CHRISTOPHER KIMBALL: Welcome to Milk Street's My Family Recipe.
We help home cooks rediscover and recreate lost family recipes.
- My grandmother Margaret's was the absolute best.
- Don't put any pressure on us or anything!
CHRISTOPHER: We bring home cooks to our Boston studio...
I'm gonna stand back.
...where, along with our host and pastry chef Cheryl Day... - Isn't it great how food can take you back?
CHRISTOPHER: ...we teach them how to make their family recipe from scratch.
- You're gonna be able to bake this cake.
- I can do it.
CHRISTOPHER: Just the way it was made by, say, their grandmother.
- Beautiful!
- Grandma would not tolerate lumps.
CHRISTOPHER: Then we send them home to recreate that recipe for the toughest audience... - There it is.
CHRISTOPHER: ...their own family.
[laughing] CHRISTOPHER: Can our home cooks pull it off?
- Mom, that's really good.
- I think that's a yes.
CHRISTOPHER: Or will the recipe be lost forever?
Right here on Milk Street's My Family Recipe.
- That is delicious.
[upbeat music playing] Funding for this series was provided by the following.
Mowi Salmon comes ready to cook.
Ready to grill, ready to season, or pre-seasoned and ready to eat.
In an assortment of flavors for an assortment of people.
Mowi Salmon.
- My name is Marie Louise Griffin, and I live in Playa del Rey, California.
I'm from the East Coast.
I grew up outside of Washington, D.C., and after that I moved around the country and the world.
My parents both grew up in Fall River, Massachusetts, but my mother's family was French Canadian.
My parents both were big on family, so we visited back to Fall River quite often to learn more about our roots and enjoy all of their foods and tastes.
- Growing up, food was kind of a fun part of the day.
My mother loved cooking.
She also grew up in the period of time when Julia Child was making her big debut.
We were allowed to come into the kitchen and watch her mimic what Julia Child was doing, so it was very entertaining.
She would get carried away with herself.
My mother taught me how to enjoy cooking, and not stress about how everything turned out, but more just how much fun it could be.
My culinary skills are pretty advanced.
I personally love being in the kitchen.
It's where I can relax.
I do consider myself a baker.
About three or four days a week, I'm making bread.
It gives me joy to see my family enjoying something that I made.
I would like help recreating a recipe from my mother and my grandmother called gorton.
It is a pork spread.
It's ground pork that's baked long and slow, and just a small bit on crackers or on crostinis, accompanied with some mustard pickles with onions and some spices.
It's like a poor man's pt.
As a child, I remember having it usually Christmas, New Year's, and my mom and grandmother grew up eating it, so it brought a lot of happiness and a lot of good memories of times past for both of them.
We moved a lot and I always had a very special folder with recipes that I really love.
In one of the moves, the recipe that I had for gorton got lost.
...coriander.
I've tried making the gorton, from what I can remember, but I can never quite get the seasoning proper.
If I don't get it right, it doesn't quite bring back the same pleasure that I remember.
This recipe is part of my family history, and I'd like to be able to recreate it so my family can pass it on.
- Now we're going to French Canadian food to gorton.
Pork cooked down sort of into a pt, but I don't know much about it anyway.
Let's talk to Marie, who might know slightly more than I do.
CHERYL: Hi, Marie.
- Hi, how are you?
- How are you?
I'm Cheryl, and Chris and I are here, and we're excited to hear about your family recipe.
- Well, I'm very excited to share it with you.
- So, first of all, how do you pronounce this?
- It's pronounced gorton.
My grandmother's from Quebec.
That's where it came from.
- Could you describe it, the way your mother made it?
- It was made of pork and some pork fat and spices, and it basically boiled all day until it reduced down to, like, a very spreadable meat spread.
- What kind of spices?
- Uh, nutmeg and possibly-possibly mace.
- Oh.
- It's kind of one of those recipes that just bring up my childhood, which they made it a lot at Christmas and New Year's.
- What was the last time you made this recipe?
- I would say like 2010 or 2011 was the last time.
I just couldn't quite get the spices correct.
