Word of the day: verjuice!

It all started with an argument about Dijon mustard. I hate Portuguese mustards which, for the most part, seem rather nasty and chemical, or at least flavorless. My go-to commercial mustard since college has been Grey Poupon Dijon mustard, with its nice sharp kick that I always thought came from horseradish. So when the doutora got her latest order of spices that included two kinds of mustard seed and spoke of making our own mustard, I said please don't forget to add some horseradish.

She couldn't see why I would want to ruin good mustard that way and informed me that my favorite mustard in fact contained no horseradish at all. With triumphant glee, my gouty fingers danced over they keyboard, asking Google Why is Grey Poupon mustard spicy? It seems there are in fact versions of that mustard with horseradish, but I've probably never bought them. In fact, the kick in Dijon mustard seems to come from the revolutionary introduction of verjuice in mustard-making in 1752 by Jean Naigeon.

Verjuice? Is that some kind of a typo? When I conceded the culinary argument and said that she was right, verjuice is used, the doutora replied what's that? She knows more about mustard than I do and thought that it simply had vinegar, which in fact it usually does. Verjus in Portuguese, or sumo verde (green juice). Vertjus in Middle French. Husroum (حصرم) in Arabic. Verjus in German too apparently. This seems to be one of those key culinary secrets I've been missing out on all my life.

Since my first foray into practical translation at age 14, I have found culinary translation and the associated terminology fascinating, not least because they often give me interesting excuses for hours of experimentation in the kitchen with interesting and often tasty results. And verjuice seems to be one such promising excuse.

There is a rich tradition, apparently of cooking and formulating with the juice of unripe grapes, unripe oranges, crab apples and other juices which are collectively called verjuice, and Middle Eastern cuisine and Middle Ages European cuisine made much use of it. It has largely fallen into disuse in modern times, though the Australians have reversed that somewhat. So now I'll have to make some of this stuff and see where that leads me.

A comment in the German Wikipedia entry - Verjus ist deutlich milder als Essig - makes me think maybe I was right about that horseradish after all, but who cares when there are new frontiers to explore in culinary translation?

Sweet Greek olives come to Portugal

The Good Doctor is widely travelled, and brings back to Portugal many interesting culinary ideas from around the world, using these to complement the traditions of her native land. So when I began to harvest olives from her trees to pickle for the coming year, she looked a little skeptically at the plastic water bottles full of crushed and slit olives and asked me Why don't you make sweet Greek olives?

I had never heard of those before, and she could not tell me much about them except that she had bought some in a shop while driving through Greece some years ago, and they were rather good, so she would prefer that I make some of those instead of the usual spiced pickles all the local farmers do. OK, I said, and began to look for information on the Internet. Nothing useful was found in searches using terms in English, German and Portuguese. I found some pages talking about candied olives made from pickled ones, but nothing useful describing the process starting with fresh olives.

What to do? I asked a Greek colleague for help, and a few minutes later, she sent me a link to a web page in Greek which describes making sweet olives and olive jam.

Since I can't do much more with Greek than sound the words out and search my brain for possible derivates in a language I know, it wasn't clear to me if I needed to work with any particular sort of olives, and I thought the suggested extraction time to remove the bitter elements from the raw olives was optimistic at best, so I took notes and prepared to "transcreate" the recipe for the olives I have available (based on my past experience picking them) and my own preferred approach to scaling recipes. Thus I arrived at the following recipe:

Azeitonas doces de Elvas

1. Gather ripe, dark olives, de-stem and rinse them, then place them in clean one- to two-liter plastic bottles. Fill the bottles with fresh, cold water and cap them.
2. Change the water daily for about two weeks, testing the bitterness of the olives until it is reduced to an acceptable level. The time needed will vary according to the olive variety, the degree of ripeness and your personal taste. The Greek recipe this one is based on suggests four or five days time with daily water changes, but that is simply too little time for my olives and my taste.
3. After the olives are debittered, cut the tops of the plastic bottles to remove the olives. Then use a de-pitter (a descaroçador de cerejas - a cherry pitter - will do the job) to remove the pits from the olives.
4. Weigh the olives and place them in a saucepan or small pot.
5. Add the same weight of water to the pan (so for 600 g of de-pitted olives, add 600 ml water).
6. Add sugar to the pot amounting to 40% of the weight of the olives (which would be 240 g sugar for 600 g olives).
7. Bring to a hard boil on high heat, and let the mixture boil for 20 minutes, with occasional stirring. Then remove from heat and allow to rest overnight.
8. The next day, add more sugar to the pot - 20% of the weight of the olives (so another 120 g of sugar if you are working with 600 g of de-pitted olives). 
9. Boil the mixture hard for another 20 minutes until the syrup thickens. Then remove from heat.
10. Can the sweet olives in sterilized jars following the usual hygenic procedures or serve them fresh, warm or cold.

