Characters

In the world of the interest groups, sub-cultures and Madison Ave., it is hard to believe that true characters ever walked the earth.

One of the finest is Pellegrino Artusi, an Italian who wrote the first pan-Italian cookbook barely twenty years after the unification of Italy.

It is important to remember that Italy was comprised of a whole bunch of nation states (no different than Greece or India) and that there was no such thing as "Italian" cuisine (and there still isn't.)

Anyway, La scienza in cucina e l'arte di mangiare bene (The Science of Cooking and the Art of Eating Well) is a masterpiece. It is a delight to read, and a delight to follow.

Modern ideas like weights and measures are simply non-existent. You need to be familiar with the context to start with. (Even in a modern setting, this is not too hard if you know what you're doing.)

But best of all, our guide is a raconteur par excellence. We get a lovely recipe of a minestrone which starts by describing the author's near-death experience by his ingesting a minestrone at Livorno. He thought it was cholera when he spent the night expelling fluids from two parts of his body and having to walk to the communal toilet, but it later turned out not to be cholera after all. So delighted is the author by the fact of not being dead that he follows it up in an adjacent sentence by not only telling you that he fled to Florence but also by giving you good advice of how best to chop up the onions that are needed for the recipe. And then the recipe continues for a whole page.

Madison Avenue, eat your heart out! Those interest groups never spent a night in a communal shitter nor ever started a recipe with one.

Shocking? Disgusting? Deliciously delightful?

You pick.

From start to finish, it's not just a compendium of recipes from all over Italy but it's filled with total and utter bullshit, fairly dubious scientific insight, and a style that would drive modern editors crazy. Nevertheless, it's also imparts a true understanding of how people actually cook (bullshit and all), and hence implicitly, what they are trying to achieve as a precise product.

Your knowledge of Italiana is incomplete without it, and the CC strongly urges anyone with an interest in Italian cooking that they get a copy pronto.

Pellegrino Artusi's Minestrone

Start by making the usual meat broth, and cooking in it a handful of shelled fresh beans. If the beans are dry, then simmer them in water until they soften. Then cut some Savoy cabbage, spinach, and a little chard into thin slices, and soak them in cold water. Then, to get the water of the vegetables, place them on the fire in a dry saucepan. Drain the contents well, pressing them firmly with a wooden spoon to get rid of the excess water. For a minestrone that serves four to five people, finely chop 40 grams of fatty prosciutto, a clove of garlic, and a sprig of parsley, and sauté them together. Add this to the saucepan, along with some celery and carrots, one potato, one zucchini, and very little onion, all cut into short, thin slices. Add the beans, and if you wish, some pork rind (as some people like to do), and a bit of tomato sauce or tomato paste. Season with salt and pepper and cook in the broth. As a last ingredient add enough rice to absorb most of the liquid, and before removing the minestrone from the fire throw in a good pinch of Parmesan cheese.

I should warn you that this is not a soup for weak stomachs.

Gobo

Root vegetable commonly known as burdock in English, quite delicious but hard to find.

Bring back the yummy vegetables of yore; what's wrong with the world?

Summer Corn Chowder

Corn chowder (recipe link)

Bowls

Possibly the most silly thing to write about on this blog but its summer which means silly, so here's a rave disguised as a rant. How's that for true inversion?

If you want to be a good chef, and the CC knows you do ("why else are you here?") buy lots of bowls.

Lots of glass bowls. Deep glass bowls. With rims.

Rims. Rims. Rims. Rims. Rims.

Did you miss it the first few times? Rims; glass bowls with rims.

You also need bowls of different sizes. Mostly for the mise-en-place (but that's obvious, right?)

The glass part is obvious. It's non-reactive, blah-blah-blah. All the chemists understand this , and so should you from your high-school chemistry beakers and pipettes and burettes, etc.

Rims. Now there's technical practice triumphs over theory.

The appreciation of the fine rim is subtle. It is in the the realm of the connoisseur not the amateur.

Let's enumerate the most obvious:

[1] covering with plastic wrap to store,
[2] filtration using stuff on top so you need a "grip" (e.g. food mill),
[3] cheese cloth cover tied with twine under the rim (porous but clean)

The list is endless. You will rue the day you refuse the rim.

The difference between a good and a great chef is whether they understand the need for a good rim.

Sea Urchin

It looks like "baby poo" but it tastes like the sea, all iodine-y and squishy. A completely acquired taste (which you may have encountered by its Japanese name, uni.)

It is totally necessary to first appreciate the role of texture as a primary determinant of culinary excellence. The Chinese capture the notion best by calling the idea of texture as kou gan or "mouth feel". Not a whole lot of prizes for guessing which side of the divide the CC comes down upon.

