Ham Steaks, Juniper, and a Cure for Gallic Ambivalence || RECIPE

This story originally appeared on TASTE.

I suspect that one luckless day a stern mob wearing crisp white aprons and pointy toques will rap on my front door with outstretched palms, insisting I surrender my food-writer membership card.

All because I am not a Francophile.

You know, the Francophile. The man who describes raw triple-cream cheese as enlightenment. The woman who extols the singular crackle and give of a great baguette. The people who proudly know the choicest spot in Paris for the most impeccable plateau de fruits de mer.

I like French food. I do. I sometimes even love it. But I generally prefer the spiced tumble of South Indian dosas and dal. Or the subtle char and zip of a Mexican platter of enchiladas en adobo. Or the fresh counterpoint of a bowl of Vietnamese bun thit nuong cha gio (vermicelli with grilled pork and imperial rolls).

The acute exception to my Gallic ambivalence is pork and juniper, two staples of French regional cooking. Combine the sweet versatility of sausages and cured pork belly with the resinous snap and funk of juniper-laced braised sauerkraut, as in the classic choucroute garnie of Alsace, and I will unfurl the vertical blue, white, and red and start belting “La Marseillaise.”

📷: Denny Culbert

More than a decade ago, when I was both a fledgling writer and a fledgling gay, I went to a conference at the Greenbrier. The stately West Virginia property held an annual Symposium for Professional Food Writers. Cookbook legends and award-winning journalists were always in attendance. I thought if I were also there I might be able to, in time, be like them.

The year I attended, one of the panelists was James Peterson. He is a kind of cookbook creator that barely exists these days. The man wrote tomes, books that regularly topped 500 pages on single subjects like sauces, seafood, and soup. In my edition of his Splendid Soups, the ingredient list runs 29 pages and there are 51 recipes for single-vegetable soups alone. Peterson’s eclectic expertise, his terse opinions and pointed judgments, his sprawling grasp of cooking esoterica all reeked of gayness. I knew because I saw myself in him. That isn’t quite right. No, I saw in him a version of myself I was desperate to become. A me that could become consumed by similar minutiae.

I recall inserting myself into a dining situation with Peterson’s partner, Zelik, Peterson’s agent, Elise Goodman, and Peterson himself, dapper and gray-haired and then about the same age as I am now. Oh, time. Those opportunities seemed to happen constantly during the symposium. The attendees—plebes and experts alike—all stayed on the property in the town of White Sulphur Spring. I twitch now thinking about how obnoxious I was. How ill-informed, too. Peterson was kind. And awkward. He reeked of Manhattanite sophistication. That made me admire him all the more.

📷: Denny Culbert

At the time, his most recent book was Glorious French Food, a 770-page attempt to inventory the breadth of French cooking. It spanned 50 recipe categories, from Assorted Vegetable Salads to Cookies and Candies with a detour through, of course, Baked Whole Truffles. Even the book’s physical dimensions eclipsed the standard: It was enormous. After our chance meeting, I cooked a little from the book, including a sublime version of oeufs en meurette, a homey dish of poached eggs in red wine sauce. I lodged the book on a shelf soon afterward, hesitant about its endless fussy recipes, equivocal about my indifference.

Then, the other week, I pulled the tome from the bookcase that runs down my hallway and paged through it. My eyes saw the book through a clean lens, buffed after 15 more years of cooking and, on my good days, living. Many of the recipes were less daunting than I remembered. A gaggle of pork dishes caught my interest, including one with ham draped in a cream sauce flavored with juniper berries and vinegar.

📷: Denny Culbert

First, you make a roux. In south Louisiana, where gumbo reigns, making roux is as commonplace as boiling water. This I can do. Then you add wine and reduce it because this is French cooking, after all. Then in go finely chopped shallots, crushed juniper berries, black peppercorns, cream, and a wallop of vinegar to shock the richness. Smoked ham steaks, in another deeply French move, are fried in butter, then slicked with the sauce. Porky, rich, homey, sharp.

I write some. I might be more sophisticated than I once was; I’m not sure it matters if I am. But I cook a lot. Sometimes. I will likely never write a 770-page magnum opus on pretty much anything. I might have already become the very person I longed to catalyze all those years ago in West Virginia. Or maybe I will not ever be that version of myself, because that dreaming was a notion, an idea, never capable of being made flesh.

📷: Denny Culbert

Ham With Juniper-Cream Sauce

Serves 5
Adapted from James Peterson’s Glorious French Food

Despite the recipe’s name, vinegar is in many ways the spine of this dish. It’s the element that makes the other components stand erect. Choose a decent vinegar. Your ham will thank you.

• 12 or so juniper berries

• 10 or so black peppercorns

• 2 tablespoons flour

• 4 tablespoons (½ stick) unsalted butter

• 1 cup dry white wine

• 4 medium shallots, finely chopped

• ¼ cup red wine or sherry vinegar

• ½ cup heavy cream

• 2 tablespoons parsley, finely chopped

• Kosher salt

• 5 thick ham steaks (6 to 8 ounces each), preferably smoked

1. Crush the juniper and peppercorns with the side of a knife or a skillet.

2. Make the roux: In a small saucepan, combine the flour and 2 tablespoons butter and cook over medium heat, stirring constantly, until the flour begins to smell toasted and turns light golden-brown, about 5 minutes. Add half the wine and use a whisk to stir the sauce until it comes to a simmer and begins to thicken. Whisk in the remaining ½ cup wine. Reduce the heat to low and continue simmering the sauce until it has a consistency a little thicker than heavy cream. Add the juniper, peppercorns, shallots, vinegar, and cream and simmer until the sauce has a thick, pourable consistency. Shoot for a consistency that you like. Strain the sauce into a bowl, add the parsley, and season with salt to taste. Return the seasoned sauce to the saucepan and keep warm.

