Book Blitz

Well, the CC was taken by his friend to this wonderful store uptown in Manhattan which is devoted solely to books on food.

It was like leading a diabetic into a pastry shop. Within the first five minutes, the CC had mentally spent his quarterly salary, and after 20 minutes, he was contemplating the prospect of bankruptcy.

Thankfully, cooler heads prevailed, and the CC escaped with only a dent to his wallet. (The rest of the books were a present from the friend to the CC.)

(For those of you familiar with Chicago, this is the Seminary Co-op of food books. For those of you who don't understand, your lives are the poorer for it.)

Those of you not passing through Manhattan may want to check out the online store.

Farmers' Market Sweep (Part 1)

Waking up is hard to do. Waking up really early is harder to do. Waking up to go to the farmers' market when you're cooking just for yourself is hardest to do.

Well, the CC hied himself to the market, but today the food gods were scowling.

Oh well! Sometimes you're the windshield, and sometimes you're the bug. Sometimes you're even the guy who gets to clean off the splat of the bug off the windshield.

Inventory of Haul

spring garlic (bought 3, and the guy said, "Take one more! It's $5 for 4.")
basil (very good!!!)
applemint
fava beans
yellow zucchini

Everything else kinda sucked.

"You call this a swiss chard? I've seen terminally-ill great-grandmothers with more life in them!", etc. etc.

Anyway, it was back to the apartment, and dinner decisions had to be made sans desperation.

Basil and spring garlic suggested pesto, and the fava beans suggested themselves. The rest of the items suggested nothing.

Well, it was hey-ho-off-we-go, and what do we have here?

Linguini con pesto e fave

Recipe to follow.

Thackeray on Curry

William Makepeace Thackeray, whose grandfather (of identical name) earned all of his fortune in India (in the elephant trade), was so enamored by "curry" that a wrote a "Poem to Curry" in the literary (and satirical) magazine "Punch".

Incidentally, the recipe is "accurate" inasmuch as it depicts the stereotypical view of "curry" that was marketed to the British in the 18th and 19th century.

Yep, "curry" in England was a product of marketing! (and predictably, around the time of Queen Victoria becoming "Empress of India", the British went nuts about all things Indian.)

Once you understand this, the concept of Jubilee Chicken and Coronation Chicken will no longer seem that mysterious.

Three pounds of veal my darling girl prepares,
And chops it nicely into little squares;
Five onions next prures the little minx
(The biggest are the best, her Samiwel thinks),
And Epping butter nearly half a pound,
And stews them in a pan until they’re brown’d.
What’s next my dexterous little girl will do?
She pops the meat into the savoury stew,
With curry-powder table-spoonfuls three,
And milk a pint (the richest that may be),
And, when the dish has stewed for half an hour,
A lemon’s ready juice she’ll o’er it pour.
Then, bless her! Then she gives the luscious pot
A very gentle boil - and serves quite hot.
PS - Beef, mutton, rabbit, if you wish,
Lobsters, or prawns, or any kind fish,
Are fit to make a CURRY. ‘Tis, when done,
A dish for Emperors to feed upon.

Preparing Fresh Fava Beans

The CC simply loves fava beans, and can eat them fresh or dried all day long.

In the summer, of course, there's no substitute for the fresh variety.

In the interest of perfectionism in the culinary arts, here's how to prepare them. Perhaps this is obvious to every child in the Mediterranean but the CC didn't grow up there.

These are definitely demanding beans but they are worth it!

Firstly, understand the scale. Five pounds of fresh fava beans will barely yield enough for a "green" risotto. This is because the pods are heavy, and the skin over the fava bean (which is also discarded) is also heavy.

Peal the beans off the pods. Yes, this is boring. Deal!

In a pot of salted boiling water, dump the beans. If they are small, boil for less than 3 minutes; for larger ones, no more than 5 minutes. (These times are crucial!)

Drain, and immediately dump them in a bowl of heavily iced water. When they are cool (less than a minute); immediately drain the water (otherwise they will get soggy. Try and dry them as best you can.

At this point, you can just pop the beans out of the skin. They will be slimy, so wash them once more, and dry immediately (otherwise they will get soggy too!)

Fresh fava beans!

