Category Archives: food

Let Us All Eat Cake

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I’m not sure I trust anyone who doesn’t like cake. Sorry, that is just how it is. So, when I was thinking about a new blog topic, I thought of occasions past, captured in photos, and my mind went immediately to cake. (Especially since I had already written about noodles.)

Do all families have a “signature cake”? I suspect many do. Ours, going into its third generation, is a sour cream coffee cake with nuts, which is equally good for breakfast, a mid-morning or afternoon snack, or for dessert. It’s buttery, cinnamony, and just totally delicious. It is known by the name “Jewish Nut Ring” in our family, although we are not Jewish, and I think that my mother got the recipe from a women’s magazine, probably sometime in the 1950s. Our recipe is very much like this one but we would never, NEVER add raisins or chocolate chips as suggested here, and ours includes walnuts, not pecans, and involves pouring melted butter on top before baking. My mom had a special round pan for this (now my sister has it), but I found a suitable one years ago at a yard sale for just this purpose.

Do all families also have signature birthday cakes? I know many who do. My sister’s was a white cake, baked in a rectangular baking dish, split in half and spread with apricot jam, reassembled and coated generously with whipped cream. I think it fell out of favor some time ago. Mine is a keeper – the Chocolate Pinwheel Cake, very much like this one, which has been tracked down to a 1954 recipe “courtesy of Baker’s Chocolate and Carnation Evaporated Milk,” two of the main ingredients. So, though I never asked her about it, is likely to stem from my mom browsing through those women’s mags again.

Our version, passed down through a series of hand-written recipe cards and pieces of dog-eared note paper, has an important difference from the above recipe, in that the filling has a healthy (or unhealthy) dose of instant coffee instead of more chocolate. And, really, more chocolate is not what is needed in this cake. Swirling an unadulterated, and almost obscene, amount of pure melted semi-sweet chocolate into the batter to make the “pinwheel” design is the key methodology. When it cools, it forms an intense, crunchy chocolate orgy, which is offset somewhat by the fluffy, not too sweet mocha filling.

Various other cakes have come and gone, witnessed by this little parade of photos, but these are the two with the most memories and staying power. It’s no wonder, as they are delicious, but also evoke special times in the kitchen and at the table, sharing sweet moments bite by bite. I’d love to hear about other cake memories!

The classic nut ring. My mother, sister and I have made hundreds of these over the years, and my daughter is the third generation baker in possession of the recipe.
One of the many Chocolate Pinwheel Cakes, and since this is not my cake plate (or my countertop), I think this one was made at my sister’s house. The cake assembly is tricky, as it involves cutting the two rounds in half each, to make four layers, with scrumptious filling in between each and around the edges. You have to pick the prettiest “swirl” for the exposed top layer.
My sister doesn’t bother with standard women’s magazines, she subscribes to Bon Apetite and Gourmet…and often finds complicated recipes that we need to execute during the holidays. The inside of this cake, made by my daughter M.E. (who is a really good baker) was even more complex than the Pinwheel cake, with a layer of cake filled and rolled into a big round. That’s why she’s looking so satisfied with herself for pulling it off!
Maybe baking complicated cakes rubbed off on her at a young age, after being impressed by her mother’s (somewhat amateurish) rendition of Mickey for her second birthday?
Doubt if I will try this one again, but I was inspired when I read a book that had the recipe included. You, too, can read the book and recreate Burnt Sugar Cake with Maple Frosting at this link! Or just bake the cake if you don’t have time to read the book. (It was an okay book, though, but the cake was better than the book, in my opinion.)

Pardon My Pumpkin

food,

Pumpkins have a bad rap. The (much ridiculed) “pumpkin spice” everything starts emerging around August now, and persists until the holidays. Halloween jack-o-lanterns sag and mold on porches until carted to the curb.

Apparently, though, the pumpkins that were just intended as fall decorations on people’s porches had a perfect preservation storm this fall. The weather was cool but not freezing, and the squirrels who usually munch on these easy targets had enough acorns and other tempting goodies to keep them happy. Thus, spurring my one-woman quest to Save the Pumpkins!

