Skip to content

recipes

Poetry family trees and brassica subspecies

Something else of interest from the Poetry Paper I mentioned earlier, a feature called The Poetry Family Trees. Featured poets – just-appointed US poet laureate Donald Hall, Sinead Morrissey, Michael Symmons Roberts, Lorna Goodison, Adrian Mitchell – were asked the following questions, which are interesting ones for all of us to keep in the backs of our minds.

  • Which ‘family tree’ do you think you belong to as a poet – which poets do you recognise as your precursors?
  • Why do you like these poets and what do you value them for?
  • The first poem/poet that made an impact on you. When and why?
  • The next book by someone you’re most looking forward to?
  • How much time do you spend reading poetry in an average week?
  • And what proportion are contemporary/from earlier centuries?
  • What else do you read?

Continuing with the many-named vegetable theme, here’s another one for you: Chinese cabbage. I’m in favour of going by the Chinese simplified name, “Large White Vegetable”. But if you want to do a closer identification, we’re talking Brassica campestris, aka Brassica rapa – subspecies pekinensis, Che-foo type. You may also encounter it as: wong baak, won bok, wong nga bok, da baicai, pe-tsai, pai-tsai, pechay, or nappa, napa, Siew Choy/siu choy, tsina, kubis gna, hakusai, celery cabbage and Peking cabbage; some of these names might attach themselves to another category of pekinensis – Chihili type – which is greener and leafier. We are gravely warned against confusing it with another Brassica subspecies – chinensis – better known as bok choy or pak choy and is also called Chinese white cabbage, Chinese mustard, white mustard cabbage.

A good source of vitamin A, this vegetable – let’s call it Chinese cabbage – has been grown in Asia since the 5th century, and in North America for about a hundred years. It forms the basis of the Korean wonder-food Kimchi (yum!). It is a wonderful salad vegetable owing to its tender, juicy, mildly spicy flavour. The best ever quick salad meal, which I first had in someone’s home in Prague of all places, is:

About 2 cups Chinese cabbage, in 1 inch chunks
3 rashers bacon
1 clove garlic
1/4 lemon
1/4 cup good olive oil
Cook the bacon; cut in 1 inch pieces. While you’re cooking the bacon, mince or press the garlic and toss it with the cabbage. Toss in the bacon, squeeze the lemon and drizzle the olive oil. Grind a bit of pepper over it all if you must. Mix fleetingly and eat hungrily. Speak to no one you haven’t shared this with – at least until the garlic subsides.

There is something ecstatic in this meal for me: the collision of hot salty bacon with crunchy cold cabbage, the tartness of the lemon and bite of garlic. And the trusty olive oil doing what oil does: dispersing all those discrete flavours across the tastebuds

    Bananarama

    Here’s a swift, simple dessert I found in a wonderful little book, A Sussex Cook’s Calendar, that my dad picked up when we all stayed in a darling thatched cottage with a cat-slide roof in the village of Steyning. I have modified the recipe ever so slightly and converted it to North American measurements. I’ve seen similar recipes where you pan fry the bananas in the butter and rather than baking, then de-glaze the pan with remaining ingredients.

    If you’re putting them over the ice cream, and you don’t like the long droopy look of banana slices, you could halve or chunk the slices, then garnish with a sprinkling of dark or demerara sugar.

    Baked Bananas (for 4)
    4 firm bananas
    Juice of 1 lemon
    Juice of 1 orange
    1/4 c brown sugar or maple syrup
    1/4 c butter
    2 tbsp Cointreau or Grand Marnier
    Cut bananas in half lengthwise; place cut side down in a buttered baking dish. Mix fruit juices and sugar/syrup and pour over bananas. Dot with butter. Bake uncovered at 350 degrees for 15 to 20 minutes until just browning. Serve warm over or under ice cream.

    Reindeer and rainy day ribs

    This morning while dog and I waited for the rain to lift, one of those rambling chains of thought and random googling led me to the website of Cyphers, a long-running literary journal edited by a group of Irish notables who have attracted the likes of Eamon Grennan (one of my poetry heroes). My search had begun with the name Eilean Ni Chuilleanain, one of the editors, whose 2001 collectionThe Girl Who Married the Reindeer, published by the excellent Gallery Books (they publish Grennan as well) I happened upon in our very own Munro’s Books. It’s a wistful book, speaks well of loss and transition, and paints a good picture:

    In Her Other Ireland

    It’s a small town. The wind blows past
    The dunes, and sands the wide street.
    The flagstones are wet, in places thick with glass,
    Long claws of scattering light.
    The names are lonely, the shutters blank —
    No one’s around when the wind blows…

