Armenian Arsig

I found the two recipe cards pictured above among my mother’s cookbooks.

I asked my mom about these recipes written out by her sister. My mom recalled eating both dishes as a young girl. She especially enjoyed Arsig, which the card spells phonetically. My material grandparents came from Chunkush (aka Chunkoosh), so my mother thought that recipe traveled from the region between the Sea of Marmara and the Black Sea to Chicago, and ultimately, to the San Francisco Bay Area. Being curious about family recipes, I set out to learn more about Arsig.

 

I searched my Armenian cookbook collection for a similar lamb and grape leaf stew recipe. No luck. I consulted Musa Dagdeviren’s outstanding The Turkish Cookbook (2019, Phaidon) which contains a host of recipes that I recognize as Armenian, but I didn’t see a dish comparable to Arsig. Nothing turned up when I tried various internet searches. Then fortune smiled upon me: I had Armenian Cuisine (2011) by Aline Kamakian and Barbara Drieskens sent from the Glendale Library, Arts & Culture (GLAC) to my local library. This cookbook contains a recipe for Gertembourt that the authors translate as Vine Leaf Stew. Although not identical to Arsig, the recipe for Gertembourt looks pretty darn close. When I google Gertembourt, my search returns a single hit: Kamakian/Drieskens’s cookbook on eatyourbooks.com.

 

The found Arsig recipe card lacks detail. I’ve cooked the dish, which serves 6 to 8, a number of times now. Here’s how I make Arsig.

 

1.4 liters / 48 ounces lamb stock

454 grams / 16 ounces brined grape leaves, cut into ¼-inch slices

1000 grams / 2.2 pounds boneless lamb shoulder stew, cut into 1½-inch cubes

794 grams / 28 ounces whole peeled tomatoes, cut with scissors into ½-inch pieces

0.5 grams / ¼ teaspoon ground cayenne pepper

Kosher salt to taste

120 ml / ½ cup lemon juice from 2 large lemons

400 grams / 14 ounces bulgur wheat

 

In a 7.25 quart round Dutch oven, add lamb stock, sliced grape leaves, lamb, tomatoes with juice, kosher salt and cayenne. Bring to a simmer over medium heat, reduce to low heat, cover and cook. After 15 minutes, add lemon juice, cover and continue to cook at a low simmer for 2 hours.

 

After 2 hours, bring contents to a boil over medium heat, add bulgur wheat while stirring. Return to stew to a simmer over a low heat, cover, and cook, stirring occasionally. After 15 minutes, turn off heat, season to taste and let stew rest, covered, for 10 minutes.

 

Some notes. I use Karkazian Ranch Fresno Grape Leaves to make this dish. I sometimes use grape leaves imported from Armenia and from Bulgaria but think the Karkazian Ranch leaves tastier and much easier to handle. I do not rinse these leaves before slicing them for Arsig.

 

Food manufacturers grade bulgur wheat by size (e.g., extra fine, fine, medium, course and very course). In this recipe I often use Bob’s Red Mill Bulgur, which the company grades as medium. I also like Duru stone-milled bulgur from Turkey.

 

I buy both my lamb shoulder and lamb stock from The Local Butcher, located near the corner of Shattuck Avenue and Cedar Street in Berkeley. I’ve purchased a lot of lamb for Armenian dishes from this shop; its butchers do a great job sourcing and cutting meat. The Local Butcher sells frozen lamb stock that makes Arsig much faster and easier to prepare. I prep the cubed lamb by sprinkling them with a heathy amount of Crystal Diamond kosher salt and placing the meat on a rack and tray to sit overnight, uncovered, in the refrigerator. 

 

As grandparents and parent pass away, it can become increasingly difficult to save a family’s food history, especially of people forced into diaspora. Through serendipity I stumbled upon these two cards. Otherwise, my family’s history of these dishes would have vanished.  When I spoke with my mom about Arsig, she remembered her family eating it with lavosh bread and thinly shaved red torpedo onions.

 

This lamb and grape vine stew deserves to live on. Arsig tastes bright and delicious. I made a vegetarian version of the stew for my daughter using chickpeas in place of lamb and 4 cups chickpea stock (here), 2 cups water and 40 grams of butter. This version tastes delicious, too!

