It doesn't - you know, sometimes meatloaf is like a bad overcooked hamburger, because you don't cook it to medium rare. If you just use beef, you can use half a teaspoon of powered, unflavored gelatin. Veal has gelatin in it, which keeps it very moist and tender. One is you want a mix of beef - meatloaf mix -veal and pork. But the simple meatloaf is just a great recipe.Īnd the - there are two secrets. She put cottage cheese in it and sour cream and onion soup mix and chili sauce and, you know, everything went into it. There was a wonderful recipe from the former governor of Arkansas's wife. So over the years, this great, simple concept was diluted with all these other things. When the 20th century showed up and there was refrigeration, the big food companies decided through the women's magazines that this is a great way to use onion soup mix and ketchup and everything else, so as sort of a dumping ground for commercial products. They'd dice it up, chop it up, put it in a loaf and bake it with some other ingredients. So what they made was a meatloaf made with leftover cooked meat, because they had a lot of leftover meat.ĭinner was the meal at noon, and for supper you use leftover cold meat. And there also weren't a lot of meat grinders around. There was no refrigeration that was consistent. In the 19th century, no one had ground meat. MONTAGNE: Well, we have several meats here, moving on to what might be a main course for a lunch or a dinner. You take one cup of them, saute in a tablespoon of butter, just for a couple minutes, and then you add that to three cups of water, one cup of milk and you simmer it for about 20 minutes and you have that really nutty taste. And so all we did was go back to these, you know, these steel cut oats.Īnd there's a little trick, though. KIMBALL: It's good spackle to fill holes in your wall or something, but you don't want to eat them. MONTAGNE: And when they'd - by that point, they'd gotten really tasteless. And those can be cooked in under half an hour.Īnd then over time, more and more processing - which is the story of the late 19th and the 20th centuries - they would do rolled oats, where they would roll them - steam them and roll them, and then they had quick oats, which were actually rolled thinner, and then instant oats, where it's actually precooked. They're not rolled oats, so they're very coarse. I have some right here, and they have - you know, they're course. So that was where it started.Īnd then they took the grout, they cut it into pieces, and you got steel cutouts. You know, early on in the 19th century, they actually took the whole grout, the fruit of the oats and grain, and they cook it six hours, eight hours - some recipes say cook it 24 hours. KIMBALL: Like the best example is oatmeal, because that shows the progression. MONTAGNE: So why don't you point out some of the things we're looking at here? KIMBALL: It did, and that what we're doing this morning is picking up those threads to see those things which did last to the 20th century, but go back to their roots. I mean I'm thinking some of this frugal spirit would have lasted well into the 20th century. MONTAGNE: But you're talking about going back that far in time. So you had this whole industry around taking large pieces of food, breaking them down, preserving them and reusing them. KIMBALL: Well, before 1850, all the ingredients were local and they were actually fairly expensive, because food, as a percentage of the total expenditure of a household, used to be quite high. MONTAGNE: Yes, but talk to us about going back in time - culinarily speaking. KIMBALL: That's why you invited me back, right? Because you were hungry. MONTAGNE: The studio has never smelled better, never smelled more like a kitchen. CHRIS KIMBALL (Editor, Cooks Illustrated): A pleasure, as always. So Chris Kimball has revived some dishes from that era, all requiring just a few simple ingredients.Īnd Chris, welcome to our studio here at NPR West. There was a time when the American kitchen was, by definition, a frugal place. And today, he's plotted out a little time travel for us. He hosts "America's Test Kitchen" on PBS, and often helps us plan holiday meals. Chris Kimball is a cooking coach of sorts for MORNING EDITION. With the economic downturn, there's increased interest in inexpensive, home-cooked meals. We're going to talk this morning about how to be a bit more frugal in the kitchen.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |