Choice Cuts

by Mark Kurlansky

  If at all possible, use garden lemons. They taste better and are more fragrant than lemons from elsewhere, which frequently have an “off” flavor.

  Boil the sugar in the water with a few strips of lemon zest, uncovered, for 10 minutes. Let the syrup cool, then squeeze the lemons into it one at a time, tasting to make sure the mixture isn’t too tart. Strain it, and pour it into an ice cream machine.

  This will produce enough for six.

  —from The Art of Eating Well, 1891,

  translated from the Italian by Kyle M. Phillips III

  M.F.K. FISHER ON GINGERBREAD

  We knew a woman who sold real estate in a small beach colony. She had a face like a brick wall, and a desire, some sixty years old and still undaunted, to play ingenue rôles on Broadway. Her past was cautiously shaded.

  We said we were going to live in France.

  She said, “Where?”

  We said, “Here, there—maybe Dijon—”

  Suddenly her face was blasted. “Oh, Dijon!”

  She put her hands up to her eyes and wept, and then cried fiercely: “The smell of it! The smell of Dijon gingerbread! When you are there smell it for me!”

  So we did.

  We smelled Dijon mustard, especially at the corner where Grey-Poupon flaunts little pots of it. We smelled Dijon cassis in the autumn, and stained our mouths with its metallic purple. But all year and everywhere we smelled the Dijon gingerbread, that pain d’épice which came perhaps from Asia with a tired Crusader.

  Its flat strange odour, honey, cow dung, clove, something unnamable but unmistakable, blew over all the town. Into the theatre sometimes would swim a little cloud of it, or quickly through a café grey with smoke. In churches it went for one triumphant minute far above the incense.

  At art school, where tiny Yencesse tried to convince the hungriest students that medal-making was a great career, and fed them secretly whether they agreed or not, altar smoke crept through from the cathedral on one side, and from the other the smell of pain d’épice baking in a little factory. It was a smell as thick as a flannel curtain.

  This is the Dijon recipe, without, of course, the mysterious quality that makes each little gingerbread shop bake loaves quite different from any others:

  Take two pounds of old black honey, the older and blacker the better, and heat it gently. When it has become a thin liquid, stir it very slowly and thoroughly into two pounds of the finest bread flour, of which about one-third is rye.

  Put this hot paste away in a cold place. It must stay there for at least eight days, but in Dijon, where pain d’épice is best, it ripens in the cold for several months or even years!

  Wait as long as you can, anyway. Then put it in a bowl and add six egg yolks, one level teaspoon of carbonate of soda, and three teaspoons of bicarbonate of soda.

  Next comes the seasoning—and it is there, I think, that lies the magic. Try these the first time, before you begin your own experimenting: some pinches of anise, a teaspoon of dry mustard, and the zest of a large lemon.

  Now beat it for a painfully long time. Put it in a buttered mould or pan and bake in a moderate oven for one hour—or less if you have divided this measure into more than one pan.

  In Dijon little gingerbread orange slices are stuffed with marmalade and glazed, or great square loaves are sliced several times and spread with apricot jam before they are put together again. Or currants and candied fruits are baked in the loaves. Or they are left plain, to be sliced very thin and be spread with sweet butter for tea.

  Whatever you do with your pain d’épice, you should put it away in waxed paper and an air-tight box. It will taste even better in two months or three.

  —from Serve It Forth, 1937

  JANE GRIGSON ON ENGLISH PUDDINGS

  English puddings have had a great reputation since the seventeenth century—perhaps earlier—and they deserve it.

  One French visitor, the protestant exile François Maximilien Misson, who came to England at the end of the seventeenth century, was lyrical in his Mémoires et Observations faites par un voyageur en Angleterre (published 1698, translated into English by John Ozell, 1719) about the unexpectedness and variety of English puddings. ‘They bake them in an oven, they boil them with meat, they make them fifty several ways: BLESSED BE HE THAT INVENTED PUDDING, for it is a manna that hits the palates of all sorts of people.’ He had in mind puddings both sweet and plain, mentioning as the most common ingredients flour, milk, eggs, butter, suet, sugar, marrow and raisins. It’s rather sad that ‘pudding,’ among ourselves, inclines to become a work of abuse. It’s true that an addiction to puddings hasn’t been exactly in favour of English teeth and waistlines, but these wonderful things are some of the most subtle and imaginative combinations, relying on simple and natural ingredients.

