Made with Butter

We realize it’s seven months until the holiday season, but we couldn’t help but remember the 20 Roadfood Christmas Gifts and all the wonderful mail-order food available on Roadfood Digest. During the Glee Club meeting in Charleston, South Carolina last February, we bought a box of Betsy’s Hot Cheese Straws and practically inhaled them upon our return home. When we returned to Charleston in April, our source had sadly stopped carrying them. Luckily, we could order Betsy’s online, and our 12 oz. tin of Hot Classic straws arrived yesterday. Like many Southern cooks, Chris’ mother used to make cheese straws for holiday parties, and their crumbly, cheesy, spicy crunch left an indelible mark on his taste memory. Betsy’s are just as good as his mother’s cheese straws, for this small kitchen in Millbrook, Alabama uses all natural ingredients and, unabashedly, real butter. Our only caveat is this: when opened, these snacks will go very quickly! Visit Betsy’s Cheese Straws online and surprise your favorite (ex-)Southerner.

More Roadfood Gifts: What Sounds Best to You?

Meat carried the day again in the second half of Roadfood.com’s poll of Roadfoody gift ideas from the Roadfood Digest series, 20 Days, 20 Gifts.  Smoked Texas brisket was the winner with 36% of the vote and, along with country ham from Tennessee and Louisiana andouille, the three received 72% of the vote.  As a matter of fact, we just yesterday placed our annual brisket order with Black’s Barbecue of Lockhart (Roadfood.com review) for New Year’s Eve (though it’s hardly a gift!).

Roadfood Gifts: What Sounds Best to You?

It seems Roadfooders are generally not vegetarians!  In our Roadfood.com poll that showcased the first half of the Roadfood Digest holiday feature, 20 Days, 20 Gifts, three of the 10 choices were meat or fish, yet they garnered 54% of the vote.  The leader?  The Chicago Hot Dog Kit from Vienna Beef, which includes all those hard-to-find, only-in-Chicago elements that make up that much-loved Roadfood favorite.

Those walnut-stuffed dates are also covered in chocolate.  If there was room to include that fact in the poll we bet they’d have picked up a few more votes.  Hurricane Sauce is a pancake topping made from apples stewed in pure maple syrup and butter.  Many people hadn’t a clue.  Popcorn balls?  They probably have a prosaic reputation, but then most people haven’t yet tried the extra-special version from the Humphrey Company.

20 Days, 20 Gifts, #20: I'm Dreaming of a Crumby Christmas

People from the New York area take crumb cake for granted. Once they move away, they realize that the mighty cakes with which they grew up do not exist elsewhere. If you don't know what I'm talking about, look at Entenmann's "Ultimate Crumb Cake," which is a corporate facsimile of the real thing, whose primary characteristic is maximum crumbitude: at least as much crumb on top as cake below. If you know a cake-starved expatriate or want to have what is truly the ultimate coffee companion for Christmas morning breakfast, check out Hahn's Old Fashioned Cake Company at www.crumbcake.net. They ship magnificent examples that are 9x13 inches and over 3-1/2 pounds each. In addition to classic cake heaped with what Hahn's calls "extra large hand made crumbs," the repertoire include cakes layered with chocolate or with raspberry preserves and walnuts. As Bruce and Sue have warned in their review of B & W Bakery (whose crumb cake is pictured above), be certain you have coffee on hand when the cake is served. It is as necessary as butter on popcorn.

20 Days, 20 Gifts: #19: Jiggs Jerky Junkies

First the beef strips are marinated in brown sugar and pepper and who-knows-what else.  Then they’re smoked over hickory, and finally they are air-dried.  The result is hugely aromatic beef jerky about which Michael Stern, in his Roadfood.com review, says “one good slab is tastebud-entertainment for a long day’s drive.”  This is the stuff, from Oklahoma’s Jigg’s Smokehouse, that jerky lovers across America crave.  The Jigg’s website says it’s made from “a thirty year old recipe that has been producing Jiggs Jerky Junkies for 3 decades.”  Why is it so good?  From the Jigg’s Smokehouse website’s FAQ page:

“Can we have your Jerky recipe?

WE FALL DOWN FROM HYSTERICAL LAUGHTER”

OK, so you don’t need to know why it’s so good, you just need to know that it is.  Admittedly, it takes a unique sort of person for whom a package of beef jerky is a suitable Christmas gift, but we know one or two and, probably, so do you.  For these special folks, a pound of chaw will cost you $26.15, shipping included (a little less for OK deliveries).

