Food

Image from the front cover of the Big Nick's menu

The Menu from Big Nick’s

I posted about Big Nick’s a couple of weeks ago on Facebook, and having had some requests from people to see the full menu — here it is.

Looking at it now, I find it damn near impossible to understand how they produced all this food out of the tiny downstairs kitchen there. True, some of the cooking happened upstairs — the grill was on the ground floor, as was the pizza oven. Right there, by the door, was one of the snuggest spots in the place to sit, even in cold weather, and watch the world go by and the clientele come in.

To reprise a bit of that Facebook post:

Sighing as I came across the attached in some old paperwork. Big Nick’s on 77th and Broadway, the place where Peter and I would always wind up after flying into NY and collapsing jetlagged, and then waking up at 11PM or something needing food… This was the place: open 23 hours a day (officially: if you were quiet they would just close around you for that 24th hour and get on with the cleaning…).

They knew Peter and me as “Grey Fur Lady and Retsina Guy” because I had this fake chinchilla coat then; and one of the first times we came in late at night, Peter was delighted to discover that they had retsina — Nick is/was Greek, and all kinds of Greek influences were scattered about the menu. So we polished off 2 liters of retsina in short order (with the staff watching with mild concern until they saw we weren’t going to trash the joint or anything).

Big Nick’s is gone now… alas for the ravages of time: escalating rents and the economic crash killed it. But it was a wonder while it lasted. A genuine neighborhood dive, where there was always endless comfort food and always someone interesting to talk to at 3AM…

…Anyway, the menu. I’ve stored it here at our offsite storage at Box.com for those who’d like to have a look at it. It’s about 6 megabytes: 23 pages long. Enjoy!

(By the way: Big Nick’s Facebook page remains, with many images and memories from customers and friends of the house. And wow, who knew: the window into which a hungry Jon Voight stares in Midnight Cowboy is the front window of Big Nick’s, and Nick himself is there…)

July 2, 2017

Home screen of Meal-Master, a recipe in Paprika

cooking Food recipes Software

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

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

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

Somehow we still have 300 cookbooks in the living room.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

May 3, 2017

Baking Food recipes Sherlock Holmes

Mycroft’s Delight: the cake

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

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

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

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

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

The recipe:

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

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

Ingredients come first: directions after.

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

Ingredients:

For the cake proper:

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

For the soaking syrup:

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

For the buttercream frosting base / filling:

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

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

For the brandied Nutella side-frosting:

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

For the ganache / cream cheese glaze:

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

The white chocolate ganache proper:

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

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

First of all, make the cake layers.

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

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

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

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

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

Now make the soaking syrup:

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

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

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

Make the buttercream filling:

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

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

Now make the Nutella-and-buttercream side frosting

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

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

Finally, make the white chocolate ganache and cream cheese glaze

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

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

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

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

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

Enjoy!

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

January 28, 2017

Cheese straws from Mrs. De Salis's 1903 recipe

Baking cooking Food Home life

The Cheese Straw Recipe

In 2010 or thereabouts, a tiny little cookbook came to us via Peter’s Mum and immediately became a household favorite.

It was published in 1903 for what was the first generation of middle-to-upper class British housewives who couldn’t afford to hire kitchen staff, but still wanted to serve food suitable to a high-class household. These cooks were also beginning to come into possession of the first generation of true labor-saving devices — the initial gas and electric ranges, the first refrigerators — and were looking for recipes to take advantage of them. So along came Harriet DeSalis, and with this group of readers in mind, wrote Savouries A La Mode.

The cookbook was a huge hit — no surprise, when the recipes worked so well. Dipping into it, one finds recipes that make the mouth water and make the chronic cook (at least this one) itch to get into the kitchen and see how they turn out. It became the first of a series that went on well into the early part of the 20th century and sold hundreds of thousands of copies over numerous editions.

They’re all in public domain now, those original editions of Savouries and its sequels, which is what moved me to scan that first book and make it available over here at EuropeanCuisines.com. But the other reason I scanned it was so I don’t have to hunt down the cookbook proper, when the urge strikes, but can just load the PDF onto the iPad and work from that in the kitchen.

The other evening I was feeling like having some kind of snack, and it occurred to me to pull out the DeSalis and see if we had the ingredients for anything that looked nice. Paging through it, I ran into the Cheese Straws recipe, and the bells went off and I salivated on cue.

Here’s the recipe.

“Take two ounces of flour, and mix with it a little salt and a cayenne-spoonful of red pepper. Then take three ounces of Parmesan cheese: grate it. Rub the cheese and two ounces of butter well into the flour, then mix all these ingredients, together with the yolk of an egg, into a smooth stiff paste. Roll the paste out into a strip one-eighth of an inch in thickness and five inches wide, which is to be the length of the cheese straws. Cut this strip into strips one-eighth of an inch wide, so that they will be five inches long and one-eighth of an inch in thickness. With the remainder of the paste, and with two round cutters, cut little rings of paste. Put the cheese straws and rings on a baking sheet and put them into a hot oven for ten minutes, the heat rising to 246 degrees. For serving, put the cheese straws through the ring like a bundle of sticks.”

So. My first thought: God that looks fiddly. But never mind. Also: Forget about the little rings, this isn’t going to be a dinner party. The second (okay, maybe the third) thought: We don’t have any Parmesan: only Cheddar.

…Like I’ve ever let that stop me. (An old allergy put me off Parmesan early, and these days, though no longer allergic, I avoid it.) So I went forward with the same amount of Cheddar, knowing that the mixture would be a little wetter due to the Cheddar’s extra moisture, and I’d need to compensate with slightly longer baking.

