Food & Drink

Pronunciation and Pasta

Ordinarily, I’m not much of an autograph enthusiast. Or, rather, I’ll enthusiastically sign autographs, but I don’t collect them. I made exceptions for Douglas Adams and Umberto Eco, and a few other geeky types whose names most people wouldn’t recognize. Earlier this week, I made another exception. I went to a presentation and book signing at a local Sur La Table, where two legendary food scientists (if food scientists can be legendary) came to share their expertise with the small assembled crowd.

The celebrities were Shirley O. Corriher and Harold McGee. I knew of Shirley mainly from her frequent guest appearances on Good Eats with Alton Brown. Alton himself is no slouch when it comes to cooking science, but he likes to bring in specialists from time to time, and Shirley happens to be an expert who is also a colorful TV personality. She is the author of CookWise: The Secrets of Cooking Revealed and has a new DVD called Shirley O. Corriher’s Kitchen Secrets Revealed!

As for Harold, he’s the author of the encyclopedic On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen. Originally published in 1984 and known among the cooking intelligentsia as “the blue book,” it was massively revised and updated last year, and is now “the red book.” It runs to nearly 900 pages and contains not a single recipe—my kind of cookbook. Instead, it describes (in a very friendly, readable style) the history, chemical and physical properties, and cooking methods for virtually everything edible. It is amazing, and I don’t use that term lightly. If its subject matter were English, it would be Bryan A. Garner’s A Dictionary of Modern American Usage. Those who know, know what I mean.

Anyway, I went with a desire to have two burning questions answered. First was: How do you pronounce “Corriher”? The staff person who introduced the authors just said “Shirley,” so I asked Shirley myself after the presentation. She replied, “It rhymes with sorrier.” Excellent. I never would have guessed that.

The other question has been bugging me for years: Why should I salt the water used to boil pasta? Every recipe, and every cooking show, says you must do this. But I’ve boiled hundreds of pots of pasta in my day and have seldom bothered with the salt, yet this has never diminished the final product in any way I could discern. I know enough about chemistry to realize that a teaspoon or two per gallon is not going to raise the water’s boiling point enough to make any difference. The other rationale I’ve heard a few times is that salting the water seasons the pasta, because some of the salt soaks right into the noodles. That’s fair enough, but if you serve your pasta with a sauce—especially a salty sauce—you’ll almost certainly be unable to taste the salt in the pasta itself. So I find that reasoning unconvincing.

Courtesy of Harold McGee, I now have two other crucial pieces of information. First, according to the red book (p. 576), salt can help prevent noodles from sticking together during cooking. It “limits starch gelation and so reduces cooking losses and stickiness.” That’s something I can get behind, although the book also mentions that you can reduce stickiness in other ways, including stirring during the first few minutes.

During the presentation, though, someone was asking about cooking dried beans. Harold mentioned that what takes the longest when cooking beans is for water to penetrate all the way to the bean’s interior so that it can soften. And salt, he said, inhibits the osmotic process by which this occurs. So salting the water in which you cook beans can increase the time it takes for the beans to get soft in the middle (or make them less soft with the same amount of cooking time). After the presentation, I asked if the same principle holds for pasta, and he said that it did. I asked whether that could be an argument for not salting the water—whether it outweighed the advantages. He replied that it depends somewhat on the thickness of the noodle, but if you have a thicker noodle and you’re more concerned about the fastest possible cooking time than its absorbed flavor, definitely skip the salt. In other words, rather than reducing cooking time by increasing the boiling point, salt can actually increase cooking time by slowing water absorption into thick noodles.

That’s cool. If I’d known there was such an occupation as food scientist when I was a kid, that’s what I would have wanted to be when I grew up.

Summer of S((c)h)wag

A couple of weeks ago, I got an unexpected package in the mail: a large tin of delicious chocolate-covered cherries, sent by my publishers as a sort of congratulatory token for having finally completed the very long project of writing Take Control of Now Up-to-Date & Contact. There’s just nothing better than getting goodies in the mail. Actually, many things are better than that, but let’s just say it’s really nice.

