A Southern Gallimaufry
Trim one pound gizzards, poach in unsalted water until tender, and drain well. (Save that beautiful gelatin-laden broth for any number of sauces and gravies, even those pâtés you’ve always wanted to try.)
Heat sesame oil in a wok or large sauté pan until very hot, add garlic, sliced peppers–poblanos and sweet bananas are a suggestion–and gizzards. Toss and stir with a little soy until peppers are cooked to your liking .
Serve with rice and Dixie kim chee.
This recipe comes from Howard Mitcham’s knowledgeable, rambunctious, and absolutely delightful Creole Gumbo and All That Jazz (Addison-Wesley: 1978). Howard lived in New Orleans in what many consider a golden era, (1955-70) when the city was filled with talent not only local, but brought on board by the scintillating lures of freedom and indulgence.
One of the most delicious seafood dishes to come out of New Orleans is barbecued shrimp, and once you’ve eaten it, you’ll never forget it. Barbecued shrimp have been around for a long, long time, and they’ve been served at many restaurants, but they’ve been brought to a peak of perfection by Pascal’s Manale, up- town on Napoleon Avenue. People come from miles around to eat their barbecued shrimp, and on weekend nights the place is so crowded, you have to wait two or three hours to get a table.
It is said that Manale’s secret recipe for this dish is buried in the center of a two-ton concrete block under the office safe. A friend of mine, Mrs. Ivy Whitty, solved the riddle by hiring a cook who used to work at Manale’s. The cook could neither read nor write, but she had all the treasured secrets in her head. Working together, that cook and Mrs. Whitty perfected a barbecued shrimp recipe that may or may not be Manale’s, but it is sublime.
It’s amazing that such a good dish could be so simple, but there’s nothing in it except shrimp, butter, and black pepper. If you try to add anything else-herbs, spices, Worcestershire, whatever-you’ll spoil it for certain. It’s important to use fresh shrimp with their heads and shells on if you can find them. The tomalley inside the shrimp’s head, which is like the tomalley of a lobster, adds a real punch to the sauce in the pan. (However, if you can’t find fresh shrimp, frozen unpeeled shrimp with tails will make a dish that’s almost as delicious and better than almost any shrimp dish you could find in the average seafood restaurant.)
At first glance it seems that the recipe calls for too much black pepper, but you’ll discover later that it’s just right. The heat cooks out of it-well, sort of. Always open a fresh can of black pepper when making this dish so that it will be fully aromatic and pungent. The general rule for butter is one stick per pound of shrimp plus a stick for the pan.
Use a 16-20 count; pat shrimp dry and place in the bottom of a buttered baking dish, skillet or casserole. Drizzle with melted butter—one stick to one pound of shrimp—and top with excessive amounts of freshly ground black pepper. Place on the highest rack in your hottest oven for about 10 minutes (jly).
In April, 2000, the Allen Canning Company of Siloam Springs, Arkansas processed its last batch of “poke sallet” greens.
John Williams, the canning supervisor at Allen, said, “The decision to stop processing poke was primarily because of the difficulty of finding people interested in picking poke and bringing it to our buying locations.”
Poke processing was never a significant item in their mult-imillion-dollar enterprise, but Williams mentioned that one of the best markets for canned poke was southern California due to the Oakies.
Euell Gibbons lauds poke as “probably the best-known and most widely-used wild vegetable in America.” In Stalking the Wild Asparagus, Gibbons writes that Native Americans eagerly sought it and early explorers were unstinting in their praise of this “succulent potherb.”
“They carried seeds when they went back home and poke soon became a popular cultivated garden vegetable in southern Europe and North Africa, a position it still maintains. In America it is still a favorite green vegetable with many country people and the tender young sprouts, gathered from wild plants, often appear in vegetable markets, especially in the South.”
In the lean years before World War II, poke salad–like ramps–was one of the first edible wild herbs to appear in the spring, lending welcome addition to a winter’s sustenance diet of dried beans, cornbread, and salt pork .
The only drawback to poke salad is that it’s poisonous. The mature parts of the plant and the roots contain significant amounts of a violent but slow-acting emetic, phytolaccatoxin. Having said that, you’re probably wondering why in the hell anyone would even consider eating it, but prepared properly, poke salad is safe and delicious.
Harvest only the youngest, tenderest sprouts of poke, no more than a foot or so. Wash, stem, and trim. Add to a pot of water, bring to a boil, drain, rinse, return to pot with water, and bring to simmer with oil, a slit hot pepper pod, and a big pinch of sugar.
