All about eating

The sound of deadlines

2007-04-25T21:30:00.000+02:00

'I love deadlines; I like the whooshing sound they make when they fly by.'
Douglas Adams

If you tell people you've got a garden, they probably imagine you sitting in a fancy chair on a meticulously mown lawn with a glass of chilled white wine. If you mention you grow vegetables, they start frowning (this does sound like work?!), but then clear up as their mind's eye pictures armfuls of freshly harvested unspecified greens. Your arms, that is, while they are enjoying that glass of chilled white wine on your lawn. The table is laid, of course, in this fairy-tale video and the next shot shows you smiling and tossing these greens into a large bowl. Yes, they like the idea of you having a garden.

Let's not beat about the bush: a garden is a lot of work. Gardening is one big fight against draught, heat, pelting rains, lice, birds and ... time. Spring has several important deadlines dictated by nature, though the weather may postpone or advance their date without telling you. Then there are the fellow-gardeners you need to keep an eye on, as you don't want to be known as someone who is late with every crop.

This year didn't start well. I forgot to buy parsley seed for sowing in November (my usual 'but-I-already-have'); while others had spinach coming up, I was still fertilizing the soil; my broad beans are half the size of my neighbour's (mine are surely a different kind) and full of lice; parsnip (usually an easy crop) refuses to sprout; what I thought to be rucola turned out to be mustard choy of which I had sown enough already; the potatoes I ordered to be dibbled in March arrived by the end of April.

Still, I don't think other gardeners will dare laugh at me. There's one crop in my garden that makes up for all these failures, one with which I can silence any comment. 'Kapucijners Winterhefe', as the handwriting on the envelope stated, partly in Dutch, partly in German. Winter marrowfat peas. See picture, taken in March. I got them from a friend, who got them etc. All I could find out via the internet was that someone in Germany remembered his grandmother sowing these peas in November. So that's what I did. It seems to work. Unprecedentedly: they are not eaten by birds (yet).

The unspecified greens I was tossing into a bowl are the ingredients of what I call tuinsla, garden salad: a mixture of salads, cresses and herbs. This salad alone is worth all the work and stress a garden brings you.

Garden salad
Use several of these fresh greens: leaf lettuce, cress, spinach, mustard choy, mint, tarragon, ramson, chive (do try the flowers). Add olive oil (I'm very fond of Apulian olive oil) and lemon juice. Toss. Eat. Go get yourself a garden.

Dead horse and anchovy

2007-03-04T14:58:00.000+01:00

In one of my all-time favourite British sitcoms, To The Manor Born, Audrey fforbes-Hamilton (living in somewhat reduced circumstances outside her manor) brings her butler Brabinger tins of tunafish from the grocer's. 'He seems to like it. I can't think why', she comments and begins preparations to cook her own jam.
Although fforbes-Hamilton can hardly be seen as a literary intellectual, I was reminded of this scene when reading The Intellectuals and the Masses. Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880-1939 by John Carey. In this book intellectuals are shown to feel threatened by the masses that crowd the cities: 'semi-human swarms, drugged by popular newspapers and cinema', soulless suburbians with bad skins from eating tinned salmon and ditto beans.

Tinned food has always made us uneasy. It's convenient of course, and modern techniques have made it no less healthier than fresh food. The British Nutrition Foundation even states that it is often a good source of protein and fibre and calls it a myth that canned food is high on fat and sugar. Tinned food may come in handy when the famous Unexpected Visitor finally arrives (or so Elizabeth David contemplated), but then: would you dare to open a few tins for them and call it dinner? None other than the world's most famous chef, Escoffier, stood at the cradle of tomatoes in a tin, but don't you think your guests still would prefer it fresh and home-made?

It wasn't so much for the convenience of modern house keeping, though, that techniques to preserve food have assumed such enormous proportions since the late 19th century. It had all to do with waging war and feeding armies. It was during the siege of Metz (Franco-Prussian War, 1870) that Escoffier began to study the preservation of meat and vegetables. And it made George Orwell write that in the long run tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine gun (Carey, p. 22).

It is said that, while catering for the troops, Escoffier could make a decent meal out of a dead horse and a tin of anchovy. What's good enough for ravenous soldiers, will do for the Unexpected Guest. Just leave out the dead horse.

Acciughate
Take the tinned anchovy out of the tin and heat in ample olive oil till it gives off its taste. Pour this acciughate lavishly on fat slices of boiled potato. Add freshly ground pepper.

Acciughate can be served with all kinds of vegetables. On boiled potato it's the Italian version of the Swedish Janssons frestelse, and simply irresistible.

Authentic Caffs - Germany

2007-02-09T16:57:00.000+01:00

Aachen
Käselust (shop/pub), Pontstrasse 6 (near Rathaus)
T +49(0)2414017449
Last visit: Dec. 2006.
Great choice of cheeses from all over Europe, for sale or to eat upstairs for lunch with grilled vegetables accompanied by a glass of German wine. A.o. Bavarian Obatzer and two varieties of Austrian Bergkäs (smelly and very smelly, no doubt).

