Barbecue - from Barbacoa or from Barbe à Queue?

Now that I’ve gotten on the subject of barbecue, let’s talk about it some.  A good place to begin is with the word barbecue itself.

According to Webster’s New World College Dictionary, Third edition, barbecue comes from the American Spanish barbacoa, which was adopted in turn from the Tainó, a people indigenous to the Caribbean region.  In the Tainó language, barbacoa means, literally, framework of sticks.  According to the Wikipedia article barbecue, not only is the word barbecue derived from the word barbacoa, but also the word barbacoa is found in the language of the Timucua people of Florida as well as in that of the Tainó.  The Wikipedia article differs with Webster, however, as to the literal meaning of the word.  According to Wikipedia, barbacoa means sacred fire pit.  One thing that there’s no disagreement about, though, is that the word barbecue is not derived from the French barbe à queue, which means from
beard to tail

Well, hell. For all these years, that’s where I thought barbecue came from.  It’s just a damn shame that it doesn’t.  If it did, we in the Southeast might have some real leverage when we insist that if the dish is to be called barbecue, it must be pork.  According to legend, you see, French visitors to a Caribbean island saw the locals cooking a whole hog over a fire in a pit, and one of the visitors remarked to the others that the unfortunate porker was being cooked from beard to tail, or barbe à queue.  Anyhow, again according to legend, the term caught on and the rest is history.  If that were really how the name barbecue came about, not only could we Southeasterners insist that barbecue has to be pork, but if push came to shove in cook-off showdowns with non-believers, we could insist that in order to call it barbecue, it had to be a whole hog.  Either way, we’d have them disqualified on a technicality.

It is just possible, incidentally, that barbe à queue is really the origin of the word barbecue, but the truth is being suppressed by a conspiracy.  There is a significant segment of barbecue society who believe that you can have barbecue beef and barbecue chicken and barbecue turkey, and on and on, the important thing being the belief that you can have barbecue that isn’t pork.  It follows that there might be certain individuals among us with private and nefarious reasons for not wanting the sacred truth, that barbecue must be pork, to get out.  Certain wealthy but unscrupulous people, you see; renegade Texans or Californians, maybe.  Anyway, such a gang of rascals might have pooled their resources and approached the world’s etymologists – scholars who study the origins of words.  Well, everyone has his price, you know,  and scholars as a group are not exactly known for their wealth.  Thus would the scalawags have been able to bribe a majority of these scholars, impoverished creatures that they are, to say that barbacoa is where the word barbecue comes from, even if they knew or suspected otherwise.  Hey, it could have happened . . .

Happy cooking!

Special Barbecue Sauce for Ribs

Barbecued pork ribs were the topic of yesterday’s post, and if you’re going to do them, I think you need a special barbecue sauce to go with them; well, at least I do. Here’s the sauce we had with our ribs last Sunday.  My wife usually avoids sauce when we have barbecued anything, but this sauce was so flavorful that she made an exception.

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1 recipe dry rub, from yesterday’s post.
1/2 C distilled vinegar.
1/4 C prepared mustard.
1 C tomato catsup.
4 thin slices lemon.
Tabasco® sauce, to taste (optional)

In a saucepan, dissolve the prepared mustard in the vinegar and mix thoroughly. Add the dry rub and stir until dissolved. Now, add the catsup and mix thoroughly. Float the lemon slices on top of the mixture.

Bring the saucepan to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer for 30 minutes. Stir gently periodically. The intent here is to extract some lemon flavor while minimizing extraction of the bitterness in the white membrane under the peel of the lemon.

Remove saucepan from heat and allow contents to cool. When cooled, add the Tabasco® if you want it.  Makes about a cup and a half.

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Incidentally, a little bitterness is a good thing in a barbecue sauce; hence the turmeric in many recipes.  Too much bitterness, on the other hand . . .  That's a different story altogether.  I once had the bright idea of trying to cook a different barbecue sauce recipe, one which also calls for lemon slices, in a slow-cooker, overnight.  Come next morning, I sampled a sip:  yuk! it was just gawd-awful - unsalvageably bitter - and lemon was the culprit.  I ended up tossing the sauce and starting over.  Learn from my mistakes.  Please!

