Smithsonian.com

Several months back I read a great piece by Matthew Rowley, the author of a book on moonshine and a blog called Rowley’s Whiskey Forge. Inspired by one of my favorite cult classic movies of the early 1970s, Harold and Maude, Rowley embarked on a quest to recreate a dish from the film: Ginger pie.

If you aren’t familiar with Harold and Maude, it’s about a macabre teenage boy, played by Bud Cort, who has a life-changing encounter with an exuberantly kooky woman four times his age, played by Ruth Gordon. When Harold first goes to Maude’s home (which is a rail car), she serves him oat straw tea and ginger pie.

Foods inspired by the Harry Potter books, courtesy of Flickr user Fairfax County Public Library

After searching high and low for a ginger pie recipe—oat straw tea didn’t appeal, for some reason—Rowley realized that he would have to recreate it himself. “I went back to Maude, the root of my inspiration,” he wrote. “Her eccentric, nuts-to-tradition take on life is a big part of the film’s appeal…. By offering a slice, Maude extends not only hospitality, but a slyly camouflaged offer of herself.”

I liked the article because it reminded me of two things I admire: the creativity of the screenwriter who originally dreamed up the perfect food to describe his character, and the ability of the baker (Rowley) to then translate that character into a real dessert.

It got me thinking about other fictional foods, in three categories—some that were turned into real products, with varying degrees of success; some I wish existed; and a few I’m glad will stay in the realm of fiction.

First off, I would remiss if I didn’t mention the Harry Potter series of books and their film adaptations. (Didn’t I hear a new one came out recently? I could be wrong.) As one blogger and self-described Harry Potter nerd pointed out, the young wizard’s favorite dessert, treacle tart, is a real dessert eaten in Britain. But J.K. Rowling also filled her books with other marvelously imaginative foods in all three categories. Although the magical properties of many of these foods can’t be conjured, many have attempted to interpret them for the real world. In fact, there is at least one blog devoted to recipes adapted from foods mentioned in the series, and an unofficial cookbook.

The flavoring wizards at Jelly Belly saw marketing potential in Bertie Bott’s Every Flavor Beans, which include jelly beans with nasty flavors like vomit and booger. These were discontinued, as were the equally disgusting sounding Cockroach Clusters, which had a gummy underbelly and a crunchy candy shell (the fictional version of which, apparently, was itself inspired by a Monty Python sketch).

The Roald Dahl book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and the 1971 movie version, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (I’m intentionally omitting the abominable Tim Burton remake), is another treasure trove of imaginary food.

The Wonka candy brand, owned by Nestlé USA, makes several treats inspired by the fictional factory, including chocolate bars that look like Wonka bars from the film, and Everlasting Gobstoppers, jaw-breakers that change colors. Of course, the fictional gobstopper really was supposed to last forever; the real ones, obviously, don’t.

In the “wish it were real” category, wouldn’t it be fun if there were a Fizzy Lifting Drink that made you float higher as you drank it? The three-course-meal-flavored gum, on the other hand, doesn’t sound very appealing. I wouldn’t mind if it skipped right to the blueberry-pie-and-ice-cream part, as long as it didn’t really turn you into a giant blueberry, as happened to Violet Beauregarde.

Fictional food also occasionally figured into the TV series Seinfeld. One food that can’t be recreated is the Mackinaw peach, which is said to be ripe for only two weeks a year and which Kramer describes as “like having a circus in your mouth.” But muffin tops, the half-baked business venture Elaine joins in season eight, were later translated into a real product by Eggo, to mixed reviews.

Finally, in the “so glad it doesn’t exist” category is the eponymous green wafer from the 1973 science fiction movie Soylent Green. What is this food from the overpopulated, dystopian future? In the immortal words of Charlton Heston: “It’s people! Soylent Green is made out of people!”

What fictional foods do you wish were real (or are glad they aren’t)?

Remember that alphabet of maple treats I posted earlier this year? I have a new “V”: maple vodka from Vermont.

On a trip home, I discovered Vermont Spirits, a small St. Johnsbury distillery that makes vodka from the fermented sugars of maple sap instead of potatoes or grain, the usual suspects.

“We’re the only ones I’m aware of in the world who do this,” the company’s distiller, Harry Gorman, told me. “Others are using maple as an additive or flavoring, but we’re actually making alcohol from it.”

A builder by trade, Gorman met the company’s founder, Duncan Holaday, while building a house for him. Gorman mentioned that he’d been experimenting with making his own beer, wine and cider for decades, and Holaday eventually recruited him as a distiller.

