Rooibos

I would never have liked rooibos were it not for Tick Tock's packaging. When I was on a collage meal plan, there were an assortment of tea bags, one of which was Tick Tock. Drawn by the bold white lettering on red, the fact that it said "rooibos" and "caffeine free" at the bottom completely passed by my attention. In other words, I mistook it for a brand of black tea, possibly akin to English breakfast.

(Not that I actually remember, but mistaking it for proper tea makes a better story than, say, drinking it because I wanted to avoid caffeine and had heard about rooibos. Because the point I'm trying to make is the allure of the packaging, not the benefits of decaffeinated beverages or the goodness of rooibos. But at some point, whether before or after I discovered Tick Tock I’m not sure, I was avoiding caffeine, having decided that coffee did terrible things to me. But even on that point I don’t know: was I reacting against coffee or black tea?)

It was only after a few days of drinking it that I realized that it tasted a bit strange. And come to think of it the color wasn’t right either. But I kept drinking it because it was Tea Time. I wanted to live the little picture on the box of cake and tea in a black pot.

Let us obsess over this picture. The picture’s small circular frame doesn’t show much, but what little it does suggests a whole scene. Although the framing feels somewhat incidental, the necessary elements of Tea are there: a teapot, two cups (not one), a milk pitcher, and a sugar bowl. The blue-stripe teaware is ornate yet rustic and set on a wooden table. The cake, too, straddles fanciness and simplicity. Yes, it is layered and trimmed, but one does not have to be a patisserie to make this cake, just a cook. I am tempted to say that this is colonial Tea rather than English Tea, which is not particularly surprising because this brand makes much of its being “from the founders of rooibos,” who of course were in South Africa. So the picture may be imagined as an image of how “the founders of rooibos” drank their rooibos back in 1903. Before Tick Tock came to bring us rooibos, we are to understand, there was this scene.

But I’m interested in the cake. It takes up a great deal of the frame. And I can’t seem to read its three-dimensional aspect. The problem is the top, which looks like icing, except that it has these strange dark swirls in it, and the top edge is irregular. So perhaps it’s a very fluffy topping, like a meringue. Except that while the left edge and the shape of the top edge suggests that the cake is sloping, the cut on the right shows it to be straight. But if the top of the cake is flat, why are there dark swirls, and why is the top edge irregular rather than smooth?

More than anything else, though, I want to know what kind of cake this is. Because obviously whoever painted this must have had a type of cake he or she was painting. All I can say is that it is yellow.

I think it’s time to make a yellow cake and drink rooibos brewed from loose leaves, longing for my longing for Tea.

Inedibles: Beet Cake and Boiled Turnip

As a certain song would put it: what is a cake with no one to eat it? I have complained, I have belittled, and I have relativized, but never* have I written on this blog about something I cooked and refused to eat.  How does one deal with inedible food, and just what is meant by ‘inedible’?

I began composing this entry before I made the beet cake. Specifically I planned to write that I began composing the entry before I baked or ate the beet cake that the entry was to be about. I was supposed to then connect this fact to the idea that I tasted the cake before I tasted it--an idea I have been developing (or perhaps only reiterating) in recent entries. But instead the real cake completely collapsed the cake I had imagined (in addition to itself physically collapsing). It went against my expectations in the most extreme way. I couldn’t even manage to eat more than a bite.

The photo from When Mia Cooks

After the last time I wrote about beets I googled beet cake, and, really, just looked for the most appealing images. The photo of uncooked batter in one recipe looked incredible: bright pink. Although the interior of the cake is hidden in all of the photos (all are taken from directly above the item), I suspect that it was in fact cake, and not whatever substance my ‘cake’ turned out to be.  Of course I didn’t exactly follow the recipe. My most egregious mistake, I think, was not measuring the amount of beets while following the measurements of everything else (eggs, flour, baking powder). But who knows. Now I want to write a recipe for something not at all appealing or expected, but photographs well. Watch out for that one. (Not that I imagine anyone is following any of the recipes I post.)

