SpiceLines

Fougeru from the Ile de France, a soft unpasturized cow's milk cheese wrapped in
ferns during the maturing process, is one of many enticing cheeses at La Fromagerie.

A couple of hours on Marylebone High Street is enough to do serious damage, especially if you’re a small town domestic diva in search of high style.

Alexandra and I left the boys to their cigars in St. James, meandered past Buckingham Palace and Big Ben (security cameras recording our every move), then dipped into the tube for the day’s real goal: a spot of shopping in this tranquil West End enclave just a whisper away from the hurly-burly of Marylebone Road.

3:04 PM: Cobwebs of jet lag…a cappuccino is required. We make a beeline for the bright pink awning of Patisserie Valerie, formerly Maison Sagne, a Swiss patisserie famed for its bon bons and 1920’s Palladian-style murals. The diaphanous murals are still there, and a table under the gleaming chandelier is a perfect spot for people watching: a tweedy couple, plump as pouter pigeons, munching buttered toast; a quartet of louche 20-somethings ordering champagne; yummy mummies in cashmere and tulle buying pink marzipan elephants.

Love the extra-strong cappuccino, tender raisin scones, divine clotted cream. But Alexandra’s hot chocolate is watery; my doughnut-sized macaroon could sink a rowboat. $36.02.

3:31 PM: Neal’s Yard Remedies, seven doors down, is an airy haven for jet-weary travelers. Remedies to Roll is a little tube of essential oils like lavender, rosemary and bergamot that, applied to the pulse points, refreshes a stale body and mind. While Alexandra checks out the coconut and jojoba shampoo, I scoop up organic French lavender and black pepper essential oils for the bath. Blissing out on the voluptuous scent of Turkish rose otto…but, alas, they’re sold out till Friday. No grapefruit oils either, so we move on. $35.79.

3: 48 PM Across the street at the cookware shop, Divertimenti, a Royal Blue Falcon Deluxe 1092 Cooker commands center stage in the front window. It’s quite smart---lots of brass trim and a matching hood—and with six burners and a heavy duty, four position, roll-out grill, I know it would make everyday recipe development a breeze. (Note to self: Falcon cookers are on sale right now. Just $4,859.51 for the 1092 model. Wonder what the shipping would be…)

Inside, shelves of All Clad and Le Creuset prove that the world really is a smaller place, but I’m falling head over heels for Richard Bramble’s brilliant white porcelain plates and bowls hand decorated with spiny blue lobsters, tentacle-waving squid and other denizens of the deep. A set of those would almost obviate the need to serve your guests any food. They could just enjoy a virtual meal, then dabble in the gorgeous scallop and mussel-decked finger bowls. $199.85 for a set of six.

The real find is a mortar and pestle, irregularly shaped, made from a single chunk of olive wood with beautiful swirling grain. It is deep and, at 17cm wide, easily able to hold all the ingredients for a curry paste or pesto. It is far too heavy to carry—we’re en route to the Baltic-- so I’ll order it when I get home. The bored clerk can barely manage to hand me a card with the store’s particulars. $68.34.

4:12 PM: “Let’s go to La Fromagerie,” says Alexandra as we peer down Moxon Street. This faux-rustic cheese shop is one of 500 reasons to think of moving to London. The vitrine looks straight into the temperature-controlled cheese room where scores of superb farmhouse cheeses from all over Europe and the UK are temptingly nestled in straw or perched on shelves. Even though we’re outside, I can smell the faintest whiff of a ripening epoisse affine.

The great thing is that you can march right into the cheese room and have one of the super knowledgable workers cut and wrap the ones you want. We’re getting tastes of three: From Spain a manchego, aged 18 months, sharp with fruity undertones, slightly gritty in texture, just right with a glass of red wine. A charcoal-dusted rouelle affine, luscious goaty tang, very rich and creamy. And from Switzerland, a fribourg d’estive, a classic gruyere with a grainy texture and nutty flavor. $26.12.

4:28: We backtrack to Paul, a branch of the Paris boulangerie, to pick up a fresh baguette. ($3.54) Then serious hunger strikes. But what luck—we’re practically next door to the Providores and Tapas Room. The two story restaurant--fine dining upstairs, breakfast, all day tapas and wine bar downstairs--is the creation of a trio of New Zealanders, among them TV personality and cookbook author Peter Gordon.

Nestled into a table downstairs, we have a good view of the long wine bar, a few bibulous customers with a rosy glow, anda n enormous tapa, or ceremonial cloth from the South Seas almost covering one wall. As for the haute fusion menu, what to choose? A grilled Scottish scallop with sweet chilli sauce and crème fraiche? Slow braised duck, Spanish black bean, feta and chipotle chilli spring rolls with tamarind aioli? Welsh Black beef rendang with steamed Basmati rice, roast peanuts and coconut-banana yoghurt?

Golly. At last, I settle upon the tataki of line-caught tuna. It is a stunning dish, three slices of seared rare tuna atop a tropical tangle of jicama, mango, papaya and coconut, with earthy dollops of toasted nori puree and a puddle of spicy green peppercorn and lime dressing. Alexandra orders a 2003 New Zealand Palliser Pinot Gris, but nearly falls asleep after her second sip. $41.23.

