Kristin Janz

Category: Cooking

  • Ancient Roman Pork Kebabs, Apicius 8.1.9

    I’ve written elsewhere (here, here, and here) about my attempts to cook ancient Roman food.  Until now, I’ve followed adaptations of ancient recipes worked out for use in modern kitchens, with quantities and preparation notes.  But I was making grilled pork kebabs as one menu item for a dinner party with friends and I wanted to try something new for the dipping sauce, something I hadn’t tried before.

    Donald always appreciates ancient Roman food, and there are four sauce recipes in Sally Grainger’s Cooking Apicius that would have been appropriate.  I’d already tried two of them, though (I liked one but not the other, possibly because of all the tinkering I had to do with the recipe due to not being able to acquire all the ingredients here in the US).  And of the others, one calls for myrtle berries, which we can’t get (we bought a myrtle plant that we’ve been babying along and carefully moving inside each winter, but still no flowers or berries), and the other for hard-boiled eggs, which I don’t like.

    Also, I’ve been going to the trouble of growing rue and pennyroyal from seed so that I have them on hand for the recipes that require them, and I wanted to use some of the fresh rue.  So I went back to Grocock and Grainger’s straight-up translation of the Apicius cookery manual to see what I could find.

    8.1.9.  Another sauce for boar:  pound pepper, lovage, oregano, celery seed, laser root, cumin, fennel seed, rue, liquamen, wine, passum.  Bring it to heat; when it is simmering, thicken with starch.  Pour the sauce into and over the boar and serve.

    Sounds promising.  I was using ambiguously labeled “pork kebab meat” from our meat CSA, not wild boar, but it was free-range pork.  And the Romans often cooked food over charcoal (many of the more convenient methods not having been invented yet).  Laser is silphium, but that was already extinct by the time most of these recipes were being written down, so they were using asafetida instead.  Liquamen is fish sauce, and ancient Roman fish sauce was pretty close to modern Thai or Vietnamese.  Passum was a sweet wine made from dried grapes.  I always use Passito di Pantelleria, which is probably the best modern approximation (Wikipedia says so, anyway).  The one made by Cantine Pellegrino is available at a local wine and spirits retailer (this is the modern, fancy term for liquor store).

    I didn’t follow the instructions exactly.  Partly because I wanted to marinate the pork in the mixture before grilling it, as well as using it as a dipping sauce.  Here’s my recipe:

    Ingredients
    1 tsp. lovage seed
    1 tsp. celery seed
    1/2 tsp. cumin seed
    1/2 tsp. fennel seed
    1/4 tsp. ground asafetida
    1 tsp. peppercorns
    1 tbsp. finely chopped fresh lovage
    1 tsp. minced fresh oregano
    1 tsp. minced fresh rue
    3/4 c. dry white Italian wine
    1/4 c. Passito di Pantelleria
    2 tbsp. Vietnamese or Thai fish sauce
    2 tbsp. olive oil
    1 1/4 lb. pork kebab meat (I wouldn’t be so vague about where on the animal the meat came from, except that I don’t know. Legs, maybe? Loin? Anything you’d use for grilling, frying, or roasting (rather than braising or stewing), cut into approximately 2-inch chunks, is probably fine.)

    Directions
    In a small skillet over moderately low heat, toast lovage seed, celery seed, cumin seed, fennel seed, and ground asafetida until fragrant, while stirring. Cool slightly, then grind with the peppercorns in a spice grinder or mortar and pestle. Add wine, Passito, fish sauce, and fresh herbs. Divide mixture into 2 equal portions. Reserve half of the mixture to use as a dipping sauce. To the other half, add the olive oil. Marinate the pork kebabs in the mixture that contains olive oil for 2-24 hours (In the fridge, of course. Ancient Romans didn’t have fridges, but the ancient text says nothing about marinating in this mixture, either.)

    Thread the pork kebabs onto skewers and grill to desired doneness. You could broil them instead, if it were raining or too cold to grill. I’m not giving precise instructions here based on what I did, because I was trying to grill-roast a whole chicken at the same time (that’s another possible blog post), and my grilling of the pork didn’t receive the close attention it deserved. My kebabs were cooked through more than I like (medium-well rather than medium-rare, though if you’re still afraid of trichinosis this may be more to your liking (ancient Romans were probably afraid of trichinosis, too)), and not seared enough on the outside because I was using briquettes instead of hardwood charcoal to get the chicken right. Also, the pork got cold before we got around to eating it, because the chicken took longer. But the hickory wood chunks I was using to flavor the chicken gave the pork a nice, smoky flavor.

    Serve the grilled pork with the dipping sauce.

    If you compare this to the original Apicius recipe, you’ll see I didn’t bother heating the sauce once it had been assembled, and didn’t bother thickening it, either.  I could have, though cornstarch isn’t strictly authentic, as the ancient Romans didn’t have corn.  You could use wheat starch, often available in Asian grocery stores near the rice flour, if you were striving for verisimilitude.

    Of course, you’re going to have trouble duplicating this recipe if you don’t grow your own lovage and rue, as they’re not easy to find.  I have seen fresh lovage, still growing in little pots, at the Lexington farmers’ market here in Massachusetts.  You could substitute celery leaves for the fresh lovage, or just leave it out.  I used organic lovage seeds sold for planting rather than culinary purposes, and lovage seeds are not too difficult to find.  If you haven’t just spent the last several months growing your own fresh rue, you’re probably out of luck, though some friends of mine who used to live in Park Slope, in Brooklyn, told me they’ve seen it at the farmers’ market there on occasion.  Before we had rue, we would substitute fresh fenugreek leaves in ancient recipes that called for it (fresh fenugreek is available at well-stocked Indian grocery stores), or dandelion leaves.  Rue is quite bitter, so you’ll get some of the correct flavor that way.  You’d probably want to use a tablespoon of either of these substitutes, as neither is as astoundingly bitter as rue.  Rue also has some interesting flavor notes that you might describe as citrusy, though, so I don’t think any substitute will be quite right.

