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.

Jag är nyfiken—gul

WEDISH PEA SOUP, or ärtsoppa, first came to my attention a year ago, when I was hunting up a dish to pair with Let the Right One In for my Halloween dinner-and-a-movie series. I ended up going with Swedish meatballs, both because they’re delicious and because they gave me an excuse to make a vampire meatball. A week or two ago, having implemented austerity measures, I scanned the dried beans selection in what I like to call the Disappointment Aisle of my local Stop & Shop. I saw something that at least had novelty on its side: yellow split peas.

What does one make with yellow split peas? Ärtsoppa, it turns out. A cursory search of Wikipedia and Google Images reveals that Swedish pea soup is generally greenish-yellow, that it is traditionally eaten on Thursday, that it includes a lot of pig products (like smoked ham hocks, see below), and that Swedes are uniformly fond of it. Here’s what one website has to say about it:

Ärtsoppa “used to be eaten on a Thursday, because this used to be the day servants took off and the soup was easy to prepare. Peas also used to be connected to the legend of Thor and Thursday is named after him. Others believe that the tradition originates from the pre-Reformation days because it was the ideal food to eat before fasting commenced on the Friday. Indeed, the Swedish Army still serves its troops with pea soup every Thursday. The soup was mentioned in historical records as far back as 1577, when the imprisoned King Erik XIV was said to have died from eating a poisoned bowl of pea soup. . . . It is usually served with a little mustard on the side and is then followed by thin pancakes called Pannkakor and a sweet, hot liquor called Punsch.”

I chose this recipe for its simplicity, but I don’t think it was submitted by an authentic Swede. The giveaway is that reference to “Swedish punch.” Punsch is not the same thing as punch, though it seems there may be some etymological connections. In any case, this soup is a welcome remedy for the fast-approaching Winter Madness: meaty, delicious, and the same cheerful life-is-worth-living yellow of my old kitchen (Behr 310B-7 Saffron Thread, FYI).

It is after you skim it, anyway. The pork hocks generate some pretty gruesome jacuzzi mung.

Beneath that, a huge pot of chunky, pig-flavored sunshine. It’s like a HappyLite you can eat.

Brilliant Red Porchetta

BOUT A MONTH AGO, I moved into a new apartment—hence my absence from this site. There were the many long days of hauling, unpacking, rearranging, and painting, which have yet to come to an end. There is also the fact that my new “pad” is more expensive, which has made the title of this blog more accurate than ever. For the past week I’ve subsisted miserably on questionable eggs, canned tuna, old-ass pasta, and collards stewed with smoked pigtails, to name only the more palatable offerings. (Considering how much smoked pigtails look like Rasputin’s pickled dong, trust me when I say you don’t want to know about the nasty bits.)

I turned twenty-eight in August. My Old Man turned fifty-eight on the same day, and gave me some desperately needed Walking Around Money to celebrate our successful completion of another year. So for a while there, I was getting pretty extravagant in my new kitchen. I made, for example, a foot-long Connecticut-style lobster roll drenched in melted Lurpak butter. It wasn’t quite Kingsley Amis’s famous caviar-stuffed lobster, but it was close. 

But the best thing I made, bar none—in fact, the first thing I made in my new oven—is this mind-bending recipe for pseudo-porchetta I found in the June 2010 issue of La Cucina Italiana: slow-roasted pork shoulder according to restaurateur Sara Jenkins of Porchetta.

By the way, that’s Pork-etta, not Porch-etta. (You also say Brusque-etta, not Brush-etta, which may be the only thing I learned from this guy those many years ago.) But it’s one of those words, like phở or Nabokov, that you only pronounce correctly if you’re itching for a beatdown.

I won’t summarize the recipe, but here are some notes: I used white wine. It worked. I did not look for wild fennel pollen, because I am lazy, cheap, and suspicious of expert advice. When I took this out of the oven at 3 a.m. and carved off a slice, I thought I was eating out of God’s own dumpster; it reheated pretty well in the morning, but it was never as good as that first bite. Finally—and several of my friends will want to hunt me down like a dog for saying this—I’m pretty much done with pulled pork until someone can give me a recipe for it that produces anything close to this thing. I know what you’re thinking: apples and oranges. All I’m saying is, give me a pork shoulder and this is the only use I’ll want to put it to.

