Off the Bone

Sicilian pasta sauce combines fennel, sardines, anchovies, raisins, pine nuts, just a touch of tomato with a few strands of saffron, and a bit of onion. It is a late-summer dish, prepared when one can gather wild fennel and when freshly caught sardines are available. It is rich and bright, sweet and savory at the same time - I say this with confidence, although I have tried only an inferior version, marred by numerous compromizes - and in February, outside of Sicily, it cannot be made otherwise.

We have more or less re-learned to think of fruit and vegetables as seasonal, but it is hard to grasp the seasonality of fish. We are spoiled by the year-round abundance of staple fish - salmon, cod, swordfish, tuna - and perhaps do not care enough to notice the comings and goings of the numerous supporting cast. After several fruitless attempts to get fresh sardines at my usual suspects for such fare - Whole Foods and Harvest - I researched the matter, only to discover that fresh sardines are a late-summer fish. They are caught, it seems, year round off the coast of Florida, but much of that catch probably goes into canning factories. Sardines are one of the very few canned foods with a strong fan following and “gourme” varieties, usually packed in olive oil.

Fennel is the second strongly seasonal component. It grows wild in California - and, of course, Sicily - and Ms. Hazan recommends that you use leaves. I have seen recipes that called for fennel bulbs, and I suspect that they simply reconciled themselves to American supermarket realities: the bulbs of cultivated fennel are much larger than those of its wild cousin, and sometimes they are sold entirely leafless. Nonetheless, leafy sorts can be found, and I suggest you try them; you can later sautee the sliced bulbs with a bit of olive oil and parsley, and have yourself a lovely light supper. Finoccio, or Florence fennel, is supposed to be superior in all regards, and is available for twice the price of ordinary fennel at farmers’ markets in summer.

Anchovies also come in a variety of grades. The best are plump, packed in salt in large tins, and sold by weight. Rinse them in cold water, scrape off the skin, remove the dorsal fin, open the fishy up with your thumb, flatten it, and remove the spine and loose bones. Rinse again, and cover in olive oil. Thus prepared, anchovies will last in the fridge for up to two weeks in a covered container. Most likely, you will get your anchovies already prepared and in tins - those packed in olive oil are, again, best.

The rest of the ingredients are probably already in your pantry (if pine nuts are among them, move them to the freezer - they’ll be much happier).

(more…)

Meyer lemons are one of those 5 dollar ingredients that have become a commonplace over the last few years, the sort that were once the preserve of high-end restaurants looking for a reason to charge more for lemon sorbet. This sort of thing always makes me feel conflicted, knowing in the back of my head that it’s industrial agriculture and the food network at the root of this largesse, wondering what’s going on to provide them to us at $1.29/lb at Fairway, wondering whether these capture anything of the quality that made them so sought after in the first place.

Technically speaking, a Meyer isn’t really a lemon at all, but a cross between a lemon and either an orange or a tangerine. Last I checked, no one actually knew which, though gene sequencing might have sorted that out by now. They’ve been around a long, long time – long enough to actually be propagated as an independent species. Originally from the Orient, they might be the only fruit to take their name from a merchant rather than a farmer or consumer – Mr. Meyer was the first person to import them into the US, back in 1910. Some books describe them as looking like small oranges – as the photo above demonstrates, this is entirely correct, assuming you allow that oranges can sometimes be deep yellow and pointy at both ends and altogether lemony in their appearance.¹

I’d never actually worked with Meyer lemons before, and though I’ve read descriptions, and had Meyer flavoured desserts, there really isn’t, clearly, any way to figure out what exactly these have to offer except by using them yourself. This, at least, is how I justified the impulse buy. My specimens were conventional, from California, but my tastebuds indicated they were of at least respectable quality. Still, I am under no illusions that these hit the heights all fruits are capable of achieving. (two words: Japanese. Melons.)

Their skin is thin, with distinct floral notes wafting around the classic citrus tang to mark this fruit out as something special. Mild enough to eat on their own, I found over the weekend that their delicacy was lost (without even a lemon zing remaining) when used in a conventional lemon cake recipe – this is a fruit that needs showcasing, and perhaps even deserves it. The flesh and juice are complex, never entirely sweet, but with the same floral tones as the skin, and also a grapefruit-like oomph, a ringing, hollow bitterness that’s not at all like what you’d get from citrus pith.

