Food Sources – Page 21 – Nicole Peyrafitte

Country Mussels or Moules Paysanes

Mussels contain high doses of Omega-3, a fish oil compound that nutritionist say is helpful in reducing cholesterol. Farming mussels is believed to have been invented in France in 1235 by an Irishman named Patrick Walton. The story goes that Patrick Walton left Ireland to escape the police. His boat wrecked on the coast of France. He tried to feed himself by trapping sea birds. To this purpose he planted stakes into the water at the edge of the beach and stretched nets over them. The sea birds ignored the contraption, but after a time he noticed that mussels had attached themselves to the stakes and were growing rapidly. Cute story! But there are some indications that the Gauls had cultivated mussels even before the roman invasion.

The most common way of preparing mussel is as Moules Marinière; our version today is an extension of this traditional preparation. It is my original version based on several French Southwestern recipes and inspired by what I found at the Bay Ridge Greenmarket this morning and I call it Country Mussel or Moules Paysanne.

First a few tips about mussels:
How much mussels to buy per person?
To serve them as a main dish, get as much as one pound per person. As an appetizer half a pound should do it.

Do’s and Dont’s about store bought mussels

1- Do’s

-Discard dead mussels: that is if one is wide open, it’s probably dead. If they are open only slightly, a quarter of an inch or so it should be fine. How do you tell if a mussel is merely gaping to breathe or if it is dead? Simply put ice on the mussels for 15 minutes then tap them gently. They should begin to close. If they move, they are alive therefore can be eaten – even if they don’t close all the way. If a mussel won’t move, and is gaping widely, it is probably dead, past it’s shelf life and should be discarded.
-Throw out broken-shelled mussels.

Mussel with byssal threads -De-beard mussels. Most likely you will not have to do that, and good for you. I remember cleaning kilos of them in my early restaurant time and that’s ain’t fun. Today they are de-bearded before you buy them, but once a while one is missed and you get to see what the beard looks like. The “beard” also known as Byssal, or byssus threads they are the strong, silky fibers made from proteins that are used by mussels to attach to rocks, pilings, or other substrates.-Discard heavy mud filled mussels. Some extra-heavy mussels that are closed may be full of mud. Doesn’t happened very often but worth checking because only one of these unloading its cargo in your kettle of broth will spoil the entire dish. Usually a “mudder” can be discovered by simply squeezing the shells and sliding them apart from each other.
-Rinse them just before using them

2- Don’t

-Do not soak them
-Do not over wrap or purchase over-wrapped mussels. Remember they are alive, do not suffocate them in the fridge or do not store mussels in airtight containers.-Do Not overcook your mussels-Do Not buy mussels that are displayed in live lobster tanks or in shellfish display tanks.
-Do Not eat mussels if you believe you are allergic to shellfish.

Recipe
for 2lbs of Mussels

Sauté 4 shallots and 1/2 lb of Italian turkey sausage (or sausage, or Italian sausage or pancetta, or ham) in a tablespoon of butter and oil (addition of oil will keep the butter from browning); when meat has rendered and the shallots are transparent, add 1 or 2 (depending on how you like it) skinned, seeded and diced fresh tomatoes (canned if not in season). Mix it all well, add a generous amount of fresh ground black pepper and salt to taste.

Add all the mussels (that have just been rinsed), mix well. Add about 1 large glass of dry white wine (about a glass per two pound bag). Close the pot tightly and cook over medium heat for about 10 minutes. Add a generous amount of finely chopped parsley or cilantro or basil and also garlic it you would like your dish stronger and especially if your meat was not already spiced.

Mix it all up and let cook for two more minutes. Please do not over cook them, or they will become rubbery. At this point all your mussels are open and ready to be eaten!

Serve in soup plates with a lot of fresh bread to dunk into the broth. Eat them with your fingers and use the shell to scoop out morsels—If you are from Bay Ridge get Country bread at Yanni’s Restaurant on 4th & Ovinton.

Voilà! and now please do watch another one of my homemade videos. The Country Mussel recipe was literally filmed with the left hand while cooking —and then eating, just watch until the end! with the right one. I didn’t know I could do this until today. Honestly tell me if it is watchable and/or helpful.

