Smithsonian.com

Meringue cookies. Image courtesy of Flickr user wiserbailey.

Chefs began whipping up meringue sometime in the early 1600s. The light-as-air confection is made by whipping egg whites and is used in a variety of desserts, such as Pavlova, macaroons and baked Alaska. It’s a delicacy that’s delightfully counter-intuitive. While most other foods get smaller and flatter as they’re beaten and smashed, egg whites are comparatively resilient and fluff up and expand under similar duress.

This past weekend I had a few egg whites left over after making another dish and thought I would try my hand at them. If these things were made by Renaissance chefs in the days before electric hand mixers, surely I could manage to whip some up myself. Unfortunately, mine were a flop—literally. The egg whites never puffed and peaked like they were supposed to; they sat in flat, unappetizing pats on my baking sheet. How could something seemingly so simple fail so spectacularly? Turns out there’s a lot of chemistry to consider when making meringue.

Although egg whites are 90 percent water, the relevant molecules are protein. Proteins are made up of amino acids, some that are attracted to water, others that are repelled by water. One you start beating the whites and introducing air, the water-loving bits cling to the water, the water-repelling bits cling to the air. The more you beat, the more bubbles with a protein coating are created and the more the whole shebang fluffs up. However, bubbles and proteins divided against themselves will not stand, and the foam will collapse without a little stabilizer. One way of doing this is to introduce an acid such as vinegar, lemon juice or cream of tartar, which encourages the proteins in the egg white to bond together. Another ingredient that adds structural integrity, in addition to providing flavor, is sugar, which works like a glue that holds the foam together.

But why don’t we want to use the yolk? This part of the egg contains fat, which interferes with how the proteins line up and coat all those bubbles that are supposed to bulk up your meringue. If the bubbles aren’t properly protected, your meringue will never have much body. This is also why chefs are discouraged from using plastic bowls for this purpose as they have a tendency to retain oils. So perhaps I wasn’t as careful as I ought to have been when separating my eggs and a bit of stray yolk made it into my whites. I’m also in the habit of using my hands to separate eggs. And even though I washed my hands beforehand, perhaps residual oils sabotaged my baking venture. So even though my first try didn’t go so well, tell us about your meringue adventures (or misadventures) in the comments section below.

Following up on our lists of historians and innovators to watch in the coming year, here are a list of great food writers who our bloggers are looking forward to following:

From Jesse:

The Perennial Plate is an online documentary series by Daniel Klein about food and communities. Season 1 had a Minnesota and Midwest focus. Season 2, which is still being rolled out, covers the continental United States.

Gilt Taste’s stories section is also worth watching as a “must-read” site. It started up last spring. While the section can get a little recipe-heavy during the holiday season, it features stories about food and culture from a wide variety of writers.

From Peter:

McSweeney’s, the book publisher, is putting out David Chang’s dude-centric Lucky Peach and also, get this, a cookbook written by Eat Pray Love‘s Liz Gilbert’s grandma.

Nicola Twilley of Foodprint/Edible Geography. She writes about “smellscapes,” the odors that define certain places; wacky food-based artists; edible insects; and she runs a lot of Q&As with interesting characters.

Naz Sahin, at Feasting Never Stops, runs a very visual blog with a great sense of humor—one set of photos shows anglers holding up their hands to show the size of the biggest fish they ever caught.

Cooked Books, by Rebecca Federman, takes a more literary approach. She’s one of the curators of the “What’s on the Menu?” project.

Also, keep an eye on the Gastronomica Twitter feed.

“Penguin Interviews,” via Frederick Cook’s Through the first Antarctic night, 1896-1899.

Frederick Cook was an American surgeon and a polar explorer who set out for the edge of the unknown: Antarctica. It was the first major scientific expedition of the Heroic Age. The year: 1897. The ship: the Belgica.

On its way back to South America, the ship got stuck in the ice for an entire cold, sun-less Antarctic winter. What little they had to eat, they ate—cans of mysterious tinned meat and fishballs that supposedly contained cream. Even Nansen, the ship’s cat, went a little crazy.

Eventually, penguins began flocking to the ship and the birds were—Cook wrote—“of equal interest to the naturalist and the cook.” He began eating penguins. They taste like “a piece of beef, odiferous cod fish and a canvas-backed duck roasted together in a pot, with blood and cod-liver oil for sauce”—but eventually he convinced the crew’s leader to make everyone eat penguin. Remember, Cook was a physician and was essentially prescribing this fresh meat as medicine.

