Most Brits associate mincemeat with Christmas – its intoxicating mix of fruit, spices, booze, nuts and mixed peel provide Pavlovian stimuli, stirring memories of cherubic choirs a-caroling, roasted poultry, and the Queen’s speech – whereas I associate it with Easter, because it was always around then that we finally ran out of mince pies. I use the term “ran out” quite deliberately, as mince pies were the kind of thing that, growing up, were considered within the realm of “supplies”, so numerous were they. Every year in early December, my industrious mother would make at least six, but often as many as ten, dozen individual mince pies, fashioned lovingly from homemade mincemeat she had prepared several months in advance.

These seasonal confections then proceeded to appear on the table each and every mealtime, during tea breaks, whenever we had company over and any other time people were sat sitting and might be persuaded to have a smackerel of something, until everyone was thoroughly sick of the sight of them. Towards the end of March, the sight of the poor, battered-looking stragglers, that had been taken in and out their box so many times that their pastry shells were all dented and crumbly, was particularly sad.

The derivation of the word mincemeat, which today contains no minced meat, is Medieval, from a time shortly after Marco Polo had returned from the East, and every cook worth his salt was finding new ways to disguise and preserve rotten provisions with the spices he popularized. Adding cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves to ground meat, dried fruits, candied peel and chopped nuts before soaking the whole lot in high octane liquor must have been a hit at the time, which probably speaks more to the concurrent lack of fresh meat than to whether this was, in fact, a delicious preparation. Either way, it caught the imagination of a nation, and though the ground meat has largely been dropped, the tradition of using these spices to perfume pie filling continues strongly.

Another reason mincemeat was such a hit way back when is because once made, it can be expected to keep, unrefrigerated for as long as 2 years – something my mother bore in mind, as she often made hers over the first weekend of the New Year giving it ample time to “improve” over the next 12 months. Throughout the year, she would occasionally rouse it from its slumbers, turning it over and adding a touch more brown sugar or booze as she deemed necessary. Suffice it to say that by the time Easter came around, and the last mince pies were served, their mincemeat contents was nearing its second birthday, and was so highly perfumed that to inhale deeply close to a warmed mincer was to risk singed nose hairs.

Following my mother’s established tradition, I was well prepared, having put together my mincemeat last January, and fed it occasionally throughout 2011, so that it was rich and boozy by the time the Holidays arrived. Unfortunately, the energetic screams of our firstborn put paid to any intentions I may have had of making batches of personal mince pies before Christmas, so I had plenty of mincemeat leftover to ring in the New Year with. Inspired by a desire to produce something that people would actually eat before the next Christian festival hove into view, I quickly prepared this mincemeat stuffed quince. You could quite equally pair it with a vanilla custard/creme anglaise or, as I prefer, a whisky-laced whipped cream, but I lost my dander somewhere along the way and just shook some powdered sugar over it to evoke the wintry season instead.

I could have used apples in this recipe, but opted for quince largely because it’s one of those fruits that was, coincidentally, first popularized in the UK during Elizabethan times and has, rather sadly, since fallen out of favor. Brought originally from Asia and sometimes known by the moniker “love apple”, quince isn’t dissimilar in taste and texture to the apple — to which it is botanically related and which would make a fine substitute here — but when you’ve got the strains of “Good King Wencelas” with its frosty and feudal lyrics echoing in your mind, quince just feels right. [For more on quince, check out our friend Rachel Eats.]

Oven-baked quince are really, really good: rich, almost custardy in flavor and not overly sweet. A perfect dessert for the Holiday period, providing enough time is taken between courses. It’s probably not worth making a batch of mincemeat just for this purpose, but they are they dead easy and quick to pull together, and will be eaten in no time, allowing you and your family to leave Yuletide flavors safely behind you before the end of January.

I’m not very old, but for much of my youth in the north west of England, it was almost impossible to find fresh foods that weren’t local. Today such a statement seems like an echo of Victorian times, but, literally, that’s how it was until a supermarket was built behind the Knutsford courthouse in the late 80s.

I often tell my wife about the cheese stall at the weekly market only kept five kinds of cheese – Cheshire, Cheddar, Lancashire, and sage Derby were ever present, with perhaps a Wenslydale reasonably common too. If anything as unusual as a Stilton, from distant Nottinghamshire, appeared, it would generate as much commotion among the town’s housewives, who elbowed their way to the front of the queue to catch a glimpse of this highly perfumed foreigner, as if Julio Iglesias showed up sporting his tennis shorts. My wife usually responds that I should count myself lucky because when she was young there were only four kinds of cheese at her local supermarket: white American, yellow American, cheddar and Swiss and had anything else been available it would have been looked upon with extreme suspicion. Touché.

