simmering

Making a brown stock is something of a meditation, and works best, in my experience, in large kitchens with subzero barns attached.

Sometimes, in fits of boredom over the years, my obsessions have ranged from listening to the same song over and over, to yoga postures, to stirring risotto, to calligraphy. These are not entirely wasted pursuits. After all, any talents I could claim are the result of various fixations. Remember Buffon, “Le genie n’est qu’une longue patience.” I like to think there is some truth in that, considering the rarity of my first-time brilliance in most areas. Practice, repetition, persistence, soon enough it seems good enough; a bit past that, it seems just about right. Making brown stock requires that kind of obsession.

Stocks are winter-time creations. It has taken me a lifetime to admit this, but winter bores me. I lived in many cold, snowy places in my life, so this is quite a shame. Sure, it would have been great to spend the days cross-country skiing or snowshoeing, outside, running inside to make hot chocolate and warm up by the fire. Oh so Vermont. A bit tricky with young kids, especially a lot of them. So, it was at such a time, nursing a baby, entertaining a toddler, watching the snow swirl around the backyard, no phones ringing, nowhere to run to, nowhere to hide, that I baked bread and made stocks. Again, very Vermont. Around that time, the household lore maintained that grocery shopping was a hobby I enjoyed. Not true! Well, maybe in farmers’ markets, in France. Come to think of it, though, I kind of liked the coop in Montpelier, and I admit to enjoying trips to the Market Basket. Still not a hobby, but a great excuse to get out, after all.

But I digress. I did have a bit of shopping to do for my stock. It turns out that you need not so much meaty bones as meat. There used to be a butcher at the Grand Union in Morrisville who seemed to appreciate the notion of a stockpot simmering, and packed up nice bits for me. After doing this more than once, you know when you’ve got a great bone, great meat, with lots of connective tissue, for gelatinous stock… Oh my. I hope no one is disgusted by this.

That’s another thing. I have seen a lot of farm animals in my life, mostly treated kindly, but not always. My family hunted (never caught a damned thing, but it was hardly forbidden). I have pictures of my brother at age seven walking around the woods with a shotgun and an orange hat. I looked out my window for seven years, and saw dairy cows all day, everyday. (Hard to believe they are no longer there, like nearly all the dairy cows I knew when I lived there).

It just seems dishonest to eat a thing unless you can know what it really looks like when it is alive, and when it dies, and think about that. I really have nothing against eating meat, but I want to do it with as much respect to the animal as possible. For some reason, in my book this means thinking about things like feathers (well, not on a cow, obviously) and connective tissue, and shins, and not just picking out those prepared pieces, pre-wrapped in cellophane.

So, my obsession for stock was aided quite a bit by Madeleine Kamman, in her exhaustive “New Making of a Cook”. What a tome! With the commentary, it is pretty hard not to want to please Madame Madeleine. I pity the well-intentioned babysitter who recognized herself as the one who had washed Madeleine’s seasoned omelet pan. Again, I digress. The stock.

Stock is wonderful, because it allows all sorts of digressions, and yet forgives you for them as long as you eventually get back to the matter at hand. In my Vermont kitchen, the excitement built from the first step: roasting the bones, meat, various vegetables, a bouquet garni to add flavor. Into the oven they went, and stayed for some time. Wonderful aromas. I am probably going to forget something here, though, because I do not have the recipe here in front of me as I write this.

I do have things to admit here. I moved into the house I live in now about a year and a half ago, maybe a little more. The last several years have been.. shall we say? yes, busy. I have not thought about obsessive cooking since the oven in my last house broke. I really hated that oven, seemed to have a sort of wind tunnel inside, but that house was not in Vermont, and I do not live there now. And, by the way, I did not break the oven. It was just fate.

Now I have a new house, with a newer oven. So, the potential for obsessive cooking is there, if only I could find my cookbooks. So far, I have uncovered “The Cook’s Bible,” collected recipes from Cook’s Magazine. Now Christopher Kimball is one obsessive cooking man, if I ever saw one. I just cannot maintain that level of perfection in the kitchen. Obsession is one thing; the testing they do in Cook’s Magazine is just nuts. I found my ex-husband’s copy of “365 Ways To Cook Pasta,” which I have to give back to him one of these days. The Julia Child and the vegetarian cookbooks and the Silver Palate, and all those others that I used over the years, including the Helen Corbitt books that my mom handed down, must be in a box in my overstuffed garage. But it is raining today, and I am not inclined to go out and dig around.

