Toast

Elizabeth David: Fennel and Parmesan

I had never heard of Elizabeth David when I first opened a Penguin edition of her French Provincial Cooking , browsing in the University Bookstore. I was a junior in college, and though I had been cooking for myself and with my housemates for several months, I was pretty unsophisticated. I was already reading cookbooks as if they were novels, but there were fewer then. It was a long time ago.

French food to me meant fancy restaurant food- I had no previous idea of the range of French country food- real food, eaten by real people, daily, as well as for special occasions. I was mesmerized, and, of course, I bought the book. I read it over and over again, looked for the ingredients and tools she talked about, and tried out as many recipes as I could. She has stuck with me, all this time; more than any other writer on food, she is the voice in the back of my head.

Then, as now, I was struck by the economy of her recipe writing- straighforward and personal. Sometimes it seemed that the instructions were too simple to be true, but they worked. My favorite Elizabeth David recipes are usually the simplest. This recipe for a fennel gratin is so spare that it is practically not a recipe at all, the same is true of her method for toasting almonds, and quite a few others.

Somehow, if you do just what she says, it is more delicious than you would have expected. The sharp clean taste of the raw fennel, which I love in a fennel slaw, is mellowed and transformed. This gratin makes an excellent side dish for meat, poultry, bean, or tomato based main dishes. It is also great with fish. Is there something edible I have left out here?

This is all you do. Preheat oven to 425F. Trim off the tough stalks and root end of each bulb, and slice each in half lengthwise. Parboil until tender in well-salted water, drain, and place in a buttered oven proof dish, cut sides down. Sprinkle with grated parmesan cheese, freshly made breadcrumbs, and ground pepper, and dot with butter. Bake until top is browned nicely (15-20 minutes, usually) and serve. I put a few of the uncooked fennel fronds on top, because I think they are pretty.

All you have to remember to do is use good butter, real parm, and your own breadcrumbs, all of which actually matters.

Adapted from An Omelette and a Glass of Wine. by Elizabeth David

"Visiting Cake" and a Pantry Visit

I'm sure I have mentioned that I am a huge fan of the supremely reliable and creative Dorie Greenspan, who has a new(ish) book out. It is also not a secret that I have a bit of a problem involving my collection of cookbooks, which is maybe too large to be in a private home-particularly the private home of an Apartment Dweller of Moderate Means. (The reason it is not a secret, is that it is Too Big to Hide.* It is not that I am not suitably embarrassed-I'd hide it if I could. Many a casual visitor- for example, the plumber- has been moved to ask me why I have so many cookbooks.) I'll bet you can guess what I just did.

Yup. After a perfunctory internal debate, I bought Ms. Greenspan's Baking, From My Home To Yours. This looks to be a pretty thorough survey of her approach to home baking, which is my kind of baking, for sure. Although there is a wide range of recipes, for all kinds of great looking stuff, I was drawn first to her selection of simple cakes and small baked goods, which can be turned out easily. I love sweets which are not too sweet, go well with tea and coffee, and have some nuance, flavor-wise. It looks like this book is just full of that sort of thing. Plus, it has a number of my personal favorites, including World Peace Cookies (a/k/a Korovas-best chocolate cookie ever) and her lovely sables.

I thought I'd try this simple cake first. It appeals because of its ease (Ms. Greenspan's Swedish friend said her mother claimed you could start making it when you saw your friends coming down the road, and it would be ready by the time they settled in for coffee), its ingredients, and the fact that I am a sucker for any thing made in a well-seasoned 9" cast iron pan. ( I just like to show mine off, and it's fun to use.)

This is what you need for my only infinitesimally adapted version:

granulated sugar, 1 cup
grated zest of one lemon
2 eggs
1/4 tsp salt
tsp vanilla
1/2 tsp almong extract
1 cup all purpose flour
8 tbsps melted butter-1/4 lb.
1/4 cup sliced almonds
demarar sugar or sanding sugar

Preheat your oven to 350F and butter a 9" seasoned cast iron skillet, or similarly sized cake pan. In a bowl, mix the lemon zest and sugar with your fingers, distributing well. Mix the eggs in one at a time, preferably with a whisk, until well blended. Add salt and the extracts and the flour, and switch to a rubber spatula or spoon to mix. Fold in the melted butter.

