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.

It’s funny what people remember. Somehow, in the last few years, I’ve acquired a reputation of a coffee addict. It’s not undeserved, mind you, but compared to other peoples caffeine addictions mine is really quite mild: a cup of coffee a day, preferably in the mornings, and I politely decline offers of more except in emergencies. I even manage not to be cranky if my morning coffee is delayed. Sometimes. Nonetheless, one of the first things Helena said to me, with a degree of concern, in a taxi from the airport was: “You must be dying for coffee.” And I was, and off we went as soon as I dropped off my bags, and so began my tour of Budapest.

I had never before seen so little of a city I came to visit. Sure enough, there was the Buda castle, a visit to St. Stefan and St. Mattias cathedrals and the Budapest Synagogue, and even an obligatory visit to the Heroes Square and an art museum. But mostly I saw the insides of coffeeshops, Helenas kitchen, and her parents’ lovely house in the suburbs - where the kitchen was the exclusive realm of Helenas mother and I respectfully stood aside. Mrs. T is a marvelous and enthusiastic cook, but before we get into the subtleties of Hungarian cuisine I should get two things out of the way: paprika and goulash. Because that’s what you are already thinking about.

Buying paprika in Hungary is serious business. You have lots of choices: sweet or hot, fresh or dried, whole or ground up to different degrees of fineness, and from one of the two growing regions that produce distinct varieties. Fresh and whole dried are best bought at a farmers market - there are several of them in the city, housed in permanent pavillions and selling everything from pigs’ ears to butternut squash. Even in the middle of winter, the quality of fresh peppers was astounding - I ate a sweet red capsicum raw, thinking of July and Union Square greenmarket, and, accidentally, a piece of harmless looking light-green bell pepper that turned out to be quite quite hot. If you speak German, youll be able to ask what you are getting - for the older generation of Hungarians a German is a default foreigner and many speak the language.

Green hot peppers don’t seem to be dried, but red hot peppers are dried and sold whole, tied with pieces of string hung in magnificent rows over the vegetable stalls. They are handled very gingerly. A dried pepper would be crushed with the back of a spoon and served in a small dish to be added to soup or stew - also with a spoon, for the oils that get on your skin can come to haunt you long after the meal, when you forget all about the peppers and decide to rub your eye. The peppers are, in fact, surprisingly hot. A couple of small flakes dropped into a bowl of soup transformed it in a few seconds, and continued doing so until I decided to fish them back out. I was also shooed away from the table before desert to wash my hands, since I did pick up the flakes with my fingers.

Ground paprika can also be hot - it is then labeled scipos or eros. Sweet ground paprika is labeled scipossegmentes (mild) or edesnemes (sweet), or both. According to my Hungarian hosts youll want a pack that also says orlemeny (special, referring to paprika of particularly high quality). Paprika comes from two growing regions: Kalosca and Szeged, and according to my hosts, the stuff from Kalosca is more brightly red and more reliably good. I have packets of both and cannot tell the difference in taste or color, but paprika’s flavor really comes out in cooking, so who knows.

Sweet paprika is really present in just about everything, and together with onions and lard forms an essential part of a Hungarian flavor base. Ground, its a delicate spice and must not be overheated, or it may turn bitter. It does, however, need fat to release most of its goodness. In soups, it’s stirred in close to the end of cooking. In stews, it’s sprinked over the already browned meat, which is then taken immediately off heat (one can then add a liquid and begin braising - the gentle temperature of a braise will do no harm). Such is the method used in goulash - which is officially a soup, although the line between a soup and a stew can be fine indeed.

I did not have a homemade goulash on the trip, although I did get my host’s recipe - Christmas and New Years is not a time for goulash; families tend to cook pork and more elaborate holiday dishes (and fish on Christmas Eve, which is a day of fasting - even though its hard to tell by the quantity of food that is served). I did have a big bowl of goulash nonetheless, in a bistro-style eatery on a frosty day after touring the Buda castle. Its a very simple thing, really - beef, and broth, and root vegetables, and paprika for color and flavor, and maybe some caraway seeds and black peppercorns - and marvelous on a cold day. More complex recipes, including the one in the Joy of Cooking, seem to me to miss the point - perhaps in an attempt to mask the weak flavors of American vegetables and paprika alike.