What I learned in the process of making these:

The whole thing can be done in the Cuisinart / Magimix, which simplifies matters considerably. I grated the cheese separately on a microplane grater, then buzzed the flour/cayenne mixture together using the steel blade in the small bowl of the Cuisinart; then dumped its contents into the big bowl, whizzed everything together with the cheese, added the two egg yolks and pulsed until the whole business gathered together. If you’re going this route, don’t overdo the pulsing, as you don’t want the mixture to toughen up.
1 egg yolk wasn’t enough for our local flour to cohere: I wound up using two.
I’d never heard of a “cayenne spoon” until I saw this recipe. There are pictures of them at Google (click here) and you know what? They’re all too small for me. We like our cayenne around here. I put in a teaspoonful. (Peter noted that you could probably get away with using chili powder if you were of a sensitive disposition.)
1/8 inch is indeed very fiddly. I wound up cutting my straws / sticks to more like 1/6 or sometimes 1/4 inch, and that worked out fine.
I put baking parchment under these to make sure they wouldn’t stick. It turns out to be a good idea, as melting butter bubbles out of them at the edges when they’re baking.
Ten minutes was way too long a baking time, and the oven temperature takes some fiddling with as well. I have no idea what Mrs. De S. means by “rising to…”. I wound up putting these in the oven at 170 C / 350F for about 5 to 7 minutes (as our oven retains heat during multiple bakes, so they needed less time as I went on). Your mileage will almost certainly vary. Experiment with a small batch to see how you get on.

…And that’s all there is to it. The straws were incredibly delicate and buttery due to the very short pastry — but the cheese is great in them and the cayenne gives them a terrific kick. The whole bake lasted through about twenty minutes of the first Hobbit movie. Peter tells me they work as well with beer as mine did with that red wine.

Try them and see how they work out for you. And mind your baking times, as the Secretary and I will disavow any knowledge of your actions if the sneaky little creatures burn to a crisp between one minute and the next. (Like my first batch did.) Do a small batch first and watch them like a hawk.

December 28, 2016

cooking Food Home life recipes

Peter’s Dhal

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.)

September 13, 2016

Baking Food

The Owl Springs Gingerbread Recipe

This recipe is kind of a favorite around here, so this morning I thought I’d put a copy of it on the blog for others who might like it. (Though the plan regarding “this morning” got a bit derailed by the video card software in the desktop machine suddenly deciding it didn’t want to acknowledge the monitor’s screen resolution. Anyway, it seems to have sorted itself out after a driver reinstall… I hope.)

Anyway. Gingerbread!

The original recipe came from this page at southernfood.about.com. The basic recipe was okay, but always struck me as too sweet, and over time it got tweaked. Now we’ve got a version of it that Peter and I both really like, so you might want to take a look at this and see if you’d like it too.

There are two ways to make it – with butter and without. The with-butter version produces a more cake-y result. The without-butter one is squidgier. Both versions seriously benefit from being served with sour cream, crème fraiche, or plain unsweetened whipped cream.

The ingredients:

1 cup all purpose flour
1 rounded teaspoon baking soda (It seems wise to specify how full that teaspoon is, as measuring-spoon amounts in Irish cookbooks are routinely heaped / rounded rather than leveled, and those of you who’ve seen recipes here before might be wondering.)
¼ tsp salt
1 teaspoon cinnamon (Less than in the original. More distracts from the ginger.)
3 teaspoons ground ginger (Because the original single teaspoon produces a genuinely underwhelming result.)
4 tablespoons sugar (Brown sugar is preferable, but white is OK.)
Optional: 1-2 teaspoons espresso powder (i.e. Azera or similar)
1 egg, lightly beaten (It’s going to go all sludgy when you mix it with the buttermilk. Don’t panic.)
½ cup dark molasses or treacle (Blackstrap molasses if you can get it. On this side of the water, plain old Lyons Treacle from the can works fine.)
½ cup buttermilk (You can do this recipe with milk, but it’s not as good. If you can’t get buttermilk, use the same amount of regular milk and substitute 1 teaspoon of baking powder for the soda.)
¼ cup melted butter (Include it or omit it as you please. The first time you do the recipe, probably it’s better to do it with the butter.)

…So. First thing: butter and flour whatever you’re going to bake this in. (I usually use a springform pan.) Preheat the oven to 350F / 175C.

Mix the dry ingredients together. You can sift them together if you like, but in my experience it doesn’t make a big difference. Re that “optional” espresso powder: I strongly recommend it. It really makes a difference to the flavor of the gingerbread, though magically it doesn’t jump out at you as coffee-ish. Think of it as a flavor enhancer.

As regards the liquid ingredients: Though we take buttermilk for granted in Ireland, it’s so weirdly regional in the US and Canada that it makes sense to offer an alternative strategy. If you’re feeling enthusiastic about the buttermilk but have trouble finding it locally, we’ve got a page over at EuropeanCuisines.com on how to make buttermilk from scratch, and also one on how to make (and keep) fake buttermilk. Check those out and exploit whichever method you prefer.

In a small bowl, beat the egg. Add the buttermilk. Beat some more. The egg will go sludgy because of the acid in the buttermilk. Don’t be bothered. Add the molasses and the butter and beat some more. The sludginess will recede a bit.

Add the liquid mixture to the dry ingredients. Stir them together, then beat them a bit more, just until the batter is fairly smooth. Pour it into the buttered and floured tin. Fire that directly into the oven (because when you’re baking something raised solely with baking soda, the raising period is limited and begins as soon as liquid hits the mixture).

Bake for 30 minutes at 350F / 175C. When baked, put the pan on a rack and let it cool thoroughly before removing the gingerbread. (Just as a side note: the butter-free version of this tends to drop a little in the middle after baking. This is normal.)

