d - Simple Cooking!

Simple
Cooking
ISSUE NO. 70
JULY~OCTOBER 2000
ELECTRONIC EDITION
Annual Food Book Review Issue
Contents
[TOUCH ANY TITLE TO BE TAKEN TO THAT PAGE]
A Difficult Man ...........................................1
REFLEXIONS, by Richard Olney
Mediterranean Mess .................................. 5
A MEDITERRANEAN FEAST, by Clifford Wright
Work, Adventures, Childhood, Dreams........8
A new book by Patience Gray
The Cook’s Bookcase ................................10
WORLD FOOD CAFÉ, by Chris & Caroline
Caldicott • PARISIAN HOME COOKING, by
Michael Roberts • MEMORIES OF A LOST
EGYPT, by Colette Rossant.
Table Talk: ...............................................12
The Kyocera Ceramic Knife • Kinnie • A
Simple Mango Dessert • Our Latest Book
r RECIPE INDEX r
Beets with Canned Tuna ................. 7
Fresh Tomato Salad ...................... 16
Lamb Stew with Wild Mushrooms ... 7
Mango Montego Bay ...................... 14
Scrambled Eggs the French Way ... 10
Scrambled Eggs with Tomatoes, Shallots, and Garlic ............................. 11
Shrimp Pan-Roasted on Coarse Salt 4
Shredded Zucchini Omelet .............. 4
Sweet Potato Stew with a Peanut
Ginger Sauce ................................ 10
A Difficult Man
In the morning, we drank bowls of black coffee
on the terrace and she asked why I was staring
so intently into my bowl. At first I couldn’t
answer because it was an unconscious thing—
finally, I explained that all the vineleaves and
skyscape were so beautifully reflected in dark
light on the surface of my coffee, a sort of
distillation of memory and eternity....
—Richard Olney, REFLEXIONS
A
KOESTLER, confronted by a fan who
kept yammering on and on about the
honor of meeting him, is said to have
sardonically replied that “to like a writer and
then to meet a writer is like loving goose liver
and then meeting the goose.” This is one of
those clever remarks that wraps a hat pin in
the soft cloth of self-deprecation—“You are a
fool,” it says, “to want to meet me, and I would
be even more of a fool to want to meet you.” In
other words, “Please leave me alone.”
Novelists, of course, would be nothing if
they weren’t self-absorbed, but it may come as
a surprise to learn that food writers are often
even more so. This is because one of the most
important purposes of the kitchen is also one of
the least acknowledged—to serve as an escape
hatch from the chatter in the living room. Like
the writer’s den, the kitchen is a blame-free
RTHUR
haven where the exhausting demands of human interaction can be replaced with the soothing company of, in the one instance, words, and
in the other, carrots and onions. Food writers
get to have their cake and eat it, too.
This is meant as an observation, not a
criticism (I mean, look who’s talking). After all,
self-absorption is what allows some food writers that uncompromising attention to technique and others that unalloyed susceptibility
to pleasure—and, in a very special few, the
eerily successful combination of the two—
which makes their writing so enjoyable. Even
so, there is apt to be a jolt when the same writer
turns his or her gaze away from the cooking pot
and glances up into the mirror.
Self-absorption is not the same thing as
egotism, the maniacal self-regard of the average
super-chef. We are led to the mirror not to be
asked to admire what we see but to be taken on
a tour of every flaw, pimple, and flake of dead
skin—and made to experience the sharp stab of
anguish each provokes. The same sensibility
that we enjoy so much when it concerns itself
with food can bring us up short if we choose to
follow it when it steps out of the kitchen.
This, at least, is the likely experience of
The gibelotte was all right, the mashed potatoes
the best I had ever eaten, pushed through a
sieve, buttered and moistened with enough of
their hot cooking water to bring them to a
supple, not quite pourable consistency—no milk,
no cream, no beating. I had never dreamt of
mashing potatoes without milk and, in Iowa,
page two
Simple Cooking 70
E LECTRONIC E DITION
anyone picking up REFLEXIONS (Brick Tower Press,
$34.95, 416 pages), Richard Olney’s recently
published volume of autobiographical ruminations. Olney, who died last year, is the author of
such classic cookbooks as SIMPLE FRENCH FOOD
and LULU’S PROVENÇAL TABLE and of two definitive
studies of French wine, YQUEM and ROMANÉECONTI; he also conceived and then directed the
production of the infinitely valuable twentyseven-volume Time/Life Good Cook Series. As
longtime readers well know, he—along with
Patience Gray—has also served as a kind of
patron saint for my own food writing. However,
after reading REFLEXIONS, I have had to cast about
for a different word—dæmon, perhaps—since,
although my admiration for him remains undimmed, I have to admit that his prospects for
sainthood are, at best, problematical.
For most of his life, Olney was an indefatigable letter writer, especially to members of
his family, and it is obvious that he initially
intended to use these (all carefully saved, it
seems) as the raw material for an autobiography along the lines of his friend James Merrill’s
A DIFFERENT PERSON—a candid account of a
young gay man’s coming of age in the 1950s.
The first hundred or so pages of REFLEXIONS are
just that, and finely crafted and entertainingly
bitchy as well, with Jimmy Baldwin, W. H.
Auden, Kenneth Anger, James Jones, and other less famous friends and acquaintances
sketched with a portraitist’s keen if not always
flattering eye.
Indeed, Olney’s original ambition was to
be a painter, and, as the paintings—portraits
all, a few in color—reproduced in the book show,
he had the talent to do it. At the age of twentyfour, he made his way to France—and for all
intents and purposes never came back. He
found cheap passage on the De Grasse, the
oldest and slowest ship on the French Line, and
equally modest accommodations at the Hôtel de
l’Académie, a student hotel, eating his first meal
in Paris in its “glum little dining room.” The plat
du jour that day was rabbit and white wine
gibelotte (fricassée) with mashed potatoes.
E LECTRONIC E DITION
everyone believed that the more you beat them
the better they were.
In retrospect, it’s hard to imagine someone who spends his first meal in Paris deconstructing the mashed potatoes becoming
anything other than a food writer, but that
would happen as if by accident, a melding of
chance events and randomly made friends.
This is by itself a fascinating story, and the
curious will find it all spelled out in these
pages, as is the entire arc of his amazing if
always relatively obscure career.
Unfortunately, only the truly curious
will be likely to make the effort. It isn’t as if the
rewards aren’t there—the book is studded with
passages of brilliantly evocative prose, some
describing now forgotten restaurants, others
simple but carefully crafted meals, still others
encounters with an extraordinary range of fine
French wines. Also, anyone with a taste for
food-world gossip will find they can stuff themselves to surfeit here.
With Olney, you were either a member of
the enchanted circle—Elizabeth David, Simone
(Simca) Beck, Alice Waters, Lulu Peyraud—or
else a potential threat, to be treated first with
suspicion and then—these being almost always
confirmed—without mercy. His portrait of James
Beard is devastating, and he makes short shrift
of many other food-world eminences as well: M.
F. K. Fisher (“empty-headed, has no palate, and
her writing is silly pretentious drivel”); Craig
Claiborne (“silly but harmless”—the harmless
part would later be struck, after a conspicuous
snub). And on and on.
This is at once refreshing and disturbing—refreshing because it brings into the open
a cottage industry of maliciousness that in the
food world is almost always entre nous; disturbing because Olney seems oblivious to the
fact that, far from settling old scores, the
damage he is doing is almost entirely to himself. And this isn’t because he’s nasty; it’s
because he never really admits how unpleasant he himself can be. The terrible rages, the
drunken misbehavior, the caddish mistreatment of others are cruelly observed in everyone
but himself. The result will leave a bad taste in
any but the most indulgent reader’s mouth—a
taste not entirely alleviated by the many moments of tenderness, affection, and vulnerability that these pages also reveal.
