An Accidental Chowder, or, the Pleasures of Fish and Cream

I was recently thumbing through a group of cookbooks, all excellent soup cookbooks featuring soups of New England and chowders. The idea was to test and compare approaches to "authentic" clam chowder. I had a huge batch of fresh clams, potatoes and cream, fresh thyme, onions, and some good fresh cod - in short, all the essentials every one of these authentic recipes required. But as I was ready to go, one item was missing, the salt pork. The salt pork is key: the saltiness, a bit of the smoky, and fat to render with the onions. Clam chowder was suddenly out, at least the New England variety. I did end up making a Manhattan-style clam chowder, and the clams were gainfully deployed, but the recipe I developed was unfortunately not a winner.

Next morning, still without salt pork, I decided to use the nice fresh chunks of cod in a delicate creamy concoction that turned out just perfectly. As New England fish chowder, it wasn't authentic at all, and I borrowed little from the recipes I thought I would feature. But it was definitely worth writing about - quick and simple, too.

I had a short pint of fish stock stored in the freezer, and this with a bottle of store bought bottled clam juice was my stock. I sauteed the onions in butter with a little light olive oil, then let them express with some good white wine. Added broth and potatoes, seasonings, then brought to a simmer until the potatoes were soft. Meanwhile, I heated the cream with a little tarragon - very important step! The cream should be steamy, slightly foamy, but not at a full boil. If the cream is not heated first, it will curdle in the soup! After the cream is added, the cubed fish need only poach in the broth for 5 minutes or so - just until they are opaque and flake easily. Recheck seasonings, especially pepper, then serve immediately. A perfectly delicate chowdery "accident", in just 20 minutes!

Fish Chowder with a French Accent!

Ingredients
2 tbspn butter + 1 tbspn light olive oil
3/4 pound fresh cod or haddock, in bite-size chunks
1 medium onion, diced fine
1/2 cup good white wine
2 cups diced Yukon Gold potatoes
2 cups fish broth or clam juice
1 cup water or light chicken broth
1 cup heavy cream
sprig of fresh tarragon, or pinch of dried
1 tsp. dried thyme
1 bay leaf
pinch of cayenne pepper
salt
freshly ground pepper

As above, start with the onions, and when translucent, add the wine, simmering off the the alcohol. Season with the thyme, stirring for a minute or so, then add all the liquids except the cream, the potatoes, the bay leaf and salt, pepper, and cayenne, and continue to cook until the potatoes are soft. Heat the cream with the sprig of tarragon in a separate pot as described above. Add in a 1/2 cup of the broth from the soup, and slowly pour the cream mixture back into the soup pot. Remove the tarragon sprig, add the fish cubes and allow the fish to poach in the broth for about 5 minutes. The fish should be opaque, tender, and easy to flake with a fork. Check the seasonings, adding salt and pepper if needed. Serve immediately with a garnish of parsley. New England style chowder crackers are allowed!

Simple Pleasures - A Sunday Soup of Chickpeas from the Greek Island of Sifnos

On the Cycladian island of Sifnos, Sunday's dinner is in the oven the night before: a gloriously mellow soup of only chickpeas and onions, sparingly spiced, it simmers all night in a special clay vessel. In the smaller villages, the vessels are brought to the town bakers' on Saturday night, and next day, it is often the men who solemnly attend to the carrying of the pot back home for Sunday lunch. The island is known for its potters and pottery - no surprise that its most famous dish has its own dedicated piece of crockery - the skepastaria, pictured at the right.

Along with the unique clay pot, villagers insist that the specialness of their soup comes from using the purest rainwater, the freshest onions, and the tangy unfiltered olive oil from their own orchards. Not to mention the somewhat idiosynchratic mensural technique for guaranteeing the right amount of water! A local recipe source says that you add water to the crock pot and cant the vessel. When the water reaches the rim of the tilted vessel, the beans should be completely covered by the water. As it turns out, not all chickpeas are alike, some swell in the soaking more than others. So, the Sifnos cooks have an approximate starting measure of chickpeas (usually a kilogram), and then the amount of water depends on how they respond to the soak. The trick of adding water until the beans are covered in a tilted vessel works perfectly!

I first discovered this soup in a recipe from Paula Wolfert. She calls it Clay Pot Chickpea Soup in her book, The Slow Mediterrenean Kitchen. While acknowledging the Sifnian tradition of overnight cooking, Wolfert develops a somewhat quicker cooking version. This is a bit of a delicious irony: for her slow cooking bible, Wolfert speeds up the original recipe! The soup is very good just as she designs it, and I loved it enough to repeat it often, always promising myself to try out the longer slower cooking method next time.

And I eventually did. With utterly marvelous results:
The chickpeas, which never really got soft enough by the Wolfert method, were meltingly tender. The broth, too, was darker and richer. I'd like to think it was the perfectly imprecise measurement of the water! As for rainwater, I passed. Bottled water will do, if tap is not fine enough in your area. A clay pot to my mind is essential. I used a thinly glazed Amnion clay pot - they don't make this artisinal crockery any longer, but mine has been my bean pot of choice for almost 30 years. And instead of slow cooking all night, started mine in the morning and had it ready for for dinner.


