Bourdain Day

June 25, 2019 by The Generalissimo Leave a Comment

🙏 My Citizens! An important reminder that today is the first-ever Bourdain Day, a marque created by legendary Chef and personality Anthony Bourdain’s friends to not only to celebrate food, but to also check in with those who may be suffering from mental health or substance abuse issues.

Food and clinical depression are two topics that hit close to home for the Supernal One, and their being intertwined today provides an opportunity to not only remember Tony, but to help others avoid his sad fate.

There are many resources for those in need of help with depression or substance abuse – please, seek them out before taking any irrevocable steps!

This link is a good first step for depression resources.

This is for help with substance abuse.

TFD Nation is a community of nearly 40,000 people – if we cannot stand together as one, we do not stand at all as decent human beings deserving of the name.

I do not know the names and faces of My Citizenry – but I want you all to finish reading with one realization: that the faceless man who leads you on this culinary journey of exploration DOES CARE. Seek help if you need it – there is no shame in the seeking or the receiving of understanding.

Remember this.

Requiescat in pace, Tony – you are sorely missed.

The Hirshon Ocracoke Island Fig Cake

June 24, 2019 by The Generalissimo Leave a Comment

Ocracoke Island Fig Cake Image Used Under Creative Commons License From nandointeractive.com

Citizens, I would challenge any of the superlative members of TFD Nation to deny that as a child, Fig Newtons were not among their favorite cookies. Soft, slightly chewy and caky at the same time and that delicious sweet filling was a great treat to the young scion who would go on to become the supernova of supremacy who alone is The Food Dictator!

Now, imagine that same taste experience, but as a grown-up treat of sublime sweetness and you have a true culinary Coelacanth – an unexpected holdover from another time that is the Ocracoke Island fig cake! Few things are closer to the heart of your beloved Leader than old recipes that are nearly lost – and this one certainly qualifies!

I first learned of the uniqueness of this island from an incredible BBC article – you can read it in its entirety here, but I will excerpt some of it now:

Native Americans, English sailors and pirates all came together on Ocracoke Island in North Carolina to create the only American dialect that is not identified as American.

I’d never been called a dingbatter until I went to Ocracoke for the first time. I’ve spent a good part of my life in North Carolina, but I’m still learning how to speak the ‘Hoi Toider’ brogue. The people here just have their own way of speaking: it’s like someone took Elizabethan English, sprinkled in some Irish tones and 1700s Scottish accents, then mixed it all up with pirate slang. But the Hoi Toider dialect is more than a dialect. It’s also a culture, one that’s slowly fading away. With each generation, fewer people play meehonkey, cook the traditional foods or know what it is to be mommucked.

Located 34 miles from the North Carolina mainland, Ocracoke Island is fairly isolated. You can’t drive there as there are no bridges, and most people can’t fly either as there are no commercial flights. If you want to go there, it has to be by boat. In the early 1700s, that meant Ocracoke was a perfect spot for pirates to hide, as no soldiers were going to search 16 miles of remote beaches and forests for wanted men.

William Howard was one of those outlaws, serving as quartermaster on Blackbeard’s ship Queen Anne’s Revenge. Leaving before Blackbeard’s final battle in 1718, Howard made his way to Virginia, eventually taking the general pardon offered by King George I to all pirates. But unlike some, Howard had a plan. For several decades, he dropped out of sight, only to reappear in 1759 when he bought Ocracoke Island for £105 from a man named Richard Sanderson, a justice and later a General Assembly member in mainland North Carolina.

Howard settled down along with some other ex-pirates and started building a community with boat pilots who had been stationed on the island to help guide merchant ships around sandbars in the area. A mainland North Carolina Native American tribe also interacted with the early settlers. The Woccon tribe had set up fishing and hunting outposts on the island, which they called Woccocock.

Through misspellings and mispronunciations, it became Wokokon, Oakacock and Okercock, before finally arriving at the current version of Ocracoke in the mid-1700s. So at this point, there were Native Americans, English sailors and pirates from a variety of places all in one location. And that isolated community of just under 200 started blending words and dialects, and eventually building its own way of speaking.

“It’s the only American dialect that is not identified as American,” said Dr Walt Wolfram, a North Carolina State University professor who studied the Ocracoke dialect for more than 20 years and currently works as the director of NC State’s Language and Life Project. “That’s fascinating to me. You can find pronunciation, grammar structures and vocabulary on Ocracoke that are not found anywhere else in North America.”

