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I accidentally found a great Eastern European grocery store in Newton this morning. It’s on a side street just off Needham Ave. in the Newton/Needham nexus (near the Mobile Book Fair) a block down from Filene’s basement. It’s big enough that you could do all your shopping there, about the size of a Trader Joes or Village Market in Rozzie.

Stand outs are the selection of herrings, smoked, dried, salted, and the salamis. I’ve certainly seen impressive arrays of salamis before – hanging from the rafters in salami enthusiasts basements or overhead in fancy meat markets, but here they are neatly arranged in the deli cabinet with their English names and prices easily visible (which can be a problem at other markets for those of us who learned all their Russian from watching A Fish Called Wanda). There’s also a nice selection of Czech, Polish and Lithuanian beers and a variety of black breads from Lithuania and Russia.

In addition to the standout salami collection, there is an intriguing selection of hams and bacons (largely special ordered from delis in Chicago, Queens and Brooklyn) and their own turkey and roast beef. The roast beef and the Moscow Summer Salami that I got were big winners – the salami had the slight afterfunk of genuineness, and was delicious on some Armenian flat bread that I somewhat randomly picked up. The regular meats had some great specials as well as moderately priced lamb (including some marinated kabobs that looked suspiciously like the Upstate NY specialty, spiedies, but probably aren’t) and an array or Chinese marinated pork and chicken (??? but they looked pretty good – like those inexplicably red boneless spareribs) as well as your staples (93% ground beef and boneless chicken breasts were both $1.99, so you’re not going to trash your food budget over there.)

Bulk candies, confections, borscht, veal brains – you could really do some damage. And they almost have a website. Head on over to Baza!

The warmish weather has gotten me wandering around a bit and in the past week I hit the new ice cream shop, Jimmies, on Corinth and El Chavo at 4254 Washington, a few doors down from our old digs. Jimmies wasn’t quite going full speed yet (they only had normal size, not foot long, dogs), but their everything dog was delicious, if gone a little quickly for $4, and their homemade relish is delicious. Typically I would recoil at the very idea of mango relish for my dog, but for some reason I took the plunge and, though it could use a little heat to go with the sweet, it was quite good. The foot longs and soft serve are on the way, so I’ll be back.

El Chavo has a nice selection of chorizos, cheeses and tortillas up front, as well as some surprisingly nice looking tomatillos, poblanos and prickly pears. The luchador busts in front are a nice greeting, and he’s done some nice work spiffing up what could have been a somewhat antiseptic space. There’s a reasonable selection of dried spices and canned and bottled sauces (I bought a nice jug of red chile hot sauce that was vinegarly piquant with nice heat and depth and broad appeal), and if, as talking to the owner (who seems like a great guy) suggests, it’s a work in progress, it’s a fantastic start. What he definitely nailed was the great dichotomy between the natural (chiles, cheeses, dried spices) and the utterly fabricated – things the likes of which that you haven’t been able to find on U.S. shelves in most of the country since the late 1970’s – simulated chocolate with crunchy polymer sprinkles, super sweet fragments with caramelesque coating, day-glo drinks of every description – I bought some green apple soda that definitely emerged fully formed from a Guadalajara test tube. Delicious and preternaturally tangy!

I urge you to check it out – grab some burrito perfect tortillas, try the canned chipotles, the refried black beans, or a nice jar of mole.

Stung by Bob’s/Droubi’s cessation of pita making last year and Samia’s closure , I’ve finally branched out and tried Bay Sweets (née Bayeh Market) on Spring St. in West Roxbury (which even has their menu online) and was more than pleasantly surprised. They’ve got a nice selection of semi-local (Providence which beats Canada) pitas in both the thick and houmous perfect variety and the thin but durable roll me a falafel type, plus all your de rigeur Lebanese grocery items (it also has that appealing half emptiness as if someone could swoop in at any moment and purchase all the torshi meshakel). The bakery has a nice variety of reasonably priced, baked on the premises items, but the biggest difference is that, in lieu of the produce section, they’ll make you a sandwich.

