The Poor Mouth

Wishing You a Green Christmas

[Insert Phở Pun Here]

NLY MY REALLY LONGTIME readers know this, but I got my start in soup. My very first non-Ramen foray into cooking, in a cockroach-terrorized Philadelphia micro-kitchen, was something called cock-a-leekie soup. Before that, when I lived in Manhattan’s Chinatown, I ate a particular variety of beef phở almost every day at a particular restaurant in my neighborhood. I told everyone it was the best—their meatballs didn’t have those kernels of gristle or hoof or whatever it is that you sometimes find in phở meatballs—but nobody listened. What made me the expert?

Well, whaddayah know, skeptics, contrarians, and haters? New York Magazine has pronounced the phở at Pho Bang the finest phở in New York: “The national soup of Vietnam isn’t hard to come by in Chinatown, but this one stands out for its rich, mellow flavor and beautiful balance. The #1 combination rice-noodle beef soup is heavy on the pinkish eye of round and light on the brisket, with just a sliver of tendon and whisper of omosa, or cow stomach, which, for some, is plenty ($5.50; 157 Mott St., nr. Grand St.; 212-966-3797).” I can’t plead superb judgment, though; I liked Pho Bang mainly because it was in lurching distance. 

[Phở ga: the one that got away.]

Despite dining at Pho Bang dozens of times, I never got around to sampling the phở ga, or chicken phở. I couldn’t imagine how, in a phở contest, chicken could compete with beef, or how, in a chicken soup contest, phở could compete with, say, the purity and goodness of Campbell’s. So, overcome by curiosity, I gave this recipe a try. “Rich, mellow flavor” is putting it too mildly. This broth is liquid gold, and has made star anise my favorite spice by a wide margin. (If you’re wondering why anyone need have a favorite spice: This was an actual question on a Penzey’s application I came dangerously close to filling out.)

The secret to beef phở is cow parts. Look at this guide: You’ve got flank, crunchy flank, fatty flank, brisket, tendon, tripe, and meatballs. The secret to chicken phở is the broth, plain and simple. Chicken is chicken, and this goes double for chicken that cooked off a stewing bird for hours. The meat isn’t really the point, which is why most of it—along with a hundred tiny bones—ends up in the trash.

All credible phở recipes call for charred onion and ginger, and I’m in no position to argue, but I have to admit that I didn’t taste much ginger in the finished product. I did taste excellence, however, so I’m not going to advise you to deviate from Steamy Kitchen’s procedure: “Place ginger and onion on a small baking sheet. The top of the onion should be about 4″ from the oven’s heating element. Set to broil on high for 15 minutes. Turn the onion and ginger occasionally, to get an even char. . . . After cooling, rub to get the charred skin off the onion and use a butter knife to scrape the skin off the ginger.” Perhaps my oven sucks, but I needed about twice as long to get the vaguest intimations of an “even char.”

Once you’ve prepared your onion, ginger, bouquet garni (two tablespoons of coriander seeds, four cloves, two star anise pods), and “small bunch of cilantro stems,” it’s time for the fun part: mangling your stewing bird. Part of your broth’s chicken flavor comes from chicken meat, but most of it comes from marrow. The more thoroughly you score or break the chicken’s bones, the more delicious, super-healthy marrow leaches out into your broth. Don’t be shy! Those bones will give a surprising amount of resistance, but if you persevere, you will show that nasty, beady-eyed little bastard who’s boss.

I’m tired, and it’s Christmas Eve, so I will now refer you back to the recipe. DO parboil your chicken and change its water! DO simmer your broth for as long as you can stand (the fragrance will make this extremely difficult). And DO strain the finished product with at minimum a fine-mesh strainer and preferably a cheesecloth. The satisfaction of making perfectly fine, particle-free broth from a nasty mess of chicken carcass is well worth the trouble. It’d make a fine meal even without the chicken, noodles, mung beans, cilantro, sliced jalapeño peppers, hot sauce, and, in this case, “bonus shrimp.”