4:56: On our way back to the tube, we swoop into Skandium, a shop specializing in modern Scandanavian design. We’ll be stopping in Helsinki, so I delay buying the sleek Tonfisk teapot with its wraparound oak sleeve and rustic cork stopper. ($113.39) Ditto for all things Marimekko, but I’m almost seduced by a cast iron cook pot with a flat wooden lid. It’s gorgeous, but would reduce me to hiring a porter just to carry it. Besides, haven’t I seen it somewhere in New York?

5:02: There it is: the Ur Table, the one I’ve been longing for, without exactly knowing it. This rough hewn French oak trestle table, made by Eric van Lerberghe, would be perfect for any repast, mid-summer or mid-winter. We’ve got the cheese, but let’s go back for the fish porcelain and a bottle of that New Zealand 2004 Peregrine pinot noir. The table’s at the Conran shop, waiting for me. $6,479.35.

Two hour grand total: $11,863.14. I love London.

Go here to see all the shops and restaurants on Marylebone High Street.

Wasabi isn’t exactly a cutting-edge flavor, especially now that most supermarket delis sell boxes of ready-made sushi with a dab of the fiery green Japanese horseradish paste. But, says today’s New York Times, diners at Eat’n Park, a chain of 78 restaurants in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Ohio, balked at ordering trendy wasabi-encrusted salmon.

In “Wasabi to the People: Big Chains Evolve or Die,” (Wednesday, July 11, 2007, Dining In, pp. D1 and D4), Micheline Maynard says senior vice president Brooks Broadhurst was perplexed by customers’ reaction, “although he did wonder whether the fish, with its pale green coating and pale green sauce, looked unappealing on the laminated multipage menu, especially next to the sundaes and pies covered in whipped cream.”

Americans crave exotic, ethnic flavors, and mainstream restaurant chains are under growing pressure to come up with dishes that use trendy ingredients that appeal to palates piqued by Top Chef and other venues for celebrity cooks. But there’s a fine, often unpredictable line between “cutting edge” and “unacceptable.” At Atlanta’s Bread Company, goat cheese salad bombed, but a Cuban roast pork loin sandwich was a winner with Hispanic customers. Meanwhile Panera Bread is serving a grilled salmon salad with Meyer lemon dressing at its 1,000 restaurants.

Pods of Prosopis alba, a variety of mesquite tree grown in South America, produce a
sweetly spicy flour that tastes of nutmeg and cinnamon.

Attention culinary trend spotters. Here’s the next new thing: cinnamon- and nutmeg-scented flour from the ancient mesquite tree.

Of course, you know about mesquite-grilled fajitas, baby back ribs, butterflied shrimp and all the other delectable foods cooked over the fragrant wood of the tree once known as the “scourge of the Southwest.”

But maybe you don’t know about the extraordinary flour that’s milled from the slender yellow pods that dangle from mesquite’s feathery green boughs in summer. It’s sweet and has a flavor redolent of cinnamon and nutmeg, maybe even coconut and mocha. It transforms ordinary pancakes with maple syrup into a breakfast of champions. In some dishes the flour has a fruity flavor, with chocolate it tastes more like a spice. The aroma that wafts from the kitchen is said to be irresistible.

Pastry chefs, are you listening?

This news came to me from Peter Felker, an old friend whom I met when I was working on Beinhorn's Mesquite Cookery, a book about the wonders of grilling with aromatic mesquite wood. Peter is a meticulous and deeply generous plant scientist who has spent the last 20 years traveling the world getting people to pay more attention to the genus Prosopis. In South Texas, where I grew up, mesquite is regarded as a pestiferous, thorny, water-sucking weed. But the pods, rich in protein and sugar, provided nourishment to Indians--not to mention starving explorers and traders--for centuries. Even today cattle munch on the beans in times of drought.

The finest mesquite flour comes from Argentina and Peru, where there are forests of enormous trees with sweet, sugary pods. In Argentina, the flour is milled in the Diocese of Anatuya, one of the poorest districts in the country. In the food journal Gastronomica, Peter writes that cakes made of ground algarobbo [the word used by the Spanish explorers for mesquite] and water, shaped and left in the sun to dry, are a ancient staple that is still sold in bus stations and food shops in northwestern Argentina.

In Peru, the flour is produced by a team of local villagers, with the help of a professor at the Universidad de Piura. In Gastronomica Peter observes that in the coastal deserts of Peru, a “molasses-like product known as algarobbina is made from the boiled down pods. The thick syrup is widely used for a refreshing cocktail composed of one large cup of milk, one half cup of algarobbina syrup, six jiggers of pisco (a type of grape brandy), four small packets of ground cinnamon and four eggs. The mixture is beaten and served over ice.” What happens next is anybody’s guess.

