The Essence of the Mediterranean
In some of the most fabulous restaurant kitchens, you will find "Glace de Viande," a thick reduction of stock (typically beef or veal) that is used as the basis for a number of sauces. Glace is a process to make, boiling down the bones of the meat to capture the essence of the meats flavor. Just a few ingredients are utilized to produce this "nectar." The key is the ingredients. They have to be picked carefully, prepared carefully and cooked carefully to achieve excellent results.
I use this explanation as a metaphor for Nancy Harmon's new book, "The Essential Mediterranean" (Harper Collins). She has boiled down the most basic of ingredients in order to produce a book that is filled with a sweet nectar of information on Mediterranean cooking.
Her process is to take a cluster of core ingredients and pare each ingredient down to it's most basic. Telling how each is grown, prepared and then cooked. Nancy shows us what to look for in choosing the ingredient, what determines its quality. She also provides insight on what the local culture has done with these ingredients as far local and traditional dishes. The essential ingredients are salt, olives and olive oil, wheat, wine, legumes, peppers and tomatoes, pork, products from the sea and from the pasture.
Peppers and Tomatoes
For example, in her chapter on "Peppers and Tomatoes," she gives recipes for four different red-pepper sauces, each from a different Mediterranean region. Two of my favorites are: Rouille (Roo-EE) is the roasted red bell pepper and garlic flavored mayonnaise that hails from France's Provencal region. It is used as a garnish for Seafood Stew or Bouillabasse. Wonderful as a dip for crudite or, as Nancy notes, "awfully good on top of a plain, hot, baked potato…" Or, Romesco, from the Catalan in Spain. A sauce using roasted tomatoes, roasted red bell pepper and dried red chili peppers, almonds, hazelnuts, and garlic processed together. A kind of spicy red pesto. Terrific on grilled fish or chicken.
Durum Wheat
We chatted about the wheat of the Mediterranean, durum wheat. This "hard" wheat has a somewhat distorted reputation. Some might feel that it's too hard a flour to make bread with. Nancy says, "Tell that to the housewives of Puglia, Sicily and Calabria," to name a few. Here in these places, they've been making bread with durum's semolina flour for centuries. In fact, the flour's color makes it very attractive, a pale yellow hue that makes the bread look like it was made with eggs. And the taste says Nancy, "more wheat-en."
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