If you’ve ever sealed a bit of leftover food by pressing a piece of plastic wrap directly onto its surface, but didn’t have a fancy name for this practice, you now have one: cartouche. That, at least, is how David Thompson, author of the most recent DCCC pick Thai Food, uses  this term. (He recommends storing leftover curry paste this way.)

The word cartouche, which can be used as a noun and a verb, is, in the cooking world, most commonly used to describe a piece of round parchment paper that chefs place over a sauce or gravy to keep a skin from forming.

As a home cook, I like its application to the more mundane and everyday practice of food storage as it gives me more opportunties to use it. Without knowing it, I’ve been cartouching for quite a while to keep foods as fresh as possible, and to keep them from turning color (guacamole, for example, benefits from this practice), and now I have a name for it.

Note: This is the first posting in “Words,” a new category I’ve created for the DCCC blog.  This is where I will share cooking terms, or unusual uses of cooking terms, or a particularly enjoyable or original turn of phrase that I’ve discovered while reading a DCCC cookbook, or ancillary reading material.

THAI FOOD
By David Thompson
Ten Speed Press
688 pp

David Thompson, author of  Thai Food, doesn’t cut any corners, and he doesn’t expect you to, either. The result? Some of the best Thai food you have had—better than what can be had at most restaurants—prepared right in your own kitchen.

There is a downside, however; the same rigorous recipes that create lively, nuanced food have the potential to leave a trail of disgruntled home cooks in their wake. One DCCC member so disliked the book that she returned it! Those of us who soldiered on all enjoyed the foods we prepared, finding them unlike, and more vibrant than, the more familar and probably overly Westernized version of Thai food we’ve had access to in the States.

There is no question that if you are new to Thai cooking, or even if you’ve done some Thai cooking at home using other cookbooks, you will be challenged when first cooking from this book, which is a truly amazingly, in-depth look at Thai food and Thai culture (the first recipe doesn’t appear until page 191!).

There are multiple reasons why Thai Food is not a walk in the park: ingredients can be difficult to find—particularly if you live in a small town or rural setting, or any place without an Asian population of some size—and there are very few suggested substitutions; for such a complex, text-heavy cookbook, the index could be much better, more complete, and provide more than one way to look up an ingredient or dish; in some cases, the instructions in the recipes proper could be clearer or more (more…)

David Thompson, author of Thai Food, the most recent DCCC cookbook pick, describes this pungent stir-fry as a “spicy, dry, yet oily curry.” It is all of those things, with a heat level that warms you from the inside out, from top of your head to the ends of your toes, with a double porky goodness that only cooking in lard can provide. Yes, lard. According to Thompson, in the north of Thailand, curries are fried in rendered pork fat rather than in coconut cream, as is typical in the south. The result is a wonderfully rich dish: The lard envelopes everything in a silken (more…)

The Eggs:

One of the plates of eggs shown above is for Jack Sprat, the other, for his wife. Both preparations—deep-fried eggs and steamed eggs—are found David Thompson’s Thai Cooking, the current DCCC pick, where they are presented more as method than recipe.

The process of making deep-fried and steamed eggs was an interesting novelty; the process of eating Mrs. Sprat’s clear choice opened a door in my egg-eating life. Deep-fried eggs represent a distinct category in the pantheon of egg preparations—scrambled, fried, poached, soft-boiled, and so on. Which means (more…)