Welcome to Mastering the Art of Microthermal Cooking

In the fall of 2001, I mastered the art of French cooking. In the aftermath of a national crisis and sense of guilt, grief and uncertainty, I guess more than one of us was comforted by Julia Child’s elaborate yet well-documented recipes and cooking techniques. I was nowhere near as organized in my approach as others, and I skipped the chapter on Aspics entirely – no thanks. It never occurred to me to document my journey through volumes 1 and 2. Twelve years later, I make the bourguinon at least once a year, and hollandaise far more frequently for special dinners with the husband I wouldn’t meet for almost another decade. Julia taught me the nuances of eggs, how to truss a bird for roasting and numerous other skills that have elevated me to the level of ‘Home Cook who Watches Chopped While Saying “I totally would have gone in a different direction with that basket. Bread pudding is so safe!”’ My introduction to cooking was through my Pennsylvania Dutch (we’re from Germany) and British father, his sister, who draws on the same background but has incorporated far more French techniques into her repertoire, and an ex-boyfriend’s mom who taught me how to entertain, Italian-style. Add to that a first generation Iranian husband whose mother and Azerbaijani Turkish grandmother schooled me in their traditional culinary traditions, and I’m drawing from a fairly diverse set of influences when it comes to cooking. So, here we are in 2013. The economy is a mess. I consider myself fortunate to have navigated myself into a new, challenging but good job. My husband and I fall into the category of homeowners who bought within our means, which means that we have two starter homes, neither of which we can sell and neither of which remotely meet our needs. There are people who are in much worse situations, I realize that, but I’m living in a space that fails to meet any of my basic needs, and as a result, I’m fairly depressed. What to do with that depression? I certainly can’t cook my way through Mastering the Art of French Cooking and blog about it. Besides, I still wouldn’t waste my time with the aspics. That’s where a good friend and a trip to the thrift shop entered the picture… For 99 cents, I have acquired a copy of Thermador’s cookbook, Micro-Thermal Cooking, copyright 1977. It’s subtitled “The Best of Two Worlds.” The cover art is a photo concoction of peaches and whipped cream and something else I can’t identify, projecting from the edges of a corningware dish that looks suspiciously like something I have in my kitchen, against a very 1970s brown background. I have always been intrigued by these third-quarter of the 20th century cookbooks that promised microwaves as the miracle invention that was going to replace your conventional oven. Cooking a Thanksgiving turkey in that thing? Sure! This is the future! Or at least it was thirty-some years ago. The Thermatronic II Micro-Thermal oven must have hit the market sometime prior to the publication of this cookbook. As recently as 2011, people have been posting on internet forums that they still have these suckers and shockingly, they still work. I haven’t procured one of these. I’m going to make these recipes in my regular microwave and the oven, to the extent that the recipe requires both. I’m still not going to make any fucking aspics because they are stupid. I will select the recipes at random, and will do my best to replicate them. The results should be interesting. When possible, I will include a photo of the recipe as it exists in the cookbook and a photo of the final product. My husband and friends will be invited to participate and provide their feedback. Over the course of the next few months, you’ll get firsthand feedback on dishes such as hot clam dip, wieners, hot dogs (not the same recipe as wieners), Marie’s tomato stack-ups, grasshopper de cacao pie, ham-yam towers and muffins from a mix! It’s going to be a fun learning experience. I have heeded the warnings that I should not attempt to operate the microwave with the door open, that I should not allow any residue to accumulate, that I should not attempt to operate my microwave if it Is damaged and that it should only be repaired by properly licensed service personnel. God help us all.