October Beans

We stopped last week to buy apples at a big farm stand near Hendersonville, and among all the lovely apples and beets and ornamental squashes and tough, late-season green beans were a few bags of dried, shelled beans marked "dried October shellies." They were available in pods, too, by the handful: half-dried, twisted pods, beautifully mottled with pink and creamy white swirls. The beans, too, were pink and white. I cannot resist beans, so I bought some.

I did some research at home. My cookbooks were little help; the only people writing about these beans (which go by the names October beans, shelly beans and -- get this -- horticultural beans) seem to have ties to Appalachia and heirloom seeds. These beans seem to be grown mostly in parts of the rural, mountainous South and Midwest. They can be eaten fresh or dried. The pods are edible, too -- people chop them up and put them in soups for flavor.

I cooked them very simply, Southern-style: a few hours of soaking, followed by cooking with two slices of chopped up, rendered bacon, a dried red chile, water and a drizzle of honey. They cooked more quickly than older dried beans.

Surprisingly, they taste very much like pinto beans. I expected a more crowder-pea-like, brassy flavor, or maybe something creamier and lighter like an Italian cannellini.

We ate them mostly plain with cornbread and sauteed spinach that night. We had them left over for lunch. And yesterday -- five days later -- I cooked the rest of them with some tomatoes, rosemary, dried red chiles and garlic and such and served them over linguine. I like Italian bean pastas a lot.

Vegetarian Southern Food Again

Mark returned for a short visit, this time with his awesome new wife, and I made a vegetarian Southern meal the last night they were here. It was semi-successful.

The grits were fine, nothing fancy -- you can see them soaking on the right side of the picture. Just soaked, simmered for a few hours, and finished with half and half.

I made black eyed peas -- I browned onions and garlic and flour carefully but quite a bit, then added some sherry and a lot of vegetable stock and some fresh thyme and cooked it all down for an hour and a half. It was a nutty brown, very rich and good.

I quickly sauteed garden collards with some red pepper flakes, finishing them with vinegar.

Florida okra and tomatoes have started appearing in stores, so I made stewed tomatoes and okra. Very simple: just sweated half a Vidalia onion in some butter, then added the okra (stems cut off) and a few chopped tomatoes (seeds and some skin removed) and cooked it all down for 15 minutes, covered.

And I made strawberry rhubarb cobbler.

NY Times: Southern Cooks Use Premade Biscuits

And some of the best barbecue joints serve canned sweet potatoes and flavorless storebought dinner rolls. Just because these foods have authentic uses doesn't mean they're any good.

I sure do want to try some Sister Schubert rolls now, though.

Chicken and Pastry

Here's a new one from the Southern food files: chicken and dumplings, aka chicken and pastry.

Southern dumplings are completely different from what we think of as dumplings, Mom -- these are more like big noodles, like those big 3" square Thai rice noodles except made out of soft wheat flour.

Most people here call the dish chicken and dumplings, but Lawson's dad's family calls it chicken and pastry, which I think is more descriptive. For me, the word "dumpling," what with that "plump" assonance and my own childhood memories, just describes balls of dough better than flaps of dough. So pastry it is.

There's another key way in which Southern chicken and dumplings is different from what we make elsewhere, and this difference took me longer to understand. It's not a soup, although it's made with a bunch of broth. It's got no vegetables, and it's not heavily seasoned. It's more like chicken and noodles in gravy. The dumplings thicken the stock as they cook, and you serve the chicken and dumplings on a plate or flat bowl with just some of the liquid, which clings to everything like a sauce. Vegetables go on the side.

Here is Lawson's grandma's recipe for chicken and pastry, as written down by his...maybe great aunt?:

Make a hole in the center of a pan full of self-rising flour. Get a cup full of hot chicken broth and pour it into the hole. Take a fork and stir it around and work in enough flour to make a firm ball. On a floured surface, roll it out thin. Leave it for a couple of hours to "die." (I don't know if you would have to "let it die" if you used all-purpose flour, we never had any of that kind at our house.) Then cut into thin strips and drop into the boiling pot of broth and chicken. Cook until tender, (not long).

