A comfort with fat

I can't remember a time when I didn't love fat.

My family was working class, and meat with a starch covered in margarine was the centerpiece of the family meal. Vegetables came from cans and lettuce was iceberg and dressing was bottled and the veggie part of the meal never excited anyone's palate.

At the end of the month--especially when my milkman father was unable to collect all that was owed him from the people on his milk route--we ate beans and cornbread, and no one was happy about it.

But even then, fat was an essential ingredient as the beans were cooked with big chunks of ham fat or the bone left over from a baked ham.

Ham and bacon fat were religiously collected in separate containers to be used as "seasoning." The ham fat was kept in the fridge for more special occasions; bacon fat, less precious, was kept in a metal container on the stove, ready to be spooned into an iron skillet to cook eggs or stirred into cornbread batter or added to the canned vegetable du jour.

My mother tried to instill in me a horror of fat, but it was a hopeless effort. My father would spear the fat trimmed from our various meats and chew with gusto. I trimmed the biggest pieces for my dad but would always leave an unctuous margin on the edges for myself. Given my mother's generally indifferent cooking, I can now see that the fat was the tastiest part of our suppers.

Back in the day, barbecue sandwiches from Sonny Bryan's Barbecue (the original on Inwood in Dallas) came with the bottom of the bun dipped in barbecue grease. Those sandwiches were insanely good. I don't know when they stopped doing that, but I'm grateful because I could never resist such excess on my own.

During the many diets of my life, I have labored to reorient myself toward fat. I have tried to convince myself that fat is gross, that things taste better when they are fat-free. But I remain very affectionate towards fat.

All of this is a very long-winded way of saying that I made a mayonnaise-based remoulade this week. Mayonnaise holds no horrors for me, so I'm sort of surprised that I don't like it more than I do.

I used the Joy of Cooking recipe--the 75th anniversary edition since I gave my old edition to my daughter when she moved into her own apartment.

It's good because it's full of mayonnaise-y goodness and pretty much anything made with mayonnaise is good, but it's still disappointing, I have to say. It's sort of more like tartar sauce with tarragon than a good shrimp sauce. In fact, I figured it wasn't going to work with boiled shrimp as I wanted it to, so I lightly sauteed some tilapia filets and served the remoulade with it. The picture above shows the tilapia with a healthy dollop of remoulade, home grown black-eyed peas (MO and I didn't grow them, but we shelled them), and a salad featuring tiny yellow tomatoes purchased at the farmer's market.

Here's the recipe:

Combine:
1 cup mayonnaise
1 tablespoon minced cornichons or sour gherkins (I had to substitute dill pickles because I
couldn't find either in my teeny town)
1 tablespoon drained small capers
1 tablespoon chopped parsley
1 1/2 teaspoons chopped tarragon (OK, I used dried--but it's organic)
1 small garlic clove, minced
1/2 teaspoon Dijon mustard
salt and black pepper to taste
(1 hard-boiled egg, finely chopped) This was optional but I had an egg already boiled in the
fridge so I opted to use it.

Unless you have a lot of people eating it, I recommend cutting the recipe in half, as I wish I had now that I have a big bowl of it in my refrigerator. This version certainly isn't my idea of the perfect remoulade, but I think it would be darned good on crab cakes (if I could get fresh crab in my rural East Texas town).

Tomorrow we're going to buzz it (per MO's suggestion) with some chipotle peppers and use it to dress fish tacos made with the leftover tilapia and some jicama slaw (another farmer's market purchase).

I have a feeling this remoulade is going to be in our fridge for quite a while unless I can figure out something else to do with it.

Of course you know what would it would be good on? Something fried. Fat, fat, and more fat.

No Proust am I

OK, I don't have much of a memory.

My childhood is largely a blur. I have some moments here and there, but usually I find that what I think I remember is really based on a photograph of me and my sister in a rare Dallas snowfall or me sitting on an alarmingly red-nosed Santa's lap. If I bite into a madeleine (or in my case, a barbeque sandwich), rather than being swept up in memories of a past moment associated with that food, I'm far more likely to think, Oh yeah, I like barbeque.

When I photographed the cookbook that my remoulade recipe came from for my last post, I saw that Mrs. Brown is not who gave it to us. I mentioned it to MO who pointed out that Mrs. Brown had given us another cookbook, a cookbook that I have to admit I find irritating due to its tying the southern Louisiana recipes together with folksy stories told about and by a character called King Culinary. Sure enough, there on the title page (which came out of the binding years ago and is stuck in the middle of the book) is the inscription: "May this serve as a reminder of good food and good friends in Louisiana--The Brown's." A bit of irony, no?

