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Peter's Isolation Goulasch
Food, restaurants and cookingHome liferecipes

Peter’s Isolation Goulasch

by Diane Duane

(Appearing here because his own site is down for restructuring at the moment.)

Himself says:

This is a “what was available in the house” reduction from my main goulash recipe, based on a combination of Gyorg Lang, Karoly Gundel, a few Hungarian things run through Google Translate and some tweaks by me…

Ingredients

  • 2 tbs lard or sunflower/corn/ ordinary olive oil. (Not Extra Virgin, you’re wasting it.)
  • 2 large onions, chopped coarsely
  • 4 cloves garlic, minced
  • 1 tbsp caraway seeds, crushed (mince the garlic and caraway together with rocking knife technique – the sticky garlic keeps the seeds from flying about. A bit, anyway.)
  • 1 lb / .5kg stewing beef in 1 inch / 30mm cubes (which is usually how it’s sold)
  • 3 tbsp Hungarian paprika,  if possible 1 tbsp Hot, 2 tbsp Sweet (or 2 tbsp regular Supervalu paprika and 1 tbsp Cayenne. Don’t use smoked paprika unless using European sausage like kabanossi or kielbasa instead of beef, then go for it, the result is yummy.)
  • 2 tins chopped tomatoes and ½ tin water
  • 1 green pepper, seeded and cubed
  • 4 potatoes, peeled and cubed

Method:

Melt the lard in a heavy pot and sweat the onions until soft, glossy and turning golden. Add the garlic and caraway and stir-fry for a few more minutes. Add the beef and stir-fry until all the cubes have changed colour.

Remove from the heat and let sit for a couple of minutes, then add the paprika (paprika + excess heat = bitterness.) Stir well together, add the tomatoes and water, return to the heat, bring to a very gentle simmer, cover and leave for about 2 hours.

Check the beef for tenderness. It should be at the “a bit more will be perfect” stage, so add the pepper and potatoes and give it a bit more; about 20 minutes should do.

Serve topped with a dollop of sour cream (ours was 30% fat Lithuanian from Eurospar, delish!) over buttered noodles, rice, mashed potatoes, tarhonya (Hungarian “egg barley”, a very small pasta similar to orzo)…

Or what we did tonight: “Bratkartoffel” – potatoes cut into ½ inch dice and slowly pan-fried until crunchy outside and soft inside, then sprinkled with salt and pepper. We finished ours in the oven – 20 mins at 180° C/ 355° F – for less greasiness; NB that this also makes a great snack by itself (try sprinkling with curry powder, spice bag mix, sea salt & cider vinegar, whatever) and using the oven makes them far less trouble than deep-frying home-made chips.

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Food, restaurants and cookingrecipes

Not Really Hungarian Pork Chops

by Diane Duane

Every now and then, in the work surrounding the slow retooling of the EuropeanCuisines.com website, I wind up doing some casual detective work to try to find the source of a recipe that, though I’d like to include it, just doesn’t feel… right somehow. This week’s case is a recipe that’s labeled “Hungarian”, but isn’t a genuine traditional recipe. It’s nice, though, and a good supper dish or easy-to-throw-together entree, so it’s worth keeping around and sharing even if I can’t put it on EC.com as a true product of its purported culture.

Backstory: The site’s previous image for our tarhonya recipe was crap, and I wanted to reshoot it. So this we did. But a bowlful of plain pasta isn’t all that interesting: I preferred to show it plated up as a side. As it happens, there were a couple of pork cutlets in the fridge… so (with an eye to the gradual approach of dinnertime) I went looking for some Hungarian recipe in which to use them, but came up empty. In fact I couldn’t find anything Hungarian that was pork-cutlet-oriented except for one recipe that made me suspicious by its rarity. It appears in an eating-for-one cookbook by the redoubtable Delia Smith.

In the back of my mind as I looked the recipe over was the thought that probably every cuisine has ingredients that are used so frequently that a casual observer would be tempted to automatically associate them with it when used in combination. That looks like what’s happened here, as the only Hungarian thing about this recipe is that it uses paprika, caraway and sour cream together. So I’m tempted to think that Delia either invented this, or had something like it elsewhere and decided to publish the recipe with the “Hungarian” label.

Delia’s version in the One Is Fun cookbook calls for the cooking to be done in a roasting tin. Since it involves preheating the cooking fat/oil, this struck me as a great way to cover the inside of the oven with a lot of spattering that would need cleaning up after. So—besides altering amounts so that this recipe works for two people instead of one—I did it in a lidded casserole. I think this works better because it also helps the pork stay a little moister/juicier than otherwise: not a bad idea if you’re working with pork that’s fairly lean.

The ingredients:

  • 2 thick pork chops or a single piece of pork loin (about 500g / 1 pound)
  • 2 tablespoons vegetable oil (though you could use lard if you have any, and feel like edging even closer toward a Hungarian approach: it’s very much the preferred fat in their cuisine)
  • 1 large potato or a couple of medium-sized ones, peeled and sliced maybe 5mm or 1/4 inch thick
  • 2 medium onions, peeled, one sliced 5mm / 1/4 inch thick, the other one halved
  • 2 tablespoons mild paprika, or (if you like it a bit hotter) 1 tablespoon hot paprika, one tablespoon regular (Note: smoked paprika works fine for this)
  • 1 teaspoon caraway seeds: more like a tablespoon of them, if you’re a caraway fan
  • 2-3 teaspoons butter
  • 100 ml (or more) of a good thick sour cream: or yogurt if you prefer it. Thin with a couple of teaspoons or a tablespoon of water or milk, if necessary, to make it a little bit pourable.
  • Salt and fresh-ground black pepper

Directions:

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F / 180C. Find a heavy lidded casserole and put it (without the lid) n the oven to preheat along with it.

Peel and slice the potatoes: peel and slice/halve the onions. If you (like me) suffer from Onions Make Me Cry syndrome, do yourself a favor before you start work on this recipe and stick the onions in the freezer for twenty minutes or half an hour. This lowers the vapor pressure of the gas they’ll release when you cut them, and gives you a fighting chance to get the work done before the gas warfare starts to impair your functioning.

On a plate or in a shallow bowl, combine the paprika, caraway seeds, and some salt and pepper. Dry your pork steak or cutlets off with paper towels and press each side of the cutlets or pork steak into the spice mixture to coat them.

When the oven’s ready, remove your casserole, pour in the oil or fat you’re going to be using (give the lard a moment to melt if you haven’t already melted it in the microwave) and arrange the sliced onions in the casserole; then add the sliced potatoes. Snug those two half pieces of onion down into this business, and perch the pork on top of them. (This stratagem holds the meat a little out of the cooking juices and helps those juices rise up and steam the bottom of it.) 

Top the piece(s) of meat with the butter, give everything another grind or so of pepper, and sprinkle the remaining spice-coating mixture over the meat and the layers of potato and onion. Sock the casserole into the oven and bake for 30 minutes. 

At this point, pull the casserole out of the oven and pour the sour cream over the meat; then return the casserole to the oven, lidded again. Bake for another fifteen minutes.

And that’s it! Get it out of the oven and serve it forth. If you feel inclined, garnish the servings with a little more sour cream and paprika, and a sprinkle of caraway. 

Enjoy!

 

 

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booksFoodFood, restaurants and cookingrecipesWriting

Ludwig Bemelmans’ NY Oyster Bar Shellfish Pan Roast Recipe

by Diane Duane

I love Ludwig Bemelmans for many reasons that usually have more to do with writing and his challenging career arc than with food (more details here). But this post’s about the food, and a specific favorite recipe.

In his collection of “slice-of-culinary-life” writings La Bonne Table,  Bemelmans passes on a bit of info that many New Yorkers, or visitors to the city, would be glad to have: the original recipe for one version of the famous shellfish pan roast served at Grand Central Terminal’s venerable Oyster Bar and Restaurant (a venue much appreciated by the cats in the Feline Wizardry series, as well as by the series’s author, who ate there as often as she could afford to while living and working in Manhattan).

So here’s the image of the page in La Bonne Table where the recipe/method appears, and a transcription of the method. He gives the version for the clam pan roast: for an oyster one like the one in the header image, I just substitute canned oysters and enough fish stock or consommé to equal the amount of clam broth Bemelmans quotes. All kinds of shellfish work brilliantly in this (and if you’re actually in the Oyster Bar some time and feel inclined toward this dish, you might like to order the combination one, which has a little bit of everything). I’ve broken up the original block of his text for readability’s sake: may his kindly shade forgive me.

 

We went to rake for cockles, which are like our clams, except for their globular structure, and they taste like Little Necks. I gave the hostess a recipe, which I found in Grand Central Station’s sea-food bar, where a Greek chef who makes it wrote it down for me and showed me how it’s made. It is one of the best things to eat, simple to make– in fact, nobody can go wrong. It’s a meal in itself, and it costs very little.

You need paprika, chili sauce, sherry wine; also celery salt, Worcestershire sauce, butter according to your taste, and clams. I use cherrystones, which are washed and brushed, and then placed in a deep pan with their own liquid. For each portion of eight, add one pat of butter, a tablespoon of chili sauce, 1/2 teaspoon of Worcestershire sauce, a few drops of lemon juice and 1/2 cup of clam broth. Add a dash of celery salt and paprika.

