Toast

Kachelmues

This post is not about noodles, but there was no picture of the kachelmues. I have provided my own, below, but I wanted you to see where the recipe came from. The lady making noodles is from a little pamphlet called "The Gastronomy of Alsace, 75 simple recipes". It is not particularly old. Dated 1982, it was apparently produced in France for English speaking tourists, and sold as a memento. I bought it for $2.00, in a used bookshop in State College. I was intrigued because it had some recipes totally new to me, and because I have not seen many English-language cookbooks covering the widely admired cooking of this region.

Despite the recent publication date, the recipes in this little book are the sort one finds in much older sources. There are those weirdly personal/vague measuring techniques ("a glass of milk") and some pretty cavalier directions, which at times presume you know so much about the techniques that you really shouldn't need a recipe at all. The particular kind of demented obsessive person I happen to be enjoys trying this sort of thing, to see what can be made of it.

I picked this recipe for an egg and onion dish because it is simple, and because it uses things I already had in the house. With a salad and the recommended side of "jacket [i.e. baked] potatoes", it makes a complete vegetarian supper. Rather than paraphrase the recipe, I have included the entire thing as written, in case you find it amusing, as I do.

Fondue aux ognions et aux oeufs
"Kachelmues"
Onion and egg fondue

1 kg. peeled onions/1 table spoon flour/100 g. butter/1 pot fresh cream/1-2 eggs per person/1 glass milk/salt/cayene pepper.

Chop onions and fry in butter until transparent. Season with salt and pepper. (5 dessert spoons onions required per person). Add 1 table spoon of flour to the pan, moisten with a few spoonsful of cold milk. (avoid curdling). Cook on a low heat; add 2 spoonsful of fresh cream and mix well. Proceed until all the cream has been mixed in. To this fairly thick sauce, add the thickly sliced hardboiled eggs. Serve with jacket potatoes which have been kept warm in a towel in an earthenware dish.

This recipe from the Vale of Ville dates back to the middle ages. The kachelmues are served after potato soup and followed by goat's cheese and a glass of "William's Pear" liquor.

The potato soup seemed a bit much to me with the baked potato, but I would have been glad to finish up with the goat cheese and pear stuff if I had any in the house. It definitely needed the salad, but was a success- very good comfort food. My next item from this book may well be the Kugelhopf. I have made one once before-recently enough to compare.

Noodle Lady photo by E.H. Cordier

Peaches and Cream Pie

I am not much of a one for excessive fooling around with fruit pies..mostly, I like them straight up, with maybe a ghost of one spice. This one is an exception, what with the cream and so on, but I think I may actually prefer it to ordinary peach pie, when it's made in optimal circumstances. As was not the case here, sorry to report. And not that I would call any homemade peach pie "ordinary".

Of course, if you have really splendid , perfect tree ripened peaches, you are not going to be all crazy and cook them in a pie, or even refrigerate them. You'll want to have them warm, ripe and plain, maybe served with a little knife to slice them, or just slurped up whole, dripping down your chin. Unless, of course, you are fortunate enough to have a peach tree of your own. Then, once you are totally replete , you will start wanting to be doing stuff to them. I don't have a peach tree, but I find that commercial peaches, of the sort that are picked unripe, can make admirable pies. Especially the white fleshed ones, which taste sort of winey, or floral to me.

Since I had company for dinner two nights in a row, I thought it would be best to make something or other ahead-and assembled my pie early. This is my first time freezing a homemade pie, so of course I picked something with a custard that has to be added just before serving, and a top crust, and then complicated matters by making it in a pyrex pan.

It seemed, after a brief survey, that most folks think it is better to freeze a pie before baking it, and to bake it without defrosting. Hence, a metal pie pan is in order, since a pyrex pan is not going to survive a trip direct from the freezer to a 450F oven. Whoops. This bit of logic did not surface until my pie was frozen, so I adapted the whole business to accomodate my little faux pas. I put the pie, from the freezer, into a cold oven, and let the oven and pie heat to 450F together.

