The Rake Magazine

Category: Food and Drink

  • Fancy a Festival?

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    What do you feel like doing today?

    If I was deeply and importantly bored for the rest of April and had a glass elevator that could take me anywhere at any moment, these would be appropriate diversions:

    The World Gourmet Summit in Singapore April 10-28
    Forget the exotic locale and international chef sightings, I’d go for The Macallan vertical tasting alone. The class details note that dress should be Smart Casual, as if we Macallan drinkers could be anything but.

    Country Cajun Crawfish Festival in Biloxi, MS April 20-23
    We’re talking 20,000 pounds of hot, spicy crawfish and The Charlie Daniels Band. That’s quite an afternoon. Fork over $10 to get into the judging area for the Super Boil Crawfish Cook-Off and help determine who gets braggin’ rights.

    Stockton Asparagus Festival in Stockton, CA April 21-23
    Everyone says they’re going to visit Asparagus Alley to pick up some recipe ideas, but what they’re really checking out is the World Deep-Fried Asparagus Eating Competition. How can you miss 105-pound Korean Sonya Thomas who can put down 5.7 pounds of the stuff in ten minutes? I’m assuming the Porta-Potties are situated a good distance from the festival grounds.

    Taste of Chinatown in New York City April 22
    They open at 1pm and close at 6pm. That gives us five hours to hit every one of the over fifty restaurants, tea houses, bakeries, and shops that are offering $1-$2 tasting plates. That’s roughly one sample every six minutes. It’s the New York marathon, my style.

    Vidalia Onion Festival in Vidalia, GA April 26-30
    No other onion deserves a festival, that’s for sure. I’d be snarfing onion rings all day long. It has the usual cook-offs and Miss Onion pageants, but I might camp out at the Boy Scout’s Vidalia dutch oven demonstration.

    Vermont Maple Festival in St. Albans, VT April 28-30
    I’m grabbing a stack of pancakes and heading to the Fiddlers’ Variety Show. Because when can you ever get enough fiddlin’ and pancakes.

    Show Me Gourd Festival in Sedalia, MO April 29-30
    I’m not exactly sure if they actually eat gourds at this festival, but they do make hats and quilts from them. So I have that going for me.

    Shad Fest in Lambertville, NJ April 29-30
    Stonyfield Farms is a Shad Fest supporter, might we expect a shad flavored yoghurt? I’d go simply to hear Susan McLellan Plaisted of Heart to Hearth Cookery give a lecture. To food geeks like me, she’s Aerosmith.

  • Home Plate

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    I remember my first baseball hot dog like it was yesterday. Sitting under the bright sun with the perfectly green field stretched out in front of me, I gently held the plump pink dawg, dressed only with the vivid yellow mustard of ballparks and hockey rinks. Amidst peanut shells crackling underfoot, I took that first salty bite as the ump called “strike three!” and I tasted the freedom of summer.

    At least that’s the mythology I’ve created.

    You see, I came late to baseball. The first love of my life was a Cubs fan and I was too young to understand. He took me to Wrigley Field and I complained about the cold. We sat and drank bad Busch Lite and maybe I ate some nachos, but he loved the Cubbies more than me, so I couldn’t abide them.

    The second love of my life showed me the real game as we sat on the couch watching TV and eating pasta with glass after glass of Barolo. I was comfortable in my skin and able to admit ignorance of just what defined a Texas Leaguer. I am now an idiot for April.

    These days, as my family piles into the car to head down to the ballpark, the discussion volleys between “Who’s on the mound tonight?” and “Are you going to get a pretzel? Will cotton candy be allowed? Can she get a hot dog AND a burger? What’s the rule on nachos tonight?”

    Everything in my life seems to, rightly or wrongly, relate to food. And the baseball I have come to love (the game filled with its own legends, mythologies, ghosts and superstitions) deserves a grand memory, a significant food moment. But most of my hot dog memories are like Josh Gibson, I’m left wondering what could have been.

    Tonight I’ll sit in my plastic blue seat and unwrap the foil of this season’s first Dome Dog. But while its hard to beat the magic of the myth, with every salty bite, every base hit, every kid of mine screaming SA-WING BATTER at the top of their lungs, the myth fades just a bit.

  • Feeding a Gaggle

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    Dahling, those pants are simply divoon!

