Watalappam

This dessert (also frequently transliterated as watalappan) is probably one of the CC's favorites even though the CC is not much of a dessert person to start with!

It's related functionally to the very Spanish flan which is another one of the CC's favorites.

The massive difference between the two is that the Sri Lankan dessert substitutes coconut milk for the cream and milk in the original. This changes the chemistry in a significant way. It also adds a ton of "sweet" spices that flourish on the island. The sugar is substituted by a very specific palm jaggery which adds a smoky flavor and brown color to the product.

Flan is notoriously hard to make. It's very finicky about the percentage of fat in the cream and the milk and the water content. Flubs are common and the act of making it requires real skill.

Almodóvar films an entire flan recipe in his movie Volver. It's both a love ode to the wonderful dessert and a character study in the great tradition of silent films. By eavesdropping on a character who's clearly very talented at making it, and watching her do the thing she loves, we learn more about her than could be inferred from mere dialog.

The chemistry of coconut milk is much simpler than that of cream plus milk. Some genius made the substitution historically and it's a knockout since the proportions in coconut milk are exactly right to get the correct consistency and hence, flubbing is kept to at a minimum.

The jaggery that needs to be used is a palm jaggery called kithul jaggery. It's a little hard to find but it has a characteristic flavor that's hard to reproduce. Regular jaggery simply doesn't have the smoky flavor and it's not sweet enough.

The CC found it in London of all places which led someone to remark, "What does the CC do in London? He buys Sri Lankan jaggery and hauls it back to New York." This has irony written all over it since the CC was in Sri Lanka earlier in the year and didn't haul it back then. However, the bottom line is "Globalization, baby!"

The dessert is traditionally steamed but you can easily make it in an oven with a water bath as long as you have large pans. It also scales effortlessly. Best of all, it needs to be made ahead of time and cooled so you will be able to impress your guests without much effort.

It's just pure magic.



Ingredients

(serves 4)

100 gram kithul jaggery
200 ml coconut milk

2 cloves
1 large stick cinnamon
1 vanilla pod
3 cardamom pods
nutmeg

5 large eggs (read notes!)

Note 1: The jaggery is conveniently sold in 100 gram units wrapped in the dried palm leaves.

Note 2: The amount of milk in a standard can of coconut milk is close to 200 ml. Good enough. This recipe is quite forgiving. Shake it well before opening.

Note 3: The CC has seen pandanus leaves (called rampe in Sinhalese) added to the coconut milk. Great taste if you have some. Can be found frozen and work like a charm.

Note 4: The jaggery is quite hard and tradition calls for shaving it. The CC smashed it with a hammer and used the pieces. It made no difference since it dissolves completely and you will filter the product anyway. Tradition frequently wastes time without asking the obvious questions.

Note 5: If you use regular jaggery, you will need 4-8 tbsp of brown sugar to get the right sweetness.

Note 6: There is no way to predict how many eggs will be needed. Firstly, the coconut milks have different amounts of liquid. Secondly, the eggs are of different sizes even within the same grade. Lastly, the yolks are of different sizes. The CC started with four and then was forced to add one more to get it right. Chances are you might need an extra egg or one less. Start with four and go from there.

Recipe

Remove the cardamom seeds from the pod. Crush the cloves and cardamom in a mortar and pestle.

In a saucepan, heat up the ground cardamom and cloves, vanilla pod, cinnamon and ground nutmeg with the coconut milk and the jaggery. Bring it to a boil and turn down the heat to very low. Stir until everything dissolves and the spices steep into the liquid. Roughly 12-15 minutes. This also has the advantage of removing some of the moisture from the coconut milk.

Taste it. It should be cloyingly sweet and the spices should be prominent. (Don't worry. The final product will be nowhere near as sweet. We still have the eggs, remember?)

Strain the liquid into a bowl and let it cool down to room temperature. (Stick it in a freezer if you're in a hurry.) Discard any spices or solids left behind. Make sure that the mixture is cold otherwise the eggs will scramble when you incorporate them.

Beat the eggs but not too much. Don't incorporate too much air into them.

