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Neapolitan Cannelloni

December 29, 2024 by Diane Darrow

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Baked pasta dishes are a much-loved tradition of southern Italian cooking. The recipe for this one, my own, is from Tom’s and my first cookbook, La Tavola Italiana. It’s cheerfully old-fashioned, mildly festive, and quite (if I say so myself!) delicious, in the way it combines a few simple and familiar Italian ingredients.
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Here’s what it takes to serve four as a first course:

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At the back, eight four-inch squares of fresh egg pasta. In front, left to right, an egg, ¼ pound of mozzarella, an ounce of cooked ham, ¼ pound of ricotta, and 2 tablespoons of grated parmigiano cheese. The dish will reach its peak when made with the best imported mozzarella (buffalo milk, if possible) and ricotta (sheep’s milk, if possible) available. But it won’t be shabby, even with lesser varieties of those cheeses.
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Originally, I always made my pasta for cannelloni from scratch, but now a local store carries sheets of fresh lasagna dough – which is an advantage I take from time to time. I boiled these squares for just one minute, refreshed them briefly in cold water, and laid them out on a kitchen cloth to dry.
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To make the filling I crumbled the ricotta in a large bowl and mixed into it the diced mozzarella, chopped ham, parmigiano, egg, and a little salt and pepper.
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For the assembly, I opened a jar of my plain tomato sauce (made over the summer with San Marzano plum tomatoes) and spread a little of it on the bottom of an oiled baking dish.  At one end of each pasta square, I put a heaping spoonful of filling in a line, rolled it up, and placed it in the dish.
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When the dish was full, I drizzled a light coating of tomato sauce over the rolls, and sprinkled on two tablespoons of grated parmigiano and a generous tablespoon of olive oil.

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After 20 minutes in a 375° oven, the filling was swelling out of the ends of the rolls, the sauce was bubbling at the edges of the dish, and the grated cheese was mostly melted. The cannelloni were ready.
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That’s all there is to it and all there needs to be. Some diners may find the dish a bit dry, so I sometimes serve it with a small bowl of extra sauce on the table – but lightly sauced is the way it appears in Italy. Think of the sauce as a condiment, not a principal component. These cannelloni may have begun life as a peasant dish, but they have evolved into a restrained and elegant one.
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And speaking of things being all they need to be, this is the last post I’ll be adding to my blog. Fifteen years, I’ve been writing it, and I feel it’s time to retire. Retire only from blogging, that is, not from cooking. Tom and I will go on happily cooking, eating, and drinking together as well as we can, for as long as we can. May all my readers do the same!

Posted in Italian, Pasta, Starters | Tagged , , | 29 Comments »

Work in Progress: A Mushroom Tart

December 14, 2024 by Diane Darrow

This is the saga of an almost successful dish. The mushroom recipe I tried this week didn’t come out as well as I’d hoped, but it’s such a promising concept for a savory pastry that I’m determined to keep working at it until I get it right. The recipe is from Raymond Oliver’s magisterial book La Cuisine, which has given me delicious dishes that I’ve made for many years – including a wonderful mushroom croûte. I wanted this tart for my repertoire too.

To start, maybe I used the wrong kind of mushrooms. The recipe wants simply champignons – the common whites. This being a festive season, I bought one of the fancier varieties: ¾ pound of oyster mushrooms. These are very flavorful – wilder tasting – but usually need to be cooked a bit differently because of their high water content. Still, I’d always been able to cook off their excess liquid easily enough.

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Tom cleaned and cut up the mushrooms for me, discarding the hard parts at their bases. (That put me a little below the quantity desired for the recipe, but I hoped it would do.) Meanwhile, in a large pan I minced and softened in butter a small onion and half a large shallot, to which I added the mushroom pieces when they were ready.

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I sprinkled them with salt, pepper, freshly ground nutmeg, and lemon juice, and cooked them briskly, stirring often. To my surprise, these oyster mushrooms didn’t exude much water. I hoped that didn’t mean they weren’t as fresh as they should have been. Anyway, when all the liquid had evaporated, I stirred in half a cup of crème fraiche . . .

