… And the Rest is Gravy

The title saying means that whatever you have left is extra richness. Not necessary but very nice to have. But what, exactly is gravy?

Gravy is a sauce made with the cooking juices of the meat it accompanies. Most are a velouté type, thickened with a roux and using stock or water. Béchamel (white sauce) uses milk instead of stock.

My first gravy memories are the ones my mother and grandmother made with great fried chicken gravy. They would pour off most off the fat from cooking the chicken, leaving the crispy bits in the pan. They then added flour and browned it. When it was the perfect shade of golden brown they would pour in cold water and stir like crazy. The result was heavenly – rich, golden brown, and full of chicken flavor with the extra texture of the crispy bits. Not lumps, crispy bits.

When it came to turkey gravy both of them forgot what they knew about gravy, forgot about cooking the roux, forgot everything. They would stew the giblets for a couple of hours, add a lump of butter-and-flour roux, and wind up with a kind of grayish, pasty mess. They would chop the giblets and add them back. The overcooked liver gave an interesting bitter edge to the substance. I took what they had taught me about fried-chicken gravy and what I had learned elsewhere and developed a really, really good turkey gravy. I use the same techniques for roast chicken gravy.

First, while the fowl cooks I make a cooked roux in a small skillet, cooking it until it’s that perfect golden color. I set it aside to cool. I remove the roast fowl from the pan and deglaze the pan with water, not neglecting the rack itself. That gives me an unbelievably rich stock for the base of the gravy. I pour it from the roasting pan into a saucepan – sometimes straining it if there are big pieces of skin stuck to the pan or rack -- and make sure it’s up to boiling, then add the cooled roux and stir. This allows the roux to melt into the stock gradually, and you don’t get lumps. I correct the seasonings, making sure to add lots of fresh-ground black pepper. The gravy is perfect on everything from the turkey to the sweet potatoes.

I once made a superlative gravy with the drippings from chicken cooked with barbecue sauce. That extra oomph with simply wondrous.

Southern cream gravy is a little different. It’s a béchamel, or white sauce, type made with milk. The really affluent will add actual cream.

Whether you use water, stock, or milk the proportions are the same: 1 tablespoon of flour, 1 tablespoon of butter or meat fat, and one cup of liquid.

Unlike gravy from roast meat, red-eye gravy is a different sauce. It’s made by using coffee to deglaze the pan you fried ham in, and left unthickened. It’s the only thing that renders that old southern standby “grits” edible. Butter doesn’t do it, milk and sugar don’t help. Only red-eye gravy can add enough flavor to make grits enjoyable.

I don’t confine my enjoyment to fried or roast fowl. I love French fries with gravy. I love country-fried steak: coat cubed steak with salted and peppered flour, fry it until golden brown, remove from pan, fry a mess of onions in the fat, add flour and brown it, then add water to make a thin gravy. Put the steak back into the gravy and simmer for an hour to get it properly tender. Serve with rice or boiled potatoes to soak up the gravy.

As much as I love gravy, I do reserve it for special meals. I don’t eat gravy every day. If I did, it wouldn’t be nearly as special as it is now, when the taste of fried-chicken gravy reminds me of summer Sunday afternoons with my mother and grandmother, the steam of the kitchen adding more heat to the day and giving real meaning to the word “summer.”

(c) 2008 Katherine DeWitt

The Quest for the Perfect Cup of Coffee

I’ve been drinking, tasting, and exploring coffee since I was twelve years old. I love coffee. I’ve been through all those periods when coffee was supposed to be bad for a person. I’ve just kept on drinking my high-test full caffeine coffee. I enjoy my last cup of the day at around 11:00, but I do make it café-au-lait by cutting it with an equal amount of milk. Recently, some researchers discovered that six to eight cups of coffee a day can halt the progress of multiple sclerosis. Who knew?

The best cup of coffee I ever tasted I enjoyed on November 22, 1963. I remember the date because it was my first wedding anniversary and the day Kennedy was shot. We had reservations at Trader Vic’s and thought about cancelling but didn’t. The restaurant was nearly empty and we had excellent service. Trader Vic’s later got a bad reputation and the Tiki figures outside were kind of cheesy, but at the time it was one of the best restaurants in Washington. The food was prepared in the French manner and excellently done. My after-dinner coffee was served in a French press pot. I had never tasted anything so good, and I’ve been trying to duplicate that rich coffee taste with chocolate overtones ever since. It was probably Kona, grown on the Kona coast of the big island of Hawaii.

At that time I was still using a percolator. I very shortly changed to a Chemex pot, a filter system that has gone out of fashion, to be replaced by the easier-to-use Melitta filter system.

My next move was to try various coffees. Most of the really good coffees are grown on high volcanic islands. Blue Mountain, which isn’t to my taste, is grown on Jamaica. There are other Caribbean coffees as well. I know the Brazilians would argue, but don’t pay them any mind.

I settled on coffees grown on the volcanic islands of Indonesian and other southeast Asian islands. The For a while I bought full city roast Sumatra Mandheling. Mandheling is Arabica variety, full flavored with a rich chocolate undertone. When the store where I shopped changed suppliers, the Sumatra they offered wasn’t Mandheling, it was only Robusta variety, and was over-roasted. There was no longer any point in spending the extra money. I went back to my old standard Mocha Java.

