split banana announcement

If you are in Staunton Va. one of these days, make sure to visit the new ice cream parlor The Split Banana on 7 West Beverley Street just beside the Baja Bean Co. They’re opening today, March 17.

I was one of the first to put a crowbar between some planks on the first renovation day last October. That was about all I ever did at the Split Banana. (Look. I was on vacation.) Being snowbound in a side street of West Sweden at the moment of writing, I’m not there to test their products and to make snarky hands-in-my-pockets remarks about their work flow.

Split Banana’s ice cream was presented for the first time yesterday at an open house of Taylor & Boody, organbuilders (here’s the page). Private rumor has crossed the ocean that it was “wonderful.” Today it is 43 degrees F in Staunton and sunny, good enough for some real-ingredients shop-made ice cream, no?

back to the roots - labskaus

Labskaus belongs to my childhood food. As I learned to know it, it was a mishmash of potatoes, red beets and some other fillings a child is unable to analyze, and it came with a pickle wedge (or is it wedge of pickle), a pickled herring of one or another sort and a fried egg. This is, more or less, how my mom makes labskaus. She’ll chime in and protest, I’m sure: labskaus is, in fact, not a recipe: it is once through the pantry and back. Of course, we’re talking a ship’s pantry.

My thoughts keep returning to Daffy Duck and the line, halfway into the cartoon “Duck Amuck”: “Thea picture, eh? I alwayth wanted to do a thea epic,” (I did supply a YouTube link, but it died). So, yes, when I looked on the web for orrriginal labskaus recipes, fantasies of twenty hungry sailors, of a stiff breeze and of shrieks of greedy gulls started forming in my mind. Here’s a list of ingredients with which someone’s father used to cook true navy-style labskaus forty years ago: 5 kilogram (11 lbs) of salted pork, same amont of salted beef. 8 kg (17 1/2 lbs) potatoes, the non-fluffy kind. 2 1/2 kg (5 1/2 lbs) onions. 1 1/4 kg (2 3/4 lbs) butter. Pickled herring and eggs to serve.

The author of this writes that those recipes that add red beets to the mash are Not Authentick; the red color of labskaus comes from the salted meat. I have an issue with red beets: they upset my stomach and give me a headache. One day shortly after a lunch with warm beets, a neighbor’s kid split my head open with a huge enameled green pan that functioned as a toy in his sandbox (I was about five years old). I saw too much red on that day. A good reason to test the sea picture mash. Since there are no twenty hungry sailors here who have been scraping rust or done whatever else sailors do in the cold for a whole morning I scaled the total amount down a bit, as can be seen on the pictures.

The meats are boiled in separate pans, “until firm to the bite” (I wonder what they were before boiling, but okay…), as well as the potatoes.
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liver?? liver.

Another one of the conventions that apply to TV cooking shows (see my previous post) is clearly that things need to look nice, and that everyone should sound like they taste nice as well. On this German show a few days ago, one person fried slices of liver.

There was a pedagogical episode where he pared off the skin and the (as Marcella Hazan calls them) “large gristly tubes.” This is an absolutely necessary, and rather fiddly, administration. One of the common horrors of liver consumption is one’s bite-for-bite confrontation with tough bits of membrane. The meticulous cleaning is the very thing that makes liver possible.

Then came a rather more dubious episode where the slices entered a frying pan and stayed there altogether too long.

crêpe nonsticce

Prologue: I am making a batch of crêpes or pancakes. I am using a cast-iron frying pan that has been around for a while, so it behaves almost like a non-stick pan. I’m using whichever oil or fat I have - no, I actually use sunflower oil. The first pancake sticks to the pan. After that, no pancake ever sticks to the pan again.

There is this German cooking show, where Johannes B. Kerner jogs around and breathes down the assorted necks of a couple of chefs and cooks, who are preparing a joint dinner, and says “ist ja toll” and “hmmmm!” and other friendly things. Luckily, Kerner doesn’t sign up to the tradition of making painfully distorted faces every time he tries something. German TV is improving.

mushroom salad

This recipe from my secret private archive was originally planned as an ingredient to a Nice-style mixed vegetable salad, private brand. Because I wanted the mushrooms to assume a vinegary garlicky character before adding them to the salad, I prepared them ahead of time. Then there was no Nice-style mixed vegetable salad. I decided to have the mushrooms as a dish of their own, and this is how:

Prepare a bowl big enough to hold the mushroom slices after cooking, with a mix of nice vinegars, such as half red, half white wine vinegar, chopped garlic to taste (without the green inner part - they say it’s hard to digest and keeps you awake at night; an effect that is probably caused by some sort of ancient voodoo charm),

ithaca brunch sausage

Ithaca, NY. One grey October Sunday morning in 1999, I was shockingly out of supplies for breakfast. After an hour or so of mental dry-spinning - a consequence of my yawny hungry-ness - I fetched my coat and went down the hill to see where I’d find some food. First I meandered through the whole downtown without much success. When I finally entered the DeWitt mall, the cafe was just about to open, and completely empty.

Cafe DeWitt lies right across the world-famous Moosewood restaurant.

kitchen alchemy spaghetti with spinach

Robin tells me that I have to post tonight’s recipe, which is another one of those that don’t seem to be anything special at all, but in reality are true kitchen alchemy (make gold with…youknow)

The idea is to combine Spaghetti aglio e olio with olive-oil fried spinach.

onion cubing techniques

I made beef stew tonight. No. I made gorgeous white wine and onion stew with beef bits tonight. During the preparation, I took care to re-visit the technique of “dicing an onion” put forward in Christopher Kimball’s The Cook’s Bible (p. 59), a great book with lots of nice and informative illustrations. However, in the manner of Bibles, not everything is equally well explained and a lot of the content is left to the belief of the reader. The onion cutting technique is one of these topics.

Kimball tells us that the onion is first halved. Then - onion-half flat on the cutting board - one makes “a series of horizontal cuts parallel to the work surface” before making the north-south cuts and the east-west cuts known from home cooking. For the horizontal cuts and for the north-south cuts, Kimball quotes the technique of “some chefs” to stop short with the cut before the root end, in order to keep the onion together.

And that is where I begin to lose it.

the funny peté bean

Sator, or stink (or stinky) bean, is used in Thai and Indonesian cooking. In Holland it is most of the time called Peté in a modernized frenchified spelling.

We are talking about beans of the shape of a thumbnail or slightly larger, and about as thick as half a pencil. Their color is most inspiring: a difficult to define, solid pastel green that lacks most of the watery translucency normally associated with peas and green beans. Through their appearance alone, peté beans speak to us of far away countries and unknown customs. In one of Louis Couperus’s numerous novels (I forget which), a colonial poisoning during an extended meal has to take place. In the Dutch filmed version this event is duly introduced by showing how a large dish of peté beans in a hot red pepper sambal is being brought into the dining hall. In the subdued lighting and the stuffy late-nineteenth century setting they wink at us, out of their red sauce, in a most sinister way. Long before there are actual deaths to report, we shiver and huddle together.

small improvements

Someone on ask metafilter is asking for new hamburger recipes. Funny that people actually know what to answer. I mean, we’re talking about hamburgers. What I would find interesting with hamburgers is how they are cooked, technique-wise. This is much more important than what happens in terms of authenticity if I mix another teaspoon full of this, that or the other into the burger mix. Spices and combinations can be improvised, cooking techniques much less so. A spoiled burger remains spoiled, no matter whether we’ve added thyme or not.

The small good things that happen in the kitchen have little to do with recipes. They are about spending tiny bits of time on actions that make all the difference. Reducing watery matter is one such example.