Month: February 2013

You know you like them.

If ever I said, in grief or pride, I tired of honest things, I lied…

— Edna St. Vincent Millay

Why are there so many varieties of crackers in the grocery store? My answer: So that we can go on pretending to ourselves that we wouldn’t much rather have a simple saltine. The ridiculous prices of “fancy” crackers ought to be enough to put you off them. Really, how much should some spices or bird seed add to the cost?

As we all strive to purge ourselves of our food snobbery and honor the simple provincial things, let’s honor crackers. The saltine cracker, I believe, was developed in the 19th century, in America, as a kinder, gentler alternative to hardtack. They became popular very quickly and even spread to other parts of the English-speaking world.

These days, they’ve even gotten a bit healthier. Reduced salt and fat-free versions are available pretty much everywhere. Whole Foods’ house brand, 365, is a very nice cracker made with honest oils and reduced salt.

When I was a young’un, growing up in the country and being dragged very much against my will to a Baptist church every Sunday, and often on Sunday nights and Wednesday nights as well, saltine crackers were sometimes broken into pieces and used for communion crackers (with Welch’s grape juice). How holy is that?

Might a nice, crusty baguette go better with a bowl of soup? Sure. But we don’t always have a nice, crusty baguette, do we? Whereas crackers, like the poor, are always with us.

Note: The photograph above was lit by two votive candles and required a 30-second exposure at f/16. Click on the photo for a larger version.

I plead guilty


Photo by Woody Welch

Every serious cook has a trashy side. Or ought to. Julia Child said, “In cooking you’ve got to have a ‘What the hell?’ attitude.” Yep. Or as a friend of mine says, “Anything’s good if you put enough butter in it.”

So it is without shame that I post the photo of the cake I made last week for Valentine’s Day — chocolate apple sauce cake with maraschino cherry icing. It was all made from scratch, though of course the cherries came out of a jar. I looked for maraschino cherries at Whole Foods, but they didn’t have them. So I stopped at the Dollar General.

Ken Ilgunas stopped at the abbey overnight last week on the way to the Washington for the rally against the Keystone XL pipeline. He was traveling with Woody Welch, a professional photographer who had with him an awesome Nikon D4 camera with some interesting lenses. Woody took the cake photo. Ken will return to the abbey next month. Stay tuned.

Update: Several people have asked about the recipe for this cake. I shall do my best. I got the recipe from my mother, who I believe got it from her mother. If I recall the family lore correctly, my version of the recipe is an alternative version. I believe the original included walnuts and even raisins. But I suspect that my mother eliminated those ingredients because they weren’t popular with the children. This is the cake that I and my siblings requested on birthdays. My copy of the recipe is written on a piece of notebook paper, in pencil, and lives inside my 1943 edition of The Joy of Cooking. Even this notebook-paper version is probably 40 years old. It contains a list of ingredients, nothing more. It’s just assumed that people know how to mix up a cake. I will add in some basic instructions here.

If you like light, ethereal cakes, this may not be the cake for you. There are no eggs. The only liquid ingredient is apple sauce. It makes a dense, moist cake that will easily keep three days.

First bowl:

1 cup sugar
1/2 cup butter
1/2 cup cocoa
1 1/2 cups apple sauce

Cream the butter and sugar together. Add the cocoa and apple sauce and mix well. Really well.

Second bowl, larger:

2 cups plain flour
2 teaspoons soda
1 1/2 teaspoons cinnamon
1 1/2 teaspoons nutmeg

Sift the flour and soda into the bowl. Mix in the spices. Stir in the liquid ingredients. Beat briskly until everything is well mixed. This will be a fairly thick batter. Divide the batter into two 9-inch cake pans that have been buttered and dusted with flour. Spread the batter fairly evenly into the pan. It will even out while it’s baking.

Bake in a 350-degree oven. Use the toothpick test to determine if the cake is done. Insert a toothpick into the center of the cake. When the toothpick comes out clean, the cake is done. This should take about 15 minutes. Be careful! The easiest way to ruin this cake is to underbake or overbake it. I start the toothpick test after 12 or 13 minutes, then retest every minute until the cake is done. Take it out of the oven as soon as a toothpick (or match stick) comes out clean.

Empty the cake pans onto two pieces of waxed paper on a flat surface and let them cool thoroughly.

Icing

I think this cake works best with a simple, uncooked, white icing. I usually cream 2 cups of powdered sugar with 1/2 cup of butter. Add just enough milk or cream to get the right consistency. Add a teaspoon of vanilla extract. A teaspoon or so of nutmeg works great in this icing. For Valentine’s Day, drain some maraschino cherries, chop them, and add enough cherries to the icing to get the color you want.

Umami again: pasta (or rice) with seared cabbage


Like most photos on this blog, clicking on the image will bring up a higher-resolution version.

