Category Archives: Cooking

Hunting Chanterelles

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Not chanterelles

I have no sooner put the dogs out after my siesta than I call them back inside. Thunder rumbles in the west as the winds swirl through the treetops. The dogs hate thunder. In a valley such as ours that is perhaps a half-mile from ridge to ridge, it is often a guessing game to determine the direction and size of an incoming storm. It lurks behind the opposing ridge before springing a surprise. Sound as often as sight is our guide to the weather.

After a couple of weeks of rain and hot humid afternoons, excellent conditions for mushrooms and ideal for chanterelles, I head sans dogs into the backwoods, walking stick, wicker basket, and a lit cigar the tools of my trade. The less I need for an activity, the more satisfaction I derive from the effort and result. Hunting mushrooms is as simple as gathering wild blackberries: first you find ‘em and then you pick ‘em.

By the time I cross the triangle field and move into the woods, the skies have turned an ominous charcoal to the north, west, and south. Thunder rolls from one end of the sky to the other, and images of battling giants are not hard to conjure. The winds pause briefly as I cross the now-dry wet-weather creek and climb a slight rise. Just thirty feet into the forest, the area already looks as if a blanket has been tossed over the treetops. Detail on the darkened ground is tricky to make out, yet in front of me, glowing like gold, impossible to miss, is a scattering of the cup-shaped mushrooms I have come to find, chanterelles.

I walk and smoke my cigar, stooping and gathering from time to time, one here, five over there. The winds pick up, the thunder becomes a constant backdrop, and a nearby lightning strike causes me to jerk and crouch instinctively. I don’t want to exit the safety of the woods and risk walking across the pasture back to the house, so I continue adding to my plunder. This foraging adventure is proving to be epic.

Coming across a fallen oak, I seat myself upon it and perch for a few minutes … until a fawn nestled ten feet away rises from a long rest to stretch and starts with fright at the sight of me. It had better develop much keener hearing, I think, if it wants to survive hunting season in a year or two. The fawn bounds away into the shadows of the forest. The storm has really intensified, and a branch from time to time is wrenched from its parent tree and crashes to the floor.

I find yet another batch of chanterelles, my wicker basket close to full. This flush runs twenty feet up a ravine into the embracing roots of an old red oak. The last mushroom I pick is plucked next to a box turtle, who gives me a baleful glare for taking his dinner. The rain is falling, but little reaches the ground under the dense canopy where I sit on another fallen tree while finishing my cigar.

Back at the woods’ edge I wait another twenty minutes for the storm to pass, then, walking at almost a jog, I head toward the house, still feeling more than a little exposed. Cindy has afternoon coffee ready, and I put down my full basket—a little over two pounds of chanterelles—grab my cup, and join her on the porch.

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Reading this week: I’ve polished off a couple of novels by Robert Fabbri on the emperor Vespasian. As a companion to those two I read the chapter on Vespasian in Suetonius: Lives of the 12 Caesars. And I’m just about finished with the biblio-memoir, Books (L. McMurtry). Any of these come with my stamp of approval, for what that is worth. All the usual trigger warnings apply for the sensitive (Even, surprisingly, with McMurtry).

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UPDATE: My book, Kayaking with Lambs, will be available October 1.

My Southern Garden

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“March 9th both beds of peas up! March 23rd sowed 2 rows of celery 9 inches apart, sowed 2 rows of Spanish onions and 2 of lettuce.” — Thomas Jefferson, 1767

It is no surprise that our Founding Gardener got giddy and detailed with the advent of spring, when the inspiration and the reality of the annual vegetable garden is ultimately constrained only by imagination and labor. Each January, mulling over the vast pantheon of vegetable planting possibilities — from artichokes to broccoli, cabbages to corn, all the way down the alphabet until reaching everyone’s favorite vegetable to gift (in quantity), the overproductive zucchini — I know in my heart that something must give. In the final accounting, after all, there are only so many dinners one can eat, so many stolen mornings to attend to the weeding, only so much space to devote.

This tendency toward overshoot, of course, may be evolutionary, that our eyes are truly bigger than our stomach. Fortunate for us, we raise hogs. These fellow gourmands have our back; they are all too ready to take on the challenge of a too-productive garden.

What follows are some thoughts on the vegetable annuals I do plant. This list is governed by one simple rule: plant what you want to eat. Although beauty and orderliness have some merit, if it doesn’t have a place on the dinner plate, why bother? (Which begs the question of why I raised those damned prickly cardoons last year.)

