December 18, 2020 • 27 mins
"Quiche, the simple baked custard that took the '70s by storm, has a winding history -- involving some weird gender issues. In this classic episode, Anney and Lauren serve forth the ins and outs of quiche."
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Speaker 1 (00:07):
Hello, and welcome to Savor production of I Heart Radio.
I'm Anna Reese and I'm Lauren Vogelbaum, and today we've
got a classic episode for you about kiche. Yes, I
have not had Kesh in a hot minute. Uh. I
was trying to remember the last time I had Keshan
I can't recall. I remember the last time I had
(00:28):
Kesh because it was last Christmas. For breakfast, my made
a lovely breakfast kiche um and uh, and I had
a very small slice because I shouldn't really have a
whole bunch of eggs um. But man it was tasty. Yeah, yeah,
I miss it. I go I go through. Keisha is
something I have to have a craving for. Like it's
(00:49):
like not what I would normally order the menu, but
you know, when I'm in that mood. Yeah good. What
I recall most about this episode and we still get
listener Maile about it, which cracks me up, is the
very odd gendering of Keish that took place in like
the eighties. Yeah, it's and so strong, so strong. I
(01:12):
never would have imagined that Keish could could cause such
a such a kerfuffle, Keish kerfuffle. I bet that was
a headline. I bet that somebody went with that in
the tassic. I like it, you know, Oh yeah, keysh
itself is that's a good I think you could use
(01:34):
keys for a lot of situations. It's like, you know,
exclaiming something or like a curse. I think, yeah, keish,
yeah perfect. Well I would love to know any listeners
if you if you're making keish or if you got
(01:54):
a keish recipe. Maybe now is the time. I've never
made one, so maybe I should get that a go.
It's it's so I mean, you know, like any time
that you want eggs to be richer than they already are,
and you also want to eat pie crust from quiche,
It's perfect. It's a it's a terrific food for many reasons.
Um and uh yeah, so we will let former Annie
(02:18):
and Lauren take it away. Hello, and welcome to food Stuff.
I'm Lauren vocaball and and today we're talking about kiche. Yes,
(02:39):
and and this is to kind of like stave off
Annie's I'm not going to say insane, that would be impolite,
but but just high level egg fascination. I have a
lot of enthusiasm for eggs. You've probably got a taste
of it in whiskey sour. When I discovered the complimentary
bar egg, I went on a crazy Easter egg cutts
(03:02):
kind of because I learned about Easter and why the
whole egg thing. Anyway, Lauren was very kind and I
was like, well, that's dude, keiche, because there's also another
fascinating thing I stumbled across with keiche, So it kind
of combined the two and we will be talking about
it and believe me, so quiche. Yeah, what is it? Keisha?
(03:23):
It's It's one of those dishes that can be made
with just about anything you like. But the base is
so simple. It's just a savory egg custard baked into
a single crust. Simple quiche. You can suspend cheese, meats,
and or vegetables in the custard before you bake it.
The result should be a velvety, textured, kind of slightly quivery,
(03:43):
sort of jellow like filling in a nice flaky crust,
and keiche can be served either hot or cold, or
any temperature in between. Really. A listener with the Twitter
handle Restless Living says their father in law calls it
omelet pie with that weird French name. That's such a
dad thing to say, it really is and uh, and
(04:03):
the variations are pretty much endless. The crest can be
pastry or puff or or bread dough. The fillings can
be just whatever you day want. It's sort of like
a custard based pizza. Yeah, bacon, cheese, mushrooms, and spinach
are pretty classic, but you can put anything you want in.
Their options are endless, and according to Urban Dictionary, Kish
(04:24):
slang for hot or seriously hot, or even next level
of hotness. I've never heard this, but I thought it
was interesting. So let's look at the history a bit.
If we break keish down to bare bones a pastry
shell filled with savory mixture of eggs, fat seasoning. They've
been around since ancient Roman times. Yeah this This was
(04:45):
about the time that domestic chickens became widespread, and so
with their newfound abundance of eggs, Romans figured out that
eggs are pretty good bind engagents, and they made lots
of different eggy dishes called patina um, named for the
sort of pie pan that they were baked in. And
these could be savory or sweet or both at the
same time, and either more omelet like or more custard.
(05:08):
Like the custard part was kind of influenced by the Greeks,
and I guess brains were real popular. Add in, I
didn't stumble across that in my research. Okay, there there
you go. Um, but they didn't necessarily have a crust,
but when they did, the crest of these early kish is,
much like coffins, were not meant to be eaten. They
(05:28):
were containers or even used as a sort of paper
towel to soak up the juices. Um. Yeah, much like
today's kish is. They could be really simple it's just
meat and potatoes, or quite elaborate, made with quail, peacock,
our whole stuffed lamb, whole stuff lamb. Okay that's a
very large pie. Yeah. Yes. Across Europe you could find
(05:49):
huge early kishes for ceremonies and small cold ones for
more regular meals, and a whole trade existed around selling
leftover pastry, sometimes made more appetizing. Question are when soaked
with meat. Jeers to the poor who would gather outside
castles and other aristocratic dwellings trying to get some of
the stuff. Yeah, whole trade. Skipping ahead to medieval Europe,
(06:12):
tarts at the time could be either a dessert thing
or more of a non dessert thing, and some of
them resembled modern day kiche. They'd sometimes be called crustar's cruststars,
which I just pronounced with the French accent. Why I
appreciated it. On every day, a meatless day for Christians,
there was a recipe for a tart that called for cheese, egg,
(06:32):
spices and pastry crust. That sounds fairly keish like. And
here's the recipe. It's an old, ye old English. So
here we go, parboil onions and sage and parsley and
hew them small. Then take good fat cheese and bray it,
and do their two eggs and temper it up there with,
and do their too, Butter and sugar and raisings of corns,
(06:55):
and powder of ginger and of canell metal, all this
well together, and do it in a coffin and bake
it uncovered and serve it. Fourth. Since we've mentioned the
word twice, I want to remind everyone in case anyone
either didn't catch your apple pie episode or is forgotten.