Howard’s community lived in near-isolation for almost two centuries. Electricity didn’t arrive at the island until 1938 and a ferry service didn’t start until 1957, leaving the islanders cut off except for the occasional supply trip to the mainland. Even today, things are a bit different for the island’s 948 residents than on mainland North Carolina.

In the past, kids adopted the dialect because that was the only version they heard. Now there are hundreds of dialects and languages that most will encounter before they graduate high school. In fact, as of 2019, on that island of 948 people, fewer than half actually speak with the full ‘Hoi Toider’ brogue.

“Within one to two generations, it’ll be gone,” said Dr Wolfram. “It’s dying out and we can’t stop that.”

Yet while the dialect may be in danger, the islanders are managing to hold onto their unique culture in other ways. In the beginning, settlers often had to come up with alternatives when they didn’t have the right ingredients for a recipe. That same concept holds true today: with limited stores on the island, if you run out of supplies, you can either head to the mainland for what you need or just find a replacement.

“Ocracoke is really good at adapting,” said Amy Howard. “I joke that we need to make a cookbook for Ocracoke that says what the recipe is and then what you can actually get, because almost inevitably, you get a quirky recipe and you won’t have everything you need.”

That’s actually how the fig cake, which is now Ocracoke’s signature dish, came to be. The story goes that in 1964, island resident Margaret Garrish was making a date cake and she had all the ingredients mixed in, except one.

“She found she didn’t have any [dates], so she did what we all do and looked in her cupboard and found a jar of fig preserves,” Amy said, explaining that figs are a holdover from the original settlers, and you can find fig trees in almost every yard. “She threw them in the cake, mixed them up and now we have fig cakes.”

Now every year in August, the island holds a Fig Festival, complete with a fig cake bake-off, fig tastings, a square dance and traditional games like meehonkey.

Fig cake is basically a fruit-based variant of the old English spice cakes that were very popular a few hundred years back, and even into the early 20th century – very apropos for an island still holding on tightly to its past! Teddy Roosevelt’s wife donated a handwritten recipe for spice cake that was a favorite of the President to a 1906 cookbook – here it is:

My recipe hews closely to the classic Ocracoke version, though I have reduced the amount of cinnamon (I’m not fond of that spice), added in a bit of ground cardamom and mace and I call for vanilla paste instead of vanilla extract. The fig preserves you use must be of the finest quality – I prefer those from the Dalmatian coast, you can buy them here.

Citizens – this is by no means a difficult recipe, and I hope you decide to visit Ocracoke Island someday before their unique dialect and way of life has passed beyond the veil into distant memory…

Battle on – the Generalissimo

The Hirshon Ocracoke Island Fig Cake

Rate this recipe

1 ratings

Ingredients

3 eggs
1 ½ cups sugar
1 cup salad oil
2 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon freshly-ground cinnamon
½ tsp. freshly-ground cardamom
¼ tsp. mace
1 tsp. freshly-ground nutmeg
1 teaspoon freshly-ground allspice
½ cup buttermilk
1 teaspoon vanilla paste
1 ½ cups fig preserves
1 cup walnuts, chopped

Instructions

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease and flour a tube, Bundt or 9-by-13-inch baking pan; set aside.
Whisk eggs in a medium bowl. Stir in sugar and oil until fully combined. Set aside.
Sift dry ingredients together in a large bowl bowl. Stir egg mixture into flour mixture, alternating with buttermilk and vanilla. Fold in figs and nuts.
Bake for about 1 hour in a tube or Bundt pan but check at 40 minutes; the cake is done when a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. (The cake will likely take less time in 9-by-13-inch baking pan.)
Let cool. If using a tube or Bundt pan, remove cake from pan, slice and serve.

https://www.thefooddictator.com/the-hirshon-ocracoke-island-fig-cake/

The Hirshon Southern-Style Smothered Chicken

June 23, 2019 by The Generalissimo Leave a Comment

Smothered Chicken Image Used Under Creative Commons License From ifoodblogger.com

My Citizens! There can be no equivocation or doubt that while the body and mind of TFD are Brooklyn-born and raised, that my soul is without question one with the antebellum south, at least when it comes to food! Yes, the liberal use of fat and sugar in classic Southern cuisine may not be especially healthy, but as part of an occasional treat – it is unmatched in flavor and toothsome satisfaction!

