I scored big last week, as not one, but two generous friends asked if I’d like to take a few quinces off their hands. I am systemically incapable of resisting free produce, especially when it comes from a friend’s garden (or a friend’s neighbor’s garden), and especially when it’s as old-world charming as quince. With this quince cake in mind, I said yes! yes! just tell me where and when and I’ll come a-running with my wheelbarrow!

And this is how I found myself with about five kilos of the yellow-green fruit, making my apartment smell very precisely like Maïa’s country house. Maïa was one of my sister’s childhood friends, and her grandparents owned a beautiful stone farmhouse a little way outside of Paris — geography didn’t exist outside the classroom when I was little, so I have no idea where it really was — where my sister was invited from time to time, and I got to tag along one weekend in the fall.

And this is how I found myself with about five kilos of the yellow-green fruit, making my apartment smell very precisely like Maïa’s country house.

The adults stayed in the main house, but we kids were allowed to play and sleep in the upstairs room of an outbuilding that may have been a stable at some point, and was the ideal setting in which to reenact boarding school scenes from Roald Dahl’s autobiographical book Boy.

Further in the back of the property was a large garden with numerous fruit trees, many of which were quince trees (cognassiers) and bearing big gnarly fruit when I visited. This was my first encounter with quinces, those woody not-pears covered with fuzz. I don’t think I actually tasted their flesh until many years later, but their pervasive, extraordinary smell — like a musky cross between the pear and the pineapple — was everywhere around and inside that house, and the two are forever linked in my mind’s sensory library.

Going through five kilos of quince takes some stamina, and I devoted part of my weekend to the task. The first thing I did was poach as many as would fit in my pressure cooker, following this recipe for vanilla poached quince I wrote about two years ago. This is (yet) an(other) instance when the pressure cooker is the cook’s best friend, as it slashes down the poaching time to just thirty minutes, and makes zero mess on your cooking range.

Most of these poached quince quarters will be eaten just like that, in a bowl, with a little yogurt or cream and an optional sprinkle of granola, but some were enrolled into this simple quince cake with almonds.

It is a variation on my trusted yogurt cake. I’ve tweaked it a little to add some ground almonds and fold in the diced quinces* for a lovely fall cake, fragrant and very moist, that’s best eaten with your hands, while sitting in a patch of sunlight on the wooden floors of the living room.

~~~

* If you maintain a sourdough starter, you’ll be happy to hear that I’ve replaced the yogurt with an equal weight of the starter I collect at each feeding instead of discarding it. Indeed, I have found that sourdough starter (not particularly ripe, but not super old either) can be used as a yogurt substitute in cake recipes like this one: it has more or less the same consistency and acidity, and produces a wonderfully tender crumb.

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I grew up in a household where the hiss and huff of the pressure cooker was a familiar kitchen melody.

My mother owned a large specimen of what the French commonly call une cocotte minute — this is a brand name to the generic, and less endearing, term autocuiseur — and I seem to remember she used it mostly to boil or steam vegetables, such as potatoes and globe artichokes, or the cauliflower for her gratin de chou-fleur.

I myself went without one for a while, until Maxence’s grandparents had to sell their country house and I was offered a few pieces of cooking equipment, including the jumbo pressure cooker that had served to feed a whole generation of grandkids.

I loved it, but it soon turned out to be too large for me: with a ten-liter capacity, it was both too big for the quantities of food I ordinarily cook, and too bulky to fit in my teeny sink when the time came to wash it up.

And so, trapped between these inconveniences and the sentimental attachment to a family heirloom, I let the poor beast collect dust on a shelf.

Until one day, I decided there was something cosmically wrong about this situation: what I needed was a smaller pressure cooker, and this large pressure cooker was no doubt needed by someone else. Who was I to halt the natural flow of the universe?

Once the decision was made, it was easy: within a month, thanks to a popular auction website, I’d purchased a second-hand, 4.5-liter pressure cooker, and found a happy buyer for my own*.

And why am I drawn to the pressure cooker in the first place, you ask? Well, it is among the most energy-efficient cooking vessels out there, that’s why: as you seal the lid tightly then heat the pot, pressure builds up inside, and this causes the boiling point of water to increase** (from ~100°C to ~120°C, or from ~212°F to ~248°F). In this environment, foods cook considerably faster and with less water than in a regular pot boiling on the stove.

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If you read French food blogs at all, you’ve no doubt come across Clea Cuisine: Clea has been writing since March of 2005 — first from Japan, where she was living then, and now from the South-East of France — and her unique voice has quickly earned her stripes in the French blogosphere.

I’ve been a reader practically since the beginning — I remember early posts about baking cakes in her rice cooker, teaching members of her French club how to make bugnes (a traditional Mardi-Gras donut), or eating ekiben (railway bento) on the train — and I am very fond of her quietly inspired style, which blends French and Japanese influences, and focuses on simple, wholesome foods.

She’s a prolific cookbook author, too, and she writes for an independent French publisher named La Plage (literally “the beach”) that’s devoted to natural living and vegetarian cooking, and is therefore a perfect fit.

One of her most recent titles is called Croquez salé*, a prettily styled book that contains recipes for savory cookies and crackers to snack on in the afternoon, pack into your lunchbox, or serve with pre-dinner drinks. The savory cookie category is one that definitely deserves more attention than it usually gets, and Clea works to change that with some thirty recipes that manage to be both original and unfussy.

My eye was immediately caught by the Petits croquants au sésame on page 54. The recipe calls for ingredients that are easily kept on hand for an impromptu batch — sesame butter, gomasio, sesame seeds, flour, an egg — and uses the slice-and-bake technique, my favorite shaping method of all.

I make just two changes to Clea’s recipe: I use tahini rather than sesame butter (the former is made from hulled sesame seeds, the latter from whole or partially whole seeds) because that’s what I usually buy, and I press the rounds of dough with the tines of a fork before baking, to create little grooves and ridges that boost the textural interest.

These tasty little numbers are crisp and crumbly with a vivid sesame flavor, and they pair well with a few radishes at the apéritif. I’ve also had them with a smear of fresh cheese to accompany a green salad at lunchtime, and they come in handy when you need to hit pause on your appetite because dinner is taking longer to cook than planned.

[More crackers and savory cookies from the archives:
~ Raw multiseed crackers,
~ Olive oil and seed crackers,
~ Cheese thins,
~ Aged gouda and dried pear scones,
~ Carrot and rosemary mini-scones,
~ Zaatar pita chips.]

* An awkward-to-translate phrase that invites you to “bite into something savory.”

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Today marks the seventh anniversary of Chocolate & Zucchini, and I’d like to take this opportunity to thank you, dear readers, for being here.

The past seven years have been, without a doubt, the fullest and the most exciting of my life, and it is in large part thanks to this blog and to you.

I feel lucky to have such an enthusiastic, curious, kind, positive, funny, helpful, thoughtful, articulate, inspiring and well-informed crowd gathered here, and it is an honor and a joy to converse with you.

To celebrate this anniversary, I want to invite you to get together in Paris, and my proposition is twofold:

On Saturday, October 16, you can join me at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France from 11am till noon, for a discussion on food blogs (in French) as part of a series of talks called Les Samedis du Savoir. (The event is free and open to the public.)

And on Sunday, October 17, please come and have a drink with us at Café Charbon; we’ll be there from 7pm (109 rue Oberkampf in the 11th, see map).

I hope you can make it to one or both of these occasions, and I look forward to meeting you in person.

(Note: neither of these is a booksigning event per se, but if you own one of my books, feel free to bring it along; it will be my pleasure to sign it.)