Tag Archives: Recipe

Pork Chops alla Milanese

Posted on by
Reply

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

“Outside Italy, these are known as ‘Viennese chops’ (Wiener schnitzel). It is difficult to know who gave the recipe to whom; Lombardy was in fact under Austrian domination for a long period.”
– The Complete Italy: The Beautiful Cookbook, Patrizia Passigli, Fred Plotkin – Harper Collins

The Italians have cotoletta alla Milanese and the Austrians have Wiener schnitzel. Both are simple dishes of pounded veal, breaded and lightly fried. Both claim that their dish came first and was borrowed by the other.

As evidence of Lombardi origin, the Italians cite a letter written to Emperor Franz Joseph by his aide-de-camp Count Attems extolling a Milanese veal preparation and suggesting the Emperor introduce the recipe at court. The Austrians rightly counter that the letter in which Count Attems mentions the Italian version doesn’t exist and that there was never an aide-de-camp from the Attems family attendant to Franz Joseph. They show that the dish existed in Austria as early as the publication of a popular German language cookbook in 1831. Point: Austria.

I get the feeling that the Count Attems letter was a feint by the Italians to force a misstep by the German speakers because once they fixed 1831 as a near enough date of the Austrian version’s first appearance, the giggling Italians slapped down a copy of Pietro Verri’s History of Milan, published in 1783, which recounts from available records a menu from a feast given at the Basilica Sant’Ambrogio in 1134 featuring lombolos cum panitio which is an obvious ancestor of cotoletta alla Milanese. Point: Italy.

They should probably get a bonus point for going medieval.

Continue reading →

The Haller Pizza

Posted on by
Reply

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

In 2005 I was working at a recently opened small fine dining restaurant just outside of Birmingham. At the time all the big restaurants, and in Birmingham at that time when you say all the big restaurants you meant Frank Stitt’s Highland’s Bar and Grill, eventual James Beard Most Outstanding Restaurant award winner in 2018, the newer places owned by former Highland’s employees clever enough to attract investors hoping to recreate chef Stitt’s success, and a handful of non-Stitt affiliated places venturous enough to open sans pedigree and good enough to make their own name, were located on the south side of the city, creatively known as Southside, with a few starting to bleed into downtown.

Most of the area’s money lived in the suburbs to the south; mainly in Mountain Brook and Vestavia but Greystone and other areas of Shelby County were pretty flush too. My employers’ plan was to get themselves a former Highlands sous chef and build a restaurant right in between all that suburban money and the great restaurants in Southside and save people some driving time while making a buck in the process. That’s just what they did.

We were open for lunch the first few months. Dinner was the primary focus but there were a few corporate headquarters located nearby so the thought was that clients would be entertained and working lunches would be hosted. What we got was cookie cutter perfect reproductions of a table of two elderly women sharing a single chicken salad sandwich and loitering until well into the time when dinner prep should have begun throughout. It was a good thought, but lunch didn’t work at that spot.

It wasn’t all in vain, though. We gleaned a little bit of wisdom re the habits of our clientele and, more importantly, I added a new pizza topping combination to my list of favorites.

Continue reading →

Pizza Dough: The Descent of Man

Posted on by
Reply

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

In the mid-nineties I had the opportunity to tour St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. It sounds silly to say given the setting, but on viewing Michelangelo’s Pieta I had a near religious experience. There was no Coleridge mentally prompting me as he did his tourist at the waterfall, because no prompting was needed. It is sublime. Every curve and fold amazes. Mary’s sorrow hidden near one and a half thousand years in marble until one man set his gifts to reveal it is terrible to behold. I’ve never been stabbed so I can’t say for certain that the metaphor fits, but my reaction to the work was immediate, deep, and unexpected. Tears welled and ran down my cheek. It was not pretty.

The Pieta is a reminder of what man is capable of. It’s humbling and inspiring at the same time. We all have some creative bent we indulge. He may not be Michelangelo, but the hobbyist guitar player who’ll never quite get bar chords right is following that same urge towards the divine. As a race we strive towards a perfection we can never achieve, but the likes of Beethoven, Austin, and Yeats leave behind spectacular failures to remind us how close we can get.

Continue reading →

Spaghetti al Lent with Tomatoes and Smoked Trout

Posted on by
Reply

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

I had a theory about Lenten fasting that was described by someone whose opinion I value as “the stupidest damn thing I’ve ever heard.” He added something along the lines of “Where do you get this nonsense?” but I thought there was something to it so I’m going to share with you here.

