A brief vacation

You must know the delightful scene in Mapp and Lucia (true, they're all delightful) when Lucia decides to fake having influenza so as to avoid meeting Mr. Wyse's sister, the Contessa di Faraglione. If they had met the Contessa "would see in a flash" that Lucia is not the Italian scholar she has always claimed to be, and this exposure must be avoided at all costs. As she is explaining her plan to her parlormaid Grosvenor, sitting very primly and beautifully dressed in her office and writing the notes of regret she will send to friends apologizing for her coming immurement -- "where could she have caught influenza?" -- Lucia says: "Such a whirligig of social life here in Tilling, I've got very behindhand in my reading, correspondence, and accounts, that sort of thing. So for the next week, I plan to live the life of a hermit. No engagements, no callers ...." And Grosvenor is brought in to the secret, the notes of regret go out, and all Tilling is agog at the thundering great coincidence of Lucia being ill, her best friend Georgie (also a supposed Italian linguist) retreating to the seashore, and the Contessa arriving all in the same week.

I have decided to borrow a page from Lucia's book and, not to get influenza (hear me, Lord) but to take a brief vacation for a few weeks. I shall, à la Lucia, catch up on my reading, correspondence, and accounts, learn more about beer and sake (the oddest drink, surely, provincial though it sounds to say so), and perhaps cook something new. If I employed a gardener named Coplen I would ask him very fimly to do something about all that Solidago, goldenrod, and if I employed a Grosvenor or a Foljambe I would speak equally firmly about the dust. But since I am my own Coplen and Foljambe I must see about the rooms and the perennial bed myself. I shall be back, "dear things," shortly. And I wonder what Lucia would blog? Just an idle question. I'm sure it would be wonderful.

Au reservoir!

Creamy vegetable lasagne

Sunday seems the right time to indulge ourselves with a treat. Most lasagne recipes are a bit fussy -- when I was growing up, lasagne was always a huge deal, as a matter of fact usually reserved for Sundays, because it was judged to involve such an extraordinary amount of work -- and this one is fussy too. It redeems itself, in my opinion, by being meatless. I have no objection to meat. But the ground beef in lasagne always seems to me to turn the dish heavy, dry, and thick. My recipe, put together from many sources over the years, is entirely vegetarian and simply luscious. You will want any nice wine at all with this, red or white, dry or sweet or -- why not? -- bubbly.

Start by bringing a big pot of water to a boil. Salt it and drop in your ten lasagne noodles to cook. (I have no truck with no-boil noodles. I just don't.)

While the noodles cook, melt some olive oil and butter in a large heavy saucepan -- about 1/2 cup of fat in all. When it is hot, sauté a combination of vegetables in it, beginning with a diced onion and progressing on to chopped carrots and chopped zucchini, and of course a clove or two of diced garlic. Add about 1/4 cup of white wine to the vegetables, and let them simmer and soften for about ten minutes. Add fresh herbs, like thyme or tarragon, plus about 1/2 tsp salt.

In a separate saucepan, sauté fresh mushrooms in butter until they also soften. Certainly you may simply cook the mushrooms with the rest of the vegetables, but sometimes I like to keep them a separate layer in the finished dish. Besides, if you take care not to crowd them -- which in the photo below, you notice I did not do, alas -- they will brown and give you a different flavor. 

When the vegetables in the first saucepan are very soft, add a 10 ounce package of fresh washed spinach to them, cover the pan, and let the spinach wilt. Along about this time, the noodles will be done and you will drain them and toss them with a bit of olive oil so they don't stick to each other.
 

Upon which, you are almost ready to assemble everything. Have ready, not only the cooked drained noodles and the two pans of vegetables, but also some grated mozzarella cheese -- about 1 and 1/2 cups -- and four or five fresh sliced tomatoes. You will also have made a simple white sauce by now. Did I mention this?

The white sauce:

• 4 Tbsp butter 
• 4 Tbsp. flour
• 2 cups milk 

Melt the butter in a small saucepan, and when it froths a bit, add the flour and stir and cook for a few minutes. Pour in 2 cups of milk, and stir and cook until hot and smooth. Add salt and pepper, and maybe nutmeg, to taste.

Now you are ready to make dinner, really. Preheat the oven to 325 F. Lightly grease a 9 x 13 x 2 glass baking dish with olive oil. Layer into the dish, first, three noodles; then some spoonfuls of the vegetable mix along with its juices and the mushrooms and their juices; then, a handful of the cheese; and then, a few slices of fresh tomato.

Continue making layers of noodles, vegetables, mushrooms, cheese, and fresh tomato. When you have finished with a last layer of noodles, pour the cream sauce over.

