Man With a Pan (34 page)

Heat 2 tablespoons of the grapeseed oil in a small saucepan over medium heat.

Add the onion and sauté for a few minutes, until translucent.

Add the cumin, stir thoroughly, and remove from heat.

Let stand 10 minutes.

Transfer the mixture to a blender, and add the remainder of the grapeseed oil.

Puree thoroughly and refrigerate overnight.

Note: There will be leftover cumin oil. It is good as a condiment in many different dishes.

PEAR PUREE

1 tablespoon olive oil
1 shallot, finely chopped
1 large or 3 small (for example, Seckel) pears, peeled and diced
¼ cup verjuice

Heat the olive oil in a small sauté pan over low heat.

Add the shallot and sauté for a few minutes, until translucent.

Add the pears and sauté until softened and lightly browned, about 20 minutes.

Add the verjuice and simmer until the liquid has mostly evaporated, about 5 minutes.

Transfer the mixture to a blender, puree thoroughly, and return to the sauté pan.

MUSHROOM SOUP

2 tablespoons olive oil
4 cups exotic or plain mushrooms, sliced
2 shallots, chopped fine
2 cloves garlic, minced
2 tablespoons soy sauce
2 tablespoons white wine
3 cups water

Heat the olive oil in a large sauté pan over medium-high heat.

Add the mushrooms and sauté until lightly browned, about 10 minutes, adding the shallots and garlic to the pan after 5 minutes.

Remove about 1 cup of mushrooms; set aside. Add the soy sauce and wine to the pan and cook until absorbed, about 5 minutes.

Transfer the mixture to blender, add 3 cups water, and puree until smooth.

Season to taste with salt and freshly ground pepper.

Transfer to a medium saucepan and keep warm.

PRESENTATION

Chervil or parsley, for garnish

Gently warm the pear puree and reserved mushrooms. Divide the puree among 4 soup bowls. Scatter the reserved mushrooms in the bowls. Drizzle about 1 tablespoon cumin oil around the bottom of the bowl. Sprinkle with cumin.

Serve the bowls at the table. Walk around with the saucepan, ladling equal portions of soup into the bowls. Instruct your guests to mix the puree into the soup. Bask in glory.

On the Shelf

My Gastronomy,
Nico Ladenis. One of the bad-boy chefs of England in the 1980s, Ladenis writes with rare candor about the ego necessary to be the best. No other cookbook demonstrates such extreme contempt for one’s audience; his descriptions of his hostility to patrons are breathtaking. The recipes are fantastic.

The Auberge of the Flowering Hearth,
Roy Andries de Groot. One of the best cookbooks ever written, this charming portrait of an unpretentious inn in Savoy is brilliant as a travel book, a cookbook, and a study of the philosophy of food. De Groot’s collected essays,
In Search of the Perfect Meal,
includes a 1972
Playboy
piece, “Have I Found the Greatest Restaurant in the World?” about Restaurant Troisgros in France, which remains unsurpassed as a study of how a world-class restaurant is run.

660 Curries,
Raghavan Iyer. Despite the horrible title, this is the indispensable book on Indian food. Iyer, a cooking teacher, not only provides a huge range of recipes but is exceptionally clear on explaining the complex flavors of various Indian regions and how to combine them. He also manages a personable and witty tone throughout that is unusual and refreshing for a book of this type.

IN THE TRENCHES

Omar Valenzuela is a forty-seven-year-old carpenter who lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Paola. Their children are nearly grown. The oldest is twenty-three and the youngest is sixteen.

The construction crews that I work on are almost always all-male. No one on them knows that I do most of the cooking for my family. I don’t tell anyone because I think that I would be made fun of. Still, I am very proud to take on this task. Good cooking, I have learned, is the secret to a happy marriage. Not everyone I work with is as fortunate as I am—my marriage has lasted more than twenty years.

I was born in Valparaiso, on the Pacific Ocean, and like most everything in Chile, the city is not far from the mountains. My mother, as is customary, did all the cooking for the whole extended family. The kitchen in my childhood home was long and narrow. I would sit at the end of a long table and watch her prepare the meals. She would clean fish, grind meat by hand, and cook all the family meals while I sat there.

