Off the Bone

There are dishes that haunt me. They stare at me from pages of books, invade my thoughts when I think of dinner. They are penguins to my polar bear - perfect, perfect food that I know will be love from the first bite, despite having no evidence whatsoever. One of such foods is stargazey pie.

Before you let this name transform into a romantic image in your head, I’ll tell you that it’s English and involves sardines or herrings, whose heads are left poking out of the pie crust. According to Mr. Davidson of the Oxford Companion to Food,

“the name ’stargazey’ describes the star-shaped ring of fish heads peering out of the circumference of the pie, possibly gazing at the stars with the uppermost eye. In some versions, the heads were grouped at the centre, dislocated to gaze upwards in a cluster, and the tails were set around the edge… The standard explanation of this odd pie is that the heads of pilchards are uneatable, but full of rich oil which it would be a shame to waste. If the fish are arranged with their heads resting on the rim of a circular pie dish and projecting out of the crust (their tails clustered at the centre), the slope causes the oil to run down into the body of the fish; and when the pie is cut up the now useless heads can be discarded. However, experiments have shown that the amount of oil thus ’saved’ is close to zero, which suggests that the only valid rationale for the pie is an aesthetic one.”

Whoever can think of a food so marvelous! Of course, I have a deep fondness for savory pies, fatty fish, and a touch of the absurd - rooted, respectively, in my grandma’s cookery, tins of Latvian smoked sprats in oil (so heavenly when spread on rye bread with thinly sliced cucumber) and the study of Soviet history.

I have thought of making stargazey pie countless times: for Tse Wei, for my former roommates, for unsuspecting guests. One day, in desperation, I might spring it on my historians, who deserve better. The difficulty usually lies in finding pilchards, or sardines, which absolutely need to be fresh and not canned, and are strongly seasonal in this country and rarely carried by supermarkets. When sardines are available, dinner companions are not, and I refuse to eat stargazey pie alone. It’s made to be shared. You are all invited. I promise I will also make something else.

We left Torsten knuckle deep in a ham, which by now is in the smokehouse. Charcuterie and the curing of meat is a ridiculously broad topic, the basics of which are fairly universal and easy enough to find in libraries or online. With an eye to specificity, I’ve decided to simply post the recipe we used, with comments and explanations in italics.

2lb salt
10g saltpeter
20g sugar
20g juniper berries
20g black peppercorns
3 bay leaves
5g nutmeg
Saltpeter is sodium nitrate, which, in and of itself, has no preservative effect at all. It does, however, get converted into nitrite by bacterial action, and nitrite, in addition to giving cured meat its colour, is a powerful preservative. Industrial cures use pure nitrite, but the byproducts of the bacterial conversion contribute to the flavour of artisanal charcuterie. Most cured meat, in fact, is fermented, by the exact same processes which wine and cheese are fermented, and the same family of bacteria – they produce lactic acid, which inhibits the growth of undesirable strains of bacteria, and the process shuts itself down when the lactic acid concentrations get too high for even lactobacteria to tolerate.
This is a dry cure – most meat is wet cured, by immersion in brine, because salt penetrates more quickly, and because less volume is lost. This is understandably appealing for industrial producers, but most traditional cures were wet also.
Grigson would have us believe that sugar is added not only for flavour but also to prevent “salt-burn” – a drying out and toughening of the surface of meat caused by too high a concentration of salt. As with most of her science, this is highly suspect, but it is actually possible to mess up a cure in this way.

Rub very firmly into meat, ensuring all surfaces are well coated. Stack in a tub, pour excess cure over the meat.
Torsten was ramming the cure as far as he could into the hock, so as to draw the fluid out from the knee. Since the synovial cavity is intact, we need to rely on osmotic action to do this, which is as problematic as it sounds. Hams, like our own unreliable carcasses, tend to go bad at the knee first.

Leave the tub in a cool, dry place. Every seven days, remove the joints from salt, brush them down and rub with fresh curing mix, preparing a fresh batch of cure if necessary. Drain the fluid that accumulates. Return to the tub, in reverse order (the one previously on top should go at the bottom), flipping the meat as well.

