Le Canard Enchaine, Kingston, NY: Simple, classic beef stock, yellow onions, baguette croutons, melted Gruyere cheese. Served with crusty French bread. $9.00

To be fair, she never said it was French onion soup. It was American, in the sense that it took shortcuts via technologies that no French chef could even imagine. However, it did have something in common with a French tradition that goes back to the great gourmet, Auguste Brillat-Savarin. One of his most brilliant “discoveries” was of something that doesn’t actually exist, despite his conviction that it did. His “osmazome” was to gastronomy what “phlogiston” and “the ether” were to the physical sciences: an invented term for something unprovable in order to explicate the inexplicable. In his book, The Physiology of Taste: Or, Transcendental Gastronomy, he wrote, in 1825:

Osmazome is that preeminently sapid part of meat which is soluble in cold water, and which differs completely from the extractive part of the meat, which is soluble only in water that is boiling.

It is osmazome which gives all their value to good soups; it is osmazome which, as it browns, makes the savory reddish tinge in sauces and the crisp coating on roasted meat, finally it is from the osmazome that comes the special tangy juices of venison and game.

Brillat-Savarin’s “science” was basically wishful thinking, but it foreshadowed two actual scientific discoveries. The Maillard Reaction (discovered in 1910, by Louis Camille Maillard), is the interaction of proteins and carbohydrates that, when heated, create a host of rich flavoring compounds. It provides the tasty browning of roasted meats, coffee beans, and other foods. This browning is often mistakenly called “caramelization,” which a different process (one that doesn’t involve proteins). The other was umami (discovered in 1908, by Kikunae Ikeda), the savory taste, first isolated from seaweed, that was only proven to be the fifth basic taste in 2001.

Chops Grille, Kingston, NY: Deep rich beef stock, red onions, deglazed with dry sherry and burgundy for a slightly-tart finish, sourdough croutons topped with cheddar cheese, and a garnish of finely-minced parsley. $7.00

What my mother’s bouillon cubes had, in spades, was umami. It got it, in small part, from beef—but mostly from hydrolyzed vegetable protein, which is basically an industrialized version of soy sauce. The reason those little cubes and soy sauce make things so satisfying is they are loaded with glutamates. Think MSG. Think Accent. This is a naturally-occurring compound is found in cheeses, meats, mushrooms, tomatoes, and many of the other foodstuffs we love. Osmazome it may not be, but tasty it certainly is.

If French cooks don’t get their umami fix from little silver-wrapped cubes, where do they get it? From stock. Meaty soup bones, slowly roasted with mire poix (two parts onion, one part each of carrots and celery). Once these are nicely browned, they are slowly simmered in water until all of their flavors—proteins, minerals, vitamins, Maillard-produced compounds, and glutamates—are dissolved in the stock. Stock is the foundation of French cooking, and it is practically everything in French onion soup.

Sal’s Place, Highland, NY: Nice stock, not too salty, topped with easy-to-spoon mozzarella, and garnished with paprika—which gives the fat a lovely reddish color. $4.99

Home cooks, in France, don’t always use stock (stock takes a lot of time, and is important enough to justify its production in professional kitchens); they might use only water. Either way, the thinly-sliced onions (which are naturally rich in soluble glutamates) are slowly cooked in butter, with a little flour, until they are uniformly golden, being careful not to let them get brown (and bitter). Sometimes the onions are strained out of the finished soup, which makes for a more refined version of the soup than we see in American restaurants.

We’re accustomed to little crocks of full-flavored soup, filled with succulent slivers of onion, usually topped with a large crouton and smothered in melted cheese, served bubbling-hot from the broiler. Americans love melted cheese (our versions of Mexican dishes are almost always smothered in cheese—which is not at all they way they’re served in Mexico). Our familiar French Onion Soup, called “Soupe à la Oignon Gratinée,” is made that way in France, too, but their cheesy version is sometimes done in a slightly different fashion.

The Tavern at the Beekman Arms, Rhinebeck, NY: Rich, salty stock, yellow onions topped with a mixture of Swiss and Mozzarella which was stretchy, but not rubbery. Garnished with parsley, and accompanied by homemade bread studded with garlic. $8.00

“Soupe à la Oignon Fromage” isn’t served in individual crocks, and doesn’t go under the broiler. Madame E. Sainte-Ange’s La Bonne Cuisine—a cookbook that, in French households, is as familiar as The Joy of Cooking or The Betty Crocker Cookbook are in the U.S.—she writes:

To obtain the stringiness that pleases the lovers of this soup so much, you must have good Gruyere cheese, fresh and with a high fat content. Grate it, or cut it in little pieces as thin as a sheet of paper. If it is too thick, it will not melt well and will require much more time. Arrange one-third of the baguette rounds in the bottom of the tureen. Cover them with one-third of the cheese, about 1 good tablespoon, and add a little pepper. Make a second layer of rounds and cheese without omitting the pepper; then a third, final layer. In all, 3 good tablespoons of cheese.

Pour the onion bouillon into the tureen (either straining it or not). Cover with a tight-fitting lid. Leave it in a low oven for a few minutes. Serve.