I have known my wife since she was an infant. She grew up next door to me in Valparaiso. For the first part of our marriage, we lived with Paola’s family, and her mother cooked for us. We came here more than a decade ago, and after we arrived we were both working and there was no one to cook for us. Paola’s hours ran later in the evening than mine, so I was happy to start making the meals.

It wasn’t the first time I had cooked for myself, or others. When I was about twelve years old, I used to go on camping trips in the Andes. It would be a group of us, about seven or eight friends. We would all take turns cooking, but my friends could make only plain pasta or beans. They hadn’t had a chance to sit and watch my mother cooking.

Climbing the mountains makes you really hungry, and all we wanted to do after a day of hiking and bathing in the river was to eat a big meal like
charquicán
. This is a traditional Chilean dish made of a mashed combination of onion, potato, squash, carrot, spinach, and, usually, ground beef, or horse meat preferably from the legs. It can also contain mashed coca leaves, and in some regions tomato is also added. On top goes a fried egg. I became the cook, and I’d make it with dried soy protein since it was really hot, forty degrees Celsius, and if we’d brought meat in our packs, it would have spoiled.

Each boy would bring one staple, like pasta, flour, things you couldn’t buy easily in the mountains.
Choclo
(corn), potato, green beans, tomatoes, onions, eggs, garlic—these ingredients we bought in the Andean villages, but everything was very tiny because it was from the high mountains and not really from a farming economy. The people just grew things for themselves and not for large production. We would also trap rabbits. I learned how to dress a rabbit from the campesinos. After skinning it, I’d dry out the fur on a stick and bring it home to put on a chair.

These days, I cook about four out of seven days a week. I make the things my mother taught me to cook, though I’ve adapted them. Paola no longer eats beef or pork, so we make do with chicken, turkey, and fish. I make big batches of seviche. My children, Madeleyn and Esteban, gobble it up. I also still make
charquicán.
If it’s rainy, I sometimes make
sopaipillas pasadas
as a treat (fried dough dipped in melted brown sugar).

On Sundays, I often get the night off. Paola will make empanadas. I love them, but I have never learned how to make them. I can cook the insides, the meat, the fillings, but I don’t know how to bake.

Recipe File

Seviche

Serves 6

2 pounds tilapia or flounder
3 lemons
5 limes Salt to taste
3 sweet potatoes
2 stalks celery
1 2-inch piece of fresh ginger, peeled
1 red onion
½ cup chopped cilantro
2 jalapeño peppers
2 tablespoons olive oil

Slice the fish in ½-inch strips and put it in a pan.

Squeeze the juice from the lemons and limes and pour over the fish.

Add salt. The fish begins to “cook”—let it sit 30 to 40 minutes, in the refrigerator.

Boil the sweet potatoes.

Dice the celery, ginger, and red onion.

Roast the jalapeños over a flame until the outer skin burns; let sit 10 minutes, then slide the burnt skin off. Thinly slice the jalapeño peppers.

After the fish has been marinating in the citrus juice for the 30 to 40 minutes, add all the other ingredients, except the sweet potato, to the fish and mix.

Let sit an additional 20 to 30 minutes in the refrigerator before serving.

The longer you wait, the richer the flavors will get.

Serve the seviche accompanied by half a sweet potato.

TONY EPRILE

A Taste for Politics

Tony Eprile grew up in South Africa, where his father edited the country’s first mass-circulation multiracial newspaper. He is the author of the novel
The Persistence of Memory,
a
New York Times
Notable Book of the Year and Koret Jewish Book Award winner. His articles have appeared in the
New York Times Book Review, Details, George,
and
Gourmet
magazines. He lives in Bennington, Vermont, with his wife and son and a dog named Thembi.

