The Hash Archive

Musée Mécanique, San Francisco

 

Both Sherdos grew up loving the dish generally known simply, and somewhat imprecisely, as "hash." 

S. grew up eating something he knew as "corn-beef hash," and which (even when you had it at a breakfast counter) always came out of a can.  When you opened the can, the hash came out as a can-shaped tube of pink stuff (with perhaps a somewhat uncomfortable resemblance to dog food).  But when you fried it up in a pan, squishing it back into little bits, and served it with a fried egg or two, it still seemed like something special.   F., by contrast, grew up often eating a hash made from left-over homemade corned or roast beef, coarsely ground with a hand meat grinder screwed to the side of the kitchen table and combined with diced onions and leftover boiled potatoes.  It was served with a poached egg on top.  When time was short and even the leftovers were scarce, F.'s family would sometimes have corned beef hash out of a can from a company called Mary’s Kitchen, fried in little patties.  Since F.'s mother's name was also Mary, the family joke was that both versions of hash were from Mary’s kitchen.  The dog food appearance of the canned version served to highlight the messy hodgepodge of flavors and textures, crispy bits and soft centers, of the homemade version.   

A similar dish from F's childhood was called “farmers’ breakfast,” although we didn’t know any farmers.  In our multi-ethnic Chicago neighborhood, where we knew people from all over the world, it was farmers who appealed as exotic.  Presumably, those farmers needed hearty breakfasts.  Farmers’ Breakfast, as served in Mary’s kitchen, was a hash of leftover potatoes and onions, perhaps meat scraps, fried crisp and brown over low heat for a long time, and then bound together with scrambled egg. 

As so often happens with words that refer to foods, the word "hash" begins referring to something very simple and ends up with some more complicated connotations.  It descends originally from the French word hacher, "to chop."  The Oxford English Dictionary gives the earliest senses of the word "hash" as "something cut up into small pieces," and then specifically, "a dish consisting of meat which has been previously cooked, cut small, and warmed up with gravy and sauce or other flavouring."  Although the English word is not quite as old as some of those we have discussed in this blog, it has been around for a long time: as the OED records, Samuel Pepys, in his famous diary from the 1660s, mentions having a "first course" of "a hash of rabbits and lamb."  Later,  presumably because hash is essentially a simple dish lending itself to improvisation and variation, and in which cheap things like onions and potatoes supplement more expensive meats, hash lent its name to the lowest form of commercial eating establishment: the "hash house" or "hash joint," in which waiters “sling hash.” 

The ubiquity of this term for a cheap place to eat is revealed in the miniature hash house shown above: from the mechanized model of a carnival at San Francisco’s Musée Mécanique.

In later colloquial uses, the word hash picks up vaguely negative or even violent connotations.  To “make a hash of” something, an expression usually used metaphorically for things outside of the kitchen, means to spoil or ruin it.  As we once again learn from the OED, the poet Alexander Pope speaks of "The Hash of Tongues, A Pedant makes."  Even more strikingly, to “settle someone’s hash" (an expression that seems to us sadly out of favor) means something like "to reduce to order; to silence, subdue; to make an end of."  Even when it remains in the kitchen, hash today still means (citing the OED one last time), "a mixture of mangled and incongruous fragments; a medley; a spoiled mixture; a mess, jumble.”  Oh dear!  Frankly, this seems to remain the case even with the hash that sometimes appears on the menus of fancy restaurants, along with meatloaf and other tasty, homely mishmashes, in homage to the home cooking many people remember but don’t do anymore.  These fancy and overpriced restaurant versions tend, on the one hand, to overdo it by loading on cheese, overcooking the eggs, and leaving the meat in big chunks; and, on the other hand, to underdo it, serving pallid potatoes and never letting anything get crisp enough. 

Thus, we want to make a pitch here for making hash at home.  However paradoxical it may seem for what is always an improvisational dish, we suggest you plan ahead, collecting choice leftovers in what we think of as the “hash archive.”  

There are four secrets to good hash, in our view:  1) begin with good ingredients (certainly nothing spoiled); 2) plan and cook in advance to build the “hash archive,” that is, the leftovers that will make the hash; 3) think beyond the spud; 4) and cook the ingredients one at a time to insure browning.  This last step, on which we’ll elaborate below, is not one Mary used.  If memory serves, she threw everything into a huge cast iron skillet and somehow got it all to brown.   

We have gotten into the habit of building the hash archive by saving extra roast vegetables and now, increasingly, roasting extra vegetables on purpose so that there will be leftovers for hash.  When we have hash in view, we tend to roast the vegetables whole (in the case of small potatoes or turnips) or in large slices (in the case of other root vegetables) so that they don’t dry out.    

