Alligators & Oysters

Today’s post is the third and last on Chef John Folse’s definitive cookbook on the Cajun-Creole traditions of preparing fish and seafood, Hooks, Lies & Alibis.

Though raised in Louisiana, for me there is still an aura of the exotic in the recipes of John Folse and the people he works with in south Louisiana. His signature dishes, as well as those of other chefs in the area are brimming with the flavors of sac au lait, granulated garlic, artichoke hearts, mirlitons and Creole mustard, to name but a few example ingredients in the hundreds of recipes included in Hooks, Lies & Alibis. Not only are the recipes enticing, but everything about the collection of ingredients, the preparation and the land of south Louisiana is presented in page after page of high quality photographs compiled by photographers both local and from out of state. Pass over the history and recipes, the book still guarantees an hour or more of browsing through stunning photographs.

This last offering from the big fish cookbook includes two recipes chosen at random, recipes still untried in my kitchen, though I’m hoping that is a temporary condition. Pictures are included relating to the two recipes, but others have been added merely as a means of hinting at the book’s visual appeal.

OYSTERS BENSON

Comment: This recipe is from Rockefeller’s Restaurant in Ponchatoula, Louisiana, and is the creation of chefs Thomas Bond, Lester Nicosia and Chris Letard. This is an ideal brunch dish and is also great when served for breakfast.

Ingredients:

18 fresh-shucked oysters

3 English muffins, halved and toasted

vegetable oil for deep-frying

6 slices Canadian bacon

3 cups seasoned yellow corn flour

1 teaspoon Old Bay Seasoning

1 tablespoon lemon pepper seasoning

1 tablespoon Creole mustard

granulated garlic to taste

¾ cup Blender Hollandaise Sauce (see recipe)

Method:

In a cast iron pot or a home-style fryer such as a FryDaddy, heat oil to 360°F according to manufacturer’s directions. While oil is heating, pan-fry Canadian bacon until lightly browned, set aside and keep warm. When ready to cook, blend seasoned corn flour, Old Bay Seasoning and lemon pepper seasoning, stirring well to incorporate. Dredge oysters in seasoned corn flour mixture and deep-fry until crispy and floating, 2-3 minutes. While oysters are frying, toast English muffins and place 1 muffin half on each plate. Top with Canadian bacon slices and crispy fried oysters. In a small bowl, blend Creole mustard into Hollandaise and divide equally over each muffin half. Serve hot.

ALLIGATOR CHILI

Comment: In Louisiana, alligator is often used as a substitute for other meats, giving us great dishes such as alligator sauce piquant, alligator spaghetti, fried alligator tail and alligator sausage. Here is an old camp recipe for alligator chili that I love.

Ingredients:

3 pounds alligator meat, diced

½ cup vegetable oil

2 cups diced onions

1 cup diced celery

1 cup diced bell peppers

2 tablespoons minced garlic

2 tablespoons diced jalapeño peppers

1 (16 ounce) can pinto beans

3 (8 ounce) cans tomato sauce

1 cup fish stock (see recipe)

1 tablespoon chili powder

1 teaspoon cumin

salt and cracked black pepper to taste

granulated garlic to taste

Method:

In a large Dutch oven, heat vegetable oil over medium-high heat. Add alligator and sauté 20 minutes to render juices. Add onions, celery, bell peppers, minced garlic and jalapeño peppers and sauté 3-5 minutes or until vegetables are wilted, stirring occasionally. Add pinto beans, tomato sauce and stock, stirring to incorporate. Bring to a low boil then reduce to simmer. Stir in chili powder and cumin and cook approximately 1 hour or until alligator is tender, stirring occasionally. Season to taste using salt, pepper and granulated garlic. Ladle into soup bowls or mugs and serve hot with fresh cornbread.

Baccalá Amalfi Style Salted Cod

Though a type of dolphin, Mahi Mahi should not be confused with the mammal.

Fishers of Men

It should surprise no one that in a world of seventy-percent water, fishing is the oldest profession known to man. Particularly among coastal societies, fish have been the principal source of food and nourishment since the dawn of mankind. Fish were caught by hand in shallow water or gathered from those stranded on the shore at low tide. From spears and harpoons, tools for fishing gradually improved to the stage where lines, hooks, nets and boats became the most efficient means of providing a large catch. In the preparation and writing of an 899 page cookbook dedicated to fish, it behooves those doing the research to spend some time examining the importance of fish and fishing in ancient civilizations. John Folse and his staff on Hooks, Lies & Alibis have done their work.

