Photographs by Katherine Bish; Food styling by Mary Grapsas
When does summer end?
Sure, the TV weather guys (even though they all pronounce “temperature” as “tempachure”) can give us the exact minute in the geophysical year when autumn commences. And there’s the first day back in school, the first leaf falling, the last dip in a pool that is suddenly just a little too chilly, no matter how warm the air. We, on the other hand, are submitting this criterion for marking the end of summer in St. Louis: It’s when plastic jugs of cider show up in the grocery stores.
One day you’re buying lemons for lemonade or stocking up on summer’s peaches; the next you’re eyeing, with a sudden and unexpected anticipation, the fluid in those jugs, a sweet liquid amber that comes glugging out of the spout, rich, icy-cold as a windshield in February and almost achingly sweet. And though you may be standing in shorts and flip-flops in the checkout line, that first jug of apple cider is as reliable a sign as you’ll find—autumn is on its way.
Autumn around here is glorious. With sunny days and crisp, bright afternoons during which a sweater is cozy but a coat still stifling, autumn is when life goes from near-comatose aestivation back to being worth living. It’s when roadside food stands peddle tomatoes with skins that are rapidly thickening, the fruit more amenable to long-simmering, oregano-laced marinara sauces than to Caprese salads; and the corn on the cob is starchy and chewy. Autumn is when the markets welcome a whole new crop of foods—and this year it’s high time you branched out and tried a couple of new things. Call it your east-meets-west, all-in-one fall-food survival guide.
Apples
We were getting ahead of ourselves with the mention of apple cider. Even though for us it’s a sure sign of autumn’s arrival, cider doesn’t appear spontaneously: No apples, no apple cider. Indeed, apples are the quintessential fall food, not that you’d know it from the stuff in most grocery produce sections. Bred bruise-resistant for shipping, picked while still green, gassed into ripeness ... These apples aren’t nearly as bad as they sound, but they’re not “just picked,” either. There is a blandness about them, a predictability in texture and taste. You want just-picked flavor and crisp firmness? Go to one of the three Eckert’s Orchards locations, across the river in Belleville, Grafton or Alton, or to another of several area orchards that allow visitors to pluck their own from the trees. Picked and stored correctly, these apples will not only last through the fall, but you’ll still have fresh apples for holiday pies.
If you find the concept of making a pie too daunting, celebrate apple season with a leisurely Saturday breakfast of apfelpfannkuchen, apple pancakes that are far easier to prepare than to pronounce.
Of course, the connoisseur won’t be satisfied with the apples available at even a local commercial orchard. Long neglected by commercial growers, many vintage apples are again being offered by specialty growers. There are Galas, sugary as a Barry Manilow lyric, and Rhode Island Greening, tart and meaty and excellent for pies. White Winter Pearmain are superb for slicing and eating raw. Melrose make the best caramel apples. Northern Spy harvests are as variable as the grape season in Bordeaux; a mediocre one can follow a classic crop.
Fortunately, nearly 100 varieties of these heirloom apples are as close as your computer. Applesource, in Chapin, Ill., has been on a crusade for more than 20 years to return this part of our food heritage to the American table. Applesource has a detailed list of the varieties it offers, as well as a sampler pack. Call 800-588-3854 or visit www.applesource.com to order online.
Apfelpfannkuchen (Apple Pancakes) for Two
Two apples, a little on the tart side
2 tablespoons butter | 1⁄4 cup flour | 1⁄2 cup milk
One egg | Pinch of salt
Core but don’t peel the apples, then slice them into about eight pieces each. Fry them in a covered pan with the butter until they are soft, which should take about 15 minutes, giving you time to start the coffee. Mix the flour, salt, egg and milk, then pour the mixture over the cooking apples. As soon as it sets, put a few dabs of butter on top, then gently slide a spatula under it and flip. (Actually, you should slide the mixture to the side of the pan, then flip it—but we are talking Saturday morning here, and that coffee still hasn’t brewed and we’re going to be lucky if the flour hasn’t gone into the coffeepot instead of the batter, so let’s not push our luck.) Once the pancake has been flipped, cover the pan again and let the apples and batter cook for about five minutes. Check on it, and you will see that it has achieved a kind of pancake status, nicely swelled and browned. That’s when you can slide it on a plate, sprinkle some confectioner’s sugar over it and serve it, to the applause and danke schön of your breakfast companion, who will probably assume that flour-flavored coffee is but another example of your mastery of German cuisine.
