Valentine’s 2014: Love the One You’re With
Be my ‘tater!
February 10, 2014 This blog is not about promiscuity or adultery, but how I approach meal preparation. I’ve published hundreds of recipes in articles, books, and online, but I’ve always thought that recipes are formulas to be used as inspiration, not strict rules. That said, I often follow them to the letter – even my own – if I am preparing something classic or traditional, especially if I am feeding guests. (I try to avoid the trendy word “authentic,” and encourage you to.) For example, let’s say we’ve got some Peace Corps folks coming over who don’t know a thing about southern American cooking and Mikel has promised them a time-honored meal. I seldom plan the meal in advance, because I can never be sure that I will find the fresh shrimp or small, never-frozen chickens or unblemished okra that a dish requires. Even in the heart of the South, in season. Once I have the ingredients for a favored dish, I often pull out my own books and look at the recipe to get the proportions right. I’ve tested or made the recipe enough times to know that if I follow it to the tee, it will not only taste the way it should, but serve the number of people it says it will. That’s not, however, how I usually cook at home for the just two of us: I improvise and make substitutions and experiment a lot more when I don’t have to think about how it will turn out. Mikel eats everything and in our 20+ years together he has never complained and almost always cleans his plate, even when I don’t.
Living abroad presents culinary challenges when it comes to making classic dishes. Here in China, I never know when or if I will find some ingredients. I make do with what is available. I love the ones I’m with, in other words. 15 years ago I was working on a book of southern sweets for one of the major New York publishers. Although I am a decent baker, and generally know when to add a little more liquid or a little more flour or when a dough needs to rest, that “wok presence,” as the Chinese call it, is very hard to translate into recipes. I was having a really difficult time putting those instructions into recipes that had so many variables. I was finding that each stick of butter and every bag of flour was different, and that altitude and the humidity of the day would affect baking times and temperatures. I was not disappointed when the publisher had financial problems and paid 106 of its newest authors, including me, NOT to write the book.
Recently, I went to one of the big food markets here in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan, where we are currently living. It’s a sprawling market that meanders through two buildings and along several alleys. The major part of the market is mostly fish (and shellfish and reptiles and amphibians), but there are butchers and vegetable vendors and, farther down the street, pet stores and flower merchants. I was surprised to find asparagus, which I’ve never associated with China. Never mind, I now learn, that China is the major producer of asparagus in the world, most of which goes to Europe, where the plant originated, and to the States. In Charmaine Solomon’s extensive Complete Asian Cookbook (500 pages, originally published in 1976, and one of the handful of cookbooks I brought with me), she gives but one recipe, for a stir-fry of beef with asparagus. I think it’s probably a crossover recipe that circled back to Hong Kong with Brits or Chinese-Americans. You just don’t see asparagus on most menus here in Sichuan and when you do see the English word on a menu, it is usually referring to stalk lettuce (“celtuce”), an entirely different plant also known as “asparagus lettuce” (“lettuce” is usually omitted because the character for lettuce is really just the word for vegetable). The asparagus was fresh, beautiful, the first of the season, and 20” long. I had them trim half of it off, and stuck it in my backpack. My visions weren’t leaning toward stir-fries, but to European traditions, with eggs and lemon and butter and prosciutto, which I was pretty sure I had back at the apartment.
Walking across a parking lot that is surrounded by butcher shops, I saw a big bundle of parsley on the ground. I couldn’t believe it! I have seen parsley once since I have been here, and it was in one of the big German-owned stores that caters to expats. I was thrilled! I picked up the parsley and tucked it as well into my backpack, not worrying at all about how filthy it might be. I have to wash everything anyway in this special sort of bleachy soap. Not because of fertilizers or pesticides but because nearly everything in Sichuan is still grown organically – with night soil. We can’t drink the water, either, so everything gets boiled or distilled or washed in the vegetable soap. I wanted to make the parsley soup that I wrote about several years ago here on the blog.
At home with my finds, I surveyed my refrigerator and pantry, seeing if I might come up with something along the lines of Eggs Benedict with asparagus – a Italo-Franco-American hearty breakfast. I had the eggs, some French butter and Italian prosciutto (from a French grocer), some hearty bread (from that German store), and half a lemon.
