Early Bird Granola

Just happened to be discussing with my son, Julien, the number of good-for-you foods that were invented in the 19th century. (OK, I know it sounds phony that we were doing that, but honest, we were.)

Sylvester Graham—a diet reformer who advocated a vegetarian diet and whole foods—invented Graham bread in 1829. It was made with unsifted, coarsely ground, whole wheat flour, and no additives. (And you're probably familiar with his other invention, Graham crackers.)

Dr. Caleb Jackson, who ran a sanitarium in upstate New York, invented a cereal called Granula in 1863. It was made with Graham flour (see Sylvester Graham, above) and resembled giant Grape-Nuts.

Then there was John Harvey Kellogg, a doctor who ran a sanitarium in Battle Creek, Michigan, who advocated a vegetarian diet (and enemas). In 1894 he patented, with his brother, a cereal called Granose, later to become Corn Flakes.

Flash forward through the 1960s, where a cereal called Granola became the calling card of the hippies, to today where granola (no longer a tradename) has become an art form.

Early Bird Foods, in Red Hook, Brooklyn, is a good example of how good granola artistry can be. We'll start with the packaging. It makes you want to buy the granola just so you can have the cleverly designed bags the cereal comes in. It's a resealable plastic bag that looks like rice paper and the label is a wonderful interpretation of an old fruit crate label with a bird flying above a city skyline (I'm guessing it's meant to represent Brooklyn).

Moving on to the contents: There are six recipes, Farmhand's Choice, Jubilee, Aloha, Choc-a-Doodle-Doo, Gets the Worm, and Kiss My Oats. The base recipe includes organic rolled oats, pumpkin seeds, toasted organic coconut, Vermont maple syrup, extra-virgin olive oil, and salt. Where the recipes differ is in the kind of fruit and/or nuts that go into them, including pecans, mango, dried apples, chocolate, macadamia nuts, cherries and pistachios. The balance of sweet to salty is seductive. These are really wonderful granolas (and I've eaten my share of granolas over the years).

The granolas are sold in 38 states or you can order it directly from Early Bird.

This brings me to a small sticking point, which is the price. The granolas are made by hand in small batches, which is why they are so good and why they are pricey. They cost $10 for a 12-ounce bag, but you won't be disappointed, and you'll be a patron of the granola arts if you buy it.

Linguistic bloviation

There's got to be a term that describes words that evolve through the linguistic game of telephone. Here's an example of what I mean. In France, back in the day, if you wanted to let a girl know you liked her you would give her a flower, or donner une fleur à. This evolved into the verb fleurter (to flower). The English language picked this up and changed it to flirt. In modernday French, the verb for flirting is flirter and comes directly from the English word flirt. So, game of telephone.

This brings me to the parfait. In France, the word parfait means perfect, but it also refers to a frozen dessert. In this country, round about the turn of the 20th century, we adopted the word parfait and used it to mean ice cream layered with other ingredients (like syrups or fruit) in a tall soda-fountain-style glass. The concept then evolved to mean anything that was served in layers in a tall glass (object being, of course, to show off the layers).

Flash forward to now: For the past couple of years, chi-chi caterers and restaurants in this country have adopted this cool, new presentation idea from France: the verrine. It's layered ingredients presented in a glass so you can see the layers. Hmmmm, wait, that sounds familiar...

So again, language has moved on. To try your hand at parfa....verrines, you could check out Terrines & Verrines from chef Franck Pontais.

Frustrating old recipes

Feeling in a old-timey kitchen mood, I decided to find an old-timey recipe for all of my home-dried apples.

I stumbled across one called March Pudding in an 1877 cookbook called Buckeye Cookery, and Practical Housekeeping. The book was conceived as a fund-raiser, with recipes submitted by local housewives in Marysville, Ohio. The book sold for about $1.75, and it raised $2,000 to build a parsonage for the First Congregational Church.

The March Pudding recipe came from a Miss Lizzie March, who (I discovered through a little genealogical sleuthing) was the 20-year-old daughter of the local Presbyterian minister, William Gilmore March.