Holiday cookies for the Portuguese, Part 2

Feliz natal, everyone. Around this time of year, I think of various friends and family members with their particular repertoires of seasonal cookies and other treats, which are always something I look forward to and tell myself I'll learn to make one day. This year I decided to try my hand at a favorite German cookie, which is a bit like a shortbread with its high butter content and low sugar. There are, of course, a number of recipes available online, but I wanted to try one I've enjoyed intermittently for 24 years now, and when I asked for it, this is what I got:

Heidesand: 250 g Butter schmelzen, etwas bräunen, wieder fest werden lassen. 100g Zucker und etwas Vanillezucker damit verrühren. Ein Ei, zwei gestrichene Teelöffel Backpulver und 400g Mehl hinzugeben, verkneten, kalt stellen. Rollen formen, in Zucker wälzen, in Scheiben schneiden. Ca. 15 Minuten backen bei 180°C.

Heidesand: Melt 250 g butter and brown it a bit, then let it solidify again. Cream in 100 grams of sugar and a bit of vanilla sugar. Then add an egg, two level teaspoons of baking powder and 400 g of flour; knead the dough and chill it. Form the dough into "logs" and roll these in sugar, then cut off rounds of the dough and bake them at 180°C for about 15 minutes.

I was a bit suspicious of that baking time in my oven and reduced it by several minutes, which was still too long. The first successful batch of cookies baked for about 9 minutes and probably would have been better with a bit less time.

Adjusted for US measurement units, the recipe would be

Heidesand
1 cup (2 sticks) butter
½ cup sugar
1 packet vanilla sugar or 1 tsp vanilla extract
1 egg
2 level teaspoons baking powder
3 cups white wheat flour

Melt and brown the butter somewhat, then let it cool and cream it together with the sugar, add the vanilla flavoring and egg. Then add the flour, sifting it in with the baking powder, and form the crumbly dough into rolls, which can be rolled in sugar if desired (or sugar can be sprinkled on the cut cookies before baking). Wrap these in parchment paper or other suitable material and chill the rolls in the refrigerator or freeze them. Cut off slices from the rolls and bake these at 350°F (180°C) for about 8 or 9 minutes, depending on the conditions in your oven.

I used self-rising flour for a little "boost" and carmelized the sugar, though not completely to a liquid state (throwing in a teaspoon of ground cinnamon in the process), so after it cooled I had to crush and grind it in a mortar. This resulted in cookies with an interesting speckled appearance. I also didn't bother adding extra sugar in most cases, as I prefer these cookies less sweet. They are a little dry, and crumble like sand into one's mouth when bitten.

No matter how much leavening agent is added to the mix, these cookies will not rise much due to all the butter and can be spaced closely together on the tray. This recipe is not very sweet, with about half the amount of sugar found in other versions, so those with more of a sweet tooth could adjust the sugar content accordingly.

Holiday cookies for the Portuguese, Part 1

Whoever told me once that "close" only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades obviously didn't know squat about baking. Given a little respect, food tends to be more forgiving than most priests in Confession.

My involvement with translation began some nearly four decades ago when an aunt gave me a battered copy of the 1897 edition of Katharina Prato's Süddeutsche Küche. My mother and I then began to translate and adapt recipes for tasty baked goods for a modern American kitchen, making educated guesses about times and temperatures and making up measurable quantities for ingredients specified in only the vaguest terms. At the time I was barely into my teens and wondered how my mother could magically interpret all that vaguery and come up with something so appealing for expanding waistlines, but those first translations taught me the importance of reinterpreting content as necessary for a new culture and different times.

With the holidays approaching and most of my interesting recipes still rumored to be in boxes in a van somewhere in Poland, I called my mother a few days ago and begged for my favorite Christmas cookie recipe - a foundational gingerbread cookie with which she often constructs frosted houses with the grandchildren at this time of year. A short time later, the miracle of e-mail brought me the following instructions:

1 cup shortening (Crisco, lard, etc.)
1¼ cups sugar
1 cup molasses
¾ tablespoon ground ginger
1½ teaspoons baking soda dissolved in 2 tablespoons hot water
½ teaspoon salt
2 rounded teaspoons cinnamon
2 eggs, beaten
6 to 6½ cups flour for a soft dough
Roll out, cut and bake at 350°F for about 10 minutes. Refrigerating the dough may make it easier to handle.

The trouble started with the shortening, but I've usually just substituted butter over the protests that "it's not the same", countering with "who cares, as long as it's good?" Moreover, butter has the advantage of keeping vegan fanatics out of one's cookie jar if they are true to the Faith. This time I discovered a big, forgotten block of Banquete creme vegetal in the fridge, and since I no longer remember why I bought the stuff, it had to go in the cookies.

