Indian Ben's Salmon

          The summer I turned fifteen, my mother and father took me, my three sisters, and two-year-old brother on a two-month car-camping trip from Atlanta, Georgia, to Fairbanks, Alaska. That trip rendered many fond family memories, but food was not generally among them. Food was especially not memorable, or not memorably good, along the Alcan, a long gravel highway that stretched for hundreds of miles with no stores between towns and towns days apart. Mom did the best she could, but we all grew tired of Spam. Nonetheless, one of the best memories of the Alaska trip was dinner at our campsite on the Copper River in Alaska.

          It was late afternoon when we took a side road that the Milepost (that most wonderful Alcan guidebook) suggested led to an interesting Indian village on the Copper River. The village—a dusty road, a small school, several log cabins scattered along the river bank—was most interesting for the high pole in every back yard with a platform, used to cache food out of reach of animals, and for a strange contraption we saw in the river that my father said was a fish wheel. Curious, we looked for someone to show it to us, but no one seemed to be stirring. Finally we found a man squatting on the engine under the raised hood of his car, making repairs. At our request, he climbed down and said he would be glad to show us the fish wheel. His name, he said, was Indian Ben. He had a big grin and spoke a shattered English with great confidence. We followed him down a path to the river.

          The fish wheel was an ingenious device, like a windmill that moved with the current. As the wheel turned, upstream swimming fish were scooped into the baskets. On the upturn, the fish dropped into a trough next to the river. Several fish were already trapped in the trough. Indian Ben picked up a big salmon, twenty inches long. Dad whistled. "That's a beautiful fish," he said.

          Indian Ben grinned proudly, gesturing towards Dad with the salmon, saying, "For you."

          "We'd love to have it," Dad said. "How much do we owe you?"

          Indian Ben looked at the ground and said the government wouldn't let him sell his fish.

        Without skipping a beat, my father said, "Well, then, thanks. We'd love to have it. And you've been so nice to show us your fish wheel that I'd like to give you a little tip." He dug in his pocket for the bills and handed them to Indian Ben, who flashed a grin, giggled, and said, "Me drink Coky-cola now." (My mother added in her diary, "Coca-Cola was indeed a treat. When you did find it, it was at least 25 cents per bottle.")

          We drove immediately to the Copper River campground listed in the Milepost. While the rest of us pitched the tent and set up camp, Mom started dinner, the salmon in one frying pan on the Coleman stove and corn pone in another. She was hungry, like the rest of us. Though she knew the salmon had hardly had time even to be well heated, much less cooked through, she lifted the veil of her mosquito hat to sneak a bite. To her amazement, the salmon was done. She called us to dinner at once.

          Fresh salmon, an hour from the river, and hot corn pone—ask any of us in the family about the best meal of our life, and we will inevitably mention that dinner at the campground on the Copper River. Just as inevitably, we'll launch into a story about Indian Ben and the fish wheel. It is a favorite and fond family memory.

Next week's post: "Grandmothers' Brunch"
Recipes from this post:
     Corn pone
     (There is no recipe for salmon because as far as I know, my mother just put it in a frying pan and cooked it. Besides, you'll never duplicate Indian Ben's salmon eaten right there on the Copper River.)

CORN PONE
serves 6-8

Ingredients
1/2 cup buttermilk or soured milk (My mother no doubt only had powdered milk to use, though she might have turned it sour with vinegar.)
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
1 egg
1 tablespoon honey or sugar
3/4 cup cornmeal
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
2 teaspoons oil or butter, for the pan
Preparation
Heat an 8-inch skillet till very hot. Add 2 teaspoons butter or oil.
To make
Beat egg and buttermilk together. Stir in oil and honey. Mix cornmeal, salt, and soda together. Add dry ingredients to wet ingredients, mix briefly, and pour into hot skillet. Cover and set over medium-low heat. Cook for 6-8 minutes or until done.

A Taste of the Mountains for City Folks

          Friends and family hosting me in the city often try to do things with me I can't do in the wilds of Oregon. We go to shows, eat at fabulous restaurants, see good movies, and visit museums. Likewise, when my friends Halle and Andy were visiting me from Los Angeles, I tried to find special country treats for them.

