Injecting food?

[MarketStEl]

In her eponymous cookbook, Alice B. Toklas includes a recipe, obtained from a surgeon, for a leg of mutton marinated in "Baume Samartain" (a mixture of old Burgundy — Beaune or Chambertin! — virgin olive oil and various herbs and spices), injected with orange juice and cognac, roasted, and served with a venison sauce into which is mixed two tablespoons of the blood of a hare. The resulting leg is "transformed into a strange and exquisite venison."

Wasn't Alice B Toklas the lover of Gertrude Stein? I'm sure I saw a recipe of hers that included hashish in it somwhere...

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It can be found on page 259 of the Harper Perennial edition (1986) of The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book, in the chapter titled "Recipes from Friends"--it's credited to Brion Gysin there.

In the meantime, the "Marijuana Food" topic is over there ------------>

[MarketStEl]

I have a "flavor injector" from Williams-Sonoma. I'm sure you can get them cheaper than I got mine from another cooking supply place.

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If your "flavor injector" is anything like the "Marinade Injector" I purchased at Fante's last week, it's a bit too big for many of the tasks suggested in this topic. It'd be just fine for infusing a roast or a turkey, but it'd blow those poor cherry tomatoes to smithereens--and it has too many holes in its needle to allow you to suck up the pan juices from cooked meat.

If it's not -- that is, if it has only one hole at the tip of its needle and/or holds less than 2 fluid ounces (1/4 cup or about 50 ml) -- then it might work for what's being discussed here.

[MarketStEl]

[indeed she was; Stein wrote her autobiography. And, yep, the recipe, for "haschich fudge (which anyone could whip up on a rainy day)," comes from the eponymous cookbook. The headnote to the recipe is a classic. In it she suggests the fudge "might prove an entertaining refreshment for a Ladies' Bridge Club or a chapter meeting of the DAR" [Daughters of the American Republic] and advises "Euphoria and brilliant storms of laughter; ecstaic reveries and extensions of one's personality on several simultaneous planes are to be complacently expected. Almost anything Saint Theresa did, you can do better if you can bear to be ravished by 'un évanouissment reveillé.'" They don't write 'em like that anymore.

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In her foreword to the 1984 reprint, M.F.K. Fisher wonders whether this legendary bit of prose is indeed Ms. Toklas', or whether it might not be Brion Gysin's--the recipe was omitted from the original 1954 US edition and added in a 1960 reprint. It is unusually florid compared to the rest of Toklas' writing in the book, which is spare, direct and clear.

Edited to add: Also note the typography. The typeface for the Haschich Fudge recipe is different from that of the text before and after it.

Edited January 7, 2005 by MarketStEl (log)

[culinary bear]

I'll take some photos tomorrow of the syringe I use and put them up here...

[petite tête de chou]

A friend injects strawberries with Grand Marnier and dips them in chocolate. Yum.

[katiaANDronald]

i bow to the mighty force of the eGullet culinary intellect. a wealth of information!

the watermelon vodka is an old favourite but surely you can even just top it up through a little hole - although I grant you that injecting it certainly adds to the whole party experience.

next time I am in cyprus where we do something called souvla (typically pork or lamb on a spit) I might try injecting some "latholemono (oil and lemon)" during the cooking process rather than just brushing it on.