Where the Red Fern Grows Skillet Cornbread with Honey-Butter

Tags

blackberries, cast iron skillet, Comfort Food, cornbread, dogs, food, honey-butter, kids' books, kids' classics, recipes, southern recipes, Young Adult Novels

The other day my friend, Dan, was giving me a ride home and we stumbled onto the topic of our childhood dogs. Dan had just gotten a tattoo on his arm–a big red heart with “Bertha,” the name of his childhood basset hound, written inside of it. I talked about Henry, my miniature dachshund and constant companion from the time I was seven until right before I left for college. Henry loved to eat crayons–he was even able to remove the paper wrapper in order to just consume the wax.

Me and Henry, 1993

At first we blamed my little sister for all the missing crayons, but then Henry started to poop the most beautiful, colorful jewels of poop all over the yard. They were speckled all colors of the rainbow, neon pinks and greens, oranges and purples–just gorgeous poops. They were so beautiful it took everything I had to convince my best friend that they weren’t candy and she couldn’t eat them.

pre-cleaned, pre-seasoned skillet

My sisters and I would walk around the yard, pointing to the little piles and matching them to their crayon names; “Burnt Sienna!” “Carnation Pink!” “Screamin’ Green!” “Wild Watermelon!” A week before I left for college Henry died. He was never sick, he never seized or got tumors–he just came in from playing in the yard one day, curled up on the rug in front of the fire and died. He looked very small and very peaceful.

Dan and my conversation turned from childhood dogs to the book Where the Red Fern Grows–a book that had greatly moved both of us dog-lovers as kids. I remember checking it off on one of those Scholastic book fair packets they used to pass out once a year in elementary school (was there anything more exciting than those colorful, book-filled, whisper-thin packets?). I was always a sucker for any books that looked slightly spooky or packed with adventure and I remember distinctly the third grade book fair in which I picked up The Indian in the Cupboard, Wait Til Helen Comes, and Where the Red Fern Grows all based on their promising-looking covers.

Where the Red Fern Grows is the story of a farm boy named Billy who desperately wants  his very own pair of coonhounds. When his father tells him that they are too expensive Billy works to earn the money to buy them on his own–selling bait and fruit to local fishermen. He eventually earns the money and buys a girl and boy coonhound, whom he names Little Ann and Old Dan. The story follows the trio’s adventures–fighting mountain lions, camping out in caves, and cutting down enormous trees all in the name of catching raccoons. Old Dan is eventually killed by a mountain lion and Little Ann dies a few days later of a broken heart. A red fern, which according to Native American legend can only be planted by an angel, sprouts on top of their gravesite.

After talking about the book for a little while–how it was one of the first books to ever make us cry–I said I needed to re-read it, as I had a vague sense that there was a great food scene in it. “Cornbread.” Dan said, “There’s lots of cornbread.” Whenever I come across someone who has a really solid memory of a food scene in a novel, especially one from childhood that they haven’t read in years, it thrills me. I went home that night and re-read Where the Red Fern Grows and sure enough there was cornbread everywhere. Billy stuffs it in his rucksack to go camping, he sells the stale chunks of it as bait to the fishermen, he makes salt pork sandwiches between its crumbly layers and eats it with jarred peaches, fried potatoes, fresh huckleberry cobbler, honey and butter.

The farm-freshness of everything in Billy’s meals was dazzling to me as a kid, it was the same reason I found the eating scenes in The Little House on the Prairie so bewitching. It was books like these that had me searching my backyard for edible berry bushes, mushrooms and roots before sitting down at night to a meal of Weaver chicken nuggets and canned fruit cocktail (No complaints, mom, it was delicious).

Mama opened a jar of huckleberries and made a large cobbler. Papa went to the smokehouse and came back with a hickory-cured ham. We sat down to a feast of the ham, huge plates of fried potatoes, ham gravy, hot corn bread, fresh butter, and wild bee honey.

