The Miracle of the Herrings

I’ve been reading about the famous Miracle of the Herrings.  At Naples in 1319, witnesses to the life of Thomas Aquinas gave testimony, and two of them recount a curious story concerning some herrings.  Nicholas, Abbot of Fossanova, recalled that

when Thomas lay sick in the castle of Maenza and was urged to eat something, he answered, ‘I would eat fresh herrings, if I had some.’ Now it happened that a pedlar called just then with salted fish. He was asked to open his baskets, and one was found full of fresh herrings … But when the herrings were brought to Thomas, he would not eat them.

It doesn’t sound miraculous.  And frankly, the refusal to eat sounds made up: Thomas was a corpulent gourmand, why pass up a final earthly nibble?  But this was Maeza, in Lazio, on the Mediterranean coast, as one Peter of Montesangiovanni reminded those gathered at Naples:

Thomas said, ‘Do you think you could get me some fresh herrings?’ The socius replied, ‘Oh, yes, across the Alps, in France or England!’ But just then a fishmonger called Bordonario arrived at the castle [and] on opening the baskets, the man found one full of fresh herrings[, which] were unknown in Italy. And while the fishmonger was swearing that he had brought sardines, not herrings, brother Reginald ran off to tell Thomas, crying, ‘God has given you what you wanted – herrings!’

Yes, herrings in the South!  Of course, today Tesco’s works this same “miracle” every day, but it’s got to be impressive for 1274.  It must have been:

Asked how he knew that the fish were herrings, [Peter] said that he had seen salted herrings at the papal court at Viterbo, so that he knew herrings when he saw them. Besides, brother Reginald, who had eaten fresh herrings in the countries across the Alps, declared that these were herrings too.

I’m satisfied.  And unlike Nicholas’ dubious ending, Peter ends the way a food story should end: with a recipe.

Asked how they had been cooked, he answered that some were boiled and some fried.

Roasted potatoes & goat cheese honey mustard salad

Fantastic dinner tonight. Roasted “exquisa” potatoes whole, coated with olive oil, salt, pepper, paprika, and a pinch of crushed red chile.  These were perfect: spicy and smooth and rich.  Served with a tin of baked beans. Then a salad: romaine, sweet red pepper, goat cheese, with a dressing of 2 parts honey and 1 part wholegrain mustard. Outstanding (nothing like honey and goat cheese).

A few days of pleasant food

It’s easy to forgot the appeal of a few days of pleasant food.  A few weeks ago I ate dinner with colleagues at Café St. Honore: a soft and sweet beef carpaccio with potato salad and watercress, a main dish of lamb shoulder over beets, swimming in a sweet rich sauce, with mashed potatoes and a kind of fried roulade-disc of pork belly, and for dessert, crème brûlée, a dish threatened with extinction as a result of its obviousness and familiarity: compare tiramisu, pork chops, gin and tonic, the liberal arts, marriage, Western civilization.  In other words: it’s easy to forget the appeal.

The following day I found myself in the evening at Bar Kohl, on George IV Bridge, an unexceptional sort of place, which managed inexplicably to serve up a tolerable burger — tolerable relative to our local low standards.  With such minimal standards perpetually degraded, we can easily forget that they are even capable of being met.

And the next day, another professional dinner, this time a the new South Indian place, Tanjore, for a three-foot long dosa, a very fine coconut chutney, a wonderful tomato & onion chutney, sweet and spicy at once, some nice lentil doughnuts, a few kinds of idli, sambore, and a masala dosa.  I went home that night tired and alone, but nevertheless sated.

The last few days once again reminded me of the salvation lying in ordinary meals.  Vacationing in Pitlochry with Alyssa Ney, after waking back at dusk from Edradour, the sun setting in a clear sky over the forest east of town, the Atholl Hotel rising up out of the woods, we had a good cullen skink at the Old Mill Inn, and the following night a fine dinner at Fern Cottage — I ate, first, smoked salmon over salad, with capers and balsamic vinegar, follow by, second, several pieces of breaded pork, served with a sweet and creamy whisky sauce.  We drank a bottle of extremely crisp and cold Chenin Blanc, and discussed what was to be done.

For breakfast we ate black pudding and rashers, yogurt and rhubarb compote, toast and plum jam.  (Tir Aluinn guest house is outstanding.)  Back in Edinburgh, I introduced Alyssa to fried pizza supper, we had dinner at Kalpna (their àla carte menu is better than their thali menu), and, while she ate haggis with neeps & tatties at the Albanach Bar, I had a lovely butternut squash soup.

