Halfway down the Danube

Monday Night Is Two-For-One Night

Michigan State University has a collection of digitized historical cookbooks! Lafcadio Hearn's La Cuisine Creole (yes, that Lafcadio Hearn) and Frank Hamilton Cushing's Zuni Breadstuff immediately caught my eye, but the real find for this blog is Ardashes Hagop Keoleian's The Oriental Cook Book, New York, Sully & Kleinteich, 1913. 'Oriental' here means Middle Eastern, and really, Armenian. (A lot of fish dishes, which I'd guess aren't often made any more.) You can download the scanned texts in PDF, or read transcriptions on the site.

As long as you're downloading massive PDFs, you might as well get some music as well! The Rub has an ongoing history of hip-hop in mp3 form. They're up to Volume 21: 1999. "No Rubber, No Backstage Pass" with Biz Markie? I thought I imagined that.

Mark your calendar (you know who you are)

Generally I don't talk much about my Brooklyn life in this blog, because really. But Stay Free! magazine is running a series of Adult Education lectures at Union Hall -- or, as they put it, 'like "show and tell" for grown-ups'. Last night's was fun and packed.

However, next month's program has something of greater importance. To wit:

Daniel Radosh: The Quest to Develop Kosher Bacon.

Yes, Kosher Bacon.

February 12th, Union Hall in Brooklyn -- roughly, Union and 5th Ave. The lecture room opens at 7:30. (And yes, it's his son.)

Mummery!

Remarkably few people (okay, one person) wondered why Imperial Stormtroopers had occupied downtown Philadelphia.  So I'll tell you.  It was the Fancies of Mummers Day.

I'll turn the floor over to Amma.  "It's sort of a white people's Carnival.  And since it's cold, they can make more creative costumes because they don't have to be concerned with, you know, battling the heat with nakedness."  And to continue the parallel, the fancies are sort of like Carnival bands, kinda sorta not really, only that Mummers tend to be older and fatter as well as paler than your typical Carnival reveler.  Which makes it a good thing that they wear more clothes.

Boring serious grown-up types have asked me to put the rest of the revelry below the fold.

Day 28: Not a hoax! Not a dream! Not an imaginary story!

A recipe from Hostess's The Twinkie Cookbook: An inventive and unexpected recipe collection. More specifically, from Chapter Nine: Twinkies and Meat. You heard me.

Pigs in a Twinkie.

Gumbo!

Had a refrigerator filled with dubious items: wilted celery, some senescent chicken thighs, half a pound of summer sausage (Klement's) left over from my birthday, a cup and a half of organic chicken broth in a carton.

First, I made a roux. Melted a third a stick of butter in a pan, added about the same amount of flour. Browned it until it looked like cafe au lait, and then a little darker. The bubbles as it browned looked like camera flashes in a stadium, quick little pulses. Turned off the burner, stirred in some paprika that was going stale, until it became the color known to early Crayola users as "Indian red".

I chopped up two small-mediumish onions, added them to the roux, stirred it until the onion bits were all coated, covered the pan and let them sweat. Did the same for the wilting celery.

In a different pan, I browned up the chicken thighs, cut into small pieces, then sauteed them with two diced peppers. Added the chicken broth, just covering the mixture. When that began to boil down, I added some tomato juice. The summer sausage, cut into pie slices, went in there as well.

Gumbo!

Had a refrigerator filled with dubious items: wilted celery, some senescent chicken thighs, half a pound of summer sausage (Klement's) left over from my birthday, a cup and a half of organic chicken broth in a carton. First, I made a roux. Melted a third a stick of butter in a pan, added about the same amount of flour. Browned it until it looked like cafe au lait, and then a little darker. The bubbles as it browned looked like camera flashes in a stadium, quick little pulses. Turned off the burner, stirred in some paprika that was going stale, until it became the color known to early Crayola users as "Indian red". I chopped up two small-mediumish onions, added them to the roux, stirred it until the onion bits were all coated, covered the pan and let them sweat. Did the same for the wilting celery. In a different pan, I browned up the chicken thighs, cut into small pieces, then sauteed them with two diced peppers. Added the chicken broth, just covering the mixture. When that began to boil down, I added some tomato juice. The summer sausage, cut into pie slices, went in there as well.