In both countries, the mesquite groves are certified organic. Flour production from the pods aims to stave off massive deforestation which is rapidly stripping the land of venerable stands of trees. In the province of Chao, Argentina, for example, over 100,000 tons of mesquite hardwood is cut down every year for furniture manufacturing. Because the tree is a legume that enriches the fertility of desert soils through nitrogen fixation, it is integral to the ecosystems of these desert-like areas. As Peter notes, “the economic future of the region may lie in the processing of mesquite flour.”

So here's the next cutting edge ingredient: An exotic imported flour with an ancient past and a fruity-spicy flavor that works magic in pastries and other baked goods—and that is also helping to boost sustainable agriculture in some of the world’s poorest regions.

When my sample arrives, I’ll let you know how the pancakes turn out.

"Next time, bring me a husband," laughs a merchant at Kuznechny, a covered market
in St.Petersburg. She is selling big bunches of dill and parsley, traditional greens in
Russian cuisine.

It’s 7:42 AM in St. Petersburg. The early morning sun is slanting across the street. Well, perhaps not early morning. During summer’s white nights, the sun begins its slow ascent at 2:00 AM after just an hour or two of deep blue twilight. I love the endless day. It makes me feel unmoored from time.

We’re standing on the sidewalk outside Kuznechny market, waiting for the doors to open.

To get here, Masha—a plump, red-headed aeronautical engineer turned computer analyst—has led Bill and me through empty streets along the Moika River, past faded stucco palaces, through an arch into a secret garden with wide, tree-shaded paths, and finally on a street car down bustling Nevsky Prospekt until we alight a few blocks from the onion-domed Lady of Vladimir church.

The covered market won’t open until 8 AM. On the sidewalk a few elderly women are selling buckets of blowsy pink and crimson peonies. Across the street, in the shadow of the 18th century Russian Orthodox church, a vaguely Asiatic brother and sister are hawking a version of shawarma, shredded carrots, cabbage and meat wrapped in flatbread. Masha shows us the window of Dostoyevsky’s last apartment, now a museum. “He always chose an apartment where he could see the domes of a church,” she says. The great novelist probably strolled through Vladimirsky, the open air market which occupied the site on which Kuznechny was built about 70 years ago. Today food is sold is an airy, white-tiled hall, but for centuries there was a vibrant oudoor market on this spot.

At last the doors open. The air is marvelously perfumed with dill. “Next time you come, bring me a husband!” jokes a vivacious red-head, who is laying out big bunches of the greens--parsley, onions with long tops and feathery dill--which are used in so many Russian dishes. There are almost no customers and the merchants don’t mind chatting as they uncover their wares—caviar on ice, brightly colored honey cakes, jewel-like displays of dried fruit and nuts.

Here’s what we’re seeing and tasting now:

--Mounds of plump stiff-necked garlic bulbs, some creamy white, others lightly streaked with purple. Not Chesnok Red, or any of the other compact Russian purple stripes grown in America, but more likely elephant garlic—which, naturally, is often called “Russian garlic.” In Georgia the mild tasting cloves are tossed with olive oil and lemon or vinegar, marinated for a few days and then eaten like a salad.

--Bright red tomatoes with tiny “birds’ beaks” or tails curling out of the blossom end. Enormous pink tomatoes that look a lot like German Johnsons, a popular heirloom variety at our local farmers’ market.

--Glorious bunches of green and purple grapes that give new meaning to the word “Dionysian.” Each juicy bunch hangs from an iron stand in solitary perfection. From the south, piles of red-gold cherries, dewy apricots, buff-colored melons, their rinds traced with intricate lacy pattern.

--In the meat section to the rear, huge pork haunches. In the fish department, tanks of live perch, carp and sterlet, a sort of sturgeon with a long, narrow, vaguely prehistoric snout. There is a recipe for whole steamed sterlet with a sauce of ground almonds and Madeira in the cookbook for Podvorye, an idyllic dacha turned restaurant near Tsarskoye Selo, the turquoise summer palace of Catherine I.

--Ladies with frilly white tiaras and stern expressions selling ladlefuls of smetana or sour cream. Russian sour cream tastes a lot like crème fraiche and it can be very runny or quite thick, depending upon the fat content. It is sublime on beet borscht and, mixed with a spicy Georgian blend of herbs and hot red pepper, over boiled beef sprinkled with dill and fresh cranberries. Carp is sometimes baked with potatoes in sour cream.

I buy a slice of domashnije siz—Masha translates this as “cheese of homemaking”—white, delicate, creamy cheese pressed into round decorative molds. It is exquisitely fresh but so perishable that 12 hours later the texture has become rubbery.

-- Spicy pickled cucumbers, whole garlic and bundles of wild garlic shoots. The vegetables are steeped in rassol, salted vinegar spiked with hot peppers, horseradish root, dill, black currant leaves and other ingredients. Leftover rassol, or “pickle water,” is the base for a variety of hearty soups, one of which is known as rassolnik, a common cure for vodka hangovers.

