Paint it Red

If a meal listed in a cookbook or menu is prepared in the Spanish/espana style, it contains tomatoes. Yet it is across the Mediterranean in Italy, a country that can boast 400 different kinds of pasta, 370 different types of cheese, that the tomato is so closely identified with the national cuisine, the nation seems to be awash in marinara.  How is it that a plant from Peru, used extensively in Pre-Columbian, Meso-America, introduced to Italy in the 16th century, grow to become synonymous with Italian cuisine (at least from a US perspective)?

The answer has to do with Espana. The Spanish crown and their scions controlled Southern Italy from the post-Columbian epoch until Garibaldi’s forces swept them out in the mid 18th Century. In the 16th Century Spain was a Super-power, Empire-committed, the Spanish had a papacy grateful for their new world riches and an armada that had just help repulse the Ottomans (Warning: Invite a navy to repel your enemy and they never leave). That along with a/the 30 Year War, French ambitions for the boot shaped peninsula, Protestant/Germanic threat from the north and the fact that every pope, King and pretender to a throne were cousins – ceding the Kingdom of Two Sicilies, both the island of Sicily and the terra firma (the toe, heel and arch of the Italian boot northward to Naples) to the loyally Catholic Spanish seemed like the least the Church could do.

The first mention of the plant in Italy comes from Petrus Matthiolus in 1544 – the reference comes from his botanical book. Cherry tomatoes are captured in a painting by Arcimboldo at the end of the century. By 1692 the first reference to a tomato sauce appears - one with chili peppers in a preparation considered ‘Spanish’ style. In 1778 the first published recipe for a ragu or Bolognese sauce is printed. In 1839, Ippolito Cavalcanti wrote about pasta and tomato sauce. But it was my new culinary hero, Pellegrino Artusi catapulted the tomato to fame by including 6 recipes for tomatoes in his first edition of Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well in 1891.

While Cavalcanti wrote in the Neapolitan dialect, as noble as it is to write in a language of the people, an estimated 90% of the population of Southern Italy was illiterate. Artusi wrote in a Florentine dialect, a particular subset of Italian that was the language of arts, letters and commerce. His choice of language coupled to the fact that his book was very popular and well read north of Naples meant his book had a greater impact on popularizing the tomato than a regional book written for people who largely couldn’t read or afford books.

Around the time Artusi’s book was popularizing the tomato within a unified Italy, 25% of the Italian population was emigrating. 80% of these immigrants came from southern Italy or Sicily and most would land in the US or Argentina. Where, in a strange land, they hungered for their traditional foodways, sending back to the ‘old country’ for olive oil and canned tomatoes. The tomato, tomato sauce became an important link to their heritage – had the Italian Diaspora not occurred, or people left from the north of the country we might think of Italy as the land of cream sauces, hard cheeses and risotto.


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Tomato Grab Bag

There are 4,000 different types of tomatoes.

We, as people, may have our thumbs and precious frontal lobes but tomatoes, like all members of the (deadly*) nightshade family possess genetic elasticity. If you put seeds from the same plant in 2 different climates, they will adapt to the local conditions to the point of appearing to being different cultivars. Replant the progeny's seeds in the same soil conditions the plants will grow up the same. As for my personal elasticity - place me in a hot, humid environment and I can’t function, let alone adapt.

The tomato is the 34th most valuable crop in the state of Oregon. Wedged in between raspberries at 33rd and sheep and tuna – 35th & 36th respectively.  The state crop was worth about 13 million dollars in 2008. In the US, tomatoes are the 2nd most valuable veg crop, well behind its cousin the potato.

After an especially brutal wheat shortage in Italy, Mussolini dictated that people grow wheat in their gardens. This did little to ameliorate the bread shortage, but the policy was able to create a tomato shortage and subsequent riots.

*Either due to custom or style guides, the word deadly appears in front of the word nightshade 87% of the time. Nightshade deadly? Well, maybe not such much. All members of the family produce an alkaloid to ward off predators. For tomatoes, most of the alkaloid is found in green leaves and green tomatoes - green in the under ripe sense. The culprit is a toxin called tomatine, which is now believed to be the opposite of deadly, being good for lowering cholesterol and all.

From its 17th century ‘love apple’ moniker, the tomato has been promoted as a medicinal wonder. Pomme d'amour is thought to be an endorsement of the tomatoes good for wood aphrodisiac qualities, but that overlooks a century long belief the tomato was thought to be the antidote for that other New World import and killer of Pope’s, syphilis.