    If you want to use rue, keep in mind that it’s, um, mildly toxic.  And should probably not be consumed by pregnant women or those attempting to become pregnant.  It had medicinal as well as culinary uses, and one of those medicinal uses was as an herbal abortifacient.  I’m pretty sure that a teaspoon mixed into a cup of liquid and shared among 3 or more people as a marinade and dipping sauce is not going to hurt anybody or their unborn child.  But I have no real knowledge on the subject.  I informed all our dinner guests of the potential toxicity issue, and you should do the same.

    How did it turn out?  Everyone seemed to enjoy the pork kebabs and dipping sauce.  There are a lot of different flavors in there, but they seem to meld well together.  Donald wants me to try the sauce again, this time using rue in one batch and a rue substitute in the other, to see if there’s any noticeable difference (Donald’s blog post on the dipping sauce is here).  Maybe he’s wondering if growing fresh rue is worth the effort.  It’s supposed to be a perennial herb, though, so I think we’ll have fresh rue as long as we remember to water it from time to time.

  • As the Romans cooked

    Donald got two Roman cookbooks for his last birthday, to add to our collection.  The Classical Cookbook, by Andrew Dalby and Sally Grainger, includes both ancient Greek and ancient Roman recipes; Cooking Apicius, by Grainger, is a selection of modernized recipes from the only extant ancient Roman cooking manual.

    I already owned Mark Grant’s Roman Cookery, Ilaria Gozzini Giacosa’s A Taste of Ancient Rome (translated by Anna Herklotz), and Joseph Dommers Vehling’s 1936 translation of the Apicius manual.

    I had found Giacosa’s cookbook more useful and authentic than Grant’s.  Both consist of recipes adapted for a modern kitchen, inspired by ancient food, but Giacosa always starts with the original Latin text for a recipe (usually from Apicius, but occasionally from Cato’s or Columella’s treatises on agriculture).  Then she provides a translation, then a modernized recipe.  This way, you can see her thought process in developing the final recipe.

    Grant’s cookbook doesn’t always provide such clear antecedents, and I’m not as happy with his ingredient substitutions.  He calls for Cheddar in numerous recipes where ricotta, feta, or a simple goat cheese would probably be more authentic.  The ancient Romans used the milk of sheep and goats, but not cows’ milk.  However, the real fatal flaw is his use of meat stock made from bouillon cubes.  I can’t take any cookbook author who recommends bouillon cubes seriously.*

    We did try one recipe from Grant’s cookbook, the one for hydromel, or honey water.  It wasn’t very successful, but I don’t think it’s entirely his fault, as it’s actually one of his most historically authentic recipes, reproducing the exact proportions suggested by Bassus in Country Matters (3:2:1 water/honey/apple juice).  It was far too sweet, even diluted with 3 parts water.  However, as Donald describes on his blog, we were able to salvage it by adding apple cider vinegar.  As I know from wine tasting, sweet drinks aren’t as cloying if they also contain enough acid to balance the sugar.  I’m not sure if the recipe didn’t work because ancient Roman apple juice wasn’t as sweet as modern apple cider, or if the Romans just had a major sweet tooth.  (I should point out that Donald prepared this recipe; he suggested elsewhere on his blog that I may not have been adequately crediting his contributions to our Roman dinners.)

    Giacosa’s cookbook tends to suggest ricotta when an ancient recipe calls for cheese, and allows the cook to decide how they’re going to prepare their stock.  The recipes generally sound more authentic, and more likely to taste good.  Donald and I have prepared her pork stew with apples, and globi.  The pork stew is from Apicius, and the globi are a dessert fritter from Cato.  Both were fairly successful, and I’ve written about this meal elsewhere on my blog.

    I do think that she’s off with her proportions for the pork stew, not enough herb and spice, and too much defrutum (concentrated wine or grape syrup) for sweetening.  Since the original recipes rarely give quantities of ingredients, it really is up to the cook’s discretion.  However, the Latin text calls for “a bit of defrutum“, which Giacosa interprets to mean 1/2 cup for about 2 pounds of meat and a pound of apples.  Donald and I probably didn’t use the best substitute for defrutum.  We used grape juice concentrate from a winemaking store, which I suspect was too sweet and concentrated.  Even so, defrutum was probably very sweet and syrupy, like expensive balsamic vinegar or the Italian sapa you can sometimes buy from specialty food stores.  1/2 cup is a lot.

    Another issue is that, throughout her cookbook, Giacosa suggests substituting the juice of pressed garlic cloves for laser or laser root.  This may have been necessary in 1986 when her book was first published, in Italy.  But it isn’t necessary today for anyone with access to an Indian grocery store (either in their city or online).  Laser originally meant silphium, an aromatic plant that became extinct about 2000 years ago, but by the time the Apicius recipes were being written down, cooks were using asafoetida as a substitute.  You may not even need an Indian grocery to find asafoetida.  I have a bottle I purchased at Whole Foods.

    Donald and I haven’t tried any recipes from The Classical Cookbook, but I’ve prepared several dishes from Cooking Apicius:  lamb faggots (the cookbook was published in Britain; the American translation of Giacosa’s cookbook uses the less unfortunate term “meat patties” for the Latin isicia), prawn (shrimp) balls in hydrogarum, toasted pine kernel sauce for roast wild boar or pork (I served it with pan-fried pork chops), offellae Ostian style, offellae Apician style (offellae are chunks of roasted or grilled pork belly), spring cabbage with cumin, parsnips in a cumin honey glaze, sauce for fried gourd (accompanied by fried gourd), and deep-fried honey fritters.  Everything has been quite good, the pork belly recipes in particular having been big hits at dinner parties or potlucks.  If anything, compared to Giacosa, Grainger has an excessively liberal hand with the spicing.  I think she puts in way too much cumin, in particular.  It may be that the cumin I buy is especially fresh and flavorful; or it may be that I just don’t like cumin as much as she does.  Her recipes have a lot of pepper, too, but, judging from our experience with conditum paradoxum, one of the few Apicius recipes to provide quantities, Romans liked their pepper.

