Merry Christmas

Button Soup Advent Calendar: Conclusion

I meant to start my series of Christmas posts with some general thoughts on what Christmas food means to me. When I sat down to write that post, I faltered, and decided to jump right into the specific preparations. Now that I have worked through several dishes and had some time to reflect, I have some thoughts to share.

Christmas food is interesting to me because few ingredients are "in season" in the normal sense. Unlike, say, Thanksgiving, Christmas is a celebration that ironically takes place during scarcity. The food relies heavily on preserved ingredients such as dried fruit, candied fruit, dried mushrooms, cured meat, and baked goods high in fat and sugar. Along the same lines, there are lots of aged items, notably fruitcake, rumpot, and wine.

Because of the bleak winter landscape, Christmas meals are informed by tradition more than conventional seasonality. While dandelions and asparagus are associated with springtime simply because that's when they grow, Christmas ingredients are often rooted in history and culture. Turkey, for instance, or exotic ingredients like dates, ginger, cloves, and cinnamon.

While I have a reverence for those imported tastes and aromas, I also tried using neglected local flavours like juniper and evergreen. Smoking with evergreen especially is something I enjoyed. The idea of "eating my Christmas tree" excites me. (On a related note, this was the first year that I ate my jack o' lantern, roasting him after the trick-or-treaters had stopped calling.)

I didn't say it specifically, but the Christmas posts were in three sections: drink, sweets, and meats. To me those groups form the core of festive food, generally, and Christmas food, specifically.

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This happens to be my one hundredth post, and the close of what I consider the first chapter of Button Soup. I have new plans for the coming year. Stay tuned.

A Turkey Less Ordinary

Turkey is certainly one of the finest gifts made by the New World to the Old.

-Brillat-Savarin


Cooked poultry has the following ideal characteristics:

• well-seasoned,
• tender, moist flesh, and
• crispy, browned skin.

Holiday turkeys should also provide the makings for flavourful gravy and stuffing.

It's difficult to meet all the above requirements with the traditional roasting method. Since turkeys are so large, they don't cook evenly. The breasts, being white meat, cook faster than the legs, and to bring the legs to the correct temperature usually means overcooking the breasts, leaving you with dry meat.

Traditional stuffing, cooked inside the bird, creates a similar problem: by the time the dressing (soaked in poultry juices) is brought to a safe temperature, the surrounding flesh is dry.

I propose the following as a remedy to these common problems.

Break the raw turkey up into two breasts and two thigh-leg portions. There are two advantages to this. First, the raw carcass can be used to make a stock that's much more flavourful and gelatin-rich than the one made with the cooked carcass. This stock can be used in the gravy and stuffing, making for a more turkeycentric feast. The second advantage to breaking the bird up is that the breasts and legs can be pulled from the oven separately, each at the proper finishing temperature (165°F).

Large roasts like turkey are problematic in that you can usually only season the exterior, leaving large masses of unseasoned meat within. Brining lets salt penetrate into the flesh and seasons the roast throughout. I soaked my turkey in a conventional brine complete with nitrite, which gave the turkey a good flavour but a slightly unsettling pink colour.

Long cooking at low temperatures yields the tenderest meat. For extra flavour I smoked mine on the barbeque. My hot-smoke set-up cooks around 225°F. It took almost five hours for the thighs to come to temperature.

Gentle heat doesn't promote the delicious, delicious browning reactions that give us crisp, golden skin. Once the turkey is done smoking, put an oiled pan over medium-high heat and brown the turkeybits until the skin is deeply browned and crispy. As an additional benefit, you'll be left with lots of fond with which to make gravy.

This process yields the tenderest, juiciest turkey I have ever eaten. The one problem with it is that few around the table will even recognize the dish as poultry; with the curing salt, smoke, and moist flesh, the final product resembles ham. My guests actually referred to it as "Ham-urkey."

I don't know how I feel about that.

