The Pat Conroy Cookbook (34 page)
Read The Pat Conroy Cookbook Online
Authors: Pat Conroy
SOUTHERN RATATOUILLE WITH BACON
This is called Southern ratatouille because it contains bacon. Southerners cannot seem to cook anything without flavoring it with some part of a pig. I still cannot spell or pronounce ratatouille, even with the bacon in it.
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SERVES 1 AS A MAIN COURSE OR 2 AS A SIDE DISH
2 thick slices bacon, coarsely chopped
1 large red onion, finely chopped (about 1 cup)
2 garlic cloves, finely chopped
2 small zucchini, peeled and diced into ¼- to ½-inch cubes (about 1½ cups)
2 small yellow squash, diced into ¼- to ½-inch cubes (about 1½ cups)
1 large ripe tomato, coarsely chopped (about 1½ cups)
1 cup fresh corn kernels (about 2 ears)
Chopped fresh chives, thyme, basil, or mint
1. Warm a large heavy skillet over moderate heat. Add the bacon and cook until fat is rendered and bacon is just crisp, about 5 minutes. Add the onion and garlic and continue cooking over medium heat until the onion is softened and begins to brown.
2. Raise the heat to moderately high and add the zucchini and squash. Cook, stirring occasionally without turning, until lightly browned but still crisp-tender, 5 to 8 minutes. Stir in the tomato and cook until softened, translucent, and beginning to break apart, about 5 minutes. Add the corn and cook, stirring frequently, for another 2 minutes. Add the herbs and mix gently. Serve at once.
POT LIKKER SOUP
I used to order pot likker every time I went to eat at Mary Mac’s in Atlanta, a sacred institution of Southern cuisine on Ponce de Leon Avenue near Peachtree. The simplest version of pot likker is this: cook a bunch of greens with a goodly portion of fatback, pour the liquid into a bowl, and serve it. A shake of pepper vinegar livens it up. It calms a Southerner’s nerves and brings a sense of order back to the world.
This is a simple, rough country soup; don’t even try to fancy it up. Remove the fat from surface of refrigerated pork stock (page 225). For each serving, bring 1 cup pork stock to a low boil. Add 2 canned tomatoes (break up the tomatoes with your fingers), some cooked collard greens, and a sprinkling of salt pork. Simmer the soup for a few minutes, then sprinkle with shreds of meat from the ham hock and serve with corn bread on the side.
PORK BUNS •MAKES 8
3 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
½ cup boiling water
Olive oil
Pork Filling (see below)
1 cup crumbled blue cheese
Chutney
1. Place the flour, baking powder, and salt in the bowl of a food processor and pulse to combine. With the motor running, add the boiling water and then add ½ cup plus 2 tablespoons cold water in a thin stream until the mixture forms a ball. Process for 1 minute longer and turn the dough out onto a floured surface. Knead briefly, cover with plastic, and let sit for 15 minutes.
2. Divide the dough into 8 equal pieces. Working with one at a time (leaving others covered), roll the dough into an 8-inch circle and brush with a little olive oil.
3. Spread one-eighth of the pork filling and one-eighth of the crumbled cheese evenly on the dough, leaving about a ½-inch border around the edge. Roll the dough up like a jelly roll, as tightly as possible. Holding one end of the resulting tube on your work surface, pull the other end around as tightly as possible and pinch the two ends together, making a smooth round. Repeat with the remaining dough. As you fill each bun, place it on a baking sheet and cover with plastic wrap. (The filled buns can be cooked immediately or covered with plastic wrap and refrigerated for up to 2 hours. Bring to room temperature before cooking.)
4. Preheat oven to lowest setting.
5. Using the palm of your hand, slightly flatten each bun. On a
lightly floured work surface, use a rolling pin to roll each bun out into circle about 6 inches in diameter.
6. Heat two large sauté pans over medium heat. When the pans are hot, coat lightly with olive oil (swirling it around for even distribution). Place 2 dough rounds in each pan and cook until the surface of the buns is flecked with light brown spots, 3 to 5 minutes per side. Remove the buns from the pans and keep them warm in a low oven while cooking the remaining buns. Serve hot, passing chutney on the side.
Pork Filling
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MAKES ABOUT
2
CUPS
3 tablespoons olive oil
2 red onions, thinly sliced (about 2 cups)
1 pound ground pork shoulder
¾ teaspoon coarse or kosher salt
¾ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1. In a large skillet over medium-high heat, heat the olive oil until hot but not smoking. Add the onions and cook without turning until they begin to brown, 5 to 8 minutes. Using a spatula, flip the onions over to brown on the other side, 3 to 5 minutes. The onions should be well colored but not burned.
2. Add the pork and cook, stirring occasionally, until the meat loses its color, 3 to 5 minutes. Add the salt and pepper and let cool. (The filling can be refrigerated for up to 1 day before making the buns.)
ROAST SUCKLING PIG
There is no reason for anyone to figure out how to roast a pig on their own when so many people do it so well and are happy to tell you how. This recipe, from Betty Fortson, chef at Bolan Hall Plantation in Beaufort, South Carolina, makes an all-day job seem doable.
