46. Mea Gulpa

Admitting that the whole is less than the sum of its parts.

First off, welcome back to The Plate Cleaner. (Or should you be welcoming The Plate Cleaner back to your inbox? Either way…) After taking a little time off after what was, for me, a breakneck end to the year (11 issues in 14 weeks is definitely a personal record), we’re back and ready to pick up where we left off.

Which was talking about ballotines, poultry that has been completely deboned but kept in one piece that is then stuffed, rolled, roasted, and served hot. (Served cold, you’ll recall, it is a galantine.)¹

My first ballotine, stuffed with stuff, not thing.

After making my first ballotine last year, a chicken stuffed with bread, cheese, and spinach, I decided to experiment. My first try, which was the subject of last year’s final issue, was a Thai-style roasted chicken stuffed with Thai spring roll filling. At the time I mentioned that it felt like the ratio of chicken to stuffing was off, with too much stuffing and not enough bird in many places.

I also (in a footnote that I’m sure you all of read) spontaneously decided on what my next ballotine experiment would be: a roast chicken stuffed with cabbage rolls. What could be better than combining two of my favourite things? So I made it, and visually it turned out just as I had envisioned.

Had I created a dish that could be Instagram-famous?

The cabbage rolls were nice and round and looked exactly like the were supposed to. I made the tomato sauce following my go-to cabbage roll recipe and served it at the table in place of a more traditional gravy. It looked great.

Except…

It was just all right. Like the spring roll-stuffed chicken, the stuffing didn’t seem to be adding much to the dish as a whole. I was confused. Roast chicken is just about the most perfect dish. Cabbage rolls are also up there. Why, when combined, did they add up to so much less?

At that point, I started formulating what I think is a pretty airtight culinary rule of thumb: thing-in-a-thing is never a good idea. The first ballotine I made, stuffed with bread, cheese, and spinach was a greater success because it is not thing-in-a-thing, but stuff-in-a-thing. Bread, cheese, and spinach are not their own thing. No one says, “Let’s have torn up chunks of bread, grated cheese, and some sautéed spinach for dinner tonight.” They’re just stuff. And stuff-in-a-thing is one of the world’s great food formats. From dumplings to Cornish pasties to tacos to Scotch eggs (which are maybe more correctly “thing-in-stuff”), stuff-in-a-thing works because the thing (usually) takes a back seat to the stuff. The thing exists just so the stuff can shine.

But with thing-in-a-thing, neither wants to be in the back seat. Roast chicken is not just a starring role, it’s a spotlight-hogging, scenery chewing juggernaut (in the best way). The same with cabbage rolls.² They want to be their own (and often the only) thing. Even served at the same meal but not tethered to each other as tightly as a ballotine, they would each have their moments and could happily co-exist. Forced into the same dish, however, they step all over one another resulting in, well, Ishtar.³

There’s no reason I had to tell you any of this. I’m guessing most of you never saw the original footnote in which I had the original idea. (By the way, if you’re not reading the footnotes, not to pat myself on the back, but you’re missing a big part of each issue. Right now you’re missing out on some quality content about Christopher Nolan that isn’t about how long Oppenheimer was.) And few of you saw the Instagram story. (Why aren’t you following me on Instagram?) I posted about making it, as well as how underwhelmed I was by it. Nevertheless, I thought it was important, as Billy Bragg once said, “to take the crunchy with the smooth” and tell you about it. It was an interesting idea that made sense on paper and looked great in photographs but was ultimately a letdown. At the very least it taught me an important lesson about trying to make thing-in-a-thing happen. Just don’t.

(If you can think of an example of a thing-in-a-thing that works really well, please let me know in the comments below. The first thing that comes to mind is a turducken, but that also seems like stuff-in-a-thing, in which the thing is “birds.”)⁴

What’s on the menu…

Bierocks The stuff-in-a-thing I want to try next are bierocks, a yeasted dough sandwich pocket filled with ground beef, onion, and either cabbage or sauerkraut. They’re favourites of the descendants of the Volga Germans who emigrated to the American midwest, particularly Kansas and Nebraska (where they are best known as Runzas, after the biggest chain⁵ selling them in the state) in the 1870s.

