For most of human history, the use of spoiling ingredients wasn’t viewed as sordid. On any bright morning between roughly 400 A.D. (when the “Apicius” of antiquity included instruction for “spoiled honey made good”) and the middle of last century, any thoughtful cook, stained recipe page before her, might have set about whisking batter for sour-beer pancakes, or gathering slightly moldy vegetables for weeknight soup, or resolving to make a sour-milk cake, and her actions would have been seen as properly belonging to the branch of human activity called cooking. The usefulness of an ingredient existed on a temporal spectrum, with differing but comparable values at both ends; this was intrinsic kitchen knowledge, guided by recipes in cookbooks like Lydia Maria Francis Child’s “The American Frugal Housewife” (1832), or Marion Harland’s “Common Sense in the Household” (1871), or Fannie Farmer’s “Boston Cooking-School Cook Book” (1896).
Those old ways have fallen out of fashion. The life-preserving discoveries of microbiology in the late 19th century are partly responsible; once Louis Pasteur proved spoilage to be caused by tiny organisms, i.e., interlopers, it was difficult to ever think of aging food in quite the same way again. New technologies came along to help keep our beer and milk fresh, our vegetables bright. Where an earlier cook knew potatoes and milk to change over time, and made her culinary plans accordingly, today an ingredient’s life is thought to have ended once time has altered it in any way.
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But ingredients still do have uses past their first flush, and we should continue to make room for them in our minds and in our cookbooks. There are some truly wonderful dishes that rely on them. Like chilaquiles, made from stale tortillas — for which I’ve included a very basic recipe. And ribollita, a stale-bread-and-bean soup, and pappa al pomodoro, a similar thing, thick with olive oil and tomatoes. Sour milk, beyond improving cakes and corn breads, makes traditional cottage cheese. The rather magical Catalan pa amb tomàquet wants tomatoes that are nearly rotten. For dessert, there is the Tipsy Charlotte, which requires a very stale spongecake. Making any of these dishes is an act of quiet resistance to the false belief that letting ingredients age spells failure.
It is true, and truly unnerving, that pathogenic strains of E. coli, salmonella and Staphylococcus aureus can set up murderous colonies in our meat and vegetables. But they don’t do so as a result of age. They mostly arrive in our kitchens on new ingredients, and their presence is generally invisible and unsmellable.
Old ingredients are just further down the paths of their lives. At spring’s start, peas are tender and sweet and need mere seconds of cooking. Two months later, they are starchy and stodgy, even right off their twirled vine: worse for a quick sauté, but better for a long stew in broth until creamy. Summer’s last corn is good only for fritters; its final tomatoes, which will hang on but not ripen, must be pickled or fried. Scott Peacock, an esteemed Southern chef, says that older sweet potatoes are sweeter than newly dug ones. I haven’t noticed, but he’s right often enough that I’m inclined to believe him.
If it makes you feel better, think of your spoiling ingredients as “aged,” as we do certain delicacies that we still — largely arbitrarily — let decay before consumption, in order to produce flavors we deem refined: our dry-aged steaks; our liquor, neglected in barrels; our wine and cheese, which rely on the microbial world for their existence; all sorts of salumi; and pickles.
The most basic strategy for making lovely dishes from old ingredients is to mix them with new ones. All those delicious stews and puddings begin with old bread, tortillas or rice, but they continue with fragrant stock, whole ripe tomatoes, flavorful fat or fine olive oil. Whatever weeknight soup receives old potatoes will also invite a big new leek and some sweet milk. Tipsy Charlotte requires stale cake, but it also demands fresh, thick cream and good brandy.
Here is a recipe for a version of chilaquiles that is simpler and more Yankee than what Lydia Child’s Mexican counterpart would have drafted in careful script for her daughter. The moisture is now gone from old tortillas, but that’s fine if you lavish them with rich bacon fat and bright tomato. And you will add a silent symbolism to the affair by cracking fresh brown eggs — that emblem of youth — over the top, ushering the elder of your pantry to a hero’s funeral.
Though Child wouldn’t have recognized the recipe, I think she would recognize anyone who cooked it. She wrote with wisdom on not just food but also thrift, and the silliness of feeling shameful about it. The economical person, she said, “is laying up for himself the permanent power of being useful and generous.” Her sentiment has rooted itself in me in the knowledge that wastefulness may sometimes be in fashion, but it is never in good taste.
Recipe: Chilaquiles à la Lydia Child