LIANE HANSEN, host:
While that puzzle challenge is certainly food for thought, you probably need some food to think. How about some Iraqi pastry stuffed with cheese?
NPR's Daniel Zwerdling is here for our occasional segment on food and cooking and he's going to teach us how to make them.
First of all, hi Danny(ph).
DANIEL ZWERDLING: Hey, Liane.
HANSEN: What are these things called?
ZWERDLING: Cheese Sambouseks. And these are savory pastries, by the way. They're not sweet. They make really great party appetizers for the next time you're going to have a party for 200. And, actually, I'm not going to make them. We are going to bake them with a wonderful cookbook writer named Greg Patent.
Now, Greg has just put out a book called "Baker's Odyssey." And the reason I like this book is because it's filled with the recipes of immigrants and immigrants' children and immigrants' grandchildren whom he tracked out all across the country. It's sort of like a global tour through food: Mexico, Norway, South Africa.
HANSEN: Neat. But I have to ask you, you're an investigative reporter, why do you want to investigate the mysteries of these cheese pastries?
ZWERDLING: Food was one of my first passions when I came to NPR many, many, many, many, many years ago. I wrote a lot about farmers and agriculture and the food industry and cooking and chefs. So when I heard that you were having an occasional food segment here, on WEEKEND EDITION SUNDAY, I thought this would be the place where I could say in baritone tones the sauce was sulking(ph).
(Soundbite of laughter)
ZWERDLING: Just kidding, of course. Although we did this cooking segment a little differently.
HANSEN: Yeah.
ZWERDLING: I mean, Greg Patent, the cookbook author, went to his kitchen, which is in Montana. Unfortunately, I stayed here in the studio. And so through the miracle of modern technology, he cooked and gave us a blow-by-blow description of what he was doing while we chatted.
Mr. GREG PATENT (Author, "A Baker's Odyssey"): I'm going to have to move a little bit because you have to indulge me, Danny.
ZWERDLING: And, Liane, before we dive in, talked about the cooking of immigrants. Listen to this, Greg Patent learned this recipe for cheese sambouseks from his mother who learned it from her mother who was an Iraqi Jew living in Iraq in the early 1900s. But Greg Patent's grandmother moved with her family to India and then to China and Greg grew up in Shanghai. And his granny, as he calls her, did most of the cooking.
Mr. PATENT: The apartment where we grew up was - it was one room and I mean one room. It was like about 12-by-15 feet. It had to be a bedroom, it had to be a dining room, it was kitchen. Granny slept on a cot, my parents slept on a couch that had a hide-a-bed in it, so that every morning everything was kind of folded up and put away. We had a small bathroom which did not have hot water, so anytime we needed to take bath we actually had to order it. So, it was a Chinese servant who would carry these big wooden buckets of hot water and he would carry them up three flights of stairs where our one-room apartment is located and the empty them into the tub.
ZWERDLING: And before we keep talking, I guess we shouldn't forget the recipe. And while you're flinging flour, you can, you know, I want to hear how you put this book together and all the research.
Mr. PATENT: The recipe is cheese sambouseks which are pastries filled with cheese. And it comes from my grandmother, granny, and this was a particular pastry she would make very frequently, and I would eat when I came home from school.
ZWERDLING: Okay. Take it away.
Mr. PATENT: Okay. We start off by putting flour and salt and baking powder and then you'll need to add some cold butter. And then I'm going to pulse until the butter is cut into very, very small pieces. And I'm going to pour in the water until the dough gathers into bowl.
ZWERDLING: I've always felt suspicious of food processors, do you really find it that the processor can make a flaky, tender dough?
Mr. PATENT: Yes. Danny, I make practically all of my pastries and doughs in a food processor.
ZWERDLING: Sacre bleu.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. PATENT: There. And then I'm going to divide the dough into 24 pieces and then let the dough rest for about 20 minutes.
ZWERDLING: Can you remember the time, you know, the moment - a moment when you were pattering in your kitchen or whatever, when you thought, aha, I have got to put together a cookbook with recipes from immigrants and their families like my own?
Mr. PATENT: Well, my last book was "Baking in America" where I told the story of America through about 200 years of baking. And that story really had to do with the way Americans adapt and change recipes and - because we always love new things. The flipside of "Baking in America" is learning recipes from immigrants who want to hold on to their homelands in a way that they can only really do by cooking and the food that they left behind.
ZWERDLING: And before we go on - I should be the evil taskmaster, what do we do next?
Mr. PATENT: The dough is all rested. And what I'm going to do now is I'm going shred the cheese for the filling. And while we're talking, Danny, I'm just going to tap the circles of dough out into four inch rounds. I'll put a piece of cheese on the lower half of each circle, fold the circles in half, pinch firmly to seal, make a little pleat and brush them with my egg wash and then get them into the oven.
