Creamy Asparagus Soup Milanese Style

It’s high asparagus season here. My greenmarket is bristling with battalions of bright green spears. (Excuse the alliteration – I couldn’t resist it!)

Most of the time I’m happy with asparagus prepared very simply, but all this abundance set me thinking of other things to do with them. One that quickly came to mind was my own recipe for Creamy Asparagus Soup Milanese Style, from The Seasons of the Italian Kitchen. This is the richest, most velvety version of asparagus soup that I’ve ever encountered. It’s quite a bit of work, compared to some, but definitely rewarding.

As usual making a half recipe’s worth, I started by cleaning and cutting up a pound of asparagus: snipping off and reserving the tips, trimming just a little from the bases, and cutting the stalks into 2-inch pieces.

I mixed 2 cups of milk with 2 cups of all-purpose broth and brought it to a simmer. In a larger pot, I stirred flour and butter together for 2 minutes, then gradually added the milk-broth mixture, stirring vigorously to produce a smooth cream. The asparagus stalk pieces went in next.

This soup base simmered away, uncovered, for an hour, being stirred every 10 minutes to prevent sticking. Meanwhile, I cooked the asparagus tips in boiling water for 5 minutes, until tender, and made a cup of lightly toasted croutons from my own sandwich bread.

Next I pureed the soup base through a food mill. This is a fairly tedious process, but it’s the best way I know to extract all the goodness from the asparagus while leaving behind all the fibers.

The smooth soup went back into the pot to be brought back to a boil. Here I confess to a defect in my published recipe: At this point it should have said “taste for salt and add as needed,” but I somehow skipped that instruction. It definitely does need some salt.

Then came the payload: In a warm serving bowl, I whisked together 2 egg yolks, 2 tablespoons of softened butter, ¼ cup of heavy cream, and a tablespoon of grated parmigiano. I slowly poured in the soup, whisking constantly; floated the reserved asparagus tips on it (actually, most of them sank, so you can hardly see them in the picture); and served, passing the croutons at the table.

This is an extraordinarily luscious soup. “Heavenly” would not be too strong a word. You really need the croutons for textural contrast. The egg yolk and cream enrichment is generally a French technique, and indeed there’s a lot of French influence in Milanese cooking – but the effect of using broth and parmigiano (you could probably increase the quantity slightly if you wished) makes this a dish that clearly comes from Italy.

Leftovers, if there are any, are very good cold, too.

 

 

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Millecosedde

The blizzard that engulfed the East Coast a few days ago provided the perfect occasion for me to make millecosedde. This Calabrian “soup of a thousand things” is a classic down-home, depth-of-winter dish, just the kind of comforting food you want when all you can see out your windows is madly swirling snow.

I had on hand all the ingredients called for in my recipe from The Seasons of the Italian Kitchen – fortunately, since I had no intention of venturing out that day. Following my own headnote suggestion, I started by checking the odds and ends of dried beans in the pantry, aiming for color contrasts. The best candidates were Great Northern (white), Rio Zape (red pinto), and Casteluccio lentils (golden brown).

I’d put them on to soak the night before. (The lentils didn’t need it, but it didn’t hurt them.) In the morning I drained them and put them in a big pot with shredded Savoy cabbage; sliced carrots, celery, onions, and mushrooms; and Beloved Spouse’s best homemade broth. After they had simmered together for an hour and a half, I stirred in salt, pepper, and a healthy dose of olive oil, and cooked for another half hour.

The pot then sat on the back of the stove until dinner time approached. The beans had absorbed most of the liquid by then, so I had to add some water to loosen up the soup. Separately, I boiled a batch of ditalini pasta, added that to the soup pot too, and cooked it for five more minutes. Off heat, I stirred in another dose of olive oil – extravirgin, this time – let it sit for a final five minutes, and served, adding freshly ground pepper and grated pecorino cheese to each bowlful.

