Language and Cooking

An analogy of the how and why of kitchen creativity

A coworker mentioned that she was not what her mother-in-law called “a natural cook”: she could follow a recipe, but she could not deviate from it in the least. I, on the other hand, can pick up on a general technique and seasoning set and go from there – either following the recipe exactly, tweaking it, or using its basic information as a jumping-off point to get completely creative.

While food is as valid a medium for creativity as any other, there are some basic ground rules we must follow. Some of these ground rules ensure that our food is safe to eat: storing certain foods in the refrigerator or freezer, cooking them to a certain temperature (or to specific visual cues, such as “fluids run clear” or “toothpick comes out clean”), and serving hot foods while they are still hot. Others are more STEM-related, such as the ways different ingredients behave when mixed with other ingredients, or heated or cooled in specific ways.

Once you know the ground rules, the rest can be changed to meet your preferences, available time and facilities, and ingredients on hand.

OK, I’ll admit that’s an oversimplification, but the most basic version of “fun with food” is “theme and variations”. If you’re not a music maven, “theme and variations” is where a section of music, the theme (like the verse of a song) is performed several times in different manners (the variations): soft, loud, fast, slow, staccato (short, distinct notes), arpeggiated (preceded by short notes of the chord it’s on), and so on.

In some ways, that still misses the nuance.

Cookbooks, like many technical manuals, have their own vocabulary. Aside from the abbreviations used to indicate quantities of ingredients (as well as some advance preparation, such as peeling a vegetable, beating an egg, sifting flour, or making sure something is cold, room temperature, warm, or boiling), there are the techniques, such as simmering, blanching, sautéing, pan-frying, whipping, folding, and so on.

This vocabulary is something akin to the parts of speech you learn in Language class. A sentence needs a subject (who or what), an action, and an object (who or what is being acted upon). In a recipe, the subject is understood to be the cook, baker, food preparer, or (“traditionally”) housewife or chef. The objects are the ingredients and the mixtures of ingredients as they are prepared (for example, a roux, which is a mixture of onion fried in a small amount of butter, to which flour is added to brown and thicken). The final object, the conclusion of this tale that is called a recipe, is what you end up eating (or serving to your family or bringing to that church dinner).

But that’s just the basic, overt vocabulary: the “I, you, it, we” and “past, present, future, infinitive”. Unless you know what to look for, you miss the styles, the genres, the sense of what that food is – and by this I don’t mean “how to duplicate what I’ve done” but rather the historical and ethnic origins of a food, how the main ingredients, seasonings, and techniques go together like the various cliques in your child’s middle school…

If, for example, you go into any mom-and-pop pizzeria, you will find shakers of oregano, garlic, and crushed red pepper. When these spices hang out with onions, basil, and tomato, they create a taste profile most of us associate with “Italian cuisine”. If you’re missing a recipe for marinara sauce or arrabbiata, this is where to start.

In addition to soy sauce and stir-frying, Chinese-American food (largely adapted from Cantonese cooking) has a go-to seasoning blend called “five spice”. While the actual blend varies from cook to cook, cinnamon, cloves, star anise, and Szechuan peppercorns are common ingredients. Peanut oil, crushed garlic and grated ginger are often used at the start of a stir-fry, while sesame oil is a frequent finishing touch.

Other Asian ingredients in my cupboard include Mirin (a sweet, seasoned Japanese cooking wine) and rice wine vinegar. Adding these to soy sauce creates a basic “Teriyaki” flavor without having to buy still another special sauce.

If you asked me for a “Pumpkin Spice Latte” out of season, I would steep a cinnamon stick and one or two whole cloves in black coffee for a few minutes, and add a quick grating of nutmeg after adding your steamed milk and your sweetener of choice. Or I might add that cinnamon stick as a garnish instead, allowing you to decide how strong you want your drink flavored.

Any decent chef or food historian will tell you that I’ve only given you a basic, “cultural appropriation” level of those seasoning blends and preparations – and they’re right. It’s a “Do-Re-Mi” level of understanding. But just as Maria tells the Von Trapp children, “When you know the notes to sing, you can sing most anything.”

I hope I’ve given you a few culinary themes to inspire your own variations.

New Adventures in Bread

 I managed to spend the entirety of the COVID-19 lockdown hardly baking a thing. Part of the reason was that my sister kept (and still keeps on) filling what little kitchen space we have with all sorts of gadgets she finds at work, and neither she nor the Other Half can find anything in the kitchen unless it is taking up all the working space on the kitchen table. Part of it is, after we account for my sister's stash of orange juice, organic milk, and Vitamin Water in the fridge and her stash of spaghetti sauce in the freezer, there's little place to keep any sort of food for The Other Half and me. Mostly, though, it was because with everything contact-limited, there were prohibitions against bringing home-baked goods anywhere to celebrate (or celebrations at all, for that matter).

