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Rabbit at Rest

Writers from across the Atlantic have begun to weigh in on the legacy of John Updike. In the London Spectator, Justin Cartwright reflects on the writer he calls “the American Dostoyevsky,” whom he had the pleasure of meeting and speaking with on several occasions: “There was something about the realism of his writing, his distaste for tackling big political issues overtly, which clearly placed him, in the minds of the Nobel academy, below Nadine Gordimer, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Toni Morrison and many others, who appeared to write about issues of world importance. But of course, the state of a nation, the revolution in sexual attitudes, the question of the conscious life, the almost tactile sense of the American reality and destiny, are all great issues, without having to be flagged as such.”

The Economist’s tribute is equally reverent: “Through the ages, American literary masterpieces, such as Moby Dick and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, have been peopled with eccentric, rootless outsiders. Mr Updike’s lodestar was Stendhal’s definition of a novel as ‘a mirror that strolls along the highway’, taking in both the ‘blue of the skies’ and ‘the mud puddles underfoot’. His triumph lay in taking the puritanism and practicality of the early settlers, such ‘enigmatic dullness’, he called it, and making it shine.” It’s worth reading in full here.

At the risk of seeming less than reverent, I thought I’d take this opportunity to point out my new cooking blog, The Learned Banqueters—the title is a reference to this Greek tome—where a series of coincidences led to an accidental semi-tribute to Updike. Yes, I cooked a rabbit. The faint of heart may wish to avoid that link, which has very little to do with literature, and read this Telegraph appreciation instead. As Updike cheerfully told his interlocutor, “If you’ve had the Biblical three score and ten, and then a bit more on top of it, then you certainly should be content.” So here’s to the good life, and the life of a writer America was and remains proud to call her own.

Season’s Eatings

My real “holiday season” didn’t begin until I’d returned to my humble kitchen on the West Coast. I was saddled with an agonizing head cold, but that didn’t stop me from diving into a number of new culinary escapades, almost all of them shellfish-based. I’ve been cooking and eating faster than I can write about the results, so forgive me if my explanatory notes are brief. I’ll start with shrimp ceviche (or “seviche,” as some cookbooks have it). This recipe is nothing like what you see below, but it’s probably superior. After three hours, mine came out a bit rubbery and difficult to chew, though it looked nice enough:

Lobster is more difficult to screw up. I used to boil, but now I steam. I don’t have any special apparatus for doing so; I just stick an upside-down bowl in the bottom of my pot, which keeps these guys hovering above the water. Usually one slips in as a result, and winds up more boiled than steamed, but with a little luck both of the pair are delicious. Pardon that rubber band.

As I’ve said before, I tend to neglect cocktails—I’m more of a Keystone Light man. But I’m also a huge fan of Eric Felten’s Wall Street Journal column. My sous-chef surprised me upon my return with the ingredients for Felten’s latest suggestion, the Bella Ruffina cocktail:

4 oz Brachetto d’Acqui, chilled
1 oz Carpano Antica Formula sweet vermouth
1 dash orange bitters

Combine in a champagne flute and give the gentlest and briefest of stirs. If you can’t find Antica Formula, use Carpano’s Punt-e-Mes. If you prefer to have a garnish with the drink (I don’t), drop a good-quality cocktail cherry in the glass.

It’s as good as it looks like it ought to be.

Next was cioppino. I’d given the sous-chef a jar of Williams-Sonoma cioppino base for Christmas, so all we needed was a metric ton or so of seafood. That’s clams, scallops, shrimp, prawns, whitefish, and two whole Dungeness crabs. I’m probably forgetting something. There was also linguini. I wish I hadn’t thrown out the jar, because it included a borderline plausible etymology of the word “cioppino.” All you really need to know is that it’s the best soup you’ll ever eat.

Now, another cocktail: the Mulled Manhattan. We have the New York Times to thank for it. This is the first time I’ve ever said that, so don’t take it lightly. Take it to the face.

