Simple Cooking electronic edition

Issue No. 95 PINE NUTS { PIÑON NUTS Five Dollars Hanging Out at Pine Nut Perplex ntil recently, pine nuts were pretty much strangers to our pantry. They entered my life as a cook in the the No-Name Uearly 70s, when I discovered pesto, which, the first time I licked some off my finger, overwhelmed my taste A Diner Story (with Recipes) buds and showered my brain with sparks of light. Half a century later, it’s hard to explain what that was all about The Story So Far: On a run-down part of Water Street sits — I’m not sure I understood it at the time. It was just a tiny, brightly painted, nameless diner. Alec, our narrator, something that happened. It would still be years before who owns a used-book store in the row of Victorian com- I tried to find words to describe that sort of excitement. mercial buildings that loom beside it, has gradually become The only one that came to mind right then was: more. a regular, getting to know the Professor (the burly, bearded As you know, pesto’s essential components are proprietor and grill cook), Greg (the waitron/busboy/ so few that they can be counted on one hand: cheese, dishwasher), and, more recently, the Professor’s teenage basil, olive oil, garlic, pine nuts. When I started making it daughter, Jess. In the past few episodes, the Professor has myself, the process turned into an education. For decent been in hot pursuit of the quintessential pea soup recipe. olive oil, I had to go to shops in Boston’s North End, that lthough I like split pea soup well enough, I have to city’s “Little Italy,” where exotic tins of imported olive oil admit that the thought of the perfect version has were stacked in piles (I bought Sicilian brands for their never kept me up at night — or, to be honest, en- discernible fruitiness — “extra-virgin” olive oil had yet to A make an appearance). tered my mind at all. It took weeks of all that exploratory ferment at the diner for me to realize that this very same There, too, bunches of fresh basil could be bought soup played a minor role in my own specialized area of in summer (impossible to find anywhere else), as could interest, the American Civil War — specifically, the flood fist-sized heads of garlic (the eunuchoidal ones at the su- of ephemera (autobiographies, broadsheets, letters, songs, permarket were the size of walnuts and, for your olfactory various memorabilia) produced by the participants. protection, were enclosed in little cardboard containers My Civil War collection fills only a few book- with cellophane windows). Finally, you could get hold real cases, and those stand in relative safety directly be- Parmigiano-Reggiano by the piece (in the supermarket hind my desk. This, small as it is, supports the rest of it was never genuine and always grated), plus Pecorino the store, which exists pretty much because it offers Sardo, if you wanted to go that extra authentic step. By a welcome alternative to spending my working hours in then, though, my wallet was empty. the spare bedroom at home, where I might be expected to What I can’t remember to save my life is how I take a few minutes now and then to fix a leaky faucet or got hold of pine nuts. There was no question that I did, put the laundry into the dryer. Here, my catalog browsing and general musings are interrupted only when a customer finds his or her way to my door — or, to be truthful, when one of these lost souls actually buys a book. I digress. Split pea soup. I spun around in my desk chair and reached down the extremely thin (fourteen pages) and equally rare copy of James M. Sanderson’s Camp Fires and Camp Cooking; or Culinary Hints for the Soldier, published in 1862 at the behest of the Army of the Potomac. It is so short because at the time there were no army cooks as such; every soldier either cooked for himself or turned his short list of rations over to a com- rade with more culinary skills who had volunteered to do continued on page 7 because I do remember being totally unimpressed: to The price differential between Asian and Mediter- me, those small, flaccid, slightly off-tasting lozenges were ranean pine nuts is incredible. When I went to buy some pesto’s single flaw. I wasn’t the only one to think this — true Italian-grown pignoli, I found that the best price online as pesto caught on in the USA, food writers increasingly was thirty dollars for half a pound! I sent the purveyor a suggested replacing them with a more flavorful nutmeat: five-dollar bill and begged him to send me a tiny sample. walnuts, in particular, although I became enamored with He did — a sprinkling in a first-class envelope, which pecans. Not in the least authentic, but infinitely better. meant that most of them got mashed en route. Italian Time passed, and eventually it was today. pine nuts (or, to be truthful, their crumbs), I learned, are Every summer, a big blue ceramic pot of basil sits perceptibly sweeter, with a deliciously delicate flavor, and on the sill of our living room window. We snip a few leaves would be wonderful in pastries. now and then through the early summer, until August, Still and all, the more assertive presence of when all the remain are fed, handful by handful, to the the Asian sort is — to my mind — actually preferable food processor. This is the only way to get pesto that still in savory dishes, and I’m certain that the “expensive” knocks my socks off — even the artisanal store bought container of pine nuts I had just nervously bought came versions lack the essential magic and, what’s worse, eat from Asia, not the Mediterranean. These were noticeably away at the mouth’s memory of the real thing. Sadly, flavor good simply because they were fresh. When the cost of notes take flight the moment you open the processor (or, if pignoli went through the roof, Italian food importers you’re more virtuous than I, lift the pestle from the mortar). simply switched to Asian pine nuts, either not knowing You have to eat it while you’re still half drunk from the (or not caring) that this variety had a higher oil content alchemy that transmutes those raw, pungent ingredients and hence a greater susceptibility to going rancid. The into a silky, vegetative, potently luscious sauce. trick is to skip the supermarket. At Trader Joe’s, we Only one ingredient is never at hand, must be can buy eight-ounce bags of Asian pine nuts, for eight put on the shopping list. “Pine nuts. Substitute pecans? dollars or so, that are fresh when opened and stay that roasted almonds?” Then the dithering begins, brought on way for months if kept in the freezer. by the haunting feeling that some scintilla of delicious- Even so, their flavor slowly deteriorates — flattens ness is mocking me as I pass it by. So, this time around is the word — so it wasn’t just curiosity that impelled my — screw it — I decided to buy the best pine nuts I could search for more things to make with them. The first dish to find. Hesitantly. The price was eighteen dollars a pound. come to mind was another of our pasta favorites, spaghetti Of course, I didn’t buy nearly that much, but still.... Ex- tossed with a variety of sautéed mushrooms (cremini, shii- cept it proved to be money well spent. take, oyster, etc., plus rehydrated porcini for the sauce).­ These pine nuts had an entrancing taste, sweetly This proved a fine idea: the pine nuts and the mushrooms nutty with the faintest whisper of pine. They showed up were complementarily bosky, and the resulting dish was substitutes like walnuts for the coarse bumpkins they simpler and better than the one I wrote about decades ago were, too oafish for a dish as tightly tuned as pesto. As in “Russians and Mushrooms” (SC•29). I savored them, I slowly realized that the turpentine-y However, it turned out that the olive oil in which undertone that I’d always assumed to be a central flavor I toasted the pine nuts was by itself one of the most deli- note was in fact … rancidity.* Here I was, in my seventies, cious things I had ever tasted (better by far than pricey tasting for the first time pine nuts that weren’t already Siberian pine nut oil), and it challenged me to come up rancid when I bought them. As Wikipedia reports in its with a pasta dish that took full advantage of it. Imme- entry on the subject: diately that empty larder standby — pasta tossed with Unshelled pine nuts have a long shelf life if kept dry and toasted bread crumbs — waved its hand. Yes, I thought, refrigerated ... ; shelled nuts (and unshelled nuts in warm if I browned the bread crumbs in pine-nut-flavored olive conditions) deteriorate rapidly, becoming rancid within a few oil and tossed them into the spaghetti with toasted pine weeks or even days in warm humid conditions. nuts … that should shoot the dish into pine nut heaven. It didn’t hurt that over the years my concept of As the pesto came together, I was greeted by a what constitutes “bread crumbs” in recipe preparations vivid sensory recall of that original epiphany, the pine nuts had evolved, spurred in part by the arrival in our kitchen at last adding their clear voice to the choir. And since I of the Japanese bread fragments called panko.