Anywhere
In every town, especially in main railway stations: ‘Bratwurst’ (pork sausage), always served in a roll. We risk missing (international) trains to get one. The ones I favour are Krakauer and Thüringer.

Frankfurt/Main
Café Diesseits (pub), Konrad-Broßwitz-Straße 1, (Bockenheim)
T +49(0)69704336
Last visit: 2005.
Frequented by both arty and/or politically conscious students and young mothers (categories that are not necessarily mutually exclusive, of course). Good coffee, tea nana. Baked camembert, omelettes, cakes. The usual German non-gutbürgerlich stuff, but well made.

Frankfurt/Main
Farmer's market at Konstablerwache (Thursdays and Saturdays)
Last visit: 2005.
One of the very few reasons to visit Frankfurt's centre (life takes place in the quarters around it). Lots of good vegetables, goat's cheese, bread, sausages. Very good choice of herbs for one's garden. Not to be missed: the wines and sekts of Weingut Rollanderhof.

Frankfurt/Main
Mosebach (restaurant), Sandweg 29 (U4, Marianplatz)
T +49(0)694930396
Last visit: 2005.
‘Immerwährende Handkäs’, good food and equal German wines (reds too). Interesting mixture of normally excluding atmospheres: ‘gutbürgerlich’ and arty.

Frankfurt/Main
Zur Sonne (pub), Berger Straße 312 (Bornheim)
T +49(0)69459396
Last visit: 2004.
Traditional Ebbelweikneipe (cider pub). Order a home made cider (sauer gespritzt = with mineral water) and eat a ‘Handkäs mit Musik’ (soft yellow cheese; mit Musik = with vinegar and caraway). If you’re less adventurous: they also serve a good ‘grü’ Soss’ (Frankfurter speciality: green sauce, made of seven herbs and served with boiled eggs and potatoes or boiled meat) and an excellent ‘Schlachtplatte’ (pork sausages from freshly slaughtered animals; we even loved the black pudding). Large garden with wood tables where street vendors sell Bretzel.

Tortilla evolution

2007-01-21T14:54:00.000+01:00

It's not always easy being a gourmet. Especially not when, tired after a hard-day's work, you're home late due to rain and traffic jams. While slowly moving forward in first gear, there's plenty of time to contemplate dinner, but all you can think of is 'pizza' or 'no pizza', the yearning for a quick and tasty take-away immediately suppressed by reality: take-aways are no good. So you just manage a visit to the grocer's, knowing that though cooking is a comforting and relaxing thing to do most of the time, today it's not.
For days like these, you need recipes for easy-to-make, ready-in-no-time comfort food. One of my old-time-classics is Spanish tortilla: a robust omelet with potatoes, onions and cheese (!). I used to make it (shame on me) with precut and precooked potatoes which I added to sauteed onions and an optional garlic on which I poored beaten eggs and ready-grated gouda. Green salad. Easy, quick, comforting.
But I learn, thank heaven. Precut, precooked and ready-grated were replaced by their untampered-with originals. Takes a bit longer, but gives a better result. And I know better still since I read Janneke Vreugdenhil's tortilla tricks, both to my delight (a real tortilla is so much better) and my sorrow (goodbye to ready-in-no-time). Making a good tortilla is a time consuming process with patience as the main ingredient. Apart from that, I learned to use lots of oil (the potatoes are more or less boiled in it) and to leave out the cheese.

This is how you do it:

Tortilla
Softly fry onions for about half an hour in a generous amount of olive oil. Put the onions aside, add some more oil and fry the thinly sliced potatoes (with some salt) softly until just ready (another half hour at least). They should be well covered in oil and not turn brown. Take out and let cool. When cooled, stir them together with the onions into a bowl with beaten eggs. Add grated pepper. Reheat pan (there should be enough olive oil left), add potatoe mixture. Turn tortilla after 5 minutes and fry other side (for this you might need the trics listed by Vreugdenhil).
Can be eaten hot or cold.

This tortilla will taste like a confit of potatoe: soft, sweet, fatty. It may take time, but requires next to no effort - the ideal comfort food at the end of a long day.

Authentic Caffs - introduction

2007-01-07T17:08:00.000+01:00

'... unpretentious in the extreme, not to say unequivocally basic (...) Only the boldest, the poorest or the most ignorant would seek shelter and sustenance here. (...) Forget pubs, he reasoned, this was where the country's true and ancient culinary heritage resided; only in these uncompromising estaminets would you find the quintessence of a unique way of English life, fast disappearing.'
(Quoted from Armadillo by William Boyd, p. 70-71)

If there is one thing in Boyd’s novel I'll never forget, it’s these thoughts of Lorimer Black, the novel’s protagonist, on a café across Old Kent Road, and his log called Classic British Caffs, in which he lists sorry places like this. But memory is a queer thing. I've been imitating Lorimer for several years now, but leafing through Armadillo, I realise imitating is hardly the word. In my list of Authentic Caffs I describe in a few short sentences various international ‘caffs’, in alphabetical order by country, town etc. They can be anything from simple diners to Michelin star rated restaurants, from beer gardens to wine growers. If they have one thing in common, it is a certain quality that appeals to me, something that makes them special, call it the X-factor.
I intend to publish these Authentic Caffs (by country or region) on this blog and keep them up to date for you. As this blog has no access to a database or content management system, I’ll link the postings to each other to improve their accessibility.
Some descriptions may seem curious, or difficult to understand if you’ve not visited the place yourself, but they should be telling enough in a way (after all, I only list those that seem commendable). Please be so kind as to correct me if you think I’m wrong.