    Grainger doesn’t mess around with trying to substitute garlic for laser; she tells you to get yourself some asafoetida, as you should.  And, unlike both Grant and Giacosa, she acknowledges that the ancient Romans did not have zucchini or butternut squash (both New World vegetables unknown in Rome prior to the 16th century), and that Apician references to cucurbitas were to Old World gourds.  I used opo squash, which is often used today in Indian cooking.  It’s not that unlike zucchini, but if you’re trying for some degree of authenticity, you definitely shouldn’t be using any of the yellow or orange winter squashes.

    So, I have to say, Sally Grainger wins the Roman cookbook prize.  Donald and I were so impressed with Cooking Apicius that we decided to purchase Grainger and Grocock’s complete English translation of the Apicius manual (“A Critical Edition with an Introduction and English Translation”), which has the Latin on one side, English on the facing page, and notes and appendices that take up more space than the actual text.

    Cooking Apicius does call for ingredients that are not presently easy to find in the United States:  myrtle berries, lovage seed, date syrup, fresh rue and pennyroyal.  If you’re an experienced cook, you can probably figure out appropriate substitutions, or else stick to the recipes that don’t use them.  Lovage seed and rue are the most problematic, as Grainger uses them in so many of the recipes.  I did buy some rue seeds to try growing the fresh herb myself, but in the meantime I’ve been substituting some bitter fresh green–I’ve tried dandelion, and might also try arugula or fenugreek leaves (all of which the Romans would have had).  I’ve tried substituting either celery seed or ajwain seed for lovage, with good results.  Or you could buy lovage seeds intended for planting in your garden.  Make sure they’re organic, not treated with any fungicide or other toxic chemical.  You’ll probably have to pick out the seeds from the bits of twig and leaf, since planting seeds aren’t sorted as carefully as eating seeds.  (This is one of Donald’s tasks when I cook ancient Roman food.)  Also, while I’m confident enough that they’re safe to eat that I’ve fed dishes containing them to friends, they’re probably not really approved for human consumption, so eat them at your own risk.  On that same note, there’s some toxicity associated with rue and pennyroyal, although my reading on the subject suggests that the fresh herb is probably safe to eat.  Just don’t go making yourself herbal teas with the stuff unless you really know what you’re doing, and stay away from the extracts.  (There have been some accidental poisoning deaths from pennyroyal extract in particular.)

    When you’re trying to re-enact a historical practice, whether cooking, costuming, or jousting, you always have to make choices about how authentic you’re going to be.  I’ve done all my ancient Roman cooking on my gas stove in my modern American kitchen, but if I wanted to be truly authentic, I’d have to build a reproduction clay oven in my backyard, or at least cook over charcoal in my Weber grill.  Then there are the ingredients.  I can decide to use goats’ milk instead of cows’ milk, and avoid New World ingredients.  But vegetables have changed in 2000 years.  The ancient Romans didn’t have bright orange carrots.  Theirs were white or pale yellow, more like parsnips.  It’s unclear which of the Brassica oleracea they meant by cymae and coliculi–various members of the cabbage family, and we know they didn’t have Brussels sprouts yet, but were they headed cabbages, or something more like kale or collard greens, or even broccoli?  I won’t even get into the whole issue of how wheat has changed over the millennia.

    However, if you want a cookbook that strikes a good balance between historical authenticity and ease of preparation, with recipes that taste good, I recommend Sally Grainger’s Cooking Apicius.

    *This is not entirely true.  One of the recipes in Cooking Apicius calls for “lamb stock (cube or fresh)”.  I’m willing to forgive Grainger here because lamb stock is a little harder to find than chicken or beef (though I’m not sure I’ve ever seen lamb Oxo cubes here in the US; it would probably be easier for me to buy some bony lamb pieces and make my own stock).  Grant calls for a chicken stock cube in at least one recipe in his cookbook.  That’s simply unacceptable, unless you live in, say, post-war Britain in the 50s.

  • Conditum paradoxum

    As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, one of the things my husband Donald and I share is a fascination with the culture of ancient Rome.  Since I also love to cook, this leads inexorably to our attempts to recreate ancient Roman food and beverages.  I say “our” even though it’s usually me doing the cooking.  Donald is there for encouragement.  Such as, “We haven’t had any Roman food in a while.”  Or, “When are you going to cook some more Roman food?”  He does help with the dishes.

    One ancient Roman recipe I’ve made twice now is conditum paradoxum, from Apicius, the most famous ancient Roman cookbook.  Depending on the translation, conditum paradoxum means “marvelous seasoned wine”, “novelty spiced wine”, or “spiced wine surprise”.

    Unlike most recipes in Apicius, the instructions for conditum paradoxum include both procedure and exact proportions.  Donald has the original Latin on his blog.  Here’s a translation (Grocock, Christopher, and Sally Grainger. Apicius:  A Critical Edition with an Introduction and English Translation.  Blackawton:  Prospect Books, 2006.  Print.).  Except I left the ancient units untranslated instead of calling them pounds, ounces and pints, because they’re not exactly the same as the modern equivalents.

    15 librae of honey by weight is put into a bronze pan containing 2 sextarii of wine so that the wine and the honey cook together.  Warm the pan on a gentle fire of dry wood and stir with a stick as it cooks.  If it begins to boil it is settled with a sprinkling of wine, besides which it will subside when it is removed from the fire.  When it has cooled down, it is heated again.  This will be done a second and a third time, and then at last it is removed from the hearth, and it is skimmed the day after.  Then you put in 4 unciae of ground pepper; 3 scruples of  mastic; one dragma each of folium and saffron; 5 roasted date stones and the dates themselves softened in wine of the same kind and quality, added in beforehand so that a smooth paste is produced.  When all these are ready you pour on 18 sextarii of smooth wine.  Charcoal is put in when it is finished (to avert the sour taste).

