Meal 81: Italy

In the estimation of many, Italy is the true heart of Western gastronomy. France gets so much of the glory, but it wasn't until Catherine de' Medici of Florence married French King Henry II and brought her chefs with her that their cuisine set on the road to such lofty achievements. A major flaw of going one-meal-per-country is that even the most culinarily interesting and diverse countries only show up once. Well, except for Italian food — thanks to the Holy See (aka Vatican City, a permanent observing state) and San Marino (a tiny but full-fledged member), we essentially get three shots at it! (Oh, I guess thanks to Monaco we'll get French food again. Score!) But even then, there's so much variety across Italy owing to a wide diversity of climates and geographies; to name just one important distinction, the North tends to use butter and the South olive oil as the cooking fat of choice.

One great thing about this project is that there's always a theme for a birthday party. Italy marks Laura's third birthday nosh, after Canada and France. In a shocking break with tradition, I'm the one who took the group photo, so Laura's included! Surrounding her are Erin, Lisa, Anna, Alicia, Jessica, Kirsty, Sarah-Doe, and Elsa. Note the utterly empty bowl that once held pesto pasta.

Antipasti | Appetizers

Our pre-dinner entertainment was tarot card readings (tarot was invented in Italy, who knew?), so we needed an appetizer that didn't require formal service. Fortunately, Italian food has perfected the art of pre-dinner nibbling with the antipasto, literally, "before the pasta." The spread gave me the opportunity to represent preserved foods from around the country.

For meats, we had San Daniele prosciutto from Friuli in the northeast, richly spiced cacciatorini salame from throughout the north and central regions, and a spreadable, fiery 'Nduja from Calabria. I can't even remember all the cheeses, but they included a fresh sheep's-milk ricotta from Lazio near Rome, a delicious, medium-flavored snacking cheese called bra from Piedmont, and a truly distinctive cheese called formaggio di fossa, so named because it's buried in a pit and allowed to anaerobically ferment for a few months, making for a really pungent, sharp, and crumbly cheese. I also roasted some eggplant, chopped it up, and doused it with olive oil, garlic, oregano and salt to make a Southern Italian salad-dip-like thing.

Pane tipo Altamura | Semolina sourdough bread | Recipe

(Sorry there's no photo. Imagine a round loaf of bread.)

I was going to make a ciabatta, until I discovered that it was invented in...1982! So I went searching for an older one, and given my love of sourdough and alternative flours, I ended up with this bread from Apulia, which is known in Italy as Puglia. (Why does English mangle it? Some Anglicizations make sense, like Florence for Firenze and Naples for Napoli. But Apulia, as well as Genoa for Genova, don't seem to add anything.)

Since Roman times, the semolina-based loaf from this particular town has received wide acclaim, and I gotta say it turned out great when I made my best imitation. Moderately spongy with medium holes, a substantial but not overwhelming tang, a bit of nuttiness from the semolina and a crispy but not overly-thick crust made this one of the favorites I've ever made. The only downside is how long it takes to make it: 40 minutes, then 2.5 hours, then 2 hours, then a relatively long bake — something that can only be made on a leisurely weekend day. This bread went great with the antipasti, and the second loaf I made held up admirably for several more days.

Aperol spritz

We're not big fans of Negronis and those other classic Italian cocktails, Laura and I find them too bitter. But this, the famous apertivo of Venice, won our vote: three parts prosecco, two parts Aperol, one part soda, with ice and a slice of orange. Aperol is indeed made of some bitter things, but it's milder and sweeter, and when paired with the dry bubbly, it's just lovely and refreshing.

Pasta fresca all'uovo con pesto alla genovese | Fresh pasta with basil pesto | Recipe

In a proper Italian meal, the primo piatto, the first plate, is generally pasta or soup. Uh, duh, pasta please.