They’ve also got the falafel mix I’ve been looking for my whole life – modestly homogeneous with enough grit to know you’re serious, but none of those giant pieces of bulghur or gravel that have always haunted my history with grocery falafel. I will post further suggestions as I consume them, but in the meantime, why not buy some pickled turnips? They’re delicious.

Bay Sweets is at 120 Spring St. which is sort of between the bookstore and the Charles River; just past Shaw’s on the opposite side of the street before you get to Kalambar Dune.

Mortreux, as expected, was somewhat simpler to make than blank manger but more of a challenge from an edibility standpoint. As it takes its name from the ingredients being mortared, I felt it was incumbent upon me to mortar everything – you can’t take chances with medieval cuisine.

Here’s the recipe again:

Mortrews. Take hennes and pork and seeth hem togyder. Take the lyre of hennes and of the pork and hewe it small, and grinde it al to doust; take brede ygrated and do therto, and temper it with the self broth, and alye it with yolkes of ayren; and cast theron powdour fort. Boile it and do therin powdour of gynger, sugur, safroun and salt, and loke that it be stondying; and flour it with powdour gynger.

What I did was:

Boiled a half chicken with ham hocks (I was unable, after a few tries, to procure pork liver. Who knew?) – because you use a fair amount of the resulting broth in the recipe, I reduced the stock for a while. I then stripped the chicken and the hocks and mortared the meat into a stringy mass.

Cooked about 1/2 pound of chicken livers and mortared them into a fine paste.

In the mortar, I then ground black pepper, galingal (there is some discussion on whether this is the proper medieval galingal – it’s in the ginger family), alkanet (for color, should have used more), nutmeg, and cubeb berries which was my answer to the “strong spice” in the recipe. I added that to the meat and liver and added, bread crumbs, stock, three egg yolks, and saffron. I brought it back to a boil and let it reduce until it seemed like I’d better stop. I powdered it with ginger and let it set. I did not use sugar, though, in retrospect, it probably would have been fine. With so many other flavors in there, it couldn’t have done much harm.

It ended up somewhat reminiscent of pate, though, visually, I have to admit it looked more like cat food.

Served on crusty bread, it had much more flavor than anything I’m used to – not flavor in the spicy sense, but a strange bevy of tastes that co-mingled, overlapped, and attempted to out do each other in the mouth. In this it seemed right – anachronistic, odd, and no doubt perfect if you were working with slightly spoiled meat. Honestly though, it was not bad at all – after you got over the initial shock of it not tasting like anything familiar, you sort of settled in and enjoyed it for what it was. It made a nice sandwich for lunch the next day as well. If you’re trying this at home, shoot for more pepper and less mace and nutmeg – you’ll end up with something that is, while perhaps less authentic, tastier.

The Pye was lovely though:

It contained apples, pears, figs, currants, cubeb berries, cinnamon, cardamom (green), mace, nutmeg. Here the flavors very nearly complemented each other – if you were to dice all the fruits together, and perhaps even cook them together before putting them in the coffin, I think it would be perfect. As it was, one out of every three bites had a lovely melding of flavors, but the rest seemed just slightly disconnected from the ideal Platonic PYE. We used dried figs – fresh figs would no doubt be superior.

Here’s a (slightly out of focus) cross section:

On January 1st, I made my first Eating Chaucer dish (I’m a little late in the recording, but I’ve been trying to track down a peacock), blank maunger (or blancmanger, blaumaunger, or blanc manger as Chaucer, a more continental figure, would have it). Here is the recipe as it appears in The Forme of Cury:

Blank maunger. Take capouns and see6 hem, 6enne take hem vp; take almaundes blaunched, grynde hem & alay hem vp with the same broth. Cast the mylk in a pot. Waisshe rys and do 6erto, and lat it seeth; 6anne take 6e brawn of 6e capouns, teere it small and do 6erto. Take white grece, sugur and salt, and cast 6erinne. Lat it see6, 6enne messe it forth and florissh it with aneys in confyt, red o6er whyt, and with almaundes fryed in oyle, and serue it forth.”

