Category: Food and Cooking

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Pucker Up

His name was Clifford. According to my mother, he was the son of my father’s first cousin once removed, but as far as I was concerned, he was a spawn of Satan. Clifford taught me how to roll rabbit tobacco, what a wedgie is, and made me eat my first (and only) Irish plum.

It’s quite possible that the reason most people in my part of the world aren’t accustomed to cooking with persimmons is because they were tricked into eating an unripe persimmon as a child. That’s what Clifford called an Irish plum, and it sure looked like a green plum, which should have clued me in on not eating it in the first place. Anyone who bites into an unripe persimmon will never forget the experience; it’s agonizingly, mouth-puckeringly astringent; the tannins in the green fruit turn spit into chalk.

The most common persimmon you’ll find in markets is the Japanese persimmon (Diospyros kaki)—usually referred to as fuyu—which isn’t totally free of tannins, but have far less and lose them sooner. If the persimmons you buy have even the faintest tinge of green, let them to sit at room temperature in natural light for a couple of days.

For a persimmon pudding, peel, seed, and chop five ripe (fuyu) persimmons until smooth and strain. You should get about two cups of pulp; if you don’t, add another persimmon. Blend pulp with two beaten eggs and two cups sugar until smooth. Stir a teaspoon of baking soda into a cup of buttermilk. Add to persimmon mixture along with 1 ½ cups flour sifted with a tablespoon of baking powder. Stir in a quarter stick melted butter, a teaspoon vanilla, and a dash or so of cinnamon. Pour into a buttered dish and bake at 350 until firm and set, about an hour or so.

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Linda’s Potato Soup

Here’s a recipe from Linda Bolton who for many years ran the Good Food Store when it was on Jackson Avenue in Oxford.

Back when I was writing a food column for The Oxford Times, I published a really basic potato soup recipe, and at happy hour the next day as I was headed for the Rose,  Linda stuck her head out of the store and yelled across the street at me: “Come here and let me tell you what all you left out of your `tater soup recipe, Yancy!” So I damn sure did, and here’s the modified recipe:

For each serving (@ a cup and a half), take two large starchy potatoes and at least one red/waxy potato for texture. Wash, peel and dice, making sure to take out all discolorations. Boil in enough water to cover, adding a vegetable bouillon cube. When almost tender through, reduce heat, sauté for each of two servings one small white onion and two cloves of garlic, both finely minced, in about two tablespoons sweet butter.

To this, add liquid from the potatoes and low boil until onions have broken down. Pour this mixture back on the potatoes, simmer and stir until the soup has a creamy, chunky consistency. Season with crushed dill seed, just a little bit of dried rosemary, and black pepper before salting to taste.

You can add a little heavy cream and another tablespoon of butter to make a more substantial soup, in which case you might also want to add a little grated hard cheese. Good hot or cold.

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Iced Coffee

While taking History of the British Empire under Dean Abadie at Ole Miss, I read Freedom at Midnight, a breezy, somewhat gossipy account of Indian independence.

The book includes a scene in Buckingham Palace in early 1947. Those present included Labor PM Clemet Attlee, Lord Louis Mountbatten, then Viceroy of India, and his cousin, King George VI, then Emperor of India. They were discussing the impending end of the British rule in India.

The King commented that he would have to drop the “I” from his signature—he would now be George R (“Rex”) rather than George RI (“Rex et Imperator”)—and that the iced coffee being served was rather weak. What struck me most wasn’t King George’s superficiality—he was not a noted intellectual—but the iced coffee. Of course I grew up drinking iced tea, but this was the first time I’d ever heard of iced coffee, and it was absolutely mind-boggling.

My provinciality aside, iced coffee isn’t that much of a jump from iced tea, since it’s just brewed coffee chilled and served over ice. You can use your favorite coffee from the supermarket, just make it twice as strong. Cool the brew before pouring over ice.

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Herb Roast Rutabagas

One large rutabaga, peeled and cubed into more or less bite-sized pieces, will serve four people easily. Coat in vegetable oil, sprinkle with salt, pepper and granulated garlic, and bake them at 350 in a well-oiled pan, turning occasionally to brown evenly. When tender, dust with dried herbs—sage, rosemary, marjoram, basil, rosemary, or a combination—spoon in a skillet, and toss with butter.

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Pepper Mushrooms

This recipe is recipe from an old friend of mine who ran a catering business in Oxford. He looked like a red-headed Rick Astley; only person I ever knew who used a cigarette holder, and of course he smoked Salem 100s menthol.

Sauté in olive oil 1 pound of mushrooms, sliced or cut in quarters, with 1 large red pepper, cut into strips, one a large red onion, sliced, and 3 cloves garlic, minced. Cool, add balsamic vinegar, thyme, and fresh ground pepper. Salt to taste. Refrigerate before serving.

