ALSO BY JOHN THORNE
Simple Cooking
Outlaw Cook
Serious Pig
Home Body
POT ON THE FIRE
POT ON THE FIRE
FURTHER EXPLOITS OF
A RENEGADE COOK
JOHN THORNE
WITH MATT LEWIS THORNE
NORTH POINT PRESS
A DIVISION OF FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX
NEW YORK
North Point Press
A division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux
19 Union Square West, New York 10003
Copyright © 2000 by John Thorne
All rights reserved
First edition, 2000
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Thorne, John.
Pot on the fire : further exploits of a renegade cook / John Thorne with Matt Lewis Thorne.—1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-374-70159-8
1. Cookery, International. 2. Cooks. I. Thorne, Matt Lewis. II. Title.
TX725.A1 T497 2000
641.59—dc21 00-038015
The chapter in this book entitled “My Knife, My Pot” originally appeared in slightly different form inGourmet Magazine. Everything else originally appeared in the authors’Simple Cooking food letters.
We have made a concerted effort to obtain permission to quote from copyrighted works. Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following:
Andrew J. L. Blank and Judy Landis. “On the Trail of Arnhemse Meisjes,” by Andrew Blank and Judy Landis. Copyright © 1997 by Andrew J. L. Blank and Judy Landis. Reprinted by permission of the authors.
Maurice Frechette. “Hobz iz Zejt,” by Maurice Frechette. Copyright © 1997 by Maurice Frechette. Reprinted by permission of the author.
Patience Gray. For permission to quote a passage from a letter to us.
Mrs. Nicholas Kelley. For permission to quote a passage from a letter to us by her brother, the late Augustus M. Kelley.
Johan Mathiesen. “Cioppino,” by Johan Mathiesen. Copyright © 1996 by Johan Mathiesen. Reprinted by permission of the author.
Maggie Rogers. For permission to quote a passage from a letter to us.
Elisheva Urbas. “Cinnamon Toast,” by Elisheva S. Urbas. Copyright © 1998 by Elisheva S. Urbas. Reprinted by permission of the author.
The Crown Publishing Group. Excerpt fromLarousse Gastronomique, edited by Jennifer Harvey Lang. Copyright © 1984 Libraries Larousse. Copyright 1998 © English text, The Hamlyn Publishing Group, Ltd. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
For Shirley & George
with love
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The “I” that speaks from these pages is mine in every chapter of this book, except in those letters where the contributor is explicitly named—Patience Gray, Elisheva Urbas, Judy Landis and Andrew Blank, Augustus Kelley, Johan Mathiesen, Maggie Rogers—and in “Cakes on the Griddle,” the section on making pancakes, which was written by my wife, Matt Lewis Thorne.
Matt, though, has also considered every word of every draft I have written, reacting, suggesting, amending, and, hence,reshaping what appears herein. As I noted in our first collaboration,Outlaw Cook, this means that the subjective self who speaks out of these pages is a larger, braver, much more interesting person than I am alone—and I honor her for it.
