oh my

First of all: user-friendliness.  This is a talking point I meant to introduce early on, but I keep changing my mind about whether I want to quantify it.  Obviously I think any food I blog about is worth eating, but some foods are more user-friendly than others, by which I mean they are less likely to alienate, confuse, or upset someone trying them for the first time. Just as obviously, what is normal to you depends on where you live and how you grew up, and when I make these generalizations I'm going to assume a typical American background, because it would be a pain in the ass to add a lot of qualifiers every time.  For instance, when I list "goat's milk cheese" under "might be bothered by," I realize that on the one hand, Americans whose parents skewed towards the hippie or the yuppie may well have grown up with goat cheese, and won't be bothered by it at all; and that on the other hand, if you come from a culture where cheese itself isn't part of the cuisine, any cheese becomes less user-friendly.

By and large I try to leave out user preconceptions when considering user-friendliness.  A kangaroo steak, for instance, is perfectly unremarkable until one starts thinking of it as kangaroo, at which point some people get all weirded out that they're eating an animal Grandma never prepared for them.  Those kinds of hang-ups are too arbitrary and unevenly distributed to account for.

Foods a first-timer will not be bothered by: peach crisp, buffalo, sheep's milk cheese, Asian pears, tomato jam.

Foods a first-timer might be bothered by: goat's milk cheese, pork belly, candied jalapenos or other uses of appreciable levels of spice in sweets, raw oysters, raw fish.

Foods a first-timer is likely to be bothered by: most organ meats, boiled crawfish (particularly if the first-timer has never had lobster or crab either), double-salted licorice, bitter liqueurs (particularly if the drinker buys something commonly available like Jagermeister, Campari, or Pimm's and drinks it straight, not knowing what else to do with it).

Foods that can be traumatic for the first-timer: durian, natto, uni, fermented shark, turkey soda.

Clearly many people will not be bothered by anything on this list, regardless of prior familiarity, or will be perfectly okay with everything up until "traumatic," or will have their own arbitrary list of foods they don't like for reasons that may make sense to them.  That doesn't mean the differences in these rough groupings don't exist, just as adult readers don't see significant differences between a third grade reading level and a sixth grade reading level.  It's still a useful way to generalize; if you're cooking for parties unknown, serving kidney and licorice is a different proposition than serving chicken and potatoes.

Food that isn't user-friendly isn't unpleasant, just unfamiliar or contrary to expectation.  Obviously you can become more friendly with it.

One reason to talk about user-friendliness is because of that divorce from hang-ups and preconceptions.  I don't give a shit if you think beef cheeks sound weird.  If I serve them to you as beef stew, it'd never even occur to you to ask what cut of meat it is, unless you're really food-literate, in which case you probably wouldn't be bothered by beef cheeks to begin with.  But I do give a shit that if I serve you pigs ears, the cartilage gives them a bit of an unusual texture, which is worth giving you a heads-up about.

Pigs ears are objectively weird in a way beef cheeks are not.

All of this implies a map, a paradigm, a frame of reference.  So.  On to the pie part thereof.

Pie

American cuisine includes the increasingly dominant national cuisine, the ethnic cuisines which may or may not be syncretized, and the regional cuisines which wax and wane but mostly wane in prominence.  

At the national level, sweet pies come in a small number of varieties: fruit pies using chopped fruit (almost always berries, apples, or peaches); custard or cream pies; and citrus pies such as key lime or lemon meringue.  There are four main types of lemon pie: cornstarch-thickened, lemon curd, sweetened condensed milk, and Shaker lemon pie, which isn't unique to Shakers at all and which uses whole sliced lemons.  Lime pie is never made that way, the rind and pith aren't palatable enough.

Then there are a great many regional pies, some of which may continue to enjoy mainstream popularity in their home region (particularly if, like huckleberry pie, they are compatible with the national-cuisine pie paradigm), some of which have become more rare.  Various examples include rhubarb or strawberry-rhubarb pie, bean pie, raisin pie, sugar-cream pie, shoofly pie, vinegar pie, pecan pie, and Derby pie.

