2B — THE OBSERVER & BAKER CITY HERALD
HOME & LIVING
TUESDAY, DECEMBER 15, 2020
Cookbook collection: top choices for 2020
and steak sandwiches doused
with piri piri shed light on
history, colonization, cultural
connections and the daily
lives of these women and their
families. Try one of Hassan’s
favorite comforts: digaag
qumbe, a spiced chicken stew
with potatoes and carrots in
a yogurt and coconut sauce
(served over rice or, as Hassan
prefers, over a bed of spinach)
with banana alongside as
traditional accompaniment.
Bill Addison
Los Angeles Times
Cookbooks are always
about connection — written
to share the love of a cuisine
or celebrate ancestry, or
sometimes to eulogize broken
bonds and safeguard history.
If you’ve run out of ideas
or motivation for prepar-
ing your next meal, if you’re
longing to be somewhere far
away or want to explore fresh
approaches to comfort food
at home, or if you’re thinking
about the broader context of
food in our troubled culture,
take heart and inspiration
from 11 standout books of the
season.
‘Baking at the 20th
Century Cafe’
“Admit it,” begins the jacket
copy of Michelle Polzine’s
hefty, handsome book. “You’re
here for the famous honey
cake.” Well, yes and no. The
10-layer version of the Rus-
sian cake that Polzine serves
at her cafe in San Francisco’s
Hayes Valley, given mysteri-
ous depths by caramelizing
the honey and lightened by
dulce de leche in the frosting,
deserves its legendary status.
Honestly? I likely won’t bake
this opus myself, nor roll out
strudel dough thin enough
to cover a table, as Polzine
instructs; I will go eat them
immediately on 20th Century
Cafe’s marble counter the
next time it’s safe to head
north. But many other less
involved and richly gratifying
desserts (cranberry-ginger up-
side down cake, sherry trifl e
with Meyer lemon mousse,
black walnut and buckwheat
tea cakes) make the book
worth owning. So does the
indomitable life force of its
author, whose mischievous
spirit shines as brightly in
her sentences as it does at her
restaurant.
‘The Flavor Equation’
I can envision Nik Sharma
— a molecular biologist
turned pastry chef, columnist
and author — lying awake at
night, arranging and rear-
ranging the elements of fl avor
in his mind the way Beth
Harmon imagines moving
chess pieces on the ceiling
in “The Queen’s Gambit.” In
his second cookbook, Sharma
invites readers to consider
recipes through the lens of sci-
ence. Engaging charts on food
pigments, aromas by chemical
Calvin B. Alagot/Los Angeles Times-TNS
Here are 11 food books to add to your collection this holiday season.
‘The Good Book of
Southern Baking’
Gently sweetened butter-
milk cornbread. Angel biscuits
(and drop biscuits and sweet
potato biscuits!). Peach, blue-
berry and bourbon cobbler.
Hummingbird cake brim-
ming with pecans, pineapple,
banana and warm spices.
The world can use more top-
notch Southern sweets right
now. Kelly Fields — owner
of Willa Jean, a bakery and
restaurant in New Orleans
loved as much by locals as
visitors (which says a lot)
— is one of this generation’s
‘A Good Bake’
virtuoso pastry chefs. Her
When Sadelle’s, a re-
baked goods and desserts sing
imagining of a Jewish deli
of the region without sliding
from New York’s Major Food into stereotypes; these recipes
Group, opened in 2015, the
are honed but not daunt-
buzz hummed loudest over
ing. Co-written with Kate
Melissa Weller’s pastries: the Heddings, “The Good Book
exceptionally delicate dough
of Southern Baking” is the
of her rugelach, the crackling kind of cookbook you’ll grab
layers of her salted caramel
from the shelf, thumb through
sticky buns, her plush take on and say, “I can do this.” Los
chocolate babka. Behind the
Angeles photographer Oriana
comforting sweets is a mind of Koran stunningly captures
science. Weller was a chemi-
New Orleans, Fields’ kitchen
cal engineer before switching style and (especially with the
careers, and she brings the
picture of Fields’ hand smash-
discipline to breads and vien- ing a strawberry cake on page
noiserie — and also to layer
255) her wry humor.
cakes and brownies. Which
is to say: Don’t be daunted by ‘Good Drinks’
Non-alcoholic drinks
the length and detail of the
recipes. Weller, who authored concocted by our savviest bar-
tenders have made quantum
the book with Carolynn
leaps since they fi rst began
Carreño, writes in a precise
but familiar voice. When she appearing on menus under
suggests letting the dough for the wince-inducing label of
“mocktails.” Julia Bainbridge
oatmeal cookies rest in the
took a cross-country road trip
refrigerator for four days to
achieve an ideal crisp-chewy in 2018, collecting recipes and
tracing schools of thoughts
texture, trust the process:
around the subject (a big one:
They are exceptional.
structure and the functions
of taste buds lead to chapters
grouped by aspects of fl avor.
