This goes with that
It's another one of those days of going to the fridge and wondering what to cook with what I've got. I have talked about this before of course, but this time I thought I would ponder on the fact that not only is it a case of what you have in the fridge, but also what you have in the fridge that goes with the thing you will use as your starting point, or would go together with something you have elsewhere in your pantry.
So I thought I'd do a bit of my normal superficial googling on the topic and came up with a few interesting things - sort of by accident because I wasn't really using the right search terms. I didn't find the answer to the original question that I had in my head - how did the classic food pairings that we know come about? I mean things like chicken and tarragon, lamb and mint, tomatoes and basil. I couldn't find an answer so I guess we just have to speculate that somewhere, sometime, somebody thought of putting them together, found they worked well and because it did, other people copied it ad infinitum until it became what is known as a classic pairing.
In one's life as a cook I guess we pick up as we go along, what goes with what. And now we are helped by cook books - well some of them. I think Stephanie Alexander might have been the first to arrange her book by ingredients and include a list of things that went with the ingredient in question. Beverley Sutherland Smith followed her example and other cooks have been a bit more subtle - in that they don't write out a list of matches, but arrange their books by ingredients and in their introductions to the ingredients, write about what are good things to use with it. I have to say I find these lists very useful. So if you are not sure what goes with what you can check their books out.
Or you can go to Food Pairings.com where you will find a tool that will tell you what goes with what (though you will have to pay for the privilege). For food pairing is not quite what I thought it was. I thought it was just the sort of matches I have already described that are part of our food heritage. They vary from country to country and from time to time, but basically they are generally well-known and accepted. Food pairing, however is apparently a technical, even scientific exercise first initiated by the molecular gastronomists such as Heston Blumenthal and the guy in Spain whose name I always forget. Apparently if you work out the chemistry of the food you are looking at you can then work out via the chemistry of other foodstuffs what it could go with - leading to unlikely matches such as chocolate and caviar and chocolate and cauliflower. They sound extremely weird but the science says they work - and Heston Blumenthal is very successful. Below is a very confusing chart which you could use if you want to know what to cook with your chicken today!
It comes from a site called Wine Folly which is more interested in pairing food with wine, but nevertheless it has a fairly simple explanation of the science of it all. One of my possible meals today was going to be centred on cauliflower, but I don't think I'm game to try it with chocolate. Though the latinos do use chocolate in some of their stews I think. Produce Made Simple has ideas of what goes with what too - more normal ones.
Then as well as what flavourings you use to create your dish there's the whole range of choice of accompanying things - this is where you end up with classics like eggs and bacon, fish and chips, toast and honey, milk and cookies (in America), mussels or steak and chips (in France), sausage and mash (in England), pie and sauce (in Australia). Looking at that list I see that I have named dishes that are national preferences - are any of them universal I wonder? Are there other versions of eggs and bacon in Europe? Quiche Lorraine perhaps, spaghetti carbonara, huevos ranchos - so yes of course there are.
Anyway for dinner I'm thinking cauliflower, cheese, mushrooms, cream and bacon with perhaps some paprika too. These are all fairly normal matchings gleaned from what's in my fridge and a life of cooking. Although David didn't seem enthralled by the idea of cauliflower, so maybe it will be the leftover sausage stew (or the solid bits) mixed with some leftover rice, fennel and chicken - a sort of cheats' paella. Don't think I'll check out the charts though. Besides cauliflower doesn't appear to be on it.
