Snake Eggs

Among the assorted oddities that find their way into my neighbors' stomachs while we attend our annual hootenany, this one bears some critical consideration. The snake, a rattler, was chased up by the hounds, captured by Paul, our resident herpetologist, who after a stimulating lecture on the sex life of snakes, handed the beheaded beast to me to clean and cook. Snake itself is not terribly unusual tasting, on the contrary rather mild. This is why the simplest of cooking methods works best. But look closely at what else I found inside. They are eggs. Rattlers bear live young, so these are soft undeveloped eggs. They look like beans. They cook like fresh beans, and perversely enough they are starchy like a bean. If you had handed me one to eat I would have guessed a long and gently cooked Phaseolus. I guess egg yolks are starchy too. Now if commercial sales of rattler becomes a practical reality, I will be able to recommend a real nose to tail approach to crotalophagia, everything but the rattle, as they say.

Apicius and the Conditum Paradoxum

This is a recipe I normally fiddle with excessively. I just call it conditum paradoxum or psychic love wine and throw in whatever strikes my fancy. But this time a Roman Banquet demands that I follow the directions as scrupulously as possible, and yes it does measure in scruples! Nothing about it makes sense, honestly. Too much honey, an odd concatenation of flavors. Look in the pot, there's pepper, saffron, bay leaves and the flecks on top are mastic. So far so good. Golden hued. But then the directions get a little unclear. Do we throw in a lump of charcoal or filter through it?

 The charcoal does indeed remove the flecks of mastic magically. As well as the dates and toasted date pits. But it also makes that lovely golden color a strangely blackish yellow that looks like dirty dish water after cleaning a roasting pan of chicken. Is this what the author intended? More importantly can this be served to modern people, used to drinking limpid pellucid white wine? Maybe there's a reason Romans drank from black glazed pottery cups?

Then the taste. It IS very sweet. But the hints of pepper, smokiness of charcoal and resiny undertones actually work quite nicely. Maybe it will settle in a few hours. You definitely would not want to swill this stuff, but it makes a rather fetching dessert wine. Here's my literal translation:

Put 15 pounds of honey into a bronze vessel along with 4 cups of wine, so in cooking the honey and wine mix. On a small fire of dry twigs heat the vessel, stirring with a stick while it cooks. If it starts to boil, sprinkle in some wine, or remove from the fire so it settles. When it cools, heat again a second or third time, then it is finally removed from the fireplace. Skim it the day after, then add 4 ounces of crushed pepper, 3 scruples of mastic, a dram each of bay leaf and saffron, 5 toasted date pits, and the dates themselves softened in wine, the same kind used before, then ground up smooth. When all this is prepared, add in 14 bottles of fine wine, strain through charcoal.

(Two sextarii in the original text is about a liter or a little over 4 cups, a fourth more than in a standard US bottle. 36 cups is about 10.5 liters or 14 standard wine bottles. Since few people are likely to make this on such a massive scale, use roughly one jar of honey to start per bottle of wine added in the end. The mastic can be purchased in a Greek grocery store, it is a resin of the lentisk tree and should be ground up before using. The text says merely leaves, which may be bay leaves, which work very nicely. It is also not clear if the wine is filtered at the end or if charcoal is merely placed in, though the former seems more likely.)

Not Exactly Lomo

I wish I could tell you what this is. I don't think it's loin. A long strip of shoulder maybe? It was just salted with a bit of cure and stuffed into a casing, hung and forgotten about for about four months. Hard as a rock. Mummified. Petrified. Needs to be shaved basically. But the flavor is so interesting and it can indeed be chewed. Buster confers.

What made me think of this was a lovely cured elk loin I tasted in Banff the other day. Much softer and smokey. In future I'll have to be just a little more impatient, huh?

Smoked Pig Assortment

IS there anything better than lounging around all day in the hammock while some gorgeous wads of pig smoke leisurely through the afternoon? With a glass of ouzo, a faithful hound and a boy for conversation? Well, yes, an impromptu party and people to eat it!Here is a big old slab of bacon, a mite salty, but so nicely different from rashers. Then some sausages with allspice and orange peel. For no particular reason. And a shoulder roast that was butterflied several times until paper thin and rerolled, cured for only a few hours and smoked the rest. It worked fine too. The trick is a cure for a week, a cold smoke for about 3 or 4 hours is enough, then on the barbecue to cook through. Of course I'm also smoked myself. Oh, and I taste rather good.

Food: A Cultural Culinary History

Folks, My food history course is now for sale on DVD from the Great Courses company. 36 episodes from prehistoric times to the present. There's a cool overview right here:

http://www.thegreatcourses.com/tgc/courses/course_detail.aspx?cid=9180 

Sunshine in a Jar

I want to know why we don't get spring here in Stockfish, CA. We skip immediately to summer, later this week it will be in the upper 90s. So this seems appropriate enough. Slice oranges as thin as you can with a knife or mandoline. These are blood oranges and navels. Then dehydrate them thoroughly either in a machine or on your roof. These are machined, about 48 hours. Then heat a bottle of cheap chardonnay, add a pound of sugar to make a syrup. Throw in a few cloves and cassia buds. Fill jar with orange slices and pour over syrup. Let sit a few months until mid summer. Take out a single slice and lay it on top of a glass of ice cold gin. Pour over tonic if you must. Sunshine!

High Tech Eggplant

Lest anyone accuse me of being unflinching in my Luddite proclivities, I think the recent IACP conference has nudged me into an oddly experimentalist (dare I say modernist?) direction. I have nothing against science per se. But honestly, I'm not into electric gadgets mostly because food tastes better using old tried and true processes. I'm not sure this does taste better, but it was fun. OK, so take an eggplant, and peel it with your baby blue kyocera peeler. Works like a charm. Then take out your mandoline (thanks Oxo folks) and slice the thinnest possible rounds. Salt lightly. Then put it into a serious MOFO dehydrator for a whole day. I bought that bitch. (NOT for myself). When it comes out, you have whisps of crispy eggplant. I was thinking I like the bitter liquid, so why salt and pour it off? Then drizzle with olive oil and vinegar and grate a raw tomato (without skin) on top. Season with pepper and oregano. And nuke it for a minute. So not really cooked. It's really spicy and lovely. Today I added some lemon juice and a little water to make it more tender and really cooked it. It sure looks like eggplant parmigiano, no? There's no cheese, but still quite nice, and not mushy, which is what happens when you just slice and nuke eggplants. OK, I am embracing the technology.