--I linger longest with a shy young man selling dried fruit and nuts. There are plump walnuts, pine nuts from Siberia, dried apricots, kiwis, figs and wild cranberries (much smaller than our own), and tiny packets of spices: cinnamon, coriander seed, and blue-black barbarries with a bright, acidic flavor. The shiny, reddish churchkhela, a traditional Georgian candy, is irresistible: walnuts are threaded onto a thin string, then dipped repeatedly into grape juice that has been boiled until it is thick and syrupy. The candy is soft, chewy, sweet and mildly scented with cinnamon.

We’d love to tarry, but our friends are calling. The honey sellers still haven’t appeared. In fact, at 9 AM a surprising number of tiled counters are simply empty. It is too early? Or is something else going on?

Since April 1, immigrants have been banned from selling at any of Russia’s 5,200 food markets, ostensibly as part of a “Russia for Russians” campaign. Traditional vendors of fruits, vegetables and spices—mostly Georgians, Uzbeks, Tajiks and Chinese—are forbidden to work in the markets. Empty stalls and price hikes followed the ban. For more, see “Markets Suffer After Russian Bans Immigrant Vendors,” Andrew E. Kramer, The New York Times, April 14, 2007.

Kuznechny Market is located at 3 Kuznechny Pereulok.
Telephone: +7 812 312-4161

In this refreshing summer soup, the sweet earthy flavor of grated beets is brightened
with a splash of lemon juice and lots of fresh dill and green onions.

At the lunch table at my San Antonio school, the only thing worse than stewed tomatoes were the dreaded canned beets. We didn’t have a choice: we had to clean our plates. If you didn’t, you’d sit in the silent, darkened dining room all afternoon, with the plate of cold, crimson, sickly sweet slices looking back at you. It was impossible to escape the sight or metallic smell of the beets. At last, when the dismissal bell rang, a tight-lipped teacher would appear to let you go home.

Needless to say, I spent more than one afternoon with the beets.

So I don’t know what possessed me to go into the old Russian Tea Room two decades later and order the borscht, a soup in which beets are the main ingredient. It was late in the afternoon and I sat there in solitary splendor; only one other table was occupied by a Broadway producer and his director in happy, animated conversation. I remember a deft waiter handing me an enormous menu and my eyes lighting on one thing I could afford: borscht with sour cream.

I don’t remember what it tasted like. But I vividly remember falling in love with beets for the first time. So it must have been good.

In the Baltic last month, I conducted an informal borshch study—that’s how it’s spelled in Russia—by ordering it whenever I could. In St. Petersburg I sat in the window of our 7th floor room at the Hotel Astoria gazing at St. Isaac’s gilded dome, the sun still glancing off its golden surfaces at 10 PM, spooning some of the most delicious borshch I’ve ever tasted into my mouth. It was perfectly simple, just shredded beets in their broth, lots and lots of fresh dill, and lemon juice. It came with a little dish of the thickest, richest smetana or sour cream I’ve ever had, and when I stirred them together, the crimson borshch turned a bright pink.

I soon discovered that borshch, which is said to have originated in the Ukraine, comes many different ways. At Restaurant Polovtsev, in the richly paneled dining room of a famous Russian senator’s mansion, I ate a hefty borshch of shredded beets—the beets were always shredded, never chopped— in beef broth thick with cubes of tongue. It was a hearty soup better suited to St. Petersburg’s annual 130 days of rain and snow than a summer’s balmy white night. At Podvorye, a dacha outside St. Petersburg, the borshch combines pork or beef brisket with an entire vegetable market: beets, cabbage, carrots, onions, sweet pepper, tomatoes and garlic. There is borshch with beans, with mushrooms, with potatoes and with roots of parsley, celery and parsnip.. In Estonia, at Kuldse Notsu Korts (aka the “Golden Piggie”), the beetroot soup was flavored with smoky sausages. It was very tart, splashed with both lemon juice and vinegar. There’s even a so-called green borshch, a sorrel soup or shchi, which has no beets at all.

In summer I want a light cold borshch with lots of fresh herbs. I found a recipe for a cold summer soup in Russian Cuisine, a cookbook by Lydia Liakhovskaya, which is the perfect fit. It is very similar to the borshch at the Hotel Astoria, except that it is served cold instead of warm. It has the refreshing idea of adding diced cucumber to the mix, and is brightened with lemon juice.

Early to mid summer is a perfect time to make cold borshch, when the beets are freshly dug from the earth and are still small and tender. (They are a cool season crop, so otherwise, wait till fall.) I used both red and golden beets; if you can find some of the heirloom varieties such as the red and white striped chioggia, all the better. Their sweet earthy flavor is perfectly set off by lots of chopped fresh dill and the green tops of white onions. (If necessary you can substitute scallion greens.) I always use crème fraiche which is much closer in richness and flavor to Russian smetana than grocery store sour cream. It is a perfect meal, needing only a glass of chilled white wine.

