Dukkah

dukkah

From David Lebovitz’s My Paris Kitchen:

“Americans are known to the French for the frequency with which we utter the phrase ‘Oh my God!’ for anything we’re even remotely excited about. I never really thought about it until I moved abroad, but even if a French person speaks no more than ten words in English, three of them are invariably ‘Oh my God!’ with a pitch-perfect American accent, so there must be some truth to it. 

One thing I’ve never heard anyone say ‘Oh my God!’ about is cauliflower. . . .”

So reads the headnote to Lebovitz’s roasted cauliflower with dukkah and yes, I made it. When you find a motif, you have to run with it, however blah. Roasted cauliflower just keeps popping up.

I hoped last night’s dinner would yield some clarity about My Paris Kitchen -- intense love or solid indifference. It didn’t.

Lebovitz’s cauliflower involves chopping a cauliflower into small florets, roasting them, then topping with dukkah, a Middle Eastern nut and spice powder. I first read about dukkah in Laurie Colwin’s More Home Cooking and knew from her description that I would love it. I wanted to make it. I planned to make it. Twenty years later, I made it. 

Per Lebovitz’s recipe (which doesn’t differ much from Colwin’s), you roast hazelnuts (or almonds), pumpkin seeds, sesame seeds, cumin seeds, fennel seeds, coriander seeds, and black pepper.  Mix in some salt. Grind until you have a coarse powder. Done. 

Oh my God. I ate a spoonful of this fabulous mixture as I was cooking dinner, and then another spoonful and then I sprinkled some thickly on a piece of bread. Toasty, spicy, salty, crunchy, and superrich -- but in a sneaky way. The spices and crumbly texture somehow mask the the fact that it’s basically nut butter. When I sat down to dinner I had just eaten the equivalent of a small peanut butter sandwich plus a few spoonfuls of plain peanut butter. 

So I was not in a position to fully appreciate the meal. The cauliflower with dukkah was very tasty, but I didn’t have any appetite for it. I’d also made Lebovitz’s pork and chard sausages, a melange of chicken livers, ground pork, and greens that you bake in bacon-draped ovals, like serving-size meatloaves. I didn’t mention the liver part to my family and these were popular -- they tasted like cannelloni filling -- but I could only eat a few bites. In effect, I couldn’t eat a good dinner because one element was so ridiculously good that I stuffed myself before we even sat down. 

You’d think this would redound to Lebovitz’s credit, but does Lebovitz get credit for dukkah? Certainly he gets points for including something as delicious as dukkah in his grab-bag French cookbook and providing such a solid recipe. But he didn’t invent dukkah.  I have a dozen cookbooks with very similar dukkah recipes. 

On the other hand, Bar Tartine contains not a single recipe you’ll ever find anywhere else. Kefir ice cream floats? Carob semifreddo? Even seemingly familiar dishes like Liptauer cheese, beet salad, and lentil soup are full of twists. The book is blazingly original. And that presents its own set of problems.

Tomorrow.