In his weighty cookbook, Folse devotes a whole chapter to fishing in the age of Christ, and the pages of that chapter are fascinating indeed. Long interested in biblical literature, the Bible is no stranger to these eyes in any of several translations, but it was the Folse chapter “Fishers of Men” that made me aware of just how prevalent fish and fishing are as metaphor and symbol, as well as a familiar vernacular and background for the stories of Jesus in the New Testament.

Right off, we learn that fishing techniques on the sea of Galilee are much the same today as they were almost 5,000 years ago. Both Old and New Testaments are filled with the images of fishermen, nets and boats. The first four disciples chosen by Jesus were Galilean fishermen. Passing by the Sea of Galilee Jesus saw Simon and his brother casting their nets into the sea and called out to them: ‘Come after me, and I will make you fishers of men.’ Walking a little farther he found James and John and called out to them to follow. Hearing Jesus the two brothers left their father and followed Jesus.

“Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a net thrown into the sea, which collects fish of every kind. When it is full they haul it ashore and sit down to put what is good into buckets. What is bad they throw away.” —Matthew 13: 47-48

Jesus often used a boat as a podium from where he preached to those gathered on the shoreline, and it was in the boats of fishermen that he sailed from village to village spreading the gospel. A fishing boat of that time, roughly 30 AD, would have had a sail and room for four rowers and another to steer. It would have been constructed of cedar and oak and measured 26.5 feet long, 7.5 feet wide and 4.5 feet deep. There was enough room for crew, ten passengers or a ton of fish or other cargo.

Perhaps the best known fish in the Bible is found in the Old Testament book of Jonah. The four chapters of Jonah were probably written around the 5th century BC and tell the story of a disobedient prophet who attempts to escape his divine obligation and winds up being swallowed by a great fish. (In no translation does the Bible ever speak of a whale.) The following lines from Jonah are especially beautiful and deserve a place here:

“But the Lord sent a large fish, that swallowed Jonah; and he remained in the belly of the fish three days and three nights. From the belly of the fish Jonah said this prayer to the Lord, his God:

PSALM OF THANKSGIVING

Out of my distress I called to the Lord,
and he answered me;
From the midst of the nether world I cried for help,
and you heard my voice.
For you cast me into the deep, into the heart of the sea,
into the very heart of the seas,
and the flood enveloped me;
all your breakers and your billows passed over me.
Then I said, ‘I am banished from your sight!
Yet would I again look upon your holy temple.’
The waters swirled about me, threatening my life;
the abyss enveloped me;
seaweed clung about my head.
Down I went to the roots of the mountains;
the bars of the nether world were closing behind me forever,
But you brought up my life from the pit,
O Lord, my God.

When my soul fainted within me,
I remembered the Lord;
My prayer reached you in your holy temple.

Those who worship vain idols forsake their source of mercy.
But I, with resounding praise, will sacrifice to you;

What I have vowed I will pay:
deliverance is from the Lord.

Then the Lord commanded the fish to spew

Jonah upon the shore.”

Hooks, Lies & Alibis

John Folse begins his cookbook, Hooks, Lies & Alibis with a forward describing his boyhood along the Mississippi River, a boyhood stamped indelibly with the place of river, wildlife, fish, swamp and bayou. It is the story of a Cajun boy growing up along the twenty-foot high levee fronting his home in Louisiana’s St James Parish, a marshy land where bar pits along the river caught the overflow and filled with spoonbill catfish, channel cats, garfish, gasperou and sweet Mississippi River shrimp. For John Folse and his five brothers these bar pits were both a playground and the birthplace of an entrepreneurial spirit. Even as children the six boys earned a few pocket dollars with the sale of their fishing bounty from the bar pits and bayous.

By age twelve Folse had graduated to working his lines and traps on the mile-wide mighty Mississippi. But the river was a source of play as much as fishing ground. Folse describes it this way…

‘What we loved most about the shrimp season was that the Mississippi River water was warmed by the June sun and the monkey vines grew long and strong from the willow trees that leaned into the river. A trip to Disneyland could not compare with swinging monkey vines into the river back then. Swimming and swinging were always the payback for a job well done raising shrimp boxes. (Mamere’s stuffed eggplant was just a bonus.) Although we had been warned often of the many perils of swimming in the river, we always enjoyed a dip in Old Muddy. And, the fact is, we couldn’t deny our guilt when asked, “Have you been swimming today?” because our mud-stained Fruit of the Looms gave us away.’