* Until couldn’t keep myself from nibbling on them — or, more to then, I’d never used a commercial bread crumb, which the point, stop myself once started — I felt compelled to universally taste like factory floor sweepings. Panko, search through our cookbook library to find some other however, has a crisper, airier texture that holds its shape interesting culinary tricks they could perform, and, in and resists getting sodden with grease, which is why it’s the process, learn what this odd little nut was all about. such a spectacular coating for deep-fried food. Panko fragments, however, were too small for my purpose here,† but I was sure I could create the same effect using an artisanal loaf made simply of flour, water, salt, here are about twenty species of pine tree that pro- and starter. Such a loaf is open-textured (so the crumbs duce nuts large enough to eat, each with its own would be airy) and at the same time chewy (so that the T shape and particular taste. However, only a few of crumbs would have the right crunchy texture). Such bread them are available in commercial quantities. These come is increasingly common — but bakers are inconsistent in mostly from the Mediterranean and the Far East (about their names for it. You’ll know it when you see it. It is the our native pine nuts, see the separate account starting on * Panko is a conjoining of “pan” (the Japanese word for bread) and “ko” page 4). The most affordable varieties come from China, (which in this case means something little, and so: crumbs — though Korea, Vietnam, and Siberia. one translator renders “panko” as “bread children,” which I love). † As it turned out, I did eventually find a brand of American-made, *You may have heard of “pine nut syndrome,” which transforms your super-quality panko that came close to what I was looking for. Turn taste buds into metal detectors — “Hey, this custard tastes like old to the panko notes on page 12 to read more on what I learned about lead sewer pipes!” It lasts only a few weeks (usually), but while it panko in general and this brand of panko in particular. does, and I speak from experience, it is scary and nasty. This isn’t rancidity, but something worse. You’ll find an explanation for why page two it happens and how to avoid it in the pine nut notes on page 4. antithesis of the tender, fine-crumbed American loaf; even and informative Cook’s Encyclopedia of Food, describes fresh from the oven the crust is brittle. Crumble a dried some of the lesser-known ones: salsa al funghi (soaked slice between your fingers, and it shatters into shards. dried Italian mushrooms pounded with garlic, anchovy, pine nuts, and tomato), salsa alla genovese (pine nuts pounded with capers, anchovy, parsley, and olives, with Pasta with Pan-Toasted Pine Nuts & a dash of garlic and vinegar), and salsa verde alla geno- vese (pine nuts pounded with basil, garlic, anchovy, salt, Crispy Bread Shards and oil), typically served with the boiled meats known as bollito misto. To Make the Bread Shards. Preheat the oven to 300°F. What I was looking for, however, were recipes Estimate how many thin slices of bread you’ll need to end up with a generous half cup of crumbs. Cut them and set that spotlight the pine nut’s particular pleasures, and them directly on the oven rack. Close the door and turn off had no luck at all until I stumbled across this omelette in the oven. By the time the oven has cooled, the bread should Elizabeth David’s French Provincial Cooking (1960). It be dried out but not browned. Remove them, and if they’re hails from Landes, a département in the southwest with cool enough to handle, wrap them in a dish towel and use great plantations of pine trees. your hands to break them into small shards about the size of raisins. Stubborn chunks can be dealt with using the Omelette Landaise. Three or four tablespoons of pine-nuts are very gently flat side of a chef’s knife. Put the shards into a small bowl, heated in butter in the omelette pan until they just barely begin to turn colour. sieving out the crumbs for another use. No harm in doing Take care, because they burn in a twinkling, and they have to go on cooking after an extra amount — plastic-bag and freeze them. the eggs, beaten with salt and pepper, are poured into the pan and the omelette To Make the Dish Itself. In this instance, Matt and I prefer made in the usual way. This is a rather odd dish, but not without charm. thin spaghetti. The pasta is snapped into thirds as it goes into Making the dish, I discovered that “not without charm” is the pot because the shorter lengths make it easier to capture some of the nuts and toasted bread with each bite. a polite equivalent of “meh.” So I tinkered with the recipe a bit and came up with this. serves 2 1 /3 cup richly flavored olive oil Omelet with Pine Nuts & Crème Fraîche 1/4 cup pine nuts • salt serves 1 1/2 cup coarse, dried but not toasted bread shards 2 tablespoons crème fraîche, brought to room temperature 1 or 2 garlic cloves, minced 1 4 1/4 teaspoon red pepper flakes 2 tablespoons butter, divided • / cup pine nuts 6 ounces thin spaghetti 1 small shallot, minced or very thinly sliced 1/4 cup freshly minced flat-leaf parsley 2 or 3 eggs • 2 tablespoons water salt and black pepper fine sea salt and black pepper to taste • Preheat your oven to its lowest setting. Lightly oil your pasta • Spoon the crème fraîche into a little ramekin to warm bowl and put it inside the oven to warm. Fill your designated up. Put an omelet pan (or 10-inch skillet) over gentle heat pasta pot with water and bring it to a boil over high heat. Set a and add 1 tablespoon of the butter. When it melts, add the 10-inch skillet over a medium flame, and pour in the remain- pine nuts, the shallot, and a pinch of salt. Stir to coat the ing olive oil. When this is hot enough to release some aroma, nuts with butter and salt, then occasionally as they toast. quickly stir in the pine nuts, stir-tossing with a flexible spatula Beat the eggs vigorously with the water, seasoning them so that everything is coated in oil. Sprinkle them with a pinch to your own taste with salt and pepper. of salt. Immediately turn down the flame. As soon as the pine nuts start to color, watch them like a hawk. The idea isn’t to get • Once the shallot-pine nut mixture has taken on color, everything uniformly toasty — the nuts should just be dappled remove it to a plate. Turn up the heat under the pan, add here and there with a touch of brown. Once that has happened. the rest of the butter, and, once it melts, pour over the use a slotted spoon to remove them from the oil. beaten eggs. Proceed as with any omelette, gently shaking • Return the pan to the flame and stir in the bits of dried bread, the pan to keep the eggs from sticking as they set, then making sure to coat them, too, with the now flavored oil. Keep tilting the pan and gently lifting the omelet’s edges with a gently turning them until they are lightly toasted. Then add the flexible spatula to let the liquid on top slip underneath. As chopped garlic and red pepper flakes. Stir this to coat the garlic soon as the top of the omelette is semi-firm, turn down the with the oil, and, as soon as it becomes translucent, return the heat all the way. Spoon the crème fraîche in little dollops toasted pine nuts to the pan, toss everything together, turn off over half of the omelet’s surface. Sprinkle with the toasted the flame, and let all this sit while you cook the pasta. pine nuts and shallot, gently fold the omelet over and slide •Salt the boiling pasta water as you usually do. When it onto a warmed plate, flipping it over at the same time, the water returns to a full boil, toss in the thin spaghetti, so its glossy, buttery bottom is on display. Eat at once. breaking the strands into thirds as you do. Stir at once, then occasionally during cooking to keep the strands from clumping together. • Just before the pasta is done to your liking, use a mea- suring cup to scoop out some pasta water. Set this aside. When the pasta is done, drain, and dump into the oiled bowl. Sprinkle over the contents of the skillet (scraping out every bit of oil) and the minced parsley and quickly toss everything together. If the dish seems too dry, add a drizzle of the reserved pasta water — and not a whit more. Serve at once with a salad of sharp greens. There are numerous traditional recipes calling for pine nuts, but almost all of these grind them up to use as part of a confection* or a sauce, as, most typically, in our pal pesto alla genovese. Tom Stobart, in his literate *The use of pine nuts in desserts and confectionery is a story for someone else to tell. This is partly due to my lack of a sweet tooth and partly because the genuine and wholly unaffordable pignoli, page three with its delicate sweetness, is best for such treats. uts of any sort don’t usually make their way into onions-and-greens mixture. Now arrange equal portions of our cooking, although I’m not sure whether this is the caramelized onions, the toasted pine nuts, and a small a matter of taste or accident; we don’t use cheese as heap of the freshly crumbled goat cheese around the edge N of each bowl, so that the eater can casually work a taste an ingredient all that much, either. So it says something of one or another into each bite. about the hold that pine nuts have over me that one of our favorite dishes in the past year contains both. It is a No matter if you rarely or never make pesto, you’ll find that a little bag of pine nuts in your freezer can yield ةبدنه) reworking of a Lebanese dish called hindbeh b-zeit I saw a photo of it, and the dish so quickly came to some nifty dividends. (Try them added to spaghetti with .