Peas peas peas.

1 lb. of green peas, fresh or frozen, slightly overcooked

ha ha

6 large egg yolks (to be warmed with 3/4 c. whole milk), warm peas steeping in 1 1/2 c. heavy cream, 1/2 c. lightly packed mint leaves

See, my best friend Cody was making a list aloud one day of absurd [...]]]> Yes, peas.

Peas peas peas.

1 lb. of green peas, fresh or frozen, slightly overcooked

ha ha

6 large egg yolks (to be warmed with 3/4 c. whole milk), warm peas steeping in 1 1/2 c. heavy cream, 1/2 c. lightly packed mint leaves

See, my best friend Cody was making a list aloud one day of absurd ice cream flavors he thought I should make, and he rather flippantly suggested “Green Peas!” Then he paused, as if he might have gone too far.

Custard mixed with cream and peas, cooled then blended with mint.

So when his birthday came around this year, I thought I’d surprise him. I consulted my David Leibovitz ice cream bible and discovered his recipe based on a flavor he’d had in Paris at the Palais Royal. Leibovitz prepares the palate by suggesting that if you’ve ever enjoyed a slice (or wedge) of carrot cake, you’ll know the idea of transforming vegetables into desserts isn’t that strange of an idea. I’d braved avocado before, and though that has a lot of fat lending itself to the creaminess, I thought the earthiness of the two might be similar.

Blended mixture strained.

Turns out the similarity is really the fun I experience in watching people try it and then try to guess what the flavor is. The mint functions like salt does in other dishes, emphasizing the base flavor. Cody tried it, but eventually I did have to tell him. His eyes lit up, he licked the spoon, said “Oh, yeah. Tooootally. Peas.”

We each dipped our spoons in our bowls again. It was definitely ice cream. It was definitely peas. And undoubtedly intriguing.

Green Pea Ice Cream: The Taste of Spring

How did we know wheat would be good to eat if we dried it, husked it, ground it, [...]]]> “It was a brave man,” said Jonathan Swift, “who first ate an oyster.” There are other culinary conundrums that come to mind when it comes to food which is disgusting or downright lethal without proper preparation, such as:

How did we know wheat would be good to eat if we dried it, husked it, ground it, mixed it with water and baked it? Otherwise it’s just grass.

Fugu (pufferfish) is a delicacy but if improperly prepared is lethal. How many test subjects did chefs go through to find out how to properly prepare it?

Cassava or manioc is a major food staple in much of the world, but before eating it must be dried, ground into flour, soaked for 24 hours, dried again, then toasted, otherwise you may as well just swallow a cyanide capsule. Who found this out?

Who first looked at a Twinkie and said, “you know, I bet I could deep fry that?”

Why did anyone ever eat a nettle?

The theme of this post is glorious, glorious spring. Spring is here! Green things are erupting from the earth and Tom Lehrer’s “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park” is running through my head. The farmer’s market is open, and big bags of new nettles are for sale for the only time in the year.

Nettles have been a food since at least the bronze age. We know this because in 2011 in the Cambridgeshire fens an archaeological dig uncovered a bunch of canoes, swords and baskets dating from 1000BC, perfectly preserved by the peat. Inside one of the canoes was a bowl with the spoon still in it, and inside the bowl was nettle soup. (One does have to wonder, however, what happened to the people who suddenly ran away from their canoes, swords and baskets and half-eaten lunch, leaving them behind long enough to be buried with layers of peat. History is weird sometimes.)

In Sweden, nettles are eaten to celebrate spring’s arrival, in a soup with minimum extra ingredients to emphasize the sheer popping spring-ness of the nettles. Traditionally, the nettles are boiled to remove the sting, chopped up with other weeds such as chervil and fennel, and returned to the boiling water with onions and salt. This is eaten with eggs. Note that this recipe includes nothing which wasn’t commonly available in the bronze age in Europe: weeds, onions, salt water, and eggs. It’s also very good, but I have taken the liberty of including pepper which wasn’t available in the bronze age unless you happened to be in Asia, and omitting the eggs, because I had eggs for breakfast.

