January 2020 – Southern Fusion Cooking

Enterprise #34 Juicer

Coming into the ring at over 10 pounds, this Enterprise Juicer can seriously crush some fruit or vegetable. It would probably also work as the world’s heaviest food mill, but it is something of a pain to clean. I have used it mostly to juice excess blueberries to make some pretty tasty blueberry wine. I have also juiced some key limes with it, like the one in the foreground (a Meyer lemon is behind it). I bottled and then pasteurized the juice.

Technically, the Enterprise Company called the #34 a “Combination Fruit Press.” I found this in the booklet they printed called The Enterprising Housekeeper, which I downloaded for free from one of my favorite websites, Project Gutenberg. Check it out, and download some Jane Austen novels as well, while you are there.

The screw at the pointy end is the adjustment for how fine you want the fruit pulp to be, which also determines how thoroughly crushed the fruit will be. That also determines how much juice will come from whatever you are running through this beast.

Now it is time to wander off into the weeds of food history, as these juicers were also used to produce “meat juice.” This came right along with the worldwide craze for a product known as Valentines Meat Juice, which was a huge seller from 1871 onwards, and naturally, it was a Southern product from Richmond, Virginia. Four pounds of heated (not cooked) raw beef produced just two ounces of meat juice, which is more accurately called myoglobin.

The Enterprise company especially recommended giving meat juice to invalids. Nothing like giving the remnants of raw squeezed beef to invalids. Food crazes never fail to entertain. I hope the Paleo crowd doesn’t find out about this.

Planting Asparagus

This will be the fourth time I’ve planted asparagus crowns, aka roots, and these are two years old, which will give us a good decade of Asparagus spears every spring. This year, however, I have the secret weapon that my family used when I was very young, and that would be well composted chicken manure. We had the finest patch of Asparagus in several counties.

As the temps are to be in the upper 50’s F this weekend, it will be a good time for a labor intensive project. The crowns need to be planted fairly deep, around six inches, and spread out properly. My garden is mostly sand, which means they need to be planted even a little deeper than usual.

I bought these crowns from Amazon for a ridiculously low price, and to my surprise, they shipped from Shanghai, China. Amazon has even outsourced vegetables. I was amused to learn this week that our corporate overlord Bezos had his phone hacked by the Saudi royal family. That will teach him about dealing with other royalty.

I’ll soak my crowns in water tomorrow, and plant on Saturday. To quote the great Wendell Berry,

“Eating ends the annual drama of the food economy that begins with planting and birth.”

Then I will try to find out the Chinese term for Spargelzeit, which is German for Asparagus time.

Lodge Commemorative and Wildlife Pieces

A trip to the Lodge Factory Store in South Pittsburg, Tennessee, is a dangerous thing, if you have more cast iron cookware than every other kind combined. My wife Melanie Jane and I went there in December with the purpose of buying Christmas presents for her family, and we came back with seven pieces of cookware, and only four of those were presents.

Pictured is a commemorative skillet for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, in Tennessee and North Carolina. It’s the most biodiverse park in the country, and the most biodiverse temperate area on the planet. It’s also surrounded by some of the worst tourist traps in the world.

We bought as presents some of the Wildlife Series skillets, which had Mallards on the back of them, some real cast iron ducks at that. The link will take you to a complete set of the most useful pieces.

I once ran into the top Lodge marketers, at of all places, Salt Lake City in Utah, at an outdoor trade show. In amongst all the ultra light weight camping equipment was a display of cast iron which probably came in at about a ton. I had to check out the Dutch ovens and skillets, which made up most of the display.

I identified myself as being a fellow Southerner, and asked them what the hell they were doing with all this cast iron at a high tech outdoor show. They laughed, and waited until every Western looking person was gone, and one of them said very quietly, “Half the people out here still think they’re cowboys, and have to have our skillets and Dutch ovens. It’s one of our biggest markets.” The new Lodge cast iron care brochure is in nine languages, by the way.

What did I buy in December? My fourth Dutch oven, and I have only had to chase cows on foot.

