taste, memory

The new Food Arts came today and I inhaled it. It’s the industry rag for chefs and it’s chock full of gossip, openings and closings. But I love the menu previews the best, where the chefs show a few dishes from their new menus and then give verbal run-on recipes (“take that jus and reduce it to a syrup . . .”). They read more like poetry than instruction.

I spend all my time writing really precise recipes now, measuring black pepper by the 1/8 teaspoon, but when during my first really serious cooking job I remember being struck by the simple beauty of a celery root puree recipe the other garde manger (cold appetizer cook) passed to me. It had arrows showing the order of composition and, also, the passage of time:
“brown butter-->shallot-->celery root-->sweat out all the way-->white wine, reduce-->fill up with half-milk/half-veg stock.”

Written on frayed-top pages ripped from mini-notebooks, recipes were folded into thick squares and passed quietly through the kitchen. As in any good game of telephone, their contents changed in the hands of the most recent player, the last cook’s sauce tasting totally different from the first cook’s. In this way, the recipes were transmitted almost orally, and these scraps were just shreds of folkloric history.

Nowhere in such a recipe does it say how much to add. Whether you're making a small batch of sauce or a large batch, when you deglaze with wine it is assumed that you add enough to just cover the bottom of the cooking pan, and when you add stock you add just enough to reach to the top level of the solids, the vegetables, scraps, etc. 

In fact, these recipe had a lot less to do with what you do (because a line cook should know) and more about when, and making any sense of it at all depended on a shared visual knowledge. When the butter has browned, add the shallots. When the shallots have softened, add the celeriac (thinly sliced, of course.)

Here’s another one.

Monk sauce refers to the pool of burgundy sauce we served with the pan-roasted monkfish. Made from a base of reduced veal stock (75%) and chicken stock (25%), if was fortified with port wine, cherry tomatoes, of course mirepoix (celery, onions and carrots) and then set to steep with cilantro stems and white peppercorns. Finally, we strained it through a fine mesh chinois, and then again through cheesecloth. The cook here wrote “fishnet,” and it’s possible he had sexy stockings on the brain, but I’m pretty sure he meant cheesecloth. I don’t remember whose recipe this was. My guess, he was European.

What’s interesting here is that these recipes don’t concern themselves with the time it takes to do something. What I mean is this: Recipes for home cooks give you two clues to move on to the next step: a visual cue (when something has browned, for instance) and then a time (about 10 minutes). Cooks recipes don’t specify how long, but rather concentrate on what level of cooked-ness it should have, which is far more precise. 

I wish that recipes for home cooks were written this way because I feel like the double-pronged direction (the time plus the visual) sometimes trips up the reader.  I know it does for me, on the rare occasion that I follow a recipe. How should you know which one to follow? (Pete Wells’ NYT essay this week touches on this. Love it.)

For that matter, how’s a person supposed to know when the vegetable is done “sweating?”

You know what? You’ll recognize the beauty when you see it. A vegetable has finished sweating when it has fully succumbed to the heat. The slices will look wilted and show the beginning spots of rusty caramelization. It will have surrendered its juices to the butter. At this point add the stock and cook it a little further into submission . . . and after that, when you puree it, it will taste more purely of that vegetable than you thought possible. Give it a taste and virtually file away the memory of that flavor. In the end, I’ve come to realize that taste-memory is far more precise than any recipe, no matter how loose or how detailed.

eggplant bonanza

That glut of food down the hill, or the fenced patch of weeds and trailing vines formerly known as "the garden," is making me more magnanimous than usual. I'm chucking vegetables into pots, stripping kale from its stems at warp speed and lopping off way too much good stuff when I cut up a tomato, just to get through them. But I'm telling you, I want to get these vegetables taken care of, and they just keep coming, Strega Nonna-style.

My eggplants are glorious. Check it out. Scads of shiny baby eggplants, weighting down the stalks like  iron lanterns.

