Long Island Larder: Eggs Are Back
"Recent studies show . . ." I won't keep you in suspense: Eggs are good for you! Cooks everywhere will wave an enthusiastic farewell to the "whites-only" omelet, another dreary food fad disappearing over the hill into the sunset of oblivion.
"Cooking without eggs isn't cooking at all," in the words of soon-to-be-85 Julia Child, and I have remained loyal to the cruelly maligned henfruit throughout my culinary career.
Eggs are one of the most delicious, cheapest, most perfect sources of protein known to man. Few foods are so versatile. Eggs are, to boot, high in omega-3, an essential element in brain development.
Yes, eggs are high in cholesterol - a word mouthed even by kindergarteners with advanced vocabularies these days - but, the fact is, the body manufactures its own supply of this necessary component in hormone and cell membrane maintenance. Trouble is, some people (alas, it's hereditary) can't sustain a proper balance in their blood cholesterol levels. But most people can!
A study conducted at Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons revealed that a group of students, both male and female, who ate three or four eggs a day over a period of several weeks showed "virtually no change in their cholesterol levels."
This will not halt a continued disagreement over eggs in the diet. It's one I refuse to think about too much except for the worry about salmonella, which usually gets into eggs with cracked shells left out at room temperature too long. For this reason I pay outrageous prices for organic eggs, still one of the cheapest and best foods one can buy.
All this fretting over cholesterol has even resulted in reports by pediatricians of underweight babies and toddlers, placed on skim milk, low-fat, and eggless diets by their diet-vigilante parents.
Nearly all kids go through maddening picky-eater stages (easily cured, as most large families know, by having six children and enough food on the table for five), but the one mother's blessing that few refuse is scrambled eggs. And that's one comfort food most of us never outgrow.
Except for Chinese Thousand-Year Eggs, my taste for eggs in almost any form has continued unabated: soft-boiled, hard-boiled, deviled, fried, poached or coddled, souffles, omelettes, frittatas, piperade, quiches, and custard pies.
Sugar Takes Its Lumps
There are great egg dishes in nearly every national cuisine, although the most eccentric one I ever encountered - Denmark's cold sunny-side-up eggs with a sprinkling of sugar - did not fall into the "great" category.
Of course there are many disagreements about the role of sugar; the Chinese put sugar into every dish that tomatoes figure in, and sprinkle fresh, raw tomatoes with a lavish coating of confectioner's sugar. Sugar has had to take its lumps too; it's been blamed for every kind of evil from ugly sandbox behavior to sprees of serial murders.
Woody Allen once predicted that sugar and chocolate will be declared dietary essentials by the year 2500. With any luck at all, carob will be outlawed.
Chard Noodle Pudding
This is adapted from a sweet-savory pudding I found in "The Greens Cookbook," a vegetarian book by Deborah Madison and Edward Espe Brown. As I don't care for the sweet aspect of it, I have eliminated the raisins and sweet spices. The original recipe was for fresh spinach, but as none was available, I made this delectable main course pudding with chard leaves.
Serves eight.
1/2 cup cream cheese
1 cup of ricotta (part skim milk)
4 "large" eggs, beaten
11/4 cups whole milk
1/2 cup sauteed onions
1/4 tsp. nutmeg
1/4 tsp. cardamom
1 tsp. salt
1 bunch. fresh, young chard
2 pkgs. fresh fettuccine
Garnish: Sour cream (light or regular - or the nonfat kind if disguised with chives or fresh parsley)
Bring a large pot of water to the boil. Combine the cream cheese with the ricotta and beaten eggs, milk, onions, nutmeg, cardamom, and salt. Wash, then remove stems from the chard with heavy scissors and plunge the leaves into the boiling water for about three minutes. Remove and drain, pressing out as much moisture as possible with the back of a wooden spoon. Chop coarsely with a large knife (not the processor, as it will mince it). Stir this into the egg mixture.
Boil the fettuccine about two minutes, just slightly underdone, then combine it with the egg mixture. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Butter a large baking dish (a six to eight-cup souffle, for example) and pour the mixture into it. Bake in the center of the oven until it is firm and nicely browned on top - about one hour.