Seventy Degrees in January

I have been writing about Global Warming since the 1990’s, but this year already looks like a real doozy. For four of the next seven days we have a forecast high in the seventies. And we are not coastal, but are in the Appalachian Mountains, where the normal highs are twenty degrees cooler than that.

Technically, Global Warming is called Anthropogenic climate disruption (ACD) or Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) or Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW). I prefer the latter. I will not use the weasel term climate change, which was promoted by a right wing political consultant, who had the nickname of “Turd Blossom.” Appropriate. I would imagine the people of Australia are probably using the phrase hell on earth right now.

What will this do to the food supply? Probably nothing good. My family stopped farming row crops in the seventies, when the heat really began to increase, and the summer rain diminished. My conclusion is, invest in irrigation companies.

Making Stock, and Taking Stock

We munched on our enormous Christmas duck for three days, and I turned the carcass into my favorite, duck stock. That made some serious Creole Onion Soup. Making stock, unlike pimping, is easy.

Ingredients

One dismembered Body, of Poultry or other Beast

One Onion, cut into quarters

Head of Garlic, halved crossways (kreuzweise)

One Carrot

One stem of Celery

Salt, Pepper, and Herbs

Water to cover

That’s it. I like to fry the Duck bits to start rendering out the fat, and to make the stock a little brown, before I add the other ingredients. I use even the onion and garlic skins, which is a crime to some people, but they add even more flavor, and make me feel even more like a skinflint. And with the Duck, there is also this–Duck fat skimmed off the top of the stock.

Though I am not a fat animal, I am a firm believer in animal fat, as it is usually wasted by most cooks. Duck fat is among the best, and most domestic ducks have plenty of it. It adds great flavor to any dish.

Cook the stock for as long as you want. I just put mine in a giant stockpot, and go off and do something else, and forget about it. Three hours later, the magic has happened–I have stock, which can be frozen or put in the fridge. It’s the best investment in stock you can make, with the exception of the time when I could have bought Apple stock for $1 a share. Now there is a sad story.

Lard Help Us, Part Three–Rendering Lard

We must have been particularly good last year, as we received $125 of gift cards for Christmas to our two best local meat producers, and then a real kicker, a giant cooler full of meat from cows and pigs grown by my brother and sister in law. We probably have about a six month supply of meats.

The first to go were some pork chops, which were the finest I’ve eaten since childhood. I made two into schnitzels (take that, Deutschland), and the other two are now marry-nating. And that was one fat hog, so I trimmed the chops and rendered down some lard from the fat.

The key to proper rendering is to melt the fat at the lowest possible temperature, so I set my 6000 BTU burner at its bottom level. The lard is rendered when the fat turns into rinds, and stops sizzling.

After a night in the fridge, the lard congeals and is ready to use. Never make any beef dish without it, and never buy commercially produced lard, if possible.

Italian Food in a Tube

Having received three books on Tuscan cooking for Christmas, I am now even more against processed or imported food than before, and in favor of nothing but local food. However, there is always an exception to every rule, and these Italian ingredients in a tube are mine. The packaging is minimal, the product stays fresh forever, and these will turn any bland dish into something tasty.

The Pesto paste is basil, sunflower and olive oil, salt, pine nuts, and garlic. Having made pesto in the past with sunflower kernels instead of pine nuts, due to the cost of pine nuts, this is a winner. A small amount of this is all that’s needed in most pasta sauces.

The Garlic puree is, well, pureed garlic with oil. I grow garlic, but sometimes a tube snatched out of the fridge is much easier than chopping and smashing. It is also very inexpensive, and there is no jar to clutter up things.

My favorite, however, is the tomato paste in a tube. Even our local supermarket carries one brand of this. The triple concentrated version in the picture is a superb product. I use it to fortify sauces made from our sometimes watery local tomatoes, instead of cooking the sauce down for an inordinate amount of time. The double concentrated paste will work as well, but has less of a punch.

So there we have the Italian flag, which is often referred to as basil, garlic, and tomato, because of the colors of three favorite Italian ingredients (sometimes mozzarella is used instead of garlic). All this just makes me crave for a pizza margherita.

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