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  ALSO BY JOHN THORNE

  Simple Cooking

  Outlaw Cook

  Serious Pig

  Home Body

  POT ON THE FIRE

  POT ON THE FIRE

  FURTHER EXPLOITS OF

  A RENEGADE COOK

  JOHN THORNE

  WITH MATT LEWIS THORNE

  NORTH POINT PRESS

  A DIVISION OF FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX

  NEW YORK

  North Point Press

  A division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  19 Union Square West, New York 10003

  Copyright © 2000 by John Thorne

  All rights reserved

  First edition, 2000

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Thorne, John.

  Pot on the fire : further exploits of a renegade cook / John Thorne with Matt Lewis Thorne.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN 0-374-70159-8

  1. Cookery, International. 2. Cooks. I. Thorne, Matt Lewis. II. Title.

  TX725.A1 T497 2000

  641.59—dc21 00-038015

  The chapter in this book entitled “My Knife, My Pot” originally appeared in slightly different form inGourmet Magazine. Everything else originally appeared in the authors’Simple Cooking food letters.

  We have made a concerted effort to obtain permission to quote from copyrighted works. Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following:

  Andrew J. L. Blank and Judy Landis. “On the Trail of Arnhemse Meisjes,” by Andrew Blank and Judy Landis. Copyright © 1997 by Andrew J. L. Blank and Judy Landis. Reprinted by permission of the authors.

  Maurice Frechette. “Hobz iz Zejt,” by Maurice Frechette. Copyright © 1997 by Maurice Frechette. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  Patience Gray. For permission to quote a passage from a letter to us.

  Mrs. Nicholas Kelley. For permission to quote a passage from a letter to us by her brother, the late Augustus M. Kelley.

  Johan Mathiesen. “Cioppino,” by Johan Mathiesen. Copyright © 1996 by Johan Mathiesen. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  Maggie Rogers. For permission to quote a passage from a letter to us.

  Elisheva Urbas. “Cinnamon Toast,” by Elisheva S. Urbas. Copyright © 1998 by Elisheva S. Urbas. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  The Crown Publishing Group. Excerpt fromLarousse Gastronomique, edited by Jennifer Harvey Lang. Copyright © 1984 Libraries Larousse. Copyright 1998 © English text, The Hamlyn Publishing Group, Ltd. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

  For Shirley & George

  with love

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The “I” that speaks from these pages is mine in every chapter of this book, except in those letters where the contributor is explicitly named—Patience Gray, Elisheva Urbas, Judy Landis and Andrew Blank, Augustus Kelley, Johan Mathiesen, Maggie Rogers—and in “Cakes on the Griddle,” the section on making pancakes, which was written by my wife, Matt Lewis Thorne.

  Matt, though, has also considered every word of every draft I have written, reacting, suggesting, amending, and, hence,reshaping what appears herein. As I noted in our first collaboration,Outlaw Cook, this means that the subjective self who speaks out of these pages is a larger, braver, much more interesting person than I am alone—and I honor her for it.

  As in my three previous food books,Pot on the Fire assembles a selection of essays written over the past several years, most of them originally published in our food letter,Simple Cooking. Those who read this book with pleasure might also be interested in subscribing to it. Either write to us at P.O. Box 778, Northampton MA 01061—or, better yet, visit our Web site: www.outlawcook.com

  — John Thorne

  CONTENTS

  List of Recipes

  Moving to Paradise—by Way of a Preface

  EDUCATION OF A COOK

  My Knife, My Pot

  Perfect Rice

  Knowing Nothing about Wine

  Banh Mi & Me

  Desperately Resisting Risotto

  The Breakfast Chronicles

  Quintessential Toast

  How Restaurants Mean

  KITCHEN DOINGS

  Beans in a Flask

  Existential Pizza

  Crustaceans & Crumbs

  Riso in Bianco

  Sticks-to-the-Pot

  Pasta and Vegetables

  “The Best Cookies in the World”