The missing post on Filipino food

Our occasional guest-blogger, Noel Maurer, has been a little busy lately, but through the magic of the Internet we have a replacement for his post on the glamorous food of the Philippines! The great cartoonist Lynda Barry was once asked:

pork versus chicken adobo, which camp do you belong to? and will you share your adobo recipe with us? also bryan wants to know your opinion on the other filipino debate, "long grain vs. calrose"?

Her answers begin here. Remember: chicken adobo will sterilize the problem. (Shameless name-dropping: Lynda Barry did the cover art for my friends Joe and Anita's wedding album. Eleventeen remixed renditions of the Chicken Dance on CD. It's terrifying. I say this with admiration. Like Ms. Barry, Joe is a product of Richland Center, Wisconsin.) Also, the Wily Filipino (narrow it down) has blogged about the mystery of adobo here and here, among other places. PS I'm sending a copy of Cruddy in the next box to Yerevan, so probably in July. C and D, you'll like. Update: there are also more of Belle Waring's thoughts on the Philippines here. (I should warn our gentle readers that there are some unpleasant and disturbed people in the comments which follow Belle's remarks. And Doug!)

The missing post on Filipino food

Our occasional guest-blogger, Noel Maurer, has been a little busy lately, but through the magic of the Internet we have a replacement for his post on the glamorous food of the Philippines! The great cartoonist Lynda Barry was once asked:

pork versus chicken adobo, which camp do you belong to? and will you share your adobo recipe with us? also bryan wants to know your opinion on the other filipino debate, "long grain vs. calrose"?

Her answers begin here. Remember: chicken adobo will sterilize the problem.

(Shameless name-dropping: Lynda Barry did the cover art for my friends Joe and Anita's wedding album. Eleventeen remixed renditions of the Chicken Dance on CD. It's terrifying. I say this with admiration. Like Ms. Barry, Joe is a product of Richland Center, Wisconsin.)

Also, the Wily Filipino (narrow it down) has blogged about the mystery of adobo here and here, among other places.

PS I'm sending a copy of Cruddy in the next box to Yerevan, so probably in July. C and D, you'll like.

Update: there are also more of Belle Waring's thoughts on the Philippines here. (I should warn our gentle readers that there are some unpleasant and disturbed people in the comments which follow Belle's remarks. And Doug!)

Late Superbowl blogging

Saw the game at Scholastic Dave's apartment, which is largely organized around the watching of gridiron. Besides the regular crowd of Wisconsin expatriates, Colbert Report Rich was there, who is moving to Brooklyn now that the show has been picked up. Woo-hoo! For a good breakdown of the game, see these posts [update: and this one too] by Jim Henley, one of the few libertarians that I don't want to c-punch every time I read him. (It's more like 20 to 30 percent of the time.) Onion John, who is now sports editor there, pointed out that it denied all the narratives leading up to the Superbowl. None of the spotlight players -- Hasselbeck, Roethlisberger, Alexander, Polamalu, or Bettis -- had a great game, and it turned out to be a defensive grind with few fast-moving interludes. (And there's nothing wrong with that.) As a long-time Holmgren watcher, I am completely not surprised at his coaching meltdown. It brought back memories from his days in Green Bay. Bad ones. Moment of wonder: watching football great Joe Namath coming out on to the field, totally shellacked. (For European readers, Namath was the long-haired 1960s gridiron star whose image inspired Homer Simpson's mother to become a hippie.) Another moment of wonder: seeing Mick Jagger's Lovecraftian life force re-enter his body during the final minute of his halftime set. Ia! A third moment of wonder: the Discovery Channel's Puppy Bowl. Awww. [And a fourth moment of wonder: congratulations to Pregnant Emma! who was at Dave's place for the game, and to Newborn Carter, who just missed it.]

