Ode on a Grecian Salad (and its amazing antecedents)

If you've been reading along for a bit you've already figured out that the Cafe Alcazar is sort of the spiritual living room of the MadriGalz. It's a fine match of philosophies. Our simple a capella arrangements of Christmas carols reflect several centuries. The Cafe is nestled inside a lovely turn-of-the-century hotel which is now home to both the offices of the City of St. Augustine and the breathtaking collection of the Lightner Museum, where simple, beautiful food is served and after lunch people are happier than they expected to be. If you look closely at the picture, you can see that the Cafe itself is in the deep end of antique (and now completely dry) swimming pool. The Cafe is centered in an assortment of shops featuring art and antiques, where the theme of straddling centuries is perfectly reflected.

There are two stories here, really: the story of the Cafe, and the story of How The MadriGalz and The Cafe Make Christmas Magic. They're as entwined as Barbry Allen and Sweet William, so you may have to hack through the briars with me a bit. The best way to share a restaurant experience, of course, is to take you there, and since I can't do that I have to use words. So it'll take a bit longer. Be patient if you can, my dears.

The Cafe part of it began for me with an incidental visit. Someone said, "Let's have lunch at the Alcazar" and I found myself sitting over a plate of something called "Artichokes Giovanni" which was more or less artichokes and mushrooms served over pasta, with a delicate topping of beautifully browned bread crumbs and a hint of lemon. It was preceded by a green salad with a tahini dressing from which I've never quite recovered, to this day. And though it's all a bit foggy, that first visit of mine, I think it may have been someone's birthday or some other celebratory occasion, for there was coffee and a memorable oatmeal cookie pie with ice cream (this still brings a tear to the eye of those who've tasted it). The food was good. In fact, the food was VERY good. But there was something else happening, too, something that happens at the most special of restaurants, something I wish I could better put into words: everyone felt right at home. I don't mean "at home" in the sense that you could take off your shoes or do anything rude at the table without reproach. I mean that there was a feeling of connection. You nodded at people seated at neighboring tables, because you had the feeling they might be distant cousins you'd forgotten. There was sense all around the room that you'd finally found a seat at a table where they remembered you, where they brought out the best wine for you, where you could rest, and eat, where the music suited you as perfectly as the wine and where you almost thought you might have invited all these (strangers) people to eat lunch with you. Upon reflection I realized that I'd had the feeling of stepping past a long line of people who had reservations or were trying to get a table, being recognized by the maitre'd and immediately seated at my favorite table and served something special that wasn't on the menu. And that's what it was, and is, to have lunch at the Cafe Alcazar.

Lorie sold the restaurant a year or so ago, but I asked her about its history because I had no memory of its evolution. She worked at Cafe Alcazar for nearly 20 years and owned it for almost 12. When asked about the menu, she gives all the credit to its previous owner, Maureen, claiming that she herself isn't much of a cook, but Maureen's innovations ("She is incredibly talented with food," Lorie says) needed no refinement. Remember the Curried Chicken Salad recipe I gave you? That must have been Maureen's creation, originally, perhaps including its setting in the elegant menu offering "East Meets West", where Curried Chicken Salad sets off green garden salad and fresh fruit to perfect advantage. And the Greek salad? The crepes, filled with something fresh and delightful du jour? All Maureen, or maybe one of a succession of chefs who worked in the kitchen over the years, each touch changing and refining the result. But the sense in the place that you're one of the insiders, that the maitre'd seated you at your favorite table, without you asking or even offering a tip? That's all Lorie.

And here the two stories begin their intersection. There had been a madrigal singing group in St. Augustine for some years under the direction of Sister Patricia Eileen (SPE), based at the Cathedral. (In fairness I should say that as in many small towns the best musical talent tends to find its way to the local churches; St. Augustine is no exception. There is today a fine group called Vivace and there are probably others doing period music. Religious feeling has less to do with it than you might think. I promise a story about this some of these days, my dears, to do with pipe organs and dreams and people who are part of both.) Both Miss Judy and I had been members and when it faded away, we continued to sing madrigals in different vocal configurations when we could. We worked as a trio for a time with our soprano friend Tracy until she moved away and the singing of Christmas madrigals was set aside. We would get the odd request every year, but close harmonies don't work with two voices unless the arrangements are very carefully constructed. And so we left it.