I had the recipe and then it got lost in a move and, uh-- - Oh.
- So yeah.
- Well, hopefully we can recreate it for you and then invite you here and let you taste it.
- Oh, I will be excited for that.
- Marie, it's been a pleasure to meet you.
We'll see you soon in Boston, and, uh, we better get busy.
- Yeah, we better get busy.
- Thank you.
It was a pleasure.
- Bye-bye.
- Bye-bye.
- At least this is a recipe.
I love this.
This is a recipe where you want fat.
- You want fat.
- But we're not taking it out.
- No, we're not taking it out.
- We're putting it back in.
- More fat.
- More fat.
More better.
- This will be a fun challenge for sure.
- Gorton?
Gorton.
Well, there's many pronunciations of it.
I've been working on mine, gorton.
I've heard "garton."
I know nothing.
I've never heard of it.
What is the gorton?
Well, that's a good question.
It's based on a recipe from French Canadians called croton, or gorton.
In this country, it's essentially rillette.
It's pork cooked down.
It's not as smooth as a pt, and it was cooked originally in lard.
- When it came down here, a lot of French Canadians migrated to New England to big mill towns, and they brought that recipe with them, and Marie told us one of the keys was the spices.
Now, these were spices that probably would be familiar in the mid-16th or 17th century in Europe.
So let's get going on the development, and try to make a gorton, one that Marie will recognize and also be proud of.
- So Marie has thrown us a real challenge here, gorton, which is basically a pt.
What cut of meat did you end up using?
- The pork shoulder turned out to be the best.
- To get the result we wanted in the end, it was all about how we prepared the meat.
- Slightly freeze the meat, grind it up.
- What did you cook it in?
Chicken stock or...?
- Water and, uh, lard.
A couple of hours, till the pork's nice and tender, and we mash it with a potato masher.
- The key is really mashing this mixture as it cooks.
Oh, yeah.
It's like a nice... nice texture.
I was kind of thinking it was going to be more chunky, like country pt-ish, but supposed to be smooth.
- It's nice and rich.
I had a tiny bit of those spices in there.
I was kind of thinking it was going to be more...
It's bland.
So the last thing we want to give to Marie is something that's a little bland, so we just did a little more research and figured out the warmer spices added to this made all the difference.
...I added on cinnamon, allspice and cloves.
And I just had to adjust those amounts.
- Some cinnamon, some allspice, some cloves, really brought this forward and made a delicious gorton.
- That's awesome.
Nice.
Very nice.
So we've eaten a lot of pork here at Milk Street in the last week, but we think we've really nailed this one, and we hope Marie is happy with it.
Very, very good.
I'm going to have one more.
- Hi, Marie.
Welcome to our kitchen.
We're so excited to have you.
- Thank you.
I'm excited to be here.
Are you ready to learn how to make the gorton?
We've been practicing our French, haven't we?
- Gorton.
- Gorton.
- I'm excited because this recipe means a lot.
It was my grandmother's recipe that passed to my mother and my mother passed to me, but to actually recreate it would-- would be fun.
- Well, we think we have cracked the code.
- She's not confident at all, Cheryl.
- I'm feeling nervous and anxious, but excited to be a part of this process, and getting their professional advice.
- So we're going to start.
I've got our meat here.
And, by the way, the best thing we have found is if you freeze this cubed meat for about 30 minutes, it makes it easier to process.
- Okay.
Is that the pork shoulder?
- It is, yeah.
- It has nice fat in it.
- Nice, nice fat.
- The tip of freezing...
I just never thought of it before.
I hadn't done that, which I'm excited to try.
- We'll get it started.
I'm going to get this to a... like a coarse ground.
Chris, if you can start chopping the onions for us.
Chris is good with the knife.
All right.
So I'm going to get this started here.
[whirring] We have a mound of chopped up onions.
- The meat goes in, the two onions.
- And about how much pork was in it?
- Two pounds.
- Two pounds.
- Two pounds ground pork.
- Uh, water.
Four cups of water.
And a teaspoon of salt.
- Yeah.
