THE THRILL OF THE GRILL Techniques, Recipes, & Down-Home Barbecue Chris Schlesinger & John Willoughby To Cary, with love and respect Contents Introduction 13 Grills Just Wanna Have Fun 19 Enough of These Will Make a Meal 33 Fish and Other Water Dwellers 95 Birds and Things with Hooves 145 Grilling at the Ritz 189 Sambals, Blatjangs, and Salsas 225 Slow and Low Is the Way to Go: Barbecue (Smoke Cooking) 265 And All the Fixin's 293 Breads and Desserts 331 Whistle While You Work: Refreshing Beverages 361 Your Basic Pantry 369 Where to Get It: Sources for Unusual Ingredients 381 Index 389 Acknowledgments 415 About the Authors Credits Cover Copyright About the Publisher Introduction I'll try any kind of food at least onceÐparticularly after a long day of surfing and a couple of rum drinks. Back in 1978, during my first stay in the tropics, this particular combination set me on a path that led to this book. I had quit a humdrum cooking job and headed down to the Car- ibbeanÐBarbados to be exactÐto spend the winter with the two great loves of my early life: overhead waves and low 80s temperat- ures. Being a misguided youth, I managed to exist on hamburgers, potato chips, and Cokes for the first month. Eventually, however, I bowed to financial needs and the entreaties of my newfound local friends and began to eat the food they ate. I started frequenting the same restaurants they did and cooking with ingredients from the open-air markets. This was the first time I had immersed myself in another culture and its food. One fine Sunday afternoon shortly before I had to leave to come back stateside, my buddies and I were out back grilling some dol- phinfish. Some of our Bajun friends showed up, among them my sometime culinary guide. He brought out some small, lantern-shaped red and yellow peppers. ªBest in the world,º he said. ªCheck 'em out.º I trusted the guy, he had always come through before, and, like I said, I'll try any food once. So I chopped up the peppers, added some lime juice, mango, and herbs, and ended up with a yellow- orange relish. I whipped some of it on the fish, took a big bite, and¼it practically blew my head off. Sweat poured down my face and every cavity in my head opened to twice its normal size as my mouth tasted a great, distinct, aromatic flavor. The culprit was the Scotch Bonnet, the World's Hottest Chile Pepper, and I loved it. Soon I was happily splashing this sauce and any other fiery hot condiment I could find on everything I ate. That was the beginning of my fascin- ation with hot foods and tropical ingredients. At the time, however, this fascination seemed to have little con- nection with my life as a professional cook. After starting out as a dishwasher, I had gone to the Culinary Institute of America, where my training had mostly been devoted to reproducing the classical 13 recipes and techniques of Escoffier. Being a chef, it seemed, consisted of re-creating the past. I learned what my teachers had to teach me, but I can't say that I was inspired by foodÐuntil I returned from my Caribbean trip full of memories of spicy foods, exotic ingredients, and raw, strong flavors. My timing was right. When I got back to the United States, the nouvelle cuisine movement, which had been under way in France for some time, was beginning to make its presence felt. In Boston, this was nowhere truer than at a Cambridge restaurant known at the time for being at the culinary vanguard. At the Harvest, the best expression of the emerging principles of nouvelle cuisine were in operation. For the first time, I found myself working with young, eager cooks who were inspired by the freedom this cuisine allowed. The basis of this new cooking style was a rededication to the profession of cooking, in which integrity, freshness, and use of local ingredients replaced such irrelevancies as flaming dishes tableside. Cooks began to use the highest-quality ingredients and let them speak for themselves, rather than overpowering them with elaborate preparations. At the Harvest, curiosity and imagination were encour- aged, and the kitchen staff was exposed to a vast array of new in- gredients. This was the best training I could have had to complement my formal schooling, and it is from this time that I date my passion for food and my sense of culinary adventurousness. All this innovation and ferment created a climate in which being a cook meant following principles, not recipes. As long as the prin- ciples were observed and the results were rewarding, each cook could bring his or her own background to bear on food. I began to look to my own background for inspiration. I was weaned on grilled food, and that burned, crusty taste was one of my first taste memories. I grew up in Virginia and spent every possible minute at my parents' cottage near Virginia Beach. When we were there, we wanted cooking to be as easy as possible, which meant grilling. My dad taught me to appreciate food for itself, not the trappings that surrounded it. He always went to Woolworth's for hot dogs because they had the best grilled buns, and he would drive an hour out of his way for the perfect barbecue sandwich. He loved shad roe, oysters, and charred steak. When he cooked, which wasn't often, he'd grill a steak so that it was burned on the outside and raw on the inside. My sister and I would always tell him that it was both too burned and too raw, but he refused to cook steak any 14 / The Thrill of the Grill other way; and eventually we got to like it. Years later I would use this principle to create one of my favorite dishes: seared sushi- quality tuna, burned on the outside and raw on the inside. Then of course, there was that great Southern specialty, barbecue. How can I do justice to this food, steeped in tradition, surrounded by myth and lore, subject of a million arguments and stubborn opinionsÐit is the most commonplace food around. The best barbe- cue is always found in a low-down dive that is as comfortable and easy as old clothes. I love barbecue for its taste and for the type of people who cook and eat it. Every year when I was a kid my folks would throw a ªpig-pickingº party. They always hired some local guys to come to our house the day before, dig a pit, and barbecue a whole pig. They would arrive just as I was going off to bed, pulling up in their trucks with their hats and their beers; they'd dig the pit and start the pig. When I got up in the morning I'd see them lounging around with that particular tired, satisfied slowness that comes from staying up all night drinking beer and tending the pit. I'd spend time with them, helping them cook and enjoying their easy camara- derie. So it is that I came to love the process of barbecuing and the atmosphere that surrounds it as much as the actual food. Barbecue taught me what I consider one of the cardinal principles of cooking: It's the cooking, not just the eating, that is to be enjoyed. On holidays we would visit Grandma Wetzler's house in rural Pennsylvania. Her table was jammed with an incredible number of dishesÐhomemade applesauce, pickled eggs, corn pudding, ham salad, homemade baked beans. It always seemed like a picnic. She had developed an enormous repertoire of rural American dishes by cooking every meal for her large family since the age of sixteen. I still think of her table as the very essence of honest, bedrock Amer- ican food. I also drew on the memories of food I had eaten as I traveled around the world looking for the perfect wave. The Scotch Bonnet was followed by many such discoveries in tropical countries from Costa Rica to Thailand and points in between. I began to notice cer- tain similarities and pieced together an understanding of why the food of hot climates captured my imagination. This style of cook- ingÐhighly spiced, usually grilled, and served in that informal, friendly fashion that goes with beaches and hot weatherÐdefined my own feelings and ideas about food. For want of a more precise term, I call this food ªequatorial cuisine.º This doesn't mean that it Chris Schlesinger & John Willoughby / 15 is all found precisely midway between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, but that it shares the characteristics of hot-weather food that I just described. Running through all of my food memories and discoveries, from barbecue to the tropics, is my love of very distinct tastes. My food has strong flavors that are not blended into a single taste; instead they are combined without losing their individuality. My sauces are raw, with lots of herbs, spices, and garlic. I like to finish my relishes and sauces as close to serving time as possible so the individual flavors stand out rather than blend together during cooking. So I add something at the last minuteÐa squeeze of lime, some fresh herbs, a chunk of spicy butter. I like my sauces to reach as many parts of the palate as possible simultaneously. In general, my food has an earthy simplicity, a casual style, with the emphasis on the clarity and dimension of the taste.