Stir all this over a low fire for three minutes. Then add four ounces of light cream or heavy cream, according to your taste, and one ounce of sherry wine, and keep stirring. When it comes to the boiling point, pour it over dry toast in individual bowls. Add a pat of butter and a dash of paprika and it is ready to serve.

If you have made too much of it, put the remainder in a container in your refrigerator. It will be as good, warmed up, a week or a month* later. It’s called Clam Pan Roast, if you ever want to order it at Grand Central Station’s Oyster Bar. I understand the recipe originally came from Maine.

(This post originally appeared at the author’s Tumblr, and is reproduced here so people who [correctly] aren’t wild about their ToS as regards data sharing don’t have to go over there.)

*I love his enthusiasm here, but frankly I wouldn’t leave this in the fridge for any month. A few days maybe. (Though it must be said, I couldn’t leave it alone that long anyway. It’s really good.)

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Chicken with forty cloves of garlic
cookingFood, restaurants and cookingrecipes

Two Recipes for Chicken With Lots Of Cloves Of Garlic

by Diane Duane

I had an ask-box message from AislinnSiofra on my Tumblr a while back pointing out that both Peter and I have sometimes mentioned making these dishes on our blogs, but never actually given the recipes. Time to remedy that omission.

Both these recipes come from Richard Olney’s fabulous classic cookbook Simple French Food, which I think everybody should have in their collection if they’re interested in cooking at all. It’s not just because Olney’s recipes are wonderful (and they really are). For me, it’s partly a stylistic issue. All through the book he throws away, casually, effortlessly, not so much recipes, but methods for turning out terrific dishes. More than that, though: this was the man who went to court to determine once and for all what part of a recipe was copyrightable, thereby doing all cookbook writers since a signal service. (Short version of the story: it’s not the ingredient list that’s copyrightable, but the description of what to do with the ingredients–the method, and the language of the method. Olney was really tired of his recipes being being ripped off, and with good reason, as his voice as a cookbook writer is unique. So he stood up and went to law over the issue, and all cookbook writers after him should be grateful.)

Anyway! The chicken. These recipes appear back to back on a single page of the Penguin paperback edition of Simple French Food, and though they both have lots of garlic in them, they are as different as night from day. One of them is what you expect of a Garlic-With-Forty-Cloves recipe on first hearing: something brash, rustic, rambunctious, and unapologetically in-your-face. The other is a far subtler business — the first chance most people ever get, I think, to experience garlic as a root vegetable, with its aggressiveness tamed but not entirely banished. Both recipes are really good. I encourage all readers of this post to try both and find out which they like better.

Here’s the first one, which in Olney is simply entitled:

Garlic Chicken / (Poules ‘aux 40 gousses d’Ail’)

Ingredients:

  • 1 chicken, cut up as for a sauté (or 4 legs, thighs and drumsticks, separated)
  • 4 heads firm garlic, broken into cloves, cleared of loose hulls, but unpeeled
  • 15cl / 0.25 pint olive oil [this is a UK pint: so, 5 fluid ounces for the US readership, or 150ml)
  • Salt, pepper
  • 1 tsp finely crumbled mixed dried herbs (thyme, oregano, savory)
  • 1 large bouquet garni: large branch celery, parsley and root (if available), bay leaf, leek greens, small branch lovage (if available)
  • Flour for dough

“Put everything except the bouquet into an earthenware casserole, turning around and over repeatedly with your hands to be certain of regularly dispersed seasoning and an even coating of oil. Force the bouquet into the centre, packing the chicken around and filling all interstices with garlic cloves.

“Prepare a dough of flour, water and a dribble of oil, roll it into a long cylindrical band on a floured board, moisten the ridge of the casserole, press the roll of paste into place, and press the lid on top. Cook in a 350F, 180C oven for 1 hour and 45 minutes and break the seal at the table.”

It couldn’t be simpler. Olney adds, “The garlic, squeezed from its hull and spread onto grilled crisp slices of rough country bread as one eats the chicken, will be appreciated by all who do not share the mental antigarlic quirk; if the bread can be grilled over hot coals, the light smoky flavor will be found to marry particularly well with the garlic puree. …For variety’s sake, turn, quarter and choke 3 or 4 tender young artichokes, coating them immediately in the recipe’s olive oil before mixing all the ingredients together.”

…I love the way he just adds that afterthought.

Now the other one:

Braised Chicken Legs with Lemon (Poulet au Citron)

“The lemon and garlic alliance,” Olney says, “is borrowed from French Catalan cooking. Were the dish prepared in that country, Banyuls, a fortified wine vinified in much the same way as Port, would replace the white wine in this recipe.

“To create tidy shapes that cook evenly and do not sprawl in the pan, cut the knob-ends from the drumsticks and, pulling the skin to one side so as not to cut into it, partially sever the joint between each thigh and drumstick, cutting through the tendons without separating the two pieces.

“Serve a plain, uncondimented pilaf or parboiled and steamed rice as an accompaniment.”

Ingredients:

  • 20 to 25 large, firm, crisp garlic cloves, peeled without crushing, parboiled for 5 minutes, and drained
  • 60cl / 1 pint veal or chicken stock
  • 4 chicken legs (thighs and drumsticks attached)
  • Salt, pepper
  • 50g / 1.5 ounces butter
  • 1 lemon, peeled (all white inner peel removed), thinly slices, seeds removed
  • 2 tablespoons flour
  • 15cl / 0.25 pint white wine

“Poach the parboiled garlic cloves for about 40 minutes in the stock, covered, kept at a slight simmer.

“Color the seasoned chicken legs in butter over medium heat (20-25 minutes) and transfer them to an oven casserole. Strain the stock to remove the garlic cloves, taking care not to damage them. Scatter the garlic over the chicken pieces, distribute the lemon slices, and put the casserole aside, covered, until the sauce is prepared.

“Remove any excess fat from the pan in which the chicken was browned (leaving just enough to absorb the flour), add the flour and cook, stirring, over low heat for a few moments. Deglaze with the white wine over high heat, stirring and scraping with a wooden spoon; add the stock, and pour into a small saucepan: this is important, the small surface permitting a more rapid and complete skimming and degreasing of the sauce while preventing, at the same time, an exaggerated reduction. Skim for about 15 minutes, removing any traces of loose fat from the surface with absorbent paper. Pour the sauce over the chicken and its garnish and cook, covered, in a 375F / 190C oven for 40 to 45 minutes. The lemon will have completely disappeared into the sauce; the garlic cloves should be absolutely intact with a consistency of melting purée; the sauce must be tasted to be believed.”

…He’s not kidding.  This dish is sublime. When you press one of these garlic cloves between your tongue and the roof of your mouth, it just kind of goes away in a little soft explosion of the mildest and subtlest imaginable garlic flavor.

Just one warning note about this dish, though. It will almost certainly give you the most aggressively garlicky farts you have ever experienced. (“Technicolor farts,” Peter calls them.) If you’re going to be in an enclosed space within eight hours or so with someone you want to torment, this is the recipe for you. …Otherwise, just make sure everyone in the area gets some, and you can all tease each other about the results when enough time after dinner has gone by.

Enjoy!

(PS: Apologies that we don’t seem to have any shots of either of these dishes in the digital image collection — I think what ones we had were caught in a disk crash some time back. We’re going to be cooking both of these next week so we can get new shots of them. Meanwhile, please bear with the stock photography…)

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Home screen of Meal-Master, a recipe in Paprika
cookingFoodrecipesSoftware

Journey’s End: Moving From Meal-Master To Paprika

by Diane Duane

I collect recipes. Lots of them. I used to use the venerable Meal-Master software for this, but over time it’s gotten a bit long in the tooth. As a result I’ve been looking for somewhere better to put those recipes… and now I’ve found it. Details follow.

I cook for pleasure, as well as necessity. When Peter and I got married, on merging our libraries we found that something like 20% of the books in both libraries were cookbooks. The living room bookshelves are full of them, despite numerous attempts to winnow them down over the last few years. The general rule has been, “If nobody’s touched the book in five years, send it to the library.”

Somehow we still have 300 cookbooks in the living room.

it will therefore probably come as a surprise to nobody that my recipe collecting has for a good while also extended into the digital realm. For many years I used Meal-Master, devised by Scott Welliver, which in the ancient days of DOS was the preeminent software for people who collected recipes. It was, by our present standard, clunky and idiosyncratic, but it worked (and had huge capacity…64,000 recipes+). And there were lots and lots of scattered treasure troves of recipes all over the web, in many languages, waiting to be found and saved.

Episoft Systems, Welliver’s (now apparently defunct) company responsible for the software, kept updating it for many years until finally, with version 8.05 (in 1999), the Meal-Master software was declared copyrighted freeware and turned loose into the wild. As operating systems and platforms changed, Meal-Master became less and less useful and / or usable, and a lot of people started looking for software that would accept imports from MM’s old-school database structure and leave the recipes looking at least something like they had to start with.

