The Hot Brown is an open face dish where there is toast, slices of ham and turkey, and a cheesy roux that covers it. On top is laid bacon, and, always, somewhere, a slice of tomato. It is cooked in the oven and served hot. And while there is plenty of leeway as far as the toast base (all those bread options), the ham and turkey (all those flavored options), the bacon crown (what kind, how much), and the tomato (I think at The Brown they use two regular slices and put them on the plate under the toast, because tomatoes disintegrate when heated in the oven. Most others I have seen, hundreds, put them on top.) The challenge though is the cheesy roux, the key to the dish. And I have honestly never tasted a hot brown where the sauce was as good as The Brown’s. But guess what? If somebody down there gets a load of mine, I wouldn’t be surprised if they called me, and requested a tutorial.

A “roux” is any sauce made by thickening milk or another liquid with either flour or corn starch. Corn starch is always your best option. For, say, two hot browns, I start with about a cup of whole milk in a saucepan, about an inch of unsalted butter (Land-o-Lakes, of course), 1/4 tsp of salt and heat it to boiling. (When the milk starts to boil and raise up in the pan, that “scalding” helps make the roux.) Then using about 1/4 cup of milk in a little glass, and two fairly heaping forkfuls of corn starch (Argo), stir them up. The starch will settle and you’ll need to re-stir the glass and get the residual off the bottom. Then pour the starch mixture about a quarter of the glassful at a time on to the roiling milk/butter mixture, while stirring constantly. Leave on low heat some to rewarm matters, then gradually add the rest of the starch mixture. It should thicken quickly. Turn off the heat. (Any unattended sauce or roux, with the burner on, will destroy the batch, and your best best then is to just start over.)

Next you add your idea on cheeses (mine in just a sec).  Melt them into the roux, and low-to-medium heat will be needed, stirring very frequently. This will become very thick, of course, but then comes my ingenious concept. You can now add as much milk as you need to make it the cheesy roux consistency you want. If too dry the toast soaks up the juice and the dish is dry and pasty. And when the sauce is plenty thin, it augments the other ingredients in the dish, whether than being too heavy and a chore to eat much of. It could require a few cups of milk to get where you want, but leftover sauce keeps long in the fridge and can be used as a topping for veggies as a side dish for other meals, or even a future hot brown.

But what cheeses? I have tried so many. I would note that the roux at The Brown is fairly pale, so much yellow and cheddar you’d wonder if you’re off track. But there’s nothing wrong with getting the taste you like. So what I do is start with about and inch of the big Velveeta slab, about a half of a cup of shredded mild cheddar, and then a half of a cup of parmesan. Sharp cheddar is too flavorful. And don’t use the expensive parmesans, like Reggiano. The cheap, creamy stuff is perfect for this. The brand at our Wal-Mart is “Frigo”, and comes shaved, and it’s the best Parmesan I’ve had. Freshly grated Bel-Gioso, which comes in slabs, is good for sure. Oh, and a half-teaspoon of salt.

So to make the hot brown, I use an oblong or round ovenware dish and grease it with butter. I use well-toasted white bread, one slice, and put it in the ovenware dish and add regular unflavored ham and turkey, and few slices of both. Then pour lots of your cheesy roux until the stack of bread/ham/turkey is nearly awash. For the bacon I cut them in half and cook these pieces over medium heat, stirring very often such that they end up frying in their own grease. The bacon will foam up when it’s done. Scoop them onto a plate with a paper towel on it to allow the crispy bacon pieces to dry a little. Then I generously decorate the stack in the ovenware dish that is now awash in the roux, and of course bacon is always the main ingredient in any dish it’s in, and many times I have been near the end of a hot brown and there ain’t enough bacon to see me through. You’ll find a lot of places with offer but two, long whole slices 0f bacon, and I have to budget how much I eat as I go. I often ask for extra bacon, even at the Brown. So for Big Red’s Hot Brown, plenty of bacon.

Most of the time for the tomato we are out of season, and cherry tomatoes from the grocery are your best tomato flavor. I slice three 0r four in half and place them on either side of the ovenware dish. Then I grate a little fresh parmesan over the whole thing, and sprinkle with a little paprika to make it pretty. Then cook it in the oven, and not too hot. If you have time 375 degrees would be kindest to the dish. When the roux is bubbling it’s done. Serve hot.

