Andrea Reusing: Cooking in the Moment

I picked up Cooking in the Moment for two reasons.  First, it fit the seasonal theme of my last post. Second, Reusing is posed on the back with a wool scarf and a black and white rooster under her arm.  I admit it, I have thing for women who know how to accessorize with poultry.  The photographer may have overdone the backwoodsy feel of the book: farmers in overalls, coolers in the trunk of a station wagon, a family cracking crabs at a table sawn out of a tree-trunk. I like the picture of a contraption for catching fruit flies and the jar of fat labeled “Not for Human Consumption,” but all this overlooks the eclecticism of Reusing’s recipes. She’s not another down-home cook like Paula Deen, running out into the field to slather butter on the tender shoots of corn as they first break from the soil. Reusing is from Manhattan originally; she grew up eating in China-town; her North Carolina restaurant is pan-asian, and her cookbook is global.

If you want authentic Southern, go with the Lee Bros.  If you want farm, go with River Cottage. Cooking in the Moment is more about doing simple–and sometimes clever–things with fresh ingredients. And drinks.  I guess that’s the third reason I bought the book. “The Homeward Angel,” reads like a biography. Named after the NC cemetery angel that inspired Thomas Wolfe–“Look homeward angel now, and melt with ruth”–it’s really just a Manhattan in disguise: 2 ounces rye whiskey, 1/2 ounce sweet vermouth, 1/4 ounce orange bitters,  two pickled sour cherries and a splash of the brine.  Can a manhattan be authentically North Carolina?  Who cares. Maraschino cherries are usually what keeps me away from manhattans, including the island. And sour cherries, who knew?  We’re fortunate enough to get good sour cherries as far north as Philadelphia, but only for a couple of weeks out of the year.  Reusing also has a wicked cherry relish–one sliced red onion, sixteen pitted cherries, and two tablespoons of red wine vinegar–that goes with just about anything pork or poultry.  She uses the leftover stones to flavor panna cotta. Doesn’t that sound like someone who knows how to make the best of the most local, most ephemeral of ingredients?

I like that local and fresh isn’t equated with regional or parochial.  There may be southern twang to the ingredients, but if she uses okra, it’s fried with Indian spices.  If she’s pickling, it’s just as likely to be pumpkin with with thai chiles as it is green tomatoes. If she can’t find ingredients nearby, she actively encourages local farmers to grow them.  So there’s recipes for flash-fried shishito peppers alongside more conventional recipes for grilled broccoli with garlic and anchovies.

That said, it’s difficult to sustain simple, whimsical, and worldly all at the same time.   The results are uneven. One week you may get a salad made with watercress with a fried egg and black sesame sauce, and another week you might get a perfectly ordinary recipe for fried chicken. Okay, I get it, it’s North Carolina.  She has to include fried chicken. But is chicken seasonal?  Hers aren’t even local;  she fed-exes hers from Kansas. Don’t get me wrong.  I like fried chicken in all its varieties, but there are so many other recipes out there, it’s hard to contribute something new.  William Styron devoted a whole essay  to Southern Fried chicken.  How do you compete with that?  Apparently with, 1) heat oil, 2) add chicken.

The timeline is the most frustrating constraint. I like the idea of a cookbook where recipes are organized not just by seasons or months, but by weeks; I’m just not sure it works. The so-called “seasons” of foods vary considerably in their peaks and duration. It doesn’t follow the rhythm of a metronome. Cooking in the Moment is slender too, so you may have only two recipes for any one time of year.   I like to stick with a cookbook, immerse myself in it for a few weeks or months, and move on, so this was painful. I bought the book in “Early April,” so I had to choose from cooking trout in a skillet or making bacon and eggs in a paper bag over a campfire.  It was raining, so I couldn’t exactly go and dig a fire pit in the backyard.  I picked up some of the early season trout fillets at the Ardmore’s farmers market, dusted them with cornmeal, and cooked them in a skillet.  It was the best store-bought trout I’ve ever made, but I still felt like I was missing something because I wasn’t in a tent in the Poconos. In the meantime, I was aching for “broiled ripe figs with warm ricotta and honey,” but I had to wait until September.  I’ll probably also have to move, preferably to  because figs are never local here.

Bottom line,  it serves as a good model for how to think about food and place, but don’t try and follow it lock-step.  I’ll probably never be true locavore, because I can’t give up Spanish vinegar, tropical fruits, or for that matter citrus.  If Pennsylvanians went truly loco, they’d probably all get scurvy. But I know to look for apples during apple season.  If there’s one thing the Northeast does well it’s grow apples,  pick apples, store apples, distill apples, and contemplate apples.  “My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree / Toward heaven still”.  You’ll never see a Robert Frost poem about okra.

Seasonal I: Local Flavors

Several months ago, I vowed to eat more foods in their prime.  I will eat more from our garden. I will seek out the best of  farmers’ markets. I will search for fruit and vegetables most in season and most recently picked.

