Betrayal, Revenge and Family Secrets: a Frozen Food "Succession"

relationships, and we want to hear your stories. Do you spend all your time scrolling through reservation apps while your partner couldn't care less? Or maybe you dump your date

“for being a picky eater? Or maybe one of you loves to eat out and the other doesn't?”

So to share your story, please leave us a voicemail. The number 617-249-3167-1 more time 617-249-3167 or send us a voicemail to [email protected]. This is Milchreet Radio from PRX, and I'm your host, Christopher Kimball. Sieberg Farms was once called the biggest vegetable factory on earth. John Sieberg's family owned it, and when they did, they were on top of the world.

It's amazing how far vegetables took my family literally from the dirt to the corporate

boardroom and to Grace Kelly's weddings. But behind the scenes, there was turmoil. Like when the patriarch tried to let the company go bankrupt out of spite, and then the banker said to my father and his brothers, you know, to save the business, you may have to commit your father. Family feuds over a frozen vegetable empire that's coming up later on show. But first, we're taking a tour of convenience. Japan's iconic convenience stores.

I'm joined now by chef and author Brendan Liu. We spoke before my recent trip to Tokyo, where he was my local guide around the city. Brendan, welcome to Milchreet. Oh, thank you for having me. A pleasure. You know, we're talking about convenience stores in Japan, 7/11 family, March, and Loss, and I remember four years ago, I was in Tokyo, and there was a 7/11 on the corner near my hotel.

And early in the morning, I went in. I think I spent an over an hour there. It just blew my mind. So maybe you could just start by giving us a tour of one of these places. What's in there? What does it look like? What does it smell like? It's so different than a

convenience store here in the States. I think the first thing you'll notice as your

precious store is how clean it is. There's no rubbish around. And then, as you enter the store, there's so much that it's almost overwhelming. There's obviously the food element. There are all kind of knickknacks, t-shirts, socks, cleaning products,

“fax machines, the magazines, and ticket counter as well. If you want to purchase the”

concert tickets, there's almost nothing you can't do at a convenience. And there are a lot of them, I guess, over 50,000 convenience stores in Japan. How do they fit into the Japanese consumers idea of what a store should be? In other words, is the 7/11 in Tokyo, particularly a Japanese concept? Or is it sort of an international concept that also works in Japan? When it started, it started as a very American concept.

So, like, corn dogs and then, like, a mini supermarket. And it didn't really work until they started introducing more Japanese products, like the Oni Giri. And it really works in Japan because Japanese don't have big houses, so they don't have big kitchens, they don't have cars. And, because of that, they like to do like little shops. So, the convenience works well for them to have a place to go maybe once a day, once every two days, just to pick up everything they need,

and you have a really delicious dinner. So, okay, so, you and I meet up in Tokyo at some point, and you want to take me on a tour of these convenience stores. Can you just pick out three or four,

five singular experiences or foods that would be something I would never see outside of Japan?

I think we would have to first try the Oni Giri, the staple of the convenience store. As soon as you pick it up, you'll see that it's like a perfect shape, and then the rice itself will still be the perfect texture. They get their rice from a small regions of Japan, and you'll taste the rice first, and then you'll taste the lovely care that's put into the feeling with that be special Japanese plums from Wakayama or tuna, and mayonnaise, the softness against the more firmness

“of the rice. After that, I think that you have to try the fried chicken. You have to do a fried chicken”

tasting between the three major brands to find your favorites. So, one will be more crispy than others, one will have a different spice line to the others, and then definitely the desserts. So, the pastry is a huge part of it, like Sakura Anpan, which is a little bread that's filled with red bean paste,

that with a bit of mochi inside, yeah. I was a few years ago, I was talking to someone and realized the curry at a very long history in Japan, and it Friday nights are often curry nights, so could you just talk about curry? So, curry in Japan, it became popular by the SNB company, when they developed their curry route, which is like the blocks of curry that have been solidified that you just add to a part of vegetables and meat. So, most of the convenience stores will have

a wall of curry in retort packs, anything from a prawn curry to more spicy than the lukari, but yeah, the curry over there has taken lots of different forms, the most popular of which is a

curry pan, which is basically a doughnut, I'm filled with curry, and this is one of the best

things about Japan if you've tried one. So, the doughnut itself is usually coated in a panco crumb to make them extra crunchy, and then inside you'll find meat and vegetable, and a lot of times you'll

“find a whole soft boiled egg, as well, inside. Well, I think I'm going to meet you in Tokyo,”

and that's the first thing I want off the plate is a curry doughnut, what's the, if you go into a convenience, what's the fun part? I mean, I think going to the, when I was there, it was almost a form of entertainment walking around, I just, it was just fun. Is that, do they understand those stores are there as, I hate the term experiential, but it's an experience going in, it's not just a place to buy something. Yeah, it's an experience not only for foreigners, visiting Japan, but also

for locals. So, if you go to a convenience store, say, in a coastal area, they might sell like fishing rods and bait, because they expect a lot of people to need that there. So, every convenience store is an adventure, basically. Yeah, you can't walk into a convenience store and not find something very region-specific, like sweet potatoes, if you're in Calagoa area, which is a little bit north of Tokyo,

there's very famous sweet potatoes, you'll find, yes. So, always a local touch in the convenience store.

