Cumin and Coriader

Cominos y Cilantro. Perhaps there is no country that uses these two spices, or rather spice and herb, more than the South American country of Colombia. Cominos are a must for any soup and no ají (the Colombian term for salsa) would be complete without cilantro. I don't think Mexicans use these two spices in their cooking to the extent that Colombians do and for people who don't appreciate the odor of these spices, Colombian cooking can be hard to get used to.
Both cominos and cilantro are old world spices, brought by the Spaniards to the Americas. Both belong to the umbellifera (carrot) family. Cominos are a common ingredient in Indian curries and frequently found in Middle Eastern cooking (for instance hummus). In Tex-Mex food it is a signature ingredient of Chile con carne and to some people it smells like sweat. More information can be found in Wikipedia's article on cumin from which the illustration is taken.

Artichokes

Gregory McNamee in Moveable Feasts: The History, Science, and Lore of Food says that artichokes were relatively unknown in the US outside of immigrant groups until in the 1960s California growers pushed to introduce it to the rest of the country. My father adored artichokes. And we always had them cut in half, boiled, and served with a bowl of mayonnaise. We never had them any other way. When I went to school at UC Santa Cruz, I would stop by a big white farmhouse on highway 1 between Watsonville and Castroville and pick up a whole crate of artichokes for him every time I drove home.

In Pittsburgh fresh artichokes are expensive but the Italians here use lots of small marinated artichokes in glass jars. When were were in Spain on the Camino de Santiago, I ordered many "menestras de verduras" or spring vegetable stews, one of whose many ingredients were baby artichokes. I kept thinking that the concept of the menestra with fava beans, asparagus, mushrooms, artichokes and other spring vegetables was a good one but that the Spaniards were simply overcooking them. I tried it when I got home and maybe I just don't like artichokes in my soup.

In Istanbul they prepare the artichokes differently: they remove the leaves and carve out the choke so that they are left with a goblet like heart. You could buy them in the markets already prepared like this. Monique Jansen has a photo of an artichoke seller preparing them. That seems to me to be the best way to buy them. No waste. On the other hand, you lose all that vegetation for your compost.

Poopa Dweck (what an extraordinary name!) in her book Aromas of Aleppo: The Legendary Cuisine of Syrian Jews has a recipe for Raw Artichoke Salad in which you trim the artichokes pretty much down to the heart and tender inner leaves and then you dress it with lemon juice, salt and olive oil. The next time we have artichokes, I'll have to try it. At least there is no danger of overcooking it.

Mayonnaise

The mayonnaise on avocados reminded me of the mayonnaise on french fries that one encounters in Argentina, Spain, and other civilized countries. I'm afraid I still prefer ketchup on my french fries but Best Foods Mayonnaise was a common ingredient in many of the salads that I grew up with. My mother's potato salad was made with mayonnaise. Our tuna sandwiches (the most common lunch we packed) were mixed with mayonnaise and celery. We dipped our boiled artichokes in a bowl of mayonnaise. Mother's carrot salad and waldorf salad were made with mayonnaise. There was even a lime jello salad made with grated cucumbers and cottage cheese that tasted much better with a spoonful of mayonnaise on top. My paternal grandmother's crab and shrimp salads were made with mayonnaise and we couldn't have fish without tartar sauce, consisting of mayonnaise, green onions, dill pickles, and black olives. One thing I did not like was macaroni salad made with mayonnaise. When I moved to Pittsburgh and saw you could make a pasta salad with oil and vinegar, it was a real eye opener.

Now I use mayonnaise much less although I do like it on sandwiches and hamburgers and you can't make tuna sandwiches without it. I think it is my husband's Colombian influence. He didn't grow up with it and when we lived in Bogotá from 1973-75, a small jar of mayonnaise was fairly expensive. At that time processed foods in cans and jars and frozen foods were not common. So for the little mayonnaise I used, I would make my own in a blender and it worked very well. It tasted like the real stuff (Best Foods -- Hellman's east of the Rockies...).

Avocados not Guacamole

When we first moved to Pittsburgh, one did not find avocados in the stores and very seldom in restaurants. The change in availability has been pretty dramatic in the last 27 years but it is still not the same as having an avocado tree in your back yard. And the quality in stores is iffy: you never know whether the avocado will ripen well or if someone dropped it and it will develop a big brown spot.

