I stumbled across this design after buying a used copy of Early American Wooden Ware for $1 from an Amazon seller. It was first published in 1942, but I have the revised edition done twenty years later. This well illustrated book was written by Mary Earle Gould.
The squeezer was an industrial design from the time when lard rendering was a standard farm household affair. The hinge at the top is a scrap piece of leather, nailed to the two boards. The process is simple enough–heat the pork fat on low heat, and squeeze the fat out with the gizmo. It works inpressively well.
According to the French, there are five varieties of pork fat. Those include leaf lard, back fat, bacon fat, caul fat, and scraps. The finest is leaf lard, internal fat from near the kidneys. Two and a half pounds of local leaf lard yeilded three pints of lard.
I really used primarily one tool making these–a spokeshave. It is a quick and easy project, which will make you free from buying disgusting supermarket lard ever again.
Way back in the 1970’s Neil Young had it right with his song “Homegrown.” Here are the first few lines:
Homegrown’s alright with me Homegrown is the way it should be Homegrown is a good thing Plant that bell and let it ring
“Homegrown”
We didn’t start out with the idea that we were going to ring in the New Year with an all local feast, but it just turned out that way. I’ll start at the top, and go left to right around the plate, and then right to left.
Top: Baked Sweet Potato. That’s half of a big one, purchased from the Festhalle Farmer’s Market. These were grown by long time family friends, and are probably the variety “Porto Rican.” These are very sweet, and are served with lots of butter–a dessert substitute.
Left Center: Corn Bread. This is an all corn meal recipe, using McEwan and Sons Fine Ground Cornmeal. I doubt that the Certified Organic Corn was grown in Alabama, but their business, Coosa Valley Milling, just south of Birmingham, has some national fame. Their meal and grits are used at multiple James Beard award winning restaurants, and you can buy their products online–all around good stuff.
Bottom: Collard Greens. These are local as well, purchased at the Festhalle, and then frozen by yours truly. I like mine with lots of home made pepper sauce. The inheritance of bottles of such has been the subject of legal battles.
Right Top: Locally grown fresh Ham. Until this year, this was practically impossible to find. The ham pictured was home brined as well, and I will give the process of home brining, “curing,” in an upcoming post.
Center: Black-eyed Peas. More than likely these were grown by my in-laws, Melanie Jane’s sister and her husband, who brought us bags of them. That’s the way to pay a visit to some one. Southern folklore has it that every pea consumed is worth a dollar. I should be a millionaire.
The wine to wash this down with is local, if you live on the Rhône river in France. It’s a Côtes du Rhône, which has just enough pink tinge to call it a rosé.
This is as classic a Southern New Year’s meal as can be put together. People in NYC would probably label it “Soul Food.” Down here, we just call it food.
June is one of the best times of the year to buy fresh locally grown produce. The omelette pictured above is all local save one ingredient, some bacon. Because we grew two of the main ingredients ourselves, this cost pennies compared to supermarket bought ingredients. I won’t mention that it is also about a thousand times better. This recipe serves two.
Ingredients
1 or 2 slices Bacon
Sliced Fingerling Potatoes
1/4 diced Onion
I diced Tomato
Salt and Pepper
Cook the bacon until most of the fat is rendered from it. Remove from the skillet, and add the sliced fingerlings. We grew these in 10 gallon grow bags, and once you go grow bags, you never grow back. We have enough taters now to take us on into the fall. Salt here well and fry until brown.
Add the onions and tomato, and turn on the oven to 400 degrees F. When the onions appear to be almost done, add two eggs. These are our homegrown ones.
When the white begin to harden, throw the whole thing into the oven. Now is paranoia time-Am I going to overcook them? There’s nothing worse than turning a good fresh egg into a golf ball. Shake the skillet occasionally until you get the desired score on the jiggle test. Then halve this beauty and thanks nature’s God for her/his bounty.
I like my eggs with some hot sauce, and I am currently on the fence between two Tabasco sauces–the Chipotle and the mild Jalapeño (Green) Sauce. Maybe I should try both at the same time.
