Food and Wine's Herbed Meatballs with Rich Tomato Sauce and Ricotta, plus a barbera

From the January 2014 "Readers' Choice" issue. I think you may give yourself some leeway with the gigantic list of ingredients. If you happen not to have fresh mint or enough ground cumin on hand, do not fret. The main point is not to skimp on (1) the milk-soaked ground almonds and (2) the fresh basil leaves and garlic; these latter two ingredients have made all the difference in the last three meatball recipes I have prepared. I must write a book about meatballs, after I write one on lemons.

For the rich tomato sauce:

• 1/4 cup olive oil
• 4 large garlic cloves, minced
• 1 cup tightly packed basil leaves, torn
• 2 Tbsp. oregano leaves
• 2 bay leaves
• 1/2 tsp. crushed red pepper
• 2 (28 ounce) cans whole Italian tomatoes with their juices, crushed
• 6 large anchovy fillets, chopped. (You may please yourself about this. I understand that anchovies are a basic, ancient, and respected flavoring, approved of by no less a source than Sylvia Windle Humphrey, whose A Matter of Taste must forever stand as one of our Culinary-Hall-of-Fame, retro favorites. Still, the only can of anchovies I ever opened reminded me, in all their red segmented glory, so vividly of earthworms that I have no desire ever to open another. You might replace them with a few dashes of Worcestershire sauce, the composition of which I believe owes much to anchovies.)  

For the meatballs:

• 1/2 cup raw almonds, finely chopped
• 1/2 cup milk
• 2 and 1/2 pounds ground lamb
• 2 large eggs, lightly beaten
• 1/4 cup finely chopped fresh basil leaves, plus more for garnish
• 1/4 cup finely chopped flat-leaf parsley -- also called Italian parsley or cilantro, this is the opposite of the curly, decorative, slightly peppery but mostly inconsequential kind we see on restaurant or Passover seder plates. I was just beginning to appreciate the odd tinny flavor of flat-leaf parsley when I read somewhere that, traditionally, Western cuisines have rejected it because its smell is that of bedbugs. 
• 2 Tbsp. chopped mint
• 1 Tbsp. chopped oregano
• 1 and 1/2 tsp. chopped thyme
• 2 large garlic cloves, minced
• 1 Tbsp. dry red wine
• 1 and 1/2 tsps. ground cumin
• 1 and 1/2 tsp. ground coriander
• 1/2 tsp. ground fennel
• 1 and 1/2 Tbsp. kosher salt
• 1/2 tsp. ground black pepper
• 1/4 cup olive oil

Ricotta cheese, for serving

I reiterate that we must feel free to play with this immense and specific list of ingredients. Where, let us say, not only mint or cumin but perhaps fennel and oregano are missing, I see no reason why the cook may not substitute rosemary, curry powder, celery salt, or that wondrous Chilean merquen, smoked chili pepper flakes. The mishmash of spices will taste nice, provided you have provided yourself with the keys, which -- I reiterate --  are fresh garlic, fresh torn basil, almonds and milk. 

Task one: make the sauce. Not difficult. In a large sauce pan, warm the olive oil  Add the garlic, basil, oregano, bay, and red pepper. Warm over moderate heat for 30 seconds. We do not want burned garlic, that horror of horrors, the smell of which you can identify upon walking into any not-so-well-run pizza joint. 

Add the tomatoes and simmer over "moderately low" heat until the tomatoes are "saucy" -- excellent word -- about an hour. [Stir in the anchovies, and] season with salt and pepper. [Maybe.]

Task two. Make the meatballs: Soak the finely chopped almonds in milk for about 10 minutes, until they are thoroughly moistened.  Add the ground meat, the eggs, herbs, and all the spices. Form into small balls and saute briefly in the heated 1/4 cup olive oil, in batches a few at a time, until all are nicely browned.  

Then, either return all the meatballs to the skillet and ladle on the tomato sauce which has already cooked for an hour, bring to a boil, and simmer until the meatballs are cooked through, about another half hour or so; or else simply add the half-cooked meatballs to the simmering sauce, bring to a fresh boil, and simmer another half hour.

While they finish cooking, you may assign yourself task three, which is to cook a potful of pasta. 

To serve all forth, spoon little dollops of ricotta cheese over a helping of pasta and these herbed meatballs in rich tomato sauce. Your accompanying wine should be any red of your choice, but nothing too full of California-style spice or blueberry jam. Why not something more bracing, more cleansing and Italian? A Valpolicella? A barbera, my new go-to wine of choice? I used to have an Italian co-worker named Lorenzo who said, "you really can't find a much better wine than a barbera," -- I think he meant, "in the ordinary course of life, assuming you are not buying Chateau Lynch-Bages as a regular thing" -- and I think he was just about right.

Stefano Farina Barbera d'Alba, retail, about $10.

Summer: grilled chipotle chicken burgers, vodka marinara, pinot grigio

Ah, my fatheads. Summer. Need we say more? It is one of those wonderful words which apparently means, wonderfully, only itself. "From the Middle English sumer and the Old English sumor, akin to the Greek sommer and the Indo European base sem-, meaning summertime; whence Sanskrit sama, half year, season." Since we at Pluot like culinary things, we will mention that the word cinnamon also leaps to mind as the same type of word. Derive it how you will, it means only itself: "from the Hebrew qinnamon, cinnamon."

