2 
2 Fresh from the field, most produce requires precious little intervention to be delicious. If it even needs heat, you can just clean it, season it, and cook it: sauté, roast, or steam it with salt and some flavorful fat (butter, olive oil, tallow, bacon fat).
The trick, then, is to find ways to preserve produce that won’t wholly destroy its soul. Modern-day canning methods rely on long cooking times to kill dangerous bacteria, with the side effect of preserving just the form, and not the flavor, of the produce. The notable exceptions are tomatoes, which become a whole new creature when cooked into sauce, and condiments (like jam and pickles), whose sugar and acid reduce the need for long canning times.
The other path—my favorite—is fermentation. Instead of killing off all the bacteria to preserve our food, we can encourage friendly bacteria and yeasts to take over. The result is not just preservation, but transformation.
In this chapter, we talk about some beautiful ways to serve fresh fruits and vegetables (including ginkgo and durian), as well as two distinct fermentation methods: direct lacto-fermentation and vinegar pickling with homemade vinegar.
We’ve also included some seemingly novel, but really old-fashioned, jam recipes, along with sweet and savory condiments ranging from pomegranate molasses to fermented soy sauce.
Stuffed Vegetables
The chefs of the Ottoman Empire, whom we have to thank for some of the finest dishes ever to emerge from a kitchen, were obsessed with stuffed vegetables, and Turks still are. My ancestors, who lived under the sultan for about 400 years, learned many of these recipes, and I figure it must be in my blood. Show me an eggplant, I want to stuff it. Even New World tomatoes, peppers, zucchini, and pumpkin. They’re all fine sautéed, but presented whole and stuffed, they are objects of unparalleled dignity. You can fill them with ground lamb and vegetables, preferably laden with cinnamon and cumin, but even simple vegetable fillings are delicious. My favorite of late are the little baseball-size round zucchini. If you make zigzagged knife insertions halfway into the top, all the way around, the vegetable will come apart evenly and look gorgeous. Then with a small spoon or melon baller, remove the inside flesh, leaving just enough of the interior wall so it holds its shape. You can use a regular zucchini, too, cut horizontally the same way. Finely chop the flesh. Sauté it with olive oil in a pan with an onion, a little garlic if you like, and some aromatic herbs and spices. I like za’atar, which is a combination of thyme, oregano, sesame seeds, and sumac. Let this cool and then add some grated cheese or crumbled feta. You can stop there or add a few beaten eggs so the whole mix stays together. You may not have enough filling for all the shells, so feel free to add whatever other vegetable you have at hand, like mushrooms or chopped spinach. Then put the tops back on and bake the stuffed zucchini in the oven on medium heat for about 1 hour. This makes a great side dish or serve a few as a main course, breakfast, lunch, collation, late-night snack. You get the idea.
—K
Colcannon Ramped Up
Should you find yourself with a surfeit of esculent greens, colcannon is a sublime way to use them up. It’s a stalwart Irish dish, served on Halloween with little coins concealed inside for the lucky children who find them without breaking their teeth. This version is not only much more interesting than the usual mashed potatoes and cabbage mix, but easier to cook. Start with a bunch of greens—turnips are best—along with 3 little turnip roots, 2 shallots, 1 potato (boiled and mashed coarsely), and a judicious amount of the finest slab bacon you can find cut into thick rashers, roughly chopped, and lightly cooked in a skillet to remove some of the fat (but not crispy). Save some of the fat in the pan. Leeks are also divine, or even better—as the section title suggests—ramps. Or use a plain old onion.
Chop the greens finely and put them in a pot. On top of these put the other vegetables, chopped. Then the bacon, then the mashed potato. Plus a little salt. Add 2 cups of water. You could use milk, but not necessary. Steam everything for about 10 minutes until soft and continue to cook with the lid removed to evaporate most of the water. Remove the mixture and place in the skillet in which you cooked the bacon. Stir often until dry and beginning to brown. Cook this as long as you like on low heat, just don’t let it burn. This makes a whole meal unto itself, serve with a nice rich stout or porter. Butter is not necessary, but if you’re feeling really indulgent, go ahead. And if you’re feeling penitent, leave out the bacon and skip the pan-frying step. It’s still scrumptious.
—K
Pickling
There are two basic species of pickle: those fermented with natural bacteria (Lactobacillus and a host of others) and those made with vinegar. I will admit to a prejudice against the latter, as somehow quick easy and, dare I say, fake. That describes most commercial pickles, pasteurized, mass manufactured, and sold in jars. They’re very expensive, too, if you want something exciting like asparagus or okra pickles. I never really understood how delicious vinegar pickles could be until I started making them myself—with my own vinegar. So the idea is still bacterial fermentation, you are just letting the bacteria work on the fermented grape or grain first before adding the vegetables. There’s nothing fake about it. And if you use store-bought, excellent-quality vinegar, they can still be quite lovely. I’m converted. But let’s start with the vinegar.
Vinegar: The Mother
You can find vinegar recipes easily. One version is made from pineapple peels. It will eventually swarm with fruit flies, which it’s supposed to do! Or someone may offer to give you a piece of mother, which is a rubbery snot-like raft that floats on top of homemade vinegar; it contains the Acetobacter that converts wine into sour wine, vin-aigre. People get obsessive about the mother. She has been cherished for six centuries, handed down from the Knights Templar; after their order was disbanded it was hidden in a Scottish monastery and passed on to the Rosicrucians and Free Masons.
Well, like bread and pickles and everything else wonderfully bacterial, vinegar makes itself. You just need to give it the right conditions. Maybe our problem is that we call it a mother and think it must be a thing that can’t generate on its own. It can, with bacteria of course. The trick is, you need to make wine first. Most wine you buy contains sulfur, added precisely to stop fermentation and prevent it from ever turning into vinegar. I’ve seen store-bought wine go bad, but never turn into good vinegar. I discovered this by accident to tell the truth. I had one large glass of homemade wine left over from a fall crush and just left it on a shelf and forgot about it. For about 3 months. When I rediscovered the wine, there was this slimy raft on top. Smelled like vinegar, tasted like vinegar. Eureka!
To start, crush organic grapes. (Who knows what is sprayed on conventional grapes to kill bacteria!) Whatever quantity you like. Whatever kind you like, too. Wine grapes work very nicely. Let them ferment in a capacious vessel exposed to the air, pushing down the floating peels and stuff on top every day, or more often. Bubble, bubble, toil, but no trouble. You will have made wine in 2 weeks or so. Strain out the solids. You don’t need a press, just squeeze with your hands or wrap in a towel and twist it to get the last drops out.
Leave the liquid out, covered loosely, for about 3 months. Consider this your starter mother. At this point you can actually use whatever wine you like, just keep a crock going into which you can dump any dregs from leftover bottles or glasses. Or whatever alcohol, as long as it’s roughly between 5 and 12 percent. The mother keeps renewing itself as you add more wine, so feel free to remove some and experiment with other types of vinegar. You can try beer: Just a few bottles with a chunk of the mother turns into a splendid malt vinegar. Rice wine also works nicely. Turning hard cider to vinegar seems to be a little more tricky, so I suggest making your own decent cider first from apples, leaving it out and letting it acidify.
Absolutely any vegetable you like can be pickled with vinegar, either white or red wine vinegar or any other type. Simply start with a strong brine, 4 or 5 percent salt, which is salty enough to float an egg. Mix in an equal part of your vinegar. Or use a greater proportion of vinegar. I usually find straight vinegar way too sour. Actually the best use for this is pickled eggs. Just hard boil them, peel, and toss in with spices, saffron if you like them yellow, a peeled beet if you want them red.
As for vegetables, hard ones like carrots and turnips should be cut to equal lengths and very briefly blanched. You want them crunchy and firm but not raw. The brief cooking begins to break down the cell walls. Start with string beans, they are the easiest. Just top and tail and throw in with dill fronds and a tiny touch of sugar. Maybe a chili pepper. Then move up to asparagus, okra (which can also be tossed in raw), cauliflower florets, and broccoli. Mix them together, too, however you like. Certain combinations are classic, like cauliflower, carrots, pearl onions, and peppers in an Italian giardiniera (or sottaceti). Rutabagas are magnificent pickled as are sliced beets. The flavorings are entirely up to you. Just avoid powdered spices or the whole thing will get cloudy. Try coriander seed, cumin, celery seed, cardamom, fennel, juniper berries, or peppercorns. Experiment; there is no way to ruin these. And most important, they do not need to be canned, processed, refrigerated, or anything. Just fill your jars and close the lid. I have kept jars for over a year on the shelf, and they actually improved with age.
The only thing you can do if you really want to ruin them is try smoking the vegetables first. They taste just like eating a sour cigarette butt. Well, I tried!