Here, for instance, is a baking sheet of potatoes, rutabagas, turnips, parsnips, and celery root ready to go into the oven.  Some would be smashed into a rough mash.  The rest went into the hash archive for later in the week.

 
When it comes time to make your hash, you’ll need onions, shallots, or leeks.  If you are taking up the opportunity to use things up, you might even have one or more of each. Three cheers for you.  You’ll need at least some roasted (or boiled) vegetables.  But your hash will be tastiest if you have a range of different things: for instance, potatoes, butternut squash, and celery root make a great combination.  We rarely make hash without celery root because it adds so much flavor.  (Guevara/Cortez/LVL produce at the south end of the market almost always has celery roots.)  The goal is to balance earthy, sweet, and salty flavors.  Although our hash usually has a little meat in it, it is easy to make a delicious hash that's completely vegetarian.  Eggs make a great finish.  For equipment, all you need are a large skillet and a big bowl.

Chop everything roughly the same size so that everything will mingle together well in the finished hash. First brown your meat, if you are using it. The meat lays the foundation for the layers of flavor in the hash and will then serve as a kind of garnish.  We love scraps of grilled skirt steak, recently mentioned in another post.  Leftovers from roasted pork loin or turkey work well.  A Holiday ham could easily make an appearance here.  A strip or two of bacon is always a good addition to hash. Once the meat is brown and crispy, we remove it and reserve it to add to the hash at the very end because we don’t want it to be steamed by the addition of the vegetables as they cook.  

Add oil to the pan, and saute your onions, leeks, and/or shallots. You want to take the time to let the vegetables get golden and soft.  This is crucial to the flavor of your hash.  If you feel impatient, try dancing around singing “you can’t hurry hash, no you just have to wait.”

When you are happy with your onions, take them out and put them in a large bowl (where you will assemble your hash before returning it to the pan).  Then add a little more oil and turn up the heat.  When your oil is hot, add your potatoes.  You really want to brown them.  Then in batches cook each of the vegetables you are including in your hash.  When you are satisfied with each vegetable, take it out and add it to the bowl. Conclude with the vegetable with the highest sugar content (say the butternut squash) and watch the heat so that you don’t blacken your pan.

When all of the vegetables are done, mix it all up and then return the hash to the skillet over low while you cook the eggs, poached or sunny side up.  It is also possible to put the hash in individual ramekins, crack an egg onto the top of each, and bake them in the oven (350 degrees) until the eggs set.  The timing on this is not that predictable so we tend to stay at the stove top.

A word about those eggs.  When we opened the carton from Chowdown Farms we gasped with pleasure at the varied colors of the eggs.  We also love the number on each carton of Islote Farms eggs, like limited edition lithographs.  These are fresh, local eggs and they are a treat, each and every time.  

We usually serve hash for dinner.  But if you are serving it for a holiday breakfast, you might consider another mishmash from a Chicago childhood.  The Chicago hash-eater’s father, who never cooked, did make juice drinks with a great deal of chaotic showmanship.  These began with frozen orange juice in a blender but they could easily start with fresh squeezed.  The blender, however, is crucial.  He liked to throw whole fruit into the running blender from across the room, usually with a nifty pitch and a whistle.  He usually threw in a banana (sans peel).  But he especially liked a whole apple, causing even the stalwart bar blender to groan and hiccup.  We’d advise you to take the seeds out of the apple, but leave the peel on.  Pears and persimmons might also go in with skins on but without cores or stems.  To avoid utter mayhem, your blender should not be too full when you start throwing fruit into it.  But, if you have children to amuse, you might consider tossing some fruit into the whirling blender, knowing that you will probably have to wipe up later.  The result is a frothy drink that Dad would have given a name, such as a “sunrise surprise frappe.”  But even better is the delicious sense of making hash out of the simple task of preparing juice.  As Dad would have said, wiping foam off his small helper’s glasses, “don’t tell your mother how we did this.”

Skirt Steak Salad

More often than not, we decide what to make based on what we see at the market and what ends up in our shopping bags.  That is especially true of salads, which we compose in response to what we buy rather than searching for ingredients from a recipe.  Recently we made a main dish salad organized around the beautiful Italian salad mix from Fiddler’s Green, to which we added julienned red cabbage (from Guevara), carrots (from Capay Fruits and Vegetables), and red onions (from Cadena Farm) to boost the already intense color, texture, and flavor; the miraculous winter tomatoes Towani Organic Farm is still bringing to the market; Nicasio Valley Foggy Morning cheese; and marinated and grilled skirt steak from Yolo Land and Cattle.  This is, then, a market salad start to finish, except for a few olives from the Co-op.  