The term coffin was one of ye old terms for
a for pie crust, yes, which is charming as all
(07:17):
get out. It kind of is. It's usually spelled with
a y too. Yeah, I appreciate it as you do.
But but you know that that sounds that sounds like
a nice quiche. I'd eat that. Another recipe of medieval
Europe tart debris, also echoes of quiche. Take a crust
inch deep in a trap, Take yolks of air and
raw and cheese. You run and mettle it and the
(07:38):
yolks together and do their two powder, ginger, sugar, saffron
and salt. Do it in a trap. Bake it and
serve it four if I love serve it for if
I serve it fourth, it sounds so much more epic
than what's really happening. Yeah, yeah, you basically have to
be like like Patrick Stewart in order to really say
it correctly. These spiced baked custards with a crust were
(08:00):
sometimes also called Duchet's, and a honey sweetened one was
reportedly served at the coronation of King Henry the fourth
in very fancy. Indeed, when a lot of us think
of kiche and the modern kiche'd wager, Kish Lorraine comes
to mind. This originated in what is now Lorraine, France. Yes,
(08:21):
but in medieval Europe the area was the Germanic Kingdom
of Lothoringian. Yeah, Loreen is actually only a bit under
French rule for about three hundred years now, like as
in like seventeen. Yeah. The word kish itself comes from
the Franco German word for cake kuhn or kusha, so
it's actually kind of German. Probably a German chef created it.
(08:41):
We don't know. Borders are complicated. Oh, if you haven't
heard of kish Lorraine, it's a bacon and classically gray
air or um sometimes crim fresh right. It's pretty tasty. Yeah,
and they were generally made in a cast iron skillet.
According to Larousse Gastronomique, he should only be served as
an order, never as a dessert course. Oh no, definitely,
(09:06):
not as a big folk paw. If you add onions,
you have keish alsacean. Seriously, so many regional varieties. But
what about keish in the U s Keisha in the
United States? Maybe sexism, buddy, Yeah, we'll talk all about
that after a quick break from a word for our sponsor. So,
(09:37):
keish started as a staple in rural areas, which the
simplicity of ingredients kind of reflects. Sure, you know you've
got eggs, you've got a little bit left over dairy,
whatever else in here, um ice box you need to
get rid of, right, But it's spread from there, becoming
popular in the U s sometime around the nineteen fifties,
really trending in the US in the sixties and seventies.
(09:59):
Oh yeah, Asian America was a bit more like a
podcast role thing than the traditional French kiche. French Kish
was thinner compared to the deep dish American variety. Of course,
Americans added all kinds of stuff to kiche. It was
fairly common to find kish on restaurant menus. You could
buy slices of keish, typically served with a salad pretty
much anywhere. You could have keyshor brunch for lunch, for dinner,
(10:20):
as a snack. You get the idea. According to Geane
Anderson's The American Century Cookbook, the most Popular Recipes of
the twentieth Century, despite a handful of cookbooks containing Keish
recipes from the nineteen thirties onward, quote Keish madness didn't
descend upon us until the late nineteen seventies and Go
Go eighties, when chefs outdid themselves dreaming off the Wall
Combos and Sylvia love Gun wrote in her book Fashionable Food,
(10:45):
Seven Decades of Food Fads. While keish was both a
popular and hardy appetizer, it was also sturdy and could
be held for hours. Keisha's enduring popularity into the seventies
had a great deal to do with the scope it
allowed creative cooks. Speaking of creative cooks, Julia Child helped
make keish more mainstream in the US by including it
(11:05):
in her cookbooks, which chefs referenced from many item ideas.
Her version of kishla reine did without the bacon. Huh,
just why? And keish grew popular in England around the
same time, although they called it ham and cheese pie,
and it also sometimes had a top crest. Kish with
the top crest that's bold, very bold. When the Kennedy's
(11:25):
are in the White House, they love a French food
was well known from Renee Verdon's nineteen sixty seven The
White House Chef Cookbook. Mr Kennedy was very fond of
the tiny kishes he had for lunch, and this cookbook
included a recipe for kishla Raine. We may have reached
peak American kish in the early nineteen eighties. By one
(11:46):
there were these boutique Kish restaurants like Miss Tissues in
l A and they were selling pies for up to
fifty dollars a pop, which is a little bit over
a hundred and thirty dollars today. Yeah. According to an
article from the time in People magazine, their clientele list
read like the bel Air phone book. There was an
article and People magazine about a Yes, that's pretty excellent,
(12:13):
but it couldn't last. No, the Kish bubble burst it did.
The popularity of Kish took a steep dive in the
US and in the UK to a lesser extent in
the nineteen eighties for two main reasons fear of cholesterol
and masculine stereotypes. Um, I don't know. Okay, So this
(12:34):
brings us to the weird kind of sexist bit of
the episode. So, okay, there was this kind of oversaturation
of kich Is in popular culture, and they're a little
bit fussy to make, and they were perceived as kind
of bougie, sort of like the pumpkin spice latte of
their time, I guess, And so they wound up seeming unmasculine. Yeah,
to the ridiculous point that in a book descended upon
(12:58):
the US called Men Don't e Keche. It was written
by a twentiesomething, your old humorist, a satirist of first
as kind of a long essay that was published in
Playboy and then expanded into this book that would sit
on the New York Times bestseller list for over a year. Wow,
and I have kind of a long quote I want
to read about how it started from an April first,
(13:21):
nine two article in the Chicago Tribune written by Bob Green,
so you can kind of get a taste of what
this was. Rejoice, all you American men who are sick
of having Alan Alda held up as your role model,
racquetball held up as your sports model, and Keish held
up as your food model. You have a new hero.
