Blue Cayenne

I’m a salad person through and through.

I have six cookbooks on my bookshelves that are dedicated entirely to salads. I have a new one on order. When I buy a new cookbook, one of the first sections I check out is the salad section.

To me a salad is essential to make a meal, a thing of beauty, a health food and on and on.

This salad from Yotam Ottolenghi’s extraordinary cookbook Jerusalem is all of the above. Plus there is the tart bite of the sumac and chile flakes and the delightful crunch of the almonds and pita.

Don’t let the sumac keep you from trying this recipe. It is available at most supermarkets, at Trader Joe’s, and, of  course, at all Middle Eastern markets. Sumac is usually used in powdered form and is ground from the berries of the flowering sumac plant. Interestingly, sumac is a distant cousin of the cashew and the mango. If you want to know more,  you can find a link to a  thorough article about sumac from Eater: here.

Make this one!

You can buy his cookbook at your local bookstore or on Amazon here.  Interestingly, on Amazon the cookbook is rated 5 stars by 87% of the 4913 reviewers. There are only 45 grumpy reviewers who give the book a 1 star rating and most of those are people whose book arrived damaged.

Nutmeg has long been highly valued–sometimes commanding astronomical prices.

In 14th century Europe, a pound of nutmeg could set you back seven fat oxen! Wow!

Nutmeg’s story begins early. According to food historian Harold McGee (On Food and Cooking), nutmeg is known to have been grown in Southeast Asia as early as the 4th century. By the Middle Ages, traders from India and the Middle East were making enormous profits trading the spice. They claimed nutmeg possessed medicinal, aphrodisiac and perfume qualities.

Later still, the value of nutmeg hit stratospheric heights when it is was rumored to be a plague cure. Then as now, desperate people grasped for far-fetched cures for horrific diseases.

Nutmeg was political, too.

During the Age of Exploration that spanned the 15th-17th centuries, plentiful crops of nutmeg (and cloves) in the Spice Islands of Indonesia pitted the European Sea powers in a frantic struggle for colonies and spoils.  The profit potential was enormous. A single nutmeg tree could live for 100 years with a yearly crop of 20,000 individual nutmegs.  (Wow…again!)

It took another couple of centuries to discover that the spice trees could be successfully grown in the Caribbean and beyond. Today Indonesia, India and Guatemala produce 85% of the world’s nutmeg.

This recipe for Syrian Nutmeg Cake is from Joanne Chang’s cookbook Pastry Love. You can buy the cookbook at your local bookstore or from Amazon here. There also are a number of online recipes for Syrian or Armenian Nutmeg cake. You can find Food 52’s version here. The Food 52 cake omits the frosting in favor of a generous dusting of powdered sugar.

The cost of nutmeg has thankfully moderated over the years. You can find reasonable prices in your local supermarket. Better yet, you can find whole nutmegs at many Indian and Middle Eastern stores at reasonable prices, allowing you to grate your own and add pungent freshly-grated nutmeg to recipes like this Syrian Nutmeg Cake. Gone are the days when you had to bet the farm (and your seven fat oxen!) on the spice.

Here is how I baked this cake in my kitchen.

Look at the beautiful color of this soup! I’d venture to guess that  you are thinking that this is a tomato-based soup. But, no. This is a Lentil and Beet Soup and it is downright delicious.

This soup is cooked from a recipe in Naz Deravian’s cookbook, Bottom of the Pot: Persian Recipes and Stories.  (Deravian’s cookbook can be purchased at your local bookstore or on Amazon here.)The Persian name for this soup is Aash-e Shooli.

Apparently, beets are a beloved ingredient in Persian cooking–seen as a healthy ingredient in the diet. According to Deravian, beets are such an integral part of Persian cooking/eating culture that beet juice is a popular street food offering. (Somehow I can’t see that happening here with beet juice. Imagine your neighborhood children hawking beet juice this summer instead of lemonade. Not going to happen.)

Beets are a healthy food, though. Food author Harold McGee (On Food and Cooking), points out that beets have been considered a part of a healthy diet for a very long time. He quotes Theophrastus in 300 BCE on the subject of eating beets raw and points out that red beets were mentioned in 16th century literature.  The long-held belief that beets are a healthy food has been borne out by modern science. Half a cup of beets has only 37 calories,  0 grams of fat, and 0 cholesterol. The betalain compounds in beets have been shown to protect against inflammation. The nitrates in beets are helpful in maintaining heart health and consuming beets improves energy reserves to the extent that competitive athletes sometimes consume beet juice before competitions.

Another Persian cookbook author, Najmieh Batmanglij (author of Food For Life: Ancient Persian and Modern Iranian Cooking and Ceremonies), writes of street food she enjoyed in her youth in Iran :

“Popular winter street foods were hot roasted beets and steamed fava beans. Iranian beets (labu) are much larger and flatter than those found in the U.S. They are also sweeter. Traditionally, they are roasted in bread ovens (tanur), then kept on a steamer in the street vendors’ carts. The beets are peeled and sliced just before serving. In my childhood, vendors would wrap them in newspapers, but now they use plastic containers.”

This, by the way, isn’t Blue Cayenne’s first rodeo with beets. You’ll find some other great beet recipes here. For example, these Smashed and Seared Beets are a beauty to behold and feature both red and golden beets.

Here is the way I prepared this Persian Lentil Beet Soup in my kitchen: