It’s looking like the Owl Springs Partnership site needs a reaming out (asst’d technical issues) so I’m relocating some stuff for safety’s sake.
Our Parmesan biscuit recipes have been there: posting them here for the interested. (This way if the URLs change over there, I can always just instruct the site to redirect them here.)
I’m putting these here so I don’t lose them (again. EYEROLL). They come out of a collection of nearly a hundred thousand Meal-Master format recipes that I accumulated/accreted over a couple of decades, from multilingual sources. Most of them I’m sure have been ported over into Paprika, which I’m using now for mass recipe storage. But every now and then something turns up that I’ve forgotten about… like these, which were squirreled away in a file simply named “BOARS.TXT.” (Remember when a file name before-the-period couldn’t be more than eight characters long? Remember? …Ah me.)
…The first one is interesting, if of no use to me at the Middle Kingdoms-recipes end of things due to the presence of chocolate. (The Kingdoms’ continent doesn’t have the bean growing anywhere, though it does exist elsewhere on their alternate Earth — thus making them of some interest to other non-Solar species, [as it has on other alternate Earths, such as ours…] once the word gets out. So it’s probably a good thing that the Kingdoms have a nascent space program*). One of Peter’s signature recipes, additionally, has an interesting take on pork and chocolate, so there’s a resonance to that. …But the second one is more to the point (in both that universe and this one), and has serious potential.
Anyway. The recipes: (which I’m not reformatting in any way: if by some wild chance you’re one of those stubborn people still using Meal-Master, you should be able to import these straight in.)
MMMMM----- Recipe via Meal-Master (tm) v8.05 Title: Wild Boar in Sweet & Sour Chocolate Sauce Categories: Meats Yield: 1 Servings 5 lb Wild boar or 5 lb. beef pot Roast 2 Carrots 2 Stalks celery 2 Onions 1 Bottle (25.4 oz.) aged Chianti Classico 1/4 c Extra-virgin olive oil 1 tb Juniper berries 2 Bay leaves 1 ts Black pepper Salt 1 c Raisins 1/2 c Sugar 4 Cloves garlic, coarsely Chopped 1/2 c Red wine vinegar 1/2 c Grated bitter chocolate 1 c Dried prunes 1 c Pine nuts 1 c Cream Sherry Place meat in large baking dish. Coarsely chop 1 carrot, 1 stalk celery, & 1 onion, & add to meat. Pour wine over meat & vegetables, cover, & marinate 24 hours, turning occasionally. Drain meat, reserving marinade. Pat meat dry with paper towels. Brown in olive oil over high heat. Strain marinade, reserving wine & discarding vegetables. Pour wine over meat. Chop remaining carrot, celery, & onion & add to meat with juniper berries, 1 bay leaf, pepper, & salt to taste. Cook over low heat 3 hours or until tender (1 1/2 to 2 hours for beef). Allow meat to cool in cooking liquid, skimming off fat that forms on surface. Cut cooled meat into pieces, discarding bone. Strain marinade & place liquid & meat back in pan. Soak raisins in warm water until plumped. Drain. Caramelize sugar in pan with garlic, remaining bay leaf, & 1 Tbls. water. Warm vinegar, then add with chocolate to sauce & bring to boil. Boil 2 minutes. Add sauce to mat with raisins, prunes, pine nuts, & cream Sherry. Cook 10 minutes. Remove meat & keep warm. Continue cooking sauce until reduced to desired thickness. Remove bay leaves. Slice meat & pour sauce over. Note: Recipe may also be used for venison, rabbit, & aged beef. MMMMM
MMMMM----- Recipe via Meal-Master (tm) v8.05 Title: Roast Wild Boar with Fig Date & Walnut Stuffing Categories: Game, Meats Yield: 10 Servings Stephen Ceideburg MMMMM--------------------------STUFFING------------------------------- 2 c Fresh black figs 1 c Fresh date 1 c Coarsely chopped, lightly -roasted walnuts MMMMM----------------------------MEAT--------------------------------- 10 lb Boar hind** 1 tb Olive oil Crushed thyme to taste Salt to taste MMMMM---------------------------SAUCE-------------------------------- 2 c Port wine 1 c Zinfandel 1/2 c Sugar 1 c Chopped fresh or dried figs 1 tb Chopped shallots 2 c Demi-glace (reduced stock) 1 tb Unsalted butter Salt to taste Combine stuffing ingredients in a food processor and chop coarsely. Set aside. Remove the bone from the boar hind and meticulously clean tendons and fat from inside the leg. Stuff with half the stuffing mixture and neatly reform the leg to its original shape. Using butcher's twine, truss the boar. Rub the surface of roast with a bit of olive oil; season with thyme and salt. Place on a rack in a shallow roasting pan. Roast in a 350 degree F. oven approx- imately I hour, or until the internal temperature reaches 140 degree F. Remove roast from oven and let rest 20 minutes before carving. Sauce: Combine port, Zinfandel, sugar and figs in a heavy bottomed saucepan. Cook over high heat until the mixture reaches the consistency of a conserve. Puree in a blender, and strain through a fine sieve. Set aside. Combine shallots and a splash of port in a heavy-bottomed saucepan and cook until almost dry. Add the fig-port syrup and demi-glace. Cook until reduced by half. Season with salt and whisk in butter. Carve roast and garnish each serving with a portion of the remaining stuffing, a bit of sauce and, if desired, fresh black figs. PER SERVING: 505 calories, 52 g protein, 34 g carbohydrate, 16 g fat (4 g saturated), 173 mg cholesterol, 127 mg sodium, 4 g fiber. From Rosemary Campiformio, St. Orres, Gualala Heidi Haughy Cusik writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, 12/18/91. Posted by Stephen Ceideburg MMMMM