Currently, the neo-Galen’s tell us the tomato is full of Vitamins A & C and packs a wallop with its antioxidant Kung Fu, especially lycopene. Lycopene, a carotenoid, that is believed to repair cell damage and prevent certain kinds of cancer, including prostate. Funny thing about lycopene, it appears in greater concentrations in cooked tomatoes – canned, paste, ketchup – health surveys repeatedly show people who eat more processed foods like ketchup are less healthy and more likely to develop cancers.

The state of tomatoes makes writers cranky. Calvin Trillin kinda started the tomatoes are tasteless meme in Alice; Let’s Eat, comparing the shelf life of a shrunk-wrapped supermarket tomatoes to that of a mop handle. Little is to be lost by bemoaning the state of supermarket tomatoes – makes you sound Pollanesque by stating the obvious. Besides there are tomatoes that have predictably great flavor in the grocery store – the super sweet varieties from Mexico and the hot house tomatoes that arrive from Canada are more consistently flavorful than the flavor roulette that many heirlooms varieties offer.

As much as people grouse about the flavor of fresh tomatoes, they also tend to get most weepy about tomatoes when they talk about combining it with other strong-to-overwhelming flavors – garlic and basil in tomato sauce, cilantro and peppers in salsa and bacon and mayo on a BLT. Just sayin’ maybe the tomato is a symbol for industrialization instead of a Wild Strawberry trope of the American Idyllic, Just speculatin’ there.

One last speculation - Before it became a popular food, the plant was grown as an ornamental. I still make the argument that throwing a red tasteless slab on a bun, the plant still fulfills that function.


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I Say Tomato

The natural season is still a few weeks away but tomatoes, the little red fruits that are commodified as a vegetable have been cropping (too obvious?) these last few weeks.

The plants genetic epicenter is on the coastal planes of Andes mountains in present day Peru. Of all the South and Meso-American, Pre-Columbian cultures to choose from it was the Aztecs who loved their red fruit/veg, breeding countess varieties. For what they lacked in the whole guns, germs and steel department, the Aztecs were amazing agriculturalists – all indications are they knew the science of what would be known as Mendelian heredity. 

The tomanamacac, the tomato seller might have xitomtal – large tomato; coaxitomatl – serpent shaped tomatoes; the fun sounding nipple-shaped tomatoes - chichioalxitomatl or the seller might be a spurious malcontent selling tomapalaxtli –spoiled tomatoes. The overlords of the empire even had a special tomato based sauce to serve with sacrificed slaves – and despite it looking like a logical contraction; salsa is not the diminutive of slave sauce. 

From the new world, the tomato moved to the old: probably from Mexico, although maybe the plant arrived in Spain via the Caribbean or less likely, it was imported from Peru. By 1529, the word tomatoe was being used in writing, implying the plant was well enough to known to be used without footnotes. In 1692, the tomato appeared in a cookbook for the first time: Cookbooks weren’t cookbooks like we think of the them today, no pictures, no measurements, the concept microwavable hadn’t been invented – these collections are part household management, part instruction manual, it is more of a 30 Servant Meal, than how to fry an egg.

By the late 18^th century our little red veg were being called for in Italian cookbooks – again these are cookbooks in the sense they contain recipes but not in the sense they were used by people in largely illiterate societies – these cooking manuals document what the court was eating. Outside of the aristocracy, at least in the south of the land now know as Italy, a region controlled by the Spanish crown, the tomato seemed to be a mainstay.

Pellegrino Artusi, who wrote the most popular and influential cookbook in Italian history, purposefully wrote his recipes "to make Italians understand one another at the table". His book published in 1891, revised 14 times until his death in 1910, included a half-dozen recipes for the tomato and tomato sauce. And this was big to treat the foods of Southern Italy on par with the cuisine of Rome, Tuscan and Venice. 

In the States, the tomato was probably introduced in the Carolinas from the Caribbean. Academics are able to surmise this, not from some fancy CSI ethno-micro-spectra-analysis test but through linguistics – apparently in the places where oldest seeds have been found – local populations pronounce the plant as ‘to-mat-A’ instead of to-may-toe, as seems to be the custom in Caribbean languages – how cool is that?

Now that the tomato has migrated from Peru to Europe and landed back in the Americas; we will pick the tomato thread up next week with tomato fun facts.  

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When the Bacon Hits the Fan

Busy, so busy but there is always time to link to 2 stories about America's new darling, bacon:

First Harvard School of Public Health published a research that indicates people who eat processed meats like sausage, bacon and hot dogs were at 42% higher risk of heart disease and 19% more likely to suffer from type 2 diabetes. Yet of the million people studied for this research, eating unprocessed beef, lamb and pork did not increase the risk of heart or weight problems.


