THANKSMAS

OLD SCRATCH

The smell of sulphur. The devil's scent I'm told. Usually associate it with deviled eggs. Those inclined to make the kitchen the monkey house are compelled to buy dozen eggs, boil, devil. The tradition is pan-ethnic, but I can't help but keep it firmly pinned to deep south. As southern as picking pigs feet, slopping chitlins, or swilling bourbon cokes, bedeviling eggs is activity taken up with fervor around Thanksgiving and beyond. I mostly just search for reasons to assemble 'em.

Of course they have origin in Roma. And in France. Russia, too. They don't do them like I do mine. The "devil" part comes from the presence of cayenne pepper or paprika or hot sauce (sometimes all three), and not from the weaponized fart reek you wear for a week after putting 12 to a tray. My recipe comes honestly. Through the blood. A mixture, as it were. From two to three families and across the divide to a true stranger even.

Composition changed little over time. Hardboiled egg yolks mixed with mayonaise, mustard, sweet pickles, paprika, a dash of Tabasco sauce, salt, pepper. From Indiana and Georgia came the addition of Deviled Ham - a canned substance verging pate but far too ingrained in trailer loci to work free of the stigma. It's good. Maybe great. I love the shit. If I'm doing a dozen, I add a large can of Deviled Ham. Mix well and add to the whites. Make one of those pastry bags out of Ziploc. Squeeze. Purty. Garnish with olives, pickle bits, pimento. What's that smell?

PISSING MATCH

Chefs tend to get into a pissing match when it comes to roast chicken. Honestly, it isn't easy to do one well. It takes practice. You have to know a few tricks. Otherwise, you may as well oil up those hiking boots and fire them up.

The first trick is herb butter. No, it's not commercially availible. At least I hope not. A stick of butter softened to room temperature. Chop some herbs up. I use tarragon and sage. Mix the hebs with the softened butter. Voila. Herb butter. The second trick is trussing. You'll need kitchen twine. Tie the legs up so they are suspended at equal height behind the bird. Tuck the wings over. This will insure they cook at roughly the same time.

Vegetables. I tend to use carrots and fennel and onions. Chop 'em up. Place them in the bottom of a roasting pan. Rub the chicken down with the herb butter. Chop a few lemons up. Stuff the chicken's cavity with them and the remaining herbs. Pour some stock over the veg and into a very hot over for 30 minutes.

You'll need to check the bird in 15 minutes to make sure its browning evenly. Just rotate it if it's not. Once it's cooked for 30 minutes, turn the oven down to 350 and cook for another 45. When done, open the oven door slightly and let it rest for at least 30 minutes. If you carve it immediately, all the juice will run out and it will taste like those hiking boots.

Plating. Simple. Spartan. Mash. Cooked veg. Chicken. Spoon some cooking liquid around it. That's it. I won't go into wine pairings. K couldn't beleive I drank a High Life with dinner.

OPEN SIGHTS TARTARE

First you'll need to kill a deer. Or find someone who does that sort of thing and would be stupid enough to give you the tenderloin. Then you'll maybe need to get over your issues with eating raw meat. If Bear Grylls does it twice a week, you can do it once a year. It's festive. It's fun. And maybe like the ancient lore says, you'll take on the spirit of the animal by eating it in its base form. Just don't get hit by a car in the wee hours.

Once you've secured a tenderloin you'll need to trim it of all the silverskin. Slice the loin into medallions and slice them into dice. You'll want a consitency like rough, loose hamburger. Keep the venison in the fridge while you work with the other ingredients. Muddle anchovies, capers, and mustard with an egg yolk (farm fresh eggs, please). Chop red onion and parsley finely then finer finest. Add venison to the anchovy, caper, mustard, egg mixture. Incorporate. Add remaining ingredients. Dash of Tabasco, Lea & Perrins. Shape and top with an egg yolk.

Venison, handled correctly, has no equal. Grab some toast and try to keep from smearing it all over your face.

TERRINE DE PORC

Rarely do I find myself enjoying both the cooking process and eating of a foodstuff. Terrines are different. Assemblage isn't complicated, but it takes time and a sharp knife. There's something ineffable about being surrounded by pig parts. Pork shoulder, belly, ham, bacon, lard. Putting this terrine together is something you'll want to do when the trees are dead yellows, burnt reds. When the air has finally fucking cooled and the house takes on a quiet only present in the coming of winter.

Putting this thing together calls for great ingredients. Look for a shoulder that's not too fatty. If you have a source for local pork, by all means... Belly is getting harder to find; ethnic grocers stock copious amounts. All you'll find in the market chains are salt pork, which is unusable. Boiled ham is needed and I always seem to have some in the freezer. A rough chop of all ingredients: shoulder, belly, ham. Then smaller dice of all three. Grease a small breadpan with lard. The oven at medium.

Now a word on bacon: 90 percent of commercially availible bacon is shit. If you can find "country bacon," hoard it. Burger's Smokehouse makes a good country bacon. If you live in Pennsylvania, Dietrich's Meats is your gate to pig heaven. You're looking for a fatty bacon. Ideally I would use caul fat, but I don't live in Devonshire. So break the bacon out. Line the tin with it, letting the excess hang over the sides.

Mix the chopped shoulder, belly, and ham together by hand. Working it like a dough is advised. Then seasoning: fresh nutmeg, mace, crushed juniper, savory, herbes de provence, black pepper, a clove of garlic. A few glugs of brandy or eau de vie. Keep in mind this will be served cold. You may need to test the seasoning. It will need to be fairly intense. Heat up a small bit in a pan for testing. Once you're satisfied begin stuffing the mixture in the tin. Cover with the bacon strips and seal with foil. Place into a larger pan and fill with water up to the half mark. In a medium oven for two hours.