** That’s probably “hindquarter”, if we’re talking about ten pounds of meat.
***
…There’s also a recipe here that starts out as a marinade and winds up with cooking instructions as well. I include it here so I don’t have to worry about anything useful having been left in the legacy .txt file…
MMMMM----- Recipe via Meal-Master (tm) v8.05 Title: Wild Boar Categories: Meats Yield: 6 Servings 1 cn Condensed consomme' 2 c Cider vinegar 8 c Red wine 1 1/2 ts Ground black pepper 2 tb Salt 2 Bay leaves 1 ts Crumbled thyme 2 Garlic cloves; chopped 8 Juniper berries 1 Piece wild boar meat (about 5 pounds) 6 Carrots Scraped and quartered 2 lg Onions; quartered 4 Celery stalks Cut into 2-inch lengths 1 cn Condensed beef broth 1/3 c Currant jelly 1/2 c Flour; mixed with 3/4 c Water Combine consomme', vinegar, wine, pepper, salt, bay leaves, thyme, garlic, and juniper berries in a glass or enamel bowl. Place boar meat into marinade. Let marinate for 2 days at room temperature. Place meat and marinade in a large kettle. Cover and simmer for 2 to 2-1/2 hours or until meat is almost tender. Add carrots, onions, celery. Cover and simmer until vegetables are tender, about 20 minutes. Remove meat and vegetables and keep warm. Add beef broth, currant jelly, and flour mixture to pan liquid. Stir until sauce bubbles and thickens slightly. Let sauce cook at a boil until it becomes the thickness of a good brown gravy. Pour hot gravy over portions of sliced boar and vegetables. Serve with Chestnut Puree. MMMMM
…So, en guete, y’all.
*…What do you mean, “what space program”? They have Dragons, don’t they?
We’ve been using the standard garden-variety North American style of home bread-baking pan for a long time, but there comes a moment when you realize suddenly that you’ve been using the wrong tool to produce the effect you want, and you start looking around for something that’ll do the job better.
In particular, though high-risen loaves with domed tops are undeniably lovely, Peter and I found that about half the time the loaves we made in the standard bread pan were showing a preference (once they’d risen to the pan’s top) for, during the further rise, expanding sideways rather than upwards. With more highly hydrated doughs, this definitely turns into a problem. The loaf-in-process sags over the sides of the pan while it’s baking, and afterwards you wind up having to chop the sides off it so that slices will fit into the slots in the toaster… altogether a most unseemly business. So we started looking for taller-sided baking pans that would give the rising dough more support in the upwards direction.
The first thing we tried was a lidded baking pan/baking tin from a US maker now long associated with this type of bread pan: a “Pullman pan”, so called because it was the type of bread pan used in the kitchens of Pullman train cars. (The style turns out to be far older than its use on the railway, though. European bakers were producing so-called pain de mie, “bread made for its crumb” [rather than its crust], for at least two centuries previous. This was the preferred bread for premium sandwiches, canapes, croutons, and toast.)
At any rate, the pan we got from the US company was well made, heavy, and baked a good loaf. But it was both bigger than we needed—loaves made with it wound up needing to be cut in half to fit in our bread box—and also a bit fractious: sometimes difficult to shut, and also often difficult to open. This got frustrating. After a while we passed the USA pan to friends at a local pub/B&B, and went back to the “regular” loaf pans for the time being.
Recently, though, one or the other of us spotted the items below on Amazon. They’re available from numerous different retailers, leading me to believe that they’re being manufactured by one or two companies in China under different badges or marques for different retailers.
This style of pan is available in various sizes and materials, so we decided to get a couple of the smaller ones—essentially one-pound loaf pans—and see how they worked. They come in both steel and aluminum versions.
...So we sent for them, and along they came. We’ve been testing them for some days now, and briefly: they’re terrific.
As regards materials: the aluminum pan weighs 405g: the steel one weighs 624g. It’s going to take more testing, over more time, to determine which of them does a better crust on the bread (though again, since these are pain de mie pans, the crust isn’t really meant to be the main act).
