Can You Solve This Mystery?

I'm going to throw a question open to all of you out there. I've spent the better part of a month chasing this down, and have had no luck. I think it's going to come down to someone's personal recollection, so put on your thinking caps! There may just be a bottle of David Zey's Zy-Sauce barbecue sauce in it for you if you have the answer.

Q:As a small child growing up in the mid-1940s in Brooklyn, NY, I remember a treat sold by vendors from sidewalk pushcarts (this was a time and place when you could buy just about anything from a man with a pushcart or delivery truck). Anyway, it was called a "Charolette Reuse," I think. It was an individual layers dessert made of a sponge cake round, whipped cream and a fruit filing (strawberry or cherry, I think) with a fancy whipped cream swirl and a big red cherry on top. The thing came in a white cardboard cylinder about the diameter of an English muffin but about 4 inches tall. You ate it by pushing up on the cardboard bottom of the cylinder, forcing the goodies to dispense from the top layer by layer. I have searched many cookbooks and corresponded with other food writers to no avail. Have you ever heard of this dessert? --Bob Monaco

Let me hear from you! If you remember buying this, or mom or dad buying for you, or your grandparents talking about it, drop me a line.

Q: Sometimes I buy snapper and am hungrier when I buy it than when I cook it. If it is frozen can I refreeze what I don't use? Would this apply to all seafood ? Thank you and God bless. Tere R.

A: This is a question I get a lot, and I'm going to address all meat, not just seafood, here.

As long as the meat has been kept cold (below 40° F) for a short time, there should not be any health issues related to refreezing it. However, make sure you check the meat for freshness before refreezing, as freezing bad meat doesn't magically cure it. Very few things are more annoying than planning a dinner around a piece of thawing meat only to find out that it's not even fit for canine consumption.

From a quality standpoint, repeated refreezings of meat will lead to degradation of taste and especially texture of the meat. This is especially true with fragile flesh like seafood.

Why does this happen? If your kitchen, like mine, came equipped with an electron microscope, you could look inside your frozen goods and see that frozen water molecules have pretty sharp edges, that act like thousands of microscopic blades hacking away at the fibers of the meat. When you thaw and refreeze the meat, that lets the molecules reform in different patterns, thus hacking at different spots within the meat. Just as the mightiest wooly mammoth was brought down by dozens of cavemen with little tiny spearpoints, so can the heftiest cod fillet be reduced to a pile of fish goo by repeated ice crystal assault.

Q: If I use measuring spoons that say ½ teaspoon or one teaspoon, how much should I use if the recipe calls for 2 or 3 ounces of margarine? Thanks. --Theresa Lopez

A: The quick and dirty answer to this is that you should put your spoons aside and whip out your digital kitchen scale. If you don't have one, I strongly recommend that you get one. They can be had for less than $20 at just about any store with a kitchen department, and they've got hundreds of uses. If you're a dieter, for example, and need to use portion control, you can't do it fully without a scale.

However, this doesn't help you, sitting there reading this with a stick of butter slowly melting in your hand and no scale in sight.

Journey with me back to grade school, to the land of fractions. *cool time warp effect*

OK, we know butter comes in one-pound boxes, with four sticks in each. There are 16 ounces in a pound. Division will give you four ounces per stick. Thus, your two ounces of butter will be ½ of one stick, and your three ounces will be ¾ of it.

For quick reference: there are eight tablespoons in a stick of butter, which means one tablespoon is equivalent to ½ ounce of butter.

Q: How long is it safe to store potato salad if it's been kept refrigerated? --Marcella R.

A: I'm going to assume you mean the traditional American mayonnaise-based potato salad, the stuff that has turned so many picnics into emergency-room vacations. As a Mustard Museum devotee, I never touch the stuff myself.

However, if you do make the traditional sort, provided it's kept in a safe temperature range from completion to serving, your salad should be safe for up to two weeks.

Q: This question is specific to pizza crust. Will using a different kind of oil make pizza crust taste any different or bake any different? For example, would pizza crust turn out the same if I used canola oil versus cottonseed oil? How do all the oils affect baking?

A: As long as the oil you use doesn't have an exceptionally low smoke point, like some more exotic nut oils, you shouldn't have any structural difficulties with your crust. The taste, however, can vary. Olive oil has that slightly peppery flavor that most people identify with good pizza. Peanut, canola and cottonseed oils are fairly neutral, without much flavor at all. It all depends on what sort of pizza you want to make and where you want the flavor to come from.

Q: I'm sure you've heard this before. How do you keep fried eggplant from absorbing so much oil when frying? I love this dish, but it becomes so greasy that a little can make one ill. I've tried sprinkling it with salt, but it still becomes like a sponge with the oil. Thanks for any help you can give. Sandy M.

Q: The salt sprinkling has you on the right track, but you've got to give that salt time to do its voodoo before you proceed.

Lay your eggplant slices out on a rack over the sink or a container of some sort and sprinkle them liberally with kosher salt. Wait 15 minutes. Flip the slices over and repeat the process. Then rinse the salt off under cold running water.

Now comes the odd part: squeeze the slices. That's right. Squeeze them to force out yet more liquid, then lay the slices out on paper towels to dry. The resulting meaty slices will be ready for all your cooking purposes.

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