Identifying People by Food

          As Marcel Proust so famously demonstrated, we can revisit entire eras of our lives by eating or merely smelling particular foods. For instance, for decades all the biscuits I have ever eaten

Making Bertha's biscuits

have in their imperfection reminded me of my grandmother. No one could make biscuits like hers—light, crusty, piping hot, and butter-flaky, like the Kentucky version of fine French croissants. Good with butter and jam, they surpassed even that perfection when coupled with my grandmother's second specialty, redeye gravy, made, for those of you not familiar with country vernacular, from the baking juices of home-cured ham.

          Though my mother preferred painting to cooking, she had a few kitchen specialties. She always had a pot of beef stew, made because she knew I liked it, sitting on the stove whenever I came home from college. As I walked through the kitchen with my suitcase, I would lift the lid of the pot to breathe in the rich, tomato-beef smell that evoked eighteen years of a happy childhood and good parenting. My mother could also make a good peach cobbler

Coogle peach cobbler

and a good pineapple upside-down cake, and even if she was thinking about that tin box she had been painting, sitting unfinished on the sunporch table, she still spent time in the kitchen whipping up a batch of chocolate chip cookies with her children. Whenever I make a peach cobbler or chocolate chip cookies, I feel my mother in every beat of the spoon.

          Though it was my mother who made spoonbread, it's my father's image that arises when I pull a dish of steaming hot, beautifully puffed, ready-for-butter spoonbread from the oven. Dad is sitting in his usual place at the round dinner table, his large family in their usual places around him. Mom has already served the spoonbread, but he has reached for the empty dish and is scraping it to pull up the thin, hard, browned layer that sticks to the buttered sides of the dish. He is proclaiming to doubting children, "This is the best part." I don't really believe him. Spoonbread crust is too much like the hard crust of toast, skin on hot chocolate, and other undesirable extras on good things;. Now that I am older, I know he was right.

Recipes from this post
          Bertha's biscuits
          Diana's favorite beef stew
          The Coogle cobbler, with peaches
          Mom's pineapple upside-down cake
          Southern spoonbread
Next week: Identifying People by Food, cont.


BERTHA'S BISCUITS

yield: 12

Ingredients
2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon sugar
2 teaspoons baking pwder
1/2 teaspoon salt
10 tablespoons (1 1/4 sticks) butter
2/3 cup plus 1 tablespoon buttermilk
Preparation
Cut the butter into small pieces. Have both the butter and the buttermilk very cold. Flour a working surface and a rolling pin. Preheat the oven to 375º.
To make
Sift the flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt into a large bowl. Add the butter and rub it in with your fingertips until the mixture resembles coarse cornmeal. Gradually add the buttermilk, tossing the mixture with a fork, until large, moist clumps form. At that point, gather the dough into a ball and put it on the floured surface. Roll it out quickly and lightly into a 1/2-inch thick round. With a biscuit cutter, cut the dough into small rounds. Transfer the rounds to an uncreased baking sheet, leaving plenty of room between them. Gather the leftover dough, knead it just to make it adhere, then cut more biscuits out of it. Simply shape the last of the dough into a rough biscuit, which will look unseemly but still be good to eat. Bake the biscuits till done, about 15 minutes. A tester stuck into the center of a biscuit should come out dry, even though the biscuits will still be pale. Eat at once.




DIANA'S FAVORITE BEEF STEW

This isn't my mother's recipe. I have no idea what she put in her stew. This is my own version, and the one I like best.

Ingredients
1 pound good quality stew beef
1 large onion
1/2 pound mushrooms
2-3 cloves garlic
Eggplant
Green beans
Corn (frozen, or scraped off the cob in season)
One large can whole tomatoes, fire-roasted
One box beef broth (or chicken)
Two tablespoons (or more) tomato paste
Basil
Oregano
Marjoram
Bay leaf
Salt and pepper

Preparation
Slice or chop the onion. Chop the garlic. Slice mushrooms. Chop green beans in large pieces. Scrape the corn off the cob. Cut eggplant into 1/2-inch chunks.
To make
Brown the beef in a large pot. turning till brown on all sides. Remove from pan with slotted spoon.
Sauté onion in grease left in pot from the beef. Add garlic and cook until aromatic. Add mushrooms; sauté till done. Then return beef to pan along with tomatoes, broth, and herbs. Cook slowly for 1 hour. Add eggplant, green beans, corn, and tomato paste, and cook till vgeetables are just tender, about 30 minutes. Salt and pepper to taste.