“To have great poets, there must be great audiences, too,” Walt Whitman once wrote, and the same is true of cooks. During my years of growing up, my mother was an excellent cook, pushing herself over time to ever-greater heights—my home, in Johannesburg, South Africa, was famous among my friends as the place where you’d get five desserts after an exotic and inventive dinner. But while I learned to cook from the women in my family, I learned the
meaning
of food from someone notorious for not being able to boil an egg without letting the pot burn dry: my father. Although my dad was the type who would likely perish from starvation before he could figure out how to use the electric can opener, he was a true food
appreciator,
enjoying it not only for its sensual pleasure but for the way it serves as communication, even discourse, between people. He held a lifelong goal to escape prejudice, and one way to do so was to share food. He had a knack for fitting in with the culture of whatever people he encountered, and if they were going to eat unidentifiable animal parts in a stew, well, he would bloody well give it a try, too.

I grew up in South Africa in the years when apartheid squatted like a giant toad on the country, doing its best to keep the races as far apart as possible. The mad plan was to keep everybody
apart
—separate schools, separate places to live, separate dining, down to the very utensils you’d eat with. As the white editor of a black newspaper in South Africa, my dad took delight in transgressing the written and unwritten rules of the country’s officialdom, finding himself in the homes and dining rooms (though, wisely, not in the kitchens) of black African, Indian, and Coloured (mixed-race) friends, and making opportunities wherever possible to share with them my mother’s culinary accomplishments.

It was not always so for him. He was raised in an Orthodox Jewish family in Scotland during and just after the First World War, and while I’d hesitate to call my distant ancestors closed minded, they were certainly no models for an adventurous outlook toward food or foreign cultures. My father once wrote in a personal note to a cousin about a childhood encounter with a neighbor, a Chinese woman whose children had scarlet fever:

My cousin Zena and I were warned never to accept candies from the Chinese woman lest we, too, catch scarlet fever. For years I believed the eating of Chinese food was the most darkly un-Jewish thing one could do and that Moses would come down from the mount and chastise me if I ever polluted the family escutcheon with anything Chinese.

In later years, aghast at his own early attitude, he liked to mockingly imitate the solemn head shake with which he and his cousin refused the proffered treats. He came to love Chinese food, and one of my early restaurant memories is of the Bamboo Inn in downtown Johannesburg, my father amusing the waiters with his idiosyncratic but effective method of holding chopsticks, gripped between thumb and index finger the way Ping-Pong players hold a paddle. Under apartheid’s byzantine racial classification system, South African–born Chinese people were classified as “Asian” or “Coloured,” making them second-class citizens with a few privileges over black South Africans, who weren’t even recognized as citizens. Since South Africa did business with Taiwan, however, a Chinese person from that island was considered an “honorary white.”

Apartheid infiltrated every aspect of South African life, and while you might find Anglicized versions of Indian or Chinese food at many restaurants—and white children like me would often eat
pap
(a maize porridge, and a staple starch in southern Africa) or other African foods served by the cook and nanny—you had to make a great effort and risk breaking the law to eat the genuine article. It was illegal for a white person to go into the “locations” without a special permit, but my father was willing both to ignore this and to use his press credentials to talk his way out of trouble.

My first encounter with South Africa’s homegrown fiery Indian food was at the house of one of my dad’s colleagues, G. R. Naidoo, who edited the Natal edition of
Drum
magazine. We were holidaying in a seaside town just south of Durban and drove into the Indian section tucked back in the hills surrounding the city to visit the Naidoos for the evening. After being served drinks and blazing-hot chili bites, we were served more drinks and more spicy snacks. Finally, around nine o’clock, my dad announced we were leaving. “But you haven’t had dinner yet,” the host said. It turned out that their particular traditional expectation was that my mother would go into the kitchen and help supervise the cooking, making sure the spices were acceptable and in the right quantities. I don’t recall what time we finally ate, but I do remember that I had never before experienced food that was this delicious and yet as assaultive to the mouth and palate as biting down on live scorpions. (A favorite chili in the Durban region is known as mother-in-law’s tongue, and I’m convinced that the African sun makes chilies more potent than those grown elsewhere.) Although G. R. visited us at our Johannesburg flat, my father would not have been able to take this distinguished journalist to a restaurant in town. Once, when the two of them met up at the Johannesburg airport, my father ordered cups of tea from the airport cafeteria. The man at the cafeteria counter, noticing that one of the people standing in front of him was an Indian, asked, “Is one of these for
him
?” He quickly grabbed an old tin mug and transferred the tea into that.