Scrape the batter into your skillet, smooth and sprinkle with the almonds, then some of the demarara or sanding sugar. Bake for 25 to 30 minutes, until it is golden and looking a bit crispy on the edge. Cool 5 minutes, then loosen the edges and bottom with a knife, or a thin spatula. Serve from the pan. It is moist in the middle-a bit marzipan-ish.

The non-cake pictues that you see are of the pantry of my Not So Tidy Kitchen* , because I told Karen I would. For reasons unclear to me, the walls look white. Actually, they are elephant gray. Maybe you will show your pantry too, for her collection?

*What is it that occasionally compels me to capitalize words in this apparently random fashion, ala Winnie the Pooh's Very Big Surprise? I suspect it has something to do with being embarrassed.

Mushroom Alchemy

Nothing is so delightful as coming upon one of these combinations, where a few simple ingredients meld in a delicious and unexpectedly special fashion. I felt like this when I learned about Mudjadarrah, and when I first baked an egg inside a tomato. Jane Grigson was a person with an especially fine nose for this sort of thing, and I am very attached to my shabby, dog-eared Penguin edition of her Good Things, from 1973.*

If you live in Pittsburgh, you should take note: The Giant Eagle has been offering beautiful fresh oyster mushrooms at $5.99 per pound. They are not at all heavy-so you can get masses of them quite cheaply, and they are gorgeous. (They also have nice fresh shitakes for only a dollar more per pound-but that is a more common occurence.) I have been eating the oyster mushrooms like crazy, afraid they will disappear, or go up to $15.99 per pound, like the other wild ones. I have had them sauteed on toast for breakfast, cooked with onions and mixed with rice and pinenuts to stuff cabbage, grilled with a lambchop, tucked in an omelet, and in a barley soup.

It was from Ms. Grigson that I got the idea for this simple combination that really knocks my socks off.In a chapter titled "Edible Woodland Mushrooms" (the oyster mushroom [Pleurotus ostreatus] is one such- it "grows out of trees such as ash and beech in a cluster of soft shelves"), she suggested a method for cooking mushrooms with potatoes, which while quite simple, resulted in the potatoes taking on a good bit of mushroomy flavor. The method I used is even simpler, and had a similar result. Given the usual expense involved with wild mushrooms, it is especially handy to have a method for cooking them which stretches them out.

This is what I did, and I would be very surprised if it did not work as well with a handful of morels, chanterelles, or other precious fungal booty. The Mushroom Lady must have been watching over me. Take some small potatoes-fingerlings or just little yukons or redskins, not much bigger than golfballs, and scrub, but don't peel them. Cut them in half. Toss them with olive oil, salt, pepper, several coarsely chopped cloves of garlic, and rosemary (fresh if possible), and put them in a metal pan in a preheated 475F oven. Roast them until they are starting to get brown and crusty- maybe 20-25 minutes, shaking them from time to time to prevent sticking. (But my oven is slow- so do watch it.)

Put some wild mushrooms, chopped very coarsely, or whole, if small- approximately the same amount as the potatoes (area-wise-they will, of course, be much lighter in weight) into a medium sized bowl and toss with some olive oil, salt and pepper. Take the pan out of the oven, add the mushrooms, and toss or gently stir it all up well. Put it back in and cook until the potatoes are done and the mushrooms have browned. This will probably be about 10 more minutes.

Serve, sprinkled with some chopped parsley. The potatoes will have taken on a lovely mushroomy flavor. So very good. If you had these with, say, some slow scrambled eggs with cream, or greens with a vinagrette, you would be really flying high. It is also quite nice just to eat them plain.

I've never had an actual truffle, but I suspect the effect I've read about, where they perfume other foods on contact, must be similar to what happens here. Pretty cool. I am such a fool for fungi, I do hope someday to have, just once, my very own truffle to play with. Maybe I could write a grant proposal requesting the award of a truffle for uh, experimental purposes?

