This recipe was touted as an irresistible party sensation:
Author Hal Rothchild recommends serving it as a canape, an appetizer. Its tanginess is delectable, but somewhat diluted by the cream cheese. And the process of dissolving the gelatin seems excessively extra work when the pie is served chilled anyway. Pair with drinks (red wine and dark beer) it’s quite a treat!
Private detective Kinsey Millhone’s unabashed love for quick-and-dirty sandwiches has become an inspiration for The Dewey Decimal Kitchen. Our late night snacks will never be the same!
In “C” Is For Corpse (page 183 of the 2005 St. Martin’s paperback), Kinsey constructs a delicious decompression sandwich after a rough encounter. Author Sue Grafton’s down-to-earth, hard-as-nails main character loves a double helping of Quarter Pounders, but doesn’t shy away from grubbing on society canapés. Her homemade slap-ups (hyphenate much?) are so interesting because they fall somewhere in between. Sure, they may seem like lazy stoner food sometimes, but try one and you’ll quickly see the deft instincts of a closet gourmet.
“I let myself into my apartment and poured a glass of white wine and then I made myself a sandwich with creamed cheese and thinly sliced cucumbers and onions on dark bread.”
A burley garden party might feature this as dark and tart take on the classic cucumber sandwich. The cucumber slices transform between the strong bread and onions, and take one a pert pickle flavor. With Kinsey’s choice of white wine – it’s the perfect down-time pairing. Which goes to prove our point: Kinsey has great taste in snacks with dynamic and satisfying flavor combinations.
A little salt and black pepper really made this sandwich pop for us! Maybe next time we’ll try it with some sunomono (Japanese sweet vinegar cucumbers)…
Which is your favorite Kinsey Millhone story?
Let us know in the comments.
Even a hardened sleuth needs to wind down at the end of the day. But where some hit the bottle, private detective Kinsey Millhone hits the fridge. Comfort food, sandwiches in particular, are her sweet solice.
In Sue Grafton’s “O” Is For Outlaw, Kinsey comes home to relax with an unusual but delectable snack:
This is just one recipe in Grafton’s alphabetical series.
The secret is the double crunch of the chunky peanuts and crispy pickles – something hearty to bite into. The bread and butter pickles play well, being tangier and sweeter than regular, sour dills. The peanut butter balances the combination with its nutty flavor and tacky mouthfeel. One bite, and you’ll never crave jelly again.
To mix things up, we started playing with additional toppings. Bacon was the first idea, but it had trouble standing out beside the other flavors. It turns out black pepper ground over the pickles and just a few drops of Sriracha are the solution. The spice perks up the peanut butter and adds zing to the pickles. Toasting just enhances the sandwich with a trio of crunches.
Look for more Sue Grafton inspired recipes coming soon.
In the meantime, what are your favorite comfort food sandwiches?
Or your favorite detectives guilty vices
Let us know in the comments.
It’s quiche time!!
The other day I found an adorable little cookbook giddily titled Cheese Chatter, by Hal Rothschild. It was a promotional cookbook for Hickory Farms of Ohio, “America’s Leading Cheese Stores”, published in 1970.
It’s a cheesy (no pun intended) collection of anecdotes and simple recipes that lean heavily on Hickory Farms cheese. If such a thing as The Cult of Wallace & Gromit existed, this would be one of their most sacred tomes.
The first recipe that really caught our eye was a Swiss Cheese Pie in the Desserts chapter:
A pretty easy combination of pie crust, dredged cheese, and egg and cream:
Put ’em together and what you get is a simple quiche or quiche base. As is, it’s predictably tasty. Swiss cheese and pepper, warm or cold – how could it go wrong? But it begs for more. This recipe is a great launching point for substituting other cheeses, adding meat or vegetables, or enhancing this recipe with additional spices. Go crazy!
So what are your favorite quiche or custard pie recipes?
Got any fun old cookbooks? Let us know in the comments..
You can tell alot about someone by how they order a drink. Their taste in spirits can tell you their past, or what they expect of the night to come. A keen eye can tell if the drinker knows what to expect from the bartender, or if they’re just showing off. And a cocktail in a casino can be a fatal tell.
