cookrookery

I sometimes get unreasonably upset when I cannot source ingredients. The other day I was trying to make a Paul Prudhomme recipe that sounded interesting. Paul Prudhomme is an American celebrity chef, I live in America, so there shouldn’t be any trouble finding the ingredients, right? Well, none of my local supermarkets stock burdock root, Jerusalem artichokes, or wood-ear mushrooms.

On reflection, though, it occurred to me how amazing it is that certain things aren’t rare. Such as cucumbers. You can’t get much more mundane than a cucumber, but isn’t it a miracle of a kind that this vegetable was first cultivated 3000 years ago in India, introduced to Europe by the Ancient Romans, made it to the New World in 1600 AD, and was finally commonly available due to the invention of coal-heated hothouses in the Edwardian era? That’s an awful lot of history for something I now take completely for granted.

Or bread, for that matter. Bread is available in one form or another all over the world, and often holds immense religious and spiritual significance, but it’s not like it occurs naturally or anything. In the first place, we had to cultivate wheat. The timeline is somewhat conjectural, but the process was probably something like this:

From left to right: a food processor, a blender, and a vegetable peeler

11,000 BC: The last ice age ends, producing long dry spells over much of the Earth which favors the evolution of annual plants which die off and leave a hard seed remaining, such as the grasses. Meanwhile, humans are running around in animal skins and cutting up their food with chunks of stone (metalworking wasn’t due for a few more thousand years).

9000 BC: Einkorn wheat is domesticated at the Neolithic settlement Nevalı Çori in Turkey, becoming the first crop to be sown and harvested on a significant scale. Humans are still wearing animal skills and their kitchen implements are still sharpened rocks.

Or butter. Somewhere between the two above dates, sheep began to be kept in Mesopotamia. The first butter was probably made from sheep’s milk, at first inadvertently. Cattle weren’t domesticated until around 6000 BC, and were traded out of India, Africa, and the Middle East to China, Mongolia, and Korea by 5000 BC.

All this work, and we still had to wait a good few millennia for a pre-sliced loaf of bread with butter. So, to celebrate this astounding age of connections we live in, as well as the hot summer afternoons, here’s a recipe for cucumber sandwiches.

Cucumber Sandwiches

Several square slices of dense-textured white loaf

1 English cucumber

butter

lemon juice

salt

Remove the peel of the cucumber. Slice the cucumber thinly. Set the slices aside until the last minute.

Very thinly butter your slices of bread. The butter should be spread from edge to edge of the slices, primarily as an kind of laquer to prevent the cucumber slices from making the bread soggy.

When you are ready to serve, place a single layer of cucumber slices on a slice of buttered bread. Sprinkle the cucumbers with lemon juice and salt. Top with another slice of buttered bread.

Using a very sharp knife, carefully remove the crusts without tearing the bread in an unsightly fashion. You can then cut the bread diagonally and diagonally again, forming four small triangles, or in half, forming two rectangles.

Arrange the sandwiches artfully on a plate, and eat them all while you’re waiting for Lady Bracknell to arrive for tea.

There are only two cuisines in the world: Italian and French. Yes, that’s what I said. All the multiple and manifold cuisines of this limitless world can be classified into two tidy categories: Italian and French. Italian food is built out of cheap ingredients, basic starches, poor cuts of meat, trash fish. The foods of most of Asia and the Americas (not counting New York), and Africa, are all Italian. They are basic, easy to make, and delicious. French cuisine is based on money: cream sauces, young veal, shaved truffles. Japanese cuisine is French. So is anything involving many side dishes, assistants, and laborious preparation. French cuisine is all brilliance, but I come down on the side of Italian. Remember the scene in “1900” where the family flavors their polenta by tapping it against a rotting fish? That’s Italian cuisine at its heart.

There are reasons for my preference. I’m lazy. I’m cheap. I don’t like cream and pastry. I think truffles and fois gras are just a wee bit overrated. I derive enormous satisfaction from turning basic groceries into delicacies. Also, I lived way below the poverty line for some time, and it shaped my food sensibilities.

Chopper cut his own ears off. Smith Street will do that to you.