*You lucky people- at last there is a reprint!

Real Fried Onion Rings

This is one American classic I thought I'd never try to do at home. At the Platonic Diner in the Sky (Home of the "Pie in the Sky" and other ideals-you know the one) these are prepared perfectly and an optional side to every suitable main dish. There, the batter is crisp, brown and light, the onions soft and not the least stringy, but not mushy either. The rings are round, distinct, and never stuck together; they are lightly, but definitely salted, after frying. These perfect rings are well drained and blotted, hot, and served almost instantly after they are done. They are properly made by a gifted fry cook, and are not the sort of thing one makes at home.

It is clearly a messy process, and a last minute pain in the butt- a side dish no-no in my book. Further, they excude wickedness. I like to eat wicked food out, rather than at home, so that there is no evidence around to inhibit the denial process.

Don't get me wrong, I don't really think any good food is actually wicked, except in the most delightful sense. There are just things that I have a harder time resisting than others, and they are more likely to lead to gluttony and regrets. So, I don't eat, say, potato chips at home, as I can't keep a partly eaten bag around. I'll eat them anywhere else though- so don't hesitate to offer, please.

The problem which has developed here, far from the Platonic Diner, is that halfway decent onion rings are getting harder to find. I, like many of my friends and associates, am more than willing to eat halfway decent onion rings. When someone brings in a little tray of them, at lunch, with take-out food, we all (especially yours truly) fall upon them like beasts. But they are less and less good, and harder and harder to find downtown. I find this disappointing-and I don't want to become bitter.

What really made me decide to try them though, was a recipe in the Barefoot Contessa at Home, a gift cookbook which I would not, myself, have bought. I have nothing against Ina Garten. Indeed, from watching her on television, I can see that she is a good cook, and that her recipes work. The thing is, she doesn't really tell me anything I don't already know, or fix things I haven't made before. Possibly it is just that we are pretty similar cooks in a lot of ways, though she obviously knows a lot about catering, and I certainly don't.

The other reason I have avoided her books is just well, strange. Several people-including people who have no idea that I ever made a pot of soup, have told me that I look a whole lot like her. It's not that I think she looks you know, unpleasant, or anything like that. I just truly don't see it myself, though-except that the hair is similar. But I guess there's something in it, coming as it does from so many independent sources. The one that really weirded me out was a person at work who , who said he came upon his wife watching Ms. G on tv, and exclaimed, "My god, [Lindy] has a cooking show!" I mean, he claims he actually thought it was me. I don't know why this is a little creepy, but it is.

I looked through the cookbook, and found the food commonsensical. The photos look good and appealing, and I'd be surprised if they weren't both well tested and well within the abilities of a reasonably adept home cook. And there was a recipe for real onion rings in there. So, I thought I'd try them, you know, just for me, and see if 1) they are reasonably do-able, and 2) if it seems possible to make them while getting a (compatable) dinner of some sort on the table.

I cut her recipe in half, as this was to be a sample, and took her advice about using a deep pot, insead of a frying pan, to avoid oily havoc. This is the test batch I made of Ina Garten's cornmeal-fried onions. You need:

a large spanish onion
buttermilk- 1 cup
coarse salt and freshly ground pepper
all purpose flour 3/4 cup
1/8 cup of medium yellow cornmeal
tsp hot hungarian paprika (you can leave this out if you like- my addition-I like some paprika in my cornmeal coating)
2-3 cups vegetable oil

Peel the onion and slice it 1/2" thick, and separate it carefully into rings. Put the butter milk in a smallish bowl, add salt and pepper, and soak the onion rings in the mix for awhile- preferably an hour or two. In another smallish bowl, mix the flour and cornmeal, and add some salt and pepper, and the paprika if you use it . When you are ready to go-preheat the oven to 200F. (Right away- you're not finishing something else in any 200F oven, so the rest of the dinner had better be top of the stove stuff.) Line a baking sheet with paper towels.

