at (and they fill in the name of their favorite sweetmaker).” But it’s on every list of the city’s best confectioners. The company’s sweet-making facilities and offices are located in Baghbazar, an old neighborhood in Kolkata’s north end where many of the city’s most famous sweetshops are located. Not that I’m allowed to visit the factory—I’m quickly whisked off to the Das family home where I wait in a dim old-fashioned parlor hung with modern art and religious icons.

Dhiman Das is meticulously polite but only modestly forthcoming. He tells me the family legend about the invention of rossogolla, the shop’s claim to fame. The way he tells the story, his great, great, grandfather Nobin Chandra Das created what is now one of India’s favorite desserts through a process of trial and error. He was looking to create a sweet moister that plain old sandesh, something that would quench thirst as well as the sweet tooth.

I saw rossogolla being made later in the day at a local neighborhood sweetshop. You can see the setup in the picture below. Presumably the arrangement in the K.C.Das kitchens is a little more up-to-date but the process is much the same.

To make rossogolla you take chhana (fresh cow’s milk curd cheese) and knead it to the correct consistency, then you stir in a little maidam (wheat flour) and make balls of about an inch (or a little more?) in diameter. These are then boiled in syrup, drained and placed in cool syrup. In the process, they blow up to more than twice their diameter, become lighter and bouncier.

There are numerous variations (mango rossogolla anyone?) but one of the classics, apparently created by Nobin Chandra’s son, is rossomalai (rosso refers to syrup and malai to milk). This is made exactly the same way as rossogolla except that in this case it is soaked in a milk-based and saffron-tinted syrup. The result is creamy, delicate and almost like a really good ile flottante, but much less insipid. Dhiman Das tells me all the Westerners like it the best.

As we sit, he sets a feast of sweets before me, not only the famous rossogolla and rossomalai, but also a whole assortment of sandesh: plain, stuffed, light and airy as well as dense and chewy. There are also a whole series of new inventions where rossogolla is sandwiched with sandesh. I’m not entirely convinced by these. I think the textures detract from each other. Still it is all very educational.

Dhiman Das sends me home with two big cans of rossogolla. They’ve been canning these since the thirties. We’ll have to see what the folks back home have to say about it.

Kali Puja

2008-10-29T01:39:00.000-04:00

In Kolkata, the morning’s thick, pink air fills once again with a slowly-building crescendo of blasts and beeps. Much to my amusement, the newspaper features a story on regulations meant to minimize the noise pollution of Kali Puja, when celebrants set off fireworks and firecrackers to serenade the goddess. Firecrackers that generate more than 90 decibels at 5 meters distance are supposed to be banned (for comparison, that’s like a jackhammer at about a meter). The next day The Telegraph reports that almost 800 people were arrested in the night for noise violations. But my question is, aren’t these firecrackers just another note in the city’s cacophonous cantata, just the loudest crash of cymbals at the concert’s end. What’s more, Kali isn’t exactly the type to go in for law and order.

She’s heavily into sweets though. When you visit the temple in Kalighat, the little shops that line the alleys surrounding the temple as well as the cramped courtyard inside sell basically two things. Little sweets made of thickened milk and sugar, some flavored with a few grains of cardamom, and garlands of hibiscus. The goddess is apparently as fond of the blood-red flowers as the sugary snacks. The shops get deliveries of a great mounds of the sweet paste which they then form into disks about the size of a silver dollar. These then get packaged into a dry leaf cone with a few blossoms to decorate the offering. You then line up (for hours!) to present the sweets to the priests.

But I’m getting a little off subject here. Because the sweets for which Kolkata is really known are not considered acceptable to the goddess or any of the rest of the Hindu A-Team for that matter. What Bengal is know for are desserts based on a fresh curd cheese, called chhana in Bengali. It’s made more or less the same as Spanish queso fresco or, for that matter, North Indian paneer, by curdling hot milk with a little acid and draining off the whey. (Curdled milk is considered impure to ultra-orthodox Brahmin and thus the gods.) To make paneer, the curds are then pressed into dense bricks and then typically used in savory recipes. For chhana the milk solids are kneaded to an appropriate consistency and then further processed into a whole menagerie of sweets, the most prominent of which is called sandesh. This can take the form elegant little cheesecake-like pillows or be denser and stuffed with nuts or other fillings. There are also variations that are simmered in syrup or soaked in a saffron-tinted milky liquid. There exist dozens if not hundreds of permutations.

But it all comes down to the kneading, I’m told by Joydeep Chatterjee.

