folo

Has it ever happened that you opened the paper or browser to see, splashed across the New York Times, your hometown and some names you actually have faces to put with? Lo & behol’, happened to me this week — thankfully, due not to crime or disaster but on account of a stunning success.

Coming at it from my angle rather than NMC-friend/food-writer John T. Edge’s, the saga starts 50-odd years ago, when I’m in fourth grade in Springfield, Mo. Ling and Evelyn Leong show up in, respectively, my brother’s first-grade class and a third-grade one. Ling and Evelyn are very shy but sweet and smart, the first Chinese kids we’ve met. We find out their daddy and uncle work for Mr. Bill Grove at The Grove supper club, where moms and dads go for martinis and steaks.

After a few years Daddy Leong (David) and Uncle Leong (Gee) open their own restaurant on what’s then the west end of town: Leong’s Tea House. The first time I see it, I’m awed: outside it’s big and beautiful, pagoda-roofed with lion statues at the door, and inside, elegant and quiet. I have a dish called Cashew Chicken.

Kevin O’Riley for The New York Times

One bite and wow, I love that stuff! In fact, from now on, I’m up for Leong’s practically anytime the question is where-to-go-to-eat. Nor am I an outlier — families, couples on dates, tourists in town, everybody falls for cashew chicken and practically wears grooves in West Sunshine Street going for it.

More time passes. David and Gee Leong have a falling-out, and the next news is a big beautiful restaurant on the east end of Sunshine Street, Gee’s East Wind. It too is a temple to cashew chicken (though I’ll try my first crab Rangoon and various other more-adventuresome goodies there). Springfield generates enough cashew chicken fiends to keep both Leong restaurants busy.

Gradually, “Springfield” (that is, Leong-style) cashew chicken proliferates throughout Missouri, even to St. Louis and Kansas City. Of course every local Chinese place has it (one of John T.’s restauranteur-interviewees quotes his father: “Are you stupid, son? Are you that stupid? You can’t cook Chinese in Springfield without cooking cashew chicken”); but even not-Chinese places (like the public-school cafeterias) do too. Drive-thru joints — Chinese, Korean, Thai, whatever — all offer the same marquee dish:

Kevin O’Riley for The New York Times

As an old playmate of mine will tell John T., “Cashew chicken is a kind of inside joke in Springfield. But it’s also our daily bread, our defining food. And it starts with David Leong.” Here is he with a plate of it recently, at 88:

Kevin O’Riley for The New York Times

Now picture some of us hicks finally scouting around the larger world and for the first time ordering our hometown favorite elsewhere — in, say, London (in my case) or San Francisco or Shanghai. Soo-prise soo-prise: stir-fried, not breaded and deep-fried, and with a lot more goodies than just green onions to partner the cashews. A revelation!

Still, wherever we eventually wash up and no matter how we manage to sophisticate our palates, we remain Springfieldians. The Leongs (or their imitators) set our default a long, long time ago. So a few times a year, we who’ve moved away must improvise to satisfy the letch. Here’s how I do that:

CASHEW CHICKEN

1/2 pound boneless, skinless chicken breast (per person)
2 eggs per pound of chicken
1/4 cup milk per egg
flour
salt & pepper
peanut oil for frying

Sauce
2 chicken bouillon cubes per cup of water
2 tablespoons cornstarch
1 teaspoon sugar
2 teaspoons oyster sauce

chopped green onions
cashew halves
hot rice for serving

Heat water to boiling and dissolve bouillon cubes. Stir 1/4 cup of broth into cornstarch to make a smooth slurry. Stir cornstarch slurry into broth with sugar and oyster sauce. Set aside and let sauce thicken as chicken cooks.

Heat oil to 350-400° in deep pan or fryer. Cut chicken into small pieces, dredge and let stand in flour for 15 minutes. Mix together egg, milk, and salt & pepper. Remove chicken from flour and let stand in egg mixture for 10 minutes. Roll chicken pieces in flour and deep-fry, in batches if need be, until golden. Drain well on paper towels and keep warm in covered pan in 200° oven.

Serve chicken over hot rice, topped with sauce, cashews, and chopped green onions. Pass soy sauce at table.

