In anticipation of our April 11th Edible World event, Sunday Supper and Family Lore, the First Person Blog will feature the stories and family recipes of Philly food personalities. Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, look out for recipes from the likes of chefs, writers and people who just love eating, making and talking about food and family.


Today we are featuring Ed Tettemer and his recipe for Beach Bean Soup. Ed is a writer and independent consultant but cooks for the Strathmere Volunteer Fire Company and caters private dinner parties, for which he was recently featured in the Inky. I dig his whimsical, folksy way of talking about food. Come back on Friday when we feature Snackbar chef John Taus’ update of his grandmother’s pierogies.


Want to be like our Philly Foodies? Share a family recipe at our Edible World event! Send your recipe, story and a photo to Karina by April 2nd! Reserve your seat at the event here.

I love to cook for friends, family, heck – anyone with taste buds and a happy hunger.


I learned the joy of cooking by motherly osmosis. Ours was a resourceful household, always with a large garden fertilized by some potent horse manure from Jigs Kentop’s farm up the street. Jigs had some big draft horses that sure knew how to poop. I can still smell the aroma of our freshly fertilized garden – what my mother called “Vitamin M.”


And out of that garden came a plenty. Big-boy, early-girl, beefsteak big Italian plum and bite-size cherry tomatoes. Pole beans and Swiss chard, red beets and Brussels sprouts and broccoli and okra, from plants with enormous tropical fronds. And in the spring, rhubarb.


My dad would put a sign at the end of the driveway: “Rhubarb 75¢ a bag.” Same price every year I remember. Why 75¢? Who knows, but the same folks would pull in that driveway and get themselves six bits worth of rhubarb every single year.


My dad believed if we were gonna have trees, they might as well be fruit trees. Apple dumplings and peach dumplings with fresh cream made dinner more like dessert. We’d go fishing a couple nights a week and fill the freezer with Neshaminy Creek sunnies and catfish. Every Friday a fish fry. And mom knew exactly how long after a good rain it took for the mushrooms to pop up. She’d hand us cotton sacks and lead us out to harvest while the meadow grass was still wet. A coffee can of bacon drippings stood ready by the stove, and nothing beats those wild mushrooms sauteed in bacon drippings, with garlic and onion and a mother’s love.


If she cooked a ham or a chicken or anything with a bone, I knew it wouldn’t be more than a day or two till we had soup. Noodle soup or bean soup or split pea on a cold day. No two soups were ever the same, as the stock depended on whatever tasty scraps were saved up during the week.


I had to start cooking when I left home in full ‘70s dropout mode. It was campfire cooking and then tiny-apartment cooking and lots of weird casseroles. I kept the drippings by the stove and a jar for table scraps in the fridge, so I could make my “garbage soup” every Sunday. It was my ritual of self-reliance for a few years until I learned to make soup with fresher ingredients: butternut squash with baked apples pureed with coconut milk, homemade chicken stock and Thai curry. Ask my wife; now that’s soup.


Sometimes I think my daughter visits just for the egg sandwich I can’t wait to make her in the same iron skillet my mother used to cook those mushrooms.


35 years along and I’d rather cook for a crowd than do anything else. I cook for our volunteer fire company and I’m proud to report attendance at drill night has doubled since I started in with the sweet potato gratin with bay leaf cream, steamed clam chowder and spicy Vietnamese noodle soups. Ben Franklin insisted his fire companies bond over good food. Men who eat together know who they can trust when the fire hits the fan.


Some paint, others work with clay. I create by scrounging the fridge and pantry and poking around Chinatown. Hmm, chicken backs, 69¢ a pound. Plantains, pitch black and just ripe for a hot pan with glistening peanut oil. And look at all this fennel and bok choy. Oddball food is my palette. The stockpot is my medium. I love knowing that someone may do something great in life with the caloric inspiration my art has provided.

Yeah, I do love to cook. So do me a favor, won’t you? Next time you’ve got 10 or 15 people coming over, ask me to put something on the table for ‘em. I’ll have a blast watching it disappear.


