My parents were displaced New Yorkers. So despite my growing up in a region where everything is fried—tomatoes, bologna, okra, pies, and, at the State Fair of Virginia, even Pepsi—I never learned the fine art of frying—especially how to make fried chicken.
Over the years, this bothered me some, sort of like a loose pot handle that was in need of fixing yet easily ignored. Now, though, my job title is Staff Epicure for Virginia’s largest newspaper. Readers look to me for advice on how to dry-age steaks, open oysters, roast goose. What would they think if they knew of my fear of frying?
When I reached the half-century mark—an occasion for celebration as much as assessment—I figured the time had come to correct this culinary shortcoming. I set my sights on how to make Southern fried chicken and sought professional help from Sydney Meers, a Mississippi native who owns Stove, a quaint and quirky restaurant in Portsmouth, the Virginia town where I was raised. Every neo-Southern meal at this 32-seater comes with a side of Syd, who intermittently cooks behind the tiled half-wall of his open kitchen and repairs to the dining room to sip whiskey, neat, alongside dinner guests.
Syd grew up in Senatobia, Mississippi. He spent many a day hanging out in the restaurant kitchen run by his Grandma Winnie Lee Johnson. There were also many mornings spent tending her half-acre garden, pulling weeds, and tamping down leaves between rows, until she’d say, “Let’s go make some lunch.” Then they’d cook. She shared all that she knew—all manner of pies, pork, and fried chicken—and encouraged Syd to do the same. “It’s part of your heritage,” she’d say. “You have to pass it on.”
That notion is now a part of him. Syd is an evangelical cook, spreading the gospel of Southern fare by way of his menu and occasional cooking classes. “To say something is a secret recipe is bullshit,” he once told me.
So when I called, Syd graciously agreed to bring me into the fold of folks who fry—with Grandmother Winnie Lee’s recipe, no less.
Two days later, Syd hands me an apron. We’re standing in front of an eight-burner gas stove in his speck of a kitchen, a honey-colored chopping block before us and pots and pans dangling above us. Metal shelving units that are stacked to the ceiling practically spill their ingredients and equipment, they’re so crammed. Classical music plays from a radio that’s hidden somewhere, maybe on one of those shelves.
Syd inspects the organic, free-range bird that I proffer for my lesson in fried chicken.
“Now, you’ve done real good, Low-raine,” Syd says in a voice seasoned with the South. “This is beautiful.”
Organic is fine and dandy, he explains, but that alone doesn’t deem the bird worthy. It has to also be free-range and raised without hormones, just like the ones that ran around his grandmother’s backyard when he was young, eating bugs and grasses, before Winnie Lee wrung their necks.
Syd makes a cut between the leg and wing with a flick of his knife. He notes that the drumette is slender, not bulging. Proof of the absence of hormones. I may not know how to fry, but I do know how to cut up a chicken. So when Syd flattens the breasts of the bird against the cutting board with his hand, I’m surprised to see that instead of slicing out the backbone, he leaves it attached to one breast.
“Sometimes grandmother would fry it up separate,” he says. “Now most people just cut it out, but that’s the choicest piece. The bone holds so much flavor.” Huh? The things you learn.
Syd has already prepared the brine, a critical element, he says, that imparts flavor and extracts bacteria and toxins. It sits in a stockpot beside us, a simple solution of salty water with a sprinkling of crushed bay leaves and fresh rosemary sprigs from his garden.
I submerge the raw meat in the brine. Syd sets his spattered red kitchen timer for 30 minutes. We slide into his tiny eight-seat bar which he calls The Cougar Lounge. Staring down at us from the wall are mounted game—buffalo, wildebeest, and antelope—that came to him by way of a friend of a friend with an IRS problem of which Syd will say no more. He opens a split of champagne and pours us each a glass.
Syd opened his first restaurant, The Calico Cat, in Senatobia. After leaving Mississippi, he joined the Air Force and attended culinary school on the GI bill. He’s owned several popular restaurants in the Tidewater region along Virginia’s southern coast. His “Cowboy Syd’s Sextuple Truffle Tart with Bittersweet Chocolate Whiskey Cream and Sensuously Sensational Chocolate Espresso Ice Cream” is included in the James Beard award-winning cookbook “Death by Chocolate.”