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England was a carnival of meat, starting with the hanging game at Borough Market, much of it with fur and feathers still intact, and ending with the aseptic white of St. JOHN in Smithfields.

Borough Market on the first day was quite envy inducing, which is something, considering that I’ve got Union Square. The winter selection here was somewhat better than at Union, with one vegetable supplier, Turnips, fully stocked. I don’t know where they got their stuff, but much of it was in at least decent shape, including, somehow, tomatoes that actually smelled edible. A baker was present, as were several confectioners, mostly dealing in chocolates of reasonable quality, but one with trays and trays of dried fruit, nuts, and Turkish delight which I might have sold an acquaintance for. Cheesemongers were limited in both scope and quality, probably discouraged by the proximity of Neal’s Yard Dairy. Mostly, though, there was meat.

At least three huge butchers were set up, each stall at least as big as Mario’s store, selling heritage meats and their own charcuterie. At least one more was closed for New Year’s Eve. All dealt in both beef and pork, with game being available in varying quantities. Mostly there were cooking cuts on display, but with tantalizing promises that primal cuts were available too. Fresh hams and huge, lightly cured pork chops seemed to be the biggest sellers. A woman, calling herself Hunter Gatherer Foods, sold salumi from Iberian pigs - the spicing was relatively light, so the fermentation and meat could be tasted more clearly. One particularly ambitious operation combined a fishmonger with an impressive 10’ high rack of hares, pheasants, partridges, geese, and skinned does, all of which were hanging for future sale. When you got close, the dead hares stared back with blood-soused eyes.

Lunch was half of one of Mrs. Elizabeth King’s meat pies, eaten at room temperature. The pie was traditional, with a raised crust (meaning it was made with hot water, and stood vertically, without the support of the pie dish), and my half must have weighed near a pound. Inside was wild game, ground with a little too much sage and pepper, set in truly luscious aspic. Still, you could taste the meat (venison and wild boar, probably no hare), and, wonder of wonders, it was relatively lean. I would have gotten pork, but they were out. My companion, unashamedly bourgeois, left wing and artistic, had boar and cranberries in his. As we ate, we watched the most beautiful meat slicer I’d ever seen, a hand cranked, cast iron contraption, big as a car engine. Every portion of it was either scarlet, black iron, or gleaming steel, and I’d bet it’s been running since before my da got to London.

Lunch finished with gooseberries, damn good, from Turnips, and a cup of Monmouth Coffee. If I ever open a café, it will serve coffee just the way the Monmouth Coffee Company does, or not at all. As I got in line for a cup of daily brew, I noticed a curious rack with a number of porcelain drip cones arranged in it, apparently for display. I ordered, then stared open mouthed as the barista ground a portion into a paper filter, stuck it in a porcelain cone, then slowly added water which was 10 seconds off the boil.

“Wait,” I asked, “are you actually brewing me a cup of drip coffee, right now?”
“You ordered one, didn’t you?”

The coffee was roasted slightly dark for me, but it didn’t really matter, after that.

Sadly, nothing else in England managed to match that first, brilliant trip to the market, except dinner at St. JOHN. St. JOHN is where Fergus Henderson perpetrates “a sort of British cooking”, which involves a great many bits of animal you might not have considered putting in your mouth. The experience goes well beyond the food – it’s steps away from Smithfield market, which is to meat what Tsukiji is to fish. As you walk to dinner, you pass butchers cutting down sides of pork, and the curious, bloodless smell of fresh meat hangs in the air. The place itself is whitewashed inside and out. Anything that isn’t bare concrete is fastidiously, serenely white, and the high ceilings, naked piping, and more white make it feel almost oppressive, like he’s daring you to call it gorgeous. It’s a relaxed room pretending to be tense. Even the typography is a quiet rebellion, Times New Roman in a city of Gill Sans.

