December 2009 NewsletterJim Casada
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www.jimcasadaoutdoors.com December DelightsMy love affair with December stretches back to memory’s earliest stages, and the Christmas season is only part of the story. A couple of weeks back I completed the manuscript of yet another Archibald Rutledge anthology, and work on that project brought back a warm flood of recollections of Decembers past. That’s because the book, the fifth one I’ve done on Rutledge, deals with Christmas at his beloved Hampton Plantation. It will include dozens of his Christmas-related hunting stories, a handful of sporting fiction pieces with a Yuletide setting, and a chapter devoted to holiday foods. The latter involves recipes and food traditions. “Old Flintlock,” as Rutledge was fondly known to his sons and close friends, had an exceptional knack when it came to writing about food, most notably holiday feasts at Hampton. To me, one measure of a writer’s power is his ability to make your salivary glands kick into involuntary overdrive merely by reading his words, and Rutledge definitely had that skill. When he writes about baked sweet potatoes with juice oozing from their skins and filling the air with the aroma of brown sugar, when he describes a haunch of venison flanked by plantation vegetables and roasted to perfection, or when he draws attention to the delectable delights of a pecan pie, I have to watch myself or I’ll be drooling. All of this sharing of Christmas with Rutledge set me on my own path for a bit of time travel into a world we have lost, but before turning to that, I’ll note that the Rutledge book should be ready by Christmas, 2010. Also, I’d be remiss if I didn’t get the obligatory “commercial” before you here and now. If you are interested in the Rutledge Christmas collection, let me know and I’ll notify you when the book appears. Meanwhile, for this Christmas, take a peek at the “Books” tab on this Web site and you’ll find a whole host of gift options—out-of-print books, anthologies bringing together the great stories of writers such as Robert Ruark and Jack O’Connor (incidentally, I just finished Volume 2 of The Lost Classics of Jack O’Connor, and it should be out this spring—again, let me know if you are interested), game and fish cookbooks, the widest range of turkey hunting books available anywhere, a biography of Robert Ruark, and of course the work I have called my “book of a lifetime,” Fly Fishing in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park: An Insider’s Guide to a Pursuit of Passion. If you find something which suits your gift needs or which would fill a niche in your personal library, I will mail books the day following receipt of orders. Enough of that advertorial, although you can’t complain too much since, as Grandpa Joe might have said, “you ain’t got no cash money invested in this thing.” Translation—you get this e-newsletter free. Let’s return to the pleasant subject of Christmas comestibles (and I bet that’s a word you haven’t encountered recently). My food memories from boyhood in the Smokies involve plenty of provender to satisfy even the most peculiar of palates, and much of it involves dishes you don’t encounter every day. I hope what follows will make you a bit peckish, and if you don’t know what that means, as my 9th grade English teacher would have said, look it up. Perhaps my most powerful memory involves Mom’s applesauce cake. Part of that no doubt derives from a passin’ powerful sweet tooth and the fact that some way, every day, I think of my dear departed mother. I’ll provide the recipe of the applesauce cake below, as well as one for that southern Appalachian delicacy, a fresh apple cake, but the setting and the way the ingredients were produced are an integral part of the story. We had a small apple orchard on our land, and Dad tended the Red Delicious, Stayman, and Golden Delicious trees with great care. That meant annual pruning, careful spraying, and hard if joyous work at harvest time. Many of the apples would be canned in late September or early October, with Mom’s annual goal being 200 quarts of cooked apples. Seldom did a day go by when we didn’t have cooked apples or applesauce on the table. Other apples would be dried, providing the key ingredient for a mainstay of hearty winter breakfasts, apple stack cakes, and fried apple pies. The cream of the crop, those apples which were unblemished, was stored in a huge bin and airy baskets in the basement. One of my youthful jobs was to go through these every week or so to cull out rotting apples. Typically I would catch them when they just showed a spot, and Mom would turn these into a cobbler (again, see below) which was delicious and easily prepared. By December we had already gathered the year’s harvest of black walnuts as well, and these too went into a variety of Christmas delicacies. Applesauce cake was made better for a marriage of the oily, pungent flavor of walnut kernels with the juiciness of apples, the meaty tang of seeded Muscat or yellow raisins, and just the right blend of spices. Walnut kernels also figured prominently in Mom’s fudge, and at least three or four times during December she would bake a whopping batch of oatmeal cookies chock full of raisins and walnuts. She had a magic