The Master and the Marmalade

 As seen in a slightly different form on FoodRiot.com, part of the Riot New Media Group

"...and you will agree that a spotted dog or a drowned baby is hollow mockery, a whited sepulchre, without it is made with suet. There is an art in puddings, to be sure; but what is art without suet?"
 - Jack Aubrey upon being presented with a decent spotted dog, The Ionian Mission, by Patrick O'Brian

Yesterday I finished The Surgeon’s Mate, book seven of twenty in the incredible seafaring adventures written by Patrick O’Brian and starring Captain Jack Aubrey and Dr. Stephen Maturin. True to form, the book was delicious, and I couldn’t be more delighted to have thirteen books ahead of me. 


As the stories are set during the Napoleonic Wars, my vocabulary and diction are a little odd right now, as I find myself saying things like, “Handsomely, handsomely now..let’s scud along under close-reefed topsails.” But that’s okay. My dog is my primary audience, and while he isn’t great with American English, he knows well enough that a “close-reefed topsail” means a falling barometer and rising winds. Best make do with the oilcloth or peacoat when walking to the park, and leave the umbrella at home. Not only do the books give the reader a hyper-detailed look at a bygone era, they are accidental food writing at its best. There are descriptions of messes shared with other captains in ports-of-call all over the world, a life-saving grove of cold-weather cabbages found when Aubrey’s ship creeps into Desolation Island (book five; so good!) and the food enjoyed with family and friends when the captain puts in to England for a moment and visits his wife, Sophie, and his “turnip-faced” children at Ashgrove Cottage. 

Menus throughout the books range from prison victuals to sumptuous feasts. Many of you probably remember the 2003 movie, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, in which Russell Crowe played a charming, battle-hungry Captain Aubrey, and Paul Bettany brought a nice spark to Dr. Maturin (though he was too handsome for the part – in the books, Maturin’s looks are most often described as “froglike”). The movie made me feel as though the entire cast was having fun and I’ve watched it at least six times. While the primary action of the film, and half of its title, was pulled from book ten, the screenwriters plucked moments from a few of the other books and threw them in, making a bit of a muddle, or a stew (maybe a burgoo?), which won’t make it easier to write another movie, which they are doing, right? (RIGHT?) 

The movie has a great scene in which the officers and Dr. Maturin are at their mess. After quaffing copious amounts of wine, the officers had moved on to their nightly glasses of port. A somewhat florid Captain Aubrey brings Maturin’s attention to two weevils traversing the table and asks him which is the better one. Dr. Maturin sighs, the naturalist among barbarians, and says something like, “All things being equal in terms of diet, environment, and the natural proclivities of the species, that one there,” he nudges a weevil with the end of a knife, “is clearly the greater weevil.” And in a crashing good humor, Jack Aubrey cries with delight, “Oh ho, I have you there! For in the Royal Navy we must always choose the lesser of two weevils!”

Ha ha! I love puns, to my universal discredit, so this moment filled me delight. One really must always choose thusly. I don’t like weevils, though, and was dismayed by how many of the tiny squirming insects wriggle across the pages of the series. But their presence is simply another example of O’Brian’s detailed descriptions of shipboard food, shipboard life, really. During my own sailing adventure, we had to take precautions against stowaway weevils by transferring any grains – cereal, flour, corn meal – into plastic containers and getting the cardboard off the boat straightaway before the eggs hatched. 

(Weevils are not the only animals aboard O’Brian’s ships. Dr. Maturin’s scientific curiosity drives him to bring all kinds of species aboard, whether to draw, dissect, or simply observe. There are chapters devoted to the determined alcoholism of a captured sloth, another in which a pregnant prison-mouse enjoys crumbs proffered on the end of a spoon, and dozens of other incidents featuring animals living, dead, preserved in barrels of salt and vinegar, and even one or two extinct species make quiet appearances, including a counterpane made from a dodo.) 

During my sailing adventure I learned quite a bit about cooking on a gimbaled stove. One part terrifying, two parts timing. If you open the oven when the ship pitches to port, you must pull a hot pan uphill. If you open the oven as the ship lists to starboard, everything in the oven wants to slide out onto the floor BUT that’s the perfect moment to grab the pan and get it to the top of the stove as the ship rolls back to portside. Sometimes sailing seems like nothing more than a series of unexpected intersections with gravity, and that my aunt was willing and able to make popcorn – already the scariest food in the world – during a blue-water passage between Vanuatu and New Caledonia was a source of absolute amazement. 

There isn’t a whole lot to do when you’re a newbie at sea, so I read a lot, including the first book in the series. Being on a boat made Master and Commander more interesting and also educational despite the differences in number and type of sails, size of boat, size of crew, and number of guns. We had three sails, four if we were to fly the spinnaker, on a 41-foot sailboat housing five people. No cannons or guns that I knew of. Captain Aubrey’s usual command had 21 sails, each raised or lowered in a beautiful choreography based on water and wind, anywhere between 100 and 150 men and boys, and many, many guns. Given my limited experience on boats, even I could tell that Lucky Jack was a very skilled sailor and a terrifying opponent in battle. A man of many appetites. 

