Click the ads! Good stuff!

North Carolina Barbecue

That’s East North Carolina. When I was a child there was only one barbecue. One didn’t have to specify “North Carolina” because we had never had any of the other versions of barbecue that one finds around the country. I discovered in my adulthood that they put (gasp) ketchup in it in Western North Carolina and I really, really don’t like it. I do like other kinds of barbecue but some of them seem to be more candied meat that barbecued meat.

I hesitated to do this topic because there is a huge group of total fanatics out there. There are web sites and discussion groups on line. One of the best is www.hkentcraig.com/BBQ. Lots of musings, restaurant reviews, critiques, and discussion. It has a tendency to make me homesick, and I haven’t been homesick for North Carolina since I was twelve years old.

This is a dish that can’t be cooked at home unless there’s someone to tend to it for a day. It’s slow cooked pork. Really slow cooked. When the sign says “pit cooked” they mean that it’s probably a whole hog slowly spit roasted over a pit of charcoal for 16 to 24 hours, being basted the whole time with a vinegar and hot pepper sauce.

When my grandmother was running a sandwich business she made everything except the barbecue. I can remember going with her to buy the barbecue and watching it being cooked. An old man sat next to the pig-over-the-pit constantly basting. It takes at least 16 hours to barbecue a whole hog. He sat on a low stool next to the carcass with the skin on. He’d turn the spit a little and pour on a ladle of the – let’s call it a marinade – then repeat. Slowly. I stood outside the shed in the dusty heat, smelling the cooking pork and vinegar with my mouth watering. I don’t know what’s done with the skin but it isn’t served with the meat.

There isn’t really a sauce the way one thinks of a tomato-based barbecue sauce. What happens is that the vinegar and hot peppers (usually in the form of Tabasco) are cooked in slowly so that they virtually pickle the meat. The result is a succulent, tender product that is pulled (shredded) and piled onto hamburger buns. Some folks chop the pork but it should be so well done that it falls apart anyway. The juices soak into the bun and moisten it, then traditionally the meat gets a pile of cole slaw on top.

Barbecue can also be served on a plate, with the cole slaw on the side and hushpuppies to go with. Hush puppies are made by deep-frying balls or elongated nuggets of thicker-than-usual corn bread batter. The legend is that they were named because they were thrown to the dogs to quiet them. That story has never really been substantiated, but hey, it brings up a picture of folks sitting around on the porch trying to eat and throwing goodies to the dogs to keep them out of the plates. Some people eat their hushpuppies plain but I prefer to butter mine. I’m not a huge corn bread fan so butter helps the corn go down.

I’ve seldom eaten barbecue from a plate. It somehow seems wrong to me. My memories are of the warm spicy barbecue and the cool creamy cole slaw combined in a single bite of a sandwich.

After we moved “north” (as far as Washington, DC) we used to go to the beach near Morehead City, North Carolina. I always made sure I got at least one barbecue sandwich. We would go by the drive-in or walk-up-to restaurant on the causeway between Morehead City and Atlantic Beach. I don’t remember the name, and I doubt that it still exists. They made a perfect pulled-pork barbecue sandwich with cole slaw that was just the right texture. It tasted best on one of those days that wasn’t a good beach day: overcast and chilly with a smell of rain on the air. We would take long day trips on those days and explore the area around the beach. A barbecue sandwich was a perfect travel companion.

Sometimes one can find real North Carolina barbecue up “north.” Many years ago there was a place in Kensington, Maryland that had nothing but barbecue and Brunswick stew. It was where Antiques Row is today, right across the street from the railroad tracks. Inside it looked more like a market. The walls were white tiled. There was a long counter where one could, if one wanted to, eat in-house, but mostly one bought the barbecue and Brunswick stew to take home.

There’s now a place in Derwood, Maryland (between Montgomery Village and Gaithersburg) that sells and serves North Carolina and several other regional barbecues. The man is from Indiana so he doesn’t really know about North Carolina barbecue. There isn’t enough vinegar or hot pepper in the preparation so it tastes more like long-cooked plain pork. The idiot seems to shake on the “pig juice” at serving time instead of cooking it in. It doesn’t work too well. He serves the hush puppies and cole slaw, though.

I miss good North Carolina barbecue. I haven’t had it in years and don’t have the facilities to cook it at home. I live way too far away from any barbecue place to get it, so mostly I live without. I have my memories and they’ll have to do: watching the old man baste the pig while my grandmother made her deal for the barbecue for the sandwiches she made and sold; eating the warm barbecue with the cool cole slaw in the back seat of my parents’ car at the beach; and going to what is now Antiques Row in Kensington, across the street from the train tracks, to a place whose only ambience was its food.

