Butter Up

How can you not love a city that’s got a street named after butter?

                 

Sorting through my photo library recently, I came across a shot of a street sign I took when I was on vacation in Belgium last summer. Why did I take it? Well, on the one hand, I wanted to remember the narrow cobble-stone street down which I wandered, happily munching cookies, waffles, and chocolate. But truth be told, I also wanted to remember the sign on which was printed the street’s name: Rue au beurre/Boterstraat. Hence my photo.

For complicated historical reasons, roughly half the city’s population speaks French and the other half Dutch (or, more precisely, the dialect of Dutch known as Flemish); thus street signs appear in both languages. So too do the menus that restaurants display to entice hungry passers-by. The dish that best epitomizes Belgian cuisine, as any visitor knows, is mussels and fries, but it’s called by its French name of moules-frites as often as it is by its Dutch name of mosselen-friet. If there’s a contender for the national dish, it’s got to be Belgium’s answer to boeuf bourgignon—but the dish appears variously as carbonnade de boeuf à la Flamande and as Vlaamse stoverij.

Of course I know that, on the one hand, it’s simply a matter of two names for the same thing. What the Dutch call boter, mosselen, and stoverij, the French call beurre, moules, and carbonnade. On the other hand, as I have so often observed, translations of food names are seldom as straightforward as you might think.  If they were, why would we so automatically prefer the French names to the Dutch ones? Who can deny that beurre has a panache that boter simply doesn’t have? And just think of the difference between soupe de poisson (or de poulet) and Waterzooi. Similar ingredients but one sounds like a delicious fish (or chicken) soup and the other . . . ? Well, the other you probably have never even heard of.

But here’s the rub. As much as we prefer French names, our English food words are a lot closer to the Dutch ones. Case in point: we put butter on our bread just as they spread boter on their brood.

So why are we so quick to prefer beurre? And why do the guidebooks refer to Brussels’ chief tourist destination—its square surrounded by ornately decorated and steeply gabled guildhalls—as the Grand Place, rather than the Grote Markt, as it's known by half the population?

 

Because for historical reasons even more complicated than the ones I referred to above, we speakers of Germanic languages (which include English and Dutch, not to mention German, Norwegian, and Swedish) have been brought up to believe that if it’s French, it’s got to be more sophisticated. But do champignons a l’escargot really taste so much better than paddestoelen met slakkenboter? They’re both just mushrooms with snail butter. And are crêpes really so much tastier than pannekoeken? Or have we just been taken in by self-proclaimed Gallic resonance?

Admittedly not as elegant as a mille-feuille, it’s the chewy waffles with their nuggets of pearl sugar I’m still dreaming of. And, by the way, that’s wafel, not gaufre.

My Introduction to Som Tam (or, Green Papaya Salad)

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It’s not often that dinner out is interrupted by a furious woman bursting into the restaurant and screaming in a language you can’t understand; nor does it often happen that your meal is interrupted by three uniformed policemen doing their best to restore calm as the entire restaurant staff, from cooks to waiters, gathers en masse to shout back in the same incomprehensible language.  

What were we to do? We had theater tickets and had to eat before 7:00. We’d found the one restaurant in town that was open on Easter Sunday. Despite the fact that it was completely empty, we’d sat down and ordered our food. Eyes on our watches, we were getting very hungry. And there we sat as the battle lines formed, doing our best not to pry into what clearly wasn’t any of our business. All evidence suggested that we weren’t going to be eating anytime soon.

Just as we were thinking we ought to leave, a plate of spring rolls made it to the table. Not the vegetarian ones we’d ordered, but we devoured them anyway. Not bad. Then something arrived that looked sort of like a plate of noodles. We hadn’t ordered any noodles, but the fight was still raging, more policemen were arriving, clearly the waiters had more important things on their mind than our dinner, so, gratefully, we tasted them. 

And immediately realized that what we were eating was 1) not noodles at all; and 2) not just good, but magnificent. Turns out that we’d been given precisely what we’d ordered—Som Tam, or Green Papaya Salad—without having realized it.

No doubt many of you already know that green papayas can be shredded into spaghetti-like strands (sort of like the aptly named spaghetti squash), but we, who didn’t know this, imagined we’d been given a cold noodle salad.

Live and learn, as they say. Papayas have long been one of my favorite fruits and there are few things I like more than a bowl of papaya cubes sprinkled with lime juice. But when I think papaya, I think orange—whether the pale orange of an apricot or a cantaloupe, or the more vivid hue of a persimmon, carrot, or pumpkin. I don’t think greenish-white. Somehow or other, green papaya salad had never made it onto my radar screen. Well, consider me a convert.

Sour, salty, spicy, and sweet: what could be better than that classic Thai blend of lime juice, fish sauce, chili peppers, and just a touch of sugar? When it’s stirred into  shredded green papaya, green beans, tomatoes, and chopped peanuts, the result is addicting. Trust me.

Knowing I’d need another fix—and very soon—I googled Green Papaya Salad right away and found not only dozens of recipes, but also—much to my delight—that in order to make it, I’d need a shredding tool sold under the names of Thai Kom Kom Miracle Knife or Kiwi Pro-Slice Peeler. With this amazing little gizmo, I am now able to reduce an unripe or green papaya to spaghetti-like strands, thus being able to re-create at a moment’s notice the salad we’d all but inhaled despite the shouting, doors slamming, and sirens that accompanied our introduction to Som Tam. 