I baked my usual Passover sponge cakes, the occasional meat loaf or cottage pie, maybe some knishes or bourrekas, and that was it.

Then again, during my tenure at Michaels, my baking was mostly related to classes I'd taken or taught: first the Wilton cake decorating classes, and later, the holiday cupcake and cookie decorating one-nighters. The rest of it was holiday baking (mostly cookies and cupcakes) and special-event baking (a few major cakes for my STARFLEET group, and an assorted selection of cookies and cupcakes). For the most part, I didn't have time for breads - most of which my sister didn't like, while my Other Half and I were trying to cut down on.

That said, bread has been part of my baking repertoire since my university days. For a while, I would experiment with a different bread recipe almost every week. But bread takes time, and the further away I got from school, the less time (and space) I had in which to make it. Also, places like Whole Foods have made artisan breads available at prices that aren't too excessive for the occasional splurge.

I've been wanting to get back to bread for a while, especially since a lot of the philosophy and science of home bread-baking has changed over the past four decades (wow, has it really been that long?) and along with it, a lot of the ingredients and tools. While I've made the occasional largeish purchase from King Arthur Baking (you're going to see them pop up a lot during this post!), a lot of their ingredients and tools are a bit pricey for my budget. As it turned out, Temu — love them or hate them (market-busting prices on merchandise mass-produced in China) — was the key to picking up an inexpensive baker's couche and a lame (bread-scoring blade). Even so, the tools were sitting in my living room for months...

What finally brought me back to baking bread was... onion soup. The kind that has a nice slice of old baguette floating just under the melted, bubbling Gruyère cheese. I went to get a simple baguette at my local BJ's and they wanted... $4.00... for a loaf that wasn't even the usual BJ's super-size... For something that simple and basic, the price seemed excessive.

I didn't start with baguettes, though. I started back because my store cut back my work hours to barely a few hours a week, and I needed bread in the house. I had the time, I had the ingredients, and I had the know-how.

My first week, I made King Arthur Baking's Irish Soda Bread recipe — which is very different from the stuff sold in stores every March — along with a tried-and-true challah recipe, and a King Arthur recipe for Raisin-Pecan Rye Bread, That's a lot of bread for a three-person household, but my thinking went like this: the quick bread (soda bread) so we could have something right away, the challah would use up old eggs and be ready by dinner, and the raisin-pecan bread was something I expected the whole household to enjoy. 

I skipped the soda bread the second week, just making the challah and the raisin-pecan bread. The latter uses a pre-ferment called a biga, which is a traditional Italian method. It also uses the newer methods of less kneading and a longer proofing (fermenting, doubling, rise) time than the bread recipes of a generation (or two) ago. I was confused by the way the biga and dough felt, and wanted to get a better handle on it. (I need to try it one more time, in a future week, before permanently changing the recipe.) Meanwhile, I started resurrecting the rye sourdough starter I'd dried for storage a couple of years ago; it takes about a week to bring such a starter from flakes to usable starter.

One of the breads I wanted to try making again was a deli-style rye bread, but that was going to take a lot more planning. Deli rye has two components that make it a two- or three-day process: a rye sourdough pre-ferment and an altus, or soaker of old rye bread and water. (I have no idea what the altus does offhand, only that it's part of the recipe.) That was the third week's bread bake. While the size and taste were familiar, the bread itself was much denser than it should have been 

Meanwhile, part of the process of keeping a sourdough culture alive is feeding it and using it on a regular basis. Once you have the mass of sourdough you want to maintain, you discard half of it and feed the remaining half with more flour and water. Rather than throwing it out, King Arthur has a number of recipes that use "unfed" or "discard" sourdough. We've glommed onto the Buttery Sourdough Biscuits recipe. The nice thing about this recipe is that it only makes about a half-dozen biscuits, which is just enough for breakfast without leaving anything to get cold. In the past month I've made it with rye starter, and with all-purpose (white) flour starter, with rye flour, with white whole wheat flour, and with all-purposes flour. Each has a distinct rise, taste, and texture. It's a keeper.

Mock Tabouli: an Easy Special-Diet Hack

When I'm asked to bring something to a picnic or other share-a-dish event, I try to bring something that ticks the boxes for those who might otherwise be forgotten - so in addition to cakes, cookies, and ethnic foods like noodle pudding or tsimmes (a very sweet beef stew), my repertoire includes vegan chili, meatless Hawai'ian salad, cut veggie platters with dip, or something similar. For this weekend's event, I chose to contribute a dish I called "Mock Tabouli".