  • Tomatoes: I typically plant at least a half-dozen varieties, ranging from the unproductive but outstandingly delicious Brandywine to the sturdy and prolific workhorse, the Rutgers. With at least six and often more varieties in the ground and 20-30 plants in all, I’m ready for whatever the season throws at the garden. Too much or too little rain, cool or hot, a few if not all will thrive. A summer table without tomatoes is a sign of celestial disfavor. And besides, who would want to eat an egg and bacon sandwich without a slice of tomato?
  • Peppers: While one good pepper plant can satisfy a family, and the pigs will not eat the excess, I still can’t resist putting at least a dozen in the ground. Like okra, they make this gardener look highly skilled. (These are the plants needed to provide ample cover for my other horticultural sins.) I find that a planting of Hatch and jalapeño peppers provide what we crave.
  • Eggplant: I plant about four (usually Black Beauty) and as late as I can still find them. Because covering crops with row covers, dusting with diatomaceous earth, are activities performed only in the most lazy and forgetful fashion by this Scotch-Irish descendant. If the flea beetles are to be outwitted, my plants go in the ground in late June or July and we dine in September on eggplant parmigiana.
  • Southern field peas: That my beloved is not a fan does not limit the space devoted to this most prolific of all that is grown in my garden of Southern varieties. I keep more than a dozen heirlooms: Texas Zipper Creams, Red Rippers, the Unknown field pea, Polecats, Purple Hulls, each lovingly preserved in the freezer for their chance to be chosen to shine bright on a summer evening. A small pot of field peas (also sometimes called crowders) with a bit of smoked tasso, fresh herbs, and other seasonings, all simmered in homemade chicken stock for a couple of hours is as close to perfection as I might hope for in this life. To paraphrase old Ben Franklin, they are proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy. A bonus is to have a reason to sit quietly and shell peas in the cooling shade of the evening while sipping a cold beer.
  • Green beans: Just a trio of poles, formed into a couple of tepees and planted with the variety called Murphy’s, is sufficient for our green bean needs. They will keep us fed, if harvested regularly, fresh in summertime and canned or frozen for out-of-season dining.
  • Butter beans: A row trellised in mid-summer, packed with pods (most often Snow on the Mountain), mounds of verdant vines, conveying richness and a promise of food security at the table. Serve them cooked in pork products, in a jambalaya, or in chicken stock, buried beneath a slow-cooked, garlic-stuffed leg of lamb.
  • Lettuce: Sharpen your pens in rebuke, but lettuce is a backdrop to the seasonal plate, always present, even needed, but seldom remarked on or loved; a mere conveyance for the main event, yet, it is still essential. I plant a rotating crop of a market mix to provide textural and taste contrasts for whatever use is called for at dinner. Obligatory, attractive, but boring.
  • Garlic: Easy to grow, essential, exciting even, garlic should always be planted in longer rows than one can spare. For to run out of garlic mid-winter is to contemplate the dark thoughts of a trip to Olive Garden. We always plant at least two varieties, Killarney Red being a favorite.
  • Onions: A row of red and a row of white, well-watered, yields a surprisingly large amount for the larder. True, we can buy them, like potatoes, “dirt cheap” at the store. And we never quite grow enough to forestall their purchase. But having your own red onion, freshly cured, is just the thing to make that lettuce look and taste less boring.
  • Winter squash: Typically I will grow three different varieties (although, for some reason I have grown none the past couple of years). Hubbard, Candy Roaster, pumpkins, the list is endless. A winter squash mashed up with butter and Steen’s syrup, with a sprinkling of pecans — now who can think of a better accompaniment to a dinner of pork chops and rice smothered in tomato gravy?
  • Okra: That ultimate cultural identity test, separating the newly arrived New Yorker from the Chosen. I grow the variety Dub Jenkins every year, courtesy of that gardening giant John Coykendall. Okra bulks up a vegetable stew (which will always have beef, my protein- and flavor-deprived vegetarian friends), should never be seen in a bowl of gumbo (unless you hang out with those misguided souls from New Orleans), is perfect in fritters, and is absolutely lovely when pickled (but only made by my friend Susan or Talk of Texas).
  • Yellow squash: I grow it every year and am always grateful for the short season we enjoy it before the squash borers invade. Then it is gone, which is fine, because too much of a good thing and the palate is jaded. Served in a casserole with bacon (from the oft-mentioned Ms. Lundy’s cookbook) or sliced thin with potatoes and zucchini, then sprinkled with herbs and salt, and baked in the oven — these are my two favorite ways to eat crooknecks, please.
  • Cucumbers: That a fruit can be so bland by itself, yet leave you salivating in the kitchen, a halved cuke in one hand and a fistful of kosher salt in the other, is a marvel. Cucumbers never last long enough.
  • Cabbages: I will war with the natural world to keep these whole and fresh all the way to maturity. Cole slaw, home-fermented sauerkraut, or alongside some freshly cured corned beef or pork, the world would be less than whole without the contributions of cabbage.
  • Greens (all of ‘em): I’ll refer you to my Ode to Greens. Let the rest of the garden be washed away or eaten by the undeserving, but please leave me the greens.