Serving the steak on top of a salad updates how it was served in one of our childhood homes, where a little very flavorful steak went a long way when served over rice.   Skirt steak from Yolo Land and Cattle comes in reasonably small packages—about one pound.  One package can serve 4 people when served this way.  Even marinated, skirt steak is quite chewy, which is its charm.  But skirt steak is MUCH better if you marinate it for 12 to 24 hours.  You need the acidic marinade to tenderize the meat. 

We got the idea for the marinade and dressing for this salad from Roger Hayot’s Dinner at the Authentic Café, the cookbook from a restaurant we loved in Los Angeles, years ago.  This is a great cookbook undermined by a terrible design: the ingredient lists are presented in a pale lime green, making them almost illegible.  Yet this cookbook has survived our frequent purges of our collection because, despite the bad choices of some anonymous book-designer, this one is filled with absolutely terrific recipes of all kinds. (Hayot's title is an ironic one, since his cooking is eclectic in the extreme.)

The original marinade recipe is this.  We confess that we sometimes randomly throw something like these ingredients right into a container with the skirt steak rather than carefully making the marinade first.  But we try to hold you to a higher standard. 

Marinade:

In a blender, whir together:

2 tablespoons heavy soy sauce

2 tablespoons balsamic vinegar

2 tablespoons champagne vinegar

1 clove of garlic (peeled and roughly chopped)

1 small chile, (seeded and roughly chopped) or a generous slug of Siracha sauce

1 tablespoon cilantro leaves

1 teaspoon agave or honey

Ground pepper

1/3 cup mild oil

Submerge the steak in the marinade and refrigerate at least overnight.  This is something you can prep on the weekend to eat later in the week.   You can bring home your steak from the market, marinate it after it thaws, and then leave it in the marinade for a few days until you’re ready to cook it.  Whenever you’re poking around in the refrigerator, turn the steak so that all sides are permeated with the marinade.

When it comes time to cook the meat, we cook it in a cast iron skillet over high heat.  It is also possible to cook it on the grill or under the broiler.  Whatever you do, crank up the highest heat you can.  Skirt steak always cooks very fast—let’s say 3-4 minutes a side.  But grassfed beef like that from the market is lower fat and it cooks even faster.  So you might want to turn it after just 2 minutes and check it after 2 minutes on the second side.

Let the steak rest for a while (10 minutes?) before cutting it against the grain in thin slices.

Place the still warm slices over the salad, and then sprinkle a little of the Nicasio Valley cheese over the top.

Here’s the dressing.  Again, in a blender whir together:

½ cup balsamic vinegar

2 medium shallots, roughly chopped

1 tablespoon Dijon mustard

freshly ground pepper

¼ teaspoon salt

After this is processed smooth, add, in a steady stream:

¾ cup olive oil.

The result is a thick, nicely emulsified dressing.
 

While we are talking about salads, we want to show another that emerged from a random shop rather than a recipe.  Here we combined Asian pear and persimmon (from Rifat Ahmad), pomegranate (we think this one is from Ramon Cadena), the red walnuts Siegfried dates has been selling, Good Humus salad mix, and a little of that same Foggy Morning cheese.  We dressed this with some Glashoff toasted walnut oil and a little Meyer lemon juice, salt, and pepper.  Again, this salad requires a stroll through the market rather than a recipe.  But its combination of colors, textures, and flavors really could not be bettered by elaborate preparation, slavish conformity to a recipe, or ambitious foraging.  It’s all right here.  And it’s wonderful.

Why a Duck? (part two): Seared Duck Breast with Duck Risotto

In this post we continue our cooking project from the last one.  Next up on our duck agenda would be seared duck breast served with duck risotto and a pan sauce made with our duck demi glace and some beautiful homemade preserved cherries in beaujolais wine that we had reserved from last summer’s harvest. 

(We learned to make these cherries from Eugenia Bone’s book Well Preserved. You can find the recipe at various places on the internet, including http://www.denverpost.com/food/ci_12595911.  But note that Bone has since revised this recipe to include 6 cups rather than two quarts of red wine.  One of the great things about Bone’s book is that she guides you toward making preserves with savory uses and helps you think about how to use them). 

To be frank, we thought this was one of the very best things we have ever cooked — which means, we dare add, one of the best things we’ve ever eaten. 

Our approach here was conditioned by a variety of recipes from different books.   The basic technique for making risotto is widely available, so here we’ll primarily emphasize simply that this dish really depends on a few key ingredients:  the shallots you first soften in olive oil, the rice, the parmigiano reggiano and a pat of butter added at the end — but above all, the stock in which you cook the rice.   