The 6s are supposed to be the Old English letter eth (which looks like a backwards 6 with a line through the top curl) – they could also be thorns – both are pronounced more or less like th and I could never tell the difference. Anyway, I read this somewhat sparse recipe a few times to try to figure out amounts, tried the semi-authentic medieval cookbook Pleyn Delit and consulted Martino de Como’s The Art of Cooking for additional inspiration. The Como didn’t seem to work at all, and the Pleyn Delit recipe had fish in it (I’m willing to have sweetened rice/chicken for desert but I’m going to have a work up to something like fish).

So I mostly went with my gut. The key to the recipe turns out to be the almond milk – a staple of medieval English cookery. It’s made, in this case, by reserving some of the broth from boiling the chicken, adding crushed almonds and bringing it to a slow boil. As the almonds boil, milky plumes bubble up from the almonds. If you were using clear water instead of the chicken broth this calls for, I’ve no doubt that you would end up with something resembling milk (I’ll get a shot of this later, almond milk is bound to show up again). I used a little cinnamon stick and a vanilla bean (anachronistic, I know – vanilla wasn’t available in Europe until the early 16th century. I have no defense save usefulness and my dislike for the suggested anise. You could also use nutmeg, all spice, cloves or grains of paradise) to add additional flavor to the milk.

All you do it tear up the chicken breast (I boiled a whole chicken to get some nice broth and then tore up the breasts), add two cups of cooked rice, the almond milk (which is strained to get the almonds out) – it tells you to cast the almond milk into the pot which sounds exciting but makes a bit of a mess – some sugar, I used about 12 tablespoons, and mash it all into a bowl to set. For garnish, I fried sliced, blanched, almonds in oil until they were good and brown and crispy and spread those on top. It looked like this.

Here’s a cross section.

It set nicely – thick and substantial but still very moist and reasonably light, considering. I left it overnight but I would guess it takes only 6-8 hours. It was sweet and savory at once, and the toasted almonds gave it a really nice sort of opulence and nutty interest. Though a number of people seemed to think a sweet rice dish with chicken was strange, no one who ate it seemed to find it odd – not even my 12 year old sister who gobbled it up, and she eats like a bird (a lark, actually). It might even be more appealing to children who are more in touch with the idea of throwing a bunch of stuff they like together and eating it.

Though there was a pretty good amount of liquid in there, the rice soaked everything up as it set. If you cooked the rice with way too much water a la congee, maybe it would thicken but stay wet? Either way, the flavors blended together nicely, though I should have gone heavier on the cinnamon. You could make it sweeter and more desert like by adding more sugar (honey could be interesting as well), but eventually you’d lose the sweet/savory mix that makes it unique. Experimenting with additional sugar and salt should eventually yield the perfect mix.

De como has a recipe that used rice flour instead of rice which should result in something more gelatinous like custard (and also more like the blanc manger that exists today which often calls for gelatin), there are also period recipes where the blanc manger is used more like a sauce over chicken.

As we approach the beginning of my Eating Chaucer project, I’ll lay down some ground rules for the cooking of the food. I will try to stick with methods that were, liberally, available in the 13th/14th centuries. This means no microwaves (which I abhor anyway), no convection ovens, Forman grills, rice cookers (though I may use a crock pot) etc. I hope to build an outdoor grill for roasting – maybe based on the descriptions in Apicius’s De re coquinaria. Even though it’s a 5th century text, it has better descriptions of cooking systems than most of the medieval stuff out there, and I have a nice new edition of it. Really though, it’s just an excuse to finish off my patio and I need to collect as many motivators as possible to get my ass in gear. I’m sure more rules will materialize as I try to balance adding layers of interesting difficulty and making this process possible and non-lethal.