(c) 2008 Katherine DeWitt

The Delights of Ginger, Crystallized and Otherwise

Crystallized ginger has a lot of sentimental meaning for me. When I was twelve my family moved to the Washington, DC area from North Carolina. Two things impressed me about the area: It was so green, and there was such a variety of food I had never heard of.

Crystallized ginger symbolizes that variety. Both my parents worked downtown and when we had days off from school, I would ride down with them. I’d spend the morning in one of the museums, then walk up to Woodward and Lothrop to eat at the lunch counter.

The candy department at Woodie’s was several steps down from the G Street entrance. The Metro station occupies that corner now. Anyway, a young girl from the country was very impressed by the big department stores. And that candy department…

I don’t remember too many of the different candies that were available, but there was crystallize ginger. It is a parade of sensations starting with the crunch of the sugar crystals on the outside, moving into the firmness of the sugar-soaked ginger itself. The taste starts sweet and fragrant and finished with a spicy bite. I love it still.

Other forms of ginger have their uses. Fresh ginger is great in oriental dishes and many deserts. Ground ginger is a must in pumpkin pie and some cookies. And there’s Chinese preserved ginger.

Chinese preserved ginger and crystallized ginger start the same way. Slices of fresh ginger root are cooked slowly in heavy syrup until almost all the liquid is absorbed or cooked away. The Chinese then pack the syrupy ginger into lamp-base shaped ginger jars.

Crystallized ginger goes a step further. The candied preserved ginger is dried, then when still sticky is rolled in coarse-grain sugar. From there, the drying is completed so that one gets those chunks of ginger that look like the inside of a citrine crystal geode. It’s as beautiful as it is tasty.

Another of my favorite ways to enjoy ginger is Japanese pickled ginger: that paper-thin pink delight that accompanies sushi and sashimi. The preparation is simple: it is treated with salt, then “put down” in a sugar and light vinegar mixture and refrigerated. The ginger turns a rosy pink. It used to be dyed red, but when the red dye was outlawed, they just left it the pretty pink. When on a plate with sushi or sashimi and the Japanese green horseradish wasabi, the color contrasts are quite lovely. And the fragrance – when I describe sushi and sashimi to people who have never enjoyed them, I say they taste like flowers. That, of course, is dependent on the scent of the ginger and the wasabi.

Fresh ginger is used in many Asian dishes from a variety of cultures. Ginger perfumes even the most mundane stir-fry. It’s just peeled, sliced and grated or sliced and added to a quick dish.

The ginger I knew as a child is ground dried ginger. It’s put into cookies, cakes, pumpkin pie, gingerbread, and other sweet deserts. It’s an ingredient in some curries and some savory dishes. We all know ginger snaps, made with ground ginger. Ground dried ginger is yet another dimension of this lovely root.

The last form of ginger is beverage. Ginger ale is pleasant, but a good strong ginger beer from the Islands is a kick in the palate and a lasting pleasure.

Ginger has an ancient and revered past. It has been used in mysticism and medicine, food and beverages. It is a specific for nausea. A strong ginger beer is a great stomach tonic and straightens out nausea quickly. Ginger snaps help prevent car sickness in dogs.

There are recipes for all ginger preparations, and recipes including ginger, all over the web, so just search and click. You’ll enjoy.

My favorite may be crystallized, but only because it symbolizes my introduction to a world of food I didn’t know until I left North Carolina. It was one reason I thought I had died and gone to heaven when I moved to this lush, green, metropolitan place.

(c) 2008 Katherine DeWitt

Bad Food! Bad! Bad!


Not all my food memories are good. I particularly remember “molded salads.” Remember those? I remember some that were green and some that were pink; some that were full of tiny marshmallows and some that were lumpy with pineapple. The pineapple, of course, had to be canned. Fresh (raw) pineapple has an enzyme that breaks down the gelatin and turns it into liquid. Some had mayonnaise, some didn’t. Some had cream cheese, some didn’t. Some even had canned salmon or shrimp. All were pretty bad.

Then there was tomato aspic. My mother loved tomato aspic. I never saw the point. I have seen it sliced, as a garnish, but in our house it was a whole side dish. It was made on purpose to eat. I haven’t touched it since I had a say in the matter.

Where did those recipes come from? Were they the nightmares of the home economists who made up recipes for food packagers? I don’t know, but a lot of cooks have carefully cooked or copied those recipes and tucked them into their recipe boxes or between the pages of a cookbook. And we encourage them by praising them when they turn up on pot-luck tables or buffet tables. We actually spoon them onto our plates and consume them, against our better judgment.

