Garlic Soup

It usually takes me years of intimate friendship to reveal my secret pet peeves: The Beatles, David Bowie, and garlic. (But a blog obviously speeds along the process.) The latter is a complicated relationship. Fresh garlic is floral, and older garlic can add wonderful funk and flavor in small doses, but only when used with respect.

As Anthony Bourdain wrote: "Garlic is divine. Few food items can taste so many distinct ways, handled correctly. Misuse of garlic is a crime. Old garlic, burnt garlic, garlic cut too long ago and garlic that has been tragically smashed through one of those abominations, the garlic press, are all disgusting. Please, treat your garlic with respect. Sliver it for pasta, like you saw in Goodfellas; don't burn it. Smash it with the flat of your knife blade if you like, but don't put it through a press. I don't know what that junk is that squeezes out the end of those things, but it ain't garlic."

Or, as Elizabeth David wrote in her essay "Garlic Presses are Utterly Useless":
"I regard garlic presses as both ridiculous and pathetic, their effect being precisely the reverse of what people who buy them believe will be the case. Squeezing the juice out of garlic doesn't reduce its potency, it concentrates it, and intensifies the smell. I have often wondered how it is that people who have once used one of these diabolical instruments don't notice this and forthwith throw the thing into the dustbin."

After the holidays, I discovered another use of garlic, a whole head for two servings, long simmered until mild:

Cure-All Garlic Soup

Water down chicken broth by adding one cup of water to three cups broth in a medium saucepan. Add a generous pinch of saffron, a scant pinch of paprika (the sweet and smoked kind is best), and one bay leaf. Add the peeled cloves from one head of garlic. Simmer for at least an hour.

Puree the whole mixture (minus the bay leaf, which you should throw away) and then put this thin, cloudy white broth back into the pot. Poach one or two eggs per serving in this mixture. Poach for about three minutes, so that the yolk is just set but mostly runny. Break the yolk in the bowl and stir around, thickening the soup.

This soup will cure you of any ailment or malaise, any heartbreak or sniffles, and at the last lick of the spoon may give you a momentary delusion of being super-powered.

*note: salt generously

Dream Magazine

Claudia Cardinale as the first cover story, regular contributions by Elizabeth David & Kingsley Amis, plus fashion/feminism/fetishism--- it was a woman's magazine for men and women

The Marinated Mushroom Narrative (Elizabeth David Part II)

There is a narrative to a classic recipe--a thread of good taste, common sense, elegant simplicity & humility to the ingredients. It is a story of specificity, told only through the language of food. Elizabeth David translated that language faithfully.

1. Presentation
From Elizabeth David's French Provincial Cooking (1960) on the presentation of hors-d'oeveres at la Mère Germaine:
The hors-d'oeveres are beautifully served here, in small oval raviers of glowing deep yellow Provençal pottery. Brought on a basket tray which was left on the table so we could help ourselves, they consisted only of olives, marinaded mushrooms, a rice and prawn salad, anchovies, these pickled cherries and the tapénade already described.

2. The Classic (slightly revised)
(Also from French Provincial Cooking)
Champignons à la grecque
The addition of a little tomato to the usual à la grecque manner of preparing mushrooms makes the dish more interesting. Put 5 tablespoons of olive oil, 3 of water, 2 skinned and chopped tomatoes, 3 or 4 crushed peppercorns, half a dozen coriander seeds, a bayleaf, a sprig of thyme and a little salt into a saucepan. Bring this to a boil, let it simmer 2 or 3 minutes, then add 1/2 lb. of very small button mushrooms washed, drained and rubbed with lemon juice. Cook gently about 5 minutes. Take out the mushrooms, put them in a small shallow oval serving dish; continue cooking the sauce a few more minutes until it is thick and somewhat reduced. pour over the mushrooms. Serve cold.

3. The Classic Revised
In this recipe from Spices, Salt and Aromatics in the English Kitchen (1970), E.D. has edged the recipe even more towards simplicity and surprise (a recommended direction, in every art.) In this version all of the ingredients are essential and none of the flavors are lost.
Coriander Mushrooms
This is a quickly cooked little dish which makes a delicious cold hors-d'oeuvre. The aromatics used are similar to those which go into champignon à la grecque, but the method is simpler and the result even better.
Ingredients for three people are: 6 oz firm white, round and very fresh mushrooms, a teasppon of coriander seeds, 2 tablespoons of olive oil, lemon juice, salt, freshly milled peper, and one or two bay leaves.
Rinse the mushrooms, wipe them dry with a clean cloth, slice them (but do not peel them) into quarters, or if they are very large into eighths. The stalks should be neatly trimmed. Squeeze over them a little lemon juice.
In a heavy frying pan or sauté pan, warm the oilve oil. Into it put the coriander seeds which should be already crushed in a mortar. Let them heat for a few seconds. keep the heat low. Put in the mushrooms and the bay leaves. Add the seasoning. Letthe mushrooms cook gently for a minute, cover the pan and leave them, still over very low heat, for another 3-5 minutes.
Uncover the pan. Decant the mushrooms–with all their juices–into a shallow serving dish and sprinkle them with fresh olive oil and lemon juice.
Whether the mushrooms are to be served hot or cold do not forget to put the bay leaf which has cooked with them into the serving dish. The combined scents of coriander and bay go to make up part of the true essence of the dish.

E.D.'s Kitchen

Lady Windermere's Flan (Elizabeth David Part I)

My favorite author is a
cookery writer: Elizabeth David.
Her writing was evocative and humble to the physical details that she was describing. Like the following description, pinpointing a stage previously unidentified in cooking terms, of the exact temperature at which a mackerel should be poached:
They must cook very gently indeed, the liquid not even simmering but merely shuddering.

She was bossy but trusted her readers' imaginations and their judgement; she had faith in their taste (which could be developed through the process of following her recipes with thorough consciousness.) As she irately wrote to the editor Judith Jones when Jones complained about a recipe leaving too much stuffing:
Inconsistencies are inevitable in a cookery book and preferable, I think myself, to absurdities brought about by overzealousness in the matter of literal renderings....I don't think one does any harm in crediting one's readers with a little imagination and knowledge of their own.

David also avoided the two most hideous traps of a cookery writer: purple prose and whimsy. Her humor, in fact, sometimes came across as the stern voice of schoolteacher--or a Mary Poppins figure--who created so much indulgence and pleasure but was too dignified to associate herself, or her work, with such frivolous joy:
Anyhow the combination of the soft apple puree with the light crisp crust is excellent; it's known in my household, I am sorry to say, as Lady Windermere's Flan.


At that, let's shift from E.D. to Ernst.
I think the perfect syllabus for a beginning filmmaking class would be solely Ernst Lubitsch's 1925 silent Lady Windermere's Fan. That's it. It's a perfect film, and it utilizes all of the medium's unique strengths.

Like Elizabeth David, Lubitsch had a lyrical style, with grounded charm and too much intelligence to ever fall into twee whimsy. One of his greatest skills--and so much of what is identifiably Lubitschian--was his trust and dependence on the imagination of his audience.

Arnaud Desplechin has remarked recently on being greatly influenced by the Lubitsch silents in his approach to filmmaking. Desplechin lets the actions of his actors trump the written script, but feels that it's important for this script to be very good and thorough before it can be thrown away. He has commented that there was excellent dialogue often written for these silent movies even though you never hear it, and that the intertitles then abbreviate the script.