Snacking State-by-State: Mississippi III - The War Between the States, Installment I (or "Oysters! Bacon! Oysters and Bacon!!!")

As most US history buffs know by now, we are in the 150th anniversary of the Civil War.  On a very related tangent to this State-by-State project, I will save two recipes in this series to recipes from the Civil War.  The latter, Yankified one will come when we cross back over the Potomac and traverse the Mason-Dixon.  The first is more of the Secesh variety.

Official Name: State of Mississippi
State Nicknames: The Magnolia State; The Hospitality State
Admission to the US: December 10, 1817 (#20)
Capital: Jackson (largest)
Other Important Cities: Gulfport (2nd largest); Biloxi (5th largest), Tupelo (7th largest)
Region: South, Deep South, Gulf Coast; East South Central (US Census)
RAFT Nations: Corn Bread & BBQ; Gumbo
Bordered by: Tennessee (north); Alabama (east); Gulf Coast (south); Louisiana (southwest); Arkansas (northwest); the Mississippi River (west)
Official State Foods and Edible Things: white-tailed deer (land mammal); wood duck (waterfowl); largemouth/black bass (fish); honeybee (insect - the honey is what you eat, of course); oyster (shell - again, you eat what lives inside it)
Some Famous and Typical Foods: typical Southern foods, with Cajun foods (gumbo, étouffée, etc) in the southern part of the state; seafood along the Mississippi River and the Gulf Coast (especially crawfish, shrimp, oyster and blue crab)

There are so many websites with Civil War era recipes, from hoe cakes to hard tack and so much more (check out the Civil War Interactive website for more recipes from the War and the era).  In his cookbook A Gracious Plenty, John T. Edge lists among the first recipes an easy dish that works today as a Civil War-era hors d'oeuvre.  Edge quotes Bethany Ewald Bultman, who provided the recipe to the recipe collection Cook with a Natchez Native, who says that she found the recipe in an 1873 Natchez, MS, cookbook:

"...handwritten in the margin [next to the recipe] was 'It got us through the WAR'.  it didn't say which war." [Edge 1999: 13]

The recipe: Confederates on Horseback

* oysters (pre-shucked or not - it's cheaper for me to buy them unshucked.  All of the local oysters at Wegman's were from the Chesapeake - yay!  I got some Chincoteague oysters: briny and strong but still delicious, each for 99¢.  One died on the way home so I had three to shuck.)
* slices of bread (one for each oyster)
* slices of bacon (again, one for each oyster.  I was out of bacon but instead of buying a whole package, I went ahead and had them slice some bacon at the deli counter.  Yes, Wegman's has its very own charcuterie section.  I got a 1/5 pound for about $1.50, which wound up being much cheaper than buying a whole pound)
* butter (unsalted, to spread on the bread)
* horseradish (to spread on the bacon.  The recipe as reprinted by John T Edge calls for anchovy paste, though other, perhaps more modernized versions call for either anchovy paste or horseradish.  I only had one of those on hand.)

Preheat your oven to 400°F and proceed with the recipe below.

Cut each slice of bread into rounds - a cookie cutter or glass will work wonders with this step.

Lightly toast the rounds of bread.

Next, shuck those oysters.  The guy at the fish counter wasn't kidding: these Chincoteagues are strong.  I mean that in two ways: by the briny smell, and by the way they simply refused to let me pry them open.  That last part is strange, considering that it was relatively easy to find an opening into these oysters to shuck them, but once I did, they hung the hell on.

Butter each toasted round of bread and set aside.

Next, take each slice of bacon - raw - and spread it with the horseradish or anchovy paste.  Note: I liked this ready sliced bacon.  It was not stringy or extra slippery like the bacon I usually get from the sealed packages. Since I don't eat a whole lot of bacon all at once, I think I may buy bacon like this more often: a few slices here or there as needed, unless I'm in need for a whole bunch of bacon grease all at once.

Wrap each oyster up in a slice of bacon.

Secure each oyster with a toothpick, unless you're like me and only have multicolored plastic toothpicks, that will melt in the oven and make your oysters taste funny, on hand.

Bake for five to eight minutes in your 400° oven, and then place each oyster-bacon-horseradish thing on its own round of buttered toast.

