Choice Cuts

by Mark Kurlansky

A pleasant vegetable side dish can be made by peeling and chopping unripe cucumbers and then steaming them in a strong stock which has been well seasoned and acidulated. They can also be hollowed out and filled with a meat stuffing. (Prepared in the following manner, cucumbers can stand on their own as a vegetable: Peel the cucumber, remove the seeds and cut it into pieces. Place in a pot lined with a few slices of bacon or some butter and cook on the fire. As soon as the cucumber begins to brown, moisten it with a spoonful of good meat stock. Let it simmer until it is really tender and has absorbed the stock sufficiently. Season as desired, using a drop of lemon juice or vinegar, chopped fine herbs and pepper.)

  Cucumbers are, however, most suited to the creation of assorted pickles. Their glasslike, spongiform cell structure renders them exceptionally receptive to the introduction of outside flavours, and to the development of flavours inherent in them. Small cucumbers are pickled in vinegar, flavoured as desired with dill, horseradish, garlic, whole Spanish peppers and Nepal pepper. The important point is to pick the cucumbers on a dry day and select good, unblemished specimens; furthermore, a strong wine vinegar should be used; lastly, the containers should be sealed thoroughly and stored in a cool, dry place.

  Larger cucumbers which are still not ripe can be placed in a brine with dill and vine and cherry leaves; they should be allowed to ferment gently so that their flavour is mid-way between that of a salt pickle and a vinegar pickle, just like a tasty sauerkraut. Quantities of excellent preserves are made with these fermented cucumbers in Bohemia, Lausitz [ie around Dresden] and all over the Slavonic North. In Northern areas, fermented vegetables act as substitutes for decaying fruit. However, I believe that Dutch soured cucumbers are the best. This is partly due to the essential superiority of the long, white, bristly cucumber which the Dutch prefer to cultivate and also to the fact that they like to add a few Spanish peppers and other seasonings which improve the flavour and help to preserve the cucumbers.

  Cucumbers which are almost mature and are beginning to turn whitish yellow should be peeled and sliced lengthways. Their seeds should be removed, together with the fibres, and the hollowed cucumbers then placed in a dry container with salt, whole mustard seeds, horseradish, peppercorns and a little garlic, if there are no strong objections to it. A bay leaf and a split Spanish pepper will make welcome additions. Bring some strong vinegar to the boil and pour it, still bubbling, over the cucumbers. Over the next few days, repeat the process by pouring away the vinegar, boiling up fresh and pouring it hot over the cucumbers and seasonings. The container should finally be firmly sealed and placed in a cool, dry place until needed.

  —from The Essence of Cookery, 1822,

  translated from the German by Barbara Yeomans

  JANE GRIGSON ON LAVER

  The English think their food, if at all edible, is suitable for the English alone. But actually they have successfully imposed their food on other cultures and nothing marks English hegemony more clearly than breakfast. In Scotland, Wales, and even Ireland, you can find English breakfast with the national name—Irish breakfast or Welsh breakfast. But in truth, ham and bacon and eggs in the morning is English. The Scots, Welsh, and Irish are Celts, and Celtic breakfast involves oatmeal, seaweed, and usually some kind of seafood. The seaweed is almost always laver. A true Welsh breakfast is laver-bread and cockles. Like many Celtic dishes, it sounds a little off-putting, but if done right, it’s a memorable experience.

  —M.K.

  Laver is the one seaweed we can decently count in English or Welsh cooking as a vegetable. The coasts of the Bristol Channel are the modern laver world. Places to buy it, in the form of laver-bread, a black, almost viscous pulp, are Cardiff, Swansea, Port Talbot, Newport, also Bristol, Barnstaple and Ilfracombe (I get laver-bread by post from Howells of St Mary Street, Cardiff).

  It was more widely sold and eaten in the past, in Scotland and Ireland for instance until recently. In 18th-century Bath, according to Christopher Anstey’s New Bath Guide, ‘fine potted laver’ used to be cried in the streets, along with oysters and pies. It is now sold in markets and by fishmongers.

