Antonio Tabucchi Week! with a bonus roast goose recipe

Book bloggers just go ahead and declare their own celebrations, and why not?  If the National Jelly Doughnut Council can do it, why can’t we?  So:  it’s international Antonio Tabucchi Week! as proclaimed by Caroline.

I read a couple of tiny, pleasing Tabucchi booklets to celebrate, Dreams of Dreams (1992) and The Last Three Days of Fernando Pessoa (1994), packaged together by City Lights Books and translator Nancy Peters.  Translated from the Italian this time – the other Tabucchi novel I have read, Requiem: A Hallucination (1991), was originally written in Portuguese, a good trick reflecting the author’s most unusual side, his profound interest in and knowledge of Portuguese literature.   Reading Dreams of Dreams, though, I can see that his love of literature as such is similar.  A kindred spirit.

The book contains twenty dreams of two or three pages each.  The dreamers are mostly writers, but three painters, one composer, and one mythological figure slip in.  I am over-simplifying, since every figure is given two roles:  Chekhov is a “writer and doctor,” Caravaggio “a painter and irascible man.”  Many are visionaries of some sort, dream-artists like Coleridge and Goya and Rimbaud, or near cousins, advocates of their own version of Rimbaud’s derangement of the senses, writers like Rabelais and Villon and Pessoa.  Freud rounds out the list, giving himself something to interpret.

Rabelais, a friar, is fasting.  He dreams of food, of a feast with “His Majesty Sir Pantagruel”:

They served François Rabelais two geese, and nineteen to Sir Pantagruel.  Innkeeper, said his majesty the guest, you must teach me how these geese are cooked.  I want to tell my cook.  The innkeeper smoothed his imposing moustache, cleared his throat and said: first you take a fine choucroute and put it to the boil for four or five minutes.  Then you melt the goose fat and sauté the cabbage, lard, juniper berries, cloves, salt and pepper, sliced onion, and then cook it for three hours.  Then you add prosciutto, finely chopped goose liver, and you bind the mixture with bread crumbs.  The geese are filled with stuffing and put into the oven for about forty minutes.  You have to remember, when it’s half-cooked, to collect the sizzling fat and pour it over the stuffing, and the dish is ready.

This description only leads, obviously, to renewed appetite for Rabelais and Pantagruel until the latter belches so loudly he wakes the former, who gnaws on the “piece of dry bread” he allows himself during his fast.

I feature this long, delicious passage for two reasons: first, recipes are enormously popular and lead to all of the likes and thumbs and +1s and “you go, girl”s that are so important these days – I have no idea what any of that means – and anyway I need to have some material in place for my inevitable transition into a cooking blog, and second it suggests a limit to the delights of Tabucchi’s book. 

The reader unfamiliar with the life and work of Rabelais, or who does not know why it is amusing that Freud dreams he is his patient Dora, or why Debussy dreams of nymphs and priapic fauns, may be baffled, irritated, and bored, like he is reading the walkthrough of a video game he have never played.  Tabucchi and I, though, we had a lot of fun playing with our literary toys.

No room today to watch Fernando Pessoa expire.  Tomorrow.

Recipes and culinary advice from Lady Jekyll, D. B. E. - go up to dress for dinner, feeling that you have done your duty

I posted a recipe yesterday, a first here.  I had to consider how to write the recipe - the rhetoric of recipes.  Although I chose, in the end, a standard format, I could have written it like this:

Fry the shallots.  Sauté the mushrooms.  Sauté the onions.  Add the green beans to the onions and steam for a few minutes in a seasoned cream sauce.  Add the mushrooms and simmer for a few minutes.  Serve topped with the fried shallots.

This is fundamentally the same recipe, in a lot less space.  The fact is that the exact measures of the ingredients, in this dish, are mere suggestions, and almost all are correctable on the spot.  It’s an easy dish, prepared using standard methods and ordinary ingredients.  Or so I can say now, having prepared it many times.  For most cooks, including me, a few years ago, this recipe is utterly useless.

I have in front of me Kitchen Essays, with Recipes and Their Occasions by Lady Jekyll, D. B. E. (Dame Commander of the British Empire), a collection of her columns, “short essays in cookery,” from The Times of London, circa 1922.  Her chapter titles gives part of the flavor of the book:

“Le Mot Juste” in Food
Luncheon for a Motor Excursion in Winter
For Men Only
Food for Artists and Speakers
Food for the Punctual and the Unpunctual
For the Too Thin
For the Too Fat

A taste of the prose:

There is nothing like Work, as Mr. Bernard Shaw reminds us (or was it Play?), to make a man or woman really selfish.  But with that excellent pacificator, Home-cured Tongue, danger can be temporarily averted and appetite allayed…  Once experienced, it will be in perpetual session, “by request,” on the sideboard, and no understudies in glasses or rolled, out of tins, can supplant the genuine article. (80)