For restaurant professionals the books are treasure troves of comparisons. The Naval hierarchy, so similar to a kitchen’s chain of command, is one thing, along with the necessity for order and discipline, everyone’s reliance on routine, and the shared tendency of both Naval and restaurant folk to hit the grog a little too hard every now and then. Delightfully familiar moments occur when two captains describe an up-and-comer in terms almost identical to those used by restaurant managers when it’s time to promote from within. 

And, perhaps because I live in Seattle, I’m continuously struck by how much the two principals really enjoy a nice cup of coffee, no matter the breeze or bullets. A calm prelude to battles won with smoke, noise, shattered wood, flying splinters, and cannonballs crashing through the netting, while the sea rises beneath you, the wind howls through the rigging, and blood flows from the scuppers; a strong cup of coffee beforehand sets one up amazingly. Perhaps half a dozen eggs, a rasher of bacon, and a loaf of buttered toast with marmalade, as well. No sense going into battle on an empty tum. 

In The Surgeon’s Mate, food plays a slightly larger role than in the other stories. Instead of simply providing background details about the lives of Royal Navy men during the early 1800s, and thereby adding levels of verisimilitude that make the books every bit as enjoyable as any Jane Austen, more so if you like your action outside of a drawing room, or if you like action, any, at all, the food in The Surgeon’s Mate provides the essential ingredients for the story’s denouement. I won’t spill the cat from the bag, but shipwreck, potential torture, a bucket of freshwater crawfish, perhaps one too many cream-based sauces on the road from Brittany to Paris, and the good Doctor’s well-timed splash of laudanum, spare our heroes for the next adventure. I’m sure there will be both coffee and marmalade, and maybe, as they’re headed for Turkey, there will be a pivotal moment involving baklava. But now I’m just being greedy. 

Guilty Pleasures

“All work and no play make Jack a dull boy.”
 – Jack Torrance, scary dad from The Shining.

When I pick up a Mrs. Pollifax or Harry Bosch story, I know I won’t put it down until I’ve gobbled it up. Banksy’s hair drifts into the corners, mapping the currents of air along the floor boards of my little apartment.  Lewis flares his gill flaps and tries to get my attention. The dishes in the sink receive a quiet, watery plunk from the not-quite-truly-leaky faucet with the calm equanimity of ceramics everywhere, since the dawn of kilns. And I read and read, immune, swaddled in story. Until….Until the sharp prick of guilt goads me from the sofa and I sigh, bookmark my adventure, and get back to work. 

Ah, guilty pleasures, such delicious treats. 

My number one guilty-pleasure song is that one by the Goo Goo Dolls. You know the one. And “Boys of Summer” by Don Henley, which I’m listening to RIGHT NOW. I have a mile-wide soft spot for musicals, especially “Chess.” As I spent a few formative years in a book and record store with a bunch of jerks who believed there is an absolute right or wrong, good or bad, in taste, I listen and warble along alone, not wishing to invite criticism. To a certain extent, the jerks have a point: Some of it is trash. But as my Sommelier friend Guy says about choosing a bottle of wine, “It doesn’t have to be hard. Pick what you like.” (He is the Unsnob in a snobby field, a tall glass of water in a room filled with sand.) But what holds true for wine – if you pick what you like, and figure out what it is about that particular wine that grabs you, you’ll expand your palate and next thing you know, you’ll be telling people they’re unrefined bumpkins, absolute Cretins, for liking Merlot – is also true for music, maybe. I'm not sure my fondness for the Goo Goo Dolls has unlocked any secret rooms of musical understanding. I am still annoyed with those arbiters of taste. For me, music evokes time and place. “Boys of Summer” (and every musical, ever) reminds me of working at Boulder’s Dinner Theater in the late ‘80s, my youth, my fledgling years in kitchens, my early association with poker and Luck. Maybe the real guilty pleasure here is over-indulgence in nostalgia.

Indulgence seems to be the key definition to a guilty pleasure. Picking up a Stephen King, a Michael Connelly, or a Dorothy Gilman book will not, past a certain point, push my boundaries of human understanding. But reading is a very private indulgence. I can simply open a door, step through and vanish. Maybe the guilt comes from knowing I am not hammering out 500 words, or sweeping, or doing the dishes, but the pleasure far outweighs the pain of ignoring chores.

   

With food, the pleasure (and the guilt) is usually in direct correlation to the number and type of calories.  An extra dollop of mayonnaise in my rabbit salad. A spoonful of whipped cream, just because I happen to be visiting Cold Side. Another helping of spaghetti,and another, until I am logey and bloated, nursing a semolina hangover. I love sandwiches. I eat them in corners of the kitchen, or hidden upstairs behind the hot water heater; my wolfish manners are embarrassing. Also, the pastry cooks need to hide the spiced pecans. And the candied pistachios. Cheese is a problem.

But right now I am in the grip of a new indulgence:

I am hooked on a medical drama. I’ll admit this is not the first time – “ER” held top spot on my Must See TV list, back in the day – but living as we do in the days of Netflix, I can stream whole seasons at a time, I can indulge in the joys of a show that takes place in Seattle, makes me cry occasionally, and features actors with really nice hair. To hell with homework. To hell with chores. I’m spending my evenings with Meredith Grey and her dysfunctional friends.