Bloomsday

Without a doubt, this is the CC's favorite description of food in literature. It's from Joyce's "Ulysses":

Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liver slices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencod's roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.

Happiness is...

... ten pounds of good tomatoes.

And they say the CC is hard to please?

BAH!!!

The Form of Cookbooks

We have already noted the tendency of cookbook writers to be optimists. They also tend to be deeply romantic with a tendency towards the pastoral.

Their imaginations are filled with villages and farmers living off the land; cows and herdmen; folk foraging for herbs in the wild; a mythical sort of Arcadia harking back to some unstated golden age of food making.

Reality is seldom so kind.

Where they have you visualize the gentle mooing of cows in a grass-spread expanse, is really earth-shattering methane-laden farts for anyone who has actually visited a farm. Where they would have you picking herbs along Mediterranean coasts should be counter-indicated with the brutal and vicious poverty that lines those lands, along with a deep distrust of strange foreigners who invade wanting to talk about food.

Recipes too are not just procedural. They contain obvious and hidden metaphors, as much about tantalizing the reader's sense of space ("Ah, Firenze!"), light ("sunrise over the Adriatic"), time ("once when we were young"), and sense ("wafting aroma from a colorful melange"), as they are about the actual execution ("try it! you know you want to!")

It is this romanticization that partly explains why certain meals tend to linger in our imagination.

Sentiment here freely mixes with nostalgia ("my mother's recipe"), transports us ("eating mangoes with juices dripping"), allows us to live vicariously in both space and time ("the royal chef prepared..."), and allows wild optimism to turn into outright absurdity.

Jane Grigson tried to imagine a neo-pastoral world: "Now we might extend the picture to include high-rise blocks, patched with vegetation on every balcony - Marmande and plum tomatoes in pots, herbs in window-boxes, courgettes and squashes trailing round the doors. Inside, there could be aubergine, pepper, chilli and basil plants on the window sill, jars of sprouting seeds, dishes of mustard and cress, with mushroom buckets and blanching chicory in the dark broom and airing cupboards."

The CC thinks we can safely say, in retrospect, that the problems of inner-cities do not emanate from the lovely odors of freshly growing herbs (a different kind of herb, maybe!)

Escapism also plays a role.

How many can truly afford a life of leisure traipsing along the Mediterranean, stopping for an omelette and a glass of wine here, and sampling onion jam there? And wouldn't it get boring after the first few weeks?

Elizabeth David freely admits this about her books written just after World War II with rationing in effect. The chances that her readers could even obtain a handful of those ingredients was negligible. The books are explicit escapist fantasies in a troubled world (however excellent the recipes might be.)

The seduction of this mythical past where food was unadulterated by chemicals, and presented without sham or pretentiousness is a heady mix, and hardly anyone is immune from the potency of the image.

These books are truly the last gasp of the Romantic movement. They provide a concentrated sense of drama in a short space (a recipe is as brief as a sonnet,) and the allure of heaven.

If only we too had the right ingredients, and the right company in the right setting, then we too could be gambolling around like fox cubs in dappled sunlight.

Why Carrots are Orange?

Carrots in ancient times used to be white, yellow or purple.

The orange carrot is a relatively recent phenomenon. Dutch growers bred the orange carrot in the 1500's to be sweeter and less bitter than the yellow varieties. They were trying to "nationalize" the carrot by cross-breeding yellow carrots with the purple variety.

All of this was done to impress the House of Orange which returned the honor by adopting the carrot as the Royal vegetable.

This sweet orange carrot is now the dominant species across the globe although one does run into the other kinds in farmers' markets.

Adventurous (fictitious) Eating

Captain Nemo from Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, as a response to Prof. Aronnax's queries:

What you believe to be red meat, Professor, is nothing other than loin of sea turtle. Similarly, here are some dolphin livers you might mistake for stewed pork. My chef is a skilful food processor who excels at pickling and preserving these various exhibits from the ocean. Feel free to sample all of these foods. Here are some preserves of sea cucumber that a Malaysian would declare to be unrivaled in the entire world, here's cream from milk furnished by the udders of cetaceans, and sugar from the huge fucus plants in the North Sea; and finally, allow me to offer you some marmalade of sea anemone, equal to that from the tastiest fruits.

