Total Ramp tart. Similar to quiche, but with with less custard, more ramp (and crisper crust).

Having recently worried around at the ethical questions attendant on promoting wild foods to all and sundry,  I offer this post with mixed emotions.

On the one hand, Have Ramps Will Cook. We are lucky enough to have access to several large patches; the spirit of experiment springs eternal and besides, people have been asking.

On the other hand, providing recipes is – I hope! – an invitation to use those recipes, so there we are with the ethics again, along with  another reservation,

namely that ramps are at their most delicious when most simply prepared. Recipes that play around with these fleetingly available wild pleasures may be very tasty, but they have an unfortunate tendency to reduce the star ingredient to a supporting player.

But then on the third hand (something I often wish I had in spring garden and foraging season), some ramp recipes have components that work with other ingredients too. The tart shell below, for example, can be used for all sorts of custard or mousse based pastries, so there’s a bit of redeeming social value that has nothing to do with the marquee vegetable.

Ways to Use Ramps

RAW:

• In a green salad vinaigrette, made with two thirds to three fourths Romaine and the rest roughly chopped ramp leaves, with a modest number of chopped ramp bulbs for crunch and punch (they’re not as garlicky as they smell, but if they’re freshly harvested they’re not shy, either).
• Chopped and mixed with mayonnaise moistened sandwich fillings like tuna, chicken and hard boiled egg.
• To make Ramp Butter. Finely mince a few, using both bulbs and leaves, put the result on absorbent toweling and squeeze out any free liquid, then mix the greenery with an equal to slightly larger volume of softened salted butter. Chill tightly covered for up to 10 days or freeze. Use as a topping for grilled meat or fish, baked potatoes or winter squash, on steamed asparagus or as a finishing fillip for milk based chowders. Spread it on slices of toasted baguette to get a pretty upgrade on the usual garlic bread.

COOKED:

• On their own as a green vegetable. Cut them up, keeping bulbs and leaves separate. Cook quickly in butter or olive oil, giving the bulbs about a minute head start on the greens. Eat. Heat makes ramps even sweeter while making them less pungent. Plop a poached egg in the middle, it’s dinner.
• In mixed vegetable stir fries – add the chopped ramps after you turn off the heat.
• In Pasta with Asparagus and Herbed Ramp Hollandaise, Roasted Ramps with Morels and New Potatoes, or Endive Wraps with Chicken and Roast Vegetables, all available on this post  (Where I promised a recipe for ramp-wrapped meatloaf without stopping to remember I never make meatloaf the same way twice, so it never showed up. The recipe is: make meatloaf – I’m pretty sure the one in the picture was mostly venison. Form it into a fat cylinder, wrap the cylinder in a double layer of ramp leaves and wrap the whole works in foil. Bake on a shallow pan, peeling back the foil for the last 15 minutes or so.)

Total Ramp Tart

Conveniently made without a tart pan (or pie plate). It was inspired by this Rustic Ramp Tart but differs in having a lot more ramp in proportion to egg, in being innocent of cheese, in being more like a main dish than a snack, and, I have to confess, in being a bit more of a production to make which of course I think is worth it. The finished tart is very good hot, but even better at room temperature.

Bonus aspect: Shaping the crust with a double raised edge produces a deeper shell than just rolling up the perimeter, but it’s still flat enough to pre-bake blind (unfilled) for maximum crispness, without the whole “ line with foil, fill with beans, etc.” routine. That means you can fill it with a modest amount of anything that needs a pre-baked shell from quiche mixtures to  pastry-cream lined fresh fruit tarts. Just in time for strawberry season!

For an 8.5 inch tart, 4 main dish, 8 appetizer servings:

• Pastry for a one-crust pie (this one is fine if you don’t have a favorite)
• 1 beaten egg
• (a pizza stone, if available. It makes a crisper bottom crust but is not essential)
• approximately 2 dozen good-sized ramps
• 1 egg yolk
• 1/3 cup cream
• ½ tsp. kosher salt
• 1 tbl. butter

Make the crust:

1. Place the pastry between two sheets of waxed paper and roll out a little thicker than you would for pie crust – 3/8 inch, if you were measuring which please don’t bother. Put the whole works on a flat sheet and refrigerate or freeze.
2. Use a toothpick to trace around an 8.5 inch template (overturned plate, bottom of spring form, cake pan). Remove top sheet of waxed paper and cut the circle on the marked line. Cut another line about ½ inch in toward the center. Re-cover and return to the fridge.
3. Remove top sheet of paper, pick up the ring of crust, put it on a flat pan and refrigerate.  Set aside the ragged outer edge of pastry in case you need to make repairs, then replace the waxed paper and roll the circle out until it’s about 10.5 inches in diameter and probably no longer tidily circular. No problem. Back to the fridge.
4. Remove top sheet of waxed paper and replace with baking parchment. Flip pastry and peel off other waxed paper. Brush outer 3 inches or so with the beaten egg, apply the chilled circle of dough, then roll the outer edge up over the ring, crimping as though for a conventional pie. Into the fridge once more while oven heats to 375 (with the stone on the middle shelf).
5. Bake for 10 minutes, then check. If bottom of shell is rising, prick just the top layer with a sharp knife point to deflate. Continue baking until the shell is completely cooked, well browned all over, 15 to 20 minutes more. You may have to cover with foil near the end to keep the rim from over browning but this is less likely here than with blind-baked deep shells.

Make the filling:

1. While the crust is baking, cut bulb ends from the ramps. Halve the long way, then slice across thinly. Set aside. Chop the tops coarsely. Set aside. Beat the leftover beaten egg with the yolk, cream and salt and set that aside.
2. When the crust is almost done, just a couple of minutes away, melt the butter in a wide skillet over medium high heat. Cook the chopped bulbs until translucent, about a minute, then add the chopped greens and keep cooking, stirring constantly, until they’ve wilted and darkened, about a minute more. Object is to reduce mass and drive off extra water without cooking any longer than absolutely necessary, and to have the ramps hot when they get put on the crust.
3. Spread the greens on the crust and slowly pour in the egg mixture; it’s basically just enough to glue the greens to themselves and the crust and there should be room for all of it, but if not, stop before overflow. Return tart to the oven, lower heat to 350 and bake just long enough to set the egg, about 8 minutes. (Extra filling, if any, can safely be poured over the top after about 4 minutes.)

Serve warm or at room temperature, neither hot nor cold. And don’t try to reheat it in the microwave; extra liquid will be forced out, making the tart runny and soggy…As you can tell, I tried it.