This is such a ridiculously easy thing to make, and certainly Chesapeake cooks have thought of this at some point (maybe even called it "Confederates on Horseback" for all I know).  It's best to bite enough of the bread so that you get the entire oyster in your mouth, otherwise it will squish all over.  Next time, maybe I will try it with anchovy paste?

- - - - -

Why do so many states along the Mississippi River follow each other in alphabetical order?  Minnesota.  Mississippi.  Missouri.  Hold up!  That's where the next few State posts take us: to the land of Kansas City BBQ, St. Louis' own gooey butter cakes, and more strange sandwiches.

Sources:

Civil War Interactive & Blue Gray Daily.  "Welcome to the Civil War Interactive Cookbook: Articles and Recipes for your 19th Century Cooking", date of publication unknown.  Copyright 2011 Civil War Interactive.

Edge, John T. A Gracious Plenty: Recipes and Recollections from the American South. An Ellen Rolfes Book. For the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi. G. P. Putnam's Sons: New York, 1999.

Jackson, Irvin.  "Biloxi Bay Potato Salad".  Mississippi Department of Marine Resources (recipe card) copyright Mississippi Department of Marine Resources, 2011.  Also published in Mississippi Seafood Recipes by the Mississippi Department of Marine Resources, copyright Mississippi Department of Marine Resources, 2003.

Wilson, Charles Reagan. "Introduction: The South: Who, Where, and What's for Dinner".  In A Gracious Plenty: Recipes and Recollections from the American South by John T. Edge. An Ellen Rolfes Book. For the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi. G. P. Putnam's Sons: New York, 1999.

Some information also obtained from Wikipedia's "Mississippi" page and other pages, and the Food Timeline State Foods link to "Mississippi".

Snacking State-by-State: Mississippi II - A potato salad fit for a shrimp

When we think of the Gulf Coast, we think of seafood.  Though Louisiana and Florida usually get the lion's share of the nation's attention when it comes to Gulf oysters, crabs, crawfish and shrimp we would be remiss to leave out the marine resources right off the coast of Gulfport and Biloxi.

Official Name: State of Mississippi
State Nicknames: The Magnolia State; The Hospitality State
Admission to the US: December 10, 1817 (#20)
Capital: Jackson (largest)
Other Important Cities: Gulfport (2nd largest); Biloxi (5th largest), Tupelo (7th largest)
Region: South, Deep South, Gulf Coast; East South Central (US Census)
RAFT Nations: Corn Bread & BBQ; Gumbo
Bordered by: Tennessee (north); Alabama (east); Gulf Coast (south); Louisiana (southwest); Arkansas (northwest); the Mississippi River (west)
Official State Foods and Edible Things: white-tailed deer (land mammal); wood duck (waterfowl); largemouth/black bass (fish); honeybee (insect - the honey is what you eat, of course); oyster (shell - again, you eat what lives inside it)
Some Famous and Typical Foods: typical Southern foods, with Cajun foods (gumbo, étouffée, etc) in the southern part of the state; seafood along the Mississippi River and the Gulf Coast (especially crawfish, shrimp, oyster and blue crab)

The Mississippi Department of Marine Resources has made it incredibly easy to find recipes to choose from when exploring Magnolia State seafood.  They've done this through a line of cookbooks, all completely available for free on their website, from their 2010 Mississippi Seafood Cookoff Cookbook (we have such things here too) to books of recipes for shrimp, oysters and even southern Mississippi-specific recipes, for that more Cajun-flavored part of the state.   I must add that the MS DMR didn't make choosing a recipe all that easy.  There were just too many tempting ones to choose from.  But I finally settled on a simple but delicious Southern potato salad, accentuated with Gulf shrimp throughout.

The recipe: Biloxi Bay Potato Salad

Irvin Jackson, Directorate of the Mississippi Department of Marine Resources, provides the recipe that I ended up making.  It's in the "Shrimp" section of their 2005 "Mississippi Seafood Recipes" cookbook (no page numbers, but it helps to know that the same recipe is featured on cards 3 and 4 of their Shrimp Recipe Cards, with a helpful photo of the dish on card 3).  Once you assemble everything, putting it all together is pretty simple.

