No. 311: Mom's Fried Chicken, Crispy Parmigiano Chicken, or Spatchcocked Chicken on the Grill?
🫐 Plus: Blueberry Desserts, Fruity Salads, New Potato Salad & Peas, Deviled Eggs
📚 Tracing the roots of family food - and a new book from Jessica B. Harris
Food is so personal, isn’t it? I mean the food of family meals and holiday celebrations. Recipes passed down and around. Traditions continued, new ones started. In my family, summer gatherings of the cousins and aunts and uncles always meant a crab feast – picking the meat out of boiled, hard-shell crabs on a picnic table spread with newspaper, dipping the backfin lump and claw meat into melted butter. There was corn on the cob and platters of sliced beefsteak tomatoes from a nearby farm. If my grandmother had her way, there’d be freshly shelled lima beans in butter and cream with lots of salt and pepper.
I always thought of these foods as classic Delmarva ingredients, but in reading culinary historian (and Oak Bluffs summer resident) Jessica B. Harris’s new cookbook, Braided Heritage: Recipes and Stories on the Origin of American Cuisine, I realized that much of what we ate – including an uber-local version of corn pone (a corn and molasses porridge cooked overnight in a low oven in a cast iron casserole or bundt pan, then sliced and fried in butter) – originated with the marriage of Indigenous and African ingredients and cooking techniques. In doing a little research of my own, I believe my grandmother must have gotten the corn pone recipe from a Black woman who went around town selling it off of a cart in the 1930s.
In her cookbook, Jessica explores how Native American, African American and European cuisines intertwined to form the backbone of American cooking. It’s a fascinating journey, with an interesting side story: In choosing recipes to include in the book, Jessica kept “coming back to the fact that the story of food is always personal; recipes that are ‘traditional’ are inevitably cooked differently in one family versus the next, and dishes evolve in these hands, from one generation to the next, or perhaps from one meal to the next.” It’s natural then, after highlighting different chefs and ingredients throughout the book, that Jessica concludes with some of her own family recipes, including Deviled Eggs, Baked Ham, Chicken Croquettes, Summer Southern Succo-tash and Mom’s Fried Chicken (photo at top).
🎆 The other chickens 🐔 - and filling out the July Fourth menu
Will you be having fried chicken for your Fourth of July celebration? Or are you leaning more towards something like Crispy Parmigiano Chicken, which is just as good cold, sliced and packed for a picnic?
New Potato Salad with Fresh Peas and Mint and Deviled Eggs with Spinach, Basil and Toasted Pine Nut Pesto would be good with either the fried chicken or the chicken breasts.
Or maybe you’re going to cook your chicken on the grill and eat on the deck or the patio. I was bowled over to see an already-butterflied (spatchcocked) Bell & Evans chicken for sale at Stop & Shop this week. I bought one of course, and did the oven version of this recipe for Butterflied Spice-Rubbed Chicken (which can also be grilled.)
To keep things festive (and to make sure there are options for vegetarians, consider a hearty salad that can be served at room temperature, like the Colorful Quinoa and Fruit Salad with Tomatoes and White Beans. (That’s also a nice side dish for alpha-gal folks who can eat chicken, but not mammalian products, often including dairy.)
Or this Quick-Roasted Beet and Strawberry Salad with Goat Cheese and Local Greens.
🫐 Berry Blue
Every morning when I’m out watering my garden, I see that the wild (lowbush) blueberries and huckleberries in our field are ripening. I always bend down to pluck a shiny one before the birds can get to it. Big fat berries on our highbush plants are ripening, too.
We will eat them with a little cream and sugar. We won’t have enough of our own to do much else, but that won’t stop me from making a blueberry treat this holiday. One of my favorites is Abby Dodge’s Lemony Blueberry Bars with Chunky Almond Crumble.
You can also get a hit of that lemon-blueberry bliss from her Blueberry-Lemon Cornmeal Upside-Down Cake, which is fun and easy to make.
Or there’s always the classic – Louise Tate King’s Blueberry Crisp.
