Contemporaneous Notes on “The Lost Decades” Cooking in the Mediterranean — with #MemoryComealive
On Wild Boar in Chestnut Forests
Contemporaneous notes of cooking; cooking, because I am not a chef, but got a good ear for stories; these are my notes on the memories come alive in a Mediterránean garden with a wood-fired clay and brick oven. Fire is unpredictable, but with careful observation and management, reliably esquite results can be produced. There have been no adjustments made to adapt these “recipes” to the idiom of the American kitchen. Quite the contrary, recipes are rare here, because I don’t measure anything; you’ll just have to catch the drift, make it up as you go with what you got close by …hay, but at least I’m leaving notes! I know you’re reading this out of some aspirational fantasy of repeating these treasures, but my thermometer is broke, again. It’s the third one, you know, at 50 euros a pop, so I just learned to keep one eye peeled. Is the wall white. What happens to a piece of dough thrown onto the oven floor. There are lot’s of kinds of watching. There’s that top-off-the-pot with water up to the brim, put the lid back on and go to bed and see how it looks in the morning way of seeing. And there’s that stoic stance by the oven door watching the focaccia bubble. This is that research that goes on before we even get to the test kitchen; yet, with luck and friends, or better yet, with hard work and perseverance, we’ll get some funding to do more testing and re-do, replicate, repeat these wonders and take their weights and measures, by the book, …er for the book. However, these field notes; these notes, written contemporaneously, document how — the memories of those meditereanean cooks that came before, come alive with fire in a brick and clay oven in the mountains up the hill from Madrid Spain.
Wild boar and chestnuts — into the oven for Sunday lunch for 14. But not so fast: these chestnuts have been transformed into that French delicacy: Marron Glacé — having survived their journey from Paderne Galica to Manzanares El Real, Madrid of over 28 months in a mason jar. We made them with brown cane sugar cakes from Columbia and a little Coñac, after roasting them in the wood oven.
This is that magic of the Iberian peninsula where everyday people cook with myth, story, or a memory that comes alive. That easy mingling of an ancient pagan ritual with a contemporary story; reliable sources report the prehistoric statues of wild boar in Murca or Braganza were worshiped as gods. In Altamira, on the Cantabrian sea, 12–17,000 years ago wild boar got the best shelf space in the cave. In that wonderful Time-Life collection that more often than not were collecting dust in the proletarian den of an early 1970’s suburban house in southern California, or thrown out, this: “Foods of the World”, Peter Fiebleman, in 1969, wrote of his hunt for a wild boar in Spain on horseback: “these animals are hunted as they were in the Middle Ages, on horseback and a lance, rather than a gun”, adding, “ I don’t know many Americans have been treed by boars, but I am one of the club. Minus wineskin, but with boots and gun, a chunk of Manchego cheese, a fresh loaf of bread, tobacco and matches, I rose with ease into the branches.” Cuisines of the people, he starts out boldly in chapter 1; until, in chapter two, it’s Don Quixote. You send a novelist to write about the food of Iberia and what do you expect; the history of literature; that first of firsts: Miguel de Cervantes.
The 60’s must have been a good time for writers and photographers at Life. Life Magazine could find no fresher eye than Burk Uzzle to cover the young bullfighters, the maletias, roaming the Spanish countryside by freight train, looking for a fight. At lunch, one warm summer day over paella, Uzzle told my daughters the story of the pig he was raising with his pal in North Carolina; because it was the shared responsibility of both, Burk thought a hyphenated name would be in order and they came up with the distinguished moniker of Cartier-Bresson, the founder of the photography collective, Magnum, that Uzzle once presidented. I didn’t hear any more about the pig, but the complemento got back to Cartier-Bresson.
Everyone in this little village of Paderne collects long bags of chestnuts. Many boil them in giant iron pots fed by a wood fire, with cabbage to feed to their warm and dry and well housed pigs. Standing next to the oven house, they tell me stories of the siege of the Romans; that they would poison themselves with the bark of the twee tree. Freedom or death. There are no recipes, because just how reproducible is this; you got to have a kilo of sun-dried tomatoes in extra-virgin olive oil with basil, garlic, and roasted chilies; marron glacé; and a two day bone broth baked at low temperature. All that is unlikely to coincide with the appearance of 9.5 kilos of wild boar. Because we may never be this way again, it’s that myth, memory, and story we have with which to make believe again.
The wild boar of Galicia also eat chestnuts, but our boar is from La Mancha: the stain — and ate acorns. Everybody does wild boar, the French, the Italians; boar, or venison. The Sardinian version sounds like they are questioning the virtue of your lineage: Bistechine di Cinghiale. What would a nuraghe stone oven be like? It might seem redundant, but these chestnuts are an alternative to the historically much rarer potato. The mason jar let out a loud pop. They smelled great, but a taste surprised: a burt wild cherry. Very dark, because they were not in white sugar. The wild boar has been marinating for five days in wine as Philippe holds up his five fingers all widely separated to show emphasis. Fruits and vegetables; a handful of sun dried tomatoes and albaca, opps, basil and lots of wine.
