Balancing Act

As Julia Child advised multiple times on adding nutmeg to white sauce, add just a few specks but not so much that people can say, "Oh, nutmeg!" (Yes, I have watched quite a few videos of her old cooking shows and learned so much from her.) It seemed crazy but there does actually exist a zone where a quantity of an integral peripheral ingredient is just right, virtually undetectable by the palate, yet without which the quality of the dish would be impaired or incomplete. It's real. It's no twilight zone.

A long while back, before I watched any Julia Child videos, I tried following a recipe to make the South African stew Tomato Bredie. The recipe called for a dash of Worcestershire sauce. I was curious and tasted the stew before adding it, just so I could tell if it made any difference afterwards. And, boy, did it transform the dish! It as a very simple recipe, but it was the best, most elegant tasting of all the ones I tried. Other recipes called for tablespoonfuls of Worcestershire sauce, and while the results of such heavy-handed flavoring were tasty, the periphery upstaged a central ingredient, so much so that nomenclature for those ones would dictate a correction to Worcestershire Sauce Bredie. Also, I think, sometimes subtlety is an enormous factor in elegance.

There are many examples of dishes utilizing the delicate touch of something extra. Some of them are quite surprisingly contrasting too, such as salt in a dessert dish (e.g. custard pie, sponge cake), lemon/vinegar/tomato puree in a creamy dish (e.g. Hong Kong style Portuguese Chicken has 2 teaspoons of tomato paste in its primarily coconut cream base), or sugar in savory dish (e.g. brown sugar in meatloaf, rock sugar in dishes with five spice).

I guess, at the end of the day cooking a tasty dish requires balancing flavors. Lively, prominent contrasts can be a win too. Famous examples are Hawaiian ham, chicken with cranberry and camembert pizza, and sweet and sour pork, just to name a few. Perhaps, not everyone like the combination of pineapple and ham, but plenty of roast meat dishes pair sweetness and sourness of fruit or otherwise and the saltiness of meat. You can find lamb roasts recipes by the dozen that use apricot or balsamic vinegar. My husband cannot get his head around bacon and banana served together with maple syrup on French toast. I love it. Whoever came up with the idea probably well understood about balancing contrasting flavors and definitely daring in his/her pursuit in creating good food.

Let us all too boldly go where no one has gone before ... or least not often ... in creating exciting new flavors.

Much Applied

Most recipes can yield enough to feed a village. OK, that is a bit of an exaggeration, but still, if it is your first time making it and your village consists of just you and your better half, a bad result becomes an abusive diet to your loved one, or an abuse to the environment through huge waste. Even if it was a good result, the huge quantity lasts for days and you end up feeling sick of it.

A lot of recipes are probably passed down from many generations ago when a household commonly was as large as a village.

If it was a meat dish, you probably can freeze the leftovers. Freezing detracts from the quality of most food, not just the taste and nutrition, but especially the texture. Anyway, it is (loosely) viable. When it is Carbonara, you are eating it, the whole lot of it, that very meal! No matter how yummy it is, which it was, as I struck beginner's luck, there is a limit to the size of your stomach.

It is often difficult to scale a recipe and keep the recipe-intended quality at the same time.

The good news is that if you got all the basic skills down, and you have learned from wide enough range of recipes, you can spot the pattern and understand which basic building blocks are used in the recipe. Then, you can scale down the recipe by your experience. In the case of Carbonara, it is essentially the same concept as making custard with whole eggs, except the liquid is the pasta cooking water, it is savory instead of sweet, and cheese is added. 

Boy, it has been a long fattening road. But I am glad that the experiences are starting to pay off. I think, life is funny. No experience ever goes to waste, no matter how bad or useless they may seem at the time. They always serve us later, even if it is in small ways.

tip: 

Here is a general egg to liquid proportion reference for custard: http://www.incredibleegg.org/eggcyclopedia/c/custard/

I think the quarter cup to one egg ratio, with the cheese, gave a nice thick but not stiff sauce in Carbonara. However, as you don't want to drain the pasta for too long and allow it to lose too much heat, it will retain some cooking water. You may want to start with just 1 tablespoon of hot pasta water for each egg first and add more as needed.