True Italian-style risotto absolutely requires the variety of rice called “Arborio,” which was named after the town in the Piedmont region where it was originally grown.  At one time this variety of rice was grown only in Italy, but today it is also grown in California and elsewhere in the United States.  Arborio rice is distinguished by its high starch content, which produces the creamy texture of the finished dish, and especially by its ability to absorb large amounts of liquid without becoming mushy as regular rice would do.  Thus, in this dish, the rice is really there as an edible, chewy container for the stock; and the taste of the risotto depends above all on the concentrated flavor of all the bounty that went into your stockpot.  The texture of the finished dish, however, depends on the cooking, which has to be done with constant attention at the last minute, just before serving.

(The whole-grain advocate in the household would like to point out that you can make a pretty decent farroto, a kind of higher-fiber risotto, using semi-pearled farro.)  

Other recipes taught us that the duck breasts, boneless but with the skin still attached, should be pounded flat and the skin scored in a checkerboard pattern with a sharp knife.  The pounding allows them to cook quickly and evenly; the scoring of the skin encourages the fat to melt slowly and the skin to crisp over a medium-high fire.  

While we have eaten less meat since moving to California, we’ve had to learn to wrestle more intimately with that meat.  If you buy a duck at the market, you will need to break it down yourself.  Learning to do so has enabled us to buy whole birds but to make a duck leg ragu one night and seared duck breasts another.

Basically, for this dish you sear your duck breasts quickly on both sides over medium-high to high heat, and take them out and keep them warm.  Then you should pour off most of the fat from the pan (duck is notoriously high in fat), and then make a quick pan sauce in the same pan. As is well known, duck takes well to a slightly sweet sauce because of its dark and relatively fatty meat.  The sauce here is essentially a variation on the famous French red-wine sauce sometimes called “marchand de vin”: a combination of pan drippings, red wine, and stock or demi-glace (the latter being nothing other than an already-reduced form of stock).   In this case we used our cherries, which had been preserved in reduced red wine, instead of just regular wine out of the bottle, which also provided a light but not cloying note of sweetness. Basically, after removing the cooked duck breasts, you "de-glaze" the pan with wine (or, in our case, with our preserved cherries in wine), stirring to dislodge any brown bits; and then add your demi-glace (which will quickly melt into the hot liquid), and reduce under low to medium heat until it has the consistency of a sauce. You can also use regular liquid stock here, which will just mean that you need longer to reduce it.

This dish thus depended on two labor-intensive ingredients that we had in the pantry.  The cherries in wine allowed us to remember and savor the ghost of the taste of early summer.  

The demi-glace is the flavor of duck reduced to a dark paste that will keep for a long time in the refrigerator, much longer than would regular fresh liquid stock.  Indeed, our modern word “restaurant” originally referred to something like demi-glace: that is, to a concentrated meat or poultry broth.  Thus the first French restaurants in the eighteenth century resembled Boulette’s Larder in the San Francisco Ferry Building, selling ready-made bouillons and “restaurants” for immediate consumption or to take home. As Susan Pinkard writes in her A Revolution in Taste: The Rise of French Cuisine, “Given how time-consuming it was to make these kitchen staples from scratch, buying them already prepared in just the amount needed would have made a lot of sense for smaller households” (206).  Even as it is interesting to be reminded how the commercialization of cooking and eating emerged from the marketing of prepared “restaurants” it is also a pleasure to reverse that process, starting with market raw materials and cooking from scratch.

The leftovers were equally good.  One of us learned in childhood that many leftovers can be turned into savory cakes with molten centers and golden crispy edges.  The risotto was no exception.  We rolled the cold risotto into cakes with oiled hands, dusted them with parmesan, and then let them set in the refrigerator for a few hours before frying them in a mixture of butter and oil over medium heat.  It’s important not to worry them if you want a nice crust (and you do).  Served with Bledsoe’s Calibrese sausages (when their chalk board said “limited supply” we immediately bought them) and the leftover pan sauce, the cakes were less elegant than in their previous incarnation but just as good, if not better.

Thanksgiving Duck (part one): Duck Ragù with Garganelli

 

The Sherdos, obstinate contrarians, have on the long Thanksgiving weekend decided to cook and write about cooking a fowl that is not a turkey.

As inveterate readers of cookbooks and cooking magazines, we’ve started to feel rather cranky about the fact that, year after year after year, and seemingly for weeks and months on end, every magazine and newspaper and cooking show devotes itself to turkey, turkey, turkey, along with all the other familiar instances of so-called “holiday cooking.”  After all, how many recipes for roast turkey can one reasonably be expected to read, much less to try? 