Making our weekly Tuesday rounds of the covered (indoor) market (the outdoor market sold mostly fruit and veg, bric a brac, and live pets, believe it or not) with my mother, on the cheese man’s left was the egg man, or “mister Chookie” as I knew him, on account of his perennial sales pitch “come tek a look at these lover-lee chookie eggs I’ve got for yuh!”. Unlike his fellow stall-holders, whose wares fell within a particular genre, the egg man also sold milk, orange juice and yogurt due to him being one of the younger siblings of the Sheldon family that owned the local dairy, and who, excepting market days, delivered these provisions to the doorsteps of the town’s residents.

Beyond Mr. Chookie was the fish man, Mr. Scales, as my mother used to call him, although at the time her pun was lost on me. Above his stall ran the legend “fresh daily from Fleetwood, Lancs”, referring to the port just north of blackpool where much of Britain’s catch was landed. That his stall was only open Tuesdays and Thursdays didn’t seem to matter. Whether it was due to her upbringing in blackpool where there is – rightfully – a great deal of local snobbery about the quality of the fish that goes into their fish n’chips, or whether because of an innate suspicion of fishmongers, my mother always eyed mr scales’s wares closely, casting a wary eye over his glossy fish, as if trying to discern if there was anything untoward hiding among the cockle-shells. Because we rarely had fish except on Fridays when we weren’t allowed anything else – even in our lunchboxes at school we had to mark the end of the week with evil-smelling “salmon paste” sandwiches – and because mum worked a full day on Thursdays, whatever we bought on Tuesdays had to last on ice in the bottom of the fridge until then (freezing fish made it taste all woolly, she always said), so freshness was absolutely crucial otherwise it/we wouldn’t survive.

Typically, the fish was cod, but often halibut or hake did service in the flaky white fish department. This was usually broiled and served with oven-baked chips, since as a nurse my mother couldn’t countenance deep-frying at home lest it give the townies the impression she was a hypocrite in her dietary exhortations, and homemade mushy peas, flecked with mint and tangy with a splash of malt vinegar. Apart from a distinctly non-traditional and rather dodgy-looking “curry” she made every so often, friday night fish suppers were my dad’s favorite – he still demands it to this day and he is about as agnostic an Anglican as you’ll find.

Instead of waiting for Friday, and going against my mum’s rubric of no-frying, but keeping with the buying of white fish on a Tuesday, we made a version of the Provencal classic, aioli garni, with a pan seared halibut fillet, steamed fennel and butter beans. Rather like much of the cooking I experienced growing up, it doesn’t look like much on the plate – the pale colors and the two sauces lapping against one another may seem bland – but the sharp tang of the garlicky aiolli with the surprising hot peppery-bite of the brown sauce against the muted flavors of the white fish and butter beans makes for an unusually rewarding dish. I am convinced that my mum would’ve enjoyed this dish a great deal, even though she would have asked why we didn’t save it for Friday night. As for my dad, well, sadly, he wouldn’t touch it on account of it humming with garlic. Too bad for him.

The largely unknown city of Compiegne, France, has the distinction of being the site of one of Louis XV’s most extravagant homes away from home. Under him, the Chateau de Compiegne became one of three distinctly opulent seats of government alongside Versailles and Fontainbleau. The latter French monarchs were hardly known for their desire to live simply as visitors to either of those other palaces can attest, and Compiegne is no exception, taking more than 35 years to complete with Louis constantly tinkering at the design to aggrandize it to his tastes. When finished it made the perfect departure point for forays into the nearby Forest of Compiegne, ancestral hunting grounds of French royalty, for some bracing sport. However, Louis was not into taking chances on returning with his game bag empty, and it is said that the forest was so well-stocked that a blind marksman could still expect to feast on wild meats.

Of course, it’s well-known that the rest of the French population were not eating in quite such grand style at that time, and it wasn’t until after the revolution and the rise of the bourgeois class that the French institution with which many of us are most familiar came into being, namely, the restaurant. Happily for us, upon visiting Compiegne in early 2010, we found that these days the city is much more egalitarian in its approach and makes abundant gastronomic accommodation for a range of economic classes. Indeed, the night we arrived, we dined somewhat opulently on escargot ravioli and kir royal before joining the sans culottes at the other end of the social spectrum the following evening with a carafe of vin ordinaire to wash down a marvelously flavorful jarret de porc, poached pig’s hock, a humble dish that was almost certainly never prepared for residents of the Chateau. Served with some whipped potatoes together with its poaching broth that would have been almost as good without the hock itself, le jarret was juicy, incredibly rich and porky, and meltingly tender.

The porcine counterpart to the famed veal osso buco of Milan, the hock is the lower portion of the animal’s shin bone ending just above the trotter, and is consequently tough and full of connective tissues. As with all such parts of the beast, slow cooking is necessary to get the best out of it, and in the case of the hock, poaching tenderizes it perfectly, but ignores the magic of the skin and underlying fat, comparable with the cheeks in terms of porky flavor. To solve this problem, and improve upon the jarret of Compiegne, we roasted it in a hot oven that performed three special functions: 1) it rendered out some of the fat, 2) crisped the skin into some amazing crackling, and 3) transformed the connective tissue into sticky, almost sweet, gelatin. We then deglazed the roasting pan with some of the strained poaching liquid and reduced the mixture into an almost clear gravy, that combined with a squeeze or two of lemon juice to cut the richness, came together on its own with the pig gelatin.