Chickpea Stock

Ten Speed Press recently published David Kinch’s new cookbook entitled At Home in the Kitchen. Written with Devin Fuller, the book stays true to its subtitle: “Simple recipes from a chef’s night off.” Kinch, the executive chef at the Michelin 3-star Manresa, spends Tuesdays unwinding and cooking the comfort food featured in his new cookbook. Sourcing pristine ingredients, like sushi-grade fish for his Salmon Rillettes or Sashimi-style Raw Fish with Sushi Rice might prove a challenge depending upon where you live. But for the most part, the book’s 120 easy-to-make recipes are supermarket-friendly (even though my local market will probably never offer butter as deep yellow as the photogenic stick on page 12).

 

And speaking of butter, Kinch opens At Home in the Kitchen with a short observation called “Butter the Size of a Walnut”. He writes how recipes from his grandmothers and “some of the most austere French cookbooks I’ve studied as a chef” call for inexact quantities (e.g., butter the size of a walnut or half a glass of white wine). These descriptions forced him to cook with his eyes. Modern recipes, although often exact to the gram, still require cooks to adapt. Kinch writes: “[w]hen it comes to using [At Home in the Kitchen], everything is an estimate—albeit a thoughtful one. A potato will roast differently depending on how thinly you slice it and how hot 400°F actually is in your oven. So, if I say about 30 minutes, and the potatoes crunch when you take a bite, put the pan back in the oven and keep checking until they’re cooked through.”

 

This caveat came to mind after trying Kinch’s recipe for Mushrooms al Horno with Crusty Bread. He writes that the baked mushrooms “kick out their water, which combines with the wine, garlic, vinegar, and herbs to make a very flavorful sauce.” My mushroom medley must have attended the Garo Yepremian School of Kicking and Passing because the baked mushrooms came out of the oven stone dry—but still delicious. Next time I will try a different mushroom combination.

 

In keeping with Kinch’s theme of Tuesday is my night off, At Home in the Kitchen’s eight chapters focus on hospitality-friendly dishes. Chapter 1, entitled “Small plates to cover your table + condiments to fill your pantry”, stands out by offering outstanding stocks and other pantry items. I made Kinch’s Parmesan Stock recipe and used up all the leftover cheese rinds I had hiding in my refrigerator. I used the stock, which keeps for 3 months in the freezer, to make pilaf.

 

Another favorite recipe from this first chapter is one of the humblest. Kinch’s Chickpea Stock gives the cook both a flavorful stock and cooked chickpeas. Here are Kinch’s introduction and recipe, which makes about 8 cups of stock and 4 cups of cooked chickpeas.

 

“If you find yourself wondering why soups and sauces at restaurants taste so much better than the ones you make at home, it’s probably because restaurants use house-made stock. Stock is the foundation of a dish, and particularly good stock can be the jumping-off point that takes a home-cooked meal to the next level. This is a wonderful, versatile stock that happens to be vegetarian. Perfect for Date-Night Risotto with Crab (page 147) or Chickpea Minestrone, Genovese Style (page 214), this stock, in particular, can also be widely used in place of water for just about any recipe to add complexity of flavor. This recipe also leaves you with 4 cups of cooked chickpeas. I recommend using them for the Raw Fava, Chickpea & Tahini Hummus [on page 35].

 

2 cups dried chickpeas

1 bay leaf

2 pieces star anise

4 sprigs thyme

1 head garlic, bottom root trimmed, head halved horizontally, skin on

1 teaspoon black peppercorns

1 medium white onion, halved

2 carrots, ends discarded and peeled

1 teaspoon sugar

Salt

 

In a large pot, immerse the chickpeas in water and soak for 2 hours. Alternatively, you can soak overnight, but decrease the cook time to around 1 hour in total so as not to overcook the chickpeas.

 

Drain the chickpeas and discard the water. Wrap the bay leaf, star anise, thyme, garlic, and peppercorns in cheesecloth and tie shut with string to make a sachet.

 

In a large pot on high heat, bring the chickpeas and 10 cups water to a simmer. The pot will form a scum resembling soap suds. Skim off the scum and turn the heat to low. Add the onion, carrots, herb sachet, and sugar and bring the stock back to a simmer.

