I never met my great grandfather and quite enjoyed this rare connection to the past. He didn’t relay much personal sentiment in his journal; most of it is a simple chronicle of events, often a sentence or two, and he wasn’t wildly consistent. There is no reference to the horror of war. It makes me wonder if the gaps in time were spent in trenches, and if he didn’t mention it because he wanted his thoughts elsewhere when recording them.

When he isn’t talking about the death of Teddy Roosevelt, or how five men were swept overboard and lost from the U.S.S.G.W., he frequently talked about food. Quite often, in fact. There truly is nothing like a great, warm meal.

Subsistence: Bacon, Beans, Beans Baked, Bread, Coffee, Flour, Fruit, Lard, Meat – Fresh Beef, Milk, Onions, Potatoes, Salt, Sugar, Vinegar, Tomatoes, Pepper

On foregoing page 16 is giving list of subsistence of the main food stuffs as used in the Army. To follow this list closely is not only a good principle for the army but also for the home. To buy staples, especially flour, dry groceries, potatoes, etc in quantity is a big money saving proposition, also a time saver as it does away with ? daily shopping trip which time could be used by better advantage. It is also a good idea to follow the army’s way of planning supplies and meals four or five days or more ahead, will save a lot of worry. 

December 25, 1917

Saw <> steamer towed in torpedoed, bow sunk, stern in air. Christmas dinner. Menu on board U.S.S.G.W.
Steak – Ham – Onion Sauce
Mashed potatoes – Peas – Bread – Butter
Coffee – <?> and Pumpkin Pie

Jan 1 1918 (in France)

Had dinner in a restaurant. Menu. Ham omelett, bread, butter, leg of chicken, French fried potatoes, coffee, rice pudding. 

]]> http://www.eatitatlanta.com/2012/01/18/world-war-i-dining/feed/ 5 http://www.eatitatlanta.com/2012/01/16/cookbooks-of-yore-aka-are-you-gonna-eat-your-cream-toast/ http://www.eatitatlanta.com/2012/01/16/cookbooks-of-yore-aka-are-you-gonna-eat-your-cream-toast/#comments Mon, 16 Jan 2012 21:53:02 +0000 Jimmy http://www.eatitatlanta.com/?p=5321

While going through some old photos with my mother we came across some old cookbooks, mostly numerous versions of the Metropolitan Cook Book and Royal Baking Cook Book, published by an insurance company and baking powder producer, respectively. I found it interesting to see the types of food made, old technique and now uncommon ingredients. Some dishes don’t exist in their old form because they have been improved upon, others because we are lazy or because no one can find a particular ingredient. Good luck even finding beef suet around Atlanta. The books are from 1911 to 1927. I’ve included a few photos below that may or may not be worth checking out.

This recipe for soup calls for one pound of meat, three cents of soup greens, one penny worth of barley, and noodles.

“A high-priced article may have little food value, while a low-priced article may have high food value.”

True that.

“Cookery for the Sick”.

Wow, I’d heal right up if I had to eat Wine Whey, which consists of scalded milk and wine. I think they call that “Prison Wine” now.

Mmmm, cream toast. I still prefer biscuits and gravy. This must be a yankee cookbook.

Some egg recipes, including “Plain and Fancy Baked Eggs” and “Scotch Woodcock”, the latter sounding like a bechamel sauce with chopped hard boiled eggs, ham, and spices.

We had good food and wine. I assisted with dinner, and for the morning-after I made the same Mexican breakfast casserole I’ve been making for years. My camera is a little better than my initial post on this dish, which is one of the most popular all-time on the old blog.

I didn’t know the origin of the recipe for years as it was emailed to me in plain text, but it turns out it’s an Emeril recipe. Bam!

Next time I do this I’m going to use two smaller casserole dishes instead of a single large one. The outside edge is cooked well before the center. If you cook the casserole until the center is no longer soggy, the outside edge of egg is a little burnt/crispy for my taste. I also like to cover mine for the first half of cooking, then remove the foil so the exposed top doesn’t overcook. This aluminum foil cover could mitigate moisture loss, which is perhaps why the casserole is still soggy in the center. Always tinkering…

I love to cook. Be it alone, where I find an afternoon of solo chopping to be quite therapeutic, or tackling major menus with friends, there’s nothing better than wielding the knife with some music blasting (dub-step was a popular cooking choice of mine this year) and a cold beer next to the cutting board. I’ve learned much more, but have so far to go. I mean, I’ve never done a souffle! Or a standing rib roast! I want to learn Indian cuisine, and how to clean and filet fish, and charcuterie, and…the list goes on. For now, here are a few of my favorite cooking lessons from 2011.