3. In a large skillet set over medium heat, add the remaining 2 tablespoons butter. When melted, add the ham steaks and cook each side until the ham is warmed through, about 5 minutes per side. Pat the ham steaks with towels to remove any excess butter so the sauce will cling to the surface of the steaks. Place the ham steaks on either a platter or individual plates, ladle the sauce on top of them, and serve.

The Subtle Revolution of Matcha Poached Eggs || RECIPE

This story originally appeared on TASTE.

In the restaurant and media worlds of northern California, where I worked during the 2000s, “simple” was ubiquitous. The finest compliment you could grant a dish was that it was simple. A simple tomato sauce on spaghetti. A simple roast chicken. A simple salad of garden lettuces with baked goat cheese. An entire region’s cuisine seemingly born of one word. Mid-to-late 20th century cookbooks that helped spawn the California cuisine movement, like Richard Olney’s Simple French Food, broadcast the adjective. Twenty-first century cookbooks, like 2007’s The Art of Simple French Food by the doyenne of Bay Area food, Alice Waters, trumpeted it.

The American Heritage Dictionary defines the word “simple” as follows: 1. Having or being composed of only one thing, element, or part. 2. Not involved or complicated; easy. 3. Being without additions or modifications; mere. 4. Having little or no ornamentation; not embellished or adorned. I will add an additional definition: 5. Makes Scott want to place a shotgun in his mouth and remove the back of his skull.

Everyone’s heart was honorable. You procured good ingredients from good farms and farmers and cooked good food. The heart can lie, though. Too often the cooking was slight, contrived in its sameness. A Californized version of country French and Italian cuisines that wielded simplicity like a cane. Restaurant kitchens feeding people by European groupthink. Who wants to eat only in restaurants what you could make at home?

A ray of light cracked through the haze the same year Waters’s book was published. In 2007, The Breakaway Cook appeared. It did the unthinkable: guided the notion of simplicity down new paths. Its author, Eric Gower, lived and worked in Japan for more than 15 years before returning to San Francisco. During that time, he inadvertently built a new culinary lexicon, one that relied on big, powerful ingredients like miso, pomegranate molasses, citrus, habanero chiles, ginger, kaffir/makrut lime leaves, and matcha.

The two powerhouses of this condiment. 📷: Denny Culbert

One recipe from The Breakaway Cook upended my ideas of cooking: matcha poached eggs. So effortless that it makes simple seem ornate. You combine matcha and coarse salt, then dust it on poached eggs that have been laid on buttered toast. We all know the combination of salt and eggs is mighty tasty. The addition of powdered green tea is alchemical. The egg’s savoriness intensifies. A delicate sweetness murmurs. I do not understand how a subtle addition does this. I no longer wonder. I merely eat the reawakened staple and marvel.

Gower now runs a matcha-fueled company called, predictably, Breakaway Matcha. It sells high-grade matcha, served at some of the Bay Area’s best restaurants, along with ceramics and other matcha-related implements. Me, I am in New Orleans, still starting my mornings with his revelatory eggs 11 years later.

Breakfast will ever be the same. 📷: Denny Culbert

Poached Eggs With Matcha Salt

Serves 2
Adapted from Eric Gower’s The Breakaway Cook

This recipe is so bare-bones, you could skip making the matcha salt and instead sprinkle both flaky salt and matcha over the eggs. Careful, though! You might find a matcha landslide careens onto your eggs if you’re not judicious.

• ¼ cup sel gris (gray salt) or other coarse salt

• 1 teaspoon matcha

• 2 slices of bread

• 2 eggs

• Butter

1. Stir the salt and matcha together in a small container until the salt is fully green. This mixture will last for ages, so best to mix it together in a jar or some such container in which you can store it.

2. Toast and butter the bread. Do this first so you don’t have to worry about it while the eggs are poaching.

3. Poach the eggs in your favorite manner. Mine is to bring a small saucepan about ⅔ full of water to a simmer over the lowest possible heat. If you want to lessen the chances of straggly egg whites, first crack each egg, one at a time, into a fine-mesh strainer, and scrape off any whites that pass through the strainer’s bottom. Then add the remaining egg to the saucepan, stirring gently so the egg doesn’t stick to the base of the pan. Repeat with the other egg. Each egg should cook for about 4 minutes, or until the whites are set.

4. Lift the finished eggs from the saucepan with a slotted spoon or spider strainer and onto a towel to blot moisture from the egg while it’s in the straining implement. Gently slip the eggs onto the buttered toast. Sprinkle the top of each egg with a bit of matcha salt. Eat!

Mexican-Italian Pasta With Garlic and Dried Chiles || RECIPE

This story originally appeared on TASTE.

Pantry pasta is a fulfilling, dependable dish. You take staples like spaghetti, garlic, olive oil, and dried hot chile flakes and fuse them into quick, easy sustenance.

Trouble is, those standbys occasionally swerve into a meal so boring my eyes loll back into my skull. We all need a jolt sometimes, right?

