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

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So go subscribe at Christopherkimble.substack.com, one more time, Christopherkimble.substack.com. This is most street radio from here. Exxon your host, Christopherkimble. My guest today, author Helen Zoe Vite, says American children are the busiest eaters in history,

“but it wasn't always this way. Kids once they foods that were sour, smoky and funky.”

When most Americans today imagine why kids in the past eat 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 corn 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 Marquez. Marina isn't just a beekeeper. She's a certified honey Somalye 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 harvested,

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 honey's 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. It's honey like olive oil where there's just a lot of lying and cheating in the industry. I assume adulteration is like in any business big ag business is an issue right? Absolutely. I mean honey is the third most adulterated food after milk in olive oil. You know anything that you buy in the store and 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 honey's 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 sourwood. This smells like the penny candies at the

odor that I associate with some sort of like hard candy. I can't quite put my finger on it, but

“Like a rich? Anis? Yeah it does. That's it. That's it. It's sort of salted licorice.”

Swedish salted licorice. Can I taste it now? Yeah you can taste it. Yep. Yeah it's sweet. It doesn't have a lot of deep character or whatever. It sort of tastes to me like the thing that we 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 Anis. 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. Hey, dry hay. This is some weird honey. Not saying that a bad way. I'm saying wow it's super interesting. I mean it's a lot going on here. So that honey is a sweet clover from the decodas. 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 and the fall.

Yeah it smells like bees and bees wax 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 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 that's why I recognize that.”

Okay number four. Wow this is um 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 a 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. Smell is. That's really interesting. Different smells like an astray. Oh yeah it is just like the morning after one of my parents cocktail parties back many years ago. 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 Sardania. This is their traditional honey that they've made for thousands of years. Probably the bitterest honey got produced on the planet. And they put it on something called the siaida which is essentially a big ravioli that they stuff with cheese and fry it on the stove top. And when it comes out of that they drizzle it with the Corbezzolo honey.

“And it is amazing. I think it would go with cheese yeah. Yeah super bitter.”

But they have a different palate and to them this is their honey of their country. A honey for every palate. 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.

Yeah, it's really interesting when I was researching for this book that I just wrote the world out this of honey. I found a lot of incidents of birth ceremonies, wedding ceremonies,

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. Rhina, 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 Marquez, author of the World Atlas of Honey. Now it's time to answer your cooking questions with my co-host Sarah Multon. Sarah is of course the star of Sarah's week nine meals

“in public television also author of Home Cooking 101. Whoa, hello Chris. How are you today?”

I'm good. Are you ready to take a couple of calls? Absolutely. 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, meet 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. My saying. 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 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, 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 astu, you can hear right away if it's not at a simmer. It's at a boil and you want to 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 that aren't 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 bake 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 the balance is back. And that gives me really the best indication. And the last thing you can do is by a digital

insertory thermometer. You could buy one like a thermopin. They have a very big readout. It's really large. And like a cheesecake is 155 and a European bread is 205 and American white bread is 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 double. So those are my short list, 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. 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 seer 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 haven't really good like five ply pans or a ply pans because it's going to be really hard to burn stuff on those pans. If you had a one-by-pan or a two-ply pan, it just means there's a sandwich of aluminum or

in their expensive, but it'll really cut down 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.”

Hi. 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 [email protected]. 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 Redding Pennsylvania. It works county, which is heavy and Pennsylvania Dutch

folks. I remember my parents taking me to some family in the burrow and going into a 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 I 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 tastes like never found afterwards. Well, guys, the 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,

“then I remember the flavor being very strong. Yep, the only thing I can think of is you could make a”

corn mill or cook a corn mill paste. It's pretty thick and you could shape it like they do like a lot of pasta shapes with a spoon or whatever. I 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 can 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 all the 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 corn mill. 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 with shapeset and heats it at the same time. Puffet or pressure, puffet. Right, yeah, pressure isn't. 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 whole 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. Well, yeah. Thank you. Wonderful. Take care. Thank you. Thanks, Greg. Bye. Bye. You're listening to Mill Street Radio coming up the truth about kids and picky eating. I'm Shilpa O's Kokowitch. And I'm Jesse Seppjek. And we're the hosts of the Bone Appetite

Bake Club podcast. Bake Club is Bon Appetite's community of confident curious bakers. Jesse and I love to bake. Some might even call us obsessive. And we love to talk about all the house and why and what didn't work that come with it. Every month we publish a recipe on Bon Appetite.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 podcast. Happy baking. This is Most Street Radio. I'm your host Christopher Kimball. I'm joined now by Helen Zoe White, author of Pickie, how American children became the fussiest eaters in history. Helen, welcome to Most Street. Thanks so much. I'm happy to be here. I love this topic. Pickie eaters. Kids being picky eaters. You know I have a number of children two of them are still

pretty young. And I love the premise of this because you start out saying in the 19th century that kids, as you might expect, ate what their parents were eating because no one is going to create you know two sets of meals. But you write favorite meal of a New England boy in the 1850s,

So let's just expand on that. So kids like briny and sour, smoky and vinegar, 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, vinegar, briny, 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 palettes 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' palettes. Is there any

research to suggest a five-year-old's palette is substantially different than a 30-year-old's palette? 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 eight 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 picking us 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 picking us. Neophobia does mean being careful that what you're going to consume isn't toxic. So approaching it with some, with some wearing us. 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 found out over the last hundred 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 night 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

logistically complicated. So let's talk about how picking is 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

I'm never a sniss. 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 shouldn't be eating meat. You should be drinking a quarter of milk a day. So what was”

who were these experts? It 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 doubty today,

nutrition seems to 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, you know, six 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, it's a 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 porridge or custard, but not much meat, fruits and vegetables, okay, but they cook them for ages, very little seasoning. But the big message of the 1900s and the 1910s is that children's food should be different.

