Picky Eaters: Why America's Kids Stopped Loving New Foods

Hey listeners, Chris Kimball here. Genevieve Taylor is coming to Milk Street Radio to answer your grilling questions. If you need new recipes or a bit of inspiration, we're here to help. Or you can try to stump me and Genevieve with your toughest grilling mysteries or food fights. Email us at questions at MilkStreetRadio.com. One more time, that's questions at MilkStreetRadio.com and we'll be in touch. This is Milk Street Radio from PRX, I'm your host, Christopher Kimball. My guest today, author Helen Zoe Weitz, says American children are the fussiest eaters in history. But it wasn't always this way. Kids once ate foods that were sour, smoky, and funky. When most Americans today imagine why kids in the past ate differently, they imagine that it must have been because of scarcity. They imagine kids were forcing down foods they hated because those were the only alternatives to hunger. But no, in the 19th century, American children happily ate oysters, coffee, and corned beef. When they talked about children's food, they talked about children's natural curiosity, their natural interest in strong flavors and interesting textures. Today, the truth about kids and picky eating that's coming up later in the show. But first, it's my interview with Marina Marquezza. Marina isn't just a beekeeper, she's a certified honey sommelier and she joins me now. Marina, welcome to Milk Street. Thank you for having me. So my first question is this, is honey a food? Is honey medicine? Is honey religion? Is it all of those things? Is it some of those things? What is honey for the human race? Well, I would say it is a food. It's one of the only foods that is made by an insect that humans consume. But it is all of those things. It can be medicine, it can be culinary, it is hygrostopic, it is antibacterial. So the magical chemical composition of honey has amazing benefits that no other food has. Since I raised bees for 20 years, very often I would gather up the honey, harvest it, put it in the sterilized jars, and then over time that honey would crystallize. And I was always taught to put the jar of honey in a saucepan with water and heat the honey to about 160 degrees, let it cool, and then put the top back on and that solves the problem. Is that the right thing to do? So crystallization is actually a sign of quality. It's a natural process and most honeys will crystallize over time. I would suggest taking the glass jar of honey and putting it in boiling water, but turn the stove so the flame is off and just let the honey jar sit in the hot water and just stir it and let it melt. Is honey like olive oil where there's just a lot of lying and cheating in the industry? I assume adulteration is, you know, like in any business, big ag business, is an issue, right? Absolutely. I mean honey is the third most adulterated food after milk and olive oil. You know, anything that you buy in the store in a plastic bear tends to be imported. So you have to really read not only the front of the label, but you have to read the back of the label and you have to look at the ingredients. You also have to look at the country of origin because you want to look and make sure that it's not a blend from two, three, four different countries. All right, well, let's, I have five samples here. This is the part of my job that I really love. We're going to do, it's a blind tasting. They're just marked one, two, three, four, five. I don't know what they are. So you want to take me through this? Yeah, absolutely. So I chose five different honeys based upon very, very different color, flavor, and botanical sources so that you can really see how different honey is and that it's not always just medium amber, sweet liquid. And the first honey that I chose is called sour wood. This smells like the penny candies at the Western country store in Vermont. It has a very particular odor that I associate with some sort of like hard candy. I can't go and put my finger on it, but licorice, anise. Yeah, it does. That's it. It's sort of salted licorice, Swedish salted licorice. Can I taste it now or don't you smell it? Yeah, you can taste it. Yep. Yeah, it's sweet. It doesn't have a lot of deep character or so. It sort of tasted me like the thing I would get in the sugar bear or something. It's good, but I don't think it's very complex. Yeah, it's not super complex, but this honey wins a lot of international awards because of that unusual note of anise. So this next one I should just point out is white number two, and it has almost a coconutty smell to it. Let me taste it. A little grassy, little funky animal, hay, dry hay. This is some weird honey. Not saying that in a bad way. I'm saying, wow, it's super interesting. I mean, there's a lot going on here. So that honey is a sweet clover from the Dakotas. This is true clover. This is what a true clover should taste like. Now, number three smells exactly like the inside of a hive when I pull the top off. I mean, this is the exact smell I get when I start messing around with my hives. In the fall. Yeah, it smells like bees and beeswax and honey and everything that I would expect in Vermont. So this is a fall honey. And you'll notice that when you smell it, it's really pungent. This is, this tastes just like my honey. So I love it. That's a golden rod, honey. Yeah, well, that's exactly what my bees make honey from. So that's why I recognize it. Okay, number four. Wow, this is, smells a little like soy sauce or fish sauce. So what's this? I've never had