Electronic Edition

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 U early 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.

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