Health Effects of Processed Meats Versus Unprocessed Red Meats from Harvard SPH on Vimeo.

I know all the kids are loving their bacon right now, from KFC's Double Down to sugared bacon donuts but these findings seem to place the blame on the salt. Even though it is really hard to abuse salt by avoiding processed foods and fast foods and even slower foods in restaurants, I must say - You can have my salt when you pry my shaker from my cold, dead, well preserved fingers.

Second bit of news isn't so much bacon. Cochon may be French for hog, but this behavior is douchebaggery in any language: Last Saturday, Cochon 555, a traveling roadshow of all things pig, landed in Portland. An event that goes from city to city places 5 chefs, 5 wineries and 5 pigs in a room with a bunch of foodists and waits for the fireworks to happen. Which I'd guess promoter Brady Lowe wanted to be of the culinary variety. Instead, the gauntlet was thrown when the offending words "Dude your pig is from Iowa*" were spoken.  *A paraphrase that we CSI'd together from written accounts.

A headbutt, 2 arrests, a tasering, pepper spray, a fractured leg, a fist fight in front of a strip club and suprisingly for 10 hours of drinking, no citations for cocaine possession. I am sure with Anthony Bourdain rolling into town this will be to No Reservation as gay kids excluded from prom are to Ellen Degenres. Kelly Clarke of Portland's the Willamette Week, has the details here - http://bit.ly/pdxpigfight.


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Raab is Dead; Long live Raab

Broccoli Raab, rapini is pretty much done for the season. Who’d have thought that this passing would fill me with as much sadness as the summer’s last peach? I didn’t see this coming, I thought it was just a short-lived fascination, a curiosity and then one day the bitter green veg isn’t there any more. We, rapini and I did manage one good last meal together – fresh pasta, chili flakes and olive oil .

For dessert; mascarpone. I made my own, which is really easy to do if you can lay your hands on tartaric acid. An ingredient, that isn’t in grocery stores, but you can obtain from the people who supply cheese and cheese accessories, most of whom are doing their work online these days. Served when it was less than 2 hours old. I was going to get some strawberries, but all my store had were those big red cottony things. Organic or not, I want them to taste like something. So instead, I spread my fresh mascarpone on warmed bread with a little vanilla salt on top.

You can flavor salt with vanilla at home. It works to a certain degree but since this was a last second idea to add the salt to the mascarpone, I went down the street to the salt shop* and purchased a special salt that is first flaked then pressed with vanilla beans under pressurized rollers. The thought, which seemed to work as opposed to well-intentioned hype, is that vanilla is embedded in large crystals, which dissolve slowly on your tongue preserving the vanilla flavor. On mascarpone, a cheese made without sodium in any form, the flaked, vanilla scented salt add a flavor, texture and highlighted the sweetness of the cream via contrast.

*Yes, I said the salt shop down the street. It is called The Meadow and they have unique, one of a kind salts and foods in their store. When foodists travel from out of state, they want to visit. The Meadow has the worst website in the world - Hey Meadow, it is really cute your designer knows how to embed flash, but I only want the freakin store hours and phone number from your website. So, I refuse to link but if you are in Portland, please visit.

Interview I conducted with author William Alexander about bread, life and gardening on the PFM Blog here.

I rather write about food but the lawn doesn’t mow itself, a Lawnba would though? I really don’t want to put the lawn off again. Last mowing, the grass was knee high in places. Worse than the drudgery of mowing down the lawn, I think some critters lost their home. Mowing was like my own living Watership Down, a total bunnicost. (No rabbits were harmed in the mowing of my lawn, however some were injured by the lameness of that reference). 

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Greek to Cheese

What else is done with feta besides sticking it in an omelet or crumbling on spinach salad?

If we are fortunate enough to know a righteous Greek cook, we might occasionally come across feta in pastitsio - a macaroni and cheese and lamb and possibly tomatoes type of dish or spanakopita. If we are unfortunate, the cheese seems to be a culinary cliché on Eastern Mediterranean foods - For an extra buck, I can order a deluxe falafel that gets feta crumbles on top (also available on a gyro). I too see the cheese as part of a spinach salad (always with kalamata olives, generally with red onions), or in menus – either with omelets (always with kalamata olives, generally with red onions) that identify themselves as Greek or because they contain the word, Zorba, Homer or Athenian, we identify them as Greek.

