My Reputation Takes a Beating

NOTE: This is the last posting for this blog, at least for the time being, as these were essays written years ago and compiled in a book (as yet unpublished) called "The Poetry of Food." When I have occasion to write more essays about food, I'll post them, but this is the last of the weekly posts. In order not to miss any others, sign up for email notification.

    Remember, while reading this post, that it was written long before there was any such thing as an internet and easy access to questions of equivalency between ways of measuring things.]

    While I was visiting my friends Maren and Lasse in Sweden, I decided one night to cook dinner for them. I told them I would make a sweet-and-sour cabbage dish with cottage cheese dumplings and bake my famous lime tart for dessert.

    "Oh," said Maren brightly, knowing that the lime tart had been featured in the Carberry Creek Dessert Bakeoff [see posts on October 7 and 14, 2019], "maybe we could have a little dessert contest, and Lasse could make his famous pear hazelnut amaretto cream cake another night."

    That idea made me a little nervous, but I was in too deep to get out of it, so I swung my leg over my bicycle and went off to the market.

    There I ran into my first difficulty: buying in kilograms what I needed in pounds. Drawing on visual and kinetic memories, I did the best I could to keep proportions accurate and managed what I hoped was proper amounts of what I needed. I only found four tiny limes for the pie, too, when I needed six life-size limes, but they would have to do. With bags of groceries, wine, and bread precariously balanced on my bicycle, I pedaled my unwieldy way home to make dinner.

    I did well with the cabbage sauté dimpled with dumplings,

The cabbage sauté

but what trouble I had with the lime tart! The four tiny limes didn't give nearly enough juice, and the only pie pan I found was very pretty but too big. I stretched my crust to cover it, and I spread the filling as thinly as possible. Then I faced the next major difficulty: how hot in Celsius is a 350º Fahrenheit over? All I could do was guess, so I stuck the tart in the oven with little prayers to the Celsius gods. I set the table with Maren's pretty plates and wine glasses, then worried that the oven was too hot and turned it down a smidgen. I lit the candles, then worried that the oven was not hot enough and turned it up again. I called Maren and Lasse to dinner.

    How they exclaimed over the pretty table! How they marveled at the dumplings with the cabbage! I relaxed a bit, then jumped up to check the oven and turned it down. When I sat down again, explaining my difficulty, Lasse asked what body temperature was in Fahrenheit, and he said what it was in Celsius, so with that basis of comparison, I figured roughly how hot the oven was and jumped up in alarm. It was way too hot! The lime tart came out of the oven long before the thirty-five-minute baking time was up, as though time, like temperature, was different in Sweden.

    Ideally, I would have decorated the top of the pie with slices of lime and banana, but I didn't have any more limes, and I was nervous about our getting to the cinema on time, so I served the pie undecorated, which was, as it turned out, a serious error.

    Maren and Lasse said, "Mm! What a delicious pie!" It did have a nice, tart lime taste, even if the filling was too dry and a little tough because it had baked too fast and had cracked and was undecorated and looked burnt sienna instead of golden glow and the crust overwhelmed the filling because the pan was too big. It wasn't bad, really.

    Several nights later, Maren and I came home from an excursion to find the famous pear hazelnut amaretto cream cake on the table. It was spectacular with swirls of white pears laid on top like petals of a flower, golden yellow centers of custard surrounded by a burgundy red hazelnut topping, and everything dusted with the lightest brush of powdered sugar. A tureen of rich, sweet cream whipped with amaretto stood nearby. After we had properly admired the cake, Lasse, his eyes twinkling with understated pride, served his masterpiece, which tasted every bit as good as it looked. I graciously conceded the prize. 

    Inwardly, though, I was embarrassed. My boastings were unfounded, my reputation in shatters. And then I thought of my own non-electric kitchen in my little mountain home and wondered if Lasse might have as much trouble cooking in my kitchen as I had in his. When he and Maren come to visit, I decided, I would make them a lime tart that would knock their socks off, beautiful with circles of fluffy coconut outlining circles of limes, glowingly golden, creamy and rich. This would be a pie, I thought, to perk up the senses like a Rumi poem or a Beethoven string quartet—or like a pear hazelnut amaretto cream cake.