Fir-Smoked Ham

If you consult a North American resource on smoking meat, you're likely find something like the following:

The first rule of smoking meat: use hardwood. Apple, hickory, maple, oak, pear, cherry, whatever you please, but do not use soft wood, and especially not evergreens. They are extremely resinous, and not only do they produce harsh, turpentine flavours in the meat, they are also poisonous!

These comments are discouraging to someone who lives where the prairies meet the boreal forest. Of course there are hardwood trees in Edmonton, but they're not nearly as common as, say, poplars and spruce. There's a spruce tree in my front yard that, if left to its own devices, will someday eat my house. There's a fir tree in my living room right now, and in the new year I'll put it on the curb and the city will take it away. Too bad I can't use any of that resinous wood, or any of those perfumed needles, to flavour my cured meat...

A lone sentence in Larousse recently changed how I look at my Christmas tree: "Westphalian ham is... cold-smoked over strongly resinous wood." After a little more research I found that there are several German hams that are smoked with wood from evergreens. Black forest ham, for instance, is smoked over fir. (That is, real black forest ham is smoked over fir: while black forest ham is a protected designation in Europe, in Canada and the States the name can be applied to the many inferior knock-offs.)

I decided to try smoking some brined ham hocks with balsam fir needles and twigs. Usually I am an all-or-nothing sort of cook, but at the last minute I decided to temper my fir trim with conventional hardwood chips.

Once the smoke got going I could smell the pronounced sweetness of the hardwood, spiked with some harshness from the softwood, specifically, the smell of burning tar, reminiscent of cigarettes.

I was really hoping to get a striking layer of black soot from the fir, but the final colour of the hocks was the same mahogany that you get from conventional hardwood smoking.

Hardwood smoke can be sickly sweet and strong of vanilla, but the pine and tar flavours of the fir added some complexity to the finished hams. The smoking process still needs a lot of work. There are lots of questions to be answered:

• Which part of the tree should be used: the needles, the wood, or both?
• Should the needles or wood be fresh? Dried? A combination of dried and soaked?
• Hot smoke or cold? Perhaps cold-smoking mutes some of the harsher characteristics of evergreen smoke?
  

At this point all I can say is that there is some potential for a good regional specialty.

The Boar's Head

The boar's head in hand bear I,
Bedeck'd with bays and rosemary.
And I pray you my masters, be merry
Quot estis in convivio (As many as are in the feast)

-English Traditional


Has it ever taken you years to understand the lyrics to a certain song?

I grew up listening to a carol that I thought was in a different language. While a few lines are in Latin, the rest is in plain English. Even so, I only deciphered the meaning of the song last year. The carol is The Boar's Head, and it refers to the English custom, dating back to Anglo-Saxon times, of serving a boar's head at Christmastime. The head was placed on a silver platter and marched into the hall with music. When I first read about the custom last year, I resolved that this Christmas I would roast a boar's head, bedeck'd with bays and rosemary.

I rested the head on a bed of onions, celery, apples, bays, rosemary, and thyme, and cooked it in a very low oven for several hours. The jowls release a lot (a lot!) of fat, which is good for frying bread as an accompaniment. The head finishes with very tender flesh and very hard crackling, and the whole mess is liberally salted and peppered. Good food for the longest night of the year, which we usually observe with heavy drinking.

Caput apri defero (The boar's head I offer)

Reddens laudes Domino (Giving praises to the Lord)

Caput apri defero

Reddens laudes Domino

The boar's head I understand

Is the rarest dish in all the land,

And thus bedeck'd with a gay garland

Let us servire cantico (serve with a song).

Our steward hath provided this
In honour of the King of Bliss;
Which on this day to be served is
In Reginensi atrio (the Queen's hall)

A phenomenon that occasionally accompanies heavy drinking:

Pâté with Pork Tenderloin and Morels

I like to make pâté around Christmas. This year I wanted to try a terrine with an inlay. Inlays are usually pieces of lean mean, like a pork tenderloin or duck breast, that are set in the middle of a terrine, surrounded by forcemeat, so that each slice of the terrine has a cross-section of the lean meat. At left you can see a rosy pork tenderloin cooked to medium.