Buttermilk pie is right about at the goat cheese level of user-friendliness.  It's a custard pie, but the tang of buttermilk puts it outside the normal paradigmatic experience of custard.  There's a long history of taking pantry staples -- milk, eggs, sugar, flour -- and turning them into a pie by finding something to add to contribute flavor other than just sweetness, whether it's the lemon or lime in citrus pies, the cinnamon and cloves in Bob Andy pie, the vinegar in vinegar pie, etc.  These are pies that predate the availability of sacks of frozen fruit or Chilean blueberries in the supermarket -- pies that could be made when there was no fruit to be had, though they also work well to complement the fresh fruit of summer and fall.

Closely related here is chess pie, which I consider the best of all year-round pies (as opposed to pies made with in-season fruit, a whole nother genre).  The key ingredient in chess pie is cornmeal.  We'll talk about it another time.  Like some time when we make chess pie.  Hold your horses.

Buttermilk was my favorite pie until I got my chess pie just right, and the truth is, I sometimes muddle the difference between the two, by using buttermilk in my chess pie.  Some people flavor their buttermilk pie with small amounts of lemon juice, cinnamon, or some other additive, and in fact if you google around, you will find plenty of people who think buttermilk pie is always made that way; as with any regional or niche food, people often don't realize that the variation familiar to them is not the only authentic choice.  I usually prefer it without such additives -- though I don't think I will ever be someone who drinks buttermilk, and I'm generally not even a fan of buttermilk salad dressings (my salad dressing selections are basically 1940s chophouse: vinaigrette, sweet and sour, Catalina, Green Goddess), in a pie I prefer the pure tangy taste of buttermilk.

However.  I had peaches to use, and it's the tail end of the fresh peach season, and I thought, hey, what about a peach buttermilk pie?  Normally I'd say the best use for a fresh peach is simply to eat it, but New Hampshire peaches ... well, they are perhaps best when they're cooked.  I'm spoiled by the peaches of, believe it or not, Indiana, which though still the north has a long enough growing season and hot enough summer for a lot of produce associated with the south to thrive there.  I ate a couple dozen delicious fresh peaches this summer, peaches so juicy you can't eat them in polite company ... but they were shipped from an orchard in Georgia.  The local ones, I cook with.

I roasted two peaches, because I didn't want them leaking a lot of liquid while cooking in the pie, and making those weird pockets fruit can make when they're surrounded by custard.  Because I roasted them peeled at a high temperature without sugar, I lost about half a peach to charred bits that I removed before dicing the peach and combining with the buttermilk filling.  

This recipe makes slightly too much filling for the size of pie pan that I have, but that always happens with buttermilk pie.  There are all kinds of ratios you can use for a pie like this, a huge variety of proportions out there.  This is just one version:

1 stick butter, softened

1 1/3 cups sugar

3 eggs

1 1/2 cups buttermilk

spoonful of flour, dash of salt, dash of bourbon

Cream butter and sugar together, combine remaining ingredients, fold in diced roasted peaches, add to pie crust, bake for about an hour at 325.

take your protein pills

My third time using my juicer, I decided to juice the two bags of cranberries that were taking up needed space in the "so full you would not believe it" freezer (I mean, I don't have room for the ice cube tray).  They were there just in case I wanted to have Thanksgiving in May or something, you know, since my local supermarket only carries cranberries in the fall.  But it's fall now.  So they no longer needed to be saved.

I got a scant cup of juice.  Part of that is that my juicer isn't all that efficient, I think, but I imagine cranberries aren't terribly juicy either.  The stuff you buy in the store is usually sweetened and diluted.  This was ... dark as beet blood.  If beets had that.  And tart.

So it became cocktails, obviously.

Not-a-Cosmopolitan:

3 oz unsweetened cranberry juice

3 oz gin

1 1/2 oz Campari

1/2 oz St Germain

(Play with proportions as you like.  I also made variations with Creole Shrubb -- any orange liqueur would work -- instead of the St Germain, but the orange flavor of that is pronounced enough that I felt it overwhelmed the cranberry.)

Hangover remedy:

2 Goody's headache powders

200ml Fever Tree Bitter Lemon

bears battlestar galactica

I would suggest you get in the comfortable chair for this one, this meal's got a lot of ground to cover.