    One thing that becomes quickly apparent if you look around for modern adaptations of this recipe is that no one these days likes  the Apicius proportions.  Everyone cuts way back on the honey.  However, although the original does call for about 11 pounds of honey in 11 liters of wine, the ancients didn’t drink their wine straight.  As far as we can tell, they cut it with at least 3 parts water to every 1 part wine.  Modern interpretations Donald and I have seen all try to produce a spiced wine that you could enjoy drinking unwatered, but that isn’t authentic, nor do I think it’s necessary.

    I used the original proportions, scaling them down for 1.5 liters of wine (2 standard bottles).  That comes out to:

    1.5 liters wine
    15 grams ground pepper
    682 grams honey
    1 roasted date pit
    1 pitted date soaked in a bit of the wine
    0.63 grams folium
    0.63 grams saffron (I used 0.5 g, since this is the smallest size available from Penzeys Spices down the street)
    0.48 grams mastic (9-10 beads)

    Scholars don’t know what was meant by folium, which means, simply, “leaf”.  Some think it’s bay leaf, which the Romans usually called folium lauri; others think it’s tejpat leaf, which the Romans usually called malabathrum.  I used tejpat, which I obtained from Kalustyan’s in Manhattan (they do mail order).  You could use bay leaf if you wanted.  Maybe the original recipe is vague because it didn’t matter which one you used.

    We got gum mastic from Amazon.  It’s a hardened resin, and comes in a jar of small beads.

    You’ll notice that the quantities of a lot of the spices are pretty small.  You’re probably going to need an electronic scale if you want to try this yourself.  Even then, unless you have access to an analytical balance (and if you have one of those at home, I don’t want to know why), your scale probably won’t measure small enough quantities with any degree of accuracy.  Mine doesn’t register weights smaller than a gram, so for the tejpat leaf and mastic, we would weigh out 4 or 10 times what we needed, then take a quarter or a tenth of that pile, judging by eyeing it.  Not very accurate, but I’m not sure it matters.  There’s a lot of pepper in there, and saffron is a very strong-tasting spice.  I’m not even 100% sure that I would be able to taste the difference if I left out the tejpat leaf and gum mastic.  So far, I haven’t tried that.

    If you don’t have an electronic balance, you could try making the recipe in the original quantity.  A sextarius is 0.54 liters, and the original recipe calls for a total of 20 sextarii of wine, so if you’re good at math (or ancient Roman weights and measures), you can figure out how much of everything you’ll need.  That will make a lot of spiced wine, though.  You’ll need a big pot.

    As for preparation, the original procedure is from a time of more primitive kitchens.  And of more primitive beekeeping.  The multiple cycles of heating and cooling the honey and wine, then skimming, are probably because ancient bulk honey (cheap enough to be used in 11 pound quantities) had a lot more gunk in it (wax, bits of dead bees, pollen).  These days, it’s difficult to find honey like that, and you have to pay extra for it, at Whole Foods or some similar store.  I didn’t bother with the skimming.  I heated the honey with 150 mL wine.  (Don’t get nervous about the metric units if you live in the United States, like I do.  Your measuring cups should have metric as well as Imperial units.  Unless you bought the really cheap ones.  If that sounds like you, go get some proper measuring cups before making this recipe.  Right now!)  Use medium low or low heat, and stir it a lot.  When you measure the honey and wine into the pot, you’ll think “This recipe will never work; it’s as thick as molasses!”  Don’t worry, the honey liquifies as you heat.

    The first time I made this, I used Greek retsina for the wine.  Some people think that’s closer to the wine they would have had in the ancient world, since they often used pine resin to waterproof the clay amphorae in which they stored it.  The second time I made the recipe, I used a 1.5 liter bottle of inexpensive Italian pinot grigio.  I didn’t taste them side by side or anything, but I don’t remember one tasting different from the other.  Use something dry with a decent level of acidity, and don’t spend too much money on it, because you won’t be able to taste any subtlety in the wine anyway.

    The recipe doesn’t say anything about how long the spices are supposed to sit in the wine and honey syrup before you add the rest of the wine.  It also doesn’t say whether you’re supposed to grind the mastic and date pit, or just toss them in.  Or how long to roast the date pit.  The first time, I roasted the date pit for about an hour at 350 F, then ground both it and the mastic (separately) in a coffee grinder before adding them to the pot.  The second time, I only roasted the pit for half an hour (which I think was still too long), and just crushed it in a mortar and pestle (the mortar and pestle is also good for smushing the soaked date).  I didn’t grind the mastic at all, the second time.  This is because mastic, a resin, is kind of sticky, and it was a pain to get it out of the coffee grinder into the pot, and then a double pain to clean the coffee grinder.  After adding the spices, I kept the pot on the lowest heat for about half an hour, stirring every now and then.  It shouldn’t boil, so if your stove doesn’t have a really low heat setting, you might have to switch it between on and off.  You could also just let it steep for an hour or so, like tea.

    The second time, when I added the whole mastic beads to the pot instead of grinding them, I was sort of hoping they would melt or dissolve into the mix.  They did soften, but they never entirely went away, and the mixture was starting to boil, so I gave up.  I learned afterwards that mastic doesn’t dissolve in water and is only slightly soluble in alcohol.  Apparently, it can take days to dissolve it in pure alcohol at room temperature.  Also, according to one of the customer reviews on Amazon, I was supposed to rinse the beads off before using them, because they’re covered with a very fine sand.  Hmm.  Next time, I guess.

