Off the Bone

One of my first introductions to Italian cuisine took place in the Boston North End, where Tse Wei and I, both college freshmen, had a still slightly nervous but very romantic dinner. I had pasta in the shape of wide ribbons, with a creamy sauce and flakes of salmon. We were on the second floor of a small restaurant on the very edge of the neighborhood, and starry blue sky was painted on the ceiling, and I remember being a little concerned about twirling my noodles around the twines of the fork properly. But it was love at first sight. The pasta, I mean. Rich and tender and flavorful, with a delicate bite to the noodles, and a savory melting flakes of salmon, and probably some herbs, I don’t remember.

It was entirely different from the pasta I grew up with, which was served as simple side dish to meat, rarely dressed in anything more elaborate than a bit of butter, unless it’s cooked “fleet-style” - tossed with a bit of ground meet fried with onions. That was the dish that caused the sailor revolt on Battleship Potemkin - admittedly, because the meat was infested by maggots.

I cook pasta a lot now, but almost always with tomato-based sauces, wet and drippy. So I decided to explore other alternatives, with the capable guidance of Ms. Marcella Hazan, and came across a chicken liver sauce. I love chicken liver. According to Ms. Hazan, Italians tend to cook it with butter, sage, and white wine - although there are probably regional variations. All these things are present in the sauce recipe - along with some ground beef, pancetta or proscuitto (I actually used hog jowl that Tse Wei kindly brought from New York), shallots and garlic, and a bit of tomato paste. It is a lovely recipe, and a pleasure to make. Have your guests in the kitchen, as the smell of onions, garlic and sage sizzling in butter is mouthwatering.

The quantities in the recipe were not quite sufficient for the four people I tried to feed, so it’s been adapted a little.
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I’ve owed several people cookies since the summer, and cleared the debt today. I’m proud and privileged to have friends who would actually walk to their nearest post office in order to mail me books when I cannot find them myself (the atrociousness of the food in W-town being matched only by the atrociousness of the sole bookstore), and since they are abundantly supplied with reading material, I can only make them more comfortable when they read. In the mail went boxes of Sunshine Biscuits (each batch contains three days of sunshine – hence the bad weather in the Northeast), Date Liebnizen,¹ and, pictured above, with chicken, Arbitrary Chocolate Cookies.

Arbitrary Chocolate Cookies came about because I’d been feeling a kind of void in my life of late, a sibilant absence. Self examination revealed that this was partly a quarter-life crisis, and partly that I didn’t know how to bake a good chocolate cookie. Some people find religion fills their voids, I found this recipe to fill mine.

Really the problem, and I’m likely conflating the life-crisis and the recipe book here, is that I’ve never really been able to muster that much enthusiasm for the concept of a chocolate cookie, never having had one that made me see them as an objective good the way chocolate cake, flourless chocolate cake, hot chocolate and 1-kilo blocks of Valrhona are. Cookies, it seems, can never be just chocolate – you have to trick them out and dress them up – not merely chocolate cookies, but chocolate chocolate chip, or chocolate chip walnut, or chocolate white chocolate chip chocolate chunk cranberry, yet nothing you can add, append, prefix or attach to a cookie involving chocolate can raise its appeal beyond that conferred by the basic concept of cookie + chocolate. Still, we feel compelled, by some ineradicable impulse, to enliven, intensify, and complicate – a simple incarnation of chocolate in a cookie does not satisfy – we must separate the cookie and the chip. We are content to leave our chocolate cakes to stand alone, robed simply in icing, flourless chocolate things resist all attempts to dilute their intense purity, brownies absorb everything in their stride, but the poor cookie is frequently overwhelmed and rarely satisfying.

Perhaps it’s the way we eat them – on the fly, sneakily, an after-lunch impulse or a pre-coffee weakness, a perennial reminder of being caught with our hands where they should not be. The depth and power I demand from things labeled “chocolate” may not be entirely compatible with this casualness. The composition of the ideal cookie should seem as spontaneous and childlike as the manner of its consumption, full of whatever the cook decided to throw in, in whatever proportions she might have had them. We want variety, and unforced harmony, and dark chocolate is a serious flavour. It makes tart things seem too tart, sweet things seem too sweet, nuts seem lightweight and oatmeal coarse and inappropriate.