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Tio Jesé’s Pickled Avocado

Use firm avocados. Peel and slice as you like, then soak in a bath of cold salted water and lime juice for about an hour. This step draws some of the oil from the avocado, making it more receptive to the pickling liquid (makes them prettier, too). Drain, dust generously with salt and red pepper flakes, and pack into jars. Fill jars with white vinegar, then pour vinegar from jars into a saucepan. For each pint of liquid, add the juice of half a lime, a teaspoon each of whole black peppers, yellow mustard seeds, and diced cilantro. Pour hot liquid back into jars, seal, and allow to sit a day before serving.

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How to Make a Mess

Messes are best made shortly before serving. Garnishes are totally superfluous.

An Eton mess is made with meringue chunks, whipped/ice cream, and (usually marinated) fruit, traditionally strawberries. As the name implies, it’s said to have originated at Eton College, UK. The variation with bananas served at Lancing College is of course called a Lancing mess, which sounds quite bloody but isn’t.

A French meringue isn’t always practical in the humid South, so I often make what is called in culinary spleen Italian meringue. Heat a cup of sugar and a half cup of water to boil and cool to barely steaming. Whip four egg whites with a squirt of lemon juice to soft peaks, then SLOWLY drizzle in the sugar syrup. Keep whipping until quite stiff.

Spoon this meringue on a lightly oiled sheet pan and bake in the oven until dry through, then break into chunks. I splurge and serve it with vanilla Häagen-Dazs when I want to feel like I’m twenty again.

 

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Hector’s Moussaka

“Jess, while my people built the Parthenon, yours were stuffing sheep shit in rock walls to keep the wind out. When Homer first sang of the anger of Achilles, your ancestors were banging on skin drums and grunting like swine. As Praxiteles found Apollo in living stone, yours were whittling dildos from oak knots.”

“Hector,” I said, “You are a strong and beautiful god bringing the fire of civilization to this aspiring ape. Your divine radiance blinds me.”

“Do not mock me, you Cretan. You asked me to teach you how to make moussaka as my great-uncle Nikolaos, so I must make you properly respectful of the gift. They say Uncle Niko made Greek cooking a Frenchified farce, but what he did was throw away the trash the Turks and Slavs put on our plates and brought classic refinement to this beautiful old dish. Now it is ἀμβροσία, ambrosia, food fit for the gods. Here, I’ll show you.”

Trim stalks and bottoms of 2 large eggplants, peel and slice to ½ inch. Soak in salty water for about 20 minutes, and dry on paper towels. Peel 4 potatoes and slice to ¼ inch. Fry potatoes and eggplant in olive oil until just soft. Set both aside on paper towels to drain. Add oil if needed and sauté two diced white onions until translucent. Add about a pound and half of lean ground beef to the onions in the frying pan, mix well to break up the meat, add two cloves minced garlic, and an 8-oz. can of tomato sauce. Mix very well, then lower heat and simmer uncovered, stirring, until liquid is reduced. Set aside.

For Béchamel, melt ½ stick butter, add ¼ cup plain flour, mix well and cook over medium low heat until it stops bubbling. Gradually add four cups whole milk, stirring continually, until quite thick. Cool and incorporate two beaten egg yolks. Set aside.

Grease the sides and bottoms of a large casserole. Cover the bottom with a layer of potato slices, add a layer of eggplant  and drained tomato slices, and half of the meat mixture. Cover the meat layer with remaining potato slices, then more eggplant and tomato, with meat mixture. Top with Béchamel and bake at 350F for 40 minutes or so. Cool before slicing to serve.

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About Waiting

Anyone who prides themselves on their patience and understanding should wait tables for a week or so to find out just how patient and understanding they really are. Many people are notoriously insensitive to workers in the food service industry; just ask any waitperson, bartender or cook. Any given one of them doubtless has several stories to tell of rude and insensitive if not to say vulgar treatment at the hands of a patron. The business of food and drink is a service industry, and it’s no coincidence that the word service comes from the Latin root servus, meaning slave. The food industry trains people to be servile, to cater to customers (and management) in an overtly deferential way because so much of a restaurant’s livelihood depends on steady patronage. I’m not suggesting that anybody who works in the business is at the beck and call of every s.o.b. with enough money to buy a hamburger, but some people seem to think so.

