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.