Toby

My favorite jams are two I make -- one is a Bartlett pear jam made with very ripe pears, grated up and left to sit for a while with an equal amount of sugar. Then I cook them down with a cup or so of good apple cider. Then, just as they're done, I stir in some walnuts and a shot of rum or bourbon. I like to eat this spread on angel biscuits. The other is peach jam -- peel peaches, cut in chunks, let sit overnight in equal amount of sugar and some fresh lemon juice; then cook down the next day -- the syrup will thicken and the peach chunks will get soft and translucent; add some rum or bourbon just as they're done. My friend made a pumpkin jam that was amazing, and also a blackberry preserves. I'll see if she'll tell me what she did.

Taipan, by the guy who wrote Shogun?

Suvir, what's your favorite chicken curry? How do you prepare it? Jaymes, could the company have been Jardinne (spelling?)?

The image of the cleaver "hacking" reminded me of this wonderful Taoist story: The ancient Chinese philosopher Chuang Tzu tells a story about a prince observing his cook cutting up an ox: Out went a hand, down went a shoulder, he planted a foot, he pressed with a knee, the ox fell apart with a whisper, the bright cleaver murmured like a gentle wind. The prince marveled at his cook's technique. The cook denied that he had a technique, saying instead that he followed the Tao. He explains how when he first began to cut up oxen he saw the whole ox in one mass. After 3 years he saw the distinctions. But now, many years later, he sees nothing with his eye. Instead his whole being apprehends. His cleaver finds its own way. He cuts through no joint, chops no bone. The cleaver finds the spaces in the joints. Its blade is thin and keen. When that thinness finds the space there's all the room it needs. In 19 years he's never had to sharpen his cleaver. When he's done dismembering the oxen, he withdraws the blade, stands still and lets the joy of the work sink in. He cleans the blade and puts it away. The prince says, "This is it! My cook has shown me how I ought to live my own life."

I really loved those articles in Natural History. What happened? Is he writing somewhere else? He's the editor of the Leisure and Arts page of The Wall Street Journal. Probably long out of print, but many of the articles were collected in Fading Feast, A Compendium of Disappearing American Regional Foods by Raymond Sokolov.

Canelles are amazing. I've always wanted to make them. Where did you get the molds? Nancy Silverton has a recipe that looks like it will work in her Pastries from La Brea Bakery book. She says that "because of their dark color, it's almost impossible to tell when canelles are cooked all the way through. Until you get your timing down, you may have to sacrifice one to check for doneness." She seasons and coats the molds with vegetable oil; also uses proportionally more eggs than in your recipe. She gives very exact instructions for preparing the batter, including boiling part of the milk and butter together, straining the batter, and then refrigerating it for at least 24 hours. She fills the molds to the top and bakes at 400 degrees for about 2 hours until they are very dark on the outside.

A Book of Middle Eastern Food by Claudia Roden has lots of Egyptian recipes. The author grew up in Cairo; the book contains recipes from Syria, the Lebanon, Egypt, Iran, Turkey, Greece, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, the Yemen, the Sudan, Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco and Israel. She says "all are inextricably linked culinarywise." I have an old paperback copy; the author has written a number of other books, including a great big one that came out a few years ago (that may be an update of the one I have). Some typical dishes from Egypt in the book I have are melokhia (chicken soup with melokhia leaves), rice with hamud sauce (rice with a lemony chicken soup/sauce, and ful medames (brown dried fava beans, dressed with garlic, hard-boiled eggs, parsley, olive oil and lemons) which she calls the national dish of Egypt) Paula Wolfert's Mediterranean Cooking has a recipe for broiled chicken with oil, lemon and garlic sauce.

