Almonds, from Spain
Angelica (root). from Saxony
Lemon Peel, from Spain
Coriander (seeds), from Morocco
Liquorice, from China
Cassia Bark, from Indo-China
Juniper Berries, from Italy
Cubeb Berries, From Java
Orris (Iris root), from Italy
Grains of Paradise, from West Africa
In my humble opinion, there’s hype, and then there’s really good gin. Really good gin is flavored with the preceding list of “botanicals” and comes in the blue bottle.
At the end of a long summer day at work, nothing beats three fingers of Bombay Sapphire gin. On the rocks. Just a tiny twist of lime. On my porch. While the sun goes down.
All winter long I crave good single malt scotch. But come summer the temperature rises and the gin returns. A seasonal rite of passage.
Since sometime right after Adam and Eve, marketers have been trying to distill and bottle the scent of love. The thing is, it can’t come from a bottle. And it requires baking.
Okay, I admit it. I have an unnatural relationship with the following cookies:
--------------- Molasses Ginger Cookies ------------------------------
2 Cups Flour
2 teaspoons baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon ginger (powdered)
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon cloves
1/2 cup butter (softened)
1/4 cup vegetable shortening
1-1/4 cups sugar (divided) (I use 1 cup white sugar in the cookies and 1/4cup+ course sugar for the coating but that’s just my preference)
1 large egg
1/4 cup light molasses
1/2 teaspoon grated orange peel (zest)
Heat oven to 350 degrees. Mix flour, baking soda, salt, ginger, cinnamon and cloves in a bowl. Beat together butter, shortening and 1 cup sugar in a separate mixing bowl. Beat egg, molasses and orange peel into butter mixture until light and fluffy (up to 5 mins.). Reduce beating speed to low (or use fork) and add dry ingredients until just combined.
Place remaining 1/4 cup sugar in a pie plate. Shape dough into 1-inch balls. Roll balls in sugar (dough will be sticky). Place balls 2 inches apart on an ungreased cookie sheet. Bake 10-12 minutes. Transfer to wire racks to cool. (Note, baking on the short side will create a soft cookie. Baking on the long side will make a ginger snap. Try some of each, they’re great either way. Also, I’m usually more generous on the spices.)
------------------------------
With a nod to our Bakerina, my love of this smell is probably a chicken and egg thing.
My wife is a person who is nearly incaple of verbalizing love to me or even to her children. Its’ a personal thing on top of a cultural thing. Certain frineds of mine have indicated I’m a complete nutcase to put up with such a situation. They’re probably right. However, if pushed, my wife will tell you that she expresses love to our family through cooking.
‘Mouse has got to admit, in the process of coming to terms with this situation I had to think about which was more important, words or food. Anyone who’s read my loving descriptions of mangoes and deer dick knows where I came down on this decision.
Which brings us back to my original point. Are these cookies, with their perfect balance of ginger, molasses, vanilla, sugar and a slight hint of orange, the physical embodiment of the scent of love? Or is it the love in the cookies that makes them smell so perfect? .
Try ‘em and let me know.
After almost a full year of malingering, loitering and generally making a pest of myself, my baking hero’rina has done it- she has mystically and osmotically made a cook out of me. Of course, it’s been the bread that I’ve been especially interested in so far. Look down a few posts and you can see the disaster that was my braid, way-too-complicated-for-a-beginner, one would think (in hindsight) . So I backed up a few pages in Madeleine’s book, and found the All Purpose Batter Bread that would be my success. ‘Third time’s a charm’, they say. Thanks to the fact that “the kneading is omitted and replaced by beating of the batter with mixer beaters, or the vigorous beating with a wooden spatula”. Of course it was this part that appealed to me. It would at least eliminate my sweaty hot hands from the variables of the process.
So with the karmic assistance of my mother, who decided to buy herself a new food processor, I ended up with her Oster food processor/standing mixer set up on my counter by 11. She is uncharacteristically excited at the prospect of my new cooking habit and even brought me her vintage ‘73 McCall’s cookbook. Here is the recipe, in-entirety (but edited a bit to suit my lazy fingers), before I forget:
3/4 cup milk, scalded
4 tspns granulated sugar
1 envelope dried yeast (4 tspns?)