Just for the record, what you're eating are the gonads of the creature, and that's the only edible part. That it was considered an "aphrodisiac" by parallel association should be obvious.

Delacroix's Lobsters

One of the many masterpieces by the French Romantic, Eugène Delacroix, his "Still life with lobsters" (1826-27.)

Before anything else, take a good luck at the picture again.

First, there's a landscape receding into the horizon in true perspective. You see the horses and the huntsmen in the background; you see the muskets and the game bags; you see the shot hare, some other game birds, a pheasant.

And you see a lobster.

What on earth is a lobster doing in a scene about game? This makes no sense.

And even more bizarrely the lobster is obviously cooked (from the color), and the rest of the game is clearly raw.

Shades of Surrealism a century before it took root? A Dali before his time? Trying to outdo Nerval?

Not quite.

To understand the image, we need to take a tour to Galen (129 A.D.), an ancient physician whose theories dominated medicine and food for more than a millenium.

Each person supposedly has a temperament composed of four elements: air (warm and wet), earth (cold and dry), fire (hot and dry) and water (cold and wet.)

Likewise each food had a characteristic warmth and coldness, dryness and wetness. More importantly, cooking could transform this.

The goal was balance. (The Chinese, independently, came up with a similar scheme.)

Before you rush out to totally declare "scientific" bullshit on these concepts, permit the CC to forward two thoughts.

One is that this idea of balance is not particularly different from your modern idea of "balancing" proteins, carbohydrates and fats. The details are different but the idea of "balance" has propagated to modern times just in a different guise.

Secondly, if you believe in "vitamins" (which is a buncha catchall compounds which are totally unrelated), you're basically just as unscientific.

(Lest the above not be clear, nobody is denying the importance of the various "vitamin" compounds for the human body. What is being denied is that they have anything to do with each other. They don't. They are lumped together because they've always been lumped together, and nothing could be more unscientific than that. Even the name is bullshit because it comes from "vital amine" and yet, vitamin C is not an amine at all.)

So a lot of bad blather has propagated to modern times under a "scientific" guise.

Back to the original Galen balance. Whatever you feel about Galen, you are going to deal with it in an artistic context which is metaphorical not scientific.

The lobsters (cold and wet) are there to balance out the game (hares and jays - warm and dry.) The pheasant is provided as an idea of the "ideal" because it was considered the perfect balanced food. The metaphor of the soaring wing of the pheasant should be reasonably obvious in this context.

Like most imagery that comes out of a medieval context, Delacroix's is rather sophisticated. And it behooves us to understand where it came from, and where it is headed later in the context of surrealism.

Coffee Addiction?

Somewhere roughly between 1732 and 1734, Bach wrote, essentially, a miniature comic opera, popularly known as the Coffee Cantata (BWV 211.)

Featuring such lovely lyrics as "Schweigt stille, plaudert nicht" ("Be still, stop chattering"), it's basically an ode to the trials and tribulations of coffee addiction.

The mini-cantata ends with the trio which exults in the fact that "drinking coffee is natural".

And never a truer word was said.

Anardana

Dried seeds of a particularly tart variety of pomegranate.

They are powdered, and add a wonderful tart aroma to dishes. One of those Persian ideas that migrated its way to Central Asia, and thenceforth via the Mughals to India.

Grated Cauliflower Frittata

Yeah, you heard that right, and it's gonna be a spicy Mediterranean affair.


Ingredients

12 eggs

1 cauliflower (grated with a grater)
1 large red onion (diced fine)
veggies (grated carrots, peas, slivered beans)

1 tbsp harissa

1/2 cup grated parmiagiano-reggiano

1/4 cup flat parsley (chopped)

sea salt
black pepper

olive oil

Recipe

Fry the onions. Then the harissa. After you stop sneezing, fry the veggies.

Finally the cauliflower but really quickly because the brassica family will stink otherwise.

Let it all cool.

Meanwhile, beat the eggs, salt, pepper, parm in a bowl. Add the above mixture after it is cool.

Y'all know how to make a frittata, right? If not, haul your ass down to the archives and do some homework.

Herbaceously Yours

Copyright © 2003, James T. Ehler (published with permission.)

Across

2. Aromatic daisy-like flower used to make hot beverages and shampoos.
5. Agrimony genus plant used in the French liqueur Arquebuse.
7. Liquorice-flavored seeds or oil used in cookies and cakes.
8. Salvia species.
10. Small Mediterranean evergreen tree with small blackish berries and glossy aromatic leaves.
11. Aromatic bitter herb used in candy and cough lozenges.
15. Licorice.
17. Dwarf Mediterranean annual long cultivated for its aromatic seeds.
18. A plant of the genus Actaea having conspicuous, acrid, poisonous berries.
19. Aromatic fresh or dried gray-green leaves used widely as seasoning for meats, fowl and game.
20. Eurasian perennial herb with white flowers that emit flammable vapor in hot weather.
21. Poisonous fetid Old World herb having sticky hairy leaves and yellow-brown flowers
22. Yarrow, field hop, old man's pepper, soldier's woundwort, thousand-seal.

