Off the Bone

For as long as I can remember, Easter has been about painting eggs.

Shallow, yes. But some rituals are too lovely to pass up - even if one has thoroughly lapsed in one’s faith, or never had it anyway, and even if one lives in a police state that frowns on religious practice, no matter how frivolous. In the 1980s, of course, nobody could seriously expect to be arrested for egg painting - at most one might get told off at work - and everybody did it. Even if it was Lenin’s birthday, and it made a baby Lenin cry (presumably). It happened once, in my early childhood memory, and my family painted eggs AND lay flowers at the foot of Lenin’s monument, cheerfully reconciling what the Soviet regime had been unable to reconcile for seven decades.

Eggs are a great fun to make, especially if you are a kid. Painting is really a misnomer - traditionally, some eggs were painted, with great skill and regional variation, but eggs for simple eating are usually dyed with onion skins, and come out a beautiful reddish-brown. My family sometimes used food coloring, but there is something almost mystical about lowering eggs into a labyrinth of onion skins and simmering water, and fishing them out a few minutes later, transformed.

This year my Hungarian roommate and I decided to have a real Easter, painted eggs and all. And since hardboiled eggs are not enough, we also made broiled lamb with fresh mint chutney, fingerling potatoes with parsley butter, shaved braised asparagus, a Hungarian Easter bread, and some rhubarb compote. I will break our implicit rules here and post another picture - behind the cut - because you must see the lamb.

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It is spring, and bunnies are afoot. This can only mean one thing, and your neighborhood butcher probably knows what it is. Mario did - and after he pulled out a box of skinned rabbits out of his chiller for us, and picked one up and stretched it out to show us, and informed us that he had only four left out of a shipment of twenty five, there was only so much we could do. We brought one home, and Eclectician got a kick out of the idea of me eating things that used to be white and fluffy.

Cuteness aside, I do find it odd that we eat things that are so pregnant with meaning, particularly at the time when that meaning is brought to the fore. Rabbits in early spring. Lamb at Easter. It smacks of symbolic cannibalism - the kind that stems from intense identification with the subject, embodied in such storytelling tropes as women eating their children (a frequent theme in European witch trials) and people consuming the bodies of loved ones after their death (in Japanese folklore, I was told).

To return to rabbits, they turned out to be delicious. Like so many other things out there, they taste kind of like chicken, but more flavorful than any chicken you have ever tasted. The rabbit from Mario became a luscious Sunday lunch - breaded, friend, and served on salad greens with rabbit sauce. For the sauce, everything but the meaty saddle and hind legs was thorougly browned and boiled, and the resulting broth was reduced. We were served another rabbit for Saturday dinner at Isaac’s; it was braised in Chianti with onions and carrots and came out amazing. The braising liquid was sopped up with olive and oat rolls from the Bobolink Farm. Both rabbits disappeared too quickly for us to even think of taking a picture.

Astounding, powerful and multi-layered. Super-ripe, goopy, washed rind (I think), cows milk, from Bobolink Dairy in Vernon, NJ. It smells almost like Roquefort, but isn’t quite as cool. Roquefort carries the smell of the cave with it, and its aroma comes out to meet you. This one is quieter. The on the palate, its impact comes from punchy ale notes (higher than most of the washed rinds I’ve had), but it also has the woodsy, mushroomy elements you find in the classic soft cheeses, Camembert and Brie. Marine saltiness, a touch of Roquefort acid. Sharp isn’t quite the word for this – it has this almost alcoholic ring (which seems characteristic of this farm’s cheeses, being present in most of the ones I’ve had).

I have tremendous respect for this farm, which makes the best Cheddar I have ever tasted, and does so in the most responsible manner they can manage. They make this cheese with the last milk of autumn each year. If you like the round, mild softies, Endgame will be a rewarding introduction to the wider world – of Livarot, of Epoisse – of pungent aromas you know exist but have not yet dared to sample. Once past the initial whoop, you will meet an awesome groundswell of soft cheese flavours to rival the best French specimens I’ve tried.

These aren’t the best macs I’ve made – but it is the best photograph of macarons I’ve taken. You can tell, because these don’t really have “feet,” the rough ring around the base of the macarons you can see here and here. Mine, by comparison, look kind of flat and smug and cynical, like their idea of fun is mugging the fluffy, innocent things in the other photos. The main problem with these was that I misunderstood the recipe, which is easier to do than you might think, because professional recipes give nothing but proportions, assuming that the cook will know what to do with them.