My companions were unimpressed by the menu. Faced with a menu featuring grey partridge, lamb’s tongues, goose gizzards, marrow bones, chitterlings, smoked eel and venison offal, they found they were tempted by pot roast pork, langoustines and steamed hake. Yet, in the presence of our server, a very small woman in a very big jacket (white) with very long glasses (black) and a great deal of hair (blond) pulled very severely back, they mysteriously rediscovered their gustatory backbones. Perhaps her descriptions sounded tempting – chitterlings grilled, after a bath in an English mustard marinade, grey partridge very nice, marrow bones a signature, invariably superb – as one friend pointed out, with this menu, they could hardly afford to have staff who didn’t actually like the food they served. More likely it was her steely gaze and imperial voice reminded them that people come here to be brave. Had I asked I’m sure her name would have turned out to be Millicent or Mildred or something similar.

In the end, no langoustines shamed our table. We started with lamb’s tongue salad (much like other tongues, with a distinct touch of sweetness), pressed pork and goose gizzards (a terrine, beautiful – whole gizzards buried in very finely shredded pork, surprisingly delicate flavour, lovely texture), and roasted marrow bones (I’d had marrow, but never saw the point before. This was unbelievably good). Pot roast Gloucester Old Spot had been smoked beforehand, and so, while very well done, wasn’t quite the act of worship the meat deserved. Venison offal – a tiny kidney and slices of liver, was faintly, pleasantly gamy, offset by a deep yet vinegary pan sauce, and beets. The kidney was actually tasty, which again, was more than I could say about the other kidneys I’ve had. The menu listed a marmalade pudding for two, which our server said was enough for three. The monster that arrived on the table, along with a half-litre of warm custard, could have fed eight of us. I’d asked for it because I have a recipe for such a thing at home, and wanted to know what one should actually taste like before making mine – the education turned out to be tangential, because this one had the marmalade over the top, whereas my recipe calls for it to be mixed right in. I did, however, learn that custard, flavoured with vanilla and a touch of nutmeg, is absolutely essential.

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.

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.

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.

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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Cheesemaking is a lot like kendo – all it is is hitting people with a big stick – but it requires so much heart to do it properly. If you really want to learn as much about cheese as you can learn without touching milk, you should go and read the first chapter of Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking. What follows is a brief, technical but hopefully readable description of the basic steps involved in turning milk into cheese. Another article will follow, discussing the less visible aspects of this process.

Start by milking your cows. You are now in possession of the two key components of cheese – insoluble protein and bacteria. Unfortunately, you’re also in possession of a number of other things which you don’t really want – chiefly water, soluble protein and more bacteria. Everything we do from here on out will essentially be about separating these two groups.

The milk is collected in a large temperature controlled vat, and some of yesterday’s whey is used to seed it with lactobacteria, which cause it to acidify. Between the large seed colony of lactobacteria and the rapid acidification of the milk, other, undesirable bacteria don’t stand a chance, being either killed by the rising acidity (in which lactobacteria thrive), or out-multiplied by the (thriving) lactobacteria.

Looked at another way, removing water from milk is the same thing as removing the solid stuff from milk. The solid stuff in milk consists largely of insoluble proteins and fats. We could theoretically filter them out molecule by molecule, but it’s much simpler to make all these millions of little molecules into much larger clumps and deal with those instead. On a molecular level, we’re essentially making dust into dust bunnies.

Given enough time, souring of milk by bacterial action will cause the insoluble proteins to clump together, but this results in a curd structure unsuitable for most cheeses. Instead, we accelerate the process by adding rennet, an extract of a calf’s stomach which basically makes it easier for proteins to clump.¹ Rennet causes the vat of milk to form a very fine network of protein strands, what looks like a single, soft, 60-gallon mass, in which fats and water and solutes are trapped rather than actually chemically integrated, much as dust bunnies have unidentifiable particles suspended inside. These particles of solution are whey.

As soon as the curd sets, we cut it using a cheese harp, which looks either like a zither, or giant egg cutter, depending on how poetic you’re feeling. Cutting the curd, a controlled destruction of the protein network, begins the process of releasing whey, and soon enough the curd is aswim in a lake of whey. We stir the curds and whey, and the gentle agitation causes the curds to expel even more whey. Controlling how firm the curd is when it’s cut, how finely it is cut, and how much whey is expelled from the curd after cutting, is one of the main ways of controlling the final texture of the cheese.²

We drain the curd and pour it into moulds, of varying size and porousness, and leave it to drain, overnight or longer, flipping it from time to time to encourage the even distribution of liquid in the cheese. The next day, we salt it, then sit it in front of a fan to dry and allow the salt to be absorbed – and then the magic begins.