The Grog Days of Summer

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

We are well and truly living in the Last Days.

True, I tend to start complaining about summer’s imminent demise about a week after the Fourth of July. I’m an hourglass-half-empty type, and without a solid two months of summer fun stretching out before me, all I can think about are encroaching darkness, extortionary heating bills, and medicating my SAD with tearful candy corn binges. Now autumn is days away. How best to wring that final cocktail of salt water, citrus juice, and Panama Jack tanning oil from summer 2010?

“In the depth of winter,” Albert Camus wrote, “I learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.” He might have been channeling my old pal Mike Stutzman, whose passion for all things tiki informed much of my summer fun this year. Recently, after having browsed in Trader Vic’s Tiki Party! (2005), I marinated a cha siu pork tenderloin, bought a fat sack of limes, and took the train to Mike’s place in New Haven.

He seems like a mild-mannered poet and teacher, but step into his cabana and you’ve entered, with apologies to Ferlinghetti, the Cook Islands of the Mind. A glass cabinet of tiki mugs sits, imposing as an Easter Island mo‘ai, against the far wall of the dining room. An antique shortwave radio serves as bar, where the visitor finds, among much else, an assortment of fancy-schmancy rums. Here and there one glimpses Mike’s piratical, one-eyed cat, Willie.

The impression that Mike must have multiple graduate degrees in the Leisure Arts is strengthened by a peek into his office, a veritable museum of tobacco pipes, tins, and packets. But the proof is in Mike’s cocktail-making expertise. Mike and his sister Annie and I shared a pitcher of Navy Grog and one of Painkillers, ate a tenderloin marinated in equal parts sugar, ketchup, hoisin sauce, and soy sauce (then sliced, garnished with toasted sesame seeds—which he just happened to have!—and dunked in Chinese hot mustard), and slipped into a hibiscus-scented reverie. As the Stutzmans and I are old friends, we didn’t spend much time talking about the theory and praxis of tikiculture. I saved that for email.

Who is Trader Vic? What does he have to do with the tiki gestalt?

Trader Vic—Victor Bergeron—ran an eponymous chain of restaurants that became the quintessential representations of post-WWII tiki and exotica culture: tiki mugs, bamboo décor, a good strong rum drink, Martin Denny soundtrack, and the proverbial “whole lot of crazy crap on the walls.” Vic invented the Mai Tai; any claims otherwise are god damned lies, to paraphrase the man himself. He and rival tikitrepreneur Donn “The Beachcomber” Beach (né Gantt) lay claim to creating or perfecting most of the “tropical” drinks we associate with tiki culture.

Your Navy Grog was delicious. Can you explain what grog is, and what’s so naval about it?

As Wayne Curtis writes in And a Bottle of Rum (2006), the first rums were essentially distilled industrial waste, the molasses left over from refining sugarcane. It was the Navy tot of choice as it wouldn’t spoil in the barrel, but would quite efficiently spoil the livers and brain cells of sailors. Grog was a way to make the rum ration more palatable and less fierce: dilute with water, sweeten (if sugar was on hand), and add citrus to ward off scurvy. Some variety of it was served aboard each of Her Majesty’s fleet until the rum ration was ended in the 1970s.

I’m not a fan of specialty glassware, but naturally I’ll make an exception for tiki mugs. Now, what are they?

Tiki mugs are meant as homage to the stone and wood statues found throughout Polynesia, Micronesia, and Oceania. Depending where you go, “tiki” is a first-man character, a male fertility symbol, and/or a collective noun for that sort of mythic character and its figural representation. Most contemporary tiki mugs, though, are original designs in the style of other tiki mugs. It’s a bit postmodern, which is why copious drinking helps one’s understanding of the subject.

How did your tiki passion get started? And what’s that weird bowl that your grandfather gave you?

I come by it honestly, I suppose. The Red Cross Blood Bank informed my father that he has a blood factor usually found only in Pacific Islanders. My mother went into labor with me performing “Hawaiian War Dance” whilst watching Sha Na Na. And being raised Jewish, I spent many hours in old-school Chinese-American restaurants, a hotbed of tiki drinks. So when I was gifted a four-pack of tiki mugs in college, it was really fulfilling my destiny. Overdoing it followed.

That bowl is an authentic kava bowl, from the Marshall Islands, I believe. It’s used to mix a mildly hallucinogenic tisane made from kava, a cousin of the pepper plant. It tastes, as my grandfather reported, like dishwater.