Recipes from this post

    Cabbage sauté dimpled with dumplings of cottage cheese

    The usually unbeatable lime tart

    Italian pear and hazelnut cake con crema amaretto

CABBAGE SAUTE DIMPLED WITH DUMPLINGS OF COTTAGE CHEESE

serves 6

The cabbage

The sauté with dumplings

Ingredients

1/2 tablespoons butter or oil

4 medium onions

2 small heads cabbage, red or green or both

1 1/2 teaspoons salt

1 teaspoon cumin seeds

4 medium tart green apples

4 navel oranges

1/2 cup granulated sugar, brown sugar (packed), or honey

Black pepper

Up to 3 tablespoons cider vinegar

Yogurt (optional)

Preparation

Chop the onions. Shred the cabbage to make 8-10 cups. Toast the cumin seeds. Peel, core, and coarsely chop the apples. Peel and cut up the oranges.

To make

In a large skillet, sauté onions in hot oil or butter. Cook 5 minutes over medium heat. Add cabbage and salt and cook 8-10 minutes or until cabbage starts to become tender. (Work in batches if necessary). Add remaining ingredients. Stir well, cover, and cook over medium heat, stirring occasionally, 20-30 minutes.

The dumplings

Ingredients

2 eggs 

1/2 cup cottage cheese

1 cup flour

1 teaspoon salt

2 tablespoons fresh dill (or 2 teaspoons dried)

4 tablespoons butter

To make

Beat eggs and cottage cheese in medium bowl. Stir in remaining ingredients, except butter. Mix well. Boil a large kettle of water (about 3 quarts). Add rounded tablespoons of dumpling dough. Do not crowd the kettle. Poach 15 minutes in gently simmering water. Remove with slotted spoon. About 20-30 minutes before serving, melt 4 tablespoons of butter in a large skillet. Add dumplings and sauté over medium heat till golden, 10-20 minutes.

To serve

Transfer the cabbage to a large, shallow serving bowl or platter. Top with dumplings. Add a dollop of yogurt, if desired. Serve hot.

THE USUALLY UNBEATABLE LIME TART

serves 8

The pastry

Ingredients

7 tablespoons butter

1 1/3 cups unbleached white flour

pinch salt

1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract

1/4 cup sugar

3-4 tablespoons very cold water

To make

Cut the butter into the flour and salt with a pastry cutter or two knives. (Or use a processor.) Mix in the vanilla and sugar, and then use just enough water to make the dough clump together. Press dough into a 9-inch drop-bottom pan, making it crawl up the sides. Chill.

The filling

Ingredients

4 limes (if they are good-size)

5 tablespoons butter

1/2 cup sugar

5 eggs

1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract

Preparation

Squeeze the limes to yield 1/2 cup fresh juice. Beat the eggs well. Preheat oven to 425º.

To make

Line the chilled crust with wax paper or parchment paper and fill it with dried beans or pie weights. Bake at 425º for 15 minuets. Take the pie from the oven and remove the beans and the paper. Lower oven temperature to 350º. Heat the lime juice, butter, and sugar over low heat until the butter melts. Pour the beaten eggs slowly into this mixture, whisking constantly. Continue to stir over low heat until the mixture thickens into a pudding. Stir in the vanilla extract. Pour this custard into the baked crust and bake at 350º for 30-35 minutes, until the custard is set.

To finish

Ingredients

the baked pie

1 banana

1 lime

unsweetened flaked or shredded coconut (optional), or whipped cream 

Preparation

Slice the lime and the banana. Sprinkle the banana slices with lime or lemon juice to prevent browning.

Decoration

Decorate the edge of the pie with coconut or whipped cream, if desired. Garnish pie with circles of lime and banana. Chill.

ITALIAN PEAR & HAZELNUT CAKE CON CREMA AMARETTO

Note from Lasse: "It's not Italian, actually—I just added that because of the amaretto (almond) liqueur. The original recipe (my mother's) had cognac in the whipped cream, but I liked the amaretto touch."

Note from me: I have given the measurements as Lasse gave them to me, which would be the most accurate. I translated them into American measurements, as accurately as I could, but you might look up your own equivalencies.

The cake

Ingredients

2 deciliter (dl) hazelnuts (1 /12 cups)

5 bitter almonds

1 1/2 dl flour (2/3 cup)

1 teaspoon baking powder

100 grams butter (1 stick)

1 1/2 dl milk (regular fat %) (2/3 cup + 2 tablespoons)

2 eggs

2 dl sugar (3/4 cup)

(I added 1/2 teaspoon salt.)

Preparation

Preheat oven to 350º. Grind hazelnuts and almonds into meal. Butter and flour an 8-inch, circular, 2-inch-high cake tin. 