My parents had two avocado trees (that are still there, despite the hard freeze in 2007), a Hass and a grafted tree with several types, including Hass, Fuerte, and Edrinal. Naturally the Hass was the favorite but there is something to be said for all types and variety is the spice of life. I remember a small fat finger sized purple avocado with thin skin that grew on the school grounds but in general, California has not taken advantage of different varieties and sticks pretty much to the Hass. A real shame.

My older sister liked her avocados with mayonnaise, my father liked his with vinegar, and I like mine with salt and maybe some lime. I really like them simply with salt mashed up on a warm corn tortilla. In Chile I had an avocado served in thin slices fanned out on the plate and drizzled with olive oil. As with the mayonnaise, that might seem like overkill for the very rich avocado (and this was a Hass) but it was actually very very good. I haven't been in a country that eats more avocados than Chile does. They put "guacamole" on everything, even hot dogs. And you can find more than the Hass variety in supermarkets. In Chile it is not called avocado or aguacate but palta. Aguacate is the Nahuatl word for it (meaning very appropriately testicle) and, according to Wikipedia, palta is the Quecha name. If so, it is strange that in Colombia they would use the Nahuatl (Mexican) term rather than the south American term.

I generally prefer my avocados plain and not mushed up into guacamole but one thing that Jordan in California Home Cooking has right is that there are "as many versions of guacamole as there are counties in California, maybe more". Again I go for simplicity and like it plain with avocados and garlic mashed to a paste with salt. It is too bad that it turns brown so quickly but least you know whether it is fresh.

Persimmons

The advantage to living in California is the ability to grow all sorts of fruit, especially those that are hard to come by in the supermarkets. If you are lucky, you have a large lot where you can grow your own persimmons, figs, avocados and guavas, in addition to the easier to acquire oranges and clementines (which we called tangerines). It had always been my desire to join the California Rare Fruit Growers ever since I heard about them before moving to Colombia in 1973. Unfortunately there's not much opportunity to grow tropical fruit in Western Pennsylvania (although I do have a kaffir lime tree...).

My grandmother, who lived in the same little town as we did, had a hachiya persimmon tree (the kind that you have to eat when very soft and ripe) and so I grew up liking persimmons (although my sisters never developed the same taste). The tree is still there and is more than 50 years old. We generally ate them fresh but now I must admit that I prefer the harder Fuyu persimmons that you can eat when still crisp. I never tried Fuyus until I was in college and my father and I picked them from a tree belonging to one of his patients. At that time they were not seedless and still had beautiful brown seeds in them. Even today it is a treat to come across the occasional seed. My mother now has both a hachiya and a fuyu tree - satisfying both fresh eating and cooking needs.

My grandmother made the best persimmon cookies I have ever had. They were large, about 5 inches across, flat and chewy and a very dark reddish orange in color with raisins and walnuts. I have handwritten recipes for them but have never been able to duplicate them. She made huge batches of them and stored them in crisco cans for distributing as treats after her afterschool Child Evangelist bible classes. The trick may have been the fact that she used lard, as she also did in her cherry pie crusts.

For Thanksgiving and Christmas we always had persimmon pudding, a favorite of my father's. It's been awhile since I've had it but I believe we served it with a lemon brandy sauce. These days if I cook with persimmons, which my mother still sends me, I prefer to make persimmon bread with dates. Sunset had a recipe for one that was sweet enough on its own and didn't use added sugar.

Jordan's California Home Cooking has one recipe for persimmon bread in which she prepares the fruit by cutting the persimmons in half, discarding the pits (?) and rubbing the flesh through a sieve. That's not the way I would do it and using Hachiya persimmons you don't have "pits" and very seldom run across seeds in Fuyus. Instead, you get a couple of very ripe Hachiya, remove the stem (and any adhering cottony cushion scale), wash them and throw them into the blender with a teaspon of baking soda. After blending smooth, let the mixture sit for a few minutes and it will become a very beautiful congealed mass of orange. Harold McGee should be able to tell us what scientific process is at work here. Then you can add it to the egg/sugar/butter mixture, followed by the flour.

When you have a persimmon tree you are always on the lookout for ways to use persimmons. This winter when I was in California, I picked Fuyus, sliced them and dried them in the oven. I haven't used them yet but I'll try chopping them up and tossing them into persimmon bread instead of/or in addition to raisins. I still have several Hachiyas in the freezer. As the persimmons get ripe, I put them in a sandwich bag and freeze them for later use in cooking.

