1,000 Foods To Eat Before You Die: A Food Lover's Life List (145 page)

Flank steak—best enjoyed rare.

Beef mavens will tell you to order these flat, muscular, flavorful steaks rare, and no other way. Long the favorite of butchers, and dubbed “the kindest cuts” since they provide maximum flavor at minimum cost, they are at their beefiest and most toothsome when cooked rare, beyond which they become dry, tough, and stringy—a travesty easily avoided.

The hanger steak
is the thick strip of meat, part of the steer’s diaphragm, that “hangs” between the rib and the loin. Sometimes referred to as “the butcher’s tenderloin,” it is a favorite of the meat cutters who know that there’s only one of these per animal, and that its flavor rivals that of a rib-eye steak. The French, who call it
onglet
, often choose it for bargain renditions of the bistro classic steak-frites, more traditionally prepared with a rib steak. So long as the hanger’s tough center vein is removed by the butcher, resulting in two long steaks of almost equal size, both may be easily grilled or broiled for a pungently juicy outcome.

The skirt steak
is the diaphragm muscle itself—a long, flat piece of meat that lies between the steer’s abdomen and chest cavity. It takes only a few minutes to sear this steak in a cast-iron skillet, broiler, or grill so that it forms a nice brown crust but remains juicy. Sadly, the skirt has become scarce, and more expensive, because of its popularity for use in fajitas and other Latino favorites.

The flank steak
—
bavette de flanchet
to the French—is the authentic cut for London broil and also for Latino
matambre
(see
listing
). A long, wide, and thin muscle from the steer’s flank, or lower hindquarters, its fibrous, striated meat is sheathed in fat that is too often trimmed off in butcher shops, so that the meat tends to dryness when grilled; some butcher shops will order untrimmed flank steak from their suppliers if it’s requested a few days ahead. Barring that, the best way to tenderize a flank is to marinate it.

Whether broiled or grilled, all of these steaks should be sliced thinly against the grain, with the knife held almost parallel to the cutting surface, as when slicing smoked salmon.

Mail order:
De Bragga and Spitler, tel 646-873-6555,
debragga.com
.
Further information and recipes:
The Steak Lover’s Cookbook
by William Rice (1997);
The Butcher’s Guide to Well-Raised Meat
by Joshua and Jessica Applestone, with Alexandra Zissu (2011);
The Barbecue! Bible
by Steven Raichlen (2008);
epicurious.com
(search grilled skirt steak; chile-marinated flank steak);
saveur.com
(search vegetable-stuffed rolled flank steak).

The California Gold Rush produced a great deal of wealth, but one of its richest legacies may be edible: the pancake-or frittata-style omelet studded with fried oysters and topped with crisp bacon that is known as Hangtown fry, a legend that has survived those rough-and-ready days.

The time: mid-1800s. The place: the lawless Hangtown, so called for its numerous hangings. (Before that nickname, it was called simply “Blood and Guts”; since 1854 it’s been known as Placerville.) The origin story: An enthusiastic wildcatter strikes it rich in the Sierra foothills and walks into the El Dorado Hotel, demanding the costliest dish on the menu. The cook hastily assembles his most luxurious ingredients: eggs (which had to be transported delicately and cost about a dollar each), bacon (shipped all the way from the East Coast), and oysters (conveyed on ice from San Francisco, more than a hundred miles away).

The combination of flavors—sweet egg, salty oysters, smoky bacon—worked as enticingly then as it does now, most notably at San Francisco’s Tadich Grill (see
listing
). A few other places in San Francisco sometimes feature Hangtown fry, but Tadich’s version is definitive for its mastery of textures: tender, fluffy eggs ever so lightly browned on the surface; crisp, meaty bacon; fresh, moist oysters, lightly breaded and pan-fried before joining the egg mixture. The heaping main dish is served with a unique, piquant, house-made tartar sauce, a sort of mayonnaise bound and thickened with mashed potatoes in a style close to that of the Balkan
scordolea
.

Where:
In San Francisco
, Tadich Grill, tel 415-391-1849,
tadichgrill.com
.
Further information and recipe:
Tadich Grill
by John Briscoe (2002);
saveur.com
(search hangtown fry);
epicurious.com
(search fried oyster omelet).

From the French
haché
, meaning to chop, hash may be the world’s most delicious way to use up what are often leftover bits of cooked meat and poultry. Easily prepared and equally easily consumed, the economical dish seems to have first surfaced in seventeenth-century England, but is now far more common in the U.S. Plain or topped with a fried or poached egg, it makes for a classic stick-to-your-ribs breakfast or brunch, but is also wonderfully handy as a last-minute dinner concoction.