You’ll need an orange, bourbon, some Cointreau, orange bitters, Angostura bitters, grape juice, and a maraschino cherry. And you’ll need to do this with them.

Last but not least, the Crab Caesar . . .

I was going to make a Crab Louis, but this requires fewer ingredients and is quite a bit better. (It’s got anchovies and buttermilk, for one thing.) But don’t take my word for it. I’ve had the flu for a week now, and for all I know everything depicted herein tastes like braised pine cone. I’m going to choke down some Easy Mac, watch a John Wayne movie on AMC, and go to sleep. Happy New Year!

Tortured tourtière

Following my stitch-up in Columbia County, I returned to the city of the Manhattoes with a heavy heart. Christmas was over, the last of the forcemeat had been fed to the hounds, and the weather was the worst kind of wintry mix. The only thing for my terrible mood, I decided, was to prepare a tourtière, a French-Canadian meat pie traditionally consumed on New Year’s Eve. Surely a couple pounds of ground meat would set me right.

Of course, I needed a kitchen. My options were limited. I’d recently learned some salient facts about S—’s living quarters: (a) that his refrigerator contained a pizza we’d purchased in August and (b) that his gas had been turned off for non-payment. M—’s father has a beautiful kitchen, but since M—’s father  chased me naked out of his apartment over Thanksgiving, the request was out of the question. I settled on Little J’s apartment, despite the presence of an intolerable dog and several dozen replica Eiffel Towers.

Little J found the recipe on her BlackBerry while we nosed around Whole Foods in Union Square. All I remember is that it called for ground veal; they didn’t have any, so we had to substitute ground lamb. So: beef, pork, lamb, carrots, leeks, onions, garlic (I think?), some spices (improvise), and, most importantly, the crust. I let J deal with that. (We intended to make it with lard, but Whole Foods didn’t carry that, either, so we substituted Irish butter.) She had no rolling pin, so we used a Coors Light tallboy.

It was the kind of delicious that results in eating four or five “servings” without a second thought. The next morning, on the Q train to Manhattan, I remembered that meat pie had been produced and called the perp to compliment her. A message had just appeared on my phone: “You tried to kill us last night.” Everyone else spent the day in the bathroom. I spent mine in a heaven of flavorful reverie. Only in New York, am I right?

I like the cut of your giblets

Sayeth Good King Wenceslaus, “Bring me flesh and bring me wine!” Well, I hate wine (though once in a while I’ll indulge my palate in a little Carlo Rossi Paisano), but flesh is another matter. Thus, I give you a tradition in the making—the Christmas Eve Father-Son Frankenturkey Roast. Credit for this idea goes to Max Watman, who advised me thusly: “Bone it out and trim some of the excess meat and use the dark meat and the excess to make a forcemeat with cornbread and country ham or sausage and some celery, carrot, onion, garlic, and sage. Take the forcemeat and put it in the turkey, sew it closed, and roast it.”

Sounds easy enough, no? Except, for starters, the “bone it out” part, which I confess was a baffling proposition. I started with the intuitive stuff: removing the plastic wrap and fishing out the giblets. Then I found another surprise in another dark, icy cavity: the neck, which looks rather like a sausage of inferior quality. My temporary sous-chef, i.e, my Old Man, suggested that we put it aside for soup. Who wouldn’t love some hot water that had that thing floating in it all day?

Rather than trim odds and ends from the inside of the bird, we amputated one drumstick, chopped up the meat, and added it to a bowl of giblets and Italian sausage. It was at this point that my sous-chef presented me with the first of several kitchen-related Christmas gifts: an heirloom meat grinder. Depending on which side of the family it’s from, it’s been used in the production of miles and miles of Italian or German sausage.

Speaking of which, you know how Otto von Bismarck said, maybe, that “[i]f you like laws and sausages, you should never watch either one being made”? You can forget that, because as soon as I get this thing back to California it’s going to be all sausage, all the time. Just you wait.

