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Orthodox Lent, Pre-Revolutionary Russian Vegan Dishes, and the Uses of Cannabis Oil

February 22, 2012 by eatwithpleasure

"Maslenitsa," by Boris Kustodiev

It’s easiest to kick off a diet (or “detox,” as we like to call them now), after a period of gluttonous, wanton indulgence. When you can physically feel the fat and salt and sugar oozing through your veins and out your pores, you are more likely to be able to resist the temptation to stuff yourself with more of the same.

People have known this for a long time: that’s why we have debaucherous Mardi Gras just before Lent. The Russian equivalent is Maslenitsa (which, like Mardi Gras, has roots in a pagan festival celebrating the coming of spring), when believers can give themselves permission to get drunk and gorge on piles of butter-soaked crepes before the Lenten fasting period begins. If you follow them to the letter, Orthodox fasting rules are strict and specific: no meat, no dairy, and no eggs for seven weeks. (Yes, nine days longer than Western Lent.) Fish may be eaten on certain days each week (though shellfish are allowed throughout, supposedly because they don’t have blood). Even vegetable oils are forbidden for much of the period, and three days a week only raw food is allowed.

Russian crepes (bliny)

Keep in mind that Lent falls during the “hungry months” of the year in northern climes, when historically vegetable stores would have been running low and nothing was growing yet. People had to get creative.

While many of us tend to associate Slavic cuisine exclusively with hearty, meat-laden dishes, there is actually a large repertoire of traditional vegetable and fish-based dishes that were appropriate for fasting days. In fact, the Russian Orthodox calendar designates more days as fasting days than not, so back when community life still revolved around the church, we can assume that a lot of Russians were actually eating vegan (or nearly vegan) meals for over half the year.

Many of them stopped observing the ritual during the Soviet period, when enforced atheism was state policy and religious observance became a punishable crime. Nevertheless, Lenten fasting has come back into vogue since the collapse. As in the US, some Russians today choose to fast out of genuine religious fervor, some as a sort of general spiritual and physical cleansing, and many just seize the opportunity to go on a communal diet (usually with a “lite” version of the doctrinally prescribed regimen).

The other day I was looking through a pre-revolutionary Russian cookbook (A Gift to Young Housewives, by Elena Molokhovets, first published in 1861) that I had picked up years ago at a used book sale in Russia. I wanted to learn more about the vegan dishes that people might have been eating at this time of year before Soviet rule changed everything. (An online version in Russian is available here.)

Title page of "A Gift to Young Housewives"

Molokhovets, of course, was not writing for the masses, who had little use for recipes: they were cooking the same dishes their families had prepared for generations. Rather, she intended it for the wives of well-to-do merchants and aristocrats who entertained guests at home, enjoyed some familiarity with French language and table culture, and could (at least occasionally) afford to purchase the non-native and pricey ingredients her recipes often require (e.g. artichokes, truffles, rum). The book was later banned in the Soviet Union because it was considered ostentatiously bourgeois. (Wikipedia notes that at one point Molokhovets remarks, “fresh roach is not very tasty and barely useful; it is, therefore, best used to feed the servants.”)

Still, I never expected to come across almond milk in any Russian cookbook. I had always considered it a product of new age hippie-dom, perhaps something that vegans in California invented sometime around 1965. Not so, it turns out. There are recipes for millet simmered in almond milk with ground walnuts and sugar (which may happen for breakfast in my own kitchen soon), cream of wheat with prunes and almond milk, and mashed potatoes with almond milk.

A second surprise was the instructions for making use of cannabis oil. “Cannabis oil is prepared from the seeds of the cannabis plant, costs about 14 kopeks a pound, is used by poor people in food, but is mostly used for lighting….It is also used in the preparation of green soap.” Molokhovets provides directions on using onions to rid it of its “bad smell and taste.” None of the Lenten dessert recipes she lists appear to include it.

Her recipe for making vinegar out of spoiled wine notes that “some people put an old swallows’ nest” into the barrel along with the sour wine, sugar, water, and wine stone (the crust of sediment left in wine casks, essentially a crude cream of tartar). Unfortunately, she does not explain the purpose of the nest.

There are recipes for “Ordinary yeast,” “Dry homemade yeast,” “Thick homemade yeast,” “Very good runny-thick homemade yeast,” “Excellent homemade yeast,” “Homemade yeast—very good,” “Potato yeast,” “More potato yeast,” and “Yeast.”

Buckwheat kasha

Having abandoned my hunt for purely vegan dishes at this point out of sheer fascination and delight, I came across recipes for “Buckwheat Kasha with Various Variosities” (“Kasha Grechnevaya s Raznymi Raznostiami”), including eggs, butter, bone marrow, and fried grouse; carrot jam with orange rind; and something edible apparently known as “sturgeon glue.”

Needless to say, Ms. Molokhovets and I will be spending quite a bit of time together from now on. Detoxing has never sounded like so much fun.

