Strawberry Upside Down Passion

I woke with the birds Easter Sunday, threw down Bach’s St. John Passion, fired-up the oven and had my own mojo mass in the kitchen. I’d somehow - in a Spring welcoming fervor - amassed tons of strawberries. And, as I'd been making far too many cool custard tarts and ice creams, was fishing about for an alt. slant to dessert with friends that evening. A huge tub of sadly neglected almond paste sucking shelf space in my teensy kitchen helped direct my meanderings.

My favorite almond paste anything is an almond torte which comes courtesy of Lindsey Shere, so I pinched it outright as the underpinning for my holy experiment. Strawberry Shortcake was the obvious tack, with sugared strawberries prettifying a nutty-moist shortcake impostor, yet it all finally seemed too done. And, while I adore fresh fruit, and viscerally get that there is nothing more perfect (in my perfectly trained nocal way), some insane permutation happens when you cook fruit, especially stuff from the ambrosial berry world: its perfume blossoms exponentially. Have you ever stood in a room as a raspberry butter tart is plucked straight from the oven? I rest my case.

Strawberry-Almond Upside Down Torte

For the top/(bottom)

3 tablespoons butter

3/4 cup loosely packed brown sugar

1/4 teaspoon sea salt

4-ish cups (about 2 pint baskets) strawberries, washed and topped

1 tablespoon flour

1 tablespoon sugar

Line a 9-inch springform pan with parchment paper (8 or 10- inch works too, just adjust cooking times for a thicker or thinner cake). Melt the butter in a sauce pan over medium heat. Add the sugar and salt and whisk a few minutes until sugar is smooth and melted. Spread evenly over the parchment paper. Cut strawberries in half or quarters, depending on their size, and spread over the sugar/butter mixture in concentric circles cut side up. Mix the flour and sugar and sprinkle over the strawberries. Make the torte batter.

For the Torte

1-1/4 cups sugar

8 oz (about 1 cup) almond paste

9 oz softened unsalted butter

1 tsp. vanilla extract

6 eggs, room temperature

1 cup flour

1-1/2 tsp. baking powder

1 tsp. salt

powdered sugar for dusting

Preheat oven to 325. Pulverize the sugar and almond paste in a food processor. Cream the butter in a mixer with a paddle attachment for a few minutes until fluffy. Add the sugar-paste mixture and beat until smooth. Beat in eggs, one by one, scraping down the sides in between additions - until well incorporated. Add vanilla. Sift dries and add. Turn this out over the strawberries and gently spread with a spatula to cover fruit.

Bake for 1-1/2 hours or more, checking occasionally, until the center feels springy and a poker comes out clean. Cover the pan lightly with foil if the top starts to darken too quickly. Cool for about an hour, until the cake is just warm. Dust the top well with powdered sugar, cut around the edges, cover with a plate and gently turn over. This cake is tender. . . if the sides slide a bit, just gently coax back towards the cake with a spatula. And the berries - which look slightly anemic at first - will darken as the cake sits and begin to look more glazed. Serve warm.

You can also have your strawberries both ways - the raw and the cooked: garnish with fresh sugared strawberries alongside whipped cream or crème fraîche...

FROM THE MENU: Spring Pea, Chilie, Mint & Cured Pork Soup

Yet another example of my current obsession with a new holy trinity: thick red onions, loads of garlic and intrepid chiles de arbol. I mean, what wouldn’t be exalted in this audacious foundation? Spring pea soups are mostly done in the cheerful bright creamy mode, and I’ve dallied in these myself. But more and more I feel abidingly loyal to the thing/things I’m working with themselves. I don’t want to manhandle them. So this soup has true texture; isn’t a technicolor blitz. The green in it mellows with cooking, as green things do - and its usual sweetness is deepened with the savor of alliums and the smoke and pepper of chiles and cured meat. Even elegant mint gets to parade its brute side.