Madeleine will simply have to understand if I am depending on my faded memories of meats roasting, stock simmering for hours, pots all over the kitchen, then shallow pans lined up on the frozen tables in the barn. It was such a process, executed over several days. The key was making the stock shimmering, as I interpreted it. How simply amazing!: pouring the filtered water and a little white wine over the roasted meat, celery, onions, carrots, and letting the low heat work its magic. Time passed, time to take all the solid parts out, pouring the stock through cheesecloth, reducing it a little more, then straining it again, skimming the top for fat, or any other evil particles… this indeed made the layers of flavor, simply marvelous.

This repetition went on for some time. By the time I finished, the huge quantities of broth had become a much smaller amount of glorious brown stock, the base of most things magnificent in my kitchen. For the health-conscious, it was nearly fat free. For most others, it was simply heaven. Nothing is more splendid than the meal that braises in the sublime.

Busy lives, crowded minds, fallen tears… so much seems to take from life at times. And yet, the good things always remain, waiting, until we look for them again.

risotto and song

I just put dinner on, and have decided to cheat at the risotto tonight, using the pressure cooker and cheaper arborio rice instead of stirring, stirring, stirring the canaroli. I taste the difference, largely because my hair and clothing don’t bask in the aroma for the time it takes to make it, but I’m not sure the kids care as long as there is plenty. Ah, but to give them taste.

Speaking of taste, during an otherwise lovely ride from Hopkinton yesterday morning, my 11-year-old son begged for me to roll up the windows when I was blasting the Fairport Convention on the van stereo. He said it was embarrassing. Sniff. I thought that the album I had chosen rocked, and had wide appeal to all age groups. Then, he noted that “Matty Groves” was “inappropriate.” Well, hard to argue that, as the lyrics started with Lord Arnold’s wife’s proposition and became increasingly violent. He truly was shocked at the idea of Lord Arnold’s abrupt return to find Matty in bed with his wife, and the murderous ending. Yeah, it is a little brutal, I admit. The part that really gets me is Simon Nicol’s gruff “GET UP” after he asks Matty, “How do you like my feather bed? How do you like my sheets? How do you like my own fair wife, who lies in your arms asleep?” It gets me every time. Still, my snobbery would have me prefer to let my kids learn about murder and adultery this way than to figure out in some giggling OMG moment that “Candy Shop” is a song about fellatio.

Right now I am listening to a CD by Lori Carson, an artist I had discovered at a friend’s house on a late night, with snow falling, turning to ice. I heard the song, “Something’s Got Me” and ordered the album soon after. When I heard the whole album, it was “Snow Come Down” that always reminded me of that night. Situations change, though, and the feelings I had lying on the floor listening to music that night turned into a friendship instead, and a nice one, at that. This evening, though, as the wind picks up and rain thinks of falling, the entire album casts its melancholy mood. Why do I subject myself to this?

Good question. I do have an answer, too.

I have to.

I love the escape of it–or rather, into it. God, I can feel it right now, the raw exposure as she sings. I get the same spine tingling from Beth Gibbons. I remember hearing her for the first time outside Portishead, on a CD from a French music magazine I used to get, “Les inrockuptibles”. I immediately bought the album after hearing one cut, and never looked back. I found it at Archambault in Montreal on one of my weekend excursions from the isolated life I led in northern Vermont… The November “stick season” with its chill grey and smoke from the woodstoves sank into my memories as I heard her remarkable voice sing, “Autumn leaves/beauty’s got a hold on me.” By that time in Vermont, the leaves were long gone, the feeling faded, but “Sand River” is still my favorite song there, one that immediately makes me wish I were in bed, and not alone.

Well, the risotto is ready. It smells marvelous, and I’ll grate the parmigiano reggiano. Mmmmm…. Wow. I forgot about the Todd Rundgren cover on this album. “And you gazed up at me, and the answer was plain to see…” Like that, too.

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Now playing: Lori Carson – Something’s Got Me
via FoxyTunes