1,000 Foods To Eat Before You Die: A Food Lover's Life List (158 page)

Be sure to try the tartar sauce, a creamy, pungent blend with mashed boiled potatoes as its velvety base; its resemblance to Balkan
scordolea
(see
listing
) may result from the Croatian origins of the Buich family, who bought the restaurant from John Tadich in 1928 and have been running it ever since.

Where:
240 California Street, San Francisco, tel 415-391-1849,
tadichgrill.com
.
Further information and recipes:
Tadich Grill
by John Briscoe (2002).

“Almost every person has something secret he likes to eat,” wrote M.F.K. Fisher in her essay “Borderland,” describing the guilty pleasure she once found during a winter in a depressing quarter of Strasbourg. To amuse herself in her fancy hotel room, she froze sections of peeled tangerines out on her frosty window ledge, then quickly thawed them on a radiator: “It was then that I discovered how to eat little dried sections of tangerine. My pleasure in them is subtle and voluptuous and quite inexplicable. Perhaps it is that little shell, thin as one layer of enamel on a Chinese bowl, that crackles so tinily, so ultimately under your teeth. Or the rush of cold pulp just after it. Or the perfume. I cannot tell.”

Secret habits aside, there’s no need to attach guilt to the palate-tingling curiosity that is the tangerine (
Citrus reticulata
). A type of mandarin, the small, loose-skinned citrus fruit is notable for its unusual, tangy-sweet flavor, its lavish juiciness, and the ease with which it is peeled.

Mandarins originated in Asia and have been cultivated for more than three thousand years, but tangerines acquired their nickname near the end of the nineteenth century, when they were first imported to the United States from Tangier, Morocco. Other easy-to-peel mandarins include the tiny, seedless clementines, sometimes referred to as seedless tangerines, and the Satsumas developed in sixteenth-century Japan, but true tangerines are the most pungent in flavor.

Within the tangerine category, there are a number of hybrids, including the murcott, or honey tangerine, which is not nearly as delicious as the Ojai pixie (in season March to May) or the increasingly difficult-to-find Dancy. The fruits are widely grown in Florida and California, during a short season that runs from November to January—a good time to enjoy their wallop of vitamins A and C. This is all a lot to sing about, which is probably why there have been at least five bands called Tangerine.

Mail order:
Melissa’s Produce, tel 800-588-0151,
melissas.com
; Hale Groves, tel 800-562-4502,
halegroves.com
.
Further information and recipes:
Uncommon Fruits & Vegetables
by Elizabeth Schneider (2010);
epicurious.com
(search tangerine granita; tangerine chutney; tangerine bavarian).

Broth is a canvas for many soups.

For most guests gathered around the Thanksgiving table, the priority is properly pacing the carnage in order to fully enjoy the holiday’s spoils (while still leaving room for multiple slices of pie). But invariably, there will be a dedicated cook in
the party who slyly, quietly waits for it all to end so that the state of the turkey carcass can be assessed and the real fun can begin. To such a canny person, the best part of the bird is that flavorful frame of bones that can be the basis for myriad great soups—imparting a roasty richness to a heady broth that can morph into mushroom and barley soup (see
listing
), Louisiana gumbo (see
listing
), eastern European-style cabbage or beet borshch (see
listing
), Middle Eastern lentil soup, and Italian minestrone (see
listing
), to name only a few.

The bigger the turkey the better the bones, and a bird (preferably a tom) that weighs between 20 and 22 pounds before cooking should result in about 6 quarts of bracing stock—enough for three separate instances of soup making.

If soup is the real goal, a little foresight in prepping the turkey for roasting will serve you well. Avoid rubbing the inside of the turkey with a fine, powdery spice like turkey seasoning, as the flavor will stick to the bones and limit the broth’s potential. Better to place whole, easily removed sprigs of herb inside the turkey, or, if using a finely ground spice, to season over or under the skin.

Once cooked, the carcass will probably have to be broken up to fit into a conventional soup pot. Before doing so, it’s a good idea to remove most of the meat so that it doesn’t overcook as the stock reduces. (It can be added to the finished soup later.) Discard all skin, which will make the broth greasy. Bits of meat firmly stuck to the carcass should be left there to simmer away until they are finally removed along with the bones and any pot vegetables (such as celery, carrots, parsnips, turnips, and onions) added to the broth.

Usually, an hour and a half of slow, steady simmering is enough to produce a lusty broth. Once all bones, vegetables, and solids are strained out, the real soup making can begin. The supremely well-prepared Thanksgiving cook will begin at once, while the rest of us will chill or freeze our broth in 2-quart portions, keeping options open for the future.

Whatever the eventual soup pot holds, the deep, roasty flavor at its base should be treasured as one of the gifts of the kitchen, something wonderful made from something that at least
feels
like it’s free.

Further information and recipes:
Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume Two
by Julia Child, Simone Beck, and Louisette Bertholle (1970);
The Joy of Cooking
by Irma S. Rombauer, Marion Rombauer Becker, and Ethan Becker (2013);
saveur.com
(search turkey stock).

The muffins Americans dub English derive from the crumpets of old England, baked on a griddle to achieve their characteristic flat, golden-brown top and bottom and their light, spongy, and airy open-crumb interior.

