Robert F. Moss

Growing up Poor in the South (or, The Southern Cross)

2012-01-22T22:16:00.001-05:00

So, just a little while ago I was reading a nice Talk of the Town piece in The New Yorker by Tad Friend about the actor/comedian David Cross. Cross apparently just moved from the East Village to "Dumbo", which sounds like it might be the Gotham equivalent of "B. F. E.", but turns out to actually stand for "Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass" in Brooklyn, which, if you ask me, is taking this whole SoHo, NoMa, etc. thing way too far.

Anyhow, the thing that grabbed me was not the silly acronyms but rather this line: "The comedian grew up poor in the South." Actually, what really grabbed me was not the line itself but rather what surprisingly did NOT come after it, which was an explanation of where it was in the South that Mr. Cross grew up. It's not like Cross has a distinctive Texas drawl or one of those rapid-fire Piedmont Carolina accents that immediately nail down someone's hometown.

The geographical description "in the South" is simply too vague and non-descriptive, not quite so bad as saying "from North America", but certainly not too much more precise. Perhaps to a New Yorker it's all the same, but to me, at least, there's a huge difference between, say, growing up poor in Miami, Florida, than there is in Elkins, West Virginia, or Houston, Texas, or Demopolis, Alabama.

Cross, if Wikipedia is to be believed, was actually born in Atlanta and grew up mostly in Roswell, an Atlanta suburb, broken up with a few stints in New York and Connecticut--and, his father is British. Which may help explain why when I asked my wife (who, as it happens, lived briefly as a child in Elkins, West Virginia) where she thought David Cross was born, she said, "I don't know. Canada?"

I'm heading to Manhattan on Wednesday for work. I doubt I'll find time to visit Dumbo, but when people ask me where I'm from, I'm just going to say, "the South." I'm curious to see whether that'll satisfy 'em. Hell, they might assume I mean Red Bank, New Jersey, and just leave it at that.

Oh, Jeez, Not ANOTHER Burger

2012-01-21T12:16:00.000-05:00

Guess which Charleston eatery the burger in the picture to the left comes from . . .

You're right. It's a little hard to tell, since it really could be from any number of local restaurants. (Hint: the wine stem in the picture is an important clue.)

The pic ran with the review from my colleague Eric from over at the Charleston City Paper of Vino Burgerz, a new gourmet burger spot that opened just up the road from me in Mt. Pleasant.

What? What? you're probably asking yourself. Some one went out on a limb and dared to open a gourmet burger restaurant? In 2012?

Well, Vino opened in 2011, actually. As Eric points out in his opening, a few weeks ago we collaborated on a "2011 in Retrospective" piece that, drawing on every bit of keen insider knowledge we had, identified that big fat gourmet burgers were one of the big dining trends of 2011--an observation almost as perceptive as noting in the midst of a hurricane that it's raining.

But, I can now officially declare that big fat burger fatigue has set in (for me at least). If I wanted to count the joints within a five mile radius of my house that serve house-ground half-pound burgers with hand cut fries, I would need both hands and might even have to take off a shoe.

Vino Burgerz does have the rather unique twist of adjoining a wine shop and offering wine pairings with burgers rather than the more traditional beer. (Hey, there's an idea: a gourmet burger joint that serves "craft beer" on tap: that would be something new!) And I'm sure the burger is pretty damn good (it great in the picture). But in the end, how many of those big whopping monsters can the residents of one city eat?

The picture in and of itself, I think, helps explain the extraordinary deluge of high-end burger joints we've been seeing lately. Look closely at what's on the bun. It's all the crap that we were told we couldn't eat for 20 years--red meat (and undercooked red meat, at that),thick smoky bacon, gooey cheese, and a fried egg with a golden runny yolk, too (salmonella, schmalmonella!). And, of course, hand-cut fries, all golden brown and wrinkly with little bits of crispy peel still clinging to them probably fried in peanut oil if not pure beef tallow. If you're going to fall off the wellness wagon, you might make it a splendid bender.

But, one wonders how much longer it can last.

No, I'm Not Kidding

2012-01-17T08:15:00.000-05:00

In case you doubt the wood-fire grill trend, Nathan Thurston is jumping ship from the Ocean Room out at Kiawah to open a new restaurant with a 1940s era grill room and . . . wait for it . . . a "wood-fired grill-rotisserie".

If you ain't cooking over wood in 2012, you're so 2011.

You heard it hear first. Or at least relatively early.

Are Wood-Fired Ovens the Wave of the Future?

2012-01-16T08:30:00.000-05:00

A few weeks ago, I made the prediction in a City Paper piece that 2012 would be the big breakout year for cooking in wood-fired ovens.

For the better part of the year I've been perfecting wood-roasting chicken on my backyard grill (one of those BBQ barrel models), which is not quite the same barbecuing but has fantastic results. (For a low-and-slow barbecuing session, you cook the meat at around 225 degrees for hours and hours on end; for wood-roasting, you cook it at 325 - 350 degrees for the same amount of time you would in your kitchen oven.)

Now, Ken Albala is taking it way further and experimenting with his own homemade backyard clay oven, with some tasty looking initial results with roasted quail. Now, admittedly, Albala, a food historian at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, CA, is a little more adventurous than your typical Saveur-reading foodie. The list of traditional foods and beverages he makes at home is quite intimidating--sausages, cheeses, mead, goose confit, and 1000 year old eggs, just for starters.

But, he is working on a book, tentatively entitled The Lost Art of Hearth and Home, which may well help inspire other home cooks to go way beyond pizza stones and Big Green Eggs and actually construct their own wood-fired backyard baking ovens.

Here's an interesting note from Albala's early experiments. One of the great things about wood roasting at, say, 325 degrees is the rich smokiness it imparts on chicken, fish, and even root vegetables. Apparently not so when you crank that heat up towards 1,000 degrees in a clay oven. "Interestingly," Albala notes about a loaf of sourdough and a spatchcocked chicken, "neither tasted smoky at all. The smoke really stops once she is super hot."

I Live in a Buzzy Destination City!

2012-01-15T22:10:00.001-05:00

So, Fodor's has put Charleston at the top of it's list of "Buzzy Destinations", ahead of such not-so-shabby cities as Cusco, Milan, Oahu, and Paris (admittedly, it was an alphabetical list). And the reason? Food. Charleston is where "award-winning chefs pioneer a spectacular Southern food revival."

Not surprisingly, the focus on local, heirloom produce and, of course, Sean Brock's Husk and McCrady's take center stage. What is curious is that the Grocery, the newest offering from Kevin Johnson which has been open only a few weeks gets prominent mention, too.

It's fun to watch the seeds that our local chefs, restaurateurs, and producers planted several years ago now starting to bear fruit. And, it also means it won't probably won't get any easier to get a reservation at our hotter downtown spots any time soon.

Scenes from the Road: New Orleans

2012-01-14T19:10:00.000-05:00

Just after Christmas, I went away with my wife for a child-free four days in New Orleans, where we proceeded to eat and drink our way across the city. I've been meaning to write up a thing or two about the trip, but there are so many things to say about it that it's hard to say anything at all. So, I'll take the easy way out and just post a few pictures from the visit.

Roast Beef Poor Boy, R & Os, less than an hour after landing at Louis Armstrong International

The eponymous cocktail at the Sazerac Bar, Roosevelt Hotel

The Carousel Bar at the Hotel Montleone, Home of the Vieux Carre Cocktail

Pork debris, poached eggs, and hollandaise over sliced biscuit: insanely good. The Ruby Slipper.

The aftermath of a Ferdi Special and cup of red beans and rice at Mother's, Poydras St.

Shuckin' 'em at the oyster bar, Acme Oyster House. Always sit at the oyster bar, and treat your shucker well. The oysters will be unbelievable cold and fresh, and your dozen may magically stretch its way well into the teens.

Early afternoon cocktails in the courtyard at Commander's Palace

Cornbread-Stuffed Quail, Commander's Palace

No pictures available from the two big dinners: the first at Antoine's (highlights: chair de crabes au gratin and souffle potatoes) and Galatoire's (highlight: crabmeat maison). At both, it was a rare pleasure to put on a coat and tie for dinner, and in such traditional settings snapping cellphone pics seemed completely out of the question.

I do have a ton of material reflecting on New Orleans cooking, how it compares to the scene here in Charleston, etc. etc. etc. Some day it may see the light. But for now I'll just let the pictures speak for themselves.

New Arrival: The Slaw and the Slow Cooked

2012-01-02T11:20:00.000-05:00

The mail just brought me my two contributor's copies of The Slaw and the Slow Cooked: Culture and Barbecue in the Mid-South, which just came out from the Vanderbilt University Press. It's edited by Jim Veteto and Ted Maclin, who also wrote a couple of essays on sauce and the future of barbecue.

My own contribution was a historical summary of barbecue in the Mid-South region, which can roughly be defined by drawing a big circle with Memphis at its center: western Tennessee, north Mississippi, Arkansas. There's a decided anthropological bent to many of the essays (Veteto and Maclin are both anthropologists), but there's plenty of other takes, too, like John T. Edge's profile of Jones Bar-B-Q Diner in Marianna, Arkansas, and an assessment of barbecue as slow food by Angela and Paul Knipple.

All told, it's the most comprehensive treatment of the region's barbecue I've seen yet. Plenty of meat, and a little sauce, too.

Scenes from the Road: Craft Beer is Officially Uncool Now

2011-12-31T17:37:00.001-05:00

Man, it's been a busy December. I've been on the road for almost two weeks, but finally back in Charleston and able to reflect on my travels. Here's a quick one: the term "craft beer" is finished. The evidence? See photo below:

Can you identify the "craft beer" in this selection?

This is from the menu at one of those national chain restaurants (site of a dinner I'm still trying to forget). I particularly like the handy photo-based design, ideal for people who don't read so good, and of course, like all classy restaurants, no prices on the booze selections.

If you have to ask, you can't afford that craft beer, dude.

Things We Said That Sounded Good at the Time

2011-12-11T09:33:00.001-05:00

I'm working on a year-end retrospective on Charleston food for the City Paper this weekend, and in the process was cruising through some back issues of the paper to refresh my memory. In the process, I came across this headline: "Salads Can Be Just as Satisfying as a Plate of Pulled Pork."

Wow. That is so fundamentally just not true.

More Mysteries of the Roffignac Cocktail (Part the Third)

2011-12-06T07:20:00.000-05:00

In which depending upon the kind assistance of strangers produces a curious recipe.

[This is part three of a series on the Roffinac. Start with Part 1 to get the whole saga from the beginning.]

Thanks to a tip from Tom Freeland (a.k.a. NMissCommentor), I reached out to Tom Fitzmorris for more information about the Roffignac cocktail--particularly in its final incarnation as the house cocktail at Maylie's Restaurant. Fitzmorris--the proprietor of the indispensible New Orleans Menu website, author of Hungry Town and the hot-off-the-presses Lost Restaurants of New Orleans--not only remembered the cocktail from his days as a Maylie's regular back in the 1970s but also conjured up a recipe, taken straight off an old Maylie's menu.

And, without further ado, here is the Roffignac as it was last served in New Orleans:

In a rocks glass filled with ice cubes, add:
1 oz. Cognac
1/2 oz. rye whiskey
Grenadine to taste
Splash of club soda
Add a lemon twist and there you are.

I wasted no time in stirring one up and, from sip number one, it was quite fine. In all my permutations before, I never thought to mix Cognac and rye. I sort of associated Cognac as the original version and rye as the later substitution, so it's curious to see a recipe with both together. But I think it really works.

Next steps: try to replicate a Roffignac with himbeer essig syrup in place of the grenadine. With the "to taste" admonition, I think we can make it work.

Thanks again to Tom Fitzmorris for his generous assistance!

Is Competition Barbecue a Menace?

2011-12-04T08:15:00.000-05:00

Wright Thompson has a wonderful piece in the Oct/Nov Garden and Gun on the Memphis in May World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest and the efforts of the Fatback Collective, a motley band of award-winning Southern chefs--Donald Link, Sean Brock, John Currence--and veteran barbecue kings--Rodney Scott, Nick Pihakis, Pat Martin, Drew Robinson. Their mission was not just to win the whole hog category but, in the process, "rescue a barbecue contest, and maybe barbecue itself, from a crushing sameness."

It's a great read and makes you really wish you could have snuck onto the team, but the central premise of the article got me thinking not about the past but about the future of barbecue.

Memphis in May, Wright writes, is "a threat to authentic barbecue", with its judges acculturated to lean pigs shot full of MSG and sugar, the cooking manipulated through their Mr. Wizard tricks like filling cavities with sticks of butter and using ice-filled pillow cases to halt cooking.

Thompson may be right when he says that these high-tech competitive teams are currently "the face of Southern barbecue." They certainly have about as much exposure as one can imagine through cable television and full-color glossy books. But, it just doesn't strike me as something to worry about.

The competition barbecue circuit is a closed, almost insular world, one in which teams travel from weekend festival to weekend festival, mingling and bonding and getting to know each others' families along the way. As Wright points out, the trick to winning a barbecue competition is to understand who won the last few contests and mimic their techniques, a sort of closed-island evolutionary accelerator that has resulted in a barbecue style that can truly be found only on the grounds of a sanctioned barbecue competition.

But is this really a threat to authentic barbecue, the slow-cooked regional variations that barbecue lovers hold so dear? I don't think so. Sure, some of the champions publish bestselling recipe books that have certainly shaped what your average backyard barbecuer (that is to say, a backyard griller) is throwing on his gas grills or his shiny new Big Green Egg. But, how many of those folks were ever going to dig a pit and fill it with hickory coals?

No, the real threat to barbecue is the Southern Pride gas-powered, wood-chip-smoke infusing cooker and others of its ilk for the simple reason that they make it really easy to have barbecue that, while not great, is pretty good. A barbecue restaurateur can put on the meat, set the thermostat, and go home and sleep in a comfy bed instead of staying up all night.

There are other threats, too. Like health department regulations that make it a herculean task to get approval to open a real wood-burning pit. Like a fast-food restaurant industry where the never-ending race to the bottom makes it hard for a slow-cooked product to compete with four dollar combo meals and computer-controlled deep fryers.

Going old school and winning one of the new fangled festivals with some old fashioned pig would be sweet. But even sweeter would be keeping our rich, ever-evolving barbecue tradition moving forward in the right direction. For my money, that means getting more good barbecue joints onto more street corners, with a new generation of barbecue kings learning the glories of cooking over wood and letting smoke and time work its magic.

No, I have no idea how that's going to happen. But still I have hope.

Rum's Inferiority Complex

2011-12-02T07:37:00.000-05:00

Check out the fun Flash segment on the home page of Appleton Estates Jamaican Rum.

Here's a synopsis, for those of you on iPads or too busy to fill out the mini-customs form required to access the site (what's with liquor sites making you enter your birthdate--does the law require them to do that, or just their lawyers?): It's a clever little bit showing a glass of dark rum over ice with a paper umbrella in it. Along comes a stream of red fruity-looking liquid. The umbrella spins into action, sending the juice flying in all directions and keeping the glass of rum pure and pristine. "The Rum That Needs Nothing" is the punchline.

It's a clever bit, but it's also a little sad, for it shows how much the recent fetishization of bourbon and Scotch is spilling over into other realms. You know the drill: the connoisseur who would pay $60 not for a bottle but for a single glass of whiskey with a lone sculpted cube of ice in the middle--unless, of course, they are the purist sort who would threaten to shoot you in the face if you even think about bringing a scoop of ice within ten yards of their drink.

I can hardly blame the rum guys for trying to keep up with the Joneses (and Beams and the Van Winkles). If I were them I would do whatever I could, too, to be able to slap three digit price tags on bottles of "limited reserve" products.

But, this elevation of rum to a sip-it-slow-on-the-rocks connoisseur drink is a little depressing. From the very beginning--when it was blended with sugar and citrus into punches--rum has been the consummate joiner, always playing well with others.

Yes, I know its reputation has been tarnished by two generations of frozen banana daiquiris and sugar-soaked pina coladas. But, from the purity of an original daiquiri to the exquisite muddled mint of the mojito, there are any number of rum concoctions that are subtle mixtures suitable for grown ups. As classic tiki drinks like the Zombie illustrate, rum is alone among the liquors in that it can be mixed with other varieties--letting you blend a light rum and a dark rum and finish the drink off with an overproof rum float.

A while back, I was given a bottle of Ron Zacapa Centenario, a 23-year-old, barrel-aged rum. It's rich, mellow, and warm, absolutely perfect for sipping on the rocks and every bit the peer of a fine bourbon. I quite am sure that, using the proper subtle recipes, it could be incorporated into a splendid cocktail--perhaps something as simple as a little lime and sugar, or perhaps something more complex that builds in a couple of liqueurs and maybe even an overproof-rum kicker.

But, every time I've pulled out that brown, rattan-wrapped bottle with the intention of shaking up a cocktail, I hear the voices of the brown-liquor snobs whispering in my ear, "You can't do that, you philistine! It would be a sacrilege." And the 23-year-old rum ends up cold and alone in a rocks glass with just a chunk of ice to keep it company.

But, would it really be a sacrilege to let such a rum mingle with a few close friend? As Jeff "Beachbum" Berry relates, Victor "Trader Vic" Bergeron developed one of the classics of tiki bar culture because he had received a bottle of 17-year old J. Wray and Nephew rum and believed, "the flavor of this great rum wasn’t meant to be overpowered with heavy additions of fruit juices and flavorings."

Did he serve it in a stylish glass with a single orb of handcrafted ice in the middle?

Hardly. He blended it with orange curacao, rock candy syrup, orgeat syrup, and the juice of one lime. And thus was born the legendary Mai Tai.

So, my plea to the premium rum distillers is this: don't try to compete head-to-head with bourbon and Scotch as a sipping liquor. You can't win a me-too game. (Did pork gain anything over chicken by branding itself "the other white meat?" The answer is an emphatic no!)

Instead, change the playing field and take the game to a place where bourbon and Scotch can't follow. Don't make rum aficionados feel guilty about mixing in a little lime juice or simple syrup. Encourage them to experiment. Hell, if you invent some fancy enough formulas with fine cognacs and multiple aged rums, you might be able to come up with single-glass cocktails whose price tags make single-malt Scotches look like house brands.

There's about two ounces of Ron Zacapa Centenario left in that bottle in my liquor cabinet, which I've been saving for a special occasion. Perhaps tonight I'll use it in a mai tai.

And I won't feel guilty about it at all.

Presidential Barbecue

2011-11-30T06:35:00.000-05:00

A team of archaeologists have discovered what appears to be a barbecue pit at Montpelier, the home of President James Madison near Orange, Virginia. Barbecue has a long, rich history in Virginia, and there are quite a few connections with George Washington, who in his journals recorded attending many barbecues and even hosted a few of his owns. This establishes a connection with another American president.

Unraveling the Mystery of the Roffignac Cocktail (Part 2)

2011-11-28T09:30:00.000-05:00

In which I attempt to contract a febrile affection or two.

(For the story up to now, see Part 1 of Unraveling the Mysteries of the Roffignac Cocktail)

Secrets of Red Hembarig Revealed

I was stuck hard on the identity of the sweetener named Red Hembarig, but I plugged away at it periodically. A forum thread on eGullet (which included a helpful response from cocktail and punch guru David Wondrich) speculated that "Hembarig" was a corruption of himbeere, the German word for raspberry, and that "red Hembarig" was nothing more than raspberry syrup.

This didn't strike me as fully satisfying--why would Arthur include raspberry syrup as an alternative to raspberry syrup?--but it was just the hint I needed. Back to the newspaper archives, and with a little trial and error I was able to track down not only "himbeer syrup" in turn of the century New Orleans but something even more interesting: a syrup that pairs himbeer (raspberries) with essig--the German word for vinegar.

And there you have it. The elusive "Red Hembarig" is, I believe, Arthur's elision of himbeeressig syrup, which means the long-lost ingredient of the great Roffignac cocktail is . . . pause for drama . . . raspberry vinegar syrup!

Now, raspberry vinegar, to modern palates, seems more fit for salad dressings than for cocktails. But, it was rather common in drinks a century or more ago. Like a lot of things in the world of 19th century imbibing, it comes out of the medicinal realm.

You can find raspberry vinegar and raspberry vinegar syrup recipes in any number of 19th century handbooks for pharmacists and chemists. The formula from the 1884 edition of the National Dispensary is pretty typical: you mix a "convenient quantity" of fresh raspberries with a "sufficient quantity" of sugar (the precision of these pharmaceutical recipes is amazing) and let it rest for 3 days. Then, you press and strain out the juice and let it sit until it has completely fermented and become clear (which should take a day or less), then filter it. You mix this liquid with sugar (2 parts of liquid to 3 parts of sugar), heat it to a boil, then strain and bottle.

And what do you do with such a concoction? The National Dispensary notes that "This syrup has no special medicinal virtues. It forms an agreeable addition to mixtures, and with water a pleasant drink for febrile affections." Febrile affections (per Rudy's List of Archaic Medical Terms) means pretty much any medical condition accompanied by a fever, so it might be safe to say that raspberry syrup is good for whatever ails you. During the Civil War, in fact, a letter writer to the New York Times recommended raspberry vinegar as "a grateful, cooling and wholesome drink for the fevered, sick and wounded."

But why wait until you are sick or wounded? Pharmacists and bartenders alike (and, in old New Orleans these occupations were often one in the same) discovered somewhere in the mid 19th century that raspberry vinegar syrup made an agreeable addition to cocktails, too.

In How to Mix Drinks (1862), Jerry Thomas includes not one but three recipes for raspberry vinegar syrup. In one, you first make raspberry vinegar by macerating 30 pounds of raspberries in 7 1/2 gallons of wine or cider vinegar for eight days before pressing and straining it. Then, you dissolve 80 pounds of sugar in the vinegar, boil it for 2 minutes, then skim and strain. Another recipe calls for 3 1/2 lbs sugar, 1 pint raspberry juice, and 2 pints of vinegar.

Thomas does not provide, any recipes for drinks using the syrup, but there are plenty out there in other publications, some alcoholic and some not. Raspberry shrub--a few tablespoons of the vinegar syrup mixed with a glass of water--was a popular summertime beverage, while hot raspberry ade (which added lime juice) was a wintertime refresher. Amanda Hesser of the New York Times rediscovered raspberry vinegar as a beverage component a few years ago, using it by the spoonful to spruce up a glass of sparkling water or prosecco. Her recipe, borrowed from a 1900 New York Times article, is for 1-1/2 quarts raspberries macerated for three days in one cup of vinegar, then mashed and strained and made into a syrup by simmering with a half pound of sugar.

Raspberry vinegar syrup was particularly popular in New Orleans, where it was commonly referred to by its German name himbeeressig. Why the German was used in New Orleans and not elsewhere in the country is uncertain, but New Orleans did have a substantial German-American community, and its members played a prominent role in the city's pharmacy, hotel, and restaurant trade.

Advertisement for Loubat's Syrups for

Soda Fountains

(Times-Picayune, March 5, 1934)

One commercial vendor of himbeeressig syrup in New Orleans was the Loubat Glassware and Cork Company, which dates back to at least the 1870s (and is still in the restaurant supply business today as the Loubat Equipment Company). In the 1920s, it advertised himbeer essig as one of the 14 flavors of Loubat's Syrups, which it sold to soda fountains in one-gallon jugs for $1.50 a piece.

So, it seems, there was plenty of raspberry vinegar syrup floating around the pharmacies, soda fountains, and bars of New Orleans around the turn of the century. Little wonder that it made its way into a few liquor drinks.

The Legacy of the Roffignac Cocktail

And that brings us back to the Roffignac. Having equipped myself with a bottle of Cognac and dozens of recipes for "Red Hembarig"--that is, himbeer essig--syrup, I was ready to take a crack at constructing perhaps the original Roffignac cocktail

But, first, here's how not to create raspberry vinegar syrup. Flush with the victory of uncovering himbeer essig, I raced to the Historical Cocktail Testing Facility. All the recipes I had uncovered called for days and days of steeping, but I was in the heat of the hunt and figured I could cut corners and mix one part of the raspberry syrup made in my previous Roffignac forays with one part cider vinegar. This, emphatically, does not work, and the pungent vinegar concoction quickly ended up in the Failed Experiment Disposal Unit (a.k.a. kitchen sink drain), wasting an ounce and a half of perfectly good rye whiskey in the process.

I resigned myself to having to wait, using the recipe for raspberry vinegar syrup from Jerry Thomas's How to Mix Drinks and recalculating the proportions to make a more manageable amount.

Himbeer Essig, or Raspberry Vinegar Syrup

12 oz. raspberries
24 fl. oz. (3 cups) cider vinegar

32 oz. sugar

Put raspberries and vinegar in a large plastic container and let them soak for 8 days. Strain through a sieve, mashing and pressing the raspberries to extract all their juice. Put the liquid in a saucepan along with the sugar, bring to a boil over high heat, stirring to dissolve the sugar. Let it simmer a minute or two, then cool and bottle.

