Milk (40 page)

P
aprika didn’t exist until chile peppers reached Hungary from the New World and were bred to a uniquely rich-flavored form suitable for drying and grinding. As part of what
George Lang’s magisterial
The Cuisine of Hungary
calls “the holy trinity of lard, onion, and pure ground paprika,” the new spice worked its way into various families of traditional braised dishes. Nothing proved to be a more inspired match for the famous trinity than the sour cream that is added to certain mild and delicate offshoots of the classic stew
pörkölt.
In Hungary this kind of dish is called
paprikás
together with the name of the main ingredient (usually chicken, veal, or fish). All parts of the Austro-Hungarian empire eventually adopted chicken versions marked by such minor wrinkles as the use of browned or unbrowned chicken, thrift or profligacy in the
amount of sour cream, and the presence or absence of green peppers, garlic, and tomatoes.

The following recipe for Viennese
Paprikahuhn
is broadly modeled on a version in
Franz Maier-Bruck’s
Das grosse Sacher-Kochbuch.
The original uses butter; I think lard as the foundation of the “holy trinity” can’t be improved on except perhaps by rendered fat from double-smoked Hungarian bacon.

YIELD:
About 4 servings

Heat the lard in a heavy-bottomed saucepan and brown the chicken pieces on all sides over medium heat. Remove to a platter. Reduce the heat to medium-low and sauté the onion, garlic, and pepper strips in the remaining fat until slightly softened. Deglaze the pan with the water or stock. Add the sweet paprika, optional hot paprika and lemon rind, salt, and tomato pulp. Give everything a good stir, bring to a boil, and return the chicken pieces to the pan. Cook, tightly covered, over low heat for about 30 minutes or until the chicken is tender.

Transfer the chicken pieces to a heatproof dish along with a spoonful or two of the cooking liquid, and keep warm over low heat while you boil down the rest of the liquid by more than half. Meanwhile, stir together the flour and a little water to make a thin paste. Whisk the sour cream into this and stir it all into the reduced liquid in the pan and heat until warmed through. Serve the chicken pieces with the sauce poured over them. If you like, pass around more sour cream in a bowl.

P
eople of a certain age remember this as a once-elegant brunch or lunch dish served on toast. The suggestion of caraway as a seasoning comes from
Craig Claiborne’s
The New York Times Menu Cookbook,
where I first encountered the dish.

It is even better made with a mixture of white and shiitake mushrooms (caps only) and/or reconstituted dried porcini. If you happen to have some homemade veal glaze, a teaspoon or so is a lovely addition.

YIELD:
4 to 5 servings

Mince the shallots and gently sauté them in the butter while you cut the mushrooms lengthwise into roughly ¼-inch slices or chop them fairly coarse. Add the mushrooms to the shallots and cook over medium-high heat, stirring, until the juice they release is nearly evaporated. Stir in the optional caraway seeds along with sherry, salt, and pepper.

Mix the flour and sour cream as smooth as possible. Stir into the mushrooms and cook over very low heat, stirring, for about 6 to 8 minutes. Scatter snipped fresh dill or minced parsley over the mushrooms, and serve on hot toast or as a side dish by itself.

D
edicated pastry-makers often have a soft spot for sour cream because the lactic acid slightly tenderizes the dough while the cream adds richness. Russians often make pirozhki (small turnoverlike pastries) with a yeast-raised dough, but this sour-cream version is a popular alternative. Mushroom pirozhki are a fine party dish, or nice as part of an otherwise light lunch or supper.

YIELD:
About 4 dozen

For the filling, cook the mushrooms as directed and mix in the hard-boiled eggs. Let cool, and refrigerate until ready to use (several hours or overnight).

Make the dough by sifting the flour and salt into a bowl, then cutting in the butter with a pastry cutter or two knives until the mixture resembles coarse grits. Stir in the sour cream with a fork. The mixture will start coming together in a dough. If necessary, lightly mix in ice water a teaspoon or so at a time until you can gather it up in a ball. Wrap the dough in waxed paper or plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least two hours.

Preheat the oven to 375°F. Lightly flour a pastry cloth or work surface and roll out the dough a little less than ½ inch thick. Cut out 3-inch rounds with a cookie cutter or the rim of a glass. Gather up the trimmings, reroll, and cut into more 3-inch rounds. Put about 2 to 3 teaspoons of mushroom filling on one side of each round and fold over the edge to make a half moon. Firmly press the edges together with a fork.

As the pirozhki are filled, place them on baking sheets and brush the tops with the beaten egg. Bake until golden brown, 20 to 25 minutes. Serve hot.