These pans are both rated for a 450g loaf….though, again, it’s going to take some testing to see how much leeway there is in this rating. Some of the recipes we use produce denser loaves than the house recipe for Just Plain Old White Bread. That, though, is the recipe we’re using at the moment for testing purposes.
The thing to warn you about in advance, if you get these, is that right out of the box, the non-stick coating on these is SERIOUS BUSINESS. The pans will Zamboni around with alarming slidiness on any kitchen surface where you place them. You don’t dare pick them up without having a firm grip on both the pan and the lid, as (given the slightest opportunity) the lid will slide right off the pan and head for points unknown.
Frankly, though, as a baker who’s dealt in her time with more than enough annoyingly sticky pans that should have been nonsticky, this is kind of a refreshing change. I’m going to be interested to see how long this phase lasts and how durable the nonstick coating is.
The important thing, though, is how readily freshly baked bread comes out of these. And the answer is: very readily. Tip them over and the new-baked loaf just kind of falls out. Though the docs suggest that the pans should be greased (indeed, buttered…), it’s looking like there’s no need for that at all. It might prove necessary to grease them when you’re baking things that have a lot of sugar involved in them. I’m thinking about testing the household seed cake recipe in one of these shortly to see how it behaves.
Anyway, here are some pictures, so you can see how these compare, size-wise, to the normal-size bread pan: and how a loaf baked yesterday with the lid off looks. …A note about those three little holes you can see at the bottoms of the pans: those are apparently for air circulation. I have yet to see whether there’s a problem with doing a very wet batter bread in one of these, but I’ll test that soon and add notes on it here.
For those who might be interested in getting their hands on one of these: hope this helps!
(Above: the pans themselves, with the little spiracle-like air holes visible…)
Above: one of the pans compared to a typical non-lidded loaf pan.
And below: the result when we sliced open the latest non-lidded bake...
(PS—disclosure: we’re members of the Amazon Associates plan, so if you use one of the lnks above to buy one of these, we get a wee tiny commission. …But you probably knew that. Just saying…)
This recipe, in a number of variants, is a favorite around here. I’ve referred to it here and there online, but realized (when I went looking, per a request) that I’d never actually posted a full recipe. So here it is.
It’s based on the “sweet cream base #1” recipe from the Ben & Jerry’s Homemade Ice Cream & Dessert Book (which we picked up when it first came out, and I’m really pleased to be able to tell you is still in print. There’s also a Kindle edition, which is a nice plus).
The recipe for this goes as follows:
Whisk the eggs in a mixing bowl until light and fluffy. Whisk in the sugar, a little at a time, then continue whisking until completely blended. Pour in the cream and milk and whisk to blend. (Makes one quart.)
If (as may be the case) you aren’t comfortable with using uncooked eggs, or just don’t want them in there at all, there is also Sweet Cream Base #2:
Pour the cream into a mixing bowl. Whisk in the sugar, a little at a time; then continue whisking until completely blended. Pour in the half and half and whisk until completely blended. Makes one quart.
Now, as for the three vanillas: Generally speaking, my idea, when I started doing this, was to use three vanillas from different regions, or at the very least, three vanillas made using different styles of preservation/processing… the general idea being that, if it all worked out, the flavor of the finished product would present a sort of spectrum of vanilla flavors instead of one flat background effect.
The three vanillas I routinely try to use tend to go this way:
(a) An alcoholic-based vanilla extract. I routinely use Nielson-Massey, though frankly there are a lot of far cheaper ones that will do as well, considering that a number of vanillas are involved in this procedure.
(b) A different form of vanilla, ideally of a different origin, and usually in a paste form. (I like this one, which we get from our local grocery.)
(c) At least one fresh vanilla bean. (Meaning, unprocessed except by the usual drying and curing that’s part of preparing the seed pod of the vanilla orchid.) (You can grow them, did you know? But apparently they require very specific conditions and are not easy to work with. See this article for details. There’s also a useful article here with a lot of basic background on vanilla and its harvesting and preparation. Yet another of those products that one tends to take for granted, while at the production end it’s amazingly labor-intensive…)
(d) And sometimes I might go for a fourth vanilla, if I had another form around.. such as, for example, a vanilla powder. Or: I make a pretty fair vanilla whiskey. Recipe: Slice open a vanilla pod. Scrape out the seeds in the usual manner. Chop up the pod. Put all of this in a little bottle — maybe about 100ml, tops — and add whiskey. […Generally I wouldn’t use too smokey a whiskey for this: mostly I use one of the more innocuous Irish whiskeys like Powers or Paddy’s.]) Leave this alone in a cupboard for at least a month or so. This is what mine looks like at the moment (and you should have seen how dark it was before I topped it up just now!). As you use it, you add more vanilla beans and top it up with more whiskey. (And there’s no reason this wouldn’t work with other alcohols. Vodka occurs immediately, or Polish pure spirit, as something that would more or less stay out of the way of the flavor of the vanilla. All the same, now I’m thinking about vanilla gin… Hmm.)
