But Mama Always Put Vodka in Her Sangria!: Adventures in Eating, Drinking, and Making Merry

by Julia Reed

  Winston Churchill was once served a Tom Collins on purpose by Franklin Roosevelt’s cousin Laura Delano, and, in the middle of a serious conversation with FDR (this was 1942), turned and spit it out. Churchill refused to drink much of anything but Johnnie Walker Red, brandy, gin, and Pol Roger champagne, but he did save the free world, and, therefore, could pretty much do whatever he wanted. Anyway, according to Erasmus, it is perfectly acceptable to spit something out, although he does recommend withdrawing first. “Vomiting is not shameful, but to have vomited through gluttony is disgusting.” Once, a guest at my house, a friend of a friend from Los Angeles, vomited on ethical grounds. She had just enthusiastically finished her second helping of the Creole dish Grillades and Grits, when she learned that the “grillades” were veal and she couldn’t bear the knowledge that a baby cow had been slaughtered for her supper. I thought her reaction a bit extreme, but apologized profusely for not alerting her earlier as to the dish’s contents. After all, another of Erasmus’s rules is that “the essence of good manners consists in freely pardoning the shortcomings of others although nowhere near falling short yourself.”

  BILL BLASS’S MEATLOAF

  ( Yield: 6 servings )

  4 tablespoons butter

  1 cup chopped celery

  1 cup chopped onion

  2 pounds ground sirloin

  ½ pound ground pork

  ½ pound ground veal

  ½ cup minced parsley

  1½ cups fresh bread crumbs

  1 egg, beaten, with 1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce

  ½ cup sour cream

  1 tablespoon heavy cream

  1 teaspoon salt

  Freshly ground black pepper, to taste

  1 pinch each of dried thyme and dried marjoram

  One 12-ounce bottle of Heinz Chili Sauce

  5 strips bacon

  Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

  Melt butter in a skillet over medium heat and sauté celery and onion, stirring frequently, until soft and translucent. In a large bowl, combine with the meats, parsley, bread crumbs, and egg mixture. (The only way to do this effectively is with your hands.) Combine the sour cream and heavy cream and fold in. Add seasonings. Place in a 5 × 9-inch loaf pan or shape into a loaf of roughly the same dimensions and place on a rimmed baking dish. Cover the top with chili sauce and lay strips of bacon across. Bake for 1 hour.

  NOTE: When I was growing up, our family’s beloved cook, Lottie Martin, made a meatloaf very similar to Bill’s. But she added ½ cup of brown sugar to the chili sauce slathered on the top. I wish I’d remembered to tell Bill that—I think he would have loved it. Since I know he loved cream, I’ve followed a tip from Blackberry Farm’s Sam Beall and added a touch of both sour and heavy cream to keep things moist.

  JULIA BROOKS’S CHICKEN HASH

  ( Yield: 4 to 6 servings )

  3 tablespoons butter

  1 small onion, chopped

  ¼ cup celery (preferably the tender inner stalks, including leaves) chopped

  ½ cup thick sliced white mushrooms

  Worcestershire sauce

  Salt

  Freshly ground black pepper

  1½ tablespoons flour

  1 cup heavy cream (or half cream and half chicken stock)

  2 cups cooked chicken cut into 1-inch square pieces

  Melt 2 tablespoons of the butter in skillet over medium-low heat. Add chopped onion and celery and cook until soft. While the vegetables are cooking, melt the remaining tablespoon of butter in a small skillet and quickly sauté the mushrooms, adding salt and pepper and a dash or two of Worcestershire sauce. Set aside.

  Sprinkle the flour into the skillet with the softened onion and celery, stirring constantly. Slowly add cream, still stirring constantly, until it is completely incorporated and the sauce is a bit thick. Add the cooked chicken and mushrooms and salt and pepper to taste.

  NOTE: Brooke Astor made a similar dish called Chicken Hash October, published in a 1946 edition of Vogue and so-named, she said, “because October is my cooking month. The maids come to town and we stay in the country and do all our own cooking.” Clearly, chicken hash was the staple of otherwise spoiled ladies forced to do without their help. Mrs. Astor spooned her hash onto squares of crisp toast and garnished each serving with “crisply cooked bacon” and parsley sprigs, which sound to me like excellent additions.