Old Faithful, The Little Black Dress of Chocolate Cakes

This is the Almond Joy Variation of the chocolate cake. It's also just fine just plain with whipped cream, or with chocolate ice cream and fudge sauce if your dearly loved one is anything like mine.

Heath Bar Cookies, aka Chocolate Toffee Crunch

Heath Bar Cookies. All four major food groups: sugar, salt, fat and crunch. With chocolate on top. Most distressing part is how simple and quick it is to make rather a lot of it.

The lemon is underneath the cherries

This floated into the kitchen because Jan 23 was National Pie Day*, an event that got a surprising amount of  PR, given that every day is pie day in most people’s estimations. It’s probably because good pie is still – compared to say, macarons  – in woefully short supply.

Ok. Deciding to bake a pie was easy. Deciding what kind of pie to bake was not, fresh local fruit also being in short supply in the Northeast just now. We’ve gone through all the frozen berries already; we’re eating too much winter squash to make pumpkin appealing, and while apple might seem obvious, it’s not if you breakfast on baked apples with yogurt pretty much every mortal day of the winter.

But then I remembered I had a whole bag of Meyer lemons in the cold room, bought on impulse simply because I was so delighted to see them. Very seasonal. Especially made into Shaker lemon pie, which by containing the whole fruit and getting baked between two crusts seems better suited to cold weather than lemon meringue, even if custard is a major player.

And yet, and yet… “cherry” is surely pie’s first name if “apple” is rejected. And since cherry is almost always made with canned fruit there’s no seasonality problem.

I dithered back and forth for a while, then came down on the side of lemon. Completed the first step – thinly slicing the lemons, mixing them with a LOT of sugar and letting them sit for a day to soften and mellow.

Then I got worried. The sugar didn’t draw enough lemon juice to completely dissolve and the visible bits of lemon peeking through the syrup-rivuletted pile of white crystals looked seriously lonely. I tasted the mixture and found it wasn’t notably over sweet, but doubts remained. And as there happened to be a can of cherries in the store closet….Genius! If I do say so myself.

Cut to Bill and me, standing in the kitchen enjoying. I allow as to how I’d better give at least half of it away as soon as possible, to avoid will power problems. (There are just the two of us and neither is slender.) His reply? “Don’t you dare!!”

Shaker Lemon and Cherry Pie

The lemon filling ingredients are more or less universal, but discarding the pithy end pieces is a nicety that comes from Ruth Levy Berenbaum’s excellent Pie and Pastry Bible. Shaker lemon pie has a closed crust; cherry is traditionally lattice. I compromised by making the lattice a bit tighter than usual.  A closed crust will work just as well.

For a 10 inch pie:

2 large lemons – Meyer are widely recommended for their less acid flavor, but I doubt the Shakers had them and the difference is pretty petitie.

2c. sugar

¼ tsp. salt

1 14.5 oz. can pitted sour cherries in water

1 tbl. minute tapioca

pastry for a 2 crust pie (easy recipe here)

5 eggs

1. Freeze the lemons for an hour or so to firm up. Grate the zest from each end into a medium sized non-reactive bowl, then cut fruit in half the long way. Cut off and discard the flesh-free ends, then slice the rest very thinly. Working over the bowl, remove seeds and drop the slices in. Stir in the sugar and salt and set aside covered at room temperature for a day.

2. Roll pastry between sheets of waxed paper into 2 roughly 11 inch rounds. Stack the waxed paper sandwiches on a baking sheet and refrigerate for 1 to 4 hours.

3. Drain the cherries into a small saucepan and reserve. In a small cup, mix 2 tbl. of the juice with the tapioca and set aside. Boil the juice until reduced by about a third, then turn the heat to medium low. Loosen the tapioca mixture with a bit of the hot liquid, then stir it in. Cook, stirring, until the liquid is thick and translucent. This will happen quickly and there will probably still be white dots of tapioca. Not to worry. Stir in the cherries and let cool completely.

4. Put a rack in the lower third of the oven, put a baking stone on it and heat the oven to 450. (I thought I had invented this – see Crisp Crust Maple Walnut Pie -  but as usual with recipes, no such thing. Ms. B. was well ahead of me and I’m sure she’s not the only one.) Give it a half hour or so to be sure the stone is thoroughly heated.

5. While the oven is heating, fit one crust into a pyrex pie plate. Separate an egg, adding the yolk to the lemon mixture. Beat the white just until thin and fluid, then paint the inside of the pie shell with it. Set aside in a cool place that is not the refrigerator. (If you’re going for the lattice top, prefabricate it on a sheet of waxed paper and chill until needed.)

6. Beat the remaining eggs into the lemon mixture. When the oven is hot, pour it into the crust and top with the cherries. They will be gloppy; it’s best to use your hands. Apply the top crust and cut some slashes in it if you’re not using the lattice. Crimp the edges.

7. Bake for 12 minutes, then lower heat to 350 and bake until bottom/side crust is well browned and top is golden, anywhere from a half hour to an hour more. Be ready to protect the rim so it doesn’t burn. The custard will of course be cooked long before the crust. Doesn’t matter; it’s so sweet and acid the eggs don’t toughen or separate. Cool completely before cutting.

Next time I make it I’ll probably double the cherries, which will not only boost their taste but also raise the top crust a little bit so it browns faster. The obvious alternative, crustwise, is a 9 inch pie, but the filling flavor is so intense it needs a lot of crust for balance.

* Concerning National Pie Day

It’s a brainchild of the National Pie Council, which I’m sure to no one’s surprise appears to be primarily a promotional vehicle for Crisco.

National pi day (March 14, because that’s 3/14) is also a great excuse to bake one but other than that an altogether different kettle of pi. It’s been going since 1988 and was originally created by a physicist named Larry Shaw, who was working at the San Francisco Exploratorium when he came up with the idea.

from the wikipedia entry on pi day, which also includes this -

I love it! - portrait of Larry Shaw, the Prince of Pi

Addendum: If you can’t get out to San Francisco – or are simply a competition hound – check out this Pi Day opportunity from the team at Serious Eats.

My take on King Cake, seasoned with thyme and marjoram, liberally studded with Gruyere, sprinkled with Parmesan instead of sugar but maybe next year I'll dye the cheese in the classic icing colors: green, yellow and purple

The classic King Cake of carnival season has many variations: coffee cake-ish, briochelike, or based on puff pastry. It may or may not include embellishments like candied fruit, frangipane, and colored icing. It may even be chocolate with coconut. But one thing will be for sure: it’ll be sweet.