  Department of Random Receipts

  TALES FROM THE OLD COOKSTOVE

  Pot on the Fire

  Potatoes & Point

  Cuisine of the Crust

  Cioppino in the Rough

  Khichri / Kushari / Kedgeree

  Caponata Siciliana

  Cakes on the Griddle

  Simple French Food

  LAST GLEANING

  Last Gleaning

  Bibliography

  Notes

  Index

  LIST OF RECIPES

  Asian Dumplings

  Basic dumpling wrapper recipe

  Basic dumpling filling recipe

  Basic instructions for wrapping and cooking dumplings

  Moslem-style Lamb Filling

  Pork and Bok Choy Filling

  Pork and Shrimp Filling

  Nira (Garlic Chive) Filling

  Goon Mandu (Korean-Style) Filling (1)

  Goon Mandu (Korean-Style) Filling (2)

  Breakfast Dishes

  Bird’s Nest with Matchstick Potatoes

  Buttermilk Griddlecakes

  with wild blueberries

  Cream Toast

  Dry Toast

  Chunky Olive-and-Onion Cream Cheese Mash

  Cinnamon Toast

  Panfried Pierogi with Bits of Onion and Dried Mushroom

  Tamales, Roasted Peppers, and Cheese

  Dried Peas, Lentils, and Other Legumes

  Fagioli al Fiasco (beans cooked in a flask)

  Geeli Khichri (wet style,moong dal and rice)

  Geeli Khichri with Potatoes and Peppers

  Khichri (moong daland rice)

  Khichri al-Baghdadi (red lentils and rice)

  Kushari (lentils, rice, and elbow macaroni)

  Mujaddarah (1) (lentils and rice, wet style)

  Mujaddarah (2) (lentils and rice, dry style)

  Penobscot Pease Pudding

  Tuscan Beans from the Old Clay Pot

  mashed on toast, with pancetta

  with bean purée

  with broccoli or broccoli rabe

  with canned tuna

  with Italian sausage

  with pasta

  with prosciutto

  with raw onion

  with tomato sauce (fagioli all’uccelletto)

  Pasta and Pizza

  Linguine with Green Beans, Leeks, and Flageolets

  Penne with Broccoli, Red Peppers, and Garlic

  Pizza Crust, Basic Recipe

  Pizza Toppings

  Broccoli Rabe

  Eggplant and Lamb Sausage

  Pepper, Onion, and Sausage

  Spinach and Mushroom

  Summer Tomato and Fresh Mozzarella

  Spinach and Chickpeas with Fusilli

  Rice and Rice Dishes

  La Peperonata con Riso

  Plain Boiled Rice

  Rice with Spinach, Goat Cheese, and Walnuts

  Ris in Cagnon

  Ris e Latt (savory rice pudding)

  Ris e Latt con Parmigiano e Sparagio

  Riso in Bianco (basic recipe)

  Riso con Limone alla Piemontese

  Riso con Mozzarella e Pomodoro Freschi

  Riso con Mozzarella e Peperone Rosso

  Riso con Mozza
rella e Salsiccie

  Riso con Asparagi

  Risotto (basic information)

  Risotto al Salto (leftover risotto pancake)

  Risotto with Butternut Squash

  Risotto with Portobello Mushrooms

  Salads

  Cu Cai Carot Chua (Carrot and Daikon in Vinegar)

  Grilled Eggplant and Pepper Salad

  Italian Butternut Salad

  Panzanetta (tomato and fresh bread salad)

  Panzanella (tomato and stale bread salad)

  with bitter greens (appears in footnote)

  Sandwiches and the like

  Banh Mi

  Pa amb Tomàquet

  Sauces, Spreads, and Condiments

  Anchoïade

  Caponata Casa Nostra

  Crispy Onion Shreds

  Asian Dumpling Dipping Sauce

  English Sauce

  Nuoc Cham (Vietnamese dipping sauce)

  Tapenade

  Tartar Sauce

  Meat, Poultry, and Seafood

  Il Ciuppin di Sestri Levanti (Italian fish stew)

  Crab Norfolk

  Crab Cake Basics

  Crab-Flake Cakes (Baltimore-style)

  Getz’s Baltimore Crab Cakes

  Homemade Sausage

  Kedgeree (traditional style with smoked haddock)

