by Dave Dewitt
8
cups chicken stock
3
cups small green onions, without the green ends
1
cup pork lard, or substitute vegetable oil
¼
cup flour
Salt to taste
In a dry skillet, lightly toast the ancho chiles without burning them. Soak the chiles for 5 minutes in hot water to soften them, then drain and dry them. With a knife, make a slit in the side of each pod and deseed it. Stuff the chiles with the cheese and set aside. You can tie them to keep the stuffing from falling out if you wish.
Heat the chicken stock and boil the green onions for 3 minutes. Remove the onions from the stock and set both aside.
Heat the lard until lightly smoking. Fry the chiles on both sides, starting on the open side. Remove the chiles from the oil and drain on paper towels. Fry the green onions in the lard. Remove and set aside. Add the flour to the lard and stir until completely mixed without letting the mixture turn brown. Pour the chicken stock in the pan and stir until no more lumps are seen. Simmer the sauce to thicken for 5 minutes while stirring. Add the chiles and let simmer 2 more minutes. The sauce should be smooth but not too thick. Add stock if necessary. Serve the chiles immediately with some green onions on the side.
COCHINITA PIBIL
(PORK COOKED BY THE PIBIL METHOD)
yield
4 to 6 servings
heat scale
mild
This pre-Columbian dish is probably the best-known food of the Mayas, according to Jeff and Nancy Gerlach, who collected this recipe on one of their many trips to Yucatán. It is one of the most popular entrées of this area and is on virtually every menu. This dish is traditionally served with warmed corn tortillas, black beans, cebollas encuridas (marinated onions), and habanero salsa. Note: Advance preparation is required.
10
whole black peppercorns
¼
teaspoon cumin seeds
5
cloves garlic
3
tablespoons recado rojo, or substitute achiote paste (both available from online sources)
1
teaspoon dried Mexican oregano
2
bay leaves
⅓
cup bitter orange juice, or substitute ⅓ cup lime juice, fresh preferred
2
pounds lean pork, cut into 1 1/2–inch cubes
Banana leaves or aluminum foil
3
xcatic chiles, stems and seeds removed, cut in strips; or substitute banana or yellow wax hot chiles
1
large purple onion, sliced
Place the peppercorns and cumin seeds in a spice or coffee grinder and process to a fine powder. Add the garlic and grind again.
In a bowl, combine the spice mixture, recado rojo, oregano, bay leaves, and orange juice. Pour the marinade over the pork and marinate for 3 hours or overnight.
Cut the banana leaves in pieces to fit a roasting pan. Soften the leaves by passing them over a gas flame or by holding them over an electric burner for several seconds until the leaves begin to turn light green. Remove the center ribs from the leaves and use for tying. Lay a couple of these ribs—that are long enough to tie around the pork—along the bottom of the pan. Line the pan with the banana leaves or foil.
Place the pork, including the marinade, on the leaves, and top with the chiles and onion. Fold the banana leaves over and tie with the strings. Cover the pan and bake in the oven at 325 degrees F. for 1 1/2 hours.
SALSA DE MOLE POBLANO
(CLASSIC MOLE POBLANO SAUCE)
yield
about 2 cups
heat scale
medium
This subtle blend of chocolate and chile is from Puebla, where it is known as the “national dish of Mexico” when it is served over turkey. This sauce adds life to any kind of poultry, from roasted game hens to a simple grilled chicken breast. It is also excellent as a sauce over chicken enchiladas.
4
dried pasilla chiles, seeds and stems removed
4
dried red guajillo or New Mexican chiles, seeds and stems removed
1
medium onion, chopped
2
cloves garlic, chopped
2
medium tomatoes, peeled and seeds removed, chopped
2
tablespoons sesame seeds
½
cup almonds
½
corn tortilla, torn into pieces
¼
cup raisins
¼
teaspoon ground cloves
¼
teaspoon ground cinnamon
¼
teaspoon ground coriander
3
tablespoons shortening or vegetable oil
1
cup chicken broth
1
ounce bitter chocolate (or more to taste)
Combine the chiles, onion, garlic, tomatoes, 1 tablespoon of the sesame seeds, almonds, tortilla, raisins, cloves, cinnamon, and coriander.
