—from Libro de arte coquinaria, c. 1420s,
translated from the Italian by Mark Kurlansky
SHIZUO TSUJI ON RICE
Shizuo Tsuji, a baker’s son with a prestigious degree in French literature, by chance became a kind of Japanese Escoffier. Like the earlier twentieth-century French master, he defined the cuisine of his country and his culture for several generations. Like Escoffier, his motto was “make it simple.” “Japanese culture,” he pointed out, “was born of austerity.” Unlike in China, in Japan austerity is central even to the imperial cuisine. Through his famous cooking school founded in Osaka in 1960, an institution that has outlived him, Shizuo Tsuji has explained for Japanese and Westerners not only the techniques, but also the cutlure and history that are the underpinnings of Japanese food.
—M.K.
Rice is a beautiful food. It is beautiful when it grows—precision rows of sparkling green stalks shooting up to reach the hot summer sun. It is beautiful when harvested, autumn gold sheaves piled in diked, patchwork paddies. It is beautiful when, once threshed, it enters granary bins like a cataract of tiny seed-pearls. It is beautiful when cooked by a practiced hand, pure white and sweetly fragrant.
Rice is the staple of staples. Not only is it a dish in itself, rice is a necessary ingredient in many other common Japanese foods. Fermented, it is saké, the well-known Japanese liquor. The thick, sweet lees of saké are present in many dishes. Rice bran adds flavor to pickles. The grain also makes a delicate vinegar, which is just being discovered by the West and one day may be found on the staple shelf of any Western kitchen.
Historically, rice was a measure of wealth. The worth of medieval fiefs was counted in terms of a rice volume unit, the koku, roughly equivalent to 5 bushels (this value actually fluctuated greatly). Even after the beginning of a strong cash economy, samurai were paid their stipends in koku of rice. Today, when the Japanese grow all the rice they need and much more, it is hard to convince farmers to plant anything other than rice. It is not only government rice crop subsidies that lead them to single- and double-crop with modern high-yielding strains. Rice has been planted through the millennia, and the cycle of its growth and harvest is a part of the unchanging rhythm of the seasons. Just as the mountains in the background of every Japanese scene change mood depending on the time of day and whether the light is that of summer, autumn, winter, or spring, so, too, with the rice paddies in the foreground. Rice, like mountains, is part of Japan.
Regardless of how many other dishes are served, a Japanese feels he has not really eaten unless there is rice. At restaurant banquets the rice is not served until after the succession of various fish, poultry, meat, and vegetable dishes, when it completes the meal together with miso soup and pickles. But in ordinary homes, rice is central to the meal, and any fish, poultry, meat, or vegetable dishes are basically “luxuries”—tasty side dishes (okazu). It is not uncommon in times of austerity, and in poor households, for the rice, miso soup, and pickles to constitute the entire meal.
The rice that tastes the best is shinmai, or “new rice,” on the market in autumn, fresh from harvest. This first rice is moist and tender and requires less water in cooking than last year’s shelf-dried stuff. Perhaps with more than a twinge of nostalgia, city residents send to their home provinces in autumn to order a few kilograms of new rice, and normally taciturn people carry on and on about which province on which sides of which mountains with how much rainfall and what sort of growing season and planted in which variety yields the very best rice in Japan. Rice can be a subject of old memories, of regional pride, and of all manner of expert knowledge.
—from Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art, 1980
NEAPOLITAN RICE WITH ALMONDS
To make ten servings get a pound and a half of almonds and half a pound of rice; wash the rice three times, cook it well and drain it thoroughly; grind the almonds—so they do not make oil as they are ground, add in a little clear water or rosewater—and strain them; set the almond milk to boil in a pot with half a pound of fine sugar; as it begins to boil, add in the rice and put the pot on coals away from the fire, stirring continuously with a spoon, and let it boil for half an hour.
Similarly, you can cook the rice with goat’s milk or some other milk.
Nota: To keep any similar dish from picking up smoke, take a cloth folded in three or four layers—but first, remove the preparation from the pot, without scraping the bottom, and put it into another pot; then soak the cloth in clear water, wring it out, place it thus folded over the pot and leave it there for half an hour, or for at least a quarter of an hour; then soak it again, and put it back again on the pot: this is how the smokey taste is drawn out. Proceed likewise for Spelt Porridge: there is no better way.
—Author unknown, from a fifteenth-century
Neapolitan recipe collection,
translated from the Italian by Terence Scully
MARJORIE KINNAN RAWLINGS ON HUSH PUPPIES
Hush-puppies are in a class by themselves. They are a concomitant of the hunt, above all of the fishing trip. Fresh-caught fried fish without hush-puppies are as man without woman, a beautiful woman without kindness, law without policemen. The story goes that they derived their name from old fishing and hunting expeditions, when the white folks ate to repletion, the Negro help ate beyond repletion, and the hunting dogs, already fed, smelled the delectable odors of human rations and howled for the things they scented. Negro cook or white sportsman tossed the remaining cornmeal patties to the dogs, calling, “Hush, puppies!”—and the dogs, devouring them, could ask no more of life, and hushed.
