07.12.07
Posted in cooking, culture, domesticity, food, how to at 8:01 am by Hanne Blank
When got back to Maryland on Monday night from Ohio and my mother’s house, I had several of her old cookbooks in tow. I am very happy about this, because I have been sort of hinting to my mom for years now that when she was ready to give up her old cookbooks, I was ready to give them shelf space. Finally, after many years of my hinting, it was time.
I am nowhere near proud enough not to admit that my favorite of these older cookbooks, and the ones I wanted most for her to give me, are the sorta trashy ones. Parent-Teacher Association cookbooks from my grade school, for instance, the kind with recipes for s’mores and play-doh on adjacent pages. A totally cheeseball but fantastico cookbook that is a compilation of recipes from 1970s-era Deep Southern charity, Hadassah, League of Women Voters, and Junior League cookbooks, and which has the hands-down Intergalactic Blue Ribbon best recipe, ever, for hush puppies. (I note that this is also a cookbook in which there are a few recipes which include the instruction “advise your cook” of such-and-so, suggesting that the ladies to whom the recipes were attributed likely did not always actually cook them themselves. O tempora! O mores!)
One of my favorites, maybe my most favorite, is the 1965 Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book. I learned to cook many things, particularly cookies, from this cook book, and most of the recipes are still pretty sturdy. It also has some excellent simple recipes for “variety meats,” as organ meats were known back in the day before Fergus Henderson made “nose-to-tail eating” a matter of some preoccupation for foodie trendsters, which could be revived to considerable benefit.
Then again, some of its recipes have not, shall we say, aged well. I present to you:
Bologna-Rice Skillet
(Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book, 1965)
One four-and-five-eighths-ounce package precooked rice (1 1/3 cups)
1/2 pound big Bologna, cut in 1/2-inch cubes (about 1 2/3 cups)
1/2 cup extra-spicy catsup
2/3 cup hot water
One 3-ounce can (2/3 cup) broiled sliced mushrooms
1/4 cup finely chopped onion
2 Tablespoons chopped green pepper
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 Tablespoons butter
Combine all ingredients in skillet. Cook over medium heat, stirring frequently, till hot. Cover tightly, reduce heat, an let stand about 5 minutes or till done. Serves 4.
Mmmm, mmm, good, what? To make it up to you, though, here’s one of my favorite recipes from this cookbook from when I was a kid:
Apple Fritters
(Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book, 1965)
1 1/3 cups sifted all-purpose flour
1 Tablespoon sugar
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 beaten eggs
2/3 cup milk
1 Tablespoon salad oil
3 cups small matchstick strips of apple [emphasis in original]
Sift dry ingredients together. Blend eggs, milk, and salad oil; add dry ingredients all at once and mix until just moistened. Stir in apple strips. Drop from tablespoon into deep hot fat (375 degrees F). Fry until puffy and golden, 3 to 4 minutes; turn once. Drain on paper towels. While warm, sprinkle with confectioner’s sugar. Serve at once. Makes 3 dozen.
For the record, these are kind of addictive, and you should save this recipe to make them in the fall when the first really good firm tart apples come in. I usually add some cinnamon and allspice and a tiny pinch of ground cloves, too. Oh, and substituting soy milk for milk works fine, though I haven’t tried them with egg replacer so I can’t say whether that works.
When I have time, I may root through some of the other cookbooks and share some of the more amusing recipes from those, too.
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12.03.06
Posted in cooking, good things, how to at 7:30 pm by Hanne Blank
So what do you do with all that duck stock you made?
Well, you can make soup! Many kinds of soup. But it is particularly nice, I think, for pho, the Vietnamese noodle soup. The soul of the bowl, with pho, is the broth. And now that you’ve got a nice rich duck stock to work with, you might as well, no?
Take 2 quarts of stock and put them in a pot. Add a good sized bundle of green onions (trimmed) and a thumb-sized hunk of ginger root that has been peeled and cut into coins. Then pop in a small piece of star anise, an inch-long section of cinnamon stick (the Vietnamese kind if you’ve got it), some whole coriander seed (if you don’t have whole coriander, a light sprinkling of the ground kind is fine), a couple of whole cloves, and a half teaspoon-ish quantity of sweet fennel seed. A healthy shot of nam pla (fish sauce) will salt and season at the same time. Cover and simmer for an hour, strain, then hold at a low simmer until ready to serve.