I love butter. My earliest memory is the summer I was 2. We were in upstate New York -- my family had an old, non-working farm we vacationed at. It was dairy country -- our road was called Dingle Daisy Road after a cow that used to live there. The local dairy truck came by twice a week with milk in glass bottles with 2 inches of heavy cream on top and butter in blocks. I used to sneak into the refrigerator and steal the butter and run out to the big field in back of the house. I would pull off all my clothes and run around in a circle eating the butter which would drip down my chin from the sun. My mother would catch me, take the butter away, clean me up and get me dressed and a few minutes later I'd be back in the field with my butter. I recently found out that Krishna, in his guise as a cowboy, was a butter thief. Apparently there's a whole cycle of folk plays that are performed in Indian villages about him stealing butter. I like Plugra. I've tried Italian butter from the Italian store in Chelsea Market and thought it was delicious also.

Back in the 1970s I was studying Chinese at NYU. Our TA, who was born in Shanghai, took several of us to a Shanghainese restaurant called Say En Luk -- 4-5-6, on East Broadway (long gone, but located right near or maybe even the same location as Dim Sum Go Go). Our teacher just wrote down what he wanted to order, so I never even looked at the menu. We had an incredible meal which I've never been able to approximate in Chinatown. Unfortunately, I can't remember all the courses, but we had a soup with yellow fish, and then yellow fish wrapped in bean curd skin and deep fried. For our last course, when we were all bursting at the seams, they brought a huge platter of meat -- it looked like either a pork shoulder or pork leg that had been braised and was just falling apart with lots of cilantro around it. I think the quality of food in NY Chinatown has really declined. I generally am the happiest eating at very inexpensive soup noodle restaurants. I haven't been out to Flushing -- is the food better there, as a rule? In San Francisco I was addicted to salt and pepper squid from Yuet Lee. I, rather pathetically, keep on trying to find a restaurant that prepares it as Yuet Lee does -- they really brown it and make a very hot dipping sauce on the side with lots of jalapeno -- and am constantly disappointed. Also in San Francisco there are a number of Hakka Chinese restaurants which have some interesting specialties -- stuffed deep fried bean curd casseroles and salt roasted chicken. Anyone know of any Hakka restaurants in NY?

My great-grandfather was a rabbi in Montreal in the early part of the 20th century. I assume he was orthodox -- I don't know if there were even those divisions then. My father spent a year living with his grandparents and told me he remember that women would come to his grandfather with meat and chickens they had bought at the butcher to have him certify it as kosher. My father said one of the things that was important was that the animal/bird have no broken bones. Sometimes very poor women would come and even though there might be a broken bone or two in a chicken his grandfather would say the chicken was OK. I always liked the story -- it seemed to say that compassion was the most important thing.

Then I used to take the peach jam and cook it down with a little butter and put it in the bottom of a cake pan. Then I'd make a buttermilk biscuit dough, roll it out into a thin rectangle, rub soft butter on it and then sprinkle chopped toasted pecans and brown sugar on it, roll it up into a log, cut it into 1-1/2" pieces and put them on top of the peach jam in the cake pan with a little more brown sugar and butter pieces sprinkled on the top, bake it, and then turn it immediately upside down and eat hot. Jammy biscuits.

It is strange the way people react to women drinking bourbon. I always get double takes when I order it at a bar. What's also interesting is people don't usually say they love vodka or rye in the same way people say they love bourbon. The pot pie sounds delicious. What kind of a crust do you use for it? I make a bourbon sauce for my bread pudding also, it's a Louisiana recipe with a little lemon peel, yellow raisins and sweet coconut flakes and it puffs up like a souffle when it's done. I add a little bourbon just at the end to peach jam and pear jam and pour some over chocolate pound cake at the end. Since I can't make up my mind, I'm going to get a bottle of Knob Creek (the discount liquor store on Broadway below 8th Street has a great price) and a bottle of Booker's. I'll let you know about the Booker's next week.

