Saturday, December 24, 2016.
Christmas Eve. Crack In The Cheesecake.
The day’s agenda is like some sort of board game, its elements sliding around to accommodate this need or that. The Marys are in town, as are some gifts, ML’s dog Bauer, and a few other things. I am on the North Shore with a cheesecake to build and the many elements of the root beer-glazed ham to reduce by about 75 percent. All this after, of course, I make a stop at Acquistapace’s supermarket to pick up all the raw materials I need and (much more ticklish) Mary Ann must have for her array of appetizers and sides. Example: Savoie’s andouille. Not their smoked sausage, she insists, but andouille.
And she needs frozen spinach for her spinach-artichoke dip. Strange: most of the stores I go to for this are out or will soon be. And here I was thinking that surely everyone has shifted to fresh spinach by now!
I have lunch at the Fat Spoon, where I am the final customer of the day. I have a Reuben sandwich. As popular as that corned beef-melted cheese-sauerkraut on rye is, I’m almost always disappointed by it, even when the ingredients and technique are clearly excellent, as they are here. In this case, the corned beef is sliced far too thick. One bite, and the ingredients all slip out of joint, and you have to decide which ingredient will be ingested on its own in the next bite. I eat only half of it, not because there’s anything wrong with the flavors or textures, but because the strata slide too far apart.
The Marys arrive home in mid-afternoon. I was hoping that the cheesecake would be cooling in the oven by three. A necessary step in making cheesecake is that it must be cooled very slowly. If it isn’t, a big crack forms across the center. I must leave this in the hands of the Marys, who are already working on their own projects.
It’s not their fault, but my cheesecake is not up to my standars. A water bath in which the spring form pan sits sprung a leak, and causes a hole to open to the top of the cheesecake. The water picks up an unattractive brown color from the graham-cracker crust. It doesn’t have any effect on the taste, but there’s no way I’m going to serve from that side of the cake tomorrow.
The four p.m. vigil Mass attracts a packed and overflowing house. Our program of songs is not a deterrent. I think we sound pretty good. I can’t help but thinking how much more I like midnight Mass. But St. Jane’s has too many young singers for that to be a good idea.
Meatballs
Two meatballs stand out in my memory of eating that famous American-Italian dish. (It surprises many American travelers that meatballs are rarely seen in Italy.) The first was the gigantic, ultra-light “diamond-studded” meatballs created by Diamond Jim Moran at the old La Louisiane. (He actually used to put diamonds in them for very special customers.) The other great meatballs were the ordinary-looking ones that Chef Goffredo Fraccaro made at his now-gone La Riviera. They were famously crusty and delicious.
The sad part of this tale is that neither meatball is being made anymore. So we must do them ourselves, or at least try. This recipe makes a meatball with the incomparable lightness of Moran’s, and the crusty meatiness of Goffredo’s. Here are the tricks:
1. Use soaked bread instead of breadcrumbs.
2. Use a bit of ground pork with the ground beef.
3. Beat the eggs to a near-froth.
4. Handle the meatballs as little as possible.
Get a pot of smooth red sauce ready before you start, because that’s where these will go at the end of the process to finish cooking.
2 lbs. ground meat, consisting of up to 1 lb. ground pork (you can use less if you like, or none) and the rest ground round
1 four-inch piece stale French bread, crusts cut away
3 cloves garlic, finely chopped
1/4 cup chopped onion
12 sprigs parsley, leaves only, chopped
1/2 tsp. dried basil
1/2 tsp. salt
1/4 tsp. crushed red pepper
2 eggs
Vegetable oil for frying
1. Break the ground meat up into a bowl and toss with fingers dripping with cold water to blend the two kinds.
2. Break the bread up into small pieces, and mix into 1/4 cup cold water with a fork until it has the texture of mashed potatoes. Add this to the meat, along with all the other ingredients except the eggs and oil. Again, wet your hands with cold water and toss the ingredients loosely to distribute them evenly.
3. With a wire whisk or blender (an immersion blender works very well), beat the eggs into a fine froth. Pour this evenly into the meat mixture.
