A Harvest Loaf

by Kate May-Price

The colors grow richer in these early fall days – even here in San Francisco, though it pales in the shadow of upstate New York’s autumnal fires. I can still sense the natural rhythm as the weather blows the golden grains on our California hills.

It is harvest time, but nowadays it can be hard to see the relevance of ensuring the winter stores. Traditionally, this was a time for reaping grains and preserving the fruits of summer. Some of us continue this work, but many of us do not.

There is however much more than seasonal harvest nostalgia, many of us are looking for a return to the lessons learned from traditional or indigenous diets. Let us then look to Jessica Prentice’s book “Full Moon Feast: Food and the Hunger for Connection.”

True to their personification, squirrels are clever – burying each acorn fools it into thinking its been “planted.” While the squirrel continues its gathering, the buried nut begins to release nutrients that are key to a germinating plant. In the spirit of coevolution,  these nutrients are exactly what is nutritionally required by the squirrel if it hopes to survive the barrenness of winter.

We can mimic this – increasing available nutrients – through the process of sprouting or fermenting grains. The recipe – without further ado.

From the “Full Moon Feast” book –

Sourdough:

Take 1 tablespoon of sourdough starter and mix it together with ½ cup filtered water and 1 cup freshly ground whole wheat (or spelt) flour in a clean jar. Let this sit for 8 hours at room temperature or between 48 hours and 1 week in the refrigerator before using in the recipe.  You can use it at room temperature, or cold.  Each time you cook with your sourdough, reserve 1 tablespoon of starter, mix with ½ cup of water plus 1 cup of flour, and store in the fridge for the next recipe. You can keep your starter going indefinitely this way.  Mine is about 15 years old.

The best way to get a good sourdough starter is from a friends or an artisanal bakery…The great thing about a real sourdough starter is that it is made up of wild yeasts – that’s what you want.  Try G.E.M. Cultures for sourdough as well.

You can also make your own starter.  Our hands have natural yeasts on them, so if we add the water, the flour and “get into the mix,” we have starter unique to ourselves. For more specific information, check out the new book, “The Lost Art of Real Cooking: Rediscovering the pleasures of Traditional Food One Recipe at a Time” by the Bay area’s own Ken Albala and Rosanna Nafziger.

“May we feel wonder for the gift of grain, which through dying is born again, or else gives its life to us.”

Kate is an educator, artist, gardener, and cook carrying on her family’s culinary history by following her nose. She currently resides in the San Francisco Bay area. Her web site is called Pen, Trowel and Fork.

Portions of this article reprinted from Full Moon Feast, ©2006 by Jessica Prentice, with permission from Chelsea Green Publishing (www.chelseagreen.com). All of the photos are courtesy of Kate May-Price.

Nocino (Walnut Liqueur) and Honeyed Walnuts

Walnuts have magical properties at Midsummer in Italy and are used to make a special liqueur called Nocino. People go into the woods to collect walnuts on the night of San Giovanni (June 23) when the shells are still green and soft. They are collected in multiples of 21 (the 3 of the Trinity times the 7 virtues), immersed in alcohol with special spices or lemon rind and left for 40 days (the same amount of time St John wandered in the desert). Some say the green walnuts can only be harvested by women in bare feet with wooden scythes.

Anna Tasca Lanza in The Flavors of Sicily offers a recipe for Nocino, whose mysterious, almost medicinal flavor, she compares to liqueurs made by medieval monks. Once you have picked your green walnuts, cut them into quarters. (Wear gloves and protect your surfaces as green walnuts exude a colorless liquid, that upon exposure to air turns brown and dyes everything it touches, permanently.) For every ten walnuts use one cup of sugar, a small piece of cinnamon stick, two whole cloves, a tablespoon of chopped lemon zest and one quart of vodka. Combine these ingredients, seal in a jar, and leave in the sun for forty days. Strain the liqueur (you can adjust the flavor at this point by adding water if it’s too strong), bottle it and put it away in a cool, dark place to age until I Morti, All Soul’s Day, November 2.

For those of you who are looking for something a little lighter, here’s a recipe I found on the internet which combines walnuts with another midsummer treat: honey.

Combine one and a half cups sugar, a half cup honey, a dash of salt in a saucepan. Bring to a boil then cook, without stirring, until a small amount of mixture forms a firm ball when dropping in cold water. This will be about 242° on candy thermometer. Remove syrup from heat and stir in eight ounces of walnuts and a half teaspoon of vanilla extract. Let cool slightly. Stir until thicken and creamy. Pour out onto waxed paper; using 2 forks, separate walnuts.

Found the great photo at this web site, Foreign Remarks, by Rebecca Helm-Ropelator. She also provides a recipe for nocino.

The photo of the jug of walnuts steeping in alcohol comes from this web site which also has a recipe and instructions.

