Coming soon to a grocery near you

Maybe you saw a news story this week that the food industry is going to change its nutritional labeling soon.  On the front of many packages will be a chart showing key ingredients that health-conscious consumers might want to avoid or limit.

The industry announcement credited Michelle Obama with inspiring their new plan, saying, "we would not be here today if she had not defined the common objective."

However, Michelle herself isn't all that thrilled.  Seems that the food guys had been in discussion with the FDA for several months about new government guidelines, but pulled out of the talks because the FDA wants stricter rules than the food guys want.  This plan is apparently an attempt by Big Food to head them off at the pass; if they go ahead with their own version it will be harder for the government to impose a new and different set of rules.

The sticking point between the food guys and the government, apparently, is whether food labels can tout "healthy" ingredients such as vitamins.  What's wrong with that?  Well, the problem is that we consumers are basically ignorant about nutrition and terribly susceptible to advertising, even if it's misleading (circling back to the ignorance part).  We are willing, even eager to be persuaded that potato chips with Vitamin A are really good for us!  And we should finish the whole bag because hey, they have Vitamin A!!  (So the food guys added .001 cents worth of Vitamin A, which doesn't do much for either you or the potato chips -- big deal.)  Similarly, ice cream is going to be really "healthy" because it contains calcium, and that "fact" is no doubt going to be prominently written on many packages.

Wait, I'm not that dumb, you say.  Oh no?  Look at all the people who buy "healthy fat-free" cookies with more calories than regular ones.  Or those who buy "healthy" breakfast cereals with 26 grams of sugar per serving.  I hope you're not among them, but I know I have cringed now and then to read the label on something I bought in haste and have been eating happily ever since.

I think the chart is a good idea, although I have a quarrel with the small type that says "25% DV."

Do you know what DV means?  And does a healthy food have more or less of the DV?

Intuitively, I tend to think that if Food A has 25% of the DV and Food B has 35%, Food B is the healthier one.  But that's wrong -- this label means eating a serving of this stuff will constitute one quarter of the total fat you should eat in the day.  So Food A is healthier.

And DV means daily value, which took me a while to figure out.

I have been reading a lot about the food industry recently and do not think much of their business ethics or their attitude toward nutrition.  The people who brought you Froot Loops do not get up every morning trying to make your diet healthier.  So I'm unhappy about this latest plan, much as I have to grudgingly admire the chutzpah of blaming it all on Michelle.

Some nice new recipes for you

I wrote last week about the deserted research station we visited in Antarctica and what I found in the kitchen.  A couple of days later we visited another such place, except this one has been kept heated and occupied as a museum/gift shop.  I think some of the stuff in this hut is not authentic, but brought in as representative of the supplies and equipment that would have been found in the 1950s. 

That would explain the relatively good condition of the cookbook on the stove, which I stupidly neglected to photograph the cover of.  Maybe it's a latter-day compilation of recipes from the time.

But in any case, we're all looking for new ideas to perk up our boring repertoire of entrees, so maybe these will pique your culinary imagination.  I know the reconstituted turnips and peas sparked some thoughts for me.  Bon appetit!

Rats -- I should have turned the page to get the end of the recipe.  Guess we'll just have to improvise from here.

Food of the past

I've just come back from a magnificent trip to Antarctica.  One of our stops was at Base W of the British Antarctic Survey, on Detaille Island off the Antarctic Peninsula.  The Brits established a series of bases there during and after World War II, initially to keep tabs on potential German wartime maneuvers and subsequently to conduct scientific research.

Base W was evacuated on a few minutes' notice in 1959 when the men were told that icebreakers couldn't reach them, and they'd have to go by dogsled 13 miles over the ice to meet a rescue ship.  The building survives as it stood that morning, with unmade beds, dirty dishes, abandoned work papers and left-behind clothing and boots. 

The kitchen and pantry constitute a food museum of the 50s.  My friend Wendy, who spent the first ten years of her life in England, said that visiting Base W was like a time capsule back to her childhood, with all the favorite British foods on display.  I didn't recognize the brand names except for Grape Nuts cereal, Colman's mustard and Rose's lime juice.  But I did reflect on the heroic measures that the occupants of this base took to make sure they would get not only nutrition but psychic comfort from their meals in this harsh and isolated place.

Here's a sampling of what they left behind.

What struck me about the foodstuffs was first, how attached the Brits have always been to their sweets -- clearly the limited food service facilities at Base W were fully prepared to do desserts of many sorts.  Second, how food service a half-century ago was so closely tied to canned goods.  You didn't have to be in Antarctica to get the bulk of your nutrition from cans and jars (even in New York City, where I happened to be living at the time, heavily processed foods were the norm).