I can't believe I'd never made pasta until now, and it was just as fun and satisfying as folks had told me it would be. With something so simple — it's just flour and eggs — the ingredients are extremely important. I used Italian Tipo 00 flour, which is milled super-fine, which helps it cook faster and also not require as much hydration (hence no added water beyond the moisture from the eggs), leading to a softer texture. The eggs came from the farmer's market. Making up the dough (pasta means paste, as in dough) was easy enough, the laborious part was cranking the sheets of dough through ever-narrower settings on the (borrowed) machine, carefully dusting each layer with flour to avoid them sticking.

Pesto means "pestle," as in the thing you use with a mortar to mash something. Fortunately, the Cuisinart has eliminated the tedium of mashing basil, garlic, grated hard cheese, pine nuts and olive oil with pieces of stone, so this classic Ligurian sauce came together in just a few minutes. Sharp from raw garlic, rich from abundant oil, and fresh and aromatic from basil, the pesto played so well against the soft, mildly eggy canvas of the fresh pasta. There was nary a noodle left after just a few minutes.

Involtini di manzo in salsa di tomate | Beef pinwheels | Recipe

In Northern Italy, meat is traditionally more abundant, and meat dishes are often straightforward hunks of flesh. In the poorer South, meat is treated as more of a luxury good, whose flavor is to be stretched by blending with complementary ingredients. Perhaps an illustration of this distinction is the two meanings of the word braciole: to northerners it'd be medium-thick slices of meat, to southerners it's meat slices pounded thin and stuffed. The latter, which is also universally known in Italy as involtini or "roll-ups," is what we had for a main course. I made it Sicilian-style with breadcrumbs, grated cheese, raisins and pine nuts (ironically, the pine nuts were far more expensive per pound than even the grass-fed beef), held together with a toothpick and browned all sides until cooked through. With the pan juices, I built up a tomato sauce, then put the involtini back in. The great thing about this dish is you can cook ahead of time, and reheat in just a few minutes. (It's also pretty yummy cold!)

Cassata ricetta mia | Sicilian layer cake, my way

A birthday party needs a cake, right? The cassata, probably Italy's most famous cake, is made with sponge cake soaked in rum, and layered with the same sort of creamy spread you find in cannoli. The recipe I found looked cool because it uses a layer of marzipan lined with chocolate to give the thing body; I half-managed to layer the pan with the rolled-out almond paste, but spreading with molten chocolate was a disaster and it all clumped up. I changed course by mushing it all into a layer of chocolatey marzipan, and used that as a layer of the filling. Another layer was sweetened ricotta cheese studded with chocolate curls. Candied fruit is a traditional part of the cake, but Laura doesn't like it, so I kept a corner clear for her. The cassata was rich and delicious, but be warned that whatever recipe you follow is going to be a whole lot of work.

Gelato di cioccolato | Chocolate gelato | Recipe

Drop the mic, put a cork in it, closing time, etc. I shall no longer search for a chocolate ice cream recipe, because there's no way anything could be better than this gem, which comes to us by way of the beloved goddess of Italian cuisine, Marcella Hazan.

What's all the more astonishing is that it's so rich and sumptuous, yet as a gelato contains no cream. So why's it so rich and tasty, and smoother than any frozen dessert I've ever made? Surely the blend of rich cocoa powder and melted semisweet chocolate rounds out the flavor, but the trick is in a dash of caramel that you whip up in a pan on the side and pour into the custard right as it firms up.

We went through roughly a bottle of Italian wine apiece, plus the Aperol Spritz. The recycling collectors must think we're lushes with very particular regional taste in wine.

Meal 74: Hungary

Though it's common to think of Europe as being a jigsaw puzzle of peoples who've been there since before recorded history, the people who now populate the land known as Hungary didn't show up until a mere millennium ago. Known as the Magyars, they brought a herding tradition — and a non-Indo-European language most closely related to Finnish — from Siberia. Over the centuries, they settled into an intensely agricultural society that blended new foods such as paprika from the Turks and pastry from the Austrians into their meaty, brothy, bready core cuisine. (And oh, do they like their paprika: I used a quarter-pound in making this meal! If you're cooking Hungarian food, do yourself a favor and get some fresh stuff.) Related to jigsaws, one thing I've been mulling about after cooking this meal is that the old phrase, "The whole is greater than the sum of the parts," isn't always true. In fact, often you can get more utility out of breaking up an ingredient, and using each bit to its advantage. With the chicken, I was able to get several tablespoons of fat by trimming off the skin and slowly rendering it. (I used this in place of lard. No objection to lard, I'd just forgotten to buy some, and it was cold out!) And with the eggs in the torte, by separating the yolks from the whites, the recipe avails itself of the richness and emulsifying properties of the former, and the magical leavening properties of beating the former.