One of my favorite dishes of this cuisine is smothered chicken, and today I shall teach you how to make it my way! Smothering meat, seafood or vegetables is a cooking technique used in both Cajun and Creole cuisines of Louisiana.

The technique involves cooking in a covered pan over low heat with a moderate amount of liquid, and can be regarded as a form of stove-top braising. The meat dishes cooked in this fashion are typically served over boiled or steamed white rice as a rice and gravy, while the vegetables are typically served as side dishes.

This method of food preparation involves using the Maillard reaction to “brown” the meat or vegetables and then deglazing with stock or water and simmering the mixture over low heat for an extended period of time. It is often done in a cast iron pot or dutch oven, so the heat can be evenly applied and distributed.

A large variety of meats are “smothered” in South Louisiana cuisine, including both domestic animals and wild game. Domestic animals cooked in this fashion include chicken, domestic duck, pork, beef (including such organs as the liver), and domestic rabbit.

Wild game commonly cooked in this fashion include squirrel, rabbit, nutria rat, feral pig, woodcock, wild duck, and venison.

As noted in a great article from the Baltimore Sun:

The French have a mad zeal for codification. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the seemingly simple task of cooking chicken.

They have the saut, wherein the bird is browned in butter, then removed to a plate while the sauce is prepared separately, before the whole thing is brought together – briefly, never at a boil – before serving. And they have chicken tuve, always cooked with plenty of liquid and no browning.

In between, there’s the cocotte, which is like a saut, except that ++ the chicken is cooked in a covered pot (a cocotte). The all-but-forgotten poele is a lot like a cocotte, except that the chicken is cooked on a bed of vegetables.

Then they’ve got the fricassee family, made by cooking browned chicken (how brown it is and the type of stock and wine determine whether it is a light or a dark fricassee) in liquid until very tender, then binding that liquid with a combination of egg yolks and cream. The blanquette, a first cousin, is the same thing except that the chicken is brought slowly to a simmer in cold stock, giving a more delicate flavor.

Thanks to the French, we have a thousand names for chicken, but I have absolutely no idea what to call the bird I made the other night. If forced to follow French terminology, I suppose I’d call it a modern kind of dark fricassee – one that favors direct flavor rather than richness.

But I prefer to think of it as that prototypically American dish, the smother. That name doesn’t have an Escoffier pedigree, and I’m afraid to look it up in the old Larousse for fear there would be some graphic details on a superior means of slaughter.

This is not to say that smothered chicken has no history. In fact, this recipe somewhat resembles one described under the heading “To Smother Young Chickens” in Lettice Bryan’s “The Kentucky Housewife,” published in 1839 and now available in a facsimile edition from Food Heritage Press, 978-356-8306.

I think it’s time for the smother to come back into its own. If I were French and forced to codify the preparation of a smother, it would go something like this: Meat is lightly coated with flour, then browned. Seasoning vegetables are added and lightly cooked. A moderate amount of liquid is added and everything is cooked, loosely covered, until the meat is quite tender. If desired, other garnishing vegetables can be added when the cooking is almost complete.

What you wind up with is meat that is dead tender (perhaps a bad choice of words, given the name), in a lightly thickened, deeply flavored sauce. Considering the flexibility in seasoning vegetables and cooking medium (stock, wine, water), there are hundreds of possible variations.

The fixed rules for success are these:

* Make sure the pieces are thoroughly but lightly floured. The flour browns nicely, giving a good deep flavor, but too much will turn to a gluey mess when the liquid is added. Bang the floured pieces together, pat them with your hands, knock them against the side of the bowl, do whatever it takes to make sure that only the thinnest coating adheres.

* Brown the pieces slowly. That is what makes for a deeply flavored sauce. It might seem that it’s taking too long, but at 10 minutes per side, you’ll wind up with perfectly golden chicken, ready to braise. Note: That’s golden, not dark brown. You don’t want to overcook the chicken or it will be tough. When you’re braising it, make sure it doesn’t cook too quickly, either. If you rush it, the chicken will get tough rather than tender.