anything like this. So this is actually honeydew. And honeydew is produced when the bees are gathering the sweet droppings of aphids. And this particular honeydew is produced in Transylvania. And when you taste it, you'll get this very savory umami warm. So we have aphid poop honey, with a great name. And it's got like a condensed milk note, a little bit like balsamic, like the evergreen trees. It's very complex. And I like that. I mean, I guess if you were going to put a drop on sushi or something, it would be perfect. Okay, the last one looks like honey butter. It's very thick. Smells, that's really interesting. Different. Smells like an ashtray. Yeah, yeah. It is just like the morning after one of my parents cocktail parties back many years ago. Oh, so is this something you like put on sweet cheese or something? I don't know what you do with this. So this is the honey of the island of Sardinia. This is their traditional honey that they've made for thousands of years. Probably the bitterest honey produced on the planet. And they put it on something called the Ciedas, which is essentially a big ravioli that they stuff with cheese and fry it on the stovetop. And when it comes out of that, they drizzle it with the Corvettesalio honey. And it is amazing. I think it would go with cheese. Yeah. Yeah, super bitter. But they have a different palette. And to them, this is their honey of their country. A honey for every palette. Exactly. I love this thing about the Yoruba in Nigeria. During the wedding ceremony, the bride and groom taste lemons to represent disappointments, vinegar to represent bitter arguments they may have, cayenne pepper to represent spice and passion, and honey to remind them of their sweet life of joy. Sounds like, you know, a pretty balanced deal, right? Yeah, it's really interesting when I was researching for this book that I just wrote, the World Atlas of Honey, I found a lot of incidents of birth ceremonies, wedding ceremonies, just a lot of cultural, interesting stories, how honey was used, and the significance of it in different cultures around the world. It's pretty much produced in every country on the planet, except Antarctica. So honey is part of every culture in some way. Marina, thank you so much. Thank you for the tasting. I still love my honey from Vermont. But now I know a lot more about honey than I did just a few minutes ago. Thank you. It was my pleasure. Thank you, Chris. That was Marina Marchese, author of the World Atlas of Honey. Now it's time to answer your cooking questions with my co-host Sarah Moulton. Sarah is, of course, the star of Sarah's weeknight meals on public television, also author of Home Cooking 101. Well, hello, Chris. How are you today? I'm good. Are you ready to take a couple of calls? Absolutely. All right, let's open up the phone lines. Welcome to Milk Street. Who's calling? Hi, this is Nisha from New York City. How are you? I'm good. How are you? Good. How can we help you? I wanted to ask you both about using my other expenses while cooking and baking. So I've experienced some vision loss in the last five or six years, and I do love to cook. But a lot of things that you cook, like if I follow a recipe, it calls for you to look at the food. And when it gets to a particular color, let's say, meat for browning or butter and sugar when you cream it together until it's pale yellow. It's one of my challenges saying, okay, how do I know when I'm at the next stage? Let's start with this question. How good or how bad is your vision now? My issue is mostly my central vision that gives you acuity when it comes to color. I see. So I can't see if the meat has gone from raw to brown. It pretty much looks the same. There are some things that are helpful. I was once cooking with a well-known chef in Boston, and we were cooking onions, and she told me, and I've used this ever since, she can always tell if they're cooking at the right rate by listening. So when we cook onions, you know, it's a nice gentle sound and it starts to get a little angry, you know, the heat's too high. I think that's important. And I can say that with any kind of sauteing or even when something's bubbling or a stew, you can hear right away. If it's not at a simmer, it's at a boil and you want a simmer. If you're sauteing or browning meat, you can tell if it's too high. You can just hear it. It takes a little experience, but I use my sense of hearing almost more than anything else in the kitchen. I'll give you two more quick things than on to Sarah. A cake or whatever, you can smell it. The chocolate comes out of the cake and you can actually smell chocolate in the kitchen. So that'll give you a pretty good idea. And finally, touch. You know, if you are cooking a steak, a professional chef who's grilling or whatever will press it down and can tell, you know, how rare it is or how well done it is. And the same thing I feel with any kind of baked good, especially cakes, I don't use the toothpick method because I think it's pretty useless. I don't use color. I press the top down with my finger or a fork and see if it bounces back. And that gives me really the best indication. And the last thing you can do is buy a digital instant read thermometer. You could buy one like a thermo pen. They have a very big readout. It's really large. And like a cheesecake is 155 and a European breads 205 and American white breads 195. And so you can know when something's done just by looking at that big display. The last thing is, as you know, they're talking scales and you know, things that