Heady stuff. But sitting in the bar, waiting for the bird to brine, Syd says it all goes back to his grandmother.
As a child, he sat atop sacks of flour in her restaurant watching the line cooks while his mother waited tables. He takes a picture from the wall and hands it to me. It’s a faded snapshot, circa 1955, of the diner-ish place. The sign out front says “Johnson Cafe—Bar B Q Steaks.” A second sign, emblazoned with “air-conditioned,” hangs over the door, a beacon to the hot and weary. A man-sized ice cream cone stands at the entrance.
“Winnie Lee,” says Syd, looking at the picture. “What a girl she was.”
The timer dings.
Back in the kitchen, Syd removes a hotel pan from a shelf and dumps three cups of flour and one cup of cornmeal into it. This is the start of his grandmother’s dredge. Syd uses his hands to mix it up, cautioning me to rely on all-purpose flour because cake flour will absorb too much moisture and turn to clumps. His grandmother sifted her flour, but because most come pre-sifted these days there’s no need to do so unless it’s humid. It’s always humid down South.
“We like cornmeal,” he adds, “because of the crunch factor and because it helps hold the flour on the skin.” He says the slightly coarse texture of stone-ground works best.
“Here’s the way you’ve got to do the salt,” Syd says. He sprinkles four pinches into flour and cornmeal and offers me a taste. The salt registers in specks on my tongue.
“Not enough?” I venture a guess.
Syd agrees. He adds two more pinches and mixes it in. I take another taste. A more uniform salt sensation spreads across my palate.
“Just right,” Syd says.
The pepper that Syd sprinkles into the pan was gleaned from the bottom of the pepper grinders in the dining room. Shrewd restaurateurs don’t waste a thing. I place a smidgen of the dredge on my tongue. There’s just a whisper of heat. I’m surprised that Syd says the seasoning is correct given that it’s much less pronounced than the salt. I voice my concern.
“Girl, that’s because pepper holds up better during cooking than the salt,” he says. “The salt will dissolve.”
Oh.
It’s time. I remove the chicken from the brine, flicking off any herbs that stick to the skin. I catch the faint aroma of rosemary and bay as I roll a drumstick in the dredge.
“No, stop doin’ that,” Syd says, taking over. He covers the meat with handfuls of flour, flipping and flouring and flipping and flouring the drumstick until it’s completely coated. “Handle the flour, not the bird.”
I can’t recall what kind of oil I used during my past frying foibles, but I know it wasn’t what Syd pulls out of the fridge: a clear plastic tub containing lard that’s slightly off-white and as smooth as buttercream icing. At the bottom of the tub is a glistening brown gelée—drippings from braised pork bellies, a staple on Syd’s dinner menu.
In this kitchen, the contents of that tub are considered gold, all but guaranteeing chicken in the same league as Winnie Lee’s. Settle for nothing less, Syd says. If you don’t have lard, fry up about five pounds of bacon and use the drippings. If all you have is Crisco, don’t fry chicken.
Another nonnegotiable item: Syd’s decades-old cast-iron skillet. Black as a cat, the pan has been wiped clean but never washed, same as Winnie Lee’s. She figured the difference was her skillet, which held all the seasonings of every food she ever cooked in it. No secret. Just the soul of the pan.
Syd ignites a gas burner and adjusts the flame to medium-high. The l
ard melts into a pool about 1/2 inch deep. When it begins to bubble, the pitch becomes more a gurgle than a sizzle.
“They now have fancy thermometers, but this is the way you fry chicken,” Syd says, noting the sound. “You’ve got to listen.”
The throaty gurgle signals that the lard is hot enough to fry. Using tongs, we quickly nestle the chicken in the skillet, skin side up, careful to handle only the ends of the bones so we don’t mar the coating or inadvertently squeeze out any moisture. The gurgling continues. Soon the meat is rimmed with a frenzy of fine bubbles, which Syd attributes to moisture from the bird. Only when these tiny globules create a goldenrod outline around each piece is it time to turn the chicken.
We take turns carefully turning the fried chicken with tongs. Grease spits and snipes at us, but Syd nixes my plea to use a spatter screen, saying it would trap moisture in the pan and turn the chicken soggy. When the pieces turn a shimmering golden brown, we tong them from the pan and set them on paper towels to rest for a spell. It’s by sight, not sound, that you know when fried chicken is done.
