Marlene Parrish - What Einstein Told His Cook 2

PIGS IS PIGS

I like to try new products and bought a plastic-wrapped package labeled “Souse” in my neighborhood market. The package didn’t include even the simplest cooking instructions, nor could I find any recipes in any of my dozen-plus cookbooks. So I sliced it, coated it with cornmeal, and tried to brown it in a frying pan, as I do scrapple. The result was grease soup. What went wrong?

Just because souse and scrapple have funny names and come in refrigerated rectangular blocks doesn’t mean they’re related, except for their porcine parentage.

Scrapple, often called Philadelphia Scrapple, is a Pennsylvania Dutch concoction of cooked pork scraps and trimmings (no gruntz) called puddin’ , mixed with cornmeal mush, a.k.a. polenta, and spices. Refrigerated, it forms a fatty cake that can be sliced and fried for breakfast. The English, as Pennsylvania Dutch people call the rest of us, make a similar product that they call, ironically, by the German name ponhaus .

Souse, on the other hand, is—are you ready?—pickled, spiced, and seasoned scraps from boiled pigs’ heads, feet, and ears. No cornmeal binding; it’s held together by the gelatin that forms when the pieces are cooked. When you put yours into the frying pan, it was like trying to fry Jell-O.

Also known as head cheese, souse is meant to be eaten cold (if at all). It is related to the Italian sopressata , which is made by boiling a de-brained pig’s head until the meat and tongue fall apart, whereupon they are cut into small pieces, seasoned and spiced, put into a cloth bag, and pressed ( sopressata in Italian) into sausage form.

In this country, scrapple and souse are not commonly sold in upscale, “gourmet” meat markets, where the clientele may be more partial to such politically correct and trendy delicacies as free-range salami, roast suckling duck, and grass-fed trout. All to be garnished, of course, with stuffed chives. (Think about it.)

RAINBOWS ON RYE

Can you tell me what that weird, rainbow-y sheen is that I see on roast beef, corned beef, and pastrami? Is my fear of it irrational, or if I can manage to get past the appearance, is it safe to eat? I haven’t eaten a deli beef sandwich in years.

Shame on you. There’s nothing better than a New York–style, kosher, thin-sliced, fat-laden corned beef sandwich on rye. But the diet pendulum has a habit of swinging back and forth, so depending on whether it’s fat or carbohydrates that happens to be in the doghouse when you read this, there will be those who advise you to order your sandwich either without the meat or without the bread.

Now, about your multicolored meat: That iridescent or rainbow appearance that sliced meats sometimes take on is not a coating of nefarious mold or rot. It is merely an optical effect. You may find it on both cured meats such as ham or corned beef and uncured meats such as roast beef and pork. It’s caused by the slicing process.

Meat, or animal muscle, is made up of myofilaments , tiny strands of protein. They are bound together in parallel bundles to form myofibrils, which in turn are bundled together to form the fibers that make up whole muscle. When a very sharp knife or slicing machine cuts the myofilaments crosswise at a certain angle, their severed tips, which are comparable in size to the wavelengths of light, can play optical tricks. One theory has it that the translucent tips bend ( refract ) the light waves into two different directions. This optical effect is called birefringence or double refraction . The two refracted waves then interfere with each other on their way to your eye and break up into their component rainbow colors.

Or, the iridescence on a meat surface may be caused by diffraction , the breaking up of light by the pattern of closely spaced myofibril ends, as in a so-called diffraction grating. In either case, the colors you see are dominated by green because the human eye is most sensitive to that color.

It’s all perfectly harmless.

A COLORFUL CURE

Why do cured meats such as ham, corned beef, and hot dogs have that bright pink color?

“Curing” meat means treating it to keep it from spoiling, thereby preserving it for future use. (Interesting that the “cure” prevents, rather than treats, the problem.) Ancient methods of curing meat include smoking, drying, and salting. When refrigeration and mechanical packaging came along, these flavor-intensive methods became unnecessary and experimentation with chemical curing began.

Meats cured with pure salt (sodium chloride, NaCl) tend to turn an unappetizing brownish-gray color. But about a hundred years ago it was found that if saltpeter (potassium nitrate, KNO 3) was added to the salt, the meat turned a nice, rosy pink. Today, we know that the potassium nitrate was being reduced to potassium nitrite (KNO 2) by microorganisms on the meat and that it’s the nitrite that does the job. So potassium or sodium nitrite is now added to the curing salt directly, and saltpeter is rarely used. Nitrites give the meat a tangy flavor and an appetizing color, owing to the reaction of nitrite with myoglobin to form nitric oxide myoglobin . They also fight rancidity and the development of off odors and off flavors during storage.

But the most important function of nitrites is to inhibit the growth of pathogenic bacteria such as Staphylococcus aureus and Clostridium botulinum , the bacteria that cause botulism.

There’s only one hitch in this rosy (literally) picture: Not only does nitrite kill botulin bacteria, but in doses of about 20 milligrams per kilogram of body weight it can kill humans as well. Fortunately, much of the nitrite added during curing is decomposed by cooking.

The USDA limits the amount of residual nitrite in any finished meat product, cooked or raw, to a maximum of 70 parts per million. At that level, a 150-pound person would have to eat 43 pounds of the product at one sitting to get a lethal dose of nitrite. That’s a lot of bologna.

The bad news is that nitrites in cured meats can react with amines from the amino acids in heated meat protein to form chemical compounds called nitrosamines , many of which have been shown to cause cancers in experimental animals and are likely to be carcinogenic in humans as well. Bacon is a special case, because the high temperatures at which it is cooked are particularly conducive to nitrosamine formation. For that reason the USDA permits less nitrite to be used in curing bacon than in curing other meats.

Small amounts of nitrosamines occur naturally in some of our foods, such as fish. Moreover, bacteria in our mouths can change nitrate, which is present in many vegetables, to nitrite, which can then act upon the amines in the vegetables’ proteins to form nitrosamines. Nitrosamines can also be formed by the action of the highly acidic juices in our stomachs upon a wide variety of amine-containing foods. Small amounts of nitrosamines can also be found in beer and tobacco.

All this may sound frightening, but don’t give up on cured meats as a way of avoiding nitrites and nitrosamines. In our society we can’t always eat fresh meat; some meat products must be cured before being distributed widely. Their small and carefully regulated nitrite content is a winning tradeoff against the risk of botulin poisoning.

On the other hand, it might be prudent not to tempt the nitrosamine gods by smoking a couple of packs of cigarettes while consuming 43 pounds of cured sausages and washing it down with a few gallons of beer.

In other words, stay away from Oktoberfest.

THE FOODIE’S FICTIONARY:Knockwurst—a really bad knock-knock joke