Midnight Pear Quickbread

Sometimes a favorite new recipe is created by the collision of desire and constraint. Desire: Zucchini bread at 10pm on a Thursday night. Constraint(s): No zucchini, only a half cup canola oil, and a village with narry a store open past 7:30pm.

What I did have: Some ripening pears in the fridge, plenty of olive oil, and an itch to open my new jar of pain d'epices (otherwise known as pumpkin pie spice) purchased at Goumanyat & Son Royaume, my favorite spice store in Paris. I'm using as little white flour as possible these days, and decided to go all in with whole wheat.

After several expectant peeks through the oven door (alas, a watched cake does not bake faster), I was ready to eat a slice right out of the pan. It was absolutely what I wanted. The cake was moist but not cloying (thanks to those juicy pears). The heft of the whole wheat flour and the warmth of the spices made it not unlike the French pain d'epices - honey cakes traditionally made with rye flour. This may not be as sweet as some of the quickbreads Americans are used to (I only used 1 cup sugar for 2 loaves). A decade in France has tempered my palette, and my love of super sweets has gone way of the Twinkie (not extinct, but not likely to pass my lips again).


Perfect the next morning with a spoonful of fromage frais (try greek yogurt or whipped cream cheese in the US) and some apple kiwi jam...

Midnight Pear Quickbread

3 cups whole wheat flour
2.5 tsp pumpkin pie spice (ginger, clove, cinnamon, nutmeg)
1/8 tsp fresh ground nutmeg
1/2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 teaspoon table salt
1 large handful golden raisins

3 eggs
1/2 cup vegetable oil
1/2 cup olive oil
1/2 cup white sugar
1/2 cup brown sugar (Cassonade, raw sugar)
2 cups grated pear (very ripe)
2 tsp vanilla extract (or 1 tsp of ground vanilla powder)

Preheat oven to 350F.

Combine dry ingredients in a medium mixing bowl. Beat eggs. Add oil, sugar, stir to combine. Add pear and vanilla, combine.

Add flour mixture in two additions, stir just enough to combine.

Grease two loaf pans. Divide the batter between the two. Bake for 45 minutes or until skewer comes out clean. Cool for 10 minutes. Turn out on a wire rake to cool completely. Serve warm or at room temp. Also great toasted with a plain yogurt and jam.

Makes 2 loaves, each serves 6

Soup's On

As you can see by the tardy appearance of this post, 2012 is off to rather a slow start. What began as a mild winter - G. was sitting outside in his shirtsleeves on New Year's Day - has finally given way to frosty fields and frozen fingertips.

I've chosen my corner, I may not move till spring. Have you met my chaise longue? (Dreams do come true). I've pushed it as close to the wood burning stove as I can without singeing my eyebrows, and there a warm glow coming from the wall G. recently spent 3 weeks painting with local ochre pigment (more complicated than it looks)...

I'm not a subtle fire maker. No girl-scout rubbing twigs together, I.

I'm more of a "Load em up" lady. Five logs, a thicket of kindling, two cushy balls of newspaper and a handful of fire-starters. It may not be worthy of outward bound, but I grew up with a single Duraflame log that you lit without even taking off the paper wrapper. I think progress is being made. Plus, I'm lugging my own wood from the cellar, which has to count for something.

In my cozy corner, I've been re-reading David Copperfield - which is wonderful, because I've forgotten absolutely everything except the dead mother (there's always a dead mother in Dickens) and the ever-creepy Uriah Heep. I've also been falling asleep over the "Code de la Route" - which I need to memorize (or at least finish) before my French driving exam in early Feb. The test is very French, as there can be three right answers to any question.

My other post (the second warmest spot in the house) is at the stove. I've been making soup. All kinds of soup. Barley soup, spilt pea soup, and my classic carrot and parsnip soup - made with the leftover champagne from New Year's Eve. Augustin often joins me, demanding to be lifted up and saying "me tourne!" which is Franglish for "Let me stir, Mommy". I alternate between the pots and the computer. Cooking is my best remedy for writer's block. With G. away on business, I even dug deep into the pantry and found a box of instant Jell-o brand pistachio pudding that my mom snuck over on her last trip.
The French eat a lot of soup. It's warm, filling, convenient, cheap. It freezes well and expands to feed extra guests. We have friends - and they're not alone - who eat some kind of vegetable soup, bread and yogurt almost every night for a light dinner, as they (and the kids at school) eat their main meal at lunch. You'll also find a striking number of French women on veggie soup de-tox diets after the foie-gras laden excesses of the holidays.