I don’t know how to solve this problem, but you can’t really fit too much more chocolate into a cookie than is in an Arbitrary Chocolate Cookie. Tasting them, it seems like there’s nothing you could add to them that wouldn’t work – and nothing you could add that would. Put anything you want in the batter, and it will be… okay. Itself. A chocolate cookie with nuts in it. With dried cherries in it. With white chocolate chunks in it. Always, fundamentally, unshakeably, a chocolate cookie. A chewy triple chocolate cookie, a chocolate chocolate chip cookie, a chocolate death monster at midnight cookie. Think of a name involving chocolate…

This recipe works. It tastes… pretty damn good. But I suspect nothing you can do to it while remaining true to the basic intent behind it will really get it beyond PDG. I do, however, have fairly concrete ideas about how an arbitrary chocolate cookie could be re-imagined, and will be trying those out in a couple of weeks.

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Diana found this link god knows where.

The cookbook nursed at the devil’s left tit

The first page pinned me to my seat and froze the cholestrol in my veins (the pin was about the size of a trombone). The second curdled the milk I had at breakfast. I tried to claw my eyes out, but my fingers were sunk knuckle deep in the wooden arms of my chair, and my eyelids had long since shriveled and fallen off. Yet, yet, compelled by some pernicious malevolence, I continued to press forward, forward, I know not how. My limbs were not my own, I did not feel them move. Impelled by raw horror, it was as though I were clicking “next” by force of mind alone.

After Tse Wei and I visited the Flour bakery, I resolved to stage several expeditions to some unexplored parts of Boston. Today, despite the rain, I went ahead and took a bus to Watertown, in search of Armenian food.

I had a rather vague idea of what Armenian food would be like - my impressions came from the stories of L., a family friend in Riga and an excellent cook who respects his ingredients and can gently help them along better than anyone else I know in that part of the world. His stories involved choosing the lamb from a frolicking flock to be grilled for dinner. There are no frolicking flocks of lambs in Watertown, but what you’ll find will still be worth the trip.

The Watertown Armenian community clusters around the Mt Auburn Street, not far past the Mt Auburn Cemetery if you take the 71 bus. It’s nothing much to look at, especially if you are peeking out from under an umbrella - typical two-story houses of any a Boston suburb, quiet residential side streets running off of Mt. Auburn - which is also mostly quiet and residential. Everything you might want for your Armenian fix is within two blocks - get off the bus after the Kimball Road stop - which are very much worth the trip.

The central attraction are three ethnic grocery, deli and bakery stores - the Sevan Bakery, the Arax Market and the Massis Bakery. None of them look like they should have a web page. Inside is the all-pervasive smell of Middle Eastern spices, slabs of spiced smoked dried beef, strapping young lads hoisting sacks of chickpeas and pomegranates, kids of all ages drooling at ten different types of baklava, and more varieties of feta than I could ever have imagined (the Sevan had six fresh ones, sitting in enormous tubs of brine, and a number of vacuum-packed varieties that I didn’t count).

The markets are mind-opening - for the sheer variety of seemingly familiar and completely unfamiliar foods. The jars of sweet preserves were incredibly tempting - I took home baby eggplants in sugar syrup, leaving behind the preserves of rose petals, figs, quinces, tiny bitter oranges, mulberries, and vanilla (a warm-white mass the consistency of crystallized honey) - as were jugs of olive oil and bunches of healthy-looking herbs. The deli items looked delicious - you can get all the Greek and Middle Eastern specialties you would expect (spanakopita, tabouleh, stuffed grape leaves, babagonoush), and some that you will not readily identify (numerous savory pastries, stuffed eggplants, something with sauteed liver). Watertown would also be a place to go for orange and rose water (much, much cheaper than Cardullos), Greek olives, capers, nuts and dried fruits.

But I bet you are wondering about baby eggplants. At that tender age, they don’t have much of a taste of their own and are mostly sweet - although apparently you can adapt the recipe for chunks of proper grown-up eggplant. The baby eggplant texture, however, is lovely - snappy, verging on crunchy, with a bit of give. They go well with tea, when you just want a little something sweet.