Can’t wait to see what I mean? All right, the Belgian entries as an example, then.

Antwerp
Snack a-Amir (restaurant)
Last visit: lunch in 2004. Address: Appelmentstr. 18, T 00(3)232329655
Outstanding Lebanese in Jewish quarter featuring feasting Pakistani, Belgians and (partly fasting) Arabs. They serve wine too.

Sippenaeken
Le Barbeau (pub)
Last visit: 2003. Address: Near the church
Coffee and cake, in the evening good stews and a decent choice of Belgian beers. Almost perfect service. Often closed on weekdays.

Tradition

2006-12-15T14:13:00.000+01:00

Sorry for not having posted for such a long time. Duty called in the form of exams. I passed, thank you.
As now is December - quite a festive month in The Netherlands - I think it might be a good time for something traditional. First we have the feast of St. Nicholas, bishop of Myra (Turkey) in the fourth century, now living in Spain and still going strong. We celebrate his birthday (which it isn't) on 5 December with lots of sweet things, mulled wine, parcels wrapped or hidden in ingenious ways and mock poems to ridicule the receiver. (That's for the grown-ups; children are often paid a personal visit by the old man.) As soon as this is all behind us, we are heading for Christmas (trees and grand dinners, but no presents) and New-Year's Eve (oliebollen, champagne and fire works).
At least, that's how it used to be. Nowadays Santa Claus is getting more popular with the grown-ups, leaving St. Nicholas for the kids (though not in my family, oh no). Traditionalists are crying shame. How do we keep our balance if such age-old traditions are cast away? And for what? For a ho-ho-hoing idiot from The States?
They forget that tradition is a word for change. That the feast of St. Nicholas as it is celebrated now is based on a 19th-century bourgeois reinvention of older convent-school traditions (the steamer in which he traditionally arrives from Spain is rather a give-away). And that this reinvented tradition found its way into all layers of Dutch society only as late as the first half of the 20th century.

I myself like these traditions. And to enhance peace between tradition and change, I offer you all this recipe for borstplaat (a kind of fondant), one of the traditional sweets we eat on both St. Nicholas and Christmas.

Borstplaat
All you need is about 6 molds or cookie cutters (in any form you like, though roundish is best, 5 cm diameter) , sugar (250 gr), cream (5 tbs) and water (2 tbs). These ingredients may not seem mouthwatering, but if mixed in the right amounts and treated with due care, the result is.
Place molds on waxed paper on a heat-resistant plate. Heat sugar, cream and water on low heat and keep stirring. If the liquid starts boiling, keep stirring for about 5 minutes more. The liquid has thickened enough if the last drop falling from your spoon forms a little thread. Immediately get the pan off the heat and continue stirring. If the substance gets thicker and opaque, poor it into the molds (be quick, be very quick), about 1 cm per mold. Let it cool for approximately 20 minutes, turning the molds every now and then.
For vanilla borstplaat, add some vanilla sugar; for chocolate borstplaat a little cocoa; for coffee flavour mix a few spoons of strong coffee into the almost thickened liquid.

If this recipe happens to reach you after Christmas, make it your own invented tradition by serving borstplaat on New-Year's Eve in the shape of a glass of champagne or an exploding fire cracker.

Rillettes 'café de Paris'

2006-11-13T21:59:00.000+01:00

Every now and then we hear people enthuse over that extaordinary restaurant they discovered in Paris where they ate the best ever pot au feu, that simple trattoria in Tuscany where 'mamma' ruled the kitchen or that wood-panelled pub in that tiny Irish village where the men were singing sad songs, washing away the minor and not so minor hardships of daily life with large pints of Guiness. Unspoilt by tourists other than themselves (until that moment at least), these restaurants/trattorie/pubs gave them an impression of the authentic, something typically Parisian/Italian/Irish, untouched by modern times. We listen benevolently, trying not to show we've heard these stories before, knowing that these memories have everything to do with a romantic holiday mood and nothing with reality. We of course, experienced travellers, never fell for that humbug.
Needless to say, the café I discovered in Paris some thirteen years ago, was something quite different. It was a dark brown, quiet place near the Bourse, where I spent some pleasant hours drinking coffee and doing a bit of work, surrounded by real Parisians doing more or less the same. I had lunch there as well: rillettes de porc as a starter and beef stew for main course. All good value for money. Unfortunately they didn't do dinners because, as the landlady sighed: 'le patron est parti'.
I've been to Paris once or twice since, but never went back to that authentic little café. I can still remember, however, the velvety taste of those rillettes. As rillettes are not easy to come by in The Netherlands, why not make them 'on the premisses'? All you need is belly pork and some time.