The preparation of the syrup will give your house a good fumigation and send the wife and kids running for the doors. But, once it cools and the flavors blend in the fridge overnight, it's a truly remarkable substance: sweet and tangy and complex, the bite of the vinegar mellowed and smoothed by the raspberries and sugar.

Now, there's just one confusing thing about Stanley Clisby Arthur's recipe for a Roffignac. "Sirup" appears twice in the ingredients list: 1 jigger of whiskey, 1 pony of "sirup", seltzer or soda water, and, finally, "raspberry sirup". In the instructions that follow, he says simply to add the whiskey, then "the sirup, which may be raspberry, grenadine, or red Hembarig." So, does this mean you use a pony of regular simple syrup and a splash of raspberry, grenadine, or "red Hembarig"? Or, do you use a full pony of the flavored syrup?

A Roffignac made with a jigger of rye and a pony of regular raspberry syrup is nicely balanced. The same drink made with a pony of himbeer essig was quite off: way too pungent and strident. I loved the zing of the raspberry vinegar, but it was much too strong. So, I tried a few variations where I moderated the himbeer essig, cut it with plain simple syrup, added in a little bitters, swapped Cognac and rye in and out.

A version made with rye whiskey and a blend of simple syrup and himbeer essig was getting close to the mark, but something about that vinegar tang and the sharp edge of the rye just wasn't quite there.

Finally, I mixed up one with Cognac and himbeer essig diluted 2 parts to 1 with a simple syrup made with demerara sugar, which has a nice pale brown color and a little darker, richer flavor than a syrup made from granulated white sugar. I stirred it up, took a sip, and and thought to myself, Goddamn. That tastes almost exactly like Coca-Cola. With, of course, a very pleasing kick.

Could this be the original Roffignac? A drink as mild as Coca-Cola but as potent as a Sazerac?

Maybe.

The Original (Perhaps) Roffignac Cocktail

1.5 oz. Cognac or other good brandy

2/3 oz. simple syrup

1/3 oz. himbeer essig syrup

soda water

Combine the Cognac and syrups in a rocks glass and stir. Fill glass with ice, top with club soda, and give one final stir.

Arthur calls for a highball glass, which would be at least eight ounces, but unless you just drown the thing in soda it leaves it awfully empty. I generally use a 6-ounce rocks glass, which seems more appropriate

The Roffignac Cocktail,
Rye Whiskey Version

A Roffignac Rebirth?

While I like my version of the Roffignac, I am painfully aware that I'm totally shooting in the dark, trying to recreate a cocktail I've never tasted before and with ingredients that are murkily established at best.

It doesn't seem possible to me that a whiskey soda with a splash of raspberry syrup would have been special enough to become a signature New Orleans drink, one that would rival the Sazerac or Ramos gin fizz. My Coca-Cola-esque version seems more like the kind of thing that would have gotten the attention of locals and tourists alike. But I'm just guessing.

Errol Laborde over at MyNewOrleans.com recently retold an amusing anecdote about Roffignac cocktails taken from an 1892 edition of the Mascot literary magazine. I'll let you read the anecdote over there, but the fact that the Roffignac passes itself off as a temperance drink further suggests that it would have been very soft drink like in flavor.

Larborde also notes that the Roffignac, which never came back into fashion after Prohibition, lingered on as the house specialty at Maylie's, which opened in 1876 and lasted 110 years. When Maylie's closed in 1986, Laborde writes, "so did the public life of the Roffignac."

1986, alas, was just a little before my (legal) drinking time, but perhaps someone who remembers the Roffignac from Maylie's could weigh in on the concoction: was it just a raspberry-flavored whiskey-and-soda, or something more subtle and complex? Does anyone from New Orleans remember seeing a bottle of himbeer essig syrup at soda fountains or elsewhere?

Maybe, just maybe, the public life of the Roffignac is not at its end just yet.

Unraveling the Mystery of the Roffignac Cocktail (Part 1)

2011-11-26T09:42:00.000-05:00

In which I am stymied by the mysterious Red Hembarig

I am currently neck deep in research on the classic cocktails of New Orleans, and along the way stumbled upon a bit of a mystery. The Sazerac, the Ramos gin fizz, even the absisnthe frappe: these I was familiar with. But not too long ago, while working through old newspaper archives from around the turn of the 20th century, I came across a cocktail that I had never heard of before. It was highlighted as one of the signature drinks of New Orleans, and it had a splendidly rich, dramatic-sounding name: the Roffignac Cocktail.

That name came from a man known in New Orleans as Joseph Roffignac but who bore the even more grandiloquent full name of Count Louis Phillipe Joseph de Roffignac. Roffignac fled France during the Revolution and established himself as a leading merchant in New Orleans. He served as mayor of the city from 1820 to 1828, inaugurating under his watch the first paving and lighting of streets, and was by all accounts a bon vivant and all-around great guy.

While it isn't likely that Roffignac himself ever tasted the drink named in his honor (he died in 1846, long before I can find any trace of the cocktail in print), it had become one of the city's signature drinks by the 1890s.

Maylie's Restaurant, New Orleans
Home of the Roffignac Cocktail for Almost a Century

Mannessier's Confectionary--a Royal Street shop known for its coffee, ice cream, and pastries--was also famous for its Roffignac cocktails. In its 1899 guide for carnival visitors, the New Orleans weekly Harlequin included included Mannessier's along with the Sazerac, the Imperial Cabinet, and the Old Absinthe house as drinking spots not to be missed, noting that "the Mannessier has a great reputation for its roffignacs."

Mannessier's closed in 1914, but the Roffignac lived on at Maylie’s Restaurant on Poydras Street. Originally named Maylie and Esparbe, the restaurant dated back to 1876 and catered initially to the butchers of the Poydras market. By the turn of the 20th century it was considered second only to Antoine's among the city's restaurants. Its classic dishes included its soups, eggs Remoulade, panned veal, and pan-fried trout, and the Roffignac was the house cocktail.

So what kind of cocktail was it?

The 1937 Primary Source for
Roffignac Recipes

Googling up some basic information on the Roffignac was easy, since it has appeared on several cocktail enthusiast blogs recently. All of the recipes seem to trace back to a single source: Stanley Clisby Arthur, whose slim 1937 volume Famous New Orleans Drinks and How to Mix 'Em is an indispensable guide to historic New Orleans libations. Here is Arthur's recipe for the Roffignac, which is essentially a whiskey soda with raspberry syrup:

1 jigger whiskey
1 pony sirup
seltzer or soda water
raspberry sirup

Arthur's instructions have you mix the whiskey, "sirup," and soda water in a highball glass and add ice. He notes that you could replace the whiskey with cognac, which was used in the original version of the drink, and instead of raspberry syrup use something called "red Hembarig," which he describes as "a popular syrup when old New Orleans was young."

Down in the Historical Cocktail Testing Facility (a.k.a. my kitchen), I easily mixed up a whiskey-and-raspberry syrup version of the Roffignac, since, thanks to a bag of raspberries in my freezer, I had all the necessary ingredients on hand.

Quick and Simple Raspberry Syrup
This would be better with fresh raspberries, but if they're out of season or you are in a historically-driven cocktail research rush, you can limp by with frozen.

2 cups raspberries
1-1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup water

Combine raspberries, sugar, and water in a small sauce pan and bring to a boil, stirring until the sugar is dissolved. Reduce heat and simmer five minutes or so, then remove from heat and allow to cool. Pour through a strainer, squeezing all the juice from the berries, and bottle. Refrigerate and use as needed.

Raspberry syrup and a bottle of Old Overholt rye in hand, I proceeded by Arthur's instructions to construct my first Roffignac. The resulting cocktail had a brilliant red color and was pretty tasty but, I would have to admit, nothing to make a big fuss about--just a raspberry-tinged whiskey soda.

The next step, of course, was to try to recreate the original version hinted at in Arthur's recipe. The Cognac made perfect sense: it was the liquor of choice in New Orleans cocktails up until the 1870s, when, in part because of the phylloxera outbreak in France, Cognac and other real French brandies became rare and expensive and the city's bartenders began substituting whiskey. The original Sazerac, in fact, was made not with rye whiskey but with Cognac, and its name comes from Sazerac de Forge et Fils, a much-esteemed brand of Cognac in the mid-19th century.

But what about that other ingredient, Red Hembarig? My efforts to track it down hit a brick wall very quickly. The term seems to appear only in the work of Stanley Clisby Arthur, and all the references I could find on the Interwebs (like cocktail blogs) pointed ultimately back to Arthur's book as their source. Searches through digital book, newspaper, and magazine archives came up dry. It seems a word invented by Arthur himself.

For a few days I was stuck fast. What on earth was Red Hembarig?

And then came a lucky break . . . which I'll tell all about in Part 2.

Part 2 now posted here

Classic Cocktail Books

2011-11-25T18:02:00.001-05:00

Brandy Sour, Which I Enjoyed While
Composing this Post and May Explain
the More Egregious Typos

So, this came to me via my old buddy Robert Trogdon, who sent in a tweet:

any rec for good cocktail book? Something old school.

A little too long a topic for 140 characters, so I'm jumping to the blog to record a few recommendations.

If you want to go REALLY old school, you have to go to Jerry Thomas's How to Mix Drinks, or, the Bon-Vivant's Companion (1862) which, most authorities agree, is the first bartender's manual published in the United States. Fortunately, since it dates back to the Civil War, it is long out of copyright and readily available online at Google Books and many other places.

But, unless you're just a total cheapskate, it's well worth plunking down a few bucks for David Wondrich's Imbibe!: From Absinthe Cocktail to Whiskey Smash, a Salute in Stories and Drinks to "Professor" Jerry Thomas, Pioneer of the American Bar. Despite its impressively 19th century title, it's a recent work (2007) that draws from the recipes in Thomas's original guide and adds a lot of great historical anecdotes and also solid, helpful advice on translating the old formulae and ingredients to the modern bar.

I recently ordered Stanley Clisby Arthur's Famous New Orleans Drinks and How to Mix 'Em, an essential 1937 work that is a time capsule of classic recipes from American's most important cocktail city.

And, perhaps the book I reach to most when actually mixing a cocktail is Dale DeGroff's The Essential Cocktail: The Art of Mixing Perfect Drinks, it's got a great selection of both classic and modern cocktails, and DeGroff's deft hand with ingredients results in recipes that are always just a bit tastier and more interesting that other bar guides.

Hope this helps, Troggie, and I hope we can lift a glass together soon!

Now Available Online: Pimento Cheese Please!

2011-11-15T23:06:00.001-05:00

Pimento Cheese, Please! from Christophile Konstas on Vimeo.

The waiting is over. Pimento Cheese, Please!, the best sixteen minutes of documentary film ever produced on the subject of classic Southern cheese spreads, is now available online. I pop up every couple of minutes with a few fun facts on the history of pimento cheese, and you gotta watch out for the coolest clip of all--the guy about 3/4s of the way through (okay, at 13:54 to be precise!) carving up watermelons with a handsaw.

Nice job, Nicole and Christophile!

2011-11-05T10:19:00.002-04:00

Pimento Cheese Please, a documentary from Nichole Lang and Christophile Konstas, is premiering at the Hippodrome Theatre in Richmond this Wednesday (November 9th). Read all about it in Richmond Magazine.

Lang and Konstas shot much of the documentary here in Charleston, including interviews with Matt and Ted Lee, Robert Stehling of Hominy Grill, and, of all people, me. I shared with them a great old pimento cheese advertisement from the 1920s that I hope made it into the final cut.

If you're in the Richmond area, check it out!

The High Cost of Knowledge

2011-10-31T08:05:00.003-04:00

In the midst of a round of research this morning, I came across a number of articles in scholarly journals that I was interested in taking a peek at, but I didn't because they were locked up in pay sites for various journals or consortia of journals. This is nothing new: since I'm not affiliated with any university, I'm used to the fact that most content published in academic journals isn't freely accessible to me.

This morning, though, a particular irony struck me for the first time: it seems the most expensive content out on the Web is the stuff being published by non-commercial, not-for-profit educational institutions, those whose missions are all about spreading knowledge to the world.

For example, you can go to the Cambridge Journals site and access an article in Modern Asian Studies (just to pick one at random) for the low, low price of $30.00 (yes, in case your missed it, that is more than the price of a typical hardback book) or, better yet, rent it for 24 hours for just $5.99.

And, mind you, this is not for a physical copy of a publication that must be printed and mailed . . . that would be understandable. This is just for the information itself, delivered at virtually no marginal cost over the Interwebs. And, there's no authors' costs to consider here, either: unlike commercial periodicals, academic journals don't pay their contributors. And, accessing the information online would not prevent specialists in the field from subscribing to the journal itself: the article is three years old.

It did occur to me that harping on the exorbitant single-article price might be a little unfair, since perhaps all the Cambridge University Press is doing is trying to get users to buy a subscription, which would make the content available much less expensively. How much less? I have no idea. In order to even see the subscription prices, apparently, you first have to register for an online account. When I tried to register for an account, no values were populated in the drop down list for "Country" and the site crashed when I tried to submit my registration.

It wouldn't be worth even complaining about normally: if the price of something is too high, who cares. Don't buy it. Nobody owes me free journal articles. And, if they have a bad web site that prevents people from buying things . . . well, they won't be making much money off their journals.

But what gets me is that when you visit the "About Us" page for the Cambridge Journals Online, you are presented with a bunch of self-important hooey about their commitment "to advance learning, knowledge, and research worldwide" and how "the dedication of Cambridge University Press to advancing knowledge is visible within our journals, seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day" (except when the site crashes, of course.)

And how to do that? Delivering journal content over the Internet, the "About Us" statement says, "has led to new markets opening up across the world. These include libraries operating together as consortia, and institutions in the developing world becoming able to access journals for the first time." [emphasis mine]. "Markets" is strangely jarring amid such high-minded prose about advancing knowledge, and I assume these libraries are forced to operate as consortia because the price of journals is too damn high for them to buy on their own.

There's something oddly Mandarin about it: the ensconcing of knowledge within the expensive, hard-to-access walls of academia, available only to those who are willing to pay an extraordinary amount for it. Preaching a mission of spreading the noble light of knowledge to the masses while simultaneously making it as costly and difficult as possible to access it.

Here's a piece of advice from the commercial world: if you're really serious about expanding knowledge around the world, make it as cheap and easy to access as possible. Putting academic articles behind not just pay walls but exceptionally expensive pay walls only guarantees that they will not be read and learning will not be advanced.

So, I guess I won't be reading that article in Modern Asian Studies. I hope it doesn't have any groundbreaking information in it.

Mislabled Fish

2011-10-23T13:09:00.000-04:00

"No, really, I am tuna!"

The Boston Globe has a great but disturbing investigative piece into the seemingly growing practice of mislabeling fish.

That it occurs in not particularly surprising, especially when you consider how trendy fresh, locally-caught fish has become. It's easy to imagine a couple of unscrupulous wholesalers out there who can't pass up the temptation to double or triple the price of the humble hake by labeling it cod or upgrading some perch filets to snapper.

What's a more unsettling is how widespread and accepted the practice seems to be among restaurateurs. In some cases it's just a little creative substitution when the price of a menu fixture gets too high. In others, though, it seems to almost a standard operating procedure, like serving tilapia as "red snapper" and escolar as "white tuna" in sushi restaurants. This does little to calm my own sushi fatigue.

And, as fish supply chains grow longer and longer, it makes one wary of the whole thing. The Globe piece is Part 1 of 2. I'm curious now to see what the second piece reveals.

Keeping the BBQ Flames Alight

2011-10-17T21:50:00.002-04:00

This Rick Perry Barbecue Roadkill story is turning out to have a lot more legs than I thought. I wrote an op-ed about it last week for the Los Angeles Times, and it took almost a full week from the time I finished the piece until it ran, and I was worried that by the time it hit print the story might be on its last gasp.

Not so. Not only did my op-ed get a nice pick up through the Times' syndication network, but there are now some new developments in the case. The Burlington Times News now reports that not only has Wilbur King of Kings Restaurant in Kinston sent a letter to Governor Perry weighing in on the matter but now, finally, Perry's opponents are waking up to the potential landmine just waiting to go off. From the Times News report:

“We got a call Thursday from the (Mitt) Romney people wanting to know if we would send some food to Romney,” King said. “He would like to comment on it because they heard about Perry's comment. ... They said they'd be back in touch with us.”

I'm waiting with bated breath for Romney's response. C'mon, Mitt. Don't let us down.
My op-ed is showing some legs, too. I can now officially say that this turkey ran in newspapers from Bangor, Maine, to Sacramento, California. Here's a quick rundown of the papers where it appeared, in addition to the original in the L.A. Times:
Bangor Daily News
Bellingham (WA) Herald
Charlotte Observer
Kinston Free Press
Myrtle Beach Sun News
North Jersey Record
Sacramento Bee

Watch your backs, Woodward and Bernstein.

That's My Boy

2011-10-12T06:43:00.000-04:00

Actual transcript of a conversation between my wife and our five year old:

Charlie: What is Thanksgiving?

Wife: It's a holiday where we think about all of the happy and good things in our life.

Charlie: Like barbecue?

Exactly, son. Like barbecue.

The Roadkill BBQ Flap Continues

2011-10-10T07:47:00.000-04:00

The Los Angeles Times asked me to weigh in on the recent Rick Perry roadkill barbecue controversy, which I did in an op-ed that ran in the Sunday paper yesterday. The political world is still reeling.

But not as much as if the piece had run as I originally wrote it. My editors routinely have the most picky, trivial complaints about the drafts I submit, like "it's way, way too long", "much too dry and dull", and "not supported by facts and potentially libelous." While their emendations are probably to blame for my being passed over for the Pulitzer yet again this year, they do have the nice side effect of giving me a little extra material for my blog.

One of the things that wound up on the cutting room floor was my rejoinder to one of the L. A. Times's own writers. Here are the two paragraphs from my original draft:

Apparently this dust-up baffles some folks on the West Coast. A few days ago Los Angeles Times opinion writer Paul Thornton declared, “This can’t be real. Either today's political culture of umbrage-taking, and over the smallest offenses, is fed primarily by the media (thus this story is way overblown), or we snobby coastal dwellers are right to regard anything between Miami and Seattle as flyover country. I hope (and believe) it’s the former.”
Personally, I think Thornton either has a really dry sense of humor, or he’s just another naive, earnest Berkeley grad who’s never actually been far enough away from the Left Coast to realize that sometimes folks say things with a straight face that they don’t really mean just because they think it’s funny to pretend like they’re having an argument and also if you fly too much farther east than North Carolina you’ll end up in the damn ocean. I hope (and believe) it’s the former.

Now, the putative reasons the editor gave me for excising this passage was that a) it was too long (it's 160 words, and that is a lot for a short piece) and b) because Thornton's piece "appeared only in a blog post on a blog with very few readers." (Hey, those are your editor's words, Mr. Thorton, not mine . . . though I enjoyed adding the emphasis.) I have no reason to question that rationale.

Perry, for his part, has responded to the controversy by ignoring it completely and, I guess, hoping it will just go away. In fact, as of yet, there has not even been an official response from the Perry campaign, not even a denial that he has dined on gamy, well-aged dead animal carcasses that may or may not have tire tracks on them.

As every political handler knows, that's the absolutely worst way to handle a PR crisis. Personally, I would have advised Perry to go on the offensive immediately, attack the credibility of the Reeds and their book Holy Smoke: The Big Book of North Carolina Barbecue, which started this whole thing. Heck, they spent their entire careers in academia, and the book was published by a university press and has a lot of big words in it. Surely they could spin up some pretty damaging "East Coast intelligentia" charges?

Better yet, embrace the scandal: announce publicly, "yes, I eat roadkill. I love it and I'm proud of it!" Think of the potential for a photo op of with old Rick Perry lifting a fork of mesquite-smoked raccoon. Surely there are any number of barbecue joints down there in Texas that could serve it for him. The good people of North Carolina, I dare say, would respect a man who sticks to his principles and might even forgive his lousy taste in barbecue.

But, the Perry campaign has ignored all my advice, and look what it's brought them. Last month, Perry was leading the field of presidential contenders in the state of North Carolina, with 35% of poll respondents saying they would vote for him. In just a few short weeks, that number has fallen to 15%, and Perry is now in a sorry fourth place behind Herman Cain, Mitt Romney, and Newt Gingrich.

Just one more politician laid low by barbecue. A story as old as the nation itself.

Bourbon's Rise

2011-09-29T07:21:00.000-04:00

There's a good piece over at NPR about the continuing trendiness of bourbon--the tastings, the festivals, the tourists following the "Kentucky Bourbon Trail".

Interesting fact from the story: with 4.7 million (!) barrels of bourbon aging in warehouses, there are now more barrels of bourbon in Kentucky than there are people (4.3 million).

And that suggests that when the bourbon bubble bursts (as I predict it will), there's going to be a huge glut on the market and bourbon is going to get really, really cheap. Just my own little prediction . . .

How Low Can You Go?

2011-09-26T07:36:00.000-04:00

So, for several years now we've had chefs trading in their toques for overalls and opening barbecue stands--so long, in fact, that I think I've typed "chefs trading in their toques for overalls" at least a half dozen times and better find a new phrase. Then it was gourmet burgers. Then high-end tacos, often served from rolling trucks.

Now we're on to hot dogs, with Richard Blais's (yes, the Top Chef guy's) HD1--as Broderick reports in a Savory Exposure post with some really sharp pics--just one of the latest incarnation of the gourmet hotdog stand.

I'm trying to think of what cuisine could be lower than the hot dog? The peanut butter and jelly? The grilled cheese? Sorry, that's already been done: so 2007. Can't be macaroni and cheese--chefs have been making mac n cheese with gouda and fontina and even big chunks of lobster for years now. Real ramen, we have learned in recent years from those noodle bars popping up all over the place, is SO much better than that packaged crap we ate in college.

I'm dragging the bottom of the barrel here: Slim Jims? Vienna sausages? Potted meat?

Surely potted meat is the lowest of the low. Has anyone run into a gourmet version at a hipster food truck yet?

If not, it's only a matter of time.

You heard it here first.

More BBQ Scandal

2011-09-25T11:38:00.001-04:00

Porky Le Swine over at BBQ Jew makes a trenchant point about the ever-widening Rick Perry BBQ/Roadkill scandal: in his comments, Perry is effectively admitting that he eats roadkill!

Maybe in Texas, Rick. But, really, do we want flattened armadillos being served at state dinners?

This is getting more and more disturbing with each passing day.

BBQ Politics Goes Viral

2011-09-24T09:30:00.004-04:00

My fellow barbecue historians John Shelton and Dale Reed (authors of the wonderful Holy Smoke: The Big Book of North Carolina Barbecue)have a knack for turning a phrase. Now they've gone viral thanks to an anecdote about Republican presidential hopeful Rick Perry's allegedly saying back in 1992 after sampling the offering at a certain North Carolina barbecue joint: "I've had road kill that tasted better than that."

Google that phrase about roadkill, and you'll see hundreds of hits already in just the two days since the Raleigh News & Observer broke the story (and racked up 139 comments on their site already). I'm happy to dribble a little more oil on the flames!

No response yet from the Perry campaign, but this is the kind of scandal that could wreck a campaign. Stay tuned . . .

Taking a Poke at the Bourbon Fans

2011-09-22T21:34:00.002-04:00

Over the past year or so, I've become an advocate of rum as the true historical drink of the South, and I've had fun taking a few pot shots at the trendiness of bourbon along the way. In my latest piece on rum for the Charleston City Paper I review the new locally-distilled Sea Island spiced rum from from the guys at Wadmalaw Island's Firefly Distillery (the same ones who created the sweet tea vodka a couple of years ago). I held off for most of the piece, but couldn't help throwing in a little dig at bourbon in the last paragraph of the piece:

If there was ever a time for Southern foodies to end their unnatural fascination with bourbon and return to their good old rum roots, that time is now. And what better way to get started than with a distinctively local product like Sea Island Rum?

So, imagine my surprise, when I opened the City Paper yesterday (or, to be more accurate, pulled it up in my web browser) and saw my editor had taken a few liberties and moved my poke at bourbon to the opening paragraph!

But, I'm actually pleased with the emendations, even if it gives the piece a little more of a controversial slant. Bourbon, fans, you're on notice! Rum, the original Southern liquor, is on the rise!

Google Buys Zagat

2011-09-09T07:53:00.000-04:00

Yesterday it was announced that Google was buying Zagat, which struck me as interesting since Zagat and its maroon-covered guidebooks seem like such an orphan in these days--stuck somewhere between the old fashioned printed expert guidebooks like Michelin's and the new freewheeling social opinion sites like Yelp.

It vaguely occurred to me that Zagat probably has a website, but if I had ever visited it before I don't remember doing so. And when I navigated over the Zagat.com to check it out, I can see why I never used it before.