The Sauce: They swore by Cantadina tomato paste, and they were particular about brands. Two cans of water per can of paste gives the right consistency for the sauce. I use tomato juice from our own tomatoes, and thicken it with, you guessed it, Cantadina tomato paste. The meatballs and the rolled steak favorite brazhul (I believe the word is braccioli, but that’s how Italians pronounce it) are the main flavorings for the sauce, but on top they threw several (3-5) branches of what they called “voznegal”, or basil. The “b” came out “v”, and the back of the word I always thought was a variety, like negali or something. But the old man Nicola, Minnie’s husband, an immigrant from a town called Oscuali Satriano, grew it in his super fertile garden and we stored it in a paper bag under the sink. But I only add about 4-5 leaves that I grow and dry, and I usually fish them out. Because you can sure over-basil the sauce, so if you’re using dried stuff in a bottle use about a teaspoon or two per gallon of sauce. The oil from the meatballs floats to the top as it simmers (3 hours is needed, and stir it occasionally or it can burn on the bottom and ruin the thing), and that oil extracts some of the basil, and that’s why they laid it on top. And that’s also why they ran us off, again and again, as we dipped the bread in the top of the simmering sauce.

Meatballs: They key to this entire meal is the meatballs, so make enough of them. They last forever as leftovers, and make a great sandwich. And you can freeze them along with the sauce by simply scooping them into a freezer bag and dropping them into the freezer. Again, be sure to make enough of them. Use regular hamburger, because you want the fat content, and you cook them in a skillet and end up dumping all the cooking scraps into the sauce. You use two eggs per pound of ground beef, about a 3/4 of a teaspoon of salt and pepper both, per pound. I think so anyway. To be like them, I don’t use measuring containers or devices when I make this sauce, and judge it in the middle of my palm. You can over-salt and over-pepper anything, but that’s about the amount. Next ingredient: freshly chopped garlic. A lot. One whole garlic bulb per pound of beef is about right. Chop into little chunks, 1/8th to 1/4th inch. Two more ingredients. Parsley, about a tablespoon per pound of beef. And next and key: a generous amount of shaved parmesan cheese. About a half of a cup per pound, but I’ve never measured it. In our area is a brand called Frigo and to me it’s by far the best. After tossing all this in the fun starts: squishing it all together with your bare hands. It’s then necessary to thicken it up with saltine crackers (Zesta, of course). It usually needs a half of a sleeve of crackers to dry the mix so you can roll meatballs out of it. It depends on the egg size, and out here on the farm we have our own chickens and the eggs are big and we need extra crackers. They always used “large” eggs in their recipes, and never jumbo or extra large. It changes the ingredient ratio. But in meatballs, you just add the crackers you need. Roll the meatballs  into golfball-size only a little smaller. A pound makes about 15 of them.

Cooking the meatballs is a little tricky. They always used skillets at low-to-medium heat, and the meatballs want to stick to the pan. But you want to deliver a nice cooking to them because that’s where the flavor is made. If the skillet isn’t hot enough this won’t happen as well, and if it’s too hot they fall apart when you turn them. So when it’s right, you turn them by gently pulling them away from the pan with a fork, and get a cook on several sides. One by one as they finish you scoop them into the sauce, which has been slowly heating on a nearby burner. When adding more meatballs to cook, just drop them in the skillet right on the scraps and leftover grease from the previous ones. When all are cooked, scrape all the scraps and grease into the sauce. They usually didn’t stir it, to allow the grease to accumulate at the top, where they layed the basil

Brazhul (Braccioli): This rolled round steak is a favorite of a lot of Italians for their pasta sauce. They use round steak, which you can buy everywhere, and one or two per batch of pasta sauce is advised. There’s never any left over. They first smear shortening  (“crisco”) on the slab of round steak, which is usually 5 or so inches by 8-10 inches oblong. Then plenty of salt and pepper, and just like meatballs, add some parsley and shaved parmesan, and a generous sprinkling of chopped fresh garlic (do not consider store-bought minced garlic). Then you roll it up and wrap it with a string, the kind of string for cooking, made of cotton and no nylon or weird molecules. Then you cook it some in the skillet you cooked the meatballs in, achieving some searing on most sides of it, 5-10 minutes worth. Then plop it into the sauce. After 3 or so hours of simmering it falls apart when you use a fork to fish it out of the sauce to retrieve the string. So be sure to just use one piece of string per braj. You wouldn’t want to leave any behind for someone to find.