Now, stick a candy thermometer in a dutch oven or similar deep sturdy pot, add the oil and heat to 350F. Have some tongs and the baking sheet at hand, as well as the 2 bowls and a dish of coarse salt. Take about 1/3 of the onion rings out of the buttermilk, dredge in the flour (you can do this with one of your clean hands-keep the other, preferably the dominant hand, dry for tong wrangling), and drop gently in the oil. Fry for about 2 minutes, turning once with the tongs. Extract with tongs, and lay out on the paper towel cover pan. Sprinkle with salt.Check the temperature, adjust the heat accordingly, and do the rest in 2 batches.These guys will stay warm and crisp for 30 minutes while you frantically get the rest of dinner ready.

They are ridiculously good- crisp, tasty and breeze-light, for heaven's sake. You must handle them carefully once they are fried, for they will shatter into shards if you don't. Wow. I've got to figure out a meal that I can make with them, so I can share them, and be adored. So what do you think? Maybe a pan-grilled buffalo burger (my current favorite of all hamburgers) on a homemade bun, and some slaw? Not very original, but then onion rings kind of go with red meat to me, from diner associations, I suppose. I think the slaw may be mandatory. Or maybe a big poofy omelet and sauteed mushrooms? They're awfully pretty, IMO, and not such an alarming project after all.. Any ideas for the rest of the Dinner with Onion Rings? If someone served me some real onion rings with my dinner, I'd be pretty grateful. I'm just saying.

P.S. Yes, of course I ate them. Too many. I'll make them only for company in the future. Not as if this debacle was unpredictable. And BTW, hearburn did not ensue.

Jacques Pepin Speaks

I went to hear Jacques Pepin give a talk, and at first I didn't think I was going to be able to hear much of what he had to say. The Carnegie Music Hall here in Pittsburgh was pretty much filled, even in the 2nd balcony, and his French accent, combined with some acoustic muffling, had me straining to understand every third word. Eventually the random noises settled, and I adjusted to the accent. It was a pleasant evening spent with an interesting, and admirable fellow.

So that the magnitude of my shallowness is apparent, let me note before I say anything else, that even from our perch above, you could see what a handsome guy he is-we should all look so good at 71. This is not the result of a life of leisure. M. Pepin was already working in the kitchens of his family's restaurants when he was 11.

He left school at 13 to begin his 7 day a week apprenticeship in a hotel kitchen, and has been ever since enthusiastically cooking, running the kitchens for several French presidents, developing ideas for Howard Johnson's, opening restaurants, writing highly regarded books about cooking, teaching and performing, and incidentally, for his own satisfation, simultaneously completing a graduate degree in 18th century French literature at Columbia. Yikes. Most of his talk concerned these matters, about which you can read further in his engaging autobiography, The Apprentice: My Life in the Kitchen, and another volume, due to come out shortly. It's fascinating stuff

M. Pepin really came into his own, though, during the question and answer period. Exhibiting the open mind which has led him to absorb and incorporate his wide range of experiences into his individual approach to food and cooking, he fielded questions at very different levels of sophistication with respect, courtesy and humor.

Asked what he "thought of organic foods", he was enthused, while offering some cogent remarks and predictions about prices and availability for masses of Americans. He noted that, as compared to Europeans, there were, of course, Americans whose exposure to foods was much more limited. But, he also noted, because of the more provincial nature of european cooking, there were many Americans, interested in food, who had a much wider range of food experiences than the average European.

When he first came to the United States in the early 1960's, he had to go to a specialty store to buy fresh mushrooms. Now, there are 6 different kinds in his Shop and Save-though most of the time none of them taste like much of anything...

Asked about the experimental foods and foams of El Bulli and the like, he explained that he personally was more interested in a tasty dinner. But he also noted, that like haute couture, which seems so strange on the runway, this kind of cooking will most likely find it's way, in influence, much altered, into our common experience, eventually. In this, and in his anecdotes about Craig Claibourne, Julia Child, and other famous food people he has worked with and known, he shone with a generosity of spirit, openness, good humour and genuine enthusiasm which was a real pleasure. I was so glad I went. A very cool guy.

