Gateau Grand Marnier from Mary and Vincent Price’s Treasury of Great Recipes… Joining the #TreasuryCookalong…. Varying a classic cake recipe with whole grain flours and kefir… Contemplating how a global luxury brand treats its workers in Haiti… Being relaxed as the cake breaks just before the photo for the blog…
After the fun of #Marguerite100 I thought I’d join in on the Vincent and Mary Price #TreasuryCookalong, a book that’s been a part of my life pretty much always. My copy, which belonged to my mother, is a first printing of a 1965 classic reflecting a view of international restaurant cuisine that was most sophisticated in its day. Nearly from the time I could read, I sat at Mom’s kitchen table looking through her cookbooks.
Grub Street in London last year republished one of my, hmmm, I’d say 15? favourite cookbooks of all time– The Everyone Eats Well in Belgium Cookbook, by Ruth Waerebeek with Maria Robbins. This is a presentation of Belgian cuisine written to honour the author’s great-grandmother, grandmother, and mother within historical backgrounds and as individual personalities. It’s a collection of recipes that feel definitive yet friendly, elegant but possible to accomplish, familiar yet novel.
At first I was taken aback by choices the publishers made in the redesign of the book. The original edition of 1996 has headings in cursive and charming line drawings and sidebars with historical and cultural tidbits. I’d grown attached to this book in this style. Grub Street’s republish has striking, stylised “food-porn” quality photographs and a very close and expert attention to lettering style and layout, colour and design. The Taste of Belgium, as it’s been renamed, feels as important as the book is, which is a good thing, even if I miss the cosier quality of the earlier edition. But I’m happy, out of print as it was, many more readers and cooks will be able to explore the delicious and savoury comfort dishes that tempt one, page after page, of either version. And the new one is beautiful indeed, masterfully designed, a book to really look at, to visually take in.
Idly browsing Food52, I alit upon this recipe for Punjabi Buttermilk Stew with Spinach Dumplings and was drawn in. The dish sounded so utterly delicious. (Which it was, and is why I wish to share it.) Preparing it became a kind of odyssey of ingredients, questions and realisations, about which I’ve written what I hope is not too laborious a blog post. Please disregard if it is! These are the issues that came to the fore for me as I prepared the dish:
Culturing Buttermilk
How to substitute local winter kale for frozen spinach
Sour substitutions for citrus in your cooking
Peasemeal as a UK substitute for Gram Flour.
Cooking oil conundrums. British Rapeseed Oil as a solution?
“What’s for dinner?” Once you have kids, that question becomes part of your life. Even my mother-in-law, growing up in the 1930s, in the deep country in a large family as a child of a coal miner, remembers asking her mother, who would flatly respond, to which many of us can empathise, “Crickets and soot.”
Someday I want to make Crickets and Soot for dinner. Not a fancy Heston Blumenthal take on it, but literally…
Yesterday I decided to take my menu cue from this wonderful Carolina Chocolate Drops song and make… Cornbread and Butterbeans.
I liked the idea of a meal constructed differently, perhaps more simply, than the ones I often belabour– this one felt like a variation on Dal and Flatbreads, an easy, nutritious, cheap meal my children do enjoy.
What did I learn:
The Lima Bean of my American childhood is reborn in the dried Butterbean (in this case, a lazy tin) of my adulthood in the UK.
The “stew” I made with butterbeans was really good and simple and kind of universal: leeks, onion, carrot, celery sauteed in butter/ olive oil, the beans, some added liquid, salt and pepper and thyme and a bay leaf– and at the end lots of fresh parsley, which is still growing happily in this rainy but mild winter. The dish reminded me of the Marcella Hazan Italian recipe for a very garlicky white bean soup with loads of parsley. There’s a mildness to these beans and a slightly mealy texture that one child did end up rejecting, even as both of them continue to open up to new foods, thank goodness, because not being able to be fully creative in my cooking is tiresome.
Cornbread: I used some kefir in place of buttermilk. It was a bit on-the-edge and so sour that it instantly reacted to the baking soda/ bicarb in the recipe that it frothed over the jug. Because it was SO sour I decided to use the full amount of sugar in the recipe, in some attempt to please, i.e. not disgust, those same children as above. The result, having got in the habit of always reducing sugar in any recipe, was a taste way too sweet for my liking. And I used the duck eggs that I’d bought for the birthday cake that ended up being eggless. The cornbread tasted like cake to me, and not gritty. But still was fun to mop up the beans with it.
Kitchen Counter Culture 