Ravioli: Nothing gives the Italian feeling to a meal like ravs. They’re fun to make, are so wonderful to eat, and are great as leftovers. And you can freeze them. Rolling them out and pinching them together, all of us, great fun. One “batch” makes about a hundred of them. Use five eggs, four cups of flour (Gold Medal), and 3/4 cup of water. Thats all. Again, depending of your egg size you’ll need to add flour as you make the dough. So when you put these three ingredients together, make three separate balls from it. It it’s too wet add some flour as needed. Set one on a table where you can roll it out to about 20 inches to two feet round-ish. (Be sure to cover the other two dough globs with wax paper or it will start to harden.) Using the roller, flatten the ball to round it out, going in several directions. Pat with flour, flip, roll, powder with more flour, rub it in, flip, roll, and after 5 flips or so it should be pretty thin, again, rolling out in several directions to make it round. And you have to make it thin enough to not be pasty, but not so thin that it rips when you try to make the rav. Then using a knife, or ideally a pizza cutter, which they didn’t have back then, make squares of 2-3 inches by cutting vertically and then horizontally. The filling we use is a pound of hamburger, one egg, and a package of spinach. Boil the spinach, drain, and add to the hamburger and egg and mix. No seasonings are added. Then using a fork or whatever, plop a marble-sized amount of this onto the squares. Then notify the army of pinchers, because nobody wants to miss out on that. Using a fork, and a little flour to dab the fork with so it doesn’t stick to the dough, pull the square dough piece over to enclose the spinach mix, and pinch on three sides to make the rav. We sprinkle a cookie sheet with flour and lay them out on it, and cover with a paper towel until time to cook them. You salt the water you’re going to boil them in, and the Italians were particular about salting the water, and yes, you can over-do this too. So a few teaspoons per pot maybe. Boil 20 minutes. Strain, pour onto a serving platter, and spread some of the sauce onto these and serve immediately.

Take one of those small 8 oz. things of the blue cheese crumbles and pout it into a bowl. Add enough milk such that some of the crumbles are still sticking up out of it like a deserted isle somewhere. Then add Mayo (Hellmann’s is the only mayo), and I can’t say for sure how much, but maybe three or four heaping forkfuls, then about half again that amount of sour cream, plop that in there. Then grind fresh pepper generously, probably half a teaspoon, but more than that would be OK. Then the critical ingredient, garlic salt. I use the Lawry’s, in the jar with the green lid, probably a teaspoon. More is better, but you can add too much, so be careful. Mix it up good, and it should be creamy but not too thick. If it’s too thin, the milk will fall through the salad and leave he blue cheese crumbles on the top. I’ve done this many times. Easy on the milk!

It saves OK, and for a few weeks and more. But the blue cheese gets bluer and bluer, and the dressing gets tangy. So for re-use, I usually spoon some out, add just a little milk and a good dose of mayo to thicken, and this dilutes the dressing back more like the beginning. A healthy sprinkle of garlic salt also brings back the original flavor.

Blue cheese dressing is an acquired taste, and in fact this happened to me. One day when we were around 19 or 20 my brother somehow got me to eat some blue cheese on a cracker, and I think I was half awake or something, but I ate it and it grossed me out bad, and it was several years later I finally got over it and ate the dressing on a salad and I was hooked.

When she was in her later 80s, I was in my early thirties, and for 4th of July one year we roasted a pig and cooked a bunch of Italian stuff, and I insisted she teach me everything she knew about all of it, from the meatballs and the Brajull (sp braccioli?), the ravioli (“ravs”), the sauce, and of course the bread. It was incredible, and I still make all of them several times a year. We called the party “Piga Roasta”. When she was way past 100 I told her I still made the bread regularly, and she looked at me and raised a finger, and said, “You keep it up!” Now the whole world can do it.

First thing, she always used Gold Medal All Purpose flour, and don’t use the bag in front, that’s the old one. The grocer puts the new ones in the back, she said. Old flour grandma? I believe great chefs all agree, use the best ingredients, period. If truth be told, I usually use unbleached flour, which is better for bread they say, as opposed to all-purpose, and I can’t say I notice. But having this attitude, I’m sure it helps whatever you’re making.

So, a five pound bag of flour is what the recipe is for. Dump the majority in a large mixing bowl, saving at least a cup or more to add as you knead the dough to the wetness you’re after. Add 2 tablespoons of salt and mix with the flour. The older folks like Minnie, they never measured stuff. So I use the middle of the palm of my hand to estimate a tablespoon.

The amount of water is this: ¾ of a soup bowl for the yeast mixture, and eventually you will add ¾ of a regular saucepan of warm water to the flour/salt mixture. For the yeast, use warm water, like you wash your hands in, add a teaspoon of sugar and mix it into the water for the yeast to feed on. Then dump 2 packets of fast-rising yeast on top of the water in the bowl. Careful now, you just gently dump the yeast onto the top of the water, and of course it floats, but don’t touch it! And don’t mix it in! Cover the bowl with an upside-down saucer, and let the yeast germinate and froth up, about 15-20 minutes. When it’s ready, you’re ready to get started.