It’s a process dating back to at least 1747, when the English home economist Hannah Glasse provided a recipe for them in her then groundbreaking book
The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy.
The crumpets’ chief appeal, then as now, is what Glasse described as their inner “honeycomb” texture, which seems designed just to hold pools of melting butter and islands of marmalade.

English “muffins” made a spectacular debut in America thanks to Samuel Bath Thomas, a humble baker who left his native England in 1874, bound for America with little to his name but his family’s recipe for a muffin baked on a hot stone griddle. After a few years working in a New York City bakery, in 1880 Thomas had saved up enough money to open his own, at 163 Ninth Avenue in today’s Chelsea neighborhood. Thomas’ bakery sold all the usual breads—white and rye and the like—but also a curiosity called English muffins. Thomas advised his inquisitive customers that these were to be hand-or fork-split, not sliced, and toasted prior to serving. Word spread fast, and Thomas was soon opening other bakeries throughout the five boroughs and delivering his English muffins by horse and wagon. He died in 1919, long before his brand became the supermarket classic that it is today, and didn’t get to see his muffins adopted as the standard base for eggs Benedict, quick homemade pizza snacks, or deluxe burgers.

Tip:
To protect their airy texture, split English muffins with your fingers or a fork, working all the way around to ease the halves apart; avoid cutting them with a knife, which flattens and so ruins the inner crags.

Pairs best with a glass of milk.

Salty-sweet, softly chewy, and studded with tiny melting pyramids of chocolate, Toll House chocolate chip cookies offer the kind of wholesome, homey pleasure that seems to catapult us straight back to childhood, when the essential accompaniment was a glass of cold milk—nowadays temptingly swappable for a cup of coffee or tea.

Among the pantheon of American food personalities and institutions, some are real (Chef Boyardee, Hidden Valley Ranch) and some are corporate (Betty Crocker, Aunt Jemima), brand names personified by various front men and women through the years. Nestlé Toll House stands proudly as a member of the “real” team, and it’s also arguably the brand with the best culinary legacy.

The Toll House Inn was a historic bed-and-breakfast catering to travelers in Whitman, Massachusetts, about twenty-five miles south of Boston. In 1930, it was bought by a woman named Ruth Graves Wakefield—ironically, a dietician—and her husband. Wakefield was responsible for cooking and serving all the food, and the inn quickly gained a local reputation for excellence. One visitor who helped popularize her skills was the very real Duncan Hines, another notable on the list of American food names. A traveling salesman from Kentucky, in 1935 Hines began publishing a list of the best restaurants he found on the road. In it he included the Toll House Inn, and did much to publicize Wakefield’s cooking and her homemade Indian pudding. But it was later in the decade that Wakefield would make her
legendary mark, with what was allegedly one of the happiest accidents in culinary history.

Presumably, she was preparing to bake chocolate cookies when she discovered that she’d run out of baker’s chocolate. What she had on hand was a bar of semisweet chocolate that her friend, the chocolate company owner Andrew Nestlé, had given her. She broke it into tiny pieces and put those pieces into her favorite batter for buttery sugar cookies. She thought the chocolate would thoroughly melt, but alas (or rather, fortunately) it did not.

The result, which she originally called the Toll House chocolate crunch cookie, was an immediate hit.

Soon after the cookie’s debut, the Boston press trumpeted its excellence and published Wakefield’s recipe. The cookie’s popularity rose, and so too did sales of Nestlé’s semisweet chocolate bars. Andrew Nestlé and Ruth Wakefield struck a deal. Nestlé would print the Toll House cookie recipe on its package, and Wakefield would receive a lifetime supply of Nestlé chocolate. Whether there was any additional compensation, we don’t know, but in 1939 Nestlé introduced semisweet chocolate morsels, and today the package still carries the Toll House chocolate chip cookie recipe, which really remains the best.

Where:
In New York
, City Bakery, tel 212-366-1414,
thecitybakery.com
.
Mail order:
Sarabeth’s Bakery, tel 800-773-7378,
sarabeth.com
.
Further information and recipes:
Toll House Cook Book
by Ruth Wakefield (1953);
cookstr.com
(search chocolate chip cookies rosemary black; all-american chocolate chip cookies).

Is there any American over the age of ten who hasn’t experienced the cozy, satisfying lunchtime appeal of the classically mayonnaise-y tuna salad sandwich, perhaps crunched with celery and a sprightly green lettuce leaf? Yet it’s a pleasure well worth rediscovering. Although
fresh
is a justifiably lauded term where food is concerned, certain preserved ingredients (herring, anchovies, caviar, pickles, and dried fruits among them) have a character all their own. Canned tuna is just such an ingredient—the outcome of a long Mediterranean tradition of cooking and preserving various foods in olive oil, combined with a dose of American ingenuity.

The first American cannery was established in 1812 in New York, to preserve oysters, first in glass and then in tin. By the twentieth century, fish canning was an established industry, a particularly large segment of which was based in Monterey, California, and devoted to Pacific sardines. But in 1903, the annual sardine run was short, so canneries packed tuna instead—and a multimillion dollar business was born. Today U.S. canners pack more than 32 billion cans of
tuna annually, either as large, solid pieces or as chunks packed in water, vegetable oil, or olive oil.