Ham Cacciatore

Another week, another ham, all in celebration of our new book: HAM: AN OBSESSION WITH THE HINDQUARTER, right there on the right. It's published March 1st--and it's a stunner: beautiful design, lots of photographs, and (well) a bit of snark from yours truly. Let's just say at one point there's a bad case of maggots in a French charcuterie. (If that doesn't make you want to buy a cookbook, what will?)

But of course, it's not all gorgeousness. Recipe-testing is a mess. Our kitchen gets the industrial treatment on a daily basis. I can't tell you how many bottles of counter cleaner I go through in a month. Amazing. All this food, at a constant pace, with more books to come. Whew. No wonder I need a vacation. But not from ham.

This week, I'm writing about the second of the four types of ham: a fresh ham. Last week, we did the wet cure. But now we're taking on the most elemental way to make a ham: a big pork roast, not smoked, not cured in any way.

In the book, there are lots of recipes for leftovers, for smaller portions, but I thought I'd share with you one of my favorite dishes Bruce created: the ham cacciatore.

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Salt Cod Cakes

Let me tell you this: the very last thing I need in my life is some idiot locavore wagging a finger in my face, telling me how I must only eat in season. In my part of the world--rural New England--there's nothing in season right now. Not even eggs. The chickens have stopped laying with the loss of daylight. Nothing. Zip.

Which is why salt cod was invented. (Well, not because of the chicken part of all that.) It's a way to preserve the catch for the long winter: the fish so highly salted that it can't go bad. In other words, the only way to eat locally in a world of snow.

Isn't it funny that something that was created as a means of survival has now got high-falutin' culinary aspirations? We can even find salt cod at our local supermarket these days!

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Cider-Cured, Braised Ham

Welcome to ham month on the blog. Don't worry: it won't be ham all the time. But all month, I'm going to be featuring snippets from our new book: HAM: AN OBSESSION WITH THE HINDQUARTER. Up top on this page sits the ham for today: a cured, braised one. And there to the right on the page sits the book itself. It's already available on amazon--and will be published in just a few weeks.

I can't wait until you see it! It's the first time I've written a book in first-person. All our other books are written as "we." This one's "I." It's my fractured, at-times hilarious take on how Bruce developed those 100 recipes, plus the story of how we raised our own pig, took it to slaughter, tried to cure one leg, failed, tried again, and learned more about ham than you can imagine, including tres chic European hams and down-home American country hams.

To quote from the introduction:

From that first fateful day when we started this project [you'll have to read about it--let's just say it involves the lethal combo of Eudora Welty and porn], Bruce and I have endured refrigerators full of ham leftovers, with hunks of pork being delivered by UPS every afternoon; I've been to northern Kentucky in the dead of freeze-butt winter; both of us have been to a ramshackle slaughterhouse in rural Massachusetts; and we have borne witness to an enormous toe-on pig leg in our back refrigerator, a swarm of maggots in a French charcuterie, and a group of chic, black-bedecked New Yorkers eating a quivering pile of ham in aspic.

So let's get our first sneak-peak recipe from the book: the way to make your own wet-cured ham.

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Paris-Brest, Part 3 (and the grand finale)

So I know you're ready. For the grand finale, of course. For the whole thing to come together. For a Paris-Brest. For the best of the best.

OK, stick with me here. A great old dessert requires a bit of work. (As if you didn't know.) On this final post of the three, we're going to make two things: crème pâtissière and crème Chantilly. Wow. More and more cream. Mostly because it's a beverage.

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Paris-Brest, Part 2

And so it's on to the second part of our dessert classic, the stand-out in the Paris-Brest, this French fantasy of cream. We've already built the cake itself, discovering ways to make pâte à choux work, light and airy every time. Now it's time to start filling it.

And thus, the nougatine.

