JULY~OCTOBER 2000ISSUE NO. 70 ELECTRONIC EDITION

CookingSimple

Annual Food Book Review Issue

Contents[TOUCH ANY TITLE TO BE TAKEN TO THAT PAGE]

A Difficult Man ...........................................1REFLEXIONS, by Richard Olney

Mediterranean Mess ..................................5A MEDITERRANEAN FEAST, by Clifford Wright

Work, Adventures, Childhood, Dreams........8A new book by Patience Gray

The Cook’s Bookcase ................................10WORLD FOOD CAFÉ, by Chris & CarolineCaldicott • PARISIAN HOME COOKING, byMichael Roberts • MEMORIES OF A LOST

EGYPT, by Colette Rossant.

Table Talk: ...............................................12The Kyocera Ceramic Knife • Kinnie • ASimple Mango Dessert • Our Latest Book

r RECIPE INDEX rBeets with Canned Tuna ................. 7Fresh Tomato Salad ...................... 16Lamb Stew with Wild Mushrooms ... 7Mango Montego Bay...................... 14Scrambled Eggs the French Way ... 10Scrambled Eggs with Tomatoes, Shal-lots, and Garlic ............................. 11Shrimp Pan-Roasted on Coarse Salt 4Shredded Zucchini Omelet .............. 4Sweet Potato Stew with a PeanutGinger Sauce ................................ 10

A Difficult ManIn the morning, we drank bowls of black coffeeon the terrace and she asked why I was staringso intently into my bowl. At first I couldn’tanswer because it was an unconscious thing—finally, I explained that all the vineleaves andskyscape were so beautifully reflected in darklight on the surface of my coffee, a sort ofdistillation of memory and eternity....

—Richard Olney, REFLEXIONS

ARTHUR KOESTLER, confronted by a fan whokept yammering on and on about thehonor of meeting him, is said to have

sardonically replied that “to like a writer andthen to meet a writer is like loving goose liverand then meeting the goose.” This is one ofthose clever remarks that wraps a hat pin inthe soft cloth of self-deprecation—“You are afool,” it says, “to want to meet me, and I wouldbe even more of a fool to want to meet you.” Inother words, “Please leave me alone.”

Novelists, of course, would be nothing ifthey weren’t self-absorbed, but it may come asa surprise to learn that food writers are ofteneven more so. This is because one of the mostimportant purposes of the kitchen is also one ofthe least acknowledged—to serve as an escapehatch from the chatter in the living room. Likethe writer’s den, the kitchen is a blame-free

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haven where the exhausting demands of hu-man interaction can be replaced with the sooth-ing company of, in the one instance, words, andin the other, carrots and onions. Food writersget to have their cake and eat it, too.

This is meant as an observation, not acriticism (I mean, look who’s talking). After all,self-absorption is what allows some food writ-ers that uncompromising attention to tech-nique and others that unalloyed susceptibilityto pleasure—and, in a very special few, theeerily successful combination of the two—which makes their writing so enjoyable. Evenso, there is apt to be a jolt when the same writerturns his or her gaze away from the cooking potand glances up into the mirror.

Self-absorption is not the same thing asegotism, the maniacal self-regard of the averagesuper-chef. We are led to the mirror not to beasked to admire what we see but to be taken ona tour of every flaw, pimple, and flake of deadskin—and made to experience the sharp stab ofanguish each provokes. The same sensibilitythat we enjoy so much when it concerns itselfwith food can bring us up short if we choose tofollow it when it steps out of the kitchen.

This, at least, is the likely experience of

anyone picking up REFLEXIONS (Brick Tower Press,$34.95, 416 pages), Richard Olney’s recentlypublished volume of autobiographical rumina-tions. Olney, who died last year, is the author ofsuch classic cookbooks as SIMPLE FRENCH FOOD

and LULU’S PROVENÇAL TABLE and of two definitivestudies of French wine, YQUEM and ROMANÉE-CONTI; he also conceived and then directed theproduction of the infinitely valuable twenty-seven-volume Time/Life Good Cook Series. Aslongtime readers well know, he—along withPatience Gray—has also served as a kind ofpatron saint for my own food writing. However,after reading REFLEXIONS, I have had to cast aboutfor a different word—dæmon, perhaps—since,although my admiration for him remains un-dimmed, I have to admit that his prospects forsainthood are, at best, problematical.

For most of his life, Olney was an indefat-igable letter writer, especially to members ofhis family, and it is obvious that he initiallyintended to use these (all carefully saved, itseems) as the raw material for an autobiogra-phy along the lines of his friend James Merrill’sA DIFFERENT PERSON—a candid account of ayoung gay man’s coming of age in the 1950s.The first hundred or so pages of REFLEXIONS arejust that, and finely crafted and entertaininglybitchy as well, with Jimmy Baldwin, W. H.Auden, Kenneth Anger, James Jones, and oth-er less famous friends and acquaintancessketched with a portraitist’s keen if not alwaysflattering eye.

Indeed, Olney’s original ambition was tobe a painter, and, as the paintings—portraitsall, a few in color—reproduced in the book show,he had the talent to do it. At the age of twenty-four, he made his way to France—and for allintents and purposes never came back. Hefound cheap passage on the De Grasse, theoldest and slowest ship on the French Line, andequally modest accommodations at the Hôtel del’Académie, a student hotel, eating his first mealin Paris in its “glum little dining room.” The platdu jour that day was rabbit and white winegibelotte (fricassée) with mashed potatoes.

The gibelotte was all right, the mashed potatoesthe best I had ever eaten, pushed through asieve, buttered and moistened with enough oftheir hot cooking water to bring them to asupple, not quite pourable consistency—no milk,no cream, no beating. I had never dreamt ofmashing potatoes without milk and, in Iowa,

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everyone believed that the more you beat themthe better they were.

In retrospect, it’s hard to imagine some-one who spends his first meal in Paris decon-structing the mashed potatoes becominganything other than a food writer, but thatwould happen as if by accident, a melding ofchance events and randomly made friends.This is by itself a fascinating story, and thecurious will find it all spelled out in thesepages, as is the entire arc of his amazing ifalways relatively obscure career.

Unfortunately, only the truly curiouswill be likely to make the effort. It isn’t as if therewards aren’t there—the book is studded withpassages of brilliantly evocative prose, somedescribing now forgotten restaurants, otherssimple but carefully crafted meals, still othersencounters with an extraordinary range of fineFrench wines. Also, anyone with a taste forfood-world gossip will find they can stuff them-selves to surfeit here.

With Olney, you were either a member ofthe enchanted circle—Elizabeth David, Simone(Simca) Beck, Alice Waters, Lulu Peyraud—orelse a potential threat, to be treated first withsuspicion and then—these being almost alwaysconfirmed—without mercy. His portrait of JamesBeard is devastating, and he makes short shriftof many other food-world eminences as well: M.F. K. Fisher (“empty-headed, has no palate, andher writing is silly pretentious drivel”); CraigClaiborne (“silly but harmless”—the harmlesspart would later be struck, after a conspicuoussnub). And on and on.

This is at once refreshing and disturb-ing—refreshing because it brings into the opena cottage industry of maliciousness that in thefood world is almost always entre nous; dis-turbing because Olney seems oblivious to thefact that, far from settling old scores, thedamage he is doing is almost entirely to him-self. And this isn’t because he’s nasty; it’sbecause he never really admits how unpleas-ant he himself can be. The terrible rages, thedrunken misbehavior, the caddish mistreat-ment of others are cruelly observed in everyonebut himself. The result will leave a bad taste inany but the most indulgent reader’s mouth—ataste not entirely alleviated by the many mo-ments of tenderness, affection, and vulnerabil-ity that these pages also reveal.

