Off the Bone

In January, there was a massive snowstorm. I was stuck at a friend’s house in New York, and we sat inside watching the snow pile up on her table. We were both reminded of The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe. I have not read the book since I was young, but I remembered the witch luring Edmund into her sleight with Turkish Delight. At the time, I thought Turkish Delight had something to do with turkey (the bird), and was somewhat mystified by the attraction. Some time later, I learned that it was a sweet, jelly-like confection, flavored with citrus and rose. When I returned from New York, I knew I had to make my own.

There are a lot of recipes for Turkish delight on the Internet. None of them should be followed — they all have fatal flaws. My first attempt involved over an hour of stirring cornstarch and sugar over a hot stove; it came out lumpy. The second, using pectin, needed refridgeration, and wasn’t solid enough. The third produced caramel-flavored (that is, burned) candy; I still haven’t scraped all the black crud off the bottom of my good Le Creuset pan.

Finally, I discovered the recipe this is based on, and reduced it to its bare essentials. Unfortunately, it uses gelatine, so it is not vegetarian. But it’s quite easy to make, and delicious.

Ingredients:

• 3/4 c water
• 3 c sugar
•  
• 3 tbsp (4 packets) gelatine
• 1/2 c water
•  
• 2/3 cup cornstarch
• 1/2 c water
•  
• 1 tbsp orange extract
• 1 tbsp rosewater
• few drops food coloring
• (or whatever other flavors you think would be tasty)

1 cup confectioners sugar

Find a straight-sided baking pan with surface area no more than 50 square inches. Line the pan with parchment paper on the bottom and the sides.

Stir the gelatine into 1/2 c water. Whisk the cornstarch into as little water as you can get away with, but make sure there are no lumps.

Stir the water and sugar in a heavy pan over high heat. When they’re combined, wash down the sides of the pan with a wet pastry brush. You don’t want the leftover sugar crystals to cause the rest of the sugar to crystalize. Cook the mixture until it reaches 220 F.

Add the gelatine and the cornstarch to the sugar. Keep the heat on. Stir. The gelatine will melt, and the mixture will come to a boil. Add the flavorings and coloring, and boil for about five minutes, stirring constantly. Pour into the prepared pan. Unlike many confections, you can scrap the mixture from the sides of the pan.

Allow the Turkish Delight to set overnight. Then cut into cubes and roll in confectioner’s sugar. If you used too much water, or didn’t cook it for long enough, the candy might weep a little over time. Before serving, just re-roll in confectioner’s sugar.

At this time of the year, sorrel is Latvia’s most ubiquitous edible green. It’s a bright, acidic green, whose leaves resemble pointy and elongated spinach, and Latvians refer to it straightforwardly as “the sour one” – “skabenes.” It’s cheap as dirt and seems to be treated with a bit of contempt – unlike “modern” and relatively expensive spinach or lettuce it is usually purchased by fragile old ladies who probably use it for soup. My grandmother, and my great-grand mother used to make it, too – it was served cold, based on simple water or sometimes sour milk, and contained, aside from boiled sorrel, a chopped hard-boiled egg, sometimes a sauteed onion, and a dollop of sour cream. Cheap food, but also delightfully refreshing in summer.

The common garden sorrel (Rumex acetosa) is related to a whole group of other plants that all look and taste rather similar: red or sheep sorrel - Rumex acetosella, a smaller-leaved, sturdier plant; French sorrel - Rumex scuatus - which grows only in southern Europe and supposedly has more “graceful acid”; wood sorrel from the related oaxlis genus, mountain sorrel, from yet another group, and probably numerous others in various geographic regions. Aside from the simple sorrel soup, which more prosperous French peasants made with chicken stock or milk and cream instead of water, sorrel is commonly used in sauces and as a salad green. In Scandinavia it was put into bread when there wasn’t enough grain, and the Icelanders used it in liew of rennet to curdle milk for cheese.