Store-bought eggplant do not compare to fresh eggplant. They're silkier, paler and when cooked slow and low, they will melt in your mouth. The only problem with growing them is that they come all at once. I've been throwing them on the stovetop to smoke and wither down every chance I get, and I even froze a bunch of them for making babghanous, the smoky eggplant and homemade mayo dip that I adore.

But the other day I peeled back the burnt skins and pureed the smoked eggplant, pumped it up with farm eggs and a pretty healthy pour of heavy cream and slowly baked the custard. I wouldn't bake it uncovered again, strictly for visual reasons, as the skin it formed on top was an unappealing leatherish army green, but still, the custard was delicious in small doses and carried a great deal of smoky eggplant flavor through. (My thought: it might be better as a sformato: baked in individual cups in a water bath. Next time.)

Tonight I took the leftover eggplant custard and mixed it into a batch of steamed basmati rice with dill and toasted almonds and found myself stumbling onto something pretty great. Smoked eggplant dirty rice? Oh my god. And it's vegetarian. No matter which way you lean on the protein spectrum, this stuff rocks. But the next time I may forgo making the custard; I'll just add the crushed smoked eggplant to the sauteed onions and almonds, add the rice, bury a cinnamon stick and a few bay leaves in it, and steam.  (Sorry, there's no recipe. It was pure improvisation.)

But my absolute favorite way to make eggplant comes from this little Uzbekistani restaurant on Brighton Beach Boulevard in Brooklyn. We stumbled up from the beach one day, our noses leading us to this restaurant whose windows, open to the street, were exhaling great puffs of smoke. My gut identified it as pork. Inside, two guys were spinning shaskliks (kabobs: some pork, some lamb rib, some ground lamb) over chunks of charcoal as if caught in a hot game of foosball. We ordered a couple of those, and they fully lived up to the smoky hype drifting out onto the street, but the revelation of the day was the eggplant and tomato "salad," a dish of shining cubes of purple eggplant, some tomato and a few spent petals of onion. The entire thing had been cooked into submission, and in an ungodly amount of olive oil, too.

But that day I discovered something: I hadn't been cooking my eggplant near long enough. And another thing: if you cook the eggplant in its skin for a long time in olive oil, like a French confit, it comes out as soft and luscious (and nearly as sweet) as a marshmallow. I kid you not. So this is my rendition of the Uzbek eggplant-tomato, studded with cinnamon and bay, honey and plenty of olive oil. In our house it goes by the feckless name "eggplant stuff," but we think of it with great reverence.

tomato and eggplant confit

1 pound eggplant, preferably a small variety

1/2 large onion

2 beefsteak tomatoes,

3 garlic cloves, peeled and thinly sliced

2 bay leaves

1 teaspoon honey

1/2 cinnamon stick

juice of 1/2 lemon

1/2 cup canola oil, divided

1/4 extra-virgin olive oil, divided

1/2 teaspoon salt

10 turns black pepper

Heat half of the canola oil in a large sauté pan over medium-high heat. Add one-third of the eggplant and fry until dark golden. Remove to a paper-towel lined plate and repeat with the remaining eggplant, adding the rest of the canola oil as needed.

Blot the eggplant  well and season with a little salt.

Peel the tomatoes: stick a fork in the center of the tomato and hold it over the gas flame until the skin pops, rotating the tomato. Peel the skin and cut the tomatoes into chunks.

Heat the 2 Tablespoons of olive oil in the pan and add the onion. Cook over medium-high heat until darkened around the edges. Add the garlic and cook for another two minutes.

Add the tomatoes, cinnamon stick, bay leaves, honey, salt and the rest of the olive oil. Shake the pan and don’t really stir; turn the vegetables over very gently to combine. Turn the heat to low. Cover the pan and cook over low heat until the eggplant is soft and there’s liquid in the pan, about 20 minutes. Uncover the pan and cook over low heat until the thick liquid clings to the vegetables, about 15 minutes. Turn out into a shallow bowl and serve hot, warm or at room temperature.

chanterelles, for real

I had given up the hope of ever finding chanterelles here. It seemed that our dusty-bottomed, pine-needled woods would never give them up.

