Fat Chances

Some thoughts on dieting. A simple recipe. Vintage menus. And my favorite new product.

Since I’m about to go off on book tour, I thought I’d post a few menus from a previous tour.

“You’d be so pretty if you’d lose some weight,” was the mantra of my teenage years. I longed to be thin.

The more I obsessed about it, the more I ate - and the larger I grew. It made me miserable.

At the age of 20 I met a man who likes large women and somehow, magically (and to his immense disappointment), the weight melted away.

It has never come back. “Why aren’t you fat?” is pretty much what I’ve heard ever since.

I can’t explain it. But I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately - well, we all have - as we listen to the wildly competing information on weight. On the one hand we have the hoopla about Ozempic and how it’s making people thin and happy. On the other hand we have the pernicious anti-diet movement which is being funded by Big Food, who don’t want to take any responsibility for their contributions to our national obesity crisis. (I liked this article on the subject.) It made me go back and take a look at an article I wrote almost fifty years ago for the short-lived feminist magazine, New Dawn.

Seems only fitting to follow that by telling you about my favorite new source of fat. Last week, when I was in Sacramento, I spent an entire morning at the legendary Corti Brothers market where I discovered all manner of wonderful new (to me) products.

Who wouldn’t want this duck fat spray? Potatoes at my house will never be the same.

After that, I think it behooves me to offer up a delicious dish that is good precisely because it lacks fat.

Simply steamed chicken sounds like it’s too good for you to actually be good - and it is certainly not a beautiful dish. But if you steam a chicken right, you end up with flesh so smooth, soft and tender it seems to have turned into some other animal. It is the easiest dish you’ll ever make. And the most elegant. But there are a few rules.

1. You want to use a gentle liquor that will tenderize the bird and infuse it with flavor without overwhelming it. Sake is perfect.

2. You need to begin with a good chicken, one that has real flavor. There is nothing here to disguise the taste the bird was born with.

3. Salt the chicken well, inside and out, before putting it on the steaming rack.

4. Don’t overcook the chicken. Depending on the size of your bird, begin checking at about 50 minutes. Unless you’re using a very large chicken, it should be done in under an hour.

5. This is the most important point: After steaming your chicken, allow it to relax in the steamer until it is cool (20 to 30 minutes). If you take it right out of the steamer the flesh will seize, get tough and ruin everything.

6. You can make a ginger/scallion sauce for the chicken: here is Francis Lam’s classic recipe. Or simply serve it with ponzu or soy sauce. Alternatively, you can reduce the liquid in the steamer and pour it over the chicken. In this case, less is more.

Sake-Steamed Chicken
1 well-bred chicken, rinsed and dried
salt
1 1/2 cups sake
1 1/2 cups water
Optional scallions, ginger

Rinse your chicken, dry it well, and salt it generously inside and out. (If you have some scallions and/or a knob of ginger, they make a pleasantly aromatic garnish when you stuff them in the cavity of the bird.)

Mix the sake with the water.

Put a steamer inside a large casserole with a tight cover. (If you don’t have a steamer, a colander will do.) Pour in enough of the sake/water mixture so that it just reaches the bottom of the steamer.

Put the chicken on the steamer basket, breast-side up. Bring the liquid to a boil, cover the pot, turn the heat down to a simmer and steam gently. After about 20 minutes check the level of the liquid – if it’s already low, top off with some water.

At 50 minutes, check for doneness by making a cut in the breast and checking that the meat is no longer red and the juices run clear. (A small chicken should take just under an hour; larger ones may need to steam for an hour and a half.)

Allow the chicken to rest in the covered pot, with the heat off, for about half an hour before serving. Serve with ginger scallion sauce, excellent soy sauce, or ponzu.

This chicken is, if possible, even more delicious eaten cold on the following day.

Serves 2-4, depending on your appetite and the size of the chicken.

I finally got to have dinner at Torrisi last week (reservations are insanely impossible to come by), and while all the food was delicious, it was this innocuously named Chicken Soup that really blew me away.

Clear as a bell, it had a startlingly velvety texture that was like an instant hug. “How did they manage this?” I had to ask. The answer is that they begin with chicken stock and use it to make more chicken stock, filling the pot with chicken feet and wings to coax more collagen into the broth.

The fact that it also contained little threads of enoki mushrooms and copious amounts of grated black truffle didn’t hurt. And then, of course there was the egg…