Shrimp Creole

When I was a young teenager, in the late 1950’s, my family vacationed in Atlantic Beach/Morehead City North Carolina. The bed-and-breakfast where we stayed was in Atlantic Beach. There was a small marina attached and in residence were a creative and playful black standard poodle and a really dumb Dalmatian. One of my favorite dog stories is about the poodle. One afternoon the proprietors decided to try out a trimaran, a very new hull design for that part of the world, and wouldn’t let the poodle go with them. I stayed on the dock with him as he watched the boat go out, make a big loop, and come back in. As the boat approached, he waded out in the water and waited for his people. When they stepped off the boat he carefully shook all over them. It was deliberate because he didn’t shake until they were within range. He also chased butterflies.

The only food available on the island was breakfast at the inn and fast food. If we wanted a real meal we had to go across the bridge and causeway to Morehead City.

After a hard day of shell-hunting, salt and sand there was nothing like getting clean and dressed up and going for a good dinner. I remember walking on the dock where the shrimp boats came in, the salt marsh, salt water, fish and creosote making a not-quite-unpleasant smell on the soft evening breeze. Sometimes a shrimp boat would come in while we were there. The holds were emptied and the fish sorted out from the shrimp and packed in ice. The shrimp were dumped onto long tables, where young boys would snap the “heads” off, leaving just the tails to be packed in ice and shipped north.

At the time, Morehead City was the farthest-north shrimp fishery. Almost all shrimp were sold frozen, but these were sent by truck directly to the New York markets, where they commanded a premium price as fresh. There were cats, of course, one of whom refused to eat anything but fresh shrimp. I know how it felt.

The shrimp dock had a restaurant attached, but they offered only the standard: fish, shrimp, bay scallops, crab cakes, soft shell crabs, cole slaw, hush puppies, and French fries. All fried, all accompanied by tartar sauce. It was all good because it was all fresh, but it got to be too much of a same thing to eat it every night.

Just up the road apiece was a different restaurant. It billed itself as Italian, but that was only part of the story. That’s where the good shrimp were. They bought fresh shrimp from the dock so it hadn’t been frozen. They offered “Cold Boiled Shrimp” which was basically a giant shrimp cocktail with a really good horseradishy cocktail sauce. And then there was shrimp creole. It was wonderful. Lots of shrimp in a chunky sauce of tomatoes, green pepper, onion, and celery served over rice. It was my introduction to shrimp creole and I measure all shrimp creole recipes by that dish.

In the years since, I have duplicated that shrimp creole. I used to use just canned tomatoes and chop them up but the variety on the market has improved and I can get diced canned tomatoes. When I can find it, I stir in some filé powder (AKA gumbo filé): powdered sassafras leaves used for thickening and flavor. If I can’t find the kind that has ground thyme in it I add thyme leaves. One of the saddest things in my life is that my grandchildren don’t like it.

Over the years I’ve been served some disastrous messes that masqueraded as shrimp creole. Most of them use tomato sauce instead of tomatoes and leave out any real flavoring. I’ve now given up eating any shrimp creole but my own. In New Orleans, believe it or not, I was served something that was really shrimp in tomato soup over rice. It was dreadful, but we were in a real tourist trap. We should have known better because there was no line outside. It was the only bad food we had in the Crescent City.

Every time I smell the “holy trinity” of green pepper, onion, and celery sautéing it brings back those vacations at the beach. The bed-and-breakfast with the standard poodle and the Dalmatian in residence; hunting shells, trying to swim in a gentle surf, getting sunburned and trudging through the sea oats on the dunes; dressing for dinner and enjoying shrimp creole and cold boiled shrimp; and dancing at the dance pavilion with Coast Guardsmen from the locally based CGC Chalula and Marines from Camp Lejeune.

(c) 2008 Katherine DeWitt

Biscuits and Butter and Jam, Oh My!

I love old-fashioned southern buttermilk biscuits. Some of my earliest memories are of eating cold unbuttered biscuits out of a cookie jar at Mary’s. Mary was the matriarch of a family who, one at a time, worked for my grandmother for decades.

This was the old segregated south. It was either illegal or socially unacceptable to hire African-Americans for anything but menial jobs. My grandfather had employed Mary’s father or grandfather, I’m not clear which, in his lumber yard and construction business. He would have liked to make him foreman, but he told my grandmother he didn’t dare promote him over the lazy, drunken white guys. It would have cost him his business. I don’t remember the man’s name, but I know that he invented a “pocket” window for my grandmother’s pantry. The window opened downward into the wall.

Mary, then her sons and daughters, worked for my grandmother. I particularly remember Roberta. She had gone to Howard University, but came home to work and put her little sister through college. Roberta had the most beautiful handwriting I had ever seen. She was more my grandmother’s business associate than domestic help and I hope my grandmother paid her accordingly. I admired Roberta and tried to copy her handwriting. When her sister finished college, they both moved north and we lost track of them.