    This is the time of year when I start eyeing the barbecue and readying myself for an annual cook-out. I don’t do much barbecuing, because (or consequently?) I have a smallish charcoal bbq which is a lot of bother. So I found some nice looking ribs and that got me to thinking about Texas bbq, and I found a helpful site that suggests you can parboil them in seasoned water for a speedier finish. It had started raining anyway, so I tried it: parboiled the ribs for about half an hour in water flavoured with onion, garlic, cloves and bay leaves; assembled a sauce with tomatoes, onions, mushrooms, green pepper, garlic, cloves, bay leaves, fig balsamic, chipotle chiles,brown sugar, soya sauce, Worcestershire and some home made plum chutney; cooked the ribs for about 1.5 hours in a 325 oven, and they were falling apart in loads of lovely spice. Not Texas bbq of course, but good ribs.

    Perhaps I’ll have to have some authentic Arkansas barbecue when I’m in London, at Bubba’s, in Spitalfields Market, if I can pass up the awesome lamb burgers they serve there. The choice has been made for me in the past, as they only buy small quantities of Welsh lamb for the burgers, and they tend to run out when the market is busy. Which seems to be all the time.

    One for the birders, and a bit about smoked salmon cheesecake

    Neither food nor poetry, at least not poetry yet, and nothing too edible spotted… I have been taking an introductory birding class, and here’s what they tell us we saw on our last field trip today, a rainy, cold morning in Beacon Hill Park:

    Glaucous-winged Gull
    Mallard Duck, male and female
    American Wigeon, male
    Northwestern Crow
    Violet-green Swallow
    Barn Swallow
    Vaux’s Swift
    Great Blue Heron
    Chestnut-backed Chickadee
    Red-breasted Nuthatch
    Hermit Thrush
    American Robin
    Rock Pigeon
    Common Bushtit
    Golden-Crowned Sparrow
    Song Sparrow
    Eurasian Starling
    House Finch
    Spotted Towhee
    Wilson’s Warbler
    Townsend’s Warbler
    Yellow Warbler
    Western Tanager
    Orange-crowned Warbler (heard)
    Downey Woodpecker, male
    Spotted Towhee
    Winter Wren (heard)

    Plus I saw a raven when I got home; I’d seen four of them being chased all the way down the Gorge Waterway by a flock of crows just yesterday. The best part of our field trip was seeing where the heronry was: we spotted about 20 nests in a single tree, several of them with herons in situ. Apparently they counted over 90 nests in that area last year.

    Meanwhile, I thought I’d point you to a terrific smoked salmon cheesecake recipe, which I employed to much critical acclaim at the launch. It’s not hard to make but important I think that you not overcook it, so I reduced my oven to 300 instead of the 350 the recipe recommends. Also I substituted bottled (roasted+peeled) red peppers for the green peppers called for. Refrigerate it for a couple of hours before serving (one of those wonderful things that you can make the day before) and it will firm up nicely.

    Rhubarb rhubarb rhubarb

    I have a pair of rhubarb plants that despite my neglectful stewardship manage to rouse themselves every year to give me a couple of batches of fruit. Not enough to do too much with, but at the very least I like stewed rhubarb: it is transformed with a bit of grated orange zest and the juice of half or a quarter of an orange. And sugar of course. Nice with plain yogurt for breakfast. If you have lots on hand, try a rhubarb custard pie sometime: my my my my my but it’s good. More orange zest called for there, and maybe a dollop of nice vanilla ice cream if the pie is still warm when you get to it.

    My cousin Shirley had an old newspaper recipe for Rhubarb Marmalade which sounds a lot like one I had a few years ago and still dream about, and which kindly expects that you may not have an abundance growing in your garden when the mood strikes.

    2 oranges
    2 lb frozen rhubarb
    1/2 cup water
    3-1/2 cups sugar
    1 cup golden raisins
    Cut oranges in half lengthwise. Place them cut side down and slice paper thin, discarding seeds. Cut slices in half, and put them with rhubarb and water in a large saucepan. Bring to the boil, turn down to medium and boil 10 minutes, stirring often. Add sugar and cook slowly until thick, about 20 minutes. Stir often. Add raisins and boil 1 minute. Ladle into hot sterilized jars and seal. Makes about 48 ounces.

    The February 2006 issue of Poetry Magazine surfaced during a night table re-engineering exercise, and I read The Bowl of Diogenes, an entertaining article about poetry criticism by William Logan, who sits on both sides of the critical fence.