The word “reflections” is particularly aptfor the title of an autobiography—meaning asit does both meditative observations and imag-es taken straight from life, which—as Olneyhimself puts it in the quotation at the begin-ning of this essay—combine to create a “distil-lation of memory and eternity.” The problem isthat about a third of the way through the book,it seems he was no longer able to continue thehard—but up to then very successful—work ofrecasting raw experience into carefully consid-ered prose that gives the book’s title its point.

At that point, he begins cobbling the restof the book together by taking excerpts fromhis copious stash of letters and connectingthem with short stretches of “I went here, I didthat” narration. The letters, in other words, areleft to carry the weight of the story...somethingthey should almost never be allowed to do.Written in the heat of the moment and withoutthought of their impact on anyone but theaddressee, they easily veer from emotionalheat to obsessively detailed minutiæ (in Ol-ney’s case, a listing of practically every bottle ofwine he ever drank in France).

Once this happens, the book simply es-capes the control of its author...and the readerbecomes a passenger on a ship where anothernasty storm is blowing in and the captain hasonce again locked himself in his cabin with abottle. There are warnings early on that this isnot going to be an easy trip. Olney is helplesslyattracted in lovers as well as friends to hyster-ics, people who use acting out, often savageacting out, as a way of controlling others.

The passages describing their behaviorcan be almost unbearable to read, especiallysince Olney seems incapable of putting a deci-sive end to a bad situation—as he is alsounable to do in similarly perverse businessrelations, such as the one he had with Time/Life Books during the production of the GoodCook Series. His stormy relationship with theFrench chef Georges Garin, which spans muchof the book, eventually becomes so excruciat-ingly painful and violent that the reader can’thelp wondering if it really is no more than afriendship gone bad—if not, it is a friendshipthat makes your usual soap opera plot seemlike so much marshmallow fluff.

Why go on reading? There are a numberof reasons. First, Olney was an active andultimately a prominent participant in the French

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wine and food scene for almost half a century.He knew personally the great chefs and thegreat vintners; he went everywhere; he tastedeverything—and he kept careful notes that,read together, provide a peerless record ofFrench gastronomy. Furthermore, the book’snarrative, self-serving though it often may be,has the tortured power of a Tennessee Williamsplay—or, really, several Tennessee Williamsplays, staged back to back.

Finally, Olney was one of the greatest foodwriters who ever lived, and probably the bestAmerican one. Unlike M. F. K. Fisher, he was abrilliant cook; unlike almost anyone else, hewas never so rigorous as when he cooked forhimself or a casual gathering of friends in therustic kitchen of his hillside Provençal home inSolliès-Toucas. Thus, while you are hardly sur-prised by his detailing in REFLEXIONS the prepara-tion of a pot-au-feu for the Club des Cent, anexclusive Parisian gastronomic group, it is anunexpected treat to have him happily recount-ing the making of a homely lunch for three:

Nora was in Solliès for a few days at Eastertime. Gisou joined us for the Easter weekend.Wild thyme was in flower everywhere andshoots of wild asparagus were pushing updaily on the hillside. We lunched on wildasparagus omelettes, swelled and golden, semi-liquid inside, and salads composed of tendergarden lettuces, rocket, salt anchovies maison,

grilled, peeled and seeded peppers, green sweetshallots, green beans....

Such descriptions—and you will findmany in these pages—are often superior to anyrecipe, the author’s obvious pleasure in thedish giving the reader an encouraging pushwithout the burden of nagging instruction.

The shrimp were grilled dry in fiercely heatedfrying pans thickly layered with coarse sea salt,less than a minute on one side, then on theother, only until the translucent shells turnedpink and opaque; I have never since preparedthem any other way.

Interestingly, the cooking the passagedescribes was performed not by Olney himselfbut by Alice Waters; the shrimp were part of asupper she cooked at Solliès-Toucas for acrowd of guests, including Lulu and LucienPeyraud. Alice’s daughter, Fanny, made thetomato salad. The atmosphere conveyed is onenot only of happiness but of harmony—youleave the book feeling that anyone who wantedto could find a way to join in the cooking. Olneymay have been difficult and self-absorbed, butwhen it came to the pleasures of the kitchen, henever comes across as hogging the stove.

On the contrary. In one of my favoritepassages, he tells of a visit of a nephew, Chris-topher, who comes for a three-week stay thesummer before his last year of college.

The day before leaving, Christopher realizedthat he needed a cooking lesson. He loved theslices of rustic sourdough bread that I grilled,rubbed with garlic, dribbled with olive oil andcut into small squares to accompany pre-din-ner drinks and he thought the flat zucchiniomelette (shredded zucchini, salted in layers,squeezed, sauteed in hot olive oil, stirred intoeggs, beaten with chopped butter and freshmarjoram, returned to the hot pan with moreolive oil, Parmesan grated atop and finishedbeneath a grill) was very special. He returned toRochester and proudly treated the family toolive oil-anointed garlic crusts and zucchiniomelettes.

The teacher’s pride is touchingly palpable, notleast because of the innocence of the studentand the magic simplicity of the dish. Someonewho knew him well once described Olney to meas the nicest unpleasant man he had ever met.There are worse epitaphs—indeed, this is onethat the recipient would probably have secretlyrelished himself. ◆

(1953) In the ortolan season, spring or fall, wewent to Chez l’Ami Louis, a simple, even ratherslummy, bistrot in appearance, which mayhave been the most expensive restaurant inParis. The floors were spread with sawdust, thetables with news sheet, the dining room washeated by a coal stove and stove-pipes, thewalls were dusky from their emanations andthere was no wine list beyond the half-dozenwines scribbled to the side of the menu. A largeproportion of the clientele was American. Mon-sieur Antoine, the Swiss chef-proprietor, whowas alone in the kitchen, except for a dish-washer, was a madman; he hated all sauces—in fact, he hated most French food and wascontemptuous of all his colleagues. At Easter-time, he served legs of milk-lamb, roast toorder, and, in late autumn, rare-roast wood-cock. We began with his duck foie gras, firm andpink, accompanied by a slice of raw countryham, cured on the bone; the ortolans weremerely sautéed in butter for a few minutes.

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Mediterranean MessMuch of the writing about Provençal food isvery misleading when it comes to the historicroots of the cuisine. During the Middle Ages,cabbage was virtually the major source of foodfor the Provençal masses. But in the contempo-rary cookbooks cabbage is hardly mentioned,and we read instead about tomatoes, zucchini,and potatoes as if these New World foods havehad a long history in Provence. It seems likelythey became popular in the cuisine only re-cently, perhaps around the end of the nine-teenth century.

—Clifford A. Wright, A MEDITERRANEAN FEAST

HISTORY IS EXHAUSTING. It demands that werelearn everything over and over; ittrashes our most cherished notions; it

seizes reality by the feet and flips it on its head.And, more often than not, as a reward for allthis effort we get handed a cabbage. A MEDITER-RANEAN FEAST [Morrow, $35], Clifford Wright’smassive—eight hundred pages, five hundredrecipes—tome on the history of Mediterraneancooking, is many things—eye-opening, wide-ranging, at times impressive, at times down-right annoying. But it is only rarely a feast,unless what you have in mind is a dyspeptic’sdefinition of that word: a meal with too muchfood hastily prepared by an inexperiencedcook and slapped on the table by a conde-scendingly surly waitstaff.