Stonehedge, West Park, NY: A lot of bread and beautifully-browned onions, beefy stock. Stonehedges’ version was the only soup we tried that was not served in the typical brown-lipped crock. Topped with Swiss, and accompanied by small warm rolls. Dinner only. $6.00

I haven’t tried la Sainte-Ange’s non-gratinéed version, but I suspect the bread would dissolve, thickening the soup, and the threads of cheese, distributed throughout the soup (rather than just on top) would make a dish whose texture resembles Chinese Eggdrop Soup. Cool weather—soup season—is almost here; I’m looking forward to a kitchen redolent of roasted mire poix, well-browned beef bones, and golden buttery onions.

——

French Onion Soup can be found anywhere: from dive bars to white tablecloth joints, from hipster hang-outs to classic French bistros. Over the course of three weeks, two of us slurped a bunch of them, and (almost) never tired of them.

Foster’s Coach House, Rhinebeck, NY: Distinctly beefy stock, yellow onions, topped with a slice of bread and a slab of melted Swiss so large it required a knife and fork. $6.00

It’s not possible to point out if one crock contained the best—or the worst—French Onion Soup in the Hudson Valley. After all, we could never sample ALL of the potential candidates—we could easily have missed the winning (or losing) candidate. Besides, even though they’re all the same dish, their recipes, preparation, and service style are all different. Plus, there are so many subjective judgments involved: some people want more cheese than others; some don’t want to detect any unwarranted spiciness, while others like the surprise of a bit of zing; some want a lot of onions or bread, some not so much; still others come to the table with preconceived notions of their ideal soup, and are pleased or disappointed when reality doesn’t match it. And then there’s the influence of the restaurant’s ambiance and reputation.

These are all reasons why I would never want to be a restaurant critic (and why I take the recommendations of other critics with a shaker of proverbial salt).

The Anchor, Kingston, NY: Spicy beef stock, brightly seasoned with thyme and black pepper, yellow onions, topped with large croutons, a slice of Swiss cheese, a sprinkling of Parmesan, and a garnish of chopped scallions. $6.00

The best we could do was to decide if our sampled soups met (or didn’t meet) our expectations. It would not be fair for us to say which restaurant’s soup failed to live up to our imaginary ideal. Anyone can have an off day, and a disappointing soup might not be typical of the restaurant’s usual fare. However, we can say, without hesitation, that we were both surprised and delighted by our soup experience at The Anchor, in Kingston.

Featured Image: French Onion Soup from The Anchor in Kingston, NY. All photographs by the author.

Gary Allen’s most recent book is Can It!: The Pleasures and Perils of Preserving Foods, his third book from Reaktion. You can find more of his speculations about things he has been known to (but really shouldn’t) put in his mouth — his own foot being a prime example of the latter — on his website:  onthetable​.us  

It’s the Chinese name for China. It means “middle kingdom,” because they regarded themselves as a bit of civilization at the center of the world, surrounded by barbarians. Since they created one of the world’s greatest cuisines, in company with France and Italy, they’ve earned the right to their jingoistic pride. Certainly, the food served by a zillion run-of-the-mill take-out places is barbaric when compared with that which can be found in some of the larger urban Chinatowns.

Having had a life-long love affair with big city Chinatowns—New York, Chicago and San Francisco—I miss having access to the sort of restaurants and ingredients that are not easy to find in other places. Like where I live now.

Fortunately, Albany is not far away… and it’s possible to rekindle that old love affair whenever I want. Just off Exit Two of the Northway (I-87, for the numerically inclined) is Hong Kong Bakery. It’s at 8 Wolf Road, just off of Central Avenue. I haven’t even tried the dishes on their menu… because it’s impossible for me to get past the selection of dimsum.

assorted dimsum

Far too often, after ordering a familiar dish—like pork potstickers—I get thick dough wrapped around some fine-grained forcemeat. They may be tasty, in a pinch, that is if I’m feeling desperate. But it’s nothing like the real thing.

At the highest levels of Chinese gastronomy, texture is the defining characteristic. The dimsum at Hong Kong Bakery are textural treasures. Har Gow, shrimp dumplings, are not filled with ground shrimp forcemeat, the sort that is extended with cheaper ingredients. Biting into one, whole shrimp provide what an Italian would call an al dente experience. The simple soy sauce that accompanies it is of excellent quality… it’s good, but it is not the point. The juicy burst of pure ocean flavor of the dumpling itself is the real deal.

Har Gow — shrimp dumplings

Steamed dimsum are not wrapped in wheat flour dough… they arrive in impossibly thin transparent rice noodle. The fillings—roast duck, chunky pork, beef shortribs, chickenfeet, shrimp and spinach—each have their own textures and flavors. Speaking of rice noodles… rolled sheets of delicate translucent noodle come drizzled with a simple soy sauce. That might sound simple, maybe bland, but the taste/texture combination is far from ordinary. The rice rolls come with several fillings—shrimp, roast pork or duck, beef, scallions, and crispy rice. I plan to try them all (‘though possibly not at one sitting).

rice noodles

Fried dimsum include the potstickers mentioned above… but they’re nothing like the ones you might find in a neighborhood take-out joint. They also have dumplings filled with shrimp and chive, vegetables or vegetable with beancurd skin, taro, roast pork. One my favorite fried items is the Turnip Cake. It’s tasty on its own, but it comes with a sweet-savory dipping sauce that might be hoisin and oyster sauce (either that, or it’s the best quality oyster sauce I ever had).

pot stickers (gyoza)

Eventually, I will work my way—happily—through everything on their menu.

