"I went about those days with a new rapier my godfather had given me on Saint Anthony’s Day and, quite frankly, I was more interested in the rapier than in Bonaparte’s fall. I’ve never forgotten that. I’ve never stopped thinking to myself that my rapier has always been greater than Napoleon’s sword."
Book: The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas by Joaquim Maria Recipes: The Brazilian Table by Roberts and Roberts The Brazilian Kitchen by Leticia Moreinos Shwartz
Marinated Hangar Steak
1 medium onion, thinly sliced 3 cloves garlic, pressed 1 teaspoon tomato paste 1 tsp corriander 1 tbsp honey 1/4 cup Cachaça 1/2 cup olive oil 1 lb hangar steak Salt and Pepper to taste
Marinate the steak for 1 to 2 days. Grill for to preferred doneness.
Manioc with Sauteed Onions
2 lbs Manioc (Yucca) 6 tbsp butter 2 cups julienned onion Salt and pepper to taste Chopped parsley for garnish (optional)
Peel the manioc and cut into cubes. Boil in salted water until tender. While the manioc is boiling, saute the onions in butter over medium low heat, do not let them brown. Remove the manioc from the pan and drain, reserving 1 cup of the cooking liquid. Mix the manioc with the onions to coat with butter. Add the reserved liquid a little at a time until the mixture is moist. Salt and pepper to taste.
Here are some things that I learned about steak. The Pathmark sometimes has hangar steaks, but not this time, so I picked the steak that looked closest to it, a "London Broil." I bypassed the skirt steak thinking I would "do what the recipe says." According to Wikipedia, London Broil is not a "cut" of meat. It's a method of cooking the meat. Apparently, Pathmark isn't aware of this, or they are aware, and they are trying to get rid of some crappier cut of meat under the disguise of "London Broil." Whatever cut I got, it was terribly tough. And that after marinating it overnight (in rum, not Cachaca - still haven't found any - local liquor store man - "we're still out, but keep checking back!). And there is no way that red, juicy meat was overcooked. The lesson: Always buy a skirt steak.
At least the manioc was good, probably because kitchen helper Mindy made it. And can you ever really go wrong with asparagus? It's been on sale a lot around here, that's why it makes so many appearances.
I also made some Pao de Queijo, but I didn't get the right flour so they didn't come out that great. Didn't stop us from devouring them, but I'm not going to include the recipe here until I've perfected it.
About the book:
Just when you thought "she's finished War and Peace! At least we won't have to hear about Napoleon any more..." And yet, here he is cropping up again as a symbol of class conflict. A seven year old Bras Cubas is not impressed with Napoleon. But his family is surely celebrating the great man's downfall (his first one). Of course in a colonial city where the wealthy are profiting off the poor, the rich Cubas family would have to throw a grand affair of a dinner to celebrate Napoleon's defeat. And of course, our young rapscallion is more interested in his rapier and his dessert than he is in politics.
"The proportion of freedom to inevitability decreases and increases according to the point of view from which the action is regarded, but their relation is always one of inverse proportion. A sinking man who clutches at another and drowns him; or a hungry mother exhausted by feeding her baby, who steals some food; or a man trained to discipline who on duty at the word of command kills a defenseless man—seem less guilty, that is, less free and more subject to the law of necessity, to one who knows the circumstances in which these people were placed, and more free to one who does not know that the man was himself drowning, that the mother was hungry, that the soldier was in the ranks, and so on."
