Around The World In Eighty Cookbooks

LEMONADE SPRINGS

Around The World In Eighty Cookbooks

by

Sandye Carroll

Time has caught up with me. I�m in style now. Or, at least my ethnic cook persona is in style. Ethnic food is in all of the magazines. It is the major subject of the great rash of new cookbooks. It�s even hit middle America. The prairie gourmet wallows in sophistication as he prepares dinners of gazpacho, poulet saute, salata, and pudim flan. Spanish, French, Greek, and Portuguese. Nothing authentic, everything Midwestern. Foods out of context, like levis in Paris.

No matter how authentic a recipe is, if its setting is Early Melting Pot, the recipe is Americanized. And American ethnic cqoking is a waste of time. So are Americanized ethnic cookbooks. I already know what American food tastes like. I want food that will, open up wondrous new possibilities.

So why am I proposing a mixed bag like the following menu? I�m trying to open up horizons, turn people on, point, out new worlds. First the fifteen day round-the-world tour, then the year abroad.

This dinner will serve four to six people.

First stop on this high-powered culinary tour is Greece. The appetizer is a Greek cream salad called taramasalata. Its primary ingredient, tarama, is salted and pressed preserved fish eggs. You buy them in jars or in bulk from Greek and Middle Eastern delicatessans. For mail order info, write to Lekas and Drivas, Inc., 98 Fulton Street, Brooklyn, N.Y. 10001 but shipping tarama may be a problem because it must be refrigerated.

For taramasalata. soak two one-inch thick slices of long french.bread in milk for ten minutes. The bread should come out mushy. Squeeze it out and dump the bread into a blender with three ounces (or 1/3 of an eight ounce jar) of tarama. (Save the milk for a sauce or a soup or something.) Also drop into the blender the chunks of one small onion, two cloves of garlic, the juice of two lemons (three if the lemons are small), and once cup of olive oil. Blend the mess until it is the consistency of a thin mayonnaise.Serve the taramasalata as a dip for slices of French bread, torn into chunks, and eat it with Greek olives from\ a Greek delicatessan, and with fresh vegetable chunks, like cucumbers, tomatoes, celery, scallions, etc.

This recipe is an old family recipe (not my family), but you can find other taramasalata recipes, as well as the rest of Greek cooking, in two excellent cookbooks. The Art of Greek Cookery by the Women of St. Paul�s Greek Orthodox Church, is published by Doubleday which also published the authentic and thorough The Art of Armenian Cooking by Baboian, as well as a whole bunch of other Art of... books. The Art of Greek Cooking is the best Greek-American cookbook I�ve ever seen. It is packed with well-tested Greek recipes, and contains an explanatory glossary and a directory of Greek stores.

The other Greek cookbook isn�t Greek at all, but is a comprehensive introduction to the cooking of the whole Middle East. It is A Book of Middle Eastern Food by Claudia Roden (Penguin Books, Middlesex, England). Being a paperback, it is much cheaper than the Doubleday book, and is crammed with authentic recipes and commentary.* Penguin publishes several ethnic paperback cookbooks, and all of them are remarkably good values. Their Indian Cookery by Singh is the, best introduction to the many cuisines of India, and is authentic while retaining an unusual simplicity and clarity. South East Asian Food by Brossenden has been published in a more expensive American edition by Pantheon as Joys and Subtleties. South East Asian Food is one of my favorite cookbooks of all time. It covers Indonesia, Java, Thailand, Burma, etc. The author is scrupulously authentic, keeps all of the regions separate, explains the cooking characteristics of each region, and lists the typical ingredients in several different languages. If you can�t find these books here, write to Blackwell�s, Broad Street, Oxford, England.

The main course of our eclectic meal features Korean barbecued beef (BulGogi), Chinese spinach, and Yugoslav homemade noodles.

To me, Korean food is an intermediary stop on the journey from Chinese cooking to Japanese cooking. This is due in part to the fact that the Japanese received their Chinese cultural influences through a Korean filter for many centuries. If you are interested in Korean cooking, The Korean Cookbook by Judy Hyun (Follett, 1970) is the least adapted (read: Americanized) of the few Korean cookbooks on the market.

This recipe for BulGogi is from a Korean friend in California. Slice three pounds of round steak or chuck steak as thinly as you possibly can. If the Slices aren�t very thin, pound them thinner with a wooden mallet or a wooden block. Put two tablespoons of white sesame seeds in an ungreased small frying pan, and heat the seeds over medium heat until they become dark beige or until they start to pop. Crush the toasted seeds in a mortar. Add two tablespoons of oil (preferably peanut oil, but what the hell), one cup of Japanese soy sauce (like Kikkoman brand), two tablespoons of white sugar, four minced scallions, two mashed cloves of garlic, and a half teaspoon of black pepper. Mix this all together, pour it over the meat, and let the meat marinate for two hours. Take the meat out of the marinade, shake off the excess liquid, and broil the meat very quickly over a barbecue or in the oven broiler. The meat is so thin that long cooking will turn it to beef jerky and break your teeth.

The Japanese also love toasted sesame seeds, and one of their marvelous creations is toasted sesame seeds sprinkled over barely cooked spinach, with maybe a few drops of soy sauce or Japanese rice vinegar as a garnish. Spinach is one of the favorite Japanese CONTINUED FROM PAGE 48.

CONTINUED ON PAGE 76.

vegetables (little kids in Japan hate carrots, not spinach), and the Japanese do marvelous things with it. Japanese Cooking by Martin (another Penguin book) has lots of neato keeno spinach recipes, as well as a good assortment of other authentic recipes. This may be the best Japanese introductory book out, since it is readily available, cheap, and well-rounded.

