limoun al-omani, part 1

In this post I would like to begin the documentation of a culinary project to undertake the reverse-engineering of “Kurdish lemonade,” a chilled citrus beverage served at Babani’s Kurdish Restaurant in St. Paul, “the United State’s first Kurdish restaurant.” The drink at Babani’s is made not from fresh lemons, but dried limes (this much I know) and, despite the generic name, is very likeable. It is citric, tart and refreshing, but also tannic and kind of earthy. The sole recipe I managed to turn up that in any way involves what I already know making this drink must, is as follows:

Omani Lemon Tea

4 cups of water
5-6 whole dried Omani lemons (or Basri lemons, or black lemons)
2 large Tablespoons of honey
more sugar to taste, if desired

Open up the Omani lemons and remove the interiors, reserving the rinds. Boil them with the water and honey for 5 minutes. Strain and serve.

*

Omani lemons are actually limes, and in the Middle-east, and probably elsewhere as well, the lemon-lime distinction as enunciated in the commodities of the West does not seem to exist. There, limes are just another kind of lemon (and as such belong to something more like a lemon-lime continuum).

Omani lemons, or “black lemons” are limes that have been boiled in salt water and sun-dried. When the limes dessicate, the flesh within them turns black. In the image of the product below, the script, which is Farsi, reads “limoo omani.”

refrigerator dills

This is a recipe for the ‘refrigerator dill’ pickles my mother makes. She used to make the old-fashioned kind in vapor-sealed glass jars. This she stopped doing after years and years because the batches ceased to turn out well for whatever reason, despite her use of the same old family recipe. Now she makes these, and they are fantastic, though unlike their forebears, these pickles cannot be stored without refrigeration. What follows is my transcription of her recipe.

1 gallon plastic ice cream pail
cucumbers sliced and quartered
1 large white onion, sliced                                                   
4-6 garlic buds     
4-6 dill heads
1.5 quarts water
1 quart white vinegar
1/2 cup canning salt

Fill pail with cucumbers standing on end. Add the remaining ingredients. Heat and boil 1.5 quarts water, 1 qt. white vinegar, 1/2 cup canning salt. Pour over cucumbers.
Let stand 3 days uncovered. 
Cover and refrigerate.
Will keep 1 yr.  

abat-faim – Debord

Abat-faim, Guy Debord, 1985. 

Abat-faim 

One knows that this term designated a “meal’s principal dish, which one served first to quiet down, to reduce the hunger of the dinner guests” (Larousse).

In their dictionary, Hatzfield and Darmesteter refer to the term as “antiquated.” But history is the infallible master of dictionaires. With the recent progress of technology, the totality of nourishment consumed by modern society is uniquely becoming hunger reduction. The extreme degradation of nourishment is a banality that, in the manner of other banalities, is generally tolerated with resignation: as a fatality, a ransom paid for progress that one knows can’t be stopped because one is overwhelemed by it everyday.

chopsticks – Barthes

Chopsticks (Roland Barthes, from Empire of Signs, 1970, translated into English in 1982)

At the Floating Market in Bangkok, each vendor sits in a tiny motionless canoe, selling minuscule quantities of food: seeds, a few eggs, bananas, coconuts, mangoes, pimentos (not to speak of the Unnamable). From himself to his merchandise, including his vessel, everything is small. Occidental food, heaped up, dignified, swollen to the majestic, linked to a certain oepration of prestige, always tends toward the heavy, the grand, the abundant, the copious; the Oriental follows the converse moement, and tends toward the infinitesimal: the cucumber’s future is not its accumulation or its thickening, but its division, its tenuous dispersal, as this haiku puts it:

Cucumer slices
The juice runs
Drawing spider legs

fresh figs – Benjamin

Fresh Figs (Walter Benjamin, from “Food”. Published in the Frankfurter Zeitung, May 1930.)

No one who has never eaten a food to excess has ever really experienced it, or fully exposed himself to it. Unless you do this, you at best enjoy it, but never come to lust after it, or make the acquaintance of that diversion from the straight and narrow road of the appetite which leads to the primeval forest of greed. For in gluttony two things coincide: the boundlessness of desire and the uniformity of the food that sates it.

a nice cup of tea – Orwell

A Nice Cup of Tea
by George Orwell
Evening Standard, 12 January 1946
 

IF YOU look up ‘tea’ in the first cookery book that comes to hand you will probably find that it is unmentioned; or at most you will find a few lines of sketchy instructions which give no ruling on several of the most important points.

