potonthefire

by Pot On The Fire Free(Lit)

  It was obvious I had to teach my old pancakes some new tricks. I had no trouble getting them to roll over and they were great at playing dead, but that was it. In fact, since they no longer came from a box, they weren’t even “my old pancakes” anymore. When the spirit moved—less and less often—I’d consult one cookbook or another, stir up a bowlful of batter, and John and I would have ourselves some pancakes. I felt better about the ingredients, but in every other respect I might just as well have been using a mix. And, even on good days, I’m not sure the pancakes I produced ever surpassed the ones made with Bisquick I’d happily downed as a kid. I guess it wasme who needed to learn a few tricks.

  It’s odd that, right then, I was really fired up about a group of other dishes based, like pancakes, on simple batters of flour, milk, and eggs—things like popovers, puffy oven-baked pancakes, and clafoutis. These were, for the most part, new cooking experiences for me, and that, I suppose, was the difference. I was used to keeping my thoughts and feelings about foods I had known all my life quite separate from those about new foods I was exploring.

  But this time, a small spark of interest and excitement eventually leapt the break, and I found myself wondering about the connections between the formulas for these new batters and the various basic pancake recipes I’d been following. Maybe I could make our pancakes lighter … more tender … crisper at the edges … if I pushed the batter in the direction—richer in eggs, say, or more the consistency of heavy cream—of those I’d been using for popovers or clafoutis.

  Eager to find out, for starters, whether the secret to a light pancake might be a loose, eggy batter, I cooked up a batch right away. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised—but I was—that the resulting pancakes were more like some kind of mongrel crêpe than anything else. Forget “light”! These were limp, sprawling, anxious-seeming things, hardly able to stand up to a fork, much less to the assertive flavors of maple syrup and bacon.

  As it happens, my recent work with batters had also involved an occasional foray into crêpedom. John and I were most comfortable when we were at a far remove from the likes of crêpes suzette. (I should sayI was most comfortable. John now tells me that he would haveswooned if I’d presented him with crêpes suzette.) So, we made cheese blintzes, in memory of the near-perfect ones we’d eaten at Theresa’s on the Lower East Side; diminutive Swedish pancakes, which, topped with tart, sugared lingonberries, traditionally follow a Thursday night supper of split pea soup; buttery crêpes dressed with just a squeeze of lemon juice and a sprinkle of sugar, eaonce suchten from our fingers.

  It would be a simpler and more likely story if I could say thatthese had been the inspiration for, the direct antecedents of, the strange creatures that now confronted us. And it’s true that the qualities we liked best in the atypical crêpes we were drawn to—the tantalizing play of textures in the cheese blintzes, the admirable way the Swedishpankakkor held their own in such savory company, the uncomplicated goodness of the lemon-and-sugar crêpes—had a lot to tell us about what we might shoot for in our pancakes. But you’ll get a more accurate sense of the way my mind works, not to mention a clearer picture of how these pancakes turned out, if I admit that actually I was curious to see what a griddled, baking-powder-leavened buttermilk popover would be like. At any rate, now I knew.

  No matter. The important thing was that we had taken the first step. Even these bland, self-effacing pancakes had more life in them—and certainly more thought behind them—than the standard cookbook variety with which I’d just been going through the motions. From now on, full of ideas about the pancakes we wanted to end up with, we would be working our own way toward them. The following is a brief report on our current whereabouts.

  BUTTERMILK GRIDDLECAKES

  [makes 8 4- to 5-inch griddlecakes]

  The ideal pancake must attain to that golden mean where substance strikes a balance with delicacy, crispness, and feathery lightness. For us, this pancake achieves just that, earning both halves—“griddle” and “cake”—of its sobriquet. Many cooks have found—and we agree—that a separated egg adds an extra touch of lightness. The blend of flours is a time-honored one, including just enough whole wheat to accentuate the taste of the grain and a big spoonful of cornmeal to lend a pleasing husky whisper to the texture. This pancake batter is not as thin as many, but it pours well and spreads out smoothly. We find no need for the sugar that is often called for to promote browning, to mask the strong taste of some commercial leaveners, and, frankly, to boost the flavor of highly processed flours. And the judicious use of three different fats—peanut oil in the batter, a touch of bacon fat on the griddle, and sweet butter to melt on top—contributes a final note of special savory goodness.59

  bacon fat (or peanut oil or butter) for the griddles (see note)

