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March 17. Corned Beef & Cabbage. Corned Beef
Spices.
We sat at the kitchen dinner table listening to
Corrina and Sara singing with Nana Mouskouri.
The three of us: Patrick, and Ruth and myself.
It was the beautiful maybe profound " Why Worry ".
We were here on Kavanaugh Hill in our Civil War
1864 white
house, just
up from the Wauwatosa
Spice House.
It was 6 o'clock and the bells from both St. John's
Church and the Carmelites
were ringing
through
the giant green fir trees in our large back yard.
It was here, at the top of the hill, where the Indians
lived, centuries ago; where Chief Wauwauteetzey
had his teepee. Wauwauteetzey; firefly; one
who brings
a
special delicate illumination to the darkness.
And it was Friday March 17 ... yes, the Irish St.
Patrick's
Day, and it also
happened
to be young Patrick's birthday.
His 17th birthday.
It was good to smell the spices coming from the
simmering
corned beef that Ruth was cooking for our supper; the
mixed pickling spices, the bay leaves, the juniper
berries,
& the garlic, all cooking with the simmering corned
beef.
She even added a few extra salt corns along with
the
black pepper corns. And what style of pepper might
be
appropriate here? She used the extra bold
Tellicherry.
And which salt corns might be correct? The salt from
the peat bogs had the reputation for being the finest
salt.
When the song was sung; over, the book we were to read
from was brought out & turned to the chapter " The
Meaning
of Hu ". It was a book by John Bennett "
Intimations "
Talks with J. G. Bennett at Beshara. The cover
design was
from Beshara Design Centre 1975 painting from Mark Rothko.
Beshara was just outside London, and Mr. Bennett was
talking with the students about earnestness; about being
right.
continued .......
March 18 entry. Our birthday gift to Thomas Earth,
Patty's
husband & our son-in-law: An in-depth interview
with
a
spice student of some forty years on the formulation of a
correct Easter Polish Sausage Seasoning. Tom &
I have
talked extensively about this particular spice mixture.
Here are the questions & the musings; the thoughts ...
Q. You are a well known spice compounder, yes, I
appreciate that. But might I ask frankly what gives
you
the right to attempt this?
A.
Well
........ continued
...........
.
March 10 entry. Corrina comes home for Spring break
&
brings her roomate from Eastman School of Music, her
friend Sara. The mixing of a batch of Peace Climb
Chili
powder; the drinking of the saffron tea to help sing
better the songs we were to sing ( Sara is a voice major
);
the saffron yogurt; the drawing of the blue design
on the golden enameled one pound saffron tins from
the Antonio Garcia Saffron farm in Novelda just outside
Valencia. Sunday March 12 Ruth & Corrina's Mom,
Elizabeth, would do the Lebanese yogurt custom of drying
the yogurt culture in a beautiful Irish linen hankerchief,
and what a lovely thing to see saffron yellow yogurt being
dried in a hankerchief of this quality. Saffron and
the
spirit of renunciation in the custom of the saffron gilded
yogurt served to the bride in the India Kashmiri wedding
ceremony. The comparison of the color coming from
saffron to true pitch in music ... the effects thought to
be
of the same high quality. How might one personally
verify
this? continued .......... .
.
March 29. David from Ravenswood comes in with a
request for a Bedoin lamb spice ... it is a heavy spice
mix-
ture, possibly a little too royal to be accurate, or maybe
not. I recall the paragraph from The Tenth Muse by
Sir
Harry Luke, where the older Arabian prince is looking
vexed at a young prince who likes chicken. One
doesn't
eat chicken, one eats lamb, or something substantial; more
sturdy, complex. We do however blend this spice
mixture
up. It is similiar to Esscoffier's spice mixture as
given
in
his cookbook and also similiar to the Schenkel's Spice
Powder
as written in Petite Propose Culinaire; also similiar to
the
French Charcoute Garni that Pam & Patty mixed up
special
for Julia Child when she first came to Milwaukee to
teach.
