The Problem of Evil

Without the Darkness How Can We Know the Light?

My Catholic friends call it The Problem of Evil, but it exists in many forms in many cultures. If [insert name of principal deity] is omnipotent and desires that we be good, why does [insert gender-appropriate pronoun] allow evil to exist? The answer they've come to accept is that [deity] wants us to grow and learn and ultimately do good as a result of reaching a state of grace. That answer kept the clergy happy until the Calvinists came along and muddied the waters by asserting that you're either born with grace or you aren't, but that's a tangent I'd rather avoid for the moment. The topic here is bad things—pain, evil, unpleasantness—and the way we respond to them.

My philosophy professor (one of them, anyway) called this issue the Pain Rationale. The Problem of Evil, he argued, is just a subset of the Pain Rationale. Every society deals with the Pain Rationale on a daily basis at every level of human endeavor. Essentially, the issue is pain, discomfort, evil, and anything else that most of us don't like. Why should we put up with bad things when we have the capability to overcome them? We can go back to the age of Stoics and Epicures and ask, with them, why should we put up with pain when pleasure is so much more—uh...pleasant?

On one extreme of this question is severe pain and oozing hideous evil. Severe pain has been on my mind a lot lately. For the past four months, I've been dealing with pain management issues because of disc injury. The disc compresses my sciatic nerve any time I sit upright, and the resulting pain can be excruciating. Combating this problem has entailed three epidural injections of corticosteroids, several thousand dollars worth of physical therapy, and a pharmacological journey through NSAIDs, anti-spasmodics, and opioids. I have Celebrex, Tylenol, and Tramadol coursing through my veins as I type, and their efforts still leave a bit to be desired.

If I could throw a switch and permanently turn off this pain, I would do it without a regret or even a second thought. Clearly, I've come down on the side of the Epicures with respect to this particular pain.

Clearly.

But, no, my goal is not to banish all pain. I enjoy exercising, and a good workout always creates a degree of pain. Oh, sure, a good personal trainer will tell you never to work yourself until it hurts, but the distinction between the discomfort you feel at the end of a productive workout and the pain you feel when you've overexerted yourself is one of degree, not one of type. It's all pain. One level of pain whispers, "Move carefully, stretch gently, and be nice to these muscles, or we'll make you sorry." The next level of pain screams at you, drowning out everything else.

Even if you're a couch potato, you need a certain amount of pain in your life. You need that ache in your shoulders and hips on Sunday afternoon that tells you to haul your lazy ass out of bed after you've slept for fifteen hours. You need those pangs in your belly that drive you to the refrigerator. You need that sharp prickling feeling on your fingertips telling you to let go of the handle of that hot cast iron skillet. Pain, in moderation and where appropriate, is a necessary element in our lives. Without it, we'd all eventually just lie down and starve to death.

Honestly, though, without hunger, eating wouldn't be as much fun. I'm not recommending fasting as an aperitif, but isn't a meal just that much more satisfying when you're really hungry? We "work up an appetite," and it makes a fine excuse for working harder. Anticipation, someone said, is the savor of the dish. In a way, all this working and waiting is really just one step removed from banging your head against a wall in anticipation of the relief of stopping. Okay, it's an easy topic to slip into hyperbole, but is there really any savor without the preceding hunger pangs? Can we enjoy life in the absence of pain? If there is no darkness, what good is the light?

Spice and Pain

Much of Eurasian philosophy has really led us astray on these questions of absolutes: good, evil, pain, pleasure. Some of our earlier philosophies—Skeptics, Gnostics, Zoroastrians, Manichees, the Medieval theory of humors—and much of surviving Chinese philosophy (Yin and Yang) point to a different set of goals than the absolute. Those philosophies suggest that the enlightened goal is always balance. Pleasure, says the philosophy of balance, is not the absence of pain—it's the proper balance between pain and relief. Note, that's proper balance and not fifty-fifty split. The most extreme examples I know of pleasure—sex and food—always contain an element of pain.

No, I am not saying whipping each other with razor wire and splashing around in a pool of vinegar will enhance your sexual pleasure (although, for a few it probably will), but sexual pleasure is born of friction, tension, restriction, collision, and a bit of hair-splitting between the realms of pain and relief. One man's teasing is another's torment. What hurts enough to fire your jets and what hurts enough for you to leap back and say, "Stop right there, Tex," depends on your own thresholds.

Pleasure from food also involves a degree of pain. Think of all the food items we consume that, in high concentrations, are just downright painful. Capsicums and piperines, ginger and galanga, onions and garlic, all create a burning sensation that can be disagreeable. In the cases of capsaicin and piperine, high enough concentrations can actually raise blisters in your mouth. Likewise, extremes of bitter, salty, and sour tastes (think quinine, sea salt, and white vinegar) can also reach a point of discomfort that at least encroaches on outright pain. These elements are spice. Without them, food falls to the level of sustenance. Without them, eating isn't fun.

