Category: Food

The humble onion, good as gold

There should be a National Onion Month or something. Onions are so always-available and so cheap that we take them for granted. Let’s pretend that March is National Onion Month and imagine how drab life would be without onions.

Are there things in your kitchen that you stock a bit ahead as insurance against running out? For me, that’s mayonnaise, salt, olive oil — and onions. I’d almost sooner run out of wine than onions.

Once upon a time, we ate mostly yellow onions, though white onions could be had, and even red onions, sometimes. Now — at least in the United States — sweet, Vidalia-style onions are available year round. I don’t often buy yellow onions or red onions, but both sweet onions (for eating raw) and white onions (for cooking) are must-haves. A friend of mine once said that she started chopping onions before she knew what was for supper.

And I do eat them raw. It is said that an apple a day keeps the doctor away. If that’s true, then it’s also true of onions. Years ago, while driving through the mountains of Mexico, I ordered an onion sandwich ( … de cebolla, con mayonesa, por favor) in a little restaurant. A few minutes later, two women peeked out of the kitchen to see who the crazy person was, and the waiter brought an onion to the table to make sure that there wasn’t a problem with my Spanish. But they brought me a nice onion sandwich, sliced thin and in layers, mayonnaise on both sides, just right.

For solidarity with Ukraine: Pierogi !


Pierogi with roasted Brussels sprouts and Impossible vegan chicken nuggets

Yesterday the Washington Post ran an article (with a recipe) on pierogi, written by an American with Ukrainian ancestry. I read the article and could hardly wait to make pierogi. The article is “Making Ukrainian pierogi roots me to my family tree.”

I reduced the recipe by more than half, and I still have pierogi for another day. They’re not hard to make. It’s just a long process. I used yellow potatoes, and for the cheese I used Gruyere — the perfect cheese for comfort food. The Impossible fake chicken nuggets are the best I’ve tried. It has been years since I’ve eaten chicken, but I don’t think I’d know the difference. I didn’t have any sour cream, darn it.

Country comfort food

Biscuits are a misdemeanor. Fried biscuits are a felony.

The fact that it’s February is justification enough for comfort food. But the parlous condition of the world at the moment, with Putin (hopefully) knocked back onto his heels in Ukraine, is even more justification. Pinto beans, biscuits, and slaw are a Southern staple. Onions are always served with pinto beans. Danish Havarti is not exactly a Southern staple, but it’s a comfort food that goes ever so nicely with beans, slaw, and biscuits.

I was surprised to learn that not all Havarti comes from Denmark. I buy it at Trader Joe’s. I need to check on the source, but it’s possible that it comes from Wisconsin or Canada. According to the Wikipedia article, Havarti is a staple in Denmark, where 17,000 metric tons are produced each year. I can certainly testify that, in Danish hotels (which don’t necessarily reflect the kitchen tables of the Danish population), the breakfast buffets always include huge loaves of Havarti, mounted on a rotating-wire device for slicing.

Fry your biscuits in (what else) an iron skillet. I shortened the biscuits above with butter and fried them in olive oil.

Pub food


Scallop pot pie

In this publess part of the world, if you want pub food, you have to make it yourself. One of the few compensations of January is the pleasure of running the oven. There’s snow outside. That was my excuse for making comfort food.

This is a sea scallop pot pie with potatoes, cauliflower, onion, celery, and peas. There are only seven scallops in the pie, plenty enough to flavor it. The winter vegetables and the crust are the main event. I may make this again for Burns Night, which is January 25.

Ale goes with everything.

Cherry pie

Maybe pie cherries aren’t as hard to find as I had thought. I usually rush through Whole Foods as quickly as possible, but last week I took my time and did some browsing. I was greatly surprised to see that they have canned cherries. I bought two cans, enough for a nine-inch pie.

It’s inevitable that pie cherries will be pricey. These were $5.79 a can at Whole Foods. Amazon carries them, but I had balked at the price. Previously the Oregon cherries were $7.07 a can at Amazon. The price has come down to $6.19 per can, sold in a four-can pack. I’ve ordered four cans of cherries, not because I plan to make a lot of cherry pie but because the canned cherries have a two-year expiration date, and it’s a good thing to have in the cabinet for company.

I used the recipe from the 1943 edition of Erma Rombauer’s The Joy of Cooking. It’s a traditional basic recipe. The recipe calls for tapioca flour as the thickener. I substituted corn starch. Berry pies, in my opinion, should always be just a touch runny and crumbly. The pie was perfect.