ZWERDLING: But, Greg, can I interject for a moment. There are millions and millions of people in the United States who could give you recipes like this from immigrant parents or grandparents. I mean, how do you start tracking down the hundred-some recipes in the book?
Mr. PATENT: Well, any gathering that I would go to, I would ask, do you know somebody who does great Polish cooking? Do you know somebody who can teach me some Lebanese cooking? I met Maria Elena Flores(ph) who was the actual first person that contributed to my book. I met her through her daughter in Berkeley, California, when my son was getting his Ph.D. in linguistics.
And at his graduation ceremony, he introduced me to Belen Flores(ph) who was kind of the administrator of the graduate program in linguistics. And I said, I see that you're Mexican. Do you do any baking? And she said the person you really need to get in touch with is my mother. And so she basically offered me up her mother to teach me pumpkin empanadas and bunuelos and flour tortillas, which were all things that he mother made in Mexico and she continues to make 40 years later in her - the town that she lives in, near Sacramento.
And then I need a Polish baker. And my daughter-in-law and my son were living in Chicago. She told me she would do some checking. And it turns out that next door, her neighbor Liz McDonald(ph), had a housekeeper who is Polish. And so when Liz McDonald asked her Polish housekeeper if the housekeeper knew of anyone who could help me out with some Polish recipes, the housekeeper said he has to meet my mom Christina(ph). And Christina and I got together, I made a special trip up to Chicago, and we had two days of just solid total baking.
Oh, by the way, before we put them in the oven, there's one last step and that is just brush each pastry lightly with the egg wash.
Another thing, Danny, is that a lot of the recipes in the book were traditionally made by many women working together.
ZWERDLING: Ah.
Mr. PATENT: This was a way of socializing. It was a way of catching up on gossip. When I was up and Albany, New York, I worked with a group of Sicilian-American women and I worked in the kitchen with them for an entire weekend. And it was just fabulous just being involved in their conversation and trying to remember what they did last year. These are all recipes that these women had learned from their mothers who were the first-generation immigrants. And they didn't necessarily write everything down. They had a recipe template and they would say, now did I put in the sweet vermouth or the marsala into the cannoli dough last year? So, what these women told me was they said we're so glad you're writing this down because now we will know what to do next year when we make the recipe.
(Soundbite of laughter)
ZWERDLING: I love it.
Mr. PATENT: Okay. Well, now that the pastries, all the sambouseks have been brushed with the egg wash, it's time to put them in the oven.
ZWERDLING: And, Liane, that where Greg Patent and I very sadly said goodbye.
HANSEN: You didn't even get to taste them. You were 2,000 miles apart - no fair.
ZWERDLING: I know. But through the miracle of overnight shipping, Greg has delivered these sambouseks to our door.
Rebecca, could you come in please. Our producer, Rebecca Martinez, is a multitalented young woman and she…
HANSEN: Hey, Rebecca.
REBECCA MARTINEZ: Hi.
ZWERDLING: …heated this up in the oven.
MARTINEZ: Here you go.
ZWERDLING: It literally just come from (unintelligible) in Montana.
HANSEN: Oh, look at those. They look like little empanadas.
ZWERDLING: Every culture has stuffed savory pastries like this.
Here you take the first bite.
HANSEN: Really?
ZWERDLING: Maybe you'd like to describe the, you know, the taste.
HANSEN: Well, it's very flaky. The pastry is very, very, flaky and buttery, so when you put in your fingers, you know, it leaves this lovely grease on it and of course all the flakiness down into the - on to the plate. So you take bite.
ZWERDLING: Shaped like a moon.
HANSEN: It is shaped - half moon.
(Soundbite of chewing)
HANSEN: Mm-hmm.
(Soundbite of deep breath)
HANSEN: Mm-hmm.
ZWERDLING: Stuffed with cheddar.
HANSEN: Is that it? Mm-hmm.
ZWERDLING: And I think a mixture of cheese. These really are lovely.
HANSEN: I've been told by the mother not to talk with my mouth full, but, of course, I…
ZWERDLING: I won't tell her.
HANSEN: …have to avoid this.
So, what's your next assignment?
ZWERDLING: Off to Antarctica.
HANSEN: Really?
ZWERDLING: I'm going to see if the continent is really melting.
HANSEN: Oh, hard - another investigative report.
NPR's Daniel Zwerdling.
Hey, Daniel, thanks a lot for being a part of our food segment today. Have a great trip. And, boy, I really look forward to cooking with you in future segments.
ZWERDLING: Well, yeah, me too. Thanks.
HANSEN: You can find recipes for Iraqi sambouseks and Australian lamingtons at npr.org/books.
This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News.
HANSEN: I'm Liane Hansen.