Strain the egg mixture using a fine sieve into the cold coconut milk liquid above. You will need to use a whisk to get the egg mixture through the sieve.

This step is CRUCIAL. The final product will simply not work without it.

Mix the batter gently to incorporate it completely. It should be slightly dense and thick but still liquid.

Split the mixture evenly into four oven-proof bowls. Cover each of them tightly with aluminum foil.

Now, you have two choices.

Steaming: Steam the four bowls in a steamer for 40 minutes. Check at that mark. They should be jiggly. If not, steam for an extra 5 minutes.

Baking: You're not really baking. You will need a deep pan that can hold the bowls. Preheat the oven to 350°F for 10 minutes. Heat some water in a kettle. Place the bowls in the pan. When the oven is heated, and the water is boiling, pour it in the pan around the bowls. Cover the pan itself with a separate piece of aluminum foil and put it in the oven. Steam for 40 minutes. Check. If not jiggly enough, steam for an additional 5 minutes.

The trick with the water is that all the energy is going into vaporizing the water so that the egg mixture itself never goes above the boiling point of water. Very clever and this clearly scales effortlessly.

Let them cool down to room temperature. Chill in the refrigerator until ready to serve. They are frequently topped with more cashews and raisins but this is a bit of gilding the lily.

Mugi Gohan (Barley Rice)

The CC is insanely fond of this dish.

This is the ultimate "poor people" dish in Japan and even today there's a slight disdain towards it.

Historically peasants paid rice as taxes in the feudal era. They had a tendency to hide stuff from the authorities — tax evasion is as old as mankind! — a point memorably made in Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai (七人の侍). The peasants frequently mixed other grains that were not taxed to their cooked rice — barley, millet, etc. which contributes to their "lower class status". Ironically, this is why the they  never suffered from beri beri but the upper classes did.

It was also served as army rations and today is often served in school lunches, all of which add up the reasons that it is really resented.

Which is too bad because it's freakin' awesome!

Since the CC has no associations with it, the CC is free to love it. It has texture, nutrition, lack of boredom (white rice?), flavor and chewiness.

Ingredients

1/2 cup barley
1 cup rice

3 cups dashi (or water)
salt

Recipe

Note 1: The only "trick" is that the barley needs to be soaked ahead of time for 30 minutes so that they can be cooked together.

Note 2: You can vary the proportions. More barley, less rice, etc. This is the median that the CC likes.

Note 3: Use dashi if you can.

Soak the barley for 30 minutes. Rinse the rice under cold water until it runs clear. Let it sit for about 10-15 minutes.

Put all the ingredients in an open pot. Cook until the rice is done. Depending on the humidity you may need to add a little more water at the end.

Food as Metaphorical Horror

Humans have always had a slightly complex relationship with food in as much as it reminds them of their animal origins. For starters, carnivores that we may be, we have always had a slightly problematic relationship with slaughter and novelists, artists and film makers have exploited that endlessly.

Here are some of the best food metaphors in the interest of horror that the CC knows of in the medium of film.

Rules of the Game

Slaughter as a metaphor for the ruthless elimination of an entire generation in World War I.

Bonus: Made in 1939. Looks forward presciently and sees a repeat upcoming.

Rosemary's Baby

If you can make tea horrifying, you have real cinematic skill.

Bonus: The Lipton tea ad-placement near the end of the movie.

Repulsion

It's straightforward enough to horrify using a skinned putrefying rabbit but it takes a special talent to turn toast and (exhausted) marmalade into one for a horrific sexual frigidity gone awry.

Saló

The perfect meeting of medium and subject. Integrated into the film as a logical progression of horrors, Pasolini mentioned that he intended it as a "commentary on the horrors of fast food".

(You'll have to see this one. Can't reveal it without giving it away.)

Bonus: Nails.

Buñuel's Food Satire

A preoccupation with food, and discussions on food is a marking trait of the bourgeoise. Nobody understood better than Buñuel that food isn't just nourishment but an external symbol of attitudes of a society.