To make

Mix the ground hazelnuts and almonds with flour and baking powder. Melt butter and mix with milk. Whip eggs and sugar until really puffed up. Stir dry ingredients into the egg mixture along with the milk. Pour the cake mixture into the prepared pan. Bake about one hour at 175º centigrade (350º Fahrenheit). Set aside to cool.

Topping

Ingredients

2 cans of pear halves in syrup

1 jar of apricot jam

almond flakes (roasted)

10 ounces cream (1 1/4 cups)

3 tablespoons Amaretto liqueur (or Cognac)

Preparation

Roast almond flakes on a baking tray under the grill till golden. Whip cream with amaretto and keep refrigerated.

To make

Wet the cake with some of the pear syrup (careful—no soaking). Spread the apricot jam over and around the cake. Put the pear halves on the cake, covering the top fully. Decorate with almond flakes on top and on sides of cake.

To serve

Serve the Italian Pear & Hazelnut Cake con Crema Amaretto with a cup of strong coffee and a small glass of amaretto liqueur or cognac.

Christmas in Denmark

     The Christmas I was twenty-two years old I fell in love—in a familial, not a romantic, way—with a Danish man and his family. I was living in Cambridge, England, where I was studying as a Marshall Scholar, and my Danish friend Maren had invited me to spend this, my first Christmas away from home, with her family in Bagsvaerd, Copenhagen.

    Maren's family was as merry as my own. I felt at home with them at once. Niels and Ursula, Maren's father and mother, lived in a narrow, semidetached, three-story house filled with original paintings by artist friends of Ursula's parents.

Ursula in her living room

These artists had often used Ursula and her siblings as models, and one of the paintings depicted Ursula as a child in a blue dress with a handful of flowers she had just picked. 

    I slept in a bed tight under the eaves in the room of Maren's brother, Benjamin, who was spending the year on a schooner. Maren's sister, Stine, was there, with her baby, Ulreg, whose father (shockingly to me at that time, given my Southern upbringing) was African and who was also there from time to time. Maren took me to visit her grandmother, who lived in a beautiful old house along the harbor and had an exquisite collection of doll houses, some with miniature paintings of the pictures in Ursula's house that those same artists had reproduced for her. 

    When Maren had to study for exams, she sent me on a train excursion to Hamlet's castle in Helsingør with her boyfriend, Troels, who, in spite of not speaking English, didn't seem averse to the idea. She gave me a map of walks through the King's deer park in Bagsvaerd, where I wandered under Danish beech trees and around the hunting castle on the hill. She put me on the train to Copenhagen for a day in that ancient city spangled for Christmas.

    Ursula's kitchen was so small everything was within reach from one place, fittingly, as Ursula, too, was small. At mealtime, Maren and I carried steaming platters of food up a flight of stairs to the dining room. Classical music played on the record player. When Niels put on Bartok, the rest of the family groaned in mock complaint. That I liked Bartok delighted Niels, and he and I became comrades in exile whenever he played Composition for Two Pianos and Percussion or one of the string quartets.

    The Christmas celebration itself was exuberantly and warmly rich with family and national traditions. The Christmas tree, crowded into the living room and decorated with exquisite ornaments, twinkled with scores of candles on the tips of branches. On Christmas morning we joined hands and danced around the tree. There was music on the piano and a great Christmas feast with the traditional ris a l'amande for dessert. It was so good I asked Ursula if I could have the recipe. When she wrote it out for me, on the paper I still have in my recipe box, she told me that it's easy for rice cooking in milk to burn on the bottom of the pan. She told me with twinkling eyes I would need a husband to stir it for me. (Consequently I didn't make it for years, until I finally decided I could watch the rice on my own and didn't need a husband.)

    Traditionally, the cook leaves one whole almond in the dessert. Whoever finds it has good luck the rest of the year.

    Among the many presents under the Christmas tree that year was a package from my family in Georgia that included a box of pecans, exotic fare to my Danish friends. It's symptomatic of how much I had come to feel at home that when my friends asked what kind of nuts they were, I couldn't remember what they were called.

    From the time of that Christmas, gilded with family warmth and Old World charm, I have been Niels and Ursula's "American daughter." I have written to them occasionally, always at Christmas, always with a special fondness for Niels. When I revisited Denmark five or six years ago, I went to see Niels and Ursula again. 

Maren, Ursula, Niels

They were old now, and old age had not been kind. Niels was almost crippled with a bad hip, Ursula nearly blind. Nonetheless, Niels walked with Maren and me through the backyard garden, and Ursula served us wine and Danish cookies in the living room with its beautiful paintings. When Maren and Ursula carried dishes into the kitchen and I was alone with Niels, I gently brushed crumbs off his chest, hoping not to offend him, but wanting to help him reassert dignity because I loved him. I have a picture of me that Niels took that afternoon. He was an old man. His hands weren't steady, and his eyesight wasn't good, but the picture is beautiful. I'm wearing a flowered skirt and am sitting in the garden among flowers, looking at Niels impishly and fondly.

