The Poor Mouth

Cooking with Epstein

ATING is a new memoir by Jason Epstein. I’ve written about it for Barnes & Noble Review: “First catch your hare,” begins one of the most famous and DIY-minded recipes of all time. Except—no such recipe exists. It is typically attributed to Isabella Beeton, she of Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management (1861), though some claim it is found in Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy (1747). The disappointing truth is that the phrase is merely an old saw, akin to “Don’t count your chickens,” and has nothing whatsoever to do with the culinary arts.

Likewise, the line “First catch your big break” does not appear in Jason Epstein’s Eating: A Memoir, but one could be forgiven for thinking it did. Mr. Epstein is not a cook by trade; he is in fact one of the most important figures in American book publishing, having not only more or less invented the trade paperback format (at Doubleday, aged 22) but also having helped create the New York Review of Books and the Library of America. He spent 40 years as the editorial director of Random House, working with luminaries like Nabokov, Mailer, and Doctorow.” Click here to read the whole thing.

Duncan Runs on America

ELLO AND WELCOME, new readers of The Poor Mouth! In honor of the official launch of this site—meaning I clicked a box in TypePad that says “Yes, publicize this blog”—I’m going to beg you for money like the 501(c)(3) I wish I was. But instead of offering you a garishly decorated tote bag or a pamphlet with your name listed under “Benefactor,” “Associate,” or “Amigo,” I’ll tempt you with something that’s actually cool: a damaged and pencil-marked but AUTOGRAPHED first edition of Duncan Hines’s Duncan Hines’ [sic] Food Odyssey (1955).

Needless to say, I have only one of these, and I’m saving it for whomever sends me the biggest PayPal donation by December 20th—which is to say I’m giving it to my mom for Christmas unless one of you is man enough to stop me. Did you know that Duncan Hines® was a real person before he was So Moist. So Delicious. And so much more?™ According to the Food Odyssey, which in the history of literature is second in importance only to the regular Odyssey, greasy-fingered Duncan is

an erect and well set-up individual, just short of six feet tall, with thinning gray hair, a ruddy complexion, a genial twinkle in his eyes, and only slightly on the rotund side. While undoubtedly one of America’s best-known gourmets, he is definitely not a gourmand. During the past thirty years he has traveled over two million miles by automobile, train, and plane throughout every state in the Union, parts of Canada, Mexico, and the Hawaiian Islands in the quest for good food and good living. He has probably eaten in more different places that any other living man.

Duncan Hines® may be So Moist™ and so forth, but Duncan Hines the man was probably something like Don Draper’s senile father-in-law. The Food Odyssey is full of tidbits like: “You may even ride about the grounds in a genuine Chinese pedicab, half bicycle and half ricksha [sic], pedaled by an authentically costumed ‘coolie.’” And how about this Runyonesque dialogue?

[W]e were ready to drive away when around the corner of the square came a colored man carrying a basket covered with a snowy napkin and calling out, “Fried chicken, twenty cents a hunk!”

“Twenty cents isn’t much,” I said to my friend. “Let’s try a ‘hunk’ of his chicken.”

To our amazement it was excellent—warm, crisp, and golden-brown. I asked the vendor what he did to get his chickens so tender.

“Well, suh,” he answered, “I gets up early in the morning and chases them roosters around the yard until they gets up a good hot sweat, and then I wrings their heads off right now!”

It is, in spite of these embarrassing morsels, a remarkable book, “with lots of authentic recipes,” as the jacket promises. Think of it as a hokey, unreconstructed cousin of Mark Kurlansky’s The Food of a Younger Land. And then pay me for it. But why? Well, I could tell you that Stefan Beck® (So Charred. So Congealed. And so much less satisfying than you’d imagined.™) suffered a variety of unexpected setbacks in fiscal year 2009 and can really use the help. Or that he’s seriously considering culinary school and needs tuition money. Or that he’s fighting the obesity epidemic by teaching schoolchildren to render their own animal fats in a safe, environmentally conscious way. None of these is strictly untrue. But—why donate money to The Poor Mouth by clicking here or on the button to your right? Just ask Mr. Duncan Hines himself, on page 186:

Many thanks, from my cutting board to yours!

