Corned Beef and Cabbage

"This is just one version out of the score of recipes for this venerable dish which is not a grill at all and which you  will scarcely find nowadays simmering away in the galleys of the great petrol barges which whirl down the Rhone to Marseille." Elizabeth David, from "Grillades des Mariners du Rhone"






As Her Bounty sat anchored at bay tottering gently to the prevailing winds of the Caribbean all of the crew eyed up the beach of Nassau, but for different reasons.  For Stone Eyes he had but one thing in mind: for quartermaster to procure three head of cattle by any means necessary so that he could proceed on the business of corning the beef.  Stocks of large grain salt would be available now at port trading and he could butcher and 'corn' all within the same day under tents where he could avoid the blistering heat and the ganging flies.

By the time the rest of the crew had finished with their own private business, they would, like ghosts drawn to the night, follow their noses to the beachside where Stone Eyes would have dedicated one
cow to the night's feast.  He set up an enormous spit of fire, laced his quarter of the cow by a rotating pike and let the salted beef roast in open air for five hours.  In copper buckets each the width of a man, he boiled recently plucked cabbages, pulled carrots, and as many potatoes as he could possibly retrieve.

By the time the beef had ripened on the spit, it was more than just the crew of Her Bounty who had meandered down the beach head following their nose.  Crew members had to push other cut throats out of the way or sometimes offer them grog from the oak casks as a decoy to appease their appetite.

Stone Eyes could see none of this, of course, but he could hear the sound of the hunger in the air and it was at this point that he applied his final sauce of English mustard and Bahaman dark sugar which formed a syrup so thick that it stuck to the side of the animal as it spun in the night against the attacking fire.

Fish Tacos

"Giulia's cooking was like herself, elegant and delicate – in bearing she was more the fastidious aristocrat than the sturdy peasant – subtly seasoned, but with unexpected contrasts, as in a cold, uncooked tomato sauce which she served with hot dry rice." – Elizabeth David, from An Omelette and a Glass of Wine






As the legend goes, a cook by the name of Stone Eyes had been taken captive by Captain Hap Rayne's crew, stationed as they were in the shallows at Nassau New Providence at the time of the Golden Age of Piracy when pirates outnumbered citizens on the island a good two to one.

The marauding black flag ship Her Bounty's treasure chests full, it was not yet allowed to shore by the active canons of Fort Montague located at the top of the hill in the center of town.  Her Bounty had five million in gold bullion but nowhere yet to trade and had lost its cook taking the Spanish cargo carrier the Basque only three days ago. Stone Eyes had one very critical problem: he could not see,

and looked at you, as they say, with two round ghost-like marbles for eyes.  Place the proper food down to his cutting board, however, and he could work miracles unlike any other, for he could feel and smell with a near divine ability.  The lone woman on board had become Stone Eye's assistant becoming, in a sense, quartermaster of the galley. She was left alone because of her importance to the task of assisting in feeding a crew.  Giulia wrote down Stone Eye's recipes and kept them in an assortment of sealed bottles to keep dry.  Only one remained at the later sinking of Her Bounty, 'Fish on Bread,' which called for flounder grilled over an open pit and seasoned by a

homemade blend of dried thyme, paprika, onion powder, cayenne, salt and pepper.  The fish, sliced in long strips, and drizzled – if by any chance available – the juice of lime or a crushed mango, would be spread over stacks of the preserved corn tortillas.  The men of the crew always knew when it was fish on bread night and might be found shucking their posts at top decks to steal a sizzling sample.

 

Salad at Oloron St-Marie

"Far from any town or village, lost among the trees on a gentle hill overlooking a man-made reservoir, the restaurant didn't even have a name.  We called it 'the lake place.'  There was no telephone.  If we wanted to make sure of a table we would drive up the previous day to order our meal, but sometimes we would take a chance, arriving at midday and hoping that Giovanna would have some of her freshly made pasta for us." – Elizabeth David, from An Omelette and a Glass of Wine



When we first took bites of this Basque picnic salad, we were sitting, I will never forget, at a specially made backyard terrace overlooking the Orlon-Sainte-Marie in the Basque country of southwestern France.  The name here had no name either, but locals would trickle in as if they already had their seating in place.  A waiter by the name of Igon brought us a Bandol blanc and we sipped at this while

we listened to the water move along the rocky ledges. We asked Igon what his name meant and he said, in English thankfully, 'ascension,' which we thought appropriate by how he produced the food so gracefully. As he laid down our salad plates, he began to describe the salad that was before us with such accuracy that we asked him wryly if this was not maybe a waiter's salad instead.  Igon gleamed and responded to us that he was not merely the waiter

