Manolo’s Food Blog

Like The Manolo, Mr. Henry has been traveling, holed up in a Cape Cod rental bungalo without internet access.

He tried to eat locavore. He made a real mental effort. But as a citizen of the world he believes no neighborhood is truly so far removed from his acquaintance that he cannot partake of its proudest fare. And where, he asks, is the local food exit off Interstate-95?

In the spirit of a summer share, therefore, he would like to offer a few travel tips:

On the highway, don’t drink the iced coffee at Starbuck’s. It’s a guaranteed stomach cramp. Try Newman’s Own Organic at MacDonald’s instead. It’s delicious, neither watery nor burned, and costs half as much as the Starbuck’s one.

As for eating roadside fast food, just don’t. Pack a picnic you can enjoy at the rest stop. Pretend the sound of roaring cars to be Niagara Falls. (Mrs. Henry added a dollop of sour cream to her chicken salad which rounded out the mouth feel and slightly disguised the mayonnaise — altogether a nice picnic choice.)

Don’t go to Cape Cod for codfish, which in every case will be an anodyne, frozen, white fish filet caught months ago far, far away — the very same filet you might get in Peoria or Topeka.

Don’t eat oysters on the half shell in Wellfleet. They are OK, but the clams are far sweeter, especially the littlenecks.

If stuck shopping at the local superette, a quick and easy barbecue sauce can be made from three parts ketchup and one part worcestershire sauce. Slather it on AFTER the ribs come off the grill. (Please don’t even pretend you’re going to do a dry rub marinade. Be reasonable. It’s summer. In the morning, dinner always seems to be a long way away.)

Boil your corn until underdone, a mere seven or eight minutes. Let it cool and slice it off the cob. Mixed with chopped tomato, celery and cilantro (or whatever pungent fresh herb you can find). Splash it with oil and vinegar and you will have a marvelous crunchy salad on hand for snacks or for meals.

For the best possible dinner, take Little Henry and posse out to the marshes. Let them loose in the shallows with buckets to dig fresh cherrystone clams, littleneck clams, razor clams, and mussels. (Rubber gloves are a good idea because clam shell edges can be sharp.)

Sautéed in a big fry pan with onion and white wine, each variety will cook at a different rate. Pluck them out when they open so as not to render them rubbery. Reduce your sauce a touch and add a dab of thickener to help it grab hold of the pasta. (Mr. Henry likes heavy cream but sour cream works fine, too.) Serve over linguine with a chilled bottle of Sancerre close at hand.

On the Fourth of July, the corn was not quite knee-high. Tomatoes were good but not magnificent, not yet the stand-alone dish they will become next month. Garden arugula was bright and not too sharp, happily reminiscent of Italian varietials. Peppers and onions came off the grill with flesh still meaty and toothsome.

Still, although Mr. Henry does not like to complain, the tastes of the weekend were beginning to be a bore. Meat grilled outdoors is all very fine but without a skillful marinade lacks both subtlety and complexity.

On a lazy Sunday morning at Paul’s country house, however, Mrs. Henry, ever the clever one when given a moment’s free time, created an appetizer of scallops that was the most exciting new taste of the summer. Completed in five minutes, it was beyond compare.

She brushed the broiling pan with olive oil and arranged a quart of sea scallops across its surface. In three minutes they were nicely browned yet still soft to the touch of a finger. [Don’t let them get rubbery. There is no need to cook them solidly throughout. So long as they are warm inside, you’ve done your job.]

She served them on top of a cool, fresh relish. To a peeled, seeded and diced tomato she added coarsely chopped cilantro leaf, the juice from half a lime, a pinch of salt and — now for the genius — one peeled and diced peach. The flowery aroma of peach married to its tangy tomato cousin created a subtly balanced liqueur, lighter than a wine sauce, which perfectly supported the scallop’s mild sweetness.

Manolo says, the Times of the New York, they are catching onto something that Manolo has recognized for many years now, that the oyster has at last returned!

“We’re in a time comparable to the 1880’s and 90’s now,” said Mark Kurlansky, the author of the recent “The Big Oyster” , who took part in the Seattle conference. “It’s a kind of second Golden Age of the oyster.”

And what is there not to love about the Golden Age of the Oyster?

Look below, even the Belgian chefs agree; good oysters are worth the eating, even 50 meters above the ground.