  Misson has described the heftier puddings including the kind eaten with gravy, or with sugar and butter. Filling, decidedly. But there’s much to be said, and more than is usually said nowadays, for a national cooking that has invented Queen of Puddings, summer pudding, syllabubs, gooseberry fool, Bakewell Pudding and that sweet concoction we now insist on calling crème brulée as if it were French and not the Burnt Cream of English cooks of the eighteenth century.

  A generous hand with the cream—not to mention butter and eggs—has been the making of many of the best English puddings. Equally their downfall has been stinginess with cream and the illusion that nobody notices if you use margarine or vegetable fat instead of butter or lard.

  Another blow has been the commercialization of puddings, premixed in packets, with skimmed milk powder, chemical flavour, chemical colour and chemical preservatives. Custard powder made in this way has been one of our minor national tragedies, also the commercial use of cornflour as a thickening substitute for eggs. It’s cornflour that has made people loathe the idea of blancmange, turning an ancient and courtly delicacy into those cold shapes derided as ‘baby’s bottom’ (‘dead man’s leg,’ ‘dead baby,’ according to shape, are school names I recall for some of the less appetizing suet puddings).

  Puddings unquestionably were some of the first victims of mass catering and manufacture. But they survive, though in their huge number they are barely explored nowadays. For instance, how many families have sat down to Sussex Pond Pudding (sometimes called Sussex Well Pudding), for which I give the recipe? Yet it is one of the best of our suet puddings. That is a slightly complicated affair, but many of the best puddings are also the simplest. There’s nothing simpler than junket flavoured with brandy, sprinkled with nutmeg and spread with clotted cream, and there’s nothing simpler than adding a quince, if you can get one, to an apple pie.

  People used to talk, still do talk occasionally, of the roast beef of old England, along with the revolting image in their minds of an overfed John Bull. My English family scenario would be candles on the dining-room table, clotted cream in a large triangular Coalport bowl patterned with blue and white flowers about to be added in large helpings to cold apple pie left over from Sunday lunch. The thought of it has buoyed children—and adults too, no doubt—through the tedium of Evensong.

  —from English Food, 1974

  WILLIAM ELLIS ON APPLE PIE

  William Ellis was an eighteenth-century Cato, a writer principally interested in agriculture who periodically wandered into the related topic of food. His books on farming, country living, and country food were extremely popular in England at the time.

  —M.K.

  Of Apple-Pyes, and Apple-Pasties, for Harvest and other Times.

  Apple pyes and pasties are a main part of a prudent, frugal farmer’s family-food, because the meal and apples that make them are commonly the produce of his land, and are ready at all times to be made use of in pyes or pasties, for giving his family an agreeable palatable repast; a covered or turn-over pasty for the field, and the round pye for the house; the first being of a make and size that better suits the hand and pocket than the round pye, and therefore are more commonly made in farmers fam
ilies; for one, or a piece of one, being carried in the plowman’s and plowboy’s pocket, sustains their hunger till they come home to dinner, and oftentimes pleases them beyond some sort of more costly eatables; nor is it less wholesome than pleasant, for that the ingredients of the apple-pye are rather antidotes against, than promoters of the scurvy. In short, it is the apple pye and pasty, and apples made use of in some other shapes (particularly the famous Parsnip apple) that I take to be some of the cheapest and most agreeable food a farmer’s family can make use of; but for displaying their value in a more elegant manner, I hope the following poem will not be unacceptable to my reader.

  Of Apple-Pyes: A poem, by Mr. Welsted.

  OF all the delicates which Britons try,

  To please the palate, or delight the eye;

  Of all the several kinds of sumptuous fare,

  There’s none that can with apple-pye compare,

  For costly flavour, or substantial paste,

  For outward beauty, or for inward taste.