Not around here. At this time of year I’m still recovering from the holiday cookie binge, and the idea of more of the same doesn’t hold much of a thrill. Yet I’ve always loved the idea of the thing, so our traditional King Cake is basically cheese studded brioche. Traditional tradition is honored in the ring shape and in the hidden token whose finder is the King.

Being King has its downside; it usually means you have to provide the next cake or throw the next party, which may come as soon as next week. (See the Wikipedia entry for an extensive exegesis of King Cake in its many, many manifestations.)

Savory King Cake

This recipe makes two roughly 10 inch rings because one very large one doesn’t always cook quickly enough. If you don’t need two you can freeze one and have it handy in case you wind up being King next time. It’s very simple and quick to make as far as working time goes. Just be sure to allow for the overnight cool rise.

What a difference an oven makes. I have two in my vintage stove, ovens in which these cakes were baked at the (theoretically) same temperature for the same amount of time. The paler one was in the little oven, the darker one in the bigger oven which I know full well runs hot and try to compensate for.

½ c. lukewarm water

1 tbl. dry yeast

1 egg

3 egg yolks

grated zest of 1 large lemon

3/4 tsp. dried thyme, crumbled

scant ½ tsp. dried marjoram, crumbled

1 tsp. salt

1 c. light cream or half and half

4-5 c. bread flour

4 oz. softened butter

6 oz. Gruyere or other nutty flavored hard cheese, cut into ¼ inch cubes

(1/2 c. chopped duck cracklings or crisp bacon, optional)

2 large dried beans, figurines or, so nobody breaks a tooth, large garlic cloves

1 c. coarsely chopped raw cashews, spread on a plate

1 egg, beaten with

1 tsp. lemon juice

Parmesan

coarse salt

1. Put the water in a large mixing bowl –  a stand mixer is ideal – sprinkle on the yeast and let it sit 10 minutes or so to foam. When it’s bubbly, whisk in everything else up to the flour.

2. Let the mixture sit a moment, then whisk in 2 cups of the flour, 1 cup at a time.

3. Add the butter. Switch to a paddle or wooden spoon and work it in completely, then work in enough additional flour to make a very soft, still sticky dough. This may take anywhere from 1 to 2 cups, depending on the size of the eggs, the moisture content of the butter and placement of constellations in the heavens above. The dough is ready as soon as it (more or less) leaves the sides of the bowl.

4. Scrape the dough into a rough ball, cover the bowl with plastic wrap or a damp tea towel and set it aside in a warm place until doubled, about 1.5 hours.

5. Turn the dough out on a lightly floured board and sparingly, a little at a time, knead in enough additional flour to make a smooth soft dough that is not sticky. Put it in a clean bowl, cover tightly and refrigerate overnight or up to 24 hours.

6. Punch down the dough; turn it onto a very lightly floured work surface and let it relax, covered, for ten minutes or so. Roll it out about ¼ inch thick, scatter on the cheese dice (and meat) and press them in. Roll up tightly like a jelly roll; fold into a ball, knead to further distribute the lumps and again let rest, covered, for about 10 minutes.

7. Divide the dough in half. Roll one half into a snake about 18 inches long, then coil it into a ring, pinching and pressing to join the ends firmly. Insert a token (from the underside) and press the ring firmly into the cashews to embed them in the base. Transfer to a lightly greased or parchment covered baking sheet. If you have room to bake two rings at once, repeat with the other half of the dough. If not, cover the other half, set aside in a cool place, then shape it when the first half goes into the oven.

8. Lightly cover the ring(s) with plastic wrap or a damp tea towel and let rise to not quite double, 1 to 1.5 hours. Heat the oven to 375.

9. Brush the ring(s) with the egg wash, grate on a liberal dusting of Parmesan and sprinkle sparingly with the salt. Bake until risen and well browned, half an hour to 45 minutes. It’s done at 190 degrees internal temperature (let’s hear it for instant read thermometers!), so start checking after a half hour. Cool on a rack and serve in thin slices.

The cheese coated holes make the cake seem light, but it's still tastiest to keep the slices on the thin side.

Concerning Recipes.

This bread in cake’s clothing is from one of my Good Food columns, now lost somewhere deep in history. I have the recipe only because I used it in The Modern Country Cook, itself now somewhat historical, having come out in 1991. The ingredients haven’t changed much but the instructions are a lot more streamlined.

I haven’t done any research but wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn this paring down is happening all over. For instance:

I’m currently in the middle of making a sort of bastard* Cassoulet, and as this is something I seldom do I turned for guidance to The Food of South-West France, by Paula Wolfert, a wonderful book when it came out (1983) and still a model of its kind.

Its kind is extremely thorough, however, so I also checked around elsewhere. Most of the elsewhere in my bookshelf was either equally thorough or not thorough enough, but when I looked again, there was Paula Wolfert’s World of Food (1988).

The Cassoulet recipe in that one is slightly shorter and easier to follow-while-modifying. Down it went to the kitchen. Then today (this is one of those recipes that takes at least 2 days and can easily be stretched out even longer) I was standing here at the computer trying to avoid work…

First recipe to pop up? Paula Wolfert’s, this time from Food and Wine Magazine in 2005. Considerably less involved, though still a bit of a production, and that’s the one down in the kitchen at the moment.

*Bastard may be a bit strong, this batch does involve multiple cookings and multiple meats (including plenty of duck confit), so perhaps it’s as legitimate as any named for someplace in the French countryside. To quote Elizabeth David:

“The Cassoulet is a dish which may be infinitely varied so long as it is not made into a mockery with a sausage or two heated up with tinned beans, or with all sorts of bits of left-over chicken or goodness knows what thrown into it as if it were a dustbin.” (French Provincial Cooking, 1960. Of course I looked. Are you kidding?)

The decorated dark ones are gingerbread; pale stars are sugar cookies. Little round coconut covered jobs are rum balls; crescents are vanilla crescents (known as Moth cookies in our family). Round ones in the back are two kinds of jumbles and the dark rounds in the middle are Mexican chocolate chocolate chip.

I expect to discuss the Christmas Ham in the very near future, and may also pony up a picture of The Tree.

But first, even without cues from the weather, little miss knee jerk has responded to the usual stimulae in the usual fashion. Five or six pounds of butter, along with a similar weight of nuts but vastly less sugar  -  one of the reasons home made cookies taste so much better than store bought -  have already been put to use and I can tell there’s more to come.

