A Love Affair With Southern Cooking_ Recipes and Recollections - Jean Anderson [93]
“Wee ordaine that the day of our ships arrival at the place assigned for plantacon in the land of Virginia shall be yearly and perpetually kept holy as a day of thanksgiving to Almighty God.”
This, insist members of the Virginia First Thanksgiving Festival, Inc., which reenacts the event every November at Berkeley Plantation, was the first Thanksgiving. No Indians and probably no food, although bacon, peas, cornmeal cakes, and cinnamon water have been mentioned.
The irony here is that for 300 years nobody remembered—let alone celebrated—that first Thanksgiving. Then one day in 1931, Berkeley Company documents surfaced in, of all places, the New York Public Library, among them a record of the 1619 ceremony.
In 1958 a group of determined believers formed the Virginia First Thanksgiving Festival, Inc., “to gain appropriate recognition for Virginia’s documented claim to the first official Thanksgiving in America.” And then in 1962 came a mea culpa from President John F. Kennedy via his special assistant Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
“You are quite right,” he wrote, corroborating the Virginia Festival’s claim, “and I can only plead an unconquerable New England bias.”
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HOT BROWN
MAKES 4 SERVINGS
I’d heard about Louisville’s famous Hot Brown, a broiled open-face turkey sandwich in a bubbling cheese sauce, long before I tasted it. I wasn’t disappointed. Over the years I’ve enjoyed variations on the theme here and there, some of them made with chicken, some accompanied by sautéed mushrooms, but to my mind none matches the original. Here’s the back story: In the roaring ’20s, Louisville’s swanky Brown Hotel threw dinner dances. Hundreds came, danced till the wee hours, then retreated to the hotel dining room to feast on ham and eggs. One night in 1923 chef Fred Schmidt decided to dish up something different: He layered toast and sliced turkey in single-portion gratin pans, covered them with mornay sauce (a white sauce with cheese added), ran them under the broiler, and crowned them with a crisscross of bacon. To Louisvillians that original Hot Brown is the one and only; the hotel still serves it. Although the recipe is simple, it’s more suited to chefs than to home cooks, who rarely have stacks of single-serving gratin pans. I use pie tins for my Hot Browns. They’re functional but lack the glamour of copper gratins. Note: Whatever you use for this recipe must be flameproof, able to take intense broiler heat; that eliminates glass and ceramic baking dishes that are merely ovenproof. Caution: Because the cheese sauce may not reach 160° F., the temperature deemed safe for eggs in this age of salmonella, I use a pasteurized egg and urge you to do the same (see About Pasteurized Eggs, frontmatter).
8 slices toast, trimmed of crusts (use firm-textured or home-style bread)
Eight ¼-inch-thick slices cooked turkey (or chicken), cut to fit the toast (I favor breast meat)
4 tablespoons (½ stick) butter
6 tablespoons all-purpose flour
2½ cups milk
1 large pasteurized egg, well beaten (see Caution at left)
1/3 cup plus 2 tablespoons freshly grated Parmesan cheese
¼ cup softly whipped cream (optional)
1 teaspoon salt, or to taste
¼ teaspoon black pepper, or to taste
8 slices crisply cooked bacon
1. Preheat the broiler. Arrange 2 slices of toast side by side in each of four single-serving metal gratin pans (or four 8-inch metal pie pans attractive enough to appear at the dinner table). Top each piece of toast with a slice of turkey and set aside while you prepare the sauce.
2. Melt the butter in a heavy medium-size saucepan over moderate heat, then blend in the flour. Add the milk and cook, whisking constantly, for 3 to 5 minutes or until thickened and smooth.
3. Blend a little of the hot sauce into the beaten egg, stir back into the pan, and cook and stir 1 minute more. Under no circumstances allow the sauce to boil; it will curdle. Off heat, mix in the 1/3 cup grated Parmesan