have. So those are my shortlist, Sarah. I agree with everything you just said. And it's funny because Julia Child always used to say that if you could smell it, it's almost done. Yeah. But I was also thinking about if you're cooking a chopper steak or something that you're trying to get a little bit of sear on another way to know, first of all, you'll know that the pan is hot enough. If when you put it in the pan, you hear, you also know when it's properly seared because you'll be able to push it with the tongs, you know, very gently nudge it. And if it moves, then it's seared. So that's another way. But you know what? The best way is repetition. The more you do, the more you'll understand what you need to do and how to figure it out. I would go out and buy if you have a really good like five ply pans or eight ply pans, because it's going to be really hard to burn stuff on those pans. If you had a one ply pan or a two ply pan, it just means there's a sandwich of aluminum or copper inside of a stainless steel clad outside, maybe two sauce pans and a skillet, three pans and they're expensive, but it'll really cut down to any possibility of burning anything. That would be worth someone. Yeah. Thank you. I really appreciate it. Sure. It's been a pleasure. Thank you. Bye. Bye. Bye. This is Milk Street Radio. Sarah and I are here to solve your toughest culinary problems. Give us a ring 855-426-9843 or just email us at questions at Milk Street Radio dot com. Welcome to Milk Street. Who's calling? Yeah, this is Greg from Burlington, Vermont. Hi, Greg. How can we help you? Well, this goes back maybe almost 70 years and yeah, I was born and raised outside of Reading, Pennsylvania, in the Berks County, which is heavy in Pennsylvania Dutch folks. And I remember my parents taking me to some family in the borough and going into the front door and seeing a bowl of corn curls. And to this day, I still remember not exactly the taste, but I know that whatever those corn curls were, they tasted nothing like the industrial type of mass produced corn curls. And ever since I've been looking for a recipe for homemade corn curls, I can't remember the exact flavor, but I'll tell you, it really made an impression on me and that taste I'd never found afterwards. Well, can I ask a question? So your memory of it, was it light and puffy or was it a bit more substantial? I think it was a little bit more substantial than I remember the flavor being very strong. Yeah, the only thing I can think of is you could make a cornmeal or cook a cornmeal paste. It's pretty thick and you could shape it like they do like a lot of pasta shapes with a spoon or whatever, and make a curl out of it and just simply fry it, you know, because if it's made at home, that's the only way you could possibly do it is to fry it. You're never going to get something that's light and puffy. It's going to be a more substantial fried corn paste, but or the other possibility was somebody was making them locally and making good corn curls. But if you did it at home, it would have to be a fried shaped corn paste. That's not going to be like a cornmeal. Try that. I'm sure the basis of it is a corn mush of some kind. Yeah, sure. How does a manufacturer actually make a corn curl? I think they make it like you make pasta. I think they put it through an extrusion machine which shapes it and heats it at the same time. Put it under pressure, puff it wherever they do. Yeah, pressurizing. You've researched Pennsylvania, Dutch, German cookbooks, and you haven't found anything. Actually, I haven't gone that far, but that's a great idea. You know, there's culinary historians almost everywhere. There's culinary historians in New York, there's an organization in Ann Arbor. You might try to find a local chapter. Reach out to them and see if they can help you. Sure. Historical society in my old hometown. Absolutely. That's what I would do. You know what? If you find the original, you've got to let us know. Yeah, this is kind of interesting. Yeah. Absolutely. I will try. Okay. I will let you know. All right. Wonderful. Take care. Thank you. Thanks, Greg. Bye. You're listening to Milk Street Radio, coming up the truth about kids and picky eating. I'm Shilpa Oskokovic. And I'm Jazzy Sepcek. And we're the hosts of the Bon Appétit Bake Club podcast. Bake Club is Bon Appétit's community of confident, curious bakers. Jazzy and I love to bake. Some might even call us obsessive, and we love to talk about all the hows and whys and what didn't works that come with it. Every month, we publish a recipe on bonappetit.com that introduces a baking concept we think you should know. Then you'll bake, send us any questions you have. And we'll get together here on the podcast to talk about the recipe. So consider this your official invitation. Come join the BA Bake Club. New episodes on the first Tuesday of every month, wherever you get your podcasts. Happy baking. This is Milk Street Radio. I'm your host, Christopher Kimball. I'm joined now by Helen Zoey-Vite, author of Picky, How American Children Became the Fussiest Eaters in History. Helen, welcome to Milk Street. Thanks so much. I'm happy to be here. I love this topic, picky eaters, kids being picky eaters. I have a number of children, two of them are still pretty young. I love the premise of this because you start out saying, in the 19th century, that kids, as you might expect, hate what their parents were eating because no one's going to create two sets of meals. But you're right, favorite meal of a New England boy in the 