Caught Red Handed

ELL, IT LOOKS AS THOUGH this site’s only truly faithful reader, a certain Southern-food-loving Irishman, has taken the grand prize. (The second- and third-place donors will receive a Mason jar of my homemade lard, perhaps.) I thought about using Rollo’s generous contribution to make a dozen Sunrise-style chicken biscuits, or to procure some of a very powerful substance popular in the South, but I decided instead to explore Rollo’s roots in Northern Ireland. It was time to try an Ulster Fry.

The only component of an Ulster Fry requiring anything more complicated than frying is the soda bread, which is prepared and then quartered, assuming I’ve understood this correctly, into “farls.” For this charming little disappointment you’ll need flour, sugar, salt, baking soda, buttermilk, and a recipe, because I can’t be trusted to explain anything baking-related.

I jest slightly when I call this soda bread a disappointment. It doesn’t hold a candle to Southern biscuits or even English muffins, but it’s got an intriguingly dry, crumbly, dungeon-rations quality to it.

I should note that each “farl” separates easily into two flatbreads, and would be great for some kind of Irish-themed breakfast sandwich. I’m not sure how you’d get all the other ingredients into it, though. You need fried eggs, bacon, sausages, and mushrooms, as well as—ah, hell, I guess that wouldn’t be so tricky at all. I’m just ashamed I didn’t think of it sooner.

Serve with milk, orange juice, and Black Bush, in separate glasses if possible.

Canadian Bakin’

ROUND THIS TIME last year I discovered tourtière, a Québécois meat pie typically eaten, so I thought, on New Year’s Eve. More extensive research (i.e., rereading the Wikipedia entry while sober) revealed that one may indulge in the sacred tourtière on Christmas Eve, too. I made mine even earlier this year, as a dry run for a potential Christmas dinner contribution. (I may end up going with the Polish bathtub carp instead.) It was a time-consuming process, but the result made last year’s tourtière look about as appetizing as the Jamaican beef patties in my high school caf. I hasten to add that last year’s effort, like those beef patties, was exquisitely delicious.

[Cracklins: Lard’s way of rewarding your quest for authenticity.]

I wanted to make as authentic a pie as my means would permit, but I ran into obstacles almost immediately. For instance, my means did not permit me to buy an authentic nineteenth-century copper vessel to prepare my tourtière in, nor did they permit me to travel back in time and kill a flock of passenger pigeons. I had to make do with an authentic recipe from the website of the Woonsocket, Rhode Island-based American-French Genealogical Society.

[Is anything more authentic than grinding your own meat?]

The recipe linked above doesn’t, you’ll note, specify the type of crust to be used, but since I had recently rendered some authentic, gorgeous, snow-white lard, I seized upon the opportunity to use a bunch of it up. Or rather to watch it get used up. I have never successfully prepared a baked good of any kind without assistance, nor am I privy to such arcane Domestic Science as is depicted in the photo below.

[Displacement: Still trying to figure this shit out.]

There were a lot of problems, as there always are, with the crust recipe I pulled off the Internet, which was salvaged only by the timely application of Domestic Science. This recipe from the Times seems sound, not that I would know, but it certainly isn’t French-Canadian with a name like LaFiandra attached to it. Oh well, deduct 50 points from my authenticity score. The recipe I actually picked was probably some unintelligible emoticon rebus from AnswerBag, so you’re much better off either way.

[“Cutting in” the lard: Way more authentic than using a food processor.]

But enough about the hard part. Let’s move on to my contribution to this process: spicing a bunch of delicious meat and then dumping it in the crust. The recipe calls for one and a quarter pounds of lean ground pork and three-quarters of a pound of lean ground beef. I think I ground up a one-pound pork tenderloin and mixed it in with a pound of not-so-lean ground beef.

[All pies should look like this.]

To this I added the suggested quarter-teaspoon each of ground cinnamon and ground cloves, plus salt and pepper to taste, by which I mean at least twice as much as the recipe calls for, and probably more. I threw in some carrot pieces with the recipe’s lone finely chopped onion, and of course the half-cup of water. Cook “slowly” for “about an hour” typifies the inscrutable, even koan-like puzzles for which French-Canadians are renowned. If that’s too Zen for you to wrap your mind around, just give the spices forty-five minutes or so to permeate the ground meat. Then add it to the crust. You’re almost out of the woods—

[This depicts the exact moment when I lost my mind.]

