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Meats

We are not contrary people by nature but find it very hard to heed warnings to limit, or heaven forfend curtail entirely, our consumption of succulent morsels of tender flesh. Would life be worth living without bacon, cold cuts, sausages, hearty stews, and mouthwatering roasts? We think not. We know there are like-minded folk out there who obsess about such things as much as we do; some go so far as to wield the cleaver and saw, butchering their own meat. We salute you all. Good meat, we are all coming to appreciate, comes from well-reared animals that have lived full and, dare I say, happy lives. So for all the following recipes, do source your ingredients as best you can and be sure that the life that was given to sustain your own was not sacrificed in vain.

Weight Watcher’s Veal

My mother’s penchant for contriving strange dishes was proverbial. It might have been peas and raisins in a salad or maybe flounder cooked in the dishwasher. Or the “just like fresh” objects drawn from the freezer at the slightest hint that someone might be hungry.

So it was with no small measure of apprehension when, twenty years ago, she invited my new girlfriend to dinner. Mind you, this was during the week, and that meant that we would be eating at home because my parents were avid workday weight watchers. The situation was complicated by the fact that I’d had a string of strange girlfriends in years prior: an athletics coach from northern England with an inscrutable accent, a mad Las Vegas playwright obsessed with Armageddon, and a few others I have blocked out. In each case, the crucial first meeting and meal was fraught with anxiety for one simple reason—none of these women was Jewish. So I knew this one, my latest catch, would be treated differently, as the keeper and someone my mother would go out of her way to impress. That meant something special and home cooked.

My mother chose one of her signature dishes, something my father apparently liked, or never claimed otherwise. It was a dish I had come to dread. This night was to be a cozy supper for four of Weight Watcher’s Veal, as she called it.

This is how I recall the dish being made: Obtain 1 pound of ground veal. Place it in a tepid pan without any oil until it oozes its liquid and boils. Cook until a grayish mass. Then add a packet of Lipton’s onion soup mix. Add in a can of tomato paste, followed by enough water to make it vaguely chili-like. The key to the dish is that it then has to be cooked for several hours on the stovetop, loosely covered so its odors permeate the entire neighborhood. At the last minute, add a can of sliced button mushrooms, only partially drained to preserve the flavor of the can. Garnish with something like mandarin orange slices or pineapple rings. It is best served with converted rice.

Now when this dish appeared on the kitchen table (not dining room, presumably to lend an air of homeyness) all I can recall is my girlfriend’s jaw dropping as she watched the pale and lurid mass being doled onto the plate. That she actually managed to get it down, out of politeness, was a minor miracle, as was the fact that she married me anyway.

This is how I make a pretty similar dish today: Take 1 pound of pork shoulder (aka country ribs) and coarsely chop by hand. Season with salt, pepper, oregano, and ground cumin. Heat a pan until extremely hot, pour in some olive oil and immediately place in the pork without stirring. It will smoke. Only when it is brown on one side and a nice fond has been created should you stir. Add in 1 finely chopped onion and let it brown. Lower the heat, and add a few cups of dry white wine to deglaze and a drizzle of vinegar.

Next take 2 dried mulato or ancho chilies and toast in a dry skillet. Then put them in a mortar with 1 cup of hot water. Let sit for 10 minutes, then pound into a fine paste. (Or blend if you must.) Add this to the simmering meat. Let cook for about 20 minutes, and then add about 1 cup of cooked kidney beans—or better yet teparies, my favorite. Then add 1 cup of hominy—nixtamalized whole white corn kernels. (You can make this yourself from field corn soaked in lye or calcium hydroxide or buy it canned.) If you like, a square of really good dark chocolate melted in will make this dish sing. Continue to cook very gently to let the flavors meld. Add a little water if it gets too dry. Serve with a crumble of queso fresco, some chopped tomato, and a few sprigs of cilantro.

—K

Pottage of Fat Goose with Pureed Peas

If you perchance peruse historic goose recipes, going much farther back than Dickens’s roast goose served on the Cratchits’ Christmas table, you will find a panoply of intriguing techniques. There is goose baked whole in a pastry crust in sixteenth-century Italy; goose stuffed with oats and boiled; goose semiroasted, slashed, and finished on the grill to make what was known as a carbonado in Restoration England; goose ragouts; and goose served in a staggering variety of sauces. But one in particular caught my attention. It hails from Le Cuisiner of Pierre de Lune, published in Paris in 1656, and involves salted-cured goose, served in a pottage of pureed peas. Here is the recipe, translated from the original:

Potage D’oie Grasse Aux Pois Passés

If the goose is salted, do not lard it; if it is not, then lard it with bacon; then cook it in a pan with lard, and then cook through with bouillon, and a bundle (of herbs). Cook your peas separately and pass through a sieve with the goose bouillon, parsley, a bit of pepper, and a morsel of green citron. Garnish with fried bread and little bits of crumbled bacon.

To help you re-create this dish, here is a full description of the technique. Carefully remove each breast half from the goose with a sharp boning knife. Keep the skin attached. Remove the legs and thighs intact for another use, such as confit. Use the bones and giblets for a light stock, which you can freeze for use later in the recipe. (Reserve the liver for yourself, seared and served on crackers.)