Raoul Amundsen was a member of the crew, who perhaps should be remembered not just for reaching the South Pole first, or even going on to reach both poles first, or even passing through the icy waters of the Northwest Passage. Because Amundsen and his Belgica shipmate Frederick Cook ate penguin meat, they were able to stave off scurvy—a vitamin C deficiency that plagued nearly every explorer of the Heroic Age. They’re some of the very few explorers of that era who can make that claim.

What the crew of the Belgica also stumbled upon was a novel method for hunting the birds. According to a recent paper in Endeavour, Jason C. Anthony (also the author of forthcoming book on polar cuisine), writes:

By the end of July they were living mainly on penguin meat, with a marked improvement in the crew. Gerlache, the captain, was the last to consent, and thus the last to be cured, but soon offered rewards to the crew for bringing in penguins for the larder—one frank for living birds, fifty centimes for dead ones. This was easy money, as it turned out. The crew learned in their final months that they could summon both penguins and seals to the ship by simply playing a tune on their cornet.

They played them music, almost like polar snake charmers intent on eating the birds they charmed. Cook reported on December 16 (p. 382):

At meal time, a cornet is used to call the men together, and the penguins, it seems, also like the music; for when they hear it they make directly for the ship, and remain as long as the music lasts, but leave once it ceases. In this manner we have only to wait and seize our visitor to obtain penguin steaks, which are, just at present, the prize of the menu.

Of course, the music may have played only a bit part in the overall conquest of the South Pole. And, as Ernest Shackleton later learned, not all music was a recipe for catching a potential penguin dinner. As Fen Montaigne writes in Fraser’s Penguins:

One of his men pulled out a banjo and began playing “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary,” which, as Shackleton recounts in South, “The solemn looking little birds appeared to appreciate.” The bagpipe, however, was another story, and when a Scottish member of the expedition began to play the national instrument, the Adelies “fled in terror and plunged back into the sea.”

Would you eat this bacon sundae? Image courtesy of Flickr user Sam Howzit

Everything tastes better with bacon, Sara Perry grandly proclaimed on the cover of her 2002 cookbook. Since then, the love of bacon has grown to surreal heights; it’s become a collective obsession. Should you get the urge, it’s easy to order some bacon ice cream, bacon-infused vodka, bacon soap, or even a monstrosity called the bacon explosion, which is essentially a loaf of bacon-wrapped sausage with yet more bacon.

So what, exactly, could be inspiring this cult of bacon-worship? And why won’t it die?

Well, it’s delicious.

Arun Gupta of The Indypendent explained that bacon has six ingredients with umami (savory) flavor. But that’s always been true, and while we’ve been eating bacon for centuries, the kind of mania that exists in America today is a new trend. A Chicago Mercantile Exchange report from September 2010 found a recent surge in pork belly (where bacon comes from) prices, which have climbed steadily since 1998. Earlier this year, the CME retired frozen pork belly futures after 40 years of trading. In the olden days, when bacon was a seasonal treat, buyers could store frozen pork bellies and sell them once demand was high. But in the past decade, our love affair with bacon has become a constant, year-round obsession. We don’t need pork belly frozen and stored, we want the fresh stuff right now and keep it coming. Now, bacon goes on everything, all the time.

It’s also very, very unhealthy.

In the diet-crazed 1980s and 1990s, bacon was mercilessly demonized. It even made the cover of Time Magazine in 1984 as the face of America’s cholesterol problems. Today, we care a bit less about the calorie content of our food and more about its wholesome origins. Three years after Everything Tastes Better With Bacon was published, Corby Kummer hailed a bacon renaissance driven by the production of artisanal bacon, which is “a perfect cherry-wood brown,” and has a “deep, subtle, lightly smoky flavor.” Standard supermarket bacon, by comparison, is “tinny and one-dimensional.” On the other end of the spectrum, you could argue that its popularity stems from the desire to fly in the face of all the trendy rules of food and health. As Jason Sheehan wrote in Seattle Weekly: “The phrase ‘Everything’s Better With Bacon!’ becomes like a challenge: Oh yeah? Watch what I can do…” Bacon is fatty freedom food. Putting bacon on everything (or, uh, wearing it as lingerie) is a statement of hedonism, pure and simple, a defiant stand against any movement that suggests we moderate what we eat.

It’s more American than apple pie.

Oscar Mayer started packaging pre-sliced bacon in 1924, and soon bacon became a staple of the American family breakfast. As Chris Cosentino, founder of Boccalone: Tasty Salted Pig Parts, pointed out: “You look at classic Norman Rockwell pictures of people at a diner, and what are they eating? Bacon and eggs.” Bacon is the iconic food memory of most people’s childhoods—which makes it the ultimate comfort food. The nostalgia for Mom sizzling up some bacon on Sunday morning—even if it didn’t actually happen to you—is a collective American experience. Bacon’s not just a delicious meat product anymore; it’s a shorthand for the fuzzy golden heyday of our past.