How we ended up with four Rhode Island White “Starter” chickens is the typical story of if your head is hard enough, beating it against the wall eventually works. After a few Google searches, I finally found four local sellers who hatched their own chickens. The first three I called didn’t answer, and had no voicemail. The fourth answered on the first ring, and promptly put me on a waiting list for chickens which would be ready for sale in a week. I made the cut, and drove up to the community of Battleground to pick them up.
Did he have the chickens! The first group I saw was a flock of a few hundred Rhode Island Whites, which were a special order from a hatchery. My chicks were part of an “overrun” set of hens, which were the result of an excess production of chickens, that the hatchery did not want. During my drive home, I had time to think about why chickens that look this fine are threatened as a breed. I came up with two good reasons.
The first is that correlation does not equal causation, a common mistake among our poorly educated population. Consider the following parody:
All Cats are Gray at Night
All White Chickens Look Alike
They don’t, except on a superficial level. Similarly, just because the words Rhode Island appear in Rhode Island Red chickens and Rhode Island White chickens, that the whites are only a white version of the reds. They aren’t. Whites are a well documented breed that is the result of crossing three different breeds that was introduced in 1888. Rhode Island Reds were developed by a number of breeders using a large range of different brown chicken breeds. The names are the result of geography, not merely genetics.
The larger issue is that Big Chicken, and Big Ag in general, ruins everything it touches. The myth that industrial production is more “efficient” than local food production finally took it on the nose this past summer, as even politicians are lamenting how expensive their crudité has gotten. Dudes, try shopping somewhere other than the supermarket–a farmer’s market, maybe.
At any rate, the big decline in Rhode Island White numbers in the 1960’s corresponds with the corporate takeover of food distribution that occurred at the same time. In this case, correlation can be proven to be causation as well, with independently verifiable evidence. Now that the system of Big Chicken is beginning to show its weaknesses, from Bird Flu caused by overcrowding and poor sanitation, to high prices brought on by equally greedy corporations, like Big Oil, will local production step in and fill the void? Is that flock of hundreds of Rhode Island Whites a sign or an aberration? History, in the long term, favors the sustainable, in whatever form it may take.
Goat Island Brewing’s Oktoberfest beer is not actually made in the community of Berlin, Alabama–locals call it “Bur-lin”–but just a few miles to the west, in the town of Cullman. Cullman is in fact named after founder Johannes Gottfried Kullman, who was a “Colonel” in one of the many German revolts against royalty in 1848-1849. After revolt after revolt in Germany failed, Kullman thought it wise to relocate to the constitutional Republic of the USA.
Goat Island is becoming another craft brewery that is growing every year. The Oktoberfest is a well behaved lager, that could easily be drunk by the pint. It doesn’t hurt that they have beers with clever names, like Peace, Love and Hippieweisen, a wheat beer made with Alabama summer weather in mind. It also doesn’t hurt that their Duck River Dunkel won a silver medal at the Great American beer Festival in Denver in 2018. Not bad for a small Southern brewery.
Goat Island is an actual place, a small island just offshore in the Smith Lake impoundment. Legend has it that a single goat was marooned there as the waters rose, and spent a solitary life as the only one of his kind on the island. Someone could at least have taken him a beer.
“Soup Tomatoes” was an unknown term to me until a few years back, when I asked a vendor at the Festhalle what variety of tomatoes she was selling, and she responded “soup tomatoes.” Soon enough I found out that those were specially priced tomatoes for home canning, not a particular variety of tomatoes intended for soup. Now we look forward to the arrival of soup tomatoes every year.
Why? These are really just tomatoes that have an odd shape or blemish of some variety. They won’t fetch the premium price of perfect slicing tomatoes, which can go for as much as a buck a pound. Used for canning, prettiness is second to taste, and since none of these will ever live to the entrance age of Miss America Tomato, quantity is the key. All tomatoes look the same, after being run through a food mill.
The bottom line to this story is that this twenty five pound box of tomatoes went for ten bucks. All skin flints such as myself immediately see a mental image of a sign that says twenty five cents a pound. Through the food mill they go, and the puree, with salt and fresh basil added, goes into the jars, and gets topped off with some olive oil. Then we have a superior product at about 1/5 of the cost of a commercial one. Forget inflation–don’t worry, be happy, and buy some soup tomatoes.
