In our neck of the South, stuffed peppers mean mild, fleshy bells filled with a mixture of rice and meat or seafood, usually ground beef or shrimp. A vegetarian version with beans is wonderful as well.
Select peppers that are globular rather than oblong, slice off the top, and remove whites and seeds; a lot of people parboil the peppers, but don’t. For a stuffing mixture, use a 50/50 blend of rice/meat or beans in a light tomato sauce seasoned with black pepper, sage, and basil.
Crowd into a casserole, baste with more sauce and place in a medium (300) oven until peppers are cooked through. Baste again with sauce, top with dry white cheese, and toast.
The authentic, die-hard, you-will-go-to-hell-if-you-don’t-do-it-this-way recipe from Syracuse demands new russet white potatoes (grade B), not red nor sweet (an interesting option), but Yukon Golds, a variety developed in southwest Ontario–in spitting distance of upstate New York–do just fine.
Bring two quarts water to a low boil and stir in two cups salt. Likely not all the salt will dissolve, depending on the softness or hardness of your water (soft water will hold more salt). The potatoes sizzle while boiling as the moisture leaches out. Once the potatoes are done through, remove them with a slotted spoon into a colander and let them dry. A salt crust will form on the skins. Serve hot with melted butter for dipping.
With Roffignac, on one hand, you have an effete, fruity cocktail, on another, the roguish oysters Roffignac.
Both recipes are from the most popular restaurant in antebellum New Orleans, which occupied the corner of Royal and St. Peter Streets. Howard Mitcham says that oysters Roffignac was the first baked/broiled oyster dish in New Orleans, and if Howard says so, it’s so.
You’ll not find many oyster recipes that use red wine, and fewer using paprika for actual flavor as opposed to a color accent, but it’s a robust combination. Add this dish to your repertoire as a hearty alternative to that sissy Bienville.
For four servings: 2 dozen fresh oysters in their shells 1/2 lb. peeled boiled shrimp (about a pound raw in the shell) A half dozen scallions, finely chopped About a dozen small button mushrooms, chopped 2 cloves garlic, minced 1 stick butter 2 tablespoons cornstarch 1 tablespoon paprika A dash of cayenne About a half cup of dry red wine
Clean oysters of mud and hangers-on, shuck, and reserve liquid. Heat butter, add scallions, garlic, shrimp, mushrooms, and seasonings. Cook until done through. Dissolve cornstarch in about ¼ cup water, add wine and oyster liquor, and drizzle into hot mixture until thickened. Cool before spooning over oysters and broiling.
We call counterfeit coins slugs; this sandwich filling is a culinary counterfeit posing as a burger. During the Great Depression, a lot of diners in the American South stretched patties of ground beef or pork with potato flour. These were deep-fried, giving them crispy exteriors and juicy insides, topped with mustard, slid between buns, and sold for a nickel, which back in that day were also called slugs.
John Weeks brought this recipe from Chicago to Corinth, Mississippi, in 1917. Weeks had his hamburger meat ground to specification by local butchers, which included potato flakes and flour. Originally called Weeksburgers, in the Fifties, soy grits replaced the potato and flour. Patties of the mix are fried in canola oil and served with mustard, dill pickles, and onions on a slider bun.
Slugburgers are very much a thing in Corinth, surrounding north Mississippi, and Alabama. Each year people from across the continent descend on Corinth for the annual Slugburger Festival, which began in 1988. For three weekend evenings in summer–its in July this year–the town celebrates the local culinary icon with music, a carnival, and The World Slugburger Eating Championship
For slugburgers, add two cups potato flakes and a cup of flour to one pound of ground beef, add a tablespoon each salt and pepper. Use your hands and mix very, very well. Form into patties, on the thin side. Some people—me included—dust the patties with flour before deep-frying in canola oil. Serve on a bun with mustard, pickles, onion, and a side of French fries or onion rings. This makes about 8 burgers.