Green Tomatl Salsa

As a seasonal occurrence let’s taste another distinguished native American food: the tomatillo, miltomate or husk-tomato. Pierre had bought the 2 lbs of them I had ordered last week —a good thing that they keep well— and today I finally got to make a salsa verde. This green-husked fruit is a close relative to the tomato. Also member of the Solanacea family, it’s Latin name is Physalis philadelphica. The Latin name for what we know as tomato today is: Solanum lycopersicum. Both fruits’ names (yes! they are fruits) derive from the Nahuatl word: tomatl. Sophie Coe in her book America’s First Cuisine gives an important precision:

“Nahuatl is an agglutinating language, which means that the root of the words were modified by adding prefixes and suffixes. To find out exactly which plump fruit was being eaten one must distinguished between a miltomatl, a xitomatl, a coyotomatl and many other kinds of tomatl. Some Europeans, who did not understand the structure of the language they were dealing with, thought they were simplifying things by shortening the name of the larger fruit which we know as the tomato from xitomatl, meaning plump things with a navel to plain tomato”

I have read that Tomatillo husks are used to help retain the bright green color of the cactus when boiled with the latter. But this is not something I have yet tried; if you have, please share your experience.
The Salsa Verde recipe I made today is very simple and can be used in many ways. The picture shown above is a pan fried fillet of sole with Salsa Verde & brown rice. I made enough salsa to serve tomorrow with chips and cocktails. I also froze a container for later in the season.

Recipe:
2lbs of Tomatillos Salsa Verde
Remove the husk.
Wash thoroughly with hot water to remove the slightly slimy coat.
Meanwhile boil water & blanch the tomatillos for 30 seconds.
While they cool:
chop 1 onion very small.
1 jalapeño pepper
1 bunch of fresh cilantro (fresh coriander)
Salt to taste
Optional: lime juice, olive oil.
Blend your tomatillos in food processor or chop by hand.
Add your chopped veggies.
Keep in the fridge until serving time, or save at room temperature if you are going to serve it with fish or poultry.
How to cook your fillets:
Heat your pan coated with a dollop of butter and a table spoon of olive oil.
Dip your fillet in milk, drain excess and dredge in lightly salted flour, drain excess.
Cook your fillet about 3/4 minutes each side over medium heat.
Remove and serve over a bed of green salsa and steaming brown rice.

Yum! Healthy, fast and tasty!

aMAIZing

Zea Mays

When Colombus discovered the existence of corn (maize) in November 1492 on the island which today is called Cuba, he noted in his diary that “there are large cultivated areas which produce roots [cassava], a sort of bean [the haricot], and a sort of grain called maize.” He certainly had no idea that maize was already ruling the entire Americas, being under cultivation from southern Canada to lower South America. Mahiz is the phonetic name Colombus picked up from the natives. When European botanists began to list maize in their indexes, it became Zea Mays, Zea being a Greco-Latin generic name for wheat like grains and Mays the Latinized version of the original Taino name mahiz which means “life-giver”. How appropriate, maize being the most productive of the grasses but also the only cereal which cannot reproduce itself without the aid of men.

So how did maize become domesticated? Well, do not expect me to give you a precise explanation of the mysteries of the origin and domestication of maize when the “professionals” have been fighting over this issue for half a century. In her book The Story of Corn, Betty Fussel dedicates an entire chapter to the “Corn War” that started in the 50’s. One school, led by Havard Prize winner Paul Mangelsdorf, believed in — and searched for — the “primal ear,” convinced that the ancestor of cultivated corn was some kind of ur-corn. The other school, led by Nobel prize winner Georges Wells Beaddle, discovered through chromosomal interbreeding experiments that corn evolved from a kindred grass called teosinte, a wild grass still found south-west of Mexico City. This seems to be today’s consensus:

“Everybody agrees that domestic corn began about ten thousand years ago and that the place was Mexico and that present-day corn came, one way or another, from the interbreeding of teosinte and maize.”

Thus Garrison Wilkes of the University of Massachuset as interviewed by Betty Fussel. The explanation of how it happened is however still in the ground, and even though archeologists, scientists and botanists all believe that Mexico is the cradle of maize, the oldest — 7,000 years old! — carbon-dated trace was recently found in Panama.

What we do know for sure is the profound cultural/economic importance of maize. The Encyclopedia Britannica, for example, describes it as “the grain that built a hemisphere”. For the Incas, the Mayas, the Zapotecs, the Aztecs, the Zunis, the Iroquois — to only name a few — maize was also a core element of their spiritual life. As Eduardo Galeano was aware long ago:

Guatemala City, 1775
Nor do the Indians come to Mass. They do not respond to announcements of the bell. They have to be sought out on horse back in villages and fields and dragged in by force. Absence is punished with eight lashes, but Mass offends the Mayan gods and that has more power than fear of the thong. Fifty times a year, the Mass interrupts work in the fields, the daily ceremony of communion with the earth. For the Indians, accompanying step by step the corn’s cycle of death and resurrection is a way of praying; and the earth, that immense temple, is their day-to-day testimony to the miracle of life being reborn. For them all earth is a church, all woods a sanctuary.