20 Days, 20 Gifts, #18: Texas Czech

It was the bakeries of West, Texas that originally made kolaches a signature pastry of the Lone Star state, but now you'll find them almost everywhere east of the Brazos River watershed. A kolache, in case you don't know, is a small pastry that resembles a Danish, but is made with dough that is sweeter and softer. Preferred fillings are such old world favorites as poppy seed, prune, and apricot, although the Kolache Factory offers ones filled with sausage, barbecued beef and – whoa, Nellie! – chocolate cream cheese. To make sure they don't sit in the post office over the weekend, they are shipped only Monday through Wednesday: www.kolachefactory.com.

20 Days, 20 Gifts. #17: A Gift to Last Through Eternity

Nashville’s Loveless Cafe (Roadfood.com review) has changed ownership and expanded over the years but all the favorites remain, from the homemade blackberry and peach preserves to the slow-cured country ham.  If you are not familiar with country ham, know that it is really only a distant cousin to the hams found in most of the rest of the country (and maybe a 32nd cousin to sliced deli ham).  The meat is saltier, drier, with a tighter texture and far more complex and interesting flavor (and one that, for some folks, takes some getting used to).

That excellent country ham is available at Hams & Jams, the Loveless Cafe’s online store.  They offer it fully-cooked and spiral-cut, or in packages of center-cut slices, or pieces sized for slipping between biscuit halves (ohhh, Loveless’ delectable ham biscuits!).  Or, if you take to heart Dorothy Parker’s assertion about two people and a ham, you can give the gift of eternity with a whole country ham. That’s 14-16 pounds of cured pig for the very reasonable price of $59.95.  We’ve ordered a whole Loveless ham for Christmas in years past and not only was it very fine ham but we enjoyed every scrap and bone into the following summer.  Hardly eternity, but we’re not complaining! More...

20 Days, 20 Gifts, #16: Truffle in Paradise

Beautiful boxes of chocolate candy are made in an unsightly industrial building just up the road from Costco in Brookfield, Connecticut. Of all the delectable things you can get from Bridgewater Chocolate, including the world's most intense chocolate-covered cherries, superb barks, bars, and toffees, best of all are truffles. Their chocolate skin offers faint resistance; inside is silky filling that is unbelievably fresh, indescribably chocolaty, too rich to eat in mass quantities but too delicious not to. Varieties include milk chocolate, dark chocolate, hazelnut, orange, raspberry, and coffee. Bridgewater warns that the truffles contain enough dairy product that they must be kept refrigerated … as if anyone could leave them uneaten for any significant period of time. They come in handsome gift boxes worthy of a royal chocolatier. www.bridgewaterchocolate.com

20 Days, 20 Gifts. #15: Bryant’s Barbecue Brew

Is Arthur Bryant’s (Roadfood.com review) legendary Kansas City barbecue joint as good as it ever was, or has it slipped?  That debate will no doubt continue for decades to come, but of one thing there can be little debate, and that is the uniqueness of Arthur Bryant’s barbecue sauce.  Not sweet at all, it is a tart brew, gritty with spice, tasting as much of India as Kansas City.  Barbecue sauces line the supermarket shelves by the dozens, and just about every barbecue shop across the country offers their own sauce in take-home bottles.  Nonetheless, we can assure you that Arthur Bryant’s sauce is like no other barbecue sauce anywhere.

We always have a few bottles around the house.  When we run low we buy it by the case; we drop bottles in the Christmas stockings of our fellow sauce lovers, and keep any extras for ourselves (not only is it great on barbecue, we think it makes a superlative sauce for fried chicken).  A case of sauce will run you $64.50, shipping included.  They now carry sweet and hot barbecue sauces too, and they’re OK, but we recommend you stick with the original.

20 Days, 20 Gifts, #14: Cajun Christmas

We originally came to Poche's Market for the plate lunch, a serve-yourself buffet of such Cajun country delights as backbone stew, catfish and crawfish, fried chicken and dirty rice dressing. But once we poked around Poche's meat market and smoke house, we knew what we had to do when we returned home: phone the place and order lengths of andouille sausage. They are packed firm enough that the skin snaps when you break it, and the inside mix of pork and rice is dotted with bits of scallion and a hailstorm of peppery spice. Poche's also makes and mail-orders crawfish sausage, cracklin's, roux-in-a-jar, and even whole turkeys and ready-to-roast stuffed turduckens. Poches: 3015A Main Highway, Breaux Bridge, LA. 337-332-2108. www.pochesmarket.com