Swine & Dine: Recipes for Bringing Pork to Any Occasion

North Carolina Pig Pickin Recipe

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Place the pork on a high shelf in the oven and roast it for 25 minutes. There's no need to baste pork as there is enough fat to keep the meat moist. The way to tell if the meat is cooked is to insert a skewer in the thickest part and the juices that run out should be absolutely clear without any trace of pinkness. When the pork is cooked remove it from the oven and give it at least 30 minutes resting time before carving.

While that is happening, tilt the tin and spoon all the fat off, leaving only the juces. The onion will probably be black and charred, which gives the gravy a lovely rich colour. Leave the onion in, then place the roasting tin over direct heat, turned to low, sprinkle in the flour and quickly work it into the juices with a wooden spoon. It makes Southerners talk because it makes us remember.

Before we tell you how a thing tastes, we need to tell you how it makes us feel and what it reminds us of. Southern is on the tip of our tongues. Whether good or bad, food memories are hard to shake. There is no more tenacious nostalgia. One bite of food or one whiff of an aroma from our past is swift transport to somewhere.

The persuasion of a food memory is association, not accuracy.

Pork Shoulder Recipes

Memories are rarely drawn to scale. That said, I gave a lot of thought to what I picked. I attempted to show that the core of Southern food is agrarian, resourceful and homemade. Pretty fried chicken or barbecue might be the homecoming queen riding in the parade, but the family farm built her float. Even if there were an adequate list of quintessential Southern recipes, telling Southerners how to cook those dishes, especially those they grew up eating, is perilous if not ill-advised. Get in the kitchen, sharpen your pencil, and make your own.

best Noble Pig Recipes images on Pinterest in | Food, Recipes and Apple recipes

As Bruce Springsteen not a Southern boy, but no fool sings: To close this opening, let me turn to words from our beloved John Egerton, the most insightful scholar and champion of Southern food: Brunswick stew is the flagship Southern community stew, made by a bunch of people adding things to the pot and poking around in it, intended to serve a crowd. It can be made on a stove, but it is best suited to the outdoors where smoke gets in our eyes. And we, as their neighbors and fellow citizens, buy it, and buy into it.

Raconteur and humorist Roy Blount Jr. The vegetables matter just as much. Each cook has a secret combination of vegetables and seasonings, but nearly all agree that corn, butter or lima beans, and tomatoes are requirements.

Bacon Wrapped Pork Medallions

This is where any agreement ends. All stew-stirring communities continue to declare their provenance, and certainly their take on the way to make it, to be unassailable. The good people of both the town of Brunswick, Ga. There are folklorists who swear it was perfected in North Carolina. Some decades ago, Brunswick, Ga.

The inscription declares the pot to be the very one in which the very first Brunswick stew did bubble on July 2, Georgian Brunswick Stew tends to be made in relatively small batches, often in local cafes where it is served as a barbecue side dish. In , the Virginia General Assembly issued a decree naming Brunswick County the home of Brunswick stew, claiming they can trace their stew back to , when it was made by Jimmy Matthews on a hunting expedition and was little more than squirrel, onion, butter and bread.

These days, stew-making in Virginia is often a male-dominated ritual. Men known as stew masters tend huge cauldrons, stirring the contents with boat oars, cooking up hundreds of quarts. These stews are very thick, often not declared done until an oar can stand upright in the center. Virginia Brunswick Stew is served as a main dish with white sandwich bread on the side, although there are photos of people emptying plastic sleeves of bread directly into the stew.

This version incorporates a little of both iconic styles, and comes from a neutral state of grace. It can be made indoors in reasonable quantities. It can be made quickly because it assumes you will buy roasted chicken and rather than cook a pig, you will buy barbecue from someone who does it often and well. Bring the tomatoes, broth, ketchup, barbecue sauces, Worcestershire, salt, pepper and hot sauce to a simmer in a large pot. Simmer 10 minutes, stirring often.

My Good Food

Stir in the onion and butterbeans. Simmer until they are almost tender, about 20 minutes. Stir in the corn, chicken and pork. Simmer until the vegetables are tender, about 10 minutes more.

Not sure what to cook?

It should be balanced, but unequivocal. Serve warm with the bread. Many of our swooning, posturing magazine cover shots suggest that the most accomplished Southern cakes are layer cakes. But a review of community cookbooks and kitchen cupboard recipe boxes reveal that we adore a magnificent pound cake, and have been baking them for longer in our culinary history.

A slice of pound cake travels well and requires neither frosting nor fork. This simple, sublime pound cake is excellent alone and also an amiable companion to fruit and sauces. Nonetheless, here are two of my observations on making old family recipes for pound cake in these modern times: First, most old-fashioned pound cakes turn out best when baked in an old-fashioned lightweight and light-color aluminum tube pan with a removable bottom sometimes called an angel food pan. Second, most heirloom cake recipes assume you are using a hand-held mixer, which is less powerful than our stand mixer behemoths with motors powerful enough to propel a boat across a pond.

Cakes mixed in stand mixers require less mixing time. Grease with Crisco a inch aluminum tube pan with removable bottom. Dust it lightly and evenly with flour and tap out any excess. Beat the butter and cream cheese in a large bowl with an electric mixer set to medium speed until the mixture is smooth and creamy, about 2 minutes. Increase the mixer to medium-high speed on a stand mixer high speed on a hand-held mixer and add the sugar in a slow, steady stream. Beat until the mixture is pale yellow and sits up tall with fluffy peaks when scraped down from the sides of the bowl.

