DISANTO’S MARINADE
The marinade recipe follows this brief introduction.
The two-fold goal of this website is in its name: it’s both to help you learn more about cooking (as in “D’ya get it?”), as well as to exhort you into the kitchen to do so, as in “Let’s get cooking.”
I want to share with you the two enduring lessons that I have learned during my many years over the stove and kitchen counter.
The most important, looking back on it, I learned in my 30s—in a manner of speaking, “in a pinch.”
I was tailing a friend, Ron DiSanto, in his kitchen, as he put together a marinade for grilled chicken thighs for which he was renowned. He went about his cooking, from pantry to counter, counter to stove, as I wrote down his every move, noting each ingredient, the number of cloves of garlic, the measure of the onion, whether a spoonful was level or not, and so forth.
At one point, he opened a jar of coriander powder, stuck in two fingers and pulled out a healthy pinch, adding it to the mix.
“How much was that?” I asked. “I don’t know,” he said, “a pinch.”
I said, “What do you mean ‘a pinch’? You’ve got to know how much, you know, a quarter teaspoon or something, right?”
“I never measure things like that,” he said. “I just go by feel. It was a pinch.”
At that moment, DiSanto taught me the cooking lesson that I deem most important: not to be a slave to the recipe or, by extension, to the shackles of precision. And its hidden tax—the fear of failure.
Or, as Julia Child once demonstrated, after you flub a pancake flip, you just warble on.
The second lesson I learned from a hard-boiled egg.
It is never to underestimate the humble and to appreciate the beauty in the best.
Once, many years ago, on a visit to my grandmother’s home in Belgium, she brought me a lunch of bread, her homemade mayonnaise and a hard-boiled egg.
That was it.
The egg was larger than the everyday egg (it turned out to sport two yolks). In all respects, it had been faultlessly boiled. Its white was opalescent, just on the approach to firm, jiggling as if it were cream Jell-O. The yolks, two suns, no olive-green sheath at all. And at the center of each, a deep yellow like marigold’s petals.
It tasted like egg, too, the way sulfur can be a mere whisper from spring water. And the yolks melted in my mouth like a snowflake fallen on a pond.
It was just a hard-boiled egg.
This marinade is particularly delicious on grilled pieces of pork or, seen here, chicken thighs. Photo from Konstiantyn Li at unsplash.
RECIPE: DiSanto’s Marinade
For use especially with chicken or pork. Marinate meats for 2-3 hours, not much longer, or the acidity will break down the musculature of the meat in an infelicitous way. Makes about 5 cups, enough for several grillings. (NB: Do not reuse previously used batches.)
Ingredients
1 medium yellow onion, peeled and diced
3 cloves of garlic, peeled and diced
1/2 cup olive oil
1/4 cup cider vinegar
2 cups freshly squeezed (or frozen) lemon juice
2 cups water
2 tablespoons prepared horseradish
1 teaspoon each: celery salt, ground cumin and cayenne pepper
1/2 teaspoon ground coriander
2 tablespoons brown sugar
Directions
Sauté the onion and garlic in the olive oil until nearly transparent. Add the remaining ingredients and boil the whole lot at a gentle simmer for 15 minutes. May be stored in a covered jar in the refrigerator for up to a month, or frozen for several months.