Lawson remembers watching his grandma make chicken and pastry when he was a kid, so he was able to fill in some of the holes in that recipe for me. I also looked at Jean Anderson's instructions in the cookbook you gave me, Mom, and a few other places. And here's what I did:

Chicken and Pastry

Roast a chicken. Eat half of the meat at one meal. Pick the other half of the meat off and save for chicken and pastry.

Make stock with the carcass, skin, pan drippings, an onion, and a carrot.

(Most traditional recipes call for starting with a whole chicken and boiling it. But most traditional recipes are for tough old hens that have stopped laying, not grocery store roasters. Roasting the chicken first gives a bland bird more flavor. And since we can get several two-person meals out of one chicken, there's no use just boiling the whole thing.)

When the broth is finished, make the pastry dough:

• 2 cups white all-purpose flour -- I used White Lily.
• 1 and 1/2 teaspoons salt
• warm broth, not yet skimmed -- I used a bit less than a cup, but this will vary.

Mix together with a fork just until doughlike. Do not knead. Form into ball and set aside.

Skim the fat off the broth and heat the broth in a clean pan. Add salt, pepper, a fresh sage leaf, and a sprig of thyme and simmer for 10-15 minutes, long enough to get the flavors smoothed out.

Roll out the pastry on a floured counter. At first I rolled it to about 3/8", but Lawson said it should be still thinner, almost translucent, so I did that. Later we decided the thicker pieces were a bit better -- they had some chewy substantialness that was lacking from the thin ones.

Cut the pastry with a knife into rectangles about 2" x 3".

Add the chicken meat to the broth and bring to a boil. It should be a big rolling boil. I didn't like it and tried to convince Lawson to turn it down, though he swore he remembered a ferocious boil -- I thought it would make the broth taste scorchy and flat. But I understood after we put the pastry in that the broth has to be moving and hopping furiously to keep the pastry from sticking to other pieces. So do that.

Drop the pastry pieces one at a time into the pot. Once all the pastry was in, it probably took about 15 minutes for everything to cook through and the broth to thicken slightly.

We ate it with green beans boiled and then tossed with lemon zest and a touch of butter. Very simple, and perfect on a cold wet January night in South Carolina.

On Succotash and Microwaving Sweet Corn

So, as I mentioned in a comment below, we recently heard from Lawson's dad that microwaving fresh corn is way better than boiling it. I looked up several recipes, did some experiments, and found that he is absolutely correct. I'm a convert.

All the prep I did was to cut off the messy tip of the husks with scissors. I didn't pull the silk out -- I just cut off the whole silk-and-husk part that was hanging off the end. I pulled off a few banged-up outer leaves from some ears, but not all. Mostly this was so the corn would fit in our microwave.

Then I microwaved the corn for 4 to 5 minutes, rotating the ears once halfway through. If I put more than two or three ears in at a time, I would increase the cooking time by a few minutes.

Use gloves to rotate and remove the ears -- that corn gets hot, and little pockets of steam in the husks can burn the heck out of your hand.

Let the corn sit for 10-15 minutes so it can steam and cool off, then pull off the husks and silk. The best part: shucking cooked ears is way easier than shucking them raw. And the corn flavor is intense.

I didn't even put butter or salt on this corn, it was so good. It was from somewhere in the Upstate; Lawson's dad brought back 8 ears for us, and I've been wishing for more ever since.

Mostly we ate it plain, but one night I made succotash with all fresh ingredients. It was among the freshest, purest, most summery foods I've ever cooked.


I didn't like any of the recipes I read, many of which called for bacon, which I thought would be wrong here. Fresh lima beans or butter beans might have been good, but I liked the sweetness of the dish without them. So here's my recipe:

Succotash

1-2 tablespoons butter
1 small onion, diced
2 cups fresh tender okra, sliced crosswise into 1" pieces
2 or more cups fresh tomatoes, seeded and roughly chopped
2 ears fresh sweet corn, microwaved and set aside to cool
salt

Saute the onion in butter over medium until soft, not brown. Saute okra lightly. Add tomatoes and let cook for 5 to 10 minutes, until thickened slightly -- you want to keep the tomatoes tasting fresh, not sauce-like. At the last moment, shuck the cooked corn, cut the kernels off, and stir them in. Add salt to taste.