(Would you like to know how to roast a turkey?  Take a dressed bird, put it in a hot oven and cook it until it's done.  The rest, as they say, is conversation.  Of course there are also innumerable recipes that involve hotter ovens or cooler ones, recipes for frying, steaming or grilling a turkey, and all kinds of brines, garnishes and other strategies that claim to (and sometime do) produce crisper skin or moister meat.  So by all means, have at it.  But it sometimes seems to us that the sheer profusion of recipes for roasting turkey produces the reverse of its intended effect: that is, it has made the simple act of roasting a bird, which is obviously one of the most basic and ancient of kitchen operations, into a sort of arcane mystery, in which somehow the “best” recipe always remains to be discovered, always mysteriously just out of one’s reach.)

Anyway, at last Saturday’s market, Chowdown Farm had fresh ducks for sale, which inspired us to splurge on two of them, so as to attempt a complicated multiple cooking project spread out over several days of this holiday weekend. 

To be sure, duck is a relatively expensive luxury, for good reasons.  Even laying aside the economies of the factory farm, ducks are simply more expensive to raise than, say, chickens.  Although we’re certainly not experts on the subject, our understanding is that chickens can be raised with little more than a small yard with grass and a coop, whereas ducks need water, a larger area, and special food.  So ducks are not really for daily consumption, but something to be saved for a special occasion.

After getting our two ducks home, we first carefully cut off the legs and the breasts.  We put the two remaining carcasses in a big pot, with a cut up leek, a few onions, carrots, celery sticks and a bouquet garni (some parley, thyme, and bay leaves, tied together with string).  We covered this with water, brought it to a boil, turned down the heat, and simmered it overnight, producing a rich duck stock.  (For more on stock-making, see our post on chicken stock from April 28 2012).  The next day we strained and de-fatted the stock, reserving about ten cups (some for the ragù, the rest for another dish we'll write about in part two of this post); and then reduced the rest into a kind of duck demi glace (a sort of concentrated brown sauce with a paste-like consistency), both of which would be crucial ingredients in the dishes we were planning to make.

First up would be an Italian style duck ragù, which we served with some home-made garganelli pasta.  For this you need the stock but not the demi glace.
 
Our very first post was about this garganelli dressed with spring asparagus.  Fresh pasta takes a bit of work, though a few simple and inexpensive tools — like the dedicated cutter that produces nice even squares of rolled pasta, and a simple wooden dowel and board for shaping the garganelli — do make the task a bit easier.

 

As for Ragù: well, this is one of those notoriously contested terms in cookery that can refer somewhat confusingly to a number of different things.  The Oxford English Dictionary traces the origin of the word, whose Italian form we’re using here, from the French ragoût, which itself emerges from the French verb ragouster, “to have a taste of, to incite the appetite.”  As a noun, the word usually refers to some kind of highly-seasoned stew of meats, fish or vegetables.  In the seventeenth century, it seems clear that people still heard the word as a kind of compound referring to a dish made “a-gout,” to the taste — or, as it were, a “tasty,” spicy or piquant dish.  For example, in an English translation from 1653 of Varenne’s Le Cuisinier François (1651), a book often cited as the founding text of modern French cuisine, a “ragoust” is defined as “any sauce, or meat prepared with a haut goust, or quicke or sharp taste.”   Susan  Pinkard’s recent A Revolution in Taste: The Rise of French Cuisine observes that, in seventeenth-century France, the words ragoût and fricassee were used more or less interchangeably to mean “dishes cooked in a sauce that incorporated the juices of the principal ingredient, supplemented by other liquids such as bouillon, wine, or cream” (107).  Pinkard also suggests that these dishes developed in the early seventeenth century when the raised stove became common, allowing the cook to maintain a low, even temperature, as various forms of hearth cooking — spit roasting, grilling over the coals, or boiling in a cauldron over open flames — would not. The close watch one keeps over the stovetop ragù was once, then, an innovation.

The word seems to have been imported into English almost immediately.  The English poet William Davenant, in The First Days Entertainment at Rutland-House (1656), a sort of loose opera commonly cited as the first new dramatic performance in London after the closing of the theaters during the English revolution in 1642, describes the bounty of a banquet as including

Your Pottages, Carbonnades, Grillades, Ragouts ... and Entremets.

As recently as 1925, in P.G. Woodhouse’s Carry On Jeeves, Bertie Wooster refers memorably to his aunt’s cook Anatole (whom other rich people are always sneakily trying to hire away from her) as “A most amazing Johnnie who dishes a wicked ragoût.”