This is too bad. Wright’s background isthat of an Arabist, a valuable perspective tobring to Mediterranean cuisine—especially whendiscussing southern Europe. There, the Arabsare usually portrayed as scimitar-waving in-terlopers whose repulsion is one of the founda-tions on which European culture rests. Intruth, however, the invaders were part of acivilization that had much more to teach thanto learn. Far from the desert nomads of thepopular imagination, by the time of their in-cursions into Spain and Sicily the Arabs hadbecome skilled agriculturalists.

Unlike the Romans, who preferred toimport novel foodstuffs rather than attempt togrow these themselves, Arab rulers estab-lished experimental gardens to learn how toraise them on local farms. And these samerulers shaped taxation and land-use policiesthat encouraged agricultural innovation, in-

cluding complex irrigation systems. Conse-quently, under Muslim rule Sicily and Spainunderwent an agricultural revolution (the rem-nants of which were erroneously attributed byChristian scholars to the Romans) that wouldintroduce such foods as artichokes, spinach,and eggplants to the southern European kitchen.

All this information appears in the firsthundred pages of A MEDITERRANEAN FEAST. In myopinion, Wright would have produced a betterand far more readable book if he had held thatfocus, fleshing out an alternative vision ofsouthern European cooking from a mostlyMuslim viewpoint. The result would be, at thevery least, rather humbling to a Eurocentricaudience.* Wright’s ambition, however, is toembrace all of the area’s history—at least as faras it connects with the Mediterranean cuisinewe know (thus, there is relatively little on theRoman Empire—and less still on the civiliza-tions before it—the agricultural and culinaryadvances of which, he argues, were mostly lostduring the Dark Ages and had to be relearnedfrom the Arabs).

Wright divides his book into three sec-tions, the first of which, “An Algebra of Medi-terranean Gastronomy,” explores how the

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gradual mastery of technology and agriculturalskills lifted the area out of perpetual scarcity toa state where the rich were able to turn eatinginto an art and the poor could at least expect anoccasional time of feasting to break the monot-ony of their harsh existence.

This part is followed by “An Ecology ofMediterranean Gastronomy,” which details howvariations in the area’s climate and geographygave their particular flavor to each of the re-gion’s many cuisines, and by “A Measure ofMediterranean Gastronomy,” which considersthe importance to the region of two items oftrade—spices and grain (especially hard wheat).Even then we are far from through: the bookconcludes with over a hundred pages of supple-mental material, including an essay on sources,an Islamic glossary, and a pronunciation guide.

To put it mildly, this is a very ambitiousproject. It forces Wright to eschew a straight-forward narrative in favor of one that loopsback and forth through time and over largeareas of the map, weaving his text out of severalinterrelated themes that, comprehended to-gether, are meant to reveal the complex designof the whole. This approach may have workedfor some—I’m not unaware that this year’sJames Beard Cookbook Awards named A MED-ITERRANEAN FEAST its cookbook of the year. Butthis reader was too lost in the text’s briaryunderbrush to ever get much sight of the forest.

In fact, the book reads less like a work ofconsidered historical investigation than like adoctoral thesis, in which chunks of hastilydigested material, peppered with pedantic andsometimes spiteful footnotes,† have been roughlyknit together with a plodding and often testyprose. Wright regularly treats the reader as acomplete blockhead—or, worse, as a fellowfood writer. Consider the following passage,which appears in the last chapter of the book—by which time, you might think, relations be-tween reader and writer would have softened abit (the italics are the author’s):

The mystery over the origin of macaroni isclouded by the fact that food writers tradition-ally have failed to discuss and distinguish themany varieties of wheat. Establishing the localeor era for the origin of macaroni hinges onidentifying not its particular shapes, nor that itis made of flour and water, but the kind of wheatused to make it. If mixing wheat flour and watertogether and stretching the dough into threads

is what is meant by pasta, macaroni, or noodles,that definition tells us nothing; it is not histori-cally heuristic. The reason scholars are inter-ested in the origin of macaroni is that theanswer can contribute to a better understand-ing of the role a new food played in subsequentpolitical and economic developments. Ascrib-ing the word macaroni to an alimentary pastemade from soft wheat, as many food writers dowhen discussing the history of macaroni, isincorrect, although quite commonly and un-derstandably done because there is no uniqueword to indicate macaroni made with soft wheat.That filiform, round, cylindrical, or sheet doughproducts made from a mixture of water and theflour from cereal grains existed for a very longtime is not in question. That fact is not ofinterest to historians. After all, some MiddleEastern flatbreads are made of wheat flour andwater and are rolled out as thin as lasagne.What is historically important about the inven-tion of macaroni, the sine qua non of its defini-tion, is that it is made with a particular type ofwheat flour, Triticum turgidum var. durum....

What Wright manages to accomplishhere is less to persuade you that what a foodhistorian most wants to know about pasta iswhen it began to be made with durum wheat(who’s arguing?) than to evoke that nightmarewhere you find yourself suddenly back in acollege classroom, the professor fixing you withan accusatory eye and snarling, “That defini-tion tells us nothing; it is not historically heuris-tic.” You wake up drenched in sweat, thinking,“Good God, I don’t even know what that means....”

In a book this size a persistently hector-ing tone wears very thin, and Wright simply hasno sense of when enough is enough. Unfortu-nately, this is just one symptom of the book’spervasive flaw—an overarching conviction thathis readers can’t be trusted to understandwhat he is getting at...and, in consequence, arelentless determination to pound each andevery point into our thick heads. Passagesbelaboring the obvious or making niggling dis-tinctions in a rancorous tone are the least of it.Excise every passage that either explains whatwe are about to be told or summarizes andexplains again what we have just been told andthe book would not only be significantly short-er but much easier to follow.

Take all the above, scatter five hundredrecipes randomly throughout, and what youhave is a text in need of serious editing. If only

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the Morrow editorial department had expend-ed the necessary effort to extract from Wright’smanuscript the remarkable book that A MEDI-TERREAN FEAST ought to—and surely could—have been. What we have been given instead isa book that punishes most those who make agenuine effort to read it through.

My advice is: don’t. Instead, read thoseparts that especially interest you and otherwiseconsole yourself with—and here we come to thegood news—the book’s superb collection ofrecipes. With these, too, there are problems thata stricter editorial hand could have resolved.Some should have been left on the cutting-roomfloor—what is a recipe for French fries doinghere?—and the others organized into some sortof coherent order. As things stand now, they arescattered higgledy-piggledy throughout the text—that eggplant recipe you vaguely remembercould be in twenty different places.

Even so, what a splendid trove of recipesit is, sampling the cooking of every historicalera and—it seems—practically every neigh-borhood in the Mediterranean basin. Many ofthem are unusual, almost all of them skillfullypresented, and a goodly number individuallyquarried by the author himself.

Among those worth noting are the sumac-flavored chicken-and-onion casserole fromPalestine, baked in a wrapping of flatbread; thegarlic-, herb-, and pepper-flavored appetizer ofmarinated green olives, lupine beans, andmixed nuts from Languedoc, amusingly namedAperó-Chic Super (“super-chic appetizer”); thelobster risotto from Friuli-Venezia Giulia, inwhich the coral, tomalley, and leg meat arepounded into a paste that is then stirred intothe cooking broth, itself made from the waterin which the lobsters were previously boiled.