Spring Pea, Chile, Mint & Cured Pork Soup

3 tablespoons olive oil

8 oz. pancetta, smoked bacon, guanciale or prosciutto, whatever you prefer or have around, cut into 1/4-inch thick lardons

2 red onions, cut in half lengthwise and sliced lengthwise into 1/2-inch strips

6 to 8 cloves garlic, roughly chopped

Sea salt and freshly ground pepper

2 to 4 medium chiles de arbol, depending on your heat obsession, seeded and crumbled

3 # fresh peas, shelled

1/2 # snap peas, cut lengthwise on the diagonal

1/2 # waxy fingerling potatoes, skin on, cut into 1/4-inch rounds

1 small bunch mint, picked and cut roughly into chiffonade

4 cups of chicken stock, preferably homemade

Sugar, optional

Virgin olive oil to finish

In a large, lined pot big enough to hold the soup heat 3 tablespoons of olive oil over medium heat. Add your pork of choice and sauté until rendered and lightly browned, about 10 minutes. Add onions and a good pinch of salt and pepper and sauté until tender, about 10 minutes. Add garlic, chiles and cook until fragrant, about 5 minutes. Add the peas, snap peas, potatoes and 1/3 cup of the mint and cook another 5 minutes. Cover with stock by about 1-inch (add water if necessary), and season to taste with salt and pepper. Simmer about 20 minutes until the potatoes are just tender. Scoop out about 1-1/2 cups of the soup’s vegetables and meat along with a bit of the broth and carefully blitz in a blender or food processor to a rough purée. Add a little more of the soup’s broth if necessary. Stir this back into the soup. Taste for seasoning. Some peas are less sweet than others, so add a pinch or two of sugar if needed. Serve in warm soup bowls with a drizzle of virgin oil and some of the chopped mint.

The La Cucina Delle Regioni D’Italia Series

These books are extraordinary.  I discovered them randomly years ago when a friend scored one in Italy. Originally published there in the 70’s and 80’s as a regional series of about 20, they are now somewhat rare, and completely worth the hunt.  

First, they are so Italian. Unlike our crisp, studio-generated, hand-holding counterparts - these are rough, organic and bold both in body and spirit.  They make you want to touch them. . . bound in yielding cardboard, their covers and pages are coarse linen card stock intensely color-stained with drawings, paintings and poster reproductions. They are so beautiful you want just to live beside them.  And then there’s the meat of it.

I sit with these books. Read them front to back. Innocently dip in and get hijacked for hours.  Mario Batali - who claims he never wants these to go out of print - says they are written “Italian-style,” that is, their story, components and instructions are all a single paragraph mash-up. There are no separate lists of ingredients, often no quantities, temperatures or even specific cooking techniques given. It is part of their charm.  These books assume a basic working knowledge of cooking.  It is all so refreshingly old-world.  

The recipes themselves are loopy, authentic. They call for curious ingredients (by our dainty standards), and are given in their original Italian dialect followed by choppy English translations.  Further, much of the text isn’t translated at all: introductions, poems, quotations and menus are left to stand in their original. So if, say, you’re not frosty on your Umbrian, you simply have to fly with the thing. All of this can be joyously bumpy going, and revelatory.  Here’s Crostini di Milza (Spleen toasts):  

Take some ox spleen, open it with a knife so that the skin remains outwards, then scoop out the flesh, leaving nerves and skin.  If you have some meat sauce, leave the flesh to cook in this sauce, adding bits of butter: otherwise heat in butter a mixture made with a slice of ham...

or here, Minestra di porri (Leek Soup):

In the ancient Florence this soup probably was the traditional dish prepared on the feast of St. Laurence (10 august).  In fact it has been found a recipe for a leek soup in the menu of the Canons of the Basilica and the feast was called feast of the leeks instead of feast of St. Laurence.  Slice the white part of 1 kilo of leeks and put them in a pan with oil...