What, in the end, convinced me that this is an ingredient worth revisiting, was a flourless citrus cake (adapted from Martha Rose Shulman, and the only pareve cake I know). I normally use oranges, or ideally, mandarins and limes, for this, but the Meyer lemons gave this cake a dimension, a positively singing high note, that I’d never known it could have. Round out with mascarpone, or underscore with a bare-bones chocolate sauce.

Recipe and footnotes follow – and I would make this a fancy schmancy link if only it were as simple to do in wordpress as it is in LJ.

(more…)

I hope this is the only piece that I will start this way, but the best use for Weetabix is as a weapon. Properly soaked, it holds together in flight and explodes spectacularly on impact, drenching your opponent with milk and covering him in shards of bran. It is so perfect for food fights that one cannot escape the conclusion that it was designed with this specific purpose in mind. Especially since Weetabix is not, objectively speaking, very good eating. It is a loosely pressed biscuit of tiny dried whole wheat flakes which goes soggy the moment you add enough milk to stop it being dry. It is English, and has been around since the 1940s, which should not come as a surprise in any way.

My love for Weetabix is deep and irrational, and I have never been in a food fight. I’ve been told all about them, though, over many a morning bowl of soggy wheat biscuits, happy and tired and energized and sweaty after the morning jog with two sweet and quirky and wonderful boys.

Every morning at 6.30 we would meet in an empty parking lot, cold and sleepy in our identical green school track suits, and run the hilly mile along a quiet road to an outlying boarding house and back. We did not talk, and were all the closer for it. I always hoped - and never managed - to catch a glimpse of either the housemaster or the head boy of Camberlot when we stopped outside before heading back, for I had crushes on both of them. By the time we returned, exhausted and happy after the last steep upward stretch, breakfast was about to be served, and we proudly staked our places at the head of the line, looking down our noses on sleepy girls - also in green school tracksuits - who tumbled down the stairs to stand behind us, and talking about food fights and much else besides. Life was good. And there was Weetabix. And you could build a Stonehenge out of it, if you borrowed some buiscuits from friends.

If you choose to buy some Weetabix for breakfast - Whole Foods now carries it, and perhaps a few other places - you could dress it up in yogurt and fruit (perhaps with a bit of milk), or mix with milk and dry fruits and nuts to make it more exciting. But it’s wonderful, really, in its plain sogginess.

Stakhanovite gets her East European on from time to time, and so we went a combing the lower East Side this weekend in search of a place to feed her soul.

It’s interesting to see how Europe sort of slips from East to West, how in a way the cultural change is almost imperceptible. It’s something I don’t think Americans really feel, judging by the conversations I’ve had about regional identity. Americans seem to break their country up into very distinct chunks, broken up along one line or another. The grits line. The Texas border. The barbecue line. Stakhanovite and her friends portray Russian as almost Polish and Polish as almost Czech and Czech as almost Austrian… Stakhanovite is Russian, but we found ourselves in a Polish restaurant, and that was close enough – and I don’t mean this in a flippant way. Russian and Polish cuisine share far more than the two languages do, and Stakhanovite declared her inner East European well satisfied.

The Lower East Side (which really starts much further south), was once a part of Eastern Europe, but only traces remain now – yet they are beautiful traces, both in terms of quality and in the sheer fact that they’ve stayed, allowing time to move on around them and revealing the genealogy of the place. Like geological cores. There’s the Second Avenue Deli, of course, and Moishe’s Bake Shop, which never, ever quite manages to live up to the expectations its window creates (and admittedly they are high), and several Polish butchers – of which more later, and the whole of mini-Ukraine (sadly devoid of gastronomic interest).

We found ourselves in a place called Polonia, on First Ave, and we were happy as soon as we walked in, for the place looked like a truck stop and sounded like it was in Poland. It was in a basement, and the air was thick enough to see the sunlight. The floor was checkerboard linoleum, and a lunch counter, near invisible beneath trays of nasty looking pastries, occupied a third of the room. Dour men with white hair and hard hands ate kielbasa, sinking it with something that might have been strudel. I’m not well up on Polish baking. The tables were saved for retirees, and neighbourhood families brunching. Prices for working men who ate there every day, prices at which I’ll go back for pierogies. Often. The kitchen staff consisted of three babushkas, talking about their grandchildren in Polish – it must have been the first kitchen I’ve ever seen in New York without a Mexican dishwasher. One of the babushkas was on dish duty, but I’m guessing they take turns.