I’ve had a real run on surprise goodies recently. Last month, a reader who’s a professional photographer sent me a lovely print from a Moxy Früvous shoot he’d done in the early ’90s. A couple of weeks ago, I received a large gift basket of hot sauces, which I agreed to review and write about as a follow-up to my Interesting Thing of the Day article on Tabasco Sauce and my blog post about Measuring Spiciness. (Stay tuned. The wheels of progress are spinning slowly this summer.) A couple of days ago, I received two CDs from This American Life, courtesy of a reader I’d helped out with some technical questions. Just this morning, the Fisher Space Pen Company offered to send me a prototype of their latest model for testing—with purple ink, natch—as a result of my article on Space Pens. And yet another message in my Inbox this morning was from a reader and regular correspondent who wanted to know if he could buy me a gift subscription to Z Magazine.

Well, this is all quite extraordinary. I’m pleased, touched, grateful—even in the cases where a commercial motive is perhaps lurking behind the scenes. Of course, I would never, ever want someone to feel obligated to send me stuff—or even a thank-you note—for doing them a favor. Favors shouldn’t have to be repaid. But if you choose to send me stuff simply as a way of spreading some good karma around, I am certainly happy to accept. (Well, usually. When I wrote about Castor Oil, a reader offered to send me some castor bean seeds. As I have no outdoor space available where I could plant them, I had to decline.)

Because I’ve spent so much of my life at trade shows and conferences, I’ve become accustomed to using the term “schwag” to denote free merchandise, usually of a promotional nature. (Trade show attendees invariably walk away with all sorts of odd tchotchkes, usually emblazoned with corporate logos.) So by extension I’ve been referring to the items I’ve received recently as “schwag” too. Some cursory research this morning, however, turned up some curious facts. Apparently, there are three distinct spellings: “swag,” “shwag,” and “schwag,” which—though sometimes used interchangeably—have developed rather different primary meanings. As nearly as I’ve been able to determine, they (usually, not always) break down as follows:

  • swag: Typically used for stolen goods. Please do not send me any of this.
  • shwag: Typically used for marijuana of poor quality. Please do not send me any of this either. (And no, I don’t want it even if it’s high quality.)
  • schwag: Typically used for free merchandise (promotional or otherwise). You may send me this if you wish.

But please do me the courtesy of letting me know in advance if I should expect a package from you. As much as I enjoy surprises, I prefer to have a general idea of what I’m opening, times being what they are.

Measuring Spiciness

As explained in this article on Tabasco sauce, there is an objective, scientific way to measure the spiciness of foods; peppers or hot sauces subjected to this test get a rating in Scoville heat units. Unfortunately, these measurements are never used where it counts: on menus in Mexican, Szechwan, and Thai restaurants. The menus sometimes have little chile symbols, or sometimes just asterisks, that are supposed to indicate how spicy a dish is. But these symbols are arbitrary, they vary from one restaurant to the next, and they are nearly always (in my experience) meaningless.

Even worse: the suggestion “Specify desired level of spiciness.” I do, but they never take me seriously. Maybe I just look like some lightweight gringo who can’t handle his capsaicin, but no matter how spicy I order my food, it’s almost never even hot enough to make my eyes water, which is beginning to approach “hot enough” in my book.

A case in point: One day I went to a Thai restaurant and ordered the dish on the menu with the most chiles next to it. The waitress asked how hot I wanted it. I said, “Extremely hot.” She looked at me with a concerned expression. “Extremely hot?” she asked. “Incredibly hot,” I replied. The concerned expression turned to a puzzled, worried look. “Wait a minute, do you want it extremely hot or incredibly hot?” Clearly, we were experiencing a communication failure.

I tried a different tactic. “I want you to make it as hot as it possibly can be,” I said. The waitress paused for a moment to let this sink in, then gave me a horrified expression, as though I had just asked her to set me on fire. Finally, she said, slowly, “You mean…like death?” “YES!” I exclaimed, delighted that my message had finally gotten through. “Hot like death. Exactly. Please.” She regarded me severely for another moment, wrote something down on her pad, and disappeared into the kitchen.

When the dish arrived, it was noticeably spicy—I’m going to go out on a limb and say maybe two out of four peppers. But not death. Not even “pass-the-hanky” hot. What a disappointment.