Category Archives: Food

Spring Lamb from a Once Noisy Rock

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[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

Silla used to be Scylla. Those were heady days. When the Greeks were in charge this was a mighty place. Sailors knew: “but that is the den of Skylla, where she yaps / abominably, a newborn whelp’s cry, / though she is huge and monstrous.” Six heads of monstrous per Homer, who knew a bit about showmanship, with “triple serried rows of fangs and deep / gullets of black death.” The place had a buzz.

Opposite the rocks that lore named Scylla was Charibdis; a Sicily-adjacent whirlpool, impassible. To risk the whirlpool was to lose your ship. The rocks meant a sacrifice of six crewmen, “from every ship, one man for every gullet.” It was the original hard place.

Further south along the toe’s coast, you find Palmi, with views across the Tyrrhenian of the Aeolian Islands’s Mt. Stromboli to the northish and across the Strait of Messina of Mt. Etna to the southwest. There aren’t many places in the world from where you can see two active volcanoes. Keep going with the sea to your right and olive trees to your left to reach Reggio Calabria, the provincial capital (Overly simplified: Italians say regions when Canadians would say provinces and their provinces are what we’d call counties.)

The most interesting thing about Reggio Calabria to me right now is that it’s listed as the 100th most populous city in Europe by Wikipedia. Not 99th. Not 117th. What are the odds that the city I read about last night and decided to look into further this morning would hold such a decidistinction? In grade school I was told that Mt. Everest was found to be 29,000 feet tall but reported as 29,001 because the statisticians didn’t think anyone would believe the round finding. “Latest measurements” put it at 29,032 feet. Better lasers than in Hillary’s time, I suppose.

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Meatballs with Sausages: Breaking the Code of Silence

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They must live within a lie. They need not accept the lie. It is enough for them to have accepted their life with it and in it. For by this very fact, individuals confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are the system.  – Vaclav Havel, The Power of the Powerless

This is going to take a minute, so if you’re just here for the recipe feel free to skip on down.

I got my first job at sixteen in an Italian restaurant/pizzeria owned by the people who lived across the street from us. The place was a retirement of sorts. The mister was formerly of the stock market, Alabama bred but with a mid-American accent learned out of professional necessity. Get him laughing and Gadsden came out. The missus was from Brazil. They both spoke English, Spanish, and Portuguese. She added French, German, and a bit of Italian. Their son who helped run the place spoke all of those but German.

They were all clever as can be. (And still are. I see them almost weekly, but this is a nostalgic anecdote and there’s power in “were.” It creates for the reader a sense of being transported, and once frame of reference is changed the experience is more immersive.) There’s an old saying that a gentleman is someone who’s as comfortable in the company of pirates as of kings. As a trader, he spent time with New York financial power players. She was practically Rio aristocracy. They could pull off Ma and Pa shop keeper. No problem.

I remember one afternoon, the missus complimented a woman on her purse. The woman, in her thirties and from the over-the-mountain community (we know because she managed to get that in), was working out whatever insecurities she needed to work out by implying that (a) yes it is a nice purse, (b) you’ll never be able to afford one, and (c) what would a shop keeper know about fashion accessories anyway. The missus gave a Brazilian smile and nodded. “It really is nice, though.”

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Recipe: Deconstructed Salisbury Steak

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“Eat the muscle pulp of lean beef made into cakes and broiled. This pulp should be as free as possible from connective or glue tissue, fat and cartilage…..The pulp should not be pressed too firmly together before broiling, or it will taste livery. Simply press it sufficiently to hold it together. Make the cakes from half an inch to an inch thick. Broil slowly and moderately well over a fire free from blaze and smoke. When cooked, put it on a hot plate and season to taste with butter, pepper, salt; also use either Worcestershire or Halford sauce, mustard, horseradish or lemon juice on the meat if desired.”
– Dr. James Henry Salisbury (1823-1905)

Don’t do that.

Before Bob Atkins, there was James Henry Salisbury. He got lost in the Victorian Era nutritionist craze. John Harvey Kellog promoted a vegetarian, cereal-heavy diet supplemented by yogurt enemas. Sylvester Graham made people sleep on hard beds, take cold baths, and lie about masturbating. Those were the heavy hitters. It was a fascinating time peopled by fascinating people.

As with Kellog, Salisbury was an early voice suggesting germs had a part in sickness and infections. He got made fun of a good bit for that before being proven right. Both men probably got away with a lot of crackpottery after that. Salisbury promoted a diet of beef cakes as described above, three times a day washed down with hot water. Why hot I’m unsure, but he warned against ever drinking other liquids at other temperatures. Fruits and vegetables were chock full of poisons and the cause of “summer complaints.” Pace Kellog and Graham, plants were relegated to a rounding error; no more than one percent of the Salisbury diet.

