Voracious
Page 12
PRIDE AND PREJUDICE
White Garlic Soup
Serves 6 to 8
20 garlic cloves, peeled
2 cups whole milk
2 tablespoons olive oil
20 garlic cloves, unpeeled
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
1 small white onion, roughly chopped
Leaves of 5 thyme sprigs
4 cups chicken stock
1 cup heavy cream
Kosher salt
Freshly cracked black pepper
⅓ cup grated Parmesan cheese
The night before making the soup (or at least 4 hours before), put the peeled garlic cloves in a bowl, cover with the whole milk, cover the bowl, and place in the refrigerator. This will help leach out the bitter, spicy edge of the garlic. After the garlic has soaked overnight, discard the milk and reserve the soaked garlic cloves.
Preheat the oven to 350°F.
Combine the olive oil and unpeeled garlic cloves in a Dutch oven, cover, and roast until deeply golden brown, 30 to 45 minutes. Once the garlic cloves are roasted, squeeze them gently to remove them from their husks.
Heat the butter in a large stockpot over medium-low heat. Add the onion and thyme and cook until the onion is translucent, about 8 minutes. Add the chicken stock, cream, roasted garlic, and soaked raw garlic to the pot and increase the heat to medium. When the mixture comes to a gentle boil, lower the heat again and simmer for 5 minutes.
Remove the soup from the heat and transfer about one-third of it to a blender. (Note: Hot soup creates steam, and this steam has nowhere to go in a blender, which can lead to scary explosions if you don’t follow this tip: On the lid of your blender there should be a hole that is covered by either a cap or a wand. Remove the cap or the wand and cover the hole with a clean kitchen towel. This gives the steam room to escape, which means the hot soup won’t explode all over you.)
Blend the soup in batches until it is very smooth. Strain through a fine-mesh sieve, season with salt and pepper to taste, top with Parmesan, and serve.
The Silence of the Lambs
CROSTINI with FAVA BEAN and CHICKEN LIVER MOUSSES
Every once in a while a literary recipe pops into my head and I have to ask myself, “Are you going too far?” This might be one of them, and the porchetta di testa is another, but I just can’t help myself. Whenever I see fava beans in the market come spring, looking like the Arnold Schwarzenegger version of sugar snap peas, it’s impossible for me not to think about Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lecter series. Was anyone else as obsessed with these books as I was in high school? (No? Is that why I had only one friend?)
Whether you’ve read the books or not, I’m sure you know a thing or two about Hannibal Lecter. Few other characters have had as lasting an impact and stayed as present in our cultural consciousness as Dr. Lecter. Thirty-two years after he first appeared in Harris’s 1981 novel Red Dragon, he is the star of the NBC television show Hannibal, which premiered in May 2013.
The success of Harris’s novels was due in large part to America’s fascination with serial killers, a fascination that was new then but has only grown these last thirty years. Books and television are full of serial killers, from Chelsea Cain’s Gretchen Lowell series and Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 to TV’s Dexter, Criminal Minds, and The Mentalist. Our culture is saturated with psychopaths. The criminal profilers that Harris was studying in the late 1970s were bringing to light a fact that we all know well now—that serial killers don’t have to be scary-looking or visibly crazy, that most often they are in fact charming and well-spoken and sometimes even handsome. They could be law students or nurses or even brilliant psychiatrists.
Playing to America’s morbid fascination with sociopaths, Anthony Hopkins’s portrayal of Hannibal Lecter in the 1991 movie adaptation of The Silence of the Lambs helped secure the character’s cultural staying power. It was the first horror film ever to win the Oscar for Best Picture, and only the third film ever to win Oscars in the top five categories—Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Director, and Best Writing.
Thanks to Hopkins, “I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti” is as familiar a line as “Here’s lookin’ at you, kid.” The quote is memorable not only because of that horrible sucking noise Hopkins makes after he says it, but also because of its eerie mix of savagery and refinement. Lecter is talking about cannibalizing someone, and yet his wine and side dish pairings are dead on. Liver and fava beans is a classic combination, and Chianti (in the book it’s Amarone) complements both perfectly. Harris didn’t throw in this line haphazardly; he knew food well, as did Dr. Lecter, who “was known for the excellence of his table and had contributed numerous articles to gourmet magazines.”