Well, it sounds like these are much more decentralized than some way there's more power locally to buy local products, for example, fishing rods and bait. Lawson's ethos, you say, quote, "creating happiness in harmony in our communities." I can just imagine a store 24 or 7/11 here in this country saying, you know, we're really trying to create happiness in harmony in our communities. I don't think so, but I take it that's for real. I mean, they're not just saying that.

It feels to me like, there is at least some truth to that slogan. Yeah, so, Lawson, after the

“3/11 tsunami, they were, I think, the first ones into that zone with trucks that could provide food”

and any of the essentials for people in the disaster zone. And also, they send out small trucks to very regional areas like once a week to provide the elderly local population who don't have access to a brick and mortar convenience store. They are a service to the society in that way. We didn't go into this thinking, our convenience stores were going to think about, you know, their social importance, but it really struck me that convenience are kind of this microcosm

of like Japanese society in that it's always looking for the best ways to service Japan as a

community rather than just looking for profit. I would love to have one of these in my neighborhood. Brendan, thank you. Fabulous tour of convenience stores in Japan. Thank you. It's wonderful to share the convenience with you. Thank you so much. That was Brendan Luke, along with co-author, Karen Ying. He wrote the cookbook, "Combini, cult recipe stories and adventures from Japan's iconic convenience stores." After my latest

trip to Japan, I can report that my all-time favorite items at a company are the Excel sandwiches and the Japanese style gummies. Now I'm joined by my co-hosts. I'm out and to answer a few of your cooking questions. Sarah is of course the star of Sarah's week nine meals on public television. Her latest book is Home Cooking 101. Okay, Chris, before we get going with the calls,

“I have a very important question. I know how you feel about salt and pepper, you know,”

why pepper, who cares about pepper. Are there any other ingredients? You just don't get it.

Well, let's start with why. Okay, bay leaves, dried bay leaves. I'm sorry. I would do a

blind test with anybody. Three bay leaves in a stew with five pounds of meat, like you're never

ever in a million years going to taste that. So I love the smell of bay, but I don't think that most dried bay leaves are doing very much for you. The other thing is, this used to drive me crazy, a sprig of time. That is such nonsense. Like a sprig of time for the supermarket is going to do zero zip for whatever you're cooking. If it's more than a cup, because the time we get the supermarket doesn't have a lot of flavor start with. I think in the heyday, maybe a French cooking in the 19th

century, you pluck the time from your kitchen garden. It actually was highly aromatic and perfumed. So a little bit of or I think this point is pointless. And then you look around the world and other cultures don't think like that. They start with fish sauce. They start with lemongrass. They start with chilies. They're putting big flavors in. And I think that's a style of cooking that makes more sense today than the French method, which was very high-quality ingredients in

over a period of time developed flavor. But it doesn't work when you're dealing with supermarket

“produce that isn't the same. So you have to change the rules of the game. I agree with you.”

A sprig of time just thrown in loose like that. You know what I do? I take more than one.

I take the whole package. Well, here's the thing I also do. I take a very heavy rolling pin.

Yeah, that's good. I have a marble rolling pin that I never really use for anything else. And I'll do the same with rosemary. Change the rules of the game, but don't lose the herb. Don't throw out the baby with a bath water. Yeah, the time doesn't taste the way it did, but Coke's some flavor out of it because time has flavor. I just add more. If you think for yourself and taste and go like, wait a minute, this isn't working. Then you got to do it differently.

Then you get out your marble rolling pin. My point only is you got to think for yourself sometimes. Yeah, so I think we can agree on that. Oh, we absolutely agree on that. Okay. Yeah, let's take a call.

“Welcome to Milk Street Who's Calling. Hey, this is Matt from Brooklyn. Hi, Matt from Brooklyn. How can we help you?”

So about three or four months ago, I was making some gumbo with some leftover stock that I had made from Turkey. And I realized it didn't have enough. So I checked the freezer and I was looking around and I noticed some duck stock. So I threw that in with the turkey stock. But as I was rifling around the freezer, I noticed I also had like smoked pork trotters and chicken wings and like beef necks. So I threw all that in there with the stock. I just let it simmer.

