Main

Frying fish in peanut oil (like using lard for fried chicken) gives catfish the crispiest, least greasy coating imaginable.

The fact that our great-grandchildren may never eat a real seafood dinner gives those of us who still eat fish a responsibility not to put blue cheese on it. I like to serve this with pickled beets (page 142) and the potato salad that follows. This treatment would work for almost any flavorful, rich fish.

If you can’t grill the radicchio, just sear it on the stovetop in a cast-iron pan over medium-high heat until it is caramelized and tender.

A laying hen is a different animal from the six- to ten-week-old supermarket fryers, roasters, and broilers we usually see. Laying hens are typically sold between one and three years old and create a different sort of stew, deeper in overall flavor but with less succulent meat. If you are using a laying hen, increase the cooking time to about an hour and a half, or until the meat is very tender. It will not be necessary to remove the breast meat during cooking as directed below.

This dish is all about timing: poach the eggs first and keep them in a warm spot.

The simplest way to enjoy wild shrimp is to cook them fast and serve them warm, still in their shells, with melted butter. This recipe takes the opposite but equally flavorful tack: the shrimp are slow-cooked, infusing the entire soup with sweet shrimpiness.

I ate this magical meal at Girl Scout camp and then thought about it for the next thirty-odd years until we went camping in the mountains near Joe’s. It’s a full breakfast in a paper bag, easy to make if you already have a campfire burning (or hot embers in a charcoal grill or fireplace), portable, and delicious. As the bacon in the bottom of the paper bag renders and becomes crispy-chewy, the fat protects the paper from burning and gently steams the egg. This cannot be prepared in advance: after the eggs are cracked, the bags should be dangling over the hot coals within a minute. If your mess hall prefers scrambled eggs, they work well, too.

Not far from Joe’s Mountain Gardens in Celo is Canton, a mill town that is home to Sunburst Trout Farm (see Sources, page 264), where Sally Eason raises delicate pink trout in the pure water that rushes down Cold Mountain. If a campfire is not in your immediate future but you have some sparkling fresh trout, this works well on the stovetop, too. Serve it with wilted ramps (page 27) or other greens.

Silvia and I have made this often over the years, the first time in my (illegal) home kitchen for an Easter catering gig when we made the entire meal twice, timing it so that the second roast was perfectly blistered and crispy when we arrived back home with a car full of dirty pots and pans to have dinner with our own families. It goes well with wilted spring scallions, roast potatoes (basted in the drippings), lightly dressed spicy arugula, and beans in all forms. One favorite bean dish for this ham is from Amanda Hesser’s The Cook and the Gardener: flavorful white beans simmered with hearty herbs and crème fraîche until slightly thickened.