And if you have vegetables that demand immediate pickling, without the time to use your own vinegar, a good store-bought wine vinegar works well, too.
—K
Lacto-Fermented Pickles
With nothing but salt, water, and time, you can transform almost any firm vegetable into a puckered, sour version of itself. Salt kills off nasty putrescent bacteria, allowing friendly salt-loving bacteria to colonize the pickles. As these bacteria proliferate, they produce lactic acid, preserving the vegetables for long storage and giving them a wonderful sourness.
We cover quite a few fermented pickles in our first book, but we wanted to revisit the method here because it is so fundamental. Lacto-fermentation is quite simple and eminently versatile, as you might expect from a technology that’s been preserving the produce of thousands of generations.
Start with any firm, fresh, clean produce: small cucumbers (of course), peppers, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, hard green tomatoes, hard green baby watermelons, and so on. Place the cleaned and trimmed vegetables in a large jar or crock. Make a brine of about 2 tablespoons of salt per 1 quart of filtered water (no bacteria-killing chlorine, please), and pour it over the vegetables to cover them. Place a small plate or jar on top of the vegetables to keep them submerged under the brine, and use a rubber band to secure a napkin or other finely woven cloth over the mouth of the crock. You want air to circulate, but you do not want bugs to reach the pickles.
Leave the crock in a cupboard for a week or more. Check on it occasionally to remove any bits of mold that float on the surface (harmless, but it needs to go). The pickles are done when they taste pleasantly sour to you. The timing will depend on the warmth of the cupboard and the density of the vegetables. Brussels sprouts, for example, take a long time to get pickled all the way through. When your pickles are done, transfer them to a jar and store, sealed, in your refrigerator. They will keep for several months.
You can also add all sorts of delicious spices and herbs. Whole cloves of peeled garlic, peppercorns, coriander seeds, sprigs of dill, allspice, and juniper berries are all quite good, but play around. The salt level of the brine is also adjustable: the saltier it is, the slower the fermentation, but the longer the pickles will keep.
If your cucumber pickles get mushy, consider adding a few grape or oak leaves. One or two large leaves per quart will do. In my case, I have to run into Golden Gate Park for twigs from the coast live oaks, whose leaves are very small. I’ll put half a dozen in a jar. The tannins in oak and grape leaves are what keep the pickles crisp.
—R
Using Brines, Pickles, and Whey
Making your own pickles and cheese can leave your refrigerator bursting with gallons of odd liquids. Sometimes the pickled vegetables themselves are even a bit perplexing—now that summer’s bounty is sitting in your refrigerator, what can you do with it, besides nibbling it plain?
For starters, check out Effortless Sourdough Bread with Whey or Brine on page 5, Whey Polenta on page 22, and Pork and Sauerkraut on page 76.
Pickle Brine
Last summer I threw some small slightly spicy peppers into a brine with garlic and coriander. A few weeks later a pickly, peppery aroma filled my entire pantry, and the peppers were nicely pickled. They’re quite delicious sliced on top of chili, for the record.
When I repacked the peppers from the original crock into jars for refrigerator storage, I found I had some extra brine. I couldn’t bring myself to dump it because—although it took up precious space in my apartment-size refrigerator—I liked it better than the pickles. The brine was sweetly, aromatically peppery, savory, and complex. It was like pepper wine. I started using it as the base for all my salad dressings and whisked it like lemon juice into my mayonnaise and aioli.
The point is that homemade pickle brine can be used as a weak acid in your recipes. Think of it as an especially savory and aromatic diluted vinegar or lemon juice. Splash some in your soup just before serving. Marinate your meat in it.
Simplest of all, use a little pickle brine when starting your next batch of pickles. It will act like a starter, speeding up the proliferation of those wonderful lactic acid bacteria. Of course, this is only true for a raw, nonvinegar pickle brine.
When making cheese, the vast majority of the milk’s volume turns into whey. There are a few delicious cheeses you can make from that whey—see ricotta and mysost, for example. But if you’re not up for that, you will quickly find yourself shuffling around jars of the pale greenish liquid in your fridge.
Provided the whey itself is not salted (and most cheeses are salted after the whey drains out), you can also use the whey as a soup base or as the water replacement in bread. In fact, the lactic acid bacteria in the whey will give the bread an instant sourdough-like character, and the residual sugars in the whey will help your loaf brown beautifully. After soaking beans and draining off the soaking liquid, try cooking them in whey. Whey leaves everything it touches with a subtle sweet cheesiness.
