Friends and Neighbors

I love cooking, especially weird stuff, and I also love pop culture, so naturally when the two intersect I’m pumped. Whether it is an anime like Food Wars or online cooking shows like Binging With Babish finding ways to try out new sorts of meals is always something I’m interested in, especially when it comes from unexpected places.

So several years ago when I was watching some episodes of Dragnet 1967, I was dumbstruck when I saw a cold open that featured Harry Morgan’s Bill Gannon describe his secret barbecue sauce recipe to Jack Webb’s Joe Friday.

It all starts out innocently enough… ketchup, mustard, onions, garlic, and vinegar are commonly found in barbecue sauce recipes. But vanilla ice cream? It might not actually be as silly as it seems. Almost every barbecue sauce contains a lot of sweeteners – usually molasses, but it could also be brown sugar, honey, there’s even a recipe from one of Snoop Dogg’s cookbooks for a barbecue sauce that contains apricot jam! Also since the sauce is being used for lamb that could play nicely, too, as lamb often pairs well with sweet flavors.

In trying to recreate the recipe as-is, we’re going to rely on the dialogue as written as well as the items Gannon has on his desk. Right away we run into some problems, mostly in terms of measurement. In his little monologue, Bill Gannon uses at least three different units of measurements for his ingredients, including volume, container, and weight. Now obviously, the writers of this episode never expected somebody to try and recreate it – this is a comic relief scene, and I suspect this episode (The Big High) was front-loaded with comedy because the rest of the episode is a particularly heavy-handed anti-drug story with an ending that is one of the darkest of the entire series (ironically, the idea of barbecue sauce made with ice cream sounds like an idea someone would come up with while high, but oh well) So while we’re going to try and stay as true to the scene as possible, there are some moments where we’ll have to do some interpretation and substitution.

The ketchup is easy enough. A quart of ketchup would be 32 ounces, which is your average good-sized bottle from the supermarket. After mixing up the ketchup in a chilled bowl, he says to add “one can of red pepper”, which is a little bit weird because later in the recipe he asks for “one pound diced red peppers – peeled”. So I’m going to guess he was referring to red pepper flakes. Now I like a bit of spice in my food, but I don’t want this to be unbearably hot, so for the “can” I’m going to use a small, 0.5 oz jar of flakes that can be found in any supermarket spice rack. Given we’re going to end up with well over a gallon of sauce, that should add heat without overwhelming everything else.

Also presumably adding heat as well as other tangy flavors is the “can of hot mustard”. Now, he could theoretically be talking about a can of something like Colman’s Hot Mustard powder, but as you can see above, the prop department has given Harry Morgan what appears to be a jar of Grey Poupon. There doesn’t seem to be a hot mustard variant of Grey Poupon on the market today, so I went online to find a hot mustard in a similar-looking container. I settled on Lowensef, an extra-hot German mustard that comes in 9oz glass jars. I figure Bill Gannon would approve, as throughout the series his rather… exotic palate was a consistent source of comic relief, to the point where two of his sandwiches have been featured on the YouTube channel Sandwiches of History.

Next he calls for a quart of vinegar. He doesn’t say which kind… most barbecue sauce recipes I’ve seen ask for apple cider vinegar, but the closest indication we get is what appears to be a bottle of clear liquid on his desk. The bottle actually looks more like one that would hold rice wine vinegar these days, but I’m just going to assume Gannon meant standard distilled vinegar, which like ketchup, can easily be purchased in 32 ounce bottles. This is followed by some vegetation: the aforementioned peeled and chopped red peppers, one small jar oregano (like the red pepper flakes I went with a 0.25 ounce jar from the supermarket so as not to risk overwhelming the sauce with the flavor of dried herbs) and four or five cloves of fresh garlic. And then what do you do?

