The Settlement Cook Book and Apple Roly-Poly

I stood in the deserted Book Exchange yesterday afternoon, sniffing through the old books, when I noticed a battered volume covered in old yellow shelf paper. Shelf paper is always a good sign. Nobody these days has plain wood shelving they want to cover, and a book must be well-loved to merit a homemade jacket. In thin pencil on the spine were the words, "Settlement Cook Book."

Inside, Mrs. Simon Kander smiles placidly at me, "Very Truly Yours," and I recall that she often sits on well-papered shelves with the likes of Irma Rombauer and Fannie Merritt Farmer. But I don't yet discover her real design -- I slip a dollar in the box and run with my treasure. It's only hours later, back in the city, that I slide the shelf-paper jacket from the book and gasp.


Two-by-two, noses in their cookbooks, are a couple dozen cute little cooks, marching towards a large heart on the horizon and the words, "The way to a man's heart." Come, my apron-clad, man-seeking companions, let us take the road laid out before us as it winds its way through our iceboxes and ranges, through our pies and pickles, through the capillaries and arteries of a manly chest to the heart that lies beating within it. It's a hilarious grotesque, a creepy relic of coy humor, and a fabulous treasure for my shelf.

Mrs. Simon Kander, née Lizzie Black, compiled the first edition of her cookbook in 1903, a charity project to benefit a community of Russian Jews in Milwaukee. That edition also bears the subtitle, "The way to a man's heart," but instead of antlike marching cooks, it depicts a lady playing the flute. Mine is the 30th edition, from 1951. The book is falling apart, and I might need to work some curatorial magic to get it in good enough shape for my own shelf. Since Mrs. Kander herself was German, the cookbook includes kuchen and matzos and spritz krapfen -- and, of course, clear signposts pointing its readers to manly hearts. Is it the Apple Roly-Poly? The Wine Syllabub? Rinktum-Dity?

Apple Roly-Poly
p. 345

Make Plain Pie Crust or Biscuit Dough. Roll out 1/2 inch thick. Spread with chopped apples or jam, raisins, sugar and cinnamon; roll like Jelly Roll. Place in a small baking pan, spread butter over all and add 2 cups of cold water, and bake in a hot oven, basting often, with the sauce in the pan, until done. Serve hot.

(Kander, Mrs. Simon. The Settlement Cook Book. Milwaukee: The Settlement Cook Book Co., 30th ed., 1951).

Kefir Cheese and Dates

I had to leave for a few days to V.'s French kitchen, and so I cleverly stashed my latest batch of kefir in the fridge, hoping the chill would retard the fermenting action of the kefir grains. Unfortunately, there is no stopping the kefir once it gets going, and when I returned home and went to strain out my precious kefir grains, I was left with curds and whey -- the kefir grains, of course, firmly embedded in the curd.

Unfazed, I removed a good bit of curd/grain mixture, wrapped it in cheesecloth, and rinsed it well. I refrigerated the grains in a little glass jar filled with water, and turned to my remaining kefir cheese. I had about a cup of it -- an average cheese yield for a quart of raw milk. I sprinkled it with sea salt, stirred it well, and let it sit. The salt absorbs slowly, so it's good to be cautious. (Ordinarily, kefir is of a creamy, slightly frothy consistency, not much thicker than light cream).

At the Civic Center farmer's market today I bought a pound of honey dates ($2/lb), as well as some on-the-twig fresh dates ($2.50/lb). Fresh dates are crisper than the gooey self-preserved things we find in grocery stores, and taste something like a fuyu persimmon. Sometimes they even have an orange luster to them. For a lovely midafternoon snack, split and pit a large date, dab it with kefir cheese, and pop it in your mouth. The contrasting fibrous sweet goo and creamy salty cheese are rather too addictive.

Cheesemongrel

Yesterday my employer asked his wife why the cheese was in the refrigerator. It might seem an odd question, except V. is French, and habitually breaks food safety recommendations to keep her cheese out on the counter. "Here," she said, "it is too warm. In France we have a cool room next to the kitchen for keeping cheese. Anyway," she added, "in France we eat cheese at every meal, and use it up much more quickly." Her kitchen teems with bacteria -- kombucha and kefir and yogurt fermenting everywhere, raw milk and soft runny cheeses puddling at all sorts of scandalous torrid temperatures.

I made a little promise to myself that I would buy some good cheese when I got back to the city. After stilton and raclette and cave-aged gruyere, one finds oneself snubbing dowdy little annatto-yellow cheddars. Late in the afternoon, my companions paused in a small town to meet somebody. We were patiently sipping pinot noir when one of us said, "If you had to give up either wine or cheese, which would you stick to?" We weren't even eating cheese. It just so happened to be on everyone's mind.

