Buttermilk Graffiti

by Edward Lee

  While we wait, Amal shows me some of her family pictures. They are blurry photos of smiling men and women in bright-colored clothes, always with some kind of food nearby. We prep the ingredients for the dishes we are about to cook together.

  When the smen is ready, she drains off the thyme water. She chooses a clean glass jar that will hold all the butter. With her right hand, she picks up a small fistful of the butter and the last remaining drops of water trapped inside before pressing it into the jar. Another small handful goes into the jar, pressed into a corner. She continues this process about fifteen times, until the butter reaches the top of the jar. She lays a small circle of cheesecloth over the top of the butter, then screws the lid on tight and wipes the outside clean. The smen is done now. She puts the jar in the back of her cupboard and tells me it will be ready in thirty days, but you can leave it for as long as you want. And that is smen.

  I remember my first day in the French Moroccan kitchen. Frank asked me if I knew how to make a chocolate mousse cake. I said yes, too afraid to disappoint him. Jaime, an Ecuadorian and Frank’s right-hand man for the past five years, was chopping leeks at a station next to mine. He and Frank knew each other’s movements like an unspoken language. As soon as Frank left the kitchen, I gathered my mise en place for the chocolate mousse cake: chocolate pistoles, eggs, heavy cream, and sugar. That’s all I knew. I didn’t know where to start. So I asked Jaime what he liked to put in his chocolate mousse.

  “You gotta melt the chocolate, man.”

  “Yeah, of course, I know that, but I just wanted to see if you did it that way, too.”

  After a few more questions, Jaime knew I had no idea what I was doing. With each step, he’d roll his eyes and show me another technique. I followed his every move, from turning egg whites into a meringue to whipping heavy cream to a light cloud to folding the batter together in slow figure eights. Jaime barely spoke to me. He didn’t have to. A kitchen crew can communicate without words. Later that night, the cake was a hit. Frank came back into the kitchen and congratulated me. “That’s a good recipe,” he announced loudly, so everyone could hear. I cringed. “Make sure to give the recipe to Jaime,” he said. “I don’t think he can make a mousse this good.” I was speechless. Frank winked at Jaime, who chuckled under his knife hand. I slinked away. That was Frank. He didn’t tell you how wrong you were. He let you dig your own grave.

  Before Amal teaches me her family recipes, she pulls out a jar of smen that she had brought back from Morocco. It is about eight months old. It smells like the inside of a worn leather satchel. I ask her if smen can be made by flavoring the water with something other than thyme. No, she says, this is the only way to make it. It is tradition. My mind wanders to what other flavors could work: basil, red peppercorn, corncobs. This is the difference between us. She has a tradition; I don’t. As much as I envy the confidence and faith she has in her traditions, I know I can’t be her. Maybe part of being American is releasing the anchor that we have to our heritage so we can drift directionless into the unknown waters of identity. Maybe the more we watch Hollywood movies, the more we lose a connection to something ancient and pious. Maybe it is this very conflict that defines who we are.

  Amal tells me that her mother has a jar of smen that is more than thirty years old. No one is allowed to touch it. No one even knows where her mother keeps it. She will rub a little on your chest when you’re sick or sparingly massage it on a swollen ankle. Amal talks about it with the amazement of a child. I can’t imagine holding on to anything for that long. I ask her what it smells like, what it tastes like. There are no words, she tells me.

  Amal teaches me a dish she calls djaj mhamer, chicken thighs spiced with ground ginger, turmeric, saffron, fresh garlic, and minced preserved lemon. They go into a braising pan together and cook for about an hour. The spices are intoxicating. In her cupboard, she keeps jars of spices she has brought here from Morocco. The cumin is heady and oily; the turmeric is absorbed into my fingers at the slightest touch. Even the black pepper has an extra voltage to it that awakens my nerves. She carefully unwraps a silk kerchief to show me a small vial containing saffron. Amal knows exactly how many threads are in that vial. She counts them as she uses them. When she runs out of a spice, she uses what she can find at the local supermarket. She has to add more of the supermarket stuff than she would like; the flavors are just not the same. As the chicken simmers, she adds a small spoonful of smen. That is all you need, she says. It gives the dish its identity. It gives it that haunting flavor that makes her homesick. The smen bridges the spices with the preserved lemon so that no single ingredient is detectable. They all come together as one unified flavor. The chicken itself is incidental. It is the sauce that I want to bathe myself in.