Not only does a “Grey's Anatomy” bender bring a little perspective to a Chef’s freakishly stress-filled world (“The customer got wheat toast!” “CODE BLUE! CODE BLUE!” “He’s going into de-fib…where’s that white toast?!” “Push two of epi and charge paddles to three-hundred…CLEAR!!” “We just 86’d white bread!” “We what?! Send Paulo to the store! Stat! We’re losing him….” “Chef, his wife is Yelping on her phone…can you come talk to her?” “Not now! Where’s that toast? Charge to four….CLEAR….!” “Chef, we lost him. He’s throwing his napkin onto his plate.” “No! Try again! Fire white toast!” “Chef….he stiffed the server…” “*Sigh* Time of promo: 14:23.”), but I also get a small dose of science with every episode.

While it’s not quite as good as working in a medical bookstore, or even renewing a subscription to “Discover” magazine, “Grey’s Anatomy” makes me feel as though I’ve kept a hand in. As it takes place in a teaching hospital, the doctors are doing a lot more than sewing up lacerations. I’ve seen a couple of very interesting clinical trials, learned way more than I’ll ever need to know about post-procedural fistulas, and hey, remember stem cells? These cats are actually growing organs in dishes! Neat! Wait'll you see what they do with a three-dimensional printer!

Possibly as a way of tempering the guilt, as I watch I draw corollaries between cheffing and doctoring. The white coats, the fondness for sharp blades, the long hours, the drinking, the clogs, the shenanigans. Huge differences, of course, hats off to doctors, that’s a long, hard haul, a road I didn’t take. But I’m glad I don’t have to hire a medical billing specialist, even when a ten-top requests all separate checks. I’m glad people come through our door when they are hungry and reasonably happy, instead of scared and possibly dying. Watching television doctors lose patients on the table underscores my sense of career satisfaction.  Is a nine-year-old with cancer going to bleed out on my prep table today? No. 

But it would be a mistake to think that kitchen stress is all for naught. The life of the restaurant is at stake, which provides the livelihood to dozens of people. To keep a restaurant healthy and thriving, a Chef must teach discipline, diligence, and instill in his or her crew a definite sense of urgency. We must teach and watch, remind and correct, all day, every day.

I’m almost caught up with “Grey’s Anatomy.” And then I don’t know what I’ll watch, or how I’ll set fire to all those hours when I could (…should?...) be doing something else. Maybe I’ll dive into “Game of Thrones.” And I’ll tell you what – after what happened to George and Izzy in Season Five, the Red Wedding will be no problem, no problem at all.

Rabbit Salad Sandwich

This method is a good way to use up any rabbit left-over from the last braise, just adjust the quantities of the gear to work with how much protein you have. This will also work with fried tofu, left-over turkey, and chicken.

Picked rabbit hindquarters

As much mayonnaise as you can handle

Chopped tarragon (or chervil)

Halved red grapes

Toasted walnuts

Maybe a little celery. Maybe.

Salt and Pepper

Some nice bread. I prefer a slightly sweeter loaf. Get what you like, though.

Combine the action. Put it on the bread. Find a corner. Devour your treat.

Tea & Cookies

“In an old house in Paris that was covered with vines,

 lived twelve little girls in two straight lines.

They left the house at half past nine...

The smallest one was Madeline.” – Ludwig Bemelman

I’ve decided it’s time to read Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. 

And while you might assume this decision coincides with a long convalescence, or incarceration, in fact, the decision to pull the two hard covers off the top of the bookshelf, blow off the dust, and begin what may be the longest slog in my reading career, was a result of wanting to find the oft-quoted madeline scene.

I also decided to actually make the cookies today, which required a trip to the Market for a pan, a trip that ate into my reading time. I may have been able to stave off the napiness of my “Sunday afternoon” (that’s Wednesday to you) long enough to find the paragraph, which occurs within the first 100 pages, but the walk to Pike Place, the time spent browsing through the giant bouquets, the decision to bring home a trout for dinner (Lewis stared at me the whole time I ate), the light chores, the chat with Mother, the fiftieth episode of “Grey’s Anatomy,” the re-reading of a Connelly: all conspired against settling in with Marcel.

But I think that’s okay. I spent some time looking at Wikipedia pages and the handful of blogs devoted to Proust and I’m running the risk of losing my original point. Which was simply that there are certain phrases, certain thematic elements running through a handful of books which were so crucial to the collective brain as to obviate the actual book.That is to say, there’s no sense in sitting down to a tasty read if the read in question has been read so often, taught so often, misquoted, plagiarized, and dissected to the point where you believe you have the full story, and so, contrariwise, I wanted to actually read the damn thing instead of flipping through the collective brain's wacky card catalog, I wanted to read a paragraph that may encapsulate the meaning behind food writing, the impetus to evoke. 

But what I learned today was that the “Madeline moment” as I’d come to think of it, was really much more of a neurological function of the hippocampus, and much less an evocation of past through taste and smell. You see, I had thought that when Marcel tasted the bit of soggy cake floating in lime-blossom tea (um, what?), he was reminded of something, which is what I think we all tend to use the madeline moment to mean, but a closer reading of the passage, and the helpful words of a Proustian scholar-blogger, indicate that rather than simply being reminded of a simpler time, as I am when I smell Countrytime Lemonade™ (once the coughing stops), Marcel was transported. As though he existed in both times at once. I also found out that translations of the story more recent than mine are called In Search of Lost Time. Very different than Remembrance of Things Past.  The active verb suggests a certain tension, as when at work, trying to make the flour mixture for the fried chicken bits, we were searching for lost thyme, not idly remembering where it was wrongly put away in dry storage.