In her autobiography, My Life as a Restaurant, Alice Brock, owner of Alice’s Restaurant, describes the situation well and offers a very human response:

I am often accused of being rude to customers. Well, it’s true, I am as rude as they are, only they don’t always realize their behavior is inhuman: after all, I am in a restaurant and THEY are hungry, THEY drove all the way from Florida, THEY just want a sandwich, THEY just want to see Alice, THEY just want to look around, and take a picture, get an autograph, use the bathroom, introduce me to their dog, who is named Alice, have a cup of coffee, SPEAK TO THE OWNER…because this food-covered lady in work boots, who is so rude, can’t possibly be the OWNER. I guess I have a temper…good! I won’t stand for being treated like a piece of public property or a freak and I will never allow a customer to get away with giving an employee a hard time. The customer is NOT always right.  Being a “service industry” makes people think we are just computerized slaves.

One of the high-lights of an evening is to hear of a customer bringing a waitress to tears…I rush out to the dining room, pull their plates off the table and point to the door: “OUT…OUT…GET OUT AND LEARN SOME MANNERS!” To try to please the “difficult” customer at the expense of my fellow workers is ridiculous. Some people just have an attitude. They upset the waiter or waitress, who in turn upsets me, who in turn upsets the whole evening. It’s not worth it to try to please or placate these bitter, unhappy people, better to put them out at the first sign of trouble. This is something I have to be there to do…it’s hard to tell or expect someone else to do it. Sometimes I’m wrong, or the waitress is wrong, but better to lose a customer than a co-worker.

Ms. Brock is a notable exception, I might add, since most managerial-type people treat their waitstaff as expendable. And, to be fair, most people who eat out frequently learn how to deal courteously with waiters, but I’ll be the first to admit that it is a learning process, not an instinct. Nowadays, dining out is almost always coupled with another experience (a movie, a play or some other sort of public entertainment) but at one time dining out itself was often taken as a singular occasion to be enjoyed on its own merits rather than as an appendage to another event. This happy time was when restaurants were successful not merely on the basis of turnover, but more on the quality of the foods they offered, the comfortable atmosphere they maintained and the genial clientele they accommodated. Great care was taken not only with the menu, which usually involved many courses designed to fit the season as well as the particular talents of the cooks and the general style of the restaurant itself, but also with the presentation, the service, the table, seating, lighting and other elements of atmosphere. Such staging demanded a great deal of planning as well as much care in the execution.

I have seen some degree of return to this tradition, but it is still rare to find a restaurant that does not cater to some abominable god of expediency. I’ve often encountered difficulty when dining out and trying to take my time between one course and the next with a pause to have a bit of beverage and conversation because waitpersons tend to interrupt with an insistent, “Are you alright?” as if to say that by not yelling at them for not bringing the food immediately that they were falling down on their job. The reason for this is that waiters are programmed to turn over tables as quickly as possible and since most patrons have had the “20% tip” rule-of-thumb drummed into their heads, waiters are eager to get the ten or twenty buck tip and get you out in order to get the next ten or twenty bucks. (Me, I tip as well as I can; just want you all to know that.)

To learn how to wait tables efficiently and unobtrusively is an art; I’ve known some champion waiters from both sides of the kitchen doors, and I’ve been subject to the attentions of some world-class bartenders (be nice, people). Yet some customers, out of ignorance or stupidity, will exhaust and demean a good waiter, detracting not only from their own enjoyment of a meal but also from that of others. Bartenders, on the other hand, just will not put up with a bunch of bullshit; trust me, I know. Perhaps what I’m describing is simply an example of what is being called a decline in civility, but, as Alice says, “Some people just have an attitude,” and in my book as well as hers, such people simply require an adjustment. This, you understand, takes patience and understanding. To a point.

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An Essential Mexican Cookbook

Diana Kennedy was a Brit who married the NY Times correspondent for Latin America in the 1950s and early 1960s.

She fell in love with Mexican food, learning the cuisine literally from the ground up, visiting every state in Mexico on buses, donkeys and in her pre-power steering Nissan pickup, carrying a shovel to dig out of mud and sand.

Kennedy’s explorations resulted in an authoritative body of work that provides a thorough, extensive survey of the many cuisines of Mexico from Chiapas to Baja, but her most essential work is The Cuisines of Mexico (Harper & Row, 1972). If you are at all interested in food and cooking, and you have a taste for books that are well-written, well-researched, and ring with authority and  conviction, then you must have this within reach.

Kennedy’s introduction, “A Culinary Education” certainly ranks among the most notable essays about coming to know food as more than mere nourishment (see below). The first section, “Ingredients and Procedures” gives the initiate a thorough grounding in such arcana as herbs, kitchen equipment, and chilies. You’ll find no better introduction to the basics of the Mexican kitchen.