This was the time I lived in a notorious armpit of Melbourne known simply as ‘Smith Street.’ There was never any shortage of interesting things to see on Smith Street: pub brawls, overdosed gentlemen being taken away on stretchers, folks sitting on doorsteps swigging from bottles in paper bags. The notorious criminal Mark “Chopper” Read lived just up the road from me. Smith Street was also a hive of multicultural food and culture, as armpit areas of large cities often are. I remember being able to buy chicken carcasses at Safeway for a dollar, with which I made delicious soup. A few blocks away, in a classier neighborhood, another Safeway stocked no such thing. There were long strips of baccala (salt cod), freshly made pasta, and other evidence of Italian influence. My time in this neighborhood helped formulate my interest in creating food from nothing, cuisine from poverty, strength from adversity. So I’ve always liked the Italian food ethic.

That being said, I’ve become something of a fan of Paula Wolfert recently, and Paula is not one to stint on ingredients simply because they are expensive or rare. Now that I have the wherewithal, she has inspired me to give French cuisine another chance (I confess it is mostly because of the bewitching names she gives her recipes, such as this one, “Monastery Chicken”). This recipe is simply delicious, and it is adapted from her book “Mediterranean Clay Pot Cooking.”

I encourage you to try it despite the requisite linden, which I had never heard of before either. Linden is not staggeringly rare. I found linden at the herb store just around the corner from my house, the kind of place that sells incense and essential oils and tiny soapstone carvings of the Goddess. Linden flower is usually used as a medicinal tea, but it tastes and smells floral and sweet and entrancing. It’s worth it.

Monastery Chicken with Linden Tea Sauce

Serves two.

2 large chicken thighs

salt, pepper

1 garlic clove, crushed

1/3 oz linden flowers and leaves, dried

¼ cup white wine

¼ cup heavy cream

½ tsp lemon juice

Prick the skin of the chicken with a fork. Season all over with salt and pepper and rub the meat with the crushed garlic.

Bring two cups of water to boil in a small saucepan, and add all the linden leaves. Remove from the heat and let infuse for 15 minutes. Strain the tea, return it to the pan, and boil until it is reduce to 1/3 of a cup. Add the white wine and set aside.

Place the chicken thighs, skin side down, in a skillet, turn the heat to medium low, and heat slowly, allowing the fat to run out and fry the chicken until it’s just golden. Remove most of the fat from the pan with a bulb baster or a spoon, add the linden-wine mixture, partially cover and simmer for 15 more minutes, turning the chicken once.

Take out the chicken and put it on a serving plate in the oven to keep warm. Reduce the cooking liquid to about 1/3 cup, add the cream and boil until the sauce thickens slightly. Add the lemon juice and season with salt and pepper. Spoon it over the chicken.

Chicken cooked in flowers is just good.

I’ve written elsewhere about the difficulties I have with breakfast. Simply put, food before 11am makes me nauseous. There have been exceptions to this. The buffet at the International Garden Hotel in Narita, Japan, was so exciting I grazed for two whole hours. Miso soup is just good at any time of day. And I am fond of cold pizza, or, when in Thailand or China, congee with the works. Roald Dahl recommends half a papaya melon with a whole lime squeezed over it, and so do I.

Perhaps I do like breakfast. I just don’t like normal things for breakfast.

Today, I remembered a non-normal thing for breakfast I first made six years ago and then forgot about: lablabi, a kind of chicken soup with chickpeas and spices, which I read about in The Age (Australia’s only serious newspaper). The author described people lining up to consume bowls of this dish first thing in the morning at Moroccan markets. I duly made it, and it was indeed fine. I even used real homemade chicken stock, which improves anything.

The problem is, upon consulting that oracle of all truth, wikipedia, I learned that lablabi is not Moroccan. It’s not even from an adjacent country. It’s Tunisian, and it isn’t served for breakfast, but for dinner. There are two possible explanations for this. Either Moroccans like to eat Tunisian dinner dishes for breakfast, or the author was bullshitting, as food writers do. Can someone who has actually visited either of these two countries give me a ruling on this?

In the meantime, this is a kickass breakfast.

Lablabi

(for two)

3 cups chicken stock (homemade is ideal)

1 can of chickpeas

1 Tb harissa (a Tunisian chili paste, available as a powder in the West)

1 tsp ground cumin

½ tsp salt

Two large slices of sourdough bread

1/3 cup freshly chopped parsley

1/3 cup freshly chopped cilantro

1 Tb chopped capers (absolutely essential)

2 soft-boiled eggs

Olive oil (fine and interesting quality, please)

Simmer stock, chickpeas, harissa, cumin, and salt for 15 minutes. Tear up the bread into chunks. Place the bread, the herbs, and the capers into two soup bowls.

