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Currants and raisins dot lemon-flavored Welsh griddle cakes. The crumbly biscuits are cooked in a cast-iron skillet. (kelly gorham) |
Cookbook Review
A Baker’s Odyssey, By Greg Patent, Wiley, 400 pp., $34.95
Award-winning author Greg Patent is uniquely qualified to write the international baking book "A Baker's Odyssey: Celebrating Time-Honored Recipes from America's Rich Immigrant Heritage." Born in Hong Kong to Russian and Iraqi parents, he was raised first in Shanghai, then in San Francisco. Drawing from a vast cohort of family acquaintances and colleagues, Patent found recipes from 65 home bakers who represent every continent.
The author uses the term "baking" loosely. Some of these confections never see the inside of an oven; instead they're shallow- or deep-fried, even boiled. Along with breads, rolls, and cakes, there are fritters, pancakes, chips, and dumplings. In fact, what these recipes have in common is that they're made with flour.
And what an amazing range of things you can do with flour. South African crumpets - quite unlike their porous British counterparts - are small, sweet, puffy pancakes, just right with a little butter.
Scottish shortbread, that happy, shattering amalgam of butter and sugar, is so simple you could practically make it in an Easy-Bake Oven. The recipe yields about a third more than anticipated. I brushed the extras with bittersweet chocolate (not Patent's idea), which were like Pepperidge Farm Milano cookies on steroids.
Welsh griddle cakes were lemony, crumbly biscuits studded with currants and cooked on a stovetop in a cast-iron skillet. They also yielded more than promised, needed more liquid than called for, and who has the nonstick electric skillet that Patent suggests using? Surely not the 18th-century women who first made them.
Most of the recipes were a lot more work, but for the most part worth it. Lithuanian mushroom piroshki meant starting with a buttery yeast dough, soaking porcini and dicing a mountain of mushrooms for a rich and savory filling, then assembling and frying the piroshki in oil. With sour cream, the savory pastries were pillowy, with a gilded, brittle crust, and almost distressingly decadent. There were piles of extra filling, however, which went with eggs and pizza later in the week.
I went through the same sequence, without yeast, for pumpkin empanadas: made dough and filling (I used butternut squash), shaped and stuffed it, and before long, three hours had flown by. The smooth, dark, spiced filling and sweet, flaking lard crust were irresistible.
At first I thought the charmingly named pluckets, or monkey bread, would be easy, its short list of ingredients reading like a typical milk and egg dough. But there were two slow rises, followed by parceling the dough into 64 pieces, rolling each in butter and sugar, giving the bread another slow rise, then a slow bake. The finished bread was a constellation of gilded doughnut holes, rapidly plucked off and devoured by my family.
There aren't many Asian treats; I guess that's what happens when the staple starch is rice rather than wheat. One notable exception is fritters of shrimp and bean sprouts made with rice flour and mineral water. I needed a good deal more liquid than the recipe suggests, but the cakes have a fabulous taste and texture - crisp from the rice, crunchy from the sprouts, firm from the shrimp.
Most of Patent's bakers are immigrant grandmothers, masters who rarely measure, instead testing by weight, feel, and appearance. You have to hand it to Patent for quantifying these clues in recipes so that bakers with merely ordinary gifts can reproduce them. Instructions may be wordy, but they tell you where you have to pay attention.
By week's end, our kitchen really felt like it had taken a trip around the world, courtesy of one hard-working stove, and one baker with five extra pounds. A walk around the block sounded pretty good, too.
© Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company.