Mix 2 tablespoons of fine sea salt with 1¹⁄₂ tablespoons of unrefined sugar, ¹⁄₂ teaspoon of Insta Cure No. 1 (or pink salt, which can be bought online or at specialty grocers), 1 tablespoon ground pepper, and 1 tablespoon of crushed juniper berries. Liberally coat the breasts, put into a large gallon-size zip-closing plastic bag, and store in the refrigerator for 7 to 10 days. Turn the bag over every day.

Remove the breasts from the fridge, rinse off and pat dry. Brown them gently in a pan with 2 tablespoons of melted lard (or goose fat). Toss in a bouquet garni tied with string. Pour over goose stock to cover halfway and cook the breasts through very gently, with the pan covered, 15 to 20 minutes. The final texture and taste will be remarkably like cooked ham.

Meanwhile boil a pound of green or yellow split peas in the bouillon with some parsley, pepper, and candied green citron. Pass through a sieve or puree in a blender or food processor. To serve, put the peas, which should be fairly thick, in a large deep platter and lay the goose breasts, thinly sliced, on top. Scatter croutons and bits of crumbled bacon on top for garnish. Serves 4 to 6 people.

—K

Pickled Pig’s Feet

E-bone and Mookie, my two sons, and I have some extremely silly rituals. Among these is going to pay our respects to the pickled pig’s feet at the supermarket. They sit on the top shelf, aisle six, above the Spam display. In a big glass jar float little pink nubbins of gnarly flesh, skin, and fat. They look absolutely vile. I take the jar down (I’m certain it’s the only one that has ever existed) greet it warmly, consider buying it for a split second, and always put it back. Why I am at once compelled to strike a cordial friendship with the feet but also long to taste them, I can’t explain. It’s not a weird-food machismo sort of thing because I love every part of the pig unabashedly.

Who eats these anyway? I’m fairly certain it’s a southern dish, ultimately German. But the Irish, too, have their crubeens; think of the song “Galway Races” and “a big crubeen for thruppence to be pickin’ while you’re able,” but I have never been able to find them in Ireland. The English, too, once loved their pig’s pettitoes and I have cooked some historic recipes with miserable results. So maybe it was a just a challenge. The easiest place to find pig’s feet is at an Asian supermarket.

Wherever you find yours, they should be split and cross-sectioned. Every pig comes with four trotters, right? They must be somewhere. Simmer them in a pot of water with aromatics such as celery, carrot, onion, and bay leaf until tender, 1 to 2 hours. Then put them in a jar, cover halfway with the simmering broth and half with white vinegar. Add a good handful of salt, some pepper, maybe a bay leaf, sage, coriander seeds, even a chili pepper wouldn’t hurt. Cover the jar and leave it right out on the counter, as I am told was common practice in groceries throughout the South, right there next to the pickled eggs. Let the feet pickle a month or so. The flavor is truly intriguing: sour, piggy, fatty. It’s surprising that they’re not tough but really soft and tender, especially the skin. The brining liquid gels as well, even at room temperature. There is not much meat on them, but they’re quite tasty. Not at all the chewy old foot you might expect. The idea of nibbling away at toes can be arresting, but it’s good.

—K

Boudin Noir

I went for a ride one day, an aimless jaunt driven by boredom, and found myself at a huge newly remodeled Southeast Asian supermarket. I wandered around, looking for nothing in particular, pretending not to notice the intriguing aromas. I saw some very nice-looking produce, big bags of rice, live fish in tanks. And then, there it was. My heart’s desire. Slightly stained, dripping a bit, but exactly what I’ve always been looking for. A bucket of blood. Five pounds of blood for $6. I bought a slab of pork belly and screwed up my courage to make some real boudin noir. Aka black pudding, alias morcilla. Whatever you call it, it’s blood in a casing. Of course I imagined the bucket spilling in the car on the way home and getting stopped by a policeman: “Trust me officer, it’s really just pig’s blood!”

The procedure could not be more simple, if, that is, you can get past the bizarre gelatinous mass of congealed blood in the bucket. Here’s how. This is a recipe that avoids fillers to maximize the full flavor of blood, which is absolutely delicious. Around the world you will find similar recipes that extend the blood with oats, breadcrumbs, and rice. Do as you please.

Take 2 pounds of very finely chopped pork belly, which is, like bacon, more than half fat, so the final mix should be a fifth fat, or 20 percent. To this you will add about 3 pounds of blood. You can squish it all up with your fingers to get it back to liquid state or, if you’re squeamish, use an immersion blender. Add 1 teaspoon of Insta Cure No. 1 (that’s the brand name for a salt and sodium nitrite mix), 3 tablespoons salt, a lot of pepper, even more nutmeg (which I adore), some thyme, and about 1 cup of shallots fried in fat. Pour the mixture through a funnel into the casings. You’ll get about five foot-long puddings if you use beef middles. Poach these very gently in a big stockpot for about 25 minutes. At this point you can refrigerate or freeze them. A lovely variation on the recipe is to add pine nuts and raisins, and a touch of chocolate and a pinch of sugar. The sweetness is surprisingly fetching.