Unfortunately, and this is why we took until the start of fall 2011 to make this dish, unsmoked pork hocks are rather difficult hard to obtain in America even from reputable butchers where their smoked counterparts are ever present, and it was only last week that we managed to get our hands on some, in, of all places, a regular suburban supermarket. Our freezer is now half-filled with pork hocks which will be dropped into Sunday gravy in the near future, and may well also feature in a special attempt at home-making aspic jelly should we run out of inspiration or suffer from pork overload in the interim. We would encourage you to seek out this humble cut of meat too, you won’t be dining royally but it might help you feel wealthy when you check your bank balance.

Greeks, Romans, Moors, Normans, Spaniards, Garibaldi and his thousand, and finally hordes of tourists have visited Sicily over the milennia. Some stayed for centuries, some only for generations, but even those whose sojourn was comparatively brief played a role in the island’s blending of cultures and traditions.

If this human concoction can be distilled into a single dish, it might be pasta con le sarde. A strikingly simple plate of spaghetti, fennel, onions, and sardines garnished with golden raisins (sultanas) and pine nuts, but its layers of flavor and texture speak of Sicily’s multifarious heritage. Grapes, introduced by the Greeks in the 7th century BC, combining with the tradition of using dried fruit in savory dishes adopted from the Moors, the abundant use of saffron borrowed from the Spanish Bourbon monarchy, and the native reliance on cheap and readily-available ingredients of the highest quality in the onions, foraged wild fennel, pine nuts and the island’s golden olive oil.

And, just like the variegated Sicilian identity, the disagreements over what constitutes a real pasta con le sarde are multihued. Some prefer a thicker long pasta like perciatelli or bucatini over spaghetti, some add breadcrumbs, some refuse to add anchovies, others only saute half the sardines with the sauce, breaking the other half into mix after the pasta has been added to the pan, and yet others would crumble almonds over the assembled dish and bake it in a moderate oven for 20 minutes. The biggest philosophical difference though, lies in the presence of tomato paste. Palermitano’s typically leave it out altogether, whereas cooks further west and south in Trappani, Marsala and, particularly Agrigento, would claim it as an essential ingredient.

Ever the diplomats, we (probably to the aggravation of native Sicilians) chose the middle ground, and elected to use anchovies and bucatini, leave out the tomato paste, cook all the sardines in the sauce, and add both breadcrumbs and broken almonds, but we chose not to bake it. It was wonderful: crunchy, salty and sweet, and with a profound maritime flavor overlaid perfectly by the fennel.

Those of you with an aversion to small oily fish should probably avoid this dish completely for substitutions of whiter, milder species cannot be recommended, unless even greater Sicilian wrath is desired. And, if encouragement to try something different is needed, look no further than the twin factors of wholesomeness and economy. Sardines and pasta are still very affordable, and, for us, halfway through a month-long meatless regimen ahead of a warm weather vacation, it checked all the taste and healthful boxes.

It also checked the seasonal box, for, strictly-speaking, this dish should only be eaten between March and September when wild fennel can be found extending its spidery fronds all over the island’s uplands. For those of us without wild ingredients to hand, or such a favorable climate, cultivated fennel plus a scant 1/4 teaspoon of ground fennel seeds (or a smaller quantity of fennel pollen), provide a similar perfume.

Please note that one should always use the freshest possible sardines, and not just for this recipe. The oilier the fish, the shorter the shelf life – hence why anchovies are so often salted and in oil – and the general rule of thumb is 8-12 hours out of water is about as long as it takes for sardines to go from glorious to gory mess. You can certainly freeze them too, but like most fish, especially small ones, the defrosting process has to be slow and delicate to prevent them from getting mushy.

*Credit should be given to Ferdinando’s Focacceria for inspiring us to cook this dish.

When you think of old-style Italian-American restaurants does red sauce spring to mind? Red check wax table cloths, family-style servings, a free salad with your entree, rotund red-faced guys with their sleeves rolled-up, going “ey!” and slapping each other on the back? Sure, it’s a cliché, but it’s also close to the truth in a lot of places, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. I, for one, love a classic east coast red sauce and meatballs joint, but it’s not the complete picture.