    Once you’ve decided the honey wine syrup has melded with the spices long enough, add the rest of the wine.  Then strain out the spices.  I didn’t bother with the charcoal.  Partly because the recipe is unclear about how the charcoal is used, and partly because I wasn’t confident that the hardwood charcoal I buy for the grill should be added to food.  However, I’ve used charcoal in the chemistry lab to decolor and clarify solutions, so I suspect that the proper procedure for this is to add a spoonful or two of ground charcoal, bring to a simmer, then strain.  If you do want to try this, you will need to strain it through a coffee filter.  Otherwise you won’t have clarified the wine at all, you’ll just have added unsightly black dust to the bottom.  Cheesecloth isn’t fine enough.

    Since I didn’t use charcoal, I didn’t even both straining through cheesecloth, I just used a fine mesh strainer.  It doesn’t get rid of all the spice sludge, but I was lazy, and decided that the spice sludge added character.  It it at least removes all the large chunks.

    Now you have conditum paradoxum.  It should taste mostly of honey and saffron, with a bit of a peppery bite.  Like I said earlier, you won’t want to drink this straight.  It’s way too sweet and syrupy.  3 parts water to 1 part spiced wine works pretty well.  Or, if you want to throw away all the historical authenticity for which you’ve labored so hard, use sparkling water or club soda as the mixer.

    Even diluted, it still tastes mostly of honey and saffron, and pepper.  The wine gives it a necessary dose of acidity, though, balancing the sweetness.

    It actually made me think of a wine cooler, especially the sparkling variation.  Very sweet, flavored, not too alcoholic.  One of the most fascinating things about trying to reproduce ancient food–or cooking food from contemporary cultures around the world, for that matter–is noticing unexpected similarities between the foreign and the familiar.

    If you’re interested in either ancient Rome or food history, check out my earlier post on cooking ancient Roman food.  And stay tuned for future posts, where (assuming I get around to writing them) you can read all about The Search for Ancient Spices No One Uses Anymore, Sometimes Because They’re Poisonous, and How Ancient Roman Food is Like Thai Cooking.

  • Seriously, Mollie Katzen?

    So, yesterday I made Lasagna al Pesto from Mollie Katzen’s cookbook The New Enchanted Broccoli Forest.  (The “new” part means it’s a re-issue of the original Enchanted Broccoli Forest, not that it’s about an enchanted broccoli forest only recently discovered.)  One step calls for finely mincing a pound of raw spinach.  I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a pound of raw spinach on a cutting board, unconfined by the plastic bag it came in.  It’s a lot.  I had to work on half a pound at a time, since my cutting board wasn’t large enough to accomodate it all.  And I think I gave up somewhere around “finely chopped”, which consists of significantly larger pieces than “minced”.

    Is this small enough?

    Even that took a long time. 15 or 20 minutes of chopping, easily, alternating between chef’s knife and cleaver. My shoulder is still a bit stiff.

    I also made the green lasagna noodles the recipe called for from scratch, because I couldn’t find any at the grocery store. It was kind of a pain, but I’m a bit of a kitchen masochist (earlier this week, I made coconut milk from an actual coconut). I used the recipe in The Bread Lover’s Bread Machine Cookbook (Beth Hensperger).  You can make a lot of stuff besides bread in a bread machine; this particular cookbook also has recipes for jam.  I thought it worked pretty well.  Rolling out the dough was a bit of a pain, as I don’t have a pasta machine and had to do it by hand.  But it was easier than I remembered from the last time I tried making homemade pasta, when I was a teenager.  I don’t know if it’s because the recipe I used this time was better, or because my arms are stronger now.

    A sheet of spinach lasagna noodle drying on the counter

    I didn’t bother cutting the pasta into lasagna strips, since I would have had to re-assemble them into sheets in the pan, anyway.  Though I did have some strips, because I didn’t realize the pasta recipe would only make enough for one batch of lasagna, so then I had to trim bits of the edges of the 3 sheets I rolled out to re-assemble into a 4th sheet in the baking dish.

    I thought the homemade pasta was good, though not quite as amazing and wonderful as I’d hoped, after all that work. I did like it better than dry noodles, but it didn’t have the light, tender texture of really good fresh pasta. It was a bit doughy. I might have rolled it out too thick, or it might just be the recipe, which called for all-purpose flour instead of semolina.

    The lasagna used up the last of my vegetable CSA produce, finally. I’d made massive amounts of pesto during the height of basil season, since we were getting an enormous bunch of fresh basil each week, and stashed it away in the freezer. This was the last container.

    I didn’t take a picture of the final lasagna, because I’d made it for a potluck we were hosting, and by the time it came out of the oven, people were already here.  Donald thought it was good, for a vegetarian dish.  Other people seemed to like it well enough, too, since there was only a little bit left over.

  • How to make paneer

    On Wednesday, I made cheese for the first time, and documented the process with my trusty digital camera.

    I used the paneer recipe on page 297 of Sundays at Moosewood Restaurant. You need 2 quarts of milk, 3-4 tablespoons strained lemon juice, a large pot, a large spoon to stir the milk with as it heats, cheesecloth, a colander, and something to weight the cheese with as you press it.

    First, you put the milk in a pot and heat it to a vigorous boil over high heat. Make sure to use a pretty big pot. I used a 6 quart stockpot. The milk foams a lot as it starts to boil, and if you aren’t careful, it will foam over the edge and you’ll have an awful mess to clean up. (This did not happen to me, but it did foam quite a lot, even in a 6 quart pot. I was glad I didn’t try to use a smaller pot.) Stir the milk often as it heats, so the bottom and sides don’t burn.

    Once the milk has boiled, turn off the heat and stir in the lemon juice. I used just a smidge under 3 tablespoons, because that’s what I got out of 1 lemon, after straining the squeezed juice through a tea strainer. The recipe said you might have to use an extra tablespoon, but I didn’t. It also said you might have to heat the mixture on low heat for half a minute or so to get it to curdle, but mine curdled almost immediately, once I’d mixed in the juice. What you’re looking for is that the solid part of the milk (the curds) will separate out from the liquid (the whey), first in little tiny globules, then in larger chunks. (Who can avoid thinking of Miss Muffett at a time like this?)

