THE COOKBOOK TEST #0014: GOURMET ON THE GO
INSTALLMENT #0014 (FREE) / BAKERS VERSUS COOKS / A HIDDEN POINT OF VIEW / BEEF AND PEPPERS / STUFFED STEAK / PUMPKIN BREAD AND CHOCOLATE MOUSSE
Dear Readers,
Today's vintage cookbook is relatively small-run, published in Milwaukee, and something of a chaotic mix of classic French dishes and Processed Food Era atrocities. I'm featuring GOURMET ON THE GO for a couple of reasons: it's a relic of its time and place, and it's a Rosetta Stone for my childhood.
Gourmet on the Go was written by Naomi Arbit and June Turner, two Milwaukee-based cooks who cultivated a following with their writing, classes, and their "Gourmet Touch" TV show. (I assume "The Gourmet Touch" was local to Wisconsin, but I can't find a trace of it online.) Their work was formative for my Grandma Pat Norton, who tuned up her already formidable cooking via the authors.
"She got the book as a result of going to a cooking class [taught by the authors]," recalls my dad, Robert Norton. "And then one of mom's dinners got into the Bon Appetit magazine."
Wait, what? Grandma was in Bon Appetit? I had no idea!
"It was just a mention," says Dad. "The cooking courses she took were from the people who wrote the book, that was the connection."
Those classes, recalls my dad, were a matter of honing my grandma's already strong culinary game (captured briefly above, in the table of contents for our family’s mini-cookbook Recipes from Pat’s Kitchen.)
"She was already very good with intuitive cooking," he says. "She knew what she was doing when she was combining things. Which is something I like to do, too - you get good ingredients, and you think: 'How would these go together?' It's kind of an artistic endeavor. When you get a fussy recipe in a cookbook, it borders on being a chemistry exercise."
Touche, Dad - I've always been on the "baker" side of the baker vs. cook wall. I like specific quantities and I prize repeatability and clarity. Cooks like my grandma and my wife Becca, on the other hand, tend to fly by instinct and tradition. Either approach can yield delicious food, of course, but I always feel a little self-conscious of how thoroughly I'm aligned with the “weigh it / time it / temp it / mise en place it” side of cookery.
Gourmet on the Go is very much a product of its time, which is to say roughly the year I came into this world. Reading it is like traveling to another country, and it makes me wistful, confused, and amused in equal measures.
at your service,
James
GOURMET ON THE GO COOKBOOK
BY NAOMI ARBIT AND JUNE TURNER
Ideals Publishing Corp. / 64 pages / 1974
At 64 pages, Gourmet on the Go is practically a free pamphlet by modern cookery standards, and, indeed, the copy I have is stamped with a sticker that reads “Compliments of Home Savings of America.” But it’s a busy book, with as many as four or five recipes per page, covering everything from desserts to salads to mains to breads to vegetables.
The writing is breezy, and it reflects an era where the home cook didn’t necessarily aspire to authenticity so much as unshackling themselves from the constraints of homemaking. Take the description for New England Clam Chowder, for example: “You don’t have to dig clams to dig this chowder - everything is out of a can!” And indeed, the first two ingredients listed are other types of canned soup.
Most modern cookbooks are reified through specific biographical experiences and/or deeply cut, richly contextualized slices of geography and/or ethnicity. Gourmet on the Go feels as though it’s written by and for ladies of a certain sort (Midwestern, white, time and money on their hands, appearances to maintain, but also places to go), but none of that comes through the framing or color text - the deep background that tells you about the recipe writer’s decision making process and research remains in the shadows.
BEEF AND PEPPERS
The tension within Gourmet on the Go is right in the name - it's meant to be the sort of food you can serve to fussy in-laws, but with concession to time, modernity, and convenience. It's an impossible promise, perhaps made most obvious in recipes like one for "cassoulet" that takes an hour and uses frozen lima beans.
There's also a tension at work between the dominant cuisine for upscale homemaking - French and French-inspired stuff, mostly, with some British classics sprinkled in between the margins - and a desire to be a sophisticated world traveler. The former fares anywhere from well to poorly, but the latter ... well, the latter might be best exemplified by Beef and Peppers.
"Inexperienced western chefs will become masters of Oriental cookery with Beef and Peppers, which is eating at its best."
How many errors are contained within this single, 19-word sentence? I count at least three:
1. What the devil, beyond an expression that must have seemed archaic even in the 1970s, is "Oriental cookery" supposed to mean? Syrian food is Mughal food is Cantonese food is Polynesian food? Even if you just map "Oriental" onto "Chinese," it's a vast oversimplification.