As in my three previous food books,Pot on the Fire assembles a selection of essays written over the past several years, most of them originally published in our food letter,Simple Cooking. Those who read this book with pleasure might also be interested in subscribing to it. Either write to us at P.O. Box 778, Northampton MA 01061—or, better yet, visit our Web site: www.outlawcook.com
— John Thorne
CONTENTS
List of Recipes
Moving to Paradise—by Way of a Preface
EDUCATION OF A COOK
My Knife, My Pot
Perfect Rice
Knowing Nothing about Wine
Banh Mi & Me
Desperately Resisting Risotto
The Breakfast Chronicles
Quintessential Toast
How Restaurants Mean
KITCHEN DOINGS
Beans in a Flask
Existential Pizza
Crustaceans & Crumbs
Riso in Bianco
Sticks-to-the-Pot
Pasta and Vegetables
“The Best Cookies in the World”
Department of Random Receipts
TALES FROM THE OLD COOKSTOVE
Pot on the Fire
Potatoes & Point
Cuisine of the Crust
Cioppino in the Rough
Khichri / Kushari / Kedgeree
Caponata Siciliana
Cakes on the Griddle
Simple French Food
LAST GLEANING
Last Gleaning
Bibliography
Notes
Index
LIST OF RECIPES
Asian Dumplings
Basic dumpling wrapper recipe
Basic dumpling filling recipe
Basic instructions for wrapping and cooking dumplings
Moslem-style Lamb Filling
Pork and Bok Choy Filling
Pork and Shrimp Filling
Nira (Garlic Chive) Filling
Goon Mandu (Korean-Style) Filling (1)
Goon Mandu (Korean-Style) Filling (2)
Breakfast Dishes
Bird’s Nest with Matchstick Potatoes
Buttermilk Griddlecakes
with wild blueberries
Cream Toast
Dry Toast
Chunky Olive-and-Onion Cream Cheese Mash
Cinnamon Toast
Panfried Pierogi with Bits of Onion and Dried Mushroom
Tamales, Roasted Peppers, and Cheese
Dried Peas, Lentils, and Other Legumes
Fagioli al Fiasco (beans cooked in a flask)
Geeli Khichri (wet style,moong dal and rice)
Geeli Khichri with Potatoes and Peppers
Khichri (moong daland rice)
Khichri al-Baghdadi (red lentils and rice)
Kushari (lentils, rice, and elbow macaroni)
Mujaddarah (1) (lentils and rice, wet style)
Mujaddarah (2) (lentils and rice, dry style)
Penobscot Pease Pudding
Tuscan Beans from the Old Clay Pot
mashed on toast, with pancetta
with bean purée
with broccoli or broccoli rabe
with canned tuna
with Italian sausage
with pasta
with prosciutto
with raw onion
with tomato sauce (fagioli all’uccelletto)
Pasta and Pizza
Linguine with Green Beans, Leeks, and Flageolets
Penne with Broccoli, Red Peppers, and Garlic
Pizza Crust, Basic Recipe
Pizza Toppings
Broccoli Rabe
Eggplant and Lamb Sausage
Pepper, Onion, and Sausage
Spinach and Mushroom
Summer Tomato and Fresh Mozzarella
Spinach and Chickpeas with Fusilli
Rice and Rice Dishes
La Peperonata con Riso
Plain Boiled Rice
Rice with Spinach, Goat Cheese, and Walnuts
Ris in Cagnon
Ris e Latt (savory rice pudding)
Ris e Latt con Parmigiano e Sparagio
Riso in Bianco (basic recipe)
Riso con Limone alla Piemontese
Riso con Mozzarella e Pomodoro Freschi
Riso con Mozzarella e Peperone Rosso
Riso con Mozza
rella e Salsiccie
Riso con Asparagi
Risotto (basic information)
Risotto al Salto (leftover risotto pancake)
Risotto with Butternut Squash
Risotto with Portobello Mushrooms
Salads
Cu Cai Carot Chua (Carrot and Daikon in Vinegar)
Grilled Eggplant and Pepper Salad
Italian Butternut Salad
Panzanetta (tomato and fresh bread salad)
Panzanella (tomato and stale bread salad)
with bitter greens (appears in footnote)
Sandwiches and the like
Banh Mi
Pa amb Tomàquet
Sauces, Spreads, and Condiments
Anchoïade
Caponata Casa Nostra
Crispy Onion Shreds
Asian Dumpling Dipping Sauce
English Sauce
Nuoc Cham (Vietnamese dipping sauce)
Tapenade
Tartar Sauce
Meat, Poultry, and Seafood
Il Ciuppin di Sestri Levanti (Italian fish stew)
Crab Norfolk
Crab Cake Basics
Crab-Flake Cakes (Baltimore-style)
Getz’s Baltimore Crab Cakes
Homemade Sausage
Kedgeree (traditional style with smoked haddock)
Maine Coast Cioppino
Pigeon Hill Bay Crab Cakes
Postmodern Pot-au-Feu
Rao’s Famous Lemon Chicken
Smoked Salmon Kedgeree
Sweets and Desserts
Arnhem Cookies
Bread Crisps
Oranges à l’Arabe
Summer Peach and Fresh Raspberry Dessert
Vegetables (see also Pasta and Pizza, Rice and Rice Dishes, and Salads)
Asparagus in a Bowl
Champ (mashed potatoes with various greens)
Sweet-Corn Fritters