(13:41):
His name is Bruce Feirstein. He is an author and
his credo is simple and pure, Real Men Don't kiche.
Feirstein has set out to define, once again, to a
nation that has somehow forgotten it, what real men are
and what real men do. The first salvo of his
real Man manifesto, here's in my issue of Playboy. And
(14:03):
then he goes on to quote, if your Steen real
men do not have meaningful dialogues. Real men do not
find things super Real men do not wear anything with
more than four zippers. Real men do not wear bikini underwear.
Real men do not have vanity license plates for things
you won't find in real men's pockets, lip balm, breath freshener,
(14:26):
opera tickets, and recipes for keichh. A real man would
be an airline pilot. A kiche eater would be a
travel agent. The real man's diet steak, hamburger, cheeseburger, bacon, cheeseburger, pizza, burger,
chili burger, Hammond, Swiss on rice, spaghetti, macaroney and cheese,
French fries, home fries, hash brown potato chips, Bretzels, beer
(14:48):
and ported beer and ported dark beer, corn on the cob,
orange soda. Real men will avoid the quiche of death.
That's some pretty serious stuff. Was there a problem with
with like chapstick and breath freshener. I don't know if
I'm just supposed to have chapped lips and smell terrible
(15:09):
and all the ladies who want to kishi then ah, yeah,
so that's a lot. This is also I ran across
this and That's one of the reasons I wanted to
do keys that I mentioned beginning Real men don acas,
and I was like, WHOA, I need to look into this.
So after that there was a follow up from the
April twelfth edition of the Chicago Tribune he gas, it
(15:32):
looks as if the keysheeters really are about to take
over the world. Recently we discussed the real men versus
keysheeters controversy. Now I've come across startling evidence that indicates
the keysheaters are becoming a greater force than anyone may
have previously imagined, and all too real man caves into keish.
This piece would go into how one Eric Weber, who
(15:53):
had previously written a book called How to Pick Up Girls,
followed it up with a decidedly different book called Connect Okay,
I think the whole thing was meant to be at
least a little bit facetious or satirical, but I'm not
positive that all of the fans of the book got that. No,
and when I first found this, a lot of people
(16:16):
took it very seriously, yeah, or not very seriously, but
they agreed with it. Yeah, yeah, they took it on
as kind of their creedo. So sorry, about it Kish,
and then in um the Chicago Tribunes, Beverly Dillon wrote
in the Fickle World of Food Fads, one of the
biggest trends a few years ago was kish, basically a
(16:39):
pie crest filled with an egg custard. The Kish lens
itself to embellishment. Cooks found that just about anything could
be added to the egg filling, from vegetables to seafood.
Kish became so identified with trendy food that it inspired
the popular question do real manny keish? After that, the
dish seemed to lose favor. It's now to time to
(17:00):
bring it back. Some real men say, now is the
time to bring back kiche. A lot of debate about
the kish. I guess it's kind of been rehabilitated, although
I will say I think of it as kind of
a fancy brunch thing, and I do personally feel like
(17:20):
I see more women ordering it, and in my own experience,
the only time I've ever had kiche ever is at
funeral weeks. Really, yeah, I kind of have a negative
association with it. Sure, it's just like people bring it,
I guess, because it can be served at any temperature
at lasts. Yeah, it's it's got a lot of protein
(17:41):
in it. You know. That's that's good. We'll have to
give it another go. Okay, it's it's one of the
foods that I shouldn't really eat because of the high
egg content. So yeah, too bad, It's okay. Speaking of
this question of kish in two, there was a study
that was published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality
Science called Real Men Don't Eat Cache Regulation of gender
(18:04):
expressive choices by men. The authors ran a series of
experiments to see whether men and women would would display
a preference for masculine perceived or feminine perceived foods from
a menu, and furthermore, whether they would be stressed out
about their choices and uh. They used word choice along
with kind of common stereotypes, you know, like meat as masculine,
(18:25):
salads feminine to to create these these perceptions, and they
found that given a too short chunk of time to
choose something from the menu, both men and women would
order a pretty even mix of masculinized and feminized foods,
But given as much time as they wanted to peruse
the menu, men would gravitate towards the masculine foods and
(18:46):
women would still order basically whatever they wanted. They later
ran an experiment that found that that having to pick
amongst these lady and do gendered items did indeed seem
to stress guys out. Men performed worse on a subsequent
memory task and women did not. And this all seems
to confirm other research that men are generally more concerned
(19:07):
about appearing gender normative than women are up to and
including their dietary choices a k a. The patriarchy hurts everyone, Yes,
it does. And back on my old show, back when
I used to produce stuff Mom never told you videos,
we did an episode on why men are more associated
with like meat eating meat, and um, it's really interesting
(19:29):
and has to kind of do with the fact that
they were working like old old times, old days, we
were working long hours, like and there was a special
thing and so just to fuel them for their hard labor,
they got the first choice of meat. They cut it,
and they got to eat it. Anyway, we should do
a whole episode on it some time. It's it's really interesting.
(19:52):
Yeah that sounds nice and depressing, I mean, but really
but really fascinating. And I love that kind of study.
