Off the Bone

Unlike many wild fruit of the Northern hemisphere - often too sour, too small, or too tough - wild strawberries are some of the tastiest things that can grow on plants. They are generally tiny - each little berry the size of a large pea - but each packs a wallop of flavor that puts your average supermarket strawberry to shame.

All strawberries come from the genus Fragaria, and the supermarket specimens are probably a variety of garden strawberry, F. ananassa, or F. virginiana. At least thirty other varieties grow in the wild. One prevalent both in the States and in Russia is a forest strawberry, or F. vesca - the shape and color of droplets of blood and only a little bigger. They grow in lightly wooded areas, clearings and meadows, and are garden strawberries writ large; they smell of delirium and taste of fairy tales. Like fairy tales, forest strawberries are incredibly delicate - they should be eaten within hours of picking, transport badly, squash each other with their own weight, and disintegrate or get hopelessly waterlogged if washed. Here they are not washed at all - unless you are completely paranoid, you’ll quickly forget about this hygienic glitch once you taste them.

Growing right next to forest strawberries and sometimes among them are field strawberries, F. viridis. Field berries are larger, rounder, and more sturdy, and grow on taller plants. Unlike their forest cousins, they can be picked before they are fully ripe, because they are amazingly delicious green - not yet fully sweet, but already fully flavorful, with a taunting taste of lush green and sunshine yellow and a rustle of grass. When ripe, field strawberries turn a modest pink and acquire a sweeter, more straightforward flavor.

Where wild strawberries grow, they are easy to find, growing in large rusty patches in low grass. Their season is now - forest berries are almost gone, but field strawberries are still sold in buckets in local markets an by the roadside when one drives into the country. They are a significant source of supplementary income for the local villagers.

Any true Russian will eat these berries raw and plain, perhaps with a sprinkling of sugar; after you and everyone you know can eat no more, field berries especially make excellent jam. Forest berries are also good for jam, but their season is too short and making jam out of them is generally considered a waste. Forest berries would make an excellent strawberry fool, or, for an East European touch, can be whirred together with sour cream.

From the New York Times:

Fruit to be tattooed

More on this in a few days.

Before I continue my review of freshwater fish with sturgeon, I should offer a note on translation and an apology for the increased use of Latin (for this post and the next). It is difficult to translate the names of any but the most common animals and plants accurately, because the words are sometimes missing. Russian has at least four common-knowledge names for different species of fish in the sturgeon family, and a few for different types of wild strawberries (often regionalisms, since wild strawberries even now travel much less than fish). Hence Latin. So you could look these things up if you ever have a mind to do so.

So, sturgeon. This family includes species that are firmly freshwater and those that are anadromous (i.e. live in salt water and spawn in streams). They are a very old fish family whose ancestors could already be found in the Jurassic period. Like many an old family, they have done quite well for themselves, and better in Europe than in America (where the sturgeon population was greatly reduced through pollution, damming, and overfishing). The best-known representative is perhaps beluga - the largest freshwater fish and a source of most of European caviar - but the lesser members of the family are equally valuable from the culinary viewpoint and are sufficiently valuable commercially to fall victim to regular poaching. This fate also befell the two fishies I cooked and ate - probably sterliad (Acipenser ruthenus) - freshwater native of the Black, Caspian and Azov sea basins - although they could also have been small sevrugas (A. stellatus), who are coresidential with sterliad’ and come to the same rivers to spawn. The two species have also been crossed by Soviet biologists; their offspring proved able to breed and are now called “bester.”

Sturgeons are very unusual-looking fish - and perhaps the cutest I’ve seen. The best thing about them is the snout - they have long, thin, slightly flattened noses and little whiskers that make them look perpetually curious. Sturgeon have no scales, but their bodies are covered with bony plates: five rows of sharp spiky ones (along the spine and two per side), and something on the rest of their skin that makes it slippery in one direction and sandpaper-rough in the other. These plates cannot be cleaned off - the regular ones apparently dissolve when the fish is cooked, but the rows of spikes remain dangerous and have to be watched. I was informed a few days after I was finished with my fishies that they can be peeled like tomatoes - immerse in boiling water for 10 seconds, and the skin should come off like a glove. I personally quite like the skin, despite the caution it requires.