1850s, baked beans, cod fish cakes, corned beef, salt pork, turnips, cabbage, onions, minced pie. So let's just expand on that. So kids like Briney and Sour are smoky and vinegary, right? Yeah. So when I started researching in 19th century sources about what children were eating then, it immediately seems like you're someplace very far away. The kids were just eating all sorts of surprising things. I mean, every vegetable that you can name, lots of coffee, and all of these really sharp flavors, vinegary, Briney, fermented. And the reason that American cuisine was so sharply flavored in this time was because people didn't have refrigeration. So to preserve food, you had to do things like smoking it or salting it or fermenting it. And this was just the normal everyday food that people were eating. And we see kids, as much as everybody else, getting used to these flavors from a really early age. So I have two thoughts. One is, kids have different palates than we do. And therefore, they're simply exercising their natural taste. That's on one hand. The other is, well, they have options that kids didn't have 150 years ago. So let's start with the first part. Let's start with kids' palates. Is there any research to suggest a five-year-old's palate is substantially different than a 30-year-old's palate? Yeah. So the jury is really still out on that as far as I know, because there hasn't been good research. What we do know, though, is that kids are wildly more capable than we've been told as a culture of acquiring taste from a really early age. And this is a very important point, actually. When most Americans today imagine why kids in the past or in other cultures ate differently, they imagine that it must have been because of scarcity. They imagine kids were forcing down foods they hated because those were the only alternatives to hunger. But that doesn't hold up to the evidence. What was fascinating to me is that Americans in the 19th century, when they talked about children's food, assumed that children as a group were naturally omnivorous. They talked about children's natural curiosity, their natural interest in strong flavors and interesting textures. In fact, if they were going to describe any group in the 19th century as picky, they would have said it was wealthy adults. Children as a group, even wealthy children, even children with plenty of food and plenty of choice, were seen as childish eaters because they were so curious and non-discriminating. It really was the opposite of our culture's view of children's food. So where does pickiness come from then? One really common explanation that you hear is that it's evolutionary that if our ancestors as children hadn't been biologically cautious about new foods, then they would have gone around eating poisonous mushrooms and berries. And it's true that there is a stage in many animal species of what's called neophobia. Neophobia means being scared of new things, but neophobia is not the same thing as pickiness. Neophobia does mean being careful that what you're going to consume isn't toxic, so approaching it with some wariness. But neophobia can be overcome much more quickly than we've been told, both in the animal kingdom, where neophobia usually lasts just a couple of minutes, but also all evidence from history suggests that kids can overcome neophobia really quickly too under the right conditions. What we've found out over the last 100 years or so is that if you give kids the wrong conditions, they can remain picky for years. Well, if you lived in Vermont in 1850, you also were not eating in between meals, probably, and you were burning calories because even kids were helping out. And so you were bloody hungry by the time you got to lunch or dinner, unlike kids today who probably arrived at the table without a huge appetite. Yes, hunger is very important. And why picky eating comes about, even if they were really well fed overall, many kids in the past were hungry when they sat down to eat for precisely the reasons you just said. They were burning lots of energy. Kids typically played outside a lot, they did outdoor chores, they walked places as transportation, and there wasn't a lot of snacking between meals, in large part because snacking just used to be much more logistically complicated. So let's talk about how pickiness actually began in America. So in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, lots of reform movements came around, especially in food, and they started focusing on the role of food poisoning in childhood death. So their answer was to restrict diets for children to avoid disease or death, right? Yeah, so against this backdrop of kids eating really widely, you have reformers more and more loudly worrying about this kind of childhood omnivorousness because kids' death rates were really high. About one out of four or five kids died in childhood during the 19th century, and the number one cause of death was epidemic diseases or food poisoning. But they didn't know about germs yet. So in the absence of that knowledge, reformers start saying, we should feed kids bland food. We shouldn't give kids spicy condiments. We shouldn't give kids coffee. We should make their food as plain as possible. Not a lot of people listened yet, but these kinds of arguments start to really take on some power around the turn of the 20th century and start to inform new ideas about what children's food could be. Okay, so all of a sudden, the foods that adults eat can be harmful to children. Then the next step is you get a bunch of experts, quote