Author Archives: Shannon

Cornbread with a Side of Stalinist Hijinks

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von bremzenLast fall at the Brooklyn Book Festival, I wandered over to one of the stages where a panel of food writers were holding court and became instantly charmed by a woman with audacious glasses, voluminous scarves and a loud Russian-accented voice. She was just the blend of frank and weird that I like in my authors, so I resolved to read her newest book, Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food and Longing.

I’m so glad I did. Anya von Bremzen’s bizarre mash-up of cookbook, family history and anthropological study of Homo Sovieticus is one of the oddest but most enjoyable food volumes I’ve ever laid hands on. There is surprisingly little talk of borscht, but instead you’ll learn about Russian meat patties while also finding out how Stalin kept himself amused at his summer house meals. (It involved leaving tomatoes on chairs and exhorting high Politburo officials to put “dick” signs on Khruschev’s back. That wacky, mass-murdering prankster!) And the book is beautifully written, so much so that I laughed out loud when she described how her ex-boyfriend humbly offered himself up to co-author her first book and correct her “wonky English.”

cornbreadThe USSR seemingly having been full of voracious meat-eaters whenever supplies allowed, there aren’t a lot of recipes here for a vegetarian to attempt, but von Bremzen did provide a recipe for cornbread that I was eager to try. She actually included it as something of a joke, representative of Khrushchev’s certainty that corn was going to solve all of the USSR’s food shortage problems. Instead, he managed only to baffle and disgust millions of Russians who held firmly to the belief that bread could be made only with wheat. For this, he earned the title Corn Man, which I gather sounds like a worse insult in Russian than in English.

Anyway, the USSR was a massive place, and some of the people there did, in fact, eat corn, like in Moldova, whence the author drew the cornbread recipe. I was attracted to it mostly because it calls for as much feta cheese as it does cornmeal, with some butter and sour cream to boot. Continue reading →

A New Year of Food Resolutions

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egg nog“One of my goals this week,” Jason said to me a few days ago, “is to drink a lot of eggnog.”

There’s something to be said for the attainable resolution. I know that it’s traditional to set yourself high bars this week that you will spend the next twelve months attempting to clear, but I’ve always thought New Year’s resolutions are a little silly. Not that you shouldn’t be constantly striving to be the best version of yourself you should be, but did anyone ever move mountains (or lose ten pounds, even) because of a drunken whim that passed fleetingly through her consciousness on New Year’s Eve?

That’s why my own resolutions tend toward the vague (Be more gracious!) or the pleasant. It’s far easier to count them as successful that way. This year, I will bake more bread. I will finally eat the world’s spiciest pepper before the pepper experts change their minds again about which one that is. I will pickle things. I will stop forgetting Jason’s requests to avoid cleaning his cast iron pots with soap. I will remember to make more pesto before the basil plants freeze. I will compliment people more heartily on their cooking.

Tell us your own food resolutions in the comments section. But seriously, dieting is kind of a snooze; consider following Jason’s lead.

He’s been doing a magnificent job of fulfilling that eggnog resolution, by the way.

Ice Sculptures and Newborn Cheese: More MOOCing Adventures

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fruits of my labor

Fresh ricotta with dill

One day, while I was procrastinating from doing homework for my online Science and Cooking class and a million other tasks by poking around on Arts & Letters Daily, I came across this article from the London Review of Books. Apparently, I am not the only person who was lured into taking a Harvard science class by the insertion of “cooking” into the title. Just remember, readers, where you heard it first.

rocaWhen I did finally stop surfing the web and started doing my online coursework, I noted dismally that I am falling pretty far behind. I have waded through material on phase changes, but I still confuse elasticity and plasticity, and who knows when I’ll finally get around to spherification. I think the main problem is that I get weirdly hypnotized by certain videos and have to stop working to let them sink into my brain. For instance, who would have guessed that very, very pure water doesn’t freeze easily, even in a refrigerator that is kept below the freezing point, because there are no microscopic bits of muck for the ice crystals to glom onto? It’s called supercooling (no, I am not making that word up), and it allows for wacky poured ice sculptures to be created at the table by fancy chefs like Jordi Roca. (Note: the instant formation of it is more magical and less phallic than this still image would have you believe.) Seriously, don’t you feel like you need a few minutes to digest that image before you memorize some formulas? I did.

