Mushroom Crab Imperial

We had the fun of making dinner for some winemaker friends from Italy who were in town this week. Like the other Italian friends for whom we cooked last year, they requested an American meal. As we planned the menu, Tom suggested starting with Mushroom Crab Imperial, a traditional Maryland dish he often enjoyed in his long-ago graduate-school days in Baltimore.

My cookbooks produced several recipes for crab imperial, fairly different from each other, and none using mushrooms. So Tom took the lead in choosing and making a version like those he remembered. The nearest recipe was in a little promotional book called Maryland Seafood, which we’d acquired on one of our visits to Baltimore, so he used that as a base.

Happy to be the assistant this time, I picked over a pound of back fin crabmeat to discard any bits of cartilage, and then watched Tom work. Early in the afternoon, he sautéed a batch of sliced mushrooms in butter. Then he made a roux of butter and flour in another sauté pan, stirred in a cup of half-and-half (for a richer dish than the milk that other recipes called for) and cooked until the sauce thickened – just a few minutes. He folded in the crabmeat, mushrooms, salt, and paprika, warmed everything together for a few minutes to let the flavors blend, and then scooped the mixture into individual gratin dishes and tucked them into the refrigerator.

In the evening, we baked them in a moderate oven for 20 minutes and served them. (We should have given them a dusting of paprika, but we forgot.)

Our Italian friends were intrigued by the dish. American blue-claw crabs are different from the kind of crabs found in Italy: smaller, sweeter, richer. Though the portions were small, they were delicious and very filling. With them Tom served Marisa Cuomo’s Ravello, a lovely white wine from the Amalfi Coast.

The rest of the dinner had been mine to make. I roasted a plump eight-pound capon with a simple stuffing made of onions softened in a lot of butter, a little crumbled sausage meat, and bread. (No recipe for the stuffing – it’s the way my mother always made it, except that I used homemade whole wheat bread.) Tom made the pan gravy for me, which he enriched with morel mushrooms.

Alongside, I served green beans boiled and tossed with an olive oil-mustard-parsley dressing (like the one I’d found in the asparagus recipe that I wrote about here) and duchess potatoes – i.e., mashed with milk, butter, egg yolks and grated parmigiano, and finished in the oven.

Despite the little Italianate touches on the vegetables, this made for a classic American dinner plate, and with it Tom served a classic American wine: 2005 Ridge Geyserville, a zinfandel blend which we consider the very best of its type. Ridge’s Zins are not fruit bombs (the prevailing California style and one that would have fought with the gentle flavors of the capon). Ridge makes Zinfandel in an elegant, clarety style that very graciously accompanied the capon and morels.

After that, we set out a course of American artisan cheeses: a blue from Georgia and three New England specimens in a range of styles – one firm and tart, another soft and buttery, and the third a very French-ish goat.

For dessert, another American classic: the luscious strawberry shortcake that I wrote about here.

We ended very italiano, with espresso and grappa – plus a little taste of a tequila reposada, for a final American touch.

An Indian Feast

Just before we left on our Texas birding trip, Tom and I did another of what we call our cookathons with our friend Hope. These involve many advance days of ethnicity decision, recipe selection, shopping list creation, and ingredient purchasing. On the day itself, Hope arrives at 3 p.m. and we all start cooking. With luck, we manage to sit to dinner around 7, fairly well exhausted from the kitchen work but anticipating a splendid meal.

India was our selected cuisine this time, and the recipes came from three cookbooks: Vineet Bhatia’s Rasoi: New Indian Kitchen, Julie Sahni’s Classic Indian Cooking, and the same author’s Classic Indian Vegetarian and Grain Cooking.

.

Here’s the menu we chose.

Crispy Prawns with Red Onion, Cumin, and Turmeric Khichdi
Masala Crab Cakes
Goat Curry
Vegetables Braised in Yogurt and Spices, Patna Style
Pink Lentils with Garlic Butter
Cucumber and Yogurt Salad
Basmati Rice

Shrimps, crab, goat, veg: That didn’t sound too complex. But we sort of forgot how very labor-intensive Indian food is to prepare. From 3 to 5 pm, with only a little time out for a glass of prosecco, the three of us did nothing but chop and grind things. The kitchen counters were totally covered with little dishes of red and white onions, garlic, ginger, green chilies, coriander seeds and leaves, curry leaves, cumin seeds both plain and toasted, and measured amounts of other spices. Only after two hours of that could we start actually cooking.