What’s the point of coming to India if you can’t get yourself a guru? And I couldn’t ask for a better one. Not that Joydeep exactly fits the stereotype, he is clean-shaven and modestly rotund. Though not modest in most other respects. When he speaks, whether indoors or out, it is always to the balcony. It turns out he trained as a physicist at Oxford (or was it Cambridge?) with a specialty in chaos theory. (Now that’s something that comes in handy in Kolkata!) These days he mostly works as a journalist and his obsession, as I find out in intricate detail after a two-hour lecture, is the field of Bengali sweets.

Bengalis can’t knead the chhana, he tells me, “this is the kind of job which is not possible for Bengalis to do because the kind of bone structure we have, the kind of anatomy we have, the kind of inner strength that we have with this kind of weather.” No, what you need is a guy from Bihar. And he assures me he knows the best one in Kolkata. “I’ve always told him that if I were the king—or some such thing—in India I would be adorning your hands with diamonds and whatever I have” he says, adding, “He’s such an important man…” Because unless the chhana is kneaded to the right consistency it doesn’t have the right grain. And that, Joydeep insists, is worse than a disaster. I’m promised an introduction to the chhana master on the following day.

You get this really warm and cozy feeling in your stomach when you finally meet your guru, especially when he takes you along to visit his pals.

On the Eve of Kali Puja

2008-10-28T00:18:00.000-04:00

The first thing that hits you as you emerge from the city’s grubby arrivals terminal is the air: thick and acrid, like a still, poisonous fog. The second thing is the cacophony of traffic. Indians treat their cars as percussion instruments with a wide range of taps, raps and blasts that express their intentions, emotions and position in the hierarchy of the road. The caste system is alive and well here. The diesel-belching trucks are the Brahmin of the road, bullying everyone out of their path in the choked roadway. Buses and taxis compete for second place, the latter unequal in mass, certainly, but they make up for it by their sheer entrepreneurial whim. Then come the skittish passenger cars and the three-wheeled auto rickshaws. Finally, the human propelled rickshaws have their own unique spot in this hierarchy. Because they are the untouchables the rules don’t really apply, allowing them to weave through the fitful flow with a kind of reckless oblivion. And the pedestrians? They are insects, scurrying to preserve their lives.

It takes well over an hour to get to the center of the city, past lakes and ponds, and mud huts with sagging roofs surmounted with great billboards advertising luxury high-rises. Kolkata itself could be a lovely city, a Barcelona on the Ganges. It is full of charming, wacky and just plain odd buildings that remind you of what a peculiar place the Indian raj must have been. The Anglo-Indian cuisine that developed here is surely one history’s more grotesque miscegenations, but the architecture that dates from the years when Kolkata was the colonial capital is delightful. There are gorgeously crumbling mansions in a vaguely beaux-art meets Taj Mahal style as well as handsome apartment blocks with names like Palace Court. But of course, that isn’t what the first time visitor notices. What you see the trash and the disrepair and the poverty. But please, don’t come here, if you can’t see beyond that, because there is so much more.

It is the eve of Kali Puja, one of the many festivals, or pujas, that Kolkatans celebrate. Elsewhere, the holiday is called Diwali and it is dedicated to the Lakshmi, the goody-two-shoes goddess of grace and prosperity. But not here. In West Bengal it is devoted to Kali, the vengeful mother goddess. Block associations, sports clubs and everyone else with the time and the money puts up shrines all around the city with life-size or mostly bigger idols of the goddess with her necklace of skulls and her tongue stuck out in surprise. There are prizes given for the best shrine, the best lighting and even the best sound effects. Garlands of colored lights make some blocks look like Christmas in Brooklyn. Along S.N. Banerjee Road, garlands of flowers lie in twisted piles of yellow and orange along the side of the dusty road. Opposite, the shops full of carefully framed images of the goddess are fronted by chest-high baskets of sugary sweets dyed in colors too outrageous for mere nature—all watched over hundreds of palm-sized statues of the approving goddess, each hot-pink painted idol, carefully tied in a cellophane cocoon. She gets her sweets tomorrow.