Book: War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy Recipes:Culinaria: Russiaby Marian Trutter
Caviar
Hard Boiled Eggs Mayonaise Blini Unsalted, Tablewater crackers Whipped Cream Cheese (other accompaniaments could include sour cream, butter, mashed capers, sliced raw onion, pasta with creme fraiche and lemon zest, lemon slices, etc.) Champagne Vodka
This is not a real recipe, per se, more a collection of foodstuffs. I suppose the cream cheese wasn't particularly Russian, but we'd eaten so much sour cream by this point, I was afraid of a general hunger strike if I brought any more out. Generally, I make my deviled eggs with mustard and salt and pepper, or other tasty additions, but I didn't want to overpower the flavor of my caviar, which is already plenty salty enough. I didn't make fresh blini, just defrosted the leftovers from the mushroom meal. I also am too embarrassed to state what brand of caviar I used. I wasn't up for a trip out to Brooklyn, in fact I managed this whole project without visiting Brighton Beach at all, which I suppose is sort of a shame, but instead thought that the Food Emporium would have some. They did. It was dyed with food coloring to be unnatural shades of red or black and it wasn't very good, but it was caviar and I was too tired to quest after better.
Thankfully, neither Jay or Ben had ever had it. We enjoyed it. The eggs in particular were tasty with a dollop off caviar on top. The blini gave an extra flavor, different from the crackers, and the cream cheese was delicious. Champagne and Vodka pair wonderfully.
About the book:
Tolstoy repeatedly revisited the idea that a single man could never inspire people to move from east to west. That had the people not wanted to move from east to west, Napoleon would have been locked up for a lunatic. He reiterates, at great, great length, that despite this fact, modern historians still want to attribute the movement from east to west to the power wielded by great men, "modern history, like a deaf man, answers questions no one has asked. If the purpose of history be to give a description of the movement of humanity and of the peoples, the first question—in the absence of a reply to which all the rest will be incomprehensible—is: what is the power that moves peoples? To this, modern history laboriously replies either that Napoleon was a great genius, or that Louis XIV was very proud, or that certain writers wrote certain books."
He never states precisely what that power, or force is. He speaks, again at great length, about man's freedom. He says that Napoleon, far from wanting for himself to tour Moscow as her conqueror, had less freedom than anyone. He says that once we know more fully the cause of an action, the more we come to recognize the absence of freedom in executing that action. He claims that men give power to great men out of lack of freedom, but he doesn't ever say why they come to do this. He also claims that great men, of themselves, have no power and he cites some very terrible leaders to back it up. But there are two things he never addresses: Centuries of indoctrination and hunger.
In pre-historic times, a tribal leader was elected because of his prowess in battle. He literally had to be strong enough and have enough power to protect his people from other tribes. After many years of indoctrinating this belief, we get the dynasties and blood lines and the wealth and mystique that surrounded kings. That is a hard idea to shake off. What made the early Americans able to shake it off was that we had a fairly high standard of living already and our king was an ocean away. The reason why they killed poor Louis is because they were starving and he was living, well, he was living like a king right in the midst of them. The people were told by a few men with ideas that it was ok to kill their king, so they did.
The idea that leaders don’t have personal power may be true in fact but it certainly isn’t true in the minds of a leader’s subjects, who, for centuries, have been buying into the image, pomp, and circumstance accorded the royals. People very well may have followed Napoleon to Moscow simply because he declared himself emperor and said, let’s go to Moscow.
As to why they moved at all, one has to look to economics more than philosophy, personal power, or mysterious “forces.” If the people are starving, they will follow anyone who tells them it will bring them more bread. If they are eating well, and want to be eating better they will follow a Jefferson who tells them they deserve to eat better. I suppose, in that vein, the people of France would have followed Napoleon to conquer America had he proposed it as easily as they might have followed a barker selling them cheaper cuts of meat in the stall down the block.
There is a lot of merit to what Tolstoy is saying about lack of freedom, but he never applies that to propaganda. Napoleon was a master of propaganda. He told a battered, self-consuming France that if they followed him, he would make them rich. So they followed him. If they had not been starving and riled up to fight by new ideas, they never would have revolted in the first place. It wouldn't have been worth the risk to their dinner tables. We could retort that there have been innumerable times in history when the people were starving and did not kill their king, but it was only because there was nobody to tell them it would come out to their benefit somehow. Why stir up trouble if you're not going to get more food out of it?
