It is about historical digestion. And morality.

I fried an egg for my daughter today. The yolk was too mushy, it hurt her, she said. And the white, too crunchy. This is just in case any of you are still reading this for cooking advice: wrong blog, maybe. Not that it was actually crunchy. But she did cry a little.

I have two new subscribers since I last posted. Welcome! We are a sinking ship, but I occasionally still move the furniture.

My problem, at least mostly, or my major problem, was not knowing when to consider my dough properly risen: the amount of time can vary hugely when you screw around with all the variables all the time like I do. Having gotten a handle on this, all of my loaves since have been wonderful. And the ones that weren’t, well, had obvious explanations.

In fact I rewrote and nearly here presented that bit of pith I was on about; I would have, except that my theories have gotten ahead of my practice again, and I can’t bear to go on about old practice.

Meanwhile I’ve bought the new Sandor Katz fermentation book, which is a joy. Though hasn’t got a lot to say about bread. But the theory, and the license—a joy, and to be widely recommended.

Anyway, more eventually. Even though I hate food writing. Loathe it. Can barely glance at magazine racks anymore without some amount of inner puke. So, yeah.

So, this week I am not going to push bread making on you. For a change. Having really good bread around for the price of flour and fuel has changed the way I eat, has given meaning to the fairly ridiculous term staff of life, even. A really good loaf, you can eat half of it with butter and call it a pretty good dinner—you can eat half a loaf before dinner without even really noticing if you’re not careful. In fact, that may be a passible definition of a good loaf. Most bread sits heavy in my stomach, is suitable for a piece or two as filler. Really good bread is food, is a thing you can live on.

Maybe in another year or two of close study I’ll be nailing it more than once every couple months.

We’ll see.

Well, I had bad dreams. Woke up with my head in a rush and my belly in a knot, went down stairs to bake bread and drink coffee and write, a little before four this morning. I don’t blame the pig particularly, though I allow the possibility, but rather the plentiful eating of rich food at a late hour followed by indolence and then sleep. The effect was, after all, entirely predictable.

I am in fact entirely ruled by my stomach. I was a lost man, and deeply suffered, before I was found, and well fed, and eventually married. It was, to be certain, a little embarrassing. To see all that anguish evaporate. My whole portfolio if you will—my case study, my personal history—in the face of a few decent regular meals a day. Really. I’d thought I was doomed.

So saved, and capable again of reasoned action, and of subtle study, I have dedicated a considerable amount of my time to fine tuning my digestion. Yes! like an old man in a novel, I know. I never eat this before noon, and never that after eight—the other not at all, not since whenever. It is an absorbing study. It is, or ought to be, I believe, a branch of medicine.

Of course, then it was the early nineties, and the craft beer movement was in full swing. That bar with the Guinness turned out to be owned by another, and considerably more obsessive home brewer, Ray McNeill, for instance, and so I had no shortage of good and diverse beer on which to cut teeth. But still it would be another ten years, almost, before my father would consent to drink aught but dark beers. Habits are stubborn things.

For myself, it took me years, as I outgrew the prejudiced (and slightly precious) palate of my late adolescence, to realize that IPAs were not to be drunk sitting down at table, unless perhaps there was pizza or bar-food on that table. That beer shouldn’t be drunk cold in winter, or for much of fall and spring for that matter. That (a crisp, light) lager has its place—particularly with Mexican food, with which there is nothing on earth better to drink, I am firmly convinced.

As, in my old age, I have started to drink considerably less beer, having finally realized that not every afternoon does a beer really agree with me, so has my desire for that beer to be the right beer increased. And so, this week, finally, I have come around to the idea (very late in coming) that I ought to keep any number of different beers on hand, more beer collectively than I’ve ever kept on hand, really, at exactly the time I am drinking the least beer of my life since age fourteen.

What a pleasing prospect.

—Moby Dick, chapter 94.

I don’t even like to write the word bacon, here. I’ll have bacon nothing, please, or plain with eggs &etc. It can be made at home without difficulty, and keeps in the refrigerator for a good long time. That is about enough said about bacon. Or close enough, rhetorically.

Pork belly, however. The thing bacon is made from. That.

A friend of mine, recently visiting, inventoried my freezer, saw my pork belly. Pure fat, rhetorically, barely struck through with pink—not even struck all the way through, to be clear—the fattiest piece of pork belly I’ve ever handled—gorgeous, perfect—(raised by these friends of mine, incidentally)—how about we roast it, he said.

Roast a pork belly? Interesting, thought I. He took a pound, lacerated it, rubbed it with salt, lavender, (he is a lavender sort of fellow), let it sit. I don’t remember his roasting regimen. It’s not important.

It was exceptional. I mean, memorable. The culinary high point of a high week, culinarily. Nearly spreadable. We ate it on bread, some of it—we ate it as one of several things at a meal. I came back to it throughout the meal. I started the meal with it, and I ended with it.

It was less strange than it might sound, oh timid reader. Bacon in another form, my lamb, except tender, moist, melting.

I believe this will become an annual feast dish in this household.

