Ode to Marmite

 RHYS BOWEN: I’m going to say something controversial today:  I love Marmite.

Do you all know what Marmite is? It’s a brown, gooey stuff that tastes … well…strong and salty. I can’t really describe it. You spread it on toast. You use it to enhance soups and gravies. It’s actually a yeast byproduct, invented over a hundred years ago when brewers wanted to come up with something to do with their left-over yeast after the beer was fermented.

But I think, seriously, that one has to have been born with the Marmite gene. I don’t know of any non-Brits who like it. And yet my children, all born in America, all eat it all the time. I’m not sure about my grandchildren.  When we first got to the States I tried serving it to new friends. One of my favorite things is to toast a marmite sandwich and then to grill one side of it with cheese on top. The result is heaven to me. To my friends not so much. I watched their faces as they tried to struggle through it, occasionally daring to ask, “What exactly is this?”

John and I often have it for breakfast, after the obligatory sardines (another acquired taste). But I’ve yet to come across the Yank who exclaims “Marmite? I tried it in London and now I can’t get enough of it.”

I’m also a big fan of liver. John adores kidneys. We also tried serving these to American friends and got looks of horror. I have to say that after my daughter majored in biology I became less keen on kidneys. Now I know exactly what they do.

I’m sure there are plenty of foods that other people love but I hate. Candied yams, for example. Yuck. I’ve never tried tripe but Mexicans adore menudo. I do like sweetbreads but I’m never cooking them myself. It’s so fiddly and time consuming.   So I’d love to know if there is a food you adore but nobody else does.

HALLIE EPHRON: So interesting! Yes, marmite tastes to me the way the inside of a tin can smells. 

I love freshly made chopped chicken liver. Essential ingredient: chicken fat. I save chicken fat trimmings in the freezer until I have enough. Then try to find fresh chicken liver in the supermarket – often unavailable. My chopped chicken liver has lots of onion and hard boiled egg in it, and I hand chop it in with a chopper I inherited from my mother-in-law and in a bowl my grandmother used. It’s SO delicious! And I confess I’ve never had a decent version from a deli or restaurant. Theirs always taste…old.

LUCY BURDETTE: I’m sure we must have eaten Marmite in Australia, but I don’t remember loving or hating it. But chicken livers, no thank you. That and lamb–everyone says “oh but you haven’t tasted my recipe.” But I don’t care for either one, doesn’t matter how much onion and rosemary you tuck around the edges. On the other hand, not everyone loves my favorite, candied jalapenos. 

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: Lucy, I’ve come to believe lamb is like licorice - you either love it or hate it, no inbetween. (I love the former and can’t eat or drink anything flavored with anise.)

The only singular thing I seem to eat is peanut butter and pickle open-faced sandwiches. Not pickle as in Branston Pickle (although I do love that.) I mean toast, smeared with natural peanut butter, and topped with slices of dill or kosher pickle. Spare me the pregnancy jokes; I’ve heard them all.

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Marmite. I have never tasted it, and I have to say it sounds pre-tty horrible. I do love chopped liver, though, SO yummy. With onion and eggs, yes. YUM.

I love licorice candy, red and black. Lamb? Lamb? Rack of lamb is the best thing in the world. Truly. 

But I have never and will never have baked beans. Ah. How could anyone eat those? Or lima beans. Gah. Or poached eggs. I cannot even think about poached eggs. 

I do sometimes eat matzo when it’s not Passover. It’s delicious, even with nothing on it. Does that count?

DEBORAH CROMBIE: Marmite, Rhys! I have to confess that even having lived in Scotland and England, and having been married to a Scot for almost fifteen years, I never developed a taste for Marmite. To me it tastes the way B vitamins smell–not appealing at all. I think you might be right about it being a taste that has to be acquired early. 

I do love chicken livers and sometimes will saute them until they are crispy on the outside but still pink on the inside, and eat them on toast with butter and salt. Poor man's pate–yum. And I adore sweetbreads, but never cook them because no one else will eat them.

