Delicious rice and beans: Variation 941

An obsessive person could spend the rest of their life chronicling the variations on rice and beans that exist around the world and a hungry person could do worse than to not have more extravagant options. I read once that rice and beans, when combined with corn, create a kind of super-food that makes particularly efficient fuel for the body, which shed a lot of light on the tacos I grew up with. Mexicans have been living well on the combination for centuries, but their Caribbean cousins have had a lot more fun with it.

Hoppin' John

This recipe is in the excellent book Serious Pig by John Thorne. The section on Louisiana is a cultural history told through food, combining French and African cooking with native ingredients to create a landmark of America. And some seriously delicious rice and beans.

He says this dish is a stubbornly traditional one, probably coming with slaves from the Caribbean and spreading through the South. Apparently there are very few recorded changes in over 100 years of published recipes, kind of an 'isn't broke so don't fix it' thing. His explanation is short and it worked for me, so I'll quote it:

1 cup black-eyed peas or cowpeas prepared for cooking; a small chunk of
lean slab bacon, sliced thick, or a cracked ham or beef bone or a small chunk of salt pork, sliced and simmered in ample water for 15 minutes to reduce the salt; 1 onion, chopped; 1 cup raw rice; 1 hot red pepper, fresh or dried, seeded and diced, or Tobasco sauce to taste; and (all, some or one of the following as you choose) 1 clove of garlic, minced; 1 bay leaf; minced fresh parsley; a little thyme. Season well with salt and pepper.

Bring 5 cups of water to a boil. Add the beans, with the bay leaf, if using, and let them simmer for about 45 minutes. (If you are using a cracked pork or beef bone, add it now also, and ignore all bacon/salt pork instructions, frying up the onion in a bit of melted fat or oil and adding it when you add the rice.) While the beans are cooking, prepare the bacon/salt pork by frying it until the pieces are crisp. Either reserve these until the end of cooking (to lend a touch of crispness) or put them into the beans when the rice is added. Fry the onion in the fat once the pork has been removed until it is translucent but not brown. Either way, reserve the fat.

At the end of 45 minutes, taste the beans for doneness; your tongue should be able to mash them against the roof of the mouth. If they are soft but not mushy, they are done just right. Eyeball the remaining liquid in the pot- there should be at least 2 1/2 cups. If not, add more water. Pour in the rice and mix in all the other seasonings, the bacon/salt pork bits (unless holding them for the end), and all- or as much as you want of - the cooking fat. Stir the mixture well and bring the liquid up to a simmer. Let cook for another 20 minutes. Then turn off the heat and let the hoppin' John rest for 10 minutes. Taste. The beans should be just a little more tender, the rice perfectly cooked. Crumble over the reserved bacon or sprinkle over the crisp salt-pork bits, if any, and serve. Pass around a platter of cornbread and a salad of fresh greens or a bowl of cooked ones. This is a meal that will feed 4 very well indeed.

Indeed.

I served it with cornbread from a recipe in the same book and something that was supposed to be cooked greens but ended up a kind of hot salad that wasn't bad, despite bearing no relation to the recipe it came from.

This dish was great. I've had New Orleans style Red Beans and Rice dishes many times, but never hoppin' John. It's a little more straightforward, more bacon and less gravy. You can taste the herbs and hot peppers in this simple combination, without all the sauce that makes every bite of red beans and rice pretty much like the last one. I've only driven through New Orleans, so I'm sure I haven't had the primo red beans and rice with a gravy you'd drink if you could, but for my taste hoppin' John is a fine substitute, easy to reproduce and very adjustable to taste.

Fried Fish, Nor'east Style

Eating fish in Kansas typically meant fried catfish, a delicacy when done right but not exactly the top-tier of seafood selections. As part of my new 'connecting with the ocean' thing I've been turning my roommates wild bluefish into some of my favorite restaurant dishes. I'm gonna catch a couple of these buggers myself next month, and believe me, they're in for it.