When ready to serve, sauté them whole in a pan first. I find it best halfway through cooking to cut each pudding into rounds and sauté them so the sides get brown and crispy. You can serve with Granny Smith apples cooked right in the same pan. I will not hesitate to tell you, even at the risk of boasting, that this is the best boudin noir I have ever tasted. If you serve them with a fried egg, a roasted tomato, some mushrooms, fried bread, and rashers of bacon, you will understand that of which true bliss consists.

—K

Liverwurst

As long as we’re stuffing casings, here’s something just as easy to make and really delicious. You’ll never get the very fine texture of store-bought liverwurst unless you use a lot more fat and have a machine that can pulverize it into an extremely fine paste. This is a little more rustic but tastes lovely. Start with a pig’s liver. Yes it is disgusting. The ancients thought liver was just congealed blood because it was believed to be the organ that makes blood. They also thought that human livers have five lobes, but they were actually looking at pigs’ livers. Anatomy lesson aside. Poach your liver in water until pale and firm. The pig’s liver, not your own, though if you yourself go pale, remain firm and continue. Fry up an onion and add to the liver. Finely dice either pork fat and shoulder or pork belly. You want about equal measures of poached liver, meat, and fat—all well chilled. If you add a little more fat, that’s fine. Season with spices and add salt. If the total measure is about 5 pounds, add 3 to 4 tablespoons. Now obliterate this into the finest puree you can, however you can. I use a monster mortar, but batches in a food processor would work fine I’m sure. Fill your casings and tie with string. Let rest several hours until the surface is a little tacky. Then smoke over smoldering oak logs (hot smoke) for about 2 hours. This is very simple, just light a wood fire in a smoker or even a small kettle-shaped portable barbecue grill, just until the wood is on fire, then cover it so the flames go out. Put in your wurst and let them smoke. Then let them mellow in the fridge for a few days. The interior will be fairly soft and spreadable. On a slice of dark pumpernickel, it is perfectly ethereal. A cold glass of beer is required.

—K

Coteghino

Here’s another truly remarkable recipe to try, coteghino, also spelled cotechino, from Modena in Italy, which is made predominantly from pig’s skin. You’ve likely tasted cracklings or chicharrones (ciccioli in Italian) or, as I like to call them, “fried football.” Just imagine that same lovely flavor but in a soft yielding sausage. You can stuff these into a very fat casing, about the size of a small football, or into a hollowed-out pig’s foot, in which case it becomes a zampone. Not Zamboni, that’s what they use to smooth ice skating rinks, though a zampone might work, too. Imagine you are making a regular sausage, part meat and a bit of fat, but to maybe half of this standard mix, you add finely chopped raw pork rind. You can use a pinch of nitrate if you want for that lovely pink color. Season vigorously with herbs like sage or oregano and add some spice. Nutmeg is nice, and I like a hint of clove. Salt and pepper, too, of course. A dash of wine is good. Stuff and tie up your sausages and let the flavors meld for a few days in the fridge. Then gently boil your coteghino for 3 to 4 hours. Be sure to poke a few holes in it. If you like, you can make a bollito misto by adding a hunk of beef, a chicken, a tongue, and whatever else strikes your fancy to the boil. Eat with some mustard on the side and some green sauce made with parsley, garlic, oil and vinegar, thickened with breadcrumbs. Serve with lentils as a traditional side dish for New Year’s Day, when the whole thing is sure to wake you up and cure even the worst hangover. Slice your coteghino before service, and eat it while hot.

—K

Pig Jam

I suppose the closest thing to pig jam that is actually eaten somewhere would be rillettes, which is basically just pork cooked for hours until it becomes stringy, with a lot of congealed fat, stored in a jar. The first time I had it was with breakfast while honeymooning in the Loire Valley. Oinktuous, spreadable goodness. (The fat serves as oinkment!) The version I offer here is very different and is really much more of a soft sausage stored in a jar rather than in a casing. The currently popular ’nduja is a relative, though that’s actually in a casing, but soft and spreadable and wonderfully spicy. There are actually two versions of this recipe, one is raw and long cured, much like a salami, the other is very gently poached in a canning jar and comes out more like Spam, to tell the truth, or a soft breakfast sausage cousin of scrapple. They’re all close cousins, so I would say play with this recipe until you find the one you like. What is nice is you can put it in really small jam jars and then open one for breakfast. It’s also something you can make in a small batch, and you don’t need any special equipment at all.

Start with 2¹⁄₂ pounds of fatty pork shoulder. Chop finely with 2 tablespoons sea salt, 2 tablespoons raw sugar or maple sugar, ¹⁄₈ teaspoon of Insta Cure No. 2 if you will do the uncooked version, or Insta Cure No. 1 for the cooked. These are nitrate mixes you can buy online. Add in flavorings like fennel seed, mustard seed, pepper, and sage. Entirely up to you. The trick here is you need a big stone mortar and you want to pound the ingredients very, very finely. It’s something like making mortadella, another cousin. It will take a while. (A food processor will probably work, too.) While pounding toss in 3 ice cubes, one at a time, every couple of minutes. You’ll see the mix turn into a kind of thick meat batter. Spoon into little jars. If doing the raw long cure, top with some melted lard and seal. Let sit 2 to 3 months in a cool dark place. For the quicker and cooked version, put the jars in a pot with a few inches of water and then poach for about 5 minutes. Turn the jars over and poach gently another 5 minutes. Remove them and turn upside down and let cool. The gelatinous broth and fat will settle at the top of the jar and create a seal. To serve give each person his or her own little jar, a knife, and some crusty bread with a few fried eggs. You can also brown these in a pan—just turn out of the jar and fry up, if you prefer them hot. Or slice into rounds if you’re using bigger jars.

