by Julia Reed
In 2006, Hudman and Ticer got turned on to nose-to-tail cooking when they spent a year in Italy prior to opening the first of their five restaurants, Andrew Michael, and attended a family pig killing. They remember the uncle procuring the brains to scramble up with some eggs while the grandmother, in her bedroom slippers, stirred the blood to keep it from coagulating. “We figured we could do the same in our kitchen,” Ticer says, and they did. The menu at Andrew Michael has featured cakes made of the meat of braised trotters (otherwise known as feet) as well as a localized homage to Raymond Blanc’s trotter stuffed with morels and sweetbreads (but because they’re Memphis boys and not a French chef camped out in England, the sweetbreads were barbecued first). Across the street at Hog & Hominy, they serve a pig’s tail that’s braised, fried, and sauced in the manner of buffalo chicken wings.
Porcellino’s, another of the duo’s establishments, boasts a full-time butcher and meat curer as well as a nine-hundred-square-foot-plus walk-in refrigerator containing whole carcasses of cows, lambs, and pigs, very little of which goes unused. Fried bits of pig ear lend some tasty crunch to the popular brussels sprouts salad, and smoked ears are turned into the occasional terrine. Now that they are finally happy with the texture of the pickled ears, they plan on frying them in strips and serving them in a mason jar along with some ranch dressing enlivened by Calabrian chiles, tarragon, and basil. “It’ll be sort of like a serving of fries with ketchup,” Hudman says, adding that if you cut the ears into long enough strips, “they’ll curl up a bit—they’re really pretty.”
Though the beauty of the slightly curled length of pig ear might elude a lot of people, those same folks will most likely be tempted by the ranch dressing, the sauce of choice for all manner of fried stuff, including the tamale. Likewise, the ears, says Hudman, will serve as “a vehicle to get ranch to your face.” Porcellino’s already has a similar vehicle on the menu, sliced pickled tomatillos, fried and served with an especially addictive ranch made with mascarpone cheese. That dish is an inspired tribute to a former I.C.P., the fried dill pickle chip, an item that long ago made the transition to I.D.P., or Insanely Delicious Phenomenon. (Hudman, who says he’ll “mow down a basket of fried pickle chips in a second,” agrees with my initialism.)
The fried dill chip is said to have been invented sometime in the early 1970s in—where else?—the Delta, near Tunica, Mississippi, at the Hollywood Café. Opened in 1969 and immortalized in the Marc Cohn hit “Walking in Memphis,” the Hollywood fries its much-copied pickles in beer batter seasoned with cayenne pepper and chile powder, and I can attest that they’re worth traveling many miles to enjoy. The thinness of the chip is key, as is the chip itself—at Pickle’s restaurant in Seaside, Florida, they serve batter-fried dill spears, a grave error (though I do recommend the frozen margaritas).
Ticer and Hudman say they have no interest in doing a take on a pickled egg, especially not the red-dyed version, another countertop I.C.P. of old, but Emeril Lagasse has a recipe for pickled eggs and beets that no less an arbiter than Martha Stewart posted on her website. The adventurous Hall has boiled and steeped eggs in red wine for color, but no chef I talked to had any interest in spiffing up pickled pork lips or hocks, the fatty knuckles of the animal. For the real, unadulterated versions, you can head online to the Pickled Store if your neighborhood market or childhood gas station has, perhaps understandably, given up on them. The site offers up no fewer than eight varieties of pickled eggs and five of pigs’ feet, but also lips and hocks, put up for three generations by a company called Matt & Dana in Amite, Louisiana.
The Pickled Store bills pig lips as “one of the cornerstones of pickled pork products” and laments, with a seemingly straight face, that they’re “getting harder and harder to find.” Despite a marketing pitch that claims “the best thing about pig lips is that you can kiss ’em before you eat ’em,” neither Hudman nor Ticer nor Stryjewski, chef/owner at Cochon and Cochon Butcher, has any intention of going near them. Stryjewski says the lips, disconnected from the hog, colored a deep red or pink, and grinning out from the sides of the jar, are the one pork piece he wants nothing to do with. “They scare me.” But the thing about the varied taste buds of our ever-surprising fellow countrymen is that one man’s unnerving I.C.P. is another man’s beloved snack. Judging by the testimonials on Matt & Dana’s pickled lips page, the company might live to see another generation. “A sleeper,” Skip writes. “Really good, unexpected, and now a staple.” Mindy agrees, calling the lips “a very nice experience! Strong porky flavor and wonderful texture.” Susie from Arkansas is even more effusive: “I’d have to give these pig lips the loudest Woooooo, Pig! Sooie! call ever.” Still, to play it safe, the company might want to consider branching out into the brave new world of Kool-Aid pickles.
