Mad about Majolica

I have this tiny little food-related addiction, aka a passion for pottery. To me, sliced tomatoes look more delicious when served on a green majolica platter, madeleines more evocative of France when piled onto a Quimper plate, even olives more appealing in a little terra cotta tapas dish.
Amongst my favorite pieces are the fruit and vegetable inspired creations of Rhode Island potter Barbara Eigen, particularly her signed work from the 70s and 80s.
Here her fennel pitcher holds breadsticks and the little fennel-heart dish contains a roasted red pepper dip.


The driftwood-grey walls of my beach house kitchen work well (she said, modestly) with the majolica's matte finishes. Here a much-loved radish platter hangs near a similarly-sized row of Eigen-depicted asparagus. I know she produced corn cob platters around the same time, and although I haven't been able to locate one yet, I SHALL.

The rhubarb platter is huge, more than twice the size of the radish cluster and has a ditinguished provenance. For years it resided in the kitchen of baker extraordinaire Flo Braker -- San Francisco Chronicle columnist and author of outstanding baking books. (I cannot imagine anyone who cares even minimally about pastry-making not owning Flo's "The Simple Art of Perfect Baking.")

Every time I entered Flo's kitchen I would glance at this platter and remind her that I expected it to be left to me in her will. One day we were to meet for lunch at an elegant restaurant. I was already seated when Flo walked through the dining room with this big chunk of pottery tucked beneath her arm. She plunked it down in front of me and said, "Now please stop hoping I'll die."
I've treasured it ever since and feel sure Flo now will live to at least 110.

Souffle Tuesday: How Not to Write a Recipe

Seduced by a gorgeous photo in "Gourmet's Menu Cookbook" and my immoderate affection for leeks, I decided to make the book's hazelnut and leek souffle. I quickly discovered that the actual recipe was ridiculously vague about the main ingredient: "Chop finely 10 trimmed leeks (let's not even go into the grammatically incorrect "finely" for "fine")and 1 onion" --uh, this is not a soup or a stew, this is baking and baking requires at least a nod in the direction of precise measurements.
What size leeks? Pencil-thin? Fat as billy-clubs? And what size onion? Maddening.

To deal with this I turned to the basic Julis Child souffle formula I posted last Tuesday, fiddled a bit with other parts of the recipe and settled on this:

Leek and Hazelnut Souffle
inspired by a recipe from "Gourmet's Menu Cookbook."

Butter a 6-cup souffle dish and coat bottom and sides with grated Parmesan cheese. Place dish in refrigerator and pre-heat oven to 400-degrees.
Chop fine enough leeks to measure 2/3 cup and simmer them in 1 cup milk for about 5 minutes, drain the leeks, reserving the milk. Make a thick white sauce with 2 1/2 tablespoons butter, 3 tablespoons flour and the reserved milk.
Remove from the heat and stir in 4 beaten egg yolks. Fold in the leeks, 1/3 cup chopped hazelnuts and 3 tablespoons grated Parmesan, 1 tablspoon minced parsley and salt and pepper to taste. (Remember that the seasoning's intensity will be diminished by the egg whites)
Beat 5 egg whites until they start to foam; add 1 teaspoon of salt and continue beating until soft peaks form. Stir 1/4 of the whites into the base mixture and then fold in the rest. Gently spoon into the prepared dish and place in pre-heated oven. Immediately reduce the heat to 375-degrees. Bake until golden brown and no longer wiggly.

Not the prettiest souffle --the interior is rather drearily beige--but delicious. I made a sort of a sauce for it by melting some unsalted butter and stirring in a generous amount of minced chives. Chive blossoms would have been even prettier, but our garden has fallen behind on its chive flower production.

Tomato Tasks

So this is how I spent most of my Sunday afternoon: cutting plum tomatoes in half, scooping out their gooey ribs and seeds with my fingers and roasting the hell out of them. All the tomatoes in this basket came from one ridiculously fecund plant, a fecundity I rather resented about half-way through the slicing and scooping. But, come winter, when I pull a little package of these intensely flavored morsels out of the freezer and toss them with some pasta or lay a tomato-y ribbon across a sauteed chicken breast, I'll be glad I did the Ma-Ingalls-preserves-crops-for-Winter bit. Even though I really just wanted to lie on the couch re-reading a Donna Leon mystery.

Oven-charred Plum Tomatoes
Don't use this method for any but ripe-yet-still-firm plum tomatoes; most other types just cook down into a soupy mess.
Line a baking sheet with aluminum foil and brush with olive oil.
Cut tomatoes in half length-wise and remove the ribs and seeds. Place on the pan cut-side up. Sprinkle gernerously with salt and dizzle with olive oil. Place in a 425-degree oven and roast until shriveled and charred black along the edges. This usually takes a little over an hour in my experience, but YTMV.
After about 45 minutes, toss in some whole cloves of peeled garlic and check to see if a few of the smaller tomato halves need to depart the oven earlier than their bigger brethren.
When fully roasted, remove from oven, cool and store in small, freezer-friendly containers. I usually put one container in the fridge and freeze the rest.

An Artist Bakes the Ginger Cake

I don't have an artistic molecule in my body but I'm a great appreciator. My friend Stella -- with whom God was generous with artistic gifts -- baked this cake soon after I posted Sylvia Thompson's recipe. I adore the way she finished it, converting the suggested dusting of confectioner's sugar into an elegant row of white stripes and contrasting the cake's rich brown color with the green tabletop. Gorgeous.