Anyway, I spent a lot of time at Mary’s house. The first house of theirs I knew was literally a log cabin with a lot of land around it. They had to walk to a spring for water and carry it all the way back. They did laundry in a huge pot outside, filled with buckets and buckets of spring water toted from that spring. Our laundry was sent out and I don’t know who did it. I never quite understood that, though Mary’s brood might have done our laundry. It would have made sense.

I was often sent to stay at their house. When friends and neighbors chastised my mother for it, she would ask, “Who would dare hurt her?” And she had a point. So I had some insight into the African-American community in our small town that made me an advocate for civil rights years later.

Back to biscuits. I am constantly amazed at the variety of things called “biscuits.” I judge all biscuits by the standards Mary set. Hers were “short” enough not to need additional lubrication such as butter. I suspect what made them taste so good was that she used lard for shortening. Lard makes a superior pie crust, too. Scones are just biscuits with sugar and sometimes raisins.

Roy Rogers used to serves a sort of Western biscuits. They taste as if they’re made with self-rising flour and almost the only fat in is brushed on the top before baking. I don’t think they’ve ever seen milk.

Popeye’s biscuits are awful. They’re hard and dry and look horribly machine made. I’m not crazy about their chicken, either. It’s even harder and dryer than the biscuits.

KFC makes pretty good biscuits. Not as good as Mary’s, but passable. They have a crusty exterior and a soft inside and taste almost like buttermilk biscuits. When I used to live close enough to a KFC I would go in a buy a dozen biscuits and nothing else.

Oddly enough, my local supermarket, SuperFresh, makes excellent biscuits so I don’t need to drive a half hour to the nearest KFC. Or make my own. Biscuits aren’t hard to make, they just take time.

The difference between a buttermilk biscuit and a baking powder biscuit is that one uses baking soda and soured milk for leavening and the other uses, tad ah! only baking powder. The tang of the buttermilk (or milk “clabbered” with lemon juice) makes the biscuits better. They should never, ever be made with water. Always milk and plenty of shortening. My mother liked the crust, so she rolled them out thin so there wasn’t much middle Some people cut them out really thick so there’s lots of soft middle. . I prefer a modest amount of middle. Cold biscuits lose the crispness of the crust, anyway.

I no longer eat my biscuits cold and unadorned. I heat them up and butter them. I love 'em with chicken or beef gravy, too. For breakfast, “Day old” biscuits get toasted: split, buttered, and put into the toaster oven to get crispy and brown. My mother used to do that for a special treat and I still do it for breakfast. I’ve never decided whether I prefer them with or without preserves so I always do half-and-half and alternate bites. I always use preserves, AKA jam, never jelly or marmalade. Jelly is for my grandson’s peanut butter sandwiches. Marmalade goes on English muffins or toast.

However they’re made, whatever is on them, whether they’re hot or cold, biscuits always remind me of that cozy cabin smelling of wood smoke and filled with Mary’s children and grandchildren. Because my little blonde head spent time with Mary’s family, and I knew Roberta, I never did understand prejudice and I have retained a lasting love of biscuits.

(c) 2008 Katherine DeWitt

A Hamburger Love Story

I am a confessed carnivore. Even more, I am addicted to hamburgers. If I don’t get a good hamburger at least once a week, I go into a decline. The key is the word “good.” For that, I now have to make them myself, due to the e. coli phobia running rampant through the population. I used to be able to get good ones away from home.

The History channel recently broadcast one of those food shows featuring hamburgers from all over the country. It got me to thinking about Hamburgers I Have Known.

I once worked with a girl from Hamburg, Germany who ate raw chopped beef on sliced pumpernickel bread. It had finely chopped raw onion and something else in it and wow, was it good! Steak tartare is raw chopped beef with onion, raw egg, Worcestershire sauce, hot sauce, and black pepper and may have preceded the Hamburg chopped-beef sandwich, which may in turn have been the origin of the ground beef burger we eat on this side of the pond. We changed it by cooking it and putting it on a white-bread bun.

The best standard short-order hamburger I ever ate I had in a dumpy little diner in Quince Orchard, Maryland when my father was teaching me how to drive. He didn’t trust the Drivers’ Ed course at school to teach me correctly and he was working nights when I got my learner’s permit. I would get home from school and he would take me out driving, through all kinds of weather, on all kinds of surfaces, and even finding “impossible” parallel parking spaces. He was tough, but I really, really learned to drive.

On one of our outings, we stopped in this little dump. The hamburger was juicy and medium rare and luscious. I don’t even remember what I had on it, but I suspect chili, onions, and mustard. Those were my druthers in those days.

