Month: April 2020

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ANZAC Biscuits

In 1915, Australian and New Zealand soldiers formed part of an Allied expedition that set out to capture the Gallipoli Peninsula to open the way to the Black Sea for the Allied navies. The ANZAC force landed at Gallipoli on 25 April, meeting fierce resistance from the Ottoman Army, but the campaign dragged on for eight months. At the end of 1915, the Allied forces were evacuated after both sides had suffered heavy casualties and endured great hardships.

Though the Gallipoli campaign failed the actions of the Australian and New Zealand troops during the campaign bequeathed an intangible but powerful legacy. The creation of what became known as an “Anzac legend” became an important part of the national identity, and is often credited with securing the psychological independence of the nation. News of the landing at Gallipoli made a profound impact on Australians and New Zealanders at home and 25 April quickly became the day on which they remembered the sacrifice of those who had died in the war.

This recipe comes from my old friend and neighbor Tom Lestrade. He said they’re just wonderful, and if you don’t want to trouble with golden syrup (which I recommend you do) Karo dark is a good substitute.

ANZAC BISCUIT RECIPE

1 cup old-fashioned rolled oats
1 cup unbleached all-purpose flour
3/4 cup sugar
3/4 cup shredded or flaked sweetened or unsweetened coconut
1 stick butter
2 tablespoons golden syrup (recipe below)
1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
2 tablespoons hot water

Preheat the oven to 300°F. Line baking sheets with parchment paper. Take half the coconut and half the oats and chop well. Stir together the oats, flour, sugar, salt, and coconut. Place the butter and syrup in a small saucepan or microwave-safe container, and cook or microwave (medium 3-4 min) until the butter has melted and the mixture is bubbling. In a medium-sized bowl, combine the baking soda and boiling water, then stir in the hot butter. Be prepared: the mixture will bubble up, foamy, energetically. This is why you’re using a medium (rather than small) bowl. Stir the butter mixture into the dry ingredients. Hand fold in bowl until everything is moist, no dry spots. Drop the dough, by teaspoonfuls, onto the prepared baking sheets. A teaspoon cookie scoop works well here. Leave at least 1 1/2″ between them; they’ll spread quite a bit. Bake the cookies for 10 minutes, until they’re a deep mahogany brown; the cookies are meant to be crisp/crunchy and dark brown, not chewy/light brown. Remove the cookies from the oven, and cool them right on the pan. Store, well wrapped, for a week or so at room temperature; freeze for longer storage.

GOLDEN SYRUP

Golden syrup is a lightly caramelized simple syrup flavored with lemon. Dissolve two and a half cups cane sugar into one cup hot water. Bring to a boil then reduce heat to a bare simmer, add a lemon slice and cook until a golden color.

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Carrot Salad

One of the more delightful elements of human nature is the always-surprising and often revealing insights we get from people who help us see those components of our lives we find mundane and trivial as exotic and interesting. In my experience, foodstuffs provide the most common examples. Take for instance the reaction of my friend Aileen, who is from Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, to carrot salad, a food I’ve always known and more often that not ignored.

Aileen is tall and slender, with thick, beautiful mahogany hair that cascades in waves down to the middle of her back. Even more striking, she is one of the few people I’ve ever known with green eyes, true green with the barest flecks of brown. For all that, she is not the sort of woman most people would describe as beautiful, since she has the sort of face the English deem “horsey” and is embarrassingly awkward, simply devoid of grace walking or sitting, somehow even managing to look uncomfortable lying down. Yet she is kind and gentle. Her husband is a short, blond fellow, handsome in a bunny-rabbitty short of way with the hairiest forearms you’ve ever seen in your life. He plays an accordion player in the oom-pah band at Gluckstadt. They moved here four years ago, which is about the time she first saw carrot salad, at a church social.

“It really stood out,” she said. “I mean, if you think about it, how often do you see things that are orange on a table in the first place? Or raisins? I had to take a couple of spoonfuls and went up to one of the older ladies there, showed her my plate and said how much I liked the slaw. I thought it was slaw; it had grated carrots and mayo, and I thought the raisins were really an original touch. Well, she looked at me like I was from Mars!”