The spice mixture that Paula Wolfert asked us to work on
for her ... her authentic Tabil Tunisian Spices, heavy
with
the sweet lemony aromatic coriander seed; this is more
like what a Bedoin lamb spice might be like, as the
coriander
seeds were cheaper, plentiful, functional as they helped
to
keep the meat or fowl fresh a bit altho the heavy first
mixture might do that too ....6 parts allspice, 1 part
each
cinnamaon,cloves, nutemg, cardamom ... this is a pretty
fancy blend. Look into this all .... there is this
other
thing
too that complex mixtures might be good for our mental
development, as with a baby ... putting stimulating items
around the crib to activate more stuff in the mind ... so
lets look into simple authentic mixtures in comparison to
more complex mixtures; maybe see what the great chefs
thought about this subject.
David & I did mix up the first batch of the new
Sardinian Lamb
Spice with charcoal. Dedicated to Tom Stobart.
I remember telling Jan Longone that when Tom Stobart
died his soul came to the Spice House. David was
gracious and read aloud the very fine writing by Mr.
Stobart on pp. 14 and 15, which Ruth & I have read
with our young spice apprentices many many times
through the years. Why? Because it puts the
question
of spices into the larger picture of what things are all
about. A good spice book must do that; it can't be
just
a technical book, as spices belong to this enigmatic
yes profound thing that man is about; they in a sense
have the connection to man's develop[ment. It is my
feeling that as time goes on, the true nature of spices
will be understood more ... altho probably their high
nature was understood by certain special groups or
wisdom schools way back in antiquity. In some way
they can lift us up to see more; be more. So the
elegant
mixtures of the past can't be just understood as being
too sophisticated to be honest.
.
April 4. Patty & Tom sign their lease in
Chicago's
OLDTOWN and invite Mom & I ( Ruth & I ) down to,
once again, do our " Doorstep Mulling Spices " ceremony.
This is where we make up our special mixture of
coriander, China cinnamon, & cloves, and broadcast it
on the doorstep at the time of the opening of their new
Spice House. The rent is something in the
neighborhood
of $ 5,000 a month? is that what they said?
And it
is
right next to the donut shop that Patty loved back in
the late 60's when Ruth & I would take the kids
there.
The last time we did two readings; first Tom read that
sublime, truly, & moving St. Paul's faith, hope,
& charity
.... of all of these charity is the greatest, what
writing eh?
Patty's wedding & at Pam's too ( hopefully
Billy's too someday soon!) I was asked to read it
... when
Tom & Patty
opened their Old World Third Street Spice House: 2/2/92,
they let me read something by Charles Luk; Lu Kwan U, some
beautiful writing on the jeweled nature of smells &
scents
&
fragrances ... the diamond fragrances .... our Spice House
advisor, Mr. Beidler, and what a man, he is gone now and
missed, studied with Charles Luk in Hong Kong. He
would
take his students high up into the cliffs sourrounding the
harbor, take out a small knife & some fresh ginger
root, cut
off a little piece for each, and ask his students to
mediate upon
the ginger. This was in about 196l when Paul was
about 60.
I think Patty said that the well known O'Brien's
Restaurant
family of OLDTOWN own their new The Spice House
building. Patty & Tom just were awarded
the
small
business people of the year award for their Spice House in
Evantson, near Northwestern University. Patty &
Tom each
spent about four years working & studying spices with
Ruth
&
I as spice apprentices .... they took over our Old World
Third
Street Spice House in 1992, altho they had to completely
do
a major renovation of a hundred year old historic
building, and
it turned out beautifully. They worked very hard, the two of
them, for four years then, they saved $ 90,000 in cash
... and
decided to open their second Spice House in Evanston, just
outside Chicago. They spent every penny they had
saved,
but they didn't owe anyone anything ... which is our sort
of
conservative way of looking at things. Guess it all
worked
out well indeed. Ruth & I have a photograph of
Tom &
Patty
& Mayor Daley, along with Burt Wolfe, the food
writer, taken
at a special event at the Chicago Cultural Center, where
Tom
did a great spice effort, as this was a Morroccan Food
evening
and Tom brought all the spices for everyone including his
now well known Marakesh Chicken Spice, which I guess
Mayor Daley was very happy to take home with him.