* potatoes (any potato salad needs potatoes - in this case half of a $5 quart of spuds from the I-83 farmers' market)
* shrimp (Rock shrimp from the Gulf - these were about $14 per lb.  I got half a pound)
* green onions and celery (about $3 total - you will need them raw)
* eggs (hard boiled)
* sweet relish (a little more than a dollar)
* yellow mustard (had it)
* salad dressing (I just used mayonnaise - many a Southern potato salad is coated with mustard and mayo.  Since Hurricane Irene took my previous jar of mayonnaise, I needed a new one.  In this case, I splurged on a jar of Duke's Mayonnaise, that Richmond-based classic and favorite of Southern cooks for almost a century)
* Cajun seasoning (or in lieu of that, Old Bay, which is also quite popular throughout the South)

You will need to boil three things: the potatoes, the eggs and the shrimp.

Yes, we prefer to steam those shrimp here, but that's not how they do it in Mississippi, and since this is a Mississippi recipe I figured I would stick with the spirit of their shrimp.  A quick way to do it is to follow the instructions for steaming shrimp that you find on the side of the Old Bay can, only with enough water to boil it.

Boil, peel and cut up the potatoes, and mix them with the chopped green onions and celery.

Mix into the veggies the boiled shrimp, sliced eggs, relish, mustard, mayo and Old Bay.  And that's pretty much all you need to do.

Like the Mississippi mud cake, this shrimp filled potato salad was quite easy to make - a running theme in these specific Mississippi recipes I chose, it seems.  Add salt, Old Bay and Cajun seasonings to taste (I like mine slightly saltier than this) and serve with just about anything, or eat it on its own.  It's substantial enough after all.

Sources:

Civil War Interactive & Blue Gray Daily.  "Welcome to the Civil War Interactive Cookbook: Articles and Recipes for your 19th Century Cooking", date of publication unknown.  Copyright 2011 Civil War Interactive.

Edge, John T. A Gracious Plenty: Recipes and Recollections from the American South. An Ellen Rolfes Book. For the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi. G. P. Putnam's Sons: New York, 1999.

Jackson, Irvin.  "Biloxi Bay Potato Salad".  Mississippi Department of Marine Resources (recipe card) copyright Mississippi Department of Marine Resources, 2011.  Also published in Mississippi Seafood Recipes by the Mississippi Department of Marine Resources, copyright Mississippi Department of Marine Resources, 2003.

Wilson, Charles Reagan. "Introduction: The South: Who, Where, and What's for Dinner".  In A Gracious Plenty: Recipes and Recollections from the American South by John T. Edge. An Ellen Rolfes Book. For the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi. G. P. Putnam's Sons: New York, 1999.

Some information also obtained from Wikipedia's "Mississippi" page and other pages, and the Food Timeline State Foods link to "Mississippi".

Snacking State-by-State: Mississippi I - Thick like Mississippi mud...

Heading down the length of the Mississippi River from Minnesota, we slog through the Mississippi mud to hit the Gulf Coast at the other end.  Food wise, it doesn't really get much more Southern than this.

Official Name: State of Mississippi
State Nicknames: The Magnolia State; The Hospitality State
Admission to the US: December 10, 1817 (#20)
Capital: Jackson (largest)
Other Important Cities: Gulfport (2nd largest); Biloxi (5th largest), Tupelo (7th largest)
Region: South, Deep South, Gulf Coast; East South Central (US Census)
RAFT Nations: Corn Bread & BBQ; Gumbo
Bordered by: Tennessee (north); Alabama (east); Gulf Coast (south); Louisiana (southwest); Arkansas (northwest); the Mississippi River (west)
Official State Foods and Edible Things: white-tailed deer (land mammal); wood duck (waterfowl); largemouth/black bass (fish); honeybee (insect - the honey is what you eat, of course); oyster (shell - again, you eat what lives inside it)
Some Famous and Typical Foods: typical Southern foods, with Cajun foods (gumbo, étouffée, etc) in the southern part of the state; seafood along the Mississippi River and the Gulf Coast (especially crawfish, shrimp, oyster and blue crab)

Foodwise, Mississippi has a lot to claim on the culinary landscape.  Like much of the Deep South, its influences are both standard Southern foods and, in the southern part of the state, Cajun foods.  Seafood is also important here, as is seen in the many fish and shellfish dishes from the state.  It is also important to note that Mississippi is home to some of the South's most notable chefs and food writers: Iron Chef Cat Cora (Jackson), cookbook author and sometimes Atlantic food blogger Regina Charbonneau (Natchez), the late Craig Claiborne (Sunflower) and John T. Edge (Oxford), food writer, scholar and member of the Southern Foodways Alliance.

