A Comprehensive Look at Cookbooks

There are many kind of cookbooks.

There are the real works of passion and love. Julia Child, Marcella Hazan, Paula Wolfert, Diane Kennedy and Fuchsia Dunlop are examples of these. Impeccably researched; these are veritably works of art that make you proud of the culinary arts.

Then, there are the one book-wonders; one should not be dismissive of these.

After all, it takes effort to write even that first book. In the CC's opinion, authors like Najmieh Batmanglij, and Chandra Padmanabhan lie in this domain. The first book was their magnum opus, and that was all there was to give. (Please let no one dissuade anyone from buying the magnum opus. These are sooooooooo unbelievably brilliant that you simply must own them!)

Finally, there are the money-grubbers. All they have is somebody else's recipes, and all they are trying to do is make sure they hold on to the modest efforts of the products of a civilization, and somebody else's effort.

Examples of this would be a cookbook called Cooking at Home with Pedatha. After this publication, the authors are pretty much finished. Since the actual originator of the book is dead, they have nothing more to contribute to the culinary world. They are left within the empty world of copyrights and laws, and not a whole lot more to add to the culinary arts.

Sad, really! What an empty life they must lead.

In any case, it's best to have an objective judgment between the three types of cookbooks, and learn to distinguish between them.

That Burger-y Feeling!

Jimmy Buffett's Cheeseburger in Paradise

Vaangi Baath

Finally, the moment of truth.

Yeah, the whole thing is fussy and work but deal with it. As the CC said before, this is one of the joys of life.

The recipe is a myriad of textures. Each bite is different if you make it right because of the sheer multitude of textures in the combination.

(Source: modified from Cooking at Home with Pedatha.)

Ingredients

1 cup rice
1/4 tsp turmeric powder

2 tbsp vaangi baath podi

2 japanese eggplants (cubed)
1 potato (diced medium)
1 green pepper (diced medium)
1/2 cup peas

for tempering

1 tsp mustard seeds
2 tsp urad daal
4 green chillies (sliced vertically on one side)
1 tsp asafoetida
12-16 curry leaves

the paste

1/4 cup dry coconut
2 green chillies
1/2 bunch coriander leaves (yep, leaves only!)

the powder

1/4 cup urad daal
1/4 cup chana daal (bengal gram)

Recipe

Boil the rice in plenty of salted water with the turmeric until just under soft. Drain, let cool and set aside.

Roast the dry coconut until golden. Grind with the green chillies and coriander leaves into a fine paste with the minimum amount of water possible. Scrape into a bowl.

Dry roast the two daals on low heat until they turn golden. Grind to a fine powder. Set aside.

Add half the paste, the vaangi baath podi to the rice and mix gently. (This can most effectively be done with your hands so jump in there and mix them gently.)

Heat the oil. Add the mustard seeds until they pop; add the urad daal. Add the rest of the tempering ingredients (curry leaves, asafoetida, green chillies.)

Add the chopped vegetables, and stir-fry without adding any water until done. (The order, in case it is not obvious, is necessarily potato, green pepper, eggplants.)

This step takes a looooooooooooong time so the CC advises that you chill during this step (and yes! the not adding any water makes all the difference in the world!)

Add the peas, the remaining half of the paste, and all of the prepared powder. Cook for 3-4 minutes on a low flame.

Mix all the ingredients together and serve.

Vaangi baath

Tomato Broth

The recipe bears a great deal of resemblance to your basic tomato sauce so you may want to read that first.

You must take your time with frying the tomato purée. Yes, this is Maillard. As Brahms once told a critic, "Any ass can see that!"

Ingredients

1 medium red onion (diced very fine)
4 cloves garlic (crushed)

1 lb tomatoes (passed through a food mill)

olive oil
sea salt
black pepper

Recipe

Fry the onion and the garlic at very low heat for at least 10 minutes. Yes, this matters.

Add the tomato purée, salt and pepper and fry for a bit. Let it reduce at a low heat for the better part of 20-25 mins. All the taste comes out of this extreme reduction so deal.

Add the water to dilute it to the required consistency, and let it come to a boil.

This is the point in time you can add "seasonings" (for example, rosemary, etc.) Let it simmer on a low heat for 20 mins.

You need to pass the stuff through a strainer to get the broth. Dilute further (if necessary.)

Panglossia

From Voltaire's Candide:

“Oh, Pangloss!” cried Candide, “what a strange genealogy Is not the Devil the original stock of it [syphilis]?”

“Not at all,” replied this great man, “it was a thing unavoidable, a necessary ingredient in the best of worlds; for if Columbus had not in an island of America caught this disease, which contaminates the source of life, frequently even hinders generation, and which is evidently opposed to the great end of nature, we should have neither chocolate nor cochineal.”