Since I don’t have an electric mixer big enough to fit the bowl, I’ll be using the whisk attachment for my immersion blender. Now, the next section requires some more interpretation. Gannon says to add “five chopped Bermuda onions” as you mix all of the other ingredients together. Bermuda onions were something mentioned in pop culture quite a bit at the time, but these days for a number of reasons their popularity has gone the way of Bermuda shorts. You can presumably still find them in certain places, but for an equivalent good-sized sweet onion with a somewhat flat shape, today I’m going to go with Vidalias.

This is also as good a time as any to point out there’s no actual cooking involved in the making of this sauce. That’s the most curious part to me – more so than even the ingredients. If I were to try making a sauce with these ingredients I’d probably start by sautéeing the vegetables and garlic in a saucepan for a while, which would release some of the moisture and sugars inside, and then add the liquids and simmer until it has reduced and thickened. Also, since he wants the red peppers to be peeled, I’d prefer to roast them under my broiler until they get some char and then peel the skin away after that. But we’re trying to stay true to the scene, so no cooking – just mixing it all together in a chilled bowl. After all, as Bill says, “it’s how you put them together”. So what happens next? That’s right… we mix in Bill’s secret ingredient – one that he supposedly heard from an old chef friend. One quart of vanilla ice cream.

Now this brings up an unexpected problem. I bought some Breyer’s, and the case said it holds 1.5 quarts. But when I tried to measure out 32 ounces on my kitchen scale, the whole of the container didn’t reach that amount. Is this another example of shrinkflation in action, or is there something else going on? I dunno, so I’m probably going to end up eyeballing the amount. I’m also switching from the whisk to the actual immersion blender attachment to make sure everything is of an even consistency and there aren’t any errant chunks of vegetables floating around.

Now that we’ve got the sauce settled, it’s time to move on to our protein. Given this recipe is all about the sauce, I’m not going to be too precious about the lamb – I’m going with a pre-seasoned lamb shank readily available from a nearby Wal-Mart. Since this is supposed to be served for a barbecue I’m going to be cooking in my portable grill with wood pellets for smoke. The punch line of the scene seems to be that Gannon uses this sauce because he doesn’t like the taste of lamb (“you put it on lamb, you never know it’s lamb!”). But I do like lamb, so we’ll have to see how it shakes out once the lamb is finished cooking.

Two shakes of a lamb’s tail later, the shanks are finished and resting, ready for the sauce. I was tempted to try basting the lamb in the sauce during the last part of the cooking process, but again, no mention of that in the episode so we’re going to use the sauce straight-up. We’ll have plenty of leftovers, though, so maybe I can save them to take another crack at it later

Despite the rather unappetizing peach-pink color scheme, the actual flavor of the sauce is not bad at all.  The most prominent flavor is a sharp tang – the ketchup, vinegar, and mustard are certainly doing the work. There’s some heat, too, courtesy of the mustard and pepper flakes, but not overwhelmingly so. There is sweetness from the ice cream, but it’s mild and acts as a counter to the sharpness that comes from the rest of the ingredients. You don’t get any vanilla flavor at all. The barbecue sauces I was raised on and tend to use are very sugar-forward, so this was a nice contrast. If you’re more used to a more vinegar-based barbecue flavor like North Carolina style, you’ll probably dig this.

I’m keeping a jar or two of this stuff around for further experimentation (not sure what else I’ll find a use of it for, but I’ll jolly well try) and that brings me to the major drawback of this recipe – there’s way too much of it. As I said before, you end up with well over a gallon of the stuff, so unless you’re grilling an entire rack of lamb or four or five legs/shanks, there’s no way you’ll be able to use it all. So if you want to try making the sauce yourself, I’d recommend cutting the recipe by at least half. Or maybe try adding a scoop or two of ice cream to your preferred barbecue sauce recipe in place of the other sweeteners.

So yeah, that was a surprisingly successful dive into the world of recreating joke TV recipes. I’ll probably see what I can do to further refine this, and maybe try and track down some other recipes to experiment with in the future.