The same islands also produce the world’s costliest coffee. The berries are eaten by a civet, and excreted. The beans are harvested, lightly roasted, and sold for an exorbitant amount of money. The digestive enzymes of the civet neutralize some of the acids and the bitterness, and the result is, they tell me, a coffee of unsurpassed depth and richness of flavor. I’ve never tasted it. I would have to hit the lottery before I’d spend that much for coffee.

I usually like filtered coffee, but I also like Turkish coffee. It’s made by putting powdered coffee into the tiny cup (or pot) and filling it with boiling water. It’s heavily sweetened. The drinker lets the foam settle, then drinks it in tiny sips. Don’t drink the sludge on the bottom. I don’t like espresso, probably because it is always made with over-roasted beans.

In my explorations and experimentations, I may have matched that great coffee of 1963. I’ve made coffee from beans of many countries, both varieties, and varied roasts. I’ve drunk many coffees in many places. It may be that the circumstances and my inexperience enhanced the impact 45 years ago, and I may never actually have that rush again. I still yearn to match that cup of Kona at Trader Vic’s.

(c) 2008 Katherine DeWitt

Summer Steak Sizzle

Ah, summer. The heat rises and the cicadas sing. It’s too hot to cook stews or pot roasts.

The perfect summer meal starts with steak. When I was twelve I had the staff hanging out a restaurant kitchen door watching me eat my way through a porterhouse steak of massive proportions. I really enjoyed that steak, and I had dessert after. I don’t remember what was for dessert but I finished it. I was a skinny kid, too. I devoured that steak while we were on vacation on our way to the beach. A steak brings memories of shimmering heat, the song of the cicadas, the smell of growing fields, and lazy driving through the countryside. Steak and summer have gone together for me ever since that trip.

My partner’s birthday is August 15, so I’m really glad that he likes the Ideal Summer Meal. Throw a steak or two or more over charcoal, quick-boil some corn on the cob and provide lots of butter and salt and pepper, and slice good ripe beefsteak tomatoes (or my tomato salad) and you’re good to go.

The centerpiece of the meal is the steak. It can be a rib eye; a good porterhouse or T-bone; if you’re rich, a tenderloin; or if you have good teeth, a sirloin. I’m fond of rib eye steak, myself. It’s flavorful and tender but isn’t as large as a porterhouse or a sirloin. That’s OK.

I can no longer eat a pound and a half of porterhouse steak. My grandfather maintained that there were only four steaks in a steer: the four symmetrical porterhouse steaks. If a steak doesn’t have equal amounts of meat on both sides of the T bone it isn’t a porterhouse, it’s a T-bone. If it isn’t at least an inch thick, he didn’t think it was a steak.

The sirloin is a bit tough for me but has lots of flavor.

Then there’s the tenderloin, the filet mignon. It’s a lean piece of meat that’s tender in spite of its leanness. It doesn’t have as much flavor as a rib eye or porterhouse but that’s because it doesn’t have as much fat. Yes, fat is flavor. Get over it.

I like my steak “Pittsburgh rare.” That means charred on the outside and cool in the middle. I can handle warm in the middle. Any more cooking and the steak dries out unless it’s very high in fat marbling. I live with people who like it anywhere from just rare to medium-well (barely pink in the middle). Don’t give me a hard time about germs. The inside of a steak is sterile, and if you char the outside you’ve killed any bad germs. Mad cow disease is not a germ, it’s a prion, a twisted protein, and no amount of cooking destroys it, so I’m as safe as anybody who eats well-done steak.

The steak is only the beginning. Corn on the cob isn’t what it used to be – and a good thing, too. There was a time when the only way to get perfectly sweet corn on the cob was to take the pot of boiling water to the corn stalk, pick and clean the corn, and drop it right into the kettle. Nowadays most market corn has the “supersweet” gene. It enables the corn to store more sugar and less starch and convert less sugar to starch after it’s picked. It has revolutionized the fresh corn market by making it possible to ship corn longer distances. You can tell if the corn you buy is the right type by looking at the kernels. If they’re mostly yellow with occasional white kernels, then it’s supersweet. Just boil it for a couple of minutes; or microwave it; or clean off the silks, close the husks back up around it, soak it in water, and put it on the grill. But don’t leave it on for long. Overcooking ruins corn. Then slather it with butter and sprinkle fresh-ground black pepper on it.

Then there are tomatoes. Oh, my god, summer tomatoes. I don’t eat winter tomatoes. There’s nothing like home-grown or farm market beefsteak tomatoes. They’re meaty and sweet and very low in acid. The other low-acid tomatoes are yellow ones. I’ve eaten tomatoes picked semi-green and tomatoes picked dead ripe, and believe me, dead ripe is better. I make a dish of tomatoes where I seed and dice them and marinate them in a mixture of olive oil, lemon juice (fresh or frozen, never bottled), fresh garlic, salt and pepper. This is my partner’s favorite way to eat tomatoes, but it can’t be made with anything but low-acid, fully ripe summer tomatoes. No! Don’t even try! It’s especially pretty with red and yellow tomatoes mixed together. No, don’t add any parsley or anything. Leave it alone! One of the marks of a good cook is that he or she knows when to leave it alone!

Finish the meal with the ice cream of your choice, bought or home made, and there you have it. You haven’t heated up the kitchen and you’ve had the Perfect Summer Dinner.

(c) 2008 Katherine DeWitt