The Food Almanac: April 14, 2011

In The Food Almanac, Tom Fitzmorris of the online newsletter, The New Orleans Menu notes food facts and sayings.

Eating Calendar
Today is National Hush Puppy Day. Hush puppies are an important part of a well-balanced mess of fried catfish. We see them on other fried seafood platters too. Most of the time the role of hush puppies is strictly as cheap filler, and that's probably how they came to be in the first place.

The story (no idea whether it's true) is that the cook carrying food from the kitchen across the courtyard to the dining room of the main house had to do so with dogs running underfoot. To quiet them, she made some of the coating for the fish or chicken into a ball, fried it up, and threw it to the dogs. They, of course, went running after it.

Hush puppies can be raised to a higher level. By incorporating onions, bell peppers, parsley, and perhaps some fresh corn, and a little jalapeño, one comes out with a hush puppy that stands alone. The best hush puppies I ever ate were and are at Cuevas's Fish House, an all-you-can-eat fried whole catfish place near Picayune, Miss.

Deft Dining Rule #404
No catfish recipe, no matter how involved or careful, will match the goodness of fried catfish with a crisp, golden-brown, cornmeal coating.

Gourmet Geography
Catfish, N.C. is in farm country 58 miles north of Charlotte. A school of substantial size is there. It's a mile to Lookout Dam on the Catawba River, which forms an enormous reservoir where you would imagine more than a few catfish live. No catfish restaurants are in the area, unless that's on the menu at Rock Barn Lyle Creek Grill, three miles away.

The Old Kitchen Sage Sez
The best way to coat catfish (or anything) with cornmeal for frying is to put the seasoned meal into a big, round-bottomed bowl, toss in a few pieces of fish in, and shake the bowl around until everything's coated. If you get good at this, it looks dramatic.

Edible Dictionary
spoonbread, n.A very moist, thick version of cornbread, made by mixing cornmeal with enough milk, eggs, and butter that, even after it's baked, it's more like a pudding than a bread. Most often, it's made in small portions of a cup or less. It's usually made rather sweet, enough that it can be served as a dessert. Spoonbread usually doesn't rise at all. As the name implies, it's eaten with a spoon. It can be flavored with almost anything used in standard cornbread: cinnamon, fruits, corn kernels, vanilla, bacon, or whatever strikes the fancy of the cook.

Annals of Food Writing
Heloise Cruse was born on this date in 1919. She created a newspaper column called Hints from Heloise in a Honolulu newspaper in 1959, and wrote it for a couple of decades. Her daughter writes it now. She may be most famous for telling us what else to do with vinegar besides making salad dressing.

Food Namesakes
Jack Bruce was born today in 1943. He doesn't have a food name, but his band, Cream, did. Its drummer had a double food name: Ginger Baker. The Grapes Of Wrath, John Steinbeck's novel about grape pickers in California, was published today in 1939. Lemuel Boozer, a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in 1860, was born today in 1809.

Words to Eat By
"Eating at a new, highly-recommended restaurant is like a very important blind date, a contract with uncertainty you enter into with great expectation battling the cynicism of experience. You sit waiting, wondering about the upcoming moments of revelation. Somewhere in the back of your head is the dour warning that disappointment is inevitable but you don't really believe it or you wouldn't be there. The best eaters are always optimists."  Stuart Stevens, American journalist.

Words to Drink By
"I am willing to taste any drink once." American writer James Branch Cabell, born today in 1879.

Check out other Food Almanac columns by Tom Fitzmorris.