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Screen Doors and Sweet Tea: Recipes and Tales from a Southern Cook by Martha Hall Foose

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I love food. It’s a borderline obsessive thing. I like to eat, I like to go out to new restaurants, I love to cook. At the reference desk, I always have various food blogs open in the background. I’m always making something new and bringing it in… and of course, I’m always on the hunt for good cookbooks. Faithful readers have seen evidence of this obsession in earlier cookbook reviews.

Martha Hall Foose won a James Beard award in the American Cookery category for her book Sweet Tea: Recipes and Tales from a Southern Cook. And I completely understand why, and I’ve only just made one recipe!

Cornbread Crusted White Chili – and yes, it’s as good as it sounds.
Here is the outer cheesy cornbread crust – inside, there was an amazing white chili with tomatillos, chicken, and hominy, but my friend and I devoured it before I remembered to take a picture. Whoops.

I read this cookbook like a novel. Foose throws us into the slow Mississippi Delta world that she loves so much. Every recipe has a history; we meet characters like Aunt Mary Stigler Thompson – a woman who declares none of the entrants in the mayonnaise making competition are “as good as my own”; Mrs. Ethel Wright Mohamed, a woman who stitched hundreds of tea towels to remember her beloved late husband; and M. Taylor Bowen Ricketts who cooked black-eyed peas just as well as she painted. Foose’s notes section with cooking instructions are just as charming as the histories that grace every recipe.

Oh, and the food. Huge color photographs adorn nearly every page of complex, beautiful, mouth-watering Southern food. From curried sweet potato soup with pork rind croutons to banana puddings served in a mason jar to field peas with snaps… I was hungry every time I picked up this book. I took my time with Screen Doors and Sweet Tea – in fact, I took so long that it’s now over-due. I had to quickly photocopy all of the recipes I want to try and return it to the library. I know I’m not the only one who’s actually cooked from this book – at the front, I found a post-it note from another patron who had meticulously written out each recipe that she tried.

Southern cooking is not fast, nor is it easy. Many recipes require hours of prep work, and I know that I don’t have a lot of time for this kind of cooking during my hectic work week. But for special occasions, I will definitely make a caramel cake. Or the greens with cornbread croutons. Or overnight dinner rolls.

Oh, it’s time to start planning the next dinner with Foose. And I’m adding this book to my Christmas wish list. I foresee running out of shelf space at this rate.

And the Results Are In…

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… and it was tasty!

Don’t worry, we’re not announcing the winner of the latest giveaway early. You still have until October 19th to enter.

Instead, I wanted to share the end result of a recipe from a cookbook I reviewed earlier in the summer, The Best Casserole Cookbook Ever by Beatrice Ojakangas. I didn’t have my camera handy for many of my previous cooking ventures, but I grabbed a few snaps of the finished Burgundy Beef last night. It was too beautiful not to record for posterity. If you haven’t picked up a copy of Ojakangas’ book, maybe these pictures will change your mind.

 
Here’s the finished product, just after taking it out of the oven.
Extreme beef close-up. You can see the pearl onions and mushrooms in this shot.
My plate for dinner; I served the beef with the classic combination of garlic mashed potatoes.
Let me tell you, it tasted just as good as it looks. And I have the world’s best lunch for the next couple of days!  I wish I grabbed shots of the Spicy Cheese and Green Chile Dip and the Vegetable Moussaka… both of those recipes came out just as nicely as this one. But they were quickly devoured at a work potluck. Library workers know how to eat.

“Fat” by Jennifer McLagan

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“For all the Jack Sprats out there – you’re wrong!”

This is the dedication for my new favorite cookbook, Fat by Jennifer McLagan. I’m not alone in loving this work; the James Beard Foundation gave the coveted “Cookbook of the Year” award to this title. More than a simple collection of recipes, McLagan included extensive food histories, nutritional information, world-wide food folklore, and step-by-step instruction on everything involving fat.

The book is divided into four different sections – butter (“Worth it”), pork fat (“The King”), poultry fat (“Versatile and good for you”), and beef and lamb fats (“Overlooked but tasty”). Each section has a 10 page spread giving an overview of that types of fat included within the chapter. For example, the beef and lamb fats chapter touches on suet, bone marrow, marbling, tallow, and dripping. An extensive introduction, bibliography, and index round out the structure of the book.

McLagan truly believes that one of the problems with the modern diet is its fear of fat. She starts developing this thesis in her dedication, expands on the sentiment within the introduction, and continues to discuss specifics within the beginning pages of each chapter. “Fat, we reasoned, was why we packed on the pounds and got ill, so we banned animal fat from our lives” (page 2). She makes a good point – as a whole, North Americans are still obese, unhealthy, obsessed with exercise… and eating less animal fat than ever before. The animal fat sources that she examines are rich in monounsaturated fats – different beasts than the hydrogenated and polyunsaturated fats found in an average American diet. McLagan not only looks at the nutritional benefits of eating more fat, she also examines the reasons why it’s so pleasureful. She includes many interesting “fat” quotes and phrases in the margins of the pages, reminding us how fat wasn’t always such a taboo thing to be called. I loved the variation of sources – Shakespeare sits next to German folklore next to Dorothy Hartley.