    Years later I had a dream about Niels, a vivid, powerful dream, pulsatingly psychic. I woke up profoundly moved and felt I should write Niels immediately. Two days later I got an email from Maren telling me her father had had a stroke and probably wouldn't live long. When he recovered enough to live (as it turned out, for a couple of months more, though in a state of constant sleep), I sent him a letter, which Stine read to him. I told him about my dream and spoke of our Christmas together, of Bartok and the beautiful tree with its candles and ris a l'amande, evoking one last time the magical Christmas when he had welcomed to his family a shy young American girl and had taken a place in her heart.

Next week: "My Reputation Takes a Beating"

Recipe from this post: Ris a l'amande

RIS ALAMANDE

This is the recipe just as Ursula wrote it down for me on now faded, cream-colored, linen-textured paper. The misspellings and grammatical idiosyncrasies are in the original. Below her version, I have given the English equivalent measurements.

(10 persons)

1) 1000 gr. (1 liter) milk boiling

2) add 125 gr, rice. Cook for about 20-25 minutes

    (Take care, it will burn in the bottom)

    add a teaspoon salt

    cool it down.

3) 3/4 liter cream to be whipped

4) 125 gr. or more almonds (take off the brown with fingers after some minutes in boiling water) to be cut in very small pieces

Mix 1, 2, 3, and 4 very cautiously. (keep it cool)

English equivalents

4 cups milk

1 cup rice

3 cups cream

4.5 ounces almonds (or more)

My notes:

(1) Don't forget to leave one almond whole.

(2) Don't boil almonds more than one minute, or they'll get soft.

(3) Although I wouldn't malign Ursula's recipe for the world, I would, for my taste, add a teaspoon of vanilla and maybe also a couple of tablespoons of sugar to these ingredients. And don't you think chocolate chips would be a nice addition? Untraditional, but good.

Dinner with Eileen

        NB: This essay was written several decades ago. Nothing I say here should be taken as indicative of what Bend, Oregon, is like today.

     One of my lectures, during my ten years as a Chatauqua lecturer with the Oregon Council for the Humanities, was on the meanings of food: transformative, cultural, communal, religious. When I was invited to give the lecture in Bend, Oregon, Eileen, one of the organizers, suggested I meet her for dinner before the lecture. We would eat, she said, in a restaurant new to Bend that she was curious about.

    Having dinner with Eileen was something like dining with M. F. K. Fisher. A student of Bend's Culinary Institute, Eileen was about my age, had studied the chemistry of Japanese cooking in Japan, and had a degree in organic chemistry. When it came to food and restaurants, she knew her stuff.

    Because I needed to be at the auditorium at 6:30, Eileen had arranged for us to be seated at 5:00, half an hour before the dining room actually opened. But when we arrived, the college-age hostess told us to wait in the bar because seating didn't begin until 5:30, eliciting Reichl-like comments from Eileen as we waited. Bend was developing some superb high-class restaurants with really good food, she said. "But," she went on, "the wait staff im these restaurants is not equally sophisticated." She called them immature, referring to their age, of course, but also to their unprofessional approach to waiting tables. "They should put us immediately in the dining room," she said. "They should take our coats, call us 'madam,' treat us like royalty. If Bend is going to have the pretensions of fine European restaurants, it should fulfill them in all ways." She told me that the cook at this restaurant had been brought from Boston. "I don't know why they had to go all the way to Boston," she said, leaving unsaid that the Culinary Institute surely turned out equally good chefs right there in Bend.

    At 5:30 a pleasant but not overly professional server with a part-time job to put her through college seated us in the dining room. Eileen immediately turned over her knife to see if it was washed well.

    Looking over the menu, Eileen said it was pretty ordinary with nothing especially exciting or original—the same old pastas, chicken, steak, and seafood. "When I go to a restaurant, I always check out the pastas," she said. "Restaurants make a killing on pastas because they're cheap to make, so the prices should be comparably cheaper."