          Since it was a hot day, one such treat would be a swim in cold creek waters, so, after a picnic on my lawn, we drove to a favorite close-by swimming hole. No one else was there. We swam in the cold, green water of the Oregon wilds, then warmed up on a sun-soaked, flat, serpentine rock before diving into the water to float down the riffle and swim some more. We swam in our own solitude and beauty, at the foot of a towering rock cliff, a scene as far removed from Los Angeles and Hollywood as reality from movie.

          Well satisfied that I had given my guests something the city couldn't, I took them home for a dinner of pasta with mushrooms and asparagus on my front deck.

As soon as dinner was over, I suggested we take dessert with us and get back in the car fore the second part of my plan. We would have to hurry, I said, if we were to catch the sunset from Whisky Peak, but by the time we had dashed up the road and then climbed the short distance to the top of the mountain, all that was let of the sunset was a long streak of red and several orange stripes glowing along the horizon. The darkening sky had already blotted out Mt. Shasta and had left only a silhouette of the Red Buttes, but my plan wasn't spoiled because I had brought Halle and Andy to Whisky Peak for the stars.

          For that we were in good time. One by one, two, three, a dozen at a time, they appeared, like actors called on stage. We lay on our backs on the concrete wall of the old fire tower and watched the Milky Way gradually lighten like a video fade-in, a white streak across the sky. Shooting stars darted across a corner or streamed dramatically through the center of the overhead dome. Andy studied the sky chart with a flashlight, then tried to point out constellations to Halle and me. We imagined Greek shepherds making star pictures in the sky, telling their stories—Orion, the hunter; Andromeda, saved from the sea monster by Perseus; the Pleiades, seven sisters chased by Orion. We took an intermission from stars to eat strawberry cream cheese pie,

then returned to the show. Time had slowed to the tempo of stars. Sound was given the whisper of stars. This was not possible in Los Angeles.

          It was past midnight when we left the mountain. As we were driving home, an owl flew from the woods and down the road in front of my car, guiding us for a short way home. The trip to the creek and up Whisky Peak I had planned; the owl was unpredicted. But I was intensely satisfied that my city guests had experienced the owl in addition to the country gifts I had planned: the picnic after the swimming hole and the strawberry cream cheese pie with the stars.

Next post: "Uncle Ben's Salmon"
Recipes with this post:
     Pasta with mushrooms and asparagus
     Strawberry cream cheese pie



PASTA WITH MUSHROOMS AND ASPARAGUS
serves 2

The sauce

Ingredients
2 tablespoons olive oil
3 cloves garlic
2 cups mushrooms
8 ounces asparagus
1/2 cup sun-dried tomatoes (not oil-packed; about 4 ounces)
1/2 cup dry white wine
1/4 cup mascarpone cheese or cream cheese
1/4 cup powdered milk (or 1/3 cup whipping cream, and I guess if you're going to use mascarpone, you might as well use cream. Or, maybe, if you use mascarpone, you had better make up for that richness by using double-thick nonfat powdered milk. Your choice.)
1 tablespoon fresh parsley
Preparation
Mince the garlic, slice the mushrooms, cut the asparagus into 1-inch lengths, cut the dried tomatoes into thin strips, and chop the parsley. Mix the milk powder with enough water to yield 1/2 cup of double-thick milk, if you decide not to use the cream.
To make
Sauté the garlic in hot oil over medium-high heat until golden. Add mushrooms, asparagus, and sun-dried tomatoes and continue cooking till the vegetables are tender and most of the liquid has evaporated, about 10 minutes. Add wine and boil for about 10 minutes, to reduce the liquid by half. Add double-thick milk (or cream), mascarpone, and parsley. Simmer about 8 minutes to produce a sauce. Season with salt and pepper.

The pasta
Cook 6-8 ounces of fusilli (or other spiral pasta) in a large pot of boiling water till done al dente. Drain.

Assemblage
Ingredients
Fusilli pasta, cooked
Mascarpone sauce
1/4 cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese
Preparation
Grate the cheese.
To assemble
Rewarm the sauce if it has cooled. Pour over pasta in a large serving bowl and toss well. Sprinkle with Parmesan and serve.







