March 2010 – Page 2 – Into the Woods

Stilton

Note to myself: Those glass plates don’t photograph very well. I need to go to some junk shops and find some photogenic dishes.

Blue cheese and garlic are the best of friends. Though I love a good Roquefort, I prefer a good Stilton. I suspect this is because the Roquefort (sheep’s milk) is richer than Stilton (cow’s milk). Blue cheese loves onions, too. The Fat Ladies, every ounce of them English, in one of their cooking shows, made a Stilton and onion soup that I made at home a couple of times, and it was good. The dressing on the salad in the photo contains a whole head of garlic. What a great peasant supper — a garlicky salad, Stilton, and a loaf of homemade peasant bread.

Rural England is a dairy culture, and they make great cheeses. Last time I was there, they still home-delivered fresh milk in bottles. Friends in Wales once served me for dinner a whole array of English and Welsh cheeses, including the Welsh Caerphilly, which you can sometimes find in American stores.

As for the Fat Ladies, one of them (Jennifer Paterson) is dead now. Netflix has the DVDs of their cooking show. Their show is extremely entertaining and rich with ideas for those of us who respect peasant food.

The Fat Ladies (YouTube)

Le Cordon Bleu in Paris

Serving English cooking. The photo is about 10 years old.

If you saw Julie and Julia, in which Meryl Streep plays Julia Child, you saw the film version of what Le Cordon Bleu cooking school in Paris was like in the 1940s. It’s been 10 years since I was in Paris, but I came across these photos recently while pulling files off an old computer.

The event in the photos is an international buffet cooked by the students at Le Cordon Bleu. They make foods from their native cultures. A friend of mine was a student at Le Cordon Bleu at the time, and he took me to this event. I was not surprised to see that the Asian students’ tables were mobbed, while there was only a small group around the English students’ table. That kind of snobbery is a shame, because the English students had cooked an amazing example of an English Christmas dinner.

Le Cordon Bleu does these international buffets several times a year, I believe. They are mobbed.

Serving Asian cooking…

I’ve eaten in lots of places — Bangkok, New Delhi, London, Ireland, Denmark, and all over Mexico and the United States. Paris is not my favorite food city. Parisian food is just too rich and meaty to appeal to me, so I found myself going to Asian restaurants or to this vegetarian restaurant near Notre Dame, Le Grenier de Notre-Dame. The vegetarian food there is only so-so. Americans do vegetarian food much better. The cities with the best vegetarian food, in my opinion, are New York and Los Angeles. The food in Ireland is about a million times better than the food in England, especially outside of London.

I don’t aspire to, or fawn over, haute cuisine or trendy food. To me, it’s all about honest foods skillfully prepared. I’ve been asked a few times to name the restaurant that I’ve most enjoyed. That’s pretty easy: Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Alice Waters‘ restaurant.

A virtual supper for James-Michael

Cabbage in sweet and sour sauce

A friend in California has been asking for my recipe for cabbage in red sweet and sour sauce. Rather than typing something into an email, I thought I’d take some photos and blog it. James-Michael used to frequently request this dish back in San Francisco. For years, we never lived far apart, and we kept up the tradition of Sunday night supper. Many is the time I rode my scooter in a cold fog over Twin Peaks to cook at his apartment. More often I cooked at my apartment, and James-Michael had the more important task of selecting the after-supper DVDs.

Those of you who are more experienced cooks, please excuse the detail. This is a tutorial for James-Michael, who is still a novice cook. As I’ve mentioned before, I rarely follow recipes exactly. Rather, I read recipes for the concept and then run with it.

This concept came from a recipe that was included with my Aeternum pressure cooker, made in Italy, which I bought in the 1970s. The original recipe was for a whole cabbage, with the stalk excavated, stuffed with Italian sausage. Though I used to make the stuffed version, with vegetarian stuffings, for years I’ve mostly just used plain cabbage, cut in half and with the stalk removed. You can make it in a pressure cooker (especially if the cabbage is whole and stuffed), but you can also use a covered pot.

1. I’d suggest starting with a smallish head of cabbage. Remove the outer leaves and wash it. You also need a nice, strong onion. By the way, I bought this cabbage at Whole Foods. It’s organic and was grown in Watauga County, a mountain county not too far to the west of here.

2. Cut the cabbage in halves. Cut out the stalk. Chop the onion coarsely.

3. Cook the onion gently in a tablespoon or so of olive oil. No need to brown it. Just cook it until it’s soft and translucent.

4. Add about one and a half cups of water. Bring the water to a boil. Add about a tablespoon of sugar. I use raw sugar. Also add about three tablespoons of vinegar, some salt, and some pepper. Add two or three tablespoons of tomato paste or ketchup, enough to give the sauce a nice red color. Optional: add a small handful of raisins.

5. I don’t think this dish would come out right without the celery seed. Use about half a teaspoon, or a little more if you like.