The settlers called maize Indian Corn and when the grain reached Europe — 50 years after Columbus — it became known as Turkish Corn. At that time Turkey was often a convenient origin for unknown alien produce, flower or animal. There is a logical explanation though, as most of the New World produce entered the Old World from the eastern side of the Mediterranean basin and not as one might think through Spain, Portugal or Italy.

Since then the entire world diet depends on corn and the corn situation today would require several post. I intend to complete the article at some point.

The sweet corn that we enjoy throughout the summer should be eaten immediately after being picked because as soon as the ear is separated from the stalk the sugar begins to turn to starch. As Waverly Root writes in Food:

“Sweet corn is botanically green but gastronomically ripe…..Mark Twain recommended putting a kettle of water in the middle of the corn field, building a fire under it and, when the water begins to boil, picking the ears within reach and shucking them directly into the kettle”.

My favorite way of having sweet corn is a northeastern Native American recipe which I found in Cooking with Spirit by Darcy Williamson and Lisa Railsback:

“Pull husk halfway down ears of corn and remove silk and sprinkle with sea water. Pull husk back over and twist shut. Place over hot coals and turn frequently for about 12 minutes.”

Obviously, for those who do not live by the ocean, salted water will have to do the trick. I use a bit of wire to keep the ear tightly shut. Don’t forget to turn it over frequently, then just add some butter and salt. After 12 minutes on the barbecue you will have the best corn ever.

Huaraches or Sandals!

Thanks to Anne’s comment on the papalo blog she sent me on the right track to find out more about huaraches. No wonder I couldn’t find any info I had the name wrong! I had understood guarachas. Anyhow I decided to depend my investigation and took a stroll to Guerrero Food Center in Brooklyn Greenwood Heights where I had read they had good ones. They offer 3 kinds of Huaraches Regulares: cecina —marinated salted sliced pork; enchilada & chorizo . I had a cecina and a chorizo. Overall taste was very salty, I ended up leaving some of the meat but finishing the thick and tasty bean filled tortilla. The were topped with cilantro, and not papalo. Definitely not as good as the one I had at the Poughkeepsie flee market.

Señora Carmen Gomez

According to the website of the Mexico city restaurant El Huarache Azteca the preparation was the creation of Señora Carmen Gomez. They also indicate that:
“luarache”, comes from the language of the Tarasco area where “cuarache” means sandal” (see original here)

And Jack Kerouac wore them while on the road:

I looked like a maniac, of course, with my hair all wet, my shoes sopping. My shoes, damn fool that I am, were Mexican huaraches, plantlike sieves not fit for the rainy night of America and the raw road night. (Jack Kerouac in On the Road, 1957)

I am not as enthusiastic —or lucky, as the Village Voice about the huaraches of the Guerrero Food Center . The one I ate (picture on top) were very salty and totally lacking “zestiness and sharpness”. The Upstate huaraches had all these qualities and more…
My New-York huaraches investigation would be totally incomplete without paying a visit to the famous Redhook park vendors. Redhook park is a great place to go hang out on week ends. Soccer on one side, baseball on the other & Latino food vendors all around! You can pick from Mexican, Guatemalan, Salvadorian, Chilean delicacies, but go see for yourself I might forget some.

Red Hook Huaraches

Only one vendor was featuring huaraches. We got a pork one with all the works. Instead of the oblong sandal shape thick bean filled tortilla, this one was roundish and rather thin. The overall taste was satisfying despite the meat a bit dry, not enough salsa on the bottom —we added some on top. The veggies were crisp. I could have used a little more cotijo cheese. The winner is definitely the Poughkeepsie flea market huaraches vendor. From what I have seen so far it doesn’t look like papalo is commonly served with huaraches but this is the way I am going to make mine. Stay tune for my Pyreneen sandals!

Lost in Pepper!

All I wanted to do was post a quick recipe for Labor Day:
A raw mushroom salad marinated with pink & green peppercorns. Little did I know! I took the photo a week ago, the ‘shrooms are long gone but I am still marinating in pepper!