Recent decades have seen a blossoming of fusion in cuisines that has done much to spread the word about the primacy of balance. The Thai standard of a balance between salty, sour, sweet, and hot has even inspired a number of titles for cooking tomes and classes. The broader sense of balance demonstrated in the best cuisines all round the world (Kyoto, Provençe, Spain, Sichuan, Yucatán, Piedmont, to name just a few), has begun to edge its way into the public consciousness, but it's been slow coming. The big secret, the big unspoken rule of thumb, is that foods succeed best when they present the right sense of balance in every aspect of a dish. Flavors have to be balanced between not four but six basic flavor elements: salty, sweet, bitter, sour, hot, and umami.

Quick digression here on umami. Every time I hear some Food Network or PBS commentator rediscovering umami, it makes me a little sad for the state of world scholarship. Dr. Kikunae Ikeda identified this taste element in 1908. Here we are discovering it a century later. Pish. Umami is often translated as savory, but I'm comfortable with giving its discoverer his due and using the name he gave it. For the three or four people in America who still don't know, umami is the richness of glutamines that comes through in MSG, clams, shiitake mushrooms, seared tuna, and Parmigiano-Reggiano. For those who will quibble that these things don't taste alike, I would point out that apples, sugar cane, mango, and chocolate cake are all foods strong in sweetness, and those don't taste alike, either.

Meanwhile, back on the topic of balance, I think most cooks understand the concept of balance in flavors. Many even grasp that balance has to be visual—dark against light, red against green. The place where many American cooks fall down, in my opinion, is in the area of textural balance. Oh, we know to balance the soft and the spongy with the crisp and the crunchy. We even understand the joy in the delicate pop of caviar eggs or tapioca berries. Unfortunately, somewhere along the way we've pretty much eliminated a broad range of food textures from our diet.

Over the years, diners in the US and Canada have decided, for reasons of habit or health, to eliminate a lot of textures that we find unpleasant in large portions. We don't like chewy meats, sinew, gristle, cartilage, fats, and the jiggle of natural gelatins, so we banish them from our plates. Other cultures revel in the texture of gelatins in marrow, fish skin, and organ meats. We call it icky, and lose some remarkable flavor elements in the name of removing icky bits from our dishes. I remember watching a cooking competition some time back in which the contestants had to produce an original dish at streamside using fresh-caught cutthroat trout. Every contestant—professional chefs all—fileted the damned fish. Every one. Not one of them thought to use the whole body and head of the trout. I wonder if they know how much their dishes were lacking as a result?

We treat gristle and cartilage with the same disrespect. One of the more popular forms of yakitori (grilled skewers) that I remember folks enjoying on the streets of Yokosuka, bonjiri (chicken butts), would never sell in the US—too little meat and too much fat and gristle, to say nothing of the negative connotations of That Part of the Body. Even the yakitori tebasaki (skewered chicken wings), which you frequently see the American GIs buying, are enjoyed differently by the different cultures. The Americans would gnaw off some of the skin, pick out the bits of white meat, and throw the rest of the wings away. When the locals finish theirs, they're throwing away nothing but bones and skewers. After stripping a wing of meat and skin, they splash on more sauce and gnaw the cartilage from the joints. "Maybe they're just hungrier than we are," a sailor friend commented. "They do eat smaller meals, you know."

Maybe. Or perhaps some of us have lost the ability to enjoy some textures because it was easier to eliminate them. If the gristle is difficult to chew, strip it from the meat. We're not so poor that we have to try to ingest every conceivably digestible bit of the animal. I'm as guilty of this as the next American. More, in some cases. I don't often enjoy gnawing food from bones even though I know some of the most flavorful meat is butted up against the ribs. I admit, there is something very satisfying about stripping all the edible matter from a spare rib—stripping it down to the calcium—but I don't do it often.

I guess I need to work on that.

Arroz con Pollo

I could probably discuss this dish in two tiers—arroz con pollo classico and the flavorless crap that passes for arroz con pollo in most places nowadays. Arroz con pollo, a Spanish dish, probably started as a simple method for stretching a single chicken to feed a large family: cut up the chicken, brown the pieces, remove the chicken, bloom the flavors of a sofrito (a sauce base of tomatoes, onions, and garlic) in the schmaltz (melted chicken fat), pour in some rice, pour in some stock and wine, sprinkle with spices, put the chicken back in, and simmer the whole until the rice absorbs most of the liquid.