Until I got to the point where I stopped actively collecting Meal-Master-format recipes, I managed to gather about 40,000 of them (and I get a sense from having seen other Meal-Master enthusiasts’ posts that my collection was actually a little on the small side). A few years ago, it occurred to me that I really needed to get active about trying to find some software to export them to, before everything moved on so far that the import could no longer be done. So I exported all my stored recipes into a series of files in the MM export format (with the .MMF suffix) and started looking for a new recipe storage candidate.

The problem was that a lot of the software I found available at that point didn’t import the Meal-Master structure particularly well or flexibly.  Routinely, in the process of the import, something froze or crashed it — usually because of one or another of the workarounds that MM fans had constructed over time to get around some of the program’s more rigid features. As a result, the imports I attempted at that point were mostly disastrous, and in frustration I put the project aside for a while. I was still twitching, though, at the thought of all those recipes lying around in a format that did me no good anymore — Windows 7 flatly refused to run Meal Master, and while Windows XP ran it all right, XP was rapidly approaching its end-of-life. I’d gone to a lot of trouble to pull all those recipes together — many in foreign languages, many from online sources that were long gone — and the situation niggled at me constantly.

Recently, though, a change in local circumstances pushed the issue to the fore again. Peter and I had spent some time, over the last year or so, discussing the fact that our EuropeanCuisines.com food-hobbyist website hadn’t had a serious makeover in several years. Additionally, we’ve been considering a change in direction for the site:  more food blogging, and content pointed more toward those interested in doing something we have a fair amount of experience in — traveling to European destinations, renting small holiday places there, and cooking in them.

With that in mind, we were also looking at a complete restructure of our recipe section, with an eye to making it more structured and easy to find things in. Additionally, a whole lot of those 40,000 Meal-Master recipes of mine are European, and I wanted a way to restructure them for use on the EC.com website. Specifically I wanted a way to make them easy for people to download with a tap or click — and most especially, I wanted to make them easy for people to get at on mobile devices. After all, when you’re a tourist standing in the middle of a busy grocery in Munich or Bratislava or Oslo, you don’t want to have to be tearing your hair over the thought of that terrific recipe that you saw on whatever-that-website-was and not be able to get at it quickly, so that you can buy the ingredients, go to your holiday flat, and cook the damn thing.

So. With all this on my mind, last week I started searching again for something that would both import my Meal-Master recipes smoothly, and (eventually) work well in cooperation with the website. And what the hell? I found it. It’s Paprika.

(BTW, as a sometimes-food blogger I need to state here clearly for the record — and the usual legal reasons — that the only money to change hands here was me giving them my money. Not the other way around.)

Paprika has been around for a while, and that it took me this long to find it is probably just a function of my not having looked in the right places at the right times — or, alternately, that when I was looking most actively, I did not yet have my iPad. Which is where I found Paprika, in its app form. The software exists in both iOS and Android forms, and as a Windows desktop version. There is also a Mac version, which, not having a Mac, I haven’t tested (and there’s a Kindle Fire version too, which surprised me a bit). But the iOS version for the iPad is, not to put too fine a point on it, as slick as snot.

It is beautiful and glossy and well-set up, and does everything I could’ve hoped for and a great deal more. It is friendly to all the major online food and recipe sources; it’s compatible with a lot of the bigger food blogging sites, and also with the hRecipe microformat. (Which will matter when I start wrangling the converted recipes into the main EC.com website.) And best of all, from my point of view, one of the numerous recipe export format types it accepts is the .MMF file export type of Meal-Master.

When I saw this, my heart began to sing a little song — but I still needed to run some tests: I’d been disappointed too often before. I was willing enough, though, to venture €4.99 on the app for the iPad. And frankly that was one of the best just-shy-of-a-fivers I’ve ever laid down. Half an hour of working with the app told me that I wanted the desktop version of the program right now, whether it imported MMF recipes well or not.  I went immediately to their website and bought the Windows desktop version.

I should say here that one thing I attempted with the iOS version before purchasing the Windows desktop program didn’t work terribly well. I very much wanted to test the app’s import ability on a small .mmf file that I had handy. But once I’d  moved a copy of the .MMF file up into the Paprika app’s cloud, the app nonetheless seemed to have trouble seeing it. However, I was already so impressed by the way the app looked and handled that at that point I didn’t much care. I was more than willing to handle the Meal-Master imports from the desktop end. (Please note also that I’m not entirely certain that the failure to “see” the file in the cloud on the Pad didn’t have something to do with our famously dodgy rural / cellular broadband, which starts cutting up cranky when it rains, ffs. In Ireland this is not an advantage.)

As soon as I opened the Windows desktop version of the app, however, my hopes were raised again, as the import requirements looked extremely simple. It took about three mouse clicks and five minutes for Paprika to import a test .MMF file of 2000 recipes. They imported with all their categories intact — which had been one of my major concerns; tagging is everything in a recipe database — and perfectly formatted. None of them had any photos associated with them, obviously — Meal-Master had never been capable of anything of the kind — but Paprika will allow you to add images to recipes as you like. Having checked the imported recipes over in the big desktop machine, I sync’d them to Paprika’s cloud, and then sync’d the iPad to them. The sync went without any problems, and everything crossed over perfectly. (I have yet to do this for my HTC One as well, but I still have to get the Android version of the app for that. Later today perhaps.)

So I happily got to work on importing the rest of the recipes. It took me about an hour to pull in the 40,000-odd of them. At the end of the hour, I was left with a big, fat, beautiful-looking recipe collection that was ready for the next stage: reorganization. No surprise that it was going to need some of that, as some of the Meal-Master categories were a bit idiosyncratic, or just plain silly. And numerous categories needed to be spelled differently or rationalized for one preferred spelling (for example, I had recipes with about six different formats and spellings of the term “chile heads” for recipes that go back to the fabled Chile-Heads mailing list / newsgroup). Others needed to be eliminated entirely and their entries moved into other categories. But that was just going to be some organizational work that could be done in bits and pieces over time. At the end of that hour, I was one very happy cook.

One of the great strengths of Paprika is the way it syncs across devices. It’ll be a while yet before I sync my main collection up to the iPad and my phone, as I want to make sure that I’ve first thrown out any duplicates that may have crossed over, and finish the category reorganization. Then begins a slower project of curation, as one thing Peter and I want to do for our EuropeanCuisines.com visitors is make Paprika-friendly recipe collections available for easy download. That’s a project for future months, as we proceed with EC.com’s reorganization.

In the meantime, though, I can now with a light heart go about the house deleting the various installations of Meal-Master that had been tucked away in the guts of various of the machines, waiting for the day when I would finally find a way to make those squirreled-away recipes both available to other people and safe in a new format. My long search is finally over. (And now I’m also free to range around the web collecting more Meal-Master recipes, and making them both safe and available to others, before their format becomes lost entirely in the mists of time.)

So, to sum up: if you are a longtime Meal-Master user, or know one, I unreservedly commend Paprika to you as a way to go forward.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go kill some obsolete categories. 🙂

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Mycroft's Delight
BakingFoodrecipesSherlock Holmes

Mycroft’s Delight: the cake

by Diane Duane

There’s a widespread headcanon among the writers of Sherlock fanfic (and others in the fandom) that Mycroft Holmes — possibly as an associated phenomenon of an old or longstanding weight problem — is very fond of cake. For some reason, chocolate cake is the favored candidate in these theories. So in 2012 or so, when without warning I  turned up the notes I’d made on this cake when I ran across it in Switzerland in the very late 1990s, my thoughts turned to Mycroft, and the idea that he’d have really liked this one.

I got busy recreating the cake as accurately as I could. In the neighborhood of Sedrun — the tiny town near the Oberalppass where I ran into it — it was referred to simply as an Urner brenntweintorte, suggesting that its ancestor-cake originally came from over the border. (Andermatt is in Canton Uri: Sedrun is in the Graubunden.) I had no luck in getting the recipe from the little confiserie where it was one of the star items, and with reason: I think they suspected me of being a spy for another bakery.

But over time I’ve learned how to pretty accurately analyze what I’m eating, and my notes from my two visits to the little confiserie were pretty detailed… so I don’t have too many qualms about sharing it here. (It’s kind of overdue for that, anyway: it’s been up in a couple of different versions on Tumblr since 2012, but not at my main blog until now.)

I’d say it’s a cake worthy of a Mycroft’s attention. It’s nowhere near as pretty as the original, for which apologies. (I can still see that lovely cake in my mind’s eye. The glaze on top was smooth enough to skate on, and their version had six significantly skinnier layers. It was a beautiful thing.)

So here’s the recipe. I add one caveat in passing. Others who’ve baked the cake have sometimes found the initial batter overly thick / dry. There’s a more extensive note about this here, but the problem seems to have been something to do with egg size. In  particular, Irish eggs run larger than US ones: so get the biggest “extra large” eggs you can find.)

The recipe:

Double Chocolate Courvoisier Torte with Brandied Buttercream Filling and Two Icings (Brandied Nutella Frosting and Cream Cheese & White Chocolate Ganache Glaze) ...otherwise known as Mycroft’s Delight

Note please: this cake will take the guts of an afternoon to make. Don’t attempt it as a last-minute thing. In particular, there’s no harm in baking the layers, soaking them in the syrup, and then refrigerating them overnight – you can then pick up where you left off with the fillings and icings.

Ingredients come first: directions after.