Fish Cakes

I love fish and crab cakes. We ate frozen fish sticks a handful of times when I was a kid, but they never became a regular thing. I had a fresh, properly spiced crab cake for the first time in my teens and I immediately understood how the bastardization got rolling. Most of the pre-made frozen garbage in the store started as a popular dish and fish sticks are no different. This recipe, from The Great East Coast Seafood Book by Yvonne Young Tarr, is the redemption of the fish stick.

The recipe recommends using cod, but I had bluefish so that's what I used. Worked great.

Ingredients:

1 lb cooked, flaked cod, haddock or ling
2 eggs
1/2 cup Enriched White Sauce (recipe follows)
1/2 tsp dry mustard
1/4 tsp powdered sage
Salt and pepper to taste
1/4 cup milk
Flour
1/4 cup dry bread crumbs
Oil for frying

I was very annoyed when I realized the white sauce required a whole other step, but it's easy, so it passed. It's basically a white gravy flavored with onion.

White Sauce Ingredients:

3 tbl butter
3 tbl flour
1 cup cold milk
1 cup cold cream
1/2 tsp salt
White pepper
1 small onion, thinly sliced

The directions in the book are concise and specific, so I'll just quote it:

Melt the butter over medium heat in a heavy saucepan. Saute the onion until the slices soften, then discard onion and blend in the flour. Stir in the flour with a wire whisk for 3 or 4 minutes. When the mixture is smooth, remove from the heat and add the cold milk and cream all at once, stirring until the mixture is well blended and lump-free. Return to medium heat and cook, stirring continuously, until the sauce bubbles and is creamy and thick. Season to taste with salt and white pepper.

Okay, with that done we're ready to get to these cakes.

This is a perfect dish to make for dinner because you prepare it hours beforehand and it can be multiplied to include as many cakes as you need. Start by mixing the fish, one egg, white sauce and seasonings. Put this mix in the fridge until it gets cold. The next step is shaping the cakes and they hold together better as they get colder. It took me a couple of tries to figure out how to shape them right, but my only problem was not leaving them in the refrigerator long enough.

When the mix is cold, lay a platter with wax paper. Beat the last egg with the milk and put the bread crumbs into a dish. Put the flour into a dish nearby as well.

Grab a spoon. It seems to be easier to get the right amount if you use a big spoon, they're also more regular in size that way. Dip a heaping spoonful of the mix and drop it into your hand. Roll it into a ball and then flatten it into a thick cake.

Dip both sides of the cake in the flour first, then into the egg-milk mixture and then in the bread crumbs. Repeat until all of the mixture is in cakes, sitting on wax paper. Refrigerate for two hours or until you're ready to cook them. I usually give the cakes another run on the flour, egg-milk and bread crumb assembly line right before they go into the oil.

Heat 1/4 inch oil in a large skillet and fry the cakes on both sides, turning once. They cook pretty quickly, so I usually let them go until they're good and crispy. I never managed to cook them enough to dry out the insides, so cook them to your crispy quotient and they'll be fine.

I tried all kinds of different spices in the mix with success. Garlic chopped super-fine, dried thyme and chile powder all worked great. I didn't do any kind of sauce or dip with any of them because they were all juicy and didn't need it.

Very nice.

Chow-da!

Growing up in a landlocked state, the ocean was always something that existed in books, like China or the moon. Even though I've lived within minutes of the Atlantic for six years I still live like I'm in Kansas. I've been to the water maybe five times. It's pitiful. So in an effort to begin correcting this oversight I've been cooking more fish. Not exactly fresh air, saltwater and sunshine, but it's a start.

Fish Chowder #2

Another way I'm getting back to our primordial origins is by going out to catch some of this fish I'm cooking. I haven't done it yet, but my roommate brought back two grocery bags full of wrapped bluefish from a boat trip off of Long Island. Apparently you pay $30, they take you out on a boat, give you a pole and you fish all afternoon. They clean and wrap what you catch, bring you back to the subway and send you home sunburned and smelling awful. City fishing at it's best (easiest).

