Off the Bone

I learned at Williamstown that nasty, underripe plums from Stop&Shop make decent tomatoes. I’d quarter and sauté them with a pinch of salt and pepper, and then add them to pasta or whatever (you might want to try this, by the way – an interesting experiment in taste), because the actual tomatoes I could get were filthy waxy things that I wouldn’t throw at Dubya if they put him in the stocks.

Actually, I’ll have to think that one over a little.

I was introduced to plums by a tiny Japanese woman in a hole in the wall on 2nd and 10th, directly across from the 2nd Avenue Deli. The woman’s name is Chika Tilman, and the hole in the wall is called Chika-licious. Chika-licious is a dessert restaurant, and probably unique in my dining experience, and for fear that I’ll spend this entire entry raving about it, that’s all I’m going to say for now.

Diana likes plums (I thought they were the things you passed by on your way to the peaches at the market), and at the time, Mrs. Tilman had a bruleed plum on her menu. This plum was literally the second best piece of fruit I’ve ever tasted – crisp as a cucumber, and yet so overwhelmingly, perfectly ripe you could have worn its smell as perfume. We didn’t so much eat it as sink into its flavour, so deep and joyously floral we felt positively unworthy. It took us a while to catch our breath. Mrs. Tilman, during a lull in service, nibbled on the other half of the plum she served us, holding it to her mouth with both hands, like a bowl of tea. Gingerly, not daring to believe she would divulge her source, I asked where I might find these objects of wonder.

“I ship them from a farm in California,” she said, and took another bite of the plum. That was the last time a woman broke my heart.

Every plum I’ve had since then has been bought in a forlorn hope of matching that perfect, perfect half-plum that we had, but most have, in themselves, been lovely eating. When Diana came down for the first time this year, we went and bought a handful of every sort of plum we saw in Union Square. Neither of us had ever really thought there was so much variety to be had – in the photo, you see Victoria plums and Ozark plums, and Japanese and Castletons and Elephant Hearts. Friars and Simcas and little Greengages, found the next day, didn’t make it into the picture (the Greengages, sadly, were in poor shape, but this variety is supposedly the best eating plum around).

Our favourite, by far, were the Elephant Hearts, slightly mottled, very much heart shaped, with brilliant crimson flesh. You get a floral explosion when you bite into them, honey and a touch of cherry and exquisite grape, with sleek, mild tannins in the skin. The good ones get pleasantly tart in the middle, poorer ones just kind of peter out. Friar plums are miniature versions of the black plums you see all over the place, and correspondingly more intense – their black skin has a powerful tannic kick. The plums referred to in plum pudding, incidentally, aren’t necessarily plums at all, but any sort of dried fruit - the word was used in medieval times as a generic term. A similar confusion from the opposite side of the planet results in umeboshi, known to us as Japanese pickled plums, actually being a sort of apricot. Prunes (a prune is a plum, in French) are made from varieties with a high sugar content, close relatives of the Victoria or Italian plums - California prunes are apparently made with a variety known as prune d’Agens, which the French thought particularly estimable.

We ate all the Elephant Hearts, juice running down our chins and hands, and turned most of the rest into plum tarts – based on fouace instead of tart crust. Fouace is an enriched bread, much like brioche, but sweeter, eggier and heavier, almost to the point of cakiness (oddly, it’s less buttery). It worked well, we thought – but it’s honestly almost too much trouble to go to, not because the fouace is at all hard to make, but because at this time of year, the plums are so good you should just eat them as you walk down the street, smiling as you go.

A good brunch is inconceivable without good company. One can, and sometimes needs to, eat one’s breakfast, lunch or dinner in solitude, but brunch is meant to be a convival affair, intimate but lively, where conversation flows as freely as coffee and one can afford to pay relatively little attention to food. After all, how adventurous can one get with eggs? (I shall leave aside my own misplaced childhood creativity, when I gleefully combined hard-boiled eggs with halved tomatoes and dots of sour cream to create replicas of highly poisonous mushrooms. They are known in Russian under the cheerful name of “death to flies.”)

The company at our housewarming brunch last Sunday was delightful, and the company has asked us to write about our quiches, so I will, after indulging in a little historical commentary.