Puree small amounts of this mixture in a blender until smooth.
Melt the shortening in a skillet and sauté the puree for 10 minutes, stirring frequently. Add the chicken broth and chocolate, and cook over a very low heat for 45 minutes. The sauce should be very thick. The remaining sesame seeds are used as a garnish, sprinkled over the finished dish.
Jefferson’s garden at Monticello. Photograph by Dave DeWitt.
four
THE SPICY US STATES
In colonial America, chiles were grown by Thomas Jefferson, who was given seeds by other American gardeners and planted them at his various plantations, including Monticello. When I visited Monticello in 2011 to give a talk about my book The Founding Foodies, I discussed Jefferson’s fondness for peppers with Peter J. Hatch, the director emeritus of gardens and grounds for the Thomas Jefferson Foundation. Hatch was responsible for the maintenance, interpretation, and restoration of the 2,400-acre landscape at Monticello from 1977 to 2012. He writes in his book “A Rich Spot of Earth”: Thomas Jefferson’s Revolutionary Garden at Monticello:
Jefferson grew various forms of Bells, Bullnose, sweet, and cayenne pepper (Capsicum annuum), as well as Texas bird pepper (Capsicum annuum var. glabriusculum). His documented sowing of cayenne pepper seed at Shadwell in 1767 is one of the earliest references to this form of Capsicum in North America. Later, in the 1812 “Calendar,” “Major,” “cayenne,” and “Bullnose” (marked by a crinkled, noselike appendage on the blossom end) were planted in adjacent rows in square IX. The Texas bird pepper, obtained from Dr. Samuel Brown of Natchez through acquaintances near San Antonio, was among Jefferson’s most exciting introductions. Jefferson planted bird pepper seed in the garden and with a dibble in flowerpots, and relayed the seed to Bernard McMahon in 1813. Green (also called “Bell” and “Bullnose”) peppers appear in the Jefferson family manuscripts as additions to tomato pickles and gumbo soup, while cayenne peppers were added to Virginia Randolph Trist’s tomato soup and Septimia Meikleham’s salad dressing. The Monticello family physician, Dr. Dunglison, prescribed a red pepper gargle to relieve the sore throats of Jefferson’s granddaughters. Culinary historian Karen Hess called the use of hot peppers in traditional Virginia cooking “highly skilled and discrete.”
George Washington grew “bird peppers” at Mount Vernon, along with other experimental plants such as palmettos and guinea grass. But chiles never really became popular on the East Coast. They were, however, adopted with great fervor in Louisiana by way of Mexico.
Tabasco plant with ripening fruits. Photograph by Dave DeWitt.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF TABASCO® SAUCE
While the early settlers of the Southwest were growing New Mexican–type chiles and cooking enchiladas, Mexicans were developing and cultivating many different strains of capsicums. One such strain, Capsicum frutescens, was grown near the port of Tabasco on the Gulf of Mexico
, which had regular trade with New Orleans. During the US war with Mexico, American soldiers captured the port of Tabasco (which is now called San Juan Batista) in July 1847.
Although exact details are lacking, historians believe that chiles were imported into New Orleans by soldiers returning to that city for treatment of various tropical diseases. Somehow, seeds were transferred to a prominent banker and legislator, Colonel Maunsell White. By 1849, White was cultivating the chiles, which were then spelled “Tobasco,” on his Deer Range Plantation. That year, the New Orleans Daily Delta printed a letter from a visitor to White’s plantation who reported, “I must not omit to notice the Colonel’s pepper patch, which is two acres in extent, all planted with a new species of red pepper, which Colonel White has introduced into this country, called Tobasco red pepper. The Colonel attributes the admirable health of his hands to the free use of this pepper.”