Layer on the last of the fresh tomatoes, dust the top with a bit more of the mozzarella cheese -- or some Parmesan perhaps? -- drape the pan with tin foil, and pop it in the oven for about 25 to 30 minutes. When it is fully bubbling and delicious, take it out and let it sit for ten minutes to firm up before you ring the gong.  

The beauty of this meal is that while you eat you can also regale the family with a short history of lasagne. It seems to be an ancient concoction. The Oxford Companion to Food, no less, tells us that the Greeks and Romans ate simple flat cakes or fried squares of dough called laganon or lagani, which were probably added to peasant stews to give them bulk, as dumplings would eke out a meat stew. However, our more modern definitions of lasagne as both the flat pasta sheets and the dish made of them, layered among meats, vegetables, or sauces, may already have been known in medieval Italy. The Companion explains, "Marco Polo, recounting his travels in the Orient, said that he ate in Fanfur [a] 'lasagne' made with flour of the breadfruit, implying clearly that he was already familiar with lasagne [the noodles] made of ordinary flour."

In his massive, italics-laden, Cookbook-of-the-Year-Award-winning A Mediterranean Feast, Clifford Wright goes deeper into the history of lasagne than even the nice people at Oxford do. He is anxious to thrash out not merely what lagani would have been, but exactly what are the differences among pasta, and pasta secca (dried pasta), and macaroni and true macaroni (made from pasta secca), and which pastas were first recorded as made from what wheats, hard, soft, or otherwise. We readers gape at his knowledge. We salute him for investigating references to pasta in classical authors of incredible obscurity ("the Greek use of the word lasanon [sic?]appears in Hesychius to mean a kind of foccaccia made of wheat and oil"), and for finding out that the Chinese traveler Chau Ju-Kua, circa 1150, was startled by the long shelf life of (hard) wheat in Muslim Spain -- "this would hardly be notable if the Chinese knew of hard wheat." Bravo, Mr. Wright. However, if as a reader or a cook you have any experience of A Mediterranean Feast, before you are half-finished accompanying him through his long journey into the subject of all things lagani you will nod sagely and say to yourself, "I know where this is going. 'The Arabs invented it.' "

Skim ahead to the next paragraph break. We are on page 622. "The origin of macaroni lies not with the Etruscans, Greeks, Romans, or Chinese, but apparently with the Arabs." This may be entirely true, but Clifford Wright is paradoxically the last person I would trust to give this information. A Mediterranean Feast is the most weirdly politically charged cookbook I have ever owned. It's only human nature to boast about the things we love, only human nature to happen to find out that whatever subject or group of people most fascinate us are secretly the foundation stone of the universe. But really. Are we to believe that Europeans were so stupid they did not know enough to grow crops in summer until the Arabs taught them to do so (p. 22)? And, amid his recipes and his history, need a cookbook author scold his readers not to criticize the wearing of the Muslim veil ("this is not to be judged in terms of women's rights")?

It may be that Mr. Wright has relaxed a bit in the ten years since A Mediterranean Feast was published -- though to judge from the sample lecture titles offered on his website today, perhaps not. We may be better served by consulting his long list of links to very interesting food and culinary history websites. In any case, do enjoy my creamy vegetable lasagne. If the family want to talk about less inflammatory things during dinner, by all means let them.  

2008 Two Hands shiraz "Angels' Share"

...mmmmm
soft, satiny, ripe baked mature black fruit 
ends with enough acidity to please the grown-ups
luscious, sweet

Unfiltered -- note the crud (I mean, skins and things) at the bottom of the glass.

Wonderful.

Two Hands Wines, S. Australia

Retail, about $25.

"The careful overcoming all existing troubles," or -- original recipes (plus Beer Cream Pie)

I'm perplexed. What makes an "original" recipe? To contribute to food and wine websites, one must provide original recipes, even if one has always cooked and written about previously published, "retro" fare because it's often so tasty and because rescuing it from obscurity is great fun. When was the last time someone made Mexican oatmeal soup from Yvonne Young Tarr's New York Times Bread and Soup Cookbook (1973)? It's not original, but in a real way, it is completely new.  

Alas. Online foodie platforms need freshly thought-up content. I surmise the reason is that they are making money from ad revenue and so reprinting other publications' material, even if it is decades old and fully acknowledged, leads to copyright and royalty difficulties. Very well. I'd still be pleased to have some legal eagle absolutely define originality in food and drink.