A Recipe ( and Book) to Treasure

"The cake has become perhaps the most valued in my repertory," wrote Sylvia Thompson about her Fresh Ginger Cake in one of my most treasured cookbooks: "Feasts and Friends."
"It's easy and foolproof and can be handed round in not much more than three-quarters of an hour after I've thought to make it," she continues. "Once I even got the cake into the oven *during* a party."

I've never understood why Sylvia Thompson's food-writing isn't as well-known and revered as Laurie Colwin's. Both display the same wit, warmth and wisdom -- in fact, they were dear friends. Thompson's book is subtitled "Recipes from a Lifetime" -- a lifetime of a passionate cook whose father wrote for the Marx Brothers, whose mother was a movie star and revered hostess, and whose godmother was MFK Fisher.
I could babble on and on about Thompson, but I want to get this terrific recipe posted. Consider this just Part One of my musings on a brilliant and delightful food writer.

Fresh Ginger Cake
1 stick butter, plus a little softened for the mold
1/2 cup water, cool
1/2 cup (firmly packed) light brown sugar
1/4 cup light molasses
1/4 cup dark corn syrup
1 extra large egg
Fresh ginger the size of an egg, grated medium-fine
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour, plus a little more for the pan
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
Sifted confectioner's sugar for the top
(Thompson calls for a teaspoon of quatre epices, but I omit it)

Heat oven to 350-degrees F.
Choose any mold with a 6- to 8-cup capacity. (Thompson uses an 8-inch square; I use a 6-cup ring mold) Brush with butter and dust with flour.
Melt the butter in the water in a largish saucepan over medium heat. Don't let the water boil.
To the butter/water, whisk in the brown sugar, molasses, corn syrup and then the egg. Whisk in the ginger, discarding any long strings the whisk brings up. Add the flour, baking soda, quatre epices if you're using it, and salt. Whisk a minute or two until lumps dissolve. Pour into the pan. Rap gently on the counter to knock out any air bubbles.
Bake until a skewer thrust in the center comes out clean and the top, when tapped, springs back--Thompson suggests about 35 minutes, but my ring mold version is usually done in 30. Gently turn out onto a dish to serve warm or onto a rack to cool Finish with sifted confectioner's sugar.

[At high altitude, use 1/2 teaspoon baking soda and bake at 375-degrees. A double recipe, according to Thompson, may be "handsomely baked" in a 10-inch square pan at 375-degrees for 35-40 minutes.]

"I serve [it] warm or at room temperature with only a drift of confectioner's sugar and a flower on top," Thompson writes, "but there are times when a plop of whipped cream and just a few slivers of candied ginger are lovely. Past that, toppings such as ice cream or fruit sauces seem to me to distract from the cake's fineness."

In my experience, the cake is best when served within a few hours of baking. After that, it's still extremely tasty, but the consistency becomes more like gingerbread than a delicate cake. I usually serve it, as Thompson suggests, accompanied only by softly whipped cream -- unless I have some very ripe Comice pears on hand, which I will slice and heap into the center of the ring-shaped cake. I hope she wouldn't consider that a fruit sauce distracting "from the cake's fineness."

No-Souffle Tuesday

Between the heat and the holiday, souffle-making fell off the To Do list last week, but I have several interesting recipes to test and hope to have one to share next week.

I saw on the Chez Panisse website that lucky diners there recently got to enjoy a corn and chanterelles souffle. How luscious does *that* sound? Or corn souffle with zucchini blossoms? When I attempt to reverse-engineer a savory souffle recipe from a mere mention I usually start with Julia Child's "General Proportions" chart:

For a 6-cup mold:
Thick bechamel made from 2 1/2 Tb butter, 3 Tb flour and 1 cup liquid
4 egg yolks, beaten into sauce
3/4 cup cheese/fish/meat/vegetables
5 beaten egg whites folded in
(if the meat/vegetable component is particularly dense, I'll often add a sixth egg white)

But for the next couple weeks I'll be sticking to full recipes rather than educated guess work. Particularly if this damned heat spell breaks soon.

A Charlie Brown Apple Tree

At the back of our property we have two small apple trees: Pink Pearl's fruit is as luscious as it is beautiful, while No-Name's apples are cute but sadly deficient in the flavor department. So guess which tree managed to birth all of TWO apples this year and which one produced more than two dozen? A clue: the apples in this photo do not have pink flesh. And there are more than two of them.
Poor No-Name was never intended to be judged on its fruit; its purpose in life was to be a rootstock tree, providing life support for some fancy grafts, but the grafts failed and Resident Gardener hasn't had the heart to shovel-prune the host.
Yesterday I decided to make a little apple galette with No-Name's progeny, figuring that with a good homemade crust and plenty of butter and sugar even B- apples could make a good dessert. I followed Jacques Pepin's instructions in "La Technique": just good crust rolled very thin with thin slices of apple laid on top in overlapping shingle style, a sprinkling of granulated sugar, dabs of butter and plenty of time in a hot oven. (I like my galettes to have the very dark crusts you find in most French pastry shops).
When the galette was cooked, I glazed it with our homemade apricot jam -- it wasn't exactly pretty (note that there's no photo here of the finished pastry) because I didn't bother to strain the jam, but -- accompanied with softly whipped cream flavored with a slug of vanilla -- it tasted just fine. More than fine.