34How nicely that wordlunch places the intensity of Dahl’s gourmandizing. Had it beendinner, he would seem no different from any other food lover; had it beenbreakfast, we might feel that we were getting in over our heads. But lunch! We can only think … howlucky!
35Contrast here the definition ofbiscuit —“a piece of unleavened cake or bread [that is] crisp, dry, and hard, and in small flat thin shape”—in the BritishNew Shorter Oxford English Dictionary with that ofcookie —“a small cake made from stiff, sweet dough rolled and sliced or dropped by spoonfuls on a large flat pan (cookie sheet) and baked”—in the AmericanRandom House Dictionary. The first could quite easily have been written more than a hundred years ago and contains not a hint of, say, the chocolate chip cookie. But the lexicographer who definescookie has not only seen a chocolate chip cookie but most probably made one.
36When we originally wrote about this cookie, real amber sugar crystals were very difficult to find. However, since then, the good folks at The Baker’s Catalogue have taken an interest in the Arnhem cookie and offer these special crystals to interested bakers. (Their catalog photograph of the sugar shows the cookie, too.) As this book went to press, a pound of the crystals is $2.95, plus shipping. And their catalog is a treat. The Baker’s Catalogue; P.O. Box 876; Norwich, VT 05055; (800) 827-6836: www.kingarthurflour.com.
37As to the pronunciation:Arnhemse takes the accent on the first syllable; thehem is fairly short, and the possessivese is hardly pronounced at all. The Dutchei is an English longi, the same as thei inmice. The diminutiveje is such a fixture of the language that you can’t get through the day without it. It’s pronounced “yeh,” but again fairly quickly, so you don’t linger on theh. You haveeen kopje koffie met een plakje koek (a small cup of coffee with a piece of cake). Dutch ten-cent pieces are two fives, henceeen dubbeltje. Koekjes are cookies (small cakes). And so forth. Putting it all together, it’sARN hemseMICE yez.Meisjes almost always means “little girls,” but teenage boys when crossed in love describe themselves as having problems with themeisjes.
38I should note that this recipe should not be taken as typical of this work. As its subtitle suggests—The Broiling, Roasting, Baking, Deep-Fat Frying, Sautéing, Braising, and Boiling Cookbook—this is a book about cooking technique from a gifted and practiced professional. Indeed, Joe Hyde is a chef’s chef, which is one reason why his book did not receive the attention it deserved: the recipes demand first-rate ingredients and some skill as a cook, and the prose has the taut control of someone who earns his living working in a restaurant kitchen and not at a typewriter. This isn’t to say he can’t write. Every time I open the book, which is often, I find myself unable to resist reading once again the book’s preface, in which Hyde describes with great gusto his memorable adventures as an apprentice cook at places ranging from local dives to Ferdinand Point’s La Pyramide.
39This series of articles was itself collected into a book,French Home Life, published in 1873.
40Here, for instance, is Jonathan Swift, in hisDirections to Servants (1745): “If a lump of soot falls into the soup, and you cannot conveniently get it out, stir it well in, and it will give the soup a high French taste.”
41Historians now speculate that the Spanish may have first brought the crop to Ireland. Trade was brisk between Spain and Ireland in the seventeenth century, and the newly introduced plant became an important agricultural crop in Ireland long before it did so in England. It wasn’t grown in the United States until Irish immigrants brought it over in the eighteenth century.
42In her memoir of growing up on an Irish farm,To School Through the Fields, Alice Taylor describes the potato harvest being stored away in an outdoor potatm pit. This was “a six-foot-long trdnch that was about two feet deep and three feet wide. Butt loads of potatoes were poured into it and stacked high, and then thatched with straw to ward off the rain and frost.”
43And on the etiquette of eating them: “Our English visitors have difficulty in manipulating potatoes in their jackets. What they call a ‘cheese’ plate we call a ‘skin’ plate. The potato is first put on this and skinned with the knife and fork, then lifted on to the dinner plate. These skin plates are replaced by cheese plates later when required.” This in a book on Irishcountry cooking!
44Not that anyone did any actual pointing—the phrase “potatoes and point” is meant not as a description of reality but as a kind of bitter joke—in the manner of the Irish saying “Sauce of the poor man—a little potato with a big one.” As P. W. Joyce explains inEnglish As We Speak It in Ireland, “You will sometimes read that each person, before taking a bite,pointed the potato at a salt herring or a bit of bacon hanging in front of the chimney, but this never occurred in real life.”
45SeeSimple Cooking, pages 33 through 40.
46Carol Field, inThe Italian Baker, tells us that in the middle of the sixteenth century, the Mannerist painter Bronzini composed a rhyme in praise of bread salad. This pre-tomatopanzanella was made of onion, cucumber, basil, purslane (porcellina), and arugula. Any salad of mixed bitter greens, tossed with torn chunks of our grilled and oiled slice, remains a dish worthy of a poem.
47If you wonder what a Catalan dish is doing inthat book, you forget that Catalonia extends across the French border into thepays Catalan of Roussillon.