Let's talk about a few specific elements.

Corn.

Corn is pretty great.  I don't know what I'd do without the foods of the New World.  Even apart from the fact that corn kernels are the best canned vegetable and the best frozen vegetable -- though they experience some loss of flavor and texture, it's not nearly as pronounced as in most vegetables -- the sheer variety of forms corn can take is fucking staggering.  Let's break it down:

Cob and kernels.  Self-explanatory.  As demonstrated, usable to make caramel.  Note in passing that corn is the most underrated of all chowders, capable of excellence with only three ingredients (corn, cream, salt), though five is better (+bacon, +hot sauce).

Cornmeal.  Ahhh, cornbread.  When the weather is colder, I'll show you some couche couche, a fantastic and criminally little-known cereal made with cornmeal.  Cornmeal is also the basis for corn chips, tortillas, etc., and while I don't share the enthusiasm for corn dogs that some possess, I am an ardent supporter of fried cornmush.  Cornflour, similar to cornmeal but finer, is found primarily in fry mixes for chicken or fish, especially in the South.

Grits.  Superficially similar to coarse cornmeal, grits are made from coarsely ground corn (ideally stone-ground).  If you're a Yankee or foreigner, you probably haven't had grits.  You're missing out.  Soft and silky when first cooked, grits solidify when cooled, and can be reheated for a texture that's hard to describe, though similar to fried cornmush -- sometimes crispy on the outside, softer on the inside, somewhat like a French fry.  Grits are often compared to polenta but aren't quite the same, if only because the varieties of corn themselves differ -- just as slightly different varieties of corn are used for all these other corn forms.

Hominy.  Especially big kernels of corn that have been nixtamalized (treated with an alkaline solution) and hulled, which makes the corn more digestively useful, and therefore features in the cuisines native to the New World which were dependent on corn, as opposed to those cuisines which have developed subsequently which typically rely on flour (or rice, in Louisiana and the Carolinas) for their principal starch.  It's no coincidence that hominy survives in Mexican and southern cuisine, where corn has historically been most important.  But nevermind that: hominy has a very light corn flavor and a sort of spongy texture that's hard to compare to anything else.  It's amazing at soaking up flavors, which is why it is the key component of posole, one of the world's great soups.  Dried and reconstituted hominy is far superior to the easier to find canned stuff.

Popcorn.  Come on.  Awesome.  I still vividly remember the introduction of Smartfood.  My brother and I regularly argue over who will inherit my mother's popcorn popper, a standalone electric unit which uses oil in a curved bowl to pop the popcorn.  Air-popped popcorn, which displaced such units in the marketplace, and microwave popcorn, absolutely suck in comparison to oil-cooked popcorn, whether popped in a standalone unit or on the stovetop. 

Huitlacoche.  Technically not corn, this is a fungus -- a mushroom, if you're a marketer -- that grows on ears of corn, to the consternation of some and the delight of others.  It has only really been adopted by Mexican cuisine, perhaps because they call it huitlacoche, while gringos call it "corn smut."  The flavor is actually very subtle -- a little earthy, like cocoa powder without the acidity.

BOLD BOLD BOLD HELLO THERE.  Lima beans.  BOLD BOLD BOLD SHAZAM.  God, so many people hate lima beans, but here's the thing: the dried ones are not very good; the frozen ones are only okay; the canned ones are terrible (get canned butter beans instead).  You want to get them fresh, and they have a brief season.  Ideally, lima beans are slightly sweet, with a creamy texture.  They get mealier if they get bigger, and since my limas come from my mother's garden, where generally things are let to grow as big as possible, the ones I'm using do lean in that direction.  But I'm an experienced and satisfied lima-eater, I'm okay with that.  They're just not what I'd consider conversion limas.

"Lima beans" isn't bolded because every time I bold it, my browser crashes, even when all I do is restart the browser, open up Blogger, open up this draft, and do nothing but highlight "lima beans" and then press the bold button.  True story.  What the fuck, Blogger?  Motherfuck.  Fourth fucking time in a row now!  Pisswhistler.  I have employed an alternate means of emphasis.