Pigs, Romans, Countrymen

E MARTINMAS REVELERS received a piece of good news as our meal was winding down: Our associate Mr. Tobias Arianna, of Arianna-Braun Architects, had just taken Juror’s Favorite at the 2009 New York Canstruction® contest, an “international charity competition where architects, engineers, contractors and students they mentor, compete to design and build giant structures made entirely from full cans of food. . . . [A]ll of the food from the New York City competition will be donated to City Harvest.” Toby, the dude responsible for my recent impromptu trip to Wellfleet, MA, contributed, along with the other members of his outfit, “Feed the Bank,” a giant piggy bank made up of 3,024 cans: all Chicken of the Sea® salmon, plus a “coin” in the top—a big old tin of “some generic sugar cookies,” according to Toby. In honor of “Feed the Bank,” I have decided to blog a porcine kitchen failure that I had intended to leave unreported. I’m talking, unfortunately, about Chinese red-braised pig ears. When I get done with this, you will never have to think about trying pig ears. Ever.

If you live in an affluent area, you’re unlikely to find these pre-packaged in the meat section of your grocery store. But all pigs have them, so if you ask your butcher nicely, I’m sure he’ll be able to track a few of them down. I paid $2.27 for four of them, and they were worth every penny and not a penny more. In case you’ve never seen a pig up close, the ear is roughly the size of a human hand. It is one of the most human-looking things I’ve ever eaten, but I’m not going to, you know, cry about it.

On to the preparation, which is simple, pretty inexpensive, and correspondingly mediocre. I got it from Serious Eats. I have no idea why Chichi Wang’s ear looks so much redder-braised than mine—longer cooking time? Different soy sauce? The correct rice wine? Anyway, you’ll need star anise, half a cinnamon stick, a quarter-cup of Shaoxing rice wine (I used Ka-Me), three tablespoons of soy sauce, and two tablespoons of sugar. Parboil the ears—“to remove any scum and impurities,” she says. Oh, there’ll be “impurities.” It’ll look like Satan’s bathwater.

Put the parboiled ears in a pot. Cover them with water, add the other stuff, and bring the floppy, nasty mess to a rolling boil. Wang suggests simmering for two and a half hours, after which “[a] chopstick should easily pierce through the skin.” I thought my ears were done when they passed the chopstick test, but since my mixture never really “reduced into a syrupy mass,” I suspect my real problem was too little heat and too much water to start out with. I will not, however, be giving this a second chance. Even had the flavors been there, the texture is singularly unpleasant—chomping into this ugly flap of cartilage, you’ll feel just like Mike Tyson. Ancient Chinese secret: Stick to bacon.

Party Marty

OW’S THIS FOR a weird-ass thing to celebrate? “St. Martin’s Day (or Martinstag or Martinmas) is November 11, the feast day of Martin of Tours, who started out as a Roman soldier. He was baptized as an adult and became a monk.” That tidbit comes from Wikipedia, but since it’s a Catholic saint we’re trying to learn about, we must dip into a much older source of widely accepted half-truths: the Legenda Aurea or Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine. Here’s what this collection of medieval hagiographies has to say about our man Marty: “Martin is as much to say as holding Mars, that is the God of battle, against vices and sins. Or Martin is said as one of the martyrs, for he was a martyr by his will, and by mortifying of his flesh. Or Martin is expounded thus: As despising, provoking, or seignioring. He despised the devil his enemy, he provoked the name of our Lord to mercy, and he seigniored over his flesh by continual abstinence in making it lean. . . .”

Sorry, what? I must have dozed off. At any rate, speaking of “flesh,” St. Martin’s Day happens to be celebrated by feasting upon a delicious goose. Often there’s also a parade of children carrying lanterns (see above, from some creepy country like Germany). Over the weekend I was invited to both a lantern walk and a goose carving. Since I’m not a Krampus, I decided to pass on the former—but who could say no to this?