In my opinion, barbecue sauce of any sort is best when made a day or two before it’s to be used, and held covered in the refrigerator.  Just let it to come up to room temperature before you serve it.  I guess it’s a little like home-made chili – refrigerate it overnight, on account of "it ain’t fit to eat the day you make it."

Happy cooking!

Labor Day Weekend - Barbecued Pork Ribs

Whew!  Glad that's over.  This laboring is for the birds.

Well, not really.  I 'labored' in the kitchen (and on our back deck), cooking, but as I've said before, that's not really labor.

On Sunday, I barbecued two racks of pork ribs, using a method that I'd never used before. We'd seen an indoor/outdoor method for barbecued pork ribs on an episode of America's Test Kitchen (PBS). Since I wasn't particularly enthusiastic about tending the fire in the kettle all day, and worrying about it raining, I thought it would be worth a try.

Although we cooked the ribs on Sunday, the preparations began on Saturday.  First, I mixed dark brown sugar and spices into a dry rub  for the ribs.  Then I put enough rub on each rack of ribs to cover the top completely, and massaged it into the meat.  I rubbed the top of each rack only and not the bottom.  After the rub-down, I covered the ribs loosely with plastic wrap and put them in the refrigerator so they could fester (a technical term we use at our house to describe the process of flavor exchange among food as the result of mutual physical contact) overnight.

Incidentally, I made enough dry rub for two doses on each rack and then some, and covered the remaining rub tightly and refrigerated that, too. Also, I did not remove the membranes from the ribs because I needed the membrane to test the slab for doneness, as explained below.

Sunday morning, I fired up my barbecue/smoker kettle.  I usually use mainly hickory with just a little mesquite for fuel, but I used only hickory this time because the idea was to smoke the ribs without cooking them through completely, over a coolish but smokey fire, and I just didn't want to go to the trouble of getting out the mesquite. 

Anyhow, after the kettle was smoking along nicely, I put the rib racks in, membrane-side to the grill surface, and put the lid on.  I smoked the ribs for 3 hours. Then I brought them indoors, gave them another dose of the dry rub, and finished them in the oven.

I lay the re-rubbed rib racks, membrane-side-down again, on a wire rack in a shallow roasting pan and covered the pan tightly with aluminum foil. I then put the pan of ribs in a 200-degree oven. At the end of 3 hours, I removed them from the oven and tested them for doneness by bending them in such a way that the membrane is stretched to see if, and how easily, it breaks. Nothing happened.  The membrane held firm.

Now, this was an experiment, remember, so I wasn't disappointed.  We just crimped the aluminum foil back around the pan and threw it back in the oven.  I raised the temperature to 300 degrees, and after an hour, I repeated the test. This time, the membrane broke easily.  We let the ribs cool for 30 minutes, then sliced the racks up into individual ribs and served them.

The ribs were delicious, but just a little chewy for my taste. Next time, I think I'll cook them in a 300 degree oven for 4 hours after smoking them for 3 hours. That combination should result in meat that is fall-off-the-bone tender.

Here's my recipe for dry rub for pork ribs:

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1 C dark brown sugar, loose - not packed.
1/4 t ground allspice.
Ground cayenne pepper, to taste.
dash ground cinnamon.
1 t ground clove.
1 t ground mace.
1/2 t dry mustard.
1 t ground nutmeg.
1 T ground paprika.
1/4 t garlic powder.
1/4 t onion powder.

Combine all ingredients in a bowl and whisk thoroughly, being careful to break up all lumps.  Makes about 1 cup of dry rub.

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Note that brown sugar is moist, while dry mustard seems to attract moisture, even when it's kept in a hermetically-sealed container.  Thus, if your rub wants to stay lumpy, blame it on the sugar, or the mustard, or both.