"Wine," said the filmmaker to my left.

"Cheese," said the rapper to my right.

"Where is the boundary," I asked, "between milk and cheese? Leave me something fermented and dairy and I'll give up the cheese." I pictured myself straining a nice yogurt to a tangy custardy thickness and insisting to an arbiter of cultured dairy disputes that it really wasn't "cheese".

Some more pinot and a splash of bourbon later, I found myself on the way to the Tenderknob with a new girl who announced at no provocation, "I promise you, I love cheese more than you do."

Frankly, I'm just a casual cheese philanderer. A dairy dilettente. "Yeah?"

"Yeah. Before I even started this job, I knew cheese way more than anybody. But my boss knew orders of magnitude more than I did, and that was a year ago I started learning from her. I just spent the last week with an ex in Hawaii eating shitty food, and I can't wait to go eat some cheese."

What was the phrase my employer used? Show some neck. "What is it that you do?" I'm a cheese cur showing neck.

"I'm a cheesemonger." I'm a cowering mongrel. Maybe she'll give me a rind of parmesan if I visit her -- which, in fact, I think I just might do.

I do still wonder whether she likes cheese as much as a certain Babette. Babette hefts all her swaying furry bellies to come running when she smells chevre, or triple-cream brie, or a bit of feta still dripping with brine. Her complete abandon to epicurean enthusiasm leaves me a little breathless. How can a cat have such discriminating tastes -- eschewing milk and yogurt and creme fraiche in favor of "cheese" -- if cheese isn't, in fact, a distinct biological entity? It's not like she knows a damned thing about the coagulation of proteins, or the action of bacteria on milk sugars, but her little, little brain can put leathery romano and pickled sheep's milk feta and runny brie in the same category, and discriminate them from creme fraiche. Can she really taste the agedness that (usually) distinguishes cheese from other cultured dairy products?

I know; it's very tedious when people ascribe wonderful intelligence to their pets. But I'm doing just the opposite. Bless her, Babette isn't such a clever one -- leaving me to think it's the cheese that's so very smart. After all, the strangest thing about cheese is that it tastes like cat piss and soiled garments -- eminently nasty things -- but somehow dupes us into enjoying those same fungal flavors. And not without some advantage to itself. Think of the nice treatment we give our favorite cheese cultures (VIP petri dishes, nubile young cheesemongers). Rather a useful leg up in the cutthroat world of bacterial survival, no?

It's a clever cheese, I tell you.

Oatmeal Raisin* Browned-Butter Muffins

The Grand Dame of Southern Cooking was a Communist. Her name is Edna Lewis, and I was thrilled to stumble across her cookbook, In Pursuit of Flavor, at Goodwill today. She writes, "In those days, we lived by the seasons, and I quickly discovered that food tastes best when it is naturally ripe and ready to eat." And unlike Alice Waters, she started cooking professionally all the way back in 1949. She makes her own baking powder, and braises meat in a clay pot, and advocated seasonal food long before the West Coast jumped on the slow food bandwagon. She fed William Faulkner and Tennessee Williams. And, yes, worked for The Daily Worker.

Here's the thing, though. I'm not really pitting one culinary genius against another. Unlike other caustic celebrities, the heroes of cookery play a good game of wholesome charm. Think of a kitchen full of the likes of M.F.K. Fisher, Alice B. Toklas, James Beard, Julia Child...? My heart just melts like butter on an oatmeal muffin. Which reminds me to tell you that oatmeal muffins are improved twelvefold by the addition of half a cup of browned butter -- but that does NOT mean you should refrain from topping them with extra butter when you split them open all steamy from the oven.

Browned-Butter Muffins

Melt 1/2 c. butter over low heat. While it slowly gilds to a honey-wheat color, whisk together 2 cups white flour, 1.5 tsp. salt, 2 tsp. baking soda, 1 T. cinnamon, 3 c. rolled oats, and 1 cup of raisins*.

In another bowl, whisk 3 eggs, 1/2 c. honey, and 2.5 c. kefir or yogurt (some part of which may be old sour milk, water, or other bilge).

Pour the browned butter into the oat mixture and toss it about till evenly coated. Stir in the liquids and let the batter sit and thicken up for an afternoon or overnight.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees and butter and flour 18 muffin holes. Bake till golden brown on top, some 25 minutes or so.

