CMU's Recipe Archive
cs.cmu.eduLooked up the cajun dishes. I've seen worse, but come on.
Dirty rice is dirty rice because it originated in slave kitchens and was a cheap and efficient way to make use of offal. It gets its color from liver and is traditionally made by browning chopped lizards and gizzards along with the trinity and mixing in rice with a bit of stock. That recipe probably tastes fine... some palates probably would have an issue with the little bits of liver, even though I find them essential to the spirit of the dish. I do love Dawn's mushroom steak sauce, and usually sautee some sliced onions with mushrooms and add that to a pan before tossing in some shaved roast beef and using the mixture for po-boys.
Only masochists prepare gumbo roux the way they describe in the recipe. It's much easier to get a nice, heavy cast iron skillet and heat the oil over high heat, stirring vigorously for 10 minutes, than it is standing there for 45 minutes to an hour over low heat. Sift the flour into the oil as the pan heats up so that you don't have any clumps and stir EVERYTHING. When your roux gets dark enough, add your veggies and set the heat to medium. The vegetables will stop the roux from continuing to darken and brown.
Red beans and rice should be cooked slowly with some sort of smoked pork, like ham hocks. You're slowly infusing the beans with all the flavors from the pork. With gumbo or red beans, you don't add sausage or other meats you intend to eat until the very end so that you don't boil all of the fat and flavor out of the item (or in the case of seafood gumbo, you don't want to dry it out).
The "Cajun shrimp" recipe isn't cajun at all. It's scampi with beer.
This reply was hilarious. Could you share a good authentic dirty rice recipe? I have a lb of beef liver in my freezer and am intrigued.
On another note you make it sound similar to brazilian feijoada.
This guy's site is about as authentic as it gets. Most of the recipes he lists there are identical to what I grew up eating and for the most part he stays away from modern embellishments and shortcuts. He's got a huge tome called The Encyclopedia of Cajun and Creole Cuisine for sale which I basically bought for everyone in my family when it came out.
http://www.jfolse.com/recipes/meats/beef38.htm
Beef liver is a bit too strong for dirty rice, honestly. It's usually done with pork or chicken liver and then chicken gizzards or ground pork for the other meat component.
The funny thing about the CMU dirty rice recipe, by the way, is that I have a common ancestor with author. The common ancestor is a man named Michel Zehringer (his father was German who moved to France) whose name was changed to Zeringue when he landed at Biloxi because the French officials didn't know how to pronounce it. His immediate children were also Zeringues... so I don't know who fell off the family tree and hit their head to change the spelling a second time.
{Note/small correction}: it looks like this is a mirror of a recipe collection by Amy Gale from the 'rec.food.recipes' usenet group.
(see https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~mjw/FOOD/MainPage.html for some context)
Why do random people's recipes have any credibility? Versus, say, Cook's Illustrated or Serious Eats.
They certainly have more credibility that the SEO optimized stuff that search engines produce these days.
Google search used to have editors. If they still do, it would be great if they boosted the CMU recipe page rank by 100x or so...
‘Credibility’ in what sense? (IE. ‘credible witness’?). I would guess random people’s recipes are useful as big data if the data set is diverse with a long history. Unfortunately I can’t find a statement about the dataset to qualify this point
In the sense that I would want to invest time and money in making the recipe they are suggesting based on their recommendation.
I belive this is for historical and research purposes, but I may be wrong.
Octopus? Always reminds me of Inky.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/apr/13/the-great-esca...
It’s fun as a snapshot of Usenet culture from way back.