STRAWBERRY CREAM CHEESE PIE

The crust
Ingredients
1/2 cup butter
2 tablespoons sugar
1 cup flour
Preparation
Preheat the oven to 375º.
To make
Combine but do not cream the butter and sugar. One of the beauties of this recipe is how easy it is, so don't overwork. Add the flour and mix to make a dough. Place 1/4 cup of this mixture in a baking pan and crumble it. Bake until light brown. Press the remaining mixture over the bottom of a 9-inch pie pan and bake at 375º about 15 minutes. Cool.

The filling
Ingredients
1 quart strawberries (Good strawberries. Be choosy. They should have a strong smell when you walk past them in the store—or in the field, if you should be so lucky as to have a u-pick strawberry patch nearby. If you have to make this pie out of season—but why would you, since the results are inferior?—you could use frozen strawberries.)
1 cup sugar (Omit if you use frozen strawberries.)
3 tablespoons cornstarch
To make
Mash half of the strawberries (I use a potato masher) and add water to make 1 1/2 cups total. Mix together the sugar and cornstarch. Bring the mashed strawberries to a boil with the sugar and cornstarch and cook until the mixture is thick and clear.

Assemblage
Ingredients
The pie crust
The filling
The crumbs
3-4 ounces cream cheese
To assemble
Spread the cream cheese on the cold pie crust. To keep bits of the crust from dislodging and mixing with the sticky cream cheese, make sure the cream cheese is warm, at room temperature, so it will spread easily. Place whole berries on the cheese. If you use market-size modern berries, you might want to cut them in half. Fill the pie with the liquid mixture and top with crumbs. Let it cool and serve at room temperature.

Hippy Bread Makers Bargain with the Farmers

          Every summer when I was a child, my family spent two weeks at my grandparents' farm in Kentucky. Grandma and Grandpa milked their own cows, gathered eggs from their chickens, and ate plentifully from their garden. Grandma canned beans, put up preserves, and made butter, but she didn't make bread. Bread was delivered weekly by the bread man. While my grandmother stood at the door of the van to buy her ordinary lunch bread, my older sister, Linda, and I climbed into the van, into a wonderworld of yeasty and sugary smells from doughnuts, raisin breads, muffins, buns, rolls, cupcakes, cookies, coffee cakes. Conferring in excited whispers, we scanned the shelves to choose our promised treat: a frosted cupcake or an M&M cookie? A cinnamon roll or a lemon-curd Danish?

          Years later, with the Kentucky farm well behind me in years, I grew closer to its spirit as I joined the back-to-the-land movement of the sixties and lived on a hippy commune in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California. We didn't have milking cows, but we did have chickens. We had a garden, too, but it didn't do well in that dry climate on a piece of land with little water. Grandma and Grandpa had lived more self-sufficiently, but in one respect, at least, I was more close-to-the-land than Grandma: I made bread.

          I became an enthusiastic and diversified bread maker. The Wonderful World of Bread became my best-thumbed book. I made muffins, Irish soda bread, and moist steamed breads. I made beautiful braided Jewish challah,

Challah made by Anne Swinehart

Swedish rye, dark multigrain breads, golden whole wheat loaves that rose over the loaf pan with chef's-hat tops, honey cinnamon buns, sunflower seed and raisin breads, boiled and baked bagels, traditionally twisted pretzels, and fried doughnuts (a concession to unhealthy bread). On baking days, the communal kitchen smelled like a bread van, only more wholesome and less sugary.

Irish soda bread

         I learned to treat yeast carefully so it would work its magic. I learned the action of the verb "to knead." My arms grew muscular from working that action until the dough was stretchy and satiny. I discovered the best places to set the dough to rise—behind the oven in the winter, in the upper loft in the summer—covered with a damp cloth and hidden away like a secret. With the mysterious power of yeast at work, for the next few hours the dough grew and puffed and rose to double its size. When I retrieved it and gave it a good hard punch with my fist, it lost its pride with a defeated grunt and fell in on itself, only to rise triumphantly in the oven.

          Another woman on the commune, Jessie, was as much a bread maker as I. One day as we worked in the kitchen, we put two and two together: (1) We had no garden vegetables but lots of bread. (2) Down the way, the farmers' wives, like my grandmother, grew marvelous vegetables but didn't bake bread. Why not make a trade?