THE COOGLE COBBLER, WITH PEACHES

serves 6-8
This is a wonderful winter recipe using home-canned peaches from the summer before. I amended the family cobbler recipe to use honey instead of sugar back in the days when I wasn't eating refined sugar, until the day a chemist friend told me that when it came to what the body did with sugar and with honey, there was no difference. From that time on, I cooked with sugar again. The original recipe, using sugar is given below the honey version. The honey version is a little gooier than the other.

The honey cobbler
Ingredients
1 stick butter
1 cup flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
3/4 cup honey
1/2 cup milk
1 can peaches, preferably home canned (or 5 or 6 fresh peaches)
Preparation
Preheat the oven to 400º. Peel and pit fresh peaches, if using. Open the jar, if using home-canned.
To make
Put the butter in a 9x13-inch pan and let it melt in the oven while the oven is preheating. In the meantime, mix together the flour and baking powder, and, in another bowl, the milk and honey. Pour the wet ingredients into the dry and beat smooth. Pour this batter over the melted butter in the pan. Place the peaches over the batter. (A little juice is good, too.) Bake at 400º for 30 minutes.

The sugar cobbler

Ingredients
1 stick butter
1 cup flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup milk
1 can peaches, preferably home canned (or 5-6 fresh peaches)
To make
Mix the sugar with the other dry ingredients. Stir in the milk. Include the juice from the canned peaches when you pour the peaches over the batter. Otherwise, the directions are the same as above.

MOM'S PINEAPPLE UPSIDE-DOWN CAKE
serves 6

Ingredients
1 2/3 cups all-purpose flour
1 cup sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/3 cup butter, mileted
2/3 cup milk
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2 fresh pineapple or 1 can sliced pineapple
Preparation
Preheat oven to 350º. Melt butter. Cut rind and eyes off pineapple and slice. Or open the can of pineapple slices. (That's the way Mom did it.) Grease a 9" square pan.
To make
Combine flour, sugar, salt, and baking powder in medium bowl. Beat butter, milk, and egg together and add to dry ingredients. Beat to blend. Stir in vanilla. Drain half the juice from the can of sliced pineapple, if using. Place pineapple rounds, with remaining juice, on bottom of prepared pan. Pour batter over pineapple. Bake 20 minutes or until done.



SOUTHERN SPOONBREAD

serves 6-8

Ingredients
1 cup white cornmeal (or fine-grained yellow)
3 cups milk
1 teaspoon butter
1 teaspoon sugar
1 teaspoon salt
3 eggs
Preparation
Separate the egg yolks from the whites. Beat the yolks till thick and the whites till stiff. Grease a deep baking dish. Preheat the oven to 350º.
To make
Scald 2 cups of milk. Mix together the rest of the milk and the cornmeal. Gradually add the cornmeal mixture to the hot milk and cook 5 minutes over medium heat, stirring constantly. Cool slightly and add the butter, sugar, and salt, and mix. Add the beaten egg yolks, then fold in the stiff whites. Pour the batter into the deep dish and bake at 350º about 45 minutes. Serve hot from the baking dish with plenty of butter.

Box of Stories (7): Grandma's Viola's Peanut Butter Kisses

          This recipe does not come from my grandmother, whose name was not Viola but Bertha. It comes from Casey Kwang's American grandmother.

          Korean by birth, Casey was adopted by an Oregon family when he was a child. Later, the same family adopted his brother. Casey is a poet. He is young and has gorgeous, thick, shiny, black hair. He speaks for his generation in complex images that well from the depths of the self, from the source of our individual and common humanity, where neither academic nor poetry-slam clichés dwell. Casey and I met when we were both finalists for the Oregon Book Awards. At the time of the recipe, he had moved to Seattle, and I had come to visit.

