The Evolution of "Toad-in-the-Hole".

I own one book on English cooking, and this recipe came from it, though I found it borrowed by Richard Olney and his compilers in his "Pork" volume in "The Good Cook" series Time-Life published in the late seventies. Jane Grigson collected this recipe in her "British Cookery".

One can imagine "Toad-in-the-Hole" appearing on a Dickensian dinner table. Or at breakfast in "The Secret Garden". It looks English. Simple, a little stodgy, just meat and bread pudding
without any French or Continental airs. I am not sure its inventor-whoever she was- meant it to include Jimmy Dean sausages, but I do live in Tennessee. Jane Grigson proposes partridges,steak, and kidneys as alternatives to the sausages. She even mentions that some have imprisoned lamb chops in the batter, but adds" This I do not care for quite so much".


1 pound of pork link sausages

3 tbsp lard or oil

1 cup of flour

salt

2 eggs

1 1/4 cups of milk


Sift the flour into a bowl. Add a pinch of salt. Slowly whisk in the eggs and the milk, eggs first. (I encountered lumps at this point- persistent ones- so I pushed the batter through a sieve, and rubbed out the lumps.)

Put the lard or oil in the center of a 9 inch baking dish and heat it briefly in a 425 degree oven. Meanwhile, simmer the sausages, which you have pricked with fork tines, in very warm water for 5 minutes. Now place a layer of batter over the bottom of your baking dish. It should set a bit so one can embed the sausages in it. Pour the rest of the batter over the sausages and bake at 425 degrees for 30-40 minutes until the batter is golden brown. I confess I skipped the embedding part because I neglected to read every sentence of the instructions. This led to the toads trying to escape, and I had to push them back down into the batter. No matter. It still tasted good.

I think this would be great fun to cook with a child watching, or even helping. Just the name alone should pique interest.

This would be good on Christmas Eve for supper, or on Christmas morning for breakfast.



* A word to new or young cooks. You could do worse than to collect the Time-Life series "The Good Cook." It is timeless, and Richard Olney was chief consultant.

* Irma Rombauer has a version of this in her "Joy of Cooking".

I Hear America Picking.

Perennially late to the party, I met Mike and Frank a week ago on a Monday night when I had been up for over thirty six hours and was looking for something to keep me up till nine. I had given up on watching anything on TV after that, and had almost given up on making it until eight-

Until television's Great Roulette Wheel spun one last time, and I landed on the History Channel.

And there they were. The Kerouac and Cassady of Junkdom. "The American Pickers". Out on the back roads of Flyover Country in their white van, free of drugs but flush with cash, guided on their cellphone by their trusty tattooed human wire haired pointer Danielle, who back at their store, collected leads on farms and outbuildings and sheds full of stuff no one could bear to throw away. Buildings full of "Made in America" from the era when things were last made in America. (The occasional Vespa and preserved Rolls-Royce the only exceptions). Penny arcade games, wind up record players, old ESSO gas station signs, antique mouse traps. A Duck-billed dinosaur bone. It is all out there, through the parting of the grassy weeds, right up to a door of the about-to collapse barn guarded by a geezer who seems to not want to sell anything. In go Mike and Frank picking and digging, picking and digging. Thirty feet under a mound of trash they find a miniature trombone, or an antique paint can-it does not matter. They want it.

"I can't sell that", says Geezer, "It was my Daddy's. He thought the world of it". Our boys make him an offer. Geezer looks pensive. Geezer is thinking, or what passes for it on camera. "Okay", he says, "I got to get at least a hundred". Mike and Frank look dubious. "Fifty", says Mike.

"Sixty", says Geezer, and he and Mike shake hands.

And away the Pickers go in their the white van, miniature trombone in hand, on this road trip that never ends, looking for "Man-tiques". Danielle, tied to the store, smells adventure. She wants to go picking with them. Just once. She tells them so.

Oh no. Mike and Frank want no part of it.( I don't blame or judge them. They don't want a woman in the van. I don't want a man in the house. We would get on well together.)

Diogenes looked for an honest man. I look for a happy man. Or two, in this case. And in Frank and Mike- I have found them. Men to envy, whose avocation is their vocation. Men who like what they do for a living, jumping out of their van with the enthusiasm of puppies as soon as they see that tell tale rusted metal in a farm field with an old garage surrounded by school buses. How many of us could dare to say the same, here in this country where every employer now sneaks through e-mail or data mines Facebook looking for excuses to replace the disgruntled with the timorous and obedient.

