Christmas In Dry Valley

The view of Rich Mountain from parent's front porch.

My Mom, Dad and brothers moved to the foothills of the Smoky Mountains in Townsend, Tennessee about a year after I started college. My mother's side of the family is from this area, in fact she was born here. Her parents, my Nana and Grandfather, moved to the suburbs of Detroit in the early 1950's to find work in the auto industry when she was one year old, as did many out of work Southerners. East Tennessee in the 1950's was poor and rural, and Detroit was a boom town. Many of these Appalachian expats didn't end up finding any manner of real happiness in Detroit. Some stayed. Some actually moved to the Copper Mountains in the Upper Peninsula because they somewhat resemble the Smokies. Many returned to the mountains they loved. Poverty, it seems, is a more easily accepted lifestyle when you are in a place you have very real love for deep in your bones. My Grandfather drank himself to death in the chair he sat in every day after work in the suburban Detroit home where he raised my mother and uncle. I couldn't tell you if it was because he missed the mountains. He died just a few short months before I was born.

So it wasn't much of a surprise that, after Nana died, my family decided to move south with the help of a bit of money she left them. They have struggled, as most people in east Tennessee seem to, but I think they are very happy to be there. And I have been very happy to visit. We started visiting Tennessee when I was very young and I have spent almost every Christmas there since they moved. Even though I have never lived there,  Tennessee is very much a part of me. Many of my relatives have heavy southern accents and I have great aunts named Bobby and Gladys and Phyllis, most of whom kept extravagant beehives or similar fashionable hairdos most of their lives. My mother cooked things like biscuits and gravy and fried chicken when we were growing up, just like Nana and her sisters would when we visited.

I love the food of the American South, especially the food and food traditions of Appalachia. In the South, where racial divides have historically run very deep, it can be hard to tell where the line between soul food and southern comfort food is. This is what I love about the dinner table. It is truly a harbinger for commonality, equality and democracy. Not so long ago in Townsend it wouldn't be unusual to find smoky country ham, hominy or fine grits, beans baked with ham hocks, wild watercress wilted in bacon fat, or greens in pot liquor on local stoves. Today, the small town of Maryville, the closest metropolis, is surrounded by malls and chain restaurants. My mother and I were talking about how strange it seems to both of us that you can't find a local restaurant that makes a home made biscuit. You are hard pressed to find anything more than typical commodity products on grocery store shelves, barbecue joints are few and far between (though there are a couple of good ones), and you are unlikely to find someone under the age of 50 who has ever tasted wild watercress. But this is still a very, very good place for food.

The renowned Inn at Blackberry Farm is here, where John Fleer got people thinking about the fine food traditions of the foothills and paying good money to experience it. My mother owns a bakery, Wild Mountain Rose Bakery, where she makes delicious, hand made bread from her wood fired oven. The Market in Maryville which sells her bread has a really remarkable butcher shop in it.

And then, of course, there is Allan Benton. Allan Benton is a bit of a hero of mine. He has recently become very well known thanks to the likes of David Chang et al. I have been a customer for some time, before the hoopla. Allan is friendly, kind, and gracious. More often than not he is taking orders by phone at his shop in Madisonville and he will happily drop what he's doing to give passers by a tour while telling the story of Benton's, a story that started with his childhood in Virginia: killing, butchering, curing and smoking hogs for the family. He makes ham and bacon the way he was taught in the hills as a child, and this is what makes his products so special. Many country ham producers in the south are changing their hams to suit modern tastes: lessening the salt and smoke, controlling their curing cells to keep the funk at bay. But a Benton's ham is made as it always has been. It is as aggressive and wild and boisterous as the south itself and is probably very much like the hams that were made by the first foothills settlers two centuries ago. Admittedly, it's not for everyone.  In fact, we had to stop putting Benton's bacon in our burger because too many Yankee princesses were complaining that it was too smoky (as it turns out, Allan says even in Tennessee they sell more unsmoked bacon than smoked). But I love love love it. It is an experience not unlike drinking Scotch from Islay, whisky that is peaty and smoky sometimes to the point of becoming medicinal. And once again, some people love it, others don't. This area was settled in large part by Scots, so this comparison seems all too appropriate, as does my appreciation for both, as a Scot descendent myself.