- I remember my mom, when she made it, she would double the recipe, 'cause...
So that it would last.
- You said earlier, too, you said breakfast.
- Uh-huh.
- Was this eaten just for breakfast, or was eaten at every meal or...?
- After the holiday period time, it was usually just at breakfast.
- So there was Cheerios over here, and there was gorton over here.
CHERYL: Well, this is looking good.
It's cooked down quite a bit, as you can see.
And then now we're going to just mash it just to really kind of give us a little start with that texture.
- Right.
- You should do this once in a while as it cooks for a couple hours, because it's not going to be fine like a pt, you know.
- Right.
- But it needs a little bit of texture too.
- I mean, how bad?
Slippery little sucker.
- I'm gonna stand back.
So one thing about lard, if you go to the supermarket, you just get lard.
I think it's fat from anywhere in the pig.
But if you can get leaf lard from the butcher, that makes a lot of difference.
They use it for pie pastries.
- Yeah.
- That was the go-to.
- Yeah, absolutely.
MARIE: Oh, okay.
- It's starting to smell good to me already.
- It's got some pork, lard...
It's got onions.
The three things at the bottom of the pyramid.
- The onions.
So we're going to let this cook for two hours... - Oh, wow.
- ...so it really breaks down.
- Let it go.
CHERYL: Smells good, looks good.
- That's about the texture you want.
The water's disappeared.
It's evaporated.
- Oh.
– And now we just have to add the critical-- CHERYL: The spices.
Yeah.
So we've got cinnamon, we've got allspice, and we've got cloves.
Those were the cloves.
- I think I was definitely missing one of them.
CHERYL: And the allspice.
I love allspice in savory dishes, so we'll get this stirred up.
So you said you were missing one of the spices.
What do you think about this combination?
I did put in cinnamon, but I'm not sure...
I definitely didn't put in allspice.
I feel a little bit naive that I didn't try that one, I just feel like maybe this might be the missing piece.
So I served this to my husband, and first thing came to his mind is he goes, "Oh, it's kind of like a poor man's pt."
- Yeah.
Since it's just really for a fraction of the cost, you can make something this delicious.
- Any dish that starts with "poor man's" means it's better.
Right?
I mean-- - Yeah.
- Almost all the time... - Resourcefulness.
- The cheapest thing... Yeah.
That's where preserved meats came from.
That's where pts and terrines came from, right?
- Yeah.
So we're going to let this continue to cool, and then what we're going to do is fill our little ramekins, and we're going to try it and see... - How wonderful.
- ...how close we get to your recipe.
- I'm excited to try it.
- All right, so, Marie, we have let it sit.
It has set up, and, voil, there it is.
- It looks very familiar.
- Are you ready to try?
- I am.
- I-I just want to say this does not look like a poor man's... - It does not.
- Can I just say, this is a little... hearty enough, but yeah, a little fancy.
- All right, here we go.
- It smells good.
CHERYL: Can't wait to try it.
- Mm.
CHERYL: What do you think?
Oh, that's, uh... Yeah.
Brings back a lot of memories.
I'm tasting this gorton, and I am just overwhelmed with memories.
It's very good.
It's very good.
- This is really good.
- I think it's perfect.
I can taste the allspice in it, which I think that's what nailed it.
CHRISTOPHER: What I really like is, instead of the fancy French terrine or something, which takes two days to make.
- Right, right.
- It's eight pages of mastering the art of French cooking just to get halfway through the recipe.
I mean, this is not hard to make.
- Not at all.
- Not at all.
- But it's just as good.
It's simpler and therefore it's better, I think, right?
- I do.
I think it's delicious.
- Can we just say lard is good?
- Lard is good.
- Can we do a T-shirt here that says... Lard is great.
- Lard is good.
- Lard is good.
- Yeah.
- Well, thank you for letting us figure this out.
- No, thank you.
I really appreciate the help.
- I'm not sure my five-year-old is going to give up the Captain Crunch, but, you know, maybe on New Year's Day.
- Exactly.
- Today I'm making some baguettes, some sourdough bread to go with the gorton.
And that part's the easy part.