Ferdinando’s Focacceria on Union Street in Brooklyn’s Carroll Gardens neighborhood has been in business as long as any in New York City. In 1910, in the heart of what was then a burgeoning Italian community, it opened its doors principally to cater for expatriate paesani working at the nearby Brooklyn docks, and it’s been serving the neighborhood faithfully ever since. However, unlike many of the other Italian eateries in the area, Fernandino’s does not serve everything with lashings of tomato gravy (not that they don’t offer red sauce – try it with their tripe), instead, they serve their original regional Sicilian dishes as if they don’t care or aren’t aware that long-established Italian restaurants are supposed to top everything with a meatball. They are most famous for their panelle and vastedda (chick pea fritters and veal spleen sandwiches, respectively), which they didn’t just decide to start selling since David Chang and Michael Symon announced it was cool for Brooklyn hipsters to eat offal.

That Ferdinando’s and many other original Italian businesses are still in operation in Carroll Gardens speaks to the fact that descendants of the neighborhood’s original communities remain where their forefathers first landed, in sight of Ellis Island across New York harbor. Not that simply by merit they don’t deserve to be in business, but that health-ninnies and changing dietary proclivities have discouraged most people from looking kindly upon rolls filled with deep fried chickpea dough or boiled calf-innards.

Our recent visit was the culmination of several years of anticipation and a pleasant relief after a terrible, screamy morning with our 5-month old. It was planned as our first lunch out with the baby, and we arrived flustered and desperate that he would nap long enough to allow us to get through a meal in peace. Finding ourselves a table at the rear, as distant as possible from the other patrons, we settled ourselves in and admired the time-worn decor of sepia-tint photos of the old country, a thickly over-painted tin ceiling and some attractive stained glass. The baby sparked awake shortly after we’d ordered our wine, but to our amazement, he emerged from his car-seat cheerful, quiet and relaxed. Maybe he is as susceptible as we are to a relaxing restaurant atmosphere? Whatever the reason, cue a great lunch.

Owner Francesco Buffa’s food is unrepentantly rustic and from the mismatched plates to the friendly but slightly gruff service, it is a truly authentic experience of old Brooklyn that is increasingly hard to find. Starting with a cold octopus and celery salad and a plate of garlicky broccoli di rape with a basket of crisp Italian bread from Mazzola bakery two blocks up, before proceeding with a panelle and mozzarella sandwich and a vastedda special (with the most unctuous ricotta), our happiness reigned for nearly two hours. In fact, so becalmed were we and Paolo, that we had dessert and espresso as the wait staff cooed around the baby.

Buddhists say that expectations are the root of all suffering, but even if we’d had the greatest morning of our lives instead of one of the most grueling, Ferdinando’s would still have been special. We will be heading back again soon to try their famous pasta con le sarde (with sardines, raisins and pine nuts) and rice balls stuffed with house-made ragu and peas. Whether Paolo will cooperate remains to be seen, but the food is so good that it’s worth the risk.

Almost seven years ago I journeyed from Santillana del Mar to Santa Maria de Lebaña via San Vicente de la Barquera. So many saints, so much devotion, that it was little surprise to learn that beyond the monastery of Santo Toribio de Liébana and through the Picos de Europe lies the hallowed ground of Covadonga.

It was at the battle of Covadonga in 718 that Christian Spain under Pelayo, King of Asturias, began the reclamation of Iberia from the Muslim Moors. Nestled deep within the Asturian mountains, Covadonga is as important to the Spanish national myth as Hastings is to the British or Lexington to Americans. However, history defies such over-simplification – the linear narrative of one thing followed by another – and it is too easy to say that simply because certain events turned out the way they did there were no other possibilities. Indeed, a sentence stating that the defeat of a Moorish army by a Spanish king at Covadonga began the reconquest of Spain – which culminated in Ferdinand and Isabella vanquishing Boabdil, Emir of Granada, in 1492 – encompasses more than 700 years and glosses over seven whole centuries of war, shifting borders, switching alliances, inter-marriage, suffering and grief.

It is with this in mind that I wonder if it’s an exaggeration to suggest that had the battle at Covadonga ended differently the whole course of western history, and therefore of the world, would have been affected. Spanish historian Claudio Sanchez-Albornoz does not believe so. “Si los musulmanos no hubiesen conquistado el España en el siglo VIII, los españoles no habrian conquistado America en el XVI.”* For him it follows that what began there in the 8th Century resulted in a militarized and battle-hardened Spain conquering much of the New World.

For me, and my own personal sense of history those seven years ago, a dinner of beans, pork belly, chorizo and morcilla suggested just as plausible a theorem: that had not the Asturian armies under Pelayo feasted on fabada in preparation for the fight the next day, there may have been another outcome. And while personal experience suggests that after a hearty meal of this kind one is utterly disinclined to remaining awake, let alone to feeling lively enough to bum rush a horde of scimitar-brandishing Berbers, I still feel that this notion has validity. After all, how could one’s sense of local patriotism and desire to defend one’s homeland fail to be stirred by such a dish? That the culinary use of saffron arrived in the far north of Spain via these same Moorish invaders and the integral ingredient smoked pimentón wasn’t to be discovered for another eight centuries following the conquest of Mexico doesn’t disprove this hypothesis, rather it merely serves to highlight, once again, the non-linear path of history.