Corn-Stuffed Tomatoes
Corn Omelet
Farmhouse Colcannon
Southern Corn Pudding
Sweet-Corn Pudding
MOVING TO PARADISE—
BY WAY OF A PREFACE
Everything has changed; nothing has changed. Thirty-five years ago, I attended Amherst College, just two towns away from where I now write these words, and there’s something disorienting about being back. On the one hand, after all this time I hardly know the place. When I left the area in the late sixties, it was just starting to reflect the hipness of those times: a funky food co-op here, a bicycle store there, a scattering of Crabtree & Evelyn wannabes. Now the place is overripe with the hipness of today: body manipulators, nutrition consultants, coffee roasters, microbreweries, feminist gift shops. The effect is not unlike shopping for clothing at a college prep shop at the age of fifty-five: no matter what shape you’re in, nothing really fits. You get to be twenty only once.
On the other hand, the atmosphere—the lush, deciduous greenness of so many enormous trees; the college campus with its strange contrast of sobersided patrician architecture and motley youthful inhabitants—triggers long-buried sensory imprinting that is still dank with the humidity of adolescent angst. I take Matt for a quick drive-through tour of the campus … and leave it at that. There will be no looking up old professors or revisiting old dorm rooms. Instead, I prefer to delight in our new home about seven miles farther west—the small, sweet city of Northampton.
This place, if you’re unfamiliar with it—the city recently got its fifteen minutes of fame with the publication of Tracy Kidder’sHome Town —is located more or less at the center of Massachusetts, surrounded by fertile farmland and resting beside the—here, impressively wide—Connecticut River. It is the shire town of Hampshire County, with the requisite impressive granite courthouse, but, more important to us, it serves as the commercial hub for four liberal arts colleges (including Smith College, which is situated here) and the University of Massachusetts, a sprawling educational megalopolis.
So, much of the city’s commerce is directed at college students and those who teach them. There are countless used-book stores, a host of coffee bars and ethnic restaurants, two independent movie houses, and a quite respectable museum of art. This is a good place to live if you like to rent obscure videos, listen to live music, buy used books or CDs, or just settle into a plush armchair at one of the coffee bars and, acaffè latte by your elbow, bury yourself inWired orThe New York Review of Books.
When famed soprano Jenny Lind gave a concert in Northampton in 1851, she proclaimed the city “The Paradise of America,” liking it so much that she honeymooned here in 1852. I have no idea why she made that proclamation, but I do know that Northamptonites have been quite willing to agree with her—on one little side street you can find a Pizzeria Paradiso and a Paradise Copy Shop. In the intervening years, Northampton has certainly come to possess many ideal metropolitan qualities. For instance, its downtown is not only walkable but inviting to walk in, even late at night. Our second or third evening here, we joined a friend at a nearby restaurant for supper and later decided to stroll a few blocks to an Italian pastry shop for dessert. It was after nine, but patrons filled the outdoor tables of the coffee bars and strollers thronged the sidewalks; the air buzzed with the sound of people having a good time.
Even so, drive ten minutes from the center of town in almost any direction and you’re in the middle of farmland. Coming back from the post office the other day, I saw a huge, odd, but somehow familiar-looking truck lumbering toward me. As it got closer, I realized it was an open hopper truck, similar to ones we had seen on our trip to Maine’s Aroostook County—and, like those, this one was piled high with spuds. Their soddy, tuberous aroma trailed in the truck’s wake, a reminder—as is the fact that garden centers outnumber fast-food joints along our Miracle Mile—that this area is still largely farm country, famous, in fact, for its cigar-wrapper tobacco leaf, onions, and (hurrah!) asparagus.