6. When all these ingredients have been added to the sauce, boil the sauce gently for a few minutes. Then put in the cabbage. Ladle the sauce over the cabbage. Cover the pot and let it simmer gently for about an hour. Every 10 minutes or so, lift the lid and ladle more sauce over the cabbage. Test the cabbage with a fork to see if it is becoming tender. When the cabbage is tender, consider how much sauce you have. If there’s too much sauce, and it’s watery, then after the cabbage is tender remove the lid, turn up the heat, and boil off some of the water. If at any point while the cabbage is cooking the amount of sauce gets too low, add a little water. Half the art of cooking is getting the sauce right. You want it to be concentrated and savory, never watery.

Here’s your virtual supper! I served the cabbage with pinto beans and rice. To make the rice, I chopped some raw nuts in a blender, then browned the nuts lightly in a pan. When the nuts were browned, I added the rice and stirred in a spoonful of the cabbage sauce to moisten it. Then, at the table, I spooned some cabbage sauce over the rice.

Sourdough starter: no harm in trying

I bought the crock at a junk shop in Madison for 99 cents.

I’m sure I would have experimented with sourdough years ago, were it not for the fact that, while I was working, I didn’t have much time for baking. Plus, I lived in San Francisco for 17 years. Baking sourdough bread at home in San Francisco would seem a bit odd, since the city is full of good sourdough bread.

As a nerd, I could never be content to just blindly follow some directions and end up (hopefully) with sourdough bread. I need to understand what’s going on. As usual, Wikipedia supplies the fundamentals. Because I’ve made homemade sauerkraut, all the concepts are familiar to me. Even experienced sourdough makers often seem to think that what makes sourdough is just yeast. But it’s more complicated than that. Wikipedia explains that sourdough is a symbiotic combination of yeast and lactobacillus. Now we’re getting somewhere…

Yeast is a fungus. It eats sugar, and the useful byproducts of this metabolism are carbon dioxide and alcohol. When we bake with yeast, the carbon dioxide bubbles cause the bread to rise, and the alcohol is baked off.

Lactobacillus is an anaerobic bacteria. It eats sugar and produces lactic acid. Lactic acid is a food preservative. It’s what makes sauerkraut.

In sourdough, the lactobacillus feed mostly on the metabolic byproducts of the yeast. The lactic acid produced by the lactobacillus gives sourdough bread its sour taste. It’s the same process that makes sauerkraut sour. The lactic acid has another important effect in the sourdough starter, which can sit at room temperature for weeks without rotting. The lactic acid lowers the pH of the concoction. This acidity prevents unwanted bacteria from growing. This is the same principle that makes vinegar a preservative, and it’s what keeps bad bacteria out of sauerkraut.

And now we can see why most recipes for making your own sourdough starter start with pineapple juice. The acidity of the pineapple juice keeps the bad bacteria from growing until the starter is mature enough to produce enough lactic acid to do the job. Then we can use water.

So where do the yeast and lactobacillus come from to inoculate the starter? They’re all around us, especially on the grains of wheat.

If you’d like to make a sourdough starter, I’d suggest Googling around for recipes. Read several recipes. I’m using this one, more or less.

I’ll post more photos as the process continues. It may take up to two weeks before I’m ready to make sourdough bread.

Not much to see yet

Farm subsidies

Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine

Did you know that the federal government provides billions of dollars in subsidies to millionaire and industrial growers for producting animal feed? And that fruit and vegetable farmers get only 1 percent of these subsidies? That’s one reason the Big Mac is so cheap — government subsidies pay part of its cost.

The awful 14th century

Pieter Bruegel, the Triumph of Death

I have written previously about the dark and miserable era that followed the fall of Rome, starting in the 5th Century. Here’s another: Europe in the 14th Century.

In 1978, the historian Barbara Tuchman, who won a Pulitzer for her history of World War I, published a book that also became a best-seller: A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century. This book caused quite a stir when it was first published, and I had long meant to read it. I finally did, after I found a copy of it in a junk store in Madison for 75 cents.

Centuries before, the ideal of chivalry had provided a little light in the darkness of the Middle Ages. But by the 14th Century, chivalry had fallen into decadence. The nobility lived as parasites off the labor of the peasantry and gave nothing to speak of in return. War and extravagant consumption, it seems, were all the nobility lived for. Wars went on and on from their own inertia, though no one even remembered what they were fighting for.

The church too, in centuries past, had preserved a tiny light of order and learning in the darkness of the Middle Ages, but by the 14th Century the church was as decadent and corrupt and parasitic as the nobility. Everything was for sale: the sacraments, annulments, dispensations, pardons, offices, emoluments. The church also was torn by schism. There were two popes, one in Rome and one in Avignon. Torture and Inquisition were highly refined and ruthlessly practiced.