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. . . moved the pan off the heat, and left it sitting at the back of the stove until needed.

Next, I prepared the crust. Oliver’s recipe for pâte brisée, which uses an egg, makes substantially more dough than I’d need for an 8-inch tart, and I didn’t want to have leftover dough to deal with. So I chose an eggless Julia Child pastry recipe that I like, made it, and lined a small pie pan with the rolled-out dough.
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By then it was still only mid-afternoon, and the recipe says to serve the tart immediately after baking, so I put the empty shell in the refrigerator to relax, as instructed, and went away for a few hours to do other things – not thinking to put a cover on the oyster filling in its pan. This may have been a mistake.

When I returned in the evening to fill the tart shell, there didn’t seem to have been a problem with the filling. The crème fraiche had congealed around the mushrooms, but the mixture was still quite moist, and I assumed the cream would re-liquify in the oven.

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As the oven preheated I completed the recipe by adding a topping over the mushrooms. I measured out ⅓ cup of grated gruyère and ¼ cup of fine dry breadcrumbs. That amount of cheese seemed reasonable when I sprinkled it over the filling, but the breadcrumbs looked as if they’d make an awfully heavy dry coat. I went light on them.

The tart baked at 350° and was to have been done in half an hour. My different-from-Oliver’s pastry crust was still pale and soft at that time, so I had to give it another 15 minutes.

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As you can see, the breadcrumbs had taken over the entire surface of the filling, apparently fusing with the cheese, even though some cheese flakes hadn’t even melted. The finished tart didn’t look at all the way I’d imagined it.

And when we served it, the tart had no big burst of flavor from those normally rich-tasting oyster mushrooms. The filling was soft and bland underneath the gritty breadcrumb layer. (I scraped most of it off my slice.) You could just about taste that there were mushrooms in there. Even the pastry didn’t behave well: underneath the filling, the crust was almost soggy. Darn it!
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Nevertheless, I can’t believe this approach can’t produce an excellent mushroom tart. I’m going to keep after it, trying some or all of these modifications:

  • Use only common white mushrooms, or at most, cremini
  • Be sure to have the full weight of mushrooms
  • Slice them very thin
  • Increase quantities of onion and shallot
  • Don’t let the filling sit uncovered for any length of time
  • Use either Oliver’s pâte brisée recipe or another egg-based one
  • Par-bake the shell to lessen its absorbency
  • Skip the breadcrumbs entirely

Here’s one point in the project’s favor – though I’m not sure how to interpret it: When we reheated the rest of the tart a day later, its mushroom flavor had strengthened considerably. That’s enough hope for me to go on.

Posted in French, Hors d'oeuvre, Savory pastry | 2 Comments »

Côtes de Veau Franc-Comtoise

November 29, 2024 by Diane Darrow

I’m giving the name of today’s post in French because, in English, Veal Chops with Cheese sounds too pedestrian, like something sitting under a slice of Kraft American Singles. Be assured, this dish is more interesting than that. The recipe – which I found in the Beef and Veal volume of the Time-Life Good Cook series – is by Curnonsky, the famed French “prince of gastronomy” from the early 20th century. And the Franche-Comté region, now part of greater Burgundy, is known for fine food.

The recipe calls for one thick veal chop per person; how thick not specified. Tom and I decided an inch would be right, and he duly added two chops that size to his shopping list for the butcher. There’s a thing we tend to forget about butchers: just as a “baker’s dozen” means more than 12, a butcher’s “inch” is bigger than the inch on a ruler. The two rib chops we received were easily 1½ inches thick, and large: they weighed a pound apiece.
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We could almost have made dinner for both of us on one of those giant chops. But scaling down the other ingredients of this recipe for eight chops to quantities for one would have made them ridiculously small. So, onward with the two!