Since then, the woodchucks ate all our zucchini, the squirrels made off with our tomatoes, and rabbits have gradually nibbled away at all the rest. “Nothing like gardening to turn mild, pacific folk into ravening, blood-lusting murders,” my colleague insists, but Ann, God love her, continues to approach pest control organically. She constructs magical wards from dog hair, garlic pellets, and even coyote urine.  Sadly, our suburban squirrels have never seen a coyote before, so they don’t seem put out by it. They continue to roll the still green tomatoes across the yard where they can eat them in peace.  I even found a half-eaten one on the picnic table. Are they borrowing our lawn furniture as well?

“At least the woodchuck is keeping its distance,” Ann said.

“So are the neighbor kids,” I add. And it’s true.  Last year they continually leapt over the chain-link fence, looking to play catch on a wider expanse of green.  Now they just pace back and forth on their lot, looking feral.

I’ve also been somewhat frustrated with the range of cookbooks that genuinely help me with my newfound quest.  Publishers, it seems, have discovered that people like farmers’ markets. They know we read Michael Pollan and we’re willing to pay 40 or 50$ for a book that will bolster our belief that locally sourced, organic vegetables are noble.  Ann, who grew up on a farm in Northeast Pennsylvania, insists that this is just called “food,” but I remind her that when she was growing up, her organic sweet potatoes came with marshmallows.  Today’s organic and locally sourced food is not about picking your dinner up off the ground or out of a spiral-bound junior-league cookbook. Locally sourced food is sophisticated, elegant, and politically subversive.  It does not come with marshmallows.

But here’s the problem.  As much as one may want to get behind simple, local and seasonal aesthetic of someone like Alice Waters, it seems that it’s actually difficult to capture that effectively in a cookbook.   I remember the disappointment I felt the first time I looked at a Chez Panisse cookbook.  Really?  This is what the fuss is all about?  Chez Panisse’s reputation was built on the quality of its ingredients and the skills of its chefs. Without these, the cookbooks were simply spartan recipes for Caprese salads.

More recent cookbooks have tried to address this trend.  They’re as much about procuring ingredients as they are about preparing them.  The more a writer gets into talking about local sources and markets, however, the more one realizes that his or her locale isn’t mine or yours.  I’m also somewhat impatient with cookbooks that are organized by season.  It’s hard to accept that during the summer, I’m can only use summer recipes, or when I have a summer like this one, the cucumber recipes. Meanwhile there are all these pages of sour cherries, fiddle-head ferns, blood oranges and quinces that are either out of place or out of time.

The first book to wrestle with these issues seriously, I think, was Deborah Madison’s Local Flavors: Cooking and Eating for America’s Farmers’ Markets.  This book was useful several years ago when Ann and I joined our first CSA, the Red Hills Farms west of Philadelphia.  Like most new CSA members we had questions like, “Is Kohlrabi food?” and “No seriously, do people actually eat this?”  There is a whole range of alternate dimension vegetables, like garlic scapes.  They grow exactly as plants shouldn’t, in stiff curling stalks like crazy straws; if left to their own devices they will flower in a colorful globe.  Yes, they are part of the garlic plant that everyone loves, but we don’t see them in grocery stores any more than we tend to see heads on chickens.  Scapes are too mild to use as an aromatic and too tough to sprinkle on as an afterthought, like chopped scallions. So what do you do with them?  You look in a book like Local Flavors.

And you don’t find them.

Don’t get me wrong.  Madison gets most of it right. Kohlrabi is there, along with fiddle-head ferns, quinces and blood oranges.  But there’s no scapes, and this bothered me because that’s what I needed, a quick DYI reference for dealing with scapes.  Instead, I’m leafing through alluring pictures of citrus that only grow in Southern climates.

Madison’s admits to spending most of her time in Santa Fe markets, so perhaps that’s part of the problem.  But she says she’s writing a book for all America’s Farmers’ Markets.  Is that even possible?  Is it desirable? If one could cover all that territory, wouldn’t the book end up focusing on the most common things in markets — which would miss the point — or it would have to become encyclopedic — which also would seem to miss the point.  There are actually more recipes for Kohlrabi in her previous, utilitarian opus, Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, but it’s about as much fun to read as a phone book.  That sense of place, that sense of cooking in the moment that I’m looking for, isn’t here either.

I have a growing suspicion that blogs may actually be better for this kind of thing than cookbooks.  Local blogs can tip me off to when the sour cherries hit the market and explain what to do with them. But this is a cookbook blog, so I have to give books the benefit of the doubt.  Over the last two months, I have  experimented with the newest crop of books with mixed results.  I worked my way through the in-season part of Andrea Reusing’s Cooking in the Moment, which emphasizes not only cooking by seasons, but by the month and even week. I worked my way through Nigel Slater’s Tender, with its ultra-local emphasis on terraforming urban backyards. I also tried to overcome my prejudice against Chez Panisse style cookbooks and bought David Tanis’s A Platter of Figs, and The Heart of the Artichoke.   I’ll break these reviews into separate posts to make them easier to digest, but to ease the suspense a little, I’ll tell you advance.  None of them say anything about garlic scapes.

Nor do they have recipes for woodchucks.