Lay three slices of rye bread out on a cutting board. Smear two of them with a tablespoon each of yellow mustard. Smear the last one with mayonnaise. Top one of the mustard smeared slices of rye bread with 4 slices deli ham, 2 slices American cheese, 2 leaves of iceberg lettuce, and four slices bologna. Top the second mustard-smeared slice of rye with 4 slices salami, a half dozen pickle chips, 3 tomato slices, 4 slices turkey, 2 slices Swiss cheese, and the third slice of rye bread, mayonnaise side down. Stack this unit on top of the first mustard smeared slice. Secure the sandwich with toothpicks skewered through pimento-stuffed green olives.
First time I asked Nan for her roll recipe, she put me off, saying she did not know where the recipe was when I knew damn well she had it on an index card in that little Colonel Rebel recipe box she kept on top of her refrigerator.
She kept that up until I got tired of it, called her up one night when I was drunk and talked her into getting her butt off the couch. As she read it to me, I could just see her wagging a finger.
It took her twenty minutes, swear to God.
“Dissolve one package yeast in 1/2 cup warm water. When yeast begins to work, add 1/2 cup sugar, another 1 1/2 cup water, 3 tablespoons vegetable oil and 2 teaspoons salt. Blend until sugar is dissolved, add 3 large eggs and beat well. To this mixture, add 2 cups plain flour and blend until smooth. Gradually add enough flour (up to 4 or more cups) and mix well to make soft dough. Cover dough and refrigerate for at least eight hours. When ready to bake, form dough into balls, place in a jelly roll pan or pie plate and let rise until doubled in bulk, about 45 minutes. Preheat oven to 400 degrees, bake for 15-20 minutes until brown. The dough will keep for up to four days covered in the refrigerator.”
Most recipes call for rice with chicken livers and/or gizzards. Some people use ground meat or game; onions and peppers typically round out the dish.
A bone of contention with dirty rice comes between those who cook the rice with the meats and vegetables and those who cook them separately and mix them with seasonings before serving. I belong to the cook-separately-and-mix faction. I do the same with jambalayas. I’ve been called to the carpet for that more than once, but I stood my ground. I like the texture better.
For dirty rice, first cook your gizzards. You can go to the trouble of trimming the membranes if you want, but I’ve found that if you stew gizzards for a very long time they’re going to end up as tender as can be, easy to mince, and the resulting broth is a thing of beauty.
Sauté trimmed livers with a little garlic and minced white onion until just done through. Add chopped meats to cooked rice with whatever sautéed vegetables you like with a little oil to moisten.
Season to taste. I like an Italian herbal blend with a little black pepper. Keep warm in a covered container, and add chopped green onion before plating.
My father often cooked a big breakfast on Sunday mornings, and he always made salmon patties. He said his mother made them with jack mackerel, adding that we should be grateful he went to law school so we could afford salmon. For him, a child of the Depression, that was a notable step up in the world.
I’ll not lie to you; these taste best when fried in bacon grease. If that makes you clutch your chest, use Crisco. Olive oil just isn’t right, and butter won’t take the heat. Most people I know make salmon patties with flour, but cornmeal gives a crispier crust and a better inside texture (flour tends to make it a bit gummy).
One 16 oz. can of salmon makes 4-6 cakes. Drain fish, reserving a quarter cup of the liquid. If you’re a sissy, remove skin and bones. Mix well with one beaten egg, a little chopped onion, the can liquid, and enough corn meal to make a thick batter. Be careful with salt; I like plenty of black pepper. Brown in at least a quarter inch hot oil on both sides and crisp in a very warm oven.
Fiction writers concern themselves more with the turmoil of the human condition (often theirs) than (like the rest of us) what’s on the table, but it’s inevitable that you’ll find food in many important novels; food is, after all, essential of existence itself.
Margaret Mitchell was born to an upper-class home in Atlanta at the turn of the last century, and her family roots sank deep into antebellum Georgia. Given the social dynamics of her upbringing, she was certainly well-informed when it came to that period’s Southern table, so we shouldn’t be at all surprised to find a notable description of an antebellum spread in Gone with the Wind.