So hungry already.

Scoop an egg from its shell into each bowl, then ladle soup over and drizzle with olive oil.

It occurs to me that if you substituted vegetable stock, you would have my first vegetarian recipe! Unless you consider eggs to be meat, that is. Hmm.

Insert joke here

I interrupt my regular program of heavy meat-based dishes to bring you something more appropriate to the 100º weather outside my window. Much as I love lamb broths and spicy chicken wings and braised pork and so on, by evening my apartment is so disgustingly hot it’s as much as I can do to blanch a bean. So here is a delicious salad which is a whole meal in itself.

It’s supposedly Salade Niçoise, but I can tell you right now anyone from Nice would be disgusted with me for claiming that. Salade Niçoise is one of those dishes, like bouillabaisse, which no one will ever agree upon. But don’t feel bad – wikipedia defines ‘salad’ as a dish which a) may include vegetables, pasta, legumes, meat, poultry, seafood, fruit, sauces, dressings, noodles, gelatins, nuts, and croutons,  b) may be served hot or cold, c) may be served at any point during a meal. Thanks for narrowing that down, guys! In other words, salad is anything I say it is. So this is Salade Niçoise.

Dan’s Salade Niçoise

½ can of good quality tuna

2 eggs, hard-boiled and halved

A bunch of cherry tomatoes

A handful of tiny black olives (Niçoise, in other words)

2 Yukon Gold potatoes, boiled until just tender and sliced

A handful of green beans, blanched in boiling water but still crunchy

½ red pepper, sliced

½ yellow pepper, sliced

Dressing:

½ cup olive oil

1 crushed clove of garlic

4 anchovy fillets in oil

Sea salt and pepper (freshly ground)

Arrange the ingredients artfully on a plate. Chop the anchovy fillets and mix with the other dressing ingredients and drizzle on top.

A word about the tuna: I use Quinault Pride albacore tuna, because I can get it. It is loin-cut, preservative-free, caught and packed by Quinault Tribal Enterprises on the Taholah reservation in Washington, and it is good. Unfortunately, their website seems to be down, but if you live in Washington, you should be able to seek it out.

You might be surprised how many people have tried to answer this question. Did you know there’s a “Complete Idiot’s Guide” to cooking foods from the Bible? I didn’t, until I stumbled upon it in the cookery section of the library. I immediately opened it, seeking an answer to my personal interest, “what was Jesus’s favorite food?” I was disappointed. I did receive details about Jesus’s feast with the Pharisees, but nothing about what he thought of it, except that he didn’t get along with the Pharisees. Googling the question later produced a range of answers ranging from the profane to the hilarious, but no serious leads. Further investigation provided me with such books as Cooking with the Bible, Biblical Food, Feasts, and Lore, and Foods Jesus Ate and How to Grow Them, as well as the Idiot’s Guide. Yet none could answer the question.

I suppose the obvious answer is bread. Bread is the staff of life. When Jesus is kicking around the desert the Devil says something like “hey, if you’re really the Son of God, what about turning these rocks into bread?” Jesus must have thought pretty highly about bread if that was what the Devil thought he would most like to turn rocks into. And then of course there’s the Last Supper. And all those tortillas… but I still hold that the evidence does not speak as to whether Jesus loved bread above all other foods or was just good friends with it as a symbol.

Not a food.

Intrigued, I continued my research into the food preferences of Ascended Masters with the Buddha, Siddhārtha Gautama, and had little more luck. Arguably, food is more important in Buddhist ritual than in Christianity. The Bible makes a big thing about food restrictions. I’ve nothing against this, and some of these restrictions I can get behind. Leviticus specifically prohibits the eating of ferrets, for example, a tradition that has been carried all the way to the present day (“warning – this food may contain traces of peanuts, shellfish, and ferrets”). Buddhists, however, like to make offerings of food, Buddhist monks collect alms in the forms of food, and so on. Often these offerings are oranges, as seen in many restaurant shrines. Does this mean Buddha’s favorite food was oranges? Or did Buddha, perceiving all as illusion, have no preferences by definition? It is said he died of food poisoning, though the food in question is up for debate. The Mahayana tradition has it that Buddha ate a poisonous mushroom, and thus died in the same manner as the Roman Emperors Claudius and Charles VI. However, the Theravada tradition say that Buddha died from eating bad pork. I think I’m going to compromise, and say Buddha’s favorite food was the truffle.