    The Challenge
    There is a gaggle of women coming to my house for dinner Saturday night. Women and food. This is a complicated arena in which to perform. The last time we all got together, there was (in my opinion) too much talk about who was too fat and who was envious of whose legs. Nobody was mean, in fact it was mostly self-deprecating which is worse if you ask me. But I saw how they were looking at the food, taking only a sliver of this, pushing that around their plate, denying themselves the dessert completely. The complexity of women seems greatly evident in their differing relationships to food.

    Now that I am hosting, my challenges are:
    1. Different grades of palates, some sophisticated some not.
    2. Creating a menu so that they won’t eat self-consciously and run directly to an all-night Pilates class after dinner.
    3. Putting out something interesting, as is always expected at my house.

    The Menu
    Flat breads and cheeses for early nosh. Plus, Escargots Vol au Vent. This is the rogue dish of the evening, snails in puff pastry with herby butter. The daring and intrepid will try them, some will be surprised and like them, some will not be able to surmount the textural issues. Some won’t even hazard a try, but I don’t care because it just means more for me.

    Steak Salad. Replicating the one I ate at Pop! the other day, I’m using mixed greens dressed with a simple balsamic vinaigrette and crumbled Maytag blue cheese. Grilled and sliced flank steak will be laid over the top. This should satisfy the Gluten-Free girl and the Carb-Avoiders.

    Couscous with Grilled Chicken. Using whole wheat couscous should satisfy the South Beachers. Couscous also challenges some people to think differently about what a starch offering can be.

    Haricots Verts. With a kicky shallot dressing, these little French beans taste like Spring to me. They are good for everyone and so cute they won’t intimidate the Non-Veggers.

    Creme Fraiche Chocolate Cupcakes. They’ll never know there’s creme fraiche in there until I tell them. They come out with a slightly tangy bite that pairs well with the dark chocolate. I’m topping them with a dollop of rum-sweetened mascarpone and an edible flower. Too pretty to pass up.

    In the end, we will laugh more than we gripe and probably drink too much wine to even taste the food or remember to care about the size of our rumps.

  • Children of Persephone

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    It’s time to light the fires. It’s above 45 degrees, it’s time to reclaim cooking outside.

    Nothing is more significant to a warm April evening than the smell of a freshly ignited grill wafting through the neighborhood. I guarantee that campus kids all over town will be huddled around their mini-Webbers, grilling up burgers and dogs to go with their leftover keg beer.

    It’s the same thing that drives us to look for restaurants with open patios on the singular sunny day in March. We’re coming above ground, we’re leaving the coats at home, we’re wearing flip-flops even if our toes are cold. It’s the understood bargain of living here, we are the children of Persephone, escaping Hades for the beautiful and the brief.

    In celebration, I think it’s completely appropriate to burn some food. A crispy blackened hot dog, splitting with exuberance is a fitting tribute to the first frog sounds in the swamp. Daylight Savings allows me to actually see the steak I’m cooking, leaving the pinky warm center uncompromised. I don’t care if the kids are covered in mud, as long as they stay clear of the asparagus while I gently roll it across the hot iron. All this and no bugs.

    But just as Holiday stations started stock-piling bags of charcoal, a story came over the wire about another study showing that grilled meats caused cancer in rats. Does it give me a moment of pause? Do I look at my grill through the window and consider shutting it down? Never.

    I’m not glib to the potential darkness of cancer, quite the contrary. I lost a very important man during the Spring a few years ago. This man was a thunderstorm, sometimes bellowing and causing confusion, but always leaving things greener and fresher in his path. He took nothing for granted, whether it was the last beer in the case or just a good day to take the kids for a ride on the orange tractor. Harding’s cancer came in the worst way possible for someone in our circle, his throat closed and he could no longer swallow food. Yet he still sat with us at dinner, enjoying us enjoying the meal.

    He taught me that it’s not the quantity of life lived, it’s the quality of it.

    I refuse to let the fear keep me underground. Granted, I’m also not going to go and eat three charred chickens everyday either. What I really seek is the balance. I love a blackened rib eye, but this year I’m making sure it’s from Thousand Hills Cattle Company where the grass-fed beef is chocked full of healthy omega-3’s. And certainly I’ll wash it down with a glass of red wine as I watch the sun moving quickly across the sky.

