Cured Meat

Other than a soft bun or white bread, cornbread is the choice for barbecue. Min has been making it so long she only uses the recipe in her head. After years of working with the test kitchen staff of Martha White, the historic Nashville flour and cornmeal company, and writing the live radio commercials for Martha White’s Friday night segment of the Grand Ole Opry, who needs a recipe? The key, of course, is self-rising cornmeal mix. Southerners prefer white cornmeal (made with white corn) to yellow. So do Rhode Islanders, as R. B. likes to point out, where the native white corn johnnycakes are as ancient as their close cousins, Southern hot water hoecakes. Either way, white and yellow are interchangeable and basically a regional preference, like white and brown eggs. Don’t get hung up on color. For cornbread, it’s all about crust and batter. First, the best crust comes only from a well-seasoned black iron skillet preheated with bacon drippings or oil. When the batter hits the pan, POW! It sizzles. Second, the batter must be creamy and pourable. If your batter is thick and dense, add more liquid, because you want the batter to slide to the edges of the pan with ease. Cornmeal absorbs quite a lot of liquid, and even a shot of water can loosen things up. Get the feel of good cornbread batter, and crumbly, dry cornbread will be a thing of the past. Now, about the balance of outside crust to inside moisture. For Min, the finest cornbread is an inch thick and a mile wide. Most 2-cup recipes baked in an 8- or 10-inch skillet are just too tall, denying the cornbread its rightful ratio of crust. Min uses about 1 1/2 cups of cornmeal mix for a 12-inch skillet and only about a cup for a 10-inch. Sugar is also an issue that divides cornbread camps. The most common cornbread recipes and mixes are often half flour and half cornmeal, with a heavy dose of sweetness. We’re in the other camp, using very little sugar (or none at all) in skillet cornbread. It’s just a matter of taste. If you live in the land of self-rising cornmeal mix, get acquainted with it and use it to replace the plain cornmeal, flour, leavening, and salt. It’s the best way to go. If not, and you don’t have a relative to send you some, give this a try. Always serve cornbread flipped out of the pan with the beautiful browned crust faceup. Whatever you do, invest in a good cast-iron skillet. It will bring your family generations of top-notch cornbread.

Good freezer management makes it so much easier to get away with two-timing. When the freezer door won’t close, we know it’s time for a couple bags of sauerkraut for an Alsatian choucroute (pronounced shoo-KROOT) garni. A French peasant dish from the Alsace region, choucroute garni means sauerkraut “garnished” with an abundance of pork products, or occasionally goose or duck. It’s the perfect freezer purge for using up all manner of cheater pork plus any sausages, bacon, or ham bones. Whatever you find in there will pretty much work with this dish. Choucroute (the sauerkraut) is traditionally slow-baked in a heavy casserole with slab bacon or a ham hock, carrots, onion, garlic, apple, and wine or beer. The seasoning mix depends on the cook (or the pantry), but usually includes juniper berries, bay leaves, cloves, black or white pepper, even cumin and coriander seeds. The sausages, ham, and other meats are added near the end of cooking. Get the bagged or jarred sauerkraut for the freshest taste. While the sauerkraut turns French in the oven, thaw the trove of frozen meats. A fruity, dry Alsatian Riesling is traditional for both cooking and drinking. French and German beers are also a good match. To complete the meal, add boiled potatoes and a green salad.

It’s no big deal to make a pot of real “baked” beans, especially if you forget about the baking part and use a slow cooker. The only work is cooking the bacon and onion before dumping everything into the crock. Boston beans have lots in common with barbecue. The vital ingredients—molasses, mustard, onion, and bacon—are the same components that impart the barbecue balance of sweet/sour/savory in sauces. In the slow cooker, the beans finish up just as thick and dark as any from Boston.

Let’s face it, everything tastes better with bacon, especially chicken breasts in need of a little fat and flavor. You know by now that the boneless, skinless chicken breast is not our top choice, but with a little rub, some smoke, and slow, moist cooking these breasts are okay and ready for casseroles, soups, and sandwiches. Skip the bacon if you’re on a fat-restricted diet.

An intriguing bread both sweet with honey and anise and savory with pepper and pancetta, versions of it have been baked for pagan and sacred and secular festivals since the epoch of the Greeks. Giuseppe Fazia sometimes bakes the gorgeous, fragrant bread at his forno in Via Tommasini in Reggio Calabria.

Deep in the Gothic tangles of the Aspromonte sits the fourteenth-century Santuario della Madonna di Polsi, a refuge culled by an ancient order of cloistered sisters dedicated to the honor of the Madonna, through a life of acetism. Once a year, though, in the early spring, when pilgrims from faraway parishes walk over Monte Montalto to the sanctuary to celebrate the festival of the Madonna, the nuns sacrifice a flock of newborn lambs to the glory of her, braising their flesh in old, shallow coppers and feeding the faithful at long, rough-hewn tables set out on a meadow floor.

Shanks slowly braised like these composed a winter Sunday lunch served to us in a linoleum-tiled card room snugged behind a bar on the edges of Potenza. The players were sent off precisely at one so that the cook might lay the oil-clothed tables with yellow linens and set them with blue and white china. The eight or ten tables were all reserved, as they were each Sunday, the only day when the improvised dining room was open. We had heard about the wonderful food and asked the signora if we might wait until the table of one of her fixed clients might become available. “Impossibile.” She laughed. “Questi tavoli non saranno liberi prima di mezzanotte.” “These tables will not be free before midnight.” She explained that after lunch, the pretty linens and china would be washed and tucked away to await next Sunday, leaving the gaming tables free for cardplaying throughout the afternoon and evening. When one booked a table, one booked it for lunch and endless rounds of briscola, the high-stakes action to which even the women were invited on Sundays. A lovely and entrepreneurial program, we thought, but what about our lunch? The sympathetic signora made room for us, tightening up the seating around a table for four, adding two more place settings and chairs. And so we dined with the priest and his mother and a retired fruitseller and his wife, all of whom spoke only in dialect while we bumped along in Italian. The encumbrance of language soon dissolved in the mists of the signora’s beautiful food. Plates of local, dried sausages and farmhouse cheeses, baskets of just-fried, bay-perfumed breads, a soup of bitter greens, great bowls of rough, handmade pasta sauced only with the rich liquors from braised lamb and dusted with pecorino and, finally, the whole, braised shanks of lamb themselves, sending up sublime perfumes of garlic and rosemary. And as sustaining as is the memory of the company and the food on that Sunday in Potenza, it is another scene that plays more sweetly in my mind. A sort of coming-of-age for me—it was there that I learned, fast and well, the secrets of briscola.