I’m always starting out as Snow White, May West wrote, but drift.
I have great reverence for cooks who wrote stuff down. Sometimes I’ll follow a recipe 10 times. ‘“I always start out as Snow White, May West wrote, but drift.’” Philippe was getting pissed with all the stuff I was putting into “his” traditional Galician recipe; handed down from his uncle, defended against intruders for generations; It’s the one that always works. The citrus and the wine: “How about some of this cane sugar alcohol the chestnuts fermented in.” He was reluctant, agreed to everything, but had that annoyed look on his face. Now, we're all writing contemporaneous notes, after reading about Comey’s dead man switch, of that that just occurred.
The short video of after overnight in the oven gives visual clues to an aroma that is other worldly; oh Yeah, I live in this other world in far, far away; Philippe, our neighbor down the street who keeps the helicopters in the air and I have been talking about cooking wild boar with a year, but his sources in his native Galicia, habla poca por se lluve; they talk little to keep the rain out of their mouths, were not coming through so he found someone in Castilla La Mancha who had one and got the 9 kilo back shoulder, el jamon.
Contemporaneous Notes So what must be done then; perhaps polenta, grilled; roasted fat potato slices; or maybe boiled little ones; or roasted and smashed… Wild mushrooms would be perfect, but it isn’t the season, does anyone have some frozen. I’ll see what I can find down in the pueblo. Ok so bread, get fresh yeast and let it set outside overnight so that it is poolishly in the morning. Are you feeling poolish?
Manzanares El Real lies at the foot of the Sierra de Guadarrama, along side the Manzanares River. Here, it’s a mountain stream. Fly fisherman from the capitol, 45 Kilometers away, wondering up-stream in their department store “official” fishing duds. A Movable Feast, or For Whom the Bell Tolls, one or the other, or both, bought and sold. From the left bank, right side of the Atlantic, left bank of the Manzanares, who when she gets ready to flows through Madrid on her laid back way to Lisboa; you can speak Spanish to the Romans and Milanese flows back into Castilian.
A metaphor, a string of space grammars, a time for anything… It’s that light you see in El Greco, a Latino “Woody Allen” springtime, a playful romp in the country.
The Journey is the Destination
…As time goes by. Sing it Sam! In country, away, left bank in spring, out country, where I be and where I’m not. Even if I am and there is no there to be here in. But Pink Noise covered that first. Millenniums begin in the spring. Long marches, solitary confinements, be here now engagements, the birds making a ruckus outside. What must be done? New pillows maybe, a tent. Blood in the desert: “…a more ancient heritage, revealed its full potential and began to play such a titanic role in the formulation of a new literary and linguistic consciousness.” An entertaining list in stream of consciousness chronology. Always more or less in order. “The poetry of the Macaronics…”
“I am not an artist but I have a good memory for flowers… Janine… Marie-Louise… (…) what’s written plain that isn’t much, it’s transparency that counts…the lacework of time as they say..
Louis-Ferdinand Celine, “Enchantment for some other time”
The Sierra de Guadarrama divides Spain into north and south, even though, they go mostly north-east to west; they still stop the north wind and rains, but moreover separate an Atlantic from a Mediterranean culture, new and old, commerce in the north, warriors in the south; Celts, Phoenicians, Basques and the Romans, on the road to Santiago. Historical digression ad-nauseum. And before that? And before that? And before the “Pre-history of Novelistic Discourse”, that? …well, before that we walked around naked with clubs and hit stuff and ate it. Then we got on the trail, our holy walk in the country. Out country. In-n-out. In but out. You know, left bank of the Alta Cuenca, where the big birds still fly. Storks and vultures, by the thousands, circling.
The north eastern side, between here and La Granja, where Gary Cooper slumped on a hillside with an imaginary fascist bullet lodged within, an American fighting for democracy, for the Republic of Spain. Even though it was mostly a fight between Communism and Fascism. Americans were always sticking their values into the pot, liberty, democracy, then watching them get kicked to pieces by the “politica real”. George’s disappointment, Paris pouted until after the invasion.
The reason for the unreason to which my reason turns so weakens my reason that with reason I complain of thy beauty. — Miguel de Cervantes
This side of the mountain represented a happier time. Fresh trout, bottles of wine, and senoritas capable of transforming worn out cotton blouses into prurient fecund bogenvilla. A flour mill built of stone in the 14th century by the moors, slowly decaying by the river. Al Molino del Cura. Two stories of hand cut stone, nine point four two meters round, pie are squared maintaining the water aloft, now guarded with the cross. An ovum, a phallus; the staff of life, a crucifixion. A tango. Tutu tanga´s tango: diablo’s hanging from the window, on the eve of the day of the dead, but don’t seem to bother the trout, anyway.
