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.

A few days ago I sat in the library periodical room. I brought my own work, but the more time I spent surrounded by journals, the more I felt that as an aspiring academic I should have some clue about their contents. Last I checked, nobody seemed to have stolen my dissertation topic, but for all I knew someone could have been making my job easier by doing related research. My eyes fell on the Journal of Modern History, for I sat near the Js, and I picked up the latest issue. A quick scan of the table of contents - and there it was, a review essay on food! In half an hour my notebook was filled with the additions to my “extracurricular” reading list, and I started thinking about other connections between food and academia, running not through research but through academics’ stomachs.

Except for the few cranky dieters, we love food, and, by and large, we are not too picky. This goes especially for graduate students. I don’t know what these people eat when they get to their homes, kitchens, and spouses, but almost everything flies in academic settings: cold pizza, hot pizza, leftover sandwiches from the luncheon seminar, chips and pretzels and any crunchy things from a bag, alcoholic beverages in any price range, carrot sticks with or without a dip, and anything with sugar in it. We do not exactly starve, but the stereotype of a starving student is so strong that it never fails to guide our hand to the proverbial cookie jar as long as the cookies are free.

This makes cooking for academics an easy business. Within the walls of the ivory tower were are all children, and food is exciting. We try every item in the buffet without trying to learn their ingredients first, stuff our mouths with chocolate-covered strawberries, and delight in florescent yellow ‘cola’ drinks with weird labels. I started a friendship with red onion marmalade, eased the stress of peer review with donut holes (bought), consoled colleagues with chocolate-cranberry cookies, and expressed gratitude with fresh apple cakes. We break bread to create a community, but also use food the way people before us must have used touch - to reach out to someone when words don’t cut it, and when touch is off limits.

And this, I think, is another reason we love food so much. Academia is lonely, and food means other people. Even if they just ordered it delivered. If they made it - that’s true love, whether or not it’s fully baked.

(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.

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.
(more…)

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.

(more…)

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.

(more…)

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.

(more…)

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.

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.

(more…)