A few years ago, a recipe in Pati’s Mexican Table capsized what had become my ingrained method of cooking pasta with garlic and olive oil. I was intrigued by the recipes in Pati Jinich’s book—a combination of homey Mexican dishes, like pinto bean soup and chilaquiles in red salsa, alongside gently Mexicanized American classics, such as chipotle mashed potatoes and roast turkey marinated with citrus and achiote paste. Jinich’s cooking is a reminder to readers that borders are fluid. Ingredients and techniques cross nations and continents; people do the same. That kind of thinking—and cooking—is a humanizing beacon during these discouraging times, when the hopeful essence of the United States’ potential seems to be in jeopardy.

Your weapons. 📷: Denny Culbert

Jinich’s own recipe for pasta with garlic and olive oil features two simple, profound additions: mild, fruity dried Mexican chiles and strong fresh herbs. Her tangles of spaghetti breathe with a kind of worldliness. It is as if they have taken a sabbatical across central and northern Mexico, acquiring an obsession with guajillo chiles and oregano during their wanderings.

There is flexibility to nearly every component of the dish. The original recipe asks for guajillos, those gentle dried chiles that are one of the most common dried chiles in Mexico. You could also use dried New Mexican or Californian chiles. I have. On the page, Jinich calls for a small handful of big-flavored, chopped fresh herbs: rosemary, thyme, oregano, and marjoram. I have used a different permutation each time I make this pasta. Sometimes two of the four, and always in varying proportions. I insist on marjoram being there. Because I am a marjoram obsessive. Your blueprint: Use at least two different herbs. From there, the ratio is yours. Only mildly interested in rosemary? Use less of it and more of the others. You get the idea.

Smell that garlic and chiles. 📷: Denny Culbert

The cooking itself is seamless. First you add the pasta to salted boiling water. You then warm olive oil until it ripples, and add chopped garlic. In seconds, when the scent of garlic becomes incontrovertible, you toss in finely chopped dried chiles. Suddenly, the smell shifts from hot and garlicky to warm and chile-fruity. Quickly, the chopped herbs go in; the air blooms with musk and pine and sweet greenness. The drained noodles and a gurgle of pasta cooking water are slipped into the skillet and the lot is tossed until a slippery sauce coats the pasta.

If you like, add a grated salty cheese. Pecorino, Cotija, Parmesan. One in that vein. Add some chopped parsley, too, if you want more verdant lift. The result: Italian at the core; Mexican in spirit. Some might call it fusion. I call it smart, modern cooking.

Now, that’s a bowl of Mexi-pasta. 📷: Denny Culbert

Mexican-Italian Pasta With Garlic and Dried Chiles
Serves 4
Adapted from Pati Jinich’s Pati’s Mexican Table

The precise type of dried chiles in this handy dish doesn’t matter, provided you’ve selected a chile that is mild. You could even use a combination of mild chiles if you happen to have more than one on hand. Same goes for the herbs. You want sturdy herbs like the ones listed. But you could use only one, rather than having to source all four.

• 1 pound spaghetti or other thin pasta

• ½ cup olive oil

• 5 garlic cloves, finely chopped

• 1¼ ounce dried mild, fruity chiles, such as guajillos or New Mexican chiles

• 3 tablespoons finely chopped herbs (a mix of any of these: rosemary, thyme, marjoram, oregano)

• Salt

• Freshly ground black pepper

• ½ cup grated Parmigiano-Reggiano, Cotija, Pecorino Romano, or ricotta salata (optional)

• 2 tablespoons coarsely chopped fresh Italian parsley (optional)

1. Bring water to a boil in a large pot and add enough salt so it’s almost as salty as the sea when it comes to a boil.

2. Meanwhile, wipe the chiles with a damp cloth, then remove their seeds and finely chop the flesh. Careful! The pieces will want to fly everywhere. (If you haven’t already done so, you could chop the herbs, too, while the pasta water comes to a boil.)

3. Add the pasta to the boiling water and cook, stirring occasionally, until a little less than al dente.

4. Meanwhile, heat the olive oil over medium heat in a very large skillet big enough to hold the pasta. Add the garlic and cook just until fragrant, about 20 seconds. Don’t let it burn! Add the chiles and cook for another 20 seconds or so. Again, when they’re fragrant, move on to the next step. Add the herbs and cook yet again for 20 seconds or so. If the pasta isn’t ready yet, turn the heat to very low.

5. You’ll want to reserve some of the starchy cooking water, so strain the noodles into a colander set over a mug or measuring cup.

6. Add the pasta to the skillet, increase the heat back to medium, and add about ½ cup pasta cooking water. Cook, tossing, for another couple minutes, adding more cooking water if needed, until the pasta is al dente and slicked with sauce. Season to taste with pepper. You probably won’t need more salt, especially if you’re adding cheese. Toss with the cheese and parsley, if using either or both. Serve either family style on one large plate or divide among individual plates.

Bread Soup From the Lost Years (Portuguese Bread-Cilantro Soup) || RECIPE

This story originally appeared on TASTE.

It only took a Swiss chard and cilantro bread soup to remind me that memory is wanting, a daisy chain of recollections in a broken, wayward sequence.