First, it's a pay site that lets you get a basic listing of restaurants but not see any ratings without buying a subscription, which seems doomed in this day of free sites. Second, the "Related Buzz" column on the right hand side (which showed when I searched for restaurants in "Charleston SC") has an old story from back in March about Tony Bourdain and Kat Kinsman having a slap flight over food writers (not really "buzz" if it's six years old, guys) that seems in no way related to the search.

Things are no more relevant if you, for example, search for "pizza" in "Atlanta". "Buzz" from May about a pizza restaurant opening in Baltimore is not useful to someone looking to each pizza in Atlanta, Georgia. Maybe a little search expertise will help . . .

Zagat's pay-wall model had another interesting downside: it made it harder for people to find content on the site, since it would show up very high on Google searches. (That'll probably change soon . . .)

I'm sure Google will manage to take the reader-generated content and put it to some sort of good use, but the deal is interesting for other reasons. Apparently, the New York Times story reveals, the Zagats courted Google pretty aggressively and not the other way around.

My favorite line from the article, quoting an analyst: "It's a little bit of a consolation prize." Two years ago Google made a failed half-billion dollar bid to acquire Yelp, the top online restaurant review site.

It should get interesting over the next few months . . .

Hyderabadi Biryani

2011-08-29T06:35:00.031-04:00

All over Hyderabad last week, big billboards from the Times of India announced the newspaper's Best Haleem & Biryani Contest, inviting readers to submit (via text messages of the Times's website) their favorite restaurants the city's two signature dishes. Being new in town, I didn't have a favorite to submit, but I figured it was a clear sign that I needed to check out the local haleem and biryani.

I got to the biryani first, which was pretty easy to do since it was on the menu or buffet at just about every restaurant where I ate that week.

While many regions of India have their own variations of this dish (as do other countries such as Iran, Sri Lanka, and Thailand), Hyderabadi Biryani is perhaps the most well-known, and it's a reflection of the city's Muslim history. Hyderabad was founded in the late 1500s on the banks of the Musi River by the sultans of the Qutb Shahi dynasty, rulers of Turkish descent who migrated to India in the 16th century and then conquered the kingdom of Golconda in south-central India. The Qutb Shahi ruled Hyderabad until 1687, when the city was captured by the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb. The Mughals, themselves Muslims of Persian descent, granted authority over the city to the Nizams (administrators) of Hyderabad. Seven Nizams ruled the city from the mid-1700s until Indian Independence, and they were known not only as great patrons of the arts and literature but also of great food, and it is from their kitchens that the traditional Hyderabadi Biryani is said to have emerged.

Biryania is a single-pot dish of basmati rice and meat, blending Mughal and Turkish techniques with the local ingredients and spices of the Hyderbad region, which tend toward chilis, garlic, coconut, and spicy pickles and chutneys. The meat traditionally used in biryani is mutton, though chicken is very common and lamb sometimes used as well. Now, "mutton" in India generally means goat's meet, not sheep--a fact that I didn't figure out until about halfway through the trip and which immediately explained why the "mutton" dishes I ate, all of which were delicious, didn't have any of that distinctive "wet wool" flavor you get with, say, good old British-style mutton chops.

Whether mutton, chicken, or lamb is used, the preparation is pretty much the same. The meat is typically cut into small pieces with the bones left in and marinated in a mixture of curd (yogurt) and spices for a couple of hours. As to which spices, it was a little hard for my palette to determine what was in the several varieties I sampled at various times during the week. But, the marinade typically has a dozen or more spices in it: red chili powder, green chili paste, ginger garlic paste, cinnamon, cardamom, tumeric, mace, shah jeera (carraway), clove, bay leaves, cumin, coriander, salt, black pepper, mint, garam masala, coconut powder, saffron, lemon or lime juice, and even dried fruit and nuts all appear in various recipes. It's the careful selection of these spices that distinguish one cook's biryani from another.

The long-grained basmati rice is pre-cooked until about half-done, then its layered together with the meat in a single deep pot. Some cooks make just two layers, with meat on bottom and rice on top, while others alternate a couple of courses of rice and meat, rice and meat, and a final layer of rice on top. That top layer is then garnished with things like cashews, onions, and more spices.

In the old days, biryani would have been cooked over the coals of a fire in a big ceramic pot, its top sealed with chapati dough to keep in the moisture. In more contemporary versions, a modern stove and a stainless steel pot with a tight-fitting lid is used. The whole thing is then cooked briefly over a high flame and then for twenty minutes or so over a low flame, with five or ten minutes off the heat at the end to allow it to finish.

The real skill in making biryani, it seems, is to be able to cook the meat properly through while not overcooking the rice into a sticky mush. Properly made, the long, twisting grains of the basmati rice each stand out individually, soft yet firm enough to chew. And, the best part is the little chunks of fragrant meat tucked away inside. That long list of spices and the yogurt, too, impart a complex savoriness to the mutton or the chicken (the chicken, in fact, tends to be colored a deep red, like it is with good barbecue, though from the spice combination, not smoke). It's a subtle dish, filling and pleasing with the perfectly-textured rice, and the meat and spices add nice complementary notes but don't dominate the dish they way they do in, say, a curry.

In fact, though it's touted as one of Hyderabad's grand delicacies, I found biryani to be less an exotic, dramatic treat as I did a homey, comforting dish. On my very first day in the city, as I forked my way into a big plate of a delicious chicken version, I couldn't help but thinking, "this certainly seems familiar." And it didn't take long for me to figure out why that was. The spices and flavors were very different, but the dish itself--the texture of the rice, the savory meat tucked inside--were the spitting image of the classic Lowcountry pilau. And, some initial research indicates that there likely is a real historical connection between the two.

But that's a story I'll have to leave for later . . .

Now, as to my vote for the Times of India contest, it will be a little difficult. Of the twenty restaurants on the biryani ballot, I only got to try the version from the famed Paradise Restaurant--which many consider the best in the city--though my lunch was not at the original location in Secunderbad (the adjoining twin city to Hyderabad) but at the new Hi-Tech City branch (conveniently located next door to the KFC). It was the fourth version of biryani I had tried in Hyderabad, and while it seemed a little spicier and more aromatic than other restaurants', it's hard for to declare one way or another if it was the best.

It looks like the voting is still open, but we should find out the winner, soon.

Home Again, Home Again

2011-08-28T07:57:00.000-04:00

I just got home yesterday from a week in Hyderabad, India. The jet lag isn't quite as crippling as I was afraid it would be, especially compared to coming back from England or even the West Coast of the U.S. I think it's because there was plenty of time to sleep on the sixteen hour long flight from Delhi to Chicago, arcing up over Russia and Greenland and Canada. So, my body has no idea what time zone it's in, but it's at least relatively well rested.

Hyderabad Airport

I had aspired to blog about my trip as it happened, but between long days at work (it was a business trip to work with some partner software teams), busy nights out exploring the local food, and general spottiness of internet connectivity, I wasn't able to do much more than a tweet a few pictures.

But, now that I'm back I hope to capture a few of the food-related experiences here.

Until then, here are just a few random pictures I took along the way.

Street View (from my hotel)

Golconda Fort (16th Century)

Old Hyderabad

New Hyderabad (Work in Progress)

Best SC Pizza: EVO

2011-08-05T23:37:00.000-04:00

In breaking news, Food Network Magazine named North Chuck's EVO Pizzeria as having the best pizza in South Carolina. Good pick.

In even more stunning breaking news, we find out that the Food Network has a magazine!

The End of Eat Local and Farm-to-Table

2011-08-03T07:15:00.002-04:00

Passionate about eating local? Want to know your farmer and know where your food comes from? Frito-Lay jumps on the bandwagon.

So, on to the next trend . . .

Shrimp & Grits: The Irresistible Seductress

2011-07-30T11:27:00.005-04:00

Shrimp & Grits: My Version

Man, is it almost August already? The kids got out of school at the beginning of June and suddenly I looked up and here we are more than halfway through it. I've been keeping busy with work, travel (including a great family vacation to the Mid-Atlantic that I keep meaning to post pictures from) . . . and then a little family illness fun to boot.

I've also kept myself busy working on the City Paper's Summer Dish issue (coming out any day now), which mostly involves eating my way across the city. Plus, as a follow up to my review visit to the Red Drum, I caught up with chef/owner Ben Berryhill and got the scoop on his new restaurant Next Door, which you can read here.

One thing from my interview with Berryhill that didn't make the City Paper piece was his take on shrimp and grits, which is another installment in a drama I like to call "Shrimp and Grits, the Irresistible Seductress." It goes basically something like this:

Young (or not so young) chef moves to Charleston seeking opportunity in a flourishing restaurant scene. A true artist and dedicated to his craft, he defiantly declares that while he WILL immerse himself in the traditional food culture of his new city but he will NEVER, EVER serve that beguiling, evil recipe . . . Shrimp and Grits!

After all, what could be more cliched and trite? Does this city really need one more restaurant serving shrimp and grits? No, it does not! our hero declares, and boldly stakes out a unique, original, and acclaimed fine dining menu.

The years pass, and delicious fresh shrimp flow in from local waters and appear on the chef's plates, and he's dishing up delicious heirloom stone-ground grits, too. And then there's that fantastic, smoky artisanal bacon or sausage sitting right there on the line, too . . . and eventually, the temptation just overcomes him and the shrimp and corn and bacon merge . . . and there, on the menu, is that one item that he swore would never darken the pass-window at his restaurant: the diabolical SHRIMP AND GRITS!!!

Sean Brock of McCrady's and Husk was one of the most vocal holdouts against our city's staple dish, but he caved several years back and has since produced a splendid version at McCrady's, complete with grits from heirloom Jimmy Red Corn that are blasted frozen by liquid nitrogen before grinding, molded into a disk with shrimp, and topped with shrimp stock gel, sea-like foam, and colorful herbs and flowers. At Husk, his version is a little more rustic but still fantastic, studded sometimes with Benton's bacon and other times with Surry County sausage plus wood-roasted tomatoes, braised fennel, and even a braised pigs ear.

Ben Berryhill told me a similar story. When he came to town in 2005 and opened the Red Drum, he was fresh off a twelve-year stint at Cafe Annie, the acclaimed pioneer of high-end Southwestern cuisine in Houston, Texas. Berryhill's plan (which he executed flawlessly) was to take traditional Lowcountry ingredients and apply his chile- and wood-grilled Southwestern style to them. And, he was adamant that he would NOT serve those treacherous shrimp and grits.

Ah, but the flesh is weak. A few years later, he confesses, he "broke down" and created his own "Low-Tex" version. The "Low" is fresh Lowcountry shrimp and Anson Mills grits, while the "Tex" is the venison sausage from Broken Arrow Ranch in the Texas Hill Country and the chile beurre blanc served on top. And, boy, are they good.

Let those among us without sin cast the first stone. One can fully understand the impulse for chefs to steer clear of the over-exposed, cliched local "specialties". But, they all come around soon or later, and for one simple reason: the flavors of shrimp and corn are perfect together, and when you toss in a little smoky meat, it's absolutely glorious.

(I, too, have fallen. I captured my version of shrimp and grits here some time ago.)

Why Do We Tip (Redux)

2011-06-20T00:14:00.000-04:00

I'm a big fan of NPR's Planet Money Podcast. It's my go-to selection on my iPod while I'm cooking dinner. So, I listened with great interest this weekend when Planet Money delved into one of my long-standing favorite topics: why do we tip waiters in restaurants? I've weighed in on this subject on multiple occasions, including this hoary blog post from five years ago which lays out my general party line.

My opinions have not changed much in a half-decade, and I still continue to be bemused by how most people who delve into the subject of tipping look at it primarily from the customer's point of view (e.g. Steve Buscemi's Mr. Pink character in Reservoir Dogs) and not the waiter or restaurant owner's. Planet Money, though, does a pretty good job, I think, of looking at it from all angles, and their piece turns up a couple of interesting points.

First, they wonder why it is that, even though so many people express frustration at tipping, we still do it: "How do you undo five hundred years of custom and expectation? . . . No one wants to be the first guy who starts stiffing all the waiters because they feel like tipping is illogical." As I go into in more depth in my old post on tipping, I think this is primarily because the real decision-making power on the topic is in the hands of the waiters and restaurant owners, not the customers.

We can see that in cases of other occupations that over the course of a decade or two have transitioned away from a tip-based compensation scheme. Take grocery store bag boys, for example. Interestingly enough, the Planet Money commentators ask during their piece how come we don't feel compelled to tip workers in grocery stores. Perhaps they are a little younger than me, but when I was a teenager you always tipped the bag boys in grocery stores who took your bags out to your car for you, as my high school friends who worked as bag boys were prone to discuss ad infinitum. These days, that custom is all but extinct (as is, I suppose, the term "bag boy").

And how did it happen? In many of the grocery stores I frequented it was due to an active decision and campaign on behalf of the store's management, who posted big signs on the wall saying something to the effect of, "Carrying your bags out to the car is a service we perform free of charge. Please, no tipping." After a few years, everyone began feeling comfortable not tipping that nice kid who helped with the cart, and these days I not only don't recall anyone tipping bagboys anymore but I don't even remember seeing those signs saying "please don't tip".

I'd be curious to hear from someone who was behind those management decisions why it was they decided to actively discourage tipping, but I bet it was because as the economy changed they found that they could attract better employees if they offered them a more fixed, reliable wage.

But that still leaves unaddressed the question of why tipping persists in the restaurant industry when it's on the outs in supermarkets.

That's where the second interesting point from the Planet Money piece comes in. During their interviews, the reporters found that when they asked waiters and waitresses if they would trade making the same money guaranteed through a fixed service charge rather than through tips, the answer was almost always no. And why? "They like it. They like the excitement, and for every bad tip there's a good one around the corner."

And why is that? I think it's because, as I said in my original post on the topic, "Waiting tables is very much a customer-facing sales position, and any waiter who has figured out how to upsell tables with appetizers and drink specials understands that tipping is essentially a slightly-unstable commission system."

And that optimistic willingness to forgo the guaranteed moderate income in favor of the uncertain upside chance for a really big score is a characteristic I've seen in all sorts of salespeople, from the waiters and waitresses hoping to move a little extra liquor and charm a few extra percentage points out of a check to the high-end software sales guys angling to land a six-figure commission on an enterprise deal.

And I still don't think tipping in restaurants is going anywhere anytime soon.

Back for Summer: the Strawberry-Basil Mojito

2011-05-28T17:35:00.000-04:00

Now that summertime is officially here, I'm ready for a lot of hot weather friendly drinks--especially the rum-based ones. This week, a small bag of basil leaves showed up in my Rosebank Farms CSA share and that, along with the load of fresh local strawberries still in my fridge, all but demanded that I drag out an old favorite recipe: the strawberry basil mojito.

It's a wonderful variation on the Cuban classic that I first encountered out at The Lettered Olive on the Isle of Palms and then concocted my own recipe in imitation. The strawberry, basil, and lime meld splendidly together, and the aroma of the basil when you first muddle it into the sugar is nothing short of sublime.

Here's my recipe:

4 - 6 large, fresh basil leaves

2 - 3 strawberries, sliced

1 T sugar

3 T rum

Juice of 1 lime

2 T of club soda

This is really enough for two to share, or you could make it a double and keep it all to yourself.

To create: put the basil and sugar in a cocktail shaker. Muddle vigorously until the basil is starting to break into bits and blending into the sugar. Add the strawberries and press with the muddle until well mashed and incorporated into the basil and sugar. Pour in the rum, lime juice, and ice. Shake until well blended. Pour into two rocks glasses (or one big one, if you're doing the double) and top with club soda. Garnish with a lime and enjoy.

Pimento Cheese Sandwich Crisis at the Masters

2011-04-07T21:05:00.000-04:00

A near-crisis situation on Tuesday as a pimento cheese shortage strikes the Masters Tournament in Augusta. A severe shortage of the famed green-plastic-wrapped pimento cheese sandwiches ensued after a thunderstorm knocked out power at the sandwich processing center.

Fortunately, power is back on now and the sandwich pipeline in flowing once again.

Phew.

Kevin's BBQ Joints

2011-04-04T08:24:00.002-04:00

A guy named Kevin has come out with a pretty good barbecue website called Kevin's BBQ Joints. On the main page, you can enter in a zip code and get a list of barbecue restaurants in the area (with the option to filter out chains). And, there's a regular feature called My Favorite BBQ Joints where folks with serious barbecue credentials (like Drew Robinson, the executive chef of Jim 'N Nick's Bar-B-Q, and John T. Edge of the Southern Foodways Alliance) itemize their favorite barbecue joints, accompanied by pictures that will make you seriously hungry.

Strawberries!

2011-04-02T18:41:00.000-04:00

As I said a few days ago, if the asparagus is in, the strawberries can't be too far behind. Boone Hall Farms' U-Pick strawberry fields are now open for the season, and the boys and I picked three buckets full this afternoon.

A strawberry pie is in the works tonight!

Asparagus!

2011-03-30T06:47:00.000-04:00

One of my favorite parts of spring is fresh asparagus. Over the weekend I had some splendid local asparagus sprinkled with goat cheese from Jeremiah Bacon down at Oak. The next day, I picked up a little of the new crop from Boone Hall Farms to make at home:

If the asparagus is in, that means strawberries can't be far behind.

Creating a (New) Southern Icon, Part 2: Memories & Recipes

2011-03-28T10:02:00.005-04:00

About a month ago I dug into the history of pimento cheese and the surprising fact that, despite its current status as the quintessential Southern food, it was actually invented by Yankees. For most of the 20th century, in fact, pimento cheese was popular nationwide and was largely an industrial food product, something that people bought at the store rather than made from scratch.

I left hanging the question of how this “up-to-date”, nationally-distributed food become so closely identified with Southern cooking while fading both from supermarket shelves and from culinary memory everywhere else in the country. In part it was because the post was already much too long and in part because I don't have nearly as much concrete evidence on that question as I do on the origin of the famous spread.

But, I need to give it a shot. I gave my best stab at it verbally last weekend when I was interviewed by Nicole Lang for her forthcoming documentary "Pimento Cheese Please!" (due out this fall), and here is a written version of it.

As best as I can tell, it's a two-fold answer. First, more than in any other region, Southerner cooks took an industrial product and made it their own, creating home recipes that turned it into something special. Second, and seemingly more important, is the function of the collective Southern memory when it comes to food.
Today, it is taken for granted by most cookbook writers that “real” pimento cheese is made from a combination of grated cheese, mayonnaise, and pimentos. Hotly debated is which type of cheese to use—sharp cheddar, white cheddar, Swiss, Monterrey Jack, Parmesan, or even Velveeta (I use sharp cheddar for mine). And, whether the mayonnaise should be homemade or a specific store-bought brand (I'm a loyal Duke's partisan) and what other elements should be added for flavoring. Black pepper, cayenne, jalapeños, onion, bacon, pecans, hot sauce, garlic powder, cider vinegar, and celery seeds are just a few of the more common enhancements. You can find a few recipes here and there that call for the original cream cheese, but they're definitely in the minority.

These formulas for “real” pimento cheese is a rather recent phenomenon. If you judge from cookbooks, newspapers, and magazines, pimento cheese remained in most people's minds a manufactured product for most of the 20th century. Before the 1980s, it's hard to find any published recipes at all for making your own pimento cheese at home. There are plenty of sandwich and salad recipes that include pimento cheese, but it's treated almost exclusively as an ingredient you would buy at the store, not make from scratch as a standalone dish.

Now, I'm not saying there were no cooks in the South making their own pimento cheese at home. Far too many Southerners today have vivid memories of their family's homemade versions for that to be the case.

Audrey Parker Brooks, a newspaper columnist who grew up in Texas in the 1920s, recalled of her school lunches, “My mother made delicious pimento-cheese sandwiches from scratch. It was mixed with Mamma's own homemade salad dressing.” In Gadsden, Alabama: Stories of the Great Depression, Robert Wilbanks recalls the sandwiches of that era, noting that, “very few ingredients were prepackaged . . . pimento cheese did not come from a store but was made at home by cutting and mixing 'hoop' cheese and pimentos from a jar.” Plenty of Southern cooks, it seems, were making their own pimento cheese from scratch. They just weren't making a big deal about it.

Substituting of grated cheese and mayonnaise for the Neufchatel or cream cheese from the original domestic-science versions may have been the turning point in creating what is today a Southern classic. The new availability of “hoop cheese” in Southern stores in the early part of the 20th century likely inspired some Southern cooks to use it instead of the softer cream cheeses in their pimento cheese concoctions. Grated cheese, of course, would need something to bind it together, so adding mayonnaise was a natural adaptation. From there, any number of additional enhancements—from onions and mustard to lemon juice and jalapenos—would add flavors and make the mixture more and more interesting.

But, good homemade recipes are only part of the story. An even larger factor appears to be the role of memory. In the 1980s, Southern writers capturing in print their memories of the pimento cheese sandwiches of their youth. Pimento cheese starts showing up in a lot of Southern novels, like Fannie Flagg’s Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café (1987) and Clyde Edgerton’s Raney (1986). Before this time, pimento cheese was treated in print—when it was treated at all—as simply another food product you would buy at the store. In the last two decades of the century, Southern writers transformed it into, to use the phrase of Reynold Price, “the peanut butter of my youth—homemade by Mother.”

The cause of pimento cheese got a big boost from the Southern Foodways Alliance (SFA) in 2003 when it staged the Pimento Cheese Invitational as part of its annual symposium in Oxford, Mississippi. More than 300 entrants submitted recipes and accompanying essays capturing the memories that made the food special to them. The winning recipe, provided by local entrant Nan Davis of Oxford, called for grated cheddar and pimentos bound together by homemade mayonnaise and seasoned with onion powder, red pepper, Worcestershire sauce, and a pinch of sugar. While the other two finalists used store-bought mayo, Davis insisted that only homemade would do. She called it “Lella's Pimento Cheese,” after her “very special aunt” Lella, who was famous for the pimento cheese sandwiches she reliably prepared any time there was a funeral, a family illness, or a church gathering.

The Pimento Cheese Invitational struck a chord with Southern food writers. In the wake of the event, dozens of recipes for pimento cheese that referenced the SFA event began appearing in Southern-themed cookbooks and magazines. In The Book Club Cookbook (2004), Judy Gelman and Vicki Levy Krupp described the Pimento Cheese Invitational and published the recipe of novelist Lee Smith, who had been a speaker at event, noting, “a traditional Southern food, pimento cheese is held sacred by southerners, in spite of being largely unknown outside the South.” In The Place Setting (2009), Fred Sauceman reprinted Nan Davis’s recipe and recounted the SFA event, noting, “They came with stories of red-headed aunts. Stories of surviving beauty school, of long-gone corner grocery stores. Memories of bridal showers and Epworth League meetings and lunch breaks at a North Carolina cotton mill. They came with remembrances of Meemaws, Mawmaws, and Grandmas. The substance that ties together all these recollections is pimento cheese.”

John T. Edge, the SFA’s Director, was the organizing force behind the Pimento Cheese Invitational, and he has his own personal connection to the food. In Southern Belly (2002) he writes, “In all my born days, I had never eaten a sandwich that tastes as good as the white bread-encased chicken salad and pimento cheese treats my aunt Ruth Barrett made. Trimmed of their crust, lavished with a thick smear of Duke's mayonnaise . . . for me, they were the ultimate evocation of care and comfort, a bland yet beatific blessing bestowed by my mother's only sister, my surrogate grandmother.” That's some powerful, personal stuff, and it shows how the affection for pimento cheese in the South is linked as much to the people who made it and the places where it was served as it is to the food itself.

But why in the South and not elsewhere in the United States? Conceivably, considering how popular pimento cheese was across the country in the 1930s and 1940s, plenty of people from Minnesota or Oregon should have fond childhood memories of the pimento cheese served by a grandmother or favorite aunt at one or another social functions.

Perhaps in the South the sort of social functions at which dainty spreads like pimento cheese were served—funerals, church gatherings, weddings, and receptions of all kinds—played a more prominent role in average daily life and, therefore, have a stronger hold on the memories of Southerners raised in the middle part of the 20th century. Perhaps it's because of Southern food writers like Edge and Sauceman, who look back at the traditions of their childhoods, document them, and celebrate them. Or perhaps its because of New Southern chefs like Louis Osteen and Bill Neal, who turned away from French haute cuisine and created updated, high-quality versions of the things they remembered eating as children, sweeping pimento cheese into the mix along with more traditional Southern foods like grits and okra. Quite likely, it's a little of all of these.

This is not to say that the modern day version of what might be called “high-end” pimento cheese is not a genuine Southern delicacy. One of my favorites is the spread Sarah O'Kelley makes at The Glass Onion here in Charleston. A Georgia native, she recalls her father's making her spicy pimento cheese sandwiches on white bread. Like most cooks, she is adamant about the ingredients, and her recipe keeps it simple: cheddar cheese and pimentos—both grated rather coarsely—along with a little chopped green onion and Duke's mayonnaise. It must be Duke's, O'Kelley insists (amen!), since it has no sugar and more eggs yolks for richness.