ricottaAnother problem is that I’m lagging behind on my labs. The use of my disorderly, cluttered kitchen as a laboratory makes me nervous and leaves me with little hope of precision. But when I can rouse myself to action, they usually prove interesting. By far the best lab so far has been making ricotta cheese from a quart of milk and a little white vinegar. I’m actually not sure what I was supposed to learn about phase changes from this, but I made cheese, guys! From scratch. Continue reading →

Spicy Spinach and Potato Chowder

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It’s been soup and stew season in our home for these past few wintry weeks. That’s fine by me; I love curling up with a steamy bowl of something tasty while it’s snowing outside. But this weekend I noticed that all of our soups had begun to resemble each other, featuring beans or tomatoes or both. It was like they all shared a common ancestor, and that ancestor was chili. Don’t get me wrong: I love a good bean as much as the next person, but a girl cannot make it through soup season on chili alone.

So I set about creating with a soup that was warm and filling, had a dearth of legumes and contained nothing canned (as I was loath to brave our icy front steps to pitch the empties into the recycling bin). The result was a kind of potato chowder with a spicy Indian twist, but nary a bean in sight. If you need a break from the chili this week, give it a go.

potato spinach soupSpicy Spinach and Potato Chowder

  • 2 Tbsp. butter
  • 1 medium onion, chopped
  • 2 carrots, chopped
  • 2 tsp. tumeric
  • 2 Tbsp. curry powder or other Indian masala mix
  • 1 Tbsp. curry paste or Indian pickle (I used pickled lime)
  • 5 cups vegetable stock
  • 3 large red-skinned potatoes, chopped
  • 1 pint half-and-half
  • 1 bunch spinach, de-stemmed and coarsely chopped
  • Salt and pepper Continue reading →

Christmas Dinner, Puzzle-Style

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GrinchDinnerThe holiday season is a time for feasting on rich delicacies, but just what form those delicacies take varies widely depending on where you’re sitting down to dinner. Below are some traditional Christmas foods; can you use your knowledge of international cuisine and linguistics to match them to the country whence they came? (Note: the meals described might be served on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, according to each culture’s traditions.) If you can guess all ten, consider yourself worthy to pull up a seat at the table anywhere in the world.

  1. Roast pork, potatoes, red cabbage, gravy, Risalamande (rice pudding with cherry or strawberry sauce), Gløgg, high-alcohol beer
  2. Turkey stuffed with ground beef and peanuts and decorated with fresh slices of pineapple and cherries, marzipan, raisins, almonds, hot chocolate
  3. Hamborgarhryggur (ham steak), reindeer, ptarmigan, hangikjöt (smoked lamb)
  4. Svineribbe (seasoned pork belly), sauerkraut, redcurrant sauce, flatbread, shots of akevitt
  5. Roast turkey with stuffing, pigs in blankets, cranberry sauce or redcurrant jelly, roast potatoes, brussels sprouts, parsnips and carrots, plum pudding, mince pies, trifle with brandy butter
  6. Tamales, roast pork leg, torrejas (French toast soaked in dark sugar syrup, cinnamon and cloves), rompopo (eggnog)
  7. 12 dishes to honor the 12 apostles, which can include: stuffed carp, fried carp, herring in wine sauce, herring in cream sauce, fruit compote, pierogi, peas and carrots, sauerkraut, makowiec (poppy seed cake)
  8. Cold meats with cranberry sauce, barbecued prawns or lobster, pavlova (fruit on top of a baked meringue)
  9. Cured leg of pork, queso de bola, pasta, fruit salad, tsokolate (hot cocoa)
  10. Fried carp, Sacher torte, Lebkuchen and sterne (Christmas cookies)
santaAnd the countries…

a. Poland
b. Philippines
c. United Kingdom
d. Honduras
e. Australia
f. Austria
g. Denmark
h. Iceland
i. Peru
j. Norway

Don’t click “continue’ until you’re ready to see the answers! Continue reading →

A Tasting Platter of Food Links

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We strive for original content here at PitchKnives, but it just so happens that lately I’ve crossed paths with some interesting food ephemera from all corners of the web. Not wanting our readership to miss out on these tidbits, I’ve compiled a few of them here so that you’ll have more than just your cookbooks and our humble blog to help you while away these long, dark winter evenings. Click away and eat up.