Another great blog entry about nocino: she descibes the look as similar to motor oil but the flavor as nutty and sweet and she says creates an odd sensation as it makes its way down to your stomach. It’s often used as a digestive, to soothe an upset stomach. It seems to be the perfect drink for winter which is when it’s ready to drink.

May Wine

Excerpt from the May Day holiday e-book

May Wine is served on May Day. In Germany, May Wine is the quintessential summer drink. It is usually flavored with Sweet Woodruff (Waldmeister or Maikraut), perhaps because it improves the taste of thin, new wine. May wine is also the name for any wine punch flavored with herbs, fruits, berries and occasionally flowers.

To make May wine, pick sweet woodruff that does not have open blossoms several days before you want to serve the wine. Tie the stems with cotton thread and hang until dry so the sweet vanilla scent of the herb emerges. Then immerse the dried herb in a bottle of wine, usually Rhine wine, although Adelma Grenier Simmons uses champagne or a mixture of half Rhine wine and half champagne.

Some recipes advise you to leave the woodruff in the wine for days, even weeks. Others suggest removing it after ten or fifteen minutes, probably because woodruff contains coumarin, an anticoagulant and may cause headaches. However, it is probably not dangerous, unless you are pregnant or taking anticoagulants.

Michael Moore, writing about Northwest medicinal plants, suggests using vanilla leaf, another herb containing coumarin, to create a substitute for Polish sweet vodka, by putting a handful of the dried leaves in a fifth of vodka and steeping it for at least a month. He says it gives a nice green tint to the vodka, as well as a sweet flavor. Anyone want to try this with woodruff?

And Adelma Grenier Simmons says that a German friend of hers steeps woodruff in brandy year round, then adds the flavored brandy to the May wine. I have to say a little bit of woodruff goes a long way, and I probably wouldn’t leave it steeping in the brandy for much more than a week. Woodruff can also be used in the same way to flavor milk or apple juice if you prefer a non-alcoholic May drink.

The traditional Mai Bowle also has strawberries in it. Simmons garnishes her May bowl with fresh woodruff, Johnny jump-ups and violets. In Germany, the Mai Bowle is served every day during the month of May.

You can find more May Day food ideas, including a special minestrone and frittata served for May Day in Italy and a yogurt dish served for Hidrellez (the Persian celebration of May 1) in my May Day e-book.

References:

Rose, Jeanne, Herbs & Things, Grosset & Dunlap 1972

Simmons, Adelma Grenier, Herb Gardening in Five Seasons, Plume (Penguin) 1990

Pumpkin Recipes

I love pumpkin pie, pumpkin pecan bread and my daughter’s creamy pumpkin black bean chili. What’s your favorite pumpkin recipe?

Creamy Pumpkin Black Bean Chili
By Shaw Fitzgerald

2 tablespoons butter or olive oil
1 medium white (or yellow) onion, diced
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 to 3 teaspoons Thai Kitchen red curry paste
1 to 2 teaspoons cinnamon
Dash clove powder

1 to 2 15 oz cans of black beans
1 29 oz can of pumpkin or one medium-sized sugar pumpkin, roasted
1 large semi-tart apple (such as Gala), diced
2 cups chicken broth or vegetable broth
1/3 to ½ cup heavy cream

Secret ingredient: tablespoon of European (unsweetened) cocoa powder
If not available, add one teaspoon instant coffee or a shot of espresso

Grated cheddar cheese for topping

This recipe is better if you roast the pumpkin yourself, plus then you have some pumpkin seeds to roast for garnish. First halve and clean a medium-sized sugar pumpkin, then slice it like a cantaloupe. Coat the slices with oil and lay them on an oiled baking sheet.

I add enough water so the pumpkins will steam and cover the whole baking sheet tightly with tinfoil. Put this in an oven at medium heat for about 30 to 45 minutes. After the slices have cooled, you will be able to easily peel off the shell.

Saute diced onion in butter until translucent. Add the curry paste and garlic and let bloom. Add the chicken broth, black beans and apples. Let simmer and reduce. Add cinnamon and clove. Add the roasted pumpkin, pressing the pieces against the sides of the pan to turn them into mush. Simmer another 10 to 20 minutes until thickened. Add the cream and stir in. Add salt and pepper to taste. Serve with grated cheddar cheese on top (and/or roasted pumpkin seeds).

Easily made vegetarian or even vegan by substituting vegetable broth for chicken broth, olive oil for butter and omitting the cream.

The pumpkin quote comes from this great web site, French Word-A-Day, which contains the French quotation plus some great pumpkin expressions. Did you know that in France, having a migraine is having a pumpkin head?