    “In most arts… there is a guild rule against writing criticism. One looks in vain for the ballet reviews of Twyla Tharp and the film reviews of Angelina Jolie. In poetry, as in few other arts (fiction is a partial exception), the critics are the artists themselves — even though many poets, and wise poets they are, have sworn an oath of omerta, never to breathe a word of criticism against a fellow of the guild.”

    He explains his position and his passion for crossing over anyway:

    “I turned to criticism myself, not out of a messianic instinct or the will to martyrdom, but out of the terrible knowledge that I was a better reader when I read for hire, that I read more intently when driven by necessity.
    …criticism has forced me to read books I would otherwise have ignored. I’ve read far more contemporary poetry than most people, and far more than I would have if left to my own devices. I’ve probably read more dreary and ordinary books of verse than is healthy… Yet, on a rare occasion, I’ve felt like Balboa staring out across an unknown sea or Herschel seeing Uranus swim before his telescope… I’ve found a book that reminds me, not just why I write criticism, but why I write poetry.”

    He argues firmly against accessibility as the primary goal of contemporary poetry:

    “There are, even now, publishers and readers and even poets who think poetry far too obscure, who think poetry ought to be so simple it hardly needs to be read at all… The best poetry has often been difficult, has often been so obscure that readers have fought passionately over it…
    For two centuries, well-meaning vandals have been trying to dumb down Shakespeare, wanting to make him common enough for the common reader, in the doltish belief that, introduced to poetry this way, the common reader will turn to the original. Yet the reader almost never does. He’s satisfied with a poor simulacrum of poetry, never realizing that Shakespeare without the poetry isn’t Shakespeare at all. The beauty of poetry is in the difficulty, in the refusal of the words to make the plain sense immediately plain, in the dark magic and profound mistrust of words themselves…
    Surely we read poetry because it gives us a sense of the depths of language, meaning nudging meaning, then darting away, down to the unfathomed and muddy bottom. Critics, generations of critics, have devoted themselves to revealing how those words work, to showing that each sense depends on other senses. Not every poem has to be as devious and shimmering as Shakespeare (there is room for plain speaking, too); but the best poetry depends on the subtlety and suggestiveness of its language. If we demand that poetry be so plain that plain readers can drink it the whole plain day, we will have lost whatever makes poetry poetry.”

    Yogurt of the gods

    While living in England I once said, only half in jest, that I would not return to Canada until they started selling Greek yogurt. Circumstances beyond my control made me break my vow, but I still think it was a good one to aim for. There is nothing like Greek yogurt. It is smooth and luscious and may be partly cream; the ewe’s milk version is far milder and creamier than anything made of goat’s milk. Traditionally it was made in porous ceramic pots which allowed the whey to leak out, leaving a thick yogurt, something between other yogurt and cream cheese. Greek varieties made with ewe’s milk contain about 5% milkfat, and cow’s milk yogurts contain 9% (as opposed to whole-milk yogurts in this country which have around 3.5%). You can try to make your own with this recipe. Fage Total Greek yogurt is my gold standard.

    There is a legendary restaurant in London called Moro, serving Spanish and North African cuisine, and which has produced a couple of excellent cookbooks, first Moro: The Cookbook and then Casa Moro, which is mostly Spanish food. I have the first one, and in it I found a fabulous recipe for Leek and yogurt soup with dried mint. Lacking the Greek yogurt the recipe calls for, I used Jersey Farms 5% yogurt. Whatever you do, don’t use skim milk yogurt if you’re making this as it won’t have the right silky texture. The egg and flour mixed with the yogurt stabilise it and keep it from curdling, but it will separate if you over-heat it. The caramelised butter (a lot like the black butter in my skate recipe) is important too, as it really adds something to the flavour, which is mild and elusive. Don’t use fresh mint as it would be too.. minty. Here’s a slightly modified version of the Moro recipe (to serve four):

    1-1/2 tbsp butter
    3 tbsp olive oil
    2 large or 4 medium leeks, trimmed, washed and sliced thinly
    1 tsp paprika
    1 tsp dried mint
    1 egg
    1 tsp flour
    1-1/2 cups (350g) good thick full-fat yogurt
    2 cups vegetable or chicken stock
    caramelised butter (2 tbsp butter heated slowly just until the white bits turn golden)
    Salt and pepper to taste

    Over medium heat, melt butter in olive oil. Stir in the leeks and cook for 10 minutes. Add the paprika and dried mint and continue cooking gently, stirring occasionally, until the leeks are soft and sweet. Meanwhile, whisk the egg with the flour until a smooth paste is formed. Add the yogurt and thin with the water or stock. Pour over the leeks and heat gently until nearly bubbling. When hot, remove from heat and drizzle with caramelised butter.