Food: General - Sarasota Soundings

Tracking Turkey 2010

Holly Chase — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 17:03:37 +0000

Editor’s Note: Here’s a post from 2009. It seems just as timely now as it did then. Happy Thanksgiving.

“You first parents of the human race … who ruined yourselves for an
apple, what might you not have done for a truffled turkey?”

— Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, French food writer.

In the late 18th century, shortly after the founding of the United States of America, the statesman Benjamin Franklin wrote to his daughter:

“I wish the Bald Eagle had not been chosen as the Representative of the Country; he is a Bird of bad moral Character, like those among Men who live by Sharping and Robbing, he is generally poor and often very lousy…The Turkey is a much more respectable Bird, and withal a true original Native of America.” (1)

No stranger to the pleasures of the table, Ben Franklin was doubtless well acquainted with the wild turkey, a game bird indigenous to North and Central America.

In considering these birds, I would like, first of all, to deal with the English noun “turkey.” Unabashedly, I confess it to be my inspiration for this paper, which I first delivered in the country of the same name.

The most convincing etymological sources (2) speak of fowl known as “turkey cocks” in reference to large domesticated birds (provably of the genus Pavo). By mid-16th century “Guinea hens” were synonymous with “turkey-cocks” and referred to fowl of African origin. Some of these were supposed to have been brought from West Africa (Guinea) and others from Numidia via the Turkish dominions, hence the name “turkey.” Sixteenth century Spanish explorers in Mexico found that the Aztecs had domesticated a large fan-tailed bird, the huexolotl, which was prized for its meat and regularly offered as tribute to the Aztec monarch, Montezuma. The Spaniards introduced this bird to Europe, where the confusion over its name began.

For those of you who like to know the origins of words you eat, here is a brief summary of what happened to the feathered pride of the Aztecs:

The Spaniards called the new bird pavo, after the European fowls they knew.The French, considering the bird to be from the general Caribbean region called the creature poule d’Indes, or dinde, after the Caribbean islands Columbus had mistaken for India, and which we call the West Indies. Later, in provincial areas of France, the birds were sometimes known as jusites after Jesuit brothers who started a turkey farm near Bourges. (3)

Linnaeus, the great Swedish classifier, mistakenly gave the New World creature the Latin name that rightfully belonged to the Old World fowl, Meleagris gallopavo. Thus, something else (Numida meleagris) had to be concocted for the turkey-cock. (Meleagris means speckled.) (4)

The English called it turkey because it was closer in appearance to their turkey-cocks that to anything else they’d seen. The Turks, probably to agree with the French, or maybe because they thought it inappropriate to roast a creature named for their nation, chose to call the bird hindi, thus pushing matters farther east.

Meanwhile, the Portuguese preferred to go west. Sources mention that they wrongly supposed the bird to have come from Peru. To this day, Portuguese speakers from Brazil to Goa call the bird peru. And thanks to Portuguese trade with India, the Hindi name for turkey is piru.

The Arabs took their own word for cockerel, dik, and added the Arabic adjective pertaining to Turkey or Asia Minor, rumi, which referred back to the Byzantine Empire, of the Land of Rome. Thus, dik rumi, an Arab turkey, is really a Roman rooster.

But it is none other than the wild Meleagris gallopavo that American folklore has solidly established itself as one of the native foods enjoyed by the Puritan colonists of Massachusetts when they celebrated their first Thanksgiving in 1621. That feast was, by all accounts, a prayerful occasion during which the English pilgrims thanked their Savior for a safe flight from religious persecution in England and for the bounty of their first harvest in the New World.

To properly appreciate turkey’s place within the cuisine of the United States, one must look briefly at the development of our holiday commemorating the Pilgrims. As a feast-day, it was not an instant success. After that initial Pilgrim banquet, over two centuries would pass before Thanksgiving, the most “typically American” of celebrations, was officially decreed a national holiday.

Beginning in the 1820’s, Mrs. Sarah Josepha Hale, the editor of an influential women’s magazine, Godey’s Lady’s Book, carried on a patriotic crusade for the establishment of Thanksgiving as a national holiday. She wrote hundreds of editorials and letters urging politicians, clergymen and the readers of her periodical to lobby for this cause. Finally, in 1863 in the midst of the American Civil War and shortly after the Northern Army’s victory at Gettysburg, the combination of Mrs. Hale’s annual exhortations and the Northern desire to celebrate its triumph prompted President Lincoln to proclaim the third Thursday in November as the national day of Thanksgiving. As early as 1857, Mrs. Hale filled the cookery pages of the November issue of Godey’s with recipes for roast turkey and other dishes to be served at the Thanksgiving meal. Despite myriad changes in food technology, taste, and society since then, American magazine and newspaper food editors still adhere to Mrs. Hale’s basic format.