So Ruth & I will be driving down to
Chicago
soon.
.
April 7. Ruth & I are in the midst of a
purchase of ten
bags
of Hungarian sweet paprika, each bag 110 pounds, so this
is
more than a thousand pounds of paprika. We have
been buying
Hungarian paprika for some forty years now, and I
must say that even though we have a nationnwide reputation
for making available the finest grades of Hungarian
paprika,
on balance, year in & year out .... what we do not
know about
Hungarian paprika is much more than we do know ( altho
we know quite a bit). Ruth thought it might be good
to
just include everyone in on " walking through " this
purchase with us; sharing our thoughts in the completion
of this purchase. At this moment we have seven
samples
of Hungarian paprika prepared as knowing paprika buyers
arrange them, on our kitchen table. The method is
to take
a small amount of the red spice, say an 1/8 cup amount,
and fold a standard sheet of white paper in half; place
the paparika inside the paper as it is laying down, then
fold over
the paper, and press the paprika until it becomes a thin
red circle about 4 inches in diameter. This way the
particular
qualities of each become much more observable; the
color,
i.e. the tint, brick redddish orange, or a redder tint;
and the
intensity of the color, which is different from the tint;
&
also the granulation of the paprika; finer or coarser,
also
the amount of tiny straw hued bits in the powder, which
are there in all lots, altho not observable at
first. These
come from certain sections of the ground pod. The
richer
grades tend to bleed red into the white paper, this would
be
the pigment or the oleoresin coming out due to the rubbing
of the sample firmly between the two parts of the folded
paper. Paprikas are rated by the paprika houses in
Hungary.
What we are looking at here to buy is a 130 rated
quality,
which is quite good. There are about seven grades
within
the umbrella of good Hungarian paprika, and Ruth & I
&
the kids all attempt to buy that top grade; the lush,
rich,
high pigment grade termed " Extra Ordinary " in Hungarian;
the word is Kulonleges. The " s " on the end is
pronounced
as " sh ", a language feature also of Turkish.
We will do a test with each of these seven samples
which is to fry onions & lard together, then to add
the
paprika to this frying mixture. This is that basic
way the
Hungarians prepare many paprika dishes, i.e. making this
basic lard-onion-paprika mixture first, and this is why
one
who cooks with paprika in this manner really gets to know
the quality of their paprikas as it is one of just three
variables
at the start. We taste each sample; how bitter is
it?
How
much of a bite does each have? Pungency. The
top grade;
Kulonleges, has been worked on through the years in
Hungary by developing strains of paprika pods which
are completely free of heat, also termed bite or pungency
factor. The objection of heart burn was continually
addressed in the preparing of the " sweet "
paprikas,
and it is a bit surprising to see this subject treated
with
such regard for the digestive aspect of how the different
grades create a reaction in our stomachs. One
assumes that
much more care and consideration was given to what one
ate in Hungary, and because of this, the better quality
grades were always considered from this aspect of
digestion. In our Spice House library we have
an
excellent small book, " Hungarian Paprika Through The
Ages "
by Zoltan Halasz, which we obtained with the help of Tessa
McKirdy of CooksBooks in London. This is an
extremely
well written book done by a master craftsman an artist
with words, altho just a tiny bit of a public relations
effort,
but filled with specific details on growing &
processing.
I recommend this book, as well as an excellent article on
paprika published in the September 1980 GOURMET magazine,
which
was written by Kathryn Livingston.
This is a fine piece of writing, altho it should be
updated
as with the newer free market system in Hungary
there
has been a realignment of the large paprika producers;
and also a redefinition of the technical aspects of the
seven major quality grades. These things are
function
driven, i.e. produced according to the needs of the
marketplace, and these needs have changed considerably.
I am looking to be working with daughter Patty to do a
review-rewrite of that Gourmet article; the layout
structure of which is excellent in regards to doing a good
writing job re: Hungarian paprika. In my
conversations
with the late Richard Sax, he told me how he loved
Hungary; he had spent months there doing food research
and building a sizable body of his writings for the now
defunct CUISINE magazine. They paid all his expenses
etc. Somewhere this writing is sitting gathering
dust ...
it
would be good for his good friends Sandy Gluck & John
Thorne,
to obtain a copy of his Hungarian manuscripts to
review them & see if something might be done with
them.
