Cookbook of Panama Canal Zone Cuisine Wins Award
Opening the Gates to Canal Cuisine, a cookbook created by the Panama Canal Museum with the help of many volunteers and published with the Library Press @ UF and the George A. Smathers Libraries, was recently announced as the winner selected to represent Panama in the American category of the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards. As a finalist, the cookbook is a contender for the “Best in the World” award, which will be given at the Gourmand Awards on May 25-28, 2018 in Yantai, China. Read more about the awards here: http://www.cookbookfair.com/.
Opening the Gates to Canal Cuisine contains hundreds of recipes that were used by people of all nationalities during the American Era of the Panama Canal. The cookbook helps preserve the unique cultural and historical heritage of those who labored to make the Canal one of the World’s greatest accomplishments. Opening the Gates to Canal Cuisine celebrates the diversity of the Zonians, as well as what they had in common: being a part of a unique operation and a social experience that transcended the generations.
Opening the Gates to Canal Cuisine features everything from ceviche to lime squares; and the cookbook represents not only Panama and America, but also Ireland, India, Spain, and many more countries. You can read the entire cookbook here: http://ufdc.ufl.edu/AA00032190/00002.
Congratulations to everyone who participated in the cookbook, including the officers and board of the Panama Canal Museum and those of you who served on the Cookbook Committee: Sarah Finkelstein (chair), Cissy Collins, Sis Medinger, Catherine Goodrich, Jerry Fields, Joey Zornes, Alice Latimer, Olimpia Stapleton, and Elizabeth Neily. The University Press of Florida recently posted about the award: https://floridapress.blog/2018/01/30/awards-announcements-our-authors-recent-wins-2/.
Do you recognize any of these recipes? What was your favorite Zonian dish? Is there anything you would add to this cookbook?
We hope to see you at the food exhibit opening in March 2018 at the Smathers Library!
Author
3 Comments
Patt Earl
B A L B O A C L U B H O U S E E M P A N A D A S
Black pepper was a preservative in the days of Marco Polo; and the search for spices was what got Vasco Nuñez to look for a place to be named after him, in the newly discovered Western Hemisphere. Because of the generous black pepper content of the empanadas, these will keep very well for several days unrefrigerated. Put them there anyway, just to be on the safe side. They are fantastic for picnics and for brown-bag lunches.
F I L L I N G
3.5 lbs lean Ground Beef 2 Tbsp Oil
½ Cup Flour 1.5 tsp Salt 5 Tbsp dried minced Onion, re-hydrated
3 Tablespoons Black Pepper or 1 medium fresh Onion diced NOT sweet!
Brown the ground beef and the onions in the oil. Blend the Flour, Salt and Pepper. When the meat is lightly browned, pour off excess grease. Add Flour mixture to meat mixture while still hot, and mix thoroughly. Add about half a cup of water, and stir to thicken meat mixture until it’s rather pasty, NOT crumbly, so it can be molded to fit onto the dough. While preparing the crust, chill meat mixture to shape more easily, or set aside to cool for at least two hours.
D O U G H Mix in six-quart Mixing Bowl
4 cups Flour ¾ cup Margarine or Crisco
5 tsp Baking Powder NOT Baking SODA! 1¼ to 1⅓ Cups Milk
2 tsp Salt 1 Egg beaten
This is just a doubled regular Biscuit recipe. However you may use any biscuit recipe for the crust. Prepare dough as for biscuits but knead it as bread dough rather than lightly.
The dough must be very stiff to hold together, rather than be soft, flaky or crumbly.
Divide it into thirds or fourths and set other portions aside.
One-at-a-time, roll each piece of dough out one-eighth inch thick.
Using a saucepan Lid or a SS mixing bowl about 5-6″ in diameter, cut circles in the dough. Gather up all the excess outside the circles, roll in a ball and set aside. Moisten the edge of the dough circles with water to make them sticky to adhere. Scoop up the meat mixture with a 2Tbsp coffee scoop, compact it into a lump (about like half a ping-pong ball) and place the lump on a dough circle. Repeat until all the circles have meat on them. Fold half the dough over the meat, stretching as required and keeping the meat away from the edge of the dough, with a fork, to form half-moon shapes. Edges of dough circles must still be moist. Seal the edges of the empanadas about ¼ inch, with the tines of the fork, poke holes in the tops with a pointed knife, then press down on the top of the dough to distribute the meat and to squeeze out the excess air. The dough will then form to the meat mixture. Re-seal, and tap edges of dough with the tines-up fork horizontal on table, to make empanadas rounded. Place the empanadas on a baking sheet, spaced one inch apart. Reseal & reshape in half-moons as required.
Roll out the remaining dough and repeat this process until dough and meat are used up.
Paint the tops of the empanadas with a beaten egg to give them a shiny yellow appearance.
Bake the pans in the center of the oven at 425̊ CONV until lightly browned, about fifteen minutes. Use metal spatula to remove from the baking sheet, immediately out of oven.
Makes three dozen (more or less). Guaranteed to not last long!
Robert Dryja
First it was a Johnny Marzetti recipe and now a whole cookbook! I would not have thought that these would be bring back memories of the Canal Zone from the 1950’s and 1960’s when I grew up there. Now, if can just track down the arroz con pollo recipe that Carman made for dinner– no olives in it.
Bob Dryja
Persona non grata
Hey China! We zonians are from the USA. Our Cuisine is American. Don’t give our Awards to Panama. There’s some old retired guy or gal in Florida that deserves it more because that’s their cookbook. Don’t posthumously make us Panamanian. What are we Mormons? That’s just downright Shady.