Rillettes 'café de Paris'
1,5 kg fresh belly pork, 1 table spoon sea salt, 2 cloves of garlic, bay leaf, 1 table spoon of fresh thyme, 8 leaves sage, pinch of nutmeg, ground black pepper, 125 ml water, clarified butter (enough to seal two pots of 0,5 l - I reckon you'll eat the rest the same day)
Cut belly pork (in Dutch: buikspek or speklapjes) into small pieces (1,5 cm) and add salt. Let it be for several hours or overnight in the fridge. Put pork, herbs, spices, garlic and water in a pan (choose one that is just big enough), cover and cook for about 4 hours in a preheated oven (low heat, 125 °C max.).
Poor the juices into a bowl. Discard the bay leaf. Use a fork to shred meat. Add juices (I used all) and mix thoroughly till you get a smooth substance. Pack into pots, press well so no air will be left, and seal with a layer of 1 cm of clarified butter.

Rillettes are great on rustic bread or toast, with home-made pickled cucumbers (see picture) and a white Loire (Menetou-Salon, Tourraine) or Alsatian wine.

Autumn is icumen in

2006-10-22T14:06:00.000+02:00

In these unusually hot October days, some people overdo their longing for autumn, while many more are too onesidedly in favour of warm, dry, sunny days at any time of year. This been said, I must admit I did enjoy one much too warm sunny afternoon visiting the Noordermarkt in Amsterdam. This organic farmer's market takes place Saturdays only in the Jordaan quarter in the centre of Amsterdam. Now, considering the fact that Amsterdam is the biggest city in this country and this is the only organic farmer's market in town, you'll be amazed to learn it counts just about thirty stalls. It must have been really busy then? Well, there was a fair amount of people on that beautiful day: American expats, Israeli tourists, Eastern European street musicians, and yes, inbetween I spotted some locals, mostly from the more well to do area's of Amsterdam. Organic farming, you must have guessed by now, isn't a big thing in The Netherlands.
Though small, the market has much to offer: donkey sausage, wild duck, pumpkin bread, goat's cheese with and without calvados, chard, parsley root, cranberry juice and an incredible range of mushrooms, to name but a few.
As our first goal was a rare performance of Gesualdo's fourth book of madrigals by The Kassiopeia Quintet in the adjacent church, we couldn't buy much, let alone meat, game or smelly cheeses. We settled for chanterelles instead, which were for sale in abundance (though I've read that this year's harvest is lacking in quality).

Before I give you the recipe of this posting (it isn't of the kind you couldn't come up with yourself, I fear), I'll share a few things I know about chanterelles. All borrowed knowledge, as I have not been equipped with generations of fungal experience, nor am I a passionate gatherer of wild mushrooms, contrary to all other Europeans - or so I learned from Stephanie Alexander's The Cook's Companion. Reading Alexander, one gets the impression that the European hills are alife with hopping and dancing blonds carrying cane baskets, vanishing into the woods only to come hopping out again with their baskets brimfull of porcini, chanterelles and trompettes de la mort. This may hold true for eastern and southern European countries, but in The Netherlands the gathering of mushrooms is allowed in some area's only (which surprised me: I've always been told that it's forbidden). Even so, there is no tradition at all, and no Dutch pharmacist would or could help you sort out your potentially lethal harvest, as they do in France.
If you intend to give gathering wild mushrooms a try, it would be wise to start with chanterelles, as they are easily recognizable and don't have poisonous look-alikes. Do not, however, harvest too many: they are, according to Bocuse, hard to digest. Something else I learned from Bocuse, especialy about porcini: ask the vendor to cut open big ones to check if they're not wormy. The only other way to find out is by cooking them (the worms will crawl out), and that's too late.

Chanterelles à la crème
Serves two: 250 gr chanterelles, 2 shallots, few dices of lightly smoked belly pork or bacon, 100 ml cream, ground black pepper, salt.
There is no need to do much with these tasty mushrooms. Cut away brown spots and clean them with water and a soft brush (as these are wild mushrooms, there will be some dirt left). Fry bacon and shallots (cut into small pieces) till glazy and soft, add chanterelles and fry for 5 minutes. Add cream, and salt and pepper to taste. Eat with broad noodles. Or with baked potato. Or with breast of chicken. Or with entrecôte. Or with veal schnitzel. Or with venison steak.

There are all kind of possibilities: ne swik thou never noo.

