Sunchoke Soup with Speck and Aji Peppers

Food Network’s Chopped presents competing chefs with baskets of challenging ingredients and gives them a short time to invent and prepare an appetizer, an entre, or a dessert that features these ingredients. Recent episodes have presented contestants with everything from goat brains to durian, the Southeast Asian fruit delicacy with such a strong smell that it is typically banned from hotel rooms or public transportation. (I have tried durian twice, and I can attest to both its terrible odor and its really strange flavor - it combines notes of a sweet, creamy custard with strong onion overtones.  Probably one of the world's ultimate “acquired tastes.”)  One of the less challenging but still quite interesting ingredients that featured recently was speck, which the Chopped judges described as similar to a smoked pancetta. My wife and I learned about speck when we lived in Switzerland, where we frequently used it instead of bacon. It is much less common in the U.S., but it is available: to prepare the recipe presented below, we used La Quceria Speck Americano, available at our local Whole Foods Market. Not as heavily smoked as the typical Italian speck, it was still quite good and worked well in the dish. Alternatively, other, more traditional brands can be purchased on-line, and they should work nicely, too (see Favorite Goodies from the Noodle Doodler for a couple of examples).

The sunchoke – or Jerusalem artichoke – is the root of a plant that belongs to the sunflower family. According to Alan Davidson’s The Penguin Companion to Food, the name derives from girasole, the Italian word for the sunflower. The name “Jerusalem artichoke” was the combined result of mispronunciation of girasole with a note in 1603 by the explorer Samuel de Champlain who encountered it in Canada and described its taste as “like an artichoke.” Since the plant has no real connection with either Jerusalem or artichokes, marketing considerations subsequently led to the name “sunchoke.” Whatever you choose to call it, this root vegetable is available all year, but according to the entry for it in Judy Gorman's Vegetable Cookbook, the peak season is from October through April. Smaller and sweeter than potatoes, they pair especially well with black pepper, lemon juice, and sea salt, according to my favorite source of such information, The Flavor Bible: The Essential Guide to Culinary Creativity, Based on the Wisdom of America's Most Imaginative Chefs by Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg, who also recommend pairing with bacon, cumin and potatoes. The recipe given below for sunchoke soup uses most of these ingredients, with some minor substitutions (e.g., lime juice instead of lemon juice). It is adapted from one in Judy Gorman’s book (“Jerusalem artichoke soup” on page 172), with speck substituted for baked ham, and fresh Peruvian aji peppers added to give it a bit of a kick.

I used the aji peppers because they were featured during a limited-duration “pepper event” at our local Whole Foods Market. According to Barbara Karoff’s South American Cooking: Foods and Feasts from the New World, the term “aji” refers generically to all Andean peppers, but in Peru, it refers to the mirasol pepper, which she describes as “fiery hot,” noting that – at least in 1989 when her book was published – these peppers are rarely available in the U.S. Tasting a slice of one raw, I found it similar to a raw jalapeno – slightly hotter, but nothing like the screaming heat of a habanero. Karoff recommends the hontaka as a reasonable substitute as they are often available in Latin or Asian markets, but jalapenos are probably an easier substitution. If you like hot food, the nice thing about this soup is that, like a really good wine, the balance of flavors changes during the course of each taste: here, you first taste the spinach, then the other ingredients come into play, and finally the heat from the chili kicks in at the end. We found that it went especially well with Olde Burnside Brewing Company’s Ten Penny Ale.

Sunchoke Soup with Speck and Aji Peppers

Ingredients:

6 cups chicken broth
1 pound sunchokes, peeled and quartered
1 medium russet potato, peeled and quartered
1 3 oz. package speck, cut into small pieces
2 tablespoons lime juice
1/8 teaspoon ground cumin
5 oz fresh baby spinach
3 fresh aji peppers (or substitute 1 large jalapeno)
Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste
½ cup whipping cream

Directions:

1. Chop the peppers into thin rings. Combine the peppers, chicken broth, sunchokes, potatoes, and speck in a large saucepan. Cover and cook on low heat until vegetables are tender, about 20 minutes.
2. Transfer the mixture to a food processor and blend until smooth. Return to the saucepan and stir in the lime juice and cumin.
3. Chiffonade the baby spinach, add to the saucepan long enough to wilt, about five minutes. Season with salt and pepper, stir in the cream, and heat gently about five minutes longer. Ladle the soup into bowls and serve.