Between these two memorable periods of eating out, I made an enormous pot of refried beans — pintos, broth, sautéed onion and garlic (plenty of this), and four or five chopped chilies of medium heat, all cooked slowly for four hours — and spend several weeks enjoying it with British cheddar inside flour tortillas and (especially) with spring onions and black olives over corn tortilla chips.  This might have been the most pleasant food of all — the creamy, rich, spicy beans were, and remain, a force to be reckoned with, another bit of elusive appeal in a world gone mad.

Recent eating

Busy as hell recently.  Working on a book manuscript.  Eating relatively well: green beans, chilies, onions, and cashews tonight; roasted potatoes and pork loin chops with apples cooked in butter, sugar, and Scotch whisky last night.

A few weeks ago Simon was in Edinburgh on business.  We went to some local standards: Mums for haggis, Mosque Kitchen (in new digs with higher prices and smaller portions), Newington Fish Bar, and Mussell Inn (scallops and mussels doused in cream, leeks, shallots), but the highlight (and new for me) was Café St. Honore, in New Town.  This place, all dark corners and old empty wine bottles, serves a charming instance of the paradigm of Scottish fine dining: French bistro food made from Scottish ingredients.  We ate bowls of cullen skink, a really fine example of this dish, a light cream stew of potatoes and smoked haddock (think New England clam chowder as Old Scottish haddock soup), a delightful terrine, and the ubiquitous scallops with black pudding.  For the main course, Simon ate roasted lamb, while I had salmon with whitebait and various accoutrements.  I couldn’t complain about any of this; it was a kind of effortless and satisfying food, the kind that makes you feel better, or at least not worse — this would sound like “middling” were it not such a rare cuisine.

The following week I was in Albuquerque for a wedding, stuffing myself with cheese enchiladas (outstanding instances from, Los Compadres, the Froniter restaurant, and El Patio), breakfast burritos (from the Frontier, doused with green chili salsa), and chile rellenos (at El Patio, made from whole green chiles).  The New Mexican cuisine is so necessary, so foreign to the insipid blandness of the UK.  There are more chiles in one Frontier breakfast burrito than exist at present on the entire island of Great Britain.

There were some rather fine IPAs available in Albuquerque as well, from the Marble Brewery and from a trendy-ish suburban brewpub called Chama River.  I felt relaxed and at peace for a week, reclining in hotel rooms, walking slowly in the sun, drinking outside in Algodones (about 20 miles north of the city), such that arriving at Heathrow en route to Edinburgh gave every impression of making landfall on the wrong side of the Styx.

Albuquerque

I arrived in Albuquerque on Monday night and have been rewarded immensely in the form of actually spicy food. Tuesday morning, a bit jetlagged, I had a breakfast burrito, filled with eggs, hashbrowns, cheese, green chili salsa, and carne avodado, at the Frontier restaurant, across from the University. There was more spice in this single burrito than exists on the island of Great Britain, especially after I smothered it with an additional ladle-full of salsa. After crawling about downtown in the afternoon, drinking a lovely IPA from the nearby Marble Brewery, I made dinner of a green chili cheeseburger at a diner, before repairing to the Anodyne pool hall for Jack and cokes. Finally, for lunch today I dined with friends at Los Compadres, where I ate a plate of refried beans, rice, and cheese enchiladas, two fried eggs, and cheese, all smothered with a truly outstanding red sauce. In advance of this were served a salsa with chips; said salsa left me so fantastically homesick, so disgusted with the Old World … only the depth of positivity contained in the enchiladas was able to negate those painful emotions.

Joel Barlow’s hasty pudding

We should imagine that language, both refined and vulgar, was invented to describe our food.   Our poets therefore should be both cooks and gourmands; we should in any event experiment with treating them as such.  To this end, a few months ago I made efforts to recreate the object of Joel Barlow’s heroic “The Hasty Pudding” (1793), with the help of an expert in Early American literature from Utah State University.

That’s Barlow, not the expert from USU.  Now I have cooked from Barlow before, but the hasty pudding would be tougher: succotash sounded good despite Barlow’s derision, so getting Life to live up to Art was easy, but how could any imminent pudding match Barlow’s transcendental descriptions?

I sing the sweets I know, the charms I feel,
My morning incense, and my evening meal,
The sweets of Hasty Pudding. Come, dear bowl,
Glide o’er my palate, and inspire my soul.

And Barlow is clear that the simplicity of the dish makes not for easy preparation:

Ev’n Hasty Pudding, purest of all food,
May still be bad, indifferent, or good,
As sage experience the short process guides,
Or want of skill, or want of care presides:
Whoe’er would form it on the surest plan,
To rear the child and long sustain the man;
To shield the morals while it mends the size,
And all the powers of every food supplies,
Attend the lessons that the muse shall bring.