Here is the recipe as it appeared in the cookbook.

It's astonishing to me that recipes with so little information actually got published back in the day. I guess the recipes were more like sketches than actual blueprints for cooking. Maybe all of the women of the 19th century were so accomplished as cooks that they didn't need annoying little details like How much liquid goes into this batter? What kind of pan does it cook in? How hot is the oven? How long do you bake it? And I defy anyone to follow the exact order of business as described in the recipe. It simply can't work.

However, I did my best to reinterpret the information given. I didn't change any of the quantities, but had to make a complete guess on the soaking liquid for the apples. Since it was called a pudding, I made the assumption that it belonged to a class of desserts that were sort of like plum pudding, so I baked it—with much expectation—in a shaped pudding mold*. The resulting dessert was more cake-y and less dense than plum pudding. And I could NOT get it to unmold, though it was perfectly tasty. I have temporarily given up (I mean really, how many molasses cakes is a person expected to have in the refrigerator?), but I may get back to this one day.

I'm putting this out there now in hopes that someone who stumbles across this says, why of course, Lizzie March said bake but she really meant steam. Or else she baked it in some other kind of container that made the dessert easier to unmold/serve.

* The steamed pudding mold shown above is from Creative Cookware. Search on Plum Pudding Mold; they sell 1.5-quart and 2-quart molds. They also sell nonstick molds.

Purple carrot juice

Carrots used to be purple (read more about them here) and in the past bunch of years there has been a mini-trend to grow purple carrots again. The pigments that make the carrots' skin purple (the flesh is still orange) are a group of phytochemicals called anthocyanins. These self-same compounds are what make most berries deep red to purple, and are also (potentially) responsible for these fruits' health benefits. So if you add anthocyanins to the already extraordinarily healthful beta-carotene (the carrot's orange pigment), you have a pretty cool vegetable.

A number of juice brands—including Smart Juice, Bolthouse Farms, and Lakewood—are now using purple carrots to make carrot juice, as well as including purple carrots in other juice blends to boost their antioxidant power. Purple carrot juice has the natural sweetness of regular carrot juice with an undercurrent of berry flavor (from the anthocyanins).

Fruit as medicine

In the 1867 book The Market Assistant (see yesterday's post), the author went on a tad about fruit as medicine:

[Fruits] are not only nutritious, but they are also medicinal in their properties. They produce certain beneficial changes in the blood (which medical men term "alterative"), which alters the blood from an unhealthy to its healthy condition; consequently, by the use of ripe fruits, many diseases lurking in the system are either neutralized or removed. Many fruits have the peculiar medicinal property of "cooling" the blood as it is termed, or in other words, rendering it less liable to feverish or inflammable excitement.

Though not supported by any kind of serious scientific fact, it turns out these notions were right on the money. What Grandma (and mid 19th-century docs) took on faith has since been borne out by research. In the past 15 years or so, fruits (especially those with deep colors) have been identified as being exceptionally concentrated sources of antioxidants, with effects ranging from memory improvement to tumor suppression.

So, next time you eat some blueberries, just see if your inflammable excitement doesn't abate.

The Market Assistant

I love reading old cookbooks. I don't mean 1900s old, more like 1800s old. It's interesting to see what things remain the same and what things have changed. On the one side are the forgotten kitchen skills of our foremothers (making buttermilk, waxing the pinfeathers on poultry, hanging meat); on the other are the things we have today that were unknown then (pluots, chipotle peppers, broccolini--not to mention frozen food, food processors, and silicone).

When contemplating the ingredients that we have now that they didn't have then, I checked in with my favorite food-history website Feeding America and stumbled across a book called The Market Assistant. It was published in 1867 by a guy named Thomas Farrington De Voe, who was (and this is for you New Yorkers) a butcher at New York City's Jefferson Market. The book was a sequel to one he had written in 1861 called The Market Book. In his preface, De Voe explains why there was such a big gap between the two books, which he had intended as companion volumes:

The dreadful Rebellion, however, commenced with the attack on Fort Sumter the day after I had arranged for the publishing of [The Market Book], and I concluded to wait for the suppression of the Rebellion before entering upon the second.