SERVES 3 TO 4
1 cup cornmeal
2 teaspoons baking powder
½ teaspoon salt
1 small to medium onionminced,
1 egg
¼ cup milk or water
Mix together the dry ingredients and the finely cut onion. Break in the egg and beat vigorously. Add the liquid. Form into small patties, round or finger-shaped. Drop in the deep smoking fat in which the fish has been fried, until they are a deep brown. Serve hot and at once.
I have a strange recipe from St. Simon’s Island, off the coast of Georgia, that adds a little sugar and a small can of corn to hush-puppies. Sugar is anathema in any cornbread except the most delicate cornmeal muffins. It is more than inappropriate to the hearty honesty of hush-puppies. As to the canned corn, this is a free country and the experimenter may legally add it if he so wishes. He may not legally, however, then call the results hush-puppies.
From a rural correspondent I had passed on one of those flashes of genius that touch cooking at fortunate moments. His mother, he wrote, made hush-puppies in small round cakes about two inches in diameter, then with her finger poked a hole in the center, as for a doughnut. This gives twice the amount of crisp, crunchy crust, the very best part of the hush-puppy, and does away with any tendency to a heavy center. I recommend it earnestly.
I do not recommend a practice of some sportsmen, of using beer for the mixing fluid. By it, the sweet nutty flavor of the hush-puppy is a little soured, even when baking soda is used instead of baking powder. Devotees of this custom are likely to be those so unbalanced by large quantities of the mixing fluid that they are in no condition to treat hush-puppies with the respect due them.
—from Cross Creek Cookery, 1942
ANGELO PELLEGRINI ON POLENTA
If there is any one dish—aside from paste, which is so widely used in soups—eaten in greater quantities than any other, it is polenta. North of Rome, in Tuscany, in Lombardy, in Piedmont, and in the Venetian provinces, this thick, coarse, corn-meal mush is always on the table. The metropolitan American knows it as the elegant dish served in Italian restaurants in Boston, New York, and San Francisco. Or perhaps he has eaten it at the home of his Italian friends, served with casserole rabbit or chicken and mushrooms. Excellent fare, superb when served with rich, red wine; but such is not the polenta as eaten by the Italian peasant! Of course, the mush itself, since i
t is nothing more than corn meal cooked in water, is the same anywhere, though the grind and the quality of the corn make some difference; but the condiment, the fowl, the mushrooms, the rich sauce—these the Italian has found in America, and with them a means for transmuting a dish which in his native land had become obnoxious to him.
The culinary inventiveness of the Italian housewife, as I well remember, was severely taxed in devising means to make such humble fare attractive to her children. Except on rare occasions, as rare as they were memorable, the best she could do was to smother it with salt cod baked in tomato sauce. Everywhere she was frustrated by lack of ingredients. And so we ate it hot with cream cheese, or with turnip greens cooked and sprinkled with a miserly dash of olive oil, or with hot cracklings, and a thousand other lowly auxiliaries. We ate it cold with figs and grapes, with green onions and cheese. We buried it in bowls of bean broth and cabbage. We sliced it and grilled or fried the stuff with indifferent results. It was, it remained, always and forever—polenta, a veritable plague, an evil from which no deliverance seemed possible. We had not yet thought seriously of America.
But of all the miserable bait with which we were lured into eating more and more of that insipid and bloating yellow nightmare, the lowly pilchard was positively the worst. I do not know how pilchards were cured, nor do I care. They came pressed beyond recognition in barrels; ugly, foul, putrefied little creatures from the Mediterranean. The perverse genius of the race, the evil inventiveness of the Borgias and the Medicis, the hatred of the Guelfs and Ghibellines have coalesced in the pilchard barrel of the Italian grocery store. When I was dispatched to the grocer’s to buy a brace of the little critters, I knew what lay in store. On the way home I gouged out their eyes and ate them out of sheer spite, cursing the while in a manner shockingly precocious in one so young. At home they were broiled on live coals, sprinkled with olive oil, and placed in a platter on the center of the table. Then each member of the family would take his turn dabbing pieces of polenta on the fish—gentle little taps, just enough to soak up the stench. When the stomach was about full, the fish was divided among the members of the happy family, each to do with his share as he wished. That is to say, to eat it and thank God for another bellyful.
I frequently complained, in the innocent manner of children who have yet to learn that their misery cannot always be interpreted in terms of parental discipline, and asked why we had to eat such awful stuff. My grandfather, who preferred bread dunked in wine—which he had regularly for breakfast until his eighty-eighth year, when he died prematurely of snakebite—sought to console me on such occasions by telling me what he had had to eat when he was a boy. The sermon was his version of the familiar one which has left grandchildren grumbling since the first grandfather mumbled it in his beard. His fare, he assured me, had been the same polenta, served with the same befouled Mediterranean pilchard, but with this miserable difference: after the fish had been warmed over the coals, his mother suspended it on a string from the ceiling so that it hovered over the center of the table. Then each member of the family would tap it gaily with his piece of polenta, sending it with deft strokes across the way to his brother or sister who promptly returned the compliment. And thus amid peals of laughter and bacchanalian revelry, each filled his belly and concluded with a prayer for a bumper crop of yellow corn. That done, the pilchard, somewhat frayed but none the worse for wear, was ceremoniously detached from the string, wrapped securely in wax paper, and stored in the pantry to await the morrow’s eager barrage of polenta. When completely worn out, it was replaced by another, more foul and evil-smelling. Grandfather was a grand old man.