It doesn't seem like such a simple combination could be so strikingly delicious, but I vividly remember the first time I had it—as a part of a picnic spread at Middleton Place during the closing outdoor concert for the Spoleto Festival. “Be careful,” my hostess said as she passed the tray of crustless white bread sandwiches stuffed with a layer of orange spread. “That’s pimento cheese from the Glass Onion. You'll be hooked.”

And I was. They were rich, creamy, and exceptionally complex in flavor. I don't know how many of those tiny little sandwiches I managed to put away, but I do know that my midsection hurt long before the concert began and by the end of the first tune I was nearly prostrate on the grass.

In just the past year, New York City magazine writers and bloggers have hailed the arrival of pimento cheese, the “Southern comfort food,” to the Big Apple. The Tipsy Parson on Ninth Avenue now serves it with housemade crackers and deep fries it into fritters. Bobby Flay offers a pimento burger at his Bar American, while Arkansas-born Robert Newton wows Brooklynites with his “Southern snack tray” of deviled eggs, pickled okra, and pimento cheese at his new restaurant Seersucker.

Pimento cheese has finally arrived home in New York after a century-long journey, and it managed to improve itself considerably during its travels. Does it really matter that its Southern pedigree isn't terribly long? As Southerners, we've taken on pimento cheese as an item of our own and transformed it into a delicacy, and that's more than enough justification for me, at least, to consider it a (new) Southern classic.

Installment 2: Cypress Artisan Meat Share

2011-03-26T15:24:00.001-04:00

If you want a taste of why Cypress's Craig Deihl is a finalist for this year's James Beard Foundation's Best Chef Southeast Award, just try a sample from the big brown sack of goodies he calls the Artisan Meat Share.

The second installment of this year's share hit the streets last weekend, and here's just a sample:

For the record, here's the inventory:

1. Pork pate

2. Hard salami

3. Lonza (cured pork loin with crushed red& black pepper, thyme, and bay leaf)

4. Picante salami

5. Pecan-smoked bacon

6. "City" Ham - a big, round slice of ham cured with salt, brown sugar, crushed red pepper, bay leaf and time and smoked with pecan wood

7. And the capper . . . Pork butter.

I've had pork butter before, but I wasn't exactly sure what went into it. It's not, as you might think, really a bunch of lard. Instead, as Deihl was nice enough to explain to me when I stopped in to pick up my bag, it's starts with the crispy bits of meat left after Deihl and crew finish rendering out lard from fatty pork. They take those bits, grind them fine, and whip them into butter and marscapone cheese. And it's sinfully creamy and delicious.

And as a bonus--which I forgot to include the in picture and now are long gone--was a small bag of fresh fried pork rinds.

Diehl's up against some formidable competition for the Beard award: Andrea Reusing of Lantern in Chapel Hill, Hugh Acheson of Athens's Five & Ten, Linton Hopkins of Restaurant Eugene and Holman & Finch in Atlanta, Edward Lee of Magnolia 610 in Louisville, and John Fleer, formerly of Tennessee's Blackberry Farm and now at Canyon Kitchen in Cashiers, North Carolina.

I'll just slip the Beard judges a little dab of pork butter on a freshly baked biscuit. That'll seal the deal for our local contender.

Pork on the Road

2011-03-24T10:00:00.002-04:00

A buddy of mine likes to send me pics from the road. Here's his latest:

Can anyone name the restaurant? Hint: it's not in the South--far from it, in fact.

Will Cooking be the High Art of the Twenty First Century?

2011-03-23T10:46:00.005-04:00

CNN's Eatocracy blog has an interesting bit of video of Chris Cosentino (of San Francisco's Incanto and Boccalone) imploring young chefs to learn the fundamentals and the classics. Watching this, I had a weird flashback to my old grad school days studying 20th Century American Literature and very similar instructions from successful writers to young aspiring modernists to learn their classics--their iambs and dactyls, their Ovid and their Milton.

I would hardly argue that a cook doesn't need to know how to make an omelet, braise meat, or chop an onion. That seems pretty obvious. But, when Cosentino insists not that a young chef would gain a lot from it but rather that he or she MUST know what a demi-glace is or how to make a shirred egg, suddenly I'm hearing old schoolmasters insisting that if you can't conjugate the Latin you can't possibly construct a passably readable sentence in English.

It's taken me almost a decade, but I've now come to terms with the fact that, a hundred years hence, video games will be the high literature of current our decade, studied with groans by countless classrooms of bored high school students. But maybe, just maybe, there will be a similar canonization of the great chefs, with cooking being instituted as one of the great expressive arts of the early 21st century.

Or maybe not. But, all the signs of a coalescing "high art" are starting to appear.

A Peek Behind the Scenes at Keegan-Filian Farm

2011-03-21T08:13:00.000-04:00

I've you've eaten out at one of the nicer places downtown recently, you're probably noticed "Keegan-Filion Farm" chicken or pork on the menu. The folks over at The Glass Onion have a nice profile of Mark and Annie Filion on their Soulfood Food blog.

It probably shouldn't, but it still surprises me when I read profiles like this that, even with as much success as the Filions have had getting their fantastic products into so many restaurant kitchens, it still isn't generating a whole lot of income (Mark Filion continues in a day job in industrial sales).

I have this notion in my head that we would all be better off if we ate half as much meat but paid twice as much per ounce in order to have the really good stuff. For instance, instead of going to the grocery store and plunking down 5 bucks for a 3 to 4 pound whole industrial-farmed chicken you paid ten bucks for a high-quality, free-range chicken that had spend most of its life wandering around a grassy field and had actual flavor to its meat. And, you stretched that high quality bird out over two 4-serving meals rather than one.

Could the economics works? Could the logistics? Is there even enough land around for farming that this would be practical if a significant number of people adopted the "pay more, eat less" mantra? I mean, no one is going around America today suffering from a lack of protein in their diet.

I'll continue looking into it. Until then, though, if you see Keegan-Filion chicken or pork on a local menu, do your palate a huge favorite and order it post haste.

Local Bartenders Getting Their Props

2011-03-19T06:48:00.002-04:00

Charleston's chefs have been receiving national media attention for quite some time, and now some of our local bartenders are getting a little notice, too.

Garden & Gun just ran a nice piece featuring Brooks Reitz of FIG, who gave them a recipe for the lost classic Remember the Maine (how's that for a drink name?) And, Joe Raya of the Gin Joint appears in this Imbibe Magazine piece on Southern Comfort for his take on Philadelphia Fish House Punch.

I talked to both Reitz and Raya myself not too long ago for a piece on rum I wrote for the City Paper, and I can attest they not only know their stuff but are really nice guys, too.

Riding the Inside Pork Track (or Something Like That)

2011-03-17T22:08:00.002-04:00

So, those rubes over at the City Paper think they're all cool because they found out that tickets to the Guy Fieri Food Show go on sale tomorrow at 10:00 am.

On sale to the general public, maybe. Those of us in the know have had access for quite some time now. In fact, you can buy your tickets RIGHT NOW if you know the SECRET INTERNET PRE-SALE PASSWORD!

What, you don't know the SECRET INTERNET PRE-SALE PASSWORD? Okay, let me clue you in. The password is . . .

Pork.

That's right. P-O-R-K.

Just in case you were planning on getting up at 3:00 am tomorrow (after a long night of St. Paddy's Day reveling) to get in line to ensure you had a crack at those $250 "Off Da Hook" tickets, don't bother. Log in from your iPad and book them now.

Don't believe me? Check out the screen cap below:

I could have shelled out a quarter grand and bought myself an Off Da Hook ticket on row B, which, as it turns out, is ON THE FREAKIN' STAGE, but I didn't. I'm trying to give everyone else a shot at swankiness, being an egalitarian at heart.

Now, how did I get this super inside scoop, you might ask? And, why in the hell is "pork" the SECRET INTERNET PRE-SALE PASSWORD?

As it turns out, the Guy Fieri Food Tour is presented by . . . wait for it . . . the National Pork Board. Man, talk about not being blah and being inspired, what could be less boring and not-white-meat than Guy Fieri?

Now, you might be wondering: did I get this inside scoop because my blog post a few days ago about the National Pork Board's attempt at re-energizing their marketing efforts got me way into the NPB's good graces, or was it all just some crazy coincidence? I'll let you decide. But, hurry now if you want to beat hoi polloi: once the ticket sales are opened to the general public, you'll never know what kind of riff raff may buy their way into an exclusive meat-and-greet with the Food Network star.

Inspired Work from the Pork Board

2011-03-15T07:40:00.002-04:00

In stunning news coming out of Des Moines, Iowa, the Pork Board announced that it is retiring the beloved "The Other White Meat" slogan in favor of . . . wait for it . . . "Pork: Be Inspired."

. . . sorry, I nodded off for a moment there.

I do sort of feel sorry for the marketing guys at the Pork Board, since coming up with a slogan to replace the quarter-century-old "The Other White Meat" is a pretty tall order. The tag line ranks as one of the most successful product slogans in marketing history. A study by Northwestern University's School of Integrated & Marketing in 2000 showed it to be the 5th most recognized slogan in the country. It probably doesn't help that after two decades it had become so integrated into the American consciousness that, despite legal efforts of the Pork Board to protect its brand, its primary use today seems to be as the fodder for jokesters' t-shirts (like, "Cat: the Other White Meat", and others even less tasteful.)

But, despite the cultural penetration of "The Other White Meat" as a slogan, for pork sales it hasn't seem to do much of anything. The Pork Board's VP of marketing, in the hoopla around the rebranding, told the Associated Press that the famous slogan "stemmed a decline" in pork consumption but now times have changed and consumption remains flat. Stats from the U. S. Department of Agriculture (see graph below) suggest that those sales have been flat for a long time.

What's not noted in all the recent media pick ups of this marketing story is that "Be Inspired" isn't the first attempt to re-energize the pork brand. Six years ago the Pork Board announced that it was phasing out "The Other White Meat" in favor of a new campaign: "Don't Be Blah," which sought to cast pork as the exciting alternative to boring old dinner fare like tuna and chicken and to win over new consumers, especially women in the 25-49 age demographic (see a good NY Times summary here).

This time around, the Pork Board is going back to its base. Noting that 28% of American households make up for 70% of the at-home pork consumption, they're looking to get those loyal pig-eaters to incorporate it into more meals. The "Don't Be Blah" campaign downplayed the meat itself, focusing on people and lifestyle instead. In the reboot, they're getting back to the food itself, with print ads showing a pulled pork sandwich piled high on a bun and a freshly sliced roasted pork loin (see examples on the campaign's official website).

While I have to say this new approach sounds more likely to succeed, it's hard to miss the irony. After all, here's an industry that self-consciously bred pigs to be leaner and grow ready to slaughter faster and, at the same time, used a remarkably successful campaign to convince people that pork is really a lot more like chicken than beef. And now they're spending millions of dollars to convince consumers that their products aren't boring.

A quick side-by-side taste test of a pork chop or roast from the typical factory-farmed pig against one from a pasture-raised heritage breed like Tamworth or Berkshire shows the remarkable difference between today's "white" meat and the good old-fashioned red kind. Today's pigs have an estimated 50% less fat than pigs of the 1950s, which may have seemed like a good idea back when beef was getting shellacked by nutritionists for its high saturated fat. But, even though beef sales have declined consistently since 1970, Americans still eat a lot more of it each year than they do pork.

Here's a modest proposal to help spike those flat pork sales numbers: make it taste good again. That might help Americans be inspired to eat more of it.

Swordfish BBQ

2011-03-12T19:54:00.001-05:00

Last weekend I had the onerous task of covering the BBQ, Blues, and Brew event at the Charleston Wine + Food Festival. You can read my account of the event on the City Paper website. While there, I took some great pics of the two swordfish that were barbecued by Dan Long of Crosby Seafood, but they ended up on the City Paper's cutting room floor--perhaps because, if you aren't totally into the whole "what the hell is that on that BBQ grill?" thing, you might have been a little skeeved out by it. I myself thought they were alligators when I first got a glimpse of those reptilian snouts sticking out of the smokers and was mightily relieved to find out they were just massive six-foot long fish.

Here they are in all their glory for those who aren't too faint of heart:

The swordfish, for the record, was wrapped in banana leaves, and the resulting big chunks of meat (which were topped with tomato sauce, some sort of olive spread, and grated parmesan) were tender, tender, tender, and only slightly smoky--probably because all that banana leaf protection held in the moisture and kept out a lot of the smoke. But, of course, I'm just speculating, having never slow-smoked my own banana leaf-wrapped whole swordfish before . . .

Okay, I do have to admit--that big eyeball is pretty damn freaky.

I'll just sit here watching the email for that notification of my Pulitzer prize for photojournalism.

Soul Food on the Ropes in Chicago

2011-03-10T21:02:00.000-05:00

A little while ago, I wrote about the irony of soul food restaurants' struggling in Harlem just as upscale Southern cooking was becoming all trendy down in the lower numbered blocks. Now, Amy Evans Streeter of the Southern Foodways Alliance reports a similar trend at work in Chicago, though in the Windy City's case there seems to be at least a little bit of a silver lining to the story.

Putting a Name on Texas Oysters

2011-03-05T21:18:00.001-05:00

Robb Walsh, the legendary Texas food writer and now one of the founding members of the Foodways Texas organization, has been actively advocating of late for Texas oystermen to adopt the labeling of their products with place names just like oysters from all over the rest of the country do. It's become a bit of a controversial stance, but Walsh makes a very compelling case for the practice in this recent blog post. What I like most about his explanation is not the part about how the places make a difference (which I don't doubt) but rather the effect that having specific place names, as opposed to the generic "Gulf Oysters" appellation, has on the commercial behavior of oyster producers.

Fascinating stuff, and I'll be looking for a dozen Pepper Groves or maybe some Point aux Pins to join the Blue Points and Malpeques at a my local oyster bar very soon.

Airport Cooking, The Hard Way

2011-02-26T21:21:00.000-05:00

Kinsey Giddick has a nice profile of Duane Nutter, the chef at One Flew South, perhaps the only fine-dining restaurant to be found inside the security zone at an American airport. I've always sort of attributed the lack of good food in airports to the fact that they're sort of a big lowest-common-denominator mall food court type environment, but the piece--especially the details of Nutters' having to cook with his knives chained to the prep table, and the difficulty of getting ingredients through the security screening line--points out the logistical challenges to cooking well in airports, too.

Nutter will be here in Charleston for the Wine + Food Festival next week, cooking a dine-around with Kevin Mitchell of the Charleston Culinary Institute.

A Few Tips from Culinary School

2011-02-24T07:10:00.000-05:00

I don't know why, but I'm a sucker for lists of kitchen tips, like this recent version from Esquire, "13 Things You Could Have Learned from Cooking School."

Of the thirteen, the last two are my favorites:

If you want to brown or caramelize something, don't move it. People want to stir things, but the worst enemies of browning are movement and moisture.

Use the correct size pan. If it's too large, the butter or oil you're using may burn. If it's too small, you won't get any color or browning — think chicken with soggy skin — and that's where a lot of the flavor comes from.

Lately I've been really focusing on these two in trying to get a good brown sear on pork chops, scallops, etc., and those two tips really are key.

Pimento Cheese & Gravy

2011-02-22T08:30:00.001-05:00

So, the same day I posted my long bit on the history of pimento cheese, I opened the edition of Gravy, the Southern Foodways Alliance's Newsletter, which had just arrived in the mail. And there inside was an excellent piece by Emily Wallace on the history of pimento cheese in the North Carolina Piedmont.

She has some great material about her family's growing up with Ruth's and Star's, two regional brands of pimento cheese made in North Carolina. As it turns out, pimento cheese sandwiches were a staple of the cotton mill commissaries, and Wallace connects the rise of the local brands with their contracts with the textile mills. It dovetails nicely with the end of my piece, taking the story forward and providing good details about how pimento cheese became a favorite food of the Southern working class.

You can download Gravy from the SFA website here and read the whole piece for yourself.

Creating a (New) Southern Icon: the Curious History of Pimento Cheese

2011-02-21T07:18:00.008-05:00

Pimento Cheese and Heritage Pork Bangers from Tom Condron
at Liberty Gastropub, Charlotte, NC

Pimento cheese has a dirty little secret. It's not really Southern at all.

I know, I know. What could be more southern than pimento cheese? It's “the pâté of the South” and “Carolina caviar.” The green paper-wrapped pimento cheese sandwiches served every year at Augusta National during the Masters are legendary. In The Place Setting: Timeless Tastes of the Mountain South, Fred Sauceman writes that pimento cheese “lines up alongside barbecue, grits, and cornbread as one of the foods that define the South.” Larry T. McGehee called it, “one of those major southern distinguishing institutions, right up there as a subject of debate with religion, politics, barbecue, biscuits, gravy, mint juleps, and the proper age for curing of country hams.” And, as everyone writing about pimento cheese seems compelled to note, it's a delicacy almost completely unknown outside the bounds of the Southern states.

That may be true today, but it hasn't already been that way. In fact, pimento cheese's Southern identity is really just a few decades old.

The origin of pimento cheese consistently stymies food historians. Everyone has assumed that it was a Southern invention. Some speculate it must have originated back around the beginning of the 20th Century, when big rounds of hoop cheese first became widely available in Southern country stores. Most, however, quickly admit a lack of evidence and chalk it up as a story lost to history.

The truth of the matter is that everyone has been looking in the wrong place. To find the origins of pimento cheese, you have to turn your sights up north of the Mason-Dixon Line. Curious as it may seem, the “pâté of the South” was created through the combined efforts of Northern food manufacturers and cookbook writers from the “Domestic Science” movement, who together invented a brand new product and then made it popular throughout the country.

My version of pimento cheese, served gussied-up style

Almost all pimento cheese recipes today call for blending grated cheddar or a similar firm cheese with diced pimento peppers, mayonnaise, and various seasonings. The original version was quite different. It started as a way to combine two newly-available products of industrial food manufacturing: cream cheese and canned pimentos.

Cream cheese was first made after the Civil War in New York State, where farmers in a growing dairy industry needed new ways to market their products. According to one legend, a farmer named Charles Green invited a European cheesemaker to the town of Chester, New York, in the 1870s to teach Green how to make Neufchatel cheese. The European's instructions were overheard by William Lawrence, who for some unexplained reason, was lurking outside under an open window. Lawrence raced off to try the recipe, but got the measurements wrong and ended up using twice as much cream as the French formula. The results of this fortuitous accident was the soft, unripened product we know as cream cheese today.

The dramatic details of this story are, in all likelihood, complete bunk, but the actors themselves seem to be correct. Federal District Court records identify William A. Lawrence as the first person to make Neufchatel cheese in the United States, and the only manufacturer until 1875. In 1883, the New York State Inspector of Milk investigated the manufacture of Neufchatel and found two factories in Chester, that of Lawrence and Durland and that of Charles H. Green. Green used milk alone in making his cheese, which he wrapped in paper and tin-foil and packed in boxes marked “Neufchatel.” He turned out some 3,000 five-ounce boxes of cheeses per day, but the factory of Lawrence and Durland sold even more--5,000 cheeses per day. The inspector also discovered that Lawrence and Durland skimmed their milk and ran it through an emulsifier, where it was mixed with one and a half pounds of lard for every hundred pounds of milk. For this, he pronounced the cheese to be adulterated. The finding didn't seem to hurt the company's business, for they renewed the registration of their product’s trademark in 1904 and 1906 and brought an infringement suit against a rival firm in 1913.

"Philadelphia Brand" Cream Cheese
Advertisement, 1924

By 1900, at least five companies were making Neufchatel in New York state, and they introduced several variations, including cream cheese, which soon eclipsed the popularity of the original. Cream cheese was made by mixing cream with Neufchatel curd, and it was typically molded in rectangular forms in the same 1-1/2 by 2-1/2 by 2-3/4 inch size that is still commonly used for the product today. Though produced primarily in New York, the variety somehow became linked with the city of Philadelphia, and “Philadelphia Brand Cream Cheese” became one of the market leaders. In 1903, the Phenix Cheese company of New York City bought the trademark for Philadelphia Brand Cream Cheese, and after the company merged with the Kraft Cheese Company in 1928 it became the country's top-selling brand.

Cream cheese is just one half of the story. The other is pimento peppers.

Through most of the 19th century, the word pimento meant allspice, the unripe berries of the Eugenia Pimenta evergreen from Jamaica and the West Indies. It was not used as a term for sweet red peppers until the 1880s, when recipes calling for “sweet Spanish peppers” began appearing in print. In the 1887 edition of Miss Parloa's Kitchen Companion, Maria Parloa noted that such a pepper, when green, “is much milder than the common bell-pepper, although they look so much alike it is often difficult to distinguish them.” She recommended that they be stuffed and baked. Thomas Jefferson Murrey, one of the most popular cookbook authors of the era, was a proponent of the sweet pepper, too, incorporating it into recipes for salmon a la Creole, boiled beef salad, and omelet with Spanish pepper. In the late 1890s, imported Spanish sweet peppers started being canned and sold by large food manufacturers, which not only boosted their popularity but also introduced the Spanish name pimiento. Soon the “i” was dropped from common usage, and by the turn of the century most print accounts of the peppers call them “pimentos”.

Cream cheese and red pimento peppers hit the market just as a powerful new force was rising in American culinary life: Domestic Science. Also called “home economics”, this woman-led reform movement sought to bring order and scientific precision to all aspects of the home, most particularly the kitchen. Centered at institutions like the Boston Cooking School and led by personalities like Ellen Richards, the first woman admitted to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Fannie Farmer, the “Mother of Level Measurements,” the domestic scientists were both instructors and evangelists, and their recipes and ideas about cooking forever changed the way Americans ate. And that included bringing pimento cheese to the South.

Cream cheese and Neufchatel embodied the ideals of “scientific cookery”. They were soft and mildly flavored, and their clean white color connoted purity. That they were something new and sold by modern food manufacturers only added appeal, for the Domestic Scientists were passionate advocates for modern industrial canning and food packaging. Cookbook writers and journalists folded the soft white cheese into all sorts of those innovative new recipes for salads and hors d'oeuvres that today make our stomachs churn. They rolled it into balls to serve in lettuce cups, wrapped it in slices of dried beef, and combined it with nuts or herbs for stuffing into celery sticks and hollowed out radishes.

Canned pimentos were ideal for the scientific kitchen, too. Their mild, sweet flavor was inoffensive and unlikely to stir the baser appetites and, since the presentation of food mattered as much or more to the Domestic Scientists as taste, their flashy red color was perfect for brightening up a plate. Canned vegetables were still expensive luxuries at the time, connoting elegance and sophistication, so tins of imported Spanish peppers held a particular cachet. In 1899, the editors of the Boston Cooking-School Magazine included a cauliflower and pimento salad on their Monday dinner menu for August, noting that, “on account of their brilliant color, pimentos are a pleasing addition to many a salad, and when used sparingly their sweet, mild flavor is usually relished.” In 1908, Jane Hegner advocated in Good Housekeeping that housewives adopt pimentos because “these are more juicy and richer than the ordinary sweet green peppers, while their vivid color lends an attractiveness to any dish.” She recommended them in pimento timbales, pimento omelets, and pimento patties.

The Up-to-Date Sandwich Book (1909)

It seems almost inevitable that these two favorites of domestic scientists would be brought together. Janet McKenzie Hill, the editor of the Boston Cooking School Magazine, published the following salad suggestion in her 1899 cookbook Salads, Sandwiches, and Chafing-dish Dainties: “Lettuce, Neufchatel cheese in slices, and shredded pimentos.” It's not quite pimento cheese, but it's close. A decade later, Jane Hegner's 1908 Good Housekeeping article described sandwiches made with a spread of soft cream cheese with mustard, chives, and minced pimento mixed in. The following year, Eva Green Fuller's Up-to-Date Sandwich Book presented a more basic version of the pimento cheese sandwich: “Grind two small cans of pimentos with two cakes of Neufchatel cheese, and season with a little salt. Spread on thin slices of lightly buttered white bread.” Dozens of similar recipes appeared in magazines and cookbooks in the 1910s and 1920s.

It wasn't long before dairy manufacturers discovered that pimento cheese was a great way to extend their product lines. They experimented with plenty of other additions to Neufchatel curd, like olives and chopped nuts, but none took hold as firmly as pimento cheese. To make it, they ran pimentos through a mechanical chopper and mixed them into Neufchatel curd along with a pinch of red pepper just before the cheese was molded. Producers initially sold pimento cheese wrapped in parchment and tinfoil, just as they did plain Neufchatel or cream cheese. But, the product didn't stay fresh very long, and they soon switched to packing the cheese in three- or four-ounce glass jars with screw tops, which both extended the shelf life and let purchasers leave the jars out on their tables as serving containers.