The peasantry was miserably poor, lived in filthy hovels, was racked with disease and saddled with crushing taxes. Up to two-thirds of their children did not live to be adults. Several times during the century, there were peasant revolts. But always those revolts were put down as quickly as the nobles could rally enough men on horseback to cut the peasants down.

And if that wasn’t enough, there was the Black Death, which killed up to 60 percent of Europe’s population. There were no longer enough people to till the fields, further increasing the misery for those who survived the plague.

By 1415, French chivalry was in ruins, with thousands of nobles dead in the mud at the Battle of Agincourt. Those ruins of the fortresses and abbeys of the Middle Ages that we see today: Much of that was not the result of centuries of gradual decay. Rather, it was destruction caused by the wars, raiding and pillaging of the 14th Century.

A saint was born out of this ruin: Joan of Arc.

Why is this relevant to a relocalization blog? Because human nature doesn’t change. We would do well to not forget how thin is the veneer of civilizaton, or how fragile the rule of law. No matter what the cost of war, we humans never seem to learn. Elites, glorifying war, have the same tendency to become ever richer and to make ever greater wagers to increase their wealth and power. Again and again we find that the times of greatest luxury for elites are the times of greatest hardship for those who actually do the work.

To quote Barbara Tuchman:

“Chivalry, the dominant political idea of the ruling class, left as great a gap between ideal and practice as religion. The ideal was a vision of order maintained by the warrior class and formulated in the image of the Round Table, nature’s perfect shape. King Arthur’s knights adventured for the right against dragons, enchanters, and wicked men, establishing order in a wild world. So their living counterparts were supposed, in theory, to serve as defenders of the Faith, upholders of justice, champions of the oppressed. In practice, they were themselves the oppressors, and by the 14th century the violence and lawlessness of men of the sword had become a major agency of disorder. When the gap between the ideal and real becomes too wide, the system breaks down. Legend and story have always reflected this; in the Arthurian romances the Round Table is shattered from within. The sword is returned to the lake; the effort begins anew. Violent, destructive, greedy, fallible as he may be, man retains his vision of order and resumes his search.”

A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century. Barbara W. Tuchman. Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1978. 720 pages.

Family dairies, R.I.P.

Small, family-run dairy operations used to be very common all across North Carolina’s Piedmont and the nearby Blue Ridge Mountains. They are gone. I doubt that very many of them survived much later than the 1950s. Like all small family farms, the dairy farms had to deal with competition from the larger, more industrialized operations. There also were health regulations to deal with. If I remember correctly from what a dairy farmer told me many years ago, to sell top-grade milk required that the milk be chilled to a low temperature — 34 or 35 degrees, as I recall — within minutes of coming from the cow. Small operations couldn’t support the cost of this refrigeration equipment.

This old dairy, on Mountain Road near Danbury in Stokes County, was typical. The building in which the milking was done was usually made of concrete blocks. This was because the building was constantly being hosed down and washed.

The smaller room to the right, with the sink, is the clean room where vessels were washed and where the milk was brought. The larger room to the left with the cow-sized door is the milking room.

The sink was for washing the milk cans and other vessels.

We're brown while California is green

After I moved to California, it seemed odd to me how the green seasons are almost reversed. In California (except for the mountains), the rainy and relatively warm winters bring the greenest season in March. Then, because it doesn’t rain from April to September, summers are brown.

Here it’s almost the opposite. It rains during the winter, but it’s too cold for anything green. Come March, the greening begins. Several warm, rainy days are forecast for the end of this week. That should get the grass growing.

This photo shows the side of Hanging Rock from Overby Road in Stokes County.

Scrounging for signs of spring

Can you espy the bluebird?

The landscape is still brown and gray and wintry, but given the warmer temperatures for the past few days, and because the birds are singing, spring is surely just around the corner. This time of year, if it’s not raining, I take a walk around the yard every day to see how things are coming along.

A leaf bud on the magnolia

Young mustard. This volunteered beside the chicken house. A morsel that I threw to the chickens must have escaped somehow and taken root.

Daffodil shoots

I don’t know what this is. The ground is thick with it in the flower bed where the cosmos grew last year. I suppose this could be cosmos, but I also suspect that it may be different type of wildflower, a perennial, that I planted last year but which won’t bloom until this year.

A day lily shoot

Young clover, starting to feel its oats

I found the right chairs

For months, I’ve been looking for the right dining chairs. The chairs I’ve liked best are Amish chairs. They have the mass and the no-nonsense lines that work best with Gothic revival and with the heavy, solid cherry tables my brother built for me. I was put off by the price of the Amish chairs, though, and was hoping to find something I liked for less. But today I found just the right Amish chairs at the Amish furniture store in Walnut Cove. They had been marked down by a third because the factory filled an order with the wrong finish, or something like that. The chairs were made at an Amish factory in Ohio. They’re oak, stained with a cherry finish. I bought four — two with arms and two without.

They look severe, but they’re surprisingly comfortable. And they were made by American craftsmen.