The Italian ragù, however, is a slow-cooked stew of mixed meats and flavorings used to dress pasta.  Two of the most famous, of course, are the ragù Bolognese from Emilia-Romagna, that simmers veal, pork and beef in a rich sauce with just a hint of tomato and thickened with milk or cream; and the ragù Napoletano, which mixes chopped meat with lots of tomato — and thus seems to be the ancestor of old-fashioned American “spaghetti sauce.”  In The Splendid Table, Lynne Rossetto Kasper observes that a French ragoût is always a dish eaten on its own (in fact, many French cookbooks use the word as a synonym for "stew"), whereas the Italian ragù is always a sauce for pasta.  Kasper records that the Italian cookbook author Christofaro di Messisbugo served ragù-like dishes at the court of Ferrara in the 16th century, dishes which she believes had much in common with Middle Eastern cuisine, incorporating exotic spices such as rosewater, saffron, cinnamon,  ginger — and of course sugar.  They would almost certainly have tasted sweet to a modern taste.  The modern Italian ragù, she believes, was in effect re-imported into Italy from France in the 18th century, when aristocratic Italians became obsessed with all things French.

Our duck ragù is based on a recipe from Mario Batali, whose description of it as a dish “raised to mythic status” when combined with homemade garganelli captured our imaginations.  Garganelli, a shaped pasta like homemade penne or ziti, comes from the Italian word for a chicken’s gullet (and is thus a linguistic cousin of the English word “gargle”).   

The ragu is actually quite easy to prepare: basically, you just brown your duck legs, then sauté a mixture of chopped aromatic vegetables, and then add tomatoes, wine and stock.  The duck legs are then braised slowly in this sauce.  Finally, the cooked meat is shredded and returned to the sauce, whereupon it's ready to be finished with your pasta.  The original recipe called for chicken stock, but  using duck stock amps up the flavor and distinctiveness of the dish.  And, perhaps needless to add, the ragù is also great with any kind of store-bought pasta — you might try it with the lovely fresh parpadelle from Pasta Dave at the market.   

Duck Ragù with Garganelli

• 1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil
• 4 duck legs, visible fat removed, patted dry
• 1 onion, diced
• 1 carrot, diced
• 1 rib of celery, diced
• 2 cloves of garlic, chopped
• 4 fresh sage leaves
• 2 cups red wine
• 1 cup duck stock (or substitute chicken)
• 6 oz tomato paste (or substitute about 2 cups of chopped fresh or canned tomatoes)
• Garganelli made from about 1 pound of pasta dough (or substitute about 2/3 lb of storebought penne or ziti)
• Parmesan cheese for grating

Season the duck legs with salt and pepper.  
In a dutch oven, pot, or large saucepan, brown the duck legs for 10 minutes, and remove to a plate.
Add the chopped vegetables, and cook over low to medium heat until soft.
Add the wine, stock, and tomato paste, stir, bring to a boil.
Return the duck legs to the pot, turn down the heat, and simmer, partially covered, for at least one 1 hour or until the legs are well cooked. 
Remove the duck legs, allow to cool slightly, then shred the meat and return it to the pot.
Simmer uncovered another 30 minutes or until the sauce is thick. 

Cook the garganelli until just barely tender, and add to the pan with the sauce.
Toss over high heat for two minutes, adding a splash of pasta-cooking liquid if necessary.
Remove from heat, spoon into bowls, and top with grated parmesan and additional pepper.

(NOTE: This dish should easily serve at least four, but the precise amount of pasta you use is negotiable.  If you're serving only two people, you can freeze half the ragù for later.  Your goal is to have plenty of sauce to coat the pasta well, but not so much that the pasta is swimming in sauce.) 


Make this dish any old day and we promise your loved ones will be humming the old tune from Disney’s Mary Poppins:  “every day’s a holiday with you.”

First crab and "South End of the Market" Cottage Pie

This morning at the market, we overheard someone say it was a "much restricted" market because of the weather.  While it is true that it was drizzling and cold, it is also true that the market was bursting with treasures.  We got what are likely to be the last organic grapes from Mt. Moriah farms, as well as the first crab of the season from Mission Fish.

We also nabbed two ducks from Chowdown Farms.  We're planning a duck ragu as one of our uses for those ducks and we'll write about that later.  We love crab in salads (see one of our first posts about our version of Crab Louis) and that's what we'll do with this first crab of the season, combining it with beautiful lettuce mixes available from several different farms and the last-gasp tomatoes from Towani farms.  If we weren't currently obsessed with making our own fresh pasta, we'd pick up some from Pasta Dave at the market--a welcome addition to our vendors--and serve it with melted butter and as much of the crab as our budget and picking patience would allow.

