Hollywood Cat Call — 1961

Open casting call for black cats for the Roger Corman movie Tales of Terror (1962), starring Vincent Price, Peter Lorre, and Basil Rathbone. Plaid was apparently quite popular at the time. (Life magazine photos by Ralph Crane / Nov. 1, 1961.)

Yes, Flannery O’Connor DID Teach Her Chicken To Walk Backwards!

Today I learned that Flannery O’Connor had her first brush with fame at the age of 6 because she had taught one of her chickens to walk backwards. The Pathé newsreel people somehow heard about this, and they rushed to Georgia to film her. That short was screened all over the world. She joked that “When I was six I had a chicken that walked backward and was in the Pathé News. I was in it, too, with the chicken. I was just there to assist the chicken, but it was the high point in my life. Everything since has been anticlimax.”

It took a while, but after a lot of dead-ends, I finally found the film online. (Glory hallelujah, there is now a Pathé archive online!) Click here to watch “Do You Reverse?” (1932).

Sadly, O’Connor died at 39 from lupus. I don’t believe she ever saw the film.

Oh! And tomorrow would have been Flannery O’Connor’s 85th birthday. Happy Birthday, Chicken Whisperer!

 

Mission: Chicharrones

For some reason I felt a weird compulsion to attempt to make my own chicharrones this weekend. Chicharrones are pork rinds, but not at all like the kind I grew up with (and never really liked). Those are the the sad, distant cousins of the type of pork rind I discovered a couple of years ago at a local Mexican bakery and sandwich shop. These still have meat attached and are chewy and decadent (or disgusting, depending on where you stand on the whole skin-eating thing). Over the past two or three years, I’ve gotten chicharrones maybe 8 or 10 times. Of those, maybe only half of the times were they really, really good. They don’t do well under heat lamps, and unless you get there early (and I never get anywhere early), you’ll be stuck with dried-out, hard bits of pig. I decided to try to make my own so that I would be assured of getting some that were fresh and delectable (or fresh and disgusting depending on that skin-eating thing).

I turned to the internet to see what I’d need. The main ingredient here is pork belly. And it is, apparently, all but impossible to find at any of the white-bread grocery stores I frequent. I figured I would have to go to a Mexican meat market, but I decided to try a couple of my usual grocery stores first. First I tried Central Market — the upscale Texas grocery store chain that is every bit as good as its P.R. claims it is. Mostly. This place has an incredible meat department — the sprawling display case of meat is bigger than the house I grew up in. When I asked the butcher behind the counter if they had any pork belly, he seemed surprised. I’m guessing it’s not a common question. He told me I could call and place a special order sometime, but it just wasn’t something they carried. This is the store that carries 8-foot stalks of sugar cane and 57 varieties of apples. If octopus-and-rhubarb sausage exists … they’ve got it. They’ve got EVERYTHING! But pork belly? No way. Don’t they do their own butchering? Isn’t that part of a pig? Along with cheeks and jowls and bacon and pork chops? Shouldn’t it be on the premises — maybe not wrapped up all pretty but available? When I asked about fresh lard, the guy’s eyes got really big, but he managed a polite, “No ma’am, we sure don’t.” I also asked at my neighborhood grocery store — part of a large local chain. The butcher was Hispanic, and when I asked about pork belly and fresh lard he started laughing. “I’m going to have to go to a Mexican meat market, right?” And he said, “Yes you are, miss — this is a white people’s market.” I laughed with him, and felt really … white.

So I went to La Michoacana on Greenville Avenue yesterday. I’d never been there before and had expected it to be much larger inside. I walked around a bit looking at the produce and bakery items. I eventually made my way to the back of the store to the meat department. I had practiced a few phrases in Spanish just in case the butcher didn’t speak English, and, in fact, I don’t think he did speak much English, but we managed to understand each other after a tortured few minutes where I was trying to convince him that I wanted to make my OWN chicharrones — “No, really!” — and not buy the ones under the heat lamp on the counter. As I waited for him to go fetch my pork belly, I suddenly noticed a guy four feet away from me hacking away at a giant piece of bloody meat. There didn’t appear to be any skill in what he was doing. He was a teenager — maybe he was in training. Or maybe he’d lost a bet. I averted my eyes from the bloody mess only to see a whole row of containers of manteca fresca — fresh lard. Yay! I was expecting it to be refrigerated, and I was expecting it to be white … but inside the hot store it was liquid and looked like chicken soup. I picked up a container thinking “This is sure gonna make a mess if it spills in my car on the way home.” The butcher came back with two strips of pork belly. It was more than I wanted, but he seemed insistent on selling me a pound’s worth. Why not? He kept looking at me very suspiciously as he wrapped it up for me. He handed it to me, and as I started to walk away, I heard him tell another customer in Spanish that “la rubia” was going to make her own chicharrones. I turned around to look at them and they were chuckling. Again, I felt VERY white but smiled weakly and headed to the register.