Ukrainian Tractors, Strawberries, and Glue

Several years ago, in a bookstore in Finland, I came across Marina Lewycka’s novel, A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, which I devoured and absolutely loved. And it's clear that I wasn’t alone in my enthusiasm: according to the information on the jacket of one of her later novels, it was translated into 30 languages, sold more than 750,000 copies, and was nominated for both the Man Booker Prize and the Orange Prize for Fiction. The novel is basically the story of two long-feuding sisters who come together to deal with a family crisis precipitated by their aging father. The first paragraph of the novel sets the scene and gives a preliminary taste of Lewycka’s writing style:

“Two years after my mother died, my father fell in love with a glamorous blonde Ukrainian divorcee. He was eighty-four and she was thirty-six. She exploded into our lives like a fluffy pink grenade, churning up the murky water, bringing to the surface a sludge of sloughed-off memories, giving the family ghosts a kick up the backside.”

The central character, Nadezhda, learns about this by phone. Two pages into the phone call from her father, the following snatch of interior monologue summarizes her reaction succinctly:

“Did I hear that right? She sits on my father’s lap and he fondles her superior Botticellian breasts?”

Nadezhda is less than convinced by her father’s arguments that after he marries Valentina, the Botticellian love of his life, they will have wonderful evenings together, discussing art, literature and philosophy. (“He has already solicited her views on Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, by the way, and she agrees with him in all respects.”) Ultimately, Nadezhda is reunited by the Valentina crisis with her sister Vera, with whom she has not spoken since their mother’s funeral. Lewycka has a marvelous way with descriptive little exchanges that paint vivid pictures of her characters. For example, here is Nadezhda's memory of meeting her sister just after the funeral:

“… Vera looks me up and down critically.



‘Yes, the peasant look. I see.’



I am forty-seven years old and a university lecturer, but my sister’s voice reduces me instantly to a bogey-nosed four-year-old.



‘Nothing wrong with peasants. Mother was a peasant,’ four-year-old retorts.



‘Quite,’ says Big Sister. She lights a cigarette. The smoke curls upwards in elegant spirals.”

One of the things that Lewycka does especially well is to construct hilarious dialog involving fractured English by non-native speakers. Don’t get me wrong: from my own struggles with other languages, I am acutely aware how much better some of Lewycka’s fractured English dialogs are than most of my own attempts to communicate in anything other than English. To construct dialogs like she does, Lewycka has to have both an excellent command of English and an appreciation of how non-native speakers struggle to be understood. For example, after Nadezhda’s father marries Valentine, she wants an elegant car. He is only able to afford one that looks good in his new wife’s eyes but barely runs at all.  Naturally, it fails at an inopportune moment, leading to this exchange:

“Valentina turns on my father.



‘You no good man. You plenty-money meanie. Promise money. Money sit in bank. Promise car. Crap car.”

This style of writing is similar to skaz, defined by Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia as, “a term in Russian prosody designating the recreation by a narrator of indigenous oral speech in cadence, rhythm, and diction.” The entry goes on to list Nikolay Gogol, Aleksey Remizov, Mikhail Zoshchenko, and Nikolay Leskov as masters of the technique. In the preface of his English translation of Zoshchenko’s delightful collection, The Galosh, Jeremy Hicks describes skaz as “the use of an unsophisticated but highly colourful language put into the mouths of characters who themselves typically tell the story.” That seems like a fairly accurate description of some of the funniest bits of dialog in Lewycka’s book. In fact, it reminds me of some of the dialog in the 2005 movie, Everything Is Illuminated, based on the 2002 novel of the same name by Jonathan Safran Foer. One of my favorite parts of the movie is the description of the “seeing-eye bitch Sammy Davis Junior, Junior,” the replacement for an earlier, departed dog named Sammy Davis Junior.  As is the case in Everything Is Illuminated, the humor in Lewycka's book provides an entertaining conduit for an extremely serious basic story: in Everything Is Illuminated, this story is about a young Jewish man's search for the woman who saved his grandfather from extermination in the Ukraine during World War II, while Lewycka's novel shows how the turmoils of war, the events leading up to it, and its aftermath can affect the lives of two siblings so differently that they effectively grow up in separate worlds.



