Before I met my French boyfriend and his family, my culinary repertoire was sadly devoid of small sea creatures. Sure, I might occasionally have ordered mussels when out to dinner, but let’s face it—those mussels tasted only of what they were sauced with. I had never tried a clam or oyster, nor did I particularly care to. Scallops made me cringe. I was also fairly certain that sardines and anchovies were probably the
same thing.

But my shellfish ignorance was not to last. When I moved to Paris three years ago, my boyfriend and I started making regular excursions to his familial home in Angoulins sur Mer, a fishing village nestled into the western coast of France, famous for its oysters and mussels. A few miles out to sea, Île de Ré is the source of yet more fish, and some of the world’s best sea salt. The range and scope of what local fishermen pull from those waters has not ceased to impress me yet.

Lunch and dinner at my boyfriend’s house became a kind of regular adventure, and still is. His family favors multiple small courses over single, main dishes, so every meal becomes an opportunity to sample various things. Each new plate that emerges from the kitchen is a surprise, and since they buy much of their food from local vendors, it is a surprise that changes with the seasons. Eating at their table has demystified food in a way we often willfully obfuscate in the States—lettuces are dirty when plucked from the earth, fish come with scales and bones.

In the three years since my first visit to Angoulins sur Mer, I’ve tasted much that was once completely foreign to me. I’ve also learned to appreciate simplicity. For instance, I now know that a sprig of thyme, a bay leaf, and a measure of white wine help mussels taste most like themselves—clean and so slightly saline. I’ve learned that naturally harvested scallops are much smaller than their American counterparts, and are best served still attached to their ruched shells by a comma of coral roe. Sardines, bright silver and as long as your hand, are best in the summer when you can eat them outdoors under an arbor, simply grilled and doused in lemon juice. Nothing but practice makes removing their tiny bones any easier.

In the regions around Angoulins sur Mer, there is a strong tradition of mixing seafood with salty butter. This is due to the proximity to Île de Ré, where they favor butter palpably salted with flecks of gros sel (large-crystal sea salt). I’ll never forget the first time a platter of tiny rose-colored shrimp was placed in front of me one day at lunch. I watched my boyfriend pull off a head and flick away the shrimp’s soft shell in one stroke. He sucked the brackish head juice before placing what remained of the shrimp onto a heavily buttered slice of brown bread.

Now that we live in New York, it is nearly impossible to find anything like the variety of seafood we enjoy when in Angoulins sur Mer. Luckily, you can buy very good quality sardines in a can, which I do every time we visit France. American supermarkets have started catching on to this fact, and it is possible to find good sardines here too, often imported from Spain or Portugal. Canned sardines are tasty served simply on buttered toast, but I think it’s worth the extra few minutes to make your own sardine butter. I mix American butter with chunky flakes of gros sel from Île de Ré (also now available in fine supermarkets and specialty stores online), so that, even in New York, my boyfriend and I can enjoy a taste of his home.

SARDINE BUTTER RECIPE

Serves about 6 people

1 ¼ sticks/10 tbsp salted butter, slightly softened (If you can find butter with actual crystals of salt, great; otherwise, mix in a pinch of gros sel or, failing that, the finer fleur de sel.)

1 can good-quality sardines, packed in oil

juice of ½ a lemon

about a tbsp minced chives

freshly ground black pepper

1. Place the softened butter in a medium bowl. Drain the sardines, and add them to the bowl. Use a fork to mash the butter and the sardines together. Have fun!

2. After a minute, add the lemon juice. Keep mashing until incorporated. At the last minute, add the chives, and some black pepper.

3. Move the butter to a ramekin, or roll it in plastic to form a log. Refrigerate it for at least an hour or so.

4. Serve the sardine butter with toast.

About the author: Cristina Sciarra is a writer, a photographer, and a culinary enthusiast. In her spare time, she travels and creates recipes for her website, theroamingkitchen.net.

 

A few summers ago, I conducted my graduate-school research at a health clinic in a batey, or rural community, about an hour north of Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic. Punta Cana’s high-end resorts and all-you-can-eat buffets are a stark contrast to the impoverished former sugarcane plantations that make up the bateys in the island’s interior. Electricity is rare and subject to apagaones (blackouts) that can last an entire day, which has serious consequences for rural health clinics trying to operate blood labs and store vaccines—and severely limits the menu dished up for clinic staff.

