Cooking is a trade. I’ve said so before. It is no more an art than is carpentry. Sure, you can be artistic in the expression of your trade; cabinetmakers can be artisans, as can cooks, but never artists. It is merely a trade, like all the others, were raw materials are manipulated using specialized tools and knowledge to produce an end product that people whish to buy. The difference between a good tradesman and a great one lies in the skills he has mastered.
I, therefore, can’t stand to see something cooked, a method used, a culinary trick, without wanting to master it. For example, a walk through china town leaves me hungry for dumpling-making abilities, wok skills (of which I have absolutely none), and peking duck recipes. I want to let pizza dough fly with that quiet arrogance, cold-smoke fish, roll sushi, make sausages. The pursuit has already taught me to cure meats, bake sourdough breads, make perfect consommés, and breakdown 70kg tuna, not to mention all the simple skills needed for the daily life of a chef.
In general, I feel confident that I can learn to do anything with food. This is why it’s so bloody frustrating that I can’t master orecchiette.
For those who don’t know, the name of this small, round, dented pasta translates as “little ears” and each one is hand made. Diminutive Italian women who probably look like your grandmother sit at wooden tables in the backstreets of Trastevere, upon which lay, tucked under towels, fists of a dough made only of flour, water, and salt. These they deftly roll into pale, thin snakes and chop, chop, chop them in woodpecker-time into perfectly even beads. Then, in a motion reminiscent of a child crushing a bug, the old women flatten each one with their down-pressed thumbs, and flick it into a wicker basket sitting in their aproned laps, rolling it slightly as they do so. One after the other, like dealing cards in reverse, each tiny ear pops from the table, little domes with thin centres and thick rims, ready to catch sauce, hold flavour, like cups to your mouth.
I love orecchietta. They are one of my favourite pastas. Except, no matter how hard I try, I can’t make them properly. Admittedly I am not an old Italian woman, not yet anyway, so I am at a disadvantage. I understand the method, have practiced a bit, but my little ears are lopsided, cook unevenly, tear, and are generally both ugly and unpalatable (and then there's the pasta...). Perhaps I need to sit at the desiccated, cracked feet of a pasta guru; perhaps I need smaller thumbs. Or perhaps I need to spend a few years on laneway cobbles rolling and pinching and popping. One more tool for my kit.
For now, I’ll stick with the dried stuff.
Orecchietta with Caramelised Fennel, Anchovies, and Toasted Breadcrumbs
300 g dried orecchietta
1 head of fennel
1 clove garlic
6 anchovies
4 tbsp breadcrumbs
½ tsp lemon zest
Remove the tops of the fennel, keeping any of the fine fronds that remain. Cut the fennel in to two from top to bottom and remove the thick, woody core. Slice the fennel into 1 cm slices; don’t cut them too thin, as they will break down completely during cooking. Place the fennel, a tablespoon of olive oil, a pinch of salt, and 4 or 5 tablespoons of water into a small pot with a tight fitting lid. Cover and cook over medium heat until all the water has evaporated. At this stage, uncover the pot and cook the fennel until it is soft and has become golden. Crush the clove of garlic with your palm and toss it into the fennel. Remove from heat and set aside.
Cut the anchovies into small pieces and mix them into to the warm fennel.
Bring a large pot of salted water to the boil. Cook the pasta until it is tender but firm. While the pasta is boiling, heat a small pan on medium-high heat. Add a tablespoon of olive oil and then the breadcrumbs. Stir and toss these constantly until thy have become a dark brown. Remove from pan to a cool bowl. Stir zest into the warm crumbs.
When the pasta has been drained, return it to the warm (and now empty) pasta pot. Remove the garlic clove from the pot and discard. Toss the caramelised fennel with the hot orecchietta, adjust seasoning, adding a bit of olive oil if it is a bit too dry. Serve into bowls, sprinkling the toasted breadcrumbs over the top along with some chopped fennel fronds, if you have any.
Note, this pasta calls for no cheese. If you think it needs cheese, try something for me: add some salt. Parmesan is very salty, and often when we think we want cheese, we actually lack salt. Trust me.
On Skillsets
Kitchen Chaos
This is something of a repost, I first told this story on the world wide intranets on my Wife’s blog. It is one of my favorite kitchen stories to tell, partly because it is the worst dinner service I’ve ever worked, a night where the entire kitchen completely ceased to function and fell into a sweaty, smoke-tinged, screaming chaos, from which none of us believed we would ever emerge. Mostly I tell the story as penance because, as you’ll see, it was completely my fault.