As for all this talk about lack of freedom, it stems from the fact that through various inspirations, Nick Bolkonski, Jr. lands himself in the midst of the Decemberist revolts, according to Tolstoy, because he had no freedom to do otherwise. But it was the ideas, the propaganda of Pierre, which lead him to do this.
I guess my point is that Tolstoy never looks at hunger as potentially being the "force" he is looking for. He says that the people were poised to move from east to west and then back west to east again. But I say, they would have gone in whatever direction they thought they could get the best meal for their pains.
This wraps up my discussion of War and Peace. I am rather sad to see the end of it.
Book: War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
Recipes:Culinaria: Russiaby Marian Trutter
Nachyneny Perets (Stuffed Bell Peppers)
4 good sized Bell Peppers (I used red, orange, and yellow) 2 carrots, shredded 1 large onion, finely chopped 8 oz white cabbage (leftover from the stuffed cabbage we made earlier), finely chopped 2 tbsp oil 1 cup cooked rice Dill, salt and pepper to taste 1 cup vegetable stock
Carefully cut the tops off the peppers and scrape out the insides. Saute all the vegetables until they are tender. Mix together with the rice (I suggest cooking your rice in vegetable broth for added flavor, it took a lot of salt to avoid being bland) and fill the peppers, replacing the tops. Pour the stock into a casserole dish, arrange the peppers so that they are standing up and covered with their tops, cover the dish and bake at 350 degrees for 30 minutes.
Kurka po Kyivske (Chicken Kiev)
3/4 cup of cold butter 4 thinly sliced chicken breast fillets Salt and pepper 3 tbsp of flour 1 cup breadcrumbs 2 eggs Oil for frying
It is most important that you shape your butter into elongated balls and re-chill it before attempting this recipe. We just put the butter in the freezer and cut it into cubes, I think this made wrapping the chicken around it much harder. That said, lay out the fillets and pound them into an even thickness, try to ensure that they are as wide as they are long, this will also help to keep the butter in the chicken when you fry it. Fold the sides of the chicken around the butter, then roll from the long end, tucking in the sides as you go. Some people use toothpick to keep it in place, we resorted to the ever useful kitchen twine after a few mishaps. Dip the chicken rolls in flour, then in egg, then in breadcrumbs. Through some oversight, the ingredients list in the cookbook did not include the breadcrumbs. We omitted them by accident. I rather think that extra thick batter would have also done a better job of keeping the butter in the fillets. Chill for 2 hours (another step we skipped, as it was already getting late).
Fry your rolled chicken in superhot oil for about 3 minutes. This will bubble and pop as all good fried food does, but if, about halfway through, you hear the bubbling and popping increase dramatically, it means that all your butter has leaked out of your chicken. Don't worry, you will still have tasty fried chicken, it just won't be Chicken Kiev. We had about a 50% success rate.
Those chicken rolls which retained their butter were purely delicious. Cutting into the roll was exciting, because you could sort of hear the butter squishing around and then it turned into a delicious lake on your plate. All that butter complemented the peppers nicely as well. Many variations to this recipe add parsley and garlic or other tasty additions to the butter. I contemplated this, but honestly, the more authentic recipes just call for butter and while it might be nice to experiment, things remain traditions for a reason; it might not have been healthy, but it was darn good.
Special thanks to kitchen helper Jay for being in charge of the frying after I splashed my finger into the hot oil! Thankfully, my hands were more or less covered in flour and egg, so I wasn't damaged badly, just battered.
About the book:
Our friend Pierre is still roaming around Moscow (which has started to burn!) and he is having grand fantasies about assassinating Napoleon. I'm not really sure how he thinks he will accomplish this, but he has a knife and a loaded pistol. We shall see what the future brings to him.
Book: War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
Recipes: Cooking Around the World: Russian and Polish by Lesley Chamberlain and Catherine Atkinson
Music: We've maybe been slacking a bit on the Russian music, but there might have been some Russian guitar at the beginning of the night...