During my 10-week stay, I slept on the floor of an empty clinic room with a handful of Canadian medical students doing internships. Meals were served family style; food was brought in at the beginning of each week from the capital. Fruit and vegetables were nonexistent, and the “meat” option was an overly processed bologna that was dubious on Monday mornings and scary by Wednesday. Despite being on an island, our fish selection was limited to canned sardines. For breakfast we had white bread dipped in sugary coffee; a typical lunch was fried plantains with spaghetti and rice. Yes, spaghetti and rice. Everything was flavored with Maggi bouillon cubes, which left us parched and thirsty. Dinner was often boiled plantains with hot sauce, or fried eggs and dumplings. (Dumplings were usually served at the end of the week, when pickings were slim. A mixture of water and flour, they were hard to choke down even with copious amounts of rum and Presidente.)

The clinic closed on weekends, so we’d all catch a bus out of town on Fridays toward one of the gorgeous playas lining the island’s north coast. These places were like culinary meccas to us with their beachside shacks serving fresh fish, beans, even the occasional leaf of lettuce. However, nothing hit the spot quite like the piña coladas served at every beach bar. After days of bland starches, something about the sweet richness of the coconut milk and the tangy bite of the prized pineapples was mouthwatering. My friends and I used to suck those babies down like water, stocking up in preparation for another week of tastebud-numbing cuisine.

Flash forward five years: Back in New York City, I’m on maternity leave in the dead of winter. It was a brutal time for me; I felt isolated and lonely, cut off from friends and my usual calendar of travel and fun. In many ways, it wasn’t so different from those long weeks living at the clinic! Back then I couldn’t sleep because of the stifling heat and mosquitoes; now it was because of a colicky baby. Maybe that’s what inspired me to host a piña colada party for the other moms in my son’s playgroup. I remembered how those piña coladas had cheered me up, and, while my fifth-floor walk-up was a far cry from the beaches of my favorite island, I thought a tropical cocktail with other frazzled moms might just do the trick.

And so, on a cold February afternoon, we all gathered in my apartment to sample one of the Caribbean’s most famous exports. I had spent the day searching for cream of coconut only to be shown coconut milk time and time again by the staff of Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods, and other neighborhood groceries. Don’t make that mistake! I finally found the real stuff in a local bodega. Then I got some ripe pineapples, ice, and the DR’s most famous local rum: El Brugal. Some recipes call for heavy cream or ice cream, but even nursing moms can’t handle that many calories with their booze!

The whirring blender, sticky pineapple, and stories from our pre-baby lives brought us new moms together that day. For a few hours, we escaped from our constant talk of sleep training, nursing, and baby weight to sip our piña coladas and relax. I think the babies felt it too.

The Perfect Piña Colada

Mix 1 cup cream of coconut (like that from Coco Lopez), 1 cup fresh pineapple, and about a half-cup rum. Add them all to a blender with ice. It will be thick, so keep some pineapple juice on hand if you want to thin it out. Serve with a wedge of pineapple.

If you’re still hungry for North Indian food after our post on papri chaat and butter paneer masala, check out this post on Foodists.ca, in which we expound on our discovery of, and love for, chole bhature (curried chickpeas with fried bread). Recipe included, of course.

Related: Recipes From Afar: Papri Chaat & Butter Paneer Masala, North India

A half-year after returning home from a few weeks in North India, I thought it would be a good idea to cook some Indian dishes for friends. Twelve friends, to be exact.

It wasn’t long after I emailed said friends that I began questioning the wisdom of this decision.

Indian food is notoriously difficult for a non-Indian to pull off. Sure, having access to the right spices is half the battle, but in past experiments with an Indian cookbook, I’ve found that the spice ratio often seems off. For all the toasting and grinding of seeds called for, there’s never anywhere near the amount of flavor one expects, certainly nothing like the richness radiating from most Indian-restaurant dishes. (Of course, that might be the excess ghee speaking.) Or else, between the red chile powder and garam masala, I somehow wind up with so much heat that the dish is nearly inedible, even for a spice lover like me.

So why did I think I could have an Indian-food dinner party? While in Udaipur, Scott and I stayed at the friendly Hotel Krishna Niwas, where one of the owners, Sushma Khatri, runs cooking classes on pretty much anything you’d like to learn in Indian cuisine. At our request, she made us one of Rajasthan’s classic dishes, dal baati chorma; we ate it with relish and promptly signed up for a formal class. We wanted to cook some of our favorite dishes from North India: chole bhature, butter chicken, paratha. We ended up making all of those plus dal, chapati, and masala chai. In Sushma’s open kitchen, filled with easy-to-access spice bins and pre-pureed tomatoes, it all seemed so easy—and everything we made together was delicious, especially when eaten on the hotel’s roof, gazing out over Lake Pichola.

