Roast Turkey

Happy post-Thanksgiving, all! I hope your homes were full of the people you love and your tables laden with delicious food.

We had a relatively simple Thanksgiving out in Ohio, where my family lives. After the requisite morning of cleaning (we maybe have a problem with piles of mail at our house), we settled down to the most important task: cooking. We mixed, baked, sauteed, and roasted.

One thing I love about this holiday (besides the excuse for massive cooking, of course) is how much tradition comes into play. My dad prepares weeks beforehand by testing out his mother's recipe for pumpkin pie until it's perfect (much to my mom's dismay). We always take an afternoon walk in the park while the turkey cooks. And my sister always makes mashed potatoes and brownies. For someone who has a hard time accepting change, it's the perfect holiday.

And yet, there's always something different. Our traditions, to which I cling so fiercely, are actually fairly new, adapted since we've lost family members. So Thanksgiving is much different from the holiday I remember growing up. And sometimes it's just a small change, a new recipe to try.

Like this roast turkey recipe from The Williamsburg Art of Cookery. The book is another modern compilation of recipes, but taken directly from 18th-century cookbooks and manuscripts from old Virginia. I'll tell you more about the book in a few days.

Meanwhile, the turkey! We prepared it along the lines of 18th-century birds, rubbed only in butter, and stuffed it with a basic Williamsburg dressing. To quote:

"Put the Gizzard, Heart and Liver in cold Water and boil till tender. When done, chop fine and add stale Bread, grated, Salt and Pepper, Sweetherbs, two Eggs well beaten."

(boiled giblets)

(sweetherbs)

You'll notice the lack of specific measurements, as well as clarification on the exact types of "Sweetherbs." But this was typical in the 18th century, where most women learned to cook at their mothers' sides and could estimate the proper amounts of ingredients. So I tossed in some fresh parsley, along with dried marjoram, basil, thyme, and tarragon, imagining that those might have grown in a housewife's kitchen garden. Then I added the chopped giblets (smelling richly of turkey) and bread crumbs, and mixed it all together with the eggs. My dad and I "Fill[ed] the Turkey with this Dressing" and set it to roast.

Now, technically the stuffing was the only truly historical food in this recipe. My dad closed the openings with little metal skewers instead of sewing them shut, and he covered the bird in aluminum foil to keep in the moisture. It was pretty funny to see the finished bird with all sorts of metal and temperature contraptions sticking out of it.

But oh, the taste. The giblets added a complex richness to the stuffing, and the herbs complemented them nicely. We used to do all sorts of complicated things to the turkey, like brining it and rubbing it in spices, but I must say, Williamsburg (and aluminum foil) got it right. This is one new recipe I don't mind adding to our traditions.

Fried Parsnips

I have always been wary of parsnips.

When I was little, our dinner vegetables tended toward the traditional: peas, green beans, corn, carrots, salad. For a long time I didn't know what parsnips were. Based on the name I thought they were something like turnips, which I knew all about from reading the Molly McIntire series of American Girl books. Remember those? In the first book, Molly refuses to eat her plate of mashed turnips. They're pale, mushy, and definitely gross. But the housekeeper tells Molly she can't leave the table until she's eaten her entire dinner, and by the time Mrs. McIntire returns from her WWII factory job (late at night, it's implied), Molly still hasn't left the table. I remember this chapter vividly: how cold and unappetizing the turnips looked by then. I assumed that parsnips, with their similar name, must be the same.

(Never mind that Mrs. McIntire proceeds to reheat the turnips with brown sugar, making them surprisingly delicious.)

But this blog is all about adventure, so last week I decided to end my accidental life-long boycott of parsnips.

To cook parsnips prairie-style, you trim the ends and boil the parsnips until a fork can pierce them easily. Once they're cool, you shave off the skin with a table knife. It's a tricky maneuver that can make you extremely grateful for the invention of vegetable peelers. Once peeled, you slice the parsnips into thin strips, dredge the strips in flour, and fry them up in a few tablespoons of butter.

The verdict? Well, parsnips taste kind of....bland. Like carrots that have lost their color and flavor. Of course, frying them in butter adds a rich dimension to the taste, but I'm not sure I'd like them cooked in another way. Also, I'm growing tired of this prairie method of frying all vegetables in some kind of fat.

But perhaps the prairie method is the problem. Anyone have suggestions for making parsnips tasty? Otherwise I'm likely to keep my misconception of them as the equivalent of Molly McIntire's turnips.

Snowstorm

Last weekend, Josh and I drove to visit his family in Connecticut. We headed down on Saturday morning, planning to celebrate his birthday with pizza and card games.

Except we hadn't reckoned on a snowstorm.

It was October, all right? It doesn't snow in October. Especially not when the trees are still full of red and gold leaves and Halloween hasn't even happened yet.

The snow started to fall in thick, heavy flakes around lunchtime. By mid-afternoon we had a few inches on the ground, and tree branches began to bend under the weight of the accumulated snow. As it turns out, those beautiful red and gold leaves also serve as an excellent support system for wet, heavy snow. Then, around evening, the branches began to crack from the weight. We stood outside and listened to the branches fall in quiet, resonating thumps.

