Using the ingredients you have, an age-old kitchen rule
Today’s trending news about meat shortages in the supermarkets, and ideas about “whipping up delicious menus from what’s available from a nearly bare cupboard shelf,” are far from being new ways of life.
My dad Chester, who is age 90 and the youngest of the nine children in our Polish family, recalls from his youth my Grandma Potempa raising young pigeons in the farm barn for consuming. The fancy term for this fowl feast is “squab,” and it can still occasionally be found on the menus of fine dining restaurants as a delicacy, as can rabbit, another of Grandma’s main entrées from the past. At the time, these “alternative” meats were less about taste and more about necessity during the scarce provision times of The Great Depression and “lean years” of the 1930s and 1940s.
Our farming neighbors down the road, Steve and Joann Scamerhorn, have chatted with me about supper menus which included fried squirrel as the main course. Steve’s late mother Lydia would make squirrel during his youth, and his family kin, including his cousins who still reside in Tennessee, considered squirrel a family dinner staple of early years.
“When the men would all go out hunting years ago, it wasn’t uncommon that if they got enough squirrels during a shoot to clean for an amount of meat to cookup, I’d lightly bread it, and then let it simmer in a pan gravy to serve-up with potatoes and a vegetable,” Joann said.
She said as their young daughters Ann and Amy got older, to appease all, Steve gave up his hunting hobby.
Before Christmas, during a string of book signings to promote my newest cookbook “Back From the Farm: Family Recipes and Memories of a Lifetime” (2019 Pediment Press $34.95), my December travels brought me through Lexington and Louisville in Kentucky. Along the way, I stopped through the tiny burg of Bardstown to have lunch at the Old Talbott Tavern, built in 1779 and hailed as the “oldest western stagecoach stop in America.”
Constructed of thick stone walls, heavy ceiling timbers, the uneven floorboards and warm and inviting fireplaces welcome guests to dine while surrounded by the past. Its location at “the crossroads of the young west” where “the Post roads from North, East, South and West all meet,” beckoned weary travelers to warm-up with a bowl of the state’s signature stew called “burgoo,” which traditionally was made with squirrel meat. The establishment’s link to today’s “modern times” is their website www.talbotts.com and telephone number (502) 348-3494. Through pandemics of the past and present, wars, fires and national hardship, the Old Talbott Tavern is proof of possible business survival despite obstacles.
On my December day, at my shared lunch table, I dined with folks from near and far, including breezy New York City publicist Laura Baddish, right alongside a local, Marcus Niemann, the latter who is “manager of quality” at the Four Roses Kentucky Bourbon Warehouse.
“The secret of any burgoo is just including whatever ingredients you happen to have available to put in this stew,” said Niemann, 30, who grew up on the stew.
“Burgoo is really supposed to be made with squirrel meat, but you don’t see that so much anymore.”
The Old Talbott Tavern also ranks as one of the oldest bourbon bars in the world. Throughout the centuries, it has welcomed many celebrated names from history, literature and even world leaders. From Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln to deposed ruler of France, King Louis Phillippe, as well as Queen Marie of Romania, all have lifted a spoon or glass. Outlaw Jesse James shotup one of the upstairs bedrooms of the adjoining inn during a drunken-induced nightmare, and wilderness adventurer Daniel Boone was regular seated at the bar.
General George S. Patton, writer Washington Irving who penned “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle,” and composer Stephen Foster (dubbed “the father of American Music” who wrote “Oh! Suzanna,” “Camptown Races,” “Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair” and “My Old Kentucky Home,” all stayed at the inn and dined in the tavern. John Fitch, the man who invented the steamboat, also called Bardstown home and frequented the tavern before his death in 1798.
The Old Talbott Tavern’s recipe for burgoo is an ideal menu way to welcome the month of May to revisit the past while looking toward hope and good news around the corner in the future. And best of all, any of the stew ingredients that might be “unavailable” is optional, and can be omitted, based on what’s within arm’s reach in your pantry or cupboard.