The last ingredient is grease. Crisco, or shortening that is. She’d scoop out a ball of it, and carefully trim it to the size she wanted. This is critical, because shortening is what makes bread firm and crusty, like Italian bread. See, she married my grandfather Nicola Carpinello, an immigrant Italian, and he liked the hard bread, but in Cincinnati back then the only place you could find it was at the Jewish places, and that was a long trek to town down West 8th from up on Price Hill in Cincinnati, and none of them ever drove. So they’d walk there from western hills, about 5 miles. She eventually learned to make this bread to save the long walk. (Incidentally, his name in fact was Carpinelli, but in New York they changed his name to Carpinello because if they thought you were Spanish they might hire you, but if Italian maybe not.)

Back to the Crisco. It ended up about the size of a racket ball, but probably not a tennis ball. My mom thought it was ridiculous, but she says when she tried to take the ball and figure how much it was, Minn wouldn’t let her. So after holding it out to show me the size, she the just threw it into the salt/flour mixture, poof! Dumps in the yeast mixture right after that, slosh, then the ¾ saucepan of water, slosh. All at once. Then she used a big fork, mixed it all up, and then dumped the very wet dough out onto the table for kneading, which is the crucial step of course.

She separated the dough into two large globs, each to be kneaded and raised separately in two batches, making 3 loaves apiece. She was careful to use the parts of her fingers between the two joints, the middle segment, for kneading. And she would gradually roll each ball out into a long pepperoni-sized snake, three feet long maybe. Then she’d ball it all up and do it again. But kneading is a feel, and when you have successfully smashed all of these ingredients together, which is what kneading does, it should be really smooth, with no lumpiness at all, however you can do it. She said, “Soft like a baby’s butt.” I use the palms at the base of my hands, and roll the dough around until it’s smooth. It usually takes 5 minutes per dough ball.

As you knead you expose more and more of the water trapped in the flour, so you need to add flour to get the dough where you want it, and with the ingredients so inexact, there’s nothing wrong with getting some from another bag if needed.

But know this: when you’re done kneading, the batch will need to be a little moist, but she kept saying, “Not too wet”. It can’t be firm, or it won’t rise, and if it’s too wet, it will rise and go flat. But there was one time I think I added too much water, and it took a lot of flour to dry it out, and I left it a little more moist than usual. And it grew to the best batch ever. So, a little moist, but not too wet. The dough ball should hold its form when you set it down, for example.

You grease (shortening) a large bowl, like they mix salad in, or punch. That big. You plop each dough ball into the pan, and then grease the ball itself with shortening, and then she would put a big stack of towels over the bowl, like, a big stack. Three maybe. After two hours, the dough balls should be bulging up to the top of the bowl into the towels. Then you “punch it down”, with your hands or whatever, down until it’s firm and flat like a big bowl of soup or something. Re-cover, and let it rise a second two hours.

After the second rising, grease 6 loaf pans, and separate each dough ball into 3 pans. Just rip what appears to be a third of the dough ball, shape it crudely into the rectangular shape and place it in the greased pans. Then she would make the sign of the cross over each one, and raise them another two hours in the pans. What I do now, to protect them a little as they rise, is pull out a long piece of aluminum foil, bend all the sides at one inch into a 90 degree flap, like a little cookie sheet would look, and then put it over the pans like a truck cap. Gently floating, nothing fancy. I put them on my rack above my stove, which is usually warm, and they rise up into the foil. The foil doesn’t hold them back, and you want them to raise up out of those pans an inch or so. I don’t think she bothered covering them as they rise in the pans. Bread, it wants to rise, generally. The longer it goes, the more the yeast is active.

You’re ready to bake. She called it a “seven hour bread”, with six hours rising and nearly an hour in the oven. But she couldn’t commit to a temperature. She’d say, “350 is too hot”. So, like three-thirty-something? “Well, you’ve got to know your oven. In the old days they would come out and calibrate it for you”. I guess the old gas stoves were a little variable. But I cook them at 340 or so, for about 45 minutes, and don’t under-cook them, because you can’t slice them, and they go bad faster. It’s seven hours and you can’t rush it. And no convection, even if you’ve got one of those good ovens.