Stellabella, the reason I don't travel is essentially laziness and, even more pathetic, I hate being parted from my beloved possessions for more than a few days (I'm a Taurus). Worse, when I do travel, I almost immediately begin buying doubles of things I already own at home so that I'll feel more comfortable (I have Gemini rising). You can imagine what a blow dying will be for me. My only hope is that in my next lifetime I'll be free of this ridiculous preoccupation with my things. I guess I'm the equivalent of an armchair traveller -- an armchair stomach. I read a lot and can imagine how things taste and actually can get pretty good at recreating things I've never tasted to taste authentic; I grill everyone who's travelled to anywhere I'd want to eat on what they ate; and whenever I meet anyone from a country I'm interested in, I try to get them to cook with me. I've been lucky to live in San Francisco where Mexican ingredients were readily available. Now in New York, I'm starting to be able to get more ingredients plus my nephew is a farmer and he grows all kinds of chile peppers and tomatillos. A few years ago I had a major obsession with Mexican food, and read (and continue to read) a bunch of Mexican cookbooks. Beyond Bayless and Kennedy's early cookbooks, these are the ones that I like for learning about regional foods. Cuisine of the Water Gods, by Patricia Quintana, which goes around the entire coastline of Mexico, state by state, with recipes for local fish and shellfish plus vegetables, salsas, desserts. The Food and Life of Oaxaca and Zarela's Veracruz--Cooking and Culture in Mexico's Tropical Melting Pot, both by Zarela Martinez. She seems to have embarked on a mission to educate Americans about the regional cuisines and cultures of Mexico. The Oaxacan cookbook is rather austere (there's an incredible dish in it called che guina -- a masa-thickened beef soup with chiles, made with beef short ribs and guajillo chiles -- that I love), but the Veracruz one is just great. She explains that the cooking has been influenced by both Mediterranean (Spanish) and Afro-Cuban Caribbean ingredients and techniques. My Mexico--A Culinary Odyssey, by Diana Kennedy, is arranged by region, and gives a lot of very odd recipes I've never seen anywhere else. Seasons of My Heart by Susana Trilling, is about Oaxaca, and is divided into the seven regions of Oaxaca, plus a chapter ofn Oaxaca City and other one on moles. A Cook's Tour of Mexico, by Nancy Zaslavsky, combines recipes with descriptions of the marketplaces, restaurants in each region. Some coffee table books, Savoring Mexico and Mexico the Beautiful Cookbook, while not arranged by region, give the region each dish comes from, and also give a sense of what different regions look like for slugs like me.

Christopher, thanks, that's what I was trying to say. Have you ever tasted the Booker's? Someone told me it was kind of rough -- the bourbon you'd like on a camping trip. (High proof?) As I said, I really like to sit around and sip bourbon late at night. My current bottle is nearly empty and I'm leaning toward getting a bottle of Booker's. The book you quoted gives it a 96 rating and says "a deep, rich nose with a complex mix of sweet vanilla, rich butter, oak, honey, caramel, leather, cloves, and a wonderful orangy backdrop..."

Atholl brose.

Wilfrid -- Any recipe with the word "debris" in it makes me want to rush out and cook it. There's something about the concept -- consistency, texture, softness, depth of flavor -- that corresponds to the way I like to eat. Maybe we could start a debris thread.

Suvir, that sounded incredibly good. I was hooked right around the tamarind-date sauce and it just got better and better. What do you put in your chile chutney? What green chiles do you use?

Once at the end of a very unscientific and lengthy bourbon tasting, I got treated to a shot of the 20 years old A.H. Hirsch bourbon. Even in the state I was in, I could taste it was something special. Is anyone familiar with Booker's? Is it really that much better? (Discount liquour store has it more than double the price of Knob Creek.) Yeah, bourbon in sweet potato casserole with pecans at Thanksgiving. In fact, bourbon in nearly everything at Thanksgiving.

