potonthefire
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about 5 large green olives, pitted
2 tablespoons salted capers (see note)
a handful of fresh Italian parsley, minced
¼ cup red wine vinegar
2 tablespoons white (or brown) sugar
salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
Wash, dry, and trim the stem end from the eggplant. Cut it, skin included, into ½-inch dice, place in a colander, and sprinkle with the coarse kosher salt, spreading this through the eggplant pieces with your hands. Set over a large bowl and let rest for at least a half hour and preferably up to 2 hours. Then discard the collected liquid and dump the eggplant cubes in a sink full of cold water. Swirl them around to rinse them well, then lift them out, handful by handful, squeezing them hard. Put them back into the colander, into which you have already spread an expendable dish towel. When all the eggplant pieces are in the towel, gather its ends together and twist it progressively tighter and tighter, forcing as much liquid out of the eggplant as possible. Put the cubes in a large bowl.
Peel and coarsely chop the onions. Core, seed, and coarsely chop the red pepper. Cut the celery into bite-sized pieces. Pour the olive oil into a large pot and heat over a low flame until it begins to ripple. Stir in the crushed hot red pepper and then the celery. Cook this, stirring occasionally, for 5 minutes, then add the onion, garlic, and red bell pepper pieces. Cook these, still stirring, for another 5 minutes, or until the onion is soft and translucent. Stir in the eggplant. Sauté this mixture for 20 minutes. At this point, taste the eggplant. The flesh should be soft and tender. If not, continue cooking another 5 minutes and taste again.
Add the tomatoes with their liquid, dividing them into chunks with a heat-proof rubber spatula. Reduce heat, cover, and simmer about 10 minutes, while you cut the pitted black and green olives into small bits and rinse and chop the capers. Add these, stir in well, and cover again, continuing the simmering until the eggplant skin is tender, about 15 more minutes. Taste the caponata for doneness: the vegetables should all be soft but retain some texture; the liquid should be syrupy. Stir in the minced parsley, the vinegar, and the sugar. Cook just long enough to dissolve the sugar, then remove from the heat. Add salt and pepper to taste. Serve warm or at room temperature.
Cook’s Note.The true caper comes from a small bush (Capparis rupestri) with tough oval leaves that grows wild around the Mediterranean, its buds producing lovely, short-lived flowers. Brine these buds and you have capers, their pungent flavor coming from the capric acid (named after that slightly goaty taste) that develops during curing. Capers are cured either in a salty vinegar solution or in plain salt, and anyone—like myself—used to only the pickled version will find dry-salted capers an eye-opener: plumper, firmer in texture, and intensely flavored. In fact, they are almost like a nutmeat, and I find it hard to resist eating them straight from the container. Look for them at better fancy grocers.
Of the many sweet-and-sour Mediterranean eggplant dishes these researches uncovered, one of the most appealing is the Turkishpatlican ve biber salatasi, which transforms our mythological vegetable beast into a delectable, fire-breathing dragon. This version has been worked up from Ayla Algar’sClassic Turkish Cooking and the Turkish-influenced Bulgarian-Sephardic cooking of Suzy David inThe Sephar-dic Kosher Kitchen.
GRILLED EGGPLANT AND PEPPER SALAD
[serves 4 to 6]
2 medium-sized eggplants (about 2 pounds)
1 green bell pepper
2 red bell peppers
2 fresh poblano (or other mildly hot) chile peppers
1 large tomato
1 clove garlic, minced
salt and black pepper to taste
1 teaspoon sugar
1 to 2 tablespoons wine vinegar
4 to 6 tablespoons olive oil
a handful of flat-leaf parsley, chopped
hot red pepper flakes or powder to taste
Grill the eggplant and peppers over an open flame, if possible, or otherwise under a broiler until they are seared and black on all sides. The eggplants will turn soft and sag slightly. Peel the still warm eggplants and set in a colander to drain for at least a half hour. Then chop the flesh into small pieces and put into a medium-sized bowl.
Meanwhile, peel away the blackened skin from the peppers. Slice them open and remove and discard the seeds. Reserve all juices. Cut the flesh into small pieces and mix both these and the reserved juice with the eggplant.