After ten years in the old country, the lost decade, peering behind those carefully piled old rocks, held in place by gravity and tradition, moistening a parched mouth at Marga´s tavern on the road below the castle, las illuminarias and a smokey ancient pot, stuck together and torn apart by an invented history, the centrifuge and the centriped: wounds in search of lost time, fresh from the massacre at Attocha or just as likely from the last millennium. An involuted script left by Cesar, Arab kings, Isabella and Ferdinand, Franco, Hitler and Mussolini, Hemingway and Eisenhower; directing modern actors about their lives. The European novel grew in a warm imaginary and was baked in a prohibited illuminated moisture.
…and there was those two mason jars of bone broth all gelled up in the refrigerator. Two days in the oven. This broth forever changed the way I’ll make a rabo de toro. The bone broth makes friends with the ox tail and merges; the chestnuts from O’Corol with the Boar from La Mancha. Stained chestnuts.
I hope it works as well with the Wild boar. What was that thing Einstein said: “ A theory is something nobody believes, except the person who made it. An experiment is something everybody believes, except the person who made it.” No, not that, the one about experimenting: If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn’t be called research, would it? It’s the scientific method after all: guess and then test. It just might work. A pretty good guess. But is it reproducible, have you written your materials and methods.
Habla poca por se lluve
In moments like this I turn to Kafka’s I Am a Memory Come Alive. You must know, I’m a little apprehensive, because Prometheus admonished:
“There are four legends concerning Prometheus: According to the first he was clamped to a rock in the caucuses for betraying the secrets of the gods to men, and the gods sent eagles to feed on his liver, which was perpetually renewed. According to the second Prometheus, goaded by the pain of the tearing beaks, pressed himself deeper and deeper into the rock until he became one with it. According to the third his treachery was forgotten in the course of thousands of years, forgotten by the gods, the eagles, forgotten by himself. According to the fourth everyone grew weary of the meaningless affair. The gods grew weary, the eagles grew weary, the wound closed wearily.
There remained the inexplicable mass of rock. The legend tried to explain the inexplicable. As it came out of a substratum of truth it had to end in the inexplicable.
There remained the inexplicable mass of rock. The legend tried to explain the inexplicable. As it came out of a substratum of truth it had in turn to end in the inexplicable.”
What follows are my memories in search of yesterday. If you’re still looking for my contemporaneous notes, here they are, you won’t need a subpoena.Any search for the secret sauces perhaps should focus on the critical ingredient that could speed their discovery; Longing; that longing for a taste of that moment so long ago, the aroma drifting out the door; smoky air masking the air like lace.
That image, written down after imagining it some time ago. Polenta. But how do I make polenta to go with the mushroom sauce. And some big pasta shells. And a focaccia. And mashed potatoes, and baked thick slices, and boiled and baked. Potato and polenta heaven bathed in a nice sauce.
Giant focaccia dough of sun-dried tomato and kümel seeds, caraway. All but a half of one remained into the following day. So beautiful with the flowering herbs and extra-virgin olive oil. Do you get my drift…?
That magic heat of a wood-fired oven and you can invent the impossible; imagine a memory come alive. …and that butcher block that came from Lexington Street in San Francisco by boat.
Can you see it; they are so content side-by-side; its harder than it might look landing two large chunks of dough onto the floor of a hot oven. “Are you in…” And just because I can paint it with flowering sage, back and forth until you burn the hair off your arm. Really, it was like that.
The baker’s lament. This is the thinker’s heat, this heat from a wood-oven, because it gives you time to think, or sometimes to just look and the thinking just takes care of itself. Thats this magic in the heat of a brick and clay oven. Time.
Hallaba lu. A hooten nanny upside down fun day. Really fun with
…the very lovely polenta’s belly button, sun-dried tomato. Some days you just gotta do it, there is no time to look at pretty pictures in the cookbook; no, you gotta do this now! In goes the organic corn, the size of big couscous, and out back for the broth that’s been stewing and back to the kitchen to stir. Thinking like a risotto, at the end, lots of grated parmesan. A heart shaped cookie cutter to make a bunch of hearts, then into the oven to toast. Wood-oven toasted polenta hearts is just too romantic to print, but look accidental on the plate. Oh, the plate. Wedgewood. Magnum admonished its cadre to wear good shoes, but I’d caution you to have old and good china.
The Anatomia de Primivera
Antes de abrir mis ojos, la imagen de sus labios ha tomado mi alma.
