Turkey soup

Eastside Road, December 26, 2009—

WHEN DID WE COOK that turkey? Doesn't matter: not all that long ago, I guess. There was a quart of much-reduced turkey stock in the ice-box. I diced one carrot, two celery stalks, and three leeks and softened them in olive oil, then added the stock, some water, the last of the pesto, and a sprig of thyme, and let it simmer half an hour or so. Not bad. Green salad.

Cheap Pinot grigio.

Roast lamb

Eastside Road, December 25, 2009—

ONE OF THE GREAT meals: roast leg of lamb. It was about a three-pound roast, boned; Thérèse gave it about an hour of oil, garlic, and rosemary, and then instead of rolling it back up and roasting it Eric left it butterflied and grilled it in the fireplace. Absolutely delicious. With it, cauliflower with celery-root and onion, and gratinéed potatoes. Green salad, of course.
Cheeses: Roncal and Blu del Monviso, not quite up to a Castelmagno, but a very delicious Piemontese cheese.

And the dessert! Something I've never had before, an invention of the moment: Thérèse rescued some year-old fruitcake by combining it with some dried figs and sultanas and making a pie of it, with a delicious short buttery crust. A first-rate dinner.

Red wine, "L Preston" (Dry Creek Valley), 2006

Bear

Laytonville, California, December 24, 2009—

"A PERFECTLY EDIBLE ANIMAL but rarely used in the kitchen," says Larousse Gastronomique, which goes on to some particularly silly paragraphs on bear's paw, going so far as to quote Mencius. We did not have paw tonight: we had roast haunch. I had never eaten bear before, and was looking forward to something quite different. I suppose I was thinking about how different elk and antelope are from beef and lamb. Bear, at least this bear, turns out to taste very much like good dense grass-raised beef, perhaps a little sweeter but not as sweet as horse. There was no fat at all; the texture was fine-grained and not at all stringy; the finish was clean.
Paolo said it was not a large animal, say three hundred pounds. Bear are increasing hereabouts; one walked through the town of Petaluma a few months back. Paolo told us of a neighbor of his who was grilling salmon on his patio a couple of summers ago; he forgot something and went into the house for it, and returned to see a bear standing by his grill eating his salmon.

With the bear, mashed potatoes; snow peas; Brussels sprouts and chestnuts; sautéed peppers, onions, and zucchini; dinner rolls. A full plate.

Rosé, T&T (Dry Creek), 2008; Carignane, Louis Preston (Dry Creek), 2006

Penne al pesto

Eastside Road, December 23, 2009—

I KNOW: YOU HAVE the feeling you've read those words before. I'll do a quick search before I go on. Ah: it was exactly a month ago that I looked it up, on Nov. 23: "Only five times since September 2008," I wrote then; "I would have thought there'd been at least a dozen occurrences."
That same litte jar is in the refrigerator, its contents carefully covered over with a film of olive oil; Lindsey again "boiled up some penne; I threw a vinaigrette together, and hey presto we're home again."
Tomorrow will be different, I'm told; tomorrow we're eating bear. I can hardly wait.
Oh: Green salad, of course.

Cheap Montepulciano d'Abruzzo

Soup of the evening

Eastside Road, December 22, 2009—

WHO CAN SAY WHEN he first read Lewis Carroll? I'm sure it was before I was ten years old, probably before I was eight. And the passage that interested me the most intensely, moved me the most profoundly, was that concerning the mock turtle soup, with Tenniel's mysterious illustration of the beast who told Alice and the Gryphon "in a deep, hollow tone: ‘sit down, both of you, and don’t speak a word till I’ve finished.’"


I don't know when it was explained to me that mock-turtle soup is made of veal stock, hence the calf's head in Tenniel's illustration. Certainly we never had turtle soup when I was a boy, mock or otherwise; I'm not sure I ever have tasted it. It fascinated me, later, when sophistication began to charm me, and I read somewhere that one splashed a bit of sherry into the soup while cooking it.

We did have soup, though; never turtle soup, and certainly never with sherry in it. We had mostly tomato soup, sometimes home-made, just as often out of a can. Later, when I lived in town with my grandparents, we had all kinds of soups, nearly always home-made. Gram was a deft hand with the stock dishes of her Missouri childhood; the weekly chicken always gave us a pot of stock when most of its flesh was picked away. (Earlier, when I was a very little boy, I was terrified when occasionally she soldiered out into the back yard, grabbed a handy Rhode Island Red, and wrung its neck.)