If you need a meal this week that isn't too demanding and will please different palates, we'd like to recommend a Sweet Potato Cottage pie that we think of as "South End of the Market" Cottage Pie because its three chief ingredients can be purchased at the South End:  raisins and sweet potatoes from Schletewitz Farms/The Fruit Factory and ground beef from Yolo Land & Cattle. 

The recipe originally came from Fine Cooking magazine and is available here:  http://www.finecooking.com/recipes/sweet-potato-cottage-pie.aspx.  Predictably, we made a few changes.  These lower the fat content of the potato topping and spice up the filling.

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For the topping
2 large sweet potatoes (about 2 lb. total)
1/2 cup Greek Yogurt
3/4 oz. (1/4 cup) finely grated Cheese
Kosher salt and
Freshly ground black pepper 

For the filling
2 medium celery stalks, cut into 1/4-inch dice (about 3/4 cup)
1 large carrot, cut into 1/4-inch dice (about 3/4 cup)  
1 medium onion, finely chopped (about 1-1/2 cups) 
Kosher salt 
3 medium cloves garlic, minced 
2 tsp. cumin seeds toasted and then ground
2 tsp. chopped fresh oregano or 1/2 tsp. dried oregano 
1 tsp. ancho chile powder or other pure chile powder 
1/4 tsp. ground cinnamon 
1 lb. ground beef  from Yolo Cattle
1 14-oz. can whole peeled tomatoes
1 chipotle chile from a can, chopped
1/2 cup coarsely chopped green olives  (we use those from the Davis Co-op olive bar)
1/3 cup coarsely chopped raisins from the Farmers Market (they really are better), perhaps chopped so that they distribute evenly

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Prepare the toppping

Position a rack in the center of the oven and heat the oven to 425°F. Line a heavy-duty rimmed baking sheet with foil.

Prick the sweet potatoes all over. Roast until very tender, about 45 minutes to an hour.  You can do this well in advance, perhaps when you've got the oven on for another meal, and then just store the roasted potatoes in the refrigerator until you are ready to make the cottage pie.

When cool enough to handle, scoop the flesh into a medium mixing bowl. Add the yogurt, generous salt, and 1/2 tsp. pepper and beat with an electric hand mixer on low speed until smooth and creamy, about 1 minute. Set aside. (It also works to mash the potatoes with a hand masher.)

Prepare the filing

Heat the oil in a 12-inch sauté pan over medium-high heat. Add the celery, carrot, onion, and 1 tsp. salt. Reduce the heat to medium and cook, stirring frequently, until the vegetables are soft, fragrant, and starting to turn golden, 10 to 15 minutes. Add the garlic, cumin, oregano, chile powder, and cinnamon and cook for 30 seconds. Add the beef, season with 1 tsp. salt (original recipe recommends 2), and cook until no longer pink, about 5 minutes. While the original recipe recommends tilting the pan to spoon off most of the fat, the grass-fed ground beef from Yolo Land & Cattle is really lean so you don't need to do this. 

Pour the tomatoes and their juice into a small bowl and crush them with your hands or a fork. Mix in the chopped chipotle.  Add the tomatoes to the meat and cook, uncovered, until thick, 10 to 12 minutes. Add the olives and raisins and cook for another minute; season to taste with salt. 

Assemble and bake the pie

Transfer the beef mixture to a 9x9-inch baking dish. Spread the sweet potatoes over the top in an even layer. Bake until bubbling around edges, about 30 minutes. Top with some grated cheese. Bake another about 15 minutes until the cheese has melted.  (Fine Cooking recommends broiling this at the end but we get distracted and come to grief so we omit that step.) Let cool at least 10 minutes before serving. 

We have assembled the pie a day or two in advance and then heated it up with success later.  That makes it perfect as a dish to have on hand before those hungry houseguests arrive.

Fresh ginger cake and fairytales of one kind and another

The delicately pretty, thin-skinned, fresh ginger from Towani Organic Farm at the market this fall has inspired us to make a ginger cake and to reflect on some of gingerbread’s appearances in history and literature.

Ginger was one of the spices that inspired the spice trade between the Roman Empire and China in the second century.  It later became a staple of Medieval European food, which was much more highly spiced than it would later become. By the early fifteenth century in England, it arrived regularly on boats from the Mediterranean and by the sixteenth, it appeared routinely in cook books and medical guides.  Often in powdered or candied form, since it is relatively perishable, ginger flavored savory and sweet dishes, and provided various medicinal benefits, including “comforting the heart,” aiding the digestion, cleansing and warming the body, countering inflammation, and heightening desire.  