Polish food, when possible, consists of meat, meat and more meat. And this was decent meat – kielbasa was juicy and smoky and snapped pleasantly when cut, and bigos, the national dish, a sort of choucroute garnie, was based on heavy duty sauerkraut. You could taste the effort that had gone into its creation, almost down to the last peppercorn, and it was full of little brown bits of meaty goodness. Though flavourful, the sauerkraut could have been younger and fresher – not a flaw, merely a stylistic choice. Pierogi, filled with sauerkraut and mushrooms, splendid. About as good as you can make pierogi without slathering them in schmaltz. The only item of true quality, though, was borscht, unlike any Stakhanovite had tasted before. Beet flavour shone over a rich and savoury foundation, with a clear hint of bay leaves. The soup had a splendid tang, partly from the beet pickle juice, partly (we thought), from kvass. Forgettable dumplings floated in it, Stakhanovite thought they were a Polish touch.

We emerged blinking into the sun, and found ourselves, entirely by accident, outside the Kurowyzczy Meat Market, which people in Poland have heard of. I’m not kidding. Their window display looked like a Soviet hospital – gleaming steel trays rested on a white tiled sill, a single ham, brown and aged like oak, dumped carelessly on each one. Framed above them was a huge document, bearing the seal of the Polish ministry of agriculture and signed by someone meriting a footnote in history. It was issued in 1930, to the original Mr. Kurowyzczy. We went in, of course – their meat looked splendid, bright red, and a whole calve’s liver gorged with blood, but what people really go there for is the kielbasy (pl.). I made puppy eyes till I was allowed to take some home – Stakhanovite purchased a bit of her childhood. The shelves were a paean to the Warsaw Pact, covered in names and products she gleefully recognized (the shelves in Latvia are much less so). Like stepping onto the set of Goodbye Lenin. Buckwheat cookies. Polish pickles. Huge jars of unlabelled herring. Little fudge creams with pictures of a cow (these Stakhanovite bought) – they tasted of some universal experience of childhood, sweet and soft, cream and sugar rather than chocolate.

We went home with some ham sausage (make ham, compress into sausage shape, cure again) and kasha kishka, which is an intestine (kishka) stuffed with buckwheat groats (kasha) and pig’s blood, a Polish boudin. The ham sausage was good – it’s apparently the product the Poles esteem most highly, flavoured with garlic and peppercorns and smoke, but the kishka was a revelation. Like the best, richest, smokiest breakfast hash imaginable, and then some. It was one of those dishes with which to convert skeptics, and if any of you choose to visit me, I will feed it to you for breakfast.

Incidentally, I’ve a recommendation for what is apparently even better Polish food out in Brooklyn. I invite any interested readers to join me in a posse.

Polonia. First Avenue, between 5th and 6th. Meat costs as much as a burger, but 8 pierogi are $5.25, and are better for you. Borscht is compulsory, and they have good pumpernickel bread.

Kurowyzczy Meat Market. First Avenue, between 7th and Saint Marks. Cheaper than that ripoff that calls itself a deli in your neighbourhood.

I’ve noticed that there is no easy way to reply to a comment.

Dennis, Chris, I’ve replied to your comments.

I’m working on sorting this out, but my first search of WP documentation hasn’t suggested a way to do this. Suggestions? For now, Stakhanovite and I get notified of comments by e-mail, so assume that there will be a reply within 24 hours or so.