Every day, every ride for Mike and Frank is a trip down a metaphysical Route 66, a Camino Real, for those fortunate enough to get out and drive it. Junk is only an excuse. Like Kerouac's Dharma Bums, Mike and Frank are out smelling the midnight mint.

It smells like freedom to me.

My Favorite Winter Ragu

I work tonight, and this ragu, on fettuccine, will be my lunch. No need to spend $3.50 I could use for a gallon of gasoline on an overpriced half-baked pizza slice at The Big Hospital across Church Street Cafetorium. No need for a JJ BLT from Jimmy John's. No need for tortillas from Los Palmas. I can eat better than that, and cheaper.

A winter ragu needs to be heartier than the light sauce of summer. It needs to look north toward Bologna with its cream and butter and diced carrots. I eat this on pasta and on toasted Italian bread. I eat it for breakfast, for after all I work night shift when breakfast,lunch, and dinner
lose their moorings and drift into other parts of the day.



Winter Ragu



1 pound sweet Italian sausage

1 medium yellow onion, diced

3 garlic cloves- diced or crushed in a press.

Olive oil

Sea salt- to sweat the onions, and then to taste

Italian seasoning

1 1/2 tablespoons of Balsamic or red wine vinegar

15 ounces diced tomatoes- I use Fire Roasted Muir Glen canned tomatoes.

1/3 cup heavy cream

1/3 stick of unsalted butter.


Put 3 or 4 tablespoons of olive oil in a large, deep saute pan or deep skillet. When it is hot add the diced onions and saute them till they are golden. Add some sea salt to sweat them. Next add the garlic and the crumbled sausage and 1 teaspoon of Italian seasoning. Saute the sausage for a few minutes (no need to brown it), then add the tomatoes, the vinegar, and the diced carrots. Saute, covered, on low medium for 45 minutes to an hour or until the carrots are tender. Then add the butter and the cream and keep on low heat another ten minutes.

Serve on any pasta. Very good with spinach pasta. This amount of ragu should feed at least 4-6 people.

Gingerbread Coffee Cake

Being a nobody, homebody cook with no professional pride to get in the way, I find myself free to use conveniences that might embarrass someone more serious. I am not too good to open a can or twist off a top. I will use a mix if I want to. I used a box of Betty Crocker Gingerbread mix to make this.

I work 12 hour night shifts in a difficult profession. I wake up tired, and go to work tired. On my days off- I cook, for it is my hobby, but there is no way for me to manufacture time. Last night I wanted to make a coffee cake, but having had only 8 hours sleep in 3 days, my ambitions were low. I pulled down a box of gingerbread mix, added 3 eggs instead of 1, 1 1/4 cups of water, added 1/4 cup of ginger preserves, and the juice of one half orange, mixed it well, and baked it. I glazed it with the juice from the other half of the orange mixed with more ginger preserves.


This cake is like a gingerbread brownie pudding cake. It is dense, but moist, with little nuggets of ginger. I poured heavy cream over my first slice, but whipped cream would be good too.


I baked this in a 9 inch nonstick cake pan. 350 degrees. 35 minutes.

A Contrarian's Christmas

There were enough merry Christmases in my youth to compensate for my indifference to that holiday in later life. I now refuse to celebrate spending money. To me, the greatest holiday of the year is that day in early April when barn swallows return to Tennessee skies. The only winter holiday I mark is New Year's, and my tradition that day is to re-read Charles Lamb's essay "New Year's Eve".

"Every man has two birthdays", wrote Lamb,who counted the first day of the year as one of them .And he wrote as well -"No one ever regarded the First of January with indifference. It is that from which all date their time, and count upon what is left. It is the nativity of our common Adam".

Old women look back, and semi-old women look back more clearly, which is why I am writing this vignette about my father's family. I will leave my mother's family in Heaven, where they belong. Especially my grandmother Clara Robertson Palmer, a lover of Longfellow and Whittier and Bonnie Prince Charlie. It was she who once told me about my "great, great grandfather James Robertson, who went down through the Cumberland Gap-". (She was an honest and good woman, and I've no reason to doubt her).