Lewycka has other novels, which I look forward to reading. One – Strawberry Fields – was given to me as a gift, and I have just started it.  I haven’t read enough yet to have a clear picture of what this one is about, but I can already tell it is going to be another hilarious read encapsulating a serious, deeply thought-provking basic story. In the first chapter, one of the characters – a woman from Kiev named Irina – arrives in England, where she is met by Vulk:

“He was the type Mother would describe as a person of minimum culture, wearing a horrible black fake-leather jacket, like a comic-strip gangster – what a koshmar! – it creaked as he walked. All he needed was a gun.”

Immediately, Vulk relieves Irina of her passport and Seasonal Agriculture Worker papers, saying:

“I keep for you. Is many bed people in England. Can stealing from you.”

Vulk drives Irina to where she will be working, and she is hungry:

“He had some potato chips wrapped in a paper bundle on the passenger seat beside him, and every now and then he would plunge his left fist in, grab a handful of chips, and cram them into his mouth. Grab. Cram. Chomp. Grab. Cram. Chomp. Not very refined. The chips smelled fantastic, though.”

After I finish Strawberry Fields, I plan to read Lewycka’s 2010 novel, We are all made of glue, at least in part for the same reason I picked up A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian in the first place: with a title so intriguing, how could you not read it?

Dede Wilson’s Terrific Little Poetry Handbook

NOTE: since this blog is about both food and literature, it is important to be clear which Dede Wilson is being discussed here: the author of the little book featured in this post is a North Carolina poet, and NOT the Dede Wilson from Amherst, Massachusetts, who is – among many other things – Contributing Editor to Bon Appetit magazine and the author of the food blog, For the Love of Food .



I discovered Dede Wilson's poetry collection, One Nightstand (published in 2001 and available from the publisher, Main Street Rag) at one of the North Carolina Writer's Network (NCWN) conferences several years ago.  This delightful little book consists of 36 poems followed by a 17 page poetry class, all wrapped up into an incredibly succinct poetry handbook. In fact, this is one of those “desert island books,” the kind you would take along if you could only take one suitcase full of books: there would be others in the bag as well, of course, but it would be a foolish act bordering on the criminal not to take this one.



I have always liked Lewis Turco’s handbook, The New Book of Forms (see the Poetry and Prose section of Favorite Goodies from the Noodle Doodler at the end of this post), which lists a lot more forms than One Nightstand does, and it discusses some of them in much greater detail. For example, Wilson’s description of the sestina is two paragraphs occupying less than half a page, while Turco’s description is just over four pages and includes diagrams to help illustrate how this complicated poetic form is constructed. On the other hand, the great thing about Dede Wilson’s collection is that she illustrates each of the forms she discusses with one or more of her own poems.  She gives a brief but surprisingly detailed discussion of the form chosen for each of her poems in the section at the back of the book, with a workable definition of the form, typically some comments on its history, and definitions (or pointers to definitions, included nearby) of important related terms. For example, to understand blank verse – most commonly consisting of lines of unrhymed iambic pentameter – it is important to understand what iambic pentameter is. Wilson gives a one page summary of blank verse, distinguishing it from free verse, while on the facing page, she defines both iambs and pentameter. To complete the picture, she also gives – in three pages – a historical overview of free verse covering everything from contemporary poets espousing or rejecting it to some degree or other, to Walt Whitman’s publication of Leaves of Grass in 1885 and back again.  (According to the Benet Reader's Encyclopedia entry on Whitman, after Leaves of Grass became popular, Whitman was dismissed from his government position for having written an immoral book.) While most of Wilson’s poems are done in specific forms, she does include three free verse examples of her own (perhaps “two and a half” would be a better description: her poem “Undressing Billy Collins” is described as “free verse ending in a couplet”).



The forms that Wilson’s book covers range from extremely well known ones like the sonnet, the haiku, and even the limerick, to somewhat less well known examples like the triolet and the ghazal.  She even includes two forms that you won't find in Turco's compendium: the minute and the quatern. The minute is a 60 syllable form invented by the American poet Verna Lee Linxwiler Hinegardner, who was poet laureate of the state of Arkansas until she was de-throned in 2003 (apparently, prior to Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee’s appointing Hinegardner’s successor, it had been traditional for the state’s poet laureate position to be a lifetime appointment. For a more complete discussion, see the website HinegardnerLink). This interesting poetic form consists of three stanzas, each four lines long with syllable counts 8, 4, 4, and 4, and a fixed rhyme scheme (aabb ccdd eeff). Wilson credits Cathy Smith Bowers – who has just been named poet laureate of North Carolina – with bringing “this virtually unknown form into focus” with the publication of her collection, The Book of Minutes consisting entirely of poems in this form (it is available from Amazon: see the Poetry and Poetics section of Favorite Goodies from the Noodle Doodler at the bottom of this page).