Nettle Soup for Spring

1 bag fresh nettles

Enough salty water to boil the nettles and no more

½ onion

2 cloves garlic

1 tablespoon flour

A few sprigs parsley

freshly ground pepper

First of all, you must cope with the terror that is nettles. If you go out picking them, wear gloves. If you are a coward like me and buy them in a bag at the Farmer’s Market, carry them home gingerly at arm’s length making sure not a single leaf brushes near any part of the flimsy plastic wall separating your hand from the Weed That Bites. Put them down on the counter and watch for a while to make sure they don’t make any sudden moves, then bring some water to boil.

They are watching me.

How much water? Well, the point of this dish is to taste the nettles, so no more water than you will need to make the eventual soup. For me, this was about 6 cups in a large stock pot for a plastic bag full of nettles. If you use more, you will end up throwing away water, which means throwing away flavor. So use just enough to blanch them and make the stock afterwards. The nettles will shrink when boiling, like spinach.

When the water is at a killing boil, throw in the nettles stems and all (using tongs or upending the bag) and laugh maniacally as the stinging hairs loaded with acetylocholine, histamine and formic acid are neutralized, rendering the leaves helpless to your devilish plans. Let them boil for three minutes. Envision your throat swelling closed after you sample your first spoonful of soup and let them boil a couple of minutes more. When you are feeling brave, drain the nettles (preserving the cooking liquid) and shock the leaves in ice water. This is called blanching and it preserves the color, which is at least half the reason to cook with such a malevolent ingredient.

You will see in the picture that the water the nettles have been cooked in (left) appears deep brown. It is not. It is in fact, as you will see if you let some dribble from a ladle, lovely deep green. Green so deep the green-receptors in your eyes fail and you can only perceive brown. Or something. And the smell! Here is the scent of spring! A combination of newly mown grass, fresh horse dung (you know you like it, admit it), open fields, hedgerows, soft rain falling on rustic church steeples in Scandinavian villages, etc. You only have to smell it to know spring has truly arrived and the green things are returning. (Before you use this water for stock, however, pour it off slowly into another container, leaving the grit in the first. Nothing ruins a good refined soup like the crunch of grit between the teeth.)

Squeeze out water from the nettles (no gloves required, just your hands. Come on. Do it.) and chop them to prevent long stringy fibers clotting your soup. Chop up some parsley too, while you are at it – this is a herb soup, so you can add chervil or chives or anything green. Just don’t overdo it – it’s all about the nettles.

Heat up a lump of butter. Chop up half an onion and two cloves garlic. Sautee the onion and garlic until they are soft but not browning. Throw in the nettles and sprinkle with a tablespoon of flour. Stir well and add a few ladles of your nettle stock, until you reach a nice runny consistency.

Blend it as smooth as you like – I think the smoother, the better. Reheat it with a splash of milk. Sprinkle it with pepper, eat it, and be grateful. Spring.

I’ve been curious to try making pita bread (for Iraqi pita bread, Dan posted an excellent recipe two years ago) . I found the process to be fairly simple, but a bit time-consuming. Fortunately the delight of watching the pitas expand — literally like a balloon — was enough of a delight that I see [...]]]>

I’ve been curious to try making pita bread (for Iraqi pita bread, Dan posted an excellent recipe two years ago) . I found the process to be fairly simple, but a bit time-consuming. Fortunately the delight of watching the pitas expand — literally like a balloon — was enough of a delight that I see me continuing to make them for a good while.

Recipe (makes 10-12 pita pockets):

• 1 tsp sugar (I used evaporated cane juice)
• 1/2 cup warm water (somewhere between 95 and 105 degrees Fahrenheit for the yeast, my pleasing-yet-unreliable method is to stick my finger in and go, “hm, does that feel comfy for yeast?”)
• 1 package of yeast (or if you buy it in bulk, about 2.25 tsp).

Mix these items together. Let them sit 10-15 minutes, it will form a big foamy head. This means it is happy. If there is no foam, it will NOT make your dough rise. This is because it is UNhappy. The yeast being dead or the water being the wrong temperature may also be contributing factors.

