High Peaks of European Cuisine

 

     Growing up in a Midwestern suburb during the Eisenhower era, I came to feel that I lived in a cultural desert.  Not realizing then that everyone’s own culture tends to be invisible to the individual, I thought not only Chicago’s nearby Black neighborhoods, but also small Midwestern towns, not to mention every other country on earth, had more to engage the imagination than the trimmed lawns of my neighborhood where the height of aesthetic ambition seemed embodied in my parents’ artificial Christmas tree situated in the picture window and played upon by varicolored lights as it revolved.  The corresponding cuisine notoriously depended on ketchup, margarine, Wonder Bread, Jell-O salads, and casseroles using canned soups.  On the rare occasions that my family dined out, it was either for burgers or, for a fancy meal, steak or fried chicken.

     But I soon learned that other options existed and, in menus as in other matters, I became a dissenter.  My mother learned early that I preferred Oscar Mayer Smokey Links to hot dogs and Liederkranz to Velveeta and, as I reached high school age, I found access to lamb and eggplant from Diana’s on South Halsted, sausage with mumbo sauce from a stand beneath the 63^rd Street El, and pickled cabbage from the Assyrian-American Restaurant.  Now, of course, ethnic holes-in-the-wall are everyone’s favorites and salsa is America’s most popular condiment.  A combination of world travels and stacks of library cookbooks have given me some familiarity with what is done with food today.  I have learned that no other region produces such a grand variety of pickled foods as the Korean banchan, while Indian cooking excels in the harmonious orchestration of large numbers of aromatic herbs and spices.  At the same time, I came to reconsider white people’s food and to realize that the European continent has dramatically high peaks of its own culinary achievement.  Though I took a long way round, I had come to be able to appreciate the unique triumphs of white people’s cooking.    

     Bread is made in a good many parts of the world, but European wheat breads have been developed to a level of sophistication far outpacing other regions.  Most of the world’s breads are unleavened flatbreads like tortillas or chapattis, sometimes, like Ethiopian injera, fermented.  In the nineteenth century the first satisfactory chemical leavens became available, allowing the cook to make raised breads like biscuits, soda bread, coffee cake, and bannocks.  Oven-baked raised breads using barm, yeast, or sourdough starters include naan, Khamiri roti, and Arabic khubz, including pita, but in Europe an array of high-rising yeast breads unlike those known elsewhere arose.  Every region of Europe developed specialties: pain de mie, challah, pan gellego, ciabatta, pane Toscano, but the acknowledged masterpiece of European bread is the French baguette.  Countless excellent breads are made with whole wheat or with multiple grains, and I relish a sprinkling of sunflower, flax, and sesame seeds, yet for me as for most diners and bakers the acme of bread, the very best loaf, is a baguette.  (Baking all my life I continue to pursue the perfect baguette in my own kitchen.)  The contrast in texture between crust and interior and the pure and fresh wheaten taste, bland enough to complement any dinner made this the most common and iconic of French foodstuffs.  The very magic of the action of the yeast, creating bubbles and caverns, makes a light and variable loaf that is excellent with unsalted butter while not distracting from the other contents of a full plate.    

     People throughout the world, in the universal quest for intoxication, have made alcoholic drinks of whatever was hand: using the sap of palms to make wine in West Africa, agave for pulque in Mexico, rice for sake and mijiu in East Asia, even mare’s milk for Mongolian ayrag or kumis.  Each of these has its charms, particularly in its home territory with complementary climate and cuisine, yet the production of wine from grapes in Europe goes far beyond what was done elsewhere.  Surely the range is extraordinary from a dry and fine-bubbled sparkler, through the light fruit of Beaujolais, the grave and knotty flavor of pinot noir, the satin of Bordeaux, the musky hearth-like warmth of port, even the strong straw taste that lurks behind the sweetness of Tokay.  Surely for those who consume alcohol there is a wine for every taste and every moment.  The simple treatment of grape juice to preserve it and at the same time to induce inebriation became in Europe an elaborate aesthetic game, as any glance at wine literature will indicate, but one with resulting in dependable satisfaction.  