All this helps explain why we came here, but not why we left the Down East coast or why our moving entailed abandoning Maine completely. Some of our reasons were entirely ordinary—wanting to be nearer to nephews who are quickly growing up, missing the pleasures and conveniences of urban life, finding we’d had it with winters that begin in early November and end late in April. But others were not.
I had returned to Maine back in 1987 for a last taste of the place where I spent my boyhood summers. While I had to travel much, much farther up the coast to find it, a taste of that world still lingered on. During the first few years of our time there, we could still find old-fashioned grocery and dry-goods stores, local dairies that had never heard of ultrapasteurization, doughnut shops that made cake doughnuts from scratch and fried them in lard, lunch counters that offered homemade pies and real beanhole beans, and country stores offering skunk cheese, fish jerky, fresh-churned butter in rough-cut chunks—and none of it for the benefit of tourists.
All this—or near enough—disappeared during our ten-year stay, including many of the places I wrote about inSerious Pig. In Brewer, the Buttermilk Donut Shop closed; in Ellsworth, Dick’s Restaurant, the Hancock Dairy, the Pine Tree Diner, and the J.J. Newberry five-and-ten-cent store, with its classic lunch counter; in Winter Harbor, The Donut Hole+ (despite a rave review of the place by Jane and Michael Stern inGourmet a few months before it closed—the owner was just worn out); in Bucksport, Duffy’s Restaurant; in Eastport and Machias, two vintage A & Ps.
Some new, good things arrived to take their places, but they were enterprises of a different order, established by people who had come to Maine because it is lovely there and quiet and, for the moment, still affordable enough to offer them—as it had the potters, the bell casters, and the stained-glass-window makers who arrived decades before—a chance to turn an avocation into a living. We ourselves, of course, were part of this crowd, but we were not reallyof it. I had come to Maine to find something I had lost there; they had come, many of them, to participate in the founding of the New Green Age.
I love trees and organic vegetables as much as anyone, but I take them as symbolic of a liveable future, not a direct route to it, and in Maine, those who believe itis the route seem to be marking it with increasingly ominous road signs. For instance, there’s been a vendor who’s tried for years to sell hot coffee at the Common Ground Fair, a statewide celebration of alternative agriculture, and every year he’s been refused a booth—even when he switched over to organic coffee. It seems that caffeine, like animal fat, whatever the source, is simply bad. That is symptomatic of a kind of self-righteousness that appears to swell with the arrival of each new herbalist and dulse harvester.
Northampton, not surprisingly, is rife with such attitudes—“Happy Valley,” a friend ironically describes it—but that is only one part of a headily active ferment. The local natural foods supermarket has a meat department that is much better—more varieties of meat, more specialty cuts, all of it organically raised—than most regular supermarkets, and a cheese department that simply blows the competition away. Porterhouse steaks, Cornish clotted cream, and obscure French cheeses coexist peacefully, if a tad bizarrely, with herbal tinctures, locally made tofu, and rice-milk beverages.
Also, as it turns out, this part of Massachusetts has a more robust vernacular culinary life than any we found in Maine, if only because there are more people and more money here to support them. Recently, local dairy farmers formed a co-op to sell their own antibiotic-free milk and found that they couldn’t produce enough of it. The area abounds in roadside farm stands and farmers’ markets, diners and hot dog wagons, sausage makers, old-fashioned doughnut shops, and such unexpected finds as the brace of penny-candy stores right here in town.
All this is a statement aboutme, not about Maine, a place I continue to love, or about the people who live there, all of whom I wish well. I’m extremely grateful to have been given a second helping of an experience that touched me as living in no other place ever has. And I already miss the stark, soul-cleansing beauty of the Down East coast. But I was becoming a writer whose major subject was fading into nostalgia and regret. To hell with that … better to toss myself back into the turbulent waters of today and see if I still know how to swim.
potonthefire Page 1