Posted in breakfast, cooking, nutrition, Russia | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments »

Eggplant Rolls with Walnut-Garlic Paste and Their Transcendent Echoes

February 12, 2012 by eatwithpleasure

My bedtime reading lately has been a beautifully written book called An Everlasting Meal by Tamar Adler. In it, she describes how to cook intuitively and well using the leftovers and tail ends of one meal to make the next, so ingredients “topple into one another like dominoes.” Conceiving of meals in this way turns what once were discards into opportunities: the bones of a roasted chicken, stems from a bunch of parsley, and discarded ends of celery and onion and carrot make a flavorful stock, and the butt end of a stale loaf of bread adds satisfying heft to the French onion soup you will make with it.

I haven’t even finished the book yet, but it has already changed the way I work in my own kitchen. Rather than cooking something with only one purpose in mind for it, I have started looking at each component of a meal as a building block in many potential dishes, one morphing into another over the course of the week. I spend less, waste less, and savor more variety.

One of my favorite Georgian finger foods is badrijani nigvzit, fried eggplant slices rolled around garlicky walnut paste (see recipe below). I recently made it for a party and ended up with far more paste than I had eggplant to fill with it. Rather than buying more eggplant the next day or freezing it for next time, I roasted beets, sliced them into ½ inch-thick rounds, then slathered them with the walnut paste and ate them atop peppery arugula and feta cheese.

There was more still, so I mixed it with kale and olive oil and roasted it all until the kale was tender and redolent with nuts and garlic. I ate some of that as an accompaniment to leftover pasta, then tucked a heaping spatula of it into a miraculous omelette that simultaneously popped and melted in my mouth.

The last of the fragrant kale I layered onto one half of a crusty warm baguette, slathered its other half with mayonnaise and sandwiched a just-fried egg sprinkled with salt and pepper between the two. When I bit in, the yolk ruptured and burst forth in a sweet and satisfying flood. Not too shabby for Day 3 leftovers.

More on An Everlasting Meal in an upcoming post. Everyone should read this book.

Badrijani Nigvzit (Eggplant with Walnut-Garlic Paste)
Serves 8-10 as an appetizer

  • 6 medium Italian eggplants (1.5-2 inches in diameter) or 2 large globe eggplants
  • Neutral-tasting vegetable oil (canola, sunflower or grapeseed) for frying
  • 1 cup walnuts
  • 2-3 medium cloves garlic, peeled
  • 1 Tbsp. ground coriander
  • 1 tsp. ground fenugreek
  • 1 tsp. ground marigold*
  • ½ tsp. cayenne pepper
  • ½ tsp. salt
  • Small handful pomegranate seeds, if desired

*The dried and ground petals of this flower impart a subtle bittersweet flavor to a wide variety of Georgian dishes. Look for shaprani if you happen to be in Georgia, or dry and grind petals from your own marigolds. Otherwise, leave it out.

Wash and cut the tops off the eggplants. Do not peel. Cut lengthwise into ¼ in.-thick slices. If using large globe eggplants, cut slices in half lengthwise to form 2 in.-wide strips. Sprinkle the slices on both sides with salt and let stand at least 30 minutes, then rinse in a colander, pressing out any dark, bitter juice. Pat dry.

Heat 2 Tbsp. oil in a medium skillet over medium heat. Brown eggplant slices on both sides, working in batches so as not to crowd the pan and adding oil as necessary. Wait until both sides have turned a deep golden brown, then remove eggplant slices to a plate lined with paper towels. Continue until all slices are fried and set aside to cool.

Grind walnut halves in a food processor until they have reached the consistency of coarse sand. Empty into a medium bowl. Grind garlic in a food processor with ¼ cup water until a white liquid is formed. Add to ground walnuts. Add coriander, cayenne, fenugreek, marigold, and salt to garlic and walnuts. Stir to combine, adding water as necessary to form a spreadable paste (about 1/3 -1/2 cup). Taste and adjust seasoning as desired.

Spread a generous layer of paste on one side of each eggplant strip. For longer strips (cut from the center of the eggplant), fold in half crosswise (enclosing the paste) and then in half again to form a squarish pocket. For shorter strips, fold the top and bottom ends in toward the middle, layering one end on top of the other. Arrange the pockets on a platter and sprinkle them with pomegranate seeds (if desired) to serve.

Posted in cooking, food writing, Georgian food, recipes, try this | Tagged , , | 1 Comment »

Coming Home to a Place You’ve Never Been, and Other Surprises of the Post-Soviet Kitchen

February 3, 2012 by eatwithpleasure

A friend of mine—a genuine gourmand—recently departed DC for a long-term work assignment in Bucharest, Romania. She bequeathed the contents of her freezer, pantry, and liquor cabinet to lucky me, who became the proud steward of a bison steak, a pound of ground venison, mango chutney, Minnesota wild rice, assorted spice rubs, 3 bottles of pure maple syrup, as well as bottles of champagne, cognac, Armagnac, almond liqueur, and a few other assorted spirits.