We were lucky to have two people of Hungarian descent, Michele and Danielle, with us. (I'm one-eighth Hungarian, for what it's worth!) Also on hand were Brandon, Diana, Irene, and Soo-Young who's in Budapest as I write this!

Gulyás | Beef and vegetable soup with paprika | Recipe

This dish, called "goulash" in English, was originally made by herdsmen, who'd slaughter one animal, make a huge stew in a hanging pot over a fire, and eat for several days. Accordingly, it's an unfussy dish, and while you'll see a whole lot of recipes out there, it's little more than cubes of meat slowly cooked in a broth scented with paprika and onions with some root vegetables thrown in toward the end. (The farmer's market happened to have parsley root; if you can't find that then parsnips are a good substitute.) I do particularly like this recipe for its caraway seeds, which add an almost minty aroma and play nicely off the brightness of the paprika.

Csirke paprikás | Chicken in paprika-sour cream sauce | Recipe

I loved this dish growing up. The vibrant color and flavor of the paprika, with the scrumptious creaminess of the sour cream, made for an unctuous sauce to smother over every bit of chicken and sop up with noodles. In my preparation, I took it two steps forward and one step back. The mistake was accidentally buying a hen instead of a chicken, which even after an hour and a half of braising was still pretty tough. The two things I did right: using super-thick, homemade sour cream, known as tejföl in Hungarian and known throughout Slavic countries as kajmak; and making spätzle-esque dumplings to sop up all that tasty sauce.

Nokedli | Little egg dumplings | Recipe

These dumplings are not at all complicated to make, it's just tedious them. Mixing up the dough takes all of two minutes, but scraping the dough back and forth across a spätzle plane over boiling water, and then scooping the little boiled dough bits, takes patience. They did go absolutely perfectly with the cream sauce, so I don't at all regret making them, and I'm happy I happened to have the proper device on hand. (If you don't have one, you can pinch off little bits of dough, but the texture wouldn't be the same and it'd be even more annoying to make!)

Kenyér | Crusty bread | Recipe

Just as no battle plan survives contact with the enemy, sometimes what I figure out to cook makes no sense once I start getting down to it. I'd identified a Hungarian bread recipe, but as I set out to start making it I realized it was of the sweet variety, nothing like the hearty, crusty bread that the above dishes require. So with several hours remaining until meal-time, I researched more deeply, only to discover that the best recipes require overnight fermentation. Drat! Well, I happened to find a website in Hungarian that through Google Translate seemed to approve of this no-knead recipe, with hints of rye and whole wheat, so I went for it.

I'd kind of looked down on no-knead breads — how would you develop the gluten? why are you afraid of touching the dough? — but you know what, for a fraction of the work and no additional time, this was one extremely decent loaf. The crust was decently thick and crunchy, the interior spongy and dense but not gummy. Really, an excellent bread for sopping up soup and sauce without falling apart. I think I'll make it again.

Uborka saláta | Cucumber salad | Recipe

As one description says, "Hungarian vegetables tend to be of the nongreen variety." Cucumbers make a notable exception, perhaps because of the crisp and cool contrast they make to the rich, soft stewed meats. This salad wasn't all that exciting, and I think I put too much water in the dressing so it was all just not very flavorful, and yet it took a lot of work to shave the cucumbers — since I don't have a mandoline, and I wanted thin uniform slices, I used a peeler instead.