Billy’s Skillet Cornbread with Honey-Butter

Makes one 8-inch skillet

Ingredients:

• 1 1/4 cup yellow cornmeal
• 3/4 cups AP flour
• 1/8 cup sugar (If you’re a Yankee, like me, and used to sweet cornbread you might want to up the sugar to 1/4 cup, although the seriousness of this cornbread mixed with the honey-butter was pretty divine)
• 2 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 cup buttermilk
• 1/3 cup whole milk
• 1/4 cup butter, melted
• 1/4 cup shortening, melted (plus extra for greasing skillet)
• 2 eggs beaten
• 1-2 pieces of salt pork, bacon or ham (optional–frying one of these up in the skillet and pouring the batter over the grease adds a delicious smokiness to your bread and greases your skillet)

Directions:

If you don’t have a cast-iron skillet you can bake this in a cake pan or baking dish, but I do recommend doing it in a skillet, it adds a great crispness and flavor. If you are unsure of how to season your skillet there is a great tutorial here (although I think that rather than putting it in the oven at 200 degrees for 3 hours you can do 275 for about an hour and a half-two hours). You’ll probably want to do this the day before, it’s time-consuming.

Once your skillet is seasoned, put your oven to 375 and melt your butter and shortening in the skillet. Pour melted butter and shortening into a dish and rub the remaining grease around the skillet with a paper towel, being sure to coat the sides. Put the skillet in the oven while you prepare the rest of the ingredients.

Sift together all your dry ingredients then add buttermilk, milk, beaten eggs and melted butter/ shortening mixture. Mix until incorporated, being careful not to over-mix, it’s okay if it’s just a little bit lumpy. Take your skillet out of the oven and if you have a piece of salt pork, bacon or ham, fry it up in the skillet leaving the grease in the pan. If you don’t, add a little but more butter or shortening and spread it around the pan. Pour your batter into the pan and bake at 375 for about 20 minutes, or until a tester comes out clean.

For the honey-butter simply add about 1/4 cup of honey and a pinch of salt to 1/3 cup of softened butter and whip until emulsified. Allow it to set up and marry in the fridge a little bit before spreading on hot cornbread.

Advertisements

To Kill A Mockingbird Lane Cake

Tags

1960's, Atticus Finch, booze cakes, Cake, childhood, Edna Lewis, film, Gregory Peck, harper lee, Jem Finch, kitschy food, lane cake, movie classics, movies, race, racism, Scout Finch, southern food, stable whipped cream frosting, to kill a mockingbird, vintage food

When I was nine-years-old my dad took to calling me “Scout.” I was fiercely tom-boyish, with a mushroom-cut, slightly buck teeth, and a such a good throwing arm it made my dad laugh and say “Mercy!”. I wore the same pair of overalls with a “Baseball is Life” t-shirt almost every day and my knees and hands were constantly bruised and dirty.

That fall, my best friends and I discovered what we were sure was a haunted house in the neighborhood. We visited it every day after school, peeking in the windows and leaving messages on notebook paper in invisible ink on the porch. Back at Christie or Meg’s house we would listen to Green Day’s “Dookie” on repeat and paint our nails with turquoise Hard Candy nail polish and talk for hours about what we were sure we had seen behind those yellowing lace curtains. At night, when my dad got home from work, he would ruffle my hair and say “Hey, Scout! Did you see Boo Radley today?”.

Around that time my dad left his worn-out copy of To Kill a Mockingbird on my pillow. The connection that I felt to Scout, with her mischievous, rough-and-tumble exterior and deeply empathetic interior, remains to this day one of the most intense I’ve ever had. I fell so deeply in love with the quiet and fiercely moral Jem that I scribbled his name in my notebook on more than one occasion and wished that he was as real as I felt he was.

I started bugging my mom relentlessly to find a recipe for Miss Maudie’s famous lane cake, a cake, Scout says, “so loaded with shinny it made me tight” (211). I had no idea what this meant but the words alone sounded good enough to eat and I was certain it was the best cake on earth. These days, with the internet, it takes less than three seconds to find any recipe you could ever imagine, but back in 1995 it would have required much more effort and I soon forgot all about Miss Maudie’s cake.