The recipe for the gingerbread is here; rum balls are here and vanilla crescents here. The jumbles are David Schama’s Jumbles, via Rose Levy Berenbaum. The dark ones are the original (almonds, pecans, bittersweet chocolate and raisin);  the  pale ones are  pistachio, white chocolate and apricot.  Recipe is at the end of this post, where there are also recipes for Bill’s favorite spritz and my favorite pffernuesse and a link to James Beard’s Let’s Sugar Cookies, the recipe I use -  with a little less sugar and a little more mace..

I told you I wasn’t finished yet.

Mexican Chocolate Chocolate Chip Refrigerator Cookies

The Mexican part is cinnamon and almonds; there is no hot pepper. (If after all the recent overuse that combo’s still ringing your bell, I’m sure you could add a bit.) Be warned that these are crisp cookies. They have only the chips in common with the kind of “chocolate chip cookies” the phrase brings to mind, and if you use chocolate without emulsifiers they won’t even have that.

For about 40 cookies:

1 ¼ c. all purpose flour

3 tbl. cocoa

1 tsp. cinnamon

¼ tsp. clove

(a generous pinch of salt if you’re using unsalted butter)

4 oz. butter, malleable but not squishy

¾ c. sugar

1 egg

2 tsp. vanilla extract

½ c. small chips of bittersweet chocolate*

½ – ¾ c. finely chopped almonds

1. In a small bowl, stir flour, cocoa, spices (and salt if using) with a wire whisk until they’re well combined. Set aside.

2. Cream the butter and sugar; beat in the egg and vanilla; then stir in the flour mixture and lastly the chips.

3. The dough will be soft, but firm enough to form into rolls. If it isn’t, chill just long enough to shape. Set the almonds out on a plate. Divide dough in half.

4. Shape each half into a roll about 1 ½ ” in  diameter and roll in the almonds, pressing to embed them. Wrap the rolls tightly in plastic wrap and refrigerate overnight or up to 3 days. The rolls freeze well for longer storage if wrapped again in something more protective.

5. At baking time, heat oven to 350. Cut rolls into slices about  3/8ths inch thick and put the slices about an inch apart on parchment lined baking sheets. Bake just until a broken cookie looks dry inside, 10 to 12 minutes or more depending on your oven. If the first broken cookie isn’t done, leave it on the sheet and break one of the halves for the next check.

6. Let cool a moment on the sheets, then transfer to a rack. Cookies will be soft when removed from the oven and become crisp on cooling.

* Chopped up high-end candy bar is fine. The chocolate chips I use are the little drops of  Michel Cluizel couverture Kayambe Noir (72%) sold by Chocosphere.

 A Note about the Jumbles:

Using chopped white chocolate (in this case Caillebaut) and apricots instead of bittersweet and raisins yields a very different texture because the fat melts out of the chocolate and the apricots don’t absorb as much moisture as raisins do. Result is a richer, crisper, flatter cookie.

If you want cookies with white chocolate chips to stand up, either cut the butter or up the flour.

Holiday chocolate cookie-candies, everything easy except what to call them.

These classic holiday goodies are almost perfect: Only one (processor) bowl to wash; no cooking; deeply chocolate flavored without calling for obscene amounts of expensive high-end chocolate. Very simple to form and they keep for a long time. Just one small problem: their name.

You can’t really call them Hooch-soaked Crumbs with Chocolate and Nuts, but Bourbon, Rum or Brandy Balls doesn’t exactly do the job either. Maybe they should be called Poor Man’s Truffles. Please consider this an invitation, all suggestions cheerfully considered.

What we need is something that says Small, Rich, Alcoholic* and Chocolate, without getting any more specific. After deliciousness, lack of specificity is the distinguishing merit of let’s temporarily call them SRAC’s; they’re the pasta casserole of cookies. You can make them out of almost any dry sweet you happen to have around.

In our house, that’s sometimes leftover cake, reduced to crumbs and dried in a low oven. But it’s more likely to be cookies, either from a new recipe that was tried and found wanting or from the store closet, where there are always ladyfingers in case of emergencies.  As long as the nutmeats are soft and the crumbs are on the dry side, success is guaranteed.

The many recipes I’ve seen all call for set amounts and ingredients. The one that requires 2 tbl. cocoa or a few ounces of melted chocolate to 3 or 3.5 cups of some combo of vanilla wafers, confectioners sugar and pecans is common almost to the point of universality, but anything with this sort of exact measurement strikes me as… I don’t want to say ridiculous, but certainly the kind of overkill that makes perfectly capable people think they can’t cook.

So, in the spirit of public service, here’s the “recipe” as I feel it should be, a liberator of individual creativity (and user-up of leftovers). Good any time but especially welcome in the season of maximum painstaking baking.

SRACS

(small, rich, alcoholic, chocolate cookies)

1. Round up the stuff you’re going to use, inspired but not limited by the Possible Ingredient list that follows.

2. Grind the crumb item in a processor along with a small pinch of salt. Eyeball volume. Add from ½ to the same volume of coarsely chopped nuts and grind until the mixture is very fine. It may start to clump up at this stage.

3. Grind in @ 1 tbl. of cocoa per cup of material, then whirl in a few drops of syrup, @ 1 tsp. per cup.

4. One or two tablespoons at a time, depending on the quantity and desiccation of the crumbs, add flavorful alcohol. Stop when the mixture starts to coalesce into a mass. Go away and do something else for an hour or so.

5. Test the mixture for texture and taste. It should be claylike, soft but not sticky or greasy. Adjust, adding more of something absorbent if it’s oily or soggy, something liquid or semi-liquid if it doesn’t hold together. If the taste is all that wants adjustment, start by adding the salt if you thought you didn’t need it, then add small amounts of absorbent and liquid alternately.

6. Decide if you want to coat the cookies with something that must be applied right away (option b). If so,  set out the something in a shallow bowl. Otherwise, just roll the mixture between your palms into 1-inch balls and set them aside.

Possible ingredients

Absorbent crumbs:

• Almost any plain cake. Trimmings from something that needed neatening are obvious candidates (assuming you prudently put them in the freezer), but leftover layer cake freed from the icing works fine too. Crumble and dry out before proceeding.
• Purchased or home made plain cookies. Vanilla wafers are traditional, but my favorite ready-made is Savoiardi, the Italian-style ladyfingers widely sold to be used in tiramisu. Nabisco Famous Chocolate wafers up the chocolate quotient; anise biscotti,  Graham crackers and similar add their own unique flavors. Avoid shortbread, which winds up too greasy and of course anything filled with goo (a little jam will just mix in, eventually).