…Anyway. A reminder from the food chemistry department as regards alcohol in ice cream: if you add more than about a quarter cup of alcohol (60ml, give or take) to a given quart of ice cream mix, it will function as antifreeze and you’re likely to wind up with a very sweet and lovely slushie, but not much more. So don’t get carried away. Do your math as you put the vanillas together.
I have little experience with non-machine-based ice cream making, so if you have a recipe for a no-machine version that you like, just make a very plain one and add a couple or a few of your chosen vanillas to it. If you’ve got a machine, the procedure is simple: to your basic mixture, add the vanillas you prefer, whisk them in, and freeze as usual. If vanilla powder is one of your chosen ingredients, I’d mix about half of it into the initial mixture, and sprinkle in the rest of it close to the end of the freezing period, as the ice cream’s firming up. Over the next 48-72 hours in the freezer (assuming you like to leave your ice cream alone for a bit to let it develop its flavor), the dry vanilla’s flavor will intensify.
… And that’s it! Noting of course that adding fruit to this mixture (either in the ice cream, or on top) works really well.
Enjoy!
(Disclosure: We’re in the Amazon Associates program, so if you use the Amazon link(s) above and buy something with it, we get a wee tiny commission. Just so you know.)
It’s just one of those words a cook really needs. Merci, la France…
Les petits plats qui mijotent au coin du feu is a phrase that is used like a word and it rarely fails to garnish a conversation about food. It would be unfair to accuse those who use it – albeit at times as a crutch – of leaning on a vain cliche, for they know it – or sense it – to be a magical formula: the incantational touchspring that unites a diverse people in a single reaction. It means “slow-cooking stews”, but it symbolizes “the good life” and somewhere, shadow-like, behind its words lies a half-remembered state of voluptuous, total well-being (”Là, tout n’est qu’ordre et beauté, luxe, calme et volupté”).
Le coin du feu is the hearth that, even for those who have never known it, recalls the security of the family united before it in warmth. But the magic word in the magical phrase is mijoter. It describes that condition of near suspension in which there is, nonetheless, a whispering movement, a tiny bubble rising here and there to break a stew’s still surface – and it means, at the same time, a slow ripening. The comfortable satisfaction felt upon lifting a lid and glancing at a stew’s surface – the sense that, merely because a liquid’s surface is sustained at precisely the right point of hardly perceptible movement, all is well, the stew’s progress out of one’s hands and its success assured – is familiar to all cooks.
–Richard Olney, Simple French Food: “Meats and Poultry: Stews (Ragoûts, Daubes, Sautés…)”
Because when composers start talking about cooking, it’s smart to listen. 🙂
This bake unfolded on the Twitter thread here:
https://twitter.com/dduane/status/1369223611039551497
1/2 Equal weight of eggs butter sugar flour . Melt butter and sugar together , whisk in the beaten eggs , whisk in flour once eggs incorporated, pour into greased baking tin . Bake for around 40 minutes 180-200 degrees . Blend Juice of two lemons and icing sugar into a syrup.
When cake has cooled , use cocktail stick to make loads of deep perforations on top of cake , pour over thick lemon syrup so it soaks into the holes but also covers cake with thin layer . It’ll cool to a lemony sugary crust . Eat whole thing in one go
Right… starting in on this now. 3 large eggs for me = 200g; so, 200g each of flour, butter, sugar.
…Ready for the oven. (The bottom of the springform has some baking parchment clamped into it to [I hope…] keep this pan from leaking…)
And there’s the cake. A little dark on the top and around the edges, but that’s just our oven (it runs hot, and any first bake is therefore experimental…). Don’t think I’m going to care after the icing hits it.
Now the icing. (For those interested: my baking only sporadically uses icing sugar, and if I buy it in, typically it turns into a brick in the box/bag before I get around to it. So instead I usually make my own in the coffee grinder. The grind is finer than storebought.)
…So. I’m short of cocktail sticks, but I do have skewers.
I’ll be adding this in stages, as I want the cake to soften up and become more absorptive as I go along.
Unfortunately I don’t have an image of the icing stage. Apologies. But: here’s the finished cake.
Oh, and here’s @DavidGArnold‘s lemon drizzle cake from yesterday. Extremely nice. Can see why someone might be tempted to eat it all at one go. 🙂
Everybody gets all hot under the collar about the composition and mixology details of James Bond’s (usually) favorite mixed drink. But one piece of Bondian lore about the drink that gets lost a lot of the time is the story of how Bond got (indirectly) schooled on how not to be cheated on his Martinis.
The source of the brief but memorable rant (in Ian Fleming’s novel Thunderball) is the indefatigible Felix Leiter, whom we must assume went around the block in the CIA’s service any number of times before he ran into Bond. At one point or another he and Bond stop into a bar for some refreshment, and when the Martinis arrive, Leiter is so annoyed that he sends for the barman to remonstrate with him.
