Possumblog

Pie!

I made someone hungry and curious!

Kitchen Hand commented down below in the "crackers in your soup?" post about those wacky South Australians who dunk a meat pie into soup (probably trying to make a root beer ice cream float without root beer or ice cream) and with Chef Tony's addition about Loozyana meat pies and pies made out of whales (or maybe it was pies made in Wales), it got KH to wondering about what all this stuff has in common.

And so he presents, A History of the Pie in Nine Paragraphs.

What I don't see is how one of the staples of my youth fits into all of this. When I was a youngster, there was hardly anything better than the nights when we had pot pies. A tiny aluminum tray from the frozen food section at Winn-Dixie, filled with thick creamy soup, three English peas, five tiny cubes of carrot, and some slivers of chicken or beef, all covered over with a flaky crust.

Mmmmm--nothing like that! They probably cost a dime apiece, which is probably why we had them on a regular basis.

Even bigger treat?

Those rare occasions when Mama would spring for the Banquet version instead of the store-brand, because the name brand type not only had a top crust, it EVEN HAD A BOTTOM CRUST!! I would carefully separate the top crust, lay it aside, eat the filling, then the bottom crust, then finally the top crust.

Ahhhh.

Switching gears a bit, as for the soup I made last weekend, it's really easy. Since we had to make so much so we could take it to church with us, it would have been too expensive to get canned soup or dry soup mix, so I got a pack of mixed bean soup mix from the aisle with dried beans and peas and stuff.

And being a child of my mother's, I got the inexpensive store-brand bag of beans. They're dried beans, fer cryin' out loud! No reason that one package should be twice as expensive as another! Anyway, the package of 16 beans included all the usual suspects, along with a small package of seasoning.

Before you soak or boil the beans, pour a few at a time in your hand and look for ones that are bug bitten or to see if you can find any rocks. This is a vital necessity, because although boiling water makes the beans soft, it seems to have little effect on the composition of rocks. And I did find a rock in the bag I got, but relatively few with bug bites. (Which really aren't anything more than cosmetic issues, at least for me. I rarely look at the beans as I'm eating the soup, and figure any bugs are probably dead after being cooked overnight. But Mama says you're supposed to get those out, so I do.)

The better way (I think) to prepare the beans is to let them soak overnight, but I couldn't wait that long to let them rehydrate, so I did what they said to do on the bag and boiled them on high heat for twenty minutes, let them steep for an hour, then poured off the water and refilled it with fresh water and put it all in the crock pot.

You don't have to put meat in there, but since the flavoring package in the beans was supposed to be "Cajun" (whatever that might have been--it was a fine white powder, which didn't really look very Cajuny), I had decided to get a pound of Cajun smoked sausage to go in it. I sliced the links into quarters then pieces about the size of my fingertip, which I am happy to report remained firmly attached.

Put a little extra salt and black pepper in the tureen and left the thing going all night long, and in the morning had a good pot of soup. Reba asked if I'd put any tomatoes in it. "Uh, well, was I supposed to?"

Turns out that I should have. Luckily, we had a couple of cans of Ro-Tel that gave it a very nice spicy kick and finished filling up the crock.

It turned out very well, although not a lot got eaten at our church meal, I think because people didn't quite know what kind of soup it was. I figure if I'd made a little placard that said "Cajun bean and sausage soup," it would have gotten gone a lot quicker. No matter. Meant there was more for me!

Posted by Terry Oglesby at January 23, 2007 09:39 AM