Serve plain or with a nice dollop of whipped cream / crème fraiche / sour cream.

…And now to go discuss matters with the video card again. AMD, gonif! (I swear, I’m changing over to an Nvidia card as soon as it’s practicable…)

August 9, 2016

Food Home life Media Obscure interests Online life

“For Science!”: Eating Doritos Roulette

(First of all: is there some specific reason they used the Classic Star Trek font [or one very like it] for the warning panel on the bag? Is it somehow seen as “futuristic” to be afraid of chili heat? Just asking. But if so, I weep for my species.)

… It’s funny the things that can get your attention sometimes. At some point in the last couple of weeks, this post regarding someone who’d had a bad reaction to Doritos Roulette made its way across my Tumblr dashboard. I looked at the post and blinked a couple of times, said a couple of things under my breath about some of the more insensitive comments, and then went on with whatever I’d been doing.

But then, over the week that followed, it happened that I saw a couple of ads on TV for these chips, and I thought to myself, “Okay, now I’m curious. I’m a white girl; let’s see how I do with these.”

As background information for this experiment, it needs to be stated that we have two different kinds of “hot food people” in this house. As a New Yorker raised in the Metropolitan Area during a time when hot and spicy food was (for a suburban girl) harder to lay hands on for a good while, I got rapidly clued in in the 1970s, and developed a fair tolerance for heat in my food. Not huge, but fair. Six years in LA much improved this situation.

The other participant in this study is someone who, for a Belfast boy, stands out in having had a taste for the hot stuff that long precedes its now-widespread popularity in British mainstream culture. This is a man who has a whole shelf of hot sauces, and whose idea of what’s nice to put into a newly opened bag of crisps is one or more of the following:

(The two on the right are typical favorites that came from Oriental Emporium in Dublin until they stopped carrying it a few months back. The one on the left is something we picked up in passing in Austria in June, and originates apparently from a native Austrian company; causing Peter to remark, “Yet another reason to go back to Bregenz.”)

So your baseline here is two people one of whom has a significant tolerance for chili heat*, and one who has a mild tolerance but at the very least can be guaranteed not to faint dead away from shock at the taste of something spicy.

So, onward to the experiment.

We dumped about the third of the bag out onto a plate, as you see above. We were interested in doing visual examination first to see if there was any way to tell the doctored chips from the non-doctored ones. The company has been careful: visually, they are indistinguishable. Our guess is that all the chips are originally identical until a given number of them are separated out into a separate assembly line to be sprayed with chili extract.

PR stories about these chips indicate (per the company’s advisory) that the doctored ones have been sprayed with chili extract approaching the strength of a (mild) Scotch Bonnet / habanero chili at around 73,000 to 75,000 Scoville units (the not-mild ones can be double this, and they vary without warning). This is not exactly an entry-level strength. The average Jalapeño pepper clocks in at somewhere between 4000 and 7000 Scoville. To that end, I made sure that there was a tub of crème fraîche handy. This was for me and not for Peter. Habaneros generally are at the far upper end of my heat-tolerance ability, and I wanted to make sure that I had a fire extinguisher ready if it was needed. (As for Peter, even he has his limits. We have some Moruga Scorpions in the freezer in the moment, and he’s spent the last couple of months wondering what he can use them on/in that they won’t ruin. Too much heat is simply a waste of time.)

We proceeded by breaking chips in half and nibbling until we found hot ones, then exchanging them to see how hot they were—admittedly, a very subjective business—and how their heat persisted and built. There are some chili heats, after all, that flare quickly and die away quickly (like Tabasco), whereas others linger in your mouth and on your lips and tongue, and build—a cumulative heat. The hot chips in the Roulette bag have a cumulative heat, though not one that even by my standards would be tremendously strong. Both of us have over our time here had far hotter curries or chilies, and have drunk a lot of wine or eaten a lot of raita to to wrestle them down, but otherwise have suffered no ill effects.

Two interesting things immediately became apparent: (a) The heat is not consistent across the hot chips. Some, probably due to quirks in the manufacturing process, have been dosed harder than others. (b) There is some transference of the hot chili flavoring to non-hot chips. Peter and I both felt sure we were able to detect a difference in flavor between the ones that had been purposefully dosed with chili extract and the ones that had not. (Flavor is always an issue for us both in situations like this: we both like the heat, and sometimes both like it quite strong, but neither of us has any time for the witless application of pure extract-based heat without flavor.) Some of you will recall the old packaged-food warning, “Contents may have settled during transport”. My guess is that during the production and shipping process for these chips, there’s a lot of rubbing and jostling, and some of the hot coating on the dosed chips rubs off and gets on some of the others.

With this in mind, it does bear pointing out that there was a fair amount of the usual colored dust in the bag that one gets used to seeing in brightly colored junk foods. One wants to consider how easy it would be to inhale some of that dust… and what the results might be if the stuff got down into your bronchi. Even when just chewing and swallowing the hot chips in the normal way, both of us were caught at the back of our throats by the heat of the chili extract, and there was some discreet coughing from each of us (significantly more from me) until we swallowed once or twice. That dust struck me as an immediate possible cause for the problems experienced by the unfortunate girl in the Sun news story. And seriously—mock an asthmatic for having trouble with that? And for possibly having a reaction on top of it, secondary to inhaled dust contaminated with straight chili extract? “Judge not lest ye too be judged.”

Anyway. Our conclusions: if you are a person comfortable with fairly spicy food, you can safely eat these, but you may still be surprised — so take precautions. If you are not able to handle capsaicin-based heat, you might want to steer clear of these: the hot chips may cause you trouble.