July~October 2000
The word “reflections” is particularly apt
for the title of an autobiography—meaning as
it does both meditative observations and images taken straight from life, which—as Olney
himself puts it in the quotation at the beginning of this essay—combine to create a “distillation of memory and eternity.” The problem is
that about a third of the way through the book,
it seems he was no longer able to continue the
hard—but up to then very successful—work of
recasting raw experience into carefully considered prose that gives the book’s title its point.
At that point, he begins cobbling the rest
of the book together by taking excerpts from
his copious stash of letters and connecting
them with short stretches of “I went here, I did
that” narration. The letters, in other words, are
left to carry the weight of the story...something
they should almost never be allowed to do.
Written in the heat of the moment and without
thought of their impact on anyone but the
addressee, they easily veer from emotional
heat to obsessively detailed minutiæ (in Olney’s case, a listing of practically every bottle of
wine he ever drank in France).
Once this happens, the book simply escapes the control of its author...and the reader
becomes a passenger on a ship where another
nasty storm is blowing in and the captain has
once again locked himself in his cabin with a
bottle. There are warnings early on that this is
not going to be an easy trip. Olney is helplessly
attracted in lovers as well as friends to hysterics, people who use acting out, often savage
acting out, as a way of controlling others.
The passages describing their behavior
can be almost unbearable to read, especially
since Olney seems incapable of putting a decisive end to a bad situation—as he is also
unable to do in similarly perverse business
relations, such as the one he had with Time/
Life Books during the production of the Good
Cook Series. His stormy relationship with the
French chef Georges Garin, which spans much
of the book, eventually becomes so excruciatingly painful and violent that the reader can’t
help wondering if it really is no more than a
friendship gone bad—if not, it is a friendship
that makes your usual soap opera plot seem
like so much marshmallow fluff.
Why go on reading? There are a number
of reasons. First, Olney was an active and
ultimately a prominent participant in the French
page three
wine and food scene for almost half a century.
He knew personally the great chefs and the
great vintners; he went everywhere; he tasted
everything—and he kept careful notes that,
read together, provide a peerless record of
French gastronomy. Furthermore, the book’s
narrative, self-serving though it often may be,
has the tortured power of a Tennessee Williams
play—or, really, several Tennessee Williams
plays, staged back to back.
Finally, Olney was one of the greatest food
writers who ever lived, and probably the best
American one. Unlike M. F. K. Fisher, he was a
brilliant cook; unlike almost anyone else, he
was never so rigorous as when he cooked for
himself or a casual gathering of friends in the
rustic kitchen of his hillside Provençal home in
Solliès-Toucas. Thus, while you are hardly surprised by his detailing in REFLEXIONS the preparation of a pot-au-feu for the Club des Cent, an
exclusive Parisian gastronomic group, it is an
unexpected treat to have him happily recounting the making of a homely lunch for three:
Nora was in Solliès for a few days at Easter
time. Gisou joined us for the Easter weekend.
Wild thyme was in flower everywhere and
shoots of wild asparagus were pushing up
daily on the hillside. We lunched on wild
asparagus omelettes, swelled and golden, semiliquid inside, and salads composed of tender
garden lettuces, rocket, salt anchovies maison,
page four
Such descriptions—and you will find
many in these pages—are often superior to any
recipe, the author’s obvious pleasure in the
dish giving the reader an encouraging push
without the burden of nagging instruction.
The shrimp were grilled dry in fiercely heated
frying pans thickly layered with coarse sea salt,
less than a minute on one side, then on the
other, only until the translucent shells turned
pink and opaque; I have never since prepared
them any other way.
Interestingly, the cooking the passage
describes was performed not by Olney himself
but by Alice Waters; the shrimp were part of a
supper she cooked at Solliès-Toucas for a
crowd of guests, including Lulu and Lucien
Peyraud. Alice’s daughter, Fanny, made the
tomato salad. The atmosphere conveyed is one
not only of happiness but of harmony—you
leave the book feeling that anyone who wanted
to could find a way to join in the cooking. Olney
may have been difficult and self-absorbed, but
when it came to the pleasures of the kitchen, he
never comes across as hogging the stove.
On the contrary. In one of my favorite
passages, he tells of a visit of a nephew, Christopher, who comes for a three-week stay the
summer before his last year of college.
The day before leaving, Christopher realized
that he needed a cooking lesson. He loved the
slices of rustic sourdough bread that I grilled,
rubbed with garlic, dribbled with olive oil and
cut into small squares to accompany pre-dinner drinks and he thought the flat zucchini
omelette (shredded zucchini, salted in layers,
squeezed, sauteed in hot olive oil, stirred into
eggs, beaten with chopped butter and fresh
marjoram, returned to the hot pan with more
olive oil, Parmesan grated atop and finished
beneath a grill) was very special. He returned to
Rochester and proudly treated the family to
olive oil-anointed garlic crusts and zucchini
omelettes.
The teacher’s pride is touchingly palpable, not
least because of the innocence of the student
and the magic simplicity of the dish. Someone
who knew him well once described Olney to me
as the nicest unpleasant man he had ever met.
There are worse epitaphs—indeed, this is one
that the recipient would probably have secretly
relished himself. ◆
Simple Cooking 70
E LECTRONIC E DITION
(1953) In the ortolan season, spring or fall, we
went to Chez l’Ami Louis, a simple, even rather
slummy, bistrot in appearance, which may
have been the most expensive restaurant in
Paris. The floors were spread with sawdust, the
tables with news sheet, the dining room was
heated by a coal stove and stove-pipes, the
walls were dusky from their emanations and
there was no wine list beyond the half-dozen
wines scribbled to the side of the menu. A large
proportion of the clientele was American. Monsieur Antoine, the Swiss chef-proprietor, who
was alone in the kitchen, except for a dishwasher, was a madman; he hated all sauces—
in fact, he hated most French food and was
contemptuous of all his colleagues. At Eastertime, he served legs of milk-lamb, roast to
order, and, in late autumn, rare-roast woodcock. We began with his duck foie gras, firm and
pink, accompanied by a slice of raw country
ham, cured on the bone; the ortolans were
merely sautéed in butter for a few minutes.
grilled, peeled and seeded peppers, green sweet
shallots, green beans....
Mediterranean Mess
Much of the writing about Provençal food is
very misleading when it comes to the historic
roots of the cuisine. During the Middle Ages,
cabbage was virtually the major source of food
for the Provençal masses. But in the contemporary cookbooks cabbage is hardly mentioned,
and we read instead about tomatoes, zucchini,
and potatoes as if these New World foods have
had a long history in Provence. It seems likely
they became popular in the cuisine only recently, perhaps around the end of the nineteenth century.
—Clifford A. Wright, A MEDITERRANEAN FEAST
E LECTRONIC E DITION
H
ISTORY IS EXHAUSTING. It demands that we
relearn everything over and over; it
trashes our most cherished notions; it
seizes reality by the feet and flips it on its head.
And, more often than not, as a reward for all
this effort we get handed a cabbage. A MEDITERRANEAN FEAST [Morrow, $35], Clifford Wright’s
massive—eight hundred pages, five hundred
recipes—tome on the history of Mediterranean
cooking, is many things—eye-opening, wideranging, at times impressive, at times downright annoying. But it is only rarely a feast,
unless what you have in mind is a dyspeptic’s
definition of that word: a meal with too much
food hastily prepared by an inexperienced
cook and slapped on the table by a condescendingly surly waitstaff.
This is too bad. Wright’s background is
that of an Arabist, a valuable perspective to
bring to Mediterranean cuisine—especially when
discussing southern Europe. There, the Arabs
are usually portrayed as scimitar-waving interlopers whose repulsion is one of the foundations on which European culture rests. In
truth, however, the invaders were part of a
civilization that had much more to teach than
to learn. Far from the desert nomads of the
popular imagination, by the time of their incursions into Spain and Sicily the Arabs had
become skilled agriculturalists.
