Shameful Pleasures

As a kid, I ate things that, upon reflection, were probably better off uneaten. Not mud or hair or other inedible things that whisper "Let me in" to the unbalanced. Proper food, just...not the way one is meant to eat them. Pats of butter, for instance. Christ, I loved butter. Not on rice or noodles or toast (though that happened as well when Mom prepared meals). No. The best butter (salted, of course) was pilfered little slabs, sheered from the end of quarter-pound blocks while nobody was looking and the refrigerator door stood open. And the best place to eat them? Behind the couch in a sunbeam, hidden from view like some feral little beast with a fresh kill.

The last time I snarfed a tablespoon of butter behind the couch, Elvis still performed for sell-out crowds. While my tastes have evolved, my relationship with food remains just as intense; every once in a while, old memories and primal cravings rise to the surface of my thoughts with sudden, compelling urgency.

And so I found myself recently assembling an old kit I hadn't thought about in decades: a box a graham crackers, a half-gallon of milk, a pint glass, and a spoon. Another ritual from childhood. As precise and predictable as any junkie's kit, this has no name. There is no recipe. It's merely a thing I do. It could not be more simple: jam as many graham crackers into a glass as will fit. Then break more and stuff them into the gaps along the side. Fill just to the top of the crackers with milk. Wait a beat. Dig in. The balance of crunch and mush slides along a tipping scale until, at the end, it's a mess. A slurpy, sloppy, chuggable mess.

I may be a grown-ass man with work to do and bills to pay, but now and again, knuckling under to childhood food cravings allows me to put aside thoughts of that work and those bills.

Repeat, as the shampoo bottles advise, if necessary.

Cooking with Lard, Potash, and Hartshorn: 1932 Lebkuchen

A little royal icing with rum is no hateful addition

I've just returned from a week in Kansas City where, among other errands, I delivered a small load of German yuletide spice cookies known as lebkuchen. Don't know it? You've heard of gingerbread? Same deal. Well, close enough to get the idea, anyway. Like its Anglo-American and French cousins, gingerbread and pain d'épices, lebkuchen has been around for centuries. A tipoff that it hails from another age is the ancient use of honey rather than sugar for sweetening. Not that lebkuchen is terribly sweet — just enough to satisfy a late morning/mid-afternoon craving with a cuppa tea. The glugs of rum in the icing and dough itself don't hurt.

The cold dough is stiff

Made with ground almonds and candied citron, the fancy version I baked is more properly dubbed Elisenlebkuchen (perhaps St. Elisabeth's lebkuchen, but German bakers have no consensus on the meaning). The recipe comes from a Weimar-era German cookbook: Frau F. Nietlispach's Das Meisterwerk der Küche  (Bong & Co, Berlin, 1932). If honey weren't sufficient, the cake-like cookie calls for three additional ingredients that firmly anchor it in another age: potash, hartshorn, and lard.

As I reviewed Nietlispach's recipe, I flipped through the contents of our pantry in my mind. The lard (Schweinschmalz) was no stranger in my baking repertoire. For the candied citron (Zitronat), I used a diced mix of homemade candied orange peel and the last of my candied Buddha's Hand/Cthulhu Head citron.

A quick check with my old pal Michael McGuan revealed that he had just rendered lard the day before; within 40 minutes I'd gotten my hands on 200 grams of it. More than enough for this recipe. The cooked pork smell rolling off the creamy white lard gave me pause. Would it be too strong for cookies? I forged on anyway without any attempt to refine it. The porkiness, in fact, faded away to the barest nothing after baking, a faint savory porcine whisper that complemented the spices.

Thinner shapes cooling on the rack

But what about the potash and hartshorn? Potash is a particularly old ingredient and may refer to a number of substances that include potassium. Originally made from leaching wood ash and reducing  the potassium-rich residue in pots, potash was a important source of income for colonial Americans who cleared and burned forests as if the trees were without end. The alkaline salt is used in glass-making, fertilizer manufacturing, and occasionally to inhibit certain enzymes in beer brewing, but its use in baking is what interests us here. Along with hartshorn (see below), potassium carbonate (K₂CO₃) is a chemical leavening agent that helps give loft and lightness to somewhat stiff doughs. Baking soda commonly substitutes for it in modern recipes.

Brokeback Lebkuchen

Hartshorn or hartshorn salt [Hirschhornsalz, (NH₄)₂CO₃] is also known as baking or baker's ammonia. With the advent of baking soda and baking powder, it fell from favor in the US, but traditional baking recipes from northern Europe, Poland, and Scandinavia still employ it. Although it was once actually obtained from shavings of deer antlers, industrial sources assure that woodland animals are no longer culled for cookie ingredients. At least not on a commercial basis. While baking, hartshorn releases ammonia gas that expands the dough. Although the gas dissipates fairly quickly, the lebkuchen may have a whiff of smelling salts about it right out of the oven. Don't be alarmed; it doesn't last.