Separately, in a big bowl, mix together:

• 3 cups flour (I like white whole wheat)
• 1 1/4 tsp salt

Form it as if you were making a volcano in a sandbox, a big mountain with a chasm in the middle. Pour in the foamy yeast mix, and begin stirring it with one hand. With the other slowly/intermittently pour in:

• 1 cup warm water

Mix it in pretty well, and then take the whole fleshy ball and place it on a well floured counter or cutting board. Begin kneading it.

With this recipe, I continually flour the board generously throughout. I’d say I added at least 1/2 cup more of flour while kneading, in bits whenever it started sticking to everything. In fact, let’s add that to the ingredients for all of you pre-cooking recipe skimmers:

• 1/2 cup flour

Knead it for 15 minutes. Grab the front part of the dough and fold it back, and then push down with your palms. I love this. Love it!

This is quite a vigorous workout for your yeast, as you could imagine, and so it needs a nice warm place to relax before the final race. Oil the inside of your mixing bowl, place the ball of dough in, then flip the dough (so that both sides are greased). Cover it with a towel, and put the bowl in a warm place (I actually set the bowl on top of a yogurt maker turned on, which provides a nice low-level heat. An oven turned on for a minute and then off for a minute should work well too), and then sing it a lullaby. I have not found any lullabies for yeast, and so I wrote one especially for it:

Baby yeast, swim summer’s sea
When waves do foam, come back to me
I’ll hug you, kiss you on the head
and cover you, warm in bowl’s bed
when morning opens up your eyes
Let’s make the bread, it’s time to rise.

Let the dough rise 2-3 hours, it should be double in size. Gently punch it down, pull it out of the bowl, and then knead it on your floured surface a couple minutes. The tear it into approximately 10-12 pieces.

At this point, move your oven rack to the lowest position in the oven (you will be baking there), and turn on your oven. You want it at 500 degrees. This is pretty dang hot, so listen carefully: when you open the oven, a gust/cloud/wave of burning heat will leap from the stove. So make SURE your face is turned away and you are out of the line of fire. Trust me from personal experience, this blast of heat in your eyes HURTS.

Back to the dough. Take one the pieces, wet your fingertips, and knead it with your fingertips for about 10 seconds. Then put more flour down, and put the now-rounded piece in the flour, then flip it, and then roll it out with a rolling pin. You don’t want it too thin, maybe 1/4 inch. And as round as possible. Then set it aside for baking (note: I stack mine, but the bottom ones tend to stick together, I would recommend maybe not stacking them more then 6 high).

Once the oven is preheated (don’t begin until it is), put your cookie sheet (or baking/bread stone if you have one. Hm, maybe a stone should be put in earlier, not sure) in the oven for a minute to warm it. Take it out, put some of the dough discs on it (I generally can fit 3/sheet), and then pop it back in the oven. After 4 minutes they should have blown up like a baloon, flip them. Bake them another 2 minutes. Take them out and put them on a cooling rack. Repeat until you’re done.

Make these. They taste super good. Roll a few to be 3/4″ thick and eat ‘em like english muffins. Or make Hummus to go with it. You won’t be disappointed. Unless you screw up.

Answer: lamb and leek broth, seafood soup, crab in cream, oats fried with [...]]]> You’re running a little restaurant in the Midlands, Britain. A family come in and order cawl, Cullen skink, partan bree, skirlie, Arbroath smokies, collops, a large Melton Mowbray (with a side of neeps) and some clootie for dessert. What do you bring them?

Answer: lamb and leek broth, seafood soup, crab in cream, oats fried with onions, whole smoked haddock, sliced meat, cold pork pie (with mashed turnips) and boiled fruit pudding. But doesn’t it sound better in the original?