I had to try the minestra immediately as I couldn’t wrap my head around it, which always sparks me to action.  And it was unlike any "soup" I’ve made before: a lush, crispy-soaked baked crouton walloped with leeks, pine nuts and parmesan.  These recipes lean on vintage technique to make what seems only ordinary shine.  This, my friends, was a vegetal dream of welsh rarebit, the chartreuse topping of which was glisteningly held together with an à la minute velouté.  We ate more than was right. 

For Crostini di fegatini (Livers on toasts) I sautéed rabbit liver and giblets with onions, deglazed with stock, gingerly thickened with an egg yolk-lemon-flour liaison, then served on crostini. Upscale chipped beef? Glorious. Old-fashioned.  A cunning way to elevate what is workaday. 

I love these books, how gorgeous they are, their fearless approach to the whole beast, how they assume a common food intelligence which instinctively accounts for human wiggle room, for our kitchen quirks and tics.  Because cooking, after all, is a wild thing, and these books channel that spirit perfectly.     

The Pig, Winnie & Me

Devil’s Gulch Ranch in Marin called us last week wondering if we’d like one of their soon-to-be slaughtered pigs, a half that is, 100 pounds plus. These animals are glorious, milk-fed and reared in pastures alongside wine grapes and asparagus. As Bill Niman of BN Ranch says of his animal's charmed lives: they have just one bad day. How could we say no?

I naturally drove the thing straight to Winnie's with an assist from our friend John who helped devise and haul the impromptu body bag. Winnie is pukka when it comes to food and cooking. Forget willowy California cuisine. She was born and raised in Minnesota where she fed a large extended family and worked in restaurants. She also completely restored an old creamery and presided over the lodgings. Her mother opened, ran and cooked at a road-side diner in her 60’s & 70's, for God's sake. 

I have learned crazy things at Winnie’s side in her wide Dutch still-life of a kitchen. How about warm bacon-honey gravy from pan drippings with grained mustard and feisty vinegar poured into bowls of hot potatoes, green onions and raw garlic; wine-infused braised beef with roots, finished with currant jelly, over handmade buttered egg noodles; blistered vinegar-soaked potatoes kilned with olive oil and lard (if we’re lucky) tossed in a grocery bag with rough salt, or tomato-potato gratin packed with rosemary and roasted under the slow pungent drip of a garlic-jabbed leg of lamb? I am not kidding.

Winnie adores all things pig and has a preternatural with with one. You can study the meat charts until you’re blue, but something else altogether is at play in big butchering - a kind of communion with the animal. Winnie is our pig whisperer. 

Our hulking side dwarfs even her ancient butcher shop’s block (so well used that most of its giant surface is concave with knife work).  We circle the thing ceremoniously - our heads bowed in golden light under huge copper pots - wondering where to begin; how to undertake this glistening pig.  We run our hands over it a lot, feel our way in, remove head and ham first so that its core almost fits the block. Winnie finds natural separations of flesh with her fingers and we follow with our scraggy tools (her mother’s tiny black bone saw is surprisingly effective in this). In a few hours the refrigerator is larded with rib rack, porterhouse, picnic roast, shoulder roasts, belly cuts, ham, head, tail. 

I am always amazed at how tiring this work is, at how sobered and awed I am afterwards. The only seemly thing to do, I guess, is to sit-down gratefully with friends to grilled new porterhouse and garlicky fat white beans with fennel, oranges and bitter greens (a version of which is on our new menu). It is a life.

Lisa Neimeth

LISA NEIMETH DOES RIGHTEOUS WORK.  I first came upon it at an open studio in her cottage home tucked behind a gate and then a garden, as in any good fairy tale. She immediately towed us into her glass-encased backyard studio (nee chicken coop circa 1886-really), where we stood soaked in sunlight among nest-rich assemblages, tableaus of dispossessed bones, transfixing representations of sameness: eggs, birds, half-shells, delicately broken clay. All this and Aretha Franklin spinning in the background. I was made dizzy.