Absorbent non-crumbs:

• Cocoa
• Confectioners sugar

Semi-dry, aka soft oily nuts. I like them lightly toasted:

• Pecans
• Walnuts
• Macadamia nuts

Semi-liquid, aka syrup:

• Light corn syrup
• Honey
• Maple syrup
• Golden Syrup
• Molasses (good with gingersnap crumbs)

Liquid:

• Whiskey
• Bourbon
• Brandy/Cognac/Armagnac/Calvados
• Rum
• White fruit brandies, i.e. kirsch or slivovitz
• Cautions: Cordials like triple sec, amaretto and such are very sweet and a bit overwhelming in this context. Scotch is pretty strongly a personal taste; I like drinking it but don’t care for it in these cookies. If you try it; come to the same conclusion and don’t want to waste the material, try adding a good shot of finely ground black pepper.

Coatings:

• a) Easy: These come out dry enough to pick up without getting chocolate all over your fingers, so the easiest coating is none at all. But in the usual way of chocolate pastes they don’t look particularly appetizing.
• b) Second easiest: Roll as soon as formed in cocoa, coarse sugar or powdered sugar.
• c) Still pretty simple, but now in two steps because anything with genuine texture won’t adhere: Some time within a day of forming, beat an egg white until foamy. One at a time, dip balls, scraping excess against the side of the bowl, and roll in chopped nutmeats, toasted coconut, finely chopped semisweet or white chocolate. Dry on racks. Repeat if desired for heavier coating
• d) Not easy, but not difficult if you’re willing to go for the matte home made look rather than shiny chocolatier perfection. As long as the chocolate doesn’t overheat, it won’t streak white when it sets, and I think the texture contrast that makes hard coated soft truffles such winners is worth the extra bother:

1. Chop enough semi-sweet chocolate to equal at least  a cup or use disks of couverture. (This is enough to coat about 20 1-inch balls, and about the smallest amount it’s easy to melt properly. Any that’s left over can be reused, either re-melted or chopped.)

2. Put the chocolate in a shallow bowl and microwave at low power in 30 second installments, stirring after each. Stop when the chocolate is no more than 2/3 melted. Stir until all is melted and smooth, then perch the bowl over a pan of warm but not hot water; goal is to keep it fluid without reheating it. Sweet spot is 85-90 degrees, but since you’re not really tempering the chocolate, you don’t need to worry about using a thermometer.

3. Set out a rack. Turn off the phone. Dollop a large puddle of chocolate into your left palm (or right, if you’re a leftie). Using the other hand, drop in a ball, roll it to cover, scrape excess against the edge of your hand and put the ball on the rack. Repeat.

Don’t try to use all the chocolate in your hand before adding more; body heat is warm enough to make the chocolate too hot.

See, not as messy as it sounds like.

* If you want to avoid alcohol you could probably use strong brewed coffee or orange juice, but I have to confess I’ve never tried it.

A genuine heirloom (i.e. passed down through generations) turkey: my mother’s gravy boat. It has a matching ceramic ladle that broke about 15 years ago and has been in storage awaiting repair ever since. This speaks equally to my tendency to procrastinate and to the fact that said ladle, while cute, does not hold enough gravy to be practical.

In the edible bird department, some givens, about which more below:

1.) Like the proverbial yacht, if you have to ask how much a heritage turkey costs you probably can’t afford it.

2.) Buying a heritage turkey helps keep an endangered gene pool robust, so you get preservation points as well as a delicious dinner (assuming you cook it correctly).

I’m not in the yachting class and am already convinced on the deliciousness front, but I’m cooking two turkeys this year anyway, just for the sake of comparison.

One is a heritage bird from a farm about a half hour north of here, the other is an “organic, free range heirloom,” imported from Pennsylvania (about 5 hours south of here) by a specialty grocery. Although I haven’t cooked them yet, some things are already clear.

Those who simply want kitchen tips can go immediately to Roast Turkey 101.2 for general cooking hints and a recipe for wild mushroom stuffing. Guidance that’s specific to heritage birds is in the second part of  Wild Turkeys, Thanks But No Thanks. 

Otherwise, onward, with background research help from: My friend Ilana the egg lady at Blue Moon Farm;  her friend – and now mine – Maryann Hegel, at Freedom Farms, where I attended a turkey harvest last Saturday;  and Peter Davies and Mark Sherzer, co-owners of Turkana Farms LLC. (Mark’s a lawyer), where I bought my heritage bird.

1.)Why They Cost So Much

Just how much varies quite a bit, but a heritage bird (probably but not definitionally raised on organic principles) will cost somewhere around three times as much as a USDA Certified Organic conventional bird, which will in turn cost roughly twice as much as the supermarket standard. This is because:

* Right at the start, baby heritage chicks (poults) cost the farmer twice as much as conventional chicks. It is in the nature of turkey raising to lose at least a few poults in the first week or so, so right away the heritage grower is out of pocket at twice the going rate.

* Whatever their individual merits, all of the many heritage breeds take roughly twice as long as the agribusiness standard to make market size. During this extended period, those birds that survive childhood are eating more and more and more, all the while requiring protection from predators and an assortment of other regular attentions.

*Heritage  market size is @ 8 – 24 lbs, compared to conventional’s 10 – 40 lbs. or more, so fixed costs like shelter and care are higher on a per-pound basis.

* Most growers of heritage turkeys are small to tiny fry as the turkey biz goes. They can’t buy feed grain in cost-saving quantities and they don’t sell enough birds to recoup the cost of proper on-farm slaughter facilities. There aren’t many inspected slaughterhouses willing to accept small orders; those that do charge a lot for their services and of course the turkeys must be transported to and from.

2.) Doing Your Bit for Conservation

Almost all – maybe 97 percent – of the commercial turkeys in the US belong to one breed: the Broad Breasted White, a miracle of efficient feed conversion that otherwise has very little to recommend it, being both profoundly handicapped and not especially tasty. Then another percent or two are Broad Breasted Bronze, immediate progenitor of the whites and not a whole lot better in either regard.

But even if the Broad Breasted’s were models of animal health and gastronomic delight, confining an entire domestic species to a single very narrow gene pool is orders of magnitude not smart.

Alternative turkeys: a couple of closely related heritage breeds: New Jersey Buff hen, Bourbon Red tom, photographed at Blue Moon Farm

As I see it, you could save money and still help out by donating a less-big chunk to a worthy organization like the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy , but that’s a lot less fun. You can’t serve a thank you letter for Thanksgiving dinner – and you don’t get the extra bang-for-buck of helping a nearby farmer stay in business.