Colonel White manufactured the first hot sauce from the Tobasco chiles and advertised bottles of it for sale in 1859. About this time, he gave some chiles and his sauce recipe to a friend named Edmund McIlhenny, who promptly planted the seeds on his plantation on Avery Island. McIlhenny’s horticultural enterprise was interrupted by the Civil War and invading Union troops from captured New Orleans. In 1863, McIlhenny and his family abandoned their Avery Island plantation to take refuge in San Antonio, Texas.
When the McIlhenny family returned to Avery Island in 1865, they found their plantation destroyed and their sugarcane fields in ruin. However, a few volunteer chile plants still survived, providing enough seeds for McIlhenny to rebuild his pepper patch. Gradually, his yield of pods increased to the point where he could experiment with his sauce recipe, in which mashed chiles were strained and the resulting juice was mixed with vinegar and salt and aged in 50-gallon white-oak barrels. In 1868, McIlhenny packaged his aged sauce in 350 used cologne bottles and sent them as samples to likely wholesalers. The sauce was so popular that orders poured in for thousands of bottles priced at a dollar each wholesale.
In 1870, McIlhenny obtained a patent on his Tabasco (as it was now spelled) brand hot pepper sauce, and by 1872 he had opened an office in London to handle the European market. The increasing demand for Tabasco Sauce caused changes in the packaging of the product as the corked bottles sealed with green wax were replaced by bottles with metal tops. In 1885, the product won a gold medal for excellence at the World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition in New Orleans. By 1886, completion of the nationwide railway network greatly assisted the distribution of Tabasco Sauce.
After the death of Edmund McIlhenny in 1890, the family business was turned over to his son John, who immediately inherited trouble in the form of a crop failure. John attempted to locate Tabasco chiles in Mexico but could not find any grower to meet his specifications. Fortunately, his father had stored sufficient reserves of pepper mash, so the family business weathered the crisis. However, that experience taught the family not to depend solely upon Tabasco chiles grown in Louisiana. Today, Tabascos chiles are grown under contract in Colombia and other Central and South American countries, and the mash is imported into the United States in barrels.
John McIlhenny was quite a promoter and traveled all over the country promoting his family’s sauce. “I had bill posters prepared,” he once said, “and had large wooden signs in the fields near the cities. I had an opera troupe playing a light opera. At different times I had certain cities canvassed by drummers, in a house-to-house canvass. I had exhibits in food expositions, with demonstrators attached. I gave away many thousands of circulars and folders, and miniature bottles of Tabasco pepper sauce.”
All of this promotion did not go unnoticed by the competition. In 1898, another Louisiana entrepreneur named B. F. Trappey, a former employee of the McIlhenny company, began growing Tabasco chiles from Avery Island seeds. He founded the company B. F. Trappey and Sons and began producing his own sauce, which was also called “Tabasco.” The McIlhenny family eventually responded to this challenge by receiving a trademark for their Tabasco brand in 1906. The two companies competed with identically named sauces until 1929, when the McIlhenny family won a trademark-infringement suit against the Trappeys. From that time on, only the McIlhenny sauce could be called “Tabasco,” and competitors were reduced to merely including Tabasco chiles in their list of ingredients.
I wanted to know precisely how Tabasco® Sauce was made. So on a shoot for Heat Up Your Life, I traveled with our crew to Avery Island, Louisiana, where I interviewed Paul McIlhenny, president of the McIlhenny Company and the great-grandson of its founder, Edmund McIlhenny.
DAVE: Paul, tell me exactly
how Tabasco® Sauce is made.
PAUL: The day the peppers are harvested—and of course it is just the bright red juicy peppers. We grind them up with 8 percent salt, really Avery Island salt, coarse ground salt, and that mash then actively ferments or works for about 30 to 60 days. It is not a fermentation like in the production of alcohol, but it is a fermentation. Then the mash stays in the barrels for three years. We bring the mash here to Avery Island and finish the aging here. After the aging, we clean off the oxidized mash from the top, and we inspect each barrel. We take the aged, drained, inspected mash, which is what this is here. We add very strong 100-grain vinegar, mix it slowly for four weeks, and then extract or strain off the seeds and skins.