Searing the bison in a little lard the other night, I wondered what would surprise her most about life in her first eastern European city. That’s the question I remember Russians asking me most often when I first arrived in Moscow as an exchange student. I wasn’t sure how to answer it. While many little things were different, the undercurrents of life—the pressures and satisfactions of work and school, family, homekeeping, friendships, preventing the entropy of everyday existence from spinning outside the bounds of the acceptable—that was all essentially the same. I wanted to say something profound about the inner lives of Russians and Americans, but all I could come up with were things like. “You guys eat a lot more soup than we do, and your spoons are way bigger.” Back then I swatted these observations away as mundane and insignificant, instead smiling, shrugging, and muttering some cliché about how everyone looks so serious all the time. 

Within a matter of months, many of the quotidian surprises that had intrigued me at first now seemed ordinary, and I stopped noticing them. But when I arrived in Kiev in November of this year on my own work-related trip, they all struck me again with renewed force. Though I’d never visited Kiev before, the city bears so much in common with its counterparts across the border in Russia that I had the bizarre sense of coming back to a place I’d never been. Nowhere was this more evident than in the kitchens I visited over the course of the week.

Everything in a post-Soviet kitchen, from utensils to dishes to furniture and appliances, tends to be smaller than what Americans are used to, except for soup spoons, which are huge. Most people’s refrigerators are half the size of American ones, and they never fill up the way ours do. No one seems to own anything as large as an American dinner plate. Instead they might eat a first course of soup and then a second course small enough to fit on a lunch plate, or they serve themselves little by little from serving dishes placed directly on the table. This is especially common if a family has company over, because they will most likely be eating in the living room at the only table in the apartment large enough accommodate both plates and serving dishes (and often just barely, at that). Almost no one has a separate dining room.  

In the Soviet Union, mass production of consumer goods with little or no variation in design meant that cupboards across the enormous expanse of the USSR contained remarkably similar sets of dishes—the red mugs with white dime-sized polka dots, the squat ribbed glasses that might as easily contain a full cup of vodka as water. Twenty years after the collapse, plenty of these are still kicking around. Pots and pans, which people store inside their ovens, also look  alike: almost everyone seems to have the white aluminum pot with the universally chipped black lip, tiny handles and a flower design on one side. 

The people I’ve met never use paper towels in their kitchens and don’t own Ziploc bags or tupperware. They store their leftovers in the pots they were cooked in or the dishes they were served in, overturning a plate on top. They are as likely to keep leftovers out on the stove overnight(s) as they are to put them in the refrigerator. As surely as there is a toilet in the bathroom or WC, there is an electric kettle in the kitchen for boiling water for tea.

Taken one by one, none of these details jumped out as particularly illustrative of any inherent differences beween the US and the former USSR. Many of them are common to other parts of the world as well. But taken together, they represnt a uniquely post-Soviet experience that has become comforting to me in spite of (or perhaps because of?) its foreignness. 

I’ve never been to Bucharest, so while I know that Soviet influence impacted Romanian political structures, I’m curious to learn how much it infiltrated their kitchens.

Posted in kitchens, Russia, travel, Ukraine | Tagged , , | 1 Comment »

Wine Tasting 101

January 9, 2012 by eatwithpleasure

Photo: under CC license from Flickr user slack12

I’ve wanted to learn more about wine and how to choose a good one for a few years now, but have been reluctant to actually do it. What if I stop liking $10 bottles of malbec? I can’t afford to refine my palate, I thought.

Nevertheless, when I saw that Northside Social (a coffee shop/café/wine bar in Clarendon that I love) was offering a $25 wine-tasting class, I couldn’t resist signing up. (Full disclosure: the class was a few months ago and I forgot to post this until now!) The class was designed not to help people learn to choose a good wine from a wide selection of bottles (which requires knowing what you like and perhaps some memorization of which regions, vintages, and climates produce wines that suit your tastes), but rather to teach us what you can tell about a wine just by looking at it, smelling it, and tasting it.

The small group of participants sat down at the bar, three unmarked glasses of white and a page-long table with space for filling in different aspects of each wine’s appearance, aroma, and flavor in front of each of us. (Three reds came later.) Northside’s sommelier and general manager, Alison Crist, walked us through the process beginning sommeliers use to determine the vintage (age), varietal (type of grape), and region of an unknown wine.

For instance, if you swish a wine around in its glass, take note of the liquid residue it leaves behind on the sides. Wines that are high in either sugar or alcohol leave behind a slick that sticks to the glass for some time. This is called the “legs” of a drink. Tip a glass of wine to the side: slight color changes from the center toward the rim, e.g. fading from red to pink, indicate an older wine. Red grapes with thinner skins (tempranillo, nebbiolo, pinot noir) tend to produce wines with less intensity of color than do thick-skinned grapes (like syrah).