     Similarly, the cheese produced in Europe is far more varied than most of the world’s cheeses.  While fresh cheeses like the Indian panir or the Middle Eastern ackawi which are widespread are made also in  Europe: the familiar cottage cheese, German quark, and French fromage blanc.  The most distinctive European cheeses are, however, prepared with particular molds, fungi, and bacteria.  The litany of their names might suggest a cheese cantata: Brevibacterium linens is used in making Limburger, Penicillium glaucum for gorgonzola, Propionibacterium freundenreichii makes the holes in Swiss, and Penicillium camemberti and its cousin Penicillium roqueforti for camembert and roquefort.  The flavors may be mild or sharp, bland or salty, perhaps nutty or smoky, the textures light or dense soft or hard, smooth or grainy, a grand array of possibilities unequaled elsewhere in the globe. 

     Many foodstuffs are most appealing in natural form.  Fresh apricots can scarcely be improved, new peas and a beefsteak need only a bit of cooking and seasoning, while oysters and clams are best utterly au naturel.  The satisfaction of fresh milk, salted peanuts, tomatoes just plucked from the garden, and countless other foods is universal.  Cuisines differentiate, however, when more complex preparation is employed, often resulting in a product that could not really be foreseen in its raw materials.  Bread, wine, and cheese are all the result of fermentation, and the astonishing variety of each of these basic foods is a testament to our species’ ingenuity, demonstrating the power of art to transform nature.  These products are not simply foods; they are feats of imaginative and aesthetic judgement.

     They are, we may be glad, artistic creations with physical substance.  I sit this afternoon on my front porch in a soft breeze, hearing the birds of late summer.  With a piece of baguette, some thin slices of Gouda, and a glass of Chateau Garreau, I may partake of these pinnacles of European cuisine all at once and, to enjoy such a feast, one need not do any preparation whatever, though today’s bread is homemade. 

Menus

 

 

I have long thought that much of my house’s aesthetic decision-making occurs in meal preparation yet the products of the culinary art are consumed and thus more obviously ephemeral than other cultural artifacts.  To me, who ate these dishes, they form a sort of poem of imagined tastes.  What follows is a single week of recipes.  I made no special preparations and edited nothing, beginning this list without mentioning it to Patricia.  In summertime we use a good deal of produce from our deck garden.  I note these ingredients as “garden” vegetables.  Our herbs are mostly fresh and home-grown as well.     

 

 

chilaquiles with poblano peppers, Mexican cheese, and garden cilantro

 

tabbouleh with mint and pumpkin seeds, strawberries and Greek yoghurt

 

chicken and mushrooms Chinese-style dumplings, brown rice

*

Carolina barbecue hash, boiled egg, orange juice

 

homemade baguette with brie, green salad, cauliflower puree soup, almond flour brownie

 

moussaka with eggplant and garden zucchini and potatoes

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scrambled eggs with ham and peppers, orange juice, roll

 

garden zucchini cheese casserole, corn on the cob, pistachio ice cream

pizza with garden zucchini and basil

*

blueberry pancakes

 

ahi tuna, broccoli and cauliflower, cucumber yogurt salad, boiled red potatoes

 

avocado whole wheat toast, garden green beans, tomato, pear and Gouda cheese

*

corn cakes with pepper and onion

strip steak pieces au jus with mixed garden greens (chard, beet, kale), beetroot, cucumber blue cheese salad, mashed potatoes

panir and peas with potato samosas

*

dilled eggs, fried potatoes, roll

 

zucchini casserole with three cheeses

 

barley beef vegetable soup, peaches and cherries

*

millet cakes with kale, green salad with blue cheese

 

seafood risotto with haddock, mussels, and squid

 