Mrs. Hale and President Lincoln may have assured the seasonal demand for turkey, but so plentiful were the wild turkeys that turkey breeding for superior flesh did not attract significant commercial interest until the 20th century. Earlier American turkey breeders had concentrated on the production of large feathers deemed essential for Victorian womens’ hats and fans. (5)

While the fashion for turkey plumes may have subsided, the cooking of turkeys continued to be a subject of much discussion and divergent opinion. In “Statesmen’s Dishes and How to Cook Them” (1890), Mrs. Stephen J. Field suggested that “three days before [a turkey] is slaughtered, it should have an English walnut forced down its throat three times a day and a glass of sherry once a day. The meat will be deliciously tender and have a fine nutty flavor.” (6) An eighteenth century adventurer in the American Midwest extolled the merits of stewing a turkey in racoon fat. (7)

Currently, one highly successful processor of oven-ready turkeys advertises birds that are “self-basting.” Its raw turkeys are injected with corn oil to keep the meat from becoming too dry. Many of these turkeys are also equipped with heat-sensitive devices that indicate precisely when the bird is done to perfection.

Though its stuffings of bread-crumbs and herbs, nuts and dried fruits, sausage meat or oysters vary widely from kitchen to kitchen, a roast turkey is an essentially simple affair. It is no surprise that in the American idiom, “to talk turkey” means to speak plainly and directly, to deal with the basics. Hence one well-known firm’s “Turkey-Talk Line,” a toll-free telephone assistance service which operates from a few weeks before Thanksgiving through the Christmas-New Year holidays. Despite innovations such as birds with embedded thermometers, the firm receives thousands of calls from distraught, once-a-year turkey chefs who prove that “fool-proof” is a relative term. Panic frequently arises when a consumer has neglected to remove the bird’s plastic wrapping before placing it in the oven or has forgotten to turn the oven on until half an hour before dinner is to be served to a dozen guests.

Sentiments about Thanksgiving are strong. And since a superabundance of family members and food are what characterize the celebration for most Americans, it is not surprising that there is a collective attachment to family food traditions. This tends to discourage avant-garde experimentation. Turkeys stuffed with couscous or accompanied by a kiwi chutney do appear in magazines, but by and large, most Americans cooking for their families are unlikely to tamper with tradition at Thanksgiving. Though few would dispute the festiveness of a fine rack of lamb or a magnificent bouillabaisse, few Americans would seriously consider either suitable Thanksgiving fare. (8)

By virtue of its iconic role in the Thanksgiving dinner, turkey has become an American symbol—not so much to non-Americans, who may associate the United States with beef cattle, great grain fields, and fast food—but by Americans themselves.

Unofficially, at least, the bird with the ugly head and the spectacular plumage eventually achieved some of the status Ben Franklin begrudged the eagle. During World War II, extraordinary measures were taken to ensure that American troops overseas, and even those fighting on the front lines, were given hot turkey dinners on Thanksgiving Day. (9) & (10)

Oddly, mass popularity has not diminished wealthy or fad-following Americans’ appetite for turkey. It continues to be a meat for feasts even as improved farming has made it plentiful and cheap enough to be used instead of beef or pork scraps in sausages and hot dogs. And lean, freshly ground turkey, sold alongside ground beef in supermarkets the year round, carries no message of either Pilgrim piety or holiday largesse. More often than not, it is simply labeled “low-cholesterol.”

Despite advertising’s transformation of turkey into an inexpensive “health food,” a browned, well-basted roast turkey is in no danger of being supplanted as the centerpiece of our holiday devoted to unabashed gluttony. But what irony that the turkey (albeit stripped of its flavorful, fattening skin) should also epitomize prudent restraint for body-conscious Americans today. What would the Pilgrims think?

— Holly Chase

Notes & Bibliography

(1) The American Heritage Cookbook and Illustrated History of American
Eating and Drinking, American Heritage Publishing Co., 1964; p. 482.
(2) The Oxford English Dictionary, second edition.
(3) Larousse Gastronomique (English edition), Crown Publishers, New
York, 1964.
(4) The Oxford English Dictionary.
(5) The Thansgiving Book, by Lucille Recht Penner (Hastings House, New
York, 1996), p. 115.
(6) See note 1, p. 483
(7) The Wild Turkey: Its History & Domestication, by A.W. Schorger
(University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, Okla; 1966, pp. 370-1). An
entertaining blend of exhaustive research and superior writing– food
scholarship at its zenith.
(8) When “new” dishes enter the Thanksgiving repertoire, food writers tend to link them to earlier American traditions. And America, at least in the geographical sense, certainly includes Mexico, source of the turkey. Yet I know of no proposals to add two especially splendid Mexican turkey recipes to the Thanksgiving table.

The first Spaniards in Mexico wrote that the Aztecs ate turkey with a sauce based on bitter chocolate, the ancestor of today’s mole poblano, a seductive poultry sauce from the Mexican state of Puebla. And then there is pavo en escabeche, stewed turkey marinated in oil, vinegar, herbs and onions—a dish with obvious Mediterranean antecedents.

(9) Thanksgiving: An American Holiday, An American History, by Diana Karter Applebaum (Facts on File Publications, New York and Bicester, England, 1985); pp. 249-250.

(10) The most typical “trimmings” would include a sage and bread stuffing, mashed potatoes, giblet gravy, cranberry relish, creamed onions and fresh celery.

Paper adapted from a lecture given in Istanbul, Turkey, in 1990 at the Third International Food Congress (Ucuncu Milletlerarasi Yemek Kongresi).