Beach Bean Soup
This is really, really good.


• A few strips of good bacon, cut into 1/4-inch pieces
• 1 good sweet onion, finely chopped
• 1 carrot, peeled and finely chopped
• A bunch of garlic chopped up
• 2 garlic cloves, chopped
• 2 1/2 cups dried beans, such as baby limas, navy or pinto, (or any combo)
soaked overnight in water 2” higher than the beans
• 6 to 8 cups homemade chicken stock
• A good shake of red pepper flakes
• 2 bay leaves (fresh if you can find ‘em)
• 1 teaspoon brown sugar or molasses
• 2 teaspoons kosher salt
• A good meaty hambone from your leftover Sunday dinner
• 2 to 3 tablespoons chopped pungent fresh herbs: rosemary, thyme, savory or sage, in any combination


1. In a large Dutch oven, cook the bacon, covered, over low heat, stirring
occasionally until the fat has rendered out and the pancetta is fairly crisp, about 15 minutes; with a slotted spoon, remove the pancetta to a bowl. Add the onion, carrots and garlic to the pan, cover and cook, stirring frequently, until the vegetables are soft but not browned, about 15 minutes.


2. Drain the soaked beans and add to the pan, along with 6 or 8 cups of good stock, the pepper flakes, bay leaves, sugar and the cooked bacon. Add your ham bone now. Bring to a simmer, partially cover, and cook until the soup begins to thicken and the beans are soft, about 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 hours. Add more chicken stock as necessary to achieve the consistency you prefer. After 1 hour of cooking, stir in the salt. And skim off the fatty scum whenever you see it.


3. Add the herbs during the last half-hour of cooking. Cooked vegetables can be added now to let the flavors marry. (I like to sauté peppers and such, even a jalapeño. Cook ‘em till they’re really good and soft, even caramelized. Toss ‘em in the pot and give it a stir.)


4. Serve with a good crusty bread and good chewy red wine. Yum yum eat ‘em up.


5. Oh, make sure you make this soup at the beach, on a windy and chilly day.
Preferably with Charlie Parker playing real loud on the hi-fi. Otherwise, it’s just really good bean soup, not beach bean soup.


- Ed Tettemer

In anticipation of our April 11th Edible World event, Sunday Supper and Family Lore, the First Person Blog will feature the stories and family recipes of Philly food personalities. From now till the event, look out for recipes from the likes of chefs, writers and people who just love eating, making and talking about food and family.


Today we are featuring Helen Horstmann of Philly Foodie. On Wednesday, look for Philly food character Ed Tettemer and his recipe for Beach Bean Soup.


Want to be like our Philly Foodies? Share a family recipe at our Edible World event! Send your recipe, story and a photo to Karina by April 2nd! Reserve your seat at the event here.

My mother is a well-known cheater. She is the person with her thumb on the egg in the egg and spoon race, the one stealing from the bank when you play Monopoly, the one who “accidentally” whacks you with a wiimote. She freely changes the rules of a game to suit her needs, and laughs as she does it. So, it should hardly be a shock that she doesn’t exactly play fair when it comes to food.


Specifically, she believes it is her right to consume only what she finds tastiest. The person eating all the berries off the fruit platter? The one leaving behind the rind on the brie? The consumer of chicken skin, muffin tops, and the ice cream on an a la mode? All my mother.


One of the delights of my childhood was a weekly angel food cake. If you have not had the regular pleasure of consuming fresh angel food cakes, the best part is the crust on top. The fluffy center clings to the softly crunchy caramelized exterior. It’s cool and sweet and light on the tongue, and you can eat it every week and never get sick of it. Or, at least, I assume you can… because my mother always did.


It’s a wonderful dish when the second best is consumed with as much relish as the choice bits. But my own crusts taste all the sweeter for knowing that it’s my right to pull them off and gobble them up, without any cares for fairness or making things even.