As it happens, eggs had nothing to do with brunch as it appeared in England in the late 19th century (adding to the long list of British culinary contributions, such as the sandwich, banoffee pie, and Magna Carta). Brunch as a word was apparently invented in 1895 by Mr. Guy Beringer of Hunter’s Weekly, who wrote a passionate plea for introducing brunch as a meal. It was to be enjoyed upon returning from a Sunday morning hunt - or upon finally emerging out of bed after Saturday night’s carousing. It looked much like a caffeine-spiked dinner, less soup and vegetables, comprising cold cuts, meat loaves, ham toasts, and roasted larks for the ladies. Eggs became prominent only after brunch caught on in the States in the 1930s, first in hotel restaurants, then just about everywhere else. It was, I believe, a fortunate development.

Poached eggs and omelette have a longer brunch history than quiches do - perhaps because they are more impressive and less likely to be made for breakfast on a regular basis. They are hardly difficult, although making twelve individual ones might wear one down. Quiches are easy to make for any crowd, and flexible enough to accommodate any degree of culinary experimentation. The most difficult part of a quiche is the crust, and even here the difficulty is largely a myth, especially if you settle for a pat-in-the-pan crust that does not require any rolling. The rest of the quiche is simply filling bound with custard, baked until set. The number of possible fillings is infinite - the Joy will give you a good range of classics, and I have even seen quiche cook books - an example of soulless commercial publishing if ever there was one, for a quiche filling can be anything you want to make it (just don’t make it too wet), and the best cookbook is your own imagination. The two quiches we served were spinach and blue cheese, and roasted peppers, onions, and gouda.

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Diana has lived seven years in Boston, and I feel I’ve lived there almost as long, yet we are only now discovering huge tracts of the city previously unknown to us. The South End feels like one of the quieter stretches of Greenwich Village, not yet stretched into a hideous botoxed movie-set version of a street people used to live on. Flour Bakery strikes the same delicate balance, hip without being paralytically so, well thought out and well designed, but with an imperfection here and there, a bit of reassuring mess - but only in the decor - the food was deft and carefully crafted.

The sandwiches we ate here were better than we’ve had at Darwin’s, and if you’ve lived in Boston any length of time, you’re already running to the South End. On the right is a roast lamb sandwich, done perfectly rare, with that energetic texture lamb has, tender and slightly chewy, its flavour gentle yet distinct. The red is sweet pepper relish and the white, herbed chevre (read: boursin). On the left is the best tuna sandwich I’ve ever had, better even than the ones my mum used to make me, three inches of home-made bread and tuna and tomato and onion and pepper, the bread (and this is important) soaked with the liquid from the salad and still chewy. This one has tuna and chives, hardboiled eggs and a relatively mild tapenade, and a thick layer of spinach, and I never thought you could make a tuna sandwich so well planned and perfectly balanced. Both are made (Flour gives you no choice in this matter, and choice is unnecessary) on 3/4” thick slices of their house white, a beautiful bread with crumb as close and tender as brioche, baked just short of crusty for easier eating in a sandwich.

Raspberry seltzer was what soda should be, very raspberry, medium sweet and chiffon pink. I don’t know if they make the syrup themselves, but if they buy it, I’d like to buy some.

I was unable to resist the lure of a craquelin for dessert – it sounded like such a perfect breakfast – a fist of brioche wrapped around bitter marmalade, the top given a crust of sugar and almonds. I have no idea if this is an actual French pastry, but the prospect of getting these fresh from the oven each morning would make me pay the rents in the neighbourhood (if I could). Diana had an unreasonably large cup of “trifle” – lemon pound cake, chocolate mousse cake and berries, smashed with some whipped cream. This, while pretty good in and of itself (and a lovely use for leftover cake) left me feeling vaguely dissatisfied, on the grounds that goddamnit real trifle has custard, even if you make it with frozen berries, store-bought sponge and custard from a little plastic cup. When I said so, Diana bopped me on the head, which I thought was rather unjust, considering that I didn’t even mention this to the staff.

