A Damn Mess of Cheddar

What do you get when you mix French fries with fresh Cheddar curds and gravy? For most folks it sounds like a decadent mess to eat when you're drinking heavily or trying to recover from a night of heavy drinking. But for the Québécois and their fellow (as of now) Canadians, it's poutine, a delicious dish that fortifies Canadians during their harsh winters.

Prior to traveling to Ottawa, which I've done at least once a year for the past three years, I didn't know anything about poutine. I had heard, of course, of cheese fries and fries with gravy and even cheese fries with gravy (I was a member of a co-ed fraternity, after all, and never shied away from bars and bar food), but these dishes are something quite different from poutine. Those culinary travesties, made with processed orange cheese and commercial gravy, claim a place only at the bar and cannot, like poutine, secure the exalted status of a national dish. In Ottawa I've seen mothers and daughters solemnly eating poutine, not saying a word to each other and only taking a break from putting fork to mouth to take a sip of black coffee. This is a far cry from a drunken and loud bar meal.

I've become a bit obsessed with poutine and want to eat it every day when I'm in Ottawa. Part of my fascination has to do with my continual quest for local and regional foods, but another part--a greater part, perhaps--has to do with its undeniable deliciousness. When eating a grilled veggie sandwich at the Elgin Street Diner, how could I possibly turn down the chance to transform plain fries into a gloriously rich dish with gravy and milky cheese curds, made at a nearby cheese factory, for only two extra dollars? And I don't even have to worry about fooling myself that the gravy is vegetarian. At the Elgin Street Dinner the deeply flavored gravy is made from mushrooms. This is not the case with the gravy offered at other establishments, but I still might have to try it from a roadside poutine truck. After all, it's the local thing to do.

If you want to try some nonlocal poutine that's served on white plates in a trendy New York City setting, instead of in Styrofoam cups in cold Canada, visit The Inn LW 12, an Anglo-Canadian gastro-pub in the Meatpacking District (7 Ninth Ave., at Little W. 12th St.).

X

This listing has been sent

X

Send this listing as a text message to a cell phone.

TO: --

Add Note

FROM: Name OR email address (required)

NOTE:

Add Note

Presented by:

I accept Terms and Conditions

No Country for Aged Cheese

I'm back! Not just to my blog, but also to the U.S. For most of January and the last few days of 2007, I was away in Thailand, visiting friends based in Bangkok and exploring the country's northern and northeastern provinces.

During my four weeks in Thailand, I was surprised by how interested I became in the history of Southeast Asia and in the well-maintained remains of its past. I spent a good deal of my vacation touring ruins, some of which are listed as UNESCO World Heritage sites.

What didn't surprise me was the lack of cheese in Thailand, beyond the Italian ones my friends in Bangkok generously bought for me at the fancy food market at Siam Paragon. Southeast Asia is not the place for cheese. But it is the place for many other foods. Never before have I been to a country where there was so much food available, anywhere anytime. There were restaurants and food stalls everywhere: in markets, on main roads, on sidewalks, in parking lots, on the beach, in homes, in night bazaars, down side streets, just about everywhere! And there was an incredible variety of food. Usually, after a few days in a new country, I can figure out a country's or a region's typical dishes, especially the vegetarian ones, but in Thailand I just couldn't. The variety of food in Thailand is so great that it's impossible to sample it all. Just as soon as you buy something to eat from one food stall, something else tempts you. Full from whatever you've bought earlier, you decide to eat your new treat later, but when it comes time to eat it, you find yet something else to try. And I'm a vegetarian! If I ate meat, the extensive choice would have been even more overwhelming!

Pork is popular at markets and food stalls. You can sample easily identifiable pig noses, feet, and ears; pork balls, sausages, hot dogs, and even Hello Kitty, grilled on thin bamboo skewers; and a limp tangle of pig skin that I myself bought and ate, thinking that it was a dish of broken, cooked noodles. If you don't want pork, there's chicken: feet on skewers and in stews; slabs of raw poultry with shell-less yolks still attached; and grilled quarter chickens on thick wooden skewers, sold from wicker baskets on trains. If there's chicken, there are eggs: white, brown, pale blue, and shocking pink; scrambled and mixed into noodles or rice, prepared in portable, street-side woks; or hardboiled and then grilled on skewers, deep fried, or sliced to reveal their vibrant orange yolks. These can be served in a tart salad of onions marinated in lime juice, fresh chili peppers, fish sauce, and cilantro. For the daring, there a bowls of deep-fried bugs: crickets, grasshoppers, grubs, dragonflies, some of which are ground into curries.