Drain and use much as you would spinach. Euell has a poke salad dip in his book. I like it with scrambled eggs and onion, and it’s wonderful in an omelette or a quiche.
If you live in the South, you know a hunter, and sooner or later you’re likely to find yourself with game in your kitchen.
Deer, duck, and dove are among the most typical, but the possibilities are only limited by state legislatures, and I have it on good authority–actually a stentorian chorus therof–that Mississippi’s version of this august body politic is subject to circumvention.
Because feral hogs have become very much a nuisance in Mississippi, I’m also given to understand that hunting the beasts is encouraged; the only red tape involved is permit fees. (“Cross my palm with silver.”) Pig season stretches from October to May, but that, too, is (again, from what I understand) loosely enforced.
So be advised: given a likely glut of hog carcasses, it’s a good bet that if you show the slightest interest in wild pork to anyone with a good gun, you’re liable to end up with a haunch of wild hog even if you don’t remember saying you wanted one at that kegger in Pelahatchie.
And, yes, I have a copy of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert on DVD, and yes, I know words to several Donna Summer songs, and during my salad days, I even once had a pair of Daisy Dukes (don’t say it). But unless you wear gear to bed, I am not what you would call delicate, much less fastidious, so when my buddy Raymond, a sure shot, showed up at my door with this huge haunch of meat dripping blood in his hands, I gratefully accepted it and sent him on his way with a jar of pear preserves and his promise that he’d be back the next day after work to take some of the cooked meat home.
Back in my college days I studied medieval literature, and the accounts of their gargantuan feasts, where great gobbets of meats were served and consumed with vast goblets of wine made a great impression, so the sight of this shoulder of boar sent a vicarious thrill through my little want-a-Garter mind. I longed to have an open hearth with a blazing fire and a turnspit dog to cook the meat evenly.
Alas and alack, I had no such fire, not even a place to build one in the yard, and besides, my snooty neighbors would look askance on me roasting meat on anything less than a designer grill, which left me with my trusty little gas oven (c. 1964).
First I washed the shoulder, which thankfully had been skinned but still had a generous sprinkling of stiff, short black hairs. I knew this wild meat had to be marinated, and for a long time, so I dragged a cooler out and there I placed the leg, which I’d salted ever-so-lightly, while I made the marinade. Not being one to waste wine, I chose to use a big can of pineapple juice and apple vinegar (4:1) with about a half-dozen freshly-squeezed oranges, two tablespoons pickling spices, several branches of fresh rosemary and threw in a Zatarain’s sack out of sheer habit.
I let this simmer for a while on the stove, then poured it on the meat, added enough water to cover, closed the lid and placed the cooler in a corner. After the leg had marinated for about 12 hours, I drained it, stabbed it in the meaty parts with a short, sharp knife and stuffed sliced cloves of garlic into the cuts. I then brushed it with a light oil (NOT olive oil), and dusted it with a mixture of salt and pepper (50/50). It went into the oven about 8 a.m. on a rack at 400 for about an hour, then I reduced the heat to about 300, and there it cooked for the rest of the day.
I took it out around 4 to cool, and when Raymond came by around 5:30, we carved it up, Raymond taking most of it as well as the bones for his dog Terry, who is a friend of mine as well. The meat was quite good, not gamey at all, and just as tender as it could be.
This recipe is the only one you’ll ever need. Many might consider the dark rum optional, but it’s essential; even if you’re a teetotaler, the alcohol burns off in the cooking, and good heavens, you’re bound to know someone with at least one bottle.
I like a mix of gold and dark raisins, and prefer salted pecans to walnuts. Like all great cakes, this one is best made the day before.
Mix thoroughly ¾ cup vegetable oil and ¾ cup warm buttermilk with ¾ cup white and ¾ cup light brown sugar (you don’t have to pack it). Set aside. Sift together 2 ½ cups plain flour, 2 teaspoons baking soda, 2 teaspoons each ground cinnamon and ground ginger, and a couple dashes of nutmeg.
Add half the dry ingredients to the oil/buttermilk mixture, and the rest alternately with 4 well-beaten eggs at room temperature. Add two cups grated carrots, about ¾ cup raisins, ¾ cup chopped nuts and a cup of drained crushed pineapple. Finish off with a tablespoon of vanilla extract and a generous slug of dark rum (okay, three ounces).