I'm glad that that there's there's search into it. Yeah. Yeah,
speaking of hard work and intense labor. We've got some
physical chemistry coming up next. But first a quick break
for a word from our sponsor, and we're back, Thank
(20:23):
you sponsor. Okay, so quish science science. Yeah, so, Akisha
is a type of baked or set custard. And in
this you've got four basic stuff things at play. You've
got you've got egg whites, egg yolks, milk, fats and
milk kind of watery stuffs. Sounds so appetizing, the stuff
(20:44):
that isn't the fat, right, Yes, it sounds really delicious
when you put it that way. Okay, so um so
So the egg whites. The egg whites are the kind
of jelliest part of an egg. They contain these proteins
called albumins that start out as kind of tight individualistic
coils of amino acids. And these protein molecules have both
hydrophilic or water loving bits on their outsides and then
(21:07):
hydrophobic or water hating bits kind of curled up on
their insides, similar to proteins and milk. Unlike in milk, though,
when you heat them up, they lose their structure. Suddenly,
all of those water hating bits are freaking out and
looking for something to protect them, so they cling to
other protein molecules, meaning that the proteins all wind up
(21:27):
linking with each other and uh therefore trapping bits of
liquid amongst themselves. The proteins of the egg yolks coagulates similarly,
but at a higher temperature than the whites do, so
so you can kind of game your kiche by adding
different ratios of whole eggs to just yolks or just whites.
More whites mean that you get a firmer gel that
(21:48):
you have to be kind of a little bit extra
careful not to not to burn or scramble when you're
cooking it. Um and more yolks mean a softer gel
that's a little bit more forgiving. Meanwhile, Okay, the milk
fats and milk watery bits in a quiche, these are
going to be the bulk of the liquid that gets
trapped up by those coagulating egg proteins, all right, uh So,
(22:09):
so your balance of milk fat to milk watery stuff
will affect the creaminess that the mouth feel of the
final product. If you want an extra creamy kiche, you
can also subbend some crime fresh or sour cream to
to help out with this. But you do have to
be a little bit careful because because water and water
soluble minerals help create an ideal gel in the quiche,
(22:32):
the minerals help create more bonds among the protein chains,
creating the really good wobbly network that you're looking for.
Wobbily network, wobbily network. I love this. I always make
the outlines and I have sections for science and I'm like,
I'll leave that one to Lord, and she never lets
me down. This is so cool. I love knowing this
(22:52):
stuff because it helps you when you're cooking. If you
know why, if you know why the science works, then yeah,
you're like, you're like, oh, it helps you troubleshoot a
little bit. Yeah. And speaking of cooking, we do have
a few cooking tips for you. Yeah, okay, So, so
to keep your custard stable a k A. Smooth instead
of chunky. Nobody likes chunky custard um, you can you
can take a couple of steps. First, you can add
(23:14):
up to a tablespoon of flour to your custard base,
whisk it in there. That will help absorb water and
and blend it throughout the mixture, avoiding any lumps from
pockets of steam. Also, experts recommend to bake your quiche
low and slow, no higher than three hundred degrees, and
maybe lengthen the baking time accordingly to about an hour
(23:35):
or so. Higher heat can scramble the egg proteins before
they have a chance to to gel up with all
of that delicious dairy. You should also a cook and
season your ad ins separately to prevent them from a
from messing up that water ratio and your custard. You
should maybe think about prick the pie dough with a
fork or what have you before pouring in the egg
(23:55):
custard mixture to prevent rising uh And this this way
you won't have a little weird puffy bubbles in your crust.
You could also try brushing the crust with egg whites.
That's a step you would take after you a par
or blind bake the crust, but before you pour in
the custard, and it helps seal the crust against any
moisture in the custard to to keep it crisp. Use
one egg per person as a general rule of them,
(24:17):
and the cream should be more prominent in the eggs.
There is a lot of debate about the correct ratio
of egg to dairy, and whether you should use all
whole eggs or some whole eggs and some separated yolks,
and the correct ratio of milk to cream. You know,
everyone agrees that you want to taste the eggs but
(24:38):
not wind up making an omelet, and that you want
it to be rich but not too rich, But no
one really seems to agree on like which point in
any of these spectrums is just right. Um. So, if
you're not sure where you fall in this debate, then
try try a recipe that's sort of middle of the
road first, with about half milk and half cream and
approximately equal volume of egg to dairy, which means about
(25:01):
five eggs per cupit dary. In metric that equals about
two eggs per hundred milliliters. Yeah, so there you go.
Some tips to help you next time. Another thing you
might think about if you're getting creative When researching this one,
I've stumbled upon a recipe for a kish that was
made with a derrito's crust. Derrito crust like Nacho doritos
(25:22):
or like cool ranch. I think it was Nacho bright
powder made me suspect not. Yeah, I believe you, but
now I really want a cool ranch crust you kinda yeah,
the person who did it saying he was trying to
make it um less of this the bougie thing that
we were talking about, so like bring it back into
(25:45):
the band. Yeah yeah, yeah, See it's got a Dorrito's crestfellas.
Now you can enjoy it. That brings us to the
end of this classic episode on Kish. I hope you
appreciated what former aren't had to say. It kind of
like a weird I don't know, like a like a
(26:08):
time travel situation. It does give me that that vibe. Ah,
what was I thinking about when I recorded Keiche? It's
a different person then, I know, right, Yeah, because this
episode came out originally in um October of twenty seventeen, which,
(26:29):
according to COVID time is like thirty nine million years ago.
So yeah, it's like a fossilized podcast. I'm like, no,
no one was alive then, Like yeah, like that certainly
they weren't eating Keiche. It seems it does seem really
(26:50):
really wild. Um, but but yeah, I thank you for
going on this time travel journey with us. Yes, I
hope I hope, UM, I hope you're you're gonna go
make a quiche? Yes, yes, UM and I we both
hope that you're having safe, happy holidays and if is involved, well,
please let us know about it. You can email us
(27:14):
at hello at savor pod dot com. We're also on
social media. You can find us on Twitter, Facebook, and
Instagram at savor pod, and we do hope to hear
from you. Savor is production of I Heart Radio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, you can visit the I
heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows. Thanks as always to our superproducers Dylan
(27:34):
Fagan and Andrew Howard. Thanks to you for listening, and
we hope that lots more good things are coming your
way
Hello, and welcome to Savor production of I Heart Radio.
