Lynne C. Anderson will speak about her new book Breaking Bread: Recipes and Stories from Immigrant Kitchens on Tuesday, November 9th

Lynne C. Anderson will give a talk on her new book “Breaking Bread: Recipes and Stories from Immigrant Kitchens” Through stories of hand-rolled pasta and homemade chutney, local markets and backyard gardens, and wild mushrooms and foraged grape leaves—this book recounts in loving detail the memories, recipes, and culinary traditions of people who have come to the United States from around the world. Chef and teacher Lynne Anderson has gone into immigrant kitchens and discovered the power of food to recall a lost world for those who have left much behind. The enticing, easy-to-prepare recipes feature specialties like Greek dolmades, Filipino adobo, Brazilian peixada, and Sudanese mulukhiyah. Together with Robin Radin’s beautiful photographs, these stories and recipes will inspire cooks of all levels to explore new traditions while perhaps rediscovering their own culinary roots.

The meeting will take place at 6 pm on Tuesday, November 9th at the Schlesinger Library in Radcliffe Yard, in Cambridge, MA.

http://www.culinaryhistoriansboston.com/public.htm

Joe Carlin will speak on The Humble Clam on 10/26 for Culinary Historians of Boston

On Tuesday, October 26th from 6 – 8 pm at the Schlesinger Library, Joe Carlin will speak on

The Humble Clam: The Making of a Culinary Icon

For Colonists, clams were a survival food, consumed during periods of want. New England farmers set their pigs free on the clam-flats to eat their fill, and long line fisherman, trolling for cod off George’s Bank, used clams from the Great Marsh as bait. Today this humble mollusk is a cultural icon and symbol of New England cuisine. This talk will explore how the humble clam, dug from the mud became a culinary icon and symbol of summer in New England. Many consider clams from the Great Marsh to be the best soft shelled clams on the east coast, the perfect ingredient for chowders, clambakes, and of course, they make the best fried clams.

Joe is a public health nutritionist and has been active in the CHoB since year one. Joe is interested in a variety of topics including eating, drinking and entertaining during the Colonial era, the history of the hearth, tavern culture, and food technology. He lives in Ipswich, MA, the clam capital of the world, which explains in part his interest in the history of the clam.

Joe’s first book Cocktails: A Global History is expected to be published by Reaktion Books in 2011.

Foods of the Triangle Trade: 2010 Culinary Historians of Boston Annual Banquet will be on May 23rd

This year's banquet moves along the sea-lanes of the early British Empire "between the civil wars," 1650-1775. It marks the introduction of new foods from the tropics of Africa and the Caribbean to the Anglo-American table, as well as Mediterranean foods and Asian spices in larger quantities.

Contact the banquet committee through the Culinary Historians of Boston website: http://www.culinaryhistoriansboston.com/public.htm

Here's the Spring 2010 schedule for the Culinary Historians of Boston

Wednesday, January 20th
Kathryn Allamong Jacob “King of the Lobby: The Life and Times of Sam Ward, Man About Washington During the Gilded Age“ www.kingofthelobby.com
Why is this Gilded Age lobbyist relevant to the Culinary Historians? Sam combined delicious food, fine wines, and delightful conversation to create a new kind of lobbying in Washington after the Civil War. In a capital city where the food at official dinners was often appallingly bad, Sam reigned over the new social lobby that he created at his dinner table for more than a decade. Those who dined with him gushed that his evenings were "noctes ambrosianae"!

Tuesday, February 23rd
Andy Coe “Chop Suey: A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States”

Tuesday, March 23rd
Corky White “Coffee and the Café in Japan”
Corky White is professor of Anthropology at BU and she currently working on a book on Coffee and cafes in Japan.

Wednesday, April 21st
Stephen Cole and Lindy Gifford "The Cranberry: Hard Work and Holiday Sauce”

May 2010 (date to be decided)
Banquet
Newberry College

What I'll be cooking this weekend: Chickpea Curry with Tomato and Mango

I'll be making a dinner for 12 people on Sunday night, many of whom are vegans. Here's what I plan to serve. I published this recipe on Grist.org in 2007. If you want to see the original article, it's here:

http://www.grist.org/article/tis-the-season-for-wicked-curry-in-a-wicked-hurry

I'm doubling the recipe so that we should have more than enough. I'll let you know how it goes...