  Maine Coast Cioppino

  Pigeon Hill Bay Crab Cakes

  Postmodern Pot-au-Feu

  Rao’s Famous Lemon Chicken

  Smoked Salmon Kedgeree

  Sweets and Desserts

  Arnhem Cookies

  Bread Crisps

  Oranges à l’Arabe

  Summer Peach and Fresh Raspberry Dessert

  Vegetables (see also Pasta and Pizza, Rice and Rice Dishes, and Salads)

  Asparagus in a Bowl

  Champ (mashed potatoes with various greens)

  Sweet-Corn Fritters

  Corn-Stuffed Tomatoes

  Corn Omelet

  Farmhouse Colcannon

  Southern Corn Pudding

  Sweet-Corn Pudding

  MOVING TO PARADISE—

  BY WAY OF A PREFACE

  Everything has changed; nothing has changed. Thirty-five years ago, I attended Amherst College, just two towns away from where I now write these words, and there’s something disorienting about being back. On the one hand, after all this time I hardly know the place. When I left the area in the late sixties, it was just starting to reflect the hipness of those times: a funky food co-op here, a bicycle store there, a scattering of Crabtree & Evelyn wannabes. Now the place is overripe with the hipness of today: body manipulators, nutrition consultants, coffee roasters, microbreweries, feminist gift shops. The effect is not unlike shopping for clothing at a college prep shop at the age of fifty-five: no matter what shape you’re in, nothing really fits. You get to be twenty only once.

  On the other hand, the atmosphere—the lush, deciduous greenness of so many enormous trees; the college campus with its strange contrast of sobersided patrician architecture and motley youthful inhabitants—triggers long-buried sensory imprinting that is still dank with the humidity of adolescent angst. I take Matt for a quick drive-through tour of the campus … and leave it at that. There will be no looking up old professors or revisiting old dorm rooms. Instead, I prefer to delight in our new home about seven miles farther west—the small, sweet city of Northampton.

  This place, if you’re unfamiliar with it—the city recently got its fifteen minutes of fame with the publication of Tracy Kidder’sHome Town —is located more or less at the center of Massachusetts, surrounded by fertile farmland and resting beside the—here, impressively wide—Connecticut River. It is the shire town of Hampshire County, with the requisite impressive granite courthouse, but, more important to us, it serves as the commercial hub for four liberal arts colleges (including Smith College, which is situated here) and the University of Massachusetts, a sprawling educational megalopolis.

  So, much of the city’s commerce is directed at college students and those who teach them. There are countless used-book stores, a host of coffee bars and ethnic restaurants, two independent movie houses, and a quite respectable museum of art. This is a good place to live if you like to rent obscure videos, listen to live music, buy used books or CDs, or just settle into a plush armchair at one of the coffee bars and, acaffè latte by your elbow, bury yourself inWired orThe New York Review of Books.

  When famed soprano Jenny Lind gave a concert in Northampton in 1851, she proclaimed the city “The Paradise of America,” liking it so much that she honeymooned here in 1852. I have no idea why she made that proclamation, but I do know that Northamptonites have been quite willing to agree with her—on one little side street you can find a Pizzeria Paradiso and a Paradise Copy Shop. In the intervening years, Northampton has certainly come to possess many ideal metropolitan qualities. For instance, its downtown is not only walkable but inviting to walk in, even late at night. Our second or third evening here, we joined a friend at a nearby restaurant for supper and later decided to stroll a few blocks to an Italian pastry shop for dessert. It was after nine, but patrons filled the outdoor tables of the coffee bars and strollers thronged the sidewalks; the air buzzed with the sound of people having a good time.

  Even so, drive ten minutes from the center of town in almost any direction and you’re in the middle of farmland. Coming back from the post office the other day, I saw a huge, odd, but somehow familiar-looking truck lumbering toward me. As it got closer, I realized it was an open hopper truck, similar to ones we had seen on our trip to Maine’s Aroostook County—and, like those, this one was piled high with spuds. Their soddy, tuberous aroma trailed in the truck’s wake, a reminder—as is the fact that garden centers outnumber fast-food joints along our Miracle Mile—that this area is still largely farm country, famous, in fact, for its cigar-wrapper tobacco leaf, onions, and (hurrah!) asparagus.