  WHEN first this infant dish in fashion came,

  Th’ ingredients were but coarse, and rude the frame;

  As yet, unpolish’d in the modern arts,

  Our fathers eat brown bread instead of tarts:

  Pyes were but indigested lumps of dough,

  ’Till time and just expence improv’d them so.

  KING Coll (as ancient annals tell)

  Renown’d for fiddling and for eating well,

  Pippins in homely cakes with honey stew’d,

  Just as he bak’d (the proverb says) he brew’d.

  THEIR greater art succeeding princes shew’d,

  And model’d paste into a nearer mode;

  Invention now grew lively, palate nice,

  And sugar pointed out the way to spice.

  BUT here for ages unimprov’d we stood,

  And apple-pyes were still but homely food;

  When god-like Edgar, of the Saxon line,

  Polite of taste, and studious to refine,

  In the dessert perfuming quinces cast,

  And perfected with cream the rich repast:

  Hence we proceed the outward parts to trim,

  with crinkumcranks adorn the polish’d rim,

  And each fresh pye the pleas’d spectator greets

  With virgin fancies and with new conceits.

  DEAR Nelly, learn with care the pastry art,

  And mind the easy precepts I impart;

  Draw out your dough elaborately thin,

  And cease not to fatigue your rolling-pin:

  Of eggs and butter, see you mix enough;

  For then the paste will swell into a puff,

  Which will in crumbling sound your praise report,

  And eat, as housewives speak, exceeding short:

  Rang’d in thick order let your quincies lie;

  They give a charming relish to the pye:

  If you are wise, you’ll not brown sugar slight,

  The browner (if I form my judgment right)

  A tincture of a bright vermil’ will shed

  And stain the pippin, like the quince, with red.

  WHEN this is done, there will be wanting still

  The just reserve of cloves, and candy’d peel;

  Nor can I blame you, if a drop you take

  Of orange water, for perfuming sake;

  But here the nicety of art is such,

  There must not be too little, nor too much;

  If with discretion you these costs employ,

  They quicken appetite, if not they cloy.

  NEXT in your mind this maxim firmly root,

  Never o’er-charge your pye with costly fruit:

  Oft let your bodkin thro’ the lid be sent,

  To give the kind imprison’d treasure vent;

  Lest the fermenting liquors, mounting high

  Within their brittle bounds, disdain to lie;

  Insensibly by constant fretting waste,

  And over-run the tenement of paste.

  TO chuse your baker, think and think again,

  You’ll scarce one honest baker find in ten:

  Adust and bruis’d, I’ve often seen a pye

  In rich disguise and costly ruin lie;

  While the rent crust beheld its form o’erthrown,

  Th’ exhausted apples griev’d their moisture flown,

  And syrup from their sides run trickling down.

  O BE not, be not tempted, lovely Nell,

  While the hot piping odours strongly swell,

  While the delicious fume creates a gust,

  To lick th’ o’erflowing juice, or bite the crust:

  You’ll rather stay (if my advice may rule)

  Until the hot is temper’d by the cool;

  Oh! first infuse the luscious store of cream,

  And change the purple to a silver stream;

  That smooth balsamick viand first produce,

  To give a softness to the tarter juice.

  —from The Country Housewife’s Family Companion, 1750

  HANNAH GLASSE’S APPLE PIE

  Make a good Puff-paste Crust, lay some round the sides of the Dish, pare and quarter your Apples, and take out the Cores, lay a Row of Apples thick, throw in half your Sugar you design for your Pye, mince a little Lemon-peel fine, throw over and squeeze a little Lemon over them, then a few Cloves, here and there one, then the rest of your Apples, and the rest of your Sugar. You must sweeten to your Palate, and squeeze a little more Lemon; boil the Peeling of the Apples, and the Cores in some fair Water, with a Blade of Mace, till it is very good; strain it and boil the Syrup with a little Sugar, till there is but very little and good, pour it into your Pye, and put on your Upper-crust, and bake it. You may put in a little Quince and Marmalate, if you please.