Manolo says, ayyyyy! Belgian chef stunt dining!

When Mr. Henry has sushi one of the first things he needs to decide is what he is having. That is, what he is having to drink with tonight’s sushi.

As an appropriate accompaniment to sushi, sake is an obvious choice, and as it happens there is a perfectly respectable bottle already open in Her refrigerator. For lunch, green tea is always advisable because at this point in the career of Mr. Henry’s liver even half a beer at lunchtime leaves him feeling as if someone had thrown the sea anchor overboard. Forward progress is impeded and, heaven knows, he needs to be getting along with his life goals each and every day, and this includes afternoons.

Scotch is Mr. Henry’s personal favorite with sushi and with nearly everything else, for that matter.

A healthy pour of Oban or Talisker over ice cubes made from filtered water (more genius from the engineers at Sub-Zero) provides an ideal imbibational choice – strong enough to cut through the lingering fire of powdered wasabi, yet without the sugars of wine or the starches of beer.

White rice is as close to library paste as Mr. Henry’s educated palette will accept. When the short-grained is served chewy and lightly vinegared, however, scotch efficaciously clears away any lingering bits of hamachi or maguro, leaving the mouth ready to greet the next wiggling arrival.

When you elect to switch away from wasabi-based sauce toward a bit of eel, however, you need a more powerful cleansing of the palette, a thorough and abrupt alteration, the commencement of a new chapter in the evening’s unfolding novella. Here is where your choice of drink is key, and here is where you can change your whole meal, indeed, your whole approach. You might even say that your choice of drink determines your cultural identity, your very ethnicity.

Memoirs of a Sushiphile, Part I

In quick succession sometime early in the 90’s, as if impelled by a master plan, Manhattan streetscapes began to display sushi houses on every other block.

What only the truly initiated noticed, however, and here you are fortunate to be reading the reportage of Mr. Henry, an old Japan hand, was that most of these new houses were not under the management of Japanese persons. Indeed this fact was proven when shouting expressions in his increasingly fluent Japanese to the wait staff elicited only silent, baleful stares, responses that could not be explained by reliance on hackneyed clichés of oriental inscrutability.

No, clearly these persons of Asian extraction were participating in an elaborate masquerade not of their own liking. These were Chinese and Koreans, most of them fresh arrivals to America, and their dreams of striking out boldly in the land of opportunity had gone terribly, terribly awry.

It is no secret to you, Mr. Henry hopes, that the Chinese and Korean nations loathe the Japanese, and there are sound, historical, grudge-bearing, vengeful reasons for such enmities. How odd, therefore, to see ancient hatreds so quickly buried in the quest for gainful employment. How much more odd it was to see those enmities buried with regard to food, that most intensely personal and immutable of identity markers.

In the 90’s most of our sushi chefs, however, remained of Japanese ancestry principally because entrance into the ancient, venerated guild and training in its special knowledge requires years of grunt work and an uncle in the business, precisely the same hurdles facing an aspiring electrician or plumber in the greater New York area. Notwithstanding this cultural and, yes, racial legacy, however, strange things began happening to the fish. Slices began to get bigger.

A piece of sushi should be a one-bite experience. The incisors do not participate. The entire edible object, glistening with fresh omega-3’s and not dripping with excessive shoyu and wasabi (dip a corner — don’t dredge the thing, please, please, please) is placed as far back in the mouth as the fingers – yes, the fingers – will allow. Use your chopsticks to grab a pickle or a slice of ginger but the true sushi-meister uses two or at most three fingers of the right hand only.

Did sushi originated as an accompaniment to drink, the heavenly eastern equivalent of the beer nut or the pretzel? Who knows? Mr. Henry is not here to render decisive opinions on the arcana of Japanese culinary history, and if he were to do so he would probably incite hate mail from frustrated, underpaid academics.

Sushi is, you will admit, a predictable experience. It cannot suffer from uneven charcoal broiling. It is either sublime or else for hygienic reasons you should not be ingesting it.

Mr. Henry is not one for sauces.

After three forkfuls of even the finest sauce, he longs for the pure and free flavor of the meat, fish, or fowl. Here in the home of the brave, the cradle of individuality, are not sauces an Old World affectation? Have US Customs agents been vigilant about their importation? Does the National Security Agency monitor wine reductions, veloutés, or Catalonian foam?