(If the Muslims had not conquered Spain in the 8th century, the Americas wouldn’t have been conquered by the Spaniards in the 16th.”)

Towards the end of what is, in my opinion, his finest work, Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell tells of the bitter street fighting he witnessed in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War when the delicate alliance between communist, socialist, and anarchist factions of the Republican army finally collapsed. While certainly not the bloodiest scene in a war that cost around a million lives, it was one of the most significant, sounding, as it did, the death knell for the Republican cause against Franco’s Fascists. Never after this internicene strife were the respective Republican parties able to trust one another enough to wage a successful war.

Even prior to the Spanish Civil War, anarchist and regional-nationalist groups in Catalonia were making trouble for the shaky Spanish state (then under Republican rule). Indeed, it was during this period of the early 20th century that Barcelona became known as la rosa del fuego, the rose of fire. Modeling their destabilizing tactics on the exploits of Italian anarchists and revolutionaries under Giuseppe Garibaldi, the weapon of choice for Catalan anarchists came to be a round iron ball stuffed with explosives ignited with a string fuse. [Anyone who has ever seen a Tin-Tin or Felix the Cat cartoon will immediately recognize what I'm describing.] In Barcelona, anarchist activity centered around the-then hard-scrabble, now beautifully redeveloped waterfront, neighborhood of Barceloneta, where the mazy streets and crumbling slums provided ample cover for clandestine activity and proximity to the port offered easy access to contraband goods and shady characters.

It was during these unsettled years of the 1920s and ’30s that a Barceloneta bar owner by the name of Maria Pla, during a moment of whimsy with mashed potatoes to hand, created what is now the signature tapas dish of Barcelona, la bomba, the bomb. Potato croquettes with aiolli or a spicy dipping sauce is about as common a tapa as you can name, but Pla’s genius was to shape the croquette and plate it with these two sauces in a way that resembled the anarchists’ favorite weapon.

Today, la bomba can be found in tapas bars and tascas throughout Barcelona and beyond, and its origins in that murky political underworld are mostly forgotten. In fact, we ate it first at Tapa, Tapa a rather touristy tapas bar on the Paseig de Gracia in Barcelona knowing nothing of its fascinating history.

More than its political significance, la bomba is remarkable both as a relic of a turbulent time in the city’s history, and as a statement of the enduring gastronomic playfulness of Catalan chefs. Where today their creations run to rather more extravagant creations — like Ferran Adria’s trick olives (in which olive oil is sealed inside green agar-agar shells, set using a chemical reagent, and served in a ramekin looking for all the world like a simple tapa of olives) — Pla’s invention was just as, if not more so, adventurous, because it was poking fun at the potentially hazardous world of political terrorism.

Perhaps this quality of not taking life too seriously and finding time to play with ones food even in periods when one might be blown-up at any minute speaks to the broader philosophy in the Iberian peoples that George Orwell found both frustrating and alluring in equal measure — and this is not to reduce Spaniards of any stripe to the caricature of gluttonous Sancho Panzas, but rather to celebrate that such is possible even under the greatest duress — that, though they may cling tenaciously to opposing political viewpoints, which in that era, they fought tooth and nail for, nothing is taken quite so seriously as eating and drinking.

He’s certainly not the first to make such a remark, but when in a recent episode of his PBS show Mexico: One Plate at a Time, chef Rick Bayless commented that Mexican food may be the first “fusion cuisine” in the Americas, the concept resonated with me. The collision of cultures and culinary traditions that resulted from the European conquest of the Americas had as profound and delicious consequences for its Spanish, French and English protagonists as it had on the diets of its unwilling Native American and African antagonists. Indeed, and here I understand that I’m on sensitive ground, in cultural terms one might venture that one of the few short term benefits, that became a long term legacy, of this brutal period was the fabulous variety of new dishes that resulted from this coming together of New World, European and African ingredients and techniques.

Anthropologists and historians generally agree that apart from Brazil, the islands of the Caribbean are the most “Africanized” countries of the Americas because the extraordinarily harsh conditions, and consequential high slave mortality rate, in these places required that the plantation’s human capital be almost constantly replaced, continually refreshing African traditions. This sad history has allowed for the persistence of several West African cultural traditions, in syncretic religions like Haitian voodoo and Brazilian candomblé, as well as a variety of typical dishes, in the New World. Chief among the latter of these is the filling cassava mush known throughout much of Central and Western sub-Saharan Africa as fufu.

