The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [108]
Cookbooks usually instruct you to soak and arduously squeeze the sauerkraut handful by handful. (I demolished a salad dryer trying to automate the process.) This once made sense in the Alsatian countryside, where preserved cabbage and turnips were the only vegetables available during the long winter months; by April, the sauerkraut had become dark and highly acidic. But when Alsatians use choucroute nouvelle—fermented for only three weeks and used right away like the sauerkraut we get in the United States—the most they do is quickly rinse off the brine.
The meats found in nearly every recipe are smoked bacon, salted bacon, and smoked or salted pig’s knuckles or shanks (jarret, jambonneau). Nearly as universal are smoked palette de porc, Strasbourg sausages, and salted loin of pork, though some cooks prefer the untranslatable échine, which Cécile Westermann and others prefer to the shoulder for its flavor. Beef is out of the question. Every recipe includes three or four types of sausages; half of them call for quenelles of pork liver, poached at the last minute. Les joues (cheeks) and épaule (shoulder) are found now and then, sometimes fresh and sometimes smoked. Surprisingly, most of these terms are too technical for paperback dictionaries like the one I carried in France, and in the end I needed all four volumes of Harrap’s Standard French and English Dictionary next to my pots and pans. But literal translation is pointless, because French pigs are butchered into different pieces from ours and handled differently later.
I located diagrams of French and American butchering methods, aligned one over the other, and held them up to the light to see where the French cuts fall on an American pig. With my free hand, I telephoned the butcher and asked if he would saw off the part of the shoulder blade near the neck, keeping the backbone and first ribs attached, and could I get it salted. My goal was échine salée. I tried again with jambonneau, which runs from above the knuckle (also known in pork circles as the hock) to just above the feet. In reply, he pretended to have received a long-distance call on the other line. So I telephoned four ethnic butchers—two Italian, one Polish, and one German. They could provide some of the inexpensive cuts like knuckle and shank, though not the cheeks and neck, and nobody carried unsmoked, salted shoulder, loin, or bacon. Salting was invented as a preservative, but we use it now to deepen and concentrate the flavors of foods.
Before long I was in a taxi bound for Harlem with a picture of a pig in my pocket. From what I knew about the salted meats of the American South, I suspected that the answer might lie there. A friend had put me in touch with Aubrey Foster, general manager of the Pan Pan Coffee House, at 130th Street and Lenox Avenue, where every day in the basement he smokes a great deal of pork over hickory. I met up with Foster at the Pan Pan just in time for an early lunch of juicy barbecued ribs and an excellent chopped barbecued-pork sandwich. We pored over my pig diagrams and drove up Lenox Avenue to Clarence & Sons Prime Meats. I was tempted by the frozen possum and coon but stuck to business and discovered snowy-white salted bacon and smoked jowls (streaked like bacon but with a deeper taste); fresh jowls are available around Christmas, when Clarence’s customers order whole pigs’ heads. I was told that the jambonneau on my diagram is never available, because American hams are cut down to the knuckle, leaving only the lower shank.
While I was in the neighborhood, I bused