Friday, March 31, 2006

R.I.P.

Edna Lewis (1916-2006)



A bit late, but better late than never!

Most of the current greats owe her more than they honestly acknowledge, and she was ahead of all these new-fangled fads (which are nothing more than old-fashioned tradition in a spanking-new "scientific" bottle.)

Wednesday, March 29, 2006

Tomato Soup (in winter) - Part 4

The "fabled" recipe at long last!

Ingredients

3 lbs tomatoes (chop them in eighths -- fast and simple)
2 large red onions diced coarsely
1 large potato diced coarsely
1 tbsp whole peppercorns
2 bay leaves
2-3 tbsp cumin seeds (read below!)
2 tbsp "home-made" tomato paste (but substitute commercial, you wimps!)
salt to taste
3 tbsp of olive oil

Required Kitchen Instrument

Food mill

Recipe

The recipe is simple but don't try to "hurry" it. Patience is rewarded. You can coax good taste out of crappy-ass winter tomatoes. Trust me!

Heat 2 tbsp of olive oil. Add the onions, and the let them "sweat" (as the Italians say.) When the onions are dark pink (but not caramelized), add 1 tbsp of the cumin, the bay leaves, all the peppercorns and saute for a whole minute.

Then, add the tomatoes, and turn the heat down real low (this is the patience part.) Let the tomatoes slowly "melt", and release their juices. This will try your patience as it will take the better part of anywhere between 20-40 minutes. Resist the temptation to turn up the heat. When the fat rises to the surface...

Skim, baby, skim!

When done skimming, add the potatoes, cover the pot, and let it stew for 20 mins or so, on medium heat. The fat's in the pot. No point in the low heat now.

What you need to do is pass this soupy mixture through a food mill but in the interest of time, effort, and the general hatred of washing up dishes, read below!

In a separate pot, heat 1 tbsp of oil. Add 2 tbsp of cumin, fry for 15 seconds. Then add the tomato paste. While this is frying, place the food mill over the second pot, and add the stuff from the first pot into the food mill, and start rotating.

Rotate, baby, rotate!

When you are bored, toss the crap in the food mill away. Let the other stuff come to a gentle rolling boil for a while, and simmer for 10 minutes.

Add the salt to taste.

Ambrosia, baby, ambrosia!



Honest Confessions:

1. In the interest of being complete, if the soup is too tart which it may very well be, thanks to crappy-ass tomatoes (F**K YOU, genetically modified, crappy-ass tomatoes!), add some sugar to balance the taste. Marcella Hazan, the doyen of Italian food cooking, recommends this, and even though this is an Indian recipe, who am I to argue with her?

(To be fair, if you need to do this with tomatoes at the height of summer, your cooking skills suck!)

2. The CC used 2 potatoes producing a thicker soup, and had to thin it.

3. Don't bother peeling the potatoes. The CC wasted his time. The food mill will take care of it. DOH!

4. I've seen cooks fry curry leaves in the very first step. Didn't have any so didn't add them.

5. I wish I had used more cumin. So will you!

Friday, March 24, 2006

Enough said!

Medieval & Renaissance Food

Check it out.

Saturday, March 18, 2006

Gott im Himmel!

Talk about German precision engineering!

What a waste of time and money.

Monday, March 13, 2006

Sourdough

Sourdough = obsession.

Serious obsession! You know, the adolescent kind? When you rationalize stalking your beloved on the internet. Not that the CC ever did that. They hadn't invented the internet then; you had to use the telephone.

Why is it obsessive?

The answer is rather easy. Complete and utter lack of control. And good cooks tend to be control-freaks (along with good programmers, and good just-about-anything.) Perfection is only a detail away, and if only you could control the details...

Maybe this time, I'll be lucky. Maybe this time, it'll stay. Maybe this time, for the first time, it'll rise...

But, will it? And if not, why not?

You're dealing with a rather delicate symbiosis which you can actually turn into a rather robust symbiosis. (Once again, perfection is only some details away.)