48The book is worth seeking out if only to enjoy his riff on thenonuniversality of pa amb tomàquet (accompanied by an illustration of a fantasy New York City fast-food place serving nothing but).
49This is not meant to deny the concept of thecold slice —the piece of pizza eaten the next morning for breakfast … and found good. Ifpa amb tomàquet is the hand that reaches out from the durable loaf to the instant crust that is pizza, the cold slice is the hand that reaches from the opposite direction to clasp it firmly in a fraternal grip. But the toppings on a cold slice were baked onto it, so this does not invalidate the comments above.
50The paste may have been scooped from a crock, cut from a sausage-shaped roll of tomato leather, or dumped from a can cut open with a scaling knife. As Andrew Smith tells us in his preconception-puncturingThe Tomato in America, recipes for making tomato paste and tomato leather appeared in American newspapers long before the Civil War. In one of the examples he provides, the November 1834 edition of theNew York Farmer printed an eyewitness account of the way tomato paste was made in Turkey, which concluded with the writer’s astonishment at how far a small amount of it would go: “A small pot which I brought with me, containing about half a pint, lasted my family more than a year, and we used it very freely.”
51A Treatise on Onion Soup: Its History, Powers, and Modes of Proceeding,a small (sixteen-page) pamphlet published in 1979.
52In Flavors of the Riviera,Colman Andrews, noting this same commonality, explains that the wordciuppin itself is “simply a corruption of the Genoese wordsûppin, meaning îlittle soup.’” So much for the “Italian phonetic equivalent” ofchop.
53The absence ofwine both in Spencer and Cobb’s discussion of cioppino and in their recipe for it is also a matter of interest. The book was published early in the Prohibition Era (1920–1933) and so can be trusted on that subject about as much as cookbooks published today are reliable when they touch on the subject of fat.
54Although that is changing fast. Even as prosperity-oppressed Americans fantasize about subsisting on the spare but putatively life-prolonging diet of the Mediterranean poor, the rising income level among those who have traditionally eaten such food has brought about a diet revolution of its own: fast-food meals, fat-intensive snacks, and lots and lots of fresh meat. Each package of imported pasta, bottle of olive oil, or tube of roasted garlic paste the Mediterranean diet enthusiast adds to the grocery cart brings somecontadino one step closer to his first Big Mac.
55Colman Andrews, in his sympathetic but clear-eyed assessment of the “Mediterranean Diet” inFlavors of the Riviera, notes that a pioneering nutrition study on the island of Crete in the years following World War II revealed that while fish,
meat, and dairy products made up only 7 percent of the diet, some 72 percent of the families surveyed identified meat as their favorite food, and I’ll bet it still is.
56I may be unfair here. A careful reading of the small print on the copyright page suggests that this book is a translation of an Italian cookbook to which Root provided the introduction and the notes—some explanatory, some expository—that appear in boxes here and there throughout the book. If so, Root might never have preparedany of the recipes in this book that bears his name—which would explain why the commentary has the feeling of floating in from the dining room.
57For instance, Marion Harland’s recipe for flannel cakes inCommon Sense in the Household (1873) calls for flour, milk, egg, and yeast; the one she gives inBreakfast, Luncheon, and Tea (1892) calls for cornmeal, milk, yeast, and no egg; and, finally, the one in herComplete Cook Book (1903) calls for flour, egg, milk, and baking powder.
58I include here baking soda, first known as saleratus or “aerated salts,” which came into use around the same time. Although it is a component of baking powder, it possesses leavening power of its own, which can be set off by an acidic ingredient in the batter (most famously, buttermilk), and many cooks preferred to utilize it alone. Baking powder could be made at home by mixing baking soda and cream of tartar (a by-product not—as I once thought—of teeth-scrapings but of winemaking), but increasingly it was scooped from a tin container holding a patent mixture, in which case it might well be made with much cheaper, if harsher, aluminum salts.
59Should anyone be interested, there is an extensive discussion of homemade baking powder, buttermilk (and the self-renewing Swedish dairy culture we substitute for it), and weighing versus measuring in the chapter on cornbread making inSerious Pig.
INDEX
Abdennour, Samia
Achaya, K. T.
Acton, Eliza
Akbar the Great
anchoïade
Anderson, Burton
Anderson, E. N.
Andoh, Elizabeth
Andrews, Colman
Apple, R. W., Jr.
arborio rice,See also Italian rice
Arnhem cookies
distinctiveness of
Roald Dahl on
search for (Blank and Landis)
Artusi, Pellegrino
Asian dumplings
basic filling for
boiled
chiao-tzu
Chinese varieties of
dipping sauce for
garlic chive filling for
goon mandufillings for
Korean-style
Moslem-style lamb filling for
nirafilling for
panfrying
pork and shrimp filling
steaming
varieties of
wrapper for
wrapping and cooking
asparagus
and rice
over toast
Bachelard, Gaston
Bagehot, Walter
bagels and cream cheese
Baillie-Groshman, W. A.