I couldn't find a bourbon thread, only odd mentions here and there. I love bourbon. Other than wine, for me it's the one alcoholic beverage that makes you realize instantly that it's a food. Manhattans are nice, but at home I drink it neat, late at night -- sipping likker, and actually sit in my rocking chair and think or write. I keep either Knob Creek or Maker's Mark at home. Knob Creek used to cost a lot more, but now I can find it discounted -- I used to prefer it, but it doesn't taste quite as rich and filled with corn as it used to. When I have money, I like to have a bottle of Baker's around -- it tastes like bourbon brandy to me, and I drink that after dinner. I've tried Evan Williams and was disappointed, and for sour mash, preferred Jack Daniels to George Dickel (too sweet). Haven't tried Bookers -- some people say it's the best bourbon around. The best I ever tasted was A.H. Hirsch. I cook with bourbon also, might as well, it tastes so good. I use it in desserts -- cherry clafoutis, whisky cake with ground brazil nuts; and in marinades or sauces for pork. My favorite gravy for turkey is turkey broth and drippings, sweet corn, apple cider vinegar and bourbon. Anyway, my bourbon bottle is almost empty and I need to get a new one. I might try Bookers -- is it really that good?

Elizabeth David, exactly. French Provincial Cooking was one of the first cookbooks I owned when I was learning to cook. I made my first flourless chocolate cake from it -- a list of 5 ingredients (she said bitter chocolate--I hoped she meant bittersweet, and I was hazy on caster sugar) and 5 sentences of instructions. Although I didn't know what I was doing, and baked it in an oven with absolutely no thermostat (I had to lie on the floor and open the broiler to see how high the flame was and then guess what the temperature might be) and a door that had to be jammed shut with a chair, it came out perfectly. For all I knew the recipe could have been the Rosetta Stone and yet I trusted her completely. I feel the same way about Edna Lewis, especially Taste of Country Cooking, and I think the similarity is each has such a distinctive voice and creates such a sense of where the food comes from that I know how the dish will taste just from reading the recipe. Whether it tasted like David's or Lewis' rendition wasn't the point. It tasted just like the food I cook tastes. To me, that's the true alchemy of cooking. And I think, especially for David, her assumption that you do know what you're doing gives you the freedom to find your own taste/voice.

Bux, Blue Hill's salmon is memorable. I've had the poached duck, but also tasted a chicken dish there which I suspect was poached also and it was the best-textured chicken I ever tasted. When I lived in San Francisco, I shopped at the Mission St. Market, which had an Italian fish and poultry store. They too sold whole duck and duck legs. They said the breasts were requisition from their purveyors by restaurants; the restaurants didn't want the legs. Maybe that's what happens here also. In Chinatown you can also get duck gizzards and hearts (great for confit salad with cracklings) but not the livers -- probably the same deal.

Thanks to both of you for the answer. I've been trying to get the answer for a while -- amazing how uniformed people in liquor stores can be. There is, in Tupelo, a recreation center for young people founded and funded by Elvis, with, I think, a swimming pool, for further recreation. Do they let you in the house? You know, it's been totally gentrified. It did not look like that when the Presleys actually lived there -- they were evicted from it, although this may be more Elvis info than anyone wants to know. Are the fairgrounds where E first performed (age 10) still there?

To Tupelo? Did you go to the house itself? How come? What was it like? New York City. So, I'm still not clear -- what you're saying is that what this recipe was calling sugar cane brandy is agricultural rum, aka sugar cane rum? Then what is Barbancourt? How'd you like the Barbancourt? I was buying the older stuff until the price rose rather steeply.

I have a recipe that calls for sugar cane brandy or dark rum. What exactly is sugar cane brandy (difference in distillation process from rum??), do you know the names of any producers and is it obtainable in NY area?

The Grass Roots Cookbook, by Jean Anderson. This was originally published in 1977 and was inspired by a number of articles Anderson did for Family Circle magazine on regional home cooks. It sounds hokey, but the book has pretty much been kept in print since then and is filled with authentic regional American recipes. Great Cajun recipes for shrimp gumbo, chicken a la gros oignon, rice dressing (close to dirty rice) . . . And while not a cookbook, Heirloom Vegetable Gardening, by William Woys Weaver (who is a specialist on early American foods, particularly among the Amish and Mennonites of Pennsylvnia), is a compendium of heirloom vegetables that Weaver grows in his garden in Chester, PA. Weaver gives the history of each variety, tips on how best to grow it, and also gives a small number of early American recipes for some of the produce. There are some color photos and lots of line drawings to help identify the varieties.