Many years during the Christmas visit we make the trek out to Madisonville to see Benton's. One of the little known gems you can get there is his breakfast sausage. It is a raw pork sausage studded with nutmeg and sage packed in to a sleeve of burlap and cold smoked. It is without a doubt the best breakfast sausage on earth. I am very proud of my own, but it falls very short of Mr. Benton's. Having breakfast sausage on hand in the Millar house means biscuits and gravy will follow. I have been working on perfecting my own biscuit recipe and am always excited to make them for Mom to see what she thinks of version ?.0. My mother puts Pet brand evaporated milk in her gravy. I never knew this and when she told me I was a little suspect. As it turns out, a lot of people in East Tennessee cooked with cans of evaporated milk. There was a Pet production facility here so it was inexpensive, and it kept well without refrigeration. This was pretty important in a part of the country that was economically depressed and that sees raging heat and humidity in the summer months. Some of these hollers and mountain communities didn't see electricity (and therefore refrigeration) until the 1970's. So if you didn't have a cow, you had no milk unless you had Pet.

I have always loved my mother's biscuits and gravy above all others, so as I was making gravy this morning, I did as she suggested and used a can of evaporated milk. And the lights suddenly went on. I have never been able to make it myself as well as she could, and now I know why. Evaporating the milk concentrates and faintly caramelizes the lactose, milk's natural sugar, which gives the gravy that same subtle dairy sweetness, and turns good into great.

This is one of the reasons I love to cook with my Mom. I constantly pester her with questions, and sometimes I am blindsided by some little nugget of wisdom that I never thought to ask about and she never thought to share. She taught me to cook and she is still teaching me. My personal history is wrapped up in the things she learned to cook from her mother, right along side the history of the people of this region, all those good things to eat, and the wonderful stories that get passed around our home. Stories about great grandmother Rose who cooked most of her life on a wood stove and could tell with a pass of the hand if the fire was ready for baking a pie. Or how she taught them the hard but necessary truth about where chicken comes from when she went into the yard and wrung a bird's neck to make dinner one night. Or what it is like to go without so your children will have something to eat that day in school. Or, perhaps, a story or two about the great abundance of both food and joy around the table on Christmas night, now that the days of living on the edge of hunger are at least for now a memory for my family. It is quite often a story about something simple, a piece of candy her mother gave her, maybe, that will cause her to pause and remember Nana, her sweet and giving mother, who she lost too soon, who stayed connected with the tall, rocky hills of Townsend, and kept them alive for her daughter, who kept them alive for me. Cooking and eating are one of our great cultural archives, but also one of our most fragile. Writing about food helps, but it does not replace the acts of cooking and eating. If we don't take a little time to preserve the foods that are so central to our personal histories by bringing them to life in the kitchen and the dining room, they will be lost and unrecoverable. This yearly sojourn to Tennessee brings things to life that I may never cook in a restaurant. But they remind me who I am, and put my feet firmly in the red clay of Tennessee, if only for a moment.

Miracle Tonics

I have been in a very bad mood at work lately.

I am admittedly not very far from flying off the handle about something on a fairly regular basis, but the last couple of weeks have found me very often unjustifiably and irrationally angry at the slightest provocation. There are many reasons for this, not the least of which is the onslaught of corporate christmas parties filling our docket this month, and principally one which has been spirit dampening and soul crushing at every turn. This particular group has loads of money to spend. You would think this is a chef's dream, but that is a horrible myth. The fact is, the more money someone has to spend, the more they have to say about how it's spent, and money, I am quickly learning, very rarely is an indication of good taste. The big check waltzes in to a restaurant and demands their tastes be met without one care in the world about what wonderful things a talented, professional, and knowledgable crew might be able to do to make them happy if they would only open their hearts to it. Very quickly, all dreams of culinary liberation through finance fade. Very quickly, that opportunity cook with Alba white truffles or pour some stellar grower champagne gets shoved aside for someone who wants a mountain of shrimp cocktail and filet with lobster tail, enough filet, mind you, that each and every guest is allotted over a pound. With this group, it's all about more, not better.

But they have that check. That huge check. And they are not naive; they know exactly what power they have. No restaurant is in the position to turn it down. So you do it. You book the party and you order the shrimp. You make the cocktail recipe they brought you by Sarah Lee. And I am a bit of a prima donna. So it kills me. It really and truly crushes me. My profession, the craft that so many thoughtful, passionate, creative people have dedicated so much labor and love toward giving it the remarkable beauty it has in modern times, deserves better than to be some philistine's errand boy.

But, the money is there and so is your standard. You cook from scratch, order the best shrimp and the best filet, and you cook a delicious, if not inspired, meal, which is exactly what happened. I spoke in the prime rib post about how much I enjoy finding some love for the over done and abused, and shrimp cocktail & filet sure fit that category. So my staff and I took them very seriously, as seriously as we would have taken those Alba truffles.

And two extraordinary things happened.

Two extraordinary broths happened.

