Save Your Heads

I once read somewhere-- I can no longer recall where-- that it is a good idea to save your shrimp heads. This means buying shrimp that haven't already been deveined and decapitated. Whenever possible, start a collection of heads and shells in the freezer. That way, when the moment strikes, you've got the makings for a shrimp stock.

It just so happens that our nearby pan-Asian market sells proper frozen shrimp, the kind that look like the aquatic bugs they really are. A few weeks ago, having made something-or-other involving shrimp, I saved the heads and shells. They've been in the freezer ever since, staring out mutely from inside their ziploc bag.

Such uncharacteristic foresight has made possible an excellent new discovery. The frozen heads formed the basis of a Brazilian shrimp stew we made the other night for our friends. The stew features a ginger-infused shrimp stock spiked with coconut milk and cashew butter. The recipe is adapted from James Peterson's Fish and Shellfish, which rightly describes its flavors as similar to those of a Thai curry, only without the fish sauce and lemon grass. With its striking pink color, the stew looks magisterial, yet is simple to prepare; its combination of flavors is deeply comforting. The key is that the rich saltiness of the stock is modulated by the last-minute addition of lime juice and cilantro.

The fun part involves chopping up the shrimp heads in a food processor. To make the broth, you churn up the heads and shells from 2 or 3 pounds of shrimp. (I used the frozen heads as well as the shells from the 2-pound bag of frozen shrimp I bought for this recipe). Keep the peeled shrimp-- the bodies themselves-- in the fridge while the broth cooks.

In a heavy pot, sauté the chopped heads in a little peanut oil, along with a chopped onion, 2 chopped garlic cloves, a goodly piece of ginger, grated, and two seeded, chopped chilies. The finer you chop everything, the more efficiently the stock will accommodate the flavors. Sauté all this until all the shrimpy bits turn red.

Then add a large can of diced tomatoes, and about three cups of water. I supplemented this with some prepared fish stock, but that's only because I had it around.

Simmer for about 30 minutes. At this point the dish is essentially made.

Strain the broth, using a fine-mesh strainer, and discard all the debris. Return the broth to the pot. Then, mix together 1/2 a can or so of coconut milk with several healthy tablespoons of cashew butter. The recipe suggests peanut butter as an alternative, but how many recipes call for cashew butter? What an opportunity. Whisk this mixture into the broth.

When it's nearly time to eat, drop the raw shrimp into the simmering broth. Then add the juice from 3 limes, and season with salt and pepper. The shrimp will be done within 3 minutes. So by the time you're ready to serve it, the shrimp will have cooked.

Serve in a shallow soup bowl with a tower of rice in the middle, and garnish with a healthy dose of finely-chopped cilantro. For a lighter meal, or as a starter, you could nix the rice.

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When we made this for our friends the other day, we started off with a "Brazilian" salad. What, one might ask, constitutes a "Brazilian" salad?

According to the internet, the recipe is similar in form and content to "salad." The difference is that you then add some hearts of palm, sliced into little coins.

Needless to say, Brazilian salad is delicious.

Baby Tray

Gourmandise returned for a brief stay this weekend, as if we were nothing more than a rural pied-à-terre. "Helloo!" was its cavalier greeting, as it breezed through the house and made itself comfortable, leaving an disastrous mess in the kitchen. "Let's eat!" And then, just as abruptly, it vanished.

But more on this anon. We did make a fish stew of sorts this weekend, and I'm very pleased with the recipe. And the pannetone bread pudding that followed was also quite fun. Again, though, this was just a short visit: gourmandise was merely passing through.

I would like to dwell, however briefly, on the more familiar sight that meets us every evening. This, as much as anything else, is what the word "dinner" tends to signify:


Harsh is the landscape we traverse each night on the road through dinner!

The meal itself is assembled according to a precise formula: chicken nuggets, green beans, spaghetti-O's, cheese, hummus, and the inevitable and highly-anticipated cup of applesauce. Each soft food is to be accompanied by its own corresponding spoon, per A's instance ("New 'poon? New 'poon?"). Yet the aftermath varies nightly. Each new tray yields a new terrain of crags and furrows. And any effort to wipe A's hands and face clean only further redistributes the gray paste she creates anew at every meal.

Gourmandise thus tends to make house calls later in the evening, as a rule.

Which at least partially explains why it's so easy to poach snacks from the Baby Tray. Is that an unsullied portion of a chicken nugget? Are you going to finish that cheese, kiddo? Daddy gets hungry, you know.

Empty Larder

It's been a busy week. The sink is full of dishes. The house is strewn with coffee cups. And there's nothing in the pantry; nothing good, anyway. It looks like a half-hearted yard sale in there: a jar of honey; a bag of tangerine rinds; some dried mushrooms; rice.

The fridge, too, smells increasingly suspicious. But the hint of rot, of abandon, pervades the entire house. Our kitchen, at the center of it all, has become a subtracting-machine. There's no bread, no eggs, no fresh vegetables. Before the weekly delivery came yesterday, we'd even run out of milk. How did we fall so far?