The French restaurant I was working in was run by a slightly mad and absolutely brilliant English chef, Matt, who’s cockney wit encompasses such an astounding range of insults and profanities – in at least four languages – it’s impossible not to admire, regardless his insinuation you prefer sex with animals to the company of your girlfriend (and he knows this, he tells you, because he’s intimate with your girlfriend). We all told ourselves we put up with it because he was teaching us so much, and is so well-respected in the Sydney restaurant scene that merely having his name on your resume will open doors for you. These things are true. Closer to the bone, however, is that we all loved it, lived for it, were fired up by the sort of personal, honest cruelty normally reserved for blood relatives. These were not the trials you endured with coworkers, they were emotional trauma that make people family.
Matt’s Sous Chef, Steve, a six-foot-something Canadian from the cultural no-man’s-land of Saskatchewan, had, in addition to helping run the kitchen, three primary roles: First was food cost/wastage control. God save you if you ordered more of any one food item than you were going to use that day. “What do you mean you need a box of fennel? I’ll get a half box. DON’T run out.” Not even God could save you if Steve caught you wasting food.
His second role, equally important, was quality control. Steve has this supernatural ability to know when you’ve not done something properly. He’d be on the other side of the kitchen plating food yelling for more duck jus, clattering hot plates, calling dockets, while, in a rush, you start cooking scallops in a pan that isn’t quite up to temperature – and he’d know it. It must have been the pitch of the sizzle or the smell of something not caramelizing at exactly the right rate, and he’d turn, point and shout “NOOOO! GET IT OUT OF THE PAN!” (though with his accent he said “oot”) “OOT! IT’S NOT HOT ENOUGH, and you know that.”
Third, Steve’s simplest (and I suspect favourite) responsibility, was to dispense verbal abuse in the rare moments when Matt had nothing to say or paused for breath. Any normal dinner service, therefore, consisted of the two of them calling dockets, directing waiters, plating food, and taking turns ensuring that you’ve absolutely no doubt your work is neither fast enough nor good enough.
On this night, our problems emerged almost immediately after the start of service. It was the new dish on the hot entrée section, my section, and everyone was ordering it. “ORDER IN! One gazpacho, one rouget, and one gnocchi! ORDER IN! Oysters and a gnocchi!” The menu shorthand necessary during service belies the true nature of Matt’s style of cooking. When Matt shouts “rouget” he wants a pan fried fillet of the little red fish atop a warm saffron pickle of baby carrots, pencil leeks, shallots, and white asparagus, garnished with marinated and slow roasted whole cherry tomatoes, basil purée, deep-fried parsley, and a shellfish jus. My new dish was even more complicated.
I’d been a bit worried about the dish since my day began at 8:00 a.m.. By adding the dish to my section Matt had effectively doubled the amount of work I had to do in a day. For the gnocchi dish I had to joint, brown, render, and then slowly braise ox tail, cool it, pick the meat, and reduce the braising liquid to a jus. I had to poach, peel, and then slice beef tongue, purge snails, mix up café de Paris butter (a herb butter with no less than twenty ingredients), portion and pound out wagyu neck minute stakes, and make an onion cream sauce reduction, which then went into a CO2 powered whipped cream gun. Then, of course, there were the herb and parmesan gnocchi (roast potatoes, pass through a fine sieve, mix, pipe through a pastry bag, blanch, shock in ice water, dry, and portion). And there were the sweetbreads.
Sweetbread is the culinary term for the pancreas or thymus gland of a young cow and I can only surmise that they must have such an attractive name to help one forget what is actually being served. I’d never cooked sweetbreads before, and when I opened the butcher’s bag I was greeted by a mass of pinkish-grey, mucous-covered, gelatinous, opaque, segmented flesh, which seethed and slid in such a convincingly alien-egg-sack-like manner I didn’t know whether to drop the bag and flee or clamp it shut to prevent the sweetbreads from doing the same.
My fears aside, the sweetbreads needed to be poached in a court bouillon – a vegetable stock, heavy on aromatic herbs – then they were to be pressed, cooled, their fatty and sinewy membranes peeled away, trimmed, and portioned for service. Later they will be pan-fried until they are crispy on the outside and decadently creamy on the inside. Prepared in this manner they are a true delight.