As to the recipes, bear in mind that Kennedy was writing for a somewhat less sophisticated audience, and these were selected for simplicity and ease of preparation; still you will find surprises. You might be, as I was those many years ago on first reading, delighted by the seafood recipes (“There is an awful lot of coast to Mexico …”), which includes perhaps one of the first recipes for “cebiche” included in an American cookbook.

The inclusion of many Gulf species among these recipes is poignant indeed in this post-BP Gulf world. My personal favorite among them is the snapper Vera Cruz, which we served at the Warehouse during my tenure.

Kennedy’s writing is strong and serviceable, rarely lyrical but savory when so. Her most powerful gift is an excruciating, attention to detail in every respect, evidence of her intelligence and commitment to authenticity. She wanted you to know what she loved.

Kennedy died on July 24, 2022, at the age of 99.

A Culinary Education

Although I have always loved good food, it was in Wales during the war years, when I was doing my service in the Women’s Timber Corps, that I first savored food I can still remember today.

In the Forest of Dean we would toast our very dull sandwiches over the smoldering wood fires and roast potatoes and onions in the ashes to help eke out our rations on those frosty, raw mornings. Later, in the Usk Valley, as we cycled for pleasure through the country lanes and walked the Brecken Beacons, we would stop for the farmhouse teas: thick cream and fresh scones, wedges of homemade bread spread thickly with freshly churned butter, wild damson jam, buttery cakes that had been beaten with the bare hand. From there I moved to an even more remote village in Carmarthenshire.

After the war there were occasional trips to France, and memories flood back of the first belons, and moules along the Côtes du Nord; rice cooked with minute crabs that had to be sucked noisily to extract their sweet juice; the ratatouille, and refreshing Provençal wines in a Saint-Tropez bistro. I can’t forget the lunchtime smell of olive oil in northern Spain as we walked up through the oleander bushes from the beach, and the never ending meals in the Ramblas restaurants in Barcelona, or beef à la tartare after a day’s skiing in the Austrian Alps. It was then that I really learned to cook, to reproduce what had been eaten with such pleasure.

I met Paul Kennedy in Haiti, where he was covering one of the many revolutions for The New York Times. We fell in love and I joined him in Mexico later that year.

And so life in Mexico began. Everything was new, exciting, and exotic. Luz, our first maid, loved to cook. One day she brought her corn grinder to the house and we made tamales: first soaking the dried corn in a solution of unslaked lime, washing the skin of each kernel, and then grinding it to just the right texture. It seemed to take forever, and our backs ached from the effort. But I shall never forget those tamales. She introduced us both to the markets and told us how to use the fruits and vegetables that were strange to us.

Finally Luz had to go, and Rufina came from Oaxaca; it was her first job. She was young and moody, but she was a really good cook and my apprenticeship continued as she taught me how to make her rather special albóndigas, rabbit in adobo, and how to draw and truss a hen.

But I suppose it is Godileva to whom I am most indebted. I always loved the evenings she would stay to do the ironing; we would chat about her life when she was a young girl on her father’s small ranch in a remote area of Guerrero. They had lived well, and she loved good food. She would pat out our tortillas, and before lunch would make us gorditas with the fat of marrow bones to enrich them, and as we came in the door would hand us, straight from the comal, sopes smothered with green sauce and sour cream. We would take turns grinding the chilies and spices on the metate, and it is her recipe for chiles rellenos that I have included in this book.

I had other influences as well. My friend Chabela, on several trips into the interior, taught me almost all I know about the handicrafts of Mexico; together we visited craftsmen in remote areas and on those journeys we would try all the local fruits and foods. It was she who spent many hours in my kitchen showing me, accompanied by meticulous instructions, the specialties of her mother’s renowned kitchen in Talisco.

At last our stay had to come to an end. Paul had been fighting cancer courageously for two years, and it was time to return to New York. By then we had traveled extensively together, and on my own I had driven practically all over the country, seeing, eating, and asking questions. I started to collect old cookbooks and delve into the gastronomic past to learn more for the cookbook that I hoped some day to write.

Paul died early in 1967, and later that same year Craig Claiborne suggested that I start a Mexican cooking school. I suppose I wasn’t ready to start a new venture; I was too saddened and worn by the previous three years. But the idea had planted itself, and in January 1969, on Sunday afternoons, I did start a series of Mexican cooking classes-the first in New York. A wintry Sunday afternoon is a wonderful time to cook, and the idea caught on.

The classes expanded beyond those Sunday afternoons, and the work for the book went on as well. But while the classes continue to flourish and grow, the research and testing have come at least to a temporary halt-if only to allow the book to be published at last. For I find myself involved in a process of continual refinement, due both to the frequent trips I make to Mexico to discover new dishes and to refine old ones, and to the constant dialogue between myself and my students and friends who try these recipes with me.

DIANA KENNEDY
New York April 1972