The notion of a more-or-less empty larder can, of course, be perfectly romantic. Imagine yourself alone in the Yukon tundra, cold, bored, and starving. You forge ahead, losing hope as you go. And then, a miracle. You happen upon an abandoned cabin, nestled amongst the snowdrifts. Once inside, you build a fire, boil some water, and search the pantry. There you find some basic imperishables: flour, olive oil, a can of tomatoes, honey, baking soda, tuna, beans, and four sealed jars of Bovril. Suddenly, it's a game, and you're Crusoe: what can you cobble together from these carefully-husbanded elements? An array of fresh pita, accompanied by a savory bean purée? A simple fish stew with flour dumplings?

Phooey.

Our kitchen hasn't fallen out of time. We've fallen out of it. Each sidelong glance into the kitchen this past week has been cast with a growing sense of distance. There is no longer time for gourmandise. There is only avoidance, and breakfast cereal.

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Tomorrow, though, we will arise, clear-eyed and better-rested, and go shopping. Some friends are crossing the tundra for a visit, so we'll have to sweep out the cabin, stoke the fires, and add some fresh straw to the mattresses.

Fish stew with dumplings? Perhaps, but not from the larder.

The Whole Cow?

Having recently purchased five jars of Bovril, I was challenged to determine whether this might be enough of the beef-bouillon concentrate to reconstitute a whole cow. (This is all thanks to Elizabeth's excellent post comments the other day). It would have been a good idea, though, to have read the labels before purchasing the jars: I am now the proud owner of five utterly beefless containers of the stuff, part of the Bovril brand's dark years (2004-2006). The jars are also past their expiration dates of December 2007.

To say that no cows were harmed in the production of these beefless Bovril jars would, however, be true only in the narrowest of senses. In the old days, OXO, Bovril's parent company, rode upon the broad shoulders of the British Beef Industry, whose scraps and bones formed nearly 40% of the unguent yeast extract's ingredient list. ("Alas! My poor brother," sighs a mournful steer as it contemplates an interwar-era bottle of the stuff). This all changed, if only briefly, during the height of the Mad Cow scare. For a two-year period between 2004 and 2006, Bovril's new parent company, Unilever, removed the beef in order to counter trade restrictions on British meat products.

This is the Bovril I ended up with. So it's beef-free. This doesn't mean, however, that no cows were harmed during its production. All it takes is to recall the massive cattle and sheep purges throughout agricultural Britain, and the notion of "beef-free" suddenly becomes a bit more harrowing. Alas indeed: my poor brothers and sisters.

The consequences of this purge chez nous is a bit more banal: an overstock of now-antiquated yeast extract. Needless to say, the experiment of reconstituting cows ended before it ever began. We have put away our alembics and specimen jars.

But am I unhappy? Am I disappointed? Not in the least.

Because the fact is that it tastes exactly the same. I can spread it on toast with impunity. Maybe I'll even boil up a mug of beef tea, to fortify myself after a bracing constitutional. And I can certainly pooh-pooh the fact that the jars are past their prime. The sell-by date on an imperishable product like Bovril, after all, is about as specious as a sell-by date on diet soda. One of the joys of the product is its relative infinitude: it's built for the larder.

My conclusion: Bovril does not even taste like beef, and it never did. If one were to describe the flavor, one might say that it tastes, well, brown. And salty. If cattle have anything to do with Bovril's flavor, then this is more a matter of distinguishing it from Marmite-- that other brown yeast extract-- than of reproducing the essence of cattle.

I'm not sure where this leaves us, except to marvel at the Bovril brand's remarkable hold on the British consciousness. And thus, in turn, on my own. Will Bovril restore your vigor? But of course. Will Bovril guide you through the lean years of your life? Naturally. Will Bovril cure your hangover? Why, yes. Yes it will. And will Bovril keep the British Empire running strong? We all know the answer to this:

If you keep it in a thermos, you can take it with you almost anywhere. And so, in a sense, yes.

Salt of the Earth

A quick note on the joys of baking in salt.

Provided one has access to salt, of course, there are few more economical ways to transform one's range of flavors. The salt-- as I now understand it-- has little to do with seasoning; it instead forms a specialized temporary oven molded around the food inside. It thus allows the food to season itself.

In other words, it's a bit like cooking in the ground, except that the salt provides a cleaner indoor cooking surface than, say, sand. But the principle is the same: the salt forms a tight seal that retains moisture and distributes heat evenly.

There are two basic ways to bake in salt (again: as I understand it). The first achieves what might more readily be called a salt crust, rather than a salt oven. You mix kosher salt with beaten egg whites, and spread this around a seasoned piece of meat or fish; as it bakes, the egg causes the salt to stiffen into a firm cake around the meat. This protects it from direct heat and locks the moisture and aromatics inside.