P.S. Is cashew chicken good for you? Well, all I can tell you is that my brother says the last time he ran into used-to-be-skinny-and-shy pal Ling, here was “this big, muscular extrovert with a hot girlfriend.” That’s what Springfield Cashew Chicken does for a person (especially, a Leong). Haw!

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Just about every foodie has heard of Heston Blumenthal and his Michelin three-star restaurant west of London, the Fat Duck (#1 in the World’s 50 Best Restaurant Awards for 2005 and in the top two — at the moment after El Bullí, near Barcelona — for the past five years). There Blumenthal wows more than 80 people a day, each spending around £220 (over $300) for gastronomic wonders such as snail porridge and bacon-and-egg ice cream.

So you can imagine the shock and horror that ensued on February 27, when Blumenthal announced he was temporarily closing the Fat Duck because of a health scare. Over the preceding three or four weeks, he told reporters, 40 diners had called in to say they’d become ill after patronizing the Fat Duck. He said he hoped to reopen this week, since tests had shown no evidence of food poisoning (and the week of shutdown would cost him £100,000 — $141,000 — which he didn’t know whether his insurance would cover).

Bad enough, but jeez, Friday it got worse: Bloomberg reported that by now, rather than 40, 400 people have called to report the trots and nausea after Fat Duck meals. (A spot of opportunistic me-tooism, ya think?)

Blumenthal’s first phone call after learning what was going on, as you see the poor bloke tell the Guardian reporter at the first link, was to the Health Protection Agency of the Royal Borough of Windsor & Maidenhead. Reports Bloomberg:

“This is a very complex outbreak,” Dr. Graham Bickler, the agency’s regional director, said yesterday in a press statement. “We are working closely with the restaurant and with colleagues in the Royal Borough’s Environmental Health team to explain what happened and to ensure that the risks of it happening again are reduced as much as possible.” …

Health officials have conducted tests on foodstuffs from the Fat Duck and taken samples from diners and from staff members, looking for signs of contamination by germs — either bacterial or viral — which might have occurred at any time from being supplied to the restaurant to being served, the agency said. …

“We’re saying 400 possible cases, not that 400 people have fallen sick,” Teresa Cash, a spokeswoman for the agency, said in a telephone interview last night. “When people hear something like this has happened, they may call and report something.” The complaints relate to meals since late January.

Blumenthal’s spokeswoman, Monica Brown, said the chef had no further comment while the investigation was continuing.

The restaurant has examined records of which waiters served which customers, which dishes the diners ordered and where they sat without finding any correlation, Blumenthal said in a telephone interview on Feb. 28. The Fat Duck has used an independent company, Food Alert, for four years to monitor hygiene and it is involved in investigating the complaints, he said.

Well, could it have something to do with serving sand?

The tasting menu costs [$182] for about a dozen courses such as the Sound of the Sea, where diners don earphones and listen to lapping waves while consuming seafood washed up on what looks like a beach. The sand is a mix of tapioca and Japanese breadcrumbs.

Cute, ‘eston. But ‘ow’s a Duck to stay Fat on that?

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(from Chamoun’s Rest Haven in Clarksdale and my iPhone)

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Maybe like you, these days I’m finding myself trying to call back all my grandmother, Mama Brook’s, occasional reminiscing about the Depression. I wish we could talk again not simply because I still love and miss her nearly forty years after her death, but also to pick a brain that knew so much about making enough from too little.

This shared national impulse probably accounts for the set of videos “going viral” this week, starring a 90-odd year old named Clara (Cannucciari). She’s cute as can be, and especially if you’re Italian and called your grandma Nonna, she’s an awfully good stand-in for the ladies a lot of us are missing. Find her videos and enjoy her company and tips at GreatDepressionCooking.com.

Here she is making a Poorman’s Meal for her (great?)-grandson and his friends:

More episodes here.

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Gumbo z’herbes or green gumbo is a Spring (specifically, lenten) tradition in New Orleans.  Being New Orleans, recipes for the dish has ham, sausage, and a hambone.  You can only take self-denial so far in the Cresent City.