Winter is a reflective season, and nowhere is this more true than with food, as many of the things we eat in December were by necessity harvested in September, or earlier. The special significance this pâté has to the past year is the garnish studding the forcemeat: morels. This was a remarkable year for mushrooms. These morels are a small portion of the hundreds of pounds picked by Chad and Thea out near Devon early in the summer. Most were dried, and I'm sure many are now being enjoyed at kitchen tables around Edmonton.

As you might have guessed from the shape, this pâté wasn't actually cooked in a terrine. I pressed the forcemeat around the tenderloin, then wrapped the whole assembly in plastic and poached it in the oven. I hoped it would keep its round profile, but obviously the meat settled, producing the oval shape you see above. I guess I should invest in some proper terrines. (Christmas gift hint.)

Yule Log Cake

My mom has prepared a yule log cake every Christmas I can remember. I have no idea how this tradition came to my family, as it is extremely French ("bûche de noël"), and we are not.

The cake is a simple sponge. Whole eggs are beaten thoroughly, sugar is added, then a bit of water, and finally flour and cocoa are folded in. The batter is runny, and forms a shallow, uniform, fine-textured cake after baking.

The interior icing is a buttercream made by whipping room-temperature butter into Swiss meringue. Swiss meringue is a mixture of whipped egg whites and simple syrup cooked to soft ball stage.

The exterior frosting is icing sugar beaten into lard, which makes the colour bright white, in contrast to the beige buttercream inside the log.

I dragged a fork across the exposed sides of the cake for a bit of texture.

Wheat Pudding

I don't cook rice very often, but I used to work at a restaurant that let me take home large amounts of leftover rice, and over the years I have developed a taste for rice pudding. My favourite version is
made with a blend of brown and wild rice (which adds a satisfying chew to the dish), and dried saskatoons.

Lately I've been wondering if I could make a similar dish with a starch that is more common in my kitchen. Take that fifty pound bag of wheat berries in my closet, for instance. The one that I keep threatening to grind into flour if it doesn't make itself more useful.

I was wary of trying to adapt wheat to a rice pudding dish. When I first started cooking with wheat berries, I thought I could treat them like rice. I made some disastrous attempts at "risotto-style wheat" and "wheat pilaf." No matter how long I cooked the berries, they never seemed to burst like wild rice, or release their starch like short-grain rice, or stick to each other like pilaf. They were tasty and enjoyably chewy, with a little pop as you bit through the bran, but they just rolled around on the plate, and didn't form a cohesive starch like rice.

Lately I've been reading about the traditional Ukrainian Christmas dinner, a meal of twelve meatless courses, looking for ideas on winter meals. When reading about the main ingredients in their feast, I kept thinking, "I have that in my pantry... I canned tons of that this fall... I know where to find that...," items like dried mushrooms and fruit and sauerkraut and potatoes. It sounds like the Ukrainian landscape is very similar to ours, which makes the Ukrainian culinary repertoire a useful resource.

The first course of the dinner is usually a dish called kutia: boiled wheat berries, sweetened with honey, often flavoured with poppyseeds, served cold.

Kutia recipes gave me a method for bursting the kernels of wheat and shortening their cooking time. The key is to dry the wheat in a low oven for an hour. I'm not sure exactly why this works. Maybe drying the berries weakens the cells walls and lets the boiling water penetrate more easily. I don't know. But after drying for an hour, then soaking overnight, the berries burst after only a couple hours of boiling.

Once the cooking liquid is reduced, the dish has a great texture. I half expected the mixture to be gluey, but it's surprisingly creamy, with the exploded bran giving a good chew-factor.

At the end of cooking, I added honey, salt, dried cranberries, and a bit of butter. For a looser pudding add cream.

My only qualm is the slightly grey colour of the pudding, a flaw that I'm willing to overlook simply because it's so tasty.