roast pork with vegetable, rice, and beans

Hungarian Food

     The Hungarian word for food -- eter -- has, of course, no relation whatever to “eat.” As a non-Indo-European tongue virtually all Hungarian words are inscrutable even to the traveler who knows French and German. Few tourists gain any substantial acquaintance with the language, but every visitor comes to know something of the cuisine. The intimate communication of dining, the very paradigm of travel as the foreign outside is taken into oneself and assimilated with delight or dyspepsia, is available from every café, restaurant, and street vendor; it is all but inevitable. (It takes really stubborn satisfaction to return from Acapulco’s Hilton as Henry did, saying, “They eat just like we do: big steaks, salad bar . . .”) Eating Hungarian food while meditating on the word eter, one may come to associate that assertive t with insistent garlic, paprika, and heavy-handed salting, the liquid r with the richness of fats (lard and deep-frying are still popular; cream, sour or fresh, may top anything; pastries and snacks are popular at all hours, including the humblest of all: langos or fried dough, susceptible to toppings ranging from sugar to garlic), and those precise little es with the strength of the basic ingredients, the goose, duck, pork, and carp, the potatoes and pasta and egg noodles veering toward gnocchi that form the cuisine’s foundation. Eter. The word food sounds flat-footed by comparison, but no more than an American diner meal might taste.
     The stereotype of Central and Eastern European meals as weighty affairs has some truth yet (though for me Hungarian restaurants offer nothing as hefty as their Czech cousins whose ubiquitous “farmer’s plate” may include two types of dumplings and three varieties of pork, the entire composition chromatically muted, a sort of grey tending toward beige). The category of “special diet” or “health-conscious” options in restaurants with an English menu may list only deep-fried foods, starting with deep-fried Camembert which has earned its role as a “diet” dish due to being meatless.
     The Jegverem restaurant in Sopron glories in substantial offerings, calling itself “a restaurant for guzzle-guts.” A rhyme in the menu entertains the waiting customer with its pleasantly garbled English, though reserving a trap-door for the last line:


Be it lunch, dinner, or other meat,
Our lifestyle is to have big feat.
Hungarians always up tull eat,
Whilst they lie under a coffin-sheet.


     At this establishment Patricia had venison stew, while for me it was a pig’s knuckle, served over leeks and pickles inside a container of bread topped with sour cream and accompanied by a half liter of Soproni beer. (As this was a “gypsy” preparation, the ever-whimsical menu description said, “First, steal a pig and singe the hair off. If you are too lazy to do this, steal a pig already singed . . .”)
     The Hungarian cook operates on a principle of savory overkill, overwhelming the diner with rich substance. At the Lukac in Budapest, I had pork stuffed with liver pate and then breaded, fried, and served with paprika sauce; Patricia had veal stuffed with Roquefort, then rolled in nuts and fried. There was such a quantity of Roquefort she left a great pool on her plate. Ordering goose leg at the Cellarium in Pecs, she was given two sizable legs with thighs attached as well as a side dish of cabbage prepared with apples and champagne. And we were eating at modest establishments.
     The typical Central European breakfast of (bread with cheese and cold cuts or sausages in its minimalist form in a cheap pension was enhanced with little individual packets of liver and ham paté, hazelnut butter, and tarragon mustard. One could pass on the sorry sort of juice drink and make the most of the muesli.
     At the main indoor market of Pest, the Vamhaz, a fanciful turn of the century building with excited ornamentation, one sees the noble fresh-water fish so popular here, catfish, and trout, giant carp and pike-perch from Lake Balaton. Apart from a marvelous variety of peppers, root vegetables abound: overgrown radishes, unapologetic celery roots, parsnips, even kohlrabi. These fine and sturdy vegetables seem rarely, though, to make their way to restaurant plates where salad is apologetic: a few slices of cucumber, a bit of shredded cabbage, and a pickled morsel or two.
     Louis XIV called tokay "Vinum Regum, Rex Vinorum" ("Wine of kings, king of wines"), and, having come to its hometown, we sampled the celebrated Tokaj Aszu which we could hardly stomach in spite of its praise by popes and nobles of earlier eras of taste. Then there are the wines: Egri Bikavér or Bull’s Blood, of course, and some palatable enough others, kekfrankos and kekoporto. Hungarians make as well a variety of distilled palinkas with their intense fruit spirits, and the mysterious bitter liqueur Unicum. John Cross relayed his mother’s folk wisdom about this dark blend of many herbal flavorings, “It’s medicinal, really. After sleeping your blood sugar is down low and you need a swig or two of Unicum in the morning to get going. You see, it has a white cross on the bottle. That’s because it’s good for you.”

