Recipes for Trouble

Has a recipe ever performed a healing or transformative role in your life?

The earliest recipe books did not concern themselves with soup and pastry: they provided directions for magic. Papyrus relics from Egypt, written in Greek, Egyptian, Hebrew and Aramaic attest to a range of recipes for spells and healing potions.

Later, as recipe books became more tied to culinary lore, herbal and magical remedies would often appear in the margins. Sometimes, as in my mother’s Ukrainian Catholic Women’s League cookbooks, fanciful concoctions appeared at the ends of chapters, unconsciously echoing the supernatural tone of the earliest recipes ever written.

Recipe For Happiness

From Tested Recipes, published by the Ukrainian Catholic Women’s League of St Josaphat’s Parish, 1963

The other night The Gay Schoolteacher came over for dinner. His beautiful smile faded slightly when he saw me. Blood was gushing from my finger, and my oven was erupting into flames.

I was trying out a new recipe, from Nigel Slater’s The Kitchen Diaries, which I got for Christmas. Slater is food writer for The Guardian and the author of eight books. Kitchen Diaries is an account of Slater’s activities in the kitchen, over the period of a year. As such it’s a rather prosaic account of weather, shopping and cooking: lovely at first, and with great photos, and then a bit repetitious.

The bloody gash was my fault, but the fat fire could have been blamed on the recipe. It didn’t specify the size of the pot (mine was way too small), and there was too much fat in the recipe. And then there was the fact that I was seriously in the weeds with marking, and seriously not capable of cooking a meal without courting disaster.

But back to Kitchen Diaries. I do like how casual the author is. Lunch may be a complex stew but dinner might just be cooked rainbow chard tossed with olives and lemon olive oil, eaten on sourdough toast: “A supper that fills us with joy.”

Recipe-wise, the book’s a tad frustrating since there’s no separate index for the recipes: you may be intrigued by his chickpea-squash curry and you may never find it again. (which makes me wonder if I should index the recipes in my next food memoir)!

I made Slater’s chicken stew. It was quite a bit of work for a gal with teaching, marking, research, writing, and a radio interview to do. The marinade demanded six ingredients, and the chicken needed to marinate overnight (or in my case, a scant two hours). The Gay School Teacher helped me bandage up my finger, and the fire subsided without the intervention of municipal authorities.

We were pretty happy to sit down to dinner. The stew didn’t quite deliver on flavour but texturally it was perfect for a chilly almost-spring March evening, and two old friends engaging in a conversation that has spanned more than three decades. Recipe for happiness? Yeah, I think so, with mashed potatoes, some good French wine and The Schoolteacher’s spicy chocolate cake thrown in.

How do you use recipes? What cookbooks got you through the winter? What’s your magic culinary recipe these tentative, almost-spring days?

Chicken Stew
I’ve tweaked Slater’s recipe to make it easier and more flavourful. It’s also much improved the following day.

1 can cannelini or Romano beans
A large chicken, cut into 8 pieces
25 ml olive oil
50 ml balsamic vinegar
8 plump cloves garlic, peeled
3 or 4 bay leaves
2 teaspoons herbes de Provence
1 teaspoon tarragon
Grated orange zest from 1 large orange
1/4 cup orange juice
1 teaspoon kosher salt
several grinds of black pepper
6 medium leeks, thinly sliced
2 medium sized sweet potatoes, peeled and chopped
1/2 litre chicken stock
splash of white wine or vermouth

Combine balsamic vinegar, olive oil, garlic, bay leaves, herbs, orange zest, orange juice, salt and pepper in a large non-reactive bowl. Add chicken, making sure to coat it completely. Place in a cool place for 3-4 hours or overnight.

Set oven at 300 degrees. Brown chicken pieces until golden in a large non stick fry pan, shaking off and reserving the marinade before you do. Place chicken in a large Dutch oven. Deglaze fry pan with wine or vermouth, then add leeks and garlic. When softened, add marinade and chicken stock and let it come to a boil. Add the beans and sweet potato to the chicken then add the liquid. Cover, and place in oven for 1 to 2 hours or until chicken is cooked through. Add salt, pepper to taste. Serve over polenta or mashed potatoes.

I seem to be doing brunch a lot lately.

It’s winter, and weekend mornings do not yet lead naturally to coffee on the back porch or walks in the park. It’s February, and we need our friends, the comfort of steaming plates of eggy things, and the morning light pouring in.

My sister The TV Gal’s visit was as good an occasion as any to meet friends for brunch at my local brunch spot, Mitzi’s on College.

Mitzi’s, a venerable woman-owned institution with (now) three outlets in the west end of Toronto, has always been a go-to place for a queer-friendly delicious and innovative brunch.

