My great-grandmother, Ray Q. Thornton, kept scrapbooks in the kitchen. Or at least that's where I think she kept them. I have only the dimmest memory of the years Meme lived with us, but I remember clearly that there was a bookshelf in the kitchen and that at least some of the real estate on it was taken up by old-fashioned photo albums without a single picture in them. Instead the pages were full of recipes cut out of newspapers and magazines. I'm sure there were several volumes like this, but I only know of one that survived. It's a battered, old-fashioned "loose leaf notebook and memory album," full of clips by a
Birmingham Age-Herald food reporter whose name could pass for a casserole: Sue Scattergood. The recipes Meme deemed worth saving were mostly sweets and salads: baked Alaska, coconut bread pudding, blushing apple salad. She wrote out many of her own recipes by hand, but the ones she got from the newspaper were neatly trimmed, then glued down with some conviction — they're holding fast to the pages after more than 60 years.
I haven't been so diligent in keeping up with recipes that mean something to me. The closest I've come to keeping a kitchen scrapbook was stuffing the whole May 6, 2007, issue of the
New York Times Style Magazine into Brad's
Silver Spoon. It's tacky the way the magazine sticks up out of the book and the pages are badly battered except where the cookbook has protected them. But I've held onto it for an Oliver Schwaner-Albright essay called "Iced Storm," all about the decades-old New Orleans practice of making coffee concentrate. The piece concludes with a recipe adapted from the
Blue Bottle Coffee Company.
New Orleans Cold Drip Coffee
Ingredients:
1 pound dark roast coffee and chicory, medium ground
10 cups cold water
Ice
Milk
Technique:
1. Put coffee in a nonreactive container, like a stainless-steel stockpot. Add 2 cups water, stirring gently to wet the grounds, then add remaining 8 cups water, agitating the grounds as little as possible. Cover and let steep at room temperature for 12 hours.
2. Strain coffee concentrate through a medium sieve, then again through a fine-mesh sieve.
3. To make iced coffee, fill a glass with ice, add 1/4 cup coffee concentrate and 3/4 to 1 cup milk, then stir. To make café au alit, warm 3/4 to 1 cup milk in a saucepan or microwave, then pour into a mug and add 1/4 cup coffee concentrate.
(Concentrate will keep in the refrigerator for up to two weeks.)
I like to keep the finished product in glass bottles — specifically
Traders Point Creamery yogurt bottles because their narrow necks make it easy to pour and the colorful resealable caps look awesome. In New Orleans, they keep their concentrate in mayonnaise or mason jars, which is, I'm sure, how Meme would have done it.
In two visits this week, we’ve also tried three other panini: the Cuban (slow-roasted pork shoulder, smoky mountain country ham, pickled pepper relish, and Gruyere); the New Orleans (a variation on the Muffaletta, made with salami, capicola, mortadella, provolone, and olives) and the Coosa Valley (scrambled farm eggs, sliced avocado, and bacon). The sandwiches are served sliced in two, making the halves easy to trade, and each one comes with a choice of soup, salad, or a seasonal side. The latter, in summer, is either deviled eggs with shaved country ham or a field pea, sweet corn and cucumber salad. The only soup I’ve sampled so far was the roasted chicken, a light, bright broth embellished with firm summer vegetables and shredded crepes.
The crew is still getting its bearings. Service was slow, sides dishes were transposed, and on our first visit, the lack of signage made it tough to figure out whether we were supposed to seat ourselves or order at the bar. But such hiccups are easily forgiven in an eatery’s earliest days. Much like one member of the trio that runs the nearby Trattoria Centrale, brick & tin proprietor Mauricio Papapietro (shown at right) learned his way around a kitchen working for Birmingham superchef Frank Stitt. And by applying his extensive experience to something as simple as the sandwich, Papapietro may prove anew that what makes fine dining isn’t the price point so much as the food..jpg)
Roasted corn with brown butter
That's sort of what it was like the first time I had Indian-style okra. 
Posts