The American Supermarket

     One of the ways in which American culture is conquering the world is the spread of the supermarket through Europe and the developing world, displacing the open air stalls, the bakeries and butcher shops that had distributed foodstuffs for millennia. There is surely much to regret in this change, and I recognize the evils or agribusiness: the development of patented seeds, the cultivation of produce for endurance and appearance rather than flavor, the energy wasted to transport produce halfway round the world, the peculiar American commitment to corn, and I am not even touching the trend toward marketing prepared foods, uniformly more expensive though of lower aesthetic and nutritional value.
     Still, entering an American supermarket, who can fail to be seduced by the array of possibilities, the richness of choice, the ease of obtaining an immense variety of foodstuffs so conveniently available? What a paradisiacal vision the meat counter would have seemed to the generations of semi-starving ancestors! Who could avoid shopping for images with Ginsberg? Or fail to say grace with Howard Nemerov?
     I can walk those arid aisles with toiletries and cleaning supplies, cellophane tape and Tums, past all the pre-made meals and those just half pre-made. The rewards are great, who would complain when one can glimpse a sudden bell pepper from Holland like a model with absolutely flawless yellow skin! The Israeli oranges, extravagant in peel but so fragrant and almost too full of themselves! Kohlrabi that look as though they should have been grown underwater! Kale asserting a darkly serious vegetable strength, the conundrum of a whole coconut, fine apples made to fit the hand and in a dozen varieties, the fruit Athenaeus called a gift from Dionysos! What glories, too, of grains and seeds, a good share of what people have found toothsome these last few thousand years.
     Then, too, there is the meat, that “the bloody/Mess of our birthright, our unseemly need,” according to Nemerov, who proceeds to thanks the Lord for having “conferred aesthetic distance/ Upon our appetites.” All those once-hot tissues now a cool wall, silent, awaiting preparation, latent with promise for our own needy flesh. Can we discern the ways of cattle, swine, sheep, and fowl from these clues they have left behind? Can we put on their virtue when we dine? Aware that my body would be consumed by beasts of a dozen phyla were it lying in the woods, knowing that those ancient Near Eastern reliefs of a predatory lion on its agonized prey represent life itself which can live only upon life, I have never quite understood moral vegetarianism. Of course, reason may have less to do with the issue than the memory of an odor such as the one that caused M. Loisel to exclaim “Ah! le bon pot-au-feu! je ne sais rien de meilleur que cela!” or perhaps a great joint of pork that has infused the house after cooking for half a day.
     We pay, of course, for the grand panoply of possibilities in the supermarket through the homogenization of the local and seasonal resources, and we receive something rather different from the tables of previous centuries. We may practice virtually any cuisine, but, for that reason, possess none of our own.
     It is really rather similar in the marketplace of beauty and thought. Just as the modern cosmopolitan mind can no longer see one mythology alone, and thus has little choice but to exchange the believer’s depth and simple certainty for breadth and an embarrassment of possibilities. Knowing the whole crew -- Zeus and Thor and Kwan Yin and Christ – it is as impossible to privilege one alone as it would be to commit to a lifetime of Oaxacan food, tasty though that may be. If I can listen to Indian ragas as well as Bach fugues, I am likely to hear neither with the ear of the specialist, but to hear both at all is no small thing. The Tibetan Buddhist monks seem to have the highest of times in their theological disputations, laughing and back-slapping and posturing grotesquely, but I am afraid one would have to leave Plato, Aquinas, and Spinoza forever behind in order to join them. We who find ourselves in the belated twenty-first century have little choice but to range about omnivorously, unsure whether it be a pleasure or a curse.
     In the USA today, we can only make the most of our wide range and excel as comparatists whether we would have chosen to be or not. If my chapattis are no match for those of a Delhi-wallah, and my baguette cedes to the ordinary Parisian boulangerie, I can at least revel in the range of possibilities available at the supermarket and on my bookshelves.