Friday, January 30, 2015

We experienced a deep contentedness when feeding

Sean Brock has you impale the cauliflower on a biscuit cutter so it remains upright while cooking. 
I first became interested in Sean Brock, chef at Husk and McCrady’s in Charleston, after reading this lively New Yorker profile a few years ago. It began with an account of Brock’s love of pigs and pork, followed by a physical description of Brock: 

“Short and barrel-chested, he wears a baseball cap and T-shirt in the kitchen and keeps a stash of Slim Jims at his desk. He has small, keen eyes embedded in pink cheeks and seems to have absorbed the best qualities of his livestock. There is a placidity and a watchfulness about him, a deep contentedness when feeding, and a braying outrage when his territory is threatened. ‘I feel like this sometime,’ he told me, holding up a picture on his iPhone. It showed an angry Ossabaw hog about to charge.”

Brock is attempting to preserve venerable Southern foodways and to that end only uses ingredients from south of the Mason-Dixon line at Husk. He’s also trying to collect all the American cookbooks published in the 19th century. Fascinating guy. Last year when I heard about his book, Heritage, I promptly ordered it. The book arrived. I admired the handsome pictures, read the polished, generic prose, studied the recipes, and sighed. I wished I hadn’t bought the book and put it on the shelf. 

The rowdy personality from the New Yorker profile is absent from Heritage and the recipes are impossible. I’m not faulting Brock for the recipes -- this is how he cooks. I’m faulting myself for ordering the book sight unseen. There’s almost no dish here for which you don’t need to mail order einkorn flour, Carolina Gold rice, or black walnuts. You require a budget for truffles and foie gras, a stomach for lamb hearts and sweetbreads, a local source for wild licorice, ramps, and pokeweed, plus a dehydrator, juice extractor, immersion circulator, and sous chefs. Even just to bake Brock’s Appalachian grandmother’s apple cake, which you’d think would be one of the easier recipes, you need 27 cups of chopped apples. 

Heritage is pitted against Gabrielle Hamilton’s Prune in the Piglet and I had to really rev myself up for this little comparison project. Brock presents his recipes as super-elaborate composites, so the pork chop recipe is actually: cornmeal-fried pork chops with goat cheese-smashed potatoes and cucumber and pickled green tomato relish. The green tomato relish wasn’t happening because it’s January and I nixed the smashed potatoes because I suspected that the cauliflower was going to be trouble enough and I was right.

Stripped of trappings, the pork chops turned out to be a breeze. You pound the chops until thin and supple, like fabric, and soak in buttermilk overnight. When you’re ready to cook, dredge them in cornmeal and fry in a lots of oil. They were fantastic -- crispy on the outside, tender on the inside, and really bad for you. They easily trumped the sturdy gray chops from Prune. Unanimous. Point went to Sean Brock on the chops. 

tiny, stackable mise-en-place bowls made by my sister, who really needs to open an etsy store
I haven’t tackled a recipe as absurd as Brock’s roasted cauliflower with Meyer lemon and brown butter, watercress and pink peppercorns in years. Abridged narrative that you should feel free to skip: Cook cauliflower whole on the stove top while basting in butter, then roast in oven. Remove stem, peel, and slice the stem’s tender core. Reserve. Slice cauliflower head into serving portions. Make a puree from cauliflower scraps, broth, and cream. Make a sauce of browned goat butter, lemon, turmeric, and home-pickled ramps. (I substituted capers.) The kitchen is now a heartbreaking mess, but you’re almost ready to eat: Pour puree from the blender onto warm plates, top with cauliflower slices, add some watercress leaves and the reserved pieces of cauliflower stem. Drizzle with brown butter sauce and garnish with lemon zest and pink peppercorns.

Only I could make Brock's dainty cauliflower look like a hearty Asian soup.
The cauliflower was a bit too crunchy and the puree too thin, for which I fault the inadequately detailed recipe.But there’s no denying that on that ugly little plate were delicate, beautiful, evanescent flavors that you seldom experience in home kitchens and never in mine. This dish had hints of greatness. I can’t really describe it better than that without going all purple on you. By comparison, Gabrielle Hamilton’s roasted cauliflower seemed tasty, rude, and workmanlike. 


And yet I feel about Heritage exactly as I did going into this experiment. The needle didn’t move. The book is attractive, way too fussy for a home cook, generically written, and full of opulent dishes that I’d like to eat -- at a restaurant.  Prune is voicy, obnoxious, and sui generis, full of strange, dumpy things I have no interest in making, let alone paying for in a restaurant (canned sardines with Triscuits?), but also eccentric dishes I can’t stop thinking about. Prune engages me, Heritage doesn’t. For me there’s no contest here, Prune all the way.

43 comments:

  1. Heritage is the great disappointment of my life. Santa brought it to me for Christmas. Coal would have been better. Damn you, Santa!

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    1. Santa brought me Bar Tartine -- the right idea, just not quite the right book. At least Santa is trying.

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  2. I remember that New Yorker profile! I've been hoping to get to one of his restaurants ever since.