I was seriously concerned about this "fresh herring" as nowhere in the directions does it say "cook" the herring. Being uncertain, and thinking I would never find cured herring fillets, I just bought a jar of pickled herring in cream sauce, thinking, why not? I threw it all into the food processor and it was the least favorite snack of the night. It wasn't horrible, but even I didn't eat that much of it. As it turns out, after buying the jar, there were cured fillets right in my backyard Pathmark which might have made the dish tastier. And Wikipedia has this to say about raw herring: served as a Dutch delicacy, Hollandse Nieuwe, (Dutch New), is raw herring from the catches around the end of spring and the beginning of summer. This is typically eaten with raw onion. So, Bethany and Carey, when in Holland...
Chicken Bitki
1 tbsp butter 4 oz mushrooms, finely chopped 1 cup fresh breadcrumbs 12 oz ground chicken 2 eggs, seperated 1/4 tsp nutmeg 2 tbsp flour 3 tbsp oil Salt and pepper Lettuce leaves and sour cream to serve
Cook the mushrooms in the butter over medium high heat for 5 minutes or until all the juices have evaporated. Mix crumbs (crushed crackers - if have no idea where your Pathmark keeps its breadcrumbs and never have bread in your house), chicken, yolks, nutmeg, and mushrooms. Beat the egg whites until stiff peaks form. Kitchen helper Jerillyn was going to do this with a whisk "because it says you have to," but I turned her on to the hand mixer and saved her from carpal tunnel. Fold the egg whites into the mixture and shape it into flattened and elongated meat balls (oblongs instead of spheres). Roll in the flour to coat and then fry 10 minutes or until golden brown and cooked through. The original recipe doesn't call for sour cream, but we found ours to be a bit lacking without it.
Everyone liked the Bitki better than the pate. Small wonder.
About the book:
I have read way ahead since my last blog and am trying to fill in the gaps. One of the things Tolstoy constantly circles back to, and back to, is the idea about who is responsible for the great, man-made events of the world. He has Napoleon thinking always that he is responsible. Tolstoy tells us in asides this is absurd. He seems to believe (though his repetition and insistence imply that he was not 100% certain) that the greater the man, the less control he had over his own decisions. There is some merit to it, I suppose, in that, had the Grande Armee not wanted to got to war, Napoleon would have been arrested as a lunatic for trying to rile them up. In a nutshell, Tolstoy seemed to think (and this is where his theory falls down, folks) that somehow the world is ready for massive numbers of people to move from West to East and so a Napoleon must arise with a great idea to conquer Moscow. It was the will of the something which makes the people want to support a Napoleon. He never uses the word god. He simply states that the world was going to do it, and Napoleon, or any great leader, far from being responsible, is simply carried by the tide, incapable of stopping himself even if he wanted out (which, being Napoleon, he didn't).
I find it troubling, because, he has a point. How on earth can one person be responsible for so much human turmoil? But then, where does the idea originate? Economic depression perhaps? The latent human urge to create upheaval and reroot ourselves? Tolstoy never touches on it, and we are left looking backward at the events of the past, possibly missing the signs for the future.
I bought a jar of Blue Hill Bay Herring Fillets in Wine Marinade and I cut up some Dark Wheat bread and it was delicious. Interestingly sweet and surprisingly tasty. After the toast was gone, Samantha was eating it with a fork from the bowl, it was that good.
Salmon Koulibiac
Ingredients:
2 Salmon Fillets
2 Hard Boiled Eggs 1 cup of cooked long grain rice
2 Bunches Green Onion (sliced both white and green portions)
Large bunch of Fresh Dill
1 Lemon (zested and juiced)
Box of Puff Pastry
1 Egg (beaten for glaze)
If you are going out to see some friends at an open mic before dinner and don't want to eat at midnight, I suggest prepping your filling ahead of time. Add half the dill to the water and steam the salmon for just about 4 minutes. Don't listen to any web site that says you have to (over)steam your salmon for 10 minutes, it won't ruin it, it just won't be nearly as tasty. Flake the salmon, and mix everything together in a big bowl to await your return. And don't, as I did, forget to boil the eggs, because that will spoil your whole plan for getting that prep work finished ahead of time. If you have a faithful kitchen friend named "biscuit Ben," ask him kindly to boil the eggs for you, then crumble them and add them to the mix. When you are ready to bake, use one sheet of puff pastry for the bottom. You are supposed to roll it out - I don't have a rolling pin and couldn't use my grandmother's "Vodka bottle as a rolling pin" substitute because my vodka bottle has chocolate drips all over it - so I just oiled a baking dish and threw the sheet in there and that worked fine. Spread the salmon mixture evenly over the pastry, leaving room at the edges to seal it. Assemble the top, pressing the edges together and brush with the beaten egg. Bake at 400 degrees for 30 minutes until golden brown.
