Issue No. 92 FIve Dollars

CookingSimple

Hanging Out at the No-Name

A Diner Story (with Recipes)

Oatcakes ~ Hummus, HOld tHe PIta

continued on page 6

Dill Pickle SoupIf this were a culinary romance, I would have sampled

zupa ogórkowa in a crowded tavern in Warszawa. Reality being what it is, I came across this soup in

the Polish imported groceries section of the local Stop & Shop. This part of Massachusetts has a strong Polish presence (there’s even a Polish National Credit Union), which makes for easy access to freshly made pierogi and to locally produced kielbasa and even kiszka — a sausage made of buckwheat groats, pork liver, pork snouts, beef blood, diced pork fat, and so on, that has become one of my breakfast favorites. Supermarkets here have also gotten into the act, carrying a selection of imported Polish grocery items. Unfortunately, these are dominated by pickled vegetables swimming in distilled vinegar strong enough to melt plastic. Still, I give the shelves a quick glance as I push my cart by, and thus it was that an unfamilar glass jar flagged me down. It was labeled “Cucumber Soup.” I once made a curry with cucumbers in it. It was very good, and since then I’ve been (mildly) interested in cooked cucumber dishes. In fact, I’ve even made a cucumber soup, following the recipe that appears in older editions of Fannie Farmer. It turned out to be more for the bridge club than for me — bland, rich, and, well, gelded. However, all I had to do was pick up the jar to see this soup was something else. True, its contents were shot through with threads of cucumber (and, for that matter, carrot). But the medium for these was one big mass of mashed potato. The label lied. This was a potato soup, and I love potato soup. Certainly, if the jar had simply contained chunks of cucumber floating in an herb-speckled broth, I might still have bought it and taken it home, but not with bated breath. My palate draws me to foods that are fatty and salty and becomes more diffident when the offerings are sour and/or sweet. This is why my culinary explorations almost never take me to Germany, let alone the European countries to its east. Borscht, sauerkraut, sauerbraten, pickled herring ... I can eat these things, sometimes even

The Story So Far: On a run-down part of Water Street sits a tiny, brightly painted, nameless diner. Alec, our narrator, who owns a used-book store in the row of Victorian commercial buildings that loom beside it, has gradually become a regular, getting to know the Professor (the burly, bearded proprietor and grill cook), Greg (the Gen-Y waitron-busboy-dishwasher), and, more recently, the Professor’s young daughter, Jess. In the past few episodes, the Professor has been in hot pursuit of the quintessential pea soup recipe.

Winter, in this part of the world, doesn’t give up without a struggle. In fact, it has to be dragged off the stage cursing and flailing about. Even so,

there was a hint of spring in this morning’s weather, warm and moist enough for a bank of fog to come rising up off the river and blanket the town. It added a bit more thrill to the walk downhill over the snow-crusted sidewalks, especially with a dog eagerly tugging on her leash. When I pulled open the No-Name’s door and went in, I found the diner empty of customers. The Professor was leaning over the counter, dourly regarding the head-lines of the morning paper. “Quiet in here,” I said, when he looked up. The Professor grunted. “The working class has eaten and gone,” he replied, “while the leisure class has yet to venture out into the gloom. That leaves only you as a potential customer… well, you and,” he glanced down, “your faithful dog.” Sasha quivered all over to express her joy at be-ing noticed, and, even more so, in the anticipation that, with the diner being empty, she could actually sit on a counter stool right beside me. Just then, Greg came out of the kitchen, bear-ing a tray heaped with clean cups and dishes. His face brightened when he saw Sasha‘s head poking up just high enough to clear the counter. “Ah ha!” he said. “At last, a customer for our special tasting menu!” He set down the tray with a clatter and hurried back into the kitchen. The Professor, inured to such behavior, didn’t even bother rolling his eyes, He brought up a cup and saucer from beneath the counter with one hand, even as he snared the coffee pot with the other. As I stirred

page threepage two

with pleasure, but entice me they do not. This lack of connection is the reason why it didn’t even occur to me that the cucumber in this soup might be pickled, or — to put the horse before the cart — that it would turn out to be cucumber pickle soup. Except it wasn’t that, either. I once wrote in an essay about potato soup that

there’s no shortage of seasonings to bring a welcome spritz of flavor to a good potato soup. But a good potato soup needs only a spritz of flavor. Add more and the potato retreats to play backup for someone else’s show.

Now, two decades later, here was a lovely exampling of that dictum. The sharp-sour, dill-inflected savor of the pickle invigorated the delicate taste of the potato, without in any way elbowing it aside. (In fact, it made me think that this might be an answer to that dolor that afflicts all but the most carefully crafted potato salads.) I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of commercially made soups that I enjoy eating.* It was a pleasure to add another to that roster, especially a soup with such a short and admirably unsullied list of ingredients. I was able to buy one more jar. Then, on a sub-sequent visit to Stop & Shop, the slot was filled with jars of something called “vegetable salad.” Cucumber soup was gone for good. It was never restocked, and I couldn’t find it anywhere else, including online. Its absence was so total that I found myself wondering if my memory of it was but a remnant of a dream. But I wasn’t going to let it escape so easily. I would just have to make it myself. Recipes for pickle soup aren’t hard to find if you happen to own any Polish cookbooks. We don’t.† This was probably for the best. If what you’re trying to recapture is a memory, the worse way to go about it is to reach for it through other people’s ideas. However “authentic,” they rarely give you what you’re looking for. And the recipe I worked out for myself did do that — perhaps because by the time I had the soup the way I wanted it, memory found itself finessed and graciously gave in.

Dill Pickle SoupThe pickles can be half-sour, kosher dill, or garlic, but if possible they should be naturally cured and vinegar free, which means you’ll find them in the refrigerated case where cold cuts and other deli-like items are sold. Even better, they should come from your local food co-op, where you can find such pickles made entirely with natural ingredi-ents. Best of all, you can make your own. (Recipes for true, brine-cured cucumber pickles can be easily found. See the supplement for one, or turn to my pamphlet The Dill Crock, which I’m happy to reprint on demand for any reader who would like one. The price is $5, postage paid.)

[serves 4]

4 medium/large yellow potatoes, washed

2 cups water • 2 cups milk

1 large carrot, peeled and quartered

2 tablespoons unsalted butter

1 bunch scallions, trimmed of roots and ragged tops

1 clove garlic, minced1/4 teaspoon caraway seeds, ground (optional)

1 teaspoon minced fresh dill leaves or 1/2 teaspoon dried

4 to 6 brine-cured pickles, stem ends trimmed off and discarded, the rest coarsely grated

1/2 cup pickling liquid from the jar of pickles

salt and black pepper to taste

serve with: your favorite rye bread and butter

• Put the unpeeled potatoes and the carrot chunks into a pot and pour over the water and milk. Bring to a simmer, cover, and cook for 30 minutes, or until the potatoes can be easily pierced with a serving fork or skewer. (Cooking the potatoes in their skins keeps them from getting wa-terlogged and lets the nutrients in the skin leach into the cooking liquid.)

• As the potatoes and carrots cook, cut the scallions in half at the point where they turn green. Cut the bottom pieces in half lengthwise, then slice these into large dice. Coarsely chop the green ends.

• Set a soup pot over medium heat and add the butter. When it has melted, put in the prepared scallions, the minced garlic, and the ground caraway seeds (if using). Mellow everything gently until the scallions are translu-cent. Keep this warm over a low flame.

• When the potatoes are done, remove them from the pot but reserve the cooking liquid and keep it warm. Once the potatoes are cool enough to handle, slip off their skins (easily done with yellow potatoes). Cut the potatoes into quarters and return these to their cooking liquid. Cut the carrots into little chunks and add them to the soup pot.

• Sprinkle the minced dill over the potatoes. Then, using the edge of a stiff plastic spatula, chop/mash the potatoes into a coarse slurry. There should be lots of potato chunks, but none of them very large.

• Stir these mushed potatoes, the chopped pickles, and the pickling liquid into the soup pot. Bring this up to a bubbling simmer and let it cook for 5 minutes. If the soup is too thick for your taste, thin it with more milk. Taste for seasoning, adding salt as necessary and plenty of black pepper.

Later, I did consult some Polish cookbooks, and loved finding a recipe for “Dill Pickles for Soup” in Robert and Maria Strybel’s mammoth 887-page Polish Heritage cookery. It came with the comment, “If you like zupa ogórkowa as much as we do, you may want to put up pickles especially for this purpose and have them on hand all year.” There was nothing in the least unusual about the recipe except that the pickles were processed in 8-ounce jars — just the right size for a single batch of soup! Then there was their hangover cure: Fill a glass with equal measures ice-cold pickle brine and seltzer, then drink it all down in a single gulp. Actually, as a salt replenisher after too much time in the sun, this doesn’t sound at all bad. But for a case of morning-after, I’ll take my pickle brine in a nice hot bowl of potato soup.