And just so you don't think he's, you know, one-dimensional, or anything, that's a picture of one of his paintings, cribbed from his website, up there in the corner.

Recipes in General, and Deborah Madison's Mushroom Pie in Particular

Those food writers and books about food which feature the most interesting prose do not uniformly offer the finest recipes. When it all comes in one package, there is no greater treat for an obsessive reader and cook. With or without the literary bonus, reliable recipe writers are rare, and friends forever. They are our benefactors, who should not be overlooked, and cannot be overpraised. With their recipes, I can begin cooking something I have never made before, confident that if I do my part, I am unlikely to have an abject failure on my hands. These sources are, well, more precious than rubies, and all that.

Dorie Greenspan, Mirielle Johnson, the Ruth Reichl-edited yellow Gourmet Cookbook, Everyone Eats Well in Belgium, and Please to the Table, for example, are all nearly perfect sources for recipes which have obviously been thoroughly tested, taste good and interesting, and work properly when you follow them. Deborah Madison is another such recipe writer, who specializes in mostly vegetarian fare.

She has a perpetually surprising flair for striking and creative, yet fundamentally simple combinations of flavors, of the sort which make me shake my head and wonder why I could not have thought of them myself. It really is astonishing that she can be so endlessly inventive with food, without resort to gimickry. I mean, people have been eating and cooking for thousands of years, and even the best of new food ideas are generally reworking combinations or techniques of considerable age. To be so original within this framework is truly remarkable.

For many years, I have kept her substantial Vegetarian Cooking For Everyone on the short shelf with The Joy, Maida Heatter, Marcella Hazan, the yellow Gourmet, my notebook of collected recipes, and a few others I consult regularly. And I'm not even a vegetarian- more a vegephile. Recently, I've been having a terrific time, though, cooking from her two most recent, slimer volumes,Vegetarian Suppers and Vegetarian Soups.

Most recently, I made two suppers from the former, with an eye to using two happy Costco finds: a giant ( one pound!) bag of beautiful sliced dried shitakes and a string parcel of five perfect avocados, ripened bruise-free in a bag on my counter. A friend took me as a guest to the Costco near the airport. There is one going up nearby, which will be accessable to the carless-I'm definitely signing up. (Yes, I also got more excellent bargain pinenuts, too.)

The vegetarian suppers were Black Bean Tostadas (coming your way soon), and a delicious mushroom tart. Here's how you make the tart, as adapted. (Of course, my adaptation may render the recipe less reliable-you should have a look at the original, indeed the whole book, anyway. They have it at my library, even in the small downtown branch.):

dried mushrooms (porcinis in original, I used my shitakes, sliced) one cup
dry white wine or sherry 1 cup
9" tart or pie shell
olive oil
butter
large onion, finely diced, one
sliced fresh mushroom, white or brown 1/2 lb.
portabellas, gills removed, 1/2 lb., in thin slices
sea salt
pepper
tomato paste 1 tsp
sprigs fresh parsley, minced 3
sprig of fresh thyme or marjoram, minced, one-or equivalent dried
egg, one
2/3 cup half and half, cream, or mushroom stock

Preheat oven to 425. Boil dried mushrooms in a saucepan with the wine and 1/2 cup water.Turn off the heat. Cover, and soak 30 minutes. Strain. Save liquid.
Meanwhile, freeze the tart shell.
Heat oil and butter in skillet. Cook onion until it begins to color, about 5 minutes. Add fresh mushrooms and some salt. Turn up heat and cook about 10 minutes, stirring. Stir in the tomato paste, and a little soaking liquid. Add dried mushrooms. Cook for about 15 minutes, adding more liquid in small amounts. Add half the herbs, and taste for salt. Add pepper.

Meanhile, blind bake the shell for about 15-20 minutes. Beat egg and cream. Spread mushrooms in the shell, and pour custard over. Bake about 30 minutes, sprinkle with remaining herbs. Serve with a salad and follow with fruit. for a heartier supper, begin with soup. Leftovers make an enviable take along lunch, whether or not you have workplace equipment for reheating.

