THE COOKBOOK TEST #0027: CHICAGO COOKS

INSTALLMENT #0027 (PAID) BASIC/NOT BASIC / A SHORT DRIVE TO CHICAGO FOOD / LET'S SPEND 1,500 WORDS ROASTING A CHICKEN, SHALL WE? / "TOAST"

Dear Subscribers,

I hope that CHICAGO COOKS: 45 PERFECT RECIPES FOR THE PASSIONATE PALATE marks the beginning of a new era for THE COOKBOOK TEST, an era wherein incredibly random cookbooks come to me through exceedingly strange routes. Here is the origin story for Chicago Cooks:

A dear friend of mine is currently sailing from the Mediterranean across the Atlantic and then up from the Caribbean to Maine and I'm lucky enough to see her and her partner every year at a big Thanksgiving-in-February celebration that my wife and I co-host in rented geodesic domes in suburban Minneapolis-St. Paul. 

During this year's celebration, her partner gave me a copy of Chicago Cooks, a self-published cookbook that the author - who is famous as an audio engineer with expertise in reel-to-reel jazz recordings - sends out as a gift to repeat customers. Apparently the copy of Chicago Cooks that found its way into my hands is the third one that my friend and her partner have obtained via his love of reel-to-reel tape recordings.

The book is notable for a couple of things. The first is how tremendously basic most of its recipes are - carrot soup, grilled cheese, two versions of roast chicken, mashed potatoes, pan-fried toast(!), seared asparagus, a fried egg, coleslaw. 

Most of the book's recipes are at the very core of American comfort cooking, so common as to be pretty much invisible, and with a few exceptions, not particularly Chicago-centered in any given way. 

But! And this is an important "but" - the book is almost pedantically detailed about how to achieve these basic dishes. The first roast chicken recipe (attempted below), for example, includes 16 steps. The hard boiled egg recipe (which I'm not going to attempt because I do have this one on lock-down[1]) is six detailed steps plus four tips and a list of five different tools. 

Chicago Cooks is all about long hard roads to familiar nearby destinations, and I appreciate this sort of masochistic martial arts-student-training-montage approach to cookery - you generally learn something when you're being hectored to death by an insufferable pedant.

At any rate: The Cookbook Test is finding its footing, and maybe that footing is one foot in the well-lit and concrete realm of the contemporary and famous and one foot in the ethereal shadow realm of the self-published and antique. Despite its relatively recent publication date, Chicago Cooks is part of the latter group, and I love it for that.

at your service,

James

CHICAGO COOKS: 45 PERFECT RECIPES FOR THE PASSIONATE PALATE
BY JONATHAN HORWICH AND CAROL MONTAG
SELF-PUBLISHED | 2017 | $35 OR FREE WITH ENOUGH REEL-TO-REEL TAPES

I grew up in Madison, Wisconsin, so I have some opinions about Chicago, and Illinois. For one thing: my friends' parents regularly called drivers with Illinois plates "FIBs," which translates roughly to (cover your ears if you're adverse to foul language) "F-ing Illinois B-tards." To be fair: I saw FIBs cut off, rudely pass, or otherwise dominate locals enough to judge the label more or less fair. 

Another thing: I've had Chicago deep dish pizza at a couple of well-regarded spots, and plenty of not-as-well-regarded spots, and I don't care for it. It's as similar to New York-style pizza as goat soup is to filet mignon, with "soup" being the operative word - it takes longer to make than just about any other pizza out there and its an overly moist, goopy travesty when it finally hits the table. Chicago Cooks doesn't feature deep dish pizza, but it does feature a corn tortilla-based 1980s-era diet-friendly "Peewee Pizza" that looks so thoroughly unpleasant that I'm not even going to attempt it as a laugh. (In my defense: the introduction to this dish begins with: "We actually don't like pizza," and the recipe itself really seems to back up that perspective.)

Counterpoint: I live for a really good all-beef Chicago dog, which I think is one of the world's really great sausage-focused dishes. The whole "dragged through the garden" thing is for real - there's so much heat and acid and lively crunch that the sausage is really just part of a much bigger orchestra, and I have a hard time eating any hot dog NOT served on a poppy seed bun. 

When I went to school at UW-Madison there was a Chicago dog stand a few blocks from where I worked at the DoIt Center (information technology, but I got a job there because the name cracked me up), and I savor my memories of those simple, lovely, well-made hot dogs. Chicago Cooks features a four-page obsessively detailed interview with Doug Sohn, the founder of Hot Doug's, followed by a nine-point summary of how to do your own quality Chicago dog.

I'm not going to attempt this, either, because I've already spent enough time making Chicago dogs to know that the book’s working definition is canonically correct and really excellent. I'll include a snapshot of the summary here, though, because it's neat and I like it.

Otherwise, most of my Chicago memories are of discovering Indian food and Thai food for the first time on Clark and Devon and record stores and live music venues and cafes pretty much exactly along the lines of High Fidelity.

We’re all sensitive people / with so much to give

I can't really watch that movie anymore because, having actually lived it, seeing it again gives me severe emotional vertigo. Fun film, though. Jack Black really broke out, deservedly, thanks to his performance.

ROAST CHICKEN LENTAMENTE

Chicago Cooks takes an early stand with its Roast Chicken I recipe. The recipe includes two dense pages of text and a Patrick Nagel-like computer graphic of a roast chicken, and the actual process demands three days of prep in the fridge plus a roughly four hour prep, cook, and resting period. This is not an "easy roast chicken" or a "weeknight roast chicken" or a "roast chicken for beginners." This is more of a "total pain in the ass" roast chicken.