Virtually every movie he made included vicious satire on the strange relationship between the two. Needless to say, the food was always deliciously filmed.

The best scenes in the oeuvre:

The Exterminating Angel

Magnificent dinner scene with the waiter stumbling. Revealed as "modernist theater". Slow devolution of civilized society into animalistic eaters. Bonus scene: the lamb.

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoise

Food, pretension, death; more food, more pretension, more death; embarassment while eating, dying while eating, embarassed dying while eating.

Viridiana

The beggars enacting The Last Supper. Photograph taken by the beggarwoman with her "winking" pudendum. Banned by the Church. Need the CC say more?

War of the Worlds

Summer's coming up, and soon there will all the movies about how the "machines are taking over", and the "machines will rule men", etc.

BORING.

The CC will just settle for a toaster that can make toast correctly gauging the thickness of the sliced bread, and the moisture content.

This technology was firmly within engineering grasp thirty years ago so where is it?

We'll save the world later, okay? OKAY.

Food in Movies

Given how visual food is, one would think that it is not too hard to film it. However, it seems to be surprisingly hard. Waiting around for broth to boil isn't exactly dramatic.

However, there are many movies about food, largely concerned with exploring metaphors around food : food as communication, food as sensuality, food as sex, food as culture.

Here are some of the movies on food that the CC loves.

• Eat Drink Man Woman

  Perhaps, the CC's favorite movie on food. Just the opening sequence gives the CC goosebumps. He's probably watched it more than a hundred times. The movie itself is quite amazing too.

• Mostly Martha

  The original German movie (not the crappy remake.) Features an obsessive-compulsive chef whom the CC strongly identifies with. The CC's love of Italian food plays a role too.

• Tampopo

  How could you possibly not love the delightful quirkiness?

• Mirch Masala

  Not exactly a movie on food but certainly one to exploit the metaphors around it.

• Delicatessen

  Apocalyptic future. Cannibalism. A "bullshit detector". Lentil smugglers! What's not to like?

The CC has almost certainly seen all and any movies related to food. Some are charming and quirky; some are routine and forgettable; some have exquisite filming of food sequences but not much else.

Just for the record, the CC singles out "Babette's Feast" for most boring food movie ever. There were some peasants, and a flopping turtle, and there was supposed to be the "transcendental power of art in the name of God" or some such. God help us if we have to sit through this stuff on a routine basis!

Perhaps the audience would like to chime in?

Buñuel's Martini

Anyone who knows the CC knows that he loves his martinis, and anybody who knows the CC knows that the CC loves the movies of the surrealist, Buñuel.

This then is Luis Buñuel's martini. The CC is convinced that Buñuel wasn't just a perfectionist in his movies.

To provoke, or sustain, a reverie in a bar, you have to drink English gin, especially in the form of the dry martini. To be frank, given the primordial role in my life played by the dry martini, I think I really ought to give it at least a page. Like all cocktails, the martini, composed essentially of gin and a few drops of Noilly Prat, seems to have been an American invention. Connoisseurs who like their martinis very dry suggest simply allowing a ray of sunlight to shine through a bottle of Noilly Prat before it hits the bottle of gin. At a certain period in America it was said that the making of a dry martini should resemble the Immaculate Conception, for, as Saint Thomas Aquinas once noted, the generative power of the Holy Ghost pierced the Virgin's hymen "like a ray of sunlight through a window-leaving it unbroken."

Another crucial recommendation is that the ice be so cold and hard that it won't melt, since nothing's worse than a watery martini. For those who are still with me, let me give you my personal recipe, the fruit of long experimentation and guaranteed to produce perfect results. The day before your guests arrive, put all the ingredients -- glasses, gin, and shaker -- in the refrigerator. Use a thermometer to make sure the ice is about twenty degrees below zero (centigrade). Don't take anything out until your friends arrive; then pour a few drops of Noilly Prat and half a demitasse spoon of Angostura bitters over the ice. Stir it, then pour it out, keeping only the ice, which retains a faint taste of both. Then pour straight gin over the ice, stir it again, and serve.