The second method, which we tried last night for the first time, involves more salt but less difficulty. (The recipe is adapted from Eileen Lo's The Chinese Kitchen, a book I'm enjoying more and more each time I use it). The basic principle here is to stuff the chicken loosely with aromatics, wrap the bird in lotus leaves, and then suspend the leaf-wrapped bundle in hot salt. If the package is tight enough, you have the basic principle of a luau. But again, this is something that doesn't require you to dig a hole outdoors, or risk having sand drift accidentally into the dish. If a few errant flecks of Kosher salt fall onto the chicken, so much the better.

The prep:
It's best to use a small chicken here. Tidy up a 3 1/2 pound chicken, and massage it with 1/4 cup of Kosher salt. Let this rest while you preheat the oven to 450°. You'll need two additional 3- pound boxes of Kosher salt; empty one of them into a dutch oven large enough to accomodate all the salt and the bird. Empty the other box into a baking pan. Heat both in the 450° oven for 1/2 hour or so. Meanwhile, soak a piece of dried tangerine rind (available in an Asian grocery, although in a pinch any aromatic rind could, in theory, work) in hot water until it softens.

Rinse the salted chicken and pat it dry. Then rub it, inside and out, with a mixture of powdered ginger dissolved in Chinese cooking wine-- about 1 tsp dissolved in 2 tablespoons. Then insert a generous slice of fresh ginger and some crushed scallions into the cavity. Wrap the whole thing tightly in interlocking lotus leaves.

I couldn't get lotus leaves. So I didn't have the chance to figure out the art of wrapping the bird (do you need string? how fragile are the leaves?). But I did get banana leaves, which offered a much different flavor combination: instead of the earthy funk of lotus leaves, there was the more tropical perfume of banana. This substitution was, in the end, serendipitous, since it opened up the possibility of further substitutions. (I could imagine, for instance, a combination with lemon grass and ginger on the inside, and with banana leaves on the outside. But why not a cilantro, lime, onion, and chili combination as well? What other kinds of broad leaf could be used; and how would it taste without the leaves at all?).

Cooking:
When everything's ready to go, make an indentation in the bed of salt in the dutch oven and place the leaf-wrapped bundle in it. Then pour the other tray of hot salt over the package to cover it. Bake the whole thing in the 450° oven for an an hour and ten minutes, and then let it rest for 15 minutes, or even longer.

When ready to serve, dump off the salt, and then remove and unwrap the package. You serve the chicken cut into pieces, accompanied by a mild dipping sauce made from ginger, scallions, soy sauce, peanut oil, and Chinese vinegar. The cutting style depends on your preference: you can carve it up in European fashion; or serve it hacked up neatly with a cleaver; or, once it cools slightly, you can simply pull the meat off the bone.

The jury's still out about how best to accompany such a dish. It might perhaps best be served as an appetizer, since the flavors are complex but quite mild. Last night, for instance, the dish was overwhelmed by the others we served alongside it.

Alternatively, this salt-baked chicken would match nicely with clean flavors that would foreground its earthy complexity : steamed Chinese vegetables, for instance, might work nicely.

What is most exciting about this whole experiment is that it's not simply a dish; it's a method. It thus goes without saying that salt-baking can be adapted to prepare all kinds of foods: whole fish (with or without the leaf wrap); beef, pork, chicken, lamb. Lee How Fook's in Philadelphia's Chinatown (11th and Race), for instance, serves a legendary salt-baked spareribs dish. There are numerous recipes for salt-baked snapper, which I will try one of these days. And here's a link to a blog post on salt-baked potatoes, even. I wonder if salt-baked eggs might work.

I am the Cheese

No, this is not an autobiography.
This is a tribute to a fellow turophile (is that a great word, or what!), the late Robert Carlton Brown.

If you cruise the cookbook aisles at old bookstores, you may have come across any number of his late works, from Let There Be Beer! to 10,000 Snacks. My favorite, though, is his delightful 1955 tome The Complete Book of Cheese, a characteristically playful little book bound in a bright yellow dust-jacket.

Chapter one, "I Remember Cheese," rings with the air of nostalgia familiar to cheese-lovers virtually anywhere. Though hardly Proustian, this nostalgia is no less acute: no sooner has the most wondrous mouthful of cheese passed one's lips, no sooner has the most perfectly ripened, unpasteurized local brie been found and savored, than the sky clouds over. The moment has passed. It suddenly becomes the day after the parade. Ribbons of sorrow drape the world; it's time to sweep up the confetti and start dreaming again.

Bob Brown understands this. Here's what he writes: "I remember another market day, this time in Lucerne. All morning I stocked up on good Schweizerkäse and better Gruyère. For lunch I had cheese salad. All around me the farmers were rolling two-hundred-pound Emmentalers, bigger than oxcart wheels. I sat in a little café, absorbing cheese and cheese lore in equal quantities. I learned that a prize cheese must be chock-full of equal-size eyes, the gas holes produced during fermentation. They must glisten like polished bar glass. The cheese itself must be of a light, lemonish yellow. Its flavor must be nutlike. (Nuts and Swiss cheese complement each other as subtly as Gorgonzola and a ripe banana.) There are, I learned, 'blind' Swiss cheeses as well, but the million-eyed ones are better."

