Succotash, Umami, and Cucumber Sandwiches (by Leslie McGrath)

Last Saturday I had a bucket list experience: I spent two hours with in a high-end kitchen supply outlet store with my daughter, who works there, and her employee discount. I realized that I bought things not only because I needed them, or wanted to replace an older version, but also because the words used to describe them were too delicious to forgo. The “corn zipper” is a case in point. This tool allows a cook to strip an ear of corn right from the root of each nib. The promise of efficiency is delivered in the word “zipper” and I can only hope I hear that zipping sound when I first use it to make succotash. Succotash is a Narragansett Indian word for “broken pieces”, first cooked along the coast of New England where corn and lima beans were plentiful. It’s a simple mixture of the two vegetables, a little salt pork for the fat, and some milk or cream to hold it together enough to make it a dish. It was an inexpensive meal, a thrifty way to put leftover corn to use.

I also bought a tube “umami paste”. Umami is part of the flavor spectrum (sour, salty, sweet, and bitter) and first was known to the Japanese, whose cuisine traditionally combines foods to produce a savory taste like that’s found in fish, mushrooms, cheeses, and fermented foods like soy and fish sauce.

It’s an earthiness, a brown base note in the mouth. Umami strikes me as being more complex than the other elementary tastes. After all, fermentation takes time and often a number of ingredients. This tube of umami paste seems a sort of cheat, as though one can bypass the effort and knowledge necessary for building umami by squirting some of this goo into soup.

Yesterday I came across a food I hadn’t seen in quite some time: cucumber sandwiches. I’d been invited to a local couple’s home for “a Pimm’s in the garden” in honor of two poets who were in Stonington for Merrill House events. Pimm’s is a gin based liqueur made with citrus fruit and spices, very popular in England.  Our host was a well-travelled Irishman who had set up an outdoor bar alongside a table of food. There were nuts and corn chips, a large pitcher of flowers, and two enormous pewter trays lined with triangles of cucumber tea sandwiches. My friend the poet Richie Hofman took this photo. Traditionally, cucumber sandwiches are very delicate. Made only with thin slices of peeled cucumber on the very thin white bread (trimmed of crust) with a scrim of butter on the inside so the sandwiches stay crisp, they’re a food more about effort, precision and texture rather than flavor. A cucumber sandwich is a gesture toward the older, more languid times (and places) when people met in the afternoon to chat as the day cooled.

Succotash, umami, and cucumber sandwiches. Three very different flavors with background stories as complex as the etymologies of their names. The words themselves when used in a poem have very dense specific gravities, carrying as they do connotations both cultural and personal.

 

Comments

[Stephanie Brown]

This piece is so full of flavor! Sight, taste and texture and summer afternoons, salty, earthy and cool. The Williams Sonoma excursion sounds divine. I have considered buying that corn zipper.

[Leslie McGrath]

Hi Stephanie,

Thank you for those kind words. The corn zipper is my new favorite thing. It's made in Switzerland! And has a cutout smiley face. I think all tools should have some sort of smiley face on them.

[Laura Orem]

"Corn Zipper" sounds like the title of a new collection of poems. Also, I didn't know soy sauce was fermented.

I have four lima bean vines. I will send you a boatload of them when they are ready.

[Amy Greacen]

You had me at Pimm's. My friend Rachel got me hooked on a cocktail apparently called "lawn party" that combines pimms #1 with ginger ale, a splash of vodka, s;ices of cucumber and, if memory serves, a sprig of mint. It is summer in a glass.

Was the umami paste MSG? I've seen it there at WS and never really picked it up.

This is a fun strand, Leslie. Of course not all artists are foodies, but the sensualist pleasure angle of eating is a whole other level of nourishment and it opens immense vistas in writing. We shall have to plan a few menus. :-)

(I foresee an installment of "Much depends upon Dinner" in sometime between Halloween and Thanksgiving. You?)

[The Best American Poetry]

Pimm's! I just bought a new bottle yesterday. The standard Pimm's Cup mixes the gin-based liqueur with lemonade and ice, and that's a good summer drink (especially if the lemonade is fresh and you're an anglophile), but it's even better when you add a shot of good gin kept in the freezer (e.g., New Amsterdam). I'm sipping one such right now with the Mets ahead of the Cubs 2-0 and darkness settling on the lakeside greenery out the western window. DL

[Leslie McGrath]

Amy-- no msg in the umami paste, thank goodness. And we should think of doing a dialogue week here when you're the James Merrill fellow. That'd be rousing!

David, the image of your Pimm's cocktail stayed with me all day. I've now got a bottle of gin in the freezer and a fresh bottle of Pimm's at the ready. Just as soon as I grade a couple dozen essays.

Leslie

[Sarah G.]

Delicious, all of this.