I won’t give you the play-by-play, because it got very complicated – starting one dish, moving to another while the first simmered, on to a third, back to the first, and so on: Tinker to Evers to Chance for another two hours and more. (Also washing pots and bowls as needed to reuse them.) I’ll just tell you about the principal dishes as we – ultimately – ate them.

.

Crispy Prawns with Red Onion, Cumin, and Turmeric Khichdi

This, from the Rasoi cookbook, was a lovely shrimp preparation, unlike anything Indian I’d ever had before. Because of the amount of work it took, there’s no question this is really a restaurant dish, but we all loved it. The shrimp are dipped in a batter of egg, cornstarch, chopped coriander leaf, and cayenne, and then deep-fried. They’re placed on a cushion of khichdi, which is made as follows.

Heat oil and butter in a pan, sauté cumin seeds, garlic, ginger, chili, and red onion. Add turmeric and basmati rice. In a minute, add vegetable stock and cook until the rice is almost done. Finish with yogurt, butter, salt, and chopped coriander leaf.

We set ring molds on three plates and spooned the khichdi into them. To our pleased surprise, when we removed the rings the rice stayed in neat little cylinders. We topped them with the fried shrimp, added a pool of green coriander chutney (it was supposed to be piped in a decorative ring around the plate, but hey!) and sat to our first food of the evening. It was well worth the wait. The combination of flavors was astonishingly good. And rich. The khichdi was particularly luscious. I think I’ll make that again to serve just on its own.

.

Masala Crab Cakes

The crab cakes, also from Rasoi, were also lovely. To assemble them we had to sauté black mustard seeds in oil, add chopped curry leaves and chopped onion; sauté some more; add chopped garlic, ginger, and green chilies; sauté some more; stir in a paste of cayenne, turmeric, and water; add crab meat and sauté some more; stir in grated parboiled potato, and season with chaat masala.

All that could be done a little while in advance. When ready to serve, we had only (!) to form the mixture into cakes, dip them in egg, coat them with breadcrumbs, and deep-fry them. The mixture was very soft, and we wondered if the cakes would just fall apart in the deep fryer. But no, they behaved very well, coming out as crisp, golden brown 3½-inch balls.

We’d made two cakes apiece, because the recipe seemed to call for so little crab – less than 1½ ounces per cake. But they so were rich and crabby that, knowing how much food there was still to come, we ate only one apiece. We served three chutneys on the side: tamarind, hot mango, and papaya-orange. Store-bought, not fresh made: we had to cut ourselves some slack. All the chutneys went well with the cakes. (The other cakes, reheated, were fine the next day.)

The chaat masala flavoring was new to me, and a welcome discovery. It’s an intriguing mixture of black salt, green-mango powder, cumin, mint, asafoetida, cayenne, nutmeg, black pepper, and regular salt. It’s used in many dishes, and I understand it’s also good just sprinkled on apple slices. I’m going to try that soon.

.

Goat Curry

Ghosht Kari, a recipe from Sahni’s Classic Indian Cooking, is an old standby of mine. I’d only ever made it with lamb before, though in India, goat is the meat of choice for this dish. We first browned pieces of goat in oil, removed them and browned onions in the same pan; added garlic and ginger; then cumin, coriander, turmeric, and cayenne; returned the meat to the pan and added a puree of yogurt, tomatoes, garlic, and ginger; added hot water, covered the pan and let it all simmer together, adding chunked potatoes partway through the cooking.

While the lamb version of this curry was always done in two hours, we had to cook the goat quite a lot longer before it got tender. Then the dish needed to rest for a few hours before being reheated and served, sprinkled with ground roasted cumin seeds and chopped coriander leaves.

It was a little disappointing – possibly because the first two dishes were so spectacular, and possibly because we’d made a marketing error here and not gotten the goat from our ever-reliable butcher Ottomanelli’s: It had too much bone and too little flavor. The dish was nice enough, but not as spicy-hot as it had been in the past. We relied on the various chutneys to make it more interesting.

.

Vegetables Braised in Yogurt and Spices, Patna Style

We were trying Patna Korma, a recipe from Sahni’s vegetarian and grain cookbook, for the first time. The vegetables are eggplant, zucchini, carrots, and green beans. The braising medium is yogurt, tomato puree, ground almonds, fried onions, cumin, coriander, turmeric, cayenne, and black pepper. When the dish is done, it’s sprinkled with garam masala and chopped coriander leaf.