Also note: this recipe is set up for three 8-inch layers. You can, of course, if you like, do what I did here – bake two 9-inch layers in a springform, then cut them in half crossways and stack them.

Ingredients:

For the cake proper:

  • 6 large eggs
  • 1 cup superfine granulated sugar or fine caster sugar
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla extract or essence
  • 4 ounces unsweetened baking chocolate, melted and slightly cooled
  • ½ cup good quality cocoa
  • 1 cup flour, sifted
  • ½ teaspoon baking powder
  • ½ teaspoon powdered cinnamon
  • ¼ teaspoon mace
  • ½ teaspoon orange extract and 1 teaspoon orange zest, crushed as smooth as possible in a mortar (or if you’re lucky enough to have access to it, a half teaspoon of orange zest puree)
  • A few grinds of fresh nutmeg (about 1/8 teaspoon if we’re being picky about it)

For the soaking syrup:

  • ¼ cup sugar
  • 1/3 cup water
  • 2 tablespoons Courvoisier cognac (alternately, you can substitute a good brandy: Hennessey, etc)

For the buttercream frosting base / filling:

  • 3 cups confectioners’ sugar / icing sugar
  • 2/3 cup unsalted butter
  • 2 large egg yolks
  • 4 tablespoons Courvoisier or brandy (whichever you used above)

(A note in passing: you will be dividing this in half. Half goes in between the layers; the other half gets Nutella mixed into it and goes on the sides of the cake.)

For the brandied Nutella side-frosting:

  • 4 ounces Nutella, warmed
  • 2 ounces melted milk or dark chocolate
  • 1 tablespoon Courvoisier or brandy, as above
  • 2 teaspoons cocoa powder

For the ganache / cream cheese glaze:

  • 1 recipe white chocolate ganache (see below)
  • 3-4 ounces Philadelphia or similar cream cheese (plain Neufchatel will also work)

The white chocolate ganache proper:

  • 4 ounces premium-quality white chocolate, finely chopped
  • 1/3 cup heavy cream
  • ¾ tablespoon unsalted butter, at room temperature and cut into 3 pieces

…So let’s take this one thing at a time.

First of all, make the cake layers.

Butter and flour three 8-inch cake pans/tins, even if they’re nonstick. (To prevent the cake acquiring pale patches during baking, you can mix a teaspoon of cocoa with each couple of teaspoons of the flour you use to prep the pans.)

In a mixer with the whisk attachment, beat together the eggs, sugar, vanilla, orange extract and orange zest, until this business is light and fluffy – usually ten to twenty minutes. At the end of this process, slow the speed down and add the dry spices.

When these have been combined, stop the mixer and alternately fold in by hand the combined, remaining dry ingredients and the melted chocolate.

Preheat the oven to 350F / 175C. Bake the layers for about fifteen minutes until done (check for doneness with a skewer if you have any doubts). Remove the layers from the oven and allow to cool for at least 15-20 minutes: then bang the pans on the worktop to loosen things up, and turn the layers out onto a rack to cool completely (usually 30-45 minutes).

When completely cool, use a skewer to poke twenty or so little holes in the top of each layer. Do your best not to go all the way through the bottom of the layer. Put the layers on a cookie sheet or other waterproof surface to prepare for the next stage.

Now make the soaking syrup:

Boil the sugar and water together for five minutes. Remove from heat and allow to cool. When cool, stir in the cognac or brandy (whichever you used) and set aside until the layers are ready.

When they are, pour the syrup carefully over the tops of the layers so that it soaks in through the holes. Use a pastry brush to paint any excess syrup evenly over the tops of the cake layers.

Now set the layers aside while you work on the filling and icings.

Make the buttercream filling:

In the mixer bowl, using the “normal” beater or paddle, combine the butter, icing sugar, egg yolks and brandy, and beat like crazy for about ten minutes until perfectly smooth (beat longer if you need to).

Scoop out half the buttercream and use it to “butter” the bottom and middle layers of the cake: then stack them. Press down evenly and gently on them (I usually use a cookie sheet for this) to even out the layers and the filling.

Now make the Nutella-and-buttercream side frosting

Add the cocoa, melted chocolate, brandy and Nutella to the remaining buttercream mixture, and beat very well. Since the goal is for this mixture to stick to the sides of the cake and not run straight off onto the serving plate, check the texture and beat in some extra cocoa if necessary to thicken the frosting until it’s tractable.

Smooth the sides of the cake with the flat of a knife if necessary to deal with any buttercream that’s oozed out the sides. Use the Nutella frosting mixture to coat the sides of the cake. Also frost the upper edge and a little ways up onto the top surface of the cake with the Nutella mixture if you can. If you have enough to frost the whole top without the side frosting being too thin, that’s great: it’ll look better.

Finally, make the white chocolate ganache and cream cheese glaze

Prepare a large bowl with some cold water and ice cubes in it. Then break up the white chocolate into as many pieces as possible, and put them in a heatproof bowl that will fit comfortably in the bigger bowl that contains the cold water and the ice cubes.

Bring the heavy cream to a boil. Then pour it over the white chocolate. Working with a whisk or spatula, gently stir the chocolate and cream together until the white chocolate is completely melted. When the ganache is smooth, stir in the butter.

Now cool the ganache by putting the its bowl into the larger one and stirring constantly so that it doesn’t harden. After about five minutes of this, start beating in the cream cheese by forkfuls. You’ll probably need to whisk it at the end of this process to get rid of the last few lumps. Finally, add a tablespoon or so of brandy to make it easier to work with. (You can correct the thickness of the ganache back and forth by beating in more cream cheese or a little more brandy until it reaches the consistency you’re after.) Spread and/or drizzle this mixture over the top of the cake until it’s evenly covered.

Once all this craziness is finished, you may want to refrigerate the cake for half an hour to stabilize everything a little.

Serve in thin slices. A shot of brandy on the side (to cut the incredible richness) and a double espresso wouldn’t hurt, either.

Enjoy!

And by the way: there’s fanfic to go with the cake.

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cookingFoodHome liferecipes

Peter’s Dhal

by Diane Duane

A bunch of you were asking for his recipe for this: so here it is. Believe it or not, I didn’t know he could do this kind of thing when I married him. Hidden talents…!

The problem with informal food photography like this, of course, is that (like so many other one pot dishes of a peasant-y nature) it tends to just look kind of beige. (Or, as Himself Upstairs puts it, “Like savory mud.”) I couldn’t be bothered to go get parsley or whatever for it. Trust me: it was extremely good. Below, Peter frames it as a possible side dish, but we ate it happily as a main course, believe me.

(PS: sorry for the slightly blurry photo. I was more intent on getting the image’s subject inside me than on the focus…)

Peter says:

Improvised store-cupboard dhal, for when you can’t be bothered with a cookbook.

 

1 cup vegetable oil

2 large onions, chopped fine

4-6 cloves garlic, chopped fine

1 tbsp. each of ground cumin, ground coriander

½ tbsp. each of ground turmeric, ground chilli, ground black pepper

½ tbsp. each of mild curry powder, hot curry powder

1 tsp. salt

2 cups red lentils

½ cup green lentils

½ cup brown lentils

Boiling water

1 tbsp. lemon juice

 

Heat the oil, fry the onions & garlic until soft and glossy. Add all the spices. Fry for a few minutes. Add all the lentils*. Stir everything together. Add enough boiling water to cover by ½ an inch. Stir everything together, reduce heat, cover and simmer for about ½ an hour. Check occasionally. Add more water if required a bit at a time, then stir. (Don’t overdo it. Preferred texture is like stew, not soup.) Add lemon juice, stir, and serve with rice and/or flatbreads.

 

Makes a good side with shop-bought tandoori chicken.

 

*Alternately add lightly fried chicken or lamb cubes and 2 x cans of chopped tomatoes along with the lentils. Reduce water accordingly. Simmer for ¾ hour, serve when meat is cooked, and call it a dhansak. (It isn’t really. But it tastes good anyway.)

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Bakingcookingrecipes

The Return to the Brown-Edged Wafer

by Diane Duane

I have a soft spot for this particular cookie (as this post from some years back should probably make plain). The other evening I got the yen to make some of these, and ran into a problem. We were out of potato flour.

On reflection it seems extremely strange that in Ireland it should be so hard to find potato flour. (And don’t get me started about onion powder. Garlic powder, no problem, there’s lots of it around here, but onion powder is unfindable. And why should that be?! No answers yet.) The only source for potato flour (for me, anyway) is one or the other of the two big Asian supermarkets up in central Dublin. But anyway, there I was wondering where that last package of potato flour had gone (answer:  this German dumpling recipe) and the cookies were not going to happen.

Except that then an idea occurred. We did have some rice flour, which I picked up a month or two back with an eye to testing out some gluten-free baking recipes. Might that do the trick? It was worth a try.

The recipe I normally use as the closest approach to the original Brown Edge Wafer that Nabisco used to make is this one from Cookie Madness, based on a recipe from the potato flour packaging. So i made the recipe as per instructions, with only one change: swapping in a cup of rice flour for the cup of potato flour.

It works perfectly. Not being able to do a side-by-side bake and not having anything to rely on for assessment but my own taste buds, I couldn’t detect any significant difference in flavor between the potato-flour and rice-flour versions. So if you too are out of potato flour, this is a different way to go.

