Spring Feeding

Writing this on Thursday, I am rushing to complete the annual ritual of cleaning my home, especially my kitchen, in anticipation of the Jewish holiday known as “Dry Cracker Week.” The purge includes any grain resembling barley, rye, oats, wheat and spelt. Frankly, I am not sure what a spelt is, but I can assure you there is none to be found here. Also banished are liquors that contain these, like scotch and bourbon and condiments like soy sauce (wheat) and more.

This is also the one time of year that I clean the oven and the fridge, whether they need it or not. My rule of thumb with the fridge is if something has been opened in there since last year, it should probably go, for example, the jar of horseradish I bought for last year’s Seder.

Whatever the tradition, most holidays are about the food. Sometimes it is about special foods that you eat, sometimes it’s about foods that you don’t eat. Passover tends to be more about the latter as are the Jewish dietary laws in general.

Cooking is the transformation of nature into culture. What we eat or don’t eat says more about us than what we wear, how we vote, or where we went or didn’t go to college. In some sense our food choices are tied to our deepest identity and sense of holiness. One person’s comfort food is revolting to another.

Here is a poem about a point in my life nearly 30 years ago when I decided to try following Jewish dietary laws for the first time while navigating the challenge of frequent business travel. I often found myself in sometimes awkward situations where attempting to select food that met the restrictions of the law was difficult and sometimes embarrassing. I hope you find it amusing. And I hope that whatever your tradition and whatever you are eating or not eating in the coming week it is an expression of your deepest identity that ties you to your tribe and culture. Or, at very least, I hope it is tasty and delicious.

Holy

For I the Lord am your God; you shall sanctify yourselves and be holy; for I am holy.

--Leviticus 11:44

After I started observing the dietary laws,

I travelled to a conference in Charleston where a

stately catered lunch was served in the grandeur

of the U.S. Custom House. As the waitress approached

our table, I asked if she could tell me

about the soup. “Honey,” she said, “The chef

calls that Every Creeping Thing Chowder.”

I passed and chewed thoughtfully on an oyster

cracker as my fellow diners slurped and moaned

with delight. When the main course arrived,

the waitress leaned toward me liberating a small

jade cross from where it lay nestled. It swayed

like a tire swing over a limpid Carolina creek.

“Sweetie, this bad boy right here,” she whispered

nodding toward the plate she was setting down

in front of a woman in a shiny blue dress, “while it

splitteth the hoof, it does not cheweth the cud.

It is unclean for you.” She oinked discretely in my ear

in case I had failed to catch her drift. “How about

the green beans?” I asked, knowing that

the aromatic brown sauce adorning them was almost

certainly a lost cause. “Rabbi,” she laughed,

“They’s ‘bout as trayf as it gits.” “Y’all go ahead,”

I said to my companions. “Please don’t wait.”

She returned with a plate containing a huge mound

of plain mashed potatoes. All eyes dropped away,

pretending not to stare as if I had been disfigured

in an accident or had just wrapped tefillin on my arms

and begun to daven. “Belinda, would you help yourself to

a biscuit and pass the rest down,” the blue dress

drawled. A colleague looked at my plate and then

at me. I reached for the pepper, busied myself with its

application. He was wondering how,

or perhaps, if, to ask.

Marmalade Skies

“Bought marmalade? Oh dear, I call that very feeble.” — Julian Fellowes

The first time I tried marmalade I was pretty disappointed. All I knew of the stuff was that it was beloved by Paddington the Peruvian bear who had somehow made his way to the London railway station he was named for. When I finally had some for the first time, I found it sweet but at the same time unpleasantly bitter. What did I know? I was eight years old!

I came to love marmalade, the more bitter the better. For a time, my ‘go to’ marmalade was Dundee’s Three Fruit that came in a white jar and is made with oranges, lemons and grapefruit. Dundee was a brand established in Scotland in 1797 by grocer James Keiller. Keiller bought a load of bitter Spanish Seville oranges on speculation and, according to legend, his wife had the brilliant idea of turning them into marmalade thus inventing this citrus preserve. Dundee’s is thick cut, meaning there are large bits of citrus rind in it, but the chunks were still never thick enough for me. 

I can rarely find Dundee’s anymore and almost never the Three Fruit kind. And the white jar, sadly, has been replaced with plain glass so now when I get a craving for the stuff, I make my own. It’s crazy how easy it is. Here’s how. 

Note: If you hate marmalade, the same process can be used to make jam with any kind of fruit or berries. Or just stop reading right now. 

Homemade Marmalade

There are just two ingrediants. Three, if you count water.

citrius fruit, sugar, water.

