Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
A gravy that’ll wake you up
Red-eye is a classic Southern pan sauce made from country ham and coffee
My pervasive Roman Catholic sense of nagging guilt has been drowned out this week by a song that peaked at No. 3 in October 1970. “Green-eyed lady, lovely layd-eh.” Remember that one? “Green-Eyed Lady”? The band was Sugarloaf. Look it up. You’ll remember.
Regardless, and perhaps not coincidentally, that song has always been one of my guilty pleasures, along with a craving for breakfast sauces. Like — wait for it — red-eye gravy, lovely grav-eh. Just for example.
Why you need to learn this
Madge may not have an Uncle Jed, but, she does have second cousin Buford, and one day she’ll bring him over for Sunday brunch. On that bright morning, you’re going to want to serve something that, as the great Southern cook Hoyt Tidwell would say, “will make you want to slap your grandma.” And nothing, I tells ya, slaps grandma like a good oldfashioned red-eye gravy. After all, it’s made with real, live, eye-opening, nerve-jangling coffee.
Even better yet, the same method that gives us redeye gravy produces a host of other sauces, none of which, to my knowledge, are named after discolored organs. Let’s take a look.
The steps you take
Red-eye gravy belongs to a club we like to call “pan sauces.” Pan sauces are, yes, Dr. Wisey MacWisenheimer, sauces made in a pan. But, not just any pan, mind you. It’s got to be a pan in which you have recently cooked something meatish, like, in the case of red-eye gravy, a big ol’ slice o’ ham.
A quick interlude about ham: Here on our adopted home planet, Earth, the natives enjoy many, many hammy iterations, all of which are somewhat different, most of which are delicious. While all hams are, by definition, the back leg of a pig that has been preserved, or “cured,” those curing methods vary from style to style, as do the curing ingredients. Also, some hams are smoked and others are not. Country ham is a variety common in the American Southeast that’s cured and most often smoked, similar somewhat to prosciutto or speck.
Now to the pan sauces. Here’s the premise: When you cook proteins like meat or fish, juice splats into the hot pan and evaporates, leaving behind small but tasty smears of clumpy brown desiccation — like fond memories, if you will, of a departed friend. By stirring in liquid, those fond memories are reincarnated as a delicious sauce.
Most pan sauces include other flavoring ingredients: mustard, garlic, chutney, whatever. And they’re thickened, either by a gelatinous stock or with added flour or cornstarch.
Classic red-eye gravy has only a couple of ingredients: the browned bits from country ham (what I like to refer to as “ham squeezin’s”) and brewed coffee. To make it, you simply deglaze the former with the latter and reduce. It’s like Cliffs-Notes for pan sauce, and it’s honestly that easy. Honest.
It’s funny, though: I can smell your rising fear from here. “I don’t have country ham! And second cousin Buford’s coming over!”
Sigh. Look, Lumpy, try not to panic. Just go to the deli and get a few slices of ham off the bone, preferably with lots of fat you can render for the searing. Trust me: It’ll be delicious, and in my book, unless second cousin Buford happens to be the Kentuckian ambassador, delicious trumps authentic pert near every time.
Of course, if your goal is simply to make a pan sauce, any kind of meaty thing will do: pork chops, steak, even scrapple or its kissing cousin from out Cincinnati way, goetta. After all, it’s just breakfast.