The quatern is another interesting poetic form, and Wilson’s book was my introduction to it, an introduction that was extremely beneficial, as I will explain presently. Like the much better known villanelle and pantoum forms – both defined and illustrated in Wilson’s book – the quatern is based on repeated lines and a fixed rhyme scheme. Specifically, the quatern consists of four, four-line stanzas where the first line of the first stanza becomes the second line of the second stanza, the third of the third, and finally concludes the poem as the last line of the last stanza. The rhyme scheme for the first and third stanzas is abab, while that for the second and fourth stanzas is baba. The form was invented by Vivian Yeiser Laramore, the poet laureate of Florida from 1931 to 1975.  My own particular fondness for the quatern form stems from the fact that it resulted in one of the few poems I have so far managed to get published. This one appeared in the 2009 issue of Alehouse Press:

Rhapsody in People

Purple people-eaters eating

people with purple potatoes

at the annual business meeting.

First course: elbows and tomatoes,

followed next by toes alfredo.

Purple people-eaters eating

are fussy creatures, dontchankow?

Special main course of the evening:

a secret people seasoning

on cattlemen from Loredo,

purple people-eaters eating

popular cowboy tornedos,

served in little Winnebegos

made for convenient re-heating

later in the busy week ahead, those

purple people-eaters eating.

Niki Segnit’s Flavour Thesaurus

A few months ago, two of our British friends sent us a copy of The Flavour Thesaurus by Niki Segnit (thanks, Steve and Rebecca). Similar in some ways to Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg’s The Flavor Bible, the subtitle of Segnit’s book gives a good, concise description: pairings, recipes and ideas for the creative cook. Both of these books address the fundamental question of “which ingredients go well together?,” but the styles and approaches of the two books are quite different. Specifically, the food matching section of The Flavor Bible is organized alphabetically by ingredient, with each section listing good, great, and superb pairings with that ingredient, occasionally also giving pairings to avoid. While Page and Dornenburg give frequent quotes from eminent chefs about favorite pairings, the book doesn’t really give recipes. In contrast, The Flavour Thesaurus organizes ingredients into groups, discusses specific pairings and frequently includes brief recipes based on those pairings. In both cases, the authors’ intent is to encourage culinary creativity rather than a “cooking by the numbers”-type slavish adherence to fixed recipes.

The Flavour Thesaurus characterizes 99 ingredients, putting them together into 16 flavor groupings, organized along the same lines as a color wheel (e.g., orange lies between red and yellow, green lies between blue and yellow, etc.). These flavor groupings have descriptive names much like the adjectives often applied to wines, names like “Floral Fruity,” “Earthy,” or “Brine and Salt.” Some of the ingredients listed in these groupings seem very natural, but others were quite surprising, at least to me. For example, the “Floral and Fruity” group included entries like raspberry, rose, and blueberry that seem "fruity and floral," but I was not expecting to see coriander seed or white chocolate included in this group. Nevertheless, it is clear that a great deal of thought went into these assignments, which are sometimes based on a chemical characterization of dominant flavor components. For example, cabbage is assigned to the “sulphurous” group in part because “dimethyl sulphide (DMS) is an important component in the flavour of cabbage.” Further, this observation forms the rationale for pairing cabbage with seafood, which is also noted to contain DMS.


The pairings included in The Flavour Thesaurus are often quirky little vignettes, like the entry for cabbage and garlic on page 119:

“If, as Mark Twain has it in Pudd’nhead Wilson, ‘cauliflower is nothing but a cabbage with a college education,’ cavolo nero is a cabbage with a holiday home in Tuscany.”