Searing cabbage is an Asian touch, and it’s smart. Searing brings out the best flavors in cabbage. Nor do you have to scorch it. Cabbage browns easily with moderate heat and no smoking, as long as you use an oil (such as sunflower oil) suitable for the heat.

I made this dish with pasta. My Celtic digestive system gets along with wheat much better than with rice, but your mileage may vary. Slice the cabbage as thin as possible. Sear it in a skillet until it’s nicely browned. Proudly sneak in some monosodium glutamate, about 1/8 or 1/4 teaspoon per serving. You don’t need to add any salt. Make a sauce by trickling water into miso until it’s the thickness of gravy. Proudly sneak in a dash of ketchup. To the cooked pasta, add olive oil, some toasted walnuts, some parmesan, and some raisins. Pile the pasta and cabbage on a plate, then spoon some of the sauce over both of them. There’s more than enough salt in the miso alone.

The umami here comes from the monosodium glutamate, the miso, the parmesan, the ketchup and probably from the browned cabbage as well, since the umami flavor is a very brown flavor. I’m not going to include any apologetics here on the use of monosodium glumatate, which I’ve blogged about several times. In fact, I’m creating a new category of posts named “Umami.” I am of the opinion — until I see scientific evidence that might change my mind — that monosodium glutamate is a natural and harmless product that can do wonders for food and that deserves to be rehabilitated. I’m on a quest to get more umami into my cooking. Being snobbish about things like ketchup or monosodium glutamate serves no purpose. Are the Scottish snobbish about sheep bones? We must work with what’s available.

The right way to treat a ditch

Why are ditches universally treated with scorn? They are a symbol of the low and degraded. Even Oscar Wilde, speaking of the ditch’s cousin, the gutter, said, “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”

Human activities constantly create ditches, and constantly we neglect them, though they are critical to the quality of our soil and water. It is very rare to see a ditch treated well. I’ve had my eye on one such ditch since last fall. It’s in a pasture-like area along N.C. 8 north of Germanton that was reseeded last fall. At the bottom of the ditch, the critical part, someone took care to spread an excelsior mat to prevent erosion. They also placed straw bales to slow runoff. To whoever did this good deed, I commend you.

Maintenance. Ouch.

When you install an amazing musical instrument like the abbey’s Rodgers 730 organ, you also take on the sacred responsibility of maintaining it. It’s a complicated being, and it’s 20 years old. Though nothing serious has ever gone wrong, little things go wrong, and it’s best not to let those little things mount up. Also, there are not many organ technicians around, as you might imagine. So I wait until the nearest technician is going to be in the area so that I can share his travel charges with other customers. Today he cleaned the key contacts (a couple of notes were stuttering), replaced some burned-out lamps in the pistons, and answered, as usual, my stream of nerdish questions.

What young'uns used to eat


The school cafeteria staff, circa 1960. Mrs. Martin is on the left.

When I was in elementary school, we called the school cafeteria “Miss Martin’s Slop Shop.” Mrs. Martin has gone on to her reward, but we all owe her such an apology.

I have often thought about Mrs. Martin’s made-from-scratch cooking and how lucky we were to have it. I remember many times walking in line with the other kids, outdoors to avoid making noise inside the school building, to the side door of the cafeteria. The wonderful smells wafting out the open windows of the cafeteria would hit. I particularly remember Mrs. Martin’s scratch-made rolls (I always had seconds and thirds), her amazing vegetable soup, and her apple crisp.

An alumnus of the school recently put out a book of old photographs made between 1927 and 1967. I cannot find a single overweight child in this book, and certainly not an obese child. We did have snack foods in those days — chips, Moon Pies, and all that. And all kids got snack food and candy, though never at school. We had ice cream in the afternoons. And desserts. But everyone was lean.

I’m not going to get into a rant about our industrialized, de-localized, factory-driven food system. But here’s a plug for cooking from scratch…

By the way, the scraps that the kids didn’t eat were collected into a large container, and a farmer in the area fed the scraps to his hogs. Nothing went to waste, either.


The serving line at Courtney School, circa 1960. Courtney school is in the heart of the Yadkin Valley.

In search of umami, first follow-up

In my first post on umami, I mentioned that I would see if I could find some MSG at Whole Foods and also pick up some kombu seaweed, which is said to be high in umami.

Whole Foods is just about as MSG free as it is possible to be. I asked a spice captain if they carry any form of MSG. He was vaguely aware of the concept of umami and the doubts about the decades-long demonization of MSG, but the answer was still no. No MSG.

When the the guy at the cash register asked me if I found everything I was looking for, I said, “Everything but MSG.” He looked me like I was an alien. When I gave him a brief summary of the case that MSG is not as bad as we’ve been taught to believe and said that I want to experiment with it, I think he thought I was some kind of crank. Oh well. I did at least get some kombu seaweed.

