03 January 2009

Of bagels, beets, and beans

When I post about food exclusively, you can bet the weather is either too cold or too rainy for us to spend any time outside. Right now the temperature is below freezing, and I don't think it got up as high as +1ºC all day yesterday. In fact, a light snow fell for a good part of the afternoon. And this time of year it is too dark on my morning and afternoon walks with the dog to allow for photography.

Home-made bagels and Kraft Philadelphia cream cheese

Yesterday morning, Walt made bagels. Again, they were excellent. I don't know how he does it. I confirm it: I'm not a baker. I don't know how to work with flour. I can throw together a simple cake or a quick bread like cornbread, and I can make flour-thickened sauces, but when it comes to pastry, pie crusts, or yeast-leavened breads, je suis nul. Maybe it's because I've never needed to develop those skills, having a talented bread baker in the house.

Bagels rising on a baking sheet
before being boiled and then baked


Bagels — I want to make sure Susan and Simon see them, because they brought us the Philadelphia cream cheese from England that inspired Walt to make bagels again. We got some smoked salmon and smoked trout to have with them and the cream cheese.

Can you tell I'm really enjoying taking pictures using a tripod?

Did you know that Philadelphia cream cheese doesn't have any special connection to the city of Philadelphia in Pennsylvania? Philadelphia was adopted as a brand name for cream cheese in 1880 because that city was associated with top-quality food products back then. The first cream cheese was made in New York State. Nowadays, it is what is known in France as a fromage industriel — it's made in a factory, not on a farm.

A sesame-seed bagel

There is a village called Philadelphia in New York, way up north of Watertown on the St. Lawrence River, but I don't know if that's relevant. The Dictionary of American Food and Drink byJohn F. Mariani (1983) says the first cream cheese in America was produced in Downsville, N.Y., on the northern edge of the Catskills and not too far from Binghamton.

Bagels, cream cheese, smoked trout, and smoked salmon

On New Year's Eve, we went to the outdoor market in Saint-Aignan to buy our holiday oysters. And we walked by one of the good vegetable stalls along the way. I noticed that there were raw beets on display, and I thought about making a grated raw redbeet salad. You can grate raw beets the same way you can grate raw carrots and they make a nice salad with vinegar and oil.

Trois betteraves crues

I also noticed that the raw beets cost only half what the cooked ones cost, at 2.00€ per kilo. I was going to pick up three round beets, and then Walt said we should get one of the betteraves longues, the sort of carrot-shaped ones. So we did.

Une betterave longue rôtie au four

I cooked that one, wrapped tightly in aluminum foil, in the little toaster oven yesterday morning. It took a while, but it came out really nice. You can cook raw beets in the microwave or in boiling water as well, but the oven-roasted ones have a richer flavor, I think.

The cooked beet, cut into pieces to make it cool faster

At the vegetable seller's, one of the customers ahead of me in line asked for a handful of mâche, which is called lamb's lettuce in English, I think. Wikipedia calls it corn salad, which is a name I was not familiar with. Mâche is a winter crop.

It had been a long time since we'd had a salad made with mâche, which is a specialty of the Nantes area down at the mouth of the Loire River. And mâche, like Belgian endive (endive), escarole (scarole), and curly endive (frisée), is a salad green that happens to be very good served with beetroot.

Salade de mâche aux betteraves

So after our smoked fish, bagels, and cream cheese, we had a big salade de mâche aux betteraves. Eating fish and salad was a nice break from our recent diet of beans (we are having lima bean soup for lunch today).

Eating black-eyed peas on New Year's Day brings you
good luck for the rest of the year.


By the way, after our lunch of giant lima beans with duck and sausages on New Year's Day, we also had a little bowl of black-eyed peas for supper, just for good luck in 2009. I bought the black-eyed peas at SuperU. They were in a jar, not a tin, and they were imported from Portugal. Delicious.

12 comments:

  1. Here in PA the traditional dish you have to eat on New Year's day is sauerkraut. A big bowl of pork and sauerkraut is also on our family's table at Thanksgiving and Christmas. We aren't Pennsylvania Dutch, but we know a good food tradition when we see it.

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  2. Happy New Year, Carolyn. We missed out on sauerkraut this year. Maybe January isn't too late...

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  3. beets beets beets... I want to make a beet salad! Ken, how long do you roast those beets for? Is it similar to a potato? Say... an hour? 350, 375, higher?

    Carolyn, I have a friend here in St. Louis who grew up in Pennsylania, and she, too, mentioned the other day that she had to have her traditional pork and sauerkraut on New Year's Day! I hadn't realized that was anyone's tradition... and here you are, seconding it :) Hope it was good!

    Judy

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  4. Choucroute [sauerkraut] is an Alsatian tradition. I've never heard of it as being special to Christmas or New Year's day. You could have choucroute any time of year in a Brasserie alsacienne in Paris with Gewürztraminer or Champagne! Oh la la!!

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  5. Judy, all I can say is you should roast beets until they are done. Don't turn the oven up to high or the beets might burn. 350F is probably about right. Wrap the beets in foil. After an hour, poke them with a skewer or a knife to see if they are tender.

    CHM, I wish we had a choucroute restaurant in Saint-Aignan. There is a new Taverne de Maître Kanter in Blois -- remember, we had lunch in one of those in Bourges last June.

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  6. Walt's bagels look wonderful. We've been eating bagels (from House of Bagels) with lox, cream cheese, onion, and tomato throughout the holidays. It's great to have around.

    I threw some black-eyed peas into the chili on New Year's Day for an untraditional take on the southern tradition.

    And yesterday I made pea soup with the last of the holiday ham.

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  7. Hi Ginny, good food makes the holidays and these short winter days feel better, doesn't it? Walt makes great bagels, as you can see.

    We are supposed to have snow on Monday, with morning temperatures down into the low 20s F. Brrr.

    Happy New Year to you and yours, Ken

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  8. Hi Ken , I found you via S&S. By the look of your little salad leaves, they look exactly like baby spinach/silverbeet, which is sold everywhere in Australia with other salad.If that is what it is, it's extremely easy to grow,as you just keep cutting it before it gets too big and the plant keeps producing more leaves,spinach & goats cheese omlette is delicious.

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  9. Nice buns!

    I can't do bread either, I think yeast is allergic to me, and I can't be doing with all that physical working of the dough.

    There is an Alsacian Restaurant at Chambrey les Tours, in amongst the equipment hire and new kitchen shops. We ate there with Susan's parents - I had the coucroute, which was ginormous

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  10. Hi Ken and Walt – glad to see our Philly being put to serious good use. Your confitures likewise in our kitchen. I've said it before and I'll say it again – Walt's buns are just perfect...sigh...:-))

    Mâche = lamb's lettuce = corn salad definitely. We get a far greater range of baby salad leaves in Europe than I remember ever seeing in Australia.

    Beetroot takes forever whichever way you cook it, but I agree with Ken that doing them in the oven is best. It suits their earthy flavour, and concentrates their sweetness. Serve them with a little plain yoghurt or crème fraîche as an accompaniment to roast meat. Yum.

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  11. Hey Ken, I just saw some cooked beets at Géant, presented the way you had mentioned! So maybe I just hadn't been looking...

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  12. the bagels look fantastic -- i think they're fun to make, too, yes?
    happy new year to both of you. i've emalled you a ganked essay by mimi sheraton on the differences between bakers and chefs. crusty! hope you'll enjoy.

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