When a Man Named Tiny Fries You Pork, You Eat It

Parsing the distinctions between grieben, chicharron, lardons, scratchings, grattons, and cracklins — not to mention which are for snacking and which are for seasoning other foods — can sometimes result in raised voices. Commonly made of pork, duck, chicken, or goose, these little fried pieces of fatty animal bits can be an unavoidable consequence of lard rendering…or the entire point of the firing up the pan in the first place.

One of the reasons I like driving around South Louisiana is the local food, especially the charcuterie. In fact, if you happen to be in New Orleans for Tales of the Cocktail next month, book a few extra days and head west into Cajun country. Whether it’s a family-run watermelon stand, fresh shrimp, or just one guy selling Creole tomatoes out of his truck, be prepared to stop wherever the offerings look good. Bring a cooler.

In Broussard (between Lafayette and New Iberia), Tiny Prudhomme offers a range of prepared flesh at his aptly named House of Meat. Ribeye sausage, boneless chicken with rice stuffing, duck tasso, quail, marinated rabbit, jerky, boudin, T-bones, rolled roasts, and the like.

But the look and smell of his cracklins pulled me over as soon as I walked in the door. Crisp chunks of pork — a bit of skin, fat, and meat in every piece — were seasoned with hot pepper, salt, and pepper. They were fantastic.

Oh, and there’s a drive-thru. Unless you know for sure what you want, though, park it and go in. Tiny’s no dummy: he sells Styrofoam coolers, too.

Tiny Prudhomme’s House of Meat
416 North Morgan Avenue
Broussard, LA 70518
337-837-3791

Goes well with:

• Rowley Down with Swine, Lard, a piece I wrote in response to a San Francisco Chronicle article suggesting that one should discard the solids when rendering one's own lard. Rendering lard is easy, but discarding the solids? A shameful waste of good cracklins (though a different style from Prudhomme's). Cracklin cornbread recipe included.

Donnie’s Spice Mix and Louis Szathmary’s Chef’s Salt

Cooks around the world — and companies that cater to them — create seasoning mixes to speed and streamline cooking. It’s so much easier to reach for a jar or a shaker holding a mix than to try to measure a teaspoon of this and a quarter-teaspoon of that while the stove is on and the pan spattering.

Donnie's, not yet mixed

Of course, there are foreign mixes with familiar names that aren’t necessarily part of our everyday cooking. Think of France’s quatre épices, Indian garam masala, ras al hanout from North Africa, or Chinese five-spice powder. Closer to home, we have Lowry’s and Mrs. Dash with their respective seasoning salts, while Tony Chachere spices Louisiana dishes in homes far beyond his own, and it seems that California serial restaurateur Juanita Musson barely knew a dish that couldn’t benefit from a dash of Vege-Sal.

Poke around my cabinets and you’ll find a few such mixes. I’m partial to several from Penzey’s, the Midwestern spice monger. Two jars in particular I never let go empty: chef’s salt from a recipe by Hungarian chef Louis Szathmary and — a recent addition to the larder and a bigger jar — Donald Link’s mixture he calls Donnie’s Spice Mix from his book Real Cajun.

This chef’s salt is one I’m likely to use to season roast beef, to strew on hot candied pecans, or to spike potatoes roasted in duck fat or (as my great-grandmother called it) goose grease.

Louis Szathmary’s Chef’s Salt

1 cup of salt
1 Tbl Spanish paprika
1 tsp black pepper, ground
¼ tsp white pepper, ground
¼ tsp celery salt
¼ tsp garlic salt

Mix and store in a dry place. In The Chef’s Secret Cook Book (1971), Szathmary notes: “Be sure to use garlic salt, not garlic powder. If you use garlic powder, a small pinch is enough.”

Link’s seasoning mix, on the other hand, has no salt at all. It’s a more pungent mix with a warm, mellow bite. If you use it, you’ve got to add salt separately. I tend to double the recipe each time I make it and it helps my budget that I buy spices in bulk at a nearby market with a substantial Middle Eastern customer base.

Donnie’s Spice Mix

4 tablespoons chili powder
2 tablespoons cayenne pepper
2 tablespoons paprika
1 tablespoon ground white pepper
1 tablespoon ground black pepper
1 tablespoon garlic powder

Again, mix and store in a dry place. For the chili powder, I use pure ground New Mexican red chile rather than a commercial chili mix. It's your kitchen: use the powder you want. Just make sure it's long on flavor and has some oomph.

This one I use on eggs, in gumbos, in various soups, meats for the grill, and vegetable dishes. It’s the spice mix I reach for when I open the cabinet door and am not sure what I want. I’ve grilled great lamb chops by mixing this in equal measure with ground cumin then adding salt and a small dash of oil. Despite the cayenne, it’s not a blistering hot spice mix. I’m lavish with this stuff. When the paprika costs about $8 a pound, I can afford to be.