See the supplement for de Pomiane’s pickle soup recipe and an easy (and quick) way to make your own half-sours.

xqxqxOatcakes

The first time I tasted buttermilk, I turned and spat it out on the street — to the amused astonishment of the Southern friend who’d convinced me to try it. Yankees!

What can you do with them? Answer: Give them another forty years, because I’ve finally come around. Now I love the stuff enough to drink it right out of the carton. Furthermore, I know exactly when I realized

*These would be Progresso’s Chickarina, Campbell’s Pepperpot, Goya’s Classic Black Bean Soup, and… Seabrook Farms’ Creamed Spinach diluted with an equal amount of milk.† Oddly, we do possess Edouard de Pomiane’s the Jews of Poland: Recollections and Recipes (1929). I checked and it does have an appealing recipe for pickle soup, but it was nothing like the one I was trying to reproduce.

page threepage two

this. I was leafing through Saveur when I came across a photograph of a glass of buttermilk, flecked with bits of minced chive and black pepper. I couldn’t believe how totally delicious it looked, how foolish it was that this wasn’t already part of my life. Before the day was over, there was a carton of buttermilk in the fridge; before the week was over, there was a big pot of chives set in our sunniest window. I snipped away all that summer and fall, and when winter put an end to it, I switched over to freeze-dried dill. (Freeze-dried chives have no flavor.) Furthermore, once it became clear that this but-termilk beveraging was no passing fancy, I decided to switch from the commercial product to a close cousin I could make myself, a Swedish cultured milk called film-jölk.* Although it isn’t exactly like buttermilk, I think it tastes even better — a smooth, tangy mass of delicate curds that just melts in your mouth. I wrote about filmjölk many years ago, when Matt and I kept a culture going to use in baking cornbread (see page 360 in serious Pig for the details). Unlike buttermilk cultures, those in filmjölk can be kept going by mixing a dollop in some fresh milk and letting it sit overnight at room temperature. The bacteria will also culture anything from skim milk to heavy cream, which means that it is useful for all sorts of projects. Happily, Gem Cultures, the company that sold us our original starter, was still in business. I ordered some and, over a year later, it’s still going strong. And that would have been that, a tip of the hat to Saveur and on to other things, had not Mo, my pal at Zingerman’s — Ann Arbor’s food phenomenon (deli, bakery, roadhouse, mail-order source for choice foodstuffs) — sent me a canister of the organic, stoneground Macroom Irish oatmeal that they were introducing to the USA. For reasons that I don’t really understand, Irish oatmeal has a uniquely delicious flavor that even small gristmills here in America can’t match.† Because of this, for all my adult life, my oatmeal of choice has been McCann’s traditional steel-cut oatmeal. If you, too, are a lover of slow-cooked traditional oatmeal, you’ll know that mills process it in different ways. Once the whole grain is hulled, the resulting groats are softened with steam (or some other process), then flattened with steel rollers or cut into small chunks with steel blades — producing, in the first instance, rolled oats, and, in the second, steel-cut oats.‡ Both methods lend themselves to refinement. Rolled oats can be rolled thin (and are thus quicker to make) or not so thin (so that they cook up chewier and tastier). Steel-cut oats can be toasted before being run through the blades; they can also be cut into larger or smaller pieces.

“Pinhead” oatmeal, a favorite in both Scotland and Ireland, takes its name not — as I once thought — from the size of the groats but from the tiny specks that remain once the steel blades are done pulverizing them. The oatmeal introduced by Zingerman’s is all again different, and thus has its own entry in Cathal Cowan and Regina Sexton’s Ireland’s traditional Foods (1997).* It gets its name from the town in County Cork where it has been milled since 1832, and two important things distin-guish it from any other Irish oatmeal. First, the whole oats are roasted in a kiln before they are processed; secondly, they are ground in Ireland’s last operating traditional mill, where the use of slow-turning millstones conserves the full flavor of the toasty grain. The aroma of this oatmeal hits your nostrils the moment you open the can. You might as well be at the mill scooping it out of the bin: it’s as fresh-seeming and potent as that. In fact, from that moment, I knew that Macroom was going to blow McCann’s away. Where McCann’s is nutty tasting, Macroom, judging from taste alone, might be mistaken for actual crushed nuts ... at least until the vegetative aftertaste of the grain comes through. No other oatmeal I’ve ever tasted has this depth. And, despite its fine texture, because it hasn’t been steam-processed, it cooks up velvety smooth but not at all mushy the way instant oatmeal does. I had eaten my way through half the canister before the nickel dropped. “Oatmeal” has evolved into a generic term for ground-up oats of any sort that are eaten as a breakfast cereal. But the Macroom product was bona fine oat meal. In fact, it looked almost identical to the stone-ground white corn meal with which we make our cornbread. And this connection prompted the obvious question: What would happen if I made that bread using Macroom instead? Our basic cornbread recipe is simple enough. Quickly mix the batter, pour it into a preheated, greased skillet and bake it in a hot oven. Then, after about twenty minutes, invert the skillet over a cutting board, so that the deliciously crusty bottom becomes the top. If you like your cornbread moist, almost pudding-like, give it a slightly shorter cooking time; if you like it drier, let it stay in a few minutes more. This method worked perfectly utilizing Macroom, producing an oat bread that was tender, moist, full of oat-rich flavor, with a crusty bottom-turned-top. However, I found myself not quite happy with the result — and it didn’t take me long to figure out why. Most of the things I put in or on my cornbread — cheese, garlic, chiles, country sausage — didn’t work that well with this bread. What I wanted on it was pretty much what goes with it best when I eat my oatmeal in a bowl, which is butter, honey, and (if not so applicable here) a splash of cream. And the thickish version I was turning out wasn’t the best way to make the most of these. To do that, I needed something much more sug-gestive of a traditional oakcake, which is produced out of nothing more than oatmeal, salt, a little cooking fat, and enough water to make a dough.† For such a mixture to be edible it has to made very thin, and it takes a lot of skill (and brute force) to accomplish this. My personal oatcake (as I now began to think of

*Buttermilk is made with Streptococcus lactis, while filmjölk uses Lactococcus lactis and Leuconostoc mesenteroides. In either case, the tang comes from fermenting the lactose in the milk into lactic acid. This in turn changes the ph of the milk, which causes the casein in it to precipitate — hence the clabber.†Cook’s Illustrated begs to differ. In an oatmeal tasting in the July/Au-gust 2009 issue, McCann’s didn’t even make it into the “recommended” category, and was described as tasting “like cardboard or paper pulp.” I rarely agree with CI’s tasters, and this time I think they’ve taken a few too many hits from the imitation vanilla extract bottle. To put their expertise into perspective, I’ll just quote some commendations for their first two choices: “like tapioca pearls popping in my mouth” and “like a warm granola bar.” These people are oatmeal lovers?‡Groats can also be eaten, if you cook them long enough. On my lifetime list of dishes to try just once is something called Groaty Dick, a traditional specialty from England’s Black Country (named for its outcroppings of coal), made by cooking soaked groats, beef, leeks, and onions in beef stock for up to 16 hours at 300°F.

*One oddity in their entry is this: “The older generation speak of having it in tea” — shades of my grandfather, who used to wet his breakfast cereal with his morning coffee. Nothing put me off my breakfast more until I met someone who shook dollops of catsup on her fried eggs.† This, let it be said, is the most basic of oatcakes. If you want to boggle your brain, turn to F. Marian McNeill’s the scots kitchen, which has two pages (printed in microscopic type) of variations on that theme.

page fivepage four

it) would require neither skill nor muscle, but it would be made in a wide enough skillet so that when I turned it out, slathered it with butter, and drizzled it all over with honey, it would be near soaked with those things, while still crisp and hot. After trying out various skillets for the task, I discovered that our Vollrath 12-inch round, nonstick, aluminum griddle produced the very giant-pancake-like oatcake I wanted. Life is bliss.