Note: The gills are removed from the portabellas so that the color of the dish as a whole will be more medium than dark brown. I decided I didn't care about that, but I thought I'd pass it on. I suppose it might be marginally prettier that way, but I think it's pretty nice looking anyhow.

Kitchen Primer: Shrimp Mornay

I didn't do much exploring on my recent work trip to State College, but I did visit my favorite ( and the only) used bookshop in town. I had located the place on a previous visit and remembered that it is open at night..so I headed right over. It's called Webster's, and I have had good luck there in the past. I got me some nice stuff, including, but not limited to four used cookbooks. One is Craig Claibourne's Kitchen Primer, a simply written introduction to outfitting a kitchen and basic, building-block type recipes, with seriously charming black and white illustrations. It was, in fact, the illustrations which caught my eye in the first place. I thought they might be block prints, but it seems they were "handsomely rendered, in the rarely used scratchboard technique, by Tom Funk."

Remember making these sorts of pictures as a child? You painted a matte black surface over a plain or painted ground, and scratched through the surface to make an image? This is what this looks like if you are really good at it. It's hard to see the photos at this size-if you click on them, you'll get a better view.

In addition to being charming, these detailed black and white illustrations are really helpful. Like the drawings in Charcuterie, which I have recently enjoyed, they show the steps to procedures clearly, possibly in a way that photos, however helpful, cannot.

I'm very fond of photos in cookbooks, particularly for showing you what the finished product should look like. But I'd like to see more explanatory drawn illustrations. All the Elizabeth David and Jane Grigson had decorative line drawings, and I liked them too. It doesn't hurt if the drawings are attractive. You can see the endpapers on this book below.

It was originally published in 1969, a time when I was just beginning to learn to cook, at least in part from the recipes of Craig Claibourne in the New York Times Cookbook my parents gave me when I left home, along with my copy of The Joy, both of which got so worn out that they had to be replaced. I think this would still be a good primer for someone who has a beginner's interest in learning to cook in a way that goes a little beyond throwing a few things together for a 30 minute meal. It does have a flavor of its time though, which I find endearing, but which might be meaningless to someone who wasn't around then. I decided to make something from the book that reminded me of the sort of thing I would have found impressive/fancy at the time. It's still good.

This is what you need to make Shrimp or Crab Mornay:

4 Tbsps butter
2 Tbsps flour
1 cp milk
1/2 cup grated swiss, gruyere, or sharp cheddar
1/4 cup cream
salt
freshly ground pepper
pinch cayenne
1/2 tsp worchestershire sauce
1 lb shrimp or crab, cooked and shelled
4 tbsps grated parm
smoked paprika

Preheat broiler with rack 5" from flame.

Melt 2 tbsp butter, whisk in flour. Add milk, continue to whisk. When thick and smooth, take off heat, stir in cheese, add everything through Worcestershire sauce. Melt the reat of the butter in a skillet, and thoroughly heat the shellfish. Spoon into a gratin pan, or individual oven proof dishes or ramekins. Pour sauce over. Sprinkle with cheese and paprika, and run under the broiler on a baking sheet until bubbly and browned.

Consume. So it's simple and ordinary. Yup. But it is really, really good, and festive. None will be left behind. I admit, I added the paprika. But that's all. And it is, of course, not necessary.

The other books I got are: An old penguin of Jane Grigson's Charcuterie and French Pork Cookery, Jean Anderson's The Green Thumb Preserving Guide (hardback with cover), and a cardboard backed pamphlet, in English, from a French publisher, called The Gastronomy of Alsace, a collection of "family country recipes", with a bunch of illustrations, that looks very promising to me. More to follow on these.

Picnic Tourte and A Golden Delicious Digression

I have gone on at some length about my regard for the late Mireielle Johnston, and her wonderful cookbook, Cuisine of the Sun. More than a few of my most reliable and well loved recipes came from this collection of "Classical French Recipes from Nice and Provence," which appeared in my life in the late seventies. It was, to me, a key to a whole world of distinctive, delicious and unpretentious food. No doubt the recipes are classic, but they were also chosen, refined and executed by a brilliant home cook, and very clever lady. I was pretty much never disappointed when I trusted her judgment.