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How to Host Thanksgiving Dinner (And Enjoy it Anyway)

Skip — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 14:00:00 +0000

Photograph courtesy of QuintanaRoo on Flickr

You’ve been nominated. Perhaps your family has issued a decree. Or maybe, it’s simply your turn. No matter what the reason, you’re hosting Thanksgiving dinner next week. This need not be a burden. In fact, given the right planning and organization, orchestrating Thanksgiving dinner can be a pleasure.

I’ve found that the key to the successful dinner is thinking backwards. Start your Thanksgiving planning by visualizing yourself surrounded by family and friends at the dinner table, then rewind your mental video to determine how you got there. Ask yourself which foods took the least amount of preparation, which took the most. Write these things down. Make a list.

Now, add a little detail to the list to remind yourself which dishes can be prepared the day (or evening) before. Which dishes need to be prepared Thanksgiving Day? Which must be prepared within an hour of dinner?

At this point, you will have at least a vague idea for your plan of attack. So now it’s time to further refine the list. In fact, it’s time to begin to create a schedule. For example, if you intend to serve dinner at 2:00 p.m., and have calculated that the turkey will take three hours to roast, and half hour to rest before carving, the bird needs to be in the oven at 10:00 a.m.

Why 10:00, and not 10:30? In addition to the three and a half hours for roasting and resting, I’ve factored in 15 minutes to pre-heat the oven, and 15 minutes to carve the bird and arrange it on a serving platter. Your schedule should reflect all of these variables.

By now, your initial list has probably become three or four lists as you prioritize the steps leading to that wonderful image of yourself sitting among family and friends at the table. The next stage in the process is to identify the tasks involved in readying the ingredients for individual dishes: the prep work.

How lovely to watch a rock star chef on Food TV blithely talking about adding a cup of chopped onions to a sauté pan, as her perfectly manicured hand reaches across an Italian granite counter to retrieve a cup of chopped onions. Of course, TV chefs have the benefit of having four sous-chefs backstage who keep them supplied with all the chopped, minced, pureed, ground, or marinated ingredients they’ll need to create a smooth-running half-hour television show. You, too, can enjoy having these things prepped in advance (although you probably can’t count on having the four sous-chefs backstage).

As part of your master schedule, allow plenty of time for prep work. This will greatly reduce any cooking anxieties. You do not want to be hunting for a clove of garlic in a refrigerator stuffed with food for twenty while you have a pan of hot oil waiting for you on the stove.

Now is also the time to think about how many of the recipes on your menu will require the same ingredients. If, for example, you have two dishes on your menu, each requiring a cup of chopped onions, be sure to chop two cups of onions to have on hand, pre-measured and ready to go when the time comes to cook. Try to think of other ingredients that can also be prepped early: have winter squash that can be peeled and cubed? Brussels sprouts to be trimmed and scored?

One task that you can check off now, days before Thanksgiving, is making sure your oven is properly calibrated. If you don’t already own one, get an inexpensive oven thermometer. Test to see if the temperature you set on your oven thermostat is indeed what is displayed on your thermometer. If your oven’s temperature does not match your control thermometer, you’ll know in advance that you’ll have to compensate, setting the oven temperature a little higher or lower. You don’t want burned pie crust or underdone potatoes.

In addition, it would be wise—again, if you don’t already have one—to get an instant-read meat thermometer for your turkey. Knowing that you’ve cooked your turkey to an internal temperature of 165 F. will give you a great deal of confidence and allow you to focus on the myriad last-minute details of getting the meal to the table.

One last comment about prep work that will make the entire Thanksgiving experience more enjoyable: give yourself a break when you’ve finished chopping vegetables, measuring ingredients, and generally assuring yourself that you have the situation in hand. Relax, perhaps with a cup of coffee or a glass of wine ,before you begin the actual cooking.

This break provides a peaceful interlude and helps you to mentally shift gears, to move from the self-supporting role of prep cook to the grander role chef de cuisine.

Of course, at some time before Thanksgiving, you’ll need to shop for ingredients. I’ve not spoken about shopping, because I feel there are too many variables. Factors such as your menu, proximity to a mega-store or specialized deli, your work schedule, etc. make it difficult to talk about provisioning in universal terms. Suffice it to say that if you can plan a menu and create a schedule, you’ll know what you need, and when.

So, menu set, shopping and prep work done, what do you do on Thanksgiving morning? First of all–trust no one. People are rarely more giving of themselves than at Thanksgiving, and offers to assist in the kitchen will be impassioned and extravagant. Be wary, be very wary. Should you delegate the creamed spinach details to a close friend or relative, don’t be surprised if Macy’s parade or the NFL game distracts your well-meaning helper and leaves you with lumpy bèchamel for your spinach.

But it’s okay. You’ve factored that into your schedule, and, you, the unflappable you, can pick up the slack. When I say that you shouldn’t trust anyone, I mean that—as I’ve written elsewhere—90% of cooking is simply being there.