I have no idea how the hostess prepared that thing. I’ll try to find out. It all happened before I arrived, and besides, I was too shellacked (hi, Mom) on French 75s (hi, St. Martin of Tours) to have the faintest clue what was going on. Here’s my associate Max Watman—the author of this forthcoming masterpiece—on the French 75, the queen of cocktails.

Isn’t she beautiful? Sketchy dudes take note—the womenfolk were practically unintelligible after like two sips of this thing.

It’s lucky there was some stick-to-your-ribs carbohydrate to soak this up. The following picture puts me in mind of a probably apocryphal story about Diogenes of Sinope. A well-meaning friend told Diogenes something like, “If you would only learn to flatter the tyrant, you wouldn’t have to eat lentils.” To which Diogenes said, “If you would only learn to eat lentils, you wouldn’t have to flatter the tyrant.” To which I said, “If you would only learn to make lentils this tasty, we wouldn’t be standing around in togas having this dumb conversation.” (The finished dish included candy-like chunks of sugar pumpkin.)

So I don’t know how to roast a goose or cook lentils—what am I good for, except, as one friend put it, “eating-related self-calls”? I can tell you how to mix up something that will blow the effin’ doilies off your Thanksgiving appeteaser table this year: cranberry salsa dip with cream cheese. First, you click this. Then you do what it says. Then you get a big mouthful of cranberry, capsaicin, cream cheese, cilantro, ginger, and the elegant cracker of your choice.

Just look at that. Festive enough for ya?

Jersey Deviled Ham

VERYONE KNOWS NEW JERSEY is weird. I made this discovery in the late 1990s, while visiting Secaucus for a horror convention. Neither Secaucus nor the horror convention was particularly weird, unless you find grown men in cenobite masks weird and not just sad. No, what I found was a vendor selling back issues of Weird NJ, a magazine about “places you won’t find on state-funded maps or located on any tourist attraction pamphlets.” Every state has its folklore and local color, but only the Garden State, it seems, has enough to fill issue after issue of a semi-respected periodical with creepy signage, abandoned buildings, paranormal happenings, tall tales, and so on. Do I even need to point out that a state whose NHL team is named after a cryptid is probably situated on a ley line, if not a 22,608-square-kilometer Indian burial ground?

And yet. The weirdest thing about New Jersey is not to be found in the pages of Weird NJ or in the depths of the Pine Barrens but in the deli sections of the Garden State’s supermarkets. The weirdest thing about New Jersey is the esteem in which it holds pork roll, also known as Taylor Ham. The current issue of the New Yorker features a piece by Calvin Trillin on poutine, that famous Québécois concatenation of fries, curds, and gravy, in which he writes, “Jokes about poutine . . . are the equivalent of jokes about the Scots eating haggis or Scandinavians in the upper Midwest crowding into church basements to feast on lutefisk.” But as regional or national novelties go, poutine, haggis, and lutefisk are haute cuisine next to this underwhelming disc of processed minced ham.

The Wikipedia entry for pork roll should be read in full, but here’s my favorite passage: “A common practice is to slice four cuts from the outer edges inwards about 3/4 inch to an inch towards the center, evenly spaced around the circumference. These cuts prevent the pork roll from curling up in the middle, which causes it to cook unevenly. With these cuts, the cooked slices have become known by many different names such as fireman’s badges, pac-man bacon, and notch meat.” I can’t conceive of anything classier than making something called “pac-man bacon” your state food. An associate of mine from New Jersey is so protective of the “Jersey breakfast” that he chastised me in earnest for referring to the bread as a “Kaiser bun” rather than a “hard roll.”

Without further ado, here’s what all the goddamn fuss is about.

TRENTON MAKES, the rest of the world gets breakfast at McDonald’s. (On the real, though, it’s pretty okay as a sandwich.)

OysterFest Redux

FTER UNDERGOING EXTENSIVE PAST-LIFE, or rather past-month, regression therapy, my associate Cricket (the names have not been changed) was able to remember how to make oyster stew. Sort of. For the brave souls who would like to try this at home, and who have a cauldron handy, I give you her ‘recipe’: “I have watched them a couple of times. They throw a big glob of butter into the hot skillet, where it sizzles . . .”

