potonthefire
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SUMMER TOMATO AND FRESH MOZZARELLA
[makes 1 12-inch pizza]
When we lived Down East, fresh mozzarella was available only when there were enough summer folks around to make a market for it. This meant that mozzarella season and tomato season arrived pretty much at the same time, and we celebrated that fact accordingly. This is our one tomato pizza. It’s hardly original, but the method is not the usual one, and it results in an especially tasty version—one worth waiting most of the year to make.
3 small or 2 medium ripe red tomatoes
dough for one 12-inch pizza, made as described above
4 ounces good mozzarella
1 large clove garlic
1 tablespoon olive oil
½ teaspoon pure hot red chile powder
salt and freshly ground pepper to taste
several leaves of fresh basil
An hour before general pizza preparations begin, core, quarter, and cut the tomatoes into bite-sized chunks. Lay these out on paper towels (see note).
Preheat oven and pizza stone and prepare the pizza dough as directed above. Put this in a warm place to rest. Cut the mozzarella into small bite-sized cubes. Trim and mince the garlic until it is reduced to a moist pulp. Heat the olive oil in a skillet. As soon as it is hot, turn off the heat. Sprinkle in the ground chile, add the minced garlic, and stir together well. Turn in the tomato pieces and mix quickly so that they are all flavored with the garlic, hot pepper, and oil. Season with salt and pepper.
Spread the seasoned tomatoes and pan juices evenly over the pizza dough and then dot it with the cubes of mozzarella. Slip the pizza onto the preheated stone and bake until crusty and brown, or about 5 to 6 minutes. While the pizza cooks, tear the basil leaves into small bits. When the pizza is done, remove it from the oven and slide it onto a cutting board. Sprinkle the fresh basil evenly over the hot pizza, then slice and serve slightly cooled.
Variation.Scatter the pizza with torn bits of Mediterranean black olives after spreading the dough with the tomato-garlic mixture.
Cook’s Note.The trick to this pizza is to keep as much juice in the tomato pieces as possible, since it is the juice that contains the flavor. To prevent the pizza from swimming in juice, cut the tomato into chunks rather than slices. Then—at least in our quick-cooking method—the pizza is done and out of the oven before these chunks collapse. However, be warned that the chunks emerge scalding hot; take your time scattering the bits of basil over the pizza to give them a chance to cool.
Sources & Further Reading
Our pizza flours and baking stone are available from the King Arthur Flour Baker’s Catalogue (see page 212), an admirable source for baking supplies and high-quality specialty flours. (But avoid their aluminum pizza peels; the dough adheres to them.)
Edward Behr’s essay “Pizza in Naples,” which contains his recipe for authentic Neapolitan pizza, appears in the spring 1992 issue (no. 22) ofThe Art of Eating ($9.00 from P.O. Box 242; Peacham, VT 05862).
The novice pizza maker might start with Marcella Hazan’sEssentials of Classic Italian Cooking, Carol Field’sThe Italian Baker, Pamela Sheldon John’sPizza Napoletana, which contains a wealth of color photographs taken in the city’s pizzerias (who would ever have believed thatnapoletani eat pizza with a knife and fork!), or Arthur Schwartz’s section on the subject in hisNaples at Table, a splendid account of the cooking of that city in particular and the region of Campania in general.
CRUSTACEANS & CRUMBS
Sometime during the Great Depression, the crab cake leapt from obscurity to the status of an American gastronomic icon. There’s no question that crab cakes were eaten before that time by those who lived near the Chesapeake Bay,25but it seems that even there this was a dish relegated to the back of the recipe box. In the early decades of this century, the area’s famous oyster beds were beginning to vanish from overharvesting and pollution, and the watermen were turning to crabbing to earn their living. But crabmeat was only slowly acquiring a reputation as a delicacy. It was the poor who, finding oysters priced beyond their reach, would embrace it first, replacing the oyster roast with the boiled-crab dinner as the region’s signature seafood dish.