    After adding the lemon juice. Appetizing, huh?

    Then you pour it into a colander lined with cheesecloth. I wasn’t sure how much cheesecloth to use. The recipe said several layers. I took 3 long strips of cheesecloth that I unfolded from the piece of cardboard in the middle of the package. I used about 1 1/2 packages.

    I worried that I might have used too much cheesecloth. I'm still not sure.

    After most of the liquid has drained away, lift up the cheesecloth around the curds and pick up the whole thing like a bag. With your hands, keeping the curds inside the little cheesecloth bag, squeeze out as much liquid as you can. This is where I wondered if I had used too much cheesecloth. I felt that if I had used a little less, maybe only 2 strips instead of 3, I would have been able to squeeze out more water. I thought the texture of the finished cheese was maybe a little soft. On the other hand, I’m not sure the 2 strips would have enfolded all the cheese curd properly, and some of it might have gooped out around the edges. I guess if I try this again, I might try 2 strips, and see what happens.

    Here’s what it looks like after you’ve squeezed the water out. According to the Moosewood recipe I was using, this stage is called chenna, and is a soft cheese that is often used in Indian sweets.

    After squeezing out as much liquid as possible

    Next, keeping the cloth wrapped around the cheese, squish and/or pat it into a sort of flat block. The recipe said 5″ x 5″ or 4″ x 6″. Mine was more like 5″ x 6″, but close enough.

    Next, you put it back in the colander and put a heavy weight on top to press it into paneer cheese. I had a bit of trouble with this step, because the colander I was using was too narrow to fit in any weight that would cover the whole surface of my cheese. You want the whole cheese to be covered, or the edges won’t get pressed (they’ll probably be a bit crumbly no matter what you do). I ended up switching out the original colander for the drainer part of my salad spinner. I wasn’t quite as happy about this, because I’m not sure the drain holes are really elevated far enough off the surface below to allow the liquid being squeezed out to escape properly. But it was the best I could do. I filled a 4 quart pot with water and put that on top as the weight.

    You can see the overhang of the roof outside reflected in the water

    The recipe says to press it for 30-60 minutes, and that the longer you press it, the firmer it will be. I let it go about 70 minutes. Here’s what it looked like, after being unwrapped.

    Here's how much you get

    I rinsed out the cheesecloths under running water and hung them out to dry, planning to wash them properly this weekend when I do laundry. I didn’t want to throw them out, because I bought one of the packs at the grocery store and it was kind of expensive (at least for such a small amount of cloth).

    I hope everything I use these for doesn't taste like spoiled milk

    That’s it! I wanted to cook something with the paneer, so I cut it up into small cubes.

    It’s kind of amazing to think that this is all the cheese you get from 2 quarts of milk, isn’t it? With harder cheeses like cheddar and Parmesan, where you do a more effective job of squishing out the whey, the yield is even lower.

    Two cups of cheese cubes from two quarts of milk

    I used the paneer to make the Spiced Paneer on page 351 of Moosewood Restaurant Daily Special. Cubes of paneer sauteed in oil with cumin, cayenne, cardamom, turmeric, salt, and a bit of yogurt to help the spices stick to the cheese. It was very tasty! The paneer went into a salad for dinner that night (Spinach with Cilantro-Cashew Dressing, page 289 of the aforementioned book). I used the famous baby spinach that I had worried might have been squished under my corn, and a tomato from the 4 1/2 pound box of CSA tomatoes I received this week.

    The final product

    The paneer did crumble apart a bit as I cooked it, especially the edge pieces, and the texture was kind of soft, but it firmed up nicely in the fridge.

    I did taste the paneer before cooking it with spices, and it was very mild, but definitely tasted like cheese. I’m wondering if this might be a good substitute for the sort of cheese curds they use in Canada (and which are impossible to find here) to make poutine. Next time I have leftover gravy, I’ll have to find out!

    I was surprised by how easy it was to make the paneer. The whole process (not including the hour of pressing) took less than 45 minutes, including clean-up. And that’s 45 minutes in real time, not Rachael Ray time!

  • More CSA complaints

    Um.  Can you guys try not to put the corn on the cob on top of the baby spinach next time?  I swear, Wilson Farm has the worst grocery baggers on the planet (I’ve lost track of how many peaches, plums and nectarines they’ve ruined), and apparently the same people are putting the CSA shares into the baskets.

    We finally got a decent amount of tomatoes.  For a few weeks, we’d been getting 2 a week.  This week we got 16.  Donald is a little disappointed that we still got the same massive amount of zucchini and summer squash, though.  And lettuce is back, after a lovely 2-week lettuce hiatus.  I’m sort of disappointed that heirloom tomatoes are in full swing, and we only got the most basic, boring tomatoes they grow at Wilson Farm.  But I can sort of understand.  The heirloom ones tend to be more susceptible to splitting and cracking, especially around the stem, and once that happens they go bad pretty quickly.  If we got 16 large heirloom tomatoes, we’d have to eat nothing but for a couple of days so that they didn’t rot before we got to them.  And then we’d have no tomatoes left for the rest of the week.  Also, even basic, boring tomatoes are pretty tasty in August, when they’re locally grown (not the tasteless ones that they pick green in California and blow ethylene gas over to sort of ripen them before they put them out on the shelf in your Massachusetts grocery store).

    For dinner tonight, I made Mediterranean couscous salad (with tomatoes and zucchini, as well as other vegetables), tomato and mozzarella salad with basil, and boiled corn on the cob (with lime-cilantro butter).  Fresh local raspberries from our CSA share for dessert (even though Donald was eyeing the new cherries I’d bought; I told him we had to eat the raspberries first, though, because they’re more perishable).  Everything was yummy, though Donald opted out of the couscous salad because of the measly 1 cup of diced zucchini I’d added, and had leftover pork tenderloin with figs from last night instead.