    When the food came, I thought my sweet potato purée divine, but I didn't say so for fear of seeming unsophisticated. While we ate, Eileen talked about taking cooking courses with her husband in Europe—the kind, she said, that take place im the kitchen of some Italian grandmother renowned for her cooking. She praised the Culinary Institute and talked highly of the students, mostly high school graduates who had taken the culinary arts program at Bend High School, and especially of Julian, the head of the institute. She talked a lot about Bend—the influx of people with money and class who understood fine dining and would support a good cultural atmosphere but who did not support the schools or other public institutions that create a thriving community. Bend was a small town suddenly thrust into a big-city atmosphere, she said, and was unable to keep up with its new citizenry.

    Because of the immature wait staff at the restaurant, I was late arriving at the auditorium for my lecture, though I started on time anyway. While I talked to my audience about food, I kept thinking about the superb meal I had just had at one of Bend's newest high-class restaurnats with a high-class lady who gave me the inside scoop on fine dining.

Next week: "Christmas in Denmark"

Literary Potluck

     Refreshments seem to always be served at Chautauqua lectures, sponsored by the Oregon Council for the Humanities, but Tobe Porter, the Port Orford librarian, made a unique connection between my lecture topic—our relationship to food—and the refreshments for my lecture at the Port Orford library. She suggested a potluck of dishes inspired by a book, accompanied by the books themselves.

    The table was crowded with food and books. The biggest hit was three bottles of dandelion wine, standing behind Ray Bradbury's book by the same name. I haven't read the novel, but I can attest that the wine was superb, though I didn't have more than a taste, not wanting to be loopy at the podium. Hershey's chocolate kisses spilled cornucopia-like at the base of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. A plate of grapes, meant to refer to Grapes of Wrath, was a clever pun. A golden-brown, creamy-soft spoonbread sent good Southern smells wafting around Maya Angelou's Hallelujah! The Welcome Table, and a pan of cornbread paid tribute to its accompanying book, a 1945 cookbook that included kitchen tips like how to cook with war rations and how to substitute meat drippings for butter. One woman's soft gingerbread cookies, inspired by a passage about little gingerbread cakes in her favorite book from childhood, The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew, were childhood delicious and answered precisely the way I interpreted the assignment: to find somewhere in a book you liked a reference to food you would like to make.

    I had an advantage in fulfilling the assignment because I had researched literary references to food for my lecture, from Beowulf's mead to the turkey Scrooge gives the Cratchitt family for Christmas to turtle soup from Babette's Feast. Because I was busy preparing for the lecture, I thought about bringing something simple—an apple for the Biblical reference or for Sleeping Beauty; pomegranate seeds in reference to Demeter and Persephone or a peach in honor of T. S. Eliot's Prufrok, who says, in contemplating old age, "Do I dare to eat a peach?" I also thought about bringing mutton kidneys, a favorite food of Leopold Bloom, protagonist of James Joyce's Ulysses, but decided not to, maybe because it wouldn't have been a potluck favorite but mostly because Bloom likes mutton kidneys because they "give to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine," something I thought we could do without at the lecture. In the end, I made a dish suggested in A Midsummer Night's Dream by Titania, the fairy queen. Charmed by a potion while asleep, she awakes to fall in love with Bottom, who has already been turned into an ass, and asks her fairies to "feed him with apricocks and dewberries,/ With purple grapes, green figs, and mulberries." The fruits must have been beautiful, offered to Bottom—the orange apricots, black berries, purple grapes, green figs, all fresh and plump and bright. My own offering to the literary potluck wasn't quite as lovely since the apricots were canned and the blackberries frozen and the figs were brown because I couldn't find green ones and I blended everything too much with the addition of vanilla yogurt. But there was more reason than the usual one for Titania to give Bottom these foods: apricots, grapes, figs, and berries are all, as Shakespeare must have known, aphrodisiacs. I'm not sure I was really looking to snag a date at my lecture, but as far as I could tell, the aphrodisiacal properties of my dish were lost on my audience—except maybe for the woman who leaned suggestively against the chest of her partner as I talked about the meanings of food, literary and otherwise.

Next week: "Dinner with Eileen"

WasThis the Best Meal of My Life?

     Without knowing any more than that there was a Vietnamese restaurant on the main street of Old Town, Alexandria, Virginia, where my sister's friend had had the best meal of her life, my sister, Sharon, and I set out to eat there, too. We didn't know exactly where Old Town was, and even after we found it we weren't sure which street was the main street or which way to turn on it if we found it. Finally, we stopped at the Amtrak station to find a telephone book. [NB: This was way back then, before cell phones.]

    "But what are you going to look up?" I asked Sharon. "We don't even know the name of the restaurant."

