What are the flavors of the season?
Well, if you go by the contents of your cookie exchange, the ingredients in your mulled wine or the scents emanating from your local branch of Yankee Candle, then the so-called “sweet spices” — cinnamon, clove, nutmeg — set the agenda.
In the early days of the Spice Route (say, some time in the 15th century), these ingredients weren’t earmarked for sweets exclusively, but also were used in savory dishes, often as a display of wealth by royalty and merchants. But, over time, Westerners have learned to associate most East Indian spices, with the exception of pepper, with desserts and pastries.
If, like me, you enjoy sweets in moderation and savories in excess, why don’t you celebrate the flavors of the season with these dishes? In addition to these spices, I’ve added a couple more sweet flavors that show their savory side in the right plate of food.
1. cinnamon — pho broth
There are few seasonings as pungent as cinnamon, which makes it a love-it-or-hate-it proposition.
Cinnamon smells so good in hot bread or in mulled wine, but it can be a difficult spice to cook with unless you want your food tasting like Trident gum. Cinnamon never plays the role of secret ingredient.
Except, perhaps, in pho broth. This long-simmered base for Vietnamese beef noodle soup begins with roasted warming spices, including star anise and cinnamon sticks. Somewhere between the licorice tingle of the anise and the rich meatiness of the beef-bone stock, the cinnamon sneaks in and bridges the two.
I am partial to the pho at Pho Dai Loi 2 on Buford Highway (two other branches are in Forest Park and Lawrenceville), where the limpid broth thrums with flavor and the garnishes are always fresh.
Pho Dai Loi 2, 4186 Buford Highway, Atlanta. 404-633-2111.
2. caramel — claypots
As long as you’re on Buford Highway, head up the street to the more upscale digs of Chateau de Saigon. This restaurant also makes an extremely fine bowl of pho as well as a host of other dishes. But you’re here for the claypots or kho to dishes. The glossy, sticky brown sauce that suffuses the chunks of tilapia or pork in these vessels starts with a base of dark caramel. Vietnamese cooks boil sugar and water until very dark and just on the fulcrum between sweet and bitter, then thin it with more water to use as a seasoning. Give it a try.
Chateau de Saigon, 4300 Buford Highway N.E., Suite 218, Atlanta. 404-929-0034, chateaudesaigon.com.
3. nutmeg — white sauce
Called white sauce in English, béchamel in French and besciamella in Italian, this sauce tastes like its principal ingredients — flour, milk, butter — and no more until it gets a barely-there grating of nutmeg. Stir it in, and this sauce gets its soul.
Creamed spinach, which is made by simmering the leafy green vegetable in a rich white sauce, typically contains a hefty dash of nutmeg. Some steakhouses use it in their recipes, others don't. It can overwhelm quickly if the cook is immoderate. As soon as eggnog pops into your taste memory, you know there’s too much nutmeg.
Sotto Sotto uses nutmeg with a sure-handed temperance. This Inman Park Italian mainstay has a menu heavily influenced by owner Riccardo Ullio’s home province of Emilia Romagna.
Taste carefully and you might notice nutmeg in the besciamella sauce that envelops the free-form lasagnette alla bolognese, in the ravioli nudi (spinach and ricotta dumplings), and even in the restaurant’s bolognese sauce.
“Almost everything in Emilia Romagna has nutmeg in it,” Ullio said. And none of it tastes like a Christmas cookie.
Sotto Sotto, 313 N. Highland Ave., Atlanta. 404-523-6678, urestaurants.net.
4. chocolate — mole sauce
You know where we’re headed right? To Oaxaca, the land of mole sauces, the most famous of which uses cinnamon-scented Mexican chocolate along with nuts, onions and a host of other spices.
The best place in Atlanta to sample a bang-up Oaxacan mole, in my opinion, is at Jonesboro’s Taquería la Oaxaqueña, where the luscious brown/black mole graces chicken in any number of preparations.
You can get a fall-apart braised leg under a blanket of mole, a mole chicken taco, or (my favorite) a mole chicken tamale wrapped in a banana leaf.
Taquería la Oaxaqueña, 605 Mount Zion Road, Jonesboro. 770-960-3010, www.taquerialaoaxaquena.com/home.html.
5. pepper — carrot cake
For dessert, let’s take a spice normally associated with savory dishes and show its sweet side.
Black pepper famously pairs with balsamic vinegar as a dressing for strawberries in the Italian dish fragola pazzo (“crazy strawberry”). But in no dessert does it sing a sweeter tune than in Asha Gomez’s carrot cake at Spice to Table.
Her mother’s recipe combines coarse grindings of pepper with clove and cardamom in the cake’s moist crumb. Add a cup of hot spiced chai and you’ll feel the holiday spirit warming you straight to your toes.
Spice to Table, 659 Auburn Ave. NE Suite 506, Atlanta. 404-220-8945, spicetotable.com.
For more ideas about gifts, decorating, where to eat and what to do, check out our complete Atlanta Holiday Guide.
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