Here’s the rub on grilling meat
By veronica hinke Contributor June 16, 2011 11:46AM
Esther Kaplan applies her late father’s grilling rub, “Izzy Kaplan’s Rub” to a chicken. | Joel Lerner~Sun-Times Media
Izzie Kaplan’s Rub
(From Esther Kaplan)
4 parts Hungarian sweet paprika (Esther Kaplan uses three parts Hungarian sweet paprika and 1 part spicy paprika.)
2 parts salt
1 part granulated garlic
Mix paprika, salt and garlic together in small bowl. Add just enough water to form a paste. Mix thoroughly. Use a brush to coat chicken or roast beef before roasting in oven or on a spit.
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Updated: June 29, 2011 10:44AM
One of Esther Kaplan’s most cherished possessions is her late father’s grilling rub recipe, “Izzie Kaplan’s Rub.”
“It’s a down home, ‘why not’ kind of recipe,” the Evanston resident said of the simple blend of paprika, salt and garlic that her father, a kosher butcher, used to season rotisserie chicken and roast beef.
In many ways, his recipe helps keep her heroic dad’s memory alive. Isidor “Izzie” Kaplan worked as a butcher as a young man in Warsaw, Poland — before escaping from the Nazis in the 1940s into Russia, where he set up a meat shop in Leningrad.
“Rationing was harsh,” Kaplan explained. “To have more money to feed his family, he stole beef fat for sale on the black market. He was caught and became a prisoner in Siberia, where he used a shovel to dig deep holes in the ground for telephone and telegraph poles.”
One of those holes helped Izzie escape the gulag. He hid in a hole, freezing, until long after dark when the guards left.
“He walked, barely clothed, in the freezing night to the small town where his family lived,” Kaplan said.
When the Nazis attacked Russia, Izzie joined the Polish brigade of the Russian army. Through every Nazi-ransacked town Izzie crossed with the brigade, he combed the brutally ravaged spaces searching for Jewish survivors — giving them food and placing them in homes where they could regain their strength.
“He had food and a gun, the two most powerful convincers. I guess, at that time, he had become a guardian angel,” Kaplan said of her dad. Particularly to one young woman he met at Chozov, a small Polish town near the Russian border. Izzie gave two long salamis and three long loaves of bread to the frail woman who had days earlier narrowly escaped
Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. She had just returned to her home town, where she discovered her family had perished and someone had taken over her father’s candy store. She and Izzie, who believed his family had perished in the siege of Leningrad, married one week later. While pregnant with Esther, who was born in 1946, the couple fled the onset of communism in Poland by immigrating to Brooklyn. Izzie worked as a butcher until borrowing money from his wife’s uncle to buy a butcher shop and bungalow colony in the Catskill Mountains. In summertime, the bungalows were a haven for New Yorkers escaping the sweltering air conditioner-scarce city.
“No one wanted to heat up their bungalow by cooking, so starting Thursday night and through Friday morning, my father would be cooking nonstop on huge rotisseries,” Esther said. “He was able to cook 16 barbecued chickens or eight roast beefs at a time. They would all be sold by 3 p.m. on Friday. This was the origin of Izzie Kaplan’s spice mix for chicken or beef.”
“People couldn’t get enough of it,” The Spice House writes about Izzie Kaplan’s rub on its website, where the recipe is posted.
Hungarian sweet paprika, which is made by grinding roasted peppers, is the main ingredient of Izzie’s rub.
Paprika, whether sweet or smoked, is as popular now as a flavor enhancer for grilled meats as it was during Izzie’s time. Cory Morris, chef de cuisine at Mercat a la Planxa in Chicago, uses paprika to season his modern recipes.
He has used mild smoked paprika in a rub blend to flavor smoked lamb shoulder. The recipe is a mix of hot smoked paprika and sweet smoked paprika, kosher salt, pepper, brown sugar, garlic powder, onion powder, ground cumin, turmeric, dried sage and oregano, dry mustard and powder made from nora chilies, small, heart-shaped chilies that are commonly used in Spanish kitchens.
“Smoked paprika adds the nice flavor of pimiento peppers, and a great depth of flavor when they are roasted over oak wood,” Morris said.
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