Preparing the chops themselves was straightforward. I melted two tablespoons of butter in a sauté pan and seared the chops on both sides, over high heat.
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Then I lowered the heat, salted and peppered the chops, covered the pan, and cooked them gently for 20 minutes.
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Meanwhile, I prepared the cheese. I mixed a cup of grated gruyère with half a beaten egg, a tablespoon of heavy cream, and a grating of nutmeg. When the chops were ready, I transferred them to a baking dish, spread the cheese mixture on them, and drizzled a tablespoon of white wine over each.
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Into a 375° oven the dish went. I had no idea what that topping was going to do – melt in? run off? firm up? crust over? The recipe wanted it to bake for only 10 minutes, being basted twice with the reserved butter from the sauté pan. That didn’t seem like much time to finish chops so thick.

And indeed it wasn’t. After 10 minutes, The meat was still quite resistant to piercing with a small, sharp knife. Tested again after seven more minutes, there still wasn’t much change. However, I thought I’d better get the chops out of the oven before their topping dried up and turned into a shingle.
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Happily, the cheese hadn’t changed much – only softened a little from the butter baste. And the whole dish looked and smelled appetizing, so I declared it done.

On our dinner plates, the chops were intimidating: they looked enormous – almost like juvenile tomahawk steaks. I have to admit, the meat was quite chewy, needing to be cut into very small bite-size pieces. But it was very tasty; and the unusual cheese topping combined surprisingly well with the chops. That topping would be very nice on pork chops too, I think.
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It’s clear that my veal chops needed much longer cooking time in the covered sauté pan – if in fact chops as thick as these would work with the recipe at all. I expect that I’ll try it again one day, if I can persuade our beloved butcher, Frank, to cut us truly one-inch chops.

Posted in French, Main dishes, Meat | Tagged , | Leave a Comment »

Some Regional Breads of France

November 13, 2024 by Diane Darrow

The anxieties leading up to, and in the aftermath of, the presidential election seem to have affected me most strongly with a fierce desire to bake breads. So I’ve been spending a lot of time with my copy of Bernard Clayton’s book The Breads of France, experimenting with specialty breads of the French regions.

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Cheese Bread from the Auvergne

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The Galette de Gannat is an ancient unleavened type of bread that Clayton updated to a yeast-based version. It doesn’t rise very much, but it’s rich with eggs, butter, and Gruyère cheese. Mine took quite a bit longer to rise than the recipe indicated, but patience paid off in the end. A wedge of the bread goes nicely with an afternoon glass of wine or as an adjunct to a dinner plate. Tightly wrapped, my loaf kept well for several days. After it dried out a little, it was still very good, lightly toasted and buttered, for breakfast.
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Rye Bread from the Touraine

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My attempts at rye bread have always produced heavy, dense loaves. I thought this Pain de Seigle might be lighter and airier, as it had to rise for most of three days. A starter that ferments for 24 hours is the basis for a sponge, which continues for another day; on day three the loaf is formed and left to rise lengthily also. Even so, my two tiny loaves didn’t behave: Those slashes in the tops were supposed to have opened and puffed up. I’m hoping very thin slices of them will work as cocktail breads, under smoked salmon or sturgeon.
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Corn Bread from the Basque Country

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Cornmeal is the only flour used in this Gâteau au Maïs, and it gets its rising only from egg whites. Egg yolks, melted butter, sugar, and salt are blended together in a bowl, and the egg whites, stiffly beaten, are folded in. I confess I added an extra white to mine, lest the rise not be enough. It came out much like a pound cake – quite sweet and only lightly corn-y.  Clayton recommends it with fruit for a dessert. We liked it better for breakfast, where slices were very happy to accept a slathering of butter.
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Pear Bread from the Auvergne

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Piquenchagne (interesting name!) looked like an ideal bread for autumn, being flavored with fresh pears. For a small loaf I peeled, cored, and pureed a ripe Bartlett pear; then stirred in acacia honey, an egg, salt, and yeast. The dough, made with all-purpose flour, received two lengthy rises, and I brushed the top with an egg-milk glaze before baking. It made a light, tender loaf with just a hint of sweetness, but something must have gone wrong because we could hardly taste the pear! One day soon I’m going to try the recipe again with a stronger-flavored bosc pear.
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Spice Bread from Paris