I almost forgot: What you’re witnessing here is the production of “forcemeat.” There are several critical distinctions between forcemeat and stuffing, the most important one being that the former sounds vastly more sophisticated than the latter. The others I leave to you to suss out. The ingredients we used are as follows: ground-up stuff, onions, carrots, celery, walnuts, garlic, fresh sage, and large chunks of fresh ginger. The salt pictured below just happened to be there and is not necessary.

The deboning process was too complicated to document photographically, and it’s difficult to manipulate a camera with your hands coated in turkey matter. If you’d like to try it, I recommend this guy’s tutorial. Note that only the turkey’s main structure—ribs? shoulder blades?—comes out. Those creepy little arms and legs can stay right where they are. If you do it right, the turkey should go on resembling a turkey while being considerably flatter, like something from an early Warner Brothers cartoon.

What used to be full of useless bones can now be packed snugly with forcemeat. As Max clarified in a follow-up message, the forcemeat should be “halfway between a stuffing and a sausage. Like a boudin. . . . You want the whole thing—you’re putting it all back together?—to be pretty tight, like the bird has become a sausage.” And so it was.

And then we strapped it down, hooked it up to some electrodes, and waited for the lightning storm to take care of the rest.

It truly was a Christmas miracle—not only did the bird taste delicious, but it also saved our holiday dinner. You see, the real centerpiece of the meal was to have been a traditional pre-cooked Christmas ham. But someone who will remain nameless forgot to establish that the ham had, in fact, been pre-cooked. Were it not for this heavenly fowl, the Beck family might have dined on General Tso’s Double Disappointment. So that’s my good deed for the year.

Arachibutyrophobia

Pardon my absence, should you happen to have noticed it; I’ve just returned from a picturesque food-and-beverage tour of snowy New England. Some highlights: Chinese duck rice in Boston, waffles and clam chowder on Cape Cod, and cannolis and world-famous Narragansett beer in Providence. Nothing warms you up like a Red Cottage breakfast chowder when you’re being chased around by the nastiest storm of the season!

I was back in the kitchen today—Christmas Eve—but before I delve into that mind-blowing feat of culinary excellence, I’ve got catching up to do. Last week, by special request, my sous-chef prepared me a batch of the finest cookies available to humanity: peanut butter and Hershey’s Kisses. These little guys may look simple, but they represent a pas de deux of exquisite flavors that I’d take over Diane St. Clair’s Buttermilk Sherbet any dessert of the week.

You’ve probably got the ingredients lying around already: peanut butter, sugar, brown sugar, powdered sugar, flour, an egg, and a giant bag of Hershey’s Kisses. Oh yeah, and plenty of Christmas cheer.

Actually, I can’t remember how this works, so let’s just call it a secret recipe. Here’s one of many, many reasonable approximations—I’m sure you’ll find these cookies are to die for.

Deez nuts

Yuletide is well and truly here. Yesterday I watched A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965); tonight I watched How the Grinch Stole Christmas! (1966). The latter gave me some interesting cooking ideas: How about a “three-decker sauerkraut and toadstool sandwich, with arsenic sauce”? They didn’t have arsenic sauce at Andronico’s, so I settled on liver and onions, with a side of Gjetost, roasted chestnuts, and Framboise Lambic.

Earlier in the day I’d cured an unusually persistent hangover (thanks, J— and R—) with a massive breakfast of scrambled eggs, bacon, and peas—in other words, everything in the refrigerator. Since I’m lazy, I hadn’t bothered to clean the frying pan. I found it caked with bacon grease, which I heated up and used to caramelize onions. I threw in some of my lard as well. What else am I going to do with that stuff?

I may have to start eating calves’ liver more often. It’s incredibly cheap, even at the fancy supermarket; I think I paid three dollars for the cut on the right, which was about 0.4 pounds. It’s probably not the healthiest thing in the world, but neither are the other things I eat on a regular basis.