Flour is at 1595 Washington Street in the South End, at the corner of Washington and Rutland. The easiest way to reach it from Camberville is to take the #1 bus down Mass Ave and get off at Mass Ave and Washington, then walk the rest. The walk will make you happy – the neighbourhood has a graceful, moneyed reserve, and is dotted with places that made us wish we could eat several lunches in a day. And we came across a garage sale en route, at which we found an enameled cast iron skillet (from Belgium!). Carrying it around Harvard Square later, I got several requests to fry eggs for people.

So get on a bus – there’s a city out there! With superb bakeries in it! And to encourage you to do so (and because we’re doing so ourselves), we’re even starting a new category – the Dark Reaches of Boston.

Back in the city, and none too soon. It’s late summer, and the produce in Union Square sits up and begs to be eaten. This is my favourite market season – perhaps because I was first overwhelmed by the greenmarket this time last year, perhaps because I’ve never seen the market in July. But right now, I swear, the market is perfect, a million stabs of Van Gogh colour, tomatoes and eggplants and peppers against a backdrop of greens so deep as to be black, shaded and made delicate by the flush of peaches, the bashful translucencies of baby greens and squash blossoms.

One superstar chef, Boulud, I think, said that in his first two years in the kitchen, he learned to tell a good carrot from a bad one. He was slow.¹ A good carrot, a good tomato, a good anything, knows it’s good and screams to be cooked, or crunched, or chunked and christened with salt and oil. A good eggplant even sounds perfect when you cut it, a delicate rasp – you can hear the juiciness, the micro-spray as the blade passes. It sounds like cutting freshness.

I hadn’t actually thought to make this entry about eggplants – they somehow aren’t as spectacular as tomatoes, or peppers, though they’re part of the same family (There are actually eggplants which are shades of orange and are shaped like tomatoes – these are a different species from the more common purple ones).² They seem stable, constant performers, mildly flavoured, a near perfect vehicle for aromatics in oil, lending body and cream to a dish rather than imprinting it with a distinct identity, as their more vividly coloured relatives do. But ripe eggplants feel heavy with the promise of sweetness and satisfaction, and fit a certain way in your palm. Their skins are coloured indigo and milk, and shades you see in the dawn sky. They do have a distinct season, which we are in the middle of – and Diana and I had a craving, and things you can crave tend to be worth writing about.

Eggplants come from Asia and Africa (McGee makes a specific claim for India), and show their tropical roots by going bad quickly in the fridge, as the cold collapses the delicate sponge inside them. They arrived in Europe via the usual route (Arabia, through trade and war) in the 13th Century, and are the only edible nightshades which come from the old world. Since then, asian and western strains have become distinctly different on the plate, the former smoother and creamier, the latter having a little more structure, frequently described as meaty. Their uniquely spongy texture gives them a near insatiable thirst for oil, though the cook is by no means obliged to give in to this. The Joy suggests precooking by a variety of methods, my mother, as in the recipe below, has had success simply searing them. For this reason, however, eggplant dishes can be inordinately rich – a famous Arab recipe, imam bayildi, involves stuffing eggplants with onions and baking them in an overgenerous quantity of olive oil. The name means “the imam fainted,” allegedly after his wife told him how much oil had gone into the dish. A highly attractive recipe, along with an extended discussion of the origins of both dish and name, may be found at this excellent website.

I suggest further going here to see some of the orange eggplants I mentioned, and here for an altogether too earnest description of some of the varieties available in Japan.

I like eggplants which I can cup in my hand. Larger eggplants tend to be older, and eggplants grow bitter with age. Forget any that don’t feel heavy. Surface blemishes tend not to matter, especially on western eggplants, which have substantially thicker skins than asian ones. At home, we char eggplants in a wok, and flavour them emphatically, with chili and black bean sauce. The result is very like an eggplant caviar, and, if you scorch the eggplants right, will have some of the smokiness you usually need a charcoal fire to achieve. This recipe works with both Asian and Western eggplants – the former will give you something a little like custard, a little like rhubarb preserve, and a lot more appealing than this sounds. The latter will give you eggplant caviar with distinct chunks, pleasantly resistant until they melt away.

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