Bob Brown, who in the 1920s and 30s was one of the more interesting experimental poets of his generation, displays his characteristic modesty in this remembrance. Standing in for his own judgment— the experience of tasting these cheeses, impossible to replicate— are the qualifications for prize cheeses. We learn what Emmentalers must taste like, not what they happened to taste like that day, to a passing visitor. Gone is the absurd eye-rolling and tummy-rubbing behavior that forms the food writer's bluntest instrument. We are left instead with the passing memory of a market day, of farmers and Swiss cafés. Through his nostalgia we learn something of the timeless.

Now, I don't place a lot of faith in the timeless, as a rule. It's an effect, a literary trick created by this clever poet-turned-hack-writer of popular cookbooks. All the same, I don't know if there's another way to account for the turophile's relationship to the ever-receding experience of the perfect cheese. Perhaps it's the hack writer who gets it straight, in the end.

The best part of The Complete Book of Cheese, though, is that it indulges this nostalgia only fleetingly. A work of profound optimism, it devotes only a few of its pages to such remembrances; it instead looks intently to the future. With chapters dedicated to recipes for rabbits (rarebits), fondues, and soufflés, the book projects its readers into the future of endless possibility: here are recipes you can try tomorrow; here are lists of cheeses upon which you can base your travels throughout the world. You can enjoy cheeses here, today, at home. And you can enjoy cheeses tomorrow, next year, anywhere in the world, as long as you live. And Bob Brown has provided a glossary of cheese varieties as your Baedeker.

There's more to be said here: Bob Brown, whose circle of intimates included the likes of Gertrude Stein, Nancy Cunard, Kay Boyle, Harry and Caresse Crosby, and Crazy Uncle Ezra, wrote just about everything, from mock-Whitmanian poems of America to professional pulp. Most interestingly, perhaps, he's best known among modernist circles for developing the notion of printing "readies," a literary counterpart to the somewhat better-known notion of "movies." But all this will have to wait for another post.

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In my next post I will see whether it is indeed possible to reconstitute a whole cow from Bovril alone. We shall see.

Gimme a "B"

Here are three things I like to do with bacon:

One: fantasize.
"Aha!" you might say, as if catching me in a logical inconsistency. "If you have bacon, then you don't need to fantasize about it. You can only fantasize about bacon you don't have."

Wrong, and wrong. I have four and a quarter pounds of Millheim bacon in the fridge— and the store, incidentally, is Penn's Valley Meats, and not "Bierly's," as I mistakenly mentioned in an earlier post— and I have been fantasizing about it all day. I'm going to give a pound to P1, and a pound to P2; I'm going to freeze a pound; and with the rest, I'm going to make things. And like the astrological animals lining up to visit Buddha, the possibilities are out there, waiting. They're starting to form constellations.

Two: engineer the test slice(s).
This is about as close as our kitchen gets to the scientific method. As a lifelong anti-positivist, I cannot stress fully enough the urgency of reversing this bias when it comes to bacon. Testing is very important. One doesn't want to make any mistakes. So before starting any recipes, fry up a slice, to check for smokiness, sweetness, fat content, cooking time, and so froth. Go on, fry up two.

Three: go for it.
The French call it passage à l'acte. What is one to do with all this fantasizing and preparation? Let it run its course.

The first and, let's face it, maybe even the best, thing we did with yesterday's bacon trove is to make B.L.T.s. Given, it's winter. Trying to find a good off-season tomato is about as close to quixotic as anything I can imagine. (see item One, on fantasy, above). All the same, on a warmed, buttered baguette everything took flight. The home-smoked, home-cured Millheim bacon came to life, with a decent tomato and a few leaves of romaine lettuce keeping the sandwich bright and cheery. I can only imagine what this will taste like in the summertime, with some of the local tomatoes at the height of their season. (or would this be a T.B.L., and thus a wholly different affair?)

This bacon is pretty spectacular stuff. There is other local bacon, too: Nittany Meats in Zion, PA also has excellent bacon (and sells whole slabs and bacon ends, too, which helps for recipes). But what distinguishes the Millheim bacon is its particular combination of sweetness and smokiness; and the pork bellies themselves seem also to be of an extraordinarily high quality: lean and flavorful. There's an experiential dimension, as well: one of the benefits of driving out to buy some is that you pass through some magnificent farmland along the way, with Amish horses-and-buggies trotting down the road as you go. Magic.

For the sake of future reference, here are my five favorite bacon dishes, a list subject, of course, to adjustment.
N.B. this does NOT include uncured pork-belly recipes, and the like. How could it?

