My sexy new cooker

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On our first "we're moving to England" trip, we saw a house with a massive iron stove standing kind of free-form in the middle of the kitchen like a Victorian monument. This was the first time I had ever seen an Aga. 

The story goes that a Nobel prize-winning Swedish physicist, forced to stay home and recuperate after breaking his leg (in a vigorous physics lab experiment gone wrong? the story doesn't say), was watching his wife cook and was struck by the thought that there had to be a better way. So he invented a new stove.  This story is on Wikipedia, so I assume it to be 100% true. 

The Aga is unlike other stoves. It is always on. It has no temperature settings. It is made of solid iron. It is as beautiful as it is functional. I knew that I had to have one. 

The Aga is, in a word, 'different'. I had my heart set on a "4 oven" cooker. And because there are no temperature settings, each of the ovens maintains a different heat level. Roasting, Baking, Simmering, Warming. In clockwise order. Something about induction or air-flow or whatever keeps the heat constant and ready. The 1,300 pounds of iron used to form the beast mean that the heat is retained. 

It also puts out a bit of heat, warming your kitchen by 5 degrees or so, and creating a homey atmosphere that pets and kids love. When we moved to Massachusetts and experienced our first several feet of snow, I knew that if I had ever found the right place to bring in an Aga, this was definitely it. 

One problem: they're only made in England. Which means that every Aga has to get on a ship. And the ships only land in Chicago(...! Apparently, they come down the St. Lawrence and across the Great Lakes). And the ships are slow. And you have to pay for everything in Sterling. Which means saving every penny for years in an "Aga" jar hoping that one day, when we grew up, we too could experience the joys of cast iron cookery on a mammoth, British scale. 

 

 

Part of the issue was going to be re-configuring the cabinetry.  All of it basically had to come out to make room for the stove. And then new cabinets back in around it. Which meant saving more pennies, and maybe scrounging in couch cushions and behind car seats. But finally, finally we went to the store to pick out the new addition to our family. 

We chose the red one.

 

It took weeks and weeks to come together. First, the stove got lost at sea. Or put on the wrong boat. Nope, not that boat. The next boat. And when I said "next", I actually meant the one after this one. No, no. The other one. It will one day show up in the US, don't worry. Oh! It finally arrived! Wait. No, sorry. That was somebody else's. Oh wait! It's here! Um. We ordered the wrong kind. Please, Mr. Grady, put your heart back into your throat. We can simply convert this kind to the other kind you ordered with a couple of days effort. See? No problem!

Beyond the insane wait for the ship to arrive and then the stove to be assembled by a man about 3 days younger than the house we live in, each step, no matter how simple or complex, took 7 days to complete. One week, remove existing cabinets. The next week, move the gas and water line (for a pot-filler faucet above the stove). Time passes. Install the stove (but don't hook it up). Wait a week. Install the base cabinets. Have the countertop templates cut. Wait a week. Install the counter tops. More time passes. Install the tops of the cabinets. Wait. Tile. Wait. Faucet. Wait. Trim. Wait hook up the stove.

OK. Now. Ready, set cook. 

 

When cooking in an Aga, you've got to remember that a) you can't change the temperature, and b) the oven doors are solid iron, and you're not going to smell anything cooking through them.  It's like cooking by feel, rather than science. Want something to crisp? Move it up and to the right a bit. Want something to slow down a bit? Stick it over in the simmering oven. After a while, you develop a connection with your stove that lets you kind of suss out when something is done based on as much instinct as calculation.  

And besides which: it's a giant red stove. How could you not love it? 

 

 

