The Hoka had two signature desserts: the New York-style cheesecake made by the Freer sisters, and a hot fudge pie made by Jani Mae Locke Collier. Jani Mae is a native of Oxford. She and my sister Cindy lived together at a big house at the end of North 14th in the mid-1970s when the Hoka started. Jani brought this recipe to the Moonlight when Betty Blair got it going. Jani Mae is married to Emmett Collier, who makes beautiful pottery in Brandon, Mississippi. It’s a very simple recipe, easily made, and best served à la mode.
Jani Mae’s Hot Fudge Pie
1 cup sugar 1 stick butter ½ c. plain flour 5 tablespoons cocoa 2 eggs beaten
Cream butter and sugar, mix well with flour, cocoa and eggs. Spoon into a toasted pie crust. Place in middle rack of oven at 350 until firm in the middle, about 20 minutes or so. Serves four.
Slit bread, brush with olive oil, sprinkle with an Italian herbal blend, and layer with mozzarella, black olives, and finely-minced shallots. Assemble, brush with more oil, and bake in a moderate oven (300) until crisp. Cut into sticks.
Most people claim I’m an old ass who’s quick to fuss about any damned thing in the world. Let me confirm that accusation by pointing out that when cooking New Orleans-style red beans most people insist on using the wrong beans.
Yes, that’s right. Instead of honest-to-goodness red beans, most people—even most vendors—use kidney beans, which are—yes—red, but they aren’t the right red. You’ll see small kidney beans marketed as red beans all the time; even the Camilla brand red beans are kidneys, as are those used by the Blue Runner people.
However, most markets in the mid-South will have honest-to-goodness red beans sold simply as red beans. If you look at the ingredients, you’ll find “small red beans,” not kidneys as you’ll find on the Camilla package or on the Blue Runner label.
Wave me off and say there’s only a whisker’s difference between the two, but it’s crucial; a matter of veracity.
One of our most enduring social mechanisms is that by which elitism becomes more ostensibly manifest in people who come from humble backgrounds.
Take for example any given one of those Upper East Side hipsters who infest the trendier corners of New York City and act as if they’re the apex of the social universe when in fact most if not all of them grew up in a fly-over state and moved to the city in hopes of sharing a line of coke with Ivanka Trump.
A less current but perhaps more familiar example would be Craig Claiborne, who grew up in a boarding house in Indianola, Mississippi, and eventually became the arbiter of culinary taste for the nation. Claiborne’s excesses in his disregard for the “little people” were such that he was chastised by Pope Paul VI for a $4000 dinner for two in Paris he enjoyed with his partner Pierre Franey in 1975.
L’Osservatore Romano deplored the swinish display while millions were starving, the French press noted that the price of the meal represented a year’s wages for most workers, and American columnist Harriet Van Horne wrote–no doubt with some degree of smugness–“This calculated evening of high-class piggery offends an average American’s sense of decency. It seems wrong morally, aesthetically and in every other way”.
Claiborne was nonplussed, which is the typical reaction of the wealthy to their extravagant indulgences. “Let them eat cake,” indeed.
Given this display of culinary snootery, it’s somewhat of a surprise that we find on page 312 of Claiborne’s The New York Times Cookbook–after a whole slew of soufflés and between two egg curries–a recipe for pickled eggs, which are to most people the least sophisticated dish in the world. Is this a chink in Claiborne’s Tiffany armor?
Perhaps, but then again perhaps not; one recipe I have from a Junior League-type cookbook published in the 1930’s claims that they’re “ever so good chopped into hash, and provide just the right touch bedded on greens with a dressing of sharp, spicy goodness.” Maybe pickled eggs acquired the blue-collar brush after they became a snack staple in Southern pool halls and honky-tonks; then again, maybe that’s where they got their start.
For every half dozen boiled eggs, bring to heat 1 cup water, 1/2 cup vinegar, 1 tablespoon mixed pickling spices, 2 slices ginger root, a crushed clove of garlic, and a tablespoon salt. Mull, cover eggs with spiced vinegar water, seal and set aside for at least 2 days.
