Just The Caffeine Talking

The Trip to Iceland, Day 6

My experience of travel to various places has taught me that one should always include a "slack day" in one's travel plans. There are a number of good reasons for having a day with few or no activities planned: you can re-visit someplace you really enjoyed, you can switch around if something is closed or too crowded, you have a cushion in case someone doesn't feel good or is simply too tired, and you've got a day to just hang out in another country. Sometimes that's the most enjoyable part of a trip.

Friday was our slack day. We got swabs stuck up our noses to make sure we'd be allowed to fly home, then got lunch at a conveyor-belt sushi restaurant on the waterfront. It was pretty good — in the same league as sush in Seattle, which was better than any I've had on the East Coast but not as good as in Japan. Evidently nose-swabbing gave us an appetite because we put away a lot of sushi, mostly salmon and tuna.

One aspect of "globalization" which has been consistently disappointing to me is the remarkable lack of culinary crossovers. Iceland is a country where people eat a lot of fish, sushi is a Japanese method of preparing fish, so why didn't I see any codfish sushi? Why don't the taco trucks in Philadelphia have cheesesteak tacos? Why don't po-boy places in New Orleans serve banh mi sandwiches?

I appreciate authenticity — but I'm also aware that most authentic cuisines are a mass of borrowing and hybridization. In this era of creeping global monoculture, it's odd that food lags behind. I think we're missing some potentially good dishes.

Anyway, the sushi was good. After lunch we got our swimsuits and drove down to the Nautholsvik Geothermal Beach, which is a public park at the south end of Reykjavik, just past the municipal airport and Reykjavik University (not to be confused with the University of Iceland, which is on the other side of the airport).

Like the much bigger, much fancier, and much more famous Blue Lagoon spa, Nautholsvik is not a natural geothermal spring. It's the hot water outflow from a geothermal heating system — which means the water temperature can be monitored and controlled to avoid boiling the patrons. Natural springs don't have thermostats.

Sir William Jackson Hooker described the "boiling springs" of Iceland in his day: "I rode, however, one morning, to the hot spring, where I found a tent pitched, and as many Icelandic women and girls as it could possibly hold, sheltering themselves in it from the weather. They had come with their linen, which was brought on horses from the town, to the hot spring, where all the clothes of the people, for many miles round, are washed. Some of them had a few little miserable potatoes, not so large as a full-sized walnut, which they were cooking in the spring for their dinner, and which they offered me. I had carried with me some eider-ducks' eggs, for the purpose of trying how long it would take to boil them hard, and I found they required ten minutes, whilst lying in a part of the water where the thermometer rose to 200°."

You get a sense of what a high-trust society Iceland has in places like the Nautholsvik locker room. There are no lockers, and certainly no locks. Just plastic baskets to stash your clothes — and keys, and wallet, and phone — in while you soak in the hot pool.

The water's about 100 degrees Fahrenheit, very pleasant on a day when the air temperature didn't get above 50. There is a sheltered cove with a sandy beach where crazy people like my science advisor can go and dip themselves in life-threatening cold seawater before retreating up the slope to the hot water of the pool. I didn't indulge in any such foolishness.

Perhaps it was an artifact of the time of day, mid-afternoon, but we were definitely in the "prime demographic" for the Nautholsvik geothermal pool — middle-aged and older adults. After we'd been there about an hour some teenagers arrived, but they were still in the minority when we left. Maybe teens don't feel as much of a need to soak their joints in hot water.

Relaxed almost to a comatose state, we showered off and then had dinner at what may be my favorite restaurant in Iceland: Islenski Barinn. It has local food like fish pie (more like a cross between shepherd's pie and chowder), dung-smoked salmon on brown bread, excellent crepes, and local beer. The decor looks unchanged since Iceland's independence, and it is considerably less expensive than Dill.

After some more strolling about, we finished up our last full day in Reykjavik with a glass of wine at one of the downtown hotels, and then to bed.

The Trip to Iceland, Day 4

After a breakfast in our room (scones and coffeemaker coffee) we crossed Austurvollur Square to the Settlement Museum, a branch of the Reykjavik City Museum. The museum occupies the basement of a building (a hotel, I think) and consists of the in-situ archaeological site of a Viking longhouse from the first settlement of the Reykjavik region.

It's fascinating to see. They can date it pretty precisely by the volcanic ash that settled in the walls as they were being built. In the intervening thousand years the street level has risen about 5 meters — but I was intrigued to see that the house is basically aligned with the modern street above.