Recipes for the dish call for as many greens as you can get your hands on:  mustard, turnip, collard greens, beet and carrot tops, cabbage, spinach, scallions, watercress, parsley, chicory, etc.  I’ve seen a lot of recipes call for a wild herb called pepper grass, and notes that it is likely to be found anywhere weeds are growing.  Here’s something about it on Chuck Taggart’s Gumbo Pages site (which also has a good recipe for the dish):

One magical ingredient — when I was a kid we used to pick this wild grass that was called “pepper grass”. If you chewed the stalk and seeds you’d get a distinct black-peppery flavor, but slightly more herbal. I once read that Creole women could be seen on neutral grounds and in vacant lots gathering pepper grass to use in their green gumbo. I’ve never tried this (not being entirely sure what pepper grass is, and if it grows anywhere outside Louisiana), but if you know what it is and you have it growing in your yard or nearby, I’m sure a bunch of this would add a wonderful dimension to your gumbo z’herbes.

Dooky Chase uses it in her famous version of the dish.  I figure it has to grow around here (in North Mississippi) but don’t know how to spot it.  Some online plant identification sources show something they call pepper grass. Is that it?

I’m guessing it’s probably not up and visible yet in North Mississippi, but I’d like some to add to a pot of herb gumbo.

Update: A quick glance at Google Images produces these pictures. If this is it, I think I’ve pulled these things up as weeds in my herb garden!?

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The Chowhound site has a great video (below) of Paolo Laboa, the chef at the San Francisco restaurant Farina, making pesto in mortar and pestle, to serve on sheets of homemade pasta. I learned a fair amount from the video, and it makes me want to try again to make pesto by hand.

It also makes me miss that part of summer.

The recipe is the chef’s mother’s sauce, and uses seven ingredients: basil, pine nuts, olive oil, sea salt, Parmesan, pecorino and garlic. The recipe I have used (which is based on the one in Marcella Hazan’s first book) has butter and ground pepper, too. In the video, the chef is very emphatic that regular extra-virgin olive oil has too strong a flavor and that a completely neutral oil should be used if you don’t have oil from Liguria. He emphasizes the variety of basil he uses, and it’s one that I’ve been able to get to grow locally (it’s also my favorite, and the one I’d grow every time if I could be sure it was what I was buying when getting starter plants).

The sous chef at the restaurant was crowned the “World Pesto Champ” at a contest in Genoa, Italy, using the recipe, which I cannot find online. I wonder if he uses more pine nuts than I do.

I’m slightly startled to see that I’ve never posted the pesto recipe I use here. This summer, I’m going to tinker with the suggestions from this video and may post then. A couple of things I figured out that are distinct from Hazan’s method: If you are using a food processor, to avoid oxidation and to keep that pea-green color, put (softened) butter in with the basil at the first. I think the butter coats the leaves as they are cut and reduces oxidation. Somewhere along the line I figured out the trick of adding a bit of the pasta water. What I’ve never done is get the hang of making it in a mortar and pestle, but watching this video tells me some things I wasn’t doing, and makes me want to try again. Come on, summer!

h/t Ruhlman’s blog.

Is anyone relieved that I did a whole food post without once mentioning you-know-what?

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Last summer, John Currence added a small food and drinks menu to the bar at City Grocery, a great addition to an already very nice bar. The menu has the best muffaletta I’ve had outside New Orleans (it is a heated one– a subject of some controversy in New Orleans, where the muffaletta at the Napolean House bar is also heated. I prefer the CG’s to the one at Napolean House), chicken salad, pimento cheese (both are served dip-style, with the black pepper croutons you see with some salads at the restaurant down stairs), and shrimp remoulade. All are really good examples of each, with my favorites being the muffaletta and the chicken salad.

This week, he had a special upstairs in the bar for the first time, and it raises a recurring theme on this blog– he made pig ear sliders, apparently in part due to a recent trip to the Big Apple Inn in Jackson.

I can say with almost complete certainty that this is an original invention– a quick google search for “pig ear slider” (in quotes) turns up no hits whatsoever. Are you folks aware of how rarely a google search comes up with no hits?