I'm Anna Reese and I'm Lauren Vogelbaum, and today we've
got a classic episode for you about kiche. Yes, I
have not had Kesh in a hot minute. Uh. I
was trying to remember the last time I had Keshan
I can't recall. I remember the last time I had
(00:28):
Kesh because it was last Christmas. For breakfast, my made
a lovely breakfast kiche um and uh, and I had
a very small slice because I shouldn't really have a
whole bunch of eggs um. But man it was tasty. Yeah, yeah,
I miss it. I go I go through. Keisha is
something I have to have a craving for. Like it's
(00:49):
like not what I would normally order the menu, but
you know, when I'm in that mood. Yeah good. What
I recall most about this episode and we still get
listener Maile about it, which cracks me up, is the
very odd gendering of Keish that took place in like
the eighties. Yeah, it's and so strong, so strong. I
(01:12):
never would have imagined that Keish could could cause such
a such a kerfuffle, Keish kerfuffle. I bet that was
a headline. I bet that somebody went with that in
the tassic. I like it, you know, Oh yeah, keysh
itself is that's a good I think you could use
(01:34):
keys for a lot of situations. It's like, you know,
exclaiming something or like a curse. I think, yeah, keish,
yeah perfect. Well I would love to know any listeners
if you if you're making keish or if you got
(01:54):
a keish recipe. Maybe now is the time. I've never
made one, so maybe I should get that a go.
It's it's so I mean, you know, like any time
that you want eggs to be richer than they already are,
and you also want to eat pie crust from quiche,
It's perfect. It's a it's a terrific food for many reasons.
Um and uh yeah, so we will let former Annie
(02:18):
and Lauren take it away. Hello, and welcome to food Stuff.
I'm Lauren vocaball and and today we're talking about kiche. Yes,
(02:39):
and and this is to kind of like stave off
Annie's I'm not going to say insane, that would be impolite,
but but just high level egg fascination. I have a
lot of enthusiasm for eggs. You've probably got a taste
of it in whiskey sour. When I discovered the complimentary
bar egg, I went on a crazy Easter egg cutts
(03:02):
kind of because I learned about Easter and why the
whole egg thing. Anyway, Lauren was very kind and I
was like, well, that's dude, keiche, because there's also another
fascinating thing I stumbled across with keiche, So it kind
of combined the two and we will be talking about
it and believe me, so quiche. Yeah, what is it? Keisha?
(03:23):
It's It's one of those dishes that can be made
with just about anything you like. But the base is
so simple. It's just a savory egg custard baked into
a single crust. Simple quiche. You can suspend cheese, meats,
and or vegetables in the custard before you bake it.
The result should be a velvety, textured, kind of slightly quivery,
(03:43):
sort of jellow like filling in a nice flaky crust,
and keiche can be served either hot or cold, or
any temperature in between. Really. A listener with the Twitter
handle Restless Living says their father in law calls it
omelet pie with that weird French name. That's such a
dad thing to say, it really is and uh, and
(04:03):
the variations are pretty much endless. The crest can be
pastry or puff or or bread dough. The fillings can
be just whatever you day want. It's sort of like
a custard based pizza. Yeah, bacon, cheese, mushrooms, and spinach
are pretty classic, but you can put anything you want in.
Their options are endless, and according to Urban Dictionary, Kish
(04:24):
slang for hot or seriously hot, or even next level
of hotness. I've never heard this, but I thought it
was interesting. So let's look at the history a bit.
If we break keish down to bare bones a pastry
shell filled with savory mixture of eggs, fat seasoning. They've
been around since ancient Roman times. Yeah this This was
(04:45):
about the time that domestic chickens became widespread, and so
with their newfound abundance of eggs, Romans figured out that
eggs are pretty good bind engagents, and they made lots
of different eggy dishes called patina um, named for the
sort of pie pan that they were baked in. And
these could be savory or sweet or both at the
same time, and either more omelet like or more custard.
(05:08):
Like the custard part was kind of influenced by the Greeks,
and I guess brains were real popular. Add in, I
didn't stumble across that in my research. Okay, there there
you go. Um, but they didn't necessarily have a crust,
but when they did, the crest of these early kish is,
much like coffins, were not meant to be eaten. They
(05:28):
were containers or even used as a sort of paper
towel to soak up the juices. Um. Yeah, much like
today's kish is. They could be really simple it's just
meat and potatoes, or quite elaborate, made with quail, peacock,
our whole stuffed lamb, whole stuff lamb. Okay that's a
very large pie. Yeah. Yes. Across Europe you could find
(05:49):
huge early kishes for ceremonies and small cold ones for
more regular meals, and a whole trade existed around selling
leftover pastry, sometimes made more appetizing. Question are when soaked
with meat. Jeers to the poor who would gather outside
castles and other aristocratic dwellings trying to get some of
the stuff. Yeah, whole trade. Skipping ahead to medieval Europe,
(06:12):
tarts at the time could be either a dessert thing
or more of a non dessert thing, and some of
them resembled modern day kiche. They'd sometimes be called crustar's cruststars,
which I just pronounced with the French accent. Why I
appreciated it. On every day, a meatless day for Christians,
there was a recipe for a tart that called for cheese, egg,
(06:32):
spices and pastry crust. That sounds fairly keish like. And
here's the recipe. It's an old, ye old English. So
here we go, parboil onions and sage and parsley and
hew them small. Then take good fat cheese and bray it,
and do their two eggs and temper it up there with,
and do their too, Butter and sugar and raisings of corns,
(06:55):
and powder of ginger and of canell metal, all this
well together, and do it in a coffin and bake
it uncovered and serve it. Fourth. Since we've mentioned the
word twice, I want to remind everyone in case anyone
either didn't catch your apple pie episode or is forgotten.