Genuine heritage birds (Chocolate Slate) on left; psuedo-heritage bird (Broad Breasted Bronze), delivered to Freedom Farms by mistake but raised as carefully as his cousins.

One minor irritation: Organizations like The Heritage Turkey Foundation and Slow Food and many individual suppliers wax lyrical about the particular merits of Bourbon Reds and Narragansetts, Chocolate Slates and Royal Palms, but can you order them by name? Probably, somewhere, but everywhere I looked “heritage” was the extent of the guarantee.

Obviously, this gives the growers maximum wiggle room to hedge their bets with assorted breeds and then deliver whatever does best in a given year, but I think it may also be because so many of them buy day old poults, rather than breeding their own, and they’re buying from hatcheries that are willing to sell a relatively small number – tens and hundreds, rather than thousands – of birds.

The catalogues from such places are closely related to seed catalogues when it comes to enticement. This breed is gorgeous, that one is especially sociable, this other is teetering on the brink of extinction. If you’re not breeding your own, you have no incentive to stick to just one when browsing in the candy store.

Unfortunately, if you’re not slaughtering your own you have no way to keep them separate for marketing purposes. They leave the farm as distinct as can be, but they come back headless, footless and featherless, looking pretty much the same.

That said

There’s no mistaking the difference between heritage (above) and not (below).

The fat bird on the bottom is the one imported from PA. It is a Broad Breasted Bronze. It is not, however, the same as these

A couple of the standard issue Broad Breasted Bronze turkeys that landed by accident at Freedom Farms.

When I ordered the commercial turkey I was just trying to compare Broad Breasted Modern with Heritage, but it turns out (after a bit of googling) that the bird I got is probably an Orlopp Bronze, a protected hybrid of a hybrid, created by Hendrix Genetics, a huge multinational major player in livestock breeding.

None of this means it won’t be delicious, and none of it necessarily means it has genes not normally found in turkeys. (Can’t say for sure about that part since although it was supposed to be organic, it wasn’t) But in any case this does suggest that “new and improved” might be a more accurate description than “heirloom”.

My oven is orders of magnitude too small for me to cook them at the same time;  the largest contingent of leftover eaters will be here on Friday, and by me the whole reason to have Thanksgiving is in order to have stuffing that has indeed been stuffed into the bird.* So I’ll be cooking the BBB on Thursday and the Heritage (which will come out better if cooked unstuffed) on Friday.

Stay tuned for a comparison based on the cold leftovers, which can be tasted side by side.

Might as well give it a shot, even though it’s actually apples and oranges. The conventional bird, while theoretically raised humanely and given plenty of room to roam, was actually neither, as far as I can tell from a bit of internetly drilling down. It did get far better treatment than anything raised for the mass market, but that’s not saying much.

Maryann may be the one who’s had the best chance to really see. She didn’t cook two birds side by side, but she did cook one of the accidental  Broad Breasts she raised side by side with her Chocolate Slates. The verdict? “It was absolutely delicious.”

Her guests said they liked last year’s heritage bird a little better, but it sounds to me as though (not surprisingly) nurture matters as much as nature if you’re talking strictly about table quality.

Before we met, Bill raised BBB’s for a few years, not de-beaking or clipping their wings, letting them roam freely and all the heritage usual, and he says they were far and away the best turkeys he’s ever eaten.

Update: When Bill read this last night he denied the BBB part. I thought he’d gotten his original birds from the local Agway, which even 40 years ago would have meant the Bronze turkeys he’s raved about all these years would have been BBB’s. But I seem to have misunderstood. He traded with a farmer friend – some rabbits for the turkey poults – and as he also got a Royal Palm or two and a Bourbon Red, his Bronzes – all of which flew with no problems, one of which mated with a wild turkey, were probably every bit as heritage as any in this story.

* See The Food Lab at Serious Eats for an interesting suggestion about preventing the “stuffed bird doesn’t cook through fast enough” problem. Short version is you put the stuffing in a cheesecloth bag and get it good and hot before you put it in the turkey.

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 The American Livestock Breeds Conservancy Definition of a Heritage Turkey

“All domesticated turkeys descend from wild turkeys indigenous to North and South America. They are the quintessential American poultry. For centuries people have raised turkeys for food and for the joy of having them.

Many different varieties have been developed to fit different purposes. Turkeys were selected for productivity and for specific color patterns to show off the bird’s beauty. The American Poultry Association (APA) lists eight varieties of turkeys in its Standard of Perfection. Most were accepted into the Standard in the last half of the 19th century, with a few more recent additions. They are Black, Bronze, Narragansett, White Holland, Slate, Bourbon Red, Beltsville Small White, and Royal Palm. The American Livestock Breeds Conservancy also recognizes other naturally mating color varieties that have not been accepted into the APA Standard, such as the Jersey Buff, White Midget, and others.  All of these varieties are Heritage Turkeys.

Heritage turkeys are defined by the historic, range-based production system in which they are raised. Turkeys must meet all of the following criteria to qualify as a Heritage turkey:

Naturally mating: the Heritage Turkey must be reproduced and genetically maintained through natural mating, with expected fertility rates of 70-80%.

Long productive lifespan: the Heritage Turkey must have a long productive lifespan. Breeding hens are commonly productive for 5-7 years and breeding toms for 3-5 years.

Slow growth rate: the Heritage Turkey must have a slow to moderate rate of growth. Today’s heritage turkeys reach a marketable weight in 26 – 28 weeks, giving the birds time to develop a strong skeletal structure and healthy organs prior to building muscle mass. This growth rate is identical to that of the commercial varieties of the first half of the 20th century.

Beginning in the mid-1920s and extending into the 1950s turkeys were selected for larger size and greater breast width, which resulted in the development of the Broad Breasted Bronze. In the 1950s, poultry processors began to seek broad breasted turkeys with less visible pinfeathers, as the dark pinfeathers, which remained in the dressed bird, were considered unattractive. By the 1960s the Large or Broad Breasted White had been developed, and soon surpassed the Broad Breasted Bronze in the marketplace.

Today’s commercial turkey is selected to efficiently produce meat at the lowest possible cost. It is an excellent converter of feed to breast meat, but the result of this improvement is a loss of the bird’s ability to successfully mate and produce fertile eggs without intervention. Both the Broad Breasted White and the Broad Breasted Bronze turkey require artificial insemination to produce fertile eggs.