Unlike the Romans, who preferred to
import novel foodstuffs rather than attempt to
grow these themselves, Arab rulers established experimental gardens to learn how to
raise them on local farms. And these same
rulers shaped taxation and land-use policies
that encouraged agricultural innovation, in-
July~October 2000
cluding complex irrigation systems. Consequently, under Muslim rule Sicily and Spain
underwent an agricultural revolution (the remnants of which were erroneously attributed by
Christian scholars to the Romans) that would
introduce such foods as artichokes, spinach,
and eggplants to the southern European kitchen.
All this information appears in the first
hundred pages of A MEDITERRANEAN FEAST. In my
opinion, Wright would have produced a better
and far more readable book if he had held that
focus, fleshing out an alternative vision of
southern European cooking from a mostly
Muslim viewpoint. The result would be, at the
very least, rather humbling to a Eurocentric
audience.* Wright’s ambition, however, is to
embrace all of the area’s history—at least as far
as it connects with the Mediterranean cuisine
we know (thus, there is relatively little on the
Roman Empire—and less still on the civilizations before it—the agricultural and culinary
advances of which, he argues, were mostly lost
during the Dark Ages and had to be relearned
from the Arabs).
Wright divides his book into three sections, the first of which, “An Algebra of Mediterranean Gastronomy,” explores how the
page five
The mystery over the origin of macaroni is
clouded by the fact that food writers traditionally have failed to discuss and distinguish the
many varieties of wheat. Establishing the locale
or era for the origin of macaroni hinges on
identifying not its particular shapes, nor that it
is made of flour and water, but the kind of wheat
used to make it. If mixing wheat flour and water
together and stretching the dough into threads
page six
is what is meant by pasta, macaroni, or noodles,
that definition tells us nothing; it is not historically heuristic. The reason scholars are interested in the origin of macaroni is that the
answer can contribute to a better understanding of the role a new food played in subsequent
political and economic developments. Ascribing the word macaroni to an alimentary paste
made from soft wheat, as many food writers do
when discussing the history of macaroni, is
incorrect, although quite commonly and understandably done because there is no unique
word to indicate macaroni made with soft wheat.
That filiform, round, cylindrical, or sheet dough
products made from a mixture of water and the
flour from cereal grains existed for a very long
time is not in question. That fact is not of
interest to historians. After all, some Middle
Eastern flatbreads are made of wheat flour and
water and are rolled out as thin as lasagne.
What is historically important about the invention of macaroni, the sine qua non of its definition, is that it is made with a particular type of
wheat flour, Triticum turgidum var. durum....
What Wright manages to accomplish
here is less to persuade you that what a food
historian most wants to know about pasta is
when it began to be made with durum wheat
(who’s arguing?) than to evoke that nightmare
where you find yourself suddenly back in a
college classroom, the professor fixing you with
an accusatory eye and snarling, “That definition tells us nothing; it is not historically heuristic.” You wake up drenched in sweat, thinking,
“Good God, I don’t even know what that means....”
In a book this size a persistently hectoring tone wears very thin, and Wright simply has
no sense of when enough is enough. Unfortunately, this is just one symptom of the book’s
pervasive flaw—an overarching conviction that
his readers can’t be trusted to understand
what he is getting at...and, in consequence, a
relentless determination to pound each and
every point into our thick heads. Passages
belaboring the obvious or making niggling distinctions in a rancorous tone are the least of it.
Excise every passage that either explains what
we are about to be told or summarizes and
explains again what we have just been told and
the book would not only be significantly shorter but much easier to follow.
Take all the above, scatter five hundred
recipes randomly throughout, and what you
have is a text in need of serious editing. If only
Simple Cooking 70
E LECTRONIC E DITION
gradual mastery of technology and agricultural
skills lifted the area out of perpetual scarcity to
a state where the rich were able to turn eating
into an art and the poor could at least expect an
occasional time of feasting to break the monotony of their harsh existence.
This part is followed by “An Ecology of
Mediterranean Gastronomy,” which details how
variations in the area’s climate and geography
gave their particular flavor to each of the region’s many cuisines, and by “A Measure of
Mediterranean Gastronomy,” which considers
the importance to the region of two items of
trade—spices and grain (especially hard wheat).
Even then we are far from through: the book
concludes with over a hundred pages of supplemental material, including an essay on sources,
an Islamic glossary, and a pronunciation guide.
To put it mildly, this is a very ambitious
project. It forces Wright to eschew a straightforward narrative in favor of one that loops
back and forth through time and over large
areas of the map, weaving his text out of several
interrelated themes that, comprehended together, are meant to reveal the complex design
of the whole. This approach may have worked
for some—I’m not unaware that this year’s
James Beard Cookbook Awards named A MEDITERRANEAN FEAST its cookbook of the year. But
this reader was too lost in the text’s briary
underbrush to ever get much sight of the forest.
In fact, the book reads less like a work of
considered historical investigation than like a
doctoral thesis, in which chunks of hastily
digested material, peppered with pedantic and
sometimes spiteful footnotes,† have been roughly
knit together with a plodding and often testy
prose. Wright regularly treats the reader as a
complete blockhead—or, worse, as a fellow
food writer. Consider the following passage,
which appears in the last chapter of the book—
by which time, you might think, relations between reader and writer would have softened a
bit (the italics are the author’s):
E LECTRONIC E DITION
the Morrow editorial department had expended the necessary effort to extract from Wright’s
manuscript the remarkable book that A MEDITERREAN FEAST ought to—and surely could—
have been. What we have been given instead is
a book that punishes most those who make a
genuine effort to read it through.
My advice is: don’t. Instead, read those
parts that especially interest you and otherwise
console yourself with—and here we come to the
good news—the book’s superb collection of
recipes. With these, too, there are problems that
a stricter editorial hand could have resolved.
Some should have been left on the cutting-room
floor—what is a recipe for French fries doing
here?—and the others organized into some sort
of coherent order. As things stand now, they are
scattered higgledy-piggledy throughout the text—
that eggplant recipe you vaguely remember
could be in twenty different places.
Even so, what a splendid trove of recipes
it is, sampling the cooking of every historical
era and—it seems—practically every neighborhood in the Mediterranean basin. Many of
them are unusual, almost all of them skillfully
presented, and a goodly number individually
quarried by the author himself.
Among those worth noting are the sumacflavored chicken-and-onion casserole from
Palestine, baked in a wrapping of flatbread; the
garlic-, herb-, and pepper-flavored appetizer of
marinated green olives, lupine beans, and
mixed nuts from Languedoc, amusingly named
Aperó-Chic Super (“super-chic appetizer”); the
lobster risotto from Friuli-Venezia Giulia, in
which the coral, tomalley, and leg meat are
pounded into a paste that is then stirred into
the cooking broth, itself made from the water
in which the lobsters were previously boiled.
My eye was also caught by some hearty
breakfast stews sold out of cauldrons by holein-the-wall vendors to dock workers—in Salonika, lamb trotter soup, and in Tunis, lablani,
a fiery, garlicky chickpea stew.
The following recipes, the first from Andalusia and the next from Basilicata, are two
good examples of Wright’s knack for spotting
fresh and simple dishes and explaining why
they matter. Such enthusiasm makes him
much better company in the kitchen than in
the classroom and ultimately rescues his book
from failure. The tragedy is that it should ever
have had to do so.