I saw a map of the olive oil-butter line; the dividing line between areas of Europe that primarily use olive oil and those that primarily use butter as cooking fat. Now the EU has super-fast trains and Ferraris to carry goods from one region to another, but that wasn’t always the case. Until recently, you shopped locally without needing to be told to do so by a t-shirt. If you lived below the line you cooked with olive oil. Above, with butter. I remember looking at that map years ago during Lent and realizing the countries to the north of the line were mostly protestant.

The Catholic Church used to have a much larger appetite for fasting. By some accounts nearly half the days of the year were designated as preparation for feast days or days of remembrance or were part of a holy season. All of those were subject to dietary restrictions. If you’re an Italian Catholic in 1516 enjoying a nice dish of turbot sauteed with zucchini in olive oil and one of your dining companions reminds you that the next day, as the first Wednesday after the Feast of Santa Lucia and thus an Ember Day, was a fasting day, you might check the stores to be sure you had more turbot, zucchini, and olive oil to cook them in for tomorrow because the rules likely made no difference to you. The Mediterranean diet was such that you had to be sure and only inject lamb, pork, or beef into your regimen three times a week, which is likely two or three times more often that you were used.

Continue reading →

Southern Style Smothered Pork Chops

Posted on by
Reply

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

I used to work in a restaurant called Elizabeth on 37th in Savannah, Georgia. It was a great place swimming in awards and accolades from all manner of associations but the owners were most proud of their James Beard Awards. If I remember right, when I was there we had a Beard Award for Best Restaurant: Southeast, Best Chef: Southeast, Best Wine Program, and our Chef de Cuisine won the Rising Star recognition. We even got shortlisted for whatever they called the best service in the nation award in 1999 or 2000.

When we got word of that service nomination we looked at the other four restaurants in competition and saw we were up against NY, San Francisco, Dallas, and a second from either NY or San Francisco – it’s been a while and I forget. One of the waiters I worked with used to work for the or one of the NY based nominee(s) and said something about them having a $30K a month budget for flowers. We didn’t have that. The owner cracked a few bottles of champagne and we paraded through the restaurant chanting “We’re number five! We’re number five!”

Continue reading →

Mac & Cheese That’s Only Comparatively Time Consuming to Make

Posted on by
Reply

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

I went to elementary school in an old mansion on the North side of Red Mountain overlooking Birmingham. It was donated to the Dominicans and the nuns converted the first two floors into classrooms and such with the third a convent dormitory. A few times a year two or three grades at a time gathered in a largish reception area bounded by the chapel, the library, and a classroom that housed the second grade for a while before swapping to house the fourth. It only had one easily coverable window so it was an ideal makeshift movie theater. The nuns set up an old reel to reel projector in back and showed us ninety-fifth run movies on a tripod mounted roll-down screen. The best seats were on the stairs.

After the movie we ran around the playground whacking each other with sticks as sword stand ins after watching Ivanhoe, arguing about who hit or missed with imaginary arrows after The Adventures of Robin Hood, and really arguing about who got to be Steve McQueen’s Captain Hilts (the coolest Cooler King ever) after The Great Escape. The movies were so old James Garner may have been the only actor who was still alive when we saw him on that tiny screen, but we didn’t know that. We were not learning and that was what mattered.

Continue reading →

Spicy Pineapple Collard Greens and The Great Vowel Shift

Posted on by
Reply

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

I wasn’t a very good vegetable eater as a kid. My sister was. She was evil about it. I’d be midway through the go-to opening pea deployment – a spread with a rise towards the plate edge, a scooped out crater in the middle, and a spread of green dots like a monochrome Pollock painting whisping along the curvature cunningly contrived to make it appear as there were less peas than before – as that little shrew was asking for seconds she didn’t really want. She didn’t just want to be Mom and Dad’s good little eater. She wanted to highlight that I wasn’t. A stray dog bit her once when we were playing in the woods and she had to endure a painful series of injections “just in case.” The rabies shots and the venal display she put on mugging for vegetable praise are probably unrelated. Contrary to popular usage, karma doesn’t act within the same incarnation so she won’t get hers until the next life. But she will get hers.

My oldest son claims to love veggies, but he’s got a narrow definition of them that includes French fries, pickles, and corn on the cob and excludes everything else. His younger brother will eat his brother’s list plus anything we’ve grown in the garden. It doesn’t have to be from our garden, it just has to be a variety of edible plant he’s seen come out of our garden at some point or a bell pepper, which isn’t really a vegetable but gets lumped in with them like tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, and a lot of the things I immediately think of when I think of vegetables but aren’t. Both turn their noses up at the bulk of our dinner sides.