We tend to see wines described in terms of pleasant flavors like fruits, honey and spices, but when you sniff a wine, let yourself be open to whatever scents come through. Upon first sniff of one red, I got a big whiff of plastic. I thought something must be wrong with either my nose or the wine, but Alison backed me up. The more sunshine grapes are exposed to as they develop, she said, the more of something called volatile acid they contain. This can give the wine they produce the faint aroma of nail polish remover or, indeed, plastic. This is one of the hallmarks of some wines from hot and sunny places like Italy and southern Spain.

Like most cheeses, wine is produced through fermentation, so it makes sense that some of it might smell a bit funky. One of the reds we tasted smelled to me like goat cheese, another like parmesan. Wines aged in old oak barrels often take on smoky scents of tobacco and leather while those aged in newer oak barrels might contain hints of vanilla and baking spices like cinnamon, cloves, and allspice.

When you finally taste a wine, you can tell still more about its alcohol content and the climate the grapes were grown in. Take a sip and swish it around in your mouth a little, then swallow. Open your lips slightly and see how much saliva forms on the sides of your mouth. If there’s a lot, the wine is highly acidic, which indicates the grapes were likely grown in a cooler climate. If your mouth remains fairly dry, you can bet the grapes were grown somewhere warm.

Do you feel a slight warmth or burning near your lungs after swallowing? That’s the alcohol: you’ll notice the sensation most with highly alcoholic wines (14% or more). Grapes grown in warmer climates tend to get bigger and thus contain more sugar than those from cooler climes. During fermentation, this sugar turns to alcohol, so wines from sunnier regions tend to be boozier than their more temperate counterparts. Temperate climes lead to more temperate wines.

Now think about the flavors you pick up: sweeter red fruits or tarter black fruits (if you’re drinking red wine)? In whites, are the flavors more citrusy, tropical, appley, or mild like stone fruits (peaches, nectarines, apricots)? Don’t forget about rarer options like pomegranates, figs, prunes, and dates.

Don’t stop at fruits: there might be vegetable notes like green pepper, hints of wood or spices, and earthy or “barnyardy” flavors you may not tend to associate with something you enjoy drinking—minerals, grass, tobacco, rain against stone. One professional wine writer I’ve read described a Virginia wine he tasted as “potatoey, in a satisfying, earthy sort of way.”

As sommeliers develop their palates, they might be able to distinguish between two closely related wines grown in similar climates under similar conditions based solely on subtle differences in flavor. For the rest of us, however, this exercise serves as an opportunity to taste mindfully. When you slow down enough to compare the flavor of what’s in your mouth with the memory of something else, your perceptions heighten and tastebuds sharpen. Drinking wine can thus become not simply relaxing, but even meditative.

In the end I gained a more nuanced appreciation of the layers of flavor, texture, and aroma that make up a well-crafted wine. I don’t think it will limit my enjoyment of budget-friendly table wines so much as expand my appreciation for more complex ones.

Posted in cooking | Tagged , , | Leave a Comment »

How to Render Lard and What to Do With It

December 23, 2011 by eatwithpleasure

 

Photo: Flickr user cafemama

After returning from Ukraine, you’d think I would have had enough lard to last the rest of the year, and indeed, there were a few days not long after I got back when all I craved all day was miso soup and grapefruit. But I had two packages of leaf lard (the creamy pink fat from around a pig’s kidneys) in the freezer that I had picked up at the farmer’s market before I left, and my friend Wendy had long been offering to teach me how to remove the impurities by rendering it. It’s the holidays and I’ve got pies to bake, so what’s a girl to do?

Given the general hipness of pork products right now (announcements about snout-to-tail dinners, pig roasts, hog butchering classes, and pork belly specials pour into my inbox with a frequency no other meat enjoys), I’m surprised by how many people still shrink back in disgust at the mention of lard. It seems to have been so vilified in the 1980s and ‘90s diet crusades against animal fats that people, many of whom have never tried it before, believe that lard not is not only unhealthy but also tastes bad. Certainly everyone is entitled to their opinion, but if your mind is not already made up, let me assure you—there is much to love about lard.

I grew up looking forward to the few times a year (at Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter) that anything containing lard showed up on the table. My mom’s family short crust recipe, which my Norwegian great-grandmother Sophie used for many of her desserts, calls for it. Lard makes for a dazzlingly flaky crust and a lush, almost umami flavor that makes sweet pies and pastries pop. (The same principle makes salted caramel cupcakes and bacon-wrapped dates so alluring.) In Ukrainian cuisine, it complements the malty heft of a genuine dark rye bread with a savory creaminess, kicked up a notch with the addition of mashed garlic and coriander seeds studding the crust.

Leaf lard is softer and has a purer, creamier flavor than fatback (the fat from underneath the pig’s skin), so it’s the best choice if you’re planning to make pastry.

Whatever your meal plans, if you purchase lard from a butcher or farmer’s market, you’ll likely need to transform it from a hunk of fat into a measurable, uniform substance before using it in your recipe. This process is called rendering, and it’s an easy way to make yourself feel like a real pioneer in the kitchen. There’s something weirdly satisfying and old-timey about turning something so obviously cut from the body of an animal into a more familiar and readily usable ingredient. It makes me feel frugal and indulgent at the same time, salvaging a cheap “byproduct” that would otherwise go to waste to create such rich, rare (to us now) flavors.