Walk me through those Painkillers you made. (I think I have the name right. At first I remembered it as “Paint Thinners.”)

Painkillers are, it turns out, a registered trademark of Pusser’s brand rum, and as it happens I used a Cruzán amber rum instead. So strictly speaking, we were drinking a Painkiller-inspired cocktail . . . let us call it, for argument’s sake, the Paracetamol. That would be one part each OJ and Crème of Coconut, two-plus parts amber rum (very plus for us), and four parts pineapple juice, garnished with fresh-grated nutmeg. It’s what a Piña Colada ought to be—a little more forward with the rum flavor, and its bouquet not so reminiscent of suntan lotion.

Suppose one is in a state of crippling anguish over the end of summer, and hoping to go out with a tiki-themed bang. What do I need?

If there are Mai-Tais, or better yet, cocktails designed for multiple drinkers (like the Scorpion Bowl), guests are usually game, but hospitality comes first: If you know your guests will want beer, or martinis, or soft drinks, get plenty of ’em. (Though perhaps you could convince them to pour their Schaefer into a tiki mug, of which you should also have many on hand.)

You’ll need pupus (finger food). Asian appetizers are de rigueur for a tiki party—spare ribs, dumplings, Korean BBQ, satay skewers, etc. I like to add in some Hawaiian dishes like poke (a cousin of ceviche) or lau-lau. Spam is also Hawaii’s adopted meat product of choice—a Spam musubi (rice ball) is real Local Style. If you can find poi, go for it—almost everyone is curious how it tastes, and inevitably one person will adore it and finish the bowl.

Of the remaining “luau” trappings, I run a bit conservative. Tiki torches are good, especially filled with functional citronella oil. But plastic leis will give your guests itchy necks. I learned this the hard way. Hours of Arthur Lyman-style exotica and slack-key guitar music get lost in the background—as with drinks, generously mix in music that will make the guests happy. Of course, if someone plays ukulele, they should absolutely bring it along. Most of all, you need people. It won’t be a proper hukilau without plenty of guests.

We’re conversing for an Internet audience, and the commenters usually manage to find something to be upset about. How do you respond to the inevitable charges that tiki is an insulting, reductive appropriation of Polynesian culture?

I’d say have a drink, and try not to overthink it. Most of what tiki culture borrows from other cultures—Pacific, Asian, Caribbean—is just another version of the stuff we all love: good food, drink, music, hospitality. Yes, the mugs themselves are inspired by a style of figural carving that’s used for subjects that include mythic figures, as something beautiful and evocative of place. Recreating and re-imagining cultural touchstones can be tacky, sure, but it’s not appropriation any more than a Great Pyramid of Giza paperweight is grave robbery. It’s a souvenir of tourism, not the spoils of war.

I also like the idea that despite wave after wave of missionaries to the Pacific islands, smashing statues and preaching doctrine, tiki has survived as part of our culture that embraces intemperance, leisure, and good-natured idolatry.

[Willie, acting all hard.]

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.

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!

 

Atlantic Excrabaganza

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

People collect all sorts of crap: matchbooks, stamps, campaign buttons, shot glasses, G.I. Joes, telegraph line insulators, taxidermy, Hummels, Klingon weaponry, even gently used underwear. I collect U.S. states. I’ve dreamed of having my own road show; it’d be called “Food Gas Longing,” and I’d sign off every episode “with Slim Jim wishes and Gatorade dreams.” Since I don’t have any sponsors, it’s been slow going, but in April I logged my forty-third state—South Carolina.

Every state I’ve seen has been by car. Traveling to Charleston and Edisto Island from Connecticut (one of the nine states I’ve called home, for readers tempted to picture me in madras shorts and a Vineyard Vines ascot) meant passing through old favorites, most notably Delaware, Virginia, and North Carolina.

Along this route I can recommend, for starters, Sambo’s Tavern (283 Front St; 302-674-9724) in Leipsic, Delaware. About Sambo’s, which I didn’t visit on this outing, my friend John B— wrote, “Pictures of every NASCAR driver of the early 1990s ring the dining room. . . . [T]he crabs make it. High quality, fresh, local crabs. We got our dozen for $35 and had a fun afternoon banging them with mallets and washing down the brine with lager.” (Yuengling, in these parts.) Sambo's was my introduction to crab croquet. I can report that a basket of salt-encrusted blue crabs is a meal like no other. In heaven, these will be the bar snack, mark my words.