  • RedwallThe book lists on Flavorwire are enough to single-handedly lengthen my to-read catalog beyond any sensible proportions. That’s why I was so excited when they recently published a a list of 50 Essential Novels for Foodies. It’s stuffed with plenty of tasty-sounding options that I’ve never heard of before, but any list that includes the cordial-fueled feasts of Redwall…well, they had me at hello.
  • Being a frequent runner, I’m obsessed with podcasts of all stripes, and one of my new favorites is Snap Judgement. It guess it’s loosely based on the theme of pivotal decisions, but more accurately, it’s theme is…um…cool stuff. A good place to start is their Thanksgiving episode, which is supposedly about gratitude, but ends up being largely about food, too. Just listening to the way the spy in the first story pronounces “Gummi Bears” is worth the price of admission. Continue reading →

Food and Death on the Small Screen (or TV with a Side of Sun-Dried Tomato Pesto)

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sopranosAlright, I admit it: I like watching television while I eat dinner. I KNOW, okay? I am single-handedly destroying the time-honored tradition of family suppers, and Jason and I will probably forget how to have actual conversations, and the world is going to hell in a hand basket. And yes, I, too, hate the zombie-like stare-at-the-screen epidemic of the modern era. But, but, but…I like coming home from a frenzied New York City day and cooking dinner and letting myself be hypnotized for a little while.

Jason and I excuse this guilty pleasure by telling ourselves that at least we watch good TV. And it really is a grand age for television dramas, isn’t it? We don’t have cable, so most of our viewing takes the form of gobbling up the latest DVD releases of shows like Game of Thrones or Homeland or Mad Men or (R.I.P.) Breaking Bad. But I like the “classics,” too. I’ve sat through two viewings of Deadwood and I’m not above a third. And when I heard that Jason had never seen all of The Sopranos, the show that ushered in this golden television epoch, we went back to the pilot and started from there.

It’s funny; after my first viewing of The Sopranos, six or seven years ago, most of what stuck with me was the violence, but this time it’s the food that really stands out. Everyone, even the skinny teenaged daughter, is constantly packing away the ziti and manicotti and cannoli and other Italian foodstuffs ending in “I” that I can’t hope to spell correctly. It’s like they’re defying death with the stuff of life. In the last episode we watched, the recent-immigrant cousin Furio expertly formed a massive ball of mozzarella cheese (baby-soft, lily-white, the closest cheese approximation of mother’s milk), while pulling on a cigarette and almost ashing into the bowl. Then he went and beat some people up. Life and death, man, life and death.

Anyway, you shouldn’t try to take on The Sopranos without the proper sustenance. Here’s a recipe for a sun-dried tomato and walnut pesto that’s hearty and delicious and will leave you yearning for the next episode.

Sun-Dried Tomato and Walnut Pesto Continue reading →

Whale Sushi, Salt Junk and Other Mysteries of the Sea

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rockwellkent

Eat at your own risk.

I’ve had whales on the brain this week. First, an article from The New Yorker’s annual food issue informed me that a fashionable sushi restaurant in Berkley, California just got busted for serving black market sei whale meat. The restaurant is now closed, and the offending parties are facing up to sixty-seven years in prison and 1.2 million dollars in fines.

While I don’t condone the eating of whale meat, I am a little confused about why this incident caused such a furor in our ravenously meat-eating country. Why is okay that we eat some mammals and not others? Surely part of the reason is because many whales are endangered, but serving up horse is also illegal in California, and we’re not suffering a horse shortage. Is it because they’re cute? Is it because they’re smart? Need I remind all the bacon lovers out there that pigs are pretty smart, too? (In Japan, for example, whence the contraband sushi came, it is culturally acceptable to eat whale, though it is not in vogue with the younger generation, and the government has recently unloaded several tons of its whale meat surplus on Japanese schools for Traditional Culture Week. In comparison to a week of whale on the cafeteria menu, my elementary school’s dreaded enchilada casserole seems pretty benign.)