I’ll probably grind my spices with a mortar and pestle until I get tired of that, but I’ll do all of the preparation intensive things at least once (I only so I can take pictures and pretend that I always did it like that). I’ll get my chickens at Mayflower Polutry and shop at Savenors until I run out of money. Hopefully Quality Meat Market and the Roslindale Fish Market will be able to help me out with some of the more obscure items – even relatively common items like partridge and bream can be a pain to find these days.

So, again, the object is to eat everything food related in The Canterbury Tales. If there is no specific dish mentioned (which is common) I’ll pick something representative from a period cookbook. There are a few spots where Chaucer used character’s revolting eating or cooking habits (Roger Hodge’s cook is said to stuff his geese with flies that infest his shop) to make a point; I’m going to skip those unless I find one that’s really funny and non-lethal. I’ll use only cookbooks from before 1500 to give myself some leeway – mostly I’ll be relying on the 1393 treatise The Forme of Cury, written by Richard the Second’s (the monarch during most of Chaucer’s career) Master Cooks and a group of manuscripts known as An Early 13th Century Northern European Cookbook. Where possible I’ll borrow from the much more humane The Art of Cooking, by Martino de Como sometime before 1474 (when it was borrowed by Platina and published in his De Honesta Voluptate). In addition to having some actual instructions, it also doesn’t tend to require multiple boilings – this from The Forme of Cury (the liberal modernization of the Middle English is my own):

Lampreys in Galantyne:
Take lampreys and kill them with vinegar, white wine and salt, scald them in water and slice them a little at the navel. Take the blood and guts out the end and carefully reserve the blood [there's a lot of blood reserving in this cookbook]. Roast them and keep the leavings. Stuff with vinegar, crusts of bread, ginger, flour, powdered cloves, raisins and the blood and leavings, strain it, salt it and boil it. Serve on a plate

I hope Chaucer doesn’t mention lamprey – do they still eat those over in the Great Lakes region? I still remember the giant lamprey crawling out of Lake Eerie in that Vonnegut story, which had become too polluted even for it, and eating one of the main characters.

Anyway, if Chaucer could crib half of The Canterbury Tales from Boccaccio, I can certainly venture down to Italy to find some recipes with at least general directions and less blood saving. I’ll only drink proper period beverages with the meals – wine if mentioned, otherwise ale which is mentioned a lot. Water is for washing and in the Middle Ages, not even for that.

I will also, keeping Molecular Gastronomy in mind, try and report back on some of the nuances of eating Chaucer: How do you keep the chicken bits from sinking to the bottom of the blanc mange (do ground chicken and pulled chicken have different buoyancy to mass ratios?)? Do geese really attract more flies than other fowl? If you reserve the blood from bloodsucking lamprey, whose blood are you reserving? With the new Massachusetts laws allowing me to shoot nuisance “resident” geese, should I just eat one of them? We’ll find out.

I’ve always been inspired by wacky pointless quests (like releasing every bird mentioned in Shakespeare in Central Park), and egg week went so well that I’ve decided to take one up for 2008. Next year I will endeavor to eat every dish mentioned in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales – beginning with a lovely blancmange on New Years Day. Stay tuned here for details and menus.

Ful many a fat partrich hadde he in mewe,
And many a breem and many a luce in stewe.

The partridge shouldn’t be a big problem and the breem is doable but I may have to catch the pike myself. I hear Lake Cochituate has some good ice fishing.

I’m housing the beginnings of a bibliography of food books at the Eats at Pazzo page over on the right. At present it’s just a beginning but I’ve been noting interesting sounding books for a while and finally decided to put them in some sort of order – I’ll annotate the ones that I’ve read and add some contemporary histories as time permits.

One thing from my reading is clear – anyone with romantic notions of Medieval England and France definitely didn’t have to eat the food.

