Tag Archives: bread

The History Dish: Pumpernickel Ice Cream and Cinnamon Lemon Bay Leaf Ice Cream

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icecream1Left: pumpernickel. Right: Cinnamon/bay leaf/lemon.

Here in New York City it has been HOT. But here’s my solution: I made two fascinating flavors of historic ice cream. Brown Bread ice cream, infused with actual pumpernickel bread, and a cinnamon-bay leaf-lemon ice cream made with fresh bay leaves.

The History

The spark of inspiration to make both these recipes came from my favorite book on ice cream history, Of Sugar and Snow: A History of Ice Cream Making.  The author, Jeri Quinzio, explained the rye bread ice cream appeared in the first book completely dedicated to ice cream making, written by a “Monsieur Emy” in France in 1768.  Rye bread crumbs are infused in the cream, but are strained out before freezing. A popular 19th century flavor, later recipes added toasted rye bread crumbs just before freezing for a bit of crunch, but Emy’s was a smooth ice cream.

IMG_1396

My bay leaf plant on my fire escape.

The second recipe I tried was called “Cinnamon Ice Cream (Creme de Cannelle),” from Agnes Marshall’s Book of Ices, published in 1885. Marshal was an ice cream genius, and I’ve written about her before. She was the first person to suggest using liquid nitrogen to freeze ice cream. Her recipes are genius, to the point of madness–like her savory Neapolitan made with tomatoes, artichokes, and peas.

Her cinnamon ice cream featured a stick of ceylon cinnamon, the zest of half a lemon, and a bay leaf. I had purchased a fresh bay leaf plant for just this recipe. A fresh bay leaf is dramatically different from dried: vegetal and aromatic, I wanted its special flavor for my crazy ice cream.

The Recipe

icecream2It’s pumpernickely!

For both of these recipes, I started with a basic custard ice cream:

Custard Ice Cream

  • 2 cups heavy whipping cream
  • 1 cup whole milk
  • 1 vanilla bean (or, other flavoring of your choice)
  • 6 large egg yolks
  • 3/4 cup sugar
  • 1/4 teaspoon coarse salt
  • Additional mix-ins

Add split and scraped vanilla bean to cream and milk in a saucepan. Bring to a boil.  In the meantime, in a glass bowl whisk together egg yolks, sugar and salt until blended. After cream mixture comes to a boil, pour slowly on the egg mixture, whisking constantly. Return to saucepan and cook over low heat, stirring constantly with a wooden spoon, until custard thickens slightly and evenly coats back of spoon (it should hold a line drawn by your finger).  Pour custard through a fine-mesh sieve into a bowl set over ice, or place in refrigerator, until chilled–overnight is preferable. Churn in an ice-cream maker according to manufacturer’s instructions, adding mix-ins like nuts or fruits in the last few minutes of freezing. Transfer ice cream to a resealable plastic container and freeze until firm, about 2 hours.

For Pumpernickel Ice Cream: Toast 2 cups of pumpernickel bread until deep brown on the edges. Add to milk and cream and bring to a boil. Remove from heat, and allow to infuse for two minutes. Proceed as recipe directs.

For Cinnamon Ice Cream: To milk and cream, add “a finger-length” of Ceylon cinnamn (about 4 inches), 1 bay leaf, and the peel of half a lemon. Cut the peel off the lemon with a pairing knife, taking care to avoid the white pith. Bring milk, cream, and spice to a boil; remove from heat and allow to infuse 2 minutes. Proceed with recipes as directed.

I also made this fun little video of all the steps to make these ice creams; enjoy and I hope it’s helpful!

The Results

icecream3Cinnamon ice cream perfection.

The pumpernickel ice cream was genuinely repulsive. It has a mucus-like texture I noticed even before I froze it, some strange gooey quality infused from the bread. The flavor of the pumpernickel  gave the ice cream an assertive savory-sweet taste, as though I had made ice cream from an entire McDonald’s hamburger, ketchup, pickles and all.

But the cinnamon ice cream–oh! Interestingly, cinnamon is not the flavor I would have assigned to it. The flavor, delicate and complex, would be unidentifiable if you weren’t informed. There’s a greeness from the bay leaf, a gentle citus from the lemon zest, and a soft floral quality from the ceylon cinnamon. The combination goes perfectly with the texture of the custard. It’s a real winner, and the ice cream you should make to cool you down in the dog days of summer.

The History Dish: Cabbage Cake and the Jewish Vegetarian Movement

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3Cake Filled with Cabbage: buttery, sweet and savory.