Labios rojos, sonriendo, labios que he estudiado anoche.
Labios contando,
Labios bailando.
Labios abriendo el camino hacia las puertas de primavera.
La Primavera. La Madrileña.
Ojos verdes, azul en la madrugada.
Quiero ver, despierto, bajo el sol de verano, sus ojos contando los besos de la primavera, en silencio.
March 14, 2008
David PeckEverybody loves my polenta, but you. You break my heart. I thought it was love…? There was that first kiss. Her: “It was a Kiss.”
Watching the heat. Great heat. Nothing else like a hot oven; it’s like learning to cook all over again. An iron skillet goes in on top of the coals and can come out and rest on the stone steps and cook slowly. After the sauce was stewed for two days; the sauce was added to fresh herbs, onions and shallots, shiitake and oyster mushrooms; butter, red wine; then finished with cream to go over the pasta shells. That little sprinkle of freshly graded parmesan on top.
You know the scientific method and all that, but really, reproducibility is not always the first concern when reconstructing the materials and methods of which was. But it’s a good idea to leave your lab notes behind, not because you have any hope for its reproducibility, but because the conditions will never be the same; it’s always that “let’s make it up as we go along” fun that just takes over and, you know, the fucking magic heat of a wood fired ceramic oven — kind of excitement on a cloudy day in Madrid.
Chinghiale! What to do with a cast iron skillet, small onions and shallots? Smash some garlic with the skins on; add a couple spoonfuls of virginia’s sun-dried tomato mixture; a dollop of butter; a splash of wine — and into the oven to rest on a thick bed of coals to get the party going, but it will burn in 10 minutes; you just got to stand there and watch.
The next Saturday evening I got confirmation of the imminent visit for lunch the next day of Ken, his wife, and daughter. Ken is one of those organizers that organized organizers — since high school. He’d grab people and get them to boycott grapes. They could be friends later, but he needed people now. Organizers are like priests with a lineage: who organized whom; whom was organized by whom; who by who. Ken coined a phrase yesterday: “aggressive organizing.” Ruthless! We talked of your struggles defeating the Party elite in Berkeley and Sacramento to become Kennedy delegates. You both were ruthless. “People say I am ruthless. I am not ruthless. And if I find the man who is calling me ruthless, I shall destroy him.” — Robert Kennedy
“You have to help me change the world, now!” I then walked off the quad and into the student union to go to the bathroom. I really, really needed someone to be at that table. What was the moniker Andy Spahn gave Ken for his scorched earth campaigns for student government? Ruthless economic democracy. All afternoon like that, rat-a-tata-tat. The early days of Students for Economic Democracy. He’d organize 10 students to walk precincts for Gus Newport, who appointed 100 students when he became Berkeley’s democratic socialist Mayor. Without any real interest in debating just what economic democracy was, or should be was; we were all focused on making the future ours by winning elections come hell or high water. Glorious days of student organizing in the late 1970’s and early ‘80’s that left an imprint that doesn’t fade.
Why not repeat these big pasta shells, but with a reproducible kitchen version of the wild boar sauce — one more time before all the ingredients are consumed — just to see if it could be repeated.. There’s still a jar of the sauce and the stewed boar is frozen. Got the onions and shallots. Freed from the bonds of the province of Galicia, I could add anything I wanted; green peppercorns in vinegar; fresh ginger in the olive oil to fry the mushrooms; gobs of the marinated chestnuts. Ken didn’t tell me his daughter was vegetarian, but she got lucky with the asparagus and the wrinkled potatoes my daughters made.
Chapter 2
Deconstructing Osso Buco
It’s an Adventure Imagining Ossibuchi alla Milanese
Why not a long low temperature bake of ossibuchi alla milanese for the feast of Corpus Christi. Even though ‘this is a dish that should be left to the Milanese,’ as Pellegrino Artusi cautioned in Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well from 1891 — because Osso Buco “is a specialty of Lombardy;” this is where our new culinary adventure begins — spoiling for a fight! Our irreverent interloper in the kitchens of the Mediterranean dared, with the equanimity of the unschooled, to recover the ancient recipe of ossibuchi alla milanese baked for two days in a wood-fired oven! “I mean come on”, he began in his best of Bakersfield accent, “it’s only a meaty piece of bone with a hole in it”. (Bakersfield, for you schooled, yet clueless, lies both at the butt end of the Southern San Joaquin Valley in California; and also the end of the road for Steinbeck’s Jodes. Often referred to as the armpit of California — even by locals, yet not without hope; it’s where Cesar Chavez coined the Sí Se Puede that became Obama’s Yes We Can; where Merle Haggard declared he’s glad to be an Okie… But this is only a bloviating morcilla, as they say in the Spanish theater for a digression from the main plot; a false start at the making of blood into sausage). So our daring dude with a wood-oven asked what recipe the Milanese native Tiziana would recommend? She responded: “I love ossibuchi ….but I must confess that I have never cooked ossibuchi alla Milanese!”