Well, I mean, the notion that if you are saying that 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 blander 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 are actually giving their kids these really bland, measured meals, they themselves had not eaten like that. They didn't 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 seems to bear out. This seems like evidence that we're now doing the right thing. One interesting thing

the same food as their parents from toddlerhood. But that's changing. Childhood picking us 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, our 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. 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 picking us is not inevitable. People have changed a bit from absolute skepticism

and also just really like anger to be frank. But I've 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 Mount Street. Thanks so much for having me. That was Helen Zoe White 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 most street radio.com or wherever you find your podcast.

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 and it was amazing and I never regretted that day. I spent like so long

sniffing as one piece of eel because I was so nervous to try it and I ended up sniffing it for so long that it almost went up my nose. I tried it and just tasted 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 stevers or little necks, but yeah,

“you have to take the skin off of them and pull this thing and you're basically just eating”

like they're stomach, like a stomach of it, so I just like, but I just kind of close my eyes and then just let them hatch. When I was four, I did not let go of them, so I kept trying and trying it. Like, why did I tie my turn five? I was like, hmm, I like them. My mom was making Brussels sprouts for dinner and when I sat down I saw them and I was like, "Oh, 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 sprouts onto my plate and I couldn't stop. I did my breakfast, I did like rice, try it and then take little bites. I was saying, "Hey, I'm not having lunch anymore." And then my mom and dad said, "Yes, I love to do food." Thanks to all of our listeners and friends for sharing your stories.

You're listening to Milk Street radio coming up with me the cult of the North Shore beef sandwich. On Christopher Campbell, you're listening to Milk Street Radio right now. My co-host Sarah Malt and I will be answering a few more of your cooking questions. Welcome to Milk Street, who's calling?

“Hi, this is Lizzy Goldstein from Norwalk Connecticut. Hi Lizzy, how can we help you?”

So my question is in regards to mixing pasta with sauce. I'm 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,

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 at least I have in years and 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 and a skillet not in a sauce pan which also means there's more of an operation 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 vinegarette 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 were 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 a tract 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 and that's four. In fact, we just did a cachio pepper 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 us 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 that under an hour or 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 happens much water, but a higher ratio of starch in the water. Yeah, I think that's it. Good summary. Yeah. Uh-huh. Excellent. Yes. All right, Lizzie. Thanks, Lizzie. Thank you. Yeah. Okay. I appreciate it. Bye.

This is most street radio. Give us a call. We'll try to solve your dining disasters. The number as always

eight five five four two six nine eight four three that's eight five five four two six nine eight four three or email us at questions at milkstreet radio dot com. Welcome to milkstreet who's going? 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 powder 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. Instead of the secret ingredient of the year. 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,

do. It would be one for one exchange. Great. Thank you Sarah. You know I haven't used powder milk a lot in recipes. It's perfect. 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 a regular milk. I'm talking about using it in recipes that

call for it. Sarah did you're on live at a gingerbread house? What candy can you have a long

nose? She sounds really thoughtful. Well no actually she's amazing cook but she was frugal. I like

frugal. Yeah no frugal's good but that one was pretty bad. I mean I 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. Yeah sure. Alright thanks. Bye. Thank you guys. This is most of you radio. Right now it's time to hear from Milk Street's digital editor Claire Lauer. Claire recently sat down with comedian Josh Gundeman to discuss a Massachusetts culinary curiosity the North Shore beef sandwich.

Hi Josh Gundelman. 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 is a whole or are you specifically from the North Shore? That's the Jesus is a whole.

No the North Shore is mobblehead it swamps get it's peabody it's Danvis. You go as far west as Worcester they're not going to serve you one of these things. You get to hang them 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 weirdness is like obviously New England has a real seafood culture and like a roast beef I'm like fried shrimp fried clam restaurant is extremely like 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 what 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 trade-faven if you will but that's like yeah steam clams fried clams the big thing fried shrimp like scrawd 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 hyperlocal 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 square-ish

“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 that 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 grittled bun so it's nice and buttery you don't just go bun from the bag or bun from the oven well okay so I also imagine you wouldn't like a nice

hold up against the meat and cheese and mayo and sauce pretty well and and you you see you want

both the texture and the flavor I think is is why you put that bun on the grittled that makes sense because there's not a lot of textual contrast in the same way no no it's a sandwich with a lot of texture uniformity I think especially if you get the rare like the more delicate and rare the beef the closer it is in texture to mayo exactly it is like a sandwich it eats like a donut but I want everything to eat like a donut who 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 you're 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 here you can't 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 sandwich is with a lot of specific terms Foby flavor of beef time and bag if you took it all and that long was in the bag B2B beefed upon ratio FPW 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 of if we're talking about acronyms and abbreviations is GFI like go fuck yourself kid that's very Boston very Boston where my parents live within five to ten miles you can probably hit like half of the really big ones the you know some of the 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 revir beach but there's revir and sagas and they're all over the place I want to go back to the beef itself you said flash pink warm so you want this pleasantly warm but not hot yeah not steaming okay

“but you want it warm to to feel fresh honestly like fresh and warm I think are pretty”

pretty close together with something like this and then there's Foby 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 a number of napkins where do you fall what's your ideal napkin count oh 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 dunk in 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 just thinking about the state of entertainment and I promise this is relevant you know a lot of how movies are made known how TV shows are made as 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 condominent conversation with milk street's digital editor Claire Lauer you can find more of Josh's work at his website

head to milk street radio.com or wherever you get your podcast and now I'm on sub-stack I write about

“cooking recipes travel food science for month as well as what I'm reading and watching please”

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