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.

Easy Shrimp

I'm stuck at the house today. Leg injury. This involuntary immuration is driving me to the edge of sanity. It's a beautiful day, not a cloud in the stunning blue heaven that arcs above. Yet here I am, confined to the couch and those places I can reach in short, zombie-like shuffles. But I take comfort in this fact: Today is better than yesterday and tomorrow will be better yet.

I'm not an optimist, you understand: I just refuse to be sick.

Standing to cook, though, is a pain. So I rummaged through the fridge, pulled out a bag of boiled shrimp (Louisiana style, naturally), and piled them on a plate. I tipped about a tablespoon of sea salt on the plate, ground some black pepper on it, and squeezed lime juice over the little pile.

Peel a shrimp, dip it in the mixture, and pop it. Easiest lunch in a week.

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.

If It’s Monday, We're Eating Red Beans

Around New Orleans, respectable bowls of red beans and rice may be had any day of the week. It’s been that way since before my grandparents were born. The combination is so interwoven into the fabric of the city that hometown son Louis Armstrong declared his loyalty to the place by signing off his letters red beans and ricely yours.

Many aficionados of the local legume maintain that Monday — blue Monday, the old traditional washing day — is the proper day for red beans and rice. With minimal up-front preparation, some spicy meat and almost Spartan seasoning, a pot of beans can bubble away on the stove quietly while housekeepers tend to other household chores.

It’s true that I’ve made red beans on Wednesdays, Fridays, and other heretical times of the week. So bet it. Calendrical orthodoxy is not one of my virtues. But tonight, a large cast iron pot of red beans and another of South Louisiana medium grain rice will grace our table for dinner. There will be sausage and hot sauce as well.

Below are two recipes: one from Camellia, the go-to brand found in nearly every New Orleans grocery store, and one the way I (more or less) do it. More-or-less because I tend to eyeball ingredients rather than measure them in neat teaspoons and ounces, so the taste is always familiar, but rarely exactly the same. I like mine more aggressively seasoned than the company’s recipe, but not so much that I obscure the taste of the beans themselves.

Red Beans Rowley Style

1 lb red kidney beans, rinsed and soaked overnight
1 lb heavily-smoked andouille sausage*, diced

The Sofrito
Vegetable oil
1 large onion, diced
1 handful (less than 1 cup) celery, diced
5-6 cloves of garlic, minced
1 red bell pepper, diced

The Seasonings
2 tsp salt
1 tsp black pepper
1 tsp white pepper
1 tsp onion granules
½ tsp hot chile powder (cayenne, Aleppo, or pasilla de Oaxaca)
2 bay leaves

Preheat a large Dutch oven, add a splash of oil, and add the andouille. Brown the sausage and set it aside. Add a bit more oil, then sauté the sofrito ingredients until limp. Add the soaked beans and the browned sausage, all of the seasonings and enough water to cover by 1-2 inches. Bring the pot to the boil, then reduce to a simmer and cook, stirring now and then, until the beans are soft and creamy, but still hold their shape. This will take an hour and a half to two hours. Something like that. Serve over hot cooked white rice and toss on a grilled or sauteed pork sausage if the feeling grips you.

The recipe that appears on bags of Camellia red beans is a stalwart washday recipe, a little more streamlined than my version.

Camellia's Famous New Orleans Style Red Beans

1 lb Camellia Brand Red (Kidney) Beans
1/2 lb ham or seasoning meat
8-10 cups water
1 onion, chopped
1 toe garlic, chopped
2 Tbs celery, chopped
2 Tbs parsley, chopped
1 large bay leaf
Salt to taste

Rinse and sort beans. Cover beans with water and start to cook over low fire. Render meat in skillet, remove and set aside. In skillet, sauté onion, garlic, parsley and celery in meat drippings. Add meat, bay leaf, salt and pepper to beans. Boil gently, stirring occasionally for about 1-1/2 hours, or until tender. Add water while cooking if necessary. Serve with long grain rice.

Goes well with:

• In her book Gumbo Tales, Sara Roahen devoted an entire chapter to red beans and, specifically, to New Orleans author and raconteur Pableaux Johnson who makes something of a fuss about them. Johnson (whose red beans I’ve had at a great big table filled with guests) offers yet another version with canned red beans. Check out his recipe at Red Beans Roadshow. 
• When I'm in South Louisiana, I often hit the town of LaPlace, about a half hour west of the New Orleans Airport, to load up on heavily smoked andouille sausage. If you can't get there yourself, Jacob's will ship. cajunsausage.com. 
• I am a Meat Wagon — a story about getting stopped smuggling andouille after a trip to LaPlace. 