The Martinis arrived. Leiter took one look at them and told the waiter to send over the barman. When the barman came, looking resentful, Leiter said, “My friend, I asked for a Martini and not a soused olive.” He picked the olive out of the glass with the cocktail stick. The glass, that had been three-quarters full, was now half full. Leiter said mildly, “This was being done to me while the only drink you knew was milk. I’d learned the basic economics of your business by the time you’d graduated to Coca-Cola. One bottle of Gordon’s Gin contains sixteen true measures – double measures that is, the only ones I drink. Cut the gin with three ounces of water and that makes it up to twenty-two. Have a jigger glass with a big steal in the bottom and a bottle of those fat olives and you’ve got around twenty-eight measures. Bottle of gin here costs only two dollars retail, let’s say around a dollar sixty wholesale. You charge eighty cents for a Martini, one dollar sixty for two. Same price as a whole bottle of gin. And with your twenty-eight measures to the bottle, you’ve still got twenty-six left. That’s a clear profit on one bottle of gin of around twenty-one dollars. Give you a dollar for the olives and the drop of vermouth and you’ve still got twenty dollars in your pocket. Now, my friend, that’s too much profit…”
Fleming was famously careless with his research notes regarding food and drink (some authorities claim that, having sought out and been given what purported to be the perfect Martini recipe, he got it backwards when putting it in whichever book it appeared in…), but this sounds like something that either happened to Fleming in his own travels, or was something he heard about from some other source he trusted. The terse quality suggests a memory of unusual clarity. (Or notes correctly transcribed…)
Anyway, I keep misplacing this quote, so now it’s where I know I can find it…
It’s a country dish; a poor people’s dish; a farmer’s hasty breakfast or stopgap luncheon. And (to those who know about it) it instantly recalls the remote Alpine region where it was invented, and where it’s uniquely served and loved. Maluns is the iconic and indispensable potato-based comfort food of people from Canton Graubünden in Switzerland, and Graubündners will travel miles to eat it.
This is one of my favorite Swiss-originated foods. I go out of my way to eat it whenever business takes me there—because it’s a pain in the butt to make, labor-intensive and time-consuming. But sometimes, when I get to feeling—not homesick: how can you be homesick for someplace that’s not home?—but feeling like I wish I could be in Switzerland, even virtually and just for an hour or two, I make maluns at home.
The dish has the Alps in its bones. It speaks, like so many of the local specialties, of a place where the local lifestyle was once very difficult: where you made the best of what you had when the snows set in hard, or spring was taking forever to arrive. It’s easy to imagine some pensive cook in a tiny chalet, a few centuries back, staring at the last few leftover boiled potatoes and a little flour, and a firkin of the local butter or the lard from the last pig they killed, and thinking, “Hmmmm…”
Coming as it does from a region where people needed to burn fat in the cold winters, this is no dish for the calorie-conscious. It’s heavy on the butter or lard, whichever you wind up using. (The recipe below uses herb butter, which is readily available in Switzerland and makes the dish a little more interesting).
Also, it takes forever to make maluns. Or at least it feels like forever while you’re standing there stirring the stuff. It’s like old-fashioned polenta: there’s no way to hurry it up. (And unlike polenta, it doesn’t seem likely that any enterprising Swiss convenience-food maker will come out with Quick Maluns any time soon. In fact, the concept feels vaguely illegal somehow.)
The method is simple. You grate the pre-boiled potatoes. (They have to be boiled a couple of days previously and allowed to cool: this causes some of the starches in the potatoes to start to convert to sugars, which helps the potatoes form up into the desired “crumbs.”) You stir the grated potatoes together with the flour and salt called for in the recipe. Then you melt the butter in a heavy iron frying pan, sprinkle in the potato mixture, and start stirring. And you keep at it for at least half an hour.
Over the course of that period, the potato mixture first turns into an unpromising-looking sludge. But then this starts to break up into little balls or crumbs. These start getting a beautiful toasty brown. Finally they start to get actively crunchy… which means they’re just about ready.
In a hotel or restaurant in Switzerland, maluns usually arrives from the kitchen with a bowl of sharp apple puree on the side. In some places, it arrives with a local bergkäse shaved or grated on top, or possibly just some Emmental. You dunk forkfuls of the maluns into the apple compote, and in between you take long cool drinks of whatever local white wine has been recommended. (There are people, usually from the older generation of maluns-eaters, who suggest that the only proper drink for this dish is milchkaffee, the heavily milked big-serving coffee beloved of the Alpine regions. Probably it would be disrespectful to start an argument with them on the subject.)
To make maluns for four people, you need:
Peel the parboiled potatoes and grate them on the coarse side of the grater. Sprinkle over them the flour and salt, and stir together lightly.
Heat the butter and add the potato/flour mixture to the pan. While keeping the heat low and steady, stir almost constantly until the potatoes form large “crumbs” and are golden brown. Don’t overdo them! They’re meant to be only slightly crunchy on the outside, and tender on the inside.