One year we got a couple of requests at about the same time. One was to do something purely for the sake of entertainment, and one was to provide the music for a holiday church service, but we had no soprano. Oh, I shouldn't say that: we had Miss Judy and she is an amazing soprano, actually, but she's too strong a weapon to post at that station. With her vocal range and ability to sight-read and sing different parts, she always served as our utility player. With my own limitations, this meant we needed someone with a clear, blend-able upper range, who could sing the melody in most cases, so that I could sing the lower harmony and Miss Judy could do whatever the hell magical thing is it that she does. And suddenly, I thought of Lis. I'd been listening to her sing for more years than I cared to count, but had recently come into closer orbit with her, gotten to know her, and dared to ask. And she said yes! Imagine. This amazing voice, this astonishing person, deigned to sing with me and Miss Judy, and there we were, unexpectedly: The MadriGalz.

So there, my loves, are the two winding stories. You already know that The MadriGalz try to sing at the Cafe Alcazar every Christmas, and that this year we were invited to sing at Creekside Dinery and Saltwater Cowboy's. You know we have a CD and you know how much we love singing together, and you know our hiberation is underway and will end when the days begin to grow shorter once again.

And I prayed for snow

When I was a small child, it probably didn't snow at Christmas as often as it seemed to, but at least was cold around Christmastime and that meant there was at least the possibility of clean, white, magical snow. It was east Tennessee, and the Great Smoky Mountains stood nearby and, well, it was possible.

Anyone who has lived in north Florida knows that while cold weather is certainly possible, snow is just about out of the question, though not completely unknown. There was one winter in which the fort green, that beautiful expanse of green grass carpet surrounding St. Augustine's Castillo, was tipped with white snow. It was the same year I was sneaked into a local drinking establishment to hear Gamble Rogers, the same year I heard Lis sing for the first time...but these, my darlings, are stories for another time. Snow, it is.

So here we are: one of the first winters I spent in St. Augustine as something other than a tourist, Christmas Day was so warm the doors and windows had to be opened to let the heat from the roasting turkey out of the stifling kitchen. This is how it went in other years, too. Some years, a satisfying chill would descend for the holidays, making happy the women working in kitchens to bring forth perfectly golden brown turkeys and their men, out in the woods as soon as family obligations would grudgingly permit, where a deer killed in the bracing cold would keep longer on one of those 80-degree Yuletide mornings. It made kids happy, too, since those nice flannel p.j.s and fluffy sweaters Santa brought were so much easier to wear in colder weather. And all this aside...I couldn't summon the "I'll Be Home For White Blue Christmas Without You Chestnuts Roasting What're You Doing New Year's" feeling in the 78 degree sunshine. So I prayed for snow.

I have prayed for snow, asked Santa for snow, joked about asking Santa for snow, told my husband, my friends, my children that snow was all I wanted for Christmas every year for more years than I like to think about. And now we've had a 2-week long cold snap (can a "snap" really last as long as a fortnight?), with days that have barely been able to raise their drooping heads out of the 30s and nights that have been blown by the north wind into long hours of 20s, with wind chills almost touching single-digits. This morning, in fact, my prayer for snow was almost answered (maddeningly), though it seems to have skirted us here in north Florida and passed along to the south of us. And in its wake I find I am more than even grateful for our beautiful Golden Hour, in which the sun spills gently through the oaks and touches the Spanish moss ever so quietly.

Respectfully, I'd like to change my prayers, wishes and best hopes from Christmas snow to winter peace, without, perhaps, the drama of near-freezing temperatures for quite so long, and with, perhaps occasional reminders of glorious spring beckoning in the distance.



And in case you still need to bake something so your oven stays on and your house is warmed, I think you ought to get those big baking potatoes out. Scrub them, poke a few fork holes in them, and wash them well. Spray with some Pam, or rub with a touch of butter (my grandmother would have used bacon fat), and sprinkle with some kosher salt; bake until done. You can eat them tonight, or you can save until tomorrow and serve as you like with eggs for breakfast, sliced, drizzled with olive oil and roasted or chopped right up into your breakfast omelet. Oh, and for heaven's sake, do stop praying for snow.

Cold days, blue skies and more remembering

Remember when I mentioned that stunning view to the west, from high up on the beachside tower at Guana? This is more or less what it looks like, though of course my phone pictures are far inferior to the serious ones Rodney takes. (Sooner or later, I'll get his work into my blog since I'm pretty sure he'll let me use if for free, but that's a photo layout for another evening.) Still, you get the idea. And since it's approximately as cold as it is in Outer Space or the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and therefore too cold even for crazy people like Rodney and me to walk on the beach, this picture will have to do for now. And it's been cold for a long, long time, at least, for those of us used to the brief cold snaps and quick warm-ups of north Florida where the proximity of the Gulf Stream usually means the cold evens out pretty reliably. It's been cold for so long that even things that don't usually freeze seem to have frozen.