Cheese expert and author Steven Jenkins writes while one feta can be creamier or saltier than the next, his feta customers aren’t shopping quality - they like what they like. Some of that might have to do with people chasing down the feta of their youth and he is forced to stock essentially the same cheese from Israel, Bulgaria, Romania, Sardinia, Lebanon, regions of the country now known as Hungary and from all quarters of the former Yugoslavia. No matter which country produces it, feta is largely the same – it is a fresh sheep’s milk cheese (although goat can be used and in the US, a milder cow’s milk feta can be found), formed into 10 to 30 lbs. blocks or cylinders, sliced (pheta is Greek for slice), it is placed in a brine to arrest the cheese’s ripening/maturing and shipped to market.

One of the issues with feta is it is a food that comes out of a specific location and culture – terrior – whose cuisine doesn’t translate seamlessly into the American diet. We like our cheese to be all melty and stuff. And tend to value the mealtime trinity of meat, veg starch above small tastes like olives, bread, fruit and cheese.

The original Moosewood Cookbook, loves it some feta though to an insane degree. Recipes describing the cheese baked with eggplant and/or bell peppers, topped on pasta, mixed in zucchini-feta pancakes, stirring in sauces, crumbled on salads and most frighteningly served with in something called an Arabian Squash Casserole – a dish which I am told goes well with tabouli, but I am going to doubt that assertion. The broccoli forest is not enchanted my friends; it is haunted by the moans of thirsty ghosts who ate too much salty cheese in their lifetimes.

As for getting the feta outside your Greek omelet, recently at Portland Farmers Market, two vendors joined forces and mixed feta and a sunchoke relish into a spreadable topping for bread. I hear it was good, oh so good, but for me, I would embrace the simplicity of the cheese and serve it by contrasting it something sweet like fruit or a fig paste, a chewy bread and a chilled cider or white wine that might run away from the dry towards sweet.

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Working in the Kitchen on the Weekend

Cooking anything good this weekend?

Massaman Curry and another batch of egg/spring rolls. Before I launch into the meals of the near future, I want to give some love to steak sandwiches. 

I am not sure sandwiches count as cooking, more of an assembly but they were 4 of my last 6 meals and damn they were good. I cooked both sirloin and flank steak rare with a little salt and pepper, sliced it thin, piled up on chewy bread, the inside covered in a thin layer of horseradish. A good sandwich can just hit the spot, occasionally a sandwich elevates itself to a transcendental experience – where the sandwichee wonders how such quotidian ingredients combine to turn themselves into something that can change a mood.   Music and food are apt metaphors, sandwich and song can be so uninspiring; be it bread, spread, cheese and meat or bass, drums, guitar & voice doing verse, verse, chorus, verse. When they are good, either/both can demand your absolute attention and alter the way you exist in your conscious day. This sandwichee stands awestruck.

Back to the weekend cooking – I recently upgraded to a large mortar & pestle. Well, not upgrade so much but super-sized. My older, smaller mortar & pestle is now dedicated to smashing spices. The big one was purchased with the intent of making aioli and Thai style curries. Cans of curry are good - the ones you add fish sauce, lime juice and coconut milk, actually they are pretty great when you only have 20 minutes to cook a meal. But the curry you make yourself is better.

Since I discovered the superior taste of fresh ground curries, I am a bit concerned I will soon feel the need to make my own coconut milk - just like I started making fresh cheeses. Well, except the cheese thing wasn’t an ‘I can make it better myself’ issue; making ricotta and mascarpone is cheaper than buying it – so until 4 coconuts are cheaper than an 89¢ can of coconut milk, I should be okay.

Smashing stuff is fun albeit time consuming. It’s also somewhat precious, the more rustic the dish or the preparation, the less willing I am to use equipment. My food processor is great but not so much for aioli or curry where the ingredients get overworked and lose some of their nuance.

However, I would take a commercial grade deep fryer and a professionally designed exhaust system for the batches of egg rolls. I’ve had some troubles getting the egg rolls right: The lack of recipes, not that I’d meticulously follow instructions and ingredients but recipes are good for proportions; I have been adding to many bean thread noodles, in fairness it doesn’t look like you are adding all that many noodles when they are dried, but by the time they are reconstituted and added to the filling, it gets to be pretty noodle-centic. I tried to adjust my recipe by asking coworkers for feedback but everyone has an opinion on how they should be different, texture was the only complaint for my last batch. After getting really close last time, I am going to try 2 different things, only partially cook them, so they can be heated up later and instead of ground pork and mushroom, I am going with seafood egg rolls. We’ll see how it works out. For the rest of the cooking I think it is leftovers and going out.