 

After 45 minutes, stir in a couple pinches of salt. Avoid the temptation to add salt at the beginning because this toughens the skin of the chickpeas. Continue to simmer, uncovered, until the chickpeas have cooked through, about 45 minutes more. The chickpeas are finished when they no longer taste dry but still remain some of their texture.

 

Remove the pot from the heat, cover, and let the chickpeas cool completely in their broth, ideally overnight. This allows the final extraction of flavor, and the results will merit the extra time.

 

Remove the herb sachet, carrots, and onions and discard. Strain the chickpeas over a large bowl to reserve the stock. Both the stock and the chickpeas can be used immediately or stored separately in airtight containers in the freezer for up to 3 months.”

 

One of the things I like about this particular Chickpea Stock recipe is what I like most about At Home in the Kitchen: the advice that Kinch shares throughout the cookbook. In the case of his Chickpea Stock recipe, I learned to infuse the cooked chickpea stock with its ingredients overnight to extract extra flavor. At Home in the Kitchen includes a treasure-trove of these culinary gems, especially on how to increase the flavor of a dish.

 

Of late I’ve noticed a number of cookbooks with some nice chickpea recipes. Jeremy Fox’s On Vegetables (2017) has a recipe for Chickpeas in Broth, Lots of Olive Oil & Black Pepper, Pan con Tomate. (Fox worked for Kinch at Manresa.) Nancy Silverton’s Chi Spacca (2020) includes a Whole Roasted Eggplant with Chickpea Purée and Zhug recipe. And Eric Ripert’s brand new cookbook, Vegetable Simple (2021), features a super simple Chickpea Salad (page 73). All these recipes start with dried chickpeas. A chickpea variety that I really like is called sultano. Gustiamo, an on-line retailer, imports these special dried chickpeas from Italy. Although pricey when compared to the dried chickpeas that often reside on the bottom shelf of supermarkets, these small, organic Italian chickpeas have a pronounced nutty flavor. They make great falafel, too. 

 

I religiously follow cookbook reviews and I am not sure why At Home in the Kitchen isn’t getting a lot more press: I think it is one of the best spring 2021 cookbooks along with Mister Jiu’s in Chinatown by Brandon Jew and Tienlon Ho. I have a long list of recipes from At Home in the Kitchen that I want to try: Farinata; Jambalaya, New Orleans Style; Roast Chicken; Oyster Stew; and Almond Granita. Adding to the entertaining/party vibe of At Home in the Kitchen, Kinch recommends a musical pairing with each of his recipes. What tune pairs well with Chickpea Stock? “Cadillac Lane” by Buck Owens.

Minestra di “cicerchiole” con i ceci

I hope that you and your loved ones are all safe and well.

 

My state’s Stay Home/Stay Healthy order allows market shopping, but experts advise to limit these outings to once a week. So like many others, I am buying more canned and dried food items. I picked up some dried chickpeas (aka garbanzos beans) and decided to make a bean and pasta soup from Oretta Zanini De Vita’s Popes, Peasants, and Shepherds: Recipes and Lore from Rome and Lazio (University of California Press, 2013). I find this pantry-friendly dish comforting and, when necessary, adaptable.

 

Minestra di “cicerchiole” con i ceci features a small, square pasta that goes by different names throughout Italy. Many will recognize the shape as quadrucci and quadretti (“little squares”). A factory-made version goes by the whimsical name lucciole (“fireflies”). But in Lazio, they call the pasta cicerchiole and ciarchiola because its diminutive size approximates that of a local wild pea.

 

Here’s Zanini De Zita’s recipe for Minestra di “cicerchiole” con i ceci (Soup of chickpeas and homemade pasta).

 

1 pound (500g) chickpeas, soaked and ready to cook

1 sprig rosemary

1 slice lardo or pancetta

1 garlic clove

1 ladleful tomato purée

salt

5 ounces (150g) cicerchiole (i.e., quadrucci, a homemade pastina)

 

Bring 2 quarts (2 liters) lightly salted water to a boil in a pot. Add the chickpeas and rosemary and cook over medium heat until the chickpeas are tender; the timing will depend on the age of the chickpeas. Check after 20 minutes and frequently thereafter. Drain the chickpeas, reserving the cooking water.