A note about looking for fresh, skinless trout fillets in East Harlem. Don't bother. The original recipe called for trout, which I really wanted to try, but there is only one fish market in my neighborhood and no trout to be found and only salmon steaks with the skin on. I ended up buying frozen fillets in individual sealed packages. It was fine.
"Russian Salad"
Ingredients:
2 cartons of grape tomatoes (because they are the only ones that are red right now)
3 cloves garlic
1/2 Vidalia onion
1/2 Cup sour cream
Salt pepper to taste
Slice tomatoes into chunks, press garlic, and chop onion finely. Add sour cream and salt and pepper. Mix well and chill. Let stand long enough for flavors to blend. If you are not a big onion person, don't add the whole onion, it's really oniony. But tasty and a nice, creamy accompaniment to our Koulibiac.
Some suggested variations to the Koulibiac: Sam thought Feta would add nicely to the mix and I think some white sauce or alfredo-style sauce would complement it deliciously. I think you could use the alfredo sauce especially if you used a regular pie crust, which would give you more of a pot-pie taste to it. I imagine you could substitute any other sort of shredded meat as well, if you are not a fish lover. Also, if you have any leftover filling when you are done, I think it would be great mixed up with mayo in pita bread.
About the book: Apparently, the Russian aristocracy was even more "French" than I realized. At one point, an awkward son of our social grasper wished to tell a story at a party and insisted on it being spoken in Russian, but he spoke haltingly "as a Frenchman might, who'd lived in Russia for a year." I also read about the other son, Anatole, who was a "rake" about town and threw drunken card parties every night before visiting the brothels. He had a friend who made a bet that he could climb out on the roof, drink an entire bottle of rum (not vodka!) without taking the bottle away from his lips and without holding on to anything for support. He won his bet and he might be a quite charming addition to some of our more raucous, modern fraternity parties.
The set up of the story right now is that all the proper people are anti-Napoleon and have staying in their midst a "true" emigre from France. Who seems to be staying there only until the Bourbon restoration comes out on top. These folks have his and her coachmen to assist with capes and jackets, and twiddle their time away at parties praising the Czar and his family and cursing the revolutionaries. A few "uncivilized" young persons advocate for Napoleon, but so far they have been quickly muffled up by empty pleasantries and overzealous hostesses who speak too much French. NB: It is only to the revolutionaries that Pierre (a half-Italian illegitimate son) is know as Pyotr.
About the music: The nutcracker suite is not suggested eating music. I believe all the comments were to the effect of "I feel as though I have to eat faster!" We had to skip ahead to the Borodin in order to enjoy a relaxing tune with our meal.
(The potatoes I just threw together. I read some kind of Russian Recipe for Potatoes and Dill, but couldn't find anything too authentic on the internet that didn't involve soup or mushrooms. )
Ingredients:
1 Bag Baby Red Potatoes
Olive Oil for Coating
Sea Salt for Sprinkling
Dill
Heat oven to broil. Set a timer for 15 minutes. This is most crucial. Otherwise, you may forget about them or a student's parent might call and engage you in a frantic search for her son and you will end up with mostly burned potatoes which otherwise would have been perfectly crispy and delicious. The salvaged remains (from the bottom and edges) will prove this to you in a most disheartening way as you throw away the blackened bits.