Lecso | Stew of peppers, tomatoes and onions | Recipe

I probably didn't need to make this since there was so much other food going on, but it wasn't too hard. As another simmered dish, the texture matched that of the stews. The recipe mentions that it makes a good breakfast with some eggs on top, which sounds pretty similar to shakshuka, the North African dish.

Dobos torta | Chocolate-frosted layer cake | Recipe

I'm not huge on pâtisserie. The precise chemistry of baked goods is too much science and not enough art, while I'm a bit too haphazard to carefully handle and prepare fragile goods in precise preparations. But I had to game up for Hungary, which thanks to its split empire with Austria gained a strong expertise in making really tasty and impressively composed desserts. And all signs pointed to making this multi-layered cake, slathered with a thick coating of bar chocolate and butter to allow for long storage and transportation. (And flavor!)

The classic dobos torte is round, with a toffee crust. The cake part is little more than an really sweet omelet, with ten egg yolks, a pound of sugar, seven beaten egg whites, and less than a cup of sugar. Despite appearances, you don't cook one cake and then slice it like cheese, rather you bake the layers on their own. It's really tedious to bake each layer individually as would be required for a round cake, so I followed the Smitten Kitchen advice and simply made two jelly roll pans of cake and sliced them up. No good excuse on not having the toffee crust; I just messed that one up by being too cautious and removing the caramel from the stove before it was done, so I ruined one layer of cake and just junked it. But other than that, this cake was pretty easy, the frosting is especially forgiving and after refrigeration sets very nicely.

This was our last sit-down Nosh of the year. We've got a combined Honduras/Holy See holiday party coming up, and then in the new year we're onto the I countries!

Meal 68: Guinea

Teeny dried shrimp. Pre-cooked fonio grain. Okra powder. Unlike shopping for Ghana, this time Diaby had everything I needed. As I got to talking with the man behind the counter -- finally, for the first time in a half-dozen trips, we broke the ice! -- it turns out he's from Guinea. (I was startled to hear the name of his city, Mamou. That's pronounced the same as the family name for my grandmother who passed away last month. I suspect she had no idea she had something in common with a West African trading town!)

This meal owes a big debt of gratitude to the really wonderful Guinée Gourmande, which helpfully divides recipes regionally and also has some handy commentary and articles giving color about ingredients that bare recipes normally don't. If only every country had at least one site with such thoughtfully organized and lovingly produced content!

So, between the Guinean shopkeeper and the blog, here's hoping this meal turned out authentically! (And apologies for the sparse photos, the camera wasn't working so these are from a phone.)

Djindjan | Ginger drink | Recipe

Another source I've been increasingly cross-referencing for local recipes is the Peace Corps. Many (most? all?) volunteers get a cookbook as part of their training, which tend to be adapted for each country. While many of the recipes tend to be creative adaptations of local ingredients and cooking methods to create comfort foods, there's usually some for cooking what most people tend to eat around there. And hence, this recipe for a ginger drink. This recipe had me at "this tastes just like the stuff you get in little bags" -- I know that it's common in Africa to sell drinks in plastic bags, so I was sold. I'm no judge of whether it really did taste like a bagged beverage, but it was sure tasty! The spices and the citrus round out the sharpness of the ginger very well. Oh, and this stuff mixes up great with rum.

Kansiyé 'Mafe' | Smoked chicken and beef stewed in peanut sauce | Recipe

I couldn't find a smoked chicken, nor a recipe for how they smoke chicken in West Africa, so I winged it (haha) a few days before with a bundle of hickory chips. Turns out it's not too hard to do on a gas grill, though it took four hours and ended up a bit less smoky than I'd hoped. I'll keep working on my technique. Though the title of the recipe doesn't mention it, it's as much beef as chicken, and the shank meat I picked up at the farmers market was so flavorful. For the vegetables, I threw in cassava and a big eggplant, and it was a substantial and tasty stew, one of my favorites of all the African cooking thus far. You could easily make this with a plain, unsmoked chicken (just increase the cooking time for the stew), and if you don't have the ground dried shrimp it's not a huge deal (maybe use some Thai fish sauce to substitute?).

