Nutty as fruitcakes

Christmas has come and gone, absorbing more of my time than I would really have liked, principally in preparing far more food than is good for me.  Anyway, that's why I haven't had an opportunity to post during the festive season.

One of the reasons Christmas cooking takes so much of my time is that I find myself making some things that are traditional for Mrs Walles and some that are traditional for me.  I grew up eating fairly conventional New Zealand Christmas fare: ham, new potatoes, peas and carrots along with a roast, usually pork in our case but occasionally lamb.  So my first American Christmas (I've had three here now, but this last one was the first in my own home) was quite a culture shock with only one point of similarity (the ham).  Mrs Walles comes from Italian-American stock and so pasta figured heavily in that first Christmas dinner - not that I was complaining, mind you, as it was all excellent, but it was certainly different from what I was used to.

One of the most remarkable of all the American festive food quirks, I find, is the widespread distaste for Christmas cake, or indeed fruit cake of any kind.  There is an annual competition, in Texas I believe, where fruit cakes of all shapes and sizes are lobbed by catapults to see who can hurl theirs the furthest, and my own polling indicates that many if not most Americans agree that's the only thing they are good for.

For two Christmases I was baffled.  I was used to seeing Americans turning up their noses at foods they were unfamiliar with, but I couldn't understand this wholesale revulsion to such an inoffensive food. I'm well aware that not everyone in the fruitcake-eating regions of the world likes the stuff, but in America fruitcake is a kind of joke.  But what really got me was that when I made my own Christmas cake, using the hallowed family recipe that never fails, the result just didn't appeal like it usually did.  So unappealing was it that, even coated in a thick layer of brandy icing, most of the cake would end up in the bin shortly after New Year's Day.  Was there something in the air?

But now I understand.  Clearly lingering jet lag from long pre-Yuletide flights had clouded my reason over those two Christmases past.  Careful investigation this year led me to discover that what is labelled "mixed fruit" here, and which is trotted out for sale as the holidays approach, is not mixed fruit as I know it.  Mixed fruit should be heavy on the sultanas and raisins, but the stuff commonly available here contains not a single dried grape. Instead it contains candied pineapple and something called citron, which is the candied peel of a green citrus fruit which must taste something like a lime in the flesh.  Neither is conducive to a good fruit cake, making it overly sugary sweet and dense with an off-putting flavour.

This year I purchased my dried fruits individually and mixed them myself (not a trivial matter as it turned out - the mixed peel had to come by mail order from a British food importer).

The cake that emerged from the oven this year is just as I remember it.  Even Mrs Walles, long an opponent of fruit cake, had to admit that it was palatable, especially without the citron.

And so I think I've probably solved the mystery.  I reckon that American fruit cake has such a bad reputation because it is made with the wrong kind of fruit.  I can't imagine how this state of affairs came about. Maybe fruit cake devotees here couldn't get the best ingredients and had to make do.  Maybe revolting fruit cakes were deliberately baked during the revolution to scare the British away.  I don't know, but it doesn't matter.  Its enough that I know I can make good fruit cake here myself.  And in the unlikely event that I'm offered a slice of the genuine American article, I should probably politely decline.

Philly Cheesesteak

My only experience of Philadelphia so far has been from the inside of a train station, but thanks to a friend of ours who is a native we recently got to sample its most famous culinary creation, the cheesesteak.  This is a sandwich (in the American sense, which encompasses a broad church of bread-based foods, in this case it means it comes on a long roll) filled with thinly sliced steak and cheese, at the very least, with added extras depending on who makes it.

Our friend was kind enough to bring us two different kinds, one from Pat's, which has widespread reputation for good cheesesteaks (and is supposed to have been founded by one of the inventors back in the day), and one from Max's which is her personal favourite.

Max's was modestly wrapped in paper, Pat's was more promotional.

Having tried both of these I can honestly say that they were both fantastic but Max's clearly blew Pat's out of the water.  Apparently Pat's use processed cheese (only in America!) while Max's uses real cheese, and it really makes a difference.  And while Pat's added only onions Max's added some kind of tomatoey sauce which moistened everything up delightfully.  Here's a cross-section, Max's on the left, Pat's on the right.