I mention Hong Kong Bakery first because I highly recommend you stop there before going a few blocks further, to the Asian Supermarket (1245 Central Avenue). Whatever you do, don’t go here hungry. You will buy far too much of everything (and “everything” is something of an understatement).

A shopper navigating one of 8 massive aisles.

Aisle after aisle of every imaginable Asian foodstuff—from China, India, Japan, Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia, and probably more (the selection is overwhelming). Meats, vegetables, mushrooms, and fresh seafood that you’ll never see in a supermarket. An entire case of sausages from China and southeast Asia. Pork belly. Chicken feet. Whole black-skinned silky chickens. Buns and dumplings and shumai of every description. An entire row of dried noodles. Eggs from ducks, chickens and quail. Fifty or more types of soy sauce. Hundreds of kinds of tea. An insane number of Japanese snacks, in flavors of which no westerner could ever dream. Seafood—much of it still alive—creates views and aromas that are not for the squeamish. But, if you happen to have a recipe for frog or turtle or conch or snails or crayfish, you’ll overlook a shopping experience that is nothing like the typical sterility of a shopping center supermarket.

At the front of the giant store, you can get hot food, ready to go: steamed buns, roast pork, glossy roasted ducks, fried crabs… just in case your dimsum satiety has passed, and you’re feeling a bit peckish. Not all of these treats are destined to make it home. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve ripped into them in the parking lot.

Here’s a small album of photos taken in the market:

bok choy

bamboo shoots

rambutans

garam masala (whole)

Gary Allen’s most recent book is Sauces Reconsidered: Aprés Escoffier, a volume in Rowman & Littlefield Studies in Food and Gastronomy. You can find more of his speculations about things he has been known to (but really shouldn’t) put in his mouth — his own foot being a prime example of the latter — on his website: onthetable​.us

Everyone knows the answer, right? It’s that fluid substance we pour over our food to make it taste better.

Naturally, the answer is a bit more complicated (or this book could be reduced to just those last fourteen words) and poses some interesting questions. For example, some of those “fluid substances” are by-products of the cooking process that serve to reinforce the flavor of the main ingredient (jus and pan gravy are familiar examples) while others are made separately and provide a culinary counterpoint to the primary ingredient. The latter include, among others, the marinara that coats a pizza, the hollandaise atop eggs benedict, and a vast array of condiments freshly prepared or commercially-made—from mustard, ketchup, and mayonnaise, to Worcestershire, and sriracha.

marinara sauce-image courtesy of ForknPlate

Then there is the question of viscosity. How much viscosity is too much? When does a sauce cease to be a sauce and become better described as a paste? And, what if an ingredient, like Chinese sesame paste—which is more solid than Middle Eastern tahini—is thinned with other, more liquid ingredients to make something that is clearly sauce-like? Does that make it a kind of proto sauce?

Still more issues add complexity to the discussion.

How does the intended usage of one of these flavorful liquids affect its position in a hierarchy of sauces? Where do we even place the sauce relative to other foodstuffs? Do we pool it under, pour it over, mix it thoroughly throughout, serve it on the side (in condiment bottles or little bowls of dipping liquid), or even encapsulate it inside (like the agar-covered pearls of molecular gastronomy or Shanghai-style soup dumplings)?

So, we’ve already begun to probe the variables that delineate possible categories for sauces, the rude beginnings of a kind of taxonomy. Many of our decisions will place individual sauces somewhere on a continuous spectrum of sauces, rarely all one form or another.

Attempting to force an ingredient into one of two categories (sauce or nonsauce) is almost as useless as separating the entire animal kingdom into male and female. While that does provide one kind of distinction, it tells us very little about individual species and how they relate to one another. Nature, including the nature of sauces, is not so easily crammed into one cubbyhole or another.

Needless to say, we are not the first to have tried to make sense of the world of sauces—some have had more success than others. There is nothing completely new under the sun (a maxim that is, itself, an example). This book attempts to build on previous efforts, and possibly to create a more universal taxonomy of sauces. If, like Isaac Newton, we are to see farther by standing on the shoulders of giants—a notion that he borrowed from a series of giants that goes all the way back to the Roman poet Lucan—then we must begin with the sauces and the sauce classifications of the past. It remains to be seen if—after visiting Westminster Abbey and literally standing upon the shoulders (and the rest of what remains) of Isaac Newton—our view has been much enhanced by the experience.

Chapter 8: Time for a Change

For a century, Escoffier’s system of Mother and daughter sauces has been the standard for understanding the otherwise chaotic nature of, and connections between, sauces.

Auguste Escoffier — image courtesy of bbc.co.uk

However, when we look at the hierarchy of sauces created by Escoffier (and Carême before him), a few drawbacks present themselves. First, we notice that almost all of the mother sauces share a common feature—they are thickened with flour. Hollandaise is the only exception. A larger issue is that very few people today use sauces like those (even French chefs employ a range of sauces that Escoffier could never have imagined). Today’s kitchens are much more cosmopolitan than those of a century ago.