In any case, the sensation is called Involuntary Memory. And like most brain stuff, it’s cool, and complicated. Not just evocation. More like time travel.

But I need to focus if I’m to bake these cookies.  

There is that other thing though – the evocation, the welling-up, the oral tradition of food stories. Food writing is jam-packed with vignettes recalling the “first time I tasted something tasting like something”, or “how my life changed because I ate something slippery.” Bourdain, Aschatz, Fisher, Hamilton, the 40,000 plus food bloggers out there, ALL write about those firsts. Not because it’s bad or boring (sometimes it’s really boring), but because those moments DID change their lives. I’m staggering down memory lane right now, working on a food memoir, not because sharing the ways in which tasting macerated strawberries on my third birthday set me on an unwavering course to a career in food  (it was a wavery course), or because those strawberries are a landmark in my cognitive development, but because sharing stories about food, since food is something we all have to relate to, provides a truly profound sense of commonality.

(A somewhat major digression: I’m a big fan of the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, an outfit that provides a haven for elephants and rhinos orphaned by poachers. They recently shared a study measuring the survival rates among herds which had lost the older matriarchs to ivory hunters. Apparently, younger herds suffered greater mortality during times of drought and stress because they had lost the memories of the matriarchs, who, as tiny baby girl elephants, had been led by their mothers and aunties to remote watering holes. Now, I’d bet my incisors that the food-writing tradition, the recipes shared through story, shared kitchens, community cookbooks and the rest of it, is a spoke on the same evolutionary wheel.  This may be obvious, given the predominance of women in the food-writing blogosphere, but what I just said about commonality? Well maybe we should think about those shared stories as a way of bridging the vast divide between species. Maybe thinking about old lady elephants as grannies with battered old gnocchi boards would lessen the world market’s demand for ivory. Just a thought. Okay, back to Proust.)

One of the problems with food writing, with writing in general, actually, is the fatigue one feels with one’s voice. Proust had to lock himself into a house with cork-lined walls in order to channel his voice long enough to write his masterpiece, but you can bet there were days when he must have longed for a moment of cerebral silence. In food writing, as you sit down to write about tea (not lime-blossom) (and yes, it’s actually a teasane), you cannot help but slightly loath the tone, the voice, the perky food writing chatter prattle, when beginning a sentence with “The first time I tasted rooibos…”

So instead, I will tell you about the fifth or maybe sixth time I tasted rooibos. And then we will bake cookies.

 

October, 2004. I had rented a car in Cape Town, driven north up the coast, turned onto a mere squiggle of a road that took me through the Cedarburg Range. Unpaved, uninhabited, steep blasted reddish rock landscape on the edge of the Great Karoo. At the time, I was trying to escape feeling sad. Or, at least to give the sad a larger seat so it didn’t seem so big. Stepping off the side of one’s known world is a good cure, or maybe only a tonic, but I do recommend it. After hours of driving, of mastering the stick shift with my surprised left hand, I arrived at the Lord Milner Hotel in Matjiesfontein, a faded relic of a time during which sick whites took their tubercular lungs into the middle of nowhere for “the air.” After dinner and trifle, I had a pot of rooibos, which was my routine while I was in South Africa, because the taste of the tea, the smell of it, took me back to the south-facing, ponderosa pine spotted hillsides of my childhood. The taste was not Proustian in intensity, I was not transported the way I am when I smell blanched fin herbes and recall the verbena tea(sane) I foisted on the younger siblings. Simply reminded. The smell and flavor illuminated a landmark in my sensory past, helped me see my origins, which was the reassurance I needed at the time. If you know where you come from, you might have a better chance of figuring out where you’re going. Or at least more informed. 

Rooibos is delightful. Iced or hot, with lemon, or with milk and sugar. There is no caffeine but there is a robustness to its flavor which makes it seem almost like a black tea. In South Africa you can buy it in a can, like our Nestea Brisk Tea™ (a taste that would evoke tennis lessons and hot tar), but I preferred the evening ritual of a hot pot of tea. The name means “red bush,” because, get this, it comes from a red bush. Not really. It’s green and then dries to red. I just read the Wikipage and guess what?! It’s a legume! The legume thrill-ride continues! Also, rooibos has about a million cancer fighting, antioxidant, cure-what-ails-ya compounds. As it only grows in one place, however, climate change will probably cause its extinction within a century. I’m going to start hoarding.

So where are we? We explored the differences between my idea of what a Madeline Moment was and what the big brains say it is. We talked about the importance of sharing stories about food and also confessed to a claustrophobic sense of self-natteryness when writing about it.  We revealed our love for hot beverages made from spiny bushes. Nothing left now but to bake some cookies. This is a food blog, after all.

Lemon Lavender Madelines

This recipe couldn’t be easier. Could. Not. Be. Easier. So the next time I try baking madelines, I will use ground nuts in place of flour, change the way I add the butter, maybe experiment with savory (jalepeno-cheddar? Bay-leaf and black pepper?), or adding fruit. The fun thing about madelines is the shape – the cookies are the perfect size to slip right into your face. There are conflicting stories about the origin of the name but I’ll let you do the foodwork, I mean foot work. Look in the Gastronomique, or The Professional Pastry Chef.