Harris’s agent once said of him, “He loves cooking—he’s done Le Cordon Bleu exams—and it’s great fun to see him in the kitchen while he prepares a meal and see that he’s happy as a clam.” His skill in the kitchen is probably the reason that he is able to make even the most disgusting food scenes sound somehow appealing. Dr. Lecter doesn’t just eat brains, he “dredges them lightly in seasoned flour, and then in fresh brioche crumbs,” he “adds shallots to his hot browned butter and at the instant their perfume rises he puts in minced caper berries,” and then he “grates a fresh black truffle into his sauce and finishes it all with a squeeze of lemon juice.” You could almost forget what it is you’re reading about.
Almost.
My family ate a good amount of liver growing up, but I was embarrassingly old the first time I ever tasted a fresh fava bean. The only favas I had ever seen had already been shucked, blanched, peeled, and stuffed into rumpled bags in the freezer aisle, and those weren’t even allowed in my house because of my dad’s aversion to them. The first time I ever handled a fresh one I was working in a restaurant kitchen and the chef had put them on the menu as a special for that night, but they didn’t arrive with the delivery until twenty minutes before service. Everyone was told to start shucking as quickly as possible so that they could be blanched and ready to serve by the time the first order came in.
All of the cooks gathered, hunched around a table, burned and cut fingers moving like hummingbirds. I was so in awe of the beans I popped one in my mouth, uncooked and with the husk still on, and immediately spit it out. The cooks laughed mercilessly at me, but after service one of them handed me a heaping spoonful of the finished product—blanched and whipped into a mousse with lemon and garlic and Espelette pepper, the brightest green I’d ever seen.
THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS
Crostini with Fava Bean and Chicken Liver Mousses
Makes 16 to 20 crostini
1 baguette
Fava Bean Mousse (recipe follows)
Chicken Liver Mousse (recipe follows)
Olive oil and/or port, for drizzling (optional)
Slice the baguette about 1 inch thick and toast the slices in a toaster oven or under a broiler. Top the crostini with dollops of fava bean mousse and/or cooled chicken liver mousse. Drizzle with olive oil or port if desired.
FAVA BEAN MOUSSE
Makes about 1½ cups
1½ pounds fresh fava beans
½ cup olive oil
⅓ cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese
Juice of ½ a lemon
1 tablespoon grated fresh lemon zest
1 garlic clove, minced
½ teaspoon kosher salt
Shell the fava beans from the pods and set them aside; you should have about 1 cup.
Bring a medium pot of water to a boil over high heat and prepare an ice bath (a large bowl of ice cubes and cold water). Boil the favas until they are tender and the outer skins begin to shed, 5 to 7 minutes. Drain and immediately place them in the ice bath (this stops them from continuing to cook and preserves their beautiful color).
Peel the outer membranes off the fava beans and discard them. Place the blanched and peeled favas and the rest of the ingredients in a blender and blend until very smooth.
&nb
sp; CHICKEN LIVER MOUSSE
Makes about 3 cups
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
2 tablespoons rendered chicken fat (or more unsalted butter)
2 small yellow onions, sliced
2 thyme sprigs
1 teaspoon black peppercorns
¼ teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 piece star anise
½ bay leaf
1 pound chicken livers
⅛ teaspoon pink curing salt (optional)
⅓ cup ruby port
1 cup cream cheese, at room temperature
2 tablespoons sherry vinegar
1 tablespoon sugar
Kosher salt
Heat 1 tablespoon of the butter and 1 tablespoon of the chicken fat in a heavy-bottomed pot over medium heat. Add the onions and thyme and cook until the onions are golden brown.
Combine the peppercorns, cinnamon, star anise, and bay leaf in a spice grinder and pulse until finely ground (the cinnamon should already be ground, but adding it to the grinder helps the ingredients move around and get ground up). Add the spices to the onions and continue to cook until the onions are soft and caramelized.