Having the raw materials in sufficient supply also gave me a chance to do an experiment I’d been thinking about. The original Nabisco Brown Edge Wafers were quite thin (looking a lot like these Marjoram butter cookies at SheWearsManyHats.com). Ideally I wanted to get my cookies to come out more like these: more wafer-y.

The ball-rolling-and-flattening technique of the original recipe works well enough, but doesn’t produce that thin a cookie. (Also if the dough is too soft the flattening turns into a real chore: it gets stuck to whatever does the flattening, and various strategies attempted to defeat this — flouring or sugaring the glass used to do the flattening — have proven only occasionally successful.)

As I considered the cookie recipe, I started wondering whether it would be possible to treat these as a refrigerator cookie. I.e., make the cookie dough into rolls, chill it, and slice it. Maybe, I thought, if  sliced thin enough, the wafers would come out flatter when they spread.

So I made a second batch of the dough and took a run at this. It takes a bit of extra work. Some people might prefer this approach: it’s possible, I think, that freezing the rolls and cracking them out when you wanted cookies might work. (Sigh. Another experiment…)

The problem is that the dough, when initially ready to bake, is very light delicate. So the thing to do is refrigerate it for an hour or so before even attempting the roll-making part of the operation.

Having chilled it, I laid down some baking parchment and dropped some fat spoonfuls onto it in a line. These I rolled up fairly gently and put away to chill again.

IMAG0957

Once the three rolls made this way were good and cold, I took them out of the fridge and rolled them until they were genuinely round. Then I let them chill some more.

IMAG0958

When ready to bake, I put the first of them in the freezer for about twenty minutes while preheating the oven, and prepared the cookie sheet.

With the roll well firmed by its time in the freezer, I sliced (aiming for slices about 1/4 inch thick). The slices, as seems inevitable, flattened on the bottom side while being sliced. They could be pinched back into shape by hand once on the cookie sheet, but I didn’t bother: this whole operation was more a proof of concept than anything else.

slices

Result: The ones I baked this way did not flatten any further. They also kept a bit of the edge of the original slicing. So in terms of producing a more waferlike cookie, this approach doesn’t work. (Though once again the flavor was just fine.)

IMAG0961

This leaves me thinking that a more useful approach would be a more liquid dough/batter. Another egg in the mix, perhaps? Maybe even a little lemon juice? (I used lemon essence and lemon oil in the second batch instead of vanilla. This was a really good flavor, by the way.)

So this is something to think about for next time. Also: that marjoram butter cookie recipe: egg whites… Hmm.

(Also, per that afterthought: I just ran into this recipe, which calls for egg white rather than whole eggs. The amounts described would seem to kick the recipe’s liquid content up, so this is worth looking into. Another day, perhaps…)

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cookingFoodHome lifeIrelandrecipes

“Molly’s Chocolate Pie”

by Diane Duane

Some of you will know (or guess) that I’m interested in the intersection of Sherlock Holmes and food. God knows, in canon Holmes really enjoys his meals, and one of his standard reactions to a big cheque at the end of a case is to rub his hands together with glee, grab Watson, and run straight off to a good restaurant. (For example, “…I have a box for Les Huguenots. Might I trouble you then to be ready in half an hour, and we can stop at Marcini’s for a little dinner on the way?” [HOUN]; “When we have finished at the police station I think that something nutritious at Simpson’s would not be out of place.” [DYIN])

So when the excellent  Azriona started a new fic entitled Mise en Place, and AU-cast Sherlock as a sort-of-Gordon-Ramsay, of course I was interested. In this scenario, John is the co-owner with his sister Harriet of a superannuated, deeply indebted and generally ailing family restaurant on which abrasive-celebrity-chef Sherlock descends to either fix it or put it out of its misery. During the initial assessment meal, for his dessert Sherlock’s served a piece of chocolate pie made by Molly (once waitress, now occupying the position of cook under duress) and finds it not only the only edible thing he’s been given but actually worth finishing.

Now, I enjoy baking, and really like a good cake or pie (as this might indicate). So when Azriona put up the recipe for Molly’s pie, I said, “Hmm, okay, let’s give it a shot and see how it turns out.” Obviously this was going to imply a conversion of the ingredient quantities (as well as some substitutions) for cooks on this side of the water, where — in modern times anyway — recipe measurements, at least of dry ingredients, are routinely done by weight rather than volume.

So here it is.

From the bottom up…

The crust:

image

The closest readily available UK/Irish equivalent is the “digestive biscuit,” a slightly sweet wholemeal / whole wheat “cookie”/ biscuit with a slightly different texture. To the right is one from one of the better-known brands, McVities.

The Food Network crumb crust recipe is as usual slanted toward the US market and uses US measurements and concepts. Well, fine, they’re playing to their major market. But here we run hard into one of the more annoying problems for the UK-Irish-European-based cook: There are no graham crackers here.  (Well, okay, there are some… in specialty stores that cater to expats… but you do NOT want to pay what they’re going to charge you.)

Overall, in terms of flavor and performance, the digestive biscuit is an OK substitute. But now we run into a problem: how many of these do you need? Because here we run into another difficulty: the Food Network recipe is calibrated in “graham cracker sheets”. This means the longer one of these, to the left:

image

…So we need to know what one of those “sheets” weighs. The trouble is, go Googling to find out and you get a lot of different answers, not to mention people arguing more or less fruitlessly about what constitutes a serving. I went off to the Nabisco site to try to pull data from the nutritional info panel of the brand I remember best from my US childhood, Honey Maid grahams, but they weren’t incredibly helpful. Calories? Yes. Weight of sheet? No. (“Serving Size: 31 g. Serving[s] per container: About 13.” [eyeroll] “About”? Seriously, guys, if you don’t know, who do we ask? Sheesh.) Worse, this site suggests that a serving is two sheets “weighing about 28g”. Yeah, but is that 28g per sheet, or per the whole serving? Is it too much to ask these folks to write clearly? (Other people have been having this kind of problem as well. This makes me feel slightly better. But only slightly.)

Anyway: somebody over here has actually specified weight (and also appears to have put the graham crackers through a bomb calorimeter, which is scientifically interesting if not culinarily germane). THANK YOU GUYS. A sheet weighs 14g.

Moving along: a single digestive biscuit weighs 14g on my scale. A perfect 1:1 correlation: something I’ll never need to waste time thinking about again, all Gods be praised.

Onward. The Food Network crumb crust recipe converts this way:

Makes 1 9-inch pie crust

14 digestive biscuits (196g), finely crumbed (I put mine through the food processor, but stuffing them into a Zip-Loc bag and bashing them mercilessly with a rolling pin would certainly work as well)

  • 3 tablespoons / 48g sugar (Irish cooks / cookbooks have a tendency to assume you’re rounding/heaping your spoonsful, where US cooks would routinely level. I split the difference here and rounded slightly.)
  • 6 tablespoons / 72g unsalted butter, melted

Preheat the oven to 175C. Process the biscuits and sugar together until finely crumbed. Add the melted butter and pulse until moist (or stir in well with a fork if you couldn’t be arsed to mess up the processor for this).
Press the mixture into a 9-inch pie plate and bake until firm, 18 minutes or so.

European cooks, please note! — While the original recipe says “18 to 22 minutes”, if you leave this version of the crust in for 22 minutes, it will have burnt itself black. The digestive biscuit crumbs are (I think) denser than graham cracker crumbs, and a bit more heat-absorptive. Also, if you’re using a fan oven, that will speed things up as well. I’d start checking the crust at about 14 minutes — 12 or 13 if you’ve got a fan oven — and yank the thing out as soon as the top edges start to get seriously brown.

A note in passing about making this crust: Normally I tend to fight shy of graham / crumb crusts because they can be fairly uncontrollable (not to mention difficult to make pretty). It’s like making a sandcastle, but the sand is greasy and you’re working in a pie pan. Push down in one spot, it pops up in another and tries to escape over the edge. While I was making this, I found myself muttering “Next time I’m doing this damn thing in a springform.” …Maybe I will.

Now to the filling:

Here again, the measurements are slightly less problematic than the ingredients.

Not until relatively recently have there been good dedicated baking chocolates on the UK market: and none* of the best ones are local. In particular, until quite recently there’s been nothing at all locally available that corresponds to the “Baker’s” brand cooking/baking chocolate familiar to most serious US cooks. A lot of UK-based cooks, if they don’t have access to something patissier-specific like the lovely Belgian Callebaut, will routinely reach for Cadbury’s Bourneville when baking something that calls for semisweet. But this isn’t an ideal solution, as that bar of Bourneville you get from the Tesco is a confectionery item rather than a baking ingredient. It contains additional vegetable fats, and more sugar than is strictly necessary.

Nonetheless, I went with the Bourneville (which comes in at only 40% cocoa mass or thereabouts) for this first pie, simply because it’s affordable and there’s sort of a cultural bias towards it. If as a casual cook I wanted to goose the cocoa mass percentage in this pie up to the recommended 60% or thereabouts, I would pick up a bar of Lindt Excellence 70% or something similar and split the total chocolate weight about half and half between that and the Bourneville. Or I’d look around the shops for something from Green & Black’s. (When I take another run at this, though, it’ll be an all-Lindt production, since I’m staring at two bars of the 70% Excellence at the moment.)

