The Poor Mouth

Heart & Soul: Argento’s Suspiria

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

As a woefully unproductive waste of soft tissue, I spend a great deal of my time—most of it, really—eating unhealthy foods and watching appalling movies on Instant View. Last October, in hopes of fostering the illusion of productivity while leaving my habits unchanged, I wrote up a series of dinner-and-a-horror-movie pairings for my culinary blog, The Poor Mouth. My selections included The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and tacos lengua; The Exorcist (1973) and split pea soup; Let the Right One In (2008) and Swedish meatballs; The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) and Texas Red; Pumpkinhead (1988) and pumpkin seed mole; Dagon (2001) and stuffed squid; and The Hills Have Eyes (1977) and chicken fried steak.

I owe this idea to my shoddy memory: I’d conflated TNT’s Joe Bob Briggs-hosted MonsterVision (1993–2000, R.I.P.) with TBS’s Dinner and a Movie, which first aired in 1995 and is not, alas, horror-centric. As a tribute to ol’ Joe Bob, whose western shirts and bolo ties loomed so large in my adolescent consciousness, I’ll reprise the feature this year for a larger audience than my Facebook friends, all of whom, to judge by their status updates, are preoccupied with child-wrangling and “wishing this cold would go away.” Check back for a new ill-advised date-night suggestion every Friday from today until Halloween!

And now, for our feature presentation: Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977). In brief, Suspiria is about a young woman, Suzy Bannion (Jessica Harper), who has the misfortune to enroll in a dance academy run by a coven of witches. If this sounds to you like some new thousand-page bestseller for tweens, you’ve got a few surprises ahead of you, like Entertainment Weekly’s nomination for “the most vicious murder scene ever filmed.” I won’t even mention the broken window, the maggots, or the piano wire. For what it’s worth, Jessica Harper seems to have devoted her entire post-Suspiria career to thinking happy thoughts.

Despite several grisly scenes, Suspiria, which takes its name from Thomas de Quincey’s Suspiria de Profundis, is not schlock. Schlock rarely boasts so singular—albeit not quite beautiful—an aesthetic. The film is shot in such luridly saturated color that it looks like a stained glass window come to life; Argento has said of the film’s production that he was “trying to reproduce the color of Walt Disney’s Snow White; it has been said from the beginning that Technicolor lacked subdued shades, was without nuances—like cut-out cartoons.” Some of Suzy’s fellow dancers would look at home in a Klimt painting. 

Though the acting frequently leaves something to be desired, the film never plays its deficiencies, or its nightmarish absurdities, for laughs. You will search in vain for anything like comic relief in Suspiria: To quote from its promotional material, “The only thing more terrifying than the last 12 minutes of this film are the first 92.” These days, it’s not unusual to hear a hipster name-check Argento with the proprietary reverence once reserved for a Fellini or a Bergman. Nevertheless, on the assumption that most readers haven’t seen Suspiria a few dozen times, I’ll say no more about the plot. Just watch it—and then wash your eyeballs thoroughly with soap and warm water.

What’s for dinner? For the cocktail portion, I’m recommend something profondo rosso like a Manhattan or, better yet, a Bella Ruffina. (There’s also red wine, of course, but I guarantee you know more about that than I do.) For the entrée, with special thanks to the Colavita archive, here’s a treat that may be as unfamiliar as Suspiria: Beef Heart alla Soffritto. It’s difficult to find good beef heart recipes, and I pondered weak and weary over about twenty Italian cookbooks at my local library before deciding to settle on an Internet recipe. This dish, unlike other stuff I’ve prepared with beef heart, is anything but ghastly—a delicious, low-calorie, and inexpensive sauce to enjoy with the pasta of your choice. It’s also easy to make.