When you are getting ready to make and serve your pho, take two cooked duck breasts (I don’t add the breasts to the cassoulet, so I used those) and slice them thinly. If you have any leftover other meats — fish, thinly sliced steak, tofu, tempeh, seitan, whatever you have around that needs to be used — cut them into bite-sized bits and set them aside, too. If you have leftover Asian dumplings, those can go in, too, particularly the won ton sort, and pot stickers work too (but not the steamed buns like gai bao). You’ll also want some sort of vegetable component. Mung bean sprouts and Thai basil and cilantro are traditional; a chiffonade of romaine lettuce is very nice, or if you enjoy bitter greens like endive that’s good also.
Last, cook up some noodles. Thin rice noodles are traditional; thin egg vermicelli are also good. Whatever sort of Asian noodle you like is fine, really. Cook them according to package directions and drain them.
Then assemble your bowl of pho. Noodles first, then non-vegetable toppings, then broth, and don’t forget to leave room for veggies.
Delicious and light and savory. A pound of noodles, two quarts of broth, and two duck breasts will serve 4. Finish the bowl by squeezing in a healthy wedge of lime (or two, if you’re like me and you really like lime) over the top of it all. It also helps the duck go further, and since duck is a little on the expensive side, why not?
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Posted in cooking, good things, how to at 4:07 pm by Hanne Blank
Assembling a cassoulet is embarrassingly simple.
You need a great huge pot or pan with a lid, and all of it, including the lid, has to be able to go in the oven. This is the one I have, it’s fabulous and worth every (considerable) penny, but I have made happy cassoulets in everything from Corelleware to cast iron Dutch ovens to a big Chinese clay pot. So it doesn’t much matter what you’re gonna cook it in. There ain’t no such thing as a “cassoulet pot.” (Of course I believe that there isn’t any such thing as a paella pan or a tarte tatin pan or a pommes Anna pan either, because I make them all in varying sizes of cast iron pans. My kitchen is small and I just don’t have room or patience for 9000 fussy singlepurpose pans. Who does? I don’t know these people.)
Drain your beans. You remember the beans. You put them in to soak last night. Those. Drain them. Put them into the baking dish.
Next, put your faux-confit duck parts in, nestled down into the beans. Ditto with your pork bits. Chop your sausage(s) into portion-sized chunks and put those in. Peel and halve a couple of small onions and put them in, and maybe a few small turnips if you have them, or a couple-four carrots. Definitely throw in a handful of peeled whole garlic cloves. Tuck in a bay leaf, and if you have some fresh thyme, tie a few sprigs together with kitchen twine and pop that in too. It is a nice touch to take one of those halved onions and stick a few whole cloves in it before you throw it in, but it’s not necessary.
Pour in about a quart and a half of poultry stock if you have it or water if you don’t (it certainly isn’t going to suffer for flavor regardless of which you use). The beans should be covered to the depth of about an inch of liquid.
Cover the pan and put it in a moderate (350 degrees F) oven. Leave it in there at 350 F for an hour and a half, then reduce the heat to 250 degrees F. Leave it for another hour or two, then remove the lid. Move the meat bits around so that the parts that have been out of the liquid get a chance to be in the liquid, etc.
Return to the oven, uncovered, to let some of the liquid cook off. As it cooks it’ll form a delicious crust on top. Great battles have erupted between the kinds of people who have great battles about these things over the issue of how often this crust should be broken and pushed down into the bubbling beany goodness below. Frankly I fail to detect any significant difference no matter how often or how rarely I do it, so I don’t worry about it one bit. But I do, a few times over the course of the day that a cassoulet spends in my oven, give it a stir/redistribution of goodies.
Let it cook until it’s done. It’s done when you want to eat it, as long as when you want to eat it coincides with at least 4-5 hours of oven time after you turned the heat down. If it gets too dry, add more stock or water. It shouldn’t be too soupy, unless you like that.
Eat. With a green salad (you need some greens with this, and some vinegar, to balance the richness out). Some crusty bread is nice to sop up the juice with. Beer, or cider, or a red wine you like that isn’t too sweet, or just cold good water.
If you must have dessert, fruit is the way to go, and maybe a small quantity of very dark bitter chocolate.
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12.02.06
Posted in cooking, domesticity, how to at 10:56 pm by Hanne Blank
Cassoulet can, of course, be made in ways that do not turn it into a multi-day process. But if you have the time, it seems it is always best when you do it over at least two days. Or so think I.
