The Crabby Cook - by Jessica Harper

So, after I wrote the post about the Pigs Legs In Coca-Cola, I got some comments and emails from friends with more fancy-pants ideas about cooking with Coke.

You may have seen Arlene’s comment with a recipe that suggests you stick a can of Coke up the chicken’s butt and balance it upright on a grill. I will def try this. My cousin Wendy wrote about a southern recipe for ham glazed with it, and Suzanne says she is famous for her ribs cooked in Coke, although when I asked her for the recipe, she said she’d tell me but then she’d have to kill me. I opted to live and backed off.

Then I heard from Jeffy Lee. Jeffy Lee is a lovely mensch I know who cooks for his family (I know, dreamy, right?). He  emailed me his bubbie’s recipe for brisket baked in Coke.

There’s been a lot of talk about bubbies lately, thanks to comic Sarah Silverman’s widely viewed video plea to young people to call their Jewish grandparents in Florida and convince them to vote for Obama. (If you have not yet called your bubbie in Florida and would like encouragement from Sarah Silverman to do so,  click here.)

I don’t have grandparents anymore, but my children have a bubbie and a nanni who are both already Obama Mamas and need no phone call. They also both have recipes for brisket that do not involve Coke.

But Jeffy Lee’s bubbie’s recipe is so much more intriguing.

So, you get a brisket, say 3 pounds. (Unless, say, it’s a Jewish holiday and you got suckered into cooking for a crowd, in which case, double the recipe and next year sucker someone else into hosting. This is my advice btw, not Jeffy Lee’s. He’s much too kind to say such things.)

Anyway, then you mix up an envelope of Lipton’s dried onion soup with a little water, to make a really gross paste. You slap that brisket into a 9″—13″ pyrex dish and schmear it with the paste. Then you dump on a bottle of Heinz chili sauce, and then pour on a can of Coke. (I know it sounds disgusing, but the cooking changes things. Trust me, Jeffy Lee knows his stuff.)

Cover it all up and put it in the oven for about 3 hours. My guess is 325 degrees.

When it’s done, let it rest for “a dime” as Jeffy says, then cut across the grain.

While it’s in the oven, you can call your bubbie and tell her to vote for Obama or just brag that you’re making a brisket, or you can email Sarah Palin a gentle reminder about how to pronounce “nuclear.”

Tags: brisket, bubbie, Jewish, Sarah Palin, Yom Kippur

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 4th, 2008 at 12:51 pm and is filed under Meat Me, Recipes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.