touch with the latter, always making sure not to overcook them. That resulted in moist, chewy morsels which, when still warm and accompanied by a glass of milk, were pure culinary heaven. Mom always made the applesauce cakes the weekend following Thanksgiving, a time when the boys and man of the house were busy getting the opening days of another rabbit season off to a rollicking start. Looking back, I suspect she was also glad to have us out from under foot. Whatever the exact motivation for her timing, by the first of December she would have a bevy of perfectly baked applesauce cakes “aging” in a downstairs room we never heated. They got better with each passing week, thanks at least in part to the addition of a dollop of wine to keep them moist and because, like fruit cakes, they benefited from a bit of time before being eaten. I think a few weeks just allowed the myriad flavors to mix, mingle, and eventually mate in a marriage of perfect taste. Don’t get me wrong though, Christmas food involved more than desserts, and for that matter, the sweets covered here merely scratched the surface. It seemed like Mom was baking something almost every day in the two weeks immediately prior to Christmas, with candy roaster or pumpkin pies, tea cakes, sweet breads, half a dozen kinds of cookies, and the like figuring in the holiday picture. Meanwhile, with cottontail season being open, we dined once or twice a week on rabbit, along with the occasional feast of quail or grouse. We had already been enjoying squirrel for weeks, but none of us ever tired of game on the family table. I didn’t realize it at the time, but it was probably welcome in terms of family economics as well. Other than small game (thanks to being scarce as hen’s teeth, deer and wild turkeys were not a part of my youth, either as a hunter or in terms of food), our main meat at this season was pork. There’s nothing unusual about that, because until the current generation pork was the primary meat for most mountain folks. Our pork came from hogs Grandpa raised, and until sometime in my teens we had an annual family hog killing which occupied a whole day and produced great foodstuffs in a variety of forms. There was canned sausage, stored by making the sausage patties, stuffing them into quart jars, and covering with just rendered lard before sealing them. It was a central feature of many a breakfast, and quite often our evening meal would feature cathead biscuits and sausage gravy. That way a quart jar of sausage could go a long way. At other supper times another pork product would figure prominently in our supper, and before mentioning it I should note that dinner was our main meal, and in the Smokies “dinner” comes in the middle of the day. Quite often we would have a cold supper of cornbread and milk, but in the cold weather months this changed a bit. We would still have the same fare, but the cornbread would be a freshly baked pone filled with cracklings. For those of you among my readers who have led lives of culinary deprivation, cracklings are the crisp tidbits left from rendering pork fat into lard. They carry enough cholesterol to be a cardiologist’s nightmare, and convey enough flavor to bring tears of pure joy to the eyes of a mountain boy. On special occasions we would have country ham (Dad cured ours), invariably offered in company with either biscuits or grits. Another part of the hog reserved for festive meals or company was tenderloin. Although it is never tastier than when eaten fresh the day of a hog killing or the next day, tenderloin was also canned and made for some mighty fine eating. When we didn’t eat pork, wild game usually graced the table. Fried young squirrel or baked squirrel when dealing with older bushytails, when accompanied by milk gravy, biscuits, sweet taters, and turnip greens which had already been nipped by frost and which included plenty of little pieces of the diced root in the bargain, was a most satisfying meal. Much the same held true for rabbit, and Mom could work wonders with either of these critters. We only had chicken or turkey, mostly the former, on special occasions. That meant most Sundays and on either Christmas Eve or Christmas Day. For the most part, these were not “store bought” birds. Instead, they were free-range chickens raised by Grandpa Joe. As was the case with the hogs, when family members bought shoats and Grandpa raised them, Dad and some of his siblings bought biddies enough each spring to provide eggs and table fare throughout the year. I can assure those of you who have never known the pleasure of eating free-range eggs or consuming chicken raised on a diet of which scratch feed was merely a supplement, nothing that comes from Perdue Farms or Tyson even comes close. I must also admit that I thoroughly enjoyed that part of the “chicken every Sunday, Lord, chicken every Sunday” (words from an old Bobby Bare song) process that would send a P.E.T.A. proponent shrieking straight to the nearest feel-good shrink. Chickens went to their Sunday dinner final reward in one of three ways. Some were caught and unceremoniously had their necks wrung. Others were caught and went straight to Grandpa Joe’s equivalent of a guillotine for barnyard fowl; namely, a razor-sharp ax dealing with a chicken’s neck stretched across