Royal icing is one of the traditional decorations for these cookies and I doled it out in blocks, lines, stars, and other shapes on the thick slabs I made with half the batch and on the thinner stars, gingerbread men, and open-palmed hands. A little bit of rum in the icing isn't a bad thing. Alton Brown has as good a recipe as any. He uses vanilla extract, but a similar amount of lemon juice or —my choice — rum also works to loosen and flavor the icing.

For those who can read the old German script, here's the recipe:

Gunter glieben glauchen globen. Doesn't make any sense to you? Check out below.

And if reading that doesn't come easily to you, here is my transliteration and adaptation for modern kitchens. The text of Frau Nietlispach's recipe follows for those who like to check against the original.

Elisenlebkuchen

(Rowley )

½ pound honey

½ pound sugar

100 g pork lard

1-1.25 pounds flour

½ pound peeled and grated sweet almonds

125 g finely cut mixed candied citron and orange peels

2 eggs

4 g each of ground cinnamon, ground cloves, cardamom

15 g of potash (potassium carbonate, 2.5 tsp), dissolved with 2 Tbl of rum

4 g hartshorn (ammonium carbonate, 0.75 tsp) dissolved with 2 Tbl of rum

Let the honey, sugar and fat boil in a pot. In the bowl of a stand mixer combine the spices, almonds, and one pound of the flour. Carefully add the hot honey mixture and mix slowly to blend. Then add the eggs, potash, and ammonium carbonate and continue mixing until the dough is smooth and shiny. Add additional flour if necessary to achieve a dough that’s just barely tacky to the touch.

Let it rest, covered with plastic wrap, overnight in the refrigerator.

When you are ready to cook, heat the oven to 350°F. Roll out the dough, using flour as necessary to prevent sticking, in large slabs [5-10mm thick] and cut into rectangles about 8 x 5 centimeters or round cakes roll about 5mm and cut into shapes with cookie cutters.

Line a cookie sheet with parchment paper a silicone baking mat. Transfer individual cookies to the sheets. Bake slabs 18-20 minutes or cut-out shapes 12-25 minutes. Transfer to a wire rack to cool. After cooling, coat them with different glazes to such as chocolate, sugar and raspberry glaze and decorate each cakes differently: with [royal icing], finely chopped almonds, colored granulated sugar (nonpareils), chopped, green pistachios, halved almonds, etc. [As an alternate to lining cooking sheets] before baking, you can put the cookies on Oblaten [baking wafers].

Elisenlebkuchen  

(Nietlispach)

1/2 Pdf. Bienenhonig, 1/2 Pdf. Zucker, 100 g Schweinschmalz, 1  Pdf. Mehl, 1/2  Pdf. geschälte und geriebene Süß Mandeln, 125 g feineschnittenes Zitronat, 2 Eier, 4 g gemahlener Zimt, Nelkenpulver, Kardamom, 15 g Pottasche, 4 g Hirschhornsalz, beides in etwas Rum aufgelöst — Honig, Zucker und Fett laßt man aufkochen, fügt  Gewürze, Mandeln und Mehl zu dem heißen Honig, verrührt gut und kochen. Dann kommen Eier, Pottasche und Hirschhornsalz dazu, worauf man den Teig sehr gut verkneten muß. Ist er glatt und blank, rollt man in aus, sticht große, runde Kuchen aus und bäckt sie aus gefettetem Blech schnell bei guter Hitze. Nach dem Erkalten sind sie mit verschiedenen Glasuren: Schokoladen-, Zucker- und Himbeerglasur zu überziehen und jeder Kuchen anders zu garnieren: mit feingehackten Mandeln, buntem Streuzucker (Nonpareilles), gehackten, grünen Pistazien, halbierten Mandeln ufw. Man kann die Kuchen vor dem Backen auch auf Oblaten legen.

Goes well with:

• Elise Hannemann's Liverwurst, another old German recipe from the library here.
• Ginger comes up a lot at the Whiskey Forge. From Soulless Ginger Lemonade to Kentucky Mules, check out some of the other recipes.
• Want to make your own lard at home? It's easy as pie. Easier, even. Here're directions.
• Look for potash (Pottasche) and hartshorn (Hirschhornsaltz) among the baking ingredients at grocers catering to a German clientele; the brand I use is Alba Gewürtze. No German delis in your neighborhood? Try ammonium carbonate and potassium carbonate from GermanDeli.com.