It is true that French chefs have always explored the cuisines of other cultures, but they generally adopted one ingredient or another, which were then employed in a classically French manner. Something labeled “Florentine” would not be recognizable to a citizen of Firenze; it would merely be a French dish that contains spinach. Dishes served à la Japonaise would seem even more bizarre in Tokyo (they might be a salad containing artichokes, mussels, potatoes, and/or truffles). The descriptor, à la Japonaise, is also applied to a bombe of peach ice cream. The only remotely Japanese thing about the latter was that the dessert had a tea-scented filling.

fish sauces — image by thaifoodandtravel.com

Today’s chefs—and many home cooks—think nothing of creating entirely new sauces that could include chile pastes, like Korean gochujiang or Peruvian ají amarillo; or fish sauces, like Vietnamese pla ra or British anchovy essence. They thicken their sauces not just with reduced cream or starchy roux, but with ground nuts and seeds, or they purée exotic fruits and vegetables. We routinely incorporate ingredients and techniques—from every far-flung corner of the world, and every culture and every time period—never imagined by classically-trained French chefs.

Our palates are not only more eclectic, we have a desire for authenticity in our food (even if we’re not sure what “authentic” really means). We don’t want a French dish that merely nods at another culture’s culinary traditions; we want the real thing.

But there is another reason his list of mother sauces seems inadequate. We live in a more technological world, one in which we expect at least the trappings of a scientific approach. Escoffier’s system reflects the thinking of a different century, a different millennium. We may not always be logical in our thinking about food, but we expect an approach that is more substantial than four starches and that lonely hollandaise.

How, for example, would Escoffier’s taxonomy categorize the creations of molecular gastronomy? While he created a number of bottled sauces, for use in the home, Escoffier’s system isn’t flexible enough to address our broadened tastes. Escoffier, like Carême before him, had an architect’s desire to control the experience of his clients. That kind of ego seems out of place when we think nothing of having BBQ sauce, honey-mustard, ketchup, piri piri, a couple of soy sauces, sriracha, Tabasco, or Worcestershire on our tables—maybe at the same time.

Stubbs BBQ Sauces — image courtesy of howtoshopforfree.net

Clearly, a completely different approach is required. It must be flexible enough to incorporate any sauce, from any part of the world that exists now, has ever existed, or ever will exist. It must be able to address any sauce, regardless of the unusualness of its ingredients. It needs to be logical, and it needs to be able to function without having to build on historical sauce precedents—yet be able to seamlessly accommodate any of those pre-existing sauces.

There may be other ways to accomplish that goal, but the simplest that comes to mind is one based on the physical structures of the sauces. To that end, let us consider five new mother sauce categories (plus a hybrid category, Composites, for sauces that merge two or more of the original five).

Appropriately enough, the first of the solutions to our self-imposed task is, in fact… solutions.

[excerpts from Sauces Reconsidered: Aprés Escoffier, 
Rowan & Littlefield, February 2019]

Featured Image: Hollandaise sauce over asparagas: image by Betty Crocker Kitchens

Gary Allen’s most recent book is Sauces Reconsidered: Aprés Escoffier, a volume in Rowman & Littlefield Studies in Food and Gastronomy. You can find more of his speculations about things he has been known to (but really shouldn’t) put in his mouth — his own foot being a prime example of the latter — on his website: onthetable​.us

Gary;s found oyster shell

I shouldn’t have been surprised, as oysters have been popular in the Hudson Valley for a very long time. Some twenty years ago, I spoke with one of the archaeologists who were doing exploratory digs at Kingston’s Senate House. He told me that thousands of barrels of oysters were shipped up the river from New York harbor, as early as the early Dutch period, and that some of those oysters were as large as a foot in length. New York City was once the capital of oyster fisheries in the US, and oyster houses could be found on nearly every block. Alas, pollution has killed the oyster industry on lower Manhattan, but Long Island Sound still produces lovely briny oysters—‘though no one allows them to live long enough to reach the gargantuan sizes of the past. Most oysters are harvested when they’re a little over two years old.

Connecticut Bluepoints

Curiously enough, since oysters are filter feeders, there are plans to re-introduce them to New York harbor. They may actually begin to clean up the very pollution that ruined the industry a century ago. We might consider waiting a few decades before eating any of them though!

Wellfleets

Recently, oysters (from places a bit farther way from Manhattan) have regained some of their lost popularity… in part, I suspect, because we diners have become more aware of local differences in foods, their terroir. Just like wine, an oyster’s flavor is a direct result of the unique characteristics of its environment, perhaps even more so. How cold and salty the water is, how much and what kind of algae (oyster food) grows there, how long the oyster is bedded there—all these factors affect the taste of the oyster that winds up on a bed of crushed ice. Generally speaking, oysters that live their lives in warm waters (Chesapeake bay and south) grow faster; they get to feed for more months of the year. That leads to plump, but milder-tasting flesh. Northern oysters tend to be smaller, brinier, and—to my taste at least—more desirable when served raw. I’m particularly fond of the ones from Eastern Canadian waters (Crassostrea virginica, the same species as the famous Wellfleets) and from Washington’s Hood Canal (Ostrea lurida expansa, such as Hama Hamas). The big eastern oysters, such as those from the Gulf of Mexico, are ideally suited to frying. It’s no accident that Oyster Po-boys originated in New Orleans. There are even bigger oysters… such as the Giant Pacific Oyster (Crassostrea angulata), but they’re used primarily for making oyster sauce.