  Once you have learnt to recognize laver (Porphyra leucosticta and Porphyra umbilicalis) it is more bothersome than difficult to prepare laver-bread for yourself. The seaweed is common on rocks between high and low tide, the fronds, purple-pink, wavy and fine, have to be washed free of sand and salt (with a little bicarbonate of soda to take away the bitterness) and then stewed in fresh water until they become tender ‘and can be worked like spinach with broth or with milk or a pat of butter and a squeeze or two of lemon juice.’

  I have lifted that quotation from Kettner’s Book of the Table (1877), which was written not by Kettner the restaurateur but by the celebrated Victorian critic Eneas Dallas. Dallas complained that laver had lost its popularity and was no longer to be met so frequently in London clubs. If only French cooks had ruled England, he wrote, ‘they would have made it as famous as the truffles of Perigord.’

  Before I tasted laver—with oatmeal, bacon, roast lamb—I was intrigued by the name. Welsh? No, it was not Welsh, it was straightforward Latin, the name Pliny used for a water plant which certainly wasn’t a seaweed. Our seaweed was called laver first by 17th-century botanists. The older name, as in Scotland and Ireland, was slawk or sloke.

  Laver grows round the world, and is one of the favourite seaweeds in Japanese cuisine. The Japanese improve it by cultivation. It is dried in sheets—they can be bought in Japanese shops in London and elsewhere—and is used especially in combinations with rice.

  Laver-Bread with Bacon

  The Welsh and Irish way of eating laver. I remember years ago, having it for breakfast in one of Cardiff’s main hotels. Very good.

  Take about three heaped tablespoons of laver and mix them with enough oatmeal to be able to form small coherent cakes. Turn them in oatmeal, then fry them in bacon fat and serve with bacon, or with bacon, sausage and lamb chop as part of a mixed grill.

  —from Vegetable Book, 1978

  GIACOMO CASTELVETRO ON SPINACH

  Giacomo Castelvetro was an Italian political refugee in England. There was much that he liked about the country that had saved him, but he felt that the people ate too much meat and sweets and not enough fruits and vegetables. In 1614 he wrote a treatise on Italian fruits and vegetables in the hope that the English would adopt some of these plants.

  —M.K.

  Next comes spinach, a very good and wholesome garden plant, which we eat on its own or accompanied by other herbs, such as spinach beets, parsley and borage.

  In Italy it is eaten especially in Lent, cooked in salted water and served with oil, pepper, a little verjuice and raisins.

  Another way is to cook the spinach first in plain water, drain it, chop it very fine with a large knife, and finish cooking it on a low heat in a pan with oil or butter, seasoned with salt, pepper and raisins; this makes a really delicious dish.

  We often put this spinach mixture in tarts, and in tortelli which are fried in oil or butter and served with honey or, better still, sugar.

  —from The Fruit, Herbs & Vegetables of Italy, 1614,

  translated from the Italian by Gillian Riley

  KARL FRIEDRICH VON RUMOHR ON SPINACH

  This plant, with its pretty colour and mildly aromatic flavour, is very often consumed as a vegetable. Apart from its advantages from a dietetic point of view, it manages to flourish throughout the year, baulking only in the face of the sharpest frost or most persistent drought.

  In some areas, people have fallen into the bad habit of boiling spinach in water, which is then poured away while the spinach is chopped and steamed in butter or meat stock before being served as a vegetable dish. As mentioned above, the spinach may also be given a new and foreign flavour by the addition of onions, and other intruders such as beurre manié and breadcrumbs may be used to bind it. This treatment of spinach is really most unsuitable.

  If you like to eat your spinach finely chopped, it should, like so many o
ther herbs, be blanched and then chopped. It can then be steamed very gently in water or meat stock over a moderate fire, with butter and salt being added as necessary. Flour and breadcrumbs will deprive spinach of a great deal of its natural freshness and flavour, but, if people insist, the use of these two ingredients is certainly preferable to that of chopped onions.

  The Italians dig up the entire spinach plant when it is still in the first bloom of its youth. They remove only the outermost leaves and fibrous roots and steam the little plants whole, without cutting and chopping them. The roots of young spinach plants are indeed very tasty, imparting a trace of aromatic bitterness to the sweeter leaves and creating a flavour which will please even the most indulged palate after a few samples.

  The combination of spinach and sorrel, steamed as above, is first rate.