Sturgeons of all species, are delicious, and, despite being freshwater fish, not terribly bony. If you don’t like fish at all, you may well like sturgeon. Their flesh is white, firm, meltingly smooth, delicately sweet, and not at all “fishy.” They can be smoked to marvelous effect, grilled whole, panfried, braised, or made into soup - the latter two are traditional in Russian cuisine, and for good reason. Of all fish, sturgeon makes perhaps the best stock - their spines are cartilage, and stock quickly thickens. I don’t know any truly traditional Russian recipes, and there are no great tricks to either fish soups or braises. If you decide on the latter, I suggest first making stock out of the heads and tails, then braising the rest of the fish in it (with the usual onions, smashed garlics, herbs - try dill for a more Russian take). Chill the whole thing until the braising liquid turns to jelly. Kick your family out of the kitchen if you must - it really will be much better cold.

Some notes on prep:
- use paper towels or rubber gloves to handle unskinned fish - avoiding the spikes is a pain, and the rest of the fish is really remarkably slippery
- thick skin - sharp knife
- a good way to remove the head - make deep incisions from both sides, from behind the fins to under the cheek plates, then slide the knife under the top head plate and cut the spine
- sturgeon is a fatty fish and hence forgiving of overcooking. Like with every freshwater fish, don’t undercook

The photo I have posted is somewhat inelegant – the ducks were contorted to fit the dish, you can see the gaping hole where one’s throat was slit. I cooked this a few weeks ago, for a dinner on the farm, and by the next day, nothing at all was left. Every atom of meat was gone from the bones, and the bones themselves were fed to pigs.

This is, irrefutably, my granma’s dish. When she was young, this was a dish for restaurants and celebrations, meaning it contained meat, in some form, any form. Today it still retains some of that cachet, but in an altered state. It has descended now, become commonplace, available in the market every day, usually made with little care and less respect. A culinary historian would tell you it is merely a regional variation on a technique and recipe found throughout all of China, but to think of it as such cannot capture how intensely familiar the flavours and memories are. It was the first dish my granma taught me to cook, and my grandfather craved it as he lay dying. For twenty five years, we have invited a different duck to every family reunion, and my mother and her siblings will argue over whether it tastes the way it really tasted in their youth, bursting with the arch spiciness of galangal.

The basic technique is to braise a duck (or, where we come from, a goose) in soy sauce, with Chinese five-spice, by which I mean a mixture of star anise (never just aniseed), white pepper, cinnamon, cloves and coriander. Some claim you have about equal amounts of the first two and pinches of the last, I prefer that cloves and cinnamon are a distinct presence. Either way, sweet, warm star anise should be the main flavour in the mix. Prior to braising, the duck is lacquered with a mixture of dark caramel and soy sauce, which give it the depth of colour and sheen you see in the photo. Pork, traditionally from the belly, and mushrooms also go in the broth, and firm tofu and hardboiled eggs are added at the end. In restaurants, you eat it in two courses – the breast, at room temperature, is sliced thinly across the grain, then heaped on a mound of tofu and cucumber. We dip it in rice vinegar infused with chili and garlic, diced finer than broken rice. Later in the meal, a clay pot is brought out, with head, feet, wings and the butchered carcass – the gelatinous bits of the bird, cooked and recooked till the broth is thick as honey, freshened with coriander leaf. This is eaten hot, sucked off the bones with every facial expression your mother told you not to make when you were little, the bones deposited on the plate with chopsticks and surprising delicacy. We used to eat these things because we had to stay alive – now my granma claims they keep her joints fresh and less creaky than they should be.

The pork, tofu and eggs are a separate dish in restaurants, as are the giblets – at home, the whole mess is served with huge bowls of rice. Cooked this way, a duck becomes an atlas of textures. Fat and skin offer a distinct, barely there resistance to your teeth. The lacy tenderness of the breast is completely different from the melting of the leg, the spine is almost a plaything. I didn’t consciously know that ducks had jawbones till I pulled the meat off one, and now I won’t forget. The jawbones protect the tongue, a slippery bud so sought after you can buy packets of them in Chinatown. And even the pork, pulled from the pot, is a surprise, its skin the perfect combination of firm and giving. Marco Polo brought stories of its texture back to Italy, thus introducing the concept of al dente to the country.