Cauliflower Fried in Butter
Ingredients: One Head of Cauliflower (trimmed and separated into florets) 2 Tbsp Flour Salt and Pepper to Taste 2 Tablespoons butter
Steam the cauliflower until just tender. Coat with flour seasoned with salt and pepper and pan fry in hot melted butter until brown and crispy on all sides.
Before engaging in this, retreat from the frustration anything in your life might be causing, such as lost keys, check books, or students. By no means should you go on a rant about said missing item when it is suddenly discovered to have been hanging out with his wayward friends, lying to his mother, and cutting your class. Any of these actions may lead you to leave the cauliflower in the flour too long so that it gets caked rather than just coated and to subsequently, and in anger, throw it all into the pan before the butter is hot enough. The result? Soggy cauliflower that you have a sense would have been much tastier had you calmly dusted it with flour and salt, added a few tablespoons of olive oil to your butter, heated the pan properly, and browned it more quickly.
"Quick" Chicken
Ingredients:
1 ea average chicken (I just used 5 chicken thighs)
3 tbsp butter
1/2 cup sour cream
2 ea eggs
salt
pepper
Fry the chicken in butter. I took a cue from Julie and Julia and dried my meat to make it brown better. Darned if that wasn't about the only thing that was easy to make happen. Cover the pan and stew the chicken for 15 minutes. Open it and leave on very low heat. Beat eggs and stir in sour cream. Pour the sauce into the pan on low heat, stirring regularly, until the sauce thickens.
Here's my take on this recipe: It was like coating chicken in very moist, creamy scrambled eggs. Scrambled because I might have still been ranting about a student instead of stirring, and eggy simply because the 2 eggs to 1 half cup of sour cream was just too much egg. I suggest reducing to one egg and, if you like sour cream, increasing to 1 cup. I would also get boneless, skinless chicken, since the nice crispy skin I had achieved was sort of boiled out of it by the sauce.
NB: When attempting to recover a failed chocolate vodka, you can try chilling it, and that will take some of the edge off the burn and the chocolate will not precipitate out. You can also try adding ice to it and serving it with some cream, which takes the other edge. However, in the end, the dulled blade still remains and you should buy better vodka.
All said and done, the meal did not taste bad, even the soggy cauliflower was suggestive of better days gone slightly to fat. It was not so good as to put me off my desire to paper cut a certain teenager with his report card, but I did enjoy some for lunch leftovers today.
(My food photography may need some work - but look at that scrambled egg sauce...)
About the book - I have only read chapter 1. The Russians in this chapter seem to see Napoleon as no better than another Robespierre profiteering on the chaos of France. They speak about the "hydra of revolution" which implies that he is simply one head of many, and all bent on destruction. His power; however, is perhaps the greater as he has set himself up above the people whereas at least Robespierre had remained party to the tribunals who eventually engineered his demise. The impression Tolstoy leaves us with from this speech is that there was no delineation between the revolution and Napoleon's upstart wars.
As for the 2 characters you meet in chapter 1, Anna is charmingly and pretentiously called "Annette" and litters her conversation with 3 generations of genteel French phrases. What a cruel ironic blow it must have been to those raised to think of Paris as the center of culture, worthy of emulation, having to see their beloved mentors reduced to the rotten red (to borrow a phrase from Dickens) of the guillotine. And Prince Vasili, "who like a wound-up clock, by force of habit said things he did not even wish to be believed" should prove to be quite the standard, villainous, social grasper. I think I'm going to enjoy reading this book.
About the music: Tchaikovsky, procured by Jay (thank you!), was playing all through the dinner cooking. I don't know how to write about classical music, but it was lovely.
A last note about this project - one person, Eric, has already offered to forward me a recipe. Thank you! I would love to see them. Scouring the internet is tiresome and not always authentic - I am going to make a bookstore trip soon for a Russian Cookbook, but in the meantime, if you know any foolproof (student-crisis proof?) recipes, please pass them on.
