I dream of broth
A dispatch from my sickbed.
Nau mai, haere mai. Welcome to The Boil Up, The Spinoff’s weekly food newsletter. I hope you’re hungry!
As I write this, I have Covid. I am in bed, my laptop propped on my legs, a warm cat on my chest and a cup of tea dangerously resting on the quilt beside me. My throat feels like hell, but it could be worse. One of my friends, also infected, has lost her sense of taste. Coffee, she reports, is just hot water. My partner didn’t finish his morning coffee on the day he tested positive, and he hasn’t had a cup since, complaining that it tastes like dirt. I haven’t been caffeinating because I want to rest as much as possible, so I’m not sure where I sit on this spectrum. Thus far, I have retained all my senses, but my throat is only comfortable when I’m sipping something warm. And so, I dream of broth.
Last week on my 95bfm segment, Breakfast Food, Rachel asked: what is the difference between soup and broth? A good question, if we’re thinking about brothy soups like ramen, phở, chicken soup or, the king of soups, minestrone. However, a better question is about the difference between stock and broth, both clear liquids filled with nourishment. The short answer is that stock is generally made from bones while broth is made from flesh, which follows their differing uses: the former as an ingredient in other dishes (said soup, but also stews and braises, curries, risotto, gravies, and so on) while the latter can be a dish in its own right, or a very significant component of one, as with ramen, phở, bouillabaisse or tom yum. The longer answer gets into things like cooking times (stock is long; broth, less so), seasoning (stock is often left unseasoned), use of aromatics and texture. Perhaps the best way to differentiate them is to consider their goals: we boil bones to extract collagen and create a thick, velvety texture in various dishes, while the goal of broth, with its various extra seasonings, is to create something delicately flavoured and intensely savoury, something you’d be happy to sip unadulterated, from a cup.
At some restaurants, this is how broth is served. On my birthday, I had deep, umami smoked tomato broth at Forest, served in an amber glass teacup, topped with a slick of toasted garlic chive oil. At Cazador, every Feast begins with a rough ceramic cup of rich, warming broth of game meat (quail, venison, duck) and pungent herbs (caraway, watercress, kawakawa), like a potion. Whenever I see broth on a menu, I order it.
The best broth I’ve ever had was when my friend Dara Klein – now head chef and founder at Tiella in London – was practicing recipes for her pop-up. In the tiny, grubby blue kitchen at my Eden Terrace flat, she performed some kind of sorcery, emerging with bowls of yellow tortellini stuffed with pork in a rich golden broth. I was reminded of Dara’s broth last weekend, at Pasta e Cuore, when I saw passatelli in brodo on the menu. An excellent cucina povera dish of short, rough noodles made from bread crumbs, parmesan and eggs, Dara is the only reason I knew to order it – it’s her favourite dish, one she will post images of on her Instagram whenever she returns to Bologna. And thank god I did know, because it was heaven. If comfort food exists, it was in my bowl of passatelli in brodo.
I wanted to end this by describing a broth I made for myself that soothed my throat, mind and spirit. Maybe I could even make passatelli – I have the ingredients on hand – but I’m too exhausted. In lieu of passatelli, broth or this glorious essence of chicken that my algorithm keeps cruelly delivering to me, I simply have mug upon mug of tea, peppermint, fennel, rooibos, licorice, lavender. Maybe later I’ll find the energy to open a packet of instant ramen, using less water than the instructions call for, pouring in the sachet of damp brown umami powder into the pot, stirring with a chopstick, the quickest broth of all.
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Weekly bites
The World’s 50 Best Restaurant’s List dropped last week – an elite ranking second only to the Michelin system. While I love to read descriptions of unexpected foods – ribs with fava beans; frozen gazpacho sandwich; jasmine-scented ice cream with pork pate, shrimp and pickled radish; steamed oyster with pork skin and pork spine broth; king crab with sea carrot custard; roasted caviar with vindaloo curry and Greek yogurt – the pointlessness of the list has once again been highlighted by Grub Street in this article. If we are going to analyse the list though, it is interesting to note that there are 10 Latin American restaurants included among the 50, each with menus that emphasise local and Indigenous ingredients – an approach also seen at many of our best restaurants. Just saying.
And in the same week, the 2024 James Beard Foundation Media Award Winners were also announced. While these awards are entirely US-centric – media must have been published/made in the US to be eligible – the longlist is a fun place to find top quality food-related book and media recommendations. As a long-time follower of @theduskykitchen, I was excited to see Abi Balinget’s Mayumu: Filipino American Desserts Remixed given the Emerging Voice award (it’s unavailable to buy in Aotearoa but my trusty Auckland Libraries have a few copies rolling round). I can also highly recommend Hetty Lui McKinnon’s Tenderheart and Sohla El-Waylly’s Start Here, as well as this chilling essay, which took out the MFK Fisher Distinguished Writing Award.
Meanwhile, Japanese beverage giant Kirin (as in the beer) has begun selling an electronified spoon they claim enhances salty tastes, making food taste saltier without adding extra sodium. While the spoon was awarded an Ig Nobel Prize last year (which honours quirky and whimsical research), it could have an actual health effect in Japan where the average adult consumes about 10 grams of salt per day, double the amount recommended by the World Health Organisation.
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Snack of the week
Tunnock’s Milk Chocolate Teacakes 6 x 24g for $5.99 at New World Victoria Park
Another treasure picked up from my whirlwind trip to Freemans Bay last week was a box of these British delicacies. If you’ve never tried a teacake, these are the UK version of a Mallowpuff – although the subject of which is the superior chocolate-coated, marshmallow-based treat is much-debated. At the risk of alienating myself from my readers, I love a Teacake. Not that it’s necessarily better than a Mallowpuff, but there is a novelty factor to a Teacake, as well as the fact that the marshmallow involved in one is soft and melting, more like uncooked meringue. If you smashed a Teacake on your forehead, you’d be covered in sticky marshmallow and shards of chocolate.
And then there is the biscuit of it all. Both Teacakes and Mallowpuffs owe much of their structural integrity to their biscuit base. The base of a Teacake is much softer than that of a Mallowpuff, still very much a biscuit, but one that gives easily beneath the teeth. If it were a firmer biscuit, eating a Teacake would be a far messier endeavour: as it is, the unctuous marshmallow oozes as you bite, creating quite a decadent eating experience that is quite different to the sturdy, clean-hands eating of a Mallowpuff. One negative point is that the Teacake base is a little bit gritty – there’s something in there that you can hear crunching between your molars as you chew. The chocolate shell is also thinner than that of a Mallowpuff, so if you’re in it for a good hit of choccy, I would go for the Kiwi favourite. But if you want something a little closer to cake, a little more indulgent, unusual and silver-wrapped, pick up a box of Teacakes. 8/10
Mā te wā,
Lucinda
My favourite make at home hot drink when I'm under the weather is miso soup - it always makes me feel better.
I desperately need to try a teacake now