Chickpea Curry with Tomato and Mango

This recipe is fantastic with Meyer lemon juice added at the last moment. Meyer lemons have a nice lemon flavor but they are not as sour as regular lemons. They tend to be smaller than regular lemons and have a smoother rind. Warming the spices will make the house smell fantastic and make your dinner extra delicious.

Serve with basmati or brown rice.

I thought this would easily serve 8 people, but it depends entirely on how hungry you are.

1 tablespoon curry powder
1 teaspoon ground cumin
½ cup canola oil
2 cups chopped yellow onion (approximately 2 medium onions)
1 tablespoon minced ginger
2 cloves of garlic, chopped
2 big cans (28 oz cans) fire roasted organic tomatoes (it doesn't matter if they are crushed or whole, as you will crush them in the cooking process)
½ cup dried mango slices, cut into strips (a pair of scissors is good for this)
2 regular cans (about 15 oz each) chickpeas, rinsed and strained
a few small red hot chili peppers (I used ones called piri piri that you can buy in a jar)
salt to taste
lemon juice from a Meyer lemon or 1 tablespoon regular lemon juice
1 cup cilantro leaves, loosely packed (more is fine, but you need at least 1 cup)

1. Warm the spices in a skillet over low heat until they become aromatic, then dump them onto a plate. (I say warm rather than toast because they really do not need to change color.) I warmed the spices in the pot I was going to use to make the curry. I just dumped the spices onto a plate once they were warmed through and wiped out the skillet with a paper towel.

2. Add the oil and warm it over medium-high heat. Once the oil is pretty hot, add the chopped onions. Add the ginger and garlic. Cook until they are translucent. They do not need to brown.

3. Add the two cans of tomatoes. If you are using whole tomatoes, use a spoon to break them down. Toss in the dried mango. Cook for five minutes. Add the spices.

4. Add the chickpeas. Add the chili peppers if you want some heat.

5. Cook the curry for about 20 minutes or until the chickpeas are slightly softened and completely warmed through. The dried mango should be completely hydrated and softened by now too. You may need to cook it for 30 minutes, but start checking at the 20 minute mark.

6. Take the curry off the burner. Throw in the lemon juice and stir. Taste the curry. Now add a pinch of salt and taste again. Correct the seasoning with more salt if necessary.

7. When you serve the curry, throw some cilantro on top of each portion. Ask your guests to stir it into the curry.

-----

Thaiish Cabbage Salad
This is completely inauthentic. I made it up out of my imagination, using flavors that I associate with Thai food, and then I threw in some weird stuff, like apricot jam. You can use the other half of your bunch of cilantro in this salad.

Serves 8 as a side dish

Salad
1 head Napa Cabbage, roughly chopped
1 cucumber, peeled, seeded if necessary, cut in half lengthwise, and sliced into crescents
1 red bell pepper, seeded and cut into small triangles (cut the pepper into strips and then cut the strips on angles to make triangles)
1 blood orange, tangerine, or regular orange, peeled, seeded, and cut into sections
a few leaves of basil (optional: this is just as good without it if you don't want to spring for it)
½ bunch cilantro, leaves stripped off the stem
1/2 cup unsalted roasted peanuts, roughly chopped

1. Wash the chopped cabbage and shake it semi-dry or put it in a salad spinner. It doesn't have to be completely dry for this salad.

2. Add all the rest of the ingredients except for the peanuts.

3. Dress the salad and toss it. If there's too much dressing move the salad to another bowl, leaving the extra dressing in the bottom of the first bowl. (But save the extra dressing in the fridge for your next salad!)

4. Now add the peanuts.

Salad dressing
1 tablespoon peeled chopped ginger
2 cloves of garlic, chopped
juice from one blood orange or 1 regular orange
2 tablespoons apricot jam
2 tablespoons lime juice (or more to taste)
juice from a Meyer lemon or 1 tablespoon regular lemon juice
2 tablespoons rice vinegar (option: rice vinegar with ponzu flavoring)
1/3 cup olive oil
a few tiny red hot chili peppers (I used piri piri from a jar)
pinch salt
1 or 2 teaspoons sugar to taste (optional)

Place all ingredients except sugar in a blender. Blend until uniform. If you use a blood orange, the dressing will be an odd shade of pink. Taste it and see if you need to add sugar to tame the tart nature of the dressing.