The term coffin was one of ye old terms for
a for pie crust, yes, which is charming as all
(07:17):
get out. It kind of is. It's usually spelled with
a y too. Yeah, I appreciate it as you do.
But but you know that that sounds that sounds like
a nice quiche. I'd eat that. Another recipe of medieval
Europe tart debris, also echoes of quiche. Take a crust
inch deep in a trap, Take yolks of air and
raw and cheese. You run and mettle it and the
(07:38):
yolks together and do their two powder, ginger, sugar, saffron
and salt. Do it in a trap. Bake it and
serve it four if I love serve it for if
I serve it fourth, it sounds so much more epic
than what's really happening. Yeah, yeah, you basically have to
be like like Patrick Stewart in order to really say
it correctly. These spiced baked custards with a crust were
(08:00):
sometimes also called Duchet's, and a honey sweetened one was
reportedly served at the coronation of King Henry the fourth
in very fancy. Indeed, when a lot of us think
of kiche and the modern kiche'd wager, Kish Lorraine comes
to mind. This originated in what is now Lorraine, France. Yes,
(08:21):
but in medieval Europe the area was the Germanic Kingdom
of Lothoringian. Yeah, Loreen is actually only a bit under
French rule for about three hundred years now, like as
in like seventeen. Yeah. The word kish itself comes from
the Franco German word for cake kuhn or kusha, so
it's actually kind of German. Probably a German chef created it.
(08:41):
We don't know. Borders are complicated. Oh, if you haven't
heard of kish Lorraine, it's a bacon and classically gray
air or um sometimes crim fresh right. It's pretty tasty. Yeah,
and they were generally made in a cast iron skillet.
According to Larousse Gastronomique, he should only be served as
an order, never as a dessert course. Oh no, definitely,
(09:06):
not as a big folk paw. If you add onions,
you have keish alsacean. Seriously, so many regional varieties. But
what about keish in the U s Keisha in the
United States? Maybe sexism, buddy, Yeah, we'll talk all about
that after a quick break from a word for our sponsor. So,
(09:37):
keish started as a staple in rural areas, which the
simplicity of ingredients kind of reflects. Sure, you know you've
got eggs, you've got a little bit left over dairy,
whatever else in here, um ice box you need to
get rid of, right, But it's spread from there, becoming
popular in the U s sometime around the nineteen fifties,
really trending in the US in the sixties and seventies.
(09:59):
Oh yeah, Asian America was a bit more like a
podcast role thing than the traditional French kiche. French Kish
was thinner compared to the deep dish American variety. Of course,
Americans added all kinds of stuff to kiche. It was
fairly common to find kish on restaurant menus. You could
buy slices of keish, typically served with a salad pretty
much anywhere. You could have keyshor brunch for lunch, for dinner,
(10:20):
as a snack. You get the idea. According to Geane
Anderson's The American Century Cookbook, the most Popular Recipes of
the twentieth Century, despite a handful of cookbooks containing Keish
recipes from the nineteen thirties onward, quote Keish madness didn't
descend upon us until the late nineteen seventies and Go
Go eighties, when chefs outdid themselves dreaming off the Wall
Combos and Sylvia love Gun wrote in her book Fashionable Food,
(10:45):
Seven Decades of Food Fads. While keish was both a
popular and hardy appetizer, it was also sturdy and could
be held for hours. Keisha's enduring popularity into the seventies
had a great deal to do with the scope it
allowed creative cooks. Speaking of creative cooks, Julia Child helped
make keish more mainstream in the US by including it
(11:05):
in her cookbooks, which chefs referenced from many item ideas.
Her version of kishla reine did without the bacon. Huh,
just why? And keish grew popular in England around the
same time, although they called it ham and cheese pie,
and it also sometimes had a top crest. Kish with
the top crest that's bold, very bold. When the Kennedy's
(11:25):
are in the White House, they love a French food
was well known from Renee Verdon's nineteen sixty seven The
White House Chef Cookbook. Mr Kennedy was very fond of
the tiny kishes he had for lunch, and this cookbook
included a recipe for kishla Raine. We may have reached
peak American kish in the early nineteen eighties. By one
(11:46):
there were these boutique Kish restaurants like Miss Tissues in
l A and they were selling pies for up to
fifty dollars a pop, which is a little bit over
a hundred and thirty dollars today. Yeah. According to an
article from the time in People magazine, their clientele list
read like the bel Air phone book. There was an
article and People magazine about a Yes, that's pretty excellent,
(12:13):
but it couldn't last. No, the Kish bubble burst it did.
The popularity of Kish took a steep dive in the
US and in the UK to a lesser extent in
the nineteen eighties for two main reasons fear of cholesterol
and masculine stereotypes. Um, I don't know. Okay, So this
(12:34):
brings us to the weird kind of sexist bit of
the episode. So, okay, there was this kind of oversaturation
of kich Is in popular culture, and they're a little
bit fussy to make, and they were perceived as kind
of bougie, sort of like the pumpkin spice latte of
their time, I guess, And so they wound up seeming unmasculine. Yeah,
to the ridiculous point that in a book descended upon
(12:58):
the US called Men Don't e Keche. It was written
by a twentiesomething, your old humorist, a satirist of first
as kind of a long essay that was published in
Playboy and then expanded into this book that would sit
on the New York Times bestseller list for over a year. Wow,
and I have kind of a long quote I want
to read about how it started from an April first,
(13:21):
nine two article in the Chicago Tribune written by Bob Green,
so you can kind of get a taste of what
this was. Rejoice, all you American men who are sick
of having Alan Alda held up as your role model,
racquetball held up as your sports model, and Keish held
up as your food model. You have a new hero.