Boston brown bread

          That week we made extra breads and bundled them into baskets. Dressed in our long skirts and beaded necklaces, we knocked on the door of one farmhouse after another, displaying our baskets of homemade bread and suggesting a trade for vegetables. The housewives, enticed as much by the quaintness of the idea as by the good smells and beautiful displays, said they would love fresh bread and they had green beans, beets, cucumbers, tomatoes, squash, herbs, chard, artichokes to spare. Week after week, whatever was in season they piled into our arms.

       The trade agreement lasted for two summers before the commune broke up and people moved elsewhere, but for that short time, Jessie and I served as the California 1960s equivalent of the Kentucky bread man.

Next week: "A Taste of the Mountains for City Folks"
Recipes from this post:
     Irish soda bread
     Boston brown bread
     High-protein challah
     Bagels
     Esalen Ed Taylor's Big Sur brown bread

IRISH SODA BREAD
yield: 1 small loaf
(Note: This bread is the most yeast-bread-like of any quick bread I know. I particularly like to use it for bread bowls for soup.)

Ingredients
2 cups whole wheat flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 egg
1 tablespoon honey
1 cup buttermilk or yogurt
Preparation
Beat the egg. Oil a baking sheet or cast-iron skillet. Preheat the oven to 375º.


To make
Stir the dry ingredients together. Beat the honey and buttermilk or yogurt into the beaten egg. Gradually pour this mixture into the dry ingredients and blend everything with your hands. If the dough seems too dry, add more liquid; if too wet, add more flour. Knead the dough for about 5 minutes. Shape the dough into a round, flat loaf and place it on the oiled baking sheet or skillet. Slash it across the top, 1/2 inch deep, in three places. Bake the bread at 375º for 25-30 minutes. When it is done, it should sound hollow when you thump it on the bottom.



BOSTON BROWN BREAD
yield: 2 round loaves
(I love steamed breads and puddings. This is one of the best. It uses no yeast.)

Ingredients
1 1/4 cup whole wheat, rye, oat, or buckwheat flour
1 cup cornmeal
1 cup sifted whole wheat pastry flour
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1 cup raisins
2 cups buttermilk
1 cup molasses
Preparation
Butter two coffee cans, bottoms and sides. Put a large kettle of water on the stove to boil.

To make
Mix the dry ingredients and toss in the raisins thoroughly. Mix the buttermilk and molasses together and stir the mixture into the flours. Fill coffee cans two-thirds full with this batter. Cover tightly either with plastic lids or foil held in place with rubber bands. Set on trivets in a large pot and pour the boiling water into the pot to come halfway up the sides of the coffee cans. Put a top on the pan, but keep your eye on the level of the water. Add more as necessary. Keep the water at a simmer rather than a rolling boil. Steam the bread for three hours. Cut warm bread with a thread by wrapping the thread around the loaf and pulling the two ends past each other. Serve with cream cheese or butter.






HIGH-PROTEIN CHALLAH
yield: 3 loaves of 15 slices each

Challah by Anne Swinehart, a master
bread maker (using her recipe)

Ingredients
3 cups stock, warm
2 tablespoons baking yeast
2 1/2 teaspoons salt
1/3 cup honey
1/4 cup melted butter
1/4 cup oil
4 eggs
9 cups whole wheat pastry flour
1 1/2 cups plus 1 tablespoon instant nonfat milk powder
Preparation
Melt the butter. Beat the eggs. Grease three loaf pans, Eventually, after two risings, preheat the oven to 350º.
To make
Dissolve the yeast in the warm stock in a large mixing bowl. Add the salt, honey, butter, and oil and stir well. Beat in all but 2 tablespoons of the beaten eggs. Stir the flour and milk powder together. Gradually mix these dry ingredients into the liquid until the mixture is dry enough to begin kneading. Knead the dough until smooth and elastic. Set the dough in a warm place to rise until doubled. Punch it down, shape it into three loaves, and place these loaves in the oiled pans, or, for more beautiful bread and more traditional challah, divide the dough into three parts and then each part into three more parts. Roll the small parts into strands 12 inches long and 1 1/2 inches thick. Pinch one end of the three strands together and braid them. Place the three braids in the three prepared pans or on baking sheets. Let the loaves or braids rise again until doubled in size. Brush the tops with the remaining 2 tablespoons of beaten egg and bake at 350º for 30-35 minutes.