Good Enough to Wait

By Sonya Lea

Preserving food is the extended foreplay of the gustatory world.  Especially for city-dwellers, it revives a sense of connection with wild nature, and rejuvenates senses dormant from over-reliance on the fast and the cheap.  If drive-thru is the dining equivalent of the quickie, preserving fresh, seasonal produce for later supping is tantric bliss.

The last week of summer I drove out to the local farm and purchased boxes of coral peaches, firm pickling cucumbers, banana and pasilla and sweet Anaheim peppers, ripe red and fleshy green tomatoes and plump blackberries.  It didn’t look like promiscuity until the saleswoman sized me up and down behind the mountain of produce stacked in eight large boxes.  “Well, you’re sure going to have your work cut out for you,” she snarked.  And the old man in line in front of me offered a wide grin, as if he knew what I would be up to, and said, in a wistful tone: “Me and the missus used to put up.  Oh, I miss it so.”

By the time I unloaded the car and began washing the long, nubby cuke, I realized I was going to be days in this kitchen – days immersed in the sweet perfume of fervid juice and musky field; days with my fingers in slippery seeds, days nudging the ruby pit from its fleshy center.   I filled the sink with cool water and stripped to my bare feet, and brought a berry to my lips, tracking its nib with my tongue before biting into its succulent drupelets.

Canning, freezing, drying, curing, fermenting, pickling, jam and jelly making – preserving holds the genius of our earliest people.  Preserving developed between 5500 and 3500 BC, creating villages, and vessels, and livestock, perhaps even the very urge to civilize in the way we experience it today.  (Though it seems strange to this acculturated cook, one of the ways historians categorize societies as being ‘civilized’ is when the primary purpose of food gathering, preparation and storing has been diverted to allow the pursuit of other, more ‘complex’ activities, such as war, religion, bureaucracy.)  Homo sapiens found he could manage his stock, and digest proteins better when food went over fire, and intentional cookery followed, leading to food as a social engagement, as taboo arbiter, as identity-maker.  What we keep can communicate our sense of frugal sparseness or our abundant beguilement: the heirloom we shelve can be our strained broth or our rose-drenched honey.  We preserve what we wish to have known as the common good.

It’s possible that salt was the first additive used as a method to preserve food.   Used by ancient communities close to the sea, salt preserves by inhibiting toxin-producing bacteria, making it essential for forms of flesh – meat, fish and the human body, as for mummifying.  Those who wielded the salt wielded the power, as the Emperor Claudius knew when he strolled into the senate one day asking if man could live without salt meat.  Before it was the Eternal City, Rome was a staging post where local marketers exchanged their goods for precious salt.  Leaders and merchants preserved their own futures along the Via Salaria, the salt road; when unforeseen circumstances meant there was little access to fresh food, salt could define a government’s rule.

Indeed, whoever holds the keys to the pantry holds the power.  None knew this better that Mahatma Gandhi, who emerged from his six-year prison confinement to protest the exclusive British licensing of Indian sea salt.  When he marched from the ashram to the beach at Dandi, he placed salt crystals evaporated by the sea into his small palm, enacting a potent ritual that defied the authorities in one simple act.  Indians followed, breaking the law en masse, literally assuming worth of one’s salt, until the Brits relented and asked Gandhi to represent his Indian Congress Party at the 1931 leadership conference.

At Indian rituals, Roman feasts, Athenian festivals, Chinese banquets, Middle Eastern merry-making, and Egyptian sacraments all manner of seeds, plants and flowers were preserved with sugar.  After the fourteenth century, the master confectioners of Paris made their fortunes selling to the aristocracy, and since gifts of preserves were considered luxurious, these sugared treats became a regular expense of anyone who had a role with the law. (Used as chamber spices for ‘dispelling wind and encouraging the seed’ these sweets, often called sweetmeats, were at least poetically-perfect: a candy by any other name would surely not have prefaced lovemaking.)  Sugar was brought to the New World after Columbus’ affair with Canary Island’s Governor, one Beatrice de Bobadilla, who sent him from their month-long tryst with cuttings of sugar cane.  From that sweet union, came America’s love affair with all things candied.  Jams, jellies, syrups, sugared fruits, sugar-wine (rum) – sugar was once an international currency, with labor rewarded in casks of syrup, and millions paid for its becoming a standard with their very lives, including creating a caste of slaves from Africa who would do the back-breaking work of sweetening up the colonist’s diet, and his pockets.  Even though we now have more sugar than we know what to do with, we continue a romance with the saporous temptress: we call our beloveds ‘sweetie’ and ‘honey’ and ask them to give us some ‘sugar’ when we wish to be kissed.  “It must be jelly,” says the blues singer, “Cuz jam don’t shake like that.”