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This Pain d’Épice seemed like a supercharged gingerbread. I diluted honey in hot water, then stirred in all this: Sugar, salt, baking powder, baking soda. Cognac, anise extract, cinnamon, ginger, cloves. Grated orange rind, chopped almonds, golden raisins. Twice as much rye as white flours. The mixture nicely filled a small loaf pan, baked in 40 minutes, and perfumed my whole kitchen with its spices. Clayton says it improves with age and will keep for several weeks, so I haven’t sliced into yet. I may save this loaf for the upcoming holidays.
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For a small household, this much baking in a short amount of time may have been a foolish overindulgence, but that’s what freezers are for. And I’ve got to say making all these breads was a good way to avoid paying attention to the news.

Posted in Baked goods, French | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments »

Discovering Corsican Cuisine

October 30, 2024 by Diane Darrow

 

Tom and I are just back from a week’s coastal cruise in the Mediterranean: circumnavigating Corsica on a fairly small ship (130 passengers). Neither of us had ever been to Corsica, and we were eager to experience the island’s rugged scenery, charming port towns – and, of course, its foods and wines.

While we’d enjoyed several European river cruises with this French company, Croisieurope, its ships’ menus had never highlighted the cuisines of the regions we passed through. Happily, that was not the case this time. There was a full Corsican dinner onboard one evening, and another on land, at an auberge fermier (farm-inn-restaurant). Both were excellent.
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The ship’s Corsican dinner started with charcuterie. Each plate had samples of five kinds of cured ham and five kinds of salumi, all Italian-like but with subtly different strong flavors. They seemed more rustic, with a down-on-the-farm character.

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The main course was veal, stewed in a rich brown sauce along with chunks of slab bacon and carrots, plus three kinds of bracingly fresh black and green olives; served over egg noodles. Excellent olives became something of a leitmotif of shipboard meals. We weren’t sure whether this was Corsican influence or the chef’s choice.

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Next came cheese: three wedges, said to be all from goat’s milk, though two seemed more like sheep cheeses. All were interesting and good, again with a kind of down-on-the-farm intensity.

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We finished with Fiadone, apparently Corsica’s favorite dessert: a kind of ricotta cheesecake. With it, chestnut ice cream (beneath the candied orange slice). Delicious.


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Our dinner ashore at the Domaine Pozzo di Mastri, a very large farm in the commune of Figari, was a model of rustic elegance. We dined outdoors, on a pleasant, cool evening, at picnic tables dotted about on a covered stone patio, and fireplaces burning around the edges. All the food the restaurant serves is grown, raised, foraged, and/or made on the property.

For an appetizer each person received half of a small eggplant that had been baked in a lively, chunky tomato sauce and topped with a sort of cheese-flavored bechamel.

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The main course was served family-style, in huge bowls for each small table. (I couldn’t get this picture of our bowls until all five of us had taken our first portions, but trust me – they started out full.)
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The meat was pork – luscious cuts from a spit-roasted whole pig, which must have been basted with aromatic herbs and wines or fruit liqueurs. Alongside was thick, creamy, lightly cheesy polenta. And a magnificent braise of wild mushrooms: lots of cèpes (porcini), along with several other kinds I couldn’t identify.
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Next came a board with five cuts of cheese and a pot of fresh fig jam. All were the same sheep cheese, called brocciu, distinguished by slightly different ages, densities, and treatments. They made interesting flavor contrasts. We loved the fig jam so much, I brought home a jar of it.
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Finally, dessert: for each person an individual chestnut cake, sitting in a pool of delicate custard sprinkled with chopped almonds. Mine was the best thing made with chestnuts that I’ve ever tasted. A perfect conclusion to a meal to remember.
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Now, it wasn’t only Corsican foods that we were so pleased were featured on this cruise. The ship’s wine list included a selection of Corsican wines, as well as standard French varieties. I’ll now pass the baton to Tom, who’ll share his impressions of the wines we drank.
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The ship’s wine list offered one sample each of Corsican white, rosé, and red wine, all from the same producer, Umanu, so there was no great stylistic diversity on display. All three were quite drinkable, if a little simple, but good, straightforward examples of Corsican wine for an audience that almost certainly had never tasted it before. That was certainly my case, so I found the mixture, in all the wines, of indigenous varieties and clones of some familiar ones quite interesting.

