The Reporter's Kitchen

by Jane Kramer

  Back in London, Ottolenghi started researching Arabic texts of the period, which, he says, introduced him to the “richly thick dining history” of the Abbasid dynasty, whose decline had opened the door to the First Crusade at the end of the eleventh century, ushering in ninety years of Christian rule, but whose glory years had long since defined the sumptuous and extravagant potlatch style of the high court celebrations that resumed during the Ayyubid Caliphate, when Saladin’s armies took back Jerusalem from the Europeans. It was, as Ottolenghi puts it, “a period notably obsessed with the culinary arts.”

  A few weeks later, he went to work in his London test kitchen, transforming the arcane clues and measurements gleaned from hundreds of medieval recipes into dishes adapted to the Met’s vast basement kitchen, not to mention his own. El-Haddad, a Gazan who lives in Maryland, and Schmitt, a New Yorker who lives in Spain, are scholars of the Abbasid high-court banquets, which in the dynasty’s heyday involved as many as two or three hundred dishes, and they kept in touch with Ottolenghi for the next six months, sharing research and results, until together they had worked out what Ottolenghi calls “the significant flavors” that you would have found in any one of those feasts. Most notable, he says, were the combinations of sweet and sour—of fruits, say, cooked with meat. Then came the flavors of preserving—pickling fish, for instance, in the white-pomegranate vinegar known as “Babylonian vinegar” and honey. But the most surprising delicacies of all were bananas. “The Europeans who arrived in the eleventh century were bananas about bananas,” Ottolenghi told me, his point being that for every period of crusaders gnawing bones at dinner there were periods of great gastronomic surprises and sophistication and even a certain amount of monotheistic mingling. (In Hebron, for instance, an ancient Abrahamic tradition of hospitality ensured that any stranger entering the town was welcomed and fed.)

  The daily staples of medieval Jerusalem were bread and lentils. Lentil pots like the one the two Met curators found were the sine qua non of every Jerusalem kitchen, from the humblest to the most elaborate. So, too, was the battery of tools with which wheats and grains were pounded and refined in very distinct and various ways to produce whiter, lighter flours and hence more delicate breads and pastries. Europeans, accustomed to heavy, unrefined breads—especially rye-flour breads—took to them instantly, as well as to the unaccustomed taste of cane sugar, which came from the marshes of Iraq, in their desserts. Ottolenghi and his young test-kitchen cook, Esme Howarth, spent the better part of six months translating the instructions and ingredients in scores of ancient recipes into their contemporary equivalents, or near equivalents—their job being to create new dishes that would still be unmistakably medieval.

  El-Haddad and Schmitt say that they dreamed of serving a hundred of those dishes at the banquet, passed and shared at long, low, communal tables, with everyone sitting on the floor eating with their fingers, making the celebration a lesson in historical authenticity. Their dreams were dashed, not only by the impossibility of sourcing and cooking all those exotic dishes (for one thing, there are no armies of slaves in the Met’s kitchen), but by the strong likelihood that the kind of people willing to spend a hundred and twenty-five dollars to sit on the floor for a forkless three-hour meal would be too old or simply too stiff to get up from the floor once they finished eating. After some negotiation, and a test run through the famous multicultural shelves and counters of the purveyor Kalustyan’s, fifty blocks south of the Met on Lexington Avenue, the menu was fixed at thirteen courses. As for the proper libations, Ottolenghi ordered local Cremisan wines—red and white—from vineyards in the Judean Hills that Salesian monks have been cultivating for the last eight hundred years (and that are now threatened by an Israeli government attempt to claim the land for new settlements, as well as for a new wall pushing back the Palestinians who still live there). The irony was not lost on the diners when on the second of two sold-out nights of feasting, he told the vineyard’s story and El-Haddad talked about visiting her parents in Gaza but being unable to cross into Israel and visit the city whose celebration she was helping to plan.