In Virginia, I spent the night on Chincoteague Island, renowned for its population of wild ponies, immortalized by Marguerite Henry in Misty of Chincoteague (1947), Sea Star, Orphan of Chincoteague (1949), and others. I can’t vouch for Ms. Henry’s oeuvre, with which I’m unfamiliar; Publishers Weekly had hard words for the “grating overuse of exclamation points” in her “disappointing” novel Brown Sunshine of Sawdust Valley (1998). I can promise that the sight of raggedy, ruminative feral ponies in the adjacent Assateague Island State Park is nothing short of magical.

Chincoteague is underwhelming in the off-season. Most restaurants are closed, and one’s inner animal-rights fanatic may be awakened by the sight of ponies penned up on commercial property—presumably for those vacationers more intrigued by soft-serve and souvenirs than a patient foray into the state park. But there’s serviceable seafood, and I suspect it only gets better in the summertime. Try Bill’s Seafood Restaurant (4040 Main St; 757-336-5831), an unpretentious spot (“honey, there’s nothing wrong with the butter—it’s cheese spread”) which boasts a classic oyster stew with Virginia ham, and a generous shellfish “tower,” which will be removed from its display stand as soon as you’ve had a moment to admire it. The stone crab claws and raw oysters are fat and fresh.

When leaving Chincoteague, one should be vigilant for peanut stands. Boiled peanuts (or “balt peanuts,” as they’re called in Tennessee) are exactly what they sound like: raw peanuts boiled in salt water. They’re sold self-serve in Ziploc along some of the less-trafficked byways. A welcome alternative to Slim Jims.

I’ll mention Wilmington, North Carolina’s Firebelly Lounge (265 North Front St; 910-763-0141) in passing, because I don’t remember what I ate there—not the frog legs, which a waiter warned me were a novelty food that tastes just like . . . etc. Firebelly is of interest primarily because it offers generous portions (of whatever I ate) and because Steve Buscemi was stabbed there while filming something with Vince Vaughn. Just don’t leave Wilmington without marveling at its well-stocked Serpentarium, where no one will prevent you from taunting a King Cobra until it tries to bite you through the glass.

The highlight of this route is the SeeWee Restaurant in Awendaw, South Carolina (4808 U.S. 17; 843-928-3609‎), technically inside the Francis Marion State Park. SeeWee is no secret, having been promoted by Jane and Michael Stern of Roadfood fame, but it deserves all the enthusiastic publicity it can get. Be sure to get fried oysters, fried shrimp, fried okra, fried green tomatoes, macaroni and cheese, butter beans, collard greens, hush puppies, Nehi grape soda, banana pudding, and, best of all, she-crab soup. The soup comes with a NyQuil cup of sherry, to mix in to one’s taste.

Summer is soft-shell crab season, as many readers are doubtless aware. I scored only one soft crab, in Charleston, at the Amen Street Fish and Raw Bar (205 East Bay St; 843-853-8600). This may be a tourist magnet—though not on the order of the Myrtle-worthy Noisy Oyster or A.W. Shuck’s—but if it is, that’s fine by me, because what am I if not a professional tourist? I ordered a deep-fried crab with a succotash of bacon and corn, and the second thing I did upon returning home, after preparing an alligator steak bought on Edisto Island, was buy five soft-shell blue crabs and go to town on them.

A quick guide to eating this summery delicacy:

• A soft-shell crab is one that’s molting. If you live on the Atlantic Coast, the soft-shell crabs you’ll find at your local fish market are blue crabs. It’s best to buy these live, but it can be hard to tell if they are, as they’ll come out of a fridge, barely moving (if at all), and will not snap at you like a lobster. As long as they’ve been refrigerated, it doesn’t matter if they’re essentially dead. They should be cleaned as close to dinnertime as possible.

• Cleaning a soft-shell crab is faith-shaking. You’ll need to shear the crab’s face off with scissors. Don’t be alarmed by its bloodcurdling scream . . . no, really, it’s probably dead, and even if it’s not, it won’t run around like a chicken does when you cut its head off. It’s definitely incapable of running around. You’ll need to strip its gills, the feathery things under the shell that look like you wouldn’t want to eat them. You’ll also need to yank off the “apron,” the panel on the ass-end of the crab’s underbelly.