July~October 2000
R EMOLACHAS
(BEETS
CON
WITH
A TÚN
TUNA)
THE AUTHOR NOTES: This dish using tuna in oil
is a beautiful maroon color from the beets,
and is extraordinarily appetizing. The flavors are enticing and an excellent accompaniment to grilled chicken or fish. Remember that beet juice can stain (the reason it was used as a dye in medieval times),
so handle with care around clothing.
[SERVES 4]
10 small beets, trimmed of leaves
One 31/2-ounce can imported tuna in olive oil
salt to taste • 1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil
2 tablespoons red wine vinegar
2 garlic cloves, finely chopped
1
1 /2 tablespoons finely chopped fresh parsley leaves
•Bring a pot of lightly salted water to a boil
and cook the beets whole with a portion of
their stems until easily pierced by a
skewer, about 20 minutes. Drain and let
cool, then peel, trim, and dice.
•Place the beets on a platter and add the
tuna with its oil, breaking it apart. Sprinkle
some salt, the olive oil, vinegar, garlic, and
parsley on top of the beets and tuna. Toss
gently but well, and serve.
A GNELLO
(LAMB
CON
WITH
F UNGHI
MUSHROOMS)
THE AUTHOR NOTES: Mushrooms are the food
par excellence in sylvan/pastoral cuisine,
and in Basilicata a cook would use
cardoncelli (Lactarius deliciosus), mushrooms unavailable to us. But a mixture of
portobello, oyster, and chanterelle mushrooms provides an equally lusty taste. Or
use common (button or field) mushroom
mixed with dried porcini that have been
previously soaked and drained. Do not
wash the fresh mushrooms—brush or
wipe them clean. This recipe from Matera
is perfect for cold weather.
CONTINUED ON PAGE
15
page seven
Work, Adventures,
Childhood, Dreams
a
Patience Gray
(EDIZIONI LEUCASIA, 1999)
a
Have a room of your own and keep the key to the
door in your pocket or something like that, said
Jung.
—Patience Gray
ASCICOLI, THE AUTHOR CALLS THEM (the English
word is “fascicles”)—pieces of writing too
allusive to be called essays, too coherent
and carefully crafted to be called fragments.
Instead, bursts of thought, dreams, memories
propel us to mysterious destinations along routes
full of sudden, unmarked curves. Their titles—
“Patron Saint and Patron,” “About Your Journey
and Mine,” “Other Worlds & Other Rooms”—
often serve more as punch lines than as guideposts, and they certainly give you no hint at all of
a prose style that can catch you up and spin you
along like a leaf in a freshet, making you dizzy
with pleasure just when you most ought to be
paying attention to the lie of the shore.
Notice, for instance, how in the following
passage the reader is unexpectedly, unexplainedly flipped back in time as well as distance—the
chill of the evening reminding the writer of
totemic transitions in the landscape on the
drive north from Italy.
F
The well was deep and Wolfe’s attic window
was wide open, strung with a stave of laundry
lines on which a random assemblage of clothespegs were marking time. “I’ll walk along the
roof,” I said. “Don’t!” said Norman. Done in by
the mileage and the flapping of the canvas cab,
he was preparing to doss down on the landing.
I took off my sandals, got out of the window and
decided not to look down. I kept my eye on both
feet on the cat-run ledge which ran along the
roofline. Gingerly touching the sloping slates of
the mansard roof I advanced slowly, reached
the corner, turned the right angle, went on
some twenty feet, then started feeling for the
cast-iron window bar. It had a piece of loose
wood tacked along the top. Stupid to fall now, I
thought. I got through the window and opened
the door.
The extraordinary disorder of the claustrophobic little room! When two people get inside
they have at once to sit down on the bed to make
way for the piano, the extendable table, the
records, the coffee grinder, the eau de vie, and
the books and music standing out in cantilevered piles. The bed, a 1930 piece, was inextricably combined with a varnished credenza
motorstyled, a rented room’s pretence to stabiCONTINUED ON PAGE
14
We reached Paris at night and slid into the last
parking space outside Napoleon’s Circus. It
was July, a Sunday, cold, and most of the bars
on the boulevard were closed. Sunflowers stop
at the Bouches-du-Rhône and the gold corn
had turned green on the way.
She and her late husband, Norman Mommens,
are planning to spend the night with their
friend, Wolfe.
page eight
E LECTRONIC E DITION
The elliptical drag up five floors of dilapidated
staircase ended in a fruitless banging on Wolfe’s
door. There was a window on the landing opening on a courtyard well. A turtle dove was rolling
its rrr’s in the hollow depths below. We stood at
the open window, remembering the turtles peculiar snoring whirr on spring evenings, by
Apollona’s shingle-choked rivermouth. We used
to find turtle corpses there, flat side up, where
the fresh water seeped through the shingle and
trickled in glittering little streams, sifted by
sand, down the beach. “Turtles, pecked at the
throat by turtle doves,” so Norman said.
Simple Cooking 70
From the Cook’s Bookcase
World Food Café
Chris & Carolyn Caldicott
(SOMA, $28, 192
E LECTRONIC E DITION
A
PAGES)
LTHOUGH WORLD FOOD CAFÉ was just published just last fall, by the time I read a
review of it* the publisher had already
sold out their stock and I had to buy my copy
from a used-book dealer.† You have only to
pick it up to understand why prescient readers
cleared it from the bookstore shelves: WORLD
FOOD CAFÉ is one of the most compelling (and
lovely to look at) vegetarian cookbooks to come
our way in quite some time.
Chris Caldicott is a British photojournalist and the official photographer for Royal
Geographic Society expeditions. At some point,
he began collecting recipes for dishes that he
encountered during his travels, sometimes
simply from watching the cooks while they
prepared them. In 1991, he and his wife,
Carolyn, also a vegetarian and global cooking
enthusiast, opened the World Food Café in
London’s Covent Garden, from which ultimately came this cookbook.
WORLD FOOD CAFÉ is divided into four
parts—the Middle East and Africa; India, Nepal,
and Sri Lanka; Southeast Asia and China; and
Latin America—each of which is then broken up
into chapters devoted to a particular country—
Morocco, Mali, Cuba, Turkey, etc.—or, in the
case of India, areas of a country. The authors
introduce both parts and chapters with brief
descriptions of their experiences eating in these
places and then present the recipes they gathered there. In some instances, these are surprisingly few—the chapter on China offers only
two!—and in a few other instances, they will be
all too familiar to American readers; Mexico is
represented by—among others—guacamole,
refried beans, and huevos rancheros.
However, this is a small complaint to
make about a book containing so many interesting (and often easily prepared) dishes gathered from odd corners of the globe. Some are
street food, like the fiery and garlicky eggplant
dish the authors ate near their guest house in
Calcutta. Others were served in private homes,
July~October 2000
like the corn curry they enjoyed at the house of
a stationmaster on Diu, a tiny island in the
Arabian Sea, when he invited them to come
there for lunch when their train was delayed.
Another time, on a riverboat journey along the
Niger, they ate their meals on deck, cooked by
native passengers who had come “equipped
with stoves, pots, and hampers of ingredients,
subsidizing their fares by selling hearty stews.”
The authors’ version of one of these, sweet
potatoes cooked in a complexly flavored peanut-butter sauce, has become a signature
dish at the World Food Café.
SWEET POTATO STEW IN A PEANUT GINGER SAUCE
[SERVES 4
TO
6]
4 tablespoons sunflower oil
1 large onion, cubed • 4 garlic cloves, crushed
2-inch piece fresh ginger, peeled and minced
13/4 pounds sweet potatoes, peeled and cubed
1 pound white cabbage, cubed
2 teaspoons paprika
1 teaspoon cayenne pepper
13/4
cups ( 14 ounces) chopped plum tomatoes
1 cup pineapple juice
1/2
cup smooth peanut butter
salt and pepper to taste
TO GARNISH
2 carrots, peeled and grated
2 beets, peeled and grated
2 bananas, peeled and sliced • juice of 1 lime
handful of fresh cilantro leaves, chopped
•Heat the sunflower oil in a large, heavy
pan over medium heat and sauté the onion
until soft. Add the garlic and ginger, sauté
for a few minutes, then add the sweet
potatoes and cabbage.
