Apr 26, 2006  |  By: GEORGE OLIVE  | COMMENTS     

I’m not a big horseracing fan. I’ve never been to the Kentucky Derby, although I do like the contrast of quietly sipping a tall mint julep while watching short athletic men bouncing around on horses. If you’re like me, horseracing is forever frozen with the image of the English Ascot races in the movie "My Fair Lady"—all those fabulous hats, and nobody cared who won.

Last year, the surprise win of Giacomo at the Derby had the announcers mispronouncing all over the place. This year’s names seem to be less pronunciation hurdles than conceptual ones. It’s hard to know what to make of the horse names "Lawyer Ron" and "Deputy Glitters." They sound like either an odd gay couple or a trashy plotline from "Boston Legal."

Even non-racing fans know that the Kentucky Derby is held at Churchill Downs in Louisville. When you think of Louisville or Kentucky you don’t immediately think of food the way you do when you say Boston or San Francisco or Louisiana. But in fact, there is regional cooking in Kentucky that goes beyond mint juleps. The most famous dish is burgoo (accent on the first syllable), which sounds like it ought to be the nickname of a politician, "Vote for William ‘Bubba Burgoo’ O’Reily."

In fact, I’d love to see a Kentucky Derby where all the horses have food names. Ms. Julep Mint would be a perfect name for a filly or local drag queen. Or better yet, all the horses have names that are ingredients in a recipe, so when they’re running, the announcer would be doing a cooking show at the same time. "And now here comes ‘Half Pound Of Ground Round’ followed closely by ‘Cup Of Chopped Onion’ and ‘Peeled Tomatoes,’" he’d say. By the time the race was over, the clubhouse restaurant would be full of people ordering chili.

ACTUALLY, THE MOST appropriate food names for these horses would be those of the ingredients in a Kentucky burgoo, a meat-heavy mixture that probably used to have a lot of whatever game the local hunters killed that season—deer, squirrel, rabbit, opossum—but now includes whatever you hunt at a supermarket.

The more kinds of meat the better. Minimally, a good burgoo contains some lamb for authenticity (sheep being an important industry in Kentucky), but many recipes also include beef, pork, veal and chicken. Including local game would put your burgoo in the winner’s circle. Horsemeat, however, would be considered tacky, especially on Derby day.

Vegetables include at least potatoes, cabbage, onions, corn and tomatoes, although many recipes add okra, beans, peppers and carrots.

If this all begins to sound more or less like a vegetable meat soup/stew, it is, with some hot peppers and Worcestershire sauce for kick. What seems to be critical is that you cook the hell out of everything. Many recipes say cook as long as possible, sometimes up to 12 hours for it to be authentic burgoo. This requires either a two- or three-day period of extended cooking sprints, or a burgoo marathon from morning until evening. Besides the initial cooking and separating of the meats, you don’t have to do a lot but keep it simmering.

If you don’t feel like going through all the work, go to a burgoo festival where you can get it ladled from big kettles and swap horse breeding and squirrel shooting stories with the native Kentuckians. Or you can even order some great native burgoo online from the Moonlight Bar-B-Q Inn, www.moonlite.com, which has several Kentucky locations and is famous for its family recipe.