I’m about to jump on a plane to Europe, after jumping off a plane from Hawaii yesterday, but couldn’t resist blogging this aside from a recent Scott McLemee column.
At one point, they [‘Chairman Bob’ Avakian and his philosopher sidekick] note that the slogan “Serve the People,” made famous by the little red book, could be used — with very different intentions, of course — at a McDonald’s training institute. This is, on reflection, something like Hegel’s critique of the formalism of Kant’s ethics. Only, you know, different.
Chairman Bob is stealing a riff here from Damon Knight’s famous short story “To Serve Man,” which was made into an even more famous Twilight Zone episode. I imagine that Chairman Bob’s version is more laboured and less funny than the original: “Don’t get on the ship. The book, To Serve Man, IT’S A COOKBOOK!” has to rank as one of the best closing lines of all time.
There’s a wonderful passage in Colm Toibin’s ‘The Master’, a fictional biography of Henry James, where the hero is on his way to see the house in Rye where he’ll spend the rest of his life. It came to mind when I sat down to list my favourite cookery books.
“…on the train he wondered if anyone watching him would know how momentous this journey was for him, how exciting and how potentially disappointing. He knew that it was merely a house; others bought and sold houses and moved their belongings with ease and nonchalance. It struck him as he traveled towards Rye that no one, save himself, understood the meaning of this. For so many years now he had had no country, no family, no establishment of his own, merely a flat in London where he worked. He did not have the necessary shell, and his exposure over the years had left him nervous and exhausted and fearful. It was as though he lived a live which lacked a façade, a stretch of frontage to protect him from the world. Lamb House would offer him beautiful old windows from which to view the outside; the outside, in turn, could peer in only at his invitation.
He dreamed now of being a host, having friends and family to stay; he dreamed of decorating an old house, buying his own furniture and having continuity and certainty in his days.”
Like any well dragged up Anglo-Saxon, Henry James had the property bug. (Though he did lease rather than buy.) As someone who’s moved on average every 9 months for the last 10 years and in 5 different countries, I sympathise. Unpacking this time, though, the kitchen stuff came out before the books, except the cookery books, that is. I’d been desperate for the last 6 months to have my own kitchen again.
Cooking is the closest proxy to home ownership when you need to do some nesting. It’s the ultimate in control of one’s environment and the people in it. It’s a solitary pleasure with a social purpose. It brings emotional and physical wellbeing. It’s both creative and methodical. It requires absolute concentration and yet switches your brain right off. And it makes you feel at home, wherever you are.
So, having established how important cooking is to me (which is not the same as saying I’m any good at it…), here is a shopping list of some cookery books that can make any place seem like home:
Avoca Café Cookbook
The Avoca Café is a café in County Wicklow where you go on a Sunday afternoon for the gorgeous hearty soups and crusty brownbread, scones and cream, crunchy salads, and satisfying stews. It has done a lot to renew interest and pride in Irish cuisine and remind us that the essential of good cooking is great, fresh ingredients simply and lovingly prepared. I have more pages of this book than any other marked with postits and melted butter. Just last night, I had a loaf of their divine banana bread in the oven. Toasted each morning and lashed with salty butter, it will provide a week of comforting breakfasts.
The idea behind Avoca food is gentle fusion. There are hints of Asian, French and Italian cooking, but the focus is on good local produce and unchallenged contentment. The book also has loads of colour pictures of the food. Serious cooks probably don’t need these, but I think there’s nothing like them to start you imagining you’re making the food already. The Avoca Café Cookbook II is out now, but I haven’t yet bought it.
A recent purchase is Aine McAteer’s Recipes to Nurture. This book is the opposite of what I’d normally buy – the food in it is verging on macrobiotic. But there’s nothing joyless or self-denying about this cooking. The food is so sunny you feel you‘ve escaped the dreary northern European winter by just reading the recipes for Thai fish cakes, sunrise papaya salsa and pineapple ginger ice dream.
A couple of months ago, I scoured all the bookshops in Dupont Circle without success for a book of classic American cooking. I’m pretty fussy, though. I was looking for something with a nice layout, loads of pictures and recipes for things like pecan pie, key lime pie, and any number of savoury regional dishes. If anyone has a recommendation, I’d love to hear it.