When the maluns is done, shave butter over the top before serving. Serve with milchkaffee (half and half milk-and-coffee) or a cool white wine, with applesauce on the side—a sharp or tart one is best.
(This recipe was adapted from Bewährte Kochrezepte aus Graubünden [Tested Recipes from the Graubünden], a charity cookbook produced by the Chur chapter of the Swiss Women’s Institute.)
*The word maluns is distantly descended from the Latin micula / miculones: “little crumbs.” These terms were worn down from Latin into the modern Swiss Romansch word now used for this dish through a number of different forms — mig’luns / migluns, micluns, maleums. Maluns is also known as Bündner kartoffelribel in German, or by the dialect name Hoba.
The following recipe was improvised on the fly on the evening of October 16, 2020, and unfolded on Twitter. I don’t allow my tweets to be unrolled (because the companies that do that make money off my labor without giving me any). But I’m happy to share the recipe, and the process, here in my own web space, with anyone who’s interested.
***
Status report, Baking-While-You-Write dep’t: These three Bramleys weigh 1100g (that biggest one is nearly half a kilo all by itself. I FEEL AN APPLE PIE COMING ON.
Via the Man Upstairs:
Here are half a dozen recipes and a few observations.
I can provide Indian lime pickle recipes as well if there’s a real glut of fruit; they work perfectly for lemons, since “nimbu ka achaar” uses either or both.
However they’ll require more ingredients than preserved lemons, which at their most basic don’t need any other ingredients than Lemons, Salt and Time™ (Not Thyme!)
I’ve seen “fast preserved lemons” and “7-day preserved lemons”, but none will be as good as lemons left to mature and macerate in the salty acid for 3-4 weeks or longer.
Various preserved lemon recipes.
(1) Plain – just lemons and salt – can be used in more ways than spiced, and not restricted to North African recipes either; the most I put in mine are a few dried Thai bird’s-eye chillies.
(2) Try to remove all the pips when doing the initial quarter-cut; definitely remove all the pips if planning to make a purée.
(3) Traditionally the only part used is the peel; I’m non-traditional and use the lot.
(4) If making more than one jar, turn the contents of one into preserved-lemon purée with a processor or stick mixer. Either rinse the preserved lemon pieces and add fresh lemon juice as required, or just whizz everything. Obviously once this is done you can’t rinse off the salt and brine, so adjust the salt content of recipes where it’s used accordingly. A teaspoonful is great in sauce for fish or chicken, or mixed with mayo for sandwiches, or adding a salty tangy zing to a pot of soup, or…
Three recipes for plain salt and lemon:
https://www.daringgourmet.com/how-to-make-preserved-lemons-moroccan-middle-eastern-cooking/ This recipe adds water to top up. Don’t dilute the preservative. Use more lemon juice instead.
https://www.thekitchn.com/how-to-make-preserved-lemons-110714
https://www.simplyrecipes.com/recipes/how_to_make_preserved_lemons/
Three with spices:
https://www.thekitchn.com/recipe-preserve-5236
https://foodnetwork.co.uk/recipes/preserved-lemons/ This also suggests topping up with water. As before, use lemon juice.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/how_to_make_preserved_01545
Hope this helps!
Those of you who follow me on Twitter or Tumblr, or who dip in here from time to time, will know that cooking and cookbooks are issues of interest in our household. Particularly the cookbooks. There are a couple hundred of them in the living room at the moment (and that’s after we weeded out some unnecessary ones and sent them off to the library at the end of last year). They span all kinds of cuisines and approaches to cooking, and a nontrivial percentage of them are pre-20th century.
I have to confess that the older ones are some of my favorites (and not just for the recipes: often because of the advertising that appears in them, or because of other associations—regional, historical, linguistic. For example: a covey of cookbooks in (Sursilvan) Romansch, bought as much for the language/dialect or vocabulary as for the regional specialties). US and European “community” cookbooks of the 1800s and early 1900s are also favorites of ours. And some such cookbooks get added to the collection due to having come up on the local radar by other means, often obscure.
Right now, for example, I find myself looking at a project I wasn’t expecting to need to add to my TBW pile: a full-blown translation of a French cookbook. This one has a bit of a resemblance, in approach anyway, to one we’ve had available for download at EuropeanCuisines.com for a while: Mrs. de Salis’s fabulous Savouries a la Mode.
Savouries, like the many other guides and cookbooks Harriet de Salis wrote during the late 1800s/early 1900s, was aimed at the “New Woman”—the lady of the house whose circumstances, for whatever reason, rendered her unable to afford the staff / extra hired help that were in some classes taken for granted in an earlier time, and without whom it was thought impossible to “keep house properly”. So recipes that might have otherwise been lost to us (except by the former household staff themselves writing cookbooks, which fortunately also happened) are preserved, in full detail, in de Salis’s works. And old recipes of this kind—dishes or treats that one might have expected to be able to readily have at home, once—are always welcome.