Edge is notable for his many writings on food around the country, including many books, among them compendia on various American classics: fried chicken, apple pie, donuts and hamburgers.  He is also author of the authoritative Southern cookbook A Gracious Plenty.  This book collects typically Southern recipes from all over the proper South.  The book tackles exactly what the South and its foods are, and notes the varieties of definitions, opinions and experiences, as Charles Reagan Wilson notes in his Introduction to Edge's A Gracious Plenty:

...[C]elebrating the [South's] foodways became a way to express Southern pride.  Woe to the non-Southerner who would disparage grits or collards.  Not everyone who lives in the South today, though, has a self-identity as a Southerner.  American homogenization has blurred regional boundaries, through national networks of communication, transportation, and consumer marketing... [Yet] Southerners continue to nurture their sense of Southernness through festivals, sporting events, popular culture, and even political attitudes. [Wilson, in Edge 2000: xvi]

Edge's compendium is a collection of recipes from various Southern community cookbooks.  Edge is a champion of the genre.  While community cookbooks are hardly confined below the Mason-Dixon Line, Edge suggests they are

as Southern as sweet tea.  They may get comparatively little critical respect, but they are much relied upon in Southern kitchens... 

...[W]e believe that the collected recipes reflect a greater Southern community, one that is neither black nor white, rich nor poor, but united in the love of good food and fellowship.  [Edge 2000: 3]

One classic Southern dessert, Mississippi mud pie/cake, comes more from the Mississippi River than Mississippi the state.  Still this recipe, originally from The Pastors Wives Cookbook from out of Memphis (and reprinted on pages 272 and 273 of Edge's A Gracious Plenty), certainly merits inclusion here.  If you do it right, as another famous Southern chef Nathalie Dupree once noted, "this cake should be cracked and dry-looking, like Mississippi mud in the hot, dry summer" (Edge 2000: 272).  Or at least Mississippi mud when it's covered in melted marshmallows.

The recipe: Mississippi Mud Cake

For this recipe - easier than the pie version since you don't need a crust - you will need:

For the cake part:

* butter (the recipe calls for margarine, but I don't have that and I've got a whole lot of butter laying around, so there's that.  Plus, why spend money when you don't need to?)

* eggs (a dozen for less than $2)

* cocoa (had it)

* granulated sugar (same)

* flour (Had it.  Use the soft kind if possible - here, White Lily)

* salt and vanilla (had them)

* mini marshmallows (about $2 at Harris Teeter.  I didn't realize they were so pricey)

For the frosting:

* more butter (again, the recipe calls for margarine)

* confectioner's sugar (a whole box)

* milk

* more cocoa powder

First make the cake.  You will cook together the butter, cocoa and sugar in a saucepan until melted together.

Add to this the flour and salt.

In a separate bowl, mix the eggs and vanilla, and then add to the saucepan.

Stir together everything over heat until mixed.

Pour the batter into a greased pan and bake at 350°F for about 30 minutes.

While the cake is baking, prepare the frosting by mixing the milk, melted butter, cocoa and granulated sugar.  No need to heat it.  Just mix it all up.

Keep mixing it.  You should do this about 10 minutes before you pull out the cake.

Once the cake is finished, start by spreading mini marshmallows on the top of the cake.

Follow the marshmallows up with the frosting.

Edge's source suggests that this dessert should look like the hot parched mud by the banks of the Mississippi. It certainly looks muddy (hence the name), but it doesn't taste it.  This is one of the easiest, messiest, gooiest cakes I have made in a long time.  Almost as sweet as the whoopie pies from Maine, and far more of a mess, I had to share this with people.  Thank God they ate most of it because I would've developed diabetes had I eaten the whole beautiful pan's worth of cake.

