noodsletter #.0005
GAENG of PRIK, the root of all celery, a haiku.
Hello!
You’ve received this email because you’ve signed up for noodsletter. Thank you. The recipe section is located at the bottom of the email, everything else on top.
There is no recipe this week, but we will discuss:
Celeriac slaw*
As ever, I welcome your feedback! Leave a comment, send an email, whatever; you don’t have to be positive, you don’t even have to be nice, just be humane for god’s sake
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Adventures With Prik Gaeng
We recently published a guide to Thai curries and curry pastes by Pailin Chongchitnant, as well as a raft of curry and curry paste recipes by Derek Lucci.1
We spend a lot of time thinking about how to make useful stuff for people, and I, personally, thought Pailin’s guides were very useful, but I wondered how many of our readers would really take some of what she said to heart. In particular, I wondered whether anyone would make curry pastes and curries with whatever they had lying around, as she suggests, in part because we do, after all, have those amazing recipes by Derek Lucci. (If you have not made one of them, do the pork rib curry. Made well, it’s the best thing I’ve eaten in years. Made badly [by me], it’s one of the best things I’ve eaten in years.)
All of these thoughts came back to me the other day when I was staring at a bunch of very hot chili peppers my kid picked up at the farmers market from Evolutionary Organics’ extensive selection. I say “picked up,” but it was mostly me picking up the ones she touched, and I ended up with this:
I made a fake, vegetarian katta sambol (a Sri Lankan pounded relish usually made from dried chilies, shallot, dried Maldive fish, and lime juice—I have Maldive fish but didn’t feel like rooting through my cupboard) with a couple, and realized they were really quite hot, and I was at a loss as to what to do with them. And then all of a sudden I realized I could make a curry paste “with what I have on hand,” which included most everything for a typical green curry paste: galangal (in the freezer), lemongrass, chilies, spices, etc. The only things I didn’t have were the makrut lime zest and the cilantro root, but that was part of the spirit of the whole thing, yeah? So I pounded all the ingredients down and made a paste.
Again, these were super hot chilies, so this wasn’t going to be the most useful paste, but now I had it, so I had to use it. So I just used it as Pailin suggested, which was in stuff I was cooking anyway. Here’s what I made with it. (I tried to upload photos of each of these dishes, but I’m up against the limit of Substack’s capabilities; I’ll post them [again] on IG.)
Super spicy rice noodle soup. Fried the paste in a ton of chicken fat (really, maybe too much), added a very simple chicken ramen stock (chicken, garlic, ginger, napa), seasoned the bowl with raw sliced onion, fish sauce, Golden Mountain seasoning (green cap), threw a quick stir fry on top, some fried garlic and shallots, too.
Batter-fried chicken. Cut the drums and thighs down to the bone on one side, rubbed the paste on the exposed flesh and just salted the skin, let that sit overnight, then threw the pieces in a potato starch-batter (courtesy that other Serious Eats contributor genius, Tim Chin) and fried it until it was done.
A potato curry (it was all I had!). This was cooked per the method outlined in Derek’s green curry recipe, cracking the coconut milk, frying the paste in the coconut fat, diluting with more coconut milk and water, seasoning, then adding in the potatoes to cook.
All in all, a success. The noodle soup had excellent flavor, but something about the huge amount of chicken fat and the outrageous spiciness of the peppers did crazy things to my body; I felt physically hot for four hours. The chicken was delicious, but to be fair it was fried chicken and the flavor of the curry paste didn’t really come through, unless you ate it cold (it also wasn’t spicy at all!). The potato curry was a disappointment, but only because a curry with just potatoes in it isn’t my idea of a good curry at all, no matter how good the potatoes (which were very good, from Evolutionary, not actually sure which ones). I am however getting a huge kick out of showing the (very small, circumscribed) world (of noodsletter readers) that photo!
A Bit o’ Book
THE TONGUE IS THE STRONGEST MUSCLE
There are countries out there where people speak English. But not like us - we have our own languages hidden in our carry-on luggage, in our cosmetics bags, only ever using English when we travel, and then only in foreign countries, to foreign people. It’s hard to imagine, but English is their real language! Oftentimes their only language. They don’t have anything to fall back on or to turn to in moments of doubt.