the section of log where he chopped kindling wood. It was the third method, however, which particularly suited my fancy. Hens tend to become derelict in their egg-laying duties when disturbed while roosting, yet that’s the best time to catch one when you are dealing with free-range birds. Grandpa, in an example of the commonsense wisdom which has long typified the “make do with what you’ve got” approach to life taken by hardy Appalachian hill country folks, had come up with the perfect solution. He had an exceptionally long, stiff cane pole equipped with about three feet of old-fashioned black nylon fishing line and a size 10 hook. When Grandma Minnie needed a fat hen, Grandpa would scatter a couple of handfuls of scratch feed, then back away while the hens greedily shouldered one another aside for prime pickin’s. From a decent and discreet distance, Grandpa would put a kernel of corn on the hook and, using the pole, drop it into the middle of the feasting chickens. Invariably he got a “bit” almost immediately, and all he had to do at that point was pull the squawking, wing-flapping hen his way, hand-over-hand in the same way you maneuver a cane pole when using the bass fishing technique known as doodlesocking. Once he laid hands on the chicken, he would remove the hook, but this was no catch-and-release situation. Instead, once he had the hook back it was time to employ one of the two above-mentioned techniques for dispatching a hen. A baked hen from Grandpa’s lot, cooked to a lovely brown turn in Grandma’s oven, was about as good as eating got. She would make gravy using the giblets, adding three or four boiled, chopped up eggs as well, and with a leg or thigh and a brace of cathead biscuits swimming in gravy, I was in pure paradise. The only thing which made it better was being given the privilege of digging into the picked over carcass to get the little eggs in the making to be found inside. There was a whole line of miniature yolks of diminishing size in the body cavity, and I reckon it’s been even longer since I ate those than it has been since I had a chunk of cracklin’ cornbread, fresh from an iron spider and slathered with butter made in a hand churn. Those may seem somewhat strange Christmas recollections to at least some of you, but that was life as I knew it in boyhood. One thing for sure, I knew from an early age the precise origin of the food I ate, and I understood the cycle of life in a practical, down-to-earth way that probably not one youngster in a thousand does today. Our Christmas food came from what we raised, cultivated, fed, harvested, preserved, or killed, and I’m convinced it meant more to us as a result. I might add, in closing, that it was also, thanks to the kitchen magic of Grandma Minnie and my Mom, incredibly delicious. Sure, there were memorable gifts, special moments of various kinds, the joys of caroling and gathering all the greenery and decorations for what was a truly natural Christmas, but looking back nothing enchants me in quite the same way food memories do. Here’s hoping you have some similar treasures stored in the storehouse of your mind, and all the best to you and yours for the Christmas season. We’ll finish with some recipes. APPLESAUCE CAKE1 cup butter Cream butter and sugar. Add applesauce and remaining ingredients a small amount at a time. Bake for 50 minutes to an hour at 350 degrees. Check with toothpick to see if cake is done (toothpick will come out dry). FRESH APPLE CAKE3 cups sugar Beat the eggs and add remaining ingredients. Batter will be stiff. Bake for one hour at 350 degrees. FROSTING1 13-ounce package of
cream cheese OATMEAL COOKIES WITH BLACK WALNUTS½ cup sugar Cream sugars and margarine; add egg and vanilla. Place dry ingredients in separate bowl and mix well. Add raisins and walnuts to dry ingredients. Combine creamed mixture and dry ingredients well. Drop by tablespoons onto cookie sheet. Bake at 350 degrees for 8-10 minutes or until gold brown (do not overcook if you want soft, chewy cookies). Yields about three dozen cookies. FRIED SQUIRREL1 cup flour Mix flour, salt and pepper and place in a paper or plastic bag. Beat egg well and place in a shallow dish. Drop squirrel in flour bag, shake to cover well, remove squirrel, and dip in egg mixture. Return squirrel to flour bag and shake to coat well. Repeat with all the squirrel pieces. Heat canola oil in skillet and quickly brown squirrel. Place browned squirrel in roasting pan or baking dish and bake, uncovered, at 250 degrees for approximately an hour and a half or until squirrel is tender. SQUIRREL AND DUMPLINGS2 squirrels Cut squirrels into serving pieces. Place in a Dutch oven and cover with water. Add bay leaves and simmer for 90 minutes or until squirrels are tender. Skim if necessary. Squirrel may be removed from the bones at this point and returned to stew if you desire. Add onion, celery, carrots, seasonings and water. Cook for 15-20 minutes or until veggies are tender. Increase heat. Heat stew to boiling. Add dumplings and continue cooking as directed below. DUMPLINGS½ cup milk Slowly add milk to dry ingredients. Drop by teaspoons into boiling liquid. Cook for 15-20 minutes or until dumplings are done in the center. Thank you for subscribing to the
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