The Spice Shelf

Variety's the very spice of life, That gives it all its flavour. - William Cowper

The Spice Shelf is a random selection from amongst the useless potpourri that inhabits my skull.

Just a few notes out of today’s Taste section in the Buffalo News.

If memory serves, today marks Sara Moulton’s first appearance in the weekly food section. If so, I would like to welcome her to Western New York. While she is still doing great work today – her shows appear occasionally on PBS locally – her live Food Network show Cooking Live (1997 – 2003) is greatly missed. In my opinion, it is, bar none, the best cooking show to have ever graced the airwaves. Better than Jacques. Better than Julia.

You're Gonna Need a Bigger Pot

Scientist have discovered that chickens are related to Tyrannosaurus Rex. Imagine the size of the matzo balls you'd need for that soup.

Home For Passover, Part One - Chicken Soup

The Jewish holidays tend to bring out the traditionalist in me. It's not that I don't take a few liberties, but mostly I prepare things as my Grandmother did. Some of these choices will piss off purists, not to mention my personal physician, but I don't care. The last thing I want is the shade of Sadie Gordon erupting from the ground like Fruma Sarah. And frankly, the stuff tastes like the tastes I recall from childhood.

We start with chicken soup, the soul of Jewish cooking. Sadie was a child of the shtetl, and a mother during the depression. Her choices deserve some respect. They also have the benefit of working. Backs, necks and feet were fine by her but you also need meat for chicken soup for the holidays. She'd use a whole chicken. I prefer the meat from thighs and legs, and they were on sale last week at Niagara County Produce. More than that, the leg/thigh pieces weighed in at 1.25 pounds a piece. Considering that most battery chickens weigh in at 3.5 to 4 pounds there was only one conclusion -- stewing hens!

I bought 1/2 dozen, three of which I left the skin on. My grandma insisted that this added flavor. So, I covered them by about 1 inch with water, brought them slowly to a simmer, and skimmed off the coagulated proteins rising to the top. When that phase ended, I added the vegetables. This is where the purist's heads will explode.

I peel veggies when making traditional stocks, but not for this. Heck, the experts cannot agree on whether the freshest stuff is better for stocks, or old and tired stuff. Some suggest that there are good nutrients near the skin. In my broke, college days I used to collect the skins of onions, peels of carrots and celery tops in the freezer for use in stocks. In this case it just works.

The veggies are scrubbed thoroughly with my Marvin the Martian vegetable brush. In addition to the usual mirepoix parsnips are added in an amount relatively equal to the carrots. The soup does a slow, SLOW, simmer for 1 1/2 hours at which time the chicken is extracted, the meat removed and the scraps and bones returned to the pot for another hour of simmering.

Some of the reserved meat will be returned to the final soup, and some used for chicken salad. The stock is strained and de-fatted, and for service fresh veggies (peeled this time) are added to the jiggly gelatinous stock and cooked until tender. Some of the chicken goes back in, as do the Matzo Balls that Trish made while I was sleeping.

The result? Something that Sadie would recognize and we love!

PS, yes there is some fat on the finished stock. It wouldn't be chicken soup without some -- but then there is the issue of schmaltz. . .

Paean to Campbell's Soups

If you read this blog even occasionally, you know of my love and devotion for the mere concept of soup. I believe it to be not only as close to perfect a food as food gets, but often also a perfect representation of the culture from which that soup originates. When I say I am making such a soup, I am painstaking in doing it properly, and with authenticity. Yet my pantry almost always has two Campbell's condensed soups: Tomato and Chicken Noodle.

They do in fact qualify under any definition of "soup", but for me they take a special place - a comfort, or sick, food. This is what I my Mother fed me when I was under the weather. And, man, have I been under the weather the last week. I decide it was a good time to get pneumonia. Chills, fever, barking cough, difficulty breathing and worst of all a complete and utter loss of appetite. For the most part I was living on water and Canada Dry Ginger Ale (accept no substitutes). But when I did crave something more, it was one or the other of these.

So, here's to the pride of Camden, New Jersey, and here's to comfort foods!

Happy is said to be the family which can eat onions together. -- Charles Dudley Warner

Call it French Onion Soup or Soupe à L’Oignon Gratinée, it is simply a great soup - perfect for a meal on a cold winter night. I have written of my love of soups before, and I am sure I will again, but this soup has a special place in my heart, because it is always my example when discussing the topic of the recipes.

I have been blessed in the past six months to receive three wonderful cooking related books, each of which discusses the concept of a recipe. First, Jacques Pepin's Chez Jacques, a lengthy but elegant dissertation on the recipe, including the observation that: A recipe is a teaching tool, a point of departure. Then there is Michael Ruhlman's brief but equally elegant observation that "Recipes are not assembly manuals." Finally, the is the delightful John Thorne, who opined that "Matt takes a recipe as being instructions for making a dish, where, as often as not, its nuts-and-bolts aspect (which some might say is its only aspect) rarely holds my attention."

These writers sum up my feelings on a variety of levels. The bottom line for me is that a "recipe" is someone's opinion. Here is where Onion Soup comes in - if a recipe were more than simply someone's opinion, there would only be one recipe for French Onion Soup. It's a great example of the variations that can occur; from simplicity to gussying the concept up like a tart.