Irish OatcakeThis oatcake can be simple to make even if you don’t care to culture your own filmjölk or get in a supply of Macroom Irish Oatmeal. (See below for ordering information, as well as a special offer for SC subscribers.) For the former, you can substitute buttermilk; for the latter you can pulverize McCann’s Quick Cooking Irish Oatmeal (which is steamed and rolled) into a coarse oat flour in a food processor set with its steel blade. The Cuisinart spice grinder reviewed on page 7 can do the same thing to McCann’s steel-cut Irish oatmeal. Our Vollrath griddle is quite light — if you use a skillet, make sure you can easily turn it over so that the oatcake will land upside down on the cutting board. One oatcake serves one most generously or two quite suf-ficiently.

[makes one 12-inch oatcake]1/2 tablespoon peanut or other cooking oil

4 ounces stone-ground oatmeal

scant 1/2 teaspoon each baking soda, cream of tartar, and fine sea salt

1 egg • 3/4 cup (6 ounces) filmjölk or buttermilk

to complete: butter and honey to taste

• Preheat the oven to 425°F. When it is ready, pour the cooking oil onto a 12-inch griddle (or into a skillet, see above) and set this in the oven for 5 minutes.

• Meanwhile, put the stone- (or processor-) ground oatmeal into a mixing bowl and sift in the baking soda, cream of tartar, and salt. Break the egg into a second bowl, then whisk in the filmjölk or buttermilk, blending them well.

• After the 5 minutes, remove the griddle from the oven, tipping it gently so that the oil covers its entire surface. Quickly turn the liquid ingredients into the dry ones, whisking them just enough to blend. Don’t overmix. Then immediately turn this onto the griddle, using a flexible spatula to clean out the bowl. The batter will sizzle.

• Put the griddle back in the oven and bake for 18 minutes. The surface of the oatcake should spring back when lightly pressed with a finger. Flip it onto a cutting board, so that the bottom, crusty side faces up. Spread it liberally with butter and drizzle it with honey. Serve at once.

* cook’s Note: sources. An active starter of filmjölk can be ordered from Gem Cultures for $12 plus shipping. While you’re visiting their website, www.gemcultures.com, browse around — these people hold the keys to a fascinat-ing world. You can also contact them by mail or phone: GEM Cultures, Inc., PO Box 39426, Lakewood WA 98496 • (253) 588-2922.

The only place I know in the USA that sells macroom Oat-meal is Zingerman’s, $16 for a 2-pound tin. However, Mo has set up a special discount for SC subscribers (mail/in-ternet orders only): Enter the code SIMPLE and you’ll get five dollars off the price of a tin, limit 2. The offer expires November 30, 2009. www.zingermans.com • 422 Detroit St., Ann Arbor MI 48104 • (888) 636-8162.

See the supplement for a note on my experiments making this bread with other breakfast cereals

xqxqx

Hummus, Hold the PitaThe most typical dish of Sifnos is … baked chickpeas, revithia fournou, a fixture of Sunday dinners that bakes in a slow oven all night Saturday. — Miles Lambert-Gócs, Greek salad

Recently, I received a review copy of Janna Gur’s handsome, coffee-table-size the Book of New Is-raeli Food. It is in many ways the most illuminating

Israeli cookbook I’ve come across, which only intensified the shock when I happened upon her recipe for “Basic Hummus Dip.” In it she instructs the cook to soak the chickpeas in a tablespoon of baking soda, then to cook them in an additional half teaspoon of the stuff. There are only two reasonable explanations for this (not count-ing “The devil made me do it”): (1) Israeli chickpeas are actually pebbles in disguise or (2) her American editor warned her that in this country all chickpeas are stored in some stiflingly hot Florida warehouse for five or six years before being released for sale. Of course, I can’t exactly prove this, but I do know from a lifetime of dealing with them that chickpeas take an exasperatingly unpredictable amount of time to cook. In our experience, this can range from three to six hours, not counting the instances when we were too hungry to wait any longer and gnawed them down as they were. Using baking soda to rectify this is what might tactfully be referred to as waterboarding for chickpeas. Use that amount of baking soda and they’ll truly be putty in your hands … and taste that way, too. The result will not be pretty.* The secret to chickpea cooking is simple if incon-venient: Give them all the time in the pot that they need. Put them in filtered water, if necessary, and cook them the day before (or overnight!) so that the hours can slip by … one, two, three, four, five, six … until that magic moment when the test bean simply melts in your mouth. “To hell with all that,” you mutter. “I’ll just buy them in a can.” Sure. Usually, this isn’t a bad option — I often do it myself. Chickpeas are one of the few beans with enough presence to elbow aside the whispery off-flavors that come of mass processing. The problem is what isn’t there: the subtle flavor notes that get entirely cooked away. In a dish like hummus bi tahini, where the chickpea taste and texture is pretty much everything, using the canned product dooms it to mediocrity.† The reason that I even noticed Janna Gur’s bak-ing soda fixation is that the dish in question has recently come back into our life after a long hiatus. When Matt and I lived in Maine, we baked almost all the bread we ate, and I had gotten pretty good at making pita. Few things are nicer on a cold winter night Downeast than taking these straight from oven to table, each loaf still gloriously puffed (if luck is smiling on you), gingerly ripping them apart to release a cloud of steam and that intensely ap-petizing yeasty, fresh-baked-bread aroma, then stuffing them with (among other things) roasted peppers and hummus bi tahini. * Hard water keeps chickpeas from softening, and in this case a pinch of baking soda in the soaking water can help. I’ve also read that chickpeas taken from their pods and dried while still green (rather than letting them dry in their pods) turn out mealy unless given a lengthy cooking.† Even the taste of the unadulterated cooking liquid from home-cooked chickpeas can be genuinely sublime. Refrigerated overnight, it becomes delicately gelatinous, and provides the final touch to a richly flavored hummus.

page fivepage four

When we moved to Northampton and to a small apartment kitchen, my bread-baking days came to an end. We tried for a while to keep at it, but there was no good place to store the fifty-pound bags of our favorite bread flour and no good counters on which to knead and roll out the dough. No matter. We could get hold of very good bread (and pretty decent pizza) — but nothing like good pita. And, unlike most bread, pita has to be very fresh, very good or it is nothing at all. No pita meant no more hummus, no more baba ganoush. And we missed those things. What I had to do was entirely rethink the relation-ship, knock pita out of the equation, at least for the time being, and focus on the hummus. Matt and I had already shoved it along from appetizer to full-fledged sandwich, but I still thought of it as a dip. However, on reflection, I real-ized I had a better template — bagna caôda, that delicious meld of cream, garlic, and anchovy served with a platter of vegetables, which makes winter bearable in Italy’s Piedmont region. Employed in the same fashion, hummus bi tahini could become a perfect hot weather repast. Of course, there would have to be some changes. Unlike bagna caôda, hummus isn’t molten or all that rich. This means that the vegetables would have to be a bit more moist and provide a certain richness of their own — in my imagination, not unlike a ratatouille. This notion evolved into what follows: a handsome, filling meal that can be made in advance and that is totally vegetarian without wearing that fact on its sleeve — in short, the basis for a lovely summer supper.

Hummus bi Tahini with Pan-Roasted Vegetables

some Preliminary Notes. Tahini, of course, is a paste made of raw sesame seeds, pretty universally available in cans. However, I did some experimenting and came up with a close cousin made by pulverizing the seeds myself, re-sulting in something much fresher tasting — an adventure detailed in this issue’s supplement. • Because the vegetable mélange has plenty of garlic, we omit it from the hummus, adding some minced hot red chile instead. If you’d like the traditional version, omit the chile, adding one or two peeled and very finely minced garlic cloves in its place.

The Hummus bi TahiniIf you’re planning to eat this dish for lunch, you’ll need to have cooked the chickpeas the day before. Otherwise, soak them overnight, start them cooking first thing in the morn-ing, and expect to eat the resulting hummus for supper.

[serves 4]

8 ounces dried chickpeas, picked over and rinsed well, then soaked for 8 hours (or overnight)

1 teaspoon kosher salt, plus more to taste

juice of 1 plump lemon (about 3 tablespoons)

1/4 cup tahini or freshly made sesame seed paste (see supplement for recipe)

1/4 cup (loosely packed) minced fresh cilantro leaf

1 red serrano or other small hot chile, stemmed, seeded, and finely minced

• to cook the chickpeas: Put them in a pot and cover them with at least 1 inch of water. Bring this to a boil, watching carefully to prevent the pot from boiling over. Keeping everything at a steady boil, cook the chickpeas for 10 minutes, skimming away any persistent foam. Then stir in the salt, lower heat until the boiling is reduced to a gentle quivering, and cook until the chickpeas are tender but not mushy, from 3 to as many as 6 hours. When they

are ready, let them cool in their cooking liquid, refrigerating them in it until making the hummus.

