FOOD FOR THOUGHT
Take a trip back in time with classic dishes
By Wanda A. Adams
Advertiser Food Editor
It's nice, now and again, to enjoy a little menu nostalgia.
That was the case a couple of weeks ago when I visited Kapi'olani Community College's Ka Ikena dining room for lunch with Carol Hoshiko, Gladys Sato and Conrad Nonaka of the culinary program — as well as The Advertiser's former food editor, Joan Namkoong, who's busy marketing her cookbook, "Go Home, Cook Rice" and trying to launch an O'ahu food festival later in the year.
It was a day when the menu, prepared by student chefs, celebrated Austria and Germany, so there was wienerschnitzel and a sausage plate, and the appetizers included a dish neither of us had seen on a menu for years: Steak Tartare. This classic preparation of raw scraped or chopped steak with egg yolk, finely chopped onion and anchovies has come into disfavor because of fears of food-borne illness and because the food world has moved on. (To, for instance, ahi carpaccio or ahi tartare, which is much the same dish with sashimi-grade tuna.)
Neither of us could resist seeing if the dish would be as interesting and luxurious as it had once seemed. And it was very nice, indeed, accompanied, as it should be, by little rounds of toast, finely chopped onion, caper and beautifully cut cucumbers. The only flaw was too even a texture. This is a case where a food processor will not do; the meat should be chopped by hand and retain some of its resilience.
Nostalgia reigned, too, on New Year's Eve, when something got into me and I decided we just had to do a Boeuf Wellington: a fillet of beef lightly browned, slathered with reduced mushrooms and pate and wrapped in puff pastry before baking to finish, served with a madeira sauce. This all sounds terrifically daunting but proved, like Steak Tartare, to be exceedingly simple, given that we bought the pate and puff pastry already made.
Certainly, I wouldn't want to return to those stuffy "Continental" menus of my girlhood: Pear Mayonnaise for salad, then a heavy meat course of Boeuf Bourguignonne, Steak Au Poivre, Chicken Cordon Bleu, Stroganoff, lamb chops with those little frilly paper cuffs on the bones followed by Cherries Jubilee or some such dessert.
But every once in a while, it's interesting to look back and see how a dish stands up to your — we hope — more sophisticated palate and to recall the times when you may have tasted it, or prepared it, in the past. (My first Boeuf Wellington was at a dinner party held by one of my college professors, during which I proceeded to become more and more ill for reasons having nothing to do with the food until, by the time the Wellington arrived, I turned a rather strange color and had to be sent home in cab. My friends said it was delicious.)
Some foods, I regret to report, do not live up to the pleasure with which we remember them. Take my advice: Don't try cotton candy as a grown-up.