4. Wet your hands again with cold water and caress the mixture into balls two to two and half inches in diameter. Handle the meatballs as gently as possible, compacting them just enough to make them stick together. Don’t worry is there are cracks as fissures, as long as they’re not about to break wide open.
5. Heat the oil about a quarter-inch deep in a skillet over medium-high heat. Put in enough meatballs to allow them to be rolled around easily. Roll them around every minute or so to brown them evenly. This will take ten to fifteen minutes, depending on the size of the meatballs.
6. When the meatballs are browned, remove from the pan and place into a pot of simmering tomato sauce. Cook for at least ten minutes, until no pink is left in the center.
Remove the meatballs from the sauce. Put cooked pasta into a bowl and pour the sauce over it. Toss to coat the pasta completely. Serve with a meatball on the top or size. (One of these is enough.)
Makes eight to twelve meatballs.
Barbecue Oysters @ Red Fish Grill
The name is misleading. Doubly so, because not only do the oysters have zero barbecue aspect, but they’re also unlike that other misnamed local seafood classic, barbecue shrimp. What they actually resemble is Buffalo chicken wings, but with oysters instead of chicken. The oyster is fried, then topped with a hot-sauce-laced butter and blue cheese dressing. This dish actually made its first appearance at Mr. B’s, where they still serve it now and then. But when Ralph Brennan (who still co-managed B’s at the time) opened the Red Fish, he absconded with the barbecue oyster idea and made it a signature.
A waiter once told me, “If you work in a restaurant, after awhile you get sick of eating its food. But this is one dish none of us ever get tired of. We’re always picking at any extra ones that come out.” That is easy to understand. The things are irresistible, especially in that wonderful time of year (first five months) when oysters are very large and meaty.
Barbecue oysters at the Red Fish Grill.
Red Fish Grill. French Quarter: 115 Bourbon. 504-598-1200 .
This is among the 500 best dishes in New Orleans area restaurants. Click here for a list of the other 499.
December 29, 2016
Days Until. . .
New Year’s Eve 2.
Carnival Begins 9.
The Fourth Day of Christmas
This is the day when the four calling birds arrive. Actually, the original lyrics of the song were “four colly birds.” “Colly” is an obsolete Britishism for blackbirds, the kind we’ve heard were once baked in a pie. Never had them that way, but I’ve heard it’s pretty good. In other versions of the song, you go out for a Christmas tree, four colored lights, your true love sends a simulated alligator wallet, and (in my version) you get four quarters of a muffuletta.
Restaurant Anniversaries
Antoine’s reopened for the first time following Hurricane Katrina on this date in 2005. It was the second (after Arnaud’s) of the old-line, grand Creole restaurants to do so, and was a pleasant surprise. So much damage was done to the restaurant’s original building that it almost fell. On this day in 2005, I was walking back to my car after lunch at the Court of Two Sisters and saw the passageway to Antoine’s kitchen open, and saw some cooks standing around. I walked in and met familiar staff. They said it would be opening night, and that two hundred people were already booked. I asked if they could take four more. My family and I were there that night. Things weren’t perfect, but it was an evening I’ll never forget.
Today’s Flavors
Today is National Pepper Pot Day. Pepper pot is a soup whose roots go back to the native people of the Caribbean islands. It’s most often identified with Jamaica, where it’s made with chicken, pork, beef, or all three, with many leafy vegetables. It reminds me a bit of New Orleans gumbo z’herbes, and may in fact be related to it. The odd thing about pepper pot is that it’s not really all that peppery. At least not the versions of it I’ve had.
It’s also National Wine Rotation Day. While wine bottles in storage for future drinking should be disturbed as little as possible, most of us who collect a few wines (as opposed to the really dedicated, avid oenophiles) lose track of what we have on our shelves or in our closets. You might have some older bottles that will soon be past their prime. Pull it all down off the shelf and see what’s up there. Restack the wines with the ones most in need of drinking at the top, and the ones that will last a long time at the bottom. Once a year will prevent sad wine deaths.
