The Pavlova Project
Plus Birds, Fish, and Fennel
Happy Labor Day Weekend, eater-gatherers! In case you’re trying to make summer last just a little bit longer, I thought I’d share a recap of what we ate last weekend at Supper Club. We squeezed every last drop out of late summer produce, and anything we ate would be delicious this weekend or next as the fruits and veggies get sweeter and riper. Plus, I made a dessert that I really want to tell you about; it’s a stone-fruit bonanza with a fennel surprise. Read on for rhapsodic prose about flavors and perhaps some inspiration for any holiday weekend gatherings you might be having.
But first, this supper club was a special one. A heroic friend came in from New York City for less than 24 hours just to be a part of it (and take all of the beautiful photos you’re about to see), and two friends attended for the last time, as they are tragically moving to Pennsylvania, wherever that is. Two other friends got a babysitter so they could be with us. Gathering is hard: addresses are changing, kids are entering the scene, and schedules are filling to the brim. I was especially grateful last weekend as I felt and observed the alchemy of our ephemeral little community, connections sparking to life between beautiful people generous with their time and energy. And really enthusiastic about eating.
To start, we drank clarified jungle birds. If you’re not familiar with this tiki revival cocktail, you’re in for a treat. It’s got pineapple, lime, Campari, rich demerara syrup, grapefruit oleo saccharum, and rum. It is, dare I say, a bittersweet symphony. Recipe testing for this one was awesome, though it left me rather worse for wear some mornings. Don’t sleep on clarifying: it rounds out the hard bitter edges and makes for a satiny mouthfeel. I followed this Thirsty Whale tutorial using equal parts Old Monk, Hamilton Pot Still Gold, and Smith and Cross for plenty of funk. It was smooth as MARBLE, folks.
We sat outside and had red onion tian on griddled polenta squares, local cucumber and Athena melon with a mint-lime-scallion dressing, and halved figs with Four Fat Fowl’s St. Stephen (a cheese so good it I almost got into a car accident because of it), honey, and flaky salt. We sipped on Biokult Naken, an Austrian skin contact fizzer that’ll make your dreams come true, and Prati al Sole’s Gola, which everyone agreed tastes like kombucha, dry cider, and wine had a funky little baby on a Piedmont hillside. We told jokes in the way I imagine people did in Days of Yore to entertain each other and laughed so loud we disturbed the neighborhood. As nighttime closed in around us we became an island of warmth around a table. The crickets sang, the world faded away. An extra sharp supper clubber reminded everyone to take their wine glasses inside for dinner. (We gulped icy Pullus pinot grigio, a beautiful Slovenian skin-contact wine.)
It’s hard to tell who was really the star of dinner. A case could be made for fennel, which laced the walnut sauce on the eggplant and dressed the heirloom tomatoes in an umami-bomb of a dressing with melted anchovies. It added unusual depth to familiar flavors and zhuzhed up the night. The roast branzini are also contenders: dutifully lined up like flavorful soldiers, they delivered heady punches of lemongrass, ginger, scallions, and habanero pepper in their flaky, tender flesh. I love Yewande Komolafe’s work and followed her advice to use a mortar and pestle when making the marinade. The aromatics released floral, citrusy, and sharp aromas I’d never experienced from chopping or blending, leading to some of the most pleasurable, tactile cooking I’ve done. I felt like a citizen of the world eating bites of fish perfumed in a West African style after mouthfuls of hyper-local, almost bloody heirloom tomatoes.
More local than the tomatoes, however, was the purslane that I picked from our yard. Purslane is an edible weed that has taken over the garden that succumbed to this summer’s heat and my incompetence. I’m trying to look on the bright side of that catastrophe, and the lemony punch that purslane brings to a salad is a pretty good consolation prize. I put it in a salad with cukes, pepps, tomatoes, pea shoots, raw corn as sweet as cane sugar, and a feta-mint-oregano dressing with herbs from the garden. It was an understated hero of the dinner table, but a hero nonetheless. Check your yard for purslane. Give it a try.
At this point in the evening, the conversation turned to decolonizing time, the extent to which time is linear, and a term called “temporal slipperiness.” I was paying attention, I swear, but I was also harboring an explosive secret: the first dessert course was ready in the other room. (I follow a scorched earth policy during supper club: we move from patio to dining room to living room, leaving each space in delicious ruins rather than cleaning up as we go.)
I’m particularly proud of this dessert because I created it in an attempt to replicate an experience. In August, I had dinner at Newton’s Thistle and Leek. The romano beans and tuna crudo were outstanding, but nothing could have prepared me for dessert: a meringue topped with roasted plums and coconut cream. The cream was laced with anise, and it melted into the airy meringue and rich plums when they all hit my tongue. I resented sharing it with my husband.
I couldn’t stop thinking about this dessert. I thought it would be even better on the scale of a whole Nigella Lawson pavlova to maximize marshmallowy softness. I practiced making whipped coconut cream, a kind of finicky endeavor. I figured out a way to get anise into powdered sugar. And I found a recipe from the same restaurant for what I assumed was a similar plum treatment, but thought I’d add some of the beautiful cherries I’d recently gotten to add another layer of flavor. Here’s what she looked like when she was all assembled. I nearly screamed.