First, procure a cow’s heart. One should do the trick, unless you’re having a big horror-themed dinner party, in which case you ought to spring for something fancier than beef heart. Rinse the heart thoroughly. It looks pretty awful, with its stringy “membranes” and hard, white, waxy fat deposits, but remind yourself that at least it’s muscle and not organ meat. Simmer for one and a half to two hours. When the heart is tender, cut off every hint of white—this is health food, remember?—and anything else you wouldn’t want to put in your mouth. Cube the remainder. I like pieces about the size of the carrots in a frozen vegetable medley. Sauté a chopped onion and a minced garlic clove in olive oil. Add the pieces of heart, tomato paste (I recommend more than Colavita’s recommended six ounces), dried basil and oregano, and at least one cup of water. Simmer for a half hour. And, for God’s sake, eat this before you watch the movie, or you won’t want to eat it at all.

Meatopia: Meat-Up on Governors Island

 

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

As of this writing, Google returns about 21,700 hits for “bacon-flavored condom.” How do I happen to know this? I just thought of the stupidest possible use for bacon, and then dared the Internet to come up empty-handed. My suspicion about the long-lived and very tiresome bacon craze is that the rise of vegetarianism and veganism, dietary choices often (but by no means always) promoted by the smug and priggish, has lent meat-eating a kind of roguish cachet, like letting your child go to play-date without his elbow pads. In New York City, anyway. 

At the first-ever Meatopia, a food festival hosted by Josh Ozersky (a James Beard Award-winning food writer and the author of The Hamburger: A History), Robert Richter (the pit master of Fatty ’Cue), and Jimmy Carbone (Good Beer Month Founder and Taste of Tribeca Co-Chair) on Governor’s Island, July 11, I spotted a t-shirt reading MEAT IS MURDER. TASTY, TASTY MURDER. Did I find this funny? Of course. Did I appreciate the sentiment? You bet, although I do think this shirt is pithier. 

Still, a part of me wishes to go back to that prelapsarian time when meat-eating was taken for granted—when people just ate their bacon, instead of crafting it into Star Wars memorabilia. The last time anybody made a decent joke about meat was 258 A.D., when St. Lawrence was roasted on a gridiron by the Roman Emperor Valerian. Lawrence is said to have quipped (okay, shrieked), “Assum est, inquit, versa et manduca!” (“This side’s done, flip me over and dig in!”) Not for nothing is he the patron saint of comedians and spareribs. 

Meat is nothing to laugh at, though it’s certainly something to sniff at. We ought to eat as much of it as possible, without the self-conscious pride of defying the nanny-statist health nuts or sanctimonious cow-huggers. It should be our daily bread. Well, the stuff on offer at Meatopia was not meat in that quotidian sense. There was no North Carolina chopped barbecue, no Kansas City ribs, no Texas Red, and certainly no pre-formed, shrink-wrapped, Grade-Z burger patties. This was meat imitating art, and I hope I’m not betraying my common-manly sensibilities when I report that it was pretty damned delicious. 

Preposterously long lines and a distracting beverage tent, featuring a variety of beers from Sixpoint Craft Ales, made it impossible to try everything, but I tried. Seamus Mullen of Boqueria (53 W 19th; 212-255-4160), one of around thirty chefs featured at Meatopia (and the t-shirt culprit), roasted a whole lamb, a glassy-eyed dinosaur that looked as malevolent in death as it must have looked peaceful and fluffy in life. He also sold slices, below cost, of a black-hoofed leg of Jámon Ibérico de Bellota, acorn-fed cured ham he claimed to have smuggled into the States in a suitcase. 

High Plains Bison, the “Official Lean Meat of the Chicago Cubs,” offered little Styrofoam cups of sliced bison steak with a kimchi salsa, thus combining the bragging rights of a meat I’d never eaten with the reliable pleasure of anything involving kimchi. The bison itself is touted as a lean alternative to beef, but cooked slowly, barbecue-style, it doesn’t let on that it’s any healthier. It doesn’t let on that it’s any different, either, but that didn’t bother me much. 

Chipotle Mexican Grill isn’t an outfit I’d expect to see at a fancy meat festival, but I’m glad it was there. Its carne asada tacos, prepared with Niman Ranch beef, were proof that people who reflexively declare franchise food inferior are not thinking with their tongues. (All of Chipotle’s pork comes from the Oakland-based Niman Ranch, though I didn’t catch and don’t especially care whether the same is true of the beef—though it was excellent beef.) 