unquote, who jump into the fray and say, you know, you shouldn't be eating meat. You should be drinking a quarter of milk a day. So what was, who were these experts? Expertise itself was fashionable in the early 20th century in a way it had never been before. This moment oriented Americans towards a more numerical relationship with their bodies and their food that has not left us ever since. Ever since we have been counting calories and thinking about nutrients and not thinking about things like pleasure and tradition and the more intuitive ways of approaching eating that had been common in the past. And children's food really gets caught up in this. So nutrition experts start telling parents there's a right way to feed kids and there's a wrong way. And as much as nutrition often seems a bit dowdy today, nutrition seemed really cool and cutting edge back in the early 20th century. And as I said, there were some genuine developments in knowledge that were, you know, helping people cure diseases like rickets or... And there was the 1906 food and drug clause. Yeah, exactly. Food seems newly safe. The government is now regulating things and is ensuring there won't be adulteration. All of these, it's this big stew. All of it comes together to make nutrition seem really important. And something that middle class parents, if they're going to be good parents, should listen to. So middle class parents start giving their kids these very bland, supposedly really digestible foods. Like a bowl of white bread mashed up with milk with slices of fruit on it. Exactly. Yeah. Or, you know, long cooked porridges or custards, but not much meat. Fruits and vegetables, okay, but they cook them for ages, very little seasoning. And, but the big message of the 1900s and the 1910s is that children's food should be different. Well, I mean, then the notion that if you are saying the children are different than adults and require a different diet, and if you look around the world and discover that children eat all sorts of things in different places around the world, you kind of have to throw out that idea that kids somehow universally demand a simpler bland or diet because it's not true. That's not how kids eat in other countries. So one of the most amazing things to me was that, of course, the parents who were actually giving their kids these really bland, measured meals, they themselves had not eaten like that. They had eaten much more diversely. And so they have only to look at their own childhoods to see this really different way of doing things. And it was, you know, the fact that child death rates were falling so much in the early 20th century was really compelling to people. A lot of people said, you know, I wonder if those diets really were hurting kids. And now that, you know, many fewer kids are dying, you know, this, this seems to bear out. This seems like evidence that we're now doing the right thing. One interesting thing is that today, of course, you can still find lots of places where children are learning to eat the same foods as their parents from toddlerhood. But that's changing. Childhood pickiness is itself spreading around the world. It's correlated with highly processed food, you know, and the availability of these really palatable shelf-stable things. But it's changing cultures before our eyes. So where do we stand today? You know, are kids always going to be picky eaters? Is this the inevitable future? Or is there any hope that things might change? You know, I'm actually optimistic. And I don't know how warranted that is. Based on facts? Are you just feeling optimistic? Based on reaction to my work. My work is really triggering for many parents. Hearing the suggestion that kids aren't inevitably picky is really hard for many parents. And I've been working on this book for more than a decade. But over the trajectory of that time, I have felt the temperature of the room change a little bit. When I first started telling people, I'm working on the idea that mass childhood pickiness is not inevitable, people have changed a bit from absolute skepticism. And also just really, like, anger, to be frank. But I have found, just in the last couple of years, much more open-mindedness culturally. Helen, it's been a real pleasure. Thank you for being here on Milk Street. Thanks so much for having me. That was Helen Zoe Veit, author of Picky, How American Children Became the Fussiest Eaters in History. You can find an extended cut of our interview on Tuesday, April 14th at MilkStreetRadio.com or wherever you find your podcasts. Of course, in the 19th century, American children drank coffee and ate oysters. That time is long gone, but there are some kids today who are daring eaters. We asked our listeners and friends to share their stories. One time I felt brave was when I had to first try my spicy food. So I was scared. I was like, I shouldn't do this because it's going to burn my mouth. And then I tasted it and it was amazing. And I never regretted that day. I spent, like, so long sniffing this one piece of eel because I was so nervous to try it. And then I ended up sniffing it for so long that it almost went up my nose. I tried it and it just tastes like chicken. My mom cooked soup, but there were peas in the soup. So I just tried a little bit. And then I had two more bowls after that. My dad decided that we were going to make steamers or little necks. But yeah, you have to take the skin off of them and pull this thing. And you're basically just eating their stomach, like the stomach of it. So it's