Somer is the time for us to cook something very easy for dinner, and to drink a refreshing and surprisingly assertive pinot grigio to accompany our meal. We say surprisingly assertive because we have long since described the pinot grigio (aping Winston Churchill's dismissal of some tepid politician), as "not a grape to go tiger-shooting with." This one at least did well beside a grilled chicken burger. Graffigna Reserve pinot grigio, 2012.

The chicken burgers are very easy to prepare. In a large bowl, combine: 2 pounds ground chicken, about a half teaspoon dried thyme, a half teaspoon dried tarragon -- more of these to taste, if you like, or any different herbs you like -- salt and pepper to taste also, and about a half teaspoon chipotle chili pepper. We picked this up in the spice aisle at the grocery store because we finally ran out of that delicious merquen, or Chilean smoked chili pepper flakes.

Combine the meat and spices thoroughly, and shape all into 8 patties. Brush them with olive oil. Let them rest on a plate while you ready your charcoal grill, using that divine chimney starter which is so convenient and such a saving of briquettes, and which obviates the need for lighter fluid. 

When the coals are hot, dump them carefully into your grill, place the rack over them, and lay on your chicken burgers, arranging them nicely over the evenly piled coals. Place the lid over the grill, with the vents on the lid slightly open. Check your burgers in about ten to fifteen minutes, after which time they should have baked through. All that remains is for you to flip them over and let them sear to golden brown, since now you will leave the lid off and allow the flames to leap up a little.

In the meantime, you can put together a vodka-tomato sauce, following the recipe in The La Bonne Soupe Cookbook (Jean-Paul Picot and Doris Tobias, 1997), or you can open a jar of Mezzeta's "Napa Valley Bistro" Creamy Vodka Marinara Sauce, which if you do that, I won't tell a soul.

From whence-ever you derive your vodka-tomato sauce, you will have it simmering gently just for ten minutes or so while your burgers finish on the grill, and then you will bring them in and slip them into the bubbling sauce. Once everything is heated through and smothered and juicy, you may dish up. Serve your burgers open faced, with toasted buns and a salad, or over rice or noodles with perhaps a side of some zucchini or mushrooms you have slathered in olive oil and grilled over the dying coals. Pour the pinot grigio.

And lastly for the purists among you, here is the recipe for Penne à la Vodka, Pasta Quills with Vodka Sauce, from La Bonne Soupe. It takes about half an hour to make. Experienced cooks may enjoy streamlining this to suit their own convenience, simply noting that the four necessary ingredients are tomato, vodka, cream, and herbs. Since in the middle of the recipe we all find out that we are required to have a cup of tomato sauce already on hand, I grant everyone the dispensation of being allowed to open a can of stewed tomatoes to stand in for the pre-prep "sauce."

La Bonne Soupe's Penne à la Vodka

2 Tbsp. olive oil
4 cloves garlic, diced
3 cups plum tomatoes, peeled, seeded, chopped
1/2 cup vodka
1 cup tomato sauce
1/3 cup chopped fresh basil or 1/2 teaspoon dried
1 cup heavy cream
salt and freshly ground pepper to taste

 Heat the oil in a 2 quart heavy pot. Add the garlic and cook, stirring, until softened but not browned, about 2 minutes. Add the tomatoes and cook, stirring, until they have softened, about 5 minutes. Add the vodka, raise the heat, and cook until the vodka is absorbed, about 10 minutes. Reduce the heat and add the tomato sauce, basil, cream, and salt and pepper. Cook, stirring, until everything is reduced to 3 cups, about 12 minutes. Remove from heat and serve ladled over pasta.

Food & Wine's beef ricotta meatballs, and more Road Trip (!)

I will give you this meatball recipe from Food & Wine's March 2014 issue, as long as you come along with me on a little more of my road trip to Iowa City. Meatballs are sort of hearty and American, aren't they, just as road trips are hearty and American? Did I mention that on a simple walk around my nice cousin's block -- all my cousins are nice of course, I did not mean to distinguish -- I found Grant Wood's home? He bought it thanks to the fortune he earned from painting American Gothic. The address is 1142 Court Street.

The house had belonged to a wealthy family who made their money in brickmaking. Across Court Street, the land slopes noticeably down; this is where the clay was dug to make the bricks that built the Oakes' fortune and the house. In spring the old clay pits are all flowering groundcover, and the trees in other people's backyards.

Now we will start our dinner, chopping, measuring, and braising as we travel. The recipe is "Beef ricotta meatballs with braised beet greens," but we will adapt it because it was a bit fussy and because it included anchovies, which I am sorry I cannot abide. If you have the inner strength to open a can of what looks like red earthworms and then cook with them, I salute you. For my part when a recipe calls for anchovies I substitute a drop or two of Worcestershire sauce, which I believe gives much the same flavor.

To begin, you will heat in a large skillet

1/2 cup olive oil 

and saute

1 carrot
1 onion
1 celery rib

all diced, until they begin to soften. Add 3 anchovy fillets (or not) diced, and some whisper of a tomato -- half a cup of tomato paste, a fresh chopped tomato, a ladleful of canned stewed tomatoes or what have you. Heat this little sauce to bubbling, then remove from heat, cover, and set aside.