    Light ’em up. Grill on.

  • Cheese Parade

    of livestock and mold

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    Starting in the upper left and moving clockwise.

    French Brin D’Amour
    The “sprig of love” is a cheese made from Corsican sheep. The rind is encrusted in the aromatic herbs with which it spends three months curing. The juniper berries and rosemary give its pale ivory paste a floral flavor. It’s a pretty, pretty cheese. This is the cheese to come home to after a bad smelly cheese experience, a bad date or a bad marriage. It restores the faith.

    Chimay Bierre
    This cheese is washed with Chimay, the beer of Belgian monks. It’s a smooth cheese with nuttiness and a tart finish, but I kept thinking: Why aren’t I just drinking Chimay?

    Bellwether Farms San Andreas
    The sheep on this California farm have the San Andreas fault running right through their land. I expected the cheese to have a flavor of foreboding with a hint of grassiness and fear (you know how animals can sense forthcoming doom and all). And yet, this is an easy table cheese that is mild with a piquant finish. My three year old ate nearly the whole wedge.

    Tome Verte
    Fresh goat cheese is soft, lilly white and cuts the normal tangy nature of goat by more than half. This French version is coated in fennel, thyme and pink peppercorns which give it a nice herbal flavor. Don’t expect the richenss of aged cheese, instead think of a wind-swept meadow exploding with spring clover.

    Red Hawk
    This triple cream cheese from the Cowgirl Creamery in California is somewhat of a darling in the cheese world, garnering awards from the American Cheese Society left and right. Washing the rind provides the signature sunset-orange tint, but it also gives the cheese its smell. Stinky. Bad-celery-melting-in-my-veggie-drawer stinky. My first taste was overwhelmed by the stinkiness, making me think of creamy cabbage. But the second taste (after I had presumably primed my tastebuds) was mellower and creamy with a nice earthiness. I’m eating this with some Caymus Conundrum on Saturday when my sunny patio hits sixty degrees.

    Bleu des Basques
    A nicely balanced bleu from the French Basque region. There’s just enough saltiness to work with the tang, it’s full of character without having that overbearing ego. Be warned, when you bring the cheese to room temp (which you should do before eating) it might sweat a little due to the lovely fat content. Just keep it loosely wrapped in wax paper while it warms up, and never hold fat content against a cheese.

    All these cheeses can be found at Surdyk’s.

  • Who Can Blame Her

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    Reuters recently reported that a mysterious woman has perfected the dine-and-dash in many of Rome’s best restaurants. The alleged “gourmet food junkie” has been known to dine fabulously on fine wines and exquisite fare, simply to find when the bill arrives (ooops) her wallet has been left in another purse. Revealed only as DN of nearby Viterbo, the “mooch artist” has been dealt with accordingly: she has been banned from Rome for five years.

    Not arrested, banned. Not made to pay restitution or scrub pots and pans, just banned. And maybe that is the ultimate punishment for a food-lover, not only taking the good stuff away, but keeping it just out of reach.

    Not surprisingly, Roman police have reported that despite the ban, our daring and naughty DN continues to sneak into Rome. Who could have predicted that one?

    It’s just not in the nature of Italians to deny anyone food. I think the waiters secretly hope she turns up at their table. What will this hungry woman want? Will she have an appetite for pungent cheese with honey and figs or will she just order a simple ravioli with dusky truffles. There’s no doubt that every bite will be savored, every moment a mark on her memory of this amazing meal. They’ll pour her a glass of prosecco while she watches the sunset, their hearts secretly proud that she chose them for her potentially last meal in Rome.

  • Drink to Forgiveness

    What, a student asked the other day, was the last place to be ruled by the Romans? Nowhere in Italy, that’s for certain; the last Roman emperor I know to have set foot on mainland Italy with the purpose of exercising political power was Constans II in 662. The Holy Roman Empire, begun by Charlemagne and destroyed by Napoleon, we agreed did not count, being notoriously neither holy nor Roman nor an empire. “How about Constantinople, New Rome on the Bosporus, not captured by the Ottoman Turks ‘til May 29, 1453?” the young man suggested. I was able to raise him eight years. At the southeast corner of the Black Sea is the port city of Trebizond, modern Turkish Trabzon, and this pleasant place was ruled by its own local Christian Roman emperors until 1461.