Finally, at times like Thanksgiving, I’m reminded of a piece of advice I got from a doctor friend: in case of an emergency, the first thing to do is take your own pulse. While things may not go entirely as planned, you need not panic. Wholly dependable or not, help will be at hand. An emergency in the kitchen is guaranteed to draw the most hardened NFL fan away from the game to lend support. Just stick to your schedule as best you can. Everything will be fine.

Thoughtful advance planning of your Thanksgiving meal will pay off at the dinner table; you’ll reap compliments and maybe even a round of applause from happy, thankful diners. As you dry the last of the pots and pans that served so well in preparing your feast, you can savor the ultimate satisfaction that comes from a job well done and the comforting knowledge that, next year, it will be someone else’s turn.

Three entertaining—and maybe useful resources:

The Butterball Hotline
Susan Stamberg’s Mother’s Cranberry Relish
Green Bean Casserole

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The post How to Host Thanksgiving Dinner (And Enjoy it Anyway) first appeared on Sarasota Soundings.

Catch of the Day

Skip — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 20:36:20 +0000

Here in southeastern Connecticut where we spend our summers, Gambardella Seafood on the docks in Stonington nearly always has something good on offer when we drop in for a visit. But once in a while—as you can see below—we arrive to find them offloading a fishing boat that had just pulled up to their dock.

On this day, the catch was Whiting. Ordinarily not the most flavorful fish in the hold, we gave them a boost with lemon, olive oil, garlic, and red onion.

Following the marinade, we placed the fish on a bed of grape leaves and lemon balm and grilled them over hardwood charcoal. They completed their one-way trip from the Atlantic Ocean to our dinner table in slightly less than eight hours.

We don’t get to do that in Sarasota.

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Jamie Oliver on NPR Today

Skip — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 16:40:36 +0000

Jamie Oliver, best known as the British Naked Chef, visited NPR’s Weekend Edition this Sunday morning.

Sharing his thoughts on food frugality as they apply to Thanksgiving, he really got our attention when he pointed out that we live in a time when millions who need to watch their food costs have no idea how to prepare simple meals. In Western cultures where fast foods have been a feature for more than a generation, the need for people to know how to select and cook food and to rediscover the satisfaction of sharing meals has never been greater.

We’ve been saying the same things around our own tables (with family, friends, and our cooking class participants) for years.

We’ll be happy if the message begins to get across, thanks to the propulsion of Mr. Oliver’s outspoken celebrity. Most of all, we hope that the incoming administration’ s Secretary of Health and Human Services picks up the signal. Mr Obama’s own half-hour infomercial featured several constituents who were obese. They were everyday Americans whose financial constraints and health conditions could be bettered through dietary changes and more informed food preparation.

No matter who delivers it—the message is far more important than the messenger.

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Viva Cristoforo Colombo

Holly and Skip — Sat, 06 Oct 2007 15:44:56 +0000

Cristoforo Colombo

Some of my friends have been checking in today, to ask how I plan to celebrate Columbus Day. Certainly, one component of my observance will be to use this blog to dispel any misunderstandings about that tawdry business with Joe Columbo.

I can see how misunderstandings have arisen. The guy’s name was Columbo, and he got whacked in public on Columbus Circle in midtown Manhattan. But contrary to the most popular misunderstanding, it happened months before Columbus Day—on June 18, 1971. And Joe was leading a rally to celebrate a holiday he’d made up, one that had nothing to do with global exploration: Italian-American Unity Day. The purpose of the rally had more to do with gaining public sympathy for his own “family,” upon whom the FBI had been lavishing their attention, than in unifying Italian-Americans.

Christopher Columbus apparently had had enough problems of his own with the indigenous population of Hispanola without being associated with wise guys a few centuries into the future. I hope I’ve cleared this up.

Nevertheless, celebration is in order. To paraphrase Calvin Trillin, Columbus didn’t come all the way to America just to have a city in Ohio named for him. Nor did he sail west because he got a deal on accommodations for a long weekend in October… And if we are to believe historians, Queen Isabella’s admiral never actually made it to North America at all.

But on this holiday weekend, I’ll celebrate the fact that Christopher Columbus, one of Genoa’s native sons, is the man who brought linguine al pesto to the New World.

Of course, I’ll spend some time in sober reflection about the man and his accomplishments. After all, for my Columbus Day dinner, I’ll need only to combine fresh basil, Parmigiano, pignoli, garlic, and olive oil in the Cuisinart. In Columbus’s time, if I had wanted to go out for a dish of linguine al pesto, I would have risked falling off the edge of the earth.

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Shopping on the Edge

Skip — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 21:30:26 +0000

In the introduction to her new cookbook, Chocolate & Zucchini, Clotilde Dusoulier, writes about her American gastronomic epiphany. The undisputed darling du jour among female food bloggers, she recalls her fascination with U.S. supermarkets, where she first saw entire, central aisles devoted to breakfast cereals.

Mlle. Dusoulier is not alone. We still marvel at the mega-market in Burlington, Vermont, where we paced off 50 feet of shelf space packed with salsas. We couldn’t help but wonder what had happened to the après ski staples, raclette and fondue. Since then, one of us has been harboring entrepreneurial dreams of launching ‘Tia Maria’s Catamount Salsa.’ He reasons that no salsa-dependent Vermonter could resist a product featuring a South-of-the-Border auntie and the official state feline.