How then is the dish prepared?

The yellow flour, bestrewed and stirred with haste,
Swell in the flood and thickens to a paste,
Then puffs and wallops, rises to the brim,
Drinks the dry knobs that on the surface swim;
The knobs at last the busy ladle breaks,
And the whole mass its true consistence takes.

That’s corn meal, for you Old Worlders.  The resulting pudding is eaten with milk; this, Barlow sings, “Shall cool and temper thy superior heat.”  That’s the heat of the pudding, mind you.

From all this (and, I admit, a few websites) we formulated the following recipe.  Scald 4 cups of milk, then add 3/4 cup of corn meal and plenty of salt.  Stir this for about 10 minutes until it thickens, then remove from the heat and cool.  Add two beaten eggs, and then bake in a buttered dish at 325° for 2 hours.  The result is a semi-solid quivering mass of yellow, corn-flavored mush, a kind of wet, fluffy cornbread.  With milk, as Barlow repeatedly prescribes, it was delicious.

A notable feature of Barlow’s account of hasty pudding is his description of the different names for the dish.  In both regional American dialects and foreign tongues we find a rich plurality that seems to both delight and distress the poet: hasty pudding is also called polenta (France), Indian mush (Pennsylvania), and suppawn (New York), but it’s real name is “Hasty Pudding.”  This vertiginous diversity, of course,  belies something universal: the fact that everyone has a different name for hasty pudding means that everyone eats hasty pudding!

To mark this crucial point, we cooked a second pudding, this time taking loose inspiration from a brief recipe that appears in Barlow’s regional tour: “in dear New England” hasty pudding “Receives a dash of pumpkin in the paste, / To give it sweetness and improve the taste,” and later Barlow notes that “Some with molasses line the luscious treat, / And mix, like bards, the useful with the sweet.”  Short of pumpkin, we opted for molasses (about 1/2 a cup) along with tablespoons of nutmeg and cinnamon.  The resulting pudding was dark brown and rich, suitable for dessert, or (of course) an American breakfast.  (One could sweeten this dish quite a bit more or not at all — with more molasses, or cane sugar, or honey.)

Barlow’s concern with the word for the dish (names other than “Hasty Pudding” are “spurious appellations, void of truth”) is important.  The poem finishes up more predictably, with descriptions of corn harvests and eating hasty pudding (including an extended digression on the right type of spoon to use).  The initial obsession with naming the dish suggests the kind of magical thinking on which it would be something deep and powerful to know the name of God.  It also reminds us that our secular, material puddings are but reflections of a sacred, invisible ideal — even granting his satirical intent, Barlow’s Hasty Pudding ends up a lofty and elusive creature, a form rather than a concrete plate of food, far removed from the meals of common life that inspired him.  This point detracts not a whit from the excellence of the food that can be prepared with “The Hasty Pudding” as a template.  But the invisible, we must remind ourselves, is also inedible.

Trout, lemon, capers

Tonight I briefly fried a fillet of trout in butter, lemon juice, and capers, and served it with buttered corn and a pile of new potatoes that had been roasted with thyme and lemon.

I have become deeply reliant on a tub of masaman curry paste, which I have been combining with coconut milk along with stir-fried onions, red peppers, chicken, mushrooms, pineapple, beef, some combination of these. The Chinese store on West Crosscauseway has about five different varieties from this brand — so let the reliance continue.

In other news, I am almost done with a substandard bag of Tesco-brand muesli. A nice and very appealing-looking new box of muesli (“Dorset Cereals’) has been sitting in the cupboard for a month. But I’m committed to finishing the shitty bag. One or two more bowls, and then …

Orecchiette with lentils

I sautéed mirepoix along with some garlic and black pepper, then added green lentils and vegetable broth, and cooked this for about 20 minutes. To this I added the cooked pasta, and a handful of grated parmesan.

Falafel problems

There are some falafel problems around the Dugald Stewart Building, where I work.  There is only one falafel that it is permissible to eat, which also happens to be good, from the Nile Valley Café on Chapel Street.  Theirs is spicy, flavorful, with a crisp exterior, served with a good sauce, onions, cucumber, tomato, wrapped up in pita bread and heated in a sandwich press.  (The principal defect of the Café is that it is next door to an offensively bad “burrito” place.)