Now, you may wonder at the obvious ones missing, potatoes and corn. And I do typically grow some for the table. But here, and just between us, I blush to confess, the economy and scale of the grocery store to provide quality at a reasonable price makes my efforts superfluous. Besides, I am a rice man by inheritance and culinary inclination. And, as for the noble corn, it is always at its best stone ground and made into cornbread.

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Reading this weekend two books (again and again) by very different Southerners, both of whom knew that the meaning of a good garden is hospitality. Butter Beans to Blackberries, Recipes from the Southern Garden (R. Lundy). What prose, what style, what wisdom and joy is found in these pages (such as the instructions on page 164, for okra and corn fritters with sorghum and pepper relish). And Thomas Jefferson, the Garden and Farm Books (T. Jefferson). A fascinating glimpse into his world and life.

Making Squirrel Cassoulet: Part Two

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A few of my cabbages in the garden are no more. Which might beg the question, why am I making a confit out of squirrel instead of rabbit? Because the rabbits in the vegetable patch dine on the efforts of my hard work at night. On those occasions when they allow themselves to be seen cavorting in daylight, I am carrying a hoe, not a shotgun. Meanwhile squirrels (unfortunately for them) expose themselves to all manner of unlucky timings that shorten their mortality, from being indecisive road-crossers to standing on a limb barking while the hunter nearby is relieving himself. So, alas, no rabbit for my dinner, only squirrel … but only for now, sweet bunny, only for now.

Why confit and cassoulet? Let’s start with the obvious. They are each beautiful French words that we love saying for the reason that we can actually pronounce them. Indeed, being linguistically challenged myself in all languages, including my native, this may be the main reason that I fixed this dish: the recipe provided me the confidence to roll both words off the tongue and into a conversation. They also are intended to sound, in their Frenchiness, highly palatable and highly desirable (which also leads to highly priced surcharges at whatever froufrou bistro you land in for your date night). Hiding plain foods under clever foreign names that often translate essentially to the same dishes as their American counterparts is a time-honored sport of our restaurateurs to inflate their bottom line.

Think about it: Does simply uttering the word pâté not encourage more guests to sample my efforts than if I had called it what James Villas does, Pork Jowl and Liver Pudding? Would some of you not be reading this (if anyone is indeed reading it) if I had called my dish Salted Squirrel in Bean Stew?

So now let’s reduce the two words — confit and cassoulet — to their essentials. A confit is an ingredient (and a process) made by curing a piece of meat in salt, then cooking it in a fat for long hours, before eventually storing it submerged in the same. It keeps for months until needed. Meat, salt, fat. What could be simpler (and taste better)? The one-dish cassoulet is your average Monday night bean dinner, except it contains multiple versions of salt and fatted proteins, all combined to take you on a supercharged highway to a coronarial destination both blissful and corpulent. (Though, the French are all reported to be skinny, so better take up cigarettes.)

As a personal philosophy of cooking, I don’t hold much truck with theories of cultural appropriation, but I do believe strongly that one should try to cook with local ingredients. Adapt any recipe to what you grow and what is in your larder. Don’t you be buying no champagne vinegar when what you have on hand is a perfectly good pear vinegar that you brewed. The beans you harvested this summer in your garden (in my case butter beans) will do just fine. Need salt pork? How about that freshly cured jowl under the stairs. Link sausages? Well, thanks to the deer hunting acumen of a favorite nephew coupled with the curing skills of a local Mennonite butcher, both in South Louisiana, I have them by the coils.

Will the resulting dish be a traditional Toulouse cassoulet? Certainement pas. Just as the French settlers in Louisiana made their beloved boudin with ingredients found at hand, good cooking in East Tennessee also reflects place. Food should never be confined to a straightjacket, with one exception … my chicken sausage gumbo. (Perfection is not to be trifled with.) But truly, all that really matters in the end is that you cook your meals with love for friends and family.