Beets.  It was a long time before I loved beets, because I had grown up with Harvard beets -- pickled beets -- and was never fond of them.  I discovered plain old regular beets in New Orleans, and for whatever reason they became my standard side dish with fried fish.  Beets have a sweet (remember Mrs Howell?) and earthy flavor, and are sort of potato-like in texture, though they neither fry nor mash as well as potatoes do.  They're very forgiving when you roast or boil them in their skins, which then rub or peel off easily.

The stems -- which have a similar flavor to the beets, but lighter -- and greens (sweetish, tender) are both edible.

Lunch, then, consists of:

Succotash, which I have talked about before, a traditional dish of lima beans and corn.  I added tomatoes and sweet pepper in this case.

Beet "confit."  I covered slices of peeled beet in duck fat and cooked them at a low temperature until tender.

Smoked grits cake.  The grits were cooked in the stovetop smoker with salt and butter, and then combined with diced ham and my aforementioned "lactic corn," before being refrigerated.  A slice of the refrigerated grits was reheated in a pan with just enough butter to keep them from sticking.

the mayor of simpleton

This is a short post about a big area: candied fruit.  It's short because I can't improve on, nor claim as my own, these instructions for the basic two-week process of candying fruit.  That said, there are many ways to do it, and if some other method sounds better to you, go for it.

I've been candying fruit for years, and not to toot my own horn, but I play around with it more than I have seen others do.  So these are my comments on it in general:

1: Citrus performs terrifically.  Berries don't.  Apples, pears, and quince don't -- they become all sweetness with no flavor.  The basic process here replaces all of the water in the fruit with a very rich sugar syrup, which makes for a very sweet product, and not all flavors stand up to that.  Pineapple and cherries are the best non-citrus options.  I kinda think it's not coincidence that the typical mix of fruit in a fruitcake is ... citrus, pineapple, and cherry.

2: Chile peppers perform very well.  I've made several "tropical boomcakes" -- fruitcakes flavored with slices of candied habanero and pineapple, rum, ginger, and cinnamon.  Using habanero, it's not hard to make a fruitcake that's spicier than any commercial product this side of hot sauce.  But jalapeno and other chiles have great flavors that go well with sweetness.  Last year I made "jalapeno poppers," using candied whole jalapenos, filled with a ganache of caramelized white chocolate and Seville orange rind.

3: There is no reason the syrup cannot have flavor in it.

That's what I mean by doing more than I've seen other people do.  It started with saffron-flavored candied pineapple, when I was first experimenting with sweet applications of saffron five years ago (best results: saffron/vanilla bean ice cream, or saffron dulche de leche baked into the top of brownies).  I've used ginger in the syrup for candying habanero, and made a reasonable jar of sugar plums using "Christmas spices" to flavor small candied plums.

The above photo is of two examples: a lemon slice candied with tea infused syrup, which will probably find its way into a lemonade cake; and my pride and joy, the Coca Cola cherry.

Imagine the cherry orchard behind Willy Wonka's chocolate factory, some years after its acquisition by the Coca-Cola Company.  You pick a fresh, tart, Balaton cherry, and take a bite.  It tastes like Cherry Coke, but -- not quite.  Because the cherry element, the fruit flavor, tastes not like Hubba Bubba bubblegum but like a real, fresh cherry -- and somehow all the Coca-Cola flavor is there too.

It's pretty fucking great.  I just used Coca-Cola fountain syrup as my candying syrup, and boosted it with sugar until the cherries became candied.  Think of the soda that the leftover syrup will make!

You can also make very simple "sour patch" candies by taking candied fruit that has been taken out of the syrup and left to dry some, and then rolling it in a combination of granulated sugar and citric acid.

There's a lot of potential down this road.

got me going around

You go to the supermarket, and right away you're faced with thirty herb and spice options.  Various leaves, berries, buds, twigs, and seeds were picked somewhere, dried and ground somewhere, packed into little canisters, and they all serve the same basic purpose -- to add significant amounts of flavor to your food, with insignificant or negligible nutritional effect.  Ounce for ounce, they're many times more expensive than whatever you're putting them on, despite being much cheaper than they used to be.

