Thursday, July 31, 2008


Peas ‘n Carrots, Carrots ‘n Peas

In 1986 I had occasion to visit the U.K. The trip was to celebrate the founding of an organization to which I belonged. Those of us from the States and Canada stayed a few days in London at the beginning and end of the trip, but the main accommodation was at Wadham College, Oxford. The organizers had planned a series of day trips to the surrounding area and we had set meals in many of those places.

The season was the end of September/beginning of October. Let me say right off that it was a great trip with friends and fellow club members. It was well planned and well executed and went like clockwork.

Except…every meal featured peas-and-carrots. I hyphenate because we didn’t get peas in one pile and carrots in another – we got mixed peas and carrots. They all looked and tasted alike, too. I had visions of a vast peas-and-carrots factory somewhere pumping out bags and boxes and cartons of frozen peas and carrots.

I have clear memories of the four main meals: The black tie dinner at Wadham College, the Scottish banquet in Edinburgh, the medieval banquet at Warwick Castle, and the Welsh banquet in Cardiff.

The black tie dinner at Wadham didn’t have peas and carrots. It opened with smoked salmon and closed with profiteroles. It was nicely formal and quite good. The breakfasts were buffet style and featured those weird fried eggs found all over U.K. The Full English Breakfast is another blog entry in itself.

The Scottish banquet opened with an “appetizer” of haggis, tatties and neeps (potatoes and turnips, both mashed into tasteless pureés). For an amusing and fictitious account of haggis, go to www.electricscotland.com/haggis. Haggis is a really dish made of the innards (aka offal) of a sheep, cooked together with oatmeal and spices, stuffed into a sheep’s stomach and boiled. It is piped to the table by bagpipers and toasted with fine whisky. Before you tell me I misspelled it, “whisky” without an “e” always means Scotch. Whiskey with an “e” can be Irish, Bourbon, corn, rye, Canadian, or just about any flavorful distilled spirits made from grain. The haggis tastes like good dog food smells – not bad at all. After the haggis course, we had lamb and peas and carrots. Of course.

I really don’t remember the medieval banquet all that well. It had been modernized from real medieval recipes, which all feature honey, and made to suit twentieth century tastes. I do know that it featured lamb and peas and carrots, because we all remarked on it. There were “minstrels” and other entertainment, all sort of touristy and not all that medieval.

The Welsh dinner featured lamb, as did the others. Accompanied, of course, by peas and carrots. We were treated to harp music during a dinner that could have taken place any time between 1946 and the present. The second-best part of the meal was the waitress, who piled my large son’s place high with – wait for it – peas and carrots. She explained that she had brothers and home and knew how much they ate. It’s a good thing he liked peas and carrots. The best part of the meal was the mixed berry pie at the end. The crust was so flaky it was hard to get out of the pans. The filling was hot and just sweet enough and so flavorful I’ve been trying to duplicate it ever since. No luck.

Just about the only dinners that we ate as a group that did not include peas and carrots were the black tie dinner at Wadham College and the Chinese meal in London.

I am very fond of the Brit Com As Time Goes By. I have noticed that they eat a lot of peas and carrots, too. Large peas and large carrots cut into discs.

It was more than a decade before I voluntarily ate peas and carrots again. Even then I have made sure to have petit pois and baby carrots and have flavored them with various herbs, a touch of onion, and butter. I don’t think I could face those giant peas and big, aggressively orange carrots ever again.

(c) 2008 Katherine DeWitt

Thursday, July 24, 2008

The Delights of Ginger, Crystallized and Otherwise

Crystallized ginger has a lot of sentimental meaning for me. When I was twelve my family moved to the Washington, DC area from North Carolina. Two things impressed me about the area: It was so green, and there was such a variety of food I had never heard of.

Crystallized ginger symbolizes that variety. Both my parents worked downtown and when we had days off from school, I would ride down with them. I’d spend the morning in one of the museums, then walk up to Woodward and Lothrop to eat at the lunch counter.

The candy department at Woodie’s was several steps down from the G Street entrance. The Metro station occupies that corner now. Anyway, a young girl from the country was very impressed by the big department stores. And that candy department…

I don’t remember too many of the different candies that were available, but there was crystallize ginger. It is a parade of sensations starting with the crunch of the sugar crystals on the outside, moving into the firmness of the sugar-soaked ginger itself. The taste starts sweet and fragrant and finished with a spicy bite. I love it still.