I sometimes wander cookbooks and the Internet when I am unsure what I want to cook. Or eat. Recently my fingers strolled across The New Portuguese Kitchen. I have paged through the book a few times, always intrigued. The recipes seem at once manageable and unexpected. Food that speaks a language I know, in a dialect I have never heard. Plus, many Portuguese have a fondness for bacalao, and I like salt cod plenty myself. But this was not a salt cod day.

I wanted to cook something that was quick, with ingredients I had around. Ooh! There it was: a cilantro bread soup with poached eggs, açorda alentejana as the dish is called in Portugal. I started plotting the steps, then—wham!—my mind scurried in a fresh direction. A flash of intense green. Melancholy. Fat white beans. Fog. Endless fog, with splotches of sun.

I had eaten this dish before. But I have never been to Portugal, I reminded myself. Where, when, how? The memory flared into blunt relief: San Francisco. I ate this soup constantly for a few years.

Crackly edges are the best. 📷: Denny Culbert

It was the mid-2000s, and I was in a grim place. My first true relationship had ended. I knew he and I together was wrong, but it was my first heartbreak and the ache bombinated. I then ricocheted into an even unhealthier relationship. The kind you know is ill-advised. The kind you need because being needed is all that matters.

I lived around the corner from Bar Tartine when it opened. This was the offshoot of the famed Mission bakery, where the coconut cream tarts are legendary and the country bread is peerless. In 2006 at Bar Tartine, bread was the entry point for many of chef Jason Fox’s dishes. Like so much else during those years, I could remember his bread soup in fragments. I was doing a lot of drugs at night, cocaine mostly, and the resultant days were spent with a quavering brain and an exhausted body. Those nights deadened the pain of lost love and the longstanding ideas I had of my minimal worth as a gay man. New friendships were forged, too. Bar Tartine, with its warm staff who became like kin, tall dining counter where I practically had a stool of my own, and Fox’s smart, accessible food, like this bread soup, was a balm. The restaurant was an implacable oak in the middle of a tornado. I recalled the soup’s brightness. I guessed cilantro did that. I remember bread, too, of course. And an egg. The rest of the dish? No idea. Damn memory.

I texted Fox and told him I was doing a story about the soup and wanted the recipe. We talked on the phone, and I could tell it was strange for him to finger a recipe from his past. His present is at Commonwealth, one of my favorite restaurants in the States, where this soup has never appeared on the menu. At Bar Tartine, though, the soup was around for most of his three-year run. He could still remember most of the steps during our call, and as he walked me through the recipe, my remembrance began to crystallize.

Cooked chard with a bunch of onion. 📷: Denny Culbert

A few days later, Fox sent me the full recipe. I split fans of Swiss chard into stems and leaves, then sliced the stems into thin half-moons and tore the leaves into large, rough pieces. I sautéed the stem bits with onion until almost soft, then added the leaf chunks. While those wilted, I added cilantro, garlic, and a load of olive oil to a food processor and blitzed until the three merged into a rough puree. Bread was torn into craggy pieces and toasted in olive oil. Eggs were poached, and a can of fat white beans was opened and rinsed.

I inhaled as I began to assemble a few bowls. In the past, this soup was not just good; it was important. Through the opaque lens of memory, had I imbued the dish with false deliciousness? When the soup’s primary function was its familiarity—its steadfastness when I could barely find stillness of my own?

The puree that’s about to transform this soup. 📷: Denny Culbert

I warmed some chicken stock and added the chard and beans, then the cilantro puree and salt. More than I would have imagined, even considering my stock was unsalted. Into the bowls went the bread, followed by the poached egg. A pause. It smelled right and good. Smell can trick, though, just like memory. I plunged a spoon deep, retrieving a blop of egg, a bean, a fainting lick of chard, and a hunk of bread. I slurped. The soup was sublime. Simple, but bursting with green and crunch and silk and lusciousness.

Nostalgia is pointless. Latching on to an idealized past seems to me a surefire way to scorn the now. Still, it can be useful. Food doesn’t have to be delicious to matter, if we decide it should. It can hold weight beyond its possible deliciousness. Sometimes nostalgia can hurtle into the present and, through taste, you see the present and past align. Memory still errs. Reliably so. Sometimes, though, memory can right itself.

The glory. 📷: Denny Culbert

Portuguese Bread and Cilantro Soup
Serves 4
Adapted from Jason Fox, chef-owner of Commonwealth in San Francisco

There’s a kind of alchemy in this soup from Jason Fox. He used to cook it at San Francisco’s Bar Tartine more than a decade ago. Each element—the greens and beans and bread and cilantro puree—is dead simple. Somehow when the elements unify, the dish leaps from basic addition to exponential goodness. You could use water, if you have no chicken stock. It’s a whole lot better with stock though.

• 2 cups torn country-style bread (about ½ loaf)

• ¾ cup plus 1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil

• 1 bunch Swiss chard (stems diced, leaves torn and both separated)

• ½ small white onion, diced

• 1 bunch cilantro

• 1 clove garlic

• 2 cups chicken stock or water (much better with stock though)

• 1 cup large white beans, drained (you can use canned or precooked beans)

• 4 eggs

• Salt

• Freshly ground black pepper

1. Heat a skillet over medium heat and add ¼ cup olive oil. When the oil shimmers, add the bread and cook, stirring often until the bread is a little browned, about 5 minutes. Push the bread into a bowl and wipe the skillet.

2. Add a tablespoon or so of olive oil to the skillet and warm over medium-low heat. Add the chard stems and onion and cook, stirring occasionally, until almost tender, about 5 minutes. Add chard leaves and cook, stirring every so often, until both the leaves and stems are tender, another few minutes. Season with salt and pepper.