We do love our soup around here, and particularly on cold damp gloomy days. Tonight it came not from a can but a box: red pepper soup from Trader Joe. It's organic, so that takes some of the sting out of eating from a box. Lindsey didn't add a thing. You could float a bit of finishing olive oil on it, or even a drizzle of crème fraîche — but it's perfectly okay as it is. With it, a slab of TJ's naan, its garlic a little bitter, I thought; afterward, the green salad.

Cheap Montepulciano d'Abruzzo

The Mock Turtle's song, parodying a popular song of the day:

Beautiful Soup, so rich and green,
Waiting in a hot tureen!
Who for such dainties would not stoop?
Soup of the evening, beautiful Soup!
Soup of the evening, beautiful Soup!
Beau - ootiful Soo - oop!
Beau - ootiful Soo - oop!
Soo - oop of the e - e - evening,
Beautiful, beautiful Soup!

Dobos torte

Eastside Road, December 21, 2009—

INSPIRED BY SEEING the movie Julie and Julia, our friend Becky said she'd always wanted to cook a certain recipe from Lindsey's book: Dobos torte. Perfect, I said; I used to make one for Thérèse's birthday in the old days; let's get together and surprise her with one.
Well, of course, it didn't work out that way. Lindsey's retired now and has time to make such things herself. Besides, I think Becky was happy to have the chance to study at the side of the master. So while I reconstructed my user folder, lost to a poorly executed backup strategy, the women spent the afternoon making a cake.

We first met the cake in the pages of a pamphlet of Hungarian recipes, issued in a series on international cuisine that we collected from used-book stores back in the innocent 1960s. In a fit of madness Lindsey got rid of all those pamphlets years ago, but later found an assembled collection of most of them to replace them.
Needless to say, I hadn't looked at the recipe in decades. I remembered it as being layers of génoise, assembled with hazelnut buttercream, topped with caramel painfully sliced into wedges. It's not génoise, it's an egg-butter-flour cake; it's not hazelnut buttercream, it's chocolate with a few crushed hazelnuts; and it wasn't the Hungarian pamphlet, it was on page 50 of Cakes and Tortes, published by the Culinary Arts Institute of Chicago, Illinois, in 1957. Lindsey adapted her version of the recipe from that source. I haven't compared the two, but of course I'd recommend her version as her book is undoubtedly more easily found.
What you do is make six thin cake layers, sandwich them with frosting, then cover the side with frosting, then pour caramel on top and quickly, while it's hot, cut it into serving-size wedges. When I made this cake I always beat the eggs by hand, with a whisk, and creamed them with the sugar, then flour the same way; but the women used an electric hand mixer today and I suppose the result was indistinguishable.
It's an absolutely delicious cake: my favorite, I think. Its textures and flavors maintain their individuality yet merge beautifully, and the finish is deep and rich. It would be delicious with a demitasse or a dram of the right liqueur, but tonight we made do with a cup of Lapsang Souchong: that wasn't bad, either.
What? Oh, right: dinner's more than cake. Becky made cabbage rolls from a recently published vegetarian cookbook; I didn't get the title. Instead of the authentic kielbasa the stuffing involves brown rice, pecans and cashews, and dates; the cabbage rolls are then baked with a tomato sauce covering. I thought them quite delicious, but couldn't eat more than two: I was looking forward to dessert. (There were seven of us at table.)

Gerwurtztraminer, J.W. Morris, 2007; Cabernet sauvignon, Chateau Souverain, 2003 (in magnum: thanks, Paul)

That lasagna

Eastside Road, December 21, 2009—

LINDSEY SLOWLY READIES the refrigerator for the holidays. "Slowly"'s not the right word; "methodically" might do her more justice. She's not a slow woman, Lindsey, except perhaps sometimes when she's eating; I've often thought her uncanny taste sensitivity might have been formed in childhood by her slow, methodical habits at the table. But I digress.
Last night what should come out of the icebox but the last of the lasagna she made for John, over two weeks ago. I won't say it was better for the hibernation, but it certainly wasn't worse. Bolognese is a wonderful thing; Bolognese and Béchamel is one of the many fine moments in Italo-franco relations. (Most of them, I suppose, in the kitchen.)

Cheap Nero d'Avola