First off, no buttermilk pie. If I’m going to do that, it’ll be next week.
The main dish for tonight was a steamed black sea bass served in a highly-flavored potlikker made from dried oysters, dried shrimp, country ham, turnip greens and vinegar, ideally turnip vinegar made according to Brock’s recipe but with apple cider vinegar named by Brock as an acceptable substitute.
First problem was no black sea bass at my reliable fishmonger. Grouper and red snapper are the best substitutes but I didn’t like the Saturday-afternoon look of either, so I went with what looked like some pretty fresh striped bass. Honestly, the fish doesn’t contribute to the main flavor drivers here, so any somewhat flavorable white fish that stands up to steaming well should work. Hell, black sea bass only is caught around to the Mississippi Delta, so that leaves half the coastal South uncovered on that anyway, right?
The drying of the oysters went great but honestly I’m not sure they contributed all that much. I used stewing oysters; maybe I should have put a bit of their storage liquid into the broth. I’m not going to waste high-quality cold-water oysters on drying for something like this—the whole point of dehydrating anything is that it makes the tastes way more intense so you pick the ho-hum versions of that ingredient. You don’t sun-dry a great late August tomato, you sun-dry your average hydroponic or greenhouse tomato that doesn’t have flavor otherwise.
I didn’t have country ham, so I used thick-cut bacon. I’m trying to be meticulous here because I want to give the book the benefit of the doubt. But if you have to use everything just so to get the right outcome, that justifies my overall doubts about the book anyway.
I also couldn’t get turnip greens, so I went with collard greens. That’s out of three possible substitute choices, the others being chard and kale. Chard might have yielded stronger flavor in the potlikker, closer to turnip greens. Kale? I honestly hate it and hate working with it, so no. Mustard greens were also available, but they have such a strong flavor, so also no.
The procedure here is to render the fat off the ham/bacon with dried oysters and dried shrimp in the mix, then to add water and vinegar, and subsequently the chiffoned greens. In the meantime, you make dumplings of cornmeal, flour, salt, eggs and gruyere cheese. The greens and flavor-adding ingredients come out of the broth, the dumplings get cooked in it, the fish gets steamed in some of the broth, and then you serve it all together.
The basic problem is just that the broth is underflavored. The dumplings are fine (though Brock wants you to pipe them into the broth with a pastry bag, which is a complete no-fucking-way from me—you want me to use a pastry bag, there had better be a REALLY good reason, because it’s a nuisance). The fish is fine. But the broth really needs to be way more smoky, way more vinegary, way more intense overall. I don’t think the difference between thick-cut bacon and country ham is the difference that makes that difference, much as I like country ham.
I wish I’d substituted a brand of smoked malt vinegar I have that I really like, and maybe added some hot sauce rather than chili flakes as recommended—something to add a kick to it.
Next week I’ll give the book another shot, but this does nothing to make me feel like I want to keep using it. It’s a finicky recipe and it doesn’t pay off. If the reason it doesn’t it that I didn’t use precisely the right ingredients, then that justifies my general wariness about the book.