Cuisines, though they also consist of cooking techniques and often substantial differences in the nature of that "whatever" that the spices are being put on, tend to become associated with a particular palette of spices, to the extent that you can pick up a jar of "Turkish seasoning" or "Tex Mex popcorn seasoning" or what have you.  That supermarket with all those canisters is a recent addition, after all, and it's only in the 21st century that cooks are starting to take advantage of the near-universal availability of ingredients and pair them according to chemical compatibility rather than older, traditional associations.

When it comes to produce and meat, availability has historically been determined mostly by environment -- one reason there are fewer beef recipes in the South, for instance, is because the land is not as suited for grazing, nor was ranching as suitable to the southern economy.  But long before modern transportation brought ground beef to Athens, GA, and Rangpur limes to Nashua, NH, the spice trade was impacting world cuisines by altering palettes not according to environment but in response to trade relationships.  Unlike meat, unlike even the sturdiest root vegetables, spices are almost imperishable -- and their per-ounce price makes them well-suited for importing.

It's a myth that people used spices to conceal spoiled meat.  They used them for the same reason you and I do: they fucking taste good.  And although we can get them cheaper, earlier eras were more profligate with their spicing, ignoring the "sweet/savory" divide that has developed more recently in the way we approach our spice cabinet.  Only in the cheap white sugar era does anyone consider the addition of chile peppers to chocolate a novelty.  Aztecs and conquistadors were combining the two centuries ago -- just as the Italians were adding rosemary to cakes, cooks in the Levant were stewing lamb with dried apricots and cloves, the British were making candied carrots and turnips, and the Greeks were adding cinnamon to meaty tomato sauce for pastitsio.

While some European countries may not have had access to cinnamon until much later, it was found in ancient Greece and Rome thanks to the trade routes from China, which passed through Persia on the way west (Persia's palette is deeply impacted by its position at the center of the East-West trade network).  Its fragrance and durability made it a real workhorse in the kitchen -- far from being limited to sweet applications, in parts of the world it became the most common meat seasoning, much like black pepper in medieval Europe (or today, for that matter) and paprika in Hungary.  (Much of the earlier cinnamon was actually cassia, which is a subject for another time.)

Pastitsio, like lasagna and chili, is one of the world's great casseroles.  The name -- well, you can probably figure the name out for yourself; it means "hodgepodge," the word pastiche having been derived from it (which is clearer in the "Pulp Fiction is a pastiche of pulp fiction" sense than the "The Mighty Ducks is a pastiche of The Bad News Bears" sense).  I imagine the dish is probably older than Greece's use of tomatoes, and was previously made with a brown meat sauce, but I don't know that for sure.

Pastitsio at first glance looks like a simpler lasagna: it's a baked layered dish that includes pasta, meat, tomato, and dairy.  Unlike lasagna's sometimes-frustrating flat noodles, pastitsio traditionally uses tubular pasta of one kind or another.  And very unlike most Italian or Italian-American cooking, cinnamon is a prominent element in the tomato sauce, which is often very strongly seasoned in order to stand up to the richness of the cream sauce.

I don't have a decent photo and I don't want to wait until I get one to blog this, so these are the elements:

Pasta: any tube pasta, cooked and mixed with the bechamel.

Meat sauce: lamb would traditionally be used, ground beef is a common substitute.  I used chopped pulled pork, having bought a pork picnic cheaply at the supermarket -- it's a handy form of protein, because the bone makes such good stock, and you get both cracklings and meat out of the deal, but after a couple pulled pork sandwiches I'm always looking for something else to make.  Now, like chili, the meat sauce for pastitsio invites complexity.  Tomato and cinnamon are traditional.  In addition to that, I used three kinds of oregano (Greek, Cuban, and Mexican, which are actually three separate species, not just varieties of oregano), a cup of Dogfish Head Red & White beer, a little pork stock, onions, sweet Italian peppers, a little allspice, significant amounts of fennel pollen, and just enough chile pepper to create a noticeable heat.

Bechamel: make a white roux of equal amounts of butter and flour, cooking for just a couple minutes; add milk and cook until thick.  Season, in this case, with cinnamon and fennel pollen, and then add shredded Pecorino Romano cheese.  Remove from heat and beat in a few eggs.  Not everyone uses eggs; some use more than a few, so that the top layer of the pastitsio becomes custard-like.

