Voracious

by Cara Nicoletti

  He pictured to himself every roasting-pig running about with a pudding in his belly, and an apple in his mouth; the pigeons were snugly put to bed in a comfortable pie, and tucked in with a coverlet of crust; geese were swimming in their own gravy; and the ducks pairing cozily in dishes, like snug married couples, with a decent competency of onion sauce. In the porkers he saw carved out the future sleek side of bacon, and juicy relishing ham; not a turkey but he beheld daintily trussed up, with its gizzard under its wing, and, peradventure, a necklace of savory sausages.

  Ichabod’s love and longing for Katrina Van Tassel is based solely on the fact that her family eats well. His desire for her is so bound up in hunger that he looks at her as if she herself were a meal—“plump as a partridge; ripe and melting and rosy cheeked as one of her father’s peaches.” It’s creepy. But I kind of get it. In one of my favorite autumnal literary passages, Ichabod is walking by a field of buckwheat and imagines its future as pancakes:

  As Ichabod jogged slowly on his way, his eye, ever open to every symptom of culinary abundance, ranged with delight over the treasures of jolly autumn. On all sides he beheld vast store of apples; some hanging in oppressive opulence on the trees; some gathered into baskets and barrels for the market; others heaped up in rich piles for the cider-press. Farther on he beheld great fields of Indian corn, with its golden ears peeping from their leafy coverts, and holding out the promise of cakes and hasty pudding; and the yellow pumpkins lying beneath them, turning up their fair round bellies to the sun, and giving ample prospects of the most luxurious of pies; and anon he passed the fragrant buckwheat fields, breathing the odor of the bee-hive, and as he beheld them, soft anticipations stole over his mind of dainty slapjacks, well buttered, and garnished with honey or treacle, by the delicate little dimpled hand of Katrina Van Tassel.

  Buckwheat was a staple of the American diet in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but its production took a huge hit in the twentieth with the invention of nitrogen fertilizers. These fertilizers made the cultivation of wheat and maize much easier, and buckwheat lost popularity. I had never eaten a buckwheat anything until I was well into adulthood and working at a restaurant that served buckwheat waffles. The taste and texture were a revelation to me.

  “THE LEGEND OF SLEEPY HOLLOW”

  Buckwheat Pancakes

  This recipe calls for a mix of both white and buckwheat flours. (Despite the name, buckwheat doesn’t contain any wheat and is actually related to rhubarb, sorrel, and knotweed, so if you are gluten intolerant, feel free to sub out the white flour and use all buckwheat; the pancakes may be a little denser but they will still be delicious.) Yogurt lightens the buckwheat’s denseness, and brown butter brings out its nutty earthiness. These pancakes are great served with honey or maple syrup, butter and jelly, peanut butter and bananas, or, for a more savory breakfast, crème fraîche and smoked salmon (I’ve tried them with all of these toppings, for research purposes, of course).

  Makes 8 to 10 pancakes

  5 tablespoons unsalted butter

  2 large eggs, separated

  2 tablespoons sugar

  1 cup plain full-fat Greek yogurt

  ¼ cup water

  1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

  ¾ cup buckwheat flour

  ½ cup all-purpose flour

  4 teaspoons baking soda

  ½ teaspoon kosher salt

  Favorite toppings (see headnote), for serving

  Brown 3 tablespoons of the butter and set it aside to cool.

  Place the egg yolks in a large bowl. Add the sugar and whisk until the yolks are a creamy light yellow. Add the yogurt, water, vanilla, and browned butter and whisk until combined.

  In a separate bowl, whisk together both flours, the baking soda, and the salt. Whisk the dry ingredients into the wet mixture.

  In a medium bowl, whisk the egg whites until they reach stiff peaks. (Alternatively, you can do this part in an electric mixer with a whisk attachment.) Gently fold the stiff whites into the batter until they are fully incorporated.

  Preheat the oven to 150°F (for keeping the finished pancakes warm while the others cook).