I had much more luck with the prophet Mohammed. We know without a doubt Mohammed’s favorite meal, because he says so in a number of hadith, including this one, concerning his beloved wife Aisha:

“The superiority of Aisha over other women is like the superiority of tharid to other meals.”

Tharid, also known as tashreeb or tahgrib, is a chicken stew served over torn up bread. The bread slowly absorbs the stew.

So at the end of all my research, I am left with an image of Jesus, the ascetic, saying “no, no, I’ll be fine with just bread.” And Buddha saying “Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so” (okay, so that was Douglas Adams). And finally Mohammad: “Bring on the tharid!”

Tharid, Tashreeb, Taghrib

Serves 2

(adapted from Annia Ciezadlo, in her essay They Remember Home, about Iraqi refugees about to be settled in Texas, of all places)

Splash of vegetable oil

3 cloves garlic, smashed

2 small onions, roughly chopped

2 medium waxy potatoes, peeled and quartered

1 bay leaf

1 Tb curry powder

½ Tb ground turmeric

½ Tb kosher salt, plus more to taste

4 skinless chicken thighs

1 19-oz can chickpeas, drained

2 pieces flat bread, such as Iraqi al-tannour, naan, or pita

1 lemon, quartered

½ Tb dried sumac

Heat oil in a pot over medium heat. Add garlic, onions, potatoes, bay leaves, curry powder, turmeric, and salt. Cook, stirring and scraping bottom of pot occasionally, until onions and potatoes are golden, about 10 minutes. Add chicken and 1 ½ cups of water; stir to combine. Bring to the boil over high heat, reduce heat to medium, and simmer, uncovered, until chicken is tender and cooked through, 20-25 minutes. Add chickpeas; cook for 5 minutes more. Taste the stew and season with more salt, to taste. Line 2 bowls with torn pieces of flat bread. Ladle stew over bread. Squeeze a wedge of lemon over each bowl and sprinkle with sumac.

As you see this recipe requires flatbread, which you can generally buy at any supermarket nowadays. I’m not a baker, but I am sick of the generic flatbread at my supermarket, so here’s a recipe for a flatbread you can make in a household oven. It does help to have a baking stone, or, in my case, the inverted cast-iron bottom of my tagine, which works just as well.

Iraqi Pita

(adapted from Maggie Glezer, A Blessing of Bread)

This pita is very large and has no central pocket, which makes it ideal for sopping up stews, but it becomes stale pretty quickly. This will make four large pitas – if you freeze the leftovers, they will keep a few days more and need only to be warmed up under the grill.

1 tsp dried yeast

4 cups all-purpose flour

1 ½ cups warm water

1 tsp sugar

½ Tb salt

1 Tb vegetable oil

Mix the yeast with half the flour. Slowly pour in the water and mix until smooth. I am assured this goes a lot easier with a mixing machine. Let the slurry stand 10-20 minutes, until it has begun to ferment and bubbles are appearing.

Add the sugar, salt, and oil, and mix until everything is dissolved. Add the remaining flour and mix until the dough is very smooth, about five minutes. Or it would be five minutes, if I had a mixing machine. The dough should be extremely wet and soft, impossible to mix by hand. If it is at all firm, add water 2 Tb at a time until it is wet again.

Place the dough in a large bowl and cover with plastic wrap. Let the dough rise until it has doubled in bulk, about 1 ½ hours.

Heavily flour a baking pan. Turn the dough out, using plenty of dusting flour, onto a well-floured work surface. Trust me, you’ll need all the flour. Cut it into four equal pieces and round them, then roll them in more flour. Place the rounds back on the baking pan and wrap with plastic wrap. Let the dough rise another hour.

Second rising

While the dough rises, place your baking stone or upside-down cast iron pan in the oven under the broiler, and preheat the oven to 550º, or whatever the highest temperature it can manage is.

After an hour, turn off the oven and heat the broiler (the pitas need to bake from both sides, the iron below and the broiler above). On a lightly floured surface stretch out one of the chunks of dough until it’s about 1/8^th inch thick.

It's thin!

Place it on a baking sheet, and put the baking sheet on top of the heated iron or baking stone under the broiler. Bake it about 5 minutes, but be careful not to overbake, because it will burn in the space of a minute. Meanwhile, stretch out the next pita. Wrap the finished pita in a towel and put the next one in the oven.

I served this with a bulgur pilaf. As you can see, a feast worthy of a prophet.

Tharid, pita, and pilaf