Some meals stick in your mind. It may be because of the exceptional quality of the food or the company you share. I find that outdoor settings enhance such experiences and make them even more memorable. Among my top remembrances was an evening meal at the end of a two-week camping and fishing trip in Montana.
We had received permission from the owners of a nearby ranch to fish several miles of their property, accessing the stream, where cutthroat trout willingly took a dry fly, through a barbed-wire fence gate and crossing a meadow. Our rancher friends also had directed us to a small Forest Service campground where campsites were spread along a small babbling brook. Tall pines and firs formed a beautiful setting, and we were the only occupants.
Before donning waders and rigging up to fish on the last evening, I handed my partner a one-gallon Ziploc bag and asked that he return with two trout between 12 and 14 inches in length, packed in moistened grass.
My friend Hal fished downstream and I up. Both of us found a fly that worked, mine President Eisenhower’s Beetle Bug Coachman and Hal’s a Trude with similar white and red in the fly dressing. We had a delightful evening. In addition to sighting several wild mountain sheep, we had four nice trout to cook for dinner. Because our meal took place on the last night of a two-week camping trip, we made do with simple ingredients that remained in our camp cook kit.
Great meals begin with quality ingredients that are enhanced and complemented by well-chosen spices and herbs. We were starting with fresh trout, but were low on everything else, having learned the only store in Phillipsburg closed because a local mine had played out and subsequently shut down.
I rummaged through my depleted supplies and found the tail end of a sack of flour, garlic powder, paprika, and salt. Our camp cooler held some passable iceberg lettuce, several tomatoes, green onions, and two lemons. A plastic bin produced a few salad croutons in a plastic bag, a small jar of capers, and our last bottle of a crisp, slightly fruity California sauvignon blanc, which quickly found its way to our frigid campside brook.
Salt, paprika, and garlic powder gave me a seasoned flour. I patted the trout fillets dry before tossing my fresh cutthroat with the make-do coating and cooked them in the last of our butter, finishing with a version of classic piccata sauce in the pan using capers, lemon juice, and a touch of white wine.
The seasoned flour dried the fillet surfaces so that when cooked, it formed a thin, caramelized, golden crust that sealed in the trout flesh’s moisture and gave a slightly crunchy texture that was pleasing to the palate. The touch of spice in the flour gave enough punch to bring inherent flavors out.
When making a piccata sauce, dust fish fillets such as petrale sole, dorado, halibut, or trout with flour and sauté them in butter, then remove the fillets when they attain that golden crust. A rough guide is the rule of 10 minutes total cooking time for an inch of fish flesh. Scrape up the residue up from the bottom of the pan, add more butter, and let it foam. Then deglaze with lemon juice and a touch of white wine. Finish by adding drained capers, which will give off a bit of salt. Stir constantly on a low/medium flame to reduce and thicken the sauce. Lemon and butter were made for delicate-flavored fish.
Everything went together beautifully that night. Years later, Hal and I still remember and talk about that meal and trip. Take a spectacular setting, add good company, worthy conversation, quality seasonings, and the freshest of ingredients, and you have something special.
Spices as we have them today, other than perhaps salt, weren’t well known or available in medieval Europe. Salt itself was as valuable as gold. In 1096 a.d., a pound of saffron cost the equivalent of a good horse. In the 1300s, a pound of nutmeg could be worth seven oxen. Starting around 1200 a.d., Silk Road trade routes brought spices in from the Middle East and Asia, thanks to Marco Polo’s exploration and the Arab and Portuguese shipping trade. Fortunes were made that dramatically influenced the emergence of Europe from the Dark Ages. It is said that the search for spices was a major contributing force for exploration of the New World, subordinate in importance only to the search for gold and the saving of souls. Spices enhance and bring out flavor.
But before the advent of modern refrigeration methods, spices also were used to mask the foul taste of unsavory food. In some cases, spices lessened bacterial contamination, gave color, and aided food preservation. It was widely believed that certain spices could have healing powers and enhance one’s love life.
A few years ago, just before the onset of our recent drought, a fellow fly fisher and I traveled with the late Neil Brunkhorst on the way to a fly-fishing club outing at Pyramid Lake. We stopped at Neil’s Donner Lake cabin for the night, having to dig through four feet of fresh snow to reach the cabin door. The cabin had been winterized, but we found very little other than salt and unground black peppercorns to enhance the prime-grade steaks (lots of flavorful marbled fat) that we had brought for dinner. We shoveled through the white stuff in shifts to reach the cabin and then cleared a small pad for a Weber charcoal grill. A simple salad, garlic bread, and the right proportions of freshly ground pepper and salt on our meat gave us a sumptuous meal in front of a roaring fire. The legendary Jack’s Steak House in Redding uses nothing more than salt and pepper on their steaks, too.