The white, of the 2022 vintage, was vinified from Vermentino and Bianco Gentile. (I still don’t know what that is.) It was crisp and lightly mineral-inflected, and matched well with the ship’s veal and pork dishes.

The rosé, a 2023 blend of Sciarellu – which seems to be a clone of Sangiovese – and Cinsault, had an interesting fruit-and-earth character, slightly robust, and to my palate even more pleasing with those veal and pork dishes. This rosé was for me the most interesting of the three.

The 2023 red was blended largely of Pinot Noir, whose character showed most clearly, and a barely perceptible Nielluccio, whose identity I do not know. This red drank well enough with most of the ship’s cuisine, but I found it fairly blah. Surely Corsica can make better reds than this: Diane and I have some serious research to do.

T.E.M.

Posted in Corsican, Desserts, French, Main dishes, Starters | 5 Comments »

Potato and Rice Pilaf with Peas and Cumin

October 13, 2024 by Diane Darrow

The recipe I’m writing about today ought to produce an interesting pilaf, and I believe it would have – if I hadn’t made one careless mistake and one poor choice in preparing it. I’m writing up the dish anyway, as a reminder to myself about paying attention.

I was eager to try the recipe when I came across it in Marie Simmons’ book Rice: The Amazing Grain. It calls for aromatic Basmati rice, which I rarely use because it typically wants lengthy soaking and straining before cooking. But Simmons declares that she never soaks or rinses it – period. That sounded so good to me that I went right out and bought some Basmati for it.

The recipe also attracted me by its use of potatoes along with rice, which was new to me. Potatoes together with pasta sometimes, yes, but potatoes with rice – who knows? To find out, I prepared ingredients for two servings, half a recipe’s worth.
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Here are ½ cup rice, ½ cup potato in ¼-inch cubes, ¼ cup thawed frozen peas, 1 cup homemade meat-and-vegetable broth, ½ teaspoon whole cumin seeds, 1 tiny minced garlic clove, and 2 tablespoons chopped onion.

The seeds of my misfortune are right there, as you’ll soon see.
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Merrily, I began the cooking. It was a process much like that of the excellent recipe for fideos in my preceding post, which may have influenced me to treat this too thoughtlessly.
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Sauté potato cubes in olive oil, stirring frequently, for 8 minutes

 

When golden, add onion and sauté for 3 minutes, then garlic for 1 minute

 

Stir in rice, sauté for 2 minutes

 

Add broth and salt, bring to a boil, stirring well

 

Cover and cook 12 minutes; sprinkle on peas, cover and cook 3 minutes

 

Now let’s look at what I did wrong. First, that chopped onion. You can see the bits darkening steadily in each photo. The onion was supposed to have been cut in ¼-inch cubes, like the potato, at which size I expect they could have held up in the dry sauté. It was plain careless reading of the recipe, and it gave my pilaf an unmistakable hint of burnt onion.

Next, that broth. It was supposed to be unsalted chicken broth. I had chicken bouillon cubes on hand, but they’re quite salty. My own good all-purpose broth is unsalted, so I thought it would do. But I’d recently mixed into it a big dose of water used for soaking dried porcini mushrooms, which contributed a very strong presence. So much so, it nearly blotted out the rice’s own delicate flavor.
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Well, the pilaf wasn’t inedible, but it wasn’t very good. At least we were having only the plainest of ordinary dinners that evening, so the disappointing dish didn’t spoil a special meal.