The culinary history of Jackson, Mississippi is filled with colorful characters, including one who exemplifies the genteel aspects of any Southern city in the early decades of the last century.
Winifred Green Cheney was born into a very old Jackson family; originally from Maryland, the Greens moved to Jackson in the early 19th century. Winifred was born in the second family home at 647 North State Street in 1913. She graduated magna cum laude from Millsaps with a bachelor of arts in Latin in 1933, and on October 25, 1934 (after a 7-year engagement) she married Reynolds Cheney, who became one of the city’s most prominent attorneys.
While Winifred, in almost every respect, was a model for a well-to-do woman of social standing in the mid-century South (active in her church and in social charities, etc.), in another she was not: Winifred was a writer. In the course of her life, she wrote (about cooking, mainly) for such well-known publications as The National Observer, The Rotarian, Southern World and, of course, Southern Living. She published two cookbooks (both by Oxmoor House), Cooking for Company (1985) The Southern Hospitality Cookbook (1976).
Winifred’s Southern Hospitality Cookbook is not only a treasure-trove of splendid recipes, but as a whole is a tutorial of upper-class cooking in the mid-20th century South. The recipes are rich and varied; the ingredients are often expensive, and the times for preparation are usually considerable. Indeed, one of the most frequent critiques of the book is how complicated, indeed “fussy” the recipes are, many often calling for minute amounts of several various ingredients and elaborate stage-by-stage instructions on their preparation. But this is the way Winifred and the women of her generation cooked; they had plenty of time on their hands, and more often than not enough money to spend on costly and hard-to-find ingredients.
Many of the recipes are heirlooms from Virginia and the Eastern Seaboard, as well as many from “my great-grandmother … from Lone Star Plantation in the Mississippi Delta, written in her fine Spencerian hand.” (“But there were no directions,” Winifred adds. “I found this to be true with most of the old ‘receipts’ in her walnut escritoire papeterie.”) She also includes recipes from dozens and dozens of friends and neighbors: Odel Herbert’s Carrot Casserole, Vivienne Wilson’s Asparagus and Carrot Escallop, Claudia Whitney’s Meat Spaghetti, Zollie Kimbrough’s Shrimp Casserole, Linda Lacefield’s Apricot Stuffing for Duck, Becky Voght’s Caramel Icing; and many, many more.
The Southern Hospitality Cookbook is a milestone in the culinary history of Jackson as well as the Middle South, but what takes it to a higher level is a short essay by her editor at The National Observer, David W. Hacker (“Savoring Miss Welty’s Wit at a Special Seafood Lunch”), and a preface by Eudora herself, “A Note on the Cook” in which she writes:
“The original Lady Bountiful was the invention of an Irish dramatist in 1707. Winifred exists as her own version. She makes her rounds with baskets and trays as a simple extension of her natural hospitality.In good weather, but especially in bad, splashing forth in raincoat and tennis shoes, carrying a warm cake straight from her oven, she sympathizes with you or celebrates with you by sharing her table with you.
When Jane Austen’s Miss Bates, attending Mr. Weston’s ball, is seated at the supper, she surveys the table with a cry, ‘How shall we ever recollect half these dishes?’ When I sit down to Sunday dinner at Winifred’s, I feel just like Miss Bates. What guest could not? But it now becomes possible for us to recollect the dishes we’ve dined on there. The cook herself has recollected the recipes for them in her own cookbook. It’s like another extension of Winifred Cheney’s gracious hospitality; she has added another leaf to her table.”
Take two cups of self-rising flour and sift in dry a scant teaspoon of baking soda. Add 1/3 cup cold vegetable shortening, and mix thoroughly with your fingers until granular.