just like a, but I just kind of closed my eyes and then led down the hatch. When I was four, I did not like all of them. So I kept trying and trying. By the time I turned five, I was like, I like them. My mom was making brussels spats for dinner. And when I sat down, I saw them and I was like, oof, they looked gross in my opinion. And when I ate it, it was so good. So I started stuffing more and more and more brussels spats onto my plate and I couldn't stop. I did like broccoli. I did like rice. Try it and then take little bites. I was saying, hey, can I have him in mushroom? And then my mom and dad said yes. I love the food. Thanks to all of our listeners and friends for sharing your stories. You're listening to Milk Street Radio. Coming up, we meet the Cult of the North Shore beef sandwich. I'm Christopher Kimball. You're listening to Milk Street Radio. Right now, my co-host Sarah Moulton and I will be answering a few more of your cooking questions. Welcome to Milk Street. Who's calling? Hi, this is Lizzie Goldstein from Norwalk, Connecticut. Hi, Lizzie. How can we help you? So my question is in regards to mixing pasta with sauce. I am very good at making pasta. I'm very good at making sauce. But then when I put them together, I feel like I end up with pasta on one side and sauce on the other side and it's never fully mixed together with chunkier sauces like a bolognese or if I have vegetables and lemon sauce. It doesn't happen so much with vodka sauce. And so we're talking about fresh pasta, correct? Both fresh and dried pasta. Well, you know, I have more familiarity with the dried, I don't make my own pasta, or at least I haven't in years. And you know, there's this classic thing that I'm sure you're aware of that you don't completely finish cooking the pasta. You add it to the sauce to finish cooking in the sauce and then you save some of the pasta cooking liquid and add a little bit, which adds a bit of starch and also helps to glue the sauce to the pasta. You try doing that and that's not working for you? I wonder if maybe I'm just a tad impatient with it. I sometimes feel like, oh no, there's too much pasta water and it gets too watery and then I worry that I messed it up. Yeah, well you add the pasta right to the sauce. Yes. So like I'll claw it out and add it to the sauce. Right. So I generally, a lot of times I'll have my sauce in a skillet, not in a sauce pan, which also means there's more evaporation going on. And then I'll add the pasta to it and cook it in there and only add pasta cooking liquid as needed. It's not necessary, you know, like a couple tablespoons or a quarter cup at a time. Do it slowly, but that will certainly incorporate. They should become one because pasta, this is why I hate pasta salad, for example, pasta absorbs liquid like there's no tomorrow. So if you make a pasta and you toss on a vinaigrette or some sort of mayonnaise sauce to have a pasta salad, you know, 10 minutes later, it's dry as can be because it's absorbed all the liquid. And likewise, when you're combining pasta and sauce, it will just keep absorbing the liquid. So it should become one. Maybe you're just not cooking it long enough in the sauce is what I'm thinking. Yeah. And I usually don't use a skillet. So I think that that could also be helpful. Okay, well, let's see what Chris has to say. We weren't actually talking about this today in the office. So I'll keep this under an hour. The first thing most people don't realize, and it's really interesting, if you take a cheap supermarket pasta and feel it, it's very smooth. If you take a really good pasta, it's rough. That rough surface, which usually has been extruded through a bronze dye, not a Teflon dye, is going to help attract and keep the sauce. So using the right dried pasta to start with is really important. Number two, cook a pound of pasta in two quarts of water, not four. In fact, we just did a Cacio Pepe recipe where we're cooking it even less. And that way you get more starch, you know, twice as much starch in the water, because you have half as much water. Finally, you marry the sauce to the pasta, cook it for a couple of minutes, toss it a lot. I find that tossing is really important and helps it's like tossing a salad. Don't add too much water, but you can add it as you need it. And there's a lot of starch in that water that's going to help bind the sauce to the pasta. One last thing though, just so you know, in Italy, Italians don't like the sauce to be absorbed by the pasta because they want to taste the pasta. You know, here in America, we don't taste the pasta, we just taste the sauce. They want that pasta to stand out on its own. So you don't want a complete marriage of both. You do want the sauce to stick, but you don't want it to be totally absorbed by the pasta. So it's a little bit of a balancing act. But I think if you've got a better pasta to start with, and you can just take it out of the package and feel it, if it feels rough, you're halfway home because the sauce will stick better. Did I get under an hour with that? That was pretty good. Yeah. Yeah, I think the takeaways are rougher pasta, more surface area, like a skillet to mix the pasta and sauce together, and half as much water, but a higher ratio of starch in the water. Yeah, I think that's it. Good summary. Yeah, excellent. Yes. Okay, Lizzie. Thanks, Lizzie. Thank you. Yeah, okay. I appreciate it. Bye bye. This is Milk Street Radio. Give us a call. We'll try to solve your dining disasters, the number as always, 855-426-9843. That's 855-426-9843, or