“Then they start throwing in the condiments from the tray—lots of chopped garlic, tomatoes, the green herb mixture—what else? Did you get a picture of that tray?” I did. Here it is. Chopped green onions—but what the hell is that mixture that looks like fermented grass clippings?

“After sautéing for a couple of minutes, they open a quart of oysters and pour them into the pan. They shake that around for a minute or two and then pour in a bunch of cream. When that is hot, they add it to the big cauldron at the end of the line. . . . Now, somehow potatoes show up in this concoction, which raises the question of the big pot—did they start out with chowder base? Or just potatoes? Is the guy at the end adding already-cooked potatoes? This is something we will have to investigate next year.”

Down Home Cookin’

ALLOWE’EN IS OVER. For real this time. I’m sorry I didn’t make it to the pairing of pickled beef  heart with Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977) or of Italian tripe soup with Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust (1980) and Umberto Lenzi’s Cannibal Ferox (1981; a.k.a. Make Them Die Slowly). (I’m sorry, but you’re probably not.) So I’ll end this seasonal tribute on a more appetizing note, with one of my all-time favorite southern suppers: chicken fried steak, a.k.a. country fried steak, a.k.a plain old CFS. I’ve had this all over the South, but I think Texas holds the patent. In any case, I stole this recipe, and the one for gravy, from Homesick Texan. Since I’d just be rehashing the instructions provided there, and since I don’t want to make a habit of that (much as I’d like to), I’m just going to slap up a picture of the finished product and say: Make this thing. If CFS weren’t fairly messy and involved, and if I weren’t so bad at making gravy, I’d run the risk of eating it every night.

For those completely in the dark, CFS is a piece of brutally tenderized top round, a.k.a. cube steak, deep-fried like a piece of chicken. Lest there be any confusion, the same piece of meat is sold as top round (tenderize it yourself!) and cube steak (already given the once-over). Real Texans use tiny hammers, and so did I.

You know the gravy’s legit because it looks like Elmer’s Glue with fruit flies caught in it. It takes a decent bit of practice to get the consistency and the salt just right. Before I sign off, I’d like to quote Homesick Texan on one important matter: “When I’ve spoken of chicken-fried steak to the uninitiated, people always get hung up on the choice of beef: ‘Wouldn’t it be better if it were made with, say, a porterhouse?’ they’ll ask. But they’re missing the point. I don’t want to put you off and say it tastes like shoe leather (which its detractors are wont to complain), but after beating the beef and frying it up, there is just no advantage to using prime steak. Much like chili or barbecued brisket, chicken-fried steak was a tasty and innovative solution to only having not-so-choice beef on hand.”

Dagon Come and Me Wan’ Go Home

OWARD PHILLIPS LOVECRAFT. Some call him the true master of the horror story. Others call him a misunderstood genius. Still others (me, I mean) call him a corpse-like weirdo whose writing sounds like Satan hired William F. Buckley Jr. to write publicity copy for Hell. Consider this sentence from “The Call of Cthulhu”: “The Thing cannot be described—there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order.” He’s talking about the giant bat-winged, squid-faced cephalopod Cthulhu. Cthulhu is not, it turns out, all that hard to describe.

“The Call of Cthulhu” has never been made into a major motion picture, but a Lovecraft novella, The Shadow Over Innsmouth, was adapted into a monstrously (haw haw) crappy Spanish movie called Dagon in 2001. Dagon is about a fishing village that sells its soul, so to speak, to an evil sea-god in exchange for lots of fish and golden ingots. Again, Dagon sucks. Do not watch it. Rent a real movie like La Dolce Vita for a change and try this sophisticated and cosmopolitan Mario Batali recipe for stuffed and grilled mini-Dagons.

I was happy to learn that squid is cheap as hell—eight calamari, about a pound of squid, cost just seven bucks at Pagano’s Seafood in Norwalk. The squidmongers were friendly, courteous, and professional. They’d damn well better be—like a WalMart security camera, Dagon is always watching his minions.