  All this helps explain why we came here, but not why we left the Down East coast or why our moving entailed abandoning Maine completely. Some of our reasons were entirely ordinary—wanting to be nearer to nephews who are quickly growing up, missing the pleasures and conveniences of urban life, finding we’d had it with winters that begin in early November and end late in April. But others were not.

  I had returned to Maine back in 1987 for a last taste of the place where I spent my boyhood summers. While I had to travel much, much farther up the coast to find it, a taste of that world still lingered on. During the first few years of our time there, we could still find old-fashioned grocery and dry-goods stores, local dairies that had never heard of ultrapasteurization, doughnut shops that made cake doughnuts from scratch and fried them in lard, lunch counters that offered homemade pies and real beanhole beans, and country stores offering skunk cheese, fish jerky, fresh-churned butter in rough-cut chunks—and none of it for the benefit of tourists.

  All this—or near enough—disappeared during our ten-year stay, including many of the places I wrote about inSerious Pig. In Brewer, the Buttermilk Donut Shop closed; in Ellsworth, Dick’s Restaurant, the Hancock Dairy, the Pine Tree Diner, and the J.J. Newberry five-and-ten-cent store, with its classic lunch counter; in Winter Harbor, The Donut Hole+ (despite a rave review of the place by Jane and Michael Stern inGourmet a few months before it closed—the owner was just worn out); in Bucksport, Duffy’s Restaurant; in Eastport and Machias, two vintage A & Ps.

  Some new, good things arrived to take their places, but they were enterprises of a different order, established by people who had come to Maine because it is lovely there and quiet and, for the moment, still affordable enough to offer them—as it had the potters, the bell casters, and the stained-glass-window makers who arrived decades before—a chance to turn an avocation into a living. We ourselves, of course, were part of this crowd, but we were not reallyof it. I had come to Maine to find something I had lost there; they had come, many of them, to participate in the founding of the New Green Age.

 
I love trees and organic vegetables as much as anyone, but I take them as symbolic of a liveable future, not a direct route to it, and in Maine, those who believe itis the route seem to be marking it with increasingly ominous road signs. For instance, there’s been a vendor who’s tried for years to sell hot coffee at the Common Ground Fair, a statewide celebration of alternative agriculture, and every year he’s been refused a booth—even when he switched over to organic coffee. It seems that caffeine, like animal fat, whatever the source, is simply bad. That is symptomatic of a kind of self-righteousness that appears to swell with the arrival of each new herbalist and dulse harvester.

  Northampton, not surprisingly, is rife with such attitudes—“Happy Valley,” a friend ironically describes it—but that is only one part of a headily active ferment. The local natural foods supermarket has a meat department that is much better—more varieties of meat, more specialty cuts, all of it organically raised—than most regular supermarkets, and a cheese department that simply blows the competition away. Porterhouse steaks, Cornish clotted cream, and obscure French cheeses coexist peacefully, if a tad bizarrely, with herbal tinctures, locally made tofu, and rice-milk beverages.

  Also, as it turns out, this part of Massachusetts has a more robust vernacular culinary life than any we found in Maine, if only because there are more people and more money here to support them. Recently, local dairy farmers formed a co-op to sell their own antibiotic-free milk and found that they couldn’t produce enough of it. The area abounds in roadside farm stands and farmers’ markets, diners and hot dog wagons, sausage makers, old-fashioned doughnut shops, and such unexpected finds as the brace of penny-candy stores right here in town.

  All this is a statement aboutme, not about Maine, a place I continue to love, or about the people who live there, all of whom I wish well. I’m extremely grateful to have been given a second helping of an experience that touched me as living in no other place ever has. And I already miss the stark, soul-cleansing beauty of the Down East coast. But I was becoming a writer whose major subject was fading into nostalgia and regret. To hell with that … better to toss myself back into the turbulent waters of today and see if I still know how to swim.