3. Add the cilantro, garlic and ½ cup olive oil to either a blender or food processor. Puree until quite smooth and season with salt.

4. Add the stock to a pot over medium heat, along with the chard and drained beans. Meanwhile, bring a shallow pot of water to a boil then reduce to the lowest temperature possible. While using a spoon to create a gentle whirlpool, crack each of the eggs into the water, one at a time. Cook until the whites are set and the yolks are still jiggly, 4 minutes.

5. Add the cilantro puree to the stock, chard and beans and stir. Taste and season with salt and pepper. Divide the bread between four bowls, and do the same with the soup base itself. Top each bowl with a poached egg and serve.

Cold Buttermilk & Cucumber Soup || RECIPE

This story originally appeared on TASTE.

My brain froze. Scratch that: It was more like a blown fuse, and I was incapable of determining what to cook.

It was sometime in July 2015, my first summer living in New Orleans. Long before I moved to the Deep South, I had read time and again about the acute midyear heat that envelops the region. I, a Westerner and then a Yankee, had trained myself to cook by working in restaurants and at home in Boston, Washington, D.C., San Francisco, and New York. I grew into the kind of person who had a few dishes I could improvise from memory. Pantry pasta. Bread crumb eggs. A dal or two. I scoffed at the idea of a kitchen so hot and sticky that using either the stove or oven was unthinkable. Then the sluggish dog days of that first New Orleans summer limped in. Stupid Yankee.

I was sweaty and languid, in a numb torpor from the gravity of the humid air. The muscle memory took over. Spaghetti with olives, garlic, and Aleppo pepper. Steam poured from a pan of boiling water. The kitchen grew hotter and damper by degree. I coiled the pasta on a plate and stared at it. It seemed like the very last thing I wanted to eat. I put a whorl in my mouth. Correct. Pasta was a terrible idea.

Defeated, I tried clearing the webs from my addled brain and fumbled for a cookbook that skewed Southern and might house an answer. Buttermilk! I snagged Angie Mosier’s reliable Buttermilk cookbook from a high shelf in my kitchen and started scanning. There it was: a recipe for cold buttermilk-and-cucumber soup.

It read like nothing I had cooked or even considered. You blitz buttermilk, peeled and seeded cucumbers, and seasoning in a blender, chill well, then garnish and serve. I shopped, made a batch, and tasted. Rich, forceful, refreshing, effortless: My listlessness receded as I instantly uncovered the backbone of Southern summer cooking.

I called Mosier recently to learn the genesis of her revelatory soup. A few years ago, she says, she ran a bakery in Serenbe, Georgia—a utopian-minded community about 45 minutes south of Atlanta built to help squelch urban sprawl by preserving the area’s rural nature. The bakery was affiliated with a farm, and come summer, the bakery was drowning in cucumbers. “I’m not a girly girl,” jokes Mosier. “But I’ve always loved tea sandwiches, especially the texture of the ones with cream cheese and cucumbers. I thought it might be interesting to make a soup that captured that.” Was it ever.

The author in his home kitchen in New Orleans

Adding that Louisiana hot sauce. 📷: Denny Culbert

She described a similar buttermilk conversion. Mosier is a native Southerner, but she never understood the ingredient’s allure until she tried the full-fat, small-scale churned buttermilk made by Cruze Family Farm in Tennessee. “That kind of buttermilk gives the special tangy decadence of cream cheese,” she says, noting that you can still use any type of buttermilk for the soup to great results. She was right: I’ve used both fancy, local buttermilk from Mauthe’s Progress in Mississippi and industrial buttermilk from the supermarket. Each is good in its own way.

During our chat, I confessed my previous incredulity about the ferocity of Southern summers and my resulting shame and foolishness. She laughed. “Glad to hear that people like yourself from the North understand. They’ll ask me why the only thing I often want to eat in the summer in Georgia is a tomato sandwich. Now you know.”

Ah, the magic of summer tomato sandwiches in the Deep South. That’s a story for another time.

Cold Buttermilk & Cucumber Soup
Serves 4–6
Adapted from Angie Mosier’s Buttermilk Short Stack Editions book

There’s a fair amount of flexibility with this recipe. Want the color to be a purer white? Use white pepper. A Southern hot sauce such as Crystal, Louisiana or Tabasco would be ideal. Only have Cholula or Sriracha? So be it. This soup is all about ease.

• 3 large cucumbers (about 2 pounds)

• 1 garlic clove, finely chopped

• ¼ cup chopped Italian parsley

• 1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

• A few dashes hot sauce

• 3 cups buttermilk

• Salt

1. Peel and seed the cucumbers. (A soup spoon is great for seeding.)

2. Finely dice one of the cucumbers and set aside about ½ cup for garnishing. Coarsely chop the other cucumbers and add them, along with any other remaining diced cucumber, to a blender. Add the garlic, parsley, black pepper, hot sauce, buttermilk and salt. Blend until smooth, then refrigerate, covered, until well-chilled, at least an hour and up to 24 hours. (In truth, it keeps for at least a few days. But the optimal window is one hour to one day.)

3. Right before serving, taste the soup and season with salt. Garnish with a hearty drizzle of olive oil and the reserved diced cucumbers. Serve in whatever vessel you like. As the soup’s creator says, “It’s as good taken on-the-go as it is in your good china.”