Talking with My Friends about the Books They Wrote this Year

There are several things about my life that haven’t turned out the way I had planned: I am not a crime-fighting ballerina (life goal, age 5), nor do I live in a house with a fireman’s pole that goes from the bedroom straight to the breakfast table (life goal, age 9), and somehow, unaccountably, I have never become a member of the B-52’s (life goal, age 20 - the present).

Other aspects of my life, however, have turned out even better than I could have imagined. I love to read and I had hoped that I might one day spend time around other people who liked to read too. Never in a million years did I think that I would end up becoming friends with people who actually wrote books as well as read them, and I certainly never thought that I would become a writer myself. Through sheer luck I ended up living in a community populated by many writers, and I have also met many writer friends at classes and conferences.

This year several of my friends published books. I decided that it would be fun to interview them about their books and also about the writing and publishing process. Being a food writer, I have many friends who have written cookbooks, but I also have friends who have written non-fiction books this year as well.

January is the perfect month to curl up and read and to stay home and cook. I hope that this series of interviews will inspire you to check out these books.

First on the list is an interview with Monica Bhide, author of Modern Spice.

For many years I worked in Cambridge’s Central Square, a hotbed of political radicals, indie music, MIT students jaywalking unselfconsciously into oncoming traffic, and Indian restaurants. No matter what I had packed for lunch or planned to eat at any of the neighborhood cafés, I was irresistibly drawn to the Indian buffets because of the fantastic aromas that filled the air. It was impossible to do any errand in the area without instantly salivating and deciding, “You know what? I think I am going to take that sandwich I brought for lunch home for dinner because I have got to have some Indian food right now!”

I was overcome by a similar feeling as I read Modern Spice, by my friend Monica Bhide. She writes about food so vividly and evocatively that I once again felt compelled to eat some Indian food immediately, and I felt frustrated that I couldn’t instantly cook and taste every recipe in the book. These are – just as the book title suggests – modern recipes created for the way that people cook now: they are lighter than most traditional Indian recipes and easily prepared by busy people who want to enjoy a great dinner without spending hours in the kitchen. The flavor to work ratio is just right.

Modern Spice was just named one of the best cookbooks of 2009 by AOL and it was cited as one of the “Best.Books.Ever” by Top Chef’s Padma Lakshmi in Newsweek. The first printing of the book sold out in a month and a half, and I can easily understand why.

Monica had already authored The Spice is Right and The Everything Indian Cookbook, so I asked her how she got the idea for Modern Spice.

MB: I love to cook Indian food, as do many folks here in the U.S., but I always felt that the way I cooked and the way many of my Indian friends cooked was not yet reflected in any Indian cookbooks. Our new cuisine is a reflection of our lives today, here and now. Just as traditional curries and dishes cooked painstakingly from scratch reflect our mother’s and grandmother’s generation, our dishes reflect our modern lifestyles. They are easy, fun and intensely flavorful.

Modern Spice is about capturing the cuisine of this new generation. The dishes are vibrant and have enticing flavors, yet they are simpler, refined, and adapted to modern lifestyles. This is Indian food as it is cooked today. This book takes my mother’s cooking and translates it for my generation, which embraces the same flavors but is not stuck on any absurd marker of authenticity that no longer exists.

This book shies away from mango lassi—there are 200 books out there (including two of my own!) that you can read for that—instead it brings you a Lychee Martini. It doesn’t offer chicken tikka masala; it provides a recipe for chicken gently simmered in fresh cilantro and mint. This is Indian my way, reflecting the modern Indian cooking of today, reflecting the modern Indian.

RC: What kinds of research did you do in order to write this cookbook?

MB: I talked to a lot of people who cook Indian-inspired foods. I have traveled the world in search of modern Indian food and recipes. While I wrote the book in a year, I feel like I have been researching for it my entire life.

