Pistachio Soup

This unusual soup is an Iranian Jewish recipe.

It's best served cold and it's even better the second day. You can make it elegant and smooth or leave it with a slightly grainy texture. Both are delightful.

The best part is you can make it ahead of time, and when a heat wave strikes like in New York right now, there's nothing like an ice-cold slurp of deliciousness to cool you down.

A couple of warnings:

The soup's tastes and textures do not come "alive" until the last step so you are likely to go WTF on the CC until the end. Have faith and carry on!

The soup is "rich" so a small portion goes a long way.

Since the CC is the CC, he can't help but point out a few things.

Note the use of nuts and sweetness in what is essentially to modern palates, a savory dish. The medieval origins of this dish are really extraordinarily clear.

The CC's dinner companion noted that the dish tasted "Indian". The CC was forced to point out that much that is considered "Indian" is not Indian at all. The Persians cast a long shadow on not just Indian cuisine but India as a whole.

The Mughal emperors imported not just chefs but also mercenary soldiers from Persia. Indian classical music is a clear outgrowth of Persian models of the same (although, in all fairness, they did take it much much further!) In fact, a significant portion of modern-day Hindi vocabulary is nothing more than your routine Persian vocabulary.

This characteristic use of sweet and savory with a heavy usage of nuts is a hallmark of Persian cuisine and this dish exemplifies it completely.

On a separate note, what makes this recipe "Jewish"? It's just a recipe, right?

The answer is that the recipe can easily be made pareve if necessary. (Just use water instead of stock.) There is a rich tradition in Judaic recipes from Spain, Morocco, Iran and India that are basically vegetarian or so close that their substitution makes little difference.

The medieval Judaic cook loved flexibility at her dinner table as much as her modern-day counterpart. The easiest way to serve your guests is to develop a repertoire of recipes that can bend to the rules of  kashrut without breaking them!

There's a learning lesson if ever there was one.


(Source: Yotam Ottolenghi.)

Pistachio Soup

Ingredients

1 2/3 cups raw pistachios
1 leek coarsely chopped
4 shallots coarsely chopped
1/2" ginger coarsely chopped
1/2 tsp roasted ground cumin
4 cups chicken stock (use water if you're vegetarian - vegetable stock will NOT work!)

1 cup juice of Seville orange

OR

juice of 1 small lemon
1 cup orange juice

2 tbsp. butter
sea salt
black pepper

Recipe

NOTE: Please read the instructions carefully. There are clear steps and they matter.

Pour boiling water over the pistachios and steep for 1 minute.

Pour 4 tbsp. of the same boiling water over the saffron and let it steep.

After a minute, rub the pistachios under running water to get rid of the skin. You will not be able to get rid of all of it but do your best. This matters if you want the color of the soup to not be a dull brown. If the color doesn't matter, you can skip this step.

Preheat the oven to 350°F.

Roast the pistachios for 8 minutes. Be careful. They have a tendency to burn. Reserve a few for the garnish.

Heat the butter in a pan. Add the leeks, shallots, ginger, cumin, salt and pepper and fry languidly on a medium-low heat for about 12 minutes. Add the stock and the pistachios and bring to a simmer. Add most of the saffron liquid and let cook at a low heat for about 20 minutes.

Blend the soup with a hand blender until quite smooth. (This was hard. If you blend it again the next day, you get a much more refined soup.)

Take off the heat. Add the lemon and orange juice.

Serve with a drizzle of the saffron liquid and the reserved pistachios.

The Dark Side of Pastoral

The genre of food writing both memoir and cookbook are the last gasp of the Pastoral.

The pastoral is the genre of art, literature or music which depicts rural life as lived in harmony with nature preferably according to the seasons. It's heyday was in the Romantic era late into the Industrial Revolution. The revolution had created a massive upheaval and migration from rural to urban centers. It also created massive wealth through increased productivity.

It was possible then for an urban aesthete to romanticize the myth of the unsoiled countryside clashing violently with the notably apparent grime of urbanity and thus mythologize the past.

If you find yourself thinking that this resembles a massive number of books in recent time about the "joys" of farm life, you would be entirely correct.

There is a book published recently by a woman who married a Japanese farmer, and the book is spectacular, of course, but the CC was a little puzzled that she could afford a modern house with fancy equipment in rural Japan. A teeny-tiny little dig beneath the surface, you find out that she made her money running an English school.

The book is selling a fantasy.

The blunt truth is that there is very little money to be made in farming. The reason is simple. It requires minimal skill. Any farmer in rural Africa or Asia can do the job so there's a ton of supply and only a fixed demand which goes up only slowly as populations rise.

There is an exception naturally. As any good economist would tell you that it consists of having a high demand and only limited supply. In this context, it would mean selling a unique product that nobody else produces.

This explains the rush for obscure heirloom tomatoes, varieties of eggplants, herbs, etc. The CC should also mention the existence of Sembikiya in Japan where "perfect" fruit is sold akin to jewelry (with prices to match!) These are luxury items and can easily sustain a livelihood.

Of course, you could always be a "gentleman farmer" as can be seen in the books of Jane Austen but the wealth has always been obtained from somewhere else. The farm is a consumption item not one of production, and the consumption comes attached with the genuine pleasure in consuming a superior product.

So as Ricardo might have understood it, you might as well out-source the problem, and consume the finest produce, meat and seafood that other people can procure or produce better than you unless you happen to be skilled at its production which case the CC would appreciate an invitation!

Technical Artistry

At its broadest level, the art of cooking is split into three broad categories - cooking, bread-making, and pastry.

It's routinely mentioned that the pastry-making is a science but the remaining two are arts. Ever wonder why that is the case?

Let's digress since the CC loves digressions (particularly when they shed light on the subject via metaphor.)

Many moons ago when the CC was but a wee lad, he studied chemistry. Inorganic chemistry was all moonlight and madness but organic chemistry was systematic and staid. It took twenty further years to figure out why this was the case and the answer is obvious as all answers, in hindsight, routinely are.

Organic chemistry consists of studying just three molecules (carbon, hydrogen, oxygen) which have the advantage of being "light" (meaning: the quantum mechanics is particularly simple.)

(You can add in the rest - nitrogen, phosphorus, sulfur, etc. but it doesn't change the basic fact.)

So it's simple because it's a highly restrictive system. The interactions are easy to understand and model.

Compare with inorganic chemistry (100+ fuckers!) with complex quantum interactions and you've gotten yourself a mess.

What does this have to do with cooking?

Everything as it turns out.

Pastry-making consists of manipulating just four variables - flour, eggs, milk^†, sugar. The products are complex but the interaction can be modeled almost perfectly. Even better, the products are regulated so you know exactly how much fat and water there is in the milk and you can weigh the flour, eggs and sugar. There is total control.

Compare it with cooking - you have almost no control. The ripeness of roughly 200+ ingredients varies, the meat and fish vary in complex ways, and the water content of vegetables changes with the seasons.

Bread-making, at least classically, is the same. You have no control over the starter (= combination of yeast + bacteria.) Plus, it changes seasonally with the temperature and humidity.

So you must improvise even though you know the rough path of the score.

Pastry-making is score-driven. Cooking needs basic routine and technique but is ultimately improvisatory.

Cooking is jazz, baby!

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† Milk includes milk-related products like butter, cream, cheese, etc.