  3 ounces (about ¾ cup) unbleached all-purpose flour

  ½ ounce (about 2 tablespoons) whole-wheat flour

  ½ ounce (about 2 tablespoons) stone-ground cornmeal

  ½ teaspoon cream of tartar

  ½ teaspoon baking soda

  ¼ teaspoon salt

  1 tablespoon peanut oil

  1 large egg, separated

  ¾ cup buttermilk

  TO SERVE:

  sweet butter and maple syrup

  Set the oven to its lowest temperature and put in the plates to warm. Dip the end of a finger into a small amount of bacon fat and fill in 4 5-inch circles on each of 2 two-burner griddles with a light film of grease.

  Measure the dry ingredients into a mixing bowl—preferably one with a handle and a spout—and give them a couple of turns with a whisk to mix them thoroughly and break up any lumps.

  Measure the oil into another bowl. Add the egg yolk and whisk gently, then add the buttermilk and whisk again. Now scrape the buttermilk mixture into the bowl of dry ingredients and whisk just to blend.

  Separately, beat the egg white until it forms soft peaks, then fold it into the batter with a rubber spatula.

  Preheat the first griddle over a medium-high flame. When the griddle is hot and the grease entirely melted, start the second griddle heating and portion out half of the batter to make 4 pancakes on the first. Then, move on to the second and do the same, scraping the bowl clean. As soon as each pancake has puffed up and the bubbles on its surface burst and stay open, flip it over to cook on the other side. As soon as all are turned, reduce the heat to low. When done, bring them at once to the table on the preheated plates. Serve with the butter and syrup.

  Variation.In the summer, we like to fold half a cup of wild blueberries into the batter just after the beaten egg white. Avid blueberry pancake fans often resort to frozen berries during the other three seasons, but they might consider following Edna Lewis’s lead and stew these into a syrup instead. This is servedin combination with the maple syrup—something she describes as the tastiest pancake topping anyone could imagine.

  Cook’s Note.When John and I began to get serious about pancakes, we treated ourselves to a pair of two-burner Silverstone-lined Nordic Ware Griddle Kings. Now we can sit down at the same time, each with a full ration of pancakes laid out on warmed stoneware plates. Although we own both soapstone and cast-iron griddles, we prefer the aluminum griddles because they heat up quickly and are easy to clean. They require no greasing, so that the small amount of bacon fat we use is strictly for flavor and to aid in the crisping process. (On the down side, they don’t diffuse heat very evenly, which requires some attentive spatula work.)

  SILVER DOLLAR GRIDDLECAKES

  When this essay first appeared inSimple Cooking, subscriber Maggie Rogers wrote to share a childhood recollection of her neighbor:

  Mrs. Stuckey, mother of twelve, standing at a huge black woodstove, makingperfect “dollar” pancakes. So rich that we two add-ons, hungry from our mile’s walk to catch the school bus, lost any recall of propriety lessons and moved into the fracas—probably unnoticed! What a warm family of Mennonites they were: dairying, thirty-five cows, only recently moved from
hand to machine milking. But back to pancakes. These were spooned right onto the stovetop; no griddles meant more space and productivity. I don’t remember what we poured over them—if anything—since they were a size for picking up in the fingers, no fork needed. Butter? They seemed as though they weremade of it…. I’ve never found such since, although my sourdoughs are close. Best with sweet salted butter and the strange slatey-sweet taste of elderberry jelly. They marry perfectly.

  SIMPLE FRENCH FOOD

  My copy of Richard Olney’sSimple French Food, a first edition, was bought off a remainder table at Barnes & Noble in the late 1970s. I can still remember the table—it had nothing else on it but piles of the book—and I can still remember my excitement when I picked it up and began leafing through its pages. As well I might:Simple French Food is one of the books that changed my life. In my mind, it sits not in the cookbook library but on another, more private shelf, whose inhabitants must sometimes look at each other and wonder how on earth they ever all arrived at this same destination.