Cold Summer Borshch with Dill, Cucumber and Crème Fraiche
(adapted from Russian Cuisine by Lydia Liakhovskaya)

To serve 4

Ingredients:

2-1/4 pounds of gold and red beets
6 cups water
1 pound cucumbers
1 large bunch dill, about 2 cups chopped
1 large bunch green tops of onions, about 1-1/2 cups chopped tops
1/4 cup freshly squeezed lemon juice, or to taste
Pinch of sugar, to taste
Salt to taste
1/2 cup crème fraiche
1 to 2 tablespoons of shredded golden beets for garnish (optional)
Additional chopped dill and green onion for garnish

Method:

1. Scrub the beets with a brush under cold running water. Cut off the tops and tails. Put the beets in a medium saucepan, cover with 6 cups of water and bring to a boil over high heat. Lower the heat to medium and simmer briskly until they are tender when pierced with a fork, about 45 minutes. Do not let the beets get mushy.
2. Strain the liquid from the beets into a bowl and reserve. In a separate bowl allow the beets to cool. When they are cool enough to touch, peel them and shred them on a coarse grater. (If you are using golden beets, reserve 1 to 2 tablespoons separately for garnish.) Set aside.
3. Peel the cucumbers, cut them half vertically, and scoop out the seeds with a spoon. Cut the cucumber into 1/4-inch cubes.
4. In a large bowl, mix the shredded beets, cucumbers and reserved broth. Add the chopped dill and green onions. Stir in the lemon juice, sugar and salt to taste. Mix well and chill for one hour.
5. To serve, ladle the cold soup into four bowls. Top with one to two tablespoons of crème fraiche, garnish with a spoonful of the shredded golden beets and sprinkle chopped dill and green onion over it all.

Green borshch's brightly acidic flavor comes from sorrel leaves, which are packed
with oxalic acid. Potatoes, onions, other greens and lavish quantities of pepper
help to balance the tartness of the soup.

Green borshch, as you might suspect, has no beets at all.

Instead it gets its color from liberal amounts of sorrel, along with parsley, green onion, and a smattering of dill.

You rarely see sorrel in American markets, except perhaps in the gourmet herb section of your supermarket. Which is odd, since rumex acetosa is a perennial herb that grows rampantly throughout Europe and parts of Asia, Its bright, sour taste comes from an abundance of oxalic acid in the mature leaves, and in the time of Henry VIII it was favorite salad herb. John Evelyn, an 18th century diarist and friend of Samuel Pepys, praised the “grateful quickness” it imparted “in the making of sallets…as supplying the want of oranges and lemons.” Like citrus fruit, it was said to cure scurvy and all sorts of inflammatory ailments.

But most of us, if we think of sorrel at all, associate it with French cuisine. Larousse Gastronomique has a host of recipes for the herb, including a luxurious veloute soup in which the leaves are blanched in boiling water, sweated in butter, then pureed in a chicken consommé thickened with a white roux and beaten with egg yolks, double cream and more butter. What’s amazing is that sorrel’s powerful acidity can stand up to all that richness.

In contrast, Russian sorrel soup is plain peasant fare, the sort of dish that might have been casually improvised on a summer day after a walk in a lush meadow. Coarsely chopped leaves, gathered in the wild or cultivated in a vegetable plot, were simmered in a hearty broth with potatoes and onions. More greens were added towards the end, then a spoonful of smetana or sour cream and a sliced hard boiled egg. It was—and is—a complete meal, satisfying and filling, especially in a cool Northern climate.

Sorrel is also known as spinach dock, and in fact sorrel and spinach are sometimes combined in green borshch. Then it may be called zelyonye shchi. Shchi is a sour Russian soup, usually made with cabbage or sauerkraut—the connection, I suppose, is in the acidic taste. There is also a type of shchi that includes nettles and sorrel.

By any name this sorrel soup has a wonderfully tart flavor that seems right for summer, even if it is a bit hearty. I first tasted this soup as part of a vodka-fueled lunch at Podvorye, a rustic restaurant near the town of Pushkina that is said to be a favorite of Vladimir Putin. The recipe in Podvorye’s cookbook calls for 250 grams of sorrel –about 9 ounces. To get that much sorrel, I went to Whole Foods and ordered a dozen 3/4- ounce plastic clamshells from Jacobs Farm, an organic culinary herb grower in California. Quite naturally, the day after it arrived I was visiting a neighbor in the next block who showed me a healthy patch of sorrel in his vegetable garden. “I don’t know what to do with it,” he said ruminatively. Hmmm….

Russian sorrel soup seems to be made more often with beef broth, but because I had two quarts of homemade chicken broth in the freezer, that’s what I used. It is good either way: the important thing is that the broth should be rich and full-flavored. To slightly offset the sourness of the sorrel, I used buttery Yukon gold potatoes and sweet Vidalia onions. The cookbook specifies additional “greens” but doesn’t give many clues—I used tops of green onions, flat leaf parsley and a little dill. Lavish amounts of salt and pepper should be added towards the end in order to pull the flavors into balance. Podvorye’s soup was quite peppery.

With all the herbs, potatoes, a hardboiled egg and crème fraiche (which tastes more like Russian sour cream than the supermarket variety), this green borshch is so filling that you don’t need anything else for supper. Still, a tiny glass or two of chilled vodka wouldn’t be amiss.