Commercially-made pimento cheese hit the market around the beginning of 1910 and was distributed to grocery stores across the country, starting in the Midwest. In March 1910, grocer E. A. Dalager of Austin, Minnesota, advertised “Pimiento Cheese—Something New.” A month later the Colton-Wilder Grocery Company of Grand Forks, North Dakota, ran a similar ad, offering “Pimento cheese, something new, per jar . . . 20¢.” Within a year, pimento cheese was being advertised by grocers as far west as Portland, Oregon and Albuquerque, New Mexico. Who manufactured most of this early product is unknown, since grocery ads from this period commonly just listed “pimento cheese” without specifying a brand or manufacturer. W. N. Burgess of Colorado Springs, though, specified in his January, 1911, ads, “Pimiento Cheese: it's put up in Wisconsin—and you know what that means to cheese. . . . There's nothing quite so tasty for sandwiches and salads. There should be a few jars of this fresh shipment on YOUR pantry shelves.”

Packaged pimento cheese was sold widely in the South, too. Devinney and Sons Grocery of Montgomery, Alabama, was carrying it by May, 1910, and in June, C. H. Baldwin and Son of Columbia, South Carolina, advertised that they had just received a shipment of “'Clover Hill' Pimento cheese. 15¢ jar. Very delicious and new.” A month later, the J. L. Janes and Co. of Augusta, Georgia, was advertising, “Pimiento Cheese, you know how fine it is. This is good. 2 for 25¢.”

The South can't claim pimento cheese as its own invention, but the state of Georgia was actually the center of the nation's pimento growing and canning industry. (This is a topic I delved into in more detail in a prior post.) Some commentators have advanced the theory that because Georgia produced most of the pimentos in the United States, the peppers were more easily availability in the South and, therefore, foods like pimento cheese became more popular in that region than elsewhere in the country. It's a good theory, but the peak period of Georgia pimento production—the 1920s through the 1940s—corresponds directly with the nationwide pimento cheese boom. Georgia pimentos were canned and shipped throughout the country, and their availability seems to have increased the popularity of pimento cheese nationally and not just in the South.

In the 1920s and 1930s, hundred of cookbooks, newspaper cooking columns, and advertisements featured pimento cheese, and none of them describe it as being in any way a Southern thing. Instead, it is presented as an example of modern, up-to-date eating something associated in particular with soda fountains and sandwich shops. A 1921 article in Popular Science Monthly profiled automated sandwich-making machines and included a photograph of “an expert” operating a pimento cheese mixer, noting “the soda-fountain lunch has caused this increase in the demand for these concentrated meals.” A writer for the Atlantic Monthly cited the concoction as an example of modern “individual malbreakfasting”, noting a man he knows who “suffers from chronic indigestion because, on his way to the factory where he is employed, he disposes of a pimento-cheese sandwich and a cup of tea.”

Kraft Pimento Cheese Ad (1933)

Pimento cheese started out as a relatively anonymous commodity, but before long the big dairy manufacturers cranked up their marketing machines for the creamy spread. Kraft and Borden were both major producers and advertised their brands widely from the 1920s through the 1960s. Bluhill, a Denver, Colorado dairy, had the leading Western brand in the 1920s, ‘30s, and ‘40s. It was a hot commercial product, and there was nothing Southern at all about it.

So how did this once “up-to-date”, nationally-popular food become so closely identified with Southern cooking while fading from culinary memory everywhere else? How is it that Judy Gellman could write in 2006, “pimento cheese is held sacred by Southerners, in spite of being largely unknown outside the South”? Or, that Wright Bryan of NPR could comment, “Pimento cheese is so ingrained in the lives of many Southerners that we don't realize our passion for the stuff doesn't exist outside the region. Call me provincial, but I was shocked (shocked!) when I learned that everyday people from Boston to San Diego don't slap pimento cheese on bread for a quick lunch, or slather it across their burgers for a decadent treat.”

I'll try to answer that question in a future post.

Handicapping Best Chef Southeast

2011-02-17T22:42:00.001-05:00

The James Beard Award Semifinalist List just came out, and here's the roster for Best Chef Southeast, with boldface for our two local entrants (and, yes, I shamelessly stole the list from the City Paper website)

Hugh Acheson, Five and Ten, Athens, GA
Billy Allin, Cakes & Ale, Decatur, GA
Ashley Christensen, Poole’s, Raleigh, NC
Scott Crawford, Herons at the Umstead Hotel and Spa, Cary, NC
Craig Deihl, Cypress, Charleston, SC
John Fleer, Canyon Kitchen at Lonesome Valley, Cashiers, NC
Damian Heath, Lot 12 Public House, Berkeley Springs, WV
Linton Hopkins, Restaurant Eugene, Atlanta
Scott Howell, Nana’s, Durham, NC
Shane Ingram, Four Square, Durham, NC
Anthony Lamas, Seviche, Louisville, KY
Edward Lee, 610 Magnolia, Louisville, KY
Ouita Michel, Holly Hill Inn, Midway, KY
Andrea Reusing, Lantern, Chapel Hill, NC
Keith Rhodes, Catch, Wilmington, NC
Hector Santiago, Pura Vida, Atlanta
Chip Smith, Bonne Soirée, Chapel Hill, NC
Aaron Vandemark, Panciuto, Hillsborough, NC
Ken Vedrinski, Trattoria Lucca, Charleston, SC
Tandy Wilson, City House, Nashville, TN

I, of course, being a fierce Charleston partisan, am biased toward Deihl and Vedrinski. But, if I had to put some money on the contest, I would probably put it on Linton Hopkins of Restaurant Eugene in Atlanta. He's been doing his thing for quite a while, but this year his combination of intense, local, heirloom Southern cuisine with fine-dining flair seems to be right in the whole general zeitgeist thingamajig.

I've gotta admit, however, that even though Sean Brock's Husk made it onto the long list for best new restaurant nationwide, I'm a little surprised he didn't make semifinalist for the national outstanding chef award. Maybe next year.

I'm rooting for the home team!

Political Barbecue, 2011 Style

2011-02-06T09:10:00.002-05:00

Whoever said Social Security is the third rail of politics clearly wasn't thinking about barbecue. Michelle Obama stepped into the middle of a hornet's nest recently because of a single line in an email announcing the selection of Charlotte, North Carolina, as the site of the 2012 Democratic National Convention:

Charlotte is a city marked by its Southern charm, warm hospitality and an "up by the bootstraps" mentality that has propelled the city forward as one of the fastest-growing in the South. Vibrant, diverse and full of opportunity, the Queen City is home to innovative, hardworking folks with big hearts and open minds. And of course, great barbecue. [emphasis added]

This has brought snorts of derision from barbecue fans, including my friend John Shelton Reed, who always seems to come off with a great zinger for situations like these. "Complete the sentence," he told an Associated Press reporter. "As a barbecue town, Charlotte is one, not what it used to be; two, like Minneapolis for gumbo; three, good enough for Yankees; four, not far from Shelby."

The answer, of course, is number four. And, the owners of two of Shelby's classic barbecue joints--Red Bridges Barbecue Lodge and Alston Bridges Barbecue--quickly extended invitations for the first lady to come in and find out what great North Carolina barbecue really tastes like.

In the spirit of fairness to Mrs. Obama, I do feel compelled to point out that the other contenders for hosting the convention were St. Louis, Minneapolis, and Cleveland. While partisans of St. Louis and their eponymous ribs might lodge an objection (one that would be summarily overruled), surely no one would dispute that when choosing among Minneapolis, Cleveland, and Charlotte, if "quality of barbecue to be obtained therein" is one of your criteria Charlotte is going to come out far and away the winner. Bill Spoon's Barbecue on South Boulevard alone is enough to clinch the victory.

It does make you wonder, though, whether Lexington, N.C., was ever seriously considered for the convention. They do have a Holiday Inn Express with a 700-square foot meeting room, including a built-in LCD projector and screen, that might just do the trick. And no one would argue with you about the quality of the barbecue.

Except people in eastern North Carolina, of course.

No, I Am Not Making This Up

2011-01-25T07:17:00.001-05:00

I visited Amazon.com today to look for books. And here's what I was displayed as recommendations, "Inspired by Your Browsing History."

That recommendation engine is scarily accurate.

Burning with Guilt

2011-01-23T18:56:00.003-05:00

As if we all didn't have enough things to get bunged up with guilt about, now, the New York Times reports, we're going to have to worry about our wood-burning fireplaces. I would have assumed this is just a northeastern urban and West Coast phenomena, especially since it's the first I've heard of "fireplace guilt", but the article quotes a woman from Boone, North Carolina (admittedly, a "public relations executive"), so it seems to be heading our way, too.

The fireplace I can certainly do without, considering that at my previous house I never once built a fire the whole time I was there and in my current one we have gas logs that haven't been lit in over a year because the propane ran out and it's not really worth the expense of refilling the big tank.

But, don't you dare come gunning after this baby:

It burns logs. Real ones. And for twelve hours or more at a time.

Barbecue: Woeful Lapses Addresed

2011-01-18T06:15:00.002-05:00

I received an email from Barry Foy recently taking me to task for some "embarrassing gaps" in my knowledge of barbecue. The esteemed Mr. Foy, it seems, admits that I turned up some good material in my research for Barbecue: the History of an American Institution, but that when it came to the meaning and derivation of the word itself my scholarship was grievously lacking. And he should know, being the author of The Devil's Food Dictionary: A Pioneering Culinary Reference Work Consisting Entirely of Lies.

Mr. Foy was kind enough to set me straight with a few definitive definitions, which I will be sure to work into the revised and expanded edition that my publisher will no doubt ask me to just as soon as I get those movie rights sold. (Note to Hollywood agents: when you do come knocking at my door demanding to handle the disposition of said rights, please form an ordely line out on my stoop and sidewalk and, please, no shoving.)

Here's the straight dope from The Devil's Food Dictionary:

BARBECUE: An extremely vague term for one or another of several approaches to cooking one or another type of food, usually meat except when it is something else, which make use of one or another cooking technique that most often involves smoke, though not always, and in which a sauce of one sort or another plays either an essential, a prominent, or a negligible role. Barbecue has a nearly fanatical following in North America, particularly in the southern United States, where it carries a lore rich in history, culture, and the sort of factionalism that often leads to gunplay. History documents some legendary feuds over what constituted 'authentic' barbecue, most of which ended with the victors roasting their vanquished enemies on spits over hickory, cherry, or mesquite embers (depending on where the conflict took place), then basting or dipping them in a sauce that was either sweet, vinegary, or spicy (also depending on location), and serving them with sliced white bread at stock-car races."

Now while this might seem to be the last word on the subject, if you check out the “I” chapter you’ll find the following:

I HADN’T FINISHED TALKING ABOUT BARBECUE YET: In conclusion, every American forms a specific mental image at the mention of the word 'barbecue,' but research shows that no two such images are alike. Nonetheless, expert opinion is unanimous on at least the following points: 1) the word 'barbecue' derives from the Spanish barbacoa, which comes from a Taino Indian word…unless it comes from the French de la barbe à queue or barbaque; 2) real barbecue is made only with pork, only with beef, only with mutton, or only with chicken, except when it is made with armadillos, rattlesnakes, tofu, etc.; 3) only one type of wood produces the right smoke for barbecue, except for certain other types of wood; 4) only Americans cook proper barbecue, except for citizens of countries on every other continent except Antarctica; 5) sauce is merely an optional garnish for real barbecue, except when it is an integral, indispensable component of it; 6) barbecue can be cooked only over hot coals on a spit, except when it is cooked on a grill over gas flames with the addition of wood chips, or in an oven or pressure cooker after a basting with liquid smoke; 7) producing good barbecue is a complicated and time-consuming process, except when it is so simple that an eight-year-old could do it in less than forty-five minutes.

And I think that pretty much clears everything up. If you've not read The Devil's Food Dictionary (which I've been a fan of since its blog days back before it was published in book form), you're missing out. Where else will you find definitions like these: "Pear: Perhaps the only fruit famous enough to be shaped like itself." Or, "Aspic: . . . once a common technique in French cuisine; regrettably, everyone who remembered why has now passed away."

I stand corrected!

A Shrinking South?

2011-01-16T20:20:00.001-05:00

The Washington Post reports that D.C. is rapidly losing its Southernness. And it's not just the District of Columbia alone but a large portion of northeastern Virginian. Some noted Virginians seem ready to throw in the Southern towel altogether. "I do think we've reached a critical mass of some kind," the Post quotes 72-year old former state senator Russell Potts as saying. "We're not a real Southern state anymore."

Historians and linguists agree that the northern boundary of the South has moved somewhere down around Richmond which, perhaps not coincidentally, is where researchers have also drawn the "sweet tea line", a demarcation of where restaurants stop offering sweet tea to customers. (Though, it seems, McDonald's is now doing what it can to break down this barrier by offering sweet tea nationwide.)

It is a curious evolution, for though Virginia still maintains its long, rich tradition of Southern country hams, its once-famed barbecue culture (as I've discussed before) has long since faded into obscurity.

I, however, am not one to despair, for I contend whole heartedly that the state of Florida--which most commentators routinely write off as not Southern at all--is in fact one of the most Southern states we have. Anyone who doubts that fact should try barbecue at Shorty's in Miami or Bono's in Jacksonville, Florida, or spend a football weekend in Tallahassee. Or, pick up Diane Roberts's splendid book Dream State: Eight Generations of Swamp Lawyers, Conquistadors, Confederate Daughters, Banana Republicans, and Other Florida Wildlife, which I am about midway through reading and recommend highly for anyone who wants to get a feel for both the history and contemporary reality of the state of Florida. Or, for that matter, just to have a rip-roaring good laugh, for she is wickedly funny.

If everyone out there would just agree with my contention, then we'd pick up Florida right off the bat and that would more than offset any geography lost by the defection of northern Virginia.

And, anyway, the rumors of the demise of the Southernness of Virginia may be greatly exaggerated to begin with. What better to trust than the food we eat? Safeway grocery stores, the Post reports, says that the group of its stores located between Culpeper, Virginia, and Frederick, Maryland, "posts the company's biggest sales of such regional offerings as fried chicken, ham hocks and other 'country meats,' collard greens and sweet potatoes."

So I say the jury is still out.

Planter's Punch: the History--In Verse

2011-01-06T23:29:00.000-05:00

The Charleston City Paper just ran a piece I did on the history of Planter's Punch, for which I turned up some new historical material that I've never seen anyone else discuss.

It is often claimed that Planter's Punch was created right here in Charleston. The potent concoction of rum, sugar, and citrus was the specialty of the house at the Planters Hotel in the 19th century, and it went on from there to gain national fame. Or so the story goes. Unfortunately, it's not true.

The Planters Hotel was indeed a famous antebellum establishment. It opened in 1809, when Alexander Calder converted the old Dock Street Theatre into a hotel, and it became the favorite resort for rice planters when they came into the city for the winter. The hotel was well known for its imbibing clientèle: a British visitor who stayed there in the 1830s noted that during dinner "very little wine is drank, and rather too much brandy." But there's not a shred of evidence that its bar ever served a beverage called Planter's Punch. That association seems to have been made in recent years based solely on the name of the hotel itself.

See the City Paper for the whole story.

I managed to turn up not just a couple of old Planter's Punch recipes but old recipes in verse!

Prognostications: Gearing Up

2010-12-23T07:25:00.002-05:00

I've been trying to gear up for my next round of prognostications, seeing that the year 2010 is rapidly drawing to a close and 2011 is now literally just around the corner. (Well, not literally just around the corner. Just around the corner it is still 2010, and my neighbor Stanley still hasn't raked up any of his leaves yet this year. For which I am thankful, since I--or, to be more accurately, various members of my family--have raked up at least SOME of the leaves in our yard so it's only ankle deep in leaves, not knee deep, and compared to Stanley's yard we look downright prim. Raking leaves, I predict, will NOT be a big trend in 2011, in my household, at least.)

After a couple of years of great cavalierness with the timing of my predictions for the "new" year, this year I've vowed to be on top of things and get them done absolutely no later than Jan 1st or a few days or weeks thereafter. I've scribbled a few raw notes on the back of cocktail napkins and was really about to get into the swing of things when I heard the latest Dinner Party Download (DPD) podcast from Rico Gagliano and Brendan Francis Newnam, which effectively demolishes the whole practice of predicting food trends.

The segment on trends picks up around 11:45 into the podcast. If one can predict anything about food trends in 2011, it's that the predictions about such trends are going to be really lame, as evidenced by DPD's summary of the early trends identified by food trend consulting firms (yes, there actually are such outfits, which may mean I have totally missed my calling in life.) "Action in adult beverages?" "Frugality fatigue?" "Poutine?" Is this really what we have to look forward to next year?

So now I'm totally deflated in my efforts to at compiling my own prognostications. Maybe I'll just take a nap this afternoon instead.

All I Want for Christmas is a Sack of Meat

2010-12-21T08:30:00.001-05:00

Last weekend my wife gave me my Christmas present early: an Artisan Meat Share from Craig Deihl of Cypress Restaurant.

We've already broken into the pork pate and the summer sausage, and both are terrific. The pork pate includes, in addition to the obvious coarse-ground pork and spices, rich ingredients like pork liver, eggs, and cream plus onions and garlic, which result in what one might term one of the best meatloafs ever.

I'm even more enamored with the summer sausage. It's a fermented, semi-dry sausage made from half beef and half pork, and it's blended with a whole bunch of spices that include black pepper, smoked paprika, mace, garlic, juniper, caraway, mustard, and marjoram.

Summer Sausage w/ a Selection of Cheese and Crackers

The fermentation not only helps preserve the sausage but also gives it a delightful tangy edge. That and the slow smoking results in something that can only be described a deep and complex flavor. The taste grows and expands as you hold it in your mouth, with very warm, smoky finish. We've been eating it as simply as possible: sliced and served alongside cheese and crackers--and a dollop of pimento cheese, for good measure.

Also included in the bag is this line up: guanciale, lonza, saucisson sec, salami spread, country bologona, smoked turkey breast, and--if you can believe it--lamb bacon. This last one is the most intriguing of them all. It's cured with salt, brown sugar, and spices for 10 days and, the Meat Share's "User Guide" advises, should be eaten without cooking.

These should keep me busy over the Christmas holidays, and you can believe one or more of them will be turning up on the appetizer plates I'll be making for various holiday gatherings this week.

When in doubt, give the gift of meat.

P.S. Did I mention that my wife is the best Christmas gift buyer in the world?

Old School Biscuits

2010-12-19T09:12:00.001-05:00

This week I got a little old school with a batch of biscuits.

Old school how? For starters, I used an old recipe. And by old I'm referring not to the age of the formula itself but rather the condition of the paper it's written on. I transcribed it from my mother's version some twenty years ago when I was first teaching myself to cook and trying to learn some of her stand-by recipes. This is one recipe that has been put to very good use.

The Recipe

But, age of the paper aside, I've actually gone more old school with this batch than I have in the past, and that's because just a few days ago I received my order from Columbia's Anson Mills and it included their Colonial Style Whole-Grain Wheat Flour. This is flour the way it used to be made before the era of the iron-roller mills. It's made from whole grains of Red May wheat, which you can tell right away from not just the coarser texture but also the little dark flecks scattered throughout it, which are the bran.

Anson Mills' Colonial-Style Red May Wheat Flour

I figured such old-school flour needed something a little better than plain old supermarket buttermilk, so I splurged for a bottle of buttermilk from Homestead Creamy. Their milk comes from just two farms--their own in Wirtz, Virgnia, and a neighbor's. It's bottled in real, old school glass bottles, and if you live in Roanoke, they'll deliver it to an insulated milk box on your doorstep via their old-fashioned milk delivery service. (Being a bit outside their delivery area, I picked up my bottle at Earthfare.)

Good buttermilk

It's remarkable stuff: very, very thick and creamy. In fact, it's much more like good yogurt in texture and flavor than the regular buttermilk you get at the supermarket. (As a side note, it is still cultured buttermilk, meaning that it is regular milk with bacteria added to create the lactic acid that gives buttermilk it's distinctive sour edge--much the way yogurt is made. True old-school buttermilk is the thin stuff left over after butter is churned. I am hot on the heels of acquiring myself a bottle of that, but that's another story altogether.)

Here's the recipe.

Biscuits

2 cups flour

1 T baking powder

1/2 t salt

1/4 t baking soda

1/3 cup of cold butter

3/4 cup of buttermilk

First, combine the flour, baking powder, salt, and baking soda in a large bowl and mix together. Next, cut in the butter. There are several ways you can do this. You could use a pastry blender (like this one), which is a handy little device with five or six parallel metal blades that chop up the butter and mix it in with the flour. By all accounts they work well, but I've never tried it: I just cut the butter in by hand. To do so, I take the cold butter and chop it into small cubes, then toss them in the bowl with the flour. I cover the butter lumps with flour and squeeze them between my fingers to break them down into smaller bits and rub the butter into them. You just squeeze and rub, squeeze and rub until all the butter is blended in and your left with a bowl of what looks like bread crumbs.

Important: You want to make sure the butter is cold; otherwise, it will just mix in with the flour. You want those little lumps: those are what make the biscuits flaky in the end.

Finally, stir in the buttermilk and mix up the dough until the liquid is all absorbed by the flour. With your hands, knead and shape the dough until all the flour is worked in and the dough is of a single consistency. It should be still be slightly sticky to the touch, but not so sticky that it clings tou your hands and the side of the bowl. Now you're ready to roll out the biscuits.

Dough rolled out and ready for cutting

Sprinkle a little flour across a cutting board (or you could do this right on the kitchen counter), turn the dough out on it, and knead it up and down on the board, sprinkling on a little more flour if it seems too sticky. Roll out the dough on the board with a rolling pin (I rub mine down with a little flour to keep the dough from sticking) until it's between a half-inch and an inch thick. How thick you like your biscuits is a personal preference. I tend to make my a little thinner--probably a half inch thick when rolled out.

To cut the biscuits, you could use a biscuit cutter if you have one. Or, just do what I do and use a plastic cup of the desired diameter. This again is a matter of personal preference. Lately, I've been making them several inches in diameter, which is perfect for slathering with jelly and having for breakfast. If you're going to use them for other purposes, though (like topping them with ham and pimento cheese for a tasty appetizers) you could make them even smaller.

Ready for the oven

Place the biscuits on a greased or non-stick baking pan and bake in a 450 degree oven till brown and crispy around the edges. My old handwritten recipes says to start checking the biscuits at 8 minutes and every two minutes after that. For this batch, it took me a full twelve minutes to get them fully done; smaller cut biscuits will likely take closer to eight minutes.

Remove from the oven and let cool on a wire rack, though in practice you can eat one as soon as it's cool enough to hold, and half of this pan disappeared within five minutes of its being out of the oven.

This recipe would work just fine with regular old all purpose flour and cultured buttermilk, But, the Anson Mills flour makes an remarkable difference. The biscuits turned out a light brown color reminiscent of good whole wheat bread. And, the flavor of the old-fashioned flour is stunning. The biscuits are notably crispier than ones made with regular all-purpose flour, and there's a good, solid body to them. Little flecks of bran remain in the biscuit, too, giving it a touch of a grittiness to some of the bits that is unusual but not at all unpleasant--a lot like stoneground grits, in fact. The bottoms of the biscuit get a nice dark brown and crispy, too.

To serve, I simply sliced them in half and spread on a little butter and some good strawberry preserves. A perfect breakfast.

BBQ & Books: Nosh Mob Event This Thursday

2010-12-13T07:33:00.001-05:00

This Thursday I'm part of the City Paper's next Nosh Mob event: a barbecue tasting & book signing at Blue Bicycle Books.

Where: Blue Bicycle Books, 420 King St.
When: Thursday, Dec. 16 from 5:30-7:30
What: Samples from Home Team BBQ (and there's rumors about beer, too.)

I've apparently signed myself up for a little presentation where I "deconstruct the standard barbecue menu and talk about how brisket, sauces, slaws, and more fit into the larger history of 'cue." We'll see what I come up with, but drop on by if you have a chance.

Cornbread with a Side of Controvery

2010-12-12T06:24:00.002-05:00

Cornbread is a long-standing and genuine Southern staple. Unlike pimento cheese or fried green tomatoes, which were never served in the South Carolina home of my boyhood, cornbread is something that we ate on a regular basis and thus is for me a nostalgic, homey comfort food. It's also really, really good.

This recipe is my paternal grandmother's, which she wrote down and gave to my mother not long after she and my father got married, and my mother, in turn, wrote down for me at my request when I got really interested in cooking in my early 20s.

For the bread to turn out properly, you really have to cook it in a cast iron skillet. I have an 8-inch one that's just the right size--a Lodge pan that I bought at Hiller's Hardware in downtown Columbia and seasoned myself back when I was in graduate school. I suppose you could make this same recipe in a regular old baking pan, but you would miss out on the very best feature of cornbread: that crisp, firm quarter-inch of dark brown crust that's created from the heat of the iron pan.