•When the vegetables start to soften, add
the paprika and cayenne. Stir to coat the
vegetables with the spices. Add the
chopped tomatoes and pineapple juice.
Cover the pan and simmer until the vegetables are soft. Then stir in the peanut
butter until well combined and season to
taste with salt and pepper.
page nine
•Toss the carrots, beets, and bananas in
the lime juice and sprinkle over the dish,
together with the cilantro. Serve with rice.
Parisian Home Cooking
Michael Roberts
(MORROW, $25, 355
W
PAGES)
HEN WILL FOOD WRITERS CATCH ON TO THE
FACT that the famous passage in which
page ten
Parisian [women] cook in an offhanded manner, relying on intuition and experience, not
worrying about a dish coming out perfectly.
“Women attach less importance to appearance
than to tradition, to long-simmering dishes like
bouillabaisse,” says Gisèle Berger, who has a
restaurant in Clichy. “It’s less method, more
love.” On the other hand, men approach cooking as if it were a problem to solve, an obstacle
to overcome. Says Erna Jacquillat, a cooking
teacher, “They follow recipes. Their cooking is
methodical and their dishes are usually well
presented and impressive. I can look at a
mirepoix [a finely chopped flavoring mixture of
carrots, celery, and onions] and tell you the
gender of the person who chopped it up.”
There are some sophisticated recipes
here (have to keep the men happy, after all),
but most of the dishes in PARISIAN HOME COOKING
are direct, simple, and uncomplicatedly delicious, like the salad of toasted walnuts and
torn bits of Belgian endive, tossed in a dressing
of walnut oil and lemon juice; the mussels
broiled in garlic butter; the chicken simmered
in red wine and aged red wine vinegar; the
gratin of broccoli rabe and Gruyère; the tart
with a crust almost like “a big shortbread
cookie” and a smooth, rich, intensely lemony
filling. Interestingly, Roberts devotes a whole
chapter to eggs, since Parisians, who are baffled by our own habit of serving them for
breakfast, often prepare scrambled eggs for an
easy, soothing dinner. His directions for making these in the French manner is a model of
elegant recipe writing.
SCRAMBLED EGGS THE FRENCH WAY
When properly executed, oeufs brouillés, literally, “agitated eggs,” bear slight resemblance to
their American cousin, scrambled eggs. The
scramble should result in small tender clumps
of eggs suspended in an almost saucelike base.
Most people prefer them creamy, with the consistency of oatmeal. Cooked until dry, they’re
more like small-curd cottage cheese but still
springy and light. Use a small pot rather than
a skillet for French-style scrambled eggs. It’s
pointless to cook less than 6 eggs; in fact, the
larger the quantity, the better the scramble.
Simple Cooking 70
E LECTRONIC E DITION
the narrator of REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS
PAST soaks his madeleine (an insipid cookie)
into his tisane of tilleul leaves (a vile herbal
concoction drunk by the French to calm their
digestion and bring on sleep) has everything to
do with the involuntary power of memory and
nothing whatsoever to do with gastronomy? As
the epigraph to a cookbook, PARISIAN HOME
COOKING included, Proust’s famous quotation
is as apt—and as appetizing—as a cough syrup
advertisement.
It is to Michael Roberts’ credit that his
book would have been not one whit less attractive had he actually chosen to begin it with a
paean to Nyquil. And what a good idea for a
cookbook, too—go hang around Parisian markets, get fellow shoppers to invite you home to
dinner, and collect recipes from all and sundry. (Of course, it helps if you’re a professional
chef who spends part of every year in Paris and
those fellow shoppers are your friends.) The
resulting book—enriched with a wealth of warmly
intimate black-and-white photographs by PierreGiles Vidoli that bring you into real-world
Parisian kitchens—is a casual stroll through
today’s French dinner, a meal prepared in a
world of small apartments, minimal free time,
and working wives.
There is a chapter on every course, prefaced by an explanation of how it has reshaped
itself to fit contemporary Gallic taste. Introductions to individual dishes sometimes provide the provenence of the recipe (some good
tales there) and other times information about
the dish itself and why this version is Roberts’
favorite. He also shares news of current Parisian culinary fads—like seeking out just-dug
garlic heads for making chicken with forty
cloves of garlic—and reassures us that the
French are still very attuned to la différence, in
cooking as everywhere else.
For each egg, add 1 teaspoon of water, 1/8
teaspoon salt, and 1/2 teaspoon of butter to
your bowl of eggs. Beat the mixture lightly,
using a wooden spoon; use a whisk for scrambling. Scramble the eggs over low heat, whisking all the time. When the mixture begins to
coagulate and form lumps, begin a little dance
of removing your pot from the heat and replacing it, scraping the bottom and sides with the
whisk to detach the particles that form there. If
you loosely scramble 6 eggs in less than 9
minutes, you’ve not done it properly. For richer
scrambled eggs, stir in 1 teaspoon each cream
and butter per egg at the end of cooking.
move again from the heat and continue
whisking for 30 seconds, then replace over
low heat and cook, always whisking, for 2
to 4 minutes more, to desired doneness.
•Remove the eggs from the heat and mix in
the parsley. Pour the eggs into a large
serving bowl and mound the remaining
tomato mixture in the center. Serve immediately with—or on—hot buttered toast.
This variation makes a perfect end-of-summer
supper.
SCRAMBLED EGGS WITH TOMATOES, SHALLOTS,
AND GARLIC
[SERVES 4]
3 tablespoons olive oil • 1/3 cup thinly sliced shallots
3 cloves garlic, thinly sliced
11/4 pounds Roma tomatoes, peeled, seeded, and
chopped
3 sprigs fresh thyme (or 1/2 teaspoon dried)
11/2 teaspoons salt and freshly ground black pepper
to taste
10 large eggs • 3 tablespoons plus 1 teaspoon water
2 tablespoons unsalted butter, cut into bits
2 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley
•Heat the oil in a medium skillet over
medium heat. Cook the shallots and garlic,
stirring, for 2 minutes. Add the tomatoes,
thyme, 1 teaspoon of the salt, and pepper
to taste and cook until the mixture is dry,
about 10 minutes. Remove from the heat.
E LECTRONIC E DITION
•Break the eggs into a bowl. Add half the
tomato mixture (keep the remaining tomatoes warm), the water, butter, and the
remaining 1/2 teaspoon salt and beat with
a wooden spoon. Pour the eggs into a
saucepan, place over low heat, and whisk
continuously until the eggs begin to
thicken, about 6 minutes. Remove from
the heat and continue whisking for 30
seconds, then replace over low heat and
cook, always whisking, for 2 minutes. ReJuly~October 2000
Memories of a Lost Egypt
Colette Rossant
(CLARKSON POTTER, $20, 159
PAGES)
W
to soothe
the misery of the unhappy, lonely,
cut-adrift child? Uncom-plicated, richly sensual, immediately comforting, food can
offer everything that love can, albeit shrunk to
one dimension. Even when meals themselves
are miserable, there is the eating that can take
place in private and, at least in old-fashioned,
privileged households, the time spent in the
kitchen in the company of the cook.
Colette Rossant had a French mother
and an Egyptian father; he died in 1938, when
she was six. Her mother then left her and her
slightly older brother in Cairo, in the care of the
father’s family of wealthy Sephardic Jews.
Alas, her mother did not then entirely abandon
her but reappeared periodically to wreak emotional havoc—summoning her to France and
then sending her back to Cairo again when the
maternal role once more began to pale.