The house itself looked almost exactly like the buildings Sir William described in Iceland a millennium later in 1809:

". . . the walls of these are extremely thick, especially at the base, formed of layers of stone and turf, not standing perpendicularly, but leaning a little inwards, and about seven or eight feet high; a sloping roof of turf, laid on birch boughs, makes the whole height of the buildings, which even thus does not reach above twelve or fourteen feet . . . both walls and floors are but seldom boarded: the sides are usually nothing but the black stone and turf, and the bottom only the bare ground. Generally, there are small openings, either in the walls or roof, by way of windows . . . A chimney, or rather an aperture for the emission of the smoke, usually made with a tub, is seen only in the best houses, in others the smoke is left to find its way out at the door, by which, also, the only air that they can possibly receive is admitted."

After that we walked eastward, up hill, to what can only be called the tourist neighborhood: full of souvenir shops, bars, the Punk Museum, and other operations designed to separate foreigners from money. One of them was a great shop selling handmade woollens, where Diane bought a lovely sweater so warm that it is almost impossible to wear indoors.

At the top of the hill is the Hallgrimskirk, the biggest church in Iceland. It's a nifty Gothic-Deco building that looms over the city and has become a national icon. Amusingly, one could fit the entire Cathedral building next door to our hotel, steeple and all, inside the nave of the Hallgrimskirk with plenty of spare room.

The best comparison I can make is to a very different building: Gaudi's Sagrada Familia church in Barcelona. Both are superb modernist churches which still call back to their religious heritage. Sagrada Familia is ornate and highly decorated, drawing on the many Gothic and Baroque churches of Spain. Hallgrimskirk is very plain and severe, from the austere tradition of Lutheran churches in Scandinavia.

And, yes, we visited the Icelandic Phallological Museum. The Penis Museum. Of course we did. What can one say about it? A reasonable collection of anatomical specimens — about what one would expect from a college biology department. A collection of snickering artworks and historical exhibits which I found rather scanty. No Roman penis amulets, no Japanese penis sculptures, no ithyphallic Egyptian statues of Osiris.

I have a strong suspicion that 90 percent of the people who visit the Phallological Museum simply take selfies in front of the entrance and don't bother paying to go in.

My science advisor did have a chat with the manager about some deficiencies in the collection — all their baculae (penis bones) were displayed upside down, with the smooth back end up and the tip with lots of fiddly bits at the bottom. Those fiddly bits are sometimes the only way to distinguish closely-related mammal species, but they look more phallic with the back end up.

We did not have penis-shaped waffles at the snack bar.

With the best of good will toward the people running the Museum, my summation is that unless you want to post some selfies of yourself grinning like a fool in front of a whale penis in a jar, give it a miss.

Then back to our hotel for a quick clean-up, and then off to Dill, Reykjavik's Michelin-starred restaurant featuring foods inspired by traditional Icelandic ingredients.

The thing about super-pricey hoity-toity restaurants like Dill is that . . . they're really good. One can chuckle at the relentless use of the word "sustainable" on the Web site of a joint that charges $150 a seat. One can raise an eyebrow at terms like "codfish foam" on the menu — but when some very talented people devote hours to the project of making a really good meal, that's what you're likely to get.

The menu for the evening was as follows:

First, a series of little amuse-bouches including smoked trout (cooked on a traditional Icelandic sheep-dung fire), a tiny bowl of super-concentrated vegetable broth, little cakes of dried wolffish, and an onion cake dotted with sweet carrot slices. We had champagne with that — from France but with a notable "mineral" flavor suited to Iceland.

Then a vegetable course of greens, fermented cabbage, a barley risotto, salt-baked beets, sol, and mushrooms. What's sol? A kind of seaweed, known as dulse in the British Isles. "In Iceland, also, it is very commonly eaten, but seldom in a fresh state," according to Sir William.

Next came the fish course, of cod foam with lumpfish roe on rye bread; and cod with mushrooms, seaweed, and birch. We were drinking white wine by this point, another French label which I carelessly didn't write down. The pairings were perfect, though.

And then the meat: some braised lamb (cooked for ten hours!) accompanied by a rutabaga puree. Also a slice of grilled lamb loin with black garlic and a dousing of consomme. These were paired with a red wine, and again I'm sorry I didn't note the labels because it was excellent (the restaurant Web site is very secretive about what wines they serve).

We finished that wine with a vegetable course of rutabaga with wasabi, and a kind of potato puree with berries.

Dessert was a roll cake, chocolate with pickled rhubarb, and a lemon thyme vinegar caramel. I had coffee with that course.