Green Summer Borscht with Sorrel, Potatoes and Crème Fraiche

(adapted from the cookbook for Podvorye Restaurant)

The soup tastes even better if you make it early in the morning, so that the flavor of the sorrel has time to blend with other ingredients.

To serve 4

Ingredients:

6 cups rich beef or chicken broth, preferably homemade
3 cups potatoes, peeled and cut in 1/4 inch dice
4 large eggs
3 cups onion, cut in 1/4 inch dice
2 tablespoons canola oil
9 ounces sorrel leaves, roughly chopped (see note)
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
1 cup green onions or scallions, tops only, chopped
1 cup flat leaf parsley, chopped
1/4 cup fresh dill, chopped
1/2 cup crème fraiche

Method:

1. Combine the broth and diced potatoes in a large saucepan and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat to medium low and simmer for 10 minutes.
2. While the potatoes are cooking, put the eggs in a small saucepan and cover with water. Bring to a boil, turn off the heat, and leave them while preparing the soup.
3. In a medium skillet, sauté the diced onions in the oil until they are soft, translucent and just beginning to brown around the edges. Add to the soup and simmer for 5 minutes.
4. Add the sorrel, green onions and parsley to the soup and cook for 5 minutes. Add salt and pepper to taste, but don’t stint. You’ll need plenty to balance the tartness of the herbs and the blandness of the potatoes. The soup should be peppery tasting.
5. Before serving, peel the eggs and cut them in quarters. Add 2 or 3 pieces to each bowl, tucking them under the sorrel and potatoes. Top each serving with a generous spoonful of crème fraiche and sprinkle with a little dill.

Note: Fresh sorrel can be ordered from Jacobs Farm.

Two articles caught my attention this week:

After 13 years in America, Gelareh Asayesh returned to Iran to join her family for the saffron harvest in the crocus-studded fields of the northeast province of Khorasan. In “Season of the Flower,” (Gourmet, August 2007, pp. 32-34, 112) Asayesh vividly recalls the stripping of the precious red gold stamens from the purple flowers: “During visits for tea and conversation, housewives would haul out cloth bundles, unknotting them to spill forth flowers still cool from the night. Each blossom would be ruthlessly stripped while we talked. Everyone in the family seemed adept at this task, their hands moving nimbly, stripping petals away from stamens that would join the growing bundles held between fore and middle fingers…It was the one time of the year when the garbage smelled sweet.”

Asayesh also describes Persian dishes in which saffron is a key ingredient: “…pale yellow hand-churned bastini-e-akbar mashti—saffron ice cream dotted with thick clots of cream…aromatic lamb stews simmering in heavy stone pots in dimly lit kitchens…[and] roasted melon seeds and pistachio nuts flavored with the spice.” She includes a recipe for gheimeh, Persian beef and split pea stew flavored with saffron, cinnamon, allspice and dried Omani lemons.

In last week’s New Yorker, Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk recalls how American hot dogs, hamburgers and grilled cheese sandwiches transformed Istanbul’s fast food street fare during the 1960’s—despite edicts against eating meat of unknown origin. In “Forbidden Fare,” (The New Yorker, July 9 & 16, 2007, pp. 48-50), Pamuk describes his ecstatic early encounters with the illicit frankfurter: “We’d gaze through the glass at the dark-red sauce that had been simmering all day and select one of the frankfurters wallowing in it like happy water buffalo in the mud…” For the writer, eating American street food was a major break with Islamic tradition and a step towards the “solitary individualism that modernity so often involves.”

At Podvorye, a country restaurant favored by Vladimir Putin, peonies and zinnias
were blooming in profusion in the summer garden.

“Marina came in a red motorcar of an early ‘runabout’ type, operated by the butler very warily as if it were some fancy variety of corkscrew. She looked unwontedly smart in a man’s grey flannels and sat holding the palm of her gloved hand on the knob of a clouded cane as the car, wobbling a little, arrived to the very edge of picnic site, a picturesque glade in an old pinewood cut by ravishingly lovely ravines. A strange pale butterfly passed from the opposite side of the woods, along the Lugano dirt road, and was followed presently by a landau….”

--Vladimir Nabokov in Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle, 1969

Nabokov’s Ada is a novel that demands to be read during the dog days of summer, preferably on a velvet couch while drinking cold black tea spiced with black peppercorns and red currants. Ada and Van Veen’s cousinly love affair evolves slowly and deliciously during a languid summer at their family’s romantic country retreat. Even though Ardis, a three-story pile of “pale brick and purplish stone,” is located in some mysterious land, not quite Russia, nor Europe or America, it is in spirit a summer place that evokes the dreamlike world of the old dachas built during the reign of Peter the Great.

Dacha means “something given”—and the term came to be used for the property given by the tsar to his most loyal retainers. Some dachas were simple log cottages or izbas, others were small palaces—but all of them were places of retreat from the world, where long hot summers might be spent drowsing in bedrooms on cool sheets, chasing butterflies in wildflower meadows, and drinking, as Nabokov wrote, “the cold sweet tea of childhood".