To make a rather long story shorter… I noticed a lot of pumpkins just hanging out on porches, even as holiday wreaths started appearing on doors. One neighbor even repurposed a couple of pumpkins into holiday decor by spray painting them gold, so Martha Stewart!

I sent a plea on our neighborhood listserve for any pumpkins still intact, saying I would use them for cooking. Within a couple of days I had eight rather large specimens in hand, or rather actually on our own front and back porch awaiting processing. Can you eat big pumpkins, people ask? This summary from the University of Nebraska Extension Service tells all. Yes, is the short answer.

One of these large orange orbs, I found, can yield up to fourteen cups of pumpkin pulp. But, as my research revealed, pumpkin is really the all purpose fruit/vegetable. You can sneak pumpkin pulp into just about everything. It can be the star of the dish (think pumpkin curry for instance) or it can just enhance the texture and add nutritional nuances. It can be incorporated into an almost infinite variety of sweet baked goods or savory treats.

I’m down to three pumpkins to process, and still thinking of ways to use it. I’ve done pumpkin biscuits, cookies, butter, soup, bars, hummus (this is particularly good), and I am excited to try next a pumpkin gnocchi with sage butter. I just did an online search to find recipes for most of these inspirations, though my friend Sallie sent me her secret pumpkin butter recipe. (Sorry, not sharing that!)

Despite all my pumpkin cooking efforts with fresh pulp and chunks, our freezer is also full of containers of processed pumpkin. So it is really the gift that keeps on giving. In summary, I feel my campaign to Save the Pumpkins has been a big success. Here are some photos of the adventures. Happy New Year to you all, and may your year be as fruitful as my pumpkin escapades!

Our own jack-o-lanterns back on Halloween. I must confess, I also rescued the undisturbed backs of these even before gathering intact pumpkins from neighbors.
Neighborhood pumpkin plea results, awaiting processing. There were more on the front porch as well as these on the back porch.
First stage in the processing is to split open and scoop out the insides. Roasted pumpkin seeds are a by-product, but even though I always try to get them all, I am sure the compost pile will be yielding our own pumpkin patch next year.
Big batch of pumpkin butter. I gave a lot of it away to friends and also delivered a container to each of the neighbors who donated to the cause.
Pumpkin butter was one of the components of our holiday cheese and charcuterie board, at center here.
Pumpkin snickerdoodle bars is the latest of the creations…to be brought to a party this very afternoon and hopefully a big hit!

Cranberry Sauce Musings

food, Thanksgiving,

The varieties of tastes, and capacity for creativity, of humans never ceases to amaze me. That’s one reason I became a folklorist. And, since it’s almost Thanksgiving, let’s take cranberry sauce as an example.

Cranberry sauce, in one or more of its many iterations, is de rigeur at most Thanksgiving tables. (But, even it’s absence would say something about the Thanksgiving meal group’s preferences.) As a native North American fruit whose side dish pedigree goes back, or so “folklore” has it, to the imaginary First Thanksgiving, it is fitting.

But what variety of cranberry sauce graces the table? For millions, apparently, it is the fast and convenient comfort of canned cranberry sauce, which was invented by a lawyer in 1912. A reported 4 million pounds of cranberries sacrifice their existence to the canned cranberry industry each year.

Fresh cranberries also have their devotees, though only a shockingly low five percentage of cranberries are sold fresh, and not all those make their way into sauce. (What this says about America is not the topic here, but does give one pause.)

Okay, I am a member of Team Fresh. And, as my Thanksgiving gift to you all, here (see below) is the recipe I use. It’s great on “day of” but also sublime mixed with mayo on turkey sandwiches, or mixed into yoghurt or oatmeal. Good with other meat meals too. As it is usually still hanging on til the rest of the holiday season, I personally find a lot of uses for it.

Have a safe and happy Thanksgiving, all, despite what is going on around the world. May your table include your own traditional cranberry confection along with great memories.

Thanksgiving Fresh Cranberry and Ginger Sauce

1 pound (or slightly more) fresh cranberries

2 cups sugar

1 cup orange juice

1/2 cup water (or more orange juice if you like)

Zest from one orange

1-2 TBS fresh ginger (how much do you like ginger?)