The dreadful Rebellion. Wow.

Anyway, here's the thing that I found that falls into the category of Things That Have Remained the Same. In the 1860s, ingredients not yet in season locally were being shipped to the Northeastern markets from warmer climes. As De Voe says:

Early in the spring from the South...many rare vegetables and other edibles are brought to market by the facilities afforded by the railcars and steamboats, thus inducing...artificial seasons.

And what did I find that they had then that we don't now? Actually, not much except for a substantially greater variety of things like potatoes, apples, grapes, and tomatoes--things now designated as heirlooms. But I did find these:

• Swan
• Fresh kidney beans
• Scarlet carrots
• Martynia--a fruit that was pickled like cucumbers
• Potatoes with great names--black kidneys, peach-blow, yellow pink-eyes
• Fig tomatoes--probably like squat plum tomatoes
• Shaddock--a forerunner to the modernday grapefruit
• Ground cherries (husk tomatoes)
• Pineapple cheese--cheese in the shape of you know what
• Chimney-corner butter--cheap butter, made in the winter (the best butter was made in the spring)

Corn Part Two: Crop diversity in Ecuador

OK, boring headline, but really cool picture. For the past decade there has been a concerted effort to record and preserve the astonishing variety of crops grown in the northern Andean highlands of Ecuador. In a survey of farms in the region, it was found that local farmers are growing a stupefyingly large variety of chile peppers, beans, squash, corn, and potatoes.

This includes 30, I say, son, 30 different kinds of corn!!

In addition to cataloging this incredible diversity, each year there is a seed-exchange fair (the photo above is from the fair) in the town of Cotacachi to help preserve varieties in danger of disappearing. And a food processing facility has been set up to provide a profitable outlet for local crops—thus encouraging farmers to keep farming. The artisanal products made in the processing plant appear to only be sold in Ecuador, but here's what they have (that I wish I could buy): Andean blackberry marmalade, dried cape gooseberries, roasted black squash seeds.

In case you've never seen a cape gooseberry, it looks like a tomatillo, to which it is in fact related. They are also called ground cherries, though they are not at all related to that fruit. Ground cherries, if they're grown in your area, might be appearing in farmers' markets about now.

Did anyone get the Foghorn Leghorn reference above? It's hard to write in a cartoon accent. If I'd said "I say, son" out loud, I'll bet you would have gotten it.

Keeping lemons

If you stored lemons on the counter instead of the refrigerator, would they grow mold? I suspect that an unrefrigerated lemon might just dry up. Any opinions?

In earlier generations, when refrigeration was pretty much nonexistent (not counting ice houses), cooks would surely have had to deal with lemons stored at room temperature. Assuming that the lemons would in fact desiccate (oooh, S.A.T. word), this little piece of advice from an 1877 cookbook called Buckeye Cookery makes sense:

TO KEEP LEMONS.--Cover with cold water, changing it every week. This makes them more juicy.

Goat Cheese Quesadillas with Spicy Maple Mustard

Originally quesadillas (in Mexico, anyway) were sort of like griddle-cooked tamales. The same kind of dough (masa) used to make tamales and corn tortillas was formed into a flat round, filled with cheese, folded over and cooked until the cheese melted and the masa was no longer raw. Modern and regional variations use flour tortillas instead, but the concept is still the same: A proper quesadilla is cooked on a flat griddle called a comal, and it's in a half-moon shape.

And here's why I don't do that. It's a pain. It's a lot of maneuvering of hot, cheese-filled things. So I do what many other cooks (at least in this country) have chosen to do, and that is put the cheese filling between two tortillas and bake them until the cheese melts.

Of course if you feel an attack of authenticity coming on, then you can always get yourself a comal and make a proper quesadilla. The comal shown here runs about $10 or less. And since comals are basically cast-iron skillets with very low sides, you can use a skillet you already have or a pancake griddle. You'll have to experiment with the following recipe to see how much of the filling you can manage when you're making a half-moon-style quesadilla.

