Care. Recipes. Boiled dinner.

Travel

6 Jan

Taking care is a round-about process. It’s often invisible. It’s the cleaning up, observing what’s needed, taking away the extraneous.

A pig had gotten stuck in the knee-high snow — which was well above her head. She couldn’t see in the white walls of the path she’d bored outward from her house in her panic. Rushing only made her more afraid. I had to stoop, slowly reach to scratch her ears, talk to her. And wait. Pushing, moving too fast didn’t work. But by making a space for her to feel safe she finally moved along back toward her snug hut and her breakfast. It was the not-doing that helped.

If no one had noticed the chickens snowed into the upper barn they would have gone quietly without food for days. Just noticing them saved them. Letting your awareness encompass something — a farm, a baby, someone ailing — is very different, yet no less vital, than driving some mission forward. We all have it in us to do both but often the care side gets little praise.

This side of things should not go unnoticed. The yin to the yang, the one is essential to the other. It’s not the way of the earth to shout out “you’re not treating me well!” Her business is to accommodate, to collaborate with our initiation. We diddle around with rakes and hoes — and she grows the vegetables. It’s up to us to adjust our actions. Eventually enough abuse brings her wrath with wildfires and floods, but more, it is a misconception and a waste not to work with such a power.

The earth is waiting for us to turn around in our snow tunnel and find our way back to the hut. We keep blundering forward, causing harm when the way is already laid out. We know how to sustain ourselves skillfully and without destruction. It’s only two or three generations ago we knew how to work the land together, not waste, eat sensibly. Now we have even more access to the wisdom of all cultures. Just as we have access to thousands of gorgeous cookbooks with all the recipes from incredibly talented cooks. The wisdom is there, we just have to apply it to our current circumstances.

It is not easy; it’s simple.

Piero, the chef in Tuscany, used to say “the oven does not cook the food, you do”. He’d always set the oven at the same temperature for whatever he was putting in there — from roast rabbit to eggplant tart. It was up to you to watch, use your senses to see what was needed — The pan to be turned? To be taken out when golden? the temperature up briefly? It’s the same with recipes. Once you’re familiar with the operations of cooking (dicing, sautéing, braising, etc.), recipes serve merely as indications. To stick to the letter of a recipe does not take into account the moment you are living in, the ingredients in front of you, who you are cooking for. All that wisdom is there, accessible, but it’s lost if your attention in the present is not brought to bear.

Even in baking this is true! Sure, you have to get a little comfortable with the proportions of fats, liquids and dry ingredients, and how to use leavening, but I wing it all the time.

One of the best cakes, a Genoise sponge, is just 4 eggs, ½ cup of sugar, ½ cup of flour, 4 tablespoons of melted butter.

Once you get the feel for how it comes together by cooking it a few times, you are free to respond to the ingredients. Do you sift the flour? How old is the flour? Does it taste good? Do your springtime eggs give it a deep golden color? Do you like a tiny pinch of salt added? How about replacing some of the flour with cocoa?

One of my favorite winter meals is Boiled Dinner. I love how off-putting the name is. It is clear about the simplicity of the dish but belies its deliciousness. I believe the name comes from Ireland via New England but also makes me think of the countless cultures where a crock of salted-down meat saw you through the winter. A hunk of rinsed salt-pork, or a brisket pulled from the brine, with the addition of some vegetables or aromatics, was simply ‘boiled’ — which is to say simmered.

So — you take a piece of meat in a large pot, cover it with water, add vegetables in big hunks, some seasoning, bring to the boil then lower the temperature and simmer. That’s it. But here’s an example with specifics. If it’s a big piece of meat with some bone in it you cook it longer by itself before adding vegetables. If it really was brined or salted beforehand it may need soaking or a precooking to get the salt out. If it’s fresh you’ll need to salt the soup as it’s cooking. Sometimes I use sausages (already salty), putting them in all at once with potatoes, carrots, rutabaga or cabbage. I like the cabbage just quartered so there’s big leaves falling apart like a book in the broth. Once all is tender and the sausages cooked through, you serve it in bowls with mustard to stir into the broth which emulsifies into a cloudy-sharp foil to the meat.

A Moroccan version is Couscous aux Sept Legumes,

lamb with seven vegetables (often pumpkin, potato, carrot, zucchini, cabbage, tomato, and a few chickpeas). You add spices to the broth, centrally powdered ginger and black pepper, but this could be expanded upon in a paprika and cumin direction. Spicy harissa can be dolloped onto each bowl at serving.

Read the recipe, garner the wisdom, but then be present and do the cooking with care.