—K

Beef Rindsrouladen

Beef, quite frankly, is among the most boring of meats. Unless you find a really well-aged steak, beautifully marbled with fat, quickly seared on a grill, and served extra rare, or as I say, still mooing, most beef is just pretty dull. Often the more expensive, the less interesting as well. Filet mignon is so soft and bland, more like baby food than meat. All the more reason to buy the cheapest cut and do something fun with it. The basic outlines of this recipe for Rindsrouladen come from my dear friend Melissa, who got it from her German grandmother. I like the idea of passing down the wisdom of the ancients, but I also like messing with things, though this is close.

Start with an inexpensive cut meant to be braised. Bottom round or top round is best, which is basically the steer’s rear end. Flank or London broil should work well, too, but definitely not a steak. Carefully butterfly the meat horizontally and open it like a book; if you’re able, cut both sides again horizontally from the center to the edges, so you have one long thin surface of meat, four times longer than the original. Pound it flat with a batticarne or flat-ended mallet. If you like, you can also make four smaller rolls. I just like the drama of one big one.

Salt and pepper the meat. Spread the top side with good grainy brown mustard. Then a layer of chopped raw bacon; 4 slices should be enough. Then a sliced onion, then a couple of finely chopped sour dill pickles. (Ideally the bacon, mustard, and pickles will be your own homemade.) Carefully roll the entire thing up tightly and tie with string three or four times around and perhaps a few times across the length. You want to keep all that good stuff inside.

Lightly dust the roll in flour and in a capacious pan, brown the roll on all sides in oil. Then add some good beef broth and red wine (though beer would be great, too) to come up halfway on the roll. Throw in a bay leaf and some thyme tied up in a bundle. Braise gently, covered for about 1¹⁄₂ hours, or longer. You can even make this a day ahead, put in the fridge, and reheat the next day, it will be even nicer. When ready to serve, slice the meat, revealing the spiral of ingredients, and serve in a shallow dish in a pool of the gravy. Potato pancakes go wonderfully, as does spaetzle.

If you really want to mess with this recipe, feel free to borrow a trick from its relative, the sauerbraten, which is basically the same cut of beef, left whole; marinated in spices, vinegar, wine, and vegetables for a few days; then braised. The rolled-up meat bundle can also be marinated the same way. Before serving, crush a few gingersnap cookies into the gravy. Purists will declare this hybrid heresy, but the extra sour, spicy punch makes the rouladen doubly interesting. Or lean southward for another fun variant: Load the roll with capers, pancetta, and Mediterranean herbs. Use a dry white wine, a little tomato puree, and some cream or milk in the braise.

These kind of rolled-up meat braises have a long pedigree, and if someone suggests your variant is a mishmash without historical precedent, point them to sixteenth-century maestro Bartolomeo Scappi’s magnificent recipe for brisavoli, which is slices of beef stuffed with pork fat, prosciutto, garlic, egg yolks, cheese, pepper, cinnamon, parsley, mint, and thyme. These are quickly roasted on a spit then simmered in a broth with grape syrup, agresto (the juice of unripe grapes), and raisins. Resplendent!

—K

The Celery Cure for Salumi

This is a true story, and I haven’t changed the names to protect the innocent. One day I was sitting in a factory in Berkeley at the feet of Paul Bertolli, arguably the finest maker of organic salame in the country, learning about the technique as an absolute neophyte while working on The Lost Art of Real Cooking. He was a gracious host, generous with details, offering tastes, explaining the importance of well-reared pigs. I have nothing but respect for him. Then at one point I asked about nitrates, and he turned to me and said “No nitrates!” but, but…“No nitrates!!” He repeated. I finally coaxed out of him the secret of celery powder and how, for some reason, to qualify as organic, cured meats must contain no industrially produced nitrates, but celery powder is okay.

At that point, the major manufacturers of so-called no-nitrates cured meat said nothing about celery powder, it was just one among many natural flavorings. In effect, people were being lied to because celery powder does in fact contain nitrates, chemically indistinguishable from the industrial sodium nitrite. Since then, some companies, like Niman Ranch, do explain on the package that their bacon, franks, and other such products do contain nitrates naturally occurring in celery powder. But many people still believe they can buy cured meats that are nitrate free. You can’t, there is no such thing. Even fat back salted and smoked tastes and cooks up very differently from bacon. Even if it says uncured, it’s cured with celery powder.