And finish the gumbo. It came out so good. It was so good. And I was trying to figure out what this stock was. So I like Google it and I didn't really know what to Google. So I wanted to

know if you guys had any info on like a stock that has every animal in it. Well, first of all,

let's just pause and reflect on what you had in your freezer. That's pretty darn astonishing, right Chris?

“Well, I thought he was going to pull out a frozen pizza and put it in the stock. That's what most people”

have on their freezer. I know, really, but you must be a very good cook. But let's go back to your gumbo. What was in your gumbo? sausage and turkey. I didn't put any shrimp. All right. So it was mostly a meat lane. I think gumbo is the kind of dish that it's really, you know, there's many occasions when it would be okay to use your every animal known to man broth. If you've got something more delicate, you know, like scallops and you want to make some sort

of sauce, I don't know if that would be the right broth to start with. If it's a single ingredient, you want to shine that you're going to use this liquid for. Maybe you want to stick with just a chicken or just a duck or just a beef. I don't know, Chris, what do you think? Well, let's go to the beginning. Stocks were just anything you had left over. He was on the back burner of your coal stove, right? And you just put, you know, the water used to boil cabbage would go in all your vegetable

trimmings. It was just a way of using up everything in the kitchen. No meat went into it, probably just bones and trimmings. But in the last few years, based on, you know, traveling in the most street, I find that very few cultures use stock. Stock is a very French thing or European thing. And most people use water. Yep. Like a leak potato soup. You know, the water's good, actually, maybe a little chicken stock, because I want to taste the other ingredients. So I totally agree with

Sarah that what you made is perfect for the dish you made. But I would say in a lot of recipes, sometimes you want a little bit of flavor but not too much. But I think for your purposes,

I'm telling you. I want your freezer. I want to know all the other meals that preceded this one.

And ham hocks and those kinds of things, by the way, are just phenomenal. They're wonderful.

“The gelatin, the flavor, et cetera. So no, I think you're spot on. But sometimes water”

actually is better. You know, Chris, on that note, years ago, when I worked at, you know, a lot to leave. Jacques Peppain was a visiting chef in two years. He came maybe four times. And I'd follow him around like a little puppy dog and just try to learn as much as I could. And one day, I was cooking family meal, which is what you cook for the staff before service starts. And we broke down our own racks of lamb. And I was taking scraps from that process and making a stew. And I went to

reach for, I think, even veal stock or something, which we had in house. And he came over and he said,

what are you doing? I mean, he said it in a nice way. He's a sweetie pie. And I said, well, I'm, you know, I'm using a stock. I wanted to be flavorful. It's sausage said lamb is so strong and flavor, use water. I was like, boy, yo, yo, yo, yo, yo, I hadn't occurred to me. It really hadn't. So I think Chris's point is very well taken there. Yeah. Anyway, sounds like it was a great meal. You didn't invite us. No, really. But it sounded sounded delicious. Yeah. There's some leftovers

in my freezer. There you go. Say, now you're going to do something else with those leftovers. I got an idea. Put them on their frozen pieces. It just got rice in it, right? So it put it in a nonstick pan or a pan that you used a lot. So it doesn't stick. Put in some oil and crisp it up. Make a very thin pancake with it and get a crisp on both sides. We have to do that. Thank you so much. Thanks for calling. Bye bye. Bye bye. This is most to eat radio. If you need some inspiration,

the kitchen give us a ring. 855-426-984-31 more time. 855-426-984-3 or just email us [email protected]. Welcome to Milk Street Who's Calling. Hi, this is Elizabeth. Hi, Elizabeth. How can we help you? I love to bake different kinds of cakes. One of the cakes that I am pretty famous for is a chocolate cakes. But I have two different recipes and honestly they're just about the same ingredient for ingredient. But one of them has buttermilk, vegetable oil and melted butter. And my question is,

does the melted butter make the cake denser, moisture? What is the function of the melted butter?

“Because honestly, that's the only difference I see between the two. Have you made both cakes?”

I have made them both. They're both nice and moist. Honestly, I can't really tell the difference. But I'm just trying to come down to one cake that is going to be my go-to chocolate cake. One of them is called the best chocolate cake recipe. And that's the one with the butter. And the other one is I'm a gardeners chocolate cake, which is fantastic. Butter has water in it. You know, when you melt it, it separates into three layers. So that water means there's that much

less fat than if you just use total oil. So you're not going to get quite as moist or tender a cake with the melted butter as you would if you used oil. Why would we add melted butter to a recipe? What's the advantage of it? Yeah. Maybe for flavor purposes. I don't know. Chris, what is your thought? Well, let's start with the question. How much oil is in each recipe?