Tempura
You know you’re getting old when you begin to sound like a fogey in even a second language. Back in the days when we learned Japanese—which was apparently about the same time Tom Cruise was serving as a Scientology samurai there—tempura applied only to batter-fried seafood. “Vegetable tempura” was “shojin age.” Today, the difference is blurred in Japanese conversation; virtually no Japanese restaurant outside Japan notes the distinction on its menu. If you are in the mood for tempura, though, now is the best time of year to ask for kabocha. Better yet, fry some of your own. Sometimes called “Japanese pumpkins,” kabocha are dark green and about the size of candlepin balls, and they look like obese acorn squashes. You can find them in some supermarkets now, or at places like Jay International Food. They can be simmered or roasted, but the almost-sweet flavor comes out when they’re fried tempura-style. Slice them in wedges about a quarter-inch thick at the rind. (That rind, incidentally, is much tougher than that of a pumpkin, so abandon any thought of trying to carve a kabocha into a jack-o’-lantern.) Slice the skin of the rind away with a fillet knife so you are left with the deep-orange flesh. Deep-fry your kabocha, dipped in tempura batter, along with a handful of big shrimp and broccoli florets.
Wondering why your tempura is gluey and sodden? There are two secrets to good tempura, the batter for which doesn’t contain any ingredient more exotic than a cup of flour and a cup of water for every egg: (1) We use icewater in the mix, with cubes still in it, and (2) we leave the batter lumpy. Don’t try to encase the kabocha or other ingredients in the batter. Just give them a light dip.
Black Walnuts
Our grandmother claimed that black walnuts tasted like soap. We think they’re ambrosia in a hard-to-crack shell. Few will land in the middle in their estimation of these native nuts. Missouri grows more of them than practically any other state, and if that apple cider is the taste of autumn around here, the pungent, prickly aroma of a black walnut still in its green husk is the smell of autumn. Gathered by children to sell to raise money for charities or fired with approximately the same velocity as that rendered by a grenade launcher from under a mower when they hide in deep grass, black walnuts are ubiquitous from late August, when they begin to fall from the trees, until the squirrels harvest the last ones in late December. You can compete with the squirrels and try to harvest them yourself, but drying, hulling and then cracking the shells and picking them is more time-consuming than programming your TiVo and leaves you with just as much to show for your labor. Better to buy the meats shelled, even though prices can make truffles seem a bargain by comparison. They’re a delicious addition to banana bread or brownies, fudge or fondant—but they’re even better as the centerpiece of our justly celebrated black-walnut brittle.
Black Walnut Brittle
11⁄2 cups corn syrup | 3 cups sugar
11⁄2 cups water | 1 tsp. salt
1 oz. vanilla | 2 cups black walnut pieces
Cook corn syrup, sugar, and water to 310 degrees. Add salt, vanilla and nuts. Stir until the nuts are coated, then spread the mixture as thinly as possible on a greased cookie sheet or marble slab. When it has cooled, break it into pieces. This brittle can also be roughly crushed to make a splendid topping for ice cream.
Nocello
Speaking of nuts in autumn, ever try Nocello? The Romans thought walnuts a model of the human head, the husk representing the scalp, the shell a skull, the twin lobes of meat inside the bicameral brain—and, in our case, the size is just about right. Further, Romans being Romans, they figured out a way to make walnuts into an alcoholic beverage. Nocello is from the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy, the same place that produces balsamic vinegar. Tradition has it that the nuts must be picked on Midsummer’s Day. Even if they aren’t, they have to be plucked from the tree rather than gathered off the ground. Husks removed, the nuts are soaked in their shells in alcohol and other secret ingredients for a couple of years. The result is an incredibly concentrated, pungent, buttery liqueur that may be among the world’s best digestifs. Go easy on it, though. With an alcohol content of 24 percent, more than a bumping glass serving and you’ll suddenly be performing the overture from Cimarosa’s Amor rende sagace again. No one should have to endure that twice in a lifetime.