 

Chop together the lardo and garlic and sauté gently in a pan over low heat. Add the tomato purée, season with salt, and cook until the sauce is well reduced. Add the cooked chickpeas, the pasta and 4 cups (1 liter) of the chickpea water to a boil. When the pasta is al dente, transfer the soup to a tureen or ladle into individual bowls and serve.

 

Some notes and thoughts. In my experience, dried chickpeas—at least the store-bought domestic ones sold in the US—rarely cook in 20 minutes. Check after 20 minutes, but let the chickpeas cook until they are truly tender—this may take an hour or even longer—but not so long lest the chickpeas become mush.

 

If you have lardo, pancetta or some other equivalent meat or fat on hand, then lucky you. With no lardo or equivalent in my pantry, I sautéed the garlic in a couple good glugs—maybe 4 tablespoons—of nice olive oil. In the past, I’ve added diced onion to the garlic, and sometimes carrot and celery, too. Many recipes for chickpeas and pasta soup include anchovies.

 

In Popes, Peasants, and Shepherds, Zanini De Zita shares a quick and easy way to make cicerchiole:  cut fresh “…fettuccine crosswise at intervals equal to the width of the noodle.” She writes that most recipes for cicerchiole call for an egg dough.

 

With the flour shortage at my local market and because I own a KoMo grain mill (here), I made whole-wheat pasta mixing one large egg with 50 grams freshly-milled Warthog hard red wheat from Barton Springs Mills and 50 grams Central Milling Artisan Bakers Craft Plus bread flour. (More on milling, blending and bolting flour for pasta here and here.) As it comes out of the mill, Warthog flour strongly smells of cinnamon and baking spice.

 

If you want to take a deeper dive into cicerchiole, I recommend that you consult Zanini De Zita’s Encyclopedia of Pasta (University of California Press, 2009) and The Geometry of Pasta (Quirk, 2010) by Caz Hildebrand and Jacob Kenedy. Zanini De Vita covers cicerchiole in the Encyclopedia’s Entry No. 203 for Quadrucci. She writes that the small pasta generally contains wheat flour, eggs and sometimes nutmeg. In central and southern Italy, cooks often make this pasta using just flour and water. In Italy’s Marche region, they mix wheat and corn flour to create their version called quadrelli pelosi. Lazio’s cicerchiole often contain wheat and emmer flour.

Looking at the above regional variations, one might conclude that authenticity springs from necessity and availability. So especially at a time like this, use what you have on hand. And if that’s dried pasta, cook it in salted water then add the pasta to the cooked chickpeas (or beans or farro or barley or lentils).

 

Back to cicerchiole. The Geometry of Pasta says the small square pasta measure 3mm by 3mm by .5mm. Kenedy writes that the little squares are “…the simplest shape to make, but rather fiddly and so easier to buy.” This may be true in normal times, but these are not normal times. 

Pinzimonio di Ceci

Some outstanding new cookbooks hit our bookstore shelves in June 2015. Little Brown published The Beetlebung Farm Cookbook by Chris Fischer. Fischer worked in some prestigious kitchens, such as Babbo in New York and St. John Bread and The River Café in London, before running his family’s farm on Martha’s Vineyard. The Beetlebung Farm Cookbook features direct, simple dishes made with local ingredients: Beet Salad with Green Tomatoes and Radishes; Baby Leek, Asparagus and Pea Green Soup; Slow-Roasted Lamb Shanks with Parsnips; and Strawberry Shortcake. Fischer (with Catherine Young) penned a very fine work.

Across the pond Mitchell Beazley released Mamushka: Recipes from Ukraine & Beyond by Olia Hercules. Because Armenia is one of the book’s “Beyonds”, Mamushka intrigued me and I’m extremely happy I bought this cookbook. Hercules’s chapters covering fermented pickles and preserves, desserts and drinks stand out as among the best.  And speaking of dessert, here’s a shot of Hercules’s Osyne gnizdo (Wasp Nest Buns). Really good.

And now, let’s move on to the star of this post: Five Quarters: Recipes and Notes from a Kitchen in Rome by Rachel Roddy and published by England’s Saltyard Book Company. Even though I write a food blog, I don’t really read other cooking blogs…expect Roddy’s. Many of my favorite everyday recipes come from her cooking site, Rachel Eats. I understand that a US version of Five Quarters arrives in February 2016, but I couldn’t wait that long. I ordered my copy from overseas and it just arrived. I highly recommend this outstanding cookbook to anyone interested in simple, mostly Italian food.