And how much butter is added to the first recipe? Both of them have a half a cup of oil and a

cup of buttermilk. And then the best chocolate cake recipe has a half a cup of unsalted melted butter. I assume the second one also changes the amount of flour in the recipe from the other one. Believe it or not? No, they're both one and three quarter cups sugar. The only other, the sugar, one of them's two cups of sugar and the other one's a cup of brown sugar and a cup of white sugar. In general, I think cakes made with oil are better because oil is a

liquider room temperature. They'll stay fresher longer and they'll stay moisture longer. Butter is not a liquider room temperature and it will tend to stay all more quickly and it will not have that soft moist texture of the way it will. And so in general, like chiffon cake or something that uses oil, I'm all for oil. I'm a little surprised though that you have all this additional melted butter and nothing else in the recipe changes. I will say, I'm sorry, the only

other difference in ingredients is I and a garden has a cup of hot coffee versus the one with the butter has a hot coffee. Okay, okay, well at least, okay, that's the difference is that

“they're using the amount of liquid actually. Yeah, that's why we couldn't figure this out.”

Coffee's an interesting point too because coffee points up chocolate. Coffee's great with chocolate,

The fat, you know, 83% fat versus 100% is probably not going to make a huge difference given

“the total amount of oil in the recipe. Yeah, that's what I would do. It's a good question”

because oil in the area are very, very different in baking. I agree. And my only other question is, you know, a lot of baking recipes say two cups of flour or whatever. I try and find recipes that do everything by grams. You're right. So I just, I've converted one cup to equal 125 grams of what flour. Does that sound about right? It does. If you look at King Arthur, I think they say 120, but we did it a couple years ago. We came up with over 130, I weigh my flour too. But the

recipe you're using, you'll see their grams being very different than what you do. So if you see three cups of flour in a recipe, instead of 360 grams, it might be 390 grams. So you can follow the recipe if they have the grams. And that's the best way to do it. That's kind of my guidelines. Yeah, or you know, I'm trying to use baking books that have everything in grams because they measured it in grams. So it's going to work the way they want it. And by the way, as you know,

“cake flour, bread flour are different weights for cups. So you have to switch it around a”

rifling. But no, I think you're doing the right thing. But a vegetable oils are definitely my preference for cakes. Yeah. Well, thanks so much for your patience. You really did help me out. Okay, thank you. All right, Elizabeth. Take care. Have a good one. Bye-bye. You're listening to most reading. Radio. Coming up the rise and fall of a vegetable dynasty. I'm Jessica Battleana, staff editor at King Arthur Baking Company. And I'm David Tumarkin,

King Arthur's editor director. And this is Things Bakers Know, a new podcast from King Arthur, where we explore every corner of the baking world. Every episode of Things Bakers Know,

Dive's deep into a different baked good. Plus, we'll always leave time to answer your home baking

questions. Subscribe now so you won't miss an episode. This is most yet radio. I'm your host, Christopher Kimball. At its height, Seabrick Farms produced one-third of the frozen vegetables in America. Once you had a garden where one respects to the school, could anything ever again taste the delicious? Well, at Seabrick Farms, we too grow vegetables right outside the door.

Cook and freeze them on the spot. You just boil them, bag and all, and enjoy that homegrown taste again. Behind this wholesome image, there was a dark side. The farm brought fame and fortune to the Seabrooks of New Jersey, but it also led to generations of family drama, just like a real-life version of the TV show's succession. Joining me now is writer John Seabrook. He shares this story of his family in the book The Spinach King, The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty.

John, welcome to most street. Hank, we're as good to be here. So, your family, as long history, in truck farming. You comment that truck farming is not named because they were trucks involved. So, what is a truck farm? Let's start with that. You know the expression, I don't have any truck

with that. Truck also meant goods, like in a bar to economy. So, sometimes produce was just basically

used as currency. This is back in the 19th century. And truck farms were also called market gardens, which is why New Jersey was called the Garden State. They were promoting their state as a ideal place

“for market gardening or truck farming. If you want to build a dynasty, doing it off truck farming,”

it's got to be like crazy as the idea in the world because it's climate dependent, there's strikes, the finding people to work on the farm is hard. So, having researched all this and you have your own family stories. Was there some reason you think your family was able to be so successful? And what has to be one of the toughest business models in the whole world? Chris, well, yeah, it's true. It's amazing how far vegetables took my family. Really, literally from

the dirt to the corporate boardroom and to Grace Kelly's wedding. The most important reason

for their success was that they were not just farmers, they were engineers. So, my grandfather was born in 1881 and he's really the one that created the industrial farm. So, for him, there was the internal combustion engine, there was electricity and there was telephony. All three technologies were really not used on most farms at that point. And he was an early adopter of those technologies.

on to the technology of frozen food, which was really where my family made its real mark.

“See, work farms is known to most if it's known to anyone now as a frozen vegetable frozen food company.”