2. Sticking with this specific bit of the sentence: deploying soy sauce, ginger, and corn starch will not make you a master of anything whatsoever, much less the entire length and breadth of all Asian culinary techniques.
3. Beef and Peppers is not, in fact, "eating at its best." In its defense: my kids (5 and 10 years old, respectively) liked the tender bits of steak in this recipe because they were tender without being particularly flavorful, although both resorted to adding salt. (They weren't wrong to do so.)
But this recipe's flavors are so mild and restrained, and applied in such small quantities, that the finished dish is principally just under-seasoned strips of beef swimming in a sauce of mild vegetables. The sliced, uncooked tomatoes added at the end of the process are utterly mysterious even for this basic stab at a Chinese-American stir fry, as they contribute little more than color and water.
Granted that we were still four years away from Edward Said's Orientalism when Gourmet on the Go hit the stands, and when you're writing for a suburban Milwaukee audience in 1974, it might stand to reason that you're not going to serve up deep cuts of Chinese regional cooking and, not unrelatedly, that you're going to need to introduce bold flavors like ginger in tiny, cautious amounts.
I’ll spare you the recipe for Beef and Peppers because it’s been superseded in intervening years by, like… everything.
STUFFED STEAK
What’s stuffed steak? Why would you do this? What would happen? These are the questions that were on my mind when I picked out this recipe as the second one to try out from Gourmet on the Go.
I didn't particularly like the looks of this recipe before I started it; once I began cutting a pocket into my sirloin I liked it even less. The steak frayed as I sliced through it, and the resulting mess was a tribute to both my own ham-fisted knife skills and the silliness of inserting a filling that could just as easily be splashed on top of a finished, perfectly intact steak after it was cooked.
Directions called for 20-24 minutes of broiling to cook both sides of the stuffed steak. It's possible broilers have gotten stronger over the years; I guessed that 10-15 minutes would be more like it, and I ultimately got the whole thing to a satisfactory medium rare with about 12 minutes of broiler time.
And when it came to the eating? Well, it was surprisingly good. The stuffing, with its complementary herbal parsley / green onion and umami-loaded mushroom and Worcestershire sauce was surprisingly punchy and nice, and ultimately the steak was reasonably well cooked throughout. Normally I sous vide my steaks to medium rare before a quick finishing sear so I can enjoy a control freak's triumph over uncertainty, but the "slap the damn thing under the broiler" method worked out fairly well, too.
STUFFED STEAK
1 3 lb. sirloin steak, cut 1 ¼ inch thick
2 Tbsp. butter or margarine
1 8-oz. can of mushrooms, drained
2 green onions chopped
1 Tbsp. flour
2 Tbsp. parsley, chopped
1 Tbsp. lemon juice
1 Tbsp. Worcestershire sauce
Salt and pepper to taste
Cut a pocket in the steak with a sharp knife, the length of the steak and almost all the way from side to side.
Melt butter in skillet and saute onions and mushrooms until onions are soft. Stir in flour, then add lemon juice and Worcestershire sauce and stir until thickened. Add parsley.
Fill the pocket in the steak with the stuffing. Put three or four toothpicks along edge to keep pocket closed.
Broil for 10-12 minutes on each side. Salt and pepper to taste. Makes 6-8 servings.
PUMPKIN BREAD
If Thanksgiving at Grandma's house had a single specific signature flavor, it wouldn't be turkey or pie or stuffing or potatoes - it would be Gourmet on the Go's pumpkin bread, that soothing, mellow, spiced confection that was adult enough to enjoy during the main meal but sweet enough to pass for a subtle dessert. I remember going back for slice after slice, trying to be cool about it, but eventually and inevitably being warned to try some of the other food, too.
PUMPKIN BREAD
3 1/2 Cups flour
2 tsp baking soda
1 1/2 tsp salt
3 cups sugar
1 tsp nutmeg
1 tsp cinnamon
4 eggs, beaten
2/3 cups water
1 cup vegetable oil
2 cups canned pumpkin
3/4 cups chopped nuts
Preheat oven to 350 F. Grease two loaf pans. Combine flour, baking soda, salt, sugar, nutmeg, and cinnamon. Combine eggs, water, oil, and pumpkin. Add to dry ingredients and mix only until well blended. Fold in nuts, pour batter into loaf pans. Bake for 1 hour or until a toothpick inserted into the center of the bread comes out clean.
And if Christmas Eve at my parents' house had a specific flavor, it would probably be my dad's chocolate mousse.