In any case, you can easily find this celery powder cure online now. For short cures, it works fine: on sausages, bacon, pancetta. I’ve used it on everything, in the exact same proportions as Insta Cure, which is 1 teaspoon to 5 pounds of meat. I’ve used beef and pork and even goose breast, and I have to admit, I can’t tell the difference. Where I don’t think it really measures up is in long-dried and fermented products such as hard salami and bresaola. It doesn’t have the double whammy of Insta Cure No. 2, a combination of sodium nitrite that kicks in immediately, plus sodium nitrate that slowly converts to nitrite. But ultimately if it is the chemical equivalent of Insta Cure No. 1, why bother?

The bigger question, however, is how European manufacturers claim to use no nitrates whatsoever. Either they are lying, are uninformed about what they are throwing in (which seems unlikely), or they are using locally mined salts that naturally contain nitrates. I have a feeling that’s how it happened in the past, before you could buy the cure ready made. There are recipes that call for saltpeter (potassium nitrate) going back to the Middle Ages (in fact a whole deer preserved and buried!), but recipes don’t regularly call for it until the nineteenth century. I think before then it was just already in the caves where they mined salt.

Regardless of which cure you use, here’s a delightful little snack I first saw one Christmas in Brussels. Let’s call them salami olives. Start with about 2¹⁄₂ pounds of pork shoulder, nice and fatty, and chop it very finely by hand. Add in 2 tablespoons of sea salt and 2 tablespoons of fine sugar. Maple sugar works really nicely, too, if you can find it. Add ¹⁄₂ teaspoon of cure and whatever seasonings you like—oregano, pepper, fennel, chili flakes, etc. Mix well by hand. Get very narrow-diameter casings, rinse them out well. Narrow hog casings are fine, about 1¹⁄₄ inch in diameter. Tie off the end of the casing with string, and push it onto the tip of a funnel, then stuff the meat through the funnel into the casing, carefully pushing down the chopped meat. Poking a few pinholes in the casing makes it easier, but don’t stuff it too tightly. Now the fun part—tie off the sausage at about 1-inch intervals, forming little olive shapes. (Some people just twist them, but I find they usually unravel.) Poke them all around with a pin. Let these cure in a cool, moist chamber for 1 or 2 months. Don’t let them dry out too much or they become rock hard. When ready to serve, break off the olives and discard the strings. Put in a bowl next to regular olives. They’re lovely to just pop in your mouth.

—K

A Note on Casings: From Sheep to Beef Bungs

Every time I buy sausage casings online, something quite different arrives in a white plastic bucket. Some are thin and delicate with a tiny diameter suitable for hot dogs or small breakfast sausages, such as the sheep casing. Some are massive. The beef bung is in the latter category. It is technically the caecum of a cow, one of the many stomachs found in ruminants. (We have a tiny one, too—the appendix.) Perhaps the most disconcerting part of this particular anatomical object is that it’s closed on one end, a “blind gut” or cul-de-sac in French. In Latin, ancient Roman agricultural writers call it a fundolus, or dead end. It’s just a big bag, maybe 5 inches in diameter, so you can actually just stuff it by the handful. It will easily hold 7 pounds of meat or more, so it may be best to tie off into smaller salamis, though it’s the traditional casing for massive mortadella and the like. The nicest part about this size is that not only can it be cut into perfect sandwich slices but the curing takes much longer, at least 3 months, and you get a far more pronounced sour flavor from the natural bacteria. Just make sure you keep it somewhere cool, about 55ºF and humid. Otherwise the outside will dry hard and the inside will remain soft, something known as case hardening. Also, be sure to tie this well as it will need support beyond a string at the top. The best way is to tie four or five strings from top to bottom. Then weave in as many strings as you need around the salami, tying them into the longer strings as you go around, and knotting tightly. As the salami dries, the strings will become loose and you may need to retie them or tighten them up.

Back to casings—there are also beef middles, which are used to make the classic long salami shape, about 2¹⁄₂ inches around, also easy to stuff by hand without a funnel. I have found that these tend to dry out quicker than other casings. There are also hog middles, about the same size, though I got some once that seemed much wider, with perfectly baroque folds and twists. They’re quite thick and good for sopressata. Just be forewarned, they really stink. Exactly like what you might guess.

Whatever size you use, while it’s curing give the salami a little squeeze every now and then. You want it somewhere between soft and rock hard, entirely up to you though. As far as the contents go, I would encourage you to experiment. For example, some cayenne or ancho chili powder with cumin and garlic will give you a nice chorizo. Some soy, Shaoxing rice wine and ginger yields very nice lap cheong. Just be sure to use part salt and part soy sauce, as a too-liquid mixture will not dry well. Crushed juniper berries with maple sugar is my favorite, but again, try sage or tarragon and a splash of sherry, anything goes. As long as you keep to the basic proportions of 5 pounds of meat with about 20 percent fat, 3 to 4 tablespoons of salt, 3 to 4 tablespoons of sugar, and 1 teaspoon of Insta Cure No. 2, you should be fine. (I say 3 to 4 tablespoons because I just pour these into my palm.)