And that was in the 30s. You know, Clarence Byrdsai and he knew each other and Clarence Byrdsai was freezing fish and working with other kinds of food. But he had no success with vegetables. And so, my grandfather worked with Clarence Byrdsai to develop a quick freezing process that worked for vegetables. And then he also cultivated lima beans on a huge scale. A lot of children probably owe their horrible lima bean experiences to my grandfather. And so, yeah, he developed

a completely vertically integrated Henry Fordist like vegetable factory in South Jersey. And eventually, he had 50,000 acres under its control and had 8,000 people who worked for it. Yeah, I read the life magazine article from 1955. And they are quote from it said that it's packaged output of lima beans would have stretched 2,250 miles. And I love this. Thanks to careful scheduling, the truck will dump its load with no dead waiting

time, right? Often less than an hour elapsis for the time of being as picked until it has been washed, sorted hand-checked packaged and quick frozen. So, as you point out, it was the factory

“model factory farming, I guess, is the way to put it, right? Yeah, it is. But I mean, I think that”

the interesting wrinkle and the kind of, in some ways, the Achilles heel in the whole model

was labor. And as much as labor as they could find, they always needed more. And so, and not only

did my grandfather create the farm, he created the housing. He created a town called Seabruck, which is there. You can look it up with a map. And owned the housing, the whole world he created was this kind of capitalist feudal, weirdly sort of medieval, but also modern world that really had no parallel. So, there was also a banking story here. And so, that started in 1911, Arthur agreed to sell his land in half of Seabruck and son to his son Charles.

You said that that was the original sin and the Seabruck story. Could you explain that? Yes. So, my great grandfather was the one who had the 50 acre farm. And, you know, he was a very good truck farmer and didn't really want for a huge amount in the world. But, Charlie his son, who was extraordinarily ambitious, without his father knowing about it, made contact with a wall street investment firm and didn't tell his father that he had all this backing and bought his half of

“the business for, you know, I think was then 24,000, you know, maybe I don't know what that is today,”

but it wasn't anywhere near what it was worth. So, the great grandfather Arthur gets bought out by

your grandfather, his son, for 24,000, which is less than a million today, which was ridiculous.

And then, your grandfather got into trouble with his son, Jack Seabruck, right? So, here you have great wealth, you have a dynasty in vegetables, frozen vegetables. But then, you say, by war Zen, this is interesting. The company was packing 65% of the nation's frozen lawnmobines, 35% of its frozen broccoli, and 40% of its frozen spinach. And then, in the 50s, mylars invented by DuPont, and then you get into boil on the bag frozen products. Yeah. So, the Seabruck Farms brand

was created after World War II. Before that, their business was packing for bird's eye. But after World War II, they created their own brand, and then the sons, my father, and his brother, Courtney, expanded the business to California, to places where the labor was cheaper, the cost of production was cheaper, but it lacked the kind of fortress centralized control that my grandfather, not only had built, but seemed to need, and my grandfather, then later in his life,

seemed to be haunted with guilt, and the paranoia that his sons would do to him what he had done to his father. There's a Greek tragic element to it, almost. So, Jack Seabruck has a pension for horse-drawn coaching, and then he also was quite friendly with Eva Gabor. Yep. So, he was living the high-life, right? Well, yes, he was a good-looking guy. He graduated from Princeton

high-class thing. You know, the images of these women dressed in evening clothes who, you know,

they didn't have to get their hands dirty at all, they were off to the opera or whatever, and he himself, my father was the brand ambassador in everybody knew who he was, and Seabruck's also knew the Kelly family, because the Kelly's had originally built the brick power plant, the power, the vegetable factory. Grace Kelly was somewhat younger than my father, but because the family's knew each other, my father was invited to the wedding in 1956, which he also saw

as a fabulous marketing opportunity for the brand. But, wait, wait, but there's a story you tell

“about raising money for him to go to that wedding, I think. Yeah, so he got the invitation. His father”

did not, whether that caused tension, I sort of speculate. But, yeah, then his father, he didn't

really want to pay for him to go, so they had a money raising campaign with the advertisers, you know, and even consumers chip in another five cents in paper jack, Seabruck, to go to the Kelly wedding. He was doing that today, I don't know if that would work. You're getting self-funded to go to Grace Kelly's wedding on Kickstarter. Exactly. And you do have to tell the Avigabore swimming pool story. Yeah. Yeah. Well, Avigabore would come down to South Jersey and people had not

seen Avigabore, or anyone like Avigabore down there. And she actually shouldn't just come down. She took part in the company Christmas page in, you know, she acted a part. She wore this kind of later hose and like outfit for a promotional photograph. But, the thing that really enshrined here in legend was that she would swim naked in my grandfather's pool, except with a shower cap, to protect her platinum blonde hair from turning blue. And I don't know how many people actually saw that,

but if you go down there, you still hear people talking about Avigabore swimming in the swimming pool. So what happens after Grace's wedding in Monaco and all Avigabore was there a

“day new mall? Was there another phase of his life after that that was quite different?”