Som Tam (Green Papaya Salad)

(adapted from, literally, dozens of recipes)

2 green papayas, peeled & shredded

½ lb string beans, cut into 1” lengths, blanched until crisp-tender & 

plunged under ice water (Thai yardlong beans are traditional)

2-3 plum tomatoes, seeded & chopped

½ cup chopped unsalted peanuts

Dressing:

                                                      ¼ cup Asian fish sauce                 

½ cup lime juice (to taste)

2 tbsp sugar (palm sugar is tradition, but brown will do)

1 tsp minced garlic

2 Thai bird’s eye chilies (or any other chili pepper), minced

A few tablespoons dried shrimp (traditional, but the salad’s fine without)

Toss the salad ingredients together in a large bowl. Mix the dressing ingredients together and pour over. Stir well. Garnish with chopped cilantro before serving.

[Note: traditionally, this salad is pounded together, ingredient by ingredient, in a mortar and pestle and no doubt there are many purists who insist the salad can be made in no other way. I’ve heard the same claimed of pesto sauce—that it doesn’t taste authentic unless the basic and garlic are pounded in a mortar and pestle. What can I say other than acknowledge that according to such purists, neither my pesto nor my som tam is authentic. Somehow, I can live with the shame.]

Epilogue: It turned out that the shouting concerned who owed or didn’t owe whom money. The apologetic & embarrassed owner didn’t want to charge us for the meal, but the food was so good, we insisted. Not only that, we’re going back for more.

“To a worm in horseradish, the whole world is horseradish” (Yiddish Proverb)

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As a child, I had one association with horseradish. Passover. On the seder plate it was called maror—Hebrew for “bitter herb”—but my parents tended to call it by its Yiddish name of chrain. Although it was supposed to remind us of the bitterness of years of slavery in Egypt, I was always partial to horseradish. Not the prepared stuff you buy in tiny little jars, but the freshly grated variety, moistened with vinegar and seasoned with a bit of salt. Today you can find horseradish root at the supermarket just about anytime, but back then it was stocked once a year, a few weeks before Passover. As soon as I saw a chunk of the deceptively odorless root in the refrigerator, I knew what to expect. My father’s annual ritual of horseradish preparation. 

Come the weekend before Passover, he’d get to work, peeling the root, chopping it into manageable pieces, and tossing it into the food processor with some vinegar and a pinch of salt (no doubt he also added a few spoonfuls of sugar). A few seconds of pulsing was all it took. But the drama of the ritual lay in the opening of the food processor. As I recall, he would don a surgical mask for the moment of truth, because the fumes that wafted out of that processor would otherwise have knocked him out. Try it. You’ll see. 

Horseradish doesn’t have a smell when it’s whole. When it’s been cut, however, it releases the same compound that’s responsible for the sinus-blasting and eye-popping pungency of wasabi and mustard, to both of which it's related (and which, not coincidentally, are two of my other favorite flavors).  That mucous membrane-irritating compound has a purpose other than that of adding savor to my dinner or serving as a symbol of bitterness; it protects the plant from the chomping teeth of an unsuspecting herbivore—like a horse, for instance, after whom the horseradish is not in fact named and to whom it’s positively poisonous. “Horse” used to mean “strong, large, or coarse,” as in horse chestnuts or a horse laugh (not “hoarse laugh” as I always thought, but “horse laugh”).

Now if a knife can break enough cell walls to release the acrid compound, just imagine the potential of the whirring blade of the food processor. And if the odor is sharp enough when the root is being cut or grated on a chopping board on the countertop in a well ventilated kitchen, just imagine the ferocity of the pent up odors when they’re suddenly released en masse. Most recipes I’ve read merely advise you to avert your face when you remove the lid of the processor; my father, more cautious still, resorted to desperate measures.

Some of the horseradish he’d put in glass jars; to the rest he’d add some boiled beets (or were they pickled beets?) for a touch of sweetness. But for me, only the white stuff would do. For me, gefilte fish was incomplete without it, as was the brisket, the charoset, and the matzah. Without horseradish, the meal lacked savor. To me, it was horseradish that defined Passover.

But I’ve since found out that Passover isn’t alone in claiming the root or in bestowing its nose-clearing pungency with symbolic resonance. In much of Northern Europe, a traditional Easter dish is Horseradish Soup, called Bialy Barszcz in Poland. Rich with sour cream and kielbasa, the soup is spiked with a hefty amount of grated horseradish—symbolizing Jesus's sacrifice—and traditionally served with hard-boiled eggs, symbolizing his rebirth.

Slavery in Egypt or Jesus’s sacrifice. A lot of symbolic weight to put on the shoulders of a root that’s simply trying to protect itself from being eaten by a grazing herbivore. Or by me.

Whether it's Easter or Passover you're celebrating, here's how to prepare your own horseradish. For every pound of horseradish root, you'll need about a half cup of white vinegar and a teaspoon and a half of salt. Peel & coarsely chop the horseradish. Place it in the food processor with a few tablespoons of the vinegar. Pulse until the horseradish has broken down. Add the salt and enough of the remaining vinegar to get a pasty consistency. If you must, you can add a few teaspoons of sugar or a peeled medium (uncooked) beet. Purist that I am, I add neither.

Addendum: After having spoken with my parents (two of my closest readers), I have two corrections to make. First, it was my mother—not my father—who peeled and chopped the horseradish, in addition to making the chicken soup, matzah balls, gefilte fish, brisket, and virtually everything else (no doubt, she'll want me to credit the guests who bring the kugels and desserts, but blog posts—like Academy Award acceptance speeches—have to know when to call it quits).  Second, my father alerts any of you tempted to try making your own horseradish that the surgical mask alone is not sufficient to protect you against the fiery fumes that will emerge when you twist off the top of the food processor. In addition to the mask, he advises goggles.