1. Pumpkin-bacon risotto. A household staple, so we'll make this sooner or later.
2. Pasta with peas and bacon. Should be pancetta, but hey, we're in Pennsylvania.
3. Frisée salad with lardons, sautéed potatoes, and poached egg.
4. B.L.T. panzanella (courtesy of Alton Brown).
5. Spiced nuts with sugared bacon, a New York Times recipe we made for a party in December. And wow. Hell, skip the nuts; the sugared bacon is a revelation. Here's the recipe, adapted from the NYT.

First, the nuts. In a largish bowl, beat an egg white, and add about two cups of good roast nuts-- mixed, or just almonds or cashews-- along with 2 tablespoons of sugar, and then garam masala (homemade is best, of course, but you can buy it pre-ground), cumin, cinnamon, allspice, and a little pinch of cloves. This is all to taste, but best to go in descending order. Also add salt and cayenne. Toss everything together.

Spread the nuts on a baking sheet, put in a preheated 325 oven, and roast for about 15 minutes, tossing early and often to avoid mini-omelettes from forming. When toasty but not scorched, transfer to a bowl and raise the temperature of the oven to 350.

Meanwhile, the bacon. On another baking sheet covered with parchment paper sprayed with Pam (the sugar will caramelize and make for a dreadful cleanup otherwise), spread out 3/4 pound of bacon in a single layer, using two pans if necessary. Sprinkle on both sides with about 1/2 cup of light brown sugar. Bake this until the bacon is crisp and dark golden, 20 to 25 minutes. Now, the bacon is DELICIOUS if you take it out before it gets too crispy, but for the sake of the recipe it's important to get the bacon quite crisp, since it will be mixed with the nuts. Use your judgment here. But the phenomenon of turning a meat product into confectionery is eye-opening. Heart-stopping, too, but what the hell: this is a seasonal treat, for winter only. Make it in December. Diet in January.

Finally, cool the bacon on a wire rack over newspaper. Break the slices into bite-size pieces and mix with the nuts.

When we made this in mid-December, we found that the party guests had picked out all the bacon, and that there were still nuts left over in the dish. So don't be skimpy.

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As a little post-script, I visited Hout's on their last day of business. Very depressing. The owners seem to have torpedoed the business in order to make a profit from the land.

I did, however, buy five jars of Bovril.

Hout of Time

I've just learned that O.W. Hout's, a State College, PA institution since, I think, 1920, will shut its doors on January 11. It seems they have simply run out of customers.

While somewhat unsurprising, this closure is deeply significant: it represents the final stroke in the transformation of the State College area into yet another friendlyville. No longer rural farmland, the counties surrounding Penn State University are now commercial subdevelopments. And, as in the case of most rural or ruralesque parts of the United States, other businesses have arrived in tandem with the contractors. These businesses are coeval with, and designed for, the kind of sub-suburb this part of the world has become.

Hout's never failed to frustrate me, but this wasn't for its outdatedness. Far from it. I'm an ardent supporter of the untimely and the slow, especially when it comes to food. The problem with Hout's is that it didn't fully grasp what the specifics of its appeal might have been. Or if it did, it simply didn't have the resources to act.

Hout's is a relic. A true country farm store, it sells everything from furniture, hardware, and lumber to garden supplies, kitchen equipment, and "gourmet" food. In recent years, the limitations of the form became sadly apparent: although the butcher was never anything other than excellent, the store's efforts to sell local produce fell flat. After all, whether local or not, vegetables just aren't appealing if they're left to rot on the shelves. Of course, other attempts at small-market produce retail tend similarly to struggle. Short of the low-overhead farmer's market, it's hard to compete with the food giants.

And who went to Hout's for its furniture? From visit to visit, the store seemed to become emptier, if ever so slightly, as it sold off old stock and didn't replace it.

A farm store can't be a farm store if there are no farms. It would be easy to feel nostalgic for the loss of a store that represents a once-prominent but now quaintly overshadowed form of rural capitalism. Imagine a door-to-door salesman hocking encyclopedias in the era of the internet. As the news stories will surely declare, Wal-Mart and Lowe's have crowded out the farm-store niche: they offer a scale (and thus a price) better suited to the hard-up "rural" folk who shop there. But don't get me started on Wal-Mart.

But is this really just the passing of a dinosaur—a casualty of the highway of Progress? There is something more at stake here; and nostalgia aside, there's no need to tell the same old story of mega-capitalism.

Hout's is a victim of another historical force, just as real, but more complicated than commercial Darwinism alone: not an inability to modernize, but an inability to de-modernize. A failure, that is, to recognize the particularity of what it does well. Butchery, lumber-cutting, housewares, hardware: these are all valuable, necessary, services. But they can't be jumbled together in the same haphazard way that renders scale the only way to compete: whenever bigger is better, the Wal-Marts will always the "advanced" form and Hout's will always be the "antique" form. These reliquary trades need a new logic.

