Have you ever tried to reproduce a flavor? You eat something at someone else’s house, or at a restaurant, or you even decide that something that came from a box or a jar is worth trying to make at home, and you set about figuring out what’s in it and trying to whip up a duplicate.

As a kid, I didn’t eat much that came out of boxes or jars. Cold cereal – Life, Chex, and Cheerios, mainly – was our usual breakfast and, if my parents went out for dinner, we sometimes had frozen pizza or blintzes (the only childhood food I remember disliking), but that was about it. My mother is an excellent cook, and she cooked every day.

Inimitable

There was only one boxed food that ever graced our dinner table: Near East Rice Pilaf. I’m sure you’ve had it. It’s a combination of white rice and orzo, and there’s a little foil packet of spices you mix in. You add a little butter, boil it all up, and you end up with a steaming pile of fluffy pilaf.

They don’t tell you exactly what’s in that little foil packet, but I think it’s crack. Near East Rice Pilaf has a particular hold on me, and I know I’m not the only one. It has a mild, salty, nutty flavor that makes it more like potato chips than rice; you can’t stop eating it.

When I lived in San Francisco, some twenty years ago, I decided that no self-respecting cook should serve a pilaf out of a box, and I set about trying to make my own. I scrutinized the ingredient list (“rice, salt, crack”). I went all over town trying to find orzo (not commonly available at the time). I carefully measured and mixed my spices, checked the rice-to-orzo ratio, and started cooking. The first batch was good. It tasted like mildly spiced rice with orzo. It went well with lamb chops. It tasted nothing like Near East Rice Pilaf.

Neither did the second, or the third. I don’t know how many iterations I went through before I gave it up, but it was probably well into double digits. Since my Near East Rice Pilaf fixation was entirely my mother’s fault, I called her to complain about my defeat.

My jar of herring

She laughed. Laughed! Right out loud, in my face.

Now my mother, while not the most sensitive of people (that’s not a trait that runs in our family), certainly does not take pleasure in my failures, and I was a little taken aback.

“Why is that funny?” I asked, after the guffawing had subsided to a soft chortle.

“Because I did exactly the same thing about ten years ago,” she said.

The nut doesn’t fall far from the tree, as my husband likes to say.

This is the incident that kept pushing itself to the forefront of my thoughts as I pickled my herring the other day. For me, pickled herring has a very particular flavor – the Vita flavor. That’s the brand of pickled herring I eat, and that’s what I think pickled herring should taste like.

It was with great trepidation that, this morning, I took my first forkful of my herring. I took care to get a good balance of onion and fish, with no whole peppercorns or allspice berries. I looked at it closely. Looked right. I smelled it. Smelled right. I tasted it.

Miracle of miracles, it tasted just like it was supposed to. My herring was quite lean, so the texture is a little different, but the balance of vinegar and sugar was right on. Astonishing. If you want to pickle some herring yourself, I’ve posted the recipe here.

And if you’ve figured out how to duplicate Near East Rice Pilaf, both my mother and I would like to hear from you.

Vini, vidi, Vita!

I’ve had a five-gallon compound bucket full of herring in the basement for almost a year now, courtesy of our friends Geri and Emory. They got the fish from our neighbor Bob, who fished them out of the sea last winter with his own two hands. The fish are cleaned, headless, and packed in salt, waiting patiently to be pickled.

Herring coming out of the brine

Geri and Emory are expert herring picklers. They spent many years living in Denmark, where pickling fish is a national pastime, and they brought their herring habit home with them. I, however, am a rank amateur, so I looked around for reputable sources to guide me through the process.

Plenty of pickled herring recipes are out there on the Internet, and my local library came through with Linda Ziedrich’s The Joy of Pickling.

The Joy of Pickling?

I probably get more pleasure out of food than most people do, but I’ve never uttered “joy” and “pickling” in the same breath.

I blame Irma Rombauer for the “Joy of” genre. Her 1931 Joy of Cooking was the first, and there have been hundreds since. Specifically, there have been 477, according to the Library of Congress, and the list of things book buyers are presumed to take joy in is mind-boggling. It runs the culinary and religious gamut, but extends to just about every hobby, discipline, and character trait.

If you don’t take Joy in Cooking, how about Birding, or Demography, or First-year Piano? There are Cats, which are to be expected, but also Frogs and Cockatiels. There is Hockey, there is Rugby, there is Snorkeling. Every kind of sewing project, from Split Ring Tatting to Machine Embroidery, appears on the list.

If you can’t find joy in the mundane – Geraniums or Jell-O Molds, say – perhaps you can find it in Being a Woman, Being a Vegetarian, or Being a Eucharistic Minister.

Maybe Ernie J. Zelinski’s 1998 magnum opus, The Joy of Thinking Big: Becoming a genius in no time flat, is for you. No? Then there must be joy in Negative Thinking, Failure, Funerals, or Being Wrong. Or Lent. Or maybe Liberace.

Why must we find joy in a pursuit in order to deem it worthwhile? I understand why The Drudgery of Cooking didn’t make Rombauer’s short list, but isn’t there something between that and joy? Can’t something be merely satisfying? Amusing? Gratifying?

In a world where joy is sometimes hard to come by, the “Joy of” list isn’t going to be much help. I’ll give you Sex, but Vegan Baking?

Granted, I haven’t done much vegan baking, but I pickled once, and there was no joy to be had. The incident involved a crop of cucumbers harvested from the rooftop garden we had in Manhattan.

We thought we were pretty clever. Our building had a skylight with a grate over it, and we planted the cucumbers in whiskey barrels we put right next to the light. When the vines started coming up, we trained them to grow across the grate. The system worked beautifully, but we had to be vigilant about making sure the cucumbers didn’t lodge in the holes in the grate, which were about an inch square. If they did, they’d grow and wedge themselves in, like someone who gets fat and can’t get his wedding ring off.

We lost a few to the grate, but still had a decent harvest. I set out to make dill pickles, using a recipe someone had given me, and swore by.

I followed the steps to the letter, but then got to an instruction I had somehow missed in my first reading. “Store the pickles in a cool place for three weeks.” An ideal cool place, it went on to specify, would have a temperature within a degree or two of 60.

Pickles-to-be

This was Manhattan in August. There was no cool place. The refrigerator was too cold. The basement, too warm (not to mention public). If I air conditioned the apartment down to 60 for the requisite three weeks, these would be the most expensive pickles in the history of mankind.

It took me a full hour to realize that our wine cooler – the cabinet-size kind that holds about twenty bottles – was pretty close to the right temperature. Out came the Veuve Clicquot, in went the pickles.

For three weeks, I faithfully skimmed the scum off the brine, and did several other things which the recipe required but the memory of which I have clearly repressed. When all was said and done, we had two gallons of some of the soggiest, saltiest pickles I’d ever tasted.

I’m hoping to do better with the herring. They’ve been soaking for almost 24 hours, in a couple changes of water, and I’m going to tackle them today. I’m not expecting joy, but pickled herring is almost as good.