    "Vietnamese. Under 'restaurants,'" she answered smartly, and there they were (as they were not in the Grants Pass phone book), restaurants listed by national cuisine—but no Vietnamese restaurant in Old Town Alexandria.

    "I'm going to ask the station master," I said, in an effort to try the more familiar, Grants Pass, method of seeking information.

    "Ask him what?" Sharon retorted, but what I asked was what the main street was called. He told me it was King Street; what was I looking for? I said, "A very fine Vietnamese restaurant," and he said, "Oh. The Sang Dong. It's only four block from here."

    Feeling pretty smart for having found the restaurant where Ann had had the best meal of her life, we drove the four blocks, parked the car, and walked in, were seated and given menus. Aghast, we looked at each other. This was Thai food. We were very hungry and wondered briefly if we should just eat here. Together we folded our napkins on the table and walked out.

    "I can't imagine anyone I'd rather be dong this with," Sharon said warmly as we got in the car and continued down King Street, reading the name and, more importantly, the nationality of each restaurant we passed.

    "There it is!" Sharon cried and swung around the corner. There were no parking places, and we were hungry, so she parked in a taxicab stand.

    Vietnamese cuisine, according to the explanation of the menu, combines the gourmet quality of French cooking with the cutting techniques and rapid cooking of the Chinese culinary art. It is, as indicated by this restaurant, utterly delectable. I had marinated shrimp and scallops, skewered. Sharon had braised fish in a ginger sauce. We shared a bottle of Chardonnay. Was it the best meal we had ever had? We ruminated on the question. Sharon said she had once eaten a simple omelet and salad in a tiny restaurant in the south of France that would be hard to beat.

    "What about the dinner you and I had together in the Greek restaurant in Atlanta?" I reminded her.

    "Yes, that was very good," she agreed.

    But is it the food or the company and the occasion that make a meal exceptional? I doubt that Ann ate here alone when she had the best meal of her life or that she was mad at her husband that evening. Sharon and I laughed as much in the Greek restaurant as we were doing here in the Vietnamese restaurant. It was true that this Vietnamese dinner with its accompanying French wine was particularly exquisite, but it was also true that the company was delightful. Finally, replete, we pushed our plates aside and asked for a cappuccino. When it came, it came with a brandy, on the house. Was it because we were so obviously having such a good time that the management treated us to a brandy? We left agreeing that maybe it was the best meal we had ever eaten. Even a parking ticket didn't dispel our bliss.

    Marvelous restaurant, the best meal of your life. The East Wind Restaurant. On King Street in Alexandria, Virginia. Old Town. You can find it.

Next week: "Literary potluck"

Recipes from this post:

    (Although I don't have recipes for the exact foods Sharon and I ate that night in the East Wind restaurant, I offer the following three recipes as examples of Vietnamese cuisine.)

    Beef with shrimp sauce and lemon grass

    Braised fish in caramel

    Ginger sauces

BEEF WITH SHRIMP SAUCE AND LEMON GRASS

serves 4

Ingredients

4 stalks fresh lemon grass, or 4 tablespoons dried lemon grass

4 shallots

4 cloves garlic

2 red chili peppers, seeded and minced

3 tablespoons sugar

2 tablespoons vegetable oil

2 pounds lean ground beef

2 1/2 tablespoons shrimp sauce

freshly ground black pepper

1 cucumber

Coriander sprigs, for garnish

Preparation

If you are using fresh lemon grass, discard the outer leaves and upper half of the stalk. Slice the lemon grass thinly and chop it finely. Otherwise, soak the dried lemon grass in warm water for 1 hour. Drain it, and chop it finely. Thinly slice the shallots and mince the garlic. Seed and mince the chili peppers. Peel, halve, and slice the cucumber into 1/4-inch slices.

To  make

In a mortar or blender, pound or grind the lemon grass, shallots, garlic, chilis, and 1 teaspoon of the sugar to a fine paste. Heat the oil in a wok or large skillet over moderately high heat. Add the paste and stir-fry until fragrance arises, about 1 minute. Add the ground beef and stir to break up the lumps. Cook until the beef is browned, about 5 minutes. Add the remaining 2 tablespoons plus 2 teaspoons sugar. Reduce the heat to low and keep stirring for 5 minutes, or until the beef is lightly caramelized. Add the shrimp sauce and stir for 3 minutes longer.

To serve

Transfer everything to a serving platter and sprinkle with black pepper. Serve over rice with the cucumber slices, garnishing with coriander.

BRAISED FISH IN CARAMEL

serves 4

Ingredients

1 - 1 1/2 pounds mackerel or eel, bone-in, about 1-inch-thick steaks (I've used catfish, and it was delicious.)