We lost power around 5:30 that evening. We stayed in and ate cereal for dinner instead of that promised pizza. We played Dominion for four hours by the fire while we moved flashlights and candles around for optimum lighting. It was actually kind of an adventure.

The next morning, we realized that it was maybe less of a good adventure than we'd assumed. The house had no heat, and branches had covered the driveway and the street. It looked like Josh and I weren't going to make it back to Rhode Island that afternoon.

That's when my hearth cooking instinct kicked in. I built a fire (and briefly smoked out the place when I forgot to open the damper), and we set about making the best of things. Around mid-morning, we toasted a passel of English muffins over the fire while Josh's dad fried up peppery eggs on the grill.

Then I set a kettle of water on a bed of coals to heat (as both Josh's mom and I were dying for a cup of coffee at that point). It wasn't quite the nifty set-up we had at the living history museum, but it would do. Meanwhile, I got the coffee ready. As Josh's family only had Keurig coffeemakers, we had to get a bit creative. I punctured a few of the K-cups with the machine, then peeled off the foil coverings and set the cups in a coffee filter.When the water was hot, I simply poured it through the small K-cups to brew a cup of coffee. It was kind of like an awkward double-filtering system, but it worked!

Things got better and better throughout the day. By mid-afternoon, the boys had cleared the driveway and the street was relatively open. Josh and I made it back to Rhode Island in time to prepare for school the next day. As of today, his family is still without power, and I'm hoping they'll get it back soon.

But isn't it good to know that pretending to live in the past and cook old-fashioned food is actually worthwhile?

Fried Potatoes

I'm starting to notice something about this project. Are you?

There's not a lot of color in prairie food. It's mostly shades of brown. Which could go to a gross place, but I'd rather think of it as a commentary on the limited availability of food and storage out on the prairie. It seems that once fall rolled around, people had to hunker down for the winter with a tasty selection of root vegetables and salt pork that would keep in the cellar.

And hey, I'm not against salt pork! Or root vegetables. I had some last night.

But if I'd been eating variations on potatoes, carrots, and salt pork all winter long, I might not have been so enthusiastic about that meal.

Potatoes are a kind of comfort food for me. Maybe it's my Irish background,* but potatoes taste darn good any way you cook them. Baked, boiled, mashed (my sister's favorite), fried, deep-fried....yum.

These are pretty straightforward. Boil whole, unpeeled potatoes until just tender, then peel with a knife while still hot. (The skin comes right off.) Slice into 1/4 - 1/8 inch rounds, and fry until brown in leftover drippings. Eaten with carrots and grilled pork chops, they taste of crisp fall days spent crunching through leaves.

*Nerd note: Did you know that if Columbus had never arrived at the New World and initiated the Columbian Exchange, the Irish potato famine might never have occurred? The potato was introduced to the Old World following Columbus' exploration, and it quickly became so central to the Irish diet that it was only a matter of a few centuries before a potato blight devastated the population in the 19th century. I just (re)learned that for the course I'm teaching this year.

Johnny Cake

Back when I was a youthful graduate student, my roommates and I decided to explore the best of Rhode Island. We made it to the Hope Street farmer's market and a harvest festival before papers, reading, and student teaching took over. Then, in May, we emerged from the cave of school. We realized that we only had a few weeks left to explore the best of Rhode Island before graduation.

My roommate had been talking about jonnycake since we read about them in Edible Rhody that past fall. Jonnycakes are a signature Rhode Island dish. They're like pancakes that had a steamy affair with cornbread: you fry a cornbread batter on a griddle, then serve the cakes with maple syrup. Yum. So together with my roommate's science cohort, we arranged a trip to quaint Little Compton, solely so we could try jonnycake at a local restaurant. (But we did visit a lovely beach afterwards.)

The jonnycakes were delicious, and we came away satisfied. It turns out that there's a bit of controversy surrounding how to cook jonnycake, depending on where you live in the Ocean State. But generally, you want a small, pancake-like patty that will travel well (indeed, the name might have come from "journeycake").

The Ingalls family, on the other hand, would beg to differ.

Prairie jonnycake, or johnny cake, as they spelled it, is baked in a flat sheet that you cut into squares. It crumbles easily, so it probably wouldn't travel well. About the only things it has in common with Rhode Island jonnycake are the ingredients: cornmeal, baking soda, some fat and sweetener.

But it does serve as a tasty vehicle for maple syrup! I drizzled my prized syrup on top of several squares of johnny cake, and they were gone in no time. While this prairie version doesn't have quite as many fond memories attached to it as the Rhode Island variety, it serves as an easy weekend breakfast in the fall.

Stewed Jack Rabbit and Dumplings

Up to this point, I've been playing it safe. The recipes I've chosen have at least mildly resembled something I've eaten in the past. But that all changes today.

That's right. I cooked a bunny.