(تيزلاب life in my imagination that authenticity had already been crushed garlic and blanched French-cut green beans.) The jettisoned by the time my eye reached the recipe. I went thing to remember is that unless they’re truly fresh they’re my own way and I’m glad I did. best toasted (even for pesto) — since that act coaxes out The particular magic of the dish lies not only in its their subtle mellowness, pretty much unique in the world nicely calibrated blend of flavors and textures but in its of nut meats. Still, even these won’t prepare you for the unexpected elegance — as if it had fled a society gathering entrancing flavor of pine nuts fresh from the shell … which to chum around with us. I’ll take a modest bit of credit brings us to my second great pine nut adventure. ♦ for this, since I replaced the tongue-throttling bitterness of dandelion greens with a range of less acerbic ones and A Note on Pine Nut Syndrome. the strong-armed saltiness of feta with the softer tang of fresh goat cheese. his can happen about two days after eating pine nuts Tand can persist for two weeks (usually, but not always) before it goes away. While it lasts, almost everything you Chickpeas, Wilted Salad Greens, Pine Nuts, eat has an intensely bitter, metallic taste, which is not only extremely unpleasant but rather frightening, especially and Fried Onions when you go to a doctor only to discover they haven’t a clue ( to as what’s wrong. Fortunately, these days you can solve serves 2 or 3 all your medical problems online. Just joking! But I did at least learn a lot about this ailment when it struck me. 1 16-ounce (more or less) can of chickpeas • salt At the time, I was buying Trader Joe’s pine nuts, 1 bay leaf and 1 small hot pepper (dried or fresh) which were sourced as coming from China, and I immedi- ately thought that this particular supply had been somehow 5 tablespoons (more or less) extra-virgin olive oil contaminated. (Sorry, China, but your reputation for food 2 tablespoons pine nuts contamination is not exactly sterling.) This also made sense 4 onions, cut in half then sliced into 1/2-inch wedges because pine mouth had happened to me only once, even though I had eaten a lot of TJ’s pine nuts. I decided not 2 large cloves of garlic, finely chopped to go on playing pine-nut-syndrome roulette, and bought a 12-ounce head of a lettuce with attitude, such as pine nuts only when they were sourced from Korea, Russia, escarole, torn into bite-size pieces and/or Vietnam. And it worked. 1/4 cup lemon juice This wasn’t my problem alone, of course, and there 1 tiny log of fresh goat cheese, gently crumbled was some interest internationally in finding out the cause — especially since it was a quite recent phenomenon, first • Empty the can of chickpeas into a small pot. Refill the recorded in 2001 by the Belgian Poisons Centre. Tests found can half full with hot water from the tap, swirl it around, and add this to the pot as well, along with one teaspoon of no chemical contaminants, chemical residue, or bacteria the salt, a bay leaf and a small hot pepper. Bring this to a on the nuts that would had affected eaters. So much for quiet simmer on a back burner and leave it there the while. my theory. However, eventually they did find that Chinese middlemen, when drought drastically cut the supply of • Pour a tablespoon of the olive oil into a small skillet and put over low heat. When the oil is hot, stir in the pine nuts, edible pine nuts, began mixing in nuts gathered from a turning them gently to coat them with the oil. Continue to variety of the Chinese white pine, Pinus armandii, which toast them over low heat, turning regularly, until they are has long been designated “unfit for human consumption.” a mottled tan. Keep an eye on them — they’ve got theirs Unfortunately, pine nuts gathered from Pinus on you and burn the moment you let them slip from your armandii looked and tasted like other Chinese pine nuts. mind. A small pinch of salt isn’t required but won’t be Many shipments were sold before the alarm was sounded. amiss. When done, pour the pine nuts into a small bowl, But when it did, those Chinese dealers found themselves leaving any surplus oil in the skillet. hoist on their own petard, because once the syndrome had • Heat 2 tablespoons of the olive oil in a large skillet (I use a been traced to China, reputable suppliers stopped buy- 12-inch wok), add the onion pieces, sprinkling them with a ing Chinese pine nuts altogether. As Trader Joe’s stated generous pinch of salt, and sauté them over medium-high when I wrote to ask: “Our pine nuts are not sourced from heat, stirring often, until they are translucent and tender. China and we will not be sourcing this item from there in • Transfer half the onion mixture into the waiting small the future.” And I got the same response from nuts.com, skillet. Set this over medium-high heat and, again stirring a major quality online purveyor. occasionally, sauté these until they become richly brown. In short: to avoid playing pine-nut-syndrome • In the larger skillet, stir the chopped garlic into the roulette, don’t buy any pine nuts imported from China (or remaining onions. Once the garlic is translucent, add anyplace where the nut’s origins are not revealed).* the remaining 2 tablespoons of olive oil, then turn in the greens, handful by handful. Don’t be alarmed if these fill * Obviously, this won’t be true forever; the Chinese govern- the skillet — they will quickly shrink after a minute or two ment is trying to get the producers to clean up their act. But, of cooking — just keep turning them over with a spatula. once burnt, twice learnt. I would also like to tip my hat to The goal is to cook them just to the point where they wilt Grace Tan Hui Shan, who won a Unilever prize for her thesis but still have some texture (i.e., don’t let them collapse into on pine nut syndrome, a model of investigative research. a soggy mass). Remove them at once from the heat and It’s available online at pinenutsyndrome.wordpress.com . dress with the lemon juice, adding salt to taste. • To Serve: Divide the chickpeas and their liquid into two or three large soup bowls, then spoon over the sautéed page four our winnowing. In fact, spitting out the shells (especially Some Thoughts on Indian Nuts at each other) soon became more appealing than actually In a recent piece, I wondered whatever became of India nuts, eating the hard-to-get-to nuts. Once we pulled into our those tiny nuts we bit open to get at a kernel that wasn’t driveway at Fort Bliss and my mother got a sight of the worth the work. I can hear it now: the relentless cracking back seat, no pine nut ever darkened our Buick again. sounds around me in the cheap back-balcony seats at the Loews 83rd Street movie house. —William Safire 2/12/89 afire was writing a follow-up column because his readers had written in to correct the then New York STime’s language authority — his “India nuts” were [Piñon nuts] grow only under conditions that defy cultivation, in fact called “Indian nuts,” a once-popular term for piñon fertilization, irrigation, and all kinds of mechanical or American pine nuts. Hard as it to believe, these native spraying, harvesting and shelling. All operations are done nuts grew increasingly popular in the first half of the last by hand, in competition with rats, birds and insects. century. Sales started at a crawl at first, but by 1936, — Jasper Guy Woodroof, Tree Nuts thousand of tons were being harvested, and most of them s often happens when something from your child- went to cities on the East Coast. New York was obviously hood suddenly reappears in your adult life, it took one of them, hence the young Safire cracking and spitting A me a bit to connect those piñon nuts to the pine his way through a sackful, engrossed in Bury Me Dead. nuts for which I was now acquiring a taste. For one thing, Indian nuts had vanished by the time I got into a I had been thinking pignoli and, by extension, Mediter- New York City movie theater (although I don’t remember ranean cooking; for another, these were soft and tender, the floors being any cleaner), but I had my own childhood while “piñon” conjured up hard little shells. But eventu- encounter with them in the early 50s, when I was ten or ally the coin dropped and I set out to learn more about so years old. My family lived then in El Paso, Texas. My piñon nuts, maybe even to get hold of some. mother was a big believer in taking a Sunday drive, and It turned out that the Thorne family’s encounter we made regular forays into New Mexico, to Carlsbad with pine nuts was a bellwether for the future of the indus- Caverns, White Sands National Monument, and, most try: it was about to go bust. The Bureau of Indian Affairs memorably, Lincoln National Forest, high up in the Sac- estimated that the 1960 harvest was about 125 tons, an ramento Mountains. enormous drop from crop yields twenty years before. And To get there, our Buick Special had to climb five things continued to get worse — the piñon pine was falling thousand feet in sixteen miles, taking us from the Chi- victim to a kind of agricultural perfect storm. Cattlemen huahuan Desert at the bottom to what is known as an already saw the piñon forests as wasted grazing land, alpine “sky island” at the top, the temperature falling as and their complaints led the U.S. Forest Service and the we climbed up into a great pine forest. This was when we Bureau of Land Management to designate the tree an kids put down our comic books and actually looked out “invasive plant.” This, in turn, led to the “rehabilitation” of the car windows, as each sharp turn revealed another millions of acres by massive deforestation via axe-cutting, breathtaking vista. Before entering the park proper, we herbicides, and eighty-ton “Tree Crushers” that flattened would stop in the town of Cloudcroft for cold drinks, then the trees and chopped them into firewood. head into the national forest for an old-fashioned picnic. Nor was deforestation the piñon pine’s only en- The cool, pine-scented air brought both my parents emy. Increasingly, lengthy dry spells weakened