Gouiki | Mashed plantains

The same recipe explains how to make this side, which is pretty easy. Just make sure to buy green plantains and not the ripe ones. The texture and technique is a lot like mashed potatoes, but the taste is entirely different.

Mangoé rafalari | Susu-style mango stew | Recipe

I've never seen a mango stew before, so I had to try this one. It's got many of the familiar elements of West African cooking, like the dry-smoked carp (so many bones to pick out when flaking it!) and red palm oil (which I now buy by the half-gallon), but throwing the mangoes, whole, into the pot was a new one for me. I probably overcooked the mangoes, because I followed the French version of the recipe, which doesn't have the note on the bottom of the English one saying that the types of mangoes that are exported tend to be the softer ones that don't need as much cooking. Hm. Anyway, it packs a pretty pungent flavor-punch, between the tang of the fruit, the salt of the fish, and the richness of the oil.

Fonio | Info (in French)

It tolerates poor soil and erratic rain, has high nutritional value, and tastes pretty good. So why hasn't fonio become the next quinoa? Turns out that this member of the millet family has tiny grains with husks that are really hard to remove -- the traditional method involves mixing with sand for grit, beating in a mortar and pestle repeatedly, and then washing with a lot of water (which kinda eliminates the whole "good where there's little water" thing). But fortunately, a Senegalese engineer developed a machine that successfully hulls the little seeds. It's still cost-prohibitive for farmers to buy directly, but inexpensive enough that a relatively small amount of outside funding could make a big difference in people's lives and nutrition.

At least in Guinea, fonio is eaten like couscous. It's a bit labor-intensive to cook; even the "pre-cooked" version first is plumped up with boiling water, steamed twice in cheesecloth, blended with a bit of okra powder to make it malleable (when you're eating with your hands it sure helps if it sticks together), and steamed once more. The texture was like couscous with a little more tooth, and it had a nice and mild nuttiness. If you happen to see fonio somewhere, give it a shot, before everyone discovers it in like ten years.

Tarte caramélisée aux mangues et bananes | Caramel tarte with mangos and bananas | Recipe (in French)

I know that dessert really isn't a thing throughout much of Africa, but sometimes I just gotta make something. This inventive recipe exhibits the legacy of the French by making what's essentially a tarte tatin, but instead of apples, it's tropical fruits. I used demerara sugar for a rich and tasty caramel, and the crust recipe is easy and forgiving. Note that if you feel weird about putting your pan (I even used a springform) directly on the stovetop for the caramel-making, you could just as easily do that in a pot and pour it into the pan before baking.

The next meal takes us to the adjacent, and very similarly named, Guinea-Bissau.

Meal 66: Greece

Greece has seen myriad civilizations, invaders, and influences over the millennia, and a climate in which most anything can grow, all of which have contributed to a cuisine that is both abundantly flavored and for the most part extremely healthy. It's also built to be sampled in abundance, with a wide range of mezedes for nibbling and sharing. Fortunately, most of these dishes didn't need to be served piping hot, which made it a little less insane to prepare ten dishes in a medium-sized kitchen with one helper (thanks so much, Neil!).

Our setting for this Nosh certainly encouraged relaxed enjoyment of the Earth's bounty: the porch of our friends' home in Asbury Park, on the Jersey Shore, on a very pleasant summer evening (thanks so much, Jenifer and Phil!).

Fasolada | Bean and vegetable soup | Recipe

In our culinary journey through time, this humble vegan soup of beans and vegetables brings us both to the very beginning and the most recent days of the history of this part of the world. The Minoan civilization, which preceded the Greeks, grew legumes -- this soup, save for a few New World additions such as tomato, is pretty much their direct legacy. Nowadays, with the Greek economy in a shambles, this soup is as popular as ever, as a big pot is cheap to make and fills the family's stomach. The flavors are simple, with few seasonings or fancy techniques to hide the true flavor of the ingredients, so if you're making this dish as a matter of recreation, make sure to get high-quality beans and vegetables, and take your time simmering to draw out the flavors.