How obsessive are the chefs? I asked our waiter at one point: does the chef pick out appropriate dishware for each menu item? Or are the items inspired in part by the dishware? Oh, no. That wouldn't be obsessive enough. The chef works with local potters to create the right serving dishes for each food. That's attention to detail.

We paid up and walked (a bit unsteadily) back to our hotel. After sharing two bottles of wine and some champagne, my science advisor says she doesn't remember anything after leaving the restaurant until waking up the next morning. I can report that she didn't insult anyone along the way.

Next time: whales!

The Trip to Iceland, Day 1 (second part)

The ferry ride to Heimaey took about 20 minutes and was the quietest boat ride I've ever taken. We later discovered that the good ship Herjolfur is electric-powered, with a big recharging plug on the dock at Heimaey. It makes sense for a short-haul ship in a country with plentiful geothermal power and no local hydrocarbon fuel. (I'm willing to bet the ship has a diesel auxiliary power plant for longer voyages or emergencies.)

The approach to Heimaey is amazing: steep volcanic cliffs rising straight out of the sea, with a narrow entrance to the harbor. Sea birds nest in the cliffs and whirl around over the water. The whole island group is utterly fantastic-looking, like something off of an album cover or a fantasy novel.

Once ashore we dragged our bags to the Hotel Vestmannaeyjar and then went in search of lunch. Unfortunately, Sunday the 17th was Easter Sunday, and the Icelanders are pretty serious about their Easter observances. Only one place was open, a tourist-oriented bar & grill by the waterfront. The menu was mostly pub food — burgers and the like — with a few ostentatiously "exotic" items: whale steak, puffin, or reindeer burgers. The kind of thing you photograph with your cell phone and post to social media. "Check it out! I'm eating WHALE!"

I'll admit it: I had the reindeer burger. I can't really say what reindeer tastes like because the burger was loaded up with stuff like cheese and cranberry jam to offset the flavor. What I could taste was kind of halfway between lamb and beef.

And no, I have no qualms about eating Prancer. Reindeer aren't native to Iceland (nothing without feathers is, really). I'll let Sir William take it:

"These animals were first introduced into this country (according to Von Troil) in the year 1770, from Norway, by order of Governor Thodal. Ten out of thirteen died on the passage. The three remaining ones have done extremely well, and bred so fast, that at this time Count Tramp reckons that there are about five thousand head in the island. They are, however, quite useless to the natives, for no attempts have been made to domesticate them, nor can the inhabitants afford to buy powder and ball to enable them to kill then for provision."

Evidently the Icelanders have armed up since 1809, as I saw it on the menu a few other places.

Even though we'd been up for about 24 hours by that point, it was still afternoon (and afternoons go on a long time at that latitude in April), so we put on our walking shoes and went out in search of birds. The desk clerk at our hotel said he had spotted a puffin only the day before, so we headed for the cliffs at the west end of the island, about a mile away.

The landscape of Heimaey is phenomenal, with volcanic cliffs and old craters right next to the town. The town itself is . . . functional. Older buildings have corrugated iron roofs and siding (not a bad idea when occasionally flaming ash is in the forecast). Newer buildings are that boxy Scandinavian style which makes me think all their architects were big LEGO fans as children.

Eventually we reached the western cliffs, passing some replica medieval Icelandic houses along the way. We saw a gorgeous view across the water of more fantastic offshore rocks. Plenty of gulls, plenty of oystercatchers, plenty of terns, even a couple of pigeons and a wood duck, but not a puffin to be seen. Still, the scenery was great, and we spent an hour out there before plodding back to our hotel and collapsing into bed. Thirty-three hours awake is long enough.

Next time: The Volcano!

Happy Tricolor Day!

Today is Italian Tricolor Day. To celebrate, I prepared homemade pasta with red and green pesto:

Italy and Mexico are fortunate countries, in that their national colors match their cuisine. Making an Italian dish patriotic-looking is pig-easy. Just use some tomato sauce, some greenery, and some mozzarella. In other words, make some generic Italian food. Same for Mexico. Japan's flag also lends itself to patriotic dishes: a red plum on a bed of rice, and you've got a flag lunch. Spanish cooks in a patriotic mood can lean heavily on saffron and tomato.

Sadly, all the countries with blue flags are severely handicapped. Making patriotic American or French food means you have to rely heavily on uncooked blueberries, or cheat and use food coloring. And in Libya or Saudi Arabia I guess you just shut up and eat your spinach.

Anyway, both kinds of pesto were delicious.

 

Kitchen Report: Pudding!

This Christmas, we had a traditional English Christmas Pudding for dessert after our dinner. What's a Christmas Pudding? It's . . . well, it's a lot more akin to a fruitcake than anything most Americans would describe as "pudding." I'll try to generate some suspense in this 'blog post by not revealing how it tasted just yet.