Native yeast (they're in the air), and benign bacteria aid each other, and you can use them to make bread. (this is a complex subject for future discussion.) Suffice to say, for a couple of thousand years nobody has died of botulism thanks to this symbiosis.

Why is it not controllable? Too many variables. Temperature is one, but there are plenty of others.

So sourdough takes the traditional cooking attitude (="take a recipe and make it"), and puts a stake through its heart.

Take that you control-freak, bitch!

No wonder cooks obsess about getting it right (what did I say about obsession?)

Alas, the CC is hardly immune to this obsession. I have tried for two years and I openly admit to being less than perfect. (The failures can be converted into "alternate" successes for rather beautiful chemical reasons. Isn't that peachy?) But if the CC were to be honest, he has only had a handful of successes (and to be fair, more recently than initially.)

Incidentally, sourdough encompasses more than bread. Anyone, from the southern states knows of sourdough pancakes (the real kind not the modern crap!) And traditional idlis, dosas and utthapams from Southern India are actually sourdough.

Why the south in the last two examples? They tend to have warmer climates, and hence are more conducive to sourdough (although San Francisco is an exception for rather technical reasons.)

Is this a blog entry or a lecture? Not sure, really!

Thursday, March 9, 2006

One more book (sigh!)

OK, so the CC was so enchanted by the last Jennifer Brennan book, that he has gone ahead and ordered another one.

It's vaguely on Polynesian food entitled Tradewinds and Coconuts, and it's just about as likely to be "faithful", "true", and "authentic" to the cooking of these islands as the original "Raj" cookbook was to Indian food.

But the CC is a sucker (sometimes.)

Alas!

Whither authenticity?

Tomato Soup (in winter) - Part 3

So the CC was at this Mexican restaurant in NYC earlier this week, and as soon as he entered, he was delightfully pleased with the warm cumin-scented atmosphere reminding him of the tomato soup of his youth.

What does this have to do with the original "tomato soup" postings? Not much. Think of it as a teaser trailer for the recipe later this week.

Dang, these Hollywood folk know more than a few tricks. I need a control group or something.

Sunday, March 5, 2006

A most enchanting book

The CC is reading a rather enchanting book titled Curries and Bugles : A Memoir and Cookbook of the British Raj.

Whatever one's political opinions on The Raj, it would be most curmudgeonly to deride such a delightfully charming, part nostalgia-laden memoir, part cookbook.

And to top it all, it's filled with the most charming old-fashioned expressions that the CC hasn't heard in a decade.

Of course, it would be completely and utterly infra dig for the CC to actually list them.

The book, actually, goes back to a somewhat-dying tradition in cookbooks. Before they became formally recipe-laden, and filled with hyper-glossy near-pornish pictures, they had an almost whimsical air to them.

The first pan-Italian cookbook belongs to this genre (more on that in a later post.) For example, it describes the author's near death by cholera by a dish eaten at Livorno (it was dysentery really!) followed by a recipe of the dish -- a minestrone.

Wouldn't you just love to use a cookbook like that?

Alas! The modern world of interest-groups, sub-cultures, and Madison Ave.-consultants does not lend itself to such eccentricities.

Hence, the CC's delight at both the form, and the content of the book. Add to that, the recreation of some foods long forgotten from his youth, and you can guess why this post has a rather rhapsodic air about it.

Some rather enjoyable excerpts from the book:


"By the by, an omelette is never cooked to such perfection anywhere as by an Indian cook."

-- Harriet Tytler, An Englishwoman in India.

Yep, it's true. Julia Child, eat your heart out!


On the inscription on the tombstone of an unfortunate Rev. Isadore Lowenthal:


ACCIDENTALLY SHOT BY HIS CHOWKIDAR

Well done, thou good and faithful servant




Delightful, the CC says, simply too delightful for words!

And, for all the Californians (Californicators?) here, she runs a restaurant eponymous with the book in San Diego (although she must be rather old by now.)