Pour boiling water over the tomato to loosen its skin, then peel and seed it. Cut the flesh into pieces and mix this and any juice into the pepper-eggplant mixture.
Stir this well and add the minced garlic, salt, and black pepper to taste. Dissolve the sugar in the wine vinegar and stir this into the mixture. Add the olive oil, minced parsley, and hot red pepper flakes or powder to taste. Let the flavors mingle for an hour or so before serving. Serve with wedges of pita bread. The salad will keep for several days in the refrigerator.
Further Reading
Cooks seeking more adventurous versions of caponata might consider the grilled version in Johanne Killeen and George Germon’sCucina Simpatica, the Italian Sephardic Jewish one in Edda Servi Machlin’sThe Classic Cuisine of the Italian Jews, or the recipe for “Island Eggplants” in Rosemary Barron’sFlavors of Greece . And while eggplant is certainly the traditional foundation of caponata, it is hardly mandatory. Among the books consulted for this piece, we discovered versions made with potatoes (in Mimmetta LoMonte’sClassic Sicilian Cooking) , artichokes, and cauliflower and escarole (in Jo Bettoja’sSouthern Italian Cooking ).
CAKES ON THE GRIDDLE
Cakes made of a batter so thin that it flows easily upon a griddle, and that can, therefore, be quickly baked and served hot, are griddlecakes, and great favorites they are…. Cold days are the gala days for hot cakes.
—New England Cook Book (1905)
Pancakes were an event in my family, and it was a very special Sunday—as Sunday it almost always proved to be—when my mother would consent to make them. This was because she believed that they should be eaten straight from the griddle—which meant that she would have to stand at the stove before a collocation of skillets, turning out batch after batch of them, while four hungry children and an equally hungry husband eagerly awaited their turn to be served … and served … and served again. It was only when appetites waned (and the level of batter in the pitcher had dropped precipitously) that she could load up the frying pans one last time for herself, knowing that she who ate last at least ate in peace … and had the table to herself.
We North Americans have no patent on the pancake, but we do hold one for the pancakebreakfast —and most certainly for the flavor combination of griddlecakes, syrup, and sausage links or bacon. If a forkful of hot cake dripping butter and maple syrup now brings me back to my childhood kitchen, with all the anticipatory bustle of a pancake morning, I’m reminded that its evocative force was just as keen when I was still a child. Then, my little Log Cabin syrup tin linked me directly to the exciting world of the winter forest, where lumberjack camp cooks flipped their flapjacks high into the air and smoke belched from the stovepipes of maple-sugar shacks, sending the sweet smell of boiling sap floating over the deep drifts of snow.
Here, I know, I speak for myself, but surely not only for myself. Fried or scrambled or three-minute eggs, hash brown potatoes, buttermilk doughnuts, steaming bowls of oatmeal, hot buttered toast, fresh-brewed coffee poured straight from the percolator, each has its place at the traditional American breakfast table. But none of them—except the coffee—has left in its wake as much appreciative prose as the griddlecake.
Breakfast may be only a breaking of the night’s fast for many of us, a matter of a bowl of cereal and a glass of juice. But for those who will soon be pulling on their work boots, it has always been the day’s most important meal, filling the stomach and energizing the spirit. Let the old cowboy song say it for anyone ever dragged from a warm bunk into the icy morning air by the aroma of griddlecakes w
afting from the cookshack or farmhouse kitchen:
Wake up, Jacon, day’s a-breakin’
Fryin’ pan’s on an’ hoecake’s bakin’.
Bacon in the pan, coffee in the pot,
Git up now and git it while it’s hot.
Why? Why pancakes? Why for breakfast? Why with syrup? I realized, not for the first time, that with a much made dish, as with an old friend, our sense of familiarity may come less from intimate knowledge than from casual assumptions we have never bothered to challenge. When we finally do, we discover in them unfathomed and unguessed-at depths.