After accidentally watching “Super Size Me” right after having read Fast Food Nation, I’m always in the market for a non fast food answer to my burger and hot dog cravings and Simco is the current undisputed champion. The flagship is on Blue Hill Ave in Mattapan, but a second location in Rozzie on American Legion is even more convenient. Little known outside Mattapan, Simco serves burgers, dogs, and fried clams that would stand up anywhere. They’ve operated in Mattapan since the 1930’s and, judging from the decor, in Rozzie from not too long after that. Their buns are appropriately minimalist, grilled for the dogs, and both burgers and hot dogs have that hint of decadence – not the obvious, visceral greasiness of fast food, but a more subtle sensation of sybaritic wonder that doesn’t weigh on the rest of your day – a trick that only the really fine greasy spoons and purveyors of beach food can match.

Not for the faint, the chili dog is fantastic and the double burger a revelation with pickles. I hear good things about the clams but cannot vouch personally. Swing on over and tell them Pazzo sent you.

Simco – In the four corners (JP, Rozzie, Dorchester, Mattapan) on American Legion Highway and at 1509 Blue Hill Ave. in Mattapan.

The first annual Taste of Roslindale is set for Friday, September 28th. So far the list of participants is a little thin (and catering more to the South St. set) with only A. Boschetto’s Bakery, Bangkok Café, Delfino’s, Geoffrey’s, Sophia’s Grotto, Boston Brickhouse, and Roche Bros Catering set to attend, but they are adding more as we speak.

It would be great if Quality Meat Market and Droubis could make up a middle eastern table – especially since Cafe Appolonia (probably my favorite Boston restaurant) is no more. Perhaps, as I gather the Appolonia owner still has a hand in the place, the Brickhouse could put something together.

Sounds like a nice event – though it has once again reminded me that there isn’t a Greek/Middle Eastern joint in Rozzie.

They look so terrible they must be delicious. It calls to mind my days at Ye Olde Watering Hole in Northampton (home of the Beer Can Museum as featured on PM Magazine!) drinking $1 Bud drafts and eating picked eggs and kielbasa (the kielbasa really was pickled – is that safe?). Wandered past a few months ago before a book auction and the bondage and body piercing place next door is now an apothecary and tea bar.

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Here’s a recipe.

Next time we do egg week it will start with one of these babies:

It’s getting a little touch and go – my mother yelled at me for my cholesterol, had trouble getting enough eggs into a fried rice dish to qualify and there was a point, while eating my steak/egg/hashbrown burrito the other night, that my life started to pass hazily before my eyes.

I persevered and there’s only two days left and I feel strong as a horse, cool as a cucumber, happy as a clam.

For a variety of reasons (lack of free time due to newborn, love of eggs, ennui, etc.) my wife and I have decided to eat only egg dishes for dinner this week. This is day three (linguica and egg sandwiches) – yesterday we had a nice potato and leek frittata and Friday it was a variation on heuvos rancheros – here’s the recipe, takes approx. 6 minutes:

Fry two eggs over easy, melt sharp cheddar cheese on top. Place over a warmed square of cornbread and cover with Salsa Verde. Salt to taste.

Mmmmm. When I lived in New Mexico we did it with green or red chili sauce and a corn tortilla but this version definitely has its place.

Had brunch at Geoffrey’s (which recently replaced Salute) the last two weekends (had to double check; you can’t be too safe) and was quite pleased. They seem to have the pricing down which is a must in Roslindale and the brunch menu is just the right size; not so many choices that you get overwhelmed (and I’m easily overwhelmed before 3 in the afternoon). They would do well to swap the Scandinavian waffles with the Belgian variety – it was a novel try but they’re a little thin and bland.

Had the eggs with steak tips – both done perfectly, the steak tips seasoned simply and tender as can be. The breakfast potatoes are tasty but could be improved upon. While it’s not quite reminiscent enough of a diner steak and eggs – there is something charming about the memory of scrambled eggs and a greasy pan fried steak, even if there is little charm in eating it – it was hearty and delectable.

The second time I sampled the sausage biscuits with sausage gravy which was a sybarite’s fantasy but seemed less like a good idea a few hours later. However, if you don’t have much to do the rest of the day, I say dig in.