Layers, bottom to top:

A layer of half the pasta mixed with bechamel;

all the meat sauce;

the remaining pasta mixed with bechamel;

the remaining bechamel, if there's any to spare;

additional shredded cheese, such as more Pecorino Romano or a little low-moisture mozzarella.

Crazy good.

shiny boots of leather

Oh, I can only imagine how thrilled you must be that I'm going to blog about beets and lima beans this week.  But look, there is a weird divide in much of American culture, between meat and vegetables.  They're not enemies, for heaven's sake.  Eating animals shouldn't mean not eating plants.  We non-vegetarians are supposed to be more inclusive than that.

I'm a big fan of greens.  95% of the time, I make them southern-style -- cooked for a long, long time (sometimes days) in rich pork stock.  This is a dish from the other 5%.  You probably don't think of milk and cream as having a season, and that's reasonable -- because for most of us, most of the time, the milk and cream we buy ... doesn't.  However, if you have access to cream from an actual dairy -- you know, sold in glass bottles and everything, milked from cows down the road -- the peak of the season was a couple months ago, and what the cows are producing now (while they're still grazing and eating grass, not just winter feed) is still noticeably better and richer stuff.  So as counterintuitive as it seems, the warmer months are a good time to cook with cream.

There's a long tradition of serving creamed spinach in steakhouses, and a number of methods for making it.  Most home recipes seem to use roux, or to cook the spinach down in the cream; mine does neither.  You can do this with any young green -- beets, collards, Marlboro freshmen (that's a Vermont joke, y'all), whatever -- but be careful with the older ones, because the greens won't actually cook very long.  Also, keep in mind that greens cook down a lot -- I used the greens of three beets for one serving, along with the diced stems of one.

The main thing about this method is that you want to cook the cream and the greens separately, and then combine them, so that you don't have greens cooking forever while the cream reduces, and you don't have greens sitting in a pool of cream on your plate.  Within that, do what you like.  Nutmeg is the traditional flavoring; I used a little red chile powder instead.  Ginger is a common pairing with beet, and French four-spice would work well.

Cook the cream by reducing it in a pan, with your seasonings, until very very reduced -- I mean, some of the fat should start to separate out.  It doesn't matter if you start with heavy cream, light cream, half and half, whatever.

Blanch the greens by dropping into boiling water for a minute, dropping into ice water, and then squeezing very hard (squeeze small handfuls at a time) to mostly dry them out, before chopping up small.

You can do both of those steps way in advance.  A couple days if you like.  When you're ready to serve, heat a little butter in a pan until starting to brown -- add the diced beet stems if you're using them, or a little onion or garlic or what have you -- then add the greens and the cream, and stir until heated through.  Salt sufficiently.  You should end up with something both rich and fresh-tasting.  Tada.

Well hang on, one more thing on pizza, because if I hold it all for the big long pizza post, it's gonna be too long for anybody to read:

Umami Pizza Sauce:

Tomato base: Roast a quantity of good flavorful tomatoes until they have lost quite a lot of liquid; do not use salt.  Remove skins and puree; you can strain the seeds out, but don't need to.  If good flavorful fresh tomatoes aren't available to you, puree a can of San Marzano tomatoes and cook until thickened.

Aromatics, any or none of the following, diced and sauteed: onion, fennel, sweet pepper.

Aromatics, any or none of the following, pureed with the tomato base: garlic, carrot, charred onion, sweet pepper, hot pepper.

Umami/salt component: fish sauce to taste, or anchovies pureed with the tomato base, or soy sauce.  You can also simmer parmesan rinds (sometimes available cheaply at your supermarket) in the tomato base and then strain them out.  You should use a sufficient quantity of your umami component so that you don't need to add salt.

Let sit in the fridge for at least one day.  Include a hard grating cheese -- Pecorino Romano, aged gouda, Parmesan, etc -- in the cheese element of the pizza.

Always sauce your pizza lightly.  More heavily sauced pizza styles are perfectly fine if that's what you like ... but not when you're working with a home oven.