The simplest wa/to prepare spinach is Chinese stir-frying. Simply wash a bunch of spinach, leaf by leaf, under running water to remove every bit of sand. Break off all of the stems. While the meat is broiling, heat a tablespoon of oil in a large frying pan over high heat. Don�t let the oil get so hot that it smokes; it should be hot enough that it looks as thin and ripply as water. Shake off the excess water from the spinach and dump it into the frying pan. Quickly stir the spinach around, up and down, over and under, until every leaf is coated with the hot oil. This should take less than a minute. Cover the pan, reduce the heat from high to medium, and let the spinach steam for no more than a minute. It should all be limp, but still bright green. That�s it.

This leads us into the subject of Chinese cookbooks. Of the hundreds of Chinese cookbooks out, only a few are really worth the money you are forced to pay for them. One of the newest is Claiborne and Lee�s The Chinese Cook£>oofc(Lippincott). It is highly overpriced, but the recipes seem authentic, and are interesting, varied, reliable, and imaginative. It is designed in the standard cookbook rip-off style with one recipe per page surrounded by lots of aesthetic white space. At $12.50, it should include a few thousand recipes, not a couple of hundred.

By far the two best Chinese cookbooks are also the two most expensive. The Thousand Recipe Chinese Cookbook by Gloria Bley Miller is primarily Cantonese, which is the most common style of Chinese food in America. It is crammed full of understandable, authentic recipes but has only a moderate amount ot explanation about ingredients and techniques. Food made from these recipes always comes out tasting like restaurant food. An Encyclopedia of Chinese Food and Cooking by Chang and Kutscher (Crown) costs a whopping $17.50, but it covers just about all a general cookbook should: explanations, basic techniques, buying guides, nutritional information, special dietary information, and regional food styles as well as thousands of recipes.

What combines better with Korean beef and Chinese spinach than a Balkan version of the Italian fetuccine with parmesan and butter? First, you have to make the noodles. A few hours before' dinner, measure three cups of hard unbleached bread flour (which you bought from a health food store or an Italian bakery) into a bowl, and add four eggs. Mix and mix and mix and then knead until all of the flour has turned into a dough. Gather the dough into a ball, and throw away any unincorporated flour. Now knead the dough for at least ten more minutes (twenty minutes is better). The dough should turn into a silky smooth ball, all uniformly yellow and bouncy. Cover the dough with a bowl or plastic wrap, and let the dough rest for a half hour. This will take the bounce out of the dough so that you can roll it out into very thin sheets.

Roll the dough out, a quarter at a time, until it is no more than one tenth of an inch thick. Cut it into strips about a quarter of an inch wide, and let the noodles dry on the table until you are ready to use them. Turn them occasionally to prevent them from sticking together, and sprinkle them with flour if they seem to be very sticky.

Just as you are ready to eat, boil the noodles in quarts and quarts (at least four) of salted water for just a few minutes (maybe five), or until they are tender but still firm. NOT MUSHY. Pour them immediately into a colander to drain off all of the hot water, and then pour them into a hot serving dish. Drop two tablespoons of sweet unsalted butter on top of the noodles, mix it in quickly, and then mix in a half cup of sour creem and a cup and a half of grated hard sheep�s cheese or grated parmesan. (I like jparmesan, but the Yugoslavs who own this recipe like sheep�s cheese.) Serve right now.

For more Balkan recipes, get yourself a copy of The Balkan Cookbook by Kramarz (Crown, 1972.) It�s not nearly as adapted as it Claims, and you can make some great soups, dumplings, sausages, and pastries from this book.

Hungary is sparsely represented in the Balkan cookbook, and the well-developed cuisines of Hungary deserve a book of their own. Unfortunately, the book they got is a rip-off. It is The Cuisine of Hungary by George Lang (Atheneum), costs a ridiculous $17.50, and could have been produced for a lot less. I must admit, however, that I love this book. Even though I had to buy it retail because the cheap bastards at Atheneum wouldn�t send me a review copy. I�m not important enough, you know. Anyway, the recipes in this book are fantastic, and their variety is astounding.

Since you spent all day making noodles (it really only takes an hour), you don�t want to slave over an elaborate dessert. I recommend Sandye Carrol�s superduper unauthentic well-adapted yummy extra light zabaglione. For each person, break two eggs into a saucepan, and add two tablespoons of sugar and four tablespoons of marsala, madiera, cointreau, or some other sweet wine or booze. Beat this mess together over low heat until it thickens into a sort of light pudding. Be sure to beat it constantly and to keep your fire moderate, or you�ll get odd-tasting scrambled eggs. Meanwhile, have someone whip some heavy cream, about a quarter of a cup per person, with about a tablespoon of sugar, until the cream is stiff. Fold the hot zabaglione into the whipped cream dish it out into beautiful crystal goblets, and serve with some sort of cookie. This makes about twice the normal sized serving because I love it so.

For a more authentic zabaglione, and the rest of Italian cooking, see The Talisman Italian Cookbook by Ada Boni (Crown), which covers all of the regions of Italy with lots and lots of authentic recipes. This is an English translation of II Talsimano, which is the Italian Joy x)f Cooking.

We all know that spaghetti isn�t all there is to Italian food, but if you are as hung up on noodles as I am you should be glad to know that The Complete Book of Pasta by Scott (Morrow) is now out in paperback. I don�t know the paperback publisher. There are enough superb noodle recipes in there to keep you happy for years. ^