From the river the boys moved into the swamps beyond the cane fields in back of the house. They poled their pirogues into these swamps to a spot where the big gators lived, looking to exercise skills handed down from their father. Following their father’s lessons the boys tied a six-inch steel hook to the end of a quarter-inch thick cord rope and baited it with half a chicken. One boy climbed a willow tree angling over the marsh and tied the cord with hook and bait to a thick branch dangling two feet above the water. In time an eight to ten foot gator leapt with a swish of its tail into the air grabbing the bait and swallowing the hook. Later, poling the bayous of home, the boys learned of the early summer bullfrogs. Excellent in the kitchen pot, they were also a source of income, shipped around the country to biology labs looking for specimens.

Apart from fish, the swamp-floor pantry provided big and small game, game birds and crustaceans, all of which were eaten more often than fish in the Folse household. Crawfish and channel catfish were the two staples, though crawfish did not become popular on Louisiana tables until the late 1950s. For the Folse’s, crawfish was a delicacy. It was Crawfish Bisque on Easter Sunday, Daddy’s River Road Crawfish Stew on Mother’s Day, and late in summer boiled crawfish with corn and potatoes was a common dish.

Folse tells a salty tale about cleaning a large channel cat…

‘Daddy said the head and skin were important because they added that wonderful gelatinous texture to the stew. He removed the gills and whiskers from the catfish, and then, with a Brillo pad in hand, scrubbed the whole fish under running water from the cistern. The slime that protected the fish’s skin had to be removed, and there was nothing better than Brillo for this task. Daddy also claimed that the skin kept the tender meat from falling apart during the two-to-three hour cooking process.’

From a small piece of land in Louisiana’s St James Parish, land strategically located between the river and the swamp, John Folse was bathed in a culture and cuisine that he came to make known worldwide. Mention his name in some circles and heads are filled with mouth-watering thoughts of Louisiana Cajun cooking.

Skillet Corn Bread

The staff of life—Bread. It has for many centuries been essential to lives around the globe, a part of worlds old and new from ancient Egyptians to Rome and Greece, prized by princes and paupers and with symbolic significance to most religions.

American colonists arrived in the New World accustomed to bread made from flour, rejecting corn initially as a grain fit only for livestock. They soon learned from Native Americans to appreciate corn as a basis for delicious bread and puddings. Corn soon found a permanent place in American kitchens. “Old-fashioned” cooking, especially in the south, of corn pone, corn pudding and corn bread were easier alternatives to wheat based bread for people living in the country. Louisiana heat and the scarcity of flour complicated the making of traditional bread, and instead Cajuns and Creoles made corn pudding, sweet potato pudding, corn bread, biscuits or rice cakes.

Long a subject of superstition in Louisiana, one old Creole belief tells us that a loaf of bread upside down on the table is evidence that the devil is around. It was once considered acceptable by many to beat one’s wife if her bread didn’t rise, felt to be good evidence of infidelity.

In his book, The Encyclopedia of Cajun & Creole Cuisine, John Folse explains, ‘Ever since the native Indians introduced corn to Americans, corn bread has been a staple on the southern table. The Creoles adapted this simple bread using different ingredients and flavorings such as jalapeños to create new recipes.’

A casual invitation to dinner led to the thought of contributing something with a Louisiana flavor. The big Folse history and cookbook offers four recipes for corn bread in its chapter on breads. CREOLE CORN BREAD seemed like a good choice.

INGREDIENTS:

1 cup yellow cornmeal

1 can cream corn

1 lb. ground meat

1 tsp salt

1 tsp baking soda

1 cup milk

1 egg

1 onion diced

1½ cups grated cheese

2 jalapeño peppers, seeded and minced

METHOD:

Preheat oven to 375°. This method of cooking corn bread calls for the use of a cast iron skillet. Chef John Folse points out that corn bread is best prepared in a preheated cast iron skillet. In a medium saucepan brown the meat—in this case sausage— over medium-high heat. In a separate bowl combine the cornmeal, corn, salt, baking soda, milk and egg. Blend well. Pour half of the cornmeal mixture into the heated cast iron skillet. Layer the ground sausage, onions, cheese and jalapeños on top of the corn batter. Pour the remaining batter over the layers. Place in the oven and bake for 45 minutes or until golden brown. It should serve eight people.