Memories of Fire, Brick, and Adobe
The Wood-Oven Cook in the Mediterranean Garden
Imagining umami: We imagine food with 4 ‘primary’ tastes — unrepeatable by mixing together the others: sweet, sour, salt and bitter. Yet there is an elusive fifth primary taste: umami; this story is the search for umami on the shores and slopes of the Mediterranean.
What’s the thing about hot and sauce; it ain´t. Hot’s just a location on a synapse, a receptor on the tongue; a place of memory; an aid to motility. What’s the thing about a sauce that’s hot but spicy.
How do you get that deliciousness, flavor, relish, gusto and zest — that ‘umami’ taste or rather that flavor into the sauce? That depth of flavor: a “remembrance of lost time”; a depth covering the geography of the tongue yet evoking a memory. Smoke and time, oak and adobe layered into a sauce. A flavor sublimely evoking all of our senses: sight, hearing, smell, touch, and taste. A sauce with that flavor is surely the center of the wood-fired adobe-brick oven universe.
A recipe for such a sauce is not a list, but a journey in which the steps will never be repeated; a recipe with its list and times and procedures is a lie; food pornography perverting — only a narrative can tell this story, like a fable or a myth. If you take care of the minutes, as my friend Toddo advises, the hours will take care of themselves: it’s the journey not the destination that matters.
Nursing a coffee at a table looking over the plaza de Manzanares El Real, a small town near the source of the river that flows through Madrid, reading yesterdays text, I wondered: “Any difference between Chimichurri , hot-sauce and BBQ sauce?” Geography, culture, and time, I thought. Leaving the plaza was a Moroccan friend whom I've always greeted, but even after a decade of mutual greeting remains nameless. We know Harissa, but how is hot sauce made in Morocco. I’d been told by Said Frutero at the Moroccan owned fruit and vegetable stand how to prepare the chilies he sold me on the BBQ, then how to dress them in salt and olive oil, but what hot-sauce do they make at home? Intercepting the Moroccan as he walked by the Cafe Jara, I asked: “What do you call hot-sauce in Morocco?” “Riff”, he responded, as he thought. Many of the Moroccans I’d met in Spain were Berbers from the Riff mountains. Then he said “dajallaria”. He repeated the word, and I wrote it down and showed him. Si. Esto. En la Riff, dajallaria.
Spain is a central location in the historical geography of food, the intersection at chronotopics and food, that time-space where chilies and tomatoes arrived on Columbus’ boat over five centuries ago. Spain is where the trading ships of the Mediterranean met the silk road to the east, spreading these new foods along the way. The geography of Al Andalus combining with Asia and the newly discovered Americas. Islam, Judaism, and Christianity together in an awkward convivencia. I finished my coffee and wandered through the plaza, drenched in the early morning light of autumn, to ask Said Frutero and Kalil for the spelling of this delicious word. Said was pushing a hand cart toward the truck with the morning’s delivery. A pueblo is a wonderful place. Its your fruit store and butcher; your bar and church, but its also your encyclopedia — if you only ask.
“What do you call hot-sauce in Morocco.” He looked up at the truck driver unloading fruit. Harissa, the driver responded. Ok, but if you make it yourself. In the Riff, they call it dajallaria. Said looked at the word I’d written as it sounded. Never heard of it. We fry onion, garlic, tomato, and hot peppers in olive oil, then add some spices. Black pepper and cumin, I asked. Yes, he replied, and some others. Paprika. Ginger. Ras a hanut. The Arabs call it Lasos. We call it Tcharmera.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
- Is that your oven in the photo, Said asked.
- Yes.
- Its enormous!
- Next Sunday let’s make a tajin.
I folded the morning’s notes and took the long way home by the castle. The stories of generations written into the stone houses. They still push Mary Poppins carts in town with large brooms sticking out. I turned on the fountain and walked up the steps opening onto the rock candy pavement looping around the aljibe; water in the dry season for the heirloom chilies and tomatoes that will rise from the dainty white wooden raised beds. Rounded raised beds drawing a line around the swimming pool or fountain or aljibe — a water tank in Arabic. This garden’s form follows its function. Rounded raised beds? You try round out of rectangular boards. But Susanne demanded round for her raised beds!
My “sauce” got finished off with more extra virgin olive oil; Vinegar de Jerez; fresh chopped garlic; chives; ginger; lime; and a bunch of cilantro; both red-wine and balsamic vinegar; fresh white pepper. There is no place on your tongue to hide. I saw some joker, playing a part for a story in the NYT: “…cookbooks are mostly the same, just the stories are different.” YA! and Blues is mostly the same, just a change of venue; sex is the same, just in another bed. But no, slow-food, baked with patience and love, is never the same.
This is the story of today’s Chimmichurri hot sauce. Reduce the gallon and a half brine of Saturday’s beef ribs. (Oh… and for those yearling beef ribs. Brine for 24 hours in sea salt; cilantro stems, ginger; garlic; ground pepper; White Wine; Lime; Parsley; Rosemary; cumin; hot paprika and curcumon. All ground up into a juice. Then bake in your brick and adobe oven, preferably one designed by Susanne Mack, for 4+ hours at 180 c. Tender, with a crisp crust. 5 kilos for 6 people disappear quickly…) Add the slow-baked for 44 hours tomato sauce — Forgotten “napoletano” pizza tomato sauce for next Saturday’s pizza party — and the roasted and smoked Moroccan chilies. Add juice of 4 limes and fresh white and black ground pepper. Mix. From the last baking, make the sauce for the next.
Then bottle…