  3

  Dining on the Nile

  Among the most beloved items in my increasingly crowded office are: a big and very-early-twentieth-century photograph of waves crashing at Colombo, Sri Lanka; a nineteenth-century map of Africa and a Masai beaded bag on a stand; mounted and framed specimens of Julia butterflies given to me by my husband on my birthday; a brilliantly colored suzani from Afghanistan; and two framed postcards from the Victoria and Albert Museum. One is a reproduction of a seventeenth-century Indian watercolor of an absinthe green magpie against a saffron yellow background, and the other is a photograph of a seemingly spent dinner table on a houseboat cruising down the Nile. In the latter, the table is covered in a linen tablecloth and set with gold-rimmed Old Paris plates, weighty silver forks and spoons, and an assortment of glass beakers, champagne flutes, and wineglasses. An earthenware water jug, a pair of silver candlesticks, a bottle of claret, and another of champagne also litter the table, above which hangs an Indian glass lantern. On the walls, there’s a William Daniels print, a satchel on a hook, and a pair of gilded mirrors.

  I’ve put myself in that cabin and imagined myself at that table more times than I can count, but it’s only one of the treasures described above that can take me to other worlds—ones where I’ve already been or where I long to go.

  Webster’s defines the word exotic as “strikingly, excitingly, or mysteriously unusual or different.” In the case of some of my own exotic images, there’s also a strong element of nostalgia. I can’t pull up to the table on that boat any more than I can explore India during the Raj. But I find it inspiring to be surrounded by the relics of the curiosity of those who came before me, and I’m often catapulted out of my chair—either to the bookshelf across the room where I can read about the exploits of others, or further down the road where I can enjoy some of my own.

  As much as I love to be in London, my favorite city, or Spain, where I am constantly pulled, it’s those “excitingly different” and often supremely uncomfortable places that I recall most vividly. And, of course, I remember what I ate there. There was the rich consommé that was pretty much the only consumable thing on the Trans-Siberian railway to Novosibirsk (other than beer and vodka), followed by mounds of caviar in Moscow, to which I’d returned via a terrifyingly ancient Aeroflot plane. There was the picnic of cold roast chicken and Tusker beer beside Tanzania’s Mara River, where the hooves of antelopes—recent bounty of the leopard who’d dragged them up the branches of a massive fig tree—tinkled above us like so many wind chimes. There were the cherries picked alongside Gypsies in the Romanian countryside just after the Ceauescus had been executed, and the mojitos at an illegal jazz club in Havana, where the Cuban equivalent of Tina Turner gyrated like crazy and the bass player’s stand-up instrument was held together by glue and wire.

  Finally, there was the inn in Kabul where the British manager’s perfect gin and tonics and astonishingly sophisticated fare made it easier to ignore the scorpions scuttling in our rooms.

  I’d gone to Afghanistan in 2003 to write about a fledgling beauty school. During the Taliban’s regime, it was illegal for women to work, but many risked their lives to run clandestine salons in their houses, often hiding their supplies by burying them in their backyards. Curling hair, even with perm rods crudely carved out of wood, was one of the very few ways they could support their families and maintain some self-esteem. Now they wanted to perfect their skills and open up their own small businesses.

  The women in the school had only recently shed their burkas and they looked forward to the daily midday break as a long denied opportunity to socializ
e. Lunch was prepared by Naija, whose husband had been paralyzed by a land mine, and every day brought a literally fresh revelation. Who knew that the eggplant and tomatoes that were the chief ingredients of my new favorite dish buranee banjan could thrive in the middle of a giant dust bowl? There was not a lot of visible commerce going on—except for the produce stands on almost every block. If it hadn’t been for the tear-inducing exhaust, you could have smelled the bundles of mint and cilantro stacked next to the ubiquitous bags of dried chickpeas. Just outside the school, a man appeared every morning with a wagon full of kharboza, a white-fleshed watermelon that is possibly the best thing I’ve ever tasted.

  Dinners at the Gandamack Lodge, located in a house once rented by Osama bin Laden’s fourth wife, were even more of a surprise. Owned by Peter Juvenal, a BBC cameraman and an old Afghan hand, it was managed at the time by a Sloaney but intrepid young Brit named Jamie Peck. The twenty-odd guests shared some bare-bones bathrooms, and the scorpions were indeed alarming, but there was not a lot Jamie could do about either of those things. What he did do was keep the place well stocked with booze and wine and very cold beer and create a menu that was breathtakingly ambitious given our environs. On our third night, a guard was killed in a robbery at a similar nearby guesthouse, but once inside the Gandamack’s gates, we turned into Graham Greene characters, gin-soaked and willfully oblivious to the danger all around us.

