Your Grandma's Pot

Everybody has their favorite kitchen object. I got an old round cast-iron griddle at a flea market many years ago that is perhaps my favorite piece of cooking equipment. It fits perfectly on one burner, and it allows me to cook more than one thing at a time--eggs, potatoes, and shrimp for breakfast; grilled cheese and sliced zucchini for lunch. I use it a lot.

A friend of mine, Ted Mann in Arlington Virginia, is always looking for antique kitchen stuff at flea markets and church bazaars and giving them to me. He’s obsessed with old kitchen equipment, and I sometimes get the benefit of his obsession.

He found a few things for me last year that are some of my favorite items: French steel sauté pans and a 14” oval copper-bottomed sauté pan, presumably for fish, for $10. The latter has that wonderful, hammered finish that you don’t see in modern versions.

Ted also has some nice old appliances. One is an old toaster that looks vaguely Art Deco or perhaps Mission inspired, but it is small, and recently we had a good laugh trying to toast some large Tuscan bread slices in it. We just had to do a turn-and-toast a couple of times.

Ted’s found me a couple of beautiful antique tools, like this whisk, which I have hanging up.

Recently, he got a whole box of cookware, including a set of 1960s Magnalite cookware for a few bucks. This was the earliest aluminum cookware for the home, and it's still some of the best.

Like all old things, old pots, pans, and whisks have stories, and you wish they could talk about them: the kid who set off the fire alarm because he buttered the bread before he put it in the toaster, or the grandmother who used the whisk to make a cake for her husband not long before he died, or the carving knife that sliced a turkey on that lonely Christmas during WWII.

I don’t know my griddle's or my pans' stories but I connect to them anyway. I know that my old tools have a culinary history and that someone somewhere was comforted by what they cooked with them.

And I continue the tradition, and the stories. Except the part about buttering the bread before it goes into the toaster.

The Best Gumbo Ever

I’ve had stuff in my freezer for months waiting to go into my next big pot of badass gumbo, and finally I decided to clean out the freezer and do it—leftover turkey from Thanksgiving, turkey stock (I thought), shrimp, sausage, and a couple of squirrels from Terry my neighbor (the same one who gave me the trout in an earlier posting).

The squirrels were the wild card here—new for me—but sheesh, they more or less have parts like a chicken, right, except for arms where wings would be? And except for the fact that they kind of look vaguely fetus-like...


I started out with what now has become a normal gumbo beginning—first you make a roux.
(Traditionally gumbo could be thickened with roux, or okra, or filé powder, but not all three. Today, roux-based gumbos are common, with okra thrown in, and filé as a kind of condiment seasoning at the end.)

A gumbo roux is dark, and it’s easy to burn, so I keep the fire low. I used 10 tablespoons each of olive oil and flour. It takes two hours for me to produce a good roux on low heat, but at least I don’t ruin it. Here's the roux at the beginning


and the end of the two hours.



Then into the roux went 4 cups of chopped onion, bell pepper, and celery, and that cooked for 10 minutes.

Then in went what I thought was frozen turkey stock—except that it wasn’t. It was another roux + vegetables gumbo base that I had frozen for a quick start next time. So now I had a gumbo base cooking that was as thick as paste. I had to thin it out with lots more canned stock and chopped tomatoes (and a bottle of beer), which gave me a lot of liquid to work with. This was going to be a big pot o' gumbo, really big.



All I could do is try to fill the void with whatever I had--in this case, two pounds of smoked sausage, two pounds of shrimp, two squirrels, 8 cups of chopped turkey. In case it wasn’t enough, I took out the fryer I had and began to thaw that.

The shrimp I boiled for 5 minutes, cut each in half horizontally (to allow more shrimp pieces to permeate the soup), and boiled the shrimp water down to concentrate the flavor before putting it in the gumbo.

A classic formula for gumbo has a trio of meats: a red meat, a fowl, and a fish or shellfish. The squirrel was an odd West Virginia touch—Creole meets Mountaineer.

I had no experience with squirrel, so I tried first just cooking the whole squirrels in the gumbo liquid for 30 minutes and then trying to cut them up. I wasn’t very efficient, so I put all the mutilated parts into a strainer and continued to cook the squirrel in the gumbo. Twenty minutes later, they were still tough, so I took the parts out and braised them in a separate pot with some wine. The meat is very lean, but not at all gamey.


The whole process took most of Mother’s Day, but since my recently deceased mother was a great cook, she would have been right there with me. And she was. OK, except that mother only made seafood gumbo, with shrimp, crabs, and oysters, and she might have winced at the squirrel carcasses.

I like serving gumbo with the rice on top for color contrast, garnished with chopped parsley and green onions. And in this case, a bit of braised squirrel in the bowl.