By 6:00, ten hours after I started, I was “boxed” as we say – section set up, standing at my stove with no further prep to do. Technically, I was ready for anything. “ORDER IN!” Matt absolutely bellows out dockets. “Beets and a Gnocchi! Ok Yank,” I’m the only American in the kitchen. “You’re on.”
“Gnocchi” meant this: Heat a pan until it is smoking hot. Season the steak, oil the pan, quickly sear the steak, thirty seconds on one side, ten on the reverse, and leave it to rest in warm place. In another pan on medium-high heat, pan-roast the sweetbreads which you have first patted dry and dusted with flour, when they have good color, throw a knob of butter, a sprig of thyme, and a crushed clove a garlic into the pan and flip the sweetbreads, foaming in butter until the entire surface has an even, dark golden crust, careful not to burn the thyme. Now is a good time to make sure the onion cream gun is still hot. Meanwhile in a small pot, warm some jus and picked bits of ox tail. At the same time, in yet another pan, on medium heat sauté the gnocchi until lightly colored, flip, add butter and the sliced tongue, toss till warm through and drain off the excess butter. In another small pot, warm some clarified garlic butter and gently poach the snails.
Now assemble the plate: steak down first, then a seemingly random but always identical arrangement of snails, gnocchi, tongue, tail, and sweetbreads on top. Finish with a sprinkle of parmesan, crispy sprig of thyme, oxtail jus, a slice of café de Paris butter, and a few squirts of onion cream foam. Easy.
Easy except that the dish required five pans and I only had a four-burner stove. Ok. I’d just have to rotate through the components. What about the other dishes on my section, some of them two- or three-pan dishes? Rotate faster. Right, here we go, steak is on, snails in, sweetbreads on, steak flipped, steak out, gnocchi on, no color on the sweetbreads yet, gnocchi flipped, tongue in, jus hot, tiniest bit of color on the sweetbreads, tail in jus, gnocchi and tongue out, still not enough color on the sweetbreads, come on, jus off, snails out, steak on plate, why won’t they color, tail, tongue, gnocchi, jus, foam, and parma, all plated, strategic spaces waiting for the soggy, pale-brown sweetbreads. Crank the heat, wipe the rim of the plate to look busy, flip the sweetbreads. Shit. Burnt.
“YANK!” Matt’s spotted my mistake. “What are you DOING? Even heat, you worthless knob. They’ve got water in them. They FUCKING PISS OUT WATER. That’s what sweetbreads DO! They won’t caramelize until you cook out the water. It’s going to take a while, get them on first thing.” New pan on, sweetbreads in, wait, wait, wait, finally colored, flip, foam in butter, re-warm the rest of the dish, re-plate and send. “ORDER IN! TWO GNOCCHI! ORDER IN! ONE OYSTERS, ONE GNOCCHI! That’s three gnocchi, cocksucker, and this time without the carbon.”
Pans on, sweetbreads in, slowly, slowly browning, still manage to cook and plate all the other components before the sweetbreads are ready, but the timing is a bit better; at least nothing is burnt. I wasn’t able to reflect on this minor success because in the time it took me to cook and plate three orders, six more gnocchi orders came in. Each time I got a group out, a greater number of orders have backed up, my timing was still off, and I, as well as everyone else in the kitchen, knew I was falling dangerously behind.
“YANK! You are well in the shit now. Give me two gnocchi and three Rouget. PRESSÉ” The starter section was divided into hot (me) and cold (William) starters, and I could sense, though I didn’t have time to look, that Will was ready and waiting on my plates to finish several tables. I, in turn, was waiting on sweetbreads to finish my plates. “WHAT’S GOING ON OVER THERE, STARTERS?” Now Steve was yelling too. “GET YOUR SHIT TOGETHER! LET’S GO!”
More orders in. More gnocchi. A group of four, then a group of two, then six. All the while, each group of tables was taking too long, holding up each successive wave more and more, until eventually orders were coming in nearly a quarter of an hour before I had a chance to even start cooking them. In desperation I threw eight or nine serves of sweetbreads in a pan and watched in horror as the flour from the sweetbreads and oil instantly transformed into a rolling sea of bubbling paste. “GET FIVE GNOCCHI ON THE PASS NOW!” Matt, roaring now, face red, hadn’t seen my pan of splattering glue. Steve had.