  Jamie had managed to locate a sixty-something-year-old chef named Noor, who had been unemployed since the Soviets invaded in 1979. More than twenty years on, Noor, like most of his countrymen, had all but lost his skills, but Jamie, with his limited Dari and unlimited enthusiasm, coaxed them out of him. The unlikely partnership resulted in some seriously good food: chilled cucumber soup with dill, spit-roasted leg of lamb, a lemon curd tart, fish cakes accompanied by a tangy chili jam. On our last night, the menu included some particularly ingenious risotto cakes with a little ball of mozzarella buried inside that melted when they were cooked.

  I make those cakes a lot—they’re a perfect dinner-party first course because most of the work can be done well ahead of time (unlike regular risotto) and they look really pretty napped with a simple tomato sauce. Sometimes I add a half cup of chopped prosciutto that’s been sautéed in a bit of olive oil to the risotto; sometimes I make like Noor and throw in a pinch of saffron and bits of braised artichoke hearts (dice about six fresh artichoke hearts, sauté them in a little butter and water until the liquid’s gone and add them with the onion). Either way, they are delicious and they always remind me of my decidedly exotic sojourn to a little piece of paradise in an otherwise war-ravaged country. Those civilized, almost otherworldly evenings at the Gandamack are likely the closest I’ll ever come to dinner on that houseboat on the Nile.

  RISOTTO CAKES WITH MOZZARELLA

  ( Yield: About 15 cakes or 7 servings )

  5 cups chicken stock

  7 tablespoons butter

  10 tablespoons olive oil

  1 medium onion, finely chopped

  2 cups Arborio rice

  ½ cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese, plus more for serving

  ½ pound fresh mozzarella

  2 to 3 eggs

  1 cup all-purpose flour

  1½ cups fine day-old bread crumbs, preferably from a baguette

  ¼ teaspoon salt

  Homemade tomato sauce, for serving

  Fresh marjoram sprigs for garnish.

  Bring stock to a slow simmer. Put 1 tablespoon butter, 2 tablespoons olive oil, and the onion in a heavy saucepan over medium-high heat. Stir until onion becomes translucent, about 7 minutes. Add rice and stir to coat well. Add ½ cup of the stock, stirring constantly, until almost all the liquid is absorbed. Repeat process, stirring constantly, and adjust heat so mixture simmers but rice does not scorch. After about 20 minutes, nearly all of the stock should be absorbed. Rice should be creamy but firm to the bite. Stir in Parmesan and 2 tablespoons butter.

  Remove from heat, spread risotto onto a large plate and place in refrigerator for ½ hour until firm and chilled. Using a spoon or a melon scooper, make 15 small half balls of the mozzarella. Pack risotto into 1⁄3-cup measuring cup and invert onto the palm of your hand. Place a half ball of mozzarella in center and press risotto around the ball to make a patty about 2½ inches in diameter and ¾ inch thick. Make sure risotto covers the cheese. Repeat until you have 15 rice cakes.

  Place 2 eggs and 2 tablespoons water in a bowl and beat with a fork. Spread flour and bread crumbs on separate plates. Mix salt into bread crumbs. Coat each cake lightly with flour, dip in egg mixture, shake off excess and coat evenly with bread crumbs. (If needed, beat remaining egg with 1 tablespoon water.)

  Preheat the oven to 200 degrees. Line a baking sheet with paper towels. In a large skillet over medium-high heat, melt 2 tablespoons butter in 4 tablespoons oil. When butter stops bubbling, fry the first batch of cakes until golden brown and crispy, about 2 minutes per side. Place on baking sheet and put in the oven. Drain off oil and wipe out pan with paper towels. Fry the rest of the cakes in remaining oil and butter.

  To serve: Place two cakes on each plate. Sprinkle with Parmesan and spoon tomato sauce around them. Garnish with marjoram.

  Tomato Sauce

  ( Yield: 2 cups )

  2 pounds ripe plum tomatoes or 2 cups canned tomatoes and their juice

  5 tablespoons butter

  1 medium yellow onion, peeled and halved

  1½ teaspoons salt

  ¼ teaspoon sugar

  1 tablespoon fresh marjoram, finely chopped, or 1 teaspoon dried

  If using fresh tomatoes, cut them in half lengthwise and put them in a covered heavy-bottomed pot. Bring to a simmer and cook for 10 minutes.

  Puree the tomatoes through a food mill and put back into pot. Add the butter, onion, salt, and sugar. Cook at a slow but steady simmer, uncovered, for 30 minutes. Add the marjoram and cook for 10 or 15 minutes more. Remove onion and taste for salt.

