Butter. Pork fat. Poultry fat. Beef and lamb fats.

These are the four chapters that make up Jennifer McLagan’s cookbook Fat, an enjoyable, educational, and entertaining read. It is also an enticing trove of recipes—some sweet and some savory, and some with surprising and original flavor combinations.

Stirring pastured butter into the parsnip and rutabaga puree. Seeing as the best butter is from pastured cows, and that pasture is fueled by the sun, these cubes of butter are captured sunlight.

Starting with the first chapter, “Butter,” I made Butter Parsnips and Rutabaga, a puree flavored with cumin, orange juice and zest, and a generous amount of butter. McLagan says this recipe is the only way she enjoys eating rutabaga, a root vegetable she dislikes but that is much loved by her husband. I’m a rutabaga fan, and so did not need to be converted by her recipe. Yet I was, and have added it to my permanent collection of rutabaga preparations.

With the need to use up some surplus eggs from our laying hens, the recipe for Pepper and Orange Pound Cake was next up. Made with cake flour, McLagan’s recipe is more delicately textured than traditional pound cakes, though it becomes firmer after a couple of days. (McLagan says to let the cake rest overnight before serving; I suggest a couple days, particularly if you like to dunk a piece in dessert wine, as I do.) Its flavor is pleasant, subtle, and not overtly peppery, unless you happen to bite down directly on a speck of pepper.

Pepper and Orange Pound Cake

Perhaps because I’m an Indian food lover, my favorite thus far is her Butter Chicken, or Murgh Makhani (top photo). Authentic Murgh Makhani uses chicken cooked in a tandoor oven, something that is found in Indian restaurants but not in most homes. McLagan’s two-butter version is an elegant solution this problem. In McLagan’s recipe, the chicken is browned in ghee rather than baked. To the same skillet, a spice paste fried to build flavor and aroma, and the bottom of the pan is scraped to “deglaze” it. After a tomato-based sauce is created the chicken pieces are returned to the pan to cook through. The chicken is then removed and at the last minute, off heat, diced cold butter is stirred in—just until melted. This step, known as monter au beurre in French, or “to mount with butter,” gives sauces a thicker body, glossy look, and a rich, buttery flavor.

By using two classic Western cooking techniques—deglazing and mounting with butter—to good effect, I like to think of McLagan’s Murgh Makhani not as an inauthentic Indian dish but, through an original adaptation and deep understanding of cooking techniques, as a authentic Western dish infused with the irresistible flavors of Indian cuisine.

Note: The challenge with making a mounted butter sauce is keeping the butter from separating, as it is beginning to do in my photograph of the dish. One trick to avoid this, I believe, is to make sure the butter is quite cold (taken directly from the fridge); the butter I used had sat out at room temperature while preparing the rest of the dish. And perhaps incorporating the butter bit by bit would be a help. I added all of the butter all at once. Anyone?

Green Curry Soup (Bowl made by Anne Coneys)

I love greens of all sorts and, though I’ve prepared them in many different ways, I most often fall back on the foolproof preparation of braising them. Fine and dandy, but I was beginning to bore myself, not least my boyfriend Mike who isn’t as greens crazy as I am.

Then I saw Anna Thomas’s story “The Soup for Life” in the current issue of Eating Well, one of the food magazines DCCC is currently reading and cooking from. Thomas loves greens, too, and has found an ingenious way to use them—as the basis of wholesome and flavorful soups. On one gray, blustery day she found herself in need of dropping a few pounds but also wanting to create something comforting and delicious to eat. The result? (more…)

We’ve had great weather for grilling enthusiasts this summer in Vermont. Until one day last week when I planned a lunch with my friend Lynne. With constant rain coming down, and a wounded chicken to tend to, I decided to cancel our lunch date. The ingredients couldn’t wait until Lynne’s next day off from the library, where she (more…)

Epazote in the garden at Dowdy Corners, planted in and among the arugula

A couple of books ago, Dowdy Corners Cookbook Club was thick in the middle of Mexican cooking, and it was my chance to find out what the herb epazote is all about. It’s usually described as being quintessential to the cooking of Mexico and as having a distinctive and pungent flavor so unique that no other herb will do; recipe writers eschew substitutions of any kind, saying it’s better to omit, if you don’t have it.