In case you want to try this at home, here’s an outline of what he did: First, he boiled those ears in apple cider vinegar for 2-3 hours. Then he cut them into smallish pieces, did egg-wash-and-flour to batter them, then deep fried them. The slider was a little bun, coleslaw, a dill pickle and some tender, succulent bits of fried pig ear. I thought they were great, and my wife, who came to scoff but remained to snack, says it was tasty. At least one occasional commenter on this blog also had some and enjoyed it.

Nevertheless, I somehow doubt these will become a regular thing.

In other John Currence-related news, he is going to open a fourth restaurant (the three current ones are described here– City Grocery, Big Bad Breakfast, and Boure), which is to be an as-yet-unnamed wine bar/bistro in the former Rhes Market space next to Big Bad Breakfast. I walked through the construction, seeing where there will be a raw bar, booths with curtains (no doorbells), and a long standard bar. He’s hoping for an April opening.

Also, John is once again a semifinalist for a Beard Award for Best Chef: South. He’s a repeat nominee, and I hope this is his year. Five finalists are announced on March 23rd and the award ceremony is May 3rd. Other names I recognize in that category are Scott Boswell of Stella! in New Orleans, Derek Emerson of Walker’s Drive-In in Jackson, and Christopher Hastings of the Hot and Hot Fish Club in Birmingham. Here’s the full list of semifinalists for chefs (H/t to the New York Times Diner Blog).

UPDATE: By lotus and ducky:

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… this quote doesn’t bother me a lot.  But you really don’t want to read the whole thing if this description of the federal governments “pure” food regulations, defining what’s permissible, bothers you:

Canned mushrooms may have “over 20 or more maggots of any size per 100 grams of drained mushrooms and proportionate liquid” or “five or more maggots two millimeters or longer per 100 grams of drained mushrooms and proportionate liquid” or an “average of 75 mites” before provoking action by the F.D.A.

Now’s your chance to read it all.

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Doctor, I have an unhealthy relationship . . . with the food pages of British newspapers. The dishes look so enticing —

Times of London

— that I can’t resist mooning over the recipes. But without fail, every one of the suckers includes at least one term of measurement or other nomenclature that throws me. So I go into it knowing that I’m doomed to frustration.

For instance, on ToL’s page of 10 comfort food recipes, that photo of Lancashire Hotpot seduced me to Gordon Ramsay’s recipe . . . but just look at these ingredients and instructions!

Serves 4-6

This recipe is one that Marcus Wareing, my head chef at Pétrus, adapted for his main course on the TV series Great British Menu. Marcus makes the stock from scratch, as he says this adds a depth of flavour that permeates the lamb and vegetables. It is undoubtedly a hearty and rustic dish at heart, but when cooked well is good enough to serve to the Queen. Get your butcher to bone out the middle neck of lamb and ask him for extra bones with which to make the stock.

For the lamb stock
About 1kg lamb bones
1 tbsp olive oil, plus extra for oiling
1 carrot, cut into 3 pieces
1 onion, cut into quarters
2 garlic cloves, peeled
Few sprigs of rosemary
Few sprigs of thyme
2 bay leaves
Pinch of rock salt
1 tbsp tomato purée

For the hotpot
1kg middle neck of lamb, bone removed and reserved
3 tbsp plain flour
Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
4 tbsp olive oil, plus extra to drizzle
1 Spanish onion, thinly sliced
2 carrots, thinly sliced
1 large garlic clove, thinly sliced
Few sprigs of thyme, leaves only
Few sprigs of rosemary, leaves chopped
3 large potatoes (such as Maris Piper), peeled and sliced to the thickness of a £1 coin
20g cold butter, thinly sliced

1 First, make the lamb stock. Preheat the oven to 200C/Gas 6. Chop the lamb bones with a heavy cleaver (or get your butcher to do it) and place them in a lightly oiled roasting tin. Roast for 10-15 minutes until the bones are browned all over.

2 Meanwhile, fry the carrot, onion and garlic in a little olive oil in a large heavy-bottomed pan until lightly browned. Add the herbs, salt and tomato purée and stir over a high heat for a couple of minutes. Add the roasted bones and fill with just enough water to cover. Bring to the boil, then turn down to a simmer and cook for 11/2 hours, skimming off any fat or scum.