Max's reminded me very much of eating a good steak and cheese pie back in New Zealand, which isn't surprising because there are many similarities.  Given that meat pies are almost entirely lacking in this part of the world, it's obvious that things like the cheesesteak fill the gap.

It's also clear that the City of Brotherly Love knows what its doing.  I've ordered cheesesteaks before in other parts of the country, even the state, and the genuine article is just in a league of its own.  I certainly know what I'll be eating next time I go to Philadelphia!

Thanksgiving fare

Thanksgiving was last Thursday, followed by a few days off for Mrs Walles and I.  We needed it after preparing all the food.  There was the turkey, of course...

 ...and bread stuffing with cranberries...

...fresh bread...

...along with yams (the American kind, like sweet potatoes), cornbread, more stuffing (cornbread this time, out of a packet), gravy, cranberry sauce and, as a token gesture towards nutritional balance, green beans.

Then there was dessert.  I made two pumpkin pies - to test the difference between fresh and canned pumpkin - and an apple pie.

There were only the two of us, but that just meant that we had leftovers right through the weekend, plus a few things for the freezer.  I wasn't going to let my first Thanksgiving pass without all the usual trimmings, just because there would be far too much food.  That's seldom a good enough reason to stop me doing anything!

Turkey time

It's Thanksgiving next week, and Mrs Walles and I are well prepared.  In past years one of the local supermarkets has given away free turkeys if you have enough loyalty points.  This year turkey prices are unusually high so they aren't offering that, but by biding our time and keeping our eyes open (most of the credit here going to Mrs Walles) we found one for 45¢ per pound. We got an almost twenty pound bird for less than eight dollars plus extra money off next time we fill up the car, which just about makes it even in my mind.

The idea that an entire turkey can be bought for less than ten dollars - a real flesh and blood bird, not a photograph - seems remarkable to me. Apparently some of the locals have become conditioned by Thanksgiving deals into thinking a turkey at Thanksgiving is an inalienable right, like freedom of speech and guns.  There was a man behind us at the checkout when we bought ours who was almost apoplectic with anxiety that he might miss out on his free poultry, and then even more so when the cashier told him, in effect, that if he was waiting for a free one he'd better go and catch it himself (which, as this demonstrates, is quite possible).

We also picked up ten cans of cranberry sauce on special, which should tide us over.  It might not be so much a matter of having sauce with our turkey next week, as having turkey with our sauce.

Now we just have to decide how to cook it.  I've cooked turkeys a few times here but I want to do something a bit special for the holiday meal, and my mind is turning to stuffing.  That poses a problem, because I like the dense, moist kind of stuffing that goes inside the bird and is traditional where I come from.   But I also like the comparatively dry herbed bread cubes that are traditional here and cook separately.  I don't know if I'll be able to choose between them, so that turkey had better look out: it's going to be well and truly stuffed this Thanksgiving.

John the Greek

The state fair may have been cancelled, but apparently that hasn't deterred many of the food vendors who have set themselves up along one of the roads leading into Bloomsburg.  We received intelligence of this on Thursday and on Friday acted on it swiftly and decisively, like some kind of gastronomic US marines.  We battled the conditions - twenty minutes standing in driving rain, plus an indignant man behind us who abused the staff because they didn't accept credit cards - but it was worth it in the end.

We picked John the Greek as it seemed well patronised.  We both ordered a gyro (which is a bit like a doner kebab, but from the other side of the Aegean) and shared some stuffed vine leaves (which I believe are called dolmades, but since that belief is based entirely on a sketch from the first season of A Bit of Fry and Laurie could well be wrong).  I've become particularly partial to the vine leaves since trying them earlier this year on Long Island, and since we don't really have any Greek places around here I wasn't going to let the opportunity pass without indulging again.

Mrs Walles also got dessert.  Now, for some people just cheesecake alone is good enough, but not for fair-going Pennsylvanians, it seems.  What's better than cheesecake?  Why frozen cheesecake dipped in chocolate, of course.  And what's better than frozen chocolate-dipped cheesecake?  Frozen chocolate-dipped cheesecake on a stick! (Keep up!).  In fact all manner of frozen chocolate-covered items on a stick were available.  I was a bit dubious, which is why I didn't order anything myself, but after trying Mrs Walles's I know to get one myself next time.