My personal hajj - to find the perfect pig fat

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Several years ago, I went to Tuscany for the first time. I'm lucky enough to work for a company with a major research and manufacturing center in Siena, Italy. It's actually the largest site in my division of the company. Which means, as much as I generally speaking hate the very idea of packing my suitcase, sleeping in not-my-bed and showering in not-my-shower, I still end up there at least a couple of times a year. In this case, at least, it's a burden I'm willing to shoulder. You know, for the good of the family. Because I'm all noble like that.
Back to that very first trip. I was out with the team at a little restaurant tucked up a cobbled street behind the main piazza del campo (the one where the horse race happens. Think James Bond & 'Quantum of Solace'). My Italian is not so good, even these days, though I can pretty much work my way through a menu. On that first trip, I just asked my colleague next to me - a native of Siena - to order whatever she thought I'd like. 'Something local.' I said. She smiled, and promised to take care of me. What came out next was a selection of antipasti. Salumi. Bruschetta smeared with a kind of dark liver pâté meets haggis. And one particular plate of what looked like thin slices of fat, with a dusting of dark chocolate shavings. Normally I don't trouble myself too much with asking what is in a particular dish. I've found that I'm usually better off not knowing before I taste it. But my curiosity was piqued. "What's that?" I asked my colleague. Her eyes lit up as she told me. "Lardo di Colonnata. You must try it." Even with my rudimentary Italian, I was pretty sure I knew what she was talking about. I speared a slice with my fork, and put it onto a slim piece of toast - crostini and popped it into my mouth. Oh. My. God. Imagine a slice of salami for a moment. Perfectly cured. A little salty. Now remove all the needless meaty bits from that salami, and leave behind the creamy-yet-toothsome fatty bits. Now sprinkle that with a bit of Olympian ambrosia. and add a dash of crack cocaine. And it's still better than that. Silky, salty perfection.
Each trip back, I always sought out the lardo. It's a Tuscan specialty, made for hundreds of years in the north of the region, and difficult to find (or even conceive of) outside of the region. The process involves taking fat from the back of a pig and curing it for about 6 months in a marble basin, stowed away in a warm cave in the hills, or maybe a dirt-floored cellar of a family home. At one point apparently someone official in the EU caught on to the process and was horrified. Because, you know... that just doesn't sound healthy. There was a brief movement to shut down production. The people of this tiny town, thankfully, fought this intervention successfully, proving that a) nothing unhealthy could live through that curing process, and b) the stuff just tastes too damn good to be banned. And so it continues to be made in the small village of Colonnata using traditional techniques.
Ever since we started getting our own pigs a couple of years ago, I've had an idea in the back of my head to work up towards my own lardo. Ambitious, I know. But I've been working up to it. When I started to plan my latest trip to Italy for work, I told my Bride I'd be spending an extra day or so, to make a special trip up to Colonnata. I had the pig fat. I just needed the special basin. And to see the source, and meet the people that make it. Colonnata is a small village - can't be more than a couple of hundred people. It is in the mountains above Carrera - as in, where the marble comes from. It's a long, windy road up, and you can see where the slopes have been cut away in huge quarries, leaving the hill sides in jagged, straight-cut edges of white stone. When you get near the village, you have to pull off and walk the final half kilometer or so up the hill. Looking at the quarries as I hiked up the road, it was easy to see why the men who cut and hauled the marble away appreciate the high-calorie practicality of a meal like lardo.
I wandered around the village for a bit and found a little shop near the edge that had all sorts of marble products. On the floor, several boxes were set out. More than boxes. They were basically hollowed out cubes of marble. I got excited. In my broken Italian, I asked the proprietress... "Concas? Por... um... lardo?" She smiled and nodded. I looked and lifted and poked, and couldn't decide. Then she showed me the prices. 30 to 50 euros apiece. Holy crap. Cheap. I bought 2 immediately. She wrapped them up for me, and pushed the bags to the edge of the counter. Then I remembered: marble? It's heavy. Each one of the basins weights over 10 kilos. And I still had to make it back down the hill to my car. Not to mention figure out a way to get them home in my suitcase. It didn't matter. I was so ecstatic to have them, that I could have bought another pair and still been happy stumbling down the hill. I sat outside at a little bistro, eating lardo and anchovies, sipping a beer, grinning like an idiot.
Now I've just got to dig all the fatback out of my freezer, and start the curing process. I'll let you know how it turns out. Six months or so from now.
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Making sorghum candy