—K

Salam D’la Duja

Here is a remarkable way to cure salami, common in the Piedmont region of northwest Italy. The humidity makes traditional drying difficult, so the links are stored in a glazed earthenware vase (duja) and covered with rendered fat. After about 3 months, they are cured and sour, still a little soft, and disconcertingly for some people, still look raw. They aren’t at all. Like the previously mentioned little salami olives, you can just pull one out of the pot and leave the rest. The important thing is not to put the crock in the refrigerator. If it’s too cold, the meat will go bad rather than cure with good bacteria. The shelf is not a good idea either if you live in a very hot place. Somewhere cool, 55º to 60ºF is ideal. The flavoring for these is traditionally just black pepper, but cayenne pepper goes so nicely, and it is reminiscent of the better-known ’nduja of Calabria, the name of which is said to be a version of the French andouille. It is pronounced the same way, too: n doo ya, but the two products are not even vaguely similar. I suspect there is no relation between this Piedmontese duja and the Calabrian ’nduja, either.

—K

Salo

I was told by my friend Katrina that in Ukraine, whence her ancestors came, they are obsessed with a kind of cured fat eaten in huge slabs on a hunk of bread. This is not delicate slices of Tuscan lardo cured in cool marble coffins. Nope, this is just wads of pig fat. I love the idea. So, with nothing more than a thick slab of pork leg fat, salt it with a little pink curing salt and sugar, and hang it up somewhere cool and damp. No casing is required, just tie it with string. Wait about a month. It is still very obviously just fat, but delicious, tender, and great on bread with a shot of vodka or two. You can also take it to another level by seasoning it well with sage and thyme and letting it cure just a few weeks. Then cold smoke it for several hours over applewood. Cold smoking is a little tricky: Basically you want a big chamber with a smoldering log inside, without letting the temperature get hot, which of course would melt the fat. It is so lovely, sliced on toast, you may never need bacon again.

—K

Stock

Making a good stock is quite straightforward: Put various animal bones in a pot, cover them with water, and gently, gently simmer them as long as you can.

Which bones to use? Anytime you eat flesh on the bone, save all the bones in your freezer. Every week or two, turn your collection into stock. Even the bones from a four-hour stew will still have plenty of goodness in them (especially if they are thick bones). If you can find some, add knucklebones to your stockpot, chicken feet if it’s a poultry stock, or fish heads and shrimp shells for a fish stock. Heavy bones would be worth cracking or sawing into, if they come to you intact. The only bones you should not use are the bones of oily fish like salmon or sardines—their fragile polyunsaturated oils will quickly turn rancid when cooked, and very little could coerce you into tasting the stock.

Vegetables enrich a stock but aren’t strictly necessary if you won’t be serving it plain as broth. Save your onion and celery ends and carrot trimmings in a bowl in the fridge, and add them to your weekly stockpot.

You can also use fresh bony cuts of meat, like chicken legs, beef, or lamb neck bones or shanks, but you should remove the meat from the bones as soon as it is properly tender—an hour or less for birds, a few hours for red meat. Extended cooking in that much water will make the meat stringy and watery, and it won’t contribute much to the stock. Shank bones have lots of delicious marrow inside—this should be scooped out after 20 to 30 minutes or so of simmering and eaten with a sprinkle of salt on toast, or a spoon. Return the bones to the pot, and keep simmering the stock.

Try to stack the bones closely in the pot, so you can cover them with the minimal amount of water. Poultry carcasses should be flattened. This will help your stock be very concentrated without extensive boiling later on. A little acid hastens the extraction of minerals and gelatin from the bones—add a splash of apple cider vinegar.

Poultry bones will produce a nice stock within a few hours, but you might as well leach out all the goodness and let them go overnight. More than a day, and the oils will go rancid and impart a nasty flavor to the stock. Beef and other large bones can simmer for 2 to 3 days, and the stock will only improve (more than a few days, and again, you’ll face the issue of the fats oxidizing). By the time your stock is done, all the gristly cartilaginoid bits should be very tender—and delectable. Remove the bones and chill the stock.

If your bones are producing a great deal of fat, you would be wise to pause the stock halfway through cooking, chill it, and scoop the hardened fat from the surface. Save it, of course! This way you can simmer your stock longer without endangering its flavor or quality.

Stock-Based Soups

The most obvious use of stock is in soups. Even a vegetable soup made with a hearty stock base will taste rich and satisfying.

Sauté onions in butter (or the fat you skimmed from your stock). A lot of caramelization is nice for a beefy stock; merely translucent onions are fine for a chicken or fish soup. Add stock, vegetables, herbs, and salt, bring to a simmer, and cook until tender. Add some finely minced garlic and turn off the heat. Adjust the seasonings once the garlic flavor has infused the soup. You can also add back any of the meat you took from the bones.

—R

Reduction Sauces

Concentrated homemade stocks are gold. All that simmering snips proteins into little fragments, in much the same way that fermentation creates magically flavorful miso and tamari from bland soybeans and Parmesan from plain milk. This savory flavor is most apparent when you concentrate your stock by boiling it down. And then the gelatin in the concentrated stock gives it a wonderful lingering, silky texture.

Simple Reduction Gravy

I prefer a simple reduction gravy to flour-thickened gravy, and it’s just as easy.