Our racks were larger than average, but 2 cups of the rub was plenty for two application on both of our racks.

Happy cooking!

Corn Bread

Toward the end of yesterday's post, I mentioned corn muffins and corn sticks.  These staples of Southern dining are the topic of today's post.

Cornbread, in every imaginable form, has been a staple at the Southern table for as long as there's been a South.  Not so long ago, folks in the South ate cornbread at every meal.  Hoecakes, so called because fieldhands cooked them over an open fire in a shovel or hoe, were served for breakfast, dinner, and supper (the big meal of the day, dinner, was the midday meal; there was no such meal as lunch in those times), and cornpone was served for dinner and supper.  Big sheet-cake pans of 'citified' cornbread, containing baking powder and/or baking soda, eggs, etc., were usually reserved for Sunday dinner.  Some cornbread even contained berries or other fruits, and was eaten as dessert.

Corn muffins and corn sticks, however, had special status, at least they did at our house; they were reserved for days when snap beans or greens were on the menu, when there'd be plenty of pot liquor.

Pot liquor, as you know if you've spent any time in the South, is a by-product of the traditional Southern method of cooking vegetables in water, an example of which is the snap bean recipe of yesterday's post.  Pot liquor is the cooking liquid that remains after cooking, with the vegetables removed.  It contains many or most of the nutrients that the vegetables contained before they were cooked, as well as much of the flavor of the seasoning ingredients.  Thus, in order to get full nutrition of a vegetable after it's been cooked Southern-style, you have to drink its pot liquor.

Corn muffins/corn sticks and pot liquor are natural partners.  I mentioned yesterday that corn sticks were my favorite.  The reason is that corn sticks are long and narrow, so they're easier, and a lot less messy, to dunk in pot liquor.  You don't have to pull them apart like you would a muffin.  On the other hand, muffins are easier to eat slathered with butter or margerine.  Of course if you do that, they're not fit for dunking in pot liquor anyhow.

To make corn muffins and/or corn sticks, our ancestors first made a loose batter of plain (non-self-rising) corn meal (white or yellow), all-purpose flour, buttermilk, melted lard or bacon grease, baking powder, baking soda, and salt.  They then mixed the batter thoroughly, with a spoon or old-fashioned hand-cranked egg-beater.

Before they started the batter, though, they would have greased the muffin and/or corn-stick tins they were going to bake the bread in, with lard or bacon drippings, and put them in a hottish (425-475 degree) oven to heat up.  There's nothing that sticks to the pan quite like muffins and corn sticks, and pre-heating the greased tins prevented the muffins and sticks from sticking.  If you don't grease and heat your tins, you're just begging for trouble.

When the pans were judged to be hot enough, they were removed from the oven.  Then batter was spooned into the muffin and corn stick molds.  Because stuff with baking powder and baking soda in it rises, the molds weren't filled all the way up.

The filled muffin and corn-stick tins were returned to the oven.  After 20 minutes or so, they were removed from the oven and set aside to cool a little.  They were a beautiful golden brown, and the aroma made your mouth water.  They were served as soon as they were cool enough for the cook to remove them from the tins without getting burned.

Now you may ask, do I make corn sticks and muffins this way?  Well, I won't lie; the answer is no.  I haven't baked muffins or corn sticks to this recipe in a long, long time.  There is a reason for this.  Simply put, I remember doing it the old way, and what a pain it was, and now I'm just too lazy to do it that way.  Especially now that I don't have to.

Corn meal millers, you see, took pity on the likes of me years ago; they started selling corn muffin mixes.  These convenient mixes come with all the necessary dry ingredients.  All I have to supply is the buttermilk, the vegetable oil, and the elbow grease to mix them together.  And I wouldn't even need to supply the elbow grease if I wasn't too lazy to get out my electric mixer.

What brands of corn meal/muffin mix are out there?  I honestly have no idea.  Personally, I use Martha White® Corn Meal Mix, but I don't think it's available nationally.  I believe it's a regional brand that's only available in the Southeastern United States.  If you can buy it locally, fine, but if not, I'm sure that similar products are available in your area.  Seek them out, and if you can't find 'em, please let me know.