In any case, the cooked chocolate custard that results even when you’ve only used Bournville in this approaches a pot-de-crème-like consistency and smoothness. Very nice indeed.** (I’d also think seriously about making this pie with Green & Black’s Maya Gold instead of plain semisweet chocolate. Mmmmm.)

So, onward! The ingredients:

  • 450ml milk
  • 92g sugar
  • 30g cornflour / corn starch
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 4 large egg yolks (at room temperature)
  • 2 tablespoons / 30ml brewed coffee, cooled
  • 1/2 teaspoon / 2.5ml vanilla extract
  • 115g semisweet baking chocolate, chopped (21 of those little blocks in the large 200g Bourneville bar will take you just over this, to 121g. You may as well eat the rest. The angels weep if you waste chocolate.)

As per Azriona’s recipe:

1. Heat the milk in a large saucepan until hot but not boiling.

2. Whisk the sugar, cornstarch and salt in a large bowl; then whisk in the egg yolks, coffee and vanilla. Whisk half of the hot milk into the egg mixture until smooth, then gradually whisk the egg mixture into the pan with the remaining milk.

3. Cook over medium heat, whisking constantly, until the mixture boils and thickens, 3 to 5 minutes. (If you have a thermometer, the mix should be at least 160F to ensure that the eggs are cooked and you’re not going to kill anybody. Sherlock would be disappointed, but your friends and family won’t be.) Note that this produces an extremely thick and tight custard, very very quickly. Don’t turn your back on this one, and by no means stop whisking during the cooking period or the whole business will burn. Also, turn that heat right down as soon as it starts boiling. You need to keep the cooking process gentle, as the custard’s consistency damn near approaches that of magma as it tightens.

4. Remove from the heat and whisk in the chocolate until melted. Transfer to a bowl and cool slightly, stirring a few times to prevent a skin from forming. (You might do this over cold water if you like, but just make sure you stir it quite regularly until it hits the just-before-lukewarm stage.)

5. Pour the filling into the crust; press plastic wrap directly onto the surface and chill until set, at least 4 hours. (Just because it’s something I do in these cases, I buttered the plastic wrap first.)

6. Cut, top with whipped cream and shaved chocolate, and serve.

A couple of notes in passing:

  • I left the pie alone for six hours before cutting a test slice. It had set well at that point, but it’s still a soft set. In the morning, after a total of about 14 hours, it cut more cleanly but the set was still on the soft side. If you’re one of those people who wants their cut pie to stand perfectly upright even at the pointy end, you may not get that here.
  • Softly whipped cream seems to suit this better than very stiff cream. Your mileage may vary.
  • This is a REALLY GOOD PIE. I may take another run at it in a day or two and tart it up a little. But still. REALLY GOOD. I just now had it for breakfast and I suspect I’m going to have it for lunch as well. The rest of it is going down to our local to be shared with our neighbors before we make total pigs of ourselves.

So go make this pie.

*As far as I know.

**Peter thinks that this would make a good cooked-custard-based ice cream mix. GTFO, Mr. Husband. (Actually I think it would need to be a thinner for the ice cream machine’s sake, but the flavor would certainly work.)

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EuropeFoodFood, restaurants and cookingGermanyrecipesSwitzerland

Thinking it’s time to make this cake again…

by Diane Duane

Schwarzwälder kirschtorte is named for the Schwarzwald or Black Forest region in southeastern Germany, so it’s often known outside the German-speaking countries as “Black Forest Cherry Cake” or “Black Forest Gateau”. This cake is possibly one of the most famous of German desserts… which is interesting when one considers that it (or the inspiration for it) may actually have come from Switzerland. Certainly the kirschwasser* or cherry firewater on which the modern cake is based came originally from the land around the central Swiss lakes, a region still famous for it and home to great kirsch brands such as Etter and Dettling. In any case, the spirit wandered northward to the Rhine Valley and the neighboring Black Forest, where it started to be manufactured fairly widely in the mid- to late 1800’s.

Hand-tinted 1900s postcard showing
a young Schwarzwald woman wearing
the traditional bollenhut

The ancestors of the cake we now know started emerging during this period. Desserts involving cooked cherries, kirsch, and cream or whipped cream were well known in the late 1800’s. Around the turn of the century, the first known kirschtorte appeared near Zug in Switzerland, where kirsch was distilled from the famous Zuger sour cherries. It was probably just a matter of time before someone combined the cake with the cherries, the cream and the kirsch. There might even have been a visual component involved: some writers suggest that the look of the cake is a sort of visual pun on the traditional costume of country girls in some parts of the Black Forest — reflecting their black or dark brown skirts, their white blouses, and their traditional hats covered with large cherry-red woolen bobbles.

Maybe, maybe not. What we do know is that the famous confectioner Josef Keller (1887-1981) claimed to have invented the modern-style kirschtorte in 1915 at the Café Agner in Bad Godesberg, near Bonn… though the claim was never verified. Whether he did invent it or not, the cake appears in written recipes for the first time in the mid-1930s, turning up in 13th place on a list of favorite German cakes in 1949. Its popularity in Germany grew quickly and steadily after that, and it’s during this period that the kirschtorte starts appearing off its home turf, particularly in Britain.

There the new arrival was unfortunately treated very badly. Normally the first things it lost were the kirsch — since this would have been an exotic and expensive commodity in the UK until a couple of decades ago — and its name, which was quickly anglicized into Black Forest cake / torte / gateau. One by one the cake’s other sterling attributes began to fall away as it was made by more and more people who had no idea what the original recipe was supposed to look like. In this sadly reduced form it became a mainstay of British bad-restaurant cuisine during the period described in Simon Hopkinson’s and Lindsey Bareham’s dryly funny UK food history-cum-cookbook The Prawn Cocktail Years, and this seems to be the cake which has been exported to large portions of North America.

Fortunately the non-ruined version of Schwarzwälder kirschtorte still thrives on its home ground, where the baking industry works under regulations that require a kirschtorte to be made according to a basic set of guidelines. The rules define it as either “a cake made with Kirschwasser and whipped cream or with Kirschwasser and buttercream, or a combination of the two” — so without the kirsch, the cake isn’t genuine. The presence of fruit is actually considered secondary to the presence of the kirsch, the flavor of which has to be clearly apparent. The layers — of a light Viennese cake or sponge — must contain at least 3% cocoa or chocolate (though there can be more), and the topping must be of either buttercream or whipped cream, and garnished with chocolate.

But inside those guidelines, naturally there’s a fair amount of discussion among interested bakers about the fine points of cake construction technique and secondary ingredients. Slice the layers from a single cake, or bake them separately? Cherry compote or whole cherries in the filling? Add a shortcrust-pastry base and use sponge cake or Viennese cake in only the upper layers? The discussion goes on.** But regardless of the quibbling of the experts, Schwarzwälder kirschtorte remains one of Germany’s favorite cakes, if not the favorite, often known as the “Queen of Cakes”. It appears in good bakeries all over the three German-speaking central European countries, and the Todtnauer holiday region in the Black Forest sponsors an annual Schwarzwalder Kirschtorte festival.

Our recipe is an adaptation of one which has been making the rounds on the Net since the first days of online recipe exchange, though its source is uncertain due to its attribution having been stripped off long ago. This recipe uses both buttercream and whipped cream, and also follows the bake-the-layers-separately routine. This is a little more work than baking just one layer and slicing it — but it seems a good way to keep the kirsch evenly distributed, rather than making it easier for it to leak out of the upper layers and pool in the cake’s bottom.


The three baked layers: they’ll fall a little after baking
to about 3/4 inch thick  

For the cake:

  • 6 large eggs
  • 1 cup sugar
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla extract or essence
  • 4 ounces unsweetened baking chocolate, melted
  • 1 cup flour, sifted

For the syrup:

  • 1/4 cup sugar
  • 1/3 cup water
  • 2 tablespoons Kirsch

For the filling:

  • 1 1/2 cups confectioners’ sugar / icing sugar
  • 1/3 cup unsalted butter
  • 1 large egg yolk
  • 2 tablespoons Kirsch

For the topping:

  • 2 cups canned sour cherries, drained
  • 2 tablespoons confectioners’ / icing sugar
  • 1 cup heavy cream, whipped
  • 8 ounces semisweet chocolate

A couple of notes before starting:

  • The cake layers are made without any leavening agent such as baking powder — so that the only thing that makes the layers rise in the baking is the air you’ve beaten into the batter. You therefore have to concentrate on incorporating as much air as possible during the beating process. If using a mixer, make sure to use the whisk attachment instead of the normal cake beater. If using an egg beater or hand mixer, you may need to beat the basic egg and sugar mixture for longer than ten minutes to get it light and fluffy enough.
  • Because the cake doesn’t contain any shortening, it stales quickly. The buttercream filling/icing therefore fulfills another function besides just tasting nice and holding the layers apart: it keeps the cake from drying out prematurely. If as you’re constructing the cake you start getting the feeling that there isn’t going to be enough buttercream to cover it evenly on the outside to at least 1/4 inch thick, pause to make some more buttercream. Later on you’ll be glad you did.

