Marlene Parrish - What Einstein Told His Cook 2

Be that as it may, chefs in Venice enjoy covering their scampi with fresh bread crumbs and broiling them in a garlicky butter sauce. Thus, when an American restaurant does that to their shrimp, they call the dish “shrimp scampi” which, when you come right down to it, means “shrimp shrimp.”

That reminds me of when my daughter, Leslie, and I were strapped for something to cook for dinner and came home from the market with, among other things, some good-looking eggplants, known in most places outside North America as aubergines . We scooped out the pulp, did a few things to it that I vaguely remember as involving garlic, olive oil, and bread crumbs, stuffed the mixture back in the skins, baked them, and christened the dish “eggplant aubergine.”

Redundancy raises its ugly head. Again.

Scampi Scampi

Shrimp scampi (or in Italian, scampi scampi ) is a popular dish in Italian American restaurants, perhaps more so than in Italy. Top the garlicky shrimp with crisp, buttered bread crumbs for crunch. You can make your own, but I prefer to use the extra-crunchy Japanese bread crumbs called panko . Many non-Japanese markets carry panko these days.

CRUMB TOPPING:

1 tablespoon unsalted butter

¼ cup coarse, dried bread crumbs, preferably panko

SHRIMP:

3 tablespoons unsalted butter

1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil

1 pound shrimp, peeled, with tails removed, and deveined

4 large cloves garlic, sliced

Kosher salt

Freshly ground pepper

¼ cup dry white wine

2 tablespoons chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley

2 tablespoons freshly squeezed lemon juice

Lemon wedges for garnish

1.Make the crumb topping: Heat a small sauté pan over medium heat. Add the butter. When it is hot, add the bread crumbs and stir until they become tan. Immediately remove the pan from the heat and set aside.

2.Make the shrimp: Heat a large sauté pan over high heat, and add the butter and olive oil. When the mixture is sizzling, add the shrimp and sauté, tossing constantly, for 1 minute. Add the garlic and sauté for about 1 minute longer, or until the shrimp turn opaque and pink. Do not let the garlic brown. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

3.Reduce the heat to medium and add the wine. Bring to a boil, then reduce the heat to low and simmer for 2 minutes. Remove the pan from the heat. Sprinkle the shrimp with the parsley and drizzle with the lemon juice, then toss to coat.

4.Divide the shrimp among individual-serving casserole dishes and top with the crisp bread crumbs. Serve right away. Pass the lemon wedges for added spritzing.

MAKES 4 APPETIZER SERVINGS OR 2 GENEROUS MAIN-COURSE SERVINGS

Chapter Seven

A Carnival for Carnivores

FORTY-SIX BILLION pounds of beef, veal, lamb, and pork, plus 36 billion pounds of poultry, are consumed each year in the United States.

According to USDA statistics for the year 2001, the average American consumed 68.2 pounds of beef; 51.6 pounds of pork; 1.8 pounds of veal, lamb, and mutton; 77.8 pounds of chicken; and 17.9 pounds of turkey, all in terms of trimmed weight at the retail counter. That’s a total of more than 200 pounds of meat for every man, woman, girl, boy, and baby in the country, even counting vegetarians.

Does that make you feel full?

Technically, the word meat includes the flesh, or muscle tissue, of any animal, including fish and shellfish. But we went fishing in the preceding chapter and will stick with two-and four-legged creatures in this one—that is, poultry and “red” meat, respectively.

Okay, the pork producers want us to call pork the “other white meat” because it isn’t as red as beef or lamb. The reason is that pigs are lazy. (Nobody ever tried to fall asleep by counting pigs jumping over a fence.) Because they are congenitally inactive, their muscles contain very little of the red, oxygen-storing compound called myoglobin (see “How now, brown cowburger?” on chapter 7) that other animals stockpile in their muscles for sudden energy demands.

Along with muscles for movement and locomotion, most animals have bones for support and internal organs for sustaining the processes of life. So besides meat per se, we’ll talk a bit in this chapter about using bones in stocks, and we’ll delve briefly into the edible but largely unappreciated (in this country) innards.

Differences among the world’s cultures are reflected in their attitudes toward meat—what meats are eaten, and how, and when. In the United States, our red meats come almost exclusively from three mammals: cows, sheep (lambs), and pigs. We may read with fascination and various degrees of dismay about cultures in which other mammals are eaten (including goats, rabbits, camels, horses, whales, and dogs), not to mention amphibians and reptiles (frogs, lizards, alligators, and snakes), or even insects (grasshoppers and grubs).

But at the same time, other cultures may feel repugnance toward at least two of our three favorite meats: beef is forbidden to Hindus, and pork is forbidden to Jews and Muslims. Much of the Catholic world eschews all meats on Fridays, while vegetarians reject them at all times—or, in the current vernacular, 24/7/52.

Nevertheless, meat is valued as the “center of the plate” on tables around the world, with regularity in wealthy countries and whenever possible in poorer ones. Cultures based on raising livestock for their renewable resources, milk and wool, cannot generally afford to kill their “golden calves” for the sake of a hamburger.

Let’s take a highly abbreviated look at the structure of meat and what happens when we cook it.

A mammalian muscle is made up of (surprise!) muscle cells, also known as muscle fibers. These long, skinny cells contain several nuclei apiece, and are packed together in parallel bundles inside an elastic husk (a sarcolemma ), like a bundle of uncooked spaghetti inside a garden hose. These fiber-filled “hoses,” still largely parallel to one another, are stacked together like a pile of logs to make up the muscle proper. That’s why meat has a fibrous texture, or “grain.”

Muscle tissue is made largely of protein. In a sirloin steak, for example, 57 percent of the dry weight is protein and, depending on how the steak is trimmed, about 41 percent is fat. The tiniest filaments within the muscle cells, called myofilaments , contain the actual protein molecules, which are mostly actin and myosin . When set off by chemical and electrical “move” signals from the nervous system, these protein molecules bond ( cross-bridge ) with one another to form tighter, shorter protein molecules, thereby making the myofilaments, and hence the whole muscle, contract.

But now, into the kitchen.

When we cook meat, the primary effect is that the protein molecules become denatured or reconfigured. That is, upon agitation by the heat, their convoluted structures unwind and then, generally, clump together by forming cohesive bonds. Known as coagulation , this clumping has several effects.

For one thing, the coagulation scrambles the neatly lined-up bundles of fibers in the muscle tissue, making the structures more tangled, random, and rigid. Second, the tighter structure of the reconfigured proteins squeezes out juices (muscle is 65 to 75 percent water) and dries out the meat. Thus, a steak becomes both tough and dry if cooked too long. Moderate cooking, however, has many virtues: it tenderizes meat, improves its flavor, improves its appearance, and makes it safer by killing microorganisms.