But then one day, as we were sitting down to a proper diner out on the porch (both the dinner and the alfresco part being rarer and rarer these days . . . ) a tiny truck pulled up, rusty but agile, clearly a feral sort of woods truck. And our friend T. popped out, looking a bit wild himself, and loped to the house swinging a lovely wooden basket which was, as he came closer,  full of chanterelles!

"I took these to the OBT and no one wanted them." He laughed, knowing full well the value--both gastronomic and economic--of these mushrooms.

(That's Osage Bait and Tackle to the uninitiated, a bait store within a bar within a restaurant--of the freezer-to-fryer variety--and that night night anyway, it was full of chickens.)

I accepted the basket gratefully before asking him to join us for dinner, right after which I fetched my stiff brush and started carefully brushing their tops and gills, using a paring knife to take off their dirty bottoms and gently scrape away the tough skin there.

They were pretty lovely specimens. I handled chanterelles often during my cooking days and these were just as I remembered, if not fresher-looking than the ones we used. I didn't need the mushroom book (though I would eventually take an identifying spore print); I knew immediately that they were safe because my hands recognized them--their putty-ish orange surface, as if they'd been sculpted from latex. Also, unlike their lookalike, the ominous-sounding Jack O'Lantern mushroom, these grew individually and not in clumps, and their gills didn't always connect from the base to the tip; they showed the occasional run or clump, which is a chanterelle giveaway.

Beneath them he had tucked some hens of the woods, too. They're tougher, and longer-lasting, so I thought I'd confit them in olive oil sometime that week. But the chanterelles, we were eating those as soon as possible.

I'd messed up wild mushrooms in the past, by over-decorating them . . . not this time. I was going to keep it simple and let the chanterelle flavor come barrelling through.

So I mixed up a batch of pasta dough, using this Mario Batali recipe, and then, with some help from my wee assistant, started making the tagliatelle:

I browned a stick of butter (yes, a stick; these are chanterelles!) in a pan, added a couple of sprigs of rosemary and took it off the heat. The butter rose in a heavy foam, the bubbles spilling over the rosemary, spewing sweet pine scent. Then I added the sliced chanterelles and the garlic, along with a little olive oil to keep the butter from overcooking, and sauteed until the mushrooms wilted and tasted cooked through. I then added about a cup of fresh corn kernels and cooked it all another minute.

When the tagliatelle was done, it was time to toss and to add grated parmesan:

and then to sit down with to our plates:

My brother pointed out that I should have kept it simpler--just brown butter, chanterelles. What was up with the corn? I bluffed and said it was a classic pairing, corn and chanterelles. I looked over and his protests seemed to be muffled by an enormous tangle of tagliatelle. It was either what I said or what I made that caused him to buy it. At any rate, it was a dish that couldn't be made any other week of the year, in any other place.

cast-iron a.m.

Cast-iron carrots and parsnips. It may seem an odd choice for breakfast, but with a chunk of good bread and a little bacon on the side (you can see mine steaming in the background) fried roots for breakfast are heaven.

This is really private-dinner material, a sideline kind of thing that only assumes center of the plate real estate when you're alone, or when an odd day prevents you from making a full dinner. Yet a mess of butter-fried roots is an oddly satisfying meal, if you take the time to fry everything long enough--twenty minutes or longer to cook them to full tenderness--and it gets really good if you can just trust the pan, turn your back and let it burn a bit. The charred bits are addictive, and the sweet parsnips and carrots hold up well against the slight bitterness of the black edges. 

This was something I used to make for myself during college, one of the weird little dinners I devised as I was finding myself in the kitchen.  I'd cut the carrots and parsnips into long daggers, all of pretty much equal thickness, and then fry them in an illegal amount of butter until spotted black on the outside and tender within, and then I'd pour the whole pan over a mound of plain white rice to catch the sweet butter and root juices. 

But on Saturday morning we just mopped up the juice with day-old ends of baguette, a charred root in one hand and a piece of bacon in the other. And it was not a bad way to kick off the weekend.