Ruth Reichl and Gourmet won the James Beard Foundation Award for Food Journalism: Multimedia, defeating Ruth Reichl and Gourmet, and also… where is it, I have it here somewhere… ah yes, The Whole Hog Project from Mike Sula at the Chicago Reader and, representing the multi part of multimedia, Sky Full of Bacon. (See them here and here if, somehow by now, you haven’t.)

It was, in any case, a great thing to be nominated along with the Reader, and I thank them for the opportunity which I hope they feel I rose to, and which has afforded me entree to top chefs and national attention at an earlier stage than I could have done on my own. Big thanks to Mike Sula for inviting me along on the last stage of his adventure, and to Kate Schmidt, his editor, for supporting this in-depth project in so many ways, my part included.

Winners are now indicated in the posts with links to the Beard journalism so you can read it for yourself:

Newspaper
Magazines
Miscellaneous print/online
Broadcast

Since I’m going to an underground dinner tomorrow night, I had better finish up my own recent feast, previously chronicled (the country ham part) in this post.

I think I’m fascinated by Southern food because it’s the food heritage I never had. Southern food was on the periphery of midwestern eating when I grew up— Kansas may be more like Minnesota or Wyoming in many ways, but Oklahoma and Missouri are both strongly Southern-tinged, and so Southern influences often leaked over into Kansas diner food. It reminds me of childhood eating in little ways while having a rich and baroque folklore, exotic ingredients (crabs, cooters, okra, grits), colorful names and all the other things that desperately plain midwestern food lacked. When even something as common as biscuits and gravy seemed to summon up a whole Steinbeckian world of working-class joes and janes beyond my middle class growing-up, just imagine what the thought of crab shacks or hoe cakes portended.

There’s certainly loads of color to be had in a book like Charleston Receipts, the 1950 compilation of Charleston-area recipes which is said to be the oldest Junior League cookbook still in print. For starters, each chapter begins with a healthy dose of Negro dialect, and the recipes effortlessly cover the gamut from society balls and cotillions to downhome cooking of your catch in a cast-iron pot over a fire. There’s almost novelistic flavor even in things like the names of the contributors— one recipe is attributed to “Mrs. Serge Poutiatine,” a Charleston belle (nee Shirley Manning) who landed a Romanov prince. The recipes often show their origin in the era of canned vegetables, but it’s not hard to adapt them to their pre-Del Monte form.

So I took about half the recipes from Charleston Receipts, while most of the rest came from Edna Lewis’ and Scott Peacock’s The Gift of Southern Cooking, a more modern but generally authentic book not unlike the one I used at my earlier Southern party, James Villas’ The Glory of Southern Cooking. Here’s what we had, starting with appetizers:

• Punch. Green tea seemed to be the base for many punches in Charleston, and it was an interesting thing to try, the earthy flavor of tea standing out in what was otherwise a sweet and fruity punch.

• Cheese straws. Little twisted cookie or biscuit-like things with lots of cheddar in them, reputed to be inevitable at Southern functions (don’t have a funeral without them!) They taste exactly like Cheez-Its.

• Continuing that theme, one guest made pimiento cheese spread sandwiches:

• Spiced pickled shrimp. This was really tasty, you just basically make a mustard vinaigrette and pour it over some boiled shrimp the day before. I will make these again, and once we had them, I no longer regretted (as I had been doing) that I hadn’t done something with some more exotic sea creature.

• Another guest brought egg balls— I thought these needed an extra kick, dry mustard or something in the breading:

• Fried pickles made a return appearance:

There were other things, some smoked duck breast from a well-known supplier which another food writer brought by, a shrimp dip, some baked cornmeal mush things that Cathy Lambrecht had found in some book (they needed to be a vehicle for something else) and so on.

Following the appetizer, we had she-crab soup— actually we didn’t inquire into gender, just used the can straight from Costco— a simple soup (butter, sherry, butter and butter) that got raves even though I thought, so simple and basic, what’s there to rave about? Then, of course, the ham, previously discussed, served with turnip greens in a pot likker made from Paulina smoked butt and ham hocks.

I believe, firmly, in many desserts and so we started with a Jell-O dessert called (wonderfully) a rum bumble, rum and a little rye mixed with cream and Jell-O. I actually made one batch of this and scrapped it, getting help from Cathy, fan of 50s cooking, as to how to mix Jell-O with cold things like cream without it turning grainy as the Jell-O hits the cold cream and instantly sets. Second batch (seen served here in Crate and Barrel tea lights) turned out perfectly.