The tableware she's forging these days is mythological, whimsical, sturdy, cave-mod, twiggy, color-enhanced. I love eating from her pieces, the way food becomes part of their ever-changing, slowly exposed story; how when you’re finished you’ve got a brief still life of bright bits lingering in crevices. These plates enter your body with a nubby fork texture that sniggles up your arm, indeed their resonant scrapings and solid, in-hand weight are daily tactile reminders of their exquisite handmadeness. They also tap into our mystery, those embedded play figure/selves perpetually hovering in strange symbolic communions. If Kiki Smith made tableware surely it would dwell in this world.

Lisa worked for years in the New York City boroughs combining her skills in both social work and urban planning in sourcing out new kinds of housing for people in need. It seems such a small leap from that to what she does now - immersing herself in essential questions of how we feed ourselves, in all ways. What she proposes is a “slow-dish” movement. She speaks straight to my heat.

                  

FROM THE MENU

STEELHEAD, SMASHED JERUSALEM ARTICHOKES, BRAISED CAVOLO NERO AND RADICCHIO, MEYER LEMON-GREEN OLIVE-HAZELNUT PESTO WITH MINT

It starts like this. I am immediately hooked by the Neapriata/Fave e Cocoria (Puréed Fava Beans with Bitter Greens) in Nancy Jenkins’ Cucina Del Sole. Its utter simplicity - favas, salt, virgin oil, greens - is, of course, what seduces me. And in fact the brilliance of dried favas dissolved in a clay pot against tart, oil-imbued bitter greens is hard to overstate. The humble purée/biting greens assemblage is a classic device for a reason. In her masterful Honey from a Weed, Patience Gray offers the variation of Fave e Foglie, a fava-chicory soup bound with olive oil and made fragrant with onions, mint and pancetta. I freely admit this kind of thing haunts me.

So I have a case of Jerusalem artichokes about to head south and five bags of Meyer lemons bestowed by a well-meaning friend, a challenge even with a restaurant. Short-seasoned cavolo nero and wild Quinault river steelhead are on the market, all of which is how the dish begins to gel. Braised kale is profoundly green yet non-bitter, so I throw radicchio into the mix which immediately puts this right. I smash the sunchokes with waxy potatoes and olive oil for rough, rich structure. Lemon and green olives simply want to be together, and what’s more, they sing with fish, while hazelnuts flirt directly with Jerusalem artichoke’s own brand of nuttiness. Mint, as always, wildly brightens the whole ensemble. Honestly, the thing makes itself.

MEYER LEMON-GREEN OLIVE-HAZELNUT & MINT PESTO

2 large Meyer lemons, washed, cut as thinly as possible, seeded

and roughly chopped

3/4 cup Castlevetrano olives (or any good green olive: Lucques,

Picholine...), pitted and roughly chopped

1/2 cup hazelnuts, toasted, peeled and roughly chopped

1/2 cup mint, washed and cut into chiffonade (thin strips)

1/2 cup virgin olive oil

Sea salt and freshly ground pepper

Mix the ingredients and season to taste with salt and pepper. Hold at room temperature.

JERUSALEM ARTICHOKE SMASH

Sea salt

1 1/2 pounds of Jerusalem artichokes (aka sunchokes), peeled, and

cut into 1 1/2 -inch pieces

1 pound yellow finn, or other waxy potato, peeled, and cut into

1 1/2- inch pieces

1/4 cup virgin olive oil

freshly ground black pepper

Bring a large pot of water to the boil. Add enough salt that it tastes like sea water. Add the Jerusalem artichokes and potatoes, bring back to a boil then lower the heat to simmer about 15 to 20 minutes, until just tender. Drain and place back in the warm pot they were cooked in. Lightly smash with a fork or a masher while drizzling over the virgin oil. Give this a good grinding of pepper. Taste and season with more salt if necessary. Keep warm.