If you're not familiar with tabouli, it's a Middle Eastern salad made of finely-chopped parsley, finely-diced tomatoes, and cooked-and-cooled wheat bulghur, flavored with onion, garlic, lemon juice and olive oil. Some versions add a bit of finely chopped mint; others use oregano, depending on your taste.

What makes this recipe Mock Tabouli is that the wheat bulghur is replaced with finely-chopped hard-boiled eggs. This makes the salad much higher in protein, keto-friendly, and if prepared in a contaminant-free environment, gluten free.

The first time I made Mock Tabouli was years ago over Passover, and it was a hack that gave me a reasonable take-to-work lunch option. (Again, no wheat or grain - no chometz.) While I'd never thought of it as having a separate name, I needed to name it to print out an ingredient card for our picnic. Since it didn't have all the ingredients of traditional tabouli, I figured "Mock" tabouli was an appropriate designation.

Note: Ingredient cards are essential for helping people on special diets decide whether or not they can safely eat what you've prepared. "Special diets" includes restrictions based on health - such as those required by people with food allergies or with medical conditions such as celiac disease and diverticulitis - as well as those based on religion, such as kosher or halal diets. An ingredient card includes the name of the dish, the ingredients in it, and allergy or certification disclaimers (such as "may contain traces of wheat, peanut, or citrus"; "kitchen is not kosher", etc).

When I make Mock Tabouli for a single meal, I use two or three eggs to make up a quantity of about two cups of salad. This weekend, I made Mock Tabouli as my contribution to a "bring something to share" picnic; I used about eight large eggs with two whole bunches of parsley and three tomatoes to end up with about two quarts' volume.

As it turned out, one of our attendees has a wheat allergy and was quite glad there was something she could eat!

Mock Tabouli

1 bunch curly parsley, about 4 ounces

1 bunch flat parsley, about 4-6 ounces

3 tomatoes (just over a pound)

8 hard-boiled eggs

2-3 scallions (or one very small onion)

juice of  two large lemons

1 clove garlic

2T olive oil

salt, pepper to taste

optional:

small amount of fresh mint (2-3 sprigs)

small amount of fresh oregano (2-3 stems)

1. Chop the parsley very finely, discarding stem-only parts of the bunches

2. If using mint or oregano, chop this finely, add it to the parsley, and mix well.

3. Finely dice the tomatoes. Add to the parsley.

4. Chop the scallions or onion very finely. Add to the parsley and tomato. Mix.

5. Finely chop or dice the eggs. Add to the other ingredients. Mix.

6. Crush or press the garlic into the lemon juice. Whisk well.

7. Whisk the olive oil into the lemon juice. 

8. Add salt and pepper into the lemon juice mixture to taste.

9. Strain the lemon juice dressing onto the salad. Toss well and chill thoroughly.

Passover "Pains" and Shavuot Grains

Passover Prep

Earlier this spring, I decided to look at all the secondary (economic, social, social-justice, and so on) issues caused by our politicians' and media's responses to CoV-SARS-2 (aka, COVID-19, the Novel Corona Virus, the 'Rona, etc.) as the modern equivalent of the Ten Plagues of the Biblical book of Exodus. My first design tried to put a bit of visual mnemonics: the "O" in the word "lockdown" looked like a keyhole, I had silhouettes of wild animals behind the line "wildlife incursions", and so on. I ended up with something looking a bit too much like the old "Ransom Note" aesthetic (or lack thereof!) of the early 1990s, so I started again from scratch. After playing around with a couple of different typefaces and moving the plagues around to avoid adjacent plagues of the same colors, I came up with something worth putting into vinyl:

While some of us might have chosen other plagues, or ways of expressing them, I had to keep in mind that my choices had to appeal to a broader, often progressive audience.

The seders themselves gave me more questions, some of which have brought me down an interesting rabbit-hole of published Biblical research. If I come to anything worth raising Ishmael, I'll probably write about it over on The Contrary Point of View.

Moving Towards Shavuot

Starting with the second night of Passover, Jews start a ritual called counting the Omer, referring to the seven-week period of the grain harvest. Conveniently, this period ends with the Biblical holiday of Shavuot (Pentecost) when, by tradition, the Law (the Ten Commandments and the start of the Oral Law that accompanies it) was received by the Tribes of Israel at Mount Sinai. The two-day harvest festival is relatively low-key for most Jews (stay home from work, add extra prayers, study Jewish Law, eat dairy foods), so it's not the sort of holiday that lends itself to a lot of holiday-specific decoration.