We beat a hasty retreat home to eat, before we dissolved in the rain.  It was getting dark so we couldn't see if there were any vendors of more traditional fair fare, like funnel cake or those apple dumplings that everyone recommends, but we'll probably get another opportunity to look later in the week.  There's hope yet of getting some fair dinkum fair food.

The cider house rules

Mrs Walles came home yesterday bearing the sad news that that the state fair has indeed been cancelled.  So no funnel cake and freshly squeezed cider for me this year, either.  I'm not sure how this is going to affect our plans: Mrs Walles has family coming in specially and we have yet to see whether small-town Pennsylvania is still enough of a draw without the fair.  Mind you, there is at least one other bucolic attraction that we were planning to show them, some kind of autumnal festivity that I don't know much about.  I'm not sure about the details, but I hope there's cider involved.

Speaking of cider, I wouldn't want you to think I'd turned into an old lush.  That's just what they call apple juice here.  Well, some apple juice.  From what I can tell, Ned Flanders had it right.  Clear apple juice is apple juice, and the cloudy stuff is cider.  Unless it's hard cider, in which case it's the kind of cider I'm familiar with, complete with alcoholic content (or so I assume from talking to people, I haven't actually encountered any yet).  Soft cider (served hot or cold) is a fairly popular drink here in the fall autumn and it has just started appearing on the supermarket shelves.  The weather may be starting to cool but Americans cleverly compensate for this with a number of delicious traditional seasonal treats.  And who would I be to buck tradition?

Fair's fair

The flood waters have receded, leaving devastation in their wake.  Mrs Walles and I took a little walk around town at the peak on Friday and gawped at the water rising almost to the tops of the flood banks.  If it wasn't for the banks then a sizable portion of our town would have been underwater.  Other towns along the Susquehanna River which weren't similarly protected really were underwater, including Bloomsburg, the town that traditionally hosts the state fair at the end of September.

As a result there was concern that the fair may have to be cancelled this year.  Justified concern, given that the fairgrounds were under several metres of water last week.  Although this is the third summer I've spent here I have yet to experience the fair: the last two times I've been here on a visitor's permit and it has run out before the fair starts.  It would be a shame to miss it again as it is, by all accounts, a sight to behold.  It's a bit like a giant A&P show, an extravaganza of farming, entertainment and food.  For months friends and acquaintances have been reeling off lists of stands I have to visit to partake of apple cider, apple fritters, ice cream, pizza, funnel cake, toffee apples and more (I've just realised how dominant a theme apples are in the line up - not that I'm complaining).

It is galling that now I am here for keeps I may still miss the fair thanks to the weather.  Never mind all those people whose lives have been turned upside down by historic floods or even those who rely on the fair for their livelihoods.  I might not get to try fresh apple fritters with cinnamon ice cream. That's the real tragedy here.

Fish in a dish

Today's post is only tangentially related to the Washington trip (you'll be relieved to hear if all the marble has been getting to you).
Instead it is concerned with something I had taken for granted in New Zealand but sadly cannot here - access to good fish.  Now the fish in America is very good, as long as you are in the right place.  Central Pennsylvania is not really the right place.  When I first arrived here, aware that the trip from New York takes about four hours on a good day, I realised that fish this far inland might be a bit sketchy.  And I was right, though perhaps not for the right reason.

You can get excellent fish here, you just have to know where to go.  After a few forays that ended badly (taste wise...I haven't eaten any properly bad fish here) I've come to realise that it's only worth ordering fish in restaurants if someone I trust has recommended it.  The other night Mrs Walles and I went out to a place where we had been advised the all-you-can-eat haddock and chips was good and it was excellent.  So good that I had two platefuls.  I've also had very good seafood at a Japanese hibachi place.  But then if you were looking for somewhere that was pretty much guaranteed to have fresh fish, a Japanese restaurant would surely be a good bet.

Though fish here is generally lacklustre I don't think this is because of our distance from the coast right now.  It seems more likely that in the time before fast transportation when the coast was even more remote people here just didn't have a lot of experience with cooking and eating fresh seafood.  I think you can see this in the way that a lot of restaurants serve fish - baked and smothered in cheese sauce, the kind of dish that's designed to stifle any flavour of the fish itself.  It's a conservative region and I can easily see this indifference to fish passing from one generation to the next even as access to good seafood improved.