• to make the hummus: Drain the chickpeas, reserving the liquid. Pour the lemon juice into a mortar or food pro-cessor fitted with its steel blade. Work the chickpeas into a slightly coarse, moist purée, adding the cooking liquid, bit by bit, until the desired consistency has been reached. Pulse in the tahini or sesame paste, then the minced cilan-tro leaf and chile pepper. Add more salt if needed.

The Pan-Roasted VegetablesWe make this dish with an ever-changing cast of charac-ters, selecting at least five or six from what looks best at the market and what is at hand at home. Besides those listed in the recipe below, we regularly use eggplant (treated like the zucchini), fennel, carrots, and green beans (parboiled).

[serves 4]

2 large portabello mushroom caps

1 green and 1 red bell pepper, cored, and seeded

4 yellow potatoes, peeled

2 medium Vidalia (or other) onions, peeled

2 Belgian endives, ends trimmed

4 medium or 2 large zucchini, trimmed

1 tablespoon kosher salt, plus more to taste

4 tablespoons olive oil, plus more as needed

2 garlic cloves, peeled and minced

1 teaspoon cumin seeds, crushed in a mortar

1 medium (14.5 ounce) can “petite diced” tomatoes

1 teaspoon dried oregano, crumbled

hot pepper flakes and black pepper to taste

• Preheat oven to 400°F. Cut all the vegetables into largish bite-size pieces, except for the Belgian endive, which should be separated into leaves. Put the cut zucchini into a bowl, toss with 1/2 tablespoon of the salt, and let sit.

• Put 1 tablespoon of the olive oil in a large skillet (we use a 12-inch flat-bottomed wok) and heat this over a medium flame. When you can smell the oil, add the mushroom pieces and sauté these, turning them often, until they are soft and wilted, about 3 to 5 minutes.

• Push the wilted mushrooms to the side of the pan and pour in the remaining olive oil, then add the minced garlic and crushed cumin seeds. Once the garlic turns trans-lucent, stir in the potato and bell pepper pieces and mix these with the mushrooms. Season lightly with salt and put the skillet in the oven.

• After 10 minutes, remove the skillet and add the onion pieces, stirring everything together. Return the skillet to the oven for another 10 minutes.

• Meanwhile, pour off and discard any liquid released by the zucchini. Wrap the pieces in a clean dish towel and wring this vigorously to squeeze out as much further liquid as possible. Then, at the 10-minute mark, remove the skillet and stir in the zucchini and Belgian endive leaves. Season with a pinch more salt and, if needed, add a splash more olive oil as well. Return the skillet to the oven.

• After another 10 minutes, remove the skillet and taste one of the potato pieces. If it needs more cooking time, stir everything well and return the skillet to the oven, check-ing for tenderness every 5 minutes. Once the potatoes are ready, remove the skillet from the oven, stir in the can of tomatoes, including the liquid, and sprinkle over the oregano. Stir everything well and let it cool on top of the stove for at least 5 minutes before serving. Divide the hum-mus into small bowls, and put these in the center of each plate, with the vegetables surrounding them.

See the supplement for recipes for homemade sesame seed paste and a hummus-based soup

page sevenpage six page sevenpage six

in cream and sugar, he gestured at the grill and added, “What‘s your pleasure?” “Two fried eggs on buttered toast,” I replied, “bacon on the side.” The Professor got these under way. There was a long moment of silence. Then Greg reappeared, carrying a tray with several saucers on it. He came up to Sasha and began setting each of these in front of her, reciting as he did: “Scrambled egg. Heel of toast, buttered. Bacon scraps à la mode. Blueberry pancake, forked but not eaten. Bran muffin crumble.” Sasha was now standing with her rear legs on the stool and her fore legs on the counter, tail wagging wildly. She managed to finish off each treat as it hit the counter, licking the saucer clean before Greg could set out the next one. “Jesus, Greg!” the Professor groaned, when he turned from the griddle to see what was going on. “If the health inspector walked in right now, I’d be finished. Con-demned. Forced to take sanitary lessons at McDonald’s.” “Boss!” Greg replied in a hurt voice. “It was you who gave me the idea.” He pointed to the T-shirt the Professor had on, which was from his seemingly endless collection from food joints all across the country.

The Professor glanced down at his front, then looked over at Sasha, who was shoving aside the well-licked saucers in search of any errant crumbs on the counter. He sighed and shook his head. “Somehow, I don’t think Nick had this in mind, but I take the point. Now clear it all away.” The reason for his urgency was obvious; a regular customer at my bookstore, Dave Spenser, beefy, mus-tached, and leaning on a cane, had just come through the door. Greg whisked away the saucers and I shooed Sasha onto the floor. Dave came over and heaved himself onto the stool on the other side of me. He caught the Professor’s eye and said, “Give me what the dog had.”

a a a

Alittle while later, he and I walked together to the book-shop. Dave had suffered permanent damage from his work as a builder and lived mostly off disability.

As he put it, he was one of life’s walking wounded. But he had an assortment of irons in the fire to keep himself busy — ranging from volunteer work to an ongoing war with the squirrels who invaded his bird feeder. His two passions in life were baseball and crime fiction, the first of which inspired many a heated discussion with the professor. The second led to his regular appearances in my store. The dim appearance of the sun above our heads meant that the fog was burning off everywhere but here, right beside the river, where it was still so thick that you could barely see across the street. “Brrrck,” Dave muttered, a combination of “brrr” and a four-letter word. “This is a regular pea souper, that’s for sure,” I agreed, tugging on Sasha’s leash. She knew where we were going and how quickly we would be getting there — far too quickly for her.

Dave glanced at me. “Do you know what that phrase ‘pea souper’ means, Booksie?” I answered his question, adopting a deep, porten-tous voice and speaking as if plucking words from the mist around us. “I’m seeing… night, wet streets, thick fog. A dim light appears… a lantern! Held up by the driver of a hansom cab. Behind him, from the passenger’s seat, a voice calls out, ‘Come, Watson. The game’s afoot!’” Dave sighed. “Yeah, yeah. A simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ would have sufficed, pal. The point is — do you know why London fogs were called that?” We had reached the door to my shop. I fished the key ring out of my pocket and turned the lock, flipping the CLOSED sign to OPEN as we went in. “Probably not because of their taste,” I ventured. Dave snorted. “Good guess. No, it wasn’t. And there weren’t peas floating around in it, either. It’s because the cheap coal that Londoners used to heat their homes was loaded with sulphur, and when the weather was right, it left London enveloped in a thick yellow cloud. A pea-soup fog was pollution.” “Boy,” I said, “the past sure does have a habit of letting one down.” I paused. “Don’t tell the Professor that, Dave. You know he’s researching pea soup recipes ... this news might take the wind out of his sails.” Dave looked at me as though I had lost what few marbles he reluctantly credited to my account. “Are you kidding, Booksie? I already told him. And, unlike you, he got it right away, I mean, he’s the son of Sherlock Holmes, ain’t he? Those cockney nag-nudgers ate pea soup made with yellow split peas.”

The Fog Cutter (London Cabbie Split Pea Soup)

The Professor says: “In Victorian days, London hackney stands often had small canteens, primitively heated in the winter, where cabbies could get warm and grab something quick and filling to eat, while their horses got water, rest, and a nosebag of oats. I looked at some antique British cookbooks for feeding the poor, then worked out what I would‘ve dished out had I been the canteen cook.”

[serves 6]

1 pound yellow split peas

1 pound meaty beef bones

4 teaspoons kosher salt

2 slices bacon • 1 tablespoon vegetable oil

1/2 pound stew beef, diced

2 carrots, 2 yellow potatoes, and 2 onions, peeled and chopped

3 stalks celery (including leaves), chopped

leaves from a half dozen sprigs flat-leaf parsley, minced

black pepper to taste

to garnish: toasted croûtons (optional)

• About an hour before the soup is to be served, rinse the split peas and put them into a large pot filled with 21/2 quarts of water. Add the beef bones. Bring the pot to a boil, skimming off any persistent scum. Then stir in 2 teaspoons of the salt, lower the heat so the pot barely bubbles, and cover.

• Fry the bacon in a large skillet. When it is crisp and brown, remove it to a paper towel and pour off and discard all but a tablespoon of the fat. Add the vegetable oil and return the skillet to the stove, over a medium flame. When it is hot, brown the diced beef, then add all the vegetables in the order given. Sauté everything, stirring occasionally, until the root vegetables are tender.

concluded on next page aaa

continued from page 1

page sevenpage six

Simple Cooking 92 © 2009 John Thorne and Matt Lewis Thorne. All rights reserved. ❍ The subscription price is $25 for five issues or $45 for ten. ❍ Unless you state otherwise, we assume letters to us are meant for publication and can be edited accordingly. ❍ P.O. Box 778, Northampton MA 01061 ❍ johnandmatt@outlawcook.com. Visit our award-winning Internet site at: http://www.outlawcook.com.