  The next dish we make is even better: lham bel barekouk, thin cuts of beef shoulder braised with black pepper, ground ginger, turmeric, cinnamon, and smen. It is topped with prunes and dried apricots that have been rehydrated in a mixture of water, vinegar, and spices. Aromatic fried almonds finish the dish. The textures are refined. The colors of the dish are like a watercolor painting. The French influence here is unmistakable, yet the taste is distinctly Moroccan.

  “The French mix the sweet and the salty,” Amal says. “It is a flavor we like.”

  The lham bel barekouk will be served with couscous. Amal brews mint tea, which she ceremoniously pours from high above her head into a small tea glass gilded with an ornate leaf pattern.

  The ladies of the neighborhood arrive, shaking the snow off their shoulders. Claudia is Amal’s sister-in-law; she is from Paraguay. Laura is from New York City, and Susan is originally from Venezuela but has lived in Westport for more than ten years. I’ve been enjoying my quiet time with Amal, but it’s clear that this is turning into a dinner party. Claudia makes peach margaritas and plays Taylor Swift. They each question me about who I am. The ladies are protective of Amal. They look out for her as if she were their own daughter. They adore her food.

  As we sip cocktails, I ask them if they’ve introduced Amal to white clam pizza yet. They tell me no. I shake my head in dismay. These ladies, who’ve been entrusted with Amal’s transition into American culture, have been withholding one of our greatest national treasures. There is time for a snack before dinner, so we order a large pie from Frank Pepe. Claudia volunteers to pick it up.

  Frank Pepe is the oldest pizzeria in New Haven. The founder, Frank Pepe, came to America from Maiori, on the Amalfi Coast, when he was sixteen years old. He spoke no English. He opened a bakery in 1925 in New Haven and, as the story goes, started to make pizza with the extra dough he had. His pizza got so popular that, by 1936, he had bought the building next door and, with his wife, Filomena, opened it as a pizzeria. They also served Rhode Island clams on the half shell, which, back then, were plentiful and cheap. In the alleys of New Haven you could find clam carts where you could buy them freshly shucked. There are many versions of the white clam pizza origin story. One of them is from Gary Bimonte, the third generation of the Frank Pepe clan to operate the pizzeria. Gary tells me that his cousin Anthony knew of a bookie by the name of Nick Desport who was a regular at the pizzeria and would always eat clams. One day, Desport asked Frank, “Why don’t you put these on a pizza?” Frank did, and the rest, as they say, is history. It seems so obvious now, but it took a long time to combine the two things: clams and pizza dough. This discovery fascinates me—the slow and gradual interconnection between two cultures, in this case, Italian and New England. When you look at the evolution of American cuisine, you always find this tension between tradition and innovation, a tension that produces the foods we crave most. It is in that intersection of the home we leave and the home we adopt that we find a dish that defines who we really are.

  As soon as Claudia returns from the pizzeria, we rip open the box and start devouring the pie. Amal eats a slice in three bites. It is true what they say: this Frank Pepe is not quite as good as the original in N
ew Haven, but this is still white clam pizza, and it makes us happy. A small pot of Amal’s family smen is melting on the stove. I take a spoonful and drizzle it over the pizza. The butter soaks right into the anthracite burnt crust. The cheese and the smen work in tandem. The pungent aroma of the smen gives the clams a funkiness that wasn’t there before. Amal seems slightly mortified that I’ve just melted a tablespoon of her family butter on a slice of pizza, but she admits that the combination is good.

  Tastes like Moroccan pizza, she says.

  Like Neapolitan Connecticut Moroccan pizza, I think.