The duration of salting should be:
2 weeks for bacon & lardo
3 weeks for jowls
4 weeks for hams
My favourite part of the morning was when we had to dig the ribs out of the bacon. Normally you’d just cut the entire slab of meat off the bones, and sell the bones for spare ribs, but these had so little meat on them relative to the amount of fat that we’d practically have wound up with lardo if we’d done this. Lardo itself is back fat. You use it for cooking, and, yes, eating straight, in sweet, translucent shavings.

As a rough guide, a day in salt for a pound of meat.
Other sources suggest thickness may be a better guide, on the lines of 4 days per inch thickness of meat. This works out to about the same duration for everything but the hams (accounting for the fact that we had an aberrant amount of subcutaneous fat) – the hams, on the other hand, would have had to stay in almost twice as long).

Wash the meat off in cold running water, 12 hours for jowls and bacon, 24 hours for ham, dry in a warm air current.
Davidson would have us believe that this step is relatively uncommon outside Germany. Certainly Grigson never recommends this, and I haven’t seen it in Ruhlman’s new book either. Grigson’s recipes, English and French, tend to follow a dry cure with brine, after which the pork is either done or smoked – the brine effectively serves the same purpose, I suppose. Jabugo and prosciutto never get washed, merely brushed off or scrubbed down.

Everything gets a base smoke at 25-30 degrees C (80-90F) for 24 hours or till pale tan. Further smoking takes place according to the cut.
Lubeck is near enough the Baltic sea that it might as well be a coastal town. Long drying, in these conditions, is impossible, and so meat and fish are smoked instead when a dry cure is needed. Smoking ensures a suitably dry environment, as well as flavouring the meat and retarding the development of rancid flavours in fat – helpful, since salted meats are apparently more susceptible to fat breakdown. You can, incidentally, “wet-smoke” a meat – essentially by keeping the surface moist throughout the smoking process. The appeal of doing so is that, as with wet-curing, the effect is achieved much faster.

Bacon goes into a smoker at 18-20 C (65-70F) for 2-3 weeks till mahogany.
Jowls get heavy smoke at 40-50C (105-125F) for 4 days.
Hams stay in a cool smoke house at 18-20C (65-70F), getting a light smoke every other day, till asparagus sprouts.

Ham and asparagus is apparently a huge thing in northern Germany, like the first herrings in Denmark, or Beaujolais nouveau. The asparagus is steamed and served cold, and the dish goes with mustard.

We didn’t mean to take a holiday break – honest!

I’m writing from London, a random caf by the Goodge Street Underground, stopping over en route from Singapore back to Brooklyn. My brother’s due to show up in a couple hours, and together we’ll haul my jet-lagged carcass to the Borough Market, where, hopefully, we’ll see something worth writing about.

In the meantime, a holiday story. Christmas dinner, I cooked for the family - a couple uncles, the parents, and granma. Dinner was a crackling shoulder of pork (possibly my most successful roast ever), with all accoutrements suitable to its rank and position. Carrots, snap beans, spinach tart, roasted tatties, the works, and Christmas pud for afters.

My family (with a few wonderful exceptions) are a dour lot at table, fixed in their ways and tastes, who tend to faint at the sight of blood in their meat, so I wasn’t entirely expecting a good reception. They generally approved of the crackling, however, except for my granma. I asked if I could improve the situation.

“It’s not as good as the red haired devil’s food we had the other day.”

“I thought you didn’t eat the food of the red haired devils, granma.”

“I didn’t know it was the red haired devils’ food when your mum ordered it, she just told me it was fish. Anyway, it was damn good.”

Turns out my granma, at the ripe young age of 90, has discovered fish and chips. I went out with her for fish and chips before leaving, and I must admit, those really were damn good fish and chips.

Back soon, with parts 3 and 3 1/2 on pigs, and, if D is feeling up to it, possibly something on Hungarian food. And, after that, turning one.