I never learned how to make any of that stuff. I didn’t like it. I have felt obligated to at least taste many of these dishes because people I worked with or went to church with made them and I didn’t want to hurt their feelings. How many of us have consumed bad food and remarked on it favorably because we didn’t want to hurt someone?

We have done it for other dishes, as well. There was, and is, banana pudding. It is an exercise in blandness. Bland vanilla pudding, bland vanilla wafers, bland bananas. It’s too sweet, too soft, too blah. Yet it turns up on church supper tables and family picnic tables with a consistency I can only wonder at. Maybe it’s because it’s easier to make than chocolate cake. It’s easier to make than almost anything except, perhaps, little dishes of vanilla pudding. I still can’t stand vanilla pudding because it has absolutely no character.

Bad food isn’t confined to side dishes and dessert. Take tuna casserole, for instance. As Henny Youngman said of his wife, “Please.” I may be prejudiced, because I can’t stand canned fish. That’s a personal problem. I don’t like canned tuna, canned salmon, sardines or anchovies. I don't even like smoked oysters. My mother had a habit of giving us chilled canned salmon as an entrée in the summer. Just plain canned salmon, complete with the little vertebrae. She liked to crunch them. The inclusion of the bones gives canned salmon a sort of dusty taste.

To read this one would think my mother was a bad cook. Within the limitations of the way she learned to cook, she wasn’t. There were many delicious dishes that she did superbly well. She just liked stuff that I didn’t, like green beans cooked with bacon grease until they were black and so salty they actually burned one’s mouth. I would literally gag when I had to eat them. I was a grown woman before I discovered what green beans really taste like.

Now that I’m grown, I don’t have to eat what I don’t like, unless, of course, it turns up on a buffet table made by someone whose feelings I don’t want to hurt. I plead with all those people who think folks really like their special dishes to watch to expressions of people in line when they come to the green mass with the pineapple and marshmallows. Do they smile and dig in or do they maintain a blank face and take a token amount?

You be the judge, then restrain yourself. Please don't subject your friends to stuff like that.

(c) 2008 Katherine DeWitt

Real Smithfield Ham

I’m glad I was born early enough to experience real Smithfield ham. It isn’t what it used to be.

The original statute specified that the hogs be peanut fed. In 1966, the Virginia Assembly removed the peanut-fed requirement from the official definition. Smithfield hams haven’t been nearly as good since.

Peanut-fed hogs yield a ham that is oily-rich, not lardy-rich. The fat is translucent, not white. The peanut finishing makes a huge difference in the hams, and I don’t have any idea why the Virginia Assembly was so stupid as to degrade the most famous product of its land in that way.

They’re still dry-salt cured, which removes so much moisture they’re flat and thin and the flavor concentrates down to an essence, almost like the reduction of stock to a syrupy consistency when making sauces. The salting and the smoking yield a meat that is dark red, not pink. And in a real peanut-fed ham the rim of fat is narrow and yellowishly translucent. There’s nothing else like it. In the days of real ocean liners, such ships as the France would stock Smithfield hams as the best ham in the world. That’s the world.

Oh, there are country hams and Virginia hams, all of which are intensely salty and rich, but the flavors aren’t right. They just don’t taste as good.

To cook a Smithfield ham, it must be scrubbed of the pepper coating (protects it from insects) and soaked two or three times to remove as much salt as possible. Then it must be simmered for 3 hours. Not 2 ½, not 2 ¾, but 3 full hours. I used to do it in a cast iron kettle that was oval and covered two units of the stove. I couldn’t even lift the thing now if I still had it. I do have a huge graniteware casserole that might take it. I wish I still had occasion to cook a whole Smithfield ham. After simmering, the ham is cooled, the skin removed, and the fat scored in a diamond pattern. A whole clove should be inserted into the center of each diamond of fat. This mimics a pineapple, the traditional symbol of hospitality in the old South. The whole thing, cloves and all, is then glazed with brown sugar softened with a little pineapple juice. Then it must be baked for another hour. That sets the glaze and lets the clove flavor permeate the ham.

The ham is served sliced paper thin, frequently on biscuits. It isn’t usually a main-course kind of thing but an appetizer or party dish. It can be used as a second meat at Thanksgiving meals and a Smithfield ham sandwich is downright decadent.

The “essence of ham” flavor of the meat combined with the salt-sweet combination of the curing and the glazing yields a rich, luxuriant, almost impossibly wondrous flavor. I’m very sorry that those born too late may never have the full experience of a peanut fed ham, but maybe having known it and being unable to repeat it is worse. I really miss real Smithfield ham.

Bon Cuisine

(c) 2008 Katherine DeWitt