Chicken with 40 Cloves of Garlic; Or, A Wintry Dinner for the Weary

On the one hand, an intimate wintry dinner with friends is just the thing to restore your faith in the pleasures of hearth and home. Nothing like a fire crackling away and the warm glow of candlelight to make you feel that all’s right with the world. On the other hand, when that intimate dinner falls days after the excesses of the holidays, it might also be just the thing to make you wish you could spoon up a bowl of oatmeal and call it a night. There’s only so much festivity one can endure and after you’ve hit your limit, you’ve hit your limit.

If, your holiday overload notwithstanding, friends have nonetheless been invited, something obviously must be served. But what? When the thought of another roast is enough to make you retire your oven mitts and resort to your drawer of take-out menus, here’s a dinner that will save the day. It balances seasonal conviviality and the simplicity of a family supper. Nothing takes too much time and, apart from slicing potatoes and apples, there’s almost no effort involved. Not including salt & pepper or olive oil & butter, no dish calls for more than five ingredients and those five called for are on almost everyone’s hit parade. Who doesn’t love chicken, garlic, potatoes, salad, and apples? 

Don't, by the way, be alarmed by the quantity of garlic. When you leave the cloves whole, you don't release the sulfur compounds that give garlic its characteristic & strong taste; left whole, the cloves will soften into a sweet mellowness. In fact, despite the traditional name of this dish, I often add more than 40 cloves.

Chicken with Forty Cloves of Garlic

2 tablespoons olive oil

1 tablespoon butter

3 chicken breasts & 3 thighs - skin removed,

each piece cut in half and sprinkled with salt & pepper

40 whole peeled garlic cloves

½ cup chicken stock

½ cup dry white wine

Heat the oil and butter over high heat in a large skillet and brown chicken pieces on each side. Lower heat and add garlic, making sure the cloves settle on the bottom of the skillet. Sauté for about 10 minutes. Add the wine and stock; bring to a simmer; cover and let simmer for 15-20 minutes. That’s it.

Potato Galette

4 russet potatoes - peeled & sliced into very thin discs

 (if you have a mandoline, now’s the time to use it)

3 tablespoons butter

Melt the butter in a 9-10” inch non-stick skillet. Pour most of it into a small bowl. Layer the potato discs into the skillet, drizzling with the reserved butter and sprinkling with salt and pepper as you go along. Cover tightly & brown over a low heat for about 20-25 minutes; slide onto a plate & invert back into the skillet. Cover & brown the other side for another 20 minutes or so. Slide onto serving plate & cut into wedges. (You can, of course, sprinkle in some minced garlic and/or herbs if you like.)

Endive Salad with Walnuts & Blue Cheese

3-4 heads Belgian endive

½-1 cup toasted walnut halves

4 ounces blue cheese, crumbled

2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice

4 tablespoons walnut oil (or olive oil)

Separate endive leaves but keep them whole. Toss in a large bowl with the toasted walnuts & the crumbled Roquefort. In a small bowl, stir together the lemon juice and the oil; season with salt and pepper. Toss onto the salad.

Apple Tart

4 cooking apples – peeled, cored, quartered, and each quarter sliced into quarters

3 egg yolks

¾ cup heavy cream

5 tablespoons sugar

Pre-baked 9-11” tart shell – you can buy one or make your own (I make mine in the food processor in the usual way, using 1 ½ cups flour, a pinch of salt, 7 tablespoons butter, and about 4 tablespoons ice water; refrigerate until cold; roll out & line a tart shell; line with foil and pie weights; bake at 375° for 20 minutes; remove foil & bake for another 20 minutes. Let cool before filling.)

Arrange apple slices in concentric circles in the pre-baked tart shell. Whisk together the yolks, cream, and 3 tablespoons of sugar. Pour over the apples. Sprinkle the remaining 2 tablespoons of sugar on top. Bake at 375° for about 45 minutes or until very golden-brown. You can broil for a minute or two if you want it even browner. Serve warm or at room temperature.

Jell-O Pudding: "The funnest sacrifice"

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I’m writing this post as quickly as I can because the clock is ticking. According to the ancient Mayans, the world is coming to an end. We’ve only got until 12-21-12, a few days from now.

Happily, there is something that just might save us from impending apocalypse. No, it’s not a heartfelt prayer and no, it’s not an arcane ritual. Quite on the contrary, it’s something you’re likely to have in your kitchen at this very moment.

Corn? Beans? Potatoes? No way. If you were a Mayan god—Quetzalcoatl, say, or Kukulkan —wouldn’t you be bored after untold centuries of agricultural offerings? How much succotash can a god eat, after all?

Now, you might be thinking that what the gods really want, what would really avert the doom that’s hanging over our heads, is some vital internal organ or other, or perhaps a liter or two of blood, or some other such result of human sacrifice, but once again, you’d be wrong.

Chocolate pudding. That’s what the gods want—at least according to the folks at Jell-O Pudding. Who ever gets tired of chocolate pudding? The new Jell-O commerical features a guy slogging his way through the jungle, wading across a river, and dragging a huge wooden crate up the side of a pyramid, all in order to present his offering to the gods in the hopes of averting global catastrophe.

“Call me loco,” he says, “but I think this is gonna work.”

Well, you can’t fault them for trying and those of you who like a bit of culinary history will be happy to learn that the Jell-O folks are in good company. In the late seventeenth century, a Frenchman by the name of Henri Misson visited England and, although he was far from ecstatic over the food he was served, you might be surprised by the one thing that he did wax poetic over: pudding.

Blessed be he that invented pudding, for it is a manna that hits the palates of all sorts of people; a manna, better than that of the wilderness, because the people are never weary of it. Ah, what an excellent thing is an English pudding! To come in pudding time is as much as to say come in the most lucky moment in the world!