“Throw it out,” Steve said. The man who served roast potato skins for staff lunch so that nothing is wasted wants me to throw out nine serves of sweetbreads. That’s strange. What was even stranger, and what had me most worried was that Steve was no longer yelling. This was a completely new development. He’d gone past screaming, or he’d decided that what I needed was some help instead of more yelling (this in strict contradiction to conventional kitchen wisdom which states more yelling fixes everything). “Start again,” he was almost whispering now, “and don’t put so many in a pan at once.”
It continued like this for another hour and a half. I just couldn’t get my timing right and nearly every table in the restaurant waited too long for their food. At some point I looked up (god help me why did I waste the time it took to look up?), and the entire kitchen had stopped. I was taking so long to get starters out that there were long gaps when no tables were ready for mains. In a kitchen, to stop is to die. No one, not even the dish hands, would look at me. I knew it was my fault, but what I desperately wanted was a sympathetic glance, one reassuring smile, from anyone.
Finally, one of the pastry chefs, Al, came to help me. I cooked, he plated. Clawingly, achingly, screamingly, we started to pull service out of my nose dive when Matt shouted “WHERE ARE THE TWO GNOCCHI FOR TABLE 31?”
“Uh…? Two gno…”
“WHAT THE FUCK! I SENT THE REST OF THE TABLE! THEY’VE ALREADY GOT THEIR FOOD! WHERE IS IT?”
“It’s in the pan chef!” A small lie, as I was just putting the various components in the pans as I spoke. I waited for it. Waited for the yelling, waited for Steve to come crashing down on my section, waited for the inevitable shouted insults and public humiliation, but it didn’t come. What followed was the most terrifying silence I have ever experienced. The only sounds in the kitchen were the gentle roar of my four burners on high, hiss splatter of water coming out of sweetbreads, and the heavy, metallic scrapping of my pans as I tried hopelessly to speed-cook all the components of a gnocchi dish.
And then, sweating draining off my nose into the cluster of white-hot pans on my suddenly tiny-looking stove, praying I didn’t burn anything, I could sense him standing behind me, towering over me in that deafening silence, inflated by his rage. I could hear him, his English teeth clenched together, drawing in a great breath, and I braced myself for the onslaught. When he leaned in close I could feel the heat of his angry breath on my ear and he whispered, almost a sigh that was somehow clearly audible to the rest of the kitchen: “If you don’t get those gnocchi on the pass in two minuets,” and here he grabbed my kitchen timer, set it for two minuets and hit start, “I’m going to fire you, and the guy next to you,” jerking his thumb angrily at Al who’d come to bail me out.
Those two minuets boiled away so quickly. By the time Matt walked away and Al and I had exchanged terrified glances, we’d lost half a minute. 1:30. 1:20. Plates down, steaks finished. 1:10. 1:00. Shit! Get the oxtail in the jus! :55. :50. Flip the gnocchi. :45. Steak plated. :40. :35. Gnocchi out, snails out. :30. Gnocchi, tongue, tail, snails, plated. :25. :20. Jus. :15. Onion foam. :10. Butter, thyme sprig, parmesan sprinkle. :05. Sweetbreads. Oh god the sweetbreads. Please let the sweetbreads be cooked enough. Please. Turn them out of the pan and… they’re perfect. Holy shit they are utterly perfectly golden crisp. Look at that! Perfect!
“TIME’S UP! WHERE THE FUCK ARE…”
“On the pass chef!” I thrust the plates at him; he barely glanced at them.
“Good. Now give me three gnocchi and two rouget.” And like that it was over. Well, the yelling was over, but the night wasn’t. I still had to fight, with Al’s help, to drag us all out of the pit I thrust everyone into. The entire kitchen, in fact, had to fight, since I’d so ruined any semblance of rhythm for the night’s service. We’d continue fighting until sometime after midnight.
When I finally lay down in bed, Kell woke enough to murmur “How was your day?” Though I’d never admit this to any of my coworkers, there in the dark, well after 2:00 a.m., replaying the evening behind my closed eyes, I allowed my self one self-pitying sob and responded “I don’t think I can do this anymore.” And then I went to sleep; I was due back in the kitchen at 8:00 a.m..