  • Childhood cookbook memories

    Last weekend, Donald and I were in Nova Scotia for my 20-year highschool reunion. It was a lot of fun! I attended a tiny highschool in rural Nova Scotia, and our graduating class was somewhere between 40 and 45 students. So there wasn’t anyone in my class that I didn’t know; although, embarrassingly, I had trouble recognizing some people at the reunion. Not as many people made it for the 20-year reunion as for the 10, but it was still great to see everyone who showed up.

    Never mind that, though! I’m sure you’re all dying to hear about the cookbooks I acquired on my trip.

    My parents are thinking of moving again (for the 3rd time since I graduated from highschool), so when I was there, my mom had been going through all the stuff she’s accumulated over the years and deciding what she really wanted and what she was going to try to sell in a yard sale.  She had a big box of cookbooks she’d decided she didn’t want anymore, and invited me to go through and see if there was anything I wanted. (Of course, she’s still keeping most of her large cookbook collection; I come by my love of cooking and cookbooks honestly.)

    To my horror, she was planning to get rid of this gem from 1970, James Beard’s How to Eat Better for Less Money (a revised edition of an original 1954 publication).  (The dust jacket was long gone by the time I was old enough to start reading cookbooks, so I’ve only ever seen this cover.)  I can’t tell you how many hours I spent poring over this masterpiece as a child.  It had a chapter on cheese, with descriptions of all sorts of cheeses too fancy for us to buy in Nova Scotia in the 1980s (and too expensive for our limited food budget–I think the emphasis is on the “eat better”, not on the “less money”).  There are suggested menus for various occasions (“Summer Terrace Dinner for 6”,  “Winter Brunch for 4”).  There’s even “A helpful supplement on budget wines and spirits” at the end.  I used to fantasize about cooking all the different menus for dinner parties I would have someday (yes, I was an odd child).  I’m not sure how many of the recipes from this book I actually made as a teenager, but there was the notorious granita di caffe that I made for dessert when I was about 14, and that turned my brother, sister and me off coffee for years (I like coffee now, but I still can’t drink iced coffee or eat coffee ice-cream, in memory of that dessert; though I think that the problem was not so much that it was a bad recipe, but that children aged 9-14 who aren’t used to caffeine and suddenly eat a whole bunch of coffee slush drowned in whipped cream are likely to make themselves sick to the stomach, and that’s what happened to us.).

    Ah, memories.

    The sad thing, though, is that the Suck Fairy appears to have waved her magic wand over this cookbook, because, looking through it, I can’t imagine I’m ever going to make any of these recipes.  They’re not all bad, exactly (though there’s a disturbing section on ways to cook hot dogs); I just think that the recipes that sound decent are pretty close to similar recipes in better cookbooks (like the America’s Test Kitchen ones).  And the wine and spirits section!  Oh dear!  I’m sure the wine section is reasonable, though it’s no longer quite as useful for me to know which vintages of the 1960s will be a good investment for future drinking (unless I want to raid my friend Bob’s cellar).  But how about this tip:

    “To serve a superb premium Scotch at low cost, buy six bottles of a low-priced blended Scotch and one bottle of Smith’s Glenlivet or Glenfiddich unblended all-malt Scotch.  Pour the contents of the seven bottles into a container and mix them.  Refill the seven bottles and put on your own label, which might read, ‘John Smith’s Personal Selection.’  We promise you the result will be as good as any $9 Scotch on the market.”

    Well, that may be true.  But somehow I don’t think they’re talking about a $9 Scotch in 2011 prices.

    A lot of the advice in the book is outdated.  It suggests using “hot-roll” mix to make quick pizza.  Apparently this book was published before you could buy those cardboard tubes of pizza dough at every grocery store.  It warns that shallots are hard to come by, and that you might be able to find them “in foreign markets in most large cities” (try Stop and Shop).  It suggests buying your meat from a knowledgeable neighborhood butcher instead of the grocery store (these days, it seems that you have to live in a large city for there to even be a neighborhood butcher, the decent ones all seem to be pretty high-end and not a place to go to save money, and at a lot of the chains pretending to be neighborhood butchers–like the Meat House in Arlington–you end up having long, frustrating conversations explaining to them where on the animal the cut of meat you want comes from if it’s anything more obscure than a brisket (can they not use Google?)).

    It’s sad when a beloved cookbook is cursed by the Suck Fairy (the magical entity who points out to you that the books you loved as a child really aren’t that good).  I’m almost afraid to look too hard for a copy of another out-of-print childhood favorite, The Larousse Treasury of Country Cooking (to be distinguished from the far more famous and not out-of-print Larousse Gastronomique).  This wasn’t one my mother owned, but one I used to borrow from the bookmobile over and over (a bookmobile is what you have, at least what you used to have, when you attend a tiny rural elementary school without much of a library).  I think the bookmobile must have gone to more than just elementary schools, otherwise it had a weirdly high number of cookbooks.  But I digress.

    My mother was also getting rid of Fields of Greens: New Vegetarian Recipes From the Celebrated Greens Restaurant.  It looks pretty good, though it’s also a little out of date (1993).  The author keeps telling you that you probably won’t be able to find Meyer lemons if you don’t live in northern California (and then tempting you with recipes that require them–so cruel!).  But they’re pretty common in Boston, when they’re in season.  I mean, they’re common if you shop at Whole Foods or Russo’s or Wilson Farm (i.e., with all the other yuppies).  Maybe not at the Stop & Shop.