My eye was also caught by some heartybreakfast stews sold out of cauldrons by hole-in-the-wall vendors to dock workers—in Sa-lonika, lamb trotter soup, and in Tunis, lablani,a fiery, garlicky chickpea stew.

The following recipes, the first from An-dalusia and the next from Basilicata, are twogood examples of Wright’s knack for spottingfresh and simple dishes and explaining whythey matter. Such enthusiasm makes himmuch better company in the kitchen than inthe classroom and ultimately rescues his bookfrom failure. The tragedy is that it should everhave had to do so.

REMOLACHAS CON ATÚN

(BEETS WITH TUNA)

THE AUTHOR NOTES: This dish using tuna in oilis a beautiful maroon color from the beets,and is extraordinarily appetizing. The fla-vors are enticing and an excellent accom-paniment to grilled chicken or fish. Re-member that beet juice can stain (the rea-son it was used as a dye in medieval times),so handle with care around clothing.

[SERVES 4]

10 small beets, trimmed of leaves

One 31/2-ounce can imported tuna in olive oil

salt to taste • 1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil

2 tablespoons red wine vinegar

2 garlic cloves, finely chopped

11/2 tablespoons finely chopped fresh parsley leaves

•Bring a pot of lightly salted water to a boiland cook the beets whole with a portion oftheir stems until easily pierced by askewer, about 20 minutes. Drain and letcool, then peel, trim, and dice.

•Place the beets on a platter and add thetuna with its oil, breaking it apart. Sprinklesome salt, the olive oil, vinegar, garlic, andparsley on top of the beets and tuna. Tossgently but well, and serve.

�AGNELLO CON FUNGHI

(LAMB WITH MUSHROOMS)

THE AUTHOR NOTES: Mushrooms are the foodpar excellence in sylvan/pastoral cuisine,and in Basilicata a cook would usecardoncelli (Lactarius deliciosus), mush-rooms unavailable to us. But a mixture ofportobello, oyster, and chanterelle mush-rooms provides an equally lusty taste. Oruse common (button or field) mushroommixed with dried porcini that have beenpreviously soaked and drained. Do notwash the fresh mushrooms—brush orwipe them clean. This recipe from Materais perfect for cold weather.

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Work, Adventures,

Childhood, Dreams

Patience Gray(EDIZIONI LEUCASIA, 1999)

Have a room of your own and keep the key to thedoor in your pocket or something like that, saidJung. —Patience Gray

FASCICOLI, THE AUTHOR CALLS THEM (the English

word is “fascicles”)—pieces of writing tooallusive to be called essays, too coherent

and carefully crafted to be called fragments.Instead, bursts of thought, dreams, memoriespropel us to mysterious destinations along routesfull of sudden, unmarked curves. Their titles—“Patron Saint and Patron,” “About Your Journeyand Mine,” “Other Worlds & Other Rooms”—often serve more as punch lines than as guide-posts, and they certainly give you no hint at all ofa prose style that can catch you up and spin youalong like a leaf in a freshet, making you dizzywith pleasure just when you most ought to bepaying attention to the lie of the shore.

Notice, for instance, how in the followingpassage the reader is unexpectedly, unexplained-ly flipped back in time as well as distance—thechill of the evening reminding the writer oftotemic transitions in the landscape on thedrive north from Italy.

We reached Paris at night and slid into the lastparking space outside Napoleon’s Circus. Itwas July, a Sunday, cold, and most of the barson the boulevard were closed. Sunflowers stopat the Bouches-du-Rhône and the gold cornhad turned green on the way.

She and her late husband, Norman Mommens,are planning to spend the night with theirfriend, Wolfe.

The elliptical drag up five floors of dilapidatedstaircase ended in a fruitless banging on Wolfe’sdoor. There was a window on the landing open-ing on a courtyard well. A turtle dove was rollingits rrr’s in the hollow depths below. We stood atthe open window, remembering the turtles pe-culiar snoring whirr on spring evenings, byApollona’s shingle-choked rivermouth. We usedto find turtle corpses there, flat side up, wherethe fresh water seeped through the shingle andtrickled in glittering little streams, sifted bysand, down the beach. “Turtles, pecked at thethroat by turtle doves,” so Norman said.

The well was deep and Wolfe’s attic windowwas wide open, strung with a stave of laundrylines on which a random assemblage of clothes-pegs were marking time. “I’ll walk along theroof,” I said. “Don’t!” said Norman. Done in bythe mileage and the flapping of the canvas cab,he was preparing to doss down on the landing.I took off my sandals, got out of the window anddecided not to look down. I kept my eye on bothfeet on the cat-run ledge which ran along theroofline. Gingerly touching the sloping slates ofthe mansard roof I advanced slowly, reachedthe corner, turned the right angle, went onsome twenty feet, then started feeling for thecast-iron window bar. It had a piece of loosewood tacked along the top. Stupid to fall now, Ithought. I got through the window and openedthe door.

The extraordinary disorder of the claustro-phobic little room! When two people get insidethey have at once to sit down on the bed to makeway for the piano, the extendable table, therecords, the coffee grinder, the eau de vie, andthe books and music standing out in cantile-vered piles. The bed, a 1930 piece, was inextri-cably combined with a varnished credenzamotorstyled, a rented room’s pretence to stabi-

a a

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World Food CaféChris & Carolyn Caldicott

(SOMA, $28, 192 PAGES)

ALTHOUGH WORLD FOOD CAFÉ was just pub-lished just last fall, by the time I read areview of it* the publisher had already

sold out their stock and I had to buy my copyfrom a used-book dealer.† You have only topick it up to understand why prescient readerscleared it from the bookstore shelves: WORLD

FOOD CAFÉ is one of the most compelling (andlovely to look at) vegetarian cookbooks to comeour way in quite some time.

Chris Caldicott is a British photojour-nalist and the official photographer for RoyalGeographic Society expeditions. At some point,he began collecting recipes for dishes that heencountered during his travels, sometimessimply from watching the cooks while theyprepared them. In 1991, he and his wife,Carolyn, also a vegetarian and global cookingenthusiast, opened the World Food Café inLondon’s Covent Garden, from which ulti-mately came this cookbook.

WORLD FOOD CAFÉ is divided into fourparts—the Middle East and Africa; India, Nepal,and Sri Lanka; Southeast Asia and China; andLatin America—each of which is then broken upinto chapters devoted to a particular country—Morocco, Mali, Cuba, Turkey, etc.—or, in thecase of India, areas of a country. The authorsintroduce both parts and chapters with briefdescriptions of their experiences eating in theseplaces and then present the recipes they gath-ered there. In some instances, these are sur-prisingly few—the chapter on China offers onlytwo!—and in a few other instances, they will beall too familiar to American readers; Mexico isrepresented by—among others—guacamole,refried beans, and huevos rancheros.