I particularly like rolled oats soaked overnight in whey. I bring them to a boil first thing in the morning with a bit of cinnamon, salt, and butter, then turn off the heat immediately and let them steam, covered, for 15 to 20 minutes.
—R
Jams and Mostarda
Jam making is supposed to be an ordeal. You need several hundred pounds of fruit, dozens of canning jars, a 20-quart stockpot, tongs, packets of pectin, funnels. Wait, what did people do before Pasteur? Just cook down fruit and put it in any old sealed crock? Absolutely. And it will work if I want to use maybe a few pints of tiny fraises des bois, fresh raspberries from the farmer’s market, or a little bag of juicy peaches. Or, best of all, gooseberries if you can find them. Scale is of no importance here at all. Rosanna offered some really superb and detailed directions in our first book together, and I have to admit, she started me on jam making. I am now prepared to wing it and so can you. In a nutshell: Throw fruit in pot. Toss on some sugar. Add in some lemon peel with the pith (the source of pectin). Boil until everything falls apart and the liquid gets thick. Remove the peel. Pass the mixture through a food mill if there are seeds (as with raspberries and strawberries). Put in jar hot. Seal. Done.
Now for the fun part. You can buy decent jam in any supermarket, but you can’t buy serious spiced-up jam, or at least not just anywhere. Start by adding to your fruit base some finely chopped jalapeños or soaked anchos. This is stunning with cream cheese on crackers. Or add some crushed mustard seed. This is a variation on the Italian mostarda di frutta. Especially if you have sour fruit, the piquancy of the mustard sets it off so nicely. This goes with meat. Cinnamon and nutmeg also work wonders with cooked fruit. Just toss whole pieces in and fish them out toward the end if you like, or use ground spices. And just in case you think this is some outlandishly ridiculous novelty that no real Italian person would do, my friend Bartolomeo Scappi (chef to the popes in the mid-sixteenth century) made a red currant sauce, exactly as above, which was published in his Italian Opera (Works) of 1570. How about the one he calls mostarda amabile (lovely mustard)? The grape sauce he mentions is just cooked-down grapes with sugar, done the same as other fruits, and strained. Ironically the word mustard in English comes from the word for grape juice (must) and our modern condiment forgets the grapes and keeps the mustard seed. Here’s the original version from Scappi (I really love his loose attitude):
Take one pound of grape sauce, and another of quinces cooked in wine with sugar, four ounces of apple cooked in wine, and sugar, three ounces of candied citron peel, two ounces of candied lemon peel, half an ounce of candied nutmeg, pound all together with the quince, and the apple with the mortar, and when everything is pounded pass it through a sieve together with the grape sauce, and add to this material three ounces of cleaned mustard, more or less depending on if you want it strong. And after straining add a little salt, finely pounded sugar, half an ounce of pounded cinnamon, and a quarter of pounded clove. And if you don’t want to pound this mixture just break them up small. And if you don’t have grape sauce, you can do it without, just use quince and apple cooked in the way mentioned above.
Mustard
Mustard as we know it today, incidentally, is absolutely simple. Use a mixture of yellow and brown seeds. The surprising part is that it tastes acrid and bitter immediately after you make it, but if you leave it for a few days the bitterness dissipates. Also odd is that water activates the heat so you need to either soak your seeds first or grind them and add water. It doesn’t matter if you soak first and then grind or grind and then soak. Either way, the seeds will absorb the water, and the longer they hydrate, the hotter they’ll be. Once you’ve pounded the seeds, finely or coarsely, into a paste, then add flavorings such as vinegar, salt, a touch of honey or maple syrup is lovely, and a drizzle of beer or white wine works nicely. Throw in anything you like.
—K
Soy Sauce
Nowadays most soy sauce is made on an enormous industrial scale. That’s not to say it’s bad or even untraditional. The Japanese Kikkoman Corporation goes back to the seventeenth century, but every now and then you’ll hear mention of some tiny artisan producer, making only a few cases that go for hundreds of dollars each. Well, why not try making your own? Here is the procedure. Mind you, this is a replication of the most primitive form of soy, called jiang, which originates in China. There are versions that use only soybeans; this one also includes wheat.
Boil a pound of whole red winter wheat (which you can find in the supermarket or online) until cooked thoroughly and soft, then pound it into a course wet meal in a really big mortar. Do the same to a pound of yellow soybeans. Then knead them together into a dough by hand, roll them into balls and put them in a big bowl on a bed of rice inoculated with the mold Aspergillus oryzae. This is sold in a little bucket, with rice and mold included, at most Japanese grocery stores. I have seen recipes that just allow any mold at all to settle in, but if it can be purchased, then why not use the right one?