My Slow Food Problem

2008-08-22T08:58:00.000-04:00

Now don’t get me wrong, I love the flavor of freshly-picked, $4.50 per pound farmer’s market heirloom tomatoes as much as anyone. Maybe more. For lunch today I cut some up in thick slices, and laid them out on organic bread slathered with Hellman’s (OK, I am weak) and sprinkled sel gris on top. And I have been known to pay $20 dollars for a couple of not terribly weighty pork chops and, yes, they tasted lardy, gamey and delicious the way pork chops are supposed to taste and, yes, I abhor the way that clever animals like a pigs are crushed and abused worse than commuters on the No. 6 train

But I am also white, middle class and food obsessed. Still, I am not delusional. And when I hear one of the organizers of the Slow Foodapooloza in San Francisco start talking about reviving the idea of the Victory garden as a way of giving disadvantaged people in the United States access to fresh, wholesome food I am convinced that the Slow Foodies are so insulated from reality that they make George W. seem like a reincarnation of Upton Sinclair. Anya Fernaldis, the Executive Director of Slow Food Nation, readily admits that minimum wage workers are hardly worrying about sustainable agriculture. So her suggestion is that they plant gardens and harvest the fruit of their labor. It worked for middle-class, suburban and rural families during the two world wars. So why not in the ghetto or the trailer park? She says that’s it’s a question of time if you don’t have the money. Time? Is her head so deeply buried in the compost that she think single mother’s are just hanging around the house watching Oprah? That families that have seen their wages erode and erode to the point where practically every family needs two wage earner’s to keep their heads above water has time? Has she any idea how much lead there is in the ground in the inner cities? Does she think that the people who can’t afford my $4.50 tomato have other things to do with their free moments than to dig in the soil with the hope that 5 months later, they will be able to harvest a crop of zucchini? This seems like the kind of prescription Marie Antoinette would have cooked up had she been a soccer mom.

And anyway, I’m not really sure that the concern of most slow foodites is to take the revolution to the people. The organization is fundamentally about class anyway. Or to be fair, it’s about eating really good food which can only be produced in labor-intensive ways which makes it unaffordable to the commoners and thus makes it a very convenient class marker. Like the opera or the ballet but tastier. That doesn’t make it “bad,” just a little delusional.

Crystal Dunes

2007-10-03T14:55:00.007-04:00

I ended my visit to Louisiana’s cane country by visiting a modern sugar factory, constructed in 1961, it was the last one built in the state.As you walk around the Cajun Sugar Cooperative plant you are buffeted by an ever-shifting mixture of smells: the sour earthy funky manure smell of molasses, the sharp putrid vegetal smell of freshly ground cane (called bagasse). There are hints of mown grass, hay, caramel and sweat. The Cajun produces a million tons of raw sugar in its grinding season, more than three times what the entire state of Louisiana produced a hundred years ago.

I was taken around by the Lance Weber. Lance looks more like a linebacker than the operation’s manager of a sugar mill yet it’s up to him to make sure the system doesn’t stumble. Once the mill is cranked up in late August, it runs 24/7 until sometime in December. “She’s like a woman,” Lance tells me with a whisper of a smile, “once you get her going you got to go with it.” In some ways, the process of making sugar is exactly the same as it has always been: you squeeze the cane, boil it down, crystallize it and drain off the molasses. But the speed, scale and efficiency would leave the tycoons of the last century breathless.

The cane that arrives in flatbed trucks and giant metal carts is transferred to conveyor belts by a giant claw that seizes the enormous bunches of grass much like the little mechanical grabs that pick up fuzzy toys in supermarket vending machines. At the end of the belts, a non-stop Niagara of cane cascades down into a long maw that chews it up and spits it out onto another conveyer belt, now looking more like mulch rather than anything you’d want to stir into your coffee. This is fed into a battery of four rollers with interlocking teeth that shred and press this wet hay to extract as much juice as possible. This repeats once, twice, six times. The leftovers, that is the bagasse, are fed into four-story high furnaces that feed steam turbines that keep the process running. Any excess steam is used to keep two electrical generators—named Donna and Paule Ann—producing electricity. A woman’s work is never done, it would seem.

At this point the cane juice is clarified by the addition of lime to precipitate out the solids. Lance pulls out a test tube of the clarified juice, which resembles nothing so much as a urine sample. As you move up in the plant, the heat slowly increases. It’s never exactly hellish but you do occasionally think of purgatory. An especially depopulated one however.

About five workers are inside the plant at any given time, most of them huddled in an air-conditioned room that acts as a kind of cockpit for the entire operation. (Lance shouts over the roaring turbines to tell me that twenty years ago, there would have been four times as many employees.) Once the juice is clear it is pumped into evaporators first at 240°F and then under a vacuum at 140°F. The resulting syrup is thick and the color of dark caramel.

