72. So, once again, it’s National Soul Food Month. Seems like it’s only been a year since the last one.
Not the greatest timing for Food Tells a Story. Or maybe it’s the perfect timing. Lately, yours truly has been on a pasta kick. I don’t know why. It’s as much a physical craving for pasta as it’s a mental exercise in expanding my cooking repertoire.
Problem is that this craving hit me about the same time that I started an Instagram page christened “soul.food.heaven.” So there’s not much soul food on there, for now, and that’s embarrassing.
But with Juneteenth closing in, I figured I’d better start getting my head back into my adopted cuisine of choice. I tried a little fusion thing first, with something I dubbed “Cajun Cavatappi.”
The result was something I described as a three-way between spaghetti, red beans & rice, and an old-fashioned Chili Mac. I picked cavatappi pasta, not out of a rational assessment of the sauce I’d be creating, but because that’s the kind I use for my holiday Mac & Cheeses, supposedly one step fancier than the classic elbow macaroni.
I approached the sauce like I was making red beans & rice. I started with a Trinity mirepoix (onions, celery, bell pepper), sweated down mostly in the drippings from browning Italian sausage, along with some rich New Zealand butter. Then I added diced tomatoes, and seasoned the mix with Slap Ya Mama. I wanted that Louisiana taste in there, even though I’d be adding back the Italian sausage later. As the sauce developed, I added a few splashes of Red Rooster hot sauce. Then I added the red beans.
When the beans were done, I added the meat and cooked pasta, and smoothed out the texture with some of the pasta water. Did the finished product qualify as “soul food” or was it just a botched Italian dish? Who knows? I thought it certainly had a soul-food vibe. It also tasted good. My Dad, who will be 99 in July, ate it for three meals, and over those three days, the taste got even better. Wish I’d kept closer track of what I was doing!
So what next? I got an urge to use the small head of cabbage I’d been keeping in the refrigerator for……a while. I also had a beef smoked sausage in there. Voila! Fried cabbage and sausage:
Now I felt like I was headed back to my wheelhouse. Fried cabbage certainly qualifies as country cooking. I cook and season cabbage the same way I’d cook its sister, collards, or any other green, which reflects the African style of using meat as a seasoning for the greens. It was also richly seasoned, perhaps overly so. The red pepper flakes and hot sauce had already made their point; the extra twists of the pepper grinder for the sake of my photos at the end may have been overdoing it.
I had also salted the cabbage as it cooked, and I didn’t account for the salt that would be melting out of the sausage. So it was perhaps a little too salty too. I warned Dad that it was pretty salty and spicy, and that if it was too much for him, I’d be happy to whip up something else.
(In my Ron Howard “Arrested Development” voice:) That was a lie. I didn’t actually have an alternative. But it didn’t matter. Once again, Dad ate the whole thing, right down to licking his bowl clean at the end.
This wasn’t “soul food” in the sense of festival cooking. It was, and was meant to be, a humble supper dish. It did, however, get my head back in the game. Now I can start thinking about what to make for my Juneteenth solidarity meal.
Food Tells a Story 