Grandmother Moss's Cornbread (With a few Small Enhancements)

1 cup cornmeal
1/2 t baking soda
1 t baking powder
1/2 t salt
1 cup buttermilk
1 egg
3 T vegetable oil (to go in the batter)
1 T of butter (for greasing the skillet)

Optional enhancements:
1/4 cup finely chopped onion
about 12 pickled jalapeno rings, chopped

To begin, you have to preheat both the oven and the skillet. I can't emphasize this step enough because if you start with the batter in a cold pan you won't get the same crust and it will stick to the pan instead of popping right out when it's finished (and leave you with an ugly, ripped up top to your cornbread). So, turn the oven to 400 degrees and put the empty cast iron skillet inside so that it preheats along with the oven while you are mixing the ingredients.

Next, make the batter. Not much to it: put all the dry ingredients (the first four) in a mixing bowl and stir them together. Put the buttermilk, the egg, and the vegetable oil in a separate container (I use my glass measuring cup) and mix them with a fork until the egg yolk is broken up and mixed in. Then, pour all of the liquid into the mixing bowl with the dry ingredients and stir until it is all mixed in and of a smooth consistency, but don't over mix it. Finally, add whatever optional enhancements that you like (such as the onions and pickled jalapenos that I usually add).

Once the oven is heated and the iron pan is good and smoking hot, remove it from the oven to the stovetop (you'll need a good thick oven-mitt or kitchen towel since that cast iron will be HOT). Toss a pat of butter in the pan and stir it around with a spoon till it's totally melted and coating the pan--this will both flavor the cornbread crust and help it crisp up and not stick to the pan. Pour the batter into the skillet, return it to the oven, and bake for 25 minutes until the top is golden brown.

Now, some folks find getting the finished cornbread out of the skillet to be tricky, but it shouldn't be. The key is to not let it cool in the pan. Here's what I do: put a plain old dinner plate on the counter, remove the skillet from the oven (again using a thick oven-mitt), and invert it over the plate. Most of the time the cornbread will drop right out onto the plate and you're done. If you turn the skillet upside down and the cornbread doesn't move, simply put the pan down on the stove top, get a butter knife, and run it around the inside of the pan to loosen the crust from sides of the pan. Then invert it over the pan again and it should pop right out. Once it's on the dinner plate, let it cool at least 10 minutes before serving.

My two standard enhancements to my grandmother's recipe are the chopped onions and jalapeno. You can leave them out if you like, but I think they add extra moistness and flavor to the bread, and lest you're worried about the heat factor, as long as you use the pickled variety from a jar and chop them finely, the jalapenos don't make things too spicy (using chopped fresh jalapenos is a different story).

A Side Dish of Controversy: Sugar and Flour in Cornbread

Note that while I'm pretty open minded about optional enhancements--you could toss in bacon, cracklins, herbs, hot sauce, whole kernels of corn, you name it--there are two ingredients that do not and will not appear in my cornbread. They're the kind of things that I would consider not "optional enhancements" but "flat out adulterations". Those ingredients are wheat flour and sugar.

There's been much silly debate over whether corn bread should or should not have sugar in it. Silly, I say, because it is so plainly self evident that corn bread could not possibly have any sugar in it for as soon as you add any you immediately transform it into cornmeal cake. The real deal is rich, hearty, and possibly even savory, but it certainly is NOT sweet.

The same prohibition goes for wheat flour, which only heightens the cake-like quality of adulterated corn bread. It's also completely at odds with cornbread's history, though that's a long enough subject for a whole separate post.

I am well aware that this is just an opinion and, to judge by a cursory Internet search, one that puts me in the cranky minority. So, I threw together a little poll and put it up in the sidebar. Weigh in and let me know what you think.

Does Authenticity Matter? The Lee Bros. Simple Fresh Southern

2010-12-10T21:01:00.001-05:00

The Lee Brothers Simple Fresh Southern (Clarkson Potter, 2009)

Right out of the gate I had an immediate visceral reaction when I read the dust jacket for the latest cookbook from brothers (and fellow Charleston residents) Matt and Ted Lee. The blurb starts off strong: "Matt and Ted Lee grew up in Charleston, South Carolina, immersed in the flavorful traditions--long-simmered gumbos, fish-fry marathons, whole-hog barbecues--that have made southern food the most beloved of American cuisines." That had me hooked.

Unfortunately, the very next word that follows is "but," and the copy proceeds to explain how busy life is today in this era of two working parents and how the recipes therein are meant to update traditional recipes with lighter cooking methods and new, more modern ingredients. In fact, not just the dust jacket but the rest of the marketing material for the book sticks to the key themes of "easy", "fast", and "healthy," selling these as "simple" recipes aimed at "the busy home cook." The Publisher's Weekly review did little to advance the cause, either, noting that the book is an exercise in "applying the principles of the current fashion for simplicity and speed in the kitchen to the revered down-home flavors of the South" and "bringing Southern cooking into the 21st century."

"Fast", "light", and "easy" just isn't my style (and, as my wife will quickly point out, neither is "neat", "elegant," nor "one-pot meal"). In my working drafts folder I have a half-finished piece entitled "In Defense of Slow-Cooked Vegetables" in which I argue passionately for the virtues of simmering vegetables in a dutch oven with a big chunk of smoked meat until they cry "Uncle". As far back as the early 1990s I was toying with writing a cookbook entitled "Cooking with Lard", but I never got around to it and two guys named Mike beat me to the punch with a jokey version and then Jennifer McLagen, a Beard Award-winning cookbook writer, came out with a serious and authoritative tome on the subject.

It would be easy for one to write off the Lee's latest effort by saying "that's not real Southern cooking," meaning, of course, that it's not authentic.

But, if you actually read the recipes in Simple Fresh Southern and not just the dust jacket copy, you'll find that, while the dishes may be light and quick and possibly even healthy, they are really just plain good eating. In fact, it makes you wonder whether whoever wrote the marketing materials actually read the book or whether they simply plugged a few words into a template designed for today's average cookbook buyers.

I don't think Matt and Ted Lee are on a mission to save us from the the busy bustle of daily life nor the "burden" of homecooking so much as they are trying to rescue Southern cooking from the depredations of the mid-20th Century (and, if you judge by the women's magazines and newspaper food pages, everyone was far too busy to cook from scratch back then, too.)

You don't really find within the Lee brothers' book too many updated versions of the fatback-and-greens, lard-based biscuits, and fried sidemeat dishes that were stereotypical of Southern cooking in, say, 1890. Instead, you get a lot of updates on the kind of recipe that your great-aunt may have found in one of those spiral-bound community cookbooks and took to her church family night supper in 1962, recipes that usually began with, "Open a can of . . ."

There is, for example, green goddess potato salad, which the Lees note was "dreamed up in a fancy hotel kitchen far from the South"--that is, at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco in 1920. But, it appears so frequently in mid 20th century Southern cookbooks, they argue, that it might as well be considered Southern. Matt and Ted use the mayo-and-sour cream dressing (made green with chopped scallions, parsley, and tarragon and spiced with anchovies) to dress red potatoes into a warm potato salad. It's a definite upgrade from the versions you find in newspaper columns in the 1960s and '70s, which called for things like "2 teaspoons French's Herb Seasoning, 1 teaspoon French's Minced Onions, and 2 teaspoons French's Worcestershire sauce" and was used to dress iceberg lettuce

In New Fairyland Cooking Magic (1964) from the Fairyland School PTA from Lookout Mountain, GA,
the Lees found a recipe for "shrimp and deviled egg casserole", an insidious-sounding concoction of deviled eggs layered into a casserole pan, covered with a thick, cheesy cream sauce with shrimp, ketchup, Worchestershire, and sherry, and finally topped with buttered bread crumbs, baked, and served--in a final indignity--over canned Chinese noodles. What made them think they could rescue such a mutt is beyond me, but rescue it they did, homing in on the potential in the marriage of shrimp and deviled eggs. The result is an egg salad made with farm fresh eggs, store-bought mayo, dijon mustard and tabasco into which is folded chopped local shrimp with a squeeze of lemon and smoky bacon and scallions. The mixture is tucked inside toploading hot dog bun to create a Southern version of a New England lobster roll. And it looks delicious.

Now, be honest, would you rather have the authentic original or the updated one?

The Lees banish marshmallows and canned mandarin oranges from ambrosia and replace them with fresh grapefruit and oranges and toasted coconut flakes. Heck, they even take a flyer at reforming Purple Jesus, that iconic college party punch traditionally made with Everclear, citrus juices, and grape Kool-Ade in big plastic trash cans. Matt and Ted offer up a variant with vodka and soda flavored with cherries, blackberries, and citrus that's more suited for a classy summer front porch party than the kind of affair that leaves you sprawled prone in the bushes.

The book is less about Southern recipes and more about Southern ingredients and preparation techniques. Watermelon makes its way into margaritas, gets tossed with squid and basil, and is brined into watermelon and onion pickles. Bourbon is poured with a liberal hand to marinate flank steak, flavor ice cream, and to spike up a fig compote. There are "shopping notes" on how to find everything from fresh shrimp and oysters to salt and olive oil, and instructional sidebars on techniques like stove-top smoking and quick pickling that seemed aimed a returning some of the old flavors of traditional preservation techniques to the modern-day kitchen, flavors that were lost in the era of canning and freezing.

In this sense, it's a cookbook that's very much in line with the efforts of Linton Hopkins and Sean Brock and all those other chefs who are "reclaiming the soul of Southern food". Is it "authentic?" You be the judge. But, it's definitely good Southern eating.

"Authentic" Pimento Cheese

2010-12-07T06:41:00.001-05:00

People get passionate about pimento cheese. It's been called the "Pâté of the South" and "Carolina Caviar." It's the kind of thing that Southerners get all misty eyed remembering from their youths and Yankees get all wondrous and rapturous about when they discover it.

Like other foods that stir diners' passions--barbecue, for instance--pimento cheese can also stir up a lot of disagreement. It's the kind of thing that people quickly harden into a "my way or the highway" kind of mentality about. In fact, every single ingredient can be debated.

Grating the Cheddar (Finely, in this case)

The base of just about every pimento cheese recipe you see today is three-part: cheese, mayonnaise, and pimentos. But, do you use cheddar, white cheddar, Swiss, Monterrey Jack, Parmesan, cream cheese, or Velveeta (or a combination of several of these)? Do you grate the cheese finely or leave it in big ole chunky shreds?

The Basic Foundation: Cheese, Mayo, Pimento

You would think the pimento part would be fairly straightforward, but as I discussed a few days ago, it's not clear whether fresh or canned peppers would actually be more authentic.

And what about the mayonnaise? Nan Davis of Oxford, Mississippi, who won the Southern Foodways Alliance's Pimento Cheese Invitational in 2003 with a recipe she learned from her Aunt Lella. As Davis recalls that when Lella taught her the recipe, "She started with 'Well, first you make the mayonnaise'. I interrupted her and said that I was not going to make homemade mayonnaise, just to give me the proportions on the cheese, pimentos, and spices. There was a long pause and then she said 'Well, you might as well not bother'". Davis has used homemade mayonnaise ever since.

One of my favorite pimento cheese versions of all times is that of Sarah O'Kelley of the Glass Onion here in Charleston. The Glass Onion is a die-hard farm-to-table, fresh local ingredients kind of place, but O'Kelley is insistent on using store bought mayo for her pimento cheese. "You must use Duke’s brand,”O'Kelley told Garden & Gun magazine. "Duke’s has no added sugar and more egg yolks."

Ready for Sampling

I'm partial to Duke's Mayonnaise myself, perhaps in part because I grew up in Greenville, South Carolina, where Eugenia Duke first began making her no-sugar mayonnaise in 1917, and the yellow-labeled jars were omnipresent.

Once you get the first three ingredients in the mixing bowl, the concoction becomes a palette for your culinary creativity, and what each cook adds from there is what makes their "special" pimento cheese recipe so special. Black pepper, cayenne, jalapeños, lemon juice, onion, bacon, pecans, hot sauce, garlic powder, mustard, cider vinegar, and celery seeds are just a few of the things you might see adding a little zip or kick or twist.

Or, You Could Gussy it Up a Little

When next summer rolls around I plan on going all lardcore and making my pimento cheese with fresh, fire-roasted pimentos, handcrafted hoop cheese, and homemade mayonnaise from Southern-sourced oil (maybe I'll even press it myself from locally-grown soybeans.) Until then, here's the standby recipe I'm going with for holiday parties and other family gatherings.

Pimento Cheese

8 Oz. sharp yellow cheddar (or 4 oz. sharp cheddar and 4 oz. aged white cheddar)
1/2 cp. Duke's mayonnaise
1/2 cp. pimentos from a jar, drained and chopped into 1/4-inch bits
black pepper
pinch of salt
1/4 cp. diced green onion
1 t. dried mustard
1 t. freshly-squeeze lemon juice
1/4 tsp. cayenne

Grate the cheddar. Lately I've been using the fine holes on my grater, but (yes, Janet) you could use the larger ones if you prefer big shreds instead. Put the grated cheese in a large mixing bowl and stir together all the ingredients. Start with a little less than a half cup of mayo and add a little more once you have everything else mixed in to make sure you get the right consistency--I like mine to be thick but still loose enough to spread easily, and the 1/2 cup of mayo will usually do it.

I like to make my pimento cheese the day before I serve it so it has a good night in the fridge to let everything merge and meld together. You can serve it immediately, though, in a pinch.

Lately, I've gone for mustard and black pepper for a little zip, cayenne to add a subtle bit of heat, and lemon juice to brighten it all up. But, there are a hundred different things you could use instead and come up with a similarly satisfying spread, so here's your chance to get creative.

How to serve pimento cheese once it's made is a topic for several more posts, but you can get all fancy and spread it on little toast points (see glamor shot above), or just serve it in a bowl with some crackers around it, or--as usually ends up happening to me--simply leave it in a plastic container in the fridge and scoop out a couple of spoonfuls here and there until it's gone before you get a chance to serve it at any sort of gathering.

It's good stuff.

Does Authenticity Matter? Pimentos

2010-12-05T07:47:00.004-05:00

The authentic pimento?

I'm currently somewhat obsessed by pimento cheese, having had so many splendid examples in various restaurants and venues over the past year and spent a considerable time trying to perfect my own home version.

One of the versions that caught my attention was that of Linton Hopkins of Restaurant Eugene and Holeman & Finch in Atlanta. He makes his with a blend of white cheddar and extra sharp yellow cheddar along with homemade mayonnaise (from local farm eggs), tabasco, and black pepper and--the kicker--real Georgia pimentos that he buys fresh and roasts himself, being sure that a little of the black char from the skin gets into the mix.

"Georgia used to produce a huge amount of true red pimentos for pimento cheese, the classic Southern staple," Hopkins told Creative Loafing Atlanta a while back. "But now it all goes to the canning industry. So you don't see them here anymore. The local farmers don't have them; it's all done by the big agribusiness."

What Hopkins says is almost all correct, but for perfect accuracy you would have to remove the words "now" and "anymore." Georgia did indeed produce huge amounts of red pimentos in the past, but from the very beginning they weren't produced by small local farmers but rather by "big agribusiness."

No one in the South had even heard of a pimento pepper until well after the Civil War. Through most of the 19th century, the word "pimento" meant allspice, the unripe berries of the Eugenia Pimenta evergreen from Jamaica and the West Indies. The spice was popular throughout the United States, and oil from Jamaican pimento berries was prescribed as a purgative and toothache remedy.

Pimento was not used as a term for red peppers until the 1880s, when sweet peppers from Spain began being imported to the United States, packed in tin cans (which themselves were a relatively new innovation). Not long after, recipes calling for “sweet Spanish peppers” began appearing in print. In the 1887 edition of Miss Parloa's Kitchen Companion, Maria Parloa noted that such a pepper, when green, “is much milder than the common bell-pepper, although they look so much alike it is often difficult to distinguish them.” She recommended that they be stuffed and baked. Thomas Jefferson Murrey, one of the most popular cookbook authors of the era, was a proponent of the sweet pepper, too, incorporating it into recipes for salmon a la Creole, boiled beef salad, and omelet with Spanish pepper.

By the late 1890s, Americans were calling these imported peppers by their Spanish name, pimiento. Soon the “i” was dropped from common usage, and by the turn of the century most print accounts of the peppers call them “pimentos”. Thanks to their bright red color, which helped liven up salads and other dishes, and their mild, sweet flavor, pimentos became one of the darlings of the "domestic science" school of cookery instructors, and their magazine articles and cookbooks advanced the pepper's adoption in home kitchens nationwide.

While the peppers were popular throughout the country, the South--specifically, the state of Georgia--became the center of the American pimento industry. Imported Spanish pimentos were expensive, and a few enterprising Peach State residents saw an opportunity to get into the game. Around 1911, farmers affiliated with the Georgia Experiment Station outside of Griffin, Georgia, began trying to cultivate a domestic pimento. Working with imported Spanish varieties, Samuel D. Riegel identified the plants most suitable for the Georgia soil and from them developed the “Truhart Perfection” pimento, which became the basis of a new local industry.

In 1914, Riegel's son, Mark, invented a roasting machine that made peeling the peppers easier, and the next year he founded the Pomona Products Company to can them commercially. By the 1920s, a flourishing pimento industry had developed in and around Griffin. 1938 was the peak year, with 25,000 acres under cultivation, and the Pomona Products Company alone was producing 10 million cans per year. California growers began competing with Georgia around this time, but the Peach State remained the leading producer of the little red peppers until at least the 1960s.

So, from the very beginning, pimento peppers were grown on a large scale with the express intent of being canned and nationally distributed. The pimentos used by your Southern grandmother in her special pimento cheese recipe were, in all probability, purchased in a tin can or glass jar, even if she lived in Georgia.

But, does that make pimento cheese made with fresh pimentos somehow "inauthentic?"

Linton Hopkins has developed strong relationships with local organic farmers near Atlanta who are interested in heirloom varieties, including Nicolas Donck of Crystal Organic Farms, who began supplying him with fresh, locally-grown pimentos. I was thrilled when I found this out, because--while you can apparently get them during the summer in various farmers markets--I don't recall ever seeing a fresh pimento pepper myself. I'm dying to try making pimento cheese from fresh peppers as soon as summer rolls back around and I can maybe track down some pimentos at a roadside market.

What could be tastier? And if, strictly speaking, using the fresh peppers is not really authentic to the way the iconic cheese spread was made in the past, I don't why we shouldn't try to make these old recipes even better by using fresh ingredients. And, at the same time, I see no reason to feel guilty about using diced pimentos from a jar.

Now, all of this might have you wondering how we started mixing those canned pimento peppers into a cheese spread in the first place. As it turns out, pimento cheese itself has a long and curious history, and one, in fact, of highly questionable authenticity. But that's a topic for a later time.

I'm off to the store for a jar of pimentos to whip up some pimento cheese.

Southern Cooking: Does Authenticity Matter?

2010-12-04T09:10:00.001-05:00

CNN's Eatocracy blog has stirred up something of a hornet's nest over its coverage of their first CNN Secret Supper at Linton Hopkins' Restaurant Eugene in Atlanta and their celebration of modern Southern chefs like Hopkins, Steven Satterfield, and Sean Brock, whose passionate, intensive use of fresh, traditional ingredients constitute "a love letter to the cooks, farmers and soul of the South" and "reclaiming the soul of Southern food."

This drew the ire of many commenters who claimed that such food is "no more Southern than braised kangaroo". Why? Because it's just "some New York Yankee's idea of Southern cooking", and "I've never seen anything like this served on any down home southern table," and--more than anything--it's "not what my grandmother made." Eatocracy sums it up nicely: "You can't out-cook a ghost."

The editors' invitation to readers to "share your thoughts on the state of Southern cooking" has sparked a full-on flame war with over three hundred comments in two days, and the content suggests it's virtually impossible for us to have a discussion about Southern cooking without everyone starting to talk about where they were born and raised and sooner or later somebody telling the Yankees to go home.

For me, though, it re-raises a question that has been nagging at me for some time, and one that my research into the history of Southern food has done little to resolve: how much does authenticity even matter?

One problem with using authenticity as a measure is that our own conceptions of Southern food history are so slippery. Take this list of Southern staples: sweet iced tea, pimento cheese, barbecue, hushpuppies, shrimp and grits, fried green tomatoes, RC Cola and moon pies. Are these things traditional Southern foods?

It all depends upon how you define "traditional." Did it have to be served in the region in antebellum days ("before da wah?")? Before World War II? Before Jimmy Carter made the South cool? Before the turn of the 21st century? Does it have to be something your grandmother cooked or your grandfather loved to eat?

And then there's geography: does anything originating in Florida or Texas count? What about foods that were popular not just in the South but in other parts of the country, too? What about something made by your grandmother who was born in the North but lived in the South her entire adult life?

It's hardly news that Southerners have a unusually strong interest in the past, but too often we seem less concerned with the past itself as we are in employing it as a cudgel in some contemporary argument. Hate agribusiness and want everyone to start eating fresh, local, organic, heirloom vegetables? Intimidated or annoyed by expensive restaurants and ingredients you don't recognize and wish people would just serve you a cheap fried pork chop? Either way you can turn to the some point in the past and find evidence to buttress your position.

I'm launching a series of posts that dig more into this question of authenticity. The idea is to look at some of the things we're eating and making such a fuss about these days, how we are talking about them, and the history--both factual and mythologized--behind these "traditional" Southern food. Does authenticity matter? Should we concern ourselves with how people cooked and what they cooked in the old days? Or, should we just shut up and eat?

Gotta go . . . Just made myself hungry thinking about fried pork chops.

Fullsteam: Lardcore Beer

2010-11-29T21:08:00.001-05:00

When I attended the Southern Foodways Alliance symposium back in October, I had the good fortune of sampling the products of ~~Raleigh's~~ Durham's Fullsteam Brewery for the first time. They were in attendance at the big catfish fry out at the Taylor Grocery, tapping four kegs of different beers from their lineup.

At first I thought it was just one more new regional craft brewery, the kind that have been cropping up in every decent sized Southern city these days. There would be nothing wrong with that--those craft breweries are turning out some excellent beer--but Fullsteam takes things up about three more levels with some seriously intense beer alchemy.

Calling themselves a "plow to pint" brewery, Fullsteam is definitely pushing the envelope. In case you doubt me, see how the F in Fullsteam is backwards? That's edgy! But even more edgy are the flavors they are introducing to beer. On tap that night out at the Taylor Grocery were a Sparkling Scuppernong Ale, Carver Sweet Potato Amber, Summer Basil Wheat, and Hogwash Hickory-Smoked Porter.

Fullsteam's "plow-to-pint" aesthetic is self-consciously radical, with small batches of beer purposely brewed with unusual flavors from ingredients that are grown right here in the South. Local, organic, seasonal--a little trendy, perhaps, if you're talking about food, but still pretty novel in the beer world.

The Summer Basil, made with twelve pounds of basil from Coon Rock Farm in Hillsborough, North Carolina, is a remarkable beer, a hearty wheat brew that is absolutely infused with the rich flavor of basil. When the pourman described it to me, I figured it couldn't possibly be any good--basil in beer? But in fact, it was remarkably tasty, like a mouthful of flowers (and, strange as it might sound, I mean that in a good way.)

But, the start of the show for me was the smoked porter. That's right, Hickory-Smoked Porter. It's made from barley that Fullsteam smokes themselves over hickory wood in the classic North Carolina barbecue tradition, and while it's not overpowering you can really taste the smoke flowing through. I can't attest for the beer's pairing with hickory smoked pork, for there was no barbecue in sight that evening. The order of the day was deep-fried catfish, and I can state without a shred of doubt that Hogwash is a brilliant accompaniment for deep fried catfish.

The world of microbeers have progressed so far now that just another brewery introducing another good beer to the market is hardly worth even mentioning. But, highly flavored beer that bring the pure, intense sensibility of the farm to table movement to the craft of beer brewing is certainly worth making note of.

All I can say is, Fullsteam ahead!

Southern Cooking Takes New York (Again)

2010-11-27T08:10:00.003-05:00

I've been watching with interest as Southern food continues to further capture the fancy of Gothamites. Barbecue rib joints started taking off a few years ago. Now Southern cooking is going upscale. Bloomberg.com just reviewed two new Southern-themed restaurants--Seersucker and Peels--that are wowing New Yorkers with shrimp and grits, country ham, and pickled eggs.

Seersucker, the creation of Arkansas-born Robert Newton, has been earning raves from many quarters (and a few brickbats from others, especially for the high prices). At Peels, it seems, you can have your down-home treats like biscuits and hushpuppies in a thoroughly high-end New York restaurant environment, complete with a security guard at the door and a 90-minute weekend wait. The fried chicken will run you twenty bucks, but it is free-range and freshly-killed. And that, I guess, is proof positive that Southern cooking has arrived.