The final result after the whipped cream topping goes on

FOR THE CAKE: Beat eggs, sugar, and vanilla together until thick and fluffy, about 10 minutes. Alternately fold chocolate and flour into the egg mixture, ending with flour. Pour the batter into 3 8-inch cake pans that have been well greased and floured. (Do not use oil to grease the pans: use butter or Crisco or a similar solid fat. If you use oil, the layers will probably stick to the pans. Also: make sure you do the greasing and flouring even if you have nonstick pans.)

Bake the layers in a preheated 350 degree F. oven for 10 to 15 minutes or until a cake tester inserted in the center comes out clean. Cool cakes in pans for 5 minutes; then carefully turn out on racks and allow to cool completely.

FOR THE SYRUP: Make syrup by mixing together sugar and water and boiling for 5 minutes. When syrup has cooled, stir in kirsch. Prick the cake layers and pour syrup over all 3 layers.

FOR THE FILLING: To make the butter-cream filling, beat together sugar and butter until well blended. Add egg yolk; beat until light and fluffy, about 3 to 5 minutes. Fold in Kirsch.

CAKE ASSEMBLY: To assemble cake, place 1 layer on a cake plate. Spread with butter cream filling. Using 3/4 cup of the cherries, which have been patted dry, drop cherries evenly over cream. Place second layer on cake. Repeat. Place third layer on top. Fold 2 tablespoons confectioners’ sugar into the whipped cream. Cover the sides and top of the cake with whipped cream.

Decorate top of cake with remaining 1/2 cup cherries. Grated chocolate is perfectly acceptable as a topping, but if you prefer to make chocolate curls from a chocolate bar, shave them off the bar (at room temperature) with a vegetable peeler. Refrigerate the curls until ready to use. Press the chocolate curls on sides of cake; sprinkle a few on the top. Chill the cake until serving time. Afterwards, because of the cream, keep the cake in the fridge until it’s finished.

*Just a quick note here to avoid confusion: kirschwasser is not cherry brandy, or any kind of cherry liqueur. It’s not a sweet spirit at all. You could describe it as a schnapps in the original sense of the word — nothing like the sweet “schnapps” concoctions of more recent times.

**There’s also a Swedish variant in which all the layers are meringue, but this one seems to drop out the kirsch entirely, so it’s not really a Black Forest cherry cake regardless of its name.

Disclosure: I’ve ganked this recipe from its home at EuropeanCuisines.com because I put it there to begin with, and I bloody well feel like it. 🙂

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Dough showing well developed gluten structure
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Folklore, string structure, rye dough and Raymond Blanc (with afternotes on a bread recipe)

by Diane Duane

I was making bread the other day and suddenly found a finger in it.

…Cognitively speaking. (Not a real finger, don’t panic….) But writers’ brains are such strange places sometimes. Here’s today’s example.

My short-term memory is a constant joke around here. You can (as happened this morning) tell me that the weather station’s batteries are kaput and can’t be charged in the normal battery recharger, meaning they have to be put into one of the more technologically challenged ones…  and I will still, two hours later, look at the weather station and remark, “Oh look, its batteries have finally gone south” — to the sound of ironic laughter from Himself Upstairs. (And I’ll then recall the whole previous conversation perfectly well, but will have mislaid it between times.) Some of this is Not Paying Attention, but other aspects of it are just Sixtyish Brain Fail.

However. Ask me for a quote from a book I read forty years ago, and no problem, there it is. As you shall hear…

So I’m working with this recipe from Raymond Blanc for the first time, because the other evening I went to sleep with the TV running (I sometimes  do) and it was showing an episode of Blanc’s “Kitchen Secrets” series from last year, the one about bread. Now, bread is a passion with me. (A master post about this will turn up in a day or three so I don’t keep losing some of the links I keep looking for.) Bad bread is everywhere — I can’t think of another place where Sturgeon’s Law applies so rigorously; in bread’s case it’s because of the pestilent ubiquity of something called the Chorleywood Bread Process. (More about this in another post, but originally this process was devised as a way to make decent bread in large quantities from the soft wheats that are all that will grow in the British Isles. It uses yeast as a flavoring rather than as a way to develop the bread naturally: gluten is developed in this process by violent physical agitation and the addition of ever-increasing types and amounts of additives. Ick.)

Good bread, though, is something I can’t get enough of. This is one of the reasons I love Switzerland so much. (German bread is almost as good as Swiss, generally, but the Swiss in my opinion have a slight edge.) And any way to make good bread at home is worth knowing about. Add to that the fact that it’s Raymond Blanc sharing his method for pain de campagne on this particular show, and there’s no way I wasn’t going to try it out as soon as I was conscious again. (I really like Blanc. Not only does his passion for good food burn with a pure bright flame that should be visible from space, but he’s funny, dry, not afraid to make fun of himself, and he doesn’t seem to feel the need to prove how great a chef he is by screaming at people.)

So this recipe: like most good country breads of central Europe, rye flour is involved. And rye is typically such a nuisance to work with. It makes the dough sticky, it’s a pain to clean up, it gets everywhere. There I am at the worktop this morning, dealing with the quite sticky dough — look at the way the gluten’s got it stringing in the image underneath here, so lovely — scraping it out onto the floured work surface and starting to get to grips with it. Or it with me, because any dough with rye in it has a life of its own beyond that of the yeast. I slice the dough into four and start shaping it, and the usual struggle for domination begins. It’s climbing up my wrists, it’s trying to attach itself to my clothes, it’s under my nails. I look down at the hands and sigh and wonder where the nail brush is.

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And suddenly I see, in the back of my head, the image of a woman’s severed finger, her pinky to be precise, with a signet ring on it. And a voice speaks up from the depths of time, as it were in narration, or sort of a caption, and it says:

“…This cannot be my wife’s finger, because it’s got rye dough underneath the fingernail, and my wife has never kneaded rye dough in her life.”

And I stop what I’m doing and my mouth falls open. Not so much with the thought “Where the hell did that come from?”, because I know where it came from: I’m kneading rye dough, and the association was instantaneous. The thought that is now making me crazy is, “What fairy tale is that?”

And instantly I despair, because if there’s one thing we have a lot of in this house, it’s books of legends and fairy tales. It is going to take forever to settle this issue, and it’s going to drive me crazy until I do.

…And of course the despair doesn’t last that long. In another time it would have, because I’d have had to go through all those books. But these days, Google Is Our Friend many times every day. So once I manage to get the dough shaped (two baguettes, two oval loaves) and put aside for the dough’s second rising, I go off to Google and search on the phrase “has been kneading rye dough”. Too precise. Knock it back to “kneading rye dough” and “fairy tale” and only one result comes up: a reference to the great Welsh epic tale, the Mabionigion.

So now I know where I am without really having to check the backstory (though I do anyway to see if I remember the setup correctly). And some detail comes up that makes me laugh, because the dialogue might as well have come out of Sherlock Holmes as out of the man who actually utters it, a Welsh Prince named Elphin.

The original material is here and on the page after. (It is, as I expected, Lady Charlotte Guest’s translation of the Mabinogion, which goes back to 1849. (ETA: the pages aren’t displaying at the moment — you may need to check their cached versions at Google.)  But let me sum it up for you.

Elphin has been lucky enough to pull out of a weir in a river near his home a miraculous child, the (soon to be famous) prophet, bard and wizard Taliesin. Elphin takes the child home and he and his wife more or less adopt this prodigy (which frankly is a smart move). Then after a while Elphin has to go off to spend Christmas with his uncle, a petty king named Maelgwyn. There is a lot of sucking up to Maelgwyn by all and sundry during this period, especially on the subject of his queen, who is more beautiful and modest and graceful and blah de blah de blah than all the other women in the kingdom, or so everybody keeps telling Maelgwyn, this being the local level of Speaking Truth To Power, i.e. Not Very High.

Well, somewhere in this process — and it’s only fair to suggest, though gently, that these islands being what they are at Christmas, Drink Has Been Taken — somewhere in here, Elphin, who loves his wife a lot,  actually commits the tactical error of saying what he’s thinking: that his wife is pretty damn beautiful and graceful and modest and blah de blah de blah on her own, thank you very much, and at least as much so as the queen. …Well, you can see where this is going. Maelgwyn throws Elphin’s butt into the dungeon and sends a courtier off to see if Elphin’s wife is all she’s cracked up to be.

The man sent off to do this is a schmuck named Rhun (“the most graceless man in the world: there was neither wife nor maiden with whom he had held converse but he was afterwards evil-spoken of”). Rhun heads for Elphin’s castle with the intent to prove that Elphin’s wife is in fact not what she’s cracked up to be, thereby gaining favor with Maelgwyn.

It’s at this point that little Taliesin, who plainly has his prophecy engine fully engaged, tells Elphin’s wife that a jerk is heading in their direction to dishonor her. “So here,” says the baby prophet/bard, “is what you’re going to do. Find one of your housemaids. Dress her in your clothes and jewelry. Sit her down at table as if she was having dinner. Let Rhun the Jerk find her instead of you. What happens is not going to be pretty, sorry about that, but it’s her or you.”