Chef's Salad with Kale and Potato Croutons 

for the evening but also the owner and the chef.  This was simply his home and he opened it up to the public every night except for sunday when, instead, he allowed these same patrons to use his vast kitchen to feed him and his own family.  The Basqaise, as Igon called it, refers to virtually any dish combining local country ham, tomatoes and peppers, which have varying degrees of hot flavor as well as sweetness.  This salad, he pointed out, was not hot but sweet, that it was the potatoes broiled by scallions and parmesan that were the centerpiece, although there was, to be sure, shorn ham, tomatoes grown from down the road, and a roast beef that had been culled from the slow, as he called it, growing Basque cow.  "Underneath, sweet pickles scattered about, but here we like to churn some of our peppers to paste, and there are dabbles here and there."  How could we forget Igon?  To this day, as the refrigerator begins to overfill with lettuces, tomatoes, a few stray red potatoes, I like to create what I now call the Saint-Marie Salad, and can hear the faint trickle of the Oloron in the background.

Cowliseum

The story of the building of the Monona Terrace is the story of the building of Madison itself.  The torch for the idea of creating a dynamic civic space became a generations' old series of what-ifs and why-nots.  One of the great early examples was the UW Stock Pavilion, essentially a largely

proportioned barn, show ring and classroom for the pioneering UW Agriculture department that also, by near accident, became Madison's premier concert hall: it could seat more than 3,000 people in bleachers and 1,500 on folded chairs.  The problem with this multi-function center was that it had huge columns jutting up from the floor which blocked the view of many attendees.  "Freight trains on a

Stock Pavilion nicknamed the 'Cowliseum'

track next to the building would sometimes rumble by in the middle of a contralto's Ave Maria, radiators hissed, and steam pipes chugged....then there was the smell.  Before concerts, crews with shovels would pick up anything obvious and then cover the dirt floor with a thick blanket of sawdust...chairs would sink in several inches as the audience sat down, most would list a little to one side, and patrons would often go home with sawdust in their shoes."  As city historians observe, Madison had a somewhat peculiar dilemma, based on its surprising rising needs as an urban center, but with competing intentions of somewhat overachieving city leaders who had, like Frank Lloyd Wright himself, very potent vision but not always the means or management to build the dream venue.

Nature Journal

13 December


Weather still considerably dismal, so find that you cannot wait for anything during the in-between season.  There are conveniently close hikes and walks all over the great gray bluffs.  At the parking lot of Hixon we begin to think of day's walk through woods as a mystery story and wonder who had been held captive in castle of the tree.  We moved along through the woods off of the trail; entire bluffsides littered in enormous patterns of old fallen oak, which now look to be mossy fortresses,

sometimes laid over outcroppings of driftless limestone.  Much of the timber had been cut at some time, dragged to points to create the forts and 'lookouts.'  Fungus scales and the muck of leaves gather where few footprints have fallen.  We walk along one mammoth fallen oak suspended at a rise out over the downslope until it becomes too high to comfortably look down.  We jump onto the broadside of a smaller standing tree and work our way down like a fireman's pole.  Just up a bit, toward the more known area of the new trail, we find a dangling vine the size of an old boat rope.  The dare is on to leap and see how long it will hold.  It holds for longer than expected, out over the ground several feet, then gives – the fall

fortunately onto soft ground and on balance.  Fat tire bikers pass, duck and weave in and out of tight curves.  Roots jut out from the side of sheer cut hills.  Limestones placed at curves for definition.  Old relics of times past crop up as natural clues and we assemble our mystery somewhat further until we come to the conclusion that the trails and untamed woods tell many tales of adventures past and present.

Tao of Food: Portobello
Chickpea Wraps

Onto a baking pan diced buttons of four portobello mushrooms, 2-4 quartered tomatoes, red onions sliced to preference, some chopped rosemary if on hand, olive oil and as much salt as thought needed.

This will bake in 425 oven until all the vegetables are tender enough that you can picture them easy to bite into and eat.  The kitchen will fill with an aroma that is very hard to define by comparing to other smells.  Tomatoes, when cooking, give off a sort of sweet smell; combined with the earthiness of the

mushrooms, it begins to smell of a restaurant preparing for appetizers.  Meanwhile crush a can of chickpeas combined with a dash of balsamic vinegar to taste and again salt, maybe pepper.  This will create the bottom spread of the flatbreads.  Place muenster and parmesan cheese over the chickpeas – this will become the main sauce.  Now that the vegetables are soft and combined, they go over the top.  Place a grouping of greens over this for crisp texture, then wrap or fold, depending on the size of the flatbread chosen.  Either a panini machine or a broil, long enough to melt the cheese and warm the chickpeas, can work to heat. The cheese begins to run out the ends.  Lay the wraps onto a

cutting board and cut to perfect size.  Many good textures in this wrap – both hearty and light.  The main components of the mushroom and tomato filling balanced by the flatbread and chickpea layering.  With a leftover soup available, and a handful of chips, a great weekend afternoon meal.  