In the early 20th century, a group Jewish people believed that the less meat you ate, the closer you would be to god. By refraining from eating meat and fish, one could avoid the necessity of slaughtering living beings. This idea was epitomized in The Vilna Vegetarian Cookbook (originally published as Vegtarish-Dietischer Kokhnukh: 400 Shpeizn Gemakht Oysshlislekh fun Grsin, or Vegetarian-Dietetic Cookbook: 400 Recipes Made Exclusively from Vegetables), a kosher cookbook published in 1938. Originally printed in Lithuania, it was recently re-released and translated into English. For a special event promoting the book’s release, I was asked to prepare a recipe; typically for me, I picked the weirdest recipe I could find: cabbage cake.

The History

Because the laws of kosher dictate the separation of meat and dairy, there are many vegetarian (and vegan) recipes among Jewish cultures. In New York City, as well as in other Jewish centers, dairy restaurants and appetizing stores flourished at the turn of the century, alongside their meat counterparts, delicatessens. Additionally, vegetarian meals were more affordable; so often, a Jewish family on a budget–or in a situation where they had little access to meat–would turn to vegetarian recipes like the ones offered in The Vilna Vegetarian Cookbook.

The book’s author, Fania Lewando, ran her own vegetarian restaurant and kosher cooking school in Vilna, Lithuania. In her introduction, she enthused on the virtues of a vegetarian life, spoke on the health giving properties of plants, and gave a a brief history of vegetarianism as “a Jewish movement.”

And she offered great practical advice, like “Throw nothing out, everything can be made into food. For example, don’t throw out the water in which you have cooked mushrooms or green peas; it can be used for various soups. Don’t throw out the vegetables used to make a vegetable broth. You can make various foods from them, as shown in this cookbook.”

Many of her recipes are simple and practical; others are fashionable, and sometimes even outrageous. In the pages of her cookbook, you can find Pickle Soup, a stew of root vegetables, peas and pickle brine; Buckwheat Kasha Cutlets, a homemade meat substitute similar to the foods Kellogg served at his vegetarian Sanitarium; Stuffed Imitation Kishke, the vegetarian version of a traditional sausage of stuffed beef intestine; and even a recipe for Kvass, a fermented beverage made from rye bread.

Cabbage Cake — or “Cake Filled with Cabbage” — intrigued me because who fills a cake with cabbage? But like the many bizarre recipes I am tempted to try, I saw potential. It layered a buttery, savory yeast dough with a slow cooked mix of butter, cabbage and onions.

2Assembling the cake.

The Recipe

Cake Filled with Cabbage
Adapted from the Vilna Vegetarian Cookbook, By Fania Lewanda, 1938
Translated from the original Yiddish by Eve Jochnowitz

4 cups white flour
1 packet yeast
1/2 cup milk, warm
1.5 cups (three sticks) unsalted butter
5 egg yolks
3 eggs
2 tablespoons sugar
Salt
1 Head of cabbage, shredded (about 2 pounds)
1 cup chopped onions
Salt

  1. In a large bowl, sprinkle cabbage with 1 tablespoon of salt. Set aside.
  2. Make the dough: Pour 4 cups white flour into a bowl. Dissolve yeast in milk, stirring gently with a fork. Add to flour. Add 5 egg yolks, 2 eggs, sugar, a pinch of salt and 1/2 cup melted butter, stir until combined. On a well-floured board, knead for three minutes. Return to bowl, cover with a towel and set aside. Let dough rise one hour.
  3. Wrap cabbage in a towel and squeeze–or press through a strainer–to remove water. Over medium-heat heat, melt 1 cup butter. Add cabbage and onions, and cook, stirring occasionally, until brown.
  4. On a well-floured board, divide dough in half, and roll into two sheets, each about 1/4 inch thick.
  5. Grease a baking sheet.  Lay one sheet of dough on the baking sheet, cover with cooked cabbage mixture, and then cover with the second sheet of dough. Pierce it all over with a fork and allow it to rise 30 minutes. Preheat over to 350 degrees. Brush top of dough with a beaten egg, and bake 45 to 50 minutes, until the top is toasty brown and bubbly.
4Out of the oven!

The Results

Since I made this cake for an event, the results were fed to about 100 people. I was worried the cake might be too weird. But in the end, it’s all about the experience; which is why I pick the recipe that sounds the most interesting, not the one that sounds the most delicious.

But thankfully, Cabbage Cake was both interesting and delicious. The yeasty dough paired perfectly with the buttery cabbage, that savory filling contrasting with the slightly sweet crust. The crust was crisp, and the filling melt-in-your mouth. It was an all around hit, and a dish I would make again as a vegetarian side or even a main course.

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If you live in the new York City area and you’d like to learn more about the history of Jewish cuisine, I’m giving a special program at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum on May 18th. It will feature a tour focusing on the diversity of Jewish food, as well as a cooking class! Sign up here!

 

Witches, Bread and LSD: The Story of Ergot

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ergotIllustration by Lisk Feng.

Some anthropologists theorize that the murderous mania of the Salem Witch Trials wasn’t caused by religious panic or hectic politics. They blame ergot, a grain fungus that causes paranoia, hallucinations and convulsions—the same symptoms that were thought to be caused by “bewitchment.”

