A mid-moving musing

Well. I’m moving. I’m currently sitting in a mostly empty apartment, surrounded by half-full garbage bags and brooms and mops in various states of undress. My socks are dirty and my skirt is hitched up to my thighs and I’m trying to get the old place in order before ferrying the last eight hangers etc., across town and beginning to attend to the new one. The new apartment is also in Madrid. It’s in a different neighborhood. The streets are new to me. I don’t have my bearings. But I can’t think about bearings ; there’s still the stainless steel polish to apply and six more rounds of laundry and hanging things to dry. Plus how many of these olives I can eat because they won’t all fit in my bag.

My point is that, though I had a wonderful letter selected for this week’s column—I’m looking at you, Cook or get off the pot—I’ve been moving for a few days, and I’m not done moving. I’ll save the letter for next week. Today, thinking about old and new, I’ll reprint one of my NY Times columns from long ago. It’s about recipes and context and connection, and the way stories help us understand even small, seemingly self-evident detail. Plus, there’s a recipe!

Mea culpa. I’ll do better next week.

Eat

What We Learn From Old Recipes

By Tamar Adler

Aug. 26, 2015

Out with the old and in with the new! Or so the saying goes. But it often goes the opposite way for me: In a reading life full of recipes, I like old ones better. I didn’t realize how much, or why, until I recently started writing a book updating a hundred of them — mostly from the 20th century, but all with timeworn roots.

There are pedagogical givens of any time. It is only when rubbed up against the givens of another that they show. The recipe of our age has a title that describes its ambition (like ‘‘Vietnamese Chicken Salad’’), then a list of ingredients and a series of calibrations — measurements, oven temperatures, time intervals. It is objective and idealistic, pledging to be ‘‘fastest,’’ ‘‘simplest,’’ ‘‘best,’’ ‘‘perfect.’’ It shies from narrative. It lacks contingencies — orienting itself literally and figuratively toward the supermarket, with its standard and constant inventory.

Older recipes, by contrast, sometimes skip titles altogether, using simply numbers or a Choose Your Own Adventure construction: ‘‘To Sauté Fresh Peas, With or Without Their Pod’’ (‘‘If you want to sauté peas in their pod, take the tenderest ones and cut off their flower end. ...’’) or ‘‘To Make a Quince, Apricot or White Pear-Plum Pudding.’’ Rarely do they supply lists of required ingredients, meaning cook it if you have it. Often old recipes hang their teaching on narrative, with an almost biblical surety that the way to cement information in the human mind is to plot it on a closely described arc of action. They are firmly anti-idealistic. They are full of contingencies.

I especially like the tacit admissions, often found in cookbooks of yesteryear, that not every meal will be extraordinary. In the preface to recipe No. 59 of his 1891 ‘‘Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well,’’ Pellegrino Artusi writes, ‘‘Among ordinary soups, this ranks with the best.’’ Being permitted a category of ‘‘ordinary’’ is a charity to any cook, especially today, when we feel obliged to apologize for anything plain. His previous recipe notes that its result ‘‘is good warm and it is even better cold.’’ Here, too, there is no end to the good that hint does, when what all cooks need each Wednesday night is cultural support for leftovers — as well as dishes that taste good that way.

Some old recipes, like ‘‘Omelette aux Fines Herbes,’’ from Alexandre Dumas’s 1873 ‘‘Great Dictionary of Cuisine,’’ conjure a bright-edged and pleasurable cooking experience through clear description: ‘‘Break some eggs into a salad bowl, and beat them with a wicker beater. ... Pour half a glass of cream into the mixture, and beat it once more.’’ Even without scientific reason, all other things equal, it seems better to froth eggs in a ceramic salad bowl than an impersonal plastic one. And there is irrepressible joy to Dumas’s end: ‘‘Have a platter ready which has been buttered with the freshest possible butter and sprinkled with some more fresh fines herbes.’’

And this, for the pudding-of-some-fruit, from Hannah Glasse in 1774, is more specific and harder to forget than any contemporary pudding recipe I can think of: ‘‘Scald your quinces very tender, pare them very thin; scrape off the soft; mix it with sugar very sweet, put in a little ginger and a little cinnamon. To a pint of cream you must put three or four yolks of eggs, and stir it into your quinces till they are of a good thickness. It must be pretty thick. So you may do apricots or white pear-plums. Butter your dish, pour it in and bake it.’’

At their best, old recipes remind us of what it means to be a human eater in the world. In his magisterial 1570 tome ‘‘The Works,’’ the papal chef Bartolomeo Scappi will begin his recipes with ‘‘Get a turtledove in its season’’ or ‘‘Get a thrush in its season, between the end of September and the end of February. That bird must especially be fresh to be good.’’ Or, my favorite: ‘‘137. Several Ways to Spit-Roast and Do Up All Sorts of Pheasants and Old Pheasants. There are two sorts of pheasants: wild ones, called wood grouse, and local ones; the wild sort is black like a crow and has brownish eyelids and a smooth beak, and is bigger than the local sort. Many of them are born in the Grigioni and Swiss hills. Their season goes from October to the end of February; in the snowing season they are very fat.’’

In today’s recipe, all that binding is gone — the season, the weather, the color of birds’ eyelids; the notion that a person should know what ‘‘a little,’’ ‘‘very sweet’’ and ‘‘thick’’ mean. But we need it. That binding contains other facts we too often forget: That our poultry was a bird. That what a bird looks like matters to how it tastes. That animals have seasonal behaviors, as do plants, as do we. That the world is not a supermarket at all, but a hurly-burly sloping tilting whorl of subordinations and dependencies — and our recipes should not try to fool us into thinking otherwise. The year turns. Seasons change. Things die. Some fresh peas are more tender than others.

Pickled Shrimp

By Tamar Adler

• 2 pounds shrimp, peeled and deveined, tails on

• 4 scallions, mostly white, quartered or in eighths lengthwise

• 2 cloves garlic, sliced lengthwise, very thinly

• ½ cup lemon juice

• ¼ cup white-wine vinegar

• 2 teaspoons kosher salt

• 1 ½ teaspoons fennel seed

• 1 ½ teaspoons coriander

• 10 dried chiles, broken once or left whole

• 1 pod cardamom

• 1 lemon, quartered and thinly sliced

• 1 cup olive oil

• ¼ cup roughly chopped fresh oregano

COURT BOUILLON INGREDIENTS

• a few peppercorns

• 4 bay leaves

• ¼ onion and/or leek

• 1 clove garlic

• a few sprigs fresh thyme or oregano

  Make court bouillon for shrimp: Put a few peppercorns, 4 bay leaves, ¼ onion and/or leek, 1 clove garlic and a few sprigs fresh thyme or oregano in a pot of water. Bring to a boil, and let cook 15 minutes. Then add 1 teaspoon salt and shrimp, and cook for 2-3 minutes at below a boil. Remove shrimp with a strainer.

  In separate bowl, combine all other ingredients except oil and oregano. Let sit 5 minutes. Add shrimp. Mix well. Add oil, and mix. Add oregano, and mix. Serve at least 5 hours later and ideally the next day, cold or room temperature.