This is as much of a definition as Niki Segnit gives for cavolo nero, which appears to be a very desirable species of cabbage (The Food Lover’s Companion, 3rd edition, by Sharon Tyler Herbst, defines “cavolo” as “Italian for ‘cabbage’.”). Segnit does give a recipe for bruschetta using cavolo nero, concluding with the advice that “kale will do fine if you can’t get the fancy stuff.”


Another interesting commentary appears in Segnit’s discussion of the pairing of capers with soft cheese, in the “mustardy” flavor grouping, where she recommends using French nonpareil capers, if possible. She goes on to say (page 103):

“They’re the really small ones that look like green peppercorns, and are highly regarded for their finer, radishy, oniony flavour. Spread the mix on crackers or rye bread and brace yourself for the little shocks of caper in each bite. The culinary equivalent of walking barefoot along a stony beach.”

In order to keep the book to a manageable length, it wasn’t possible to include everything, and some of the omissions are worth noting. For example, although “brine and salt” appears as one of the 16 flavor groupings, the ingredient “salt” does not appear in the book. Neither do black pepper or vinegar, or “the staple carbohydrates” aside from potatoes (e.g., neither rice nor pasta appear). These omissions stand in marked contrast to Page and Dornenburg’s Flavor Bible, which includes 10 sub-entries for different kinds of salt (ranging from “salt, fleur de sel” to “salt, vanilla”), along with a general entry on “saltiness,” 16 entries for various types of vinegar, four entries for different types of rice, and just over three pages devoted to pasta.



Overall, like Page and Dornenburg’s Flavor Bible, Niki Segnit’s Flavour Thesaurus is a really fascinating read, much like a visit to someplace new, with unexpected marvels tucked away everywhere you look. Although they are essentially devoted to the same subject – that of creative flavor pairings – the styles of these two books are quite different, and both are well worth reading. A word of advice about The Flavour Thesaurus, however: as the spelling of the title suggests, the book is written for a British audience, so some terms may leave American readers confused. As a specific example, in the “suphurous” section, between the entries for “cabbage” and “cauliflower” is a one-page entry for “swede.” It was clear from the discussion that the term referred to some sort of root vegetable, but neither my wife nor I had ever heard of it before. Fortunately, the Food Lover’s Companion had an entry that clarified things: “see rutabaga.”

The Poisonous Mushroom Was Delicious

Like my wife, I first experienced mushrooms as little round, rubbery things that came in cans. Not surprisingly, neither one of us liked them very much, but she changed her mind about them after friends introduced her to the joys of hunting morels in the woods of Iowa. As I stumbled through childhood, I also came across mushrooms growing in the woods: appearing in all different shapes and sizes and colors, they were intriguing as hell, but you would never think of eating them. After all, mushrooms that you ate came in cans from the grocery store: they might taste bad and their horrible texture might make your skin crawl, but they wouldn’t really hurt you. The things that grew in the yard or in the woods or on trees were toadstools and they would kill you deader than a doornail. Everybody knew that.


As I grew up, mushrooms got a lot better, partly due to my maturing taste buds I suppose, but also because they began to appear in supermarkets un-canned. And they began to appear in different shapes and sizes, a little like what you would see in the woods, only not nearly as interesting. Or as colorful: no bright oranges with white polka dots or anything like that. Those were still toadstools, would still kill you deader than a doornail, and everybody still knew that.

Some years later, deeply immersed in adulthood and professional responsibilities, a Polish colleague invited me to dinner at his house. He was a charming host and he and his wife had prepared a delicious dinner that included sautéed mushrooms. I commented on how good everything was – especially the mushrooms – and his wife thanked me for the compliment but assured me that they came from the supermarket. It seems that my colleague had grown up collecting mushrooms in the woods of Poland and, like my wife and her morel-gathering friends, knew what he was doing. Nevertheless, at a previous dinner party, when the mushrooms had not come from the supermarket (he had collected them from the woods near his house), the evening ended abruptly when he happened to mention the fact. Everyone stopped eating and went home, not expecting to survive the night. Toadstools, after all.

Several years after that, my wife and I had the opportunity to live in Switzerland. For just over four years, we struggled continuously with learning enough German to get around, along with all of the other local bits of knowledge we needed on a daily basis. Things like money (“Wait, is this coin 10 Rappen or 50?”), metric units (my wife once stunned a clerk in a shop by asking for “ein hundert Kilogramm Kaese, bitte,” wanting 100 grams of cheese – about a quarter of a pound – but requesting just over 250 pounds instead), and even time (“It says the train leaves at 14:27. What time is that, really?”). Still, it was a fabulous experience that changed our lives forever.