  Melt the remaining 2 tablespoons butter in a medium skillet (preferably cast-iron) over medium heat and scoop about ¼ cup batter into the pan. Cook until bubbles begin to form all over the pancake, about 3 minutes, flip, and cook until the bottom is crisp and brown, about 3 minutes more. Repeat with the remaining batter, transferring the finished pancakes to the warm oven until all are done. Serve with your favorite toppings.

  To Kill a Mockingbird

  BISCUITS with MOLASSES BUTTER

  The year I was nine my best friends Christie and Meg and I discovered a haunted house in the woods at the edge of Christie’s neighborhood. I’m not sure exactly what made us think that it was haunted, other than the fact that it was condemned and falling apart. The front porch sagged in like a sinkhole and in the upstairs rooms lacy, yellowed curtains blew from breezes let in through a smashed window. It was so unlike any of the other houses in the neighborhood, which were all sunny and welcoming with well-groomed yards, that we assumed something terrible must have happened there.

  We visited the house almost every day after school, watching it through binoculars from behind a tree to see if we could spot a ghost moving around behind the windows and, when we were feeling really brave, leaving notes on the front porch written in invisible ink. Every day when I got home, my dad would ruffle my mushroom cut and say, “Hey, Scout, did you find Boo Radley today?”

  I finally found out what he meant when he left his worn-out copy of Harper Lee’s classic novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, on my bedside table that year. I may have been slightly too young to understand exactly what was going on in the book, but I loved it regardless. The connection that I felt to Scout, with her mischievous, rough-and-tumble exterior and sensitive interior, remains one of the most intense I’ve ever had. I fell so deeply in love with the empathetic and fiercely moral Jem that I scribbled his name in my notebook on more than one occasion, wishing that he was as real as I felt he was.

  Along with the characters, I fell in love with Southern food, too—or at least with the idea of it. There were cracklin’ bread and scuppernongs, dewberry tarts, peach pickles, hickory nuts, cherry wine, butter beans, and a Lane cake “loaded with shinny”—I barely knew what any of it was, but I knew it all sounded better than anything I ate at home. When I was growing up on the East Coast, the closest I got to a real biscuit was a McDonald’s bacon, egg, and cheese biscuit, a rare family road-trip treat.

  As much as I loved those sandwiches, it never occurred to me that I might be missing out in the biscuit department until I read To Kill a Mockingbird and realized that in the South, biscuits weren’t just a breakfast treat, they were an every-meal staple. The residents of Maycomb sit on the lawn of the courthouse and eat biscuits with syrup and warm milk, they sop up their collard juice with them, and they spread them with molasses and butter. When Jem and Scout are hungry before dinner, their cook, Calpurnia, sends them outside with a hot biscuit slathered in butter to tide them over. Biscuits are so ubiquitous, in fact, that at one point Calpurnia even uses cold ones to shine Scout’s patent-leather shoes.

  After reading the book, I pestered my mom to make at least one of the fifty-two foods I had read about (yes, I counted). The best were biscuits made from Bisquick mix, which was more than good enough for me. I learned to make them myself and ate them as often as I was allowed. Besides McDonald’s, this was truly the only biscuit I knew until about eight years ago, when Southern food exploded in popularity in Brooklyn. Suddenly it seemed as if every restaurant was serving Southern-style comfort food, claiming that their fried chicken, shrimp and grits, and pulled pork were the best. The true test of which was the best, for me, was easy—it was all about the biscuit.

  In early 2010 I started working as a baker at one of these Southern comfort restaurants in Brooklyn, and the reality of what it meant to serve biscuits with almost
every meal hit home. All day long we made biscuits, fifty at a time. It was endless. There always had to be a backup of frozen butter cut into flour in huge bus-tubs, ready to be mixed with buttermilk at a moment’s notice. Running out of biscuits was simply not an option.

