Condiment

You know how one thing leads to another?

A couple of weeks ago, I was scrabbling around on the internet investigating cauliflower pizza - where instead of a yeast dough made with flour and water and yeast and a drizzle of olive oil, you somehow mash cauliflower into a disk and pretend it's a crust. I landed on a recipe on the WaPo site, which was not uninteresting for a couple of reasons. 1) It turns out that you can actually buy the premade cauliflower crusts from a company called, ha ha ha, Cali'flour Foods, which is good because it is a pain-in-the-ass to make it yourself. 2) The guy tweaked his version of the cauliflower crust by riffing on a recipe from a cookbook I'd never heard of: “Eat More Greens” by Zita Steyn.

So I took the book out of the library. It's a little woo-woo, but there were enough things in it that looked interesting, so it's currently sitting on my dining room table with a handful of post-it notes flagging said interesting-looking things. Like a barley and mustard green risotto, and a cauliflower couscous, and a lentil salad with avocado and roasted tomatoes and spinach, and HOLY SHIT dukka!

Years ago, really a long time ago, I acquired both of Laurie Colwin's memoir cookbooks: Home Cooking and More Home Cooking. I love them. She was a terrific writer who had a dab hand in the kitchen and some of my absolute favorite things to eat are from her. The Nantucket cranberry pie is hers. So is the Cider jelly. And for years I've been circling around her recipe for dukka, never really needing to make it, but really wanting to. After all, Colwin calls it Condiment and says "I must confess that I eat it right out of the jar". And later she offers it to her sister, who is subsequently caught eating it out of the jar with a spoon.

Finding dukka in another cookbook was all the encouragement I needed. I even had a handful of hazelnuts in the freezer. Before I started, I dug up a third version of dukka, one from Claudia Roden, which Laurie Colwin alludes to off-handedly because it seems like Colwin actually got her recipe from Jane Grigson's daughter Sophie. (Tracing recipes back is worse than genealogy.) (Besides, dukka is clearly one of those things on which every family in Egypt has their own idiosyncratic take.) Armed with three recipes, I went to work.

And, dear reader, it was GOOD.

It's good on a spoon out of the jar.

It's good sprinkled on some plain boiled farro.

It's good dressing up steamed broccoli.

It's good on a fried egg.

I haven't tried it on avocado yet, but I think that'll be my lunch tomorrow.

Colwin includes cinnamon; I skipped that. Steyn uses dried mint and nigella seeds; I skipped them. Steyn also uses ground coriander; I stuck with whole. Roden keeps it simple: hazelnuts, coriander seeds, sesame seeds, cumin seeds, salt and pepper.

I went with Roden's ingredients but made a smaller batch.

Dukka (or Dukkha or Dukkah or Do'a or Duqqa) (or Condiment)

1 cup whole hazelnuts
1/4 cup sesame seeds
2 T. coriander seeds
1 1/2 T. cumin seeds
1 1/2 t. kosher salt
1/2 t. ground black pepper

Toast the hazelnuts in a skillet. Dump them onto a kitchen towel and rub them around to get some of the skins off. Put the skinned (or semi-skinned) nuts in a food processor. Now, toast the remaining seeds until the sesame seeds are staring to color and the cumin and coriander are fragrant. Add to the food processor, along with the salt and pepper. Buzz a few times until nicely chopped, but not pureed. Eat at will.

The moral of the story? When the dukka itch gets you, scratch it.