the trees, back to the Maine of their childhoods, which put them in making them susceptible to the highly destructive Piñon an especially good mood, and thus willing to buy us kids Ips beetle. The same weather can also mean that the trees — just this one time — a small burlap sack of Indian nuts yield pine nuts that are all shell and no meat, if there’s any when we stopped for gas. I’m sure my parents thought crop at all. Considering that the cones take two years to this would be an easy way to keep us occupied during the mature, it’s clear why large-scale growing and harvesting drive home (“Aren’t we there yet?!”), and indeed it was. of piñon nuts had become a pretty dumb way to make a We had never got hold of Indian nuts before, and I’m not living. These days, on years when there actually is a crop, sure that my parents had, either. My mother must have hardy individual pickers head out into the forests and glanced in the sack, saw nothing but innocent little brown scrublands to gather the nuts, either to eat themselves, nuts, and passed it back to us. hawk by the side of the highway, or sell wholesale to local In Stalking the Healthful Herbs, Euell Gibbons or online merchants. describes the ideal way of eating them: This sort of ad hoc harvesting hasn’t the scale or My father used to hire Indian laborers, and they would often distribution network to make piñon nuts generally avail- bring no lunch except a bag of piñon nuts. At noon they able — and so they have fallen out of popular memory and would sit in the shade and feed these nuts into one corner of their mouths and the empty shells would dribble out the other corner. The whole process of shelling, mastication, and swallowing went on simultaneously inside their mouths, with never a chewed shell or a wasted piece of edible nut, and in half an hour they had made a good meal. It takes years of practice to acquire this skill, but I have known white boys in New Mexico who could eat piñon nuts in this manner as well as any Indian. We, of course, knew nothing of such wonders. Gradually, unknown to our parents, the back seat became a sea of shell fragments and the tiny bits of nut meat that escaped * Piñon nut gathering also has some unique difficulties, as you can learn in this 1977 issue of Mother Earth News: tinyurl.com/mt9o2gk. page five Piñon nuts packed in burlap bags for shipment, Santa Fe NM, 1921. so are less likely to appear in books about our culinary which I finally did when I got some to roast myself. history. The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Food Roasting pine nuts falls into that oxymoronic category “easy- and Drink hardly mentions them at all (except as an hard” in the same sense that playing the recorder does — the important food of Native Americans*), and back as far instrument is very easy to play but very difficult to play well. as the late seventies, they slipped right past Raymond (Having experienced both, I overwhelmingly vote for pine Sokolov when he wrote Fading Feast: A Compendium nuts.) I learned all I know on this subject from Penny Fra- of Disappearing American Regional Foods. zier’s website (see above). Her method involves soaking the nuts in a brine to plump them up and add a trace of salt to Consequently, If you don’t live in New Mexico or their flavor. This is optional — which I know from experience, the few other Western states where piñon nuts are gath- since I hadn’t read her full method when I did my first batch. ered, you have to go very much out of your way to get • For best results soak the pine nuts in water or a light salt hold of them. At first, my efforts at this were pretty half- brine (1 tablespoon pure salt to every quart of water) over- hearted — I’ve never understood the attraction of using night. Preheat the oven to 325°F (if you have thick-shelled your mouth to crack open a fistful of toasted sunflower or New Mexican piñones, make that 350°F). Drain the nuts in pumpkin seeds for the not-all-that-tasty nubbins hiding a strainer, then spread them on a foil-lined cookie sheet and inside. Just ask my ten-year-old self. But that opinion was pop that into the oven. In about 15 minutes the kitchen will turned on its head when I received my first order of raw fill with a wonderful pine aroma. After 25 minutes, start test- ing. (If you don’t soak the nuts first, the cooking time will be “jumbo” Nevada soft-shell pine nuts from Penny Frazier’s shorter — adjust accordingly.) The perfectly roasted pine nut website pinenut.com.† is tan with hints of butterscotch, the texture dry but tender, Yes, it turns out that our native pine nuts aren’t the taste delicious. (Penny says to chuck them if they get limited to New Mexico’s iconic piñon nuts (Pinus edulis) brown ... but, really, they aren’t so bad.) — which may have a bit more flavor but are also more Roasting Them In The Cone. Don’t do this unless you’re difficult to crack. The nuts from the Pinus monophylla, really curious. I was just that, and I’m glad I did it — once. found in the Great Basin area of Utah and Nevada, are I ordered mine from Penny Frazier. Fresh from the tree, not only insanely larger (“jumbo” is a mere euphemism) they are sticky with resinous pitch and the color of cooked but their thin shell allows them to be cracked open with a artichokes. I spread them out on a cookie sheet and put them in a preheated 300°F oven. In a half hour or so, the little pressure between fingers or teeth. Raw, they have a pine cones turned a deep brown and opened up to reveal delicate, pine-kissed, almost melt-in-the-mouth softness; the nuts ... also toasted and easy to remove. However, my roasted, that same flavor comes wrapped in toasty, buttery cookie sheet now had gobs of pine pitch all over it, which notes. Once you experience this, you can’t avoid noticing proved the very devil to get off (as it is if you get it on your the exhausted-from-the-journey taste of Asian pine nuts. clothes or hands). However, this wasn’t the deal breaker: the Only Turkish pistachios have made me so happy, next time I would just line the pan with aluminum foil. No, the reason that there would not be a next time was that half and no other nut has made me so sad ... how could the shells were empty. something this wondrous have been allowed to slip, almost absentmindedly, out of our culinary patrimony? Soaking Them In Vodka. This potent beverage originated in the dense forests of eastern Siberia, where pine nuts (and The answer, alas, is obvious: because no corporation has vodka) are a major part of the diet. It is best made with hard ever found a way to make tons of money from them. The pine nuts, which have more of the essential oils and tannins only hope is that our growing tribe of master foragers will that provide the drink with its color and unique taste. Pour sometime do for them what they’ve already done in the out a third of the bottle, refill with pine nuts in the shell, and Northwest for our native bounty of wild mushrooms. ♦ store it away on a dark shelf for a month or more (the longer you store it, the darker it gets — and no one is stopping you from the occasional taste test). Then move the bottle directly Roasting Pine Nuts In The Shell to the freezer, since this vodka is not meant to be a mixer but espite the fact I knew about pine nuts since I was a kid to be drunk in small, intensely flavored shots. And if you’re the sort who eats the pear in a bottle of poire William, feel Dand have spent most of my adult life in areas where free to nosh on the vodka infused nuts. Otherwise, bad idea. pine cones were easy to come by, it only recently occurred to me that I had never seen a single one “In the spring we would collect lots of young crickets when they are young. We used to mash them and dry them between containing nuts, even teeny tiny ones. The cones stones and eat them in pine-nut soup. That’s very rich food.” were either on the pine tree, closed tight, or on Recollected by Gladys Williams, resident of Battle Mountain the ground, wide open. Was there some magical NV, on March 16, 1978. — quoted in Ronald Lanner’s The night when, us humans all asleep, they opened Piñon Pine: A Natural and Cultural History. up and dropped their bounty to a waiting crowd of squirrels and chipmunks? Not at all. In fact, I had seen pine cone seeds countless times, but as part of the detritus to be raked up every the fall. The “ordinary” pine code seed is very tiny and attached to a scale (think very hard petal) that spins it away from the tree. Piñon tree cones, in contrast, are so seed bulging with nuts that the tree has to cover them with strands of sap or they would come showering down whenever the wind blew. You can’t really grasp how dif- ferent they are from the usual pine cone until you hold one of those sticky, nut-bulging objects in your hand — †And a very important food it was, too. The University of Nevada offers an interesting twenty minute video on the pine nut’s traditional role in the life of the Washoe at tinyurl.com/k9c33bw. †Well worth visiting not only to buy pine nuts but to learn more about the piñon nut and other native American foods — or just to experience Pasta with toasted bread crumbs and pine nuts. Penny’s spirited determination to reinstate the fruits of our American wilderness as a significant part of our everyday life. page six the cooking for his unit. Rations were limited and cooking and very flattened object. equipment primitive; a large recipe collection would only He picked up a metal-bladed spatula and care- startle (and maybe frighten) the volunteer cook. fully pried this object free from the grill, slid it onto a In other words, novelty was neither