Pasta dishes like aglio e olio, cacio e pepe, and carbonara made many appearances this year. Simple enough in design, to obtain the perfect texture and sauce consistency requires experiential timing and touch. I finally feel like I can make a proper pasta. Beautiful fresh pasta nests like these definitely help.

My favorite pasta all year was a quick pan sauce of salty pasta water and ‘nduja, a hot Calabrian spreadable salami I obtained from Jason at Cured Meats. I must have made that dish four times that week. I did spare a little to make a stunning grilled cheese with basil.

Cooler sous vide – I finally got my pastured pork at that exact right temperature.

Flannery beef. Still the reigning champ of steak in my book. So expensive. But so good. Look at the marbling on this strip!

Lasagna. My ultimate comfort food. I made many in 2011, including a few vegetarian versions so Katie could enjoy it along with me. But my heart belongs to Bologna. I made the bechamel (which I’ve finally nailed) and meat ragu version a couple of times, including once with calf livers, which made it extra funky and interesting. Lasagna for breakfast (with an espresso, in this one photo) is the best. Marone!

Soups. I’m making them quite regularly these days. They used to intimidate me for whatever silly reason, but now I know I can dig around my fridge and pantry and make SOME sort of soup. The Vitamix helps (understatement). This soup below is a mix of frozen peas and water and herbs. Nothing more.

Over the last week I’ve knocked out cheese sauces. I had a mac and cheese break (greasy, grainy) a few weeks ago, so I spent some time researching why this happens, then played around with a few variations of recipes. I wanted a cheese sauce that could take a real sharp cheese, melt smoothly, and hold up even when reheated. I’ve found my easy, no cream method – bechamel held with xantham gum. Mix in small quantities of grated cheese over very low heat.

The veggie plate. Chili oil marinated squash. Gently simmered pink eye peas. Yuzo kosho mashed cauliflower. Tomatoes with chives. No recipes, just preparing things simply and properly and seasoning in a way that makes sense.

Homemade biscuits. Buttery (but not soggy), flaky, crusty on the outside, made with buttermilk and frozen butter. Maybe not the prettiest, but I nailed the texture. It made my day.

Porchetta. Or a version thereof. This one was a picnic pork shoulder, with herbs, roasted for hours, the skin finished under the broiler.

2011 was the year I broke the oven in my kitchen. I began cooking my pizzas at 800F+ on the clean cycle, which is a process that requires some trial and error. I became a little more familiar with making, aging, and working with doughs, though I still need lots of practice there.

Moving on to other people’s food – my brother made some extremely impressive gougères. Better than the last time I tried the French Laundry recipe, and better than any I’ve tried outside of my meal at Per Se.

My friend Brad and I tackled a Momofuku meal. While I wasn’t overly impressed with the dishes, it was once again a great learning experience. This time we got to break down a whole pig’s head, debone chickens, and assemble this dish with meat glue.

And while I learn a lot by trying to follow complicated recipes word for word, my friend Rowdy continues to rock it in the kitchen and be an inspiration with his freewheeling style. I still can’t touch his hot chicken. How did he know that dish of cured, but uncooked bacon with a thyme dressing would be brilliant at 1:30 in the morning? I don’t think he did. But he just gets in the kitchen and experiments, and more and more I think that’s the way to do it.

Well, I have ten can’t-miss items that will make your favorite cook, blogger, or booze hound the hippest kid on the block. Or something like that.

#1 - Wines of France / Metro Map - This map is really quite clever, and informative.

#2 – Emile Erwin Waxed Canvas and Leather Apron – For the man who wants to look like a tough metallurgist whilst flipping pancakes

#3 – Stanley Classic Steel Vacuum Bottle - Perfect for coffee or soup breaks when you’re not busy building the American dream with your bare hands

#4 – Caw Caw Creek Country Prosciutto – (12-22lbs) – I want ham around EVERY MEAL this holiday season.

#5 – Hot Calabrian Chiles – The same fiery peppers I love at Antico and Fuoco. Why not order a kilo of them?

#6 – Cortez Bottarga – An Italian specialty, this producer of salt cured and sun dried mullet roe in Florida is the only producer of domestic bottarga, as far as I can tell. Shave over pasta for a kick of fishy funkalicious umami.