* Pay attention to how you stack the chicken. Dark meat always goes in the bottom, to cook in the liquid. White meat always goes on top, out of the liquid but in the steam so it won’t dry out. Poultry purists will go so far as to say that chicken white meat should never be cooked in a fricassee, stew or, presumably, smother, only the dark. But I’ve got two white meat lovers in my house, so I’m obligated. If you’re not so encumbered, feel free to use just dark meat.

* Cover the pot during the braising, but leave the lid slightly askew. This encourages a slow evaporation, thickening and strengthening the sauce, and it bleeds off steam, keeping the white meat from overcooking (or, more accurately, lessening the amount it overcooks).

* Don’t be tempted to add more liquid than is called for. Depending on how wide your pan is, you may not even be able to see the two cups of wine once they’re added. Don’t worry about it. It’s there. With this amount of liquid, you’ll wind up with a perfect sauce – just barely thick enough to coat the back of a spoon.

Because, of course, you don’t want to take that smothering thing too literally.

Citizens, my version of this Southern classic is quite traditional, including cooking the chicken pieces in bacon fat. You can also use ghee (clarified butter), or a 50/50 blend of both as you see fit.

Being TFD, I do call for two unconventional ingredients. The first is Knorr Aromat seasoning, which I find really amps up the flavor. The ingredients include salt, milk lactose, dried onions, dried porcini mushrooms, and spices as well as onion and garlic powders and Turmeric plus caramel color that adds an appetizing hue to the dish. You can buy it here.

I also use dried porcini mushroom powder, again for the umami factor. You can purchase a top-quality version of it here.

This is a classic recipe for a reason – and it is by no means difficult to make! I hope you enjoy it as much as I do. Please note that if you attempt to cook this in anything but a cast-iron pan, the ghost of Craig Claiborne will join forces with me to hunt you down and forcibly teach you the serious error of your ways! 😉

Battle on – the Generalissimo

The Hirshon Southern-Style Smothered Chicken

Rate this recipe

5 ratings

Ingredients

3 pounds bone-in chicken pieces (split breasts cut in half crosswise, drumsticks, and/or thighs), trimmed
½ cup plus 2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
¼ cup bacon fat (TFD preferred) or use ghee (clarified butter) or a 50/50 combo of both
2 onions, chopped fine
2 celery ribs, de-stringed and chopped fine
3 garlic cloves, minced
1 teaspoon dried sage leaves, NOT ground sage
1 teaspoon porcini mushroom powder
2 cups homemade chicken broth (strongly preferred) or low-salt chicken stock from the store
1 tablespoon cider vinegar
½ tsp ground black pepper, plus more to taste
¼ tsp cayenne pepper
Knorr Aromat seasoning (TFD preference - or just use kosher salt) and pepper, both to taste
2 tablespoons minced fresh parsley

Instructions

Pat chicken dry with paper towels and season with Aromat and pepper.
Spread ½ cup flour in shallow dish. Working with 1 piece at a time, dredge chicken in flour, shaking off excess, and transfer to plate.
Melt the bacon fat or ghee in the pan and add the chicken pieces, skin side down. Cover chicken with a plate that will fit comfortably inside the skillet. Place a heavy can, stone or brick on top of the plate to weigh it down.
Cook over low heat, checking the chicken skin, and cook until deep golden brown, 4 to 6 minutes per side; Remove weight and plate. Turn chicken so skin side is up.
Replace plate and weight and continue cooking then transfer to plate. Repeat with remaining chicken, adjusting heat if flour begins to burn.
Pour off all but 2 tablespoons bacon fat or ghee and return pot to medium heat. Add onions, celery, 1 teaspoon salt, and black and cayenne pepper and cook until softened, 6 to 8 minutes.
Stir in garlic, sage, and remaining 2 tablespoons flour and cook until vegetables are well coated with flour and garlic is fragrant, about 1 minute. Whisk in broth and porcini mushroom powder, scraping up any browned bits.
Nestle chicken into sauce, add any accumulated juices from plate, and bring to boil. Reduce heat to low, cover, and simmer until breasts register 160 degrees and drumsticks/thighs register 175 degrees, 30 to 40 minutes.
Transfer chicken to serving dish. Stir vinegar into sauce and season with salt and pepper to taste. Pour sauce over chicken, sprinkle with parsley, and serve with rice.

https://www.thefooddictator.com/the-hirshon-southern-style-smothered-chicken/