ISSN 0749-176Xpage sevenpage six

Table TalkOilerie. Many of us have a notion of an occupation we wish we had the nerve or the financing to make real, but it’s a rare thing to come across somebody else’s dream that practically makes you weep that you hadn’t thought of it yourself. That’s what happened to me when Curt Campbell described Oilerie, his oil and vinegar store in Fish Creek, Wisconsin. Curt and his wife, Amy Jo, were in Krakow in April of 2003, when he noticed that olive oil was being sold there in small boutiques, where custom-ers could come in, taste the different oils, and choose the ones that pleased them the most. The appeal of this to the customer is obvious enough, but what affected me was the pleasure it offers the merchant. If you sell wine, for example, you might break open a bottle now and then for a tasting, but you can’t do it with any regularity or with any customer. But at the Oilerie, Curt can give you a sample of any of his oils and/or vinegars that interest you, and engage you in a meaningful conversation about the special qualities that persuaded him to add them to his stock. On top of that, he gets to go to Italy to meet the producers and to hand select the oils and vinegars they sell. The oils and vinegars are dispensed from large Italian stainless-steel containers (which look not unlike giant milk cans with spigots. Called fustis or fustinox, these drums are sold at Italian hardware stores to hold the oil that customers have pressed from their own olives.) Because each bottle is filled to order, Curt can offer good prices by buying in bulk and using identical (12.7 oz.) bottles sport-ing the same distinctive design, with brass medallions that label the contents. He calls this the “Southwest Airlines” approach to olive oil marketing. Consequently, he can of-fer a twenty-five-year-old balsamic (which possesses an incredible intensity of flavor and a pronounced mouth-coating viscosity) for $18.50 and a truffle-infused olive oil (the bosky flavor of which haunts the taste buds for a long time after the oil has been swallowed) for $15.50. The Oilerie’s selection embraces different extra-virgin Italian oils with widely varying flavor notes (from mild to buttery to noticeably peppery), as well as some flavored ones (the two I tried — garlic and dried tomato — were as good as anything I could concoct myself). Also on offer are an California avocado oil and a deliciously subtle Japanese-made toasted sesame oil. Apart from the spectacular balsamic described above, the Oilerie also sells twelve-year-old “white” (uncooked) balsamic vinegar, and (among others) a subtle-tasting pear balsamic and a lively fig one, all from Modena. Most of the extra-virgin olive oils are under fifteen dollars; the twenty-five-year-old balsamic is the priciest of the vinegars. You can order all these at the Oilerie’s website (which includes many things not mentioned here). And franchises are on offer if you find your pulse quickening at the thought of your own neighborhood bottega dell’olio. Oilerie • PO Box 31 • Fish Creek WI 54212 • (800) 310-2878. www.oilerie.com.

Word of Mouth. elinor Rivers (Sylvan Creek Farm, Oak Harbor WA) writes, “Some years ago you sent me a single sheet recipe for lamb kidneys in their jackets. Two days later I slaughtered a young ram and roasted fresh kid-ney that night. What an extraordinary experience! The fat had crisped, which added an extra richness. A full-bodied red wine made up for the absence of sweet butter and artisanal bread. By the way, fresh frozen kidneys are almost as good.” Phil miano (Weston, CT) responsed to my dismissing fennel fronds as “garbage” in a recipe at our website: “I chop them finely and use them with garlic and some oil, forming a delightful green paste. I do this when I have a pork shoulder to roast. I separate the musculature in the shoulder and spread my paste throughout. When the roast is carved you get slices of pork with green ‘marbling.’ It’s delicious.”

Cuisinart® Spice and Nut Grinder. If you’ve ever used a coffee grinder to pulverize spices, you know (a) that it works and (b) that you almost wish it didn’t. The ground spices get clogged under the blade and leave an oily residue on the plastic dome, and despite all your cleaning efforts, your next batch of coffee tastes like an infusion of clove. This grinder, about half again as large as a coffee grinder, which it otherwise resembles, was designed from the ground up to pulverize two things — spices and nuts — and it does this to perfection. The grinding is done in a stainless-steel cup which, in turn, is covered with a plastic dome. You activate the grinder by pressing down on this; I grasp it by the sides while gently pulse the contents, watching as I do. What is ground in the cup stays in the cup (almost no powdery coating on the plastic dome). Even better, the steel container can be easily removed (blade and all) to make emptying it easier and cleaning it a snap — you can even pop it in the dishwasher (but wash the dome by hand). The grinder has a half-cup capacity (almonds, a quarter cup), which is plenty for the purpose, even if you’re making your own garam masala. In our house, it has tackled whole nutmeg, cloves, dried chile peppers, fresh and roasted peanuts, and flax, sesame, pumpkin, and toasted cumin seeds. In my experience it doesn’t work with herbs (too light), and a call to Cuisinart confirmed my suspicion that it’s not for coffee beans. Getting the cord to fit into the built-in storage slot does take a little fiddling, but it can be done. It comes with a help-ful instruction pamphlet. The retail price is $75, but online retailers offer it for about half that: at Amazon.com, for ex-ample, it’s $35.