Rossant has a sensuous, bittersweet
prose style not unreminiscent of the original
Colette, and it is the perfect medium for her
affectionate but unsentimental portrait of the
good life, Sephardic style, in a Belle Epoque
mansion near the Nile in Cairo’s Garden City.
The house, large enough for members of her
father’s extended family to have separate apartments, was a hive of gossip and intrigue, over
which her grandmother ruled with a firm but
usually benevolent hand.
HAT BETTER ANODYNE THAN FOOD
CONTINUED ON PAGE
16
page eleven
✑SUPER-SHARP CERAMIC KITCHEN KNIFE. This year
one of my birthday presents was a supersharp ceramic kitchen knife. These hightech wonders are made byh only company
in the world—Kyocera (pronounced KEYo-say-rah—the name comes from “Kyoto
Ceramics”), at a factory in in Sendai, a
small city in southwest Japan on the
island of Kyushu. The knives carry a
premium price (although they can be
found at a substantial discount—see the
buying note, below), in part because of
the high import duties the United States
imposes on such advanced ceramic products and partly because the process of
making the knives is complicated and
cost-intensive. Powdered zinconium and
a binding material are molded into bladeshaped blanks using special high-pressure presses. These blanks are then fired
(sintered is the technical term) for several
days at temperatures over 1000°F. Finally, the tempered blanks are sharpened on
diamond sharpening wheels, polished,
and affixed to various styles (wood, plastic, ergonomic) of handle.
Kyocera makes two ultra-premium
super-sharp ceramic blades, both 6-inch
chef knives. The first is the KC-200,
which retails at over three hundred dollars and is the only one made of zirconium carbide—a substance that turns a
sexy black when fired. It produces a
harder blade than does the less expensive
zirconium oxide that they use to make
their other knives, including the other
super-sharp model, the KC-130, which
cost just over two hundred dollars. What
sets both of these knives apart from the
others is that their edges are formed by
grinding both sides of the blade, whereas
with the others, only one side is ground.
Since the ceramic is prone to chipping or
shattering during the grinding process,
doing both sides is especially tricky.
Both of the super-premium blades
were too expensive for me; indeed, I waited
for a sale that reduced the usual discount
price of the LK-65, a five-and-a-half-inch
chef’s knife with a plain plastic handle from
page twelve
eighty-five to sixty-nine dollars (it retails for a
hundred and fifty, or about the same price of a
top-of-the-line J. A. Henkels chef’s knife twice
its size). A stainless steel knife with a blade
that is ground on only one side is a very cheap
thing indeed, but ceramic is a different material. This is by far the sharpest knife of any we
own, and we own some very good knives.
How sharp is sharp? When Kyocera tried to
produce razor blades out of the same material, their project engineers cut themselves
so badly on the prototypes that the project
was abandoned. In hardness, zirconia is
closer to diamond than to steel—it not
only takes a very sharp edge but stays
sharp for a very long time. (This is just as
well, since they can only be resharpened
on a special motor-driven diamond wheel,
which usually means sending the knife
back to manufacturer.)
Ceramic blades have other things
going for them besides a long-lasting
super-sharp edge. They are chemically
inert (no interaction with acid foods),
they never rust or stain, and they are
stick free. However, most of these qualities can also be found in high-quality
stainless steel knives. If you don’t mind
sharpening your own knives, the only reason
to own a Kyocera blade is for its sharpness—
and while sharpness is certainly an important
virtue in a kitchen knife, some time spent with
this one will teach you that it isn’t the only one.
First, though, let me say that in kitchen
work where sharpness is everything, the Kyocera is superb. It slides through tomatoes and
onions. Its nonstick surface also makes it
ideal for slicing hard-boiled eggs and anything
else that tends to cling to a knife blade, like
soft cheese. For jobs like these I prefer it to my
faithful stainless steel kitchen knife. Where
the Kyocera falters is in jobs that require a
steel blade’s natural weight. A ceramic blade
simply doesn’t have the heft. This means that
you have to push the knife through a cabbage
This illustration of my Kyocera 51/2-inch cook’s knife shows
it about 10 percent smaller than real life. I’ve also exaggerated the contrast to bring out the texture of the blade; in
actual appearance it is pure white ( i.e., no stainless steel
aura). Note the chip missing from the bottom of the blade.
Simple Cooking 70
or a carrot, whereas with my stainless Chinese
cleaver I simply slice—the heaviness of the
blade does the rest. In the same way, a steel
chef’s knife will cut a pot roast into thinner,
more even slices, because the weight of the
metal blade keeps the knife stroke true while
the ceramic blade quickly slips off course.
Finally, there is the matter of aesthetics.
My favorite kitchen knives have character—a
certain roughness of temperament mellowed
by the patina of long use and user familiarity.
The Kyocera, like many another high tech
miracle, has all the personality of a computer
modem or a caller ID machine. The zirconium
oxide blade has the look and feel of a piece of
sharpened Formica, which makes it seem less
like a piece of premium kitchen equipment
than something thrown in as a bonus for
responding to a late-night infomercial (“Yours
free! the plastic wonder blade! so sharp you’ll
throw all your other knives away!”),
Like a TV giveaway, the Kyocera turns
out to have all sort of caveats attached: Don’t
flex it. Don’t use it to chop bones, cut hard
bread crusts, or frozen foods. When you’re
washing it, be careful not to strike the edge
against a cup or a plate. With a regular knife,
the fragile one is you; with the Kyocera, you
have to be careful for the blade as well as of it.
The bottom line? Well, like many things
in this day and age, while I’m not sorry I own it
I could have easily lived without it. I still covet
the top-of-the-line, sexy black ceramic blade,
but it will never make it to the top of my wish
list, or even into the top ten. Actually, what I
really want to own now is their twenty-dollar
vegetable peeler. I’ll bet that is really
something...which, when you think about it, is
a rather peculiar thing to say about a line of
premium knives.
Anyone interested in premium kitchen knives
of any sort should request a printed catalog
from Professional Cutlery Direct, a company
specializing in top-of-the-line cutting tools (all
sold at a discount), sharpeners, cutting boards,
and storage blocks, plus other items of interest
to chefs and serious cooks. The brands they
offer include Kyocera, of course, and Global
(Japan); LamsonSharp (USA), Forshner/
TABLE TALK
✑KINNIE. A hug and a kiss for subscriber MINNIE
BIGGS (Kurrajong, Australia), who sent me a can
of Kinnie, a sweet-sour soda produced in Malta
of bitter oranges and eighteen aromatic herbs.
As soon as I read about it in her “Letter from
Malta” (SC•67), I tracked down the Kinnie website and begged to be allowed to order a case. No
deal. And my e-mails to web-based sellers of
exotic sodas weren’t a whit more productive. I
liked Kinnie very much, and even more I liked
that it is actually made with what it is supposed
to taste like—something that in this country
almost guarantees a soda’s extinction. Remember when Canada Dry Gingerale used to brag
about its Jamaican ginger? Today, the word
“ginger” doesn’t even appear in the ingredient
list. Only one local supermarket carries both my
current favorites—Moxie (made with real gentian root) and Orangina (made with orange
juice, orange pulp, and tangerine juice)—and it
allots to each the smallest possible shelf space.
Kinnie, as it turns out, tastes a little like Moxie
and Orangina mixed together in the same glass—
ELECTRONIC EDITION
Simple Cooking 70 © 2000 John Thorne and Matt Lewis
Thorne. All rights reserved. ❍ SC is published every other
month. A subscription to the electronic edition is $24 for six
issues, worldwide. ❍ Unless stated otherwise, we assume
letters to us are meant for publication and can be edited
accordingly. ❍ P.O. Box 778, Northampton MA 01061.
E-MAIL: MATT&[email protected].
WEBSITE: HTTP://WWW.OUTLAWCOOK.COM.