However, this is a small complaint tomake about a book containing so many inter-esting (and often easily prepared) dishes gath-ered from odd corners of the globe. Some arestreet food, like the fiery and garlicky eggplantdish the authors ate near their guest house inCalcutta. Others were served in private homes,

like the corn curry they enjoyed at the house ofa stationmaster on Diu, a tiny island in theArabian Sea, when he invited them to comethere for lunch when their train was delayed.Another time, on a riverboat journey along theNiger, they ate their meals on deck, cooked bynative passengers who had come “equippedwith stoves, pots, and hampers of ingredients,subsidizing their fares by selling hearty stews.”The authors’ version of one of these, sweetpotatoes cooked in a complexly flavored pea-nut-butter sauce, has become a signaturedish at the World Food Café.

SWEET POTATO STEW IN A PEANUT GINGER SAUCE[SERVES 4 TO 6]

4 tablespoons sunflower oil

1 large onion, cubed • 4 garlic cloves, crushed

2-inch piece fresh ginger, peeled and minced

13/4 pounds sweet potatoes, peeled and cubed

1 pound white cabbage, cubed

2 teaspoons paprika

1 teaspoon cayenne pepper

13/4 cups ( 14 ounces) chopped plum tomatoes

1 cup pineapple juice1/2 cup smooth peanut butter

salt and pepper to taste

TO GARNISH

2 carrots, peeled and grated

2 beets, peeled and grated

2 bananas, peeled and sliced • juice of 1 lime

handful of fresh cilantro leaves, chopped

•Heat the sunflower oil in a large, heavypan over medium heat and sauté the onionuntil soft. Add the garlic and ginger, sautéfor a few minutes, then add the sweetpotatoes and cabbage.

•When the vegetables start to soften, addthe paprika and cayenne. Stir to coat thevegetables with the spices. Add thechopped tomatoes and pineapple juice.Cover the pan and simmer until the veg-etables are soft. Then stir in the peanutbutter until well combined and season totaste with salt and pepper.

From the Cook’s Bookcase

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•Toss the carrots, beets, and bananas inthe lime juice and sprinkle over the dish,together with the cilantro. Serve with rice.

Parisian Home CookingMichael Roberts

(MORROW, $25, 355 PAGES)

WHEN WILL FOOD WRITERS CATCH ON TO THE

FACT that the famous passage in whichthe narrator of REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS

PAST soaks his madeleine (an insipid cookie)into his tisane of tilleul leaves (a vile herbalconcoction drunk by the French to calm theirdigestion and bring on sleep) has everything todo with the involuntary power of memory andnothing whatsoever to do with gastronomy? Asthe epigraph to a cookbook, PARISIAN HOME

COOKING included, Proust’s famous quotationis as apt—and as appetizing—as a cough syrupadvertisement.

It is to Michael Roberts’ credit that hisbook would have been not one whit less attrac-tive had he actually chosen to begin it with apaean to Nyquil. And what a good idea for acookbook, too—go hang around Parisian mar-kets, get fellow shoppers to invite you home todinner, and collect recipes from all and sun-dry. (Of course, it helps if you’re a professionalchef who spends part of every year in Paris andthose fellow shoppers are your friends.) Theresulting book—enriched with a wealth of warmlyintimate black-and-white photographs by Pierre-Giles Vidoli that bring you into real-worldParisian kitchens—is a casual stroll throughtoday’s French dinner, a meal prepared in aworld of small apartments, minimal free time,and working wives.

There is a chapter on every course, pref-aced by an explanation of how it has reshapeditself to fit contemporary Gallic taste. Intro-ductions to individual dishes sometimes pro-vide the provenence of the recipe (some goodtales there) and other times information aboutthe dish itself and why this version is Roberts’favorite. He also shares news of current Pari-sian culinary fads—like seeking out just-duggarlic heads for making chicken with forty

cloves of garlic—and reassures us that theFrench are still very attuned to la différence, incooking as everywhere else.

Parisian [women] cook in an offhanded man-ner, relying on intuition and experience, notworrying about a dish coming out perfectly.“Women attach less importance to appearancethan to tradition, to long-simmering dishes likebouillabaisse,” says Gisèle Berger, who has arestaurant in Clichy. “It’s less method, morelove.” On the other hand, men approach cook-ing as if it were a problem to solve, an obstacleto overcome. Says Erna Jacquillat, a cookingteacher, “They follow recipes. Their cooking ismethodical and their dishes are usually wellpresented and impressive. I can look at amirepoix [a finely chopped flavoring mixture ofcarrots, celery, and onions] and tell you thegender of the person who chopped it up.”

There are some sophisticated recipeshere (have to keep the men happy, after all),but most of the dishes in PARISIAN HOME COOKING

are direct, simple, and uncomplicatedly deli-cious, like the salad of toasted walnuts andtorn bits of Belgian endive, tossed in a dressingof walnut oil and lemon juice; the musselsbroiled in garlic butter; the chicken simmeredin red wine and aged red wine vinegar; thegratin of broccoli rabe and Gruyère; the tartwith a crust almost like “a big shortbreadcookie” and a smooth, rich, intensely lemonyfilling. Interestingly, Roberts devotes a wholechapter to eggs, since Parisians, who are baf-fled by our own habit of serving them forbreakfast, often prepare scrambled eggs for aneasy, soothing dinner. His directions for mak-ing these in the French manner is a model ofelegant recipe writing.

SCRAMBLED EGGS THE FRENCH WAYWhen properly executed, oeufs brouillés, liter-ally, “agitated eggs,” bear slight resemblance totheir American cousin, scrambled eggs. Thescramble should result in small tender clumpsof eggs suspended in an almost saucelike base.Most people prefer them creamy, with the con-sistency of oatmeal. Cooked until dry, they’remore like small-curd cottage cheese but stillspringy and light. Use a small pot rather thana skillet for French-style scrambled eggs. It’spointless to cook less than 6 eggs; in fact, thelarger the quantity, the better the scramble.

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page eleven

For each egg, add 1 teaspoon of water, 1/8

teaspoon salt, and 1/2 teaspoon of butter toyour bowl of eggs. Beat the mixture lightly,using a wooden spoon; use a whisk for scram-bling. Scramble the eggs over low heat, whisk-ing all the time. When the mixture begins tocoagulate and form lumps, begin a little danceof removing your pot from the heat and replac-ing it, scraping the bottom and sides with thewhisk to detach the particles that form there. Ifyou loosely scramble 6 eggs in less than 9minutes, you’ve not done it properly. For richerscrambled eggs, stir in 1 teaspoon each creamand butter per egg at the end of cooking.

This variation makes a perfect end-of-summersupper.

SCRAMBLED EGGS WITH TOMATOES, SHALLOTS,AND GARLIC

[SERVES 4]

3 tablespoons olive oil • 1/3 cup thinly sliced shallots

3 cloves garlic, thinly sliced

11/4 pounds Roma tomatoes, peeled, seeded, andchopped

3 sprigs fresh thyme (or 1/2 teaspoon dried)

11/2 teaspoons salt and freshly ground black pepperto taste

10 large eggs • 3 tablespoons plus 1 teaspoon water

2 tablespoons unsalted butter, cut into bits

2 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley

•Heat the oil in a medium skillet overmedium heat. Cook the shallots and garlic,stirring, for 2 minutes. Add the tomatoes,thyme, 1 teaspoon of the salt, and pepperto taste and cook until the mixture is dry,about 10 minutes. Remove from the heat.