    It's possible that profile is what prompted me to order some Carolina Gold rice from Anson Mills. Or maybe it was one of the many articles about Southern food(ways) I read after the profile caught my interest. Either way, Carolina Gold rice is fantastic, well worth the order, as are the (freeze-dried) fresh beans Anson Mills sells. I never liked rice but theirs, cooked according to their finicky directions, converted me.

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    1. I'm going to order some Carolina Gold rice and the red peas he uses in his hoppin' john. That was the one recipe that looked simple and interesting.

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  3. Such an odd question, and unrelated to your post, but I remember a book you posted about listening to awhile back, about the history of regular kitchen tools. I can't find the title now! Can you point me in the right direction?

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    1. I'll field this one for you, Jennifer: That book is called Consider the Fork. I bought it for my (not quite beloved) Kindle and got halfway through it before getting distracted by something--maybe Gone Girl.

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    2. I would highly recommend the audio book! I listened to it in the car. I don't think I could have gotten through it by reading.

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    3. Yes, audiobook all the way.

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  4. I have to tell you how much I enjoy these reviews! They're a ball to read, and I love your straightforward opinionated take on things. When so much of the web is all sweetness and light, you are a breath of fresh air. Thank you. And I'm taking Heritage off my list. Have a wonderful, intricate recipe-free weekend.

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    1. yes agree totally. fresh air. love Justine's bowls too.

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    2. Agreed! I read a lot of food and cooking blogs, and sometimes I think if I have to see one more artfully styled food photo with ingredients carefully yet casually scattered around the finished product (all on a marble slab in bright but diffused light, of course) I will scream. I love this blog - the writing, the stories, the opinions. Total breath of fresh air.

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    3. Thanks. Such sweet comments.

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  5. Heritage is waiting for me at the library. It came to my attention after seeing it in Southern Living. Sounds like I will be reading, not cooking from it.

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  6. Oh my gosh. All of that effort and all of that mess and dishwashing in service of a cauliflower, one of the most boring vegetables ever? That's just... I don't know what it is, except I'm thoroughly impressed that you would undertake that recipe and so grateful for your endlessly entertaining blog.

    Have you ever made this one? http://smittenkitchen.com/blog/2014/09/cauliflower-slaw/
    This has found its way into my regular rotation with some modifications: toasted pecans instead of the almonds, and dried Montmorency cherries from Trader Joe's, soaked in hot muscat vinegar {I like Don Bruno brand}. I also don't bother frying the capers most of the time, although if I'm making this for company I will.

    Your fans should all band together and write to Food52 and suggest that you be selected for a Piglet judge next year.

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    1. I totally agree about the Piglet comment.

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    2. And I totally agree re: Piglet, too! Let's do it!

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    3. I have to try that cauliflower slaw -- I LOVE her broccoli slaw. I've made it a dozen times.

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  7. I flipped through this book at B&N right before the holidays and rejected it for all the reasons you mention. After looking closely at a few recipes and seeing ingredients I couldn't imagine finding without Google I decided to pass. Thank you for making me feel even better about my decision. Adding your sister's pottery to my kitchen is much more tempting.

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    1. I wish I'd gone to Barnes and Noble instead of taking the amazon way out.

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  8. Great reviews/comparisons. You have such a way with words. Thank you!

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  9. I grew up in Appalachia, in that corner right where NC/TN and VA meet. My family's been farming those hills since before the Revolution. My uncle raised his own hogs and made the best country ham ever; my grandmother made biscuits and cornbread every morning on a cast iron cookstove. We had ramps and poke in the spring and field pears and persimmons in the fall, but I never heard of foie gras and truffles being "southern" before. Granny's stack cake was to die for, but 27 cups of apples? She didn't have time for that kind of nonsense, she had a farm to run! I don't know what kind of "venerable southern foodways" Sean Brock is trying to preserve, but they're nothing like I ever saw as a born and bred, dyed-in-the-wool Southerner.

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    1. Do you have your granny's recipe for stack cake? I've always wanted to make a stack cake and when I saw that recipe I thought -- this is the time! But then the 27 cups of apples shut me down. Maybe I should have used the words "Southern ingredients" rather than "foodways." He's really more about the agriculture -- the benne seeds, peas, rice.

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  10. I love how you got us from your initial excitement to your final assessment. And that Asian soup comment cracked me up.

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  11. I am going to a meeting in Charleston in the spring under the pretense of learning -- mostly to go to Husk. Shhhhhhhhhhhhh....

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  12. Brock's pork chop preparation sounds a lot like Wienerschnitzel.

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  13. Your reviews are priceless and helpful. I've been in the South all my life, cooking seriously, and no one I ever heard of cooks like that. You saved me from a bad purchase. Many thanks.

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  14. I eagerly anticipate the Piglet every year. And then I start reading the posts and lose interest. I can't believe it's taken me this many years to figure out. I don't love the Piglet. I love your posts surrounding the Piglet. I read the official Prune vs Heritage match up yesterday before reading your post just now. Piglet vs Tipsy Baker? No contest :)

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