Remove it from the oven and run a knife around the edges to loosen it from the baking dish. You can either unmold the pudding onto a large warm platter, or serve it from its baking dish. Serve with room-temperature sour cream.
Idiot-Proof Flat Souffle-Roulade
Regular souffles are one of the easiest dishes to make. However, for the souffle-challenged, here is one that can't fail, as it never rises very much in the first place. I first laid eyes on this mystifying masterpiece on an old Julia Child television show in the '60s.
It can be filled with anything not too heavy or wet, baked, rolled up like a jellyroll, and cut in slices for either a first course or a brunch dish. You will need a 17-by-11-inch jelly-roll pan to make the roulade.
This looks like a lot of ingredients and fussing around; however, it's really easy to make - fail-proof.
Serves four to six.
Bechamel sauce base:
1/4 lb. unsalted butter
2/3 cup unbleached flour
3 cups milk (any percent you like), heated
1/2 tsp. coarse salt
Sprinkling of cayenne
Freshly grated nutmeg (a smidgen)
Souffle mixture:
The sauce above
6 "large" room-temperature eggs, separated
Pinch of cream of tartar and one of salt
1 cup shredded Gruyere or Swiss cheese, not packed
1/2 cup soft bread crumbs
Butter
2 Tbsp. Parmesan cheese
Filling:
2 cups chopped cooked broccoli
2 cups ham, in julienne strips
Fresh parsley, chopped
1 cup of Bechamel sauce (re served from above recipe)
Melt the butter in a heavy saucepan and stir in the flour over medium-low heat. After it has cooked a few minutes, whisk in the milk and seasonings. Reserve one cup. Set aside the remainder, covered loosely with paper toweling for a lid.
Preheat the oven to 425 degrees F.
After separating the eggs, beat the yolks into the Bechamel sauce. Beat the whites with the cream of tartar and salt until they stand in soft, glossy peaks, then fold a big spoonful of them into the Bechamel sauce to lighten it. Fold the whites and sauce together lightly - it doesn't matter if there are some blotches of white - along with the Gruyere or Swiss cheese.
Saute the bread crumbs in butter until light brown, turn out onto a plate.
Souffle Mixture
Lightly grease the jelly-roll pan and line it with parchment baking paper, then lightly spread the souffle mixture evenly over the entire surface, taking care not to deflate the air cells. Bake in the center of the preheated oven for about 12 minutes, until set but not dried out.
Sprinkle the souffle with the bread crumbs, cover it with a sheet of waxed paper, and invert it onto a large cookie sheet. After five minutes, lift off the jelly-roll pan and peel off the parchment paper. If edges are dry or cracked, trim them off with a sharp knife to make rolling easier.
Warm the filling ingredients with the reserved cup of Bechamel sauce and spread this over the souffle. Beginning on the long edge, roll the souffle up, jelly-roll fashion, peeling off the waxed paper as you work, and rolling it over onto a parchment-lined baking sheet.
Sprinkle it with the Parmesan and reheat it gently in a 300-degree oven just long enough to warm it, about five minutes. You can make it ahead of time and let it rest, covered with a light kitchen cloth until serving time. You can keep it warm over a large pan of hot water on the top of the stove if the wait is not more than about 30 minutes.
A Nice Topping
Julia Child said you could refrigerate or even freeze the roulade, then reheat it in the 300-degree oven. However, I've never tried that, so you're on your own.
The souffle-roulade doesn't really have to be filled if you put some kind of flavoring into the Bechamel sauce - say chopped cooked spinach, mushrooms, cheese, or sauteed onions. Then you can simply sprinkle the roulade after it's baked with some kind of cheese and herbs and roll it up.
A cheese sauce, or one made of mushrooms and Bechamel or a light, fresh tomato sauce would make a nice topping - perhaps one of those sauces sold in the refrigerated cases with fresh pasta might work, though I've never tried any of them. I have an inherent distaste for most pre- made sauces, whether dried, bottled, or frozen, but if you've found one you like, by all means use it.
Just be sure to taste it before messing up your souffle-roulade with it.