A relic of my six-year-old self hanging in my kitchen.

Years later, two years ago to be exact, I was working as a baker at a Southern comfort-food restaurant in Brooklyn. One day, looking at the prep list, I saw “BAKE/ASSEMBLE LANE CAKE” written in large bold Sharpee. I nearly fainted with joy. “A lane cake?!” I said, “Like Miss Maudie’s?!” No one knew what I was talking about so I set about making the sky-high confection with its thick layers of impossibly airy white cake and intoxicating gooey filling. The cake was everything I dreamt it would be and more.

This year is the 50th anniversary of the Oscar-winning film adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird, and just last week (April 13) was the birthday of the late great Edna Lewis, who brought this cake alive in her iconic “The Gift of Southern Cooking.” Celebrate both of these wonderful events and make this cake!

Miss Maudie’s Lane Cake

Makes 1 9-inch 3-layer cake

Adapted from Edna Lewis and Scott Peacock

Ingredients:

• 3 1/2 cups cake four
• 2 teaspoons baking soda
• 2 teaspoons cream of tartar
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 8 oz (2 sticks) unsalted butter, softened
• 1 cup room temperature half-and half (whole milk will work too)
• 1 teaspoon good vanilla extract
• whites of 8 large eggs, room temp (reserve your yolks for the filling!)
• 2 cups sugar

Directions:

Cream butter in a mixer fit with a paddle attachment and slowly add sugar. In a separate bowl mix together flour, cream of tartar, baking soda and salt and run through a sifter two to three times (I know it’s a pain but I’m convinced it makes a difference). Add the vanilla to the milk. Alternate adding your sifted dry ingredients and the milk to the butter mixture in about three batches. Mix until well-combined being careful not to over-mix. Remove this batter from the mixing bowl and set it aside. Clean out your mixing bowl and put the whites into the mixer. Whip with whisk attachment until soft peaks form. Add about a cup of the whites to the very thick batter and mix it to make it looser, then continue to add the whites, carefully folding them in until completely combined. Pour batter into three well-greased 9-inch nonstick cake pans (you can line it with greased parchment paper if you don’t have a non-stick pan but if you do have one I found it was unnecessary with this batter). Don’t worry if it looks like your cake pans aren’t full enough, this cake rises a lot. Bake at 325 degrees for about 25 minutes, or until tester comes out clean. Invert onto cooling racks.

Filling Ingredients:

• 1 1/2 sticks of unsalted butter, melted and cooled
• Yolks of 12 large eggs
• 1 1/2 cups of sugar
• 1 1/2 cups chopped pecans
• 1 1/2 cups dried cherries chopped (traditionally raisins are used, you can use any dried fruit you prefer)
• 1 1/2 cup sweetened coconut flakes
• 1/2 cup bourbon
• 1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla
• 1/4 teaspoon salt

Directions:

Melt butter and set aside to cool. In a separate saucepan mix together egg yolks and sugar (don’t do this step too much in advance, if yolks and sugar sit together for too long they do a funny thing called “burning” and create these icky strands of protein). Once your butter is cooled add it to the yolk/sugar mixture and over medium low heat cook the mixture, whisking constantly until the mixture is thick enough to coat the back of a spoon (this took about 7 minutes for me). Mix in the coconut, pecans and cherries and cook for a minute or two more until all of the dry ingredients are well-coated with the yolks. Remove from the heat and add your bourbon, vanilla and salt. Stir to combine and let cool to room temperature before spreading on your cooled cakes.