Might this humble blue house date from the Civil War? Did women in long skirts and men in suits and neckties sit on this porch on hot summer evenings, anxiously scanning the newspapers for word on the 28th Iowa infantry? My walk around the block also took me past the site of this "Camp Pope," where the 28th mustered and drilled before setting out for war in December, 1862. The sign below,

standing on the lawn, explains that while most of Camp Pope's buildings were taken down and the materials re-used by local people immediately the men left, the house's location and construction do match a Civil War era date. So, I would think, do the massive overhanging trees, which look a lot like the massive overhanging junipers outside 1142 Court. Grant Wood planted those himself.

There are lots of interesting and mostly huge and well-to-do homes in Iowa City. The unkempt mansions are student lodging for the University of Iowa -- as may be the humble blue Civil War house with the styrofoam cooler and red couch on the porch. The gorgeous, very kempt mansions, many perched up on modest hills with gardens spilling down to the sidewalks, belong to University professors, especially those specializing in medical research.

Some people paint their houses yellow.

Three storeys seem to have been de rigueur for home building here in the -- 1880s?

Having made your sauce, now to your meatballs.

In a bowl, soak a thick slice of bread in 1/4 cup milk. In another bowl, combine

1 pound ground beef
1/2 cup fresh ricotta
1/3 cup freshly grated parmesan
1 egg
1 tsp finely grated lemon zest
1 tsp crushed red pepper
1 Tbsp finely diced parsley
1/2 Tablespoon ground fennel (seeds will do)
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp pepper

Combine all this with the soaked bread. Mix well, roll into balls, and brown them briefly, half the batch at a time, in heated olive oil.

Return all the underdone meatballs to the browning skillet and add the reserved vegetable and tomato mixture, which serves as your braising sauce. Simmer everything over medium-low heat until the meatballs are cooked through, about twenty minutes. Serve sprinkled with chopped oregano, sea salt, and more parmesan.

Our recipe calls for beef, but I see no reason why we may not substitute pork. Which reminds us to take a look at this.

 

It's a part of a little sculpture park outside the Hoover/West Branch truck stop and rest area on I-80 near West Branch, Iowa. Products that the state is known for emerge from decorative flanges at the tops of a set of steel columns. An ear of corn, an acorn, a fish, some things hard to identify. And a pig. In  From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present -- 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, Jacques Barzun writes,

All styles of art are 'realistic.' They point to varied aspects and conceivings of experience, all of which possess reality, or they would not command the artist's interest in the first place and would not spark any response in the beholder.

Maybe there is the key to understanding what, really, is art. Look at it and decide if you get any response as a beholder.

Finally, home across the River -- people seem to call it only that, not the Mississippi -- which the 28th Iowa also had to cross a hundred and fifty years ago, without benefit of this bridge. 

Until next time, and the next recipe. My nice cousins fed us very well.

Projects

Now, my fatheads, you mustn't be appalled if I leave you to your own devices for perhaps long stretches in the next few weeks or even months. I have so many projects I am working on. (Projects is such a nice strong word. It calls to mind not only paper and ink and ideas but maybe flower pots and twine, or buttons and glue, or hammers and determinedness. I borrowed the word from another blogger.) I am compiling my second book of essays from the vanished At First Glass, this compilation tentatively called If No One Minds, and have decided also to take my first compilation, Prose Food, and break it up into chapbooks. This decision was almost thrust upon me after I explained to a friend how long Prose Food is, and that I was submitting it to various publishers but had heard nothing in response. No surprise there, of course, since I wasn't born yesterday. But when my friend said, "three hundred pages is a big investment for any publishing company," I suddenly saw things as it were from the other side. Yes, that would be a big investment for an unknown food and wine blogger.

Very well, why can't I make chapbooks and bring them to local craft fairs and village fests this spring and summer, and see if people will buy them? I'm thinking $4 each, or three for $10. This means I am learning how to prepare a chapbook using Microsoft Word '03 and my own printer. You stand warned: in case you ever try it, know that double-sided printing is a bit tricky. Quickly I've learned I either have to invest in a long-armed stapler or an awl and some twine (aha!) when it comes to the project of binding. Prose Food #1 is already 78 pages long. 

Then there's the novel about divorce in the age of the internet. And there's photography. Why can't I bring my photos to the local library and ask if they will display them on their ever-changing art exhibit wall? And the spring is coming so I never know when I have to rush out and take shaky pictures of sandhill cranes whirling overhead while they decide, en masse and "kk-rrool" -ing, which way is north. Actually they seem to fly west a lot. Below I include the near-to-bud-bursting branches of the maple trees, to give an idea of scale. I like the freakish, Wizard-of-Oz effect of the blurred birds.