Bottles of Vermont Spirits vodka at a trade show, courtesy of Flickr user Christopher Lehault

Vermont Spirits has existed since 1998, but this is the first year it has been able to offer tastings to the public at events like the craft festival where I encountered it. (Before a 2009 change in Vermont legislation, distillers could only sell bottles in liquor stores, with no sampling.) Now that word is spreading and business is picking up, the micro-distillery plans to move into a larger, better-located facility next year and start offering tours.

“People go around looking for a gift, and maybe they’re used to buying maple syrup and other things made in Vermont, but they’re usually surprised to see this,” Gorman said.

The vodkas from maple are called Vermont Gold and Vermont Gold Vintage; the company also makes a Vermont White using milk sugars. The idea in both cases, he said, was to use ingredients that represented the state.

“Maple is a very expensive source of sugar for fermentation—potatoes or beets would be much cheaper. But Vermont doesn’t grow as many potatoes or beets as it does maple trees,” Gorman explained. “Plus, it just makes an extraordinarily good vodka.”

To make the Gold, he starts with something between sap and syrup, since sap is only 2 or 3 percent sugar and syrup is at least 66 percent, while about 20 percent is best for fermentation. The distillery ran its own sugaring operation at first, but it was “a huge project,” so now they buy syrup in bulk and dilute it with spring water. The mix is fermented with yeast in a temperature-controlled tank for roughly a week.

“At that stage it’s about 9 percent alcohol, so we call it a beer, although it’s not a particularly good one,” he said. The first distillation stage separates the heart (ethanol) from the heads (other compounds) of this “beer,” and the heart continues into a “fractionating-column still” for evaporation. The third and final distillation refines any remaining compounds (tails) out of the alcohol. You can see the process in this photo gallery on VPR’s website.

“I think one of the big secrets to distilling good vodka is making absolutely certain than you’ve made a clean cut between the heads and the heart, because heads really make the flavor go bad,” Gorman said. “After making that cut you’ve got 192-proof pure spirits, 96 percent alcohol, which is as pure as you can distill.”

After adding distilled spring water to dial the alcohol down to 80 proof, he runs the vodka briefly through a charcoal filter “to take the sharp edges off, but ensure that we’re not removing the flavor,” and then it’s ready for bottling. Vermont Spirits produced about 30,000 bottles this year, which retail for $40 and up.

Technically, there’s no maple in Vermont Gold, just alcohol—but the taste somehow lingers through the distillation process, giving the vodka a very subtle sweetness and hints of buttery caramel.

“People have often said that good vodka has no flavor; it’s supposed to be a clear, neutral spirit for mixing,” Gorman acknowledged. “But making it from these sources produces vodkas with a very different character. The Gold has such a unique flavor that I would only have it neat, personally. I use a lemon twist and that’s it.”

Neat is right.

Bowl of menudo for breakfast, courtesy of Flickr user zarzoso

Years ago, during a three-week trip to Turkey (and after recovering from a bout with “sultan’s revenge“), I went with some newfound Turkish and German friends to an outdoor café following an evening in the pub. (This was in a Mediterranean resort town that was far less conservative than the places I visited in the interior.) The late-night snack of choice wasn’t pizza or hot dogs or chili-cheese-fries; it was soup. The tomato-y red lentil stew we ordered hit the spot. The Turks told me that soups like the one we were eating were also common breakfast fare in Turkey.

For some reason, Americans usually banish soup to the post-noon meals. But that appears to be another of our national quirks, like shunning the metric system, in which we are out of step with the rest of the world. Not just in Turkey but elsewhere in the Middle East, Asia and Latin America, soup is considered up to the task of being part of the most important meal of the day.

I never learned the name of the dish I ate that night in Turkey, but I recently did some research and found recipes for one that sounds right—a mixture of red lentils, bulgur wheat and tomatoes, sprinkled with dried mint. It’s called Ezogelin çorbası, and the story behind it could make you cry in your soup.

Ezo the gelin (bride) was a real person who lived in the early 20th century. According to an article on the Web site for Harvard University’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies, “Legend has it that Ezo, with her rosy cheeks and black hair, was admired by travelers along the caravan route who stopped to rest in her village. Many men longed for her hand in marriage and Ezo’s family hoped to secure a worthy match for their daughter.” But she was unlucky in love—her first marriage ended in divorce; her second took her to Syria and a hard-to-please mother-in-law. “It is for her, the story goes, that Ezo created this soup. After bearing 9 children, poor Ezo died of tuberculosis in the 1950s and has since become a Turkish legend, depicted in popular films and lamented in folksongs.”