Take some citrus fruit, it doesn’t matter how much. If you only want to make one jar, a couple of pieces will suffice. Seville oranges are traditional but you can use pretty much any orange, lemon, or grapefruit or a combination. I have never used limes, but they should also work just fine. 

Since you are going to be boiling and eating the whole fruit including the rind, I highly suggest using organic fruit if you can get it. If you can’t, wash the fruit very well. If it is organic, wash it anyway. 

Slice the fruit in half lengthwise and then slice perpendicular into thin half-moons. You can vary the thickness depending on how thick you want the fruit rind in your final product.

Cut the fruit on a board or something that can catch the juice. If you have a wooden board that you use for chopping onions or garlic, you might want to avoid using that so the jam doesn’t taste of onions. 

Place all the sliced fruit and accumulated juices in a measuring cup. Push it down and note the volume. Pour the fruit, seeds and all it a pot and add an equal volume of water. Citrus seeds have a lot of pectin which helps the final product gel. Eventually you will remove them but not yet. 

Boil the fruit and water on a low simmer for 2 hours. Turn off and let sit overnight. 

The next day fish out the seeds with a slotted spoon. Conveniently, the seeds turn a dark color so they are easy to see. After removing all the seeds measure the volume of the fruit and water again and add back to the pot along with an equal quantity of white sugar. Yes, that is a lot of sugar. It doesn’t have to be super exact because when you cook it, water evaporates until the sugar to fruit ratio is correct. In essence, it adjusts itself. 

Place over a medium heat and gently stir until all the sugar has melted. Then bring to a boil and adjust the heat to a low simmer.

Now comes the tricky part.  Cook until done. 

How do you know when it is done? Here’s how. 

Take a small plate and place it in the freezer. 

After some time, maybe an hour, the liquid will start to look thicker. The bubbles will be bigger and rise more slowly. It should start to coat a spoon. Think of sugar that is starting to caramelize. 

When you think it might be done, take the plate from the freezer and place a small spoonful of the liquid on the plate. After a moment or two push it with your finger. You should see that it is gelling and becoming more solid like, well, jam. If you are not sure, let it go longer and try again. How long you let it cook depends a bit on how solid you like your marmalade. Remember it gets more solid as it cools and sets and when you refrigerate it. 

Close to the gel point. Note the gelled bits on the side of the pot.

When you think it is about there, turn off the heat, let it rest a few minutes and then spoon it into as many glass jars as you need. I would not use plastic as the jam is hot and could melt the plastic. After the jars cool, place them in the fridge. 

If you are not going to can the jam by sterilizing and sealing the jars (a whole process I am not going to get into here), you need to keep the final product refrigerated just as you would with an open jar of jam. 

It will keep for a long time in the fridge. Sugar is an incredible preservative. Unless you see mold growing in it, it should be fine to eat. I have had a jar of marmalade in the fridge for months. You only use a little at a time after all. If you are lucky, some the sugar might crystalize around the edges.

I recently made a batch using just organic lemons, bright and sweet with just a little bitterness. It is divine stuff and is amazing on a fresh buttered roll with a cup of coffee. 

There are things that can be made at home and should be made at least once just for fun and to understand the process but in general are not worth the trouble. The store-bought versions are perfectly good, thank you very much. Examples of these include: butter, mayonnaise, pasta, ice cream, peanut butter. 

On the other end of the spectrum are things that must be made at home (at least in the US). These include: pita bread, hummus, pasta sauce, whipped cream, salad dressing.

Marmalade is somewhere in between. If you find a brand you like, the store-bought kind can be decent. But if, like me, and your marmalade can never have too much ‘thick cut’ fruit in it, then this is easy to do.  You’ll have Mrs. Keiller eating her heart out – with your marmalade on it. 

Out and About: The Strange World that is Sorta Post-Covid But Also Kinda Isn’t

Last Saturday night my wife took me out for dinner and a show for my 60th birthday. “But wait a minute,” careful readers will say, “I thought your birthday was in September, no?”

It was. But the present from my wife were tickets (6 months hence) to see Paula Poundstone, stand-up comedian and frequent panelist on NPR’s news quiz show “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me.” Ms. Poundstone, who once said that she eats a box of Pop-Tarts every day, was performing at the beautiful Weinberg Center for the Arts in Frederick Md. The Weinberg is a beautiful old theater built in 1926. It’s a venue straight out of The Great Gatsby. 