The Chesapeake is home to the blue crab, the meatiest and best-tasting Atlantic crab, and to eat a boiled-crab dinner is to experience that crustacean in as direct a way as possible. It is also to step back in time to when working-class eateries—beer gardens, oyster houses, barbecue pits—offered generous portions in a convivial, even boisterous, atmosphere to customers who took an uninhibited delight in both.
To dine on boiled crab, you sit down at a table covered with brown paper; your eating implement is a wooden mallet, with your fingers playing outfield. The waitress arrives with a pitcher of beer and a tray piled with boiled crabs, and you fall to. Shells crack, juices splatter, the mess on the table gets messier, and your fingers get smellier. The room is noisy with the crunch and thud of mallet on shell and the hubbub of people drinking lots of beer and having a good time. The novelist Jean Rhys got this atmosphere exactly right when she wrote: “They [ate] with gusto and noise after the manner of simple-hearted people who like their neighbors to see and know their pleasures.”
To such eaters, the crab cake would seem, at best, an appetizer to this feast and, at worst, an intrusion from their great aunt’s bridge club. However, as the century progressed, the economics of the restaurant business and the general genteelizing of society conspired to bring such eating places to extinction’s brink. What replaced them was something new: the turbocharged vernacular meal. Chili joints, fish-fry shacks, pancake houses, burger havens, hot dog carts: each specialized in a dish that might by necessity come from inexpensive ingredients but was prepared and promoted with such unalloyed enthusiasm that eating it made you feel like a prince. It was as if the raucous-tinged ambience of the hash house, now outlawed, transmuted itself into an aura that embraced the food itself. With the lip-smacking already injected into the foot-long hot dog or fried chicken in a basket, eaters could be persuaded that there was no need fortheir lips to make any noise at all.
The revolutionary force that transformed the Salisbury steak napped with cheese sauce into the cheeseburger had the same liberating effect on the crab cake. At the time, crabmeat was dirt cheap, and the dishes that utilized it had names—crab cutlets, crabmeat de Luxe, crabmeat à la king, crabmeat imperial—designed to help the hostess obscure the fact that it was, in culinary prestige, only a few steps up from dirt itself.
The crab cake took over several of the techniques that made these dishes tasty—it was well seasoned with Worcestershire or Tabasco to make it spicier and was bound together with a sauce—or sometimes heavy cream—to make it richer. But it broke almost entirely away from the tradition of refined dissembling. Its name and its unadorned presentation declared, “Iknow I’m good, and, as far as I’m concerned, you’re a snobby fool ifyou don’t know it, too.” The crab cake was the Clark Gable of crabmeat dishes: it didn’t wear an undershirt and it didn’t give a damn who found out.
Like its beefy cousin the hamburger, the crab cake’s simplicity focuses rather than diffuses our appetite. Sit down to a boiled-crab dinner and you have to winnow out your pleasure bit by bit. Sit down to a crab cake and the pleasure is immediate and intense. The crabmeat has already been picked—you can take as big a mouthful as you want. In fact, the crab cake goes the burger one better in concentrated taste experience. It provides its own bun and—unless you’re the sort with a ketchup bottle instead of a left hand—its own relish, too.
Crab cakes are so delicious you don’t have to like crab to love them. In fact, you don’t even need crab to make them—salmon or shrimp or minced clams will work nearly as well. However, the crab cake was first, and for a very good reason: the common denominator of most crab cookery is the container of picked meat. And crab cakes serve that meat best because they mess with it least.
Before there was the crab cake, there was the crab croquette, an extremely popular
dish at the turn of the century. Bits of meat or seafood were bound together in a thick sauce, formed into shapes—balls, mostly, but also pyramids, ovals, what have you—breaded, and deep-fried. What we call the crab cake today is the sum of inspired improvements made to it by countless unknown cooks over a span of decades. The crab cake recipe in Sheila Hibben’sThe National Cookbook —published in 1932—shows us the first step in this evolutionary process, namely, flattening and then panfrying the crab croquette.