As a bit of an epilogue, I have to point out that at the end of the terrible night Matt pulled me aside for what I assumed was to be another berating. “There is a locker upstairs in the change room that is empty. Be sure to put your name on it.” Then he walked away. He wasn’t telling me I had passed some kind of test, or that he wasn’t angry, because he was angry and I had failed, but he wanted to remind me, and I want to remind you, readers, that the kitchen is a tiny, volatile, super heated, universe, always on the verge of self destruction. Whatever happens inside that universe between the time you enter and the time you leave isn’t real; it stays behind when you go home and, mercifully, has magically dissipated when you return. It has to be like this, or none of us would ever go back.
Anyway, here is a simple recipe for an accompaniment to most any meal. It’s particularly good with anything from the barbeque. Try not to fuck it up.
Warm Salad of Roasted Vegetables with a Chive and Seeded Mustard Vinaigrette
1 green zucchini
6 baby yellow squash
4 kipfler potatoes (or other waxy small potatoes) boiled
6 swiss brown mushrooms
12 cherry tomatoes
1 bunch parsley
Heat oven to 180ºC (350ºF). Cut the zucchini, squash, potatoes, and mushrooms into bite-sized pieces, toss each with a bit of oil, salt, and pepper, and arrange in groups on one or two baking paper-lined trays. Do not mix the different vegetables, as they will roast at different rates. Cook the vegetables, including the whole cherry tomatoes, until they are soft and delicious, removing each from the tray when they are done cooking. When they have all finished, toss together with a handful of picked parsley. The tomatoes will burst and become part of the dressing. Serve warm.
Chive and Seeded Mustard Vinaigrette
1 bunch chives, chopped
1 tsp seeded mustard
1 tbsp tarragon vinegar
3 tbsp olive oil
Mix all ingredients, season, and adjust the amount of oil or vinegar to your taste.
Lowly Spud
One day I’m going to write a book about the history of the potato. This little tuber has, arguably, changed the world like no other food. Follow, from culinary curiosity to French Army filler to Western European diet staple to Great Famine origin to Eastern European staple to presidential hopeful spelling mistake to third world standard fare. Since it’s introduction to the New World by Spanish explorers in the 16th century there is hardly a major event, war, migration, revolution that has not involved, if not been sparked by the spud.
As evidence, take for example, the American accent. That nasal, rapid-fire auditory assault which has won me so many friends here in Australia is almost solely the fault of the lowly potato. So much of the way Americans speak is based on the Irish accent, and their overwhelming influence thereon can be attributed to the mass migration of poor Irish during the potato famine of the 1840’s.
While I’m on the subject of the Irish (and, in some kind of synchronicity, drinking Irish whiskey) let me say a little something about Irish food. That something is this: I know nothing about it. Not a thing. I can’t even imagine what it is like. I look at all those pale, freckled, malnourished people and I honestly wonder what, in god’s name, have they been eating. Try as I may, all I can envision are Guinness-drinking louts, rolling green hills speckled with sheep, red-haired maidens, and dancing leprechauns singing ‘Oh Danny Boy.’
Admittedly I don’t have the most vivid of imaginations.
I suppose I do know one thing about Irish food. I love Irish Stew. What can I say about this simple dish of three ingredients? This must be the ultimate combination of simple flavours and it results in a meal that is so primitively satisfying I often feel there is no other comfort food. You must make this some cold Sunday afternoon.
Traditionally the meat in this stew is not browned, and I have added a few ingredients that I like to include. However, if you are a strict traditionalist skip the browning and stock making steps and omit all ingredients but the lamb, potatoes, and onions. Your meal will still be outstanding.
200 g lamb shoulder, bone out, 2 cm (1 in) dice
8 pickling onions, peeled and cut in half along the horizontal
4 mashing potatoes (russet, désirée), peeled and cut into large cubes
200 g lamb bones
1 bay leaf
1 clove garlic
50 g butter
50 ml cream
Heat oven to 180ºC (350ºF). On a tray, roast the lamb bones until deep brown. Put the bones in a small pot, making sure to scrape any of the little stuck bits of meat and juices from the pan. Cover the bones with water, bring to a boil, and simmer for at least an hour, skimming any fat that rises to the surface.
Meanwhile, working in small batches, lightly salt and brown the cubes of lamb in a large skillet. Put the lamb, half the potatoes, the onions, garlic, and bay leaf into a large pot. Strain the stock into the same pot and top up with water until the contents are just covered.
Simmer for 2 to 4 hours, until the meat is tender but not falling apart. Season.