Some like it hot

Romanian cooking is tasty but I would not call it spicy. This is a cuisine where they warn about the hotness of a dish that doesn't even make you break a sweat. Or, me, anyhow. Granted, I'm more than your average person when it comes to spiciness. I like it hot. That's why it baffles me that a country that has those nice ardei iute (hot peppers) doesn't do all that much with them. The pickled version is nice but not very exciting. The only dish I've ever encountered that made me go "wow" was what we came to call "hot pepper oil". It's ridiculously simple and we first had it in Oradea, in a small pizzeria on the river. It might not even be Romanian. I'm sure it exists in other countries as well since it so easy to make. But, as with so many things, easy often is best. Here's how to make your own hot pepper oil:

World dominance failed, again

This seems rather silly. Surely it's better to be a little hungry than risk foreign contamination. Who knows what the British pack into their army rations! It might be mince pies! Mint sauce! Baked beans! The horror! This piece of news is actually not all that new. Ten days ago, The Spiegel reported that German Care packages were turned back because it was feared that they were infected with Mad Cow Disease. [They saw through us. Darn. And we thought we had found a new way to world dominance!] There is only one fact that bugs me about this explanation. Those food rations are NATO certified Mad Cow Disease-free and, gasp!, are cleared for consumption by US army personnel, e.g. in Afghanistan. When Der Spiegel inquired, the US Embassy in Germany rather sheepishly declared that the ban on the NATO food rations would be lifted again. I'm watching this with bemused curiosity.

Be merry

I am sure everyone is a little worn out from bad news. So, no posts about the administration that couldn't organize an orgy at an Ibiza rave. I don't really have anything to say to those people for whom ideology trumps evidence. Instead, food! When I am stressed out, I cook. Yesterday I made cornbread pancakes, chicken and sausage jambalaya, and Key lime pie. (And now you see why I work out like a sonofabitch.) The pancakes used a Jiffy cornbread mix, so no recipe. The jambalaya was sort of like Belle Waring's Red Rice recipe, except I only had one strip of bacon, so I fried that and put in two tablespoons of butter in the grease. Then I sauteed about 400 grams of chicken thigh meat before putting the vegetables in. I chopped four stalks of celery instead of just one, and instead of a carrot, a seeded and diced green bell pepper. I also threw in a few cloves of chopped garlic and some chopped parsley. Some olive oil too.

Hot weather breakfast

I was going to write about this yesterday, but you know what? It was too hot. Let's see. Start off with Lazy Man's Sangria. You get a jug of wine and one of those orange juice fruit blends from the store. Mix them proportionately in a pitcher, and squeeze a lime or two in. Spike it with some brandy if you got it (and if you're drinking this on a Monday morning, you probably do). It's better if you let it sit in the refrigerator for a while, but it's not bad if you don't. You don't want heavy starches. Fried potatoes are out. Thin toast with jam is good. Rice is good. Leftover black beans and rice is very good. If you have mango trees in the backyard, this would be a good time to pick a few. If you don't, maybe the store has some? (Or not. Sigh.) If they don't, maybe they have some worthwhile melons? I live in hope. You can't go wrong with a fresh ripe tomato and a hard-boiled egg, with some salt and pepper. (Casanova liked this.) My dad's Old Country, in addition to being right under the Sun, lies at the confluence of several different biogeographic zones of ocean life. Breakfast came from two oceans and three or four phyla, things that they don't have names for in English. If you can, do. They also serve tapas for breakfast. Not the various little dishes of Spanish appetizers, though the word might derive from the Spanish (then again, it might derive from the Sanskrit word meaning 'heat'); no, this tapas is candied pork. Here's a recipe for the American version. And of course, coffee.

Strong stuff

Two glasses of smoky Georgian white wine, and I end up talking about K.A.R.R., the evil twin of the talking, crime-fighting car K.I.T.T. on the 1980s television show Knight Rider. The unanswered question: what would three do?

Chilly? Eat chili

Chili is one of those crazy American foods that have a thousand different recipes, all of which are right (except for the ones that aren't). The first chili was likely Native American: game stewed with hot peppers. In a Balkan context, a venison or boar paprikash wouldn't be too far off. The great civilizations of Mexico gave chili the tomato, the Spanish brought cattle to the American plains for the beef, the Texans turned chili into a cult, and the Depression spread it across the United States. With that in mind, here's a recipe for a basic chili that shouldn't be too alien to Balkan tastes:

Cut 500 g of good stew beef into 1 cm cubes. Brown the meat. Add 250 g of tomato sauce, enough beef broth to cover the meat, salt, pepper, and as much paprika as you dare. Let it simmer as the meat becomes tender, and let the broth reduce. If you want, you can add cooked kidney beans, up to 500 g, and let it simmer fifteen minutes more.