Vaangi Baath Podi

Before we go on to making the vaangi baath (eggplant rice with vegetables) itself, we first need to learn how to make this fairly complex spice mix.

This sounds rather mundane on the page but is a spectacularly intoxicating affair which takes quite a bit work to make but is one of the joys of life.

(And while you're whirring your coffee grinder reflect on the fact that once upon a time, people used to grind this by mortar and pestle.)

First, read this post.

(Source: Cooking at Home with Pedatha.)

Ingredients

to be roasted dry

1/4 cups coriander seeds

to be roasted in oil

1/2 cup red chillies

to be roasted in ghee

1/4 cup naagkesar
1/4 cup dagad phool
1/8 cup marati moggu
1/8 cup star anise
1/4 tsp cardamom
1/4 tbsp cloves
1/4 tbsp nutmeg
1 stalk mace

Recipe

Roast the coriander on a low flame first till golden. Set aside.

Roast the chillies in very little oil on a low flame till crisp and bright red but not brown. Set aside.

Roast each ingredient SEPARATELY in the barest of bare minimum of ghee until done, and set aside.

Combine everything and grind to a fine powder. Store in a dry airtight container.

Parade of the Terminally Useless

That's an "electric wine opener". Independent of what Wine Spectator might say, "never go full retard".

A North-Indian Winter's Lunch

Long beans with cumin and ajwain
♥
Bhutte ka saag
♥
Methi-mutter-malai
♥
Makke di roti

The Depression Special

Food, Glorious Food from Oliver!

π

This is too geeky for words but the CC loves it!

Food, and books, and math, and edible books, and edible math, how could you possibly NOT love it?

Marati Moggu

After the spate of depressing posts about ingredients that you may or may not be able to find, finally a post where you can make legitimate substitutions.

This is the dried fruit of the caper tree (Latin: capparis spinosa; Indian: marati moggu, marathi moggu, etc.)

If you can't find it, take salt-cured capers (not vinegar-cured), wash the salt off, and dry in the sun (or at your lowest oven setting below 200°F for 90-120 minutes depending on the size of the capers.)

Unsurprisingly, it tastes like capers but the drying changes the flavor enough to be worth it, and you can store it for a long time.

The CC vaguely remembers that "dried capers" are a Greek specialty but he could be wrong about this one.

Star Anise

A classic of Chinese and Vietnamese cooking, this is a probably fairly well known spice. (Latin: Illicium verum.)

It has an anise-like smell (no surprises there!) and should be fairly easy to find everywhere.

Naag kesar

The CC is at a loss as to how to describe this except that it's called "cobra's saffron" in English (naagkesar, nagkesar, etc. in various Indian languages) (Latin name: Mesua ferrea.)

You need this for various recipes. Absolutely critical. Sorry folks, you're on your own on this one. The CC doesn't have any way to help you out (yes, the CC feels bad about this bait-n-switch.)

Tourists!

The BBC reports: Fish market allows tourists back.

The world's largest fish market is reversing a month-old ban on tourists at its riotous early-morning auctions.

Access to the tuna auctions were restricted on 15 December, the start of the market's busiest trading period.

Tsukiji is known as the source of fresh sushi and sashimi to top restaurants around the world.

Tsukiji market in the Japanese capital Tokyo had accused tourists of flouting hygiene rules and causing disruption with flash photography.

Some tourists had been caught hugging, licking and even riding the huge frozen tuna that are Tsukiji's most arresting sight, an official said.

Exotic

Two days ago, while shopping at the Temple of Food™, the CC encountered a middle-aged woman muttering to herself about "exotic ingredients" while her nervous bored husband hung around the edges wondering what exactly he had gotten himself into.

Then finding what she wanted, she looked at the CC and murmured in a soothing matronly voice, "Cumin is so exotic."

And the CC wanted to tell her, "Lady! Cumin is not exotic. Katsuobushi blocks and dried whole caper fruits are exotic. You need to get out more often."

But he was unerringly polite. This was a mistake. Someday in his anec-dotage, he will regret being polite.

Culinary Finds

Finds at the markets this week:

Squid ink
♦
Radhuni
♦
Ras-el-hanout
♦
Cubeb peppers
♦
California Bay Leaves

Who are we kiddin'?

The CC hates to admit it but every once in a while he peruses the food rags. Of late, he's been seeing a spate of articles featuring what can only be absurdly exotic food substances for the vast majority of the readers.

One of the articles feature goat's milk. Another features abalone mushrooms.

Really?!? C'mon now, pull the other one.

The CC lives in New York, arguably where it's easy enough to find the most exotic of exotics, and he hops on the train to hit the regional markets in Queens pretty often.

