My favorite culinary rant of the week comes from the beautiful and wise Julie at A Finger in Every Pie, who has a few things to say about the "new and improved" Kiev on Second Avenue and East Seventh Street. It is my belief that if we were all allowed to follow Julie around for a week, we would all be eating much, much better by the end of that week. Go visit her and see why. (Incidentally, for you fellow music nerds out there, this is the same Kiev that was mentioned in this classic King Missile song. Except that, as Julie says with such force and brio, it's not the same Kiev anymore.)
My favorite quote of the week, and easily one of the best sentences ever to be recorded by my voicemail, comes from the also-beautiful-and-wise bunni, who is slogging bravely through the Aeneid, which we've taken to calling Oy, That's a Lot of Romans: "The Romans were the people you wanted to do your plumbing, but epic poetry was certainly not their strong suit." (Bunni has plenty of other quotable things to say about the Aeneid, most of which are filled with f-bombs, all of which are a riot.)
My second-favorite quote of the week comes from Regina Schrambling at gastropoda. Because I don't want to get my muddy shoes all over Regina's copyright, I won't reproduce it here. What I will do is encourage you to click on the link and scroll down to the ninth story from the top, the one that begins: "Here's what $32 buys you these days..." From now on, whenever people ask me why I make my own life so difficult by shlepping 20 pounds of groceries from Union Square to Astoria via the N train, I'm just going to hand them a copy of this instead.
More thoughts about stovies. I realize, dear friends, that by mentioning stovies about a sesquillion times since my return home, I run the risk of turning the humble-but-noble stovies into a badly overexposed topic, the PTMYB equivalent of runaway brides or shark attacks. It's not that I want to flog a good thing to death; no, the truth is more prosaic. The truth is that I ran out of steam on Thursday night, and after several futile attempts at writing something that would a) give stovies a little context and b) not be so awful as to make me drive spoons into my eyes, I just decided to give up and post the recipe.
Here endeth the dissembling and excuse-making. Here beginneth the context. At the risk of resorting to lazy rhetoric in the tradition of "Webster's defines 'x' as..." or "If you Google 'x'...", the entry for stovies in the mighty Oxford Companion to Food describes them simply as "a Scottish dish of potatoes, onions, etc., often with mutton, stewed with very little added liquid." The late and much-missed Alan Davidson, who edited the Oxford Companion and wrote the stovies entry, points out that stovies do indeed make for very good eating, the real point of interest is the etymology of the name. He presents two points of view: one being that stovie is derived from the French etuve, a braise cooked in a covered container with very little liquid, the other being that "to stove" is an English verb in its own right. The former argument points to the large number of French cooking terms used in Scottish cookery literature; but, Davidson writes, the historian Catherine Brown disputes this theory, pointing to the use of "stove" as a verb in a poultry recipe found in Gervase Markham's The English Hus-Wife, published in 1615. On a superficial level, I am inclined to agree with Ms. Brown, but I also know that to gain a real understanding of where a dish and its nomenclature comes from requires study of my own, not just by glomming on to the most acceptable theory of the time. (It is this sort of glomming on that promulgates bad culinary history, the kind that fuels "tomatoes were considered poisonous until 1821/Catherine de Medici invented haute cuisine/"johnnycake" is just a corruption of "journey cake" apocrypha, and while those tales are often whimsical and charming, they often obscure a path that is every bit as interesting and fun to follow, if not more so.)
As I mentioned in my comments to the previous post, stovies are one of the simplest things you can make, requiring onions, potatoes, some form of meat or vegetarian meat equivalent, some form of fat, some form of liquid, salt and pepper. I found literally hundreds of stovie recipes online, calling for yellow, white or red onions; for floury potatoes; for waxy potatoes; for beef dripping, lard, butter and/or olive oil; for minced beef, minced lamb, stewed mutton, chicken parts, or tempeh; for water, chicken broth, beef broth, water flavored with Bovril, water flavored with powdered vegetable stock, lager cut with water, lager all on its own. You can cook it for half an hour, as I did, or you can cook it for two hours. You can shake the pot assiduously to keep the bottom from burning, or you can gently encourage the formation of a bottom crust, not so burned as to taste acrid, but just burned enough to give everything a nice caramelized flavor. You can cook it on top of the stove, or in the oven. As with many well-loved staple dishes -- fried chicken, buttermilk biscuits, coq au vin, chocolate chip cookies -- every fan has his/her own recipe, and what works for one of us may make the rest of us recoil in horror. I am still waiting to get my wrist slapped by someone who has been making stovies for 30 years, and who would be horrified by my ingredients or methodology. Then again, maybe it won't happen: maybe stovie lovers know that this is a generous, wide-open dish, with plenty of room for us to play around until we find the version that says to us a-ha, that's it.