1 tspn salt
2 large egg whites, lightly beatn (i too, have developed a whisking disorder, bakerina)
1 large egg
1/4 cup oil (of your choice)
2&1/2-3 cups unsifted unbleached all purpose
Pour the scalded milk into a large mixing bowl and let cool to 110-115F, add sugar and yeast and stir well. Let stand 10 minutes. Mix salt, beaten egg whites and egg, and 1/4 cup of the oil together in small bowl (I also put in tspn of vanilla extract- cause well, i just put that shit in everything). Place (’place? is that the same thing as ‘Put’?’
2 cups of the flour in with the milk; gradually add the mixture of liquid ingredients using a wooden spoon or an electric mixer on low speed. Add the flavorings (here I put in 1/4 of diced cheddar just for experimentation purposes). Add the rest of the flour prn, stirring or mixing on medium-high speed until the batter shreds from the beaters or spoon. Turn into large greased bowl and let rise until doubled, 45min-1 hr.
Preheat oven to 375F. Punch the dough down (heehee, this too, is fun), then...(wait for it)...beat it with a woodn spatula for a few minutes. Let rise again until level with rim and bake, about half an hour.
I knew as soon as the knife punctured the light crust and the steam escaped visibly from the middle, the light-white super-soft semi-sweet stuff is delicious beyond my wildest dreams. Success.
There were 30 of us. The year was 1987, just a year or two after the famous “opening” of China to full-scale invasion by Western students. The night before we’d spent in primitive concrete tourist yurts in the far reaches of northeastern China. There were those among us who would have made some effort to spend the night on the steppes in a real yurt except that smelly, smoky yak-skin tents in the middle of winter sounded even less attractive than the unheated round cement things that could have passed for a bad facsimile of trailer-park igloos. Besides, we got to sleep on/under smelly yak skins on the bed, so that was plenty “authentic.”
This was leading to something about food.
Right. Having escaped with most of our extremities, we headed back toward alleged civilization in the form of the Empress’s Summer Palace. The Empress had a summer palace in the far reaches of northeastern China because even in the old days Beijing was ungodly hot, dusty, polluted and miserable in summer. (This stands in stark contrast to winter when it’s cold, dusty, polluted and miserable and any sensible Empress would make her way to Suchou or someplace actually habitable.)
The “highlight” (and I use that word in its most quotation-mark-enclosed sense) of the winter Summer Palace tour circa 1987 was the “Empress’s Royal Meal.”
We started with an appetizer of bird’s nest soup. For those who don’t know, this is soup made with the delicacy less colorfully known as regurgitated bird-spit.
That was followed closely by “Phoenix tongues” aka pigeon tongues. (I’ll teach you to spit at me… off with their tongues!)
By this point in the evening the more sensitive East-Coast prep-school girls (and I use that term instead of “women” intentionally) were falling by the wayside.
Then the dishes began to come fast and furious.
Sea slug. Remember school when you used to chew erasers and eat old rubber cement? Sea slug is exactly half way between the two. But as any chef will tell you, it’s all in the sauce. And like the pigeon tongues and the bird-spit soup before them, the spices were… well, they were far too bland. Northern Chinese are not known for their spices. So forget the idea of the sauces saving any of this meal.
Pork trotters showed up somewhere in the process. Once again, there are ways you can cook pigs feet that make them taste okay. Or you can cook them for a bunch of tourists and not worry about that not-so-vague hint of barnyard. Next, please.
About this point I should mention that none of the staff speak any English at all. Most of the students are first- and second-year level and have really minimal Chinese skills. Our advisers had made themselves scarce. Gone out to drink and eat with the cooks, I believe. Therefore, it is up to the three or four of us who have 3rd and 4th year Chinese and who are generally fond of food to try to puzzle out what each dish is and to explain it to the rest of our comrades.
You’d think sea slug would be challenging, but that one is relatively simple. If it’s from the ocean, rubbery-looking and it isn’t squid or octopus or jellyfish, then it’s sea slug.