expected nor plate, and set it before me. wanted. The eaters were satisfied if the food wasn’t burnt, “Cue the trumpets,” Jess muttered behind me. hadn’t been allowed to go bad, and filled the stomach; “Behold!” Greg said triumphantly. “The cutting huzzahs were awarded to the cooks who could take the edge of hamburgerology … The Flat Boy!” same old stuff and make it memorable — which was mostly a matter of getting everything right. Focus, Alec, focus! Pea soup. Here it was and … a a a uh oh … the recipe began, “For some unexplained reason, hat sat on the plate before me was a hamburger, this is by no means popular with the troops, and large true enough, but one that had just emerged quantities are constantly returned to the commissary.” Wfrom the nether side of a steamroller. Still, it was In Sanderson’s opinion, this was not the fault of the split clearly more than that — my fictive steamroller had fried pea but the cook. His recipe did sound good — but es- it to a crisp as it was squashing it flat … so flat that it sentially it just added split peas to his recipe for salt-pork was right now leaking juices, nay, grease onto my plate. soup. Somehow, I intuited, this was not going to fly at the Impossible to put this delicately: hamburger as road kill. No-Name. Greg’s impatient vibrations made me feel as On the other hand, his soup of mashed white though I were being molested by a theramin, so I stopped beans and salt pork sounded mighty tasty. Maybe it was examining the thing, lifted it up, and took a bite. As soon time for the Professor to broaden his approach. Although as I did, I realized this had never been a burger. Greg had my copy of Camp Fires and Camp Cooking was in pretty put raw ground beef and a slice of cheese into a bun and decent shape for a 150-year-old pamphlet, I wasn’t going stuck them under a kind of super bacon press. to let it near the inside of a scanner. I picked up a pen So, while the outside of the Flat Boy was crisp and carefully copied out the recipe. Then I folded it, put almost to crunchy, on the inside it was like a fatty meat it in a shirt pocket, summoned Sasha, who was snoring pie. True, grease is the ultimate burger flavor enhancer, in her dog bed, and headed over to the No-Name for a but the idea is to cook (or to press) it out onto the grill, late lunch. Today was Wednesday, and with luck there leaving just the flavor behind — a detail that seemed to would be one serving of the diner’s macaroni and cheese have slipped Greg’s mind. with my name on it. “Amazing!” I said, honestly. “The illegitimate I realized that the Professor might not be there. This offspring of a hamburger and a panini sandwich.” was the time he went out to tend to various errands. As I “Yes, Alec! I knew you’d get it!” Greg was about entered the diner, his absence was confirmed when I was to say more, but a car pulled up outside. He jumped. greeted with a cloud of greasy smoke —not the Professor’s “Excuse me a minute,” he said. He was still wearing the modus operandi. oven mitt, so it took but a moment to grab hold of his The place was empty of customers. Jess was jury-rigged meat press and hustle it into the kitchen. washing tables while Greg was bent intently over the grill, Immediately, I began tearing off pieces of the doing what I couldn’t tell. He looked over as I came in and Flat Boy and passing them down to Sasha, who quickly shouted, “Alec, man, would you prop the door open? If realized she didn’t even have to chew them. It was like the Professor comes back to all this smoke, I’ll be skinned feeding a happily grunting vacuum cleaner. and nailed to the barn door." I was just wiping my fingers on a napkin when “No, he’d smoke you to a lovely mahogany hue in Greg peeked nervously around the kitchen door. Seeing that smoking gadget you conned him into buying,” Jess it was a customer and not the Professor who had come answered. Greg gave her a look. “Vegetarian,” he said. in, he came back, relief written large on his face. “Just, Then, to me, “Alec, what brings you here? If it’s lunch, I please, please, let this freakin’ grease fog disperse,” he can offer you something truly awesome.” muttered. “Actually,” I answered, “some mac and cheese “I guess the road to culinary innovation isn’t an would be great. But I came over because I think I may easy one,” I said with genuine sympathy. have the perfect solution for the great pea soup debate.” Greg shuddered. “This project was fraught. You Greg looked at me as if I had lost my mind, or should have seen the mess when I tried adding mustard maybe just realized I never had one to begin with. “Alec,” and catsup. Also,” he lowered his voice, “I had to do all he said, his voice dripping with faux pity, “that whole pea this while the Professor was away. I’m hoping if … when soup business is so … so, yesterday. Gone. Done with. … I finally nail this, he’ll get right behind it.” Shoved into the closet.” He gestured at the counter. “Take He leaned closer to me and lowered his voice. “I a stool. Prepare to be astonished.” got the idea of the Flat Boy listening to him rant about Clearly, mac and cheese was not in my future. how chefs these days are relentlessly stuffing burgers with But what was? It looked as though Greg were frying a everything they can get their hands on. ‘A hamburger chunk of cinder block in a large cast-iron frying pan. isn’t supposed to be the size of a baby’s head!’” Greg did “Is that what I think it is?” I asked. “Part of a cinder an astonishingly accurate impression of the Professor’s block? If so, you’d better bring along a lot of catsup.” voice. “The Flat Boy gives all that nonsense the finger.” Greg sighed. “Oh, ye of little faith. Look closer.” I hesitated. This wasn’t going to be easy. “Maybe I did, and saw something I missed before. The you should think of making this the subject of a great whole apparatus was actually pressing something against YouTube video,” I said. “But I don’t think your usual No- the grill, something oozing grease and melted cheese. Name patron will prove an eager participant in burger Greg pulled on a scorched and tattered oven mitt, deconstruction … the real stroke of genius is going to be grabbed hold of the frying pan’s handle, and, with a grunt, convincing anyone here to buy it.” hoisted it up and set it aside — revealing a very brown I paused. “Have you tried a Flat Boy yourself?” Greg bit his lip. “Uh, yes, but only from the tech- page seven nical perspective … I figured it would be self-defeating to ask myself too early if it were any good.” and cheese into little cubes. I prefer to grate it — things He gave a sigh of defeat. “Was it any good?” move much faster that way. Just put the butter and the “Ask Sasha,” I answered. “She loved it.” grater into the freezer for a bit ... say fifteen minutes ... before you go at it. • Before you open the can of milk, be TO BE CONTINUED sure to give it a good shake. • This recipe calls for an 8×8×3 square cake pan. That’s no accident — an 8×8×2 pan won’t cut the mustard. If you use one, the results will be too dry, because you won’t be able to add the full amount of evaporated milk. The 8×8×3 pan isn’t easy to find, but it exists; otherwise, your only real alternative is a 9×9×2 pan. No-Name Macaroni & Cheese 8 ounces elbow macaroni, cooked as the box directs The Professor says: “Macaroni and cheese recipes are 1/2 stick (2 ounces) butter, grated grouped into three schools, each with infinite variations. 1/2 pound sharp cheddar cheese, grated I grew up with the school that made it with white sauce. 4 eggs • 2 12-ounce cans full-fat evaporated milk This made things easy for my mother, since she could use the same sauce for a cauliflower-cheese bake and generous dash Tabasco sauce (minus the cheese) for her tuna casserole. I still have fond salt and black pepper memories of the cauliflower-cheese bake (I mean, what • Preheat oven to 400°F. Butter an 8×8×3 nonstick bak- else can you do with that vegetable?), but the taste of flour ing pan. (This stuff sticks like crazy — you might never does nothing for the subject we’re discussing. get a Pyrex one clean again.) Spread half of the macaroni “Woody, my predecessor, made his using a big over the bottom, and sprinkle this with half of the grated hunk of Velveeta and a bit of milk. Cheesy as all get out, cheese, then half of the grated butter. Make the second sure — again if you can abide the taste. I will give him layer the same way. one thing: he was a purist. No grated cheddar mixed in • Beat the eggs and half of the evaporated milk in a bowl. to disguise the purity and savor of all that processed Season with the dash of Tabasco, a cautious amount of cheese food.* His is a version of the “macaroni and cheese salt, and plenty of black pepper. Briefly beat again, then spread the mixture over the macaroni. Pour the remaining period” school, which isn’t so bad if you make it with real can of milk over everything. Bake for 45 minutes or until cheese ... and can take the calories and the indigestion the contents of the pan are bubbly and golden brown. Let that usually follows. cool for 15 minutes before serving.♦ “The third school and the one I favor is a custard- based macaroni and cheese. I like it because the eggs and milk do the thickening instead of flour and there’s plenty of cheese flavor. To be honest, I also like the fact that it can be cut into neat squares — no oozing all over the plate, but plenty moist and flavorful. I got hold of the recipe years ago doing part of my military service at Fort Jackson in Columbia, SC. Whenever I got off-base I went searching for BBQ — and most of what I found was so good that those days are just a porky blur in my memory. “However, one of those places served a side of mac and cheese whose plainspoken deliciousness blew me away. When I begged, the pitmaster called his mama to get me the recipe — she made a batch for him every morning. ‘This is a real old family recipe,’ she told me when I took the phone to write it down. ‘I’m no spring chicken now, and I can remember eating it before I was born.’ I changed the half stick of margarine to butter, but the evaporated milk, with that old-time cooked (or if you’d rather, “caramelized”) dairy tang, is what makes the dish.†” Toasted bread chards and pinenuts. * Prep Notes. A lot of recipes tell you to cut up the butter