A Tasteful Send-off
In April 2014 in New Orleans, Mickey Easterling, a woman described in various obituaries as a “philanthropist and party giver,” attended her own funeral. I realize it’s true that we all, in one form or another, attend our own funerals, but Easterling was not lying quietly in a coffin or residing in a tasteful urn. She was sitting upright, on a platform erected for the occasion, decked to the nines in a big black hat and a hot-pink feather boa, a cigarette holder in one manicured hand and a Waterford crystal flute of champagne in the other.
The event, held in the grand Italianate lobby of the newly restored Saenger Theatre on Canal Street, was attended by more than a thousand people and made the news as far away as Ottawa and London, where people were riveted by the details, most of which had been carefully planned by the, um, hostess. Among the tidbits reported: the items atop the wrought-iron table next to the garden seat in which she sat (champagne bucket containing an open bottle of Veuve Clicquot, coffee-table book on hats, pack of American Spirit cigarettes); the ferns and pots of white phalaenopsis orchids flanking the “stage” to approximate her own backyard pool patio; the fact that she wore her favorite jeweled brooch (spelling out the word bitch); and her age, eighty-three, which seemed a tad unfair since most of the articles also quoted one of her trademark lines (“Age is a number, and mine’s unlisted”).
There was no program, just a jazz combo on a balcony above and a whole lot of people approaching the “garden area” and raising their glasses (and their camera phones) to the figure before them. “It was a very pleasant effect,” her friend, the Tennessee Williams scholar Kenneth Holditch, told a reporter with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. “At first I hesitated to even go look, but when I did … it was not unseemly.” Sammy Steele, who did her makeup, went further: “She looks wonderful. She is a living legend, even in death.”
I will have to take their word for it, though the large color photo on the front page of the New Orleans Advocate, the city’s new daily, was perhaps a tiny bit jarring, if not flat-out grotesque. Still, Easterling was not the first New Orleans “legend” to make a splashy exit. When Ernie K-Doe (the rhythm and blues singer most famous for the 1961 hit “Mother-in-Law”) died in 2001, his widow, Antoinette, commissioned an effigy, made from a department store mannequin, so that he could remain a presence, seated on a throne in their nightclub, the Mother-in-Law Lounge. Dressed in an ever-changing selection of his former performing outfits, the look-alike K-Doe—in real life he had often referred to himself as the Emperor of the Universe—was also occasionally taken out for public appearances by his wife before she died, in 2009. Then, two years ago, there was Lionel Batiste, the bass drummer of the Treme Brass Band, who attended his wake leaning against a street lamp, wearing a hat and suit and his familiar watch, whistle, and rings. That had been the doing of his son, who had promised his father that he would “send [him] off good” and enlisted the help of the funeral director Louis Charbonnet. “You have to think outside the box,” Charbonnet told the Times-Picayune. “And so he’s outside the box. We didn’t want him to be confined to his casket.”
Putting aside the fact that this seemingly growing trend of dead people sitting and standin
g around all over town is getting to be unsettling, I was interested in Easterling’s painstaking orchestration of her own departure. There was, for example, the dress she wore by Leonard, a French fashion house known for its thin silk jersey pieces in splashy prints. A friend of mine who is a frequent international traveler also wears Leonard—the clothes weigh almost nothing and rarely wrinkle—so Easterling’s choice seemed the perfect thing for what is presumably the ultimate trip. Then there was the champagne. Prior to her demise, Easterling drank a lot of it. She even carried around a little case of Waterford flutes because she didn’t like imbibing her favorite Veuve Clicquot from inferior vessels. But it was generous of her to share. Veuve for a thousand is no small investment in something destined to go flat in your own glass.