•Break the eggs into a bowl. Add half thetomato mixture (keep the remaining toma-toes warm), the water, butter, and theremaining 1/2 teaspoon salt and beat witha wooden spoon. Pour the eggs into asaucepan, place over low heat, and whiskcontinuously until the eggs begin tothicken, about 6 minutes. Remove fromthe heat and continue whisking for 30seconds, then replace over low heat andcook, always whisking, for 2 minutes. Re-

move again from the heat and continuewhisking for 30 seconds, then replace overlow heat and cook, always whisking, for 2to 4 minutes more, to desired doneness.

•Remove the eggs from the heat and mix inthe parsley. Pour the eggs into a largeserving bowl and mound the remainingtomato mixture in the center. Serve imme-diately with—or on—hot buttered toast.

Memories of a Lost EgyptColette Rossant

(CLARKSON POTTER, $20, 159 PAGES)

WHAT BETTER ANODYNE THAN FOOD to soothethe misery of the unhappy, lonely,cut-adrift child? Uncom-plicated, rich-

ly sensual, immediately comforting, food canoffer everything that love can, albeit shrunk toone dimension. Even when meals themselvesare miserable, there is the eating that can takeplace in private and, at least in old-fashioned,privileged households, the time spent in thekitchen in the company of the cook.

Colette Rossant had a French motherand an Egyptian father; he died in 1938, whenshe was six. Her mother then left her and herslightly older brother in Cairo, in the care of thefather’s family of wealthy Sephardic Jews.Alas, her mother did not then entirely abandonher but reappeared periodically to wreak emo-tional havoc—summoning her to France andthen sending her back to Cairo again when thematernal role once more began to pale.

Rossant has a sensuous, bittersweetprose style not unreminiscent of the originalColette, and it is the perfect medium for heraffectionate but unsentimental portrait of thegood life, Sephardic style, in a Belle Epoquemansion near the Nile in Cairo’s Garden City.The house, large enough for members of herfather’s extended family to have separate apart-ments, was a hive of gossip and intrigue, overwhich her grandmother ruled with a firm butusually benevolent hand.

Simple Cooking 70page twelve

This illustration of my Kyocera 51/2-inch cook’s knife showsit about 10 percent smaller than real life. I’ve also exagger-ated the contrast to bring out the texture of the blade; inactual appearance it is pure white ( i.e., no stainless steelaura). Note the chip missing from the bottom of the blade.

eighty-five to sixty-nine dollars (it retails for ahundred and fifty, or about the same price of atop-of-the-line J. A. Henkels chef’s knife twiceits size). A stainless steel knife with a bladethat is ground on only one side is a very cheapthing indeed, but ceramic is a different mate-rial. This is by far the sharpest knife of any weown, and we own some very good knives.How sharp is sharp? When Kyocera tried toproduce razor blades out of the same mate-rial, their project engineers cut themselvesso badly on the prototypes that the projectwas abandoned. In hardness, zirconia iscloser to diamond than to steel—it notonly takes a very sharp edge but stayssharp for a very long time. (This is just aswell, since they can only be resharpenedon a special motor-driven diamond wheel,which usually means sending the knifeback to manufacturer.)

Ceramic blades have other thingsgoing for them besides a long-lastingsuper-sharp edge. They are chemicallyinert (no interaction with acid foods),they never rust or stain, and they arestick free. However, most of these qual-ities can also be found in high-quality

stainless steel knives. If you don’t mindsharpening your own knives, the only reasonto own a Kyocera blade is for its sharpness—and while sharpness is certainly an importantvirtue in a kitchen knife, some time spent withthis one will teach you that it isn’t the only one.

First, though, let me say that in kitchenwork where sharpness is everything, the Kyo-cera is superb. It slides through tomatoes andonions. Its nonstick surface also makes itideal for slicing hard-boiled eggs and anythingelse that tends to cling to a knife blade, likesoft cheese. For jobs like these I prefer it to myfaithful stainless steel kitchen knife. Wherethe Kyocera falters is in jobs that require asteel blade’s natural weight. A ceramic bladesimply doesn’t have the heft. This means thatyou have to push the knife through a cabbage

✑ SUPER-SHARP CERAMIC KITCHEN KNIFE. This yearone of my birthday presents was a super-sharp ceramic kitchen knife. These high-tech wonders are made byh only companyin the world—Kyocera (pronounced KEY-o-say-rah—the name comes from “KyotoCeramics”), at a factory in in Sendai, asmall city in southwest Japan on theisland of Kyushu. The knives carry apremium price (although they can befound at a substantial discount—see thebuying note, below), in part because ofthe high import duties the United Statesimposes on such advanced ceramic prod-ucts and partly because the process ofmaking the knives is complicated andcost-intensive. Powdered zinconium anda binding material are molded into blade-shaped blanks using special high-pres-sure presses. These blanks are then fired(sintered is the technical term) for severaldays at temperatures over 1000°F. Final-ly, the tempered blanks are sharpened ondiamond sharpening wheels, polished,and affixed to various styles (wood, plas-tic, ergonomic) of handle.

Kyocera makes two ultra-premiumsuper-sharp ceramic blades, both 6-inchchef knives. The first is the KC-200,which retails at over three hundred dol-lars and is the only one made of zirconi-um carbide—a substance that turns asexy black when fired. It produces aharder blade than does the less expensivezirconium oxide that they use to maketheir other knives, including the othersuper-sharp model, the KC-130, whichcost just over two hundred dollars. Whatsets both of these knives apart from theothers is that their edges are formed bygrinding both sides of the blade, whereaswith the others, only one side is ground.Since the ceramic is prone to chipping orshattering during the grinding process,doing both sides is especially tricky.

Both of the super-premium bladeswere too expensive for me; indeed, I waitedfor a sale that reduced the usual discountprice of the LK-65, a five-and-a-half-inchchef’s knife with a plain plastic handle from

July~October 2000

ELECTRONIC EDITION

Simple Cooking 70 © 2000 John Thorne and Matt LewisThorne. All rights reserved. ❍ SC is published every othermonth. A subscription to the electronic edition is $24 for sixissues, worldwide. ❍ Unless stated otherwise, we assumeletters to us are meant for publication and can be editedaccordingly. ❍ P.O. Box 778, Northampton MA 01061.

E-MAIL : MATT&JOHN@OUTLAWCOOK.COM.WEBSITE: HTTP://WWW.OUTLAWCOOK.COM.

SUBSCRIBE AT: HTTP://OUTLAWCOOK.SAFESHOPPER.COM/ISSN 0749-176X

TABLE TALK

page thirteen

or a carrot, whereas with my stainless Chinesecleaver I simply slice—the heaviness of theblade does the rest. In the same way, a steelchef’s knife will cut a pot roast into thinner,more even slices, because the weight of themetal blade keeps the knife stroke true whilethe ceramic blade quickly slips off course.

Finally, there is the matter of aesthetics.My favorite kitchen knives have character—acertain roughness of temperament mellowedby the patina of long use and user familiarity.The Kyocera, like many another high techmiracle, has all the personality of a computermodem or a caller ID machine. The zirconiumoxide blade has the look and feel of a piece ofsharpened Formica, which makes it seem lesslike a piece of premium kitchen equipmentthan something thrown in as a bonus forresponding to a late-night infomercial (“Yoursfree! the plastic wonder blade! so sharp you’llthrow all your other knives away!”),

Like a TV giveaway, the Kyocera turnsout to have all sort of caveats attached: Don’tflex it. Don’t use it to chop bones, cut hardbread crusts, or frozen foods. When you’rewashing it, be careful not to strike the edgeagainst a cup or a plate. With a regular knife,the fragile one is you; with the Kyocera, youhave to be careful for the blade as well as of it.