Let this sit in a warm place, covered loosely with a cloth, until the whole thing is blanketed with a thick shag of white mold. Then toss the hairy balls into a strong brine (that’s just water with a handful of salt) in a jar and put in the back of a cupboard and forget about it. Wait about a year, though you can always take a peek if you’re impatient. When the contents of the jar are dark and fragrant, you’ll need to devise a contraption to press the liquid out of the balls. Wrapping small batches of balls in several dishtowels and then placing under a weight works well. Be sure you set the batches on a tray to catch the liquid. Pour the liquid off periodically into a small bottle. It will be lighter in color than most soy sauce, which is darkened with caramel, and more pungent. Try it with a slab of raw fish or a vegetable. It would be a shame to cook with this, but of course you can. The leftover solids can be used just like miso paste, which is pretty much what it is. Stir it into a soup or flavor a sauce or marinade with it.
—K
Ginkgo Nuts
As a senior in college, I lived above Dupont Circle in Washington, DC, on Fifteenth and Swann, in a neighborhood that was then pretty much on the edge of upcoming and still fairly seedy. Today it seems to be pretty yuppified. The principal charm of the venue was the stately ginkgo trees lining the avenue. They were given by the ambassador from Japan in the late nineteenth century, when the houses were all built.
Since then, I have had an overwhelming affection for this species of tree. They’ve been around for twenty-five million years, living fossils. Male trees have motile sperm. They are closer to animals than to plants. And when the females bear fruit, you better believe it, the aroma is feral, but the leaves are so delicately beautiful, yellow maiden hair fans, it’s worth the season of stench. Come that season, early in the morning, elderly Asian women are seen collecting the yellow fruits. So I thought, after years living with a beautiful tree right down the block, it was time to snatch a few from the ground and see what the fuss is about. Give it a try, and you’ll find out for yourself.
My friend Willa, expert in such matters, told me, thank goodness, that you need to wear sturdy rubber gloves. Not just because of the stink, but the fruit around the nut is caustic. So don your gloves and collect them in a sturdy plastic shopping bag. Bring them into the backyard—for heaven’s sake, don’t do this inside! Wear a mask if you must. You’ve smelled durian before, right? Try a hundred times more potent. Peel away the fruit with your well-gloved fingers, but don’t under any circumstances be tempted to taste the soft part. The stench alone will linger in your nostrils for days, but it’s worth it. Wash the interior beige nuts many, many times with a hose outside. Use an old scrubby sponge, too. Then crack the nuts as gently as possible to remove the shells. The odor will still be dizzying. Soak the nuts in hot water briefly and peel off the dark papery skin beneath the shell. Then voilà! Tender, almost translucent greenish orbs. Edible poetry. Two hours of labor later, you will have a cup of nuts, if you’re lucky. They’re intriguing raw but better slightly toasted in a pan with a sprinkle of salt, which balances nicely with their inherent hint of bitterness. You can put them on a little skewer as Japanese yakitori. Or they’re very nice in a stir-fry, too. You can, of course, buy them, usually canned, in an Asian market, but they just don’t taste as good as when you’ve done it yourself and survived the purulent fecal onslaught.
—K
Speaking of durian, this is a large fearsome spiked beast of a fruit. If you live near a Southeast Asian grocery, they’ll stock them. The impressive exterior is nothing compared to the bizarre creamy white custardy flesh that smells a little like armpit, a little like garlic, and a little like crap. It is, despite all this, remarkably delicious, the king of fruits in fact. It is meant to be hacked open and eaten, nothing more. But the texture is so reminiscent of custard, that freezing it is just irresistible. Just remove the seeds, puree the fruit with a little sugar and a splash of alcohol, which will prevent it from freezing solid. Then just pop it in the freezer and scrape out with a spoon. Tempt your friends with spoonfuls. Some will hate you for it, but the fortunate few will reel with delight.
—K
Pickled Green Walnuts
They say that stolen fruit tastes the best, as I learned one day after pilfering a few green walnuts from a neighbor’s tree. I think the gods punished me well though: Without thinking I poked them all over with a pin, only to find that my hands had turned completely black and stayed that way for about 1 week. The lesson learned: Ask a friend first, and wear gloves.
