While we are still luxuriating in the glow of late spring, it's time to start thinking about the upcoming summer solstice, which will mark the start of early summer according to The Political Palate (The Bloodroot Collective (Betsey Beaven, Noel Giordano, Selma Miriam, and Pat Shea), 1980).
The book is heavy on international recipes, and given how summer is known for an abundance of vegetables and Chinese cooking is known for featuring an abundance of fresh vegetables, it's not too surprising that the early summer section includes a lot of Chinese (or at least Americanized versions of Chinese) recipes. So we'll have a complete menu, I've chosen a soup, salad, main dish, and vegetable side, but I'm going to save the soup for last just because that recipe amused me the most.
First up is a salad that makes use of tender early-summer peas.
The quickly stir-fried snow peas are tossed in a marinade, chilled, and then used to top lettuce. Apparently the sauce made of tofu cakes blended with lemon juice, tamari, and herbs doesn't count as dressing, as the extra marinade from the peas PLUS some vinaigrette are also supposed to flavor the salad. That's a lot of sauces. The most interesting addition, though, is the 1/2 teaspoon of crushed Szechuan peppercorns. I did a double take on that one. Weren't Szechuan peppercorns banned in the U.S. when this book was written? Indeed, they were banned in the U.S. from 1967-2005, so I guess the Bloodroot Collective was sneaky enough to have a source....
For the main dish, we continue the Szechuan theme with some Szechuan noodles.
(I also continue the theme of asking why I decided to use this book for a whole year, given that its water damage makes it nearly impossible to scan!) It's interesting that the Szechuan noodles don't include Szechuan peppercorns, but they do call for a lot of ingredients that shoppers in typical 1980s grocery stores wouldn't find easily, including chili paste, rice wine vinegar, and hot pickled turnip. Plus, cooks who wanted the recommended side would need to pick up fermented black beans.
Since these recipes call for so many specialized (especially for the time!) ingredients, I assume they're more authentic than most of the "Chinese" recipes I see in a typical community cookbook from the '60s or '70s, but I don't really have a lot of knowledge to base that assertion on (other than the fact that none of these call for cream of something soup or a healthy topping of cheese).
My favorite recipe, though, is the one for Hot and Sour Soup with Wild Daylily Buds. My love for the recipe is based entirely on the strength of its first two lines.
"Collect 1 qt. wild daylily buds. Be sure you know what they are." There aren't too many recipes that simply tell readers to collect wild buds and then admonish readers to "know what they are" without any further instruction. Don't just collect any random buds you come across, but if you don't already know what wild daylily buds are, well, you're SOL. The Bloodroot Collective isn't going to tell you, and the internet does not yet exist. Basically, this is an admission that the recipe is likely to be unusable a sizable portion of the people who own this collection, and the writers don't particularly care. It seems like a good recipe to help lead us toward the carefree days of early summer.... Hey, if you don't know what you're looking for, just take the day off.
I was also struck by how exotic the ingredients are for 1980. I think that some of the ingredients would be really hard to find locally for a lot of people now. Even if you do live in a town with an Asian market (or 3), the labelling sometimes leaves you guessing as to exactly what is in the package.
ReplyDeleteThat's true. Sometimes the workers will help out if you ask nicely, but it depends on how busy the store is, how many people are working, and their tolerance for clueless non-Asian people. (I can't blame them for being skeptical! In my tutoring gig, one sociology instructor asks students to go somewhere where they would be considered a minority and write about their experiences in that environment. I once read a paper by a white woman who went to an international grocery and I ended up feeling sooooo bad for the people who were working there and had to put up with her. Luckily, the manager whom she inevitably asked to speak to basically kicked her out rather than chewing out the employees she was harassing. She seemed to think the point of her paper was that people from other cultures are mean and bad at customer service, but that is NOT what came through. I really wondered what her professor had to say about that one, as she clearly missed the point of the assignment.)
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