2 large eggs

2/3 c sugar + ¼ cup for post-baking dusting

1 Tbsp lemon zest + 1 tsp to combine with post-baking dusting sugar

¼ t lavender (be sparing or your cookies will taste like soap) + ¼ tsp for post-baking

Pinch salt

1 t vanilla extract

1 c cake or all purpose flour

10 Tbsp unsalted butter, melted and cooled, plus 1 Tbsp for the pan

  

Preheat oven to 375 degrees.

Generously butter and flour your newly acquired madeline pan, ignoring the fact that you couldn’t quite get the goo from the price tag scrubbed off, even though you know this will bother you for years.

In a mixing bowl, beat the eggs and sugar until a lifted fork/whisk/beater drips mixture resembling ribbons. Add the lemon zest, lavender (or don’t), and vanilla extract. If you want to use orange zest and almond extract instead, that’s fine, just means a different name at the top of the recipe. Sift in the flour and mix until barely combined. Drizzle in the butter, mixing until again, it’s just combined (you’re trying to avoid stretching out the glutens in high-protein flour – if you use cake flour, you’ll have less of a problem in this department).

Spoon one Tbsp into each declivity.

Bake for about 14 minutes, turning the pan half-way through, or until the edges are brown and the cookie “springs back” to the touch.

Gently remove the darling baked goods and sprinkle some lemon lavender sugar over them.

Repeat. This recipe gave me about 20 cookies – two pan’s worth.

Brew a cup of your favorite tea.  Sit, sip, taste, relax, remember.

The Quickened Pulse

"After the sugar snow had gone, spring came." - Little House in the Big Woods, by Laura Ingalls Wilder

By the end of February the plum trees were twirling their skirts while the cherry trees ironed their frocks for an early March debut. The winds coming up from the south kicked up the Sound, and white-capped waves, a relative rarity, smashed themselves against the rocks lining the path where I walk the dog. The air, the water, and the plants filled with life and the birds were singing about nests and the joys of flying on windy days.

March was a long month of tumultuous weather, in like a lion, out like a, well, lion, but a really wet, sulky one. If I hadn't been outside every day, I would have missed those tiny signs the plants hang from their leaves, missed the sage-blue unfurling of the buds on the long red arms of the bushes by the water. The Passover Seder, the Easter Brunch, the birth of new babies were all social confirmations of the seasonal shift, and meals moved away from slow-roasts and long-braises to grilling outside and shivery picnics on the beach.

All this walking with the dog, all this watching the budding world stretch and yawn and wake around us, has given me time to think. Most of this thinking is about work, of course. And about the various “isms” I encounter daily in the kitchen – racism, sexism, and alcoholism are the Big Three, and each are perfectly juicy topics for a clog-blog.

But instead, I’m going to continue my legume thrill-ride with a few words about lentils.

I think I was reading a David Lodge novel the first time I came across the word “pulse” as a descriptor for a dried legume. He described the jars filled with pulses along a kitchen counter….this may have actually been in an Elizabeth George, and it’s possible that it was Inspector Lynley who noticed the jarred pulses…no matter. When I came across the word used in that sense, I figured it out based on context cues and a suspicion that the British were just using a different word. But it isn't just the British, and it isn't limited to lentils.

The list of pulses used by the Food and Agricultural Organization includes some of the usual suspects – black eyed peas, pigeon peas, lentils, kidney beans, to name a few – and the more obscure, like vetch. Vetch is one of those pulses used solely for forage and green manure these days as it isn't quite digestible for non-ruminants – basically, vetch comes to the table at the end of a very long winter, when every other extremity is exhausted. Should someone serve you a salad made with vetch and nettles, you should make sure you have water and batteries put by. 

Lentils and a few other legumes have been cultivated by humans for thousands and thousands of years. I've written before about the ways in which legumes and humans seem to have co-evolved, and lentils are a great example. Anyone who has read The Clan of the Cave Bear can imagine Ayla cooking up a pot of lentils du puy to go with her ash-roasted ptarmigan, foraged greens and rosehip compote. 

Another surprising fact about lentils is that the name comes from the shape of the pulse – a lentil looks like a lens. I would have guessed the name came from some derivative of Lent, as the legume is a humble food that supplies a lot of protein, perfect for the long haul between Fat Tuesday and Easter Sunday when some of those given to Lenten sacrifice forgo meat.  

When Escoffier writes about lentils in the Gastronomique, you can sense the exclamation points as he raves about the small legume’s big nutritional whallop, and his dry wit comes through when he goes on to say: 

“If lentils are soaked for too long, they begin to germinate, which renders them, if not actually poisonous, at least more difficult to digest.”

That guy. LMAO.

The different kinds of lentils around the world range from the red to the black, the yellow to green, but they all resemble pebbles and gravel, not seeds. Hard coats and bright colors, the shiny black beluga, the slightly mottled green lentil. It's easy to imagine the red and yellow lentils on the shelves in the aquarium section at the PetCo, easy to imagine the darker varieties pulled from the bed of a country stream.

We prepare black lentils at work, starting with tiny cubes of bacon, onion and carrot, adding the legumes, adding stock, and cooking over medium heat until tender. Salt, a splash of sherry vinegar, and a capful of Worcestershire™ sauce finish them off and they are served with either duck or salmon. One of the funny things about lentils, and I mean really hilarious, is their relatively short cooking time – white beans take half a year to cook, but lentils are a brisk fire – about 20 minutes or they turn into dimpled, muddy mush.