If someone's going to be a door-to-door salesman today (and why not!), he can't just sell the same old encyclopedias. If someone wants to sell encyclopedias (and why not!), she can't just do it by going door-to-door. The appeals of traveling salespeople and encyclopedias is no longer obvious; it has to be invented rather than taken for granted.

Hout's, for one, needed to cut bait. They sat on their inventory-- useful when one is looking for, say, cedar siding to match the boards on a 1930s cottage. But awkward when it comes to an entire floor dedicated to (really!) showcasing furniture at once too expensive, and too out of date, to appeal to most everyone. And even more awkward when it comes to, say, apples or cucumbers.

If someone decides to take the business over and give it another run-- and I hope they will-- I hope the best elements of the farm store can be retained. Oddity, for certain, is a wonderfully nostalgic characteristic. But what the store really needs now— other than an infusion of cash— is an ideology, a raison d'être.

If only they could sell wine...

Sometimes the Bar... It Eats You

For starters, the Elk Creek Café was wonderful. But today's post isn't about that. We're going for dinner there again this week, so I'll write about it then.

This post is about my failed bacon mission.

It's become something of a legend 'round these parts: there's some mighty fine bacon to be found in Millheim. And this is said with the recognition that Central Pennsylvania is already renowned for its Amish bacon. So it's safe to say that there's something pretty special happening in Millheim. You might not know this, though, from looking at the humble façade of Bierly's Meats, a nondescript country butchery on Rte. 45 in downtown Millheim. But their home-cured sugar bacon will make your socks roll up and down.

Like many of the storefronts along Millheim's main street, Bierly's powder blue siding has seen better days. This is so much the case that when H. and I would visit Millheim in years past, we never once acknowledged that Bierly's Meats was an extant market. There are a number of businesses like this in central Pennsylvania. One wonders: are they ever really open for business? Or are they relics from some indeterminate war-era past? It's a happy moment when the former is the case; and there are often some wonderful things to be discovered within.

Bierly's meats, by all counts, is one such cabinet of wonders. The problem is, I've never managed to get there while it's open. A few Sundays ago we drove out to have brunch at the newly-opened Elk Creek (which was lovely), but the side-trip was in vain: the meat market is closed on Sundays. It is open on Saturdays, so when we made our way to Elk Creek's art opening/tavern menu event at around 4:30 yesterday afternoon, I had high hopes. But alas, I should have done my homework: Bierly's closes at 4 on Saturdays.

I have tasted bacon from this market, so I know it exists: P2 kindly brought us back some from a pilgrimage he made over the summer. Now it's my turn to repay the favor. Bacon for everyone in the neighborhood! I will go this week. Perhaps even tomorrow. Ah, but are they open Mondays?

I can't handle another disappointment of this magnitude!

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On a separate note, I did add bacon (ah, but workaday supermarket bacon) to the bread salad I described in yesterday's post.

It was fine. Whatever.

I Have a Confession...

So I was just at the local Y, wonder of wonders. The gym was nearly empty. It seems I am one of the few in my town still clinging idealistically to their post-New Year's workout fantasies. But perhaps there's a reason for the attrition: the TV in the gym was tuned to the Food Network, which, if you ask me, is downright sadistic.

To make matters worse, Giada de Lauretis was on. So much for my "low impact" workout.

So here's my confession: one of the recipes looked marvelous. It was for a panzanella— which is fun to make in the summer, and deeply satisfying (as mushy, oily, salty bread would naturally be)— but with artichoke hearts added to the mix. She used the frozen variety, thawed to room temperature. The masterstroke involved toasting the bread cubes and artichoke hearts on a grill-pan with a little olive oil.

If I can find some good off-season tomatoes tomorrow, I'll make this salad tomorrow night. Tonight, see, we are driving to the recently-opened Elk Creek Café in Millheim, PA, for some "Nouveau Dutchie" cuisine. I'm very excited. And we will, I hope, have time to buy some of the excellent Millheim bacon while we're there.

Ooh-- now, bacon in the panzanella would be fun. Take that, Giada! Take that, YMCA!

Shall I Compare Thee to a Vietnamese Hoagie?

Aside from a few dusty historians of Famous Roads and the odd admirer of columns and plumbing, there aren't as many people crowing about the marvels of colonialism as there used to be. Except for Sarkozy and the French right wing, perhaps. Which brings me to my point: here we are marking fully sixty years of active decolonization, and the foodies seem to be caught living in the past. For like mushrooms after a forest fire, foodies thrive in the aftermath of colonial encounters. From the Gin and Tonic to Thanksgiving Dinner-- I won't even mention atrocities like wasabi mashed potatoes and tunaburgers-- the creolization of kitchenstuffs is the by-product of all kinds of international pillage, whether mercantile borrowing or downright invasion. Empires expand, invade, and crumble. And the gastronomes are there, devouring the residue with ethnophilic glee.

How is one to feel about this?

I say: give praise to the Vietnamese Hoagie.