As a side, I microwaved some of my beloved Hungry Jack® instant mashed potatoes, then covered them with fresh ground pepper to cloak the flavor of mediocrity. On to the chestnuts. These were surprisingly simple: You preheat the oven to 425°, score or puncture the nuts, and stick them in for anywhere from fifteen to twenty-five minutes. But if you’re not careful, there can be complications.

I recommend scoring the nuts deeply with a sharp knife. I stuck mine with a fork, but it didn’t have the intended result. After about fifteen minutes, I was startled from my Lambic- and mashed potatoes-induced complacency by a sound like gang warfare blasting from my oven. Believe me when I say that the minor earthquake I experienced last year was less frightening than the din of chestnuts exploding over an open heating element.

Between 50 and 75 percent of my nuts made it through the ordeal intact. The survivors were outstanding. The dead and wounded reminded me of “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner”—they had to be washed out of the oven with a hose, or at least with a moist sponge. But even these contributed, in their own small way, to my Christmas cheer. They sounded just like a Red Ryder BB gun, and if I hadn’t been careful, they surely would have shot my eyes out.

χωριάτικη σαλάτα

There are only three salads I really enjoy: the Caesar I make for myself, the Insalata Siciliana at Patsy’s, and χωριάτικη σαλάτα (horiatiki salad). There is nothing quite so satisfying or healthy (if you go in for that sort of thing) as horiatiki, which really ought to be Greece’s national dish; it towers over the competition, like “piece of chicken” and “piece of lamb.” I won’t be a snob and say that you should go to Greece for “the real thing,” though the produce is noticeably better there. Anyway, now is not really a good time.

The procedure is simple: You chop up a cucumber, some tomatoes, and a red onion. Drizzle on some olive oil, and season with pepper, salt, and oregano. Basil’s good, too. The sous-chef, being an archaeologist (Bronze Age Greece), has a palate carefully calibrated to the traditional proportions, but it’s really a “to taste” kind of deal. Also, there should be kalamata olives in the mix, but I forgot to buy them.

Then comes the feta, never crumbled, always in big slabs as shown. Re-season. Serve with a lot of bread, because the bottom of this rig is going to be swimming in olive oil. (If not, you’ve done it all wrong.) It’s interesting to note that the country that produced this small masterpiece has nothing but contempt for vegetarianism, which is so alien that it necessitated the neologism hortophagos. In rural areas, telling your host that you’re a vegetarian will generally result in your being served fish. Vegans are advised to make other vacation plans.

Lardy

Note: This is the continuation, or should I say B-side, of Sunday’s “Cracklin’ Rosie.” My procedure for slow-cooking a pork shoulder can be found here. I mean, I didn’t make it up or anything, but it’s the one I use. This time I added a few more cloves than before, and tried to sort of wedge pieces of onion inside the meat.

It came out better, and moister, than it looks in the regrettably tiny picture below. (Someday I’ll have a superior camera and more Typepad storage; until that day comes, use your imagination.) Next up was to invent my own sauce. I had high hopes of being sort of an idiot savant at this. Everyone will beg me for the recipe, I thought to myself, but I’ll never tell.

Well, scratch that. It turns out you don’t get the best results by ignorantly tossing together random ingredients. You get a weird, lumpy, and vinegary mess. Here’s how to do it:

1 cup water
1 cup ketchup
1 cup apple cider vinegar
1/4 c Worcestershire sauce
1 T lard
1 clove garlic
1 tsp packed brown sugar
1 tsp cayenne pepper
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp onion powder
1/2 tsp ancho chili powder

I think it could be improved substantially by adding more ketchup or by reducing the amount of vinegar you use. But really I’d just recommending using a real recipe.

At least I got to use some of my mouth-watering lard. Granted, it came out yellow—perhaps because I filtered it with a paper-towel-lined colander instead of with a cheesecloth. But that just means more flavor, right?