Continue reading →

Piperade: A Spicy One Pan Breakfast for Whenever

Posted on by
1

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

I’m thinking sandwiches but that’s no answer. Big salads? Roasts? The question I’m mulling is whether there are foods we specifically identify with lunch or dinner. I can see an argument for sandwiches being of lunch in a way they aren’t of dinner, but internet argument about what qualifies as a sandwich aside, I eat things between bread at dinner often and I have a meat and two or three for lunch with the same frequency, not that I keep a log.

Restaurant menus should be a help and at first, they seem to be. Many places have an after-five menu where there’s a shift toward entrees at the expense of sandwiches in comparison to the before-five menu. The more refined a restaurant is, the more likely that the dinner menu features entrees exclusively. That seems to be an argument in favor of tying the sandwich to lunch and I think it would be a very good argument except we don’t speak French (Je comprends qu’il y en a qui parlent français mais je parle en général de la population américaine.) Unlike the Gauls we don’t have an Académie Française to dictate how much liberté we’re allowed linguistically. In English it’s messy democracy we have to deal with on that front and private enterprises like Merriam Webster and American Heritage can stand athwart yelling that x means y all they please. The fact of the matter is that if a preponderance of English speakers decide that x means z, it’ll be reflected in their next edition. In our language, dictionaries don’t tell us what words mean. They tell us what we tell them words have meant so far.

Continue reading →

We call it Awesome Sauce: Birmingham Style Hot Dog Sauce

Posted on by
Reply

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

“Nobody, I mean nobody, puts ketchup on a hot dog.”
– Harold Francis Callahan

If you like to cook you’ve experienced the private joy of making something from scratch that you usually buy pre-made, finding that homemade tastes better than store bought, and saving money in the process. Simple marinara is a good example of what I’m talking about. It’s remarkably easy to put together. Cheap too. Buy a can of plum tomatoes for a couple of bucks and combine with ingredients – olive oil, garlic, oregano and or basil, a splash of white wine, red pepper flakes, and salt – that you probably keep in the pantry and you have made sauce. You’ll have to wash a knife and cutting board in addition to the pan you’d have to wash anyway if you reheated an eight to ten dollar jar of whatever the grocery shelves have on offer, but since you were in charge it’s exactly as herby and salty as you like it. People will say things like “You made this yourself?” and you can act demure and pretend that it was not that hard but a little harder than it was. That’s just one example. There are plenty more.

If you really like to cook you’ve experienced the mania that drives you needlessly to replicate something that mass market food providers do very well and in the course of replicating you’ll spend at least twice as much as you would grabbing a bottle of whatever and there’s suddenly clean up where before there was screwing a cap back on. Most of the time this type of cooking is done just to say that you’ve done it. I made ketchup once. I’ll never do it again. The recipe called for more onions than tomatoes. I didn’t expect that. Hot dog sauce is a favorite condiment of mine so I figured I’d give it a go. It was disappointingly easy to make with only a modicum of mess but even though most of the ingredients are pantry staples I was able make it cost more than the three bucks I would have shelled out for the fruits of somebody else’s labor. The problem here is that even though there are great products out there I like my sauce better. Now I have to make it a lot.

Continue reading →

Recipe: Inauthentic Steak Tacos

Posted on by
Reply
Steak Tacos

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

This recipe came about because my brother-in-law has a wandering eye. He developed an interest in cooking and started watching shows and flipping through cookbooks. He gets a channel called Tastemade that I don’t get. Cable, Satellite, and fitty-leven different internet tv services have made every house like a hotel room where you have to figure out what channel number channel thirteen is on and “Hey. They got Jeopardy at four-thirty here.” Pati Jinich’s Pati’s Mexican Table airs on Tastemade and I think he likes her. “Likes” likes. He gave me her cookbook, Treasures of the Mexican Table, for Christmas and though I haven’t seen the show yet I will agree that she looks cute in the picture on the cover.

I can’t credit Jinich with this recipe because I haven’t had time to do a dive into the book yet. I’ve read the introduction and flipped through looking at pictures and saying things like “Ooh. Pollo a la naranja y chile verde,” (translates as “Kuku wa machungwa na chili ya kijani) out loud to my wife but I can see that I need a trip to the Mexican market before trying any of the dishes. We’re decently stocked for Latin cooking but it looks like Pati’s asking more of my larder than it’s prepared to give right now. I have all the basics for Italian, French, and some regional Mexican cuisines, but she wants me to have a variety of dried chilis that aren’t from Calabria among other things. The book sparked an immediate craving for authentic looking tacos.

Continue reading →