  Thus make a Pear-pye; but don’t put in any Quince. You may butter them when they come out of the Oven; or beat up the Yolks of two Eggs, and half a Pint of Cream, with a little Nutmeg, sweetened with Sugar, and take off the Lid, and pour in the Cream. Cut the Crust in little three-corner Pieces, and stick about the Pye, and send it to Table.

  —from The Art of Cookery, Made Plain and Easy, 1747

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  A Good Drink

  ALEXANDRE DUMAS PÈRE ON COFFEE

  The plant which produces coffee is a very low, small shrub which bears fragrant flowers. Coffee comes originally from the Yemen, in Arabia Felix. At present it is cultivated in several countries. The Arab historian, Ahmet-Effendi, thinks that it was a dervish who discovered coffee, in about the fifteenth century, or in the year 650 of the Hegira.

  The first European to refer to the coffee plant was Prosper Alpin, of Padua. In 1580 he accompanied a Venetian consul to Egypt. The work of which we are speaking was written in Latin, and addressed to Jean Morazini.

  I have seen this tree in Cairo, in the gardens of Ali Bey. It is called bon or boun. With the berry which it produces, the Egyptians produce a drink which Arabs call Kawa. The taste for coffee grew to such an extent at Constantinople that the Imams complained that the mosques were deserted whereas the cafés were always full. Amurat III then permitted coffee to be consumed in private houses, as long as the doors were shut.

  Coffee was unknown in France until 1657, when the Venetians first brought it to Europe. It was introduced to France through Marseilles. It became universally used, and the doctors were alarmed about it. But their sinister predictions were treated as unreal, and the result was that, despite the arguments, the cafés were no less frequented.

  In 1669, the Ambassador from Mahomet II brought a large quantity to France and we are assured that coffee was being sold in Paris at that time for up to 40 crowns a pound.

  Posée-Oblé, in his Histoire des plantes de la Guyane, written during the reign of Louis XIII, says that in Paris, near Petit-Châtelet, the decoction made of coffee and known as cahuet was being sold. In 1676, an Armenian named Pascale established at the market of Saint-Germain a café which he later moved to the quai de
l’Ecole. He made quite a fortune out of it. But it was only at the beginning of the following century that a Sicilian called Procope re-established the coffee market at Saint-Germain. He attracted the best people in Paris, because he only provided good merchandise. Later, he set up his business in quarters opposite the Comédie Française; this new café became both a rendez-vous for theatre enthusiasts, and a battleground for literary disputes. It was in this café that Voltaire spent two hours every day. In London, during the same period, more than three thousand coffee houses were established. Mme. de Sévigné fought against the new fashion as hard as she could and predicted that Racine and the café would pass out of fashion simultaneously.

  There are five principal sorts of coffee in commerce, without counting chicory, which our cooks are bent on mixing in. The best comes from Moka in Arabia Felix, and it alone is also divided into three varieties: baouri, which is reserved for the use of the great lords, saki and salabi.

  Coffee from Réunion is highly esteemed in the trade but, even so, that from Martinique or Guadeloupe is preferred. That from Santo Domingo (Dominican Republic), which also includes Puerto Rico and other Islands of the Leeward group, is of inferior quality.

  Coffee had come into general usage in France when, in 1808, Napoleon published his decree concerning the ‘continental system’ [blockade], which was to deprive France of sugar and coffee at the same time. Beet sugar was substituted for cane sugar, and coffee was eked out by mixing it half and half with chicory. This was completely to the advantage of the grocers and cooks who took to chicory with passion and maintained that chicory mixed with coffee tasted better and was healthier. The misfortune is that even today, when the continental decree has fallen into disuse, chicory remains a part of our cooks’ repertoire and they have continued mixing a certain quantity of it with the coffee (which they buy ready ground) under the pretext of refreshing their masters. The masters responded to this situation by ordering coffee to be bought in the bean. But, in moulds made especially for this purpose, chicory paste has been made into the shape of coffee beans; and, whether one will or no, chicory has remained wedded to coffee.