Wonderfully warming, hearty winter food. Let it snow! (And it sure did: more than two feet in Manhattan.)

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Three Roman Soups

As a title, “Soups Roman Style” doesn’t have quite the cachet of “Marriage Italian Style” and “Divorce Italian Style,” those two mordantly comic films of the ‘60s, but in fact the Roman style of cooking produces some very interesting soups. I’ve recently made three traditional ones from Popes, Peasants, and Shepherds, Oretta Zanini de Vita’s book of recipes and lore from Rome and Lazio.

All three soups draw an underlying flavor from similar base ingredients, starting with a battuto of pork fat, onion, celery, and parsley, chopped together.

In each case, after a scoop of battuto is rendered out in the bottom of the soup pot, a small amount of tomato ­– fresh, puree, or paste – is added and cooked briefly. The main liquid is vegetable broth or water. And each soup is finished with a generous dose of grated pecorino cheese, which Rome and points south use much more frequently than they do parmigiano. So much for the similarities: The other ingredients in each one made these soups quite different from one another.

 

Minestra di pasta e patate

Our household really likes a dish of pasta with potatoes. It’s a combination that Americans often think odd – starch and starch! – until they taste it. I’ve enjoyed versions from several regions in Italy and even published one of my own (in my dear departed mini e-cookbook Not the Same Old Spaghetti Sauce). This Roman version is another good one, and very easy to make.

I stirred quarter-inch cubes of russet potato into the battuto-tomato base, added broth and freshly ground pepper, and simmered until the potatoes were just tender. Then I stirred in a batch of mixed odd bits of soup pasta and continued cooking until they were done. Finally I stirred two tablespoons of grated pecorino right into the soup. Between the cheese and the rather salty broth (I had used vegetable bouillon cubes), no extra salt was needed.

This was a hearty, sturdy soup. More so than any other pasta with potatoes recipe I’ve tried, it had something ineffably Italian about it. I guess that’s the effect of the battuto. Everything blended into a comforting single flavor, given palatal interest by the different textures of potatoes and pasta. We enjoyed it very much.

 

Minestra di quadrucci e piselli

In this recipe, fresh peas take the place of the preceding recipe’s potato; small squares of egg noodles are used instead of dry pasta; and the liquid is water, not broth. This being November, I had to use defrosted peas, but they worked quite well. Again, I’d stirred about two tablespoons of pecorino into the soup pot before serving.

This was a much more delicate soup than the previous one, with the almost solo voice of the peas sustaining it. The pecorino wasn’t a strong presence in itself, but it nicely moderated the sweetness of the peas. It felt like a springtime soup – as of course it would have been, in Italy.

 

Minestra di riso e cicoria

Here the main ingredients are rice and chicory – curly endive. If that second recipe was a spring soup, this one is definitely fall or winter fare. There was no chicory in any of my local markets this week, but I was able to make it with its nearest relative in the endive family, escarole. The greens had to be boiled, drained, squeezed, and chopped before going into the soup pot for a few minutes’ sauteeing with the battuto and tomato. Then I stirred in the rice and broth and simmered until the rice was tender. This time, the grated pecorino wasn’t to be stirred into the soup as it finished cooking but rather sprinkled on the individual bowls.

This was a pleasant, mildly flavored soup (escarole being less bitter than chicory), but at the same time comforting and filling – good, hearty, chilly-weather food. The rice took up all the broth so quickly that I had to add quite a bit of water to keep the mixture from almost solidifying. I don’t know whether that might have been because I had on hand only American long-grain rice, not the short-grain riso comune, which Italy prefers for soup.

 

Final Thoughts

I also had to reduce the proportions of all the solid ingredients in all three recipes. An Italian minestra can be made to various degrees of thickness, from a truly soupy substance to what is almost a moistly sauced bowl of pasta or risotto. These recipes were heavily weighted toward the vegetables, pasta, rice, and pecorino. I was making half quantities of recipes indicated as serving four persons, and even with those reductions, my soups easily fed the two of us twice. It did make me wonder if the English translator, who claims to have made adjustments for an American readership, had ever actually made these dishes herself.