The most popular hashes are those made with rosy, mildly salty corned beef or roast beef, gently tossed with finely chopped onion melted to softness in butter or bacon fat, and mixed with cooked, finely diced potatoes, salt, pepper, sometimes eggs, a few droplets of Worcestershire sauce, and sweet or hot paprika. Although fish is sometimes used for hash, it’s not a great candidate for a lengthy pan-fry, often too soft and moist to attain the desired crispness and golden-brown hue. Pork other than ham tends to be too densely textured to work well as hash, but the much overlooked roasted or stewed lamb deserves more attention than it gets, mixed perhaps with cooked rice instead of potatoes, along with diced green peppers and some lamb-centric herbs, such as thyme or oregano.

The mass is usually slowly skillet-fried, piping hot, then flipped so the top and bottom both develop a thin, crackly veneer. Some cooks fry it in thick, individual oval cakes; others bake it with a topping of bread crumbs and perhaps grated cheese.

Long considered quick, cheap food, beef hash gave rise to the term
hash houses
, for cheap and unadorned restaurants. By contrast, chicken hashes have a more elegant reputation. Lighter and more sophisticated than other meat hashes, those based on breast of chicken (or perhaps of turkey, if it has been basted and kept moist during roasting) usually involve some sort of cream sauce and are gratinéed with grated Gruyère or Parmesan. When it opened in 1910, the Ritz-Carlton Hotel restaurant in New York featured a creamy rendition devised by chef Louis Diat, and three versions of chicken hash used to be standard on the “21” menu: the house classic, still on the menu and served with wild rice and often scrambled eggs as a late supper; Chicken Hash St. Germaine, which was garnished with a jade-green puree of green peas and a cheese topping; and Chicken Hash Beyers, which was served with nice, grainy wild rice and the silky pea puree.

The Ritz-Carlton chicken hash, long favored by lunching ladies at the original Madison Avenue site, was graced with a sherry-and egg-yolk-enhanced cream sauce, making it the richest indulgence of all.

Where:
In New York
, The ‘21’ Club, tel 212-582-7200,
21club.com
; Keens Steakhouse, tel 212-947-3636,
keens.com
;
in Portland, ME
, Bintliff’s American Cafe, tel 207-774-0005,
bintliffscafe.com
;
in Los Angeles
, The Grill, tel 323-856-5530,
thegrill.com
.
Further information and recipes:
The ‘21’ Cookbook
by Michael Lomonaco (1995);
Simple Cooking
by John Thorne (1996);
The Gift of Southern Cooking
by Edna Lewis and Scott Peacock (2003);
The Fannie Farmer Cookbook
, 13th edition, by Marion Cunningham (1996);
saveur.com
(search keens steakhouse prime rib hash; chicken hash; corned beef hash).

A New Year’s tradition since the 1800s.

To the uninitiated, it probably looks like a simple plate of rice and legumes. But any southerner can tell you that the concoction of cheerily winking black-eyed peas, simply stewed with savory, meaty hog jowls and served atop a nurturing bed of snowy short-grain rice—the dish known as hoppin’ John—is a symbol of the comforts of home, as well as a totem of good luck.

The dish began as a variation on the
nutritious rice-and-beans combination eaten throughout the Caribbean, most probably brought to the American South by West-African slaves. Legends abound as to the origin of its name, but there are references to “Hopping John” (somewhere along the line, the
g
was dropped) in both the prominent abolitionist Frederick Law Olmsted’s book
A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States
, first published in 1856, and
The Carolina Housewife
, a collection of recipes by Sarah Rutledge, published in 1847.

As in so many other cultures, in the South sustaining staples such as beans symbolize good luck and renewal, and so are traditionally eaten on New Year’s Day. For good measure they are garnished with cooked greens and cornbread, ensuring that the year ahead will be full of coins (the black-eyed peas), cash (the greens), and gold (the cornbread). Some throw in tomatoes, too, thought to symbolize health, if not a cache of rubies.

Where:
In Chapel Hill, NC
, Crook’s Corner, tel 919-929-7643,
crookscorner.com
.
Mail order:
For dried peas,
nuts.com
(search blackeyed peas); amazon.com (search spicy world black eye peas).
Further information and recipes:
Hoppin’ John’s
Lowcountry Cooking
by John Martin Taylor (2012);
Mastering the Art of Southern Cooking
by Nathalie Dupree and Cynthia Graubart (2012);
The Welcome Table
by Jessica B. Harris (1996);
foodnetwork.com
(search hoppin john lagasse);
epicurious.com
(hoppin john welcome table).
Special event:
Hoppin’ John Festival, Shakori Hills, Silk Hope, NC, September, with lots of music and a hoppin’ John cook-off,
hoppinjohn.org
(click Be a Part).

George Washington Carver

Where would the humble peanut be without the work of George Washington Carver, the noted horticulturist and chemist who began his ground-breaking research at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama in 1903? The great popularizer certainly made his mark, introducing the mysterious creature and its many uses to the world stage. But despite its familiarity, the peanut (
Arachis hypogaea
) still remains ambiguous to many. Its name notwithstanding, it’s not a nut, and it doesn’t grow on trees. It’s a legume, an edible seed enclosed within a pod, just like beans, peas, and lentils.