Most commonly served with a tomato or peanut based soup – which is sometimes garnished with seafood – fufu (fufuo, foufou, fougou) is believed to have originated in Twi-speaking regions of modern-day Ghana where the word foufouep (p is silent) means white and refers to the color of the cassava flour used in its preparation. When cooked with hot water and stirred to a similarly thick consistency as polenta or grits, and served on the side of a bowl of soup (or on a central platter), the diner takes a pinch of fufu, rolls it into an olive sized ball, makes an indentation with their thumb and uses it as an edible spoon for the soup.

The traditional shrimp and grits of the American South is, among many other variants, a direct descendant of fufu, where the American staple cornmeal has replaced cassava. In modern-day Cuba, one of the most traditional Afro-Cuban dishes, fufu de platano, has an even more direct bloodline to its African forebear in its use of that other West African starch, the green plantain.

Very similar to Cuban fufu is the joyously monikered mofongo of Puerto Rico – a dish that is so unbelievably delicious that it is even more fun to eat than it is to pronounce. Whereas fufu is often just mashed boiled plantains, mofongo (sometimes mofongu) is fried plantains that are then doused in a heavily-garlicked olive oil sauce while being pounded in a mortar. The mofongo is often then mixed with chopped up chicharrones (deep-fried pork belly cracklins), and shaped into a mound, before being dressed in an intensely savory tomato and shrimp-stock based gravy and garnished with sauted or fried shrimp.

More or less understood to be one of, if not the, national dishes of Puerto Rico, mofongo represents the creole (criolla) culture of that island in a truly unique way. The exotic tropical plantains native to Africa blending seamlessly with Caribbean-influenced sofrito used in the sauce and the typically Iberic flavors of olive oil and garlic into a colorful feast for the senses.

And a feast dish mofongo truly is. A Puerto Rican festival is said to be incomplete without mofongo, and this on an island where the perennial feast-time favorite, the long slow roasted pork dish called pernil is accompanied by both rice and beans and tostones. The competition in terms of delicious flavors being nothing short of extreme on that blessed island. Of course, we tend to wax lyrical about all the food we make here on WANF, but I want to stress that you have no idea just how amazing mofongo is, you just have to trust us and try it. It’s so rich, so intensely flavored, so texturally intriguing, and so quite unlike anything you’re likely to have eaten before. It’s a stunning combination that is as easy on the soul as it is invigorating for the intellect.

We first ate mofongo at one of a pair of fascinating restaurants in our Brooklyn neighborhood that have been serving the flavors of home to the area’s Caribbean population for more than 40 years. El Viejo Yayo (and El Viejo Yayo II) (meaning, roughly, the old man, or the grandfather), are the kinds of places – bright, harsh lighting, giant portions, patronized mostly by Latinos – that are a dying breed in our gentrified nabe, but can be relied upon for traditional island cuisine for these exact reasons. El Viejo Yayo serves a variety of mofongos, some as mains, others (almost unimaginably given their size) as side dishes, some with seafood, others with pork, and no matter how hard we try, it’s nearly impossible not to get one, in spite of the other wonderful offerings on their menu, including an outstanding soupy rice with seafood. [A propos of nothing, it's always interested me that they also make a mean brandy alexander, just one of many retro cocktails that they, unlike trendier places, never stopped making.] Under the bright strip lights, perspiring gently as pork and carbohydrates flood our system, we’ll often look around at our fellow diners – elbows on tables, giant plates or bowls in front of them, talking loudly and energetically gesticulating – and remark how lucky we are to have all this delicious diversity on our doorstep.

It sounds rather trite to conclude any piece about food in this way, but out of the myriad sadnesses of a shameful past shrouded in human misery, suffering and squalor, has risen, in mofongo (amongst the New World’s many great dishes), a gastronomic legacy that is truly a cultural phenomenon to celebrate and be proud of. And, perhaps, therein lies one of enduring maxims of great national dishes, that they speak simultaneously of what is ugly and painful as well as beautiful and serene about a country’s character, while reflecting the shared joy and peace to be found in the simple pleasures of the table.

Being the innate pessimist that I am, watching a small boat being knocked around like a dodgem car on the rollicking, blue-grey seas at the normally placid Jersey Shore this past weekend put me in mind of the Costa de Muerte, the coast of death, on Spain’s north-west coast, where Galician fisherman have taken their lives in their hands for generations. [In a quirk of editorial fate, I may, unwittingly, have taken inspiration for this flight of fancy from the cover (then unopened) of this month's Bon Appetit, but as you will see, if you persevere, there is a mite more detail below than Barbara Fairchild typically provides.]

The ocean’s bounty has never been translated into material riches in that part of Spain, and even in modern times, in spite of renewed interest centered around its albariño and mencia wines, artisanal cheeses, and gooseneck barnacles, it remains comparatively impoverished. Consequently, Gallegos have, for generations, cast their fortunes in the wind and sought better lives for themselves in other parts of Spain and the New World, including Brazil, Uruguay, Venezuela, Argentina, and Cuba.