Now let’s veer briefly sideways. While researching Belgian waffles for our page on that subject at EuropeanCuisines.com—and particularly the Liège waffle that often falls through the cracks somewhat for North Americans, since a (non-yeast-raised) version of the Brussels waffle tends to be more popular there—I went looking for French- and Vlaams-language online waffle resources, and came across the venerable website GaufresBelges.com and its recipe page. Their recipe for a beer-based waffle caught my eye, and I was pleased to see that they’d credited the cookbook.
Having tested the recipe—and finding it not at all bad—I started wondering what else might be in that cookbook that was worth knowing about. So I went looking for it, and soon enough found references to “La Patissière des Petites Menages” online: but the book itself turned out to be not that easy to find. As usual, this made me more interested in getting my hands on it, not less. Finally I found a copy available through a listing similar to this one at the French version of Rakuten, and sent off for it.
What arrived was a solid little paperback, old but very well made: the kind of thing you would have picked up from a kiosk or newsstand / newsagent of the time. The type is beautifully bitten into the page. The binding is sewn in signatures (and provoked immediate nostalgia for the long-ago days before paperback binding was universally done with glue). The 20-centime price tag translates, in modern buying power, to the equivalent of about a Euro. The book is 175 pages long: an introduction, a glossary, 140-odd pages of relatively brief and simple recipes for all kinds of baking that can be done in the home oven, a comprehensive index, an ad for other books from the publisher (A. -L. Guyot), and an ad for a company selling accordions and zithers.
…As you page through it, it becomes obvious that in this cookbook’s recipes the emphasis is on being able to make your own slightly-specialized goodies at home, without having to go down to the shops (or the baker’s) for them. (Which is perhaps why the lady on the cover isn’t wearing traditional baker’s togs, but bicycling bloomers.)
Peter, who has a university-level French course under his belt, kindly took a run at translating the introduction.
TO OUR READERS
As we announced, this “TREATISE ON PATISSERIE” completes our “COOKERY FOR SMALL
HOUSEHOLDS”, and we hope it will receive the same favorable reception.
Even in the most modest homes, wives and mothers will doubtless thank us for
providing means to treat their loved ones by enhancing the daily menu with
appealing delicacies to delight young and old.
At family reunions, or where groups of parents and friends are invited to a party for a wedding, a baptism, or other happy occasion, it will be a pleasure for any housewife to make by herself and inexpensively (without resorting to the baker’s oven), some tasty appetisers: PASTRIES, PIES, VOL-AU-VENTS, succulent SWEETS: DONUTS, CHARLOTTES, MERINGUES, TARTLETS, or fine DESSERT CAKES: BISCUITS, WAFERS, MACAROONS, FANCY COOKIES; even aristocratic ICE CREAMS, SORBETS etc. …
Finally, ladies, thanks to the recipes contained in this volume it will be easy to create
a domestic pantry abundantly supplied with LIQUEURS, SYRUPS, JAMS, FRUIT PRESERVES
and CANDIES, which will be all the more most appreciated when prepared by your
caring hands.
We have done our best to offer you a useful and pleasant manual in clear and
practical form: we hope we have succeeded!
The biscuits (cookies, a North American would say) and wafers particularly have my interest: but everything else looks good too. I look forward to getting to grips with the work of translation, a little at a time (because baking is one of the ways I get some of my writing work done. You’d be surprised how much character work you can deal with just while kneading bread…). When everything in the book has been translated, we’ll make it available in unadorned form for download at European Cuisines, and possibly bring it into e-print at Amazon as well. (And I’ll post about it here as well.)
So. Onward…
Well, a little weird.
Ireland is on COVID-19 lockdown (and will be for the next couple/few weeks, it looks like), and our next grocery delivery isn’t until nearly the middle of next week, and there’s no telling whether there’ll be baking yeast in it. And yesterday we were down to our next-to-last packet of it. So I sighed and got ready to start employing stopgap measures.
…And a quick note here: if you’re presently drawing breath to say “But I saw a post about how to make your own…” or “No one is ever really out of yeast, let me tell you how…!” — then please don’t, because there’s no need. I’ve been baking bread casually since my twenties and much more intensively over the last decade (Peter and I simply decided in unison that we’d had it with supermarket bread, and when we found the most dependable recipe imaginable, that was that). At one time or another I’ve built levains and starters from scratch, worked with sourdough starters more than a hundred years old, and have caught and cultured wild yeast on two continents. I’ve even written fiction about yeast, Thoth help me.
Anyway, right this minute—as a busy longtime-work-from-home small-businesswoman who is usually hip-deep in several universes at once while also doing website management—my preference for day-to-day baking is plain old active dry yeast of the Fleischmann’s, Red Star or SAF type. These have been genetically tailored for their work and suit my needs perfectly—being predictable, reliable, and in no need of coddling or extra attention. To be told “All you need to do is mix together some flour and water and let the natural yeasts…!”, etc etc, is for me (at the moment) too much like someone kindly offering to replace my missing Lotus Turbo Esprit with a Trabi. I will cope just fine, but I won’t sing paeans of praise about the alternative strategy. So let’s not go there, yeah? As KP says, “Please and thank you.”
