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.

Baked Sweet Potatoes With Nutmeg-Paprika Sauce, Leftover Roast Chicken, and Bok Choy

For once I'm writing a recipe (with pictures!) for one of my dinner improvisations.  The idea for the sauce came from my friend who likes sweet potatoes with olive oil, paprika, nutmeg, and salt.  The lemon in the sauce--used mostly because I had excess lemon juice from making a pear tart--is a bit intense, but seems to mellow over time and with bland sweet potato.  At first I thought it was a mistake using lemon juice, but it quickly grew on me.

The paprika didn't really taste like parika, and considering
that it didn't turn the oil bright red either, it probably wasn't.
Maybe it was mace.

For two:

2 sweet potatoes (I used "Japanese yams" which have dark purple skin and light yellow flesh)

1 largish bok choy plant

some leftover roast chicken

sauce:

juice of 1/2 a lemon

1 1/2 tablespoons olive oil

1 egg yolk

1/3 cup chicken stock 

1 teaspoon paprika

1 teaspoon nutmeg

~1/2 teaspoon salt

for bok choy:

1 tablespoon cooking oil

2 teaspoons tamari

2 teaspoons mirin

Put sweet potatoes in oven, and heat to 375 F.  When sweet potatoes are soft all the way through (maybe 45 minutes), take them out.

Heat a large saucepan to medium-high heat.  Chop bok choy into biggish pieces, separating the leafy pieces from the stemmy pieces.  Coat saucepan with cooking oil, and fry the stemmy pieces for a few minutes, browning them a little.  Add leafy pieces, tamari, and mirin, and cover for another few minutes.  Uncover, stir, and reduce liquid (on the same medium high heat) for a minute or two so it begins to coat the bok choy.  Transfer bok choy into a bowl.  Remove from heat.

Whisk together egg yolk, lemon juice, and chicken stock.  When the saucepan has cooled down a bit, put on medium-low heat and add olive oil and paprika and nutmeg.  Stir a bit while the spices temper for a minute.  Add liquid mixture, whisking as you do so.  Take a tablespoon or so size piece of baked sweet potato, remove the skin, and mash it into the sauce with a fork.  Continue whisking.  Reduce the sauce for a few minutes.  If it's too thin add some more sweet potato, or flour, but it shouldn't bee too thick--more of a gravy consistency.  Remove from heat.

On a plate open a sweet potato up with a fork, and pour sauce over it and heated leftover chicken (microwave or bake on low heat in a covered container).  Serve with bok choy.

Sweet Potato Pie II: Look look, pictures!

In reverse chronological order:

The second pie baked and fallen.

Just out of the oven, puffed.

Excess crust cut off with a knife.

Notice the spatula marks--the filling is thicker this time because I used more sweet potato but left the rest of the recipe unaltered from the first pie.

Lots of extra crust.

First pie baked.

Unbaked.  See?  This filling is much more liquid.

Prebaked crust.  I removed the weight for the last five minutes of baking.

Using not quite fully cooked sweet potato pieces as a weight to keep the crust from  becoming a balloon in the oven.

Boiling sweet potatoes.

Sweet Potato Pie

I made sweet potato pie.  I followed the recipe from the first google hit for "sweet potato pie," with some alterations.

Is this worth writing about?

I made some very broad statements in the last post, as I'm wont to do.  While I was making the crust for the pie, I kept having to look back at the recipe I adapted from Helen Rennie to remember quantities.  Despite making pastry dough many times, I needed that recipe.  Or at least I needed its list of quantities.  The recipe is not disposable.  It's a kind of helper--somewhere to defer my memory.  It's an instance of a cliche of how the internet has changed the nature of knowledge: it's not so important if one remembers everything, so long as one knows where to look.  In the case of recipes however, the internet is not necessary at all--encyclopedic cookbooks have been serving as cyborg extensions of memory for a long time.

So I don't need to know how to make pastry dough.  I wrote it here in this blog.  The blog remembers how.  To return to my question, is this worth writing, let's compare this to my diaries.  I have boxes and boxes of diaries.  Most of them I have read at least twice.  Reading them is at once familiar and surprising--on the one hand, reading them triggers memories and I might also recall writing what I wrote, on the other, I had, up until reading it, forgotten much if not all of what I wrote.  One is almost always remembering in one way or another, but there is obviously nothing cumulative about it.  Reading a diary doesn't add to a collection of things I remember, but puts me in a different stream of remembering.  Through reading the diary some memories come to life again--I think about them again briefly, they might crop up over and over for a long time.  In other words, the diary must be read, and reading happens in time.  Having "saved" (the anxiety of losing memories drove much of my diary writing) these memories in a diary, only in the unread text of the diary might they be saved.  Only without a reader might the text be said to exist as a totality.  But not really, of course--it isn't anything without being read, is it?

But this blog is not a diary.  I'm not trying to record the ephemera of experience here.  A recipe is simply supposed to record a procedure in a way that's followable.  Actually this isn't so simple, as I've discussed before.  And thankfully.  Wouldn't it be awfully dull if even just a recipe could be written in the universal register?  This suggests another purpose for a recipe: to not be quite followable.  Not that a recipe writer has to try to do this, but a recipe's potential to confuse, mystify, or unintentionally inspire might be valued.  Because apparently I need to subject recipes to the literary theories of decades ago.

The pie was good.  The crust I thought was a bit too hard, although someone else liked it, called it "crunchy."  I prebaked the crust for fifteen minutes or so before filling it, using the sweet potato pieces in tinfoil as a weight to keep the crust from puffing up.  Improvising a weight was the most enjoyable part.  Next time however I'll just fill the unbaked crust, so that the crust turns out softer.