The Poor Mouth

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.

C.R.E.A.M.

T LEAST A HALF-DOZEN readers have asked me if the green substance depicted below is spinach. It’s actually collard greens stewed with smoked turkey necks. I was too busy over the holidays to post the recipe, though, truth be told, it’s not too much more complicated than chiffonade, add necks, add water, and heat for a long, long time. Since greens are an old New Year’s Day tradition (they “are believed to bring prosperity,” in other words $TRAIGHT CA$H), here’s a far superior recipe substituting smoked pork hocks for turkey necks, and a mix of collards and mustard greens instead of plain old collards. It comes, thanks to the indispensable Google Books, from the January 1985 issue of Ebony.

For the untutored, the hock “is the joint between the tibia/fibula and the metatarsals of the foot, where the foot was attached to the hog’s leg. . . . This piece generally consists of too much skin and gristle to be palatable on its own, so it is usually cooked with greens and other vegetables in order to give them additional flavor (generally that of pork fat and smoke), although the meat from particularly meaty hocks may be removed and served.” (Thanks, Wikipedians.)

The other, perhaps better-known, New Year’s soul food tradition is black-eyed peas, which are supposed to bring good luck. This year I’d take money over luck, but since having both is just a matter of gorging yourself on two different buffet sides, why choose? Let’s begin with the recipe for mixed greens. You’ll need about two pounds of curly mustard greens (see below) and one decent-sized bunch of collards. After thoroughly cleaning off the grit and aphids that are doubtless calling your vegetables home, chiffonade the collards and roughly chop the mustard greens. Then toss them together.

Next, bring eight cups of water to a boil with three smoked hocks inside. (Helpful hint for the grocery store: Regular hocks are pink like a piglet; smoked ones are brown like a delicious chocolate bar.) Turn the heat down about halfway and simmer for an hour. Then add the greens and whatever combination you like of chopped celery, onion, and green pepper. I despise celery except in beverages and green pepper except in fajitas, but I added them anyway for texture. Seasoning is tricky. The recipe calls for a tablespoon of sugar and a half-teaspoon of crushed red pepper. Make that 1.5 T of brown sugar, substitute cayenne to taste for crushed red pepper, and add a considerable amount of salt throughout cooking, which should take just over an hour. Whether or not you keep the pot covered the whole time depends on how much potlikker you like in your greens.

The peas must be soaked overnight before cooking, but after that they’re simple. Fill a big pot with eight cups of water, two hocks, sliced onion, chopped celery, two cloves minced garlic, and a half-teaspoon each of salt and cayenne pepper. DO NOT ADD THE PEAS YET. If you’re bad at following directions, you’ll end up having to remove all the peas (and much of the seasoning) with a slotted spoon. This mixture has to simmer for an hour before the peas are added. After the hour’s up, add the peas and cook for an additional hour and a half.

Ka-ching! Now you’re ready to bring your newfound luck and money to the casino, the dog track, or, ahem, the PayPal donation box. Happy New Year!

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.