(13:41):
His name is Bruce Feirstein. He is an author and
his credo is simple and pure, Real Men Don't kiche.
Feirstein has set out to define, once again, to a
nation that has somehow forgotten it, what real men are
and what real men do. The first salvo of his
real Man manifesto, here's in my issue of Playboy. And
(14:03):
then he goes on to quote, if your Steen real
men do not have meaningful dialogues. Real men do not
find things super Real men do not wear anything with
more than four zippers. Real men do not wear bikini underwear.
Real men do not have vanity license plates for things
you won't find in real men's pockets, lip balm, breath freshener,
(14:26):
opera tickets, and recipes for keichh. A real man would
be an airline pilot. A kiche eater would be a
travel agent. The real man's diet steak, hamburger, cheeseburger, bacon, cheeseburger, pizza, burger,
chili burger, Hammond, Swiss on rice, spaghetti, macaroney and cheese,
French fries, home fries, hash brown potato chips, Bretzels, beer
(14:48):
and ported beer and ported dark beer, corn on the cob,
orange soda. Real men will avoid the quiche of death.
That's some pretty serious stuff. Was there a problem with
with like chapstick and breath freshener. I don't know if
I'm just supposed to have chapped lips and smell terrible
(15:09):
and all the ladies who want to kishi then ah, yeah,
so that's a lot. This is also I ran across
this and That's one of the reasons I wanted to
do keys that I mentioned beginning Real men don acas,
and I was like, WHOA, I need to look into this.
So after that there was a follow up from the
April twelfth edition of the Chicago Tribune he gas, it
(15:32):
looks as if the keysheeters really are about to take
over the world. Recently we discussed the real men versus
keysheeters controversy. Now I've come across startling evidence that indicates
the keysheaters are becoming a greater force than anyone may
have previously imagined, and all too real man caves into keish.
This piece would go into how one Eric Weber, who
(15:53):
had previously written a book called How to Pick Up Girls,
followed it up with a decidedly different book called Connect Okay,
I think the whole thing was meant to be at
least a little bit facetious or satirical, but I'm not
positive that all of the fans of the book got that. No,
and when I first found this, a lot of people
(16:16):
took it very seriously, yeah, or not very seriously, but
they agreed with it. Yeah, yeah, they took it on
as kind of their creedo. So sorry, about it Kish,
and then in um the Chicago Tribunes, Beverly Dillon wrote
in the Fickle World of Food Fads, one of the
biggest trends a few years ago was kish, basically a
(16:39):
pie crest filled with an egg custard. The Kish lens
itself to embellishment. Cooks found that just about anything could
be added to the egg filling, from vegetables to seafood.
Kish became so identified with trendy food that it inspired
the popular question do real manny keish? After that, the
dish seemed to lose favor. It's now to time to
(17:00):
bring it back. Some real men say, now is the
time to bring back kiche. A lot of debate about
the kish. I guess it's kind of been rehabilitated, although
I will say I think of it as kind of
a fancy brunch thing, and I do personally feel like
(17:20):
I see more women ordering it, and in my own experience,
the only time I've ever had kiche ever is at
funeral weeks. Really, yeah, I kind of have a negative
association with it. Sure, it's just like people bring it,
I guess, because it can be served at any temperature
at lasts. Yeah, it's it's got a lot of protein
(17:41):
in it. You know. That's that's good. We'll have to
give it another go. Okay, it's it's one of the
foods that I shouldn't really eat because of the high
egg content. So yeah, too bad, It's okay. Speaking of
this question of kish in two, there was a study
that was published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality
Science called Real Men Don't Eat Cache Regulation of gender
(18:04):
expressive choices by men. The authors ran a series of
experiments to see whether men and women would would display
a preference for masculine perceived or feminine perceived foods from
a menu, and furthermore, whether they would be stressed out
about their choices and uh. They used word choice along
with kind of common stereotypes, you know, like meat as masculine,
(18:25):
salads feminine to to create these these perceptions, and they
found that given a too short chunk of time to
choose something from the menu, both men and women would
order a pretty even mix of masculinized and feminized foods,
But given as much time as they wanted to peruse
the menu, men would gravitate towards the masculine foods and
(18:46):
women would still order basically whatever they wanted. They later
ran an experiment that found that that having to pick
amongst these lady and do gendered items did indeed seem
to stress guys out. Men performed worse on a subsequent
memory task and women did not. And this all seems
to confirm other research that men are generally more concerned
(19:07):
about appearing gender normative than women are up to and
including their dietary choices a k a. The patriarchy hurts everyone, Yes,
it does. And back on my old show, back when
I used to produce stuff Mom never told you videos,
we did an episode on why men are more associated
with like meat eating meat, and um, it's really interesting
(19:29):
and has to kind of do with the fact that
they were working like old old times, old days, we
were working long hours, like and there was a special
thing and so just to fuel them for their hard labor,
they got the first choice of meat. They cut it,
and they got to eat it. Anyway, we should do
a whole episode on it some time. It's it's really interesting.
(19:52):
Yeah that sounds nice and depressing, I mean, but really
but really fascinating. And I love that kind of study.