In Ian Fleming’s first 007 novel, Casino Royale, the golden rule of character development is in full effect: Show, don’t tell. With scant descriptions or backstory, we are introduced to Agent James Bond through his interactions in the casino; both by what he does and what he could do. It is on page 44 in the Thomas & Mercer 2012 paperback edition that we learn everything there is to know about Bond, and it isn’t murder or romance that reveals the man, but his drink:
Now known as the Vesper Martini, it began nameless. Bond spells it out as a clarification to a more iconic order, “A dry martini”. But this is no Martini, and in every way that this cocktail is wrong are his give-aways, his tells. Let’s break it down:
The casino is set in northern France where fine wine and grape spirits can be appreciated in all their forms. The story takes place in the early 1950s, long after Prohibition in America and a significant shift in the Martini recipe there (which carried over to the UK). However, in France, the Martini would have nearly a century old, consisting of equal parts or more of gin and sweet vermouth, as well as orange bitters (a requisite with gin cocktails). To order a dry Martini would simply be a request for dry vermouth, not more gin. Vermouth (a fortified wine) in the original Martini is an equal player stirred with gin as its “M. en ce moment”. A golden rule for cocktails: If all ingredients are translucent, stirr; if opaque ingredients are use (such as citrus juice), shake.
‘A dry martini,’ he said. ‘One. In a deep champagne goblet.’
‘Oui, monsieur.’
‘Just a moment. Three measures of Gordon’s, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet. Shake until it’s ice-cold, then add a large thin slice of lemon-peel. Got it?’
This drink order is bookended by Bond insisting on how CIA agent Felix Leiter take his Haig-and-Haig and Bond critiquing the bartender’s choice of vodka. At the bar, as in life, Bond’s swagger dominates the scene. But he’s not just showing off here. He doesn’t order a standard drink then change his mind to show off to Leiter – the bartender interrupts him. Bond likely knows what a “dry martini” in the north of France means, but presumptively orders something that is not a Martini under the same name. He lives by his own rules, and breaks any in his way.
“Shaken. Not stirred.” is only ever said in the movies, but it breaks one of the golden rules of cocktails. Shaking doesn’t necessarily make a drink colder, only aerates and bruises the liquor (as Fleming acknowledges), clouding the crystal clarity of a gin drink. Beauty is only superficial to Bond; it’s the power of the drink he’s after. Not ambitiously – the drink doesn’t lean on status, being made with a gin as common as Gordon’s – but in it’s alcoholic strength.
Many gins have lowered their ABV over the decades. Less alcohol + more dilution = lower production costs. Today Gordon’s is a market standard 40% ABV. But competitors like Tanqueray are still at a roaring 47.5%. Bond lives as though he’s bullet-proof, and creates a drink in that image. If you intend to make it as a purest, may we suggest adding a smidge of Everclear to your Gordon’s to bring it up to snuff.
The drink is also unusually excessive. Bond, who never settles for less whether in violence or sex, couldn’t be expected to order a typical 3oz drink. Here, a measure can be relative, but to fill a champagne goblet each one would have to be a whole shot (1oz), making it 4.5oz before dilution.
The Lillet serves as a kind of bitters and sweetener in one. The Kina Lillet is no longer produced. It was distinguished by its quinine content, missing from modern Lillet Blanc. Quinine sulfate can be bought at drug stores, but I don’t recommend adding it to your home bar. The Lillet available today makes just as good a cocktail.
Wait… Quinine, gin, and citrus… Sounds alot like the flavor profile of a Gin & Tonic. Not unusual for a navy man.
The last sentence of Chapter 1, we feel, best sums up a successful Vesper Martini: “…the warmth and humour of his eyes extinguished, his features relapsed into a taciturn mask, ironical, brutal, and cold.”
So what’s your favorite Bond book?
What’s your favorite spy-age cocktail?
For more cocktail tips, check out these videos from my cocktail guru, Robert Hess:
Vesper Cocktail – Robert Hess
Martini History – Robert Hess
Shaking or Stirring – Robert Hess
Last night we snuggled up with one of our favorite foodie movies: Pixar’s “Ratatouille”. This movie owes its mojo de cuisine to Chef Thomas Keller who designed a signature ratatouille for the film’s finale (recipe below).
The tomato puree makes it a little sweeter than other ratatouilles, but also acts as a counter point to the bright garlic and thyme. Once you taste this delicious dish, you’ll see how it had such an impact in the film.
P.S. – I like to substitute 50/50 red wine and tomato paste for the puree. Cheers!
Ratatouille’s Ratatouille
1/2 onion, finely chopped
2 garlic cloves, very thinly sliced
1 cup tomato puree (such as Pomi)
2 tablespoons olive oil, divided
1 small eggplant
1 small zucchini
1 small yellow squash
1 red bell pepper
fresh thyme
Salt and pepper
Preheat oven to 375 degrees F.
Pour tomato puree into bottom of an oval baking dish, approximately 10 inches across the long way. Drop the sliced garlic cloves and chopped onion into the sauce, stir in one tablespoon of the olive oil and season the sauce generously with salt and pepper.
