Brain Food
January 20, 2005
This terribly sad but well written book by Mark Kurlansky is a gripping history from the perspective of the cod. Kurlansky tells how fishing for this gadiform has deeply affected the wealth and development of many nations and technologies. I’m thinking the Flounder by Gunther Grass that I read back in the day but even more I’m thinking Fish Story, the mega-artwork by Allan Sekula, about the ’sweatshop called the Pacific’. (Sekula’s visual history Fish Story was part of the the last Documenta XI in Kassel. One photograph in particular gave me goosebumps. You see a ship painter giving the Exxon Valdez a new name…fishy stuff.)
It turns out that cod in the form of stokvis (wind dried cod) turned out to be some good thinking-man’s protein for the Norsemen. That extra portable brain-power enabled them to encounter New Foundland in 1000, where they also encountered the Beothuk People who had already discovered it and were not enamoured with the idea of sharing their space with the pink and hairy people from across the puddle.
Basques added salt to the stokvis recipe to make salt cod increasing the quality of the preservation and enabling Basque fishermen to to travel even farther - to the mouth of the St. Lawrence river. When explorer Jacques Cartier got there raring to claim his ‘discovery’ he encountered almost a thousand Basque fishing vessels. And a bunch of angry native Beothuk people getting pissy about the incessant attention.
Cod is inextricably tied to land (to dry it) and salt (to preserve it) and Salt is in fact the title of another one of Kurlansky’s wonderful books.
debra at 20:54 | Comments (3) | post to del.icio.us
Keeping one’s vows
January 19, 2005
Remember in October when I had just bought Roxanne Klein’s R A W and I reported how it made me homesick for Laurel’s Kitchen? And then upon rereading Laurel’s Kitchen I made a vow to ‘take cashew cheese seriously’ from now on?
Well, I have been taking cashew cheese making very seriously indeed, and I believe I have improved upon the Good Ladies’ recipes. Pictured above are some of the steps in this easy process (from l to r: placing the blended cashew butter in a cheese cloth, cheese cloth hanging in the window, cheese cloth dripping with cashew milk and dark winter sky).
debra at 17:09 | Comments (4) | post to del.icio.us
Like raw beans in a hippy’s beard
January 18, 2005
In less than 2 months I will be heading off to India again and as I prepare the Indian version of the Nomadic Banquet Workshop I find myself hunquering for Indian food. I’ll be writing about the Nomadic Banquet in future culiblog entries.
Hippy Beard is the nickname I gave to the Southern Indian (Karnatakan) mung dal salad that I adored in Bangalore and adapted to my own liking once back in the Heimatt. If you thought that nothing good could ever come from eating raw beans, you really need to try this simple recipe. The salad is very light and the good kind of crunchy with no negative… uh, aspects.
The cukes I replaced with zukes and unfortunately I had to omit the ‘curry leaf’ because I can’t find it anywhere in Europe. It doesn’t take a whole lot of imagination to figure out why I call this salad Hippy Beard and just like in a real hippy beard this salad keeps for a few days. I’ll ask my buddy Zeenat Hassan (who is neither a hippy nor does she sport a beard) for the real name of this refreshing snack with the cheerful ‘mouth-feel’. It was her menu choice for that fine afternoon in Bangalore… (recipe follows).
(Please read more… )
debra at 19:01 | Comments (3) | post to del.icio.us
