The Way It Crumbles: Or, When Things Go Wrong In The Kitchen

Eating Well Is The Best Revenge

by Diana Farr Louis

ANDROS Greece—(Weekly Hubris)—8/15/11—I’d been looking forward to making the olive cookies for weeks. Ever since my friend and fellow food writer Diane Kochilas posted the recipe on Facebook in early June. Using a hard-boiled egg yolk sounded strange, but the combination of black olives and a bit of sugar whetted my curiosity.

What held me back was the thought of pitting the olives. A fiddly business that would dye my fingernails indelibly. But eventually, I bit the bullet, dug in my heels, and extracted some disposable surgical gloves from my physician-husband’s drawer of emergency pharmaceuticals. And turned on “The Third Program”—I always need music to cook by.

Thus outfitted for battle, I put the egg on to boil and attacked the olives. They proved to be the easy part, even though I hadn’t read the recipe correctly and pitted far more than were needed.

Then I mashed the egg yolk with some butter, fleur de sel (would ordinary salt be ruinous?), and confectioner’s sugar, added the flour and cornstarch, tossed in the chopped olives, and rolled out the dough, as specified, between two sheets of Saran Wrap. And stuck it in the fridge. It was all very easy and straightforward.

Until the time came to bake the cookies. I knew something was wrong when I couldn’t lift the rounds I’d cut out with a glass onto the baking sheet. They kept breaking.

But by the time they were nicely browned—or golden as all recipes prescribe—they turned to sand when I tried to pick them up. I’d expected them to be something like French sablons, but not an etire beach! The crumbs were absolutely delicious, but so fine they were unsalvageable, even as a topping for something else. Reluctantly, I consigned them to the trash.

What had gone wrong?

My finger of suspicion pointed to the flour. I’d used a marvellous, yellowy flour bought directly from a small mill north of Athens. A bread-making friend who always knows secret places to eat and shop had taken us there after a fabulous lunch in “his” find on a back street in Halkida. (Our favorite spots are on the water.) The old Euboean city is as ugly as sin but its seafood brings out the glutton in us.

But I digress. Back to the flour. It is not powdery at all, but more like very fine semolina. Containing only a tiny amount of gluten, it lacked “glue.”

I do not blame the recipe. Or my friend, Diane. It wasn’t even hers. But I am grateful I’d decided to try it out first and hadn’t planned to serve it to guests.

The very thought unlocked the sluices and a host of half-forgotten/half-suppressed cooking disasters came rushing to my mind.

Some are just funny. Like the time my college boyfriend and I roasted chestnuts—without slitting them first. We opened the oven door and they shot out like cluster bombs, leaving bits of organic “shrapnel” all over his apartment. They kept surfacing in unlikely spots for months afterwards.

Others made me want to die of embarrassment. I’d invited my parents and a (different) boyfriend’s parents over to dinner not long after I moved to Rapallo, Italy. I wasn’t going to attempt anything Italian (M’s father was famous for bringing his own pasta and cooking it himself.) But a leg of lamb seemed simple enough. Except that in Italy they are tiny, about the size of turkey drumsticks. So I bought two, seasoned them, and stuck them in the oven.

We were having our wine (whisky for the men) and a few antipasti when I went downstairs—the house was on three levels, with the living-cum-dining room on the top floor—to check their progress. Although they’d been cooking for at least an hour, there was no change in color. They were barely warm. I turned up the heat and went back upstairs to my guests. Full of apologies for the delay.

Back downstairs 15 minutes later. Still no progress. Finally, M and his father came to inspect. And discovered what I had failed to notice: the little legs were so long, they prevented the oven door from closing, so all the heat was escaping, warming the kitchen instead of the meat.

Interestingly, the men were all wonderful, patient and consoling. The two mothers, on the other hand, had a splendid time carping and criticizing.

Somewhat more embarrassing, and certainly a lot messier, was the Hot and Sour Soup I made for a friend’s Chinese evening in Athens a couple of years later. It was to be the pièce de resistance and I slaved over it, using the last of the sesame oil I’d brought from New York. But as I carried the huge pot over to the sideboard, I somehow miscalculated and instead of setting it there, I tipped it over. And flooded the room.

Luckily, it was summer and the carpets were up. Gallant men grabbed mops and buckets and swabbed the decks, as it were. And, as one of them said, “Every dinner party needs a memorable dish, and your hot and sour soup took the prize tonight.”

A worse soup story happened to one of my closest relatives, who shall remain nameless. The best cook in the family, he was starting a catering business and had been hired to prepare dinner for a large group, perhaps 20 people. He can cook meat to perfection and, as well as vegetables and roasts, the best potatoes of anyone I know. But doesn’t do desserts. He asked for advice so I supplied a foolproof recipe for lemon mousse from Cooks Illustrated.

It would have been perfect had he read the last paragraph regarding refrigeration time. Everyone graciously pronounced it delicious but the mousse had to be served in soup bowls.

I have lots more stories, about curdled mayonnaise or a velvety egg-lemon sauce that turned into scrambled egg. Or the raisin cake that somehow got seasoned with cumin instead of cinnamon. Or the friend’s bean soup which was diluted with raki instead of bottled water . . . .

But most of my disasters have to do with pastry. As a cookbook writer, I should not admit this, but I just cannot do pie crust. I can’t even get the prefab stuff that comes in a package to work for me. All the pie recipes in my books have been tested by someone else. Fyllo (strudel pastry) from a packet is a different story; that only needs to be kept moist. But American-type pie crust defeats me every single time.

And since all my efforts usually ended up in crumbs like those olive cookies, I finally hit on a solution. When I want a fruit pie, I simply make a forgiving nursery favorite. No special talent or care is required, no one talks about its lightness, elasticity, or flakiness. I just manhandle warm butter, flour (probably not semolina), and a tablespoon of sugar together until they . . . crumble.

Recipe

Blackberry and Peach Crumble

I’ve been making a variation of this dessert since my son came home from 7^th grade with the recipe. Any fruit will do—apples, plums, apricots—but I’m particularly partial to blackberries. When I don’t pick enough, I add sliced peaches, or apples, the way the English do. The amounts here are certainly not written in stone and may be expanded or reduced depending on how much fruit you have.

1-1 ½ lb blackberries, washed

2 or 3 peaches, peeled and sliced

2-3 tablespoons sugar (I prefer unrefined), or more

lemon juice

3 cups all purpose flour

1 1 ½ stick softened butter (about ¾ of a 250 g packet)

pinch of salt (it doesn’t have to be fleur de sel)

Preheat the oven to 180°C or 375°F. Put the fruit in a baking dish, toss gently with a tablespoon or 2 of the sugar, and sprinkle with lemon juice. Put the flour in mixing bowl and cut small pieces of the butter into it. Take off your rings and start playing, mashing the butter into the flour until it clumps. Sprinkle with the rest of the sugar and mush it in. If you need more butter, add some more pieces. When the dough is nice and crumbly, scatter it evenly over the fruit. Bake for about 30 minutes or until the top is golden and the berries are bubbling. Some people like it with ice cream or heavy cream. I can’t say how many this will serve because it tends to make all present greedy.