Rendering lard, it turns out, is simple. (A huge thank you to Wendy for guiding me through this process!) Chop up your hunk of fat into one- to two-inch pieces or use a food processor to whir it into something resembling pink cottage cheese. (This step isn’t essential—it just helps the fat melt faster.) Then dump it into a heavy-bottomed pan and heat it over medium heat, stirring occasionally until it all melts.

Let it simmer for 10-15 minutes, until the small solid pieces resembling bacon that refuse to melt have crisped up on the outside but not burned. Strain them out with a slotted spoon and let them drain a plate lined with paper toweling. You can use these “cracklings” just as you would bacon bits: strew them over dumplings, potatoes, or vegetable dishes—if you don’t gobble them all down there and then, while they are still nearly bubbling,

Add a little water (roughly 2 tablespoons for every pound of lard you started with) to the rest of the lard and let it cool to room temperature, then pour it into a container and transfer it to the refrigerator. As it chills, the heavier water will sink to the bottom and take any impurities left in the fat with it.

When the lard has solidified, just drain out the water and scrape off the undermost layer. Your lard should keep in the fridge for three to four months, or in the freezer almost indefinitely—just be sure to keep it airtight and out of the door to avoid dreaded freezerburn.

Wendy and I pan-fried coconut shrimp and sautéed mixed greens with thinly sliced onions in a little of our lard, washing them down with a bottle of Prosecco. The hint of porky depth the lard lent to our light meal turned it from a summery snack into a hearty December supper. We were both too full for dessert, but there’s plenty more lard for that: next up, apple fritters!

Posted in cooking, try this, Ukraine | Tagged , | Leave a Comment »

From Paris to Kyiv, Fromage to Fatback

December 11, 2011 by eatwithpleasure

 

Onion domes at the Pecherska Lavra monastery in Kyiv

After my one-day foray in Paris, I traveled on to Kyiv, Ukraine for a week of work and a weekend of gallivanting from restaurant to market to café with a close friend who came from Russia to visit.

I was struck by how much Kyiv reminded me of Russia: the same scent of frost and cigarettes in the air, the same blue aprons on the dour women who clean the churches, the same overpapered community bulletin boards like palimpsests of public life. Ukrainian may be the language of advertisements and radio programs (as decreed by law, it seems to me), but 80% of the talk I heard on the street was Russian. This would change if I traveled west, I was told, toward Lviv and what has become the center of “Ukrainity” (as one colleague aptly put it).

So as I ate my way around Kyiv, I was on the lookout for elements that stuck out as uniquely Ukrainian. There were a few, though I got the sense that I’d have to go into people’s homes and villages or be around for a holiday celebration for the differences to really emerge. For one, Ukrainians tend to eat more pork than Russians. In both countries, people make use of every part of the pig, from its hooves (for creating gelatin for aspics and stews) to its ears (chopped up and baked with mushrooms, cheese, and sour cream) to its fat (for frying and flavoring other dishes). But if I had to name one thing that stood out as definitive of Ukrainian food culture, it would be fatback.

 

Vareniki with cracklings (fried salo)

Fatback is, self-evidently, the layer of fat under the skin on the pig’s back. It is known as salo here (pronounced SAH-lah), and is cured and salted or mixed with other spices to preserve it, much like Italian lardo. A Russian professor I had once described it as “bacon without the meat.” I’d eaten it in Russia, but never seen it in so many varied forms. It might be chopped into chunks and left with a thin layer of black pepper on one side to be eaten as a garnish with other foods, fried and sprinkled over  vareniki (stuffed dumplings), or stirred into borscht for extra richness.

Bread basket with three varieties of salo

We attempted to decline when the waitress (dressed, as the waitstaff at seemingly every Ukrainian restaurant in Kyiv is, in traditional costume) tried to upsell the lard plate. (You can do things like that in Ukraine.) But she snared us by hinting that we’d never had salo like this before. I can’t pass up the opportunity to try something new, so five minutes later we were presented with a full dinner-sized plate piled with thinly sliced rolls of chilled yet still creamy salo, half of which had been rolled around a paste of garlic and spices and then sliced to leave marbling throughout.

 

Slices of salo and horseradish mustard

We spread it on dense slices of dark rye bread, pleasantly tart and studded with coriander seeds. In Russia and Ukraine this Is known as “black bread,” which to Western ears unfortunately makes it sound like something they serve to inmates or prisoners of war. Far from it: there’s little I crave more when I return home from a former Soviet country. American rye is too soft and fluffy, the WonderBread cousin of the real thing. Ukrainian bread baskets come with white bread, too, but their more delicate flavor can’t stand up to the richness of the garlicky pork fat. I save them for soaking up soup (though I prefer the heftier rye for that, too).   