Assorted selection

The “oysters” that create pearls are not even oysters or, at least, edible oysters—though they are vaguely similar. Pearls form in two genera of “oysters:” Pinctada and Pteria, that are not in the same family as edible oysters. Some pearls are even found in freshwater mussels that are even further, taxonomically, from delectable oysters. Pearls are OK—but, frankly, I’m only interested in the oysters I can eat—and, easy as it is to digress into matters biological, I’ll gladly get back to the Hudson Valley’s culinary connection to these bivalves.

hama-hama

Maria Sanders van Rensselaer ‘s hand-written recipe book (she lived from 1749 to 1830) featured this dish: “To stew oysters. Take 1 pint of oysters, set them over a fire in their own liquor with a glass of wine, a lump of butter, some salt, pepper and mace. Let them stew gently.” When reading old recipes, we have to expect a certain vagueness that doesn’t correspond to modern recipe formats—or kitchen equipment.

South Salem resident Peter Rose has made it her life’s work to study Dutch cookery in the Hudson Valley. She’s written nine books on the subject. She also co-curated an exhibit at the Albany Institute of History and Art: “Matters of Taste, Food and Drink in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art and Life.” The show included objects (some of which came from New Paltz’s Huguenot Street) and artworks from Holland’s greatest period of still-life painting. In the show’s catalogue, Rose included this recipe (which I’ve slightly modernized):

Baked Oysters

Serves 4 as an appetizer

Ingredients

¼ cup unseasoned bread-crumbs (dry or made from stale bread)
1/8 tsp. ground mace
1/8 tsp. black pepper
1 pint shucked oysters with their liquor
4 Tbsp. sweet butter
Lemon wedges for garnish

Method

• Preheat oven to 350°F.

• Generously butter a 1-quart souffle dish or small deep casserole.
• Combine bread-crumbs and spices.
• Place oysters in the dish, one layer thick, topped with a thin layer of the bread-crumb mixture and dot with butter. Repeat this layering, finishing with the last of the bread-crumbs and butter.
• Bake until lightly browned and bubbly, about 40 minutes.
• Serve with a crusty roll and lemon wedge.

Gary Allen’s most recent book is Can It!: The Pleasures and Perils of Preserving Foods, his third book from Reaktion. You can find more of his speculations about things he has been known to (but really shouldn’t) put in his mouth — his own foot being a prime example of the latter — on his website:  onthetable​.us  

When, on Christmas morning, Scrooge wanted to mend his ways, he sent an errand boy to buy the biggest turkey available, “not the little prize turkey, the big one.” In Victorian times, as today, nothing said holiday like a big roast, and Scrooge’s surprise for the Cratchit family conveys the ultimate in celebration. But how did these long-held beliefs about holiday food take root?

Illustration, Thomas Berwick, British Museum

To understand the importance placed upon such types of meals, we turn to French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. According to him, the fundamental difference between the ordinary meals we serve to our immediate families and those we make for company or during holidays is that ordinary meals are boiled not roasted. Going back to at least the Middle Ages in Europe, large cuts of meat (those deemed suitable for roasting) only found their way to the kitchens of the very wealthy—at that time, the nobility. Consequently, to offer roasted meat to guests was to confer noble status upon them.

Lévi-Strauss’s notion also reflects the reality of French kitchens in his time: most didn’t contain ovens. For such special occasions as Christmas, or the arrival of honored guests, large stuffed birds or carefully larded haunches were carried to the local boulangerie for roasting in huge, bread-baking ovens. In light of this, I would argue that it isn’t the cooking method, itself, but the extra effort expended that gives special-occasion meals their higher status.

One of the primary functions of holidays is the promotion and affirmation of group cohesiveness. The shared memories and rituals that define our families—and our societies—are renewed and restored during the preparation and eating of traditional foods. The essential ingredient in any Thanksgiving meal is its invariability. Other holidays, like Christmas, allow for some experimentation, but the Thanksgiving meal is a ritual that is performed with absolute adherence to a family’s traditions.

It’s curious then that the menu for Christmas dinner, a mere month after Thanksgiving, often repeats certain foods. Some items appear on both menus precisely because they’re family favorites, but others take their place on the table due to societal traditions that extend farther back than the immediate generations. For example, many details of American Christmas celebrations are based upon English models such as the Yule log, the repetition of seasonal songs, and, of course, the annual retelling, or re-televising, of Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol.” But because the English don’t celebrate the American Thanksgiving feast, a roasted turkey at Christmas doesn’t seem as redundant in England as it does on our side of the pond.

In addition, though the pairing of sweet and savory on the same plate is unusual—the English usually keep them separate—it isn’t unknown. During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, immediately preceding the age of exploration and the colonization of America, such sweet-savory combinations were common. The food traditions brought by the early colonists were still those of earlier Europeans. Consequently, if your holiday meal is intended to serve as a ritual reenactment of ancient ways, cranberries make perfect sense. In western tradition, only roasted meats are normally served with a sweet side dish: leg of lamb with mint jelly, glazed ham with pineapple, or roast goose with red currant jelly. While these aren’t always holiday meals, they’re generally reserved for special occasions. Likewise, it should be noted that these celebratory meals often end with another ancient pairing of sweet and savory, fruit and meat: the mince pie.