• By this time, the split peas should be meltingly soft. Fish out and discard the beef bones and mix in the contents of the skillet. Add as much of the remaining 2 teaspoons salt as you like, along with the minced parsley and plenty of black pepper. Cook for another 5 minutes to let flavors mingle, then serve in warmed bowls with a pinch of crumbled bacon and — if you wish — toasted croûtons scattered over.u

```ccontinued from previous page

mangeetoutDiverse Cooking

from a Carolina Kitchen

Holiday Cookingfrom a Carolina Kitchen

by Chris Williams (two pamphlets • 28 pages • $4.95 each)

Spiral-bound fund-raising cookbooks are often what people look to when they want to get a taste of America‘s

regional home cooking. But they might do better to search out the harder-to-find pamphlets published by chefs who were born in just the right locale or moved there because they were attracted by its distinc-tive culinary ways and wanted to make their mark with them. Some of these chefs, of course, do their best to find a commercial publisher, but others really have no intention of writing a cookbook at all. They end up printing the best of their recipes because their customers keep begging them to do so, and seek no further distribution of their effort than a place beside their restaurant’s cash register. Chris Williams is just such a chef. A South Carolina native who graduated from the CIA and has cooked in all sorts of res-taurant kitchens, including some high-end ones, he has settled in at a rustic, all-you--can-eat barbecue joint in Santee, South Carolina, called Lone Star Barbecue and Mercantile. Obviously, this is not a venue for up-to-the-minute trendiness, but it turns out to be perfect for an open-hearted and respectful treatment of South Carolina’s rich vernacular foodways, which are all about feeding as many friends and family members as can be crowded around the dining-room table. Because of this fact, I should warn you at the outset that there’s little here of much use to hungry singles. Four is the smallest number the recipes are designed to feed, and that’s rare. You’ll find that the catfish stew is meant to feed twenty-four; the Lone Star’s signature meatloaf serves twelve to fifteen; the shrimp cakes, twelve; and Tipsy Squire — a trifle comprised of slices of sherry-drizzled pound cake, layered with macerated fresh berries, custardy crème anglaise, and sweetened whipped cream — is meant for at least twenty (although, given a fair head start, I‘d bet I could polish off the whole thing myself). Each booklet contains about sixteen recipes, several of which run on to the

next page. This isn’t because they’re complicated; most are decidedly not. It’s a matter of respect. You don’t need two pages on cooking collard greens, but with Williams at your side, you might well learn why Southerners treasure them so much. I was drawn to the pamphlets for this painstaking care, as well as for the affec-tionate introductions he gives to so many of the recipes, cluing us in to why he (and his customers) are so fond of them. Williams embraces local ingredients and Southern-made comestibles like Duke’s mayonnaise and Adluh stone-ground corn grits. He also unhesitatingly calls for ketchup and other bottled sauces, condensed milk, and grocery bread (see recipe) when he decides that these are part of the essential character of the dish, and not an easy but cheapening shortcut. In fact, these actually testify to both his respect for tradition and his independent nature as a chef. Regional tastes reach gale force when the holiday season arrives, and the second pamphlet offers Williams’s take on roast turkey with thyme gravy and cranberry-apple stuffing, sweet potato casserole, candied yams, and a most appealing bread pudding, made with pears and topped with caramel sauce. Those looking for something differ-ent from the season’s usual fare will find a subtly elegant stuffed boneless turkey breast and — for if you have a hunter in the family — venison en croûte. Other recipes include a baked ham with ginger-apricot glaze, Hoppin’ John, and a truly awesome “old-fashioned” macaroni and cheese. Only one recipe appears in both booklets — potato purée (mashed potatoes raised to a higher level) — which is not a problem, because you won’t want to miss it. You can tour the restaurant complex (a set of small, old-time, wood-sided build-ings — see cut below — that could easily be mistaken for a period Carolina village center) at their website: www.lonestarbbq.net. However, the pamphlets must be acquired the traditional way, by making out a check to “Lone Star” ($4.95 per pamphlet, plus a dollar shipping for each) and sending it to Chris Williams, 716 Jericho Rd., Cameron SC 29030. Be sure to state the pamphlet you want. For more information or for advice regarding any of the recipes, you can reach him directly at (803) 707-6310. u

8Tomato Pie8From Diverse Cooking from a Carolina KitchenChris Williams writes, “The ingredients and method for this recipe are possibly the simplest and easiest in this col-lection. It remains, however, the most frequently requested recipe I have en-countered anywhere. Some folks come sheepishly, some with offers of cold hard cash! We divulge the recipe readily. It is important to use the freshest and most flavorful tomatoes you can find.”

[Serves about 15 as a side dish]10 medium-size vine-ripe tomatoes,

washed, cored, and sliced11/4 cup grated sharp cheddar cheese

1 cup mayonnaise (I prefer Duke’s brand “Southern style” mayonnaise)

1 onion, grated or minced fine15 slices day-old white bread (I prefer

Sunbeam brand)salt and black pepper to taste

• Prepare cheese spread by combining mayonnaise, cheese, and grated onion. Season to taste with salt and pepper.• Grease a 9×13 casserole dish with butter or pan spray. Cut 7 slices of bread into medium-size cubes and layer the bottom of the pan evenly.• Create a layer of tomatoes, by over-lapping them in shingle fashion for the length of the casserole dish, reserving the nicest slices for the top of the pie! Usually a casserole will require 4 rows, using 5 of the sliced tomatoes. Season with salt and pepper.• Trim the crust from the remaining 8 bread slices and arrange them on top so that they cover the entire surface of the tomatoes.• Spread the cheddar cheese mixture over the bread slices. Cover well, but don’t be tempted to use too much or your pie may become soggy. Use a little more than half, because you don’t need quite as much to finish the top.• Arrange the remaining tomatoes in the same manner. Season again with salt and pepper.• Dollop the rest of the cheese spread in rows across the top.• Bake your casserole uncovered in an oven preheated to 375°F for approxi-mately 25 minutes, or until the cheese spread cooks to a golden brown. It’s ready to serve!

888

SC•92 Supplement

sc•92 supplement | page one

Homemade “Tahini” All my cooking life, I’ve bought tahini in tins, and almost

always during that time, there has been one of these buried in the back of a pantry shelf. The can is always dusty and slightly sticky, and I’m always apprehensive when I open the lid and peek inside. Usually, I take in the dubious smell, the murky contents, admonish myself to use it more often, and proceed with the recipe. But this time I had those delicately delicious chickpeas, and I wasn’t going to inflict that on them. I also had a fresh container of sesame seeds at hand — how hard, I asked myself, could it be to make tahini from scratch? After all, it was made of ground sesame seeds; surely grinding up my sesame seeds would result in tahini. There’s a certain logic to this argument — it just happens to be completely wrong.* In any case, by the time I learned how wrong I was, I had made a very tasty sesame paste in my mortar and pestle. (I couldn’t get the food processer to do this; the seeds are too light and just fly over the blade. But our new Cuisinart spice and nut grinder — reviewed on page 7 of the current issue — proved ideal.) The result might not be tahini, but it’s an excellent substitute and frees our pantry of that half-empty can with its stale and turgid contents.

Sesame Seed Paste[makes 1/4 cup]

1/4 cup raw sesame seeds

1 teaspoon olive oil (or unroasted sesame oil)

pinch of salt

• Pour the sesame seeds into an ungreased skillet, place over a low flame, and, constantly stirring, heat them gently until they begin to release their aroma. don’t toast them: toasted sesame paste is a flavor signature of Eastern Asian cooking; it is too aggressive for tahini. The point here is to liven up the flavor a bit before grinding the seeds.

• When the seeds are warm and fragrant, stir in the tea-spoon of olive oil. Its purpose is to encourage the seeds to stick together so that they don’t go flying about when you start to pulverize them. Scrape this mixture into a mortar or other appropriate grinding device (see text just above this recipe) and work it into a rough-textured paste. Because of the hulls, it won’t be as creamy as real tahini, but — taste it! — it will have a fresher and livelier flavor than the canned stuff.

Variations on a ThemeDavid Scott, in his not-that-easy-to-find middle east-

ern Vegetarian cookery† offers a chickpea dip that replaces tahini with an intense cumin-seed presence.

Make sure you dry-fry the seeds to release their flavor before pulverizing them — the difference is impressive. Here is my version of his recipe.

[serves 4]

8 ounces (1 heaping cup) chickpeas, soaked overnight and cooked as directed in hummus bi tahini recipe (issue page 5)

2 teaspoons cumin seeds

4 tablespoons richly flavored olive oil, plus a little extra

juice of 2 lemons • 2 garlic cloves, finely minced

salt and ground hot red chile to taste

to garnish: minced mint or parsley leaves to taste

to serve: fresh warm pita

• Drain the cooked chickpeas, reserving the cooking liquid. Put the cumin seeds into an ungreased skillet and heat over a medium-low flame until they are lightly browned and begin to release their scent. Watch that they don’t burn. When cool enough to handle, grind them into a powder.

• Put this, the chickpeas, the olive oil, the lemon juice, and the minced garlic into a large mortar, a blender, or the bowl of a food processor set with its steel blade. Adding the chickpea cooking liquid splash by splash, turn all this into a soft purée. Season to taste with salt and the ground chile. Then scrape it into a serving bowl, garnish with the minced mint or parsley, and drizzle over a little more olive oil. Serve with fresh pita as an appetizer.