Pellegrino Artusi wrote his tome following the unification of Italy and was far more circumspect in his relations with other regions than our intrepid interloping cook—who went down to the opposite end of Italy to the collapsed soccer ball at the end of the boot—for the Sicilian view-point of an Ex-Pat from Vittoria on the far side of the island. He climbed the hill to Marco and Julia’s, with the giant orange full moon rising over the waterline, to review their collection of Italian cookbooks. Tomatoes or no tomatoes. Why wouldn't you put tomatoes into this ossibuchi sauce. Yet in late spring the tomatoes from the garden are only a hope and a prayer and a can, well, is a can. And what of the veal; what kind; milk fed; how old, 4 weeks or 6; where on the shank should it be cut; how many should be cut from one shank; will your butcher, butcher you for asking so many questions for the purchase of a scrap of beef. Will she cut for you the big boned pieces at the top and sell the rest to someone else.
The Feast of Corpus Christi
The Thursday after Trinity Sunday, which falls this year on my birthday, June 19, will be the first service of this Osso buco. But our celebration may be closer to a Cyprian Supper ; that wonderful collection of “all festive images of the Bible and the Gospels” where the images of banqueting liberate speech. Bakhtin would have loved James Joyce’s Ulysses, because as the New Yorker explains on the eve of Bloomsday: “There has never been a novel more sympathetic to every weird thing people do to make themselves happy, from preparing a mutton kidney to eating a gorgonzola sandwich, to singing aloud “Love’s Old Sweet Song,” to “worshiping at that altar where the back changes name…” one of many, many descriptions of backsides…”
Osso Buco you! This name must never be translated. It gives so much pleasure hearing it slide off one’s tongue, but even better sliding off anothers; ossibuchi alla milanese… it’s such a beautiful name; it first takes a position in your head long before the flavor reaches your tongue. Although I’m not so sure this isn’t a reference for something suggestively whispered with the lights down low.
Can I repeat the otherworldly taste of the rabo de torro with these holy bones…? And given the recipe inspired by the great Italian culinary chronicler with a scientific bent, our table with be shared with a Basque immunologist renowned for his investigations of anisakis; our favorite Gallego liver specialist who can treat a bad case of Hepatitis C, or perhaps arrange an urgent transplant for the over-indulgent; his wife, a radiologist from Majorca to sharpen our vision—and who always has a practical solution to any problem.
But there will be more. You just can’t answer these questions with a another cookbook or another conversation, but you simply must make several versions.
The transformation of ossibuchi alla milanese into Osso Buco Madrileño.
This ancient recipe ain’t gunna be. In my little town of Manzanares El Real, there is no milk fed beef.
Caldo of seared bones into the dutch oven and the fire… It’s the marrow stupid! Ataste of smoke and umami, that elusive fifth taste unnamed until a
Chapter 3
The Aroma of Al Andalus: A Recipe Written by Christians, Jews, and Muslims
The Wood-Oven Cook in the Mediterranean Garden
Spain’s location in the historical geography of food is at the heart of the chronotopics of culinary discovery: chilies, potatoes, and tomatoes arriving from the west; black pepper and yellow saffron from the east; but what became of the cooks of Al Andalus — the Muslims and Jews exiled onto the trading ships of the Mediterranean and the silk road when Columbus set sail for the Americas. How was this mythic culture affected by, and how did it affect, the culinary traditions of the levant.
He put his pencil down and walked over to the window and looked at the cloud beginning to dissolve down the mountain across the reservoir. The cookbook writing was producing more questions than answers. The photographs Susanne had taken were all there for 50 recipes. This story is about wood and ovens and good slow food, he thought, not ancient cooks adrift on the Mediterranean. Yet he looked out and wondered what had happened to the Sephardim because of this exodus: What did they cook when they were cohabiting in Spain with the Catholic and the Muslim; How did they adapt in Morocco, Libya, Tunisia, and Palestine; What happened when they encountered other cultures, foods, and spices. Was adsorption the cultural process at work; how did this adsorption function, or was there adsorption at the edges where these cultures met?
Summer on the mountain, where the Manzanares river begins its journey down to Madrid, Spain, often brings a traveler or two to the gate. Varda had announced her visit from the Holy Land with her husband Bentsi and their teen-age son, Eden. She had asked what she could bring as a gift. I’d been reading and hearing intriguing bits and starts about Israeli cuisine for several decades, but I wanted a taste; “bring spices”, I responded, “unusual spices”.