This is curious, not only because tea is one of the main stays of civilization in this country, as well as in Eire, Australia and New Zealand, but because the best manner of making it is the subject of violent disputes.

When I look through my own recipe for the perfect cup of tea, I find no fewer than 11 outstanding points. On perhaps two of them there would be pretty general agreement, but at least four others are acutely controversial. Here are my own 11 rules, every one of which I regard as golden:

other fish to fry

This article, about the politics (somewhat) of eating fish, is from the Opinion section of The New York Times of Sept. 8, 2006. 

OTHER FISH TO FRY 

By PAUL GREENBERG

Published: September 8, 2006 

AFTER years of carving up tuna carcasses in my bathtub, catching cod in the dead of winter and cooking fish and chips for crowds of 50-plus I have come to be known among my friends as the fish guy.

Until recently I’ve enjoyed being the fish guy and my ability to correctly answer questions about fish has felt like a game of “Jeopardy” rigged for my benefit. How do you tell a flounder from a fluke? Easy, fluke have prominent teeth, flounder don’t. Should bluefish and striped bass be cooked differently? Definitely: broil the bluefish, bake the bass.

But lately being the fish guy has become complicated. With every new warning about a species being overfished into extinction, friends have started asking if they should eat fish at all. The Pew Oceans Commission report “America’s Living Oceans” first alerted the public to the desperate state of the seas in 2003 when it declared them to be “in crisis.” That year a study in the journal Nature reported that up to 90 percent of the stocks of the ocean’s major predators (Atlantic cod and bluefin tuna to name two) have been wiped out. In the next few weeks, Congress will debate what to do about the dire state of the nation’s fisheries when it takes up the reauthorization of the Magnuson-Stevens fisheries management act.

dumpster diving

I came across the following in the letters section of the most recent issue of the Nation:

Ah, the all-American supermarket dumpster: our greatest symbol of plenty. Feelings of nostalgia well up whenever I overhear youths bragging about their latest haul. Genuine recyclers, dumpster-divers are rewarded with a cornucopia that is all the more enjoyable because of its illicit origins. 

I can remember dumpster diving only once in my life, and that was with my parents at a liquor store to get packing boxes for a move. The whole experience was humiliating and slightly traumatic, so I’ve never had any desire to repeat it.

While returning from New York recently on the Chinatown bus, I sat by a producer from NPR who told me that his roommates frequently dumpster dove, and that he had even made requests for certain items. He must have noticed the disgust on my face because he defensively added, “you know, expiration dates are only an indication of when foods should be sold. Most food will stay good well past their date of expiration.”

Yikes. Am I totally naive in thinking that this is not a widespread practice? And am I a priss for thinking that rummaging around in rotten food is revolting, not to mention imprudent?

Speaking of dumpster diving, did anyone hear this news?:

[Northwest Airlines] gave pink-slipped employees a tip sheet on how to cut living expenses. Among the suggestions: Rummage through other people’s garbage (Tip# 46: “Don’t be shy about pulling something you like out of the trash”).

Yeesh. Tip# 47: ward against potential food-borne bacteria by taking nips of scotch (but not single-malt, too pricey) after eating rummaged items.

the oil we eat: following the food chain back to iraq

The Oil We Eat: Following the food chain back to Iraq

by Richard Manning, Harper’s Magazine - February 2004

debbie does salad

Debbie Does Salad:The Food Network at the Frontiers of Pornography 

by Frederick Kaufman, Harper’s Magazine – October, 2005

the cuba diet: what will you be eating when the revolution comes?

The Cuba Diet: What will you be eating when the revolution comes?

by Bill McKibben, Harper’s Magazine – April 2005.

“Cuba became an island. Not just a real island, surrounded by water, but something much rarer: an island outside the international economic system, a moon base whose supply ships had suddenly stopped coming.

People tried to improvise their ways around shortages.

But it’s hard to improvise food.

Cuba had learned to stop exporting sugar and instead started growing its own food again, growing it on small private farms and thousands of pocket-sized urban market gardens—and, lacking chemicals and fertilizers, much of that food became de facto organic. In so doing they have created what may be the world’s largest working model of a semi-sustainable agriculture, one that doesn’t rely nearly as heavily as the rest of the world does on oil, on chemicals, on shipping vast quantities of food back and forth.”

horta ladolemono

This Greek recipe is for greens (horta) with lemon-olive oil dressing (lado lemono).