RHYS: I think lamb is also an acquired taste. It's a staple of Sunday lunch in England so I grew up liking it. But I also love chicken livers. I saute in butter then add sherry and flambe. Spread them on toast. Yum

Also like baked beans but not lima. And my poached eggs have to have firm white and slightly gooey yolk

A Little Comfort Food.

RHYS BOWEN:  It's been rather a stressful couple of weeks for me. Closing up the condo in Arizona and moving back to California for the summer, doing a book tour for TIME OF FOG AND FIRE through Southern California, then the dreaded income tax, to Las Vegas to receive a career achievement award at the RT convention, and off next week to DC for Malice Domestic.

At times like this I find myself turning to comfort foods. And these are usually foods from my childhood. When I was pregnant I craved my mother's lamb stew with dumplings only in those days most supermarkets in America didn't carry lamb. When I go back to England I feast on all my old favorites: fish and chips, bangers and mash, definitely Cornish pasties and cream teas, but also smoked haddock or kippers for breakfast, as well as the full English with bacon, tomatoes, mushrooms, baked beans, sausage etc etc. The good thing about that is that one doesn't need to eat lunch. The bad thing is that it's about a billion calories!

The comfort food I've been indulging in for lunch recently is my trusty grilled cheese and tomato soup. I make the tomato soup with milk, not water, to give added protein. Sometimes I sprinkle grated cheese over the top. And the grilled cheese is really grilled under the broiler, not fried grilled cheese the way it is served here. When I was a college student doing finals my roommate and I lived on grilled cheese, cooked over the gas fire in our room. We became quite good at not dripping cheese over the hearth.

It's ironic that when I'm sent on a book tour I stay at luxury hotels and can order anything I want. This is fun for a couple of days but then my thoughts revert to comfort food. "Could you just poach me one egg with toast?" I ask the breakfast waiter. In Atlanta once the girl looked horrified when I asked for that. "Don't you even want no grits with it?" she asked.

My other big comfort food is soup. Good hearty chicken soup made with the whole chicken and lots of veggies and beans, or my favorite curried parsnip or carrot and ginger in the winter.  And I have to confess to another favorite food that will make most of you shudder. MARMITE ON TOAST. I'm afraid you have to be born with British genes to like Marmite. When I've served it to Americans they always look as if I'm trying to poison them. But spread thinly on hot buttered toast it is the best!  I think I'll go and have some now......

What are your comfort foods?

Food Confessions

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: I used to love toasted sesame bagels with strawberry jam. I mean—I Loved them. I used to wake up in the early morning, and think—“is it time for my toasted sesame bagel with strawberry jam yet?” I could just taste those toasty nutty seeds, and the crunchy bread and the delicious yummy jam, and oh, it was fabulous. I had one every day for about a year.

Then suddenly, without warning!  It was—impossible. Yuck.  I couldn’t even think about eating one. I still can’t.

Same thing happened with baked potatoes with broccoli and sour cream. Oh, I yearned for it, couldn’t wait to get home from work to have that for that one-potato dinner...the fabulous steamy potato, all hot, and the skin crispy, the way the broccoli and the sour cream merged, and no matter what kind of a bite you got, it was the best.

Then, suddenly, yuck. AH, no, thank you.

I binged. I binged, and then somehow, like in Clockwork Orange, I could not face it again. Is there a binge thing in our brains?

Right now it’s cool and hip to “binge-watch” a TV show. We sure did it with House of Cards last season.  We watched until we were bleary.

And good think there were only 13 episodes, because maybe I would have gone all sesame bagel after 14.  Who knows. (We’re starting Season 2 now--and wow. But we won’t discuss it.)

Do you—binge? On anything? Did you binge yourself out of liking it? (Maybe it's more--a habit, than a binge.) (Roberta/Lucy, is this a psychological “thing”?)

HALLIE EPHRON: I'm not a binger. Though at the moment, I've watched episodes of Poirot that I missed for five nights running. Does that count? And yes, I am sick of them. It's amazing how often Agatha Christie recycled plot devices.