While we lived in Switzerland, I worked in Zurich and our apartment was in Seebach, at the end of one of the tram lines. An intermediate stop between Seebach and Zurich was Oerlikon, which had a market every Saturday morning that became one of our favorite activities. Gradually, we learned what we liked – and what to ask for – in specialties ranging from mountain cheeses (“Bergkaese”) to sweet cider (“Sussmost”). One of the most interesting stands in the market was the one belonging to the mushroom guy, who had a wider variety of fresh mushrooms than either one of us had ever seen before. Good as they looked, though, we really didn’t know what to do with them, so for a long time we didn’t try any. Then one day the Oerlikon market came up in conversation with a friend, who mentioned that he particularly liked the mushroom guy. He would buy “ein hundert Gramm, gemischt” – about a quarter of a pound of assorted mushrooms – and use them to make an omelet. After that, we became regular customers.

Sometimes, the mushroom guy would have really unusual species that we would try on their own. Over time, we tried small puff-balls, hen-of-the-woods, and something more exotic that looked vaguely brain-like. (He drew us a labeled picture, which I still have: the German name was Krause Glucke, which actually sounds more appealing than its English designation, which is “cauliflower fungus.” As Mark Twain said of Wagner’s music, though, it was better than it sounded.) The most unusual mushroom we ever tried from his stand was one called a Riesenbovist, known in English as the giant puffball. A large white sphere, bigger than a basketball, he sold it in slices, each about an inch thick. We bought one, breaded and fried it, and shared it for dinner.

Our departure from Switzerland was something of an ordeal. My wife was scheduled to fly back to the U.S. on Swissair, our favorite airline, about a week before I was to go to Finland for a year as a visiting professor. We had always loved flying Swissair because they treated you so well, but shortly before her scheduled departure, Swissair plunged into a financial abyss that ended in their bankruptcy fairly soon afterwards. It began with an airport holding a Swissair plane for nonpayment of fees. Almost immediately, the airline grounded its fleet to prevent all of their planes from being seized. For a few days, nobody flew anywhere on Swissair. Eventually, flights resumed, but the schedule was highly erratic, with departures regularly cancelled at the last minute. We spent a week in limbo, staying with friends, until my wife was finally able to get on a plane to return to the U.S., the same day I left for Finland.

The day I left Finland to come home for Christmas, the temperature was ten degrees below zero and the sun made its dusky, twilight appearance about 10:30 in the morning and was completely gone again by 2:30 in the afternoon. The following June, my wife came to visit me and we had dinner with some Finnish friends we had known from Zurich. Walking around Helsinki afterwards, we were trying to guess the time: we were tired and it felt late, but it was still bright daylight. Our friends looked at the sky and guessed the time fairly accurately: it was a few minutes before midnight. In the morning, it was bright daylight again by 3:00.

The extreme seasonal variation in Finland seems to profoundly influence the foods that grow there. I have never seen root vegetables as large as those sold at the farm stands in Finland: carrots three feet long and about four inches in diameter at the top, and turnips half again that big. One of my favorite food discoveries from the far north was cloudberries, a small orange berry used to make desserts, jams, and a unique liqueur. In a way, cloudberries in Finland and other Nordic countries are like truffles in France and Italy: not everyone knows where to find them, and those who do, don’t say. One of the great ways to enjoy them is in cloudberry jam, which is frequently available in the U.S. at Ikea stores. Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to find the soft Finnish cheese that goes so well with cloudberry jam, making a spectacular breakfast, so I make a point of bringing that back with me whenever I return to Finland for a visit.

One of my other favorite things during my year in Finland was an indoor market with stands carrying everything from the spiciest Italian sausage I have ever tasted to smoked reindeer and moose steaks. Once I discovered the market, I would go every Saturday morning and adapt my meal plans for the week as I shopped. It was there that I had the ultimate mushroom experience. My favorite vegetable stand had a collection of large, strange-looking, gnarly things unlike any mushrooms I had ever seen before. Naturally, I had to try one, but the woman who ran the stand looked concerned and was reluctant to sell it to me. She insisted that I wait for one of the other women with better English, who explained to me that there was a special procedure for cooking this mushroom. It was delicious, she assured me, but first I must boil it in a full pot of water, dump all of the water out, boil it a second time in another full pot of water – clean water, she emphasized, not the water I had used before – dump that second pan of water out, rinse off the mushroom in cold water, and then cook it in whatever way I wanted. She repeated these instructions twice and insisted that I repeat them back to her before she would sell me the mushroom.