Macs are basically meringue, which, as everyone knows, expand when heated, and feet are created when the top of the macaron is strong enough to trap the expanding gases rather than cracking in a manner which might seem random, but is really the product of completely predictable microprocesses involving protein networks and water evaporation. In such a macaron, the only line of weakness is a uniform ring between the base (where they’re in contact with the baking sheet) and the shell, so the expanding gases force the shell off whole, and the feet are created by an outward explosion around the base.

The key to achieving this ring of weakness is to create a meringue which is stable everywhere except around this ring – which is to say that it has to retain water better everywhere else (the reasons for this are a whole other article). Suffice it to say that water allows the meringue to maintain its structure till the egg proteins have been heated enough to bond, after which the protein bonds will hold everything together. The shell, then, is nothing more than a patch of meringue which retained water particularly well, created by dusting the macarons with fine sugar, and waiting for the sugar to melt before being subjected to the stresses of the oven. Since sugar is hygroscopic, this kick of sugar helps the tops retain water long enough to form the shell.

In addition to creating feet, the shell emerges from the oven perfectly smooth - a very French gesture – from the people who make pastry with stencils and straight edges, and weigh out batter by the gram. Italians, by contrast, seem to think it’s fine for the tops of their cookies to look like they were created with a hammer, and don’t always bother with the shell for their macs, which they call amaretti. Indeed, the crazy tops are part of the look of amaretti, and are created by sprinkling sugar over the cookies and baking them straight away, without waiting. Amaretti, incidentally, means “little bitter things,” and they were apparently eaten with aperitifs, though I haven’t come across any recipes which might be in the least bit bitter.

The pictures you’ll find of macarons tend to depict a Necco wafer palette, in pastel greens and yellows and pinks, with chocolate and white – these colours tend to be the result of food colouring. With the exception of chocolate and pistachio, flavourings tend to be incorporated into the cream rather than the macaron itself, which always made me want to try making macarons with ground-up vitamin pills as a colouring agent. They have a fantastic nutritional content anyway – matching a powerbar, in many respects, and are sufficiently delectable that the thought of eating nothing but macarons takes a couple seconds to disgust me.

I encourage you to try this recipe – it’s a great introduction to two basic techniques – dealing with egg whites, and using a piping bag, and is far easier than it looks. As you might notice, it produces plain rather than chocolate macarons, but I also know that it works perfectly. =)

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But would have happened later if not for the pernicious prompting of the miscreant Mr. Clark.

The chicken rings had a more delicate, nuanced flavour than a normal chickwich. I took this to be a result of the tiny black flecks in the batter, which I can only hope were ground herbs. They were also more interesting texturally, eschewing the bland, pleasant almost-crispness of chickwich flesh (the exteriors were, of course, similarly crunchy), in favour of a braver, intriguingly natural mouthfeel. Fries were obviously frozen and no better than can be had from the supermarket, but the famed sliders were quite an experience. I wasn’t aware you could make a burger so thin. Each burger provided four perfect mouthfuls, each mouthful such a perfect balance between sweetness, chemical grease and salt it would have made Ducasse cry. The raw patties look like fresh spam when they hit the grill, ruddy and pink as babies.

I love the way they portion. Burgers come in quartets, or cases. Fries can be bought by the sack. One day, I need to buy a case of burgers, toss the contents, and laminate the box for use as a briefcase. This urge captures the experience of White Castle in my neighbourhood quite well – half the people there were obviously regulars, the other four were hipsters in pointy shoes and aviator shades.

Eclectician and I had a dinner at Henrietta’s Table a few weeks back. It was a crowded Saturday eveniing, so we sat at the bar, and enjoyed ESPN coverage of some track meet, marvelling that Henrietta’s would show sports at all.

Henrietta’s cooking philosophy is very basic - take good ingredients and treat them simply. In general, this is what I like to do with my food, too, and although I expect more finesse and imagination from a restaurant, it does mean that I get ideas for home cooking. Like a cauliflower and carrot soup.

This is a lovely soup - made out of winter ingredients, but summery-orange and fresh-tasting, and very easy to make. It may be tempting to push this soup in a sweet carroty direction - and you may, of course, do just that, adding perhaps some ginger and other warm spices - but hold back on carrots and let the cauliflower shine; the lighter and more vegetal flavor balance is very enjoyable.

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1) Walk to your grocer and buy some spinach. Do not skip this step, for the power of this meal to dispel doubt rests upon it.