However, even something so basic as "unhomogenized milk" was hard to come by before last year. You can't even find katsuobushi blocks and a box grater (which costs about $2, he might add!)

Fresh epazote? fresh curry leaves? fresh holy basil? Hope you like to travel!

The CC understands the need for these rags to "be ahead of the curve" and "push the envelope" but goat's milk? Forget about it! It ain't happenin'.

It makes you want to reach out for a cheeseburger instead.

Everybody loves bacon (Redux)

Apparently, these heirloom beans called marrow beans taste like bacon.

The CC hasn't verified it himself but several friends have confirmed that they do indeed have a rich meaty bacon-y taste.

Dagad Phool

This is a dried lichen (yep!) used in Indian cooking. (Latin: parmelia perlata.)

Certainly the only example of a lichen the CC knows off that's used as a spice.

It has a characteristic unmistakable woodsy musky earthy smell (not quite truffle-esque, and not quite morel-esque but unmistakably earthy.)

Anyone who claims to make the very Maharastrian goda masala or the Andhra vaangi baath podi without this is pretty much clueless about food.

It seems to have a reputation as an aphrodisiac (unverified by the CC but that's another "hello truffles!")

A Modest Apologia

Over the next week, the CC will be making posts on several ingredients that are (relatively) difficult to find (or, at least the CC hasn't found the right spots yet.)

Some have legitimate substitutions and others don't.

Even the CC is at the mercy of his generous (and indulgent) parents (and other friends, etc.) who ship him the dried spices from all over the world.

On a blog that wishes to be about "food in all its glorious multitude", there are few alternatives if the CC wishes to proceed.

The CC begs your indulgence.

Least Counts

Whenever the CC reads a cookbook with the phrase, "This makes one cup of the spice mixture. It can be stored for future use", he rolls his eyes, and contempates ordering takeout.

Yes, we love cooking; yes, we are perfectly capable of spending hours to perfect a fine dish; and yes, we are willing to spend hours and days traveling great distances to find obscure ingredients.

But no, we do not wish to eat the same thing for the rest of the year, or even for lunch the next morning.

Shouldn't this be freakin' obvious?

So one cup of a complex spice mixture which takes an hour to make where the recipe calls for two tablespoons is a bit more than the CC's patience can endure.

What's the real problem? It's one of least counts really. To accurately render a recipe, you need to get down to fractional quantities which is not always possible.

What to do?

Scale down the recipe.

The CC has no problem down to 1/4th or even 1/8th of a tsp. He is perfectly capable of smashing an appropriate spice with his trusty pestle, keeping the appropriate amount, and discarding the rest.

However, scaling down is trickier than it sounds. To "correctly" scale down a "suitably large" spice recipe, one cannot just divide everything by 4 (or whatever.) Typically (but not always!), to do a good job, if you scale the largest stuff by 4 then you must scale the "intermediate" stuff by 3, and the smaller stuff by 2, and the smallest stuff not at all.

There is an intrinsic non-linear twist in the scaling down (the reverse for scaling up.)

Amateur chefs make this mistake all the time. They don't understand this.

And no, inspite of the CC's ultra-rational bent, he does not know why this is the "right" way to do things. He just knows empirically that this is the thing to do in many (but not all) cases.

Does the CC contradict himself? Very well then, the CC contradicts himself. The CC is small, and yet he contains multitudes.

Maybe the molecular gastronomy people would like to weigh in?

What to do after you've made the spice mix and used some but not all?

[1] Store some, and dump the rest, and call it a boredom tax. Yes, this is wasteful but eminently rational. (The spice mix will lose its potency before you ever reuse it.)

[2] Make the 1 cup version, and hand out as gifts to all your friends who will never make the recipe anyway. It will assuage your soul while it languishes in their spice cabinet, and they will toss it out at a future date. (You can short-circuit this process by tossing it out right away.)

[3] Buy a micro-scale (although it just might be cheaper to do the tossing because micro-scales are more expensive than spices. Yep, the CC is rational.)

[4] Have an array of powders some refrigerated and others not (as appropriate.) This assumes you don't live in Manhattan, London, Hong Kong, or San Francisco where space trades at a premium.

[5] Some pastes/powders freeze well. This actually works out in practice.

Anybody have better ideas on the subject?

Flavors for 2009

NPR states: Forecast For 2009: Anniversaries, Flavors And More.

Lynn Dornblaser of the global research firm Mintel shares her top five flavors for 2009: lavender, cactus, persimmon, masala and chimichurri.

Since masala is a catch-all term for "ground spices", the CC supposes that all flavors are "in" which is an assessment that he cannot disagree with on logical grounds.

A bit worthless as a prediction though.