    Those who have heard of Trebizond at all probably know it from Rose MacAulay’s The Towers of Trebizond, an endearing novel published in 1956 that stars a spiky Anglican parson, a suffragette, a camel, and a lady whose behavior was, shall we say, no better than it ought to be. It is a witty tale evoking a more generous, less litigious world. Not long after MacAulay’s visit to Trebizond, the local Muslim congregation, which had been worshipping for centuries in the former coronation church of the Roman emperors, magnanimously allowed their mosque to be turned into a museum so that its Christian paintings could be uncovered, studied, and restored. (You have never seen such a flutter of angels’ wings as under that dome.) Until the international treaties of 1922, in fact, a substantial Orthodox Christian minority lived alongside the Trebizond Muslims, but the Orthodox were then sent to Greece as part of an exchange of populations—ethnicity in that part of the world then being defined by religion. A tiny Roman Catholic congregation survived, served by Capuchin friars. Trebizond has always had a reputation for kindness and a mild maritime climate.

    One Sunday afternoon in February, modern passions smashed the city’s peace. The priest who cared for the dozen or so Roman Catholics in Trebizond, Father Andrea Santoro, was shot dead while praying in the church. The killer was a teenager, enraged by insults to his faith. The priest was no proselytizer; evangelism, even the wearing of religious dress in public, is illegal in Turkey, a secular state which is ninety-eight percent Muslim. Fr. Andrea lived there as a quiet witness to a force more positive even than tolerance. “Silence, humility, the simple life … clear and defenseless witness and the conscious offering of one’s life can rehabilitate the Middle East,” he told a friend. The bishop who buried him back home in Italy called him a martyr; he reported that the priest’s mother feels great pain for the young man who killed her son. No true Muslim, said a minister of the Turkish government, would kill a man of God in the house of God. “We must,” said the poet W.H. Auden, “love one another or die.”

    They drink wine in Trebizond, but they do not grow it. Turkish wine is very good, but the beverage that comes from the wooded valleys of the Black Sea coast is Turkish tea. Grapevines and tea bushes are seldom horticultural bedfellows. It is frothy coffee that one associates with the Capuchin Friars, Fr. Santoro’s order. Cappuccino gets its name from the color of their habits. But he, in fact, came from Rome, and the volcanic hills south and east of the city produce good dry white wine which refreshes countless Romans who drive out from the capital to have dinner in the Castelli Romani on hot summer evenings.

    The wine from Frascati, made by Fontana Candida (Italian for “white fountain”), is an old favorite, remarkably consistent over the years and at less than ten dollars very affordable. It is made mostly from the Trebbiano grape, the most widely grown grape in Italy, mixed with two types of Malvasia. The color is so yellow it is almost green; the nose recalls brewer’s yeast more than the wild flowers alluded to on the label, but there is a good bitter acid scrunch at the center of its taste, followed by a long pleasing flavor redolent of watermelons. This Frascati goes (of course) with fish and also with lemon chicken; it would complement a leg of lamb, roasted with lots of rosemary. It is a glass of this that I shall raise at Easter to honor the memory of a martyr, a brave man called home, a witness to the hope made possible by the practice of forgiveness.

  • Who Are You Calling Disorganized?

    As with others who work in the food business, I—and especially my chef husband—have had new friends express their reservations about cooking for us. (Usually this comes out over a few glasses of wine at our house.) But in truth, the only real differences between a home cook and a food pro are time and tricks. Sadly, most of us have less and less time to wade through an ever-expanding battery of culinary advice and implements, let alone master the tricks that are most helpful.

    I’m lucky enough to live with an impatient know-it-all who points out when I am wasting my time. Through him and all my own experiences in commercial kitchens I have learned that there are a few things that can go a long ways toward transforming the way you cook. One is to develop “asbestos fingers” so that you can pluck a piece of chicken from a sauté pan at a moment’s notice to check for doneness. Another is tongs. They are a seamless extension of a good cook’s hands (especially one who hasn’t developed asbestos fingers yet). But the best and most important trick of them all is to master the essential art of mise en place.