Ever heard that you shouldn’t make bread if there’s a thunderstorm approaching? Well, when we were in grade school she rode the bus over every Wednesday to Kentucky where we lived, and she cooked all day. Bread. Tea Rings and other confections. Milwaukee rolls. But the first thing she’d do is feel the counter tops. If they were too cold she was reluctant. “Oh, I don’t know, Dolly.” She was the real thing, for sure.

But I’d never made it, so I thought I’d rip off my mom’s recipe, even though I wouldn’t say I ate much of it ever, but the idea of what went into it was what I was after. I left out all the questionable ingredients, and what resulted is the best this dish can be, forever know as “Big Red’s World Famous Potato Salad”.

I stole the “World Famous” from my friend Bozo a little bit. We called him that because he was pulling pranks all the time, silly ones. In high school me and one of my muscle car buddies had a “Reading for Enjoyment” class, as seniors, where it was quiet and we read for the class duration. But Bozo was at lunch during that period, and invariably he’d sneak up the back steps, and catch our eye with the door usually open. He’d juke a while, make a few faces, and then let out this huge scream and scamper down the steps and outside into the crowd. The class would erupt in laughter, and eventually the teacher would, and he referred to it as “my world famous yell”. And each morning, if I could convince him to go to school that day (usually by not writing an excuse note and signing it as his mom), then he’d ask me, “Do you want me to do my world famous?”

For the potato salad, I didn’t know mom skinned and boiled the potatoes, and I baked them, instead and then after they cooled I scooped out the baked potato stuff inside for that ingredient. It’s probably the key to the dish, and I’ve never heard of anybody ever doing it that way. And all those skins left over, hmm, what to do with them.

I do them in 10 pound batches. After the scoop out, I use a fork and mix it some, but leave it chunky. The key to the whole dish is big chunks of everything, I mean within reason. Like scooping the potatoes out after they cool, even after stirring they end up in ½ to ¾ inch chunks. Then, I salt and pepper it, and generously. It can take a lot of both ingredients, and I couldn’t say how much. Probably somewhere between 1 and 2 teaspoons, of each.

Next: white onions. Most recipes call for yellow onions, but not Big Red’s World Famous. For this batch, two large white onions, like the softball-sized ones, is the dose. Use three medium-sized ones if that’s what you have. And I don’t think a yellow onion would hurt anything, if you don’t have any white ones. Slice each one about 4 times, then cut the other way to chop them into, you guessed it, large chunks. Not Yuge chunks (feelin’ the Bern). About the size of the tip of your baby finger maybe. Mix them in.

After that, mayo. And like my mom says, there’s only one mayo, Hellmann’s. For a 10 pound batch, it’s about one of those medium sized jars, but you’ll have to add until it looks right. It can’t be soupy or wet at all really, but it needs plenty of mayo.

Like any great dish, add bacon and eggs and you’re golden, and there are lots of both in Big Red’s World Famous Potato Salad. For this batch, one and a half pounds of good bacon, and one and a half dozen hard boiled eggs. Ideally, farm eggs, which we happen to have in great abundance. Fry the bacon, cut them in half and fry them in their own grease in a pan until they’re so crispy that they will break into large bacon bits when you stir it in. Which is to say don’t burn this wonderful ingredient, but there should be no “fatty” parts left on the bacon. Fry it completely, then remove the strips onto a paper towel to cool.

How much bacon grease? Fat is where the flavor is, right? Right. I only use about 3 or 4 tablespoons in a batch, but my mom dumps all of it in. I’ve never done that, so there’s your amount, 3 or 4 tablespoons, which is a small amount of the grease left over from the frying.

Mix the bacon in next, again thinking you want big chunks as part of the recipe. Slice up the eggs with one of those wire egg slicers, and spread them out across the top of the salad, and then sprinkle it all with a little paprika, and put it in the fridge to chill. You can serve it hot, and I usually have to because I’ve put it off until the last minute, with, you know, other things to do. It’s usually ready right at dinner time.

Then I sit back and catch people as they faint, or manage the stampede once the word gets out that it’s done, or counsel people who are shook up by the whole thing. Then I hide what is usually a second batch in a fridge. Generally the batch gets depleted gradually as people hit it all night, and I get out the second batch if needed. If not, any amount of leftover is a treasure. I don’t eat leftovers, but it’s somehow true that Big Red’s World Famous gets better for several days in the refrigerator. A gift that keeps giving.

So there you go. Don’t skimp on the ingredients, all of which somewhere they have told you are bad for you, but hopefully you’re not believing any of that stuff. Forego your urban myths for an afternoon, whadayasay? And under no circumstances shall you add the toxic ingredients people have experimented with, like vinegar or celery or pickle relish or mustard, or a weird anything. Don’t do it!