Well, yeah. So my father meets my mother who's a journalist covering Grace Kelly's wedding on the ship that the Kelly family took the wedding party from New York to Monaco and the SS Constitution.

And so for my father, that was, you know, a new life and he had two children. I was the first

one born and then my brother. But his relationship with his father continued to deteriorate. I think his father also was suffering from some form of dementia probably. And so when my grandfather started slipping, the banks all got together and they said, okay, we're going to have a deal here where there's going to be a representative of the banks. There's going to be Jack and there's going to be Jack's father, Charlie, CF, everybody called him. And that will be like a three-person voting

“trust that can decide key matters on company policy. And so the banker and my father always voted”

together. So they got their way. But that arrangement was only scheduled to last five years and then it had to be renewed. And it came due in 1959 and my grandfather said he wasn't going to renew it. The bankers said that's insane. We'll pull the plug on you and you'll lose the business. And then the banker said to my father and his brothers, you know, to save the business, he may have to commit your father. And so they decided to try to do that. But before there was a hearing on his

competency, he sold the business as sort of spite as much as anything. You know, family histories are, well, they can be grim. But they're pretty interesting because people do things, especially when there's money involved, that seem out of character for them. You know, you might, family, remember my grandmother died lived in Washington with her husband. And when my mother, who was managing the estate, came down to the house, she noticed that her

sister-law, her brother's wife, had put stickers under all the furniture saying it was for her. Yeah. Yeah. And it was just like totally out of character. And all of a sudden you see this person running around putting stickers on antiques and paintings and everything else. So I guess my question is, you know, I have a bunch of kids. The notion of disowning one of your kids, I can't get my head around that. And I guess you've been trying to get your head around that, too.

find that to be sort of hard to put in perspective? He disowns all three of his sons. The only one that he didn't disown was he had a daughter. And she wanted to work in the business, too. But

he thought women shouldn't work in business and never allowed her to. But she always stuck with him

and when he was ill, she looked after him. And then when the lawsuit came and the challenge to his authority, she started with him against my father and his brothers. And so he ended up leaving a lot of money to her and they never spoke to her again. So, you know, they felt that she had never done anything for the business and they had built up the business and then he ended up leaving all this money from the business to her. It's all, I mean, there's often these conflicts between

love and money. You know, is your value because you're the executive vice president, you know,

“and that's why your father respects yours because you're his son and he loves you, you know,”

as his son. And then when the brand got developed and there was this sort of idea of the sea

Brooks as being the kind of ideal personification of the brand. Any sea book that didn't behave within the limits of that, you know, sort of brand and the behavior that you were supposed to uphold was severely criticized when I'm my grandfather. So, you know, I think this is a family business story in some ways that's quite typical. This love or money or love and money confusion is just almost indescapable. John, it's been really been a pleasure. Thank you for spending

time with me. This was so much fun, Chris. Thanks so much. That was John C. Brook. His book is The Spinach King, The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty.

“American Family Dynasty's rise, and of course, then most of them fall. For example,”

the Vanderbilt's fortune came from a railroad monopoly that was in New York Central, which had control of all rail service in and out of New York. And one time the Vanderbilt's had more cash than the US Treasury. But as the railroad business declined and their lifestyle spending increased, most of their wealth eventually went with it, including the breakers mentioned a new port road island and 10 other mansions on Fifth Avenue. CNN's Anderson Cooper, who is a Vanderbilt

descendant, was told by his mother, there is no trust fund. To paraphrase that old saying, fortunes don't last, but cooking do. You're listening to Milk Street Radio coming up, Kenji Lopez Alt breaks some eggs.

“I'm Christopher Campbell, and you're listening to Milk Street Radio. Now, let's head into”

the kitchen with James Hirsch to talk about this week's recipe, Sri Lankan Spinach, and Coconut Doll, with Tomato Tarka. James, are you? I'm during great. As you know, Doll is one of

my favorite foods, and the saying is almost anywhere in India. There's always a pot of doll on

the back burner. It's just a staple. And I've had it with lots of ingredients. I've had it with a few ingredients, but you weren't Sri Lanka, and they do it actually quite differently than any doll recipe I've seen in India. So tell me the story of how you taste the doll in Sri Lankan. Well, the story actually begins about 90 minutes north of Mumbai at a temple on the side of a highway. At this temple was where I first had doll in India, and it was a very, very, well, monastic affair.