Natural Foods

Although Jordan does mention the hippies in her sidebars, I'm having trouble finding the hippie food (brown rice and vegetables) that was pretty common in Santa Cruz, Berkeley, and other university communities in the late 60s and 70s. It was a different period then and a whole different mindset: it was ok to be poor and not spend every waking hour earning a 6 figure salary and every weekend spending it. That was a time when there were no ATMs and grocery stores and supermarkets did not accept credit cards - they didn't even use barcodes yet! On the weekends, if you didn't have any money, you had to wait until Monday when the banks opened. That's how we didn't run up a credit card bill.

This was when there was still a Berkeley Food CoOp and the Monterey Market was in the small crowded store across the street. We are very fortunate here in Pittsburgh to have the East End Food CoOp, that smells just like the Berkeley CoOp did in the 70s. It must be the bulk food, herbs, and vegetables. That was also when WestBrae was an independent little operation on Gilman Street offering wonderful varieties of miso in wooden half barrels. I still remember the whole grain barley miso. A very heady concoction. The students in the married student housing in Albany had a cheese coop that bought cheese in bulk from the Cheeseboard and then divided it up amongst the members. I had done the same in Santa Cruz with a few other students: we would buy a whole wheel of jack cheese and divide it up.

UC Santa Cruz was nice in that it offered vegetarian selections at a few of its dining halls. In those times (the late 60s) students lived in dorms and ate in dining halls. There were no fast food restaurants and flex dollars on campus. The vegetarian food was very good: brown rice, whole grain breads, lots of vegetables, mushrooms and cheese. I don't see much of that now at universities (there aren't many "colleges" left either - they've all become "universities").

Why Chile Relleno

I wanted to use this blog for posting thoughts about the food I grew up with in California. It's hard to come up with a name for that so I chose the food that has always been my favorite and that I don't get enough of since I moved to the eastern half of the US. The stimulus for remembering California food during the 50s, 60s, and 70s was a 1997 cookbook that I ran across in the library yesterday called California Home Cooking: American Cooking in the California Style by Michele Anna Jordan. It's funny that I never saw it before since I work in the library (although in the IT Department in the basement so I don't really "handle" books) but I always peruse the TX shelves. It appears that the library didn't add it to the collection until 2006 so it wasn't ever on the new book shelves.

It's an interesting book with "sidebars" that tell tidbits of history but a quick thumbing through gave me the impression that it really had little of what I remember during my 30 years or so growing up in Southern California. Specifically, there is no mention of Chiles Rellenos! Instead she has a Monterey Jack Soufflé with Parmigiano-Regiano instead of chiles. Perhaps this Alice Waters influenced author is trying to distance California home cooking from Cal-Mex and it is true that Chiles Rellenos are difficult to make and more likely to be eaten in Mexican restaurants than cooked at home. But when you live in Pittsburgh, you've got to make your own. And as far as I've seen, Jordan makes no mention of Sunset Magazine which we always had in the house and which is a very good indicator of California food - the good and the outrageous (as in some of the reader contributions).

When I speak of Chiles Rellenos, I'm referring to the California type: deep fried egg battered green chiles stuffed with cheese. It is my acid test for a Mexican restaurant and no "Mexican" restaurant in Pittsburgh has ever passed it. The chiles have to be anaheim or poblanos and not unpeeled bell peppers. The cheese has to be white cheese (Oaxacan or Monterey Jack) and not processed and not cheddar and not mozzarella. Oaxacan or a similar string cheese with some acidity is the best. The cheese needs some acidity - maybe to counteract the deep-fat frying - that's why Monterey Jack is good, although it is hard to get plain Monterey Jack in our local supermarket because people here think that it's supposed to have jalapeño peppers in it.

And, of course, it is nice when the chiles have a little bite to them. These days the US seed growers are breeding all of the heat out of the chiles and pretty soon they will all taste like Bell Peppers. I remember as a child ordering chiles rellenos that were full of seeds and really unbearably hot. There is no danger of that anymore unless you grow your own. If you do, don't grow the hybrid varieties because they have lost their heat but go for the plain no named variety seed packets of poblanos.