There is no savings in preserving food at home.  The costs of labor and equipment and of what will break or go rotten through experimentation is high compared to what we can stroll down to the store and buy for a dollar or two from Smuckers or Kraft or Heinz.  Still, there is a part of our relationship to food we are buying back when we agree to follow the transformation from field to table.  In grocery shopping there isn’t the kind of bond to the elements, the land, the season, the home, the kitchen; there isn’t the connection to one’s memory, or history or intention; there isn’t seasoning or sensuality or seductive surprise that can come from becoming present to food as it changes, or even likelier, as we are changed by its presence in our midst.

This is how it happens in our home – we weave food preparation with the events of the day, with the weather, with the quiet and the conversation, watching movements and mistakes as they assert themselves, upon us and upon our food, asking for our attention.  This is how dried lavender gets shaken into the sugar canister for lavender-scented sugar; this is how the lavender buds get dumped into the peach jam, when the sifter is forgotten; this is how it gets stirred in with a jam-coated spoon; this is how it drips onto my breasts when I lean over to sample it; this is how my lover, walking by, missing no entreaty, turns me around and licks it from my flesh; this is how the fire leaps into me and my peaches while we’re dancing and kissing above the flame; this is perhaps what you also taste when I make you toast from fresh bread and chunky fruit and violet sprigs of calming flower.  We are preserving passion, which is, I believe, able to be ingested as nourishment, as earth-muse, and for us, as remembrance of a moment’s lovemaking.

On the Sunday after I’d been at the farm, a box of enormous tomatoes sat on the kitchen table, their pulp so ready to burst forth they practically split sitting in the afternoon sun.  It was time to get ready for dinner, and my man had lit a fire of mesquite and hickory on the smoker just outside the kitchen door.  As he came and went, smoke infused the house, leading us straight into an ancestral domain.  Before long we had gathered those beefy reds and laid them on the grill and waited until their skins split from heat and flame.  I let them cool on the counter, then quickly cored and peeled them, sliding eighths into a large pot, simmering slowly, before adding grainy salt and a handful of fresh basil.  An hour or so later, I lifted a wooden spoon to my mouth and felt another woman enter from the balls of my feet to the curve of my belly to just below my throat.  And then she was yelling a phrase I knew I’d heard my grandmother say a long time ago, — “Oh. My. Lord!” – a gusty, guttural call of a blues woman, an expression coming more from kinetic core than mental knowing, the smoke-dazed freshness of the fruit a memory of a time I hadn’t had, couldn’t know.  The man looked inside from the fire, smiling.  He didn’t know who this woman was yet, but he was about to taste her.

SEXY RECIPES:

Peach Lavender Jam

Sugar:
4 cups granulated sugar
large bunch lavender buds*
Shake buds into sugar and let rest for two weeks, shaking a few times each week.

Jam:
2 1/2 lb. peaches, peeled and pitted
juice of one lemon
1 cup water

Prepare peaches, cut into chunks, then sprinkle with lemon juice and stir.

Bring the sugar and water to a bowl; sift the lavender out, or not – your choice!  Stir until the sugar is dissolved, and boil rapidly five minutes.  Add the peaches, return to boil, and boil rapidly, stirring often twenty minutes, or until jell stage.

Remove the pot from the heat and let cool for ten minutes.  Skim well.  Ladle into hot sterilized jars and seal.  Process according to recommendations.

Makes three pints.

*(if you don’t grow and dry your own, purchase buds from a botanical store locally)

Smoke-Infused Tomato Sauce

4 lb. beefsteak tomatoes
large bunch basil
2 teaspoons salt
1 teaspoon cider vinegar

Prepare a grill or smoker and soak wood chips in water.  A few minutes before placing the tomatoes on the grill, let the chips begin to smoke.  Quickly place the tomatoes, cover and peek every few minutes to see if the skins have burst.  Take them off the flame (use the grill for a kebob or steak to go with the sauce.)

Peel the tomatoes, cut into eighths and if you prefer, remove most of the seeds.  Place in a heavy bottomed pan, and bring to boil.  Add salt.  Simmer 45 minutes, or until the sauce thickens.  Take off the heat and stir in the vinegar.

Add a few basil sprigs to each hot sterilized jar.  Pour the sauce over.  Heat process, cool, and check the seals.  (If you prefer not to heat process, you can refrigerate up to one month, or freeze for two months, but cool the jars first before refrigerating.)

Makes 5 cups

Use in pasta sauces or on pizzas.

Photo Credit:

Judy Maselli

References:

Crumpacker, Bunnym The Sex Life of Food, St. Martin’s Press, New York, 2006
Fisher, M.F.K. Fisher, The Art of Eating, Wiley Publishing, Hoboken, New Jersey, 1937
Schwartz, Oded, Preserving, DK Publishing, Inc., 1996.
Toussaint-Samat, Maguelonne, History of Food,  Blackwell Publishers, Oxford, U.K., 1992
Weldon, Amy E.,“The Fruits of Memory,” Corn Bread Nation 2, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, N.C., 2004