And there was the food: fried eggplant, lump crabmeat in pastry shells, and fried oysters. Now, these happen to be some of the exact things I serve at most of my own parties—and a far cry from the funeral food we are used to in my part of the world (casseroles, weird layered salads, fried chicken, pound cake, tomato aspic). Funeral food is such an exhaustive culinary and cultural subject that Gayden Metcalfe, from my hometown of Greenville, Mississippi, devoted an entire book to the subject, called Being Dead Is No Excuse. In another book, by Michael Lee West, called Consuming Passions: A Food-Obsessed Life, the author includes a “Funeral Food” chapter in which she advises against fare like that served at Easterling’s farewell: “I myself have never seen appetizers at a funeral.”
Of course, Easterling’s affair was not the usual post–church service groaning-board, but a cocktail party (or, in the words of her daughter, “a really nice way to say, ‘The party’s over’”). But I started thinking: If we plan everything else about the way we go out (hymns and readers, casket versus cremation), why not plan the menu? Even death-row inmates get to choose their last meal. Since for the rest of us the exact date for that particular repast is a tad harder to predict, we can do the next best thing by arranging for a swell meal for our mourners.
In her book, the skittish West also counsels against bringing desserts with names like Death by Chocolate, but if there’s any occasion that calls for humor on a menu, it is this one. So with that in mind, I’ll be serving the delicious champagne cocktail devised by Ernest Hemingway called Death in the Afternoon (an ounce of Pernod or absinthe at the bottom of a flute, topped with chilled champagne), though a Corpse Reviver No. 2 would not be out of place. There will also be a whole lot of tasty appetizers passed on trays, including my mother’s to-die-for (sorry, couldn’t resist) fried eggplant.
Judy’s Fried Eggplant
SERVES 6 AS AN HORS D’OEUVRE
Ingredients
1 tbsp. salt
1 large eggplant, peeled and sliced crosswise into quarter-inch slices
1 sleeve Ritz crackers (or more, as needed)
3 large eggs, beaten well
Vegetable oil
Preparation
Fill a large bowl with ice water and add the salt. Stir to blend and add eggplant slices. Soak for about an hour. Meanwhile, crush the Ritz crackers by wrapping the sleeve in a dish towel and beating with a rolling pin. Or pulse a couple of times in a food processor. (You want them to have a bit of texture, like coarse bread crumbs, so do not pulverize them too finely.)
Drain the eggplant and dry carefully. Dip each slice in beaten egg to coat well and dredge in cracker crumbs, pressing to make sure they adhere. Transfer onto paper towels. Heat about two inches of oil over medium-high heat until very hot. (It should be around 375 degrees—if you don’t have a thermometer, stick the handle of a wooden spoon into the oil. If the oil starts steadily bubbling around the handle, you are ready to go.) Fry the eggplant in batches (do not crowd pan) until golden brown, about a minute or two on each side. Add more oil as needed.
Drain on paper towels and sprinkle with salt.
Beyond the Butterball
One of my more memorable Thanksgiving midday meals was eaten in my parents’ kitchen, standing up. I’d cooked hamburgers for my father and me, and we ate them hanging over the counter because the juices from the meat had mingled (in an entirely delicious way) with the homemade mayo I’d spread on the toasted buns (actually English muffins) and were dripping (not unpleasantly) down our chins. It was memorable mainly because it did not involve turkey, or even turkey burgers, but also because the whole enterprise took less than fifteen minutes and did not require a single Pyrex dish. I should admit, here, that we’d been invited to a festive sit-down Thanksgiving dinner at someone else’s house, which freed us up to invent our own lunch, so we didn’t actually boycott the whole turkey-and-dressing-and-sweet-potato extravaganza. But I’ve thought more than once about how great it would be if, at least occasionally, on the fourth Thursday of November I could ditch the turkey altogether and give thanks that the pilgrims came to America so that the whole nation could later savor something as fine as a perfectly cooked burger on a bun (preferably accompanied by a nice red burgundy).
That kitchen lunch was an accident of sorts, but a couple of years ago I purposely veered off the well-trodden Turkey Day path, at least a little, at an outdoor Thanksgiving lunch on my former New Orleans lawn. Inspired by a piece I’d researched about the origins of the Pilgrims’ first feast back in 1621, I decided to stage one based—very loosely, as it turns out—on their menu. This is not easy. The Plymouth settlers had no flour, very little sugar, and no potatoes. We know from a couple of surviving accounts that they did have five deer, given to them by the very nice Wampanoag Indians who also joined them at the table (this was clearly before our Native hosts knew what really, really bad guests—Thanksgiving or otherwise—future waves of settlers would turn out to be), the corn the Indians taught them to grow, and “the excellent seafish” that abounded in the nearby waters, including clams, cod, and lobster. The governor had sent a small party out “fowling” for the occasion, so there were ducks to be sure, but there is no evidence a turkey was actually served.