So, before we get to my opinions, let's deal with some facts and some conjecture. The facts, or at least as we know them. Onions are an ancient food. They were most certainly eaten in their wild form, and have likely been domesticated for more than 5000 years. References exist in ancient times from China, Sumeria and Mesopotamia. Soups made of onion are documented as far back as the Roman Empire.

Onions and radishes were fed to my forefathers as they built the pyramids, and rubbed on Gladiators for strength. By the Middle Ages the main foodstuffs were beans, cabbage and Onions - no mention of meat, fish or fowl. So, while onions were enjoyed by the upper classes, they also remained a inexpensive food for the lowest of the low.

That leads to my conjecture: despite the legends about the various Kings Louis of France, this had its origins as a peasant dish - a way to use up stale bread and readily available onions. That's why I eschew ingredients such as veal stock, champagne or fine cognac.

Here is where opinion comes in. The five basic ingredients of French Onion Soup are: the liquid, the onions, the cheese, the bread and the flavorings. Let's start with the liquid. Most likely the available liquid would have been either the cooking liquid from a previous meal or just water. I have made good ones with water, acceptable ones with canned low-sodium chicken stock (sorry Ruhlman) and barely passable, but edible ones with soup base. For myself, I generally prefer an unassuming homemade beef or chicken stock. In this case I used turkey stock made from the Thanksgiving carcass.

The onions: Many recommend sweet onions such as Vidalia or Maui's. Pooh on them! As many authorities, particularly Russ Parsons, have pointed out, the difference in sugar content between Vidalia type onions and other harsher onions is minimal. The real difference is that sweet onions have less of the sulfur compounds than other, sharper onions. During cooking, these sulfur compounds cook off. Parsons even suggests that the sweet onions are less sweet after cooking than regular onions. So, at about a third of the cost, I'll take yellow storage onions.

The cheese: Usually recommended are Gruyère and Emmenthaler - both are excellent choices. But, in my effort to be frugal in the manner of a peasant housewife I must admit that deli provolone makes a decent topping. I will say that my favorite is also my favorite swiss style cheese: Jarlsberg. I love its nuttiness, and it makes a great Reuben. The main thing to remember is that it is onion soup garnished with cheese, not the other way around.

The bread: It has to be good white bread - no Wonder Bread - but it doesn't have to be expensive artisanal bread. I almost always have homemade, but most supermarkets have decent bread these days from baguettes to wider Italian type loaves (no seeds please). The important thing is that the bread get stale in a day or two. You can dry it in the oven at low temp to finish the job, but don't toast it. I have great results with either straight dough or sourdough.

The flavorings: Salt and Pepper. I have used some thyme on occasion, but found it unnecessary. As to liquids, I usually deglaze with a higher acid white such as Sauvignon Blanc. Cognac as a finisher just seems wrong, but a decent not-too-expensive California Brandy works for what I want.

That's my opinion!

A final note: There are no photos of those beautiful mahogany onions after slowly cooking. The camera needed recharging at a most inconvenient time!

Soup For Your Soul(mate)

Tom Yum Goong is spelled many ways, too many to keep track of (Dtom yum Gkoong is Kasma Loha-unchit's variation on the spelling - I assume it is the most phonetically correct). But that doesn't matter because it is one my favorite soups on the planet.

To me soup is a nearly perfect food; nourishing, warming, comforting, and great for almost any occasion. The origin of the word restaurant is found in restaurer, to restore, originally a hearty, flavorful soup to restore ones vigor.

My favorite soups are usually those which are identified with a certain place on the map, and which in a way identify a culture – at least in my mind. They are simple peasant blends that are wonderful, though many can be gussied up like a tart for the big city folks. Minestrone for Italy; Barley Broth symbolizes Scotland; Avgolémono evokes Greece; Onion Soup Gratinée – France, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Oh, and don’t forget the special soup of my own ranks of chosen people: Good Chicken Soup with Matzo Balls! I haven’t yet tried Czernina, the Polish Duck Blood Soup, but I’d bet a well made one would do the same.

Tom Yum Goong is the perfect evocation of Thailand. I don’t think I can be accused of hyperbole to describe this national soup of Thailand as the perfect balance of hot, sour salty and sweet, just hot and intense enough to make one giggle with a pleasure.

That’s why I am married.

During the beginning of our official courtship (the unofficial part lasted 14 years) we ate a meal at a great local spot called Saigon Bangkok. We were there for the lunch specials, which include Tom Yum Gai - the variation with chicken instead of shrimp. The soup made us giggle so bad we could hardly talk. We were married not long after.

So, I make it a point to make Tom Yum Goong at least once a year. It warms our hearts and our souls. While I have made a pseudo Tom Yum with other, more readily available ingredients, the best results come from getting as close as you can to traditional. Being a whack job, what you see in the first photo is a pot of lemongrass that stays inside in winter and outside in summer. It started from a stalk I bought at Wegmans. I stuck the leftover one in water and it rooted. You can get Kaffir Lime Leaves fresh there at times, but I used dried, and bumped it up with some fresh lime zest.

I tend to start off treating this unusually, as more of a tisane than a soup - steeping the lemongrass and lime leaves to extract the flavors, then removing them ( yes, I know, educated eaters know not to eat them, but it's just easier).

So, then I float in the rest of the flavors, and at the last minute I add just enough shrimp for dinner a (reheated shrimp taste like erasers - I prefer to add more shrimp when reheating).

The result - delightful!!!