Hope this helps anyone who might have had questions. Me, I’m going to finish off my share of the bag now and leave the rest for Peter. But I’ve got the crème fraîche ready…

*It’s interesting to note in passing here that while Peter has very significant tolerance for chili heat, he has almost no tolerance for (or patience with) the upward-rising horseradish-style heat of the kind you get with wasabi, hot English or Chinese mustard, or a good Jewish horseradish. When ingesting such, it is my pleasure to sit there and happily enjoy the sensation of my sinuses getting blasted clear while he runs around flailing and shrieking. Okay, maybe not shrieking so much. But flailing, yeah; and he turns all pink.

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August 2, 2015

Food Graphic and plastic arts

For Easter: okay, this is a little unusual

Looking for something different in Easter chocolate? How about your own custom-made laser-scanned 3D-printed chocolate death mask?

Called “Eat My Face,” Bompas and Parr’s new project employs “the latest facial-scanning and 3D-printing technology” to create a mold of your comely visage, which is then used to cast an egg-shaped chocolate
copy of your face.

“The exclusive service is an epic interpretation of the season that
makes conventional chocolate eggs pale by comparison,” the pair write on
their site. “We will create a positive master mould of your face, which
you can display at home, and a negative plastic mould which can be used
to create further chocolate likenesses of yourself.”

April 1, 2015

Food Halloween Hobbyhorses and General Ranting Humor Obscure interests

Halloween Candy: an idle personal overview

It was seeing this thing that got me thinking about the subject.

…WTF? RT @pattymo: Who will answer for this crime pic.twitter.com/u0h3jqCfIh

— Diane Duane (@dduane)

September 17, 2014

What surprised me after the fact was that the very sight of a “candy corn bar” provoked such a strong reaction from me (“EWWWWWWWWW”) despite my being long past trick-or-treating age.

This response poked me in the curiosity nerve, a little, so I went looking for evidence of whether other people shared anything like it — this idea that some Halloween candies were “right” and others “wrong”.

And a little research suggests there seems to be a bone-deep conservatism on this issue, combined with some regional implications, as various Worst Halloween Candy lists seem to have areas where they agree and then others where they diverge or disagree strongly. (As an example: lists at BC Living, HuffPo (in fact they have a few of these), TopTenz, Serious Eats, Complex, Nooga…) Google will guide you to more if you feel the need for a broader statistical sample.

I always took Halloween very seriously while I was still of participating age, as my family wasn’t particularly well off and there wasn’t that much candy in my lifestyle except at chocolate-heavy holidays like Easter and Christmas. (Fortunately I slipped out of this stage just barely before the OMG BAD PEOPLE ARE PUTTING RAZOR BLADES IN THE APPLES thing got started.* I didn’t mind the apples. I knew they were traditional.) (As they still are in Ireland, which is after all where it all began. Apples and peanuts have been the trick-or-treat staple here for many years: only now are the candies starting to creep into the Irish tradition.)

So for what it’s worth: looking over these lists, I find some common ground, but not complete agreement.

Stuff I liked:

Candy corn… legit candy corn. (And still do.)
Those marshmallow peanuts. (Don’t ask me why.)
Tootsie Rolls. (In the 60s they were better than they are now. There seems to be so much wax in them now that you could stick wicks in them and light them as candles in emergency situations.)
Full size candy bars. I was never a Snickers person: I prefer my peanuts separate from candy, as a rule. (Also, no Reese’s Cups for me: you can keep your peanut butter OUT of my chocolate, thank you very much. If I want peanut butter I’ll go make a sandwich.) …Three Musketeers was (and when in the US still is) my preferred bar. I had a brief flirtation with Baby Ruths but it never came to anything. The US Mars bar was and is different from the UK one, but I like them both. (And steal Peter’s occasionally.)
Licorice, especially the long “licorice whips.” Preferably the red ones, though I didn’t mind the black. I may be the only kid I knew at that period who actually liked licorice. (But then I liked spinach, and liver. Even from a young age I felt that normalcy was boring / for other people: it’s probably no surprise in retrospect that I should have become a Sherlock Holmes fan.)
Nonpareils. Those used to turn up in little boxes in my part of the NY metropolitan area. God, but I loved those things. (And if you handed me a bag of them now you’d get it back empty.)
M&Ms. Chocolate, not peanut. The same as the nonpareils. Then and now I could go through a bag of M&Ms with terrifying speed.
Candy cigarettes. My one attempt to become a smoker failed miserably — how could anyone do that, I thought at the time, it tasted awful!! — but there was just something about the texture of these things, the crunch, that I adored. Suck it until it was gone? You must be joking. Gone in three crunches.
Pixy Stix. Oh God I loved those. Strong sweet/sour contrasts have always been a draw for me.
Space Food Sticks! The chocolate ones. Wow I loved those too. Rare to get them in a Halloween haul, but when they turned up they were memorable.

Stuff I had no time for (and would swap with others who liked them):

Those Necco wafers. Not enough flavor.
Mary Janes. Boring.
Good and Plenty. Something about the candy shells always put me off. (Maybe they were distracting me from the licorice.)
Taffy candies generally, the exception being Bit O Honeys. Those were all right.
Lollipops in general. Normally too much work, not enough taste. Some Tootsie Pops made it over the bar, depending on the flavor.
Gum. Bubble, plain, whatever. Boring again.

Seasonal considerations: There were things I had no time for at Halloween because they were readily available at other times from the store up around the corner on Park Avenue:

The candy buttons.
The wax bottles containing dubious sweet liquids.
The wax lips.
Candy necklaces, bracelets, etc.
Those little wafer “flying saucers” with some kind of tiny hard candy inside them.

…Anyway. Enough of this: I haven’t even had all my breakfast yet.