Ms. Ronni “I declare” Lundy, in her well-written cookbook Victuals, an Appalachian journey with recipes, is the source for the cassoulet that I cooked. With many modifications, of course. She is also the author of the instructional injunction to not let your “fat get frisky” when cooking the confit. Those are words to live by.

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Reading this weekend: A Factotum in the Book Trade (M. Kociejowski), a dense, yet delightful read about a life spent in the antiquarian book trade in London. Written from the perspective of an employee, not an owner. And, The Reactionary Mind (M. Davis), a distributist stand against modernity.

Making Squirrel Cassoulet: part one

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The essentials:

  • One hip flask of bourbon
  • One cigar
  • A single shot .410 shotgun with shells
  • A beautiful fall day

For a successful cassoulet I find that it always comes down to the choice and use of proper ingredients and tools (and I speak with the wisdom gained from the experience of cooking it once before). So, rest easy with that assurance and let us begin your instruction, with the hunt.

First essential: It has been my private contention that there are not too many bad bourbons in this world. It is for this reason, of course, that we have been, and God willing remain, a mighty people. For a mighty people need a mighty liquor; but only if consumed in moderation and in safe circumstances, such as during a fall hunt, with a loaded gun, for squirrel. The conveyance of that liquid is by means of the hunter’s hip flask, a slim half-pint meant only to sustain (not inebriate) one for the rigors of the field and wood. It should be filled with whatever whisky is ready to the hand. In my case it was a bottle of Four Roses that drew my eye and steadier grasp.

Second essential: Cigars on the other hand can range from the sublime to the truly awful. I was gifted on my recent birthday a couple of dozen cigars by friends that validated the truth of that full range of experience. But when my beloved instructs guests to bring a bottle of wine or whiskey, and/or cigars as gifts, I can be considered blessed before the guests even darken the door. Even for the lifetime supply of Sambuca, in the form of one bottle, that I was made a present of by a dear friend, I will vow to remain humbled and truly appreciative. But we speak of cigars, meaning, that it was a nice fat robusto that I selected, from the fair isle of Hispaniola, to accompany me for this trip into our woods; leaving a birthday gifted vanilla flavored abomination in the humidor (double bagged for the safety of its neighbors) to share, no doubt, with a future visiting nephew.

Third essential: The firearm of choice, and I do have a selection to draw on here, was, as in most instances, the boy’s single shot .410. And for that fact, I do not blush. Hunting the wily tree chicken, the high wire rodent, requires a light touch and a fast swing. I have tried with both 12- and 16-gauge shotguns with modest results. The shorter barrel of the .410 (aka a 37 gauge and sometimes as a 67) gives a wider pattern of shot when one is taking a quick aim. As for instance when, while I had a lit cigar in my mouth while also simultaneously taking a whiz, a gray squirrel popped out thirty feet from me barking on a limb. I was able to successfully cock the gun, swing, shoot, kill, then “reholstering” myself, collected the game, all while taking another puff or two.

Fourth essential: It is, and you may have already picked up on this, somewhat of a sacrilege to be walking and smoking (a cigar, anyway) on a fine day. I agree. Each are separately meditative. However, there were already two squirrels in the game bag at my back when I sat down to take a restorative nip and snip the end of the cigar. The green woods before me were speckled in salmon, reds, and golds on what was one of the most beautiful of Tennessee fall afternoons. The air was a crisp 58 degrees. All was at peace as I sat on the log and reflected… sat and reflected, that is, that my bladder was full. Which is when I stood, answered that call, and shot the third and final target for the cassoulet dish I had planned.

With that success I sat back down, finished the cigar, had another sip from the flask and thought, you know this farming life ain’t half bad. Finally, when with a couple of inches of gray ash remaining of the cigar, I stubbed it out, stood and returned down the wooded path to our home to clean my harvest.

(Next time, part two, in which the steps in preparing a confit of squirrel and cooking the cassoulet will be laid out with the same clear detail as today’s lessons on hunting.)

Farm Cooking

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Among these crowded shelves where I sit are more than 100 cookbooks and books on food history. They are shelved immediately behind my writing desk for quick reference and inspiration when the spirit flags during the day. They are a varied lot. At least a half-dozen books on curing meat and another clutch of titles on preserving the harvest. A history of bourbon resting next to a culinary history of mushrooms, which in turn leans on a book of Cuban food. It is an egalitarian crowd, rubbing shoulders just over mine.