It's not precisely de-tox, but spilt pea soup is a winter favorite of mine. Ideal for a one bowl meal - if you play your cards right, your spoon will stand up by itself. I add a good slab of pork belly (a ham hock or a hunk of pancetta will also do nicely) for a meaty flavor. A cinnamon stick and 2 or 3 cloves add depth and a slight sweetness. My mom remembers making this with sherry or vermouth (sounds like Julia Child to me), but I added a swig of cognac we had laying around. Very nice indeed.

Spilt Pea Soup

1 kilo (2.2 lbs) spilt green peas

1 ham hock or 1inch thick slice of pork belly, slab bacon or pancetta

3 tablespoons olive oil

1 carrot

1 large onion

1/2 bulb fennel

1 cinnamon stick

1 bay leaf

3 cloves

2 chicken boullion cubes (or 2 small cans low sodium chicken broth)

2 tablespoons cognac or brandy

In a large stockpot, saute veggies, spices and ham/bacon in olive oil until meat is browned and onions are translucent. Add cognac. Add spilt peas and stir. Disolve boullion cubes in 1 cup boiling water. Add to the pot. Cover split peas with boiling water, about 1 inch above their level in the pot. Simmer for 1 hour. Continue to add boiling water as needed, until your soup reaches the desired thickness. Remove meat and bay leaf. Blend soup with a hand blender. Serve with the shredded meat of the ham hock on top, or a dollop of plain yogurt.

If reheating - dilute with water and/or a dribble of white wine.

Note: You won't want to add any salt to the soup, as the ham/bacon takes care of the salt content...

Serves 8

A Cherry For Your Thoughts

Being back in the States is always an opportunity to catch up with old friends. Last Saturday, I went to meet B.'s new daughter – a six-month old cutie, soon to be the recipient of frou-frou French baby clothes. B. is a great cook - she’s the one who supervised my first béchamel. There was also an unforgettable Thanksgiving in London, which found us, the night before, wondering if we should sleep with the frozen turkey between us (dinner was served, nobody died).

B. made a lunch of all my favorite things – simple oven-roasted salmon, a lightly dressed arugula salad with roasted butternut squash, red onions, walnuts and lumps of goat cheese. And for dessert, a beautiful Hungarian cherry cake.

For whatever reason, many of my closest friends, even in the States, have ended up in inter-cultural relationships. B. is married to a man from Hungary. The first time she had his parents for dinner, she made her world famous (utterly divine, not to be argued with) carrot cake with cream cheese frosting. It elicited a strangely muted response; no doubt it was too sweet for their European palette. Since then, B. has given herself a crash course in Hungarian pastry. Hence, the cherry cake.

Food is a great way – sometimes the only way, to snuggle up to a new culture. Language takes time (and French is A LOT easier than Hungarian), but food translates instantly, making people feel viscerally comfortable, warm and welcome.

When I think about the first days of my marriage – the beginning of my life in France, I know I used food in this way. With the most important parts of my personality amputated by my halting French, I was desperate to find another way to communicate. My husband’s friends didn’t know if I was intelligent, charming, or witty. What they did know is that I made a mean sweet potato puree and - after watching Gwendal a few times – a festive chicken, apricot and coriander tagine.

I tasted all of this in the tender crumb of B.'s cherry cake – a loving (and very tasty) way to bring herself closer to her new family – a culinary dent in the cultural divide.


She was kind enough to send along the recipe:

"This cherry cake is from George Lang's Cuisine of Hungary. George Lang owned the Cafe Des Artistes in NY, but was originally from Hungary. He died recently, and his obituary was in the New York Times. He led a very dramatic life, full of both glamor and tragedy (his parents died in Auschwitz and his daughter in a CA wildfire; he himself escaped post-war Hungary hidden in a coffin). His cookbook is one of the better Hungarian cookbooks because it is very precise in the way of American recipes - most are grandma-style books, with directions like (as my grandma once said) "cook it until it looks like fudge", which is useless if you've never seen it (never mind eaten it!).

His recipe calls for fresh cherries, and I have made it that way when they are in season. Last weekend, I made it with jarred Morello Cherries from Trader Joe's. The recipe is very typically Hungarian in that it calls for the eggs to be separated and then the whites whipped until stiff to lighten the cake, rather than using a chemical leavener like baking soda or powder, as in American sweets. It is also much less sweet than American desserts, which my husband prefers.

"Anyám csereszneyés lepénye" -- My mother's cherry cake, adapted from George Lang's Cuisine of Hungary

1 jar Trader Joe's Morello Cherries, well drained
1.5 sticks unsalted butter
3/4 cup granulated sugar
3 eggs, separated
1 cup flour
pinch of salt
bread crumbs
Vanilla sugar (I buy my vanilla sugar in packets either in Hungary or from a Hungarian store here. You might find it in another Eastern European store (Polish stores, for example, of which there seem to be many!) or you can make it by burying a vanilla pod in sugar. You could also just dust with confectioner's sugar

Preheat oven to 375 F.