In preparation to be blogged, the process of creating the cake was photo-documented in detail. You can see the beets being boiled whole, releasing their wine-colored dye into the water. For some reason I decided that, contrary to the recipes I had read, I needed to boil the beets and puree them in a food processor rather than grate them into the cake batter. You can see the deep violet (even violent violet) batter, and the pink frosting. I reserved and then reduced the dyed water that the beets were boiled in, and used this liquid in the buttercream frosting. The reduced liquid had an overpowering taste, but the frosting was both delicious and pretty. You can see that the ‘cake’ that came out of the oven even looked like a cake on the outside, just like the photos from the recipe I didn’t follow. But look inside to see the strange, soggy result. It might be best described as beet puree with other things in it, as opposed to cake with beet puree in it.

What you can’t see is that I deliberately omitted sugar from the cake. I wanted to see how sweet a cake only sweetened with beets could be. Also I was motivated by the beet mythology that I established earlier.  The beets, I thought, should not be corrupted by their inferior cousin, sugar. My plan was to keep the sugar separate, to load enough sugar into the frosting that the cake would be sweet enough yet the beets would still remain beets. In the end omitting sugar from the cake only made it more disgusting than its texture did already.

Earlier I wrote of beets as an antithesis to taste in relation. I treated beets as a taste singularity around which language strains to find adequate comparisons. What happens when a singularity is baked into a cake? It intervenes. 

When I was carrying them home, the beets stained a library book I had in the same bag. One more beet just fell out of my bag. I had no idea it was still there, lurking.

It wasn’t just the beet cake that was inedible. Mashed turnip too. I assume this is the work of the beet. However I would also be willing to believe, given the legends surrounding mandrake root, that all roots are malevolently disposed. I had never tried turnips before. One reader pointed out that the turnip I boiled and mashed may not have been ripe. Do turnips ripen? “Doesn’t everything ripen?”

I feel obligated to describe how the turnip was inedible. I’ll go about this in a roundabout way by describing the anxieties that the guide to cooking turnips I found online gave me. While not explicitly saying so, the guide gave the impression that the turnip is a toxic vegetable, similar to, say, cassava. It warned that “turnips tend to have a bitter flavor if not boiled long enough, with at least ONE water change (usually two)!!” I had to extract the bitterness from them by changing the water, twice? Moreover for larger (and therefore more bitter) turnips “it is best to cook them uncovered so the bitter gasses can escape.” They have gasses? What was I trying to do, exorcise a possessed vegetable? If so I was not successful. The cooked turnip smelled nice, but I could not stomach it. It was not an immediate bitterness; it twisted slowly in my mouth, making all food distasteful for the rest of the evening. It was something evil. But I’m willing to believe that the evil can be more completely beaten out the turnip, if not entirely, and that the result would be tasty.

I was going to write about the (im)possibility of taste independent of other tastes. This was brought about by the realization that my writing usually peters out into thematic dissonance. Themes may be dissonant, but can they have no relation to one another? Can tastes? Circumstances changed , but I could have just the same written about bad taste (in)dependent of other bad tastes, or good tastes. I could have tried to answer the inane question: does the turnip I didn’t eat constitute a singularity of inedibility?

It turns out this was not an entry concerned with the ontology of inedibles. Instead I wrote a great deal about how the inedibles were cooked, and how they tasted. Their specific visceralness blinds me to the social construction of inedibility waiting just beyond the immediate “ew.”

* Except on one occasion.

Oh my buttons!

In The Mill on the Floss, Tom explains to Maggie why he will not be running away the next day.  “It’s the pudden,” he confides, “I know what the pudden’s to be--apricot roll-up--oh my buttons!”  I’ve never heard of a roll-up before except of course those strips of candied fruit puree that kids used to (do they still?) have in paper-bag lunches called “fruit roll-ups.”  I assume this is a pastry.  It sounds very appealing, but more appealing to a not especially wealthy nineteenth-century English family who only ever has such things on special occasions than to my contemporary palate.  Apricot roll-up, ever since I read that sentence, has taken on a vibrant and uncertain life in my imagination.  I keep thinking of the words nd of why Tom is oh-my-buttonsing about it.  Incommensurate images float unresolved in my mind.  How is it rolled up?  It is made from fresh, dried, or otherwise preserved apricots?  What kind of pastry dough are they rolled up in: pate brisee, pate sablee, puff pastry, yeasted dough, or something else?  What is apricot roll-up?  At this point a google search would not answer the question I’m trying to ask.  I don’t want to know what it was historically, what George Eliot may have been referring to.  Because I don’t know what it is I have begun to imagine something.  I want to know what that something is, and in what ways it might be brought into the world.

