(Not so) Guilty Pleasures

I’ll own it: I love to scrape the bits of still melted sauce from the bottom of my mac n cheese pan. It’s even an obsession. Mac n cheese is hands down my most ordered dish. I almost always prepare it last, wrap it quickly in aluminum foil to keep it hot, and head out the door almost immediately to deliver it. ALMOST IMMEDIATELY. What slows me down are two things: First, I make sure to wash out my pan, because scraping off dried cheese sauce from my sautee pan later on just plain sucks. But even before that, I always scrape out the remnants and suck it down. I tell myself, I’m just tasting the dish to make sure it’s okay. Bull shit. This is hands down the very best part of an amazing dish: crusty bits of macaroni, oozing glints of melted cheeses. I’ll take that culinary moment any day over the most amazing of gourmet dishes. It’s that satisfying.

So, does that make me a philistine in the kitchen? Maybe. It’s not something most cooks talk about, though I think this tendency to eat up the left-behinds are more pronounced than most admit to. OK, many folks know that the most requested part of a bbq brisket is often the semi-charred end-pieces. Also familiar and beloved are the dried bits of rice sometimes left sticking to the bottom of the pan — captured famously in the upside-down Persian rice dish tahdig. And of course there are the so-called “oysters,” these two small roundish bits of chicken tucked into the backbone — i highly-prized favorites of the kitchen crew, often ignored by the dining room. And then there’s the various caramelized bits left behind after sauteeing, braising, glazing, etc.

Like various frowned-upon social behaviors which we nevertheless practice — which I will have enough tact not to detail here — I strongly suspect that most of us love these remnants far more than we are willing to admit or display in public. Part of what makes life so weird and wonderful, not?