The Persistence of Gravy: December 30, 2006
by
Fred Bubbers © 2007
For Christmas dinner this year, we had turkey. It's probably a little redundant since it wasn't but a month since Thanksgiving, but none of the other traditional meals really appeals to us. Last year we had ham and it was good, but in reality, all three of us, my wife, my daughter and I, prefer turkey.
Susan prepared the stuffing and put the bird in the oven; I monitored and basted it. She also prepared the vegetables and the mashed potatoes. I insisted, however, on making the gravy. The gravy at Thanksgiving was rather disappointing, having come from foil packet with a picture of a turkey on it. Packets and canned gravy were forbidden in my house when I was growing up, so I have to admit that I'm probably a little fussy when it comes to gravy.
I mentioned this to my pub-mate Mock, who was once the personal chef to the governor of Maryland , and he smiled. "I think I have some natural talent for cooking," I said, "even though I never studied it or learned very much. I only know what I picked up from watching my mother. I know how to make turkey though."
Mock smiled. "You probably are pretty good, but how much to you really cook?"
"Not very much," I admitted.
"It's a whole different thing to do it professionally."
He emptied his bottle of Bud Light and asked Robin, the bartender, for another round.
"Being a chef is grueling. And cooking one turkey and making gravy for it is one thing. Try doing that with fifty turkeys. Spend a whole day in a kitchen at a hundred and thirty degrees and you'll come running back to the software business you hate so much."
"Fair enough," I said.
The gravy turned out good and we had a fine Christmas dinner. We had plenty of leftovers, since we had cooked a twenty-pound bird for just the three of us.
Two days later, Susan and Caroline left for New York to visit her brother's family, leaving me with half a turkey carcass. It sustained me for two days until I couldn't stand to eat any more.
Yesterday, I suddenly got the urge get domestic again. I hauled the carcass in from the refrigerator in the garage, stuffed it into a pot, filled it with water and put it on a low heat. We had some carrots in the refrigerator, but I needed some celery and some onions, so I had to run out to the grocery store to pick them up. They all got sliced up and tossed into the pot.
I don't work from recipes at all. I work from memory and, for lack of a better term, instinct. I don't remember ever paying attention to my mother or my grandmother when they were cooking, but surprisingly I do remember things. I've got a limited range when it comes cooking, but for the things I do, I have a strong feeling of confidence.
I let the soup cook slowly on the stove for about five hours, periodically checking it, occasionally adding more water. All of the leftover meat had slipped off the bones and the carcass fell apart. I scooped out a piece of white meat that looked particularly succulent and tasted it. It was completely tasteless, indicating that all of the flavor was now in the broth. I took the pot off the stove and poured the steaming contents through a strainer into a bowl. The strainer caught all the leftover meat, the bones, and what was left of the onions, carrots and celery. After the bowl had cooled, I put in the refrigerator over night.
In the morning, it had solidified. At the top of the bowl was the layer of congealed fat, looking just as nauseating as it was unhealthy. I scraped it all away with a spoon, revealing the dark amber jelly underneath. I dipped my finger in it a tasted it. Perfect.
I was on a roll. I decided to make it a cooking day. I went out to the supermarket and picked up a piece of meat to turn into pot roast. A few years ago, working from sketchy memories, I had made a few attempts at making my mother's (and grandmother's) pot roast. Whenever I've tried reproducing old family meals, I've discovered through trial and error that the secrets are quite simple. Having descended from peasant stock, the tastes and textures of my youth were the result of my ancestors' creativity with limited, inexpensive ingredients. My grandmother, it seems, knew how to make everything out of nothing.
In the case of pot roast, the secret seems to have been quite simple: tomato juice. What's mysterious about it is that the pot roast never really tasted like tomato juice. In some of my earlier failed attempts it did. Finally, I discovered that I wasn't cooking it long enough. It was hard to know how long I needed to cook it, because my mother had always used a pressure cooker. I don't own one and I am, in fact, afraid of them.
I brought the roast home from the store along with a large bottle of tomato juice. I put the meat in the roasting pan and put it in the oven for an hour, just enough time to brown the outside of the meat. Then I put the meat in a crock-pot and poured enough tomato juice into the pot to cover the top of the roast. Then I set the heat to low.
For about the first two and a half hours of cooking, it looks exactly like what it is: a roast beef sitting in a pot of tomato juice. Suddenly after three hours of cooking in the crock-pot, the prolonged steady heat and the juice from the roast beef changes the color of the sauce from red to a dark reddish brown. I put in some sliced onion and let it cook for another hour.
By this time, Susan and Caroline had returned from New York . I enlisted Susan to make some mashed potatoes, corn and string beans, while I returned to the soup.
One of the recipes (or maybe they are just "concepts" since none of this is written down), handed down from my grandmother to my mother is for something called "knucklee soup." I have no idea how to spell it, or if that's even its real name or if my grandmother just made it up. It consists of broth of some kind -- chicken, turkey, or beef -- with what everyone else in the world would probably call dumplings. Again, keeping with the theme of peasant food, something from nothing, the dumplings consist of nothing more than eggs, flour, milk and butter.
I separated the soup into two pots and put some water into a third pot to cook some egg noodles for Susan and Caroline. They don't like knucklees.
I melted small piece of butter in the microwave and poured it into a mixing bowl. I cracked an egg into the bowl and started pouring in flour, mixing it with a fork. Eventually, I had an extremely stiff paste. Then I started mixing in milk until it reached the right consistency: smooth, but still stiff enough to stick to a spoon. I scooped of gobs of the batter and pushed them off the spoon with my finger into the boiling soup.
I strained the noodles and poured them into the other pot for Susan and Caroline.
While Susan was finishing with the potatoes and vegetables, and Caroline was setting the table, I took a short break. I put some ice into a scotch glass and walking into the living room. It's away from the kitchen and the den with the TV, so it's very quiet. I pulled a bottle of scotch from the bar and poured it into my glass.
I sat on the sofa and slowly sipped my drink. I had been oddly obsessed with cooking for the past two days and I couldn't understand why. The mixture of smells from the kitchen -- the sharp spicy aromas of the pot roast gravy and the turkey broth -- and the smoky taste of the scotch brought back memories of other meals in another house.
On Sundays, we visited my parents. My mother would have the meal almost prepared when we arrived. Susan and Caroline would go downstairs to the den to see my father. I'd pull two whisky glasses from the cupboard get some ice from the refrigerator and pour two drinks: Canadian Club Rye for my mother, Dewar's scotch for me. We'd sit in their living room, enjoying a quiet moment alone before dinner.
She died on December 30, 2001.
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