The Ingredients:
2 cups chickpeas, soaked overnight.
2 tsp. baking soda
1/2 cup best olive oil
2 medium red onions, chopped in a food processor
1-1/2 tsp. kosher salt, bay leaf optional
flour and water to make paste seal for the clay pot.

Serve with:
freshly ground pepper
plenty of lemon quarters
finely minced parsely

A note about soaking. Best to begin the night before. In the AM, rinse and drain, then store in the refrigerator covered with water until you prepare the soup. One hour before you are ready to assemble the soup, remove from the refrigerator and add the baking soda. Then rinse and drain once more before cooking.

Assembling the soup:
Using a processor (a mini is just perfect) chop the onions very fine. Put the rinsed chickpeas into the pot, then add the onions, salt and optional bay leaf.
Pour in the olive oil and mix gently with a wooden spoon. Add water as described above: pour in enough to cover, then tilt the pot and continue to add water until water reaches the lowered rim and still well covers the beans.
Cover your pot and make a seal out of flour and water. Start with a cup of flour, adding water and more flour until you have enough to make a seal ring between the pot and cover.
Here is how the prepped Amnionware looks - pot sealed tight with the ring of moist dough.

Place the pot in a cold oven. Turn the dial to 425, and when the temperature is reached, about 15 minutes depending on the oven, reduce the temperature to 150 to 200 degrees and cook all day - six to seven hours will be fine. Then turn the oven off and count the minutes until dinner. The aromas will surely test your will power, and the sight of the finished dish with its handsome collar will definitely work for eye candy:

Gazpacho Rediscovered - A Soup with a History to Match its Bold Flavors

Gazpacho, or what is sometimes referred to as "liquid salad", couldn't be a more perfect choice for the tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers ripening right now in gardens across the nation. With spice and flavoring variations to meet the tastes of every palate, not to mention a long list of garnish options, gazpacho can be everyone's "go to" summer soup. (Sorry, couldn't resist the Rachel Ray-ism).

An impressive history, this gazpacho: even the derivations of the word make great reading - do check out the post from the blog What Holt and Barbara Had for Dinner. To summarize, the word gazpacho may be of Mozarabic origin, similar to the Spanish caspicias, meaning crumbs, worthless things. Maybe, too, it has to do with the ancient Greek word, gaza, meaning treasure.
As a thing to eat, the "soup" probably had its origins as almonds, stale bread and garlic worked laboriously in a mortar, and then mixed with olive oil and a little vinegar - food for peasants working in the fields, perhaps. Most definitely, a tasty way to use up stale bread. And not only did the medieval Spanish have their ways with dry bread: the Greeks had their skordalia, the Arabs dipped dry bread in oil and vinegar, and the Italians made panzanella: juicy vegetables and olive oil set to steep over dried bread.
One thing is certain, the earliest gazpachos had no tomatoes. Tomatoes were first brought to Spain from the gardens of Montezuma by the early explorers and colonizers. Even then, it took some time for the Europeans to trust that the tomato, a member of the nightshade family, wasn't poisonous. So, tomato-based preparations don't show up in cookbooks until much before the mid-17th century. (This from Clifford Wright, who has a a beautifully researched write-up on gazpacho in the Food History section of his website.)

I like how gazpacho even appears in an early American cookbook! Imagine that: Mary Randolph, whose cookbook, The Virginia Housewife, or Methodical Cook, was first published 1824, has a Spanish Gaspacho in her recipe collection. Nothing boring about the early American kitchen!

What's agreed about gazpacho is that it is a mix of pureed vegetables, usually tomatoes, peppers and cukes, and these are added to a base of moistened stale bread, garlic and salt, all flavored with olive oil and and vinegar. The mortar and pestle was the tool of choice long before the blender or food processor came into use, and there's definitely something to be gained by re-introducing this implement into the mechanics of the recipe (more about this later in the post). Gazpachos can be made with grapes and almonds, with watermelon and chili peppers, even with fish - I once made Paula Wolfert's wonderful Fava Bean Gazpacho with Sherry, White Raisins and Green Grapes (from The Slow Mediterranean Kitchen) - an exquisitely rich and savory gazpacho. But today, with a basket of season fresh tomatoes, I wanted to work out a more typical version. The ingredients were to be "traditional", but I wanted to try working the soup with mortar and pestle, food mill, and no blender. I had a hunch that the old fashioned grinding and pounding of the garlic and especially the peppers with the pestle would do wonders for the texture, and I think I am right. The cells of the vegetables are worked to break down their essentials, including oils and starches, and you can actually see the silkiness develop as you work the peppers against the side of the mortar - well worth the considerable extra effort. In the blender, the blade just minces through the food, cut/slicing the fibers but not breaking them down. To economize, I used a food mill to puree the seeded tomatoes (I didn't have to skin them), and I did finally use the immersion blender to blend the moistened bread with the garlic and peppers once they had been "pestled". I had read about using a raw egg yolk to add richness, and this turned out to be a great idea - I added some olive oil and cumin as I beat the yolk for extra depth, too.