"The iridescent bubbles were beautiful.  But they were the falsest thing in the sea and the old man loved to see the big sea turtles eating them.  The turtles saw them, approached them from the front, then shut their eyes so they were completely carapaced and ate them filaments and all."  – Hemingway, Old Man and the Sea








The old man waited until midnight to approach Lake Monona by moonlight.  He might cross the Yahara at its very final edge when nobody was awake, dragging his ice boat as if a child dragging a wagon full of fresh summer watermelon to sell in a neighbor's yard, sneaking along, a thief in the night.  The full moonlight was a better light than the day's sun for the ice was his own now, at night, and it was he and the sound of the skates cutting through the shrill crust.  What a soft glow was it all with the faint yellow squares shining down from the lit windows of the isthmus buildings.  You could not know this city without these night trips, he thought, as he shoved out his handmade wooden skiff where the previous patterns of blade slits from earlier in the day had frozen over and filled, and a fine buffer of cold fog floating above the lake had formed.  He was now at the age where he might talk out loud to a grandchild despite being alone and took great joy in demonstrating to her  the way to begin the rigging and set the sail to the weather of the wind.  What else was to be done, he thought, what else was there but to teach and show how the wind might catch inside the wide sail to best propel this skiff?  "You can only feel the wind at night, you see.  All the indicators are invisible.  Sometimes the leeward shifts and becomes the face of the weather helm and you must be very quick with your rutter and jib."  She did not know of such things, but understood the floating across the great  surface of diamonds at night.  "Your mother will wonder where you are," she would remember him saying later, and hold, as tight as any finger could, the side of the hull wondering if the boat might lift into the sky and beyond.  Sometimes it did.

Nature Journal: Spillway

5 December


Still fine biking weather, so rode down the Onalaska slope off Main Street to old Sias Isles Black River.  The old fishing shack still down there.  A boy of about fourteen fishing off the shore with a spinning lure.  A narrow trail leads south along the shore and through a thickset marsh.  An old timber lean-to held up against a shoreline oak.  Gradually the trail turns to thick soggy leaves, so we set down the bikes and walk as far as we can without getting wet.  This area completely undevelopable, so one of those throwback to a bygone era landscapes that are hard to find within the city area.  Ducks mostly gone, some still confused of season, and splash off at our approach.  One downy woodpecker skips across the dead wood of another oak.  We pile the bikes back up and ride along the bay at Sias, approaching the old Lake Onalaska spillway, the dam of sorts that allows a steady flow from the impoundment to the final miles of the Black before it meets at the La Crosse and Mississippi.  The spillway, at peak season in summer, might hold five, six fisherman, who walk down along the railroad tracks and up onto the concrete shore platform.  The water right now hovers at about half an inch over the spillway.  Very slippery on the surface, a thin layer of moss washing to the ripples that wash over the top.  A northerly wind picks up and scuffles the water flowing down over the edge into cascades.  Water is gulped at drains at the entrance head of the spillway, which we assume then spits out below, evening out the flow of the structure itself.  No fish.  No birds here.  The rip rap below enormous.  One man, dressed out in cool weather camo walks over the irregular rock to a little spot before the spillway and sits on his bucket with pole set in between rocks.  We set back for the tracks and carry our bikes over our shoulders and head north along the trail towards Midway.

Rutabaga & Carrot Soup

What to do with a rutabaga?  The brief description to the Williams-Sonoma Soup of the Day recipe for Rutabaga & Carrot Soup mentions that these otherwise known "yellow turnips" often get ignored because people just don't know what to

do with them.  Yet they are sweet and very flavorful when roasted.  "Paired with carrots and allspice, they simmer into a delicious soup."  Rutabagas have that sort of taste that might remind you not just of your grandmother's kitchen, but your great grandmother's kitchen, and in that right it's one of those throwback foods that remind you of old time kitchen gardens, pickling, root cellars or a summer breeze flying through a screened-in front porch.  I'd go a step further and say that anytime roasted vegetables are called for in a recipe – roasting chicken and vegetables is a fairly common recipe – one cut-up rutabaga might turn a standard vegetable dish into something much more surprising and authentic.  This recipe calls for two rutabagas and four carrots chopped and roasted on a sheet until tender.  When done, they get dumped into a prepared soup base of a sautéed yellow onion, garlic and, importantly, a

good 1/2 tsp. of allspice. Add at least five cups of vegetable broth, a chopped up tomato and let it simmer for 25 minutes.  At this point this soup is brothy at the top and chunky at the bottom so I

assume that if a cook wanted to leave it like this it could be fine.  But the recipe calls to puree the soup in batches in a blender, then pour this back into the warm pot to adjust its brothiness if chosen.  I blended the soup not quite to a full puree, leaving some noticeable chunks of carrots and rutabagas, then added some water to loosen a bit more.  This is ultimate comfort food. A pinch of pepper over the top or maybe even a squeeze of honey...the rutabagas add a very robust but not bitter or too bold taste to the more neutral flavor of the carrots.