  In the end, though, there was something inspiring, even hopeful, about a meal served in the wing of a great museum at a couple of tables so long that a hundred and twenty people, most of them strangers, could sit down together, passing platters of arguably odd, unfamiliar food, chatting to each other about it and then about themselves and, by the end of the evening, exchanging e-mail addresses and phone numbers while, at the front of the room, Ottolenghi, El-Haddad, and Schmitt, holding microphones, explained the courses as they appeared. I learned from Ottolenghi that when he was a boy, his parents liked taking him to the Cremisan cellars “to see how the monks did it”; and from El-Haddad that alcohol is an Arabic word, and is also the word for kohl; and from Schmitt that the sweet-and-sour marinade from the halibut we were about to eat—and from which Europeans derived seviche and escabeche—has practically disappeared from Arab cuisine; and from all three of them that an abundance of sugar, when it came to sweets, was a sign of wealth, generosity, and refinement.

  The next day I avoided the scale and ate vicariously by reading and rereading the menu I had saved. The first course included, along with the halibut, platters of wine-poached quinces with spices, blue cheese, and walnut brittle; braised fennel, capers, and olives in verjus; burnt aubergine, tahini sauce, cucumber, pomegranate, and Urfa chili; chicken meatballs with melokhia, garlic and coriander; and sambousek root-vegetable pies with cardamom and lime yogurt. The main course involved slow-cooked lamb shoulder with figs, apricots, and an almond-and-orange-blossom salsa; sweet-and-sour leeks, goat’s curd and currants; green beans with pistachio and preserved lemon; and harak osbao, a lentil dish of such irresistible complexity that its Arabic name means “he burnt his fingers,” perhaps because the cook couldn’t wait to try it. Dessert was kataifi (shredded filo) nests filled with feta-and-saffron cheesecake; and pomegranate granita, with mint and roses.

  “Something light, after all that food,” Ottolenghi had said.

  That night I e-mailed him asking what, exactly, went into harak osbao, figuring that it must have been the one dish on the menu with too many ingredients to list. The next morning, this was in my inbox:

  Harak Osbao

  This is a dish for a feast, yet it is extremely comforting and delicious with all the toppings mixed in. Serves eight to ten.

  40g tamarind, soaked with 200ml boiling water

  250g fettuccine, broken up roughly

  60 milliliters olive oil

  2 red onions, thinly sliced (350g)

  1.5 litres chicken stock

  350g brown lentils

  2 tbsp pomegranate molasses

  6 garlic cloves, crushed

  30g coriander, roughly chopped

  20g parsley, roughly chopped

  90g pomegranate seeds

  2 tsp sumac

  2 lemons cut into wedges

  Flaky sea salt and black pepper

  1.  Mix the tamarind with the water well to separate the pips. Strain the liquid into a small bowl, discarding the pips and set aside.

  2.  Place a large saucepan on a medium-high heat, and once hot, add the broken-up fettuccine. Toast for 1 to 2 minutes until the pasta starts to brown, then remove from the pan and set aside.

  3.  Pour 2 tablespoons of oil into the pan and return to a medium-high heat. Add the onion and fry for 8 minutes, stirring frequently until golden and soft. Remove from the pan and set aside.

  4.  Add the chicken stock to the pan and place on a high heat. Once boiling, add the lentils, reduce the heat to medium, and cook for 20 minutes, or until soft. Add the toasted fettuccine, tamarind water, 150 millilitres water, pomegranate molasses, 4 teaspoons of salt, and lots of pepper. Continue to cook for 8 to 9 minutes until the pasta is soft and almost all of the liquid has been absorbed, and set aside for 10 minutes. The liquid will continue to be absorbed, but the lentils and pasta should remain moist.

  5. 
 Place a small saucepan on a medium-high heat with 2 tablespoons of oil. Add the garlic and fry for 1 to 2 minutes until just golden brown. Remove from the heat and stir in the coriander.

  6.  Spoon the lentils and pasta into a large shallow serving bowl. Top with the garlic and coriander, parsley, pomegranate seeds, sumac and serve with the lemon wedges.