Stabilized Cinnamon Whipped Cream

• 16 ounces cold whipping cream
• 1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
• Seeds of 1 vanilla bean
• 1/2 teaspoon vanilla
• 2 teaspoons (1 packet) powdered unflavored gelatin, softened in 2 Tablespoons water
• powdered sugar to taste

Directions:

Soften your gelatin in water. Begin whipping the cream with the cinnamon, vanilla and powdered sugar (tasting it to see if it’s the right sweetness for you). While the cream whipped heat your softened gelatin, either in the microwave or a saucepan, until it is liquid. With the whisk still going, slowly add the liquid gelatin into the whipping cream and continue to whip until still peaks form. I frosted this cake yesterday in a 90 degree kitchen and the whipped cream held up almost perfectly–what’s left in the fridge is still fully stable and didn’t melt.

Assembly:

Once your cake layers are fully cooled place the bottom layer on your cake stand. Scoop 1/3 of the filling onto the cake–continue this process on the remaining 2 layers. Frost with whipped cream frosting and serve.

Adrienne Rich Onion Galette

Tags

Adrienne Rich, caramelized onion, feminism, galette, goat cheese, Mourning, onion, onion galette, onion tart, pate brisee, peeling onions, poetry, rustic tart, savory tart, spring onion, the fact of a doorframe

For my twenty-second birthday my older sister’s best friend gave me a copy of Adrienne Rich’s The Fact of a Doorframe. I’d heard of Rich often throughout my years studying literature but I had never actually sat down with any of her work. I tucked the book up on my “must-read” shelf and there it sat for the next two and a half years.

Then, one sweltering June night I was twenty-four and terribly heartbroken and feeling adrift and lonely and scared and looking up to my bookshelf for comfort I saw The Fact of a Doorframe staring back at me. Not even bothering to move to the couch I continued to read, cover to cover, until my bottom was asleep in my desk chair and my breathing was finally regular.

I found immense comfort and strength in Rich’s ability to change her life completely, reinvent herself absolutely, and still remain exactly who she had always been at her core. My copy of The Fact of a Doorframe is littered with red colored pencil markings, arrows, circles, exclamations from that night, and “Peeling Onions” still sits, hand-written on a piece of graph paper on my refrigerator.

Only to have a grief
equal to all these tears!

There’s not a sob in my chest.
Dry-hearted as Peer Gynt

I pare away, no hero,
merely a cook.

Crying was labor, once
when I’d good cause.
Walking, I felt my eyes like wounds
raw in my head,
so postal-clerks, I thought, must stare.
A dog’s look, a cat’s, burnt to my brain—
yet all that stayed
stuff in my lungs like smog.

These old tears in the chopping-bowl.

I am a notorious onion-cryer

When I found out, a little over a week ago that Adrienne Rich had died, I was shocked at how immediately and how deeply I felt her loss. The only way I know how to deal with loss is to cook and eat, so this onion galette is my ode to Adrienne Rich and I hope it brings comfort to all of you.

Caramelized and Spring Onion Galette

Serves 5-6

Black Pepper Pate Brisee (tart crust)

Ingredients:

• 1 1/4 cups all purpose flour
• 1/2 teaspoon sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 teaspoon freshly cracked black pepper
• 8 Tablespoons (1 stick) unsalted butter, cubed and frozen or very very cold
• 4 Tablespoons ice water

Directions:

Put all of your dry ingredients into a food processor and pulse two or three times to get everything mixed around. Then take your frozen butter and add half of it to the dry mix. Pulse about 5-6 times then add the remaining butter. Pulse 6-10 more times, or until the butter chunks are a little bigger than pea-sized. Add 2 tablespoons of ice water and pulse 2-3 times then add 2 more and repeat. You should still have large chunks of butter and they should be uniform throughout the flour. Squeeze a small amount in your hand–if it stays together it’s ready, if it crumbles apart you need to add more ice water. Turn out onto a clean surface and gently bring it together into a ball, being careful not to touch it too much. Once it’s in a ball, wrap it tightly and refrigerate for 1-2 hours.

