Time got away from me

sampita

Rather than try to catch up on all the stuff I’ve cooked for the last 10 days, I'm going to pretend none of it ever happened and start fresh. But there are a few recipes and thoughts I’d be remiss if I didn’t at least mention:

-Although I stand by my contention that Sean Brock’s Heritage is impractical for home cooks, I read enough about his recipe for hoppin john to decide I had to try it for myself. So I ordered Carolina gold rice and heirloom Sea Island red peas from the revered Anson Mills and made the dish. It was spectacular, damn it. Very aggravating because if I want to eat this hoppin john again and again and again, which I do, I will have to keep ordering expensive rice and peas from Anson Mills.  

I recommend the recipe anyway.

-A new cookie in my life: Dorie Greenspan’s croquets from Baking Chez Moi. Nutty, super-crunchy, delicious, easy. If you need to use up egg whites, look no further. 

Hot Pot Island, 5512 Geary. It may not be the best hot pot place in San Francisco, but it's our hot pot place. 

-This review made me want to check out Steven Satterfield’s Root to Leaf, but it’s not yet available at the library. Has anyone seen a copy?

-Inspired by this story (and using the accompanying recipe) I made a gorgeous Montenegrin sampita for family dinner last night. Author Francis Lam describes sampita as “a plank of yolk-rich cake piled with glossy meringue, a kind of open faced marshmallow sandwich.”  I can't do any better than that. Another layer of cake would make this dessert more delicious, but then it wouldn’t look quite so magnificently absurd. How magnificently absurd? Some pictures. Really fun, tasty, sticky, ridiculous, beautiful dessert.

-Yesterday I took Mark outside and asked if he thinks we should replace our front walk. I’ve been asking him about this at intervals for the last six years, ever since the roots of the oak started to push up the concrete blocks in earnest.

I worry someone is going to trip and sue us. 

He said, “It’s good enough. We don’t have that many visitors. I think we should wait and fix the path just before we sell the house so it will look as new as possible.” 

I worry someone will slip on the slimy piece of plywood covering the mud hole and sue us.

We came inside and he said, “But if you want to fix it sooner, go ahead. Don’t worry about me. You know what I’m like.”

I worry that the condition of the front walk is liberating out our inner slobs. 

I said, “Thanks. I hired someone last week. He's starting on the 21st. I was just asking for your thoughts so I could quote you on the blog.”

I’m not sure if you think that’s funny, but he did. I’m not sure if you think our front walk needs a little facelift, but I do. 

Mostly, I just really, really hate how it looks. 

My one-track mind

some tasty almond cookies from Fancy Desserts

Oh boy, the Piglet has started and right out of the gate: No! Ryan Sutton chose Sean Brock’s Heritage over Gabrielle Hamilton’s Prune and obviously I view that as a major upset and mistake.  I’m not going to repeat all my reasons for preferring Prune, will just say that Sutton’s “(expletive omitted) cookbook review” (sic) didn’t change my mind.  

I enjoy seeing how other people experience and judge cookbooks, no matter how vehemently I disagree with their conclusions. 

I so badly wanted to blog more about the Piglet cookbooks before the tournament started, but I was getting carried away. I was walking around thinking about cookbooks all the time. Pondering what recipe I was going to test next, seeking out water kefir grains, figuring out what was wrong with Brooks Headley’s whole-wheat chocolate chip cookies (lots), wondering where I could buy chestnut flour so I could bake from Alice Medrich’s admirable Flavor Flours, trying to articulate why all the beautiful pictures of beautiful Mimi Thorisson in her beautiful Kitchen in France irritated me. I was extremely happy and thoroughly engaged. This was a problem. For about a week there, the blog became an all-consuming, unpaid full-time job and I was only growing more preoccupied with each passing day. Other projects languished. I finally had to lay myself off. 

Gentlemen, I think this is a cookbook for you.