While I react to the confusing problem of which animals are acceptable for consumption with vegetarianism, my co-worker Devin goes for the opposite approach. “Whales? Sure, I’d eat them,” he announced confidently. “Horses? No problem. It’s not like I’m going to go shank someone’s pet, but I’d eat some horse. Dogs, cats, sure. I had this pet iguana, Freddy? But it didn’t stop me from eating iguana meat. I’ll eat anything except other primates. Well, and rats. And maybe street pigeons.” This seemed like a strange collection of forbidden fruits, but I suppose we all have to draw a line in the sand somewhere.

But back to whales. Devin would almost certainly fare better than I aboard a whaling ship; I reached this conclusion while attending an event called “Thar She Blows!” at WORD bookstore in Greenpoint this weekend, celebrating the 162nd anniversary of the first U.S. release of Moby Dick. Amid the “Melvillainy” on offer (including a sea shanty sing-along, a dramatic reading of one-star Amazon reviews for the book and a pitch for a television version in which Captain Ahab would be played by Zooey Deschanel) was a presentation by a woman who had spent three weeks in Nantucket reading through old whaler logbooks to see what the crew members ate. Continue reading →

The Pomegranate Perfectionist

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Until very recently, I thought of pomegranates as closely akin to one of those puzzle boxes from which you can never extract the dollar bill imprisoned inside. Though I love the sweet-tart explosion of juice you get from a spooning a big bite of pomegranate seeds into your mouth, I found the thick-skinned, oddly-constructed fruits almost impossible to break apart without creating a mess that seemed to indicate that something really, really grisly had gone down in my kitchen. These attempts left me exhausted and pomegranate-shy.

And then, a few weeks ago, we were visiting our friends Martha and Vince and their lovely newborn daughter Millicent, and Vince, culinary maestro that he is, went to the kitchen to get a pomegranate and came back five minutes later, cheerful and spatter-free, with a bowl of loosed seeds. When I told him the method I’d been using (gained from a misguided trust of Martha Stewart) of sawing the thing in half and whacking at it with the back of a spoon, he looked mystified and slightly offended. “There are videos on YouTube that can fix this,” he said. And so there are!

There are so many things to like about this video: this woman’s obvious anxiety about pomegranate misinformation, her rather dorky air of confidence that she is absolutely correct, and the fact that she is, actually, right. Continue reading →

What Does This Apple Say About Me?: Hunting the Dunlap Apple

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dunlap's aurora

Say my name, say my name...

We’re deep into apple season now, and over the past few weeks, as Jason and I gulped big glasses of cider with dinner and munched on Empire apples from our farm share, a snippet of a lecture I once heard on the radio kept coming back to me. The speaker was an apple crusader by the name of Creighton Lee Calhoun Jr. I use the term “crusader” rather than, say, “enthusiast,” because Mr. Calhoun is a man with a mission: to save as many antique apple varieties as possible in the name of genetic diversity.

Back in the 19th century, the apple scene in America was very different. It was brimming with apple varieties, some good for eating, some for cooking, some for making applejack. And when I say brimming, I’m not talking about the few dozen that you’re probably able to name—there were thousands of varieties, over 16,000 by some estimations, in the late 1800s. But as family farms gave way to mass agriculture, all but the heartiest, most transportable, most eye-pleasing varieties were gradually lost. There are still about 3,000 varieties, but the vast majority of them are like endangered species, available only from specialty orchards.*

To illustrate his point, Mr. Calhoun often gives audiences a list of extinct apple varieties and, without telling them what they are, asks them to scan the list for their last names. That’s how genetically diverse American apples once were: almost every family could claim their own apple variety. I was dying to know—did my family have an apple? Had it survived? But since I’d heard Calhoun’s speech on the radio rather than in person, I didn’t have a copy of his extinct varieties. So I headed down the Google rabbit hole, trying to discover my ancestral apples.

Coming from farm stock and having been raised in Johnny Appleseed territory, I thought my chances were pretty good. Of my four grandparents, two had come from farming families, though one of these seemed more likely to have a tobacco variety named after them. My paternal grandfather’s line, with their farm in Cadiz, Ohio, was the most likely to hit the apple jackpot, I thought, and carried the bonus of sharing my maiden name, so I started hunting for Dunlap apples.

Weirdly, I felt a little nervous while I was searching. What if Dunlap apples were lousy? What would that say about us as a clan? I doubted that Mr. Calhoun would agree with this line of thought, but what if your family apple was like a horoscope? Continue reading →