Sources:

Civil War Interactive & Blue Gray Daily.  "Welcome to the Civil War Interactive Cookbook: Articles and Recipes for your 19th Century Cooking", date of publication unknown.  Copyright 2011 Civil War Interactive.

Edge, John T. A Gracious Plenty: Recipes and Recollections from the American South. An Ellen Rolfes Book. For the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi. G. P. Putnam's Sons: New York, 1999.

Jackson, Irvin.  "Biloxi Bay Potato Salad".  Mississippi Department of Marine Resources (recipe card) copyright Mississippi Department of Marine Resources, 2011.  Also published in Mississippi Seafood Recipes by the Mississippi Department of Marine Resources, copyright Mississippi Department of Marine Resources, 2003.

Wilson, Charles Reagan. "Introduction: The South: Who, Where, and What's for Dinner".  In A Gracious Plenty: Recipes and Recollections from the American South by John T. Edge. An Ellen Rolfes Book. For the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi. G. P. Putnam's Sons: New York, 1999.

Some information also obtained from Wikipedia's "Mississippi" page and other pages, and the Food Timeline State Foods link to "Mississippi".

Snacking State-by-State: Louisiana IV - Bourbon? Vanilla? Butter? Yes, please!

As I mentioned earlier, the four recipes I interpreted for my Louisiana posts were the same four dishes I ate at the Gumbo Shop in New Orleans on a recent trip there. There were the chicken and andouille sausage gumbo, the jambalaya, the étouffée and (for dessert) bread pudding with a rich and silky hard sauce.

Official Name: State of Louisiana (French: État de Louisiane; French Creole: Léta de la Lwizyàn - though Louisiana has no official language, French is important to the state's identity, and in 1812 Louisiana was the first state to join the Union whose majority did not speak English. For more on the linguistic history of Louisiana, see here)
State Nicknames: The Bayou State; The Pelican State; The Sugar State
Admission to the US: April 30, 1812 (#18)
Capital: Baton Rouge (2nd largest city)
Other Important Cities: New Orleans (largest); Shreveport (3rd largest): Metairie (4th largest)
Region: South; Deep South; Gulf Coast; West South Central (US Census)
RAFT Nations: Gumbo; Cornbread & BBQ
Bordered by: Arkansas (north); Mississippi & the Mississippi River (east); the Gulf of Mexico (southeast and south); Texas (west)
Official State Foods and Edible Things: crawfish (crustacean); milk (drink); alligator (reptile)
Some Famous & Typical Foods: Cajun cuisine and dishes, especially gumbo, jambalaya, courtboullion (COO-bee-yon) and étouffée; pralines; crawfish, shrimp, crab, alligator, catfish; typical Southern foods in the northernmost part of the state.

As Terri Pischoff Wuerthner mentions in the preface to her Great-Aunt Irma's version of this classic dish, bread pudding grew out of practicality.

Bread pudding was originally developed to make use of stale bread, but evolved into something so creamy, crunchy, and decadent that it is now a much loved dessert. As kids, we turned up our noses at the thought of pudding made from old bread, until we tasted Great-Aunt Irma's version. The cardamom, vanilla, pecans, and Bourbon Vanilla Sauce make this a step or two above other bread puddings we have tasted. [Pischoff Wuerthner 2006: 248]

It is fattening and filling and sweet and tangy all at once, and I couldn't help but make the whole recipe.

Recipe: Bread Pudding with Bourbon Vanilla Sauce

For this bread pudding, you need a lot of ingredients, but the author suggests that it is relatively simple to make.


For the pudding half of the recipe, you need:

* unsalted butter, both for greasing the pan and for adding to the pudding itself
* pecan halves (pecan pieces were cheaper for me to find)
* eggs (had them)
* sugar (same)
* vanilla extract (just enough for this recipe)
* ground cinnamon and cardamom (had them too)
* whole milk
* one 8 ounce baguette, cut into cubes of about 3/4 inch (one French baguette will run about $2.50 these days; some recipes call for brioche instead)

For the sauce half of the recipe, you need:

* sugar
* cream (have about a pint on hand)
* ground cinnamon, cardamom and nutmeg
* butter
* bourbon (this was an excellent opportunity to use some more of that Maker's Mark that I bought for the mint julep I made for Kentucky)
* cornstarch
* vanilla extract

The procedure is relatively simple, but has a lot of small steps:

First, grease a 9 x 13 inch pan.


