Chickenshit Afternoon, Part II

If you have never had a "Goombay Smash"
you have been missing out,
but I don't recommend them in 95 degree heat
standing over a 5 gallon vat of hot oil.

~ Brooks Hamaker

Last week, I wrote about the Chicken Drop in a post I called called Chickenshit Afternoon. The Chicken Drop, a bettors' pastime involving chickens and the trajectory of their last meal, is not as common as it once was, but it's still so well known among New Orleanians that even the erudite bar professor Chris McMillian at the Bar UnCommon took once glance at my photos of a yardbird on a Twister board behind chicken wire strapped to a plywood platform on a pool table in a bar and declared authoritatively "Well, that's a Chicken Drop."

Of course, McMillian is a master bartender and there's a certain correlation between alcohol and the Chicken Drop. I'd put it somewhere near 1:1. One also hears of variations with other livestock, including swine. Not in a bar, of course. Or maybe I just don't know those bars.

Brooks Hamaker—Mayhaw Man for years on eGullet.org and former distiller—also knew the story. In fact, he'd written it for eGullet, complete with a turkey variant. He was also kind enough to send on a link to the follow-up in which a big ol' Tom turkey goes into the fryer.

Brooks' 2003 essay, The Turkey Terror of Oak Street, Part II, takes us to the end of the story.

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Royal Blend, a Coffee Shop Refuge from the Mandess of Tales

When the mad hubbub of Tales of the Cocktail gets a little…much, I sometimes walk four blocks down Royal Street to Royal Blend. Tucked away in one of the French Quarter’s quiet, hidden courtyards, the coffee shop caters mostly to locals and tourists in the know rather than, say, the frozen daiquiri and hurricane crowd. And by "locals," I mean French Quarter locals, not just New Orleans locals.

The shop is easy to miss. But keep an eye out for the long, unlit archway in the 600 block of Royal. At the end, a sunlight-filled flagstone and brick courtyard opens to the sky. With fountains and lush greenery, it's a quiet place to take stock of what the day holds. Were I a horticulturalist, I could name those plants. Ferns, I suppose. That one seems to be a saw palmetto. And…ermm…ivy. We’ll just call them “plants.”

Head straight to the back of the courtyard, order at the counter, and grab a seat inside or among the metal chairs outdoors. Two big table umbrellas ward off the worst of rain and sun. The patrons are friendly and often chatty. Over the years, I’ve met other writers, filmmakers, cooks, journalists, photographers, artists, and tourists from all over. In the evenings, French Quarter ghost and cemetery/voodoo tour groups meet there in the courtyard. The ghost thing's not my bag, but knock yourself out if you’re into it. They meet nightly at 8:15. The cemetery/voodoo group gathers at 10:30pm on Sundays, but 1:15pm Monday-Saturday.

Of course, there’s lots of coffee—hot, iced, or all kinds of beans to go—but iced teas and frozen mocha slushies help keep the heat at bay just as well. For the peckish, there is an array of bagels, pastries, and light sandwiches. It’s my quiet place when I need to retreat, regroup, write, or just cool my boots.

Royal Blend
621 Royal St
New Orleans, LA 70130-2115
(504) 523-2716
www.royalblendcoffee.com

Stanley — Breakfast all Day on Jackson Square

Stanley on Jackson Square in New Orleans is one of my new favorite breakfast joints. Yeah, they’ve got sandwiches—good ones like chicken clubs—but I’m a whore for solid breakfast and Stanley delivers.

The high ceilings, tile floors, and marble table tops give the feel of an old ice cream parlor, but the food is upscale diner: eggs, pancakes, corned beef hash, bananas Foster French toast, and plenty of ice cream sundaes. Most dishes go for about $12. A predilection for hollandaise sauce, though, is what keeps me coming back.

Among the egg dishes, benedict variations take the fore—Eggs Stanley (cornmeal-crusted local oysters, Canadian bacon, hollandaise, on an English muffin); Eggs Stella (cornmeal-crusted softshell crab) and the Eggs Benedict poor boy (yeah, the usual ingredients done as a poor boy sandwich). But for me, the standout was the Breaux Bridge Benedict. With the coarse South Louisiana sausage boudin, poached eggs, smoked ham, American cheese, and thin “Creole” hollandaise, the dish is rich enough to be completely satisfying and small enough not to slow you down in the sometimes oppressive heat.