Onions... Now I hope that the gorton comes out as well as my breads.
For good luck, I'm making my gorton in my mother's French Creuset pan that she brought back from France.
- Got everything ready to go.
I've got the onions chopped.
There we go.
- I've got the pork cut.
Good enough.
Ready to put in the food processor.
- Now we can get this in the pot so it can cook for the next two hours.
- First mash.
Using the potato masher to getting the gorton to the right consistency seems to be working.
- Now it's time to add the spices.
This is the missing link that I have not been able to perfect on my own.
But Chris and Cheryl made it happen, so I'm looking forward to moving into this final step.
The warm spices, the cinnamon, the nutmeg...
So we have the cloves, some salt and pepper, and the allspice.
...they'll give you the savoriness that this gorton should have.
- Bring out the best, the porkiness of this recipe.
My husband, my two daughters, my son-in-law, grandkids are on their way over, so need to get busy.
Stir in the spices.
- After I add the spices in, it'll be ready to set up my island for a wonderful family get-together.
It's a lot of gorton.
And see how their reaction is, and if it's as good as I hope it will be.
So much of this recipe now that I'm, at this point, feels like I used to make it.
My mom would be very excited and proud that she's passed this on to me.
- Honestly, I think she would wish she was here to have some of it.
- My children have never tried this recipe before.
They've heard a lot about it, but they've never tasted it.
- I want my kids to be able to understand how it makes me feel to have this dish that brings back a lot of memories, and I'm hoping they'll feel and remember their grandmother as much when they taste this.
- [indistinct chatter] - Not yet.
I wouldn't mind this, like, most days I come over.
- How are you?
- Good.
Happy Father's Day.
- Oh, thank you very much.
- My husband Gus, he has been tasting my food and baking for about 38 years.
I'm so excited you're here to share this.
It'll mean a lot for Gus to like this recipe.
GUS: I haven't seen it in any form since... in 20 years.
- I think it turned out.
It turned out well.
He's really encouraged me to keep going.
- I'm really looking forward to eating this today, knowing how important it is to my wife, and how important it is to the family, and then reintroducing it to our kids and our grandkids.
- Hey.
- Hi!
GUS: It's very, very exciting.
- How are you?
- I love you.
- Good.
- My mom, she always talked a lot about what she had growing up, some things that sounded pretty gross to us.
She taught us to basically try everything.
Sometimes we got made fun of a little for what we brought for lunch.
Cheers.
- I hope you guys are excited to try this.
- So I know that it's a meat spread.
I know that there's lard in it, I've heard.
GUS: Big expectations.
Hope it was worth all the effort.
- Let's hope so.
- Oh.
- Oh, my.
- Oh, wow.
- Can I put some on a cracker for you, Hudson?
And would you like a pickle with it, or mustard?
- Yes.
- I would love it on your French bread.
That seems appropriate.
- Awesome.
Thank you.
- Uh-huh.
- This is Mehme's recipe that was taught to her by her mother.
Here it goes, everybody.
What do you think?
- Mm, it's good.
- Great texture.
- It's really savory.
- Is it cloves in here?
- A little bit of cloves.
- Cinnamon?
- Cinnamon.
- I really enjoyed it when you tasted it, and the different spices coming through.
- And then there's... allspice was the one that was missing.
- It's really good.
It's kind of like hangs in your mouth.
- I don't think we had enough details on what this was going to be.
- Meat spread is just a tough sell.
- This was actually much better than I expected.
She kept calling it meat spread, which was not selling it to the family, but I think the gorton was actually really good.
I'll definitely have some more gorton.
Can we not call it meat spread?
MARIE: I was referring to it before kind of like a poor man's pt.
It's just pork and onions, just cooked for a few hours.
- Coming into this, I was a little nervous about the lard aspect, but I was pleasantly surprised.
It was really easy and smooth.
- Growing up, we'd have it like an appetizer, but without any of this... accoutrement... from what Mehme told me, her dad would have it and take it to work with him.
So you'd take it as a sandwich.
- I sure hope it remains the thing that we have on an ongoing basis.