I understand that this post may lose me some readers.* That's okay. The nineteenth-century prairie wasn't all dry cornbread and apple turnovers. Pa Ingalls went out hunting, and he brought back turkeys and blackbirds and deer and rabbits. It's about time I investigated some of the squishier aspects of prairie meals.

Now, The Joy of Cooking informed me that while rabbit stew may seen like a foreign concept, many people still enjoy rabbit today. This unfortunately led me to believe that I could procure a dressed rabbit at my local Whole Foods. Not so, friends. I had to call around to a few specialty butchers before I found Central Meat Market, which offers beef, poultry, rabbit, goose, quail, whole pigs, and even partial cows (with a special order). Having never ventured into a specialty butcher shop before, I was a little nervous. But the butcher was quite friendly, and he even chopped up the rabbit for me.

Then I proceeded to psych myself up for this recipe. Josh and I went to the Coggeshall Farm Harvest Festival a few hours before I started to cook, which proved inspiring and...um...guilt-inducing.

We visited a hearth cooking site (manned by a well-dressed young fop), where a whole turkey was stewing over the fire. We heard all about heritage breed chickens. We strolled past a pony ride and tried our hand at checkers. Then we stopped by a crafts tent and petted the angora rabbits on display. They were so, so soft and sweet.

That's when the guilt set in. It's hard to think about cooking an animal for dinner when you're petting its relative at a festival.

Nevertheless, I had to soldier on. So that evening I tried to forget the cute bunnies and focus on the meal at hand.

I started off with salt pork (as if I'd use anything else). I browned some diced-up pieces of pork in a Dutch oven, then removed the pork for later. The rabbit pieces went into the fat to brown (while I tried to look at the pieces as abstract bits of meat. Rabbit ends up looking disconcertingly like chicken, which I wasn't expecting). Meanwhile, I simmered the giblets (heart, liver, etc.) in a separate saucepan with water, and added the liquid to the Dutch oven to simmer with the rabbit.

At this point I wasn't at all sure I wanted to eat this stew for dinner.

But still, on I went. I toasted some flour to a nice cocoa-brown, then mixed it with the chopped-up giblets and some water to form a dark gravy. Then I prepared some dumpling dough (your basic flour-salt-buttermilk-baking soda mixture) and got ready for the final stretch. When the meat was tender, I mixed the gravy and the salt pork pieces back into the Dutch oven, and dropped the dumpling dough on top. After about 10 minutes, the dumplings had puffed into a nice crust, and the stew was ready.

Was I ready?

I tried the sauce and dumplings before I tested the rabbit. The sauce was incredibly rich and earthy--definitely the giblets' doing. It was a little too much for me. The rabbit, on the other hand, was lightly gamey and a delicious combination of chicken and venison. So tasty.

I definitely wouldn't make this stew again (that sauce), and I'd have to work up the courage to buy another skinned rabbit from the butcher before I ventured near it again. But preparing for this stew was a surprisingly sobering experience. It wasn't until I visited that butcher that I realized just how sanitized our mainstream American experience of food has become. I've been accustomed to seeing only beef, chicken, turkey, and pork in the supermarket, wrapped up nicely in plastic packages. Were it not for this project, I doubt I would have fully considered how limited that meat selection really is.



* But not you, Lyuda. You've eaten rabbits before, right?

Apple Turnovers

These are the two things I've learned so far from this project:

1. Pies and pie-like things haven't changed much since the 19th century.
2. Animal fat is sinfully delicious.

You already know that I'm a salt pork enthusiast. Having only cooked with butter and oil prior to starting this project, the pork was a pleasant surprise. But now I've discovered lard.

Oh, lard.

Now, lard isn't as obscure as salt pork. Bakers still use it to make pie dough (and maybe other things? I'm not sure). But I'd never seen it before, and I wasn't sure how to procure it. Luckily, my friendly neighborhood farmer's market boasts several meat stands, and on my weekly visit, one of them happened to be selling leaf lard. "For Serious Cooks," the sign said.* I bought a package and took it home.

Lard looks, unsurprisingly, like a solid lump of whitish fat. The label read "Pork Suet," making me doubt momentarily that I'd bought the right kind. But I gamely sliced off enough lard to fill a 1/3 measuring cup, separating the fat from stringy parts. Then I rubbed it into the flour and salt just like it was butter, and brought the dough together with some ice water. My hands felt a little greasy, but all seemed well so far.

The rest was relatively simple: I rolled out the dough and sliced it into squares, then put a dollop of apples mixed with cinnamon and brown sugar in the middle of each square. Then I folded the dough over the apples to create triangles, and sealed the edges with a fork. The turnovers baked for half an hour and came out steaming and smelling of spice.

Admittedly, I was a little nervous, what with the pork suet confusion and so on. But, my god, that lard made the flakiest, tenderest crust I've ever tasted. These are little pockets of apple deliciousness, my friends, and it's all due to that animal fat.

Salt pork may get my enthusiasm, but lard gets my everlasting devotion.


*I got really excited by the sign. Apparently this project has elevated me to the level of Serious Cook!