I may be becoming a crank on this subject, but too many recipes published today seem not to have had either proper editing or proper testing, making them recipes for failure. In the long run, that may make a lot of beginning cooks give up on the task of preparing their own food – and that’s a small but sad crime against humanity.

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Cockaleekie

Cooking chicken and leeks together in a dish makes both taste better than they do on their own. Evidently, it’s a real synergy: The combination creates umami, that mysterious fifth taste discernable to human palates. The chemistry of it seems complicated (ribonucleotides and glutamates) but the effect is simply to make certain ingredient pairings produce unexpected flavor.

That was definitely the case with the Cockaleekie I made this week. The recipe I used – from the Cooking of the British Isles volume of the Time-Life Foods of the World series – is just about the barest version there is of this old Scots soup. Just six components: chicken, leeks, barley, salt, parsley, and water.

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The full recipe (I was making half) called for a stewing fowl. What I had were very large chicken legs from my favorite poultry farm out on Long Island, and I knew such well-grown birds would yield plenty of developed flavor. I dropped the legs into a pot of cold water, brought it to a boil, and skimmed briefly; added the cut-up leeks, barley, and salt; and simmered until the chicken legs were almost ready to fall apart – about an hour and a half. On the face of it, this seemed to be the essence of all the old jokes about British cooking: Whatever it is, boil it to death. I took the legs out, let them cool somewhat, skinned and boned them, and cut the meat into shreds.

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Then all there was left to do was return the meat to the soup pot, heat everything through, and sprinkle on the parsley.

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I had worried more than a little that the soup might be too austere – as pale in flavor as in appearance. Some cockaleekie recipes buttress the broth with additional ingredients: celery, carrots, butter, thyme, bay leaf, chicken bouillon. A very traditional variation even includes prunes. But I meant this to be a test of the basic recipe, and to my delight this pure, minimal version passed with flying colors. It was subtly rich, warm and welcoming; the quintessence of chicken and leek. I’m not a food chemist, but I guess I achieved umami.

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Not-very Mexican Corn Soup

The new recipe I tried this week was irritatingly ill-written. With certain substantial changes, I felt it made a decent dish, though Beloved Spouse didn’t agree. But it might have been a complete washout.

My making it was occasioned by having a few extra ears of fresh corn in the refrigerator. I’m very fond of corn soup as it’s usually done in Mexican cuisine – with rajas of poblano peppers, sour cream, and queso fresco – but this day I wanted a version that would use ingredients I already had on hand. That included not just the corn, but the near-last of the season’s tasty small heirloom tomatoes.
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Searching on the Web, I was attracted to a recipe for Mexican Corn Soup, credited to the TV food network. Now, I don’t watch the food channel, so I’m not familiar with the quality of its recipes. On a casual reading, the recipe looked reasonable, so I copied it out and gave it a try.

Here’s the first problem I encountered. The ingredient list included 2 cups of chicken broth. The first paragraph of the instructions called for using 2 cups of broth. The third paragraph called for the “remaining” 2 cups of broth. 2 + 2 = 2? Well, I said to myself: just a typo. It must have meant 4 cups of broth.

The recipe also wanted me to scrape the kernels off raw ears of corn, using a small knife or spoon. I think doing it that way is absurd: It mashes the kernels into a squirty mess. My serrated bread knife cut them off easily and neatly. While the recipe expected a yield of 3 cups of kernels from 4 ears, my 3 large ears made 4 cups. No big problem there: I’d just up all the other quantities a little. (I did, but to keep this description simple I’ll write as if for the recipe’s quantities.)
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Then I was to put half the kernels in a blender, with 2 roughly chopped tomatoes, the first 2 cups of broth, and some oregano (not specified as the Mexican type, which is very different from Italian; I assumed Mexican oregano would be preferable, and so used that) and puree it all until smooth. Two problems there: (1) No normal-sized household blender will hold that amount of fluid food without spewing it all over the kitchen. Even my big food processor had to do it in batches. (2) 2 cups of corn, 2 chopped tomatoes, and 2 cups of broth don’t make a puree; they make a liquid.