One has to remember, though, that Misson was not referring to chocolate or butterscotch pudding, but to such traditional English fare as black pudding—rich with blood, fat, and spices, stuffed into lengths of intestine, and boiled in water. To be fair, he did also mention sweeter puddings of “flower, milk, eggs butter, sugar, suet, marrow, raisins”—which might put you in mind of Plum Pudding, found just about everywhere around Christmas Time, but still, even Plum Pudding is a far cry from the silky smooth chocolate puddings beloved by children and gods alike.

How such stodgy puddings were transformed into the creamy concoctions on offer at supermarkets today is a matter I considered in a post last year and if you’re interested in such transmogrifications, you can check it out here.

For now, I’ll simply note—ever aware that the clock is ticking and 12-21-12 is fast approaching—that if I were a Mayan god, I might indeed prefer chocolate pudding to Black Pudding (although there is that blood connection, so I might want to give the matter some more thought). But then again, if I were a Mayan god, I think I’d prefer something along the lines of a Mexican Chocolate Flan with Kahlua (there’s no beating Rick Bayless’s recipe from his Mexican Kitchen) to the instant puddings the Jell-O folks are hoping will keep the apocalypse at bay. 

Stay tuned. As the commercial voice-over says, “Fingers crossed, we’ll see you on the 22^nd.”

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Mexican Chocolate Flan with Kahlua

(adapted from Rick Bayless’s Mexican Kitchen)

(makes 6)

1 cup heavy cream

1 cup milk

4 ½ ounces chopped Mexican chocolate (Ibarra is the brand I use)

1 inch cinnamon stick

1/3 cup sugar

4 large eggs

1 tbsp Kahlua

½ tsp vanilla extract

½ tsp almond extract

Pour the cream and milk into a medium saucepan. Pulse the chocolate in a food processor until pulverized. Add to the milk & cream, along with the cinnamon and 1/3 cup sugar. Bring to a simmer over medium heat, stirring occasionally’ then cover, remove from the heat and let steep for 20 minutes.

Whisk the eggs, Kahlua, vanilla and almond extracts in a large mixing bowl until combined. Slowly whisk in the hot milk mixture; return to saucepan and stir until the mixture coats the back of the spoon. Pour through a fine-mesh strainer into a large measuring cup. Then pour into custard cups, cover with plastic wrap (to prevent a skin from forming), and chill until firm.

A Corona with lima? Or is that limón?

A guy walks into a bar and orders a Corona with lime. No problem. He’s gets his bottle, icy cold, with a wedge of lime stuck in the top. That would be the small green citrus fruit that goes by the name of lime. At least that’s the name it goes by here in the United States. That’s why we call the color “lime green.” Because around here, limes are green.

By the same token, in these parts, the larger yellow citrus fruit is a lemon. That’s why we call the color “lemon yellow.” Because to an English speaker, lemons are yellow.

But go south of the border and order what you think is the exact same drink in Spanish—“una Corona con lima”—and you’ll get your icy cold bottle of beer but now it’ll be adorned with a wedge of lemon.

In lots of Spanish speaking countries—in Mexico, Venezuela, El Salvador, and the Dominican Republic, for instance—the small green citrus fruit we call a lime is known as a limón, while the larger yellow one is a lima. Aunt Clara, of Aunt Clara’s Kitchen, a delicious blog of traditional Dominican recipes, tells me that in the Dominican Republic, lemons are sometimes even referred to as limónes amarillos, or “yellow limes.”

On the other hand, in Spain itself, the mother country as far as Spanish is concerned, limas are limes and limónes are lemons. And get this one: in Portugal, a limão is yellow and a lima is green, but in Brazilian Portuguese, it’s exactly the reverse.

Why all the citric confusion? What happened during the transatlantic crossing?

As with so many fruits, the confusion is the result of a lot of history, a lot of meandering, a lot of hybridization, and a bit of climatology as well. In the case of citrus fruits, the story begins in the part of Southeast Asia bordered by Northeastern India that’s the original home to both the lemon and the lime. Citrus trees hybridize easily, so it’s hard to know what was what, especially given the linguistic confusion involved back then. Ancient Indian medical treatises use the word jambiru (which you can still find in Ayurvedic sources), but it’s not clear whether lemons and limes were meant. The Hindi word nimbu is usually translated as lemon, although it might have referred to lime as well, and it appears to be the source of both words. How did nimbu become “lemon,” you might wonder? According to linguists, when the “n” in nimbu is “denasalized,” it sounds like an “l” (you can ask your linguist friends about this one), which is precisely what happened to transform the word into the Persian “limu” and the Arabic laymûn from which the European languages got their various citric vocabularies since there was no native Greek or Latin word for any citrus fruit. [Citrus itself, in case you’re wondering, comes from the Greek word for cedar, κεδρος kedros, perhaps because of a similarity in smell.] 

So was the fruit that grew back then in northern India and Southeast Asia yellow or was it green? It depended on the variety planted, natural hybridization, and even on the weather—as it still does. When winters are warm, citrus fruit remains green, but if the temperature drops, the fruit changes color as it matures.

When citrus reached the New World in 1493, certain varieties took better to subtropical regions where the cooler winters turned the fruit yellow, whereas in the hotter tropical regions, the fruit remained green. In both cases, the staple citrus was known as “limón.” “Lime,” for whatever reason, was reserved for the less important member of the family, whether that country cousin was yellow or green. The lime barely registers in cuisine north of the border, and the lemon rarely plays a starring role in Hispanic cookery.

Which is why when you ask for a Corona with lime in the US, you get a wedge of green fruit, but unless you like lemon in your beer, remember to order “una Corona con limón” when you’re south of the border. Or at least specify “lima verde.”