Month: January 2023

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True Grits

I have before me an article out of one of those upscale magazines devoted to the South as an intellectual and cultural milieu. This magazine is printed on the finest paper, has photographs taken by talented people, and if you put it on your coffee table, you’re liable to impress someone with your je ne sais quoi.

Inside, an article on Southern food (ever-so-quaintly called “fixin’s”) targets “a grand grits revival.” The author cites grits pilaf, grits croquettes, stone-ground grits with morels, Southern fried grits, grits crackers, Logan Turnpike grits (God only knows what that is), and sweetbreads with grits as evidence of this renaissance.

People, this is chic commercial jive operating under the auspices of promoting a naturally progressive cuisine. Southern cooking is progressive; as new ingredients become available they’re assimilated into traditional recipes, often with good results, and as far as cultural assimilation is concerned, Southern cooking is a brilliant hodgepodge of distinct cultural influences, Native American, West European, and African, the tripod which forms the basis of the cuisine itself, and as new peoples with different traditions move into the region over time the such basic elements as grits as we know them will reflect these changes in wonderful ways we can’t begin to fathom.

But a shotgun wedding with French cuisine (or any other cuisine, for that matter) is much too artificial to be taken seriously. This effort seems more intended to get people to pay exorbitant amounts for a serving of grits than it is to create a compatible blend of ingredients. For better or worse, grits are versatile; they’re essentially starch, as are potatoes, rice or pasta. But can you honestly claim as the author does that adding “innovative twists and fresh accents” such as morels and/or sweetbreads to grits that you have a dish that “reflect(s) the changing nature of the South”?

I think not. For one thing, these recipes are the products of commercial establishments, of upscale restaurants designed to attract diners who have the time and money to eat at high-end tables. Recipes such as these tend to be the brainchildren of down-home boys and girls raised on their mothers’ or grandmothers’ good Southern cooking who travel to France where they stay in Paris or Provençe, sopping up the local hubris, naturalizing their schoolroom French and drinking themselves into a pixilated delusion of fraternity with the local Jaques Bonhommes on the local vin ordinaire.

While there, they of course become so enamored of le haute cuisine de la France that they decide to launch a personal crusade bent on transforming the cuisine bourgeoise of the American South into “exciting food.” This is to say, of course, food that people will pay a lot of money for because they are “infused with French accents . . . and render (sic) with some finesse.”

For another thing, these commercial recipes are subject to the whims of restaurants, which are notorious for posturing. They have to be. If such recipes reflect the changing nature of the South, then the reflection is of a superficial and ephemeral nature. If foods can indeed be considered a barometer for a region’s or a nation’s changing identity—and they very well can, if examined properly—then foods should reflect such profound and lasting changes as those brought about by shifting demographics and to a somewhat lesser extent technological advances.

To be trendy and fashionable our dishes must be finessed. Is Southern food in, you say? Well, yes, but then it does need sprucing up a bit, doesn’t it? Let’s take that plain fried chicken and serve it on squash waffles with peach salsa. Black-eyed peas? Let’s puree them, pat them out into cakes and fry them in olive oil and serve them with an herb-laden tomato puree. Grits? Yes, with morels, sweetbreads and jalapenos, deep-fried and served with cranberry chutney . . . This cooking is catchy to be sure, but I hardly think it’s significant.

Our best foods are narratives embedded in time and place, told by people for whom cooking is a conversation, not the monologue of a flim-flam chef manqué.

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Seafood Stuffing

Deep-fried stuffed crab shells were once a staple side in fish shacks throughout the lower South. You’ll  still find frozen stuffed shells as well as 1-quart bags of stuffing in markets all across the region. With more crab meat (or shrimp), brushed with butter and baked, this recipe works as a stand-alone buffet dish. It also makes great hush puppies. Beautifully.

Combine two cups crumbled stale cornbread with a cup of coarse bread crumbs and a half cup grated Parmesan. Set aside. Dice a white onion and enough celery to make 2 cups. Sauté in a stick of butter with a clove of minced garlic until soft. Add to crumbs with a slosh of white wine.

Mix thoroughly with a pound of clean lump crab meat. I throw in a few minced cooked shrimp for color. Stir in two or three tablespoons of Creole mustard, and a bit more melted butter to firm it up. Pepper and salt to fit you. Add fresh chopped parsley and lemon juice before cooking. Roll in bread crumbs before if frying.

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Salisbury Steak

When I was growing up in small-town Mississippi in the 1960s, TV dinners were a treat, something different from home-cooked, not better, really, just exotic, some indication that progress had come to the stagnant backwater of Bruce, Mississippi, if only by way of convenience foods. Frozen pizza held a similar glamour.

For a little over a dollar, we could buy fried chicken, meatloaf, or turkey and dressing with piped-in potatoes and neon peas in a space-age metal container, heat it in the oven, and eat them on the sheet-pan fold-away TV tables. I remember eating one the first time I saw “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.” I was eight.

My favorite was the fried chicken, but brother Tom’s was Salisbury steak (as close as he could get to a hamburger). It’s named for James Salisbury, one of those impressive food faddists of the late 19th century whose ranks include Kellogg, Post, and Mary Grove Nichols (by far the coolest of this three.)