All of the pizza I have been making lately has got me interested in baking other breads and, given my previously documented love of cabbage, this seems like a good place to start. I might even break out a fermentation crock and make my own sauerkraut to put in them.

What I’m consuming…

Anti-Chef I was made aware of this YouTube channel by a recommendation in John Hodgman’s newsletter. I tend to avoid a lot of the most popular foodbro types on YouTube. Your Babishes, Joshua Weissmans, and Adam Raguseas. Aside from the strong bro vibes they all give off, I find a lot of their videos poorly sourced (or completely conceal their sources) and often misleading. Babish’s video for onigiri,⁶ for example, is an abomination, completely misleading the viewer as to how the dish is properly made.⁷ It’s also, frustratingly in the top three results when you search for “onigiri recipe,” driving accurate videos from, you know, actual Japanese cooks down the list, never to be clicked on. (This probably should have been a footnote.) But there’s also an air of infallibility to most of their videos. They may have trouble with a few things, but they’re never really dwelled up and and they inevitably come out on top.

Jamie Tracey, the host of Anti-Chef, has something different going on. He makes no claim to having any particular cooking skills or knowledge, particularly when he started his channel. And because his videos frequently feature him cooking from cookbooks by Julia Child, Marcella Hazan, Thomas Keller, and others, there’s no question of where his ideas are coming from.⁸

In a typical Anti-Chef video, failure is always an option. Tracey, as many of us do, struggles to understand recipes written 50 years ago for different equipment and different types of cooks. He gets frustrated. He makes stupid mistakes. (Very often when something goes wrong with a dish there are many comments below explaining why it went sideways. Often the reasons are quite obvious to more experienced cooks.)

Tracey, like the aforementioned foodbros, is a white guy making cooking videos, so he’s not exactly exploring new territory, but his videos have an honesty and a vulnerability that I appreciate. It’s also fun to silently (or not) yell at the screen because you can clearly see what he’s doing wrong.

And finally…

As many of you already know, I have a very keen interest in the cookbooks that turn up at thrift stores. Partly because I want to bring them all home for myself. But also because there are some books that I want to find a good home for. Every few trips I will find a book that I know is fantastic that is in new or almost-new condition and I just can’t bear to leave it on the shelf. The pile of rescues has been steadily growing and something needs to be done with them.

Considering potentially doing a Moosewood bundle and two Silver Palate bundles, particularly if I can find another New Basics.

In the past I’ve tried doing book giveaways as a means of incentivizing engagement and referrals to potential new subscribers—but with middling success. I’m going to start up again soon, but have to figure out what the mechanism will be. I still think getting a free (and guaranteed very good) cookbook is a good trade for helping your beloved Plate Cleaner find a new audience. Any suggestions as to what you think might work or what might motivate you are most welcome.

And, of course, any and all suggestions, comments, and referrals are also most welcome. I’d love to hear from you.

1. As always, my timing is impeccably late to have published an issue about glantines for Galentine’s day. Maybe next year.

2. I am just realizing now that cabbage rolls are already stuff-in-a-thing. Which means: Cabbage roll-stuffed chicken = (Stuff-in-a-Thing)-in-Thing. I haven’t made a meal; I’ve made a Christopher Nolan film.

3. Ishtar directed by Christopher Nolan, no less!

4. Another dish that may seem like thing-in-thing is Balmoral Chicken. A Scottish dish traditionally eaten as part of a Burns Supper, it’s made by stuffing a chicken breast with haggis and then wrapping the whole thing in bacon. Chicken breast is a thing and haggis is a thing, right? So thing-in-a-thing? I say no because—and this is where talking about semantics doesn’t just mean being nit-pickingly pedantic—a haggis is a thing; haggis is stuff. Consider the difference between “I ate chicken,” and “I ate a chicken.”

5. It boggles the mind a bit that a chain of restaurants can have, as of November 2020, 86 locations and be almost completely unknown outside of the places it operates.

6. Japanese rice balls.

7. He tells users to make it with vinegared sushi rice, not the plain, steamed rice it is supposed to be made of. Which is absolutely wrong.

8. Well, also from Julie Powell of Julie and Julia fame, of course.