Go into almost any North American supermarket and you’ll notice that the goods occupying most of the floor and shelf space are packaged—in paper, plastic, glass or metal. A lot of these goods, at the very heart of the merchandise space, are not even food: paper products, cleaning formulas, medications, cosmetics, stationery, books, magazines, even toys.

What we’ve come to realize is that we are not the customers for whom those central aisles are stocked. A friend (and marketing consultant for one of those center-aisle items) recently observed with some disdain: “You guys are peripheral shoppers.”

We’ve never willingly considered ourselves to be on the periphery of anything. Quite the contrary, we think of ourselves as pretty hip about lots of things—food shopping in particular. Our friend was referring to our modus operandi in a supermarket. And she’s right: no matter what supermarket we’re patronizing, almost everything we purchase is indeed from the perimeter of the store.

That’s because we do something that increasingly fewer Americans do: we cook from scratch. Furthermore, we don’t buy a lot of packaged food, and we get our non-comestibles elsewhere.

Think about it: fresh produce, breads, meat and fish, dairy products, cut flowers …

Sure, from time to time, we need the odd can of chickpeas, cannellini, or San Marzano tomatoes. We hit the pasta, rice, and olive oil when they’re a good buy. And we do need to turn down one of the aisles for the house wines we favor. But by and large, yes, we are peripheral shoppers—and completely unrepentant.

We’ve been thinking that peripheral shopping might actually have a certain amount of cachet. We can imagine a New Yorker cartoon featuring the familiar pair of Bowery bums sitting on a sidewalk. Leaning against a building, one says to the other, “I used to be a peripheral shopper until I got hooked on Chef Boyardee.”

We tested ourselves and found that our friend’s peripheral label sticks, even when we venture into the hallowed aisles of our local Whole Paycheck. Whether they’re organic or not, we give canned soups and “ready-in five-minutes” pad thai kits a miss as easily there as we do at our local supermarché ordinaire.

Somehow, you never hear the PA systems at K-Mart blast: “Attention Peripheral Shoppers…!” But if they ever do, they just might get our ear.

Technorati Tags: Peripheral Shopping, Supermarkets, Coooking from Scratch

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Slow Food Fast

Skip — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 19:00:22 +0000

Occasionally, an article about favorite kitchen tools grabs our attention. You know the sort: it starts with “Now, Martha (or Wolfgang, Rachel, or Emeril) what’s your favorite kitchen tool? What’s the one tool you absolutely will not live without? If you were stranded on a desert island with a Weber Kettle Grill, 10 Lbs. of New York strip steaks, a pound of butter, and some white truffles, and could have only one tool, what would it be? When you cook, what tool is sine qua non for you?”

A surprising number of people answer that question by saying, “my microplane grater.” In fact, one of the people who gives that answer lives here in this house. I find this surprising, though, because as an Italo-centric cook, I grate only so many foodstuffs as part of my normal routine. But for my cooking cohort with Asian-fusion tendencies, the microplane grater was so life-changing that the quantities of finely chopped ginger we were accustomed to producing are now microplaned ginger, which shows up in everything from our iced-tea to guacamole.

But since the question has come up, MY favorite kitchen tool is the pressure cooker. Of course you may say that it’s an awfully arcane piece of equipment, the sort of thing your grandmother used. You will very likely have a story—real or apocryphal—about someone who spent a half day sponging pea soup off the kitchen walls and ceiling after “the pressure cooker exploded.”

We are happy to report that technology has come a long way since grandma tended the stove. The way a pressure cooker works has not changed, but the engineering has been greatly improved.

In brief, a pressure cooker’s job is to substantially reduce the time required to cook foods like pulses and tougher cuts of meat that would ordinarily take hours.

The essential elements are liquid and pressure.

When heated, liquid inside the pressure cooker’s pot creates steam and a certain amount of pressure. Modern cookers are engineered to produce 15 Lbs. of pressure per square inch at sea level. When it reaches that point, a liquid boils at a higher temperature: 257 ° F. Any excess steam generated by the boiling liquid is vented through the pot’s lid. Food cooks more quickly. A typical “braise,” that might take 2-3 hours on the stove or in the oven is done in an hour or so.

I got my pressure cooker at a hardware store in the south of France. While the town of Grasse is world-renowned for its large perfume-making operations, I remember it more for its hardware store than for the jasmine samples at Fragonard.

The fact that European hardware stores often sell cooking utensils and that the French call a hardware store a droguerie, were enough to make me seek them out everywhere I went in Provence.

My model was made by Moulinex, and in France anyway, is yet another of so many kitchen tools known simply as a mouli. Think of how Italians use the term machinetta to refer to any small machine from an espresso pot to a Fiat.

If Labor Day marks the end of summer, it also heralds the beginning of the season of “bean cuisine,” in cooler climes. But because our air-conditioner is still kicking on for much of the afternoon, we were inspired to do a little experiment to see if we could keep our kitchen cool and save energy while still cooking our beans.

