Green With Red Spots

Here’s something I’ve thought about a lot lately. From Tara Parker-Pope, New York Times:

[...] Some people are trying to cut back on meat, but not give it up altogether. While it sounds simple, eating a little meat can sometimes be harder than eating none at all.

[...] Now there’s a new cookbook for the reluctant meat eater who doesn’t want to go vegetarian: “Almost Meatless: Recipes That Are Better for Your Health and the Planet,” by Joy Manning and Tara Mataraza Desmond (Ten Speed Press).

[...]Ms. Manning, who was a vegetarian from the age of 14 until 26, said the idea for the book began when she realized that she was eating a lot of processed “vegetarian junk food.”“I came to the conclusion that an almost-meatless diet was healthier, tastier, and more ethical,” said Ms. Manning, now 31. “I didn’t want to dive into the meat-centric meals that are typical of most non-vegetarians.” Notably, Ms. Manning said she lost weight after adding a little meat back into her diet.

It’s a good idea. This all should be elementary to anyone who’s at all interested in their health and the environment. Less meat than what an average person eats (a whopping 225 grams per day in the US) is definitely a good idea: around a 100 grams of meat and dairy a day is probably optimal for your health and your carbon footprint depending on the choice of meat. Cutting out meat and dairy altogether, however, doesn’t necessarily suit everyone or make the world a better place, so this sounds like a good solution and a concrete alternative.

Cookbooks generally don’t get taken out of the shelves to provide instructions for cooking everyday dinners, though, so this should be put into people’s heads in homes and schools as well. I banged my head against the wall for nearly ten years with varying forms of vegan, vegetarian, diets and could never stay within the normal weight range. I found it amazing how much fuller (not to mention healthier and more energetic) I felt without gaining weight when I gradually added eggs and dairy, fish, white meat and finally red meat back into my diet.

Had I never been a vegetarian I don’t think I’d know or understand much about food or cooking, though. Paradoxically, the variety in the dinner choices seemingly expands tenfold every time you have to leave an ingredient out, because then you really think about what you can prepare out of what’s left.

Ditch the Recipe

New York Times has an article on Eula Mae Doré, a renowned Cajun chef who never had formal training and didn’t use recipes. She worked for McIlhenny Company, makers of Tabasco, for 57 years.

Speaking of cookbooks, like Heston Blumenthal’s excellent Big Fat Duck Cookbook, it seems that lately a wash of books has hit our bookshelf labeled under “Cooking” that have very few, if any, recipes. Instead they concentrate on other aspects of preparing food, like food chemistry, or specific ingredients, like cheese (in which case they might come with a brief, glued-on recipe section at the end that concentrates on the ingredient in question).

My own cooking rarely centers around recipes. Even when I’m using one I get the irresistible urge to change the amounts of ingredients, swap them with my own alternatives or completely break them apart and just make up my own unrecognisable versions of them. What mostly happens is that I eat something memorable at a restaurant and then try to replicate it at home without knowing how it was done and what ingredients were used, as was the case with Consommé from Baked Rice & a Poached Egg that we tasted at Postres (Helsinki).

Sometimes the first impression of what a dish is about is completely different – and far more interesting – from the picture than the recipe that accompanies it turns out to be. This often leads to experimenting that sometimes leads to great, but far more often not so great, results. Sometimes in case of failure I tend to get a bit angry and force my initial idea to work through a lot of research and experimenting, if I have the time and see enough potential in the combination of ingredients I’ve imagined.

I’m far from being a great all-round cook, but what skills I have I’ve learned through experimenting. A recipe in itself holds no logic for me, whereas preparing a dish in two slightly different ways and comparing them starts to make a lot sense.

Moving Back to Gourmet Mode After Christmas

I was probably one of the first people in Finland to get this book having had it pre-ordered for me by my love back in the summer when it showed up in Amazon (and supposedly at a huge discount at around £60 instead of £100).

Sparse in recipes despite its well over 500 pages, Heston Blumenthal’s Big Fat Duck Cookbook is not only an appropriate sequel to his excellent In Search of Perfection cookbooks, but also makes a visually striking statement that shows what the possible cookbook of the future might look like. If you’re one of those serious amateur home cooks that make a living in graphic design (like me), take a look!

The Piece of Bread Called "Pizza"

Finnish tourists in Italy have bumped into a small, delicious piece of bread, pizza, the stuffing of which varies from county to another. It’s eaten everywhere in Italy. There are extraordinary quick snack bars and kiosks, pizzerias, where people, standing up, hurriedly stuff down a few pizzas.

– Erik Haack, Gastronomian maailmasta (From the World of Gastronomy), 1968

I found this little gem at Hagelstam, the place for old & antique books in the Helsinki centre. As you can read from the excerpt above, it’s from the distant times before pizza, a dish now known to everyone, had made it to Finland. (He also describes how you can use “a little marjoram” to garnish it; the word “oregano” was also yet to be imported).

The book is mainly about food in foreign countries, and while making a good job of it, the author ( actually manages to tell us more about Finnish food culture at the time of its writing, 1968. Just imagine going to your nearest supermarket only to find they don’t have olives! He does give Finnish cooking the credit it deserves, yet goes on to say that there are few Finnish dishes that are truly remarkable internationally – kalakukko or mämmi certainly do not cut it!

Here’s one big part of the Finnish food culture that the author feels deserves sharing a recipe for:

Different alcoholic drinks have different consequences, that can be observed, for example, in a hangover. The worst hangover follows when you consume a mix of many different types of drinks. For example, by starting with beer at 9am and carrying on until noon, followed by wine until 3pm, when switching to jaloviina [a Finnish mixture of cognac and a sort of a vodka], which is followed by aperitifs at 5pm, and as the night progresses, with budget allowing, having a mix of licquer, rum, etc., whatever.

What follows is the mother of all hangovers, that Eino Leino [a Finnish author not least known for his great translations of the literary classics of the World, but also for his fondness of alcohol] writes about: I feel a pressure in the head, a sickness in the stomach; the vigorous smiths arrive, the hammers strike.

I should think so. I don’t know if this was how our fathers spent their days off, but I can tell you I’d be under the table before the aperitifs.