But, of course, Southern food in New York City really is nothing new at all. The tens of thousands of African-Americans who came North during the Great Migration in the early part of the 20th Century brought with them the traditional cooking of their home states, and Harlem developed a thriving Southern cooking tradition (dubbed "soul food" in the 1960s). Between 125th and 135th street, rib joints flourished eight decades before Blue Smoke and RUB came into being.

Now, curiously enough, the Soul Food restaurant tradition is dying out, as the New York Times reported a few years ago. The food gets a big knock for being heavy, fried, and salty, plus food costs are rising and local tastes are trending more toward Indian, Thai, and Chinese places.

The rise and fall of Southern cooking in New York City, happening at the same time.

Why My Wife Won't (and No One Else Will, For That Matter) Watch a Movie With Me

2010-11-15T20:50:00.001-05:00

We rented the Sherlock Holmes movie tonight--you know, the recent Sherlock-kicks-a-lot-of-butt one starring Robert Downey, Jr.. Four minutes into the film there's this little exchange of action-movie banter:

Dr. John Watson: You remember your revolver?
Sherlock Holmes: Oh, knew I forgot something. Thought I left the stove on.
Dr. John Watson: You did.

Me: LEFT THE STOVE ON? Are you KIDDING me? This thing is set in 1890.

The Wife: Just let it go, honey.

Me: There were no electric stoves in 1890!!!

The Wife: Maybe he left a wood stove on.

Me: How do you leave a WOOD stove on?

Someone at IMDB have tracked down a bunch of other anachronisms and recorded them here, but I've not seen anyone bothered by the stove thing yet. Doesn't matter. After four minutes I was done. From the few glimpses I got passing through the living room for the rest of the night, it doesn't look like I missed much.

In Search of the Infamous Charleston Waffle

2010-11-12T06:45:00.002-05:00

I am hot on the trail of a lost South Carolina delicacy: the Charleston Waffle. I'm not exactly sure what it is, but somewhere around 1910, the city of Charleston gained nationwide attention--and, not long afterward, notoriety--for its waffles. In fact, the term "Charleston waffle" seems to have become synonymous with a rich, heavy breakfast dish.

The first mention I've found of the Charleston waffle is a short paragraph in the Montgomery Advertiser on November 25, 1910. It reads, “The [Charleston] News and Courier is in favor of using the Charleston waffle to fix ships that leak. Sure, that's all they're fit for. The Charleston waffle, from what we can learn, is better for patching purposes than either asbestos or leather.”

That's a weird paragraph, but actually not all that unusual for 1910. That decade was the high era of the “paragraphers” in American newspapers, when a typical daily would devote several columns if not a whole page to corny one-paragraph jokes, some of them commentary on issues of the day, some snide remarks about paragraphs from other newspapers, and some just the kind of groaners your goofy great-uncle used to repeat at dinner parties. Things like: “A somersault is nothing to a hot-air artist.” And, “We don't imagine that the Missouri man sentenced by a judge to obey his wife for six months will notice any particular difference.” Some paragraphers even wrote paragraphs about paragraphers, like “A paragrapher has one consolation. He knows his children will never be annoyed by the inheritance tax.”

And, boy, did the paragraphers love the Charleston waffle. In March 1911, when President Taft rushed 10,000 troops to the Texas border as revolutionary violence swept through Mexico, the Charleston News and Courier reported that “the troops in Texas will be fed Charleston waffles every Sunday morning.” A paragrapher for the Philadelphia Inquired replied, “Probably one of the disciplinary measures of the camp,” and added for good measure, “Charleston, by the way, is somewhere on the coast of South Carolina.”

In fact, almost all of the documentary evidence I can find about the Charleston waffle is captured in various three-line cornball commentaries. Here are just a few of the dozens I turned up:

“One good thing about Charleston waffles in these days of high prices for food is that those that are served for breakfast necessitate so much chewing that they are about ready to swallow by the time the supper hour arrives.” - Charlotte Observer (December 26, 1911).

“We are convinced that the Chicago man in whose stomach the surgeons found nineteen pocket knives, seventeen nails, five knife blades, a dozen screws, and a silver dollar, could digest a Charleston waffle.” - Augusta Chronicle (September 11, 1912)

“Germany's death rate shows and increase. Have they started eating Charleston waffles over there?” - Columbia State (September 12, 1912)

“The pneumatic Charleston waffles are guaranteed against puncture.” - Columbia State (September 4, 1913)

“We wish to raise our voice in earnest protest against sending any Charleston waffles to Belgium.” - Columbia State (September 4, 1913)

Columbia's State newspaper was one of the most prolific abusers of the Charleston waffle—part, I am sure, of the long-standing rivalry between the South Carolina's old capital city and its new one. The State's editors, Robert Elliott Gonzales and Ambrose Elliott Gonzales, even captured in verse the following suggested punishments for Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa:

Make him sing the Star Spangled Banner, or,
Become an umpire, or
Work in a munitions plant, or
Drink some blind tiger likker, or
Live in Charlotte, or
Read the Congressional Record, or
Eat a Charleston waffle, or
Appoint him a paragrapher.

I think that technically counts as verse since it has short lines and everyone of them sort of rhymes with the others.

The Charleston News & Courier, it seems, undertook a spirited defense of its hometown specialty in paragraphs of its own, though other newspapers invariably used these as opportunities to heap on more corn. In April 1911, for instance, the N&C wrote, “We sent a Charleston waffle to New York but, of course, some postal clerk could not stand the temptation, and he took it.” The Baltimore Sun reprinted the paragraph under the headline “Wanted to Mend a Tire, Maybe.” When the N&C claimed in February 1912 that, “A gentleman gained ten pounds in one week eating Charleston waffles,” the Philadelphia Inquirer shot back, “Either from mere indifference or neglect to inquire more closely into the affair, however, it does not give any information concerning the result of the inevitable surgical operation.”

But, wisecracks aside, what in the heck was the Charleston waffle? It was definitely more than just a paragraphers' joke. In its restaurants section, the 1912 New Guide to Modern Charleston noted about Riddock's Arcade on King Street, “A specialty is the Charleston waffle, reknowned for its delicacy all over the country.” I've as yet been stymied, however, to uncover exactly what made Charleston's version of the waffle so special and how it gained nationwide reknown.

Part of the horrified reaction to the city's waffle might have been related to the more widespread criticism of the richness of the Southern diet, which since the 1890s had been coming under fiercer and fiercer attack from the new movement of nutritionists and "domestic scientists." A big theme of these folks around the turn of the 20th century was the idea of "hot" and "cold" foods and their proper diet for a particular climate. Waffles fell into this bucket. A reporter for the New York Sun, for example, visited the Cotton States Exposition in Atlanta in 1895 and recorded that, “the cold-bread eaters of the North and West” typically react “with horror of the richness of Southern cooking, their hot bread and waffles and their highly seasoned dishes.” Such food was thought to be at odds with the hot climate of the South and created, for whatever reason, “dyspepsia.”

But, most of the people making fun of the Charleston waffle were Southern newspapermen, ones I can only imagine had their fill of biscuits and cornbread on a regular basis. So, the search goes on as I dig farther back into recipes and newspapers to see what I can dig up. If anyone out there has any information that would help shed light on this mystery, please pass it along!

Big Ole Sodas

2010-11-09T06:15:00.014-05:00

I went to the movies this weekend for the first time in months, and when my wife made a snack bar run she asked me what I wanted. "Get me the smallest size Coke they have," I said. She returned with a squat, fat stubby cup--the diameter of one of those 64 oz Big Gulps but only half the height.

"THAT's the small?" I asked.

"Yes," she said.

Truthfully, though I wasn't really surprised, since the movie theaters have long been the home of wantonly excessive soft drink volumes, and I've long been chronicling the ever-expanding packaging sizes of soft drinks (see, for example, whether you can even afford Coke machine Coke these days.)

So, much to my amazement, when I went to my local grocery store yesterday, did I notice not one but TWO new soda container sizes on the soft drink aisle: six-packs of 7.5 ounce cans and, perhaps most surprising of all, 1.25 liter bottles.

I can understand the market for the 7.5 oz cans. There are plenty of people--most of them in the higher end of the age demographic--who like a soft drink now and again but don't feel compelled to suck down more than a single glass worth at a time. This is, in fact, almost a throwback to the 6 ounce glass bottles of their youth.

But what about that 1.25 liter bottle? Is this for the same demographic as the 7.5 oz can, only meant to be kept in the fridge so you can have four or so glasses of your favorite Coca-Cola product over the course of a few days? Or, is it meant as a single serve for our overcaffeinated, over sugared, ever-growing (and I mean that literally) younger consumer set? Is this a sign that portion sanity might be returning to the soft drink market, or is it the final proof that the prediction I made about a decade ago--that single serve soft drink containers would eventually grow so large that people would need special contraptions with wheels and handles just to lug them around--is about to come to pass?

There is surprisingly little in the press or on the InterWebs about this new turn of soft drink development, but experimenting with packaging sizes is not a new phenomenon. The 3-liter bottle was a big thing for a while back in the 1990s, but those have long since faded out, probably because their clumsy bulk was hard to fit in the fridge and difficult to pour when full, outweighing the cost break you might get from the extra volume.

Back in 2004, soft drink bottlers experimented with alternate bottle sizes again. That year, Beverage Digest cited John Alm, the then-President and CEO of mega-bottler Coca-Cola Enterprises, saying that new sizes--1.5 Liter, 1.25 Liter, and 1.75 Liter--will "reduce dependence on 2-Liter," which one can only take to mean reduce Coke's dependence on getting so much of their revenue from 2-Liter sales. (Side note: the Coca-Cola Company owns the brand, the formula, and the marketing. Coca-Cola Enterprises is a separate company that performs the actual bottling and distribution. This got even more confusing this year when Coca-Cola acquired the North American operations of Coca-Cola Enterprises but not all of the company.)

And why would reducing "dependence on 2-Liter" be important? For starters, in the New York Metro market Coke and Pepsi were duking it out head to head on store shelves in a price war so fierce they were often losing money on sales. The plan was to raise margins by introducing the 1.5 liter bottle at a price that was higher per-ounce but conspicuously lower per bottle than Pepsi's 2-Liter, and then to raise the price of the Coke 2-liter, so that there was effectively a lower priced and a higher priced Coke offering bracketing Pepsi's two liter.

The plan backfired out of the gate. Many stores dropped the 2-liter Cokes altogether, and some didn't even drop the price on the new 1.5-liter bottles, causing howls of protests from shoppers who thought they were getting screwed. The outrage was exacerbated by the fact that the 1.5-liter bottles were the same height as the 2 liters and had contours that made them look similar in width to their larger cousins. Coke's share of the Metro New York soft drink market fell from 35.6% in January to 30.1% in June, while Pepsi's rose from 34.1% to 38.2%. (See details here and here.)

Leave it to Papa Coke to come to the rescue. The Coca-Cola Company's 2004 Annual Report noted that "the Company worked closely with Coca-Cola Enterprises Inc. to reverse early unit case volume losses in the weeks after the May introduction of a new 1.5-liter package in the New York City area. By working with customers, re-examining price and package elasticity, and overhauling in-store merchandising, the Coca-Cola system regained unit case volume share lead on a full-year basis in the New York City area by the end of 2004." They did so by encouraging store managers to return the 2 liters to the shelves and put them in prominent positions where shoppers could easily see and compare both sizes and prices. By the end of the year their market share was back up, and profits were, too.

Although the 1.5 Liter Coke bottle is a very common size overseas, it hasn't been seen in the United States very much outside of New York City. So what's up with the new sizes? Is this a fresh attempt on the Coca-Cola company to push up the price-per ounce on us?

Not really, according to this dispatch from Joe Guy Collier at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. This time around, apparently, it's all about "packaging diversity", an attempt on the part of Coke to boost their sagging North American sales. Novel sizes and bundles of Coca-Cola products, the theory goes, will stimulate interest and spur purchases. In addition to the two new sizes I spotted in my grocery store, recent packaging "innovations" include twin-packs of 50 ounce (1.5 liter) bottles and an 8.5 ounce aluminum bottle similar to those things Budweiser came out with lately.

And, hey, it just might work. It caught my attention enough to snap some phone camera pics and write a blog post about it.

In the end, though, it really just comes down to getting more cents per ounce for the product. "There was a point in time when value was defined as more — more ounces for less (money)," the Journal-Constitution quotes Ralph Kytan, VP of Coke's North American bottling operations, as saying. "Package diversity is about matching up the benefits of the package with the needs of the purchaser for the occasion they're buying for." Meaning, in other words, figuring out new ways to get them to pay more per ounce than they would for a boring old two-liter.

And does it work? In a very unscientific survey, I found the following on the shelf tags at my supermarket:

Two liter: 2.6 cents per oz.
1.25 liter: 2.9 cents per oz. (and on sale, with a regular price equating to 3.5 cents per oz.)
12-pack of 12-oz. cans: 4.3 cents per oz.
6-pack of half-liter bottles: 4.5 cents per oz.
8-pack of 12 oz. bottles: 5.2 cents per oz.
8-pack of 7.5 oz cans: 7.2 cents per oz.

I predict the fairly rapid demise of the 1.25 liter bottle because, it seems to me, you buy a can or bottle of soda for either single-serving consumption, meaning you are going to drink the contents of the container all at one time without resealing it, or for multi-serving consumption, meaning you are either serving a bunch of people from a single bottle or drinking it all yourself over the course of a few hours before it can go flat, the way my wife does, ingesting Diet Coke continually throughout the day almost as if it were connected to an IV drip.

If you're buying single-serve, I would speculate, you'll choose the container most suited to your typical serving size. If buying multiserves, you'll want the one that gives the lowest per ounce cost without becoming too large to carry. The 1.25 liter bottle doesn't seem to serve either purpose.

My wife, by the way, orders the extra large fountain drink at the movies, and she was delighted recently when the snack bar started allowing free refills on the largest size cups. As for me, I threw my small cup away still half full and still had a bad case of too-much-damn-sugar stomach the rest of the afternoon. That 8 pack of 7.5 oz. cans is perfect for me. Just big enough to wash down my Geritol.

And it might very well last a full year.

"Profuse in the Extreme"

2010-11-07T07:21:00.001-05:00

I'm reading a lot of late 19th century descriptions of Southern cooking right now, and what stands out is the sharp divide between two schools of thought, one fueled by moonlight and magnolias nostalgia for the elegant meals on plantations before the War. The other--generally expressed by domestic reformers and other busybodies from Northern cities--has nothing but horror and contempt for the deplorable diet of Southerners.

Here's one of the latter, from Helen Campbell's 1880 Good Company article, "A Year in a Southern Cooking School", which pretty apty describes my own Southern diet today:

The Southern diet was, and is, utterly unsuited either to climate or constitution. Profuse in the extreme, its processions of hot breads, its inordinate use of fat in the form or ham or bacon, and its equally inordinate coffee and spirit drinking, ensured a nation of dyspeptics.

And she makes that sound like a bad thing.

Oh My Goodness . . .

2010-11-06T08:40:00.001-04:00

In case you thought the KFC Double Down was something dramatic, here's the latest Extreme Stunt Food, as discovered by Janson Cumbie and Stephanie Barna out at the Coastal Carolina Fair.

Yes, it's just what the picture looks like: a cheeseburger made with two Krispy Kreme doughnuts as the bun. Dubbed "The Luther", this, in my book, shoves the Double Down on the playground and rubs its face in the dirt.

Apparently, this monstrosity has been around for a few years, but, since I don't hang around too many State Fairs, it's a new one to me. Check out it and all the other fair food pics in the City Paper piece: they've got about thirty doozies that will either make you really really hungry or turn you into a vegetarian.

Results (Finally): BBQ History Quiz #4

2010-11-02T10:33:00.000-04:00

Major procrastination seems the be the new theme with my BBQ Quiz. I've been on the road a bunch lately (including fours days down in Oxford, Mississippi for the wonderful Southern Foodways Alliance symposium) and just haven't gotten around to keeping up with my blog deadlines. But, in case you've been wondering at all about the answer to the stale question sitting over in the right hand column of the blog, here it is.

Question: The first usage of the word "barbecue" to describe an event (and not just a cooking technique) occurred in the 18th Century. In which colony was this event held?

Responses:

A. Massachusetts: 9%

B. New York: 9%

C: North Carolina: 45%

D: Georgia: 36%

North Carolina and Georgia do seem like the most plausible answers, but the truth might surprise you: it's A. Massachusetts!

The first usage lexicographers for the Oxford English Dictionary have been able to find is from 1733, when Benjamin Lynde, Jr., of Salem, Massachusetts, recorded in his diary, "Fair and hot; Browne, Barbecue; hack overset." The OED interpreted this to mean that Lynde when to a barbecue with Mr. Browne, and on the way there was a carriage accident. This is as good of an interpretation as I can make of the cryptic entry.

In fact, barbecues were quite common in New England in the 18th Century, and I've been able to find plenty of references to them in old newspapers and journals. In October 1752, the Rev. Ebenezer Bridge of Chelmsford, MA, recorded attending "a Barbacue in Dracut." The diary of Mary Holyoke of Salem includes three mentions of barbecues in 1761 and 1762. In 1767, seventy gentlemen attended a barbecue in Braintree to celebrate the launching of a ship named the Barnard.

By the end of the 18th Century, barbecues seem to have faded from New England. But, for a brief period, it seems, Yankees were eating as much barbecue as those in the Southern colonies.

For more results from past questions, see Barbecue History Quiz Question #3

From Thrill Ride to Fear Factor: The XLerator Turns Ugly

2010-10-31T11:20:00.000-04:00

A while ago I wrote about the XLerator about which I said it's something akin to a bathroom thrill ride for 9 year old boys. To quote that previous post, "the XLerator is to handdryers what the Hummer is to sports utility vehicles (the original Hummer, not the wussy H3)--extreme, testosterone laden, and completely over the top."

These observation still hold, but now that my younger son (who is four) is fully potty trained and able to use restraurant bathrooms, the old XLerator has taken on a whole new persona: evil weapon of terror.

The four year old is particularly sensitive to loud noises, and especially those in bathrooms, which I imagine is due to the echoing and amplifying effect of all that tile. Loud-flushing toilets are bad enough. "Is this one a loud one or a quiet one?" he always asks as we approach a new bathroom. Once inside, he carefully evaluates the standing urinals, which, if they're low enough he can use, or the regular old johns, which are always the right height but more prone to having a very loud flush. Often I end up doing the flushing for him, once he has backed away to a respectable distance and covered his ears just in case.

I vaguely recall having a similar fear of loud toilets--there was a particular one in the bathroom of our church in Great Falls, South Carolina, that, back through the misty fog of early childhood memories, I still recall being terrified of.

But, I never had to deal with the XLerator, unlike my poor four year old. The thing roars like an F18 taking off right there in the echo chamber of your local restaurant restroom, rendering a noise-phobic four year old into a howling, curled up, almost-comatose ball of fear.

So, now we have a new routine when we go to bathrooms. Upon entry, look first to see if they have traditional paper towels, old school wimpy hand driers, or the infamous XLerator. If the latter, while the little one does his business, I stand casually and directly in front of hand drier, shielding it with my body to prevent any other bathroom patrons from sneaking up and using it to dry their hands before we can evacuate the premises.

And then there's the question of what to do with the four year old's hands once he's finished, since I'm still working to instill in him the social nicety of washing your hands after a visit to the restroom. In some bathrooms they have both paper towels and the XLerator, and this works just fine, though the four year old will keep stealing glances at the silver beast out of the corner of his eye just in case the thing might decide to go off on its own. In other bathrooms, though, the air dryer is the only option and we have to just let the restroom hygiene lessons wait for another day. After all, I tell myself, which is more unsanitary, a couple of unwashed hands or having a four year old collapse in terror and roll around on a bathroom floor?

This is what parenthood--and the XLerator--has reduced me to.

Oh, No Sir, I Must Protest!

2010-10-18T22:32:00.001-04:00

BBQ Geek, a blog I follow regularly and, most of the time, at least, respect heartily, has had momentary lapse of sanity and has posted the following "opinion" (and I put it in quotes because it's hard to argue opinions but in this case it is just patently wrong): "Of all the BBQ sauces out there, SC mustard probably has the fewest fans and is the most regionalized sauce." Well, that's just, like, your opinion, man.

Fewest fans? Based upon what evidence? And compared to that weird-ass white mayonnaise sauce they serve down in Alabama?

Anyhow, sauce blasphemy aside, it's an interesting piece on barbecue carts in New York City. I myself, in NYC on business just a few weeks ago, looked up all the recently-opened barbecue joints and thought seriously about trying one out for dinner. But, midway through searching Chowhound NYC for BBQ, I realized something: you shouldn't go all the way to New York and eat barbecue, especially if you live in the South,

New York doesn't have great barbecue. The remarkable thing about eating barbecue in New York is this: "can you believe we found good barbecue in New York, of all places?"

Brother, stick to barbecue when you are at home in the South, are on the road at a great barbecue city like Memphis, Kansas City, or Lexington, North Carolina. If you're in New York, go to Katz's for pastrami or Keen's for a steak or the lobby at the Algonquin for a cocktail. Don't go looking for barbecue. Even if it is served from a street side cart and the pitmaster used to cook at Daniel and Le Cirque.

Vertical Schfarms

2010-10-16T22:09:00.000-04:00

I'm listening right now to a podcast with an author nattering on and on about the future of vertical farms, which essentially means indoor hydroponic farms that feed urban populations without requiring all the soil and acreage of traditional land-based agriculture. It's a compelling sci-fi sort of concept, especially when you hear that currently to feed the city of New York it takes the land acreage of the entire state of Virginia but, according to vertical farm theorists, at least, it would take only a thirty story building on a single city block to prove the same number of calories.

All well and good, except for one thing. I'm not aware right now of there being a particular shortage of farmland in the United States. It's not like farms are bloating out all over the country and starting to gobble up the land that used to be used for subdivisions. Instead, in my neck of the woods, at least, huge tracts of lands that used the be used for food farming are now being planted over with pine trees for timber and leased out to groups of town-dwellers as hunting land. (As is the case with the 800 acres of former farmland my family owns in south Georgia.)

So what problem, exactly, are our "vertical farm" advocates trying to solve?

Lake Trout: Who Knew?

2010-10-13T07:16:00.008-04:00

My wife and I just finished watching the full run of the HBO series The Wire on DVD from Netflix. Absolutely brilliant, gripping, and for me, at least, proof positive that television shows--yes, television--will be considered the high literature of our day fifty years in the future.

Part of the reason is that the show captures the city of Baltimore in the way that no one has captured a city since Raymond Chandler portrayed L.A. in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s. There's a throw-away line somewhere in season 3 or 4 where someone mentions "lake trout" and notes that it's neither a trout nor from a lake.

And I had no idea what they were talking about until I saw John T. Edge's United Tastes piece on it in the New York Times. As it turns out, Atlantic whiting is the most commonly used fish for "lake trout". It's a great piece, and makes me want to learn more about Baltimore. A fascinating city.

On the Way: the Rice Market

2010-10-11T06:27:00.001-04:00

Nice to see, as the Post & Courier reported this weekend, that the old Boathouse location down on East Bay St. will soon be home to a new restaurant called the Rice Market. It sounds like the Crew Carolina guys are going to be involved in running the place, and it will serve "regional and international cuisine."

I'm not exactly sure what to make of this comment from one of the partners, Walter Brock, in explaining the restaurant's motif: "We have an overabundance of Lowcountry fare, which is always delicious, but if you live in Charleston full-time you don't get the same thing you get in bigger cities."

It's not like shrimp and grits and she crab soup are the only things you can eat in Charleston. La Fourchette, Fat Hen, 39 Rue de Jean, G&M, Mistral, Trattoria Lucca, Al Di La, Bacco, Fulton Five, Pan e Vino, Wild Olive, Mercato, Il Cortile de Rey,Fuel, el Bohio, Cajun Kountry Kitchen, Basil, Quyen/Party Kingdom, Pho Bac, Tasty Thai, Red Orchids, Olimpik, Samos Taverna, Opa Cafe, Manny's, Nirlep, Pooja's, Taste of India, Lana, Muse, Ali Baba, the other Ali Baba, La Nortena, Santi's, Uno Mas, Wasabi, Tsunami, O-Ku, Sushi Haru, Chai's Lounge, and the Voodoo Lounge are just a few of the "international" places that immediate spring to mind.

But, still, I'll be curious to see what the Rice Market brings to the mix. It's a great location and a big space to work with.

Chicagoans Invade the South on BBQ Road Trip

2010-10-09T08:58:00.000-04:00

Kevin Pang and Keith Claxton, two guys from the Chicago Tribune, are off on a barbecue road trip through the South. Day 1 took them from Chicago all the way to Nashville, then Day 2 and 3 across the state of North Carolina, where they hit such notable spots as the Barbecue Center and Lexington Barbecue in Lexington, Richard's in Salisbury, Allen & Son in Chapel Hill, the Pit in Raleigh, the Skylight Inn in Ayden, and Wilber's in Goldsboro. That's one hell of a two day winning streak.