I'm not sure if that's the explanation, but it's still a fact that it's hard to find good seafood around here, so I'm very grateful to the friend who gave us the tip the other night.  I don't have to wait until we visit a coastal area to get my seafood fix anymore (as I did in Washington).  The new place has me hook, line and sinker.

More cake

I was just sitting down to write this entry when I spotted the groundhog out and ran off to snap some pictures.  He was much closer than usual and because it's the middle of the day there was more light, so I'm hopeful they'll be clearer than past shots.  Also, he's just gotten much bigger, so he's bound to be easier to see whatever the distance.

Anyway, since some interest has surrounded the baking of the German chocolate cake, I thought I would post this photo of the finished product, which has now been entirely consumed.

And the recipe, adapted from the inside of the Baker's German's Chocolate packet.

German Chocolate Cake
Ingredients
For cake:
4oz (120g) semi sweet chocolate
1/2 C water
2 C plain flour
1 t baking soda
1/4 t salt
2 sticks (8oz, 250g) butter, softened
2 C sugar
4 eggs, separated
1 t vanilla essence
1 C buttermilk

For frosting:
4 egg yolks
1 can (12oz, 355mL) evaporated milk
1 1/2 t vanilla essence
1 1/2 C sugar
1 1/2 sticks (6oz, 175g) butter
7oz (200g) sweetened flake coconut
1 1/2 C chopped pecans

Directions
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (180 degrees C).  Line and grease three 9in (22cm) cake tins.

Melt chocolate and water together in microwave or double boiler.  Cream butter and sugar until fluffy.  Add egg yolks one at a time and beat well.  Beat in melted chocolate and vanilla essence.  Sift flour, baking soda and salt and add alternately with buttermilk, beating well after each addition.  Beat egg whites to stiff peaks and fold into mixture.

Pour mixture evenly into pans and bake for 30 minutes or until a skewer comes out clean.  Remove from oven and run a knife around the edge of each cake.  Rest for 15 minutes then turn on to a wire rack to cool.

Beat egg yolks, evaporated milk and vanilla essence in a large pan.  Add sugar and butter and cook over medium heat, stirring constantly, for about twelve minutes until the mixture thickens and turns golden.  Remove from heat and beat in coconut and pecans.  Cool.

Once cakes and frosting have cooled assemble the cake with frosting between the layers and on top.  Use more on top than between the layers.

Ein Cake

It's another busy week.  Mrs Walles has a birthday approaching and we're getting ready for a well-deserved (on her part, at least) break away to Long Island and New York City.  I've just spent the morning creating a birthday cake from a recipe on the inside of a chocolate bar wrapper.  I'm not usually one to make use of the recipes on the side of the box, but as you'll see this one is worth making an exception for. 

It's called a German chocolate cake.  I'd love to be able to make one of those witty remarks about it being neither German, nor chocolate, nor a cake, but I can't as it is undoubtedly chocolate and a cake, and indeed a chocolate cake.  But it isn't a German chocolate cake, as I (and I suspect many, even most Americans) assumed.  It's not a German chocolate cake either, if you see what I mean, inasmuch as it is not made from chocolate from Germany.  What it is made from is German's chocolate, German being the name of an American chocolate maker (and just to be clear, he made German's chocolate, not American chocolate - though it was undoubtedly chocolate from America). It originated in the nineteenth century with a company called Baker's (who confusingly make chocolate, not baked goods - although possibly they made the chocolate for bakers?).  It's not chocolate from Germany, is the point, it's chocolate from America, quite sweet but bitter too.

I've now written chocolate so many times that it's starting to do that thing repeated words do where they suddenly seem like they're spelled wrong.

I had downloaded a recipe for the cake from the web but once I got into the supermarket I found that the original German's chocolate is still for sale and it comes with the recipe (which was sent in by a Texas housewife in the fifties, according to Wikipedia) right in the packet, so I thought why not go straight to the horse's mouth and used that one instead.

The reason I'm going to all this trouble, and risking my ability to ever spell chocolate correctly again, is that Mrs Walles is very partial to the stuff.  Not so much to the cake, mind you (which is where all the chocolate is), but to the frosting, which I've just made.  It includes pecans, coconut, evaporated milk, eggs and lots and lots of butter and sugar and I can attest to its deliciousness.