April in Seattle is still pretty chilly, so there’s room for a hot dish like lentils-n-kale in a repertoire of salads, tacos, and pastas. And, hey, let’s leave the bacon out, give the pig a break, and still feel satisfied.

Spring Sweater Lentils:

1 c small dice leeks, whites only, rinsed thoroughly

1 c small dice carrot

1 generous knuckle of butter

3 c black lentils

2 qt cooking liquid, maybe a little more

Salt, pepper, splash of vinegar

For the kale:

One bunch Lacinato kale, rinsed and chopped roughly, butter (or olive oil), garlic, a splash of white wine or whatever you’re drinking while you cook.

For the denouement:

Fried eggs, some large-crystal salt, perhaps a couple shavings of Parmesan or Reggiano. Also a hunk of warm crusty bread, some butter and the usual table accouterments: salt, black pepper, crushed red pepper.

In a large sauce pan, start the leeks and carrots in butter over medium-low heat. When the leeks are soft and beginning to caramelize, add the lentils and stir them around for a couple minutes before adding the stock. Add liquid and turn the heat up slightly. Cook very close to a boil for 20 minutes, test for doneness, add liquid as needed. Wait until the end before seasoning.

When the lentils are about six minutes out, sauté the kale with minced garlic, deglaze, set aside. In this sauté pan or another, start frying eggs. Get the table set, shave the cheese, warm the bowls, warm the bread. Get the eggs off the heat. Taste lentils, correct, taste. You want some liquid in the lentils.

In a warmed bowl, spoon up some lentils, nestle in some kale, top with a fried egg, finish with salt and cheese shavings. Serve immediately. Serves between four and six.

This dish is cozy and comforting, but also evocative of tiny hamlets in the northern Italian alps. 

Up here, we’re still three months away from the scorching summer days of 72 degrees, so bundle up, wear your sunscreen, and enjoy your meals in shared company. 

The Beginning (and the E.N.D.)

“People have even made eating into something else: necessity on the one hand, excess on the other; have muddied the clarity of this need, and all the deep, simple needs in which life renews itself have become just as muddy.” – Letters to a Young Poet, by Rainer Maria Rilke

I will be brief as I have to slip into my clogs and head into work shortly. New Year’s Eve is one of the busier shifts in a busy restaurant’s year and I’d like to finish my list in time to slip into a party frock before midnight. Tomorrow morning’s frenzied feed will mark the end of the seasonal madness even as it signals the beginning of the New Year. The popularity of fried potatoes and eggs, washed down with a few Bloody Marys, epitomizes my feelings about going into a new year: Excess tempered by resolution, optimism haggling with experience.

The corridor between Thanksgiving and New Year’s requires focus and determination, energy, cooperation, vodka, and a good sense of humor. The jokes I make to the Expo about needing to push the rock up the hill, despite the high-wind warning and avalanche conditions, the silly puns we make from the names of prep items, the absolute hilarity of mislabeled containers, well, a little laughter goes a long way during the Big Push. Okay, but before I digress into an exposition on The Relationship Between Laughter and Flavor-Profiling, let’s tackle this New Year’s Eve Clog Blog.

The two things that interest me the most about Black Eyed Peas are, number one, they illustrate a Food Path, and, number two, they are considered “lucky.” The spelling of will.i.am’s name (not to mention apl.de.ap – are the periods meant to evoke the “eye” on the pea?) is another thing I find interesting about the Black Eyed Peas, and also, were I in the same green room with the group, I might have some questions about that Superbowl Half-Time performance.

Ah, digressions. At this rate, I’ll never get to work. The pepper jelly and the tomato-basil jam will remain unmade, a collection of separate ingredients sharing only an undetermined fate, rather than undergoing the transformation over heat into well-balanced accompaniments to the charcuterie. Also unmade: The mashed potatoes, the trinity, and the millions of gallons of stock. This paragraph is only here to mark the progression of my procrastination.

When a large population of humans is displaced, whether willingly or by force, the movement of the group across the globe creates a sort of Food Path (a term that is about as juicy and scientific as a piece of old bread). The Romans, with their vineyards and olive trees, forever changed the existing regional food in the entire Mediterranean basin. The Portuguese, and their consummate curiosity about What Lies Past the Horizon, opened up the world of spices and effectively Unblanded the Western World’s cuisine. And then there was the Slave Trade, which gave the New World peanuts, black-eyed peas, cucumbers and watermelons, and created a divisive element evident in pretty much every aspect of modern civil discourse. Things to think about for the New Year: how does the method of an ingredient’s incorporation into a cuisine – the way the ingredient arrived – affect the ways in which the ingredient is used and/or perceived? According to the source of all information in the world, Wikipedia, Sherman’s Yankees ignored the fields of black-eyed peas, even as they torched pretty much everything else, as they considered the pea nobbut animal fodder. And yet, two hundred years later, the humble sun-dried tomato swept across the culinary landscape, leaving a scorched swath of California Pizza Kitchens and Wolfgang Puck restaurants in its wake.