This is a detective story, and the story began long ago, when I was reading Danny the Champion of the World by Roald Dahl. If you don’t already know it, Roald Dahl really knew how to write for children. He focused obsessively on food, for one thing, Charlie and Chocolate Factory being the perfect example. I, however, have always preferred savoury foods, so it was the descriptions in Champion of roast pheasant (“don’t forget, Danny, before we put the bird in the oven, we have to lay strips of fat bacon across the breast to keep it nice and juicy. And breadsauce, too. We shall have to make breadsauce. You must never have roasted pheasant without lashings of breadsauce. There are three things you must always have with roasted pheasant – breadsauce, potato chips, and boiled parsnips”) Yorkshire pudding (“My mum could make toad-in-the-hole like nobody else in the world. She did it in an enormous pan with the Yorkshire pudding very brown and crisp on top and raised up in huge bubbly mountains. In between the mountains you could see the sausages half buried in the batter. Fantastic it was”) aniseed balls (“The trick with aniseed balls is never to bite them. If you keep rolling them around in your mouth, they will dissolve slowly of their own accord, and then, right in the very centre, you will find a tiny brown seed. This is the aniseed itself, and when you crush it between your teeth, it has a fabulous taste”) and, most riveting for me, the cold pie Doc Spencer brings Danny on the day after his father is injured.

“Very carefully, I now began to unwrap the waxed paper from around the doctor’s present, and when I had finished, I saw before me the most enormous and beautiful pie in the world. It was covered all over, top, sides, and bottom, with rich golden pastry. I took a knife from beside the sink and cut out a wedge. I started to eat it in my fingers, standing up. It was a cold meat pie. The meat was pink and tender with no fat or gristle in it, and there were hard boiled eggs buried like treasures in several different places. The taste was absolutely fabulous. When I had finished the first slice, I cut another and ate that, too.”

I have always been hypnotized by this description, but how to reproduce it? No recipe is included, not even in Memories with Food at Gipsy House, his cookbook, which I searched first. A certain amount of detective work was required.

Like any detective, I began by examining the clues. What did we know, I mean really know, about the pie in question? The facts, ma’am? From the sole passage Dahl left us with, we know these things:

1. The pie is eaten in England.
2. The pie is served cold.
3. The pie is enormous.
4. The pie has sides, which indicate it is a ‘tall’ pie, not a ‘flat’ pie such as an apple pie. An apple pie is encased in a top and bottom crust like a flying saucer. A tall pie is hand formed or made in a mould and resembles a drum. We have further confirmation from this in the beautiful illustration by Jill Bennett. Bennet was one of Dahl’s original illustrators, and if it were up to me, Quentin Blake would still be waiting for the phone to ring.
5. The meat in the pie is pink.
6. The pie contains whole hard boiled eggs.

I began with the first point. Was there, in fact, a tradition of cold meat pies in Britain, or was this just freeform culinary magic whipped up Doc Spencer’s wife, or, more accurately, Roald Dahl’s appetite? It did not take much research to find out that cold meat pies are in fact a British (and New Zealand, interestingly) staple, and that the meat is pork. That took care of points 1 and 2, and solves the question of the meat, which is not specified. However – when pork is cooked, it turns grey, and does not remain pink… unless it is preserved pork. Wikipedia describes the “common pork pie” as follows:

“The common pie uses cured meat. Often produced in moulds or forms, it gives the outside of the pie a very regular shape and the inside filling a pink colour. It is easier, simpler and cheaper to produce in volume, and hence the more common choice for commercial manufacturers.”

Yet this description does not exactly fit our suspect. For one thing, Doc Spencer specifically tells Danny that his wife made the pie, rather than buying it at Sainsburys. Hard boiled eggs are nowhere included. Could the pie in question be Roald Dahl’s description of the handmade, artisanal pork pie known as the Melton Mowbray, after its place of origin in Leicestershire? The Melton Mowbray pie is a premium price pie and as such the Melton Mowbray Pork Pie Association have been granted protection under the “Protected designation of origin” laws. In other words, just as champagne can come only from Champagne, France, a Melton Mowbray can come only from Melton Mowbray, England.