You can serve this by itself, with sour cream or grated cheese or yogurt, with a pilaf or over egg noodles. But it goes really well with the taste of maize, and I usually make corn bread to go with it. Americans don't use paprika all that much in their chili. It's a little too mild. We use chili powder, which is a little like an Indian masala spice mixture, except we usually don't grind our own, but get it pre-packaged. Most commercial mixtures are mainly ground dried chile peppers, cumin, Mexican oregano, and garlic powder, in roughly that order. It's rather an exotic flavor combination, especially for American comfort food cooking. What can I say. If you use hot paprika and Italian oregano in place of the ground chile peppers and the Mexican oregano, you won't be too far off. There are many, many, many ways one can tweak chili recipes. There is the traditional 'beans/no beans' divide. There is the more recent vegetarian/meat chili split; since I am firmly on the carnivore side of the debate, I have to recuse myself from that discussion. Mushrooms will add richness of flavor, and a little bittersweet chocolate will add depth, but take away some heat. Since I am a pepperhead, I might throw in some chipotle -- smoked jalapeno -- peppers to heat my chili up, or sometimes a few habanero peppers. Most people find habaneros too hot. I use habanero sauce like ketchup. But I grew up with one of the mildest chilis out there, Green Bay Chili. This recipe is my mom's, so it's authentic, although I have converted everything to metric units.

Brown 500 g of ground beef in a skillet. Drain the fat and put the ground beef in a soup kettle. Add two to three liters of tomato juice, enough to cook 500 g of spaghetti. Bring to a boil, and add those 500 g of spaghetti. When the spaghetti is cooked, it's done. Salt and pepper to taste. Ladle into bowls; some people like the meat, some people like the noodles. Serve with slices of Colby cheese, and make sure the can of chili powder is on the table.

The amount of tomato juice might seem extravagant, but we canned our own from the garden. (The secret ingredient is dill.) You can use other sorts of yellow cheese -- Cheddar works just fine -- but Colby is mellow and creamy and melts perfectly over the hot spaghetti. Lately my dad has been adding chopped onions to the broth right before serving. He's such a wild man.

Village food for us

We had a wonderful meal yesterday. We had meat, and the meat was good. You have to know that it's really hard to find a good piece of meat in Bucharest. Outside, in the country, the meat is so tender it melts in your mouth. I suspect that the city dwellers are just getting the old tough cows and pigs, whereas the country people feast on the young juicy ones. Anyway. Our nanny went to her mother's village last weekend. They slaughtered the traditional pig for Christmas and she came back with a big bag full of meat of us. We froze most of it but made some last night. It was yumm-y! I'd forgotten how good pork can taste. Hm.

Risk of Choking

We stopped at the McDonalds in Otopeni on Saturday. That's the first town north of Bucharest, where the airport is. The McDonalds sits right on the main road north to Ploiesti. (We were coming back from a trip to a little horse farm, where Alan rode on a pony for the first time ever. I'm sure someone will be posting some photos real soon now.) Anyhow: we bought a Happy Meal -- look, we're parents with two small children, okay? Happy Meals are a part of our life now, and probably will be for a while to come. Alan, age two and a half, now recognizes those golden arches from a mile away. "French fries!" he cries. And it is, dammit, convenient. No, I'm not defensive about this. Not at all. -- We bought a Happy Meal, and it came with a toy, and the toy was in a plastic wrapper. And on the plastic wrapper, it said: "ENGLISH -- Risk of choking -- small parts. Please retain information for reference. Drain after each use." That was all. Except that the plastic bag was covered with writing, on both sides. Why? Because it repeated that same warning in thirty-five different languages.