The recipe was supposed to develop a “delicate velvety” sauce, with a “complex but subtle” spicing. Alas, it came out tasting much like the sauce of the goat curry, along with which we served the vegetables, and therefore not the interesting contrast we had hoped for. Also, the instructions for cutting up the vegetables didn’t work. The carrot pieces were too thick to soften even after extra cooking time, while the eggplant and zucchini pieces were ready to fall apart before then. The green beans were the best part of the dish.

.

Side dishes: Rice, Dal, and Raita

Alongside the curry and vegetables, we had plain boiled basmati rice, a dal of pink lentils dressed with melted butter and sliced garlic, and a raita of Greek yogurt with slivers of cucumber and tomato.

The latter two are dishes I almost always serve in an Indian meal, but they didn’t contribute much this time. My lentils, which had been sitting in the pantry for some time, must’ve been too old, because they had little flavor, and neither of the two main dishes was so spicy-hot for us to need the usually welcome coolness provided by raita.

However, I learned a great way to handle basmati rice. Indian cookbooks always call for elaborate preparation of this prized rice from the foothills of the Himalayas. Typically you’re told to rinse it in water nine times, soak and drain it, parboil and drain it again, finally steam it carefully over very low heat. Happily, Hope told us that she always cooks basmati as if it were pasta – just dumps the dry rice into boiling water and cooks until it’s al dente. So we did that, and it was perfectly fine.

With this whole meal, we drank Trimbach Gewürztraminer, a wine whose own spicy flavor stands up well to the multiple flavors of Indian dishes. And afterwards, we tamped everything down with – surprise! – a grappa.

Texas Vacation

I’m away from my kitchen and cookbooks this week and next. Tom and I are on a birding trip to Big Bend and the Texas hill country. We take these trips with Victor Emanuel Nature Tours, whose leaders are as good at finding interesting places to eat as they are at finding interesting birds. So we expect to eat well in the west.

There’ll be a lot of barbecue, no doubt. This photo from the American Cooking: The Great West volume of the Time-Life Foods of the World series shows sausage, spareribs, beef brisket, chicken, and beans from a Texas barbecue pit, and we’re likely to have all of those at various times.

Probably not many green vegetables, judging from my past experience of the region’s food, but I can make up for that when we get home. So here’s to a spate of healthy exercise, hearty eating, and no dishes to wash!

Medieval Dining II: Salmon Pie

All right – so I’m never going to be the greatest cook of the 14th century. I got an inkling of that last week, when I experimented with a medieval recipe for pottage. And I’ve now conclusively proved it, since I’ve made a more elaborate medieval dish. I think I’ll stick to reading about gastronomy in the Middle Ages, not trying to practice it.

For this second attempt at medieval cooking, I chose a dish called Salmon Pie with Sweetmeats, from Hannele Klemettilä’s The Medieval Kitchen: A Social History with Recipes.

Though it covers much the same time period as Peter Brears’ Cooking & Dining in Medieval England, the other new food history I used for last week’s recipe, it’s a very different book.

The Brears book is structured around the physical arrangements for preparing, serving, and consuming food. Klemettilä, a Finnish cultural historian, structures hers around types of edibles (chapters on breads, vegetables, meat, seafood, sauces, etc.) and the ways nobles, peasants, and the middle classes ate them on feast days, fast days, and ordinary days. Also, where Brears considers only England, Klemettilä also covers France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Scandinavia. The books provide two interestingly different perspectives on 14th- and 15th-century foodways.

The salmon pie I chose to make has all the exuberant array of ingredients that were common among medieval dishes served at the tables of the rich, perhaps on one of the many meatless days. It contains figs, currants, and dates; cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, ginger, saffron, salt, and pepper; pine nuts and almond milk. Not the kind of things we think of nowadays as accompaniments to fish!

I approached the recipe with cautious enthusiasm. The first steps were to make up a short-crust pastry dough and some almond milk. I used a modern recipe for the dough (which the author allows). For the “milk” I boiled ground almonds, water, sugar, and salt; then strained the liquid. Next, I cut dried figs in small pieces, cooked them in white wine until soft, and pureed them. I sliced a nice filet of salmon into strips, cut dates into small pieces, and cooked those two items together in white wine for five minutes.