How lost they must feel in the world, where all instruction, all the lyrics of all the stupidest possible songs, all the menus, all the excruciating pamphlets and brochures - even the buttons in the lift! - are in their private language. They may be understood by anyone at any moment, whenever they open their mouths. They must have to write things down in special codes. Wherever they are, people have unlimited access to them - they are accessible to everyone and everything! I heard there are plans in the works to get them some little language of their own, one of those dead ones no one else is using anyway, just so that for once they can have something just for themselves.
From Flights by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Jennifer Croft.
While all excerpts are from books I’d recommend, this one is a real gem.
“News”
The limit of the “if you can’t beat ‘em, eat ‘em" approach to invasive species appears to be that it has never, ever worked.
Atlantic bluefin tuna will no longer be considered endangered, and instead is “status of least concern.” Ditto Atlantic yellowfin and albacore, although they were considered “near-threatened” previously. (Skipjack tuna, a.k.a. bonito, a.k.a. katsuo, a.k.a. the king, is still totally fine to eat, and is in fact in season in Japan at the moment.)
Including this link to an article about how consumption habits changed during the 1918 pandemic just because of the image of the onion soup recipe. The dishonesty about onion soup has been going on for at least a century!
This is about kokumi, which in my understanding translates to a kind of “mouthfulness.” I don’t think it’s a matter of not understanding British humor (which, I don’t, maybe?; ha, etc.), but there seems to me to be a lot of confusion in the piece, the most obvious being the writer claims he hasn’t eaten MSG when—I’m sorry!—he has. A writer mocking some entity for creating money from nothing is also a little like having a poo on your own dinner plate.
The English translation of the 13th-century cookbook Fiḍālat al-khiwān fī ṭayyibāt al- ṭaʿām wa-l-alwān by the Andalusi scholar Ibn Razīn al-Tujībī has been published as ‘Best of Delectable Foods and Dishes from al-Andalus and al-Maghrib.’
I am not sold on the premise of this piece examining the issues of the California recall election through the lens of a meal at the French Laundry, but kudos to the author for expensing that meal at the French Laundry for it.
I mostly agree with this piece about cooking whole fish, but I just want to point out it’s relatively simple to fillet fish and…whatever, just buy good, whole, local fish everyone, cook it however the heck you want, there are some good suggestions in the piece.
Not really food-related, but it starts off with mushrooms, and I sort of love Dennis Overbye. Also, there’s a link in there to one of those incredible NYT things that’s just hidden on their website: an exhaustive list of all the crap we’ve sent into space, along with news articles documenting each launch.
Hannah Raskin’s newsletter is (I suppose, unsurprisingly) very impressive, and this story about a bar with bad owner in Charleston is a good example.
My aunt says she likes to go to this aquarium for the seals and sea lions but it has a parasitic bug that looks like a salmon nigiri…come on!
The quotations in this piece about vegan “pork” and whether Muslims will try it are all great.
Restaurant Review Haiku
I sat wondering
how COVID could be blamed
for such bad sauces.2
Recipe* (not really) - Celeriac Slaw
I have gone back and forth on this non-recipe, feeling a little bad that I won’t be providing any quantities. However, if you can make a vinaigrette, you don’t need a recipe for this, you just need to be able to make a vinaigrette and spike it with more mustard than you normally would. “Need” is a little strong there; if you just want to dress celery root cut into little matchsticks with whatever your normal vinaigrette is, that will probably be delicious, too.
Other than a “need” to provide some kind of recipe service for noodsletter, I thought a brief snippet about preparing celery root might be useful to readers, since I fairly often see people at the farmers market eyeing these ugly things warily, as if it were unopened candy abandoned on the subway. I used to do the same before I knew what to do with them, because they really are magnificently ugly, and the idea that someone was finding something delicious inside what looks like a clump of pale dirt riddled with roots is very appealing to anyone who fervently believes in the miracle of culinary alchemy. (I used to feel the same about kohlrabi, but sort of from the opposite perspective, since it’s so beautiful, but also looks a little menacing, like alien fruit, if you don’t know what to do with it.)
Also, this is very easy, both to write about and do, so hop to it; buy yourself some celery root/celeriac.