SUBSCRIBE AT: HTTP://OUTLAWCOOK.SAFESHOPPER.COM/
ISSN 0749-176X
July~October 2000
page thirteen
which probably means I shouldn’t hold my
breath for it to find a US distributor. But at least,
for the moment, I know how to make it myself.
✑MANGO MONTEGO BAY. Subscriber KATRIN WILDE
(New York, NY) was blown away by a simple
mango dessert served up by her friend Kathy
Hyde. You will be, too. This is the sort of recipe
where exact proportions have to be dictated by
the amount of fruit at hand, but the drift is clear.
Choose soft, ripe fruit. Cut open and remove the
flesh and divide it into little bowls. Drizzle each
portion with a squeeze of fresh orange or lime
juice. Gently sweeten a nice amount of crème
fraîche with powdered sugar and stir in a little
freshly grated lime peel. Top each portion of fruit
with a dollop of this and enjoy.
✑OUR BOOKS NEW AND OLD. Recently we uncovered a small stash of the original hardcover
edition of OUTLAW COOK and are offering them on
a first-come first-serve basis to our readers. If
you’ve worn out your paperback edition, you
might want to claim a copy that’s a little more
durable—Matt and I will autograph it and, if you
like, inscribe it to you personally. The price is
$25 plus $2 postage (book rate) or $4 (priority).
Send us an e-mail to claim one—if we have one
left we’ll send it to you with an invoice.
Conversely, in October, SERIOUS PIG will
(at last!) be appearing in paperback—with a
brand new cover and at a very nice price
(considering it is 528 pages long)—$15. As
usual, we’ll be selling autographed (and, if
desired, inscribed) copies to interested readers. If you’d like us to reserve one of the earliest
copies for you, let us know, and we’ll put you on
the list.
The best news for last—we also have a
new book coming out in October. Called POT ON
CONTINUED ON PAGE
15
Don’t Be Alarmed...
page fourteen
lize pills, postcards, alarm clock, theatre
programmes and Galerie Daniel Cordier’s
mescalin emanations.
Feasts on Sundays, one could see that. An
enamelled iron casserole was squatting on the
piano lid with the remains of some appetizing
fish congealing among Biennale catalogues and
discs. A huge bottle of Cent’Erbe—Venice’s
lagoon-green medicinal liqueur—and a full glass
were fighting on the table with three white
china mazagrans, a fallen rose, a blanched
carnation. No blood but a lot of green liquor had
been spilt. What looked like a cast-iron astrolabe was swinging its handle in the mess and a
lot of ice was melting in an aluminium pot-aufeu on the floor. Goncharov, Rimbaud and
Stendhal signalled from the bed. Maria Callas,
her photograph blown up to life size, dominated
the scene, with the last act of La Traviata on the
record player, and the green walls pinned to the
eyebrows with Normaniana.
If you don’t quite follow all this, you’re not
alone. At least you can look up “mazagran” in
the dictionary (if you can figure out the right
dictionary to consult—I finally found the word
in a fat French one, which told me only that it is
a kind of goblet)—but for the most part you are
left to work things out as best you can yourself.
The author is the last one to spoil an effect with
an explanation.
It probably rarely occurs to her to do so—
publishing her own writing, she has no anxious
editor eager to meddle with her sinewy, enigmatic sentences. But it is also a mark of respect
for the reader in a time when almost all writing
is addressed to the lowest possible common
denominator. Her voice seems to speak to us
from another time, or perhaps from another
universe, rather than from just another country. I find the result as cleansing as it is enjoyable, a swim in a mountain stream.
WORK, ADVENTURES, CHILDHOOD, DREAMS was
published in a limited edition under the imprint
of Rolando Civilla’s Edizioni Leucasia di Levante Arti Grafiche. The production was closely
supervised by the author, whose presence can
be felt in the typeface, the book’s spacious and
attractive design, and especially in the nature,
placement, and profusion of the illustrations
(many of them by her, many others photographs of Norman Mommens’ sculptures).
The outcome is something that is not
only handsome and unique but in shape, deSimple Cooking 70
E LECTRONIC E DITION
by the four-month dating of this issue. We’re just
realigning the actual publication date with the time
span displayed on our masthead. As usual, the next
issue will arrive approximately two months from
now...but instead of being the once-again-late “September/October” issue, it will be the exactly-on-time
“November/December” issue. Pretty neat, huh? Needless to say, this strictly mechanical adjustment will not
affect the number of issues you’ll receive as part of your
subscription. —The Editors
Patience Gray
Patience Gray
Those wanting to own a copy of the book have
two options: (1) persuade an American publisher to bring it more widely into print (contact us if this is a possibility and we’ll put you
in direct touch with Patience) or (2) order a
copy directly from Tom Jaine, publisher of
Prospect Books, who has generously taken on
the task of selling the Edizioni Leucasia edition for the author. At the time this issue went
to press, copies were available for $50 postpaid (surface mail) for orders shipped to the
USA. Please make your check out to “PPCNA”
and—to avoid any confusion—write the title of
the book somewhere on it, too. Send to Tom
Jaine, Allaleigh House, Blackawton, Totnes,
Devon TQ9 7DL, Great Britain.
E LECTRONIC E DITION
Knives
Victorinox (Switzerland); J. A. Henckels, Meridian, and Wüsthof-Trident (Germany);
Sabatier, Gilles de la Fleur, and Thiers-Issard—
including their line of old-fashioned carbon
steel blades (France); and Icel of Portugal—
which produces fully-forged high-carbon stainless steel knives at a remarkably low prices).
Contact PCD at 242 Branford Rd, North
Branford CT 06471 • (800) 859-6994 or visit
them online at WWW.CUTLERY.COM.
July~October 2000
FIRE, it gathers together essays (most but
not all published in these pages) written over
the past decade. You’ll read about our efforts
to make sense of wine, to find something new
in the way of a savory breakfast, and to learn to
cook a pot of perfect rice. Some chapters relate
stories of culinary adventuring—searching Asian
grocery stores for clues to the mysterious (but
delicious) contents of Vietnamese sandwiches,
mastering the art of cooking cannellini beans
in a bottle, overcoming a lifetime fear of making
risotto. Others explore different places and
times, such as nineteenth-century Ireland during
the potato famine and the India of the British
Raj. And, as usual, you’ll find carefully detailed discussions about making everything
from Chinese meat dumplings to griddlecakes
to “the best cookies in the world.” We’re accepting advance orders for autographed copies
now at our secure website store—order before
the publication date (October 15th) and the
shipping is on us.
THE
Ring designs by Patience Gray
sign, and content the perfect companion to the
author’s HONEY FROM A WEED, a food book that
also issued from that other universe. In these
pages, you return to the same place, the same
sensibility; only the subject is different. The
other book gave us the cooking and the eating;
here are the work and the days, the memories
and the dreams. Otherwise, the contents are
exactly the same, a complex intellectual energy
brought to heel by irreducibly simple things—
two bottles on a work table, a local neighbor
seeking a replacement for a stolen statue of a
saint, a laurel-wood plank found in a cowstall,
an unanticipatedly pure bar of silver (the author works with both precious and wholly mundane metals)—and what happens next. This, I
can promise, will be what you least expect.