Or maybe, considering what I did recently bake, I don’t want to make it tangible at all, and I’m content letting it draw me toward baked semblances.  After making pear-ginger tarte tatin and sweet potato pie for Christmas, I still had some pie dough leftover in the fridge.  Thinking of apricot roll-up, I rolled the remaining dough into a roughly rectangular sheet, covered it in thin pear slices, sprinkled it with brown sugar, cinnamon, and nutmeg, rolled it up and baked it at 400 F.  Well, fifteen minutes in I became paranoid that it wouldn’t become properly crisp and turned it up to 425 F.  Also I tried to pucker the ends together to keep the juices from running out too much.  The juices did run out and burned to a black caramel at the bottom of the pan, but I liked it.  It was a roll-up.  The nice thing about a culinary fantasy defined by a single word with little semantic grounding is that it can be many things.

I was also pleased because this pear roll-up was made from things that just happened to be around.  Probably derived from the frugality endorsed by environmentalism and an ego-aspiration to quiet resourcefulness, this is also one of my foremost culinary desires.

Like the sweet potato pie of last entry, I liked it because of what I thought I was making as well as because it, I thought, tasted good.  Some vagueness or polyvalence in what I imagine I’m making seems to be a necessary part of this equation.  Taste is again mediated by fantasy, but instead of the enticing photos I referred to as enthralling (as in actually placing me in their thrall) motivators to make Mrs. Hudson’s Biscuits, tarte tatin, and apple strudel, this came of a written phrase.  Why do I romanticize the textual seed of this fantasy, and hold the photographic distastefully between thumb and pinky?

1 small round pate brisee

1 large pear

4 tablespoons brown sugar

1 1/2 teaspoons cinnamon

1/2 teaspoon nutmeg

Roll out pate brisee into a rectangle roughly twice as long as it is wide.  Halve and core pear.  Slice pear thinly.  Lay pear slices parallel to the shorter edge in two rows.  Sprinkle brown sugar, cinnamon, and nutmeg over pear slices.  Roll from short side to short side.  Pinch together the open ends of the roll.  Place roll in a baking pan with the seam facing up.  Bake at 425 F for about half an hour, or until the crust turns golden brown.

Taste

What makes a good tarte tatin? Going by the polite compliments of those who consumed the pear-ginger tarte tatin I made for Christmas dinner, my quibbles are excessive. Soggy crust does not matter. The way the butter rose to the top to form an off-white opacity does not matter. Hell, those things didn’t matter to me, either. I only wanted there to be more of it. Yet a sense of culinary aesthetics demands that the pears should not be laying in a pool of liquid when the tart is turned out onto a dish. (Maybe this could be avoided by using sugar instead of honey.)

There is also a sense that the making makes the dish, a conflation of the process with the result. The logic goes if I’m pleased with the pears boiling in honey--if it looks good, if it smells good--then the tart is good. This also goes for the sweet potato pie I made the same day. I liked its color (a bilious drab green), and what went into it. The light spices, the light sweetening of honey, the light color of the Japanese yam flesh, the thickness of the pie all came together in an aestheticism that had nothing to do with taste and yet constitutes a great part of taste. When I tasted it, it was the beauty of the process I was wishing for.

This is why it is necessary but impossible to separate taste from aesthetics, pleasure from ideas. Necessary because taste does not come of itself, and impossible for the same reason.

