Drying Parsley
Black Bean Chili
This recipe comes from the Harvest Café in Oxford. We always served it with a dollop of sour cream, sides of (brown) rice, and a dense crusty bread we got from some stoner in Abbeville.
It was a substantial dish. The tomatoes were optional depending who was cooking and how hungover, but were always added after the beans were cooked. This is crucial: if you add tomatoes or salt to dried beans, they will toughen and sour.
1 lb. black beans
2 medium white onions finely chopped
5 cloves garlic, minced
1 4 oz. can chopped green chilies
4 poblanos diced
1 can diced tomatoes, drained (optional)
2 tablespoons ground cumin
2 tablespoons paprika
2 tablespoons chili powder
1 teaspoon black pepper
corn oil
Salt
Sort and rinse beans, place in a heavy metal pot with six cups water (or vegetable stock), and bring to a rolling boil for fifteen minutes. Reduce heat, add onions, garlic and chilies. Simmer covered until beans are soft, adding liquid as needed.
Add mixed seasonings and keep on low heat. This is when you should add tomatoes. Blend in a slash of corn oil for consistency. Salt to taste. When serving, provide pico de gallo or a pepper sauce, and toppings such as diced avocado, chopped cilantro, minced onion and peppers.
Chicken Sausage
Grind 5 pounds chicken meat and skin through a ¼” plate into a large bowl. I boned thighs and throw in a couple of boneless breast halves. Add two tablespoons salt, a tablespoon ground black pepper (more if you want), and a quarter cup each of fresh chopped sage, thyme, and parsley,. Some people add cayenne, but don’t; it kills the herbs.
Blend in a half cup fresh chopped green onion, along with a half cup cold chicken broth. Mix very well, and refrigerate before stuffing loosely into casings. (You’ll need about 12 feet.) Twist sausages into about 6-inch links, and refrigerate overnight to let the seasoning work through the meat. This also makes patties.
Don’t keep this sausage sit in the fridge raw. If you’re not going to use them the following day, freeze them.
Pickled Eggs
Any time you enter a beer joint in Mississippi, you’re likely to find a big jar of pickled eggs on the counter next to the beef jerky, the pieds de porc à l’écarlate and all the other Bubbas that belly up to the fast food Southern sideboard.
Such eggs are sour, rubber shadows of those properly pickled, which are a great side with cold meats, poultry or game, also good in–and with–tuna, chicken, or vegetable salads. A recipe from a Junior League-type cookbook published in the 1930’s claims that they’re “ever so good chopped into hash, and provide just the right touch bedded on greens with a dressing of sharp, spicy goodness.” Craig Claiborne included a pickled egg recipe in his New York Times Cookbook (wouldn’t he just?).
The white of a pickled egg should be firm, not tough or rubbery, the yolk moist and creamy, not crumbly. The eggs should also have a light, balanced tangy/sweet flavor as a platform for other seasonings: I like a couple of slit hot peppers, a slice or two of garlic and a bay leaf to flavor mine–which are, admittedly, unsuitable for any occasions requiring plates, much less silverware–but dill, caraway or even cloves figure among attractive possibilities for the eclectic.
For pickling, boil a dozen medium eggs until just done; you can easily fit a dozen large in a quart glass jar. Then stuff the (peeled) eggs into the jar along with whatever accompaniments you like (jalapenos, onion, garlic, bay leaf, etc.). Fill the jar with a mixture of white vinegar and water (4:1) just to the top; jiggle the jar to burp bubbles. Pour vinegar mixture into a saucepan along with a tablespoon of salt, a tablespoon of sugar and a tablespoon of pickling spices. (If you miss the barroom rose, use beet juice.) Heat to almost boiling and pour back over the eggs; if there’s not quite enough liquid to cover them entirely, add a little more water. Seal the jar and store for at least a week before putting them out at your next kegger.
Louvain’s Grillades
My friend Rick Louvain from New Orleans loves going to supermarkets “to see what the Great Unwashed are consuming,” and insists on dragging me to my little neighborhood store for a scathing inventory when he’s in town.
On a recent outing he declared the entire produce aisle nothing more than a compost heap. His withering assessment of the floral department brought a tall bald queen around the corner clicking his nails like a scorpion. Rick had to buy a dozen roses to save us both from getting bitch slapped and owning it.
After declaring every can in the store a ptomaine grenade, we hit the meat section.
I was jittery because the butcher on duty was my buddy Charlie, who has the build of a Sumo wrestler and the disposition of a lamb. After a sweeping forensic analysis of the meat section as a whole, we came to the discount section where he grabbed a flat pack of thin round for two bucks and grinned.
Big Charlie was right next to him, humming to himself and marking down hamburger. Rick slapped Charlie on the shoulder. “Hey! Is this round steak?”
I tried to die three times. “It surely is,” Charlie said with the most bountiful smile in the known universe.
“Great!” Rick said. “Run three pounds fresh through the tenderizer for me. We’re gonna get some stuff in the deli, we’ll be back in a couple of minutes.”
Charlie winked at me when we got the meat, and I think he was thanking me for the customer, but I’m not sure. He goes out of his way to cut me t-bones to order, and if you ask me, I think he’s flirting. And that’s a big okay.