The photo has nothing to do with this entry, but it was delicious, and it got you to look. It’s a toss up as to which was better – that roast, an entire shoulder, skin and all, with nothing but salt and pepper, or the sausages we made after eating it. Sausages are to Germany as cheeses are to France – over a thousand varieties exist, with marked regional variation. With diversity come regional styles and regional pride – but for Torsten, all this is a matter of fact. Being from the north, he eats like a northerner (potatoes rather than dumplings or noodles), and knows the recipes of his region, but feels no need to play the partisan, merely impressing upon us that his wurst are not representative of all Germany.

Most sources will describe three major types of wurst – but this is like saying that cheeses are either soft, firm, or blued. Bruhwurst are raw meat, parboiled and smoked, and from this category come frankfurters, wieners (originally wienerwurst), and bierschinken, which is very similar to mortadella. Often, they were made with ice as an ingredient – to counter the heat generated by older, less efficient means of chopping and grinding. Today water is added instead, to make up the volume. Rohwurst are raw meat, fermented and dried, akin to salame and other familiar Italian sausages, sliced uncooked for eating. The idea of fermented meat sounds more alarming than it actually is – most dry sausages (think salame, chorizo, Chinese sausages, and anything which looks similar) are fermented, by some of the same bacteria that ripen cheese (the environments are very similar, both being salty and anaerobic), and the sour tang a vital part of their flavour. The ingredients for kochwurst are fully cooked, and the sausages themselves poached again, the most prominent sausages of this sort being liverwurst and blutwurst.

Both fat and meat were taken from the belly, the long cut between the loin and bacon – the fat, Torsten said, would set up at just the right firmness for spreadable liverwurst after cooking. Skin was set aside for blutwurst – which is basically blood, skin and seasoning. The blood is caught when the pig is slaughtered, then stirred to ensure that it doesn’t coagulate. When mixed with the other ingredients and poached, the blood coagulates and gives the sausage structure. This results in a sausage that is toothsome, full of gelatin from the skin, but smooth as silk, so blutwurst often has cubes of fat, or garlic or onions, or cubes of tongue (zungenblutwurst) embedded in it, to give it texture. Faced with something like twice as much fat as we had lean – itself a relative term, given the beautiful marbling – ours was studded with cubes of fat. Other versions, with cousins all over Europe, are bound with oatmeal, or, farther east, kasha. Most are lightly smoked after poaching, as a flavouring rather than a cure. The fat made them sweet and indefinably rich, the blood made them savoury.

Our liverwurst were fully half fat, with about a third lean and the remainder liver. Fat and meat were boiled together while raw liver was ground, and the still-steaming chunks ground into the liver (think tempering eggs), along with raw Spanish onions. Torsten was quiet on the subject of seasoning – all butchers in Germany are, he says – his uncles did not share their recipes with him, nor would it have been polite of him to ask. After he said that, I felt it would have been inappropriate to ask if he inherited his father’s recipes. One batch of liverwurst, ground butter smooth, tasted of cardamom and cloves. The other, slightly coarser and leaner (the coarser the sausage, the less fat is required for the appropriate tenderness), was ground with herbs then poached in jars, for a slightly rustic pate. Both had enough liver for it to be a distinct presence, like pork foie gras. As with the pigs, such sausages are relics. Sausages used to be one third fat as a matter of course – modernity has made them leaner, and us fatter.

Tamworths are actually a bacon breed, raised for a long side with good streaking in the meat, rather than a specifically lard breed. The spectacular amount of fat in these pigs… Jonathan, their owner, had this to say:

“The four inches of subcutaneous fat, I’m afraid, is due to my lack of experience with feeding pigs.

We gave these guys about four gallons of whey per pig per day, along with copious stale bread and tablescraps. The two that Torsten worked on last week were born in mid-May, and weighed in at about 300# each.
What I took away from this experience is that next year, we ought to have twice the number of pigs!

The second pair of pigs, who have their appointment with destiny today, are a month younger and probalby 50-75# lighter. I am hoping that they are a bit leaner under the skin, too.”