Bottarga

2006-09-30T12:56:00.000+02:00

This late summer academics were seen huddling together in the corridors of the Amsterdam University, exchanging small jars with orange coloured powdery contents. As these secretive meetings took place in the humanities department, no one thought anything of it. And rightly so, as this was all about bottarga.
Bottarga is salted, pressed, dried roe of gray mullet (muggine) or tuna fish (tonno), a mediterranean delicacy, claimed by every region as its own and given a fancy name: Sardinian caviar, Sicilian caviar, Egyptian caviar. But as foodtourist.com writes: bottarga is bottarga is bottarga. It comes vacuum-packed in a piece or grated in jars and is used in pasta sauces (spaggheti alla bottarga), as an appetizer (with lemon juice on a piece of bread) and can often replace dried anchovy.

Two jars of grated bottarga di muggine are in my cupboard now and one is half empty already. Today, as you'll have concluded by now, bottarga is not easy to come by if you don't have friends in Sardinian places. This must have been different in the seventeenth century. I quote from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, 5 June 1661:

'So home Sir William and I, and it being very hot weather I took my flageolette and played upon the leads in the garden, where Sir W. Pen came out in his shirt into his leads, and there we staid talking and singing, and drinking great drafts of claret, and eating botargo and bread and butter till 12 at night, it being moonshine; and so to bed, very near fuddled.'

The glossary explains that 'botargo was chiefly used to promote drinking by causing thirst'. In the case of mr. Pepys, I get the impression he ate the salty substance with bread and butter to soften the effect of the alcohol, though with limited success. From the same glossary I learned that bottarga is also mentioned in the Sailor's Word-Book by Admiral W.H. Smyth (1867, reissued in 2005), who was of the opinion that 'the best kind comes from Tunis'.
Allow me one more digression before I give you my bottarga recipe. Samuel Pepys' drinking mate was none other than Admiral William Penn, who fought against us Dutch in the beginning of what I learned at school to be the Second English War - a war we won, but lost. See, if this sounds intriguing, The Second Anglo-Dutch War (1665-1667). International raison d'état, mercantilism and maritime strife by Gijs Rommelse (Verloren 2006), about whom I read today in NRC Handelsblad.

Sicilian rice salad
Boil 300 gr rice and let it cool. Add a royal amount of chopped flat-leaf parsley, at least 2 gloves of garlic (chopped), the juice of 1 lemon, 3 heaped spoons of grated bottarga and ample olive oil. Mix well and put in the fridge for about an hour. Goes well with char-grilled meats, but not with claret.

Forever the twain shall meet

2006-09-16T13:58:00.000+02:00

In my garden I grow the usual suspects, like spinach, leek, onions, strawberries, lettuce and kale. I have also, from the very beginning, fearlessly and not always successfully, tried my hand at 'city-people-greens', like rocket and radicchio, 'forgotten vegetables' like parsnip and cavolo nero, and exotic strangers, such as Thai basil and mustard (gai choy or brassica juncea). Bemused fellow gardeners (elderly males, mostly) shake their heads over such nonsense and refuse to try the delicacies I offer them. Now that I have huge plants of amaranth to show (this picture was taken in early summer), big round yellow beetroot, and a good harvest of buggenummer muuskes ('mice from Buggenum', an old potato variety, a kind of ratte), they simply ignore these strange crops and compliment me on my endive and carrots.
Growing exotic greens is one thing, of course, and knowing what to do with them once harvested, yet another. I solely depend on the information on the packets, which tell me that amaranth and mustard can be prepared like spinach. Goodbye to exotics, then.
Spouse, who doesn't believe that 'East is east and west is west', made a wonderful hotchpotch that combined Dutch endive with its oriental and South-American counterparts. The result was sumptuous, tangy and fresh. We ate it with leg of guinee fowl. Fried bacon or sausage are the usual companions to the traditional variety.

Endive hotchpotch with a twist
For a hotchpotch of uncooked greens one needs (per person) approximately 300 gr potatoes, 125 gr greens and a lump of butter (preferably drippings, depending on the meat you serve with the hotchpotch). Some add milk, we don't.
Boil the potatoes with a substantial pinch of sellery salt. Meanwhile, cut endive, amaranth and mustard (2:1:1) into ribbons, not too small. Strain the potatoes but keep the water. Mash the potatoes (but not thoroughly), adding the water, and butter or drippings to make it smooth. Add the greens and heat carefully (the greens should become hot, not cooked). To taste: sea salt, freshly ground white pepper, white wine vinegar.

If you're interested in the crops I mentioned: some of the exotic ones I bought are from Botanical Interests, while others, especially the forgotten vegetables and potatoes, I got from Vreeken's Zaden.

Minestrone for an upset tummy

2006-09-01T22:16:00.000+02:00

What to cook when your better half is ill and can't bear the thought of eating or drinking anything at all and you're feeling slightly under the wheater yourself? Not cooking is not an option, of course. Vitamins are needed, and so are liquids, but orange juice, for example, proved to be a bad idea. Among the more substantial items such as rice, potatoes, pasta, bread and toast (for one musn't become too weak) only the latter (and that in the tiniest bits), didn't make her feel worse.
It was a week of trial and error. It all took a turn for the better once I removed, in a Montignacish sort of way, the carbohydrates from our dinner and thought of the old remedies: broth (why, of course!), camomile tea (to be avoided when in a healthy condition), coke (kills everything).
Though I'm not 'into Jamie', I found one of his broadcasts (Oliver's Twist) quite inspiring. It was a spring item and he was happily chopping about making a minestrone for his daughter Poppy. To my astonishment he served the mouthwatering, all-vegetable, soup with a handful of parmesan cheese and a royal helping of pesto. A sure way to ban out all subtilities, wouldn't you say?
I'll give you my upset-tummy-proof late summer variety. If there is no upset tummy around add onion, garlic and a rinse of parmesan or a few dices of bacon (or better still: pancetta).

