SILAS CADE SMOKES 'EM by Mike Cooper

LUCY BURDETTE: I loved visiting with thriller writer Mike Cooper at Bouchercon. Somehow we always gravitate to talking about food. So I thought you'd enjoy his take on something culinary. Welcome Mike!

MIKE COOPER:  My protagonist Silas Cade in CLAWBACK is no gourmand -- he's too busy hunting down armed riffraff along the Greenwich-Wall Street axis.  Here he is at a nice restaurant:

"I sawed away at my fish, which seemed not to have been cooked enough.  Maybe it was supposed to be that way."

Because I'm the at-home parent, on the other hand, I do a lot of cooking.  One place that my interests and Silas's intersect is barbecue.  The grill here runs pretty much all year, and not just the Weber; a few years ago I built a little smokehouse.

The hope was to reproduce my grandmother's kielbasa.  Most years she and my grandfather kept a hog, butchering it in the fall for sausage, bacon, ham and everything else.  I copied her recipe from the scrawled scrap of paper she'd written it on about fifty years ago.

KIELBASA

Grind 45-50 lb pork.  Leave fat in, but you don't have to add more if it's a good shoulder cut.  I use a cast-iron crank grinder.  (BTW, adjust all these amounts down for more typical family-sized volumes; my grandmother was cooking for multitudes.)

Mix in well:
1 cup + 2 tsp salt
2 garlic heads, crushed and soaked in 1-1/2 cup water
1 whiskey glass coarse pepper
3/4 whiskey glass paprika

Stuff the casings (I use the same hand grinder with a stuffing funnel).  1" casings seem best for kielbasa. Twist them off and hang overnight, not touching, in the refrigerator.  I have a cut-open plastic bin for this purpose that just fits into the bottom of the refrigerator.  This is an important step -- to dry the sausage slightly, and make sure the exterior is not at all damp.

Next morning, hang them in the smokebox, get a fire going, and hot-smoke them at around 160 degrees until the interior temperature is also 160. It can take hours, which is a lot of fussing around with the fire to maintain a level burn.

Note that grandma's recipe does not include a "cure" -- the sodium nitrite.  The USDA, along with the rest of the free world, insists that you should put this in to prevent botulism, which certainly seems like a good idea.

As you can see from the photo, the smokebox hasn't seen much use this year (though the morning glory vines will all die off at first frost, quite possibly this weekend).  You will also notice that we live surrounded by neighbors, including upstairs.  October is the best time for smoking not just because crisp cool air is pleasant to work in, but because most people have closed their windows for the season and will be less annoyed by the smoke.

Really good kielbasa is available in the Polish markets in South Boston, but homemade sausage is always a bit better -- even if I've never quite matched my grandmother's.
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Mike Cooper is the pseudonym of a former jack-of-all-trades. Under a different name his work has received wide recognition, including a Shamus Award, a Thriller nomination, and inclusion in BEST AMERICAN MYSTERY STORIES. The sequel to his novel CLAWBACK will be published by Viking in 2013. Mike lives outside Boston with his family. Read more at his website.