CRAB-FLAKE CAKES (BALTIMORE-STYLE)
[serves 4]
2 tablespoons butter
2 tablespoons flour
1 cup milk
1 egg yolk
1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
½ teaspoon onion juice
2 cups crabmeat, flaked
salt and pepper to taste
bread crumbs for coating
lard or butter for frying
rich cream sauce
Melt the butter in a saucepan and add to it the flour; when well mixed, add the milk gradually, stirring constantly until smooth. Add the egg yolk, beaten up with the Worcestershire sauce and onion juice, and the crab flakes, seasoning to taste with salt and pepper. As soon as this mixture is cool enough, put it in the icebox to get very cold. Form into flat cakes; dredge in finely sifted bread crumbs and fry on both sides in either lard or butter. Serve on a hot platter with rich cream sauce (a white sauce made with cream instead of milk) poured over the cakes.
Although there are other things worth noticing here—Hibben is unable to shake off the fussiness that has always clung to the croquette (that drenching with rich cream sauce!)—what strikes me most is how unappetizing this early crab cake seems. Tasty as it may have been when turned out by the right cook, to read the recipe is to feel one’s tastebuds wilt.
Others must have agreed with that assessment, for it was right about this time that the great tidal wave of white sauce, then the universal culinary lubricant—a gluey amalgam of butter, flour, and milk—began at last to roll back out to sea. Younger readers may not even know wjat white sauce is, but older ones surely will, since even into the secood half of this century basic cookbooks devoted pages to it and its many variations. Here was a sauce that any cook coule make, and so almost every cook!did, in one or another of its many forms and with varying amounts of success: celery sauce, cheese sauce, curry sauce, onion sauce, pimiento sauce, Newburg sauce, brown sauce, orange sauce, and so on, ad infinitum.
One thing that helped change all this was the discovery by the delicatessen owner Richard Hellmann at the beginning of the twentieth century that there was an unexpected market for his bottled mayonnaise. By 1915, he gave up the delicatessen business entirely to make it; by 1927, he had factories up and running in Astoria, Chicago, San Francisco, Atlanta, Dallas, and Tampa. His Hellmann’s Blue Ribbon mayonnaise had taken the country by storm.
And why not? Where few white sauces managed to rise much above library paste, mayonnaise offered instant voluptuousness and piquancy. Of course, recipes for mayonnaise appeared in period cookbooks, too, but making it oneself was a challenge rarely accepted by most home cooks. Hellmann’s, however, could be spooned straight from the jar, and this easy deliciousness was immediately embraced by our vernacular cooking, producing such delicacies as potato salad, the club sandwich, and the BLT. Also, since mayonnaise is a cold sauce, our national taste began to shift away from dishes like lobster Newburg to ones like lobster salad. Where the white sauce traditionwas maintained, it, too, was no longer made at home; its effects were accomplished by canned cream soups.
Although it took cookbook writers a long time to admit that their readers weren’t, in fact,making all this mayonnaise—the commercial version isn’t even mentioned inFannie Farmer until the tenth edition (1959)—recipes utilizing it as an ingredient began to exfoliate in the thirties, and it was quickly recognized as the ideal binder of the crab cake. Here is an early version that the Brown clan managed to wheedle from Getz’s, a premier Baltimore seafood restaurant whose crab cakes were legendary—and this in a city already famous for them.
GETZ’S BALTIMORE CRAB CAKES
(adapted fromAmerica Cooks [1940], by Cora, Rose, and Bob Brown)
[serves 4]
1 pound crabmeat
½ teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon white pepper
1 teaspoon chopped parsley
1 teaspoon dry English mustard
2 teaspoons Worcestershire sauce
1 egg yolk
1 tablespoon mayonnaise
flour for dredging
1 egg, beaten
dried bread crumbs
Put the crabmeat in a large bowl. Blend the salt, white pepper, parsley, powdered mustard, Worcestershire sauce, and egg yolk into the mayonnaise and gently but thoroughly mix into the crabmeat. Form this mixture into 8 cakes, pressing well together. Dip each into the flour, then into the beaten egg, and finally into the bread crumbs, coating the crab cakes all over. Fry these in a hot greased skillet until golden brown on both sides. Serve with potato salad or coleslaw.