First:
The filet was marinated in a powder we made form dried porcini mushroom, fennel, and cayenne for a couple of days.  This is a cheesy, steak house chef wanna be preparation but it's tasty, and when it rested out, the jus it left behind was shockingly good. Blood red and powerful, infused fully with the flavor of the spices and dried mushrooms. The beef and porcini packed enough amino acids into that roasting pan it could have spawned new life. We knew it would be good, but when it came time to execute, the conscientious sourcing, the extra care put in to preparing the steaks for roasting and the pitch perfect roast and rest left behind a liquor so very and unexpectedly special, that it led us to cook something else we normally would have very little love for, something that is typically made with very poor ingredients and very little care or attention: a French dip. Made with the left over filet (as you might imagine, there was plenty), some home made bread, French raclette, grilled red onions. Brian, barely audible past the mouthful of broth soaked beef and bread, murmured "best French dip ever".

To my way of thinking, a jus is the best of the flavored cooking liquid cannon. Jus is the liquid that naturally runs from a roast as it rests before carving, sometimes augmented by a little stock made from the same beast. So it isn't water steeped with bones, it is the pure, undiluted juices of the animal, plus whatever salt and seasoning the cook used to get the roast ready for the oven. And in my world it's hard to imagine better friends to lovely, rosy, day old roast and some soulful jus than bread, cheese, and onions.

Second:
We decided to make risotto with the lobster this year. Last year, they asked for way too much. One of our cooks spent an entire shift killing lobsters and they ate less than a third of it. So we took a different path, used fewer lobsters and had shells for stock. We also needed to poach Mount Shrimpcocktail along with twenty pounds of stone and snow crab. So we used the lobster stock as the foundation for a court bouillon to which we added some late season blanched celery & leeks from our friends at Visser Farm, lemons, fresh herbs, white wine, a small handful of salty olives, some Spanish piquillo peppers and coarse, dried Aleppo pepper. I began poaching the crab and some proteins started to collect on the surface and throughout the broth. Then I moved on to the shrimp, fantastic brown shrimp from the Gulf (Americans are justifiably proud of the shellfish that is raised near it's shores -- it is the best in the world). As I was poaching the proteins began to amass in the bouillon and toward the end it started to clear. I realized almost too late, just as I was getting ready to get rid of it, that I had made consommé by sheer luck. And it was delicious.

Consommé is a very finely clarified and fortified stock or broth (the fortified part is often over looked, but is crucial). It is one of my very favorite things to make. How good your consommé is depends largely on the excellence of the broth you start with. Get a rich, flavorful broth and build a raft made from the same uncooked protein used to make the broth and aromatics. As the proteins cook and coagulate, they act like a fine net, catching all the particulates that make a stock cloudy. If done properly, the strained liquid is crystal clear and deeply flavored. Egg whites are very often added to the raft. They coagulate very well and make for a strong raft resulting in a super clear broth. The problem is they also strip out flavor and color, so the very best consommés use only meats to form the raft. The exceptions, obviously, are vegetable consommés, which have no protein as their base and must use egg whites. There are other ways to clarify broths, like ice filtration, but the old way is the best way, mostly because the ingredients in the raft also fortify the broth, boosting flavor and contributing color. It is a very favorite if old fashion method. It's lost favor over the last few decades, perhaps because it is expensive and simple to the point where modern diners no longer recognize or appreciate its value, or maybe because it's sometimes used as a restorative by the ill, elderly, or weak who want something nourishing but not particularly challenging to eat.

If consommé boils or undercooks, it fails. The idea that one so tasty came together by accident was probably much more exciting to me than it was to my cooks, who seemed a little bewildered by my enthusiasm. To me it was reminder that no matter what you're doing in a kitchen, even something as tired and overdone as shrimp cocktail, if you cook with good food and treat it with care and respect something delicious and sometimes something unexpected will result. These broths were restorative indeed, a quiet and simple reminder of how good work truly is it's own reward.

***
So, there can be some confusion in edible liquid nomenclature. The words broth or jus or stock are used somewhat interchangeably. Please allow me to give my own little glossary of terms, most of which is probably sound, historically speaking, and some of which comes from my personal and not at all defendable musings:

STOCK: Bones and/or vegetables and aromatics simmered in water. Used as a base for soups and sauces or as a cooking medium for other meats, vegetables, or grains.

BROTH:  Stock which also uses a little lean meat to boost and deepen flavors. Sometimes a broth is the by product of cooking meat for consumption, like in chicken and dumplings. Broths are rich, rustic, and flavorful, and often served as is to accompany poached meats and vegetables.

JUS: The juices that run from a roast, perhaps extended with a little wine or perhaps stock made from the same animal. They are dense and deeply flavorful, and usually a bit aggressively seasoned from contact with the roast.

ESSENCE:  A broth reduced by half.

CONSOMMÉ: Clarified and fortified meat, fish, or vegetable broth, typically served as soup.

GLACE: A very heavily reduced, gelatin rich meat stock or broth, usually used as the base of a sauce.