(Meanwhile, for those of you who’re feeling nostalgic: have a look at OldTimeCandy.com. They have the stuff arranged by decades.)

*Has anyone ever actually found a razor blade in an apple? I mean, verifiably? With pictures? Or is this one of those Urban Myth Coinciding With Early TV/Mass Media Attention Causes Hospital X-Ray Departments Nationwide To Waste Millions Of Person-Hours On One Day Each Year things?

(See also People Being Gassed In Sleeper Compartments of European Trains And All Their Stuff Stolen. I went hunting for non-anecdotal data on this some years back and couldn’t find anything. My firm belief is that back in the day, numerous weary and stressed-out travelers were careless / clueless about making sure their sleeper compartments’ doors were actually locked before they went to sleep, and then desperately needed a face-saving excuse the morning after opportunistic thieves, or in some cases their fellow sleeper compartment occupiers, had ripped them off while they slept through it like the dead. “I mean, I’m a light sleeper, I would’ve heard anybody come in unless something else was going on. It must have been gas! Gas!” …But I digress.)

September 17, 2014

Baking cooking Europe Food Home life Ireland

In the holiday baking department: Braunekuchen / “Brown Biscuits”

Braunkuchen (Brown Cookies / Biscuits)

Sometimes you want something a little different from the usual run of Christmas cookies. These fit the bill nicely.

Germany has a long tradition of spice-based cookies / bikkies, the most famous probably being the ginger-and-cinnamon-based lebkuchen that first start turning up in recipe books in the 1500’s and have since proliferated all over that part of the world in staggering variety. (A very basic lebkuchen dough, for example, is what’s usually used for the construction of gingerbread houses.) And there are some times of year in central Europe when escaping from lebkuchen seems like an impossibility.

Yet there are cookies in the region that share the same general culinary DNA but diverge in interesting ways. These simple brown biscuits are one sort. There’s no ginger in them at all — which by itself is a touch unusual, gingerbread having so generally overrun the holiday-baking landscape — but their spice quotient is very high, and their aroma gets significantly stronger over time. Opening a tin of them even after just a day or so sealed up lets a cloud of sweet dark fragrance into the air, after which it’s impossible to walk away without eating two or three. Or more. If not quite a lot more.

This is not a same-day cookie: it requires a stay overnight on the kitchen counter, wrapped up, before it’ll be ready to roll out, cut out and bake. Also, due to its northern heritage — it comes from Scheswig-Holstein — this recipe calls for treacle (a.k.a molasses), for depth of flavor, and lard, for additional body and crispness. (If you have trouble getting your hands on lard, you can substitute other solid fats like [UK] Stork or “white fat”, or [US] Crisco, or even butter: but lard works best.)

Ingredients and method under the cut.

January 1, 2014

Baking cooking Europe Food Food, restaurants and cooking Home life

In the holiday baking department: Speculatius / Speculaas

If you’re in the Netherlands (I don’t say Holland, because you might be in the Netherlands without necessarily being in Holland) and you’ve ordered coffee after a meal or a snack, odds are strong that this is the cookie / biscuit that will come along with it. They seem to be everywhere over there.

For most of us who make it at home, this would be a cookie-cutter cookie, but on the Continent they’re likely to turn up in quite ordinary shapes — rectangles or squares — that are ornamented with designs that have been pressed into them with special Speculaas molds. (Very ornate and seriously huge Speculaas biscuits used to be given to children in the Netherlands on St. Nicholas’s Day [December 6th], but I don’t know if this is done any more.)

The flavor is something special. It sounds a little odd to describe a bikkie’s flavor as “fresh”, but this is, and the cardamom used in its spicing is what’s responsible. A lovely fragrance comes off a tin of these when you open it up, and the cinnamon and cloves that are also part of the recipe add a very holidayish scent. So this is nice to bake around this time of year for when you want something just a little different from the cookies you’ve probably been eating since the week before Christmas or thereabouts.

The only frustration about making these at home is when you go looking for a recipe on the Net. The best ones are all German, it seems, but they all seem to call for “spekulatiuswurz”, or “Speculatius seasoning,” which is a big help especially as it gives you no idea what’s in it. Fortunately there is a good scratch recipe in that bible for those interested in central European holiday baking, <em>Festive Baking in Austria, Germany and Switzerland, and this recipe comes from there.

Ingredients and method under the cut.

December 28, 2013

cooking Europe Food Home life

In the holiday baking department: Ginger Nuts

Homemade Ginger Nuts

Ginger nuts are a favorite store-bought biscuit in most parts of the UK and Ireland, but homemade ones are way better. And somehow or other I seem to have made these three times in the last week and a bit, so I think I’ve acquired some expertise.

If you want to make some holiday-ish biscuits/cookies that aren’t a lot of trouble, especially for gifts, these are an excellent bet. They’re crisp and flavorful and very more-ish. They’re also a good sort of bikkie to make if you want to let children or those who are normally a little baking-challenged assist (meaning it’s the kind of thing you can do sitting around the table with a bunch of adults and a bottle of wine, gossiping while you do the slightly repetitive work of getting them ready to bake).

Making the dough takes twenty minutes or a bit more, depending on how long you spend creaming the sugar and butter and flour together. After that it’s just a matter of how quickly you feel like assembling each baking sheet’s worth of cookies / biscuits. The dough refrigerates nicely for short periods, but because ginger nuts are raised only with baking soda / bicarbonate of soda, I wouldn’t keep the dough unbaked for more than 4-6 hours. The recipe makes between four and five dozen gingernuts, depending on how large you roll the pieces.

Recipe and method under the cut.

December 22, 2013

cooking Food Home life Ireland recipes

“Molly’s Chocolate Pie”

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

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

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

So here it is.

