A Love Affair With Southern Cooking_ Recipes and Recollections - Jean Anderson [80]
Today vineyards thrive in Virginia and North Carolina, particularly in the Yadkin and Roanoke river valleys, in the Shenandoah, and on the lower slopes of the Smokies and Blue Ridge. Gold-medal wines are coming out of hills once known for moonshine—cabernets, chardonnays, rieslings, viogniers, zinfandels, and more. Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Maryland are in the wine business, too, though not as aggressively or lucratively as Virginia and North Carolina.
There are even Deep South wines, mainly the dessert-sweet scuppernongs and muscadines Southerners like to sip—all of them finer by far than that first Jamestown vintage.
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COUNTRY CAPTAIN
MAKES 10 TO 12 SERVINGS
Whenever my mother gave a dinner party, this was the recipe she chose because it served an army and could be made ahead of time and frozen. If memory serves, she got the recipe from Elizabeth Harrelson, the elegant southern lady who was married to Colonel Harrelson, for many years the chancellor at North Carolina State. Where did Country Captain originate? There are many theories, the most widely accepted being that during the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century, a sea captain making a port of call at Savannah traded the recipe for this mild chicken curry for a free night’s lodging in town. Though Country Captain has long been a southern favorite, it did not become well known elsewhere until the 1930s, when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, receiving physical therapy in Warm Springs, Georgia, was served Country Captain by a local hostess. The dish quickly became a Roosevelt favorite, word of it spread, and thus FDR inadvertently put Country Captain on the culinary map of America. Today cutting-edge chefs offer their own versions of it, but for me, none is better than the one I grew up with. My mother always used an old hen that had gone off laying to make Country Captain, but they are hard to come by these days unless you raise your own chickens. Note: To toast slivered almonds, spread the nuts in a pie tin, set uncovered in a preheated 350° F. oven, and leave until the color of pale caramel—8 to 10 minutes; stir the nuts occasionally as they toast.
One 6-to 6½-pound ready-to-cook roasting chicken or, if you can get it, an old hen, stripped of as much fat as possible (freeze the giblets to use another time)
4 cups water
4 tablespoons fat (skimmed from the kettle liquid) or 4 tablespoons bacon drippings or vegetable oil
3 large green bell peppers, cored, seeded, and coarsely chopped
3 large yellow onions, peeled and coarsely chopped
½ cup coarsely chopped parsley
1½ teaspoons curry powder (or more to taste)
1 teaspoon dried leaf thyme, crumbled
½ teaspoon black pepper 1/8 teaspoon ground hot red pepper (cayenne)
1/8 teaspoon ground cloves
Three 14.5-ounce cans crushed tomatoes, with their liquid
3 cups kettle liquid (in which chicken steamed)
2 teaspoons salt
½ teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
1 cup dried currants
3½ cups converted rice, cooked by package directions
1½ cups lightly toasted slivered almonds (see Note at left)
1. Place the chicken on a rack in a large, heavy kettle and pour in the water. Bring to a simmer, adjust the heat so that the water bubbles gently, cover, and steam the chicken for 1½ to 2 hours or until the leg moves easily in the hip joint.
2. Remove the chicken from the kettle; also pour the kettle liquid into a medium-size heatproof bowl, cover, and refrigerate until ready to proceed. Cool the chicken until easy to handle, then remove the meat from the bones, discard the skin, and cut the light and dark meat into 2-to 3-inch pieces. Refrigerate until ready to use.
3. Spoon the 4 tablespoons fat into the kettle (if there is insufficient fat, round out the measure with bacon drippings or vegetable oil). Heat