Roddy lives in Rome’s Testaccio quarter. She writes that “Quinto quarto (the fifth quarter) is the name of the distinctive style of cooking created by the workers of the Testaccio slaughterhouse during the 1890s. Partially paid in kind with offal—which makes up a quarter of the animal’s weight, hence ‘fifth quarter’—the workers (or their wives) found clever ways of transforming their wages into nourishing and tasty meals.”

If offal puts you off, fear not! Roddy’s work isn’t entirely comprised of nose-to-tail dishes. Rather, her book celebrates simple, straightforward food that pretty much anyone can make without a whole bunch of fuss. Roddy culls excellent recipes and advice from locals in Rome, Italian friends and families, and talented food writers, such as Oretta Zanini De Vita, Fergus Henderson, Elizabeth David, Rose Gray and Ruth Rogers.

Five Quarters contains so many excellent recipes that it’s hard to know where to begin cooking. Stand outs include: Fettuccine con Burro e Alici (Fettuccine with Butter and Anchovies) that I remember cooking from a Rachael Eats post; Pasta e Lenticchie (Pasta and Lentil Soup), and Pinzimonio di Ceci (Chickpeas with Greens).

Let me quickly lament that some of my all-time favorite recipes from Roddy’s blog did not make it into her book. So I’ll just have to continue to visit Rachel Eats to find the recipe for Spaghetti with Anchovy Bread Crumbs and Eleonore’s Polpette, an AMAZINGLY delicious dish of small breaded meatballs fried and then finished with white wine.

If forced to pick my favorite recipe from Five Quarters, I choose Pinzimonio di Ceci or Chickpeas with Greens. I make some variation of this dish a handful of times every month. The original recipe comes from The River Café Cook Book (entitled Rogers Grey Italian Country Cookbook (1995) here in the States). Roddy writes that her copy of The River Café Cook Book “falls open at page 172” where you’ll find this recipe. She continues: “[t]he combination of the soft greens,…sweet and tender nubs of carrots and onion, heat from the chilli and depth from the wine and tomato is a full and delicious one.” Hear, hear! The dish serves 6.

600 g greens, preferably Swiss chard

1 red onion

2 carrots

5 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil, plus extra to serve

1 dried chilli, crumbled

250 ml white wine

2 tablespoons tomato passata, or 1 tablespoon concentrate

400g cooked chickpeas

a generous handful of chopped flat-leaf parsley

juice of ½ lemon

salt and freshly ground black pepper

Bring a large pan of well-salted water to a fast boil, add the greens and blanch them briefly. The timing will depend on the greens; spring greens take 3-5 minutes. Taste them to check. Drain them well, and once they are cool enough to handle, chop them coarsely and set aside.

Chop the onion and carrots. Warm the oil in a heavy-based sauté pan, add the onion, carrots and a pinch of salt and cook them slowly for 15 minutes, or until tender. Season with a little more salt and pepper and add the crumbled chilli. Add the wine to the pan and allow it to bubble away until it has almost completely reduced. Add the tomato passata or concentrate, greens and chickpeas, stir and cook, stirring every couple of minutes for 10 minutes.

Add three-quarters of the chopped parsley and the lemon juice, stir, remove from the heat and allow to sit for 10 minutes. Transfer to a large platter or serving plate, sprinkle with the remaining parsley and a little more extra-virgin olive oil, and serve.

Some notes and observations. Roddy writes that the dish is a meal in itself (and it is), but she will add some ricotta on the side or even an egg on top (which is a brilliant idea). I typically serve these chickpeas and greens over couscous or Japanese semi-brown rice. I’ve tried the dish using Swiss chard, kale, spinach, collard greens, beet greens and even stinging nettles. I like the spinach version best because of its soft, melting texture. I usually add celery to the onion and carrot battuto. I sometimes use chicken stock in place of the wine (and skip the lemon juice). In short, play with this recipe and adjust it to suit your taste.

I know that ordering a heavy cookbook from overseas costs a lot, but in the case of Five Quarters, I believe this fine book warrants the outlay. So far 2015 looks like a great year for cookbooks: first, Pasta by Hand (here); now Five Quarters; and on the horizon, This is Camino by Russell Moore.