And virtually everything you could possibly want to know about the different breeds of pig can be found at this fascinating website, guaranteed to arouse curiosity and alarm when you read it in the middle of a long tech.

This is Torsten. Torsten currently has his fingers buried as far as they will go in a fresh ham, for reasons I’ll get into in a couple of days. We cut the ham in the German style rather than the American – the ham people tend to think of here has been shaved down to the femur, with the butt and round removed. These hams have the hip bone and knee still attached, and weigh about 30 pounds each. At a guess, half that weight is fat, because these are Tamworth pigs, a heritage breed raised for lard rather than meat. Tamworths are descended directly from the wild boars of Europe, via bloodlines which, according to most experts, have been astonishingly pure. Some believe that the breed was developed purely by selection, and never crossbred for desirable traits. No one can confirm that an outside strain was bred in. They are known as a bacon breed, long bodied and fat.

Pigs with this proportion of fat to lean were common as little as 50 years ago, when there were still people whose need for calories was simply so great that there was no other way for them to get enough energy than by cooking everything with an equal weight of lard. So important an energy source was this, in fact, that it was almost as valuable a commodity as the pork itself, if not more so. The demand for lean meat, the turn away from lard as a cooking fat, and the growth characteristics of most such breeds have made such pigs economically unviable. They mature slowly, and backfat sells at a sixth the price of loin. On the other hand, they forage, and eat pasture, and will grow fat on virtually anything you feed them – a turn of the century farming text gives the recommended diet for these pigs as “less than 1% broken glass.”

Lard, to Torsten, is not simply the fat from a pig, but a specific sort of fat, akin to suet in a cow – the fine, soft white fat from inside the abdominal cavity, which serves as a cushion for the kidneys, known in English cookery as leaf lard. This fat, too soft to do much else with, is rendered, then used as a cooking fat, or stewed with apples and onions then spread on bread. Soft is a relative term. In the late autumn chill, it feels firm as cold butter. Still, though, it’s the wrong consistency for sausage making, and this is what Torsten is after. Torsten is a German master butcher, who can trace the line of butchers in his family back to the 30 Years War. He is also Muslim, having converted, he tells me, in a fit of disillusionment with Christianity and “the lies on which it was built.” Oddly enough, he made this discovery after an intense study of church history, inspired by a period living in what he describes as “the intensely religious Midwest”. At that point, he had been making sausages for 12 years (not counting the years he helped his father as a boy) and giving up either the sale of pork or his religion was entirely out of the question. Since the day he converted, he has not eaten a morsel of pork, though he handles it every hour of his working day.

For sausages, we use the fat beneath the skin, and even that is not a homogenous substance. The fat trimmed off the loin is fatback, the stiffest, hardest fat on the pig. Salted, it becomes lardo, smoked, it is a Ukrainian delicacy. English and American books make a distinction between hard bacon fat and soft bacon fat – the traditional test was to set a cold, hard slab of bacon across two glasses. If it sagged, the fat was soft. Torsten, though, reels off an entire litany - back, neck, shoulder, and breast, jowl… Belly combines very soft fat and medium hard fat. Different sausages use different parts. Today, we will make two kinds of liverwurst, one kind of blutwurst, and something from the offal. But first, we will cut up a pig.

A fairly detailed description of pig butchery in the German pattern follows, with photos.

(more…)

Two years ago I took a course on Soviet history with a visiting Italian professor. He was one of the happiest men I’ve known. Between talking about the collapse of the Soviet Union he would tell us stories of his academic apprenticeship, his preferred order of photocopying pages from a book, his youngest daughter’s fascination with dragons, and his exasperation with well-meaning friends who took him for dinners in the Boston North End. A good home cook himself, he hated North End Italian. It was too rich, he thought, and too complex, as if the chefs could not resist throwing together all the ingredients they were unable to afford back in Italy, and created an imaginary “rich Italian” cuisine in their New World restaurants.