Wash and pick over cranberries and discard any squish nasty ones. Put in a saucepan and brings to a boil. Cook until cranberries “pop” and their shape starts to deconstruct. (The original recipe said ten minutes, but I usually cook it more like 15-20.) It will look runny but sets up when cooled. Enjoy!

Yum!
Serving suggestion: with plain yoghurt and roasted pumpkin seeds.

Holiday Eating Adventures

food, Holidays

These days, celebrating is strange but necessary. Since our daughter and her partner Dan came home for the holidays to join our “pod” I figured we should engage not in only our own holiday food traditions, such as making and decorating (very specific) cookies, but try out some others as well.

We had “virtual” help, thank goodness. Our friend Arlene walked us through latke making via video chat (her article on the subject is a classic and includes the recipe we used). We gathered all the ingredients and accompaniments (apple sauce, sour cream and cinnamon sugar), debated about how to get as much liquid as possible out of the potato mixture, and had a grand time splattering oil all over the stovetop during the frying process. The result were delicious, crispy creations that didn’t last long around our house.

So, why not try our hand at tamales, as well? We got tamale making advice from a number of sources, including my intern Jennifer, one of my daughter’s friends, and some You Tube videos. (There’s also this article by Laura Wilmot Sheehy which I forgot about until we were done!) Our results probably would make experienced tamale makers laugh – inconsistant sizes, fillings spilling out into from their masa dough – but they tasted pretty darned good to us. Especially with liberal slatherings of homemade green and red salsas using the last of our garden tomatillos and tomatoes.

As a folklorist, I am supposed to be safeguarding against cultural appropriation. There is, I am well aware, a fine line between cultural appreciation and appropriation. I’d like to think we didn’t cross that line by trying out some other celebratory holiday food traditions. We’re not Jewish or Latino. But we enjoy good food and the joy that communal cooking brings, even if this year that means a virtual get-together.

I hope you all have a great holiday, enjoying foods of your own family and culture and maybe trying something new if you feel comfortable doing so. We’re cooking Thai dishes for Christmas dinner, though I won’t bother my Thai-born friend Ang for pointers as she’ll be too busy cooking for her own family. Probably something very American.

Our crispy delicious latkes. Well, just a little burned, too.

Dan and M.E. dig into a latke feast with the trimmings.
Tamale making. Our system of food coloring to mark the types of fillings (pork, chicken, and cheese with or without beans) was semi-successful.
The mis-matched tamales ready for steaming.
We also participated in a virtual cookie baking/decorating party with friends scattered from California to Ireland. That’s me in the top middle row with our decorated spritz cookies..

Friends and Food: Comfort in Spite of Distance

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This past week, I had two food encounters with friends – one in person, one over the miles via Zoom – that were fun and meaningful despite the distance between us. It’s possible, it just takes a fair amount of planning.

The first was a tea in honor of my friend Debi’s recent birthday. Usually, we go out for tea somewhere within a two-hour drive or less from our homes. We’ve been doing this for so many years to mark her birthday in October and mine in February, sometimes twice a year but other years somewhere in between as a combination treat. If we’d actually kept notes, we could have by now written a “Guide to Tea Around DC.” Instead, we tend to try to test our memories every year by discussing the places we’ve been.

We tend to recall places by some memorable decor, type of tea, theme of the offerings, or in some cases an event. The latter includes recalling the time at Beans in the Belfry in Brunswick, MD when the waitress slipped and dumped all the little sandwiches into my open purse, or the time we arrived for a relaxing tea experience at Sweet Simplici-Tea in Sykesville, MD only to find a full-on beer festival happening on the same street.

This year, instead of braving a tea room in the time of COVID-19, I planned a socially-distanced tea for Debi at my house. This involved thinking about what we usually have at the teas we’ve liked best (a full menu including soup and salad along with the usual tea savories and sweets and of course scones and a selection of teas), finding recipes, and then actually baking, cooking, and making a really big mess in the kitchen. Next, getting out some nice china, tea cups and saucers, cloth napkins, and etc. I got a whole new appreciation for tea rooms, and will never scoff at the $25-$30 they charge per person for full afternoon teas.