So how do Ukrainians stay so slim if they’re eating all this lard? My friend told me that in this part of the world many people even consider it a diet food. I can’t explain it, but it does lend credence to my belief that we are probably better off eating a tub of lard (literally) over a period of weeks than regularly consuming a tub of low-fat ice cream in two sittings (which, by the way, does not exist in Ukraine). 

Posted in nutrition, travel, Ukraine | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments »

22 Hours in Paris + Ruminations on Authentic Travel

November 26, 2011 by eatwithpleasure

On my way to Kiev a couple of weeks ago, I took advantage of a 22-hour stopover in Paris to recharge my inspirational inventory. I did not catch sight of the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, Notre Dame, or the Champs-Elysées, but instead spent a full day wandering the tangled streets of the Latin Quarter, historically the heart of the city’s intellectual and artistic communities. Les Deux Magots, the café where Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, and Ernest Hemingway mingled their communal brainpower, still attracts both locals and tourists in droves to its street corner. The neighborhood thrums with the buzz of conversation and life lived in the public forum.

 

Ladurée, the bakery that invented the macaron, is also here (though this location opened only in 2002: I didn’t make it to the original venue, which has been open for 150 years). The pyramids of delicate cookies displayed in its front windows lure in passers-by, where counter girls in French maid outfits brave the crush of customers who glom in the tiny front room to select their flavors, everything from classic vanilla and chocolate to raspberry cream and cinnamon raisin. Already stuffed with lunch when I walked in, I savored just one, a tiny meringue sandwich filled with exquisitely smooth salted caramel. This is the culinary equivalent of a porcelain doll, so sweet and delicate that you must not tread heavily on the floor while a batch is baking lest the cookies’ shatter-prone crusts quake and split.

 

I might have bought more, but I still had Poilâne to visit, maker of what may be the world’s most celebrated loaf of bread. I arrived late in the afternoon, when the shop was nearly empty. A small selection of baguettes, buns, and larger loaves rested on wooden shelves, along with a few quiches, turnovers, and boxes of the shop’s signature butter cookies. The Loaf (I got a small bun version) comes dusted in a thick layer of flour, white as a powdered sugar doughnut. It is made from sourdough, and its dense, chewy texture and tangy flavor beg for a smear of salted butter, the European kind made from slightly fermented cream. As the street urchin I was that day, I devoured it straight from the bag, its wheaty aroma mixing with smoke from the cigarette of the man walking in front of me.

Over the course of the day, I visited 5 bakeries, 4 bookstores, 3 galleries, 2 cafes, and a street market before settling down to dinner outside at a local bistro. Despite the evening chill, crowds pack tables along the sidewalks to share “un apéro” (the preprandial aperitif is apparently enough of an institution in France that it merits its own abbreviation) or a meal.

Most every establishment posts its menu outside so potential customers can decide if the price and selection is right, a tradition I wish more US restaurateurs would adopt. Most menus include a selection of the day’s cheeses, as well as a wine list, which is generally short—just 5 or 6 options. They generally don’t bother listing vintages, vineyards, or country of origin: it is understood that they are all French.

I watched the crowds stroll by while I ate: a galette (hearty buckwheat crepe) stuffed with ham, cheese, and egg, a green salad, and a bottle of very expensive water. (Having not slept in over 24 hours, I was afraid that wine would put me over the edge. I would have been fine with tap water, but never figured out how to order it.) I wondered how they got all these 20- and 30-something men to don fashionable glasses and pants that fit. For dessert: apricot flan from the patisserie next door, plus a pain au chocolat for the next morning’s breakfast, which I would eat in a lounge at Charles de Gaulle International Airport at 4 a.m.

Not quite sure what to do with myself now that the shops had closed and I was too full to eat anymore, I was standing on a street corner looking confused (apparently), when someone came up behind me to ask if I needed help finding something. Bertrand was of the fashionable-glasses set, and while I am not generally in the habit of going for drinks with men I meet on street corners, travel tends to inspire a certain abandon that, when tempered with a little common sense, opens us to experiences we wouldn’t otherwise have.

There were no seats left in the nearest bar, so we stood at the counter, doing our best to stay out of the way of waiters shuttling wine at breakneck speed. The sound of glasses crashing to the floor punctuated our conversation with striking frequency. Bertrand and his friend Mathieu gracefully endured my abominable French for a full half-hour before revealing their sparkling English. They poked fun at the cliché of a day I’d had: “Did you choose your lunch (un sandwich au jambon et un café crème) because you think that’s what the French eat?”

Giant chocolate gorilla!

I responded that I had ordered it because I wanted a ham sandwich and coffee, which was true, but the question got me thinking. To some degree, they were right: I had come to Paris in search of a fantasy, and I had crafted the experience carefully in order to meet my expectations about what the city is or should be. I did not scratch beneath the surface, but reveled in a dreamlike world where everyone wakes up at noon, eats croissants and cheese and drinks wine all day until— oh la la!—its time to go home in order to wake up and do it all over again the next day.