At the end of the semester I exchanged chocolate chip cookies for his daughters for his favorite home recipe - which turned out to be pumpkin pasta. It’s a lovely thing, flavors mild and clear, and perfect for fall. Aside from the pumpkin you will only need your pantry staples: garlic, olive oil, parsley, and, of course, pasta. If you cannot stand the simplicity, or have a fennel bulb in the pantry begging to be used, I’d let you add it too - although Andrea might frown.

Andrea started with raw pumpkin, peeled and sliced quite thinly. I prefer to pre-bake mine, because I don’t like peeling raw pumpkin. You can do either, but if you don’t pre-bake you should give your pumpkin time to cook almost completely in the skillet before you add pasta, which means starting the skillet as soon as you put your pasta pot on the stove. If you choose to pre-bake, keep the pumpkin in the oven until it can be pierced with a sharp knife but not yet smooshed with a spoon, and start the skillet when the pasta water is boiling (use robust dried pasta, not something that will cook in seconds).

For two servings you’ll need two cloves of garlic, half an acorn squash or equivalent (I used one small delicata squash, which was lovely), and a generous handful of parsley, chopped fine.

1. Sautee garlic in a generous quantity olive oil; when very fragrant and golden, add slices of pumpkin. Salt and pepper and wait, letting the pumpkin brown a bit (or cook if it’s raw).

2. Add chopped parsley, stir, fish out your still-uncooked pasta from the pot and dump it in the skillet with a little bit of pasta water. Stir and cook everything until the pasta is ready, adding more pasta water if you have to. Adjust salt, add more pepper, and serve piping hot.

3. Don’t sprinkle parmesan on top.

On Saturday morning Tse Wei and I strolled the Union Square farmers’ market in search of mint. It’s getting rather late in season, and rather cold, so fresh mint is becoming rarer. Luck smiled on us, though, and we returned with a generous bunch of spearmint and five tiny (and rather expensive) bunches of mints of other kinds - one with tiny round leaves arranged in neat rosettes, one with delicate fuzzy leaves like tiny spearmint, with a tint of violet, one apparently from a crawly plant. They all smelled unmistakably like mint, but wonderfully complex, with notes of green and bitterness and chocolate.

I have a poor memory for names, and planned to look up mint varieties when I got home. It was a foolhardy plan. There are about two dozen species in the mint family, but countless varieties and hybrids, so who knows which ones I have drying in bunches now. Unless you have access to farmers markets as large and diverse as the one at Union Square or decide to grow your own mint, you are most likely to come in contact with two varieties - spearmint and peppermint. Spearmint is the number one choice for most cooks, used in the mint sauce for roast lamb and most mint preserves, jellies and teas. Peppermint - more precisely, peppermint oil - is what you’ll come across everywhere else, from toothpaste to chewing gum to after dinner mints. It is a Massachusetts native, although it is now grown in Oregon and Washington, and the most minty mint, containing a large amount of menthol.

I have developed a real fondness for mint of all kinds in the last few years - mostly for making tea. It reminds me of summers in the garden, back in my childhood, when grandma would create flavorful infusions with fresh leaves plucked off all the plants in the garden - blackcurrants and strawberries and pears and sage. They smelled of summer, crackling firewood and storytelling. Before bed, I would get a mug of mint tea - hot water pored over a few fresh leaves of spearmint from a shiny tin kettle.

Even a dried mint twig steeped in a mug of hot water has very little in common with what you’d get out of a sachet of ‘Celestial Seasonings’ - it has a calm complexity of flavor instead of hysterical menthol notes. There are, of course, much better dried mint teas, but it’s so easy (and so much cheaper) to prepare your own that you might as well. Wash the mint, spread it out to dry, and when no water remains on leaves, gather in bunches and hang upside down. You can also dry them flat and spread out, but they will take more space. When perfectly dry and brittle, gather in an airtight container and store away from light. You’ll have to experiment with the quantity of dried mint that gives you your preferred strength.

The personal chef to George Sr. and Barb spills all

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.