I thought it was delicious.
I'm ready for another one, this time with a pickle.
I think I had four pieces.
- Is it good?
I think that's a yes.
- My son was a big fan.
I wasn't sure he was going to go for this one, but I think he had seconds and thirds.
I'm sure we'll be coming back to Grandma's to try it for my son.
MARIE: I think my mom would be proud of me and also probably a little emotional that I cared enough to go through the work to find this recipe.
- It's really close to what you remember Mehme did?
- Very much.
- Are you going to add to the holiday menu now?
- Yeah, I can do that.
- I'm hoping to pass this on and be a part of my grandchildren's life as much as my mother was part of my children's life.
I'd like to bake with them, teach them what I know for bread, and, of course, now the gorton recipe.
- Look at that.
Is that good?
I lost this recipe about ten years ago.
I will not lose this recipe.
I may tattoo it somewhere, but no, I will not lose this recipe.
Uh-oh, who's that guy's name again?
Your dad drew?
- It'll be made, I think, many, many times for holidays, like my mom used to, and just to share with family and friends.
- It'll be a Gus-Gus.
Just a great experience and one that I'll remember forever.
- You know, everybody's wrong about salt and pepper.
Salt is a mineral, pepper is a spice.
Have you ever thought about why salt always goes with pepper?
There are lots of spices.
In a lot of places in the world, it's not salt and pepper.
It might be salt and cumin.
So, the idea of pepper always going with salt really came from about the 17th century.
La Varenne, a very famous French chef, put them together.
But the real reason pepper rose above all the other spices was price.
You know, by the 18th century, with the British East India Company traveling to Southeast Asia, Ceylon, and Java, et cetera, the supply grew and the price went down.
So pepper really was an inexpensive spice by that time.
Therefore, it was always paired with salt.
Now, the problem is black pepper is great, but there're lots of other choices.
You don't always have to use it.
So what are some other choices that actually make sense to us here at Milk Street?
Well, one of them is an Urfa pepper.
This has sort of a moist flakes to it.
It's a little chocolatey, it's dark, it's not that hot, but it's also a great alternative to black pepper.
This is a Turkish pepper.
I actually bought a huge bag of this in Istanbul a couple of months ago.
It's referred to sometimes as Turkish silk chilis, and it's very much like Aleppo pepper, which is here, very similar pepper.
It has some heat to it, but it's really fruity.
It's really a great all-purpose pepper.
In fact, I know a lot of chefs who have these big canisters of it and use it as their go-to spice for heat.
Now, in some places, paprika is actually what goes with salt, right?
So paprika can be an alternative.
In the Middle East, it's not salt and pepper, it's salt and cumin.
And they use cumin and salt together, because cumin is such a popular spice.
And, of course, you could use white peppercorns as well.
There are different types of white peppercorns.
Some of them, let's say in Thailand or in Vietnam, tend to be a little more aromatic and not quite as spicy.
But white pepper is a nice choice.
Finally, a little bit about salt.
As I said, salt's a mineral.
You have to understand a little bit about measuring salt.
So table salt weighs the most amount per teaspoon because it has very fine grains, right?
So it packs a lot in.
When you get into coarser salts like kosher salt or sea salt, for example, or Maldon salt, the grains of salt are bigger.
Bigger grains means they pack less salt by weight into a volume measurement, like a teaspoon.
So a really coarse salt, like a sea salt, you might have to use twice as much as the recipe indicates if the recipe calls for table salt.
So, what you might want to do, depending on the kosher salt or coarse salt you use, simply weigh a tablespoon versus a tablespoon of table salt, and that'll tell you how to make the switch.
So, do salt and pepper go together?
Sure, but you have lots of other options and use the option that makes the most sense for the recipe you're cooking.
Recipes and episodes from this season of Milk Street are available at MilkStreetTV.com/MFR Access our content any time to change the way you cook.
Funding for this series was provided by the following.
Mowi Salmon comes ready to cook.
Ready to grill, ready to season, or pre-seasoned and ready to eat.
In an assortment of flavors for an assortment of people.
Mowi Salmon.
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