  A quantity of spinach will have a pleasant, mitigating effect upon the strong flavour of the bitter spring herbs. These are mostly wild and possess many beneficial properties, but many people, accustomed to sweet flavours, find them unpleasant. A good proportion of dandelion and watercress should be used in this herbal spinach, chervil, parsley, lettuce and any other aromatic herbs being added in smaller quantities. The mixture is chopped and steamed as above.

  It is traditional in some parts of Germany to gather all sorts of wild herbs during the Easter week. Varieties such as orache, nettles, dandelions, watercress and young caraway shoots are chopped and combined to make a most delicious vegetable dish, similar to spinach. It is known as Negenschöne in the Saxon dialect.

  One particular variety of beet is cultivated only for the sake of its tender and edible leaves, which are prepared like spinach. As these leaves remain green, becoming even more tender, in the worst winter weather, the plant is often known as spinach beet. Quantities of it are grown on the barren upper slopes of the Swiss Alps, particularly in Urseren, and it has in the past been known as the Swiss beet because it spread throughout Europe from Switzerland. The juice of the true spinach has a very pleasant green colour and mild flavour so that it can be used to great advantage to give a good colour to all kinds of dishes and sauces. The pressed juice of raw spinach is indeed very unlikely to spoil any dish in which it is employed as a colouring, regardless of the amount used. It is ideal for giving an attractive shade to cold herb sauces.

  To make a cold herb sauce, take one half part spinach and one quarter tarragon, the last quarter being a mixture of sorrel, purslane, parsley and chervil. Add a tiny shallot, or half of a larger one, with a few basil, marjoram and thyme leaves. Pound the mixture in a mortar made of wood or stone. Use a wooden spoon to remove the pulverized herbs and put them with boiling vinegar through a fine hair sieve into a clean earthenware pot. Put this pot on the fire and bring it just to the boil, then remove it. Salt and a pinch of saltpetre should be added at the outset to improve the colour. Allow the mixture to cool slowly, stirring it frequently so that it does not lose volume. The sauce may be thickened with olive oil, egg yolks, or a little semi-solidified white stock, as appropriate.

  —from The Essence of Cookery, 1822,

  translated from the German by Barbara Yeomans

  MARJORIE KINNAN RAWLINGS ON OKRA

  Okra is a Cinderella among vegetables. It lives a lowly life, stewed stickily with tomatoes, or lost of identity in a Creole gumbo. I do not know whether the magic wand with which I wave it into something finer than mere edibility is original, but I know no other cook who serves it as I do. To bring it to its glamorous fulfillment, only the very small tender young pods must be used. These are left with the stem end uncut and are cooked exactly seven minutes in rapidly boiling salted water. I serve them arranged like the spokes of a wheel on individual small plates, with individual bowls of Hollandaise sauce set in the center. The okra is lifted by the stem end as one lifts unhulled strawberries, dipped in the Hollandaise and eaten much more daintily than is possible with asparagus. The flavor is unique. The Hollandaise, it goes without saying, must be perfect; just holding its shape; velvety in texture; properly acid. I use the yolk of one egg, the juice of half a lemon, and a quarter of a pound of Dora’s butter per person. The only other place I have eaten Hollandaise as good as mine is at the Ritz-Carlton, and even theirs does not have quite enough lemon juice to suit me. And of course, for the price of one serving of broccoli or asparagus à la Hollandaise at the Ritz, I can buy a whole hamper of okra and feed Dora for a week.

  —from Cross Creek, 1942

  ANNABELLA P. HILL’S GUMBO

  By 1872, Annabella P. Hill was a sixty-two-year-old widow with only one of her eleven children still alive. That daughter would die the following year. Two of her sons had been killed within three months of each other, serving the Confederacy in the Virginia campaign. Her husband, a prominent politician, had dropped dead, presumably of a stroke, in 1860, while delivering a speech opposing Georgia’s secession from the Union. So, in 1872, when she published Mrs. Hill’s Southern Practical Cookery and Receipt Book, the past was very much on her mind. She was not of the Civil War generation but of the generation that gave up their sons to the war. And so while this is a Southern book from the Reconstruction period, her recipes are rooted in old food ways from a world she had known long before so many losses.

  —M.K.