Down

1. Narrow-leaved green herbage used by grazing animals.
2. Good in sauerkraut, bread and soft cheese spreads.
3. Spanish missionaries marked the Mission Trail in California with these pungent seeds.
4. 250,000 'threads' to the pound.
6. Reddish fleshy growth that covers another round spice.
9. Deadly poison used in arrows.
10. Lemon, Bee or Gilead?
12. Named after its edicinal use for disorders of the eye.
13. Hallucinogenic in excess; prison inmates' special?
14. Candy and 'dough' manufacturing both alike?
16. Pot marjoram.

Snooty McSnootington

The CC is snooty about his mangoes.

If you've only eaten the bad Mexican fruits that pretend to be mangoes, you should know that your life has been incomplete.

Attached below are a brief sampler of varieties (photos courtesy of College of Agriculture, Pune.)

Mangoes ripen for a brief season between April and June in India.

Their virtues are all different. Their tastes and textures are really hard to describe (sweetness, pulpiness, mineral-taste, etc.)

Kesar flowers at the end of the season when the others are but a memory. Paayri is primarily used for its pulpy juice.

Besides the ever famous Alphonso (which the US exchanged for a nuclear deal), missing below are such delightful varieties as the Dussehri, Langra, Chausa, Totapuri, and the Banganpalli. (Of these, the CC should single out the delightful Dussehri for those that have not had the pleasure.)

Aamrapalli
Alphonso (haphus)
Mankur
Paayri
Kesar
Naarliyo
Sardar
Sindhu

Tamatar Shorba

8 pounds of fresh farmers' market tomatoes and a really hot summer's day. What's a crazy chef to do?

Make tomato soup, of course. Rich tomato-ey, cumin-y goodness.

We've seen this recipe before but it's time for a detailed revisit.

Note the changes as improvements in technique, and also various simplifications.

Ingredients

8 lbs tomatoes (quartered)

2 large red onions (diced)
1 large potato (unpeeled, diced)

4 tbsp cumin (read below!)
1 tbsp whole peppercorns
1" ginger (chopped coarsely)

12 curry leaves

2-3 tbsp cumin seeds (read below!)
2 tbsp "home-made" tomato paste (but substitute commercial, you wimps!)

sea salt
extra-virgin olive oil

Recipe

Fry the onions at a low heat. When dark pink, add the curry leaves, half the cumin, the peppercorns and fry for a bit. Fry the ginger for a bit. Then finally, fry the potatoes for a while. (All of this frying should be languid and will probably take 20 minutes.)

Add the quartered tomatoes, and turn the heat to an extreme low. Resist the temptation to turn up the heat. After about 30 minutes, stir so that all the tomatoes are dunked in the liquid. Let it cook for another 20-30 minutes until the potatoes are quite soft.

In a separate pot, heat some olive oil. Fry the rest of the cumin, followed by the tomato paste.

Now pass the first liquid mixture through the finest sieve of a food mill directly into the second pot.

Turn the heat on extreme low, and let it simmer uncovered.

Skim, baby, skim. Every 10 minutes.

Let the soup reduce. You are better off reducing the soup beyond the desired consistency and then thinning it as necessary.

The Happy Threesome

This trio may be clichéd but it works: walnuts, stilton, pears.

In the modern culinary world, this trio is really like watching your great-aunt put on the latest hip flower-laced jeans and rappin' it out with Fitty Cent.

Which is embarassing.

However, your great-aunt was alive before Fitty so it's important to know why she's the way she is.

It's the sweet-salt combo plus the crunchy-velvety combo. Texture matters so do the taste buds.

Sweet are the pears and salty is the stilton. Crunchy is the texture of the walnuts, and differently crunchy are the pears; velvety is the stilton which blends beautifully with the equally velvety texture of the chewed walnuts and pears.

What's most important to note is that humans may have evolved but their palates haven't. We still love the same things our two-thousand year old ancestors did.

That still means sweet, salt and fat, mes amis, and rappin' it out with your great-aunt.

Beluga Lentils

They're shiny black when cooked, and look very much like black beluga caviar. The taste is suitably lentil-ly with a slight mineral edge.

Gorgeous in salads especially with lemon and olive oil. Absolutely stunning in stuffed roasted vegetables.

When cooked in excess water, the water will turn jet black which should be used to make a gorgeous vegetarian risotto nero.