This syrup is now pumped into tall cylinders that each hold some 21,000 gallons of the warm sweet liquid. To turn this into sugar, workers add anywhere between 750 and 7,500 gallons of brown sugar (this is more art than science apparently) to encourage crystallization. As the slurry cools, the sugar crystals grow, first elongated prisms and then small square crystals. Judging just when to strike the sugar (that is to stop the process) is as much a matter of expertise as it ever was. You test it by pulling a long plunger out of the cylinder smearing a little on a glass slide and looking through a loupe. What you see are crystals suspended in a light caramel solution. At this point the taste is like an incredibly complex light brown sugar. But the process isn’t finished yet. Now the sugar is spun in a centrifuge outfitted with filters that will not let the crystals pass through. The molasses that is expelled is a thick aromatic goo. It is seeded, struck and spun two more times. By the third strike, the final molasses is loam black, dense and sticky—there’s almost no sweetness left now. The sugar that results from the third strike is what they use to seed the syrup. Too bad, it’s an incredibly flavorful, earthy and perfumed dark brown sugar with notes of vanilla, bourbon and resin. Lance wrinkles his nose. “I don’t like the taste of molasses.”

he tells me as he leads me around the outside of the plant to an enormous corrugated hangar where sugar, the color of sand, spills off the conveyor belt. A wheel loader pauses from its task of shoveling this two-story high dune of sugar into the waiting flatbed container so that I can climb this sweet mountain, like an ant in a sugar bowl. I pick up a handful of the raw sugar. At this point, it is 98.5 percent pure, made up of uneven crystals that glisten like rough treasure in the pale light. The raw sugar crystals dissolve on the tongue leaving behind sweetness and smoke.

Louisiana Sugar Festival

2007-10-01T21:27:00.000-04:00

I barely had time to put down my bag in my room at the New Iberia Holiday Inn when I hear the knock on the door. "Do you want to drive or sit with the queen?" Well what would you do? Ten minutes later, I'm sitting sandwiched between Cajun royalty in a shiny white SUV cruising down highway 90 chauffeured by the assistant sheriff and accompanied by an escort of a dozen police motorcycles, lights flashing, to take us all to the reception for the soon to be crowned King Sucrose LXVI.

In the front seat sat last year’s Queen Sugar, an articulate young woman decked out in an emerald satin gown, her hair neatly coiffed to accommodate the green crown fashioned to resemble stalks of cane—looking for all the world like she had descended from the Emerald City of Oz. Her highness explained how she had spent the year touring local festivals often accompanied by other festival royalty–Queen Shrimp and Petroleum, (Shrimpers were initially dead set against oil rigs going up in their fishing grounds thinking it wreak havoc with the ecosystem—it turns out that shrimp loved the rigs, using them for breeding—next thing you know, the best catches were right by the rigs.) Queen Crawfish and Queen Swine–beating back the armies of NutraSweet apostates even as she held high the standard of the cane industry. Seated just in front of me was the outgoing King Sucrose along with his consort Queen “B.” “The ‘b’ is for bagasse,” the affable queen offered across her shoulder, “But we shortened it. You know, it just didn’t sound good.” (In Louisiana the word is pronounced “bag ass” with the accent falling on the second syllable.) Me, I was wedged in the back seat beside the rather demure sexagenarian crown prince and his queen bagasse to be. I have to say, all of them looked fabulous.

As we sped from New Iberia to Lafayette past the cane fields of southern Louisiana I kept trying to imagine these tux-bedecked farmers growing up in rural isolation, the mud-spattered sons and daughters of generations of cane growers. Electricity wasn’t common in these parts until the 1950s. Sugar was something you sold to make ends meet not something to waste on dessert. I asked them what sort of sweets they ate growing up.

“We never had dessert in the house,” the new queen consort shakes her head.

“We were poor,” His Highness King Sucrose LXV joins in, “Our snack when we came home was sweet potatoes and milk.”

“Him, they were rich,” the new queen points to her husband, “they were the first one’s to get electricity—and he got pig’s ears.” A broad smile ripples his abashed demeanor as he reminisces about oreilles de cochon, a kind of flat Cajun fritter folded over to resemble pig ears and soaked in Steens’ syrup.

Steens figures prominently in local mythology. They are the last local producer of cane syrup. This dense, dark, molasses-inflected syrup is made by boiling down cane juice until it reaches a thick caramel-like consistency. “Not that they make it like they used to,” grumbles another former King Sucrose, later, at that evening’s reception. “You know they used to harvest the cane by hand and feed it into the mill right there—but now they bring in the sugar syrup by the tanker load from South America.” I ask if still tastes the same. He nods his head, loathe to admit it. I met more royalty than I can count that night. And they all seemed pleased to see me.