Fast-forward six months to our comparatively cramped kitchen in Queens, plastic spice bags scattered across the counter, pounds of onions and tomatoes sitting on the floor, one burner short of what we really needed—and the two of us, frantically chopping and measuring and hoping everyone would be at least 30 minutes late. The shopping part was easy, at least: We are fortunate to live two blocks from a terrific South Asian grocery store, stocked with all the mango powder and paneer we could ever want, and have a bunch of Indian sweets shops from which to buy dessert (and papri chips, it turned out).

Our menu was sourced directly from our own experiences in India. As appetizers, we chose two of our favorite chaats, or savory street-style snacks, and for the three main courses, we went with curried chickpeas (the chole minus the bhature, or fried bread that usually goes with it), butter paneer masala (like butter chicken, but with paneer, a soft Indian cheese), and baingan ka bharta (mashed eggplant, tomato, and onion). The first two main courses were recipes from Sushma in Udaipur (and dishes we’d eaten all over North India); the third dish I chose because I’d particularly liked the version of it we’d had in Agra. On the side were roti and naan—store- and restaurant-bought, admittedly—and although North India is all about mopping up curries with bread, we thought that fluffy basmati rice should be on the table too. I was tempted to make lassis and chapatis, and maybe some rasmalai for dessert, but thankfully my husband knows when to tell me I’m going too far.

Another thing to be thankful for: Nearly everyone was a bit late (and the two who showed up early were put straight to work), so I had time to finish the main dishes while Scott shook up Kashmir cocktails (see recipe). Then we remembered the appetizers and quickly put out the ingredients for papri chaat (pictured above)—our favorite chaat of them all, a crunchy, spicy, sweet, tangy party in your mouth—as well as a huge bowl of fruit chaat, essentially a fruit salad with an Indian dressing (I based ours on this recipe from Manjula’s Kitchen, using banana, apple, mango, cucumber, grapes, and pomegranate seeds—and, yes, you really do need the black salt).

Ultimately, I was astonished: Our friends seemed to like the food! It had flavor and depth without burning anyone’s insides. And though I’d made the chickpea dish before with excellent results (I’ll give that recipe in a future post), I wasn’t too surprised that the two biggest hits of the night were the papri chaat and the butter paneer masala. Once you manage to track down their myriad ingredients, these are two dishes you really can’t go wrong with—even if you’re not plying your guests with mango cocktails and IPAs.

PAPRI CHAAT

(adapted from The ABCD’s of Cooking)

Serves 12

4 cups papri chips

1 12 oz. can chickpeas

2 large potatoes, boiled and chopped

1 32 oz. container yogurt (preferably Indian style, like Desi Natural Dahi)

1 bottle tamarind chutney

1 bottle coriander chutney (we used Swad brand)

1 package sev (fried gram-flour noodles)

1 package chaat masala

1 white or yellow onion, chopped

1 tomato, chopped

Lime juice

Cilantro

Green chilies, minced

We emulated our local chaat shops and made these to order in a stainless-steel bowl, which meant setting all these ingredients out and, working in batches to make two or three servings at a time, mixing them together. Measurements per bowl were pretty inexact, but you can start with a handful of chips and about a tablespoon of everything else (less of the chaat masala and chilies). It’s the kind of dish you make to taste, depending on whether you prefer your chaat dry or wet (use more yogurt), spicy or mild. Rest assured that any way you mix these things together, it’s going to taste good.

 BUTTER PANEER MASALA

(adapted from Sushma Khatri’s cooking class at the Hotel Krishna Niwas, Udaipur, Rajasthan, India)

Serves 12 (we doubled the original recipe, more or less)

6 onions, chopped

2 tsp green chile, chopped

1 tsp. ginger

6 Tbsp. butter

1 tsp. turmeric powder

1 tsp. red chile powder

1 tsp. garam masala

Salt to taste

7 tomatoes, blanched, peeled, and pureed

3 Tbsp. double cream

12 almonds, ground

12 cashews, ground

4 Tbsp. coconut powder

1 lb. paneer, cut into 1-inch slabs (or large cubes)

2 cups milk (we did not double this from original recipe, as 2 cups seemed plenty)

Pinch fenugreek leaves, garam masala

Using a food processor, grind the onion, ginger, and green chile together, and then, in a large pan, cook in butter till light brown. Add turmeric, chile powder, garam masala, and salt; then slowly add tomato puree, a little at a time. Next, stir in cream, ground nuts, and coconut powder; continue to cook over high heat for a few minutes until oil pools around pan edges. Add paneer and milk, lower heat, and add fenugreek leaves and garam masala. Without mixing the last two spices in, cover the pan and simmer for five minutes. At that point, taste the dish—we found we had to add a bit more butter, salt, and fenugreek before it was perfect.