For Tales of the Cocktails attendees, you all are in good luck: Stanley is a mere six blocks from the Hotel Monteleone and opens at 7am. Breakfast and lunch are served all day.

See you there.

Stanley
547 St. Ann
New Orleans LA 70116
504-587-0093

Chickenshit Afternoon

...professionals, students, bankers...would be watching a chicken

on a 10x10 board yelling in unison "SHIT! SHIT! SHIT!"
Ahh, you should have seen it.
The Chicken Drop was stupidity and senselessness
on a Herculean scale.

~ Brooks Hamaker

Grousing about New Orleans’ oppressive heat and humidity is all well and good, but if it weren’t for yesterday’s stultifying heat, my delicate mind would still bear a Chicken Drop-shaped hole.

As I approached Good Friends bar on the corner of St. Ann and Dauphine, the heat and sweat had put me in a mildly grumpy mood. Just in front of me, neighbors crossed into the cool interior with two large dogs. Turns out that Good Friends in the afternoon is the most dog-friendly bar I’d seen in the US. At least six meandered among the customers, lounged on the cool floor, and pretty much made themselves at home. At Good Friends, even the dogs were regulars.

But the pool table stopped me. It was covered with a plywood board that had a Twister mat duct taped to it. The board was surrounded by a wooden frame enclosed by chicken wire. It was my good fortune to stumble across the lead-up to a New Orleans chicken drop—half gambling, half brazen ploy to get bar patrons to linger and buy more.

The Chicken Drop is simplicity itself. Around a setup similar to the one above, patrons place bets—or as at Good Friends, simply put their names down under red, green, blue, or yellow columns with no exchange of money—on where a live chicken will, well, dump. I bought two beers just in anticipation.

Of course, there’s lots of build-up. “Ten minutes left!” the manager calls. “Two minutes to place your names!” “Thirty seconds, everyone! Get your names in for a free drink!” Oh, yes—patrons who correctly guess where the bird drops a deuce get a free drink. It’s the most juvenile fun I’ve had until actually writing just now the phrase “the bird drops a deuce.”

The assembled patrons gathered around to watch the live speckled hen gently removed from her carrier, then placed over the wire enclosure onto the board. The crowd jockeyed for positions around the table, guffawed, cheered, and tried to startle to chicken into prematurely defecating while she strutted over certain colors.

A few false starts as she bedecked the white spaces between the colored circles. Then, after about four minutes, gold. She dumped a huge number on yellow. I got a free beer, was all cool and refreshed, and the grump was gone.

I cannot wait until the Hamster Derby.

Good Friends Bar
740 Dauphine St
New Orleans, LA 70116-3055
(504) 566-7191


Goes well with:

• Brooks Hamaker’s essay “The Turkey Terror of Willow Street, Part I” on the Chicken Drop for eGullet—with a Thanksgiving twist. It’s just a classic New Orleans bar game and a really fun essay. Helps that I’m staying with Brooks so he can elucidate these things for me.

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Cocktail Tomes and Cookbooks in the French Quarter

Phillipe LaMancusa has been in the food business for the better part of fifty years. For most of that time, he’s been at the stove, but after Hurricane Katrina (“the storm” locals evoke in casual conversation), he opened Kitchen Witch, a French Quarter emporium of culinary books.

LaMacusa’s opening stock was his own collection of some 5,000 volumes, but these days, he’s just as likely to buy secondhand books from retiring chefs, culinary students, and scouts who bring him vintage and antique treasures. A case of cocktail, spirits, and wine books just inside the front should stop drinks enthusiasts in their tracks, but some digging among the shelves will turn up treasures. Berger Applegate’s 1916 Paul Verlaine: His Absinthe Tinted Dreams is a choice catch for aficionados of the green fairy.

There are also plenty of used (and some new) New Orleans cookbooks, including Mixing New Orleans and Gumbo Tales, Sara Roahen’s slam-dunk investigation into modern New Orleans food and drink. While tourists and collectors make up the bulk of buyers, plenty of locals shop here even still to replace books lost in the storm. Recapturing their readers’ lost recipes has been an ongoing project for food writer Marcelle Bienvenu and Judy Walker, food editor of the New Orleans Times-Picayune. Their book documenting those resurrected recipes, Cooking up a Storm, is featured prominently. Score a copy.

