P I C N I C

What am I reading these days? I brought a few books along with me. Food and Feast in Medieval England is an engrossing if dry read. One interesting fact: bakeries in England made white bread, brown bread, paindemaigne, and tourte loaves, among others. All these were breads of different qualities. The law stated that all loaves had to be the same price, thus the fancier the bread, that is to say, the less husk it contained or the more spices it had, the smaller it was. The aristocracy would buy little buns, the lower classes had huge loaves they ate over several days, but all were the same price. Is this the origin of dinner rolls?

The River Cottage Cookbook is a present I got for my mother and also an old friend. This guy, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, who is a celebrity in England, lives a very hedonistic life on his farm, raising pigs, cows, goats, and hunting game. He’s also a gardener, but it seems that he looks at all vegetable life as merely an accompaniment to meat. Chapter headings run: Sheep and lambs… shearing; organic pasture management; maintaining health; slaughter; the cuts; recipes. Recipes include: Tail and tongue of beef with rich red wine sauce; leg of mutton baked in hay; rabbit burgers. My old friend is a sort of homesteader, she has cows and eats them, she has chickens, she manages a huge garden. I’m looking forward to seeing her in a few days.

My cousin gave me for christmas a book called Tastes of Paradise written by a German academic, Wolfgang Schivelbusch. I’ve only just started it. He’s talking about how this Medieval penchant for spices, as we can read about in astounding recipes, was a sort of upper class affectation. For me this is an astounding idea. I’ve always been intriged by the strange spices used in medieval food and have occationally tried to cook these old recipes. But it’s neccesary to reduce considerably the spice proportions in them, and Schivelbush says that these spices were not used because they tasted good but because they were expensive luxuries which elevated those who ate them into a refined and distinct class. Very strange, especially from a culinary perspective. Why would someone eat what doesn’t taste good? Are we eating food now which doesn’t taste good but which we feel an urge to eat? It makes ones head spin.

Every Christmas Eve my Grandmother used to cook a traditional Lithuanian dinner called Kuchos. The only meat was fish and there were about 12 courses, one for each apostle I believe. The number of courses is usually scaled back a little from the ideal but always the same dishes are cooked. My mother has continued the tradition. The meal begins with a communion wafer. Each person takes a piece and then in turn takes a little piece from everyone else. We then all eat our own pile of communal wafers. At this point the meal begins. Last night we had:

Corn soup with jalapeno pepper.

Radicchio and endive salad with a balsamic vinaigrette. The difference between this and last night was that the dressing was as thick as molasses. I’m not sure what was going on there.

Mushroom ravioli with a butter and chive sauce.

Scallops with a ginger cream sauce.

Sesame biscuts with poppyseed milk.

Cranberry pudding with butter cookies. My aunt had made each of us an individual cookie and mine was so cute, a squirrel with my name on it!

It’s very fun to be cooking with my mother again. She has a very calm, deliberate, and paced manner of cooking. Nothing is ever too dirty and the meal is always ready by 5:30, at which time it sits and cools for a couple minutes while we finish our glass of white wine and then eat. My mom made a mixed salad with radiccio, endive, blue cheese, and a balsamic vinagrette. She uses about 12 parts oil and 1 part vinegar in her dressings! She had some cookies in the fridge she’d made a few days before. The foremost cookie is strawberry jam and walnuts. The rear right is a butter cookie dipped in chocolate and then covered with a nut powder. I myself made clams and pasta with a tomato-trout stock and also two loaves of bread.

Tabby is my parents ancient old cat. He’s 23 years old and has a raspy meow. He seems healthy other then some strange leg spasms that overcome him every once in a while. It’s as if someone once forced him to take a bath and for the rest of his life he sufferes from nightmares, waking up suddenly and trying to shake his foot dry. I fed him 3 clams at which point he fell asleep on my notebook. I was writing about the 2004 St. Innocent Pinot Noir we drank with dinner.

Well, I’ve been traveling a bit and am now in Lenox, Massachusetts, where I grew up. I used to spend hours hanging out at Lenox Coffee, the first good coffee shop in town. They roast their own beans in Great Barrington. Nathan, who is here making me an espresso on the Synesso, is the brother of my best friend growing up, Justin. (The espresso was frothy and rich) I walked merely one block to see Justin himself, who now has a handlebar mustache that is well waxed. He was wearing a felted Sherlock Holmes hat, an old cream colored jacket, and a tie fastened with a large paper clip. He looked pretty sharp filing away books. Years ago, after he returned from a trip across the country to California he had this wild idea to build an espresso cart on a bicycle. I thought he was crazy at the time but now when I remember it, I think how amazing and cool that would have been. (The espresso machine could be powered by a steam engine!) Next door is his mothers shop, Drygoods. Unfortunately she wasn’t in, but I’ll see her tomorow. Then, back at the coffee shop, I bumped into Calla, their sister. It’s a small town.