First, I confirmed that green pepper is the unripe Piper nigrum or black pepper that is mostly cultivated in Madagascar. Then I looked into pink peppercorn Schinus terebinthifolius: a faux poivre – a fake pepper. Originally from South America the Baies Roses plant is today cultivated on Reunion Island. And the last thing I was going to look into the “Dictionnaire Universel de Cuisine et d’Hygiène Alimentaire” by J. Favre — & there (re)appears the fascinating Monsieur Pierre Poivre. Oui! le poivre, pepper in French, was named after Pierre Poivre. In English that would be Mr. Peter Pepper. He was also known as Peter Piper or le missionaire des épices — the missionary of spices!

Pierre Poivre

Pierre Poivre was born in Lyon (France) in 1719 (where he also died in 1786). After studying botany and Latin he was sent to Paris to enter the Seminaire des Missions Etrangères (Foreign Mission Seminary) to become a priest. He thought his vocation was to evangelize the Far East —little did he know. Before getting ordained he was sent on an initiatory voyage to China. The trip was more than eventful: it coincided with the Jesuits been kicked out of the country. He was arrested & sent to prison. In order to plead his case he learned Chinese. He was brilliant and officials ended up granting him permission to visit the country. His taste for adventure put a serious damper to his religious vocation. He visited many places among them Cochin China (Vietnam), Macau, Canton and was totally fascinated by their botany, agriculture and commerce. In 1745 he had to return to France to get ordained but fate struck again. The English attacked the ship he was on, a cannonball hit his wrist and amputation of his forearm was inevitable once he landed on Batavia Island (Indonesia) where the Dutch helped him out. That ended his priesthood carrier and more sadly his painting carrier —though I haven’t yet found any samples of his work, he had the reputation of being an excellent painter. While recovering on Batavia Island, he studied the native plants and the idea came to him that the French should grow their own spices in order to bypass the Dutch monopoly.

Bourbon Islands

And that’s exactly what he did in 1767 when he became Intendant des Isles de France et de Bourbon — the French colonies situated in the Indian Ocean south of Madagascar today called Mauritius & Réunion. One of his claims to fame was to transfer spice trees from the Dutch Indies (pepper, nutmeg, cinnamon, clove and many others) to the French colonies. Pierre Poivre was associated with the physiocrats (physis, nature, kratein, rule). The physiocrats are regarded as proto-French revolutionaries; they proposed to benefit agriculture by implementing a system of economic freedom. Poivre was against slavery and he is considered one of the first environmentalists who created and implemented the first environmental laws. Fear of climate change was already a concern and linked to deforestation. If you want to know more about the historic of environmental concerns read this Harvard Seminar on Environmental Values by Professor Richard H. Grove here.
Pierre Poivre married Françoise Robin, who was about 30 years younger than he, and they had two daughters. It is interesting to note that nine years after Pierre Poivre passed away, Françoise Robin Poivre remarried Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours, who was the one who coined the term physiocrat —The du Pont family fled France for the USA during the revolution where Éleuthère Irenée du Pont, her second husband’s son, established the gunpowder manufacturer E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Company. Today Dupont is the second largest chemical company in the world.
Pierre Poivre's Book

Pierre Poivre wrote an extensive memoir: “Voyage d’un philosophe ou Observations sur les moeurs ou les arts des peuples d’Afriques, de l’Asie et de l’Amérique” filled with acute observations, pertinent information and political & naturalist perspectives. As I stated above, Poivre is still regarded today as the avant-garde of environmentalism and his texts are still studied —see Richard H. Grove article for more details.
In 1984 I visited Les Jardins de Pamplemouse on Mauritius Island. Since then the garden that was constructed by Pierre Poivre was renamed SSR Botanical Garden. I remember the visit fondly, though at that time I had more scattered interests and didn’t pay enough attention. I should still have pictures and recipe somewhere in storage and am tempted to go dig them out, even if they belong to a segment of my “romantic” life I don’t care much revisiting.
To be continued? Will see!

Meanwhile there is the recipe that you can adjust to your own taste:

1 lb of very fresh button/white mushrooms
1 lemon (juice)
1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil
2 teaspoon pink peppercorns
2 teaspoon green peppercorns
—dry or in can. If you use the canned ones you can add 1 teaspo0n of the vinegar they marinate in.
1/2 cup roughly chopped parsley
Salt & ….pepper? just a dash!

Prepare your marinade with all ingredients except the parsley.
Clean & cut the mushrooms in quarters (top only, use bottom in a sauce.)
Toss the mushrooms in the marinade.
Save in the fridge for up to 48 hours.
Toss in parsley before serving.
Garnish with a sprig of parsley and a few pink peppercorns

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