When Ashley came home from the war for Christmas, the table was still graced with Aunt Pittypat’s Sèvres, but the only things to eat were sweet potatoes–a perennial staple of hardship from any quarter–and a skinny rooster Uncle Peter had put out of its misery, Scarlett remembered Tara’s groaning boards:
There were apples, yams, peanuts and milk on the table at Tara but never enough of even this primitive fare. A the sight of them, three times a day, her memory would rush back to the old days, the meals of the old days, the candle-lit table and the food perfuming the air. How careless they had been of food then, what prodigal waste! Rolls, corn muffins, biscuit and waffles, dripping butter, all at one meal. Ham at one end of the table and fried chicken at the other, collards swimming richly in pot liquor iridescent with grease, snap beans in mountains on brightly flowered porcelain, fried squash, stewed okra, carrots in cream sauce thick enough to cut. And three desserts, so everyone might have his choice, chocolate layer cake, vanilla blanc mange and pound cake topped with sweet whipped cream. The memory of those savory meals had the power to bring tears to her eyes as death and war had failed to do, the power to turn her ever-gnawing stomach from rumbling emptiness to nausea.
While most of these dishes seem apt for a wealthy, socially prominent Georgia plantation meal in the 1830’s, some people (admittedly me among them) might find the presence of collards in a porcelain tureen jarring because I’m such a stuck-up redneck, but stewed collards fit on the table in any damn thing that will hold them.
Making quick breads is such a basic culinary skill that at one time those persistent legions of people who spend their time minding other people’s business sniffed their disapproval of a newly-wed husband’s bride by saying, “He married a woman who can’t even make biscuits.”
This specific example of cattiness carries with it a tacit understanding that mister didn’t marry his missus because she was a domestic diva, but for prurient reasons which were grounds for disapproval among matrons who could cook up a storm yet were inept or unwilling in arts which keep a man from taking up what was then referred to as “light housekeeping” with another woman.
Those were more genteel times. Nowadays, of course, those same people would just say he hooked up with a slut and be done with it, but there’s something to be said for polite prevarication: What it lacks in forthrightness is more than made up for in vicious subtlety.
Believe it or not, being able to cook was once a commodity on the marriage market, so much so that disgruntled husbands who settled for less than a buxom bimbo comforted themselves and others like them (honest, hardworking men, every one of them) by claiming that the cooking lasted longer than the loving. And while that might be true, there’s still something to be said for marrying a total tramp-in-training; after all, that’s what mothers-in-law are for.
Like many short bread recipes, the one for biscuits is more technique than ingredients. Getting the biscuits to rise well is key, and if you don’t follow a reasonable procedure, you’re going to end up throwing away a pan of hockey pucks. Biscuits shouldn’t be worked a lot; excess kneading makes the dough so dense that it won’t rise. Biscuits should also be cut out quickly while the dough is cool, and with a clean, sharp edge that will not pinch. Crowding the biscuits a bit also helps them to rise, but if you get them too close together the centers won’t bake through. Also make sure the oven is hot (450/475) before you put them on a rack in the upper third of the oven.
So, for all you floozies out there who need a bonus the morning after, here’s how to make biscuits. And if you don’t carry a skillet with you, well, you’re on your own.
Buttermilk Biscuits
Take two cups of self-rising flour and sift in dry a scant teaspoon of baking soda. Work thoroughly into this about 1/3 a cup of cold vegetable shortening. Mix with the fingers until it has an almost granular texture. Working quickly, stir in enough cold buttermilk (about a cup) to make a sticky dough. Throw dough on a generously-floured surface, sprinkle with a scant more flour and roll out very thick, almost half an inch, and cut into biscuits. Again, work quickly so that the dough stays cool(ish). Place biscuits just touching in a lightly greased skillet and pop them on the top rack of a hot oven for about a quarter an hour. You want them golden-brown and fragrant; brush lightly with butter while still hot and serve immediately.