Before the show, we decided to have an honesttogod sit-down meal in a restaurant. Not take out, not eating from a bag in the car, and certainly not dining outside! (What happened to spring?). This was easier said than done. We had allowed enough time to dine but not enough time for the wait at most of the restaurants we tried (30 minutes or more). Finally, we found success at a cute little Thai restaurant. It was packed but they seated us immediately. There was not a mask in sight among the patrons but most of the servers seemed to be wearing one. The vegetarian options were plentiful, the food was delicious, and the service speedy. 

Nothing is far in downtown Frederick and moments after leaving the restaurant we were seated in our 3rd row seats at the Weinberg. Paula’s audience has, I think, aged along with her. In videos of her from the 1980s and 1990s that I previewed online, her audience is made up of people in their 20s and 30s. At last week’s show, Barbara and I felt that we were on the younger end of the audience age spectrum. Definitely an “NPR” crowd. Even here, however, masks were not the rule. There were some but I’d say less than 30 percent. The theater was as packed as the restaurants on the main street. 

Paula was hilarious. She has a very wry, self-deprecating kind of humor that is at once very smart and very down-to-earth. There is always a part of her show that is extemporaneous banter with members of the audience. It’s always different and it’s always funny. I don’t know how she thinks so quickly in the moment. It’s a pretty long show. Somewhere between an hour and 90 minutes. That’s a long time to just stand in front of a few hundred people and just talk. But she had a receptive crowd and folks were ready to laugh and be among people. 

Then on Wednesday, I had lunch in Bethesda with a friend from my days at the Hillel International Center. The scene couldn’t have been more different. Bethesda can be a nightmare for parking, so I took Metro. The metro lot was more than half empty and the train cars were empty. But it was the middle of the day. Bethesda was very quiet and though it was prime lunch time, the many restaurants were open but empty. 

My friend and I met at the new José Andres restaurant called Spanish Diner. I think there might have been one other party of two in the restaurant. (The service was VERY good!). 

I am a huge fan of Chef Andres´ and have eaten many times at all of his DC restaurants, most often at Zaytinia, his middle-eastern small plates place. (It was there many years ago that a waiter shared with me the secret to making perfectly smooth hummus. No, I am not going to tell you right now what it is). In addition, to being an incredible chef presiding over a restaurant empire with unique restaurants in major cities all over the US, Andres´ is also a remarkable human being, leading the nonprofit World Central Kitchen which feeds people in disaster zones all over the world. Right now, they are doing amazing work feeding refugees from Ukraine.

Spanish Diner is, just as you might imagine, the intersection of the piquant flavors of Spain with an American Diner. There is even a section of the menu that offers, ‘Breakfast Served All Day.”

I didn’t have breakfast but rather selected the menú del día, which offered the opportunity to pick one appetizer, one main course, and one dessert. I had a lovely, creamy gazpacho, a grilled cheese made with a very strong bleu cheese that was super funky, and a beautiful flan for dessert that tasted like it was made of pure cream. The flan was served as is traditional in its own caramel sauce and in case the flan wasn’t rich enough on its own, with a dollop of whipped cream on the side. As Julia Child would have said, “It’s not something you eat every day!”

After lunch, I walked back through deserted Bethesda to the deserted Metro and headed home. 

So is Covid over? Yes and no. I think for some people in some places, it is mostly over and for other people in other places it is not. For a few, I suspect, it never will be. That’s ok. As the horribly overused expression (especially by me) goes, “You do you!” It goes without saying that the death toll of this thing has been incomprehensible. It is not at all unreasonable to be skittish about returning to public life in a whole-hearted way. Each person has to decide what is right for them and their immune system.

In a few days, I’ll be eligible for my 4th vaccine. I am waiting for the email from Safeway. By chance I got my first shot at the grocery store pharmacy and they have been fantastic at follow up. Emailing me when I am eligible for my next one, making it easy to book an appointment online and giving me with each shot, a coupon for 5% off groceries! Last time I grabbed a flu shot at the same time (sorry, just one coupon per visit). Get the sore arm thing out of the way in one go, I figured. They even sent me a link to add an electronic vaccine card to the Apple Wallet on my phone.  I don’t shop at Safeway as a regular thing but just maybe the future of health care is there. They have the right name for it. You feel way safe just going in. 

Unlike some, I won’t have to return to an office and a long commute. Nor did I mind the quiet life or even most of the restrictions that went along with the pandemic. I was happy to putter around at home trying to fix things visiting people over zoom or online. Having said that, there was something nice this week being out and about, eating in restaurants, going to a show, and hearing others laugh in a public space. There is an energy we get from seeing others about the business of living their tiny lives at the same time that we are living ours. 

And if by some good fortune, that life occasionally includes lunch with a friend and flan in caramel sauce that life is as good as it gets.