  BURANEE BANJAN

  ( Yield: 8 servings )

  4 medium eggplants (about 1 pound each)

  Salt

  6 tablespoons olive oil

  3 medium onions, finely chopped

  2 large ripe tomatoes, peeled, seeded, and sliced (or 4 or 5 large plum tomatoes)

  ¼ teaspoon cayenne pepper or to taste

  Yogurt sauce (recipe below)

  A handful of fresh mint, finely chopped or torn

  Nan or lavash bread for serving

  Preheat the broiler. Remove the stems from eggplant and cut crosswise into ½-inch slices. Select the 24 best slices (not the puffy ends) and discard the rest. Sprinkle slices liberally with salt, leave for 30 minutes, then dry well.

  Brush slices with 2 tablespoons of the olive oil and arrange on cookie sheets. Broil until lightly browned, 2 to 3 minutes per side. (Don’t cook the slices completely.)

  In a deep 12-inch skillet, over medium heat, sauté the onions in 4 tablespoons of olive oil for 15 minutes, until a deep reddish brown—but not crisp. Remove to a plate with a slotted spoon.

  Place 8 rounds of eggplant into the same skillet. Top with half of the chopped onion and tomato slices. Mix 1 teaspoon salt and the cayenne and sprinkle one-third over the tomatoes. Repeat with another layer of eggplant and the remaining onions and tomatoes. Sprinkle another third of the remaining cayenne mixture. Place an eggplant slice on top of each stack and sprinkle with remaining cayenne. Add ¼ cup water and cover skillet tightly. Simmer about 30 minutes.

  To serve: Spread half the yogurt sauce onto the bottom of a serving dish. Top with the vegetables, lifting stacks carefully. Top with the remainder of the yogurt, and drizzle with pan juices. Sprinkle generously with mint. Serve immediately, with nan or lavash.

  YOGURT SAUCE

  ( Yield: 2 cups )

  2 cups plain whole milk yogurt

  2 garlic cloves, peeled and crushed or pushed through a garlic press

  Pinch of salt

  Place yogurt in cheesecloth
or a muslin-lined strainer and drain over a bowl for 1 hour. Mix with garlic and salt to taste.

  4

  Lady in Spain

  Several years ago I packed up a bag of books and a bag of clothes and took off for Spain. I had never just taken off before, not as a student, not in my early twenties like most of my friends, not ever (unless you count a handful of lost weekends in college when, under the influence of lust and other stimulants, I disappeared to Maine). I went, ostensibly, to learn Spanish—my Presbyterian upbringing wouldn’t allow me to classify such an extended trip as pure escape, so I came up with an actual reason to go. Also, since two-thirds of the Western Hemisphere speaks the language, I figured it wouldn’t be a bad thing to do. (In school, I’d chosen sophistication over practicality and studied the French I barely remember.)

  So I found an apartment off Madrid’s Plaza Mayor and paid a big pile of euros to a language school run, improbably, by an Irish vegetarian named Declan, who was appalled at my love of bullfights and the huge Spanish rib steaks (chuletóns) sprinkled with coarse salt from Restaurant Alkalde (not to mention the strip steaks brought sizzling to the table at Casa Paco or at the very happening Lucio, around the corner.) Declan tried hard, but I never learned proper Spanish. Instead I ate and drank, making dozens of trips to the Prado and attending the bullfights every night during the feria. I learned the difference between gambas and cigalas and carabineros (three of the heavenly sea creatures available a la plancha, simply cooked on a griddle, at the glorious La Trainera); I communed, a lot, with Angel, the aptly named maitre d’hotel at El Lando, my favorite restaurant in all of Madrid.

  I did learn some Spanish, but it was a very specific kind. Panuelo, for example, means handkerchief, as in the white (blanco) one thrown out by the president of the bullfight to signal its start, or the very rare orange (naranja) one, held up to save the life of an especially brave bull. Bellotas are the acorns fed to the hogs that make the most tender—and most expensive—pork roasts and hams. If you want a couple of olives in your martini, you must ask for aceitunes rather than olivos, which usually are olive trees. (The expression tamar el olivo means “to have the olive tree”—to jump or climb it very quickly. This is also used when a bull gets after a banderillero and he swings himself equally quickly over the fence and out of the ring.) And if you want a drink during the bullfights you must yell “cerveza, por favor” or “whisky con hielo,” because beer and Scotch are the only alcohol sold in the stands. I may not have earned a certificate from Declan’s school, but I picked up loads of knowledge that to me, at least, is far more useful.