It's a classic cake in America but I've never had any or even seen one in the flesh, so it was rather interesting to follow the recipe along and see what emerged.  I'm very happy with the result so far.  I just hope Mrs Walles is, too!

Suffering succotash!

For some reason it never really occurred to me that Sylvester's catchphrase might refer to a real thing, certainly not to a thing you might find stacked in the supermarket.

Even after seeing it there in the freezer I wasn't exactly sure what it was - Mrs Walles thought it might be some kind of green leafy thing, while to me it evoked some kind of delicious squash, but the outside of the bag showed corn and beans.  And it turns out that's just what it is: a mixture of sweetcorn and lima beans, boiled.  It's basically mixed veg (though there are slight variations, according to Wikipedia - which I must stop relying on so much).  It's from the Narragansett word msiquatash - I actually looked that one up in the dictionary.  On a hunch I also looked up "squash", and it too comes from Narragansett, this time asquutasquash.

Curious to know who these people were who made such a contribution to the language of food and cartoon cats I looked up Narragansett (in the dictionary, honest, but this way you can read about them, too) and found that it was a language once spoken by various tribes in New England and Long Island, which is fascinating especially since Mrs Walles hails from that part of the world.  I see on the Wikipedia page that they're trying to revive the language, well, they've got two words to build on right there.

Ah, what an amazing language English is.  At least the borrowed words from far-flung parts of the world show that the British took the time to talk to people before they seized their land.

Drinks with dinner

I don't know if this one is just because I'm unworldly or whether it's a genuine American phenomenon, but Americans seem to make a strict habit of drinking (in the general sense, not just alcohol) with each meal.  Having a drink with a meal doesn't weird me out, but having one with every meal took a little time to adjust to.

Before I came here I would have a cup of tea at breakfast and maybe after lunch.  Sometimes I'd have something with dinner, especially if I was out, but I didn't make a habit of it.  Now we are together, Mrs Walles and I have something to drink with every meal: coffee and juice with breakfast, tea or something cold with lunch and something cold again with dinner.  When in Rome...

On the whole this is a good thing, especially at home.  Here there is always orange juice in the fridge, and sweet iced tea and a plethora of fizzy drinks - even diet ones - that New Zealand manufacturers apparently have yet to discover.

In restaurants, though, things are usually more bleak.  Americans drink juice at breakfast but not other meals, so you can't usually get it unless the place serves breakfast.  There is always a standard line up of Coke or Pepsi products, most of which are packed with sugar (or, rather, high fructose corn syrup, the sweetener of choice in this corn-fed land).  Your options are pretty much diet cola or water, unless you're feeling rakish with respect to calories, and even that doesn't expand the range much.

There are exceptions, of course.  Perkins, one of our regular places, has chocolate milk and shakes on the menu, and another restaurant chain called Ruby Tuesday (ah, Ruby Tuesday) offers not only juice but delectible exotic juice cocktails with limitless refills.

But in general, the drink options seem limited.  Not any less limited than they might be in New Zealand. But in this land of plenty - where you can have your food customised about a hundred different ways - the relative dearth of drink choices leads me to think that those drinks with dinner aren't supposed to be enjoyed in their own right, they're just lubrication to help the food go down.

This all makes me sound ridiculously petulant and ungrateful (not to say that I'm not) but really, I think I'm starting to understand the American attitude.  After all, when the food is this good - and it is really good - who cares about the drinks?

You can't always get what you want

America is, undoubtedly, a land of plenty.  But every so often I'll come across something that just isn't easily available here.

Case in point: on her first visit to New Zealand my wife encountered cream lamingtons for the first time, and took quite a liking to them.  I haven't seen them here, but then I didn't expect to since they are a distinctly antipodean treat.  (Though I did spot something in the supermarket recently that looked like it might one day evolve into a lamington: a large angel food cake with some kind of pink icing and giant flakes of desiccated coconut attached.)

Nevertheless I thought it would be a simple matter to recreate them, it's just sponge cake, icing and coconut, right?  The icing was no problem, I could make that from scratch, and while finding the right kind of coconut took a little effort I eventually tracked some down at the little Mennonite store we frequent.  But the sponge cake...ah, the sponge cake.