Ruth & I taste each sample of theground paprika ...
some
sing, yes, sing .... there is this thing about life in
something,
where a food or spice or herb is really alive. What
is this
about? But one does see it in very fine grades of
Hungarian
paprikas. Some lots sing quite beautifully.
The Spice
House system of tastes was seven fold: sweet, sour, salt,
bitter, pungency, umani, & freshness. We always
taught
that freshness was a separate independent thing, and of
a
very high order, as it was different than nutrition;
nutrition
was for the body, but freshness was also for the develop-
ment of this other part of man; that sense about beauty;
or aesthetic spirituality. So much of our work has
to do
with offering our spices & seasonings along these
lines.
It is my understanding that the three things in ground
paprika that are important; nutrition ( the
bio-flavinoids),
as with grape skin, these are very important, and paprika
has substantial amounts of these & might why the
Hungarian
diet could be a bit lop sided with fats and still work
....
the flavinoids netralized the fats to some degree ....
check
me out on this please, as really, what do I know, eh?
So the nutrition, the color, i.e. the pigment, which is so
important functionally for the use of paprika in the
food industry, and the flavor .... these three things:
nutrition, pigment, freshness, seem to always come
together. When you have one you have all three.
I'll continue this as time goes by, especially in regards
to the function driven part, how the upside down new
food world of mostly eating in restaurants, which has
swept the West and will now sweep the rest of the world,
for instance the use of paprikas in breadings for
commercial
food manufacturers, for sauce mfgs, etc. .... and also in
regard to the re-definition of the seven basic grades of
Hungarian paprikas. We should also address a
alittle
about Vitamin K, the enigmatic quality said to be present
in paprika by the discoverer of Vitamin C, which is
sizable in paprika pods. so more to come on
Hungarian paprika ........
.
March 29 journal entry. At the same time that David
&
I
were mixing up our lamb spices, incidentally we not only
mixed a batch of the rosemary-garlic,charcoal lamb spice
(Tom Stobart's),
but also we did mix up his rich, heavy, Bedoin lamb spice ..... another
customer was listenting to the end of
this certain spice work .... the pharmacist from the
COMPOUINDING
LABORATORIES, whick used to be
in the Village, but now has moved over to just across from
the Artist & Display Store on about 90th & North
....
he asked me how long saffron holds up, as when he took
over the business, in the inventory, was a large container
of whole saffron threads ... Mr. Tom Wilke is this
gentleman's name I believe .... about a full cup full
.... we
talked for a little ... I told him about the seven year
shelf
life system in use in Spain .... how this system was
devised,
arrived at would be interesting to learn ... also about
how our
saffron, which comes from Valencia in Spain ( Elizabeth
David
wrote that Valencia Saffron was the finest of all saffrons
in our times) .... seemed to be pressed, i.e. the strands
are
flattened and made a little hard, pressed, which it seems
to me enhance their storage, like pressed hardtack i n the
Civil war .... and the saffron from Kashmir that we
also
handle. thanks mostly to son Billy going to India to obtain it,
well this Kashmiri saffron is very very nice saffron, but
it isn't pressed, it's softer, and more like what is said
to be
hay saffron, or very light & fluffy, and it doesn't
appear
to
me thatl it would hold up quite as well as the
pressed strands.
.... we also talked about the Jewish saffron growers of
Morocco
and how they prepared their threads re: the keeping
qualities ( Paula Wolfert knows alot about this ) ...
also Alice
Arndt told me about the practice of coating the saffron
threads
with honey by some Mediterranean growers in the past,
which
strikes me as making for a very long shelf life, and I
mean
very very long. Incidentally Alice Arndt is giving
a lecture
on seasonings & spices at the Culinary Historians of
Ann Arbor,
that surprising group started by Jan Longone ( another
of the Spice House rare book suppliers; theWine &
Food Library
of Ann Arbor ) on April 16 .... she did the research
for the revided Joy of Cooking re'" spices. Also
about
April 16 .... it is not only my birthday, but also our
son's
birthday. quite a birthday present that Ruth gave me 37
years ago, Billy and I share the same name also, and both
turned out to be left handed ( 1 out of 2 of our spice
apprentice always seemed to be left handed) .... Billy
became very well known in the spice trade, has been
written up in Forbes Magazine and eelsewhere. .....