If you don’t live in an area with markets that cater to Mexicans, the only opportunity you’ll have to try it, particularly when fresh, is to grow it yourself. So, against all odds of having something leafy and green to work with before the club moved on to the next book, I ordered epazote seeds in February, when we started cooking from The Art of Mexican Cooking, planted them in seed starter pots, and stuck then in my window sill. (more…)

 
Last week I made the buttermilk biscuits from the current DCCC pick, Dairy Hollow House Soup & Bread: A Country Inn Cookbook by Crescent Dragonwagon. This recipe was an opportunity to use some King Arthur cake flour I’d been meaning to try (Crescent Dragonwagon recommends using cake or pastry flour, such as While Lily, for ultra tender biscuits), some of my homemade lard, and something else lingering in my fridge: baking powder that had long outlived its expiration date.

Before just chucking it out, I decided to test it using one of the many baking powder tests found online. The tests are all the same: you pour hot water over some baking powder, and if it fizzes and bubbles, it’s good to use. A typical ratio is 1 teaspoon baking powder to ⅓ cup hot water.
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It’s easy for a potluck menu to come together seamlessly when everyone attending is cooking from the same cookbook, and particularly the same cuisine—in this case, Mexican.

Last week DCCC club members gathered at Dowdy Corners for a Mexican feast that consisted of twice- or thrice-tried favorites and dishes that were first-time try outs—all from The Art of Mexican Cooking by Diana Kennedy, or almost all.

Our Menu

Margaritas, prepared by me. Though not authentically Mexican, and definitely not in The Art of Mexican Cooking, they taste good and are a good conviviality enhancer.

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Photo by DCCC club member Melanie Considine

Melanie Considine is a fine art photographer with professional experience. Translation: she’s got the art part down and she knows what buttons to press, whether she’s using her low-tech 4 by 5-inch view camera for her artwork or her high-tech Nikon D200 for miscellaneous design projects (she’s also a web designer). Several weeks ago, to reciprocate a Greek rabbit dinner, she and her husband Matt had my boyfriend Mike and me over for dinner. Matt made homemade ciabattta bread (he is a dedicated amateur bread baker and has even built his own bread oven), and Melanie, a DCCC member, prepared Mexican food from The Art of Mexican Cooking.

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This posting is for Robert Feugate, a sandwich lover and wiz-bang coder and problem solver who helped with some of the behind-the-scenes structural features of the DCCC blog. The Torta de Santuario, or “Santuary Roll,” from The Art of Mexican Cooking may not be what he had in mind when he asked me to write about a sandwich. It’s rather involved. But for hardcore sandwich lovers, for whom making the Vietnamese Banh Mi or the New Orleans Muffuletta from scratch is enjoyable way to spend an afternoon, this multi-step Mexican sandwich will be a feather in their cap.

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Shown above, clockwise from the top left, are bowls of Arroz a la Mexicana, or “Mexican Rice,” which, tinged red from tomatoes, could just as well be called “red rice,” Arroz Verde, or “Green Rice,” Arroz Blanco, or “White Rice,” and the Mexican flag held by a Day of the Dead figure, who would rather not be used as a flagpole so that he could get on with the business of drinking and smoking.

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Mexicans must eat a lot of eggs. The range and styles of egg dishes available to the Mexican cook makes those of her American neighbors to the north seem bland and limited by comparison.

The basic cooking methods will seem familiar: fried, scrambled, poached, prepared as an omelets. It’s the south-of-border ingredients, and the treatment of them—such as broiling tomatoes or chiles to making a sauce with deep, roasted flavors—that make Mexican egg dishes an exciting change from our repertoire in the U.S.—and a more flavorful way to start the day. Some of the more transformative preparations, like Brick Layers Eggs, may even appeal to those who, claim they do not like eggs. (more…)