A few long minutes later we sit in the empty bar, white linen napkins in hand, the gorgeous platter of browned chicken before us.
I bite into a thigh, piercing the perfectly crisped skin. It’s juicy but not greasy. I detect a hint of herb from the brine. Syd selects a breast—the one with the backbone attached—and proclaims it just like Winnie Lee’s. After we finish, he packs up the remaining thigh and breast for me and offers one last morsel of wisdom.
“You can do this, girl,” he says. “The more you fail, the better you get. That’s the fun of cooking.”
I ask if he ever failed at channeling his grandmother’s cooking. He raises an eyebrow. “Everything I’ve tried, I got it right the first time right on the spot,” he says, without hesitation. “I think it might be a gene.”
LASAGNA BOLOGNESE
By Deb Perelman
From Smitten Kitchen.com
The runaway success of Deb Perelman’s chatty blog Smitten Kitchen—featuring detailed photos of her cooking adventures in a tiny New York City apartment—won her every food blogger’s dream: a book contract. The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook is due out in October 2012.
This, this is my culinary Mount Everest. This twenty-layer striation of noodles, ragu, béchamel and cheese, repeated four times and then some, took me more than five years to conquer. To be honest, six years ago I didn’t know what it was. Sure, I had heard of lasagna but I wasn’t terribly fond of it because I don’t much care for the texture of ricotta once it has baked. (Ricotta, I’d argue, is best rich, fresh and cold on toast.) But I was galloping through a post on an Italian food blog and I stumbled upon a parenthesised side-thought that stopped me dead in my tracks. It said something along the lines of “I don’t know whose idea it was to put ricotta in lasagna but . . . shudder.” And I thought, but wait! What’s supposed to go in lasagna? But there was no answer, so I set out to find one.
Lasagna alla Bolognese is an epic dish. Oh sure, it looks like an ordinary broiled mass of cheese, pasta and meaty tomato sauce but it’s so much more. To make it as I dreamed from that day forward I wanted to, everything gets a lot of love and time. The ragu is cooked for hours. The béchamel (ahem, besciamella), although the simplest of the five “Mother Sauces,” is still a set of ingredients that must be cooked separately, and in a prescribed order. The pasta doesn’t have to be fresh, but I figured if I was going to do this, I was going to really, really do this, and I wanted fresh, delicious sheets of pasta to support the other cast members I’d so lovingly craft. And the cheese? There’s just one, Parmesan, and it doesn’t overwhelm.
So why did it take the better part of six years to conquer? First, I had to find the ragu of my dreams. I realize that most people have a bolognese they like—maybe it has milk or a mix of meats, not just beef (mine doesn’t), maybe it goes easy on the wine (mine doesn’t), maybe it can’t be cooked for less than six hours (mine can) and maybe it just has a slip of tomatoes inside (mine doesn’t). I sometimes think that there are as many interpretations of bolognese as there are people who make it; it’s totally cool to use your favorite. But if you’re still bolognese-hunting, oh, I do love Anne Burrell’s above all else. You could forgo the pasta, the white sauce and the cheese and enjoy it straight from a bowl. But today, we won’t.
Even once I found my ragu nirvana, it took a couple rounds to get the lasagna right. The first time I made the noodles, I rolled them too thin and put them on towels, where they proceeded to stick. Miserably. The dish was intended for a 2 p.m. lunch in New Jersey; at 3, Alex was running to a bodega in Manhattan to buy a box of dried pasta. On the plus side, we’re still talking to each other. On the minus, we had “lunch” at almost 8 that night. I had a few other mishaps; recipes I found seemed out of balance or evasive in directions. One béchamel was too thin. And I kept ending up with too much ragu, too little white sauce, too many noodles, not enough directions, too little time. It was not until this week that I finally got the recipe exactly as I’d always dreamed of it, with I hope a level of detail that will make it replicable for anyone at home. Even if you, like me, got to the final inning and realized you were out of cheese, requiring a run to the bodega to pick up I don’t want to even talk about it variety of so-called Parmesan. Yes, even for people like me.
Now here’s the part where I know you’re not going to believe me, but I implore you to consider it: This lasagna, it feels light, almost ethereal, or as close as a decidedly hearty dish can. Maybe it’s the absence of ricotta and mozzarella, or the thinness of the homemade noodles but something about it feels utterly decadent, mind-bogglingly delicious, completely warming but not . . . gutting. It needn’t immediately lead to a nap on the sofa. It’s a miracle. A miracle in twenty parts. Let’s get started.