BAGELS
Ingredients

1 cup milk
1/4 cup butter
1 tablespoon sugar
1 teaspoon salt
1 package dry yeast
1-2 eggs
3 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
2 quarts water
1 tablespoon sugar
1-2 egg whites

Preparation
Grease a bowl. Scald the milk.
To make
Step 1
Combine the milk, butter, sugar, and salt. Bring the mixture to wrist-warm temperature (between 105º and 115º) and add the yeast to it. When the yeast has dissolved (about 3 minutes), add the eggs and the flour. Knead this soft dough about 10 minutes. If the dough is too soft to handle, add more flour. Set the dough in the greased bowl and let it rise in a warm place, free of drafts, until doubled in size.
Step 2
Punch the dough down and divide it into 18 pieces. Roll each piece into a 7-inch rope, tapered on both ends. Wet the ends to help them seal; then form the ropes into rings, pinching the ends together. Set the rings on a floured board to rise for another 15 minutes.
Preparation
Bring the 2 quarts of water and 1 tablespoon of sugar almost to boiling. Preheat oven to 400.
Step 3
Drop the rings, one at a time, into the near-boiling water-sugar solution. As the bagels surface, turn them over and cook another 3 minutes, then take each one out and place it on an ungreased baking sheet. Brush with beaten egg while. Bake at 400º for 20-25 minutes, until golden brown and crisp.

Variations
After brushing the bagels with egg white, you could sprinkle on sesame seeds, poppy seeds, or coarse salt. For cheese bagels, add 1/2 cup grated cheese (Asiago, cheddar, e.g.) to the dough with the flour, and dust the top with extra cheese before baking.



ESALEN ED TAYLOR'S BIG SUR BROWN BREAD
yield: 4 5x9-inch loaves

Step 1
Ingredients
7 1/2 cups unbleached white flour
6 cups whole wheat flour
1 1/2 cups rye flour
1/2 cup warm water
1 teaspoon sugar
2 tablespoons yesat
5 1/2 cups warm water
1 tablespoon dark molasses
2 cups rolled oats
1 1/2 cups Keenraw sugar (brand name; a raw sugar)
Preparation
Mix the white, whole wheat, and rye flours together to make one flour mix.
To make
Dissolve the 1 teaspoon sugar and 1 tablespoon of yeast in the 1/2 cup warm water (hot to the wrist). When it gets foamy, add the rest of the warm water and the molasses, oats, and Kleenraw (or other raw) sugar. Add about 5 cups of the flour mix. Beat until smooth (100 times). Cover and place in a warm spot until very bubbly (about 1 hour).

Step 2
Ingredients
The sponge from Step 1
2 tablespoons salt
9 1/2 cups of flour mix from Step 1
To make
Stir down the risen sponge. Add the salt and 1/2 cup of the flour mix. Mix well. Add 9 cups more of the flour mix. Knead the dough until it becomes shiny and small bubbles appear. Cover and let rise in a warm spot until it doubles in size (about 1-1 1/2 hours).

Step 3
Preparation
Grease 4 loaf pans
To make
Punch down the risen dough and knead slightly. Divide into loaves and place in greased pans. Cover and let rise in warm spot until doubled (about 1 hour).

Preparation
Preheat oven to 325º.
To make
Bake bread at 325º or 350º for 1 hour or more. Bread is done when it sounds hollow when tapped on top.

Emma Lou's Fried Apple Pies

          I didn't grow up in the post-bellum days of Faulkner's South, and my family wasn't of the upper classes like some of the Yoknapatawpha County families of Faulkner's fiction. Nonetheless, Emma Lou, the "colored maid" of my childhood, could have walked right out of Absalom Absalom!

       Emma Lou came by bus twice a week to help my mother with the housework and innumerable chores of a family of seven. She watched the babies, picked up toys, dusted furniture, ran the vacuum cleaner, mopped the kitchen, and stuffed load after load of dirty clothes and diapers into the washing machine. Then she ironed. She was big and sloppy-looking and chewed snuff. She had a ready laugh and a comfortable, capable, motherly disposition. Everyone loved Emma Lou—my mother because she was such good help, the children because she was a reassuring, secure presence, and my father because she made fried apple pies.