Goes well with:

• You rarely got what you wanted at Juanita’s Restaurant, but you got a lot of it, a reminiscence of muumuu-wearing, customer-beating, eat-it-or-wear-it restaurateur Juanita Musson.
• PDFs of many articles Szathmary wrote for Hungarian Heritage Review, most with recipes.
• My notes on Donald Link’s Real Cajun, including his recipe for smothered pork.

Bookshelf: Donald Link’s Real Cajun

The bar of New Orleans chef Donald Link’s restaurant Cochon had a reputation as a place a casual drinker might get a snootful of legal liquors evoking moonshine’s tumultuous history. So during Tales of the Cocktail last year I brought together a band of professional and home distillers for a dinner at Cochon to run Chef Stephen Stryjewski and his crew through their paces—crawfish pie, boudin, fried rabbit livers, dark gumbo, the softball-sized cochon, rabbit & dumplings, oysters, and crispy breaded pig ears sliced pencil thin. Bar manager Audrey Rodriguez even brought out a bottle of Ted Breaux’s La Perique liqueur made from St. James Parish Perique tobacco. It was one of the best meals I’d eaten in 2008.

While I like what Stryjewski and Link do with the bounty of Louisiana, it’s their prowess with pork that keeps me coming back.

Fortunately, a trip to New Orleans isn’t strictly necessary to get a taste of what Link is up to. With the release of his cookbook Real Cajun: Rustic Home Cooking from Donald Link’s Louisiana, a lot of those recipes are within reach whether you live in Iowa City, Sioux Falls, London, or Los Angeles.

The rabbit livers are there, though parading as chicken livers. So is boudin. And homemade bacon. There’s an entire chapter called simply “La Vie Cochon.” But by and large, and with some exceptions, this isn’t restaurant cooking. Link places his recipes squarely in the cookery traditions of rural south Louisiana, so you’ll find deer sausage, baked oysters, crawfish etouffe, dirty rice, and various gumbos. Even when he gets fancy, the foods’ country roots are apparent. Catfish fried in bacon fat, anyone?

The desserts in particular—Satsuma buttermilk pie, German chocolate cake, blueberry ice cream, and strawberries with cornmeal shortcakes—make me pine for Louisiana. Until I get back to Cochon, there's Real Cajun to keep my envie for boucherie at bay.

Donald Link with Paula Disbrowe (2009)
Real Cajun: Rustic Home Cooking from Donald Link's Louisiana
256 pages, hardback
Clarkson Potter
ISBN: 0307395812
$35.00

I wasn’t joshing about the appeal of Link’s pork recipes. Last week, I bought a 13-pound pork shoulder and made two recipes from Real Cajun—smothered pork roast (at right, photo by Chris Granger) and simple pork sausage. The smothered pork is great over rice, but I also froze a bit to use as filling for enchiladas (encebolladas?) once I get back from a road trip. The sausage I froze in small pucks to use in omelets, on pizza, tossed with green beans, cooked with white beans, stuffed into quesadillas, and on more pizza. We’ll get to the sausage recipe—and what I did to it—later this week.

Smothered Pork Roast over Rice
Makes 8 to 10 servings

1 (6- to 7-pound) boneless pork roast (shoulder or butt)
Kosher salt and ground black pepper
2 large onions, thinly sliced
8 garlic cloves, thinly sliced
3 tablespoons fresh thyme leaves
1 tablespoon dried rosemary, crumbled
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
8 tablespoons (1 stick) butter
½ cup all-purpose flour
4 cups chicken broth
Juice of ½ lemon (optional)
Steamed rice

Preheat the oven to 275˚ Fahrenheit.

Season the pork very generously with salt and pepper, rubbing the seasonings into the fat and flesh of the meat. Set the roast aside for at least 30 minutes or up to 1 hour at room temperature.

Combine the onions, garlic, thyme and rosemary in a medium mixing bowl and toss to combine.

Heat the vegetable oil in a Dutch oven over medium-high heat. When the oil is very hot, sear the meat on all sides until deeply browned and crusty, 10 to 12 minutes.

Transfer the meat to a plate, reduce the heat to medium, and then stir in the butter. When the butter has melted, stir in the flour to make a roux and continue to cook, stirring, until the roux turns a dark peanut butter color, about 10 minutes.

Add the onion mixture and cook, stirring, until all the ingredients are well coated and the mixture is thick. Whisk in the chicken broth and bring to a simmer, stirring constantly. Return the pork to the Dutch oven, spoon some of the onion mixture over the meat, cover, and roast for about 3 hours, turning and basting the pork every 30 minutes or so, until the meat will break apart when pressed gently with a fork.

At this point, you can serve the roast right out of the pan, or transfer it to a plate, then simmer the pan drippings, skimming off excess fat, until reduced by about one-third, or until it coats the back of a spoon. Add the lemon juice and taste for seasonings.

Before serving, sprinkle the roast with some additional salt. Serve the roast smothered with a generous amount of sauce and hot steamed rice.

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