I did realize from the start that freezing the cream and egg yolk was not a plan. So before I fitted the top crust on, I cut two big triangular vents on top, for pouring the raw custard mix in later. I did the glazing right before baking, too. I made this particular pie earlier this week, and wrapped it up well before freezing.

I used my usual two crust recipe. I added a bit more cornstarch to the peaches than usual, due to the freezing and custard. The bottom crust was sprinkled with dried breadcrumbs as an extra absorption anti-stodge barrier. I filled the pie with 8 largish peeled, thinly sliced white peaches, 1/2 cup sugar, 3 tbsps cornstarch and a wee bit of freshly grated nutmeg and a pinch of cinnamon. It was dotted with butter,covered with the aforementioned top-crust-with-big-triangle-cut-outs, and pinched before freezing.

When I was ready to bake, I mixed 3/4 cup of cream well with one egg yolk, and poured it in the triangular holes. Egg glaze and sparkly sugar sprinkles (corny-but I'm addicted) and then it went into a cold oven, on a cookie pan, set to 450F. Once the oven came up to temperature, I gave it 20 minutes at 450F, then turned it down to 350F. If you make a pie like this, it will take anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour and 15 to finish off.

Of course, you've got to keep an eye on it to make sure it doesn't get over brown, If it is browning too fast, you can cover the darker areas with foil. Also of course you don't want to burn it... but an undercooked pie is a disgrace and a disappointment. Cute thing about this one is, you can poke a skewer through the triangles to make sure the peaches are all soft before you take it out. Very handy.

I strongly recommend against the starting in a cold oven, desperation ploy. Ew. The bottom crust was way soggy, and now I don't know how much to attribute to the freezing process, and how much to this mistake. I guess I am going to have to try another frozen pie to see if the option is usable for me.

But hey-have some fun with a pie. You can always run whatever cooling device you have against the oven, and waste your money in a worthy cause. I do it with the air conditioner now, but I did it with a big old fan before I had the high tech cooler devices-once in a while. Because when can you have a real peach pie but summer?

Ajvar Shrimp Salad

Many thanks to steven for the tip on ajvar. I was just too hot and sticky for much cooking this evening, but fortunately I stopped at Turquoise yesterday. The little Turkish Deli on Murray Avenue in Squirrel Hill has lots of goodies to take out, including their own yogurt, grape leaves, and pastries. And they had the ajvar. This spread of red pepper, eggplant, oil and garlic is much the consistency of mayonaisse, and seems to work well in a lot of the same contexts. There is a super spicy version, and a less spicy version. I tried the less spicy version first.

I made a sort of Middle Eastern shrimp salad with it, and I think it's pretty good.It had a pound of shrimp, boiled with some Old Bay Seasoning and shelled, and about a pound of boiled fingerling potatoes, sliced yellow and red peppers, spring onions, a few oil cured olives, fresh chives, mint and cilantro, a squirt of lemon, and a few tablespoons of the ajvar. Smoked paprika and sliced hard boiled egg to top it off. We had it with grilled cheesy bruschetta, and cherries for dessert. There's just enough left for a sandwich for lunch tomorrow, after friend I. and I had some dinner. (No small eaters around here.)

Nice easy cleanup, too, which is good, as I have friends coming for dinner tomorrow. There is to be a peach pie, as you will see.

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.

Clem's

I am very happy to be home. Spending most of the week in seminars didn't leave much time for looking for new places of interest in State College, PA. Clem's is neither new nor new to me, but there is good reason to stop there on the way home from these festivities, and we always do. Located just outside of Blairsville, PA, about an hour away from Pittsburgh, it has a big old wood barbeque pit. They make ribs and chicken, and serve all the usual sides-potato salad, coleslaw, baked beans- and have several excellent brands of root beer.A person can be very happy here.