I got the idea because my daughter made plans to visit us for the Christmas holiday season. She's not a huge fan of turkey, so my wife and I decided to cook a goose as the centerpiece of our meal. If you're making a Christmas Goose, the temptation to go Full Dickens and have a Christmas Pudding to follow is very strong, and I gave in. Plus I'm interested in food history and wanted to try it.

My recipe was from the extremely useful historical cookbook Lobscouse & Spotted Dog, by Grossman and Thomas. It's a solidly researched and fearlessly kitchen-tested companion to Patrick O'Brian's novels about Captain Aubrey and Dr. Maturin in the Royal Navy of Nelson's era. If you want to know how to cook a rat, this is the book to consult. Since Captain Aubrey is a huge fan of English pudding in all its forms, the book has thirty-odd different pudding recipes, ranging from "Figgy-Dowdy" to "Drowned Baby" to "Floating Islands."

A useful technique when trying an unfamiliar recipe, especially a historical one, is to find as many versions as possible and compare them. This gives one a sense of which ingredients are central to the dish, which are optional, and what the core techniques are for cooking. So I did some online research and consulted some of my other old cookbooks.

The core of a Christmas Pudding (aka a Plum Pudding because it contains raisins and the English don't know how to speak their own language) is a mix of beef suet, flour, sugar, breadcrumbs and eggs; packed with dried fruit, chopped nuts, and spices. And booze. The exact fruits and spices vary somewhat from one recipe to another.

Which was good, because getting hold of all of them was quite a chore, and some proved impossible to find. I had all the spices (cinnamon, mace, nutmeg, and clove), so that part was easy enough. Suet came from Sutter Meats in Northampton. Raisins, currants, and almonds were no problem. Candied orange peel had to be ordered via Amazon, and candied citron was simply unavailable to me. The fact that we were in the middle of a global supply chain crisis may have had something to do with that.

I began accumulating the Christmas Pudding ingredients in October, and actually prepared it in early November. This may seem like a long lead time, but Grossman and Thomas recommend getting your pudding ready a whole year in advance. Other recipes tended to center around six to eight weeks prior to serving, so I went with that.

The actual cooking is simple but time-consuming. You mix everything up together, put it in a pudding-basin (I used a metal bowl), and then steam it in boiling water for five hours. Extract it from the pot — my cookbook authors went into a certain amount of technical advice about getting the pudding out of the boiling water but I simply let it cool down before removing — and then store for two to twelve months. Give it a shot of booze every few weeks.

On the big day, heat it up with a couple of hours of steaming, then turn out onto a serving dish. Heat up a few ounces of brandy just to boiling, set it on fire, and pour the flaming liquid over the pudding. Because what dessert isn't improved by flaming brandy, really? Here's what it looked like.

So, I hear you ask, how is it? It's good. I liked it a lot — but then I'm also someone who loves mince pies and old-fashioned sangria. Raisins and cloves and citrus are a flavor combination I love in just about any form.

As one can see from this close-up view, the pudding is mostly fruit. The suet-flour-egg mixture is just a matrix to hold it all together. It goes very well with red wine, less so with champagne. We accompanied ours with vanilla ice cream, a combo I recommend.

It made a nice finish to a meal built around a roast goose. I suspect it would also go well with beef or game. Probably not a good Thanksgiving dessert — too much like the stuffing and cranberries anyway, plus everybody's expecting pie.  It's kosher, so you could have it for Hanukkah. Since I've got a quarter-pound of suet left over, I may make it again. Try it yourself — you've just about got enough time for next Christmas if you get cracking.

Christmas Menu

Menu for this year's Christmas dinner:

Oyster Patties    Cremant de Bourgogne

Cold Poached Salmon

Onion Soup    Sourdough Rolls

Roast Goose    Chateau Les Grands Sillons 2010

Chestnut Rice    Roasted Brussels Sprouts

Salad

Christmas Pudding    Apple Pie    Ice Cream

Overall it was quite delicious. The pudding will rate its own post soon. The only real flaw was that we planned this dinner for six people, but only three were available to eat it thanks to the Dread Virus. That means we're going to be eating leftovers for the rest of the year. 

Right now the goose skin is rendering for goose fat, the rest of the carcass is simmering for stock, and my son is passed out in a food coma upstairs.

Merry Christmas!

 

A Curious Omission

Dr. Kelly and I went to see Denis Villeneuve's new version of Dune a couple of weeks ago. It was good — the director has shown himself in the past to be a skilled and faithful adapter of science fiction stories to the screen. Good acting, beautiful visuals, a good score . . . 