    Literally translated to “put in place,” the French term mise en place (rhymes with “peas on moss”) is used in kitchens throughout the world. Basically, it refers to the preparation of a dish before one cooks it: Assembling the necessary tools and ingredients, chopping and prepping, and pre-heating the oven all count as mise en place.

    I used to think I was pretty slick as a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants cook. If a recipe captured my interest, I’d start cooking. Maybe halfway through the process I’d notice that the butter was supposed to be at room temperature (so I might nuke it, then end up melting it), or that I needed cream but only had skim milk (no one would know, right?), or that the dish required three hours in the oven (and guests were expected in one). Consider what a restaurant kitchen has to accomplish. Even if only a hundred people come for dinner, that’s probably about three hundred plates that come off the line. Can you imagine throwing a dinner party and assembling three hundred plates as a seat-of-the-pants cook? Bombs away.

    That’s why one of the keys to success for a pro is mise en place. Everything in its place. While you’re driving to work in the morning, pondering where you might go for dinner, cooks all over town are chopping tomatoes, cleaning squid, and making stock—all so that when you place your order that evening, your line cook has his world at his fingertips. In order to be prepared for whatever the chef commands, the good line cook must have a near-blind faith that minced onions will be on his left and finely grated parmigiano reggiano in the cooler by his knees. That is what ensures that the chaos of a restaurant kitchen can be finely orchestrated, instead of evolving into disaster. Obviously, this is crucial for speedy cooks turning out food in high volumes, but who among us throws dinner parties for three hundred?

    The real secret is that mise en place, more than a trick, is practically a way of life. It’s a concept that demands you show up with your head in the game. It means full attention and focus, respect for yourself as a cook, for your time spent making something that is well crafted, and for those who will eat it. Realizing the mise en place ideal means envisioning the entire production of a dish (or menu) with each element necessary for a beautiful, delicious result.

    In my pre-mise en place days, I thought creativity meant spontaneity, that improvisation had a higher value than skill and technique. I could blame the media for glamorizing chefs as artists and producing cooking shows that promise perfection in thirty minutes, but I think it was probably more a combination of ego and laziness. Mise en place taught me to balance creativity with production.

    Sundays are my favorite cooking day. Older kids are mired in homework, critical husband is mired in the couch, toddler is content to roll tomatoes across the counter. I am free to work on dinner, all day. My mise en place begins with looking out the window: Is it a soup day? A roast day? With a dish selected, a survey of the fridge and pantry usually means a quick shopping trip. Once I have all my ingredients, I begin prepping them. This has become my favorite task. While chopping an onion, I focus on how I hold my knife, how the angle of the blade yields a cleaner slice, how uniformly I can make each piece. The meditative nature of this simple task has helped me understand not only why technique is important, but how food yields to different techniques. Which has led me to a better understanding of food.

    After prepping, my kitchen is populated with small dishes heaped with brightly colored, fragrant ingredients. By the time people show up for Sunday supper and I begin assembling and throwing things into the flame, what may seem like the beginning of a dish is actually the end. What I serve forth, be it success or failure, has undoubtedly taught me something. I’m still working on the asbestos fingers, though.

    Chorizo Tapas

    2 T. olive oil
    1 c. chopped yellow onion
    2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
    2 tsp. paprika
    1 c. hard cider
    2 bay leaves, broken in half
    1 lb. Spanish chorizo, cut diagonally,
    into 3⁄4 -inch pieces
    1⁄4 c. sun-dried tomatoes, coarsely chopped
    1⁄4 c. chopped fresh parsley

    Heat oil in a sauté pan over medium-high heat. Add onions and garlic; sauté about 5 minutes, add paprika and cook about 1 minute more. Add cider and bay leaves; bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer for a few minutes. Add chorizo and sun-dried tomatoes; let simmer for 3 minutes. Remove bay leaves, toss in parsley. Serve in shallow bowl with crusty bread for dipping.

  • Consider the Egg

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    In Chicago to open a restaurant, I was invited to dinner with my friend Elizabeth and her parents. Elizabeth’s father, Dr. Pepper (no lie), had just completed a crazy-difficult robotic arm techno-surgery. He hurriedly gave us some scant details before turning to me and asking how the restaurant opening was going.

    The robotic arm story was left on the table while they asked question after question about kitchens and sous chefs and menus and servers’ shoes and pasta. I kept thinking we were missing a great conversation about the future of health care and that the trivial workings of a restaurant opening were best left as server fueled pub-fodder.