The bottom line? Well, like many thingsin this day and age, while I’m not sorry I own itI could have easily lived without it. I still covetthe top-of-the-line, sexy black ceramic blade,but it will never make it to the top of my wishlist, or even into the top ten. Actually, what Ireally want to own now is their twenty-dollarvegetable peeler. I’ll bet that is reallysomething...which, when you think about it, isa rather peculiar thing to say about a line ofpremium knives.

Anyone interested in premium kitchen knivesof any sort should request a printed catalogfrom Professional Cutlery Direct, a companyspecializing in top-of-the-line cutting tools (allsold at a discount), sharpeners, cutting boards,and storage blocks, plus other items of interestto chefs and serious cooks. The brands theyoffer include Kyocera, of course, and Global(Japan); LamsonSharp (USA), Forshner/

✑ KINNIE. A hug and a kiss for subscriber MINNIE

BIGGS (Kurrajong, Australia), who sent me a canof Kinnie, a sweet-sour soda produced in Maltaof bitter oranges and eighteen aromatic herbs.As soon as I read about it in her “Letter fromMalta” (SC•67), I tracked down the Kinnie web-site and begged to be allowed to order a case. Nodeal. And my e-mails to web-based sellers ofexotic sodas weren’t a whit more productive. Iliked Kinnie very much, and even more I likedthat it is actually made with what it is supposedto taste like—something that in this countryalmost guarantees a soda’s extinction. Remem-ber when Canada Dry Gingerale used to bragabout its Jamaican ginger? Today, the word“ginger” doesn’t even appear in the ingredientlist. Only one local supermarket carries both mycurrent favorites—Moxie (made with real gen-tian root) and Orangina (made with orangejuice, orange pulp, and tangerine juice)—and itallots to each the smallest possible shelf space.Kinnie, as it turns out, tastes a little like Moxieand Orangina mixed together in the same glass—

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which probably means I shouldn’t hold mybreath for it to find a US distributor. But at least,for the moment, I know how to make it myself.

✑ MANGO MONTEGO BAY. Subscriber KATRIN WILDE

(New York, NY) was blown away by a simplemango dessert served up by her friend KathyHyde. You will be, too. This is the sort of recipewhere exact proportions have to be dictated bythe amount of fruit at hand, but the drift is clear.Choose soft, ripe fruit. Cut open and remove theflesh and divide it into little bowls. Drizzle eachportion with a squeeze of fresh orange or limejuice. Gently sweeten a nice amount of crèmefraîche with powdered sugar and stir in a littlefreshly grated lime peel. Top each portion of fruitwith a dollop of this and enjoy.

✑ OUR BOOKS NEW AND OLD. Recently we uncov-ered a small stash of the original hardcoveredition of OUTLAW COOK and are offering them ona first-come first-serve basis to our readers. Ifyou’ve worn out your paperback edition, youmight want to claim a copy that’s a little moredurable—Matt and I will autograph it and, if youlike, inscribe it to you personally. The price is$25 plus $2 postage (book rate) or $4 (priority).Send us an e-mail to claim one—if we have oneleft we’ll send it to you with an invoice.

Conversely, in October, SERIOUS PIG will(at last!) be appearing in paperback—with abrand new cover and at a very nice price(considering it is 528 pages long)—$15. Asusual, we’ll be selling autographed (and, ifdesired, inscribed) copies to interested read-ers. If you’d like us to reserve one of the earliestcopies for you, let us know, and we’ll put you onthe list.

The best news for last—we also have anew book coming out in October. Called POT ON

lize pills, postcards, alarm clock, theatreprogrammes and Galerie Daniel Cordier’smescalin emanations.

Feasts on Sundays, one could see that. Anenamelled iron casserole was squatting on thepiano lid with the remains of some appetizingfish congealing among Biennale catalogues anddiscs. A huge bottle of Cent’Erbe—Venice’slagoon-green medicinal liqueur—and a full glasswere fighting on the table with three whitechina mazagrans, a fallen rose, a blanchedcarnation. No blood but a lot of green liquor hadbeen spilt. What looked like a cast-iron astro-labe was swinging its handle in the mess and alot of ice was melting in an aluminium pot-au-feu on the floor. Goncharov, Rimbaud andStendhal signalled from the bed. Maria Callas,her photograph blown up to life size, dominatedthe scene, with the last act of La Traviata on therecord player, and the green walls pinned to theeyebrows with Normaniana.

If you don’t quite follow all this, you’re notalone. At least you can look up “mazagran” inthe dictionary (if you can figure out the rightdictionary to consult—I finally found the wordin a fat French one, which told me only that it isa kind of goblet)—but for the most part you areleft to work things out as best you can yourself.The author is the last one to spoil an effect withan explanation.

It probably rarely occurs to her to do so—publishing her own writing, she has no anxiouseditor eager to meddle with her sinewy, enig-matic sentences. But it is also a mark of respectfor the reader in a time when almost all writingis addressed to the lowest possible commondenominator. Her voice seems to speak to usfrom another time, or perhaps from anotheruniverse, rather than from just another coun-try. I find the result as cleansing as it is enjoy-able, a swim in a mountain stream.

WORK, ADVENTURES, CHILDHOOD, DREAMS waspublished in a limited edition under the imprintof Rolando Civilla’s Edizioni Leucasia di Le-vante Arti Grafiche. The production was closelysupervised by the author, whose presence canbe felt in the typeface, the book’s spacious andattractive design, and especially in the nature,placement, and profusion of the illustrations(many of them by her, many others photo-graphs of Norman Mommens’ sculptures).

The outcome is something that is notonly handsome and unique but in shape, de-

Don’t Be Alarmed...

by the four-month dating of this issue. We’re justrealigning the actual publication date with the timespan displayed on our masthead. As usual, the nextissue will arrive approximately two months fromnow...but instead of being the once-again-late “Sep-tember/October” issue, it will be the exactly-on-time“November/December” issue. Pretty neat, huh? Need-less to say, this strictly mechanical adjustment will notaffect the number of issues you’ll receive as part of yoursubscription. —The Editors

Patience Gray

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sign, and content the perfect companion to theauthor’s HONEY FROM A WEED, a food book thatalso issued from that other universe. In thesepages, you return to the same place, the samesensibility; only the subject is different. Theother book gave us the cooking and the eating;here are the work and the days, the memoriesand the dreams. Otherwise, the contents areexactly the same, a complex intellectual energybrought to heel by irreducibly simple things—two bottles on a work table, a local neighborseeking a replacement for a stolen statue of asaint, a laurel-wood plank found in a cowstall,an unanticipatedly pure bar of silver (the au-thor works with both precious and wholly mun-dane metals)—and what happens next. This, Ican promise, will be what you least expect.

[SERVES 6]

2 pounds boneless leg of lamb, cubed (with a little fatleft on)

11/2 pounds mushrooms (see above)

2 garlic cloves, chopped • 1 dried red chile pepper,crumbled

1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil • salt to taste

•Preheat the oven to 325°F. Put all theingredients in a large enameled cast-iron orearthenware casserole. Toss well, cover,and place in the oven. Bake until tender,about 1 to 1 1/2 hours, stirring every 10minutes. Serve.