 



When Sir Toby Belch, in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, famously calls out the "puritan" Malvolio —

Dost thou think because thou art virtuous there shall be no more cakes and ale?

— and the Clown chimes in:

Yes, by Saint Anne, and ginger shall be hot i' th' mouth too! 

—he seems to be referring to the use of ginger to heat up the bodily passions Malvolio censures.  

By the sixteenth century, ginger was a crucial ingredient in what had become a cherished food, ginger bread or cake. Many historical accounts of gingerbread on the internet repeat the story that Queen Elizabeth I presented guests with gingerbread likenesses of themselves.  This even appears as the assertion that Queen Elizabeth “invented” the gingerbread man.  Unfortunately, we haven't been able to find the source for such a story, as proves to be the case with many of the juiciest and most beloved anecdotes about Elizabeth. What we can assert with confidence is that, while Elizabeth was a Renaissance woman with great erudition and many talents, a baker she was not.   Now, there is certainly widespread evidence that early modern cooks shaped marzipan, sugar, and various doughs into representations of flora and fauna, ships and buildings, and, indeed, people.  So it is at least possible that Elizabeth sometimes asked her cooks to make portraits of expected visitors out of gingerbread.  It is appealing to imagine the queen greeting a diplomat, suitor, or courtier with a tiny edible version of himself.  “Sweets to the sweet,” she might have said, “but keep in mind that I could bite your head off.”

Whether or not the sweet-toothed queen shaped the history of gingerbread, the drama that is often considered one of the delicacies of her reign makes frequent mention of gingerbread.  The playwright and poet Ben Jonson, famous for his appetite, among other things, dreamed up a gingerbread gag for a character in one play, and in another, depicted a gingerbread seller at a fair, with her basket full of “gingerbread progeny” and a young man who buys her out, seduced by the pleasures of the fair including his “gingerbread-wife.”

In fairy tales, gingerbread also has a special status if one that is, again, hard to track down.  In the Grimm Brothers’ “Hansel and Gretel,” a story all about hunger, the mother (only later revised into the stepmother, to the chagrin of stepmothers since) proposes that the solution to the family’s poverty and starvation is to leave the two children in the woods.  There, they come upon a witch’s house, “built entirely from bread with a roof made of cake.” While the German might specify that this is “ginger bread or cake” that detail is not in most English versions of the tale. Nonetheless, many illustrations depict the witch’s house as the prototype for the lovely but inedible gingerbread houses that are now a standard part of Christmas decorations.  Underpinning the assumption that the witch’s house is gingerbread is the assumption that gingerbread is the treat most mouth-watering and irresistible to starving, abandoned children, the food of childhood dreams.

So formidable queens and witches haunt this recipe for ginger cake, adapted from the one in David Lebovitz's wonderful book, Ready for Dessert.  While we love recipes that combine ginger in various forms (fresh, dried, and candied), we chose this one to showcase the young ginger turning up at the market, ginger that has not even yet produced thick skin and tough fibers.  The recipe is available elsewhere on the internet but we will repeat it here for convenience.

David Lebovitz’s Fresh Ginger Cake

4 ounces fresh ginger, peeled and sliced
1 cup mild molasses
1 cup sugar
1 cup vegetable oil
2 1/2 cups flour
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
1/2 teaspoon ground black pepper
1 cup water
2 teaspoons baking soda
2 eggs, at room temperature

1. Preheat over to 350°F. Put rack in the center of the oven. Butter a 9 inch springform or 9 x 2-inch round cake pan and line the bottom with a circle of baking parchment.
2. Using a food processor or knife chop the ginger very fine.  You could also use a microplane to grate it.  We used the processor. 
3. In a large bowl, mix together the molasses, sugar, and oil.
4. In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, cinnamon, cloves and black pepper.
5. Bring the water to the boil in a saucepan, stir in the baking soda, and then mix the hot water into the molasses mixture. Stir in the ginger.
6. Sift the dry ingredients over the batter, then whisk to combine.
7. Add the eggs, and continue whisking until thoroughly blended.
8. Scrape the batter into the prepared cake pan and bake for about 1 hour, until the top of the cake springs back lightly when pressed or a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean.  (Check after 50 minutes.  You don’t want to overbake it.)
10. Cool the cake completely. Run a knife around the edge of the cake to loosen it from the pan.  Invert it onto a plate, remove the parchment, and then reinvert it onto a serving plate.

We served this with unsweetened whipped cream and a sauce we canned this summer made from Good Humus Royal Blenheim apricots (basically a very loose jam). The cake has a very strong, pure ginger taste and is, indeed, "hot in the mouth."   We like to think that Queen Elizabeth would approve--and Malvolio would not.