Gourmet Gazetteer
Pepper Mountain towers 2137 feet two miles south of the Columbia River, thirty miles east of downtown Portland, Oregon. It’s in Mount Hood National Forest, and is a much liked as a hiking and camping area. You can catch highly edible fish in a number of streams in the area. If you didn’t bring tackle, the nearest restaurant is The Last Detail, seven miles southwest of the peak of Pepper Mountain.
Edible Dictionary
Brunswick stew, n.–Brunswick stew is the best-known American dish with squirrel meat as a main ingredient. Even so, it’s not much prepared anymore. Selling wild-caught squirrel meat is illegal, and so you will not likely see the dish in a restaurant. If you do, it will be made with chicken in place of the squirrel. A better idea is to make it with rabbit. Other ingredients include bacon, tomatoes, potatoes, corn, and beans. The version made in Louisiana usually contains a noticeable cayenne component (no surprise there). Two Brunswick Counties–on in Virginia, the other in North Carolina–both claim that the dish is named for them.
Deft Dining Rule #23:
Unless you’re literally starving, don’t eat bad food, even if you paid for it.
The Old Kitchen Sage Sez:
When you cook mushrooms, spread them out in the pan. If they pile up, the water they exude as they cook turns to steam and makes them comes out like canned. It’s usually best to add them later rather than earlier in the sauce-building process, but that’s not axiomatic. Nobody wants an axiomatic kitchen, anyway.
Eating Across America
Texas became the twenty-eighth state today in 1845. Among its several nicknames the most descriptive is Land Of Contrasts. From the food perspective, the contrast is between the Mexican-inspired cooking of the western part of the state and the Texas version of Cajun cooking in the east. In the major cities–especially in Houston–the ethnic diversity in the restaurants is among the greatest in the country. Houston has become an extremely good restaurant town in the last twenty years. That said, it must be noted that the typical restaurant in Texas cities and suburbs is an outlet of a chain.
Tenuous Food-Sports Connections
The bowling ball was invented today in 1862, giving rise to this joke:
Q. “What’s the difference between the food at [your least-favorite restaurant] and a bowling ball?”
A. “You can eat a bowling ball!”
Annals Of Avid New Orleans Fans
Today in 1930, Fred P. Newton completed a swim in the Mississippi River from Ford Dam in Minnesota to New Orleans. That’s 1826 miles. He was the first person to make such a swim. He entered the water on July 6; it took him over 700 hours of swimming. It must have been chilly toward the end. He climbed out of the water, walked across the railroad tracks, sat down in the Morning Call, and had three cups of cafe au lait and two orders of beignets, as if nothing had happened.
Popular Food Inventions
Robert C. Baker is a member of the American Poultry Hall of Fame for his success in developing new ways of distributing, cooking, and serving chicken and turkey. He was born today in 1921. He developed the fried chicken nugget in the 1950s, but didn’t patent it. McDonald’s rolled out the Chicken McNugget (which they did patent) in 1979.
Food Namesakes
Eydie Gormé married Steve Lawrence today in 1957. . . Jeanne Poisson, Marquise de Pompadour, was born today in 1721. Madame Pompadour, as she is better known, was the mistress of Louis XV, as well as a master of intrigue. . . Astronaut Nancy J. Currie lifted off today in 1958. She made four shuttle flights and spent over a thousand hours in space, eating the stuff astronauts eat.
Words To Eat By
“Pounding fragrant things–particularly garlic, basil, parsley–is a tremendous antidote to depression. But it applies also to juniper berries, coriander seeds and the grilled fruits of the chili pepper. Pounding these things produces an alteration in one’s being–from sighing with fatigue to inhaling with pleasure. The cheering effects of herbs and alliums cannot be too often reiterated. Virgil’s appetite was probably improved equally by pounding garlic as by eating it.”–Patience Gray, British food writer of the mid-1900s.
Words To Drink By
“When you stop drinking, you have to deal with this marvelous personality that started you drinking in the first place.”–Jimmy Breslin, American newspaper columnist.
The Harvey Girl Meets Buffalo Bill.
Another story from the Old West and its restaurants.
Click here for the cartoon.