I have never stopped at Clem's, day or night, when they didn't have cars and trucks in the parking lot. You can smell the place before you see the "1/2 mile to Clem's" sign, and it smells spectacularly good.A while back they burned most of the place down with an overenthusiastic fire, and we were having some withdrawal pangs and anxiety. But they rebuilt, and the place looks just exactly the same. If it wasn't entirely lacking in artful display, I'd say they'd aged it, to
take off the new shine. I think it's just the woodsmoke though; things do get dusty pretty fast.

Clem's sauce is great, and you can buy a big old reusable quart ball jar of the stuff for $6.50. It is neither bland nor superhot, just kind of the perfect essence of red barbecue, where the individual ingredients are not discernable. I bought some, of course, and what I do with it is so completely nothing special, that I would be embarassed to tell you if it wasn't so good. I put a piece of pork shoulder in a slow cooker, pour the bottle over it and cook it all day. That's all. I do it a day ahead, chill it, peel off the fat on top, shred the meat, and serve it on toasted onion rolls with aforementioned sides.

This should be followed by pie. watermelon. or ice cream. But you knew that.

Pizza at Roberto's

Although Roberto's in Belleview, just outside of Pittsburgh, is apparently named for it's proprietor, and has a casually Italianate style, it is also graced with a few pictures of that other Roberto , close to the hearts of Pittsburghers, Number 21, Mr. Clemente himself. I find this especially endearing, as a long time fan/hero-worshipper from childhood. My own late, lamented big grey fluffy cat, Roberto, was named after the man in right field.

These and other non-food factors-(coziness, friendly smart waitstaff, nice old-fashioned ceramic tiles, marble, flowers and the gorgeous woodburning stove you see in the photo) predisposed me in favor of the place.(The picture was taken by one of my friends, as I take hopeless indoor photos, especially those with a larger subject than, say, a cookie. ) Actually, the stove is a major food factor. It is over 1000F in there and the pizzas cook in about a minute. You can watch the cooks stretch the flubbery dough thin, top it with good things, and slide the pizzas in and out.

The three of us shared an antipasto platter, with thin slices of bread, caponata (a really good one), tuna-artichoke spread, and roasted peppers and mushrooms-good and pretty much just right for 3 people who are about to eat pizzas. My delicious pizza (you see it to the right, but it was larger than a cookie)- the name of which I forget- had a thin scraping of tomato sauce, little balls of mozzarella, folded bits of ham, and chunks of artichoke which were just the right size. There are quite a few choices of toppings, and they are applied lightly, so the weird soggy over-topped pizza thing never happens.

There's an espresso machine and homemade tiramisu if you want a dessert. I've been to Roberto's twice in the last 3 weeks, and I'll go there again soon. The only thing I would change- and I plan to ask if I can next time, is that I'd like my pizza a bit browner/longer cooked. I imagine it would just be a matter of a few more seconds. I would point out that nobody else wished for this, and that I am a fiend for very browned yeast dough- which is not so popular in these parts.

The pizza is good, the place and people are friendly...oh, and my good sized pizza was $9.99, big enough to bring some home, too.

Gemelli with Shrimp and 3 Peas

Am I overdoing it with the pasta here? I do tend to eat a lot of pasta in the summer. Well, and in the winter,too, actually. Anyhow, I was out of ideas for the peashoots that came with my farmbox this week. There were lots of them. (Peashoots that is-not such a lot of ideas.) First, I made the Potage St. Germaine with Peashoots and Chives that I figured out last year, which also addressed the lettuce glut. I even managed to avoid the multiple equipment failures and personal klutziness issues that were such fun the first time.

Nice, but there's a limit to the amount of it a person wants to consume. It is more the small bowl than the giant bucket kind of thing. I remembered seeing a recipe for a stir fry with 3 peas, and decided to adapt the idea for a pasta, with a few shrimp I had on hand. I wouldn't call this a sauce, since it is not at all liquidy. This non-liquid business was more or less intentional, with the idea of a pasta salad for lunch tomorrow in mind. The "three peas" are snow peas, regular peas, and peashoots. I thought it was pretty good with the shrimp, but if I left the shrimp out, I would have used parmesan shavings, instead of the breadcrumbs.