*In retrospect, the raisins effectively sucked up the moisture like sponges. I much prefer a muffin riddled with caverns of tart berry juice. Add frozen or seasonal berries instead -- just before filling the muffin pan if you don't want grey batter.

Of Dearth and Home

Ring in that recession! Nothing fuels the home cooking fires like the bellows of inflation. No, seriously -- every generation defines its comfort food as whatever grandma cooked up when things were tough. The corn pone crumbled in bean soup. The ham bone that lent the beans their meaty savor. Mashed potatoes all winter long. Oatmeal for breakfast. Coffee brewed with burnt toast -- though that's venturing into the territory of full-on Depression. When things really get wild, when threadbare and barefoot take the runways by storm, when the Dust Bowl supersedes the Super Bowl, and dole means government handouts, not bananas. Thing of it is, I think it's fair to say that most of us picky-palated impecunious youngsters would take a handout over Dole bananas 'most any day of the year....

In the meantime, let's celebrate the fruits of economic hardship by reminding ourselves that a backyard garden is like backing up our dollars with gold: potatoes are immune to inflation. And what is more, the distinctive creativity of every ethnic cuisine derives not just from the cleverness of the people who've cooked it every day for a thousand years, but also from a dearth of culinary options. In other words, this next generation of poor kids is on the verge of inventing the new American cuisine. Haute dumpster. And perhaps this new cuisine will be defined by a dearth of bananas, or electric ovens, or beer.

In fact, I love the word "dearth". Dear-th, dear-ness. It's not the absence of everything wonderful, but the preciousness of the little we've got. It's the perfect antidote to the mesmerizing superfluity of food on grocery store shelves (and, in fact, the perfect antidote to the perplexing plethora of lifestyles, roles, and visions I could choose). When 26 enticing varieties of olive oil gang up and fix me to the floor with indecision and panic, it occurs to me that freedom isn't a linear function of the number of choices we've got. Maybe those dear deep-rooted folks, the ones who don't pretend to be self-made, but build themselves up on the foundation of a community and its traditions, who take hand-me-downs and make quilts or whatever tired metaphors they can mine from deep in their dearth -- maybe the deep-rooted ones are happier for it.

In other words, I went to church on Sunday. Sometimes a wayward Mennonite girl could use a dose of community -- some sermonizing, a hymn or two, maybe even a wee nibble of communion loaf and a long, thirsty swig of wine. In San Francisco, Mennonites are allowed to be gay and drink wine and the communion loaf might even be challah. Go back East and the church has its panty-hose in a wad trying to figure out just how much of the loaf it's allowed to dole out to so-called sinners. But there it is: I was born into a tightly-knit Mennonite world, and it's my particular "dearth", whether or not I view it as stricture or scripture, or just one useful structure among many.

And soon, we'll all have dearth a-plenty: recession! Bring it on, I say. Let's drink to our dearth, toast our burnt toast, and hunker down with what we've got. To that end, a recipe for coffee from Grandma's taped-together copy of The Mennonite Community Cookbook:

Coffee

This coffee recipe accompanies a "birthday cake" made from alternating strata of bread and cottage cheese, topped with a whipped oatmeal-thickened skimmed-milk frosting. TMCC notes, "This is an original recipe from our Russian Mennonite refugees of World War II."

Toast slices of rye bread until they are quite black.
Pulverize these slices of bread to form fine crumbs.
Use the crumbs to make coffee.

Paprikahead's Henna Hair Dye Recipe

In honor of all the charming redheaded Irish boys named Patrick, and old boyfriends who always wanted me to quit the henna habit and revert to dirty blond, here's my latest recipe for red hair. It's easy, slimy-fun, and very effective. So effective, in fact, that just yesterday I had to listen to somebody extol at great length the beauty and rarity of my natural red hair. He even explained how redheadedness was a recessive gene, which meant that both my mother and father must have redheads in their family. How embarrassing! My red hair is a white lie, and inspires patronizing lectures! I panicked this morning when I found myself in the middle of the St. Patrick's Day parade.

Assessment: Look at your hair. Is it lightish-colored and porous? Very strong, smooth hair will not absorb the henna as well as weak wavy hair. And of course, dark hair won't show the effects much at all, while blond hair will turn orange. Unlike gnarly ammonia-based hair dye, henna does not bleach your hair, and can only add color -- which it does by bonding with the weak spots in your hair. Regardless of color and texture, henna will strengthen and condition your hair.