Then came the molasses crisis. the English word is derived from the Portuguese melaço, but try telling that to the people of Portugal. Perhaps it's the grief over the loss of their colony in Brazil which caused them to cut their ties to this critical ingredient, but searches of several supermarkets near me have failed to turn up any trace. Oh well, brown sugar it is then.

One thing led to another, and with a why not this?and a why not that?, and a doubling of the egg content to cut the stress on the mixer motor and get rid of excess eggs, and a surprising shortage of ginger powder, which required half measures, the final mix came out as

115 g vegetable shortening (creme vegetal)  
230 g brown sugar (açucar moreno)
2 eggs (ovos)
2 teaspooons ground ginger (2 colheres de chá de gengibre em po)
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon (1 colher de chá de canela moída)
¼ teaspoon ground cloves (¼ colher de chá de cravinho moída)
¼ teaspoon fine dry salt (¼ colher de chá de sal fino seco)
450 g self-rising wheat flour (farinha de trigo com fermento)

As with most of my cookies, I creamed the fat and sugar together, then added the egg (I let the mixer do the work of beating) and spices (with the idea that the flavors will mix better in more intimate contact with the fat), followed by the flour, with the speed turned down to low and the time limited to avoid knitting the gluten in the dough.

My cookie cutters disappeared in the last move, so Plan B was to form the dough into a roll, chill it good and use a sharp knife to slice off ¼" (6 mm) thick  rounds, which were then baked for 8 minutes at about 350°F (175°C) on a parchment sheet. These cookies are lighter than the original recipe (more leavening), so they bake faster, and ten minutes in my oven puts a carbon crust on the bottom which might not be to every taste. But of course, times will need to be re-translated for the conditions of your oven.

The final result was nothing like the original, though it was rather tasty. A failed score for translation with many reviewers, I'm sure, as they stuff their faces with the culinary success.

Now it's back to the kitchen to see what happens if caramel syrup takes the place of the missing melaço,

Seven days of gratitude, day three: this old frying pan

When my young veterinarian friend challenged me to write for seven days about things for which I am grateful, there was such a spontaneous flood of topics in my mind that I could not order them properly and decided not to try. When I think of the big subjects, one greater always occurs to me, and then some small thing will come to mind with butterfly wings which, in beating, swirl the air around me and propagate their effects sometimes somehow to start the hurricane. So what is most important? As translators so often say, it depends on the context.

I found this simple iron pan at a yard sale in Southern California more than thirty years ago. I think I paid two US dollars for it. Maybe less. It has outlasted so much finer functional equipment for cooling and accompanied me on a culinary journey which began in graduate school and continues to this day. Its size and stability facilitate use in so many ways: on the stovetop, in the oven, on a small portable burner or a campfire or on top of some deserving head.

A number of times, this old iron pan has enabled me to cook meals where I have had no kitchen fit for use. It has also inspired me a number of times to consider simpler, alternative ways of making a meal and sharing it with friends. It's small size is just right for a quick, small batch of biscuits, nachos, corn bread, pan pizza or a stovetop calzone to share in a simple meal with another. It has been the medium for many a killer bechamel sauce.

And since I am long overdue to keep my promise to a Portuguese friend to share a quick way of making bread on the stovetop when she has nothing in the house, I'll share my pan-baked spelt biscuits with egg here and hope that some of you will try these or a variation and break this good bread with the friends and family for whom you are grateful:

2 cups of spelt flour (about 250-300 g)
1 tablespoon double-acting baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 cup (about 60 ml) butter
3/4 cup (about 180 ml) milk
1 egg

Mix or sift the flour and baking powder thoroughly, then mix in the butter thoroughly with a pastry cutter or fork. Then beat together the egg, milk and salt with a whisk, pour the liquid onto the flour mixtures and stir for a bit until everything is thoroughly wetted. Knead the soft dough for about a minute on a board, then form biscuits and bake. For crisper ones, keep the formed dough thin, for fluffier, softer ones form them to about 3/4 of an inch (about 2 cm) thickness.

Bake for 12 to 15 minutes at 450 °F (230 °C).

To ensure greater softness and height for the biscuits, place them in a small iron pan or baking dish rather than on a baking sheet as usual. Serve hot with jam, cheese, olive oil or whatever else sounds good.

Of course this recipe works well with other flour too, such as ordinary or whole grain wheat flour, rye, etc. or some tasty combination. 

Feel free to share your own favorite uses for such a small pan and I'll gratefully try them out with friends in the kitchen!

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Day One – Teachers Day Two – Storytellers Day Four – Dogs Day Five – Dissidents Day Six – Hands Day Seven – Free Will