Ordinarily, Italians don’t soak beans overnight, but rather, cook them for 10 minutes at a full, rolling boil before moving on to the rest of a recipe. We asked ourselves what would happen if we gave the beans those first 10 minutes under pressure. Then, we went a step farther: we let them sit—sealed in the thick, heat-retentive pot and off the burner. After four hours, we opened the still-warm pressure cooker and found the beans were completely cooked. This was a great surprise. Not only were we saving energy, but we weren’t even heating the kitchen enough to trigger the air conditioning. And we had a supply of perfectly tender cannellini that would make at least two, and possibly three, meals.

So for 10 minutes of cooking under pressure and an afternoon of benign neglect, we were poised to make nearly instant fagioli al uceletto, beans with tomato sauce; insalata di fagioli e tonno, tuna and bean salad; and zuppa di fagioli, bean soup. The list goes on…

We’re not sure how long cooked beans will keep in the fridge. With our culinary styles (Italian, Middle Eastern, and Indian), we tend to use them up in a couple of days. At lunchtime, it’s a simple matter to chop a sweet Florida onion, open a can of tuna, and snip a few sprigs of rosemary for a satisfying Tuscan lunch. Bean soup is merely a batutto—chopped pancetta, carrot, celery, onion, garlic, and parsley quickly sautéed—added to a bowl of warmed beans.

Today’s pressure cookers are sleek, efficient, and safe. And, for those of us with an interest in saving energy, they provide a great way to cook slow food fast. It goes without saying, though, that when we serve our zuppa di fagioli, we’ll garnish each bowl with a shower of Parmigiano from our microplane grater.

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Our Star Fruit Vinegar Experiment

Skip — Sun, 09 Sep 2007 17:26:24 +0000

“What is sweeter than honey? Free vinegar.” — old Turkish riddle

We’ve recently found ourselves with a surfeit of star fruit (Averrhoa carambola). Due to the benign neglect of some of our neighbors, scores of ripe fruits have fallen to the ground in three different yards along our regular walk-routes (some might say trade routes).

At first, we were delighted, eating sliced stars with yogurt for breakfast, or simply on their own, as a snack. But it’s not taken us long to discover an even better use for our bounty. We’ve written elsewhere about the pitcher of tea in the fridge. We enjoy our chilled tea throughout the day, and as we use various fruits like lemons, limes, and mangoes, we add their rinds, pits, and additional freshly brewed tea to the pitcher. The process is not unlike enriching the apocryphal stock pot, simmering on the back burner, with vegetable trimmings.

When we began adding cut-up pieces of star fruit to our tea, we noticed that the tea was rapidly infused with the fruit’s flavor. This caused us to consider using star fruit as a basis for vinegar…

Last night, we got a percussive suggestion that perhaps star fruit would be a good candidate for the vinegar jar. While sitting quietly in the living room, we heard a sharp pop from the kitchen. The source of the explosion was the recycled yogurt container we keep in the kitchen sink for compost material. We had cut up several star fruit earlier in the day, and the scraps in the covered plastic container had already produced enough CO₂ to pop the top off. Might this be an enthanol alternative?

We’ve been making our own vinegar since we lived in Connecticut, when one of us concocted a batch from white zinfandel wine. We’ll never forget the words of the fellow at the liquor store when we bought the wine to start the project: “Oh, so there really is a use for Sutter Home White Zin?”

No matter what anyone thinks of the wine, it makes fabulous vinegar.

That first batch set the tone for all our subsequent vinegar-making endeavors. We take neither the vinegar, nor ourselves, too seriously and get great results. A couple of years ago, we found the Web site of a group of like-minded people who call themselves the Gang of Pour. They don’t take themselves too seriously either. In fact, one of their members wrote that she’d started making vinegar with a mayonnaise jar and some leftover wine. And that’s fine by us, because levity makes any seemingly arcane process much more approachable.

We began experimenting with vinegars from the fruit we grow in our back yard here in Sarasota. Our citrus trees are old yet extremely prolific. Each winter, we try hard to share our grapefruit with anyone we know, but in a county where half the population is on Lipitor® (for which grapefruit consumption is contraindicated), this is not easy and we end up with a lot of fruit. Our citrus are delicious, but the unnamed cultivars with which we are blessed are extremely seedy, so we juice most of our oranges and grapefruit. And because we end up with a lot of juice, we have experimented, turning out a serviceable orange vinegar as well as a terrific grapefruit vinegar.

It’s simple enough: we begin with a scrupulously clean, wide-mouthed jar, then add fruit juice and our “starter”—unfiltered and unpasteurized cider vinegar in proportions of about 6:1. We cover the mouth of the jar with cloth or a paper coffee filter (secured by a rubber band), stash the jar in a dark place, and check on it from time to time. We’re told that the optimum temperature for making vinegar is approximately 70° F. But since our house has an ambient temperature of about 80° F., the process doesn’t take quite as long. For us, the vinegar is usually ready in about two weeks.