No herbs, no pepper, no nothing -- this is all about the light, sweet flavors of the garden vegetables. It blew me away.

We ate it with buttermilk biscuits (made with Adluh self-rising flour and local buttermilk) and barbecued chicken (marinated in soy sauce with star anise and five-spice powder, then lovingly grilled over a hickory fire by Lawson.

Vegetarian Southern Food

Our pal Mark was in the US last week, and because he is currently not eating meat (long story), I got to cook some vegetarian food. It was fun. I think it's been about five years since I gave up my 12-year vegetarian spell.

Because Mark lives in Kyoto but is from around here, I wanted to make him some Southern food. These are lima beans, cooked very simply overnight in a crockpot, with olive oil and salt added in the last several hours. I experimented with the mustard greens, sauteeing a few chunks of red miso paste in some olive oil to see if I could get a meaty, salty fullness for a base the same way I would from a ham hock or some bacon. It was delicious and did have a full taste and a brownish pot liquor, but I don't know that it was that brilliant.

The grits were fermented. I interviewed Glenn from Anson Mills several months ago, and he told me that during the summer one can pre-soak grits at room temperature and get what he called "pinpoint ferment," which completely changes their taste and texture. I could never find any other information on the phenomenon, but when I soaked some grits Glenn had ground coarsely from John Haulk corn, they did indeed ferment rather quickly. It was a sweet, mild ferment, never sour, and after I let them do that overnight I rinsed them thoroughly and cooked them like normal: 1.5 or so hours on the stove, gently, with salt and butter and a little cream at the end. The fermented flavor was strong, but sweet and corny and smooth. Very strange. Lawson and Mark loved it, too, although they'd never heard of it, either.

White Acre Peas

Lately I've been learning more about Southern peas, which are beans, and include things like black-eyes peas, crowder peas, field peas, and these white acre peas. I think. I'm having a hard time sorting out the taxonomies and the regional variations and figuring out what's going on from my halfhearted internet research. This might need to become a real, carefully researched article.

Anyway, all these pea-beans have been amazing so far. This batch I cooked with just a little bacon, a few garden okra, and some water. I rendered the bacon, added the water and peas and okra, and gave it about 25 minutes at a half-covered simmer. We had it with grits and tomatoes.

Shrimp Purloo

There are about 14 ways to spell the name of this dish, one of which is "pilau"...but pilau means something quite different in Hawaiian than in South Carolinian. So I giggle every time I see it applied to rice. Shrimp pilau would not be a good thing.

Anyway, purloo, perlow, pilau, whatever. It's good and basic and has deep, deep roots in this region -- all the way back to European contact. I bought some local shrimp at the farmer's market last weekend and decided to make some purloo to use it properly.

I used Louis Osteen's recipe almost to the letter, which is something I almost never do because his recipes are usually far too rich. This one was reasonable.

It started with a stock made from the shells of a pound of shrimp. Shrimp shell stock takes all of 20 easy minutes and has the muskiest, saltiest, most profound odor and flavor...so it's always fun. This recipe used 4 cups of chicken stock plus the shells, some fresh thyme, and two bay leaves.

Then I rendered some bacon in my enameled cast iron Dutch oven, set the bacon aside, and sauteed an onion and a red bell pepper in the fat. I stirred in a cup of rice and sauteed that for a few minutes. Then came a little white wine, and the stock (2 and a half cups, reduced from 4 during the stockmaking), and the bacon. I put it in the oven for 20 minutes with the lid on for the rice to absorb the stock.

At the end I sauteed the shrimp over medium high heat for just a minute before adding them to the purloo. I added some chopped parsley, too. It was basic and good.