Very simple. It was red lentils cooked in water until they were almost porridge like, and then topped with a very simple tarka, and a tarker is just spices that have been bloomed in hot oil, and then you drizzle it over a dish, and in this case it was drizzled over the doll. Lovely, wonderful, simple, well-spiced, comfort food. Fantastic. Absolutely, loved it. Okay. Now, fast forward a few years, and I find myself in Sri Lanka, and I was in Colombia, the capital.

I was with a home cook, Mahara dole, and she offered to teach me her version of doll, and when she started making it, there was no water involved. She cooked her lentils in coconut milk, which makes a lot of sense because so much of Sri Lankan cooking is based in coconut milk. So she cooks the same red lentils, but in coconut milk, so that they become not just porridge like the creamy and rich and just so well-rounded. And then, of course, she also made her tarka, and her tarker is yellow

which gives it a nice gentle, sweet acidity to the tarka, but the signature ingredient here is just

“a ton of fresh spinach. So, almost at a one-to-one ratio with lentils is chopped fresh spinach,”

and as that spinach cooks down in the lentils, you know, the stems retain their texture, but the leaves get incredibly tender, and the result is just so much more robust and flavorful, absolute comfort food, really wonderful tons and tons of flavor. It was really a fascinating difference. You know, what's interesting to me from a cooking point of view is taking something that's fairly dare I say bland, like red lentils, and all of a flavor, or at least a lot of

flavor is in the topping. I guess it's kind of like how I make oatmeal on the morning. The oatmeal's bland, but this stuff on top is great. I just love that idea of sort of a structure underneath

that's textural, really, and you put all the really big flavors on top, and that's true both

an Indian Sri Lanka. I think it's a great method. Yeah, it really is. That's the essence of this dish. It's just cooked lentils, and then it just takes on whatever you do to it, and the difference is in Sri Lanka. They add a ton of spinach. They add that coconut milk, and then it just much more robust tarka on top. The combination is really just wonderful. Jam, thank you. Sri Lankan spinach and coconut doll with tomato tarka. It just may be my new

comfort food. Thank you, Jam. Thank you. You can get the recipe for Sri Lankan spinach and coconut doll with tomato tarka at lookstreetradio.com. This is most meat radio. Now it's time to see what Kenji Lopez Alt has been working on. Kenji, what's going on? How's it going, Chris? I thought today we could talk about breaking eggs. Ooh, this is a subject on which I actually have an opinion.

“You must have an opinion on breaking eggs. How do you break your eggs, Chris?”

Well, I was in Romania a year ago, and I was cooking with this great guy, and what he did was he had a dozen eggs, and he took one in each hand, and he smashed them together gently. So the one that had a weaker shell would start to get broken, and then he would open that egg, and then he would pick up another egg and do the same thing. Yeah, I found that technique was brilliant. Like a game of conquerors, right? Yeah, exactly. You didn't end up with little shards of egg,

and it was gentle, but effective. So that's what I do now. But then what do you do with your final egg? Sure luck. That's the final egg final problem. So I did a bunch of testing of this a couple of weeks ago. I tested both the method that you just mentioned, cracking the eggs against each other. I tested flat on a flat surface, and then I tested also against the edge of the bowl, and I actually found surprisingly for me that the edge of the bowl was actually the cleanest,

and made it the easiest to do. What I found was that when you do it on a flat surface, you're forced to kind of push your thumbs in a little bit more to get the egg separated, and so you end up, at least for me, I found that I ended up breaking more yolks and also getting more shell into it. Although, I would say that when you're cracking it on the edge of a bowl,

“you have to be a little bit more careful with the amount of pressure that you do.”

Are you familiar with this recent trend? I think it was a Tik Tok thing where you just drop the egg from a specific height. Have you tried it? Well, you get a ladder, you get to the top ladder, drop it down. Those are like five inches or something? It's like eight inches or so. You hold it above your bowl, and you just drop the egg straight in, and it breaks it kind of perfectly every time, and it actually makes it surprisingly easy to shell the eggs.

But, you know, the method that you use, when you crack the eggs against each other, I love that. I like that one too. What I do, though, actually, is if you hold the eggs in a specific orientation, so you take the point of one egg, and you point it at the flatter side of the

other egg. That's interesting. Yeah, the point will always be stronger than the side of the egg,

so you can selectively make sure that the one in whichever hand you want the egg to break in, you just point the point of the other egg at that part of the shell. Yeah, but you missed, like, look, you've missed the Las Vegas aspect of this. Well, that is true. Because every time you never know which one's going to go, and you could certainly bet on it if you like, but it adds a little, I know, June to say, "Quah," to the prize. It makes, uh, it makes making an omelet both effective and fun.