#7 – MOMA spherical ice cube trays - The fancier you make your drinks, the less people think you have a problem.

#8 – Dirty and Rowdy wine t-shirts – This season’s must have apparel item.

#9 – Rancho Gordo Heirloom bean gift pack – I don’t even bother with canned beans anymore. They tasting like…nothing. These will turn your bean (and GI) world upside down!

#10 – Now that your pantry is chock full of beans, cook ‘em up right in a clay bean pot from Puebla, Mexico.

I purchased some Spotted Trotter sausage a couple of weeks ago, on the last day of this year’s season at the Grant Park farmer’s market. I went with their brandy rabbit boudin, a deeply aromatic mix of herbs, pork, and of course, brandy and cute wittle local wabbits. The smell of both the raw and cooked sausage was so distinctive, I was actually a bit concerned that perhaps I purchased a package that had taken a turn to stank-town. So I picked up the phone and called Spotted Trotter to ask if the smell was normal (it is). Trying doing that with yer Jimmy Dean!

The first sausage I cooked straight up on my cast iron, over medium high heat as I wanted a nice sear on it. The problem was, it took forever to cook through and the exterior quickly went from a beautiful golden hue to a bitter char. If I were cooking on a grill I’d likely go with a two zone fire to handle this problem.

I decided it was easier if I cooked it sous vide. I brought a pot of water up to 150F, took it off the heat, and dropped my zip loc bag in for a swim, where it stayed for about twenty minutes. I removed it from the bag, seared, and voila. Perfectly cooked.

This is a very imprecise method of sous vide, but sausage is quite forgiving. If I went over a few degrees, or if the bath had hot spots due to the lack of circulation, it’s not really going to make a noticeable impact on my final product, as it might if we’re talking about a NY strip roast, where the difference between rare and medium is huge (to me).

Another benefit – I didn’t have to spend nearly as much time preparing my lunch. Once I put the sausage in the water bath, I went back to my home office desk and knocked some work out. Very convenient.

These items are two of my favorite buys from Costco. The Nina’s tomatoes have been a mainstay in my home. For a while I thought they were real DOP San Marzano tomatoes, but that’s not the case. However, they are real Italian romas from the San Marzano region, I think they’re great, and they are less than $3 for 6# of them.

The Goolsby’s sausage is a first purchase for me, an impulse buy from the sample-pusher no less. I was in a hurry, but when I looked, the sausage actually looked good. Three people tried the samples in the time I was on that aisle. All three bought a box of the individually frozen patties. They cook in eight minutes, in about the time it takes me to make some eggs and coffee. I find the sausage to be as good, possibly better than any fresh, non-individually portioned commercial brand that I’ve tried. I can’t recall the exact price, but I do remember that it was quite fair.

For this post I also considered the title “Jock out with my stock out”, as this past Saturday also included a good bit of college football watching while making demi-glace with my friend Dude. See, it would have worked two ways.

This was my first attempt at a true demi-glace, a rich sauce made by mixing brown stock and Espagnole sauce and reducing until it’s almost a slick glaze. Espagnole (“Spanish” in French, debates exist re the naming) is the same brown sauce, with a brown roux and tomato paste or puree, and is one of the french mother sauces created by Antonin Carême, later updated by Auguste Escoffier. Though, I’ve read that many modern chefs forgo the roux in favor of a straight up reduction to obtain the thick demi-glace.

On it’s own, the name demi-glace implies the use of veal bones, but we had to take what we could get and produced a beef demi-glace using marrow bones from Dekalb Farmer’s market, $2/lb. We actually used an Emeril recipe, but no shame in my game, it’s very similar to Escoffier’s recipe.

I’ll let the pictures do the rest of the talking, it’s self explanatory. We had a fun time talking through the recipe, handling YDFM on a Satuday, and of course, eating and drinking all through the day. The photos at the bottom of the post are a Caw Caw pork shoulder Dude cooked on the Big Green Egg for the Momofuku Bo Ssäm recipe, which include really tasty fermented bean/gochujang and ginger scallion sauces.

Finally, I have the NYC marathon this weekend, for which I’m totally unprepared. I’ve run an average of 1.5 times per week over the last few months, so my Mom and I are just going to take it easy, and I’ll push through the pain of the last ten miles with visions of the oasis called Marea to distract me.

But hey, what’s a blog post without some photos?