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I just ate an ancient ocean.

Tonight I had mozzarella for dinner. You make mozzarella by taking curd that has soured to the correct acidity to be stretchy, then essentially melting it in hot saltwater, then pulling and folding. Repeat this 12 or 16 times, and you have 4096 to 65,536 layers. Tonight’s mozzarella was warm from the saltwater and the hands of its maker, and was in an udder 12 hours before it hit my plate. It tasted of cream and warm animals, and, faintly, earth.

We ate it sprinkled with Tears of Drolma. Tears of Drolma are a very fine grained and delicately pink sea salt, shades of coral and sunset sky. They are all that remains of the Sea of Tethys, which, two hundred million years ago, separated India and China. As they came together, a hundred million years ago, and gave birth to the Himalayas, pockets of the Sea were trapped in the mountains, depositing their salt when they finally disappeared. They taste of iron and history. The Tibetans quarry these deposits, with hammer and chisel, and worship them as sacred, and say they were created when a goddess wept.

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On the first warm day of spring, I stood outside for an hour with my friend Maas, waiting for a hamburger. Neither of us has ever had to wait an hour for a burger, but we didn’t much care. We stood in line at the Shake Shack in Madison Park (Broadway and 23rd), surrounded by sararimen, spilling out of offices like gophers from their holes. This being Manhattan, the park is completely ringed by offices, and it all felt a little urban-blight, the earth still hard and cold, the trees not yet in bud, suits pouring into the square like a scene from the Matrix.

The Shake Shack really is a shack, pretty much, right down to the wriggly tin siding, standing in the middle of a park. It looks like the sort of place that should serve burgers and hot dogs, and where you can get a Mars bar to sink them with. There are, however, several clues to its aspirations – the polished retro of its billboards, and, when Maas and I were there, the New Yorker cover in its window, declaring it the best burger in the city. That, and the lines tailing away from it.

The shack maintains a wine list. This seems like pretension, at odds with the very genuine appeal of the place. Its burgers do not fit wine – they’re more like the ultimate slider, thin by the standards of the upmarket burgers you see these days, and unashamedly plain and ever so slightly greasy - but you have to wonder if you can make a burger without the grease. They come in a wax paper pocket, a pleasingly 50s bit of detail. They claim to cook to medium rare (perhaps they pair better with wine that way?) but ours were cooked through, with a decent griddle crust, thoroughly, beautifully flavourful, intense hits of beef in dripping soaked buns. These weren’t meaty burgers, burgers pretending to be steak, tender, bloody, the meat almost sweet – these were unabashedly patties. A good burger, when cooked to well done, is a progression of textures, like good sushi – a crust, then an effortless dissolve, then a crowd of tiny, chewy grains. The shack claims they’re made of sirloin and brisket, and serves them on a buttered potato-bread bun.

A sign in elegant Century Gothic informs you that the shack, in addition to shakes, serves Concretes. A concrete costs twice as much as a burger. This should tell you a lot. They only come in one size – small, and even then, finishing one is an effort. A concrete is not a shake, but a frozen custard (and some time I will do a write-up on custards and the differences between them) – a St. Louis invention, claimed by this place that guarantees that their concretes will stay in the cup even when you turn it upside down. I haven’t poked too deeply into the history of this horror, but Ted Drewes seems to have a fairly convincing argument, in the same way that a chainsaw in a philosophical debate is convincing. Whatever its heritage, this was easily the best chocolate shake I’ve ever had, quite possibly because it was not a shake. I don’t know if it was just the quality of the chocolate, or the whisper of salinity in eggs, but the depth of flavour in that cup was truly remarkable. I wasn’t a huge fan of the texture – why go to all that effort when you can use a spoon – but the warmth of the day had melted it some by the time I tried it, making a straw just about reasonable.

Some meals are just perfect – the only way this one could have been better was if we were 16, and playing truant.

The Shake Shack is at Broadway and 23rd, in the park. Opening hours change seasonally, it is always open for lunch. Burgers are cheap and concretes are expensive.