Akhtar Nawab of La Esquina (114 Kenmare; 646-613-7100) served up roasted Fudge Farms pork shoulder, marinated with “leche condensada, eqazote [sic], ajo, y naranjas.” Let me translate: condensed milk, epazote (About.com: “a Mexican herb that has a very strong taste and sometimes a gasoline or perfumey type odor”—gasoline or perfumey?), garlic, and orange. 

This didn’t leave a very powerful impression on me, and I regret that many of the more basic-sounding pork tastings had run out or developed formidable lines by the time I got to them. I’d have picked a slow-cooked pig over any number of sophisticated bilingual marinades. 

High marks to The Meatball Shop (84 Stanton; 212-982-8895) for its mini meatball salad with white beans and watercress, a dish seemingly designed to be as un-manly as possible while still including meat. I suspect I gravitated toward it to test the mettle of Meatopia’s wussier-sounding offerings. Mini meatball salad! Sounds a bit like Spaghetti-Os, doesn’t it? Well, I couldn’t pick a wood-grilled Bell and Evans chicken out of a line-up, but I can attest that it yields a remarkable meatball. Friends, there is no shame in loving a mini meatball salad. 

The list of things I didn’t get to eat includes, among many other fleshly delights, pecan-smoked short ribs, smoked duck tacos, char-grilled English lamb chops, and a baron of beef (which is not, as I initially guessed, a figure from McDonaldland’s feudal past), and all I can do now is linger tearfully over my photos. I leave you with this final thought: Meatopia was terrific, I daresay inspiring, albeit a bit undersupplied—but meat-eating doesn’t need to be a special occasion, an indulgence, a guilty pleasure. Just as paradise is a state of mind, Meatopia can and should be your own kitchen, every single day of the year. Vaya con carne.

Muskrat Ramble

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

Some time ago, a friend of mine chewed my ear off about an “Australian delicacy” introduced to her by an Oz-born colleague. (The friend in question lives in Brooklyn and, like many Brooklyners, seeks out culinary oddities with the fervor once reserved for philately or numismatics.) You prepare potatoes, carrots, and cabbage, she said, and then let them sit out overnight—breathing, as it were. Then you fashion them into a sort of crepe, and—wait, I said, is this Bubble and Squeak? The British Empire’s traditional alternative to a compost heap?

An aspiring food pedant myself, this encounter gave me pause. Is there nothing, I wondered, so nauseating—or, as in this case, merely unfamiliar—that those of us raised on tuna noodle casserole and its dim-witted twin, creamed tuna on toast, won’t shell out for the privilege of choking it down?

In the few years since I began to consider food a hobby, I’ve gorged on bull testicles (less prairie oyster than prairie calamari, and not especially noteworthy); kokoretsi (Greek for “intestines wrapped in innards”); beef tacos lengua (tongue) and cabeza (cheeks, lips); beef tripe; calf liver in abundance; lamb kidneys; pig ears and tails; roasted beef marrow bones; chicken gizzards; alligator; minnows; &c. &c.

That isn’t a boast. You couldn’t throw a bicycle lock in Bushwick without killing someone who’d sampled all that plus live octopus, hákarl (putrefied Greenlandic shark), and, I don’t know, elk eyelids cured in antifreeze. Why, then, when everyone and his bro are connoisseurs of offal, sommeliers of the animal kingdom’s vital juices, has Esquire published yet another piece on the pleasures of “EATING HEARTS. AND BRAINS. AND MAYBE BALLS”?

Tom Junod’s essay, “Those Parts,” in the April Esquire, is, by and large, delightful. It includes a terrific (-sounding—I haven’t tried it yet) recipe for kidneys. It describes “[t]he promotion of offal” as “the kind of ‘trend’ that is either celebrated or lamented among people who cogitate excessively over what the body instinctively knows—i.e., ‘foodies.’”

There isn’t a foodie alive who wouldn’t raise a glass of snake wine or boutique white dog to that territorial sentiment, having convinced himself long ago that he alone among eaters of that kidney is not a foodie but a Natural Man. (Junod puts one foot very wrong, when he says that offal is “no longer poor people’s food; it is, for one thing, expensive.” Tell that to the Shop-Rite in my town, which offers more varieties of cheap offal—including head-scratchers like chicken feet and hogmaws—than the pricier Stop and Shop across the street offers cuts of meat, period.)

