A guide to selecting and cooking salt-cured country ham, sometimes called Smithfield hams or Virginiai hams.
Archives for Ingredients and Techniques category
I remember the day I bagged my last duck. It was a chilly October morning, a slight mist hanging in the morning air. I had dressed warmly, knowing I might have to wait for the perfect one. Settling down in a place I knew would provide a nice, fat mallard, I waited patiently. Suddenly, I [...]
Even experienced cooks write in to me that they are confused by the wide variety of flours found on grocers’ shelves. Now with the bread-baking craze, even more types and brands are being added each week. Certain types of flour are better for particular uses, so I’ll try to shed some light on the great [...]
Fall always gets me in the mood for baking. There’s nothing like the smell of a freshly baked apple, pumpkin or sweet potato pie.
Since we already talked about apples, let’s turn our attention to that noble tuber, the sweet potato.
Sweet potatoes are often called yams , but sweet potatoes and yams are two entirely different [...]
Rice is one of the staples in nearly every cuisine in the world, from Chinese to Indian to good, old-fashioned Southern cooking. The natural accompaniment to baked chicken has been grown since at least 5000 B.C.
Enterprising colonists in South Carolina began cultivatation of rice soon after they arrived in America. It began quite by accident [...]
When most people think of apples, the image that most often comes to mind is the Red Delicious, that shiny, crimson star of the school lunch bag. If that’s the only apple you’ve ever sampled, though, you’ve been missing out on a bushel of delicious eating.
There are nearly 100 commercial varieties of apples grown in [...]
Gumbo is a traditional stew served in Louisiana. There is no set formula for what makes up gumbo. Even though gumbo derives its name from the African word for okra, gumbos don’t always contain okra.
Gumbo usually consists of one or more meats such as chicken, duck, sausage, or ham. Seafood gumbos can be fish or [...]