 What I’m saying is that sometimes when I don’t post on the blog it’s not because I care too little, but because I start caring too much.

I checked both out of the library and won't buy either, but prefer A Kitchen in France.

`

We experienced a deep contentedness when feeding

Sean Brock has you impale the cauliflower on a biscuit cutter so it remains upright while cooking. 

I first became interested in Sean Brock, chef at Husk and McCrady’s in Charleston, after reading this lively New Yorker profile a few years ago. It began with an account of Brock’s love of pigs and pork, followed by a physical description of Brock: 

“Short and barrel-chested, he wears a baseball cap and T-shirt in the kitchen and keeps a stash of Slim Jims at his desk. He has small, keen eyes embedded in pink cheeks and seems to have absorbed the best qualities of his livestock. There is a placidity and a watchfulness about him, a deep contentedness when feeding, and a braying outrage when his territory is threatened. ‘I feel like this sometime,’ he told me, holding up a picture on his iPhone. It showed an angry Ossabaw hog about to charge.”

Brock is attempting to preserve venerable Southern foodways and to that end only uses ingredients from south of the Mason-Dixon line at Husk. He’s also trying to collect all the American cookbooks published in the 19th century. Fascinating guy. Last year when I heard about his book, Heritage, I promptly ordered it. The book arrived. I admired the handsome pictures, read the polished, generic prose, studied the recipes, and sighed. I wished I hadn’t bought the book and put it on the shelf. 

The rowdy personality from the New Yorker profile is absent from Heritage and the recipes are impossible. I’m not faulting Brock for the recipes -- this is how he cooks. I’m faulting myself for ordering the book sight unseen. There’s almost no dish here for which you don’t need to mail order einkorn flour, Carolina Gold rice, or black walnuts. You require a budget for truffles and foie gras, a stomach for lamb hearts and sweetbreads, a local source for wild licorice, ramps, and pokeweed, plus a dehydrator, juice extractor, immersion circulator, and sous chefs. Even just to bake Brock’s Appalachian grandmother’s apple cake, which you’d think would be one of the easier recipes, you need 27 cups of chopped apples. 

Heritage is pitted against Gabrielle Hamilton’s Prune in the Piglet and I had to really rev myself up for this little comparison project. Brock presents his recipes as super-elaborate composites, so the pork chop recipe is actually: cornmeal-fried pork chops with goat cheese-smashed potatoes and cucumber and pickled green tomato relish. The green tomato relish wasn’t happening because it’s January and I nixed the smashed potatoes because I suspected that the cauliflower was going to be trouble enough and I was right.

Stripped of trappings, the pork chops turned out to be a breeze. You pound the chops until thin and supple, like fabric, and soak in buttermilk overnight. When you’re ready to cook, dredge them in cornmeal and fry in a lots of oil. They were fantastic -- crispy on the outside, tender on the inside, and really bad for you. They easily trumped the sturdy gray chops from Prune. Unanimous. Point went to Sean Brock on the chops. 

tiny, stackable mise-en-place bowls made by my sister, who really needs to open an etsy store

I haven’t tackled a recipe as absurd as Brock’s roasted cauliflower with Meyer lemon and brown butter, watercress and pink peppercorns in years. Abridged narrative that you should feel free to skip: Cook cauliflower whole on the stove top while basting in butter, then roast in oven. Remove stem, peel, and slice the stem’s tender core. Reserve. Slice cauliflower head into serving portions. Make a puree from cauliflower scraps, broth, and cream. Make a sauce of browned goat butter, lemon, turmeric, and home-pickled ramps. (I substituted capers.) The kitchen is now a heartbreaking mess, but you’re almost ready to eat: Pour puree from the blender onto warm plates, top with cauliflower slices, add some watercress leaves and the reserved pieces of cauliflower stem. Drizzle with brown butter sauce and garnish with lemon zest and pink peppercorns.

Only I could make Brock's dainty cauliflower look like a hearty Asian soup.