—from The Unprejudiced Palate, 1948
CATHERINE E. BEECHER AND HARRIET BEECHER STOWE ON POTATOES
Catherine E. Beecher was an educator with strong views on the role of women in society and the home. Her father, Henry Ward Beecher, a staunch and puritanical Calvinist, had taught his daughters to pursue life with “a sense of mission.” Catherine rebelled against her father’s religion but kept the sense of mission, establishing, in 1823, a girl’s school in Hartford, the purpose of which was to teach women that they must be the guardians of the world’s morality and this guardianship began at home. The school failed, but she went on to numerous other educational projects and wrote a number of widely read books, including Letters on the Difficulties of Religion, Essay on Slavery, and The Moral Instructor. Despite this, her fame was minor compared to that of her sister, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. And for that reason she asked her sister to coauthor The American Woman’s Home, a book of far more than recipes, a guide to her moral philosophy and the role of woman in it, in the long tradition of Le Mésnagier de Paris. The other advantage to including her sister was that Harriet Beecher Stowe had raised seven children, whereas sister Catherine’s betrothed had been lost at sea earlier in her life and she never married.
—M.K.
As regards the department of vegetables, their number and variety in America are so great that a table might almost be furnished by these alone. Generally speaking, their cooking is a more simple art, and therefore more likely to be found satisfactorily performed, than that of meats. If only they are not drenched with rancid butter, their own native excellence makes itself known in most of the ordinary modes of preparation.
There is, however, one exception. Our staunch old friend, the potato, is to other vegetables what bread is on the table. Like bread, it is held as a sort of sine-qua-non; like that, it may be made invariably palatable by a little care in a few plain particulars, through neglect of which it often becomes intolerable. The soggy, waxy, indigestible viand that often appears in the potato-dish is a downright sacrifice of the better nature of this vegetable.
The potato, nutritive and harmless as it appears, belongs to a family suspected of very dangerous traits. It is a family connection of the deadly-nightshade and other ill-reputed gentry, and sometimes shows strange proclivities to evil—now breaking out uproariously, as in the noted potato-rot, and now more covertly, in various evil affections. For this reason scientific directors bid us beware of the water in which potatoes are boiled—into which, it appears, the evil principle is drawn off; and they caution us not to shred them into stews without previously suffering the slices to lie for an hour or so in salt and water. These cautions are worth attention.
The most usual modes of preparing the potato for the table are by roasting or boiling. These processes are so simple that it is commonly supposed every cook understands them without special directions; and yet there is scarcely an uninstructed cook who can boil or roast a potato.
A good roasted potato is a delicacy worth a dozen compositions of the cook-book; yet when we ask for it, what burnt, shriveled abortions are presented to us! Biddy rushes to her potato-basket and pours out two dozen of different sizes, some having in them three times the amount of matter of others. These being washed, she tumbles them into her oven at a leisure interval, and there lets them lie till it is time to serve breakfast, whenever that may be. As a result, if the largest are cooked, the smallest are presented in cinders, and the intermediate sizes are withered and watery. Nothing is so utterly ruined by a few moments of overdoing. That which at the right moment was plump with mealy richness, a quarter of an hour later shrivels and becomes watery—and it is in this state that roast potatoes are most frequently served.
In the same manner we have seen boiled potatoes from an untaught cook coming upon the table like lumps of yellow wax—and the same article, under the directions of a skillful mistress, appearing in snowy balls of powdery whiteness. In the one case, they were thrown in their skins into water, and suffered to soak or boil, as the case might be, at the cook’s leisure, and after they were boiled to stand in the water till she was ready to peel them. In the other case, the potatoes being first peeled were boiled as quickly as possible in salted water, which the moment they were done was drained off, and then they were gently shaken for a moment or two over the fire to dry them still more thor
oughly. We have never yet seen the potato so depraved and given over to evil that it could not be reclaimed by this mode of treatment.
As to fried potatoes, who that remembers the crisp, golden slices of the French restaurant, thin as wafers and light as snow-flakes, does not speak respectfully of them? What cousinship with these have those coarse, greasy masses of sliced potato, wholly soggy and partly burnt, to which we are treated under the name of fried potatoes in America? In our cities the restaurants are introducing the French article to great acceptance, and to the vindication of the fair fame of this queen of vegetables.
—from The American Woman’s Home, 1869
FANNIE MERRITT FARMER ON POTATOES
COMPOSITION.
Water 78.9%.
Starch 18%.
Protein 2.1%.
Mineral matter .9%.
Fat .1%.
Potatoes stand pre-eminent among the vegetables used for food. They are tubers belonging to the Nightshade family; their hardy growth renders them easy of cultivation in almost any soil or climate, and, resisting early frosts, they may be raised in a higher latitude than the cereals.
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