I have a theory here. The Vietnamese Hoagie, a hybrid of French baking and Vietnamese flavor management, is more than a simple colonial fancy. Rather, its presentation of the freshest indigenous ingredients— daikon, cucumber, basil, cilantro, mint, lime, and fish sauce— in tandem with a French pâté sandwich can be seen as a sub rosa response to the French occupation of Indochine. A long, thin, missile of flavor with the portability of a Parisian worker's lunch-on-the-go, this is a sandwich that shows the battle of appropriation to be two-sided.

Colonial administrators tend not to be the most reliable cooks, after all. In the kitchens, prep-cooks and minions rush around, thinking on the fly, finding ingredients where they must. I'm not saying that all kitchen workers, colonizer and colonized alike, share the same experience and thus form the heart of the global proletariat. Simply this: in all the hubbub, what comes to the fore is the question of available resources. Whenever Frenchie imports, or imposes, a cadre of professional bakers, this becomes a new resource for Vietnamese cooks. A new sandwich is born. Thus the French colonial policy of assimilation doesn't just work in one direction here: Vietnamese cuisine could, and did, rummage through the cultural belongings of the French. And they found the baguette.

I've been making a version of this Vietnamese hoagie for some years now, and I must say I'm looking forward to eating one made by someone else; but that will have to wait. Tonight, I've assembled the makings for my own bowdlerized version of this majestic artifact, and I will be putting them together shortly. It's become something of a staple around the house, and it's one of H's favorites.

There are three basic steps, each of which can be simplified or elaborated depending on resources, fatigue level, etc.

1) The fish sauce. Make a couple of tablespoons of simple syrup-- the microwave is fine for this. Add the juice of a lime, and a tablespoon or two of any good nam pla-type fish sauce, to taste. You can then either add a pinch of shredded pickled carrots and daikon, and/or peanuts, which would be more or less traditional. Or you could whisk in a dollop of a store-bought chile sauce with peanuts I use out of abject laziness.

2) The bread. Warm a good baguette in the oven at 300°, but not for so long as to make the bread brittle. And seriously, it has to be a good baguette. If you don't have a good baguette, then the whole deal is off. Get rice noodles instead and make a Bún.

3) The fixings. Assemble the meaty bits: a pâté of some variety, and/or tofu skin, and/or the lovely little spicy tofu chunks we use, and/or other fillings (shrimp, ham, head cheese, etc). With a mandoline, thinly slice daikon and peeled cucumber to line the sandwich, and clean a handful each of mint, thai basil, and cilantro. You can also slice some green onions lengthways and lay them across the top of the sandwiches.

The assembly is quite simple, but the trick is limiting the fillings so that the hoagie remains elegant and intact, or at least manageable. This almost never happens at home. But then almost noone is watching us eat at home. Slice the bread lengthwise, spread with a little butter and pâté (note that in our case tonight this will be the leftover pâté from the other night's Beef Wellington). Line the bread with the sliced vegetables, add any additional meat or tofu fillings, lay the herbs across the top, and season with the fish sauce. Or feel free to drown it with fish sauce at table, if this happens to be your fancy.

As with a lot of street food, the assembly is easy if the ingredients are all in place beforehand. Indeed, the whole dish might be considered a sandwich composed entirely of leftover meat and the standard mise-en-place for much Vietnamese cooking.

In all, an honorable sandwich. And thus:
Remember Dien Bien Phu! Remember Saigon! But remember the sandwich vietnamien!

A Polemical Afterthought:

Gastronomes are, of course, beginning to exercise their own form of anti-colonialism, but one more fitting their immediate needs. The invasion of fast-food chains into lush gastronomic paradises like New York, Paris, and the like may indeed be a form of colonial invasion in its own right (viz. the "McDonaldization" or "Starbuckization" of the world). But I would say-- perhaps a bit cynically-- that the foodies are getting excited largely because the indigenous economies being supplanted tend to be delicious. It's a politics based, we might say, on flavor rather than fervor. I'm not against them-- I'm all for slow foods, locally grown produce, fresh-killed and hand-fed meats, and the like-- but I do mistrust the tendency for much food journalism to label this a "trend" rather than a movement. The measure, ironically, of this movement is its ability to produce tasty food over a sustained period— which means, joking aside, something quite real: an economic commitment to learning the crafts of cheesemaking, baking, brewing, organic farming, and cooking. At this point it's no longer just a fad, but a way of life.

Professor Wellington, I Presume

Welcome, core peeps! It's New Year's day, and, though still bleary-eyed, I am going to write about food. This--the writing part, that is-- is all thanks to C-Spice and her remarkable baby blog.

But how do you write about food? A baby is a living organism, who grows and changes from moment to moment. Food, on the other hand, is just a category. One meal is replaced by another, in succession. One day you've dedicated yourself to a hamburger; another day it's a beet salad. Apples and oranges. Food doesn't accumulate or remember itself, except around the muffin-top.

And food doesn't speak. If, once upon a time, it had ever mooed or clucked or bleated, such activity will undoubtedly have ceased in the process of its transformation into food.