This is what I used:

4 oz bacon, cut in thin strips, cross-wise
a shallot, minced
2 cups peas shoots, chopped up coarsely
1 cup snow peas, whole
1/2 cup defrosted frozen little peas
pinch aleppo pepper
10 raw shrimp, shelled
1/2 cup veal broth
1/4 cup fresh mint, sliced very thin
6 oz gemelli or other pasta
toasted breadcrumbs

This is what I did:

I started the pasta water and the sauce at the same time. As soon as the pasta water boiled, I added and cooked the pasta. The sauce was ready first. When the pasta was cooked, I mixed them together in the sauce pot. For a saucier effect, you could add a bit of the pasta water.

To make the sauce, I cooked the bacon in a heavy pan until it was crispy, then removed it to drain on paper towels. I added the shrimp, and the aleppo pepper, and cooked them until just done. I removed those too, sauteed the shallots, peas shoots and snow peas. Then I put everything back in the pot with the broth, cooked it all down a little, and plopped in the prepared pasta. I mixed the mint in last. It was nice warm with toasted breadcrumbs on top. Not so bad with a little vinagrette and some oily olives, room temp, for a lunch next day.

Baked Pasta/Macaroni and Cheese

I've got nothing against a classic mac and cheese. Generally, it is deep dish, with a crispy top layer, and gooey warm and cheddary, doled out in big soft spoonfuls, comfort food of high magnitude. It's just that my preference for a high proportion of crusty top part in my own portion, has led me to make my mac and cheese in a large shallow pan, and cover the top with buttery bread crumbs for insurance.

What we have here is something else again, further along the same path, and a distant relative of Carmela Soprano's baked ziti. This sort of baked pasta is more of a gratin, it is not custardy, and it has less cheese. The first one I made was from the house cookbook I bought years ago at Al Forno, in Providence. This was a really wonderful spicy super crispy almagam of cauliflower, cheeses, tomatos and cream, and it is a dish I have made over and over again. You can read about it here. It's really terrific.

Since then I've found that the basic blueprint is a good one for a quick dinner of that which remains of the fridge, assuming it goes well together. While this one does not have the transcendent qualites of the magic cauliflower gratin, it makes a nice mac and cheese variation. Generally, I make these crispier than you see in the photo-I kind of chickened out, thinking it would look burnt. I shouldn't have been a coward-it;s better when it's on that edge.

Tonight's macaroni cheese gratin thing had:

6 oz cooked pasta
1 cup cream
1 cup grated jarlsberg cheese
6 oz quartered button mushrooms
1 smoked pork chop, cut in small cubes
chopped fresh parsley
tablespoon prepared dijon mustard
grated nutmeg
salt
white pepper
pinch red pper
grated parmesan 1/4 cup
a leek cooked in a bit of butter til soft
dry bread crumbs
olive oil spray

I oiled the inside of an oval gratin dish, and mixed together everything but the parm and bread crumbs. The pasta, being hot, had a good start on melting the cheese. I topped it with the parm and bread crumbs, sprayed it with the spray (I like this for even browning) and stuck it in a preheated 500F oven. Yup. Really. You have to watch it, because it depends not only on the oven, but the ingredients, and maybe some mystical factors whether it takes 15 minutes or 45 minutes to get done. This one took 30 minutes in my rather slow oven-but that's no guarantee. You know when this sort of thing is done when it's bubbling underneath, and brown and very crusty on top.

I'd suggest trying the cauliflower one first, and then making up your own. I've no idea if these are anything particularly authentic, but I'm very fond of them.

Favorite Pie

It takes one hell of a bakery to produce anything approaching the goodness of the lamest homemade pie. Why this is I do not know. Many good bakeries produce excellent flat tarts, and wonderful cakes, but a regular old American pie from the same place is often a sad thing. Some diners and restaurants have excellent pies-so what is the story? It may be partially a question of fresh-from-the -oven-ness, but that can't be the whole deal, since homemade pie is also better in its leftover form.