Pour batter into a Bundt or two 9 in. layer pans and bake at 375 until fragrant and springy. For the frosting, mix a pound of cream cheese and ½ stick butter at room temperature with powdered sugar to texture, a teaspoon almond extract and grated orange zests. Sprinkle with nuts.
In the 1930s, Harry J. Hoenselaar worked at a honey-glazed ham store in Detroit, handing out samples and teaching drugstore clerks how to slice hams for sandwiches. He had long since mastered knifing ham from the bone, but he knew there had to be a better way.
Then Harry had a dream, and with a tire jack, a pie tin, a washing machine motor, and a knife, he fashioned and patented the world’s first ham spiralizer. He later bought the Detroit store on Eight Mile Road in Detroit where he once worked from the owner’s widow in 1957.
This, the original Honey Baked Ham store, eventually spawned a company with 417 stores, from Southern California to New Hampshire. The busiest is in a suburb of Birmingham, Ala. After decades of familial wrangling and consolidation, the entire operation has landed in the lap of Linda van Rees, a granddaughter, who moved the company headquarters to Alpharetta, Georgia, in 2015.
Many people will bake a spiral-sliced ham, but it’s best bring the ham to room temperature, twist a steak knife around the small center bone, and follow the natural lines of the meat to cut smaller pieces for the table.
Cut slits in the slice, no less than four radiating from the middle, or it’ll buckle, and you don’t want that. Don’t use much grease in the skillet, either. Blister to singing; some people like slices blackened. If you don’t serve it on white bread, you’re going straight to hell.
Stuffed eggs are a necessary appurtenance to any holiday table in the Mid-South, so having an egg plate is a requirement in one’s arsenal of tableware.
Egg plates come in all sizes and shapes–they’re even making disposable ones now–and their selection for a given occasion provides a telling clue to the character of the bearer. If you bring a ceramic plate to a funeral, you’re going to be labeled white trash behind your back; if you if you bring a cut glass plate to a keg party, you’re going to be called a fucking idiot to your face.
The number of spaces most often found for egg halves remains a mystery to me. Given that eggs are sold by the dozen or in multiples or fractions thereof, you’d think that egg plates would adhere to that standard, but such is not the case. Of the two egg plates I own, the one of ceramic has twelve depressions, the other of glass has fifteen This gives me reason to believe that my glass plate is older than the egg industry, which makes me smile when I’m loading it for the table.
Such are the modest rewards of petty pride.
Ham is the quintessential meat of the Southern table, either as main dish, or providing support in dozens of sides across the board.
But as a great many of those smart-ass hillbillies from Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky–the absolute worst–will tell you (in annoyingly nasal, condescendingly reverential tones), there are hams, and then there are hams.
The best hams are dry cured, usually with a mix of salt and sugar. These hams can be eaten very thinly sliced without cooking, but they need to be soaked in water for at least a day if baked for the table. These are often labeled country hams. So-called city hams, the kind you most often find in the supermarket, are wet-cured by brine injection. Smoked hams are usually a variant of both, with smoke and brine both providing preservation and flavor.
Then you have the green ham, which is what your old granny called a leg of pork. You’ll find it sold as a “fresh” ham. You may have to look for it, you may even have to order one, but a green ham is no more trouble than any other kind, and it’s a worthy option to the nitrate-infused clubs of meat you’ve been serving all these years.
A green ham will have a rind over a layer of fat. Score the rind in a tight crisscross pattern with a very sharp knife (honest to God, I use a box cutter), and coat with garlic, sage, a little brown sugar, coarsely-ground pepper, and sea salt. Put sprigs of rosemary and coarsely chopped white onions in the bottom of your roaster with enough water to cover them. Set the ham fatty side up on a rack.
Place in a hot oven, 450. After thirty minutes, lower to 350. For a ten-pound ham, give it three hours or until that little bone next to the big one wiggles freely. Add water to pan as needed to prevent scorching. Let sit for at least an hour before carving.
Crisp three slices thick bacon in a 8-in. skillet. Remove, drain and crumble. Beat four eggs very well, add a half dozen shucked, drained oysters with chopped onions and mild peppers. Helps to stir it a bit. Reheat skillet, and add another tablespoon or two of oil. When sizzling, add egg/oyster mix, and pop into a hot oven until lightly browned. Top with bacon, chopped scallions, and/or grated hard cheese. Serve with sourdough toast.