This reminds me of many, many years ago, I was watching Julia tape in her house in Cambridge and afterwards I was talking to her. And I come up with some really idiotic thing about the best way to zest a lemon or something. Okay. And she just looked at me like, I was totally out of my mind as if she could care less. And sometimes, like these TikTok things, I have that sort of

You're right. Exactly. So, okay. So you're saying the egg to egg is your favorite method, do you still prefer. I would say yeah, egg to egg or egg to bowl. You know, I used to think flat, but then I actually went and broke it doesn't eggs using every method. And I found that, yeah, the flat surface is actually the least effective. Also, the messiest, the one that got egg all over my cutting board. Now, I do have a question for you, which is, what about cold versus

room temperature? Many baking recipes say room temperature eggs. But I always break them

when they're cold, because I find the white, the eggs hold together better. When they're warm,

“it's a little trickier. Is that true? Yeah, I agree. So, you know, honestly, I think that question is,”

is most of the time it's a moot question, because I'm not going to bother letting my eggs sit out at room temperature if I'm making an omelet or I'm cracking them. And if you're in the US, your eggs are likely in the fridge, whereas anywhere else in the world, the eggs are going to be stored at room temperature. But I know I agree with you that I find cold eggs to be much easier, especially if I'm poaching or if I'm frying them, I don't want that inner membrane of the egg

white to break. Yeah, for sure, cold eggs hold their shape a lot better and are easier to crack. And let's finish up with one of the age-old food fights about how to scramble eggs. So what's your current best method for scrambleing? Oh, geez. I don't know what best means in this context, but what I typically do is I will break my eggs into a bowl. I will salt them. And if I have the fourth thought, I'll do that before I go and wake my kids up so that they're sitting salted in the

bowl for about 15 minutes before I start actually cooking them. And then if I want like a hard

“scramble, you're like a sort of fluffy scramble, which is how my kids like them. What I do is I put a”

little bit of water in a nonstick pan, and I heat that up over medium high heat. And then what happens is as the water comes to simmer, it sort of regulates the temperature of the pan, you know, and so you can swirl the pan around. And then as soon as that water's at a simmer, you know that the temperature of the pan is just above the boiling point of water, which is the exact right

temperature at butter and get the butter to foam without browning too quickly. So I always put a

little bit of water in the pan first, I let it come to a simmer, I swirl it around, then I dump out that water and put my butter straight in, and that's sort of the ideal pan temperature for both the hard scramble and also for making like a like a French omelet where you want the butter to foam, but you don't want the pan so hot that it's going to brown or that the eggs are going to brown. And the salt and the eggs sitting for 15 minutes does something to the

proteins? Yeah, it breaks down the proteins a little bit so that as the eggs cook, they remain a

“little bit more tender and they retain moisture a little bit better. So if you do it, you know,”

it's one of those things where unless you're doing it side by side you're not really going to notice a difference, but if you do side by side eggs that have been salted for about 15 minutes, versus eggs that you're salting just before cooking or after cooking, what you find is that the eggs that you salt just before cooking will weep out more moisture than eggs that have been salted and a lot to rest for a little bit of time. It's funny how we agree on eggs, but not unscrambled eggs,

because I put olive oil in it heated up. Okay, okay, yes it gets hotter and we've talked butter before. Exactly. The water and the eggs steams, you get much fluffier eggs. And I turn the heat off, as soon as I put the eggs and I turn the heat off and then use a fork and scramble. Well, that's similar to a method I use for making, there's these Cantonese scramble eggs where essentially you get a walk really hot, you add oil and swirl it around and then you

turn the heat way down to low and you pour your scramble eggs and you kind of swirl them all the way around the pan so you get a real thin omelet. But then the way you cook them is that you just let them cook on that first side and then you kind of bunch them up the way you would kind of push a blanket and so the tops of the eggs are still sort of unset by the time that you take them out of the walk and it becomes a sort of like golden wave of eggs where the top is a little bit

unset but then as it's moving to the plate and as it rests a little bit they just barely set so you get these kind of really soft curds at the top but then that kind of fluffier texture underneath. Kenji's golden wave of eggs. There we are. Yeah. It's catchy. Now I got to try that that sounds like going. Kenji is usual a font of information and sometimes we agree. Thank you. Thank you for having me on.

There was Kenji Lopez Alt, he's a food columnist from the New York Times also author of the walk recipes and techniques. He also co-host the podcast "The Recipe with Kenji and Deb." That's it for today. To hear all of our episodes, just go to Milk Street Radio.com or wherever you get podcasts. We've put together a collection of our all-time favorite editors recipes. You can find that collection at Milk StreetRadio.com. You can also find us on Facebook or Christopher Campbell'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.

GPH. Co-founder Melissa Baldinger, executive producer, Annie Sinsubov. Senior editor, Melissa Allison.

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