Lasagna Bolognese
Ragu adapted from Anne Burrell, everything else from trial and error.
Serves 12 (in hearty portions) to 15 (in generous 3-inch squares). You will have double the bolognese sauce that you need because I cannot in good conscience let you spend several hours simmering a sauce that will only yield 4-ish cups of sauce. Trust me, you’ll want extra.
This is a beast of a dish, and worth every second you put into it. I recommend making the meat sauce a day or longer before you need it; then, do everything else on the second day. My advice is to give yourself way more time than you could possibly need on the second day, so that you can make the dish from a place of leisure and love, and not one that is frenzied and not particularly fun. You’ll be glad you did. This is a perfect project for a lazy winter weekend, something two people could then eat dreamily all week.
A note on authenticity: This is the kind of dish that gets, ahem, passionate cooks out in droves. I’ve been told that you cannot call it bolognese if you simmer it for less than __ hours or that it can/can’t have tomato/milk/wine/only beef in it. Others will pfft over the lack of color on the crust (I had a word with my dinky oven about it). I absolutely love this about cooking—the way we care so deeply about the way our food is made, and how much I’m lucky enough to learn about the different ways people approach the same dish. But, my other favorite part about cooking is that it’s just you in the kitchen and you can make your food the way you alone like it. Feel free to tweak this to your taste by replacing portions of the beef with other meats, using less tomato paste or wine if desired or replacing some wine with milk.
Bolognese sauce
1 medium onion, coarsely chopped (1-inch pieces are fine)
1 large or 2 slim carrots, coarsely chopped
2 ribs celery, coarsely chopped
3 cloves garlic, coarsely chopped
2 to 3 tablespoons olive oil
Kosher salt
Freshly ground black pepper
2 pounds ground chuck, brisket or round or combination
1 ¼ cups tomato paste (from 2 6-ounce cans)
2 cups red wine, preferably hearty but really, anything you like to drink
Water as needed
2 bay leaves
A few sprigs thyme, tied in a bundle
Pasta
1 ½ cups all-purpose flour
2 large eggs
½ teaspoon table salt
1 to 2 tablespoons water, if needed
Béchamel sauce
½ cup (8 tablespoons) unsalted butter
½ cup all-purpose flour
4 cups whole milk
1 teaspoon table salt
1 clove minced garlic
Freshly grated nutmeg, to taste
Freshly ground black pepper
To assemble
1 ⅔ cups grated Parmesan cheese
Day 1: Make the bolognese sauce: In a food processor, pulse onion, carrots, celery, and garlic until finely chopped. Heat a moderatesized Dutch oven (4 to 5 quarts) over medium-high heat. Once hot, coat the bottom of the pan with two to three tablespoons of oil. Once it is hot, add the chopped vegetables and season them generously with salt and pepper. Cook the vegetables until they are evenly brown, stirring frequently, about 15 minutes.
I’m going to insert my favorite Burrell-ism here: Brown food tastes good! Don’t skimp on the cooking times as this creates the big flavors that will carry right through to your plated lasagna. And now I’m going to insert my own-ism: Don’t worry about sticking bits of food or uneven pieces or anything. It’s all going to work out in the end.
Add the ground beef and season again with salt and pepper. Brown the beef well and again, don’t rush this step. Cook for another 15 minutes. Add the tomato paste and cook for 3 to 4 minutes. Add the red wine, using it to scrape up any stuck bits in the pan. Cook the wine until it has reduced by half, about 5 more minutes. Add water to the pan until the water is about 1 inch above the meat. Toss in the bay leaves and the bundle of thyme and stir to combine everything, bringing it to a low simmer.
Here’s how the next 3 to 4 hours will go: You’ll keep a pitcher of water near the stove. You’ll stir the sauce from time to time. As the water in the sauce cooks off, you’ll want to add more but you don’t want to add more than 1 to 2 cups at a time or you’ll have boiled meat sauce (bleh) rather than something thick and robust with flavor. Taste it from time to time and add more seasoning if needed. Simmer for 3 to 4 hours.
Best Food Writing 2012 Page 12