Minestrone for an upset tummy
Chop all kinds of vegetables into small parts (I used zucchini, leek, fennel, parsnip, beans, carrot, bell pepper, one red pepper without seed and flat-leaf parsley) and fry them in a bit of olive oil. Don't be afraid to make too much as you can freeze the leftovers. Start with those vegetables that take longer. Add a tin of peeled tomatoes and half a liter (well, that depends on how much you're making and how fluid you want it to be) of chicken or vegetable stock. Try not to overcook. Put two thirds in a blender to make a smooth substance. Serve hot.

Scottish food - an impression

2006-08-18T15:46:00.000+02:00

If I tell people I spent my summer holiday in Scotland their faces immediately express sympathy (a precious three-week break ruined by perpetual rain and extreme cold) and concern (lived surely on nothing but eggs, porridge and fish and chips). 'How are you, now?'
As you can see from the picture, taken in the very north, the weather was alright. Moderate temperatures though not too cold, the occasional shower though never more than that and no means of communication (but ever so glad my car broke down almost next to a working telephone booth).
Food-wise I wasn't disappointed either. Scottish cuisine has much to offer, if you know were to find it. Here are some impressions from the remote corners of the Highlands.

Scotland of course is (almost) surrounded by water and dotted with lochs, not to mention the many isles, so there is an abundance of fresh fish. Or is there? Alas. Most fish are exported to southern Europe, where they fetch a better price, some are sold to local hotels and restaurants. On my travels through Scotland I came across one fishmonger, in Portree (Skye). Scotland is probably more the catch-your-own sort of country. If you're in the mood for fish, but don't usually carry fishing tackle and waders, you might try Viv's Kishorn Seafood Bar in Kishorn, Strathcarron, on the A896. I always try to drive by when heading north. With superb views towards Skye and the Cuillin mountains you can eat a bowl of cooked but otherwise unmucked-about-with squat lobsters, fresh oysters or scallops in garlic, all caught near the premises. Do cross the street for fresh organically grown vegetables, local cheeses and fine Burgundies for reasonable prices in the village shop (Patterns of Light, the arty esoteric one I mentioned in my last posting - yes, they sell dream catchers too). I've never seen a better small supermarket in Scotland. That is not only the owner's doing. It does help if you're on a through-road with some traffic. If not, suppliers may not take the trouble to visit you.

Less easy to 'catch' for the average tourist, but much easier to get is venison. If you happen to be in Rob Roy country, you could try and buy a good cut at the farm in Inverlochlarich (at the end of Balquhidder glen), but then you might find, as I did, nobody home. If so, do not despair: the scenery alone is worth the trip and every shop in the vicinity stocks Inverlochlarich venison.

Some say the only decent meal one can get in Scotland is a cooked breakfast. I don't agree, though I do like a hearty treat before bagging half a munro. The best Scottish breakfast, with the best black pudding ever, I ate at Bealach, a truly get-away-from-it-all guesthouse in Salachan Glen (between Oban and Glencoe). It's the only house in the glen, to be reached by a dirt track with encouraging road signs ('You're on the right track', Nearly there', etc.). It would be highly unfair if I would praise them for their black pudding (Macleod's of Stornoway), as it is the only item that is not made on the premises. Bread, marmelade, cakes, flap jacks, ginger cookies, excellent three course dinners and sweet after dinner things, all is made by a very relaxed hostess herself.

Is there nothing to complain about? Nothing at all? But of course there is. Lorne sausage (on top of everything: square), the restaurant situation in Durness after 2 pm, macaroni cheese and chips on one plate, mango flavoured Kettle crisps, non-organically grown salmon. These are all avoidable, like the ubiquitous chips in a buttered roll. Scottish coffee, which I'm sorry to say is no better than English coffee, on the other hand, is not.

Off to Scotland

2006-07-21T09:02:00.000+02:00

It is high season in our garden: vast amounts of round zucchini can be harvested each day, beans (white, green and purple varieties) are sprouting, we've almost finished the red and yellow beets, amaranth is growing well, mustard choy is just coming up. Each night we fight the tropical temperatures and the draught with hard-gained buckets of freshly pumped water.
Till today.
Today we leave our garden in trusted hands (though it was not easy to find a gardener who wants to eat from ours too) and take off to Scotland for a three-week holiday. We are looking forward to lower temperatures, the occasional shower and to having no means of communication.
We like to be 'in the middle of nowhere', but with a good grocer at hand. Grocers in Scotland can be anything from the kind formerly known as Safeways, via small esoteric and arty shops with organically grown vegetables layed out like a still-life (Kishorn) or drinking hall-like supermarkets where the supply of bird feed exceeds that of fresh vegetables (Drumnadrochit).
I'll keep you posted when I'm back.