While fasolada is considered by many to be the national dish of Greece, I don't know if I've ever seen it at a Greek restaurant; I've only known avgolemono, the egg-lemon soup that nursed me back from many a college hangover. Why is such a common dish, about which so many Greek food blogs tell deep stories, barely seen on menus of Greek restaurants in the US?

Horiatiki salata | Country salad | Recipe

Unlike the soup, this classic Greek salad is known around the world. The real version, apparently, has no vinegar or lemon juice, it's simply vegetables, feta, and olive oil. This one was pretty good, especially with the farmer's market tomatoes, but unfortunately the cucumber was fairly bitter. (Too bad there was no tartness to balance it out!)

Horiatiko psomi | Country sourdough bread | Recipe

I once read (but can't find again, alas) that a good sourdough starter is so cherished in Greece that saints are invoked during its cultivation, and that despite modern science, many Greek homemakers insist it's a magical, spiritual substance. While I'm all cool with the symbiotic relationship of those yeast and bacteria, to me the magic of Greek bread is the additions of little splashes of milk, honey, and olive oil, which turn mere leavened dough into a springy treat with just enough crunch and tooth to stand up to dipping, spreading, dunking, and straight-up nibbling. The protein and oil make the dough more forgiving to work with, and also crisp up more impressively in a standard home oven. Noted for future baking! Since our hosts weren't going to make bread anytime soon, I figured I should double the recipe, and use the whole five-pound sack of bread flour. By the morning, only one of the five loaves remained.

Skordalia | Garlic potato dip | Recipe

Is this a really garlicky, oily, cold version of mashed potatoes? Or is this a cavalry of garlic (after all, "skorda" means garlic in Greek) hitching a ride on potatoes and oil onto your bread and into your mouth? Either way, it's a surprisingly simple dish to make, and lends itself to endless modification. Creativity, too, because we didn't have a mortar and pestle handy for mashing the garlic, so I put it into a ziploc bag and pounded it a few dozen times with an empty wine bottle. Just don't freak out about all the olive oil in the recipe. If you've got good quality stuff, it'll really make the dip sing.

Alevropita | Feta-olive oil tart | Recipe

From the northwestern reaches of the country comes this dish that's equal parts simple, tasty, and ridiculous. If you can make pancake batter from scratch, you've already got more than enough skill to put this together. If you like feta and flatbreads and the taste of olive oil, you'll eat the whole pan. And with nearly a half a cup of olive oil and a quarter-stick of butter with a little more than a cup of flour, you'll probably be half grinning and half cringing as you make the dish. Even without the feta this would be a tasty starch halfway to fry dough, but with the cheese, it's just super good.

Piperies gemistes me feta | Feta-stuffed peppers | Recipe

Macedonia, the covering much of the north of Greece (not to be confused with The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia directly to the north), is apparently the most exciting place for food in a country that seems pretty stimulating all over. It's a real convergence location between Balkan, Greek, and Turkish, and also has the legacy of a once-sizable Jewish community. These peppers themselves mark a convergence of spicy, creamy, and toasty, making use of the broiler twice: once to soften the peppers, and another to heat the cheese filling to brown. Greece is, of course, a wine country, but if you ever need a Greek dish that goes well with beer, look no further.

Kolokitho keftedes | Zucchini fritters | Recipe

Crete, the largest of the Greek islands, is the home of what is essentially a latke (i.e., potato pancake), but made instead of zucchini. Poor Neil spent upward of an hour shredding by hand the two largest zucchini I'd ever seen in my life, along with onion, carrot, and other ingredients. And all that yellow in the photo? That's extra virgin olive oil, in abundance. The fritters were darn good, especially accompanied by the tzatziki I whipped up (Greek yogurt, shredded cucumber and garlic, mint, salt, done). The only problem with making them for a crowd is that you're spending valuable minutes right around service time standing impatiently around a skillet, waiting for them to cook -- out of all the dishes we made, this is the only one that held up our starting at the appointed hour.