Art and Chel Jackson (of podcast #7) brought molasses ice cream with a bacon cookie:

Finally, I was enticed by a recipe in the Lewis-Peacock book for what Miss Lewis regretfully acknowledged was known as Jefferson Davis custard. Two things set it apart: one was whipping egg whites separately from the yolks before baking it all as a custard, which made for a wonderfully light custard. The other was the fruit— can you name it?

The answer is: gooseberries. I’d bought them a year ago and frozen them, this was the perfect occasion to get them out and spend hours laboriously snipping off their hairy ends. The tart, tortillaesque gooseberries (no really; they have a discernable and often commented-upon tortilla-like note) and the sweet, delicate custard really went together beautifully.

The ham continues to give— I just made Navy bean soup with it— and the satisfaction of all these dishes as a collective journey deeper into Southern cooking was deep. If I start underground Southern dinners*, I’ll let you know.

* In a pig’s eye I’ll ever do that.

The first post here was about a Southern-themed party, and I recently had another one, experimenting with recipes from two more southern cookbooks, the 1950 Junior League cookbook Charleston Receipts and Edna Lewis and Scott Peacock’s The Gift of Southern Cooking. I’ll post about all the rest of the things that went into the meal soon, but I want to devote a post of its own to the centerpiece of the meal, a country ham.

If you’ve read Pig Perfect or any of the other pig porn books out there, you’ve read rapturous odes to true old country ham… along, inevitably, with laments of how the real thing gets harder to find, and the best known name in the biz, Smithfield, is in fact no longer making true country ham at all.  True country ham is like prosciutto or jamon iberico, an artisanal product in which ham ages in lots of salt until it’s dense, funky, almost offputtingly salty yet blessed with a profound complexity of flavors.  It takes forever and so, the story goes, it’s nearly commercially extinct.

Well, yes and no.  This being the internet age, even as it disappears from conventional markets, we may be entering a new golden age of country ham in which it’s no further away than the nearest FedEx truck.  It’s not at all difficult to find suppliers online, and I had one in hand within three days of deciding that country ham was going to be the main course.  I ordered mine from Father’s in Bremen, Kentucky:

$38 plus shipping that brought it to about $50, still a relative bargain compared to others going for at least $60 or $70. Does one want a cheap country ham? Well, no, but I found this on some site being touted as the best value out of the ones sampled, so it sounded good to me.

It certainly smelled good— smoky, funky, hammy. Three days of soaking followed, and then I trimmed, laboriously, the rind off, revealing the naked, prosciutto-like ham underneath:

I had found an intriguing recipe in Charleston Receipts: it called for making a sort of gingerbread shell for the ham, full of cinnamon, cloves, and brown sugar, with a little pickling juice from whatever fruit you have handy thrown in. I rolled this thick dough out (another laborious process):

There’s something vaguely Flintstonian about the way that looks, like a drumstick of fried chickenosaurus. Five hours of baking, filling the house with Christmas cookie smells, and it looked like this:

It went off to the side while I prepared other things. Finally the time came to serve it, so I cracked the shell and started carving into it:

Actually, that’s Art, of my foraging video and The Pleasant House, carving as I raced to get the greens dished up and the biscuits baked:

Charleston Receipts actually assumes you’ll glaze and finish it some other way, but that really wasn’t necessary except for appearance, if you wanted a perfect looking ham. As far as flavor went— it was great, the salty smoky meat being counterpointed by the sweetness that the crust imparted. Some parts were tough, prosciutto-funky, others tender and juicy, the ring of fat was like bacon on some pieces, it was a wonderful meat that revealed different sides of its flavor seemingly with every bite. I think the crust roasting method, as hard work as it was compared to simply baking it with a lot of gooey topping, really did a lot to preserve the ham’s own flavor and juices and impart spice notes that enhanced it.

I made biscuits and had a variety of things to put on it— homemade fig preserves and apple chutney from The Gift of Southern Cooking, as well as Stonewall Kitchen’s Country Ketchup (which is really good, very tangy and more like a relish than ketchup) and other stuff. But pretty much anything you did with this ham, including cut some off the next morning and pop it straight in your mouth, was plenty good. I’m glad I added country ham to my repertoire. Even if it’s not something I’ll make often— as Lincoln said, “There is nothing more like eternity than a train ride of eleven days, unless it’s two people and a ham”— I can easily see making it once a year, setting aside some of the harder chunks for future use in soup, and picking it down to the bone over a couple of weeks each time.

(Followup to Coppablogging and Coppamergency.)

When last we saw my coppa, it had green splotches which I washed off with vinegar.  Back into the wine fridge for a couple of weeks, and finally I decided now was the time.

But, as in a horror movie, I had no certain idea what would lie behind the bandages once they were removed… flesh of tantalizing beauty… or of unspeakable horror?

I peeled them back, slowly…

A little white mold, the good kind, but no hideous green or orange growths.