My own sorrel experiments took me in two directions – a sorrel sauce for fish, and sorrel and leek pancakes, that I also topped with slices of smoked salmon. Both were lovely.

Sorrel sauce is an infallible combination of the green’s mild, citrusy acid and the sweetness of butter, sauteed shallot and cream. Add chopped sorrel leaves to tiny pieces of onion that are beginning to turn golden, cook until they melt (they will), and pour cream until the consistency looks right. You may notice the cream curdling a little – ignore it and keep stirring or whisking, and you’ll end up with a fine, smooth texture. Add salt and pepper if you feel like it. I used a large-ish shallot for a smallish handful of sorrel, and perhaps 100ml of cream.

For sorrel and leek pancakes, take about a cup of chopped leeks and a cup of loosely packed chopped sorrel, sautee leeks in butter until soft, add sorrel and wilt quickly. When the mixture cools, stir in one egg, two tablespoons of flour, and salt and pepper. Fry like you fry pancakes. There’s the same logic to this snack as there is to sorrel sauce – mild dairy-tinted sweetness and mild acid, and just enough simple batter to hold it together.

The only problem with sorrel is that it’s ugly as hell when cooked. From a spritely green it goes to terrible khaki-brown as soon as it wilts, either because you applied heat to it, or because you simply looked at it funny. Perhaps next time I will try to mash it up raw for sauce.

“Toadstools, miss?”

A strapping farmer grinned behind the bucket of brain-shaped fungi while I was raking my brain for their English name. Empty, but they looked like something that would sell for $40 a pound in the States. “Tell me about them!”

They were morels. Morchella esculenta . “Smorchki” in Russian. “Smorchok” is an early-summer mushroom and is considered here to be only semi-edible, although tasty - which means that it gets boiled to death before being fried, usually with onions and sourcream. Elsewhere, morels are considered a delicacy and perfectly safe to cook right away.

The hot-water treatment is the sad fate of many a delicious fungus in Eastern Europe - even boletes are sometimes brought to simmer and drained before any other cooking can begin. Perhaps it is natural caution, considering that many people pick their own mushrooms and have seen their share of somachaches when something not-quite-suitable finds its way into the pot. I am reminded of Mme. Fisher, who was once warned by an old French mushroom gatherer never to pick her own wild mushrooms - it would be pure poison in the pot - she could see it in her eyes. Parboiling, of course, would not save you from a real toadstool, and morels are known for not having any poisonous lookalikes.
edit, thanks to Coraline - there are, actually, false morels - if you ever go morel hunting, check out the key.

Morels have a deep and intense wild mushroom flavor and go well alone and with others, in soups, stews and fry-ups, with butter or olive oil or bacon fat, garlic and parsley, on pasta, in risotto, and on toast. They have terrific mouthfeel, their folds bouncy and dripping with sauce (I added sweet cream and chives to mine, as well as garlic and salt and pepper), and they are easy to cook once you get the sand out.

I prefer not to soak mushrooms - they tend to absorb water, which makes them impossible to brown - but there’s no other way to wash morels. Sand and dirt get inside the folds and, if the skin is torn, into the mushroom itself, and so can little insects. Prepare to need six changes of water or more, then leave in a collander to drain for a while before cooking. Their caps will probably break wiht all this rinsing, but the little bits are just as tasty.

For a pound of morels - half a tablespoon of butter, a small splash of olive oil, two garlic cloves, a general pinch of salt, pepper, add a small handful of snipped chives and a splash of cream in the end.

This is my rendition of Pierre Herme’s Autumn Meringue Cake, the recipe for which is given in this book, one of the very few I follow to the letter. Mine differs from the recipe only in that it’s been decorated with orange tuiles rather than the chocolate glaze he uses – the architecture of the cake is so classically structural, yet so pleasingly organic, that I felt a more revealing decoration than the glaze was wanted. I haven’t included the recipe, partly because it’s a couple miles long, and partly because it distills, in my opinion, to two beautiful little tricks.