I have no time or patience for picky-eater French foodie wars over what exactly ought or ought not go into a cassoulet. Like most dishes I cook, it’s peasant food. What goes into cassoulet? Whatever you have that seems like it will work. Why? Because peasants don’t have huge wodges of spare cash sitting around so they can go to some gourmet grocery store and buy exactly the correct sort of saucisson or tinned duck confit. Anyone who says you have to do that is full of it, and won’t be getting any of my cassoulet, that’s for damn sure.
So what is a cassoulet? It’s a long-cooking savory casserole based on some sort of white beans and various sorts of meat, usually duck, pork, and lamb, but sometimes other things. My favorite cassoulets have duck, garlicky sausage of some sort, and some kind of smoked meat, either smoked turkey or pork usually. The one I am making right now will have faux-confit of duck, garlic turkey kielbasa, and smoked pork shank.
The thing this doesn’t tell you is that cassoulets are alchemical and magically wonderful. Somehow, in long slow cooking, all the various things you’ve put in the dish turn into something that is greater than the sum of its individual parts. It is worth making a cassoulet at least once, just to know that you, all by yourself, can turn some fairly humble ingredients into something that utterly delicious.
So here’s how you do it.
Soak a pound of dry white beans of your choice. I’m using cannellini because they’re what I’ve got in the house. These’ll soak overnight, so just get them soaking and set them aside and forget about them.
Faux Confit:
This is not a real confit because a real confit requires long salting/brining followed by a whole bunch of other mishegoss. Confits of poultry are a method of preserving the poultry. You can look it up if you’re curious. Since you do not need to preserve the poultry you can simply make a fake confit, which will taste amazing and add its wonderfulness to your cassoulet the next day.
Take a medium-sized clean duck and joint it (remove wings and legs). Set the legs aside. Trim the end joint off of the wings and put wingtips in your stockpot with some water, a couple of onions, a few ribs of celery, a couple of carrots, a bayleaf or two, and put it on a very low simmer. You can toss the neck in there too. Set the rest of the wings aside. Cover the legs and wings and refrigerate them for now.
Skin the remainder of the duck carcass, being careful to remove all of the fatty layer beneath the skin. Be sure to get the extra skin at the neck, but avoid the glands, ditto the fatty deposits near the tail. Dice the skin and fat and place in a large heavy deep frying pan (I use my 18-inch cast iron skillet for this) and place over medium heat to render the fat. Dice an onion, too, and toss that in to the rendering fat, along with a healthy handful of peeled whole garlic cloves. Render until the skin has given up all its fat and all the garlic cloves and onion bits are a beautiful even dark brown (but not burned!). Remove the skin bits and onions and garlic with a slotted spoon and drain them on a thick layer of paper toweling. (Incidentally, the skin bits are crunchy and delicious with some coarse salt, if you are so inclined, and you really should try them at least once. Some people find them addictive. The ghost of my gall bladder weeps bitter tears if I eat more than about 2 of the delectable crispy little things, but it’s great while it lasts.)
While the duck fat is rendering, remove the breast meat and tenderloins from the duck carcass. It is possible to remove breast and tenderloin in one piece, but I rarely bother — I cook up the tenderloins as a snack, saving the breasts for the faux-confit. Place the breasts (and tenderloins, if not immediately cooking them) in with the legs and wings and salt generously with some kosher salt, then wrap up and put back in the fridge to keep them from getting to salmonella-friendly temperatures.
As for the carcass, which you have now successfully denuded of skin and useful chunks of meat, toss it in the stock pot. Do not let the stock boil — nothing higher than a low simmer — or it will become cloudy.
Once you have strained the solids out of the rendered duck fat, heat it over a low medium flame, then add the duck meat. Legs go in the center of the pan, wings and breasts around the outsides. Reduce the flame to low, just enough to make the fat simmer lightly, and cook the meat slowly in the fat, turning after 15 minutes, then waiting 15 more. Then braise the meat in the hot fat further for about 30 minutes on a side. It should develop a delightful crust.
Remove the meat from the fat when it is done and allow to cool somewhat, then refrigerate. You may, if you wish, strain the fat and refrigerate it so you can use it later to fry potatoes in (they sound more highfalutin’ if you call them pommes sarlandaises but by any other name, good stout russet potatoes sliced into pinkie-thick discs and fried until nutty brown in duck fat, then salted and served alongside a roast meat and a green salad are a fabulous thing).