And so it is done. Rhun shows up, finds this woman looking like Elphin’s noble wife and doing the things he thinks she should be doing, and he gets to work. She invites him to dinner (typical Celtic hospitality), indeed dinner and supper, and sometime during supper he drugs her wine. She falls over unconscious, and Rhun chops off her pinky — with Elphin’s signet ring on it — and bears it away as “proof” that Elphin’s wonderful wife got so plastered with a total stranger that she didn’t even feel this happening. (The implication being, of course, that he could have done, and maybe did do, all kinds of other things to her as well.)

So Rhun returns to his master, shows him the finger, and Maelgwyn is very pleased. He has Elphin brought up out of the dungeon and “chides him”, saying (I’m paraphrasing here), “Look, dummy, you ought to know that you can’t trust a woman any further than you can throw her, and here’s the proof: your wife’s finger, your signet ring, what can you possibly say?”

Elphin takes one look at the finger and says, “Lord, no question that’s my ring: everybody knows what that looks like. But as to the finger? A few things. First, this wouldn’t even stay on my wife’s thumb, her fingers are so small. But you can see from the marks how the thing’s been forced onto this finger. Second, my wife cuts her nails once a week: Saturday nights, actually. This nail hasn’t been trimmed for a month. And third… if you look under this nail, you’ll see that whoever it belonged to was kneading rye dough in the last three days. And my wife, being a gently-reared princess, has never kneaded rye dough in her natural life. Soooo…”

Needless to say, cheeking a King like this to his face gets Elphin’s butt chucked back in the dungeon again. But it’s all right, because Taliesin the Wonder Kid is on the case. He heads off to Maelgwyn’s castle, springs his foster-father, makes everyone else look profoundly stupid, and otherwise generally saves the day. (You still feel kind of sorry for the poor housemaid, though.)

…Meanwhile, all I can do is sit here and wonder at the human brain, which can pull a fairly complete memory of something like this out of the depths of decades‘ worth of time (because it has to be easily thirty years since I last read the Mabinogion through ) at the mere invocation of the phrase “kneading rye dough”.

Sheesh.

Anyway, now all I have to do is get the rest of the rye out from under my nails…

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Now that I’ve made this recipe twice: just a thought or three (below the cut) for those of you who might be thinking of attempting it.

First of all: seriously, spring for bread flour if you’re going to make this. The first time I did the recipe it was with a standard Irish “strong white” flour. Not that the results weren’t just fine. But the second time, I used a flour that was a lot heavier on the hard wheat, and the results were significantly better.

Secondly, about the kneading times: This is serious business here. Blanc is very specific about the times in the basic recipe, and following them pays off. The first kneading period is more about mixing and letting the liquid be absorbed, as he says: the second is about developing the gluten in the flour. Then, after the first rise, even though the resulting dough is incredibly sloppy-looking, it is also surprisingly easy to manage once you start shaping it. Hint here: don’t be afraid to use a fair amount of extra flour to make the shaping easier, but at the same time try to knead as little of that extra flour into the shaped dough as you can. (This recipe has caused me to look at all other recipes I’ve used that have cautioned against “overkneading” and made me wonder whether I’ve actually been underkneading all this while.)

Another note: this dough flops out fairly flat as it rises the second time. If you want a higher-standing loaf, use a high-sided pan. (For the baguette above I used a specialist baguette pan.) You could do this recipe in standard loaf pans and it’d work fine, as far as I can tell. But you get more / better crust if you bake it naked. (NB: you would need four US-sized loaf pans if you choose to do it that way. Supported, no question that this dough would fill them.) Additionally: during the second rise I spritzed the loaves with water a few times (mostly because I was out of saran wrap / clingfilm with which to cover them, and had fallen back on damp towels tented over the loaves on upended glasses. This worked very well. May have made the crusts a little crisper as well).

Also, re pre-baking prep: You can eggwash the shaped dough before baking if you like, but it’s not necessary. The baguette above was baked naked and looks nice enough.  (Probably also more traditional that way: I doubt that pain de campagne is eggwashed when baked on its home ground.)

Re the yeast: Fresh works better if you can get it. Specifically, the bread’s flavor is improved.

Re additives: I put caraway in the baguettes the second time around (I’ve always been a sucker for a good Jewish rye, something which is a bit thin on the ground in Ireland). It worked brilliantly.

…So there you have it. This is a bread very much worth making. (I tell you… slices of that baguette still warm, with Boursin smeared all over them: OMNOMNOM.)

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Seed cake: a recipe

by Diane Duane

It’s a cheerful moment at the start of a much-loved story…

“[Bilbo] had a horrible thought that the cakes might run short, and then he — as the host: he knew his duty and stuck to it, however painful — he might have to go without.

 

“‘Come along in, and have some tea!’ he managed to say after taking a deep breath.

 

“‘A little beer would suit me better, if it is all the same to you, my good sir,’ said Balin with the white beard. ‘But I don’t mind some cake — seed-cake, if you have any.’

 

“‘Lots!’ Bilbo found himself answering, to his surprise; and he found himself scuttling off , too, to the cellar to fill a pint beer-mug, and then to a pantry to fetch two beautiful round seed-cakes which he had baked that afternoon for his after-supper morsel.”

And there you have it. Clue-finder and web-cutter, friend of bears and guest of eagles, Ringwinner, Luckwearer, Barrel-rider: Bilbo Baggins bakes, too. Here is the all-round Hero in potentia, waiting for the Call… but with one eye on the oven timer. (And the appetite obviously heroic, as well. Only a hobbit would consider two whole seedcakes “a morsel”.)

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…It’s been hanging about in British children’s literature for a while now, the seed cake. The appearance in The Hobbit is hardly the first one: seed cake turns up as comfort food often enough, sometimes in strange disguises (the reference in Winnie the Pooh to “crustimoney proseedcake” is one of these).

I woke up this morning (completely irrationally) with the yen for it and went to check what recipes were to be found.

There are quite a few out there in the Webby part of the world at the moment: apparently the cake is having a mini-renaissance due to people rereading The Hobbit in the wake of the film, or in prep for it. Now, we’ve had a recipe for something similar over at European Cuisines for a while now, but it’s more along toward the Irish-influenced “tea bread” end of the spectrum due to the chopped candied fruit in it. So I checked the classic recipe from Beeton, had a look at Delia and Nigel Slater, and then wandered about a little bit more (discovering along the line that we’re out of baking parchment [makes a note on the kitchen chalkboard]) and assessed a few others.

The recipe that looked best to me was this one over at the HobbitsSecondBreakfast site. …And typically, once I started working with it I started to adjust it. The changes are fairly significant, so let’s change the title a bit to signal this.

Took Family Seed Cake

  • 250 g  / scant 2 cups cream flour or (US: cake flour) // For a tenderer crumb than with plain flour
  • 1 teaspoon double-acting baking powder // For a better rise with cream flour
  • Pinch of salt
  • 150g  / about 3/4 cup butter, softened
  • 150g / scant 3/4 cup caster sugar (US: superfine granulated sugar, or regular granulated)
  • 2 tablespoons milk
  • 1 tablespoon vanilla extract
  • 3 tablespoons caraway seed // Double the original amount. If this is going to be a seed cake, let it be a seed cake for Eru’s sake. (Nigel Slater gets a little snippy about this, but I think he has the wrong end of the stick here. Or his caraway seeds were superannuated.)
  • 3 large eggs
  • 2 tablespoons lemon zest (or 1 teaspoon pureed zest, if you can get it) // To my mind lemon works better with this than orange.

Preheat oven to 180C / 350F.

Butter, and ideally line with buttered greaseproof paper / baking parchment (assuming you haven’t just discovered you’ve run out of the damn stuff) a one-pound loaf pan / tin. (ETA: For a more Bilbo-like result — specifically a round seedcake — give the same treatment to the bottom and sides of a 9-inch springform pan.

Sift together (or just stir together, if you couldn’t be arsed) the flour, baking powder and salt.

Get out the electric mixer and cream together the softened butter and sugar until light and fluffy. (If you can’t wait that long, cream them together until you can no longer feel granularity in the mixture when a little is rubbed between finger and thumb. Do not do this so many times that people start suspecting you’re only testing the consistency because you really like eating just-butter-and-sugar.)

Add the eggs one at a time to this mixture and beat like crazy. Add the vanilla extract and lemon zest.

Slow the mixer down and add in the flour mixture tablespoonful by tablespoonful until about half of it is gone. Add the milk. Then continue slowly adding the rest of the flour. Don’t overbeat this. Just beat gently until combined.

Slow the mixer to a crawl and stir in the caraway seeds.

With a spatula, fill the loaf pan / loaf tin / springform pan  with the mixture. Smooth the top a little. Use a knife to draw a line down the center the long way. (This really does work a little the way it does with bread, to make a path-of-least-resistance for the cake to rise along.)

Bake a seedcake in a loaf pan for 50 minutes: a seedcake in a springform for 35 minutes. Test for doneness. (A skewer should come up almost entirely dry. A few crumbs sticking to it are OK.)

When done, remove the cake and let it sit in the tin for another ten minutes.

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Then remove it and stand on a wire rack to cool.

Slice and serve. This toasts brilliantly, by the way. Be careful of toasting temperatures, as the sugar makes it likely to scorch if the temperature’s too high.

If expecting dwarves: make about six more.

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