Interestingly, and this is mostly unrelated, during researching this post, I learned that Fidel Castro’s father was one such Galician emigrant. His mother was also of Galician descent. In fact, Castro is a common Galician family name that is derived from the circular stone-built houses or “castles” of the Castreña — the Celtic Bronze Age culture that left a number of characteristic walled villages across the region. [Ironically, of course, Galician heritage is perhaps the only thing that the communist Fidel shared with his fascist counterpart Francisco Franco, but it was enough for the former to take up an invitation from the-then leader of Spain to visit their shared "home" region in the 1960s.]

The late 19th century marked the beginning of mass Galician emigration to the New World, and an unknown, but significant, number of Gallegos emigrated to Argentina and Uruguay during this period. Today, the two New World cities with the greatest number of people of Galician descent are those countries’ respective capitals, Buenos Aires and Montevideo, so much so, that it is not uncommon for Porteños to refer to all Spaniards as “Gallegos”.

Regular visitors to this blog will, perhaps, recall last April’s post about Argentine pizza which ventured a sociological theory on the impact Italian immigrants have had on the culture and food of their adopted country. It is just possible that I overstated things a little. You see, beyond its magnificent meats, Argentinian cuisine’s next most famous item is not, as I said, its pizza or pasta, but its empanadas. To explain this, I had originally intended to embark on a lengthy discussion of how Galician immigrants were behind the development of the iconic Argentine empanada. Sadly, I could find no evidence whatsoever to support this hypothesis, especially since Argentine empanadas resemble more closely the typical Spanish empanadilla than the much larger Galician empanada, and were likely to have been popular in Argentina long before Gallegos arrived en masse. Instead, a brief description of how we came across Galician empanadas in a veritable sea of Argentine-style pies during our stay in Buenos Aires last year will have to suffice. Sorry about that.

We snacked almost constantly on empanadas with a variety of fillings throughout our ten days in Buenos Aires, and began taking their quality and ubiquity mostly for granted. It was only later on in our visit when we came across Pizzeria la Americana (aka La Reina de las Empanadas), an established bakery and cafe a block from the Palacio del Congreso de Argentina, that we realized not all empanadas are created equal. In this giant place that takes up most of a city block, a bevvy of savory pastries, large and small, sat glowing warmly under spotlights behind glass screens. These piles of regular small empanadas beckoned, crustily, at us, and we would have reverted to habit and ordered a slew of them had we not spied some giant pies on individual cake stands next to them. We hadn’t seen anything like these before — two or more inches thick, baked to a shiny golden patina and filled with, among other things, greens, boiled eggs and ham — yet they were also described as empanadas. What were they?

Even more confusingly, one of the large ones was labelled “pascualina”, a moniker for pies we had come across only once before, and then in Genoa, to describe that city’s special Easter variation of the spinach/chard and ricotta torta de bietole. Could these pies be variations on that? We weren’t sure, and couldn’t summon enough of our tourist Spanish to ask what might turn into something of a lengthy and garbled question about nomenclature, semantics and gastronomic anthrolopology.

Argentina’s ethnic mix has contributed to a unique South American melding of Iberian and Italic culture and cuisine, in which a pizzeria could quite legitimately describe itself as the queen of the empanada, while simultaneously serving Genoese-influenced Galician specialties without breaking stride or encouraging skepticism from potential customers. We were momentarily confused by it all, but decided there was nothing to do but roll with it, and so ordered a couple of giant slices of the empanada Gallega de pollo, which turned out to be a delicious, if over-generous, appetizer for our subsequent lunch at one of the city’s oldest Italian restaurants.

Neither of us had ever had a pie quite like this before. It didn’t really resemble the free-form tuna and sardine empanadas I’d tried in Santiago de Compostela and Vigo years ago, nor was it like an American-style pot pie we’re so familiar with, brimming with sauce and chunky vegetables. With a bready, pizza-like crust, top and bottom, and baked in a dish about the same dimensions as a deep-pan pizza, the filling was a moist and peppery combination of chicken, sauted greens, onions and red pepper. It was absolutely delicious and we have both been raving about it ever since, but everytime we’ve tried to make any of the many variations on Galician empanadas, we’ve failed to produce anything similar, nor have any recipes for Argentine empanadas worked out the right way.

In truth, the, what I’m going to call, Argentine-style empanada Gallega that we did make, wasn’t quite as good as the one we ate in Buenos Aires. The dough was too firm, not bready enough, and I should have tried using a modified pizza dough instead, but the filling more than made up for its shortcomings. In place of chicken, we slow-roasted half a Long Island duck that we had left over in the freezer from the hand-rolled Tuscan pasta with duck ragu and mixed it with sauted kale, green pepper, garlic, smoked paprika (pimenton) and lots of onions.

