Hold on, priorities

Some people have them so right. Congratulations, America. This letter, care of The New York Times, here.

New England

My grandma is giving me her Gourmet collection in two year increments; I'm currently jamming on 1994-95. The most curious thing about these issues is the art department stuff. The photographs have such a different quality. I guess they weren't digital? And what's really conspicuous is actually the lack of photography. There are so many articles accompanied only by illustrations -- spare line drawings by Merle Nacht that are often just in black and white. I really like them, even though they confuse me because I feel like I'm reading The New Yorker. A totally different time in food journalism. Can I be nostalgic for something I never really had?

This recipe for chowder looked interesting. When I was little my mom used to take me to Swanson's Fish when she did her errands there, and I would go nuts over the clam chowder samples and crackers. The chowder was all the color of cream (and maybe all cream), potatoes and clams floating undiscovered until you could taste them and feel their startlingly different textures. I remember ordering chowder once only to receive the Manhattan variety. What an utter disappointment. Where was the mystery there?

This recipe is actually what I think chowder should taste like. The addition of smoked fish is pretty great, too. The recipe calls for a full pound of it and only 3 slices of bacon, but I had half that amount of the trout, so I added more bacon. Also, for more 90s grooves, please please rent or take out from the library the Two Fat Ladies collection and watch season two, episode five. They go to a small Scottish town's smoke house to get kippers and smoked haddock, and then they cook breakfast for a lot of handsome men who work at a small brewery. And they're so obviously tickled by the whole thing. 

Since we're living in the 21st century, nothing's real until it's been documented, and I can't draw, here's Swanson's. The picture is from their website.

Smoked Fish Chowder

adapted from Gourmet // March 1994

8 slices bacon, chopped

2 medium onions, chopped

1 1/2 pounds russet potatoes

2 celery ribs, chopped

1 1/2 cups chicken broth

1 1/2 cups water

10 oz frozen corn

10 oz frozen lima beans

2 teaspoons cornstarch

1 1/2 cups half-and-half

1 to 2 teaspoons Worcestershire sauce

1/2 pound smoked trout

2 tablespoons minced fresh parsley

1 tablespoon minced fresh dill

In a heavy kettle,  cook bacon over moderate  heat until crisp. Add onions, just soften. Peel potatoes and cut into 3/4 inch cubes. Add the potatoes, celery broth, and water and simmer, covered, for 10 minutes. Add lima beans and corn and simmer for five.

In a small bowl dissolve cornstarch and half-and-half, then stir into soup with Worcestershire. Bring soup to boil, stirring, and add fish. Stir in parsley and dill. (Reserve some for serving if you're feeling it.) So easy. Makes about 12 cups.

A taste of my own medicine

This is one I started in September but never posted. One last gust from the winds of 2008.

Missing the people at Diner Journal, thinking of turning to drinking, I tried my hand at making bitters. I had written a post for the blog there on their house-made bitters, and it was one of the best things about my summer. Josh and Peter sharing so generously what they knew, their obvious relish in the experiments behind the counter. The process involved infusing distilled spirits with something - bark, herbs, seeds, fruits - and then waiting while the ingredients took their own time and course. I loved the idea of this. Learning about bitters, like the mixtures themselves, left me hot under the tongue.

Their mystery seemed destined from their origins. Today bitters are considered the backbone of the cocktail, but they were long used as "patent" medicines, which verged on the miraculous. The issue of Harper's Weekly from June 6, 1863 hailed Hostetter's Celebrated Stomach Bitters as, "at once the best of correctives, the gentlest and most genial of aperients, an infallible regulator and a powerful restorative." Morally upright, no doubt, but kind of boring. Yet, elsewhere, in The New York Times just two months before, an ad had claimed that the very same brew, "fortifie[d] the system against miasmas and the evil effects of unwholesome water." Well good. There was something I could use.

Anyway, the little amber bottles that Josh sold in the store really did look like they had fallen off the wagon of some traveling doctor in the 19th century. Or else they were straight out The Phantom Tollbooth, the hubbub tonic of "Kakophonous A. Dischord, DOCTOR OF DISSONANCE." Do you remember the amazing drawing on that page? And Milo and company ask, what does the A. stand for? And the doctor replies, "AS LOUD AS POSSIBLE." Yes, yes, and yes. Somewhere in-between the hard facts of science and the mirages of con-men, there was a medicine of crossed lines and clattering voids. I, too, was "suffering from a severe lack of noise," I thought. Bitters would cure me. I wanted to make my own.

I did. I have a hard time explaining what they taste like. Unlike the fine bitters I sampled this summer, the batch I've made falls sort of flat on the palate. I can't tell if it needs something as a base in the mix, or is the base for something else I haven't thought of yet. I think it could have infused for longer. Honestly, I'm totally perplexed by what I've made. It is, however, very smooth, nicely spicy and just a little sweet. I don't think it would do very much in a cocktail where one would have used, say, Angostura. But whatever, I like a little of it with ginger ale, or club soda. This is how I did it.

I bought very strong vodka from the Polish liquor store around the corner from where I lived in Greenpoint this summer. (I have not seen vodka like that in Middletown, but I'm looking.) I peeled and cut up the horseradish root that I had used to make ketchup, and which had spent an entire summer in the back of the fridge looking like a hairy archaeology project gone wrong, like it might send shoots out at any moment, knocking away innocent radishes and the Ronnybrook milk bottle, sucking up life so it could burst through the refrigerator and eat the entire apartment building. Anyway, then I did the same with fresh ginger - rough chop. I added some peppercorns of different colors that I got at Marlow & Sons, lemon peel, fennel seeds, one star anise and some other things I can't remember. Into a large mason jar they all went, with the vodka, to rest.

I was away from the tincture for almost a month. Ideally, over the course of this time, you watch it, pass it while making this or that in the kitchen and look longingly at its quiet progress -- periodically, of course, allowing yourself to shake it or, even more rarely, to open the crusting lid and dip a fingertip into its suspect operation, only then to shake your head, no, not yet, and screw the top back on. When it is time, whenever that is, you strain and finish with a little caramelized sugar. Then I found my own glass dropper bottles, just for fun. And for a minute there, I felt it: I was totally a medicine woman. A righteous specialist in noise, an enemy of illnesses that don't exist.

New year

The new Diner Journal is out. Chef makes ribollita, surveys the philosophy of recipes, teaches you more about the kitchen than you thought possible and pays homage to Elizabeth David -- all in one piece. I think you should order one.