The cauliflower was a bit too crunchy and the puree too thin, for which I fault the inadequately detailed recipe.But there’s no denying that on that ugly little plate were delicate, beautiful, evanescent flavors that you seldom experience in home kitchens and never in mine. This dish had hints of greatness. I can’t really describe it better than that without going all purple on you. By comparison, Gabrielle Hamilton’s roasted cauliflower seemed tasty, rude, and workmanlike. 

And yet I feel about Heritage exactly as I did going into this experiment. The needle didn’t move. The book is attractive, way too fussy for a home cook, generically written, and full of opulent dishes that I’d like to eat -- at a restaurant.  Prune is voicy, obnoxious, and sui generis, full of strange, dumpy things I have no interest in making, let alone paying for in a restaurant (canned sardines with Triscuits?), but also eccentric dishes I can’t stop thinking about. Prune engages me, Heritage doesn’t. For me there’s no contest here, Prune all the way.

The word for the day is "plain"

The plastic handle of my spatula melted onto the surface of the stove last night because I was trying to write the previous blog post while cooking dinner. I will miss that nimble little spatula. She was my favorite. If you ever see one of those flexible old granny spatulas with the super-thin, corroding metal edges and half-melted plastic handles at a garage sale, buy it. If you foolishly don’t want it for yourself, send it to me and I will reimburse you. 

As previously mentioned, I decided to compare the pork chops and roasted cauliflower recipes from Prune and Sean Brock’s Heritage in anticipation of the upcoming Piglet. I suspected this might not be the most exciting blog stunt and now, having cooked the pork chops and cauliflower from Prune, I am sure.  But I will stick to the plan.

Alda

Gabrielle Hamilton’s recipe for salt and pepper pork chops is so simple and stern that I couldn’t imagine it would work. This is a recipe borrowed from her revered Italian mother-in-law, Alda, to whom Hamilton devotes a whole chapter in Prune. There’s a lovely paean to Alda and her old-school cooking here, though I can’t promise you won’t hit a paywall. I’ve said it before: Gabrielle Hamilton can really write. 

Do you have your magnifying glass out? 

To make these chops, you heat a dry skillet until blazing hot, season sirloin pork chops with salt and pepper, put them in the pan and cook for five minutes, flip, cook eight minutes more, remove to a platter and smear with soft butter. Hamilton: “Do not garnish.” 

How were they? Plain. Appreciated. No weird spices, no questionable sauce. There’s a lot to be said for plain food served at an old dining room table on a mid-winter Monday night after a long hard day of school, work, and looking at Oriental rugs on eBay. If I ordered these pork chops in a special restaurant like Prune, though, I would be bummed.

Hamilton’s whole roasted cauliflower with fried capers and brown butter bread crumbs was also very easy. The name says it all, but here’s the two sentence blow by blow: Roast cauliflower whole with a lot of olive oil for 50 minutes then transfer to serving bowl. Fry some capers and breadcrumbs in butter and scatter this over the cauliflower. 

How was it? Zingy from the capers, crunchy from those buttery breadcrumbs. Appreciated. If I ordered this in a restaurant like Prune I wouldn’t be overjoyed, but I would be satisfied. It’s a good one.

As a bonus, I “whipped up” Hamilton’s pizza rustica, an Alda recipe that I was curious about because, like the pork chops, it looked so plain I couldn’t imagine how it could possibly be good. You make a dough of flour, egg, and butter, put half of it in the bottom of a pan, top with fresh mozzarella season with salt and pepper, top with the other half of the dough, and bake. You do mess up your counter when you roll out the dough, but otherwise, a cinch.

How was it? Warm, it was plain in the most wonderful way, a soft, unchallenging, buttery, cheesy pastry. Cold, it was plain in a bad way, inert and flavorless. So eat it warm. Recipe here, though again, there might be a paywall.

Tonight: Sean Brock’s version of this same meal, minus the pizza. 

blizzard?