From the bottom up…

The crust:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Makes 1 9-inch pie crust

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

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

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

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

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

Now to the filling:

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

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

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

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

So, onward! The ingredients:

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

As per Azriona’s recipe:

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

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

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

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

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

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

A couple of notes in passing:

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

So go make this pie.

*As far as I know.

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

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August 16, 2013

Europe Food Food, restaurants and cooking Germany recipes Switzerland

Thinking it’s time to make this cake again…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For the cake:

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

For the syrup:

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

For the filling:

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

For the topping:

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

A couple of notes before starting:

The cake layers are made without any leavening agent such as baking powder — so that the only thing that makes the layers rise in the baking is the air you’ve beaten into the batter. You therefore have to concentrate on incorporating as much air as possible during the beating process. If using a mixer, make sure to use the whisk attachment instead of the normal cake beater. If using an egg beater or hand mixer, you may need to beat the basic egg and sugar mixture for longer than ten minutes to get it light and fluffy enough.

Because the cake doesn’t contain any shortening, it stales quickly. The buttercream filling/icing therefore fulfills another function besides just tasting nice and holding the layers apart: it keeps the cake from drying out prematurely. If as you’re constructing the cake you start getting the feeling that there isn’t going to be enough buttercream to cover it evenly on the outside to at least 1/4 inch thick, pause to make some more buttercream. Later on you’ll be glad you did.

The final result after the whipped cream topping goes on

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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March 27, 2013

Dough showing well developed gluten structure

cooking Food Hobbyhorses and General Ranting Home life Ireland recipes

Folklore, string structure, rye dough and Raymond Blanc (with afternotes on a bread recipe)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sheesh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

March 6, 2013

Food Food, restaurants and cooking Home life recipes

Seed cake: a recipe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Took Family Seed Cake

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

Preheat oven to 180C / 350F.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If expecting dwarves: make about six more.

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January 1, 2013

Food Food, restaurants and cooking Home life Obscure interests

Chocolate again: "Chocolata Inda"

The following material is posted here purely for research purposes. (Yeah, everybody’s going to believe that.)

So I really like my chocolate. Well, this would hardly be news to anybody who reads my work, since it keeps popping up. (And believe it or not, no, the constant recurrences of Switzerland in my work have nothing to do with this. That’s a separate kink, a geographical and historical one. A coincidence, seriously.)

Anyway, the history of this unique substance has always interested me. but it wasn’t until very recently that I found out about the document reproduced below: a happy 17th-century combination of alchemical/pharmaceutical tract and shameless advertisement for a hot new fad food. (Those familiar with the food-as-medicine school of thought will find this interesting reading, though maybe this comes at the theme backwards and is more medicine-as-food.)

Chocolata Inda (or sometimes the title comes up as Inda Chocolata, depending on which edition you’vegot) was written first in Spanish by one Antonio Colmenero de Ledesma, a physician to the Spanish court. There doesn’t seem to be a ton of information available about the man or his career, except that he was Andalusian and had previously published several works of materia medica (notably a work called Apologia chirurgica) before turning his hand to the chocolate end of things.

There seems also to be no indication of what made him do it, or what his affiliation might have been to the explorers or merchants who first brought chocolate to Spain from the New World. In any case, he was the first to write about the new wonder food. And he doesn’t mince his words. To hear Dr. Colmener tell it, the chocolate bean will cure just about everything that ails you. Particularly, though, he recommends it for male and female genitourinary health… with the emphasis on the “genito-“. And especially on the female end of things. Apparently it’ll put right about anything wrong with a woman’s nethers that can go wrong.

The title page of the English-language translation will give you a hint.

CHOCOLATE:
OR,
An Indian Drinke.

By the wise and Moderate use whereof,
Health is preserved, Sicknesse
Diverted, and Cured, especially the
Plague of the Guts; vulgarly called
The New Disease; Fluxes, Consumptions,
& Coughs of the Lungs, with sundry
other desperate Diseases. By it
also, Conception is Caused,
the Birth Hastened and
facilitated, Beauty
Gain’d and continued.

Written Originally in Spanish, by Antonio Colmenero
of Ledesma, Doctor in Physicke,
and faithfully rendred in the English,

By Capt. James Wadsworth.

LONDON,
Printed by J. G. for Iohn Dakins, dwelling
neare the Vine Taverne in Holborne,
where this Tract, together with the
Chocolate it selfe, may be had at
reasonable rates. 1652

…So now you know where you can get the stuff as well. Isn’t that convenient? … And now a word from our sponsor. Sorry, sorry, our doctor.

The Confection it selfe, consists of severall Ingredients according to the different Constitutions of those that use it: the Principall of which is called Cacao, [a kind of Nut, or kernell, bigger then a great Almond, which growes upon a tree called the Tree of Cacao] containing in it the Quality of the Foure Elements, as will appeare in the following Discourse.

The vertues thereof are no lesse various, then Admirable. For, besides that it preserves Health, and makes such as drink it often, Fat, and Corpulent, faire and Amiable, it vehemently Incites to Venus, and causeth Conception in women, hastens and facilitates their Delivery: It is an excellent help to Digestion, it cures Consumptions, and the Cough of the Lungs, the New Disease, or Plague of the Guts, and other Fluxes, the Green Sicknesse, Jaundise, and all manner of Inflamations, Opilations, and Obstructions. It quite takes away the Morphew, Cleanseth the Teeth, and sweetneth the Breath, Provokes Urine, Cures the Stone, and strangury, Expells Poison, and preserves from all infectious Diseases.