Goat Cheese Quesadillas with Spicy Maple Mustard
I just used plain ol' flour tortillas for this, but there are tons of other options in the market. The other day I saw curry-flavored tortillas. I think the mild sweetness of curry spices might go nicely with these.

1/3 cup chopped cilantro
3 tablespoons Dijon mustard
1 tablespoon maple syrup
1 large pickled jalapeño pepper, minced
8 (7-inch) flour tortillas
3/4 cup mild goat cheese (6 ounces)
1 green bell pepper, cut into very thin slivers
1 red bell pepper, cut into very thin slivers

1. Preheat the oven to 425°F.
2. In a small bowl, combine the cilantro, mustard, maple syrup and jalapeño.
3. Arrange 4 of the tortillas on a baking sheet and spread evenly with the mustard mixture. Sprinkle the bell peppers on top of each tortilla, leaving a 1/4-inch border. Spread the remaining tortillas with the goat cheese. Place on top of the tortillas on the baking sheet, cheese-side down.
4. Spray the top tortillas lightly with cooking spray. Bake for 10 minutes or until crispy. Cut each quesadilla into 6 wedges.

Makes 2 dozen wedges

The world's hottest chili pepper

New Mexico has a huge chili pepper industry, so I guess it's not unusual that New Mexico State University would devote itself to the search for the world's hottest chili pepper. In 2007, scientists at NMSU announced that they had found a chili pepper in northeastern India that claims the title. It is a pepper called Bhut Jolokia, which translates as ghost chili.

The heat in any chili pepper is measured by something called a Scoville Heat Unit (SHU). It is an index that measures the amount of capsaicin (the substance that makes chilies taste hot) in a pepper.

• At the low end are cherry peppers (500 SHU), poblano (1,500) and pasilla (2,500).
• In the middle range are jalapeños (10,000), cayenne peppers (50,000) and tabasco peppers (75,000).
• Chilies with very high SHU scores include Thai chilies (100,000), habaneros (300,000) and red Savina (500,000).

The Bhut Jokolia pepper weighs in at over 1 million SHU!!!!

If you're actually crazy enough to want to eat one, you can grow your own bhut jokolia peppers from seeds sold by NMSU's Chili Pepper Institute Chile Shop. A packet of 10-15 seeds costs $5.

Flavor trends

Every year for nearly 10 years, the McCormick spice company has polled chefs, food technologists and trend watchers to come up with predictions for the top 10 flavor pairings for the upcoming year.

Here's their list for 2009:

· Toasted sesame + root beer
· Cayenne + tart cherry
· Tarragon + beet
· Peppercorn mélange + sake
· Chinese five-spice and artisan-cured pork
· Dill + avocado oil:
· Rosemary + fruit preserves
· Garam masala + pepitas (pumpkin seeds)
· Mint + quinoa:
· Smoked paprika + agave nectar

Making noodles

So because of the lasagna cookbook I wrote about in yesterday's blog entry, I now have noodles on my mind (interesting image).

I remember years ago going to a demonstration by a Chinese noodle maker who took a length of dough and pulled it thin, folded it over, pulled it thin again, and repeated this process until in a matter of minutes, he had created over 4,000 noodles. It's really just simple math. You start with one big strand, fold it over for 2, fold that for 4, etc.

Guess how many times you have to fold the dough to get 4,096 noodles? Is it 100? 400?

It's only 12!

See the process in action:

Pumpkin racing

Neskoosa, Wisconsin, calls itself the Giant Pumpkin Capital of Wisconsin, and every year, in early October, they hold a regatta. The boats are, of course, made of giant pumpkins. The contestants are given 4 hours to carve their pumpkins into boats. No motors are allowed, but supplementary flotation devices are.

Wouldn't it be cool to race your giant pumpkin in the morning, and then take the boat home and use it to make pumpkin pie for dinner?