A trip to the cookbook shelf, rather than helping to resolve my questions, only added to my confusion. I discovered that, a hundred years ago, it was not uncommon for “pancakes” to be dropped like doughnuts into boiling fat, rather than fried flat in a skillet. Nor were griddlecakes universally served with syrup. Sometimes they were eaten as is, at other times with a dab of butter, a sprinkle of sugar, a grating of nutmeg. Most perplexing of all, however, was the freewheeling attitude cooks at that time had toward naming their creations. Pancakes, griddlecakes, flannel cakes, feather cakes, drop cakes, flapjacks, slapjacks … as soon as you think you have sorted out one from the other, the next cookbook you turn to muddles up everything all over again—even if it was written by the same author.57
Still, I did learn something. The griddlecake has its origins in the porridge pot, and in these books, with their plethora of recipes, ranging from the primeval hoecake (cornmeal plus water) straight through to the feathery-textured, genteel flannel cake, we can trace its efforts, all through the last century, to escape from that pot for good.
In the beginning, the cook would take some cold gruel, pat it flat, and either set it among the ashes in the fireplace to bake or slip it onto a hot, greased griddle. As primitive as the method was, that brief, direct contact with the fire made all the difference in its status. For it might almost be called a universal culinary law that the baked and the fried is of a higher order than the boiled. This is partly a matter of texture—of buttery and crisp, crusty and light, versus wet and sludgy. And it is also because the baking or the frying particularizes each spoonful of gruel/batter as it cooks it, transforming an amorphous mass into an assortment of individuals—fritters, jollyboys, doughnuts, griddlecakes—each with its own crisp crust and light, tender interior.
The griddlecake, simple as it is, can absorb an enormous amount of such attentiveness. It thus allows any cook, however poor or ill-equipped, an opportunity to shine. And nothing, as the nineteenth century would slowly but surely discover, abets this more than possession of a tin of baking powder.
My woman wants to set some [griddlecakes] and she took a notion she must have risin’ to put in ’em.
— C. M. Kirkland,Forest Life (1842)
The baking powder, or “saleratus” (the grandest word in the trappers’ very abridged dictionary), cannot be found.
— W. A. Baillie-Grohman,Camps in the Rockies (1882)
When Congress created the United States Patent Office in 1790 to encourage and protect American ingenuity, the first patent it awarded was to a Vermonter named Samuel Hopkins for an improved method of producing pearlash, a leavening agent made of chemically treated wood ash. Although European bakers bought it by the shipload for leavening highly spiced cakes like gingerbread, its soapy aftertaste was no boon to American griddle breads. But pearlash’s limitations only spurred on other inventors, and a patent self-rising flour would appear in 1852 and commercial baking powder in 1856.
Although this same ingenuity was soon to be applied to the production of bread yeast—Gaff, Fleischmann & Co. would market foil-wrapped compressed yeast in 1870—most home cooks depended on various sourdough concoctions. These could produce excellent bread, but even the most dependable could not do so on demand. Baking powder, on the other hand, was nothing if not fast-acting, and, as the various formulas were perfected58and cooks learned to take their measure, it transformed home baking. All the foods we associate with that phase, saving only yeast breads and pies, have become what they are because of it.
To the breakfast table baking powder gave the doughnut, the biscuit, the muffin or gem, and, of course, the griddlecake. Where the last of these had it over the biscuit or the muffin as a breakfast bread (and it was not at all unknown, at least in Maine, to use the griddlecake as a kind of Yankee wheat tortilla, “wrappings for the more substantial victuals [being] stowed away … cod-steak or pork-chop or beef-steak”) was that it could be produced nonstop, requiring neither tricky kneading nor rolling out and cutting nor a set amount of time in the oven.
To the eater, this meant a veritable river of batter pouring from a bottomless pitcher, an endless procession of freshly baked griddlecakes, served up one after the other after the other, until appetite cried, “Hold, enough!” If the difference between a dollop of gruel and a griddlecake was that between a penny and a silver dollar, then to have a bagful of self-rising flour was to own the mint. This is why, in pancake iconography, the basic unit is thestack.
A feeling for the logistics such a breakfast entailed can be found inPrairie Kitchen Sampler —a kitchen-by-kitchen recollection of Nebraska farmhouse cooking by E. Mae Fritz. She remembers that in the 1920s farmers could still bring their grain to the local mill. There,
as the miller milled the wheat, he would, upon request, add dry leavening agents to one or two bags turning the flour into “pancake flour.” Pancake flour, in its day and in its way, was the forerunner of all the many boxed baking mixes that now take up more and more grocery store shelf space with each passing year. … So far as I know, there wasn’t a recipe for making pancakes from pancake flour. If there was, I never saw a copy of it. I didn’t need a recipe to stir up a batch of pancakes, all I needed to know was how many people I’d be feeding [and] the size of their appetites.
