Retro Recipes and Traditional Fare

Well I'm back.  I guess I took a vacation of sorts.  Since my Mom was visiting I took some time to hang out and just relax.  Except we didn't relax at all.  If we weren't out and about, we were cooking and cooking and cooking.

I swear it was like America's Test Kitchen.  As soon as we would take a pie out of the oven we would put another back in.  Sometimes it was the same type of pie, just a different crust.

Ultimately in our pie-baking ventures, we concluded, crusts made with shortening are easiest to work with and taste the best.  The butter crusts just didn't compare.  I really didn't believe that would be the case but was so true.  The shortening crusts were flakier and much easier to roll out.  My Mom has always made her crusts with shortening and it was nice to finally do side-by-side comparisons.  Shortening is definitely the way to go.

When I was a kid, we always had Mom's Mile High Lemon Meringue Pie.  I was always impressed by the sheer beauty of this dessert.  I could never understand how the fluffy topping could go in the oven and survive.

When I think of casseroles, I imagine layers and layers of meats and vegetables slowly cooking together until fork tender. Baeckeoffe is that casserole; it beats all other casseroles. Beef, lamb, and pork are combined with onions, leeks, and carrots, then drowned in wine, and slowly braised for hours in the oven until just perfect. Baeckeoffe, which translates to baker's oven, originates from Alsace, France, a region that has changed hands many times between France and Germany. In many ways, especially gastronomically, it maintains a German identity. Here you will find beer, sausages, sauerkraut, and vineyards growing typical German grapes like Riesling and Gewürztraminer. Many dishes are specific to this region, Baeckeoffe being one of its most famous traditional foods.

The most appealing features of the dish are its minimum supervision to make and ability to feed a large, busy family—of particular interest in olden times. As the story goes, Alsatian women would drop off their casseroles with the local baker on Monday, which was the day set aside for doing laundry. The baker, who may have had many casseroles in his oven at one time, used a rope of dough between the rim and lid of each casserole to form a tight seal and keep in moisture. The low, steady temperature of the baker's oven was the ideal environment for cooking the Baeckeoffe.

I was recently in St Petersburg Russia and had a great lunch at Tsar Restaurant (note: avoid bottled water, each one cost $25). I decided to try the Chicken Kiev, which was pretty common on the restaurant menus in St. Petersburg, and it seemed so “Russian” (though I later discovered that it’s not).

Chicken Kiev is actually French in origin. Russian aristocracy became very interested in French cuisine in the 1700s and they would send their Russian chefs to France to train or bring French chefs into Russia. A French chef called Nicolas Francois Appert invented Chicken Kiev in the early 1800s. Appert's invention became famous and Russian chefs tried to imitate Chicken Kiev, calling the dish "cotelettes de volaille" instead of Chicken Kiev.

Early restaurants in New York City changed the name back to Chicken Kiev, in an attempt to attract the new Russian immigrants and this name stuck. Traditionally, it is deep fried in oil, but I found a recipe from America’s Test Kitchen that achieves the same crisp coating with frying.

I think I can speak for everyone when I say French fries are probably Americans' favorite guilty pleasure. So much so that Americans dared to rename them Freedom fries when France objected to the war. Interestingly there is nothing French about them. As history goes, potatoes were first brought to Spain via the New World expeditions. Fried potatoes became popular during the 17th century in the Spanish Netherlands, present day Belgium.

When there were no fish to fry, the poorer citizens fried potatoes. Sometime during World War I, an American or British soldier eating fried potatoes erroneously named them French fries since French was the official language of Belgium. Another theory suggests that the culinary term for slicing into thin strips, "to French," was applied to fried potatoes and thus the name.

However the story goes, fried potatoes or pommes frites have achieved worldwide acclaim. American fast food chains accepted them as their own and their popularity soared. Once you bite into a golden crisp fry with a pure white fluffy interior, you just can't stop at one.