When it comes to food, I quickly tire of whatever I've recently eaten. And I firmly believe that at any moment, something I've always assumed was perfectly safe will be shown to cause some terrible disease. So I might eat a hot dog for lunch for a week, but then I won't touch one again for months.

HANK: Because then it's out of your system? Or what?

LUCY BURDETTE: Of course Hank there is a serious psychological disorder called Binge Eating Disorder, but that's not what you're talking about here! This is more like too much of a good thing, right?

HANK: Yeah. Exactly. I only had ONE bagel.  EVERY DAY. FOR A YEAR. Sheesh. Scary. Yeah, it's more of a Habit than a binge.

LUCY: I'm like Hallie, anything I eat too much of can turn on me. Even Christmas cookies. I still have two rolls of cookie dough in the freezer and can't bring myself to bake them. Or spanakopita, which I dearly love. If I make a whole 13 by 9 inch pan of it for only John and me, it definitely becomes a slog at the end...

DEBORAH CROMBIE: I'm not a binge-er. Although I do seem to go in cycles on breakfast. For years I ate a soft-boiled egg and a slice of whole wheat toast. Mostly these days, it's granola and yogurt, but it's more time thing. I still love the soft-boiled eggs. Left-overs, now, that's a whole different thing.  I can eat something twice, maybe, and after that, yuck.

HANK: Yeah, it's hard to throw away leftovers. The key is to wait til the THIRD day. Then, no problem to toss because they are surely deadly.

I always say--let's put it in the fridge now, and we'll throw it away later.

RHYS BOWEN: I've always had a small appetite. I really enjoy good food and I do like to have good cheeses after dinner every night. But in my school days I do remember having tomatoes on toast every day for a few months, having Marmite and pickle on rye crisp until I tired of it.

HANK: Rhys, only you… Marmite and pickle on rye crisp?

RHYS: In fact I think I've been the opposite of a binger all my life--I get bored easily. I like to be surprised and try new things. When I lived in a country club the other wives wanted me to play tennis with them every morning. I couldn't do that. And these days I have friends who play bridge every day. I think I like my life as a smorgasbord, sampling a little treat here, a little treat there.

HANK: So how about some food confessions from you all--do you ever get a craving something,..and then have it every day until it loses its joy?

CHANGING THE SUBJECT HERE: One thing that will never lose its luster--is a new book  by wonderful favorite author...and right here in my little hot hand is JOHN LESCROART'S brand new THE KEEPER.  It's an ARC, and it's a Dismas Hardy, and  selfishly, I'm not giving mine up. :-)  But, because John is the coolest of all guys, he sent me two! And one is for a lucky commenter.  

Five weirdest things in my pantry

I went food shopping with my husband the other day and - even at this advanced stage of our relationship - he found out something new about me. I love Bragg's Liquid Amino Acids. http://www.bragg.com/products/liquidaminos.html I know. What the hell is it? And why doesn't it have another, less goofy name?

Can't answer those questions. A friend turned me on to this stuff (and I keep calling it that because I don't know what else to call it...sauce, dressing?) a few years back and I love it. Kind of a cross between soy sauce and balsamic vinegar, but it's really the name that I love. I feel as if I'm doing something good for my body when I drizzle it over my veggies or salads. Like an elite athlete. I bet Dara Torres knows about Bragg's It's got amino acids. Do I need more amino acids? I don't care, I'm loving them.

What other strange things are in my pantry? Marmite - the salty brown stuff the Brits eat. Dragees (dra-zhees)..those little silver balls you put on cakes and candies. Spelt. God knows what I was thing here. I'm sure it's supposed to be "good" for you, but since I've never made it I have no idea. And beignet mix. And I always have beignet mix and chicory coffee. Souvenirs, of course. But why do I keep buying them year after year? I made the beignets once, but how many of those babies can you eat? One a year? Two?

And as for the chicory coffee - if you're not at Cafe du Monde it's just brown water. Don't bother.

Rosemary