Note that she calls this “pancake flour,” not “biscuit” or even “self-rising” flour. Each of these sacks weighed fifty pounds. Even so, it would probably take her no more than three months to work her way through two of them. Her pancake formula mixed four cups of this leavened flour with two cups of milk and four beaten eggs to make twenty-four six-inch pancakes. Her calculation was that a hungry farmer—or farmhand—would eat four to six for breakfast,
slathered with butter and drizzled with syrup, [along with] several strips of home-cured bacon or a slice of ham or pork sausage patties, hash browned potatoes, and fried eggs, and he drank milk along with cup after cup of hot coffee.
Furthermore, baking powder catalyzed the cook as much as it did the pancake batter. The moment the liquid was added to the mix, the cook was racing against time: it wasn’t only the hungry men around the table who urged her on but the very stuff of the griddlecake itself. (I speak of single-acting baking powder; the double-acting variety came much later.) In the chapter “Down-East Breakfast” in his 1950 bookMaine Doings (whence came the pancake-as-wrapper quote above), Robert P. Tristram Coffin paints a vivid portrait of the result:
The flapjack cook uses no effete pancake-mix. She uses plain buckwheat or wheat flour, sour milk, salt, two even teaspoons of cream-o’-tartar, one of saleratus, a tablespoon of sugar, elbow grease, a tablespoon of shortening, a large duck’s egg, and vigor, to mix it up. She pours it out of a gallon pitcher into an old-fashioned, thick-iron frying pan, sending up volcanoes of blue smoke from its sizzling pork fat, and she fills the spider full of her dough from rim to rim. She sears her dough-flap brown on its port side … tosses it high into the air, big as the frying pan itself, catches it exquisitely as it comes hurtling down … without smearing the rim of her pan, sears it, this side, to a light mahogany, and tosses it tablewards to her hungering man. The parade of flying flapjacks is continuous. The good cook keeps the kitchen air full of them.
Fanciful as this portrait is, it nicely captures a moment in our culinary history, now lost to our everyday experience, when old-fashioned artisanship made its brief but happy marriage with modernity’
s sense of business urgently needing to be done. The practiced skill of the cook set a rhythm that looks forward to the hurry-scurry of the short-order grill; the meal she produced, however, looked back to the old-fashioned farmhouse breakfast, where frugal ingredients were transformed by intensive labor into a morning feast.
In fact, the griddlecake breakfast is an ideal example of what—now that it has almost entirely vanished—we’re beginning to realize we once actually had: authentic American peasant cooking. The meat is of secondary importance (and from the family-raised pig), the meal being built instead around a humble bread, made palatable with a coarse-flavored, homemade syrup of boiled-down sugar-maple sap or the juices crushed from the sorgo plant.
Today … well, what history intends to abandon, it first dilutes. Now, at too many breakfast tables, the syrup has only a touch of maple—if that—and the pancakes are made from a mix, if they aren’t bought frozen to be heated in the microwave. The sound of bacon spluttering in the skillet summons as much fear as it does appetite. Close behind all this treads the question: Why bother? And the pancake breakfast begins to fade away.
This is not how it has to be. In our own two-person, two-griddle household, pancakes are a regular affair, mixed from scratch, cooked, and served—with no sense of hurry—in about the time it takes to brew the coffee. Matt makes and pours the batter. Then, while she washes up, I tend to the cooking, as the plates warm in a slow oven below. Good sweet butter and a pitcher of Maine maple syrup wait on the breakfast table, but these are not the real extravagance here—or, rather, they are the lesser part of it. To our immediate ancestors, what a baking-powder-activated pancake batter gave was instant access to plenty. To us, for whom plenty is not an issue, it bespeaks instead the luxury of just enough room in our morning for all this to take place.
PANCAKES’ PROGRESS
Matt Lewis Thorne