If I could, I think I’d live off of pies. Pies have a kind of medieval magic about them, not just dessert pies but also savory pies with a top crust. Cherry pie, in my opinion, is the prince of pies.

Here is a hat tip to Dan, who mentioned in a comment a while back that Stark Brothers, the mail-order tree nursery, has cherry trees. Cherry trees were impossible to find locally. I’ve ordered a Montmorency cherry tree, which is to be delivered in early March.

Pecan pie


Click here for high-resolution version.

This was the first pecan pie I’ve ever made. It also was the most challenging pie I’ve ever made.

The problem was in figuring out when the pie was done. Erma Rombauer, in the 1943 edition of The Joy of Cooking, calls for 375 degrees for 30 minutes. That was not enough. The pie came out of the oven runny in the middle. I had to put it back into the oven. I was afraid I’d ended up with a disaster. But I ended up with the best pie I’ve ever made.

There is a strange alchemy in pecan pie, unlike any pie I’ve ever made before. Corn syrup is an essential ingredient. I had never even bought corn syrup before, but of course I bought some for this pie. My guess is that the eggs and corn syrup interact in a magical way to create a translucent soft custard that caramelizes very quickly in the oven. That’s why it’s tempting to take the pie out of the oven too soon — the top browns so quickly. But the browning of the top is part of the alchemy — a thin, chewy-crunchy crust on top of the pie. As for the bottom crust, I used my regular recipe of olive oil and unbleached flour. Rombauer’s recipe called for pre-baking the crust, which I don’t usually do. What a difference! The crust was flakier, and the chewy texture of the pie melded with the flaky pie crust in an unexpected alchemical way. The effect was so sophisticated that I’d have sworn the pie came from a Paris pastry shop rather than my own oven.

Note to MHK: I forgot to add the coffee, but I will remember next time. There definitely will be a next time.

Cracking out the pecans was tedious, but I got that job done in about half an hour. I couldn’t find an authoritative history of the pecan pie, but the consensus seems to be that it originated in New Orleans, with French (and I suspect African, as well) influence. The pecan tree is native to the Southern United States. Those of you in Europe, I’m guessing, won’t be able to find pecans. But the alchemy of pecan pie could surely be achieved with any nuts that go well with pastry, such as walnuts. Do you have corn syrup in Europe? If not, my guess is that any thick syrup would do. Even molasses (treacle) probably would produce the same effect, though the flavor would be intense. Corn syrup, by comparison, has very little flavor on its own.

I very much doubt that Erma Rombauer’s recipe is her invention. Every basic recipe I’ve seen is pretty much the same. Compare Karo’s recipe. Note that Karo’s recipe calls for a longer bake and an internal temperature of 200 degrees. If I had read Karo’s recipe first, I probably would not have had to put my pie back into the oven.

Erma Rombauer, 1943:

That nutmeg time of year


Nutmeg shortbread

If obliged to name my favorite spice, I’m pretty sure I would say nutmug. Everyone likes cinnamon. But there’s a kind of magic in nutmeg that no other spice can match, especially during the winter holidays.

My nutmeg shortcake was less than perfect. I used this recipe. Though the egg yolk makes the dough easier to deal with, I can’t say that the egg yolk improved either the texture or the flavor of the shortbread. The shortbread doesn’t melt when you bite it, the same way proper Scottish shortbread does. The egg makes a sturdier shortbread, still very good, though. Also, I only have unbleached bread flour, which may not be the best choice of flour for shortbread.

I buy eggnog once a year. Maybe this year I’ll buy it twice. It occurred to me that eggnog, if poured into an ice cream maker, would make a very nice ice cream without all the fuss required for making proper ice cream from scratch.

Mace is made from a different part of the nutmeg seed, and it’s nutmeg’s milder cousin. I usually use mace for dishes that aren’t sweet, and nutmeg for dishes that are. Year-round, if you can afford the calories, nutmeg-banana smoothies are fantastic.

Nutmeg grows in hot climates and thus would not have arrived in Europe until ships were capable of opening the spice routes. I can only imagine how much those spices cheered up European cooking, starting around the time of Elizabeth I.


Eggnog, from Whole Foods


Tomato-leek soup with coconut milk, seasoned with mace (and pepper)

Why have cafeterias died off?


Under the turkey there is cornbread dressing.

