Personal – Quaker Lasagna

The Way We Eat Now: Off-Taste

January 4, 2022December 31, 2021Leave a comment

Off-taste Bee Wilson’s book The Way We Eat Now (Basic Books) offers a deep dive into food trends and their impact. A seasoned veteran as a food writer and historian, Wilson brings impressive depth and a broad perspective to the subject. The book offers a very useful bibliography.

Alas, the tone is distinctly off-putting: peevish and scolding, she finds we are all eating the wrong things, or the wrong combinations of things, or things at the wrong time (except maybe the Danes). This is a cumulative weight for her narrative and ultimately sucks the pleasure out of a deeply informative and timely work.

Reintroduction: Why write a food blog?

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It has been a while since I’ve added an entry to this site, but with a new year coming, why not? It’s a good time to revisit why I started writing a food blog.

My path to food was circuitous. I studied history in graduate school and stumbled into journalism by accident: a friend introduced me to a small-town newspaper editor at a party, we hit it off and she offered me a job as a reporter. This was long enough ago that newspapers were powerful civic instruments – I was hooked. Flash forward. I worked for a small group of publications that published weekly restaurant reviews. Every week at our managers meeting, I complained about how bad they were. Predictably, my publisher announced that going forward, David would be the food editor.

Irritability was my only qualification.

It was a challenge. Used to reporting on hard news, I suddenly had to figure out how to write about the subjective flavors of a sauce and the texture of well – or badly – cooked beef. And how to maintain a consistent tone writing about a high-end bistro one week and a mom-and-pop pasta place the next.

I loved it.

Despite knowing next to nothing about food and food prep, it was a compelling exploration. Ultimately, I wanted to know more, and when I retired I went to cooking school, learning the details and techniques required to create good and interesting food. A high point of that experience? Working with a deeply knowledgeable and talented chef to create a classic French consommé as a final exam good enough to earn my chef’s toque.

The idea of this blog is to enable me to write about recipes, cook books, restaurants – anything food related that appeals to me in this time when food is gloriously global, and restaurants are even more threatened than usual.

I can’t wait to see where it goes.

Why Quaker Lasagna?

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My mother explored food in a bad age. It was a time for Chef Boyardee. There were no farmer’s markets, but potato chips were home delivered in big cans every two weeks. She started with an interest in nutrition, going to talks by a somewhat sketchy expert named Adele Davis and branched out, impelled by her own curiosity and taste. So we ate exotic foods our peers had never heard of: yoghurt, wheat germ, cod liver oil. She collected recipes that called for spices (imagine beef with cinnamon or seafood with cayenne pepper). Seafood alone was a violation of established community standards.

Flash forward five decades:

She announced she had stopped cooking. Sounds reasonable, we said. I asked her for the shabby brown leather cookbook she used to collect recipes all those years, and she was glad to give it up. As I paged through, it proved to be a cabinet of memories. All those flavors and combinations—some durable some not. I discovered she had grabbed random waste paper to write down found recipes. So as I turned them over, I found notes home from elementary school teachers, parts of letters she had received, political flyers picked up somewhere.

It proved to be both an exploration of the time period (starting in the 1960s) as well as a taste of our family life and the energies driving an age of upheaval.

Among the items in that book was a recipe we all loved called Quaker Lasagna. The origin is a mystery. My siblings and I believe she invented it. She thinks it might have been a talented cook named Leona Boyd. Regardless. We have eaten it for 60 years. Still a family favorite.

Ingredients

1 ½ pounds ground beef

1 large can of tomato sauce (28 ounce)

1 bag medium egg noodles

1 cup cottage cheese

1/3 cup sour cream

½ pound cream cheese

2 scallions chopped fine

½ green pepper diced

Parmigiana-Reggiano cheese

Salt and pepper

Directions

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit
Cook the noodles until almost done, reserve
Brown the ground beef and break it up into fine pieces. Add the tomato sauce to the ground beef, allow the mix to cool
While the noodles cook, blend the cottage cheese, cream cheese, sour cream, scallions and green pepper
Toss the almost cooked noodles with one tablespoon of softened butter to keep them from sticking together
Butter a large casserole and layer in (in the following order): half the noodles; half the cottage cheese mixture; half the meat sauce. Repeat. Sprinkle one teaspoon kosher salt on top of each half of the mix. Grate Parmigiana-Reggiano cheese on top and add salt and pepper to taste.