email us at questions at Milk Street Radio dot com. Welcome to Milk Street. Who's calling? This is Fiona. How can we help you today? I was just wondering, is powdered milk necessary, because I've seen it in a lot of recipes recently? Yeah, it's gotten really popular. A lot of bakers say that it adds a little more depth of flavor because it's concentrated, it's milk without the water. Some bakers toast it first. You can toast it in a skillet, for example, to give it even more flavor. But if you wanted to use regular milk, you'd have to figure out how much liquid to take out of the recipe, because obviously powdered milk doesn't have the liquid. It's not a big deal. It's just top level bakers think it adds more flavor. That's all. It's just one of those quote unquote secret ingredients. It's sort of the secret ingredient of the year. Yeah. Yeah, so you just have to figure out, like if there was a quarter cup of powdered milk in the recipe, and you wanted to add milk, you would take one cup of liquid out of the recipe and put in one cup of milk. That's what I would do. It would be one for one exchange. Great. Thank you. Sarah? You know, I haven't used powdered milk a lot in recipes. As a matter of fact, I have sort of a bad association with it, because growing up, we have this family farmhouse in my aunt who was still sort of in depression era mode from her parents, would add powdered milk to stretch our already skim milk, and it was dreadful tasting. But I'm not talking about using it in place of regular milk. I'm talking about using it in recipes that call for it. Sarah, did your aunt live at a ginger red house with candy canes and have a long nose? She sounds really awful. Well, no. Actually, she's an amazing cook, but she was frugal. I like frugal. Yeah, no, frugal's good, but that one was pretty bad. I mean, powdered milk resuscitated with water. It was just not my favorite. Anyway, yeah, it's cheap. You can find it anywhere. It's not necessary, but I think it might be fun for you if you're a serious baker, home baker even. Yeah. Okay, great. Yeah, yeah, I'll try it. All right, Fiona. Thanks. Bye. Thank you. Bye. This is Milk Street Radio. Right now, it's time to hear from Milk Street's digital editor, Claire Lauer. Claire recently sat down with comedian Josh Gondelman to discuss a Massachusetts culinary curiosity, the North Shore beef sandwich. Hi, Josh Gondelman. Hi, Claire. It's so nice to be here with you. So today we are gathered to talk about a hyper local, very special sandwich. Josh, can you tell me what that sandwich is called? The sandwich is commonly known as the North Shore beef. It is a roast beef sandwich, indigenous to the North Shore of Boston. And it is my great pleasure to talk about it as it is the sandwich of my homeland. When you say your homeland, do you mean Massachusetts as a whole or are you specifically from the North Shore? Massachusetts as a whole. No, the North Shore is mobile head. It's swamp skit. It's PBD. It's Danvis. You go as far west as Worcester. They're not going to serve you one of these things. You get to Hingham. They're not going to know what you're talking about. But it is a special sandwich, is a beautiful sandwich, and it is an extremely local sandwich. And I hope that they don't sue me for using their trademark term North Shore beef, which I believe is owned by one guy. So it is a roast beef sandwich from the North Shore. What is the food culture in the area? Like what are the main sort of dining establishments that you'll find there? I think you find on the North Shore, it's now culturally more varied than it used to be. It's not what you can't get that makes it distinctive to me. It's like the little weirdnesses. Like obviously New England has a real seafood culture. And like a roast beef and fried shrimp fried clam restaurant is truly as common as like picking up a penny on the ground where I grew up. The two of these in my hometown were Royals roast beef and seafood and Liberty Bell roast beef, which also had seafood. And I mentioned it to my wife, Maris, like years after we started dating, it was like, it's weird that like New York City, you can have everything here, but there's no roast beef and seafood restaurants. And she's like, well, that's because that's not a kind of restaurant. And I was like, excuse me. And it just like didn't occur to me that that was so local to where I'm from. And New York was not the outlier. That is wild. First of all, that sounds kind of like a kosher nightmare. For sure, a kosher nightmare. Yeah, there's there's meat, there's dairy, there's shellfish. Yeah, yeah, it's it's a tray fave in, if you will. But that's like, yeah, steamed clams, fried clams, the big thing, fried shrimp, like scrawed or a haddock, you could get broiled or fried from these places. And then roast beef sandwiches. Okay. Could you give me an overview of this hyper local sandwich? Of course. So like what you're looking for is rare sliced roast beef, that's the basis of the sandwich. You usually have it on an onion roll, like a round onion roll, or like a squarish onion roll. You often have American cheese, cheese is on the bottom, that's like a pretty crucial mark of like an expertly made roast beef sandwich, the cheese on the bottom rather than on top, because it slides around too much. And then there's various other toppings, like a common order is a roast beef three way. And the three ways are cheese, mayo, and then barbecue sauce. Traditionally, the brand is James River barbecue sauce. And the bun, you want a griddled bun, so