While driving back from Greenville I stopped at Umaido in Suwanne, where the bowls are looking a little worn, but the spicy ramen still soothes the soul. Not perfect, but a fine, cheap meal. I like the contrasting flavor of the rub on the outside of the pork, but wish it were fattier, and the egg was slightly over cooked. I really enjoy being able to add my own pickled ginger, the indistinguishable aroma and flecks of acid contributing nicely.

On the cooking front, at the GT tailgate, my brother and I fried up some chicken. And french fries (with aioli). And hot wings with Frank’s hot sauce and butter. It seemed to go over well. It was an easy tailgating setup (easier than a grill) that I plan on repeating.

This past weekend was the third session of what I’ll call the “educational and aspirational” meals I’ve cooked with my friend Brad. Meals where we’ve invested ourselves (and our cash) in planning a meal from a particular cookbook which require an inordinate amount of research and planning. The first time we tackled The French Laundry. Next was our dinner from most recent Le Bernardin cookbook On the Line. This time we dug into David Chang’s Momofuku, a cookbook I’ve mentioned a few times.

I’ll say this right up front; this meal was the most disappointing of the three. Not bad, mind you, but the return on time invested was not there. And this is not the first time I’ve been unhappy with results from this cookbook. I’ll admit some flaws in execution, but a good cookbook should set you up for success with its direction, and I don’t think this one does a good job of that. Some recipes don’t flow well, and I’m left making assumptions or changes that I think are necessary, but go unmentioned by the book. And while I appreciate the introduction to certain techniques, flavors, chemicals, and sustainability, some flavors just don’t work, and there is such a thing as an unnecessary “improvement”. I love this cookbook as reference, and the stories are great, but to me it’s not to be followed blindly, and I do not plan on attempting any more of the tedious or expensive recipes. That said, here’s what we ate.

The meal began with the English muffins, my second attempt. They were halved and griddled in a pool of bay leaf infused, whipped mix of rendered Benton’s bacon fat and butter. Garnished with Maldon salt and chives, they are excellent. This recipe is actually forgiving, the only difficult part is trying to make them pretty.

Next was the Riverview Farms pig’s head torchon. Brad boiled the pig’s head for a few hours, then we had a fun time digging our paws inside the pig’s face, pulling out chunks of meat and fat anywhere our fingers could go. A layer of fat is layed down, then seasoned meat, then wrapped in plastic wrap into the cylindrical torchon shape. Fried in panko, it was served with cherries and a mustard/mayo sauce. It was goooood, and porky, but again, I wasn’t happy with the instruction and think it could be improved. The texture was too dense and chewy, the fat was not quite where I wanted to be, and the book mentioned nothing about the size of the pieces needed to form the torchon. We chopped them to the size that made sense to us, but looking back it could have been a finer mix.

The “brick chicken” is a deboned chicken half, sprinkled with transglutaminase (aka “meat glue”), then wrapped onto itself to form a brick shape. Wrapped overnight, the glue causes the meat to adhere to itself, creating a single entity of white and dark meat. Pan roasted on the stove top and the oven, the chicken skin was initially crispy, but somewhat rubbery by the time I could cut and plate the dish. The skin was my fault. The chicken was tasty, with plenty of moisture lent to the white meat by it’s soulful cousin, the thigh. I think the chicken should have been brined first though.

The oyster mushroom with pistachio-dashi puree was ok, but the puree is a waste of time if you ask me. I would have been just as happy simply with a side of mixed, sautéed mushroom in butter.

I enjoyed the flavor of the cereal milk panna cotta, which was rich with the savory flavor of corn flakes, though a friend said it was “disgusting”. The hazelnut/chocolate served with it was amazing. We left out the avocado puree, as we agreed it was weird for weird’s sake, and our particular avocado was less than stellar.

Not pictured (bad blogger!) is the famous Ko Egg, which we had before the torchon, and I did thoroughly enjoy. Visually stunning, and slightly less delicious than that, it’s a fine egg preparation, and who doesn’t enjoy caviar? The extra potato chips were a pleasing snack too. I would recommend this dish, as it’s beautiful and elegant, a great way to start a meal. Picture from Bon Appetit below (ours more or less looked similar).

** UPDATE ** Brad sent me a photo of the egg. So the photo below is our Ko Egg dish.

More Links!

Brad’s account of the Pig’s Head in Creative Loafing.

My first attempt of the English Muffin
The Pork Belly Ssam
The Fried Chicken
Chicken Wings (best recipe in the book!)
Pork Buns