But no food! It's a little astonishing that a movie made by a Frenchman, set on a planet famed for its spice production, doesn't have any memorable food scenes. We see Paul and his mother eat breakfast in one scene, but not what they're eating. This production won't give Andrew Rea anything to re-create for a Binging With Babish video.

It's particularly disappointing to me because it means the film leaves out one of my favorite scenes from the book: the banquet in Arrakeen. I know why the scene was cut — it's talky, it's full of minor characters who don't play much part in the bigger story, and it's part of a sub-plot the director decided to drop from the screenplay.

Still, it's a pity because we miss the only dishes actually named in the book: langues de lapin de garenne, roast desert hare in sauce cepeda, aplomage sirian, chukka under glass, and "a true pot-au-oie." Translations: lapin de garenne is simply rabbit (odd to have both rabbit and desert hare in the same meal); sauce cepeda sounds like a mushroom sauce but I can't find a reference to it outside of the novel, aplomage may be an extraterrestrial creature — likely from a planet orbiting Sirius — the word to me looks like a kind of featherless bird; chukka is another fictional food; and a pot-au-oie would be potted goose (probably some kind of confit). The rabbit tongues are a particularly decadent-sounding dish, reminiscent of the Roman fondness for parrot tongues in garum. To me, the meal comes across as unpleasantly rich — suitable for a winter feast in a cold climate, but far too heavy for a hot desert setting.

Either Mr. Herbert was trying to convey that the dinner was a display by the Duke, with costly imported food that will impress the rubes; or he was showing that the Atreides have just come from a very different world and their preferred foods are out of place; or he just made up some cool-sounding dishes. My money's on the last option. 

Were I to write that scene, I'd have done things a little differently. For one thing, this is a society in which the nobility are paranoid about poison, which suggests the entrees should all be big common-pot dishes: soups, stews, maybe big baked pasta or rice dishes. Cactus dishes seem appropriate, as would dates. Make a big rabbit pie as the first course, followed by cactus soup, game birds with dates served over couscous, and fresh off-world fruit to inspire awe among the desert planet inhabitants.

Now I have to go start making dinner.

 

Food Bragging: Harvest Edition

When you belong to a farm share, you get the vegetables in season, and you get as many as the farmers have produced. This means one must learn to deal with huge waves of vegetables, often more than can be eaten in a week. We're just past peak sweet corn season, so we're still getting half a dozen ears a week. Skip a day or two and it starts to accumulate.

I discovered a nice way to burn up accumulated fresh corn, especially the ears which have been sitting for a few days: make a pie. Tonight's dinner was corn pie and a salad of heirloom tomatoes and fresh lettuce.

How do you make a corn pie? Not hard. It's your favorite savory pie crust, with a large onion, some celery, half a dozen ears of corn cut off the cobs, a couple of sliced hard-boiled eggs, and parsley. To thicken the filling, one recipe I found suggested making a puree of some of the corn and mixing it with another egg to help it set. 

Not especially difficult to make, though what with preparing the filling, making the crust, assembling the pie, and then baking it, this is not at all quick. Save it for a weekend if you're pressed for time.

Now I just have to figure out what to do with a peck of hot peppers. Any ideas?

More Food Bragging

Turned 20 lbs. of tomatoes (from the farm stand, not our garden) into 6 quarts of sauce, put up in jars for winter. Had the excess sauce with some garlic and basil over homemade linguine.

It was very good.

Summer Afternoon Supper

The fresh corn and tomatoes are now appearing in our farm-share and at the local farm stands. Also, it's really hot. The obvious solution: Caprese Salad and Corn Fritters.

Caprese Salad is one of the simplest, most elegant salads out there. Tomato, fresh mozzarella, and basil leaves, with some oil, salt and pepper. Cool, subtle, and delicious. As a bonus, like so many Italian dishes, it patriotically displays the colors of the Italian flag. (The United States and other red-white-blue countries are all handicapped by the lack of blue foods to include in national dishes.)

The corn fritters were mostly a way to use up a couple of left over ears of corn. It's also pig-easy: cut the corn off the cobs, mix together with a large egg, a minced green onion, grated cheese, and a chopped small pepper (I don't know what kind of pepper it was, but it was a mild one). Flavor with salt, pepper, and a generous amount of cumin. Add flour until the mix is the right thickness for a batter. I can't be more specific than that, but stop just before you think you've added enough. Fry in about half an inch of oil until brown.

Accompanied by a butter-smooth Gascon white wine.