If asked, I’d always request spices. Janet asked and had brought chili powder from North Carolina; a Mexican tortilla press; and the photographer from Woodstock. Larbi asked, and brought dried Moroccan spices, Somontano wines, and pastries from the Pyrenees. Khalil, from the Rif mountains, brought along bags and jars of colorful spices and a Tagine.
Varda’s spice filled bags, stuffed into a rectangular Tupperware box that had made it through Israeli airport security and Spanish customs in her suitcase, were unpacked and spread out on the kitchen table. Some had labels in Hebrew and some had no label at all. I got the empty spice jars out of the dishwasher and looked around for some order. Varda and Susanne came into the kitchen and soon took over: writing a description of the use of the contents: chicken, meat, vegetables.
Madrazo y Kuntz, Federico de (1815–1894)
Real Establecimiento Litográfico de Madrid-
1831?
Ver en la Biblioteca Digital Hispánica http://bdh.bne.es/bnesearch/detalle/bdh0000151060
Some of these colorful bags required a story. For instance, Za’atar. On the roads by her village, the Arabs, Varda explained, sold a flat bread topped with Za’atar and olive oil. A fresh sourdough rye I had baked the day before formed a sorption edge on the counter as I measured the thickness and density of a za’atar olive oil layer. The bread disappeared. “It’s also good on salad and vegetables,” she explained, “I make pizza with that flat bread.”
Yet other spice mixtures are not found on the road, but must be awakened from the silence of ancestral memory.
Yet other spice mixtures are not found on the road, but must be awakened from the silence of ancestral memory. When smaller the sign, greater is the significance: fewer ingredients, greater affect. I call Eden to come with me into the kitchen and help me make a couscous. “But I’ve never made couscous”, he fires back. Yet with out protest he joins me in the kitchen.
We had been to the neighborhood arab fruit and vegetable market and the butcher just before they closed for lunch. I bought what I’d seen Khalil put into the pot: a kind of turnip, nabo in Spanish; carrot; cabbage; Italian green peppers; fresh coriander; zucchini; and squash. And over at the butcher’s, several thick meaty pieces from the back of the beef ribs.
Eden’s paternal grandmother was born in Libya and were likely Sephardi; those ladino speaking Jews from the Iberian peninsula expelled by Isabella and Ferdinand in 1492.
Although Eden was reluctant at first to offer any suggestions, he helped peel the vegetables, while I put a large sauce pan on high heat with a healthy pour of extra virgin olive oil from the 5 liter tin. Into the pot with the chopped onions, turnip, and peppers. “What spices did your Grandmother use, Eden.” I brought the spices over to the stove; he poured ground ginger and I added fresh ginger; he added cumin, cloves, muskat, a cinnamon stick and curcuma. I added fresh ground pepper, hot paprika, and a piece of smashed garlic. Then the meat, cut into big cubes. The pan was getting too hot so I splashed in white wine, turned down the heat, and poured a beer into a frozen glass.
By late afternoon, tummies became aroused by the savory aroma of the couscous sauce infusing the bedrooms hosting their siestas; onto the terraces; and out by the aljibe. The sauce quickly disappearing into bowls of steamed couscous. Eden’s mother said it was a better couscous than her mother’s.
Chapter 4
El Bulli is Dead: Long Live El Bulli is Dead: Live Long
The Medium and the Message for the Emotional Culinary Process…?
There is, after all, a hierarchy instructing here, beginning with the physical; then the rational; and, now and then, for Pete’s sake, the emotional… Then that physical and here we go rolling around in the hay again — go ahead, roll that around on your tongue…
Everything made sense one cool winter’s morning in Madrid. The dog was sleeping by the fire. I made lunch. Leftovers again. Couscous re-imagined into a pita pot with Bavarian white veal sausages and Bulgarian feta wrapped up in khorasan pita dough. I should have known; mixing up all that and expecting the same, similar, every day; you’re not going to get away with it!
ARCO: Madrid’s International Contemporary Art Fair
I leave the hanger-like building of an exhibit space where Susanne is designing a stand for a security trade fair and slipped out the side door with my neighbour, a promising young painter, Adrian, in search of free tickets to ARCO, the International Contemporary Art Fair next door. Adrian scores first, but I get a VIP pass from a gorgeous blond showing “artistic” separated by sophisticated lingerie. We get through the gates. He goes one way and me the other. Passing through the hallway connecting the buildings I come upon an enigma wrapped into a conundrum repeated by a riddle doubling as a dialogic imaginary hidden by a mysterious fog: Ferran Adriá in Madrid’s International Contemporary Art Fair. But this wasn’t the beginning of Adriá’s arrival onto the artistic stage: He’s also got a major exhibit at New York’s Drawing Center.
“Why, Why, WHY!”
— Ferran Adriá
Vincent van Gogh — Ferran Adriá planning, on the back of a napkin, the path to the known culinary world and the map for exploring the future.