My faith in this recipe was rapidly waning.

The next step was to cook 4 slices of thick-cut bacon “in a large saucepan, turning once, until brown and crisp, about 10 minutes.” I dutifully used a saucepan, though a skillet would have done it much more handily, and turning the bacon only once in all that time is just silly. When the bacon strips were done, I set them to drain on paper towels and softened chopped onion and garlic in the remaining bacon fat in the saucepan. Nothing wrong with that step, at least, though it took a lot of stirring to get the bacon residue off the bottom of the pan. Dicing the bacon before crisping would have been smarter, easier, and better for the subsequent soup.

Moving right along, the next direction called for adding the alleged corn-tomato puree to the saucepan, along with the problematic second 2 cups of broth. That much additional liquid would have thinned out the soup drastically, so I used no more broth. Then I had to bring the soup to a boil, stir in the remaining corn kernels, and simmer, stirring occasionally, “until thickened, about 20 minutes.” I was also to “remove any foam as it develops with a large flat metal spoon.”
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Foam did certainly develop, as can be seen above, but I didn’t skim it off because it was the kind that I knew would melt back into the soup during the cooking. It did. And the soup actually thickened in the specified time, which, given the recipe’s track record so far, surprised me.

Finally, I was to stir in salt, pepper, chopped parsley, and an optional ½ cup of heavy cream. I did add the pepper and parsley; held off on the salt because there’d be a garnish of salty cheese, as well as saltiness from the bacon; and skipped the cream. Since a taste had told me the soup was extremely sweet from the corn, more cream sweetness struck me as exactly the wrong sort of addition.

At serving time, an optional garnish was queso fresco, to be crumbled into the soup bowls along with the bacon. The Mexican cheese I had on hand was cotija, a stronger, dryer, saltier cheese, somewhat resembling ricotta salata, and like it an ideal texture for crumbling. I thought it would be an important counterpoint to the corn’s sweetness, and so it was.
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It was a strange-tasting soup. Didn’t seem very Mexican. There was a hint of something like cumin in the flavor, and I couldn’t think what was causing it. My broth was a homemade mélange of poultry, meat, bones, and vegetable trimmings, not pure chicken broth – but it had never made enough difference in other recipes to account for the oddity here. Beloved Spouse doused his portion with Cholula hot sauce to cut the extreme corn sweetness; I just heaped more crumbled cotija on mine.

I can say I mildly liked the dish, but I’m sure I’d have hated it if I’d blindly followed the recipe.

As for that fundamental 2 + 2 = 2 problem, I think the error was to put any broth in the blender at all. The only 2 cups should go into the saucepan at the end. Not that I think that would have altered the final flavor of the soup: Sweetness that intense comes from modern super-sweet corn, and there is nothing we can do about it.

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Maine Specialties I: Clam Chowder and Blueberry Grunt

You can find recipes in the most unexpected places. Having been summoned to jury duty recently, I loaded up my Kindle with mystery novels to distract me during the downtime that jury service usually involves. Sure enough, there were hours and hours with nothing to do but read. And read I did.

One of my e-books was Clammed Up, by Barbara Ross. It’s set in a seaside Maine town where the heroine’s family runs a summer clambake business – which is threatened by the murder of a prospective customer on the family’s island, where the clambakes are held. Recipes for the dishes served at the clambakes appear in a separate section at the end of the book, and several of them looked very good. So I copied down three of them in longhand (alas, you can’t print from a Kindle) and, when my jury service was over, I tried them out. This post is about the first two recipes I made.