Other forms of ginger have their uses. Fresh ginger is great in oriental dishes and many deserts. Ground ginger is a must in pumpkin pie and some cookies. And there’s Chinese preserved ginger.

Chinese preserved ginger and crystallized ginger start the same way. Slices of fresh ginger root are cooked slowly in heavy syrup until almost all the liquid is absorbed or cooked away. The Chinese then pack the syrupy ginger into lamp-base shaped ginger jars.

Crystallized ginger goes a step further. The candied preserved ginger is dried, then when still sticky is rolled in coarse-grain sugar. From there, the drying is completed so that one gets those chunks of ginger that look like the inside of a citrine crystal geode. It’s as beautiful as it is tasty.

Another of my favorite ways to enjoy ginger is Japanese pickled ginger: that paper-thin pink delight that accompanies sushi and sashimi. The preparation is simple: it is treated with salt, then “put down” in a sugar and light vinegar mixture and refrigerated. The ginger turns a rosy pink. It used to be dyed red, but when the red dye was outlawed, they just left it the pretty pink. When on a plate with sushi or sashimi and the Japanese green horseradish wasabi, the color contrasts are quite lovely. And the fragrance – when I describe sushi and sashimi to people who have never enjoyed them, I say they taste like flowers. That, of course, is dependent on the scent of the ginger and the wasabi.

Fresh ginger is used in many Asian dishes from a variety of cultures. Ginger perfumes even the most mundane stir-fry. It’s just peeled, sliced and grated or sliced and added to a quick dish.

The ginger I knew as a child is ground dried ginger. It’s put into cookies, cakes, pumpkin pie, gingerbread, and other sweet deserts. It’s an ingredient in some curries and some savory dishes. We all know ginger snaps, made with ground ginger. Ground dried ginger is yet another dimension of this lovely root.

The last form of ginger is beverage. Ginger ale is pleasant, but a good strong ginger beer from the Islands is a kick in the palate and a lasting pleasure.

Ginger has an ancient and revered past. It has been used in mysticism and medicine, food and beverages. It is a specific for nausea. A strong ginger beer is a great stomach tonic and straightens out nausea quickly. Ginger snaps help prevent car sickness in dogs.

There are recipes for all ginger preparations, and recipes including ginger, all over the web, so just search and click. You’ll enjoy.

My favorite may be crystallized, but only because it symbolizes my introduction to a world of food I didn’t know until I left North Carolina. It was one reason I thought I had died and gone to heaven when I moved to this lush, green, metropolitan place.

(c) 2008 Katherine DeWitt

Thursday, July 17, 2008

Bad Food! Bad! Bad!


Not all my food memories are good. I particularly remember “molded salads.” Remember those? I remember some that were green and some that were pink; some that were full of tiny marshmallows and some that were lumpy with pineapple. The pineapple, of course, had to be canned. Fresh (raw) pineapple has an enzyme that breaks down the gelatin and turns it into liquid. Some had mayonnaise, some didn’t. Some had cream cheese, some didn’t. Some even had canned salmon or shrimp. All were pretty bad.

Then there was tomato aspic. My mother loved tomato aspic. I never saw the point. I have seen it sliced, as a garnish, but in our house it was a whole side dish. It was made on purpose to eat. I haven’t touched it since I had a say in the matter.

Where did those recipes come from? Were they the nightmares of the home economists who made up recipes for food packagers? I don’t know, but a lot of cooks have carefully cooked or copied those recipes and tucked them into their recipe boxes or between the pages of a cookbook. And we encourage them by praising them when they turn up on pot-luck tables or buffet tables. We actually spoon them onto our plates and consume them, against our better judgment.

I never learned how to make any of that stuff. I didn’t like it. I have felt obligated to at least taste many of these dishes because people I worked with or went to church with made them and I didn’t want to hurt their feelings. How many of us have consumed bad food and remarked on it favorably because we didn’t want to hurt someone?

We have done it for other dishes, as well. There was, and is, banana pudding. It is an exercise in blandness. Bland vanilla pudding, bland vanilla wafers, bland bananas. It’s too sweet, too soft, too blah. Yet it turns up on church supper tables and family picnic tables with a consistency I can only wonder at. Maybe it’s because it’s easier to make than chocolate cake. It’s easier to make than almost anything except, perhaps, little dishes of vanilla pudding. I still can’t stand vanilla pudding because it has absolutely no character.