I followed her instructions when I prepared it for dinner that night, and it was indeed delicious. I didn’t discover until several years later, though, just what it was I had eaten. Growing up, I had seen pictures of morels, the deliciously wrinkly mushrooms my wife and her friends had gathered in the woods, and as an adult I had come to relish them as an occasional expensive treat. Also, I had heard that one of the good things about morels was that their appearance was so distinctive they were unlikely to be confused with other, poisonous mushrooms. In contrast, with more ordinary-looking white mushrooms, for example, you had to be much more careful since they could be confused with things like the Death Angel, so named for good reason. There is, however, a lethally toxic mushroom called the false morel (Gyromitra esculenta) that does look something like the morel. If you boil this mushroom twice, however, discarding the water and rinsing it, that process removes the poison and renders it safe to eat. The only place in the world where they sell them and people actually do eat them is Finland, where the seller is obligated to remind you about boiling them twice in fresh water before you put them in your mouth.

All I can think about now is what my parents and teachers drilled into my head growing up: don’t eat those things you find growing in the woods. They’re toadstools and they will kill you, deader than a doornail. Everybody knows that.

Better Than It Sounds

In what has to be one of the best “left-handed compliments” in history, Mark Twain once described Wagner’s music as “better than it sounds.” The dish I describe here – pasta with vodka sauce and smoked salmon – may fall into the same category. I lived in Finland for about a year and one of the hotel restaurants in Tampere served a dish very much like the one given below, and I thought it was delicious. But then, I also thought the poisonous mushroom I had there was delicious, too (more about that next time). When I suggested the smoked salmon vodka sauce to my wife, she thought it sounded awful, so I prepared it one night when she was out. Collecting the ingredients for it generated a lot of questioning looks, so it seems clear that the combination is not something everybody would think of. Personally, I thought it was great when I had it in Finland, and I think the following recipe is not a bad approximation of the Finnish version, if I do say so myself.




Ingredients:



• ½ lb. smoked salmon, skin removed

• 1 largish cipollini onion, diced

• 4 cloves garlic, chopped

• 1 Tbs. capers

• 1 26 oz. jar of vodka pasta sauce

• 1 lb. fresh linguine



Directions:



1. Saute onion and garlic in olive oil over medium heat until the onions are translucent.

2. Flake smoked salmon into small pieces and stir into the garlic and onion mixture. Add the capers and sauté long enough to heat through.

3. Add the vodka sauce, reduce heat, and simmer while preparing the pasta.

4. Bring salted water to a boil, add the pasta, and cook until done (al dente), about three minutes.

5. Serve pasta on a plate and top with the smoked salmon vodka sauce.



The first time I prepared this, I had it with a Rosenblum Cellars 2008 Viognier, recommended by my favorite local wine store. As an alternative, they also recommended serving it with a nice Scotch whiskey, consistent with the recommendation of “smoked fish” with Scotch given by Andrew Dornenburg and Karen Page in What to Drink with What You Eat. The second time I had the dish, I tried it with a 10 year old Wolfe’s Glen single grain Highland Scotch, and I must say it was very good. For me, though, good as it is, a little Scotch goes a long way, so on the whole I would have to say I prefer it with the wine.

Pairing Violet: Withstanding M.F.K. Fisher's "Perfumed Assault of the Blossoms"

A few weeks ago, I came across Crème de Violette, an Austrian violet-flavored liqueur.  Intrigued, I just had to try it and, indeed, it tasted as interesting as it sounded.  The liquid has a beautiful violet color and the first sip is deliciously floral, quite distinctive and unique.  After about two more sips, however, the adjective “assertive” began springing to mind: interesting as the flavor is, it needs to be paired with something.  But what?