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Snowdon Family Clam Chowder

I was immediately interested in the recipe for clam chowder. Because many of the New England chowders I’ve tasted have been excessively floury, I usually prefer red Manhattan-style chowder. But I once had a fabulous white clam chowder in a restaurant in Maine, which taught me that it can be a glorious dish. This recipe looked as if it might be like that one, because it was richer in clam flavors and had more cream than any other New England-style chowder recipes I’d ever tried.

The recipe called for a pint of shucked and chopped clams. Scorning the canned variety, I trotted out to my fish market and picked up two dozen good-sized cherrystones. I can open live clams when necessary, but these looked as if they’d be obstinate, so in the afternoon I set them up in a steamer, watched carefully, and as soon as each one opened its shell just a crack, took it out, opened it the rest of the way, and carefully saved its liquor.

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The clams were fresh and sweet-smelling, still effectively raw, and when Tom had chopped them for me, they made just the right amount. A good start.

The cooking began with the usual chowder technique: rendering chopped bacon, adding chopped onion, then cubed potatoes, then the clams’ own liquor, two bottles of clam juice, and thyme, and cooking until the potatoes were tender. As dinner time approached I heated equal parts of milk and half and half, and stirred that into the soup pot, along with the clams. But here’s when the recipe went astray: It had me keep the chowder simmering for another 10 minutes after that.

I’d never seen a recipe that kept chowder on the heat so long after adding the dairy products, but I thought maybe this was a tightly guarded Maine chowdermaker’s secret, so I did as directed. Bad idea. As I feared, they curdled. Tiny gobbets of white curds formed and floated all over the surface of the chowder, leaving the rest of the liquid thin and watery looking. Ugly.

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Despite the appearance, it didn’t taste too bad – at least, I didn’t think so, though the clams themselves had toughened more than they should have. Tom was more unhappy with the chowder, even saying he couldn’t taste much clam flavor. Whatever, it was not a success.

I wonder if there might have been a typo in my Kindle edition – saying 10 minutes at the end when it should have been 1 minute. But I’m not hopeful enough about that to try the recipe again.

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Snowdon Family Blueberry Grunt

This was a new dish for me: I’d never even heard of blueberry grunt before reading the book. (You’d think a blueberry grunt was the hired hand who gathered the berries, wouldn’t you?) This recipe is simple enough to make. Put blueberries, sugar, and a little water into a deep casserole; set in a 400° oven for 20 minutes. Mix up a sweet biscuit dough (flour, butter, sugar, baking powder, salt, milk). Take out the blueberries and drop on spoonfuls of the dough.

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My dough was too thick and sticky to drop in neat spoonfuls, but I managed to tease globs of it onto the berries. Back into the oven the dish went for another 20 minutes. I let it cool a little before serving, so we wouldn’t scald our tongues on boiling-hot blueberries.

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This was a very pleasant, homey dessert – good fresh biscuits floating in a rich, warm blueberry quasi-jam. It seems to be an unusual version because it’s oven-baked. When I’d gone online to learn a bit about grunts, all the recipes I found were to be cooked on top of the stove. That way, the dough dollops appear to stay soft and white, more like dumplings. Some sites claim that you can hear them emitting grunts as they rise: hence the name. I liked my browned, crunchy biscuits very much, but when I make the recipe again – and this one I will make again – I might try it once the other way, just for the sound effects.

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An Old-time Greenwich Village Dinner

The Greenwich Village Cookbook is a repository of local culinary and cultural history. Published in 1969, it has nearly 400 recipes from 75 restaurants and coffeehouses then active in the Village, with affectionate profiles of each. Most are long gone now, but several are still in business, though the recipes from those days reflect cooking styles of half a century ago. My friends Frank and Vickie gave me a copy of the book recently, and last weekend I made them a dinner from it.

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We started with The Coach House’s Black Bean Soup Madeira. Before it closed in 1993, the Coach House had been an immensely prestigious (also elegant and expensive) restaurant on Waverley Place for over 40 years, and black bean soup was one of its signature dishes.