I am also still determined to at least occasionally be a fashion blogger, since it won't do to leave that niche entirely to the dewy-skinned young girls who take endless photos of themselves wearing the same new dress and boots. I can't decide what they've got the most of, ego, looks, pin money, better cameras, more friends to leave gushing comments, or clothes. Having a tripod for the camera also helps. Here I'm trying to show you my pink and beige leopard print "infinity" scarf. Indoors, without a tripod, and without focusing just on my neck. If you want to see how this is really done, go to Vixen Vintage, or Delightfully Tacky. Or pick from among the greats at Signature9's top 99 fashion blogs from around the world. There's no end to the cascading style sheets -- Shop, Sponsor, Life and Family, Spirituality and Wellness, Home and Garden, Art and Design, etc. etc. Food and Wine. Yes, they dare to poach on our territory.

You will understand, then, if sometimes I just hurtle in with a quick picture of a wine label, or a dashed-off recipe. Lately I find the comfort of meatballs appealing for relaxed Sundays, so you may find lots of those. Food & Wine's January 2014 issue still sits propped open to page 96 on my desk: Herbed Lamb Meatballs with Rich Tomato Sauce and Ricotta. Delicious, made with almonds soaked in milk. I also made April's Veal Meatballs with Mustard Greens (p.104), but was too busy yesterday to get a chance to try the March issue's Beef Ricotta Meatballs with Braised Beet Greens. (Memo to Food & Wine, let's lay off the endless greens, shall we?) Perhaps there's a meatball chapbook idea here. 

Wine with "Salisbury steak"

Dear me, note the old neophyte anxiety to pair food perfectly with an under-$10 wine. As any expert will tell you, "most wines go with most foods."

The most savory preparation for ground beef that I have ever come across includes a combination of chopped fresh lemon zest and grated nutmeg, in surprisingly large quantities. The recipe is called "Cannelon of beef" and it appears in Marion Cunningham's 1986 revision of the Fannie Farmer Cookbook. Lemon and nutmeg make the ground beef taste somehow beefier than other preparations that rely on tomato, thyme, or oregano, or overpowering doses of onion or Worcestershire sauce. Here is the original recipe:

2 pounds ground beef; 1 tsp. nutmeg
<grated rind of 1/2 lemon; 1/2 tsp. salt
2 Tbsp. minced parsley; 1/4 tsp. pepper
1 egg; 2 Tbsp. minced onion;
2 Tbsp. butter, melted; 4 slices salt pork

Preheat the oven to 400. Combine the beef with all the other ingredients except the salt pork (I have also used 2 slices of bacon). Mix until very well blended. Chill, then shape into a roll 6 inches long. Place on a rack in a roasting pan, arrange the slices of salt pork over the top, and bake for 30 minutes. Remove to a warm platter.

In my experience, 30 minutes at 400 degrees is nowhere near long enough to bake a 2 pound, chilled meat loaf, and I hate having to guess whether pink meat is done and safe to eat. That is why I have tweaked this recipe to make good old Salisbury steak -- hamburgers in gravy -- while making sure to keep that savory lemon-and-nutmeg combination.



Last night's dinner, therefore, was simply a pound and a half of ground beef mixed with the zest of half a lemon -- chop it very finely, and it will dissolve in cooking -- some nutmeg, salt, and an egg. I browned the patties in a little olive oil, and then removed them from the pan and sauteed onions, leeks, garlic, and celery in the drippings. Then back everything went into the pan, along with a little wine -- a zinfandel, perhaps no more than 1/3 cup. It simmered slowly for about an hour. For accompaniment, I made mashed potatoes and boiled carrots with butter and a shake more nutmeg.

But what wine will match nicely with this? I had the zinfandel on hand -- Barefoot Cellars, one of my favorites -- and another great favorite, St. Gabriel riesling. Strangely enough, two such very different wines were both rather good with the meal. Zinfandel's spice and weight was the right counterpoise to the beef and the sweet carrots; the riesling's initial sweetness but final dry elegance went very well with more delicate flavors of lemon, leek, celery, and potato. After much sipping and slurping I ended up pouring a full glass of the St. Gabriel.

And by the way, after years of trial and error, I can confidently advise on how to mash potatoes. After you drain them, put them back in the pot and mash them dry. Then add the pats of butter and let them melt. Stir everything up with a fork, add whatever milk you like, and stir that. Done. Much easier. No need to attempt to mash down cold hunks of butter, and no need to heat up butter and milk first before adding the potatoes and mashing that -- very French and authentic, to be sure, but haven't you got enough to do to get dinner on the table?

Southern-French meatballs ("Boules de Picolat")

Another of the most-viewed posts from At First Glass, certainly among the top ten. Over 4,700 views. Apparently people google "boules de picolat" a lot. 

These boules de picolat, or Roussillon-style meatballs, come from one of the most splendid cookbooks one could hope to find, Clifford Wright's A Mediterranean Feast (William Morrow, 2001). History, recipes, personal anecdote, historical anecdote, maps, illustrations from medieval and Renaissance art -- who could ask for more absorbing reading?

Only his politics do interfere with the fun. Scarcely a page passes without his crediting the invading Muslim Arabs, circa 650 A.D. and beyond, with being the fount of all joy, peace, health, culture, wisdom, and of course good food in the entire Mediterranean region. (If so, why was everybody also starving -- the major theme of the history?) And why should a cookbook author scold his readers not to criticize the wearing of the Muslim veil (see p. 207)? Mr. Wright's having been a staff fellow at the Institute of Arab Studies, and then the executive director of the "American Middle East Peace Research Institute," may explain a little something about his decidedly unculinary idee fixe.