WHAT!
The medium is no longer the message; yet, for post-mediated communication, the medium was the message, but the message is now the medium rarity of Ferran Adrià at ARCO.
This is the Electric Cool-Aid Acid Test: Why did he close El Bulli at the height of its success; El Bulli has died, long live El Bulli! The medium, the El Bulli — ness became the message for the 6,000 diners a year with the luck of a confirmed reservation, but what of the millions on the waiting list; A dining room with an eternal waiting list? What happened to supply and demand; then what do you do about those 2,000 cooks in the kitchen flown in from around the globe. Is the process as art the message. What is Ferran Adriá up to…? ‘There are so many bits and pieces of information’, he must have thought, ‘so they’ll need a map; a map of the “Genome of the Culinary Process”. And I’ll expose my preliminary studies to the world at the International art fair in Madrid, ARCO — so these cooks can find their way around and those millions of unrequited dinners will have an explanation.’
Albert Einstein
The Science of Culinary Art; or the Art of Culinary Science
If you’re still not drinking the Kool-Aid, get in line! Adriá himself reports chemical engineers he sought out for an explanation emphatically telling him that a kitchen is far more complicated than a scientific laboratory, because each ingredient has various components that interact making the scientific interpretation difficult and complicated. These napkins and flow charts are intended to advance the codification of the application of scientific knowledge, methodology, and language — to Adriá’s vision of the history and future of food. He hopes for a normalization of the past and future of cuisine — to strip away the sophisticated lingerie seperating the modern and traditional.
Chapter 5
In His Mother’s Kitchen: A Childhood in Sicily
A cookbook is a source for detail and tradition, but a story inspires. Marco tells stories of his childhood in Sicily: the wood oven in his mother’s kitchen; his aunts kneading dough for 200 loaves of bread; tomatoes drying in the summer sun. Last summer, on the eve of his August return to his native Sicily, he brought by a jar of his sun dried tomatoes, sandwiched with basil leaves and filled with extra-virgin olive oil.
Sun-dried tomato basil bread
Marco began by describing a pasta sauce made with dried tomatoes and garlic — gently sautéed in a pan with a fresh fettuccini; with a fresh glass of cold white wine, he reminisced about the focaccia his mother made with these dried tomatoes. At that moment, I had a sour dough in the kitchen-aid with the dough hook kneading and quickly added the ground, dried tomato mixture. A light pink dough soon flopped out onto the floured counter and I kneaded it into a loaf. This was the beginning of two months of drying 90 pounds of tomatoes and the baking of a hundred loaves of Sicilian dried tomato bread.
No other bread will do now. The flavor of the tomatoes with the addition of fresh torn basil and olive oil, excludes any other from my table. The sour dough bubbles anew every day with its new feast of semi-whole wheat rye flour awaiting its transformation. The heirloom tomatoes, now too many for salads, wait their turn to be sliced in half and spread on the pine board on the terrace.
Once dried, the halves are joined with a fresh basil leaf and placed into a jar then filled with olive oil. The sour dough is then poured into the kitchen aid mixing bowl with the dried tomatoes that have been finely diced in a mini food processor and united with a fresh tomato and salt.
No other liquid is necessary. Basil leaves are then torn and added. This dough needs to be hand kneaded for 10 minutes and proofed for 12 hours or more at low temperature before placing it into the oven at 220 for 30 minutes, then 180c for at least another 30 minutes. Time is on your side.
Estratto: tomato, salt, and sun.
Too many tomatoes is a gift from god. Although a ripe tomato from your garden is the essence of Summer, Autumn will fall; temperatures will drop; and rains will come — and they must be preserved.
Estratto drying in the Sicilian sun
Besides drying them, a Sicilian will make a puree by boiling tomatoes with bay leaves, red onions, and salt, and then dry the puree on pine tables for an estratto. But my estratto will have to wait for the hottest day next summer.
With the temperatures dropping, but still too many tomatoes, I make them into sauce. But not a classic Sicilian sauce. Sicily, the toes of Italy sticking out into the Mediterranean, is a culture influenced by millennia of shipping and conquest.
Matbucha: the Original Ketchup
My tomato sauce began as an accidental Matbucha from North Africa and the Middle East. I wanted a good hot sauce and I’d been thinking of how to make one in my then new wood-fired oven. My Moroccan friends raved about roasted chilies with salt and olive oil. I bought 12 kilos of tomatoes and peeled them and put them into a big clay pot with a “sofrito” of onion, red and green peppers, and garlic.
Into the oven as it was warming up for the next days roast lamb; then a kilo of Moroccan peppers for ten hours as the fire smoked and roasted them. Both the tomatoes and the peppers were combined with cumin, curcuma, salt, garlic olive oil, and cilantro.