          The apartment building where Casey lived was in the oldest part of downtown Seattle, crammed between other old skyscrapers one block from a pier on the Puget Sound. I found the building, then followed Casey's directions up the elevator to his apartment. When I knocked on the door, he was just taking a batch of Grandma Viola's peanut butter kisses from the oven. The tiny apartment, with its two rooms, its closet-sized kitchen, and its fold-out bed, smelled of heavenly hot peanut butter and chocolate. As we ate lunch at a chessboard table by the window looking over the Puget Sound and the distant, snowy Olympic Mountains, I asked about his new poetry. He read me a poem he had recently finished about a canoe trip with a young woman. It was a beautiful poem. I kept thinking, "She must have fallen crazy in love with him to hear such words he wrote about her." After our lunch, we bundled into coats and hats and walked along the pier. It was a charming afternoon—too charming, perhaps. Too close to the edge of romance, out of the question with such an age difference. I was not interested in romance with Casey Kwang, but I did treasure the friendship, the writer's connection. I continued to write occasional letters, but he never responded. I thought, "Too close to romance," but it was he who orchestrated the afternoon with the fresh-from the-oven cookies, intimate lunch, and blustery walk. I soon quit writing. What I have left from that brief encounter with the fabulous poet is two books of his poetry, the recipe for Grandma Viola's peanut butter kisses, and the directions to a swimming hole he wrote on the back of the recipe.

Next week: "Identifying People by Food"

Grandma Viola's peanut-butter kisses
Ingredients

1 3/4 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup butter, softened
1/3 cup peanut butter
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 egg
Chocolate kisses
Extra sugar
Preparation
Beat the egg. Preheat oven to 350º. Unwrap the kisses. (It's a good idea to have a child around for this step.)

To make
Mix flour, baking soda, and salt in a large bowl. Add the remaining ingredients except kisses and mix well. Put a chocolate kiss on a pinch of dough. Roll into a ball, completely enclosing the kiss. Roll balls in some sugar. Bake for 8 minutes.

A Box of Stories (6): Zuppa Inglese

          I don't know where I originally found this fabulous recipe. It has been in my recipe box for decades and has become one of my favorite specialty desserts.  But recipes that go in recipe boxes should be and usually are written on card stock, something stiff enough to withstand removings from and replacements into the box. I made three mistakes when I wrote down this recipe. 

          The first was to write it on two pieces of plain scratch paper, thin and unsuitable for being folded and refolded and stuffed back into a box that tears at the edges of paper as though with claws.

          The second mistake was to use a pen with purple ink that, as it turned out, was very pretty but smeared when it got wet. The paper is now splotched with purple spots and decorated with watery smears of pink-purple features that would do a watercolor artist proud. Some splotches have tints of yellow with them, as though in a chemical reaction of something I spilled with the purple ink. 

          The third mistake was to write on both sides of the paper so that wherever I dropped water (or something) on one side, the ink would fade to obliterate the writing on the other side. Over the years, the recipe was becoming unreadable, so I used a ball-point pen to write over the words and letters that were fading, but since I didn't rewrite the whole thing (I only rewrote what was missing as it faded and before I forget what it said), part of the rewriting is done with blue ink and part with black. As a consequence, the recipe for zuppa inglese is a piece of art, colorful, ancient, well used, and well loved.

Recipe from this post: Zuppa inglese (recipe also given in "Carberry Creek Bake-off, Part 2," October 14, 2019)
Next week: A Box of Stories (7): "Grandma Viola's Peanut Butter Kisses"

ZUPPA INGLESE
serves 12

Sponge layers
Ingredients
3/4 cup flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
4 eggs, separated
3/4 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon almond extract
2-3 tablespoons water
Preparation
Line 2 8-inch cake pans with wax paper and grease with butter, or butter 2 8-inch nonstick cake pans. Preheat oven to 375 degrees.
To make
Beat egg whites till stiff. Add half of the sugar, gradually, beating all the while to keep the mixture at the glossy stiff-peak stage. Beat egg yolks till thick. Add the rest of the sugar to the yolks, gradually, beating till thick. Then add almond extract and water gradually while beating. Fold in the egg whites very carefully. Whisk together the flour, baking powder, and salt, and, using 1/3 of this mixture at a time, sift it into the egg mixture and fold in carefully—very carefully—with a spatula or the back of a wooden spoon. Air is the only leavening in this cake, so don't lose any. Pour the batter into the prepared cake pans. Bake for 18 minutes at 375 degrees.

