Eating - Jason Epstein [19]
John Duck used an old fashioned cabbage grinder that quickly and accurately reduced the vegetables to a confetti-like but still-crunchy texture. A carefully managed food processor produces similar results, batch by batch.
JOHN DUCK’S COLESLAW
Remove the outer leaves and core from a medium head of green cabbage. Cut the cabbage in quarters, and each quarter in three chunks. Put as much as will fit easily in a food processor, and process off and on four or five times, until most of the cabbage has been ground to the size of confetti but no smaller. Empty the ground cabbage into a bowl, remove any large pieces, and add them to the next batch. Cut a bell pepper in chunks, and chop a carrot and two stalks of celery coarsely, and run them quickly through a food processor, retaining as much texture as possible. Cut an onion separately by hand into very small dice, but be careful not to add too much or it will overwhelm everything else. For a medium cabbage, mix one cup of mayonnaise—either Hellmann’s, to save time, or homemade sweetened with a third of a cup of sugar and diluted with enough milk to melt the sugar and thin the mayonnaise without making it watery. Or substitute buttermilk or plain, unstrained yogurt for milk. Then mix all the ingredients with a teaspoon of caraway seed, add salt very carefully, a few grains at a time, and a few splashes of white vinegar to taste. Chill it for an hour or so. The result will be first cousin to John Duck’s, but creamier and crunchier.
FRIED CHICKEN
I like to serve this coleslaw with Sal Iacono’s two-and-a-half-pound chickens, cut in eight pieces, which I marinate in Lawry’s Seasoning for a few hours, dip lightly in flour or Wondra, shaking off the excess, and fry the drumsticks and thighs first, then the breasts and wings, in vegetable oil at 350 degrees in a cast-iron skillet, taking care that the oil is not so deep as to cover the chicken, which I turn several times, so that the skin does not blacken where it touches the pan. The chicken is done when the internal temperature reaches 135 degrees on an instant-read thermometer, after about ten minutes for the legs and thighs and a minute or two longer for the breasts. For three-and-a-half-pound chickens, the legs and thighs will take a little longer and the breasts not so long. Don’t try this with factory-raised chickens. They will be dry and tasteless.
Sal Iacono, in his white apron and farmer’s rubber boots, was an East Hampton institution; he died in 2008 at seventy-nine. His widow and son now carry on the business. Long before the term “free range” was invented, Sal’s chickens were running this way and that outdoors in good weather in a half-acre pen, and when it rains they file two by two into their spacious henhouse. Since the 1950s, when he inherited the farm from his father, he had raised his chickens on a simple diet of corn without chemicals, hormones, antibiotics, or anything else in a clean henhouse, and he sold them the day after they were killed. The chickens are the widely grown Cornish Cross, so what gives them their intense flavor and delicate texture must be their diet of unadulterated grain, their freedom to wander outdoors in search of food, their freshness, and perhaps the clean East Hampton air—in other words, their freedom to live like other birds. Whatever the reason, they are unlike any other chickens I have ever tasted, including the celebrated blue-legged poulets de Bresse of France. Sal himself was as cheerful and easygoing as his chickens must have been to produce such flavor and texture, an honorable and humorous man, without pretense, who made a fine product, gave good value, enjoyed his work and his customers, and in his humble shop played tapes of the music to which he (and I) came of age many years ago.
Lately, Peconic Bay scallops, which used to grow in our bays like weeds, have been severely depleted by an invasion of