The sugar will be mostly dissolved, so you should feel very little grit if you rub a little between your fingers. This takes about 4 minutes with a stand mixer and 6 with a hand-held mixer. Add the eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition; the mixture may look slightly curdled or grainy. Add the flour to the butter mixture in thirds, mixing at low speed only until smooth. Scrape down the bowl between each addition. Add the vanilla extract and mix on low speed 30 seconds more.

Use a rubber spatula to make sure all of the dry ingredients are up off the bottom of the bowl.

Spoon the batter into the prepared pan. Gently tap the pan once or twice on the counter a few times to remove any air bubbles. Bake the cake until a cake tester inserted into the center of the cake comes out clean, about 90 minutes. Pound cakes will have a crack in the center that appears wet even when fully cooked, so avoid this area when testing. Pound cakes are tall, so a standard toothpick might not reach the center.

Use a longer pick or a metal cake tester. Even a dry strand of uncooked spaghetti will work. Cool the cake in the pan on a wire cooling rack for 10 minutes. Remove the cake from the pan and turn it face up to cool completely on the rack. If in the beginning there was pie, it was probably chess pie. If there were nuts, you would have pecan or black walnut or peanut pie. If there was chocolate, then in it went. Pie is as pie does.

Chess pie is insanely sweet — some would say shockingly sweet — in the way on that only Southern sweets can deliver.

After all, we raise sugar cane and sorghum cane and keep bees here. No one knows for sure how chess pie got its name, although goofy and annoying stereotypical anecdotes about our drawl feed too many of these musings. Among the more credible theories is that chess pie, in name and in practice, is a derivation of a dairy-rich English cheese pie.

Creamy Grits

You know, like cheesecake, which is neither cake nor contains cheese. Line the pie shell with aluminum foil or parchment paper, making sure it extends over the edge of the crust. Fill with pie weights or dry, uncooked rice or beans.

How do you cook pork medallions in the oven:

Bake 5 minutes or until pie shell no longer looks wet. Carefully remove the foil and weights and continue baking until crust looks dry and golden, about 5 minutes more. Cool completely on a wire rack. Whisk together the sugar, cornmeal, flour and salt in a large bowl. Whisk in melted butter, milk, vinegar and vanilla.

Pour into the pie shell, filling it only to the inside rim. Bake until the top is golden brown and puffy around the edges, and the filling is almost set, about 50 minutes. A 2-inch circle in the center of the filling should jiggle slightly not slosh when the pan is gently shaken. Shield the edges of the crust with strips of aluminum foil if they brown too quickly before the filling is done. The filling will finish setting as it cools and the edges will deflate.

The term field pea reveals their original role in the South, where for generations they were grown in the rice and corn fields to add valuable nitrogen back into the soil. Field peas were so common and plentiful that there was no need to tend them in a kitchen garden. The plants are undaunted by hot, dry, poor soil that would wither many other crops. Given their critical role as subsistence food for many poor people and livestock, some culinary historians say that field peas once thrived on poverty.

Similar to ramps, the humble peas that were once relegated to the poor worked their way up to standard home cooking and are now featured on fine-dining menus. Enslaved Africans brought field peas from their homeland. It is even more of a mystery why ubiquitous black-eyed peas, mostly canned at that, are the only type of field pea that many people know.

Dozens, if not hundreds, of different field pea varieties grow across the South each summer, peaking in production during the hot and steamy shank of the season. In some places, discussing the relative merits of different ways to grow and cook peas is a point of civic pride, tantamount to debating barbecue. Each person who voices an earnest, heartfelt opinion is equally correct. For many families, a jar of chow chow is a staple whenever peas or beans are served. With its bold flavors and crunchy texture, chow chow sure perks up a humble meal. One of the defining flavors in Southern cuisine is vinegar, often delivered in tangy, judiciously spiced, and slightly sweetened pickled vegetable relishes.

Porchetta can be found at weekly markets in the country towns around Foligno: Rather than a whole pig, Salvatore Denaro slow-roasts pork shoulder with similar seasonings pork belly is equally delicious when roasted for 1 hour at degrees. In their charcuterie on Beaune's pedestrian shopping street, Roger and Josette Batteault sell not only sausages, hams, pates, terrines and savory pastries, but fresh pork too, which Josette cooks in clever and delicious ways. Jane Sigal was awed by her efficiency she browns the onion in the casserole with the pork to save time and by her ability to coerce so much flavor out of a piece of meat, a few herbs and vegetables and a little water.

This marinated bone-in pork shoulder should be one of the first things to go on the grill, so it has plenty of time to roast slowly.

The total time will vary depending on the heat of the fire, the temperature outside and the meat's distance from the heat; to speed things up, you can cover the grill, leaving the air vents open. To determine doneness, use a meat thermometer. The pork is ready when the internal temperature reaches degrees.

Pork shoulder is a succulent cut that's best braised or roasted slowly, so it stays tender and juicy. The sweet-and-savory glazed pork here is terrific with or without the garlic-and-dried-apricot stuffing. This rich base of browned pork shoulder and spicy chili garlic sauce makes this congee porridge extra flavorful and hearty. Mario Batali creates a simple version of Italian porchetta, wrapping butterflied pork shoulder around a sausage-and-fennel stuffing before roasting.

Chef Vic Casanova flavors house-made pasta with cocoa to serve with his luscious pork ragu. Legendary chef Jacques Pepin sears pork shoulder to make a terrific crust, then braises it slowly with stock, wine, chestnuts and sweet potatoes until it's meltingly tender. The marinade also perks up the masarepa dough. Instead of corn husks, these tamales are traditionally wrapped and steamed in banana leaves. Slow-cooking pork shoulder in milk creates succulent meat and a silky, caramelized sauce.

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