This was one of the most time-consuming soups I’ve ever made. I started by cooking black beans in plain water for 1½ hours. At the end of that time, I added a sauté of chopped celery, onion, and parsley lightly thickened with flour; a whole smoked pork knuckle, a hillock of chopped leeks, a bay leaf, salt, and pepper. All that simmered together for 3 hours, after which I discarded the pork knuckle and bay leaf and pureed the soup. Next was to add Madeira (I didn’t happen to have any, so I used an oloroso sherry), reheat the soup, stir in chopped hard-boiled egg, and – finally – float a thin slice of lemon on top of each bowlful.

It was a terrific soup – subtly spicy, lush and filling.  It made very clear why the Coach House had stood so long as a bastion of fine American cooking.

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Our main course was Chicken al Charro. El Charro Español is one of the surviving restaurants from those days: It still serves traditional Spanish food in its modest basement premises on Charles Street. Tom and I used to eat there in the early ’70s, and I often ordered its chicken, so when I found the recipe in the cookbook I knew I had to try to reproduce it.

Unlike the soup, this was a fairly simple dish to make. I cut up a nice plump chicken, rubbed the pieces with a paste of crushed garlic, ground cumin, paprika, salt, and pepper, and dredged them with flour. I softened a sliced onion in olive oil, added the chicken pieces, browned them briskly, then lowered the heat, covered the pan, and let them cook until tender. Just before serving I sprinkled on some red wine and additional crushed garlic. That, along with the cooking juices in the pan, made a tiny sauce to moisten the chicken pieces.

This was a good, lively dish. It was important to have a really flavorful chicken; I think a bland supermarket bird would’ve been overwhelmed by the spicing. The final garlic addition was fairly pungent, but it was balanced by the other seasonings. My dish didn’t fully equal my recollection of the restaurant’s long-ago version – but the warm glow of memory and nostaglia has probably gilded that particular lily. I could check it out, though: Pollo al Charro is still on the menu.

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For a small fruit dessert, I chose Oranges à l’Arabe, attributed to Casey’s, a long-defunct down-home French-New Orleans-jazz restaurant on West 10th Street. There didn’t seem to be anything very Arabian about the recipe, but it sounded attractive. I peeled four oranges, made slivers of some of the peel, and cooked the slivers in sugar syrup for 30 minutes. When the syrup was cool I stirred in dry curaçao, poured it over the sliced oranges, and put the dish in the refrigerator until needed.

It was very simple and very refreshing – a pleasant finish for a pleasant meal in the style of the Greenwich Village of our youth.

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Four Days, Four Soups

This past week the onset of cool fall weather drove Tom to an extended frenzy of soup making. All I had to do was cheer him on and enjoy the results. He’s a talented soup maker, mostly in an improvisational style that he learned from his grandmother. (I once described his approach here.) This time he had some particular soups in mind, so he actually consulted cookbooks.

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Day 1: Potage Parmentier

This leek-and-potato classic is the very first recipe in Julia Child’s Mastering Volume 1. I remember being encouraged, all those years ago, that this then-somewhat daunting tome would begin so gently, with a dish using only four ingredients: leeks, potatoes, salt, and water. We’ve been making it ever since, in summer adding cream to turn it into vichyssoise. The leeks in our Greenmarket have finally gotten large enough to be worth cooking, and the local potatoes are coming along too. Voilà! Peel, wash, chop, and simmer, and you’ve got soup. It was excellent, as always.

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Day 2: Touring à la Tomate

Another favorite from long ago is this simple tomato soup recipe from Raymond Oliver’s La Cuisine. Tom began by sauteeing minced onions in lard. (Goose or duck fat is an alternative.) He then added peeled and chopped tomatoes – among the last of the season’s Cherokees – salt, pepper, and water. After simmering that for 10 minutes he put it all through a food mill and returned it to the pot. Just before dinner time he reheated it, added a batch of broken-up fine egg noodles, and cooked until they were tender.