Cube the bread, and spread half of them over the bottom of the pan.


Toast the pecans...


...and add them.


Next, whisk the liquid ingredients (including melted butter), sugar and spices.


Pour half of this mixture into the pan.


Add the rest of the bread, and top off with the rest of the liquid.


Cover with plastic wrap, lightly push on the plastic to soak all the bread cubes, and let it all sit for half an hour. Around this time, preheat your oven to 350°F. When ready, replace the plastic wrap with aluminum foil, and slip into the oven.


Now it's time to make the sauce. Gently boil together the ingredients for the sauce, except for the bourbon, cornstarch and vanilla.


These last three ingredients you will mix together in a separate bowl.


Once the butter melts, add the bourbon, cornstarch and vanilla mixture, and constantly stir while gently boiling for five minutes.


Back to the pudding: take it out of the oven, remove the aluminum foil, press the cubes down a little with a metal spatula (again to soak them some more), recover and bake for 15 more minutes.


Take it out and pour about 1/2 cup of the sauce over the pudding, and return to the oven one last time, uncovered, for 5 minutes. Let it cool a bit, and serve with some of the warm sauce. It all tastes best warm.


What to say about this amazing bread pudding? This version was, unarguably, much better than the one I got at the restaurant in New Orleans, which ended up being quite soggy in comparison. This bread pudding was firm, toothsome, sweet and tangy all at once. As Pischoff Wuerthner notes, the cardamom, vanilla, pecans and bourbon sauce make it better than so many others, and it shows. Needless to say, I am slowly working through it, both to keep from snarfing it all down at once and because it is so rich that I just cannot eat so much of it so fast. It is a delicious recipe.

We are done with Cajun country. Next we head back in the direction of the Acadian homeland, left so long ago, stopping just short of Nova Scotia and the Canadian border. I'm trading the Deep South for the Down East. It's time to remember the Maine! Er, the state of Maine.

Sources:

BoilCrawfish.com. "How to boil crawfish". Copyright 2005 BoilCrawfish.com.

Edge, John T. A Gracious Plenty: Recipes and Recollections from the American South. An Ellen Rolfes Book. For the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi. G. P. Putnam's Sons: New York, 1999.

Fitzsimmons, Tom. "What's the difference between Cajun and Creole Cooking?" Published 2003 on the "Taste Tent" section of the Tabasco Sauce website. Copyright 2011 McIlhenny Company, all rights reserved.

Junior League of Baton Rouge, Inc. River Road Recipes: The Textbook of Louisiana Cuisine [Volume I]. The Junior League of Baton Rouge, Inc: Baton Rouge, 1959. 72nd printing, April 2000.

Pischoff Wuerthner, Terri. In a Cajun Kitchen: Authentic Cajun Recipes and Stories from a Family Farm on the Bayou. St. Martin's Press: New York, 2006.

Some information also obtained from Wikipedia's "Louisiana" page and other pages, and the Food Timeline State Foods link to "Louisiana".

Snacking State-by-State: Louisiana III - What you say? Étouffée!

One of the most iconic ingredients in Cajun cuisine is the crawfish. Call it what you want: crayfish, crawdad, mud bug, little lobster-looking thing. But whatever you call it, don't forget that there's more to them than just the tails.

Official Name: State of Louisiana (French: État de Louisiane; French Creole: Léta de la Lwizyàn - though Louisiana has no official language, French is important to the state's identity, and in 1812 Louisiana was the first state to join the Union whose majority did not speak English. For more on the linguistic history of Louisiana, see here)
State Nicknames: The Bayou State; The Pelican State; The Sugar State
Admission to the US: April 30, 1812 (#18)
Capital: Baton Rouge (2nd largest city)
Other Important Cities: New Orleans (largest); Shreveport (3rd largest): Metairie (4th largest)
Region: South; Deep South; Gulf Coast; West South Central (US Census)
RAFT Nations: Gumbo; Cornbread & BBQ
Bordered by: Arkansas (north); Mississippi & the Mississippi River (east); the Gulf of Mexico (southeast and south); Texas (west)
Official State Foods and Edible Things: crawfish (crustacean); milk (drink); alligator (reptile)
Some Famous & Typical Foods: Cajun cuisine and dishes, especially gumbo, jambalaya, courtboullion (COO-bee-yon) and étouffée; pralines; crawfish, shrimp, crab, alligator, catfish; typical Southern foods in the northernmost part of the state.