An old-fashioned remedy

In the course of my research for a history-oriented feature (for Hallmark Magazine) called "Signature Dish," I spent a lot of time looking through really old cookbooks (you can get almost anything these days from the used booksellers at Amazon and Barnes & Noble) as well as websites that specialize in food history. (If you're interested, a particularly good one is called Feeding America: The Historic American Cookbook Project.)

Once you spend any time checking out food history, you'll discover that many of the books from earlier generations were more than just cookbooks. They also dealt with the topic of household management. There was advice on everything from how to make stucco to removing ink stains from a mahogany desk to getting rid of crickets.

One of my favorite tips comes from a book called The House Servant's Directory. This landmark book was written in 1827 by Robert Roberts, a professional manservant and a prominent figure in the African-American community in 19th-century Boston. Along with advice for those wishing to enter into "gentlemen's service," Roberts also included such practical advice as this:

"To remove flies from rooms. Take half a teaspoonful of black pepper, in powder, one teaspoonful of brown sugar, and one tablespoonful of cream; mix them well together, and place them in the room, on a plate, where the flies are troublesome, and they will soon disappear."

It sounds oddly tasty, doesn't it? I'm very curious to know if it actually works. If any of you has a problem with houseflies, give this remedy a try and let me know how it goes.

Who thinks barcodes are fun, raise your hand?

A Japanese firm named D-Barcode (who probably figured there wouldn't be too many people raising their hands in response to that question) has decided to start decorating barcodes to visually reflect the products they identify.

It's nice to see these otherwise mundane artifacts of our lives be so playful.

So who else was real?

OK. Chef Boyardee was real. But what about all those other food icons?

AUNT JEMIMA--Not real
Aunt Jemima was an invented character that the company hired actresses to play. The first Aunt Jemima was Nancy Green, who was born into slavery in 1834 and signed a contract that gave her the exclusive right to play Aunt Jemima her whole life.

BETTY CROCKER--Not real
Betty Crocker was invented in 1921 so that the company could answer letters they received with a more personal touch. The Crocker came from the last name of a company executive, William Crocker. The name Betty was picked because it sounded warm and friendly. The actual signature on the letters came from a secretary who won an in-house contest to do so. Her signature is still used on Betty Crocker products.

COLONEL SANDERS--Real
Harland David Sanders (1890-1980) was the founder of Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC). Although he sold the company, his image is still used.

DUNCAN HINES--Real
Duncan Hines (1880-1959) was a traveling salesman who wrote a guide, in 1935, to good restaurants around the country. The book was so popular that restaurants he included in the guide would hang a sign in the window that said "Recommended by Duncan Hines." In 1953 Duncan Hines sold the rights to his name. It was licensed to a number of food businesses, including ultimately the company who made the cake mixes.

MRS. BUTTERWORTH--Not real

MRS. SMITH--Real
In the early 1900s, Amanda Smith of Pottstown, Pennslvania, was famous in her town for making delicious pies. Her son Robert saw an opportunity and began selling slices at the lunch counter of the local YMCA. This escalated to whole pies sold door-to-door, and finally to a factory, and then several factories. By the 1950s, the company had begun selling its trademark frozen pies.

MRS. T.--Real
Mary Twardzik of Shenandoah, Pennsylvania, used to make pierogies for church fundraisers. Her son, Ted, took his mother's recipe and started the company in 1952.

SARA LEE--Real
The Kitchens of Sara Lee was a small company that sold frozen baked goods. It was founded by Charles Lubin, a bakery entrepreneur, who named the company for his 8-year-old daughter Sara Lee. The company was bought in 1956 by a large food company called Consolidated, who kept both the name and their frozen cheesecake, which was a best-seller. The Sara Lee brand thrived and by the 1980s, Consolidated changed its name to the Sara Lee Corporation.

UNCLE BEN--Not real

Chef Boyardee was a real guy. Who knew?

Chef Boyardee ravioli was a part of my childhood, much to the dismay of my mother who always offered to cook fresh pasta with homemade sauce. But her silly children craved the pasta in a can. Anyway, even though I liked the stuff I don't think even as a youngster that I believed this canned meal had ever been anywhere near an actual chef.

