Book Review: Hsa*ba

Burmese food blends the pungent sweet-sour flavors of Chinese Southeast Asian cuisine with the robust aromatics of the Indian subcontinent. While there are a handful of Burmese cookbooks on the market, one need look no further than hsa*ba (2008), written by Tin Cho Chaw, a Rangoon native currently living in the UK.  The author translates the Burmese greeting, "hsa ba" as "please eat," and with this sentiment, the reader is invited to partake in 100 family recipes including street snacks and festival dishes.

Hsa*ba feels like a very personal collection of recipes and is interspersed with brief essays on specific places and dishes. The book opens with savory snacks such as pea crackers--delicate fried wafers dotted with yellow split peas-- naan bread, and Myanmar's signature laphet thote, or pickled tea leaf salad, and follows with chapters devoted to ingredients as well as many noodle and rice dishes.  A chapter on condiments provides some essential Burmese meal accompaniments, garnishes, and dips including sour chilli dip, spicy bean curd and peanut sauce, and pickled vegeatbles.  While maintaining the integrity of the dish, hsa*ba adapts dishes for which the main ingredient is impossible to find outside of Myanmar.  A recipe for shauk dhi thote, ordinarily made with shauk thi, a native citrus, is thus reworked as lemon relish, or thambayo dhi thote.

Every dish I've prepared from this book has turned out just as described; the instructions are clear and thorough.  My favorite recipe in hsa*ba is for ohn nyot khaut swe, coconut noodle soup, reminiscent of Malay/Indonesian laksa, a spicy coconut curry broth served with noodles and eggs, for which I had never found a good recipe.  As I don't eat meat I replaced the chicken in this recipe with firm tofu and used my favorite vegetable stock as a soup base.  Even with these adjustments the dish was as complex and rich as some of the best laksa I've ever eaten.

Pain Au Cumin: Cumin and Other Members of the Parsley Family in French Pastry

In preparing the last post on pains au chocolat, I came across a recipe for petits pains au cumin, or cumin rolls, in Urbain-Dubois's, La Boulangerie d'Aujourd'hui (1933).  Although cumin has a long history in European cuisine and is often seen in recipes from the Medieval period, particularly in Northern and Eastern Europe, I was not familiar with its use in French breads and desserts.  Yet, no description or explanation of the bread prefaced the recipe, suggesting that cumin was a known and perhaps common flavoring for bread.  Intrigued by the use of this pungent spice in baked goods, I looked for other examples in late 19th and early 20th century cookbooks and found cumin to be a popular flavoring in spice cakes and breads.  Known in both English and French as 'cumin', Cuminum cyminum is native to the Mediterranean and Mesopotamian regions.  A member of the parsley family, cumin is related to caraway and fennel, both of which are sometimes called 'faux cumin' and said to be interchangeable if not on hand for recipes calling for one of these spices.  Caraway, or Carum carvi, is a European native commonly known as caraway in English, but referred to in French variously as 'carvi', 'cumin des prés' (wild cumin), or often simply 'cumin'.  

According to Dictionnaire Universel du Pain (2010), caraway's most common bread association is in the Polish pain au cumin, which is described as a rye bread.  The dictionary further clarifies that this use of the word 'cumin' is not to be confused with true cumin, typically found in Arab cuisine.  Yet the French recipes I consulted did not use rye flour, but rather a gluten-rich pastry four.

In Le Livre de Patisserie (1873), cumin is a prominent ingredient in both Gâteau de Compiègne and Manqué, both molded cakes made with a rich, sweet dough and flavored with dried fruit or spices.   Cumin is used similarly in Lina Rytz's La Bonne Cuisinière Bourgeoise (1868) in a recipe for Gâteau au Cumin. Since I did not find any mention of caraway among the recipes in these 19th century cookbooks, it was not clear whether the spice in use was Cuminum cyminum, native to the Mediterranean and Mesopotamian regions, or its eponym, the more mild and domestically available caraway.