Outside of Louisiana, it's not terribly easy to find Louisiana crawfish. The best most of us in the US (including much of the South) can do is the variety shipped in from China. Beyond that, there are a few ways to find them:

* pre-cooked and frozen (you can find a pound of them boiled, "Cajun-seasoned" and bagged in the freezer section at Giant for $9 a pound. This would have been my last choice)
* just the tails, frozen (I have seen them this way at the Columbia Harris Teeter, though I cannot remember how much they cost)
* live at your local fishmonger (not too difficult to find in Baltimore or Washington - I got mine at the Maine Avenue Fish Market a few weeks ago, live, for $7 per pound).

Once you get them, what do you do? You can fry them and put 'em in a po'boy, or you can make a gumbo or a jambalaya, perhaps even serve them barbecue style. But regardless, most Louisianans would look on in horror and contempt if you steamed them, much in the same way that most Marylanders would look on in equal horror and contempt if you boiled a crab (we just do not do that in the Chesapeake, but I digress).

But to stay true to how they do things in Louisiana, I bucked up and set to fixin' a crawfish boil, in order to make the following recipe: not a crawfish boil, but a crawfish étouffée. The term "étouffée" means "smothered" in French, and it is one of the more decadent things you will eat from Cajun country. It was one of the deliciously evil things I ate at the Gumbo Shop last November when I visited New Orleans during an academic conference (yes, I've been to the Crescent City twice, and both times it was for academic reasons). It dawned on me during the prep for the Louisiana recipes that I did eat, more or less, most of the things that I ate at the Gumbo Shop, and their $24 Creole dinner: chicken and andouille sausage gumbo, jambalaya, étouffée, and a classic bread pudding that is coming up in a few days. Their étouffée was made with shrimp, but I had crawfish on my mind. I just had to get at the meat and fat first.

Recipe: Crawfish and Shrimp Étouffée

While Terri Pischoff Wuerthner's In a Cajun Kitchen has been my go-to Bible on Cajun cuisine, this time I looked to John T. Edge and his compendium of recipes from throughout the American South, done for the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at Ole Miss. The recipe he prints on page 217 of his book A Gracious Plenty: Recipes and Recollections from the American South originally comes from the book Louisiana Legacy, printed by the Thibodaux Service League in Thibodaux, Louisiana.

For this crawfish and shrimp étouffée, I had to cut down Edge's recipe by half. And since I hardly had the amount of crawfish meat or fat that I needed (I don't have a whole lot of money to play with here), I added a good amount of shrimp to bulk up my étouffée.


You do not need a lot of ingredients for your crawfish étouffée. What I ended up with was:

* a pound of crawfish (how much meat will a pound of live crawfish yield? See below. I needed to make up the difference in shrimp, so I still ended up using a pound of crustacean meat. You will be using not just the tails but as much of the meat as possible, as well as the fat in the head portion)

Revenge from beyond the crawfish boil grave

* green onions (sliced)
* parsley (fresh and chopped, from my garden)
* butter (if you don't have enough crawfish to use just the fat)
* salt and pepper (to taste) and cornstarch (in case you want a thicker sauce, as I did)
* rice (usually plain white rice, though you could also use a jambalaya)

Recipe Part 1: Crawfish Boil

The very first step is to boil your crawfish. There is no recipe for boiling just one pound of crawfish - tantamount to steaming three or four blue crabs. The recipes that are out there call for massive amounts of the little critters. The guidelines I used came from the conveniently labeled BoilCrawfish.com, with amounts easily adjusted:


Wash off your crawfish, being careful not to let the cute little critters attack you.

I will cut you with my 'ittle claws!!! I wiiiiiiill!!!