Unfortunately, my two favorite flavor pairing books are silent on the subject of violet: neither The Flavor Bible nor What to Drink with What You Eat, both by Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg, have anything to say about violet. They aren’t silent on floral flavors overall, just violets: they list lavender, rose, and zucchini blossoms, but no violet. One of my other favorite books, The Food Lover’s Companion, (3rd edition, by Sharon Tyler Herbst), has the following to say: “violets, crystallized: see crystallized flowers.” That entry refers you to one on “candied fruit, candied flowers,” which notes that “candied flowers are generally reserved for decorating desserts.”

Alan Davidson’s The Penguin Companion to Food has a bit more to say, but even here, the results are not promising: he has two entries for “violet,” the first (with a drawing) defines it as “the French name for a sort of edible sea creature which does not have a current English name, although it may sometimes be referred to as a `sea squirt’.” His second entry gives a brief discussion of the flower, noting that, “In candied form they make good decorations for cakes, trifles, etc.” He does refer to M.F.K. Fisher’s “E for Exquisite” entry in her book, An Alphabet for Gourmets, where she describes what she once felt was the most exquisite dish she had ever heard of as “a satiny white endive with large heavily scented Parma violets scattered through it.” She goes on to note that, “It is a misfortune perhaps that not many months ago the salad was set before me in a bowl.” The salad disappointed her on a number of levels, but one particular failing was that “the dressing was light to the point of being innocuous, and it was unable to stand up under the perfumed assault of the blossoms.” Indeed, that is the challenge: the violet flavor is so assertive that it is important it be paired with another flavor that is strong enough to withstand the “perfumed assault of the blossoms.”

Tom Stobart’s book, Herbs Spices and Flavorings, has a one-paragraph entry on violets that mentions their use in flavoring “creams, ices and liqueurs,” notes their use in crystallized flower decorations, and concludes by describing a salad that sounds similar to M.F.K. Fisher's, made with endive, celery, parsley, and olives. The one-page entry on “violets, sweet” in Carol Ann Rinzler’s Herbs, Spices, and Condiments also notes their use in salads and as candied flowers for decoration. Extensive rummaging through my collection of obscure cookbooks didn’t yield much more. Probably the most interesting find was in the chapter “Jellies, Marmalades, Preserves” from The Picayune Creole Cook Book (Dover Books, 2nd edition, 1971, reprint of the original 1901 edition), which gives a recipe for violet conserve, made from 2 ounces of freshly gathered violet petals and 1 ½ pounds of sugar.

After much thought, the one pairing that did come to mind was the result of my trying, many years ago, some of the concoctions described in the 1971 book Howard Johnson’s Presents Old Time Ice Cream Soda Fountain Recipes, Or, How to Make a Soda Fountain Pay, published naturally enough, by the Howard Johnson’s restaurant chain. One of the recipes that turned out to be delicious was the “violet lime rickey,” based on violet extract and fresh limes. That memory led me to try Crème de Violette with a key-lime pie I bought at Whole Foods. Alternating bites of the pie with sips of the liqueur made a fabulous dessert, just the sort of experience I had hoped for when I bought the liqueur.

A quick Internet search turned up a couple of other possibilities. While I haven’t tried it yet, the following website gives what sounds like a marvelous recipe for “violet flavor panna cotta:”

http://totchie.blogspot.com/2010/05/violet-flavor-panna-cotta.html


The other idea was to pair my violet liqueur with chocolate, which I tried in two different ways. The first was to serve it with a really good chocolate ice cream from Four Seas on Cape Cod, in Centerville, Massachusetts. Their ice cream is rich and creamy, with plenty of flavor to withstand the “perfumed assault of the blossoms.” The second variation was based on a suggestion from one of the “chocolate and coffee people” at Whole Foods. I was looking over their assortment of flavored chocolate bars, struggling to select something with a flavor assertive enough to withstand but not so assertive as to cause serious warfare on my tastebuds, and my inner struggle was obvious enough that a woman stopped what she was doing to ask if I needed assistance. When I explained what I was after, she had two suggestions, both varieties of Taza Chocolate Mexicano: one supplemented with vanilla and the other with cinnamon. She thought the cinnamon version would probably stand up better to the violet and she was right: the vanilla version was good, but the hint of vanilla pretty well disappeared under the “assault of the blossoms.” The cinnamon, however, held its own marvelously: alternating bites of the chocolate with sips of the liqueur yielded a fabulous three-way combination of chocolate, cinnamon, and violet. With apologies to M.F.K. Fisher, I would have to rate this one truly “E for Exquisite.”