I was thinking about all this as we drove slowly through the sleepy town of Pushkina, just a few miles from St. Petersburg. With the sunlight filtering through tall trees on moldering neoclassic buildings, it felt light years away from the urban thrum. We had spent the morning at Tsarskoye Selo, the Baroque summer palace of Catherine I, the favorite second wife of Peter the Great. It was painted the most improbable shade of bright blue by their egomaniacal daughter, Elizabeth, to match her eyes, it is said. Once compared to a “celestial constellation,” the palace resembles an elaborate turquoise and white confection. The Great Hall or ballroom shimmers with gold leaf and mirrors reflecting upon themselves, and the famous Amber Study, whose glowing panels were plundered and lost, forever, it seems, during World War II, has been painstaking restored by a battalion of craftsmen. But in the Park surrounding all this opulence there are semi-wild, romantic spots with charming pavilions and little bridges that must have enticed courtiers to ramble, perhaps aimlessly, on a summer day.

Delicious fresh salted vegetables were pickled for 24 hours in a brine flavored
with garlic, dill, hot peppers and leaves such as black currant and cherry.

A little futher on we turned into the driveway of Podvorye, a rambling log izba with a tower crowned by a stained glass cock. Podvorye, which means “coach house,” is really a restaurant, but its summer garden of crimson peonies and fanciful decor—wild horse heads serve as roof finials--evokes the dreamy spirit of an old country dacha. Which is great, because within minutes of sitting down at a long trestle table and pouring the first of many glasses of Russian Standard vodka, we were besieged by busloads of singing Venezuelan tourists and folk dancers stomping on the unpolished wood floors.

Is Podvorye a tourist trap? Yes, but of the most delectable sort. It is said to be Russian President Vladimir Putin’s favorite restaurant—he was born in St. Petersburg and you can order the same menu he had on his birthday—and the guest book includes Prince Charles, French President Jacques Chirac, First Lady Lora (sic) Bush, actors Steve Martin and Gwyneth Paltrow, Simon Le Bon from Duran Duran, and fashion designers Jil Sander and John Galliano.

But if you can get past all this, it is a perfectly wonderful place to eat authentic Russian food. Podvorye’s cookbook, naturally sold in the souvenir shop, shows owner Sergei Guttsayt in Kuznechny market, poring over boxes of bright lingonberries, examining strings of dried mushrooms and sizing up fine cuts of pork. Guttsayt, who is rotound, pink-cheeked and vaguely aristocratic looking, has his own summer estate in Crimea and the red and white wine on the table is made in his vineyards.

Here’s what we had for lunch:

Beef with spicy sour cream dressing was mixed with sauteed onion and topped
with sour cream flavored with a special Georgian herb mixture and cranberries.

Boiled beef topped with a garlicky sour cream sauce. The sauce is spiced with with freshly ground black pepper, coriander leaves and a mixture of dried basil, hot red pepper, parsley, celery, dill, coriander, laurel leaf, mint and marjoram widely used in Georgian and Armenian cuisine. The dish was strewn with tiny cranberries, very tart and much smaller than our own.

Earthenware bowls of delicious fresh salted cucumbers, tomatoes, huge garlic cloves and scapes. The tomatoes and garlic were pickled for 24 hours in a brine flavored with dill stalks and flowers, black currant leaves and hot peppers; the brine for the cucumbers included horseradish root and leaves as well as dill and other wild leaves.

Plates of thinly sliced roast pork with cucumbers, and bowls of mushrooms baked in sour cream.

A superb sorrel soup or green borshch, thick with fresh sorrel leaves, potatoes and hardboiled eggs, topped with sour cream and thinly sliced scallions. The soup was sour and very peppery.

Golubitsy, or cabbage and grape leaves stuffed with beef, pork and rice, simmered in a sauce of sour cream , tomato and fresh greens.

To die for pale green pistachio ice cream, rich and nutty tasting, served with tender blini filled with dried lingonberries in a pool of the delicious honey that had eluded us at Kuznechny Market a few days earlier.

Later, perusing the menu on Podvorye’s website, I was struck by what we didn’t have a chance to try: paprika (red peppers) pickled in honey, wild quail stuffed with lingonberries and apple, chicken Taback, pressed and grilled Caucasus style, sturgeon (Beluga) shashlik (on a skewer), and the "drunken desserts"—preserves of fruit like mulberries and cornelian cherries in liqueur, homemade at Guttsayt’s own summer place in Crimea.

Podvorye Restaurant, 16 Filtrovskoye Avenue, Pavlovsk, St. Petersburg, Russia 196625. Telephone: 812-466-85-44. Web: www.podvorye.ru

Pungent mint, fruity tasting olives and creamy ricotta salata give bland summer
squash a savory spin. Add freshly cracked green peppercorns for extra spice.

When serendipity strikes in my kitchen, it’s usually by accident.

This recipe began with an embarrassment of summer squash. First there was zucchini, a notorious garden thug that drives normally circumspect people to leave baskets of the stuff on their neighbors’ doorsteps under cover of darkness.

