The Perfect Pantry

Lentils (Recipe: one-of-everything lentil soup)

I missed the 18th Annual National Lentil Festival in Pullman, Washington, last week.

I missed out on a lot of good stuff.

The Lentil Pancake Breakfast. The Legendary Lentil Cookoff. The crowning of the Little Lentil King and Queen. And the Tour de Lentil 100K Bike Ride through the Palouse region of eastern Washington and Idaho, where more than one-third of this country's lentils are grown.

Szechuan peppercorns (Recipe: salt and pepper prawns)

File this under "explorations in an ethnic market where you don't speak the language and can't read the package labels and you've wandered up and down the aisles and looked and looked and know what you want is somewhere in the store but you cannot find it."

So you ask everyone in the market, which by the way is in Boston's Chinatown, "Do you have szechuan peppercorns?" Blank stares. You try different pronounciations — sesh-wan, setch-wan, setch-u-on. Pep-per-corn. Pep-pah (the Boston dialect).

Nobody speaks English.

Nobody understands your pantomime.

Fair enough. After all, you are the only one there who doesn't speak the language.

Frustrated but determined, you ask your husband Ted to bring his Chinese friend Margaret to the market to search for these peppercorns. A few days later on their lunch break, they go — but they come home empty-handed, too. Which, frankly, makes you feel a teensy bit better.

This is a true story, by the way. It happened in 1998.

Pomegranate molasses (Recipe: pomegranate fish)

My husband Ted laughs whenever I come home from the store with a bottle of wine. I'm not much of a drinker, so I shop for wine by the label — not the brand, but the actual label. I can't resist pretty pictures, great graphics, good colors, and clever names like Goats Do Roam.

I shop in ethnic markets the same way. Every now and then I'll have a particular recipe in mind, but more often I wander through the store, filling my basket with things that look interesting. That's how I discovered pomegranate molasses several years ago, in the Syrian Grocery in my old neighborhood in Boston. (Isn't the label beautiful?)

Cloves (Recipe: Grandma's applesauce)

Liz Claiborne, Hugo Boss, Pierre Cardin and Perry Ellis all make men's colognes with a hint of cloves.

What do they know that I don't know?

When I think of cloves, I don't think of men. I don't think of breath fresheners, antiseptics, aphrodisiacs, or cures for toothaches, either, though all are traditional uses for cloves.

Instead, I conjure up the aromas of applesauce, pumpkin pie, and the screaming-hot lamb vindaloo at the Jackson Diner in New York City.

Peanut oil (Recipe: broccoli eggrolls)

Utopian idealist and German inventor Rudolf Diesel had a dream. When he demonstrated his new engine at the 1900 Paris World Exposition, it ran not on petroleum, but on peanut oil.   

In the perfect world, Diesel believed, renewable biofuels like peanut oil could power farm machinery and automobiles.

More than 100 years later, my car still guzzles gasoline, but peanut oil powers my stir-fry cooking, earning it shelf space in The Perfect Pantry.

Instant coffee (Recipe: outrageous brownies)

I was a Beatle-loving, poetry-writing, hooky-playing, hippie-dippy, sometimes-vegetarian, coffee-guzzling teenager.

My parents drank instant coffee, and when I was growing up, so did I.

At some point in my junior high years, I received one share of Chock Full o'Nuts stock as a gift, so I announced that, as a loyal stockholder, I would ("henceforth," I'm sure I said) drink only Chock Full. They didn't make instant coffee, so my mother went right on buying whatever brand she usually bought, and my principles disintegrated after a day or two of coffee withdrawal.

My parents were easy-going about the coffee thing, and I can't remember an age when I didn't drink it. Black, no cream, no sugar. I was no coffee sissy back then, though I add a bit of skim milk now.

Capers (Recipe: chicken marbella)

I love capers — the classy film "To Catch a Thief," the ditzy "How to Steal a Million", the ridiculous "Pink Panther", and anything funny with Robert Redford. 

I'm not quite as in love with the kind of capers you put in your mouth — and yet they are always in The Perfect Pantry, because sometimes a recipe calls for them, and nothing else will do.

Powdered buttermilk (Recipe: apple spice bread)

When most people think of Rhode Island, they think of Newport mansions and the America's Cup.

Jazz festivals.

Clambakes on the beach.

Rhode Island Red chickens. (Okay, not everyone thinks of chickens....)

Until I moved here, I was one of those people. If you'd told me I was moving to apple country — that, in fact, I'd be buying my Macouns at an orchard named Apple Land — I would have said "hah!".

But here I am, smack dab in apple land, where I can buy Jonagolds and Cortlands, Mutsu and Macintosh, from August until March.

The thing about apple land is that it's miles from here to anything like a grocery store. So I always keep powdered buttermilk, an essential ingredient in my favorite apple spice bread and other baked goodies, in my pantry.

What is buttermilk? And what makes it cultured? 

Instant couscous (Recipe: sweet couscous for a crowd)

Last winter, I treated the Ninecooks kitchen to a couscoussier, a double-decker pot used to create traditional Moroccan stews and couscous. The stew goes in the bottom, and rising steam infuses and plumps the couscous resting in the perforated top compartment.

It's a beautiful thing, but I have yet to use it.

I tried. I really did. The #1 Cooking Group made a menu called Preserving the Lemon, which included three dishes inspired by Moroccan cuisine. We used our tagines, but when it came time to set up the couscoussier — and start the slow process of rinsing, drying, steaming and steaming again — we looked at each other and, in unison, said, "Instant couscous!"

Black vinegar (Recipe: cold aubergine salad)

For some reason — I'm not questioning — I've received many wonderful cookbooks as gifts this summer.

(PS: I love gifts of cookbooks much more than gifts of food, and just as much as gifts of wooden spoons and cooking utensils from faraway places...in case you were wondering, or making a list and checking it twice....)

Barbara brought an encyclopedic cookbook from Argentina, and Bev returned from Peru with a charming locally-published volume filled with recipes we can't quite understand (though both books have been translated into English, which might be part of the problem). Kate's son Max brought two local cookbooks from his travels in Turkey and Greece; I discovered them in my mailbox one Saturday morning — a delightful surprise.

Ted hit the bookstores in Toronto on a recent business trip, and came home with three treasures, including Flavours of Vancouver, a fundraiser for Save The Children Canada, and the original British edition of Ken Hom's Quick Wok: The Fastest Food in the East.

I always open books in the middle or at the end, never at the beginning. I don't know why. I read newspapers and magazines back-to-front, too. So, I stuck my thumb in the middle, opened Quick Wok, and landed on Cold Aubergine Salad, a recipe that calls for black vinegar.

It was a sign.