I suspect it has to do with the fact that a really good pie is generally not perfect-looking. Crusts which are underhandled are flakier and better than those without flaw, which have been manhandled into perfection. Probably bakeries have found that their customers don't want stuff that looks imperfect- they think there's something wrong with it. Even my pie-making idols-ladies of my mother's generation who were practised, slick makers of zillions of delicious homemade pies made pies clearly not the work of a machine. Their pies looked tons more skillful than anything I turn out, but they were hand work, and didn't hide it.

It's nice that there are luxuries so easily available to anyone not so poor as to be lacking decent food and shelter, which are virtually unknown to folks who never do any of their own housework. Like line-dried-in the-sun sheets, for another example. But I'm wandering off topic again.

When I say this is my favorite pie, I mean my favorite American style, pyrex pie plate kind of pie. It would be hard to decide between this little number and a lemon tart or tarte tatin. It is even pretty hard to relegate cherry, rhubarb, blackberry and the other lovelies to lesser spots in line. I just love pie. Way more than cakes, or cookies, or even ice cream, they are splendiforous. A nectarine or peach pie with blueberries is gorgeous and wildly aromatic, juicy and tangy, and smells of summer.

Generally, I make it as an ordinary 2 crust pie. As you can see, I am not a particularly gifted hand at the lattice crust. I tend to cut crooked strips, and panic when they break while I'm setting them up. Still, I'll never get better at it without some practice, and I do think the colorful filling deserves a bit of showing off. I generally make more crust than I really need for a double-crusted pie, so that I can cover up mistakes by patching, and don't have to roll everything out just so. I like to use some real lard in a crust, but when I don't have any of the real stuff, I use a combination of butter and crisco. I start with 3 cups of flour, which would theoretically make a 10" double crust pie, but my pan is 9 inches.I just make little cinnamon-sugar thingies with the leftover dough. They are nice with ice cream. This pie crust (which is pretty much a standard fruit pie crust for me) has:

flour 3 cups
sugar 1 tbsp
salt 1 tsp
1 egg yolk
1 tsp lemon juice
unsalted butter 12 tbsps chilled or frozen
crisco or lard 4 tbsps chilled or frozen
ice water

It's made in the usual way in the food processor: Dry ingredients are fluffed up. Then the butter and crisco are cut into small squares and added, and the contents pulsed until the over-all texture is mealy. The egg yolk and lemon are pulsed in, and ice water added through the tube while it runs, just until the whole thing comes together. A hour is usually enough chilling time to roll them out.

The filling has:
6 nectarines, sliced-no need to peel them, but if using peaches, you must peel
pint blueberries
2/3 cup sugar
3 tbsps cornstarch (I don't like to use so much thickening, but this is a very damp filling.)
squirt each orange juice and lime juice
sprinkle each cinnamon, nutmeg

It is dotted with butter. Because the filling can be so moist, I generally sprinkle some fine dry breadcrumbs on the bottom crust before pouring it in. I may be deluding myself, but I think it keeps the bottom crust from extreme sogginess. This pie has a light egg glaze with a sprinkling of coarse sanding sugar on top for color and a little crunchiness. Obviously, these last are entirely optional.

Mushroom Lady

I thought you might like to meet the excellent Mushroom Lady, one of my presiding kitchen god(desse)s. She is by a photographer called Ernest Bloch, taken 1912. She is on a postcard, and I have her in a little frame on the kitchen wall. I love the mushroomishness of her hat. It says she is Swiss, but I think she is direct from the Brothers Grimm.

Update: I have been looking for more information on "a photographer called Ernest Bloch" for some time. I recently discovered, by reading a wikipedia article more carefully, that the reason he is obscure, is that he isn't obscure at all. He is the famous composer Ernest Bloch, who also had an interest in photography.