The Poor Mouth

The Murders in the Roux Morgue: Fulci’s The Beyond

[Note: This column first appeared on The Huffington Post.]

Last week, to inaugurate my Halloween movie-and-food series, I presented Huffington Post readers with as unappetizing a combination as I could think of: Dario Argento’s 1977 Suspiria and Beef Heart alla Soffritto. Today we return to the world of orrore Italiano—horror gory enough to make a Borgia wince—with Lucio Fulci’s The Beyond (1981). I must admit, when I picked Fulci’s flick for this week’s lesson, I didn’t know what I was getting myself into. My friend Neil, with whom I’ve been attending horror conventions for years, had a Beyond poster tacked up in his bedroom in high school, so I assumed I’d seen the movie and forgotten it. I was mistaken. You don’t forget The Beyond without some very expensive therapy.

I had seen Fulci’s Zombie (1979), famous for its surprisingly convincing zombie versus shark fight scene, and considered pairing it with citrus-marinated mako steak. I wish I had; it would have meant I could skip The Beyond. Unfortunately, like a zombie, I’m always thinking with my stomach, and I had a hankering for some bayou cuisine.

Louisiana has long been a favorite gothic setting. The Last Exorcism and the wildly popular True Blood are fine recent examples of the bayou’s persistent appeal. Perhaps you’ve read, or watched, Interview with a Vampire. Perhaps you’ve blown a few bucks on a New Orleans ghost tour or a “monkey and cock” voodoo fetish; perhaps you’ve been relieved of your wallet by a charming local in Saint Louis Cemetery #1. 

All this belongs to the Big Cheesy, as far as Fulci is concerned. Instead of giving us vampires or voodoo, he goes straight to the source: The Beyond’s setting, the dilapidated, plantation-style Seven Doors Hotel, sits on one of the seven gates to hell. This is established in a sepia-toned opening sequence—in 1927, everything was sepia-toned—in which a painter named Schweick is crucified in the hotel by a mob convinced that he’s a “warlock.” 

Decades later, Europe is inspired to record an unforgettable rock classic, and the hotel is inherited by a young woman named Liza (Catriona MacColl), who hopes to renovate and reopen it. So it’s a lot like the 1986 Tom Hanks classic The Money Pit, except with gouged-out eyes (a Fulci specialty), morgue mayhem, hungry tarantulas, crucifixions, demons, zombies, and a pretty spooky matte painting of hell. Oh, and a blind woman gets mauled by her own guide dog. Your typical screwball comedy.

What’s for dinner? The truth is, unless you’re a serious gore aficionado, you don’t want to visit The Beyond. Stick with Sookie or Lestat or, I don’t know, Easy Rider. But you do want to try The New Best Recipe’s fantastic Creole-style shrimp and sausage gumbo. I made the easiest version, the one without okra or filé; I also had to substitute spicy Italian sausage for andouille. First, get a pound and a half of small to medium shrimp. Bring the shells, and four and a half cups of water, to a boil over medium-high heat. Turn down to medium-low and simmer twenty minutes, then remove the shells and add a cup of clam juice and three and a half cups of ice water. That’s your stock—now set it aside.

Next, the roux. In a Dutch oven, heat a half-cup of vegetable oil over medium-high heat, to about 200°. Turn the heat to medium and stir in a half-cup of flour very, very slowly over the course of twenty minutes. Don’t stop for any reason! If you suspect your glorious liquid mahogany is burning, take it off the heat for a bit, but keep that wooden spoon moving. 

Add the “holy trinity” (Creole for mirepoix), in this case two finely chopped onions, one diced bell pepper, and one diced stalk of celery. Add six cloves pressed garlic, as well as cayenne, salt, and pepper to your liking (I think the Best Recipe skimps on cayenne). Keep stirring for ten minutes, and don’t worry, it’s supposed to be a thick, stubborn paste. Drizzle in one quart of stock while stirring hard, and then dump in the rest. Add a couple bay leaves, simmer and skim for thirty minutes; add as much sausage as you please, simmer for thirty minutes; add shrimp, cook five minutes; serve over rice, with a Sazerac, an Abita, or a foaming goblet of Tabasco sauce.

What Deaner Was Talkin’ About

[Note: This column first appeared on The Huffington Post.]

Jimmy Dean, who died last month aged 81, may be out of the news cycle, but he’s lodged in the lining of my heart as firmly as a small piece of Polish sausage. You see, thanks to a strange concatenation of events, Mr. Dean recently (sort of, maybe) saved my life. Allow me to explain.

A few years ago, when I first took an interest in preparing and eating foods other than sardines, croutons, and March of Dimes gumballs, a friend bought me a Bass Pro Shops® Sausage Kit. I suspect his intention was to steer my new hobby away from crème brûlée and polenta and toward the more gender-appropriate piles of ground meat. I’d already inherited an antique meat grinder, so I should have been all set.

Unfortunately, not only am I lazy, but I also have trouble assembling anything more complex than a Duplo set. Plus, I spent much of 2009 living out of my car. So, until June, the sausage-stuffing apparatus sat in a mildewed box in my trunk. It wasn’t until I’d settled down in southern Connecticut, the Fertile Crescent of hot dogs, that I decided it was time to pump my own casings full of coarsely ground pork shoulder and tenderloin.