Meanwhile, clean the chicken livers of any white or greenish fibers. (These fibers are safe to eat, but removing them will improve the texture of the finished mousse.)
Once the onions have cooked down, add the remaining tablespoon each of butter and chicken fat and raise the heat to medium-high. Add the livers and pink salt (if using—it will keep the livers from turning gray) and cook, stirring and tossing constantly, until they are firm to the touch but still rosy, 5 to 7 minutes. The internal temperature should be 165°F. (Generally, overcooking liver leads to an unappealing grainy texture, but the cream cheese and the blending/passing through a sieve will help hide all manner of overcooking sins, which makes this process much less stressful.)
Discard the thyme sprigs and transfer the cooked livers and onions to a bowl. Deglaze the pan with the port and allow it to cook down for about 1 minute. Pour the reduced port over the livers and add the cream cheese.
In batches, blend the livers and cream cheese in a high-powered blender until very smooth. Pass the pureed liver mixture through a fine-mesh sieve into a bowl. Add the sherry vinegar, sugar, and salt to taste. Keep in mind that the flavor will change as the mousse cools, so add a little more salt than you think tastes right. Also feel free to add more sherry vinegar, sugar, and/or pepper.
Divide the mousse among three 8-ounce jars and top with a thin layer of rendered chicken fat (or olive oil) before placing the lids on. (This helps keep the liver fresh.) The mousse will keep for up to 10 days in the refrigerator.
Middlesex
OLIVE OIL YOGURT CAKE
It was my grandfather Seymour (we call him “Papa”) who suggested Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex to me over cups of egg and lemon soup at the Greek diner in my hometown. I think it must have been the book that made him want to eat there, because usually we went to Johnny’s Luncheonette for breakfast, where a class photo of my mom and her twin sister hung on the wall and he could get a pastrami scramble with rye toast.
I was home from Brooklyn to celebrate his eightieth birthday and had just started my blog a few months earlier. Papa was full of ideas about what books I should write about, but mostly he wanted to talk about Middlesex, which he had just finished a few days prior. I am impressed by my grandfather’s kindness, intelligence, and open-mindedness pretty much every time I speak with him, but this day will always stand out in my mind. Here he was, an eighty-year-old man, a former butcher who had grown up in one of the toughest neighborhoods in Boston, speaking eloquently about gender identity and the struggles of intersex people.
I went and bought the book as soon as we finished breakfast. Unable to put it down, I read it over the course of only a few days. My grandfather was right, not only that it is a beautifully written and compelling story, but that it is filled with food. Cal Stephanides is born a girl in 1960 to a mother and father who are both first-generation Greek Americans. The Stephanides family, who formerly owned a diner that served typical American fare like cheeseburgers and milkshakes, eventually open a chain of hot dog stands called Hercules Hot Dogs. Inside of the Stephanides home, however, standard American food is not allowed, as Cal’s mother, Tessie (who feels that her husband “is more in love with hot dogs than her”), believes that the grease will disrupt their digestion, and instead she insists on cooking them only traditional Greek foods.
Cal’s grandmother Desdemona is living proof of the benefits of a Greek diet. At ninety-one years old she has “the arteries of a fifty-year-old,” and shows no signs of slowing down. Impressed by her perfect health, a German doctor named Dr. Muller asks her to participate in a longevity study as part of the research he is doing for a medical journal article on the Mediterranean diet. Dr. Muller has denounced his German heritage when it comes to cooking, forgoing bratwurst, sauerbraten, and Königsberger Klopse and opting instead for Greek foods like “eggplant aswim in tomato sauce… cucumber dressings and fish-egg spreads… pilafi, raisins, and figs” because he believes in their power as “life-giving, artery-cleansing, skin-smoothing wonder drugs.”
He asks Desdemona how much yogurt and olive oil she consumed as a child, and shares with her statistical graphs showing the life spans of other cultures—“Poles killed off by kielbasa, or Belgians done in by pommes frites, or Anglo-Saxons disappeared by puddings, or Spaniards stopped cold by chorizo.” Much to the dismay of Desdemona, who is more than ready to say her good-byes, the Greek lifeline keeps going and going.