* Don’t believe me? Here’s the recipe — as translated from his well- thumbed and greasy-fingered recipe file. “Boil two cups of elbow macaroni in a large saucepan until tender, then drain well. Return macaroni to pot. Cut 12 ounces of Velveeta® into small cubes and stir these, along with 1/3 cup of milk and a good pinch of pepper, into the waiting macaroni and mix well. Put over low heat and, stir- ring often, let it get all hot and melty.” Woody would then dish it out into little bowls to serve to the lunch crowd. This reminds me of a treat from my childhood called chili con queso. It was essentially a dip, and probably as Mexican as my Polish grandmother. My Dad, however, liked to fill an omelet with it — we kids got on all for our- selves, watching each other like hawks as we shared it out. As far as we were concerned, blueberry pancakes barely competed. † If you are over forty-five, it’s a sure bet that your grandmother had a can or two of evaporated milk lazing in the pantry. It is essentially homogenized milk with sixty percent of the water cooked off, so it’s thicker and a tad richer than milk (unless you dilute it back to cow juice). It was popular when refrigeration was a costly luxury, even at the grocer’s, and fresh milk itself was often justly suspected of being prey to all sorts of nasty practices. In case you’re curious, condensed milk is sweetened as well as evaporated, which is why it’s mostly used in desserts and why, if you, in fact, are over forty-five, you may have cans of it on your shelves, for your mother’s priceless fudge recipe. page eight able alk Great Moments in Culinary History. Matthew Davis salad’)T makes a kind of piquant spreadT out of bologna- writes in his account of a stay in Mongolia, When Things bits and mayo, the rather demure dressing used for Get Dark: “My favorite Mongolian commercial opens with Wurstsalat does nothing to obscure the fact that you are a regal Chinggis [aka Genghis] Khan shouting for a sip eating luncheon-meat with knife and fork. (It is typical of of airag [a fermented drink of mare’s milk, also called Baden-Württemberg and Switzerland, though the Swiss go kumis]. The Great Khan’s attendants, whose eyes glisten one better and add ribbons of cheese to the mix, as if to with fear at the prospect of incurring Chinggis’s wrath, underscore the brazen lack of fresh vegetables.) Taken aback realize no airag remains and so pour another thick, milky by the dish, I struggled to identify the Wurst, and when I finally recognized it, the word came to me in Romanian. I white substance into a jewel-studded silver bowl. Ching- exclaimed with glee that I knew parizãr from back home, that gis sips, remnants of the drink dotting his mustache and we also liked to eat it, and that I had particularly enjoyed beard, and after he swallows, he grimaces and bangs his it as a child. My future inlaws looked at me with friendly fist on the arm of his throne. ‘This is not airag,’ he shouts. confusion. Romania, I later figured out, must have received His attendants recoil, as this is clearly among their final its word for bologna from Austria, where it is called Pariser moments. But wait: Chinggis takes another sip, licks the and associated with Paris. In German, however, the sausage white drippings from his mustache, and asks in a more is thought to come from Lyon, and thus called Lyoner. A cheerful, curious tone what he has drunk. A brave at- Pariser is a condom. tendant, sensing a possible reprieve, inches forward and Static Electricity — Tamed. The March/April 2014 issue says in a quavering voice, ‘Heinz Mayonnaise.’” of Cook’s Illustrated offered some advice worth more than Use Your Spider! Pat Fowler writes from Blue Hill Maine: a tip of the hat. This concerns the static charge created “I was surprised that you didn’t emphasize the value when you run coffee beans through a burr grinder that of a well-seasoned, heavy cast-iron spider in browning causes the grounds to cling to the container, then shoot and then releasing the crêpes. Finally, after more than all over the counter when you try to tap them free. This three decades (there are benefits to becoming increas- is especially so in the winter, and it can make me wish I ingly ancient), I have three truly seasoned ones: 8-, 9-, had stuck with a blade grinder. (Honestly, though, burr and 10-inch. In fact. we often make pancakes after fry- grinders rule!) What I love about CI’s solution is its won- ing bacon or sausage in the pan, as (after a preliminary derful simplicity: just let the container sit for five minutes cleaning) crêpes or pancakes are the best way to season before dumping out the coffee. (Very fine grinds take a the skillet. After that all I have to do is wipe the pan.” minute or so longer; coarse grinds, a minute or so less.) JT replies: I did try cast iron, but to get the crêpe batter Lunch with the famous: William Empson. “In 1971, ten thin enough I needed to use that little wooden rake, and it years after first reading Seven Types of Ambiguity, I met turned out that I simply wasn’t deft enough. Much easier Empson in London. He’d recently retired from his chair for me to tilt the pan all about, and I lack the wrist strength at the University of Sheffield and was living with his wife, to do that with our cast-iron griddle, or at least to control Hetta, at Studio House, Hampstead Hill Gardens — in a its momentum. I gave up after I almost sent our glass tea set-up described by Robert Lowell as a ‘household [that] kettle flying across the kitchen. had a weird, sordid nobility that made other Englishmen The Literary Feast: An Irish Country Breakfast. “‘Eat seem like a veneer.’ Empson’s idea of making lunch was up however little much is in it, Doctor Laverty dear.’ Barry to place an assortment of unpunctured cans of Chinese looked up from his plate of Ulster mixed grill — bacon, vegetables on the gas cooker, where they tended to explode. sausages, black pudding, fried eggs, tomatoes, lamb chop, Ancient rashers of fried bacon served as bookmarks in his and slices of fried soda bread — into the happy face of disintegrating copy of Marvell’s Collected Poems. He stirred Mrs. Kincaid. He saw silver hair done up in a chignon, his tea with the sole remaining earpiece of his glasses.” — black eyes like polished jets set between roseate cheeks. Jonathan Raban, London Review of Books (5 Nov 2009) A mouth smiled above her three chins. Changes. As most readers now know, Simple Cooking won’t ‘I’ll do my best.’ be continuing beyond issue 100. Matt and I have begun ‘Good lad. You’ll be having this for breakfast a preparing for that event by moving along almost all of our lot,’ she said, setting a plate in front of O’Reilly [the senior cookbook collection, donating most to charity, but selling doctor of their shared practice]. ‘Himself here is a grand the best of what we have on Amazon. This is a moveable man for the pan, so.’ Barry heard the soft Cork lilt of her feast, so, if you’re interested, make it a regular stop. Also, voice, with the habit Cork folk had of adding ‘so’ at the end if you’ve ever thought of expanding your back issue col- of a sentence.” Patrick Taylor. An Irish Country Doctor. lection, now is the time to do so. You’ll find a descriptive Culinary Notes From All Over. In a recent issue (98) of list of what we have left here on our web site — with direc- Petits Propos Culinaires (PPC to those in the know), Irina tions on how to order. Dumitrescu contributes an enjoyable essay on that dubi- Electronic Subscribers, which obviously means you, may ous German delicacy currywurst, which takes the reader be dismayed by this issue’s lack of a version reformatted on a rather dizzying excursion through the world of wurst for reading on a computer screen. I apologize — this now (a word better translated, I discovered, not simply as takes up too much of my increasingly limited time. But “sausage” but as “imaginative things done to processed you’ll still receive much more content than print readers. meat”). For instance, when she visited her boyfriend’s family in south-west Germany, she was served a plate of Simple Cooking 95 © 2015 by John Thorne and Matt Lewis Thorne. Wurstsalat. To make it, bologna is cut into thin ribbons All rights reserved. m Unless you state otherwise, we assume let- and tossed with pickle strips and raw onion rings in a light ters to us are meant for publication and may be edited accordingly. m Contact information: e-mail: [email protected]. vinaigrette. While the German Fleischsalat (literally, ‘meat Website: (still dormant) www.outlawcook.com. page nine ISSN 0749-176X mangeetout pork blood, pork liver, Thai makhwen (a cousin to Sichuan peppercorns), Pok Pok Mexican puya chiles, Indonesian long peppers, Vietnamese mint leaves, Food & Stories from the Streets, Homes, & Roadside Res- homemade krathiem jiaw and hom daeng jiaw (respectively, crispy-fried garlic and shallot bits) … well, my strongest feeling was a deep regret that taurants of Thailand