    I also acquired Great Good Food: Luscious Lower-Fat Cooking, by Julee Rosso (one of the co-authors of The Silver Palate Cookbook).  This one I’m a little more iffy about.  It looks like it has good recipes, but they’re organized by seasonal menu or event rather than ingredient or type, and the seasonal menus are a bit idiosyncratic.  For instance, I just opened the book at random to the Spring chapter and found a menu for “Dinner After Ballooning”.  Apparently the author likes to go up in a hot air balloon in the spring when it’s nice, which is kind of cool, though of course not as cool as if it were a zeppelin and she wore steampunk garb (did I mean cool or dorky?).  Anyway, Herbed Bruschetta, Monkfish Medallions, Baby Zucchini with Pesto, Red-Hot Radishes, and Strawberry Sorbet sound lovely.  But it’s kind of a pain to think, “okay, I need a recipe for monkfish”, and not to be able to turn to a nice, convenient chapter entitled “Fish.”  This might be why this cookbook is apparently out of print, and Fields of Greens is not.

    I poked through my mom’s box of craft books that she no longer wanted, too, and didn’t find as many prizes, since I like cooking best.  I did find Parties and Projects for the Holidays (Christmas With Martha Stewart Living), which is mostly crafts, but has some recipes too, for holiday menus.  They’re my favorite sorts of menus to make, the ones where the suggested timeline starts off with “One week before” (i.e., you can’t possibly make all those things in one solid day of cooking alone).  They’re not the favorite menus of friends and family who have to put up with me while I’m cooking, though, since I tend to get just a little bit stressed out (i.e., impossible to put up with) when I’m cooking a long, complex menu.  Of course, Martha Stewart’s book is not just about cooking.  There are also step-by-step instructions for making Christmas ornaments from tinsel made out of real gold and silver.

    Finally, although this is a cookbook only in the sense of having recipes, not in the sense of telling you how to make food, I acquired The Complete Soapmaker.  I’m probably not really going to start making my own soap, but it’s one of those things I like to pretend to myself that I’ll have time to do someday (like gardening, knitting, sewing my own clothes, making cheese, brewing beer and wine….).  The book gets very mixed reviews on Amazon; some people say it makes great soap, others say it makes terrible, useless soap.  But the recipes sound cool.  The book does make the mistake of telling you to add water to the lye when you’re mixing it, not the other way around (which is much, much safer).  This error has apparently been corrected in later editions, but since I worked as a chemist for 13 years, I sort of already knew this.  It also seems like a lot of the reviewers on Amazon are inordinately afraid of lye.  I mean, it’s corrosive and can be dangerous, don’t get me wrong.  It’s just that when you’ve worked in the lab with materials that can burst into spontaneous flame upon exposure to moist air (and seen them do it, and had to put out the fire with an extinguisher), lye doesn’t seem so scary anymore.

    My sister was quite concerned that I might have gotten our mother’s copy of Your Country Kitchen, but Mom isn’t getting rid of that one yet.  And besides, I already have my own copy of this out-of-print treasure that I picked up at a used bookstore a few years ago.  Despite the fact that this is a British cookbook, many of the recipes are quite good (especially if you have a kitchen scale, since a lot of the quantities are given in weights), and the cheese fondue recipe is my “go-to” version.  So Lisa can have this one, if Mom ever decides she doesn’t want it anymore.

    I still want the Purity cookbook, though!

  • Safety starts at home

    It occurred to me today that maybe I shouldn’t be grilling barefoot.  As I poured the glowing coals from the chimney starter onto the grate, and one small coal went flying and landed on the ground, less than a foot from my foot.

  • Low fat, schmow fat!

    Just for a change from boiled corn on the cob, I decided to use this week’s corn from my CSA share to make creamed corn for lunch.

    A bowl of creamed corn, with fresh corn off the cob and heavy cream. And butter. Because heavy cream just doesn’t have enough fat.

    It was yummy, though I’m feeling maybe I ought to have a double portion of salad tonight, with no dressing, to make up for it. (In case you’re wondering, I didn’t only eat corn and heavy cream for lunch; I also had leftover Greek vegetable stew and salad (with dressing). And a peach.)

    Maybe next time I’ll try the variation with blue cheese and bacon.

    On the writing front, not such a good day. I was working on the novel, and only got about 1800 words written. Considering that Donald can write 800 words just in the evening after coming home from a long day at his regular job … well, not so good! This is why I need to be a stay-at-home writer in order to accomplish anything, because I’m so slow. Though today was especially bad. I just wasn’t into it, and in the morning I kept dozing off at my desk. And I didn’t have any caffeine in the house. I took a 20-minute nap, which was probably a better idea anyway, and actually helped a lot. (My theory is that using caffeine to stay awake is like curing a hangover with the hair of the dog; it only prolongs the inevitable.) I did force myself to sit at my desk for 6 hours staring at the file of my novel, though. So discipline was okay, just not inspiration.

  • Careful what you wish for!

    I’m sure it’s a coincidence, but last week I complained about all the vegetables we were getting each week in our CSA share, and this week we didn’t get as many.  Here’s what we got this week:

    1 head red leaf lettuce
    2 cucumbers
    1 bunch salad onions (3)
    1 bunch scallions
    1 bunch beets with greens attached
    baby beet greens
    green beans
    6 ears corn
    2 yellow summer squash
    2 zucchini

    Last week we got an extra lettuce (romaine), and more summer squash, and both Romano beans and wax beans instead of regular green beans. We didn’t get beet greens or beets, but we got an eggplant, and some basil.

    I suppose this week’s take is a more reasonable amount of food, but now that I’ve been trained to expect ridiculously massive quantities of produce every week, it doesn’t feel like a good deal if we’re getting less.

    I’m also a little annoyed that the “full share” people are always getting the special vegetables when the “half share” people like us aren’t. Maybe this is to be expected, but we’ve only gotten kale and Swiss chard once, and the full share people are getting one or the other (or both!) every week. And this week the full share people got tomatoes. Tomatoes! Possibly the most desirable vegetable, and we didn’t get any. Hopefully it’s just that the tomatoes are only starting to come in, and they didn’t have enough for everyone. But I’m certainly not joining this CSA again if I don’t get some tomatoes at some point.