The Chinese will scarf down tremendous quantities of anything in the allium family, but are particularly fond of leeks because their name, in most dialects, is a near homonym of the word for wealth. If everything my grandma said was true, the number of leeks I eat should make me Bill Gates several times over, but then, I don’t know what he eats. The emperor Nero was so fond of the plant that his subjects nicknamed him porrophagus – the leek eater – he thought they would improve his singing voice.¹

The traditional way of cooking leeks, where I come from,² involves charring them in lard, in a very hot wok, then braising them with salted fish, chicken, carrots and stock. Of course, what we actually cook is not leek at all, but a variety of spring onion that grows in the mountains (this is South China, where the climate in the lowlands is too warm for leeks to grow). As with most things growing in inhospitable terrain, their flavour is intense, the maxim that hardship builds character actually holding true for plants. I’ve heard them referred to in English as “mountain chives,” but am unsure how common this name is – they might be the vaunted ramps that have found their way indiscriminately into every fashionable menu, but not having a fashionable budget, I have not verified this. They come into season around the lunar new year, which leads me to wonder whether their association with the festival is the true cause of their supposed ability to influence the micro-economy.

At any rate, the foundation of the dish is the contrast between the sweetness of the leek and the roughness of the charred edges, and the dish is given body by the use of lard as a frying fat. Having grown up eating this, my natural instinct, when dealing with leeks, is to use cured pork and high heat – and it’s a combination which works. However, Stakhanovite and Ms. Hazan have turned me on to the fact that leeks don’t actually have to be stir-fried.

Large western leeks, split in half, then done over gentle heat in olive oil and a tablespoon of water, in a covered saucepan, perhaps finished with butter, have a gentle purity of flavour leagues away from the savoury Chinese stew. This is cooking at its most basic and alchemical, the transformation of raw ingredients by application of heat and not much else. I’ve been asked why I like working with food so much – this dish is a pretty good answer. Done right, ingredients should taste both unbelievable and unmistakable, and the transformation is never more apparent than in dishes like this.

(1) Davidson, 1999.
(2) If you trace my family back a couple generations. In addition to our fondness for lilacea, the Chinese are noted for their disregard of conventional conceptions of linear time.

(more…)

Sometimes the biggest cooking projects are born out of the smallest ingredients. A few days ago I saw knobs of fresh tumeric in a store – little ginger-like things with reddish-brown skin – and bought a small piece out of curiosity. Before I knew it, I was happily chopping and prepping vegetables for two hours to make curry.

The only thing you need to know about tumeric is that it’s orange. Amazingly orange. It is said that Salvador Dali carried dried orange peel in the pockets of his coat because he loved the color. He must never have seen fresh tumeric. As I peeled off its brown skin and grated it on my shiny new Microplane grater, I could not help remembering a silly cartoon from my childhood which covered exhaustively in one pithy, catchy song the complex topic of orange-ness, by listing every darn thing that was, has ever been, or could possibly be orange, even if only in the most unlikely of circumstances. My humble translation cannot capture all the depth and lyricism (the song actually rhymes!):

Orange sea / orange sunshine
Orange summer / and an orange camel.
Orange mummies / and orange daddies
Sing – orange-ly / an orange song.

This tumeric was all sunshine and camels, and the picture does not quite do it justice. It did not taste like much, but that was beside the point.

To go with that color, I decided on a curry with acorn squash, cauliflower, French lentins, and snow peas for color and texture contrast. It came out hotter than I would have dared to make it intentionally, but pretty and tasty - certainly a recipe that I will make again.

To add to my orange tumeric, I grated some ginger, minced a couple of garlic cloves, and chopped half an onion - putting the other half into a pot with simmering lentils, where it joined a chopped carrot, a few more garlic cloves and some more ginger. I microwaved the squash – cut into medium-sized pieces – for ten minutes (to save baking time), and put it in a hot oven with a drizzle of olive oil. By the time the lentils were ready, the squash was perfectly cooked and beautifully browned.

I am not an expert of curries - I eat them occasionally, with much enjoyment, but barely cook them at all. So, to add to my tumeric, ginger, and garlic mixture, I raided our spice rack picking everything that seemed appropriate - a bit of chili, a couple of cloves, coriander and fennel seeds, and some ground cumin. I fried these in a bit of olive oil, added chopped onions, and emptied the bowl of my ground/minced goodness into the skillet (Eclectician tells me I should have ground the spices first and put them in together with minced ginger, tumeric and garlic, so I’ll try that next time). Cauliflower went in - already steamed, then lentils, snow peas and squash, and, of course, some salt. All of it was ready just as the timer beeped for my brown rice. It was delicious - and hot (from too much ginger, I think) - and orange - and green - and the fresh-crunchy of peas. The squash absorbed the spices particularly well and was marvelous.

(more…)