Santa's a funny guy

lumps of coal

How was your Christmas? Did you eat roast beef and yorkshire pudding? Did you go to mass? Did you go to the movies? Did Santa bring you pecan pie Pringles? Aren't they revolting?

Our Christmas was lovely. We saw every member of our extended family living within a 90 mile radius, ate crab, listened to carols, exchanged presents, and spent last night cleaning for the house sitter which always makes me want to cancel a vacation. Today we’re driving to Los Angeles. 

I received three cookbooks: Cowgirl Creamery Cooks, The Model Bakery Cookbook, and Kenvin: An Artist’s Kitchen. I look forward to exploring them when we return. 

But I can’t leave town before wrapping up Soups, which I started out dreading and ended up loving. Not so much the book itself, as the soup experience. Soup still lacks romance for me, but while I have always preferred steak and red wine, I find that I feel better on a diet of vegetarian soups and coconut water. What a shocker.

Let’s rewind: Last Friday, I made “boiled water” soup because it involved little money or time and no trip to the supermarket. Richard Olney excerpted the recipe from a 1977 book called Ma Cuisine Provencale by Josephine Besson and writes: “This Provencal infusion is said to have extraordinary virtues. Nothing can resist it: hangover, illness, childbirth -- there can be no convalescence without ‘boiled water.’” He also writes that it is “delicious and tangy.” I wondered how such a primitive soup could possibly be delicious.  How primitive is boiled water? This primitive:

Salt a quart of water to taste, drop in 15 cloves of garlic and boil for 10 minutes. Add a bay leaf, a sage leaf. and a tablespoon or so of olive oil. Boil 5 minutes more.  Cover the pot and let the water sit for 10 minutes. Pull out the leaves and garlic cloves. Put slices of crusty bread on the bottom of four bowls, top with shredded gruyere, pour the hot garlic water over the bread. (You can add more olive oil at this point, but I forgot.) Serve.

Owen thought it was “too garlicky” and Mark thought it was “too sharp.” Isabel and her friend Juliet decided to go to dinner at the Cheesecake Factory, so I don’t know what they thought of boiled water. Or maybe their decision to go the Cheesecake Factory is exactly what they thought of boiled water.

I loved it. I’d make this again in a second.

Saturday, I made carrot soup, the only other soup that didn’t require a trip to the supermarket. (Olney plucked this recipe out of Terence Conran and Maria Kroll’s Vegetable Book.) In the early afternoon I sauteed sliced carrots in butter with some finely chopped onion. Added water and a little rice and simmered until cooked. Turned off stove, put lid on pot, and Mark and I went to see Inside Llewyn Davis, which we did not enjoy. If you were spellbound by the music, Oscar Isaac’s performance, John Goodman, and the Coen Brothers’ dark genius, you are in good company. We can agree to disagree. 

Back home, I pureed the carrot soup with the stick blender, reheated, salted vigorously, served. It was so carroty it practically crunched. Sour cream did a lot to soften the raw rootiness and in the end I was happy with the soup, though I wouldn’t make it again. 

That’s it for Soups. The book is too full of unappealing, archaic recipes (brown rabbit soup, a cream of asparagus soup made with twenty tablespoons of butter) to recommend. But I’m glad I forced myself to cook five recipes from its pages. I would be a healthier, skinnier, happier person if I ate vegetable soup for dinner two or three nights a week. Maybe that will be a resolution.

Biscuit tortoni and runzas

If I don't convince you to make biscuit tortoni at your soonest possible convenience, I haven't done my job.

As you can see, biscuit tortoni is lovely looking. It's rich and clean-tasting, but also a little rummy. The texture is that of a firm ice cream. Amanda Hesser wrote about it beautifully a few years ago in the New York Times. In Classic Desserts Richard Olney states that the dish was invented in 1798 by a Neapolitan restaurateur in Paris named Tortoni. According to Caroline and Robin Weir, authors of a big, authoritative book on ice cream, this is incorrect. I read their minutely detailed and meandering two-page history of biscuit tortoni from which I gleaned this: Someone invented biscuit tortoni somewhere, probably at some point during the 19th century. It is likely called "biscuit" because it comes from a line of frozen desserts flavored with crumbled breads, cakes, and biscuits. The Weirs aren't really sure about why it's called "tortoni." The end.

There are lots of biscuit tortoni recipes out there. The Weir recipe calls for cream, maraschino, egg yolks, sugar, and kirsch. Into the custard you can crumble shortbread, graham crackers or almond macaroons. They write that the dessert has "the typical, rich, hedonistic flavour of the Victorian period."

Richard Olney plucked the recipe for Classic Desserts from American Cooking: The Melting Pot and it is very different from the one in the Weir book. It is fabulous and I like to think that it, too, has the rich, hedonistic flavour of the Victorian period.

BISCUIT TORTONI, adapted from Classic Desserts

1/4 cup dark rum

2 1/2 cups heavy cream, chilled

1 cup very dry almond macaroon crumbs (I used this recipe and then broke the cookies up with a rolling pin)

1/2 cup powdered sugar

salt

1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla

1/4 cup sliced toasted almonds OR more macaroon crumbs

6 candied cherries, optional (but pretty)

1. Put cupcake liners in a 12-cup muffin tin. In a bowl, stir together 1 1/4 cups heavy cream, the macaroon crumbs, sugar, and a pinch of salt. Chill for at least 30 minutes.