The parsley percentage

2006-07-15T13:10:00.000+02:00

Curly parsley 'is a vegetable decoration substance, a frivolous fake herb, hurray chlorophyll with no value', or so says Onno Kleyn in the Iens & Outs e-mail newsletter of July. You may think this a bold statement for something so obvious, but it is a fairly accurate description of the sorry state of parsley in this country. Curly parsley is the common variety here, the one you can buy in supermarkets, the one you'll find in every bowl of soup and on every plate on top of a slice of tomato. Garnishing is all we use it for. The tastier flat-leaf kind is nowhere to be found, except in Turkish or Maroccan shops. I am happy to learn that Onno Kleyn's plea has been answered (starting next month flat-leaf parsley will be on the shelfs of our biggest grocer), though I would regard it a poor victory if this variety too would meet with the same trivial fate.
So what is needed now is a recipe with lots of flat-leaf parsley. Tabouleh is a good one, the more so as I can add a plea of my own: to augment the parsley percentage. Tabouleh is not a wheat dish of bulghur with tomatoes, cucumber and onions and only a handful of parsley and mint, but a parsley and mint salad with spring onions and some bulghur. I learned to make it this way when visiting the S. family of the Arab village of A. in the Galilee, Israel, now nine years ago. Big bowls of dark green tabouleh were served to accompany sheer endless servings of grilled lamb skewers at their youngest son's engagement party.

Tabouleh
To serve 4. Soak half a cup of bulghur in hot water for some minutes, then rinse well. Take equal amounts (at least one big bush - no supermarket quantitees here) of flat-leaf parsley and nana (Maroccan mint). Chop the parsley (with the stalks), the mint (leafs only) and 2-3 spring onions. Mix the greens with the bulghur, add olive oil and lemon juice, and salt to taste. Serve slightly chilled. Who needs tomatoes?

If you want to know more about parsley (e.g. its chemical components, or its name in any language you can think of), see Gernot Katzer's website (English and German). Just don't believe him when he says that parsley is used in hummus.

Côtes de b(l)ettes

2006-06-30T10:45:00.000+02:00

As far as Elizabeth David was concerned, blette was edible only if cooked by a master's hand and swimming in a rich cream sause (An Omelette and a Glass of Wine, 1984).
Blette? As in 'overripe and rotten'? No wonder it wasn't one of her favourite dishes. But this vegetable becomes tastier if we get rid of the l: bette, French for beta vulgaris, chard or Swiss chard in (American) English, silver beet in down-under-English, Mangold in German and snijbiet in Dutch. Nomenclature and food, it's no easy thing. Witness for example The Old Foodie, a marvellous weblog on historic food topics, who discusses the multilingual ethymology of Scarcity Root, another name for the very same vegetable.

So, let's pick a name: chard. It is an easy crop, as every gardener can tell you. The leaves can be treated as spinach, though I wouldn't eat them uncooked, the stems as celery or asparagus. I prefer the lucullus variety (Lucullus, an 'able soldier' and Epicurean who 'after unpleasant experiences in Caesar's consulate retired to live in refined luxury and lapsed into insanity', The Oxford Classical Dictionary) or the multicoloured rainbow chard to the more common dark green cicla.
In The Netherlands you need a kitchen-garden(er) if ever you want to eat chard, as it is nowadays a 'forgotten vegetable', a crop that is no longer commercially grown. Spouse confessed she has had to eat hotchpotch with chard in her youth, which her mother must have gotten from the greengrocer's (but then, she is three years my senior). A Dutch food encyclopaedia from the fifties (Culinaire encyclopedie, Elsevier 1957) still gives a number of recipes, all traditional French style: Côtes de bettes à la béchamel, à la mornay, au jus. We usually eat chard, stems and leaves, Italian style: sautéed in olive oil with plenty of garlic and the optional anchovy.

Now where does the l in blette come from? It's not a typo, as Elizabeth David is not the only one to use this word. So does Stehpanie Alexander in The Cook's Companion (Lantern 2004). I'll give you my theory, for want of a better one. In Alexander's book I came across yet another name for chard: leaf beet. Now the German word for leaf is Blatt, pl. Blätter. No need for much Chinese whispering to get to blette, is there? Si non e vero, e ben trovato.