Chinese Grill
If summer means backyard grills, autumn means—or should mean—the Cuban microwave. The name’s probably politically incorrect. La Caja China, “the Chinese box,” is one of those weird items you never knew you needed until you got one and then wondered how you ever managed without it. There are several models, and plans for making them are all over the Internet. (If you’re not terribly handy at construction, go to www.lacajachina.com to order one.) Most look like a wheelbarrow designed by a lowrider. With wheels mounted to make them portable, these grills are basically big boxes lined with marine-grade aluminum. Looking to host your own pig roast or just bracing for the day when your spouse’s cousin Carl comes for dinner again, along with his indeterminate number of kids and a quorum of ex-wives? Need a way to prepare a couple dozen chickens or half-a-dozen turkeys for them? Feasts that would buckle the skinny legs of even the most spacious backyard grill are manageable with the box. Sure, we sound like an infomercial, but these gizmos really are ingenious. The pig or turkey or whatever else you’re roasting goes on a rack in the bottom of the box. On top is a tray piled with charcoal. Soak the charcoal with starter fluid and have one of Carl’s kids ignite the pyre. Once the coals are glowing, spread them evenly on the tray, just as you would in a regular outdoor grill.
The box cooks the meat below, like a Hawaiian imu pit, with the coals on top supplying an indirect heat. That means that all of the juices in the meat stay in, the skin of the turkey or pig or whatever crisps magnificently and everything remains moist and flavorful and succulent. The best part? You can roast a 70-pound pig in about four hours. Chinese boxes (their origins appear to be in Cuba, among the island’s Chinese population) also have removable struts and rods (so you can grill in the conventional fashion over the coals) and spits for slow-roasting meats. Either way, the heat produced is intense. But sitting around the Caja China on a brisk autumn day, sipping a cold one and relaxing with the friends you are going to feed—and feed beautifully—is, we predict, soon going to be a seasonal ritual.
Duck
Maybe it’s the Daffy-and-Donald connotation, but Americans have long been more comfortable with cartoon ducks than with those that are where they belong, which is on a plate. (Or maybe it was the ghastly renditions of duck à l’orange that characterized “French cooking” back in the ’60s in the United States.) Whatever the case, roasted duck, the skin glossy and crisp, is one of the epicurean delights of autumn. Temperature and humidity both drop to the levels necessary for the crucial step in making the best roast duck at home, which is to say roasted Cantonese-style—yes, just the way you see them hanging in Cantonese Chinese restaurants, glistening and plump. The secret isn’t in the cooking, which is fairly simple. The trick is in getting the skin of the duck properly dry so that it will form that crackly sweet crust when it hits the oven. During the summer, it’s too humid for the skin to dry properly, and by the beginning of winter the food-fancier’s thoughts have turned to turkey. Autumn is when you want to plan your duck dinner. This October 9, when you usually celebrate the Feast of St. Denis with the same old casserole potluck, roast a duck instead.
Duck à la Dave
One duck, 4 or 5 pounds (If you can get one with the head on, so much the better, but Schnucks and Dierbergs seem to have this thing about protein having faces, so you may have to go with the headless variety, which is fine. St. Denis met his demise at the wrong end of a beheading ax, so there’s a neat, if ironic, connection, right?) | 2 teaspoons salt | 4 tablespoons honey | 1 tablespoon rice vinegar | 1⁄2 cup warm water
Cut away the extra fat from the duck and rinse the cavity. Be sure to leave a little skin around the neck. Blanch the duck in boiling water for about three minutes, then take it to a dry basement or garage or some other area where your bird can hang around—literally. The den would work just fine, but the children might object to Ping’s gentle twisting as they try to watch TV. Attach a hook to a lintel or overhead joist, then tie the duck securely around the neck with butcher’s twine. (Who are we kidding? Do you have butcher’s twine? Probably not even our butcher has butcher’s twine. Stuff’s like pipe cleaners. No one has those anymore, either. But kite string or anything that can support a 5-pound body for a few hours will do.) Tie it around the skin of the neck you left on and hang the duck, then give it a little spin and leave it there for about five hours. If you have a floor fan, turn it on the duck. The point is to dry the skin so that it will crisp correctly. One last thing: Dissolve the honey, vinegar and salt in the warm water, then brush the outside of the duck with the mixture. (If you want that candy-apple red you see in Chinese restaurants, add this ancient Chinese secret: a couple of drops of red food dye.) Yes, it will drip. Have a pan underneath to catch it. If you can, repeat the honey brushing once or twice over the course of the day. That’s it. That’s all there is to prepping the bird.