Use at least a 1/2 lb. of uncooked greens per person (kale, escarole, collared greens, arugula, swiss chard, mustard greens, frisee, curly endive, dandelion greens, etc).

1/2 cup (or a little < 1/2 c.) olive oil

1/4 c. fresh lemon juice

pinch of salt, black pepper

Wash the greens well, through several rinses. Bring a large pot of water 3/4 full to a boil. Be sure to remove the heavy rib sections and leaf stems from the leaves of the coarser greens (kale, collard greens, chard, etc). Add greens to the water, and parboil uncovered until tender (3-8 minutes, depending on type of greens). Meanwhile, stir together the ingredients for the dressing, adding salt and pepper to taste. Once tender, remove greens from heat, and drain well. If you want to eat the greens cool rather than room temp or warm, run the tender greens under cool water, bringing the post-parboil to a full stop - be sure to drain them a second time, or gently squeeze or press the water from the greens. Serve dressed with the ladolemono.

shopska salata

This is a recipe for shopska salata – ’shopska’ refers to residents of Sofia (Shoppi). I ate this every day I was in Bulgaria and it never got played out. Probably because I ate a different version of it everywhere I went, despite the fact that all shopska salata seems based on the same tomato-cucumber-feta trinity. Technically, the cheese is not feta but sirene. It is a white brine cow/sheep cheese for which feta is a fair substitute.

4 green onions, chopped
4 medium size tomatoes, cubed
1 cucumber, cubed
1 green pepper- seeded, roasted, peeled, and chopped
1 red pepper- seeded, roasted, peeled, and chopped
chopped parsley,
feta cheese, to be grated over salad
salt, pepper, vinegar and olive oil

I have made this salad often without peppers, green onions, parsley, or vinegar. The printed recipe for shopska salad generally tends to include these things, but the shopskas I was fed did not always. The easiest way to deal with roasting the peppers seems to be cutting them into strips and baking them in the oven with olive oil and salt until they are soft and sweet, then adding them, peeled and chopped, to the salad once they have cooled to room temperature. Dress the cucumber, tomato, peppers, green onion, and parsley in salt and pepper, and lightly in vinegar and oil. The presentation for this salad involves piling the vegetable ingredients on a plate, and lastly, covering them with grated feta.  

mzoura

This Tunisian carrot salad calls for harissa. Many notes accompany the recipe below, but this dish is very easy – the many notes are just a by-product of cooking mzoura quite a few times, then permitting myself to think I know why it has not turned out as good some times as it has others.

1 lb. carrots, peeled and julienned

5 tbs. olive oil

2 cloves garlic, finely minced

1 tsp. harissa mixed with 6 tbs. water

1 tsp. ground caraway

1 tsp. ground cumin

1 tsp. salt

¼ c. wine vinegar

chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley or cilantro optional garnish.

Bring a saucepan ¾ full of salted water to boil. Add carrots and boil, until tender, 5-8 minutes. Drain well. In a sauté pan over medium-low heat, warm the olive oil.

Add the garlic, diluted harissa, caraway, cumin, salt and vinegar. Stir for 2 minutes.

Add carrots and cook them, stirring occasionally, for 5-8 min. Transfer to a serving dish, and serve at room temperature, with or without garnish.

for tips, click below:

piquancy

Capsaicin (from Wikipedia)

The chemical compound capsaicin (8-methyl-N-vanillyl-6-nonenamide) is the active component of chili peppers, which are plants belonging to the genus Capsicum. It is an irritant for mammals including humans and produces a sensation of burning in the mouth. Capsaicin and several related compounds are called capsaicinoids and are produced as a secondary metabolite by chili peppers, probably as deterrents against herbivores. Birds are generally not sensitive to capsaicinoids; pet parrots often love to eat even the spiciest curry or hot pepper, as a snack. Pure capsaicin is a lipophilic colorless odorless crystalline to waxy compound.

harissa 1

North african chili sauce.

Combine 1.5 tablespoons ground cayenne, 1/4 cup ground cumin and 1/2 cup olive oil in a mortar and pestle. I also add as much as 2 teaspoons of ground caraway when I have it. Grind the ingredients into a paste, to which you may add a little salt, to taste.

Since this recipe makes more harissa than is likely to be used at once, I recommend storing it in a glass jar with a lid. Harissa of this kind does not require refrigeration. When stored, the contents of the harissa I have made inevitably separate, requiring the ground spices to be stirred up prior to use.