“Aileen,” I said, “do you remember the time you called hushpuppies cornbread fritters?”

She looked at me with those emerald eyes and smiled.

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Waters Walking

The other day my car was being repaired. I had it in the shop for an oil pump problem. I say it’s a car; maybe it’s a truck. I don’t know. It’s a twenty-two year old Jeep Cherokee with crank windows. Nothing fancy and that’s what I like about it. It was cold that morning so I put on my insulated boots with warm packs placed in each toe like hunters do, bundled up with my fingerless gloves, packed my painting kit, and set out walking around the block.

I saw a few people who might have thought I was indigent. I know the look. I’m loaded down like all I have is what I’m carrying. These things are my most valuable possessions. Walkers pass by not saying anything when, if I were dressed nicer and not for painting in the cold, they would probably say hi. I saw some people who recognized me and wandered why I was in the neighborhood. I explain I got married last March and we live around the corner. I’m out looking for something to paint. Things always look different on foot. Nothing is speaking to me yet. Then I come upon a painter friend of mine. We chat about the things going on in each of our lives and I reach down to pet her three legged dog. We say our goodbyes and as they are walking away I see a painting there.

I make a quick mental sketch of her and her companion. I begin setting up. I turn my AirPods on and begin listening to shuffling music. A car stops and a person is looking for some keys that may or may not have been dropped nearby. No luck. A young lady stops with a Polaroid camera and explains she is working on a series of photos depicting the neighborhood. Another car stops to drop off a meal on wheels to an older person. Then I get a call from my mechanic who says he’s going to need another day to finish the oil pump job. It’s okay. It’s all okay.

It’s been a little over two hours and I’m nearly through. It’s best not to get too through. I take a phone photo and post it like I always do. It feels good but I am not sure if it’s the painting or the process of seeing; but it does feel good. Then, I’m flooded with another feeling that I am doing what I am supposed to be doing. All because an oil pump broke and a walk around the block.

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The Little Black Dress of Cakes

My friend John Wills, a fine cook who grew up in east Texas, went to high school in Chicago, attended college in Alaska and now lives in Maine, told me that of all the Southern recipes he brings to the table, the one that most of his guests remember and ask about is pound cake. To be honest,” he said, “I think a lot of people also believe it’s popular in the South because you didn’t have to be able to read to make it, all you had to remember was a pound each of butter, flour, eggs and sugar.”

These days you’ll rarely find a pound cake recipe that doesn’t include milk in some form; Egerton’s “half-pound” recipe in Southern Food (1987) has whole cream. A good pound cake recipe is essential to any cook’s repertoire, and the best to have is a good sour cream version. This recipe comes from Jackson native Winifred Green Cheney’s Southern Hospitality Cookbook (1976). “With no exceptions,” she writes, “this is the best pound cake I have ever tasted.” As with most of Winifred’s recipes, this one is ludicrously meticulous; an eighth of a teaspoon of salt? Resift three times? Honestly.

1/2 cups butter, room temperature
3 cups sugar
6 large eggs, room temperature
1 cup commercial sour cream
3 cups all-purpose flour, measured after sifting
1/2 teaspoon soda
1/8 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon flavoring (vanilla, lemon, or 1/2
teaspoon vanilla and 1/2 teaspoon almond)
Powdered sugar

Cream butter by hand or an electric mixer until it has reached the consistency of whipped cream. When you think you have creamed it enough, cream some more. Slowly dribble in sugar a tablespoon at a time; beat well. Add eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition. Stir in sour cream. Put measured flour into sifter with soda and salt, and resift three times. Add flour cup at a time to creamed butter, blending well with mixer on lowest speed. Add flavoring. (I use vanilla and almond along with 2 tablespoons brandy.) Pour batter into one Bundt pan and one small loaf pan or two large (cake, see below: jly) pans, greased and lined with heavy waxed paper. Bake in a preheated 325° oven: Bundt cake for 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 hours. small loaf for about 55 minutes, large loaves for 65 minutes or until cake tests done. Cool on rack 15 minutes and sprinkle with powdered sugar. Remove from pan and allow to continue cooling to prevent sweating. Yield: 1 (10-inch) Bundt cake and 1 (7- x 3- x 2-inch) loaf cake or 2 (9- x 5- X 3-inch) cakes—40 to 44 servings.