Then I started shopping on Amazon for MSG, reading the reviews and other material to see if any brand said explicitly that it’s made by natural fermentation. One brand, Aji-No-Moto, does say on its web site that the MSG in the United States is made from the fermentation of corn sugar. Still, I wanted to buy MSG from an American company. McCormick & Company sells MSG. They’re an old American company, started in Baltimore, and still have their corporate offices in Maryland. I called them up, told them I’m a blogger, and asked about the source of their MSG. The consumer division passed me to the commercial division, and the commercial division passed me to the regulatory division. They were all very nice, but no one seemed to have any information about the source of their MSG. I decided to just go ahead and order some McCormick MSG from Amazon. I’ll post in the future about my experiments with MSG and what kind of alchemy it’s capable of in the kitchen.

But I can tell you this. MSG is sold in very large commercial quantities to somebody, and I seriously doubt that only Asian restaurants use it. Restaurants that use it probably have to keep it secret. But the demonization or even the rehabilitation of MSG is not my agenda. It’s just that I can’t help but be interested in a natural, apparently harmless substance that apparently can make such a difference in food. I’ve just got to experiment with it in my own kitchen…

Y'all cut it out now…


Mrs. Squirrel drinks rainwater from a plate left out on the deck.

Whenever I hear thumps and rattles on the back deck, and lots of little cat feet downstairs, I know that Mrs. Squirrel has come to tease Lily again. Mrs. Squirrel gets right up against the glass, knowing, apparently, that Lily can’t get at her. And then she casually lopes over to get a drink of water, her backed turned to Lily, flicking her tail to heighten Lily’s aggravation.

Crimes against coffee


Wikipedia: Note the color. Note the small, heavy china cup.

Finally, someone who can be considered authoritative on the subject of coffee says it: black-roasted coffee is wrong, and disgusting.

Let me hasten to add that it’s also wrong of me to refer to someone being authoritative on coffee, because that’s part of the problem. It ought to be self-evident whether coffee is good, without our needing to know what the authorities think. Then we would just take a sip, spit it out, and know that over-roasted coffee is terrible, that coffee drunk from paper cups is terrible, that milk (as opposed to cream) in coffee is terrible, and so on. But I fear that people get their attitudes about coffee in two basic ways. They either like and drink what everybody drinks in their local culture (like the pale, dreadful stump water swill that is drunk around here). Or, aspiring to a higher (or at least more costly) level, they think that the black-roasted stuff sold in places like Starbucks is good. It’s supposed to be fancy, so it’s got to be good, right? Wrong.

Though I have experimented with cheap coffee, to try to keep the coffee bill down, I end up back at Whole Foods. But even Whole Foods doesn’t get it and goes with the fads. Most of the coffees they sell have been roasted black, burnt to a crisp. They dropped one of the two medium roast coffees they’d carried, the one I happened to buy. I had to talk nice to (and try not to talk down to) the coffee captain to get her to start carrying it again. I made a point of saying that all the rest of this stuff is roasted black and has been turned to charcoal. I’m sure she thought I was an alien, or a hick. Doesn’t everybody know that black-roast coffee is all the rage these days?

Starbucks? I won’t drink that stuff. It tastes like charcoal, and you can only get it in paper cups. I was horrified when I first learned that in a Starbucks you don’t even have the option of a china cup. I had been spoiled by the San Francisco coffee houses.

One more rant about coffee, then I’ll shut up and stop trying to be a coffee authority. Throw out your automatic coffee maker if the decanter sits on a hotplate. I don’t understand the fetish for coffee that is boiling, scaldingly hot. It’s too hot to taste (maybe that’s the point). After coffee is brewed, if it is heated from the bottom it blackens in the pot. Or, to say it another way, heat your water, but never heat your coffee. I brew mine by slowly pouring hot water from a kettle into a simple filter cone, from which it drips into a Thermos-type coffee decanter. Then sit down and stay sitting. Relax. Don’t go anywhere. The only other acts you are allowed to indulge in while having your coffee is reading, or talking with someone whom you like to talk with. Drink your coffee out of a heavy china cup or mug that holds no more than 6 or 7 ounces. Then pour another cupful. If you possess a mug that holds more than 6 or 7 ounces, smash it. Don’t give it to Goodwill; that will just keep it in circulation.

There. I got that off my chest. Now go smash your coffee mug and start searching eBay for a decent coffee cup. Institutional cups, the kind they used to use in hotels and restaurants before the big-mug era started, work great. If you buy coffee in bulk, as I do, smell the beans. The scent should be rich and bursting with coffee flavor. If you smell any hints of charcoal or ashes, look elsewhere.

Extreme self-reliance, in Siberia


The hut

This article at Smithsonian.com is fascinating. It’s about about six members of a Russian family who fled into remote Siberia to avoid religious persecution. They lived there for 40 years, surviving on food that they could forage and what little they could grow.

I find this story inspiring. It shows just how adaptable ordinary people can be, and how little little we can live on.