Yes, winter in the age of climate disruption. Technically this was late late last fall, but with temps in the mid 70’s, it might as well have been late late spring. In this situation, the only thing to do is light up the brick oven, and eat some pizza outside.
Our pizza sauce has evolved over the years, and I will simply list the secret ingredients, soon to be secret no more. Here it goes:
Balsamic Vinegar
Garlic Paste
Italian Tomato Paste in a Tube (like the Garlic Paste)
Homemade Pesto, frozen in an ice cube tray
Home canned local Tomatoes
It is possible to screw up the sauce even with these ingredients, but it can only be accomplished with some difficulty. Go easy on the vinegar and the paste, and all’s well that eats well.
I will resist the temptation to make another bad joke about Al Fresco. I could hurt his feelings.
Time for the yearly canning update. Get busy! Life is short and Tomatoes are sweet, so can ye tomatoes while ye may.
First note–last year’s crop of canning lids were mediocre, so we switched from the usual hot water bath canning method, to pressure canning. Zero failures since then. If you don’t have a pressure canner, just double the time the jars of maters swim in the hot water.
If you’re lucky, somebody gave you something like this, or you know someone you can borrow one from. Ours only comes out of hibernation a few times a year.
Old School
The Mirro-matic was designed to process enough food for an entire family, and this one did–just not for our family. A former co-worker of mine had all of his children grow up, and off to college, and he just wanted to get rid of this beast. As the only farm boy he knew, I was the obvious heir apparent.
We will probably can only quart jars tomorrow, to speed up things and conserve on the number of lids we have. US made lids are just now coming back on the market, and none are available locally. There is a good deal on Amazon for some, and an order is forthcoming. It should be just enough money to get space cadet Bezos an extra 1/4 inch into outer space.
There was once a common saying in Mississippi, which was a simple “The richest land, and the poorest people.” That perfectly sums up the contradictions of living in a Red State.
Barbara Kingsolver discussed this dilemma quite perfectly in her essay of the same title, “Life in a Red State.” Naturally, she started with a discussion of how her kitchen was literally covered with tomatoes. Then she expanded from there. After today, I can definitely feel her pain.
The tomatoes and peas are only a fraction of the haul I made this morning at the Festhalle. Those two combined cost us the princely sum of $26, with the maters being the majority–$20. Preserving those this weekend will be a whole lot like work.
I once worked at a Southern public University where the faculty salaries were right at the lowest in the country, and the administrative salaries among the top ten percent. There is only one solution to a problem like that–leave. All that got us is a beautiful river front house, and tomatoes up to our necks. There’s nothing to not love about that.
We started off International Worker’s Day the right way, with our once every weekend Farmer’s Omelette. We had to celebrate the needs of workers to conserve every penny, so we made this partly with leftovers, although they were no ordinary leftovers. Having grown up on what we call a “dirt farm,” I know how to use a leftover.
The Base
Heaviest Skillet available
1 slice good Bacon (preferably organic)
New Taters, Precious
Just Enough Time to Wash off the Dirt
First, cook the slice of bacon. The real purpose of this is to render out the fat needed to fry the taters. I like to add some olive oil for extra flavor, if needed. These little gems didn’t need any. The Yukon Golds were so tender I didn’t even peel them. Naturally, I had planted them in composted chicken manure to begin with.
Fry the taters until practically done, and chop the bacon. Turn the oven on to 400 F. Time for the magic leftovers.
Leftovers
Grilled organic Onions
Grilled organic cherry Tomatoes
Chicken kabobs on Friday night, grilled over hardwood charcoal. It was all too good, and had those two left over. The Florida Maters were halved, and the onions diced. They just needed to be warmed, so I threw them in with the chopped bacon. Then came the money shot.
Eggs
Homegrown Eggs
Our chickens are getting fat and happy, and we had nine eggs on two days each last month–and we only have eight hens. Currently we are feeding about five families with our eggs. The birds will without doubt be demanding overtime feed soon.
Cook the eggs over-easy style in the oven, but without turning them over. Watch this like a chicken on lookout for a hawk, and take out while the yolk is still runny. This is more than enough to feed the two of us, plus a snack for our two dogs. They especially like the taters.
Southern Fusion Cooking 