A further truth be told, I have never made great practical use of the recipes in the book. They tend to include long ingredient lists and sometimes bizarre or very gourmet supplies. "A Grand Moroccan Pigeon Pie" (p. 296) will require the use of orange flower water and saffron as well as the pigeons and everything else.

Still. These meatballs in the style of Roussillon, a town in southern France, are good. I am always enthused by any recipe which combines garlic and cinnamon. And olives.



We begin with seasonings dropped in a spacious bowl: 4 diced garlic cloves, 2 and 1/2 Tablespoons of chopped parsley leaves, 1 Tablespoon of chopped fresh basil or tarragon, and some ground cinnamon "to taste" -- begin with 1/4 teaspoon, I would suggest.

Then mix in 2 pounds of ground meat, either beef, veal, sausage, pork, or a combination of any and all. Mix in an egg and salt and pepper. Knead all this together and make small meatballs of it. And yes! Wetting your hands with cold water as you make the meatballs does prevent them from sticking to you.



Next, dredge the meatballs in flour -- gluten-free, in our case. This is tedious and I almost never flour meatballs, but I must admit it enhanced both flavor and appearance for browning.

Brown the meatballs in batches in olive oil until they are golden. Set them aside, and then heat 1 pound of fresh or canned tomatoes, 1 large diced shallot, and a pinch of cayenne pepper in the drippings. Cook until the tomatoes reduce to a sauce, about 15 minutes. Then, return the meatballs to this sauce.



Now add 1 cup of green olives and 1/4 cup chopped fresh ham, if you wish, to the meatballs and sauce. Pour in 1 cup of beef or chicken broth, bring to a boil, and simmer until the meatballs are completely cooked, 20 minutes or more. In fact this can simmer quietly away for as long as it takes you to make some rice, or perhaps fried potatoes? -- and toss a salad or prepare a vegetable.



And pour the wine. Would a hearty and simple southern French Rhone do, red or white? Or even a good dry Vouvray from the Loire Valley, a wine I have been enjoying with a number of rather strong, spicy meals lately?

And what's for dessert? Here, Mr. Wright can't help us much. His is a most unusual cookbook, divided into chapters with sumptuous historical themes -- "Islands of Paradise and Isolation," "Harvest of Sorrow, Food of Dreams" -- but into nothing so prosaic as Desserts or Candies and Confections. For all his dwelling on the fact of long-term Mediterranean starvation, his recipes are heavy on meat, the food of the rich. Anyway, perhaps a nice French apple tart would do, or a little bit of chocolate. A date nut bar ... a sip of cognac ... we are staring vacantly into space, aren't we.

Porcupine balls (you know you want some)

These are actually "Porcupine meat balls," but the other sounds so much more fun.

The recipe comes from an old classic of American cookery, the famed Settlement Cookbook. I had always wanted to have a look at this, and a few months ago I found the 1976 revised edition at a library cast-off book sale. The introduction tells the simple tale of Milwaukee's Settlement House, a place for new immigrants to learn English, cooking, sewing, and citizenship around the turn of the 20th century. Upstanding volunteer ladies from the community taught the cooking classes, and one of them, Mrs. Simon Kander, decided to put all the recipes together in a booklet, both to sell and so raise funds for the House, and to relieve students of the need to copy down all their meal instructions from a classroom blackboard. The first edition of The Way to a Man's Heart ... the Settlement Cookbook was published in 1901; by 1909, profits from the cookbook's sales "were able to provide the site for a new building" for the institution. My edition, seventy years on, is the thirty-third.

This cookbook, therefore, shows its provenance from page one. It is filled with recipes that were tasty enough and simple enough to be taught, shared, and eaten by multitudes of working families over the course of many years. "Mrs. Kander," it seems, insisted "that every recipe be tested not once but many times by committee members in their own kitchens." It makes the cookbook an invaluable one, and completely different from those wonders, so preponderant on bookstore shelves, which are created as works of art in themselves -- notice how often cookbooks have a theme -- by professionals whose (delicious) recipes are also works of art, but whose delicious recipes end up being usable sometimes only as an afterthought. Or as a performance.

Porcupine meat balls are an example of something I doubt we would find in a cookbook with a more artistic pedigree. They are not pretty, they are simple and the first ingredient on the list is something from a can. Nevertheless -- well, judge for yourself:

You begin with a 10 ounce can of tomato soup, diluted with a half cup of water. Put this in a large saucepan, and bring it to a boil. You will use this to simmer the meatballs. (Since commercial soups are full of gluten, I substituted two cans of stewed tomatoes.)

Make the meatballs: you will need 1 and 1/2 pounds of ground beef, 1/2 cup raw rice, 1 Tablespoon minced onion, 1/2 teaspoon allspice, 1 teaspoon salt, and 1/4 teaspoon pepper. Mix all ingredients and shape into small meatballs. Drop them into the simmering soup or tomatoes. Let them simmer for 2 hours, stirring occasionally. The long cooking time is required to fully cook the raw rice. If the liquid boils too violently, the rice will plump up too fast and a lot of it will loosen from the meatballs and fall into the sauce.