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A very lively, fresh-tasting soup. We have no idea why it’s called touring. Possibly a variant on tourain? Larousse Gastronomique cites a tomato soup of that name from Perigord – hence the goose fat? Or a derivation from “tureen,” in which the soup used to be cooked? If anyone knows, please tell us!

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Day 3: Escarole and Rice Soup

As soon as Tom saw this recipe in Marcella Hazan’s original Classic Italian Cookbook, years ago, it went straight to his heart. He rapidly internalized it and never needs to consult the book any more, but we still tip our notional toques to Marcella whenever he makes the soup.

He sautées onions and escarole in butter and olive oil, adds his homemade broth and cooks until the escarole is tender, then adds short-grained Italian rice (regular long-grain rice is OK too). Sometimes he stirs in grated parmigiano at the end; this time he wanted more of the pure vegetable flavors, so he seasoned it only with salt and pepper. A warming, filling, homey soup.

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Day 4: Fish Soup

For this evening we wanted a fish dinner, so Tom decided to invent a fish soup to start the meal. In the morning we went to the seafood stand at our Greenmarket for a swordfish steak, and he also bought small pieces of scrod and monkfish. Back home, he took a weakfish frame out of the freezer (saved after filleting a whole fish some time back) and made it into a fish broth.

He exercised his legendary knife skills to chop onion, celery, green pepper, and tomato; then make small chunks of potato and the two fish. He softened the first three vegetables in olive oil; stirred in the tomato, potato, thyme, salt, pepper, and a bay leaf; poured in the strained fish stock and simmered it all lengthily. He used a lot of thyme, because the model he had loosely in mind was Manhattan clam chowder, so the spicy cooking smells were really tempting. Shortly before dinner time he reheated the soup, added the scrod and monkfish pieces, and simmered it all gently until the fish were done but not falling apart.

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It was very tasty: mild, but just spicy enough to be interesting, with a good fresh fish flavor; too light to really call a chowder, but more chunky than a typical soup. Very comforting on a prematurely chilly fall evening.

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It’s a great advantage to live with a man who likes to cook!

 

 

 

 

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Oyster Stew

I never used to care much for oyster stew. I thought the version that NYC’s Grand Central Oyster Bar served was probably best of breed, but even it I found bland and boring – little more than oysters swimming in a bowl of flour-thickened hot milk. But now I’m an enthusiast, thanks to a marvelous recipe for the dish that I’ve discovered in a new book.

The Plantation Cookbook was a gift from my friend Gene, a lifelong New Orleanian and very knowledgeable food lover. In addition to recipes and discussion of Louisiana cuisine, the book has profiles of more than two dozen historic plantation houses throughout the state, and stories about the lifestyles of the families who lived there.

I have to say the book gave me pause at first, because it’s attributed to the Junior League of New Orleans, and what little this northern city female knows of southern Junior Leagues doesn’t suggest that those good ladies spend much time laboring over the stove in their own kitchen. But whether the recipes are truly theirs or told to them by their cooks, there’s good stuff in this book. To wit, its oyster stew recipe. It has two features that I haven’t found together in any other recipe: exactly how the oysters are cooked, and the amount and kind of vegetable flavors that go into the liquid base of the stew.

To start, the recipe had me sauté a surprisingly large amount of chopped celery in butter, along with some scallions and parsley. A good aromatic start. The next step was to stir a little flour into the sauteed vegetables; and here I made a slight addition of my own. I let it cook for two minutes, to get rid of the taste of raw flour, before going on.

The oysters and their liquor then went into that sauce base, rather than the more typical approach of poaching them directly in the stew’s milk or cream. I was generous with the quantity of oysters, since Tom and I were having the stew as our main course. Instead of the indicated 6 oysters per portion, I used 20 for the two us (which was the number in one of the half pints of oysters that we buy, frozen, at the excellent fish store in Cape May, NJ, whenever we’re down there on birding trips).