Anyway. What was plain when I got the urge to bake yesterday afternoon was that I was going to have to throw together a preferment, because the thought of actually using up that last packet of yeast was giving me anxiety. Fortunately, when doing the last bake I’d used only 3/4 of the package of yeast, and had set aside the rest for this very purpose. So:
(Stage 1) Find favorite handled soup cup. Spoon in a tablespoon or two of flour and that yeast, and stir it about well to get combined. Add about a quarter-teaspoon of sugar just to let the yeast know that, momentarily anyway, Life Is Unexpectedly Good. Add a quarter cup of water, or a little more if necessary, to make a thick paste. Then cover the cup (or other vessel) and put this whole business aside somewhere warmish for a couple of hours. (Note that no salt is involved in this procedure until making the actual bread dough, because the salt acts as an inhibitor and the last thing you want to do with the yeast at this point is get it feeling inhibited.)
(Stage 2) In a couple of hours there should be some bubbling going on. Stir the bubbles down, add half a cup of lukewarm water, enough flour to make another thick paste, and another quarter- to half-teaspoon of sugar, because keeping the yeasts extra happy/active at this point is smart. Mix it all up until it’s smooth and put the whole business aside for another couple of hours.
(Stage 3) Repeat the above routine one more time with about twice the ingredients, except for another half-teaspoon of sugar for the yeasts. Then off you go and spend another hour or so doing something else. If the bubbles aren’t pretty active in the bowl or cup or whatever when you get back, give it another hour.
(Stage 4) And now we finally start actual breadmaking. Measure out about 200g of wholemeal/whole wheat bread flour and 400g of white bread flour. Stir in 10-12 g of salt (usually about a scant tablespoon). Add to this about 2/3 of the starter and about 350ml of water, and knead by hand or in a mixing bowl with a bread hook until it comes together and is smooth and silky-ish. 15 minutes or so by hand: in a mixer, six minutes on low speed and six minutes on high. Add more flour if necessary. Grease or oil a big bowl: put the dough in it and turn it so it’s evenly coated: cover it with plastic wrap and put it somewhere warm and comfy to rise. (I wrap mine up in a foam throw from Ikea. Works great.)
Because of the lowered raising capacity of this yeast—which is still getting up to speed—the rise takes significantly longer than usual. In this case it took something like four hours for the sponge to fill my raising bowl, which was fine, because I was binging The Rise of Phoenixes (while oblivious to the potential pun, don’t mind me, I catch on slow sometimes) and the plotting and backstabbing had seriously sped up from the previous ten episodes’ everybody-is-poisoning-everybody-else-with-slow-poisons-while-snarking-at-them arc.
At this point I hit pause long enough to punch the dough down… or actually, smoosh it down: it was very soft and sloppy. It was also larger than my normal loaf, because I’d had a put a fair amount of extra flour in to stabilize it. It became plain that (a) it was realistically too late to wait through a second rise and bake last night—which meant an overnight “cool rise” out on the sink in the boot room—and (b) if I put it in a regular loaf pan / tin to do that, it would overflow the thing in the middle of the night and make all kinds of mess. So I oiled a three-liter Les Cousances casserole, dumped the sponge in there, covered it with a tea towel, and left it to its own devices for the night. Then I went back to my binging, though not before adding more water and more flour to what was left of the preferment, and just a few pinches more of sugar, because so far at least the yeasts had been behaving Very Well and deserved a treat.
When I got up in the morning and came downstairs, here’s what the casserole looked like:
So it was plain that it was now time to bake, yay! Oven up to 200C, then (when preheated) slid the casserole in and for good measure threw about 150ml of water into the roasting pan at the bottom, to make some steam. Timer set for 50 minutes, and off to do some email and other stuff.
When the timer went off, this is what we wound up with:
It took another couple of hours for the loaf to cool and stabilize enough to slice safely. It’s a peculiar looking thing, but Peter came along and pronounced it one of the best bakes of this kind ever. (He’s fond of the pot-baking end of things: he’s quite good with the New York Times no-knead recipe.) Having had a couple of slices, I’m inclined to agree. Light: a delicate springy crumb, nice and open in the usual manner of slow-and-cool rises: definitely tasty. The crust’s a bit aggressive, but a night in a bread bag will sort that out.
…So that’s one way to do it. That said: I still want my damn active dry yeast. Meanwhile, the preferment is sitting in the office window, enjoying the warmth from the wood-burning stove, and it’s getting to be time to feed it a little again. (Because an online associate caused me to think of the torture-a-cinnamon-roll concept just now, and a yeast-raised cinnamon roll can be pretty good. We’ll see what tomorrow brings.)
…See, it’s even got a hat!
And for the moment, that’s all she wrote.