Lobsters from Zeeland

2006-06-23T10:57:00.000+02:00

It's not only asparagus or other vegetables that have seasons, so have game, fish and lobsters.
A few weeks ago Spouse and I decided we deserved a day off and drove to Zeeland, in the south-west of The Netherlands - fairly unknown territory to us. We had nothing big and fancy in mind, just drive around a bit, see the area, spot some birds, eat a herring or, if we could be that lucky, a roll with smoked eel. And as fish is best found near the water, we kept to the coastal route and didn't enter the sometimes touristic villages.
De Vluchthaven (port of refuge) in Zijpe looked like a sailor's club where members only could order a cup of soup. We were mistaken. It was all about lobster. Dutch lobster or Oosterscheldekreeft, caught right in front of our noses by one of the five licenced fishermen between April 1st and July 15th, as we learned from a promotional booklet.
It's only since 1883 that lobsters are found in these waters, that had become saltier due to the blocking of the river Schelde a few decades before (you know us, building dykes and making land out of water etc. etc.). Till then, lobsters were imported from Norway; nowadays they are still flown in (half alive and barely kicking) from Canada. Maybe it's because of lack of tradition or the overall low consumption in this country of fish, let alone creepy animals with lots of feet, that the Dutch lobster needs promotion. And care: there is always the danger that it will be pushed out of existence by escaped Canadian ones. One of the aims of the Foundation in charge (Stichting Promotie Oosterscheldekreeft) is to advance environmentally sustainable fishing methods. Diny Schouten (Het spek van slager Blom [Butcher Blom's Pork], 2003:81) hints at another: research and protecting measures.
All of this didn't darken our spirits. It was a beautiful day, the sun was shining, terns were diving into the water and we had fabulous lobsters, without even realising we helped sustaining the species by eating them.

Asparagus

2006-06-16T13:27:00.000+02:00

The season for asparagus (asparagus officinalis) is short, roughly from the beginning of May till the 21th of June. Of course, this being The Netherlands, the first date is highly dependent on the wheather. The latter one is quite fixed, though.
These six weeks don't go by unattended. Every restaurant with only the slightest culinary aspirations serves asparagus as amuse, soup, starter and main dish. Butchers sell 'special' asparagus ham and in every magazine you'll find advertisements of Alsatian wine. Shelfs in supermarkets are crammed with instant sauce Hollandaise. The asparagus themselves are neatly packed in plactic, kept well dry and laying in wait for us for days.
Did I say 'plastic', 'dry' and 'days'? No wonder supermarkets need all their marketing skills to get us to buy these sad, dried out, wooden sticks. As Diny Schouten rightly wrote in her Het spek van slager Blom. Over wat er nog te eten is (Butcher Blom's pork. About what is still there to eat, Pereboom 2003:41), one can only eat asparagus if bought directly from the farmer.
We are happy to have one nearby in a staunchily Roman Catholic (!) village, who sells his asparagus the very same day he has harvested them and until that moment keeps them in water basins. No dry ends here.
As we do not have anything against a good Alsatian wine in any season, we let our meal be accompanied by a terrific 2004 Riesling by Zind Humbrecht, found in what we thought to be a cheese farm, but which was actually a well assorted wine and cheese shop in that same pious - and rich - village.

Asparagus the Dutch way
Take 500 gr white asparagus per person. Cut off ca 2 cm from the cut end. Peel the asparagus and cook them (with cut off ends and peeled skin - gives more taste) in water for about 10 minutes (depending on thickness). Eat with slices of cooked ham, hard boiled eggs (chopped up with a pinch of nutmeg), melted butter and potatoes (traditionally boiled, but do bake them if you like a bit of bite among all this fluffy stuff).
Do not throw the liquid away but sieve it and keep it frozen to make a risotto with grilled green asparagus after the 21th of June.

A Roman dinner

2006-06-05T12:38:00.000+02:00

Italian cuisine has changed over the years. In the old days (we're talking first centuries of this era) pasta didn't exist, and instead of salt the Romans used garum, a liquid of fermented fish, to spice up their dishes. Garlic was eaten by peasants and poor people only, because of the odour. Slaves got just enough leftovers and garbage to stay alive.
All this wisdom I learned from J who is setting up a course in Roman cooking and invited some friends as a tryout. Recipes were deducted and translated by J from Apicius' De Re Coquinaria, some poems by Martial and one by pseudo-Virgil.
Academics might think it a pity that all we know about Roman society is restricted to the life of the happy few. For our dinner it was no loss. As appetizers we had moretum, epiturium and salted fish accompanied by a tasty mulsum. The main dishes consisted of cooked fish with a sweet and sour sauce and roasted doves. Pudding came as apothermum and patina (a platter of peaches cooked with cumin, parsley-seed, pepper and garum - and yes, it's delicious), although the latter is in fact a starter.
As I was chosen to try my hand at the moretum, I'll elaborate on that one.
You need a mortar (the name moretum is no coincidence), a lump of parmesan cheese (ca 200 gr), one or two cloves of garlic, fresh celery-leaves, fresh coriander, olive oil and a drop of balsamic vinegar. Put roughly two handsfull of the leaves (and stems) in the mortar with the garlic and crush them till they are an unidentifiable green mass. Add grated parmesan, oil, vinegar and if you like a bit of sea salt. Continue crushing until you understand why the Romans had slaves for this kind of work. By then the moretum should be a vivid green paste. Tastes great on unleavened bread.