Off the Bone

Maastrictian asked last night why rubbing stainless steel over a chopping board removes the odour of garlic.

The short answer is: I don’t really know, but then again, neither do any of experts I consulted. Nonetheless, with the aid of Harold McGee, the interweb, and lessons beaten into me by my middle school chemistry teacher, I have a long answer for you.

To begin with, McGee notes that acid ingredients, like vinegar and lemon juice, are traditionally used to mask the flavour of less than perfect fish because the free hydrogen bonds with the noxious compounds in fish. This process doesn’t actually neutralize their smell, but it does cause the offending molecules to become positively rather than negatively charged, which makes it easier for them to bond with water and other molecules, essentially gluing the odious bits down.

Knowing that rubbing your hands with a lump of stainless steel also helps remove the fishy odour, the suspicion must be that a similar process, based on static electricity, is at work. It’s entirely possible that a similar chemical reaction is actually taking place, but I couldn’t easily find enough information about the molecular structure of stainless steel to say.

This shows the chemical structure of the molecule responsible for the distinctive garlic smell. Someone who knows more than I do about chemistry should be able to figure out whether everything I’ve just written about fish will apply to garlic.

That it is good to know what you eat and how it got there. Even if you can’t pick it in the woods yourself, as Stakhanovite has been doing.

Britain Prosecutes Organic Food Fraud from the Guardian Online.

The English garden. Canadians hunt. Americans grill burgers in their back yards. Latvians pick mushrooms.* Every summer weekend thousands of people head into the woods armed with knives, baskets, avarice and a gentle urge to commune with nature.

My interest in mushroom picking could have come from anywhere, but as it happens it was first piqued by my tennis coach Valera. Round and bouncy, Valera most resembled a balding tennis ball and drove a boxy old Volvo the color of the sky on a miserable winter day. We lived in the same neighborhood and he would drive me to the courts, his first lesson of the day. “Hundreds of them!” he’d yell excitedly after we exchanged greetings and he turned down the bellowing radio that was tentatively attached to his car by a confusion of twisted wires. “Unbelievable! We could have cut them with a scythe - woosh! And the smell!”

Valera picked cepes somewhere West of Riga, near an old Soviet military base, climbing over a no-longer guarded fence to get into the former military grounds. People have done stranger things. Our good friend L. drove alone into the barely-familiar woods a dozen of kilometers from the nearest town, on a near empty gas tank, on Friday night to have the first pick of the harvest of ‘redcaps’ (also a member of the bolete family, Boletus aurantiacus) before the predictable weekend influx of urban mushroom hunters. She never made it to the mushroom spot, getting lost, then stuck, and returning after dark on the last fumes of gas.

These are sensible, intelligent people. But mushrooms mess with your brain. All of them.

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Williamstown, MA, is just a little too quiet to be called a one horse town. One cow comes closer to an accurate description, but that implies a certain rural cachet, the presence of farms, a hope for mushrooms in the woods and wild strawberries, or perhaps a stream in which trout may be had.

Life is full of disappointments.

The closest I’ve come to summer bounty is a co-op which claims to support farming in the Berkshires. As far as I can tell, there are three farmers here. One grows mesclun, one grows spinach, and one makes pretty good sheep’s milk yoghurt. To the staff at Wild Oats,¹ a hint – prefixing the farmer’s first name to the produce doesn’t make it taste any better if it’s not already worth eating. The remainder of Berkshire agriculture is apparently located on mercifully anonymous, supposedly organic farms in Chile, and none of the farmers can tell ripe fruit from rock. I’ve thought about asking the staff why they’re getting fruit from Chile in the height of summer, but worry that this conversation may end in violence. Of course, I visited a local “farmer’s market” last week, which consisted of two pickup trucks – one look at their broccoli sent me fleeing to Stop&Shop. How, exactly, did it come to be that I can get better produce in a city 2 hours drive from the nearest farm than in the middle of the countryside?

A lonely beekeeper named Bernie Graney is the saving grace of local agriculture, producing raw honey for ridiculously low prices. It’s creamy and gritty and tastes like life. Honey and butter and bread will keep you going for a surprisingly long time, and remind me of Tom Bombadil.

Between the post-apocalyptic produce and 18 hour work days at the Williamstown Theatre Festival, I haven’t had the chance to cook anything worth writing about for the last two months. Rather, I’ve written home for stuff to cook – and home, (hi, ma!) has responded with Astro-Fu. Each brick (the one on the left is the edible one) is 2 by 2 3/4 inches, and a little over 1/2” thick, and weighs about the same as the thoughts of an 18 year old actress. Uncooked, it reminds me of pumice in both appearance and texture, and I’m saving a piece to use in the shower when I run out of soap next week.

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My mother and I never shared a kitchen. She stopped cooking soon after I learned to boil an egg, put as much jam on my bread as I wanted, and eat the tasty things on my plate first, not necessarily bothering with the rest. Having thus given me an excellent culinary background she waltzed out of the kitchen, sure that from then on I could take care of myself. Ever since mom’s happily subsisted on fruit and sandwiches. When remodeling our kitchen, she chose extra closet space over an oven, and a cast-iron skillet for bliny over all other kitchen gadgets - including a peeler, a collander, and a chopping board. Bliny is the only thing mom cooks - with great skill and style.

The kitchen is Riga is now unquestionably my kitchen - still sans oven, but now with peeler, collander and a chopping board. But there’s still something about cooking for your mother. I try to show off. A lot. This is how zucchini pancakes were born.

May Clotilde of Chocolate and Zucchini forgive me, but I’m often at a loss with zucchini. They are such pretty vegetables, and so good for you, and so plentiful in summer, and mom loves them… But to me they just don’t taste of much. I always buy them and usually end up grilling or roasting to concentrate the mild flavor, or gently caramelizing them, cubed, on a dry skillet, letting the pale flesh turn golden. Here, sadly, roasting is out of the question, and caramelizing is more delicious than impressive. Hence pancakes: they come out very tender, emphasizing the gentle creaminess of zucchini, and the tomato and chevre filling gives a bright burst of flavor. They are also exceedingly simple.

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