Happy mother’s day, mother. Except for the sausage, turkey, and squirrel, my gumbo is your gumbo.

Pineapple Palate

I really love fresh pineapple, but whenever it’s served in restaurants or on buffets, it’s either canned or never ripe enough. To get really good, sweet pineapple—assuming you don’t live in a pineapple growing region—you have to let it ripen at home past the point you think is long enough. Most information about pineapples say that they do not get sweeter as they ripen off the stalk.

That has not been my experience. But to get the best taste, I’ve found that there should be no green anywhere on the fruit. Yellows and browns and oranges are the right, ripe colors. It can take two weeks after I bring a pineapple home before I cut it, because most supermarkets sell green fruit, not bush-ripened fruit.

The first picture is a pineapple I bought a couple of days ago. It’s mostly green with a bit of yellow toward the bottom. Buy a pineapple with some color at the bottom and it will ripen better than a completely green one. Still, if I tried to eat it now, it would be hard and too acidic—and frankly, flavorless.
The next picture is of a pineapple I’ve had sitting around for over 2 weeks. There is no green left at all. It had a very strong pineapple aroma. You have to be careful it doesn’t overripen, but if it does, just cut out any brown areas you see after you cut it, and it’s fine.

It ripens from bottom to top, so the bottom of the pineapple will always be sweeter than the top. Some websites say to ripen a pineapple upside down so the sugars get more distributed. I don’t know if this is true, but it can’t hurt, assuming you can find a place to hang or stand it upside down.

You can cut a fresh, ripe pineapple into slices and then peel and core them, or peel it first and then slice and core. Grill some slices with a bit of honey and bbq sauce and it’s a wonderful accompaniment to barbequed pork or chicken.

Warning: Pineapple contains a protein enzyme, which means it can be used to tenderize meat, but some people are also sensitive to fresh pineapple’s enzymes. My friend Mark says that if he eats fresh pineapple, his mouth and throat swell. If you cook pineapple, it eliminates the problem.

I’m glad my palate is pineapple friendly.

Mesclun is Not a Drug

I planted some mesclun (salad mix) seeds five weeks ago, a bit early perhaps, and they seemed to take forever to sprout. I’m impatient, but coaxing them is useless. Giving plant food to seeds is overkill.

Mesclun is a French dialect word meaning “mix”, so technically “mesclun mix” is redundant, but it’s not any worse than “PIN number”. Such is language use.

My “gourmet” mix includes green and red lettuces, arugula, curly endive, Russian kale. The combinations vary from seed company to seed company; read the labels. There is usually a combination of lettuces and bitter greens, and some curly something-or-other to make it look “gourmet.” They’re all delicious.

Anybody can grow salad, even in the city. Salad mixes can grow with less sun than summer vegetables require, and they’re perfectly happy in cool weather. Growing your own won’t replace going to the green grocer or supermarket for greens, but it’s a satisfying act to pick a few of your homegrown lettuce leaves and throw them into the salad bowl or on a sandwich.

My mesclun babies are now about an inch and a half high, and they’ll need to be thinned soon. They’re growing in barrels so I can tend them more easily.

Annual herbs are also easy to grow in barrels, but you do need some sun, so if your condo balcony faces northwest, you’re out of luck.

But more on the mesclun as it grows up.

Nothing Fishy

Wednesday, April 22

My neighbor, Terry, is a good fisherman, and the local streams here are stocked with trout. Terry’s wife doesn’t particularly like to gut fish for cooking, so I often get the fruits de mer of his labor.

I love fresh trout, not only because of the great taste fresh fish has, but because of a couple of good lessons it teaches me. One is what fresh fish look and smell like. The trout that Terry gives me has virtually no smell (they’re fresh water fish) except a kind of clean fish smell.

This gives me a comparison when I want to buy fresh fish at a market. I have no difficulty asking the person behind the fish counter to let me smell the fish before I buy it. If it smells ‘fishy’ or off in any way, I don’t bother. I can get something better in the freezer aisle.

A clean fish smell, except when I gut them. Then it’s easy to understand why Terry’s wife might not want to do this. But that’s the second lesson. You remind yourself when you disembowel a whole animal that you are eating something that was alive recently, and you try to appreciate the ladder of life that permits one species to consume another one.

I can understand vegetarianism, but I can’t understand people who eat animal protein but who do not want to know that it comes from animals. Such culinary denial. If we all had to catch and slaughter our own animal protein, we’d probably eat a lot less of it.

Thank you, Messieurs Trout (and Fisherman Terry). That I am higher on the food chain than you may just be an accident. But in this universe, my culinary spirit is grateful. Excuse me while I go get some flour and oil for the pan.