Keftedes me saltsa domata | Lamb meatballs in tomato sauce | Recipe

"What do you do with this stuff?" asked the butcher at Fairway while handing me the ground lamb. "I had it once at an Arab stand and it was weird." Well, dear friend who doesn't enjoy what he's selling, you might enjoy this dish as a re-introduction to the other red meat. The lamb is first blended with spices, especially the ever-present oregano, then fried as little meatballs, and finally nestled in with a tomato sauce -- which I made from fresh tomatoes from the farmers market rather than canned. This one was a winner, especially with the little kids!

Karithopita | Olive oil walnut cake | Recipe

For what the EU called its 50th birthday, the anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Rome, all its members sent two cakes representative of their national cuisines. This is one of the two Greece sent. The cake starts out rich enough, with a cup of olive oil, lots of walnuts, and semolina and cake flours. But the real treat comes when it's drenched in a lemony syrup -- so much so that you have to pour it a third at a time to make sure it all absorbs. Not too hard to make, and really nice, would make for an excellent coffee cake and is also great with a dollop of Greek yogurt.

Galaktoboureko | Milk custard phyllo cake | Recipe

I've already made baklava for Armenia, but I felt the need to make something with that flaky phyllo dough for this meal. Behold this amazing pastry, made of an astonishing 10 cups of milk, seven eggs, and a half pound of butter. As long as you're patient and attentive with the stirring, it's actually pretty easy to make, and it's really tasty, a little more subtle and less heavy than baklava. The only tweak I made was to replace about half of the sugar and water in the syrup with honey, which I would definitely do again. The Ottoman influence on Greek cuisine is clear here: "boureko," meaning stuffed pastry, comes from the Turkish "börek."

Meal 61: Finland

Note: this post is a few weeks delayed, because in the meantime we've moved! Thanks for your patience, and for keeping the faith. We promised we'd continue Noshing! Midsummer is a big deal in Nordic countries. The nearly endless sun that the Solstice brings not only cheers the soul and makes the air warmer, but it also brings forth a variety of fresh foods that provide welcome respite from the over-wintered larder. So for this Finnish meal, despite being technically about three weeks early, I seized the opportunity to make a menu with several Midsummer-y elements, along with a few distinctive dishes that you'd find year-round.

You may remember Lars, the half-Dane, from our Denmark meal; well, turns out he's also half-Finn, and brought his sister Anneli too. Plus, our guest Sofia's also of Finnish heritage; while none of these three have lived there, they've all spent many summers in the Finnish woods. Thanks to all the Finns for their help in planning and explaining! And thanks, too, to our other guests, Betsy, Dada, Laura, Carolyn, Rachel, Marcy, and Nathan!

Karjalanpiirakka | Karelian pasties | Recipe

While most of the region of Karelia is now part of Russia, these very practical pies have spread across all of Finland. The crust is a simple and quite dry dough of rye flour, which is good because with any more water in the dough it would be too sticky to roll out. (I used a little chapati-roller I bought from an antique store in Mumbai; I think the little horizontal ridges reduced sticking.) While you can fill these rye-dough ovals with all sorts of things, including leftover carrots as the linked recipe suggests, the most common is an unsweetened rice pudding, though apparently this was a relatively recent 19th-century invention. Whatever your filling, once it's plopped in, just pull up the sides, pinch 'em together, bake for a little bit on super-high heat, and you've got a snack!

Ruisleipä | Sourdough rye bread | Recipe

Compared to the five-day rye of Estonia, this loaf was a cinch. While it didn't have quite the same depth, and definitely is rather (and apparently ought to be) drier, it still had great tang and a solid crumb. Definitely one to slather with butter!

Kesäkeitto | Summer vegetable soup | Recipe

"This dish is like meatloaf," Lars said, "in that every mother makes it in her own special way." That's the only resemblance to this very light and delicate soup, made to highlight the fresh flavors and delicate textures of new vegetables. I took it one step further by making a vegetable broth from scratch -- I used onion, carrot tops, some dill stems, and peppercorns, plus one cube of porcini mushroom bouillon for depth and, of course, salt. After straining the broth, I just plopped in the veggies in small pieces, simmered until just before al dente, and threw in a splash of milk because that's what Lars and Anneli's mom always did. This soup is far from filling, but it was really lovely and a neat way to get back to veggie basics.