Upon googling “sausage,” I learned that Jimmy Dean, the man whose name has long been linked with tube steak, had just shuffled off this greasy coil while watching TV at his home in Varina, Virginia. This was no coincidence, I thought—it was synchronicity, almost as though the spirit of Mr. Dean was passing me the torch. 

On a sunny afternoon I began carrying the components of my sausage stuffer out to the porch for a photo op. In short order I became distracted (by meat) and started doing something (eating meat) in my kitchen, leaving my front door ajar. Through a window I saw that an unsavory-looking character had noticed the open door and then, instead of minding his own business, decided to make a beeline for it.

If you ever have to chase a would-be intruder off your porch, it helps to have a forty-pound elbow pipe handy. My visitor, who didn’t appear to be selling Mormonism, Thin Mints, or magazine subscriptions, jumped backwards into the driveway, lamely offered that he was “looking for a Band-Aid,” and beat a cringing retreat. Repelling the invasion made me feel manly enough; doing it with a sausage-stuffing machine made me feel like the Duke, the Gipper, and Conan the Barbarian, all rolled into one.

I celebrated victory by stuffing my first breakfast sausage. The process is somewhat intimidating, but once you’ve got the hang of it, you’ll wonder why this skill isn’t taught as early as kindergarten. It is, after all, one of those “rewarding hobbies” likely to “keep kids off the street,” to say nothing of the fact that it makes a breakfast far superior to Fruity Pebbles. Ingredients-wise, all one needs are pork, kosher salt (i.e., non-iodized; nothing about this will be kosher), cracked or ground pepper, sage, thyme, paprika, and whatever else you want in in there. Adjust proprortions to your taste, but please try to use common sense.

As Mr. Dean once put it in an ad, according to his obit in the New York Times, “Sausage is a great deal like life. You get out of it what you put into it.” I recommend ground cayenne or ancho peppers.

The stuffing (n.) is a simple matter. Just grind it, chill it, and grind it again, working in the spices with your hands. The stuffing (v.) is really a trial and error deal. First you’ll need natural hog casings, which come with the Pro Shops® kit. These look like shredded, nicotine-stained latex gloves out of a horror movie. Also, they’ll be totally encrusted in salt, so remember to soak (at least a half hour) and rinse them prior to use. Pull a strand of casing over the extruder pipe of your stuffer. The casing looks too small for this, but, as you’ll soon learn, it can stretch to truly unsettling dimensions.

Depress the plunger slowly. The casing will survive a fair amount of pressure, but overeagerness may result in misshapen or even ruptured links. Use your hands to slide the meat down the casing until an agreeable form is achieved. You can tie knots in the casing ends themselves, or around the ends with butcher’s twine. Refrigerate your links if you aren’t eating them immediately (you are, aren’t you?), and freeze them if you don’t plan to finish them in a few days.

I prepared breakfast sausage as an offering to the great spirit of Jimmy Dean, but of course there are innumerable varieties with which to experiment: bangers (U.K.), chorizo, andouille, boudin noir, and, of course, good old franks.

An Affair of the Heart

S I MENTIONED in this Huffington post, my local Shop-Rite boasts a bewildering assortment of offal. As I mentioned in that same post, I am growing wary, even weary, of the offal craze. This stuff isn’t inedible, and some of it is quite nice in its own way, but anyone with a schoolboy’s command of economics can tell you that if a meat goes for under a dollar a pound, there’s probably a reason for it. Even so, I’ve been making my way down the Organs I Haven’t Tried list. I swear when I get to the bottom of it I’ll switch to caviar and ortolan bunting.

This is a cow’s heart. I’ve been meaning to do something with a cow’s heart for weeks, and my associate John B— is always mentioning it as a candidate for pickling. I can’t imagine anything more ostentatiously revolting than a pickled cow’s heart, but it was apparently once so commonplace that Volume 47 (1908) of Good Housekeeping could inform its readers that “[p]ickled beef heart makes a delicious and inexpensive change in the ordinary menu. Its preparation is extremely simple, too. After the heart has been thoroughly boiled in water, pour spiced vinegar over it, and set away to cool. Later slice thin, and serve on a dish garnished with summer savory or parsley.”

Times have changed. A quick search of today’s Good Housekeeping website yields, for instance, a blog post about the perils of having a “good looking gyno.” This may be the only thing on earth more nauseating than pickled beef heart.

The heart shown above was pickled in a spiced vinegar of my own devising. Should you like to try it—and I’ll explain presently why this is a bad idea—the mixture is as follows: one tablespoon coriander seeds, one tablespoon mustard seeds, two broken cinnamon sticks, four bay leaves, a teaspoon of whole cloves, a teaspoon of dill seeds, two teaspoons of black peppercorns, and five cardamom pods. These should be boiled in apple cider vinegar for a good while—a half-hour, say—and then placed in a mason jar with the heart, which will have been boiled for about three hours.