More Musings on Umami

There are three sources of umami known.

The ones that were first discovered historically were glutamates (present in konbu, parmesan, sun-dried tomatoes, tomato paste.) Others found in short order were various isosinates (present in broths made of dried bonito flakes,) and guanylates (found in high concentrations amongst shiitake mushrooms.)

The key idea here seems to be a sort of synergy. A small amount of any of them enhances the small quantities of natural umami substances already found in hundreds of foods, and the most important point is that when glutamates and isosinates are combined, they have a powerful multiplier effect, which enhances the umami-ness of the underlying food.

This pretty much explains a huge number of historical phenomena, from all over the world.

Consider the Japanese dashi. It's made from both konbu, and dried bonito flakes (katsuobushi.) You're getting a potent mix of glutamates, and isosinates. Sometimes, they add shiitake mushrooms to further enhance the mix.

Same goes for the simple pasta sauce recipe of fried pancetta, tomatoes, and dried porcini mushrooms. Talk about a triple whammy!

We can also explain the powerful spread of the tomato. In a few hundred years, it radically transformed ancient cuisines (Italy and India.) The point is that the local recipes were already very attractive before the tomato, but the addition of the tomato unleashed more of the umami qualities that were already present in minute quantities in the underlying substances.

It also explains certain truths that chefs hold dear -- young peas over older ones, ripe tomatoes over fresh ones, aged cheeses over unaged ones, and oysters in winter over summer (the latter has a health component but one that has been irrelevant for at least half a century.) Same with aged hams, and dry-aged beef, and sun-dried tomatoes (even when fresh ones are available.) Your palate is selecting for the more powerfully concentrated glutamates (and drying is just one way of achieving that.)

It should be clear why fermented fish sauces (garum/liquamen in Roman times, nahm pla in Thai food, nuoc mam in Vietnamese food), fish pastes (allec in Roman times, gkapi in Thai food), dried shrimp, and intense meat products have been popular for millenia. Likewise meat extracts (Bovril), and autolyzed yeast extracts.

This is why pizza (tomato paste and parmesan), and hamburgers, french fries, and ketchup practically constitute two religions in and of themselves.

Free glutamates are most commonly found in vegetables. Isosinic acid most commonly in meat, and animal products. This is responsible for the strong intensification when meat and vegetables are cooked together.

This is why certain Italian recipes start with "fry the pancetta, or the prosciutto" even when the ingredients are all vegetarian, and the instructions call for the pancetta to be fished out after the frying. Even a relatively poor family could afford the modest amount of meat required, but the combination of meat and vegetables is a powerful one.

That's why anchovies have been popular through the millenia, and why Thai curries and pastes can never truly be approximated in vegetarian terms. They are too dependent on the grammar of seafood and its umami. There is simply no mechanism to substitute the intense mouthfulness (= umami-ness) of gkapi (shrimp paste.)

The Paradox of Simplicity

One of the most difficult dishes to make is a Roman classic, spaghetti aio e oio (you'll also see it spelled spaghettia aglio e olio.)

The CC will make this perfectly some day, or else he will die trying.

On the surface, the recipe is as simple as it gets. Fry lots of chopped garlic in olive oil, add in parsley and red pepper flakes, some salt and lots of pepper, toss in spaghetti, mix and serve.

So you're probably thinking, what's the freakin' holdup? Just do it!

The problem is the Platonic Ideal.

The dish has to be just so: flavored but not overwhelming, slippery but neither greasy nor wet, intense but not over-powering; the spaghetti must be just under al dente so that when it is tossed, it is still cooking and will become al dente; the garlic must not burn; timing needs to be perfect etc., etc., etc.

Additionally, the problem is that there are so few ingredients that errors cannot be reversed. It is relatively easy to hide things in a large stew; a dish which is so naked has no room for error.

Hence, the paradox of simplicity.

This recipe is as simple as it gets, and yet the CC will never ever serve it in front of an audience. Murphy's Law prevails in those situations, and the CC has both impossibly high standards, and every once in a while, severe stage-fright.

"So enough about the theorizing, O CC; when you make it for yourself, how does it turn out?"

Fuckin' delicious!

"So what's the freakin' holdup?"

The Platonic Ideal still awaits. Sigh!