Rest the terrine until cooled and keep in the fridge overnight with canned goods over the top to maintain its shape. You can bang the terrine out of the tin. But I've never done this. I just slice the thing straight from the pan. Service is simple. Don't dress this up. Toast. Pickles. Mustard. Beer.

DOMESTIC CANS

Schaefer: Borbetomagus guitarist Donald Miller immediately engages in a conversation with me re: Big Red One. Then Sam Fuller in general. Backyard. Leaves changing. Some months post-Katrina. Borbeto, a "snuff jazz" trio, in town for WREK's Destroy All Music festival. Conversation lulls and Miller asks if I've got a beer for him. All I got is Schaefer, I say. Mmmm. Schaefer, he says. The beer that tastes like pennies.

Genesee: Tacky Party. Folks out of town. Coins rolled and turned into 15 cases of Genny. Not bad. P and I are dressed entirely alike in 70s suits, paisley ties wider than hammerhead. When the beer runs out, P pulls secret weapons from gymbag. Lemon extract? You gotta be fucking kidding. Not at all. Bums love it. Pure alcohol. Don't remember rest of the night and spent three days trying to get the lemon taste out of my throat. Wendy's chili - and copious amounts of Wendy's hot sauce - finally removed it.

Ballantine: Has that Zeppelin symbol on the label. Only drink Ballantine in St Simons. Only place I can find it. There's some ancient grocer that carries it. All of their carts are rusted from the salty air. A buddy's bachelor party sets us up in a beachside manor. R and I are sent on a food/beer/etc run. Hundreds of dollars later we're back in a borrowed car, smoking dope we found in the glove, decimating a six of Ballantine we'd bought seconds earlier. Zeppelin II in the CD player. We stay parked for its entirety.

High Life: I like buying those ponies. Think they're six ounces. Used to buy them when I'd wash the car. Figure I'd have a "little beer." Easy to drink. Quick drink. Listened to all of Melvins Gluey Porch Treatment's on the Volks' shitcanned stereo. Before I know it, 12 ponies are gone and I'm not so interested in washing the car.

Schlitz: T and I blow off the day with a 12 of Schlitz tallboys. A four hour asskicking at Risk. Backyard, mid-summer. Some shrubs via Humboldt County glassworks. I've never had my ass handed to me like this. Hear a noise. M, whom I haven't seen in probably 18 years, walks around the side of the house, 9mm drawn. He's a cop now. I looked you up on the Internet, he says, looking at the Humboldt County glassworks. Hmm. Schlitz, he says. Just the kiss of the hops, I say.

Ranier: Ranier Beer. K and I spent a New Year's Eve weekend in Seattle way back when with R & J. Must have gone through a case of this beer in two days. New Year's Day, sitting there with R and Bloody Mary. It's dark out, I said. Sun's going down. What the fuck time is it? Three p.m. R says. Welcome to the Pacific Northwest. Happy New Year.

Little Kings: Independence Day. Poolside. Barbecue. The crew is exposed to the horrors inflicted on KA Chapter, Stetson University. They shall remain unmentioned except the prediliction for laying genetalia on shoulders unawares. Too many men, too few women (isn't Rollins a hopskipjump?). Beer run. Two cases of Little Kings before 11:30 p.m. Three hours later, mixer run. J is pulled over. Son, how much have you had to drink? Officer, only five Little Kings.

Olympia: Pre-Bob Dylan. J shotguns case of Oly. Walk to Chastain augmented by psilocybin eating. Imitations of Chaka. Show starts. Hour later J spends all 20 sublime minutes of "Joey" puking on the lawn. Dylan never plays that tune. Wanna go to Waffle House? Play Bocephus' "Young Country" on juke. Five fucking times. Don't know who drove back.

Narragansett: Per dad - a New England breakfast consits of a shit, shower, shave and a pint of Narragansett embellished with a raw egg cracked into its foam. Is it good? If you like iron filings and raw egg, yeah. It's good. Fair well and ado to you fair Spanish ladies...

LA DOLCE VITA

Jorga Fox walks like a man. Namely George W. Bush. Arms in a quick-draw crook, legs bowed and as Texas as T-Bone. I decided this after my third hour of CSI: Las Vegas. I also decided Gil Grissom is scarier than a middle Georgian enumerating "merits" of Unabomber or Tim McVeigh. Were it not for uncut ham, water, juniper, allspice, mustard, cloves, garlic, onions, I would not be narcotizing with Bruckheimer's Technicolor holistic. Capper is a plate of boiled ham begging for English mustard hours later with scant effort. Most difficult part is pulling it from its coooking liquid. The meat and bone buoy schlupping about...

Careful carving. Don't want to waste any of this wonderfully fragrant pink meat. Save the cooking liquid and turn it into soup. Hambone goes into cooking liquid. Add split peas, lentils. Potato soup would be in order if it weren't Indian summer. Cold or hot is your only perdicament. Much like Roast Beef, ham tastes better cold, once its had the time to reflect, settle. Accompaniment must be as fundamental: Cabbage, sauerkraut, brussells sprouts, swede, mash, boiled new potatoes in their jackets, braised chickory, purslane, watercress, dandelion. Pick one. Add bacon to it.

Final step is condiment choice. Green sauce, horseradish, Branston pickle, piccallili, or mustard - dijon or English - is the question. The answer reamins up to you. But there's nothing quite like a big porky bite of ham draped in Colman's mustard. Tae-bo for the sinuses. Colman's isn't a condiment; it's fucking sport. I often wonder why people fuss over dinner parties so much when the proper choice for more than a few, less than many, would be boiled ham. Maybe if we weren't inundated with so much bullshit for the wealth of our waking hours, simple, good things would make good, simple sense again. A glass of something beery, cheery. To: La dolce vita.