Locally Grown Girl

A Very Mysterious Recipe

While in Charleston a few years ago, I picked up a copy of Charleston Receipts, a reprint of an early Charleston Junior League cookbook. The folks who assembled the original did a fantastic job of collecting truly regional recipes; this is not the sort of later JL cookbook that seemed to be taken over by the soup mix/cake mix/jello powder sort of national recipes that are hard to escape after the 1970s.

When I got it home, I marked about a dozen pages with sticky notes for specific recipes to try, (there's a cookie that is the coconut version of a pecan pie bar and was delicious) and last night, thanks to some leftover rice the Cap'n made a few nights ago, I finally tried one called Philpy.

From the recipe, it was hard to tell how it was going to turn out. The rice was mashed "until fairly smooth", which was actually harder to accomplish than suspected and the final result was "vaguely smooth", I would say. The other ingredients were sort of pancake-like: whisk flour, milk and salt together until smooth, add the mashed rice, add an egg and a bit of melted butter. This thin and slightly lumpy (from the rice) batter was poured into a cake pan (the size isn't specified in the recipe) and was supposed to be baked at 450 degrees for 30 minutes. Considering there was not quite an inch of this thin batter, the recipe doesn't have any real leavener, and that's an awfully hot oven, I kept a close eye on the baking.

It started getting gigantic puffy bubbles at around five minutes, and was puffy, buttery and toasted golden brown all over at 17 minutes. The outside looked to be about a minute from scorching, so I pulled it out. The bubbles were distributed really erratically; one was about the size of my fist, and there were a few about the size of a ping-pong ball; the rest were just small blistery bits. In flavor and texture, it was most like a dutch baby (aka baked German pancake): light on the edges, denser in the middle, eggy and plain and in need of...something. Jam worked pretty well; maple syrup really didn't.

The direction said it should be split and served with butter. Well, in this version there really wasn't anything to "split"--aside from the bubbles, it was still only about an inch thick. And more butter wouldn't really fix the flavor. I got online and started googling "philpy" and an assorted combination of other words: recipe, history, charleston, rice, bread...and turned up next to nothing. This morning, I found The Carolina Rice Kitchen online, which has a section that mentions rice-based versions of johnny cakes--instead of cornmeal, rice was used. Except a johnny cake is more like a pancake, when I've had them, and they're cooked on a griddle. I didn't see anything about where the name "philpy" might have come from, if it's still a common dish (I never came across it while eating my way around the city), or what it's origins might be.

It seems likely to be a way of cheaply using leftover rice, probably cooked by and for slaves. There's at least a basic filling comfort that it provided, but nutrition-wise, it's pretty pointless (pancakes are cheap, not good for you). As an interesting bread to serve with a gravy-based meal, I can see it coming into use--and maybe by tinkering with the recipe it could be gluten-free pretty easily, and maybe a little more uniformly bubbly and crisp, which would be better. My book's recipe is posted online here.

If you happen to know more about philpy, I'd love to hear it.

Meat Pudding

Since first reading Master and Commander, I have had an obsession with suet puddings. To the best of my knowledge, I have never eaten one, but plan to remedy that at some point in April. After purchasing Lobscouse and Spotted Dog, I have plenty of recipes to choose from; there's also a handful in my two oldest cookbooks (the 1903 Whitehouse Cookbook and the 1930-ish Presbyterian church cookbook which belonged to my dad's grandmother). All of them are basically the same: chop a pile of suet fine, add it to some flour and sugar (and possibly an egg or two), stir in some chopped fruit or roll it up with a layer of jam, and wrap the whole thing in cloth and boil it for a few hours. Some versions add molasses and standard spice cake spices (nutmeg, cloves, cinnamon, ginger), and I think I will start with that version--it seems less threatening, somehow.

The boiling thing is interesting: because the dough is wrapped in a fairly thick layer of cheesecloth (or a pudding bag, or basin), I think the result is like those steamed Chinese buns that look so pasty white and have such a yummy, sweet bread flavor. According to Mr. O'Brian's essay on the subject, if the cloth is loosely wrapped the suet will form a rather damp gelatinous mass, and if it's wrapped tightly, it'll be more like the steamed buns. (My mom remembers suet pudding as something that sounds an awful lot like a suet cake one purchases for birds; I have a vague idea that someone played a trick on her about this, or perhaps it was that her family preferred the gelatinous version.) You can view a handful of different puddings at the Loscouse book's website, including my favorite one (as far as the name goes): Drowned Baby (also known as Boiled Baby, which seems more accurate, as the "baby" is cooked in hot water, rather than submerged in any-temperature water until it stops breathing).

Over the winter, I was mulling over suet pudding and had a lot of difficulty finding suet that wasn't a cake of bird suet. I thought I could use lard or leaf lard as a substitute, and while I suspect it'd be pretty fine (same meaty cholesterol-packed goodness), I've finally found actual suet for human consumption (the brand, Atora, is called "the strongest brand in the suet market"). I'm going to check around at a couple of local Brit food shops, and chat with my favorite butcher (Don and Joe's Meats at Pike Place Market) to see if "the strongest brand in the suet market" is in fact "the only brand in the suet market". Some websites claims that butchers will simply give customers suet; others say that it's "impossible" to find--but all those websites are targeted at people making suet cakes for birds, not puddings for humans. (This could be making it sound like birds are less deserving of tasty food than humans; please know, oh ye random web searchers googling "suet pudding" and finding this, that I am nearly as obsessed with birds as I am with pudding, and would never wish poor-quality food on them.)

A side note regarding my subconscious: I had two remembered dreams last night. The first involved going into a restaurant, ordering two doughnuts, and being given a cheeseburger that had a jelly doughnut as a top bun. I was not happy and fussed at the fast-food clerks to no avail. My second dream involved telling some people about the first experience, as if it really happened and was not merely dreamt about, and getting irritated when they didn't get why I was mad. Thoughts about this:

My subconscious experiences are not all that different from my conscious experiences.

People, please: A jelly doughnut/cheeseburger. I challenge you to invent a grosser food combo.

Apparently I am a fuss-budgety food critic even in my dreams.