The plum recipe called for sprinkling the roasted fruit with fennel pollen. I didn’t have that. But on a whim I went out to the garden and tasted the tiny yellow flowers of my bronze fennel. They pack a licorice-sugar explosion on your tongue, kind of like gentle, natural pop rocks. So I scattered some of these flowers on top of the pavlova and wow did I love the results. The unexpected herbaceousness cut into the sweetness of the fruits, making the dessert much more special.
We had some delicious gifted fizzy Furlani red with the plum pavlova, then had coffee granita with mascarpone whipped cream in lieu of after-dinner coffee, something I highly recommend and that I will do a lot more henceforth. But I was still dreaming about the pav. Here’s the recipe, in case you’d like to make it. (It’s also dairy-free and gluten-free!)
Pavlova with Roasted Plums and Cherries, Coconut Cream, and Fennel Flowers
Pavlova
6 egg whites, room temperature
375 grams (1 ¾ cups) caster sugar or superfine sugar
2½ teaspoons cornstarch
2 teaspoons lemon juice
Roasted fruit
1.5 pounds ripe plums, preferably a blend of varieties
1 pound sweet red cherries
½ cup sugar
pinch salt
2 tablespoons olive oil
Coconut Whipped Cream
2 cans full-fat coconut milk, refrigerated overnight
¼ cup powdered sugar
3 whole anise seeds
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
Pinch of salt
Toppings
Toasted shredded unsweetened coconut
Toasted flaked almonds
Pinch of bronze fennel flowers
Make the roasted fruit: Pit the plums and cut into halves if super-ripe, quarters if still a little firm. Pit and halve the cherries. In a large bowl, toss with the sugar and pinch of salt and macerate for about 30 minutes. Preheat the oven to 450. Toss the fruit with the olive oil, dump into a roasting pan (I used a high-walled 9X13 dish) and bake for 35-40 minutes until the juices start to bubble and thicken and the fruit is tender. Let cool. Spoon out as much of the cooking liquid from the roasting pan as you can into a small saucepan. Over medium-low heat, reduce and thicken the juices until syrupy. Mix this syrup back in with the fruits.
Fruits can be roasted and stored in the refrigerator for up to 5 days.
Make the coconut cream: Place a bowl in the freezer to chill for at least 10 minutes. Lightly toast 3 whole anise in a small pan over medium heat until fragrant. In a spice grinder or mortar and pestle (I used both, in that order), grind the anise until it is as fine as you can get it. Pass it through a sieve, then take the pieces that didn’t make it and grind and sieve them again. Add ¼ teaspoon plus one pinch of the finely-ground anise to the ¼ cup powdered sugar. Mix and set aside.
Take the chilled bowl out of the freezer and the coconut milk out of the fridge. Scoop out the solid fats that have floated to the top of the cans, taking care not to get any of the liquidy milk. With an electric egg beater, start whipping the cream. This can take 3-4 minutes. It will not expand in size like dairy cream, but it will get velvety and slightly airier. If there are lumps, add small amounts of the watery milk to smooth them out. Once the cream is whipped and silky, add the vanilla and a tiny pinch of salt. Sift in 1.5 tablespoons of the powdered sugar. Whip until fully blended. Taste and adjust flavorings. (The anise flavor should be subtle; if it’s not coming through enough, add another half tablespoon of anise powdered sugar.)
Coconut cream can be whipped a week in advance and stored in an airtight container in the refrigerator.
Make the pavlova: First, make the caster sugar. Place 375 grams of regular granulated sugar into a blender and blend for a few seconds. The resulting sugar should be finer than granulated, but not as fine as powdered. It will melt nicely into the egg whites.
Preheat the oven to 350 and line a baking tray with baking parchment. Beat the egg whites until satiny peaks form, then beat in the sugar a spoonful at a time until the meringue is stiff and shiny. Sprinkle the cornstarch over the meringue and add the lemon juice. Gently fold until everything is thoroughly mixed in. Mound onto the lined baking tray in a fat circle approximately 10 inches in diameter, smoothing the sides and the top with a knife or spatula. Place in the oven, then immediately turn the temperature down to 300. Bake for 1 hour. Turn off the oven and prop the door open with a wooden spoon. Leave the pavlova inside to cool completely, overnight if necessary.
The pavlova requires time to cool and is best made the night before you want to eat it.
Assembly: Take the roasted fruit and whipped coconut cream out of the refrigerator a couple of hours before you’d like to assemble the dessert. A half hour before you plan on serving it, flip the pavlova upside down onto a serving platter so that the flat part is on top. (This puts the marshmallowy insides as close as possible to the cream and fruits.) Spread the coconut cream over the pavlova, pushing it almost to the edge with a knife or offset spatula. Pour the roasted stone fruits and their syrupy juices over the cream, nudging it to the edge and a bit over for some beautiful syrupy drips on the pristine white meringue. Take the pinch of yellow fennel flowers, break them up a little bit, then scatter them over the top of the fruit. Scatter the toasted coconut and almond over the top. This is a big moment for scattering; get into it. Let sit for 30 minutes, find some way to occupy yourself while you wait, and serve in gorgeous and dripping marshmallowy wedges.
I stan anise coconut cream
That dessert looks incredible. And kudos on that great low-contrast tablecloth, too. I’ve been taking a deep dive on tablecloths recently. This is the first time I’ve commented in a forum since AOL. All the best,