Pork Fatback

I like lard. It gives a silky, luxurious texture to foods. (See my story on Thai stir-fried pork.) It has good keeping qualities and is stable when heated, making it an excellent choice for frying. According to Jennifer McLagan, author of the DCCC pick Fat, foods fried in lard absorb less oil than when fried in oil, making them crisper and, I suppose as a result, healthier. Lard, particularly leaf lard, is also prized for making pastry because its crystalline structure is said to create a very flaky dough.

Pork fat, I learned from McLagan, is good for us. It is mostly

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These are my favorite sort of cookie: buttery and sturdy enough to dip in tea. To provide a subtle nutty flavor, the butter is browned, a step that is not difficult but requires the attention of an undistracted cook. Finely grated lemon zest is added to balance the richness of the butter, and sea salt to balance the sweet.

This recipe hails from Australia, where cookbook author Jennifer McLagan grew up. Quick and easy to make,

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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?

This cocktail, developed while cooking from the previous DCCC pick, Thai Food, is based on a category of drinks called the Smash, also known as, according to David Wondrich in Imbibe!, the Smasher or Smash-Up, referring to that happens to the herb, traditionally mint, when it is shaken vigorously with ice, not what happens to you if you drink too many of them, though that could happen as well.

Apt descriptions like “whiskey sourish,” “sweet-tart,” “adult lemonade with a peppery kick” give you an idea of what this refreshing drink, served over crushed ice, tastes like, and why it is particularly welcome on a warm day. I was planning on giving this Thai-inspired cocktail a generic but descriptive title, like the Ginger–Thai Basil Smash, until, while searching for a photo prop, I spontaneously grabbed a

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If you’ve ever sealed a bit of leftover food by pressing a piece of plastic wrap directly onto its surface, but didn’t have a fancy name for this practice, you now have one: cartouche. That, at least, is how David Thompson, author of the most recent DCCC pick Thai Food, uses  this term. (He recommends storing leftover curry paste this way.)

The word cartouche, which can be used as a noun and a verb, is, in the cooking world, most commonly used to describe a piece of round parchment paper that chefs place over a sauce or gravy to keep a skin from forming.

As a home cook, I like its application to the more mundane and everyday practice of food storage as it gives me more opportunties to use it. Without knowing it, I’ve been cartouching for quite a while to keep foods as fresh as possible, and to keep them from turning color (guacamole, for example, benefits from this practice), and now I have a name for it.

Note: This is the first posting in “Words,” a new category I’ve created for the DCCC blog.  This is where I will share cooking terms, or unusual uses of cooking terms, or a particularly enjoyable or original turn of phrase that I’ve discovered while reading a DCCC cookbook, or ancillary reading material.

THAI FOOD
By David Thompson
Ten Speed Press
688 pp

David Thompson, author of  Thai Food, doesn’t cut any corners, and he doesn’t expect you to, either. The result? Some of the best Thai food you have had—better than what can be had at most restaurants—prepared right in your own kitchen.

There is a downside, however; the same rigorous recipes that create lively, nuanced food have the potential to leave a trail of disgruntled home cooks in their wake. One DCCC member so disliked the book that she returned it! Those of us who soldiered on all enjoyed the foods we prepared, finding them unlike, and more vibrant than, the more familar and probably overly Westernized version of Thai food we’ve had access to in the States.

There is no question that if you are new to Thai cooking, or even if you’ve done some Thai cooking at home using other cookbooks, you will be challenged when first cooking from this book, which is a truly amazingly, in-depth look at Thai food and Thai culture (the first recipe doesn’t appear until page 191!).

There are multiple reasons why Thai Food is not a walk in the park: ingredients can be difficult to find—particularly if you live in a small town or rural setting, or any place without an Asian population of some size—and there are very few suggested substitutions; for such a complex, text-heavy cookbook, the index could be much better, more complete, and provide more than one way to look up an ingredient or dish; in some cases, the instructions in the recipes proper could be clearer or more

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David Thompson, author of Thai Food, the most recent DCCC cookbook pick, describes this pungent stir-fry as a “spicy, dry, yet oily curry.” It is all of those things, with a heat level that warms you from the inside out, from top of your head to the ends of your toes, with a double porky goodness that only cooking in lard can provide. Yes, lard. According to Thompson, in the north of Thailand, curries are fried in rendered pork fat rather than in coconut cream, as is typical in the south. The result is a wonderfully rich dish: The lard envelopes everything in a silken

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The Eggs:

One of the plates of eggs shown above is for Jack Sprat, the other, for his wife. Both preparations—deep-fried eggs and steamed eggs—are found David Thompson’s Thai Cooking, the current DCCC pick, where they are presented more as method than recipe.

The process of making deep-fried and steamed eggs was an interesting novelty; the process of eating Mrs. Sprat’s clear choice opened a door in my egg-eating life. Deep-fried eggs represent a distinct category in the pantheon of egg preparations—scrambled, fried, poached, soft-boiled, and so on. Which means

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A couple of weeks ago I offered you a cocktail while waiting for dinner. Well, here it is, though not from Thai Food, the current DCCC pick, but from Bean by Bean, the latest cookbook by Crescent Dragonwagon. If that name sounds familiar, and who can forget a name like that?, it’s because she’s the author of another cookbook that was the DCCC pick last Spring. Crescent’s lovely publicist at Workman Publishing, Rebecca Carlysle, my review of that cookbook (click here to read it) and so she decided to send me a copy of Bean by Bean to review, and she has graciously allowed me to include a recipe from the book. Since I know you’re waiting for a Thai meal, and not just Thai-inspired drinking chocolate and cocktails, I picked Crescent’s recipe for green curry with tofu. Read on to get my impression of Crescent’s newest cookbook and for her extra-green curry recipe, shown in the photo above.

BEAN BY BEAN
A COOKBOOK
More than 175 Recipes for Fresh Beans, Dried Beans, Cool Beans, Hot Beans, Savory Beans, even Sweet Beans!
By Crescent Dragonwagon
Workman Publishing
370 pp.

Bean by Bean, an essential guide to preparing and enjoying one of the world’s oldest forms of sustenance, is the latest cookbook from Crescent Dragonwagon, who cultivates beans and readers-turned-happy-cooks-and-satisfied-eaters with equal facility.

If I were a bean, I would feel lucky to be planted in Crescent’s garden, and perhaps even luckier when, at just the right moment, I was picked and taken into her kitchen to be handled with care, appreciation, and love and ultimately transformed into an appetizing and sustaining meal—after all, legumes have

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Right now I’m waiting to hear from the publisher of the current DCCC pick about whether my request to post a few Thai food recipes on the DCCC blog will be granted. I don’t post recipes from cookbooks without receiving permission first, unless I’ve adapted a recipe considerably. And there has to be a good reason for me to change something; I won’t just change something for the sake of changing it so that I can say a recipe’s been adapted, thereby skirting the permission issue. If something is perfect as is, why touch it?

I’m especially hesitant to tinker with a recipe when the subject of a cookbook is a foreign cuisine, from a land I’ve never visited, and the cookbook is written by an expert, someone who’s spent years learning that cuisine and steeping themselves in the culture—in this case, chef and cookbook writer David Thompson.

But permission requests are one of the more tedious aspects of publishing. Drinking a cocktail is a lot more fun. So, while you’re waiting for the main course (hey, maybe you could supplicate Random House on my behalf, telling them to speedily process my request because you’re waiting for some delicious Thai recipes to appear on the blog.), I thought I’d offer you a cocktail.

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