It’s been a few months since our last grapefruit, so we were ready for a new undertaking. Heading out with a plastic bag and plying our neighborhood trade routes, we collected approximately 6 Lb. of fallen star fruit. We picked through our haul, saving the most pristine specimens for culinary uses, then sliced the rest to fill a one gallon jar, nearly to the top. We added just enough Brita-filtered water to top off the jar, and then added a ‘mother,’ a piece of the leathery starter that had grown and completed its mission in another project, a jar of red wine vinegar.

This latest vinegar venture is a departure for us, as it is both infusion (adding something aromatic to, say, white wine vinegar) and fermentation (adding a catalyst and letting Mother Nature do the work). We’re hoping that the combination of the fruit fermenting as it flavors the water and the mother eating up any alcohol and sugars will give us enough besotted fruit and liquid so that we’ll have sufficient pulp from which we can extract a liquid that we can strain as Star Fruit Vinegar.

Tucked away in a dark corner of our kitchen, our macerating fruit began audibly effervescing within an hour. We won’t do a lot of fussing with it while it is en repos, but we’ll certainly get back to you with an update when we have some news.

The post Our Star Fruit Vinegar Experiment first appeared on Sarasota Soundings.

Fish Story

Holly and Skip — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 17:56:06 +0000

Almost September, and the storms of summer have yet to arrive on the Sun Coast. True, our yards and the produce fields of Plant City and Ruskin need more rain, but we’d prefer that it be delivered by forces more benign than Dean, Erin, or their NOAA-named siblings.

Like it or not, we face two more months of official hurricane season. Though the Europeans’ favored month is August, there’s a reason so many Florida businesses and restaurants close during September, the middle of the five-month storm season.

Where do all the Sarasotans go? Those who don’t have homes back in Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan seem to favor North Carolina. Those who are truly en vacances, without second homes they feel compelled to use, may pack up their cars and drive through New England (lingering in Maine, in particular) and coastal Canada. We hear about those who cruise the Pacific Northwest… But the entire exodus is not to places cooler than Sarasota; many actually go through the indignities of airport security to travel to destinations just as warm, but DRY, where little rain falls from June through September and humidity is not the topic of everyday conversation.

It may be American travelers’ Euro-focus and the fact that Spain and Italy have provided so many place names to developers and city planners in Florida, that some forget about the other end of the Mediterranean. As cooks and diners, our September thoughts turn to the Mediterranean country with the longest coastline—where the dollar is still strong and simple restaurants’ “catch of the day” is literally that, not something that was trucked in overnight by Sysco.

In late summer and early fall, we think of Turkey—and fish, not fowl—caught in waters surrounding a largely peninsular nation lapped by the Mediterranean, Aegean, and Black Seas. Each body of water has different habitats that support different fish, crustaceans, and mollusks. And then there’s the Sea of Marmara, tucked between Istanbul’s Bosphorus Strait and the northern Aegean.

In Istanbul, September is the beginning of bluefish season. Though they may share the nomenclature of the fish so abundant in coastal New England, Turkish bluefish have a different diet, more delicate flavor, and are more highly esteemed than their over-caught American relatives. Istanbul has at least five different names for them, depending on their size. A few inches long, they are nicknamed defne or bay leaf. For fish 1—1/2 lbs, they are lufer, and then kofana for a fish that might serve five or six diners.

If you are not bluefishing off Nantucket or along other northern shores this summer, try this supremely simple grilling treatment on Florida kingfish, amberjack, bonito, or pompano.

You’ll need—

Whole fish, scaled and gutted, preferably no larger than 4 lbs. and as small as 1 lb. Those whose flesh or skin have a high oil content are best.

Florida white onions—sliced in 1/4 inch slices and separated into rings, tossed with coarsely ground black pepper and a little salt.

Bay leaves
Olive oil
Lemons or limes

As a guideline, for each pound of fish, you’ll need 3 bay leaves and 3—4 onion slices.

Fill each fish cavity with one layer of onion rings, some bay leaves, and 2-3 paper-thin slices of lemon or lime.

Brush or rub each fish with a little olive oil and place on a grill about 5 inches above coals that have developed a thin coating of ash.

You’ll want steady heat, but no direct flames, to slowly char the fish. When one side is nicely charred, turn over to do the other. 10-13 minutes should be enough time for a one-pound fish.

To serve: Remove the bay leaves, but keep the onions as edible garnish. If the flesh seems dry, drizzle a little more oil over the cooked flesh, and plate with citrus wedges.

Soon Turkey’s famous Black Sea hamsi, anchovies will appear in myriad dishes. In Turkey, anchovies are usually enjoyed fresh, though they can also be bought salt-cured or oil-packed. These little fish are eagerly awaited and show up as meze—filets in a cool vinegar bath or corn meal-dipped and deep-fried. As main dish elements, they are featured in rice pilav and baked between sheets of savory, flaky dough as borek. The fish are so closely associated with the northern coast of Turkey that Black Sea natives are themselves known as hamsi.

Perhaps the most irresistible hamsi presentation is similar to the bluefish recipe above—but the anchovies are first wrapped in grape-leaves and then grilled. The smoke from the singed grape leaves can’t be replicated with our abundant banana foliage. But the real problem with preparing grilled anchovies in Sarasota is: no fresh anchovies!

Sometimes one simply has to meet a dish on its home turf, or surf, as the case may be!