The second food experience stemmed from the fact that some of my folklore women friends missed our usual food adventures when we meet in person for the annual American Folklore Society meetings. We decided to cook and eat and talk together one evening.

We chose to make gnocchi from scratch, something that none of us had ever attempted. Not just normal/simple gnocchi, but a recipe for sweet potato gnocchi with sage butter sauce which sounded totally awesome (and was).

It was deeply satisfying to knead and shape the dough, watch the little pillows come to the top of the boiling water, then to brown nicely in the bubbling browned butter. We had some laughs when our friend Lucy lost the flour she had measured, “which was here a minute ago,” and other little silly things along the way.

We then all sat down and ate (in my case, way too much of) the finished product, talked, laughed some more, and got a little weepy that we weren’t able to meet together. But somehow, the fluffy little balls of potato pasta eased the sadness. And the miles between Cathy and I in the DC area, Sue in Northern Indiana and Lucy in Northern Ohio melted away with each mouthful.

Debi contemplates a tea a few years back in a commercial tea room.
Debi sits at one end of our long table for tea at our house last week. So much for the intimate tea experience.
Tea goodies in progress. The kitchen was a disaster area after all that baking! How do they do it at tea rooms??
Sweet potato gnocchi served up with friends on Zoom.
I’m still eating this days later and every time I have some, I think about my friends and how much fun we had preparing and eating together even at a distance.

Cooking Up a Quarantine

#quarantinerecipes, food, ,

Two chain letters (via email but also apparently also via social media) have been circulating, as many of my friends have confirmed, in this time of quarantine. Why this is happening right now is anyone’s speculation, and speculate they have. In the past week or so, articles, features or columns about this phenomenon have appeared in the New York Times, The Washington Post, and on CNN to name only the more reputable sources.

I noticed this trend a little over a week ago, when my husband received the “recipe” chain email. Then I received the “uplifting poem/quote” one. Since then, I have been researching and writing an article for our Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage web site, which will appear just as soon as our beleaguered and over-worked editorial committee gets to it among all the other material they have been rapid-fire publishing in the past few weeks.

I did not respond to the poetry one, but I thought the recipe one would be fun and maybe I would actually get a few good new recipes. Unfortunately, I only received three recipes instead of the thousands I had imagined. (But they were good ones, thanks to those who sent them!)

I sent a recipe that I had recently tried, from Parade magazine, to the email first on the list as per instructions in the letter. It bounced back to me. Maybe it had a typo in it? Or that person changed their email without informing their friends? Or…?

So, my recipe was lost to the many who it would have been forwarded to. But, wait. I could share it with you, dear readers. And without any obligation to forward it to ANYONE unless you do have someone you truly want to share it with. Make sure you get their email correct, though.

Here’s a shot of the recipe as it appeared in the Parade magazine. I made it pretty much word for word, and I am on my second batch now. These are very versatile, as stated. Enjoy and keep safe!

Food, Life and Freedom

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I am procrastinating cleaning out the refrigerator.  It is Veteran’s Day and I should be honoring the fallen, thanking someone for their service, contemplating the horrors of WWI. Instead, I am tackling the recesses of our overstocked fridge and trying to salvage some food that is in peril of inflicting us with food poisoning if we don’t ditch it.

Thinking about the imminent stacking up of our excess of food on the kitchen counter turns my thoughts to food in general, and my visits last weekend to two very different but somewhat related food events.  And, finally, to the people who work to bring us our food.

First, I attended some presentations of the National Museum of American History’s annual Food History Weekend.   The theme was “the changing dynamics of regional food cultures in the United States.”  This fit in perfectly, I now realize, with my second food event of the weekend: my friend Jackie’s annual “Soup and Oyster” party on Cobb Island, Maryland, which features “scalded” oysters at the local firehouse as well as soups made by the hostess.

