Cooking in clay conjures up memory of meals past
I don’t think I’ve ever met a clay cooking pot I didn’t like . . . or want to own.
And I have more than 100 clay pots of every size in my kitchen to prove it: Moroccan tagines, Provencal daubieres, Spanish cazuelas, Italian bean pots, Turkish guvecs and even ceramic colanders, including one I use to steam couscous. I love the way these pots tie me to traditions, deep-rooted ways of cooking, and add flavor and finesse to my food.
I bought my first clay pot at age 19, just weeks after starting cooking lessons with legendary teacher Dione Lucas. She sent me to a French restaurant supply store in lower Manhattan where my eyes immediately fell upon an odd-looking, low, potbellied, earthenware vessel with a tiny covered opening. The sales clerk told me it was used to cook tripe. Back then I had no idea what tripe was, but the shape of the pot fascinated me, and so I bought it for its beauty.
Somehow it survived numerous moves, to Europe, Morocco and the East and West coasts, always beautiful and always producing soft and exceedingly rich beef stews.
Years ago, I was living in Morocco, starting on my multiyear study of Moroccan cuisine. It was here that I first encountered the ubiquitous two-part cooking vessel called a tagine— low-rimmed concave plate-like bottom and high cone-shaped top. The vessel is ingenious for the way the top cools steam from the stew (or tagine) simmering below, condenses it, then sends it back down into the cooking food.
My favorite tagine was acquired secondhand from a Berber family on a field trip to the Rif Mountains. Even when I bought it, this pot bore the scent of Moroccan spices and the patina of long use. To my eyes it is also very beautiful in that the clay top piece, the cone, has been deeply grooved by its potter with crisscrossing diagonal slashes in the Berber style.
Bean pots made of micaceous clay have been a revelation. My best one, a true beauty, was a gift from chef/owner Katharine Kagel of Cafe Pasqual’s in Santa Fe, N. M.
I could go on: There’s my huge, yellow, vase-shaped cassoule used to cook cassoulets over a wood fire. A set of gargoulettes from Tunisia, in which meat is sealed, then set in the embers of a fire and then must be broken open to access the cooked food. A small meqlah from Lebanon in which I make particularly wonderful fried eggs. And a green glazed daubiere, made by master potter Philippe Beltrando, which produces delicious Provencal daubes.
I asked Beltrando, a tall, lanky, gracious man with flowing hair and beautiful tender eyes, the same question I’ve asked nearly everyone I’ve encountered since I started working on this kind of cooking: “Why do you think food tastes better when cooked in clay?”
I found his answer moving and mystical:
“Maybe someday scientists will come up with an explanation,” he told me. “It most likely has to do with the even diffusion of heat, soft heat that creates great alchemy in the kitchen. Think of bubbles rising from within a stew, hatching slowly on the surface to the rhythm of a slowly ticking clock.”
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