I might account for my former enthusiasm for the dozens of dense, eggy spice cakes by remembering my enjoyment of what went into them. There was a subtle balancing art of ingredients and spices that went into these cakes that was impossible to discern in the finished product unless you were me. It was possible for me to taste some hidden nobility in the cake despite the consistency which I could somehow deny. More likely I only now, several years later, remember them as dense and disgusting, and at the time there were not other possibilities that I knew of.

In honor of the cooking process’s interiority (if not the cook’s) rather than its ultimate appearance as taste to the world, the accompanying photos are of pear peels, pears boiling in honey, and unbaked sweet potato pie.

Excuse me.  Instead of "in honor of," the paragraph above should begin "to exploit," much like speeches that "honor" the dead.

Mrs. Hudson's Biscuits II: Hiding Behind Photography

This recipe is vastly improved using the right ingredient, corn flour, rather than the course corn meal that made the first time like eating sand.  The photo of the finished product I daresay is beautiful.

There has got to be a better way to
spread this into a circle.

I'm not sure, however, if they're "good."  It may look like a moist, dense cake, but the corn flour ensures a flat texture that dissolves into a paste of silt in the mouth.  It doesn't really taste baked--it's more like a grain paste molded into a pleasing shape, like a corn halvah.

This time I spread the dough in a round pie pan, baking it as a sort of giant cookie, and then slicing into eighths once it was glazed and cooled.  Which admittedly makes far larger biscuits than called for.

It's only the texture I'm iffy about--the flavors of lemon and corn go well together I think.

Why did I try this in the first place?  Because the photos looked nice.  Now I've taken an appetizing (I think) photo, in a different way, of more or less the same thing.  If this weren't such an oddity, the world might be full of mouth-watering photos of it.  Culinary hobbyists' kitchens everywhere would pop out these sunny-looking treats.  The texture I've described as displeasing might instead be the subject of a poetics of delicacy.  Like chocolate, a few strange people would never like it, much to the confusion and even mild distrust of everyone else.  Or maybe not.  There's more to gastronomic phenomena than photography.

What did the gelatinous goodies of the 1950s taste like?  And I don't mean "what would they taste like if we made them today and tried them?"

Something You Really Shouldn't Make, and Something Else, Which Requires The First

The photo I saw on allrecipes.

1. Looking for a way to use four granny smith apples, I was going to try to make "easy apple strudel," which more or less amounts to surrounding apple slices with puff pastry and baking it.  Unable to find puff pastry in the store, I bought phyllo dough instead, thinking that surely I could use this for something involving apples.  The something I stumbled into on allrecipes was also a "strudel," and seemed to function upon a principle of turning phyllo into puff pastry by layering butter between each sheet.  That, it turned out, was a very optimistic reading of the author's thought process.  Granted, I didn't follow the recipe exactly.  The gist seemed to be: layer about eight sheets of phyllo with melted butter in a pan, then put some apples, sugar, and whatever else you want on top of it, and then... and then what?  Here the text of the recipe says one thing, while the photo clearly shows something quite different.  The recipe reads "roll the sheets up to form a log shape."  The photo looks more like the edges were rolled up to prevent juices from spilling out.  For reasons somewhat murky to me, I went for the photo.  It occurs to me now that anyone can submit a photo for a recipe on allrecipes.  Food photography incites a strong mimetic impulse, but here the assumption that the photos accompanying a recipe come from the author's execution of the recipe, filling out the vagaries that the recipe's words have left, is wrong.  In this case the photo is of someone else's (mis)execution of the recipe.  Allrecipes is thus where a recipe's signified is set adrift.

The web 2.0 mechanism has wide limits, but of course there are plenty of other instances of dissonance between a recipe and its accompanying photography.  In those lavish coffee table cookbooks filled with beautiful photos that take up whole pages, the recipes often lack the finishing touches that made them look so good in the first place.  I have this Thai cookbook that mostly consists of photos of the countryside and its people living a far more aesthetic life than anyone possibly could.  In all the photos the dishes have these amazing garnishes, are placed on rustic tableware, and sometimes even contain ingredients that aren't in the recipe.  What draws me to make a particular recipe in the book is of course the photo, but not only is the recipe inadequate--it is impossible to recreate the photo unless you live in a fantasy version of Thailand.  In other words, rather than follow the recipe, you're better off going to a very upscale Thai restaurant in the US.  Yet if you do follow the recipe, it will be a medium through which to experience the photo.  Though you can see that your dish is not as it is pictured in the book, you taste the photo.