Today you can be on a ship below the Antarctic Circle and chow down on fresh vegetables and fruit every day.  How dramatically our expectations have elevated in 50 years, and how fortunate those of us in our blessed middle-class existence have become, in terms of food as well as in many other aspects of life.

Mincemeat

Some people like sausage, some like scrapple, those often delicious, often intimidating mixtures of unidentifiable ingredients where you're probably better off not knowing exactly what you're eating.  I love mincemeat, which in England just means (hamburger) but in the US means a sweet melange that is most often found in pies.

When I was a kid I remember mince pie as standard fare (i.e. you could buy it at the store if you didn't feel like baking) although maybe my memory is wrong.  Today it seems to be an exotic relic prepared and eaten only by aficionados.  Of which I am one.

I hadn't baked a mince pie in many years for one reason or another -- too rich, too many desserts on the menu already, people wanted pumpkin, etc.  But as I was taking requests for Thanksgiving dinner my son mentioned mince pie and that seemed like a wonderful idea.  My husband, who loves to poke around in the back of cupboards and remind me of all the goodies I bought ten years ago and haven't served yet, found not one but two little boxes of mincemeat and delivered them with a flourish.  "These are probably so old we can't eat them any more," he announced, in terms that were guaranteed to make me take up the challenge.

So how old were they?  I don't know.  They looked a little beat-up, as might be expected from having been in the back of the cupboard for a decade.  They didn't use the nutritional labeling format we're familiar with now, so several years at the very least.  I know they were less than 18 years old, because the label said copyright 1992.   But I thought mincemeat is probably similar to fruitcake (which I also love) in that its mystery ingredients probably include some industrial-strength preservative.  I forged ahead. 



The Thanksgiving pie was wonderful, and nobody died from old age or botulism, so yesterday I pulled out the second box of mincemeat and made another pie for Christmas.

If you didn't love mincemeat in advance, you would never proceed past the opened box (much like the old story marveling about the first person to eat an oyster).  It reveals a cellophane-wrapped brick of dark brown composite that smells glorious but resists arrest. 

I don't recall the texture of a fresh box of mincemeat, but the texture of my box was dense and a bit sticky.  The package said to "finely crumble" the stuff but I used a fork and plenty of elbow grease to break it into bits, then added water and brought it to a boil.

You could make a pie with just mincemeat (although that would require more than the single package I had left) but I have always added apples to cut the richness just a bit.  This pie required two big apples to fill it snugly.  I didn't bother mixing, just layered the apples and mincemeat.

Now comes the part where I channel my grandmothers -- the official way to trim piecrusts is to heft the pie in your left hand and wield the knife with your right, cutting downward as you twirl the pie around.  Yesterday I opted to seal the crusts by pressing them together with the tines of a fork, but meanwhile I was watching the movie of my grandmother pinching the crust into raised zigzags with her elegant fingertips.  And finally you must cut a flowing tree shape into the top crust so the steam, and a bit of juice, can escape.

I had a tiny sliver of pie last night, which along with the sliver I ate at Thanksgiving constitute the only desserts I have eaten in almost two years.  They were both worth the wait!!

Merry Christmas to everyone -- may your goose be fat, your pudding full of plums and your mincemeat pies delicious, now and in the new year.

My other favorite homemade condiment

My husband loves really hot mustard, hotter than he has ever been able to find in a store. Fortunately it’s easy to make our own – and wow, it’s really hot!

Start by buying “Regular Canadian Mustard Powder (medium)” from Penzey’s.  Or you may be able to get Colman's Mustard powder at your supermarket, which is almost as hot as Penzey's.  For ordinary hot mustard you could reconstitute this with vinegar, wine or water. But that’s not hot enough for Ken, so we reconstitute it with a concoction we call hot vinegar.

Hot vinegar is made not on the stove but by putting hot peppers into a glass jar and covering them with plain white vinegar, then putting them on a dark shelf at room temperature. A couple of weeks (or years) later the vinegar has become infused with lots of pepper heat. After you pour off some for a batch of mustard, add more plain vinegar; you may be able to keep the same peppers producing heat for several batches.

To make the mustard, put powder in a pint mason jar to fill it a little more than halfway. Pour in hot vinegar (hot refers only to the flavor; do this at room temperature) and stir it, adding more vinegar as the powder dissolves to a paste. It’s important to get all the powder incorporated into a uniform slurry and not lurking in dry pockets at the bottom of the jar. Lift the jar and peek at the bottom to make sure there are no dry areas; you can use a chopstick to get into the corners and mix everything.  I think from this photo that I have one of these pockets at the bottom of my jar, and I will go stir it up right now.

Reconstituted mustard will thicken up as it sits in the fridge after mixing, so you want the slurry to be more liquid than the finished mustard. If it gets too thick, stir in a little more vinegar or white wine. I haven’t tried this, but if you’re a fan of sweet mustard you could stir in some honey or brown sugar.