The smell, too, was the good funkiness of old school salume, not the bad funk of rot.

I sliced it in half, then cut myself the thinnest slice I could and tasted it.

The flavor, like the smell, was funky and deep, but not offensive in any way.  The texture was supple, buttery.  This being mulefoot, it’s more fat than meat, which is perhaps a slight disappointment, and I could wish for it being a little more salted, and perhaps a little more dried— it’s very much like raw meat in the middle.  But for a first try, I was extremely happy with having come so close to my model.

Half for me, half for Hammond whose pig it was.  So he has something to really look forward to when he comes out of his current self-imposed fast. Hey, I got yer satori right here, pal.

P.S. So I also had half of the lardo, as described here and here, hanging in the fridge for an extra few months. I took that down at the same time and sliced into it:

If there’s any difference between what I took down some months back and this, I can’t taste it. Had it been by itself, it might have dried out a little more, which would have been fine, but with the coppa in the same fridge losing its moisture, it didn’t come out any differently. So, three months, six months, doesn’t seem to make a vast difference when it comes to lardo. It’s all good.

What are the odds of two people making videos about eating raccoon in the upper midwest in the same week?

I don’t know, but here’s the Detroit News’ Charlie LeDuff, talking to a guy who traps them in the reclaimed wildernesses of Detroit.

For my raccoon video, go here.

So I had been checking on my coppa in process more or less daily, and it seemed to be doing all right, no foul odors, just a nice pork-and-seasonings smell. The one potential problem seemed to be that the moisture it was losing was keeping the inside humidity of the wine fridge turned charcuterie chamber way too high, but cracking the door regularly seemed to be helping.

Then last night I examined it, maybe more closely than before, and… mold. Not just white mold, which is normal and even healthy, but… green spots. Oh hell, that’s the end of that, I thought. Yet nothing smelled bad, in fact, it smelled great.

So I read up and found that green mold could still be washed away— it’s black mold, with roots going into the meat, that really means death for your meat and sickness for you. So I hurriedly unwrapped the cheesecloth and discarded it and most of the mold with it, and then washed the outside with vinegar, scrubbing the mold away. I even made some unobtrusive cuts to see the inside, fully expecting to see death and destruction, but… it looked beautiful. It smelled right.

I wrapped it in fresh cheesecloth, retied it, and rehung it. I think it’s going to be okay. We’ll see. That’s part of the point.

My wife ate lunch several days a week at the Trotter’s To Go downtown before it closed last week.  What, did she inherit money?  Nope, she ate soup, the one thing that seemed relatively economical there.  But now it’s closed and so it has fallen to me to attempt to replicate Trotter’s To Go’s soups in little plastic containers for her to take to work.  Consequently, she’s been bringing me soup from there to taste and attempt to retro-engineer.

One of her favorites was curried sweet potato soup.  I tasted it and, well, it pretty much tasted like sweet potatoes, a nice yellow curry powder, and a little cream.  But I suspected, it being Trotter’s, that there were hidden depths in it, specifically a top-quality vegetable broth.  This was a bit problematic for me, since I’ve pretty much never made soup without a carcass in it, in fact, my idea of soup is pretty much, take a bone, add water.

Poking around the web I found that Thomas Keller had a recipe for vegetable broth, which seemed as close as I was likely to get to Charlie himself, in The French Laundry Cookbook (which I look at from time to time, it’s very beautiful and thoughtful, but generally find hopeless to cook from).  Now, coming from Keller, the recipe was very particular about what should go in vegetable broth to produce something clear and beautiful.  Yes to fennel, carrots and leeks, no to celery (gets bitter), no to salt and pepper (save for the final dish), no to the random scraps that cloud up flavor (says he), yes to straining and straining till it’s perfectly clear.

So I started out with the Keller-approved vegetables:

Just 45 minutes later, I strained it and then put the sweet potatoes in the broth:

Now, making a Keller-level broth right there pretty much killed the economic value of making your own soup, what with those leeks and that fennel bulb and so on.  There’s probably $12 worth of vegetables at Whole Foods prices there, before we ever get to adding sweet potatoes to it. But I figured, throw in some more of the scraps Keller wouldn’t approve of and I could get a second batch out of those same vegetables.  So, after reducing both the remaining pint or so of the first broth and the quart or so of the second broth to fit in my freezer, I ended up with another little jar of very clean and flavorful Keller-approved broth concentrate, and a slightly larger one of, if truth be told, pretty much indistinguishable Keller-plus-scraps broth concentrate, which will make a nice base for my next batch. The cost per unit is at least a little better now.