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Tied to The Blogging Post

While, my posting have been a tad light and a bit cranky, I have been posting well & up a storm on the Portland Farmers Market blog. It is truly a joy to meet farmers, growers and ranchers and help promote small agricultural businesses. Having 1,000s of small farmers is so much better for the future of food than having a handful of industrial businesses, breed, grow and distribute our food supply. The passion, the stewardship of the land, the institutional know-how and innovation are all great things.

In recent weeks, Christie Hansen, reminded me that in the arguments for and against Genetically Modified Organisms – part of the problem of spending millions of dollars to develop a cultivar aren’t the big man v. technology issues but fewer and fewer companies exist who will sell a variety of seeds -saving seeds, open pollinators can actually be kind of radical.

From Rachel Reister I learned it takes 130 acres, 7 dogs and 4 people to raise a flock of 300 sheep. And Jennifer Callison, who has gone from backyard gardener to small-scale farmer in the last 12 months will be bringing her first crop to market on Thursday. Half of America’s farmers will be over 70 in the next decade, it is good to have young growers getting in the game. I also maybe claimed raab is the new asparagus.

Plus, the Farmers Market writing is just fun. This week I got to trade emails with gardener and baker William Alexander author of $64 Tomato and 52 Loaves for an interview that will be posted next week. And monitoring a contest to see the best way to cook mushrooms on Facebook & twitter. There seems to be many good cooks out there or more accurately, many good ideas about how to cook.

Finally, I was saddened to learn the designer of NYC’s blue coffee cup passed away earlier this week even though I had no idea he was alive. RIP Leslie Buck, you can read his obit here.


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Who are you Calling Authentic

A couple of weeks ago, I had a primal desire for hot food and cold beer: this time my obsession was egg rolls. Having easy access to 1000s of cookbooks at work, 100s on Asian foods, my plan was to check a few recipes, synthesize the results before I went home to deep-fry away. Surprisingly, there was a scarcity of egg roll, spring roll and lumpia recipes. Or maybe it was understandable, street food is not always well documented – when is the last time you looked up how to make a burrito? Then a big, serious book dedicated to the history of Chinese cuisine told me that egg rolls are an Americanized bastard food or a bastardized American food – I forget which one but the portent was that this food was somehow impure and not worthy of attention.

Why try to make that a bad thing? Food is adaptive, which is a polite way of saying bastardized. Chinese-American Food – Fried Rice, Egg Foo Young, General Tso aren’t the type of things you are going to find in non-tourist Canton/Guangdong or Sichuan restaurants nor is Iron Chef China going to serve egg rolls in kitchen stadium and I don’t remember any of those items in Eat, Drink, Man, Woman but I have to take exception to the concept of authentic.

French Fries aren’t French either but that doesn’t make them less good. Right now, in China the 1000s of years old tradition of fan-tsai (rice/grain and vegetable) is rapidly changing with the influx of wealth. Traditionally, the Chinese diet was based on 60-80 carbohydrate, mostly rice but wheat and wheat noodles are common in the north. This is changing and evolving - more money means more meat, more alcohol and surprisingly more ice cream – it is a very western thing for young people to eat. There is also a good niche market for supplements to help digest dairy’s lactose, which most Asian adults are intolerant to.

Does that mean food served in Beijing, by classically trained Chinese chefs is inauthentic because it is different than it was just 20 years ago? Just as cuisine is evolving in China, the food Chinese immigrants consumed in the US would have reflected what was available to cooks. The thing to remember, these wouldn't have been people who ate out all the time or own cookbooks - most US immigrant populations aren't who you would consider society’s winners. Generally weren’t the people who decided leave; go to a country where they had no language skills to work back breaking jobs with few to no rights did so because staying was worse. The food of the largely, illiterate, malnourished masses who came from a background where cooking fuel was scarce, kitchen space non-existent and calories even rarer would have been eating differently than the Emperor and his court were. So what is authentic? The food most people ate everyday or the historical records we have access to?

Chinese immigration cannot be glossed over by the shiny happy Ellis Island give us your poor, your huddled masses narrative. Laws, US laws, on the books until the 1940s, restricted landownership, paths to citizenship and restricted the number of Chinese women allowed to enter the States, so this particular population was largely male – And what would men, who labor under adverse physical conditions want when they are hungry – I don’t know, maybe something, affordable, dense, portable and calorie rich like an egg roll – or you know maybe they turned their noses up at it because it wasn’t authentic.

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