🦋 Stovetop
I made a vegetarian sauté last night that reminded me of how good vegetables can taste by themselves -- no meat, no seasoning besides a little salt, just vegetables and a little olive oil and wine. Here is the recipe (to serve 1 -- I was eating alone last night -- increase as necessary):
Stovetop Autumn- one smallish yellow onion, diced
- two cloves garlic, minced
- ¼ apple, diced
- 1/8 head of red cabbage, sliced thin
Combine all ingredients in sauté pan and cook for about 15 min. stirring occasionally, until cabbage is tender and onion is starting to burn. Deglaze with a few ounces of red wine, stir scraping the bottom of the pan, and allow the liquid to boil away completely. Serve with bread and apples and red wine.You don't cut everything up and then sauté it all at once -- the timing is best if you cut up each ingredient after adding the previous one to the pan. So everything has been cooking for a few minutes by the time the cabbage goes in. The thinner you slice the cabbage, the better it will taste.
Last night I dreamed about cooking -- I was making a stewed chicken and rice dish and bizarrely using my espresso pot to cook it in. It came out beautifully -- the grains of rice were soft and puffed up so they looked like orzo -- and they overflowed the pot like popcorn, spilling out onto the stovetop, which was already covered in some kind of red sauce that I had been cooking before that. It looked really tasty and lots of people were there hungry and wanting to be served... As long as I am thinking about recipes, here are a couple of links: The NY Times Magazine reprints a recipe for Worcestershire sauce originally published in 1876 (although it contains the direction "refrigerate", which surprises me -- were refrigerators standard kitchen appliances in 19th Century NYC?*), and an updated version from Boston chef Barbara Lynch. The updated version is made with Vietnamese fish paste so does not require any fermentation time, it's ready to serve right away; the old recipe takes a month to mature. Worcestershire sauce traces its ancestry to the Malay condiment kecap, as does Ketchup; at The Language of Food, Dan Jurafsky looks at the history of this condiment. And here is an old piece by Malcolm Gladwell on The Ketchup Conundrum.
 * Wikipædia reports that "At the start of the 20th century, about half of households in the United States relied on melting ice (in an icebox) to keep food cold, while the remaining half had no cooled storage at all, possibly excepting a 'root cellar'." So I'm thinking "refrigerate" is a modern edit of an 1876 recipe.
posted morning of Saturday, October 17th, 2009
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Of course the urban households (NY) would have been the most likely to have iceboxes, and the readers of the Times would be the better off and therefore more likely to have iceboxes subset. So refrigerate is plausible, I think, in the sense of keeping cooled in the icebox.
Btw, my grandparents, and even your grandparents (to a lesser extent) up until around the 60's routinely referred to the refrigerator in their home as the icebox.
posted evening of October 17th, 2009 by George
Yep, I remember hearing Myrtle call the refrigerator the icebox.
posted evening of October 17th, 2009 by Jeremy
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