• Bread the crab in a mixture of egg, flour, cornmeal, and special seasoning—a little salt and cayenne pepper, or Cajun spice. Fry it in oil or butter, about four minutes on each side. For a Gullah-style sandwich, serve the crab on a roll with lettuce, tomato, black pepper, and seasoned mayo.

And check out Max Watman’s grilled soft-shell crab post and recipes.

Devil Take the Hindmost

VERY YEAR I COME agonizingly close to winning decent money on the Derby, feel miserable for the rest of the day, and swear never to bet again. This year, the 136th Run for the Roses, was no different. To minimize my disappointment in case of a loss, I decided to keep my wagering to a very modest $25, a strategy also guaranteed to maximize my disappointment in case of a win. I also resolved to stick to win bets, to avoid the special misery that comes from picking 2/3 of a trifecta. I opened a Bodog.com account, something I’ve been meaning to do since I learned of this wonderful service from a urinal mat in Murray Hill. Then I texted my friends for tips and got down to the business at hand: deviled eggs.

I’ve eaten deviled eggs on Derby day for almost a decade. I was habituated to this high-cholesterol amuse-bouche by the women of Dartmouth’s Kappa Delta Epsilon sorority, who tolerated my presence—perhaps by failing to notice it—each year at their outstanding Derby party. With all due respect to KDE’s lovely, generous, cunningly decorated eggs, I’ve never been satisfied with the traditional mixture of mayo, dry mustard, and yolk. To that I added whole grain mustard, white wine vinegar, capers, and, last but not least, delicious Kelchner’s horseradish. (If you are a representative of Kelchner Food Products of Dublin, Pennsylvania, please click the tip button to the right.) The finished product is lightly dusted not with paprika but with ground cayenne pepper.

As I gobbled eggs, intel began to dribble in. Max liked Line of David and the filly, Devil May Care; Rollo was all about Ice Box; Alston rattled off a series of box trifectas; Stethers asked me if I understood “parimutuel betting with exotic wagers” and was promptly scratched. The People’s Horse, Noble’s Promise, was pretty appealing on principle, too—but when contest winner Glen Fullerton announced he’d put his $100,000 on Super Saver, and I saw that Calvin Borel was the jockey, I decided that was the way to go. And then, right on cue, Bodog.com succumbed to the dreaded “high volume of traffic.” I wouldn’t be placing any bets, after all.

Well, time for a mint julep, then. At least there was fresh curly mint growing in my neighbors’ backyard, and a handle of Evan Williams (it’s not Pappy Van Winkle, but then this blog is called The Poor Mouth, isn’t it?) in my backpack. I dialed up Max’s recipe on the Huffington Post and got to work. Or rather, got someone else to get to work. Cricket (really) had prepared the simple sizzurp the night before: “The day before you need the drinks, make a batch of simple syrup by combining one cup each of sugar and water in a sauce pan, and bringing it to a boil over medium heat. Some recipes call for five minutes of boiling, but whenever the syrup is clear and the sugar is dissolved, you are finished. Cut the heat and let it cool.”

Max’s next step advised the preparation of minted syrup, which we hadn’t done in advance, and had no time to do now. So we just followed the same directions, substituting “mint and syrup” for “mint syrup,” as follows: “The ratio of mint syrup to bourbon is largely up to you and depends, after all, on how sweet you like your drink. I like three ounces of bourbon to one ounce of syrup. Which means that one cup of minted simple syrup is enough for a 750 ml bottle of bourbon.”

“Strain a cup of mint syrup into a carafe and pour in a bottle of bourbon, give it a stir. (If you need it to be portable, buy a liter bottle of bourbon, fill up a flask and then fill the bottle back up with the mint syrup.) Now crush a whole heaping mountain of ice and keep a bunch of mint in a glass for garnish. Scoop ice, pour julep, garnish with mint, gamble away savings.” I couldn’t have guessed how badly I’d need this drink: Not only had I not been able to place my winning bet, but that rat bastard Alston had hit the trifecta on a one-dollar wager, netting $1150. Should he need something to spend it on, I’d like to point out that he’s forgotten my last eight or nine birthdays, and I’d really like one of these.

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.