The manteca fresca.

So anyway, I made my chicharrones today, and it was really easy. And they were great! Although, after about three you start feeling a little queasy. I made only a half-pound’s worth, but I still have a LOT left over. I hate to waste food, but I don’t know anyone who would even want to contemplate sharing. And I’m not sure these are going to keep. (I’ve been told that fat freezes well, so I should have just popped the unused pork belly into the freezer.) I think you can chop them up with chiles and make a kind of stew or something.

A pleasant, if fat-filled, weekend.

The “recipe” (which I originally found here):

The pork belly, cut into large chunks.

Half a pound of pork belly, simmering in water infused with about a tablespoon of baking soda (this seems to be a necessary step in making the pork belly pliable enough to cut and to chew). Remove the chunks from the water after 10 or 15 minutes; rinse off, and pat dry. Cut into small pieces.

I put a little lard into a skillet, but you probably don’t really need any oil or fat in the pan, other than the pork belly. Start frying skin-side down for 10 minutes or so, then flip over and fry the other side until crisp.

And … tada! Chicharrones! Add a little salt, and enjoy!

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UPDATE (Dec. 15, 2012): This page gets an incredible number of hits, and I thought I would update very quickly on the current availability of pork belly. I recently purchased a pound at Whole Foods in Dallas and was told that they now carry it regularly. This must be a fairly new addition, because when I asked a few months ago, I was told that they did not carry it. It comes in wrapped, coiled one-pound pieces. I forget what the price was, but it was inexpensive (I think it was under $5.00). Here is what it looks like in the butcher’s case wrapped and, below, unwrapped. Go find some!

High Grade: The Beer That’s Liquid Food!

I have a bunch of stuff crammed into boxes. I don’t even know what’s actually IN some of the boxes. There are books and papers and documents and potentially collectible stuff that I’ve acquired over the years, most of it coming from the bowels of my father’s book store. Sometimes I see stuff I don’t remember ever having seen before. Like yesterday, when I saw a postcard lying on the floor, near a box ominously labeled “eBay.” This was the postcard (right click for a larger image):

I have to admit I’ve never heard of High Grade Beer, “The Beer That’s Liquid Food,” but, damn, that’s a cool-looking brewery. I investigated further.

According to The Handbook of Texas, “The Galveston Brewing Company (1895-1918) was one of the few regional breweries that survived Prohibition. Adolphus Busch and William J. Lemp of St. Louis were both major stockholders of the corporation that raised $400,000 to found the Galveston Brewing Company in 1895. The brewery formally began operations on February 3, 1896. The pre-Prohibition physical plant consisted of a large ice plant that could produce seventy-five tons of ice, and a modern brewery that could produce 75,000 barrels of beer a year. The plant also had cold-storage rooms and railroad tracks on two sides of the building. The company dug several wells that gave a water supply of two million gallons a day. The Galveston brewery was so well constructed that it survived the Galveston hurricane of 1900 with only minor damage. The major product of the Galveston brewery before Prohibition was a beer called High Grade.”

Sounds like a pretty amazing operation (I’m not sure about post-Ike, but I think the building still stands).

I found a couple of amusing ads for the beer that appeared in the Galveston Daily News. These two ads appeared in 1908 and 1909, and this campaign featuring the annoying “Otto” seems to have gone on for quite some time. The first one, from 1908, is my favorite:

The kids … they love the beer.

The second one, from 1909, isn’t as “enlightening” as the first, but it gives a nice nod to the hard-working (and always sober) Galveston brewery workers:

More successful, I think, (and certainly less didactic) is this typically lovely example of early-20th century advertising art, featuring beer-loving mermaids prettily washed up on the rocks below the Galveston seawall:

I am endlessly fascinated by the weirdness of advertising.

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