But while I was browsing I found a book that has since yielded a stream of happy diners; Seriously Simple, easy recipes for creative cooks by Diane Rossen Worthington. This book has a couple of signature moves. First, Diane RW is very keen on oven-cooking sauces to enrich their flavour and cut down on the work involved. Her pasta with roasted cherry tomatoes and fresh basil takes literally 5 minutes to prepare (ahead of cooking) and is far and away the best pasta sauce I’ve ever made. The other trick in this book is the inclusion under each recipe of alternative ingredients or uses of the dish, called ‘the clever cook could’. The food is a nice mix of vaguely Mediterranean, Californian and Asian fusion and has an excellent section up front on pantry essentials.
In a similar vein, try Jenny Bristow’s Light Taste the Good Life. Steering away from punitive lists of food to be avoided, Jenny Bristow provides lots of great recipes for foods that happen to be very nutritious. Her spring vegetable risotto is gorgeous – lovely and light but at the same time very comforting and tummy-lining for the dead of winter. I haven’t yet tracked down any passion fruit in Brussels (though I walked a mile and a half for some peaches last weekend – what is this, communist Russia?), but when I do I’ll be making some passion fruit mousse with a tangy lime syrup. Jenny Bristow’s signature menu items are her tangy and contrasting syrups, dressings and salsas. She takes quite straightforward and well known recipes and serves them with a twist (and an extra helping of Vitamin C).
So there you have it; four books of recipes to assist with nesting and even make it feel like high summer (for those of us in the northern hemisphere who need the boost). I suspect Henry James couldn’t even boil an egg – maybe he should have tried.
I can still recall my surprise when I happened upon a volume in a second-hand bookshop by Maurice Maeterlinck, author of Pelleas et Mellisande and one of history’s most famous Belgians, only to discover that it was all about the natural history of bees. If James Meek’s piece in the latest LRB is anything to go on, I’m in good company:
Not long after the First World War, the movie baron Samuel Goldwyn set up a stable of Eminent Authors in an attempt to give silent screenplays more literary weight. One of the recruits was the Nobel Prize-winning Belgian writer Maurice Maeterlinck. Initially, neither party seems to have been troubled that Maeterlinck spoke no English, and the great Belgian set to work on a screen version of his novel La Vie des abeilles. When the script was translated Goldwyn read it with increasing consternation until he could no longer deny the evidence of his senses. ‘My God!’ he cried. ‘The hero is a bee!’
Further on in Meek’s review of Bee Wilson’s The Hive [1] he claims that Jean-Jacques Rousseau asserts somewhere that nations which eat honey are natural democracies but those which use sugar as a sweetener are fit only for tyranny. I guess I can see what the argument might be — something about honey-gathering being a suitable activity for free citizens whereas sugar came from large plantations worked by slaves — but does JJR really say it anywhere?2
1 One of the names we canvassed for this blog before we launched was “The Grumbling Hive”, I’m glad I lost that argument.
2 Montesquieu makes explit the link between sugar and black slavery at Spirit of the Laws I.15.v.
We mostly mention and link to political and academic blogs on CT. But there are whole worlds of other blogs out there. One such world that I like to visit whenever I get the chance is the food and recipe blogosphere. This week, Chocolate and Zucchini is celebrating its first birthday, congrats! That blog has come a long way. It has been mentioned in various media outlets across the globe. Its author, Clotilde, is throwing a birthday party this week in Paris (her home base) and has even opened up a forum for C&Z readers to discuss all topics related to cooking, baking, restaurants, etc. The wonderful images with which she illustrates her posts add that much more to visiting her site (and it’s all licensed under a Creative Commons License). Reading C&Z always makes me wish I had more time to cook and bake.
Another food blog I visit on occasion is Foodgoat, which takes food discussion to another level including comments about new food products on the U.S. market. And today I found C’est moi qui l’ai fait! through C&Z, another blog sure to get me inspired in the kitchen. My own modest contributions are on a recipe page I compiled mostly made up of some Hungarian specialties. I owe all that knowledge to my Mom who didn’t succeed in getting me excited about cooking while I was still living at home, but who has been a source of inspiration (and much helpful information!) an ocean apart. She is quite the cook and even has a cookbook out in English about Hungarian cooking (written in her “spare” time while continuing her first-rate scientific career). The recipe section, by the way, is one of the most popular parts of my site through search engine referrals (yeah, well, I’d like to think people are interested in my research, but I can’t blame them for preferring to cook a good chicken paprikash instead). I have also started to document good restaurants in Chicagoland.
