My daughters have had an influence on my cooking. I learned to leave a cube of butter on the table at room temperature. That way I use it as flavor on occasion. I also keep a quart of buttermilk in the fridge because it is vital in making many soups taste much better.
I recently added two tools to the cooking armamentarium. One is a fine cheese grater. Fine slivers of hard cheese, like peccorino. The cheese ends up resembling a cloud. The other is a table top knife sharpener. I love sharp knives and get all the knives sharpened professionally. This table model keeps them very sharp.
This leads to another subject: taste. Taste is obviously relative. The highly refined taste of a chef at Nobu has no greater standing in a democratic society than the taste of a manager of the local Wendy’s. The fact that the food reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle, Michael Bauer, is partial to restaurants that serve pomme frites and bifstek (burger and fries) doesn’t make him less of a food critic. You just need to know his tastes.
However, my mind doesn’t work that way. I’m convinced that some people can taste far more varieties of flavor than others. Worse yet, that people with very sensitive taste buds lose their sensitivity the more alcohol they drink.
Forty years ago, when I was foolish, I tested the prevailing view that San Francisco bagels were crap compared to New York authentic bagels. I flew in a box of Zabar’s bagels for an 11am Sunday brunch with 40 people. In a double blind test, San francisco bagels versus New York, no one could tell the difference.
The real taste test I wanted to do these days would make me an outcast. A friend, Katrina, made me do the test in a rudimentary way. We, Katrina and I, had a dozen people, double blind, taste five different food categories in groups of three different tastes, before and after having one drink of booze.
Thank god the test was sloppy. If I could state unequivocally that having a glass of wine before dinner would turn your judgment of a poor dinner into a good one or an average one into a great one ---- I’d have no friends. Nearly everyone demands the right to enjoy a glass of wine and comment knowledgably about the food they proceed to eat. Most even claim the wine enhances the food.
If you want to be an outcast do the test correctly. You need about 30 people. Use only three different types of food (four different ground up veggies, four ground up fruits and four different ground up crackers) but be sure to have four different flavors in each food category. I only had three flavors so the guests could eliminate one and make a good guess at the remaining two.
Please don’t tell me the results. From my own inadequate test, I could see that some people have much greater sensitivity to flavors, but even they lose sensitivity with booze.
