NATIVES, URCHINS, AND GRILLED LENTILS

Recipes: Salt Preserved Lemons, Oyster Hash, and Quick Shellfish Stock

Photo Courtesy Sam Hanna hannaphoto.com

NATIVES

I love oysters, and part of the enjoyment in England is the play on words with natives, the term both in French and English that classically appeared on menus to denote oysters from local waters – and still, in nostalgic establishments, often does.

There is nothing like a great Colchester, unless it is a Belon, or the flat oysters of the family ostrea. And when there is an "r" in the month as there is now, it is time to think of all the oyster again.

These days no culinary discussion is worth its salt unless there is mention early on of that great Roman authority, the legendary Apicius. It's not his fault that he is a current darling because he is the first Western foodie.

And quite passionate about food, oysters in particular. His culinary suicide was not only over oysters, but the result of his bank account dipping down to 10 million sestertii after spending 100 million on food. The crash made him think that he might starve from a lack of bivalves which even then were expensive since the oysters he loved most came from England. His method of keeping the little darlings - sticking them in a vinegar barrel fumigated with pitch - would not have worked very well on that long ocean voyage, so they had specially constructed bottoms on their galleys.

Even galley slaves had to be fed, and if they had been eating Colchesters they might have followed their master's recipe for minced oysters, crab, lobster (both spiny and clawed), cuttlefish, ink fish or scallops -- by chopping them up finely and mixing them with a little fresh lovage leaves, pepper, cumin, and laser root, whatever that is.

And I call it hash.

Oyster Hash

Lean oysters without too much of that pale and soft gonad area that turns pasty when finely chopped. It is important to keep all the ingredients very cold.

12 very fresh lean oysters, shucked

1 large shallot, peeled, cored, very finely chopped

1 tablespoon finely chopped fresh Italian parsley

1 teaspoon freshly ground coarse black pepper

½ teaspoon champagne vinegar

1 teaspoon very light olive oil

1-2 tablespoons freshly squeezed lemon juice

Finely chop the oysters and put them in a bowl over ice. Add all the parsley, pepper, vinegar and oil and mix together. The add half the lemon juice, mix and taste, and add up to all the remaining lemon juice if needed to get the right balance of acidity and salt of the oysters.

Wait 10 minutes and serve in chilled Chinese spoons. With or waithood caviar on top.

His "minced dishes" or "Isicia" are a derivation of isicia is from incisium as in salsum incisium or chopped salt meat. That gets us into, in old French, salcisse and modern saucisse, meaning a sausage made with chopped meats with lots of salt. They knew perfectly well that hand-chopped meats mixed gently and briefly with hands make the best charcuterie, let alone sausages. So why not take the minced oysters with their lovage and cumin and stuff them in a casing (after it has marinated in fresh herbs, white wine and oil) and poach it for a few minutes? Mixed with minced lobster, scallop or crabmeat would be heavenly as well.

While in heaven it might occur to one, after the second glass of Blanc de Blancs, what it would be like to mix the oyster hash with brains to make isicia de cerebellis? Apicius uses cooked and sieved brains, and eggs, and then serves these isicia up in a sauce of lovage (again), oregano, and pepper crushed in a mortar with its pestle, using hot broth to thin it to sauce consistency.

But perhaps that combo taxes the cerebella of too many ingredients? Much easier to stick a large platter of natives and some good bubbles.

URCHINS

My chef friend Matt Beaudin has just finished the 2025 Pebble Beach Food & Wine. And he served to the thousands on opening night, beef tartare served on top a potato chip with marrow foam. The first time we cooked together at that event he brought 100 big Monterey Bay sea urchins and then opened them for my dish of soft scrambled eggs served inside the urchin shells with an urchin butter sauce.

All of which reminded me of sea urchins with marrow for a Stars revival dinner at Farallon in San Francisco.

The plane left Merida at 8:30 so I was at the Santiago market by 6 that morning to buy enough bananas and watermelon to keep the huge and macho iguana in the garden happy while I was away. What he wouldn’t finish, the Kau birds would, probably joined by wild and screeching green parrots from the mamay tree just outside the dining patio. As for the three juvenile sopilotes or vultures who have taken to drinking out of the pool, they would not, but just stand by hoping the iguana would die.

I grabbed a couple of blood sausage tacos and a pint of freshly-squeezed orange juice in the market, but my mind was on the croque-monsieur and a glass of La Doucette at Le Grand Comptoir that used to be at the confluences of the ‘C’ gates at Houston International airport..

My fried ham and cheese sandwich whose secret is the very tasty smoked ham, real Gruyere and, as if the butter in which the rustic white bread is fried is not enough, lashings of mayonnaise on the inside of the bread just to keep everything juicy enough to need three napkins. I admit to a certain obsession with this heavenly sandwich and, as a way to make an airport livable, it has no peers, though the Harrod’s smoked salmon and caviar bar at Heathrow would be a contender if the staff were not so blasé.

My thoughts beyond the ham and cheese sandwich were focused on the proposed menu.

That included hot in-bone beef marrow topped with chilled and very fresh sea urchin gonads. An odd combination at first, but the two fats both cancelled and enhanced each other. If that makes sense.

It did.