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I still believe this recipe can make an interesting pilaf. Will I try it again? Not sure: I’m too annoyed with myself just now to decide.

Posted in American, Indian, rice, Sides | 3 Comments »

Vermicelli Catalan-style

September 29, 2024 by Diane Darrow

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This tasty-looking dish of noodles is Fideos a la Catalana, the most unusual and interesting new recipe I’ve made in a long time.

Noodles of any kind are not something I associate with Spanish food and cooking. I happened upon this recipe in the Pasta volume of the Time-Life Good Cook series, where its Spanish title is “Italianated” for the English translation. It had a combination of ingredients and procedure that were uncommon to me, which prompted me to try it. I’m extremely glad I did.
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Its first unusual task was to chop a few pork spareribs into small chunks, right through the bone. Tom handled that for me with his trusty rubber mallet and Chinese cleaver.

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The second task was to break vermicelli or spaghetti into the short lengths that characterize fideos. Here they are, with the remaining ingredients set around them: half an onion, chopped; the spareribs; a tomato, peeled seeded and chopped; a chunk of soft Spanish chorizo, sliced; and chopped parsley.
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Then I began following the cooking instructions.
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Brown the spareribs in lard

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Add the onions and let them just start to brown

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Add the tomato and parsley

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Add the chorizo and cook for five minutes

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Stir in the fideos (impossible to do without shattering them to flinders, but taken care of in the next step)

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Pour in two cups of boiling water, add salt, and stir everything well

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Then I was to cover the pot and simmer it for 10 minutes, or until the fideos had absorbed most of the water and were cooked through. Which they did readily enough in that time, but the spareribs needed a little longer to tenderize.
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The result came out as you saw above, looking much like an Italian dish of spaghetti in a lightly tomatoed meat sauce, but tasting completely different. There was a luscious blending of all the flavors, largely orchestrated by the chorizo, producing an unmistakably Spanish effect. We loved it, as did the bottle of young Rioja we drank with it.

The only change I’ll make next time is to cook the spareribs longer by themselves at the beginning, so the meat will come more easily off the bones. Other than that, I’m delighted to have discovered this unusual preparation for pasta.

Posted in Main dishes, Pasta, Spanish | Tagged , | 4 Comments »

Small-Dish Discoveries

September 15, 2024 by Diane Darrow

Lately, my cooking experiments have been small and fairly diverse, as I’ve tried to keep our family meals appropriate to the hot/cold, wet/dry, still/windy fluctuations of our recent weather. A cheesy appetizer here, a seafood soup there, a simple vegetable one day, a more processed vegetable another. Happily, these four specimens all came out well.
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Simca’s Croques-Madame

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While I’ve occasionally enjoyed a croque-monsieur – essentially a ham and cheese sandwich pan-fried in butter – I never liked its companion, the croque-madame. Adding a coat of bechamel sauce and a fried egg to the female version is just too much muchness. Far more interesting to me was this recipe I found in Simca’s Cuisine, by Simone Beck.

A thick mixture of grated gruyère, milk, flour, baking powder, Cognac, paprika, and cayenne is spread on single slices of bread. Drizzled with melted butter and run under a broiler until the tops are golden brown, these humble croques make a delicious small appetizer or snack.
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Maryland Crab Soup

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I’d have called this soup a chowder, since it’s full of carrots, onions, celery, potatoes, and tomatoes, in addition to crabmeat. But the little promotional cookbook Maryland Seafood, where I found the recipe, calls it just “soup.” Tom, who spent several years in Baltimore, tells me they never use the word chowder down there. Maybe it’s a New England term?

Cooking begins with water and the first three vegetables named above, plus butter, Old Bay seasoning, and Worcestershire sauce. After some time, the potatoes go in; later, the tomatoes; finally the crabmeat. Bowls of this made fine eating – a rich and lightly piquant concoction.
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Green Beans with Pancetta and Red Onions

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As an everyday vegetable, farm-fresh green beans rarely get any embellishment from me. But it’s nice to know of ways to dress them up a bit on occasion. This good, simple treatment is from Michele Scicolone’s Italian Vegetable Book.