I'm glad that that there's there's search into it. Yeah. Yeah,
speaking of hard work and intense labor. We've got some
physical chemistry coming up next. But first a quick break
for a word from our sponsor, and we're back, Thank
(20:23):
you sponsor. Okay, so quish science science. Yeah, so, Akisha
is a type of baked or set custard. And in
this you've got four basic stuff things at play. You've
got you've got egg whites, egg yolks, milk, fats and
milk kind of watery stuffs. Sounds so appetizing, the stuff
(20:44):
that isn't the fat, right, Yes, it sounds really delicious
when you put it that way. Okay, so um so
So the egg whites. The egg whites are the kind
of jelliest part of an egg. They contain these proteins
called albumins that start out as kind of tight individualistic
coils of amino acids. And these protein molecules have both
hydrophilic or water loving bits on their outsides and then
(21:07):
hydrophobic or water hating bits kind of curled up on
their insides, similar to proteins and milk. Unlike in milk, though,
when you heat them up, they lose their structure. Suddenly,
all of those water hating bits are freaking out and
looking for something to protect them, so they cling to
other protein molecules, meaning that the proteins all wind up
(21:27):
linking with each other and uh therefore trapping bits of
liquid amongst themselves. The proteins of the egg yolks coagulates similarly,
but at a higher temperature than the whites do, so
so you can kind of game your kiche by adding
different ratios of whole eggs to just yolks or just whites.
More whites mean that you get a firmer gel that
(21:48):
you have to be kind of a little bit extra
careful not to not to burn or scramble when you're
cooking it. Um and more yolks mean a softer gel
that's a little bit more forgiving. Meanwhile, Okay, the milk
fats and milk watery bits in a quiche, these are
going to be the bulk of the liquid that gets
trapped up by those coagulating egg proteins, all right, uh So,
(22:09):
so your balance of milk fat to milk watery stuff
will affect the creaminess that the mouth feel of the
final product. If you want an extra creamy kiche, you
can also subbend some crime fresh or sour cream to
to help out with this. But you do have to
be a little bit careful because because water and water
soluble minerals help create an ideal gel in the quiche,
(22:32):
the minerals help create more bonds among the protein chains,
creating the really good wobbly network that you're looking for.
Wobbily network, wobbily network. I love this. I always make
the outlines and I have sections for science and I'm like,
I'll leave that one to Lord, and she never lets
me down. This is so cool. I love knowing this
(22:52):
stuff because it helps you when you're cooking. If you
know why, if you know why the science works, then yeah,
you're like, you're like, oh, it helps you troubleshoot a
little bit. Yeah. And speaking of cooking, we do have
a few cooking tips for you. Yeah, okay, So, so
to keep your custard stable a k A. Smooth instead
of chunky. Nobody likes chunky custard um, you can you
can take a couple of steps. First, you can add
(23:14):
up to a tablespoon of flour to your custard base,
whisk it in there. That will help absorb water and
and blend it throughout the mixture, avoiding any lumps from
pockets of steam. Also, experts recommend to bake your quiche
low and slow, no higher than three hundred degrees, and
maybe lengthen the baking time accordingly to about an hour
(23:35):
or so. Higher heat can scramble the egg proteins before
they have a chance to to gel up with all
of that delicious dairy. You should also a cook and
season your ad ins separately to prevent them from a
from messing up that water ratio and your custard. You
should maybe think about prick the pie dough with a
fork or what have you before pouring in the egg
(23:55):
custard mixture to prevent rising uh And this this way
you won't have a little weird puffy bubbles in your crust.
You could also try brushing the crust with egg whites.
That's a step you would take after you a par
or blind bake the crust, but before you pour in
the custard, and it helps seal the crust against any
moisture in the custard to to keep it crisp. Use
one egg per person as a general rule of them,
(24:17):
and the cream should be more prominent in the eggs.
There is a lot of debate about the correct ratio
of egg to dairy, and whether you should use all
whole eggs or some whole eggs and some separated yolks,
and the correct ratio of milk to cream. You know,
everyone agrees that you want to taste the eggs but
(24:38):
not wind up making an omelet, and that you want
it to be rich but not too rich, But no
one really seems to agree on like which point in
any of these spectrums is just right. Um. So, if
you're not sure where you fall in this debate, then
try try a recipe that's sort of middle of the
road first, with about half milk and half cream and
approximately equal volume of egg to dairy, which means about
(25:01):
five eggs per cupit dary. In metric that equals about
two eggs per hundred milliliters. Yeah, so there you go.
Some tips to help you next time. Another thing you
might think about if you're getting creative When researching this one,
I've stumbled upon a recipe for a kish that was
made with a derrito's crust. Derrito crust like Nacho doritos
(25:22):
or like cool ranch. I think it was Nacho bright
powder made me suspect not. Yeah, I believe you, but
now I really want a cool ranch crust you kinda yeah,
the person who did it saying he was trying to
make it um less of this the bougie thing that
we were talking about, so like bring it back into
(25:45):
the band. Yeah yeah, yeah, See it's got a Dorrito's crestfellas.
Now you can enjoy it. That brings us to the
end of this classic episode on Kish. I hope you
appreciated what former aren't had to say. It kind of
like a weird I don't know, like a like a
(26:08):
time travel situation. It does give me that that vibe. Ah,
what was I thinking about when I recorded Keiche? It's
a different person then, I know, right, Yeah, because this
episode came out originally in um October of twenty seventeen, which,
(26:29):
according to COVID time is like thirty nine million years ago.
So yeah, it's like a fossilized podcast. I'm like, no,
no one was alive then, Like yeah, like that certainly
they weren't eating Keiche. It seems it does seem really
(26:50):
really wild. Um, but but yeah, I thank you for
going on this time travel journey with us. Yes, I
hope I hope, UM, I hope you're you're gonna go
make a quiche? Yes, yes, UM and I we both
hope that you're having safe, happy holidays and if is involved, well,
please let us know about it. You can email us
(27:14):
at hello at savor pod dot com. We're also on
social media. You can find us on Twitter, Facebook, and
Instagram at savor pod, and we do hope to hear
from you. Savor is production of I Heart Radio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, you can visit the I
heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows. Thanks as always to our superproducers Dylan
(27:34):
Fagan and Andrew Howard. Thanks to you for listening, and
we hope that lots more good things are coming your
way
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