  Consequently, one of the reasons I have never written about the books is that I really didn’t want anyone else in the world to know about it. And there is something about the slightly shameful feeling that comes of meeting a book on a remainder table that abets that kind of selfishness; the world had its chance and, as usual, didn’t know what to make of it. Book and reader exchange at the remainder table the cynical, mutually recognizing glance of the cultural exile.

  Richard Olney, however, is the real thing. Born in Marathon, Iowa, in 1927 and educated at the University of Iowa and the Brooklyn Museum Art School, he went to France at the age of twenty-four. Ten years later, “in love with the light, the landscape, and the odors of Provence,” he bought an abandoned property near Solliès-Toucas, around which he has since built his life.

  The writer to whom Olney immediately demands comparison is Elizabeth David. The prose of each is characterized by an aesthetic sensibility enmeshed in the stabilizing regimen of a strictly imposed self-discipline. The resulting intellectual toughness (inSimple French Food, Olney dispatches thatmonstre sacré and insufferable old windbag Brillat-Savarin with a single, savage saber thrust) can distance both authors from their readers. It is an unusually self-confident cook who, opening one of Olney’s books, doesn’t soon feel something like a naïve and frisky puppy edging up to a clever, battle-scarred, and not particularly charitable old tomcat.

  Eels live for a long time out of water and should be alive when purchased…. Rap the back of the head sharply against the edge of a table to knock the eel unconscious, cut a circular incision all around the base of the head, cutting slightly into the flesh, grasp the head firmly in one hand, holding it in a towel to prevent its slipping, and peel the skin, glovelike, from the body, turning it inside out; it is difficult to get it started and pliers can be useful, but once begun, it slips off easily.

  The very exactness of his instructions has a peremptoriness to it that announces in advance that we are not to expect any hand-holding, even when it comes to cutting an incision around the head of a still-living eel.

  It helped that I first read the book not as a potential instruction manual but as a uniquely intelligent and boldly stated culinary autobiography. What transfixed me then, and what returned in a sweeping rush when I sat down to reread it recently, is how at ease he is with a seriousness that, in this country, is itself suspect. What he expresses with rigor, clarity, and grace is an argument for the life spdnt in contemplative self-gratifhcation.

  Simple French Foodis genuinely subversive not only because it articulates such a selsibility but because it does so without shame—or shame’s usual appuptenances: diffidence, jnviality, confession. Jim Harrison is the only other American writer who comes tm mind who is as unflinchingly forward in his philosophical hedonism, and he, unlike Olney, has the excuse of being a novelist. Olney, of course, is a food writer, but he never hides behind the fig leaf of that profersion, ppetending that this is all somehow just ajob.

  Instead, Olney goes directly frmm the efflorescence of experience to the printed page, defiantly ignoring the reader’s reshsting prudishness. No one who hasn’t tried can understand the courage it takes to write a passage as unguarded as this:

  [G]iven the fanciful but far from frivolous presence of flowers and a sufficidnt variety of green things, presented in a vast, wide ceramic or earthenware vessel { nothing in the entire repertory of food possesses the same startling, vibrant visual immediacy—the same fresh and casual beauty. It is a concentrated, pulsating landscape of garden essences and must absolutely be tossed at table, for, no matter how delicious, the visual explosion of joy [mixes] inextricably and lastingly with your guests’ memories of mingled flavors….

  This salad, in the seasonal round of my own life, symbolizes the happiest time of the year—that which is lived almost entirely out of doors with the table set daily on the terrace in the shade of a grape arbor, the sparkling play of light heightening the effect of the table display of variegated greens and bright-colored punctuations…. [O]ften, preceded by melon or figs with ham in the Italian manner and followed by cheeses, it is the principal course, and sometimes it represents the entire meal.