But I shall not assume to enumerate all the vertues of this Confection: for that were Impossible, every day producing New and Admirable effects in such as drinke it: I shall rather referre to the Testimony of those Noble Personages who are known constantly to use and receive constant and manifold benefits by it, having hereby no other Aime then the Generall good of this Common-wealth (whereof I am a Faithfull Member)

Then we get a preface from our British translator. He’s a hoot. He is very, very convinced, is Captain Wadsworth (or he’s on commission). He even writes a Poem in Praise of Divine Chocolate. He spends a little while dissing other schools of medical thought, and then gets down to business.

THE TRANSLATOR,
To every Individuall Man,
and Woman, Learn’d, or unlearn’d,
Honest, or Dishonest: In the
due Praise of Divine
CHOCOLATE.

Doctors lay by your Irksome Books
And all ye Petty-Fogging Rookes
Leave Quacking; and Enucleate
The vertues of our Chocolate.

Let th’ Universall Medicine
(Made up of Dead-mens Bones and Skin,)
Be henceforth Illegitimate,
And yeild to Soveraigne-Chocolate.

Let Bawdy-Baths be us’d no more;
Nor Smoaky-Stoves but by the whore
Of Babilon: since Happy-Fate
Hath Blessed us with Chocolate.

Let old Punctæus Greaze his shooes
With his Mock-Balsome: and Abuse
No more the World: But Meditate
The Excellence of Chocolate.

Let Doctor Trigg (who so Excells)
No longer Trudge to Westwood-Wells:
For though that water Expurgate,
’Tis but the Dreggs of Chocolate.

Let all the Paracelsian Crew
Who can Extract Christian from Jew;
Or out of Monarchy, A State,
Breake àll their Stills for Chocolate.

Tell us no more of Weapon-Salve,
But rather Doome us to a Grave:
For sure our wounds will Ulcerate,
Unlesse they’re wash’d with Chocolate.

The Thriving Saint, who will not come
Within a Sack-Shop’s Bowzing-Roome
(His Spirit to Exhilerate)
Drinkes Bowles (at home) of Chocolate.

His Spouse when she (Brimfull of Sense)
Doth want her due Benevolence,
And Babes of Grace would Propagate,
Is alwayes Sipping Chocolate…

…It goes on like that for a while. But ah yes, the babes (and not just in the older sense of the word): let’s not forget what this magic stuff does for them.

The Nut-Browne-Lasses of the Land
Whom Nature vayl’d in Face and Hand,
Are quickly Beauties of High-Rate,
By one small Draught of Chocolate.

…

’Twill make Old women Young and Fresh;
Create New-Motions of the Flesh,
And cause them long for you know what,
If they but Tast of Chocolate.

Leaving aside for the moment the fascinating way this poem handles the various ongoing 17th-century vowel shifts: Shut up and take my money.

Then come the testimonials. They sound about the way you expect they would: famous person says “Yes, I tried this, very impressive” in such a way as to not get in trouble later when something goes wrong.

After that we get a prolonged and doubtless very educational discussion of the qualities and virtues (oh, all right, “vertues” ) of the warm spices as compared to this new entry into the medico-culinary arsenal: all very Culpeperish. Nick would have eaten it up.

It may Philosophically be objected, in this manner: Two contrary Qualities, and Disagreeing, cannot be in gradu intenso, in one and the same Subject: Cacao is cold and drie, in predominency: Therefore, it cannot have the qualities contrary to those; which are Heat, and Moysture. The first Proposition is most certaine, and grounded upon good Philosophy: The second is consented unto, by all: The third, which is the Conclusion, is regular.

It cannot be denyed, but that the Argument is very strong, and these reasons being considered by him of Marchena, have made him affirme, that Chocolate is Obstructive; it seeming to be contrary to Philosophy, that in it there should be found Heat and Moysture, in gradu intenso; and to be so likewise in Cold and Dry.

To this, there are two things to be answered: One, that he never saw the experience of drawing out the Butter, which I have done; and that when the Chocolate is made without adding any thing to the dryed Powder, which is incorporated, onely by beating it well together, and is united, and made into a Paste, which is a signe, that there is a moist, and glutinous part, which, of necessity, must correspond with the Element of Aire.

No question whatsoever. Moving right along: we then are treated to several ways to compound chocolate as a drug, with a lot more about the Humours and so forth tucked in here and there. And then, finally, comes the layman’s recipe: which isn’t bad at all.

The manner of making Chocolate.

Set a Pot of Conduit Water over the fire untill it boiles, then to every person that is to drink, put an ounce of Chocolate, with as much Sugar into another Pot; wherein you must poure a pint of the said boiling Water, and therein mingle the Chocolate and the Sugar, with the instrument called El Molinillo, untill it be thoroughly incorporated: which done, poure in as many halfe pints of the said Water as there be ounces of Chocolate, and if you please, you may put in one or two yelks of fresh Eggs, which must be beaten untill they froth very much; the hotter it is drunke, the better it is, being cold it may doe harme. You may likewise put in a slice of white bred or Bisquet, and eate that with the Chocolate. The newer and fresher made it is, the more benefit you shall finde by it; that which comes from forreigne parts, and is stale, is not so good as that which is made here.

…So there you have it.

The whole document is at Project Gutenberg: it’s worth a read.

Meanwhile, here’s the lovely title page from the Nuremberg edition, in which the original Spanish has been translated into Latin. (I really think the Latin version of the title gains something absent from “Chocolate: or, an Indian Drinke,” though that has its own charms.) There are copies at the University Library of Eichstaett- Ingolstadt and at the City and State Library of Augsburg. Master listing at Gateway-Bayern here.) And just think, you an buy a copy in its original vellum wrapper, here. For €7500.

(Also, just as a reminder-to-self: the link to Thomas Gloning’s excellent master list, “Bibliographical Notes on the history of cookery, food, wine, etc, mostly 13th century to 1800”.