Once out of the store, Rick said, “We’re going to make grillades. This is what my gammy uses. She breads it, fries it, makes a roux in that, throws in some garlic and onion, bell pepper and celery, diced tomato, cooks it down in a casserole in the oven. Food of the gods, and you’re cooking.”
“You’ll never let up on me, will you, Rick?”
“You’re one lucky hoss, Jess.”
Beef Shoulder Roast
Brown a 3 lb. blade-in beef shoulder with onion and garlic. Cover with water by half. Add a pound of potatoes and cup each of chopped celery and carrots. Salt lightly, flavor with black pepper, thyme, and bay. Cover and cook in a slow oven (300) until meat is tender. Save some broth for gravy.
Jumping Chicken
The Warehouse in Oxford offered frog legs and the kitchen made damn sure we had them prepped, because if someone came in for frog legs, by God, they wanted frog legs, they’d drove all the way from Pontotoc, and raised Cain if we didn’t have any.
The legs came to us individually wrapped and block frozen from—of all places—Pakistan (actually, East Pakistan, aka Bangladesh). This might seem puzzling because we do have a frog season in Mississippi, but the Warehouse operated in the 1980s, a considerable about of time before all this half-harted emphasis on local sourcing.
Though the frogs were from Asia, they were undoubtedly American bullfrogs, the frog of choice for their large, meaty hind legs. If you’re going to fry them–you’re on your own any other way–soak overnight in buttermilk.
Jezebel Sauce
Epynomic recipes tend to have documented pedigrees; we can trace bananas Foster, melba toast, and chicken tetrazzini to a particular person, chef, and ofttimes a restaurant as well, but Jezebel sauce is an orphan. We just don’t know where it came from.
Jezebel herself was a 9th century BCE Phoenician princess known best as the wife of Ahab, King of Israel, who she converted to the worship of the Lord of the Flies. She is remembered as a voluptuous temptress who led the righteous Ahab astray.
Jezebel sauce is most often served with ham or other smoked meats or poured over cream cheese for a cocktail dip with crackers. This Jackson, Mississippi recipe is from the splendid Southern Hospitality Cookbook by Winifred Greene Cheney, who claims, “Some of this sauce would have made Ahab’s wife a better woman.”
I doubt it.
Fidelia’s Jezebel Sauce
1 (16-ounce) jar of pineapple preserves, 1 (12-ounce) jar apple jelly, 6 ounces prepared mustard (I use a Creole brown), 1 (5-ounce) jar horseradish, salt and freshly ground pepper to taste. You can add Coleman’s Mustard for added kick. Blend all ingredients well with a fork or whip. This sauce keeps weeks refrigerated.
Buttermilk Gingerbread
For a deeply-scented, well-textured loaf, cream a stick of softened unsalted butter with a half cup of light brown sugar. Beat until fluffy. Mix well with two beaten eggs and a half cup of sorghum molasses. Sift one and a half cups of flour with a half teaspoon of baking soda, a heaping tablespoon of ground ginger, and a teaspoon of each of cinnamon and ground cloves. Blend into butter with a teaspoon vanilla extract and a half cup buttermilk. Mix wery well and pour into a buttered loaf pan. Bake at 350 for about an hour, until the loaf pulls from the edges. This is so very good with cider.
The Filé File
Bay laurel (Laurus nobilis) wears the crown in the laurel family’s royal culinary heritage, but two of its close American cousins can claim coronets at the very least. The first of these is the red or swamp bay (Persea borbonia) that grows all along the Gulf Coast. Before the advent of imported laurel, swamp bay brought flavor to our regional cuisine, but is largely neglected now. The far more familiar native laurel is sassafras.
Sassafras (Sassafras albidum) is the most widely-known laurel my part of the world, that being the American South. Both older and younger trees have the aromatic oils that are associated with this family, which you can generate by either scratching the bark on the younger trees or cutting the bark of the older trees. When the tree is in leaf, sassafras is one of the easiest trees to identify, as it usually has three different leaf shapes: a mitten, a glove and a solid leaf, which are spicy and aromatic when crushed.
Filé–powdered sassafras leaves–was used as a thickening/seasoning agent in potages long before gumbo came along. In Spirit of the Harvest: North American Indian Cooking by Beverly Cox and Martin Jacobs, the authors cite an article in the 1929 edition of The Picayune Carole Cookbook explaining that filé was first manufactured by the Choctaws in Louisiana. “The Indians used sassafras for many medicinal purposes, and the Creoles, quite quick to discover and apply, found the possibilities of the powdered sassafras, or filé, and originated the well-known dish, Gumbo Filé.”
Even after the rest of us got here and cultivated okra, filé remained an essential element of what came to be known as gumbos. Both filé and okra render a liquid thicker by means of strands of gelatinous (if not to say mucilaginous) substances I can’t even begin to describe, and for this very reason, they should be used sparingly together. Okra takes to stewing, but filé does not. If you’re using filé as a primary thickening agent, use a little in the last few minutes, and then offer a small bowl around the table for dusting.
Filé is available in most supermarkets, but look at the label. If it doesn’t say “sassafras”, don’t buy it. A far better option is to make your own, which is easily done by finding a tree and gathering young leaves, preferably under a full moon and in the nude, of course. Dry, crush, and mill through a fine sieve. Store as you would any powdery substance. You know the drill.