Bluefish was the catch of the day last time the roommate went out. Bluefish isn't everybody's favorite, but it's got a history all of it's own. One of the cookbooks the old tenants left behind when they moved is called The Great East Coast Seafood Book. It's a great book, very informative and thorough, which is good for a kid who barely knows from catfish.

The book has an entire chapter on bluefish that starts with a paragraph that seems designed to get me going:

Although an absolutely first-rate food fish, the "blue" is perhaps even more highly prized as a gamefish because of its evil disposition and the savage fury of its feeding habits. Only the needle-toothed piranha of South America (to which blues may have an ancient link) equals this tasty table fish in lust for blood. Known as the "chopping machine of the sea," or simply "chopper," no other species can come close to the blue for sheer gluttony and wastefulness. Voracious almost to the point of madness, they often empty inland waters of smaller fish simply by making an appearance - sometimes actually beaching these small fry as they flee in terror before them. But to give this devil its due, few fish provide more succulent table fare, nor are many scrappier, trickier, more dynamic or better appreciated by anglers than are these.

The recipe I wanted to start with is from Serious Pig by John Thorne. Thorne isn't quite as generous in his description of the bluefish, but he does mention a very old comment about one year when blue made 'the boss chowder of the season'. My exposure to chowders started with a trip to the Northeast when I was a kid. I ate clam chowder at every restaurant we went to from Massachusetts to Maine and loved every bowl equally. I'm still not sure why I wanted to eat hot clam soup all through the month of August, but after that summer I always ate chowder when I left the Midwest.

Ingredients:

2 lbs chowder fish, cut into fillets
1 bay leaf
Salt
1/4 cup diced salt pork, or thick cut bacon if you can't find the other
1 large onion, chopped
4 to 6 potatoes, cut 'thick-thin'
3 cups milk
Several sprigs fresh parsley, leaves minced
Black pepper to taste
8 common crackers
2 tablespoons unsalted butter

Put the fish fillets and bay leaf in 3 cups of lightly salted water and simmer for about 7 minutes or until the fish is cooked through. Fry up the salt pork until it starts to melt down and then add the onions. Cook until they start to soften.

Remove the cooked fish from the pot, leaving the broth in the pot. Add the salt pork, onions and potatoes to the broth and simmer until the potatoes start to break down, about 12 minutes. When the potatoes are cooked, pull out the bay leaf, flake the fish and add it back to the broth along with the milk and parsley. Bring it all back to a simmer and then turn the flame as low as possible to let the chowder steep for a few minutes. It should stop rolling at this point and just steam. Taste for seasoning, adding black pepper to taste.

While your chowder is finishing up, split your crackers and warm them under the broiler. I'd continue paraphrasing Thorne, but he finishes it off so nicely:

Ladle the chowder into warmed bowls, float the toasted common crackers on top, and drop in a chunk of butter - about half a tablespoon for each bowl - to melt on the way to the table.

He's got a handful of chowder recipes in Serious Pig. I chose this one because it didn't require fish heads, only the fillets I already had. My chowder experience to this point was limited to clam, but Thorne traces the published history of chowder back to the Norwegians who were visiting the upper reaches of North America long before the Pilgrims set down roots. Originally chowder meant fish and, if you like fish better than clams, it makes sense.

There isn't much I can say about this chowder that you can't figure out for yourself from reading the simple instructions. It's thick and creamy, with delicious chunks of fish all through it. My chowder had a good bite from a lot of black pepper. It was great. I made the same dish three times, only varying the toppings. I used sour cream and scallions instead of butter one time, hot sauce and chile powder instead of black pepper the next time. The dish is versatile and had no problem adjusting to whatever I had on the shelf.

Thorne's description of discovering chowder is much more personal and eloquent than my own, but his bigger point seemed to be that chowder has become so ubiquitous because it's the most democratic of dishes. Given milk, potatoes, onion and pork you can make a chowder with whatever else comes up in the net. Even if you grew up landlocked and paid somebody else to clean your fish. Now that's versatile.