Regional food is usually seasonal, reflective of natural resources and landscape, and has a warm, homey and almost romantic connotation.  But, when you come to think about it more deeply, this food often represents someone’s backbreaking and highly uncomfortable work in its procurement.  Oyster dredging and tonging, for instance, was traditionally done in the cold months on an unforgiving body of icy water.

Farm labor to bring us our vegetables and fruits (the apples in the pie and the green beans in the casserole?) is no piece of cake either.   Picking your own apples on a crisp fall day for fun is one thing. Harvesting tons of apples for the commercial market is a whole other thing.  The harvest and processing of the food that conveniently shows up on our grocery shelves is its own battle, fought by countless seasonal and regional workers, who deserve our respect.

So, along with honoring veterans today, let us also honor those on the forefront of the fight to keep us fed.   Freedom from hunger is a privilege which the thousands of behind the scenes food workers laboring in the “trenches” of our farms, waterways, and processing plants work to make possible.  Unfortunately this doesn’t mean that hunger (like war, of course) isn’t still very much with us.

On that sobering note, it’s off to the fridge.

 

Food = Family: Adventures in International Home Cooking

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Many people think my husband and I are a bit weird to welcome into our home a succession of interns, research fellows and/or other young people who come to Washington, DC and need a cheap place to live.  (Well, that is not the only reason they think we are weird, but that’s another story!)

However, I must say, the benefit is huge, especially if these young people know how to cook.  Lately, we have been benefitting from one of our current housemates, Khamo, who has introduced us to Tibetan cuisine.  Not only have we enjoyed eating these spicy and noodley wonders, but we’ve have fun trying to master the art of making them.

Momos, a type of dumpling, are juicy packets of savory meat served with a fiery dipping sauce.  I almost got the hang of pinching them shut in a sort of pleating motion, but watching Khamo’s deft fingers at the job I knew I would never be able to match her years of growing up doing this.  It was like watching a ballet of the fingers.

Tibetan noodle soup is the perfect winter treat.  The dough is stretchy, and the technique of adding the noodles directly to the steaming pot of fragrant soup is to break off short squarish bits from a long thin rope of it with your fingers.  Again, a skill perfected in one’s family kitchen over years, though a little easier to get the hang of than pleating momos.  It took me five times longer than Khamo to break the pieces into the pot (and not drop them on the floor in the process).  

Our third adventure in Tibetan cooking was hot pot.  This required a trip to the Chinese grocery store, Good Fortune, to get ingredients that we had no idea existed.  Frozen meat and fish balls of various hues, special sauces, and a variety of vegetables including lotus root.  We needed to learn how to eat this dish as well – you don’t eat the soup, you just scoop the contents out and leave the broth for cooking more ingredients.

We’ve lost track of all of the interns and fellows we’ve hosted in the past six or seven years, but we tend to recall the ones who introduced us to new food adventures or how to cook homestyle versions of foods we only enjoyed previously at restaurants.  Pho from Vietnam, authentic Indian cuisine from several parts of the subcontinent, Danish open faced sandwiches, German pastries…a world of good food and new “family members” to enjoy it with.

 

Minneapolis, A Breath of Fresh Air

American Folklore Society, food, Minneapolis, tourism, travel, , ,

When folklorists go to our annual American Folklore Society meetings each autumn, most of us try to avoid that melancholy post-conference refrain, “I never got out of the hotel the whole time.”  Even in the midst of snow storms in Alaska or pouring rain in San Antonio, we find excuses to cut out of a conference session or two to experience some of whatever city we are meeting in.   It is our professional duty, after all, to get a taste (literally, since most of the excursions involve sampling the local cuisine) of the city we are visiting, to honor its history and ethnic make-up, and to then compare notes of our adventures.

This year, we met in Minneapolis.  Despite the fact that we had met there back in the mid-1980s, I had little memory or preconceived notion of the city.  Consequently, I built in a pre-meeting day to explore and embarked on other forays during stolen hours.