I
should get over to 90th & North and personally inspect
John Wilke's treasure of saffron threads .... Billy just
purchased the residence of the former governor of
Wisconsin, the Go vernor Heil home, on Menomonee
River Parkway .... Billy always liked to be close to
water;
to streams & rivers; .... which is not very far from
the
new Compounding Labs location ..... I have quite a lot
more to say about saffron and shelf life .... and about
the
one pound precious tin of saffron that Jill Prescott of
Ecole du Cuisine in Koooohler Wisconsin arranged for
daughter Patty to open on the stage with Julia Child,
where Julia Child cooked, prepared , the famous French
Marengo supper, from Napaoleon's Marengo victory....
this was quite an honor for Patty ... and later that very
batch of fine coupe grade saffron was used in the 1853
recipe formulation for making shellac by a metal artisan
who refreshened some valuable shellac work in our
nations capitol dome building in Washington D. C. ....
so Ruth & I always joke togehter that if you listen
close
there to that shellaced metal work, you'll hear the
laughter
of Julia Child and Patty Earth as they had a good
time
that day ... also maybe the laughter of Carol Guensburg,
who was right there too. more to
come on
the work
of the Isslam temple builders in regards to making the
colors; the pigments, for their sacred structures using
saffron grown on the border in the high plateau country
between Persia & Aftganistan, said to be the place
where the most beautifully colored flowers on earth come
from, due to the peculiar elevation and other factors ....
to be continued. Sat. April8, 12:22.
Sunday, April 9. Diane L. stops in to buy a small
spice gift
and tells me that Professor Alan is in Saudi Arabia
helping to
teach a seminar on DNA to Israeli scientists.
Professor Alan
left Marquette University to establish his DNA consulting
firm. He has been good to us. He brought me a
wonderful
large bowl of a just prepared still warm Hungarian goulash
dish that he had cooked on a particular Sunday when I was
caught short on food and it was very much appreciated ...
his son brought us a parcel of the spice mixture used on
fresh baked bread in Israel & Lebanon ... sesame
seeds,
sumakh ( the sour redoul of the Tartars ), & that
special
Moroccan style thyme ... which he had gone out of his way
to buy when with his father in Israel. Professor
Alan also
brought me an article on Hungarian paprika which was
recently in the New York Times. I should get it out
to
review it as long as we're going to get into Hungarian
paprika as a study this year. I told Dianne that I
have a
good article for him ... the last issue of the Culinary
Historians of Ann Arbor has a piece on Jewish cooking
in
Hungary, which includes recipes with Hungarian paprika.
It is a good reference for us as we should consider the
difference between Jewish use of paprika in Hungary
compared with general Hungarian cooking. It is about
a family in New York City which kept alive their Hungarian
Jewish roots through the kitchen. I may be wrong
but I
think they say the cooking was the same. I told
Patty &
Tom
that if I ever track down the famous Mr. George Lang I
would like to arrange a dinner together for them if I
could.
Mr. Lang is the famous restauranteur with Hungarian
restaur-
ants in New York City and in Budapest. But he is in
his 70's
now and probably chooses his events carefully. He has
also written some cook books, one of which we have in the
Spice House apprentice library .... it is from that first
group
of books we purchased from Jan Longone & her husband
Dan.
The Summer 1990 Simple Cooking issue of John & Matt
Thorne was a collector's item, in that they asked the
finest
food writers to give a short book review of their favorite
cook book. The resulting list is a sort of
masterpiece in
itself. Ruth and I thought that as our twin
grandaughters
get older ( they are 11 now ), that we'd help them to get
familiar with food literature by letting them be part of
select-
ing and buying the complete set of every book listed, and
hopefully we could all study them together. I know
one book
is the Maryland Cook Book that Karyl Bannister listed as
loved ... she wrote it is still available, we thought
maybe
the twins Eva & Caity might send Karyl the copy we
will
buy & she might " autograph " it???? I should
contact
the
new editor of the Culinary Historians Society of Ann Arbor
& see if they might allow us to reprint their article
here.