The "porcupine" name comes from the way the rice sticks out from all over the meatballs. The cookbook doesn't explain this, but you see how bright I am. And their delicious flavor is owing, I think, to the combination of tomatoes and allspice. Two hours later, we ate them with mashed potatoes on the side.

The wine we poured was a Bolla valpolicella ($7.99), from Italy by way of the local grocery store. My notes for it say:

• Day 1: light -- dark red color -- little fruit -- very acidic (as Italian wines tend to be -- they are meant to make the mouth water for more food)
• Day 2: mellower, richer
• Day 3: salad dressing? (think vinegar -- not a good sign)

A sweeter wine might have been a better complement to the acidic tomatoes in this dish. What would Mrs. Simon Kander have served? In the "Beverages" section she -- or one of her committee ladies -- writes a brief half-page on wine service, acknowledging that "wine makes even the simplest meal taste better" and suggesting the traditional, unfussy pairings of a previous era: sherry with soup, sauternes with fish (again!), claret with beef, champagne with everything. Far more space here is devoted to cocktails. Some previous reader has put an enthusiastic checkmark next to the recipe for Pink Lady, a tipple that calls to mind glittery 1930s romantic comedy movies. (It does sound good. Gin, apple brandy, lime juice, grenadine, and an egg white.)

And is this the same reader who actually, selfishly cut out six pages of chicken recipes from the book? Everything from pages 308 to 315 is gone. I hope, in some terribly hot kitchen in the next world, Mrs. Kander is giving her what for.

Occitanian soup, freely translated (and another entry into my Culinary Hall of Fame)

Madeleine Kamman -- I am tempted to say, the great Madeleine Kamman -- remains my favorite cooking writer. Her New Making of a Cook and When French Women Cook comprise in themselves a complete cooking library, although I admit I prepare very few dishes from the latter; as she says in her introduction, most of its recipes are meant for entertaining and so are too elaborate for everyday. What is great about Madeleine, however, and what is evidenced in both books, is not only that she respects and teaches the science and the whys of cooking, which is always a great help (once you learn why your onions burned or your dough was tacky, you won't repeat mistakes endlessly), but that she has deep family and professional roots in France's and therefore the West's cooking heritage. She prefaces many of the recipes in The New Making of a Cook by saying, this is the authentic way (and why), this is the way I was taught and why, this is the no-shortcuts method which you must know in order to understand, etc. The cynic could argue that any writer on any technical subject is likely to claim that whatever he learned at his grandmother's side is authentic and in danger of being lost by foolish hustle-bustle modern man -- but Madeleine, whose attitude anyway is never lofty and judgmental like that, does seem to know her material. She knows, for example, that if you want to taste something like the fermented fish sauce of ancient Rome called garum or liquamen, "try to find on the French Riviera and in the backcountry of Nice a true pissalat, which by now has become a rare form of true liquamen."

Well, okay. Needless to say, I'll trust her on things like mashed potatoes or a good roast chicken.

Today's recipe is from the "Happy Marriages" chapter -- i.e., soups -- of The New Making of a Cook. I have had to translate Occitanian Soup into a somewhat less robust version of the original, not having access to confit fat, walnut oil, or pancetta. Not that it's anyone's fault but my own that I don't have access to these things. Confit fat, for example, is a kitchen product that you understand perfectly well you could make yourself, once you carefully read Madeleine's instructions about it. It's simply any animal fat, but usually duck, that is used as a kind of deep bath in which to cook a salted and spiced meat. Then the meat and fat are cooled and stored in a jar until wanted, the fat of course solidifying on top of the meat to act as a seal. So for a recipe calling for confit fat, you would reach into your cellar or fridge and spoon out a bit of it from the jar. The whole affair probably represents a cooking technique dating from the Stone Age, Madeleine says, "when meats were cooked in water in a large animal skin stretched like a pouch over an open fire. ...when one cooks meat this way and lets it simmer a long time, the water eventually evaporates, leaving the meat to finish cooking in its own fat." Incidentally, the spice mixture she likes best, to sprinkle on the meat you intend to cook in confit, comes from the village of Beynac in the Perigord (see page 786).

Need I elucidate why she takes pride of place in my little Culinary Hall of Fame?

But, the soup. In the very authentic version, you will start by soaking dried beans overnight in water. Then you'll cook them briefly and set them aside. Then, you'll brown pancetta and onions in confit fat, and add to them loads of chopped vegetables -- cabbage, leeks, carrots, turnips, and celery, plus a big bouquet garni of 20 parsley stems, 1 large bay leaf, and 1 "very large" sprig of thyme. Toss all of it and let it cook briefly, then cover the vegetables with water and cook about 15 minutes, then add the beans and their water and cook about 35 more minutes.

Meanwhile -- authentically, again -- you'll prepare, first, a persillade. This is a combination of 3 large cloves of garlic, diced, along with 1/4 cup of minced fresh parsley. Once this is ready in a little bowl, add half of it to a sausage mixture of ground turkey, goose, or duck meat plus Italian sausage removed from its casing, plus an egg and a cup of breadcrumbs. All of this mixture you will shape into six patties, which you'll then wrap in blanched, softened cabbage leaves. Tie these packages with kitchen string, and drop them into the soup to cook. They will be done after about 40 minutes' simmering. The right amounts of salt and pepper, of course, are for you to judge all through your cooking.