The most bizarre bacon products floating around the Internet:

Bacon mints: Doesn’t this kind of defeat the purpose?

Diet Coke with Bacon: Hold the sugar, add the bacon.

Bacon Kevin Bacon: It was only a matter of time.

Bacon alarm clock: An alarm clock that wakes you with the real aroma of cooking bacon.

Do you have even weirder examples? Leave them in the comments.

terra cibus no. 4: fortune cookie, courtesy of Caren Alpert

San Francisco-based photographer Caren Alpert has captured mouth-watering shots of food, stylish portraits of chefs and glimpses of chic restaurant interiors for clients such as Bon Appetit, Saveur Magazine and the Food Network. But, beginning in 2008, she branched out from her editorial and catalog work to experiment in fine art.

Alpert has taken magnified photographs of foods, from Brussels sprouts to Lifesavers, using a scanning electron microscope at her alma mater, the University of Arizona. Titled “Terra Cibus,” meaning “nurturing from the earth,” the series, recently exhibited at the James Beard Foundation in New York, provides viewers a new, and often bizarre, look at familiar foods.

I spoke with Alpert about the project:

Can you describe the process of preparing the samples and getting the shot?

I choose the foods out here in San Francisco. I sort of curate them if you will. I decide what I want to shoot. I overnight them to the lab in Arizona. They go through a dehydration process and then a metal coating process. Depending on what the food is, the length of dehydration can yield a better result and different metals used in the coating can yield a different result. That is the preparation process.

With a scanning electron microscope you are photographing the surface of a subject or a specimen—in my case, food. I am basically photographing the electrons bouncing off of the surface.

What have been the most interesting foods under the microscope?

The sugar and the salt for sure. I like the kiwi seeds. I love the pineapple leaf (below).

Have you gotten a sense of which foods are photogenic under the microscope and which are not?

I am getting better. But I wouldn’t say I am dead on 100 percent of the time.

I read that you tried a tortilla chip and it was boring looking. Have there been other duds?

Interestingly, it has been difficult to photograph meats and proteins. Bacon, for example—I thought it would be more interesting than it was at first pass. I am trying to find the best way to photograph foods like that, that are higher in fats.

terra cibus no. 33: pineapple leaf, courtesy of Caren Alpert

What sort of editing do you do?

The machine captures in black and white only. We do a post-processing treatment back at the studio where we infuse the color of the original foods as best we can.

After photographing a shrimp tail, you went to a scientist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium to inquire about its feathery texture. Do you often take your photographs to outside experts?

Certainly when I am stumped, yes. I am trying to involve more information about what we are looking at. The shrimp tail was quite surprising. Because the Monterey Bay Aquarium is a local gem for us, it was nice to be able to call on them, and they were very receptive to helping out. They were also very surprised to see the image. That is the part of the tail where you hold it and bite it off and then you throw the tail back on your plate. It is right there at that sort of cartilagey intersection.

What have you learned about food from these photographs?

How an unprocessed food or an organic food intakes water or air, you see a lot of that. Processed foods are very sharp and spiky, whereas unprocessed or more organic foods sort of have a repetitive pattern.

Has working on this series changed your own eating habits in any way?

No. Probably the biggest shock—but it hasn’t been enough to change my eating habits—is the French’s fried onions, which you sprinkle over your string bean casserole. They are really irregular and very violent looking compared to some of the others. You would think after seeing it, it would be enough to make you not want to eat them. But they are sort of a guilty pleasure. I snack on those occasionally.

Is healthy eating part of the goal? What do you hope viewers take away from the photographs?

I hope the viewers think about their own choices everyday or how they influence others around them. I got an email a few months ago from a man who said he and his two kids were on my website trying to guess all the foods. Then they would go back to their kitchen cupboards or refrigerator drawers to see if they had any of those foods at home. I think if it can encourage dialogue like that it is really interesting and successful.

I sort of like to encourage the viewer to look at it more aesthetically. I think people are so floored. “Oh my gosh, that is my lunch sandwich or that is my chocolate cake or that is my morning blueberries.” People are just fascinated. They are taken with the beauty of some foods and not others, of course. I got another email from a young woman in Spain who said that she and her boyfriend were fighting about images as art. She thought the images were beautiful and artistic, and he thought, oh, anyone can do that. They were having an argument about what makes art. That’s awesome, you know? It is really encouraging people to think about the parameters they put around those definitions.

More images can be seen at www.carenalpertfineart.com. Prints are available for purchase directly through the photographer.