Working quickly, stir in enough chilled buttermilk to make a sticky dough. Throw this dough out on a generously-floured surface, sprinkle with a scant more flour and knead once or twice, no more than enough to make a manageable mass. Roll out thick, about half an inch, and, using a sharp edge, cut into large rounds, at least 3″. Again, work quickly so that the dough doesn’t get warm; the soda has to work in the oven.
Place the biscuits–just touching–in a lightly greased skillet or thick metal pan. Pop them into a very hot oven for about a quarter an hour until golden-brown and fragrant. Brush with butter while hot.
This recipe comes from Dr. Billie Baker Swift. I received it a few years ago, but somehow lost it among a lot of other messages, and I’m only now getting around to posting it. I’ve also lost track with Billie, so if any of you know her, please tag her for me.
I first met LW while working my way through school and working at the Abbey’s Irish Rose. L.W. and his friend Sean were often at the Abbey and I believe they were working on Master’s Degrees in English. As time and my education progressed, I ended up working as a bartender in most of the everchanging bars in Oxford; Beth Munday and I were the only females working as bartenders at that time.
Eventually I ended up at the Warehouse (I think the Peddler by then) with LW., where he perfected this Bloody Mary mix. We made this mix 2 or 3 times a week. It makes a mildly spicy mix which can be kicked up with more Tabasco for those who prefer it that way. Our measuring cups were bar glasses, highball glasses, the type for gin and tonics, probably 12 oz.; I’ll leave it to you to come up with exact measurements. This makes a large quantity, and refrigerates well, a week at least.
Combine 2 large (46 oz.) cans of V-8 juice with 1/3 a highball glass (see above) each lemon juice and Tabasco (@ 4 oz,, jly) and 1/2 a glass of Worcestershire sauce (@ 8 oz. jlyi). Shake well. We garnished with whatever was handy; celery; lemons; pearl onions and olives. These days I would put bacon on the garnish.
When November comes, hunters up and down the Mississippi flyway flock to the wild with guns and dogs. In the Mississippi Delta, arguably the heart of the flyway, men of a certain feather abandon their usual nests of domesticity for camp, in Irwin Hester’s case his duck camp on Concordia Island in Bolivar County.
“It’s not really an island,” Irwin said. “If anything, it’s a peninsula, since the river makes a tight loop around it.” He looked out the window at the sunset spread out over Arkansas. “You’d think they’d have a special name for a riparian peninsula, but they don’t.”
Irwin retired from what he calls “the oil business” almost a decade ago. He received his degree in geology from Mississippi State in the early 70s and began working with Gulf Oil, stayed with them through the merger, and remained, working his way up the ladder, eventually landing in Pittsburgh at U-PARK.
An only child, Irwin never married (“Just too damned busy,” he explained). When he retired in 2012, he came back home to Mississippi, made a home, renewed old friendships, and moved his folks’ old home to the end of a dirt road on Concordia Island. Twice a year, the beginning of duck season and the end, November and January, he holds camp.
“I make real, Texas-style chili,” Irwin said. “It’s the best, and once you’ve had it, you’ll never call anything else chili. I learned to make it when I lived in Austin. I knew a guy who cooked it at his hunt camp up on the Pedernales River. He said he got his recipe from Lady Bird Johnson herself.
Irwin’s chili has no beans, no tomatoes, and no onions. He uses a lean cut of beef, usually a top round, cut into large chunks, coats these in a mixture of smoked paprika, crushed leaf oregano, cayenne, and ground cumin, and browns them in a cast iron Dutch oven. For each pound of beef, he soaks, peels and seeds four anchos.
He uses the water from the peppers in the beef, adding more to cover about an inch, and places the heavily-lidded pot in the oven at a low temperature (“Just enough to make it simmer”) in the morning, and by the time the sun gets an angle, the chili must be stirred (“Once is enough”) and returned to the oven for another hour. When men return from the field, the fire is blazing, bottles opened, and a guitar is passed around. He keeps Crystal on the table.
“It’s as good a bowl of red as you’re going to get on this side of the Mississippi,” Irwin says.
