breakfast – Page 12 – Courage in the Kitchen

Sausage Gravy

When we go south to visit friends and family I look forward to three specialties of southern cooks: Barbecue, grits and sausage gravy. Today you can find pretty good barbecue throughout the United States, but the really good barbecue is still made in small out-of-the-way restaurants that sometimes seem a little uninviting until you taste those wonderful ribs, burnt ends or pulled pork sandwiches.

There’s one in Kansas City in what was once a gas station and another in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, in a long low building that grew along with the business. And though it’s a days’s drive north of the Ohio River, you can get some darned good barbecue at a little take-out restaurant near Dale and University in St. Paul, Minnesota.

More than forty years ago some friends at Murray State University introduced me to a great barbecue place in Fulton, Kentucky. Wonderful rib sandwiches were served in the bar room of an old hotel by a waiter in a white shirt and black bow tie. The meat, smoked in the courtyard behind the hotel, was served with plain white bread. The only condiment was a hot sauce that you soon learned to respect. The little unlabeled bottles were plenty big. No Kansas City or Carolina sauces were allowed in the building.

There’s a restaurant along I-35/I-80 at Des Moines, Iowa, that comes close to matching that old place with the meat and sauce, in case you also like real barbecue.

As you can tell, we often stop at different barbecue restaurants on our trips south. Of course we stay at a lot of hotels too, and all of them offer a hot breakfast, which usually means a waffle machine and a slow cooker filled with sausage gravy next to a tray of biscuits. Our favorite hotels, like the Wildwood Lodge at Des Moines, Iowa, often add grits and bacon to the breakfast bar.

But when I think of a gourmet breakfast, I remember the men’s prayer breakfasts with my brother-in-law at the First United Methodist Church in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. Church chef Wayne Rountree served bacon, eggs, sausage gravy, tender hot biscuits and grits to die for. When I told him that his were the best grits I had ever tasted, he smiled and told me that there was a half pound of butter in every gallon batch.

For the lighter appetites there were a couple of choices of cereal, milk, toast, juice, and coffee. It was no wonder that the Men’s Prayer breakfasts were well attended, even though they started at 6:00 AM. I think that every church would benefit from a dedicated church chef like Wayne.

Wayne’s sausage gravy was tastier than most hotel gravies, but I think that mine is better than his. After I posted our sausage gravy recipe on our personal web site a man in England emailed me that he had been making a survey of sausage gravies and that mine was the best one he had found to date. That was a long time ago, so he probably has found another version more to his taste by now, but we still like ours.

With fresh biscuits or toast, sausage gravy makes a hearty breakfast on a crisp morning. You can use either mild or hot pork sausage.

INGREDIENTS:

1 lb. pork sausage
4 T flour
1/4 tsp. white pepper
1/4 tsp. salt
1/4 tsp. tarragon
2 cups milk
Dash of hot sauce
Salt to taste

PROCEDURE:

In a heavy frying pan or skillet cook the sausage and break it into small pieces. Use a slotted spoon to remove the sausage from the pan once it is cooked. Leave the fat from the sausage in the pan. There should be about 4 tablespoons fat, but this will depend upon the sausage. If there is too much fat, spoon some out. If not enough, add some shortening or butter.

Put the flour, salt, tarragon and white pepper in the pan over low heat and blend until it is smooth and begins to bubble. Cook for about three minutes . Do not brown the flour. Add the milk all at once and cook until it bubbles and thickens. Return the sausage to the pan and stir it into the sauce. Add a dash of hot sauce. Taste and adjust the seasoning.

Serve on toast or baking powder biscuits.

NOTES: This recipe serves four adults generously or two adults and one teenaged boy. Add a bit more hot sauce for extra flavor.

Sausage gravy is a good choice for brunch as well as breakfast. It goes especially well with scrambled eggs, bacon, grits and fresh fruit for a brunch buffet.

The white sauce cuts the heat of the spice, so don’t be afraid to try hot pork sausage sometime.

My father was seventeen years old when the stock market crashed in October of 1929. He told me that Grandpa Rang lost all the money he had saved from twenty years of farming except for the last couple of milk checks that he had deposited in a bank that survived the collapse. With cows and chickens and a big garden, the family had enough to eat, but clothes, hardware and other “store-bought” things were precious.

Women and girls mended clothing, darned socks, and turned flour sacks into dish towels, pillow cases, dresses and curtains–often embroidered with flowers or geometric patterns. Men and boys made tools, repaired equipment and salvaged anything they could. My father and mother passed on those frugal ways to their offspring.

For instance, the second carpentry job I learned was how to straighten nails. The first was how to bend them, but that was self-taught. Today I still find myself reusing nails and saving wood scraps.

Before I left home for college, Mom taught me how to sew on buttons and stitch up a seam, and she gave me a patching kit with some needles and spools of thread. This spring I actually sewed on a button when I was spending a few days by myself at the cabin. It is still on my fishing pants, which seem to be getting smaller.

People didn’t waste food either. Leftovers were saved and either warmed up and served again or used as ingredients in another dish. Here is an example. We called it “dough potatoes.” It’s not fancy–just leftover potatoes and onions fried in a thin batter of eggs, flour and milk–but made with a baked potato and served with ketchup, it is a good example of northern European comfort food.

Dad sometimes made this simple dish when Mom was not home to cook dinner. My sister Barb thinks that he learned the recipe from his mother, so it might have originated in Germany. If so, I may have eaten it at Grandma and Grandpa’s the year I lunched with them when we had lost our good cook at Blair School.

Anyway, here is how to make Dough Potatoes

INGREDIENTS:

1 leftover baked potato (1 to 1 1/2 cups when sliced)
1/4 cup onion
3 T flour
2/3 cup milk
4 large eggs
1 scant tsp. salt
1/4 tsp. freshly ground black pepper
3 T butter, vegetable oil or bacon grease

PROCEDURE:

Peel the potato, cut it lengthwise into quarters and slice 1/8 to 1/4 inch thick. Chop the onion medium fine. Heat the oil in a skillet and fry the potato and onion until they begin to brown.

While the vegetables are frying, beat the eggs until lemon yellow. Add the milk, flour, salt and pepper and mix well until you have a thin batter. Pour the batter over the potatoes and onions and stir continuously until the batter begins to set. Reduce the heat to very low, cover the pan and cook until done, about 3 minutes.

Dough potatoes are rather bland, so make sure that ketchup, salt and pepper are on the table.

NOTES: You can use leftover boiled potatoes, but baked potatoes give a better flavor, at least to our tastes. Once the eggs are nearly done, you can use a spatula to turn them over so the bottom does not get too brown.