The cake has only two components, meringue and chocolate mousse, and eating it is like sinking into the best bed you’ve ever slept on, miles deep, with thousand thread linen. It doesn’t just melt on your tongue, it sublimates. The meringue goes first, leaving behind aromas of chocolate and a certain evanescent something else – the solid component lightening the cream, rather than the other way round.

The evanescent something else, it turns out, is the meringue itself, bless Maillard¹ – cooked very, very thoroughly, so that the entire thing, right through the centre, is a pale caramel, the colour of new parchment. The Maillard reactions induced by this long, slow baking create a world of nuance in the meringue, which suggested, to different people, vanilla, flowers, nuts and ale.

The cardinal virtue of the mousse, while very decent in and of itself, was that it carried the flavours of the chocolate sauce on which it was based. This sauce is a thing of beauty, and as close to genuine Belgian chocolate as you’ll get without buying chocolates at $90 a pound. Classic Belgian chocolates often have crème fraiche in the ganache, and this flavour combination is captured in the sauce. It makes the acids in the chocolate sing out, and adds a mere hint of savour.

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A short post, because all I want to say, really, is that:

a) tuiles are damn pretty

and

b) they’re dead easy to make.

Beloved of high end pastry chefs the world over, I don’t know of another biscuit anywhere near as simple or as elegant. As my old chef would say, they look like something you’d give your partner (the political correction is mine). The beauty of tuiles is that it takes no effort whatsoever to make them gorgeous. Dump the batter on a baking sheet, and you’re good to go.

To make them curved, lift them off the baking sheet while still warm – you have to wait a minute or two after they come out of the oven, to let them get solid enough to handle – and drape them over something – anything. A rolling pin is traditional, an inverted bowl works fine, the rim of a pot will too. This is a somewhat delicate operation, involving a really thin metal spatula and a few tries, but they take their name from this practice, since in their classical form – circular cookies, with a slight curve, they evoke roof tiles, tuiles to the French.

The ones you see are orange tuiles – I like this recipe because the orange flavour is forceful and distinct, a punch belied by their appearance. It allows me to use them as cake toppers, and have them contribute a lingering aftertaste, a surprise ending, as well as texture – if you plan to eat them alone, scale the amount of orange down, and you will have a suggestion of orange groves with your tea – or omit it altogether, for the most delicate butterscotch confection possible. Because you need to refrigerate the batter overnight, these are perfect to make ahead for tea-parties and other excessively civilized occasions.

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The first trifle we made was a production, with specially-made little round sponge cakes split in half, vintage port, sweet cherries, and luscious custard. It was assembled in a well-equipped kitchen of Eclectician’s cousine, and happily consumed at a beautifully laid table to a congenial conversation that probably had something to do with wine, or literature, or Singaporean politics. I remember few things about food at those dinners - after it’s been cooked and eaten and discussed. They are memorable for the advanced planning and prep, the slightly nervous energy of last-stage cooking in an unfamiliar kitchen, and of course the meal itself, with its pleasantly civilized conversation and the knowledge that the children were safely squirrelled away upstairs just for the occasion.

The latest trifle was just for Eclectician and me, eaten in a messy kitchen on a table made rickety by the kneading of bread. It featured layers of leftover wedding cake, generous handfuls of blueberries and raspberries defrosted in the microwave, and plain yogurt mixed with some almond essense. Purists may argue that it was not a trifle at all, but the concept of purity can find better application than to such a gloriously messy combination of tastes and flavors.

The modern trifle seems to be a product of distinctly modern indecision. Our saxon forefathers knew exactly what they wanted when they ordered trifle (probably from their wives) - and they wanted custard. The earliest trifle recipe I could find comes from The Good Houswife’s Handmaid of the late 16th century and suggests flavoring the custard with rosewater and ground ginger. It could also be flavored with mace and cinnamon, or, according to one Mr. Bailey of The Household Dictionary, simply sweetened and thickened with the help of rennet and time (eggs omitted). These trifles, incidentally, were similar to fools, which were distinguished by the addition of fruit purees and sometimes alcohol, or not distinguished at all, according to John Florio, an English-born Italian who perhaps never did learn his way around the English cuisine.