Make sure to store the mustard in glass. It’s better to use a plastic cap than a regular metal Mason jar lid, because the mustard fumes will eventually rust the metal.  And make sure you don't rub your eyes until you've scrubbed all the pepper/mustard off your hands.

This much mustard in one bite (the part on the bread, not on the knife) is about as much as I can take without having steam come out my ears. Your mileage may vary.

Sodium in a can -- bean division

Sometimes I think reading the nutrition labels in the grocery -- or worse yet, in your pantry -- is a sure route to depression.  So many foods that seem healthy are full of things you'd rather not eat, and sodium is probably the worst and most ubiquitous.

In fairness, some of that is inherent in the process.  Salt retards the growth of microbes, so adding it to preserved foods is one way to cut spoilage, extend shelf life and maintain quality.  Food scientists call this the "multiple hurdle" strategy -- salt, plus refrigeration, plus chemicals, plus various other techniques or additives each reduce the likelihood of your food going bad.  In addition, salt in the hot liquid required for canning improves the consistency of vegetables.  Unfortunately, food processors tend to use considerably more salt than they strictly need for quality, because they know that salt makes things taste better.

Of course you can always buy the raw ingredients and cook your own, but that certainly removes much of the appeal of having those canned goods on the shelf ready for the last-minute meal.  I have always kept canned beans on my staples list, great for making chili and adding to pasta and soups.  But since I've gotten on my kick of checking sodium content, those beans suddenly look a lot less appetizing.

The good news is that you may be able to find equivalent products with far less sodium.  At the grocery I found that among the canned Great Northern beans, you can buy Bush's Best with 460 mg of sodium or Kroger Private Selection organic with 125 mg.  Among the kidney beans, Kroger has 440 mg, Bush's Best has 260 mg, and Kroger Private Selection organic has 120 mg.

So I'm going to keep buying canned beans, but sorry, Duke, it won't be Bush's Best.  And I'm going to be sure to get rid of the canning liquid.  You can reduce the sodium by 36% if you simply drain the beans, and by an additional 5% if you rinse them for ten seconds in running water.

Meanwhile, we visited our favorite ethnic grocery yesterday and loaded up on Goya dried beans.  (Dried beans, of course, have zero sodium.)  Goya has varieties not found in the ordinary supermarket and the quality is excellent.  I'm particularly enamored of Goya's canellini, which cook up rich and creamy.  The last time I made them, instead of adding a teaspoon of salt, or a tablespoon of Penzey's Galena Street seasoning, as I would normally do when cooking bean soup, I simply added a lot of black pepper and garlic.  At the table we used a pinch of sea salt but a lot less than would have been there in my regular cooking method.  (It may be time to change my regular cooking method!)

Comfort food

Every grandparent worth her salt enters into some kind of conspiracy with the kid that leaves the parents out of the loop.  In my case, it was funny that I had the same conspiracy with both my grandmothers.  I don't remember how it started, but probably one grandmother started it, the other heard about it and thought it was a great idea, and the rest was history.

The conspiracy had to do with sauerkraut.

Both my parents were picky eaters and it turned out that both of them loathed sauerkraut.  I know they both had to eat plenty of it in their good German childhoods, but by the time I came along they had put it behind them with a vengeance, announcing that not only did they not like the stuff, it stank up the house.  So when it transpired that I loved sauerkraut, both my grandmothers were thrilled.  Not only did it give them a way to coddle their little darling, it was a way to figuratively smack their own ingrate children in the face.

The conspiracy would begin when a grandmother knew I was about to visit.  Somebody would have gone down in the cellar and brought up a jar of home-canned kraut, then hidden it under a towel in the kitchen.  The instant my parents left the house, the car not even out of the driveway, the kraut was out of the jar and on the stove, stinking up the house.  If life was really smiling on me, there might be mashed potatoes to go with it.

Since then, sauerkraut and mashed potatoes have been my ultimate comfort food.  For 18 years, my office was across the street from an old-style cafeteria, which had been in the basement of a downtown office building since 1920 or thereabouts.  All the ladies who served the food had also been there since 1920, I think, as had the tables, the chairs, the dishes and the little board with the white plastic letters spelling out the daily specials.  Nor had the menu changed since 1920 -- lots of vegetables, old-fashioned meat, three or four kinds of homemade pie, and mashed potatoes every day.

And at least once a week, maybe twice, there was sauerkraut.  Sometimes it came with pork roast, in which case I was in heaven.  Other times it came with sausage, in which case I just ordered the kraut and mashed potatoes.  How many lousy, rotten days at the office were made a whole lot better with that for lunch? 

These days, I've retired from that job and the cafeteria has closed.  When I need comfort food I have to make it myself.  And Dad was right, it sure stinks up the house.