We're Moving to Louisiana

I adore Louisiana. I do. For a Californian—and Philadelphian before that—I've spent an inordinate amount of time eating and drinking my way through South Louisiana; New Orleans, of course, but also Lafayette, New Iberia, LaPlace, Mandeville, and more. Even a casual spin through the Whiskey Forge will show my affection for the place.

And while I honestly believe there are few places on this Earth as beautiful as California, we're picking up stakes and moving to Baton Rouge sometime between, oh, next week and the middle of September. Over the next several weeks, I'll be packing the culinary library, making Goodwill runs, and trying to decide if we take both cars or put one up for sale.

Then there's the liquor. The one guideline I'm following (not an inflexible law, just a organizing principle) is that open bottles won't make the trip. So, we've been enjoying an inordinate number of cocktails the past few months as we make sure that anything open gets enjoyed right here on California soil.

Over the coming weeks, I'll toss out recipes of what we're drinking to lighten the load. Until then ~ Laissez les bons temps rouler!

I am a Meat Wagon

Eugene O’Neill’s line about the shackles of history runs through my mind — There is no present or future, only the past, happening over and over again, now. Circumstances are different, but I know what’s coming.

Because of what I’m about to do, the security line at the Baton Rouge airport will grind to a halt. After all, this has happened before. And will happen again.

I tried to look natural, relaxed, as I slipped off my shoes into a grey plastic bin. It’ll be fine, I thought. Out came the laptop. They won’t stop me, not here. Off with the jacket. Though in New Orleans I was stopped with a payload smaller than this. There isn’t a piece of steel or iron on me, not one coin of copper or nickel. Last time, when the agent finally saw my package, she had said she wanted to come home with me. As I breeze through the metal detector, the TSA agent guarding it is already looking at the passenger behind me. I’m through. No incident.

Then the conveyor belt lurches to a stop.

“WHOSE is this?!” Today’s agent, a local boy, had seen through my façade. He’s pointing to my overnight bag and now knows as well as I what it holds: forearm-sized sticks of andouille sausage, several pounds of smoked beef sausages, packets of little pork sausages no bigger than my ring finger, smoked turkey legs, hot pork sausages, and—why not?— more sausage from a different producer about 200 feet down from the first. I have been to LaPlace, Louisiana, andouille capital of, if not the world, then of my heart.

“We might have to keep this bag,” he tells me. Then, breaking into a smile, he indicates my Timbuk2 laptop bag, just out of reach. It's bearing a similar carnal load: “And that one, too.”

LaPlace andouille is powerful stuff, but it’s no match for X-ray technology. Clearly, I'm not the first sausage smuggling bandit to come through security.

I am, it's been said, a meat wagon and my Baton Rouge experience is not untypical when I travel. In addition to my well-known affection for spirits, I am a fiend for cured and smoked meats. Whenever I travel, I try to make time to investigate not just bars and distilleries, but smokehouses, butchers, charcutiers, delis, carnicerias, cheese shops, wurstmachers, and any other place that might have some local meaty specialty.

Sopressata, sobrasada, chorizo, chaurice, speck, rookvlees, jerky, carne seca, horka, finocchiona, pfefferwurst, bacons, hams, smoked hocks, tasso, burnt ends, the assflesh Saucisson d'Arles—there’s no end to the sausage and cured meats I’ve schlepped across state and national boundaries. I even pack throwaway clothes as a sort of sartorial ballast so that, once ditched, I have have more room for meat on the return trip.

This morning, I made about a two-hour round trip drive just for the smoked treats—notably andouille sausage—from two shops in LaPlace, Louisiana. The LaPlace andouille is thick as my wrist and longer than a bottle of rum, each like a rolling pin of seasoned and smoked pork. That ersatz andouille I get in my local place is fine for what it is, but this stuff is transcendental. The sheer awesome deliciousness of proper Cajun andouille is unparalleled. Each batch of gumbo I make with it is stellar, filled with smoky goodness.

For my colleagues headed to Tales of the Cocktail this summer, LaPlace is a bit of a hike outside New Orleans. But just a bit. My suggestion for scoring the thicker, heavily smoked andouille typical of the town? Drive the half-hour west or pool your cash and send an emissary who will maybe skim, as courier fee, only a stick or two. If your plans don’t take you to LaPlace, stop by Cochon Butcher in the warehouse district. They’ve often got the same style of fat “sticks” in the deli case.

LaPlace

Bailey’s World Famous Andouille
513 West Airline Hwy
LaPlace, LA 70068
985.652.9090

Jacob’s World Famous Andouille
505 West Airline Hwy
LaPlace, LA 70068
985.652.9080

Wayne Jacob’s Smokehouse
769 W 5th St
La Place, LA 70068.
985.652.9990

New Orleans

Cochon Butcher
930 Tchoupitoulas
New Orleans LA 70130
504.588.PORK

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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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