I wasn’t twenty, thirty, forty years younger, still possessing the fearless- by Andy Ricker ness, doggedness, and willingness to suffer that had would carry me — or This is a rare and astonishing book, and it knocked me dizzy the at least might carry me — through the adventures offered here. I write this moment I sat down to leaf through it. What happened to me is hard to de- review in the hope it might inspire you to tackle it in my stead. scribe, but it’s analogous to what would happen if I suddenly found my- self wandering the streets of some city in Thailand — sensory overload, 3 4 reeling brain, the shock of the totally new. I might somehow “know” where I was, but this knowledge Japanese Soul Cooking would make things worse, not better, because it Ramen, Tonkatsu, Tempura and More From the would be no help at all. Streets and Kitchens of Tokyo and Beyond I own many Thai cookbooks, but they turn by Tadashi Ono & Harris Salat out — almost all of them — to be guided by the author’s sense of how much of the messy real- Tadashi Ono is a Japanese chef currently based in New York City; ity of Thai cooking the western reader can bear. his writing partner, Harris Salat, is a food writer and the proprietor of Gan- Andy Ricker, on the other hand, grabs you by the so, in Brooklyn, which is essentially this book brought to life. I am familiar hand and plunges you deep into an impenetrable with their two previous works, Japanese Hot Pots and The Japanese culinary jungle, talking all the while, ignoring your Grill, admiring them while at the same time finding them depressingly dif- Ten Speed Press, 304 pp, $35. dazed protests, your pleas that he slow down, ficult to cook from — although, given a halfway decent Japanese grocery that he stop until you get your bearings. And, maybe worst of all, each store, not unimaginably so (see Pok Pok above). step of the way brings you closer to the humiliating realization that you Japanese Soul Cooking, to my happy surprise, offers the Ameri- have no idea what he’s talking about. can reader genuine Japanese street food and How can this happen in a cookbook? Well, to start, you are shown other colloquial dishes that ask for little in terms of dazzling photos of totally unfamiliar and not necessarily appetizing dish- esoteric ingredients and deliver much in flavor and es that you don’t remember from any of your other Thai cookbooks. You authenticity — at least if you, the cook, are willing have thrust into your hands ingredients you never even knew existed to go the distance. That’s because Ono and Salat and, deep in your heart, know you will never be able to find — certainly have created home-kitchen-friendly versions of ra- not in Western Massachusetts, but probably not in the eastern part of the men, gyoza, tonkatsu, tempura, soba, and udon, state, either, maybe not in the entire country. as well as lesser-known treats like okonomiyaki Ricker is a person who knows a hell of a lot about Thai cooking (a large savory pancake with a host of ingredients (certainly enough to know that, even after many years of exploring it, he mixed into the batter) or donburi, a fast-food special has an incredible amount yet to learn) and for some reason assumes where the entrée is served on top of the rice. (Big deal? Culinary purists at the time were horrified: rice that you, his reader, are a soulmate, not some helpless tag-along. So, Ten Speed Press, 256 pp, $27.50 in the very first page of the book, he’s speeding in a pickup truck with must always be served separately. This was ... dog food!) his pal Sunny through the countryside near Chiang Mai. They pass an It would be fun to learn what those same purists had to say about eating place with a parking area clogged with motorcycles. He urges the many foreign dishes the Japanese adopted, reworking them to their Sonny to pull in. taste. Some are just plain weird — pasta sauce based on tomato catsup, for example — but others sound quite delicious. Take mentaiko spaghetti, It’s a typical roadside spot--a dusty lot scattered with tables and bench- where pollock roe, marinated in chilies and salt — thus making it “briny, es crudely nailed together, plastic stools sunk into the dirt, and a roof buttery, and hot ‘n’ spicy” — is tossed into pasta with butter, soy sauce, fashioned from teak tree leaves. Soft light comes from bare bulbs. It’s hot, so we start pounding Leo beers, a kind of Miller High Life equiva- olive oil, lemon juice, and needle-cut nori. lent, poured into ice-filled glasses. Our food starts coming out. After a In fact, the title of this book is all wrong: it should have been called few bites, Sunny and I look at each other as if to say, Holy shit, this is something like Japanese Eats. I’m not sure what the authors intended by good. We’re eating pig brain mixed with curry paste and lime leaf, then using the phrase “soul food,” but it’s clear that they don’t really understand wrapped in banana leaf; charred, chewy hunks of pig teat; and sour what that means.* If you wanted to channel Japanese “soul food,” you’d sausage---essentially pork mixed with rice and left to ferment in the have to find dishes that conveyed the miracles cooks performed when heavy heat. It’s awesome. they wrung maximum use out of a limited range of resources (think dried Now if “awesome” is the word that came to your mind when you sea slugs), the way black cooks did when facing the same dilemma in the read that passage, you can put this review aside — you’ve found your American South. book. If, like me, you feel like Krazy Kat after being clipped by a brick, The dishes written about here, far from reflecting “Japan profond,” you know right away that this tour of Thai food is not going to be a visit * I’m not going to let my response to the title dampen my good feelings about this to the spa. And you’re going to need to seriously think whether or not book, but I do have to say that the phrase “soul food” is cheapened every time it you’ll survive it. is used to refer to something other than the heritage of African-American cook- ing — and it is downright abusive when used, as here, as a catchy synonym for I realized right away that I wouldn’t. I’ve learned enough about my- “comfort food.’ Go in that direction and you could easily end up with something self that these days I get a copy of a book like this from the library before like Deep-Fried Pig Brains and Pimiento Cheese Tomato Pie: the Soul Food I commit myself to owning it. After I spent an hour with Pok Pok, after I of Southern Whites. And if you see no problem with that, you need to put this experienced all I’ve already described, after I read through recipes like the aside and go read Soul Food, Adrian Miller’s eye-opening book on the subject. one for laap meuang, Northern Thai minced pork salad, the forty-odd in- gredients for which include, among other things, pork intestine, pork skin, page ten • Heat 1 tablespoon of the sesame oil in the same wok over high sprang from the massive collision between the country’s insular ways and heat. Add the scallions and cook, stirring constantly, for about 30 sec- the forces of modernity. Remember that even 150 years ago, eating red onds, until they give off an oniony smell. Add the rice and cook, stirring meat was all but taboo; wheat (from which come those popular noodles) constantly, for 30 seconds more. Add the soy sauce, salt, pepper, and was not grown. Ramen features both. And while its simple ingredients and scrambled eggs. Cook, stirring constantly, for 30 seconds. Add the re- near ritual preparation might seem (and are!) quintessentially Japanese, maining 1 tablespoon sesame oil, and cook, stirring constantly, for 10 the dish owes just as much to China and the USA. more seconds. Turn off the heat. At the end of WW2, returning soldiers brought back from their failed • Set out four plates and four small bowls (which serve as rice invasion of China a taste for noodles. Finding themselves broke and un- molds) on the kitchen counter. Spoon one-fourth of the cooked rice into employed and with access to abundant supplies of flour (thanks to the each bowl, then quickly flip the bowl over and rest it on top of the plate, American Occupation), they began operating little stalls where they made rice side down. Do not remove the bowl for now; it will keep the rice warm. and sold ramen. The Japanese aesthetic reworked the dish until it was Repeat with the remaining 3 bowls. Set aside. entirely at home. Competition honed expertise, which in turn brought rec- • To prepare the ankake, add the crab, torigara stock, lettuce, ognition, even fame, to what were often very modest, affordable establish- ginger, salt, and pepper to a saucepan and bring to a boil. Reduce the ments. Flawless attainment of what seems supremely simple is ramen’s heat to medium and simmer for about 2 minutes, mixing occasionally. connection to the Japanese soul, but the fatty pork, the wheat noodles are Meanwhile, stir up the potato starch/water mix. At the two minute mark, inextricably Chinese. stir two tablespoons of the hot stock into the mix. Now pour this back into Paradoxically, the genius of this book is the way the authors take the stock, stirring the while, and cook, still stirring constantly, for about 15 these vernacular favorites and un-Japanese them just enough so that their seconds. Turn off the heat. American readers can feel like co-conspirators. Go ahead, they say, and • Unmold the rice by removing the bowls covering it. Pour about use the noodles from your instant ramen packets, so long as you spend one-fourth of the ankake either alongside each serving of rice or over it, the necessary time (at least