Among them are “brightness”
(spareribs in malt vinegar and
mashed potatoes), “sweetness”
(saffron swirl buns with dried
fruit), “richness” (crab tikka
masala dip) and “savoriness”
(Goan shrimp, olive and
tomato pulao). Dense in
information and balanced
by Sharma’s color-saturated
photography, “The Flavor
Equation” never loses sight of
the most critical calculation:
deliciousness.
HASSETT
Continued from Page 1B
The Hassetts lived a very quiet
life in La Grande, thus limiting the
local information available. H. M.
was Henry, born in Ohio about 1837.
His wife Maria was born in 1847,
also in Ohio. They were married in
the late 1860s and lived in Michi-
gan, where Henry worked at vari-
ous jobs as a lumberman, postmas-
ter and in general merchandising
before coming west to La Grande.
The fi rst mention of Henry was
in March 1894 when The Observer
reported that he was a delegate to
the State Convention of Populists
from Union County. Then in 1895
and 1896 there were reports of H.
M. Hassett and Joseph Palmer of La
Grande having interest in gold min-
ing within the Sanger district, near
Eagle Creek. Could it have been the
quest for gold that drew the Has-
setts west to the La Grande area?
The Sanborn Map of 1903 still
listed 1108 Adams as a Dry Goods
and Millinery business although
imitate classic cocktails or
no?) into a compendium that
considers every angle. Booze-
less concoctions often lean
syrupy. Bainbridge addresses
this head-on: “The tension be-
tween sweet, sour, salty, bitter
and umami is what the palate
wants in a drink whether it
contains alcohol or not.” Or-
ganized by their time-of-day
appeal, with a helpful rating
for the commitment level it
takes to make them, recipes
bounce from hoppy to citrusy,
creamy to herbal, refreshing
to intense. One favorite: U-Me
& Everyone We Know by
former Los Angeles bartender
Gabriella Mlynarczyk. It’s
an uplifting mix of tomato-
watermelon-basil juice, simple
syrup, lemon juice and a
splash of umeboshi vinegar.
‘In Bibi’s Kitchen’
Hawa Hassan — a native
of Somalia who modeled in
New York before founding
the bottled sauce company
Basbaas — has assembled
a project that is equal parts
vital documentary, compelling
scholarship and cookbook.
With food writer Julia Tur-
shen, she collects stories and
recipes from bibis (grandmoth-
ers) who represent eight coun-
tries in East Africa that touch
the Indian Ocean: Eritrea,
Somalia, Kenya, Tanzania,
Mozambique, South Africa
and the islands of Madagascar
and Comoros.
Dishes as varied as stewed
plantains, denningvleis (lamb
braised in tamarind), corn-
meal porridges, spaghetti with
spiced beef, chicken biryani
ily when Ada died in 1896. Michael
and the children moved to Portland
to live with Maria and Henry. H. M.
Hassett died in 1899.
The 1900 Census showed M. J.
and his two children living with
Maria and that her occupation
was listed as a capitalist. A small
glimpse of her activities appear in
The Observer when in March of
1909 it was reported that Mrs. H.
M. Hassett was sued by the receiver
of the defunct Farmers and Traders
National Bank of La Grande for the
Larry Fry Collection sum of $3,000 with interest as the
The Hassett Building is the white owner of 30 shares. When this is
structure under the right side of
tied to the October 1910 Observer
the Imperial Hotel sign.
reporting the sale of the Hassett
Building to William Siegrist we
Henry and Maria had moved to
might wonder if that had anything
Portland sometime during the late to do with the sale of the building
1890s. They often visited La Grande by Mrs. Hassett.
to visit their only child, an adopted
This now takes us to the Siegrist
daughter, Ada, who had married M. family, who became involved with
J. Buckley, superintendent of the
early La Grande Adams Avenue
O. R. & N. railroad. Ada and M. J.
history. William was one of four
(Michael) had two children: Ruth
sons born to Verena and Adolph
(born in 1892) and Frank (born in
Siegrist, who had immigrated from
1894). Then tragedy struck the fam- Switzerland in 1873 and settled in
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‘Milk, Spice and Curry
Leaves’
Ruwanmali Samarakoon-
Amunugama grew up in Can-
ada; her parents immigrated
to Toronto from Sri Lanka,
and her mother prepared fam-
ily recipes from the island’s
lush, central hill country to
keep her children connected to
their heritage. As a teenager,
Samarakoon-Amunugama
began taking detailed notes on
her mother’s cooking and on
dishes she tasted during trips
to Sri Lanka. After decades of
observing a lack of Sri Lankan
cookbooks on Canadian store
shelves, she decided to help fi ll
the void with her own collec-
tion of recipes.
