Complex Numbers

Daube Glacé

Every time I think I've heard of everything in some category, like clothing or games or food, something comes along to prove me wrong.

This is a good thing.

Entry #4 for "Journalistic Intentions"  [18+]

Southern Classic: Daube Glacé  
Daube glacé is a labor-intensive dish, best reserved for special occasions

Labor-intensive? Well, that leaves me out. I have a simple rule: if it takes longer to prepare than it does to eat, it's not worth it.

While country ham and salami are hardly foreign to New Orleans these days, they were rarities in the along the Gulf Coast two centuries ago. “We can’t hang meats outside here. They rot,” says Isaac Toups, who runs the kitchen at Toups’ Meatery. In the years before the advent of refrigeration, locals had to find other ways to keep the pantry stocked.

My father was born in New Orleans before refrigeration was common. Probably explained why he refused to put air conditioning in the house. Doesn't explain why he didn't know any New Orleans recipes.

This no-refrigeration thing plagued brewers, too. They had to get creative to find ways to cool the wort and keep the final product from getting too warm. But that's for another entry.

As Toups tells it, one of the best-known snacks of old New Orleans owes its existence to just those circumstances. “As any chef knows, when you reduce a stock down to a glace, it lasts longer,” he says.

Oh. Yep. Sure. I knew that.

Okay, no I didn't.

Daube is a nourishing beef and vegetable stew with French roots.

Quelle surprise.

When Creole cooks simmered the leftovers into a sliceable, shelf-stable concentrate, they inadvertently created daube glacé, a meaty aspic most often consumed on crackers and mayonnaise-slicked po’boys.

"Inadvertenty?"

Nowadays, many cooks in New Orleans make daube glacé using reliable store-bought gelatin, rather than the gelatins already present in beef stock and in pigs’ feet—an extra ingredient in some vintage recipes.

As an aside, I always feel an unreasonable sense of amusement whenever some vegetarian who didn't know where gelatin comes from finds out where gelatin comes from.

Daube glacé is a labor-intensive dish, best reserved for special occasions. If you’re in New Orleans, you don’t have to make it yourself: Langenstein’s grocery store offers a fine version.

If there's something that takes a long time to do, someone will find a way to commercialize it. Look up the history of ramen sometime. Or maybe I'll do a thing on that at some point.

The rest of the article is the actual recipe. I don't know what it is about online recipes; they always have to write a PhD dissertation before getting to the how-to part. No. Stop that. Post the recipe first and then do the notes. Or at least keep the intro short and to the point. I hate reading a whole book only to find that, as in this case, the recipe is Way Too Much Work to bother with (in this case, though, they did say so up front).

I just have one more thing to say, though: it's fashionable now to make fun of the gelatin mold creations from the middle of the last century. And, to be fair, some of them were absolutely disgusting. But as is often the case, it comes from a place of privilege. Aspics, like the one in the linked article, preserved food in a time before cheap and easy refrigeration. Hell, even the way we make gelatin now is way, way easier. And that's okay. I like easy. Easy is good; work is bad.

My father would probably smack me for saying that, but whatever. I'm still salty that I didn't get to try any Cajun dishes until I left home.