Retro Recipes and Traditional Fare

Be careful when you do a Google search for pasties. I was searching for the edible kind, the Cornish kind-- pastry stuffed with meat and vegetables. But, ummmm, you know, the other kind came up. Google misunderstood. It did try, though. Google asked: Did you mean to search for: all about pastry?

I had just returned to my office after a visit with Mark and Peggy Schultz, owners of a pasty (PASS-tee) shop in Turtle River, Minnesota, not far from where I live. After spending time in the Turtle River Pasties kitchen, watching Mark create very chubby pasties, all-butter pastry turnovers stuffed with beef and root vegetables, I was anxious to use the tips he shared with me to make my own batch.

I first learned of pasties over 20 years ago when I was in Ely for a state Legion baseball tournament. They were part of the line-up at the concession stand. A pasty is a little bit like a filled dumpling, but it's baked, not boiled. It's a little bit like a pie with a flaky crust, but it's eaten out of hand, not with a fork. It's a little bit like a sandwich filled with meat and vegetables, but there's no bread involved.

One of the great things about summer in New England is the abundance of fresh sweet corn and local seafood... And no dish celebrates that seasonal and regional deliciousness quite like a corn and seafood chowder.

A few years (and a few sizes) ago, whether it was corn and clam chowder, corn and lobster chowder, even corn and haddock chowder, I ordered it every time it was on a menu. Sadly, my habit of souvenir eating–you don’t know when you’ll be back so you better eat it all while you’re there–meant I also lugged home an extra 5 pounds after every vacation that wasn’t in my suitcase. (Ugh.)

So once I began re-thinking and re-tooling my favorite dishes, I just had to find a way to enjoy that creamy New England goodness without feeling (or looking) like I’d swallowed Plymouth Rock.

It wasn’t easy. It seemed like every one of the corn and seafood chowder recipes from my favorite chefs relied on white flour, a stick of butter (810 calories and 91 grams of fat) and a cup (and sometimes two!) of heavy cream (821 calories and 88 grams of fat per cup), which meant just a two cup bowl, without the fish, could have up to 800 calories…half the calories I need to eat in a whole day!

If man could only have one pan, it would probably have to be an iron skillet. You can fry, bake, sear and roast with these workhorses of the kitchen. Baking, as in cornbread, is most often thought of when using these pans for non-frying purposes, but there is a class of cakes that take the cake when it comes to iron skillet cooking, and the Pineapple Upside Down Cake is one of them.

I actually made this cake for Mama and Mimi’s birthday. They share the same birthday and don’t always want the same cake for their special day, but, this one is a great neutral for our family – everyone likes it! Mimi makes hers in an iron skillet as did Mema, her mother. This is one of those desserts with one arm reaching back to the “Ol’ South” via an iron skillet and another broadly stepping into the mid-twentieth century with the Baby Boomers and the craze for canned fruit! It seems that by the 1980’s and 90’s fresh fruit was hard to come by in Suburbia, USA, but thankfully those days are waning and fresh, seasonal produce is here to stay!

It’s funny what you think you know. For the last thirty-five years I’ve been cooking chicken scarpariello – or shoemakers’ chicken — for my family. It’s one of my kids’ favorite dishes out of my humble repertoire – cut up pieces of chicken, still on the bone, flash-fried with garlic, white wine and rosemary. The best way to eat this dish is with your fingers, mopping up the sauce with a piece of good Italian bread. It’s heaven on a plate. I first came across the recipe in Alfredo Viazzi’s cookbook. Alfredo had a restaurant – he had a few of them, actually – in Greenwich Village where we lived in 1972. We ate at Trattoria d’Alfredo a couple times a week, often spotting James Beard at a table by himself, packing away Alfredo’s fabulous food.

Imagine my shock when I researched the recipe on the Internet and found that it’s not Italian at all. I typed in “pollo allo scarpariello – ricette” on Google, so that I could pull up the recipes in the original Italian and I came up empty. They don’t have that dish in Italy or, if they do, they call it something else.