Samarakoon-Amunugama
sets the scene (“My late
grandmother’s home in
Peradeniya sits on a property
that you wish only to walk
barefoot upon”) and lays out
the foundation of the cuisine:
coconut is a bearing wall for
fl avors; onions, garlic, ginger,
chiles, curry leaves and spice
blends become frequent build-
ing blocks. She makes it clear
where substitutions might be
acceptable (frozen and even
dried coconut can stand in for
fresh) and where they are not
(store-bought curry powder is
no replacement for roasting
and grinding your own). Her
careful instructions and ad-
aptations for North American
cooks culminate rewardingly
in the recipes such as pep-
pered beef with coconut milk
and black mustard seeds, its
clinging sauce by turns rich
and spicy and sharp.
‘Parwana’
I’ve been longing to visit
Parwana Afghan Kitchen in
Adelaide, Australia, since
ex- L.A. Weekly restaurant
critic Besha Rodell wrote
about it for her Australian
Fare column in the New York
Times in March 2018. The
restaurant’s cookbook —
Hillsboro. Their oldest son, Her-
man, appears to be the fi rst of
the brothers to come into Union
County. In 1909 he married Ada
West, the daughter of N. K. West,
one of the early entrepreneurs in
La Grande. The young couple lived
with Mr. West, a widower, and Her-
man worked in his father-in-law’s
department store.
The next brother to show up in
La Grande’s history was William.
The 1900 Census shows him living
in Hillsboro working as a bank
clerk. In 1909 he decided to join
his brother in La Grande and the
1910 Federal Census tells us a bit
about him. He was a 29-year-old
old bachelor living as a lodger along
with 20-some other young men and
women in a boardinghouse run by
Peter Grant. Many of the boarders
were working for the railroad, but
others were teachers and business
owners. William was listed as a jew-
eler, who owned his own shop. We
can rightly assume this was located
in the Hassett Building.
Around 1915 William married
written by Durkhanai Ayubi,
who runs the restaurant with
her mother, Farida Ayubi,
father, Zelmai Ayubi, and four
sisters — conveys far more
than escapist fantasies dur-
ing a pandemic. Narratives
between recipes and evoca-
tive photos detail centuries
of Afghan customs and, more
urgently, the modern politi-
cal crises that led the Ayubi
family to fl ee Afghanistan to
Pakistan and ultimately to
migrate to Australia. Farida
Ayubi’s recipes for jeweled
rice dishes, herbed kabobs,
mantu (dumplings bathed in
yogurt and tomato sauces)
and gently spiced sweets exist
as remembrances and acts
of preservation. “Parwana
[the word is Farsi for ‘but-
terfl y’] is underpinned by my
mother’s vision — her belief
that through her knowledge of
the art of Afghan food, gifted
to her from her mother and
her foremothers, she had been
entrusted with a treasure of
old, a symbol of Afghanistan’s
monumental and culturally
interwoven past.”
‘The Rise’
The most important
cookbook published this year
begins with a manifesto:
“Black food is not mono-
lithic. It’s complex, diverse and
delicious — stemming from
shared experiences as well as
incredible individual creativ-
ity. Black food is American
food, and it’s long past time
that the artistry and ingenuity
of Black cooks were properly
recognized.” Megawatt chef
Marcus Samuelsson teams
with James Beard Award-win-
ning writer Osayi Endolyn to
frame the stories and cultural
contributions of more than 50
Black chefs, journalists and
activists .
Accompanying Endolyn’s
perceptive, unfl inching es-
says on many of the featured
talents are recipes Samuels-
son developed with Yewande
Komolafe and Tamie Cook
that honor the individuals.
There’s a gumbo inspired by
Leah Chase; a saucy, okra-
embellished shrimp and grits
as tribute to Ed Brumfi eld,
the executive chef at Samuels-
son’s Red Rooster Harlem; and
spice-rubbed spare ribs with
kimchi-style pickled greens
as a nod to Los Angeles chef
Nyesha Arrington.
See Books/Page 3B
Julia Barbeau, who had a 9-year-
old daughter named Madeline.
Two years later they added
another daughter named Julia. It
was reported in The Observer that
Bill Siegrist was boasting that she
was the “fi nest he ever saw” and
“says he is going to make a moving
picture actress out of her and put
Mary Pickford in the shade.” It was
about this time that William left the
jewelry business and went to work
with Herman. Just a year earlier, in
1916, a third brother, Adolph, had
moved to La Grande from Hillsboro
to work in the men’s department of
N. K. West’s store. Adolph did not
remain at N. K. West very long be-
cause he took over the jewelry store
when Herman decided to leave and
operated it until 1933 when he sold
the business to H. W. Guthrie and
Carl B. Benson formerly of San
Francisco.
The building at 1108 Adams re-
mained as a jewelry store for many
more years, later under G. S. Birnie
and fi nally Loren Hughes.
Keep looking up! Enjoy!
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