Because, logically, how different can any food be from whatever else has gone before? Some comestibles, and some potables, are so ancient they must dwell like the Bible and Shakespeare beyond copyright. They are simply human possessions. Chicken soup. Pot roast. Apple pie. The martini. But even if you venture into less-charted spaces in mankind's great kitchen, even if you venture into what should be the newest and shiniest and freshest-swept corners of it, you'll find originality is not quite what it seems.

Pick at random from an issue of wonderful Bon Appetit. For May 2011, we can prepare Grilled salmon with Indian spices and raita (a yogurt and cucumber sauce). Different and original. But at Delish.com, we may learn to prepare poached salmon with various spices (not Indian) and raita. If I were a food editor having fully internalized warnings about company policy on originality, I would have rejected one or other of these recipes on obvious grounds.

Perhaps they both got through because fish, spices, and raita is a longstanding human possession, an Indian equivalent of pot roast, and therefore exempt from copyright problems. So, pick another recipe from another wonderful Bon Appetit. September, 2010: bacon and cashew caramel corn, bar food from the Denver hot spot Colt & Gray. Caramel corn may belong in mankind's kitchen, but this sumptuous improvement on it is surely unique. And by the way, I'm all for sumptuous improvements and new things in food and drink. I merely question the idea that such improvement, while it may be novel to you and me, is ever new to the human race.

This bacon and cashew caramel corn, for example. Google the keywords, and you will find spicy bacon, almond, and maple popcorn, as devised in the test kitchens of Diamond Foods by chef Tina Salter in September 2009. Again, if I were a food editor and had internalized the vital policy, I would have raised an eyebrow at the idea of publishing the Denver restaurant's version of this snack, how delicious soever it is.

Which leads me to suspect something. Does food publishing originality consist in a sort of agreed-upon sleight of hand, the substitution of this herb for that, this technique for that? When legally does an "adapted" recipe become one's own? Do some people keep mum about raiding an incredibly obscure source -- say, Chinese Snacks by Huang Su-Huei, 1976 -- and hope no one notices?

Even if a recipe is so exuberantly weird that I am happy to believe any claims about its utter freshness, it seems that very exuberance is a drawback. One such popped into my inbox this very hour: braised pork belly with watermelon mint salad and Ponzu saucce, from Wine Enthusiast. I congratulate the chef who created it, while I respectfully pronounce that I have no intention of ever making it myself. The trouble with gems like these is, while the dish may be fine, time is short and there are far too many good, traditional, and yes, obscure but satisfying retro recipes to cook, to warrant devoting an afternoon to what looks like a bizarrerie designed to satisfy the chef's artistic calling, impress the restaurant-weary, or pass editorial muster first, and feed a family second. I would rather (gulp and) try Pepsi-cola chicken, from the New and Improved Potluck for 33,000 (1993, published -- complete with comb binding -- by the Dayton's, Hudson's, and Marshall Field's cookoff), or Glenn Quilty's plum duff (Food for Men, 1954). Or Mrs. Beeton's apple soup, 1861. Or "Eve's toast," from The How to Keep Him (After You've Caught Him) Cookbook (1968). And so on....

Still. Even I had an original recipe idea not long ago. In The Best of Shaker Cooking (1970) I discovered Sister Lizzie's Sugar Pie, which is nothing but butter, sugar, and cream baked in "your best pastry" shell. (How on earth do these ingredients solidify without an egg binding?) Enjoying a Duchesse de Bourgogne at the time, I had a brain wave and thought, why couldn't beer serve as the liquid in a pie like this? "Beer pie." How new. How different.

It's been done. And most deliciously, I would think. Nearly two years ago, Jasmine at Beer at Joe's created a porter cream pie, the beer custard ladled into a buttery pre-baked crust lined with melted, cooled chocolate. Do go there.

I suppose one could argue that every recipe, beginning with bread, was once a newfangled bizarrerie not to be compared with things Mother used to forage, but I do think the explosion of cookery publishing platforms nowadays has forced the mania for editorial novelty into skillets and cakepans where it becomes a distinctly one-off ingredient. My husband sums up by saying if I want to create an original recipe, I should just add a banana to every ingredients list, and then assure my readers that if they don't like bananas, they can omit it. I must find out if the joke is original with him.

An aside: Chinese Snacks really is the most obscure cookbook in my collection. I admit to not having raided its complexities yet. (These are snacks? It's no wonder even the French say that Chinese cooking picks up where the French leaves off.) But I love the preface, by authoress Miss Huang Su-Huei. Her readers, she says, have insisted she produce this revision of her Chinese Cuisine first published in 1972.

In reciprocating the readers' such warm kindness, I have decided, after detailed researches and careful overcoming all existing troubles, to put out Chinese-English bilingual edition available for the readers' practical purposes. 