  Maybe I’m still making up for lost time on my biscuit consumption, but despite having baked literally thousands of biscuits in the past four years and eaten well into the hundreds, I am still not sick of them, and they are still one of my favorite things to bake. Looking for something to do with our excess lard every week at the Meat Hook, the butcher shop where I now work in Brooklyn, I started experimenting with using it in a biscuit mix and it has quickly become my favorite way to make them. The lard has a savory, salty quality, and because it melts more slowly than butter, the biscuits are fluffier and airier than any I have ever eaten. They’re especially delicious with sweet and salty molasses butter.

  TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

  Biscuits with Molasses Butter

  You can get leaf lard from your butcher. (Do not buy the hydrogenated lard on supermarket shelves.) If you are a vegetarian, feel free to leave out the lard and use all butter.

  Makes 10 to 12 (3-inch) biscuits

  1 cup pastry flour

  2 tablespoons baking powder

  1½ teaspoons kosher salt

  1 teaspoon baking soda

  8 tablespoons (1 stick) unsalted butter

  ½ cup (4 ounces) rendered leaf lard

  3 cups all-purpose flour

  1¼ to 1½ cups buttermilk

  1 egg

  1 tablespoon cream

  Molasses Butter (recipe follows)

  In a mixing bowl, whisk together the pastry flour, baking powder, salt, and baking soda. Cut the butter and leaf lard into cubes (roughly 1 inch, don’t stress about it) and toss them in the flour mixture. Put the bowl in the freezer until the butter and leaf lard are completely frozen, about an hour.

  Once the fats are frozen and the dry ingredients are icy cold, transfer the mixture to a food processor and pulse until pea-sized chunks of fat are distributed throughout the flour. Transfer the mixture to a large bowl and add the all-purpose flour. Toss until the butter and lard are spread evenly throughout.

  Add 1¼ cups of the buttermilk and mix gently. Test to see if the dough holds together when you squeeze it. If it doesn’t, add the remaining ¼ cup buttermilk, tablespoon by tablespoon, until it does.

  Line a baking sheet with parchment paper or a silicone baking mat. Bring the dough together on a lightly floured surface and roll to ¾ inch thick. Cut the dough into 3-inch rounds with a circle cutter and place the biscuits on the lined baking sheet. You can reroll once with the leftover scraps of dough, but that batch won’t be quite as fluffy.

  Place the biscuits in the freezer while you preheat the oven to 400°F.

  Beat the egg and cream together and brush the tops of the cold biscuits with the egg wash. Bake until golden brown, 20 to 25 minutes. Serve warm with molasses butter.

  Note: You can freeze the formed, unbaked biscuits for a quick treat another day. Once they have frozen solid on the baking sheet, transfer them to a zip-top plastic bag. Egg-wash them right before you bake them and put them into the oven still frozen. They will need an additional 5 or 10 minutes of baking time.

  MOLASSES BUTTER

  Makes about ¾ cup

  8 tablespoons (1 stick) unsalted butter, at room temperature

  2 tablespoons light brown sugar

  Generous pinch of flaky sea salt (such as Maldon)

  ¼ cup unsulphured molasses

  In the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with a paddle attachment, beat together the butter, brown sugar, and sea salt until light and fluffy. Add the molasses and continue to beat until incorporated throughout. Spread on biscuits or transfer to a ramekin, cover, and refrigerate for up to 1 week.

  Lord of the Flies

  PORCHETTA di TESTA

  When I was very young—probably seven—the 1963 film version of Lord of the Flies was on television one night. It was Christmastime and I was sitting next to my mom and dad on the couch when my dad, flipping through the channels, stumbled across it and stopped. For the next three hours I sat still as stone, terrified by what I was watching, but too shy to tell my parents.

  As I lay in bed that night trying to sleep, the image of the fly-covered pig’s head, a stake stuck into its neck, kept going through my tiny stressed-out brain. It’s not as if I had never seen a pig’s head before. I saw them often at my grandfather’s butcher shop, but they were hairless and pale pink, eyes half-shut and mouths curved up in a way that made them look content—they were nothing like that hairy, bulgy-eyed monster from the movie. For the remainder of that night, and for a few nights following, I slept on the floor of my parents’ room.