One could, of course, speak on food's behalf. But if we speak for it, whom does this benefit?
No: a food blog must remain content with taking note of the passing of food itself-- its transformations, its consumption, its digestion.

Which is, let's face it, the best part.

Today, before I forget, I want to dedicate some script to the memory of Arthur Wellesley. Not the Waterloo part, but the beef part.

I'll say this: It's hardly foolproof, but Beef Wellington remains a possibility.

Provided you're looking for a way to blow sixty or seventy bucks on a single dish, the old B.W. is something to consider for a party of non-vegetarians looking to dine on something festive. The trick is cooking it properly. As the (new) Joy tells us, getting the pastry shell crispy and golden without overcooking the tender beef inside is something of a challenge. Last night, that wasn't really the issue, though the meat was far from rare. The problem the other night was instead that I was rushing, and the supermarket had run out of pastry sheets. So I used two 9" round pie sheets, joined in the middle.

I don't recommend this. Not only did the seam not hold, but the pastry barely met in the middle when I wrapped up the beef, and thus the edifice crumbled in a few places. The visuals were compromised. It was still quite a tasty dish, though, and worth trying again. I thought it might be cloying, but with a little bordelaise sauce underneath the slice, and with a nice fruity red to accompany it, it didn't seem over-rich at all. But that's because we had another course to follow, and were sharing a four-pound piece of meat between seven people.

The assembly promises to be the easy part, which it is, provided you either make your own pastry dough or buy the right fricking shape. Here's a quick recitation:

First, there are the duxelles. What a fortuitous discovery-- these little buggers are pretty tasty all on their own. Chop up some mushrooms in the food processor and squeeze them through a kitchen towel; after all the pinkish liquid drains out, you have a big dry bolus of mushroom mulch. This process makes the mushrooms taste more, not less, mushroomy. You then add them to a pan of sautéed shallots in butter, cook for 5-6 minutes, add a little madeira and season, and you've got a delicious mushroomy paste. This might be nice on, say, a sandwich or something. Better yet, you could stuff it under a chicken skin before roasting it, perhaps with some butter to keep it from drying out.

You then mash this mushroomy goodness together with some liver pâté (or, if fortune is smiling, foie gras) and a wee bit more madeira and you've got the traditional filling for Beef Wellington. Or so I gather; this is all from the Joy. I bet truffles would fare well in this mixture as well, or at least a little truffle oil. Something to add a little brightness might also be welcome, but the vinegar in the Bordelaise sauce worked well here, too. Brightness isn't too much of a trouble if you don't overcook the meat.

The big player here is, of course, the beef. The ideal way to proceed here would be to buy only the true tenderloin itself, the heart of the cut. But the tenderloin I bought wasn't from a butcher, as I would have preferred. Instead it came in a sealed fridge-pack that looked like a little football. It was a center cut piece, which ended up having essentially two parts, the inner and the outer, with the outer part slightly more fibrous than the inner. But both were fine-- both pieces went into the pie, laid end to end. But I would imagine that the true tenderloin would have the finer texture.

Having admired the $44 cut of beef-- its fat, gristle, and silver skin lovingly removed with a sharp (or sharp-ish) knife-- you sear it VERY briefly in a hot pan (having brought a mix of butter and oil to the smoking point). When it cools, you spread out some pastry dough wide enough to wrap around the tenderloin (this requires foresight), spread a layer of the duxelles-pâté mixture under and around the beef, and wrap the whole thing up.

Again, here's where things went a little wobbly last night: the pastry didn't cover the meat fully enough, and it felt like wrapping a present with too small a piece of wrapping paper. So the dough got a little stretched. Also, the outer piece of the loin had a tendency to flap open like a butterfly, and as that gap opened up, it pulled against the dough and caused problems. So in the future, I would a) get the right piece of beef, and b) get the right piece of pastry dough.
So even though I'd vented the pastry, it created its own natural vents as well.

I cooked it for about 30-35 minutes in a 400 oven; the dough looked close to being golden, but by then the meat was well on its way-- already 120 when I checked. And since it continues to cook within its pastry shell even after it's left the oven, it should come out by 115 or so. I think an oven temperature of 425 for a shorter period of time would work better, at least for a smallish loin piece.

A well-constructed Beef Wellington, with pastry decorations and the like, would look marvelous on the table, a Spanish galleon brimming with treasure. And since the meat is really tender, it would be easy to carve. But I served up this sloppy mess in the kitchen, adding sauce to the plate and chopped parsley to the top, in order to spruce things up as much as possible. It really was quite tasty, especially since we didn't eat too much of it. Counter-intuitively, I might suggest this as an opening course, much like beef cheeks-- rich, but served in small portions.
We then had boiled lobsters (served out of the shell) and a lovely mâche salad made by A., the salad master.

This meal, incidentally, will cause you to gain over four pounds in one evening. It did for me.