You parboil and drain green beans. In a skillet you lightly brown slivers of pancetta (cured, unsmoked pork belly) in olive oil, then add and soften sliced red onion. Stir in the beans and cook gently until they’re tender. Serve, sprinkled with salt, pepper, and chopped parsley. A very nice flavor combination.
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Grated Corn Pudding

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As fresh corn season winds down, I wanted to find one more new way to cook corn. I chose this Louisiana corn pudding recipe from The Plantation Cookbook, by members of the Junior League of New Orleans.

For two servings, I grated two raw ears of corn, then stirred the kernels and their juices together with a little milk, an egg, melted butter, sugar, salt, pepper, and a drop of Tabasco. I poured the mixture into a small earthenware dish and baked it in a low oven for an hour. The pudding came out with a lovely, tender texture and an intense, pure corn flavor.

Posted in American, Cheese, French, Italian, Seafood, Sides, Soup, Starters, Vegetable | Leave a Comment »

Easy Buttermilk Peach Cobbler?

September 1, 2024 by Diane Darrow

I’m a great fan of fruit cobblers, not least because they’re such easy desserts to make. So when the New York Times recently ran an article about an “easy” peach cobbler recipe, I was curious to see what was easier than usual about it.

Cobbler is a name covering a few different kinds of baked desserts. The kind I like to make uses a pastry crust (like this one). I roll out a round of dough, drape it over a baking dish, pile fruit and sugar into it, fold over the edges to partially contain the filling, and bake it. Another kind of cobbler puts fruit and flavorings into the dish first, then tops it with a sweet biscuit crust.

The newspaper’s cobbler (see it here) is a variation on that second kind. I tried it, scaling down the recipe to two-thirds of the quantities for our two-person household. Let me tell you, “easy” is not the way I would describe this dish.

Unusually, it’s to be made, both on the stove and in the oven, entirely in one cast iron or nonstick pan – an eight-incher, in my case. Happily, my nonstick skillet of that size is oven-safe. Starting it on a stove burner, I put in sliced peaches, dark brown sugar, and lemon juice, which I stirred over medium heat until the sugar melted and the juices thickened slightly.
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As you can see, the pan was already nearly full by then. Hmm.

Per instructions, I transferred the peaches and their syrup to a bowl and, without wiping the pan, melted three tablespoons of butter in it and cooked until the butter was a deep golden brown. It created quite a bit of foam and residue, which I wasn’t told to skim off. I just turned off the heat and left it there.
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In another bowl, I combined flour, sugar, baking powder, salt, and buttermilk to produce a texture halfway between a thick muffin batter and a soft biscuit dough.
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This was to be spread over the top of the browned butter in the pan but not mixed in; followed by the peaches and all their syrup, again not mixed in. I looked at that little eight-inch pan, envisioning the overflow there’d be in the oven, and said No way!
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So I pulled out a full-sized glass pie dish and carefully layered the three components into it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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I put the dish in a 350° oven, where in 50 to 60 minutes the batter was to have risen up around the fruit and turned golden brown. It rose up all right, but it was very reluctant to color. After 10 extra minutes, the caramelized syrup seemed to be close to burning, so I declared the cobbler done.
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It was not very attractive. Granted, I might have overbrowned the butter at the beginning. But this cobbler looked as if someone had stuck a big wooden spoon into a just-baked peach upside-down cake and vigorously stirred it all around. Not an effect I’d be pleased to present to guests.
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I will say it tasted better than it looked. Extremely sweet and peachy, in a slip-slop sort of way. Still, making it required too much fuss for me to call it an “easy” cobbler. Perhaps for other home cooks, making the pastry that I like to use for my regular cobblers would equally be too much fuss. Chacun à son goût.