And she warns us against knockoffs, even 35 years ago.

By the way, as some pirated editions from old ones with poor printing but in the same title of this edition are recently found out, your careful attention is important and shall be appreciated. 

Oh, I appreciate it all.

Mrs. Beeton's "pea soup (inexpensive)," 1861

Since our spring weather remains so chilly, it seems right to indulge in the comfort of soup. In this case it's split pea soup from a cookbook and household manual that is one hundred and fifty years old. Our "Editress" and source of the recipe is Isabella Beeton, the young Victorian matron who, in collecting and transcribing readers' recipes and writing other home-themed articles for her husband's publication, The English Woman's Domestic Magazine, managed in two years (1859-1861) to produce the massive Beeton's Book of Household Management. ("I must frankly own, that if I had known, beforehand, that this book would have cost me the labour which it has, I should never have been courageous enough to commence it.") Despite the labour and courage, Mrs. Beeton ended a tragic figure, literally tragic in the high-school English 101 definition of the word: the noble soul overwhelmed by circumstances outside herself. Everything in her book, all starchily and beautifully written, is about good food, thrift, cleanliness, correctness, wholesomeness and safety; and yet when it came time for her to give birth to her fourth child, some fool messed up -- I assume. She died of the ancient scourge, puerperal fever, a month before she would have turned thirty.

But let's not think about unhappy things like that. Let's turn, instead, to one of her many hundreds of recipes, inexpensive pea soup. We meet with it just a few pages after Apple Soup, which we also must try very soon. This latter calls for "soup apples," whatever they may have been. Or was "soup" a misprint for "sour"? And speaking of ingredients, what precisely is a split pea?

It would seem that there is only one type of edible garden pea, known since prehistoric times, Pisum sativum. (There is a field or grey pea used as animal fodder, but that's not what our soup will be made of. Nor will it have anything to do with the sweet pea flower, Lathyrus odoratus, which you attempt to grow beside your goldenrods and coneflowers in summer, but which resents the midwestern heat and spends a lot of time laying around pining for the cool and damp of England.) Relics of P. sativum's cultivation and eating have been found in settlements in Switzerland dating back to the Bronze Age, five thousand years ago. The French petit pois or little pea is simply the pea harvested young; the Chinese peapod, or snow pea or sugar pea, eaten whole, pod and all, is also our ordinary garden pea.

When the peas inside their pod are dried and split, they are called -- sensibly -- split peas. These were a food of the poor during the Middle Ages, "especially in winter," the Oxford Companion to Food tells us, because they were "cheap, filling, and a useful source of protein." In his wonderful encyclopedia Food Waverley Root tells us that he lived for years in Paris on a street called Rue du Cherche-Midi. The name, translated Hunt-for-Noon street, harked back to medieval times when nuns in a local convent served dried pea soup every midday to the district's poor.

In their essentials split pea soup recipes do not vary much one from another, and I suppose haven't varied much since the Middle Ages. A pound of peas, four quarts of water or broth, some onions, perhaps potatoes, a little fat of some kind (often bacon drippings), all simmered together for two or three hours comprise its most basic version. If anything, Mrs. Beeton's recipe is lighter, more interesting -- why, carrots! and mint, and brown sugar -- and simpler to prepare than many which require soaking the peas overnight, or stop only at the above four very basic ingredients, or worse, end by puréeing the whole cauldron of it, thus ruining the peas' nice texture. She doesn't go so far as to add a cup of cream in the manner of a few elegant cookbooks, but I do believe it's very good without it.
 

The fundamental color, alas, can't be helped, which is why I think puréeing such a mistake. In Splendid Soups James Peterson suggests whirling fresh peas into it as well, to make the green even brighter, but somehow I am not sure I want my bowl of comfort to boast the hues of the lushly growing front lawn in this chilly May. 

Mrs. Beeton's split pea soup

• 3 to 4 Tbsp butter
• 1 onion, diced
• 1 stalk celery, diced
• 1 carrot, diced
• 1 package (1 lb.) dried split peas, washed and picked over (you must remove any pebbles)
• 1 Tbsp. brown sugar
• salt and pepper to taste
• "a little mint, shred fine"
• 4 quarts water, "or liquor in which joint of meat has been boiled" (But what about some ham? Mrs. Beeton says nothing about it. Include 1 or 2 slices leftover ham, diced)

Melt the butter in a large pot and when it foams, add and sauté the onion, celery, and carrot, cooking about ten minutes until they soften. Pour on the water, bring to a boil, and add the split peas. Add the ham if you are using it. Simmer the soup for about 3 hours. Stir in the brown sugar, salt and pepper, and mint (I did omit this, fearing mint and ham would make an odd combination). 