Day 5 took them through South Carolina where, I must say, from a purely barbecue perspective, they squandered all their time in Columbia instead of getting off I-20 and heading to Hemingway and Gadsden. Day 6 was a dash through Atlanta all the way to New Orleans, where they are apparently now off on a raw oyster detour.

One of the more interesting things is their coverage of a stop at the improbably-named J.J. McBrewster's in Lexington, Kentucky, where the staff was resting up and bracing up for the broadcast of their appearance on Guy Fieri's cloying Food Network show "Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives." The interesting part is what an appearance on "the Triple D", as it apparently is called, can do for an otherwise out-of-the-way strip mall restaurant: 3 hour waits, apparently, are par for the course. Go figure.

The road trip's good stuff, and you can follow it here: http://bbqroadtrip.tumblr.com/.

A Lost Southern Delicacy

2010-10-07T06:16:00.000-04:00

What could be more Southern than pimento cheese and boiled peanuts? How about the two of them mixed together?

My recent research has led me into the origins of various Southern foods, and recently I uncovered this gem from George Washington Carver's Bulletin Number 31 of the Experimental Station at the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute (1916). Carver, the famous peanut innovator, included the following recommended peanut recipe:

PEANUT CREAM CHEESE WITH PIMENTO

To every pound of cream cheese grind ½ ounce of pimento pepper and one ounce of peanuts in the same way recommended for the above [a recipe of “peanut cream cheese with olives”].

This recipe was part of Carver's treatise “How to Grow the Peanut and 105 Ways of Preparing it for Human Consumption” It appeared as item #102 on the list, well after dozens of scrumptious sounding candies and desserts and even after such dubious concoctions as Liver with Peanuts (#37) and Peanut Macaroni and Cheese (#46). While ambitious in its combining two items that were well on their way to becoming iconic Southern foods, Carver was notably unsuccessful in getting peanut pimento cheese to stick.

Two great tastes that taste great together? You be the judge . . .

Hey, I made it into Wikipedia!

2010-10-05T22:45:00.000-04:00

No, not my own entry, but as an authoritative source on the history of barbecue sauce.

And, no, I was NOT Googling myself. What makes you think that?

Are we at a lull?

2010-10-04T22:32:00.000-04:00

I always like pondering food trends, and I have great fun trying to prognosticate them, though in reality I am so poor at predicting trends it seems the only safe way to try it is with tongue firmly in cheek. That's the ultimate "win-win"--okay, sorry--the ultimate cop out. If I get any of them right I can claim to be a genius; if I get them wrong (and I usually do), well, you see, it was all just a joke, right?

So what's happening these days? Where is it all going?

Beats the hell out of me. Right now I feel like we're in sort of a lull, stuck somewhere between the ebbing of "locavorism", which is still the most prominent trend in the food world today, and whatever is going to succeed it.

Don't get me wrong. Locavorism, despite its ludicrous name, is still hot. Just this week, the National Restaurant News declared gardens to be the hottest restaurant trend of 2010 (thanks to Robb Walsh via Twitter for the tip). But, you have to admit, it's starting to feel a little stale. It seems like something is about to turn, that we're on the cusp of something new and dramatic breaking loose.

Maybe its a reflection of what's going on in the country and the world at large: the pending November elections? This lingering recession/depression thing? We got all into the weeds of it back in late 2008/early 2009 and made a big fuss and did a lot of soul searching, and then it seemed for a while earlier this year that things were starting to slowly, inch by inch, get a little bit better. Then a few months ago it all ground back down to a halt and perhaps even turned back a little in the wrong direction.

Mostly, though, it just feels like we're on hold, waiting in limbo for something to happen, but we aren't really sure what it's going to be or even what we want it to be.

Maybe it's just me and the particular spot I am in in my life, but I feel like there's something looming out there--good, bad, or just different: who knows? But something is pent up behind the dam and ready to break. I don't care to speculate about global economics, but in the food world I'm waiting for something exciting and new to happen, too.

The Internet has knocked food journalism into a tizzy, with food magazines on the ropes, traditional publishers struggling, and even a turnover in the old warhouse profession of restaurant reviewing (which really isn't that old of a profession, since we've had computer scientists and astronauts for about long as we've had restaurant reviewers.) But, somehow Yelp and iPhone apps just don't seem like they're really the way of the future.

Whatever it's going to be, it's going to be new. We need something different: a hot new trend. Food trucks have official worn out their novelty, and they were always sort of a mobile locavorism anyway.

So, what's next? I don't know. But I have just two words: bring it!

Godspeed, Buccaneer, and Fair Winds!

2010-09-30T10:37:00.000-04:00

The City Paper reports that The Buccaneer is closing its doors today. I reviewed it back in 2009 when it first opened, and went back once or twice afterwards, and I always thought it was an interesting blend of good, solid food served in a tourist-friendly environment. (That review, oddly enough, actually provoked someone to leave a comment defending the quality of the restaurant scene in Myrtle Beach. Go figure.)

The company's press release blames the challenge of opening a "large capacity family-style themed restaurant in a very difficult economy." There's surely a lot of truth in that, but I also think its out of the way location--hidden away on alley-like Faber St. just off of East Bay--probably didn't help. It simply wasn't the kind of restaurant you would stumble upon unless you were looking for it, and even trying to give someone directions on how to get there was something of a challenge.

Nevertheless, I'll have fond memories of knocking back a Legendary Painkiller or two and wolfing down spice-laden shrimp-and-tasso-stuffed collards. Blimey, matey. We'd barely said ahoy and now it's gangway and godspeed!

BBQ Sundae Part 3: The Trend Continues

2010-09-28T18:25:00.004-04:00

A few months ago I noted the rise of the barbecue sundae, the newest new-fangled way to make barbecue portable.

Now, the good folks over at Thursday Night Smackdown report finding the perfect accompaniment for your BBQ sundae at the Hamilton Park BBQ Festival: banana pudding in a jar!

Closing for the Season

2010-09-26T17:10:00.006-04:00

No, I'm not shutting down the blog or anything. But I feel like I should find something to close temporarily, since I'm officially in an "end of the season" sort of mood.

We spent the late afternoon at the neighborhood pool, enjoying the golden sunset that comes earlier each day now. It was probably our the last visit to the pool this year. Labor Day is long behind us, the boys are back in school, and September is coming to a close. And that means autumn, which arrives late on the South Carolina coast, is finally upon us.

Fall is without question my favorite time of the year, and since the summers here in Charleston are long and oppressively hot, autumn always comes as a long-anticipated relief. But, it's a wistful time, too.

I've always loved going to the beach in the late fall and early winter, long after the last party of vacationers have packed up their minivans and roof-rack containers and headed back to their regular lives somewhere else. The amusement parks and pancake houses and souvenir stands, idle and shuttered for the season, hold a strange sort of stark, wistful beauty, half melancholy and half sweet. The bustle and noise and heat of the summer lies behind us, and a cold, slow winter lies ahead.

A new season and all its energy will come again, somewhere off in the distant future, but for now it's time to rest and wait.

Results: BBQ History Quiz #3

2010-09-18T08:43:00.001-04:00

So, I got a little behind and didn't give out the answer for BBQ Quiz Question #3 on time. Here it is . . . finally.

This one was rather undramatic, since right out of the gate pretty much everyone got the answer right:

Question: Which regional barbecue sauce style is most like the sauce used at 19th century barbecues?

Responses:
A. Midlands S.C. (mustard-base): 11%
B. Eastern N.C. (vinegar-based): 66%
C: East Texas (tomato-based) 0%
D: Memphis (tomato & molasses): 11%

The answer, as most respondents knew, is B: Eastern North Carolina. Perhaps it's because Eastern North Carolina sauce is so simple that it seems old, or perhaps it's just common knowledge, but the thin, spicy, and vinegar-based does appear to be the closest thing to the original American barbecue sauce.

One of the great differentiators in regional barbecue styles today is the sauce. In Eastern North Carolina it’s thin, spicy, and vinegar-based while in Texas it’s sweet, thick, and tomato-based. Some variations—like the white mayonnaise-based sauced from Alabama and the yellow mustard-based sauce from my home state of South Carolina—are specific to only a narrow region and not widely known in other places. These famed regional sauce variations are relatively recent developments. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the sauces used for barbecue followed a consistent formula throughout the colonies and then the early United States.

Perhaps the earliest instructions for pit-cooking barbecue appears in Lettice Bryan’s The Kentucky Housewife (1839). For sauce, Bryan called for “nothing but a little salt-water and pepper, merely to season and moisten it a little.” Once the meat was done, Bryan advised cooks to “squeeze over it a little lemon juice, and accompany it with melted butter.” Three decades later, Mrs. Annabella Hill, from La Grange, GA, published similar directions in Mrs. Hill’s New Cook Book (1872), though her recipe incorporated butter and a little mustard into the basting liquid: "Melt half a pound of butter; stir into it a large tablespoon of mustard, half a teaspoonful of red pepper, one of black, salt to taste; add vinegar until the sauce has a strong acid taste.” At the end of cooking, “pour over the meat any sauce that remains.”

This basic combination of butter or some other fat, vinegar, and pepper was the standard sauce for the rest of the 19th Century. An 1860 account of a Virginia event described iron vessels positioned along the side of the pit, ”some filled with salt, and water; others with melted butter, lard, etc. into which the attendants dipped linen cloths affixed to the ends of long, flexible wands, and delicately applied them with a certain air of dainty precision to different portions on the roasting meat.” A Harper’s Weekly 1896 account of a Georgia barbecue noted that the meat was cooked for twelve hours and “basted with salt water . . . then, just before it is eaten, plentifully bedabbled with ‘dipney’—a compound of sweet country lard and the strongest vinegar, made thick and hot with red and black pepper.”

Texas today has not one but at least four separate barbecue styles, but before the 20th century it was pretty much the same as its Eastern cousins. On a Mexican Mustang Through Texas, an 1883 travelogue, described a barbecue outside San Antonio with a sauce almost identical to that used in Virginia and Georgia: “Butter, with a mixture of pepper, salt, and vinegar, is poured on the meat as it is being cooked.”

The regional variations in barbecue sauces developed in the 20th century, driven largely by the rise of barbecue restaurants and the specialization they fostered. Of all the modern variations, the simple Eastern North Carolina style of vinegar and red pepper sauce seems most like what was used in the earliest barbecues in this country.

For more results from past questions, see Barbecue History Quiz Question #2

The Raw and the Cooked (Mostly Cooked)

2010-09-14T12:27:00.002-04:00

This City Paper blurb about the new Sunday brunch buffet at the Woodlands mentions a "raw bar of local shrimp and crab claws," which got me thinking about raw bars. I've noticed on several occasions recently "raw bars" where little if anything is raw. Oysters on the halfshell: those are typically raw. But shrimp? Crab claws?

Another local restaurant I visited recently had only a single raw item (oysters, of course) on their "raw" bar but plenty of cooked ones, including shrimp cocktail, crab louis, and steamed snow crab legs.

"Shellfish bar" would be more descriptive, but in reality, are any things raw other than oysters served on a raw bar these day? Clams, perhaps, but you never see them raw in this town. Sushi, yes--but that never appears on a raw bar menu but on a separate sushi menu. So where did the "raw bar" term come from, anyway?

Mystery abounds.

Newbie from L.A. Discovers Charleston Cuisine

2010-09-12T11:03:00.000-04:00

Jessica Garrison of the Los Angeles Times gives a starry-eyed account of her Charleston restaurant tour. She admits that before this trip, she had not "spent even five minutes in the South," so it's a fun snapshot of a diner's first introduction to Lowcountry culinary delights.

Edisto's Po Pigs Bo-B-Q (yes, that is spelled correctly, after owner Bobo Lee) gets a glowing mention, as does dinner at FIG and brunch at Hominy Grill. If you had to pick just three spots for lunch, dinner, and breakfast, those are pretty good choices. (And, such continued publicity will do nothing to help reduce the ever-growing line of tourists on the Rutledge Avenue sidewalk on Saturday morning.)

I have to call foul on just one thing, though: the narrative hook that opens of the story: "Our waiter was staring at us in disbelief," Garrison writes. "Finally, he leaned forward and, ever so politely, asked my husband to repeat himself." The husband, it turns out, was inquiring of his waiter at FIG where they might go next to try more Charleston culinary specialties, after the couple had just finished three appetizers, a soup and two main courses.

Now, either it was the waiter's first week on the job, or maybe he just couldn't hear the husband the first time. Asking where to go next is just par for the course when you're trying to cram in a full week of dining in a single weekend in Charleston, and I can't imagine any seasoned downtown waiter being phased by such an eminently reasonable request. (I would have advised McCrady's, by the way, for a post-prandial pre-Prohibition cocktail and a few of the bar snacks like pimento goat cheese or ham hock and jalapeno boiled peanuts. There's always room to squeeze in a few of those.)

Meet Meat Mitch

2010-09-09T20:18:00.000-04:00

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine from Kansas City sent me a bottle of Meat Mitch BBQ Sauce, which some friends of hers--part of a KC-based competition barbecue team--have just put out on the market. I tried some right away, and thought it was pretty good, but you really need to let these things sit and percolate for a while.

So, over the past few days, I tried it here and there on some barbecue chicken wings, on some left over pork ribs, and on some of my own home-cooked chopped pork. And, in all instances, it held up quite nicely. It's a sweet, dark-brown concoction very much in the Kansas City vein: brown sugar and ketchup are the primary ingredients, and it's got a pretty considerable spice kick to it. And, one of the ingredients might surprise you: vanilla extract. Not a typical thing to find in barbecue sauce, but if you pay close attention you can detect a very subtle, sweet vanilla flavor underlying the spice.

On the label, Meat Mitch advises, "When in doubt, JUST ADD SAUCE! Use it for ribs, steak, brisket, pork, foie gras, chicken, 9 irons, eggs, your mother-in-law, use it to water flowers. WHOMP!" This might be pushing things a bit. But, it makes me wish I had some proper burnt ends to give it the true test on.

I may be a South Carolina boy, and I have a big plastic squeeze bottle of homemade mustard-based barbecue sauce in my refrigerator at all times--useful on everything from chopped pork to pickled okra. Still, I have a long standing fondness in my heart for Kansas City barbecue, and Meat Mitch's sauce is a little reminder that I need to get out west of the Mississippi very, very soon.

Fleecing the Lambs

2010-09-07T06:28:00.004-04:00

I make my living in the Internet software business and, on the side, write for good old dead tree publications, so the intersection between the web and the traditional publishing world is a topic that has long fascinated me. I've noticed--over Twitter, of all places--a seeming increase in magazines making "calls for submissions" for food writers . . . only to look at the fine print and see that there's a "reading fee" of $25 to $50 for writers to have their submission considered. This is nothing new, of course. Agents and "literary" journals' charging reading fees to gullible but hopeful writers is a long-standing tradition.

But, with the much heralded decline of traditional print media, the pressures to resort to such revenue-generating tactics seems to be increasing. Two weeks ago, Publisher's Weekly, the old warhouse trade publication of the mainstream publishing industry, announced that it was launching PW Select, which they described as "a quarterly supplement announcing self-published titles and reviewing those we believe are most deserving of a critical assessment." The deal? Pay Publishers Weekly $149 and they will include you in their listing of self-published titles (complete with your name, title, price, brief description, and ordering instructions). Plus, they will select 25 titles for a published review.

PW, the announcement noted, "briefly considered charging for reviews, but in the end preferred to maintain our right to review what we deemed worthy." So, instead of knowing that your $149 buys you a review, you're just signing up for a slight chance. And, the best part is, this review doesn't appear in the actual Publisher's Weekly print journal but rather in the "special" PW Select supplement.

The journal's "DIY" site claims that their regular readership--everyone from agents and publishers to booksellers and librarians--constitute an "ideal audience" for such a supplement, because they are "always on the alert for new talent, worthwhile books, and marketable products." PUL-LEASE. What better way to guarantee that no one takes a look at your particular self-published book than to segregate it in a "special" issue along with all the other self-published titles out there? Most agents and publishers don't even bother--or, perhaps more accurately, don't have the physical ability much less the commercial need--to even skim through the massive flood of over-the-transom manuscripts and proposals they get delivered to their doors daily. What makes anyone think they would actively seek out more material from self-published authors?

And that got me thinking about what it would cost for a self published author to just run his or her own ad in the real Publisher's Weekly--the one that all the agents, publishers, and bookstore buyers actually read. It's a little hard to tell since--not surprisingly, considering the PW Select side business--the magazine doesn't post their rates online. But from a few other online sources--like this one from the Independent Book Publishers Association--suggest that non-discounted rates for a 1/6th of a page ad would likely run you in the neighborhood of a grand. About five times as much as the "PW Select", but at least you have a prayer of someone actually seeing it.

I know the traditional print media trade is suffering, and I believe that new online media channels offer writers and other "content producers" intriguing new options for earning money from their pens . . . oops, I mean . . . keyboards without the traditional intermediaries of the publishing world. But, this worst-of-both worlds approach strikes me as more than just a little unseemly.

Labor Day Barbecue

2010-09-04T08:01:00.001-04:00

It's Labor Day weekend, and for many Americans that means one thing: barbecue. (Or, at least, grilling out in the backyard. There's a difference.) Ever wondered why?

Barbecue and Labor Day have a long association, going back to the early years of celebrating the holiday. As the name suggests, Labor Day was as product of the 19th century labor movement. Around 1880, unions and other labor organizations staged the first celebrations and gatherings, and it was made a Federal holiday in 1894.

In the early days, Labor Day celebrations were specifically linked to unionism, and they usually included massive parades with music, pro-labor banners, and lots of American flags and other patriotic symbols,too. During the conservative 1920s, the celebrations were gradually stripped of their more radical trappings, and marches were replaced by more general gatherings, festivals, and speeches, and, particularly in the Midwest and the South, barbecue was frequently served at the event.

Serving the Crowds at the Free Labor Day barbecue, Ridgway, Colorado (1940)

Over time, Labor Day became a more general public holiday dedicated to leisure. In the South, leisure time meant picnics and outings, and barbecue pitmasters took advantage of the opportunity to make a little money. In Columbia, South Carolina, a half dozen barbecue stands advertised their wares in newspaper ads each Labor Day during the 1920s and 1930s. As E. B. Lever's advertisement below shows, the meat was often sold by the bucketful, with the customers bringing their own buckets to the barbecue stand to be filled. Rival pitmaster S. E. Perry sold his "Bucket Barbecue" for 60 cents a pound and hash at 30 cents. Some of these holiday barbecue stands evolved into permanent barbecue restaurants. (I just wrote about Columbia Labor Day barbecue stands and other little known nuggets of South Carolina barbecue history in this a piece for the Charleston City Paper.)

During the 1950s, the AFL and CIO still hosted massive barbecues on Labor Day. In 1955, for example, the organizations hosted a Labor Day rally at Denison Dam that drew union members from all over the state of Texas and was capped by a keynote address by Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Sam Rayburn. By this time, however, the Labor Day barbecue had lost many of its connotations of unionism and was treated more as a long weekend of relaxation, and the barbecue gradually shifted from the pit-cooked to the backyard variety.

In 1956, the Dallas Morning News reported that members of the city’s country clubs were "preparing for a gala and final summer fling over Labor Day weekend,” with events including dances, swim meets, and barbecues. Newspapers and magazines in the 1950s and 1960s were filled with advertisements for charcoal, grills, and meat for Labor Day barbecues, and cooking out in the backyard has been an inseparable part of the Labor Day holiday ever since.

So, whether you're digging a pit to roast a whole hog, or are picking up a big aluminum tray of pulled pork from a local barbecue joint, or even just grilling some burgers out on the back porch this holiday weekend, you're taking part in a long and storied American tradition.

The Results: BBQ History Quiz #2

2010-08-29T07:10:00.001-04:00

OK, so the polls have closed on Question #2 of the Barbecue History Quiz. Time to see how everyone did.

Question: Many states claim to be the birthplace of Brunswick Stew. In what state did it really originate?

Responses:
   A. Georgia 66%
   B. North Carolina: 16%
   C: Tennessee: 11%
   D: Virginia: 5%

While Brunswick stew is a standard barbecue side dish in all four of the above states, Georgia is clearly the crowd favorite.  I can understand all the votes for Georgia, considering how ubiquitous the stew is in Peach State barbecue joints. There's an entire city in Georgia with the name of Brunswick, and it even has a very specific material piece of evidence: the original Brunswick Stew pot, which is posted on a monument at the welcome center just outside of town.

If this pot is to be believed, the very first Brunswick Stew was made on nearby St. Simon's Island on July 2, 1898. A mess sergeant, the full story goes, created the stew for a company of soldiers stationed at Gascoigne Bluff on the island. He had no particular recipe, using whatever meats and vegetables he had handy, but it turned out so tasty that local residents started copying his formula.

Now, I'm not one to argue with an old stew pot, but the truth of the matter is that Brunswick Stew was in existence long before 1898, and it's original birthplace was not in the state of Georgia.

The correct answer, which only 5% of respondents chose, is D: The State of Virginia.

Partisans of Georgia and Virginia have hotly debated the claims over the years, but Virginia's version has the most documentary legs.

Brunswick Stew most likely was the creation of one James "Uncle Jimmy" Matthews from the Red Oak neighborhood in Brunswick County, Virginia. A soldier who fought in the War of 1812, Matthews was a sociable rover and accomplished squirrel hunter whose squirrel stews made him a popular figure at picnics and public gatherings in old Virginia in the 1820s.

His recipe was quite simple. He stewed the squirrels in water along with bacon and onions until the flesh separated from the bones, which were skimmed out. He finished the stew with butter and breadcrumbs and seasoned it with salt and pepper.

After his death, Matthews was succeeded by Dr. Aaron B. Haskins as the local stew master, who was in turn succeeded by Jack Stith and then Col. W. T. Mason. Each man brought his own innovation to the recipe. Haskins was said to have added a touch of brandy or Madeira wine to the stew for flavor. Stith introduced vegetables sometime during the 1830s, adding tomato, onion, corn, and potatoes.

By the 1840s and 1850s, Brunswick Stew was a fixture at election day barbecues in the Old Dominion State, a fact attested to by numerous newspaper and diary accounts of such events.

I can't be as definitely certain about the story of Uncle Jimmy Matthews as the originator, but the story has a decent documentary trail. In 1886 the Petersburg Index-Appeal published a letter from “Tar Heel” that sketches the basic outline of the story. In 1907, I. E. Spatig, the Commissioner of Brunswick County, Virginia, wrote a pamphlet that provided a capsule history of the county, and using information from letters he solicited from residents of the Red Oak District he traced the history of the famous stew, and the responses align with the story from the Petersburg Index-Appeal. Now, even the Index-Appeal's story was some sixty years after the supposed events, and memories are murky and malleable, but it seems to firm enough to at least award the title to Virginia.

BBQ Quiz Question #3 is posted now in the sidebar.

For more results from past questions, see Barbecue History Quiz Question #1

The Greying of America

2010-08-27T06:59:00.000-04:00

The National Restaurant News reports that restaurant traffic is expected to slow as the Baby Boomer population ages. In related news, tips are expected to plummet and the "dinner rush" to shift to four to six p.m., and waiters and waitresses will hit the after-hours bars at 8:30 PM and blow their night's earnings by 10:00.

I told you so . . . again!

2010-08-23T18:47:00.001-04:00

It does seem that I have remarkable predictive powers. Things just take longer than I expect to develop. More than two years ago I made a set of food prognostications that I revisit now and again. Upon my first review, I found most of them unfilled. Like this one:

Prediction:Young cooks will fire their publicists, mothball the chef's table, and take their names off their restaurant's web sites . . . Soon, America's leading chefs will not even have restaurants at all. They'll just show up randomly at various people's houses . . . and cook an unbelievable dinner for their surprised hosts.

Review: Okay, so I wasn't even remotely close on this one. ~~Guerilla~~ Guerrilla Cuisine is still going strong, but we haven't seen any imitators crop up. Unless, of course, I actually was right. How would we know about it if the chefs don't have publicists and websites . . . maybe it's actually going on right in our own neighborhoods. You just won't know about it until that knock comes at the door and in bustles a white-jacketed chef with obnoxious puffy patterned pants and a duffel bag full of battered cookware. So, split the middle and call it 5 points, since I MIGHT have been right on here.

Ah. The trends may move slowly, but they will come. Now Stephanie Barna of the City Paper reports some more underground supper clubs coming to light, Renata Dos Santos' LIME here in Charleston and another up in Charlotte. The later is sponsored by Patron tequila, and if going commercial isn't the sign of a trend about to go mainstream I don't know what is.

Just three months ago I was able to declare fulfilled my prediction of heirloom ingredients being adopted by fast-casual chains.

Just waiting now on the return of Le Grande Cuisine ...