My other grandmother was cut from different cloth. She was the mother of many, all of whom spent their adult years moving farther and farther away to get away from her. Just a rumor that she was relocating to be closer was enough to start the calls to United Van Lines. In her life, nothing had made her happy, and this she wanted to share. Her husband, Hubert S., tried to ignore her by smoking and working. He worked at New Departure, and was selectively forgetful. He never learned the names of any his twenty plus grandchildren. I was the only one he acknowledged, for I was the oldest. He called me "Brooklyn", because I was born there. Once, he left his family sitting in a downtown diner in Bristol while he went to park the car. He did not come back, and one of his sisters found him hours later, home asleep on the couch. In later years Grandmother S. exacted spotty revenges. I remember a family dinner when she pointed to her husband and told the table "When Hubert here finally dies, I'm going to Florida and live like a queen".

Her family complained that she would not cook for them, but after a while I am sure they realized that this was a blessing. She once served me chicken soup with the chicken heart bobbing around in it, right in my bowl. I had just turned thirty. She had not seen me in a few years, and her greeting was " Well, I see you haven't gotten fat yet".

Her children were resourceful. They had to be, and my Uncle Donnie told me he once had to shoot a chicken out of the tree himself, just so they could eat dinner.

Oh, Uncle Donnie- time has come between us. You were my favorite.

I remember sitting on the porch of the great multi-roomed house on top of a hill off the main highway. Playing a game with Donnie, guessing what color car and what make would go by next. I ran away from my Aunt Philly, who was always trying to brush my hair and turn me into a girl. I would hide with Uncle Donnie, who was as much an uncle as a teenage boy could be. He played "Green Door, What's that secret you're Keeping?" for me over and over on his record player."They got a big piano, and they play it hot behind the green door!', I would howl.

The other song he taught me, and I share it with you now ,was the saga of the two brothers Herman and Sherman.


"Little Herman and brother Sherman

Had an aversion

To washing their ears

Grandma washed them

With some Lysol

And they haven't heard a word in years".



How strange are the things we remember, yet I would not forget them for the world.

Stupid songs. Counting cars. A stubby, scowling materfamilias, waiting in a diner for her husband, who has been gone 3 hours. I never heard what she said.

But I can imagine.

Hominy, Bacon, Cheese, and Chiles Casserole

I brought this casserole to a going away potluck Thursday night. Not one bite came home with me. Just the empty dish. Several people at this potluck told me they had never heard of hominy. This surprised me, for it shows how far away some are from their roots in the South. These people, who have never heard of hominy, were the descendants of slaves who became free men and women. Who farmed and raised their own sorghum, their own sweet potatoes, who celebrated at hog-killing time. Edna Lewis, in "The Taste of Country Cooking", describes how her Aunt Jennie Hailstalk turned dried corn to hominy with fire, lye, and ashes. Dorie Sanders, in "Country Cooking" writes " Hominy was long the backbone of rural cooking in the South".


Here is my recipe-


2 15 ounce cans of white or yellow hominy.

1/4 cup sour cream

1/2 to 1 cup of grated cheese, depending on how cheesy you want the casserole. I used a combination of Mexican Farmers' cheese and Jarlsberg, because I had them on hand. Monterrey Jack or cheddar would have worked. (But not, I think, any strong European cheese such as Parmesan.)

6 strips of crispy bacon, diced up.

1 4 ounce can of diced mild green chilis.

Salt, a little to taste

A shake or two of Adobo seasoning- optional


A 10 inch Pyrex pie dish or a 9 inch square casserole dish



Drain the 30 ounces of hominy well. Spread half the hominy in the dish, then add a layer of half the cheese, the chiles, and the bacon. Dot sour cream around on top of the layer. Lightly salt, if desired or flavor with a few shakes of Adobo. Then add the rest of the hominy and top with the remaining ingredients.

Bake at 350 degrees for 15-20 minutes -just long enough to heat through and melt the cheese.

A Winter Dawn In Nashville

Tonight at work we are having a carry-in for someone moving on to a new job. Today I will be cooking. A pork loin glazed with pineapple-mustard bourbon sauce. Salsa Shrimp. Coconut Curry Shrimp. A Hominy Casserole with chiles, cheese, bacon, and sour cream. Carrots and sweet potatoes glazed with honey and Creole Spices.

There will be photos! And recipes. But not today-