Farming, for me, has always been about providing for our table. A thought that had me thinking about the books that have inspired me to cook what we have produced. And in the last 22 years, we have produced 95 percent of the meat we consume and 75 percent of the vegetables, so, we do need a lot of inspiring. I try and cook based on two criteria. The first is giving consideration for what is in season or what we have that is preserved, cured, or frozen. The second is factoring in that the ingredients are easily grown, substituted, or found at a general grocery store (no champagne vinegar required).

Below are five titles that, while not exhaustive, are favorites because to my way of thinking, they are farm friendly. Certainly, plenty of worthy candidates have been left out. But there they rest behind me, whenever I need them, shelved somewhere between the Convivial Dickens and The Wurst! German cookbook.

  1. Butter Beans to Blackberries: Recipes from the Southern Garden (R. Lundy). As Roy Blount Jr. said, “I declare, Ms. Lundy, this is all so good.” And like all truly good cookbooks, this jewel is part memoir, part travelogue, and mostly an immense resource for those gardening in the Upper South. Flip through it and look for the recipes with an accumulation of grimy fingerprints or splattered with juice. Those are the ones that get referenced and cooked from often. From the first time you fix Lundy’s crookneck squash casserole (p. 208), corn fritters, okra grits and winter tomato gravy, or even turnip custard, you know you are not going to be bored with your garden produce. But you might need an extra stomach or three.
  1. A Gracious Plenty: Recipes and Recollections from the American South (J. Edge). This fine collection is drawn from a deep well of knowledge, community cookbooks. Red-eye gravy, perfect biscuits, squirrel dumplings, pickled pigs’ feet, cream of peanut soup, and for the cold winter nights, a glass of frothy syllabub. This is Southern cooking at its best, with one hand on the skillet and the other plunged into the dirt, a shooting of a rabbit while also mentally composing a list of ingredients needed for rabbit pie (p. 187) kind of text. It has roots; water them if you wish to keep them.
  1. Greens (T. Head). This is one of the Savor the South cookbooks, put out by the University of North Carolina. Other titles have wonderful names like Tomatoes and Beans and Field Peas or Ham. Each is a slim volume devoted to the history and recipes of the title subject. While I have a dozen from the series, only Thomas Head’s work gets pulled down multiple times a year. Because, in East Tennessee, we grow greens, we eat greens, we love our greens. But even the most devoted greenophile needs some inspiration. Head provides it. Potlikker soups and turnip green gratins grace these pages, as do oysters Rockefeller with collards and, an as yet untried, collard green marmalade. Believe me, there is no excuse to grow bored with the bounty of greens. (Cooking the basic Southern greens, p. 18, for lunch will set you just right for an afternoon of working in the garden or taking a nap. Your choice.)
  1. French Feasts: 299 Traditional Recipes for Family Meals and Gatherings (S. Reynaud). This choice was a toss-up with the author’s classic, Pork and Sons, a cookbook that starts with killing a 400-pound hog and ends with 350 pages of recipes using everything but the squeal. Why do I like French country cooking? Because so much of it mirrors the essence of Southern cooking, as the Reynaud title indicates: family meals and gatherings. That cross between conviviality and seasonal eating speaks to me of home. With an emphasis on what is fresh and in season and the best way to celebrate its goodness, each page for the small-farm owner is a new way to reinterpret the possibilities in your own larder. The butcher’s wife’s pork chops (p. 228) is just such a recipe, made new depending on the season in which it is cooked.
  1. The River Cottage Meat Book (H. Fearnley-Whittingstall). Like the Reynaud book, this work begins with a slaughter, then proceeds nose to tail through the whole pantheon of meat — beef, lamb and mutton, pork, poultry, game, and offal of all sorts, it is all in here. This 2004 work helped shape how we farm and certainly influenced the ways in which I cook. The citrus-braised lamb shanks (p. 300) that we eat only once a year (when we put a lamb in the freezer) are worth the wait.

That last sentence sums up the wisdom found in the pages of these titles: The pleasures of cooking something remarkable at select times of the year. No mid-January fresh strawberries, no lamb shanks whenever you want them. Patience and honor are the best seasonings for the simple good ingredients you bring from your farm to your plate.

Eat, as my grandmother Roberts said, until you have had a sufficiency. That will be enough.