Now, these are good—in fact, they’re so good that you can still find crab cakes in Maryland today made precisely in this way. However, they also show that eschewing the white sauce doesn’t mean you’ve escaped the croquette. When the croquette was fried in boiling fat, its protective crumb coating quickly crisped, keeping it intact and preventing it from absorbing any grease. The panfried crab cake—unlike a hamburger—still needs a binder to hold it together, but—very muchlike a hamburger—it doesn’t need any coating to protect it from the fat. I believe that until the crab cake shed this croquettish coating, it didn’t truly come into its own.
Those who disagree with this opinion should ponder why panfried crab cakes have remained universally popular, while the crumb-coated deep-fat-fried ones have all but disappeared everywhere except on their native turf. If deep-fat frying is still the preferred method for frying chicken, it is because the crusty coating provides an ideal contrast to that bird’s tender but relatively insipid flesh. But when it comes to something as delicate as a crab cake, that sort of crust only gets in the way.
The quintessential crab cake should be buttery crisp on the outside, to be sure, but its integument should hold it together only up to the moment when a forkful reaches the mouth. Then it should collapse—not melt, not crumble—into moist, tender crabmeat, its assertive flavor balanced by the piquancy of the seasonings and its richness enhanced and broadened by the mayonnaise. It is the succulence of crabmeat that makes the crab cake so special and explains why other seafood cakes—good as they can be—are of a lesser breed. And it is the ability to retain this succulence that is the mark of the superlative crab cake cook.
To become such a cook, you need to acquire a light, deft hand in forming and then cooking the cakes. This comes with practice. You must also acquire a certain resolution in avoiding the crab cake recipes in most cookbooks—even Maryland cookbooks. Because of its simplicity, the crab cake tends to suffer more than most from the American tendency to make things easier than they ought to be and to improve a good thing out of existence. As Euell Gibbons confesses in his classic guide to shoreline foraging,Stalking the Blue-Eyed Scallop:
Crab cakes can be excellent if one is generous with the crabmeat and severely limits or completely eliminates the other ingredients. At one time I added such things as chopped parsley, minced onion, chopped peppers, chopped celery, breadcrumbs, and other things to my crab cakes, but by experimenting I gradually made the amazing discovery that crab cakes are much better when made of crab.
Compared to most, Gibbons’s approachis amazingly spartan: he mixes his crabmeat with a beaten egg, shapes this into one-and-a-half-inch balls with dampened hands, lets these firm for an hour or so in the refrigerator, then rolls them in crushed cracker meal and deep-fries them. Unfortunately, in this case, what simplicity gives with one hand it takes away with the other. Call these “crab nuggets” and heap them into a pita pocket lined wit
h shredded lettuce, spoon over a generous dose of tartar sauce, and you would certainly have something to give falafel a run for its money.
But this is not the way to make a crab cake. Beaten egg is the easy way to bind them together, but it solidifies during the frying and makes the crab cake rubbery and dry. As Mary Seymour, a Maryland cook who grew up at the very edge of the Chesapeake Bay, observes to Jean Anderson inThe Grass Roots Cookbook (1977):
Most people use eggs in their crab cakes, but I don’t like to. If you don’t use a lot of mayonnaise or something in the mixture to loosen it up, the eggs dry the crab out and make it tough. The mixture should be juicy and soft but still thick enough to hold together … but try not to handle it too much or the crab will pack down too tight. Now I remember when I was a girl, my mother didn’t even bother to pat out the crab cakes—with eight children, she didn’t want to take the time. She just dumped the crab mixture in a great big skillet and stirred it over the heat—sort of like crab hash. But I do take time to shape the crab cakes. I make right good-sized ones—about 2-½ inches across and I guess ’bout an inch thick. Of course, I never was accused of making my crab cakes all the same size.
It was by following the thrust of Mrs. Seymour’s advice that I produced my first truly successful crab cake. Before, I had made my crab cakes the same way I made my codfish cakes—patted into the shape of a hamburger—which all but guaranteed that they would be overhandled and overcooked. Molded gently into the shape of a baking-powder biscuit, they retained both their moisture and their collapse-in-the-mouth texture. Her recipe is a good one, but during my time in Maine I’ve wandered away from it, for reasons spelled out in the following.
CRAB CAKE BASICS