Emma Lou's were bigger and better.

        No one could make those pies better than Emma Lou, not even the Varsity, downtown Atlanta's drive-in restaurant famous for that delicacy. The Varsity version was as Twinkies compared to Emma Lou's. It was always a good day when I came home from after-school band practice and walked into the kitchen to find apple peels piled on newspaper and Emma Lou rolling pastry on the kitchen counter. She would be cutting a dozen disks to fill with apple pieces and pinch together into half-moon shapes with deeply scalloped edges. During dinner in the sunporch, where we ate around a round table, the family first smelled oil heating to the smoking point in the kitchen, then heard pastries sizzle as Emma Lou dropped them into the oil. As I carried empty plates to the kitchen after dinner, I saw hot fried pies, maple-leaf brown, draining on paper towels and more pies browning quickly in an uprise of golden bubbles in the oil.

          We ate them hot, hot, hot. The pieces of apple were still whole, entirely soft, and surrounded with sugary juices inside a crisp pastry that broke into fluttering flakes, like flower petals in a sudden gale, when I bit into my pie. Steam escaped from the bitten opening and equally from my mouth as though the steam, too, had been sliced by my teeth. When that bite, held still in my mouth, had cooled enough for me to begin to chew, the rich flavors rolled over my tongue. Eating Emma Lou's fried apple pies put my father—put all of us—in a state of ecstasy.

          I haven't had that Southern pastry since my childhood, but if I were to eat one again (the probability is small, since Emma Lou is gone), the taste and aroma would catapult me into the kitchen of my childhood where a black woman who was not a nanny and not quite a mammy, neither friend nor family but in that uncategorizable position of a Dilsey to the Compsons, was making the world's best fried apple pies. In that memory she endures.

Next week: "Hippie Breadmakers Bargain with the Farmers"

Recipe from this post: Fried apple pie

FRIED APPLE PIE

I don't have Emma Lou's recipe for fried apple pies. She didn't use one, of course, and I didn't ask her to tell me how to make them. There are a number of recipes available. The one below is the most basic and probably the closest to Emma Lou's. I could be wrong, though. She might have put all sorts of other things in her pies. But what I remember is the deep apple flavor in those crisp hot shells. Maybe this comes close. (Update, years later: Now that I have made the recipe, I can tell you that it doesn't come close. Emma Lou's apple pies were larger and therefore had a better ratio of apple to pastry. Also she obviously didn't use Honeycrisp apples, first because there weren't any Honeycrisp apples at that time, but she wouldn't have, anyway, because Honeycrisp apples are insipid, especially when cooked. Try Granny Smiths. Or, as in the recipe, Macintoshes.)

Makes 6-8 fried pies

Pastry
Ingredients

2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 cup shortening, chilled
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup cold water
To make
Sift flour and salt together. Cut in the shortening with a pastry blender until the mixture resembles coarse crumbs. Add cold water 1 tablespoon at a time and mix with a fork. When the flour mixture is moistened, gather it into a ball, wrap it in plastic, and refrigerate for 30 minutes.







Apple filling
Ingredients

2 tablespoons butter
4 Macintosh apples (This is the kind of apple my father preferred.)
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon lemon juice
Preparation
Peel, core, and slice apples. Squeeze lemon.
To make
Filling: Melt the butter in a large sauté pan. Add the apples, sugar, cinnamon, and lemon juice. Cook over medium heat until the apples are soft, about 15 minutes. Remove from heat and cool.

The pies
Ingredients
Pie dough
Apple filling
Oil for frying
To make
On a lightly floured work surface, roll dough to 1/8-inch thickness. Cut 4-inch rounds with a cookie cutter. In each round, place 1 heaping tablespoon fruit. Moisten edges with cold water, fold in half, and press edge with a fork to seal. Repeat with the remaining pastry and filling. Heat oil in a deep-fat fryer or large saucepan to 375º. Fry the pies, a few at a time, 2 to 3 minutes on each side, until the crust is golden brown. Drain on paper towels. Serve piping hot!