This preparation works well for restaurants, of course, because, as several writers have described, Chinese restaurants keep cauldrons of broth slowly simmering as long as the restaurant is open, allowing its flavour to accrete and mature over years. It used to be that you could simply order a bowl of rice doused with this gravy – and I’m sure you still can, in parts of rural China. Home cooks make do with a fresh batch each time they start, though I have secret ambitions of keeping a pot of it frozen for re-use – the broth is just superior soy sauce and water, enriched by time, care and re-use. We will cook just about anything we think could be made edible in this, from chicken feet to pig’s intestines, on the principle that if you cook it long enough, it will become soft enough to eat. This is not where Chinese cuisine demonstrates the clarity of flavour connoisseurs laud, but it captures an absolutely essential quality of good food – a realness, an acknowledgement of the whole beast, of nose and tail, of hunger, and the need to use your fingers when you eat.

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I suppose it was just a matter of time before these started making the food blog circuit, and it will be an even briefer span before we begin getting inundated with ever less interesting and more derivative ones, but for now, I suppose doing one is OK.

What is your first memory of baking/cooking on your own?

I think I was about 12, and I’d make breakfast. Chicken ramen, boiled, drained, then coated with the flavour powder (rather than putting it in soup). And ketchup. And then nuked with a couple of slices of Kraft cheddar. And I’d proudly carry it up to my mum for breakfast on Mother’s Day, along with a couple of eggs sunny side up to make it special.

Who had the most influence on your cooking?

I started to learn from my mum, but she and I have some philosophical differences about technique and butter now, thanks to my experiences in restaurant kitchens. My first chef was Chef Bright, and so he, and his sous, Ken, show up in nearly everything I do. I can trace specific techniques to specific people – Chef Damien taught me to mince garlic like you would an onion, and to cook pasta, and Chef David taught me to chop…

When in doubt, I turn to Harold McGee and the Joy of Cooking.

Do you have an old photo as ‘evidence’ of an early exposure to the culinary world and would you like to share it?

Ask my mum. Do you, ma?

Mageiricophobia - do you suffer from any cooking phobia, a dish that makes your palms sweat?

There’s a name for that? I get stage fright cooking for people a lot. Does that count? Also, I cannot, cannot make an ice cream quenelle with a tablespoon, in spite of working dessert at more banquets than I can remember.

What would be your most valued or used kitchen gadgets and/or what was the biggest let down?

My kitchenaid. Really it’s mine and Stakhanovite’s, but it lives with me. Baking as much as I do wouldn’t be possible without it.

I love my Calphalons, especially my 12” everyday pan and the 2 quart chef’s pan. I was surprised by the latter – it was of a size that I didn’t think would be good for anything, but it turns out I do everything with it, from frying rice to braising pork and baking cake.

I have two knives, a big one and a little one, and I use tongs for everything.

As far as failures go, I’m too poor to afford them. My mum has had horrible, horrible luck with peelers, though.

Name some funny or weird food combinations/dishes you really like - and probably no one else!

I have secret fantasies about feeding people vanilla and mushroom sundaes. Vanilla ice cream and shiitake mushroom sauce go really, really well together. I promise.

What are the three eatables or dishes you simply don’t want to live without?

Toscanini’s Ice Cream. Sushi. Lard. That was surprisingly easy. I almost said duck fat instead of lard, but at the end of the day, I’m Chinese.

Your favorite ice-cream…

Toscanini’s Burnt Caramel.

You will probably never eat…

Uhm. I remember a description by James Herriot of being served a slab of boiled fatback with pickles for breakfast, somewhere in the many many many miles of godforsaken countryside in England… I don’t realistically expect to be served much else that I can’t handle.

Your own signature dish…

Not mine, but my granma’s. We braise duck. The dish is simply called “braised duck” in our dialect, but it’s a preparation specific to Chao Zhou. Ask me when I fulfill that fantasy and have my own place.

A common ingredient you just can’t bring yourself to stomach…

Mon hasn’t been able to convince me to try balut, but I’d hardly call that commonplace. Nor have I been to a place where it’s actually available.

Which one culture’s food would you most like to sample on its home turf?

Everyone’s.

The people I am tagging are:

Knowing my readers, I’m wondering if this will spread to LJ now.