Dress and cut it up. Put in pot, then bring to boil.* Break up spicewood branches, and put in pot with meat. Boil until the meat is tender. Remove; then salt and pepper; then roll in flour; put in 1/2 cup shortening, preferably bacon grease. Then put in oven and bake until it is brown.

Mrs. Ennis Ownby”

from Mountain Makin’s in the Smokies, published by the Great Smoky Mountains Natural History Association, 1957.

*(“boil” is old-talk for simmer.)

They are, apparently, dried, and used in place of allspice.

We have a pint set to drying, and will tell you how it goes.

Boil a handful or three of ripe red spicebush berries for a while in about a gallon of water, with a fair bit of sugar. Once your broth is strong enough, add some more sugar if it tastes like it wants it, remembering that some sugar will be lost in the fermentation to achieve carbonation. Strain all into a gallon jar or stockpot or crock. Next, optionally, add a small handful of raw spicebush berries—wife did this, but I think, in my opinion, she may have overdone it slightly. As always, I advise to err on the side of underdoing it. Next, put in something yeasty, ideally a cup of some other fermentation you have going. I often use my kombucha for this sort of thing. Next, cover it to keep flies out, stir it a few times a day until it gets bubbly, then put it in bottles and stick them in the refrigerator. Bottles left out in the warm for too long risk explosions.

Another wild berry ripe (just passing, really) we’ve been making much of this season is Autumn Olive. Its speckled, tannic, pink-red berries are my daughter’s favorite fruit, and they’re really very tasty. I’ve fermented them up in wine but they make it cloudy. But, they make an excellent jelly. Seems to have plenty of its own pectin. Interestingly, the juice you cook up out of the berries, rather than being that lovely pink, is grey-brown, but once you add sugar to it it goes grey-pink. Really pretty first rate. My first jelly, to be honest, and soon to be a family tradition.

That fine-chopped ginger-root, and cane sugar, and a little dark molasses, and some lemon juice (all measured without measuring, to taste and by necessity, as usual, as should you do if ye care to learn aught), is my first attempt at ginger-beer. It is a very young ferment. Once it’d cooled I pitched in it a cup of kombucha I had going as starter (yeast starter culture, more populous in active fermentations than even in the 24/7 fermentation-spewn air of my house). Maybe two days later, after stirring several times a day, a very thick, very viscous, very sharp with ginger and lemon foam formed—and I stirred it again, and tasted it, and the flavors were good, so I bottled it. I bottle such things in flip-top bottles, which I don’t bother to sanitize as these things will be refrigerator-stored and drunk within the next one-two weeks. Once in bottle, I leave at room temperature for another 6-24 hours to carbonate, then remove to refrigerator. Like my kombucha, I may do this constantly—I would for sure, except ginger is an exotic, and expensive, and just doesn’t make much sense, here. So, root beer. Birch beer. I need to find local abundant wild flavorants. Juniper berries, perhaps, which are nearing ripeness. Spice bush. Roots. Need roots.

Here are two homely jugs of happily fermenting homely home-squeezed plum wine. It’s been far too long since I engaged in fermentation projects, and I feel a tear coming on.

This particular project was a medley of expedients. I am bullish on plums, though. One day, perhaps next week, I’ll go land fifty pounds of Damsons and do it right.

That said, my latest obsession is beekeeping. Beekeeping theory, actually, as I’ve never yet kept bees, nor spent more than a few minutes hanging out with one. But for weeks now, when I’ve not been reading The Sot-Weed Factor, or a high-school electronics textbook from 1991, (really), I’ve been stripping my local libraries and going cross-eyed on the internet, reading about beekeeping theory. In case you’re the sort of person who believes that obsessive research without practical experience by someone like myself is of some value, and you take any interest in bees, I suggest you take a look at the Bush Farms beekeeping site—after much outlandish consideration this guy has me sold.

Got sore hands, nearly a couple blisters, sore shoulders, sore feet, just cutting up that eight pounds fat. Gave me a little new respect I may have lacked for professional cooks, and for people who take down whole animals. I’ve sometimes ambitions to raise a couple pigs. And this is good to know: I can’t just throw them on a table and cut them up, not by myself and not just with a little help. Takes brains.

Next wad of fat I process, I’ll take the fatback and just salt it in steaks. Call that salt pork, people. Call that a huge saving in labor and energy: rendering takes all day on the stove. It’s a process should really be done in late fall, which is really when pigs ought to be killed anyway—then you want the heat, anyway, and the fat might taste better; older animals, finished on the mast crop, if you know where to buy them. But I needed my fat right away, and pig sellers need inventory all year round, so.

I cannot abide by a lack of animal fat. In my house we insist on good things, like in olive oil we must have extra virgin and it must be organic; even by the five-gallon bag-in-a-box pouring the stuff on feels profligate. Our commercial options, frankly, are awful. Like in many things food, there are shades here of be rich or die. Yet, the lard this year is a buck a pound, and everything I could ask for. And I’m a snot.

Sorry I’m writing so funny. Lately I have to take what I can get.

Vegetarian even. For Christ’s sake.

If you’re not already aware of it, the dried-beans thing is a revelation. But now I think I’m souring on the pressure cooker too.