When we travel, it is often just this sort of experience we seek: “authentic” in a fairytale sort of way. Naturally we don’t go looking for the mundane. But even (and perhaps especially) when we avoid the tourist traps of museums and monuments in favor of “cultural tourism,” we risk reducing a place to a caricature of itself if we seek to confirm that the picture we carry in our imagination conforms to reality.

Thus let me close by noting that I could just as easily have ordered a hamburger and fries instead of a crepe at dinner (as the couple next to me did), that the local Starbucks was just as packed as the other cafes I visited, and that RedBull appears to enjoy equal popularity among Parisian teenagers as it does among American ones. I admit I brought my own fairytale to life for 22 hours. Call it cliché, but hélas! it was delicious.

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Kicking Off Soup Season 2011

October 10, 2011 by eatwithpleasure

Harbingers of soup season

After returning from Turkey and wanting to eat nothing but eggplant, peppers, tomatoes, lamb, and garlic-yogurt sauce for several weeks, I have moved into soup mode. This phase hits me every year around this time, as the leaves turn yellow and ochre and I come home with a cold nose after my walk back from work.

Growing up, soup wasn’t something we often made from scratch. Too much fuss, Mom said. Not substantial enough, said Dad. Sure, there was beef stew in the winter and, later, an Asian-style mushroom soup with udon noodles based on a recipe Mom tore out of the weekly newspaper insert. But generally “soup” meant something that came from a can, often contained tiny slippery vegetables of unknown provenance, and  barely made enough for two people.   Only while living in Russia during college did I begin to think of soup as something you could whip up for dinner one night and continue to enjoy for several days hence.

Russian folk wisdom dictates that regular consumption of soup is essential for health (or “useful for your organism,” as they might put it). Many Russians I met say that soup aids digestion, soothes sore throats, colds, and flues of various sorts, and stokes some kind of inner furnace. While I’m not sure any of this is supported by nutritional science, common sense justifies it. Hot liquids warm us up when it gets cold and fill our bellies before the main course to prevent overeating. When we drink the broth that vegetables have been boiled in, we benefit from all the vitamins that leach into it during cooking, which would otherwise be tossed down the drain.

Root vegetables for sale in Georgia

My host families in both Russia and Georgia kept a variety of soups in the meal rotation, from classic borsch (no “t” on the end in Russian) and ukha (a clear fish soup) to the spicy beef and walnut stew kharcho and the tart solyanka soup, which includes pickles. They varied the contents of each based on the ingredients they had in the fridge (or, more likely, in a bucket on the windowsill or outside on the balcony) and what was available at the market. I came home determined to master this art in my own kitchen

I started soup season this year with the simplest bean soup I know. You could use canned beans for it, but it is cheaper, healthier, and tastier to use dried ones instead. Dried beans come in a wider variety of colors, shapes, and sizes than do canned, and you can buy a mixed bag especially for soup. They are chemical-free (no toxic BPA in the can lining to worry about) and don’t contain added sodium. And they don’t require a can opener: just rinse off the dried beans in a colander, empty them into a bowl, and leave them sitting covered in plenty of water for several hours or overnight to soften them. If you forgot that step and need your beans ready faster, you can use the “quick-soak” method: just boil them in enough water to cover them by three inches for two minutes, turn off the heat, and let them sit in the hot water for one hour.

Basic Bean Soup

Once you’ve soaked the beans (a one-pound bag is standard), bring them to a boil on the stove in enough fresh water to cover them by one inch. Add chopped onions, carrots, and celery (one or two of each) that you have lightly sautéed in olive oil until they are just softened, toss in a bay leaf or two and some freshly ground black pepper, then simmer over medium-low heat until the beans are the texture you like them. I prefer mine al dente, with a little bite left in them, but some people go softer, and that’s ok, too. Sprinkle in some coarse salt to taste, strew some chopped cilantro or parsley on top if you like, and voila—dinner, plus lunch for several days if you’re not feeding a crowd.

The soup freezes well and can be modified to your heart’s content. I like to toss in some kale near the end of cooking to help meet my daily quota of green foods, and I add a pinch of cayenne for extra warmth. Bacon would make a classic complement to the beans, and root vegetables like turnips, rutabaga and parsnips would fit right in, too. (Chop them up and toss them in with the soaked beans right from the start.) Add cumin and ground sumac for a Middle Eastern flavor, or thyme and marjoram for a subtler herbal twist. I love this soup with a slice of crusty baguette and a glass of red wine.

Posted in cooking, recipes, try this | Tagged , , | 2 Comments »

Olives, Honey, and Cream: Turkish Breakfast on the Beach

August 18, 2011 by eatwithpleasure

There’s nothing like work-related international travel to stretch your vacation budget farther than you thought possible. A conference brought me to Istanbul this July, after which I tacked on a week of much-appreciated R&R while visiting my friend Anna in the Turkish resort town where she is teaching English.

