Off the Bone

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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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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

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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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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.

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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.

Before I continue my review of freshwater fish with sturgeon, I should offer a note on translation and an apology for the increased use of Latin (for this post and the next). It is difficult to translate the names of any but the most common animals and plants accurately, because the words are sometimes missing. Russian has at least four common-knowledge names for different species of fish in the sturgeon family, and a few for different types of wild strawberries (often regionalisms, since wild strawberries even now travel much less than fish). Hence Latin. So you could look these things up if you ever have a mind to do so.

So, sturgeon. This family includes species that are firmly freshwater and those that are anadromous (i.e. live in salt water and spawn in streams). They are a very old fish family whose ancestors could already be found in the Jurassic period. Like many an old family, they have done quite well for themselves, and better in Europe than in America (where the sturgeon population was greatly reduced through pollution, damming, and overfishing). The best-known representative is perhaps beluga - the largest freshwater fish and a source of most of European caviar - but the lesser members of the family are equally valuable from the culinary viewpoint and are sufficiently valuable commercially to fall victim to regular poaching. This fate also befell the two fishies I cooked and ate - probably sterliad (Acipenser ruthenus) - freshwater native of the Black, Caspian and Azov sea basins - although they could also have been small sevrugas (A. stellatus), who are coresidential with sterliad’ and come to the same rivers to spawn. The two species have also been crossed by Soviet biologists; their offspring proved able to breed and are now called “bester.”

Sturgeons are very unusual-looking fish - and perhaps the cutest I’ve seen. The best thing about them is the snout - they have long, thin, slightly flattened noses and little whiskers that make them look perpetually curious. Sturgeon have no scales, but their bodies are covered with bony plates: five rows of sharp spiky ones (along the spine and two per side), and something on the rest of their skin that makes it slippery in one direction and sandpaper-rough in the other. These plates cannot be cleaned off - the regular ones apparently dissolve when the fish is cooked, but the rows of spikes remain dangerous and have to be watched. I was informed a few days after I was finished with my fishies that they can be peeled like tomatoes - immerse in boiling water for 10 seconds, and the skin should come off like a glove. I personally quite like the skin, despite the caution it requires.

Sturgeons of all species, are delicious, and, despite being freshwater fish, not terribly bony. If you don’t like fish at all, you may well like sturgeon. Their flesh is white, firm, meltingly smooth, delicately sweet, and not at all “fishy.” They can be smoked to marvelous effect, grilled whole, panfried, braised, or made into soup - the latter two are traditional in Russian cuisine, and for good reason. Of all fish, sturgeon makes perhaps the best stock - their spines are cartilage, and stock quickly thickens. I don’t know any truly traditional Russian recipes, and there are no great tricks to either fish soups or braises. If you decide on the latter, I suggest first making stock out of the heads and tails, then braising the rest of the fish in it (with the usual onions, smashed garlics, herbs - try dill for a more Russian take). Chill the whole thing until the braising liquid turns to jelly. Kick your family out of the kitchen if you must - it really will be much better cold.

Some notes on prep:
- use paper towels or rubber gloves to handle unskinned fish - avoiding the spikes is a pain, and the rest of the fish is really remarkably slippery
- thick skin - sharp knife
- a good way to remove the head - make deep incisions from both sides, from behind the fins to under the cheek plates, then slide the knife under the top head plate and cut the spine
- sturgeon is a fatty fish and hence forgiving of overcooking. Like with every freshwater fish, don’t undercook

I wanted to write about ramps – leek’s delicious wild cousin that resulted in many a tasty meal this spring and summer – but their season is over, so I shall tag this post for next spring. Instead I will draw your attention to tomatoes, since the good stuff is probably hitting the farmers’ markets just about now.

There are two things I like to do with really good tomatoes: a raw tomato sauce for pasta, and, recently, tomato soup. They are so simple that I am almost embarrassed to write about them. All you need is tomatoes. Fresh, ripe local tomatoes that tickle your nose with sweet and tangy aroma when you look at them close. I find that the sort matters little, just don’t buy enormous beefsteaks – these are for sandwiches – and don’t be tempted by yellow or orange ones – they are always less flavorful, although pretty in salads. Don’t buy any sort that you cannot smell.

Once you are in possession of tomatoes, scald and peel them. For sauce, seed, dice, toss in a large bowl with a bit of salt, a bit of sugar, and a few smashed garlic cloves. Leave at room temperature for at least a couple of hours – it will froth a little – then toss with pasta and fresh basil.

For soup, simply cut into chunks and toss in a pot with freshly sautéed garlic. Cook a little, add whatever you want (salt, a pinch of sugar, freshly ground pepper, herbs…), and serve. You can puree the stuff with immersion blender, but I like to leave mine chunky and eat it with cheesy toast.

Best summer meal ever.