DAVE: How many peppers do you think went into that one scoop there?
PAUL: Well, an awful lot, a lot more than you think. Because we take the seeds and the skins out, and that is a large amount of the bulk. It takes a lot of peppers to make a two-ounce bottle of Tabasco® Sauce. And our brand name is probably one of the most famous brand names all over the world. Like Coca-Cola®, Ford®, Xerox®, it is a trademark that is easily recognized not only here but all over the globe. We print our cartons in 19 foreign languages and we sell to more than 100 foreign countries.
The author and Paul McIlhenny at Avery Island, Louisiana.
After the interview, Paul was kind enough to prepare a crawfish boil for our cast and crew in the backyard of the colonial-style Marsh House, where we were staying.
The rise of Louisiana hot sauces greatly influenced the two related cuisines in the area, Creole and Cajun. The Creoles are descendants of the original French settlers of Louisiana, while the Cajuns are descended from French-speaking immigrants from Nova Scotia, which was originally called Acadia. (The term Cajun is a corrupt form of Acadian.) Although Creole cooking is basically a localized urban version of French cooking, and Cajun cuisine is a countrified mélange of French, African, and Indian cooking, both styles share similar ingredients and recipes.
Some food historians speculate that Creole and Cajun food was first spiced up by cayenne chiles brought from Africa by slaves and grown in plantation gardens but never commercially cultivated until the twentieth century. Today, both cayenne and Tabasco chiles are grown in Louisiana, but not in great amounts—only about 230 acres of chiles are cultivated in the state, and much of that is Tabascos grown for their seeds. However, imported cayenne powder, locally bottled cayenne hot sauces, and many brands of Tabasco-based hot sauces are readily available to spice up Cajun and Creole dishes.
So if you’re versed on Louisiana history and culture, then all you really need to know is that Creole cuisine uses tomatoes and proper Cajun food does not. A vastly simplified way to describe the two cuisines is to deem Creole cuisine as a little higher brow, or more aristocratic, than Cajun. Due to the abundance of time and resources, the dishes employ an array of spices from various regions, used in creamy soups and sauces. A remoulade sauce, for example, which consists of nearly a dozen ingredients, would not typically be found in Cajun kitchens. Creole cuisine has a bit more variety because of the easier access Creoles had to exotic ingredients, and because of the wide mix of cultures that contributed to the cuisine. That’s why you find tomatoes in Creole jambalaya and not in Cajun jambalaya, or why a lot of times you find a Creole roux made with butter and flour whi
le a Cajun roux is made with oil and flour.
Crawfish boil. Photograph by Chel Beeson. Work for hire.
The primary Creole dishes include gumbo, the stew-like soup of Louisiana. The name “gumbo” comes from the West African term for okra, gombo. Okra is used as a thickening agent and for its distinct flavor. A filé gumbo is thickened with dried sassafras leaves after the stew has finished cooking. Jambalaya, derived from the Spanish dish paella, contains rice, some sort of meat (chicken or beef) or seafood (shrimp or crawfish), green peppers, onions, celery, tomatoes, and hot chile peppers. Shrimp Creole is a favorite of Creole cuisine and is made with shrimp, tomatoes, onions, bell peppers, celery, garlic, and cayenne pepper. Red beans and rice is one of the most common dishes found in New Orleans. The red beans arrived with white French Creoles from Haiti, and the combination of the beans with rice has a strong Caribbean influence.
Popular Cajun dishes include étouffée, a seafood stew served over rice. It’s a staple Cajun dish on the menu, and during the spring crawfish season, fresh crawfish are used, and at other times of year, frozen crawfish or shrimp. Boudin is a spicy pork sausage made with green onions and rice. The “boudin balls” are battered and deep-fried, and feature bite-sized pieces of sausage. A crawfish or shrimp boil is a spicy one-pot dish made for festivals, parties, and events, including restaurant meals to mark the start of crawfish season.