Once Cal realizes the effect that the Mediterranean diet is having on her grandmother’s body, she starts wondering how it might be affecting her own. At this point, Cal is twelve years old and still living as a girl. Over the summer, she has just become aware that all around her, girls are developing breasts and “growing modest,” while she remains unchanged. She concludes that the Mediterranean diet that is keeping her grandmother alive against her will must also be to blame for her painfully slow sexual maturity. It must be, she thinks, the olive oil that her mother drizzles over everything that is keeping her body from changing, or the yogurt that she has for breakfast every morning that is stalling her breast development.
As readers, we know from the start that olive oil and yogurt are not the reasons for Cal’s slow development. Eugenides has told us that the real culprit is 5-alpha-reductase deficiency, a condition that caused both doctors and Cal’s parents to mistakenly identify him as a girl when he was born, based on his external anatomy. You would think that a story about a condition so rare would be difficult for most readers to relate to, but the genius of Eugenides’s storytelling in Middlesex is that he makes Cal’s story, and his struggle, accessible. Some readers will connect more with Calliope, the awkward preteen girl who is confused about the changes happening (and not happening) to her body, who feels freakish and lonely and left behind. Some will relate more to Cal, the forty-one-year-old man, falling in love with a woman and wondering if he will be enough, or too much, for her. Most everyone will relate to a character who is imperfect and insecure, who tries to find humor in tragedy, and who wants, above all, to be loved.
MIDDLESEX
Olive Oil Yogurt Cake
Serves 8
1½ cups plain full-fat Greek yogurt
⅔ cup olive oil
3 large eggs
1¼ cups sugar
¾ teaspoon pure vanilla extract
Juice and zest of 1 small orange
2½ cups all-purpose flour
2½ teaspoons baking powder
¾ teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon kosher salt
¼ cup raw almonds, roughly chopped
Preheat the oven to 350°F. Grease a 9-inch springform pan, line the bottom with a parchment paper circle, and grease the parchment.
In a large bowl, whisk together the yogurt, olive oil, eggs, sugar, vanilla, and orange juice and zest. In a separate bowl, whisk together
the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. Add the dry ingredients to the wet, mixing until a smooth batter forms. Pour the batter into the prepared pan and scatter the almonds over the top.
Bake until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean, about 45 minutes. Let the cake cool slightly before serving, or cool it completely and eat it cold.
Brideshead Revisited
BLINIS with CAVIAR
A few years ago I was visiting my family for Christmas and my parents and I were trying to find something to watch on television. My sisters had long since disappeared upstairs to watch The Real Housewives of New York, so we felt free to let our dork flags fly. My dad pulled out his boxed set of videocassettes from the 1981 version of Brideshead Revisited and started to reminisce with my mom about how, in their first year of marriage, they used to wait all week for a new episode of the eleven-part miniseries to air, my dad rushing home from his job as a teaching assistant to make it in time. My mom found out she was pregnant with my older sister during the course of the miniseries, and she fell so in love with Lord Marchmain’s levelheaded, insightful mistress, Cara, that she decided to name her next daughter after her (since Ande already had a name).
After hearing all of this I reluctantly decided to break my own rule of never watching a movie before reading the book. At first I wasn’t sure about the movie—the opening is all noisy cannon fire and muddy 1980s colors—but soon Jeremy Irons’s voice drew me in and I was hooked. I picked up my dad’s old copy of the book that night and spent the rest of my visit reading the book during the day and watching the miniseries with my parents at night.
One thing the show couldn’t hope to capture as well as the novel is Evelyn Waugh’s beautifully descriptive food scenes, my favorite of which takes place when Charles Ryder has dinner with Rex Mottram. They eat a “soup of oseille, a sole quite simply cooked in white wine sauce, a caneton à la presse, a lemon soufflé,” and “caviar aux blinis” whose “cream and hot butter mingled and overflowed, separating each glaucose bead of caviar from its fellows, capping it in white and gold.” They eat happily to the sound of the duck press in the background—“the crunch of the bones, the drip of blood and marrow, the tap of the spoon basting the thin slices of breast.”