Boil the reserved potatoes in water until soft. Mash with butter and cream.
Serve stew ladled over warm mash.
Divine Proof
Benjamin Franklin, one of my favourite historical figures, is often credited with saying “Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.” While I am more than willing to play along, as I love beer and enjoy the thought that Ben did as well, if I am to be totally honest I have to tell you that in all of the volumes of writing he produced, this quote does not exist. Still, he is know to have taken great pleasure in beer and may have proclaimed his belief in ale’s celestial connections oft enough that it became common knowledge. We’ll never know for sure.
While in France, as American Ambassador from 1776-1785, he wrote down his recipe for beer, which he brewed and drank himself:
“A Way of Making Beer with Essence of Spruce:
For a Cask containing 80 bottles, take one pot of Essence and 13 Pounds of Molasses - or the same amount of unrefined Loaf Sugar; mix them well together in 20 pints of hot Water: Stir together until they make a Foam, then pour it into the Cask you will then fill with Water: add a Pint of Yeast, stir it well together and let it stand 2 or 3 Days to ferment, after which close the Cask, and after a few days it will be to be put into Bottles, that must be tightly corked. Leave them 10 or 12 Days in a cool Cellar, after which the Beer will be good to drink.”
I thought I’d give it a shot. First I had to translate the recipe into modern measurements, which presented two major problems. I know how much a pint is, and a pound is still a pound, but some of the other measurements are meaningless. To start, how large is a cask? Or a bottle in Franklin’s time? And what does a “pot” of spruce essence look like? The strength and flavour of a beer depend completely on the ratio of ingredients to the amount of water, so the information is essential.
I tried to research the size of casks in the 18th century and discovered quickly that they ranged so greatly in volume that I would never know if I had the right one. I had a bit more luck with the bottle size – turns out 32 ounce bottles have been around for a long time. And, 80 of them make a 20-gallon cask. That’s a lot of beer.
As means of crosschecking that I had the right volume of cask I read up on the strength of homebrews in the 1700’s and discovered that they were often brewed weak. Beers now usually have an alcohol content of about 4.5%. Homemade beers of Franklin’s time usually had an alcohol content of 3% - 4%. The reason for this is that beer, with its bacteria-killing alcohol, was considered safer to drink than water. These “Small Beers,” as they were called, were intended for everyday consumption with most meals (even breakfast), not for getting drunk.
It is possible to calculate the approximate final alcohol content of a beer based on the ingredients. I will spare you the boring math bits. In the case of Ben’s recipe it turns out 20 gallons of water and 13 lbs of molasses yield an alcohol content of 3.7%. Perfect.
As for determining the quantities of a pot of Spruce Essence, I got nowhere. In the end I finally decided to buy some essence and follow the suggestions on the bottle as to how much I should use per gallon of beer.
Scaling Franklin’s recipe down a bit, here is what I came up with.
2 k molasses
5 L water
20 ml spruce essence
10 g brewer’s yeast
Boil the molasses and water. Cool. When room temperature, add the spruce essence. Bring the final volume to 15 L. Sprinkle yeast over the top. Ferment. Bottle.
(I’m leaving out some of the fine details of brewing; write me if you are really interested in trying this at home.)
The original recipe suggested fermenting for a few days before bottling, but I found that it took much longer to ferment, a couple of weeks (probably due to the low temperature I at which I was brewing) and, as it is dangerous to bottle beer before it has finished fermenting (boom), I waited. When I finally bottled it, the mix smelled awful, like sugar burning in pine sap, but I have read that brewing with molasses produces strange flavours that disappear over time. To be safe, I decided to wait about 12 weeks before trying one.
So, months later I’m ready to taste some liquid proof.
I think I made God angry somewhere along the line. This shit is unpalatable. It pours like thin soda and doesn’t hold a head at all. The burnt flavour has not so much subsided as been slightly masked by a new and even more offensive sour-rubbing-alcohol aroma which oozes from the glass like some pure, primordial evil. My one taste was quickly returned and left me looking for something I might use to violently remove the top layers of my tongue.
I think we might call this a failure.
I can admit, I may have got it wrong. Too much or too little spruce. Over fermented. Any number of other missteps. I suspect, rather, that Mr. Franklin had a different idea of what God’s love might taste like.
Despite the, admittedly, discouraging outcome, I might try this recipe one more time, just to be sure.
recent posts