There is no equivalent of Ernest Adams putting out rectangular blocks of sponge cake by the acre.  There might be elsewhere, say in New York, but here in Pennsylvania the closest thing is the angel food cake mentioned above, which is sponge cake, but always comes in a ring which is about the worst shape possible for lamington production.

So I'm forced to make my own square sponge, which means knocking up a few lamingtons for Mrs Walles is a rather more involved process than I'm used to.

Another baking basic I've yet to track down is pure golden syrup.  The best I've found so far is watered down with corn syrup and, while it looks and pours the same, it tastes wrong.  Corn syrup is used a lot here in place of cane sugar as a sweetener because it's cheaper.  It is not, I can assure you, tastier.

Still, I live in hope that I'll stumble across some (probably pricey) golden syrup.  Wikipedia tells me that it's used in Louisiana.  Sounds like a good reason to pay a visit to New Orleans, I reckon.

Wings

Here is a public service announcement for any travellers to the United States: don't forget to try the wings.

Finally, someone found out what you're supposed to do with chicken nibbles.  First deep fry them, then smother them in delicious, spicy sauce, then consume with blue cheese dressing, celery and gusto.  They call them Buffalo wings, I call them a gastronomic delight.

They are very widespread here as a starter, though I'm told that there are also places that specialise, offering dozens of variations.  I stick with the mild sauce as a rule, sweet and spicy (exactly how spicy depends on who was holding the cayenne pepper, I think).

It is possible that someone has already attempted to bring these to New Zealand.  I've never encountered them there, but if they exist they must be a poor attempt because if the real thing was available I'm sure they would sweep the nation like a sweet and spicy wildfire.

They are called Buffalo wings (mostly people just call them "hot wings" or "wings", though) because they were invented in Buffalo, New York.  The story I heard was that a traveller arrived late to a hotel one night, wanted food, and this was what was cobbled together.  Wikipedia tells me this is only one of several creation myths and even then I haven't got it quite right.

However it happened and whoever was responsible, I'm just thankful that they exist.

Dining out on dining

There are many remarkable things about food in the US, not least the scale of things.  For example they have the temerity to call this a sandwich:

If you look closely you can just see the bread peeking out from beneath a mountain of corned beef, sauerkraut, Swiss cheese and thousand island dressing.  Technically I suppose the bread makes it a sandwich, but only in the way that the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is democratic.  By the way that particular combination is a Reuben sandwich for the uninitiated and it is delicious - just make sure that the bread, even token bread, is rye and toasted.  They don't have to be monstrous, that's just how they make them at the Carnegie Deli in New York City.

Big portions don't really confound me - my appetite can hold its own here - but there are lots of little things that took my by surprise.  Like the convention in restaurants that you hold on to your knife and fork between courses.  If you leave them on your plate they're whisked away and don't return, so you pretty much have to lick them clean and sit them on your napkin.  I still get caught out by that one.

My biggest restaurant faux pas so far happened after I'd already spent several months here and dined out a number of times.  What I hadn't done was to order salad - for one thing it comes out at a weird time and for another who needs salad when you're tackling with the mutant sandwich or a steak the size of a tire?

This time, though, the salad came with whatever I'd ordered.  Fine.  Then came the fateful question: what salad dressing did I want?  I should have asked for a list, that's what I usually do, but I got cocky and just went for it.  I knew what I wanted, what any reasonable Kiwi would have asked for.  "Mayonnaise" I said.

It didn't help that this was one of the unusual occasions when we were out with a large group.  As I recall the table fell silent and all heads turned in my direction.  I could sense concern for my mental health from several of my dining companions, worried perhaps that I might suddenly turn dangerous and have to be restrained.  The waitress looked faint.  Somebody repeated back "Mayonnaise..." and then added "...on salad?" with a tone of both distaste and incredulity.

Because, you see, Americans don't put mayonnaise on salad.  They put it on sandwiches, they make other salad dressings from it, like ranch or the aforementioned thousand island, but they definitely do not put it straight on salad.  If I can save one person from the humiliation of asking for mayo with their salad in a US restaurant, this blog will have been worth it.

They did bring me mayonnaise, in the end, because another thing restaurants do here is take customers wishes seriously - more on that another time.  I think it may have hurt them on the inside to do it, though.

I eventually recovered from the embarrassment.  I've even ordered salad since.  With ranch dressing, thank you.  And I always ask for a list of the options if I'm not sure what they are.