it's nice and buttery. You don't just go bun from the bag or bun from the oven. Wow, okay. So I also imagine you'd want like a nice crisp char on the bun. So you have some texture and you want it nice and crispy. You want it to kind of hold up against the meat and cheese and mayo and sauce pretty well. And you see you want both the texture and the flavor, I think, is why you put that bun on the griddle. That makes sense, because there's not a lot of textural contrast in the same way in the fillings. No, no, it's a sandwich with a lot of texturally uniformity, I think. Especially if you get the rare, like the more delicate and rare the beef, the closer it is in texture to mayonnaise. Exactly. It is like a sandwich that eats like a donut. That's what I want everything to eat like a donut. Okay, so Josh, I know you're a member of a secret beef group on Facebook that rates roast beef sandwiches. Correct. What is the tone of these roast beef Facebook groups or the one that you're in? Extremely aggressive bordering on violent. And the whole Facebook group consists of each post you have to have one picture of your roast beef sandwich, not bitten. That's huge. You're not supposed to, quote, flash the beef. Like, you can't open up the sandwich to show off the beef. It is like in profile. So you see the sandwich as you would see it if it was sitting on a plate. And there's like a pretty firm rubric that they use to evaluate the sandwiches with a lot of specific terms. F. O. B. flavor of beef, time and bag. If you took it home, how long it was in the bag, B to B, beef to bun ratio, F. P. W. How fresh pink and warm the beef is. So there's like a real rigorous methodology behind it. But every post is a rating of a sandwich and then comments under it where the person who rated the sandwich and the sandwich itself are just like torn limb from limb as if by wolves. A common sign off if we're talking about acronyms and abbreviations is G. F. Y. Go f**k yourself, kid. That's very Boston. Very Boston. Where my parents live within five to 10 miles, you can probably hit half of the really big ones, some of the really beloved ones, some of the ones that people say kind of like only in case of emergency. My grandparents used to live directly behind the Kelly's roast beef location on Revere Beach. But there's Revere and Saugus and they're all over the place. I want to go back to the beef itself. You said fresh pink warm. So you want this pleasantly warm but not hot. Yeah, not steaming. Okay. But you want it warm to feel fresh, honestly. Like fresh and warm, I think are pretty close together with something like this. And then there's FOB, flavor of beef. So it's not just the how fresh it's cooked or the quality of the meat itself, but it is also additionally like the seasoning and the taste. So with the napkin count, is there a sweet spot you're looking for with number of napkins? Where do you fall? What's your ideal napkin count? That's a good question. I think three or four is pretty nice, especially we're not talking like cloth restaurant napkins. We're talking the kind of napkins that you gently pull out of the napkin dispenser or else you'll rip it in half or you'll get six napkins. Right. Like a Taco Bell napkin, which is the worst napkin. Like a Taco Bell napkin for sure or a Duncan napkin, I think, originally. Right. Okay, there you go. And this is for real a very napkin intensive food as well. This is like, if it's if the napkin count is zero, I do think that is too low. Right. Yeah. If you don't have to use a napkin at all, you did something wrong. That's right. Yeah. I was thinking about this, just thinking about the state of entertainment. And I promise this is relevant. You know, a lot of how movies are made now and how TV shows are made is they they run it through an algorithm to see how it will play before they even start making it. You could not run this sandwich through an algorithm and correctly predict how well it is loved. Yeah, I don't think necessarily this sandwich is something that you would predict because it isn't naturally occurring in other places. Right. You know what I mean? Like there are variations of like meat cheese sauce sandwich, but making something that is on its face very simple and not glamorous, but to do it with care and pride. I think that's really beautiful. Yeah. I mean, I always say everyone has a sandwich that they're willing to yell about. Oh, that's a beautiful piece of wisdom. And I agree with you. Well, thank you so much for joining me, Josh. I have learned a lot today about regional food and the glory of the roast beef three way. Thank you for having me. It was such a joy to spread the gospel of beef. That was comedian Josh Gondelman in conversation with Milk Street's digital editor, Claire Lauer. You can find more of Josh's work at his website, JoshGondelman.com. That's it for today. To hear over 300 episodes of our show, please head to Milk Street Radio.com or wherever you get your podcasts. And now I'm on Substack. I write about cooking, recipes, travel, food science, Vermont, as well as what I'm reading and watching. Please subscribe at ChristopherKimble.Substack.com. That's ChristopherKimble.Substack.com. You can also find us on Facebook at ChristopherKimble's Milk Street on Instagram at 177 Milk Street. We'll be back next week with more food stories and kitchen questions. And thanks as always for listening. ChristopherKimble's Milk Street Radio is produced by Milk Street in association with GBH. 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