Bodrum stretches out along the coast of the Aegean Sea at Turkey’s southwestern tip. Low-slung, flat-roofed buildings, uniformly white, line its narrow alleys and dot the surrounding hills. Life revolves around the sea here, which brings tourists from all over Turkey and beyond during the hot summer months. Despite the throngs of beach-goers, the water is a transparent turquoise blue, the clearest I’ve ever seen.

I wake up in a puddle of sunshine each morning, skin moist from the already stifling heat inside. It’s better outdoors, because the breeze off the sea wafts down narrow lanes lined with white stone walls, wrought iron gates, cypresses, vines, and stubby palms. The best way to cool off is to jump in the sea, which is never far away. Cafes, bars, and restaurants line the beach, their tables so close to the water that you can almost dip your toes in without standing up.

Anna and I took a shared taxi van (the preferred mode of public transportation throughout most of Turkey) to the nearby town of Yalikavac one morning to meet her friend Bagdagul for breakfast on the beach. To me, “breakfast on the beach” sounded like a picnic, but Turkey has elevated this concept to luxurious heights. The beach is served by an on-site restaurant. Bagdagul conducted some kind of negotiation with our waiter in Turkish, instructing Anna and I to go sun ourselves on enormous pillows set out just for that purpose while our breakfast was being prepared.

Ten minutes later, the same waiter called us over to a table in the shade overlooking the water. Bagdagul had ordered each of us a full Turkish breakfast. Anna and I grew giddy as dishes began appearing before us: first comes fresh cucumber slices and cherry tomatoes, green and black olives in herb-flecked oil, crumbly cottage cheese; pressed goat’s milk cheese, and a mild yellow cow’s milk cheese. Then a basket of fresh-baked white bread and a platter of spreads for it:  sour cherry and strawberry jams, candied orange and lemon peel, a mixture of sesame seed paste and thickened grape juice called pekmez tahin, like a Turkish PB&J.

Best of all is a small bowl of honey surrounding a puff of kaymak–a sweet, airy, mildly fermented cream that I’m now desperate to find at home. I first tasted the combination in Georgia, where it’s called kaymaghi. My host family’s relatives would bring it to the city from their village in the hills where the cows are. If ever I have come close to tasting nectar and ambrosia, the food of the gods, this must surely be it.

The table is so full now that there’s no room for more plates unless we stack them–so stack we do. There are eggs cooked any way we like, long cigars of fried dough stuffed with slightly salty cheese that we dip in jam and chase with strong black tea. And of course coffee, ground fine and boiled together with water and sugar to make a strong, silky brew. You’re meant to drink it directly off the grounds, leaving them in the bottom of your tiny cup when you’re finished.

By the time we got to swimming, I’d had about all the pleasure I can handle for a day, and it was only noon. I dived in and floated over the fishes, then fell asleep under a tree on the dock, the waves rolling in and our underneath me, and when I woke up, there was ice cream.
Brunch will never be the same.

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The New Food Pyramid: Where’s the Spark?

June 4, 2011 by eatwithpleasure

Perhaps the lush infographics I’ve been enjoying lately thanks to GOOD.is have me spoiled, but I was distinctly underwhelmed by “My Plate,” the USDA’s latest attempt at a visual representation of a balanced diet. The graphic, released Thursday, replaces the oft-maligned food pyramid,  which was introduced in 1992 as a way to get Americans to eat healthier food but instead became a symbol for much of what is wrong with the American diet: too much grain and carbohydrate, not enough fresh produce.

I understand that the designers were trying to simplify the image as much as possible. It’s meant to be a quick and memorable reference for the population at large, not a definitive guide for food dorks like me. And simplify it they did, to the extent that it more closely resembles a Mark Rothko block painting than a nutritional guide. I love the choice of a plate as an image (not to be confused with a pie, of course), which people already associate with food, serves as an easy reference point for proportional portion size, and doesn’t place food groups in a hierarchy like the original pyramid did. I’m thrilled to see vegetables and fruits taking up half the plate.

However, with simplicity as a guiding principle comes omission of some (crucial, I would say) nuance. Instead of a recognizable fifth food group, we get the nebulous “protein.” How are we supposed to interpret this category, given that many vegetables, grains, and dairy products are great sources of protein? Where do beans and nuts fit in? Furthermore, one-fourth of a typical American dinner plate is actually much larger than the recommended portion size for a cut of meat (which should be about the size of a deck of cards).

I’ve written before about the textual guidance meant to accompany the image. which are drawn from new nutritional guidelines drawn up last year. I wish some of that information could be incorporated graphically, but doing so would sacrifice some of the image’s straightforward appeal.

Despite its elegance as a symbol, the plate graphic leaves me cold. It may be easily memorizable, but it isn’t memorable in the way that might inspire healthier, more balanced cooking and eating. It calls to mind math class rather than the dinner table. Until we as a nation stop thinking of healthy eating as a chore and begin to understand it as a source of pleasure, we’re not likely to trim our collective waistline anytime soon.

Have an idea for a more inspiring yet still simple graphic? Do share in the comments!

A version of this post first appeared on FreshtheMovie.com. 


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