T
he combination of boiled potatoes and milk used to be part of the culinary landscape throughout most of northern Europe.
Irish Champ
is an example made with sweet milk. As explained earlier, soured milk predominated from the North Sea eastward. Cultured buttermilk is the modern substitute.

The general idea is the same in most places: Boil potatoes with plenty of salt, and mash them, while fresh and hot, with sour milk or a mixture of sour milk and sour cream, lightly bound with flour or starch to keep it from curdling. The dish is usually soupy. For the very poor of earlier generations, it contained no other ingredients except maybe a little onion. Better-off people topped it with fried bacon or salt pork and the hot pan drippings. It’s particularly good made with
Homemade Cultured Buttermilk
.

YIELD:
4 servings

Cook the bacon over gentle heat in a small heavy skillet until the fat is well rendered. Scoop out the crisp bits to drain on paper towels; fry the onion in the bacon fat over medium heat until soft and translucent. Keep warm over very low heat when it is done.

While the bacon cooks, cut the potatoes into large chunks. Put them in a large saucepan of cold water and scatter in the salt. Bring to a boil and cook over medium-high heat until tender, about 20 minutes. Meanwhile, mix a small amount of the buttermilk with the flour until smooth. Pour 4 cups of the remaining buttermilk into a saucepan, stir in the flour mixture, and warm over low heat without quite letting it boil.

When the potatoes are done, drain them thoroughly. Either return them to the pan and mash with a potato masher or put them through a ricer back into the pan. Turn the heat to low and start mashing in the hot buttermilk a little at a time until the dish is slightly soupy, or add an extra cup of buttermilk to make it very soupy. Season with pepper to taste.

Pour the hot bacon drippings and onion over the potatoes, and top with the crisp fried bacon. Serve at once.

VARIATION:
A nice
Belgian version of this dish (“stampers,” or
taatjespap
in Flemish) in
Ruth Van Waerebeek’s
Everyone Eats Well in Belgium Cookbook
omits the onion, adds a grating of fresh nutmeg, and finishes everything off with
Beurre Noisette
instead of bacon fat.

I
f you are unacquainted with Latin American–style crema, this simple dish is a lovely introduction. The cool saltiness of the crema is irresistible against the melting sweetness of the banana. (If you like, and can get, blackened superripe plantains, they are as good or better.) You may find the crema delicious enough by itself not to need the suggested additional touch of rum and lime juice. Serve it as a side dish in a meal featuring something like Cuban-style roast pork and black beans, or by itself as a very nice dessert.

YIELD:
4 servings

Stir the crema smooth in a small bowl, and stir in the optional rum, lime juice, and lime zest. Peel the bananas and slice them into roughly ¾-inch chunks.

Heat the butter in a heavy medium skillet until it sizzles. Add the sliced bananas at once and cook over medium heat, shaking the pan and turning the pieces frequently to brown them lightly on all sides. They are done as soon as browned. Scoop out the bananas before they can burn, arrange in a serving dish, and serve hot with the crema.

T
he American South is home to a family of pies consisting of a pastry crust with a very sweet custard filling—a particular sort of custard made from sugar or syrup, eggs, and butter bound with a small amount of some starchy ingredient (cornmeal, cornstarch, or flour). Pecan pie (visualize the filling minus the pecans) is a classic twentieth-century example. Older members of the group include chess pie, transparent pie, Jefferson Davis pie, and lemon or lime pie. (In some recipes you find them shading into one another.) This cousin based on buttermilk harks back to pre-refrigeration days in the South, when unpasteurized milk at ambient temperatures rapidly curdled (clabbered) and was churned to butter in that condition, leaving plenty of nice sour buttermilk for drinking or cooking. Today people use cultured buttermilk.

YIELD:
One 9-inch pie

Preheat the oven to 350°F.

Sift the sugar, cornstarch, and salt together into a mixing bowl. Whisk the egg yolks in a separate bowl. Stir the egg yolks, butter, buttermilk, and lemon juice into the dry ingredients and grate in the nutmeg. Pour the mixture into the pie shell and bake for about 40 minutes, or until slightly puffed and very lightly set. Let cool on a wire rack. The pie can be served at room temperature or (more often) chilled.

VARIATION I:
Many people either incorporate the egg whites into the filling or use them as a meringue. For the first option, beat the 4 egg whites stiff and fold them into the buttermilk–egg yolk mixture before baking. For the second, bake the filled shell for 25 to 30 minutes; meanwhile, beat the 4 egg whites stiff, adding ⅓ cup superfine sugar and a pinch of cream of tartar partway through the beating. Remove the partly baked pie from the oven, carefully spread the meringue over the whole surface, and bake for another 10 to 15 minutes.