The only problem would be making a meal for one. Mikel is out of town. Hollandaise sauce – or Salsa Olandese as the Italians call it – is certainly classic and it’s also, in my opinion, very easy to make. I honestly don’t know why folks think it is so hard or why they go to the trouble to use a blender, the way Julia Child recommended. It’s not only easy, it’s easy to fix if something goes wrong. I think the main problem that folks have is that they are simply intimidated by it. And they are afraid to add the secret ingredient, water! There are dozens of sites, I’m sure, online, that will give you detailed instructions for making the silky sauce, so I’m not going to. What you need to know are proportions. Some very basic versions call for only egg yolk, lemon juice, butter, and salt, but the classic version calls for reducing vinegar with a little seasoning. Like so many of my kitchen tools that I inherited from my mother (who was an adventurous, accomplished cook), this very small enameled skillet comes in handy often when I’m cooking for one or two. Nearly all recipes for Hollandaise have the same proportions: ¼ cup vinegar, 1 shallot, 3 egg yolks, 1 tablespoon lemon juice, 8 tablespoons clarified butter. I simply divided by three to get my smaller serving.
In the little skillet, I placed a teaspoon of chopped scallion (I didn’t have shallots and haven’t seen them here. Love the one you’re with.) and a tablespoon plus a teaspoon of vinegar and some herbes de Provence, crushed between my fingertips. I reduced the vinegar to almost nothing, turned off the heat, added a little water, deglazed the pan, and strained the water into a very small pot back on the stove set as low as I could get the flame. I whisked one egg yolk into the water with another of my mother’s tools, this whisk that is shaped so that it can get into the bottom of pots. I don’t clarify the butter, but I do use French butter with a much higher fat content than American butter. I don’t even melt it, just cut it up into smaller pieces and whisk them in one at a time until the sauce is silky smooth. I season with a pinch of salt and a pinch of cayenne and correct the seasoning with lemon juice, continually whisking. I turn off the heat and leave the pot on the stove, with the whisk still in it; I occasionally whisk it to keep it as light as possible. Should the sauce break, all you have to do is whisk in a little hot water and it should set again. While I’m making the Hollandaise, which takes a matter of minutes, I poach the asparagus. When it’s ready, I pour off the water and wrap the asparagus in a clean towel. Then I poach the eggs while I toast some bread. Cover the toast with prosciutto slices. Add the eggs. And nap it all with Hollandaise. Granted, this was a hearty meal, but it’s the only one I had yesterday.
Today I dealt with the parsley. The recipe was my improvement of a recipe by Simon Hopkinson, the famous British chef. But, like all recipes – classic or not, it has room for both improvisation and improvement. I look at that amount of stock – which I doubled – and know that it’s still not enough. Part of the problem is with the measurement of parsley: “two large bunches.” And Italian flat-leaf as well. What I found on the street was a bundle of curly parsley (whose flavor I actually prefer), about 10 inches across. It’s much easier to pull the little broccoli-like heads of leaves off the stems than pulling each individual flat leaf. I divided the leaves in half. Here you can see the stems and the two bowls of leaves.
The recipe calls for 4 big leeks but I couldn’t find them, so I bought Chinese bunching onions. Same difference as far as flavor goes. The recipe also calls for using only the whites of leeks, but I used the green of these mild onions as well. The soup will be very very green anyway.
While the leeks and parsley stems are slowly wilting – about 20 minutes, with no browning, I chopped half the parsley leaves and plunged them into boiling water, per the recipe. I drained them, rinsed them in cold water, and wrung them out in a towel and set them aside.
The recipe calls for a potato, cream, and/or egg yolks to thicken the soup. In the end, I used none, though I did begin by adding the largest potato I could find (see photo of the heart-shaped spud at the top of the page), peeled and chopped, with the stock that I had in the freezer. The recipe called for a light stock, but mine was hearty, made from a rooster, and cooked for hours. I added some water in the end.
When it came time to puree the soup, I looked at the potatoes and the amount of liquid and knew that the soup wouldn’t need the potatoes, so I pulled them out and later pan-fried them to have with supper; I could have just as easily added them to a frittata or mashed them.
Lots of playing it by ear, so to speak, so far. And then, near disaster! I turned on the blender with the soup in it, and the soup began pouring out the bottom of the blender container. I hadn’t screwed it on correctly the last time! Soup was spilling all over the blender and on the counter and headed toward the floor, but I quickly grabbed a clean new sponge and wiped it all into a bowl, cleaned up the mess, and returned the soup to the blender with its bottom tightly screwed. It was still very thick (without the potatoes, cream, or egg yolks), so I added a little more stock. If you love the taste of parsley, the way I do, make this luscious soup. It’s delicious. And it really is Crayola green. Here’s a photo with some other common objects so that you can see that I have not tweaked the color. Happy Valentine’s! P.S. I am adding some wine notes on the next page of the blog.