Appetizers

I Am…Sacha Fierce

As I leafed through an advance copy of Eric Sze and Elyse Inamine’s forthcoming cookbook, Taiwanese?, I simultaneously started building an online cart of ingredients I might need for testing that I knew would be a challenge to acquire locally. (Hudson has many redeeming qualities, but easy access to Asian pantry ingredients is not one of them.) By the time my Am*zon order arrived we had, somewhat ironically, decided to excerpt an (excellent) recipe that required none of the delicacies on my doorstep, all of which I would now get to cook with extracurricularly. The ingredient I’ve been most taken by is the Bullhead brand barbecue sauce—alternately called sacha or shacha sauce—that figures prominently into a number of recipes in the book. When I opened the tin and gave the oily mixture a stir, I immediately recognized it as the beguiling ruddy sludge (complimentary) I had encountered at many a hot pot fixin’s bar. It calls to mind a toned-down XO sauce: barely spicy, a little sweet from garlic and shallot, with a deep, round thrum of umami courtesy of ground dried fish. Le yum! I’m very much looking forward to using it in Sze’s enticing-sounding recipe for popcorn chicken drizzled with sacha hot honey, but in the meantime I’ve been having a blast freestyling: a spoonful atop fried eggs, a bit added to a pasta sauce of caramelized zucchini, a last-minute bloop over sliced ripe tomatoes. Heaven truly is a new-to-you condiment in the height of summer. —Amiel

Amaro Amas Amat

I’m lucky to be the kind of person who opens a mystery box from friends across the country to find two jars of homemade hooch, a jar of foraged mugwort glycerite, a bag of eucalyptus leaves, and a box of pennies to mask the sound of sloshing. Why, you might ask? K and A (who will remain nameless in light of their postal transgressions—you can’t send booze in the mail) simply wanted to share the fruits of their adventures in infusion with the magazine’s Barfly in Residence. For the last few years, my pals have been working through a document that has guided intrepid distillers, fermenters, and infusers for over a century: Dottore Arturo Castoldi’s Il Liquorista, a 1910 Italian compendium of recipes for booze. The amari my friends made, lightened and tamed by a hit of citrus and seltzer, are luxuriously herbal sippers. Both are viscous and immediately transportive, but while A. Comune’s citrus peel, quassia, and coriander notes perk you up, A. Stomatico is its darker, romantic twin, perfumed by galangal, saffron, and gentian. The other contents of the box were the nudges I needed to start infusing myself. (But what the hell should I do with these pennies??)

Luckily for you, there’s a free PDF of Il Liquorista online! Dott. Castoldi delivers many of the recipes in liters, so you’ll need to do some math (or Reddit sleuthing) to figure out how to scale them down for home consumption. Another important caveat: 1910 was a different time. K notes that “a lot of these recipes call for shit that is VERY toxic. And/or used as an abortifacient.” Infuse responsibly. —Alex