While you do this, boil enough water to cover the crawfish - measure this out by putting the crawfish bucket, or in my case the colander in which the crawfish will finish out their little lives, in the crab pot and filling it enough to cover the crawfish. You will need a lot of water, even for an amount as small as mine.


Into the pot, dump the crab boil. I used Chesapeake crab boil (yes, I know, it's strange but it exists; it comes from as far south in the Chesapeake Bay as you can go). You will also add a bit of salt and some cayenne pepper. I also added a few shakes of Old Bay, quite popular throughout the South so it's not exactly strange to see it here.


As you boil the crawfish water, set the crawfish in enough cold water to cover them and add a good amount of salt. This will force them to purge. You can figure out what that means for yourself.

When the water in the crab pot is finally boiling, set the crawfish in the basket and lower it into the water (or in my case, make sure the colander is already in the pot, and then dump the crawfish into the colander). They will die a quick death.

Oh nooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!

BoilCrawfish.com also suggests you add sausage and/or various other vegetables. This would make sense for a large scale crawfish boil, but for one pound of crawfish, you will not need this.


Let the crawfish come back to a rolling boil, and then turn off the heat, cover, and let the crawfish absorb everything for 15 minutes.


Let them cool, and prepare to extract all that stuff for your étouffée.

Recipe Part 2: Crawfish and Shrimp Étouffée


If you are dealing with whole crawfish, the next step is to extract two things: the meat - primarily the tails but also whatever claw and leg meat you can get - and the fat. If you pick crabs at all, you know how to get as much meat out of these little legs as possible. Also, if you pick crabs at all, you will probably be able to figure out what crawfish "fat" is - it's analogous to the crab "mustard" that so many of us love. The place to find it in the crawfish is in the head, and so you will need to reach right in there to get it.


How much will you get from a pound of crawfish, allowing for attrition of, say, one or two that died on the way home?


A pound of crawfish, boiled, will yield approximately 1/4 pound - that is, 3 ounces - of meat, if you extract as much meat as possible from the tail, the back and the claws and legs.


A pound of crawfish, boiled, will yield a little under 1/8 cup of crawfish fat. Edge's recipe calls for a whole cup of crawfish fat. Since I didn't even have a quarter cup, I had to add enough unsalted butter to make 1/2 cup of "crawfish and other fat"just to get the halved amount for his half-recipe.


The rest is easy from here. Melt some butter - not the butter you're using to even out the crawfish fat - in a heavy skillet or Dutch oven, and add the green onions. Sauté them for about 15 minutes, and add everything else:


The crawfish, shrimp, crawfish fat and butter...


And the parsley, salt and pepper.

Cover and cook over medium heat for 15 to 20 minutes. Serve over steamed rice, with lemon wedges if you like.

Your étouffée goes well with a nice Abita.

This dish was as decadent and rich in its taste as those crawfish were tedious in their preparation. It is probably not recommended that you do heavy exercise afterwards (running around kicking a soccer ball for an hour in 90 degree heat, for example, is not a good idea after eating this, as I found out the hard way). You will want to savor this over plain rice, even though you could eat it over flavored rice - again, the jambalaya from the last Louisiana post - because you will want the full flavor and texture of the silky, buttery étouffée to hit you. It was a beautiful thing.

Sources:

BoilCrawfish.com. "How to boil crawfish". Copyright 2005 BoilCrawfish.com.

Edge, John T. A Gracious Plenty: Recipes and Recollections from the American South. An Ellen Rolfes Book. For the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi. G. P. Putnam's Sons: New York, 1999.

Fitzsimmons, Tom. "What's the difference between Cajun and Creole Cooking?" Published 2003 on the "Taste Tent" section of the Tabasco Sauce website. Copyright 2011 McIlhenny Company, all rights reserved.

Junior League of Baton Rouge, Inc. River Road Recipes: The Textbook of Louisiana Cuisine [Volume I]. The Junior League of Baton Rouge, Inc: Baton Rouge, 1959. 72nd printing, April 2000.

Pischoff Wuerthner, Terri. In a Cajun Kitchen: Authentic Cajun Recipes and Stories from a Family Farm on the Bayou. St. Martin's Press: New York, 2006.

Some information also obtained from Wikipedia's "Louisiana" page and other pages, and the Food Timeline State Foods link to "Louisiana".