Shortenill's Wood

I returned to point 1. Where, so far as I could specify, did Champion take place? Six and a half miles from Hazell’s wood, where Danny and his father go to poach pheasants from the extremely unpleasant landowner Victor Hazell. Did Hazell’s wood exist? It turns out that many Dahl fans have already done their research into the real life location of Champion, and the consensus is that, due to landmarks described (Cobbler’s Hill, the road to Wendover,etc), it takes place in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire, where Dahl lived in the 1960s, and is buried today. There is no Hazell’s Wood in Great Missenden, but there is a similar wood called Shortenill’s Wood. Good enough for me. Now how far is Great Missenden from Melton Mowbray? According to Google maps, the two towns are 100 miles apart travelling on modern freeways. That’s a fair fraction of the United Kingdom. My conclusion, therefore, is that the pie in question is not a Melton Mowbray, and Doc Spencer’s wife was left to fall back on her own devices and grand tradition of home cooking.

Well, there I was. I knew the meat of the pie and that it was homemade. All that was left was to make one.

Roald Dahl Pork Pie

The British cold pork pie requires three things: pastry, filling, and pork jelly, which is poured in a hole in the top after the pie has been baked and left to set while the pie cools, holding everything together as well as being delicious in itself.

Pastry

Pastry has never been my strong suit, and this pastry was tricky. It had to stand up on its own to form the sides. Most pork pies are made in a mould, but something told me Doc Spencer’s wife didn’t use a mould. So I made a pastry out of lard, flour and salt. I will not post the recipe because I’m not happy with it yet, and you could probably do better.

Filling

I’m a lot better with filling. I decided to use uncured pork (violating the description of the original with some pangs of regret). I used shoulder of pork, diced fine but not ground, salt, freshly ground pepper, dried sage and thyme, and a sprinkling of nutmeg. I also hard boiled an egg. I wasn’t making an ‘enormous’ pie (violating the description for the second time), so one would do, right smack in the centre.

Pork Jelly

This was the fun part. Jelly is essentially stock made from bones which has been reduced enough for the gelatin in the bones to overpower the water content and set. Of course, you could always use regular stock and add some aspic. My jelly recipe was something like:

2 lb pork bones (practically free at the Farmer’s market)

2 carrots, roughly chopped

1 onion, cut in half, unpeeled

2 sticks celery

2 bay leaves

sprigs of fresh parsley

1 tsp black peppercorns

a bare sprinkling of salt

This is my standard stock recipe. I just put everything in a large pan, cover it with cold water, and simmer for hours, skimming the foam where necessary. When I feel it has reduced enough (i.e. it tastes good), I strain out the ingredients. At this point I can continue to reduce the stock as needed. In this case, I wanted jelly, so I reduced and reduced and reduced. Once cooled, it congealed. I felt it could congeal just a little more, so  when the time came I dissolved a little aspic into the hot stock.

The Process

Forming the case was the hardest part, but it was the whole point, wasn’t it? I rolled out 2/3 of the dough into a neat circle, then, like a potter, began pinching the edges up to form a nice squat pie with slightly bulging rounded sides, the sort of thing a hobbit would eat. It took a while and the pastry kept cracking, which is why I am not posting the recipe. The end result, for structural reasons, was thicker than it should have been, and while tasty, was not all edible. Never mind. Next time I’ll just use a mould.

In went the filling, with the hard boiled egg in the centre. Then with the remaining dough I made a pretty lid for the pie, sealing it well so the hot jelly would not leak out. I added two holes to admit a funnel, although I believe one is more traditional. Brushed the whole thing with beaten egg. In it went, to bake in the oven, 350 degrees F for about an hour, until golden brown.

When the pie was cool, I heated up my pork jelly into liquidity again, stirred in a touch of aspic, and poured the jelly in through the two holes in the top. It was the moment of truth. Would it leak all over the kitchen?

It didn’t leak. The final, triumphant pie went in the fridge to cool into solidity.

Oh, I am happy with my first pork pie. It was beautiful, the meat tasty, the hard boiled egg like a little hidden treasure as described, and the jelly delicious. The pastry was a little too thick. I will buy a small, tall pie mould when I can find one, and continue to experiment. But right now, I’m a little closer to the world of Roald Dahl, and that is reward in itself.