A recipe follows, a mix of specifics (“of saltpetre ¼ lb., and 1 ½ lb. black treacle”) and unspecifics (“To be smoked for 2 days in a wood-fire chimney before boiling, and steeping with abundant vegetables and herbs, a few cloves and peppercorns, garnished with home-made glaze and a little aspic-jelly”).  Aspic, that’s Lady Jekyll’s answer to everything.  An entire meal encased in aspic, yee-um.  Here is the actual end of the recipe:

The result will repay the trouble, although unfairly, for ever one sows and another reaps. (81)

Lady Jekyll assumes that the reader knows how to fill in the gaps.  Or, actually, that the reader has a hired cook.  I imagine, week after week, the lady of the house handing her Times to her cook, saying, “This, please,” Sardines à la Sackville, Chicken à la Maryland and Oatmeal Sunday Pudding (all dishes for the too thin).  The recipe for Sardines à la Sackville begins “Make a nice purée of potato a little moister than the ordinary mashed preparation” (187).  She inserts the word “nice” into any number of recipes, and who would argue with her.  You prefer a potato purée that is not nice?

I do not need to imagine that hired help.  Chapter II is titled “In the Cook’s Absence.”  It ends:

Leaving these instructions before your kitchen-maid’s eyes, the sound of your stimulating words of hope and faith in her ears, you will be able, as hitherto, to transfer most of the burden on to her shoulders, and go up to dress for dinner, feeling that you have done your duty; but, as Mrs. Wharton told us in a recent admirable novel, “the worst of doing one’s duty is that it unfits us often for doing anything else.” (31)

Speaking of which, I thought I was taking the week off.  I am, I am, starting now.

Skillet green bean casserole - the from-scratch substitute for that glop from a can (no offense meant to the glop) - by request

My first foray into recipe blogging!  If you have access to the Cook's Illustrated recipe database, go there and search for Skillet Green Beans, of which this is an annotated adaptation.

Ingredients

For the fried shallots:
     3 large shallots, slice thin – onions taste fine, but shallots fry up so much more prettily.  Onions will never look as nice as the canned fried onions. The shallots will look better.
     ¼ teaspoon salt
     1/8 teaspoon pepper – more could hardly hurt – to taste, as they say
     2 tablespoons flour
     3 tablespoons vegetable oil – olive oil is nice, too

For the mushrooms:
     10 ounces mushrooms, sliced ¼ inch thick – I’ve used any number of kinds of mushrooms, alone or in combination.  No bad answer here.  Add a smidgen of truffle oil and blow people away!
     2 tablespoons vegetable oil
     ¼ teaspoon salt

For the green beans, etc.:
     2 tablespoons unsalted butter (or olive oil)
     1 medium onion, minced
     1 tablespoon flour
     2 medium garlic cloves, minced or pressed – definitely adjust to taste here
     1 ½ pounds green beans, ends trimmed, unless you love green bean ends
     3 sprigs fresh thyme
     2 bay leaves
     ¾ cup heavy cream – half and half is almost as good
     ¾ cup low-sodium chicken broth – in France, I used veal bouillon cubes, and I’ll bet a mushroom broth would be pretty good.

Instructions

1. The fried shallots
Toss shallots with salt, pepper, and flour in small bowl.  Heat 3 tbsp oil in skillet over medium-heat until smoking.  Add shallots.  Cook, stirring frequently, until nice and crisp.  Dump the contents of the pan onto a plate lined with paper towels.

2. The mushrooms - this step just sautés them.
Wipe out the skillet.  Return to medium-high heat.  Add 2 tbsp oil, mushrooms, and salt.  Cook, stirring occasionally, until browned.  Maybe 8 minutes.  Transfer to bowl.

Note that these two steps can be done early. That holiday dinner – time management is crucial!

3. The green beans – maybe 15 minutes, right before serving.
Wipe out the skillet, or use a different pan, if you enjoy washing pans.  Heat butter until foaming subsides.  Add onions and sauté for 2 minutes or so.  Stir in garlic and flour (a little thickener).  Add green beans, thyme, and bay leaves.  Pour in cream and chicken broth, give it all a good stir, and increase heat.  Cover and cook green beans for about four minutes, for a little bit of steaming.  Add mushrooms and cook, uncovered, about 4 minutes more.  The green beans will be cooked, and the sauce will have thickened a bit.  If you are busy and let it cook a little longer, eh, it'll be all right.  Toss out the thyme and bay leaves.  A little more salt or pepper?  That’s up to you, chef.  If you are truly decadent, mix in a huge dollop of extra butter - even I don't do this.  Pour into your prettiest serving dish, and top with the fried shallots.

Serves 8.

Let’s review.  All basic ingredients.  Much lower sodium than using the canned soup.  Probably not lower fat, or not much!  It’s all on the stovetop, so you’re not competing with the turkey for oven space.  And I tell you, it’s those homemade fried shallots that really impress people.  No one expects it, and it's not even difficult.