Schloss - Almost from Scratch: 600 Recipes for the New Convenience Cuisine

THE NEW CONVENIENCE CUISINE

H ome cooking has changed, and cookbooks hardly noticed. But supermarkets did. Look at lettuce; whole heads have been replaced with pre-washed, pretorn, pretossed, and crouton-studded cellophane sacks. Salad dressings have blended into marinades, mustards have morphed toward mayonnaise, and meats are sold stuffed, filleted, roasted, and grilled.

And still most cookbook recipes call for chopping carrots, mincing garlic, and tearing heads of lettuce. They ignore the myriad of Thai sauces, Jerk sea-sonings, Asian dressings, Mexican condiments, and Mediterranean pestos that crowd the shelves of every supermarket in every town. Cookbooks give directions for marinades and grill sauces that are clones of bottled dressings; they call for sifting dry ingredients or for sauting vegetables when a bottled dressing, baking mix, or jar of salsa would yield the same results in a fraction of the time and with far fewer ingredients.

There has been an explosion of convenience foods in the American marketplace, and like the condensed mushroom soup, dehydrated onions, and French dressing of generations past, these foods are not just convenient facsimiles of finished dishes. They are high-powered ingredients in their own right.

A jar of tapenade doesnt just give us something new to spread on bread. It flavors a grilled chicken breast and seasons a salad dressing. It can be plopped atop a baked potato, swirled into vegetable soup, or used to thicken a lamb stew. With time and use, tapenade changes in our mind from an esoteric condiment to a kitchen staple that has elevated the way we cook and eat to another level.

The notion of using convenience ingredients to create powerfully flavored recipes is not new. American home cooks have been modifying scratch cooking for years with manufacturers box-top recipes, but too often these are little more than dumbed-downed versions of family favorites. They fail to take advantage of the hidden power of the new generation of convenience ingredients: the ability to cook like a chef at home.

When a chef turns out Pesto-Stuffed Grilled Chicken Breast with Sun-Dried Tomato Sauce, the pesto has already been prepared, the sun-dried tomatoes have been soaked and pured, the garlic has been chopped, the stock has been reduced, and the spice rub has been blended. A few years ago if you wanted to duplicate this dish at home, you would be facing half an afternoon in the kitchen. Now your local supermarket provides all the prep work. Pesto is available jarred, refrigerated, or frozen. Sun-dried tomatoes come pured into pesto, minced to a powder, or chopped in a vinaigrette. There are spice rubs ranging from ancho-garlic to lemon-basil, and chicken breasts are trimmed in every conceivable form. The preparation that once took hours now takes minutes. It is the vision of Almost from Scratch that this is not a phenomenon confined to individual ingredients but rather is a new way of cooking that streamlines the way home cooks can prepare everything from soup to dessert.

THE CONVENIENCE KITCHEN

Several years ago we attended a family reunion. We were staying with cousins in Atlanta, and the first morning I woke early to make pancakes for everyone. Rummaging through the kitchen I found most of what I needed. There were the expected necessities for a family with young children: two gallons of milk, a dozen eggs, a giant jar of peanut butter, and even a calcified tin of baking powder, but there was no flour. I was getting dressed to run to the store when my wifes cousin awoke. She knew there was flour. She had just bought some in the hope that I might bake something. And sure enough she pulled out a package that I can only describe as an envelope of flour containing just two cups, enough for one cake or a pan of muffins, about 8 ounces.

I hadnt seen it because to my eye it was invisible. As a chef and an only-from-scratch home cook, I bought my flour in large sacks and used it not only for baking but for thickening sauces, browning meat, dusting pans, and frying chicken. What did it mean about the current state of American home cooking that this well-equipped kitchen was stocked with a dozen bottles of salad dressing but only a token packet of flour? What had happened to the American pantry while I was busy cooking from scratch?

Obviously things had changed. Scratch baking had become esoteric, and salad dressing had become an all-purpose sauce. Mayonnaise, enlivened with vinegar and herbs, had become de facto salad dressing, and mustard, spiked with honey, horseradish, or watercress, had become a mini convenience industry. Relish, reinforced with sun-dried tomatoes, mangoes, and lime, had become chic. Pesto was being peddled alongside ketchup, Thai sauces came canned, and Jack Daniels was manufacturing barbecue sauce. And all of these items were instantly ready to produce the kind of flavor that I needed a laundry list of ingredients to create. The world of scratch cooking had been usurped by the very preparations it had popularized.