Sounds simple enough, but arroz con pollo does offer a few little challenges. First, in the Good Ol' Days, the chicken was likely browned in either collected schmaltz or in lard—not exactly healthy choices. Schmaltz, I would argue, is okay in small doses. Better to start with a small quantity of a healthier oil like olive, grapeseed, or canola. Okay, I have to admit, I'd rather eat plastic wrap than cook in canola oil, but many cooks swear that it's flavorless. If you think so, go ahead and use it.

Second, the outline I gave for a basic arroz con pollo is also an outline for a lot of problems. White meat and dark meat, for instance, don't cook at the same rate. If you leave the whole chicken in the pot long enough to cook the thighs through, the breasts will be dried out. Likewise, the long-standing Spanish tradition of cooking a sofrito as a single element results in flavorless tomatoes and harsh burnt garlic.

Third, many cooks have discovered that the chicken pieces can be a problem. Who wants to pick a chicken breast out of hot rice and gnaw it off the bones? Too messy by far. Add to that the current health concern that tells Americans to avoid the dark meat to eliminate cholesterol and saturated fat from their diet. Replacing a whole chicken with boneless, skinless chicken breast meat is a huge mistake, robbing the rice of flavor and leaving only dry fibrous meat. Honestly, I'm not a big fan of chicken thigh meat, but breast meat dries out easily and doesn't give up anything in the way of flavor to the surrounding rice. Arroz con pollo made with no chicken but skinless boneless breast meat will make for a dry and flavorless dish.

So, I may not like thigh meat or drumsticks, and I may not like chicken fat or bones, but I need both if I'm going to make a moist, flavorful arroz con pollo.

(serves six)

dramatis personae

one heavy dutch oven

one can whole tomatoes
one tablespoons olive oil
four chicken thighs (bone-in, skin-on)
two boneless chicken breast halves
salt and black pepper
one large white onion, diced
four medium garlic cloves
three Serrano chilis, minced
one and one half-cup Arborio rice
one half-cup dry white wine
two cups chicken stock
one healthy pinch of saffron threads, crushed
one quarter teaspoon cumin
one quarter-cup cilantro leaves, chopped

one large ripe avocado, sliced
one cup shredded Monterey Jack
lime wedges

quality of ingredients

A good, stout dutch oven is crucial for this dish, preferably enameled.

One three pound whole chicken can substitute for the pieces I've outlined. In any case, the chicken should not be too fatty. Remove any large clumps of fat under the skin before you begin browning the chicken.

See my comments on the quality of garlic in the Bang/Wow entry.

Jalapeño peppers can take the place of the Serranos, but the dish will have less heat. If you want more heat, cayenne or Thai bird peppers will work.

Most recipes I see for arroz con pollo call for long-grain rice. Frankly, I can't see why. Paella, a similar dish in some respects, is traditionally made with Spanish short-grain rice. I have found that Arborio produces a richer, creamier dish than any other I've tried. The results won't be quite risotto-creamy, but it will take up more stock than long-grain rice.

Saffron threads should be red or dark orange. It's not unusual to find a few yellow threads (say, one in ten), but don't buy saffron with too many pale threads. I really hate that so many spice companies package the threads in opaque containers. Don't buy it if you can't see it.

preparation notes

Open the can of tomatoes and remove and discard the tough core from each of the tomatoes. Tear each tomato in half and set them aside in a bowl. Reserve one half cup of the canning liquid.

Over a medium high flame, heat two tablespoons olive oil to smoking. Place the thighs and breasts in the bottom of the pan, skin-side down. Let the chicken pieces brown, undisturbed, for six minutes. Turn down the flame as necessary to prevent burning. Turn over the chicken pieces and brown the opposite side for an additional six minutes. Remove the chicken pieces from the pot.

Remove any excess oil (anything more than two tablespoons). Stir in the chopped onion and a pinch of salt. With a wooden spoon, stir the onions constantly as they sweat. The liquor from the onions will help lift the fond left by the chicken. Scrape as necessary to loosen up all of the fond.

Once the onions are softened and translucent (three to five minutes), stir in the garlic, chilis, and spices. Continue stirring for about thirty seconds to allow the flavors of the garlic and chilis to bloom.

Stir in the rice. Stir the rice continuously for one minute to thoroughly coat the rice with oil. The outer portion of the kernels will all appear translucent.

Stir in the tomatoes, stock, wine, and reserved tomato liquid. Bring the liquid to a boil. Place the thighs on top of the rice mixture, reduce heat a simmer. Cover the pot and simmer the dish for fifteen minutes. While the rice is simmering, chop the chicken breasts into bite-sized morsels.

Remove the thighs from the rice. Stir in the breast pieces. Remove the meat from the thigh bones and return the thigh meat to the pot. Cover and simmer the rice for ten minutes or until the rice is done.

Turn off the flame and stir in the cilantro. Recover the pot and let the rice stand for five minutes.

Serve the rice with lime slices, avocado slices, and grated cheese.