My Moroccan friends ate this by the bowlful!
Shakshuka
Our new vocabulary is beginning to stretch out mouths in interesting directions, but moreover our tongues and especially our imaginations. With a big pot of Matbucha and an extra goose egg, nothing better than combine them in the oven for a Shakshuka. Now you know why we need the Sicilian tomato bread — to stab this wonderful egg — right into the heart of the yolk with a dagger of toasted tomato bread!
This recipe I just made up a year ago, long before I’d heard of Shakshuka. This happens a lot with a wood oven; you rediscover cooking from before gas and electric ovens. A hot oven is always an excuse to play. This is quite spicy and rich with lots of Moroccan smoked and roasted chili’s and roasted red and green peppers. The goose egg was very fun. They make for a quite large bullseye.
Chapter 6
Maybe this should go in front of El Buli is dead. That was the most fun piece to write.
How to Eat Roast Spring Suckling Lamb — With the Table Manners of Orson Welles
“I gave him an evasive answer. I told him, ‘Go fuck yourself.’ — Orson Welles quoting Carl Laemmle
Spring lamb in Spain has long captured the imagination of American visitors. During a night of tapas and cañas in la Madrid de los Austrias, the famous Spanish liver specialist, Dr. Samaniego, is prone to expound on the history of Americans misbehaving in Madrid to incite my already hedonistic exuberance. He’d talk of Orson Welles having so enjoyed a leg of spring suckling lamb while filming Chimes at Midnight that he ordered another leg and finished it off also; washing it all down with bottles of red wine. One can imagine Welles taking to the idea of then having a siesta — with a belly full of lamb and Rita Hayworth at his side (Rita was born Margarita Carmen Cansino, the daughter of Spanish flamenco dancer, Eduardo Cansino; Her father was related to the writer Rafael Cansinos Assens, who discovered their origins as sephardic jews ). Dr. Samaniego, an astute student of history, could recite the unfaithful traditions of occupants of the Élysée Palace, as we arrived at a new bar; the love affair of Ava Gardner with the Spanish bullfighter Luis Miguel Dominguín, when Ava was married to Frank Sinatra; or a topical quote of Orson Welles: “If there hadn’t been women we’d still be squatting in a cave eating raw meat, because we made civilization in order to impress our girlfriends.”
Welles’ “civilization” was more hopeful than real as heard in this 1983 recording of Welles having lunch with the director Henry Jaglom at L.A.’s Ma Maison, where Wolfgang Puck was the chef before Spago.
Richard Burton comes to the table: Richard Burton: Orson, how good to see you. It’s been too long. You’re looking fine. Elizabeth is with me. She so much wants to meet you. Can I bring her over to your table?
O.W.: No. As you can see, I’m in the middle of my lunch. I’ll stop by on my way out.
Burton exits.
H.J.: Orson, you’re behaving like an asshole. That was so rude.
O.W.: Do not kick me under the table. I hate that. I don’t need you as my conscience, my Jewish Jiminy Cricket. Especially do not kick my boots. You know they protect my ankles. Richard Burton had great talent. He’s ruined his great gifts. He’s become a joke with a celebrity wife. Now he just works for money, does the worst shit. And I wasn’t rude. To quote Carl Laemmle, “I gave him an evasive answer. I told him, ‘Go fuck yourself.’ ”
El Madrid de los Austrias
Arriving at the second stop of the night, ordering our second bottle of wine — at the skilled hand of the former Secretary of the Cabinet of the Spanish Finance Minister, we poured then plowed into two large plates of tapas that appeared on the bar. The Cabinet Secretary explains why spring lamb is so savory in Spain. “It’s the aromatics their mother eats all spring out on the plains of Castilla. Around Segovia, in Castilla Leon, there is a lot of thyme and rosemary. It infuses the meat. You don’t need to add anything to the roast except a little water and lemon. This 6 week old lamb, lechal in Spanish, is only feed by its mother — that’s why it’s called suckling. But the wood and clay oven bring out the flavor of the delicate lacework of fat.” The older “recental” lamb, interjected Dr. Samaniego, is better for stew — una caldereta — but what the English eat, mutton, I’ve never seen at a butcher shop in Spain. But recental, I protested, is great if you do a good marinade.
Our bellies full, our worries drowned, our imaginations awake in the crisp early hours of a winter morning in old Madrid; the Cabinet Secretary unsheathes long cuban cigars from a black leather case and offers me one. We meander back to the Plaza Mayor leaving clouds of fragrant cigar smoke in the face of Dr. Samaniego’s wife, a radiologist. The year before she’d found a round spot on the middle of my left lung. After an CT scan no disease was found, but the neumologist suspected valley fever from all those holes I dug looking for shark teeth in hills around Bakersfield.