Filling

• 3 medium red onions
• 3 Tablespoons olive oil
• 3 Tablespoons butter
• 1 sprig fresh thyme
• 1 Tablespoon good balsamic vinegar
• 1 bundle (5-6) spring onions
• 4 ounces goat cheese (or any cheese you like–gruyere or feta would be great)
• salt and pepper to taste

Directions:

Melt your butter and 2 tablespoons of olive oil in a heavy-bottomed pan. Thinly slice your red onions (try not to cry) and put them into the pan with thyme, sprinkle with salt and cook over medium-low heat until soft–about 7-10 minutes, stirring often. If you feel like it’s getting too dry you can add a little bit of water to the pan. Once the onions are soft, turn the heat down to low and let the onions cook, covered, for 30-40 more minutes, stirring occasionally. After 30-40 minutes add balsamic vinegar and stir to coat. Allow to cook for about 10 more minutes.

Put your spring onions in a pan with the remaining tablespoon of olive oil and quickly sautee them, tossing them the whole time. This should only take about 3 minutes–they should be wilted but still crunchy.

Remove your tart dough from the fridge. With the wrapping still on, work the dough a little bit in your hands to get it to soften up, then remove it from the plastic and turn it onto a clean, well-floured surface. Roll to about 1/4 inch thickness and place on a cooking sheet lined with parchment paper. Spread caramelized onions in the middle and crumble cheese on top. Take your spring onions and arrange them over the onions and cheese, then fold the edges of the dough up around the filling. If you are more fastidious than I am you can cut the dough so that its edges are cleaner to give the galette a more precise look. Cook at 400 for about 40 minutes or until crust is golden brown. Slice and serve warm.

Kim Roasted Vegetables with Yellow Curry Sauce

Tags

curry, Kim, nineteenth century novels, post-colonialism, roasted vegetables, Rudyard Kipling, vegetable curry, vegetables

In my roughly twenty-three years of reading there are three books that I have hated enough to actually throw across the room. One was Longitude by Dava Sobel–really, of all the exciting, inspiring, relevant books you could assign to teenagers for school-wide assigned summer reading WHY would you choose this? The other was A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley which I was assigned my junior year of high school. I was going through a serious Shakespeare phase (see also: know-it-all phase) and I found this re-imagining of King Lear tawdry and badly done. The third was Kim, a novel by Rudyard Kipling that I was assigned my Junior year of college and the novel that I willingly chose to re-read for today’s post.

I read Kim in my nineteenth century British novel class–a class I had been trying desperately to get into since my freshman year of college but which always closed before I could claim a spot. I imagined that this class would be the best I ever took because I would finally be assigned Victorian novels–my most favorite kind–maybe we would even spend weeks studying gothic romances, obscure female authors, mystery novels! I could hardly contain my excitement.

Instead, I had a professor who only wanted to study post-colonial literature written by men, which certainly has its merits but was not was I was expecting. I was profoundly disappointed, and the apex of this disappointment came when I tried to read Kim. I grew up loving The Jungle Book so I thought that maybe Kim wouldn’t be so bad. I was sorely mistaken (it seems the theme of this post is “never get your hopes up ever about anything”).

Kim is the story of a little boy named Kimball O’Hara. Kim is the son of an Irish soldier and poor white mother–both of whom have died and left him under the care of an opium-smoking “half-caste” woman in India. Kim is woefully neglected by his caretaker and is constantly escaping the house to find food elsewhere. The food scenes in Kim are, in my opinion, its only saving grace. While Kipling’s feelings of racial superiority and belief that India deserved to be colonized by the British is made clear from the novel’s beginning, a true and genuine respect for and love of Indian food can be seen in Kim’s food descriptions.

Kim is eventually discovered by his father’s regimental chaplain who recognizes his ability to blend in seamlessly and “borrow right-and left-handedly from all the customs of the country he knew and loved” (121) and thinks it could be useful as a military espionage tool. Kim is called “Little Friend of All the World” because  “no white man knows this land as thou knowest” (139) and Kipling’s descriptions of him eating Indian cuisine are a way of furthering this notion–Kim is quite literally ingesting Indian culture.