I’d say this joint still has a few wrinkles to work out. I’ve been three times and while the food is tasty, the service and the prices are not. Arriving, you stand at the door waiting to be seated, whilst ignored by staff chatting in the back. You seat yourself, worried you’ll be ousted. (A sign saying Seat Yourself would do the trick). If you arrive during peak hours you’ll be waiting in line or in the limited wait room seating. You’ll ask if you can leave your cel number and go for a coffee and you’ll be told quite authoritatively that that is not an option.

But this time we knew to seat ourselves and chose a table in front bathed in sunlight. I had poached eggs on cornbread with spicy sauce, sour cream, homefries and sourdough toast. Barely warm, verging on cold. I don’t do cold eggs and certainly not for $13.75. The server cheerfully took them away and returned the plate only slightly less cold than before. I gave up on heat and joined the much more important conversation swirling around the table: our debrief of the previous night’s party. Eggs were a little underpoached, the sauce delicious, and the combo of cornbread and potatoes a little too sweet for my liking despite the addition of seasoned sour cream.

It was a glorious unseasonably warm day, so TV Gal and I ditched our plans for a theatre matinee and joined the Librarian and The Hair Dude for a stroll at The Beach.

TV Gal took a million photos like she always does. Hair Dude and Librarian cuddled on a bench as we poked around on the rocks. People held their faces up to the sun, like pilgrims awaiting a blessing: the beginning of the end of the long, long journey through winter.

There’s all kinds of art to be found in New York.

There is music, soaring out of the subway tunnels: African song; jazz sax; four part gospel harmonies; my niece The Red Headed Busker, singing her own pop melodies and hip hop inflected urban hymns.

There are art galleries, for sure, with their uneven gestures and brusque avantgardisms; there are store windows on Madison Avenue, glowing smugly; there is performance art - queer, sarcastic, ironic, joyful.

And, there is dessert.

The Dessert Chef (Shuna Lydon) and I have corresponded unevenly over a couple of years; I follow her blog, Eggbeater, and have tasted her sublime desserts at (now defunct) Sens in San Francisco, and we did a reading together in The Bay Area. She recently moved back to her hometown, New York. A couple of Facebook messages later, and The Red Headed Busker, The Butch Performance Artist and myself were meeting up for brunch at 10 Downing in The Village where Shuna is pastry chef.

This too was a kind of performance art. The Pastry Chef came out and gave a short monologue, just for us, about dessert, Karen Finley, and the rigours of working in kitchens. As usual, she was sweetly secretive about what exactly we’d be eating for dessert.

Red Headed Busker and I shared a tasty smoked salmon eggs benny with mustard hollandaise on brioche. The Performance Artist told us about her brilliant ongoing research-performance piece The Homo Bonobo Project. A basket of Shuna’s ‘baked goods’ - with her crazy-delicious citrus marmalade - appeared on the table.

As the pale winter sun streamed in we kept talking: about the changes in Greenwich Village and beyond; about the life of an artist, and about how you just keep doing the work, day after day, with or without funding. The Performance Artist bemoaned the loss of independent and queer culture in an increasingly corporatized and gentrified Manhattan. She’s rebuilding community with a series of cabaret evenings she’s hosting and performing at called The Bulldyke Chronicles, at Dixon Place. The Busker listened raptly: different genre and audience, same concerns.

Suddenly, two dessert creations appeared before us. The first was a cheesecake made with lebneh, a strained yogurt cheese, with a crisp crust reminiscent of, but way more exciting than, graham cracker, sided with roasted almonds and that thrilling marmalade. It reminded me of the cheesecake my ma makes at Easter, and the migrations - cultural and geographical - that had brought those light, resonant flavours and memories together.

These desserts are the sum of their parts. The other, Butterscotch Pot de Creme, came with dulche de leche, and brown-sugar-cumin roasted pecans. Soft and crunchy, sweet and salty; deeply sensuous.

By then, The Busker had to go perform in the subway. The Performance Artist and I groaned and moaned our way through these sweet/savory narratives, aka dessert. The afternoon was starting to wane and there was still art to be seen, and made. Performance Artist hopped on her bike and rode off into the narrow streets of the Village. I headed up towards the galleries in Chelsea and then changed my mind, went shopping instead. I was too full - of dessert, creativity, and inspiration - to ingest anymore art that day.

I’ve always believed that love stories should be written about friends.
The sweetness of their casual love,
the juiciness of their gossip
the thrill of sharing a meal.

There’s no ceremony, no legal process
no champagne
when someone enters your life and becomes
a lifelong friend.

But there is often celebration.

And meals. Lots of meals.
Babies, children, cats.
Books, films, music videos.

Friends are an archive
a witness
a board of experts
a think tank
a Greek chorus.

an inspiration

a comedy routine.

a home away from home.