New Book
Mediterranean
[SERVES 6]
2 pounds boneless leg of lamb, cubed (with a little fat
left on)
11/2 pounds mushrooms (see above)
2 garlic cloves, chopped • 1 dried red chile pepper,
crumbled
1/4
cup extra-virgin olive oil • salt to taste
•Preheat the oven to 325°F. Put all the
ingredients in a large enameled cast-iron or
earthenware casserole. Toss well, cover,
and place in the oven. Bake until tender,
about 1 to 1 1/2 hours, stirring every 10
minutes. Serve.
page fifteen
Egypt
One of my favorite chapters describes the
relationship between her grandmother and Ahmet,
the equally stubborn family cook. Both were
experts in the kitchen, which, of course, didn’t
help matters any—every day began with the two
shouting loudly at each other about what Ahmet might (or assuredly might not) be preparing
that day. And although Ahmet did the daily
shopping, Grandmaman insisted on taking over
the job for the more important weekend dinners
herself, setting out to the open market with
their servant Abdullah to carry the parcels and,
often, with little Colette as well.
Grandmaman was a familiar figure there,
and her progress from one part of the market to
the next had something of the quality of a regal
procession.
We would then proceed to the poultry and meat
market. Grandmaman always started with the
pigeon seller. As soon as she appeared, someone would bring her an old padded wooden
chair to sit on while a young boy would be sent
to get her some strong, overly sweet Arab coffee,
which would be served in a tiny porcelain cup
set on a bright silver tray. She would sip her
coffee while discussing the quality of the pigeons shown to her. “The birds had better be
tender and plump,” she’d warn, squeezing the
poor bird’s breast, “because they weren’t the
last time!” The pigeons were then killed, plucked,
and handed to Abdullah, without being wrapped
in greasy newspaper, which was a common
practice. Abdullah always carried a special
cloth bag for the poultry.
She would then return home in triumph to
hand over the spoils to Ahmet, who would
grumble that she had paid too much for the
meat or chosen fruit that was overripe.
Both grandparents were devoted to the
pleasures of the table, which did not necessarily mean that they agreed on what those were.
page sixteen
To the further dismay of her grandmother, Colette was never happier than when she
was able to escape to the kitchen and the
company of Ahmet, who would prepare little
treats for her and allow her to watch him as he
worked. Sadly, all this would change when her
mother suddenly reappeared (bursting into the
kitchen just as Colette had begun devouring a
favorite snack) and, finding her daughter too
dark and too plump (i.e., too Egyptian), sent
her off to a convent to be thoroughly Europeanized. More sadly still, soon after Colette was
snatched from this rich and magical world, it
would itself begin to fade away—a few decades
later there would be hardly a trace of it left.
Although MEMORIES OF A LOST EGYPT is a
slim volume, it is anything but slight. Few
writers can match Rossant’s ability to make
remembered food at once so appetizing and so
emotionally resonant. Even the recipes (there
are many of them and they are all good) are a
part of—rather than an appendage to—her
story. None more so than the following wonderful tomato salad—although to learn why, you’re
going to have to read the book.
FRESH TOMATO SALAD
Bring a pot of water to a boil. Turn off the
heat and add 5 large ripe tomatoes. Take
them out after 3 minutes and cool under
cold running water. Slip off the skins. In a
large bowl, mix together 2 shallots and 1
clove of garlic—both peeled and minced—
with 2 tablespoons olive oil and 1 tablespoon lemon juice. Add salt and pepper to
taste. Slice the tomatoes and add them to
the bowl. Toss well, sprinkle with 1 tablespoon minced fresh tarragon or fresh chervil, and serve at room temperature. This
will serve 4 to 6.
Simple Cooking 70
E LECTRONIC E DITION
He liked stews; she preferred roasts. He adored
grilled chitterlings; she disliked them intensely
and would not allow Ahmet to make them. He
loved stuffed eggplant and green peppers; she
delighted in stuffed zucchini or okra cooked
with tomatoes and onions. She relished squab
stuffed with rice and pine nuts; he wanted them
grilled and spiced with lime and cumin. He
would eat three or four at one sitting, picking
up the squab leg delicately with two fingers.
“Pick them up with your fingers too, Colette,”
he would say to me. “You cannot use a fork and
a knife to eat these birds.” My grandmother
would frown, muttering that this was very undignified for une jeune fille de bonne famille, but
I would attack my squab with gusto. Often
Grandpère and I would compare the number of
bones left on our plates.
footnotes
✽ by Terra Brockman in her food letter, Food &
Farm Notes, an attractive quarterly publication offering a beguiling mix of down-home
farm life and contemporary cooking, with a
seasoning of unexpected literary quotations (“I
would eat evanescence slowly”—Emily Dickinson). Her brother, Henry, and his wife, Hiroko,
are organic farmers, and both contribute to the
publication, giving it that much more depth
and interest. Food & Farm Notes is currently
$25 a year for four 16-page issues ($45 for two
years). (Mention SIMPLE COOKING when you order
and Terra will throw in the current issue for
free.) Make checks payable to “Food & Farm”
and send them to 586 Sheridan Sq. #1, Evanston IL 60202. E-mail: [email protected].
You can find out more about the publication at
WWW.TERRABOOKS.COM and about the farm itself
at WWW.HENRYSFARM.COM.➥
✽Copies are available from Jessica’s Biscuit
(ECOOKBOOK.COM • 800-878-4264) and from Britain, where the book is still in print and can be
easily ordered from the British branch of
Amazon.com—AMAZON.CO.UK.➥
✽While Wright castigates food writers for failing to take Arab influences into account when
writing about European Mediterranean cooking, he is not particularly generous in giving
credit to those who have, including Mary Taylor Simeti, who devoted a lengthy chapter to
the subject in POMP AND SUSTENANCE (Knopf,
1989), her groundbreaking work on Sicilian
food. ➥
✽For instance: “Waverley Root, who thought
E LECTRONIC E DITION
this etymology nonsense, was characteristically wrong.” If that is the case, why does Wright
continue to cite him as a source? ➥
THE ACROBAT READER TOOL BAR
(These icons appear at the top of the page.)
Information about Adobe Acrobat. Push this button to
update your copy to the newest version.
Open a file. Push this button to open another PDF document on your computer.
Print. Push this button to print this document.
Navigation Panel. Push this button to open a navigation
panel on the left side of the screen to help you move around
a document.
Hand Tool. This button is active by default. When you
push down on your mouse button, a hand appears. Use it
to move the page up, down, left, right, or any combination of these as you read the document.
Magnifying Tool. Push this button to increase or decrease
the magnification of a page. Click the mouse button to
enlarge it by increments. To decrease it, hold down the
ALT/OPT button while you click. Don’t forget to deselect the button when you’re done.
Text Select Tool. Hold this button down to choose one of
three text selection tools. The first selects text across the
entire page. The second selects text from a single column.
The third allows you to copy an illustration. To activate
the tool, position the cursor over the text you want to copy
and hold down the mouse button to select it.
First Page/Previous Page Tool. Push the icon on the left
to go to the first page of the document. Push the icon to
the right of it to go back one page. If the buttons are grey
(as here), this means you are at the first page.
Last Page/Next Page Tool. Push the icon on the left to
go to the next page of the document. Push the icon to the
right of it to go to the last page. If the buttons are grey
instead of black, this means you are at the last page.
Last View/Next View Tool. This tool allows you to move
back and forth from different views on the same page.
Thus, for example, you can shift from a close-up back to
a page view without activating the magnifying tool again.
Actual Size. Push this button to display the page of the
document at its actual size.
Page View. Push this button to reduce the size of a page
so that it will all appear on your screen.
Fit Width. This button expands the page to fill the width of
your screen. Scroll up or down using the scroll bar on the
right of the document or by using the hand tool (see above).
Rotate View. Push the left button to rotate the page 90° in
a counterclockwise direction. Push its companion button
to rotate the page 90° degrees in a clockwise direction.
Search tool. Push this button to activate a search for a
word or phrase anywhere in the document.
The toolbar at the BOTTOM of the page allows you to
open and shut the navigation panel, select the degree of
magnification of the page size, move from page to page
(or to the first or last page), and to change the way you
view the entire document (for instance, you can use it to
see all the pages at once).
July~October 2000
page seventeen