CHOCOLATE MOUSSE
The story and recipe that follows is something that was originally printed in the Heavy Table's Churn newsletter three years ago. It's a Gourmet on the Go recipe, but told through my dad's experience - he's a master of making this stuff, and I've never had a version I've preferred anywhere. It's not a thing I order at restaurants anymore because I've experienced so much disappointment (see also: lemon meringue pie, due to my mom's skill at making it.)
DAD’S CHOCOLATE MOUSSE
When I was growing up in Wisconsin, there was no reason to suspect I'd end up writing about food for a living. We weren't a household that went in for fancy food - breakfast was almost invariably bowls of cold cereal (or instant oatmeal in the winter), dinner was bratwurst or roast chicken or tuna casserole or maybe beef stroganoff if it was particularly cold out. My parents avoided the pitfalls of fast food, soda, and sweet cereal, but what we ate was classic, off-the-rack Upper Midwestern grub.
Notable exception: Christmas. This was the time of year my dad would prepare his much- anticipated chocolate mousse. My brother and I weren't analytical powerhouses as kids, but if we were, we'd observe that this is a dish of profound balances: the bitter and the sweet plus the chocolate and the citrus, all wrapped up in a smooth, silken, ethereal texture that makes 500 calories of mousse taste like a whisper of your imagination.
Why coupe glasses full of mousse at Christmas? Well, it was decadent and special, and that's a good fit for the holiday. But I wanted to find out a little more, so I emailed Dad:
Hm, that is lost in the shrouds of time. I do recall that we found it in the "Gourmet on the Go" cookbook from my Mom's cooking teacher, perhaps we just were searching there for desserts. The thing that sealed the deal way back when was that I made it for my Mom and Dad at Christmas one year at the Berkeley estate, and my Dad really liked it, which was a stretch for him as it included raw eggs. It's one of the trickier recipes I do, there are several pitfalls as you know.
The pitfalls that Dad are talking about are numerous, but the main one is the dreaded "crunchy specks”' phenomenon that comes from overcooled chocolate. If you are forced to eat mousse with crunchy specks, it will merely be delicious instead of transcendent, and you'll have to wait another year for another chance at glory. Fortunately my Dad, a digital design engineer who possesses a scientist's mind and discipline, was able to pull it off more often than not; his hit rate was probably about 4 out of 5 overall, if my memory serves.
DAD’S CHOCOLATE MOUSSE
Adapted from Gourmet on the Go
1/2 lb. German Sweet cooking chocolate
5 eggs, separated
1 Cup heavy cream, whipped
3 Tbsp Cointreau, Gran Marnier, or triple sec
Melt chocolate in a double boiler over hot, not boiling water. Cool to a warm temperature. Beat egg yolks until thick and lemon-colored.
Add liquor to egg yolks. Pour chocolate into the egg mixture and mix until smooth.
Beat egg whites until stiff. Fold carefully into chocolate mixture. Fold whipped cream into mixture.
Pour or spoon into glasses or greased mold. Chill for a few hours, at least four.
Makes 8 to 10 servings.
Robert Norton writes:
So my tricks are not too much. Melt the chocolate, you could use a microwave. Don't let it cool too much or you will get the dreaded chocolate specks.
Beat the egg yolks a ridiculous amount, they will turn lemon yellow. Don't skimp on the beating - you are mechanically par-cooking the yolks.
I add 3 Tbsp of Cointreau, but you can use any good triple-sec.
Now the yolk mixture is liquored up, pour in the molten chocolate, still pretty warm to the touch, while beating strongly. The chocolate wants to sink to the bottom, don't let it, get the rubber spatula in there and mix it all. The yolks will not deflate, get the mixture fully smooth and consistent.
When beating the egg white until stiff, stop before they start to get dry. If they get dry, you will have chunks of white in the mousse, not ideal. Not a disaster either, but not good.
On the whipped cream, buy the "gourmet heavy cream" not just regular whipping cream. Whip it until it has peaks, but stop before you start to make butter. Fold that in too, folding well until it is hopefully perfectly smooth. Put into ramekins, or glasses, or what have you; chill for several hours, at least 4. You could garnish with semi-sweet chocolate curls and a pinch of cocoa, or whatever strikes your fancy. Because of the orange liquor, an orange peel curl would work too. Plain is fine too.
We get 4 giant uneatable by any but the most dedicated portions, 6 is generous but not crazy, 8 is really modest in size. I would guess that if you had a crowd you could double the recipe pretty easily. I hope you enjoy!
Love, Dad