As soon as the oysters were in, I took the whole pan off the heat and let it sit, covered – for 15 minutes, the recipe said, or longer if preparing the dish in advance. That’s all the cooking the oysters got, but the mingling of the flavors during that time must have improved the entire mixture. Here it is, starting its rest period.

Then at dinner time it was just to reheat the oysters, heat milk (I confess I happened to have half-and-half in the refrigerator, so I used that instead) – neither one ever to a boil – and combine them, seasoning with salt, pepper, and Tabasco.

The stew was really wonderful. The silky sauce embraced the oysters, and its subtle combination of flavors beautifully set off the tang of the shellfish. We were so impressed with that sauce that I’m going to adapt it for my next attempt at New England clam chowder. For years now I’ve been unsuccessfully trying to reproduce a splendid version of that dish we had once in a small restaurant in Maine. This might just do it. Ladies of the Junior League – and all your hard-working cooks – I thank you.

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Catracha Cuisine

Here’s the report I promised, last week, on what Tom and I ate on our trip to Honduras. It’s a little disappointing: the meals were abundant and edible, but not thrilling. Most were at the lodge where we stayed, and its restaurant was heavy on choices like Eggs Benedict, French Toast, Fettuccini Alfredo, Caesar Salad, Chicken Cordon Bleu, and Rack of Lamb. Moreover, too often the menu’s reach exceeded the chef’s grasp.

However, we did manage to get some reasonable Latin American dishes. There was this Catracho Breakfast: an omelette with onions, refried beans with cheese and sour cream, sautéed plantains, avocado, and warm tortillas. (Hondurans call themselves “Catrachos.”)

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Huevos Rancheros were attractive, but much too bland for our taste. Otherwise-good Fish Tacos could have used more zip, too. Guess the kitchen was afraid to frighten off the gringos.

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On the other hand, this Tortilla Soup was the best I’ve ever eaten. We both started several dinners with it. I couldn’t figure out what exactly was in it, but I’m going to have to try various recipes soon to see if I can recreate those flavors.

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Another extremely good starter, seemingly very simple, was a corn tamale that tasted mostly of sweet fresh corn. I ate it with such enthusiasm I completely forgot about taking a photo of it!

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The Fish of the Day was always good, once we could get the kitchen to just grill it, not serve it blackened, with garlic, or with basil. This one was a sea bass, we were told.

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I approached the Tequila Shrimp with some suspicion, but it was fine too. The shrimp were very fresh, and the sauce very good over rice, though I couldn’t really discern any tequila flavor in it.

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We had one lunch at a beachfront restaurant, where I had an excellent conch salad. You can’t see the conch very well, but there was a lot of it: tender and flavorful, with a light, creamy dressing. Tom’s lunch was a generous plate of grilled fish with a topping of sauteed onions and tomatoes, a mound of rice and black beans, and a raft of fried plantains. With that meal (and with many others, truth to tell) we drank Salva Vida, Honduras’s beer, an icy-cold bottle of which is truly a Life Saver in this tropical climate.

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The major gastronomical disappointment of the trip was the almost complete absence of mangoes. We had many fruit plates with papayas, pineapples, and bananas, all more richly flavorful than anything we get in in this country. All along the highways were huge, gorgeous trees just dripping with ripe mangoes; some of the trails we walked were littered with fallen fruits that the birds and other animals had enjoyed, but our lodge just didn’t serve them.

By special request, we did get a few tastes, but apparently Hondurans appreciate unripe mangoes – green mangoes, they proudly announced. We just don’t understand that particular preference. Ironically, the juiciest mango we had was in the tiny fruit plate served on the airplane on our way home.  Oh, well – the sidewalk fruit stands in our neighborhood all have mangoes now, so we won’t be totally bereft.

 

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