December 7, 2012

cooking Europe Food Food, restaurants and cooking Home life Ireland recipes

For Thanksgiving: The OMG I Can't Get Any Pumpkin Pie

Normally I try to keep food postings more or less over at EuropeanCuisines.com, the part of the household where most of the cooking craziness in the household manifests itself. But I thought I’d copy it over at this side of things to make it available for those who might not normally visit cooking sites.

Those of us who routinely spend Thanksgiving off the North American continent but still try to lay out a traditional Thanksgiving dinner probably all have our own stories about being unable to get some vital missing ingredient, and then being forced to make do with something less than optimal…

One item that sometimes turns out to be very hard to lay hands on is pumpkin.

The difficulty usually surrounds canned pumpkin rather than the fresh kind… but even that can be a problem when it’s out of season. Markets in France and Germany for example, routinely feature some of the best fresh pumpkin to be found anywhere on the planet — firm, meaty, relatively seedless, and (most important) flavorful. But then these are varieties that have been bred for the table for centuries — not the North American varieties that are mostly bred for size so that they’ll make good jack-o-lanterns at Halloween. Problem is, once they’re out of season, you won’t see them again until the next year… and when you go looking for canned pumpkin, the response is usually bemusement. You won’t find it in most parts of Europe. If you can track it down, it’s usually in some overpriced store that caters to foreigners and is going to make you pay five or ten times more for it than you would have in a supermarket in the States or Canada.

At such times — if you’re not willing to buckle under — you learn to improvise. This recipe is one of EuroCuisineLady’s takes on the theme. It’s an adaptation of the basic pumpkin pie recipe in The Joy of Cooking. This pie — using butternut squash and yams to replace the pumpkin — produces a rich, dense pie that compares very favorably with the traditional pumpkin version. It’s not going to taste exactly like it… but for the moment it’ll do.

(For a variant on this theme using only sweet potatoes, check out our Virtually Pumpkin Pie.)

Ingredients:

1 recipe of pie dough for a single crust pie (see below)
2 butternut squash or 1 butternut squash and 2 yams (about 10 ounces each), to make about 2 1/2 – 3 cups of cooked squash/yam mixture
1 1/2 cups undiluted evaporated milk or rich cream (double cream is ideal, but standard whipping cream will do)
1/4 cup molasses or 1/4 cup dark brown sugar
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ginger
1/8 teaspoon ground cloves
5 slightly beaten eggs and 1 egg yolk
Optional flavorings /inclusions:
- 1 teaspoon vanilla, or 2 tablespoons brandy or rum, or 1 teaspoon rum flavoring
- 1 1-inch bud long pepper, ground fine (If you can get long pepper, this addition is strongly recommended: it really makes a difference to the finished pie. It’s terrific in real pumpkin pie, too.)
- 3/4 cup black walnut meats, chopped/broken

Method:

Prepare the pie crust (see below for recipe).

Preheat oven to 325° F. Wash the butternut squash(es) and split the long way: remove the seeds and strings. If using yams, peel them. Place the squashes or squash and yams cut side down on a baking sheet with a little water in it, and bake for one hour.

When finished, scoop the baked pulp out of the butternut squash into a bowl: if using yams, split them and do the same. Beat, puree or whip the squash or squash-and-yam mixture until very smooth.

If using molasses, warm it slightly in the microwave or put its jar in warm water to make it a little easier to handle. In a bowl, beat the eggs and egg yolk. Then add the molasses or brown sugar, granulated sugar, salt, spices, and cream, beating very well until blended. Add the squash or squash/yam mixture and beat well again. Add the vanilla, rum or brandy, or rum flavoring, and (if you’re using them) the walnut meats.

Pour the mixture into the pie shell. Preheat the oven to 425° F. When the oven is ready, bake the pie at 425° F for fifteen minutes, then reduce to 350° F and bake for another 45-50 minutes. Test with a knife blade: the pie is ready when the knife comes out clean (or very nearly so).

Pie crust recipe:

Ingredients:

1 1/2 cups all purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup pastry shortening or butter
3 tablespoons water (slightly more if required)

Method:

Sift the flour before measuring it into a roomy bowl or food processor. Add the salt and mix well: then work in the shortening by cutting it in with two knives, using a pastry blender, or pulsing the mixture in a food processor with the plastic blade, until the grain in the mixture is pea-sized. Stir or pulse the water in one tablespoon at a time, until the mixture holds together when you gather it into a ball. (If using a food processor, pulse until the dough mixture just gathers to make a ball.)

Allow to rest for 15 minutes in the refrigerator: then roll out and use to line a 9-inch pie pan. Fill as described above and bake.

November 10, 2012

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Chocolate again: "Chocolata Inda"

CHOCOLATE:
OR,
An Indian Drinke.

THE TRANSLATOR,
To every Individuall Man,
and Woman, Learn’d, or unlearn’d,
Honest, or Dishonest: In the
due Praise of Divine
CHOCOLATE.

The manner of making Chocolate.

For Thanksgiving: The OMG I Can't Get Any Pumpkin Pie

Pie crust recipe:

Food

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CHOCOLATE: OR, An Indian Drinke.

THE TRANSLATOR, To every Individuall Man, and Woman, Learn’d, or unlearn’d, Honest, or Dishonest: In the due Praise of Divine CHOCOLATE.

The manner of making Chocolate.

Share this:

Pie crust recipe:

Share this:

CHOCOLATE:
OR,
An Indian Drinke.

THE TRANSLATOR,
To every Individuall Man,
and Woman, Learn’d, or unlearn’d,
Honest, or Dishonest: In the
due Praise of Divine
CHOCOLATE.