  Gumbo.—Fry a young chicken; after it gets cold, take out the bones. In another vessel fry one pint of young, tender, cut up ochra and two onions. Put all in a well-cleaned soup-kettle; an iron stew-pan lined with tin or porcelain is best. Add one quart of water; stew gently until done; and season with pepper and salt. Another way of preparing Gumbo, is: Cut up a fowl as if to fry; break the bones; lay it in a pot with a little lard or fresh butter. Brown it a little. When browned, pour a gallon of water on it; add a slice of lean bacon, one onion cut in slices, a pint of tomatoes skinned, two pints of young pods of ochra cut up, and a few sprigs of parsley. Cover closely, removing the cover to skim off all impurities that may rise to the top. Set the soup-kettle where the water will simmer gently at least four hours. Half an hour before the soup is put in the tureen, add a thickening, by mixing a heaping tablespoonful of sassafras leaves, dried and pounded fine, with a little soup. Stir this well into the soup. Serve with a separate dish of rice.

  Gather the leaf-buds of the sassafras early in the spring; dry, pound, sift, and bottle them. Miss Leslie recommends stirring the soup with a sassafras stick, when the powdered leaves cannot be procured. The sassafras taste is very disagreable to some persons, therefore should be omitted when this is the case.

  —from Mrs. Hill’s Southern Practical Cookery and Receipt Book, 1872

  GIACOMO CASTELVETRO ON ARTICHOKES

  In Italy our artichoke season is in the spring, unlike England, where you are fortunate enough to have them all the year round.

  We eat them raw or cooked. When they are about the size of a walnut they are good raw, with just salt, pepper and some mature cheese to bring out the flavour. Some people do not eat artichokes with cheese; they either dislike cheese, or it gives them catarrh, or they are simply unaware of how it improves the flavour. Artichokes are not so good to eat raw when they have grown as big as apples.

  We cook them in your English manner, which is not to be despised, and in other ways as well.

  If you do not feel like eating artichokes raw, select some small ones and cut off the tips of the pointed outer leaves. Boil them first in fresh water to take away the bitterness, and then finish cooking them in rich beef or chicken broth. Serve them in a shallow dish on slices of bread moistened with just a little of the broth, sprinkled with grated mature cheese and pepper to bring out their goodness. We love these tasty morsels; just writing about them makes my mouth water.

  Another way with these small artichokes is to give them a boil first, then bake them in little pies, with oysters and beef marrow, nicely seasoned with salt and pepper.

  We usually cook the larger ones on a grid over charcoal, having cut away the top halves of the leaves, and serve them with oil or melt
ed butter, and salt and pepper. They taste even better if you squeeze some bitter orange juice over them after roasting; they appeal enormously to everyone who eats them like this.

  We cook the very big artichokes, like those you have here, in water first; then we trim off the top halves of the biggest leaves and stuff between them oysters and some of their juices, morsels of beef marrow, oil or bits of fresh butter, and salt and pepper. Then we case them in pastry, and bake them, and they are delicious beyond belief.

  When artichokes start to get hard and woody, towards the end of the season, many growers cut off all the leaves and the choke and throw the hearts straight away into a bucket of water to keep them white. They sell these ‘bottoms’ as we call them, very cheaply—seven or eight for a Venetian soldo.

  Artichoke hearts

  The best way of cooking these ‘bottoms’ is to stew them in a pot with oil, salt and pepper; or fry them in oil and serve them sprinkled with salt, pepper and bitter orange juice.

  These artichoke hearts can be preserved for winter use by boiling them a little in water, then draining them and putting them on a board to dry in the sun. When they are quite dry they should be stored well away from damp. Then when we come to eat them, they are reconstituted in tepid water, floured and fried, and seasoned with salt, pepper and bitter orange juice.

  —from The Fruit, Herbs & Vegetables of Italy, 1614,

  translated from the Italian by Gillian Riley

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  A Hill of Beans

  GALEN ON BEANS AND PEAS

  Beans have a multiple use: from them are made soups, both the watery sort in a saucepan and the thick sort in a casserole. They are also an ingredient of a third recipe with pearl barley. The gladiators with me use a lot of this sort of food each day when building up the condition of their bodies not with dense and compressed flesh, as does pork, but instead rather more spongy.