    But I get it now. I get that people who spend their days wielding robotic arms with someone’s life in the balance may absolutely need to talk about how you go about mashing fifty pounds of potatoes. People who spend their days wielding computers in fuzzy grey cubicles may need it even more.

    And so I’m Doris Day. I will sit at my piano in the embassy and belt out my song of quince, meatballs, cocoa and eggs until your poor little kidnapped souls can run freely down the stairs into the yolk colored sun.

  • Strine Wine

    When I was home in England over Christmas, I caught a liver specialist from (appropriately enough) Liverpool being interviewed on the wireless. He was talking about cirrhosis, that very nasty condition in which the liver turns into little yellowish granules, and eventually packs up completely. When he began in the liver business years ago, he said, this was the disease of older men, brought on by a lifetime’s application to the bottle. Nowadays, though, he frequently found the beds in his ward filled with young women who had managed to achieve the same effect in an altogether shorter time. The young people of Liverpool, he averred, do drink an awful lot these days.

    Archaeological evidence suggests this phenomenon is not confined to Liverpool. As the spring thaw sets in each year along fraternity row in Minneapolis, bottles emerge to view in the snow banks on the boulevard, mostly bearing the names of undistinguished vintages or popular brands of beer. As the melt proceeds, they dribble down into the gutter, where they pose a hazard to cyclists (credite experto … ). The historian Edward Gibbon, writing about Oxford during the eighteenth century, felt that the deep potations of those who were supposed to be teaching him Latin and Greek excused “the brisk intemperance of youth.” I can forgive a good deal of brisk intemperance, but a puncture in my front tire makes me livid (a very nasty condition in which the face goes pale purple with rage).

    In Gibbon’s time, the British government tried to use stiff excise duties to control alcoholic intake. Avoiding these penalties became something like the national sport. The stakes were high; you could get hanged for smuggling, but evading the exciseman appealed to a certain spirit of adventure, as those fortunate enough to have had J. Meade Falkner’s novel Moonfleet read to them in their youth can certainly agree.

    The most unlikely recruit to the government team must surely have been Rabbie Burns, the Scots national poet. This is a man who wrote lines like “Freedom an’ whisky gang thegither,” as well as one of the world’s great drinking songs, “O Willie Brew’d a Peck o’ Maut” (chorus: “We are na fou, we’re nae that fou, but just a drapee in our e’e … ”). Yet he spent the last half-dozen years of his short life (he died of heart trouble, not of drink) chasing down smugglers and illicit distillers in the deep valleys of Dumfries and Galloway. Not that it seems to have cramped his style. One of his wildest poems is a rant about the party put on in a town where the local exciseman had been carried away to hell by the devil; Burns is said to have composed it while waiting on the beach for reinforcements so he could search a smuggling ship that had gone aground on the treacherous sands of the Solway Firth.

    With a reputation like that, it is scarcely surprising that “Bobbie Burns” should have given his name to a vineyard in the Australian State of Victoria (the bottom right-hand corner) founded by a Scots gold prospector called John Campbell. Campbells Wines produced their first vintage in 1870, and their Bobbie Burns Shiraz 1998 (available hereabouts for less than $17) is a worthy scion. The Shiraz grape, widely grown in Australia, is the same as that which the French call the “Syrah,” the variety from which most of the great red wines of the Rhône Valley are made. It has, alas, no historical connection with the Persian city of the same name, home of the Persian national poet Hafiz, a bard altogether more refined than “owr Rabbie,” and one who wrote about wine, it seems, merely as a metaphor for spiritual experience.

    There is nothing immaterial about this good-hearted red. It has little nose, but plenty of fruit and alcohol, as one might expect from grapes which have reached ripeness over a long, warm autumn. The tannins are more spicy than redolent of the oak barrels in which the wine matured. This would make a cheering companion to any red meat, a pork roast say, or even haggis, the great chieftain of the pudding race. Come to that, the tannins suggest it has time still on its side. Buy some now to drink later. But best make sure you like it; sample some now as well, and call to mind Paul’s advice to Timothy: “Drink no longer water, but use a little wine for thy stomach’s sake.” A little wine—no poet (or hepatologist) could have said it better.