Kitchen Witch
631 Toulouse Street
New Orleans, LA 70130
504.528.8382
www.kwcookbooks.com

While you’re there, pick up:

• Cooking Up a Storm: Recipes Lost and Found from The Times-Picayune of New Orleans.
• Bienvenue’s classic book of south Louisiana cooking, Who's Your Mama, Are You Catholic, and Can You Make A Roux? (a first edition of the book goes for $1,200 at the Kitchen Witch, about the only sticker shock in the whole place). More recent editions are $22.95.
• Sara Roahen’s Gumbo Tales. A matchless introduction to what and why New Orleanians eat.
• Mixing New Orleans, a cocktail recipe book with histories and an introduction by Wayne Curtis.

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Cantaloupe Bourbon Milk Punch

Anyway, it's hot here, it's hot.

That's all I gotta say.

~ Morcheeba
Let it Go

New Orleans isn’t as hot as last week they tell me, but Dickie Brennan’s Steakhouse still has a sign on its revolving doors reminding patrons to use the side doors “due to weather conditions.” Fortunately, there’s no shortage of cool marble counters, air conditioning, ceiling fans, and whiskey. At Bourbon House, all of them came together yesterday (with a dozen palliative St. Bernard Parish dozen oysters to wash down my Galatoire’s lunch).

Regulars know that the house drink— made with Old Forester— is a frozen bourbon milk punch. On a muggy New Orleans day, it’s a grownup’s answer to the frozen daiquiri slushies one finds in other frozen hooch parlors and drive-troughs in the area. Somewhere between a milkshake and a smoothie, this comes with a bourbon kick that just hits the spot on days that’d wilt frail constitutions.

During Tales of the Cocktail, attendees are in for a treat. Bartender Patricia O’Neil has been adding fresh cantaloupe puree to the mix and she plans to have them new version around for a while. Now, there’s no denying the drink is on the sweet side, and I wouldn’t want to knock back four or five of them, but when the thermometer creeps higher and higher, the icy melon goodness hits the spot.

As of yesterday, the recipe was only one day old. It might be named something else by the time you belly up—but they'll know what you mean if you ask for a frozen bourbon milk punch with melon.

Bourbon House
144 Bourbon Street (about a block from the Hotel Monteleone)
New Orleans, LA
70130
504.522.0111

Quick Small-Batch Half-Sour Pickles

It has been a common saying of physicians in England,
that a cucumber should be well sliced,
and dressed with pepper and vinegar,
and then thrown out, as good for nothing.

~ ascribed to Samuel Johnson in
The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D.
James Boswell (1785)

Small, knobby pickling cucumbers are generally sold unwaxed so that, with little more than a scrub and a trim, they’re ready for the pickle barrel. But who has the space or need for a whole damn barrel of pickles? Not me.

Unlike 19th century Americans or Soviet-era Russians, I don’t put up summer’s bounty to survive harsh winters. I make them because I like the taste. Instead of a big barrel or crock, I tend to make pickles—watermelon, jicama, eggs, carrots, lemons, beets, peppers, whatever looks good at the market—in quart-sized batches. Many can ferment on the kitchen counter and may be ready to eat within just a few days.

Half-sour pickles are one of those counter pickles. It’s worth pointing out that half-sours aren’t half-done or half-ready; they’re cured quickly in low-salt brines. More salt, longer ferment and you’ve got sours. Different recipe. We’ll tackle those some other day.

Food writer John Thorne suggests an easy method to combat the air exposure that can cause the pickles to go bad. In his 1984 pamphlet The Dill Crock, Thorne recommends a plastic bag filled with brine to exclude air from a fermenting pickle. If it leaks at all, the brine inside is the same strength as what’s in the container, so the pickle doesn’t get diluted. I use a Ziploc bag to the same effect.

Final note: we trim the blossom ends of the cucumbers. It’s not strictly necessary, but the blossom ends may contain enzymes that could cause the pickles to go all soft and mushy. Not what we’re going for.






Quick Half-Sour Pickles

1 quart of pickling cucumbers

Brine for one quart of pickles
2 Tbl kosher salt
3 cups water (filtered or distilled)
½ tsp black pepper, coarsely crushed
½ tsp coriander seed, coarsely crushed
I head of fresh dill
½ tsp crushed red pepper (Aleppo if you’ve got it)
1 bay leaf
2 garlic cloves, peeled and sliced

Gently scrub the cucumbers under running water to remove dirt and any particularly prominent spines on the nubs. Drain. Trim a thin slice from the blossom end and pack the cukes into a one-quart non-reactive container, such as glass or food-grade plastic.