Read the whole story–an interview with me!–on Hopes and Fears HERE.

The Gallery: Campfire Cooking Beyond Hotdogs

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Photographer extraordinaire Jess Tsang took some snaps at my most recent fire cooking class in Brooklyn, so I thought I’d share! If you’re interested in this class, and live in the New York City area, you should get on the Brooklyn Brainery’s mailing list. I repeat the class each spring.

 

Living History: Dream of the Rarebit Fiend

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Welsh RarebitWelsh rarebit: cheese sauce on toast; all ready for my bedtime snack.

What do you get when you combine a Victorian preoccupation with bad digestion and one illustrator’s imaginative fantasy landscapes? Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend, a comic strip created by Winsor McCay that ran from 1904-1912. McCay would later go on to create the better known strip Little Nemo in Slumberland, but his earlier, more grown-up strip was just as fantastic. In every strip, a cheese-on-toast dish known as “welsh rarebit” was consumed before bedtime, and then faulted for a night of  alarming dreams. The illustrated dreamscapes the McCay created would go on to inspire scenes in King Kong, Dumbo, Mary Poppins, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Read the comic here.

After reading a book of McCay’s work, I wanted to know: would the dreaded rarebit give me bad dreams, too?

The History

In the final panel, the dreamer always awakens and curses the cheese.

In the early 20th century and before, we were preoccupied with bad digestion. Eating the wrong foods at the wrong times was blamed for a range of maladies, including troubled dreams. From The Psychology of Dreams, 1920:

“As is well known, dreams may be influenced by physical discomforts. Many individuals can, almost with certainty, bring on distressing dreams by eating at supper or near bedtime, certain combinations of food, as peas and salmon, Welsh rarebit, ice cream and oysters.”

That shit is well known. The general medical consensus was that those prone to bad digestion were prone to nightmares, and heavy foods like a rarebit made you prone to bad digestion. Case closed.

The Recipe


A silent film inspired by McCay’s comics. I enjoy the first few minute of this film; he is really chowing down on a welsh rarebit. Really shoving it in there.

So what is this wicked rarebit? A welsh rarebit is perfect comfort food, which is why nobody wanted to give the damn things up, despite the advice of their doctors. Invented sometime in the 18th century, it can be as simple as a few slices of melted cheese on toast, the preference being for cheddar or Gloucestershire cheese.  By the early 20th century, it was more common to make a sauce of American cheese, milk or cream, egg yolks, butter, mustard, Worcestershire sauce, a dash of red pepper–the recipes varied, and could be more simple or more complicated depending on what you had on hand. You can read a full history of this dish, along with theories about the origin of its name, on the incomparable Food Timeline here.

I made my rarebit with grated cheddar cheese, cream, good mustard, Worcestershire, and cayenne. I melted it slowly on my stove top before pouring it over a slice of whole wheat toast. It was nice and spicy and I immediately wanted another. Then I climbed into bed and got ready for dreamland.

The Results

Although I felt sleepy immediately after eating the rarebit, it took me a lot longer to fall asleep than normal. It was a light sleep, shifting in between consciousness and dreaming. I didn’t have any long, lucid dreams. I had watched the Anthony Bourdain Parts Unknown episode about Israel/Palestine before going to bed, so mostly I was dreaming about eating delicious Palestinian food, particularly this one interesting-looking roast watermelon salad. At another point I was at a BBQ pouring hot sauce all over roasted meat. These are the scenarios my brain is pondering constantly, and in my agitated sleep state, I was just dipping in and out of them. If you were wondering what it’s like to peer into my psyche, there you go.

But I don’t think the rarebit was to blame for my dreams. Feeding a rarebit to my husband before bed was one of the greatest mistakes I have ever made. He came home from school late and hungry, so I offered him one; he said he didn’t like it because it tasted “unhealthy.” He spent the night thrashing around in bed, kicking and punching me in his sleep. He actually woke up several times to exclaim “It was the cheese!” Finally, he started crying because he dreamed his undead grandfather shot his brother.

According to the Sleep Disorders Center at the Cleveland Clinic, eating too close to bedtime can lead to “heightened metabolism and temperature,” which in turn “…can lead to more brain activity, prompting more action during rapid eye movement sleep, or REM.” Which means more dreams. It is inadvisable to eat “heavy or spicy foods” two to three hours before bedtime.

However, cheese also contains tryptophan, an amino acid “used by the human body to make serotonin.” It can actually relax us and help us sleep, which may be why it is often served as the last course of meals. Additionally, fat and carbs can make us sleepy, according to Scientific American. So it may be safe to say that everyone reacts differently to a welsh rarebit.

As for Brian’s undead grandpa: unlike Nemo‘s freeing fantasy landscapes, Fiend often dealt with the repressed anxietys of daily adulthood.