baking powder
baldorice,See also Italian rice
banh mi(Vietnamese sandwiches)
bread for
dipping sauce for
fillings for
Barr, Nancy Verde
Barrett, Judith
Barron, Rosemary
baskets.See skibs
basmati rice
Bastianich, Lidia
beans
baked in clay pot
baked in flask
with broccoli or broccoli rabe
with canned tuna
cannellini
fagioli al fiasco
fagioli all’uccelletto
with Italian sausage
with linguine, green beans, and leeks
mashed on toast, with prosciutto or pancetta
moong daland rice
mung, forkhichri
with pasta
with prosciutto or pancetta
with raw onion
Russ Parsons’s cooking method for
with tomato sauce
Tuscan cooking methods for
Beard, James
Beauvoir, Simone de
beef
in bouillon cubes
ground, ingoon mandu
in pot-au-feu
Beeton, Isabella
Behr, Edward
Bernstein, Leonard
Bettoja, Jo
Bianchi, Anne
bird’s nest
biscuits
vs.cookies or crackers
Lundy’s
Blank, Andrew
blueberries, for buttermilk griddlecakes
bok choy, in Asian dumplings
Boni, Ada
bouillon cubes
bread.See alsobruschetta; sandwiches; toast
cityvs. country
inpa amb tomàquet
inpanzanella
in “panzanetta”
inpappa al pomodoro
peasant
role of, in peasant meals
stale
toppings for
bread crisps
breakfast dishes
bagels and cream cheese
bird’s nest
British
buttermilk griddlecakes
cheese grits
cinnamon toast
cream toast
dry toast
Grape-Nuts and yogurt
kedgeree
pancakes
pierogi with onion and dried mushrooms
risotto al salto
silver dollar griddlecakes
tamales with roasted peppers and cheese
Vietnamesebanh mi as
Brennan, Georgeanne
Brillat-Savarin, Anthelme
broccoli
with penne and red peppers
with Tuscan beans
broccoli rabe
as pizza topping
brodo di dadi,See alsobouillon cubes
Brown, Helen Evans
Brown, Lynda
bruschetta,
Bugialli, Giuliano
Buonassisi, Vincenzo
Butazzi, Grazietta
buttermilk
in griddlecakes
in Irish cuisine
and potatoes
butternut squash
in Italian salad
risotto with
cabbage
in Asian dumplings
in colcannon
Caggiano, Biba
Calingaert, Efrem Funghi
cally.See champ
Campbell, Helen
cannellini beans
capers
caponata
canned
caponata casa nostra
origin of term
as pasta sauce
tomatoless
and tuna
Cardella, Antonio
Carlyle, Thomas
carnarolirice,See also Italian rice
Carolina Gold rice
Carrier, Robert
carrot and daikon in vinegar
Catalan cuisine
cha lua
champ
flavoring greens for
Chatwin, Bruce
cheese
for breakfast
mozzarella, as pizza topping with summer tomatoes
mozzarella, inriso in bianco dishes
olive-and-onion cream cheese
rice with spinach and goat cheese
with tamales and roasted peppers
cheese grits
chiao-tzudumplings
chicken
in bouillon cubes
Rao’s Famous Lemon Chicken
chickpeas, with fusilli and spinach
chili peppers, Thai
chili powder, Mexican
Chinese cuisine
chiao-tzu
cooking methods in
dumpling varieties in
rice in
cinnamon toast
/>
cioppino
history of
il ciuppin di Sestri Levanti
Maine Coast Cioppino
sauce for
types of seafood for
Cipriani, Arrigo
Claiborne, Craig
Cobb, John N.
Cocollino, Carlo
coffee, iced, Vietnamese
Coffin, Robert P. Tristam
Cohen, Jon
colcannon
vs.champ
Farmhouse Colcannon
condiments.See sauces, spreads, and condiments
Connell, Kenneth
Contini, Mila
converted rice
Copley, Esther
corn
corn omelet
corn-stuffed tomatoes
creamed
fresh-scraped pulp of
and seafood stew
Southern corn pudding
sweet-corn fritters
sweet-corn pudding
uncooked
Cornfield, Robert
cottage life, Irish.See Ireland, cottage life in
country bread
Courtine, Robert
crab
boiled
Norfolk-style
crab cakes
Baltimore-style, from flakes
binders for
crabmeat for
from Getz’s restaurant
Pigeon Hill Bay crab cakes
seasonings for
techniques for making
cream cheese, chunky olive-and-onion mash
creamed corn
creamed toast
crispy onion shreds
croquettes, crab
crostini
cu cai carot chua
Czarnecki, Jack
Dahl, Roald
dal,See alsokhichri
Daudet, Marthe
David, Elizabeth
Davidson, Alan
Davies, John
de Groot, Roy Andries
Del Conte, Anna
Della Femina, Jerry
de Monteiro, Longteine and Kenthao
der Haroutunian, Arto
desserts
Arnhem cookies
bread crisps
oranges à l’Arabe
summer peaches and fresh raspberries
Devi, Yamuna
dipping sauces
for Asian dumplings
for Vietnamesebanh mi
Douglas, Norman
dried peas, in pease pudding
dumplings.See Asian dumplings
Eberstadt, Fernanda
eggplant.See also caponata
inbringiel agrodolce
and lamb sausage, as pizza topping
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