Miniature Ice Cream Sandwiches

Eighteenth-century lexicographer, biographer, and essayist Samuel Johnson wrote in the first edition of his pithy Dictionary of the English Language (1755) that oats are "a grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland appears to support the people." It's a quote that still raises the ire of some Scots. Of course, Dr. Johnson could also be a bit of a prick about many things, not just English ethnocentrism. He defined a distiller, for instance, as "One who makes and sells pernicious and inflammatory spirits." That's clearly hogwash. Grains of salt — many of them — are required when reading his essays.

But Johnson was in mind on a recent trip to visit my parents when my mother picked up a small tub of tiny oatmeal cookies, each the size of a medium coin, from Trader Joe's. Opinionated as Johnson may have been, was not entirely wrong about oats. Oatmeal is fine in a mash bill for, say, dark and velvet stouts, but the grain doesn't make one of my favorite cookies because it tends to yield a dry little cake. Not horrible, just not something I'd shove others out of the way to get.

So in an offhand, joking way, I told Mom "You know, if you want to keep your granddaughter busy, you could have her make little ice cream sandwiches with those tiny cookies. Maybe a teaspoon of vanilla ice cream between two of them, then freeze them." The Midwest summer was soul-draining hot; ice cream sounded great, but the tedium of little handwork required to make them was not something seriously to be entertained. This was just idle chatter; holding an idea up to the light, as it were, and casting it aside without further thought.

When I went to get ice for my iced tea the next morning, lo and behold — a one-gallon bag of miniature ice cream sandwiches was waiting in the freezer. Mom had been busy after I'd gone to sleep. We had them that night for dessert as we sat around the big wooden dining room table, talking politics, religion, and other topics one doesn't broach with casual acquaintances.

Some ideas, it seems, should not be cast aside so lightly. 

Goes well with:

• No need to restrict yourself to vanilla ice cream (or oatmeal cookies). We've made these with goat cheese ice cream (or, rather Glace au Fromage-blanc de Chèvre) that turned out quite good as did the Dutch cocoa ice "cream" made with thick coconut milk rather than cream. Lemon ice cream sandwiched between Belgian speculoos cookies are winners, too. Take this as a template and run with it. Hell, you can dip them in chocolate if you like. 
• Agnes B. Marshall was a bit of a maverick in her (Victorian) day. in 1901, she advocated mixing liquid oxygen with ice cream ingredients tableside to make ice cream, getting a jump on modernist cooks by almost a century. See Mrs. Marshall's Liquid Air Ice Cream.
• In her book Paletas, Fany Gerson gives a recipe for granizado de michelada, a granita-like frozen treat based on that Mexican spiked beer stalwart, the michelada. Here is the recipe.
• About this time last year, San Diego lost power for a day. Rum-lashed mango sorbet inspired by David Lebovitz helped get us through the dark, sultry night. Lebovitz called for dark rum, but I swapped it out with maraschino, then used rum over the top of the finished sorbet. You try it.

Salted Ginger Cookies

Every year around Christmas, we make batches of pliable, chewy ginger cookies. In addition to fresh and powdered ginger, the cookies are spiked with white pepper and coarse sea salt, then covered in sugar before baking. When they come out of the oven, they’ve spread from jaw-breaker sized balls to 2-3” flat discs. They keep well enough, but freeze whatever’s not eaten within four days.

We’re on day No. 3 and I don’t think there will be any call for a freezer.

Salted Ginger Cookies

½ cup/110g brown sugar
½ cup/100g white sugar
½ lb/226 g unsalted butter
1 egg
1/3 cup/80ml molasses
2 ¼ cup/280g all purpose white flour
1 Tbl fresh ginger, grated
2 tsp powdered ginger
1 tsp powdered cinnamon
½ tsp powdered allspice
¼ tsp white pepper
½ tsp coarse sea salt, mounded*
2 tsp baking soda
Additional sugar for rolling dough balls*

Cream the butter and sugars together in a stand mixer. Mix in the egg, then the molasses. Then add the remaining ingredients (except rolling sugar) and blend thoroughly until it forms a stiff dough.

Preheat the oven to 325°F/165°C/Gas mark 3.

Chill at least half an hour, then roll pieces of dough in your hands to form into 1” balls. Roll these in granulated sugar, then arrange on a greased sheet pan (or, as we do, one lined with a silicone mat). Bake about 12 minutes. Cool on a rack.

* Note on the salt and sugar: Free-flowing table salt isn’t what you want here. Part of this cookie's appeal is its random distribution of small, irregular chunks of grey sea salt. If it’s too large, crush it a bit, but you don’t want the salt completely pulverized. We usually use white table sugar for rolling the dough balls, but demerara would be nice and possibly even large-grained German hagelzucker (though I use that one for other cookies, I haven't tried it with these). 

Don't feel like making ginger cookies? Make ginger pie.