Sugar for my honey
For my girlfriend, who always adds a bit of sugar in her (delicious) cooking.
So, I come from a place where salads don’t have sugar. In fact most things don’t need to have sugar added. Unless you want them sweet. That’s why we don’t add sugar when cooking any main course. We do have great deserts and pastry, and those get the “royal-sugar” treatment. There’s plenty of sugar in those!
To me it comes from the notion that food can be divided into salty and sweet. And that’s it! Simple and easy, mix them throughout your day and you’ll be fine. Sweet (or salty, depending on mood, taste and availability of food) breakfast, salty lunch, a sweet snack in the afternoon and finish the day with a salty main course for dinner and a sweet desert. There. Perfect!
But here, they seem to add sugar to almost anything they cook. I always found it weird. It’s like they use sugar the way we use olive oil or salt…
Well, today I read an article in the NY Times that talks about the use of sugar in cooking , and using a scientific approach, goes on to explain why using sugar (a bit of it anyway) is a good idea.
My mother, when she still cooked, always added a dash of sugar to the vegetables she stir-fried. She said it preserved the bright green of the greens. I always thought that was hooey.
Shirley O. Corriher, a biochemist turned folksy food scientist who was sitting at my dining table, said she had not heard of this — but added that sugar does do more to fruits and vegetables than add sweetness.
It also helps preserve their shape. Heat shrinks the plant cells and transforms molecules in the cell walls into pectin, which dissolves. “The cells are falling apart and leaking,” said Ms. Corriher, who dissected the science of recipes in her books “Cookwise” and “Bakewise.”
“It’s mass death and destruction when you heat a fruit or vegetable,” she said.
Adding sugar helps keep the glue between the cells intact, she said. “It’s preventing the leaking of the acid."
So, there it is, in the face of scientific proof that sugar does help cooking, there is nothing I can say. And anyway the final result was always so good. But for now I will never argue with my girlfriend again. (well, there’s still the extra sugar in her coffee, but that’s another issue…)