Was the Northerners' disdain one of the reasons hoppin’ john, a traditional New Year’s dish made from black-eyed peas, typically served with rice, greens and some kind of pork, was considered lucky? Because they were left alone? Our font of online information suggests that the peas, because they swell, symbolize prosperity, the greens symbolize money, and the pork, because pigs forage by rooting forwards, symbolize progress. The article also mentions that hoppin’ john is usually served with cornbread, but offers no insight into what the side dish might symbolize.

But the idea that food symbolizes anything is what interests me. Nicole Mones' book, The Last Chinese Chef, is practically an exercise in scratch-n-sniff reading, so clearly does she write about flavor and aroma. There is no shortage of symbolism in a culinary tradition as old as China’s – each ingredient is an element in a larger story; the completed dish has a clear narrative, a strong beginning, middle and an end, and the relationship between story and food is relatively easy to parse. American food is a mish-mash of different cultural markers and meanings  as a result of a bunch of pretty obvious factors that I don’t have time to analyze. 

But consider this. The black-eyed pea, as a legume, fixes nitrogen in soil, is extremely drought tolerant, is versatile and has a nice buttery flavor, and bees love its flowers – it’s the kind of crop you want to plant when you’re entering another year of uncertainty, or during a post-apocalyptic rebuild, or when you decide it’s time to start your own apiary. Right there we have practicality, hope, and ambition. Not a terrible set of words to start a new year with.

We had, for a minute, a Black-Eyed Pea Succotash on the menu. Served with molasses-braised short ribs, some mustard greens and sweet cherry tomatoes, the dish was a nice mix of traditional Southern cooking and the brightness of Pacific Northwest flavors.

Here’s a quick overview:

Sort and rinse the peas (there is a surprising number of pebbles in a bag of black-eyed peas).

Cook 4 cups of beans in lightly salted water for about an hour, or until tender. Drain and set aside.

While the beans are cooking, prepare your mise en place.

½ cup slivered garlic

¼ cup thinly sliced Serrano pepper

1 cup bacon, cut into lardon

1 red onion, brunoise

2 cups of corn cut from a cob (a bag of frozen corn is fine)

A handful of blanched haricots verts, cut into pencil-eraser sized pieces

10 piquillo peppers, diced (roasted red peppers are fine)

½ cup of apple cider vinegar

Salt and pepper to taste

Set the bacon in a large sauté pan and cook over medium-low heat to crisp up the cubes and render the fat.

When the bacon is a nice ruddy color and the fat is crispy, add the garlic and the serranos and gently cook them until the garlic is golden.

Push all that action to one side of the pan and turn the heat up. When the fat is lively, add the onions and corn. Toss, toss, toss. Saute for about 4 minutes, or until the onions will have lost their “raw” flavor. Add the beans. Toss, toss, toss. Add the peppers. Toss.

Combine this mixture with the cooked peas. Add the vinegar, about a tablespoon of salt and a nice teaspoon of coarsely ground black pepper. Stir and taste. Maybe a pinch of sugar if you feel like the spice and the vinegar call for it.

Serve with whatever you like – a braised pork shank, roasted chicken, short ribs, pork chops, a heaping pile of spinach – but be mindful of the New Year’s story you are telling – pay attention to the images each component on the plate evoke, because therein lie possible clues to your feelings about the New Year.  I hope those feelings are delicious.  

A Well-Set Table

...the beneficiary had no other way of showing his gratitude than proffering the commonplace words thank you, which are as often sincere as they are not, and the surprise of a little bow of the head not at all in keeping with the social class to which he belongs, which just goes to show that we would know far more about life’s complexities if we applied ourselves to the close study of its contradictions instead of wasting so much time on similarities and connections, which should, anyway, be self-explanatory. – The Cave, by José Saramago

Somehow, in the past fifteen minutes or so, we've arrived again at the dusk-darkened door to late November in Seattle. Somehow, the 364 days since I last wrote about Thanksgiving have slipped behind me, taking with them the innumerable tasks required to keep the boat afloat, leaving behind another precious clutch of memories, lessons, adventures, and musings.

The past year was a good one for me. I contrived to see every member of my immediate family in the last six months, which took some doing as we've become a far-flung handful. The rewards for finding the time, money, and head-space for Family Travel are so much more than a pocketful of miles and a spent roll of film (film? what's that?). The opportunity to tell stories, to relive some of the more hilarious moments in our shared histories, the chance to connect to my past, my people…so important. We all betray similar mannerisms, and as much as the similarities occasionally blur the outline of Self, I hope I have finally grown up enough to be glad there’re a few people out there who automatically get my jokes, whether they like them or not.

    

In last year’s buttery Thanksgiving note I mentioned “family-born and family-chosen” – which in hindsight sounds a bit like a cryptic prophecy carved into a cave wall, found by an eleven-year-old heroine who stumbled into a Strange New World. And in some ways my time in Seattle feels sort of like an ongoing adventure in a world I am not from and do not always understand, which makes me all the more grateful for my chosen family of friends, and for my siblings, who are themselves stumbling upon cryptic prophecies about weddings or babies or successful careers.