Those wanting to own a copy of the book havetwo options: (1) persuade an American pub-lisher to bring it more widely into print (con-tact us if this is a possibility and we’ll put youin direct touch with Patience) or (2) order acopy directly from Tom Jaine, publisher ofProspect Books, who has generously taken onthe task of selling the Edizioni Leucasia edi-tion for the author. At the time this issue wentto press, copies were available for $50 post-paid (surface mail) for orders shipped to theUSA. Please make your check out to “PPCNA”and—to avoid any confusion—write the title ofthe book somewhere on it, too. Send to TomJaine, Allaleigh House, Blackawton, Totnes,Devon TQ9 7DL, Great Britain.

Mediterranean

Victorinox (Switzerland); J. A. Henckels, Me-ridian, and Wüsthof-Trident (Germany);Sabatier, Gilles de la Fleur, and Thiers-Issard—including their line of old-fashioned carbonsteel blades (France); and Icel of Portugal—which produces fully-forged high-carbon stain-less steel knives at a remarkably low prices).Contact PCD at 242 Branford Rd, NorthBranford CT 06471 • (800) 859-6994 or visitthem online at WWW.CUTLERY.COM.

Knives

THE FIRE, it gathers together essays (most butnot all published in these pages) written overthe past decade. You’ll read about our effortsto make sense of wine, to find something newin the way of a savory breakfast, and to learn tocook a pot of perfect rice. Some chapters relatestories of culinary adventuring—searching Asiangrocery stores for clues to the mysterious (butdelicious) contents of Vietnamese sandwiches,mastering the art of cooking cannellini beansin a bottle, overcoming a lifetime fear of makingrisotto. Others explore different places andtimes, such as nineteenth-century Ireland duringthe potato famine and the India of the BritishRaj. And, as usual, you’ll find carefully de-tailed discussions about making everythingfrom Chinese meat dumplings to griddlecakesto “the best cookies in the world.” We’re accept-ing advance orders for autographed copiesnow at our secure website store—order beforethe publication date (October 15th) and theshipping is on us.

Patience Gray

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New Book

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One of my favorite chapters describes therelationship between her grandmother and Ahmet,the equally stubborn family cook. Both wereexperts in the kitchen, which, of course, didn’thelp matters any—every day began with the twoshouting loudly at each other about what Ah-met might (or assuredly might not) be preparingthat day. And although Ahmet did the dailyshopping, Grandmaman insisted on taking overthe job for the more important weekend dinnersherself, setting out to the open market withtheir servant Abdullah to carry the parcels and,often, with little Colette as well.

Grandmaman was a familiar figure there,and her progress from one part of the market tothe next had something of the quality of a regalprocession.

We would then proceed to the poultry and meatmarket. Grandmaman always started with thepigeon seller. As soon as she appeared, some-one would bring her an old padded woodenchair to sit on while a young boy would be sentto get her some strong, overly sweet Arab coffee,which would be served in a tiny porcelain cupset on a bright silver tray. She would sip hercoffee while discussing the quality of the pi-geons shown to her. “The birds had better betender and plump,” she’d warn, squeezing thepoor bird’s breast, “because they weren’t thelast time!” The pigeons were then killed, plucked,and handed to Abdullah, without being wrappedin greasy newspaper, which was a commonpractice. Abdullah always carried a specialcloth bag for the poultry.

She would then return home in triumph tohand over the spoils to Ahmet, who wouldgrumble that she had paid too much for themeat or chosen fruit that was overripe.

Both grandparents were devoted to thepleasures of the table, which did not necessar-ily mean that they agreed on what those were.

He liked stews; she preferred roasts. He adoredgrilled chitterlings; she disliked them intenselyand would not allow Ahmet to make them. Heloved stuffed eggplant and green peppers; shedelighted in stuffed zucchini or okra cookedwith tomatoes and onions. She relished squabstuffed with rice and pine nuts; he wanted themgrilled and spiced with lime and cumin. Hewould eat three or four at one sitting, pickingup the squab leg delicately with two fingers.“Pick them up with your fingers too, Colette,”

he would say to me. “You cannot use a fork anda knife to eat these birds.” My grandmotherwould frown, muttering that this was very un-dignified for une jeune fille de bonne famille, butI would attack my squab with gusto. OftenGrandpère and I would compare the number ofbones left on our plates.

To the further dismay of her grandmoth-er, Colette was never happier than when shewas able to escape to the kitchen and thecompany of Ahmet, who would prepare littletreats for her and allow her to watch him as heworked. Sadly, all this would change when hermother suddenly reappeared (bursting into thekitchen just as Colette had begun devouring afavorite snack) and, finding her daughter toodark and too plump (i.e., too Egyptian), senther off to a convent to be thoroughly European-ized. More sadly still, soon after Colette wassnatched from this rich and magical world, itwould itself begin to fade away—a few decadeslater there would be hardly a trace of it left.

Although MEMORIES OF A LOST EGYPT is aslim volume, it is anything but slight. Fewwriters can match Rossant’s ability to makeremembered food at once so appetizing and soemotionally resonant. Even the recipes (thereare many of them and they are all good) are apart of—rather than an appendage to—herstory. None more so than the following wonder-ful tomato salad—although to learn why, you’regoing to have to read the book.

FRESH TOMATO SALAD

Bring a pot of water to a boil. Turn off theheat and add 5 large ripe tomatoes. Takethem out after 3 minutes and cool undercold running water. Slip off the skins. In alarge bowl, mix together 2 shallots and 1clove of garlic—both peeled and minced—with 2 tablespoons olive oil and 1 table-spoon lemon juice. Add salt and pepper totaste. Slice the tomatoes and add them tothe bowl. Toss well, sprinkle with 1 table-spoon minced fresh tarragon or fresh cher-vil, and serve at room temperature. Thiswill serve 4 to 6.

Egypt

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July~October 2000EL

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NTHE ACROBAT READER TOOL BAR

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✽ by Terra Brockman in her food letter, Food &Farm Notes, an attractive quarterly publica-tion offering a beguiling mix of down-homefarm life and contemporary cooking, with aseasoning of unexpected literary quotations (“Iwould eat evanescence slowly”—Emily Dickin-son). Her brother, Henry, and his wife, Hiroko,are organic farmers, and both contribute to thepublication, giving it that much more depthand interest. Food & Farm Notes is currently$25 a year for four 16-page issues ($45 for twoyears). (Mention SIMPLE COOKING when you orderand Terra will throw in the current issue forfree.) Make checks payable to “Food & Farm”and send them to 586 Sheridan Sq. #1, Evan-ston IL 60202. E-mail: TERRABOOKS@EARTHLINK.NET.You can find out more about the publication atWWW.TERRABOOKS.COM and about the farm itselfat WWW.HENRYSFARM.COM.➥✽ Copies are available from Jessica’s Biscuit(ECOOKBOOK.COM • 800-878-4264) and from Brit-ain, where the book is still in print and can beeasily ordered from the British branch ofAmazon.com—AMAZON.CO.UK.➥✽ While Wright castigates food writers for fail-ing to take Arab influences into account whenwriting about European Mediterranean cook-ing, he is not particularly generous in givingcredit to those who have, including Mary Tay-lor Simeti, who devoted a lengthy chapter tothe subject in POMP AND SUSTENANCE (Knopf,1989), her groundbreaking work on Sicilianfood. ➥✽ For instance: “Waverley Root, who thoughtthis etymology nonsense, was characteristical-ly wrong.” If that is the case, why does Wrightcontinue to cite him as a source? ➥

footnotes

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