The alternatives to this are all woefully inadequate.  Beirut, on Nicolson Square, is a tribute to inept restauranteurism: there is never anyone tending the mostly-empty glass counter, and minute, dried-out, sad-looking doner kebabs rest motionless on their spits.  The only time I managed to get served there, I was presented with an extremely boring falafel served with lettuce and tomato, which had not be heated all the way through.  (Don’t even think of trying to get a piece freshly fried falafel — not in this part of town anyway.) The sandwich was as though it had been prepared for the purpose simply of giving an example of a falafel sandwich, with no other aim in view.

Palmyra, on Nicolson Street, has a reasonably tasty falafel, although it is marred by a complete absence of crust.  Their principal failing, however, is that they serve their falafel with an outrageous sauce that is a perfect simulacrum of the dressing on a Big Mac.

Finally, El Falafel, on Bristo Place, offers a delightful salad bar of fixings (onions, sauces, cucumbers, cabbage, carrot, baba ghanoush), but both their falafel and their hummus is bland and insipid, the former having both the flavor and consistency of a dried-out specimen of yak dung.  Or so I should imagine.

Culinary terror

This weekend the British Society for Aesthetics came to Edinburgh; their time in town represented for me a turbulent culinary episode.   Academic catering is a dangerous animal, on which I’ve commented before.  On day 1 of the BSA conference I had a tolerable custard tart at afternoon coffee, but I grew trepidus at the thought of what dinner might consist in, and fled to the Brass Monkey, where I spent the rest of the night imbibing the nutrition of a half-dozen IPAs, along with a ham sandwich, and two small pieces of a chocolate brownie.  On day 2 I visiting the farmer’s market with some colleagues and had an Oink sandwich, which is made of tender and juicy pork with stuffing and applesauce (but which is relatively bland), and by the time of the conference dinner I found myself satisfied by the sandwich and ever-terrified of the catering.  Subliminal causes of culinary terror are everywhere; earlier on Saturday I had walked down Nicolson Street and seen a sign in the window of a Subway for some kind of McRib rip-off:

Apparently this is nothing new; there’s a Facebook page maintained by the sandwich’s British fans.  But I again left the conference, and at home made a dish of stir-fried onions, cashews, two red chili peppers, some broth, soy sauce, black pepper, and green beans.

This was good.  But within hours I was suffering again, not at the hands of the caterers who I had almost completely avoided so far, but at the hands of the New Town’s bartenders.  First, at Bramble, I found it impossible to get a Manhattan made right.

Q: What’ll you have?

A: Manhattan, up, with a cherry.

Q: Sweet or dry?

A: A little bit sweet.

(The perplexing emergence of the “dry Manhattan” in recent years is, well, perplexing.)

Result: the women who took my order relayed it to a moustachioed underling (why?  why?), who combined two measures of Woodford Reserve with one measure of sweet vermouth, two dashes of bitters, into which he finally submerged a black cherry (which garnish is the height of cocktail pretension).  The result was not as bad-tasting as I had expected, given the monumental quantity of vermouth.  Undeterred by this incorrect and outrageous performance, I returned for more.

Q: What’ll you have?

A: Manhattan, up, with a cherry, with just a few drops of sweet vermouth.

Result: the “person” “serving” me proceeded to fill a tumbler with Woodford Reserve, followed by a tiny spoonful of sweet vermouth … followed by two tiny spoonfuls of dry vermouth, all of which was stirred and strained into an elegant little glass.  This could not be said to taste good at all.

Second, I was accosted by a bartender at Rick’s hotel and told, concerning my choice of Jamison’s, that I ought to drink Scotch whisky “while in Scotland.”  (The same grimy twerp later asked if I wanted ice in a glass of Highland Park, moronically assuming that taking ice in Irish whiskey is somehow equivalent to taking ice in malt whisky.)  This insult, these kinds of insult, are quite vexing, both to the (easily-repaired) dignity and to the (inconsolable) understanding.  The poverty of British service is most troubling.  Smith may have described capitalism, but his present-day countrymen do not know how to practice it.

However, whether your drinks are made right or not, whether you are disgraced while they are served to you or not, you will get drunk.  Aaron Meskin and I dined on deep-fried pizza and chips on the way back from New Town, and this delicious but undeniably disgusting meal was a kind of hazy foreshadowing of the weakness that I manifested on Sunday, after my talk, when I ate some of the sandwiches that University catering had delivered to the Old College.  There were definitely disgusting, but decidedly undelicious.  Dainty little packets of nastiness, they were.

All ended tolerably well.  I was taken by some colleagues to the Fruitmarket Gallery, beneath North Bridge, where I had a coffee and an outstanding little sweet cornmeal cake, a polenta they called it, flavored with orange, and covered with almond frosting.  And thus fear gave way, finally, to a quiet peace.