Coarse sea salt

Freshly ground black pepper

3 tablespoons sugar

1 tablespoon thick soy sauce

3 tablespoons fish sauce

6 ounces daikon

2 large cloves garlic

2 scallions, trimmed

3 dried red chilis

2 tablespoons vegetable oil

3 ounces fresh ginger

Preparation

Peel the daikon and slice it into thin rounds. Peel and lightly crush the garlic. Trim the scallions and cut them into 1 1/2-inch-long pieces, quartered lengthwise. Peel and julienne the ginger.

To make

Season the fish steaks with salt and pepper on both sides. Make a caramel by combining the sugar and 2 tablespoons water in a large pot over medium-low heat. Let the sugar melt without stirring it (though you might swirl the pan every once in a while). When the sugar turns golden, in about 10 minutes, remove the pot from the heat and stir in 1/3 cup water, the thick soy sauce, and the fish sauce. Reduce the heat to low and add the daikon, garlic, scallions, chilis, and fish steaks. Cover and simmer until the fish is cooked through, about 20 minutes. Meanwhile, heat the oil in a saucepan over high heat and stir-fry the ginger until golden crisp, about 2 minutes.

To serve

Remove chili peppers. Transfer the braised fish to a serving platter and scatter the ginger over it. Serve with rice on the side.

GINGER SAUCES

1. Ginger dipping sauce

yield: 1/2 cup

Ingredients

2 cloves garlic

1 - 1 1/2 tablespoons sugar

1 fresh red chili pepper

1 tablespoon grated fresh ginger root

1 lime or lemon

3 1/2 tablespoons Vietnamese fish sauce

Preparation

Crush the garlic cloves. Seed and mince the chili pepper. Grate the ginger root. Squeeze the lemon or lime to yield 2 tablespoons fresh juice.

To make

Combine the garlic, sugar, chili, and ginger in a small bowl or mortar. Crush the mixture to a paste. Add the lime juice and fish sauce and stir to blend.

This might be the same sauce as in the photo
above. And either could be from either recipe

     2. Ginger fish sauce

    yield: 1/4 cup

    Ingredients

    2 teaspoons small pieces fresh ginger root

    1 fresh red chili pepper

    1 clove garlic

    2 teaspoons granulated sugar

    5 teaspoons fish sauce

    1 tablespoon water

    1/8 fresh lime

    To make

    Put the ginger into a mortar with the red chili pepper, garlic, sugar,                                                                          and fish sauce. Pound everything to a paste with a pestle. Squeeze                     the juice of the lime into the mortar, then remove the pulp of the lime section with a small knife and add it to the paste. Add the water. Mix well. Serve with fish.

Buddhas, St. Francis, and Oliver at the Loma Vista Cafe

     The first day my friend Maren and I were in Big Sur, we decided to have breakfast at the Loma Vista Bakery and Restaurant, next to and associated with the Big Sur Garden Company. Walking through a gate, we found ourselves in an enchanted place. A sand pathway, meticulously raked into patterns, led past a large Buddha statue, laced with greenery and tiny flowers, peacefully contemplating a small pool with a gentle fountain; then past cactuses with big, white, odorous blossoms and other fragrant and colorful flowers to a rose-embowered cottage that was the cafe.

    Inside, a fresh-bread odor mingled with that of coffee and tomato-and-pepper frittata. The young man behind the counter was a golden-hued, Greek-god figure with seductive blue eyes, a fresh clean face with long cheekbones, and a ponytail of light brown hair. He wore a surfer tee-shirt, and he prepared my tea with a mysterious ritual that had me bewitched.

    Taking our breakfasts outside, Maren and I wandered through a honeysuckle arch into a courtyard with small tables and a farrago of exotic flowers, large pots, and sculptures of all cultures:

Buddhas next to Renaissance angels, Bacchus with his grapes, Nordic trolls rubbing elbows with St. Francis alongside a Mexican donkey. Egyptian figures guarded the entrance arch. Honeysuckle blew its sweet breath into the air. A black cat wandered through the garden, followed in a few minutes by a young, bearded, hippy-style gardener who chased the cat away and then explained with a grin that the cat wanted to make a kitty box from the sandy floor of the courtyard. He turned to watering his plants with such sunshine in his aura he seemed a figure of mythology himself, half troll, half St. Francis.

    Maren and I returned to Loma Vista every morning we were in Big Sur. The hippy St. Francis hugged me when I arrived. The Greek-god surfer performed the tea-making ritual. Finally, emboldened by familiarity, I entered the story. "What is your name?" I asked the young man of the tea ritual.