Poronkäristys | Sauteed reindeer | Recipe

Game is quite popular, and abundant, in Finland. This is the best-known dish from Lapland, in the far north. While we couldn't find one of Rudolph's cousins, and the local butcher's exotic meat collection was temporarily out of the very similar caribou, we did end up with the still-quite-related venison. Such bold meat doesn't need a whole lot of spices to support it -- as you see, it's just wild mushrooms, beer, and butter, plus several hours of super slow stewing, long enough to break the slices of deer down into mere strands. The result is a really rich, straightforward, and truly meaty stew. With the great (and super fatty) broth it produces, I can see why the serving suggestion is for mashed potatoes, but given the season we had to stick with whole little ones. (See below for why!)

Sillisalaatti | Herring salad | Recipe

When the guy at the appetizing store asked if I wanted him to put cream sauce on the pickled herring I'd just bought, I almost shrieked "no!" Because I had my own plans to slather this preserved fish with dairy, in this case a sour cream sauce with accents like mustard and sugar. With layers of chopped dill and chive, it was pretty attractive and tasty, but I do think the recipe was quite parsimonious with the fish. I imagine this recipe was invented to make the fish stretch farther, but if you've got the budget, get more fish and treat yourself!

Varhaisperunat | New potatoes | Recipe

Scandinavians take their potatoes really seriously, especially for Midsummer. All the people I talked to (OK, it was like three people) about what I should make rattled off some thoughts of you-could-do-this or my-family-did-that, but it was made clear that it wouldn't be Midsummer without herring (see above) and even more importantly, new potatoes to accompany. These spuds are picked prematurely, with skins so thin and delicate that they slip off when subjected to moderate friction, and a delicate and sweet flavor. So they say.

Unfortunately, there was nary a new potato to be found in Brooklyn. The folks at the farmer's market said they were a few weeks out, and the closest I could find at Fairway was "creamer potatoes," which were the right size but had to be laboriously peeled. I don't quite know how exactly what we were missing (I'll pay a lot more attention to new potatoes from now on!), but what we made turned out quite nice, after a gentle boiling and a very generous dousing in plucked dill -- rather than indiscriminate chopping, Lars recommended keeping the leafy bits more or less intact and just removing the stems by hand.

Viili | Cultured milk

Viili is a fermented milk product, which is very similar to yogurt except that it's both easier and fussier. Easier, in that to make it the only special thing you need is viili -- to get started, Finns would go to a friend or the supermarket; I was lucky enough to have a coworker give me some, though you can also buy it on Etsy. Once you've got it, put a dollop in little serving-size dishes, add milk that you've heated and cooled (non-homogenized is preferable but not necessary), give it a stir, and let it sit on the counter for the better part of a day. Presto-changeo, viili + milk + time = more viili! It's important to make it in the little dishes, because the texture is very sensitive. You can't scoop it or it gets weird and ropy, the most you can do is sprinkle on some sugar or berries or other flavor before chowing down. And remember, if you want to make more viili, don't eat the last bite!

Pulla | Cardamom bread | Recipe

In the rich European tradition of sweet, buttery yeasted breads, the Finnish version is probably the richest I've ever made -- a whole stick of butter in this recipe! In fact, the dough was so slippery that I wonder if I mismeasured the flour. Anyway, what makes this one a treat is the freshly crushed insides of cardamom pods. (Scandinavians still use white cardamom, which is apparently just what happens to green cardamom on a long sea voyage!) It's a perfect foil for coffee, which apparently the Finns drink copiously, though in our case we closed out the evening with one last Finnish treat: fresh, tiny, incredibly sweet strawberries! That, and Minttu, the Finnish equivalent of peppermint schnapps, but much cleaner and stronger and less sweet.

And that's it for the F's! Gabon is coming next, from our new apartment.