And that is all. Enjoy a steaming, smoky-flavored bowlful, while you admire the bursting spring greenery all around you, the white and pink blossoming magnolias and apple trees, the crabtrees loaded with deep crimson and bright magenta froth, and the yellow daffodils and the creamy-peach jonquils, and a thousand species of growing things in the woods coming out in all their early dusky shades of reddish and tawny brown and even lime-green, and then, what else? --  the poor fat robins attempt their cheerful singing at three in the morning, notice the cold and give it up as a bad job, start again at three-thirty and give up again, try again at four and finally at four-fifteen have a good gargle and start their yodeling in earnest -- and then there are those vivid orange tulips nodding  beside the deep maroon sign for the Christian Science church you see on the drive home from work; all the while peering between the thudding windshield wipers during the endless spring rains. Oh, I don't mean you are savoring your bowl of split pea soup at three in the morning while you are driving. I just mean, well, lordy -- it's cold. 

Explore also: The Short Life and Long Times of Isabella Beeton by Kathryn Hughes (published in 2005).

In which the Italian wine industry makes a monkey out of me

Because you see, now they're putting the word Ripasso on their labels, when suitable. It used to be they couldn't do that, and in previous posts I had carefully explained, using, alas, only barely outdated information, how if you wanted a ripasso you had to know what it was, and know your producers. Now, no more of that nonsense.

I'm glad of it, of course. If you want to buy a Valpolicella that is not an ordinary Valpolicella, also neither a Valpolicella Classico nor a Valpolicella Classico Superiore, and neither yet a Recioto della Valpolicella nor even a great Amarone della Valpolicella, but rather a Valpolicella in between them all, one that has been allowed to sit on the lees from a previous batch of either recioto or amarone, why then -- it helps not only to know that that sort of Valpolicella is called a ripasso, but to learn that the label may now say so.

It's all owing to a change in Italian wine law that occurred about five years ago. "Ripasso" used to be a trademark of one winemaker, Masi, which marketed the first valpolicella to be "re-passed" through the lees of an amarone in 1964. In about the mid-2000s, it seems, Masi gave up that trademark to the Chamber of Commerce of the city of Verona, thus freeing it to be used by other winemakers in this region of northeast Italy. (We remember always to think V for Valpolicella, V for the region called the Tre Venezie, V for Venice and V for nearby Verona.) And so they have.

The example before us today is a 2006 Secco-Bertani [the maker] Valpolicella Valpantena D.O.C. [the place of origin] Ripasso [we understand].

clear bright fresh cranberry red
smells like a stable -- then, leather
very silky
tangy -- acidic, mouth watering
juicy, not sugary -- little fruit

The more I am exposed to them, the more I think that when dealing with these zingy, zippy Italian wines, we must be calm but firm. They are tart and mettlesome creatures and they want to be thrown at robust meals full of bell peppers, tomatoes, garlic, piquant sausages, fresh basil, and assertive cheeses. By contrast, a thick, sugary, chocolate-and-stewed prunes California-style red (pick one) may not necessarily need "a plate of bear meat" accompaniment after all. A simple snack of buttery crackers and what I call my boring cheese -- fresh mozzarella -- seems to flatter their languor nicely.

Speaking of languor, and chocolate and stewed prunes. Be aware that if your palate is at all accustomed to unctuous New World red wines, you may find yourself non-plussed at the descriptions other people offer for these tart, mettlesome Italian minxes. (Remember when we were aggravated at being told a disappointingly thin Barolo was "too big for us"? Too big? we snorted.) Today's lesson in ripasso legalese came from an article in the Montreal Gazette published on Canada.com in September, 2007. At the end of the article are a series of tasting notes on many valpolicellas -- good ones, from the area called Valpolicella Classico, the wine's original home before its official legal borders were enlarged in the 1960s so that less interesting product from nearby vineyards could be labeled with the V word. For these wines, good as I trust they were, our Canadian tasting panel's descriptors somehow just don't ring true. Far be it from me to judge. I merely express some curiosity about tasting reference points. "Gorging with fruit"? "Ripe red fruit, supple and generous"? And they hadn't even got to the amarones yet. Dear things, I wanted to ask, have you at all recently sampled a Lodi zinfandel -- an Australian shiraz -- a Napa cabernet? Or any petite sirah whatsoever? We are enjoying Italian wines, no?

Still. You shouldn't necessarily trust me. I'm the one who is five years late keeping up with the whole ripasso thing. 

See: "The many faces of Valpo," Montreal Gazette, Canada.com, September 4, 2007.