  Frank Crispo taught me a lot in the kitchen. He would say things such as “A fish stinks from the head back” and “Always treat your customers like you would treat your mom.” He had a lot of sayings like that. He taught me a foolproof recipe for pot de crème (a French dessert custard). He also taught me to respect myself. He taught me to be self-reliant. In many ways, we kitchen urchins go into the business looking for a chef and find a father figure—a mentor, I guess you would call him. The first day I walked into Frank’s kitchen, I was sporting a long ponytail, mascara, and combat boots. By the time I left, I had cut my hair short and wore my chef’s coat with pride. I didn’t adorn myself with anything else. I shed any notion of an adolescent identity and started from scratch. I entrusted Frank with that identity. In his own way, he nurtured me into the person I am today. I reminded myself of Frank just the other week, when I asked one of my new cooks to go find me a parsley peeler while the other cooks snickered.

  Amal seems unwavering in her identity. “I can marry anyone, but he must be Muslim,” she tells me. She loves Josh Hartnett, a Hollywood heartthrob.

  Would you marry him, I ask her?

  “He would have to become Muslim.” She giggles at the thought of it.

  Claudia and Amal’s brother have a young son. He barely speaks Moroccan. I ask the ladies what we lose with each generation. They seem to agree: usually language goes first, then memories of relatives and grandparents, then traditions, then longing for home, then a sense of identity. What do we have left? A wedding ritual, a few old photos? For me, what is left is our connection to food. Our food traditions are the last things we hold on to. They are not just recipes; they are a connection to the nameless ancestors who gave us our DNA. That’s why our traditional foods are so important. The stories, the memories, the movements that have been performed for generations—without them, we lose our direction.

  We sit around the dinner table and feast in the Moroccan tradition. We use our hands to share big bowls of Amal’s cooking. The ladies here have dined like this before, and they know all the rules. Everyone jumps in to explain to me how to behave at the table.

  “You eat less when you eat together,” Amal tells me. “It tastes better with friends. It tastes better when you eat with your hands.”

  There are many rules for the Moroccan meal. First, you must always grab the food with bread, never your fingers. Use only your right hand to touch your food, never your left. Each bowl is loosely divided into sections; you are allowed to eat only the section nearest to you. Never veer off into someone else’s space. And never touch the hand of the person next to you. Someone can offer you more food if you finish your portion, but you must never pull a piece of meat from another person’s section. Your hands will get dirty, but you must never suck your fingers and then dip your hands back into the bowl. If there is a last bite left in the bowl, always offer it to the elders first. And never leave your plate full, which is wasteful.

  We sip mint tea, and the conversation turns into unbridled laughter as the ladies tell stories about one another’s missteps.

  It is early evening. I’m having so much fun, I stop taking notes. The tender beef and the sweet prunes feel so natural together that I’m amazed I have never had this combination of flavors before. I make a mental note to try it at home. We may be in Westport, not Marrakesh, but the feeling of communing over a table of good food and conversation is universal. It happens everywhere people gather. Even in this too-quiet town, buried under inches of snow, there is a glowing table of warmth and spice that makes me long to return.

  I ask Amal if she would ever open a restaurant. She says that would be her dream, of course. Your food is completely unique, I tell her. I would travel any distance for it. She blushes. Maybe one day. She says she cooks three times a week because it helps her remember the food. She cooks without recipes. The memory of smen is still fresh in her hands, and she doesn’t want to lose it. When she makes it, it’s all through muscle memory and feel. I ask her how many dishes she can make from memory. She looks at me, confused. I’ve never counted, she says.

  At my restaurant, we have a binder where we collect all the recipes we’ve created. Sometimes I’ll flip through it and count them all. How silly that must seem to Amal.

