The
Storm Gourmet, A Guide to Creating Extraordinary Meals Without Electricity, by Daphne Nikolopoulos
(Pineapple Press, Paperback, 127 pp., $9.95)
Reviewed by Lynne Barrett
The second week after Wilma, when we, like much of South Florida, still had no power and faced long queues for gasoline, I
realized I needed to get savvier. Maybe you did earlier, after Andrew (when in some places power was out
for as much as three weeks), or maybe it was after Charley and Frances and Ivan and Jeanne, when it turned out that a hotel
room in Orlando wasn’t refuge or when the gas ran out as your five hour drive to Gainesville stretched to 17 or you
learned how thoroughly a bridge knocked out can reroute your life. Maybe it was Katrina, or Rita, or the
tail-end of the 05 season when we were using Greek letters as hurricane names, but for those who aren’t responding to
real estate deals in Tennessee, the point is: We’re going to have to get serious about this. We Floridians
need to become survival artists.
And The Storm Gourmet, as the name implies, is a guide to the art of more
than minimal survival. In addition to recipes, it offers the “Ultimate Storm Pantry” with menu
plans for fourteen days without electricity, clear, comprehensive shopping lists with what you should get now, not the afternoon
before the storm hits, and tips like a list of manual gadgets to have and places to store food safely. It
settles the argument we have as a storm nears about how much water to have on hand: one and a half gallons per person per
day, times two weeks, means a lot. It goes through what must be discarded after the fridge is off for hours
(not days) and what can be saved.
Daphne Nikolopoulos chooses, as her premise, the most extreme situation: no power
and no source of heat at all. You may have a grill and charcoal or you may have some means of heating water.
(May I recommend my Espresso al Sterno?) You may have a generator, but in my experience those run the fridge
but not the stove. And in any case, it is likely to be hot, wet weather, and Nikolopoulos’s
cool, varied menus are simple and soothing.
Think ahead, and buy ahead (the author suggests shopping over time, to spread out
the investment), and keep your wits about you. Perhaps you will cook that half-thawed frozen chicken on
your grill, and pull it apart and share it with your neighbors, as we did, but that felt pretty primitive and only got us
through one evening, while Nikolopoulos’s Tapenade Toasts, and Salmon-Tabouli Salad with Sun Dried Tomatoes and Pine
Nuts, and Peach-Raspberry Torte speak of civilization, and civilization is what we crave when the wind has knocked us back
a hundred years or so.
As the author suggests, these recipes are good for camping or boating, too, so if we reach December
and your supply cabinet is still stocked, try out the recipes through the winter and restock for the ones you like most.
The shopping
list, of course, relies on canned foods, but Nikolopoulos reminds us how to balance these out with fresh fruit, fresh herbs
in pots, and other staples and supplies. My one cavil was the “instant” pasta, which reconstitutes
itself in room temperature water. It is “typically sold only to the food industry” (which makes
you wonder about the food industry, as ever) but is available to readers of this book through a website. Perhaps
it is wonderful, but it’s trouble to obtain, so I thought, on the same principle as bulgur, which Nikolopoulos includes,
why not couscous? This morning in my “test kitchen” I combined 1/3 cup medium couscous,
equal volume room temperature water (although room temperature may be a bit warmer, post-hurricane), added a dash of sea salt,
and left it for fifteen minutes, twice the time needed when the water is boiling. And when I went back,
fluffed it up, and tasted: perfect couscous. I am now thinking of an experiment with grits.
But that’s the point. The Storm Gourmet got my imagination going about what I couldn’t
and couldn’t do. Cuisine is the daughter of invention.
The book is handsomely designed
and tucks in bits of hurricane lore here and there. The color pictures were perhaps included as inspiration,
as Grapefruit Relish or Key Lime Pie beckon, but I was so deep in the post-hurricane mood that I noticed the many attractive
dishes and tablecloths. During Wilma an upended tree ruptured our waterline and I can attest that washing
dishes with your bottled water both feels wasteful and doesn’t quite work, and even with water, laundry can be an ordeal,
so this display (presumably the photographer’s idea) seemed wrong. But it made me think.
I suggest that you go out now looking for a cheerful durable oilcloth tablecloth you can sponge down, and add some
fun high quality paper plates and napkins to your list. What the heck, splurge. You’re
an elegant survivor.
Lynne Barrett is Editor of The
Florida Book Review. She lives in Miami.