Well, oops. Turns out that there was a chef named Boyardee, though his real name with Boiardi. The spelling on the label was to make it easier for Americans to pronounce his last name.

Italian-born Ettore Boiardi arrived in America in 1914 at the age of 16. He worked in the restaurant business for a little over a decade before he opened his own restaurant, Il Giardino d'Italia, in Cleveland, Ohio. He had a loyal following and customers often asked for his recipe for spaghetti sauce. This eventually led to an actual packaged product that was produced for Boiardi by a local factory. By 1938 the business had gone national and Boiardi was selling his products under the name Chef Boy-Ar-Dee.

The company was eventually sold and Boiardi moved on to other endeavors, but the brand name was retained and to this day, a portrait of Ettore Boiardi is on the label of Chef Boyardee brand products, which is currently owned by Conagra.

All-chocolate hotel room

Like Willy Wonka, Godiva has hidden a note in a box of chocolates. When you open that box from your sweetie tomorrow, you may find yourself the winner of a getaway weekend for two in New York City. The prize includes a stay at the Bryant Park Hotel and a suite made almost entirely of chocolate, including a Jackson Pollock-style painting made from drips of melted chocolate, chocolate candles on the dining table and huge chocolate logs in the fireplace.

Check the New York Daily News site for a photo gallery of all the sweet suite details.

Good luck fruit for Chinese New Year

Chinese New Year--which starts today and goes for 15 days--has many foods that are meant to be eaten to bring good luck. One of them is the grapefruit-like pummelo (also called pomelo, Chinese grapefruit or shaddock).

A pummelo looks a good deal like a grapefruit (no particular surprise since the grapefruit is a cross between a pummelo and an orange), but has a greener skin and is sometimes pear-shaped. However, the real difference between a grapefruit and a pummelo lies on the inside. The skin of the pummelo is extremely thick and very cottony. And the fruit segments are further protected by tough membranes that need to be removed.

However, once you've done the work, you will be rewarded by the intriguing fruit inside. The segments are filled with sturdy, individual flavor cells that taste something like grapefruit, but sweeter. Your best bet for finding a pummelo this time of year would be in an Asian market, especially if you live anywhere where Chinese New Year is celebrated.

What were they thinking?

I stumbled across this home remedy in a 19th-century cookbook called Aunt Babette's:

"How to Make a Bacon Bandage for Sore Throat.
Cut the bacon in strips one quarter of an inch in thickness and two or three inches in width and long enough to pass entirely around the throat. Remove the bacon rind and any lean meat there may be in it to prevent blistering the throat or neck. Sew the bacon to a strip of flannel so as to hold it in position and prevent its slipping and then apply the bacon to the throat and neck. Pin it around the neck, so that it will not be uncomfortably tight. The throat and neck should be completely swathed with the bacon. If after an application of eight hours the patient is not better apply a new bandage in the same manner."

I'm baffled by the use of bacon as a sore throat remedy, but I'm not baffled by the use of bacon in a chocolate bar (go figure). On the Vosges chocolates website, there is a category called Exotic Candy Bars. There you'll find Mo's Bacon Bar (as well as other exotic bars made with things like hemp seed and tea). This use of bacon makes sense to me, because the combination of sweet and salty works beautifully. (Have you noticed the recent trend of salt in sweet things like ice cream and caramel?)

The creator of the Bacon Bar explains that as a child she first encountered the delicious combination of sweet + salty/crunchy when at breakfast her pancake syrup got onto her piece of bacon. As she puts it "...on that plate something magical happened, the beginnings of a combination so ethereal and delicious that it would haunt my thoughts until I found the medium to express it--chocolate."

Eventually the idea took the form of this chocolate bar, which is made with milk chocolate, crunchy bits of applewood smoked bacon and just a sprinkling of smoked salt. It costs $7, but it's worth it just to say you've had a bacon chocolate bar.