Pickled beef heart is, I’m sad to say, overpowering and nasty. I had a just few bites of it before relegating it to the Rubbermaid. The heart itself is roughly the consistency of tongue meat, but the vinegar overpowers whatever native flavor that meat might have. The sludge of spices makes it worse, if anything. But I was persuaded not to give up on my heart when I stumbled upon a recipe for something called “Coney sauce,” evidently a popular topping for hot dogs in Flint, Michigan. This horrible recipe is what I worked with. It says to grind a half pound of beef heart and a half pound of beef kidney (see above, in all its lobe-y glory), and then to spice it with paprika and chili powder.

I did so. I substituted a mixture of cayenne, ancho, and cumin powder for plain “chili powder,” adding a bit of salt and pepper for good measure.

The result, after cooking in vegetable oil, is not a proper sauce, but I suspect that’s the recipe’s fault. There are a host of more complex recipes out there, and most pictures of “Coney sauce” look far more saucy than what I ended up with, but it did, incredibly, taste great. Here’s a hot dog with Coney sauce and chopped onions—pretty awesome, if I may say so.

Meat, when ground and spiced, is meat. What this exercise taught me is: I should make all my chili out of organ meat, because it costs next to nothing. So after my “Coney sauce” sat around for a few days, I decided to fold it into some proper chili and make a chili dog. To my large quantity of Coney sauce, I added some ground leftover chuck and additional heart strips, two jars of plain pasta sauce, two cans of black beans, an onion, and a ton of cayenne and ancho pepper. The result made for a chili dog so perfect that it would have been an insult to dress it with additional condiments. Behold!

 

Frankly, My Dear

ELL, YOU KNEW this was coming: the American Academy of Weak & Stupid Little Babies has decided to call down its thunder on that quintessence of America, that most tubular of steaks, the grilled hot dog. The aforementioned Academy “would like to see foods such as hot dogs ‘redesigned’ so their size, shape and texture make them less likely to lodge in a youngster’s throat. More than 10,000 children under 14 go to the emergency room each year after choking on food, and up to 77 die, says the new policy statement, published online today in Pediatrics. About 17% of food-related asphyxiations are caused by hot dogs.”

 

Redesign the hot dog? What’s next, vinyl siding on the White House? Repairing the Liberty Bell? What would Takeru “The Tsunami” Kobayashi shove down his bottomless gullet? What would high school boys make up their tasteless and cruel rumors about? What would I do with all this fancy mustard?

Seriously, forget it. See that? That is perfection on a bun, ladies and gentlemen: a Swanky Red Hot with chopped onions, chili, and two pieces of ultra-crisp bacon. And—oh yeah—each dog is deep-fried, giving it a wonderfully unusual and crispy casing. Pace Kobayashi-San, you won’t need more than one of these.

Correction: That was perfection on a bun, until I made my way to the vastly superior Super Duper Weenie in Fairfield, Connecticut. I’ve been meaning for some time to visit Super Duper in order to write up a comparison with Swanky’s of Norwalk. Well, there really isn’t any comparison. Swanky’s franks are great, sure. But Super Duper’s weenies are, as a gentleman once told me of Dyer’s deep-fried burgers in Memphis, poetry. (He worked there, but he was right.)

As you can see, it will take a while to get through all of them. I’ve tried two so far:

That there’s a Chicagoan. Why hadn’t I ever thought of putting a whole pickle spear on a hot dog? (Then again, I’m still the only dude I know man enough to put pulled pork on a hot dog.) Last but not least, the Georgia Red Hot:

Coated in golden mustard and proprietary relish—that substance that looks like a cayenne pepper smoothie—it’s fire in hot dog form. This is seriously hot—hotter, and tastier, than the Swanky Red Hot. I’m a lot closer to Swanky’s than to Super Duper, but I’m afraid the latter is the clear wiener, and well worth the extra gas money.

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.

Something Wicked This Way Comes

E INTERRUPT YOUR regularly scheduled Hallowe’en programming for a roundup of hot dogs and fried dough I’ve eaten since Labor Day, as promised here. This is, I hasten to add, a very partial list, including only dogs and dough I’ve photo-documented, and offered only for the bragging rights, sans commentary. (I will make one exception to note that the Swanky Dog is deep fried to an enchanting crisp beneath all of those condiments, and is unreservedly recommended next time you’re down southern Connecticut way.) I’ll return shortly to tell you about foul-weather soup, bivalves, killer meatballs, and oh so much more.

CHARIOTT OF FIRE CHILI DOG, Labor Day Picnic, Norwalk, CT

SWANKY DOG, Swanky Frank’s, Norwalk, CT

GIANT CORN DOG, Eastern States Exposition, Agawam, MA

DOUBLE DOG QUESADILLA, Arianna-Farnsworth Residence, Norwalk, CT

HOMEMADE BEIGNETS, Norwalk, CT

REGULAR OLD HOT DOG, Artists in the Country, Woodstock, CT

THE IKEA DOG looked grim, so I had pizza instead, New Haven, CT

FRIED DOUGH, Wellfleet Oyster Festival, Wellfleet, MA

REGULAR OLD HOT DOG, Bookstore & Restaurant, Wellfleet, MA