The Eton Mess Is Beautiful, Chaotic, British || RECIPE

This story originally appeared on TASTE.

When I first ate Eton mess in 2011 it was less a disarray and more a meticulous calculation. Nubs of crunchy-chewy meringue danced with yogurt mousse and bands of blackberry jam—topped with a jumble of fresh berries, all stacked judiciously in a Weck jar and crowned with a scoop of mint-rosewater ice milk. It was a precise dessert from an exacting pastry chef, Shuna Lydon, who during various positions at Manhattan kitchens always kept her desserts seasonal—yes, as so many pastry chefs do, but also surprising.

I have always been drawn to meringue. The slick chew-and-shatter of French meringue. The sticky give of Italian meringue, a billowy type mounded on fruit pies. I think I ate more lemon meringue pies as a kid than Whoppers from Burger King. But the intersection of saccharine meringue, flowing cream, and ripe, tart fruit in Lydon’s Eton mess at the now-closed Peels in Manhattan’s East Village was everything I had never realized I wanted from a dessert. I knew hers was a florid, scrupulous interpretation of the classic British dessert. So what of Eton mess in its birthplace of England? What was this dish—first mentioned in 1893 and associated with a college founded in 1440 by King Henry VI—like in the country that created it?

Last month, my boyfriend, Brandon, and I wandered the United Kingdom for two weeks. A real vacation! I figured we might stumble on Eton mess during our wanderings, as Eton mess is a firm part of the vernacular of newish restaurants celebrating classic English dishes. Bothering to seek it out, though, was the least of my worries. With jet lag seeped into my bones, there would be no scouring restaurant menus for one specific dessert—er, pudding, as they call dessert in the Kingdom.

Our home base for a few days was Bath, at the foot of the Cotswolds, that absurdly bucolic area in south-central England. We headed north into the heart of those hills late one weekday morning for a hike. Or as they are called in England, a “walk.” I wonder what the Brits call a “walk” without hills and sheep.

Lunch was the first order of business being that we had slept in. Our destination: the Wild Duck Inn, a 16th century pub in the hamlet of Ewen. Ivy stretched over the building’s façade, and the warren of dining areas was like a Victorian garden maze that had transported itself to the 21st century. The food was classic with an eye to freshness: just-caught brill, local asparagus, and potatoes. I eyed the dessert—er, puddings—menu, and there it was: Eton mess with Somerset strawberries.

I hoped this kind of old dessert would still feel dynamic in its homeland in 2017. But we all know time can be cruel. Out came an accumulation of small meringue bumps, dense, rolling whipped cream and deep-red strawberries.

Staring at them meringues. 📷: Denny Culbert

I was stunned. It was one of the finest desserts I have ever eaten. Clear, concise, and rich. The cream was barely sweet, but hefty with loads of butterfat. The meringue pieces were both crisp and soft. The berries were peerless. If this is a proper mess, may chaos reign across the world for all time.

I tried to replicate the Inn’s Eton mess at home in New Orleans. Meringues are a bugaboo in the weighty, humid summer months of south Louisiana. They go soft and clinging. Still, it’s worth the trouble. I like mine with unsweetened whipped cream. The meringues and the fruit, too, if you are lucky, are plenty sweet. Me, I choose fruit that has sharpness and some kick. Blackberries maybe. I sluiced passion fruit syrup across the mess, adding a yellow shock and more tang.

That’s my mess, though. Do what you like with yours. Everyone’s mess is always ultimately theirs and theirs alone.

Eton Mess
Serves 6–8

This recipe had so many influences. But Regan Daley’s unsung In the Sweet Kitchen and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s River Cottage Fruit Everyday! are the formative ones. It makes sense, I suppose, that a Canadian (Daley) and a Brit (Fearnley-Whittingstall) informed my meringue ways, as we Americans don’t eat much meringue comparatively. Low-and-slow is the way to think about cooking this kind of meringue.

• 2 egg whites, ideally at room temperature

• pinch of salt

• pinch of cream tartar (optional)

• ½ cup sugar

• 1 cup heavy cream

• good fresh fruit, such as berries

• fruit syrup, if you happen to have some
  

1. Preheat oven to 225℉.

2. You want your eggs at room temperature. If you forgot to take them out of the refrigerator, simply crack the whites into a heatproof bowl and gently warm over low heat above a burner on the stove. In a standing mixer, whip the eggs, salt and optional cream of tartar over medium speed with the whisk attachment until the whites begin to form soft peaks. Continue whipping, adding the sugar gradually about a tablespoon at a time until the whites are glossy and bendy with firm peaks. It should take about 3 minutes. As I read once, you want them sturdy enough for a whole egg to only sink in about ¼ inch.

3. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper. Using a teaspoon, plop spoonfuls of meringue onto the baking sheet. You should wind up with about 22 individual meringue blobs. Bake until the meringues are hard outside and no longer sticky to the touch. It will likely take at least 1½ hours. Turn off the oven and leave the meringues inside. (They keep at room temperature for a few days, too, provided they’re kept in an airtight container.)

4. Beat the cream with an electric mixer until it forms flowing soft peaks. You don’t want to overbeat the cream and have it be too firm. You want to be able to softly coat the meringues pieces with it.

5. Set aside half the whipped cream and add half the meringues. Toss gently, then scoop the mix onto a serving platter. Intersperse the fruit and remaining meringues among the cream-meringue mixture. Drizzle the optional syrup on top.

