The New York Times Magazine - 20.10.2019

25

That aroma!

Even the folks

in the offi ce

wander out to

see what smells

so unbelievably

knockout.

Zhug

Time: 40 minutes

2 teaspoons whole black peppercorns

2 teaspoons coriander seeds

1 teaspoon cumin seeds

½ teaspoon cardamom seeds, extracted

from about 10 cardamom pods

6 garlic cloves, smashed

4 serrano chiles, cut into very thin coins

1 tablespoon kosher salt

3 tightly packed cups roughly chopped

cilantro leaves and stems

1½ tightly packed cups roughly chopped

parsley leaves

½ cup extra-virgin olive oil

1. In a small, dry pan, toast the
   peppercorns, coriander seeds, cumin
   seeds and cardamom seeds over
   medium heat, shaking the pan occasionally,
   until slightly toasted and fragrant,
   about 2 minutes.


2. Transfer the seeds to a large
   mortar and pestle, and pulverize into
   a coarse powder.


3. Add the garlic and chiles, and season
   evenly with kosher salt. Grind the mixture
   together until a tight paste forms, 4-5 minutes.


4. Add about ⅓ of the cilantro and
   parsley, and continue to pound together
   into a rough paste, another 4-5
   minutes. Repeat 2 more times, adding
   the remaining cilantro and parsley in
   2 batches, until the mixture is a slightly
   pulpy paste, 4-5 minutes.


5. Drizzle in the olive oil while constantly
   pounding and grinding the herb
   mixture together until you achieve a loose,
   homogeneous paste. Continue to mix
   until it has the consistency of applesauce,
   about 2 minutes. Let it stand 10 minutes
   before serving.

Yield: 1 generous cup.

For the entirety of Prune’s 20 years,

I’ve confi ned myself — with pretty strict

discipline — to cooking within a Euro-

pean-and-Mediterranean idiom. It has

been two decades of salsa verde, gre-

molata, sauce gribiche and maître d’hôtel

butter, with all the rest doused in olive

oil. Of course, giving yourself the entire

European-and-Mediterranean pantry is

hardly a confi nement. Somehow it has

never even proved to be a monotony. It

has just been a nonnegotiable outline of

territory on a map, so that we all know

how far we can go and what we are meant

to be doing as we cook menu after menu

after menu, season after season, six new

menus a year, 20 solid years in a row. And

that’s not counting desserts.

But when I’m cooking at home, there

have never been any equatorial or hemi-

spheric confi nes — mapo tofu, larb salad,

goma-ae, smorrebrod all in rotation, with

free abandon. And recently, a heaping

spoonful of zhug pretty much every day.

With this bright green Yemeni sauce,

spicy from serranos, perfumy from

cilantro, I’m getting ready to expand

the territory at work.

I’ve had both the green and the red

versions at Yemen Cafe in Hamtramck,

a suburb of Detroit that used to be heav-

ily Polish but now has immense Yemeni

and Bangladeshi populations. During a

recent visit this summer, I stopped in to

fi nally fi nd out how to pronounce ‘‘zhug ,’’

thoroughly annoyed by my own chron-

ic stumbling over the ‘‘zh’’ as if it were

the leg of a chair in my own den that I

habitually stub a toe on. (Time to simply

move the chair, G.H.!)

There were a few Yemeni teenagers

working the counter who off ered me

some tea from an aluminum percolator

like the one used for coff ee at meetings

in church basements — this tea over-

whelming with clove and white sugar.

I asked the guys at the cafe to repeat

‘‘zhug’’ for me over and over again to be

sure I got it, because the sound was so

wildly unlike the English transliteration.

I’d been walking around using soft z and

a hard g and was so incredulous at their

insistent hard s and the hard k at the

ending that fi nally one of the teenagers

at the register wrote it down phoneti-

cally on an order pad: s-a-h-a-w-k. He

pronounced the ‘‘haw’’ portion exactly

like the hao in Mandarin ni hao, and very

kindly put an extra-large container of the

stuff in my takeout order. I sat outside in

the privacy of my parked car for a few

minutes practicing the pronunciation

and taking little sips from the container

he had packed.

I think they make their sauce in a food

processor, and I would, too, if I were

making such a large quantity. But the

zhug we use now at the restaurant we

make in smaller batches, by hand in the

molcajete, and it is intensely fl avorful and

full bodied, like a true Genovese pesto.

And it’s wildly fragrant.

That aroma! There are a few moments

in my two decades at work that I will

never forget as far as smell goes: One

year the strawberries were so intensely

perfect I could smell them from down

in the prep room while the farmer was

still coming down the hatch from the

sidewalk with fl ats of them. And there

was an out-of-this-world, stop-you-

in-your-tracks scent of pine trees and

Aegean breezes that, I swear, carried all

the way into the dining room when we

were making Mastika syrup for fondant

in the basement. And now there is this

sauce, zhug. As soon as my wife, Ashley,

starts pounding the cilantro and the car-

damom with the serranos in the prep

room, even the folks in the offi ce with

the door closed answering the phones

all day wander out to see what smells so

unbelievably knockout.

And yet for all its formidable power,

Ashley’s version at Prune has achieved

a harmony among the cardamom,

cilantro, garlic and serranos — a diffi -

cult-to-achieve union given the strong

fl avor of each ingredient. So fresh, so

vibrant, but with no one fl avor more

potent than another — nuance and

punch simultaneously.

I’ve stirred it into ripe tomatoes and

cucumbers and red onion with Bulgari-

an white cheese, like a version of Greek

salad or with mozzarella as a version of

Caprese, even. I’ve whipped it into soft

butter and slathered it over grilled lamb

chops — holy smokes! I’ve fried eggs

and slipped them, sunny side up, into

a shallow bowl of zhug, like a kind of

shakshuka. And I’ve spooned a healthy

dose onto a few hard-boiled, then rough-

ly chopped, eggs for lunch — both in the

same day.

You could cut fat cubes of tofu and

blanch them for a couple of minutes in

salted boiling water; then, once they’re

well drained, bury the tofu cubes in a deep

pool of zhug, for a stunning version of saag

paneer but without the saag. Or the paneer.

No cheese, no ghee. Totally vegan.

If you need a minute to let it sink in

that the chef at Prune just recommended

— in The New York Times — something

vegan to eat, I will understand. But that

is how persuasive this sauce is. I’ll keep

that tofu dish for home cooking, though.

So that we will always recognize our-

selves in our cooking at work, we will

spoon the zhug over braised lamb necks

this fall menu.