2) Return. Put some salted water on the boil for pasta. Wash your spinach in very cold water (any remaining doubt will flee).

3) Slice a couple cloves of garlic very thin (this version has red onion, and no parmesan). If your spinach leaves are unmanageably large, reduce them to manageable size. Baby spinach is a perfect size.

4) Your water should be boiling right about now. Add pasta. I use linguine. You can use any long pasta, but all I ever got when I was young was spaghetti, and all I ever wanted was linguine, and now that I’m living on my own, I’m damn well using linguine.

5) Place evoo and garlic in pan, and sweat for a while over medium heat. I don’t know why, but starting the garlic cold just works better for some dishes. Wash chopping board and knife.

6) Crank heat, add spinach – there should be water clinging to the leaves. Salt and pepper. Toss a couple times, cover the pan and let the spinach steam for a minute. At this point, the pasta should be ready to drain.

7) Drain pasta. Uncover pan, wait a minute, throw pasta in. Toss a few times. Kill heat. Add an egg, lightly beaten (egg whites for the cautious). Dash of evoo. Cover pan. Wash other utensils.

8) Add fresh ricotta, or grated parmesan. Black pepper.

This is a meal I find myself making at least twice a month. Its strengths are many – I can put the warm pan in my lap and eat it while reading the news. I can rely on having either parmagiano reggiano or good ricotta in my fridge, and one or the other will always save the dish if the spinach is poor. It’s done, including the dishes, in only barely more time than it takes to boil pasta. Best of all, I can do it while thinking about something else, and by the time I’m done eating, I’m usually done thinking, painlessly.

All of these apply to you, plus it will make you faster at doing dishes.

Addendum: evoo = extra virgin olive oil. Sorry.

So you have a starter. Perhaps you have made one from scratch, perhaps a friend gave you one, or maybe you even got some dried starter online. If you take good care of it, it will last forever, one generation of yeast and bacteria replacing another, and it will develop its own, distinct, complext taste.

Healthy starter smells a little like apples - a little sweet and mildly acidic. It contains two types of living beings - yeast, and bacteria from the genus Lactobacillus. Yeast produces bubbles of carbon dioxide, which gives the bread volume, and lactobacilli produce lactic and acetic acids, which give the bread flavor. The acetic acid is the really sour stuff here - if there’s too much of it, the starter will smell vinegary. It develops particularlly well at warmer temperatures, so keeping your starter relatively cool is a good thing (70F is good).

All this life has to be sustained, so your starter has to be fed. Let’s assume that you have five ounces of starter sitting around, containing 50% flour and 50% water by weight (this is, in fact, what I have).

The most hassle-free to take care of it is simply to feed every time you bake. There are only two simple principles to be observed: you always have to at least double the weight of your starter when feeding; and you should make sure that after you have taken all the starter you need for baking, you have your 5oz left over for the future. The flour you feed must be unbleached. Organic is best - you don’t have to bake with organic flour, but do give it to your little pets.

So, let’s say your recipe asks for 10oz of levain build (active starter that you will incorporate into bread dough), add 5oz of flour and 5oz of water to your 5oz of starter, and when the mixture is bubbling merrily and ready to use in bread, remove 5oz back into your jar (which you have now washed thorougly - you don’t want any extraneous bacteria in your mix). These 5oz are now refreshed and happy. Unless you are planning to bake again within 8 hours, put the jar in the fridge, in one of the warmer spots - temperatures below 8C (or 46F) are damaging for wild yeast.

If you only need 3oz of levain build for your bread - add 2.5oz flour and 2.5oz water (doubling the weight of your starter); reserve 5oz for the next bake and toss the remaining 2oz.

The more often you bake, the happier and more active your starter will be, but even if you don’t bake for a while, you must feed it at least once a week. In that case, simply toss half of what you have, and add fresh water and flour in correct proportion to double the weight. You may leave it at room temperature for a few hours, or you may put it straight into the fridge - the yeast doesn’t go dormant, it just becomes very very slow. In the next few days you will see your starter bubble and swell in slow motion, and it’s rather cool. Remember to wash the jar regularly - perhaps every other time you feed.

If you notice that your beasties become sluggish, and your levain build takes longer to ripen than usual - all other things being equal, especially the temperature - give them some potato water instead of plain stuff (your next loaf will probably taste a bit of potatoes, but the effect wears off). Alternatively, you can substitute some of the white flour with whole wheat variety or even rye, which contains more nutrients. After the starter perks up, you can gradually go back to all-white.