Just make sure the ingredients list on the package does not include sugar, because in order to be authentic, muffins and corn sticks, which are to be eaten while you sip your (snap bean, or whatever) pot liquor, should not be sweet.

To prepare the batter using a corn meal mix, merely follow the instructions on the package. And if the package does not instruct you to pre-heat your tins, do it anyway.  Spraying a moderate amount of a cooking spray into the cavities of your tins is a good way to grease them.  Heating the tins in the oven, while the oven pre-heats to the instruction-recommended baking temperature, should do the trick.  After all, you don't want your corn bread to stick, and you have to fight with it to get it out of the tin, do you?  Your pot liquor's liable to get cold.

Happy cooking!

. . . Snap Beans (continued - again)

All right, now.  With the preliminaries out of the way, we can finally start cooking snap beans.

To do snap beans my way, you'll need at least 2 dry quarts of fresh green beans, preferably purchased at a road-side produce stand.  After you've tipped and tailed and strung and snapped the beans (Tuesday's post), rinse them but not for too long.  Just put them in a collander and run tap-water through them to rinse off any soil, fertilizer, or other unsavory stuff that might be on them.  A sink sprayer is ideal for this, but it may also be done by turning on the tap and moving the collander around in the stream.  Use cold water, and be sure you mix the beans in the collander so that they all get rinsed.

You may find that it's easier to do this in batches.  In fact you'll have to do it in batches if all the beans won't fit in your collander.  This goes for the sprayer method, too, incidentally. There are fewer things more unappetizing than biting into a snap bean, and hearing and feeling the "crunch" of sand in your mouth.  Be thorough.

Next, find yourself a pot (and a lid that fits it) that's large enough to hold your batch of snap beans and still have 3 to 5 inches between the top of the beans and the top rim.  It's time to season the beans, but you do this in the pot, before you add the beans.

Into pot, place some salt pork.  Salt pork is also known as fat back or streak-o-lean.  I've also used smoked ham hock.

If I'm using salt pork, I render it some.  Rendering is nothing more cooking the pork over a LOW fire until fat from the pork turns to liquid.  I don't cook all of the fat out of the pork, which would leave only bits of identifiable meat.  I just get some liquid fat, because I want substantial-sized pork pieces in the finished beans.
If I'm using a ham hock, however, I don't render it.

Incidentally, a ham hock is the cured and smoked joint (small) end of the shank of a ham.  It's used in the smokehouse as a convenient point of suspension, by which the cured ham is hung during smoking.  The hock is separated from the shank after the smoking process, as part of the process of preparing the ham for sale.  Ham hocks, traditional ones at least, are sold bone-in, but I've seen boned ham hocks for sale.  I won't say anything, positive or negative, about them because I've never used boned ham hocks myself.

Next, I add the snap beans to the seasoned pot.  Then I add enough tap-water to cover the beans (or more, if I'm really desparate for pot liquor that day), bring the pot to a boil, reduce heat, and cover and simmer over a LOW fire for at least one hour, usually longer.  During cooking, I look in now and then, and add water if the liquid in the pot looks like it's getting low.  Got to have plenty of pot liquor, you know.

Snap beans cooked this way can be a meal in itself, and was, in fact, a meal for many a South Georgia farmer (and 'towny' as well) not so long ago.  It's just plain good.  All you need to go with the beans is a big coffee mug or two of pot liquor, and a couple or three (or a dozen) hot corn muffins or (my favorite) corn sticks to dunk (or not) in the pot liquor, and you've got yourself a meal to satisfy the hungriest fieldhand.

Here's my recipe.

Snap Beans

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2 dry quarts snap-beans, tipped and tailed and strung and snapped.
Water.
Salt pork or ham hock.

To season snap beans, render salt pork in pot.  For ham hock, don't render; just add to pot to season.  Use as much or as little of either as you like.

Add beans.