When the fig puree was cool, I added all the spices to it, along with enough of the strained wine broth from the salmon to make a spreadable consistency. Now I was ready to assemble the pie.

I lined a pie dish with half the dough, spread the spicy fig puree over it, sprinkled on the pine nuts, and spread the drained salmon-date mixture over that. After adding a top crust I brushed it with the almond milk in which I’d dissolved a little more saffron. That turned the crust a brilliant golden yellow.

Baking enriched the golden color and brought up an unusual but savory aroma. I took the pie to the table and cut two plump slices. With some trepidation, we took forkfuls.

It was a one-bite lesson in how our culture shapes our lives. It tasted bizarre: an unsettling clash of flavors. The crust was good – tender and enriched by the almonds and saffron. The fig layer was good – spicy, mildly fruit-sweet, and pleasant in combination with the pine nuts and the crust. But the nice, fresh, succulent-looking salmon that went into the pie tasted just wrong! Against the other flavors it seemed positively unwholesome: fishily tart, fishily sweet.

Tom’s judgment on the pie was Disgusting! Though he’s always claimed his Jesuit education made him one of the finest minds of the Middle Ages, it apparently didn’t equip him with the commensurate palate. He took about two bites and then just nibbled at the edges of the crust. As the person responsible for this whole undertaking, I doggedly finished my whole slice, trying to accustom myself to the unfamiliar flavors. I couldn’t do it: It remained bizarre, strange and exotic in an unattractive way.

I hate to waste food, but the rest of that pie was not eaten.

*

For anyone who might be interested, here’s the book’s reproduction of the original recipe, from Harleian MS 4016.

Tart de ffruyte. Take figges, and seth hem in wyne, and grinde hem smale. And take hem uppe into a vessell; And take pouder peper, Canell, Clowes, Maces, pouder ginger, pynes, grete reysouns of couraunce, saffron, and salte, and cast thereto; and ϸen make faire lowe coffyns, and couche ϸis stuff there-in, and plone pynes aboue; and kut dates and fresh salmon in faire peces, or elles fressh eles, and parboyle hem a littell in wyne, and couche thereon; And couche the coffyns faire with ϸe same paaste, and endore the coffyn withoute with saffron & almond mylke; and set hem in ϸe oven and lete bake.

Maybe it tasted better in Middle English, served prettily to Chaucer’s high-toned Prioress, while the Miller and the Monk guzzled ale.

Medieval Dining I: A Mess of Pottage

I recently bought two books on food history: Peter Brears’ Cooking & Dining in Medieval England and Hannele Klemettilä’s The Medieval Kitchen. Both are filled with fascinating information, illustrated with woodcuts, paintings, kitchen floor plans, menus, provender lists – and recipes, mostly from 14th- and 15th-century manuscripts, updated for modern cooks. Naturally, I had to try a few of those, even though I know that intellectual curiosity and palatal satisfaction don’t necessarily coincide.

For my first foray into the Middle Ages, I chose a pottage recipe from Brears’ book. An expert on both medieval history and medieval cookery, the man is clearly a pottage enthusiast. He calls it “one of the most interesting and varied forms of medieval English food.” Now, to the extent that I’d had any notion of what pottage was, I imagined it to be something like porridge – a sort of cereal mush. Wrong! Brears gives over 100 recipes for pottages, which can be based on meats, poultry, fish, dairy products, nuts, vegetables, or fruits, as well as cereals.

The nearest general term for those dishes today might be stew. The common factor is a liquid medium, usually broth or wine, with the main ingredients chopped small and often the addition of a thickening substance, such as oatmeal or breadcrumbs. A great variety of herbs and spices also appear in the recipes, many in combinations that are strange to the modern palate. That in fact was the most intriguing aspect of these dishes: how would those odd combinations actually taste?

The recipe I made, Mutton Hashed in Onion, Herb and Spiced Stock, is one of the simplest. The main reason I chose it is that it starts with lamb that has previously been roasted, and I had plenty of leftover lamb from my Easter dinner. The meat had to be chopped very fine (I used the food processor) and put into a pot with finely chopped onions, red wine, wine vinegar, salt, pepper, cinnamon, and saffron. A mere ten minutes of simmering, and it was ready to serve.

.