Mix butter well with half of the sugar. After a few minutes of vigorous whipping, add egg yolks and continue whipping. Finally, add flour and salt.

Beat egg whites with remaining granulated sugar til the mixture is stiff and forms peaks. With a rubber spatula, gently fold it into the butter mixture.

Butter a baking pan 10x6 inches (I used my 9" round cake pan) and sprinkle it with bread crumbs. Put dough in pan and sprinkle the cherries evenly over the dough (should basically cover it).

Bake in the preheated oven for 30 min (takes longer in my oven). Cool 5-10 minutes on a wire rack, run a knife around the pan edge and then turn out to cool completely. Sprinkle with vanilla sugar.

Serves 6-8

Before&After: Quickie Salmon Tagine

I've been looking through my photos from the last year - and I've found so many recipes that I simply haven't had time to share. So I'm inaugurating a new kind of post: before&after. We're all so busy; I wanted to share some of the quick transformations - recipes that give you that magazine make-over satisfaction with limited ingredients, cabinet staples, even leftovers.

Here's one a I made with salmon steaks, leftover cubes of roasted butternut squash and some green olives from the cocktail hour at a past weekend's dinner party. A cinammon stick and the brine of the olives gives this the sweet/sour wiff of a North African tagine. By cooking the whole lot en papillote - in tin foil, you save on clean up time, and the ingredients make their own sauce. Bon appétit!

Quickie Salmon Tagine

2 salmon steaks
1 tomato, cut into eighths
8 large whole green olives
1 cup of roasted butternut squash cubes, fresh or frozen
1 cinammon stick
Sea salt and mixed peppercorns
Splash of white wine

Preheat the oven to 375F. Place a large piece of aluminium foil (several inches larger than your fish) on a cookie sheet. Place the salmon steaks, scatter with squash, olives, and tomato. Tuck in the cinammon stick (or a small pinch of cinammon if you don't have sticks), sprinkle with sea salt, grind over a bit of mixed peppercorn. Add a bit of white wine. Cover with another piece of aluminium foil and fold to seal the edges into a neat air-tight packet. Cook until the package is puffed and fish is cooked through, between 15-20 minutes.

Serves two. If you want to double the recipe, make two tinfoil packages.

Saffron 101

Every Sunday, I buy my jam, tomatoes, carrots (and the occasional rum flavored chouquette), from Martine and Didier Caron at the small stand on the side of the church. They also produce their own saffron. Saffron grows plentifully in Provence, and like the chickpeas and spelt - it was a local ingredient I quickly incorporated into my everyday cuisine. Of course, saffron is not an everyday ingredient - I'd be bankrupt if it was...)

France has made me a bit shy about asking people for things, so it took me a year to work up to the courage to casually inquire if I could come and see the harvest. Saffron is one of the few ingredients in my French kitchen whose origins remain mysterious to me. I have no problem identifying the stuff in the jar, but no real idea what it looks like when it pops out of the ground. I gave Didier my cellphone number and hoped they would call. He did.

The saffron harvest is quick - two or three weeks in Sept/Oct, before the first frost. We drove to La Ferme de la Charite, in the back country of Forcalquier. We passed knotted pines, knotched with short spikes like the rungs on a ladder. We got lost a few times on the back roads around Les Tourettes. The signs (when there were signs) began to indicate hamlets, rather than villages or towns.

When we arrived at the farm, yesterday's harvest was already on the table outside the kitchen door, hundreds of delicate purple flowers, recently denuded of their valuable threads.

Saffron is one of the world's most expensive spices. When I asked Didier why, he pointed to the black plastic crates of flowers. "La main-d'oeuvre" - the labor, he said. Saffron is a crop that simply cannot be mechanized. To give you an idea, they produced 90 grams of saffron last year, from 17,000 flowers. To make a kilogram (2.2 lbs), it takes roughly 225,000 flowers - all picked and plucked by hand. A kilogram sells for approximately 30,000 Euros.

We headed out to a field dotted with lavendar blooms, with a spectacular view of the surrounding hills. In these situations, it's best to tell people I'm a New Yorker upfront; it gives me an excuse to ask one or two really dumb city-girl questions. I walked gingerly around some pellet sized droppings, "Do you spread the rabbit dung, or do they just come by themselves? "Sheep." said Martine. "Those are sheep droppings." Ah. This is a country where a girl had best know her dung. "Where are the sheep?" I asked, looking around. "In the freezer." answered Didier, "They make less noise. "

The saffron we use comes from the Crocus sativus or saffron crocus.

There are three deep orange stigmas per flower. Occaisionally you come arcross a flower with six - like a cat with 6 fingers on each front paw.