Not all breakfast soups have such a depressing backstory, but many share one bit of folklore in common: they are considered hangover cures. Here’s what people around the world are slurping while in their pajamas:

Mexico: Our neighbors to the south swear by menudo, a spicy tripe and hominy stew that, like the boy band of the same name, many Americans have heard of but haven’t acquired a taste for. In the words of Gustavo Arellano, who writes a California alt-weekly column called Ask a Mexican! (and a book of the same name), “Menudo is amor. It’s the soup Mexican women slave over for their hungry families on weekend mornings, the dish over which families unite and teens fall in love as they pitch woo while passing along a wicker of tortillas. Menudo nowadays exists in canned form, but that’s heresy.”

Colombia: Just saying the word changua makes me feel good, so I can only imagine the restorative effects of the actual soup. Changua is a popular breakfast in the South American country, including in the capital, Bogotá. It consists of eggs poached in a milky broth with onions, salt and cilantro.

Japan: Miso soup—the yeasty-tasting broth made from fermented soybean paste and often served with tofu, seaweed and scallions—is well known to Americans who frequent sushi restaurants. But it’s also an important part of a nutritious Japanese breakfast.

Vietnam: Nothing says, “Good morning, Vietnam!” like pho, a noodle soup with a thousand variations. Beef pho is the basic version, but chicken, pork and seafood are also popular.

China: Congee, called jook in Cantonese, is somewhere between a rice soup and a porridge, depending on its consistency. In any case, it is a staple breakfast food in China. Although the basic recipe is pretty much the same everywhere—just rice cooked in a lot of water—the options for customization are endless, including meat, fish, vegetables, herbs and eggs, alone or in combination.

When you think about it, congee is not all that different from the cream of wheat or grits that many Americans eat. Just mix in a little extra water and a few add-ins, and voilà!—you’d have an American breakfast soup.

Do you ever eat soup for breakfast?

Fresh cranberries abound at this time of year, and you may even be ambitious enough to slog through a bog to pick your own, as my friend Bryn did in Massachusetts. (It was fun, but next time she’d prefer to try it without a 30-pound toddler on her back, she said.) After baking all afternoon, she still had 2 bags of berries to use up and was soliciting recipe advice.

Cranberries, courtesy Flickr user jillmotts

So, this entry is for Bryn—and for people like me who buy too many fresh cranberries at the grocery store simply because they’re seasonal and on sale, but don’t know what to do with them!

1. Red and Green: Cranberries can grace your Thanksgiving table in more ways than just sauce. Use them to add color and zing to your green vegetable sides, like these roasted brussels sprouts with cranberry brown butter or wilted kale with cranberries.

2. Red and Orange: They also pair wonderfully with orange vegetables—try Simply Recipes’ butternut squash, cranberry and apple bake, this cranberry sweet potato bake or some roasted carrots with fresh cranberries. I’m also intrigued by the idea of apples and cranberries baked in a pumpkin.

3. Red and Brown: Bryn’s favorite recipe is Mollie Katzen‘s cranberry brown bread, which balances the berries’ tartness with molasses, orange juice and brown sugar. You can find it in Katzen’s “Enchanted Broccoli Forest” cookbook, or see this version on Modern Sage. I can’t wait to try it!

4. Red and White: Baked apples are my latest obsession. Peel the top third of some large apples and scoop out their cores (I used a grapefruit knife and a melon baller), leaving the bottoms intact. Squeeze a lemon over them, using your fingers to coat any exposed parts of the fruit. Stuff the cavities full of cranberries coated in brown sugar, the zest of one orange and a generous sprinkle of cinnamon. Put the apples in a glass baking dish, and pour a few tablespoons of sweet liquid into and over each one—I used pear cider with a splash of maple syrup and cognac. Bake at 325 degrees for an hour, basting occasionally. Top with white chocolate shavings, as this Cooking Light recipe suggests, or a scoop of your favorite white topping, like creme fraiche, whipped cream or vanilla ice cream.

5. Red and Blue: Make your cranberry sauce more interesting by throwing some blueberries into the mix, as Elise from Simply Recipes suggests, and maybe even some red wine. You can also pair the berries in a dessert, such as Sweet Life Kitchen’s cranberry blueberry pie or Food for Laughter’s cranberry blueberry crumble.

What’s your favorite way to eat fresh cranberries?