In recent years, the pairing of fruits and meats has become more common, largely because of the increased popularity of non-European cuisines. The Chinese, for example, don’t usually save room for dessert because each of their dishes balances the four basic flavors: sweet, sour, salty, and bitter. Most Americans order sweet-and-savory dishes at non-western (what used to be called “ethnic”) restaurants, and they’re beginning to enjoy them at home as well.

Perhaps in keeping with this broadening of the American palate, and of a more general interest in our history and cultural genealogy, adventurous cooks are experimenting with much older cuisines. Historical re-enacters strive to create “authentic” foods at mock Revolutionary and Civil War battles, and members of the Society for Creative Anachronism reproduce as accurately as possible the cooking of the Middle Ages and Renaissance.

The image of ancient eating habits is changing. Most of us now know that historic meals didn’t consist solely of gruel (for the peasantry) and giant haunches of roasted game (for the elite). The food of the Middle Ages and Renaissance—at least for the well-off—was rich and varied, with exotic ingredients, elaborate preparation and presentations, and a level of conspicuous consumption that could be the envy of today’s fashionable foodies.

Just as our knowledge of our kitchen heritage is increasing, today’s cookbooks are beginning to look for ways to incorporate that knowledge into modern cooking. This isn’t cultural appropriation, but rather chronological-fusion cooking. It’s is our own culinary heritage, revived and recharged after 400 years.

What better way to celebrate Christmas and reconnect with our collective past than by making a classic English recipe? The extra effort spent on this dish communicates to family (and friends, if invited) that they’re special and honored. It says, as did the Bard of Avon in As You Like It, “Sit down and feed, and welcome to our table.” However, in keeping with modern tastes, let’s set aside the turkey—with apologies to the reformed Scrooge—and revisit another ancient treat, at once savory and sweet.

Francine Segan adapted a receipt from Robert May’s The Accomplisht Cook, published in 1660, in Oliver Cromwell’s England. It would have been one of twenty first courses for a Christmas dinner—followed another nineteen second courses. The Center for Disease Control recommends that our holiday meals be limited to our immediate family, so thirty-nine courses might be a little extravagant for this season.

Roasted Pork with Herbs and Grapes

Roasted Pork with Herbs and Grapes

Ingredients:

Dash nutmeg, freshly grated
1 Tbsp. salt
1 tsp. pepper, fresh ground
1 cup flat-leaved parsley, finely chopped
2 endive stalks, finely chopped
½ cup assorted fresh herbs (mint, rosemary, sage, savory, or thyme) , finely chopped
½ cup currants
½ cup seedless red grapes, quartered
½ cup seedless green grapes, quartered
1 pork loin (about four pounds), butterflied
12 thin slices pancetta (about four ounces)
15 whole cloves
4 sprigs fresh rosemary, quartered

Method

Preheat oven to 450°F.
• Combine currants, endive, grapes, herbs, nutmeg, parsley, salt and pepper.
• Spread the mixture down the middle of the butterflied pork. Roll it tightly and tie in several places with kitchen string. Cover the pork with pancetta slices, held in place with cloves and rosemary sprigs.
• Roast for fifteen minutes.
• Reset oven to 350°F, leaving it open for a few minutes to cool quickly.
• Roast for about an hour, until the internal temperature at the thickest point is 140°F.
• Remove from the oven, tent with foil, and allow it to rest for ten minutes before slicing.

Slightly adapted from: Segan, Francine. Shakespeare’s Kitchen: Renaissance Recipes for the Contemporary Cook, New York: Random House, 2003.

Gary Allen’s most recent book is Sauces Reconsidered: Aprés Escoffier, a volume in Rowman & Littlefield Studies in Food and Gastronomy. You can find more of his speculations about things he has been known to (but really shouldn’t) put in his mouth — his own foot being a prime example of the latter — on his website: onthetable​.us

Thanksgiving seems pretty obvious—it’s a typical harvest celebration, as old as agriculture itself. It was recast as a specifically American event by Abraham Lincoln, who had a vested interest in reminding us that ALL Americans had something in common (there was that Civil War going on at the time). There is only one contemporary account of the pilgrim’s first Thanksgiving. In a letter written on December 11, 1621, Edward Winslow listed the foods they ate: “the fruit of their labors,” unspecified types of fowl, and venison. It seems odd that he would not have included green bean casserole and marshmallow-topped sweet potatoes—maybe they were so obvious that he didn’t need to mention them. Seriously, that first Thanksgiving was—and all subsequent Thanksgivings have been —a classic harvest feast, consuming as much of the season’s bounty as possible. Remember, before modern food storage methods were invented, many foods were only available at certain times of the year.

The ancients celebrated the New Year at around the
same time (January only became the year’s first month with the
advent of the Gregorian calendar in 1582).

At the other end of the year, we have Easter and Passover. Both holidays occur, not coincidentally, at the same time as earlier pagans celebrated the Spring equinox, the rebirth of the year. The ancients celebrated the New Year at around the same time (January only became the year’s first month with the advent of the Gregorian calendar in 1582). The Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah, atypically, occurs exactly half a year after Passover—so it comes around the Autumn equinox (the dates for Jewish holidays are not as accurately tied to the equinoxes because their lunar calendar doesn’t sync well with the solar calendar).