In my part of the world, the weather is getting chillier and various fun holidays are approaching so I anticipate spending more time cooking and baking (although my upcoming travel schedule may challenge me on that). This is a good time to take stock of relevant blogs out there. I invite you to post links to your favorite food and recipe blogs (and other sites) here.
Have you ever read a blog post so aggressively, ferociously wrongheaded that it temporarily sucks all the fun out of political blogging?
Case in point. Glenn Reynolds seems to think that it’s fair to associate the Kerry campaign with a poster for Fahrenheit 9/11 produced by a distributor in the Benelux countries. (I’m still waiting for an explanation from the Kerry/Edwards campaign for White Chicks.) He says that Michael Moore (who is responsible for writing and directing left-wing films of questionable accuracy) is the American version of the Iraqi rebel cleric al-Sadr (who is responsible for killing our soldiers and running a repressive fundamentalist regime in Fallujah). Etc., etc.
I could argue with this nonsense. But wouldn’t all of our time be better spent sharing a genuinely delicious recipe for braised lamb shanks in red wine? I think so.
The recipe is impossible to screw up and requires little attention. I usually make it for just two people, which means that I only cook two lamb shanks with the same quantities of vegetables and liquids. Since the skillet easily holds two lamb shanks, this is a one-dish meal for two people.
Lightly adapted from Cooks Illustrated.
6 lamb shanks (3/4 to 1 pound each), trimmed of excess fat
Salt
1 tablespoon canola oil
2 medium onions, sliced thick
2 celery ribs, cut crosswise into 2-inch pieces
4 garlic cloves, minced
2 tablespoons tomato paste
1 tablespoon oregano
2 cups dry red wine
3 cups chicken stock
Ground black pepper
1. Heat oven to 350 degrees. Sprinkle shanks with salt. Heat oil in a large, nonreactive sauté pan over medium-high heat.
2. (optional) Add shanks to pan in batches if necessary to avoid overcrowding. Sauté until browned on all sides, 5-7 minutes. Using tongs, transfer shanks to a plate as they brown.
3. Add onions, celery, garlic, tomato paste, a light sprinkling of salt and 1 teaspoon of oregano; sauté to soften vegetables slightly, 3 to 4 minutes. Add red wine, then chicken stock to the skillet, stirring with a wooden spoons to loosen browned bits from skillet bottom. Bring liquid to simmer; transfer vegetables and liquid into a deep braising pan, large enough to hold the shanks in a single layer. If your skillet is large enough for all of the shanks, there is no need to transfer. Add shanks, season with salt, pepper, and remaining oregano.
4. Cover pan (with foil if pan has no lid) and transfer it to the oven; braise shanks for 1 1/2 hours. Uncover and continue braising until shank tops are browned, about 30 minutes. Turn shanks and continue braising until remaining side has browned and shanks are fall-off-the-bone tender.
5. Remove pan from oven; let shanks rest for at least 15 minutes. Carefully transfer shanks with tongs to each of 6 plates. Arrange a portion of vegetables around each shank. Skim excess fat from braising liquid and adjust seasoning. Spoon a portion of braising liquid over each shank and serve.
Here is something I just had to share, even though it has nothing to do with politics, philosophy, and the assorted types of cleverology we generally deal with on CT. But it is a solution to a particularly vexed question nonetheless; how to make an unlumpy roux. Roux are the bane of many cooks, since they so often end up either lumpy or burnt. But as they’re the basis of so many sauces, it really helps if you know you can rely on yours.
Like many culinary innovations - malted hops, blue cheese, potato crisps - my discovery occurred by accident/necessity. I was trying to prepare a chicken and broccoli bake and a chocolate and orange cake using only two saucepans and in under an hour to have them both in the oven by the start of the England-France rugby match and be able to serve them at half time.
So, instead of doing the roux in a saucepan (both were being used already), I made it in a tin bowl sitting on top of the blanching broccoli, just as you would to melt chocolate if you don’t have a microwave. The steam of the boiling water melted the butter quickly but didn’t burn it, and the flour mixed in without a single lump as the heat was so evenly dispersed. There was barely any need to stir and the whole thing took about 3 minutes from start to finish.
People are always saying their methods are foolproof when they’re not, but I promise that this one cannot fail…
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