I love the things in my garden (by which I mean, my whole messy yard) most that have been started from cuttings and have a history. There are Seven Sisters roses which bless us every May with cascades of pink clustered flowers; every one of these plants came from an ancient rose bush started from a cutting by Rodney's mother, 40 years ago or more. There is abundant wedelia, started for me by Lauren. It covers an otherwise bare section of ground, and in summer that cover looks like a carpet of miniature wild daisies, bright with yellow petals against green foliage. And two summers ago, Rodney took a cutting from my friend Katie's yard, one in which I had little confidence at the time. It was an enormous bush-turned-tree with large, lush leaves, punctuated by ridiculously large, gorgeous pink flowers.


They looked more or less like this, though it's hard to imagine how gigantic the flowers are: they're bigger than my hands, and the most delicate pink color, that pink you associate with babies. The one you see in sunsets now and then. And since my dearly loved Katie has been in Africa for 53 or 54 years, (that's a lie: it's only been a few months but it seems like years to me)give or take, that ridiculously overdressed shrubbery has been just a teensy bit like catching sight of Katie in my garden now and again. Only now it has frozen, its branches drooping sadly, the promising buds of flowers that clung to those branches right up til the freeze curled into brown husks and dropped to the garden's floor. And as sorrowful as this is, even its faded glory serves to make me think of Katie, to see her face, to remember that she'll be home soon. Soon, soon.

The elephant ears, which grow to what Mel Brooks might have called Ludicrous Size during those years in which frosts and freezes only brush past us quickly, almost unnoticed, have frozen into drooping brown stalks that look almost as if they'd melted. The canna lilies, those glamorous, flashy, long-legged beauties we can always count on to return in the spring, have melted into similar sad disarray. And yet I know that sleeping under the cold ground are the delicate wild violets I treasure so much that I forbid all yard work in their little acre, the small spot they've chosen for themselves under the convergence of a tall water oak and two magnolias. So the cold goes on, and I think of the coming of spring. Keep an eye out: I'll find a picture of those enchanted wild violets to keep us going until the breeze warms and the days lengthen and the sun's benediction returns.

Just keep warm, for now. Make onion soup for your people; you'll warm them, too, right on down to their toes. This is how I do it, in case you don't have a soup brewing in your heart right this minute.

Take about 4 or 5 onions, nice big ones, any kind you have - I like a couple of sweet onions and a big red onion, and a big white onion and even a shallot or two. Slice them thinly and put them into a cast iron skillet with some butter and olive oil. Salt and pepper a bit, to your taste as well as you can while you're still guessing. Cover the skillet and cook the onions for 15 or 20 minutes, and then take the lid off and pay close attention. You'll need to finish cooking the onions, reducing them drastically, stirring almost all the time. This will take another 15 or 20 minutes, and you can add a tablespoon of sugar or two to help the onions brown and caramelize. When they're done, really nicely browned and much reduced, sprinkle 3 or 4 tablespoons of flour over them and allow this to cook, too. You'll have to keep stirring. Deglaze the skillet with a little white wine, which will make a bit of a thick roux. Slowly add broth to this mixture and then pour this back into a nice big pot with the rest of your broth (you'll need about 4 cups of broth, all told, perhaps more if you want the soup to go further). The interesting part here is that Julia Child will tell you to use a homemade beef broth, but this why people think of French Onion Soup as being too labor-intensive to make at home. Nonsense. Use store-bought broth. Use chicken broth if you prefer, or even vegetarian broth. Let this nice mixture simmer for as long as you like, over very low heat, stirring now and then. It can simmer for half an hour or 3 hours, and if it reduces too much add some more broth or water. Taste occasionally to be sure you have the right amount of salt. When you're almost ready to stop simmering, add 3 or 4 tablespoons of good Port wine if you have it. If you don't, don't give it another thought. Immediately before you serve, stir in 3 or 4 tablespoons of good cognac, and again, if you don't have any, don't worry about it. Serve in the traditional way, with a piece of nice French bread topped with Gruyere cheese, heated under the broiler. Or you can make slices of your own or store-bought French bread, toasted in the oven at 300 degrees for half an hour, until they're golden, and melt some Gruyere or Emmenthaler on top; this gives you nice cheese-topped croutons and lessens the amount of cheese you'd use if you put it directly atop the soup. And if you're not eating cheese, fine. Just serve the soup with a nice salad and your family will be in heaven. They will forget that it's freezing, that the garden has melted, that the long winter has wrapped them 'round. They will, for a little while, think about how much they love you and each other and how lucky they are. That should hold us for a little bit, don't you think?