Stir the salt and water until the salt dissolves. Add the aromatic/seasoning ingredients to the container with the cucumbers. Put the container on a plate to contain any possible dripping once fermentation begins.

Pour in enough brine to cover the cucumbers. Push a sandwich-sized Ziploc bag into the container’s aperture, fill it with the remaining brine, and seal. Cover with cheesecloth and secure it with a rubber band to keep out fruit flies or other flying little beasties you may discover are drawn to this stuff.

After a few days, the brine may begin giving off tiny bubbles. Keep an eye on it and skim off any white foam that rises to the surface, giving the bag a rinse if necessary. The cucumbers will begin turning darker and to taste, well, brined after just two days. Let them go for a week and they should turn olive green throughout. Remove the bag, skim any new foam, close container fast, and put in the fridge.

These are meant to be eaten in fairly quick order and are not intended for long storage. Make yourself a sandwich, grill up some burgers, or snack on them Russian style, with shots of vodka.

Beer: Gateway to Whiskey

At a cocktail conference, a certain amount of rejiggering is expected. With Tales of the Cocktail only two weeks away, it's high time to see what needs rearranging. Wouldn't want to miss a free drink, now.

Needless to say, I'm excited about the upcoming annual event, but one session in particular made me certain not to miss it this year. Chris Sule, distiller at Old New Orleans Rum, has put together a panel discussion called "From Brewer to Distiller" that explores the sensibilities brewers bring to the game when they turn to distilling. Check out the preview here.

Last year Chris pulled out the stops for Mike McCaw's workshop on operating a small modern column still (in that case, a PDA-1 from the Amphora Society). Given the concerns of the NOFD (something about...explosions?), Mike wasn't allowed to distill on site, but Chris brought in waves of foreshots, heads, tails, and hearts to pass around and illustrate the smells and tastes typical in various stages distilling process. It was, perhaps, the most rank smelling room in the hotel that week. And an absolute delight.

Mike, Ian Smiley, and I followed with a panel talk on what we called, tongues in cheeks, nano-distilling: that is, very small batches typical of modern home distillers. Needless to say, we weren't the only distillers there.

As the three of us talked about our backgrounds, it came out that we all began as homebrewers. Maybe it's the experimental bent of brewers or the small batches that encourage much tweaking and adjusting and succumbing to the temptation of strange ideas. But it's undeniable: There's something about making your own beer—once you do it enough—that just says whiskey is the most natural next step.

Sule joins Ray Deter (d.b.a New Orleans and d.b.a. NYC), Jess Graber (Stranahan’s Colorado Whiskey), and hos won brother, noted home brewer Charles Sule, for a discussion about what brewers bring to the craft once they catch the distilling bug.

Hosted by Old New Orleans Rum, the 90-minute session will include tastings of whiskey mash as well as several spirits made by former and current brewers. Expect an enthusiastic examination of the “new state of American beer and spirits, drawing parallels, crafting contrasts, and telling the story of where we were, where we’re at, and where we’re going.”

Thursday, July 9, 2009 2:30-4:00 PM in the Riverview Room at the Hotel Monteleone in New Orleans. A review of the calendar suggests I'll be in that same room all day...

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Bread and Butter Bar Eggs

This Spring, my bread and butter pickles took a hard left turn. Bread and butters, after kosher-style dills, are arguably the most well-known cucumber pickle in the US. My recipe is pretty consistent from batch to batch, but this time I couldn’t leave well enough alone and got chickens involved.

As I’ve mentioned before, pickled bar eggs are a particular favorite of mine, even if they are a bit old fashioned (or just plain divey). Here and there, you still find bars that have a large glass jug with pickled eggs bobbing around in vinegar and bay leaves. Whether they really rise and fall with changes in the barometric pressure—as some flannel-mouthed bartenders claim—is a question for another day.

Some of my pickled egg experiments don’t turn out as well as hoped (the Cape Malay masala version needs work). Overall, though, eggs make great spiced pickles, exactly the kind I’d like to see more often grace back bars for hungry drinkers. The smack and tang of vinegar also make them a good mid-day snack when I’m peckish, but don’t want to eat a whole meal. A pinch of salt, maybe some Sriracha hot sauce, and I'm good.