east of Orphanides is an idiosyncratic but highly in-formative Middle Eastern cookbook, all the better for

limiting itself to the food and cooking that George Lassalle personally experienced while working in Greece, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, and Cyprus, where he eventually settled. The recipes are often introduced with a tale: cooking for workmen on the island of Aghios Nikolaos; wangling recipes from his mother-in-law’s cook; living and cooking in Cairo and Istanbul; and learning the best of Lebanese fare from the Three Wise Ones of Nicosia. His recipe for a chickpea soup from Cyprus comes with no such story. Its interest springs from the fact that it is really hummus bi tahini turned into a soup! This is an excellent way to take advantage of that delicious chickpea liquor. Just make sure you cook the beans in plenty of water.

Revithia Me Tahini[serves 4]

8 ounces (1 heaping cup) chickpeas, soaked overnight and cooked as directed in our hummus bi tahini recipe

(current issue, page 5)

juice of 2 lemons • 2 garlic cloves, finely minced

salt and black pepper to taste1/2 cup tahini

5 cups of chickpea-cooking liquid

to garnish: minced parsley leaves and 2 tablespoons richly flavored olive oil

to serve: lemon wedges

• Prepare a simple hummus bi tahini following the recipe on page 5 of the current issue, doubling the amount of lemon juice, adding 2 cloves of minced garlic as directed in the preface to the recipe, and omitting the cilantro leaf and hot chile pepper.

† Even harder to find is his the Penniless Vegetarian (1992), which is worth snapping up if you find a cheap copy in a used bookstore side-walk bin — and, given the title, that’s where you should find it.

*Sometime later, I learned from the Oxford companion to Food that to make authentic tahini you have to soak and then remove the tough outer coating of the seed, using a method much like prepar-ing black-eyed peas for akara (see last issue). Except that would be — so far as my own cooking efforts are concerned — impossibly time-consuming, given the tininess of the seeds and the hardness of the bran. No thanks.

8 ounces (1 heaping cup) chickpeas

• Pick these over, rinse them, put them in a bowl, cover generously with water, and let soak for at least 8 hours.

Before going to bed:

2 cloves garlic, chopped

1 large onion, chopped1/3 cup olive oil

1 tablespoon all-purpose flour • 1 bay leaf, broken in thirds

1 teaspoon salt and black pepper to taste

to garnish: lemon wedges

• Preheat oven to 235°F. Fill a kettle and set it to boil. When it does, lower the heat but keep it boiling.

• Drain the chickpeas, place them in a large saucepan, and cover well with fresh cold water (i.e., not from the kettle). Bring this to a boil and cook at a boil for 10 minutes.

• While the chickpeas boil, heat the olive oil in a skillet and sautée the garlic and onion until translucent. Don’t let them brown. Then sprinkle in the tablespoon of flour, stirring briskly so that it doesn’t lump. Continue cooking, stirring the while, until you have a thin, smooth, garlicky paste.

• Turn the chickpeas with their cooking liquid, the contents of the skillet, and the broken bay leaf into (by preference) an earthenware pot. Add water from the kettle so that the liquid covers the chickpeas by at least 3 inches. Then stir in the salt and plenty of black pepper. Cover with the lid (or aluminum foil if there is no lid) and put it into the stove. Cook all night.

• In the morning, set the oven to its lowest heat and leave the chickpeas in it. Serve them for either lunch or supper (the extra cooking time will only improve them). Stir every-thing up, taste for seasoning, and ladle it into bowls. Serve with lemon wedges (see below for other possibilities).

* cook’s Notes: The original recipe calls for that chopped onion, but I found it made the resulting dish too sweet and too much like baked beans (which, of course, is just what revithia fournou are) for my taste. I decided the next time to sauté the onions at the last moment and sprinkle them over the dish. Also, instead of the lemon, I garnished the potage with pieces of roasted red pepper, which added a citric note along with their own pleasing mellow flavor. The flour, naturally, serves as a thickener, producing a result that is something more than (or at least different from) plain oven-baked chickpeas — and you might translate “revithia fournou” as “baked chickpeas in their own gravy.”

Edouard de Pomiane was born in Paris in 1875, the son of Polish émigrés. One of the twentieth century’s

greatest food writers, he lectured at the Institut Pasteur and wrote a number of classic books, including cooking with Pomiane, cooking in ten minutes, and the two-volume Radio Cuisine (“Alo! Alo!”), a collection of tran-scripts from his popular radio show. the Jews of Poland: Recollections and Recipes, written in 1929, deserves a brief explanatory note. It is quite different from his other books, a cookbook that is also an ethnographic treatise — the only extensive piece of writing on Jewish cooking in Poland before it was destroyed by the German inva-sion in 1939 and the subsequent Holocaust. The clarity and range of the recipes are such that the book would be much better known were it not for its unfortunate

• Bring the reserved chickpea-cooking liquid to a boil, add-ing chicken stock, if necessary, if the amount of the liquor is less than 5 cups. When it is boiling, remove it from the heat and stir a ladleful into the hummus bi tahini. When this is incorporated, scrape it all into the pot, stirring con-stantly. Gently reheat the soup, taste for seasoning, and sprinkle with the minced parsley. Divide into soup bowls and drizzle each with a half tablespoon of the olive oil. Serve with lemon wedges on the side.

*cook’s Note. Lassalle says that some cooks stir a tablespoon of tomato purée into the soup as it reheats. I would think diced fresh cherry tomatoes would work very nicely, as well.

Revithia Fournou

the quotation from Miles Lambert-Gócs’ Greek salad* that kicks off this issue’s essay on hummus made

me curious about the bread-oven-baked chickpea dish he mentions. I was pleased to find it in one of our Greek cookbooks, Rena Salaman’s Greek Island cookery. On the isle of Sifnos, she tells us, the chickpeas are cooked in rainwater to ensure their tenderness (and obviate the need of baking soda) and the bakers traditionally cover the pot with leftover bread dough, which holds in the flavor and keeps the dish from cooking dry.† The slow cooking results in a delicious, almost molten mass of chickpeas. The islanders cook the dish in a earthenware casserole called a skepastaria, but our old bean pot does the trick just fine. The following recipe follows the original closely, but after making it, I decided to go my own way (see note).

From Rena Salaman and Linda Smith’s Greek Island Cookery (1987)

[serves 4 to 6]

* Prepare this dish the day before you plan to eat it.

In the afternoon:

sc•92 supplement | page two

* Lambert-Gócs is the author of the Wines of Greece (Faber & Faber, 1990), which is notable for both its depth of knowledge on the subject and its persistence in tracking down Greek winemakers whose products can only be purchased directly from their own bar-rels. Greek salad, described only partly in jest as a tour of Greece (both the Aegean Islands and the mainland) viewed through “the prism of taverna wine glasses,” provides a journal-entry closeup of this œnological gumshoe at work, querying taxi drivers, seek-ing out the odd local bottle on the shelves of village tavernas, and knocking on farmhouse doors. This Sam Spade comparison is, of course, a metaphor, but reality makes it almost too easy to apply. On the island of Seriphos, Lambert-Gócs writes of a hotel in the ferry port of Livadi:[Its] somewhat tatty condition added to the feeling I already had, just from walking down Livadi’s shady main drag, of being on the set of a 1940s movie starring Humphrey Bogart .... Even the hotel’s operator was perfectly suited to his part, a seedy old guy with a thin but shapeless mustache, slicked-back hair that was unruly at the fringes and sagging pants that had to be hiked up every couple of minutes if he happened to be moving about. And the more the meltemi [an Aegean version of the Provençal mistral] rustled the reeds outside, the more I thought of the old movies. I half expected a sultry young Greek Lauren Bacall to emerge from a hallway into the lobby. But all that ever actually appeared was a miscast pair of frumpy Polish room maids.

He also makes an effort to seek out local dishes — no easy thing, since tourists demand the “real” Greek stuff wherever they gather, which means moussaka on every plate and retsina in every glass. The journal entries of his travels are evocative, often charming, and sometimes affecting, and I recommend the book highly to anyone curious about back-lane Greek life. Note, however, that Lambert-Gócs is not a food writer. His description of the food he eats is often cryptic, and such recipe gathering as he does is strictly for himself.

† Sifnos is famous for both its clay-pot cookery and its cooks (it is said that Greek sailors would kill for the chance to sail on a ship with a cook from Sifnos). However, the island is also a popular place for outsiders to maintain a second home, so much so that one web-site I visited said that the island now has to import chickpeas from elsewhere, since so much of its farmland has been built over.

kimchi jar which, being squat and wide, is ideal for pack-ing in the cucumbers (and fishing them out later). The best pickling cukes (often called Kirby cucumbers) for this process are taut, dark green, and stubby. Otherwise, the only fixed rule is the proportions of the brine: one and one-half tablespoons of fine sea (or pickling) salt for every quart of water. The seasoning possibilities are nearly infinite, and can be as simple as the short list used by Jessie Eisenberg in the quote above. In the recipe that follows, I give the flavorings I usually put in — none are mandatory. You can make it easy for yourself by just using garlic cloves, dried dill leaf, and pre-mixed pickling spice.

[makes 1 batch half-sours]

1/2 teaspoon each black peppercorns, coriander seeds, hot red chile flakes, brown mustard seeds,

juniper berries, and allspice

1 tablespoon dried dill weed

1 large glass jar with a lid

enough pickling cucumbers to fill same, any remaining stem carefully snipped off