The Best Red Beans Are a Little Bit Cajun and a Little Bit Basque || RECIPE

This story originally appeared on TASTE.

There was a time, New Orleans mythology says, when red beans and rice were a Monday-only kind of dish. New Orleans’s homemakers, busy washing clothes all day, the story goes, would throw a pot of red beans on the stove, buttressed with leftover pork from the day before. Come day’s end, the red beans had gone soft, ready to be served with one of Louisiana’s finest crops: rice. Over the decades, red beans and rice became anytime food, especially for celebrations. You see it at birthdays and funerals. You bring it for Mardi Gras, that party to beat all parties.

New Orleans isn’t the only place with a thing for red beans. There’s rajma, a creamy red bean stew from Punjab, and gallopinto, a rice-and-beans dish that’s ubiquitous in Nicaragua. In Spain’s Basque country, it’s alubias con sacramentos.

Last September, my boyfriend and I drove through parts of the Spanish Basque country. We hiked Mount Adarra, passing rows of cows as we crested the summit and looked out over the half-moon-shaped Bay of Biscay and the city of San Sebastián. After our descent, we drank cider and ate plates of boiled meats, tortilla Española and cheesy croquetas at a Basque cider house, called an erretegia. My Basque friend, Gontzal, chaperoned us from bar to bar, eating the local version of tapas called pintxos. Gontzal even cooked for us—fresh anchovies, an omelet with salt cod, and sautéed guindillas (mild green peppers).

It was only when we returned home to New Orleans and I started digging into Alexandra Raij’s The Basque Book that I realized all the foods Brandon and I missed while we were in Spain: marmitako (fisherman’s stew), lamb meatballs with fresh peas, the Basque version of ratatouille called pisto. That’s always how it is with travel. You don’t realize what you didn’t know until you know it.

Making ribs manageable. 📷: Denny Culbert

While paging through the book, I noticed remarkable similarities between Raij’s recipe for Basque red beans and the ubiquitous red beans of my adopted home. New Orleans–style red beans are a Creole dish. Basque red beans, with their allotment of two kinds of sausage, a glut of other pork products, and the obligatory reliance on a vinegary, chile-hot condiment, were already singing in the key of Cajun. I wondered if I could prepare these beans the Basque way, with the addition of some porky Louisiana soul.

I had freezer stock from two of Cajun country’s best butchers: smoked pork sausage from Chop’s Specialty Meats, and boudin, that Cajun pork-and-rice sausage staple, from Billy’s Boudin & Cracklins. I used those in place of the recipe’s chorizo and blood sausage. I added ribs and tasso (southern Louisiana spiced smoked pork) in place of jamón Serrano.

I didn’t have washing to do the day I made the beans. I did get distracted, though, and let them cook longer than I intended. Some of them turned pulpy. This means the beans’ texture was a lot like Popeye’s red beans. This is not a problem, because Popeye’s red beans are mighty good.

There’s no point in making a small amount of red beans and rice. I gave some to our neighbors across the street, as you do down this way, and my boyfriend and I still had red beans for days. Turns out every day is a good day when every day feels like a New Orleans Monday.

Adapted from The Basque Book by Alexandra Raij, Eder Montero and Rebecca Flint Marx

In this recipe, you want dried chiles that aren’t too hot. Guajillos or New Mexican chiles would be ideal. If you want to un-Louisiana the dish, you could substitute prosciutto for the tasso and chorizo and/or blood sausage for the boudin and smoked pork sausage. I think you get the idea—there are lots of ways to play with this recipe.

Cajun-Basque Red Beans

Serve 6–8
Adapted from The Basque Book by Alexandra Raij, Eder Montero and Rebecca Flint Marx

• 1 pound dried red beans

• 1 large onion, unpeeled, ends cut off

• 1 leek, white and green parts only

• 1 carrot, peeled

• 1 head of garlic, unpeeled, top cut off

• 1 bay leaf

• 3 sprigs of thyme

• 2 dried chiles, stems and seeds removed

• 1 small head green cabbage, cut in half through the stem

• 2 ounces tasso

• 2 pounds pork ribs, in one piece (baby back is ideal)

• kosher salt

• 1-2 boudin links

• 1-2 smoked pork sausage links

• ¼ cup extra-virgin olive oil

• 6 cloves garlic, sliced very thin

• jar of small, thin pickled green peppers (like pepperoncini)

• Cooked long-grain rice, for serving

1. In a large stockpot, combine the beans, onion, leek, carrot, garlic, bay leaf, thyme, dried chiles, half the cabbage, tasso, ribs, and a couple tablespoons salt. Cover with about 6 inches of water and bring to a boil. Reduce to a simmer and cook for about an hour and a half. Add the boudin and smoked sausage and cook for 20 minutes. Remove the ribs, boudin, and smoked sausage and let cool. Then cut the ribs, boudin, and sausages into 6 to 8 pieces each.

2. Continue cooking the beans until they’re tender. This could take another hour and a half or so.

3. Meanwhile, bring a medium saucepan of salted water to a boil. Cut the remaining cabbage into thin strips and boil until the strips are tender, about 6 minutes. Drain well and transfer to a plate.