But back to the table—think of the foods associated with Easter and Passover. Specific religious reasons aside, what do they have in common? Lamb and eggs become available in the spring. The bitter herbs of Passover are among the earliest fresh “vegetables” available after the long winter. Charoset may symbolize the mortar used by Egypt’s enslaved Jews—but it’s made of dried fruits, honey, wine, and nuts (foods that could have been stored through, and survived, the winter). Many Easter dinners include ham, a cured meat that, in times past, would just be coming into its own after the butchering in the coldest part of winter.

—quintessentially calorie-laden winter foods—
along with a medley of spices that hearkens back to the
cooking style of the Middle Ages

And the Christmas/Hannukah/Kwanzaa/Festivus/New Year/Saturnalia feasts?

When we think of Christmas, we think of “figgy pudding” and fruitcake, even if none of us actually eat them anymore. Those desserts, like mincemeat pies and Dickensian plum pudding, are made with lots of dried fruits, nuts, and fat (often suet)—quintessentially calorie-laden winter foods—along with a medley of spices that hearkens back to the cooking style of the Middle Ages.

Traditional Hannukah foods (at least since Medieval times, and the discovery of the New World) include potato laktes and lots of dairy dishes. Potatoes store well through the winter in root cellars and, during those cold months, milk products don’t spoil as quickly as they do in summer.

“kwanzaa” comes from a Swahili phrase meaning “first fruits of the season” —a late-in-the-year harvest celebration

The very name “kwanzaa” comes from a Swahili phrase meaning “first fruits of the season” —a late-in-the-year harvest celebration. It is, of course, a holiday created in modern times, but like all holidays it looks to the past for inspiration. For American blacks, that means the foods of the south: greens, especially collards, black-eyed peas, sweet potato pies—all foods that would have been easily available in winter in the south. New Year’s Day often includes some of these same foods, for good luck in the coming year; Hoppin’ John (black-eyed peas and rice) symbolizes pocket change, while collards are supposed to bring folding money—but ONLY to those who eat them on New Year’s Day.

winter holidays are superimposed on the much older pagan
holiday, Saturnalia —which, in turn, was based on celebrations of the solstice that probably go back to the neolithic

All of these winter holidays are superimposed on the much older pagan holiday, Saturnalia —which, in turn, was based on celebrations of the solstice that probably go back to the neolithic. The thing to remember is that seasonal holidays depend on some kind of calendar, whether it hangs on the kitchen wall, or is a circle of stones that track the movements of the sun and moon. Calendars only became essential to our existence when we invented agriculture—because farmers need to know when to plant, so that crops will have time to ripen, and the vagaries of weather are not as reliable as the regular progression of the seasons.

I have no idea what kinds of foods Kramer had in mind when he invented “Festivus: the holiday for the rest of us.” Perhaps it was just extra helpings of whatever it was that Jerry and friends ate at their Upper West Side diner. And, before you ask, how can we explain the food traditions of the Fourth of July?

It can’t be a coincidence that those celebrations occur just as the hot dog harvest is coming in.

Gary Allen’s most recent book is Sauces Reconsidered: Aprés Escoffier, a volume in Rowman & Littlefield Studies in Food and Gastronomy. You can find more of his speculations about things he has been known to (but really shouldn’t) put in his mouth — his own foot being a prime example of the latter — on his website: onthetable​.us

In late winter, I search intently for any sign that spring is coming. I peer intently into the woods, searching for a slight swelling of a bud—anything at all. Then, when it actually does arrive, it’s everywhere at the same time. What had been a slight change in birdsong becomes a predawn cacophony, with every bird on the planet singing his fool head off. What was an oh-so-subtle greening becomes an explosion of flowering trees and wildflowers.

Then, before I know what’s happening, I notice that the apple trees are in bloom. The scent in the orchards is intoxicating, but knowing that when the apple trees bloom, the morels are about to appear makes me delirious. I grab my mushroom bag, pocket-knife and camera and bolt in to the woods.

apple blossoms

Alas, I search for a couple of days, to no avail. Then the weatherman promises a few days of rain, followed by warming—just the sort of news an amateur mycologist wants to hear. So, even on a day when it’s still cool and gray, I enter the woods in search of the wily Morchella.

There’s some botanical promise: field pussytoes bloom on the rocky ledges where I often find morels. An occasional dog-tooth violet and bloodroot show their blossoms against the dead leaves of the departing winter. Finding the first morel is never easy, so I look for other signs that the season is right. Wild columbine—which usually blooms at the same time as the mushrooms poke their heads through the forest leaf-litter. It’s a great relief and encouragement when we see the flowers nodding along mossy outcrops.

Picture me, stooped over, mushroom bag in one hand, a small knife in the other, creeping through the woods. Have you ever watched a robin hunting for worms? The morel hunter looks very similar. Both take a few hesitant steps, stop, then take a few more. Every once in a while, each freezes in his tracks, cocks his head to get a better angle with which to view his potential quarry. When the game is found each swoops down, lest the worm, or mushroom, effect an escape.

robin and worm

OK, morels don’t actually escape—but if an unwary hunter takes his eye off the mushrooms, even for a second, or changes his angle of view even slightly, their natural invisibility takes over and the hunter is foiled.