In the 18th century trifles and fools went their separate ways. Fools became deserts for people who wanted fruit - with whipped cream, of course - and trifles became deserts for people who were not quite sure what they wanted. They were an excuse to eat cake (or macaroons, or amaretti, or ladyfingers), custard, whipped cream (or sieved-off froth of syllabub), fruit, and whatever sweet alcohol one’s heart desired, all at once. For once, the English knew what they were doing in the kitchen.

I got an ice cream maker a few months ago. Here in Boston, we eat ice cream all year round, so this was quite a practical investment. So far, I’ve made ice cream about once a week.

So far, my favorite ice cream recipe is chocolate ginger. Take half a pound of good dark chocolate, and chop it up. Add a half cup of sugar. Heat a cup of milk, pour it over the chocolate and whisk it until it’s smooth. Pour in two cups of heavy cream and a teaspoon of vanilla extract, and whisk some more. You don’t want to whip the cream, but putting a bit of air into it will make softer ice cream, which I prefer. Stick it in the fridge for a few hours; the colder it is going into your ice cream maker, the better the result.

Chop three ounces of crystallized ginger finely. Chunks in ice cream taste larger than they look, so chop finer than you think you should. Take some creme de cacao (or whatever other liqueur you think would be tasty), and pour it over the ginger. Let it soak while the ice cream base cools. This will keep the ginger chewy and supple when it’s frozen, since both alcohol and sugar retard freezing, as well as imparting a nice flavor.

Run the base through your ice cream maker. Add the ginger in the last five minutes of freezing. Then, put the ice cream in the freezer for a few hours to fully solidify.

Speaking of chunks in ice cream, my roommate is a huge fan complex ice cream — the kind with lots of bits and flavors. Chocolate ginger isn’t weird enough for him. So far, his favorite of my recipes is caramel swirl pecan praline. I didn’t even know what a praline was until a few weeks ago, but I knew that it came in vanilla ice cream, so I wasn’t particularly interested. For the record, praline is nuts coated in sugar cooked to the hard crack stage or even a little beyond. Since I love nuts, I decided to try praline, and discovered what I had been missing all these years.

To make the caramel, cook 1 cup sugar with 1/3 c water until it turns brown, then take it off the heat and pour 1/2 cup of cream with a 1/2 tsp of vanilla extract down the edge of the pan, slowly, so as not to cause the sugar to crystallize. Then stir to mix the cream and sugar. When it has cooled, you may need to adjust the texture with a little corn syrup.

Make vanilla ice cream base using your favorite recipe, and add chopped pralines at the end of the freezing process. Then add the caramel, pouring slowly into the running ice cream maker. Wait a minute to allow the caramel to swirl, but turn the machine off before it starts to mix.

The result: complex ice cream.

I had my first encounter with fiddlehead ferns in Whole Foods at the very beginning of spring. I did not get them that time, for some reason, and had not encountered them again - until last Wednesday at Union Square farmers market. Two cheerfully plump women at the Union Square farmers market had a box of them out, and I was hopelessly lost. Fiddlehead ferns, you see, are incredibly cute - in a way of wolf cubs rather than puppies. They look, as their name suggests, like the spiral end of a violin, elegant and compact - but also a little wild and a little rough in their peeling brown papery scales and smelling of forest.

Fiddleheads are the young coiled fronds of an ostrich fern (Matteuccia struthiopteris) - and the state vegetable of Vermont, which apparently has a state vegetable. While the fronds of all ferns go through the fiddlehead stage of development, ostrich fern fiddleheads are one of the few that are tasty and safe to eat (many others are mildly or not so mildly toxic, and unfurled fronds of all ferns are inedible). Fortunately, ostrich fern grows just about anywhere northern - from Alaska to Newfoundland, Scandinavia, Russia and the cooler parts of Asia, south to Illinois, Indiana and Ohio, in the woods and swamps - and in most gardens if their owners are into ferns at all.