However, working at a craft store, and seeing religious designs that seem to focus on the Christian and the arguably-appropriated (dreamcatchers from Native American traditions, mandalas from Hinduism and Buddhism), along with designs that seem to align with Wicca and other European Earth traditions, I feel the need to create some balance with designs that celebrate Judaism.

Inspiration and Symbology

My original idea was to create a Mount Sinai with fire and smoke ascending or descending upon it, the traditional two tablets representing the Ten Commandments in the foreground, and 49 stalks of wheat, one for each day of the Omer. While this might have worked as a drawing or painting, it would have been way too busy for a t-shirt. I ended up with a rough outline of the peak of Mount Sinai, the two tablets (with the Commandments mnemonically reduced down to their numbers), and twelve stalks of wheat (one for each of the Twelve Tribes of Israel) divided into two groups of six, framing the Hebrew word "Shavuot". Those looking for a little more symbolism might recognize that the groups of six are further divided into two groups of three, with the two on the right side set up similarly to the Hebrew letter shin, the first letter in the Hebrew word for "Almighty". 

original Shavuot Design, including background

I didn't want another white T-shirt — I wanted a bit of "natural" color — but I also wanted to use a blank I already had in stock. After examining my stash, I hovered between Bella+Canvas crew necks in Mauve and Dusty Blue, and started putting them together with vinyl colors. I settled on the mauve, using metallic, foil, and glitter accents to create texture in my final composition.

I'm planning to wear it at least once to work before the holiday, and again for a Zoom-based holiday celebration.

Decades of Font Build-Up: License Issues

I've been "collecting" typefaces since the days when you could buy 5.25" diskettes with dozens of Bitstream*-compatible, PostScript, and other shareware faces for a couple of dollars. (It's more of a hoard than a collection...)  While a number of these have been jettisoned along the way for various reasons, a recent dive into the rabbit hole of "free" online font repositories (1001 Fonts, DA Font, etc.) suggests that I may still have a bunch of these either installed or in archived directories, without any attached license information. Since most cheap and free fonts in the 1990s were either bitmapped, poorly-designed, or cheap knockoffs of better-known faces, and most of us used those faces for personal, or small-distribution hard-copy newsletters, it was unusual for any of us to come to the negative attention of the rights owners (and even more unusual for the rights owners to do anything about it).

Times have changed. If I'm going to make a design "public" — either by putting an image of it (or a photograph of my finished product) on this blog, posting it to a design community (such as Behance, Dribble, or Design Bundles Community) or social medium (such as Pinterest), or allowing it to be searchable on Cricut Design Space — I have to mind my Ps, Qs, and alternate character sets, making sure that any resources I use are under the terms of the rights owner's license, and that I tag the designer, the rights owner, the place I found the resource, and (if a separate entity), the place from which I acquired the license.

This is not always as easy as it looks, and I don't always succeed at this part of my task. The proliferation of "old fonts" — both online and in my personal hoard — doesn't make it any easier.

Looking at the information on relatively recent faces on places like DA Fonts and 1001 Fonts state that those faces are "demo" versions of typefaces that the authors are currently selling on sites like Creative Fabrica and Creative Market. Great! I can play with the face, and if I need it for something beyond the free site's license, I can look up the face and license it appropriately.

Other faces have information on the brand-name foundry from which they came. While a handful of these faces are from current companies such as Adobe and Monotype, many more are from once-big names that have since been acquired by other big names (Bitstream was acquired by Monotype in 2012) or have ceased operation (such as Casady & Greene). So far, I've not been able to find the current owners of Casady & Greene's catalog.

The download page notices for many of the oldest fonts don't include any license information other than "contact the author" about licensing terms or license upgrades. Sometimes there is a link, sometimes a Readme file, and sometimes nothing at all. Unfortunately, a lot of contact information in these Readme files is out-of-date (questionable Compuserve addresses, defunct websites, etc.). Trying to contact those designers could require significant research on the user's part, as well as hoping that the license enquiry email would not be thrown out as spam.

DA Fonts, 1001 Fonts, and their ilk have been around for decades. Like me, I suspect they scraped up typefaces wherever they could find them, and have a back catalog of fonts and faces that they haven't had the time, manpower, or inclination to curate. Unfortunately that leaves them in the category of caveat emptor where type selection options for public-facing designs are concerned.

Obviously, we all have the option to not-use typefaces of questionable licensing when creating something we might want to post or sell. Personally, I need to take the time to curate my catalog and archive anything for which I don't have clear license information (or at least clear licensor information). And if you ever created shareware, donationware, or other freely-available type, you might want to check these "all the free fonts you can download" sites to make sure that anything of yours posted there has your current contact information and licensing terms.