In this new EYW Blog series, our writers will feature recipes of dishes they’ve encountered while away and re-created at home. 

A few gluttonous days in New Orleans are hard to beat, but while you can’t bring home the city’s soulful live music or lighthearted survivor spirit, you can at least attempt to make some of its classic foods in the daiquiri-free confines of your own kitchen. After my last trip to NOLA, I spent a week back in New York dreaming about beignets and BBQ shrimp before my husband and I got our acts together, invited some friends over, and set up a Sazerac bar. We were having a NOLA dinner party, damn it!

My mind wandered to what’s quick and delicious, and landed on the simple yet memorable crawfish étouffée—the version we ate at dive bar Coop’s Place [pictured below] on our last day in New Orleans was one of our favorite meals of the trip. For this traditional Cajun dish, crawfish tail meat is “smothered” in a rich, spicy brown stew of vegetables, butter, and Cajun spices, then served over rice. It struck us as the perfect main course for a party of 10—more unusual than other New Orleans classics, like gumbo or jambalaya, but still relatively easy to make.

Inside Manhattan’s Chelsea Market, I tracked down some crawfish as well as two Louisiana sausages, smoky andouille and earthy boudin blanc (pork with liver and often heart, plus rice). Unfortunately, the crawfish was frozen and from Spain, but it’d do the trick (shrimp can also be substituted).

I used an étouffée recipe from famed New Orleans chef, Emeril Lagasse. Specifically, it was the recipe Emeril demonstrated on The Martha Stewart Show—and I must admit, the visual (video) aid actually came in handy. I’ve edited the recipe below just slightly to better reflect what is shown in the video. Note that while it is traditionally Cajun, crawfish étouffée is popular in Creole cooking as well; the inclusion of tomatoes in the recipe I used makes it more a Creole version.

Because we had a large group—and everyone likes to eat a lot—we doubled this recipe with no problems (two pounds of crawfish still sufficed). It turned out so delicious we had very little left over.

During the party, we served the grilled andouille and boudin sausages—you steam the latter for about 10-15 minutes, then remove the thin casing and squeeze some lemon on it—with spicy Creole mustard and French bread as scene-setting appetizers, alongside a centerpiece fashioned from Mardi Gras beads and a souvenir voodoo doll (couldn’t resist). And to drink? It can only be Sazeracs—a little Herbsaint or absinthe to coat the glass, Peychaud’s bitters, rye whiskey, simple syrup, lemon peel (recipe). Our group found them exceedingly easy to drink.

Serves 8

6 Tbsp. unsalted butter

4 Tbsp. all-purpose flour

2 cups chopped onions

1/2 cup chopped celery

1/2 cup chopped green bell pepper

2 bay leaves

2 sprigs fresh thyme

6 cloves garlic, minced

2 1/2 cups shrimp stock

1 cup peeled, seeded and diced tomatoes

1 tsp coarse salt

1/4 tsp cayenne pepper

2 tsp Worcestershire sauce

Hot sauce, like Tabasco, to taste

2 lbs crawfish tails, with the fat (or substitute shrimp, if you must)

2 tsp Emeril’s Original Essence (or make your own)

Juice of 1/2 lemon

1 cup chopped scallions

1/4 cup chopped flat-leaf parsley

Hot cooked white rice, for serving

Directions

1. In a large, heavy saucepan, melt 4 Tbsp of butter over medium heat. Make a roux by adding the flour slowly and whisking to combine. Continue to cook, stirring constantly, until roux is the color of peanut butter. (Do this for a good couple of minutes, being careful not to burn the butter.)

2. Add onions, celery, bell pepper, bay leaves, and thyme. Cook, stirring occasionally, until vegetables have softened, 6-8 minutes. (They will appear dry—that’s okay.) Stir in garlic; let cook for a minute. Add stock, tomatoes, salt, cayenne, Worcestershire sauce, and Tabasco; bring to a boil. Skim surface, reduce heat, and simmer, stirring occasionally, for 30 minutes.

3. In a medium bowl, toss together crawfish tails (and any crawfish fat) and the Essence, and add to the simmering sauce along with the lemon juice, scallions, and parsley. Cook, stirring occasionally, for 15 minutes. Add remaining 2 Tbsp butter; stir to combine. Serve over rice.

A version of this article originally appeared on Foodists.ca.