Finally, to serve, you will remove the string from the meat packages, and stir into the soup the other half of that persillade sitting in the little bowl. And you'll have a grated hard cheese handy to sprinkle on each individual portion. "A dry sheep's milk cheese from the French or Spanish Pyrenees" would be best, or a Pecorino Romano. (I used a Parmesan.)

May I, respectfully, translate? I think it's all right if I do. Somewhere in the 1100 page depth of her book Madeleine writes that over the years, she has learned to appreciate and accept the simple reality of other people's tastes.



Melt a nice-flavored combination of fats in a heavy bottomed pot. Butter and olive oil are excellent. Add and stir, soften and wilt, some chopped onions, leeks, carrots, celery, and Savoy cabbage. (This last, and the leeks, make a real difference.)

Stir in some herbs, like parsley, thyme, and basil. Fresh thyme is one of your very best friends in the soup pot.

Add water to cover the vegetables. I like to add a packet of peppercorns and coriander seeds stapled into a paper coffee filter, which substitutes well for the cheesecloth you don't necessarily need to buy.



Simmer the soup as long as you like. Apart from the preparation of the beans, even Madeleine's authentic version only really cooks for perhaps an hour or an hour and fifteen minutes, counting the forty minutes the sausage and cabbage packages will "finish cooking with the soup." The longer the better, however.



Do, by all means, make that persillade and stir half of it into the soup at the end. I think it's considered acceptable to moisten it with a bit of olive oil, too. If it doesn't give you a new and lifelong passion for fresh garlic, it will at least keep Dracula away for the night.

And about the sausage and cabbage packages. I believe there's no harm in making meatballs instead. A pound of ground beef or veal, mixed with half the persillade and the egg and breadcrumbs, may be formed into small balls and the balls simmered 15 minutes in a separate pot of salted water. Add these to the soup -- no strings attached -- and carry on.



When you sit down to dine you will almost, almost feel you are somewhere in the Perigord, which incidentally is just where those French boys found the Stone Age cave paintings in Lascaux in the 1940s. Perhaps our ancestors then -- to be fair, Frenchmen's ancestors, wouldn't you know it -- painted so beautifully because they had just eaten so well. Confits, and things.

Madeleine must have the last word. This is one of the wisest things I think I have ever read: and it's in a cookbook.

"There is something instructive to be found everywhere and the more points of view you allow yourself to understand, the more you will become truly yourself by keeping what you like and discarding what you do not."

Another free-form Passover: tandoori-spiced lamb burgers

Arriving home from work at about 4:30 in the afternoon -- should I stop on the way, leave the car, and sniff and admire a local lilac bush, the only one in the vicinity, before the lilacs' time and lovely scent is over for another year? or should I just go home? I suppose parking the car, getting out, sniffing a bush, and then getting back in and driving off would look so odd -- there was nothing for it, after mixing a little cocktail and perhaps even sitting down for a minute, but to think about Passover dinner.

I won't say the Passover seder, since at my house we hardly do that. We content ourselves with the family seder plate, the matza, the egg, the charoset (a fruit and nut chutney symbolizing the mortar used by ancient Hebrew slaves to join the bricks of Pharaoh's cities), the parsley and salt water, and of course our traditional "shank bone." This is a drawing of a smiling, fluffy sheep which my daughter hurriedly made on a piece of scrap paper when she was about six, to stand in for the shankbone I forgot to buy that year. Such well-meaning substitutions do have precedents. There is a story of Union soldiers during the Civil War who, lacking supplies necessary to prepare charoset, placed a brick on their holiday table. Of course they couldn't dip their bitter herbs into and then eat the brick, nor can I roast my paper shankbone. In both cases we trust God understands. Besides, by now the "This is a Sheep" drawing has become a tradition.




But what's for dinner? In another nod to Pesach, we ate lamb. We made it easy on ourselves -- eventually -- by using fast-cooking ground lamb, plus a spoonful of exotica from the little tin of tandoori spice powder which came in a previous Wines of Chile live blogger tasting kit. Remember "Carmenere and curry"? Tandoori, it seems, is an Indian spice combination that you may create at home, using a number of supermarket specialties with an emphasis on turmeric, cumin, curry, coriander, paprika, and cayenne pepper. Unless you happen to have all these things on hand it might be far simpler to have it sent to you, if you please, from Ger-Nis Culinary and Herb Center, Brooklyn. The mix is named for the traditional clay oven, tandoor, in which a meat, often chicken, is baked after a good slathering in the spices. Hence, the abundance of recipes for "Tandoori-spiced chicken thighs" on line, and in non-retro cookbooks.

So, our free-form lamb burger recipe goes like this -- that is, it went like this after I regretfully sent my daughter back out to the store to buy ground lamb. Apparently either the grocery list was unclear or I was. Seeing and hearing only "lamb for dinner" she bought chops, thinking they would be all right. Drat, but some things cannot be substituted. This is the same dear child who drew the Sheep, what? -- fifteen years ago, can it be?