There was not much in this book I hadn't tried or considered in one form or another, but there was one unusual dessert I never got around to making. She called it,"one of the most traditional and well-loved desserts of Nice", but also a "curious blend". The tourte de blettes always seemed odd, including as it does spinach or chard, and cheese in a sweet pie. I had been curious to try it, but shy of commiting time and ingredients to something I might well not like. Now that I had a farmbox, with plenty of spinach and chard, some pine nuts I got for a gift, and the blog to encourage me experiment, it seemed like a good time to give it a try.

The ingredients are these:
(BTW MJ says this serves eight. This borders on the hysterical. I would say it serves at least 12, and I am known for my greed.)

Pastry

3 cups unbleached all purpose flour
2 eggs beaten
1 cup softened butter, unsalted
1/2 cup sugar
about 1 tbsps salt

Filling

4 large golden delicious apples
3 tbsps raisins
1 tbsp dark rum
1 cup of cooked, drained and squeezed and well chopped chard, spinach, or combo
4 tbsps pine nuts
1/2 cup confectioner' s sugar
1/4 to 1/2 pound mild, bland cheese (gouda or mild cheddar, eg.) diced small
2 beaten eggs
grated rind one lemon
2 tbsps currant jelly
3 tbsps confectioners sugar

Digression: It's about those golden delicious apples. I know they are horrible eaten out of hand, a travesty of an apple-the texture is mealy and the flavor insipid; the skin is unusually tough. Crispness, one of the most essential qualities of an eating apple, is pretty much entirely absent. (Caveat: I have never had one freshly picked, usually any apple right off the tree is a thousand times improved from a storage apple.) I assumed, from sampling it, that the golden delicious was bred for storage and transport, and regularly ignored for years directions to use them in cooking. I just substituted something I knew to be a reasonable cooking apple.

I had vaguely remembered a dispute reported in the early days of common marketdom, in which the many fabulous varieties of English apple were seen as threatened by a French proposal to recognize fewer varieties. Since most of the recipes including the golden delicious were French, I guess I just thought that the poor dears didn't have good cooking apples to choose from, or some foolishness of that kind. I may have even been pompous on the topic-it seems likely. I'm here to tell you that this was a Serious Error. In turns out that somehow, in cooking, the golden delicious is magically transformed. It softens, while keeping its shape, and the sugars condense, or something, resulting in an almost flowery, carmelized yumminess. End of digression, I think.

Pastry:On a floured surface, work the ingredients together until well blended, stretching the dough away from you with the heel of your hand. Shape into two balls, one 2/3 and the other 1/3 of the total dough. Cover with a clean nonterry dish cloth, and leave 2 hours at room temperature.

Tourte:Peel the apples and cut 2 in small cubes. Put the raisins and rum in a little pan. Boil and then simmer 2 minutes. Preheat oven to 425F. Mix the greens, raisins, apple cubes, pine nuts, sugar, cheese, lemon rind and eggs, in abig bowl. Slice the remaining apples. Roll the pastry out thinly. Butter a deeper than ordinary pie dish, casserole or mold, and spread the larger circle of dough in the bottom, up the sides, and over the edges of the baking dish. Prick it all over with a fork. Heat the jelly and brush it over the bottom and sides of the crust. Add the filling, and cover with the apple slices.

Cover with remaining circle of dough, and trim neatly. Poke the top crust with a fork, and bake 15 minutes. Turn heat to 325F, and continue to bake until golden- approximately 45 minutes more. (It should be a darker gold than appears in the pictures, which are washed out by sunshine and an inept photographer-me.) Sprinkle with confectioner's sugar. I snuck mine out of the pan, because it was an old beat up metal one, but if you make it in a pretty baking dish, you won't have to upend it.This may be eaten, said Ms. Johnston, warm or cold, and is especially suited to buffets and picnics.