Perhaps because their season is short, perhaps because they are not grown commercially, fiddleheads have a sort of a cult status. The young and hip with any pretensions to culinary sophistication ought to try them - or so the Union Square market ladies stated in no uncertain terms. Raw, they taste like an intense cucumber; cooked, they taste green - not vegetal or herbal, but a deep green of the forest. Some compare their taste to asparagus, green beans or okra, and there is indeed superficial resemblance.

The most difficult part of cooking fiddleheads is washing them. Remove the papery scales before you start - wet, they are incredibly hard to get out - and soak the coils in several changes of water until all the sand is rinsed out. It will take longer than you think. Parboil, and saute briefly in olive oil for a very simple side dish. You can find more recipes here - one can do just about anything with fiddles, it seems, including pickling - but go for the simple stuff if it’s your first time.

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On the first warm day of spring, I stood outside for an hour with my friend Maas, waiting for a hamburger. Neither of us has ever had to wait an hour for a burger, but we didn’t much care. We stood in line at the Shake Shack in Madison Park (Broadway and 23rd), surrounded by sararimen, spilling out of offices like gophers from their holes. This being Manhattan, the park is completely ringed by offices, and it all felt a little urban-blight, the earth still hard and cold, the trees not yet in bud, suits pouring into the square like a scene from the Matrix.

The Shake Shack really is a shack, pretty much, right down to the wriggly tin siding, standing in the middle of a park. It looks like the sort of place that should serve burgers and hot dogs, and where you can get a Mars bar to sink them with. There are, however, several clues to its aspirations – the polished retro of its billboards, and, when Maas and I were there, the New Yorker cover in its window, declaring it the best burger in the city. That, and the lines tailing away from it.

The shack maintains a wine list. This seems like pretension, at odds with the very genuine appeal of the place. Its burgers do not fit wine – they’re more like the ultimate slider, thin by the standards of the upmarket burgers you see these days, and unashamedly plain and ever so slightly greasy - but you have to wonder if you can make a burger without the grease. They come in a wax paper pocket, a pleasingly 50s bit of detail. They claim to cook to medium rare (perhaps they pair better with wine that way?) but ours were cooked through, with a decent griddle crust, thoroughly, beautifully flavourful, intense hits of beef in dripping soaked buns. These weren’t meaty burgers, burgers pretending to be steak, tender, bloody, the meat almost sweet – these were unabashedly patties. A good burger, when cooked to well done, is a progression of textures, like good sushi – a crust, then an effortless dissolve, then a crowd of tiny, chewy grains. The shack claims they’re made of sirloin and brisket, and serves them on a buttered potato-bread bun.

A sign in elegant Century Gothic informs you that the shack, in addition to shakes, serves Concretes. A concrete costs twice as much as a burger. This should tell you a lot. They only come in one size – small, and even then, finishing one is an effort. A concrete is not a shake, but a frozen custard (and some time I will do a write-up on custards and the differences between them) – a St. Louis invention, claimed by this place that guarantees that their concretes will stay in the cup even when you turn it upside down. I haven’t poked too deeply into the history of this horror, but Ted Drewes seems to have a fairly convincing argument, in the same way that a chainsaw in a philosophical debate is convincing. Whatever its heritage, this was easily the best chocolate shake I’ve ever had, quite possibly because it was not a shake. I don’t know if it was just the quality of the chocolate, or the whisper of salinity in eggs, but the depth of flavour in that cup was truly remarkable. I wasn’t a huge fan of the texture – why go to all that effort when you can use a spoon – but the warmth of the day had melted it some by the time I tried it, making a straw just about reasonable.

Some meals are just perfect – the only way this one could have been better was if we were 16, and playing truant.

The Shake Shack is at Broadway and 23rd, in the park. Opening hours change seasonally, it is always open for lunch. Burgers are cheap and concretes are expensive.