This is either right after adding milk, or the opening credits of a Roger Corman picture:

Not exactly the way Charlie makes it— I think this recipe I used for guidance adds more milk than he does— but not bad, not bad at all.  I got one good dinner for the whole family, and three pint containers to freeze. A good start. Thanks, Tom and Chuck, for helping me stretch that household budget!

Me, pork shoulder.  Photo by David Hammond.

The story so far: David Hammond bought his wife one of the mulefoot pigs featured in the “There Will Be Pork” podcasts.  He agreed to let me try to make coppa out of part of the shoulders, and I also agreed to make him bacon.  Here’s Hammond’s account of the first step of that process, with pictures of me cutting out the coppa muscle and salting/spicing it for a couple of weeks of curing in the fridge.

I was rather proud of the process of removing the coppa muscle. (Think of it as sort of a roll of meat, running roughly parallel to the spine on the shoulder.) Every time I’ve had any interaction with a pork shoulder lately, I’ve poked and prodded it to try to figure this out, and had some guidance from both Nathan Sears at Vie and especially Rob Levitt at Mado, who let me photograph it step by step. Still, I can’t say I was sure where it was…

Then we unwrapped David’s mulefoot shoulder and… hey! There it was, a perfect little cylinder of meat tucked in next to the blade. (If you look at the picture with the laptop in it, look at the end of the shoulder nearest the edge of the computer, and you’ll see an area where it’s sort of round on one end, and then you see meat and fat running long and straight along the body of the shoulder. That’s the cylindrical coppa, basically.)

I’m starting to think, actually, that when you get something that’s been naturally raised, you’re more likely to find its parts in the proper places and proportions, like on the charts, and it’s only when you get meat that’s been raised by some more artificial process that it seems kind of jumbled, irregular, like way too thin bellies or pork shoulders that each look like some different jumble of hunks of meat. So it was really a breeze cutting the coppa out to produce a nice little roll of meat and, just as importantly, a remainder of the shoulder that wasn’t mangled and abused and would make a nice barbecued pork shoulder, as it did. [Note: Rob Levitt has a more prosaic theory: it was simply butchered with a lot more skill than the stuff that gets hacked and shipped to Peoria or wherever.  Still, I think there’s something to the idea that better raised meat is better proportioned, neater, more like it should be than something that was grown unnaturally quickly.]

*  *  *

So it’s a little over two weeks later and time to hang and dry the coppa.  Here’s how it looked when it came out of the plastic bag in the fridge, like a Stuckey’s pecan roll’s fantasy of transcendence:

30 minutes of rinsing the salt off (that was Rob Levitt’s advice) and then wrapped in cheesecloth and tied off (if Ariane of Top Chef needs any tips on how to tie up meat, have her call me).  Rob recommends cheesecloth as opposed to some kind of casing because you can remove it if it gets bad mold, wash the meat, and replace it.  I also liked the fact that I didn’t have to buy 100 feet of it at a cost of about $30 plus shipping, as was the case with the 65mm casing.

Then hang it in my wine fridge— that’s the lardo hanging above it— and wait a month or so.

BillSFNM is a longtime poster on LTHForum. Here’s a time-lapse video he posted of a pizza baking in his woodfired pizza oven. (I don’t think it’s sped up by much—maybe double time.)

Pizza Leoparding Test – HD from Extreme Cooking on Vimeo.

I guess “leoparding” is cooking a pizza till spots appear? Funny. Anyway, little wonder that praise came quickly for this at LTHForum, hardly time for a phone call in between posts admiring it.

A month ago Menu Pages reported on a StoveTop Stuffing promotion in which hot, steaming samples of stuffing would be stuck in your face at bus stops, the assumption being that Prohibition is still on and therefore no one is going to be so hung over that they will immediately coat the interior of their bus shelter with puke at the sight of mealy, chewed-looking hot stuffing at 8 am.

Now The New York Times has inexplicably declared this promotion one of the best things Madison Avenue did all year.  Let’s think for a minute about what this promotion involves.  A cup of hot stuffing, a spoon, and someone passing it out.  (Okay, and some cooks somewhere in a rented banquet kitchen.)  And here is how the New York Times describes the collection of great powers necessary to pull off this feat:

Agencies: Draft FCB, part of the Interpublic Group of Companies; JCDecaux North America, part of JCDecaux; and MediaVest, part of the Starcom MediaVest Group division of the Publicis Groupe.

Does this sound like an industry that could turn on a dime, get some people out on the street, and boost your sales pronto? Or does it sound like one that started planning this work of genius in 2005, and still wasn’t sure if they were ready to hit the street this year or needed to do some more focus group testing of the concept and some more drawings of the cup design and some more work on the tagline and some more Powerpoints about overall stuffing consumption trends?  Don’t answer that.  And don’t shove stuffing in my face at bus stops.