Cracklin’ Rosie

The other day it occurred to me that I hadn’t eaten pulled pork in over a month and a half, so I picked up a shoulder at the Safeway. The shoulder blade cut typically has a good deal of fat on it, but this one sported a catcher’s mitt-sized sheath of white blubber. While removing it (left) I realized that it was probably pretty delicious. A cursory Google search turned up this post, by a certain “Homesick Texan,” on how to render lard.

It’s remarkably easy to make your own fat for frying, baking, or even just snacking with friends! As our Texan informs us: “People think that cooking with lard will make everything taste of pork, but this is not true; its flavor is neutral. What it does, however, is create incredible texture and structure. With lard, you’ll fry chicken that is both moist and crisp. With lard, you’ll make a tender pie crust that flakes. With lard, you’ll make airy French fries that crunch. With lard, you’ll cook refried beans that caress your mouth like velvet. . . .”

I did none of the above, unfortunately—though I’m planning to use my lard to create the ultimate super-top-secret barbecue sauce tomorrow, for the pulled pork that has been languishing in my fridge for two days. The good news is that lard-rendering results in a delicious byproduct: cracklins. Real cracklins have nothing in common with the pork rinds you buy (or, more likely, don’t) at your local gas station or 7-11. They’re a bit like Cap’n Crunch that’s been steeped in olive oil, i.e., the best thing you’ve ever tasted in your life.

It shouldn’t be necessary to point out that a “food” made by heating raw fat at a low temperature for several hours is, in fact, high in fat, but since all the other recipes mention this, I’ll do the same. If you want to live past thirty, don’t eat cracklins on a regular basis. And if you want them to taste good, don’t refrigerate them and eat them hours later. They’re best right out of the strainer. Check back tomorrow to find out whether the substance on the right—lard that hasn’t yet cooled and turned white—is a good substitute for sticks of store-bought butter.

I’m talkin’ to you, shrimp

My sous-chef got us a subscription to Gourmet, but several issues have passed without my summoning the courage to attempt one of its super-fancy recipes. (Do you know what it means to “sweat” a carrot? I didn’t, until Gourmet came to dinner.) I still haven’t attempted one. What you are about to see is almost entirely the work of the s-c; all I did was peel and devein those Ecuadorian white shrimp on the right.

The recipe, from page 103 of the November issue, is “Greek-Spiced Baked Shrimp.” It serves four, unless I’m one of those four, in which case it serves two. Active time: fifteen minutes. Start to finish: one hour. You will need the following:

One medium onion, chopped; two garlic cloves, finely chopped (we used the jar stuff, just to speed things along); three tablespoons of extra-virgin olive oil; a half-teaspoon of red-pepper flakes; a half teaspoon of ground cinnamon; a quarter-teaspoon of ground allspice; a 28-ounce can of whole tomatoes in juice (drained, reserving juice, and chopped); a pinch of sugar; one and a quarter pounds of shrimp; a quarter-pound of feta, crumbled; and two tablespoons of chopped dill.

Next: “Preheat over to 375° with rack in middle. Cook onion and garlic in oil with 1/4 tsp salt in a 4-qt heavy saucepan over medium heat until softened, about 5 minutes. Stir in spices and cook, stirring, 30 seconds. Add chopped tomatoes with juice and sugar and simmer, uncovered, until slightly thickened, about 20 minutes. Remove from heat. Season shrimp with 1/8 teaspoon salt, then stir into tomato sauce. Transfer to a 2-qt shallow baking dish and top with feta. Bake until just cooked through, 18 to 20 minutes. Serve sprinkled with dill sprinkled with crumbled bacon.” (Trust me — Ed.)

Allow me to submit that I never ate anything this good in Greece. I ate shrimp, and tomatoes, and onions, and feta, and they were good, but never blended together into such a sublime testament to the bounty of Poseidon. Thalatta! Thalatta! Seriously.