When the latest batch of bread and butter cukes was down to just a few slices, the jar still held nearly a quart of pickle juice flavored with seeds of celery and mustard and the ubiquitous turmeric (the rhizome that turns ballpark mustard yellow). Rather than pitch it, I cooked a batch of eggs, slipped them into the spiced liquid, and pushed the jug to the back of the fridge. After two weeks, the eggs firmed, turned a luminous turmeric yellow, and took on the definite sweet-and-sour tang of the original pickle.

Here’s the shortcut to make them without the cucumber prelude. Remember, hardboiled eggs are a mistake. If you’re boiling them, you’re doing it wrong. See here for easy instructions on cooking eggs without that sulfurous, stanky green ring.

Bread and Butter Bar Eggs

2 dozen hard-cooked eggs, peeled
1 lb onion
1 ½ Tbl kosher or sea salt
1 ½ tsp celery seed
1 tsp powdered turmeric
¼ tsp cracked allspice (or 1 tsp pimento dram)
1 Tbl each brown and yellow mustard seeds
4 cups cider vinegar
3 ½ cups light brown sugar

Peel and slice the onions into half-moons, about ¼” wide. Toss with the salt in a nonreactive bowl and set aside for an hour. Rinse and drain.

In a nonreactive pot, add the remaining ingredients (except the eggs) and bring to a boil. Stir as needed to dissolve the sugar. Reduce the heat and simmer 3-5 minutes. Remove from the heat, cover, and let cool to room temperature.

Place the eggs in a nonreactive container, such as a big glass preserving jar or food-grade plastic, and pour the liquid over them. Cover and refrigerate. The eggs should be fully pickled in two weeks, but even a few days will make a dramatic difference.

Serve with beer, whiskey, boilermakers, a pinch of salt, and a grind of pepper. Get all fancy if you like and slice them into quarters lengthwise for adding to salads. Toss them in a picnic basket or a shoebox lunch.

Felony, She Wrote

Sutton, who favored a long, unkempt beard and overalls,
typified the American moonshiner. Devoted to his hobby
and fiercely opposed to the law that prohibits it,
Sutton produced high-proof spirits at home.

~ Eric Arnold

If Marvin "Popcorn" Sutton was a hobbyist distiller, then I'm Angela Lansbury. This week forbes.com published Eric Arnold's short piece Moonshine: More than a Hobby. It seems that Arnold's heart is in the right place, but he didn't quite get his head around the concept. Starting off with the recently-deceased Popcorn Sutton was a clue that yet another article was about to flub the home distilling story.

Sutton, who seemingly killed himself this Spring, was indeed a moonshiner, but for him moonshine was a business. Max Watman, writing for Gourmet, says that when Sutton was busted by authorities (again), his three stills each had a capacity of 1,000 gallons. That's not a hobby. Joe Blow or Jane Smith making a gallon of brandy or whiskey at a time for family and friends—that's a hobby.

Both moonshining and home distilling draw on long traditions of folk distilling—and both are fine by me. But let's keep our terms straight. Sutton got busted because he was making massive amounts of illegal liquor and flaunting his activities through a book, interviews, and even an Emmy-nominated documentary by filmmaker Neal Hutcheson. Trying to sell nearly 850 gallons of shine to authorities just isn't on the same scale as trading baseball cards. That's a capitalist venture of a shrewd self-marketer.


Goes well with:

• Max Watman's book, Chasing the White Dog, will feature more Popcorn stories—as true as one can get with Sutton, I imagine. It's scheduled for a 2010 release and I, for one, can't wait. Subtitled An Amateur Outlaw's Adventures in Moonshine, Watman does indeed look into the business end of making illicit liquor—which is solidly where Sutton's story belongs.
• Paul Clarke, writing in Imbibe, gets the hobbyist distilling story right. His 2009 article New Moon Rising is one of the more articulate and accurate portrayals of what's going on in home distilling these days. That is, it jives most consistently with what I've been seeing develop over the last 20 years.
• Renee Davidson's piece Whiskey Geeks Keep Moonshine Tradition Alive for wired.com was one of the first modern articles that set aside outdated notions about mountaineer moonshiners and concentrated on what was really happening in the field.