4. When the beans are tender, remove the garlic, cabbage, tasso, leek, thyme sprigs, bay leaf, and any large chile pieces. Remove the onion and carrot, peel the onion and add the peeled onion and carrot to a blender. Add about a cup of the beans and bean broth to the blender and blend until smooth. Return the pureed beans to the pot. Cook for another 10 minutes to allow the puree to meld with the other beans. Taste and season with salt.

5. In a small saucepan, add the oil and garlic and warm over medium-low heat until the garlic turns just golden. Add half the garlic and oil to the beans and pour the rest over the cabbage.

6. Serve the beans with the reserved meat, pickled peppers, and cabbage. You can reheat the meat in a 300℉ oven for 10 minutes or so. Serve with rice.

The Best Californian Food I Ever Ate Was Indian | RECIPE

This story originally appeared on TASTE.

I’m a child of California. I love a salad. I love avocado toast. I love a carne asada taco served on a double layer of warm corn tortillas. From a restaurant, from a truck. It does not matter. I also love all the ways in which the iconic restaurants of northern and southern California—the Chez Panisses and Zuni Cafés of the San Francisco Bay Area, the Lucques and Spagos of Los Angeles—have put the state’s unique and vast bounty to use in dishes inspired by the traditions of France and Italy.

But none of those celebrated temples of high gastronomy have changed my understanding of the transformative power of freshness, that linchpin of California cooking, like the cooking of Niloufer Ichaporia King has. It first happened at a meal offered once a year at that keystone of California cuisine Chez Panisse. Later, King’s book, My Bombay Kitchen, would become a kind of rulebook in my own kitchen.

When I lived in San Francisco, the region’s savviest cooks, food writers, and diners stammered, with stars flickering in their eyes, anytime King was discussed. Every year for Nowruz, the Persian New Year celebrated on the spring equinox, King would take over the kitchen at Chez Panisse for one night. The meal was a set menu. A not-cheap one. I went.

This was in the late 2000s. Probably 2007. I don’t remember the exact dishes I ate. I was no doubt hungover before the meal. And after. (That’s just how that period in my life was.) But that one dinner shifted my thinking—and my cooking. Her food slapped me awake. I had eaten a lot of Indian food in restaurants in the U.S. Some dosas and uttapam at south Indian restaurants, a whole lot of chicken tikka masala, stewed okra and naan at north Indian spots. King’s food was a swerve. The ginger, the garlic, the cilantro, the lime, the heady spices: all there. Her cooking tasted like that other food’s snappy cousin. Same bloodline but with a clean shave, a pressed shirt, and handsome shoes.

I ate King’s Nowruz dinner at Chez Panisse again the following year, and around that time her cookbook was published. It captures everything about why her food is so singular, so influential on my own cooking.

The sharp pop of fresh ginger and lime in a cucumber salad. Fish fillets slapped with a coconut-herb chutney and steamed in banana leaves. A sweet and fiery tomato chutney.

Me, cooking it up. 📷: Denny Culbert

King’s lineage comprises Parsi, emigrants to India who left Persia centuries ago because of religious persecution. Parsi food exists at the intersection of Iranian and Indian. It’s a cuisine that’s lavish and humble, delicate and forceful.

It’s also a food culture obsessed with eggs. And potato chips—or as Parsis call them, wafers. If you love two foods that much, why not combine them? The Parsis have, with particular joy. They call it wafer par ida. Sounds like a joke. It isn’t.

You cook onions and fresh chiles and then add cilantro. You could add chopped ginger and garlic, too. You don’t have to. But you should. Then you destroy a few handfuls of potato chips with your fists and toss them in. Crack eggs into the pan and cook until the eggs are set. That’s it. Part of the allure of this recipe is its ease. Better still, the recipe harnesses the ability of fresh ginger, garlic, chile, and cilantro to transfigure a dish that could be satisfying but also one-dimensional into something truly transcendental.

Yes, you want this for a stabilizing meal the morning after a debaucherous night—which is most nights in New Orleans, where I live. Yes, you want this if/when you are stoned. Yes, you want this pretty much anytime.

Or I certainly do, at least. Because it reminds me of the power of one meal to steer a lifetime.

Parsi Eggs With Potato Chips
Adapted from Niloufer Ichaporia King’s My Bombay Kitchen

The ginger and garlic aren’t required—I didn’t use them the last time I made this, which is the dish you see in the photo. It’s a good—make that great—idea to add them, though. Still, neither you nor the dish will suffer if you omit them. Also, be sure to use a newly opened bag of chips. For that fresh chip flavor and crunch, of course.

INGREDIENTS
A tablespoon or two of butter or vegetable oil—or a mix of the two
1 small onion, chopped
2-3 hot fresh chiles, finely chopped
1 small garlic clove, grated
¼-inch piece ginger, peeled and grated or finely chopped (optional)
About ½ cup coarsely chopped cilantro
1 cup of plain potato chips
4 eggs

DIRECTIONS
1. Warm the oil over medium heat in a large skillet. When hot, add the onion and cook, stirring occasionally, until it softens but hasn’t browned.

2. Add the chiles, garlic, and ginger (if using). Cook until fragrant, just a minute or so. Add most of the cilantro (reserving some for garnish) and the potato chips and stir gently, making sure not to crush the chips.

3. Now make four holes in the chip mixture. Crack an egg into each of the holes. Dribble a tablespoon or so of water around the edge of the skillet and cover with a lid. Cook until the eggs’ whites are set, 2-3 minutes. Garnish with the remaining cilantro and serve immediately.