The Dent video that I included in yesterday’s post discussing the Dents and the Raleys stuffing hams contained the following photo.
So today let’s check out another stuffing ham twosome – the Bowes as in Pat and her son Matt seen in the photo above. (Full disclosure – my daughter-in-law is Caitie Bowes, whose father Mickey and Bobby Bowes were brothers. Bobby, who passed in 2018 (click here,) was married to Pat and Matt is their son. Got all that? It is that County thing where all of us are somehow related, connected and one big communal family.)
The following video features Bobby and Matt talking about their stuffed ham operation:
One year I joined in the Bowes operation when they were stuffing hams and my ulterior motive for doing so was to try and nail down Bobby’s recipe. Turns out that, as Bobby notes in the video, he doesn’t really have a set recipe. As you see in the video, the ingredients all got mixed and tossed while Bobby would add the seasonings. Every so often he would scoop up a sample and taste it only to say each time “Needs more pepper.” (And yes, he did sound a little like Christopher Walken saying “Needs more cowbell” when he said it.)
Whenever he did this, those of us mixing it would taste it too and pretty much everybody would exclaim how spicy and how hot it tasted only to have Bobby say “Naw, all that will boil out. It needs a little more pepper.” He would then grab the pepper container and dole out another stream or two of it throughout the ingredients while we continued to mix it. This would go on for awhile with Bobby adding pepper until he was satisfied that it was hot enough. When he says in the video that he liked it a “little zippy and little on the hot side” he wasn’t kidding. As for getting his recipe, forget about it; but I did learn that making it “a little zippy” made it mighty tasty.
Music-wise there is no category I could find for “Music to Stuff a Ham By.” However, there are several lists for “Music to Cook By” including this one which directed me to the following video. (I’m not so sure that Jake is talking about tasting food though.)