  * * *

  It’s safe to say that good food is, and probably always was, what separates celebrations from rites and rituals, where the food is prescribed and, in the case of rites, ingestion tends to be more symbolic than tasty. (Think communion wafer.) I confess to being an avid drop-of-a-hat celebrator, so it stands to reason that after years of marriage to an anthropologist and a working life of travel, I have also become something of an amateur of the history and ethnography of celebration, of how different people celebrate and why they celebrate, whether it’s a couple of hungry museum curators inspired by the discovery of an ancient lentil pot or Ed Koch presiding over a groaning board at Gracie Mansion or, as he once put it, “celebrating not being poor anymore.” And what’s amazing to me is that until food became a respectable field of social and cultural history, you could read the most exhaustive studies of people and their celebrations and find so little about the food those people ate and where it came from, who grew or raised it, how it was prepared and cooked, and what made it special—or, you could say, celebratory.

  Four years after we got married, my husband and I took our baby daughter to a village called Bonnieux, in southern France, for the summer, and when I wasn’t busy sweeping scorpions out the door of our cellar kitchen or laying foam rubber over the stone floors in the rest of the house we’d rented—a primitive form of babyproofing, or more accurately, baby-saving, on the order of plastic socket blockers—I started reading Laurence Wylie’s famous study Village in the Vaucluse, about the people of a nearby village named Roussillon, which he called Peyrane. Wylie, who taught anthropology at Harvard when my husband was studying there, had lived in Roussillon during the first two winters of the 1950s, and six years later had produced his book, which remains a classic in the field of French rural studies. It was in most ways a wonderfully rich portrait. Every aspect of life in Roussillon—all the rivalries and feuds and infidelities and secrets—seemed to be covered, or so I’d thought when I lived in Bonnieux, twenty years later, thrilled to be so close to such a legendary place. But when I took down the book again, six years ago, in the course of writing a talk about celebration that I was due to give at Oxford, I was stunned to discover that there wasn’t a word about what most people in Roussillon ate, celebrating—or pretty much what they ate at all, beyond the chestnuts that one ingenuous housewife roasted in a worn-down skillet into which she had punched holes. More distressing, the one chapter purportedly about celebrating was mainly confined to the menu for the village’s yearly banquet—“our firemen’s banquet,” the villagers called it—a desultory affair which no one but Roussillon’s six firemen and the mayor attended, because it was so expensive. Here’s what the firemen ate and drank, five years after the end of the Second World War:

  • Choice of hors d’oeuvre

  • Lobster à l’américaine

  • Civet of hare du Ventoux

  • Hearts of artichoke peyrannais

  • Canapé of Alpine thrush

  • Homemade pastries

  • Local red wine, rosé wine reserve, sparkling wine, coffee and liqueurs

  That was it: less a menu, actually, than a list, given that it lacked any of the intimations of color, taste, and texture that a great menu would evoke. I thought, “Wait a minute, Professor Wylie! Where did the firemen get their lobsters?” This was a question of keen reportorial interest to me, since, at the time of their banquet, Roussillon was dirt poor, postwar dirt poor—like Koch’s boyhood Bronx neighborhood—not to mention literally dirt poor, since it stood in precipitous dirt-road isolation in the Luberon mountains, hours from a paved road, let alone a seacoast. It was also of some gastronomic interest to me—a New Englander stripped down at her computer in the sweltering heat of an Umbrian summer, picturing the thousands of lobster pots bobbing in the cool Atlantic, off the Maine coast, and getting hotter and hungrier by the minute. I also wanted to know what besides thrush went into a canapé of Alpine thrush, and who had actually baked those homemade pastries, and how much time did it take the women—I assumed it was women—to make them and, more to the point, what kind of pastries were they. I wanted to know what kind of wood the women of Roussillon fed into their centuries-old stone ovens for the different dishes on that menu. I wanted to know who caught the hare for the lepre du Ventoux, and what went into the sauce, and what did it taste like. What in fact did a lugubriously bourgeois menu like the firemen’s mean in Roussillon? What did food mean? And most of all, why and what were those firemen celebrating? For me, rereading Wylie was like reading my first biography of Edith Wharton, a passionate decorator, and learning nothing at all about what her living room in Newport looked like, or what colors she preferred, and what kind of fabric she used for curtains.