Beet, the unknown root

OK. This is the weirdest thing and I'm not sure I got it down pat. I'm actually quite sure it can't be the way I understand it from the meagre sources I have available. Follow me and then explain to me where my thinking is wrong. All right. Says Mr. Vasile Puscas, Romanian Minister Delegate and the Chief-Negotiator with the European Union:

Concerning the sugar sector, I must say that the negotiations were extremely tough, taking into account the low production obtained in Romania during the last years (the average production during 1998 – 2002 is 99,000 tons, with 55,000 tons in 2000) and the considering that Romania is net sugar importer country. In these circumstances we succeeded in obtaining a total sugar quota (quota for sugar beat plus processing quota), which together with the quota obtained for isoglucose covers entirely the domestic consumption in Romania. This quota is about four times as much as the quota presented by the mass media as being the Commission proposal. We have chosen this strategy in order to support the sugar industry. I must underline the fact that we obtained the best results in comparison with all the other sugar importer countries that acceded to the European Union in May 2004.
Via The Periscope

OK. This is what I understand: 1. Romania is a sugar importer. 2. Romania is allowed to export an amount of sugar to the EU that equals its sugar consumption. Confusing? Yeah, well. Then read this:

Beet! Give me a beet!

It's hard to make a sugar beet look sexy. What do you think, did the PR people of this campaign succeed?

Ah. You're wondering what this is all about - and what it has to do with Romania. Good questions, both of them. The first one I'm going to answer today. If there is any interest at all, then I'll answer the second question tomorrow. Personally, I encountered this particular sugar beet for the first time about three hours ago, as I turned a page in my beloved Zeit magazine and saw a one-page ad by the German sugar beet industry. Until then, I had been blissfully unaware that the EU plans to recklessly ruin the livelihood of thousands of German (and other EU) sugar beet farmers. In order to understand the sheer magnitude of this problem, you have to know that large areas of Germany look like this:

Pie Blogging Redivivus: The White Potato Pie

Let me be frank. This is not a happy pie. This pie speaks of isolation and deprivation in the midst of plenty. This is the pie a prison cook might make for Thanksgiving after the warden goes back on his promise of pumpkins. This is the pie Orwell might have made at Wigan Pier. This pie is two steps below soul food. It is a scary, scary pie. Okay! This recipe makes two pies, so halve everything if you only want one. I started off with two large potatoes, which I peeled, boiled, mashed, and let cool. I stirred in a stick of butter (a quarter-pound, 100 grams), two cups of sugar (400 grams), two eggs and two cups of milk (500 milliliters). This scared me. It's not particularly far from a recipe I use for potato soup. It was not very thick, so I decided to slowly heat it to allow the potato starch to thicken. This took some time. I learned that this recipe is not initially forgiving of lumpy mashed potatoes. The small non-mashed bits of potato were floating loose in the liquid. Also, some of them scorched on the bottom of the pan, turning a light tan filling into a russet color as I hurriedly stirred the pot. I added a teaspoon of vanilla extract and a teaspoon of what is called "pumpkin spice" to the mixture, mainly cinnamon and nutmeg, because the filling tasted exactly like you would expect: a sweet egg custard made from potato. Like you put flan and French fries in the blender. It took nearly half an hour for the damn filling to thicken; or rather, the lumpy half was thick, but the remainder was less so. At one point I was seriously contemplating adding cornstarch. Yeah, starch to a potato pie. But it finally did thicken, the lumps dissolving into the general puree, and I whisked it smooth. I poured the filling into two prefab uncooked pie crusts, and baked them for forty-ish minutes at about 350 F (175 C). They came out bubbling, looking much like pumpkin pie to the untrained eye, but without the pumpkin pie's creamy custard sheen. On closer examination, these were grainy, raggedy pies that screamed ersatz from every steaming pore. The taste? A sweet pie made from a bland root vegetable. The vanilla and the spices mask most (but not all) of the potato flavor. The potato nature of the pie really comes out in the texture, which is unsettlingly like mashed potatoes. Good with coffee, but what isn't? And if you're on an Atkins diet, forget it. I can't help but think turnips would have given the pie more character. But that way lies madness.

Brunswick stew!

