I have been thinking of foods I grew up eating and wishing I could be some place where it was available to me. Heck, I would not mind cooking it if I could get the ingredients. I guess these days it would be called comfort food by some and just plain weird by others. But there are some things you just cannot understand until you've tried them.
First on my list is "red eye gravy". I've read different descriptions of what it is over the years but what it was when I was growing up was my Granny would fry ham in a cast iron skillet. The ham would stick to the skillet and leave lots of ham grease and little bits of ham when you took it out. Then you put in a little water (deglazing according to the cooking shows) and used a spatula (or spoon) and scraped off all the ham bits and mixed it up with the ham grease until it boiled down (reduced for you modern people). That was red eye gravy.
You'd chop up your eggs, put regular "milk" gravy over it. Pull apart the ham and mix it all up then you'd take a tablespoon and spoon the red eye gravy over top. Yummmmmmm.
Next is chicken and dumplings. I've searched over the Internet and cannot find anyone who has a recipe made the way it was made by my mother and grandmother. First of all you need a FAT hen. Not a fryer. But a big, fat hen (or a troublesome rooster if you have one. Just so long as it is fat). Fat is the key to good chicken and dumplings. First you kill the chicken. My Granny would wring the chicken's neck. My mother never could do that so she'd grab the chicken by the feet and fling it's head across the chopping block and swing the axe... Same result. Eventually the chicken would realize it was dead and stop flopping about.
Pull off all the feathers and singe the little hairs (or pin feathers.. or whatever) with lit kitchen matches then cut up the bird and put in in a big kettle. My wife laughs at me for referring to a "pot" as a kettle but when and where I grew up a pot was what went under the bed for night time use and a kettle was what you cooked in. Now, if you were lucky and got a laying hen you were in for an even bigger treat as you could have the egg bag (womb I guess) to eat after it was cooked and before you put the dumplings in.
So, cut up the chicken and put in in a kettle of water and bring it to a boil and cook it partially covered until it was tender. Meanwhile make the dumplings. As I recall there was no difference between biscuit dough and dumpling dough. You just rolled the dough out and used a biscuit cutter like my mom or you just left it in a big lump and made "pinch" biscuits lime my Granny. You could roll out the dumplings, cut then in strips, then into small pieces or you could just pinch off little dabs and drop them in the kettle.
When the chicken was completely cooked you take it out of the kettle and put it in a bowl. Then you'd drop the dumplings into the boiling broth a few at a time so it would stay boiling. Oh, did I say you left the skin on the chicken? Chicken and dumplings is about fat and not about healthy eating. The more fat the better so do not strip the skin off the chicken.
Ideally there should be enough flour on the dumplings to thicken the broth into a gravy but if not you can add a little more. Once all the dumplings are in you can pull all the meat off the bones of the chicken and dump that back in the kettle and stir it regularly while it boils to keep if from sticking and burning.
If you were lucky enough to get an egg bag you never got a chance to put it back in the dumplings as this was the best part of the chicken and it was barely allowed to get done before someone was fishing it out of the kettle and setting in to eating it. A good egg bag would have eggs from those in a shell ready to be laid to those no larger than the head of a pin. Best eggs you'd ever eat as well.
Now, you would make enough dough for dumplings as well as for biscuits as there is nothing better than hot chicken and dumplings with hot biscuits to sop up the gravy with. I'd just about kill for a good kettle of chicken and dumplings and home made biscuits right now.
The last item I'll talk about is squirrels. We ate a lot of squirrels growing up but my favorites were when we had it for breakfast. Almost like chicken and dumplings except there were no dumplings. Just cook the squirrel, add a little flour for thickening and make a big pan of biscuits. Suck the meat of the those little squirrel bones, sop up the gravy with the biscuits and then my favorite part... the heads. The heads did not have a lot of meat on them but it was the best. A little dab of cheek meat off each side. Then pull off the lower jaw and take out the tongue and eat it. Then put two fingers in the eye sockets and pull back the top of the skull and either pry out the brain or just suck it out. Best part of a squirrel is the brains.
Funny, as much as I love squirrel brains I won't eat any other kind. Odd the little finicky habits we end up with.
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