a day) making the mandatory topping ajitama, as you desire. Serve immediately — and remember, eat it with a spoon. soft-boiled, flavor- infused eggs. ☛ Cook’s Notes: What interested me especially about this recipe was the If that’s not for you, just turn the page. There’s so much else idea of serving a portion of fried rice surrounded by a simple savory sauce. The here to excite the appetite: Japanese Navy curry, deep-fried sesame thing that interested me least was the idea of using canned crab meat. Matt and chicken nuggets, and, for me, the easy-to-make, delicious hani ankake, I used to buy fresh crab meat just picked that morning when we lived in Maine, crab fried rice, which came to Japan from China in the 1860s. And you and it was very special. But canned crab meat loses all the way round: when it could figure that out because the Japanese eat this fried rice, unlike is “cheap” it is near inedible; when expensive — and here I mean, say, $26.99 a their homegrown rice dishes, the way they think the Chinese do — with pound, I can imagine so many things I’d rather buy instead ... starting with two a spoon. ♦ porterhouse steaks. When I set out to make the dish, however, the changes started at once. Since there were just two of us, I halved everything except the scallions, which I recklessly doubled, and the cup of water used to make the ankake, which I kept the same. I also substituted romaine for the iceberg lettuce (which Kani Ankake (Crab Fried Rice) would have been just fine, but the romaine was what we had at hand). Torigara stock is in reality painstakingly made of chicken bones. The “Kani” means crab; “ankake” is the Japanese term for a Chinese- authors know that most of their readers won’t bother, and, faute de mieux, allow inspired sauce thickened with a powdered starch (think corn or potato, canned chicken broth to be used instead. No thanks. If I had fresh-picked crabs, but there are others). The authors say: “With this dish, the fried rice is I could have made a tasty broth by helping myself to some picked carcasses cooked very simply, with just eggs and scallions. The mojo here comes from the heap in the Tibbetts’s back yard. No such luck, so, instead, I took a in the form of the ankake, which is a sauce thickened with potato starch, generous tablespoon of the canned crab meat, mashed it into a paste, and in this case, one made with ginger-infused crab meat. Glorious. To eat, stirred this into the cup of water with a few drops of Vietnamese fish sauce. spoon up some ankake with the fried rice.” The following recipe is given Finally, I skipped molding the cooked rice in little bowls. I just mounded it directly pretty much as it appears in the book — and my plan was to make it from the wok into two little round hills, and poured the ankake around. just that way myself, but as often happens, I started quarreling with it Dipping spoonfuls of the fried rice into the ankake was an inspired immediately. So read the recipe, see what I did with it ... and what I’ll do notion, and the result would have been very good were it not for the wretched- with it the next time I make it. ness of the crab meat. It wasn’t bad, it wasn’t good, it was like canned tuna [Serves 4] left to soak in the ocean at low tide. The next time I make the dish I plan to 2 tablespoons plus 1 teaspoon toasted sesame oil substitute shrimp, the shells of which will make a nice broth, and possibly 4 eggs, beaten substituting steamed Chinese cabbage for the lettuce. ♦ 2 scallions, trimmed and chopped 4 cups cooked rice, warm, clumps broken up 2 tablespoons soy sauce 1 teaspoon salt • Pinch ground black pepper ankake 8 ounces crab meat (canned is fine, about 1 cup) 1 cup torigara stock (see notes below) 4 ounces iceberg lettuce leaves, cut into bite-size pieces 1/2-inch piece ginger, peeled and julienned 1 teaspoon salt • 1/4 teaspoon black pepper 2 teaspoons potato starch dissolved in 2 tablespoons water • Heat 1 teaspoon of the sesame oil in a wok over high heat. Add the eggs and gently scramble until set, about 10 seconds. Remove the eggs and set aside. page eleven Our bread shards. Notes on Panko When I first encountered panko in a Japanese market in Boston, I was, frankly, dubious. I was hardly an expert on Japanese cuisine, but surely “bread” and “Japan” were mutually exclusive terms, like “Heidelberg” and “sake.” This led me to believe that these “fantasy” bread crumbs, however light and flaky, weren’t crumbled from a loaf but manufactured like a sort of breakfast cereal. As is often the case I was right and I was wrong, but, most of all, I Issue Bibliography was clueless. True, shoku pan (eating bread) didn’t become Melitta Weiss Adamson. Food in Medieval Times (Food Through popular until the early 20th century, but the important History series). Westport CT: Greenwood, 2004. thing was that it was treated like a delicacy, baked in pullman loaf pans, which have a metal top to minimize Colman Andrews. The Country Cooking of Italy. San Francisco: crust.* Mostly, it is toasted and eaten for breakfast in a Chronicle, 2011. manner all its own: cut into thick, two-inch slices, copi- Philip St. George Cooke. The Conquest of New Mexico and Cali- ously buttered, and sprinkled with confectioner’s sugar. fornia. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1878. Panko is made from loaves made in the same pans, but instead of being baked, they’re electrocuted. There are Elizabeth David. French Provincial Cooking. London: Michael Joseph, various explanations as to how this unusual technique 1960. was discovered (and please don’t try it at home!), but the Alan Davidson, ed. The Oxford Companion To Food. Oxford: Oxford one I like best — because it is about as persuasive as the University, 1999. Tooth Fairy — is that when the Japanese army up to some military adventuring in Mongolia in the 1920s, it found Matthew Davis. When Things Get Dark: A Mongolian Winter’s Tale. that the tank engines had to be kept running all night in New York: St. Martin’s, 2010. (Thanks, Pete!) winter or they would freeze up. Some ingenious tinkerer Irina Dumitrescu. “Currywurst.” Petits Propos Culinaires 98. Blacka- thought of connecting metal bread pans full of dough to wton, Totnes (Great Britain). 2013. the tanks electrical generator, which (to everyone’s aston- ishment) produced a fully baked, tender breakfast loaf. Euell Gibbons. Stalking the Healthful Herb. NY: David McKay, 1966. Furthermore, leftover scraps from these loaves turned Josiah Gregg. Commerce of the prairies : or, The journal of a Santa into perfect dried crumbs ... et voilà, panko!† Fé trader, during eight expeditions across the great western Almost nothing called “panko” in this country is prairies.... 5th edition. Philadelphia: J. W. Moore, 1851-1855. produced in the traditional way, and while it may make a better coating for frying than ordinary bread crumbs, Ronald M. Lanner and Harriett Lanner. The Piñon Pine: A Natural it lacks the necessary taste and texture to be used as a And Cultural History, With A Section On Pine-Nut Cookery. substitute for homemade bread shards ... except for the Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1981. authentic panko made by Upper Crust Enterprises, a Adrian Miller. Soul Food: The Surprising Story of an American second-generation Japanese family company. You can Cuisine, One Plate at a Time. Chapel Hill: The University of buy their product on Amazon.com, and learn a lot about North Carolina, 2013. panko watching their information-packed video at upper- crustent.com. Tadashi Ono & Harris Salat. Japanese Soul Cooking: Ramen, However, if you do choose to substitute this (or any Tonkatsu, Tempura and More From the Streets and Kitchens other‡) panko product in our recipe for pasta with pine of Tokyo and Beyond. New York: Ten Speed, 2013. nuts and bread shards, toast them separately. Reserve 2 tablespoons of the olive oil. Toast the pine nuts with the Jonathan Raban. “Summer with Empson.” London Review of Books (5 rest of the oil, stirring in the garlic and red pepper flakes Nov 2009). toward the end. Use the reserved oil to toast the panko Andy Ricker. Pok Pok: Food & Stories from the Streets, Homes, in a separate skillet. Divide it into little bowls, one for & Roadside Restaurants of Thailand. New York: Ten Speed, each eater, and serve with the pasta. Return to page 2 2013. * So named because they were adopted by the Pullman Company Frederic Rosengarten, Jr. The Book of Edible Nuts. New York: Walker, to bake bread in their tiny dining car kitchens. Tender crust, moist crumb? Call me Wonder Bread. 1984. †This argument continues to propose that when the Japanese army James M. Sanderson. Camp Fires and Camp Cooking; or Culinary encountered Wiener-schnitzel-like cutlets in Russian army messes, the reason for panko’s existence became manifest: tonkatsu! Sure. Hints for the Soldier. Government Printing Office, 1862. ‡ You can also try finding traditional panko locally at an Asian mar- Raymond Sokolov. Fading Feast: A Compendium of Disappearing ket. Tom Shea at Upper Crust Enterprises suggests these brands: “Wel-Pac,” “JFC,” or “Dynasty,” which have the true sliver-shape American Regional Foods. New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, crumb and a light airy texture. 1981. Tom Stobart. The Cook’s Encyclopedia: Ingredients & Processes. New York: Harper & Row, 1981. Patrick Taylor. An Irish Country Doctor. New York: Forge, 2007. Jasper Guy Woodroof. Tree Nuts: Production, Processing, Prod- ucts. Westport CT: Avi, 1979. Wikipedia contributors. “Pine nut.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. ♦

Extra large Upper Crust Panko. page twelve