Trim the ends off the eggplant, zucchini and yellow squash. trim the ends off the red pepper and remove the core, leaving the edges intact, like a tube.
On a mandoline, adjustable-blade slicer or with a very sharp knife, cut the eggplant, zucchini, yellow squash and red pepper into very thin slices, approximately 1/16-inch thick.
Atop the tomato sauce, arrange slices of prepared vegetables concentrically from the outer edge to the inside of the baking dish, overlapping and alternating vegetables.
Drizzle the remaining tablespoon olive oil over the vegetables and season with salt and pepper. Sprinkle the fresh thyme over the dish.
Cover dish with a piece of parchment paper cut to fit inside the dish.
Bake for approximately 45 to 55 minutes, until vegetables have released their liquid and are clearly cooked, but still a bit firm. You should see the tomato sauce bubbling around them.
You can serve with soft goat cheese on top, alone, or with some crusty French bread…….
From time to time in Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates Mr. Switters laments the meal before him as he longs for a more rugged, southern staple: Red-Eye Gravy
For the gravy, we chose this recipe from Rhoda Boone (can a name get more southern than that?). The great trick with red-eye gravy is that it requires you to cook ham or bacon to start it off (no Spam this time). The ham fat stands squarely with the coffee after they’ve been reduced together, leaving a pequantly meaty flavor akin to Bovril or Marmite. Sop it with some biscuits and mangled eggs, cracked pepper, and you’ve got a magic formula for invincibility.
The mission of the Dewey Decimal Kitchen is to, gastronomically, bring to life the books we read; as though the Milky Way spirals in a strong enough cuppa could teleport us into the fictional dimension. This morning we dine in the shabby logging town of Boquichicos, Perú. And before you can click to your sweet Google, I can promise you (sworn on a stack of waffles) that this is a place of pure fiction – except today, where we’re having breakfast:
Still in the footsteps of Mr. Switters (while he has them), we’ve whipped up a hearty leñador breakfast straight from the Hotel Boquichicos (page 78 of the 2003 paperback reissue). Switters’ first morning in Boquichicos finds him at breakfast sharing a pot of tea with english ethnographer, R. Potney Smithe. Banter leads to corn bread and jam, eggs, and beans. As you can see above, we took the liberty of adding some Spam for good measure.
Most likely the Hotel Boquichicos would have been well stocked with Earl Grey or Irish Breakfast teas, but we couldn’t resist asking the folks at Dashen what peruvian teas were available. The darkest the had was an herbal tea called uña de gato (cat’s claw), a local vine said to have revitalising properties – a perfect way to resurrect from sleep. It makes a golden tea with an easy, spicey flavor – like manly potpourri.
For the beans, we scoured the internet, landing happily on this video from The Healthy Diet Paradise.com.
Peruano/canary beans are covered in with onion and garlic (essential to any meal), bay leaves, and a small palm of salt. Simmer for a few hours untill well cooked – beans will expand, so expect to get almost twice as much volume as you put in. Another trick: let the beans cool before draining – this keeps the bean skins from becoming wrinkly. The beans will take on any flavor you add to their “stock”, and peruanos are already a light, creamy bean – the result of this recipe is a smooth, lightly savory side that goes well with something bolder.
Overall a mild and easy breakfast -the beans and bread prepared ahead of time. The combined flavors and textures are easy on the stomach, corn bread sweetly standing out like a pastry.
What your favorite breakfast? Got another recipe for peruanos? – let us know in the comments!
Only thirty pages in and I’ve got a hankering for a tall, cold one:
Now, Hector Sumac may be into “Yankee brewski”, but I want to try something different, something “local”. I picked these two Peruvian beers from my new favorite Latin American market – Dashen International Groceries.
Cristal was smooth. Damn smooth. A little too smooth – just clean and cold, with a tiny hint of honey sweetness, but no backbone, no body. Beer sites aren’t very kind in their reviews, but reviewers are usually looking for a powerhouse beer to knock them off their feet. Cristal is more like anonymous, mainstream radio at a summer barbeque: hits the spot without leaving a mark.
Cusqueña says it’s 100% malted barley, and you can really taste it. Chewy, sweet and well rounded, just asking for something spicy to dance with. A saucy dish like Gloria (who Switters will meet on page 35 of my 2003 Bantam trade paperback reissue) would pair perfectly…
So what are your favorite beers from south of the border? Let us know in the comments below.
Woo-Hoo! A brand new library card!!
The Dewey Decimal Kitchen 