This recipe reveals why recipes are often of little use to truly incompetent novice cooks. Mario says: “Remove the tentacles and clean the calamari, leaving the bodies whole.” What actually needs to happen, in Lovecraftian terms: “First, decapitate the Thing with an eldritch cleaver engraved with eldritch glyphs (like the Wüsthof logo). With thumb and forefinger, probe the briny, abysmal recesses of its mucilaginous form, relieving it of its pulpy polyps; its quill-like, translucent spine; its ink as Stygian as a thousand dead stars.” Then you peel it and wash it. Nasty. Not to mention, uh, eldritch.

Prepare the stuffing thusly: “Heat the olive oil in a 10- to 12-inch sauté pan until smoking. Add the garlic and sun-dried tomatoes and sauté until light golden brown, about 30 seconds. Add the bread crumbs and continue cooking until well mixed. Allow to cool then stir in the thyme, scallions and parsley.” Stuff ’em. Grill for about ten minutes, add to the pasta of your choice, and . . . pray for a swift death. Cthulhu fhtagn!

Freedom Isn’t Free

VER THE WEEKEND I received the following urgent instructions from Captain Rollo: “To a mason jar of bourbon, add bacon grease. Refrigerate for 1-2 days. Move to freezer. Remove congealed grease. Consume.” He explained that he had received this gnosis from “a guy I met tailgating at the Carolina-Duke football game,” and added, “I tasted his. It was good without being amazing. Mine’s in the fridge.” I’m not sure I approve of adulterating good bourbon that way—there are some things you can ruin with bacon grease—so I’ll take mine the old-fashioned way and raise a glass and a ’Stone to a true and truly sloppy American hero.

Happy Veterans Day, Rollo—and thanks for making it through a war without learning any lessons about temperance, self-control, or sound judgment. America salutes you and your bacon-flavored alcohol.

Muck o’ the Irish

T THE RATE I’m going, I should finish my Hallowe’en food pairings just in time for Thanksgiving. The present meal, Irish beef stew, was actually conceived and executed in November, but I’ll pretend that I meant it as a tribute to Leprechaun. I’ve never watched Leprechaun, which happens to be Jennifer Aniston’s silver screen debut, but thanks to IMDB I know that it boasts Faulknerian dialogue: “Help. Help. It’s happening. The attack is on. O’Grady farm. Uh, send help. The leprechaun is attacking. Army, navy, guns, marines, and we’re gunna [sic] need some medicine.”

It’s about time we got some Irish “cuisine” going on this blog, which after all is named after Myles na gCopaleen’s An Béal Bocht, also known as Flann O’Brien’s The Poor Mouth, also known as Brian O’Nolan’s “delicious parody of Gaelic-language autobiographical peasant narratives,” in the words of a certain Fintan O’Toole. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, just Google.

This recipe is adapted from “Beef & Guinness Stew,” which appears in Lynn Alley’s The Gourmet Slow Cooker: Simple and Sophisticated Meals from Around the World. You will need flour, two and a half pounds of stew beef, vegetable oil, a few potatoes, a few onions, a bag of baby carrots, two sprigs of thyme, a bottle of Harp, and some salt.

The recipe in the book has you putting 3/4 cup flour into a bag and coating the beef with it. You might want to spring for the full cup—that’s quite a lot of beef, and most of the flour will disappear at once into the two tablespoons of vegetable oil you’ll use to coat your “large sauté pan over medium-high heat.” Each batch of beef should brown in the oil for ten minutes or so. Turn frequently so you don’t miss any beef-chunk facets. Next, quarter three onions, cube three potatoes—try not to shave off your fingertips, unless you’re considering a Braille-reading hobby or a career as a yegg—and portion out a decent pile of baby carrots.

Place the meat in a slow cooker with thyme and two cups of Harp. Cook it on low for an hour and a half. Then add your vegetables and a cup of water and cook for an additional seven hours. Salt and sample as you go. When ready to serve, add a tablespoon of drunken tears and garnish with four-leaf clovers.