I was at a K&W Cafeteria today for the first time since pre-pandemic days. I found myself wondering why cafeterias are so endangered, given that they are so practical. When I got home I did a little Googling. Wikipedia has a nice article on the history of cafeterias. The answer to my question should have been obvious. It was mainly fast food chains that killed off cafeterias.

K&W Cafeterias filed for bankruptcy on Sept. 22, 2020. The company’s financial situation was already stressed, but the pandemic tipped them over the edge. Some K&W cafeterias have closed, but some remain open under a reorganization plan while the company tries to pay its debts.

According to the Wikipedia article:

“At one time, upscale cafeteria-style restaurants dominated the culture of the Southern United States, and to a lesser extent the Midwest. There were numerous prominent chains of them: Bickford’s, Morrison’s Cafeteria, Piccadilly Cafeteria, S&W Cafeteria, Apple House, Luby’s, K&W, Britling, Wyatt’s Cafeteria and Blue Boar among them. Currently, two Midwestern chains still exist, Sloppy Jo’s Lunchroom and Manny’s, which are both located in Illinois. There were also a number of smaller chains, usually located in and around a single city. These institutions, with the exception of K&W, went into a decline in the 1960s with the rise of fast food and were largely finished off in the 1980s by the rise of ‘casual dining’.”

K&W held out much longer than most cafeterias. The decline of cafeterias is a huge cultural loss. K&W helped keep traditional Southern cooking alive into an era in which people cook less and less at home. I suspect that the displacement of cafeterias by fast food also had a considerable effect on public health and the rise in obesity.

I felt guilty for stopping at K&W. It’s very rare for me to eat out anymore. But now I don’t feel so guilty. The surviving cafeterias need every dollar they can get.

Oysters


Oyster soup, more or less Louisiana style. The sandwich is a winter-style BLT — lettuce from the garden, but no tomato.

Oysters are magical somehow. They’re also slightly creepy. Picky eater that I was as a kid, it’s surprising that I even liked them. But I did, either batter-fried or in a creamy stew. We had them fairly often, as I recall.

In these parts, in the Appalachian foothills and the North Carolina Piedmont, oysters are harder to find than they used to be. People don’t want to shuck them (or don’t know how). And though they’re available by the pint already shucked, I don’t think many people buy them. Rather, when people in these parts eat oysters, it’s almost always in the restaurants that I call fried fish houses.

A neighbor gave me these oysters. He had bought an entire bushel of fresh oysters. A grocery store at Belews Creek regularly has them shipped in by the lorry load, either from the Chesapeake Bay or Florida. As far as I could tell from looking at the box, these came from Florida. The cost was shockingly low — $30 for the bushel of oysters, shipped on ice overnight. My neighbor said that the store sold the entire lorry load an hour after opening in the morning. Somebody knows what to do with them, especially at that price.

It had been 25 years since I’d shucked oysters. That was on vacation near Point Reyes north of San Francisco, back in my moneymaking days. There are two oyster farms there — the Hog Island Oyster Company, and the Tomales Bay Oyster Company. I still have my oyster knife, unused for those 25 years. Opening oysters is rather dangerous work, though I’m sure it gets safer with practice. Today I wore glasses and heavy gloves.

I had at first planned to make a creamy oyster stew. But I decided instead to make something healthier and a bit lower in calories, inspired by a recipe in the Washington Post for a Louisiana-style oyster soup. I used fresh mustard greens from the garden, tomatoes that I grew and canned, and lots of garlic.

With hundreds of thousands of miles of earth’s coastlines to work with, oysters grow (and are eaten) all over the world, though they are not of the same species or variety. I Googled to see if I could find an oyster cookbook with recipes from all over the world. I could not find such a cookbook. On a trip to Scotland in 2018, I sampled one of Edinburgh’s famous oyster bars. It was interesting, and very pricey. It also was rather city-fied. The world, I think, is waiting for someone to make a global oyster tour and write a cookbook on provincial oyster-eating, worldwide.


The neighbor’s bushel of oysters.

Radish sprouts

Radish sprouts are my new favorite sprouts. They’re also one of the healthiest kinds of sprouts you can eat, very high in antioxidants. They do have a fairly strong flavor, though. Not everyone likes them. If you don’t like radish sprouts raw, they work very nicely in stir-fries. They’re almost as big as mung bean sprouts, and they have nice, pea-shaped leaves that will turn dark green if they get enough light. The radishy flavor works really well in spicy stir-fries.