My version.

In the case of this "strudel," the photo fantasy backfired: tasting what I made didn't confirm that my version pales in comparison to the pictured, but rather it told me that what was pictured wasn't that great. It tasted about like it looked--okay.  The phyllo at the edges curled up and turned crunchy, which was mostly just annoying.  I ended up scraping most of the excess flakes off before putting a piece on a plate.    The bottom crust was far too tough, making it difficult to eat with a fork, as well as being an unpleasant texture.  The filling at least was nice: tangy, sweet, and cooked just right (the apples were neither mush nor crisp).

2. As a result of the above debacle, I now had a lot of browned phyllo flakes.  Rather than throw them away, I decided to turn them into a sort of bread pudding.  The pudding came out much better than the original "strudel" I think.  What follows is a very rough recipe, as I wasn't really measuring anything.

~2 cups phyllo flakes (I tore up some uncooked phyllo too)

2 eggs

~2/3 cup milk

~1/2 cup sugar

~2 tablespoons honey

~2 teaspoons cinnamon

~1 teaspoon nutmeg

a few drops of vanilla

~1 cup chopped almonds

~1/2 cup raisins

Preheat oven to 350 F.  In a bowl whisk together eggs, milk, sugar, honey (heat in a microwave first), cinnamon, nutmeg, and vanilla.  In a 8x8 baking pan, toss phyllo flakes, chopped almonds, and raisins.  Pour wet mixture over dry mixture.  Bake until the whole thing puffs up--maybe half an hour.

Ate My Soul and Gave Me The Recipe

As we discussed earlier, dear nonexistant readers, the ostensible purpose of a recipe is to facilitate recreations of the same result.  But of course this is not the whole story.  When you’re most in need of a recipe is when you’ve never made what the recipe tells you how to make.  At such a delicate time you take care to follow the recipe exactly.  Having never followed the recipe before, it is easy to misunderstand the recipe.  Sometimes, by sheer luck, the first time comes out flawlessly.  More often there are some kinks, which over the next few attempts, are worked out, and finally a satisfactory result is produced.  After this point, if you need the recipe at all any more, it is more as a memory map than an instruction set.


What is it you have created?  Your creation conforms to the limited contours that the recipe provides.  If you were after a replica of what the author sought to instruct you to make, however, there is no way of confirming this.  Sometimes there are photos, which often provide a more forceful impulse than the recipe itself--you see the photo and think “I want to make that.”  It’s sometimes easy to make it look right, sometimes it isn’t.

All these masturbatory, death-of-the-chef preoccupations aside, whether or not the recipe changes, you change.  At least, this is one way of accounting for culinary disappointments.  Tonight I made pasta with tomato-cream sauce and shrimp for dinner, and I ate it, but only because I was hungry.  The flavors were weak, and the textures even a little nauseating.  I’ve made pasta with tomato-cream sauce in countless different ways, some less satisfying than others.  And I keep making some form of it because I remember a few delicious instances of this dish.  But this time it’s been long enough I wonder if I have any idea what I’m after.  If I made what to me was a wonderful pasta dish a year ago, and ate it today, would I like it much?  There really isn’t any way of finding out empirically.  If I wrote down the precise recipe for those times when I made a particularly spectacular rendition, I doubt I would be able to reliably cook it again.  And I doubt I would want to.

A recipe is a much more intriguing beast than it may have appeared.


The general shape inconsistently described above also applies to me writing this entry.  Through writing, what I wanted to write changed.  What I thought I was writing changed.  These changes can hardly be tracked by the writing itself to create something coherent.  To me it appears that throughout the entry I forgot what I meant to write, and began on a new, somewhat related tangent.  By the end forgot the import of everything I had just written, summing it up as "intriguing."