McLagan highlights many fascinating history tidbits about fat. Did you know that the Indian Mutiny of 1857 was, in part, due to a misunderstanding between Indian sepoys and the East India Company over the loading procedures of the Enfield rifle? The design required the sepoys to bite off the casing before pouring out the gunpowder, but the casings were said to be greased with lard (pork fat) or tallow (beef fat), distasteful to both Muslim and Hindi soldiers. Rebellion ensues, and the British government has to take over control of the subcontinent. Other interesting anecdotes include the origins of the name “Fat Man” for the second atomic bomb dropped on Japan, history of Bolladagur day in Iceland, and discussing the chemistry of the soap lady at the Mütter Museum.

But this is more than just a book that preaches at us – at its core, Fat is a cookbook. With its gorgeous photography, I wanted to eat everything on the pages, even if it was just a picture of lardo and persimmons. The endpapers are really a magnified picture of caul fat, delicately lacing the contents of the book. McLagan prefaces every recipe with great instructions and stories. And there are a lot of decadent recipes in here – Fat Fat-Cooked Fries, Sauteed Foie Gras with Gingered Vanilla Quince, Bone Marrow Crostini, Prosciutto-Wrapped Halibut with Sage Butter, and a ridiculously mouth-watering Salted Caramel Sauce. Cooking with real fat sources doesn’t seem easy; many recipes require a great deal of preparation work, but McLagan assures us that the payoff is worth the effort.

Of course, there’s a waiting list a mile long for this book at the library, so I had to give up my copy too soon, well before I was able to cook any of the recipes for myself. But I’ve not so subtly hinted about my love for this book to my friends, plus I have a birthday coming up… One can only hope. I promise there will be a roast goose for any generous gift-givers in the future, though.

The Best Casserole Cookbook Ever by Beatrice Ojakangas

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As a cookbook lover, I’ve been overwhelmed by the sheer selection in my local branch. However, when the 2009 James Beard Award nominees for cookbooks were announced, I braved the catalog to order Beatrice Ojakangas’ latest venture, appropriately called The Best Casserole Cookbook Ever: With More Than 500 Recipes! The tagline contains all that you really need to know about this massive book – it’s huge. Utterly teaming with delectable recipes. And really, they all sound good.

Ojakangas is known for her Scandanavian cookery. A native of Duluth, Minnesota, her ancestry is entirely Finnish. Her first writing venture, The Finnish Cookbook, is still in print – a marvel for a cookbook published in 1964. The Best Casserole Cookbook is her 27th published cookbook. In a recent interview with the Toledo Blade, Ojakangas says the publication of this book is “”very timely,” offering “economical meals that are simply made with ingredients that you won’t spend a fortune to buy, or that you already have on hand. It’s comfort food.”

The day I received this tome, I sat down and started reading it like a book. Normally, I like cookbooks with full-color pictures for each recipe; I’ve been spoiled by the gorgeous cookbooks published by Clarkson Potter. The Best Casserole Cookbook lacks the excessive photography of my favorite volumes, but it does have a few lovely inserts with some mouth-watering photographs. Ojakangas divides the book into several categories, starting with the basics. I loved this section, especially seeing that my early casserole attempts centered around cream of mushroom soup that always seems too salty. One Christmas, I made cream of mushroom soup purely for use in the green bean casserole. Ojakangas shares my disdain for the sodium-packed, overly processed stuff, so she explains how to make different sauces that can act as healthier substitutes for Campbell’s. In the following chapters, she details appetizers, meats, vegetarian, grains, desserts, and even breads that one can make in a casserole dish. I especially enjoyed the “Casseroles for Two” chapter – as a single person, it’s sometimes difficult to justify making a casserole intended for 12 people, but Ojakangas’ smaller portion sizes are spot-on.

Of course, I had to try a number of these recipes. My favorite? I made the Broccoli and Chicken Casserole for Two for a friend of mine one weekday night. The recipe was insanely simple, made with sour cream and parmesan instead of a heavy cheese sauce. I assembled it in less than 20 minutes, popped in the fridge, then put it in the oven when I came home from work the next day. My friend had never eaten a casserole before, so he was surprised to find that he liked it so much!

Next week, I’m making a Southwestern Breakfast Casserole with chorizo, queso fresco, and eggs for a work meeting. We have another potluck the following week – I know that Moussaka with Lots of Vegetables will be my contribution. And I’m sure I can find an audience for Spicy Cheese and Green Chile Dip. When I (reluctantly) returned the book to the library, I forced my co-workers to browse… and I saw several people making copies of the pages to try for dinner later. I may have to buy myself a copy of this book; it will look beautiful next to my worn copy of Mark Bittman’s How To Cook Everything.