Manuel de L'Épicier (1904), a treatise on spices by Léon Arnou, collocates cumin with Dutch cheeses and German breads and German and Russian liqueurs. Arnou also notes that caraway is used in some patisseries in the North and in a variety of other food preparations.  This likely includes the Alsace region, where caraway seeds often accompany cheese.  In the household book, Un Ménage Bourgeois (1892), E. Heilmann, a chemist, refers to both cumin and cumin des prés in the preparation of liqueurs.  But it was in the Dictionnaire Universel de Cuisine Pratique (1905) by Joseph Favre that I found mention of cumin in association with bread.  An entry on batonnets, or breadsticks, mentions that in the North these are made with cumin.  This may reference true cumin, as Favre specifically differentiates between cumin and cumin des prés elsewhere in the book, stating that cumin is used in bread in many European countries, particularly in the North.  Yet Favre describes the other members of the parsley family--including nigella and caraway--as varieties of cumin, thus confirming the use of 'cumin' as a general term for various members of the parsley family.  While I could not find a definite answer to whether true cumin was used in bread, it seems likely that this spice was employed at times, as was caraway and fennel, in the breads and cheeses of Germany and other countries in Northern Europe.  The author of a 1930 travel article in La Femme de France, a French women's magazine, describes pain au cumin as an everyday bread, seen on the streets of Germany.  I've provided an adaptation of the recipe from La Boulangerie d'Aujourd'hui and recommend making half with cumin and half with caraway.

Recipe

Petits Pains Au Cumin, adapted from La Boulangerie d'Aujourd'hui (1933)

1 litre milk
50g yeast (assuming this to be baker's yeast, this should convert to roughly 2 packets of dry yeast--1/2 oz. total)
150g butter, softened
2 eggs, beaten
2 egg yolks, beaten
cumin and caraway
1 tsp salt
all-purpose flour


1. Heat the milk until warm, pour into a large bowl and sprinkle yeast over surface.  Stir until yeast is dissolved.  Mix in softened butter, eggs, and salt.  Add a cup of flour, stir to combine, and gradually mix in additional flour, about a 1/2 cup at a time, stirring after each addition of flour until the liquid is absorbed and you have a shaggy dough.

2. Knead until the dough is smooth and soft, about 10 minutes.  Cover with a cloth and rise until doubled in volume.  Preheat oven at 400-425°F.  Form dumpling-sized balls with the dough or shape into small logs.

3. Arrange on a greased pan and let rise again, covered with cloth.  Brush with beaten eggs and sprinkle with cumin seeds.  Bake for 20 to 25 minutes.

Elizabeth David and the Mystery of Petits Pains au Chocolat

The pain au chocolat one sees in bakery displays in and outside of France is made with a flaky puff pastry dough also used for the crescent, or croissant.  I've always found the combination of puff pastry and chocolate a bit too rich and cloying.  If you've ever dipped a French baguette in melted chocolate, you might agree that a crusty bread dough, made without butter fat, is a much better match.  In her inspired classic, English Bread and Yeast Cookery (1977), Elizabeth David (1913-1992) describes her memory of petits pains au chocolat while in Paris in the early 1930s:

When I allowed myself time, I could stop to buy a pain chocolat to eat in the tram on which I travelled from Passy to the Boulevard Saint Michel to attend lectures at the Sorbonne.  The chocolate in these rolls-- I have remembered it all my life-- was of that rough and gritty quality which no longer exists in France because the chocolate merchants have perfected their machinery to the point where all their products emerge smooth, bland, shining and uniform.  And nowadays, the bakers use their second-best flaky pastry or third-quality croissant dough to make their pains chocolat.

According to David, prior to World War II, French bakers typically used a simple bread dough to encase the bars of chocolate, and not puff pastry.  By the 1970s, when English Bread and Yeast Cookery was written, David observed that in France, this dough had been replaced with a lesser quality puff pastry, a shift she confirms by consulting recipes from "old French books on bread."  Since David does not cite which books she consulted or provide a publication date, it is difficult to determine whether she simply means pre-war cookbooks from the early twentieth century or earlier examples.  At what point in history did the chocolate rolls David describes arrive in French bakeries, and when did the the version made with croissant dough come to characterize the typical pains au chocolat?

A survey of the petits pains au chocolat in nineteenth century cookbooks suggests a different style of chocolate dessert.  For instance, in the 1868 cookbook, La bonne cuisinière bourgeoise, by Lina Rytz née Dick, a recipe for pains au chocolat instructs one to blend chocolate into a dough with sugar and egg yolks.  Stiffly beaten egg whites are then folded in, aerating the dough.  Almond flour is then incorporated and finally the mixture is baked in a buttered form.  This seems to be more in the style of pain à la duchesse and pain à la reine,  both likely antecedent to today's éclair.  It was not until the early 20th century, when a new method of bread baking came to France, that pains au chocolat took on a different meaning in French cookbooks.