Of course, English being what it is, it isn’t the root of some random celery plant; it isn’t even a root. Sort of similar to the way kohlrabi is a variant of cabbage, celeriac is harvested from a celery plant that has been bred to produce a pronounced stem, specifically a hypocotl (I’m unsure of whether kohlrabi is a hypocotl; we’ll save that for the kohlrabi newsletter). The flavor is distinctly of celery, but the texture is closer to a root vegetable (really, it’s actually most similar to kohlrabi, again. If you don’t know anything about kohlrabi, all of this will be hilariously useless to you, so I’m sorry about that. Buy some kohlrabi, it’s amazing!)
What you’ll buy will look something like the earth fetus above. And what you want to do, initially, is turn it into something that looks like this:
The main challenge with celeriac, other than getting past its very dirty and ugly exterior, is that oxidizes quickly, and that beautiful pale flesh will quickly turn spotty and brown. As with other things that oxidize quickly (artichoke…apples, I guess?), having a cut lemon half on hand is useful; alternatively, a small mixing bowl with acidulated water (water with a lemon squeezed into it works) can be used to stash cut pieces. I am a mess in the kitchen so I’ll typically just make do with the half lemon, squeezing it/rubbing it over the celeriac as I go.
First, using a sharp chef’s knife, I try to get off as much of the exterior with straight cuts, forming something like a cube. I swab the exposed surfaces with the lemon, then go back over with a knife and get any of the larger expanses of the dirty exterior, and then resort to a peeler for the straggling bits, yielding a demented diamond, which, again, I’ll swab with the cut lemon, but only after I run it under water to remove all the dirt to my satisfaction (ditto with the cutting board, which at this point will be littered with dirt).
At that point you can use a sharp knife to cut the thing into planks, using the largest and flattest side as a base, so you can cut the thing safely. However, I usually use a mandoline to cut those planks; it’s quicker, but it’s also a little dangerous. Celeriac is fibrous (not entirely sure if that’s the right word here; tougher?) in a way that a potato, say, isn’t, and it can catch on a mandoline blade, particularly if your mandoline has seen some use. Please be careful if you use a mandoline. It isn’t so imperative that the planks be cut to a microscopic thinness; you just want matchsticks, although with matchstick’d vegetables you often want to get them cut as finely as possible. Just do your best. They don’t have to be particularly straight, or particularly thin; the dressing and the salt will make them perfectly palatable, even if they look a little wonky, but chances are, as with all slaw, you probably won’t notice how the thing’s cut once it’s dressed.
Once you have a pile of planks, squeeze the lemon over them and rub them with the juice, then organize them into manageable stacks and, using that sharp knife, cut them into matchsticks, and then, just to be safe, squeeze a little lemon juice over them again. (Writing this out, obviously the acidulated water bowl is the way to go, and yet…I don’t do it.)
If you try a matchstick at this point, you’ll probably be a little worried; it’ll be a little woody. That woodiness will subside once you salt the celeriac, which will break it down a bit and make the matchsticks a little limp (but not in a bad way; a good way!). So sprinkle them with a little salt and give them a stir, then make your dressing.
My standard vinaigrette is minced garlic, soaked in acid (usually lemon juice) for like 15 minutes to ameliorate its pungency, then combine with another acid (red wine or sherry vinegar, typically), Dijon mustard, black pepper, and good olive oil, poured in a steady stream while whisking with a fork to produce a loose emulsion. For celeriac, I like to add ~50% more mustard, which gives the emulsion a creamier texture more appropriate for slaw (we aren’t a mayo family, really, but obviously slaw made with mayo is a thing people do; you can do that here, too), and I also like to add a fair amount of capers, like a shy tablespoon, that I chop up with a knife. You can use whatever vinaigrette/salad dressing you like with celeriac, it will almost certainly be good. In fact, maybe this winter I will give ‘nduja-ranch celeriac slaw a try; it’s almost impossible it will be bad.
Serve the slaw with whatever you like to serve slaw with. I ate it alongside chicken cutlets one day, then alongside a burger. It is also fantastic when eaten straight out of a deli container with the fridge door open at 11 at night.
The subject line is (obviously) a reference to this song by the best band ever, obviously.
If you have a disagreeable experience at a restaurant and a) are inspired to write a haiku and b) would like a sympathetic eye/ear, please send it to me! I will publish it, here, on noodsletter, if you let me. No need to identify the restaurant, please.