It doesn’t seem reasonable that something as empty-headed as a morel could not only recognize potential predators, but organizes strategies for out-witting them—but it’s easy to imagine that they do just that.

It sometimes seems like these fungi have the ability to disguise themselves—as if guided by some pre-vegetal intelligence. Their color and texture certainly aid in their deception—but their tendency to emerge from beneath the edge of a rock, or in the shadow of a decayed stick, or at the base of some thorny shrub, suggests the sort of protective strategies that can only arise from self-awareness. Logic compels us to believe that this is not the case, but the search for morels—especially the unproductive search for morels—can lead a mushroom hunter to some unusual suppositions. Occasionally, morels can be found in the open—foolishly sticking their heads into the spring sunshine—but far more often they are hiding—as if they know that there is an omelet in their future.

I’ve always known how important it is to go back over the same area where I’ve just looked for morels. Sometimes the slant of the light, or angle of view, will reveal their formerly unnoticed hiding places. But another odd phenomenon is less obvious—and it has more to do with the hunter than the hunted.

One can only look intensely at a patch of ground for a minute or so before the mind begins to wander. The eyes seem to lose focus—and, just then, a morel appears. It’s usually in plain sight, but just at the edge of the area I’ve just scanned intently. It’s almost as if the unconscious mind continues the hunt—more effectively—while the conscious mind drifts.

Gary Allen’s most recent book is Can It!: The Pleasures and Perils of Preserving Foods, his third book from Reaktion. You can find more of his speculations about things he has been known to (but really shouldn’t) put in his mouth — his own foot being a prime example of the latter — on his website:  onthetable​.us  

However, most of the time, I’m on a mission to find something drinkable that I can afford. One friend dubbed this a quest for “the finest of cheap wines, or the cheapest of fine wines.” This is not as simple as it seems, or as it once seemed to me. It turns out there are a LOT of cheap wines, most of them deservedly so. There are only a few wines that are worth much more than their piddling price would suggest.

Every once in a while, a small unknown company—often from a part of the world not yet been discovered by wine connoisseurs—produces an absolute elixir, but either doesn’t know it or doesn’t think it has a name prestigious enough to justify a higher price. Somewhere in a wine store, tucked away in the discount section that serious wine drinkers rush past on their way to the Wine Spectator’s latest 95-rated wine, these unheralded and ignored gems wait to be discovered.

In a perfect world, I would find one of those magical wines and be happy for life.

Alas, I am not alone in my quest. Who could imagine that, out there, someone as stingy as me would be scouring the also-rans for a real winner? The fact is, there are entirely too many of us. Whenever one of these special wines is found, it seems like everyone finds it at the same time. That damned supply-and-demand rule kicks in, and in no time at all the wine is priced out of my reach. Consequently, like the Flying Dutchman, I must forever search the world for true love.

One summer, maybe twenty years ago, I picked up a bottle of Peñascal, a tempranillo from Spain that may, or may not,  have been labeled with a vintage. In my price range (five or six bucks, back then), vintages were hardly important considerations. I took it home and served it beside a plate of Linguine con Pesto al Genovese.

Now I may be cheap, but I read. I’ve learned a bit about wines—mostly wines I will never taste. I’ve studied which wines pair well with certain foods. I can tell the difference between varietals, and can even recognize some stylistic differences between different wines made from the same grape. In no way, do I qualify as a connoisseur—let alone a wine snob.

I drink the stuff and I like it.

Usually.

What always puzzled me, while reading wine books, was their mention of some mysterious effect that occurs when certain foods are matched by certain wines. I understand that a wine might make a food taste better (or worse), and that the taste of some food might bring out some elusive taste or aroma of a well-matched wine—but wine writers said that, under certain conditions, a combination of wine and food could produce an entirely different flavor, something that wasn’t in either beforehand. They were describing some kind of synergistic effect that was the culinary equivalent of Tibetan throat singing.

I didn’t believe them.

It is, after all, possible that some experts—in an esoteric subject such as wine—might have a difficult time resisting the urge to show off their prodigious sensory skills, even when such skills are non-existent. How can we, mere mortals, know that they’re not just making it up? I’d often read elaborate sensory analyses of wines, listing dozens of rare and unusual aromas, mouth-feels and finishes that—frankly—I never noticed at all.

I could see no reason for believing in all this organoleptic hocus-pocus.

Then, right after swallowing a mouthful of pesto-laden pasta, with garlic and basil still infusing all of my senses, I took a sip of the Peñascal. It was okay, certainly a possible candidate in my good cheap wine quest. Gradually, after swallowing the wine, I became aware of an unexpected presence, somewhere I couldn’t quite identify. Emerging in a place that wasn’t really my tongue, palate, throat or nose, an ethereal note—exactly like those Tibetan overtones—a ghostly toasted hazelnut manifestation.

It briefly shimmered, then faded—leaving me unsure that it had ever really been there.

Gary Allen’s most recent book is Can It!: The Pleasures and Perils of Preserving Foods, his third book from Reaktion. You can find more of his speculations about things he has been known to (but really shouldn’t) put in his mouth — his own foot being a prime example of the latter — on his website:  onthetable​.us