RC: What recipe required the most test runs? How many times did you have to test and tinker with it, and what was the thing that made it so time-consuming?

MB: There was a recipe for amaretto cookies. No matter how many times the various testers made it, it was hit or miss. Basically, if the butter in the cookie wasn’t at the right temperature, the cookie dough wasn’t the right consistency. So we finally decided not to keep it in the book.

RC: Which recipe was the most fun to test?

MB: There is a recipe in the book for vodka shots served in an Indian savory crisp. We tested those several times, mostly just for fun!

RC: Did friends and family try some of the dishes for your book? How do you distinguish between useful feedback regarding whether a recipe is a success or failure as opposed to how someone feels about a recipe based on his or her personal likes and dislikes?

MB: Great question. What I did for every recipe was to test it with my family at home since I know how their tastes go and then re-test it on neighbors and friends to get their opinion. Finally, I would match that with the feedback from the recipe testers.

RC: Do you have a favorite recipe from the book?

MB: I love them all, but I am beginning to show some partial tendencies towards the cover dish – Shrimp with Pomegranate. It is such a simple dish to prepare and I love that all my son’s young friends who try it love it so!

RC: Do you have a favorite category of recipes in the book?

MB: Without a doubt, the cocktails!

RC: Which recipe has gained the most attention?

MB: Hmm… this is a hard one. I think the Rice Pudding with Mangoes and the Pan-Fried Zucchini and Squash have gained the most attention.

RC: Is there an emotional or cultural aspect to the recipes in your book?

MB: Yes! Many of the recipes are tied to stories about where they came from. I think that is what makes this book standout from other cookbooks on the market.

RC: What was the most difficult aspect of writing your book?

MB: I think timing. I had just delivered a baby and so making sure I had enough time for everything was rough.

RC: What was the most surprising thing that happened?

MB: Once I started writing, the words began to flow and it was so much easier than “thinking about the book.”

RC: What was the most unexpected thing that you learned?

MB: Simplicity in recipes is underrated.

RC: I agree with you completely about that. What was the most fun aspect of writing your book?

MB: Eating all the food!

RC: What has it been like seeing readers’ reaction to the book?

MB: Overwhelming. I have to say that I never expected the book to hit such a chord and I have been inundated with emails and fan letters. It is so gratifying.

RC: What has your overall experience of going through the process of writing and publishing this book been like?

MB: Since this is my third book, I have to say that the process overall was very pleasant. We had a few rough spots, and who doesn’t! I remember one time the paper manuscript with all the edits on it was misplaced for a day or so. That was ROUGH.

RC: What kinds of things are you doing to publicize your book?

MB: Everything from radio to TV to the internet to cooking demos to book signings to cooking classes and all else in between.

RC: Have you been using social media to publicize your book or communicate with your readers?

MB: Yes, very much so. I tweet and have a Facebook page that has been so very helpful.

RC: Have you been using video to communicate with your readers?

MB: Yes, we did a book trailer and a few live videos but not a lot yet! But I am hoping that I will with my next book.

RC: How did you feel the day the galleys were in your hand?

MB: Really anxious… wondering how the world would react.

RC: I love your column, iSpice, in the Washington Post. How do you decide what spice to focus on each week? Will you be covering fenugreek or asafetida anytime soon?

MB: Thanks! I really have fun with that column. I love to read about different spices and I pick spices that are both well known and some that are not. Readers also write in asking for spice profiles. Yes, fenugreek and asafetida are coming up, but the column does focus on spice and herbs from all around the world (and sometimes other seasonings that don’t fall in those categories – we have covered red hots and Sriracha!)

RC: How did you recruit recipe testers? Did you use professional testers? Friends and family? Where the testers cooks who had done any Indian cooking before?

MB: I used professional testers for any recipe I thought needed an extra set of eyes. Friends and family of course helped test. I made sure many of the testers had never used some of the spices, weren’t familiar with the techniques and in some cases the cuisine – this really helped show me how to simplify and modify the recipes.

RC: If readers want to get in touch with you, how would they do that?

MB: All my contact info is on www.monicabhide.com