So maybe my memory of Mrs. Brown's remoulade being the same as in the River Roads Cookbook is as faulty as so many of my other "memories." So maybe I needed to make the remoulade recipe from the Brown's gift, Royal Recipes from the Cajun Country by John and Glenna Uhler (1969).

I did, and it isn't at all what I remembered Mrs. Brown's perfect remoulade being. It's good. It's much sharper, and it's really good on boiled shrimp atop a bed of mixed salad greens. But it's different, and I'm not feeling as much love for it as I do for the remoulade I made last week.

Before I provide the recipe, let me add two caveats. First, the recipe calls for Accent, and I felt no desire to add msg to all those lovely fresh ingredients. Second, the recipe recommends boiling shrimp then pouring the sauce over them to sit overnight. Maybe if I lived in a place where fresh shrimp is bountiful and is an everyday occurrence, I'd be open to this. But I love shrimp, and if it's ready to eat, I'm eating it.

Oh, and some folks say shallots but are referring to green onions. So I went with green onions, although shallots would be good, too.

Here's the recipe verbatim:

Combine:

1/2 cup finely chopped onion

1/4 cup chopped fresh parsley

1/4 cup finely chopped celery

1/4 finely chopped shallots

1/2 cup olive oil

2 tablespoons vinegar (I used apple cider vinegar)

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon Accent

1/2 teaspoon black pepper

2 tablespoons Creole or dijan [sic] mustard

1/2 teaspoon Tabasco (I used more)

1teaspoon horseradish

Mix well.

Boil, peel and devein 2 lbs. jumbo shrimp. Pour the sauce over them and refrigerate overnight. Serve over shredded lettuce.

You can see in the picture above that it's not at all the same color as the remoulade I made last week. The remoulade I made today is yellow and much more chunky with finely chopped celery, onion, and parsley. I pumped up the Tabasco, but it still needs more.

So the next remoulade will be moving out of the arena of personal history (or at least as much personal history as I'm capable of remembering--which ain't much apparently).

I think I see mayonnaise in my future.

Mrs. Brown's remoulade

It seems only right to return to the remoulade that started it all: Mrs. Brown's remoulade. As near as we can tell, the recipe comes from River Roads Recipes, published by the Junior League of Baton Rouge. This one is the 1972 edition (which gives you a hint about how long M and I have been married).

This remoulade is piquant and a little sharp. Not sweet at all. The color comes largely from paprika.



Here's the recipe:

4 tablespoons lemon juice
4 tablespoons vinegar
4 tablespoons prepared mustard
4 tablespoons prepared horseradish
2 teaspoons salt
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
2 teaspoons paprika
Dash of cayenne (I use a little more than that)
2 tablespoons catsup (optional, and I don't opt for it)
1 cup oil (I used a combination of olive and canola)
1/2 cup finely chopped celery
1/2 cup finely chopped green onion

Combine the lemon juice, vinegar, and everything up to the oil. Gradually add the oil (although I admit that I dumped it in all at once, and I don't see that I did any damage.) Finally add the celery and onion.

You get about two cups.

According to River Roads Recipes, this recipe was submitted by Mrs. Lenton Sartain. Mrs. Sartain, I thank you. If you made this remoulade for them, your family was darned lucky, Mrs. Sartain.

The picture on the right above is my battered, coverless copy of the cookbook. It has moved from place to place with us, well over a dozen times. What's funny is that I had myself convinced that Mrs. Brown had given us the cookbook along with the jar of remoulade, but looking at it again, I'm reminded that it was a wedding present from a member of M's family, not Mrs. Brown at all. So I may be kidding myself that this remoulade is close to what I remember so fondly.

The picture on the left at the top of this post is our dinner: boiled shrimp on a bed of lettuce with plenty of remoulade on top, sliced pickling cucumbers (from the Dallas farmers' market) in seasoned rice vinegar, sauteed yellow squash, and sauteed, sliced sweet potatoes (also from the farmers' market).

I wanted to begin with a remoulade that I know my husband and I love and hold to be the platonic form of remoulade by which all others are judged. And shrimp with remoulade is pretty much the perfect summer dinner. It's hot in Commerce.