Filling
Ingredients
1/2 cup sugar
1/4 cup flour
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 cups scalded milk
4 egg yolks
1/2-1 tablespoon rum
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 tablespoons creme de cacao or cocoa powder
Preparation
Scald the milk.
To make
Mix sugar, flour, and salt in a double boiler. Add milk, gradually, stirring. Cook over simmering water while stirring (don't let the top pan touch the water) till the mixture is thick. Beat the egg yolks till blended. Gradually add part of the hot milk mixture to the egg yolks while stirring; then return the milk to the double boiler and gradually pour the milk-warmed egg yolks into the milk, stirring all the while. Cook over simmering water, stirring constantly till quite thick. Cool and chill. When the custard is cold and thick, divide it into three parts. To one part add 1/2 to 1 tablespoon rum, to a second 1/2 teaspoon vanilla, and to the third 2 tablespoons creme de cacao or cocoa powder. (Or substitute any flavorings.)

Assemblage
Ingredients
2 sponge cakes
3 bowls of flavored custard filling
To assemble
split the sponge cakes in half horizontally with a serrated knife. Put a bottom layer on a serving platter and spread with one of the flavored custards. Put a second layer of cake over that and cover with a second custard. Repeat with a third cake and the last custard. Put the last layer of cake on top.

Frosting
Ingredients
1 cup whipping cream
1 teaspoon sugar
2 tablespoons candied fruits
To finish
Whip the cream with the sugar and spoon over the entire cake. Decorate with candied fruits or other items.

A Box of Stories (5): Teaching School Children about Africa

          When my son, Ela, was little, I home-schooled him. When he was nine, I got a job teaching in a one-room school in a nearby community, which was something like an extension of home-schooling. I had seven or eight children between the ages of eight and fifteen.
      We made some marvelous journeys through the humanities. (With no guilt, I slighted the sciences, figuring the students could catch up later.) I read King Lear to those children, built paper maché medieval cathedrals with them, and wrote plays for them and directed their performances. The year of this recipe I thrust us into holistic studies of Japan and Africa. For Japan, we made kimonos, wrote haiku on rice-paper scrolls, and prepared a Japanese dinner for parents and friends. For the study of Africa, we dyed sheets and decorated them with potatro-block prints. For our African dinner, we wore our cloths like sarongs and served African foods. The sweet potato pudding was such a hit with our guests that I kept the recipe, evoking through it now not only the pungent smell of sharp African spices but also the shining faces of all those children dressed in their hand-printed "African" cloths, eating the African food they had made, and explaining to their parents that sweet potatoes were a staple food of central Africa.

Recipe from this post: African sweet potato pudding
Next week: "Box of Stories (6): Grandma Viola's Peanut Butter Kisses"



AFRICAN SWEET POTATO PUDDING

serves 6-8

Ingredients
6 medium sweet potatoes (about 2 pounds)
3 cups milk
1 cup heavy cream
1/2 cup honey
1/2 teaspoon ground saffron
1/2 teaspoon ground cardamom
Preparation
Cut sweet potatoes into chunks.

To make
Bring 1 quart of water to a boil in a heavy 2-3-quart saucepan. Cook the sweet potatoes briefly, uncovered, 25-30 minutes or until tender. Drain the potatoes and return them to the pan. Stir in the milk, cream, honey, saffron, and cardamom. Bring the mixture to a boil over moderate heat, stirring frequently. Reduce the heat to low and simmer the pot uncovered about 1 hour or until the potatoes yield a purée and the mixture holds its shape almost solidly in a spoon. Stir occasionally. Put the pudding through a Foley mill into a serving bowl. Sprinkle it with additional cardamom before serving.