CT - D4 - Part 1

Heart
Reach back into your memory for a dish that has sentimental ties. Find a recipe, buy ingredients, make it, photograph it, and tell us the story. Unlike your "missing dish," this does not need to be something you've ever prepared in the past.

Sentimental. Obviously that's kind of a hard one for me, but I promise to do my best. I can't think of any foods to which I feel especially strong ties, except for those I particularly like on their own merits.

When I think of food that people get sentimental about, it's generally stuff like:

• Grandma's cooking. With all due respect, neither of my grandmothers can/could cook particularly well. The one who is still living has long been under the impression that you can boil a chicken in plain water and eat the results all by themselves. And you'll never believe it, but I've just this second made the connection to why my grandfather so enjoyed dining out.

• Mom's cooking. I list these separately because I think they're definitely two distinct concepts in the American psyche. There's nothing wrong with my mother's cooking, but I don't have particularly strong feelings about it, and I'd have to guess that neither does she, since she's one of the few people with less capacity for sentimentality than I have (though she's more naturally receptive to it in other people than I am, which confused me terribly for the longest time). I'm sure she cooked with sufficient variety, but whenever I try to remember what she cooked when I was growing up, I can only remember two or three dishes, one being pasta. Oddly enough, the rest of my immediate family, including Mom, suffers from the same amnesia.
  

• Special occasion food. Like Thanksgiving dinner. I hate Thanksgiving, in part because it tries to be emotionally manipulative, but mostly because the collective hysteria over roast turkey (of which I'm not very fond) and the inevitable excess (which I think is supposed to be the attractive part) are maddening. (My father loves the traditional feast, but concedes to my ambivalence by referring to it as "The American Festival of Beige Foods.")

• Nostalgic food from some special place. Ballpark hotdogs. Swimming pool popsicles.

Yeah. I've got nothing like that. But now that I've satisfied my basic psychological needs by analyzing sentimentality, I can move on.

So what do I have? I feel some connection to these, probably because they have their on stories:

Chocolate Pretzels

When you move a lot, really weird things can go missing. Once, it was three of my mother's Christmas cookie recipes. Only three out of the dozen or so in the collection, despite the fact that they're all kept together in one place in the recipe box.

The most beloved of the missing recipes was for "Chocolate Pretzels." - not chocolate covered pretzels (everybody knows those are a form of narcotic that comes from Trader Joe's), but pretzel-shaped cookies. The recipe was complicated and thus not easily recreated, but I knew it contained:

• ground almonds
• ground chocolate chips
• cinnamon and some other spices
• orange zest

The fall I was home after graduating from college, I spent a lot of time on the web searching recipes, trying to find this one. I came up with about 20 variations on search terms to look for chocolate, chocolate-spice, or chocolate-orange-spice cookies that could be shaped (not rolled, dropped, or spritzed). Of course, my mother found my strategy eccentric. "They're called Chocolate Pretzels!" At any rate, I found nothing suitable.

The next fall, I was away from home and got to experiment - I was definitely going to recover these one way or another. Unfortunately, my first-principles knowledge of baking chemistry wasn't good enough to help me go about it in an orderly way. The first few rounds came out looking like something out of the litter box, actually. I finally decided that the texture of the original recipe was probably most like that of biscotti that have only been through the first baking. Bingo. Searching on those grounds, I quickly found something adaptable, and the results pass very well for the real thing, if I say so myself. Unfortunately, the scale at which I achieved success makes...a lot of cookies. You can definitely halve it, if you can figure out a way to add 2-and-a-half eggs.

Chocolate Spice Pretzels

Combine:

• 1.5 c. finely chopped almonds
• 2 c. finely chopped chocolate chips
• 2 t. baking powder
• 2 t. ground cinnamon
• 1/4 t. ground allspice
• 4 c. flour

In a large bowl beat 5 eggs until fluffy.

To eggs, add and blend well:

• 2 c. sugar
• 1/2 c. melted butter
• 1 T. grated orange peel

Stir flour mixture into liquid to form dough.

Form into pretzel shapes (roll small balls into snakes and twist into pretzels).

Bake on greased sheet at 350F 8-10 minutes.

Cool and sprinkle with powdered sugar.

Barbecue

My mother is from North Carolina, and in North Carolina there is an extremely important dish called "barbecue." Barbecue, and listen closely, because this is important, has nothing whatever to do with barbecue sauce, the thick, brown, ketchup-based substance revered here in the upper midwest as if it had sacramental properties. No, the proper sauce is a vinegar-based with paprika and cayenne pepper, which is applied to the form of hog meat that anywhere else in the country would be called "pulled pork," a name that, to my ear, will never not sound irredeemably dopey.

Properly, the hog is spit-roasted for two days in a contraption the size of a schoolbus, but that's not a realistic option for apartment-dwellers. So I figured out how to reproduce it in the slow cooker.

Anecdote: Once when I made this, I was obviously not paying very close attention to my grocery shopping, and accidentally purchased a picnic roast, rather than...whatever other cut of roast I had intended. It had the skin still attached. And if that weren't bad enough...the pig had a tattoo. Ew.

Barbecue

Ok...went to add that recipe and it's missing. Fortunately, I know Mom has a copy. Basically, you make a dry rub with cayenne pepper and chili powder and seasoned salt, treat a large pork roast, slow cook it with a little bit of the sauce, which is, I think, cider vinegar, cayenne pepper, paprika, red pepper flakes, and brown sugar... When it's cooked, shred it with a fork and douse with the rest of the sauce.

This must be served with cole slaw, but only if you make your own dressing, and you must use cider vinegar, not white. Ahem.



Veggie Curry

This is something I made a lot my first year on my own, and I think it started my cooking-with-yogurt habit. It's not the only thing I ever ate, or the only thing I tried for the first time then, but it's sort of emblematic of that period for me. It's also really, really good. It comes from Beans chapter of the the much-reviled 1997 edition of The Joy of Cooking - though I concur with many of the criticisms levied against that version (to wit, that it forgoes the start-at-the-top-and-back-to-basics detail characteristic of the earlier versions in favor of an attempt at a different sort of comprehensiveness and that just yields over-complication) it does have some excellent recipes.

I'll try to make this next week - if I do, I'll post the recipe then.

More later.