Yes, dudes, there was extra dough so I made a decorative maple leaf. And then: “Place in 400 degree oven until light brown, 25 to 30 minutes, depending on oven.” Joyeux Noël in advance, and to cardiac health a good night!

Gaze Upon Death

O THE OTHER DAY I was making fun of late-night potluck, also known as fourthmeal, and what do you think I did one night later that same week? I sat down, or should I say slumped down, to this shameful 3 a.m. repast: an entire box of Mrs. T’s® potato & cheddar pierogies drenched in Kikkoman® soy sauce. It’s a miracle, I know, that I’ve lived as long as I have. By now my arteries probably look like the rain gutters in some long-abandoned Victorian manse.

Speaking of which, folks in the United Kingdom routinely eat something so caloric and so preposterous that it should have come from the imagination of Michael Phelps after an eighth of Tom Cruise Purple. I’m speaking of the Scotch Egg, which I first encountered during last year’s Paul Newman tribute. This is sort of like the meatball to end all meatballs. The traditional version is delicious but a little elementary, flavor-wise, so here’s how to make the curried one.

The Scotch Egg fits into the impromptu fourthmeal category because chances are you’ve already got the stuff you need to make it—assuming, and I hope I’m not going out on a limb, that you keep a loaf of sausage on hand at all times. Beyond that, it’s just eggs, pepper, bread crumbs—or stale bread, and the kitchen that doesn’t stock the former is likely to have the latter—curry powder, and vegetable or other oil for frying. Preferably deep frying.

Can you guess how to do this? For each Scotch Egg you wish to make, boil an egg. Take a quantity of sausage. Add to it a little curry powder, maybe a teaspoon and a half, or two, and some pepper. Flatten you mixture on a lightly floured surface, and then roll it around your egg. Dip your egg in beaten egg. Roll it in bread crumbs. Then fry, the deeper the better, for seven or eight minutes. You want the crust of your egg to be dark brown but not black. Remove it from the oil, swaddle it in paper towels, and then cut it in half and eat it. Repeat as necessary.

Gravy Training

N NOVEMBER 25, 2009, I became a cook for real. I say so because on the aforementioned historic day I made something (a) off the top of my head (b) using only ingredients that were already to hand that was (c) unutterably delicious and (d) not, contrary to what (a), (b), and (c) might suggest, an example of ill-advised 2 a.m. fare like Crouton Lover’s Pizza or ramen avec government salmon or an unwrapped Werther’s Original® you found stuck inside the cup holder in your car. No, all ye haters, I whipped up some sausage gravy and biscuits.

Okay, so the biscuits were Pillsbury. And the gravy is, yes, remarkably similar to the gravy depicted over CFS in this post. The important thing is that this time, instead of following a recipe, I went into a shaman-like trance and visualized my associate Stanton, an esteemed burgher of Knoxville, Tennessee, preparing his trademark gravy, and mimicked his technique. (Notice to concerned parties: It’s the trance’s fault that I ruined the table with my meat mallet.)

It all started when I noticed a tube of Jimmy Dean® Premium Pork Sausage (HOT) in the refrigerator. First I fried some of that in my cast-iron skillet with a bit of vegetable oil. Then I added a little flour, a little milk, a little flour, a little milk—something tells me I’ll roux the day I figured out how to make this stuff! Ha ha . . . ha? No, I guess not. Um . . . salt and pepper to taste.

I decided I needed a secret ingredient, or at least a non-standard one, so I added a quantity of crushed red pepper, to amplify the spiciness of the sausage. It did not disappoint. I downed a solid cup of this stuff over about 500 calories of instant buttermilk biscuit, and then I put in a hard day’s work down at the plant. Just kidding. I lit a bunch of aromatherapy candles and sat in the bath all afternoon reading the new Zane novel. And then I ate the rest of the cold, gelatinous gravy with my fingers.