Other items that got high marks were the corned beef hash (made with actual corned beef and surprisingly light on the palate, considering) and the eggs benedict. Let me know how dinner is – I know I said I wouldn’t talk about restaurants, but brunch is important and they’re right across the street. The atmosphere is lovely on a warm spring day with the windows open – a few simple touche have transformed the mix messages of Salute (was it a bar, a diner, a burger joint, a fancy restaurant) to a more consistent feel.

Oh, nice drink menu as well for those who like their brunch with liquor (pitchers of mimosa was a no go but perhaps if we lean on them a little).

Overall, I’m giving them a Pazzo star and an enthusiastic welcome to the neighborhood. Opa!

I’m sure you’ve all heard of the Slow Food movement – I certainly had, but until running into it recently while killing time reading about food, I had never really absorbed what they were trying to do and the scope of their intentions. In addition to fighting against Fast Food and all that entails -

Slow Food is good, clean and fair food. We believe that the food we eat should taste good; that it should be produced in a clean way that does not harm the environment, animal welfare or our health; and that food producers should receive fair compensation for their work.

They helped form the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Milan and they have created an “Ark of Taste” (my favorite idea).

The Ark of Taste aims to rediscover, catalog, describe and publicize forgotten flavors. It is a metaphorical recipient of excellent gastronomic products that are threatened by industrial standardization, hygiene laws, the regulations of large-scale distribution and environmental damage.

Ark products range from the Italian Valchiavenna goat to the American Navajo-Churro sheep, from the last indigenous Irish cattle breed, the Kerry, to a unique variety of Greek fava beans grown only on the island of Santorini. All are endangered products that have real economic viability and commercial potential.

I love the idea of saving something that is both as intangible and as real as flavor – it reminds me again of the Brillat-Savarin quote “The discovery of a new dish does more for human happiness than the discovery of a new star”. This is precisely the sort of eco project that can attract disaffected people like myself – who doesn’t like food? I just hope the Ark and the seed bank doesn’t stop being a metaphor a la Octavia Butler.

Lovely bit by Neil Pollack at Slate on the new gluttony pavilion at Dodger Stadium.

As a further attempt to stave off the mind numbingly depressing weather, I made gnocchi last night and they were shockingly easy and satisfying to make. Just potatoes and flour in the dough (about a cup and a half of flour for the 4 medium Yukon golds I used. I have it on good authority that Yukons are the right potato for the job) – and much lighter and tasty than store gnocchis. Boiled the potatoes until firm but cooked in the middle – mashed like for mashed potatoes but adding only some salt. Mixed with flour slowly until the consistency was like pizza dough – kneaded until it seemed homogeneous (about 5 minutes) then rolled into 1/2 inch thick ropes and cut into gnocchi sized pieces. Boiled until they floated and voila.

Interesting side note on boiling gnocchi. In Molecular Gastronomy by This, he notes the common direction to boil gnocchi until they float. As it turns out, they only float because they’ve been in the water long enough to catch sufficient air bubbles on the surface of the gnocchi to become buoyant. I fooled around with a couple sizes and cooking times with this in mind and the 1/2 to 3/4″ sq. gnocchi float right when they’re done (if you’ve impressed a pattern on them with a fork – smooth gnocchi should catch less bubbles and be done before they float. Hypothetically.)

Here’s some yummy photos of Easter dinner.  All you need is a roast chicken, some bacon for vestments (they do double duty as the clothes that the Romans gamble over and the garments left in the cave – see the cave down there at the base of the hill?), asparagus for crosses (I cut a squarish whole in the asparagus with a paring knife to slide the crossbar through) curried rice to make Calvary and some potato bystanders, romans, and one cubed for a dice (should have done two dice?).  Next year we may do multiple scenes – Gethsemane with Judas?  Peter denying?  Who knows!  This year was a rare coincidence of Easter and Greek Easter so it called for some excitement.