Rock Salt and Peaches

Ready for some hot weather food now that it's July? While The Chamberlain Calendar of American Cooking (Narcisse and Narcissa Chamberlain, 1957) has a somewhat spotty record of choosing seasonally appropriate dishes, the picks for July seem like they belong in July!

What's the number one cooking method people usually associate with July (based on my exhaustive research protocol of rhetorically asking this question and then answering it myself)? Barbecue! The Chamberlains come through with a barbecue treat for a real high roller.

The Rock Salt Barbecue Steak has the added benefit of being a craft project, as the steak is encrusted with damp rock salt, wrapped in damp newspaper, and then freed with a hammer (bolded because I'm intrigued anytime hardware supplies can be used in cooking) once the grill has burned off the paper and left a rock salt shell encasing the meat. Serve with a pound of seasoned butter.

If the barbecue leaves you hot (but not fully sated for dairy fat), you know what will cool everybody off?

I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream! (Okay, this title is a better match, but it doesn't have Clint Howard.) In any case, the inclusions in this ice cream are far more benign than the Ice Cream Man's mix-ins-- fresh peaches and a little lemon juice for tartness. Bonus points for including directions for people who don't have a "hand freezer" (by which I assume they mean a hand-cranked ice cream maker).

I'm not sure why the Chamberlains associated peaches with Philadelphia, but hey, peaches grow a lot of places. We had a peach tree when I was a kid, and our sweet but dim cat used to like to climb it and meow plaintively at the birds, as if he thought they would feel bad for him and somehow let him catch them in the tree. I'm not really sure how he thought it would work, but it never did.

Now, go out and enjoy some of your own unlikely dreams under a shady tree as the July sun bakes your brain.