A quick plug first for the NYT’s piece on the rise in pedestrian deaths at night in the United States. It’s the opposite of the lazy, heavily manipulated kinds of social science that typically get promoted by American journalists. It starts with a very strong signal in the data and then thinks its way through it, without resorting to favoring a single simple explanation that happens to be tractable to policy. While I’m at it, I also have a shout out to the great read on a 1973 mountain-climbing expedition to the Andean peak Aconcagua.
This past weekend, I made a Mongolian beef stirfry that I liked and a Thai-inspired clam chowder (with coconut milk and lemongrass) built off of one of Andy Baraghani’s recipes.
And then, with the rain pouring down, I decided it was time for a pot of chili.
I’ve written about chile before. It’s the first dish I learned to cook confidently and the one I tend to improvise the most in making it. I keep mulling over the possibility of making a chile that’s technically the same as my usual approach but that uses a more South Asian flavor mix, or some other variation, and I feel completely at ease with the idea. I can easily think of shifting towards a different protein—a chicken chile, a chile verde with pork, a seafood chile (takes a different cooking strategy, though). A vegetarian chile is pretty easy to imagine, though I’m not fond of beans in mine. (I’d rather use mushrooms and eggplant for the bulk, for example, and serve it on rice.)
When I think on it sometimes, I feel a bit odd when I try to imagine what someone growing up with me as the household chef would say was my speciality or the kind of thing they remember most warmly. I don’t have a “culture” as such, I’m not making the foods from my own memories as such. Like a lot of white bougies of my era, I make a kind of post-Chez Panisse nouvelle cosmopolitan cuisine. The “authentic food of my people” is restaurants and Top Chef and specialty grocery stories. But chile does come close to being my roots, even if I’m the main person in the house that loves it.
I used to try a few new things in any given batch, and I always tend to vary the mix of spices. These days, I’m a little more predictable because I feel like I’m pretty much in the zone, that I’ve finalized my ideal version. It’s always going to start with onions and garlic, it’s always going to have a sofrito of sweet bell peppers and poblanos on top of that, I’m almost always going to use ground beef and Italian sausage, and I’m generally going to make a paste of soaked dried chiles, dried fruit, nuts (usually pepitas), canned chipotles and old bread in with the meat and vegetables before crushed tomatoes and red wine go into it.
And I’m always going to use cumin in the spice mix, along with some ground ancho pepper, salt, and ground coriander.
Which opened up a thought for me this time: what the heck is cumin? I read a lot about food history and about the political economy of global food production in the present moment so I was kind of flabbergasted to realize that one of the spices that I use in a huge range of my cooking is a complete unknown to me. At that moment, I couldn’t have told you where it grows today. It’s plain just looking at it that it is a seed, but of what kind of plant? Do we eat any other part of the plant? How old is the production and use of cumin? How important was it, is it, economically? I didn’t have an answer for any of it.
24 hours or so later, I’m slightly better off. Gary Paul Nabhan’s book Cumin, Camels and Caravans is about more than just cumin, but it situates the spice of my momentary interest in a general historical context that I’m more familiar with.1 I also note on a quick search of scholarship that there’s a tremendous amount of nutritional research on nigella seeds, aka “black cumin”, which some of you may remember was a spice I didn’t have in my cabinet when I started writing my Cookbook Survivor column. A book on spice chemistry goes over the same ground as many reference works: cumin is from the eastern Mediterranean originally and has been used in human cooking for a very long time, prized as much for its aromatics as its flavor.2 Much of the cumin in circulation every year is grown in India, but Indians consume much of what they grow; other producers of cumin today include Pakistan, Turkey, China, Mexico and Chile and Syria. The Wikipedia entry notes that it looks like caraway, and some ancient languages referred to it as a variation of caraway. (Another nice Wikipedia detail: because it’s so often in bird seed mixes, birds end up pooping it out all over the planet and it grows wild in a lot of places as a result.)
I also learn from the Chemistry of Spices that cumin is seen by Europeans as preventing flatulence, which I had not heard before, and also generally is seen as having medicinal properties helpful for gastro-intestinal issues. Also that cumin oil from the herb itself and from the seeds is different in composition but that it’s usually made from the seeds. It’s used in German baked goods, apparently, which I hadn’t heard before. And as I knew, almost not at all in Chinese food, which I actually think is kind of odd—five-spice powder seems to me as if it could have cumin in it. Feels like there’s got to be a deeper history there worth poking around in, maybe Nabhan’s book is a good place to start.
Anyway, this is what’s great about food and history—you can suddenly be struck that something you think you know is vitally dependent on something you know nothing about.
Nabhan, Gary Paul. Cumin, Camels, and Caravans: A Spice Odyssey. 1st ed. University of California Press, 2014.
Chempakam, Bhageerathy., V. A. Parthasarathy, and T. John. Zachariah. Chemistry of Spices. Wallingford, UK ; CABI Pub., 2008.
Though I do like beans in my chili…just saying, in case you ever want to cook me some chili, Tim. :)