Tandoori-spiced lamb burgers

• 2 Tbsp butter
• 1 onion, diced
• 2 stalks celery, diced
• 1 pound ground lamb
• 1 slice wheat bread, soaked in about 1/4 cup milk until the milk is completely absorbed, the moistened bread then broken up with a fork. Needless to say, meat and dairy products together, plus bread in a Passover dish, is all quite, quite unkosher
• 1 tsp tandoori spice powder, half for the meat mixture, half for the sauce it will cook in
• salt and pepper to taste
• 1 egg
• 1/4 cup white wine 
• 1/4 cup flour, to mix with 1/4 cup cold water and thicken the sauce before serving

Melt the butter in a heavy saucepan. When it foams, add the onion and celery and cook, stirring frequently, until they soften.

While the vegetables cook, mix the milk-moistened bread, the ground lamb, egg, and (half the) spices. Form into four or five patties, and place them in the pan among the onions and celery. Turn the heat up and let the patties brown on one side; then turn them over. Add about 1/4 cup of any white wine to the pan. Add the remaining half of the spices, then about half a cup of water. Bring everything to a boil, lower the heat, and simmer, covered, half an hour.

This gives you enough time to prepare the rest of your dinner. Plain rice or couscous and a green vegetable would be very agreeable. By the same token, it gives you time to call whoever is manning the customer service switchboard half way around the world -- India? the Philippines? -- answering questions and troubleshooting problems you are having with your cell phone. Annelise did a bang-up job walking me through the inputting of six separate access codes required to get my phone working again (who is working for whom, may I ask?), plus the removing of the SIM card and the cleaning of it "with a clean dry cloth." Why yes, I was entirely prepared to do that, and didn't at all struggle with balancing my real phone on one shoulder while attempting to extract the SIM card and polish it with the tail of my blouse, all the while anxious about dinner bubbling away on the stove and talking to Annelise. Her accent was pretty. I wonder where precisely she might live, and what sort of tandoori-spiced breakfast she had just come from.

And our Passover wine? As with the milk and the meat and the bread, it was not remotely kosher, I admit. Miguel Torres 2007 Manso de Velasco cabernet sauvignon "Viejas Viñas," old vines. Refined, solid, a bowl of good fruit that has been kept firmly away, it seems to me, from all caramel syrups, vanilla beans, blueberry compotes, and chocolate sprinkles. Delicious. And I do hope your holiday has been happy, and more orthodox than mine. 

Yes, please, do cook with beer (or: pork meatball soup)

You may use your leftover, flat beer to deglaze the one pan after browning meat for stock, and you may use it again to deglaze the other, in which you browned some meatballs for the soup. Plan to pour no more than a quarter cup in each case, please; otherwise you run the risk of adding a beer's (even slight) bitterness to your cooking. For that matter, surely we don't dare to braise with an IPA or any such "monster" craft brew. We will confine ourselves to something fairly mild and malty. In fact I used a leftover Chimay Trappist red.

The soup:

Sear a pound of beef, some sort of cheap cut like round, in olive oil in a heavy soup pot. When it is nicely browned, remove it from the pan. Add a little more oil to the pan if necessary. Add and briefly saute 1 chopped onion, 1 chopped leek, 2 chopped carrots, and 2 chopped stalks of celery. Stir and cook until the vegetables soften a little. (Your stock of choice could also have come from the Thanksgiving turkey carcass, why not? And has it really been a week already?)

Return the beef to the vegetables in the soup pot. Pour on a scant 1/4 cup good dark beer. Let it bubble a bit, to burn off the alcohol. Add water to cover the meat and vegetables, remembering Madeleine Kamman's rule of thumb for flavorful soup making, namely to allow 1 quart water to every 1 pound of meat. Salt and pepper to taste, and drop in any fresh or dried herbs you like -- thyme, certainly, for a start.

Simmer the soup for 2 to 3 hours on the back of the stove.

About an hour before serving, make the meatballs. (The recipe that follows is a sort of amalgamation of internet "soup meatball" dishes. The thing to focus on is the garlic and the minced fresh herbs.) Combine:

1 pound ground pork
2 cloves garlic, minced
2 large leaves fresh basil, minced
1 egg
2 slices fresh bread, torn into crumbs and softened with a combination of soup broth and milk (don't make the crumbs too soggy)
salt and pepper

Shape the mixture into small balls, and fry them in batches in a heavy skillet in a little olive oil. When they are all nicely browned but not yet cooked through, crowd them back into the frying pan and pour over them another scant 1/4 cup of beer. Bring to a boil, lower the heat, and cover and simmer 15 minutes, shaking and stirring from time to time, until the meatballs are cooked through; then add them with their own broth and juices to the soup pot, having first removed from there the old, cooked piece of beef, which has been giving its flavor to the stock all this while.

Finally "dish up," as my father used to say, sprinkled with Parmesan cheese if desired.

We are reading Elizabeth David at the moment. South Wind Through the Kitchen. Mrs. David is at once so firm, so lyrical, she opens her articles and closes her recipes with such simple command, that it makes one feel one's own writing has been a hash of sentimentality. One feels one must give a good recipe, and then stop.