I think “those parts” have had enough time in the limelight.

Recently I drove to Delaware to try a particular item, mostly for the bragging rights. I’ve never considered the First State a hotbed of culinary adventurism, but another food-obsessed friend supplied the tip. By the end of the weekend I was sure that this item, alone among God’s creatures, could check the reflexive Bourdainism that keeps many fledgling explorers, myself included, from trying that truly outré category, “expensive dishes prepared with high-quality ingredients.”

“What makes the muskrat guard his musk?” asked Bert Lahr as the Cowardly Lion, back in 1939.

Who knows? It’s not like anybody covets it—nor do many desire its flesh, which is without question the most offensive thing I’ve ever tried to digest. My associate and I sidled into a booth at the Wagon Wheel Family Restaurant in Smyrna, Delaware (110 South Dupont Blvd; 302-653-1457) hoping for a photo op and quick bite of a whole roasted “marsh rabbit.” What we got were two heaping bowls of slow-cooked “pulled” muskrat, the meat soaking in three inches of rich, dark, salty, oleaginous broth.

“It must,” I thought, “be that famous musk.”

Before bringing out this prize, our waitress asked us if we’d ever tried it, and assured us we were in for a treat. Mostly the meat was like the shreds of pulled pork you leave in the crock pot, except gamier, darker, stringier. It had more bones in it than the Sedlec Ossuary, ranging in size from “recognizably mammalian” to “sardine spine” to “oyster grit.” Several employees emerged to watch our faces. I recalled a passage from Kingsley Amis’s Take a Girl Like You:

Mrs Thompson put a plate of fish and potatoes in front of Jenny. The fish was probably haddock, with a horny, pimply skin. There were a lot of potatoes, with some unexpected colours to be seen among them here and there. . . . All Jenny had been able to manage . . . was sucking at a few mouthfuls of fish as if they were toffees, until they were small enough to swallow. She looked down at her plate. On it was a lot of fish, haddock actually, almost as much as had been there when she began. In fact—although this could not be right-—there seemed to be slightly more.

We requested Styrofoam boxes to take the rest home in. My friend told the waitress that it was nothing to do with the ’rat; he doubted that he could have finished so generous a portion of anything. She studied him with a combination of disgust and skepticism, like he’d just confessed a fondness for Gerber’s stewed apples or crustless Wonder bread, and clucked, “Really?”

The next day, at Cool Springs Fish Bar & Restaurant in Dover (2463 S State St; 302-698-1955), we ate two broiled sacs of shad roe, each about the size of a piece of calves’ liver. Like most offal, this sounds weirder than it is; each sac contains thousands of tiny eggs, but mostly it just tastes like fish. Driving home in darkness through the marshes, we nearly hit several muskrats errant. They didn’t look like much, but we knew now what evil lurks in their tiny hearts and glands—and we knew down in our soon-to-be-detonating guts that it was time for some much better raw materials.

Here’s the Beef

DMITTEDLY I’M NOWHERE near caught up on my southern Connecticut restaurant recommendations. Nor do I plan to catch up, since I’ve started cooking again in earnest—spring is almost here, and with it the return of my will to live—and I’d rather focus on my stove. I’m going to leave out a Korean, a Japanese, and a Mexican joint, but I can’t in good conscience skip my best semi-recent discovery: S&S Dugout in Southport.

It’s not much to look at it—just what you see above plus a counter, a few booths, and a giant griddle. The griddle is the home of S&S’s famous grilled mashed potatoes, which are served with at least half a stick of butter. Half a stick is actually in fairly reasonable proportion to the portion of potatoes, which is about the size of a football.

The real star of the Dugout—and I say this confidently despite not having tried any of the other offerings—is this roast beef sandwich. There’s nothing on it. No mayo, no horseradish, not even a whiff of pepper. It’s just cold, rare, perfect beef, and enough of it to keep you from quite needing those mashed potatoes, though you’ll probably order them anyway.

[3449 Post Road, Southport, CT]

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.

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.)

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.”

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.