  Years later I was assigned the novel in school and was rattled all over again by William Golding’s account of a group of young English boys stranded on an uninhabited island after a plane wreck. At first, the boys adhere to the laws of social order they have been raised with—calling meetings, electing leaders, dividing labor—but as the novel progresses, this order quickly crumbles and the reader watches, realizing along with Ralph that “the world, that understandable and lawful world, was slipping away.” Golding strands this specific age group—boys between six and twelve years old—because they are particularly susceptible to shedding societal constraints. In showing us how quickly this mini society plunges into chaos, he challenges the notion that humans are inherently civilized.

  When the boys first land on the island, their proper English manners and habits are still deeply ingrained. Faced with the prospect of having to kill a pig because everyone is hungry, Jack is unable to follow through, “because of the enormity of the knife descending and cutting into living flesh; because of the unbearable blood.” Only two chapters later, however, Jack slits a pig’s throat and proudly comes back to the camp with the “knowledge that they had outwitted a living thing, imposed their will upon it, taken away its life like a long satisfying drink.”

  When the “littluns” start to worry that there is a beast lurking around the island, panic spreads throughout the camp and Jack decides to take the head of the pig they killed and present it as an offering to appease the beast. The pig’s head, which they call the Lord of the Flies, comes to represent chaos and disorder, savagery and the instinctual brutality of human nature (I learned only recently that the literal translation of Beelzebub is “lord of the flies”). The image is so powerful, both in film and in writing, that even now, having de-faced countless pigs’ heads at the Meat Hook, I still think about Lord of the Flies every time I do it.

  The truth is, pigs’ heads are absolutely delicious if you are willing to take the time to prepare them the right way. It seems intimidating, but it’s much easier than you would expect.

  LORD OF THE FLIES

  Porchetta di Testa

  Most local butcher shops have pigs’ heads on hand, and if not, they will usually be happy to special-order one for you. For this recipe, ask your butcher to take the meat off the head in one piece and clean it of all the glands. Then all that’s left to do is spice it, tie it up as you would a roast, and cook it. It goes great over a bed of lentils, potatoes, or stewed greens.

  Serves 8 to 10

  Meat of 1 pig’s head, all in one piece, including ears and tongue, cleaned of all glands (about 7 pounds of meat)

  4 tablespoons kosher salt

  1 tablespoon plus 1 teaspoon fennel seeds, toasted

  2¼ teaspoons freshly ground black pepper

  1½ teaspoons crushed red pepper

  Finely chopped leaves of 2 rosemary sprigs

  Finely chopped leaves of 2 thyme sprigs

  15 garlic cloves, put through a garlic press

  Zest of 2 lemons plus 1 tablespoon lemon juice

  1 teaspoon plus 2 tablespoons olive oil, divided

  First, you’re going to clean the meat up a bit, which includes shaving the outside meat
with a razor if there is any hair (come on, it’s fun!). Also make sure that there are no glands, and that the hard collagen from the nostrils and ear canals are cut out—your butcher should have done this for you, but it doesn’t hurt to check. Now, in a large mortar, combine 2 tablespoons of the salt and the rest of the ingredients except the 2 tablespoons oil and mash them up with a pestle until a nice paste forms.

  Spread the face meat in front of you, skin-side down. Tuck the ears backward, up through the eyeholes, so that the holes are covered, and flatten them out. Rub the seasoning paste all over the meat. Lay the tongue flat along the inside of the snout and rub it with any remaining seasoning paste.

  Starting with the jowl on one side, roll up the meat like a jelly roll. Tie the cylinder tightly with twine as you would a roast, set it in a roasting pan on a roasting rack, and place it in the refrigerator, uncovered, to cure overnight. The next day, take the roast out and let it sit at room temperature for 1½ hours.

  Preheat the oven to 450°F.

  Rub the outside of the roast with the remaining 2 tablespoons salt and roast for 20 minutes.