In case they are monitoring him, Mr. Henry wants to say he believes law enforcement authorities are doing everything necessary to protect our values. Heck of a job, guys.

Prairie American virtues include bristling at authority, a feisty disregard for convention, and a consequent culinary approach characterized by rugged unfussiness.

Ours was not a nation constructed on false sauces!

Isn’t our most fundamental right the right to be left alone? And doesn’t that extend equally to the evening entrée?

Mr. Henry rests his case.

To be sure, he can imagine the Founding Fathers enjoying a side of cranberry relish, a shining illustration of American ingenuity. And then, of course, there is gravy, that quintessential English invention, one that survives contentedly today in the South.

A Mr. Henry dictum: Gravy is not sauce.

Shall we move on?

The topic of salmon is broad. At the local fishmongers Mr. Henry found Norwegian wild salmon, Norwegian farmed salmon, Norwegian farmed organic salmon, and his special favorite, Norwegian double-smoked cured salmon. The choices, you will admit, were overwhelming and he hadn’t even left Bergen.

West Coast and Alaskan salmon have a wild, weedy, sharp flavor that Mr. Henry has always found off-putting. But then Mr. Henry gets lost in the wild weeds of San Francisco, both physically and metaphorically. There is something out there he just doesn’t get – proper highway directions, for example, or the general tenor of conversations. The scenery is too beautiful, the harvest too bountiful.

He is reminded of a warm morning once spent in the souk of Meknes choosing bunches of the most aromatic mint on earth. Ahhhh, Mr. Henry’s memories are long. Best to stick to Norway. You can’t really get lost driving in the hinterland there because the country is entirely composed of coastline.

In serving dinner to old friends who had not graced their table in a decade or more, Mrs. Henry and her obedient consort decided that for the entrée broiled Norwegian organic salmon seemed a safe bet. It is fresh and plentiful in the market, reliably palatable, and attractively colorful. Unlike pale monkfish that belly-flops across the plate, salmon stands up smart and pink.

The Korean grocery on the corner offered asparagus, super-model thin, which after tossing with a touch of olive oil and coarse salt we placed under the ceramic radiation broiler for two minutes. The result was an irresistible finger-food — a slightly crisped, succulent, nutty sweet grass.

Our wine was a delicious Austrian grüner veltliner by FamilieBauer, refreshing, inexpensive, and cold.

A sourdough French baguette amply satisfied our limited demands for starches. Broiled baby Brussels sprouts offered roundness and verve. The meal now demanded a theme, both in flavor and in color, and the decision of sauce for the salmon loomed large.

A fresh dill sauce hurriedly purchased from the deli counter turned out to be a verdant horror. Its principal ingredient was mayonnaise and the shocking intensity of green color made Mr. Henry shudder even to try it. His old standby yogurt and sour cream dill sauce, although perfectly tasty, always had a disappointing tendency to roam around the dinner dish as though seeking converts to its particular belief system. This evening’s grilled asparagus were each too, too perfect to permit the joy-ride of an uninvited dill sauce.

It is at times like these that Mr. Henry shows the stuff of which he is made. Grit and education, abrasion and lubrication in equal measure, led Mr. Henry to re-imagine sublime salmons of yesteryear. There had been no fresh dill in the market. The salmon was out of the oven awaiting its flavor accessory, its organizing theme.

Only minutes before serving time he seized upon a new solution –- pure, unadulterated, organic, grass-fed, Natural by Nature sour cream — straight from the tub.

After all, what goes better with smoked salmon than sour cream?

[Philadelphia cream cheese is a horror. Mr. Henry is sorry to have to say it, but there it is. In the long run it does no good to sweep these things under the rug. Mr. Henry strongly believes that it is best to be open and honest about processed cheese spreads of any distinction. They are a national embarrassment, a cultural character blemish, and he cannot say this often enough.]

And if sour cream is the perfect accompaniment to smoked salmon, could it not also work with fresh?

It could, and it did. Its working-class sourness suavely partnered the rich sweet fish.

Was the serving of “plain,” if you will, sour cream seen as a failure of the imagination? Ha! On the contrary. This particular sour cream with every homespun, handmade bona fide, with deeply rich texture and the perfect blend of tartness, sweetness and umami could not have been bested by Escoffier’s Army of the Republic. American sour cream was triumphant.

De l’audace! Encore de l’audace! Et toujours de l’audace!