When I got my first job, as a sales clerk in a paint and wallpaper store for the summer, there was a hamburgers-only short-order restaurant about a block away. That’s where I started experimenting with toppings. They had a lightly smoky barbecue sauce I haven’t had the equal of since; a Swiss-and-mushroom that was to die for; and another reddish mushroom topping I haven’t tasted since. Always, of course, rare to medium rare.

Some white-tablecloth restaurants used to offer a good burger. Hamburger Hamlet was pretty good, though pricey. I’ve had a few other good burgers in that sort of place, but I don’t get out much any more. They won’t cook it rare, either.

Roy Rogers restaurants used to make a good hamburger. They served it medium rare unless you requested well done. You could put on your own toppings from the toppings bar. I sort of segued to tomatoes-and-mayonnaise with lots of pepper. Then the e. coli panic started and they now cook them well done. The bacon cheeseburger is still OK, and even better on sourdough bread, but the few remaining franchise outposts of the chain just aren’t as good overall as they were before McDonald’s bought out the company-owned stores. We won’t even discuss the tough, dry hockey pucks one gets at other fast-food places, and good luck finding a short-order restaurant anywhere any more. How does one make hamburger tough? Its very nature is the antithesis of tough.

That leaves the home hamburger to reign supreme in my life. I prefer ground chuck, which is about 80% lean. Any leaner and they sort of singe in the pan, they don’t brown, and they’re tasteless. I don’t buy packing-house hamburger. It must be ground in the store the day I cook it. That takes care of the e. coli problem. I warned Giant when they quit grinding in the store, and it wasn’t more than a couple of months before there was a recall of their packing-house ground beef. I laaaaughed and laughed. Freezing ruins the texture and diminishes the taste.

I cook my hamburger so it’s crusty on the outside and warmed through to make the juices flow. I always pepper heavily. When I have enough time, I make a sauce with lightly cooked scallions and Dijon mustard with the pan juices. That one I eat on a plate with no bun. When I was still working, I would take a lunch of cold cooked hamburger with a topping of mixed Dijon mustard and mayonnaise. It’s surprisingly good.

Buns really aren’t particularly important, though I prefer a potato or egg bread bun. The best I ever had were served at a science club meeting when I was in high school. The science teacher held the meeting at her house and her cook made homemade rolls for the hamburgers. I don’t remember the hamburgers, just the buns.

When I’m putting it on a bun, I like tomato and mayonnaise, sometimes with a thin shaving of sweet onion. I’ve added sliced avocado at times. If I add cheese, I like Dijon mustard, sweet onion and tomato. I haven’t eaten or bought yellow mustard in many, many years and I reserve spicy brown mustard for hot dogs. I don’t put ketchup on anything, anywhere, any time, any how. Yech. That is, of course, personal taste. I know people who actually like ketchup. Everybody I live with, as a matter of fact, and they’re otherwise bright people with good taste. Go figure.

I’ve never been able to duplicate that diner burger but it doesn’t matter. I make a really, really good hamburger at home and I’ve learned a lot about toppings and preparations from places I’ve been and hamburgers I’ve eaten. Let me have my weekly hamburger and I’m a happy eater.

(c) Katherine DeWitt

Peas ‘n Carrots, Carrots ‘n Peas

In 1986 I had occasion to visit the U.K. The trip was to celebrate the founding of an organization to which I belonged. Those of us from the States and Canada stayed a few days in London at the beginning and end of the trip, but the main accommodation was at Wadham College, Oxford. The organizers had planned a series of day trips to the surrounding area and we had set meals in many of those places.

The season was the end of September/beginning of October. Let me say right off that it was a great trip with friends and fellow club members. It was well planned and well executed and went like clockwork.

Except…every meal featured peas-and-carrots. I hyphenate because we didn’t get peas in one pile and carrots in another – we got mixed peas and carrots. They all looked and tasted alike, too. I had visions of a vast peas-and-carrots factory somewhere pumping out bags and boxes and cartons of frozen peas and carrots.

I have clear memories of the four main meals: The black tie dinner at Wadham College, the Scottish banquet in Edinburgh, the medieval banquet at Warwick Castle, and the Welsh banquet in Cardiff.

The black tie dinner at Wadham didn’t have peas and carrots. It opened with smoked salmon and closed with profiteroles. It was nicely formal and quite good. The breakfasts were buffet style and featured those weird fried eggs found all over U.K. The Full English Breakfast is another blog entry in itself.