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Every year in Union County, Georgia, they hold a Sorghum festival. For most of my early childhood, this was a centerpiece in our autumn activities. For those of you without enough Appalachia in your blood, sorghum is a sugar crop. Kind of like the South's answer to sugar cane. It was cheap, easy to grow, did well in places where sugar cane or beet didn't, and was a staple of Southern cookery for decades until refined sugars became more easily available. The Sorghum Festival is a celebration of this old-fashioned sticky treat, with suitable old-fashioned activities to keep a kid fascinated for a long, cool weekend. I don't know if they're still doing it, but in my youth this included log-sawing and greased-pig-catching competitions. Country fairs are so underrated. Of course, I didn't know any of this when I was a kid, though. I just knew that sorghum syrup kicks ass on a hot biscuit. I don't think I had thought about sorghum syrup or the festival in decades, though, until this past October, as we were quietly enjoying our own New England fall colors in the wake of my grandmother's (and the Critter's namesake's) passing. Sitting around one evening and telling the children stories of some of our adventures together, I remembered that we had once tried, unsuccessfully, to make homemade sorghum candy. We made a real botch of it, and I think ruined at least one pan completely in our attempts. Given how sticky hot boiled sugar can be, we were lucky that one or both of us didn't end up with 3rd degree burns in the process, given that I was 8, and she was well into her 60's. But I do remember having a lot of fun along the way.
The week of my grandmother's death, I ordered two small jugs of sorghum syrup (amazing what you can find on amazon), and told the kids we'd make candy like Nanny and I did when I was a kid. They sat in the pantry through the holidays, and occasionally the Critter would remind me that we were supposed to make candy. Shut up in the house with all the snow and ice outside, I finally broke out a jug this weekend.
The recipe is pretty simple. - 1 part syrup - 1 part water - a pinch or so of salt. Boil. OK, no problem. Even I can follow that kind of recipe. I used a cast iron dutch oven, but I think pretty much any stock pot would do. I figured, however, that if all went awry again, I wouldn't feel too bad about taking the steel wool or a power sander to the cast iron. My Bride would probably feel differently if I used the rather expensive le Crueset
Boil until you reach the "hard ball stage" or 260-270 degrees. Hey honey, where's your candy thermometer? You threw it out? You think you could have told me this before now? What the heck am I supposed to do now? Ah. Drop it in the cold water, and see if it forms a hard ball. Of course. How long is that supposed to take? 'You'll know it when you get there,' huh? Yeah. Thanks. Really f#@%ing helpful, lady.
There was a lot of watching and waiting. Sugar isn't something you want to heat too quickly or walk away from. And I'm pretty sure this is where my grandmother and I went wrong - she was probably tired of hearing me ask "is it ready yet", and pulled it off the heat a bit early, resulting in a gooey, stringy mess. Now that I've seen how long it really takes to get there, I can't say I blame her.
Hey look! Hardball stage! At this point, the whole house was full of the gentle, earthy sweet flavor of sorghum. It's very like molasses, but with a more buttery scent and flavor. There's simply nothing else that approaches that smell and taste. At this point, I poured the hot, bubbly mass into a buttered bowl to cool.
After a half hour or so, it was cool enough to handle. More from the recipe: "Butter your hands, and taking a smallish bit of the sorghum, work and stretch until it changes color and hardens. This works better when two people are pulling. Remember in the mountains, families were usually large" (I'm not kidding. That last part is actually part of the recipe. Any recipe that includes the phrase: "Remember, in the mountains..." is a winner in my book.)
There was plenty in the bowl for two of us (at this point, I became very glad that I made the decision to only use one of the jugs of sorghum to make candy) The Critter was mildly disturbed at the thought of having to rub butter all over her hands, but she really got into the pulling and twisting part. She wanted hers to "look like licorice" (which I think meant twisted and braided).
I looked back at the recipe to see how things were supposed to end. But that was it. "Pull until it changes color and hardens." What? And then what? Is it supposed to turn into sticks? Lollipops? What color is it supposed to turn into? Blue? I racked my memory to try and recall the end state, but of course my grandmother and I ended up throwing out our gooey mess, and never finished it off. Eventually, I decided that it was pretty much supposed to look and feel like caramels. (and no amount of google searching could disprove this theory). So we rolled the stretched candy out, and cut it into rounds to finish cooling.
Twisted into wax paper squares, and tucked in a jar, our little homemade candies bring a real smile to my face. Objectively speaking, I had just spent several hours of effort and turned half the kitchen into a sticky, buttery mess to produce the equivalent of a couple of $0.99 bags of candy. But the whole process of slowly boiling the dark, buttery sorghum for hours with my own 8 year old Eleanor was a kind of cosmic loop-closer, and another little peek for both of us into what growing up in another era, one without 7-11's and mall Ye Olde Candy Supershoppes was like. We all tried one, and decided the effort was worth it.
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