An hour before dinner, have the oven preheated to 400 degrees. Cut your duck down; place it on a wire rack with a shallow pan below it and put it on the top rack of the oven. After half an hour, baste the duck with some of the honey mixture and turn the oven down to 350 degrees. A 5-pound duck should be ready in about an hour. Cut it up just as you would a roast chicken and serve it with rice and some stir-fried vegetables, and there’s a good chance that the Feast of St. Denis will never be quite the same around your house.
Wine
Autumn without wine is pretty much like Krispy Kreme without the “hot light” or Liz Phair without the whiny attitude: What’s the point? Much has been made about terroir, the environment (soil, geography, weather, etc.) in which a grape grows and which says a little or a lot about its wine. Surely, though, the season in which a wine is drunk has some influence on our palates—or at least on our sense of the experience of drinking it. A crisp, chilly Chardonnay would be enjoyable any time. How about that Fourth of July evening at the beach, though, when you drank it along with the scallops grilled right there on the sand? No one would pass up a classic Burgundy—but somehow it achieved wine immortality in your memory at that New Year’s Eve dinner of roasted rack of veal. So what about the wines of autumn? Of course, the annual uncorking of the year’s bottled Beaujolais in November is afforded almost as much panoply and ritual as a Paris Hilton sighting in Manhattan. In our estimation, though, autumn is a season for rosé. We know. They aren’t serious vin de garde wines that will mature. They don’t last. Neither do the yellow and scarlet flames of color in the maples or those high puffballs of clouds in this month’s skies or those golden afternoons, warm, yet scented with distant wood smoke. It’s the ephemeral quality of a good rosé that exemplifies autumn.
So here’s what to do:
Go to The Wine Merchant or The Wine & Cheese Place and find a rosé in your price range. A French Bandol such as the ’04 Domaine Tempier would be good; so would a Domaine Bargemone from Provence, and it’s easier to find and considerably cheaper. (Avoid the often-touted Tavels. Like high-school musicals, even at their best they aren’t all that enjoyable.) And don’t overlook local rosés, such as Stone Hill’s wonderful Montaigne. While you’re there, pick up some nice goat cheeses and a slab of sausage, then head off to the hardware store to get a sturdy garden trowel. (More about that in
a minute.)
You’ll need to find a park or some other place outdoors that’s just right for a picnic. We would recommend someplace like Rockwoods Reservation or the Missouri Botanical Garden’s Shaw Nature Reserve out at Gray Summit, or even the little-used but beautiful McDonnell Park near St. Ann—but what we’re going to suggest that you do once you get there would probably be technically illegal, and so we would never countenance it even if it would do no harm and, were you circumspect, go completely unnoticed by the authorities: Dig a hole just big enough to hold your bottle of rosé, which you will bury, making absolutely dead certain you can find the place again.
The next day, pick up your companion, the one you’ve been promising a special and romantic day all year long. Stop, on your way out to your secret site, at La Bonne Bouchée for a crusty baguette, having already loaded the trunk with a blanket and other picnic accoutrements, including the cheese and sausage. More important, lest you make that elicit excavation project an exercise in futility, don’t forget the trowel or the corkscrew for the wine. We repeat: Do not forget these items. Then you’re off, and the day could not be better, blanket spread out on a sun-warmed meadow, the glories of the Midwest’s foliage all around. It will almost be too perfect. And then you’ll casually flip over the stone where you have marked your buried wine and you’ll tug it from the earth where it has been cooled to exactly the right temperature. And then it is perfect. Enjoy it. Savor it—because winter is on its way. All those glories of autumn around here? They last about as long as it takes to drink that bottle of rosé..