Brears writes a lot about exactly how food was served in medieval times. Pottages were brought to the table in large bowls, containing a spoon for each diner. He gives a drawing of one. The pottage was eaten directly from the common bowl. That’s why you see two spoons in the mess of pottage I made for Tom and me.

.

“A mess of pottage” is now a derogatory term, derived from the Old Testament story of how Esau sold his birthright for what English translators and commentators called a mess of pottage. (Evidently it was actually a lentil stew; see Genesis 25:30.) I’d always thought the negative connotation of that phrase came largely from the word “mess,” suggesting a sloppy heap of ill-mixed ingredients. Wrong again! Brears explains that, in medieval times, a “mess” was a group of people who regularly ate their meals together and were served with certain dishes to share. A mess of pottage was the quantity necessary to feed the group. (That sense of the term survives today in the military, where soldiers eat in messes, in company with their messmates.)

You may notice I haven’t rushed into saying how my pottage tasted. I cannot tell a lie: not great. It wasn’t awful. It was just moist, crumbled lamb with a mild, vaguely mideastern-tasting seasoning – probably the cinnamon and saffron speaking. Tom pronounced it boring, and I had to agree. We ate some of it, and I packed away the rest, thinking I may eventually try giving it some zip and using it in empanadas or calzones.

So, my first attempt at medieval cookery was not what one might call an outstanding success. You might say the mess was the message. Next week I’ll tell you about my second attempt.

Easter Timballo of Spring Vegetables

It still isn’t often looking or feeling like spring outdoors, but I’m doing my best to create spring in my kitchen. The menu for my Easter dinner party was a perfect opportunity for seasonal dishes, so in addition to creamy asparagus soup, roasted leg of lamb, and strawberries with panna cotta, I made a timballo of spring vegetables for an intermediate course.

This savory recipe is from my book The Seasons of the Italian Kitchen, and it’s quite an elaborate production, with layers of crespelle separated by an assortment of fillings. Crespelle are eggier than their French cousins, crèpes. I find them a little easier to make, and since in the timballo all but the topmost crespella get completely covered by the filling, it’s no problem if they come out of the pan a little blotchy!

I made ten of these almost a week in advance and put them into the freezer.

The vegetable fillings are spinach and artichoke hearts – preferably starting with fresh, raw local produce, but good luck with that in the last week of March here in New York. My recipe says it’s OK to use good frozen vegetables, and given all the other cooking involved in the Easter dinner, that’s what I did this time. After defrosting, the spinach is lightly sauteed in butter and the artichoke hearts sliced thin and lightly sauteed in olive oil.

There are two other fillings: one of cooked ground beef and minced chicken livers and the other mozzarella. You also need a couple of eggs beaten with milk and some grated parmigiano. Once you have all these assembled the fun begins. In a large buttered cylindrical mold, you layer in:

• Crespella #1, one-third of the meats, a little egg-milk mixture, parmigiano, and salt
• Crespella #2, half the spinach, egg-milk, parmigiano, salt
• Crespella #3, half the artichokes, egg-milk, parmigiano, salt
• Crespella #4, half the mozzarella, egg-milk, parmigiano, salt
• Crespella #5, another third of the meats, egg-milk, parmigiano, salt
• Crespella #6, the rest of the spinach, egg-milk, parmigiano, salt
• Crespella #7, the rest of the artichokes, egg-milk, parmigiano, salt
• Crespella #8, the rest of the mozzarella, egg-milk, parmigiano, salt
• Crespella #9, the rest of the meats, egg-milk, parmigiano, salt
• Crespella #10, egg-milk and parmigiano.

The assembled dish can be set aside in a cool place for several hours. It’s then baked, uncovered, in a hot oven for half an hour and taken out to rest for 20 minutes more before serving.

Then comes the final step: unmolding the timballo. I always worry at this point, half expecting it either to refuse to come out of the dish at all, or to come out but with all the crespelle sliding off each other into a messy heap. So far that hasn’t happened to me, though. Here’s the solid unmolded timballo:

And here it is sliced open to show the layers.

We were eight people at the Easter dinner. Several guests said some version of “Oh, that’s going to be so rich – give me just a small piece.” But I thought trying to cut thin slices would be asking too much of the structural integrity of the timballo, so everyone got one hefty eighth of it.