"Ca va les reins?" Martine was inquiring after my kidneys, which tend to get a bit squished by spending hours bent over in a field. "Ca va." I said. We swapped recipes as we moved along the rows. She was fond of saffron risotto. I told her about the saffron peach/nectarine compote I had made a few weeks before. I was dying to try some carrot saffron muffins, which I'd tasted at a local market.

When we finished the day's picking - buds just poking out of the ground would be ready tomorrow - we sat down at the table and began gently removing the orange threads with the press of a fingernail.

The lot would be spread out on a cookie sheet and dried at a low heat (60C), for about half an hour. Then Martine leaves it overnight in the oven (open just a crack) to dry out - then into bottles of .5 or 1 gram each.

As the afternoon sun began to slant low, they walked us around the farm. Augustin would have happily spent the night in the seat of the tractor; we introduced ourselves to the geese, the goats, a beautiful bull and a 900lb pig I wouldn't want to meet in a dark alley.

I left one step closer to understanding the origins of my spice cabinet, with thoughts of a saffron risotto - and a silent vow to study my types of animal dung.

Louder than Words

As a writer, it's not every day that I admit a picture's worth 1000 words. This past Wednesday, I spent the morning with Augustin, collecting storm-fallen walnuts and plums, and digging "NY" potatoes (those planted in May by yours truly!) in Mr. C's garden. No other narration seems necessary. Only one word of explanation - about the plum pits. Mr. C informed me they were picked clean and left there by the crows, who, gourmets one and all, don't like to eat things off the ground.

If this post has you feeling plum-ish - there's still time to try my roasted plums with red wine, cinnamon and vanilla.

Plum Pudding

My parents left at 5am this morning for the airport in Nice. It was a really great visit, and in the last ten days, Augustin has acquired a jumble of new English words: book, boat, red, turtle, moo, plum.

Plums irk me. Something about the raw texture, the slightly acidic density, makes me feel like I’m biting into a juicy baseball. But the abundance of the Provencal seasons doesn’t leave a lot of room for free will. This month, it’s all plums, all the time.

Back from ten days on the beach, Mr. C found his plum tree groaning with fruit, he only had to shake the branches to fill his cardboard cagettes and a rectangular green plastic basket, which very generously ended up in my kitchen.

We have a new chest freezer in the cellar. I briefly considered tossing the whole lot in a Ziploc bag, thus shoving the issue downstream a few months. But another idea presented itself, inspired, of all things, by trips I used to take with my mother to a wholesale market in Paterson, NJ. We would buy crates of slightly overripe peaches and plums and come home and make compote. The details are fuzzy, for both of us. My mother was always an unreliable narrator, and with my grandmother gone, I’m starting to realize how much is being lost, everyday. As a writer, this terrifies me. I feel I should have started recording long ago. Why didn’t I know that my great grandmother Rose was a milliner? Or that my great grandfather Eddie entered the Jewish mafia by way of a milk truck?

G.’s grandmother passed away this week. There weren’t many good memories – they were hard people, not particularly open to the wider aspirations of their children or grandchildren. It’s hard to know how to mark such occasions, people disappear, and all we have left are the stories. He remembers the way she used to spend the whole morning painstakingly shelling crabs to make him a tartine of bread and butter with the crab on top. A whole morning’s work devoured in a single minute. He remembers picking blackberries for her jam. Two for him, one for the pot. The smell of burnt coffee, sitting all morning over a low flame on the stove. He remembers the meticulous rows of their vegetable garden (like Mr. C, G’s grandparents demanded a certain precision in their beans), and the tiny, rock-hard yellow apples from their tree.

Unlike me, mother loves plums. That fact, and some leftover red wine lead to a fruitful development. I roasted the plums in a medium oven with the wine, a spilt vanilla bean, a cinnamon stick and the tiniest bit of sugar. The plums gave way, exchanging their springiness for a comforting sag. The wine turned into a spiced burgundy syrup, rich and glossy as a stained glass window. I served it with faisselle, a mild fresh cheese, though I sense that sour cream, Greek yogurt or mascarpone wouldn’t go amiss.
We are living in a golden time: when our son is so little I can protect him simply by closing the front gate, and our parents are well enough to sit at lunch on a sunny terrace and watch Augustin get whipped cream all over his face and into his blond hair. I don’t know what kind food should mark that very simple gift. Something warm and sweet is a good start.
Plums roasted with red wine, cinnamon and vanilla

3 pounds of plums
½ cup full bodied red wine
1 tbsp turbinado (raw cane) sugar
1 cinnamon stick
1 small vanilla bean, or ½ of a large vanilla bean, split down the middle
Preheat the oven to 350F.

Halve the plums, remove the pits. In a 9x13 casserole, combine plums and all the other ingredients. Roast for 35 to 45 minutes, until tender.

Serve warm or at room temperature with sour cream, yogurt or lightly sweetened mascarpone.

Serves 8.