The porchetta was pig head boned and rolled, cooked and sliced. The squab, from impeccable farming sources, needed nothing more than light smoking over a fire, seizing in olive oil, cooling, boning, and blasting quickly in the oven to order. But it was the sturgeon filled with lobster and crab mousse that caught my fancy. Boned, stuffed and tied, and roasted whole. The sauce was a fish and shellfish stock, reduced, buttered, and then sturgeon caviar stirred in to order and spooned over slices of the lobster-stuffed fish.

Tradition, decadence, and new vision, all in one dish. Exactly what good restaurant cooking today is all about.

Sometimes minus the decadence.

Quick Shellfish Stock

Fresh mussels or clams are the secret to this 10-minute rich shellfish stock. Cook them fish stock, plus a little white wine and fresh herbs.

Serve the mussels themselves for a salad, hot first course, or chopped up into mayonnaise for a sauce to serve with grilled fish. And the clams with buttered and herbed breadcrumbs and baked.

Yield: 3 to 4 cups

2 pounds fresh mussels, washed

3 cups fish stock

2 sprigs fresh thyme

2 sprigs fresh parsley

1/2 cup dry white wine

Put all the ingredients in a pot, cover, and bring to the boil over high heat. Cook for 10 minutes and strain. Decant the strained stock into another container, leaving half an inch of the old behind along with any sand.

GRILLED LENTILS

Chefs who aren’t involved with pastry hate cooking exactly from recipes.

And that’s how I found myself in Kalustyan’s, an Indian food bazaar in “little India” in Manhattan. To buy lentil papadum rather than find a recipe to make them which might turn out to be a lesson in humility.

\Not a bad thing for chefs writing recipes.

I have never seen in one place so many varieties of beans, all of them in great condition. I did not buy any because like in a video store the number of choices was overwhelming.

I focused more on the lentils.

I had seen many of them before, but never the “Black Beluga lentils.” Most beluga caviar you buy these days (I don’t) should look that good. More even-sized little black spheres were stacked in front of me in the black pepper section: Vietnamese (“smoky and complex” and most expensive at $16.00 per pound), Lampong from Indonesia (“high peperine content and very rich aroma”), Brazilian (tangy, crunchy & pungent taste”), Sarawak from Malaysia (“floral flavor”), Indian Tellicherry (mouthwatering pepper, slightly hot with a hint of sweetness), and Inidan Malabar (“taste heightener and brow warmer).

Those were the black ones.

On the shelf next to them were the reds, from “Kirmizi” hot Turkish pepper, to “Berbere Fiery Ethiopian Seasoning” which has “ajawain” in it which, according to “The Oxford Companion to Food” is “an umbelliferous plant of India.”

I couldn’t wait to get home to open them all. When I did both the cat and I got a fit of sneezing, probably from the ‘umbelliferous’ stuff. I will have to wait until the weather is clement enough to open the windows before grinding up all the spices and doing my own research, especially on the black peppers. So, I switched to the next project, the papadum.

One of the best, easiest and cheapest snacks in the world.

The little ones, 1 ½ inches across, are perfect instead of little toasts or croutons to hold hors d’oeuvre. I opened the first package of, you guessed it, black pepper flavored ones. The feel of them immediately aroused my suspicions, since my fingers felt a texture a bit like the underneath rear section of a Chihuahua. Then the smell of them even uncooked set off an inner alarm. Cooked, it was unbelievable, in the true sense of the word, in that I could not believe it was happening to me in an apartment I couldn’t open the windows because of the storm outside.

The smell was like a fish in underpants.

And the taste proved I was right about the smell.

The aftertaste, even after throwing open the windows and soaking the half of the apartment closest to the windows, was soapy. The kind of soap that a great-grandmother from the old country used, in big green cubes, not the kind sold in stores now for a fortune and labeled “Provence” or “Le Vrai Savon de Marseilles.”

No, I mean the kind she would use to hand wash out the family smalls.

This soapy aftertaste could have been reassuring, given that these pappadum could have been made on the banks of the Ganges, but was not. I decided the taste was more like Crimea, 1806, and the barracks of the Indian cavalry.

Here’s what I saved from that day’s shopping.

Buy some lime or carrot pickle, or preserved lemons. Whenever grilling fish or meat or vegetables, put a tablespoonful of one of these condiments in the processor, puree, mix briefly with sour cream, or yogurt or sour cream and mayonnaise, and you have an instant delicious sauce. Throw in some fresh herbs, especially mint or basil, some orange zest, and you are now a great cook! For sandwiches, do the same with mango chutney, again with fresh herbs.

That on a baguette sandwich of roast pork or chicken will take away all fear of authentic papadum. Especially when they are served with salted lemon crème fraiche.

Salt Preserved Lemons

After a visit to India as a child I could not get enough of its lime pickles. Which is why in Morocco, when I tasted preserved lemons for the first time, I fell in love. They improve almost any salsa, relish, chutney, or mayonnaise.

They also flavor simple and compound butters and the sauces you can make out of them. The lemons are particularly good when mixed with mint, basil, or tarragon. And a teaspoon here and there of the liquid they are stored in will correct the something is lacking in almost any savory dish.

You can also make this recipe with limes, kumquats (which only take a week to cure), Seville oranges and other sour citrus fruits. Do make sure that the spices you use are freshly bought.

Preserved lemons are best to make in large quantities, so give some away as presents, or store for up to three months in the refrigerator.

To use, squeeze the juice from the lemon back into the jar, scrape away the flesh, seeds, and pith, and chop the rind.

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