Then came bushels of the prettiest yellow crooknecks that looked as if their bottoms had been dipped in pale green paint. Both kinds of squash are delicious if plucked when still small. They are tender, with a delicate, mildly sweet flavor--so good that you can just slice and gobble them raw, like cucumbers, or dip them into yogurt mixed with a little chopped garlic. Another way to serve summer squash is to cook it with fresh corn, onion and thyme, then smash everything together slightly and add butter and salt.

But while the squash (let's not mention the eggplant) was piling up in the kitchen, the mint was running wild in the garden, staging sneak attacks on the Sungold cherry tomato vines and the dark red dahlias. I yanked up a huge handful and came inside to savor the possibilities. Fresh mint has a wonderfully cool refreshing flavor, but it can also be hot and spicy. There are so many cultivars that it’s almost impossible to keep count, but true peppermint—mentha piperita, especially the purple-stemmed variety that's mounting a surge in our garden—is intensely pungent. It makes delicious Moroccan mint tea and fantastic mojitos. It’s the best mint to use in summer cooking, especially in any dish in which you really want the taste of the herb to stand out. I love it.

Mint seemed like just the thing to perk up the mild taste of summer squash. But there was more: In the refrigerator I found a container of purplish Kalamata olives, which would add a fruity, salty dimension to the dish. And for richness, well, there was a chunk of crumbly ricotta salata, firm, creamy tasting, and only slightly salty--left over from another experiment. All that was left was to add were a few cloves of garlic and some pepper. The distinctive taste of black pepper seemed too assertive for this dish, so I opted for freshly cracked green peppercorns which lent a touch of heat, but in a more subtle way.

This is a perfect summer vegetable dish. Squash of kinds are abundant in farmer’s markets, and you may find big bunches of fresh mint as well, or even at your supermarket. When cooking, you really don’t have to measure anything, just add the mint, olives, ricotta salata and other seasonings to taste. Best of all, it’s quick—about 15 minutes to cook and a few minutes more to stand before serving.

Summer Squash with Fresh Mint, Kalamata Olives and Ricotta Salata

To serve four as a side dish, or two as a main course

Ingredients:

(I’ve given measurements, but feel free to cook this to your own taste.)

1-1/2 pounds of small summer squash (mix of zucchini and crooknecks)
1 tablespoon olive oil
5 cloves of garlic, peeled, smashed and coarsely chopped
Salt to taste
1/2 teaspoon green peppercorns
Small handful of mint leaves, about 1/4 cup
1/4 cup Kalamata olives, pitted
2 ounces ricotta salata, coarsely crumbled

Method:

1. Wash the squash and trim the tops and tails. Quarter the squash lengthwise and cut it into small chunks.
2. In a large saucepan, warm the olive oil over medium heat. Add the garlic and sauté briefly, then add the squash. Cook, tossing occasionally with a spatula, for 7 to 8 minutes, until the squash is cooked through and is beginning to brown around the edges.
3. While the squash is cooking, put the peppercorns in a ziplock bag and crush them with the handle of a chef’s knife. Strip the mint leaves off their tough stems and roughly tear them into pieces. Smash the olives with the flat side of a knife and tear them into pieces as well. Crumble the ricotta, but keep it in largish pieces.
4. When the squash is ready, remove it from the heat. Add salt and cracked green peppercorns to taste. Stir in half the mint, and all the olives and ricotta salata. Let the ingredients sit for a few minutes, so the flavors can mingle. Just before serving, add the rest of the mint.

Where would mushroom foam, bacon and egg ice cream, and blow-torched, deep-fried, caramelized cinnamon sticks with Meyer lemon be without Herve This? Or, more precisely, what would Ferran Adria, Heston Blumethal and Grant Achatz be cooking if this eminent French chemist hadn’t once ruined a cheese soufflé by tossing in all the egg yolks at once? The culinary disaster inspired This to spend the next 27 years collecting and testing “cooking precisions”—culinary rules that explain what does—and doesn’t—work in the kitchen.

In “Ion Chef” (Wired, August 2007, p. 58), Sally McGrane Interviews Herve This at a Paris bistro over an airy chocolat chantilly conjured in a jar to his own scientific formula. The article is a nice introduction to the man who, along with late Oxford physicist Nicolas Kurti, invented the field of molecular gastronomy—dubbed by Harold McGee as ‘the scientific study of deliciousness.” McGrane writes that after decades of research, This “came up with a formal system of classification for what happens when foods are mixed, baked, whipped, fried, sautéed in lime juice and so forth.” The system permits “the creation and pairing of billions of novel, potentially tasty dishes.” As an example, This “randomly generated a formula describing the physical microstructure of a previously nonexistent dish, then asked chef Pierre Gagnaire to plug real ingredients into it.” The result--a bitter orange, scallop and smoked tea combination--wowed Gagnaire’s customers.

Now This plans to investigate “the role that love—of the cook for the diners, the diners for the cook and of everyone for each other—plays in determining tastes.” That’s true alchemy, for which, I suspect, there is no formula.

I’ve been eyeing This’ book, Molecular Gastronomy, for a couple of years. After reading this article, I finally ordered it.