…have a look at this very unusual mushroom that little Joan just pointed out to me in the yard. I thought it was a piece of an old toy someone had left out in the yard, but it’s actually a fungus. I guess it’s something called an “Earth Star”, not edible but certainly lovely, pale pink with a white center. A
READ ONI’m not normally this seasonal, but I’ve been wanting to try these little individual tarts for a while and the pears at the local Kroger look darn good. You’ll need a lattice cutter for this, the good news is that they’re cheap!
READ ONMy favorite tomato story concerns one Colonel Robert Gibbon Johnson, a wealthy one-time resident of Salem County, New Jersey. It’s said that after a long journey abroad Johnson became convinced that the tomato would make an excellent cash crop in America, and he was determined to introduce it as such. Unfortunately the locals remained convinced that the tomato was poison. So, on the 26th day of September, 1820, Johnson posted a notice declaring that he would consume an entire basket of tomatoes in front of anyone who’d care to watch. Some 2,000 people turned out to witness the spectacle. On that bright sunny autumn morning Johnson strode out onto the courthouse steps, raised a tomato to his mouth and took a big juicy bite. Men gasped in horror. Women screamed and fainted. Doctors rushed to the scene…yet Johnson did nothing but smile and — occasionally — belch. It was the dawn of a bright new day.
READ ONHappy to oblige, reader Leeza. Xtomatl is the original Aztec word for the tomato. The “x” is pronounced as sort of a guttoral “h”, or so I understand, making the word sound something like heetomatl. Of course I’m no speaker of Nahuatl. Neither were the Spaniards as it happened. They simply called the things “tomat-es”.
By now you’ve no doubt deduced that the tomato is a New World fruit. Like corn, it was identified as a potentially viable cash crop by the Spaniards. But unlike corn, it took considerable time for the Old World to fully adopt it. For tomatoes (along with eggplant and potatoes) are members of the nightshade family, a group of plants that were known to contain a host of toxic (sometimes deadly) alkaloids. The same was true of the eggplant and the potato, which were likewise greeted with, shall we say, reserve, when they arrived in the early 1500’s.
READ ONReader Linda writes:
What can you tell us about the Great Pie Scandal at the KY state fair? It was one of the news headlines this weekend on the broadcast of Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me but I heard nothing else about it. Something about a store bought crust winning a blue ribbon??
You stole my thunder, Linda! I was waiting for the State Fair verdict before I wrote a post about it. In a nutshell, it turned out that a store bought (Pillsbury) crust was used for this year’s blue ribbon-winning pie. It was a buttermilk pie, and evidently it didn’t occur to the maker of said pie, one Mrs. Linda Horton, that she was breaking any rules by using store bought pastry.
READ ONWell sure, why not? It’s a fruit after all, just a big plump berry. Oh yes I understand that it tastes more like what people think of as a vegetable, but there are lots of berries like that: cucumbers, peas, squash, even beans.
The real question is why doesn’t a tomato taste like the berry that it is? Mostly because the tomato is so low in sugar compared to other berries. Your typical farm stand tomato has about as much sugar as a Brussels sprout. On the other hand it’s high in acid, like many fruits. The problem is that a higher than normal proportion of that acid is glutamic acid. And if that word is evocative of the word glutamate to you, it’s because glutamic acid and glutamates are pretty much the same thing (glutamates are salts of glutamic acid).
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Green tomato pie isn’t something you see very often in pie cases, but it’s a farm kitchen staple in many parts of the US. It’s a handy thing to have in your repertoire when either a.) your patch gets too prolific, or b.) cool weather and/or an early frost puts the hammer down on tomato ripening. All you need is 4-5 medium green tomatoes, or about 1 3/4 pounds, sliced about 1/4 inch thick.
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As I mentioned below, Bavarians are a very large family of mousse (or cream) desserts. This particular style has been in vogue lately, and who am I to fly in the face of fashion? Plus it was fun. I hope to do more Bavarians in the future, so stay tuned for an expanding menu. This one can be made with any sort of fruit mousse, I chose peach because the fruit was in season. To begin, prepare your components. As with any multi-component pastry it’s best to make the various pieces-parts over several days leading up to the assembly. Save the last day to make it since you’ll need a couple of hours of build time and at least five hours of chill time to get it done.
READ ONNot terribly often, but often enough that it bears remarking upon, I get comments that this or that recipe has created “leftovers”. I do my best to avoid that, especially in cases of spare materials that don’t freeze well. Pastry cream springs to mind. That said, there’s much to be said in favor of leftovers, especially if you engage in the pastry arts with any regularity. A few cups of random buttercreams, some poured fondant, bits and pieces of various cakes, even crumbs can come in handy for who-knows-what.
READ ONAny time the subject of fruit ripening comes up there are always at least a couple of emails about the evils of ethylene, which is the stuff that commercial fruit distributors sometimes use to “gas” fruits like tomatoes to ripen them before they get to the grocery store bins. I’m not saying I favor that practice (though in truth I don’t know what the alternative is, since ripe fruit would turn to mush after a few hours bouncing around in a truck) but the truth is there’s nothing harmful or “noxious” about ethylene gas. It is an entirely benign — dare I say natural — compound.
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