Add tap-water to cover beans.

Bring pot to a rolling boil.

Reduce heat.  Cover and simmer for at least an hour, checking liquid level periodically, adding water as needed.

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This recipe can be varied by adding chopped onion, to taste, to the pot and sweating them after you've rendered the salt pork.  If you're seasoning with ham hock, you can sweat the onions in a little vegetable oil before adding the ham hock, and get the same result.

Also, you just might find that snap beans cooked this way are so good that you want to eat them often.  Well, don't.  It's kind of evident that this dish is a little on the heavy side when it comes to saturated fats.  While snap beans this way are good, I don't prepare them this way every time.  If I want snap beans with salt pork flavor, but without as much saturated fat, I use defatted bacon instead of salt pork.

To defat bacon, I take my trusty kitchen shears to strips of raw bacon, and I cut most of the fat and toss it.  This trick works best if the bacon is cold.  Then I toss the defatted bacon into the empty pot, but I don't render it because if I've done a good job of defatting, there's not enough fat left to render.  I'm just looking for pork flavor, anyway, and there's plenty of that in the lean part of the bacon,

Now, I've never done this, but I suppose that if you wanted a 'ham-hockish' flavor without the saturated fat,  you could use a ham flavoring.  There are many ham-flavored buillons, ham-flavored pastes, etc., available in supermarkets.  You would add the cubes, crystals, paste, or what have you, to the pot first, following the instructions on the package, before adding the beans and water.

Now, before you go off and substitute ham flavoring for ham hock, I have to caution you:  Most, or at least many, bouillons and other packaged flavoring agents I'm familiar with tend to be a little high in sodium.  If you're concerned about your and/or your family's sodium intake, you'll want to read carefully the nutritional information on the package when buying ham-flavored buillons and flavoring.  Actually, this caution applies when you're buying any meat-flavored buillons or meat-based flavorings.

That's it for today.  Try snap beans cooked my way, then let me know what you think.

Happy cooking!

. . . Snap Beans (continued)

I know what I said yesterday, but today we'll talk only about buying snap beans.  I had second thoughts about covering buying beans and cooking beans in the same post.  There's just too much information, so we'll consider the cooking of snap beans in tomorrow's post.

Since I don't grow them myself, I have to buy my snap beans.  If you live in an area where snap beans are grown and are sold by growers (or others) at road-side produce stands, you're in luck.  These stands are the best places to buy green beans and other produce, because the produce is fresh and has been subjected to a minimum of handling.  In some cases, the stand is adjacent to the field.  The only handling the beans go through are harvesting, by manual or mechanical means, and transportation to the stand, likely by means of the farmer's own tractor or pick-up truck.  The beans you purchase in the afternoon were likely picked that morning.  You can't get beans fresher than that unless you grow them yourself.

While a road-side produce stand is my ideal source, you can get good beans at a supermarket or grocery store.  You have to be careful, though.  Actually, you should be careful wherever and whenever you buy snap beans, and other produce as well, for that matter.

For snap beans, you'll want a fresh look and feel - light green and firm.  If the beans are limp and they look shriveled, or their skins are wrinkled, don't buy them.

Snap beans should smell fresh, too.  I can't describe what to smell for in words.  Since we don't have technology equivalent to scratch-and-sniff available on the internet yet, all I'll say is this:  If the beans have a musty odor about them, they're probably moldy; give 'em a miss.  And do not even consider beans if there's any black color on them; either they're moldy or they're beginning to rot.

All produce is subject to damage during harvesting, whether harvested by mechanical harvester or hand-picked, and during later handling.  That's just a fact of life if you're born a fruit or vegetable.  String beans are no exception.  Expect some of the beans to be broken or scathed.  You don't, however, want to see too many such specimens.

Now, as to how much to buy, snap beans are customarily sold by the pound in supermarkets and groceries.  Road-side produce stands sometimes sell by weight, but more often they sell by volume.  In the State of Georgia at least, this is probably on account of you must weigh goods in a legal-for-trade scale, which must be inspected, at the merchant's expense, annually by the Weights and Measures division of the State Department of Agriculture. Such scales ain't cheap, and neither is the inspecion fee, so road-side stand operators sell by volume to avoid the expense.

