Edibles — Blog

Those of you who follow me on Twitter know that I am obsessed with "Top Chef: All Stars". I love the chefs, I love the challenges, I love Anthony Bourdain...I even love Padma, even though I think she's a thoroughly unlikely food show host. As far as I know, the Regency did not have anything like "Top Chef" (they were rather short on televisions, after all). But, they did have one of the very first celebrity chefs - Marie-Antoine Carême. According to Venetia Murray's book "High Society", Carême's father was a stonemason with fifteen other children; and so, when Carême was eleven, his father took him to Paris, "fed him supper in a tavern and abandoned him in the street." Awfully nice of dear old dad to give him supper first, right?

Despite that rather inauspicious beginning, Carême found his way into an apprenticeship with in a Parisian patisserie. His master allowed him to study at the Bibliotheque Royale, where he saw all sorts of engravings of ancient Greek, Roman and Egyptian architecture - and he translated his lessons into fantastic pastry centerpieces (which I suppose makes him a direct predecessor to Duff Goldman on "Ace of Cakes").

As Carême's reputation grew, he set up his own establishment and cooked for the uppermost echelons of Parisian society, including Napoleon and Talleyrand. After Napoleon's final defeat at Waterloo, Prinny (later George IV) lured Carême away from the continent to cook for him in England.

Prinny's kitchen at the Royal Pavilion in Brighton was the ultimate in modern convenience - so ultimate that he once served dinner in the kitchen itself to show it off to his guests. Prinny and his household went through an astonishing quantity of food, and Carême was in charge of making sure that the food all reached the table at the right time. And he didn't just cook - like many of today's celebrity chefs, he wrote several popular cookbooks, and his techniques influenced generations of chefs.

So in regards to "Top Chef", I've been thinking that the cheftestants have it easy compared to Carême's job. For one dinner at the Royal Pavilion on 15 January 1817, Carême and his team prepared 100 unique dishes, including 36 entrees and 32 desserts. Presumably, the kitchens would have also turned out a sumptuous breakfast, lunch, and any other snacky-snacks that day as well, which makes the production of such a lavish dinner in the age before refrigeration even more incredible.

I'll be watching "Top Chef" tonight with eager anticipation, but I'm slightly less impressed with their feats of culinary genius after reading about everything that Carême turned out. Given that they aren't running the risk of poisoning a future king with spoiled, unrefrigerated food, they should feel positively relaxed about their cooking.

Are you as obsessed with "Top Chef" as I am? Don't you think Carême would look awesome with Marcel's hair? And would you be able to handle a dinner with 100 dishes, either as a cook or a diner?

On this week's installment of "How to Live Like a Romance Heroine," we have a topic very near and dear to my heart - tea!

I love many types of tea, but my go-to drink while writing is strong, hot black tea with milk and sugar. My obsession started young, when I reread The Secret Garden every week for months. In my Iowa youth, the only tea I had was Lipton in a bag, and I compensated by having a sugar:liquid ratio that should have given me far more cavities than I actually suffered. Now, though, I am much more refined (read 'snobbish') in my tastes - only loose-leaf will do, and only in a proper mug. Tea is delicate enough that I swear I can taste the paper if it is served in a to-go cup. But where can you find these teas, and how can you make them yourself?

My favorite place for tea in San Francisco is Samovar, which has three locations scattered across the city. If you ever visit SF, you must make a trip to the Samovar at Yerba Buena Gardens; it overlooks a terraced garden nestled in the heart of the city, creating a warm little oasis of pleasure in the midst of the skyscrapers of the Financial District and the pressing humanity of Union Square.

This is the inside of Samovar on a recent weekend - doesn't it just make you want to sit and drink tea for hours? Luckily, the staff sincerely do not mind if you linger (which is much to be preferred from the 10-15 minute tea-guzzling social calls of the Regency period!).

But you do not need to pay someone to make the perfect cup of tea for you - unlike espresso, it's easy and cheap to make great tea at home without any special equipment. You only need the following:

Loose-leaf tea of your choice. There are hundreds of varieties out there, divided into categories such as black, green, white, oolong, rooibos, herbal, etc. My standby is English Breakfast (excellent with milk and sugar). There are hundreds of stores out there that sell loose-leaf tea in tins, as well as online sites like Teavana and Samovar. Better yet, seek out your local tea purveyors so that you can test the products and learn more from them about how to brew the perfect cup. You should look for full, unbroken dried tea leaves; generally, crumbled bits of leaves or the dust that you find in teabags are the most inferior byproducts of the tea production process and should be avoided.
A tea kettle. Either stovetop or electric - I'm certainly not advocating for living like a real romance heroine, with a kitchen servant keeping a pot of boiling water over the fire all day! You could also boil water just as easily in a saucepan, but I prefer the aesthetics of a real pot.
A tea ball or a strainer. The advantage of a tea ball is that you can keep the leaves contained within the ball; as they expand, they stick to the insides of whatever you are brewing the tea in, and a tea ball makes it much easier to clean up. You may also see this called an 'herb ball', and it should be available for only a couple of dollars at a kitchen supply store or Target.
A teapot. By combining the leaves and boiling water in the teapot, you can brew the tea in one vessel, leaving the leaves there when you pour the tea into a cup. Note: when making tea for myself, I've become lazy and just toss a tea ball directly into my mug; this saves me from having to wash up a teapot, since I don't have scullery maids at my beck and call.
A teacup or mug. Pretty self-explanatory, really - you need something to drink out of, don't you?

It's all quite simple after that: boil the water, spoon the appropriate amount of tea (usually as directed on the package) into a tea ball, pour boiling water over the tea ball and steep as directed, and then enjoy. Steeping for longer than recommended won't kill you, but it will release more tannins the longer it steeps, making for a more bitter brew.

For those of you who want to learn more about the history of teadrinking in Britain, the wonderful writer Joanna Bourne wrote an excellent (albeit long) post on the subject a few weeks ago at Word Wenches, replete with lots of photos and fun historical tidbits - check it out and let me know what you think!

Do you like to drink tea? Or would you rather live like a Regency heroine by drinking champagne, ratafia, or the insipid lemonade at Almack's? All comments are welcome, even if you (like me) secretly nurse an addiction to Diet Coke that cannot be eclipsed by the beverages of yore.