...
Monday, April 10. Has a good conversation with Dan
C. by
phone today about Hungarian paprika. Dan is in New
York City
and is one of those few rare men who would be called
a spice trader. He travels to countries around the
earth
to
become familiar with spice and herb situations, and helps
to
arrange trades and sales with spice buyers, like
ourselves.
He has helped us very much in obtaining hard to obtain
select lots of certain high quality spice and herbs items
through
the years. This is very exacting, detailed, and
specific
spice
work. He has especially helped daughter Pam
especially,
and they have developed a good spice rapport. I
told Dan
that we were going to do a study of Hungarian paprika this
year ... he said he was in Hungary three
years ago
and that
the situation there has changed. He emphasized the
timing
of Hungarian paprika purchases ... that the new
crop comes
into the U.S. every January after being picked
& processed
in fall, so as the year progresses the stocks get lower
& lower
so that by each December all that is left for sale
usually is
pretty sad stuff. We do always take into
consideration what
the spice traders say too, that there is a one point drop
each
month of storage, so that a 130 A.S.T.A. paprika will be
down
to 118 approximately a year later. We should broch
the
question of storage methods for paprika too, as told to
us by
the experienced and savy restaurant buyers in Budapest,
i.e.
when they find a r eally good lot of paprika, the methods
they have of storing it in a sort of suspended flavor
animation.
Kulonleges; that extraa ordinary grade, maybe Dan can help
us understand the detailed way that this highest grade is
taken apart and reconstructed there in Hungary, especially
the grinding aspect. Is any one grinding
cryogenic?
Good
saying from our talented spice helper Kyle " liquid
nitrogen is
cool ".
...
Dan's mother was a Montessori teacher, and daughter Pam,
herself
a teacher with a degree from University of Wisconsin
in Madison, was attracted to the Montessori ideas.
Pam taught
in Chicago before coming into the family spice store; was
with
Ruth and I for four years before going with son Billy
and
helping him go from one million in sales up to seven
million ...
She worked with all three kids through the Montessori
school system for some four years before moving out
of
the area. There is a book in the Spice House
aapprentice
library, " The Spiritual Hunger of the Modern Child
".
Pam has read it and studied it, as have Ruth and I, and
the
others. It centers around a conference that John
Bennett
arranged in London about 1970, at which the leading
teaching ways with small children was discussed by
respresentatives of each method. Dr. Mario
Montessori
was sone of the speakers, the son of Dr. Maria Montessori,
the founder of that system.. He got up on the
podium &
smiled and said he liked this whole idea of this
get-together,
but he had to take issue with the title of the gathering,
" The spiritual hunger of the modern child",
as children
wern't spiritually hungry at all; in fact they were the
essence of spirituality! Yes, Ruth and I have
always felt
that
way and have tried to make it so that small children come
into the Spice House alot, and even take part in some way.
What we strive to do is sort of dependent on higher stuff;
hopefully, and what is left here when the children leave
does help us in our spice work. I thought we
really
should
try to get a copy of that book on children for Dan, has he
now has a small child. Ruth was able to track down
a copy
from Bennett Books in Sante Fe, so Dan it is on th way.
Also we did a " paprika ceremony " when the twins were
here on Kavanaugh Hill for their first Easter, they were
only 5 weeks old then, and
Ruth sez we just gotta send
those pictures too!
.....
Tuesday, April 11. Ruth is excited cuz she has a
FAX in her
hand from Patty's SPICE HOUSE in Chicago and it is a copy
of the events schedule for Mayor Daley's birthday in
Chicago
next Tuesday ( April 18 ) and she and Tom have been asked
to give a short spice presentation along with some
heavy-
weights in Chicago. I'm going to try and copy
verbatim the
FAX exactly as it came through ...
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
_ _
Draft
Mayor's Birthday Party
Tuesday,
April 18
PRELIMINARY SCHEDULE
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