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SERVES 10 TO 14
1. First, you need a good butcher. To feed 10 to 14 people, a real suckling pig won’t have enough meat (it might serve 3 or 4). Ask for a baby pig around 30 to 35 pounds. If the pig is too large for the oven, have the butcher cut it in half and either bake the halves in two ovens or bake them one after another if you have only one oven. The butcher must also remove the eyes and break the jaw.
2. Preheat oven to 350° F. Place rack in middle of oven.
3. Once your pig is home, scrub it well inside and out with warm water. Dry, then rub it outside and inside with canola oil. Salt and pepper liberally (inside and out) and add a dash of Accent.
4. Crumple aluminum foil to the size of a small apple and insert in the jaw. Bake for 3 to 4 hours. Test during last hour with a sharp knife. The skin should be crackling crisp. If meat begins to fall apart, stop cooking. Obviously, as pork, the pig must be well done.
5. Insert a small lady apple in the pig’s mouth. Use green grapes for eyes. If the pig is cut in half, place the halves together on a large, parsley-surrounded platter. Cover the cut with large bunches of green grapes. The result should be spectacular.
W
hen I lived in Atlanta during the seventies and eighties, a fetishistic whoop of pleasure would go up along the aisles of the Piggly Wiggly or Kroger or Bi-Lo by wild-eyed aficionados who would let the uninitiated into the secret that the Vidalia onions had arrived in the produce department. I witnessed a pretty Atlanta Junior Leaguer eating a Vidalia onion like an apple as she completed her shopping. A friend of mine would buy a dozen bags of Vidalias on the first day they were available and concoct strange methods to preserve the sweet onions far into the winter months. Once he allowed me access to his cellar and I pulled back at the sight of grotesque, truncated women, until he explained that he used his wife’s ruined panty hose, filled them with the precious Vidalias, and then hung them from the ceiling. “There’s not one onion that is touching another onion. Too much spoilage that way.”
“You like onions a lot more than I do,” I said.
“I like Vidalia onions more than anyone on earth,” he said, his onions hiding but safe in a place where a woman’s legs used to go.
Since those early days in Atlanta, I have become a dedicated advocate of the Vidalia onion. First, let me teach you how to pronounce it because
I have seen the word mangled by some of the most famous cooks on earth. It is
vie-dale-ya
. It is an onion so sweet that you think the fields around Vidalia, Georgia, must be sugary or connected to hives of underground bees. Indeed, they are delicate and subtle and they do not overpower salads or sandwiches. I like to peel them, put them in aluminum foil, hit them with a splash of sesame oil and soy sauce, and grill them over an open fire or throw them in the oven for an hour. They take to my Pickled Shrimp (page 196) with gladness.
The only anti–Vidalia onion fanatic I have ever encountered is my former high school English teacher, Gene Norris. Gene opines (and no one else in the history of the South can make an art form out of opining) this way: “When I want an onion, I want something with kick in it, something that will bite me back, something with some substance to it. I don’t want no sweet onion that’s trying to be more like a potato than a good old onion from my mama’s garden. I want an onion that’s got some sass and backbone to it. Why celebrate an onion that prides itself on not tasting like an onion? Makes no damn sense to me.”
What little opposition the Vidalia onion has received in its triumphant march across the country has come from the unreconstructible Gene Norris. I bought a bag of them in a grocery store in Blue Hill, Maine, this past summer, and I was always pleased when they arrived on California Street when I lived in San Francisco. But what I love most about the Vidalia onion is that it led me straight into the path of the greatest Southern story I have ever heard. I call it the perfect Southern story because all the participants are Southern, because it involves peculiarity, madness, liquor, good high humor, football, snappy dialogue, and more liquor.
My next-door neighbor in Ansley Park was the most fanatical Tennessee football fan I have ever met. When I first moved into the house on Peachtree Circle, I walked out to my office in the back and passed Knox Dobbins washing his car in the driveway we shared. His face was awash with grief, and he leaned against the hood of his car as though he were about to vomit or split open with abdominal pain.
“Are you all right, Knox?” I asked.
“It’s okay. I’ll be fine,” he whispered. “The Volunteers are losing by two touchdowns.”
I nodded in silence and walked up the steps to my office. When I came down an hour later, Knox was on his back in the driveway doing the “dying cockroach” with the spray from the hose hurtling straight up into the air and falling back on him.
“The Vols won it by a field goal,” he shouted.
Later that season, Knox invited me to a football game when Tennessee was playing Georgia in Athens. The only caveat he gave was that we would be forced to sit on the Georgia side because the tickets came from a banker who graduated from the University of Georgia. Knox was worried that he could not sit on his hands for an entire game without rooting for his beloved Vols. That did not turn out to be the major problem of the game.
When I took my seat near the fifty-yard line on the Georgia Bulldog side, a diminutive but formidable lady in her late seventies sat to my immediate left, and she drank from a silver cup filled with ice. She was drinking freely of a brown liquid known as Wild Turkey. She introduced herself and said she’d never seen me, and where was the son of a bitch who usually occupied that seat? I assumed she meant the banker who provided the tickets, but did not know for sure, so I turned and studied the Tennessee lineup with Knox, who had compendious insider knowledge of the entire Volunteer team.