However, for the sake of legitimately reviewing the guts of Chicago Cooks, I dug into the recipe and made it as written. (I don't think my simplified method, below, omits anything material, but I did definitely streamline some of the wordier paragraphs and tips / tricks / context that belong to the authors alone.)

The chicken is ... good. Quite good. Really really good? It's difficult to track the return on investment when you sink this much (mostly passive) time into a recipe, but it seems palpably better than most of the roast chickens I've tried - considerably more moist and tender, and richer too - reminiscent of duck confit, although not quite as dense nor quite so fatty. It's an impressive recipe, and one I'll likely make again - it was a crowd pleaser, and didn't actually require too much active prep time.

ROAST CHICKEN I
One 4-5 pound whole chicken
Salt and pepper
Fresh herbs: at least 2-3 of thyme, tarragon, sage, rosemary, marjoram
Red pepper flakes
Fennel seeds
Olive oil
1 small lemon, cut in half
1 head of garlic, cut across top to expose cloves
2 Russet potatoes, peeled and sliced thickly
1-2 large carrots, peeled and sliced thickly

Remove any innards from a 4-5 lb. chicken and discard. Rinse chicken inside and out, and pat very dry with paper towels. Salt chicken all over using about 3/4 tsp salt for each pound of chicken. Wrap the chicken in parchment paper or foil and store in a rimmed pan or pot in the refrigerator for about 3 days.

When you're ready to cook: Take the chicken out of the fridge, discard juices, pat dry, and put it into a large roasting pan. Preheat the oven to 300 degrees as the chicken comes to room temperature.

Stuff the inside cavity of your chicken with half a lemon, a head of garlic with the top sliced off to expose the cloves, an assortment of fresh herbs (any 2 or 3 of: thyme, sage, tarragon, marjoram, rosemary), and then the last half of the lemon.

Make a paste of: 2 Tbsp of chopped thyme, 2 Tbsp of chopped rosemary, 1 Tbsp of chopped tarragon or sage or marjoram, and mix with 3 Tbsp of olive oil and 1 Tbsp of fennel seeds (crushed in a mortar and pestle) and 1 tsp of red pepper flakes (also crushed.)

Rub paste evenly on your chicken. Put the chicken on a bed of fresh herbs in your roasting pan. Peel and slice a couple of russet potatoes and a large carrot or two. Mix the vegetables with 3 Tbsp of olive oil, salt, and pepper, and arrange them around the chicken.

Roast the chicken and vegetables in the oven for 3 hours, turning the chicken around and stirring the vegetables about halfway through the process. 

After cooking, allow chicken to rest for 10-15 minutes before carving.

TOAST

One of the clearest warning signs that Chicago Cooks is the product of eccentric minds is that it contains a two page, four tip, heavily justified recipe for making toast. 88% of American households, declare the authors, have a toaster in the kitchen; the authors, however, do not. Instead of toasting their bread in the easy-to-use appliance that God and American ingenuity gifted us, they, like pre-Colonial homesteaders, dirty up an entire pan and waste minutes upon minutes toasting their bread the old-fashioned way.

I'll spare you the reprint of the whole recipe: here's my abridged version.

TOAST

Add about 1 Tbsp of olive oil and a 1/2 Tbsp of butter to a large pan at medium. Let the olive oil get hot and the butter melt, and then add your bread, sprinkling it with a little salt if you like. Flip the bread a few times, adding more olive oil if necessary, until it's nicely toasted on both sides. 

That's it! Toast your bread in a skillet with olive oil and butter. I followed the recipe as written and meanwhile toasted another piece of bread in the toaster. In order to get an apples-to-apples tasting, I brushed my toaster bread with olive oil, spread it with a little butter, and sprinkled it with a bit of salt as well.

Then came the moment of truth: the tasting.

The standard toast was nice - a bit of richness from the butter and olive oil, the traditional hard-edge crunch from the heating element. Dry but ready for an egg yolk or dollop of jam to counteract said dryness. Nothing wrong with this: classic toast.

The Chicago Cooks toast - well, damned if it wasn't notably better. The crispiness was gentler, the richness was suffused throughout the entire piece of bread rather than being confined to the surface, and the overall effect was mellower, richer, and fuller than the toaster-made toast - even though both pieces of bread had been hit with equivalent amounts of olive oil, butter, and salt.

For a special breakfast or a recipe that hinges on tasty toast, I could in fact see myself dragging out the big All Clad and taking the slow road to toasted bread once again. There you have it... the Windy City has improved upon toast! By dragging us back into the dark ages of toast.

THE VERDICT ON CHICAGO COOKS

(BUY IT / ***BORROW IT*** / SKIP IT / SCRAP IT)

Unless you really have a specific need to reinvent the basic tent poles of contemporary American cookery or a driving curiosity about a few specific Chicago culinary staples (the Chicago dog, baby back ribs, etc.), Chicago Cooks is easily skippable - it’s a weird, intensely personal culinary oddity. That said: I like it. I like its strong point of view, I like its hectoring specificity, I like its obsession with incredibly prosaic and basic dishes. I’m going to hang onto it, but it may be because I’m more like the authors than I care to admit.

[1] AUTHOR'S NOTE: Look, lots has been written about boiling eggs, and I'll tell you - reading garbage printed on the Internet is what put me through years of making eggs that were nearly impossible to time correctly or peel without damage. Here's what you do: Boil three or four inches of water. Insert your egg or eggs and KEEP IT BOILING. Eight minutes at a rolling boil should get you a liquid-y yolk, good for toast or salads or whatever. About ten minutes is perfect for a classic hard-boiled egg. Either way you'll get an egg that's easy to peel cleanly under cold running water (after post-boiling immersion in a bowl of cold water.)