I would agree. I was surprised by the taste. It is simultaneously a very individual flavor and not weird. Not a sharp taste at all, neither the greens nor the cheese stand out. If any taste dominates, it is the apple, but just barely. It's all kind of mellow, taste-wise, in the manner of a custardy sort of thing, though an entirely different texture. It is quite solid, but soft, not chewy- just sort of densely packed. Unlike a ricotta kind of pie, it is not prone to collapse. It is easy to slice, hence good for picnics and buffets- or to take sliced, in a lunchbag. It goes extremely well with strong hot coffee. I'm in favor, and glad I tried it. I'm thinking of making some for company. Meantime, I've got a lunchbag treat for the week. I might pre-bake the bottom crust a little next time.

Food Bound: Cookbook Reviews and a Recipe

Quite a few people, including me, will be reviewing and discussing some cookbooks, and other food lit. on Food, Bound,a new site at the The Well Fed Network. I have two cookbook reviews posted at the moment, one of the Ruhlman/Polcyn collaboration Charcuterie, and the other of Nick Malgieri's A Baker's Tour. In a follow-up post to the latter, you'll find a recipe for a Sicilian Cheese Pie, with a Brioche Crust, as pictured on the left. Come see.

Looney Tunes, But No Cardoons

Here in Pittsburgh, we don't generally see cardoons, and so far I have not yet been able to find any. I'm still looking; I want to try them. A while back, I asked the on-duty manager at a local supermarket if they would consider stocking cardoons. He said, "Lady, we already have them. You need to look in the videos." As I pushed my cart on, puzzled, the little lightbulb appeared in the bubble cloud over my head. He thought I'd said "cartoons."

I can see that it may be awhile before they turn up here. Meanwhile, I thought I'd try this gratin, usually made with cardoons, but adapted for preparation with fennel and belgian endive by Anya van Bremzen. In her view it has a similar effect with these substitute vegetables, both of which are personal favorites of mine.

This recipe appears in Ms. van Bremzen's voluminous and worthy New Spanish Table. I've adapted it very slightly. You may be beginning to think that I am overdoing it with this book in general, and almonds in particular. All I can say is that the book was due back at the library, and it is entirely possible that a person can't have too many almonds. If you would like to make this too, you should assemble the following:

fresh lemon juice 3 tbsps
belgian endives 5
fennel bulb, stalks trimmed off
chicken broth 1 1/2 cups (veg broth fine, I'm sure, but I have a really nice batch of c. broth going on)
olive oil 4 tbsps
a pinch of sugar
coarse salt
black pepper, freshly groung
minced onion 1/3 cup
garlic cloves, minced 3 large
parsley, minced 3 tbsps
all purpose flour 5 tbsps
whole milk 3/4 cup
slivered blanched almonds 1 1/4 cups. Reserve 1/4 cup-grind the rest in a coffee grinder or mini- processor

Fill a bowl with cold water and add 2 tbsps lemon juice. Cut up the veg as follows, and put them in the lemon water: Quarter endives lengthwise. Cut fennel bulb in half lengthwise; then cut each half into 4 slices.

Preheat oven to 450F. When you are ready, drain and arrange in layers in a wide heavy pan. Add 3/4 cup broth, 2 tbsps olive oil, 1 tbsp lemon juice, sugar. Dampen some parchment paper, crumple it, and set it on top of the veg. Bring to a boil, and simmer til just tender, about 20 minutes. Drain. Arrange in a single layer in a buttered gratin dish. Heat 2 tbsps olive oil. add onion, and cook til transparent. Add garlic and parlsey and stir a bit; stir in flour, cook 1 minute. Increase heat and whisk in milk and remainig stock. Cook til thickened. Stir in ground almonds. Spread sauce over veg. Scatter unground almonds over all. Bake til browned and bubbly. (Probably about 20-25 minutes.)

This can be served as a side dish, but personally, I think it makes a fine supper on it's own with some really good bread to mop up the sauce. Followed by a pear and some cheese, it seemed pretty complete to me.

Just a Reminder (and noodge): I hope you will post about your favorite economical meal, and clever treats for when the cupboard is bare, and will send me your permalink by April 2nd, for inclusion in Something From Nothing.