This is not a bad thing for you though, though.  In the first place, it saves you money and, and in the second, you're interested in volume, rather than weight, anyway.   Most of the road-side stands I've visited display their goods in half-peck (4 dry quarts) baskets.  One-half peck is about 270 cubic inches.  To give you an idea of its size, a typical rectangular half-peck basket measures approximately 11-1/2 inches long, by (aprox.) 6-3/4 inches wide, by (approx.) 4-1/2 inches deep.

Now, I've been known to buy a half-peck basket of beans, at least when the snap bean fit really takes me.  A half-peck cooks up into a lot of beans, however, so if the fit's not on me, I'll purchase only half that amount, or 2 dry quarts.  I've found that, for many recipes, there's a sort of minimum amount I need to get the results I want (one expected result is that there's plenty of pot liquor), and for snap beans, that minimum is 2 quarts.  I may be able to get away with using less and still get good results, but certainly not much less.  Depending on how you like your snap beans, though, you may be able to use considerably less than I do.

Incidentally, if you're forced to buy snap beans by the pound and you're wondering whether there's some formula to convert weight to volume for snap beans, there isn't.  This is because the volume of a pound of snap beans (and other produce, too) varies.  Based on the time of harvest, how long they've been sitting, where the beans were grown, how much they were watered while they were growing, etc., a given volume of snap beans' weight can vary all over the place.  All this means, though, is that you'll simply have to learn how to judge volume by eye, just like our ancestors did.  It's only a matter of practice, not rocket science.

Happy cooking!

Great green gobs of . . .

. . . beans.

Green beans, string beans, snap beans . . . whatever you want to call them.

I figured it was time for a break from steak, and snap beans are a darn good side dish to accompany any main course, including sundry variations of breaded and fried cubed steak.

There was a time in South Georgia when almost everybody kept a vegetable garden and grew this delicious legume, in one variety or another, every summer.  And with the long growing season and other favorable conditions, even if you were too feeble, or too lazy, or were otherwise disinclined to plant and tend a garden, you still could get home-grown string beans.  Chances were, your neighbor had a garden, was overrun with beans, and was more than willing to share.

Some years we had a garden, some years we didn't.  Regardless, we enjoyed snap beans when they were in season.  On many a summer morning, you could find Nannie sitting on her front porch, preparing snap beans for the noon meal.  She would 'tip and tail' each bean, and 'string' it in the process, and then 'snap' it.  It was a labor-intensive affair, but it was a labor of love for Nannie, and it's still a labor of love for me.  Here's how it's done.

First, you tip and tail the bean.  What does that mean?  Tipping and tailing is the act of removing of the 'tip', or stem, of the bean, and removing of the 'tail', or the end of the bean opposite the stem, which actually looks like a little green tail.  Don't use a knife for this.  Break the tip and the tail off the bean.  If there's a 'string' in the bean, you'll see it.  Since the 'string' of a string bean has roughly the toughness, texture, and mouth-feel of monofilament fishing line, it needs to be removed.  Just strip it away as you remove the tip or tail.

After you've tipped and tailed and strung the bean, you 'snap' it by breaking it into bite-sized pieces.  Incidentally, if you haven't guessed, a 'snap bean' is so called because of the snapping sound it makes when you break it. 

These operation must be performed on each and every bean in the batch, and can be tiring if your doing a dinner-size 'mess' (a term people in the South used to use to describe a substantial quantity of anything) of snap beans.  You're going to a lot of trouble, granted, but for fresh snap beans, it's worth it.  Besides, it's the only way I know of, short of paying someone else to do it, to get fresh snap beans.

Tomorrow, I'll share with you what I look for in beans when I buy them at the market (too lazy to plant a garden these days), and how I fix 'em, with lots of pot liquor.

Happy cooking!