Chop 2 onions and cook them in several tablespoons of butter or fat in a large, heavy skillet until golden brown. Pour in 2 cups or so of homemade stock (not more than halfway up the sides of the skillet, to prevent spatters) and turn the heat way up until it boils madly. Keep a close eye on it for 5 or 10 minutes, until the liquid has mostly boiled off and the onions are starting to brown again. Add another couple of cups of stock, and reduce it again, this time just until it’s the consistency of a nice gravy. Add some salt, pepper, and finely minced garlic. Taste and adjust the seasonings.

Depending on the strength of your stock, you might need more than two additions of stock. You could, of course, use a large, tall-sided pot instead of a skillet and add the stock all at once, but it won’t be so caramelized.

Serve the gravy very warm, or it will start to gel.

VARIATIONS

The reduction gravy lends itself to adaptation. When you add the stock, include a few tablespoons of wine vinegar or tomato paste (or equivalent quantity of tomato in other forms) to give it some balancing piquancy. Try fresh herbs like thyme, sage, or rosemary, added at the end, or spices like cumin, chili, or cinnamon, added with the stock. Include small bits of meat picked from the stock bones, or chopped giblets. Brown some ground meat along with the onions for a delicious meat sauce.

Reduction Stews

If you have stock near at hand, you can easily create last-minute stews with the flavor of something that spent all afternoon braising.

Brown a chopped onion in butter or fat in a wide, deep pot. Chop celery and carrots fairly small, and cut potatoes or sweet potatoes into larger pieces because they cook more quickly. Add these with 1 quart of stock, 1 to 2 tablespoons of tomato paste, salt, pepper, and any herbs or spices you’d like. Cook it over medium-high heat, stirring occasionally to be sure the vegetables aren’t sticking. In 20 minutes, it should be significantly reduced and the potatoes should help thicken it into a good stew consistency. Add some minced garlic, adjust the seasonings, and serve.

Again, this is just a general method. You should vary it according to your fancy and what’s on hand.

—R

Stock for Construction: Aspic

Very strong stock will set up like Jell-O when it cools. Nowadays people don’t often exploit this amazing property—perhaps it got associated with Jell-O salads and lost favor along with them. But consider the possibilities! Liquid stock mixed into mayonnaise chills into an excellent glaze for cold meats. Warm stock mixed into bits of cooked meat and poured into a greased loaf pan will chill into a delicious, sliceable terrine. The key is to ensure beforehand that your stock is strong enough: Chill it thoroughly and check that it has a nice bouncy-firm consistency (but not rubbery or gummy). If it isn’t strong enough, boil it down some more. If it’s too strong, dilute it gradually with a little water. You’ll also need to skim the fat quite carefully. Season it well, and use it more in a sauce-like supporting role—a filler or glue or layer of glaze—than as a savory version of Jell-O Jigglers.

—R

Chicken Feet

I had a pop-up book when I was young, with terrible witches and misers and mysterious cats popping out all over. The text was a translation of the start of a Pushkin poem, and I can still recite most of it by heart. My favorite page featured the pop-up house of Baba Yaga, with dark pop-up pines leaning in close.

On chicken feet there stands a cottage,

No doors, no windows, bare and lone.

Upon the sands of hidden pathways

Lie tracks of creatures unbeknown.

Unbeknown? Whatever it takes to make it scan in English.

Oh, it was magical. The book didn’t go into any more detail about the hut; I had no idea it was a central part of the Baba Yaga lore. It was just a chilling, gratuitous puzzle, and I studied those pop-up feet intently.

This is all to say that chicken feet are witchy. They are also extremely practical, adding lots of velvety density to your chicken stock. But oh! the Quetzalcoatl reptilian skin! the toenails! Such things call for cauldrons, and upon such things my house should stand.

Well, my house does stand on chicken feet. Because my house stands on cookery (as well as books and love), and chicken stock is a firm foundation for my cookery (with a few other things, like good butter), and the stock made from chicken feet is a strong stock, indeed.

Most chicken feet you buy in a store will come from young, tender chickens. They will probably also be clean. If you have just butchered an old hen that doesn’t lay anymore or a handsome but superfluous rooster with four-inch spurs on each foot, you will need to work a little harder to get your chicken feet ready for stock making.

Those old roosters grow dragon’s hide on their feet, and no amount of scrubbing will ever get them properly clean. It’s as if the filth had grown into the scales themselves. Your only recourse is to peel them. Dunk the feet in boiling water for 5 minutes, drain, and clip off the ends of the toes (to remove the toenails). Then get someone to help you painstakingly peel off the outer layer of scaly skin. It will be worth it. Dragon stock is gorgeous. You could walk on it and not fall in.

Wash the feet again and add them to your stock. When the stock is finished and you strain it, don’t be shy about sampling the juicy little pads of the feet.

—R

Gizzard and Heart Paprikash

Poultry gizzards and hearts are delicious dark, dark meat—almost blue, they’re so dark—but they take a little stewing to become tender. The gizzard is a powerful disc-shaped muscle in the chicken’s neck, which grinds seeds and grass. To get the partially digested food out of the gizzard, you have to split it open and peel the lining out, which is why gizzards have that clam-shell shape when you buy them.

I first had zúza paprikás, aka gizzard paprikash, one evening in Budapest and later worked up this recipe with help from a laboriously translated page of a Hungarian cookbook. It has a boldly orange, piquant, and creamy sauce.

