Willobie

It's cast iron for me all the way, except for the suckling pig that I put on a full sheet pan (Yes, my oven will hold one. That's why I tried the pig.) I have a 17 inch skillet that will hold a roasting rack, will accomodate just about any roast and still have room on the sides for roasted vegetables. For smaller quantities I use a cast iron pan measuring about 7 by 12, 1 1/2 inches deep. A favorite is "roast melange of winter vegetables" in which olive oil coated root vegetables are roasted with bay leaf, salt, and pepper. I use potatoes, turnips, parsnips, and garlic. Except for stock pots and a chef's pan, all my pans are cast iron.

Mississippi Perch. I recently moved to a town on the Mississippi in Illinois and found is a nice, no nonsense fish store in the area that has fresh perch early in the week, which they ship to Chicago. They also smoke their own carp, sturgeon, and paddlefish (spoonbill). Their stock-in-trade seems to be carp and catfish and neither are favoites of mine. The smoked sturgeon and paddlefish are fatty and wonderful! I love the feel of Omega-3 oils running down my chin. I finally got there on a day when they had perch and asked for two pounds of filets. I could see them being fileted through a window on the processing room door and they looked much larger than the perch I knew from Canadian lakes or New England perch runs. I didn't see the fish close up. The filets weighed a half pound each, and I ended up taking all that the fishmonger fileted which was over 3 lbs. of fish consisting of 6 filets. They were $1.25/lb dressed and $2.25/lb fileted. Incredibly cheap compared to supermarket fish. The fish were white, firm, and mild with thick muscle layers. The filets were boneless. I did them lightly dipped in flour and corn meal, then sauteed them in butter and bacon fat, and deglazed the pan with white wine. Delicious. Who knows Mississippi fish? Were these indeed perch? Could they have been yellow perch?

From my days as a butcher's assistant I recall that only two cuts can be roasted on a rack to produce reliably tender results: rib (standing or eye) and sirloin tip. One should not have to baste a roast beef, but you do what you have to, I guess. Recently, here in the midwest, I have been served 'prime rib' with grill marks. What gives? Has the rib-eye steak become the new roast beef? I order medium rare.

Montreal Smoked Meat Montreal has a flourishing Jewish community (vide The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz). Consequently it has fine Jewish bakeries and bagel emporia, but it's glory is the SMOKED MEAT SANDWICH. As a student in Montreal in the middle fifties, friends quickly introduced me to the wonders of Ben's Delicatessen on Maisonneuve near the McGill campus. A smoked meat sandwich on deli rye with double mustard and a pickle was 35 cents in 1954-55. Like all Jewish sandwiches it was piled high in the middle (about three inches thick). It was ambrosia. Ben's was very fine, but then I discovered Dunn's on St.Catherine St. West and fancied that it's meat was a little jucier. Then an Irish-Cuban friend taught me that one could order the sandwich lean, medium, or fat and I discovered that fat was almost a religious experience. On cold winter nights, before pizza delivery had been invented, we could call up Dunn's and order a sack of sandwiches (35 cents each) and fries. The cashier at Dunn's would summon a cab from the rank out front and the cabbie would pay for the food and deliver it. We paid the food tab, the meter, and a tip. Smoked meat is what in other countries pastrami would aspire to be. It is my experience that Canadian beef is superior to U.S. beef and that kosher butchers use the finest (i.e., the fattest, best marbled) beef. After listening to me brag about Montreal smoked meat for several years, my German-born wife, who knows a thing or two about schinken and speck, finally got to Montreal and we checked in to Ben's for a sandwich. She was very impressed, but the young waiter didn't know what I meant by a fat smoked meat. The next day we went to Dunn's, which was better. We stayed a week and I could not drag my wife away from Dunn's for even one lunch. That was over ten years ago, and we just got back to Montreal this spring of 2000. Dunn's was gone, as were two of the major downtown department stores (Eaton's and Simpsons had been turned into malls of a sort). Reuben's deli near where Dunn's would have been served a decent smoked meat sandwich, but it was too lean to be really succulent. Then we heard about Schwartz's on St. Laurence St. It had always been there, but I had never discovered it. It is a small kosher restaurant (i.e., no Reubens) on what used to be a tough street, the dividing line between the English west Montreal and the French east Montreal. The waiters looked like the Ben's waiters of old, with long white aprons. The one who took our order said the magic words that assured us that we were in for a real treat. He asked: "How would you like your smoked meat?". My wife answered, "medium" and I -- with a big grin on my face -- rejoiced to say, "fat". After I finished, I said: "I can die now." And meant it. Schwartzs Montreal Hebrew Delicatessen "Original World Famous Smoked Meat" 3895 Saint Laurent Montreal, QC Phone: (514) 842-4813

Drive south on Interstate 75 from Atlanta and get off at Cordele, Ga. Then find one of the two Stripling's locations: smokehouse, grocery, and gas!. Get some of their smoked rib bacon. It will make you forget about any "civilized" bacon. They are not on line and do not normally ship, but I buy 40 lbs. or so whenever I pass through on the way to Florida and I have persuaded them to ship me that amount on one occasion. I can provide an address if needed. For a grocery store brand, try Beeler's Hog Wild uncured smoked bacon. produced in Iowa. Koenemann's in Lake County Illinois also makes a fine German-style uncured bacon which is very smoky. Finally, Berger's Smokehouse in Missouri has a fine selection of country and city bacons available on line. Get the country slab. In Montreal, smoked meat means brisket, and the finest in the world is from Schwartz's Delicatessen on Boulevard St. Laurent. They are the last deli in Montreal to cure their own.

As a displaced New Englander I miss the availability of canned shelled beans, which are found in every Maine grocery. I have had good luck with growing the French horticultural as a shelling bean in Illinois, but was never able to get a decent crop of cranberry beans. The Horticultural is larger, and is the type found in our farmer's markets. Picked young and tender and treated like a string bean, the flavor of these beans is intense. My old seedsman called the cranberry bean a Vermont cranberry bean. Is that a possible origin? I have read that dried cranberry beans lack the firmness to make a good baking bean. I have a related question: I have always soaked and parboiled beans for beanpot baking, but have recently been advised to soak overnight with soda, then rinse them and pop them right into the beanpot and bake without parboiling. Does that work? I have visions of hard bullets baking for 24 hours and never getting soft. I will be using red kidney beans.