As for the stock, let it simmer for an hour or two, then strain out the solids. Let it cool, then pour into suitable containers and refrigerate or freeze (depending on whether or not you plan to use it for the cassoulet — I find that cassoulet made with duck stock is too rich for me, I prefer it made with a thoroughly defatted chicken stock).
So. That’s Day 1.
And yes, I presume you already know how to butcher and skin poultry. If you don’t know, I believe The Joy of Cooking still has instructions. It’s not hard. And since you’re going to dice the skin up anyway it doesn’t matter much if you do a hatchet job. Use sharp knives, they’re safer than dull ones. Be brave. It’s worth it.
More tomorrow.
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11.04.06
Posted in domesticity, good things, housekeeping, how to at 8:40 pm by Hanne Blank
One of the reasons I am passionately fond of Cheryl Mendelson’s encyclopedic housekeeping tome Home Comforts is that she understands the importance of airing out a house. It sounds old-fashioned to “air out” anything, and I suppose it is a bit, in this era of hermetically-sealed buildings where air only comes in through an ophidian orgy of ducts and tubes connected, in some diabolical manner, to a huge jet engine sort of thing mounted on the roof.
But truth be told, I deeply dislike buildings that do not have any congress with the outside world. From hotels where the room windows don’t open to big-box stores whose only windows are the panes of glass in the automatic doors, I find the whole American phenomenon of the impermeable structure very unsettling and offputting and frankly inhuman. Human beings and other living things need sunlight and fresh air. We know scientifically that human beings need sunlight, and that the lack of it depresses and disorients. I am convinced that there is some atavistic part of us that withers and dies if we don’t feel breezes and winds, smell and feel the changes in the air when there is rain or snow, and some weird little mechanism in our brains that requires some sense of when it is naturally daytime or nighttime or else it goes haywire and our bodily cycles become unmoored and chaotic. At least there is for me, and I suspect strongly that I am not alone.
I also dislike closed-up buildings because they tend to stink. The smell is not always overpowering or distinctive in any particular direction, but at the very least buildings that are often or always sealed up tend to smell stale and flat, as if myriad manila folders, hair nets, and pots of paste had crawled into the air ducts to die. Other smells linger for a long time, too, when a building is not aired. The scents of cooking, cleaning compounds, perfumes, shampoos and conditioners, laundry products, and clothing items (plastic, vinyl, and leather particularly) hang around for a long time. So do the smells of unclean kitty litter boxes, dogs that need baths, mildew and mold, dead mice that expired in the walls or behind the fridge, and numerous other unpleasant things. The ammonia of a kitty litter box that has gone several days longer than it should’ve between cleanings can linger in the air of a house for quite a while after the litter box has finally been cleaned. Many smells will permeate fabrics and carpets even in well-ventilated places, and in poorly-ventilated ones they soak in that much more deeply. My nose is not half so exquisitely sensitive as those of some people I know, but I can often tell when I’m in a place inhabited by a long-time alcoholic, a smoker (even one who does not smoke indoors), someone whose diabetes is not well-managed, and quite a number of other things that you might not think could be smelled, but can if you’ve the nose for it and an awareness of what you’re smelling.
Many people, encouraged heavily by advertising, believe that the cure is an “air freshener” of some sort. Sprays, sticks, things you plug into the wall or pour on your carpet before you vacuum it so that your rugs smell like grilled cheese sandwiches or Evening in Paris, whatever, they come in a double dozen formats. It’s all the same basic crap. This “air freshener” thing is a masterful bit of doubletalk and doublethink, because what “air fresheners” really are is perfume. They’re air stinkifiers, or aromafiers if you prefer. They “freshen” only in the sense that one “freshens up” one’s makeup by putting another dab of powder on one’s nose and another bit of lipstick on over the older, worn coat. What air “fresheners” really do is mask and distract. (They do not always do this successfully, though. I cannot be the only person who has ever walked into a truck stop bathroom, inhaled the pungent combo of other people’s excreta combined with industrial-strength air freshner and thought “Jesus Christ, it smells like someone took a shit on a Christmas tree in here.”)
The real cure, whether for a house that smells bad, a house that is full of smells that you wish it weren’t quite so full of, or for a house that is just plain stuffy and stale, is to air the place out. You want to give the fabrics and carpets and upholstery a chance to breathe, give the various odoriferous compounds a chance to volatilize and disperse, dry any damp places or things so that they won’t mildew or molder, and to help kill off any mildew that is already hanging around. Read the rest of this entry »
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