BRAISED CAVOLO NERO AND RADICCHIO

3 tablespoons olive oil

1 medium red onion, sliced in half lengthwise, peeled, then sliced

into 1/4-inch strips lengthwise

Sea salt and freshly ground pepper

6 medium cloves of garlic, peeled and roughly chopped

1 bunch cavolo nero (aka black kale, dinosaur kale, lainato kale),

washed and cut into 1/2 -inch pieces from bottom of stem to top

(don't dry)

1/2 head radicchio, cut into 1/2 -inch strips lengthwise

1/4 cup virgin olive oil

In a large, lined pot big enough to hold the kale and radicchio, heat the olive oil over medium-high heat and add onions, a good pinch of salt and a grinding of pepper. Cook about 8 minutes until melted. Add the garlic and cook 1 minute. Add the cavolo nero, the radicchio and another good pinch of salt and cook, tossing the leaves and onions regularly until tender, about 10 minutes. Drizzle with the virgin olive oil and season with more salt and pepper if needed. Keep warm.

TO ASSEMBLE

Sea salt and freshly ground pepper

6 steelhead filets, about 3/4-inch thick, preferably wild and local

3 tablespoons olive oil

Lightly salt and pepper the steelhead filets. Place 1 large or 2 medium sauté pans over medium-high heat. When hot add the olive oil. When the oil is hot, but not smoking, add the fish filets and cook until they are lightly golden on the first side, about 2 to 3 minutes. Turn the fish over with a spatula and cook 1 to 2 minutes. The steelhead is best medium rare and bright pink in the center. Divide the the smashed Jerusalem artichokes among 6 warm plates. Top with the cavolo-radicchio braise then the filets of steelhead. Spoon 2 to 3 tablespoons of the lemon-olive pesto over each filet.

Spider Cake

Gorgeous plates by Lisa Neimeth. Post to follow.

I HAD NO CHOICE BUT TO MAKE the Spider Cake touted in Jonathan Reynolds' boisterous homage to breakfast in the NYT a few years ago. Lord he went on! Now we've made the thing so often it's surely properly considered an old-family-recipe. And to say it's a favorite is to understate the feeling mightily.

The dish won't let you go. It's a cornbread eclair for God's sake, a rough, layered soufflé. Even the old-line southern manners of the recipe are provocative: you purposely sour milk with vinegar; pour cream into the middle of raw batter for the addictive moist center lift. It wobbles when it comes out of the oven. And it's breakfast food in the most old-fashioned sense: fortifying tender grain made opulent with dairy, hovering on the savory end of sweet. This is definitely not your modern, trifling sugar bomb.

So, I ask myself, why not spread the love and blog it (now that I do that sort of thing)? But you are warned, once you let this crazy-ass, cream-cracked, under-sweet confection into your world it takes over. Even when I have no earthly intention of losing a wide-open Sunday morning to baking, I'll stumble into the kitchen to find our coffee pot barricaded with bags of cornmeal, the fridge stocked with heavy cream we don't normally dabble in, and slow chants of "Spider Cake!" rising to the rafters. Your life won't be your own.

SPIDER CAKE

2 cups milk

4 teaspoons white vinegar

1 cup all-purpose flour

3/4 cup yellow cornmeal

3/4 cup sugar

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 teaspoon salt

2 eggs

2 tablespoons butter

1 cup heavy cream

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Combine milk and vinegar in a bowl and set aside to sour.

In another bowl, combine flour, cornmeal, sugar, baking soda and salt. Whisk eggs into the soured milk. Stir into dry ingredients and set batter aside.

Melt butter in a 12-inch cast-iron skillet. Pour in the batter. Pour cream into the center, slide skillet into the oven and bake until golden brown on top, about 45 minutes. Slice into wedges and serve warm.

Possible variations? Add a cup of fresh sautéed Summer corn, the scrapings of a vanilla bean...