So I was inspired by Bad Mama's recent post about her eating experiences in North Carolina to make Brunswick stew. Brunswick stew doesn't have much to do with the original Brunswick, or Braunschweig, or even New Brunswick, Canada. Tradition says that it was named after Brunswick County (NB: a county is a small American administrative unit, which non-US readers might be familiar with from watching The Dukes of Hazzard), but which one? There are Brunswick Counties in Virginia and North Carolina, and to confuse matters further, there is a Brunswick, Georgia that has staked its claim to the stew. Originally it was a squirrel stew, cooked with corn. A lot of recipes include beans (especially lima beans) as well, which speaks to me of a Native American origin for the dish. Was the primeval Brunswick stew basically succotash with added squirrel? Unfortunately, history is silent on the matter. Anyway, it's hard to find good squirrel these days. Most current recipes use chicken. My version of Brunswick stew was a combination of yuppie and white beige trash cooking. I took two unused boneless skinless Perdue chicken breasts that I had in the fridge (this is the yuppie part), about 300-400 grams worth, and cut them into chunks. I finished up the rest of my bacon, about 150 grams, cutting it into thin slices. I put the uncooked meat into my big skillet, chopped up a large white onion and put that in too, and covered the shebang with water and let it simmer for an hour. I also added a few shakes of black pepper and a tablespoon of Worchestershire sauce somewhere in there, to kill time. At the end of the hour I added an 15-ounce (400 g) can of generic baby lima beans, an 15-ounce can of ditto stewed tomatoes, and an 15-ounce can of ditto creamed corn. (This is the trash part.) I turned up the heat somewhat and let it cook down, stirring more often as the stew thickened, adding some salt along the way. By the end, it was a very thick, rather orange-colored stew, with very little recognizable bacon or tomato. It turned out to be a rather sweet stew as well (though not candy sweet), probably from the corn and the bacon fat, with an interesting tang. Other versions make it considerably more sour and pepperier, but it was a deliberate choice on my part to keep it basic. And it was very good; my version served two meals for the hungry bachelor, which probably translates to four to six at table. Rice, corn bread, or potatoes.

Non-Pie Blogging: Tropical and Tomato Thoughts

Ah, summer is here, a hot, wet, sticky, sultry New York City summer, and inevitably, a young man's thoughts turn to the kitchen. In response to the New York City Math Teacher's request for a butterscotch-like side dish that wouldn't violate the rules of kosherality when served with meat barbecue, I tried my previous butterscotch recipe with the exotic non-dairy substitution of two 400 mL cans of Goya coconut milk instead of the milk and butter. Worked like a charm! The taste of the islands, mon. This one, you might want to add a splash of rum instead of vanilla. Since I have sworn off pies for the moment, I ate this as a simple dessert pudding. Lately I have been craving chicken adobo. It's one of the world's great, if relatively unknown, simple chicken dishes, like chicken cacciatore or chicken Marengo. It was originally devised in the Philippines -- also hot, wet, and sticky, but there the whole year around -- but it's slowly infiltrating the mainstream in the United States. And it's pretty easy. You start with a fryer (or chicken legs, or breasts, or whatever), then simmer it in vinegar, soy sauce, and garlic until the meat is tender. Also it usually includes bay leaves and black pepper, but we're talking a very vinegary, salty, garlicky sauce here. You serve the whole shebang with rice. There are a bunch of tweaks: starch to thicken the sauce, sugar to sweeten it, different sorts of vinegars, more complex spices, et cetera. You can brown the meat initially, or sear it in the vinegar; and you can pan-fry the meat after it simmers (keeping the sauce of course). It works just fine with pork, or even goat. Except for the soy sauce, I don't think there's an ingredient that isn't common to Romania. You don't even have to serve it with rice; mamaliga should work fine. Some American versions even use potatoes. Measurements when I actually make it. Question for Romanian readers: What's the tomato cuisine in Romania like? I was thinking about the Romanian climate and agriculture the other day, and it struck me that Romania might actually be better for growing big juicy beefy tomatoes than the Mediterranean proper. In the US, New Jersey (of all places) is known for that sort of tomato, and it's probably from those tomatoes that the great American traditions of ketchup, 'red sauce' restaurants, and the Bloody Mary grew. On the other hand, northern Italian cooking uses the tomato sparingly.

