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Once upon a time, pantries were a collection of staples: salt, pepper, butter, sugar and eggs.
But spurred by intrepid chefs, travel and a seemingly endless array of speciality products, many food lovers find their collections spiralling out of control.
It all starts innocently enough: Cooks pick up asafoetida, a garlicky onion spice, to make that potato curry — once. Before long, they have aji powder, elderflower vinegar, figs in Malbec syrup, ras el hanout and sumac.
Modern pantries have become the Blob.
Hundreds of items
Lydia Walshin knows the problem well. When she counted, the cooking instructor and food writer in Gloucester, Rhode Island had more than 200 items in stock: oils, vinegars, spices, jams, sauces, chutneys, grains and six kinds of salt. Some had been there, unused, for years.
Walshin had decided to take stock as an intellectual exercise. A pantry, she had told students time and again, was an essential foundation of good cooking, a way to create a variety of meals with whatever was seasonal and fresh.
So what should go in the perfect pantry? And, more importantly, what should be left out?
After nearly 18 months, Walshin is still trying to answer the question. In 2006, she launched a blog, ThePerfectPantry.com, which highlights less-familiar ingredients, such as agave nectar, and some neglected favourites, such as arrowroot.
It also suggests ways to use them.
True, Walshin hasn’t managed to cut back on her total pantry items — the present count is 226 — but she has outlined clear rules about what belongs there.
“I have to have used the ingredient more than once. And I have to have used it in more than one way. Otherwise, it’s not part of my perfect pantry,” she says.
In a way, the pantry problem is a reflection of the frenetic US food culture.
Barrage of recipes
Thousands of cookbooks are published each year, providing ambitious kitchen warriors with recipes for Laotian beef salad, Italian-grape-and- hazelnut tart and the like.
It’s ironic. Storing foods we don’t use is the antithesis of the pantry concept, not to mention uneconomical.
Early Americans built pantries (originally called butteries because the ingredients were stored in the butts of barrels) as a place to store everyday items away from the heat of the kitchen.
The term has since developed to refer to the staples cooks have on hand, whether they are in cabinets, canisters, freezers or fridges, says Catherine Seiberling Pond, author of The Pantry: Its History and Modern Uses. It’s no surprise, Pond says, that pantries have transformed and become so cluttered: “The evolution of pantries very much echoes trends in cooking and household domestic economy.”
As Walshin has discovered, there is no one perfect pantry. But there is a baseline. Most serious cooks now stock sea salt, peppercorns, good commercial broth, extra-virgin olive oil, vinegars and several flours.
‘Desert island’ list
From there, it depends on what you like to cook and eat. Recently, Walshin posted her “desert island” list — 23 staples with which she says she could make most of her favourite dishes — including Parmesan cheese, cinnamon, cumin and Dijon-style mustard.
A reader poll of their must-haves added crushed red-pepper flakes, coconut milk, herbes de Provence and fish sauce.
“I would much rather have 226 things than 23,” Walshin says. “But it’s nice to know that I could survive.”
HELP
Make full use of those ingredients
There’s nothing wrong with a full pantry. The key is knowing what’s there and using it. Here are expert strategies on how to make that happen:
- Take stock. If spices have been around longer than a year, they might not have much flavour left. If you have ingredients you’ve never used, either try them or get rid of them.
Cooking instructor Lydia Walshin’s test of what belongs in a pantry is whether the item has been used more than once and in more than one way. “A pantry should be a staple of things you use, not things you wish you would use,” she says.
- Don’t be a snob. Experiment with accessible ingredients.
“You don’t need to go to some fancy gourmet store. Supermarkets are a gold mine for pantry staples,” says cookbook author Nina Simonds, who blogs about ingredients at SpicesofLife.com.
Simonds uses prepared marinades, bottled teriyaki sauces and curry pastes rather than mix her own spice blends or marinades on a busy weeknight. A present favourite: Trader Joe’s butternut squash soup, to which she adds spinach, a dab of curry paste and grilled chicken.
- La Brea Bakery’s Nancy Silverton, whose latest cookbook is A Twist of the Wrist, shows how to make great meals from jars, cans, bags and boxes. She uses Progresso lentil soup as a base for grilled fish and simple steamed vegetables, and canned beans for salads, crostini and homemade soups.
- Put new ingredients into everyday rotation.
When a recipe calls for a tablespoon of green masala paste, what do you do with the rest?
Silverton’s answer is: Use it for simple sauces and dressings rather than wait for the next Indian feast. Combine it with mayonnaise and spread on turkey sandwiches or use as a condiment for chicken or fish.
You can also add a touch to buttermilk dressing for a spicy Indian flavour. That also works for pestos, tapenades and chipotle peppers in adobo.
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