Interestingly, the turkey known as the Broad Breasted Bronze in the early 1930s through the late 1950s is nearly identical to today’s Heritage Bronze turkey – both being naturally mating, productive, long-lived, and requiring 26-28 weeks to reach market weight. This early Broad Breasted Bronze is very different from the modern turkey of the same name. The Broad Breasted turkey of today has traits that fit modern, genetically controlled, intensively managed, efficiency-driven farming. While superb at their job, modern Broad Breasted Bronze and Broad Breasted White turkeys are not Heritage Turkeys. Only naturally mating turkeys meeting all of the above criteria are Heritage Turkeys.

Prepared by Frank Reese, owner & breeder, Good Shepherd Farm; Marjorie Bender, Research & Technical Program Manager, American Livestock Breeds Conservancy; Dr. Cal Larson, Professor Emeritus, Poultry Science, Virginia Tech; Jeff May, Regional Manager & Feed Specialist, Dawes Laboratories; Danny Williamson, farmer and turkey breeder, Windmill Farm; Paula Johnson, turkey breeder, and Steve Pope, Promotion & Chef, Good Shepherd Farm.

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Blue Moon Farm photo by Ilana Nilsen

late autumn color, late autumn flavor: winter squash, chestnuts and wild mushrooms

Must say I do love a soup that tastes rich and creamy without being heavy – or containing cream. Also nice if it doesn’t require an arsenal of seasonings and is easy and quick to make.

The quick part does assume the squash is already baked, and that you know speedy ways to peel chestnuts, but why not? *

As usual, the ingredient list is pretty much the whole recipe, but given that the beauty shot of the main ingredients promised something a bit more extensive, here’s a rough outline, based on the most recent iteration.

“Rough” and “most recent” are definitely the words for it; this is one of those home style soups that’s infinitely variable.

In other words, almost impossible to screw up.

If we’ve eaten most of  the squash, I just use more mushroom and chestnut. When I have the help of chestnut peelers, I shamelessly take advantage. Don’t have these particular mushrooms ? No problem, there are plenty of alternatives.

That’s “alternative,” as in “it’ll be good, but in a different way.” Recipes that call simply  for wild mushrooms or mixed wild mushrooms drive me nuts.

As though there were no differences! Granted, all of them taste like mushrooms, but anyone who thinks Boletus edulis and Cantharellus cibarius can be interchanged willy-nilly should have their head examined simply isn’t paying attention.

I am tempted to rant at length. Instead will just mildly point out that this soup can be made with almost any pair of mushrooms, wild or domestic, but one of them should be an intensely flavored low moisture variety like hen of the woods or shiitake and the other should be a firm, meaty but tender variety like lactarius or cremini.

AUTUMN SOUP

as measured out in midcoast Maine in Late October 2011

3 tbl. butter

3.5 oz. Lactarius thyinos, cut into half-inch chunks

A large onion in roughly 1/3 inch dice

5 oz Grifola frondosa coarsely chopped

12 chestnuts, roasted, peeled, and coarsely chopped

5 c. light chicken stock

6 oz. baked winter squash, roughly cut into walnut sized chunks

4 good sized springs of fresh thyme – enough to add a hint but not a shout

3 scrapings of nutmeg

1. Melt the butter in a soup pot over medium heat. Add the lactarius chunks and cook, stirring occasionally, until they are lightly browned and completely cooked through. Remove and set aside.

2. Add the onion, cook until golden, then add the frondosus. Keep cooking and stirring until the vegetables are brown and there is no free liquid in the pan. Stir in the chestnuts, add the broth, cover, and simmer over very low heat until everything is falling-apart soft, about an hour, maybe more.

3. Stir in the squash and seasonings, cover and cook until the squash is more or less dissolved, about 20 minutes.

4. Fish out the thyme and puree the soup. Depending on the toughness of the mushrooms, it will come out somewhere between fine applesauce and French Restaurant. This batch was the former and perfectly tasty, but I did put it thorough a strainer to achieve F.R. for its portrait.

5. Reheat, salt to taste and portion out, topping each bowl with a sprinkle of the reserved lactarius. An herb garnish doesn’t help, tastewise, so I resisted the temptation to pretty it up with something green. If you feel you must, a sprig of chervil wouldn’t do much harm.

BAKED WINTER SQUASH

Is more flavorful and less watery than squash that has been boiled, steamed or microwaved. All the same like baked potatoes, including stabbing here and there to prevent explosions. Unlike potatoes, squash leaks sweet juice, so you do have to put it on a pan. At 375 degrees, it’ll take anywhere from one hour to two, depending on the squash variety, size and age. (They cook more quickly after they’ve been stored for a while.)

That’s my preferred method, but when I’m in a hurry I halve the squash, remove the seeds, rub the cut surfaces with olive oil and roast the halves face down. Seed removal is a bit more of a chore, but you do get those delicious caramelized cut surfaces.

* Frozen partially cooked peeled chestnuts are quite tasty and an enormous time-saver, as I learned some years ago when a chef friend sent me some. Being as they’re not a money saver (unless you’re a chef with labor costs) and are not sold at any stores nearby, I have never bought any. But they are available retail, from Chestnut Growers Inc., a Michigan farmer’s co-op, among others. If you decide to go for it, please come back and let us all know how it worked out.

However.

Reading up on gooseberry fool – don’t laugh; it turns out to be a much explored subject* – led me into a briar patch of nursery catalogs, from which I have only recently emerged.

Two ways of serving Gooseberry Fool.

You will notice the gooseberry color is a sort of midgrade pink-red, roughly the color of faded brick. This is decidedly unclassic. Recipes differ widely in method, sweetness and dairy component (most of the older ones use custard of some sort, rather than straight cream). But all of them call for green gooseberries and usually that’s green as in unripe.

Ripe gooseberries may be yellowish green, or yellow or red or almost purple and they can be delicious – as long as they remain uncooked. Unfortunately, even the best of them turns insipid when heat is applied, which may help explain why they haven’t become the hot new (old) thing.

Or it may be the thorns; gooseberry bushes are by nature dauntingly thorny, and the varieties bred to be less prickly tend to be less tasty as well.

But it’s probably the preparation problem. The blossom end has a dry scar and each little stem clings fiercely. The blossom ends, aka tips, aren’t objectionable in the raw fruit, and when you’re eating them out of hand you can simply nibble each little berry away from its taillike stem. But just about every recipe, whether for savory sauce, sweet dessert or preserve starts  with the instruction“tip and tail” -  as in remove same from each grape sized (or smaller) gooseberry. Not this one.