Pickled green walnuts are traditionally made on June 24, St. John the Baptist’s Day, when the walnuts are still soft inside and the shell hasn’t formed yet. Poke them all around with a pin and put them into a pickle solution of half vinegar, half water, and a few tablespoons of salt. Flavor the mixture with a cinnamon stick, mace, and nutmeg and cloves, if you like. Any warm spices, plus plenty of peppercorns. Now forget about it. I mean, really, throw it in the back of a cabinet you rarely use. If you can wait a year, all the better. They will be blackened, sweet and sour, and remarkably complex. You eat the whole thing, preferably with something like a plowman’s lunch: a wedge of cheese, an apple, some good ale, and maybe a slice of pork pie. Rare and intriguing is the only way to describe these.
—K
Pomegranate Molasses
My pomegranate molasses recipe is as simple as can be, but it yields a condiment that is not only unbelievably delicious but also lasts forever and is extremely versatile. Its origin, like the pomegranate, is the Middle East and the Mediterranean. Traditionally, this molasses is a souring agent in lamb stews or in marinades for chicken. It also goes really nicely with eggplant, but you can use it anywhere you want a deep sweet-and-sour flavor. Put a spoonful into a tomato sauce or even into ground beef for hamburgers. No one really knows it’s there, but eyebrows are raised.
Get a large quantity of pomegranates. I was given a big shopping bag by my pal Luigi who has a tree, so I couldn’t imagine eating them all. Actually I have a little tree, but it’s never borne fruit. Anyway, break them open with your hands. It will, unfortunately, look like someone has been murdered after you’re done. Strip back the red peel and the bitter white peel and put only the red seeds into a stockpot. Don’t worry if you break a lot in the process, just make sure you don’t leave any white pith in the pot.
Then cook the seeds down with a few tablespoons of unrefined sugar and a vanilla pod. After the seeds have all broken down, strain the liquid and return it to the pot. Keep the vanilla pod in with the juice. Keep the liquid on a very low simmer for about 3 hours until reduced. In the end you’ll have a lovely, tart, nutty sweet, blood-like super-thick syrup. About a dozen pomegranates will give you a couple of cups at most, which is fine. You’ll need only a spoonful at a time. You can stir a spoonful into ice water for a refreshing and antioxidant drink that won’t set you back five bucks. And just in case you don’t have a costume for Halloween, use this syrup and go as your favorite saint, dripping blood from some missing body part. This would be great for Lucy without her eyes, or even better, Oedipus.
—K
Carob Molasses
Carob is one of those health foods that suddenly appeared on the market when I was a kid, as a substitute for chocolate, which it isn’t. If you think of it rather as a kind of dark sweet fruity pod to gnaw on, it’s much more palatable. There’s a huge tree across the street from my office, and I am often seen snatching a few pods to bring to class for show-and-tell. It is supposedly what St. John ate in the desert as locust beans. Its seeds are also the origin of the carat from Greek keration, used as a measure of weight for gemstones. Most interesting of all, a syrup is made from carob throughout the Middle East called gulepp tal-harrub, which is used in cooking; on the island of Malta it’s made into a drink with water. To make the syrup, just break up the pods, boil them for several hours in water and then strain. Cook this down until thick, adding a little sugar to taste if you want. In a barbecue sauce or chili it is really haunting.
—K
Sanct Johansbern-Suppen
I spent one summer doing research in the gorgeous little town of Wolfenbüttel in lower Saxony at the Herzog August Bibliotek. It is an absolute gem of a library. I was actually accidentally locked in one weekend when the library closed early and seriously considered staying there until Monday. I ended up climbing up a bookshelf and jumping out a window next to a group of alarmed tourists, fully expecting to be pursued. Anyway, you can imagine my delight to discover not only that there was a press there for a few years but that in 1598 they published a cookbook: Kunstbuch von Mancherley Essen by Frantz von Rontzier. In it there are three versions of a soup called sanct johansbern-suppen; the following is a compromise among the three. We rarely think of using fruit in a soup nowadays, let alone using the even rarer red currant. But this is so remarkably fresh and bracingly sour, that it makes an ideal opening to a meal, a custom that is well worth reviving.
Take red currants and sauté them gently in butter. Add some wine (dry rosé is best), and simmer until they are softened but not disintegrated. Place a slice of toast in a shallow soup dish, pour the soup over and sprinkle mace, cinnamon, and a little sugar on top. You can also add a little rose water. Although this is intended to be eaten hot, it is also very nice chilled.
—K