And this isn't even the half of it. If, like most Bangkokians, you constantly think of what to eat next, then Thailand is the place for you. You'll be in like-minded company. Bring a spoon with you (Thais use chopsticks only for noodles) and know that there won't be any cheese.

A Toast to Cheddar

Here's an empty glass. What are you going to pour into it to toast lovely Cheddar cheese?

For Americans this can be a difficult question to answer. More than any other swilling nation, we Americans can be hung up about what we should drink with certain foods. We seem to lack the confidence to choose for ourselves the appropriate potent potable. Believing that there is a scientific, knowable formula for pairing beverages with food, we seek advice from experts and books instead of just popping open a bottle of something and seeing whether or not we like it. I think this quest for the perfect food & wine pairing stems from our lack of enduring food traditions and from the immense variety of foods we have to chose from. We can't simply do what's always been done (e.g., as the English do with port and Stilton).

What we should keep in mind when pairing food with wine and other beverages is that it's all a matter of taste and that there are no steadfast rules or a correct body of knowledge. Instead we should try something on our own and then stick with (and up for) what we like.

As you'll see from this long list of what cheese experts pair with Cheddar, it's hard to go wrong:

Beaujolais
Cabernet Sauvignon
Champagne
Chardonnay
Chenin Blanc
Gamay
Gewurztraminer
Grenache
Late-Harvest Gewurztraminer
Merlot
Pinot Noir
Riesling
Rioja
Sauvignon Blanc
Syrah
Zinfandel
***
Ale
Indian Pale Ale
Pale Ale
Stout
***
Oloroso Sherry
Ruby Port
Tawny Port
***
Tobermory Scotch
Ledaig Scotch
***
Hard Cider

It's ok if you want to learn how to increase your chances of a favorable pairing. If you do, I suggest Laura Werlin's, The All American Cheese and Wine Book: Pairings, Profiles, & Recipes, which I've finally just started reading. It's great, of course.

But don't wait until you've finished reading her book to pop open a bottle of something, fill your empty glass, and toast Cheddar!

Cheddar's Chunky Chums

Just who are Cheddar's chunky chums? Chutney and pickle, of course. They are standouts from the fine relish family.

On a sandwich these relishes make classic, satisfying pairings. When I say classic, I am referring to the British model for eating Cheddar out of hand. Those Brits like their cheese sandwiches either with thickly buttered bread or with a sticky dollop of chutney or tart pickle relish. When I was young and visiting relatives in the U.K., I opted for butter. To my young, American mind, the combo of Cheddar and chutney was just too bewildering and foreign.

Now as an adult, with a stint at Neal's Yard Dairy and a trip to India under my belt, I've come to embrace English relishes on my sandwiches. In fact, I had some for both lunch and dinner on Sunday, along with a cup of spiced Norwegian pumpkin soup and a glass of hard, local cider for lunch and a green salad with pecans and a bottle of ale for dinner. These meals were super fast, entailing nothing more than toasting the bread, melting the cheese, and reheating the soup which was left over from my Great Squash Sacrifice dinner the night before. Not bloody bad for a snowy Sunday!

Lunch on Sunday was particularly fast because it entailed reheating not only the soup but also my toasted cheese sandwiches. They, too, were left over from my squash supper. I had served them as an appetizer with boozy applejack cobblers, and they were the only dish—as hard as it is for me to tell and for you to hear—that contained Cheddar. More bruschette than sandwiches, they are slices of toasted Sicilian whole wheat bread, brushed with melted butter and pumpkin seed oil, topped with homemade pumpkin chutney (see Thanksgiving entry below) and cave-ripened Jersey Cheddar, and then toasted again until the cheese melts. (Note: I mean New Jersey, not the island in England, famous for its creamy Chanel Island milk!) I make this chutney each year at the end of November, and I think it's a lovely, seasonal companion for Cheddar. Spiced with nutmeg, ginger, allspice, and cloves, it's kind of like pickled pumpkin pie, but in a good way. Of the relishes accompanying my Cheddar on Sunday, this was the one that most resembled the pickle by which to judge all pickles, Branston Pickle Relish. It's the Heinz ketchup of the British pickle world, and it's the common pickle for a ploughman's lunch or a cheese and pickle sandwich bought at a railway station. Branston's chunky bulk comes from diced cubes of rutabaga and a medley of other vegetables, so my chutney made from diced winter squash isn't far off.