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Czarist Tea

Sweet black tea with lemon was a favorite of the oppressive czarist nobility, and under that guise Russian tea became a staple of pretentious Southern households in the early twentieth century before succumbing to white trash cookbooks in the 70s. For many a winter beverage, the revisionist in me finds it comforting on these last few cool nights of spring before summer’s onslaught.

4 big tea bags
3 quarts water
2 cups pineapple juice
1 cup orange juice
Juice of two lemons
3 cinnamon sticks
2 teaspoons whole cloves

Boil water, remove from heat, and immediately add the tea bags. Remove bags in EXACTLY five minutes or the tea will have a ‘bite’. Add other ingredients, and keep on a low heat for at least an hour before serving. This freezes easily.

 

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The World from Gillespie Place: Edwardian Jackson

I am not from Jackson, nor (even worse) am I from Belhaven. This relegates me to troglodyte status to the natives to this fair city, but before you begin casting aspersions (or something sharper and heavier) let me assure you that Seta Sancton’s The World from Gillespie Place goes a very long way towards explaining why I and others love it so.

Given my primeval ignorance, of course I had to find out who Mrs. Sancton was, and given that I know so few people here, I decided to simply do what I do best and research the matter. This eventually led me to contact Tom Sancton, who among other things is former Paris bureau chief for TIME magazine, professor of journalism at the American University of Paris, Andrew Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Tulane and a jazz clarinetist to boot. He’s also likely to be one of those irritating people who complete the NYTimes crossword even before they finish their second cup of coffee. In response to my query, Mr. Sancton wrote:

Dear Jesse,

Seta Alexander Sancton (1915-2007) was my mother. She was born in Jackson, on North State Street, into a prominent local family (Whartons on mother’s side, Alexanders on father’s side). Her father was Julian P. Alexander, a graduate of Princeton and Ole Miss law school, and an associate justice on the Mississippi Supreme Court. She graduated from Millsaps College, where she was a member of Chi Omega. She was a close personal friend of Eudora Welty, a neighbor from childhood. (My mother’s family lived first on Gillespie Place, then at 1616 Poplar Blvd; Eudora was on Pinehurst.) Seta married my father, New Orleans journalist and novelist Thomas Sancton, in 1941. They lived mostly in New Orleans and had three children of which I am the youngest. When my mother was in her 70s, she decided to write down some family stories and memories for her children and grandchildren. She started jotting down stories on notepaper, the back of envelopes, whatever she had at hand, adding stick figure illustrations as she went along. The result was the book you have in hand. In the 1990s she recorded readings of some of the stories.
Best regards,

Tom Sancton

Seta’s book is the memoir of city full of “sugar and spice and everything nice”, of June bugs and fig trees, lavender lantana and magnolia musk, braided biscuits, sidewalk parades, and ragtime on the Victrolas. “Though Edward VII was no longer on the throne,” Seta writes, “the temper of the times remained Edwardian for our mothers, our grandmothers and for us children.”

The World from Gillespie is a world where maids took children to Smith Park to play on the swings and slides, feed the swan, and eat sugar cookies in the miniature Greek pagoda. Home libraries offered volumes of Dickens, Thackeray, Tennyson and the best-selling works of Zane Gray. Gillespie Place itself was a new subdivision off State Street, and having a mother who was Episcopal and a father who was a Presbyterian was awkward. Going to the state fair was a landmark event as was going downtown to eat at the Bon Ton, the Pantaze, or the Edwards House. Seta’s eyes are filled with the genteel character of Jackson during the 1920s. Yes, of course poverty and oppression were rife at the time, but those and other unpleasantries such as war and epidemics are set aside for bridge luncheons, birthday parties, dragonflies, and swimming in Livingston Lake.

I’m charmed by this picture of Jackson’s past, watch for glimpses of it now, and see it every day. Memory, my children, is a living thing.