Bad food isn’t confined to side dishes and dessert. Take tuna casserole, for instance. As Henny Youngman said of his wife, “Please.” I may be prejudiced, because I can’t stand canned fish. That’s a personal problem. I don’t like canned tuna, canned salmon, sardines or anchovies. I don't even like smoked oysters. My mother had a habit of giving us chilled canned salmon as an entrée in the summer. Just plain canned salmon, complete with the little vertebrae. She liked to crunch them. The inclusion of the bones gives canned salmon a sort of dusty taste.

To read this one would think my mother was a bad cook. Within the limitations of the way she learned to cook, she wasn’t. There were many delicious dishes that she did superbly well. She just liked stuff that I didn’t, like green beans cooked with bacon grease until they were black and so salty they actually burned one’s mouth. I would literally gag when I had to eat them. I was a grown woman before I discovered what green beans really taste like.

Now that I’m grown, I don’t have to eat what I don’t like, unless, of course, it turns up on a buffet table made by someone whose feelings I don’t want to hurt. I plead with all those people who think folks really like their special dishes to watch to expressions of people in line when they come to the green mass with the pineapple and marshmallows. Do they smile and dig in or do they maintain a blank face and take a token amount?

You be the judge, then restrain yourself. Please don't subject your friends to stuff like that.

(c) 2008 Katherine DeWitt

Tuesday, July 8, 2008


Scrmbled Eggs

That seems such a simple title. The truth is that there is nothing simple about scrambled eggs. They can be large-curd or small-curd, soft or hard, with milk or without, plain or with additions. Most omelets start out the same way as most scrambled eggs. The difference is in the cooking.

I’m from the beat-the-hell-out-of-the eggs, beat the fresh-ground pepper in well, and salt after pouring into the pan school. No milk. Most short-order cooks break the eggs onto the grill and stir like mad with the spatula and let the customer salt and pepper to taste. The best restaurant scrambled eggs I ever ate I enjoyed at the Williamsburg Inn in the late 1960’s. They were perfect. They had been pre-beaten and cooked to the exactly correct consistency with enough butter to enrich the flavor. I understand that cooks in British country houses had a trick to keep the scrambled eggs on the sideboard from getting hard and dry over the warmers: They would add one last beaten raw egg to the cooked product just before sending it out to the dining room. With the salmonella phobia we all enjoy so much, this is probably not an option.

The addition of milk makes a softer but not runny product. The addition of cheese also makes a softer product. I love extra-sharp cheddar, grated finely so it melts into and amalgamates with the eggs. Yum. An old favorite from my childhood is adding canned herring roe. The roe has a mild fish flavor that gives you enough variation to be extra tasty without being overpowering. I haven’t noticed canned herring roe on store shelves lately, but I haven’t been looking. I live with people who say, “Eeew.” I suppose you could add cooked shad roe but that seems such a waste. Shad roe’s worth another blog entry all by itself. I’ll probably do that one day, but today it’s chicken eggs.

Eggs are cheap, nutritious, satisfying and, when cooked to individual taste, a gastronomic delight. When made into omelets they become luncheon or after-theater supper mainstay with the addition of fillings, and can be anything from rustic to haute cuisine.
Conventional omelets can be filled with sautéed chopped sweet and hot peppers and Southwestern spices. They can be stuffed and topped with grated cheddar cheese (I like to beat chives into the eggs first for this one). They can be filled with sour cream and topped with sour cream and caviar. Speaking of sour cream, that’s a filling that cries out for shredded smoked salmon. There really is no end to the variation you can get with an omelet. I recently used sautéed scallions, leftover baked salmon, and cream cheese to make a filling. Exquisite!

My father once described the way his stepmother made omelets. She was New Orleans French and her method was to separate the eggs, whip the whites almost into a meringue, beat the yolks, fold them together, and bake in the oven. There is a region of France, but I forget what region, where there is a restaurant that makes almost nothing else but that style omelet. Other variations include the Spanish frittata and Chinese egg foo yung, and those are just the better-known permutations. Almost every culture that keeps chickens for eggs does omelets.

There is no end to the taste sensations you can get with scrambled eggs. There’s nothing simple about them, from the scrambling technique, to the cooking technique, to the flavoring technique. Start experimenting in your kitchen, and don’t forget, “Hot pan, cold fat, food won’t stick.” It’s a trick that works.


Bon Cuisine



(c) 2008 Katherine DeWitt