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?
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 occurred to me that it’d be smart to import this post from EuropeanCuisines.com, it being the time of year to think about such things.
Some years back, EuroCuisineLady and EuroCuisineGuy went on a cookbook-buying visit to Hay-on-Wye, world-famous Town of Used Bookstores. The return trip nearly broke the suspension of our little Fiat Uno, whose rear end was stuffed full of old cookbooks of every description.
One great pleasure – as always, if you’re a used-book buyer – was finding the unsuspected treasures secreted among the pages: old articles, notes, the scrawled notations of cooks of years gone by. Sometimes these additions were more unexpected than usual.
Out of one book of UK dairy recipes fell, without warning, a holiday brochure from the Scottish Federation of Grocers’ and Independent Provisioners’ Associations. Some study suggested that it dates back to about 1954 or a little later, that being the earliest postwar date when food rationing would have been over and enough goods would have gotten into the newly replenished stores to make an advertising campaign worthwhile.
The brochure features recipes (among others) for the traditional dense UK-ish Christmas Cake, as well as for the essentially Scots Hogmanay dessert Black Bun, and also has small sections discussing Scottish holiday customs, and some ads for locally available comestibles. There is also a useful check-offable shopping list, and a contest for young readers with a prize of a ten-shilling money order – which was serious money, back in the day.
A table of contents:
- The Festival of Yule
- Christmas Cake
- Almond Paste
- Royal Icing
- Christmas Honey Biscuits (Polish)
- Mrs. Black’s Plum Pudding
- Brandy Butter (For Plum Pudding)
- Foamy Sauce (For Plum Pudding)
- Christmas Sundaes
- Cranberry Sauce
- Orange Salad (with Goose)
- Christmas Salad (with Turkey)
- Hogmanay Fare
- Shortbread
- Black Bun
- Scotch Currant Loaf
As the holiday season approaches, we’ve scanned this brochure and saved it as an Adobe Acrobat .PDF file for download. To prevent strain on our own hosting provider’s servers, we’re hosting the file at our storage space at box.com.
Enjoy!
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.
(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
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.
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.
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!
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. Bemelmans gives the version for the clam pan roast. For an oyster panroast 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.)
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 titled:
Ingredients:
Chuck the whole lot of this excerpt the herbs into a casserole. Turn or stir to coat everything with the oil. Shove the herbs into the center and fill all the other spaces with garlic cloves.
Make a thick, solid sealing dough with flour and water and a little oil. Roll it out sausage-like on a work surface, wet the casserole edges a little, press the rope of dough around it, and shove the lid down on top. Bake at 350F/180C for 45 minutes. Bring it to the table and break the seal there.
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:
“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:
“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…)
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 100,000 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. 🙂
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:
For the soaking syrup:
For the buttercream frosting base / filling:
(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:
For the ganache / cream cheese glaze:
The white chocolate ganache proper:
…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.
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.)