Viennese Bread and Pre-WWII Cookbooks

French bread baking underwent significant adaptations in the mid-nineteenth century with the introduction of the Vienna oven, which redistributed the oven's heat through steam injectors and a sloping floor.  It was in conjunction with Vienna bread's yeasted milk dough that I began to notice David's style of pains au chocolat in French cookbooks.  The earliest mention I found of yeasted milk dough came in the 1928 (7th edition) tome, Gastronomie pratique, written by Ali-Bab (Henri Babinski).  The recipe is titled, Petits pains viennois, or Small viennese loaves, and includes flour, yeast, salt, milk and water.  Ali-Bab says they are served at buffets and "les five o'clock tea."

In 1933, a similar recipe for Petits pains au lait appeared in La boulangerie d'aujourd'hui by Urbain Dubois.  According to Dubois, this dough is also known as fougasse, although I'm not sure why, since pain fougasse is a regional French flat bread.  In Dubois's recipe milk powder replaces the milk and butter or margarine and one egg or yellow coloring are added as well.  After this recipe, Dubois describes a variation in which the dough is wrapped around a piece of baker's chocolate.  In the 1935 classic Traité pratique de panification française et parisienne, Émile Dufour explains that pain au chocolat is made with croissant dough or fougasse dough (i.e., pain au lait, or milk bread dough).  Thus, by the mid-1930s chocolate was being added to both croissant and milk dough, although according to David, the Parisian bakeries she frequented preferred the latter.  The pains au chocolat of Elizabeth David's memory were indeed short-lived, lasting only a few decades in the first half of the 20th century.  Fortunately they are easy to prepare.

Making Pains au Chocolat

The recipe below is based on David's and includes some additional points I have found useful. David says to follow the method for preparing English bap dough, found in another chapter, and I've condensed the ingredients with those instructions.  David's original recipe calls for 1/2 oz. of baker's yeast. If you are as naive about yeast as I am you will probably assume that this is a poetic synonym for Fleischmann's dry yeast.  It is not.  As David notes in her chapter on yeast, dry yeast is much more powerful than baker's yeast and as a substitute, one need use only about a half or one third of the amount of baker's yeast listed. Too much yeast yields a dense dough that stales quickly. Another important point: these are by far the most delicious pains au chocolat you may ever try but they must be eaten straight from the oven, so ignore the temptation to double the recipe and save some for later.

Recipe

Petits Pains au Chocolat

1/2 lb unbleached white flour

1/2 tsp salt

1/2 cup milk, warmed

1/2 oz. baker's yeast, or 1/4 oz. dry yeast (1 packet)

4 oz. chocolate, divided into eighths (a good quality European milk chocolate or semi-sweet chocolate bar works well)

Glaze (optional but recommended)

2 Tbs milk

2 Tbs sugar

1. Sift the flour and salt in a bowl.  Pour warm milk into a large mixing bowl, sprinkle yeast on top and stir to dissolve.  Test yeast activity with a teaspoon of sugar if necessary.  If active, bubbles will begin to appear within 10 minutes.  Add the sifted flour and mix well.  The dough will be dry and shaggy.  Knead in the bowl or on a clean surface a few times to bring the dough together smoothly.  Do not over knead-- a few times will be sufficient.  Holding the dough in your hands, shape into a smooth ball about the size of a small grapefruit.  Place dough in a large bowl, cover with a lightly dampened cloth and set in a warm spot.  Rise until doubled, about 1 hour.

2. Preheat oven to 400-425°.  Divide dough into eighths.  Roll out and place a piece of chocolate into the center.  Fold the dough over the chocolate, pressing the seams to seal if necessary.  Place on baking sheet, cover with cloth and let rest 15 minutes.  Remove cloth, place tray on center rack in oven and bake 15-20 minutes, until tops are golden.  Meanwhile, prepare the glaze by dissolving the sugar in warm milk.  When the bread is ready, remove from oven. Chocolate will probably have spilled out onto the baking pan-- this is perfectly fine and will be very delicious to eat off the pan. Immediately brush pains with glaze until all glaze has been used.  Serve immediately.

For more on David, see this very informative, thorough, and well written article on Elizabeth David, in the excellent online magazine, British Food in America.