  Am I wrong to think that many of us feel something more akin to unease than relief when we come across such prose, with its self-possessed concentration on asalad? We have been brought up to think that intelligence used in this fashion is intelligence misused, especially when it is, as here, utterly unqualified by explanation or apology. He is obsessed by neither gluttony nor health. Nor is he an aesthetic butterfly flitting among the herbs and vegetables (“knock the eel unconscious”). The disquieted reader’s only recourse is to speculate on what secret unhappiness could drive a writer so smart, so aloof, sotough, to such a life, to such a subject.

  My own conjecture is that our culture’s implacable resistance to the legitimacy of such a life helps explain Olney’s lifelong expatriation. France is still a country where you can sit down at their midmorning snack with the workers who have come to fix your plumbing and talk seriously about Grandmother’s daube; it is also a place where you can then write about it with what can only be called rigorous sensual intellectuality.

  Intelligence in a food writer, even more than upfront sensuality, may be the ultimate provocation. Cookbook editors who are endlessly permissive when it comes to bad writing and stolen recipes come down fiercely on the slightest hint of intellectualhauteur. Olney flaunts it; he is the food world’s Gore Vidal. Who else would dare set forth this daunting definition of culinary simplicity—

  the more elaborate the set of rules—that is to say,the better one understands and is able to define an intricate framework of limitations —the greater is the freedom lent one’s creative imagination

  —and then apply it to something as humble as a parsnip? His improvisational flight onthat unsexy root will leave you breathless. More than any other food writer, Richard Olney makes me want to move to France. Not to learn how the French cook and eat, but to learn how I might—if my appetite and mind were similarly set free.

  This is why, thirty years after its original publication,Simple French Food remains a dangerous book. It may also explain why its latest publisher has felt it necessary to add an introduction by Patricia Wells to the original foreword by James Beard. (With Olney himself contributing a preface, this book lacks nothing in prolegomena.) I suggest you just push past this crowd and go right through the door. You’ll find it quiet inside; the master is in the kitchen scrambling some eggs. Take your courage in hand and go on in.

  RICHARD OLNEY: IN MEMORIAM

  I was dismayed far more than I thought possible when Matt and I learned that Richard Olney had passed away on August 3, 1999, at his remote hillside home in Solliès-Toucas in Provence. Part of the shock came from the fact that I had not known, as Ed Behr would tell me later, that Richard had been failing in recent years and was no longer able to manage the steep climb up and down the driveway that wound down the
hill from his small house to the road into town. Since he didn’t drive, he must have known that his days at his beloved retreat were coming slowly to an end; that he died in his own bed before he was forced to leave would serve as a comfort to those who knew how passionately he would have hated any alternative.

  But mostly I was dismayed because more than any other food writer—with the single exception of Patience Gray—Richard served as a touchstone for me, the personification of what, with courage, discipline, intelligence, and, yes, a broad streak of idiosyncrasy, a food writer might hope to accomplish in his life. The name of my food letter,Simple Cooking, is an undisguised tribute to him, and no culinary award I’ve had bestowed on me has meant—or could mean—as much to me as his assenting to write a blurb forOutlaw Cook. (And the blurb he wrote made me literally dizzy with pleaure.)

  It would be both presumptuous and inaccurate to describe him as my mentor, but I did sometimes consider myself as a kind of wayward nephew—in whom he might, every now and then, admit with a sigh seeing some slight family resemblance. (And, quite honestly, that sigh would have been as important to me as the assent.)

  We never met, but we did correspond—sometimes by letter, sometimes by postcard, and, most often, by fax. Consequently, I was moved to read inThe New York Times obituary—splendidly written by R. W. Apple, Jr.—that while “many saw Mr. Olney as a hermit … he kept in constant touch with friends and family in the United States by fax.” This was, I expect, a way of having his cake and eating it, too—faxing, after all, offers a hermit an ideal way of keeping in touch.

  The arrival of one of those faxes was quite an event in this household, not least because we no longer owned a fax machine and had to catch his transmissions on our computer. When I suggested that he try e-mailing (faster, cheaper, easier), he reacted as if I had suggested that he switch over to instant béarnaise sauce.