Pie Blogging the Last: E Pluribus Unum, Or, The Spaghetti Pie

Happy Fourth of July! This is the day that Americans all around the world celebrate the founding of their nation by performing its two great ritual pastimes: cooking a lot of meat, and blowing things up. Since this is not an explosives blog (yet), I'm not going to post any recipes for the latter activity. On the other hand, I have a pie recipe that reflects our national motto, "E pluribus unum" -- "Out of many, one!" -- pretty well, I think. Benjamin Franklin, that glorious rake, lifted the phrase from a work of Virgil's (or Pseudo-Vergilius's) entitled "Moretum", which is your basic elderly peasant hard but good life idyll with a recipe for pesto thrown in. Here are the money lines:

it manus in gyrum, paulatim singula vires
deperdunt proprias, color est e pluribus unus

I'm not Belle Waring (though after the initial period of adjustment I'd bet it'd be pretty cool), so I'm going to quote one John Augustine Wilstach's translation of 1884:

Spins round the stirring hand; lose by degrees
Their separate powers the parts, and comes at last
From many several colors one that rules.

'That rules' is filler, unfortunately making the passage sound like it was inscribed on a ring somewhere. But you get the gist. Stirring, stirring, stirring towards unity! The pie connection is obvious. Also, spaghetti pie is a meat pie, or at least this version is. So it fits the cooking meat Fourth of July tradition as well.

Pie Blogging: Satan May Relish Coffee Pie

Have I started making pies for the Prince of Darkness? Well, no. At least, not that I know of. "Satan may relish coffee pie," was a mnemonic phrase devised by an emigrant French professor living in Brooklyn, New York, one Franois Fauvel-Gouraud, in 1844. Gouraud had come to the United States in 1839 to promote the new photographic technology of the Daguerrotype, made public earlier that year. Unfortunately, like many first movers in new technologies, Gouraud was unable to make good on his early position. However, he rapidly bounced back. He quickly mastered American English, and promoted a different sort of technology: mnemotechnology, or the art of memory. He rapidly updated an earlier system then popular in France, and revised it to American tastes. Going on the lucrative public speaking circuit of that era, he made $20K in a single year promoting his method, roughly equivalent to $500K today. Here's a Baltimore critic, one Edgar Allan Poe, on Gouraud and his method:

It is by no means too much to say that the powers of memory, as aided by his system, are absolutely illimitable. We earnestly advise our readers to procure M. Gouraud's extraordinary work and decide in the premises for themselves.

How did Gouraud's method work? (And what does it have to do with Satan and coffee pie?) Through "conditional associations". In this case, Gouraud associated the phonetic sounds of the consonants in a sentence to numerals. S (or soft C or Z) became 0, T (or D) became 1, N became 2, M became 3, R became 4, L became 5, Sh (or J or Ch) became 6, hard C (or K or hard G) became 7, F (or V) became 8, and P (or B) became 9. So "SaTaN May ReLiSH CoFFee Pie" simply becomes 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. Easy as pie.

Instead of pies...

... a quick and dirty but very yummy soup. My soups are always experimental, sweep-the-kitchen-floor style soups. Often, they come out just fine. Today I tried to recreate a soup from Snack Attack - a zucchini soup. I read the ingredients in the menu and thought it should be pretty straight forward. I forgot I lacked one important ingredient which was sour cream. Well. If you do sweep-the-kitchen-style-cooking, then you have to deal with shortcomings.

Pie Blogging: The Bean Pie

This is a sweet pie. Thus, this is a disturbing pie, since it is also a bean pie. Yet it is a multicultural pie. American cowboys, Black Muslims, and diners in Chinese McDonald's restaurants have all eaten the bean pie with gusto and with pleasure. Sweet, disturbing, multicultural; sounds good to me. So let's go.

Pie Blogging: The Vinegar Pie

First, a quote:

"She also began to bake a lot of pies. She made dried apple pie and raisin pie. She had mincemeat she'd put up and was saving for Christmas but she opened those jars. When she ran out of those, she made mock apple pie out of crushed crackers or red bean pie. She made vinegar pie." -- Carol Emshwiller, Ledoyt.

The following recipe is taken from Carol Emshwiller's unconventional Western novel, Ledoyt. Unfortunately, I think it has a tragic flaw. (The recipe, not the book, which is excellent.)

Pie update 2

The pie is gone. The pie is gone; and I am alone.