The Scottish banquet opened with an “appetizer” of haggis, tatties and neeps (potatoes and turnips, both mashed into tasteless pureés). For an amusing and fictitious account of haggis, go to www.electricscotland.com/haggis. Haggis is a really dish made of the innards (aka offal) of a sheep, cooked together with oatmeal and spices, stuffed into a sheep’s stomach and boiled. It is piped to the table by bagpipers and toasted with fine whisky. Before you tell me I misspelled it, “whisky” without an “e” always means Scotch. Whiskey with an “e” can be Irish, Bourbon, corn, rye, Canadian, or just about any flavorful distilled spirits made from grain. The haggis tastes like good dog food smells – not bad at all. After the haggis course, we had lamb and peas and carrots. Of course.

I really don’t remember the medieval banquet all that well. It had been modernized from real medieval recipes, which all feature honey, and made to suit twentieth century tastes. I do know that it featured lamb and peas and carrots, because we all remarked on it. There were “minstrels” and other entertainment, all sort of touristy and not all that medieval.

The Welsh dinner featured lamb, as did the others. Accompanied, of course, by peas and carrots. We were treated to harp music during a dinner that could have taken place any time between 1946 and the present. The second-best part of the meal was the waitress, who piled my large son’s place high with – wait for it – peas and carrots. She explained that she had brothers and home and knew how much they ate. It’s a good thing he liked peas and carrots. The best part of the meal was the mixed berry pie at the end. The crust was so flaky it was hard to get out of the pans. The filling was hot and just sweet enough and so flavorful I’ve been trying to duplicate it ever since. No luck.

Just about the only dinners that we ate as a group that did not include peas and carrots were the black tie dinner at Wadham College and the Chinese meal in London.

I am very fond of the Brit Com As Time Goes By. I have noticed that they eat a lot of peas and carrots, too. Large peas and large carrots cut into discs.

It was more than a decade before I voluntarily ate peas and carrots again. Even then I have made sure to have petit pois and baby carrots and have flavored them with various herbs, a touch of onion, and butter. I don’t think I could face those giant peas and big, aggressively orange carrots ever again.

(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

Scrmbled Eggs

That seems such a simple title. The truth is that there is nothing simple about scrambled eggs. They can be large-curd or small-curd, soft or hard, with milk or without, plain or with additions. Most omelets start out the same way as most scrambled eggs. The difference is in the cooking.

I’m from the beat-the-hell-out-of-the eggs, beat the fresh-ground pepper in well, and salt after pouring into the pan school. No milk. Most short-order cooks break the eggs onto the grill and stir like mad with the spatula and let the customer salt and pepper to taste. The best restaurant scrambled eggs I ever ate I enjoyed at the Williamsburg Inn in the late 1960’s. They were perfect. They had been pre-beaten and cooked to the exactly correct consistency with enough butter to enrich the flavor. I understand that cooks in British country houses had a trick to keep the scrambled eggs on the sideboard from getting hard and dry over the warmers: They would add one last beaten raw egg to the cooked product just before sending it out to the dining room. With the salmonella phobia we all enjoy so much, this is probably not an option.

The addition of milk makes a softer but not runny product. The addition of cheese also makes a softer product. I love extra-sharp cheddar, grated finely so it melts into and amalgamates with the eggs. Yum. An old favorite from my childhood is adding canned herring roe. The roe has a mild fish flavor that gives you enough variation to be extra tasty without being overpowering. I haven’t noticed canned herring roe on store shelves lately, but I haven’t been looking. I live with people who say, “Eeew.” I suppose you could add cooked shad roe but that seems such a waste. Shad roe’s worth another blog entry all by itself. I’ll probably do that one day, but today it’s chicken eggs.

Eggs are cheap, nutritious, satisfying and, when cooked to individual taste, a gastronomic delight. When made into omelets they become luncheon or after-theater supper mainstay with the addition of fillings, and can be anything from rustic to haute cuisine.
Conventional omelets can be filled with sautéed chopped sweet and hot peppers and Southwestern spices. They can be stuffed and topped with grated cheddar cheese (I like to beat chives into the eggs first for this one). They can be filled with sour cream and topped with sour cream and caviar. Speaking of sour cream, that’s a filling that cries out for shredded smoked salmon. There really is no end to the variation you can get with an omelet. I recently used sautéed scallions, leftover baked salmon, and cream cheese to make a filling. Exquisite!

My father once described the way his stepmother made omelets. She was New Orleans French and her method was to separate the eggs, whip the whites almost into a meringue, beat the yolks, fold them together, and bake in the oven. There is a region of France, but I forget what region, where there is a restaurant that makes almost nothing else but that style omelet. Other variations include the Spanish frittata and Chinese egg foo yung, and those are just the better-known permutations. Almost every culture that keeps chickens for eggs does omelets.

There is no end to the taste sensations you can get with scrambled eggs. There’s nothing simple about them, from the scrambling technique, to the cooking technique, to the flavoring technique. Start experimenting in your kitchen, and don’t forget, “Hot pan, cold fat, food won’t stick.” It’s a trick that works.

Bon Cuisine

(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