A good cabernet helped as well, and it loosened our friend Neil’s tongue. On the way up Donner Pass, we found out that before we had retired, one of us was a dentist, one a grade-school teacher, and our friend Neil a spice merchant. After dinner, we opened another bottle of cabernet and learned that Neil had a background in accounting and had been hired by a major spice merchant in Oakland as their CFO. He soon found out that his company had little control over the quality of ingredients that they purchased, buying from brokers after the spices had arrived in the United States. So once he got the company books in order, he set out for Asia to go to his sources.
That evening, my friend Alan and I were enthralled by tales of his adventures tracking spice commodities to their back-country origins all over the world. He told of areas held by rebels, of bandits, swollen rivers in monsoon time, rides in India on elephants, and friendships and deals that he made in foreign lands, often with just a handshake.
Today, based on Neil’s information, the only spices I buy from grocery store shelves are those stored in glass containers. I also try to grind my spices fresh, and I find that they are good for only six months or less. If I buy ground spice in a glass container, I try to remember to throw it out after a year, because it will have lost its potency. I also know that high-quality saffron is often adulterated with turmeric, a spice that is high in antioxidants and very good for you, but not the precious commodity used in authentic Spanish paella. The real deal has the mesmerizing, vivid yellow-red color of Buddhist monk robes in Asia. With saffron, if the price seems too good to be true, it probably is.
The term “synergistic” refers to a combination of ingredients that comes together to be better than any of the individual components standing alone. I am wary, however, of any recipe that has a long ingredient list with too many spices. With some exceptions, 10 ingredients is getting close to my limit.
Beware of muddying the flavors you want when adding spices and herbs.
Early in my cooking life I used spices in a willy-nilly fashion, often throwing
in pinches of this and that with no real purpose, hoping for good results. Today, I look for tried and true combinations such as Mexican oregano and cumin in Southwestern and south-of-the-border dishes. Chocolate and peppers work well together, as do sweet and salt and the five-spice powder combination from China. Jamaican jerk spice mixtures are a winner. I love them on salmon. They contain red and black pepper, allspice, cinnamon, and thyme. I use paprika and garlic salt in my seasoned flour for lamb, beef, and pork stews. Years ago, I used generic chili powder. Today, I know the difference between
chipotle powder made from smoked jalapenos, the more delicate poblano, the high-heat serrano, the subtle, slightly smoky Spanish padron, and the relatively tame New Mexican hatch chili that graces many a dish in the Southwest. A skillful practitioner of Mexican regional cooking knows his or her chili flavors, as does the knowledgeable Asian cook. A good rule of thumb for Mexican or Asian peppers is that smaller is hotter. Those little Thai red peppers are dynamite!
Don’t forget salt and sugar. A pinch of salt will marry flavors without being noticeable itself. Likewise, a small dash of sugar will brighten a dish without giving a sugary taste. My favorite Texas aunt always used a touch of sugar in her fried okra. Chilean food is in itself bland, and Chileans use heavy doses of salt to spice up otherwise bland dishes. On a fishing trip to Chilean Patagonia, we had to ask the kitchen staff at our remote lodge on the Picacho River to ease up on the salt. Americans on low-sodium diets, sensitized to minimal salt content, were overwhelmed by its excess use.
Seven years ago, after a 16-hour, three-leg flight from Charleston, South Carolina, my wife and I landed in Grenada, which is known as the “Spice Island.” It is the lushest and greenest of all the Caribbean Islands. Historically, the island was fought over by the French, English, and in 1983, by U.S. Marines and Marxist sympathizers with Cuban ties. Our English-speaking driver rolled down the windows on a balmy evening for the hourlong midnight drive along the coast to Petite Anse, a small boutique hotel that was once a French plantation. On one side of the road, we could smell and hear the sea. On the other, the fragrance of coffee and of nutmeg and untold other spices filled the air. Their food didn’t disappoint!
Quincy’s Drunk Brush Wine Bar
By Richard Anderson
The Artist and I were up in Quincy in late autumn for an art show in which her work was being displayed. It’s a town I’ve only driven through in the past, but thanks to the generosity of friends Sally and Mike Yost we were staying overnight, giving us an opportunity to walk around and get a feel for the place. We liked what we found. The downtown especially felt neighborly, with an unpretentious “what you see is who we are” character that likely reflects Quincy’s distance from cities and a local economy based perhaps more on resource extraction than tourism.
The art show at the Main Street Artists Gallery drew a huge, lively, happy crowd that quickly filled the large space, and after a bit I sought respite in a small, open courtyard out back. Along one side was a tiny wine bar called the Drunk Brush. It was packed, too, with an equally happy crowd, so I relaxed on a chair beyond the door, enjoying something red, tapping a foot to the wine bar’s musicians, and thinking, yeah, this place, this town…we could easily come back. And we surely will, for the people, their sense of community, and for the fishing.
The Drunk Brush Wine Bar is located at 438 Main Street. Access is via a back alley that parallels Main Street.