But thanks to BJ’s and Costco (both mega-markets sell whole, dressed trout), you can reproduce another classic Turkish fish dish.

See a photo and follow the simple recipe for pilav-stuffed trout on this engaging,Turkish-English food blog.

If you have the good fortune to travel in Turkey, you’ll see fish markets like this in every coastal town. The artistry with which fishmongers display their offerings is striking: traditionally, red wooden trays are laid with ferns or other fresh greenery—the better to show off the silvery catch.

Thank you, Tony Nuccio for loaning us this quintessential Istanbul Balik Pazari (fish bazaar) photo. In the foreground, are anchovies, in the middle range, palamut, bonito, with their red gills flipped back to show their freshness. And at the very top, in all their bumpy glory, the most prized of cool season fish—kalkan, turbot—which the Turks like to cut into steaks and deep-fry.

The fish-sellers have age-old street cries, exhorting all pedestrians within ear-shot to examine their stock. Holding up octopus or huge shrimp from the Mediterranean coast near the Syrian border, the vendors appear genuinely distressed if you remind them that you are just a visitor, returning to a hotel room and not strolling back to your own kitchen.

As you might guess, we’re a little homesick. But cooks can assuage those pangs more easily than most. How serendipitous that our Sarasota Vietnamese community has as much yearning for fresh, whole fish as we do. Phuoc Loc Tho on Twelfth Street had some beautiful Florida pompano, Trachinotus Carolinus. Cleaned, but left whole, ours weighed 1.5 lbs., just right for two for dinner. We grilled our pompano alla turca according to the basic Turkish bluefish treatment above.

We put the seasoned onion slices and other ingredients inside our fish about 30 minutes before it went on the grill. Served with grilled zucchini and a minted potato salad, it would have pleased the Turks as much as it delighted us.

The post Fish Story first appeared on Sarasota Soundings.

White Zinfandel Vinegar

Holly and Skip — Tue, 08 May 2007 03:18:18 +0000

We had a shop open in downtown Mystic this past summer that, on the surface, seemed a sure hit. A local fellow thought he’d have a go at selling olive oils and vinegars. Of course, I thought this was a great idea too. I had visions of a shop like Alziari in Vieux Nice, where patrons bring their own bottles, and draw off as much olive oil as they need from one of Alziari’s massive vats. Or they bring their own containers and scoop out pounds of Piccholine, Calamata, and Sicilian Colossal olives.

Alas, our young fellow had a different strategy in mind. His turns out to be the kind of shop where Aunt Martha might go to buy a stocking-stuffer for cousin Sally who’s running around with that young Italian fellow. That is to say, a 4 oz. Bottle of olive oil of indeterminate origin that costs around $25.00.

Nevertheless, our local fellow was enthusiastic about his products, and was delighted to organize tastings on the spur of the moment. The day I visited his shop he had several bottles of vinegar on offer; among them, a bottle of White Zinfandel.

I tasted; it was fruity yet acidic; full-bodied yet mellow. I could talk about hints of blackberry, tobacco, and apricots, but the only time I’ve gotten those hints was when I tasted blackberry, tobacco, or apricots. The White Zinfandel was lovely. But at $25.00 for 750 ml. I thought I could do better.

I’ve made my own vinegar in the past. In fact, when I stayed on a vineyard in Piemonte, my host and hostess sent me home with a parting gift of Barolo mother, or vinegar starter. When I got home, I simply found a clean container, added the mother, and poured in bottle of Gallo Hearty Burgundy. Six or eight weeks later, I had some delicious red wine vinegar.

How I Did it This Time

This time, I didn’t have a mother, so I went to a health food store, and bought a quart of unpasteurized, unfiltered cider vinegar. This—I’ve been told—would do the job of turning wine into vinegar. Next, I went to my local liquor mart for a liter of Sutter Home White Zinfandel wine. Finally, I prevailed on a chef friend for an empty glass one-gallon pickle jug, and the use of her Hobart commercial dishwasher.

If you don’t have a chef friend and can’t wash your container at 192 degrees Fahrenheit, scrub your container with detergent, then rinse with a solution of one-tablespoon chlorine bleach to one gallon of water, then rinse again with warm tap water. The whole idea here is that any bugs that show up in the vinegar—and they will—should be yours, and not the previous occupant’s.

To start the process, combine the cider vinegar and the wine in a one gallon container; cover the top with a cloth, like a piece of old bed sheet. Secure the cloth with an elastic band, then store the mixture in a warm dark place. After approximately two weeks, the liquid will appear cloudy, with some milky solids forming at the bottom of the jar. This is the beginning of the mother. After approximately four weeks, the mixture should taste more like vinegar than wine. After approximately six weeks, you should have nearly one and one half liters of vinegar.

When this happened for me, I drew off approximately half of what I had, and replaced it with an equal part of Sutter Home White Zinfandel. The vinegar in the photograph represents the second round of fermentation.

At this point, I’m switching to Champagne vinegar; my friend whom I’ll call Fatima, had a bottle of indifferent German sparkling wine called Trocken that seems like a good candidate.

I’ll get back to you about this effort in about six weeks.

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