My old friend Jean and I made our way via public transportation to visit another friend and colleague, Macey, in her eclectic neighborhood of Powderhorn Park.   Why this neighborhood did not make it to the “local guide” that fellow folklorists had compiled for the meetings escapes me, because it was a fascinating mixture of ethnic businesses, a lovely park with a small lake or large pond which sparkled in the warm fall light, and rows of tidy houses and gardens.  We had a fine walk around, and ate lunch in a sort of Latino mall featuring taco, tamale, and torta stands and small stores with clothing, jewelry, teas and spices, and miscellaneous other items.

Just down the street was Ingebretsen’s Scandinavian store, actually three stores adjacent to one another, with housewares, foodstuffs (including as many different herring products as I had ever seen in one place before and a fine selection of cod roe), and other goods.  The same street had a Caribbean cafe, Halal meat markets, and other wonders. After some shopping, we bid Macey goodbye and returned to hotel life, which already seemed sterile and boring after our glimpse into Minneapolis Life Beyond.

Shorter jaunts outside the confines of the hotel included one afternoon exploring the waterfront along the river and canal with my friend Hanna. Features of this area include the bones of old mill machinery, grand views of St. Anthony Falls, which are featured in the photo at the header of this entry, as well as the  historic Pillsbury A Mill across the river in St. Paul, and some other splendid architecture, old and new.

As for the best food adventure, the prize goes to a homey Tibetan restaurant that my food-savvy friends Lucy and Sue and I discovered on a mission to “Eat Street” (a stretch of Nicollet Avenue not too far from the hotel).   The walk was a mile and half or more back, but we only briefly considered hailing a taxi.  Besides the dumplings, homemade noodles and steamed bread with spicy beef we had to work off, we were in no hurry to return to the confines of hotel life.  The fresh Minneapolis evening air, and the exhilarating feeling of discovery, buoyed us on.   Another city, another AFS conference, another set of adventures.  On to Buffalo next year!

 

Falling for Southern France, Part Four (final)

culture, food, France, memories, tourism, travel, ,

We returned from France over over a month ago, but still the memories linger and must have their due.  Here, the fourth and final installment finds us on our last full day of the trip in Sete, a small maritime city near Montpellier.

The first thing upon arriving is to find your way to the top – a challenging climb up steep streets and steps to the highest point, Mount St. Clair.  The elevation is a mere 574 feet, but the view is spectacular and lays Sete’s waterways out for you so that they make sense.  To the right, the Mediterranean.  To the left, Etang de Thau, a sort of large lake or lagoon.  And, in the middle, bisecting the town, a series of canals connecting the two.  Water, water, everywhere.

Because that climb up and back down will surely make you hungry, the next thing to do is to find a spot at one of the long string of canalside cafes.  If the weather is fine, as it was the day we were there, finding a seat around lunch time at one of the outdoor portions of the cafe may involve an awkward wait.  Seeing as most of these cafes seem chronically understaffed, also expect a leisurely experience once you are seated.

That said, the local seafood is worth it all no matter which cafe you end up at, and the menus are all very similar.  The most famous local dish is a sort of octopus pie which is called tielle setoise.  We got the last one in the cafe that day, and savored every bite of the salty crusty tomatoey minced octopusiness of it.   Mussels were also on offer, mine steamed and M.E.’s in a rich tomato sauce with sausage.   Water all around you, seafood inside your tummy…how much better does it get?

There is apparently a nice art museum in Sete, and a lighthouse which we saw from afar, but we didn’t make it to either.  We opted instead for wandering around the town, up and down the canals, poking into some shops and a modern art exhibition, snapping pictures of sites along the water.  Here, a pile of fishing nets.  There, a row of Crayola colored small boats for rent.  Trying to capture the essence of the last place, the last day, of our wondrous trip.

I boarded the train back to Montpellier that afternoon with mixed emotions.  Tomorrow we would be making the long trek back to our normal lives via train to Paris and flight home.  It would be good to be home, but I felt as though I was leaving a part of me behind somehow.  The intrepid traveler who “conquered” this portion of southern France.  The adoring Mom who got the rare gift of spending protracted time with her grown daughter and loving every minute of sharing this part of the world with her.


Adieu, France, and thanks for opening your welcoming southern arms to us.