For our feast, we caved and had two turkeys, both wild and domestic, just in case, but we also grilled some oysters along with sausages made of both venison and duck. We put more oysters in the cornbread dressing and had another dressing made of shrimp and mirlitons, but then, you know, various guests insisted on bringing staples like yeast rolls and jellied cranberry sauce and sweet potatoes with the dread marshmallows on top and pies, including pumpkin, which I hate more than pretty much anything in the world. This is always a problem—at one point in the menu planning, no matter how inventive you try to get, Thanksgiving ends up being a forced march down the assorted memory lanes of way too many people. Fortunately, we had some more useful stuff the pilgrims didn’t have, such as my friend Elizabeth’s frozen Red Roosters (our very own Thanksgiving tradition composed of cranberry juice, orange juice, and vodka). Plus, we were dressed, nominally, in costume, which tends to lighten things up. I had on a full-blown Indian headdress, made of the lovely brown and white feathers from the underbelly of a peacock, and my friend Joan Griswold, the talented painter, whipped up an entire black-and-white pilgrim’s getup with her trusty sewing machine. Her husband, the writer and humorist Roy Blount, Jr., looked extremely fetching in a headpiece he made by tying a fake cornucopia found at the grocery store to an ancient Saints visor with scruffy artificial white hair on the top.
I love a theme, and I like turkey just fine. But you do have to wonder why the pilgrims’ immediate descendants didn’t pick up on the yummy lobster aspect of the proceedings, say, or at least the duck. (I once served Scott Peacock’s duck stuffed with red rice and oyster dressing, which seems to me a slightly more realistic homage.) I also started wondering what would have happened if the first settlers had landed somewhere else. If they’d somehow made it up the mouth of the Mississippi to the Delta, where I was born, for example, we might well be eating bear on our national holiday. Well into the nineteenth century, the still sparsely inhabited Delta was so chock-full of the furry creatures that the famed African-Ame
rican hunting guide Holt Collier was said to have shot three thousand alone. Collier served as Theodore Roosevelt’s guide when the president came for the hunt of 1902—a now famous trip that resulted in the “teddy bear.” Roosevelt was on a lunch break and unable to take the shot when Collier ran the bear across the clearing. So to protect his dogs the guide was forced to tie the bear to a tree. When the president returned, he refused to shoot the tethered animal, an act that was later captured in a cartoon, which in turn led to the stuffed toy. Determined to get a legitimate bear, Roosevelt came back five years later, a trip that resulted (according to Collier’s biographer, Minor Buchanan) in “three bears, six deer, one wild turkey, twelve squirrels, one duck, one opossum, and one wildcat.” The party ate everything but the wildcat, and I guess we should all be grateful that the pilgrims didn’t manage to run across a possum or some squirrels.
Bears are currently endangered in Mississippi but they still find their way to the Delta. Last spring when the river was in flood stage a rather large specimen was found up a tree in downtown Greenville. I’ve not had the pleasure of dining on one, but apparently they were once a sought-after food source. In a piece he wrote on bear hunting for Delta Magazine, my friend Hank Burdine reported that Collier got twenty-three dollars for a dressed deer, but up to sixty dollars for a bear. His clientele primarily consisted of men in frontier camps who’d turned up to build the levees or railroads or both, but plenty of other folks were on the bears’ trail. After a Confederate colonel named Robert Bobo rebuilt his farm near Clarksdale, he still managed to spend most of his time in the swamps, where during a three-month period in 1887 he reported killing 304 bears, 54 deer, and 9 panthers. Burdine cites a journal written by Bobo’s daughter-in-law in which she recalls the “festive mood in their setting out for the wild country, with the string of four-mule wagons, the dozens of dogs racing here and there, and the hunters themselves, mounted on their fine-spirited horses. The men were gone for weeks and lived on bear steaks and stew.”