And then there is my other family, or tribe, or People: the vibrant troupe of Restaurant Folk. While the work occasionally feels not unlike a Day in the Salt Mines, I will always – ALWAYS – be grateful to work hard with such great company. The moments of recognition that occur while traveling and seeing a young woman  refill the potatoes in the hotel buffet, her dreadlocks held back with a green bandanna,  or glimpsing cooks smoking in alleys, or overhearing bartenders and servers talk about their days – these moments are grounding, they remind me that I work within a world overlaid with a million different connections. The closeness of the connections in our Seattle Food World are sometimes a little too heavy on coincidence and timing – sometimes they're flat out weird – but with a group as varied as we are I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. As Saramago says, the connections and similarities are self-explanatory.

Late last month I also changed my own little family. Turns out that when you bring in a betta fish as charming as Lewis, you start to feel as though it may be possible to find a little more room in your life, your heart, and your schedule. Lewis was a gateway pet. So, eight years after we said goodbye to Rye, I adopted a dog. His name is Banksy and he is a good boy. The close-knit family of Seattle’s squirrels has never been more apparent or more annoying.

So….what am I grateful for this year?

Looking around the metaphorical Thanksgiving table and finding a kind of peace in the continuing presence of family and friends. 

And, finding that there is room at the table for one more, and one more after that, if everyone just skootches down a bit. 

The Deep

"Release the Kraken!" - Zeus, "Clash of the Titans." 
"Keep clam and carry on." - Ivar Haglund

If I could write in David Attenborough’s voice, I would start by saying something like, “The Natural World is full of surprises…” and then we’d all climb into a nimble, deep-water explorer sub and have a look around the dark depths of the world’s seas. Maybe we’d run into a giant squid. Probably not. Which would be okay because the sub is too small to carry a fryer, a bathtub filled with a spicy flour dredge, and the vat of dipping sauce required by such an enormous order of calamari.

But if we looked around on the seafloor, we would probably spot some clams and scallops. Which, believe it or not, are in the same family as the squid and octopus – the latter are the turned-inside-out version, with a more efficient Get Away Plan. Bivalves are the poor bastards without legs (but with a “foot”) who are delicious in so many preparations. Just throw them into a hot pan while they’re still alive and, voila! After they give up their savory ghosts, we can sprinkle some parsley on top and serve them with a nice hunk of bread for sopping.

There is an interesting (to me) confluence of themes occurring right now: I’m reading China Mieville’s Kraken, about a cult that worships the giant squid, written in Mieville’s modern-British- pattering-along-dark-hallways voice, while working separately on a piece about clams, a piece I hope to sell. When I referred to my McGee to find out more about clams, and learned that the family Mollusk includes not only scallops, oysters, clams, mussels, and abalone, but also the very mobile squid and octopi, I felt as though I was looking at a family album photobombed by cephalopods. But clams seem cooler now that I know who their cousins are. 

I work with many members of this family: cleaning clams, cleaning mussels (I will never eat another mussel again as long as I live, and if I am reincarnated as an otter, I will be a vegetarian), watching other people clean and shuck oysters, cooking octopi….In the course of my cooking career, I have fried up more squid bits than you could shake a stick at – well, you could shake a stick at the pile of squid, but I frankly don’t think you’d want to be within five miles of it – but my current restaurant doesn’t have a calamari on the menu. We do have many other animals present and accounted for, including finches and bats, both baked into flaky pastry crusts and served with a delightful dipping sauce and an arugula “salad.” Not really.

But this isn’t really about work. I could describe the ways in which a thawed, raw octopus resembles a dangling clump of old wet pantyhose, and how the legs shorten, tighten and curl up as soon as they hit the hot water.  I could provide recipes for steamers, clam pastas, chowders, and some appropriate accompaniments. But the conflating themes I’ve encountered are not so much about food as about how to write about the responsibility we have to our ingredients.

I can hear your eyes roll from way over here. But hang on, maybe you can help.

Recent food trends, like “nose to tail,” “local and sustainable,” and “free range,” all propound the idea that the closer we are to our food sources, the better. That’s great. Pretty obvious, really; very high “duh” factor. And I don’t want to sound cynical about trends that may, in the long run, illuminate (maybe even eliminate?) certain practices that will make our (your) grandchildren think us barbarians. What I want to do is figure out a way to write about the inevitable death of one thing to feed another without using terms like “carcass fatigue,” or sounding like a whiner, or making people feel bad about their cioppino.

   

One of the less tangible roles a chef plays in the larger community of farmers, butchers, fishermen and foragers is that of companion to matter that used to be alive along a path that respects the source, minimizes waste, and transforms an ugly process into a beautiful, nurturing meal. A cross between Virgil and Chiron, with a hint of Escoffier? Maybe.

And, in my world view anyway, one of the roles a writer has, one of his or her responsibilities to the world he or she seeks to examine, is to peer into some of the world’s darker corners and report back. (J. M. Coetzee’s book Elizabeth Costello examines that process, and mulls over the effects of all that abyss-staring on the writer.  Unsurprisingly, the guy who brought us Disgrace and The Life and Times of Michael K, leaves us feeling pretty uncomfortable around Ms. Costello.) Because I write about food and restaurants, I'm compelled to stare at bags of clams, and boxes of bones, and cases of bacon, and think about the proximal effects of slaughter, and to wonder whether others feel the weight of it, and if so, what are we going to do about it?    

Navigating these merging currents is good work for this time of year, because colder weather tends to steer me toward rye whiskey, a brooder’s quaffer. Though I think I should abstain, actually, and keep a clear head; beyond this place lie monsters.