Back in San Francisco, I wanted to compare my recipe to that in a book I own called Cooking with Love and Paprika by Joseph Pasternak (published in 1966). To my alarm, I saw he makes a distinction between Hungarian paprikash and Transylvanian paprikash; according to him, my recipe is Transylvanian because it includes sour cream. How perplexing. Well, the zúza paprikás I had in Hungary most definitely had sour cream in it, just like practically everything I ate there (oh sigh!). Also, a good bit of Transylvania used to belong to Hungary, so maybe it’s a moot point.

Many Hungarian dishes start with rendering some minced smoked pork fat in a skillet. Unfortunately, I cannot walk two blocks to the nearest market hall and ask for a kilo of smoked Mangalica fat from the butcher. (Nor can I ask for a kilo of goose gizzards or a quart of pickled peppers ladled from the brine vat or get my jug filled up with raw milk for a handful of forints—sigh, sigh, and sigh.) So I would recommend frying a few slices of bacon at a fairly low temperature for a long time, so the fat renders out without burning at all. Pour the clean fat into a jar, eat the bacon, and clean the sticky stuff off the skillet before putting the fat back in. This will give you good fat with a nice smoky flavor.

You may chop the gizzards or hearts before cooking them; when cooked, a whole gizzard tends to be a bit more than one mouthful. You can also remove the “hinge” in the middle of the gizzard—this is the most sinewy part—and then the gizzards will become tender much sooner. I lazily leave my gizzards whole.

Mince a large onion fairly fine, and let it cook in the fat in a Dutch oven till soft and clear. Push the onions to one side of the Dutch oven and briefly brown about 1 pound of gizzards and/or hearts on the other side.

Add salt and a large peeled, crushed tomato (or a tablespoon of paste), and a ton of fresh sweet paprika, 2 to 3 tablespoons.* Pour in enough chicken stock to cover the gizzards, cover the pan, and let it simmer for about 3 hours, until the meat is tender. Undercooked gizzards are unpleasantly squeaky on the tooth. If you trimmed the gizzards, they may only take an hour or so to cook.

If the dish seems too liquid (soupy, not stewy), remove the lid and let it boil down for a bit. When it’s done cooking, add a couple of cloves of finely minced garlic and turn off the heat. Swirl in sour cream or crème fraîche to taste—at least ¹⁄₂ cup. Taste and adjust the seasonings. Paprikash is traditionally served over little egg noodles (tojásos tészta). Any fresh pasta will work fine, and I sometimes eat it on potatoes.

You can also use this recipe to make straight-up chicken paprikash. Break a small young chicken down into drumsticks, thighs, wings, and breasts. It will only need 45 minutes or so of cooking time, and you can let the chicken pieces make their own stock as they cook. Add the breasts toward the end of the cooking time so they don’t get overdone. Old stewing birds will take about 3 hours, just like the gizzards.

^* About the paprika: It really needs to be of good quality if you’re using it for more than simply sprinkling on deviled eggs. Fresh means less than a year old. Sweet means it’s made from sweet peppers, not spicy ones. It’s hard to find nonsweet paprika in the United States, so you probably don’t need to worry about it.

—R

Marrow Bones

Quite simple to prepare and primally satisfying, marrow bones are one of my all-time favorite treats. If you want them fancier, soak them in several changes of salted water in the refrigerator for a day to draw out the blood. The blood, however, is no disaster if you need your marrow bones right away.

Place the bone chunks on end in a skillet or rimmed baking sheet and roast for 15 minutes at 425ºF. Bone sections more than a few inches high may take 5 minutes longer. The marrow swells up as it heats. Don’t overbake it or the marrow will just melt and run off.

Serve hot with crackers or toast, salt, pepper, and little spoons or knives for digging out the marrow.

—R

Pork and Sauerkraut

Pork with sauerkraut is an effortless slow-braised transmutation. The acidic sauerkraut makes the pork tender, cuts its richness, and cooks down into a pungent golden mess. The aroma—even the thought of it—also happens to make my eyes well up with homesickness.

Choose a couple of pounds of bone-in pork roast, ribs, or other cheap cut of pork. The bones contribute so much flavor to the sauerkraut juices—don’t neglect them.

Heat a few tablespoons of fat in the bottom of a Dutch oven. When it’s shimmery and hot, add the meat in a single layer on the bottom. Turn it after 1 or 2 minutes to brown it on the other side.

When the meat is well browned, add 1 quart of sauerkraut and its juices. If the kraut is fairly dry, you’ll want to add some liquid to keep it from burning. Stir it a bit to loosen any meat bits stuck to the bottom of the pot. Consider adding ¹⁄₂ cup of applesauce or a fresh apple, peeled, cored, and chunked to sweeten the sauce. A few halved onions are also delicious, but the critical thing here is the kraut.

Cover the pot and let it cook gently for 5 hours or more, checking occasionally to make sure the liquid doesn’t cook off. The pork will be falling apart when it’s done, and the sauerkraut will reduce and soften.

Serve the pork on mashed potatoes, topped with the cooked-down sauerkraut.

—R