Cumin round the mountain

Every so often, but more often lately than before, I find myself finding the last straw, the Churchillian thing up with which I will not put. I reached that place recently on the pages of this newspaper.

But my disenchantment arises not from any Bangor Daily News editorial view on the current state of local or national politics. Nor does it bother me one bit to see photographs of deceased moose shot at a distance of four feet by precocious six-year-olds in the wilds of the Unorganized Territories.

I am not even moved to any identifiable emotion by news that slot machines are about to compete with scratch tickets for the nondisposable income of many Mainers. Those things I can handle.

No, what bothers me to the point of primeval screaming is the continuing intrusion into traditional recipes of cumin, the “spice of the decade.” Were cumin a flu strain, the National Centers for Disease Control would insist that we all be innocu-lated against it.

Unchecked cuminitis has spread to chefs and chef wannabes everywhere, not one whom, apparently, can resist shaking the awful spice copiously onto just about every dish leaving the kitchen table of unsuspecting, innocent diners. Salads, sauces, saut?s, salmon, sauerkraut. No matter what the recipe, the cumin’s comin’.

Sad to report, the cumin epidemic has now reached Maine, as evidenced by the cooking section of the BDN. A few days ago, in a culinary collusion of historic note, these pages carried a recipe for deviled eggs. Let me twice repeat. This was a recipe for deviled eggs; for deviled eggs, for crying out loud. And there, third in the list of twelve ingredients, was – drum roll – cumin.

I happily confess to a complete ignorance of what a deviled egg consists of in other countries where there are chickens, free-range or coop-incarcerated. But, in this country, and especially in the region where the BDN is published, a deviled egg is a deviled egg. It is not a cumined eggs.

A deviled egg is a peeled, hard-boiled egg, the yolk of which is removed and mashed with mayonnaise, mustard, salt and pepper, and then stuffed in the two hard hollows of the egg white. Paprika, or sometimes cayenne pepper, sprinkled over the re-assembled egg completes the job. No cumin called for, at least not in this neck of the woods.

Fannie Farmer, were she still at the stove, would surely sign off on this traditional recipe. So would any born New Englander who ever went to a shoreside or inland picnic. “What’s in the basket, Mom?”

“Deviled eggs, dear.”

“Any cumin in them? If there is, you can eat them all yourself.”

“No dear. No cumin. You know me better than that!”

So much for cumin, the overbearing spice, the member of the carrot family so gruesomely overpowering both to the nostrils and to the taste buds that even Bugs Bunny would warn Elmer Fudd against it.

As it happens, the BDN idiosyncratic recipe for deviled eggs gets even more heretical. Last on the list of its ingredients appears the name of arguably an even more invasive and recipe-ruining spice than cumin: cilantro. Cilantro leaves come from a plant which, like cumin, belongs to the darker, abusive of the clearly dysfunctional carrot family.

It would be hard to imagine, let alone digest, a deviled egg constructed with either cumin or cilantro, let alone both. Even free-range chickens would go on a sit-up strike were they to learn what spice-crazy modern cooks, indulging their kitchen conceits, are doing to their eggs.

An anonymous poet, in a Middle English lyric, wrote “Sumer is ycomen in, Loude sing cuckoo.” Today, that lyric would read: “Cumin is ycomen in, Loude cluck chicken.”

Charles Packard is a resident of Camden.