Experimentation on this front will continue because I could usefully spend some more time beautifying my rather scruffy attempt at a decoration, but also because one empanada fed the both of us for dinner that night and for lunch three subsequent days, and it just got better with each passing meal. Feel free to mess around with the dough recipe to your heart’s content, just as we will when we make this again, and, of course, the filling is entirely up to you too. Duck is kind of a luxury, and chicken, tuna, sardines, boiled eggs, a variety of vegetables, or plain old ground beef, would be absolutely fine. You should also feel free, should you feel geeky enough, to develop your own specious theories about the development of various global cuisines. They probably won’t be any less likely than mine.

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There is so little information available about Burma (or Myanmar, depending on how you rock it) that after the inevitable Wikipedia entry, the CIA World Factbook is the second item that appears in Google’s search results. This anonymity is largely due to the military dictatorship that has kept the country under lock and key for much of the last 50 years. Even typhoon Nargis, which smacked into the Burmese coast in the spring of 2008 killing 130,000+ Burmese, shamefully failed to change the government’s secretive operations in spite of a large international relief effort.

Burma has not always been so mysterious. During the latter half of the 19th century and first half of the 20th, the country was annexed to the British Raj of India (mostly to arrest the expansion of the French across Indochina from Laos and Vietnam), and quickly became an integral part of the British Empire supplying a rich abundance of jewels, hardwoods and spices to global markets. Indeed, the British, favoring the temperate north of “Upper Burma” over the fetid, malarial Rangoon (now Yangon) in the south, made the previously small, provincial town of Mandalay their capital, opening up that previously undeveloped area in so doing. It was during these heady days of fortune-making, steamy nights and opium dens that the sense of exoticism and opulence surrounding the city of Mandalay developed (which the Vegas casino Mandalay Bay riffs off, despite the fact that Mandalay is more than 500 miles inland).

Indians, Chinese and Anglo-Indians, their businesses and their foods, flooded Burma under the British, as the new rulers exploited Burma’s natural wealth and pushed railroads deep into the Burmese interior. Prior to this period, native Burmese cuisine had contrasted sharply with its neighbors. It had few of the complex spices of Indian cuisine and lacked the fiery heat of Thai food or the sophisticated salty, sour, sweet characteristics of Chinese cuisines, tending to rely on more subtle flavors and simple techniques. Things changed considerably during British rule, and the Burmese adopted or adapted many of the more generic dishes these foreign groups brought with them, so that contemporary Burmese food, while still distinct, displays these recent influences.

Perhaps the most popular dish in Burma though, is a traditionally Burmese dish that has been eaten to celebrate marriage throughout the ages. Own-o Kow-swear (or Own-o Kow-sway/swea’) is a chicken and coconut milk stew flavored with turmeric, garlic and ginger and served over wheat noodles, that due to its bright yellow color is thought to bestow luck on the marrying couple. It is also supposed that the enlivening flavors of ginger and turmeric offer a little extra oomph, shall we say, to the consummation.

We first wrote about this dish back in the very early days of this blog — apparently before lighting was an issue in our photography (or retouching, for that matter) — having enjoyed it at one of the (then) only two Burmese restaurants in New York, not to mention one of the very few such eateries in America. Sadly, this restaurant, Village Mingala, closed earlier this year, leaving its sister restaurant on the Upper West Side to fly the flag for Burmese cuisine in NYC, and so to mark its passing, we decided to give home-making Own-o Kow-swear a bash.

Of course, as my opening line suggests there isn’t much available on the internet about Burmese food, so we turned instead to the only Burmese cook book readily available in English — The Flavors of Burma/Myanmar — written by Susan Chan, a Burmese-Australian woman of Chinese heritage. From her we learned that since chicken (and other proteins, except fish) have typically been (and, to an extent, still are) exorbitantly priced in Burma, this dish came to be served at weddings as a demonstration of the hosts’ generosity and largesse. We also learned, very interestingly, that these days it is also often served — to those who can afford it — as a breakfast dish because Burmese weddings are most commonly celebrated in the morning, with the celebratory meal served around brunch time.

It is hard for us to contemplate eating anything with chicken in it before noon, let alone a bowl of fragrantly-spiced stew and noodles, but, happily, it also makes an excellent lunch or dinner instead. Do not be dissuaded from giving this dish a try, especially if you’ve been nervous hitherto about making Indian or Thai food at home due to the number and/or availability of some of the ingredients. Much of what you need for Own-o Kow-swear can be found in even the most badly-stocked grocery store, and in terms of skills, if you can make a regular beef stew, you can make this blindfolded.

Since, for most of us, visiting Burma or even finding a Burmese restaurant is largely impossible, unless something miraculous happens there politically, this dish is about as close as we’re ever going to get to experiencing the unknown pleasures of that exotic and mysterious nation. The really frustrating thing is that once you’ve tried this dish you just want to taste and know more and more about Burma and its food. Here’s hoping that one day, the government’s iron grip will relax, or be cast-off entirely, and the country and its fabulous cuisine can once again by enjoyed by Englishmen (and people of all countries) like me.