‘But my yogi is not a cow,’ said Kim, gravely, making a hole with his fingers in the top of the mound. ‘A little curry is good, and a fried cake and a morsel of conserve would please him, I think.”It is a hole as big as thy head,’ said the woman fretfully. But she filled it, none the less, with good, steaming vegetable curry, clapped a dried cake atop, and a morsel of clarified butter on the cake, dabbed a lump of sour tamarind conserve at the side; and Kim looked at the load lovingly. (22-23)

As disappointed and frustrated as I was by Kim I did gain one thing from reading it–an undying love of vegetable curry. I had never had a taste for curry until I read this book and found my mouth-watering at every curry description. For the two weeks we studied the novel I would leave class and go straight to Curry Kitchen to do my homework in front of steaming bowls of nav rattan curry or bharta.

Recently, my cousin’s fiance, Pete who works for his family’s spice company, brought me back some incredible curry powders from his trip to India. Smelling them I was immediately brought back to that period of time five years ago, reading Kim and living off of Curry Kitchen dinner specials.

A craving for curry that strong has to be solved immediately with whatever one has in her fridge, so the dish I made is by no means a traditional Indian vegetable curry, but it cured my craving and was delicious nonetheless. Sub whatever vegetables you want in place of the ones I used (although I will say that this mix was really well-rounded in terms of texture and flavor). You can also use raisins or any other dried fruit in place of dried cranberries and whatever kind of rice you like most.

Kim Roasted Vegetables with Yellow Curry Sauce

Serves 4-5

Ingredients:

For the Roasted Vegetables:

• 3 medium-sized red beets
• 2 red peppers
• 2 fennel bulbs
• 1 dozen baby carrots
• 1 medium white onions
• 3 heads of baby bok choy
• 2 cups snow peas
• 4 sprigs thyme
• 3 cloves garlic
• lots of olive oil
• salt and pepper to taste

Directions:

To roast the beets: first remove the leaves and wash them thoroughly to remove any dirt and debris.  Cut off a large piece of tinfoil and lay the beets out on them. Rub them in olive oil, cover with salt and pepper, add thyme sprigs and 3 cloves of garlic (smashed with the palm of your hand). Make a pouch with the tinfoil around the beets and put them on a sheet pan. Roast at 375 for about 45 minutes or until a fork can easily puncture the skin. You can peel the skin off by rubbing it with a clean dish towel.

The peppers, onion, carrots, and fennel I just washed, trimmed, cut, covered in olive oil salt and pepper and roasted at 375 for about 25-30 minutes, checking them at regular intervals to toss and rotate. The bok choi and snap peas I cooked in a wok with olive oil, tossing them vigorously for only about a minute so they were cooked but still crispy.

Curry Sauce

• 4 Tablespoons butter
• 1 large white onion, diced
• 1 tablespoon fresh grated ginger
• 1 Tablespoon minced garlic
• 2 Tablespoons yellow curry powder
• 2 Tablespoons all-purpose flour
• 2 cups chicken broth
• 1 Tablespoon brown sugar
• 1 1/2 cups diced tomatoes

 Directions:

Melt butter in skillet, add diced onions and cook until soft and translucent. Add minced garlic and fresh ginger and cook for another minute or so. Put chicken broth in a separate pan to heat up. Lower heat and add curry powder to onions and mix until it coats everything in the pan. Add flour and stir to make a paste. Slowly add warmed chicken broth to curry onion mixture, whisking constantly as the mixture thickens–about 5-7 minutes. Add brown sugar and diced tomatoes and allow to cook on medium low heat for another 10-12 minutes. Once the mixture was cool enough I put it in a blender and blended it until smooth (this is optional if you don’t mind a chunky sauce).

Cook rice according to package directions (I used jasmine rice). Heap vegetables on top of rice, cover in curry sauce and sprinkle with dried cranberries.