Continuing our Inviting Writing theme about “eating at Grandma’s house,” today’s story celebrates another Bestemor. Author Jenny Holm is a freelance writer who grew up in Minnesota, but has been all over the place since, from Russia to D.C. to an organic farm in Vermont. Currently, she’s teaching English in Georgia (the country). She chronicles her adventures in a wonderful food blog called Gusto: Eating With Pleasure.

Lefse Lessons
By Jenny Holm

“You can roll lefse for forty years and still it won’t always behave for you. Humdinger!”

My grandmother, Eunice Sylvester, bunches the dough she’s just been rolling back into a ball and spreads her pastry cloth with an additional dusting of flour. “Now don’t you dare stick to that board, stinkerpot!”

Grandma making lefse. Photo courtesy of Jenny Holm.

Chided into submission, the dough behaves this time. Grandma swiftly rolls out a 12-inch round so thin you can see through it, flips its edge over a flat wooden stick and peels it from her pastry cloth. It hangs precariously there for only a second or two before she unfurls it onto the hot electric griddle sitting atop her kitchen table.

She has spent holiday seasons laboring over these delicate potato-based crepes, called lefse, since 1967, when her husband, Arvid, (my grandfather) presented her with this very griddle as a Christmas present. “Some gift!” she quips as she jabs Grandpa with the end of her rolling pin. “I haven’t been able to escape it since!”

Lefse was one of the recipes that Grandma’s grandparents, Norwegian farmers, brought with them to the western Minnesota prairie where they settled in the late 1800s. While our dough chills in the fridge, Grandma tells me how her mother Sophie used to prepare this winter treat. A few technological upgrades notwithstanding, the process has remained essentially unchanged.

She would mix pounds upon pounds of minced potatoes with butter, milk, and salt, adding flour and working it in with her powerful hands until the mixture reached the desired consistency—too much flour and the lefse would come out dense and tough; too little and the paper-thin rounds would tear. After forming balls of dough and chilling them in the frigid outdoor air, Sophie would roll out circles two feet in diameter and cook them directly on her flat iron stovetop, feeding the fire with spent corncobs. The resulting pancakes came out light and chewy, a warm and filling treat that Sophie’s 16 children (of whom my grandmother was the youngest) enjoyed slathering with butter, sprinkling with sugar, and rolling like cigars before devouring.

My family has abandoned many of the other “old country” dishes our ancestors cooked, like lutefisk (cod soaked in lye to preserve it) and rolle pulse (beef and pork pressed into a roll with ginger and onions, sliced, and served cold), but lefse remains beloved. Demand for it at our holiday table consistently exceeds supply. However, the labor-intensive nature of its preparation and the necessity of an experienced hand to judge the quality of the dough by its texture mean that only dedicated disciples are likely to carry on the craft for future generations.

That’s why I asked Grandma to let me shadow her as she prepares the first batch of the year. My lefses come out crisper than hers do (because I spread the rolling board with more flour than necessary, she says). They are not always round, and take me at least three times as long to roll out, but I’m starting to get the hang of it.

“Don’t worry,” Grandma assures me over my shoulder. The first time she tried to make lefse on her own, she used red potatoes instead of the requisite russets, and ended up in tears over a wet, gloppy mess. “It’s nice to have an assistant. Eighty was alright, but 81—goll!”

My grandfather is no longer strong enough to help out the way he used to, but he still joins us for the company. He sits at the kitchen table over his coffee and cookies, snatching the occasional lefse still hot from the griddle while Grandma is turned toward her rolling board. Sixty years of marriage have attuned her to his every move, and without turning her head nor slowing the rhythm of her rolling she warns, “Arvid, you better stop stealing those or we won’t have any left for your grandchildren to eat!” Grandpa sheepishly finishes the mouthful he’s been chewing, takes a sip of his coffee, and launches into a jazzy, syncopated version of “Jingle Bells,” his tenor voice wavering slightly but still clear and merry.

As the small kitchen warms with the familiar, comforting aroma of boiled potatoes and the heat emanating from the two grills set up at opposite ends of the room, flour settles onto our hair and clothes like first snowflakes. My mother, who has been monitoring the grills while Grandma and I roll the dough, tears a just-cooked lefse in half, spreads it with butter and sprinkles sugar on top, then rolls it up and thrusts it into my mouth.

The first sweet, chewy bite floods me with memories of all the holiday celebrations that begun and ended with this very taste, and reminds me that so much more than butter and sugar are tucked into this delicate pancake.