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Paris-Brest, Part 1

"What's that?" you ask. Um, just about the best dessert ever created. And French, to boot. Maybe a little old-school, but still the best. A Paris-Brest, a confection made out of pastry dough, pastry cream, whipped cream, and almond brittle. So named because it was traditionally served at the end of the long bike race between, well, Paris and Brest, a city way out in Brittany. I guess if you rode all that way, you deserved to wolf down the whole thing.

A nice slice will do for me--and you, too. Because it's definitely real food. Crazy, over the top, indulgent--but real all the way. For a celebration, a Paris-Brest can't be beat.

All this week, we're going to put this behemoth together, step by step. To start, we have to make the dough--aka, the pâte à choux (pronounced: paht-ah-shoe), the ring of cake itself. It'll involve some fancy pastry-cheffery and some Frenchified terms; but with Bruce's help in the kitchen, we're going to get it done and bring back the old desserts, the old ways, the real ways, the Paris-Brest.

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Fish and Kale Stew

Sometimes, simpler is better. Although I often forget it. I get carried away. Call it enthusiasm. Or rank stupidity. (Wait--aren't those often the same thing?) Yesterday, Bruce and I were on a New Haven TV show: Connecticut Style. And yes, I got carried away. And as a recompense, received my first bleep on air. After ten years , it was bound to happen sometime. Because I get carried away. If you want to see the hijinks, check out the clip here.

So what does all this have to do with this fish stew, made with shrimp and cod as well as sturdy kale, one of winter's delights? Well, for one thing, a simple stew like this is not really me. (Just wait until you see what's up next week on this blog, my friend!) But it's what I crave in all my windy fandango: simplicity. 

No doubt about it, I'm baroque. To say the least. By contrast, Bruce is steady, straight-on. Mozart to my counterpoint. Poor guy, he has to endure endless days of Bach, particularly when I've pulled out the overdrive on the writing mode. (The first-ever book on goat, anyone? I've got Bach's Cantata #37 blasting right now, the speakers only inches away.)

When it gets like this--just as it was on that TV show the other day--he sort of brings the whole thing back to reality. And does the best thing he could: he feeds me comfort food. Like a great fish stew. Could anything be better?

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Chicken With Shallots And Kumquats

I love kumquats. But let's be reasonable: they're difficult to cook. They tend to roll around a skillet! But I'd go through a lot to get that spiky taste: fresh, vibrant, a spark of sunshine in the dead of winter.

And winter it is. It's snowing at our house. Has been for days. So we're hunkered down for the long haul. (Or at least until we have to be out the door early in the morning for a working trip into New York City.)

Let's just say this: it's hard to eat in season when your driveway is a skating rink. But kumquats fit the bill. Bright and divine, they're in our markets right now.

While Bruce was out teaching knitting the other night, I wanted to make a simple skillet supper that used kumquats to good effect. I knew I'd need to balance them with lots of aromatics and other big flavors. So here's what I came up with.

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Pickled Shallots

OK, here's an easy way to beat back winter (if not the snow lining our deck): some pickled shallots. Although that's the easy way to say the name of the dish. It's really Cebolinhas no Vinagre. But since I don't even pretend to speak the first word of Brazilian Portuguese, I'm going with Pickled Shallots.

These little bits of sweet zip show up in relish trays in small Brazilian restaurants, even in New York, but particularly near Cachoeira. They're usually made with small, red onions, ones we don't get in the United States. So Bruce reinterpreted the dish the other night for a dinner party with shallots. He made a room temperature relish tray of these, olives, caper berries, roasted red peppers, Manchego, and grilled squid to serve before a meal of marinated skirt steak, oven fries, and chimichurri. Let's just say we were having a South American feast.

And while the food was good, I loved these shallots most of all.

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Old-Fashioned Almond Semolina Cake

And I mean really old-fashioned. Because Bruce found this recipe in a cookbook originally printed in the 1880s. He had to adapt it a bit--especially the amounts (anyone for "two pennies and a half of semolina flour"?)--but this light, fantastically-moist cake is an incredibly puddling-like affair, pretty straightforward, but rich and satisfying. Best of all, there's breakfast involved. Twice. You'll see.

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