Pie update 1

I decided to divide the pie into sixths, to eliminate any psychological barriers a more dyadic approach (eighths, fourths, halves) might have created. The pre-fab crust, I am ashamed to say, was not a success. It was unable to bear the sheer mass of the pie. Both spoon and fork were necessary in extracting the first slice out. But the first taste, ah. Soft and sweet and silky, like the hair of a lover brushing one's forehead in the morning. The natural warmth of the brown sugar and the creaminess of the butter combined into a greater whole. Even my coffee seems pallid in comparison. The pie is half gone now.

Pie Blogging Just Isn't A Crime: The Butterscotch Edition

So it's a cool June here in NYC, and the social life has picked up a bit: Rififi, Sin- (the new one), Azkaban; soon Imelda, Truck Turner, and then to the Jersey Shore to assist Dave and Leah with their grand experiment of kosher smoked barbecue. I'm a little nervous, since I come from the heartland of treyf itself, but I think I have come up with some suitable side dishes for the upcoming carnifest. The following ain't one of them.

Apple lattice cake

It seems that these days I spent a lot of time in the kitchen, baking. All those March birthdays, I'm sure. So here is a recipe for the bakers among our readers. This is the best ever apple cake. It's a bit time-consuming (the apple cutting takes time) but it's well worth it. Note to US American bakers: I've calculated the cup-equivalents for you guys and they are, of course, not always "fitting". It came out as something like "a cup plus three teaspoons". We Germans believe in precision in our baking, that's why we prefer the metric weight system, you see. ;-) The dough is what we call a "Mürbteig". My dictionary gives me "short pastry" as the English expression. I'd appreciate a pointer whether this is the correct word. OK, let's begin with a list of ingredients:

The scale of things

Most loyal and esteemed reader Carlos asked for a calibration of my restaurant ratings. So here is my (very personal) scale of stars: (Caveat - I had to adjust the scale because I couldn't find a nice gif of four stars...) Won't go there anymore and if I'm starving Might go there again one day but not in a hurry Nice but something was off; will give it another try Yes! This is one of my favorites! Mindless joy Hope that clears things up a bit. :-)

Balthazar

Balthazar Str. Dumbrava Rosie 2 Tel: 212 14 60, 212 14 61 This busy restaurant is currently one of the fashionable spots of the Jeunesse Doree and the expat community. You hear a lot of English spoken around the tables, in various different accents. I saw Japanese, Spanish, Italian and British businessmen devouring their meals. Located in a beautiful old villa and decorated very tastefully, the Balthazar is truly impressive on first sight. I loved the building and the Christmas decoration, all lights and not too much else. Eye candy for those who like nice architecture and interior decoration.

Zerillo's

ZERILLO'S La Trattoria Italiana Piata Lohavari 2 Tel: 0722 383 507 Zerillo's was our first real find. We sort of stumbled over it one day in June, only days after we've arrived in Bucharest. It's situated on Piata Lohavari which is near the end of Calea Dorobantilor. A nice 15 minute walk from our house. Back in June, it was still hot and sticky and the nicest feature of the restaurant was the open terrace on the second floor. The entire floor is enclosed by glass doors which can be opened in warm weather. Oh, boy - it's heaven on a hot, humid day in Bucharest! On the first floor there is a nice fireplace for those winter days -- an all-season restaurant indeed. In Your Pocket claims that Zerillo's has the town's largest antipasti selection. While I'm not so sure about that, I can vouch that they are excellent. We had very good crostini there in summer with oh-so-good tomatoes and just a week ago, an antipasti platter with a selection of their best and finest, all finger-licking yummy. But wait before you fill yourself up on the appetizers and leave room for a main course! The portions are *big*, the salads are salads (if you know what I mean -- it's hard to find good salads in the Balkans) and I've yet to order something that I didn't sigh over with delight. The pasta is always al dente, a very important point in an Italian restaurant. Finish with a panna cotta... finally a panna cotta that doesn't have the consistency of a brick. I heard the other desserts are also good but I always end up taking the panna cotta anyhow. It's just so good. What's left? Oh, good wines, good service. The prices are high-ish for Romanian standards but the food is worth it. Very recommended.