It was good, as evidenced by the fact that all but one guest finished their entire portions. But I was a tad underwhelmed; it wasn’t as bright and lively I’d remembered. It may just have needed more salt and pepper to pep up the frozen veg. I think I’ve been a bit overcautious about salting lately, on the theory you can always add salt but you can never take it out – but that may have been wrong in this case. Or maybe I should have followed my own recommendation and taken the trouble to make it with fresh spinach and raw artichokes!

But it was an excellent Easter dinner, anyway.

Seethed Potatoes, Asparagus with Mustard . . . and a Trussing Needle

I’ve discovered two good, very simple things to do with vegetables for an everyday dinner. This is the time of year when I often get tired of the available vegetables, none of which has a truly fresh-off-the-farm look or flavor. I’d bought some fingerling potatoes and a bunch of asparagus, and I wanted do something a little more interesting than just boil them, but I still wanted them to taste like themselves, not like whatever condiments I might use. Hence, research in my vegetable cookbooks.

The Potatoes

In the Vegetables volume of the Time-Life Good Cook series I found a recipe called Seethed Potatoes. Billed as a “simple, but almost forgotten, traditional recipe” from a book published in 1916, here is its complete set of directions:

Put the potatoes in a cast-iron pot with a sprinkling of salt and very little water. A small piece of butter may also be added. Cook, uncovered, over low heat for 40 minutes, or until the potatoes are tender. No person who has not eaten potatoes thus prepared can conceive how delicious they are.

Intriguing! Though what I mainly couldn’t conceive was how potatoes could cook with almost no liquid, uncovered, that long, without burning them or ruining the pot. Still, I had to try it. Here are my potatoes ready to have the gas turned on:

The water in the pot disappeared within the first 10 minutes, and the butter shortly after. I was sure the potatoes would stick horribly, so I moved them around a few times during the cooking. They stayed rock-hard for the first 15 minutes, then gradually softened. Here they are at the end:

The potatoes were indeed delicious, especially the skins, since they benefited most from the salt. My mother’s ancient hammered cast aluminum Dutch oven (about as old as I am) didn’t mind that long dry cooking at all, and it cleaned up easily afterward. Now I’m eager to try the technique on freshly dug new potatoes when they appear in summer.

The Asparagus

My pound of asparagus looked as if it had done some hard traveling since it was picked in California’s Imperial Valley or Peru, so I really needed a recipe that would liven it up. I found one in the vegetable volume of an old Italian cookbook series that I like, I Jolly della Buona Cucina. I have 27 of these slim, spiral-bound paperbacks, covering every conceivable category of comestibles. I used to pick up a few on every trip to Rome many years ago, when they were sold on newsstands as well as bookshops. I doubt they’re still in print, but for me they remain a valuable source of traditional Italian recipes.

Asparagi alla senape is simply boiled asparagus with a zesty mustard-based dressing. To make it I mixed together three tablespoons of extra-virgin olive oil, half a teaspoon of Dijon mustard, salt, and a lot of chopped flat-leaf parsley. I poured that over the hot, cooked asparagus and let them sit for a few minutes before serving. (Italian has a grand word for this process of leaving flavors to combine: insaporire – to “insaporate” them.)

It was certainly easy, and quite nice. Though the dressing is close to vinaigrette, it didn’t have the same effect at all, because of the absence of acidity. The mustard wasn’t a strong flavor in itself, but just gave a smooth, pleasant liveliness to the asparagus. This too is a recipe I look forward to trying with really fresh local asparagus when its season rolls round.

. . . and a Trussing Needle

The meal for which I wanted these vegetable recipes also included a chicken, to be cooked whole on my countertop rotisserie. For all my cooking life I had been hopeless at trussing chickens, whether for oven roasting or rotisserie cooking. My many loops of string over breast, wings, and legs made the poor bird look like a victim in an old Hammer Studios horror flick or the star in a bondage porno.

The indented string marks were ugly on the cooked chicken too, but if I left it untied for the oven, it would splay out messily; and for the rotisserie the legs and wings absolutely had to be secured to the body. At last, not long ago – I have no idea why I delayed so long – I bought an eight-inch trussing needle and learned how to use it from the directions and pictures in Julia Child’s The Way to Cook. What a difference that has made!

Above is my spitted bird for this night’s dinner. See how plump and smooth it is? It’s completely trussed, its legs and wings incapable of movement, and yet no string is visible. When I oven-roast a chicken now, it holds together just as prettily, even when turned top to bottom or side to side. A trussing needle is a terrific little gadget. It has joined my list of favorite kitchen toys.