Lots of folks have special hints, provisos and family secrets for their great gazpachos. Clifford Wright cautions that no one ingredient should ever predominate - gazpacho should be "a completely harmonic result of an orchestra of flavors" , others say that while the list of potential toppings is long, never use more than two or three per serving. As for famous family secrets, I have a few from a charming story by way of a friend who is lucky enough to have an actual Andalusian mother-in-law, who made what I always imagined must have been the most luscious and refreshing gazpacho (and my friend said it indeed was!)

When my fellow foodie friend Liddy, first visited her husband's family back home in Spain, she was eager to learn all about gazpachos and ollas from the source. So, she sat coyly in the kitchen with her new mother-in-law and asked leading question after leading question, hoping to get to her cooking magic. She asked, do you peel the peppers or grill them to remove the skin. The answer, with a smile, was, "it depends". When she asked, can you use canned tomatoes for your gazpacho, again, it was "it depends." What liquid do you use to soak the bread? "Ah, well, that depends"... For every ingredient and step of the recipe it seemed, there was, "it depends." Just before poor Liddy was totally exasperated, and still feeling too new in the family to ask about all those dependancies, her mother-in-law turned teary, walked over to her, gave her a melting hug, and said, "I have waited years to finally have a daughter-in-law to share with all my secrets." Of course, over the years of wonderfully heartwarming visits, most of the secrets were eventually revealed:
You use a peeler to peel the peppers if they have been in the refrigerator and are no longer sweet because there's no sugar left to carmelize when you singe the skins! You grill and scrape away the skin only if the peppers are at their freshest and sweetest!
What liquid is best? If you have enough stale bread you can use the juice of the tomatoes after they are pureed. But, if you have only a little piece of dry bread, you seed all the tomatoes, scraping the gelatinous seed clusters into a dish and then squeeze the juice onto the bread - the almost jellied seed liquid adds more body to less bread!
My all time favorite nugget of gazpacho wisdom has to with using canned versus fresh tomatoes. According to the Andalusian mama, after you cut up the tomatoes, you take a deep whiff of their fragrance. If the smell reminds you of watermelon (as tomatoes sometimes do when not their freshest), use canned tomatoes for the gazpacho, and the ones you just cut up should be put to another use.

So much for the anecdotal. I finish with the recipe which pretty fairly matches what I worked on today:

2 lbs freshest Roma tomatoes, seeded
2 to 3 mini bell peppers, any color
or
1 long thin pepper, more sweet than hot
1 small cucumber, seeded
2 large cloves garlic
2 to 3 stale slices from a long french bread
1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
2 tablespoons good quality sherry vinegar
1 egg yolk + 1 tsp olive oil + heaping 1/4 tsp cumin, whipped
salt and freshly ground pepper to taste

For my version, I make no apologies for the rather involved and tedious methods applied - this was definitely a labor of love on a morning when I had plenty of time!
I started by seeding all tomatoes, saving seeds and seed liquid, squeezing the liquid through a cheesecloth onto the broken up bread pieces for a good 20 minute soak. While the bread softened, I cut up all the tomatoes, salted them and let them sit in the sun to sweeten further - 1 hour, and probably not an essential step. While tomatoes steeped, I removed the skins from the little peppers by singing them over the gas burners, slipping off their skins under cool water. I liquified the garlic with a scant teaspoon of salt using the mortar and pestle, then worked the peppers to a smooth silky paste in the same way. (The flavor and texture of the garlic and peppers was a major taste moment.) I also used the mortar and pestle to grind up the cucumbers with a dash of salt - this was actually pretty quick and easy. The bread was now soft, so I used the stick blender to blend together the bread with all the "ground" vegetables (no tomatoes yet!), then folded in about 2 tablespoons of the olive oil. I blended until I had a very smooth paste - this by choice; some might prefer a grainier texture in the finished soup. The tomatoes I pureed using the medium disk of a food mill - that gave me some pulp for body, but no skins. Next I stirred the tomatoes into the bread-vegetable base, seasoned with just a little more salt, more olive oil, pepper, the vinegar, and chilled by stirring in a glassful of crushed ice. So far, I had a very bright tasting, refreshing and rich gazpacho. I served this plain, with some toasts with chopped egg, olives, parsley and a drizzle of olive oil. Very good.


Better, however, was the reserved half of the broth that I mixed with a raw egg whipped with the teaspoon of olive oil and cumin! This version was creamy without being mellow, had depth, but still really tasted just as fresh as the vegetables themselves. Here below, topped with some chopped olives and white of egg.