Sunday's dinner entailed a little more work, but not much. I halved a Sicilian whole wheat roll, also left over from my dinner, and toasted each half. On one half, I spread ajvar and then topped it with thin slices of Cheddar, and on the other, I put the Cheddar directly on top of the roll, and then spooned on a pickle relish from Brooklyn, that I had planned to eat at Thanksgiving (again, see post below) after the cheese was nicely melted. The Brooklyn pickle certainly sounds classic, but the ajvar doesn't seem typical, does it? It's not British; it's a moderately chunky Balkan relish, made with red bell peppers, eggplant, garlic, and chili peppers. It doesn't have the zippy acidity of an English pickle or chutney, but it does have the sweetness along with a hint of heat. Acidity is usually a welcome counterpoint to the sweetness of Cheddar, but the ajvar emphasizes it, and the relish's silky eggplant complements the unctuousness of melted cheese. The mild heat prevents everything from going over the top. I must admit that I was mildly disappointed by the Brooklyn pickle, Wheelhouse Pickles' seasonal Ploughman's Pickle. Florence Fabricant of the New York Times billed it as the local, small production alternative to Branston, but it couldn't have been more different. There were no cubes of vegetables and no zip. It was kind of dull and flat and tasted or raw, poorly integrated spices. But atop the roll and melted cheese, it wasn't all that bad, proving that Cheddar can bring out the best in its chums.

Gobble Cheddar Gobble!

You'll notice that I don't have a turkey as my pictorial representation of Thanksgiving. That's because I am a vegetarian, and I won't be eating turkey on Thursday. But I will gobble gobble!

To make up for the absent turkey, I won't opt for a meatless substitute, like the mysterious tofuerky. Instead, I'll emphasize local, seasonal vegetables and prepare a veggie casserole as the main part of my holiday meal. The casserole will includes Cheddar, of course.

The reason Cheddar entered my Thanksgiving menu at age fifteen has everything to do with the Moosewood Cookbook. This was my first vegetarian cookbook after I read the influential Diet for a Small Planet. Rare is the dish in this iconic cookbook that doesn't call for a cup of Cheddar cheese. Moosewood hearkens back to the days when vegetarians were encouraged to eat complimentary proteins to ensure getting a complete one. So much for the purported benefits of a low-fat, low-calorie vegetarian diet! For its 10th anniversary, Mollie Katzen revised the Moosewood Cookbook, and after that, the recipes didn't call for nearly as much cheese, but I still like to cook the original Chilean Squash, but without the corn. I'm not going to skimp on the Cheddar!

Fearing that I was falling into a Thanksgiving rut, I broke free from Moosewood last year, and turned to my favorite cooking magazine, Fine Cooking, to find a new veggie casserole. The one I chose has a much longer name but almost the same amount of cheese: Butternut Squash, Apple, Leek and Potato Gratin with Cheddar Crust. It was really yummy, and I plan to make it again this year, along an apple pie with a Cheddar crust. We'll also have toasted Cheddar sandwiches one day for lunch, with a choice of my homemade spiced pumpkin chutney (which I fear I made too spicy this year), cranberry chutney from the Union Square farmer's market, and Ploughman's Pickle, made over the Pulaski Bridge in Brooklyn. I am looking forward to trying this seasonal pickle, which, I bought--horrible dictu!--at the beer room at the Whole Foods on the Bowery.

I shouldn't blame the Moosewood Cookbook for all this Cheddar. Cheddar, after all, is the perfect cheese for Thanksgiving. Like the Pilgrims and Puritans, Cheddar was originally English, but became decidedly American. And its sweet and nutty taste and lovely golden hue complement autumnal cooking. Eating Cheddar is like a walk in the woods in the fall, when the sun casts a soft glow on the the turning leaves, and acorns and horse chestnuts crunch under your heavy shoes.

Autumn and its pumpkins will be gone soon, so eat a chunk of Cheddar now!

Cheddar for Charity

Hurry up! You have only two more days (November 19) to bid on Wedginald, the celebrity Cheddar. Proceeds from the eBay auction go to the charity, BBC Children in Need. To learn more about the auction, read this short Reuters article, and visit CheddarVision to make your bid or donate to BBC Children in Need. Good luck!

Cheddar and Apples and Ale! Oh My!

I am doing another Cheddar talk. Please come!

Monday, November 26, 7:30 PM

Come on down to Jimmy's No. 43 and join Slow Food NYC's Amy Thompson and food historian Diana Pittet for a guided tasting of four farmstead Cheddars--Old World (Britain) and New World (Vermont and California)--accompanied by four varieties of apples from the Greenmarket and beers selected by Jimmy himself!

Jimmy's No. 43
43 E. 7th St, downstairs
(between 2nd and 3rd Avenues)

www.jimmysno43.com

Tickets are $30 each, and reservations are required. To reserve a spot send an e-mail to Amy at amethomp@yahoo.com.