Then it got a little more challenging. But with the major foodgroups as our guide, and through liberal use of beer-enhanced charades skills and creativity, we were able to work a few things out: Beef tendon was especially hard to identify though because it looks rubbery and sea-slug-like but comes from a large mammal instead of under some rock somewhere. Also, “tendon” ain’t a word that’s in a person’s everyday foreign-language vocabulary.
Pig ears were served, of course. Cartilage and rubber, just like they ever were. If any of the more delicate types were eating anything heavier than beer I didn’t catch ‘em doing it. Personally, I’ve never had a problem eating pig ears. It’s all in the sauce.
The plate of “Four Preciouses” arrived. Easy: Tongue, heart, liver and kidney. Well, kidney was not so easy, but “that thing diabetics have trouble with” led to a positive ID.
About this point I asked where the rest of the cow and the drumsticks and breast from the bird and the shoulder of the pig were. With a completely straight face, the wait-comrade said, “Of course the empress cannot eat such pedestrian fare.” With a flash of insight I said, “So the cooks and wait-staff have to take the rib-eye steaks, the pork shoulder roast, the bacon and anything not defined as offal home to get that crap out of her sight, right?”
“Yep,” he said with a smile.
“So that’s what you’re doing to us too, right?”
He retorted, “Oh no, we’re giving you an authentic Royal Meal Experience(tm).”
“Right,” I said, “Chinese cooks are very clever.”
“Very clever,” he repeated, “5000 years clever.”
“More beer,” I suggested.
Then with great fanfare, the highlight of the meal arrived and was announced: Exploding Flower Dish! Discs of something notched around the edges. You can certainly see where the flower reference comes from, but what of the “exploding.” It’s not spicy. It just lies there in its sauce with nothing resembling an explosion.
The charades begin. The beer flows. Those of us brave enough to dig in without a positive ID dig in. Rubbery. Once again, nothing more than a chewy carrier for sauce.
Beef? No. Pork? No. Bird? No. From the Sea? No.
Okay, dredge up the barnyard words and keep going.
Sheep? No. Goat? No. Cat? No. Dog? No.
Running out of barnyard words.
Yak? No. Horse? No.
Stretching here.
Tiger? No. Bear? No. Fox? No.
Deer? Bingo! BTW, “deer” is really really hard to pronounce in Chinese and it’s not a common word since any wild deer were pretty much eaten ages ago.
Okay, but what part of the deer. This clearly ain’t your daddy’s venison steak.
I’ll save you the litany of body parts. We tried ‘em all. We thought.
Then I dug deep down in my memory for the “street Chinese” I had learned in Taiwan’s less reputable alleys. I made the waiter lean over and I whispered to him quietly. He nodded.
He said to me with his perfect poker face, “But we’d never call it by such a crude term; it’s ‘Exploding Flower Dish.’”
“That explains the ‘exploding part’,” I said in Chinese. He smiled.
Then I said in English, “I know what it is, but I’m sworn to secrecy until everyone has tried at least one bite.”
When they all had grudgingly tried it, and I finally pointed out that we were eating deer dick, the reaction was… priceless.
Today’s pre-4th of July festivities found me at the home of Moe. The conversation was dull, and the food was a complimentary shade of boring. Except for the crab dip that I brought, of course. It’s a family recipe, and is always eaten with Fritos, no matter how much the wife of your boss insists that crackers might be good, too. As you can see, this is not an exact recipe at all. People like me are why they eventually began to standarize recipes, I’m pretty sure.
Crab Dip
One brick of cream cheese, softened
Healthy blop of mayonnaise
Couple of healthy blops of sour cream
Can of real crab meat, drained (it’s blasphemy to use imitation crab)
Two hefty shots of worchestershire sauce, which I probably just misspelled
Two hefty blasts of Tobasco sauce (not the green kind, which is also blasphemy)
Garlic salt, but not toooo much
Juice of half a medium lemon (pick out the seeds that fall in)
Mash it all together, taste it, proclaim it good, and put it in the fridge for a couple of hours before you go off to make boring small talk with conservatives who happen to have the most fabulous garden you’ve ever seen. Don’t forget to bring a big bag of Fritos when you go to the party because it really does have to be served with Fritos and not those sissy little pale crackers that Cindy wants to smear it on.
