Farm Postcard: Think, Roasted Cauliflower Soup
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Category Archives: Cooking
Wanted: Bannies and Blue Sweetish
The sunrise is still two hours off from cresting the ridgetop as I peer out my window. The roosters in the coop are lobbing verbal artillery into the dark, answered by another who has taken up residence in the haybarn with his harem and the ram lambs. Save for myself and the chickens, all life on the farm is wringing out a few more winks of sleep.
a Saxony drake
In the other room on the table is the dinner debris, an archeological record of a fully enjoyed Saturday evening, when a small group of friends joined us for duck gumbo and a salad created from the first lettuce of the season. (Or was it the last of last season?) Planted back in the fall in a covered raised bed near the back door, it germinated, then stalled its growth until the past few weeks. Regardless, Cindy made it sparkle with a splash of citrus vinaigrette. The salad, the gumbo, and a nice baguette, accompanied by a plateful of assorted homemade cookies, a couple of bottles of wine, good conversation, and we chalked up a satisfying end to another busy day.
The duck used in the gumbo was one of the excess Saxony drakes we purchased last year and I butchered last Sunday. I spent most of Friday evening cooking the dish, for a gumbo aged a day is far superior to one made fresh. Just before bedtime I carried the cast iron pot outside to cool overnight.
We spent the day in varied tasks before our dinner guests arrived. I hauled away the garbage, we did some work on the sheep, and we cleaned. The new kid stayed busy ridding the forsythia along the driveway of privet, then doing the same with the muscadines. I resealed the back deck and topped up the raised beds with composted soil. Cindy spent part of the morning in the workshop, making a maple-topped vanity for the upstairs bathroom.
Early afternoon, the kid was sent on his way and we retired to the bedroom for a nap before preparing for dinner and our guests.
Later, Cindy checked in on Facebook, where we have listed for sale a small breeding flock of the Saxonys. In that digital sphere, my friends, exists a world of fractured and diminishing English skills apparent to even the most casual eye. Long past are the days when we labored over paper with pen, carefully composing before sending. Today, even the most public of missives reveal a level of sophistication now lost. (I too am guilty of written mistakes, though not, I pray, as many or as egregious as some.)
Minutes before our guests came up the gravel drive, and with more than a little amusement and exasperation in her voice, Cindy called me upstairs to read a post on a livestock exchange. The poster was looking, we could only surmise, to purchase some bantam chickens and Blue Swedish ducks.
And now you are privy to what lay behind the title of this post.
Ode to Greens
For certain I love any greens, yes, even with eggs and ham. I’ve had greens ‘most every way, including in savory jam.
Were you to come join us in a sumptuous dinner, expect to have collards or turnips, in summer or winter.
Do all of these choices seem common and easy? Then let me present you with rabe and some creasy.
I confess a love for the following (it’s always a hit): minced pork roast topped with collards, then served over steaming hot grits.
Or, as a gratin fresh from the oven, all bubbly and hot. And what’s not to love about greens served in a pepper hot-pot?
Eating them fried or sautéed, the more simple is best. After eating a spinach Maria, I suggest a laydown and rest.
Done in a Dutch oven with a nice ham hock, or perhaps in a chicken or hearty beef stock.
If you have a pork shoulder, boned out, at the ready, then roll it up with greens, with your hands holding steady.
Nothing better on an evening with snow on the ground, than waiting on mustard greens to slowly cook down.
I eat ‘em with cornbread, then drink the pot likker. Or eat ‘em with boudin and wine, so please do not snicker.
And seated at the Cracker Barrel more times than I can count, I’ve had greens simmered with bacon in prodigious amounts.
But, my favorite of all, saved for the glorious end, is to pluck them and eat them while my garden I tend.
Repast
shrimp gumbo
The owner came from the back, out of the kitchen. “Boys, you are welcome to come look in the freezers,” he said, “but you have eaten everything in the place.” We eyed each other, stomachs more than sated, and noted the smug look on each other’s face. “Nope,” I said, “we are done.” Mission accomplished at the all-you-can-eat frog-leg buffet on the outskirts of Ruston, Louisiana, circa 1980. Lesson learned by the owner of the diner: You cannot compete with the appetite of a horde of 18-year-old males. If you offer it, they will descend like locusts and strip the foliage bare from the counters and the freezers.
Sometime around 2005, my father and I were touring some historic sites in the western parishes. After a morning on the battlefield of Mansfield, we stopped in Many for lunch. At a small cinder block restaurant on the outskirts of town, we ordered bowls of crawfish étouffée that were as good as any to be found. A glass of iced tea and a slice of pecan pie and we were back on the road. We spent the afternoon at Los Adaes, an old Spanish fort. When the French held Louisiana, the Spanish viceroy in Mexico City established this eastern outpost to stake a claim to the area.