    "Oliver," he said. "What's yours?" When I said, "Diana," he said, "That's a good name. I have an aunt, whom I love dearly, with that name."

    "Where did you learn to make tea like this?" I asked.

    I should have known the answer would have a story. "From a Chinese man," he said, "an architect who studied teas. He learned to make espresso drinks while he was in this country, and he developed a similar way to prepare tea. I learned from him."

    And now, along with the enchantment of Loma Vista Bakery in Big Sur, I give to you from Oliver the tea-making ritual of the Chinese master:

    Half fill a tall glass with hot water. Loosely stuff a white tea bag with tea leaves—rooibos, yerba matte, black—any kind. Secure the envelope flap with a toothpick and drop the tea bag into the glass. Using a squeeze-bottle, scallop honey along the top inside of the glass in small swirls till you have completed the circle. Then—"This is the important part," Oliver said—take a long-handled spoon and draw the honey down the sides of the glass to the bottom, each time beginning with the swirl part of the scallop. Pour steamed milk into the glass, filling the vessel to the meniscus. The tea bag will rise to the top but be hidden by the thick white foam of the milk, leaving the toothpick to poke through like a mast. Finally, with your squeeze-bottle of honey, spiral a design atop the foam. Drink slowly, in a garden, in enchantment.

Next week: "Was This the Best Meal of My Life?"

Recipes from this post: Tea from the Chinese master (see above, last paragraph)

Costa Rican Cuisine

    When I made a seven-day trip to Costa Rica one summer, I had a wonderful time and saw some beautiful places, but I was not enthralled by Costa Rican cuisine, which seemed but an imported version of what we know as Mexican cuisine. Every dinner came with a mound of shredded iceberg lettuce topped with one or two slices of pale tomato, a large helping of rice, and a smaller proportion of black beans. Fried fish or chicken might complete the meal. Vegetables were seldom served, and those sold by street vendors lacked vibrancy and robustness.

    Fruits, however, were abundant and good. I had a breakfast fruit plate with deep-red, juicy pieces of papaya; bland but still good watermelon; a banana that tasted like any banana I've eaten anywhere; and white pineapple so juicy, sweet, acidic, and flavorful it could have been the Prototype Pineapple. I got a good sample of Costa Rican oranges at a private home one morning when a thirteen-year-old boy picked two or three grapefruit-sized oranges from a backyard tree. With one unhesitating whack of a monstrous kitchen knife, his mother sliced off the top cap of one. With similar whacks, like chopping a stick into kindling, she tore off silver-dollar-sized pieces of rind, leaving a thick white skin around the orange. Then she showed me how to eat the orange out of its own thin-skinned bowl by scooping the flesh with my teeth. With a sharp bite and a deeply satisfying taste, that fresh-off-the-tree orange was one of the best things I ate in Costa Rica.

    But it's not fair for me to judge Costa Rican food, since I have [had at that time] an allergy to peppers. [See "Confessions of a Picky Eater" and "The End of the Story about Peppers," May 11 and 18, 2020.] Peppers are the cuisine. The omnipresent rice is always cooked with flakes of red pepper. Eggs are scrambled with peppers. Peppers flavor meat, chicken, and fish. The first Spanish words I learned were "allergy" and "peppers." Ordering a meal at a restaurant, I would think I had made myself clear—no peppers, please—only to find questionable substances in my food, after all. "Aren't these peppers?" I would say, indicating the green spots in my scrambled eggs.

    "Oh, but those are sweet peppers," the waitress would answer, as though the Spanish word for peppers meant only hot peppers. So I learned to say, "I have an allergy to sweet peppers, hot peppers, chili peppers—all peppers." Then I would make unmistakable getting-sick gyrations. The waitress would grin with understanding and leave, but when my dinner arrived, I would point to the rice and say, "What are those red specks?" and she would say, "Oh, no! They're peppers!" and snatch the plate to return to the kitchen. Peppers are so much a part of Costa Rican food people forget they're there.

    I didn't get sick from peppers until my fifth day in Costa Rica, so my avoidance regime worked pretty well, though it greatly curtailed my culinary experience—as it might in many countries. When my son went to Thailand, he wrote me a postcard raving about Thai food but adding, "You would starve to death in Thailand. They put peppers in everything." 

    I didn't quite starve in Costa Rica. The fruits were delicious.

Next week: "Buddha, St. Francis, and Oliver at the Loma Vista Cafe"