  There is, of course, plenty of celebration in fiction. Emma Bovary transformed herself from farmer’s daughter to respectable bourgeois doctor’s wife in the course of one copious wedding dinner. The oozing charcuterie and reeking cheeses in Zola’s Le Ventre de Paris were emblems of the greedy potlatch feasts of Louis-Napoléon’s ascendancy. Balzac—who himself went from months of famine (self-inflicted while writing a novel) to a day of feasting (when the novel was finished), which, as the writer Anka Muhlstein tells us in her enchanting book Balzac’s Omelette, always began with an order for a hundred oysters and four bottles of white wine, followed by lamb chops, duckling, roast partridge, and Normandy sole, topped off with dessert and Comice pears—raised the possibility that the most satisfying celebration of all was a solitary one. And in this, Balzac had something in common with Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria, who built himself a castle for one called Linderhof, with a single bedroom and, more to the point, a single chair for feasting alone in his small mirrored dining room, surrounded by endless refractions of perhaps the finest collection of Meissen on the planet. But even Balzac’s attention to cookery in celebration could flag when it came to the upstairs-downstairs Paris of the banquets he describes in Illusions Perdues, which had mainly to with adjustments and readjustments of favor by way of table seating; it’s hard to imagine the guilefully ingenuous Lucien de Rubempré venturing into anyone’s kitchen to watch the pastry chef spin sugar or ask the cook at the fireplace where to buy a proper roasting spit.

  It took Virginia Woolf, in To the Lighthouse, to lead us from vegetable garden to kitchen to dinner table for the Sunday boeuf bourgignon prepared and served by the sublime Mrs. Ramsay at her summer house on the Isle of Skye. Mrs. Ramsay regarded Sunday dinner as a celebration—a coming together of family and friends, an occasion for matchmaking, for an embrace of lonely, solitary people (call it a gathering of strays) and for the courtesies that a prescribed occasion involves. Children bathed and behaving. Interesting, agreeable conversation. Time out of time, or what we call liminal time—a passage from the ordinariness of daily life into the next round of daily life by way of a salubrious diversion that restores connections, renewing affection for that life and for the people in it. All celebrating is, in that sense, liminal, and it has been more and more obvious to me, as a reader, that I owe my fascination or, more accurately, obsession, with the part food plays in the experience of celebration to (as with so much else) Woolf and her luminous creation. Mrs. Ramsey literally changed the way I see, and the questions I ask, and the conclusions I draw whenever I sit down at my desk to write.

  * * *

  Last summer in Italy, my husband and I went to the penultimate night of our local sagra—a two-week-long celebration during which the women of the village of Sismano prepare nightly dinners for the hundreds of people who come from similar villages in the area to eat, dance, drink, and play. In larger towns—towns with a few thousand
rather than fifty or a hundred people—the sagra used to include a pageant or a historical reenactment. In one sagra, in a town off the mountain road we take to Spoleto, you can still wander through narrow streets, from tableau vivant to tableau vivant, with a paper cup of terrible red wine and your plate heaped with local specialties, and the most popular of those tableaux is always the one with a witch burning at the stake. Girls from the town compete to play her, and the winner each year is always the prettiest girl who can scream and groan the loudest.

  In most towns, the sagra used to be political. The Christian Democrats had one, the Communists had one, and the Socialists had one. They were a way of reinforcing, with an eye to the next election, what you could call communities of ideology, through food, music, and regrettably, long speeches. But Sismano, which is literally tucked into a castle close, was part of a feudal estate until the 1950s, and politics were not encouraged by the local nobility—the result being that our sagra had none of those ideological diversions: no oompah bands playing “The Internationale”; no tipsy bishop telling you to vote for the party of God; no posters of a perennially renascent Berlusconi. It did use to include a procession honoring the Madonna on the last of its fourteen nights, but a few years ago the local priest rescheduled it for the following Sunday, saying that he didn’t want to spoil the fun with too much piety—meaning, of course, that there was a limit to mixing the sacred and the profane. The result is that no one in Sismano actually knows anymore what it is they’re celebrating or why, only that “that’s what we do in June, and in July, we’ll go to the sagra in Castel dell’ Aquila, and then the one in Avigliano, and before you know it will be September.”