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Rigatoni Capricciosi

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I have Rosetta Stone, so I know a few things.

My new favorite restaurant is a place downtown called Lé Fresca in the just-above-water cool 2nd Avenue North corridor that used to be a choosers paradise of wig and discount furniture shops. Now it’s restaurants and lofts but the Uber shift has convinced business owners that parking is no longer a concern, likely making the one valet stand the most profitable enterprise in the district. Members of the one, true, holy, and apostolic church who are visually recognizable to clergy can park in the church lot but for everyone else finding a spot is an exercise in faith.

One of the few things I know is that “le” is the feminine plural definite article in Italian. The plural ending construct, for lack of a better term, of most feminine nouns, at least those covered by Rosetta Stone through Week 5, Day 3 is to replace the final letter “a” with an “e” unless the final letter is already an “e.” In that case you leave it “e.” So a feminine noun, say “la donna,” becomes plural by changing the “a” in “le” and the “a” in “donna” to “e” so you get “le donne”: the women.

Having been initiated into the mysteries I couldn’t help but notice that “Lé Fresca” seems to have gone rogue. By my reckoning it should have been either “Le Fresce” or “La Fresca.” According to the owner, it’s slang.

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Fumigating with Coq au Vin

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When my friend died I got his copy of Coyote Café, a cookbook by Mark Miller. There was a memorial gathering at a bar on the riverfront in Savannah, Georgia thrown together by few of his ex-girlfriends. Some of his stuff – cds, books, a bike helmet, etc. – was laid out on tables for people to pick up and take home as mementos.

He, my wife, and I were practically roommates for a spell. At the cusp of the century swap, we had the upper left apartment of a fourplex and he had the upper right. We still courtesy knocked, but if my wife was studying and Jeffrey, the friend, was out somewhere I’d still go over to his place if I wanted to watch TV (television) or listen to music. The best part of this communal arrangement was that Jeffery was a chef. We ate well. Very well. And he didn’t just feed us. He taught us all manner of things about food stuffs and ways to make them hot.

I don’t think he taught us anything out of Coyote Café. I picked it because the spine was sun-bleached; it was something that he’d had for a while. The Coyote Café restaurant is in New Mexico and I figured he picked the book up when he was running a kitchen in Arizona. It felt like something that made moves with him. Looking at it now, I don’t think he used it much. He was a sloppy cook at home. He was the opposite when working, but at home things got splashed around and dripped on. The pages are pristine. More than likely, the book didn’t get left.

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Tomato Jam (Extended Jam)

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… in which nothing was pressed.

In 1991, I went to a party in Lexington, VA, a place I was told at the time was the hot spot for inbreeding in the United States. My dad had recently been to Australia, and flying across that countrinent, he read an article in the in-flight magazine about a restaurant in Perth that was hailed as “The Best Restaurant in Australia.” It was near enough to his hotel so he went. “I’ve never been to the best restaurant in a country before,” he told me.

Being in the most inbred, per capita, city in a country is perfectly safe if you observe from a place of safety like an anthropologist in a blind or an oceanographer in a windowed diving bell. I was visiting a friend at Washington & Lee, so it was kind of like that. I don’t remember the party details. We went to a concert in a small columned structure and my friend was a first semester freshman, so I doubt it was Greek sponsored. It was private. I’m sure of that because there were only three or four hundred people in the hall and the headliner was a Robbie Robertson-less The Band. My friend was cute so she could get into any party. No idea why I was allowed in.

I’d never heard of the opening band. They were good, but fifteen minutes into their set I was pretty sure that they were still on their first song. I’d seen jam bands before. I saw The Grateful Dead when it was still jarring to see Bruce Hornsby out of his “and The Range” role. I laid in the grass at Oak Mountain Amphitheater twice while the Allman Brother played “Whipping Post” for two hours with brief side trips to other songs. It was just weird to hear an unknown band assume people liked a song they didn’t know and wanted to hear it riffed, dissected, and reassembled.

I know it was a small venue, but if the band asked me to play with them, I’d take the opportunity to showcase the breadth of what I can do; cast a wide net. These guys played one song – I’m pretty sure – for forty-five minutes. It was unexpected, but great.

I asked about them later. They were some guys from Georgia who were starting to get national attention: Widespread Panic.

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Stroganov’s Expanded Upon Beef Stroganoff

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When a dish is as simple as beef Stroganoff it’s hard to sift through the claims of invention. It’s sliced beef in sour sauce. Cut away all the variations and that’s what’s left. Not exactly splitting the atom.