3 Pass the stock through a fine sieve into a clean pan. Return to the heat and boil rapidly until reduced to about 1 litre. Turn the oven down to 170C/Gas 3.

4 For the hot pot, cut the lamb into 2cm thick slices. Mix the flour and a large pinch of salt and pepper on a plate. Dust the lamb pieces with the seasoned flour and shake off any excess. Heat half the oil in a pan and fry the lamb pieces for a few minutes until lightly browned on both sides. You may need to fry the lamb in batches if your pan is not wide enough. Remove and set aside.

5 Add the remaining oil to the pan and fry the onion, carrots and garlic until lightly browned. Remove the pan from the heat.

6 Layer the onion and carrot mixture and the lamb pieces in a deep casserole dish or a cast-iron pan. Season each layer with a generous pinch of salt, pepper and the chopped herbs. Ladle over the lamb stock until it just comes up to the top of the meat and vegetables.

7 Arrange the potatoes in overlapping circles all over the lamb and vegetables. Place the thin slices of butter over the potatoes and drizzle all over with a little olive oil. Sprinkle with more salt, pepper and chopped herbs, then cook in the oven for 1½ hours. The potatoes should be golden brown and crisp at the edges and the lamb should be very tender when pierced with a sharp knife.

8 Bring the casserole to the table and serve straight from the hot pot for a casual and rustic supper.

For starters, I’m pretty sure that no New Smyrna Beach butcher deals in lamb necks, middle or otherwise, so which cut is the best substitute? Where’s a handy-dandy conversion of metric measures and Centigrade temperatures to our, um, “English” and Fahrenheit units? Wot’s the U.S. equivalent of Maris Piper potatoes? How thick is a £1 coin??? See what I mean?

Or how about this mouthwatering promise, said to “mystically produce its own puddle of zesty sauce below a light, soufflé-ish sponge”  . . .

Seville magic pudding

Serves 4-6

- 75g butter, plus a blob for greasing

- Juice and finely grated zest of 3 seville oranges

- 175g caster sugar

- 3 large eggs, separated

- Juice of 1 lemon

- 250ml whole milk

- 50g self-raising flour

- Icing sugar for dusting

Preheat the oven to 180C/350F/Gas Mark 4. Grease a round 18cm-20cm ovenproof soufflé dish. Cream together the butter, zest and sugar with a wooden spoon until it forms a coherent mass, then beat in the egg yolks, one at a time, until well incorporated.

Mix in the juices, then the milk. Finally, fold in the flour. Whisk the egg whites until they form soft peaks when you lift the whisk, then gently fold into the mixture.

Tip into the greased dish and place the dish in a roasting tin. Pour boiling water into the tin around the dish so it comes about halfway up the sides.

Bake for 50 minutes until the top is firm and golden. Sprinkle with icing sugar and serve with double cream or vanilla ice cream.

What the dang hell is “caster sugar” and how much in English units is 175g of it? Do I correctly assume that what Rodney calls “icing sugar” is our “confectioner’s sugar”? Are the Brits’ “large” eggs approximately the same size as ours? Which of our oranges most nearly mimics Seville’s? (I mean, one thing we got around here in Florida mid-winter is oranges — none of ‘em Sevilles.)

Every week I do this to myself, no matter how it messes with my mind. Sick flowah . . .

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I’ve made various kinds of stock for years, including standards (chicken, beef, veal, fish) and somewhat less standard (crab, shrimp, game, lamb). But until recently I’ve never much messed with pork stock. Except with some ethnic cuisines, cookbooks don’t talk about it, except the occasional dismissal, and I just never thought about it much. Pork stock is widely used in Mexican and Southeast Asian cooking– here’s an interesting blog post with a long account of making pork stock from the Zuni Cafe cookbook recipe, and in this long collection of stock recipes is a recipe for Vietnamese pork stock.

Yet a moment’s reflection makes clear that every southern cook uses pork stock in a sense– the ham bone in the bean pot, and the ham hocks in the greens both are adding flavor to water in the exact sense stock-making does. And there’s no disputing the improvement the pork bones and meat make for those dishes. So I started experimenting with it, primarily for bean dishes.

More after the jump…

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