  I wonder what the restaurant business would do to her. Would it drain her identity? Would she flourish under the tutelage of someone like Frank? Would her restaurant succeed in an industry so dominated by a culture of established process? She doesn’t know what a brigade is, a sous chef, a convection oven. Does she need to? What do we lose when we gain the knowledge of process? Of portion size? Of uniformity? And is it possible to hold on to something that is both ancient and modern that lives in your hands? These are questions that keep me up at night. I came to Amal’s house to learn how to make smen, and I’m glad I did. But I leave with more questions than answers. I also leave with the jar of smen we made together. Yet I can’t help pining for a nibble of that thirty-year-old smen that stays hidden in a room somewhere in Marrakesh.

  I make smen all the time now. There are jars of it all over my cupboard, and some in the back of my fridge. I’ve tried it many different ways—with rosemary, hyssop, bourbon (it was delicious). I understand how profane it must be to combine a Moroccan recipe with alcohol, so I call this a washed butter rather than smen. The bourbon-washed butter is so good it can be used on anything from oysters to grilled vegetables. Put it on toast in the morning, or drip it over a slice of warm Pullman bread. The bourbon-washed butter gets softer as time goes by, but only time will tell what happens as it ages. In the meantime, I still have the jar of smen Amal and I made together. This one is precious to me. Perhaps I’ll keep it for the next thirty years.

  Baked Clams with Saffron and Bourbon-Washed Butter

  Briny baked clams are a perfect pairing for Bourbon-Washed Butter. Aside from the aged butter, the clams don’t need much more than a pinch of saffron, which serves as a nod to the butter’s Moroccan origins.

  This Bourbon-Washed Butter is a variation on the traditional smen that I learned from Amal. It’s a way to age butter so that it develops a slightly funky, fermented flavor. This version also takes on a smokiness from the bourbon. The aging process is straightforward, but it takes time: put the washed butter in an airtight container and leave it, undisturbed, in a cupboard or other dark place for at least 15 days. But that’s just a starting point—it can go for as long as a year or more if you make it right and there is no excess water or air pockets to spoil the butter. I would recommend about 2 months to get a flavor that is definitely funky but isn’t overpowering.

  Serves 4 as a first course

  Rock salt

  12 cherrystone clams, scrubbed clean

  About ¼ cup Bourbon-Washed Butter

  3 tablespoons grated Parmesan cheese

  12 saffron threads

  Lemon wedges, for serving

  Preheat the oven to 450°F. Spread a layer of rock salt on a baking sheet.

  Nestle the clams in the rock salt. Bake the clams for about 5 minutes, just until the top shells release from the bottom shells. Take the clams out of the oven and carefully remove the top shells and discard them.

  Put the clams back into the rock salt. Add a little bourbon butter to each clam. Top each one with a scant teaspoon of the grated Parmesan and garnish with a saffro
n thread. Put back in the oven and warm just until the butter and cheese are melted, about 90 seconds. Serve immediately, with lemon wedges on the side.

  Bourbon-Washed Butter | Makes 2 pounds

  One 1-liter bottle bourbon, preferably a 5-year-aged one

  1 tablespoon sugar

  2 pounds (8 sticks) unsalted butter

  4 teaspoons salt

  Pour the bourbon and sugar in a large deep pot, bring to a simmer over medium heat, and simmer until the bourbon has reduced to about 2 cups. The alcohol will ignite, so have a tight-fitting lid next to the stove, and do not ever peek into the pot. When the bourbon does ignite, simply cover the pot to put out the flames, but it is important to take the lid off as soon as the flames have subsided. If you don’t, pressure will build inside the pot and the alcohol will reignite the next time you lift up the lid. If the bourbon ignites immediately, turn down the heat and let it simmer more slowly. The whole process will take 15 to 20 minutes. Transfer the bourbon to a large bowl and refrigerate until it is cool to the touch.

  Add the butter to the bourbon and start to knead it, really massaging the butter and bourbon together. You want to knead it for about 10 minutes nonstop, but be careful not to let the butter warm up too much, or it will start to melt. If the butter seems as if it is starting to melt in your hands, add a few ice cubes to the bowl and keep kneading. Once the butter is ready, cover the bowl with plastic wrap and let it sit at room temperature for 24 hours.