Every town in Italy that can attach an “-ese” to the end of its name invented Minestrone. “Before us, there was no boiling water with vegetables in it!” they boast. “Dopo di noi, il diliziosa!” It’s chaos. Multiple Italian claims would have plagued meat sauce too, but the wily Bolognese, as a condition of submitting to Papal rule in 1506, insisted that all pasta sauces made with beef and tomatoes throughout Christendom be referred to as “Bolognese,” increasing their opportunity to sneer “That’s not real Bolognese.”

Alexander Grigorievich Stroganov (1795-1891) is likely who the dish is named for though there are other claimants. One story tells that Grigory Alexandrovich Stroganov’s (1770-1857) chef made a dish of minced meat because his master’s teeth were either gone or in such a state that chewing was out. Another says a chef attending to Pavel Alexandrovich Stroganov (1774-1817) served julienned beef in sauce because the meat was so frozen it could only be shaved into ribbons. But it was Alexander Grigorievich Stroganov (1795-1891) who may have popularized the dish in Odessa, freeing it from aristocratic trappings, letting it mingle with common dishes of sliced beef in sour sauce where it could sneer, “That’s not real me.”

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Getting Fries Right

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“Eat a McDonald’s hamburger and you might be getting a mouth full of antibiotics, hormones, and dangerous bacteria.” The italics are mine. That’s from “What’s really in a McDonald’s hamburger?” by Robin Konie published at thatnkyourbody.com. The curious non-capitalized headline is theirs.

There was pink slime, but that’s either gone as an ingredient or renamed something like “pure real beef that we swear is organix” or something. “pure real…” should probably capitalized. It’s catching.

I think food fear mongering is funny. Mt Dew used to contain brominated vegetable oil. It doesn’t now because people accused Pepsi Co. of putting “flame retardant” in their sody pop even though they only used a meh 8 parts per million of the stuff when the FDA says up to 15 parts is fine. Never mind that Mt. Dew is a fire retardant, as anyone who’s ever doused a MORPG session ash tray fire can attest.

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I’m Told It’s Called Lamb Keema Curry

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My family gave me James May’s cookbook, Oh Cook! 60 Easy Recipes That Any Idiot Can Make, for Father’s Day.

“Hey!” you might be saying to yourself as you read this. “I know James May. He’s that English guy from Top Gear back when it was cool and producers got punched. He’s the one who wears those Jackson Pollock shirts and whose hair won’t let him be his age.” And you’d be right.

I’m a cookbook reader, by which I mean when I get a new cookbook, not always but usually, I start at the beginning and read all the non-instructional text. I do read the text of recipes before I eventually make them, but I like the stories and bits of history and trivia that pepper the pages enough to put up with the naturally sourced/sustainable/organic sanctimony (Jamie Oliver thinks he’s Food Jesus.) I’ve pored over Escoffier, Marcella Hazan (Her Name Be Praised), and again and again the books of M.F.K. Fisher. I don’t write this lightly:

Under the heading “A Note on Weights and Measures,” James May has written the most important paragraph ever to grace the pages of a cookbook.

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Chicken Spiedini with Amogio Sauce

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“Spiedini” is an Italian word, but it means “skewer.” There’s nothing innately Italian about that part. People have been cooking things on sticks the world over since the first guy burnt his hand. “Amogio” is innately Italian, specifically Sicilian; old as the hills but with no good story trailing behind. It’s citrus and herbs with olive oil and a touch of spice. It’s a simple recipe that takes advantage of the island’s selective bounty.

I’ve read that when the Greeks arrived, Sicily was inhabited by the Elymi to the west, the Sicuni in the central region, and the Siculi along the east. Each had a style of cooking that, other than that they all used roughly the same ingredients – citrus, herbs, olives, nuts, seafood, and the occasional meat, I’ve read was distinct. I can’t find any commentary to enlighten me as to how they were distinct, just that they were. The Greeks didn’t change much to the cuisine other than introduce fish stew, which seems improbable. Anybody that lives by the sea and has a pot will get that notion on their own.

The Greeks had staying power. Syracuse was a force as early as the fifth century B.C. and Hellenic dialects were still dominant under Augustus when Rome was dependent on the island for wheat. In 831, under Saracen rule, the capital moved from Syracuse to Palermo and Greek influence faded. According to Waverley Root in his book The Food of Italy, the Saracens never left, “They are at any rate still with us in the kitchen. Almost everything which strikes us today as typically Sicilian is typically Saracen.”

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