2 or 3 large garlic cloves, peeled

1 large bay leaf, broken into thirds1/2 tablespoon dried onion flakes (optional)

fine sea (or pickling) salt • filtered (if possible) water

• Put the mixed spices and seeds in a mortar or the bowl of a food processor/spice grinder and pulverize them into coarse bits.

• Wash the jar and rinse well — no need to dry it. Sprinkle in the ground spices and the dried dill weed, then pack in as many cucumbers as will fit. There must be room at the top of the jar for the brine to cover them.

• Crush the garlic cloves with the flat blade of a knife or some other appropriate instrument. Cut these in half and insert them in the crevices around the cucumbers, followed by the bits of bay leaf and optional dried onion flakes.

• Mix up enough brine to generously cover the cucumbers, at a ratio of 11/2 tablespoons of fine sea (or pickling) salt to 1 quart of water. Better to throw some away at the end than not have enough. Pour this into the pickle jar until it is nearly full. Gently shake the jar to free any air bubbles, then fill it almost to the rim. If any of the cukes float up to the surface, fill a small plastic bag (such as a ziplock sandwich type) with brine, seal it, and fit this over cucumbers to keep them submerged.

• Cover the jar loosely and set it in a cool place (a basement is ideal; we use the floor of a closet) for two days. Then screw the lid tight and refrigerate another two days before sampling them. They will continue to mature, so if you find the first taste insipid, give them more time. (On the other hand, if they smell spoiled or have turned squishy, discard them and try again.) They are best when eaten within three weeks from the time they go in the jar.

Breakfast Cereal BreadsMy success in creating a delicious oatcake from Mac-

room Oatmeal naturally led to the notion that this might revolutionize my breakfast eating — the banner headline for which might be: No More Porridge! Cake for Breakfast Every Day! I immediately went out and bought sc•92 supplement | page three

and largely unintended anti-Semitic tone. De Pomiane himself was not anti-Jewish — quite the opposite. But he came from a fervently patriotic Polish family and naively absorbed the strong undercurrent of anti-Semitism in the information that respectable and well-educated Poles provided him about their Jewish neighbors. So the book is torn by the tension between what he himself observed and what he was told to be plain fact. The result is less unpleasant (although it can be that) than very sad. Even so, the recipes are priceless.

Pickle SoupFrom Edouard de Pomiane’s The Jews of Poland (1929)

[serves 8]

4 kosher dill pickles

2 quarts beef bouillon or stock

3 eggs

• Peel the pickles and chop them finely. Put them along with the beef bouillon or stock in a soup pot and cook for 60 minutes. Strain the soup through a round sieve, pressing with the back of a spoon to work the cucumbers through, while leaving their seeds behind.

• Proceed to bind the liquid with the eggs. Break the eggs into a bowl and whisk them with a wire whisk. Gradu-ally pour the soup, while still hot, into the eggs, whisking constantly.

• If the soup is not sufficiently acidic, add a tablespoon or two of the pickling liquid from the jar of pickles.

Homemade Half-SoursSince I was ten years old I have been in the pickle business. My brother-in-law painted old whiskey barrels to age the pickles in. These days they are used as flower pots. We made three kinds of pickles — dill, sweet, and half-sour. Half-sours are unfermented pickles made daily with garlic, mustard seeds, peppercorns all put at the bottom of a jar in a salt brine to absorb the flavors of the spices for about a week. A garlic pickle has been fermented and then fresh spices added before refrigeration. It makes you pucker up. As it ages the skin turns brown through fermentation.

— Jessie Eisenberg, pickle maker, the Bronx, New York (quoted in Joan Nathan’s Jewish cooking in america)

A lthough our recipe for “Dill Pickle Soup” allows for the use of any salt-cured pickle, our own preference is to

make it with homemade ‘half-sours’ — which offer the presence of both cucumber and pickle. What do I mean? Read the quotation above. Half-sours are not, as many assume, pickles fished from the barrel before they’ve reached the mystical state of “full-sour” but a quickly cured salt-brine pickle meant to combine the crisp sweetness of a fresh cucumber with the salt-sour, spice-edged tang of a kosher dill. If you leave them in their brine too long, they’ll just become dull and soggy and inert. So it’s best to make them in small batches and eat them up. We make ours in a quart-and-a-half-size former

sc•92 supplement | page four

a bunch of hot cereals and started testing. The fact that this part of the story has been rel-egated to the supplement should suggest that the results were not nearly as spectacular as the oatcake, but they weren’t entirely shoddy, either … just not quite ready for prime time. Two cereals produced the most promising re-sults: Erewhon Organic Brown Rice Cream Hot Cereal and my old childhood buddy, Wheatena Toasted Wheat. The Erewhon cereal, essentially Cream of Brown Rice, made into a batter and baked in the large griddle, produced a lovely griddle bread with a crisp crust and a delicate flavor. (Made with regular Cream of Rice cereal, it had almost no flavor.) I liked it best when I stirred a handful of fresh raspberries into the batter. If you like Cream of Wheat or Cream of Rice for breakfast, I’m sure you’d like this bread. To give it a try yourself, just follow the oatcake directions, substituting this cereal for the Macroom. The Wheatena bread was something else. Since the cereal is made of toasted whole-grain wheat and wheat bran, turning it into a bread was like reinventing the bran muffin — or at least something very coarse-grained and chewy. In truth, it was more like a bran muffin than most versions of the real thing, which tend to be “bran-flavored” rather than densely grainy. If you favor a breakfast loaded with complex carbohydrates, and like the idea of a chewy breakfast bread with an intriguing sweet-sour savor, this might become a favorite.

Wheatena Skillet BreadBecause of its particulate nature, this bread works better when made in a 9-inch skillet; baked in the griddle, pieces tended to break in half when lifted. The raw sugar was added not to make the bread more like a muffin but to heighten the natural sweetness of the cereal. Whole-wheat cereals can all too easily give the impression that you’re eating sawdust; this addition keeps that well at bay. So, of course, does the dried fruit. I had some dried golden plums in the cupboard, so used them, but diced dried apricots would be very tasty, as well as the traditional raisins.

[makes a skillet bread breakfast for 2]1/2 tablespoon peanut or other cooking oil

4 ounces (2/3 cup) Wheatena cereal1/4 cup diced dried fruit (apricots, prunes, raisins)

scant 1 teaspoon each baking soda and cream of tartar

scant 1/2 teaspoon fine sea salt

1 egg • 3/4 cup (6 ounces) filmjölk or buttermilk

1 tablespoon organic raw sugar (Turbinado by preference)

• Preheat the oven to 425°F. When it is ready, pour the cooking oil into a 9-inch skillet and set this in the hot oven for 5 minutes.

• Meanwhile, put the Wheatena and chopped dried fruit into a mixing bowl and sift in the baking soda, cream of tartar, and salt. Break the egg into a second, smaller bowl. Whisk in the filmjölk or buttermilk, then the raw sugar, blending everything well.

• After the 5 minutes, remove the skillet from the oven, tip-ping it gently so that the oil covers its entire surface. Quickly turn the liquid ingredients into the dry ones, whisking them just enough to blend. Because of the cereal’s particulate nature, this takes no time at all. Then immediately turn the batter into the skillet, using a flexible spatula to clean out the bowl.

• Put the skillet back in the oven and bake for 18 minutes. The surface of the skillet bread should spring back when lightly pressed with a finger. Flip it onto a cutting board, so that the bottom, crusty side faces up. Cut it into wedges and serve with loads of butter.

. . . a note on Bob’s Red Mill OatmealBecause of space constraints, I had room enough only

to diss the Cook’s Illustrated tasting panel’s oatmeal ratings for its low ranking of McCann’s Steel-Cut Irish Oatmeal — see the footnote on page 3 of the current issue. This isn’t to say, however, that I refused to even try their highest rated brand, Bob’s Red Mill Organic Steel-Cut Oats. What if — for once — the panel was right? Didn’t honor demand that I pulp the new issue of SC and retire to a monastery? Fortunately, they were true to form and opted, as usual, for Ms. Congeniality. I prepared the oatmeal in my usual way, substi-tuting milk for two-thirds of the water and adding a bit more salt than called for in the package cooking direc-tions. The resulting oatmeal was pleasingly chewy, and the flavor, though faint, was toasty and clean. But it wasn’t even remotely interesting — either in depth of taste or in the complex play of flavor notes. In sum: the Abhayagiri Buddhist Monastery will have to wait a bit longer for my company.

Issue BibliographyCowan, Cathal, and Regina Sexton. Ireland’s Traditional Foods. Dublin:

Teagase, 1997.Davidson, Alan. The Oxford Companion to Food. Oxford UK: Oxford

University, 1999.de Pomiane, Edouard. The Jews of Poland: Recollections and

Recipes. Garden Grove CA: Pholiota, 1985. A translation by Jose-phine Baker of Cuisine Juive: Ghettos Modernes. Paris: à Albin Michel,1929.

Gur, Janna. The Book of New Israeli Food. New York: Schocken, 2007.Kremezi, Aglaia. The Food of the Greek Islands. Boston: Houghton Mif-

flin, 2000.Lambert-Gócs, Miles. Greek Salad: A Dionysian Travelogue. Williams-

burg VA: Ambeli, 2004.Lassalle, George. East of Orphanides. London: Kyle Cathie, 1991.Nathan, Joan. Jewish Cooking In America. New York: Knopf, 1994. Roden, Claudia. Arabesque: A Taste of Morocco, Turkey, & Lebanon.

New York: Knopf, 2006.— . The New Book of Middle Eastern Food. New York: Knopf, 2000.Salaman, Rena, and Linda Smith. Greek Island Cookery. London:

Ebury, 1987.Scott, David. Middle Eastern Vegetarian Cooking. London: Rider, 1981.Strybel, Robert and Maria. Polish Heritage Cookery. New York: Hip-

pocrene, 1997 (revised edition). Thorne, John, and Matt Lewis Thorne. Serious Pig: An American Cook

In Search of His Roots. New York: North Point, 1996.