Or my go-to dessert – a Rustic Tart. You can do an all blueberry or a mixed berry filling!
Those tarts are pretty good for breakfast, too! If you’re a blueberries-for-breakfast person, you could also make Abby’s Blueberry Lemon Scones…
…or my Blueberry Crumble Coffee Cake.
💪🏼 Support for The Maker Pasta Shop & Cafe: Every order helps!
In last week’s newsletter, I was happy to be able to link to our Vine story on The Maker Pasta Shop & Cafe. Unfortunately, Chef Carlos Montoya suffered a health emergency last week and is now in Boston - doing well but awaiting surgery. His partner Sheenagh Caridi is with him and also working with The Maker’s staff to keep things running. We asked Sheenagh what would be the best way to support them during this challenging time. She said the most helpful thing would be to visit the restaurant in the following ways:
Book a 5 p.m. reservation
Order takeout for dinner
Pick up fresh pasta to cook at home
Shop in their retail area
Grab a snack or meal from their cooler
For more information, you can visit The Maker’s website or The Maker’s Instagram page. The restaurant is located at 339 State Road in Vineyard Haven (where The Little House Cafe used to be.)
I’m hoping you all have a nice July Fourth weekend. And, as always, if you have a question, leave a comment here or feel free to email us at cookthevineyard@vineyardgazette.com.
— Susie Middleton, editor
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🥗 Where to find recipes and past newsletters
Our recipe archive is always open at cookthevineyard.com.
All previous newsletters can be accessed by paid subscribers at cookthevineyard.substack.com.
🍽️ What’s happening around the Island
📆 News & Events
On July 6, an exhibit titled Mermaid Farm: Beauty and Struggle, curated by photographer Lexi Van Valkenburgh, opens at the Martha’s Vineyard Museum. It will run through October 12.
Tonight, Wednesday, July 2, from 5:30 p.m. to 7 p.m., join a class with chef Jenny Devivo at The FARM Institute for a farm-to-table cooking experience. Be sure to pre-register.
Take a class on preservation basics and learn to make kimchi on Thursday, July 3, from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m. at The FARM Institute. Be sure to pre-register.
🥕 Farm Stands, Summer Schedules
Ghost Island Farm is open every day, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
North Tabor Farm is open daily, dawn to dusk.
Beetlebung Farm is open Wednesday to Sunday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Morning Glory Farm is open daily, 8:30 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Grey Barn’s farm stand is open Thursday to Monday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Mermaid Farm is always open!
🐟 Seafood Markets
The Fish House at the airport is open Monday to Saturday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
The Net Result in Vineyard Haven is open Monday to Saturday, 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Larsen’s Fish Market in Menemsha is open daily, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Menemsha Fish Market is open Monday to Saturday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Sunday, noon to 5 p.m.
Edgartown Seafood is open Tuesday to Sunday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
🎧 Listen to On the Vineyard from the Vineyard Gazette
The new On the Vineyard podcast from the Vineyard Gazette is deeply rooted in the sense of place the Vineyard evokes, with reports on local happenings, events large and small, and, of course, food and restaurants. The weekly podcast has sounds from the Island both present (i.e. Memorial Day celebrations) and past (archival voices). Listen here or anywhere you get your podcasts.
Photos: Fried chicken and book cover, Kelly Marshall; Jessica photo, Pableaux Johnson; deviled eggs, Alexandra Grablewski; blueberry crisp, Alison Shaw; Chef Carlos and Sheenagh, Ray Ewing; OB bar, Tim Johnson; all others, Susie Middleton.
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YUM alert!!
I just love Cook the Vineyard! I'm so glad I caught it in the Gazette when we came out this year for a 6 month stretch...I think there should be a section there for Cook the Vineyard honestly. We have bird news, garden news, etc, which are so fun. Would love to see even a little of the CTV flavor in there (pun intended!). Thank you for all that you all do for island foodies. Love these ideas for the 4th and can't wait to try them...especially the Blueberry-Lemon Cornmeal Upside-Down Cake and the Crispy Parm Chicken. Cheers :)