The Nature of Nutty

It’s not often that I come out of the doctor’s office feeling instantaneously better. Antibiotics notwithstanding, I’m convinced that the best medicine for an ailment is something from the oven, preferably sweet and loaded with butter. So imagine my delight when, as I sat fidgeting in the waiting room, I spied the most recent issue of Vogue lying on the coffee table.

Usually it takes me a good ten minutes to find Jeffrey Steingarten’s article. His column is always frustratingly hidden between sheet after sheet of outlandish clothing and perfume advertisements, and what would be the point of finding the index when that is also mired in reams of commercial pages? So I took it as a veritable sign of destiny when I began to thumb through the magazine and almost immediately, the pages containing Mr. Steingarten’s article opened onto my lap.

This month’s column was all about brown butter, that magical ingredient famously found in Dover sole meunière. In sweet concoctions, brown butter evokes the tantalizing smells of toffee and butterscotch, or caramels and brown sugar. The column was, as usual, cheeky and well researched. The lady behind the desk was most obliged to photocopy the article for my enjoyment and I was a happy camper as I left the doctor’s office, en route to the market to buy a few pounds of butter.

Much to my chagrin, I learned from the article that my conception of the word “nutty,” as it used in food writing, is much too obfuscated to be of value. Here, Steingarten writes:

When it’s used in savory dishes, brown butter is nearly universally described as “nutty.” I hate that. Do they mean that it smells like a walnut or a peanut (not a true nut anyway), or a brazil nut or a pistachio, a coconut or a macadamia or a pine nut, an almond or a beech, a cashew or a chestnut or a pili nut or, in actual fact, the very hazelnut herself? Are they referring to a raw nut or a roasted nut, and if the latter, has the nut been dry-roasted, pan roasted, oven-roasted, or just deep-fried? People who describe a food as nutty, whether they’re lazy laymen or slothful food writers, don’t really have much of anything in mind. They can’t think of a better word, and rather than ponder and ruminate and rack their brains, they type out the word nutty. I know – I’ve done it myself. But never again! (Nevertheless, I won’t deny that my continuing use of the word delicious is anything but slothful when I use it to describe delicious food.)

Well, hallelujah to that. I found this particular paragraph to be so compelling in its argumentation and so convincing in its use of examples, that the next sentence came as a surprising disappointment to me. Mr. Steingarten claims, “In my household, savory brown butter is generally tagged as roasty or toasty.”

To me, the words “roasty” or “toasty” evoke nothing more specific than the much-maligned term “nutty” and in fact, the former two are even less explicative in their connotations. Whereas the term “nutty” at least hints of the distinctive flavor of any nut that has been cooked, whether roasted, toasted, or fried, the words “roasty” and “toasty” are at best descriptive verbs posing as adjectives. Roasting what? Toasting what?

I do confess that I probably use “nutty” more than I should, but that’s in large part due to my penchant for hazelnuts. In the future, I am going to try to use the word less often, or at the very least, supplement the word with more specific descriptions regarding the type and condition of said nut.

In the spirit of self-improvement, I’ll say that these cookies, which I may have been tempted to describe as “nutty” in the past, have a peerless aroma not unlike that of the best fleur de sel caramels.

It is a thrill to make the brown butter that is recommended, though not required, for these oatmeal cookies. Since the flavor of brown butter is intensified as the milk solids in the butter are cooked, Mr. Steingarten adds milk powder to the butter to further bolster that attractive feature. As the butter begins to brown, the aroma arising from the pot is tantalizing, to say the least. Akin to toffee, butterscotch, and caramels all in one, the scent of the brown butter may very well change the way you bake. Now, I can’t imagine making a cookie without it (or, at the very least, an oatmeal cookie).





Brown Butter Oatmeal Cookies, from Best Oatmeal Cookies from Learning to Cook, by Marion Cunningham, as it appears in Steingarten’s article in the June 2009 issue of Vogue

1 cup brown butter, at room temperature
1 cup sugar
2 cups uncooked instant oatmeal
1 tsp baking soda
½ tsp salt
1 cup All Purpose Flour, of a low-protein brand such as Gold Medal
1 tsp. vanilla extract

In a large bowl, beat together the very soft, room-temperature brown butter and the sugar, using a wooden spoon and not a mixer.

In another bowl, combine the uncooked instant oatmeal, baking soda, salt, and flour.

With the wooden spoon, mix these dry ingredients into the sugar and butter mixture. Mix in the vanilla extract. The mixture should be crumbly but cohesive enough to come together into clumps.

Preheat the oven to 350 F.

Line a baking sheet with the parchment paper. With your fingers, shape the dough into 1-inch balls. Set the balls on the baking sheet, approximately 2 inches apart. Flatten with your fingers or the back of a fork, until the cookies are ¼ inch thick.

Bake for about 10 minutes, until the cookies take on a pale-golden color. Let cool for a few minutes; then remove to a rack with a thin metal spatula and leave to cool completely.

Stored in an air-tight container, the cookies will keep well for up to a week at room temperature.