2. When the mixture is cold, beat the remaining 1 1/4 cups cream until it thickens and forms soft peaks. Gently fold it into the macaroon mixture.
3. Fill the paper liners with this mixture. Do it neatly. Sprinkle with a few almonds, wrap the whole pan tightly in plastic wrap and place in the freezer.  Freeze for a few hours, until completely firm.

4. When you serve them, put half of a cherry on each dessert. Makes 12.

And with the biscuit tortoni triumph, I'm done with my official five-recipe foray into Classic Desserts. It's a phenomenal book. The biscuit tortoni and the syllabub recipes -- jewels! The other three recipes I tried (tea cream, crepes suzette, butterscotch parfait) were all very good. You can buy a copy of Classic Desserts at evil amazon for one penny plus $3.99 shipping. Friends, this is a deal you should not pass up.

We're on to Soups now and I'm not too psyched.

On another subject, I made runzas (yeast dough, beef-spinach filling) using the recipe in the The New Midwestern Table.

They reminded me a little bit of piroshki and a little bit of Chinese barbecued pork buns and they were tasty, but breadier than Owen and I would have liked. Mark said they were "perfect." But I think I'll try making piroshki before revisiting runzas. 

Syllabub: definitely a classic

Until week before last I'd never experienced syllabub, the whipped concoction of cream, sugar, and alcohol that was popular in Britain during the 17th and 18th centuries. 

There are three syllabub recipes in Classic Desserts and, given that antique desserts with silly/poetic names have always appealed to me, I felt I had to make one. 

I chose the so-called everlasting syllabub, which Classic Desserts editor Richard Olney excerpted from one of Elizabeth David's books. It is wonderfully simple: In a bowl, combine the zest and juice of one lemon with 2 tablespoons brandy and 1/2 cup white wine. Infuse overnight. The next day, pluck out the lemon peel and beat the liquid with 1/4 cup sugar and 1 1/4 cups heavy cream until it forms soft, billowy peaks. Spoon into small glasses and grate a little nutmeg on top. 

I thought, here goes nothing. Another weird creamy dessert. But it was love at first bite. This syllabub was tart, sweet, light, airy, rich, boozy, all the flavors and elements in perfect balance. A recipe for the ages. Even Mark thought so. Make this. It may not be exactly to your taste, but I think you'll have to agree that there is something magical about it. 

I was so crazy about the Elizabeth David syllabub that the following day I made cider syllabub using a recipe from Anne Willan’s Cookbook Library. Willan’s recipe is older than Elizabeth David’s, dating back to 1660 when people still treated syllabub as a drink. Although I served the cider syllabub with a spoon, it was actually a beverage with a thick, foamy head. Or, as Willan puts it, “a feisty liquid topped by a creamy mousse.” I liked it almost as much as Elizabeth David's syllabub. Mark liked it better.

I wanted to know more about syllabub, so I looked it up in The Oxford Companion to Food:

It has often been said that the primitive method of making syllabub, ensuring a good foam, was to partly fill a jug with sweetened, spiced white wine or cider, and to milk a cow directly into it. When this technique was critically examined, and subjected to experiments, by Vicky Williams (1996), it was found to be unsatisfactory; and it began to seem doubtful whether it had ever been a common practice. Ivan Day (1996b) crowned the debate on this particular question by a historical and technical survey of the whole subject of syllabubs, now the locus classicus.

Locus classicus? Sheesh. So much for my American education.

The fact that there are people "critically examining" syllabub and "subjecting it to experiments" interests me more than syllabub itself. And I'm pretty interested in syllabub.

If you have 15 minutes to spare, there are worse ways to waste them than in reading Ivan Day's paper on syllabub. It's scholarly but funny. Day attempted milking a cow into his syllabub and reports: 

Unless your syllabub cow is extremely well-groomed, the congealing milk will also be garnished here and there with cow hairs and the odd speck of bovine dandruff, a most unappetising prospect, at least to our modern eyes. It is possible that a farmhand would have happily slaked his thirst with a rude refreshment of this kind, but surely not an aristocratic banqueteer expecting a “daintie silla-bub” in a delicate spouted glass.

And so on.

Even if you don't read the paper, you should check out Day's web site. For me, it was like falling through a trap door into fantasyland. Pink Twelfth Night cakes, sugar sculpture, jelly moulds. My personal dream.

On another subject, thanks to the reader who recommended Amy Thielen's New Midwestern Table which I picked up at the library. It’s a handsome cookbook, full of dishes I’ve never heard of, like runzas, which appear to be something like Nebraskan piroshki. I have not make those, but did make Thielen's cracker crust pizza. It was easy and very good and I’m not sure anyone but me noticed that the crust was unleavened and totally flat. We are not talking about a discerning audience here. The crust recipe is here.

The other New Midwestern dish I tried was the smoked oyster dip. Hugely popular at my sister’s birthday party. I should note that the recipe contains what I believe to be a significant typo, calling for a 13-ounce tin of smoked oysters when I am quite sure Thielen meant to call for a 3-ounce tin. Anyway, that’s what I used and, as I said, the dip was great.