In the extremely unlikely case that you have leftover cornbread that is a couple days old and a bit too dry to be enjoyed, you have two choices.
Look deep into the tepid pond of your soul and ask, sweet or savoury?
If the response comes back sweet, you make cornbread pudding. If the answer is savoury, you make cornbread stuffing.
Leftover cornbread and the dishes made therefrom are quite different than stale bread and its children. As cornbread is a quick bread, the baker went out of his or her way to avoid gluten development, and no doubt added sugar and fat in the form of butter or buttermilk or sour cream. This kept the fresh cornbread tender, but … Continue reading.
This happy fellow at left is a sour cabbage head, sauerkraut in whole-cabbage form.
You can make sour cabbage heads simply by burying little cabbages throughout your sauerkraut crock after you have liberally salted and mixed your shredded cabbage. The mass ferments together, and at the appointed time you can prod through the conventional sauerkraut til you find the whole heads of cured cabbage. It’s rather like an Easter egg hunt only with more lactobacillus.
It didn’t cross my mind to make sour cabbage heads this season until about a month after I had started my large crock of kraut. Lisa had bought some pretty little savoy cabbages. I stole one. Then I dug a deep well into the centre … Continue reading.
There are always mysteries in old cookbooks, because even the most unpoetical depend on the existence of a living tradition for the cook to know when the result is correct.
-Charles Perry, from In Taste: Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery
I think this post is particularly appropriate to the Christmas season, as in the next couple days thousands of cookbooks will be purchased and given as gifts, and even more recipes will be searched out online and acted out in home kitchens.
I myself already have an Alexandrian hoard of cookbooks. Some of them are completely useless. Others have changed the trajectory of my career and home-life. I also record recipes very meticulously, and oftentimes … Continue reading.
This is a citron. Its name is confusing: most hear it and assume it is part of the citrus family. “Citron,” after all, is the French word for lemon, and there is a citrus fruit grown in the Mediterranean called a citron, or kitron, that resembles a large lime.
The subject of this post is emphatically not a citrus fruit. It is a type of melon, so it often goes by the name citron melon to avoid confusion.
At first glance a citron melon looks like a small watermelon, except that it is perfectly round, with spackled streaks arching from pole to pole. If you cut this globe into hemispheres you’ll find an interior that is pale green, crunchy, … Continue reading.
Braised cabbage is wholly satisfying: warm and hearty and comforting in a way that vegetables usually only achieve in soup form. I guess it doesn’t hurt that there’s lots of pork fat in it, but the flavour of the cabbage is the star.
With slaw and sauerkraut, braised cabbage forms what I call the trinity of cabbage preparations. It is a cherished dish at Thanksgiving, and any wintry night.
Cook some type of fatty pork – bacon, loose sausage, and jowl all fit the bill – until it is golden brown and has rendered some golden fat into the pot.
Cook sliced onions and garlic in the pork fat until starting to turn translucent. Add the cabbage and cook briefly, … Continue reading.
In the summer of 2012 I spent a lot of time thinking about meatballs. Mostly I thought about them as I was making them, which took several hours every other week.
They are a labour of love for certain.
Once you’ve mixed up the meat and the eggs and the milk and bread crumbs and whatever else you like, you could just press it into a loaf pan, call it meatloaf, and be done with it. But you won’t do that, because you want meatballs. Even though they’re awkward, and they roll around on your plate, and don’t quite fit into a submarine sandwich, you want them, because they’re fun.
Toddy, or hot toddy, is a Scots drink of whisky, sugar, and hot water.
I’ve read that the name refers to Tod’s Well, an ancient spring that once gave Edinburgh its water.[1] In other words it is yet another instance of the charming tradition of referring to whisky as water.[2]
Ancestral wisdom tells us that taking a mug of toddy in bed before sleep will cure many ailments.
The traditional toddy recipe I have calls for equal parts whisky and water. Modern recipes are more likely 2 parts whisky to 3 parts or more of water. They also typically use citrus and spices. Though not traditional, I think the citrus is essential, as the sweet, boozy cocktail absolutely … Continue reading.
The short version of this post goes like this: remember when we made crème anglaise? That sauce made from milk, cream, and sugar, flavoured with vanilla and thickened with egg yolks, gently cooked on a double-boiler? If you put that sauce into a well-chilled household ice cream churn, you can make pretty good ice cream.
The long version of this post is more like this:
There are two broad styles of ice cream: Philadelphia and French. Philly ice cream typically contains only milk, cream, and sugar, while French ice cream also contains eggs. In fact, the crème anglaise we made last week is very, very similar to some recipes for French ice cream mix. The only difference is that … Continue reading.
The Origins of Butterscotch. Though butterscotch is common in Scotland, the “scotch” in the name does not refer to that country. In fact “scotch” is a very old English word for an etching, or scratch. Another instance of this suffix is in “hopscotch”, the game in which children jump across etchings or chalk-marks on the ground.
Scotch is also an old style of candy. To make scotches, sugar is boiled to hard crack, then flavoured and poured onto a buttered slab or dish. Portioning the individual candies while the sugar is still hot would yield sloppy candies with stringy edges, so once the sugar is partially cooled, the candies are marked out by cutting lines partway down into the mass. … Continue reading.
The last two posts have included the two most important recipes for making gingerbread houses: gingerbread and royal icing.
This season is only the second time I’ve made a gingerbread house, the first being in 2010 when Lisa and I made a gingerbread church with stained glass windows. Thanks to the nimble index fingers of Pinterest, that has become one of the most popular posts on this site.
This year I made another house in the same style, only instead of a church, I modeled the building after the one that Lisa and I live in, in McKernan.
In the extremely unlikely case that you have leftover cornbread that is a couple days old and a bit too dry to be enjoyed, you have two choices.
Braised cabbage is wholly satisfying: warm and hearty and comforting in a way that vegetables usually only achieve in soup form. I guess it doesn’t hurt that there’s lots of pork fat in it, but the flavour of the cabbage is the star.