Once you get going, you don’t want to pause during this recipe, so prep everything ahead of time. Preheat the oven to 350. The cake needs to cool upside-down, so make sure you have a bottle the tube pan will fit on, or you can balance the pan on 4 glasses. Wipe down your egg-beating bowl and beaters with white vinegar to remove any trace amounts of grease; the whites won’t whip if there’s fat around. You also don’t want to overbeat or make your egg whites too stiff; you should be able to pour the final mixture, not need to scoop it.


Angel Food Cake (from the Joy of Cooking)


* 1 1/2 cups egg whites (approximately 12 large eggs)
* 1 1/2 cups sugar
* 1 cup cake flour (no, not all-purpose flour)
* 1/2 teaspoon salt
* 1 tsp vanilla extract (if you have nice stuff, use it now)
* 1 tsp cream of tartar
* 1 tbsp water
* 1 tbsp fresh lemon juice


Measure out 3/4 cup of sugar into a bowl. In a second bowl, put the flour, another 3/4 cup sugar, and sift it 3 times. Then get cracking, and separate those eggs! Whites go into a large mixing bowl; reserve the yolks for something else.


Put the cream of tartar, vanilla extract, water and lemon juice into the mixing bowl with your egg whites. Mix for one minute on low to incorporate the ingredients, then bring the mixer up to medium. Mix for 2-4 minutes, until the egg whites are foamy and about 5 times more voluminous than when you started. Start adding your 3/4 cup of sugar, in tablespoons, over 2-3 minutes. When you’ve finished, the mixture should be glossy and starting to hold peaks.


The rest you have to do by hand. Sift approximately 1/8 of the flour mixture over the whites, and fold until just incorporated. Repeat 7 times, until all the flour mixture is incorporated. Pour into a 10 inch tube pan, and smooth the top.


Bake for 35-40 minutes, until a toothpick comes out clean.


Or feel free to make it from a mix; we always did. (But, you know, that was back in the day when the angel food cake mix came in 2 pouches — ooh, complicated!)


Cool upside-down for at least an hour and a half. Steal crusts as desired.


- Helen Horstmann

Heads up… starting this Monday, March 22nd, we’ll be featuring the family recipes of Philly Foodies on the blog. So far our line up includes the Inky’s Rick Nichols, Snackbar chef John Taus, Meal Ticket’s Felicia D’Ambrosio, the Erace Brothers from Green Aisle Grocery, Elizabeth Halen of foodaphilia and Baker E’s, Jessica Rossi from Fries with that Shake, and food personality Ed Tettemer. Plus a few surprises along the way. We’ll be posting them every Monday, Wednesday and Friday from now until our April 11th Edible World: Sunday Supper and Family Lore. Plus the FPA staff will be sharing our family recipes, including some retro cooking, southern fare and the best tabbouleh around.


And the deadline for our Family Recipe Contest has been extended to April 2nd! Details here.


First up? From Philly Foodie, Helen Horstmann’s family angel food cake recipe and a mother who just may be a total cheater.


- Karina

Everyone has at least one special family recipe, one that’s been passed down through the generations. The one that reminds you of supper at Grandmom’s or summer picnics with aunts and uncles. Or maybe you created it just this past Thanksgiving and your family went wild for it. It’s the one that comes out flawless each time or it’s the type of recipe that survives despite numerous kitchen catastrophes. Regardless, it’s a recipe that goes deeper than delicious; it contains a story.


For our next Edible World program, we are hosting a family recipe contest! We are very excited to be bringing author Suzan Colón to read from her memoir Cherries in Winter on Sunday, April 11th. Bridget Foy’s is creating a special three-course meal (menu details are here) for the event. Dinner guests can submit family recipes from now till March 26th. Three will be chosen to tell their family story along with Ms. Colón and they will be featured on her blog!


Your story should be a maximum of 250 words. Send recipes to me at kkacala@firstpersonarts.org by March 26th. Buy tickets for the event here.


Also, starting March 29th, look to the First Person blog for family recipes from some of Philly’s best foodies: Snackbar’s John Taus, Meal Ticket’s Felicia D’Ambrosio, Green Aisle’s Erace Brothers, and more!


-Karina