Selection: Procure the finest, freshest henna you can find. I do not recommend the expensive brands in health food stores. Instead, pick up a box for $2.50 at the local "India Bazar" or one of those markets where you can also stock up on Turkish delight, fresh dates, and halvah. Choose 100% pure henna -- sometimes chemicals, indigo, or ayurvedic herbs are added. It should be very finely powdered and smell faintly grassy.

Preparation: Empty two cups henna powder into a ceramic bowl. Add a tablespoon each of paprika, cinnamon, and other interesting spices. Bring 3 or more cups water to a boil and add two bags of black tea and two tablespoons of hibiscus flowers. Allow it to steep for a good twenty minutes. Return to a boil, strain, and stir into the henna a bit at a time. Add enough to achieve a smooth, almost soupy texture. It will thicken as it cools. Cover the henna pot and let it macerate for several hours. Take care to keep it off your skin.

Application: Wear a minimal amount of clothing, or lots of clothing you don't care about. Take a large kitchen bag, rip a small hole in the end, and stretch it over your head and down around your neck. Rub good oil or lotion onto your neck, shoulders, hairline, and ears, to repel any stray drips of henna. Henna will make you orange. Put a small plastic bag or rubber glove over your left hand, and put a plastic comb in your right hand. With your left hand, pull up your hair. Comb a part in your hair and shovel up a glob of henna on the comb. Smeer it around with your gloved hand. Get it right down in the roots, and along hairlines, especially. Continue parting and glopping your hair down the sides and around the back. Having a friend do it for you is very pleasant, but you can definitely do a perfect job yourself with a little care and dexterity. Don't let the henna dry on your hair. It can only work its magic when wet. When all the roots are slimed, smoosh more henna down to the ends of your hair section by section and pile your hair on top of your head,

Curing: remove your glove, and carefully pull the plastic bag up on your head. It should fit perfectly around your hairline. Gather the top of it together around your hair, tuck, and tie an old towel or scarf around it to keep everything in place. Heat and moisture are key for the next two hours. Clean up all henna spatters, do laundry, read, or watch a movie. You'll probably look funny, especially if the henna was too liquid and seeps out from under your turban like gangrenous algal ooze. Let it cure for two hours or more.

Removal: You don't want all that grime going down the drain. I've stood in a dank basement with moldy old henna dripping all round me, sawing into old lead pipes and scraping out the slime with my fingernails. Instead, hose your hair outside, or rinse it into a bucket or garbage bag and empty it down the toilet. It's a matter of debate whether shampooing your hair immediately after a henna job will lighten the colors. I like the grassy smell, frankly. It's like the hay mow.

Taste Buds

Now I know why I crave gravelly salt and blackstrap molasses and gnarly zinfandel and the most csípős of paprika. And why Mama doesn't.

My taste buds are underpopulated. They're scattered about in farflung outposts, pioneers who must be subjected to the most cataclysmic of flavor disasters before they can look up from their stony furrows to take note. Mama's taste buds, on the other hand, live in dense, tightly-knit communities among alabaster aqueducts and operas. They soliloquize on the flavors of 4 p.m. westerlies and the delights of bare, sunwarmed silverware. She is -- I'm sure of it -- what wine expert Tim Hanni calls a "supertaster": someone with more than her fair share of the tastebuds. His theory: the more taste buds you have, the more sensitive your palate, and the subtler the flavors you will like (be they tannins in wine or cacao in a chocolate bar).

Let me feign outrage. Doesn't this smack of that well-debunked tongue-phrenology that assigns various regions of the tongue to corresponding flavor-receptors? (In fact, we can taste all flavors anywhere on the tongue). And isn't it a simplistic model -- a neat linear correlation between taste-bud count and preferences? Perception is such a tangle of sensory devices and memories and expectation! Perhaps Hanni's theory would work if we also counted dollars spent on packaging, to accomodate for wine experts who get all befuddled when faced with white wine dyed red and cheap wine in fancy bottles. But first, let's wheel in the budometer, a contraption that analyzed my food preferences and correlated them with taste-bud count, which it correlated with my food preferences. It called me a "tolerant" taster. A possessor of sparse & plebian tastebuds.

Actually, I love multiple-choice contraptions that tell me who I am. Really. And Hanni's theories were mostly confirmed at a recent wine-tasting, and I'm all in favor of anything that finishes by saying, "Drink the wine you like, because even the experts don't have equal numbers of tastebuds."

Which means, of course, that Mama and I can both be taste experts -- though I think smell is the critical difference between my mother's taste and mine. Her nose can detect vices up to 24 hours after their execution -- 96 hours in the case of my suitors' sins. Little wonder she likes her stews less salty.