Oranges in a savory compote with artichoke hearts
A few weeks ago, I ran across a food article by Amanda Hesser, in which she recounted her recent experience of being served a green salad with red onions, Greek olives, and oranges in it. What struck me was the way she fumed at length over having missed out for so long on this simple culinary classic.
I grew up in a Jewish household in the early 1970s, at about the time when felafel and hummus and tabouleh started making their way west into American Jewish cooking. These, along with pita, tomato-cucumber-pepper type salads and eggplant everything, were part of the larger Jewish cultural revival after the Six-Day War. Jewish cookbooks started embracing the Lebanese, Sephardic, North African, and Persian influences on Israeli food as a complement to the more familiar Ashkenazi fare. Orange salads just seemed to fit in.
In any case, orange salads have been published in Jewish and Mediterranean-leaning cookbooks for at least 25 years–notably Paula Wolfert’s Couscous and Other Good Food from Morocco
Three orange salads
The simplest orange salad I make is a basic green salad with oranges rather than tomatoes, and it goes well with oil-and-vinegar or mustard vinaigrette. Another, more of a fruit salad, is orange and/or grapefruit segments or slices mixed with a dressing of a cup of yogurt, a spoonful of ordinary red wine vinegar, a spoonful of sugar, and curry powder to taste, maybe half a teaspoon or so, enough to make it yellow-orange and aromatic, not enough to be bitter.
Another more elegant take on the green salad is something I made a few times in my early cooking days for buffet lunches at my synagogue–orange slices sprinkled sparingly with orange blossom water and a grinding of cardamom, laid down in overlapping rows on a bed of vinaigrette-dressed romaine in a tray, and red onion rings, sliced Kalamata olives, red bell pepper rings, crumbled feta, and chopped fresh basil strewn over the oranges. It was a bit much for serving at home, but it made a beautiful buffet dish, and it always got eaten.
So oranges can serve quite nicely in fresh salads, but what about in hot dishes? There’s the rub.
Orange peel I have no trouble imagining in hot savories–a number of Chinese classics use it (beef with orange peel, etc.), and so does duck à l’orange. Cooked oranges, on the other hand, always disappoint me–somehow the structure collapses, the color fades, and so does the bright acidity. They end up pulpy and stringy and less than half as good as fresh raw pieces would have been. But people persist in cooking with them–so I thought I would give a different Paula Wolfert cookbook a try.
The Slow Mediterranean Kitchen: Recipes for the Passionate Cook
(2003) features one really unusual orange-based savory: an Algerian Jewish sweet-and-sour compote of artichoke hearts and orange sections glazed in orange juice. With garlic and olive oil. Hard to imagine–does garlic go with oranges?–but so close to my standard marinated artichoke hearts, at least theoretically, that I decided to chance it and see. Continue reading
Filed under: books, cooking, fruits, history, holiday cooking, Odd food, Revised recipes, sauces and condiments, Vegetabalia | Tagged: Algerian-Jewish cooking, artichoke hearts, Israeli food, Mediterranean diet, North African cooking, oranges, Paula Wolfert, recipes | 2 Comments »
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