One fall day, perhaps 1976, after visiting a construction site near Abbeville, Dad and I passed through the river town of Mermentau. There, we spotted a shell-covered parking lot packed at lunchtime with pickup trucks — in south Louisiana, a siren’s call to a gustatory feed. We slowed, found a spot, and got out. The menu was short. Nary a hamburger to be found, gumbo or catfish sauce piquante were the only options. We made our choice, paid, and moved to the other end of the counter to collect our bowls. Today’s lunch was the deep mahogany of a chicken-and-sausage gumbo. We took our place outside on long tables under the oaks, the oil roughnecks sliding over to make room for us.
Another day, this one in spring of 1984, I caught the ferry with friends and crossed the Mississippi to the historic town of Plaquemine. We stopped at a few random gas stations and bought a couple of pounds of homemade boudin at each. Boudin is a regional meal of rice, pork, and liver stuffed in natural hog casing. It is found throughout the southern part of the state, a perfect lunchtime repast, a meal-in-one that satisfies. We caught the ferry back across and spent the afternoon sitting on the levee eating our lunch and drinking Dixie beer before heading back to Baton Rouge.
This coming weekend I’ll be off the farm and back in the Deep South for the annual get-together of men in our family. We are staying in a lodge near Ville Platte, a town that used to be able to compete with all others for the quality of its boudin. We shall soon see if 2018 has brought any diminution to that reputation.
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Reading this weekend: Payne Hollow (Hubbard) and Between Meals (Liebling)
Respect Your Cuisine: revisited
Bedding and manure pile: 50 x 12, 7 high.
We have spent the past couple of days in intense farm work, including the annual cleaning out of the barn (see pic). And, today we are off to a homesteading conference to help staff a table for the local bee club. Where, Cindy will also be giving a presentation on the hive. So, once again, I leave you with one from the archives that relates to last weeks post. I hope you enjoy, it is one of my favorites, from May 5th, 2014.
Sir, Respect Your Dinner, Idolize it, enjoy it properly.
You will be many hours in a week, many weeks in the year, and many years in your life, happier if you do.
(William Makepeace Thackeray)
Odd, it seems Southern cooking is being celebrated everywhere but in the South. I’m a bit obsessive about cooking magazines, tending to pick them up whenever I’m in a store. And Southern cooking is always being touted and referenced as the touchstone of American cooking. And it is important, or it was at one time. But its importance does not survive in the glossy pages of a magazine or an upscale restaurant.
Don’t misunderstand me, there are great restaurants in the South. And there are great purveyors of food in the region. But good Southern cooking has always been a home-based cuisine. I tend to think of cooking styles like I do an indigenous music style, like bluegrass. Once it becomes precious, moves off the front porch into a regional music festival it is near death. Much like the ancient language that is down to nine elderly speakers; time to stick a fork in it, it is done. And Southern cuisine will soon be down to those last nine elderly practitioners.
I’ve always thought of Southern food as peasant food. After all, we have been an agrarian culture since Europeans and Africans settled these lands. We brought foods from our homes and we adopted from the locals. And we embraced the tomato, corn and pepper from points further south. There has always been a highbrow component to our cuisine, the cuisine of the planter class. But that was a food culture that, although flavored with local ingredients, aspired to be something else than what was native. A dinner plate designed to make them feel a superiority that could only be purchased.
The genesis, the glory of our food culture was in the garden, the hunt, the field all enjoyed in a warm temperate climate that allowed multiple crops and access to an unimaginable range of foods. My childhood was filled with gardens in the summer, catfish trotlines and duck hunting in the winter, speckled trout caught on the inter-coastal in the fall and Satsuma’s in season and eating so much shrimp that you were sick of seeing them on the table. Sprinkle in crab and crawfish harvests, venison sausage, gumbos, smoked goose, and pork in all its wonderfully varied uses and the Southern cuisine of my youth was worth celebrating.
But today we have given up that rich heritage of the locally harvested for a faux cuisine that has become the precious heritage of food magazines, suburbanites and Brooklyn-ites. The real food of our culture comes from the soil and dirt under your hands. It comes from the muscle ache in your back from working oyster tongs all day and shucking oysters deep into the night. It is the numbness of your hands on a December night as you pull wriggling catfish into the jon-boat. It is figuring out a way to cook okra because it exists.
It is a DIY food culture of butchering pigs and using everything but the squeal. It is staying up late to salt all your cabbage for kraut before it goes to waste. It is a real old-fashioned church supper with 200 competing dishes handed down from mother to daughter and you with only one stomach to tackle it all.
It is not found in a Walmart, a fast food chain, a high-end restaurant or, god forbid, Garden and Gun magazine. It is found on a dinner table with a family connected to the land and enjoyed with a homemade biscuit in one hand and a plate of love in front of you.
We are getting close to knowing those last elderly nine. Get your hands dirty, practice the language.
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Reading this weekend: Localism in the Mass Age, a front porch republic manifesto. A collection of essays devoted to degrowth, localism, and a politics and culture suited to the same. I found it, mainly, stimulating stuff.