Posted in American, Baked goods, Desserts | 6 Comments »

Three Summer Tomato Dishes

August 19, 2024 by Diane Darrow

One consolation for this summer’s unrelenting heat is that it’s a great year for tomatoes. Especially for the fat, ripe heirloom varieties displayed on the farm stands at my local greenmarket. On my twice-weekly shopping trips there, I never miss a chance to replenish my supply. Here are some new ways I’ve been enjoying them.

A Spanish Tomato Salad

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This is a Murcian recipe from Teresa Barrenechea’s The Cuisines of Spain: Exploring Regional Home Cooking. The tomatoes are all to be peeled, and their spicy vinaigrette dressing is to be made entirely with a mortar and pestle.

To dress a salad for two, I mashed a clove of garlic to a paste with salt; pounded in half of a peeled, chopped tomato; added red wine vinegar, black pepper, ¼ teaspoon of cumin seeds, and ¼ teaspoon of sweet smoked pimentón; pounded and mashed everything together again until it was all fairly smooth; then added 3 tablespoons of olive oil, stirring vigorously with the pestle.

The two main tomatoes for my salad, peeled and thickly sliced, were too tender and fragile without their skins to be tossed with dressing. They had to be laid out on a plate, with the dressing poured over them. The skinless pieces had a curiously different mouth-feel. Very pleasant, and a very lively vinaigrette.

 

Ricotta and Tomato Crostata

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The big color photo of a 10-inch free-form tomato tart in Michele Scicolone’s The Italian Vegetable Cookbook is irresistibly tempting. The small one I made here in a 7-inch pie dish was much more unassuming, but kind of cute. And quite easy to make.

For the filling, I mixed ½ cup of whole-milk ricotta with 3/8 cup of grated Parmigiano, half a beaten egg, a tablespoon of chopped fresh basil, and freshly ground black pepper. I spread that mixture on a shell of raw pastry dough; topped it with alternating slices of red and gold heirloom tomatoes; sprinkled more Parmigiano over them; and folded over the pastry edges, pleating them as I went around.

The tart baked for 45 minutes at 425°. Tom and I had half of it at room temperature as a first course for dinner and reheated the rest for the next day’s lunch. Both ways, it was very tasty.

 

Scalloped Tomatoes

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This pitiful picture does no justice to a very interesting preparation. I’d expected that the recipe, from James Villas’s book Country Cooking, would produce a simple, low-key version of provençal tomatoes. But its use of butter, rather than olive oil, turned it into a whole other creature. Here’s how it came about.

I took a slice off the tops of two medium-size tomatoes, scooped out a shallow pocket in each one, and chopped the loose tomato flesh. I minced about ⅓ cup of onion and sauteed it in a generous tablespoon of butter for 5 minutes. I added about ¾ teaspoon each of chopped fresh basil and thyme, the tomato flesh, salt and pepper; and sauteed it all for another 5 minutes. I spooned the mixture into the pockets of the tomatoes, and on each one spread a layer of dry breadcrumbs and an extra pat of butter. They went into a 400° oven for 25 minutes.

In the baking, all the butter seemed to infuse itself into the tomatoes, bringing the onion and herbal flavors along with it. The effect was surprisingly delicious.

I’d never consciously matched butter with cooked tomatoes before, but I’m surely going to do so again. In fact, I’d like to increase the amount of filling, carve deeper pockets in the tomatoes, and finish the dish under the broiler, to better crisp and brown the breadcrumbs. In tomato season I can see these as a fine accompaniment to any simply cooked meat, fish, or fowl. (And maybe I can make them stand up straight in the baking dishes.)

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I used heirloom tomatoes for all three of these recipes. The heirlooms have been so good this year, they’re the only tomatoes we’ve been buying. They cost quite a bit more than regular tomatoes, but for us, the pleasure heirlooms give is worth their price.

Posted in American, Italian, Salads, Savory pastry, Spanish, Starters, Vegetable | 7 Comments »

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