GOOSEBERRY FOOL

1 pint gooseberries, green to partially ripe (The ones in the fool in the photo were about half green and half pale pink, still far from their eventual deep wine red.)

scant ½ cup sugar to start, more may be needed

1 c. heavy cream, the heavier the better

1. Combine sugar and berries in a microwavable bowl. (see note) Cover and cook 1 minute at half power. Stir, then give them a minute at full power. Stir again. Uncover and cook in small increments until berries are soft and bursting out of their skins.

2. Put the mixture through a food mill to get pure pulp. Discard detritus. Chill puree thoroughly; it will thicken as it gets cold.

3. Taste pulp. It should be pleasantly sweet-sour. Add sugar to taste if necessary and stir well to dissolve.

4. Whip the cream until it holds firm peaks. Either fold it into the pulp or layer it with same into a glass serving dish or dishes.

4 servings – the glasses in the picture were 2 servings each.

Note: A microwave isn’t traditional but it is an almost foolproof way to soften the fruit without adding any water or heating up the kitchen. If you prefer, combine fruit and sugar in a small covered casserole and bake at 325 until fruit is soft enough to puree.

RASPBERRY CHOCOLATE FOOLISH PIE

Because it would be foolish to use the oven any more than necessary when it’s 90 degrees out.

5 oz. crisp, plain chocolate wafer cookies. I used Nabisco Famous (the ones with the whipped cream roll on the box) because I keep them in the freezer as a baking staple, but anything unadorned and unfilled that isn’t super-rich will do.

4 oz. amaretti

6 tbl. melted butter

1 heaping pint raspberries

3 tbl. Cointreau

¼ c. sugar or more to taste

1 ½ – 2c. heavy cream

1. Mix the raspberries with the cointreau and 3 tbl. of the sugar. Let them sit for at least an hour at room temperature, as long as overnight (in the refrigerator). Drain well, reserving the juice, then crush the fruit into a medium sized bowl. Taste.  There should be a sharp edge, but if the berry pulp is very sour, add a little more sugar.

2. While the berries are marinating, process the cookies together until reduced to fine crumbs. Or put them in a heavy plastic bag and crush with a rolling pin. Mix in the melted butter and press the (still somewhat crumbly) crumb mixture into a shallow 10 inch pie pan, making a low raised rim. Chill.

3. Whip the cream until it holds soft peaks, add the remaining 1 tbl. of sugar and beat until firm peaks form. Set aside about a third of the cream and gently fold the rest into the raspberries.

5. Turn the raspberry cream into the pie shell, smoothing the top. Carefully dollop on the remaining whipped cream and spread to make a smooth frosting. Chill uncovered for 3 or 4 hours or freeze at once.

Serving:  Cut in slices and pass the reserved juice separately. Be warned the refrigerated slices will be a bit slouchy. If you want the neat edges in the picture, freeze the pie solid, cut in slices, then let them warm up in the refrigerator until semi-thawed.

* see especially Elizabeth David’s An Omelette and a Glass of Wine,  Jane Grigson’s Good Things and  Jane Grigson’s Fruit Book, and Alan Davidson’s The Penguin Companion to Food.  Every one of these books is great reading, worth having for reference and living proof you can’t get everything on the internet. So is Elizabeth Schneider’s Uncommon Fruits and Vegetables.

GARDENERS NOTE:

“Of all garden fruits, least attention need be paid to currants and gooseberries in the matter of sites and soils; they will grow in any garden if the climate is suitable.” U.P. Hedrick, Fruits for the Home Garden, 1944.

True, at least in my experience. There are only two important things:

1. You have to have a real winter; gooseberries are a Northern fruit, and

2. You have to be allowed.

Gooseberries come in two main species Ribes hirtellum (small, American and mildew-resistant) and Ribes uva-crispa (large, European and horrendously mildew prone). There are, not surprisingly, many hybrids aimed at combining the best of both worlds.

The catch? Ribes species, including currants and jostaberries as well as gooseberries, are essential to the life cycle of pine blister rust. The rust is a fungus disease that kills white pines, and for a long time federal law forbade planting any of the enabling fruits. That law was repealed in the 1960’s but some states  – DE, MA, ME, NC, NH, NJ, RI, WV – or counties within them still have prohibitions of their own. Reputable nurseries will not send plants if you live in one of them.

And how different from the lettuce at the market, whether super or farmers.’ Being both extremely bulky and highly perishable, first class lettuce is a perfect poster child for home-grown.

Panisse (left) and Forellensclhuss – one modern, one heirloom. One toothsome, one super-tender. Neither suitable for any but the most local commercial cultivation.

It’s an ever-changing parade, with overlapping performers. First come the mild, mid-green frills of Black Seeded Simpson, dotted around in self-sown clumps, offspring of last year’s late summer’s crop. Then close behind them the classics of spring planting, including our favorite: buttery thick-leafed Webb’s Wonderful.

Self-sown Black Seeded Simpson, being permitted to stay in place beside the tomato patch. It grows so fast we ignore Rule # 1 and just cut the crowded seedlings by handfuls until we’ve used them up.

Rule # 1? Thin the lettuce! Do it yesterday. Whether it’s fast growing spring lettuce or the slower summer types, plants that are free from undue crowding grow at a pace that promotes flavor and tenderness.

#2. Provide fertile soil and ample water but don’t get carried away. Lettuce that gets too much nitrogen gets big without developing flavor and is vulnerable to rot, a favored child of soggy soil.

#3. Choose the lettuce for the season. Any good catalog will describe its choices in terms of their resistance – or lack thereof – to heat. Craciovensis, for instance, shoots up quickly in a way that would spell inedible bitterness in most varieties. But it not only keeps its sweetness, you get the thick stem as a bonus. Anuenue, a crisphead from Hawaii, stays rock solid when temperatures climb, and if it’s less sweet than cool season crispheads it still makes a mean BLT.

Spring-planted Craciovensis and rocket (arugula). Both will be shooting up shortly, at which point the lettuce will still be great while the rocket is no longer a leaf crop. Let it be, if you have the room, so you can eat the flowers.

The Best Spring Salad Dressing

When the lettuces are super-tender, mild flavored and sweet, the way to dress them is in cream, not olive oil.

Mince a small amount of garlic or garlic scape and crush it with salt in the salad bowl. Add a good glug of heavy cream, about 2/3 as much liquid as you’d be using if it were oil. Squeeze in not a lot of lemon juice. It will thicken the cream. Taste. Add more lemon if it’s insipid. Otherwise, in with the lettuce, toss and taste again. That’s it. The lettuce is a miracle. Don’t mess with it.

Another reason to Grow your Own. Conventional lettuce is on the Environmental Working Group’s Dirty Dozen List. It carries quite a bit of pesticide.