Salisbury advocated the same low-carb diet as Tarnower and Atkins (known now as paleo), his being very much meat-centered. Salisbury’s version of a “lean beef cake,” calls for meat “from the centre of the round” procured from “well-fatted animals that are from four to six years old,” but any lean is good.

For a pound of beef, add a quarter cup bread crumbs, and if you don’t have any of those little-bitty cans of tomato sauce, work in a generous squirt or two of ketchup along with a good dusting of black pepper. Don’t over-work the meat. Form into no more than four cakes about an inch thick. Cook in a low oven to medium well.

While this recommendation doesn’t fit the doctor’s diet, my optimal serving of Salisbury steak requires mushroom gravy (a light one), creamed potatoes with a little pitty-pat of butter, and green peas, just like Mother Swanson served.

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Gâteau des Rois Provençal

Sure, go ahead and buy one of those puffed-up cardboard glue-filled dyed-and-painted THINGS sold as king cakes. Hell, you’re just going to get drunk and (try to) get laid, and who eats the damn thing anyway, right?

But if you are properly inspired by the carnaval spirit of Shrovetide, then you would find fuller satisfaction in serving a work of your own hands, a creation invested with your love and care, the mirror in a minor way of the sacrifice around which the season is arraigned.

Finding a recipe for a Provençal Twelfth Night couronne briochée (crown brioche) was surprisingly problematic, and here is where I thank my friends the Bucklers for their cogent translation. The recipe may seem daunting at first, but it’s nothing more than a simple light bread, sweet-“ish” and rich with a dense texture, and as with all basic breads the emphasis is on procedure rather than ingredients.

Let me encourage you to make a test version some time before you plan to serve the cake to ensure a more perfect presentation. Also, instead of a plastic baby or some such nonsense, make the crowning ‘prize’ a piece of dried fruit—I use an apricot—and for goodness sakes just use a simple glaze such as a marmalade or a syrup—fig preserves are wonderful—with candied fruit for a topping instead of glitter and spray paint. Let the good times roll!

2 cups of well-sifted flour
1 packet active dry yeast
1/4 cup sugar
Zest from 1/2 orange
1 egg
2/3 stick softened butter
1/4 cup warm orange flower water (optional) or water

Put the water and orange flower water into a bowl, add the yeast, stir until dissolved and set it to the side to bloom. In another bowl, whisk the egg with a fork. Pour the flour into a mixer bowl, making a well in the middle. Add the sugar, orange zest, the water/yeast mixture as well as the beaten egg into the well. Mix on low, adding the butter in pats and continue to mix for 5 minutes alternating between low and high speed. Scrape the dough—it should be very sticky—into a large oiled bowl, cover with a clean cloth and leave it to rise for 2 hours (no more than 3 or a crust will form).

Line a baking sheet with parchment paper, dust lightly with flour and turn the dough out on this surface. Then sprinkling with more flour as needed to make the dough manageable, re-form the ball on the baking sheet and push your thumbs in the middle of the ball, all the way down to the baking sheet to form a crown. Turn the dough to widen hole, then cover with a cloth and let rise for another hour and a half or thereabouts. At this point, you can also refrigerate the covered dough overnight and bringit to room temperature before baking in the morning. The finished dough only takes 15-20 minutes to bake in a hot (400) oven until golden brown. Glaze, decorate and enjoy!

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Red Rose Sausage Sandwich Filling

Red Rose imitation smoked sausage was originally produced by the Jackson Packing Company, which from 1945 to 1990 sold processed meats from their plant on South Gallatin Street. Red Rose was marketed under the company’s flagship Magnolia brand, which was purchased by Polk’s Meat Products in Magee. The sausages are sold in 24-ounce packages, usually three links. Red Rose at home is sliced into sections, split, fried or grilled and served with beans or potatoes. Two Jackson eateries, the Beatty Street Grocery and the Big Apple Inn on Farish, serve Red Rose sandwiches.

This recipe is a riff on the restaurants’ sausage sandwiches, the innovation here combining the slaw with the sausage stuffing, which works beautifully. Peel the casings from the sausages, break the filling into a heavy skillet—chopped onion would be a nice option—and cook until heated through. Continue cooking until most of the grease is cooked out. Drain thoroughly and add about 4 ounces of slaw; that works out to half a large container from KFC. Serve warm on Bunny burger or slider buns with a dusting of black pepper and several shakes of Crystal hot sauce.

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My Baby Skillet

The most cherished and versatile element of my batterie de cuisine is a well-seasoned 6” cast iron skillet I inherited from my sister Cindy, who called it her “baby skillet”.

Now, Cindy called anything of a diminutive nature  “baby”; a hand spade was a “baby shovel” and I swear I once heard her call Massachusetts a “baby state”.

“Cindy,” I said, “It’s the Bay State.”

“That’s not what I said,” she replied with a sharp glance. I let it drop; I’d learned a long time ago you can’t win an argument with a big sister.

This skillet is just the thing you need to use for baking in small amounts. This little honey is perfect for good half-dozen (or four catheads). It’s also ideal for a pan of cornbread that will feed at least four easily, and a meat loaf that will feed three. When it comes to baked pasta, I would dearly love to have three more of these skillets to use for a manicotti party, one pan of four for every two people.

They’re also inexpensive, but if you’re lucky,  you get one from someone you love.

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Fannye’s Pigeons

Fannye Cook was a pioneer environmentalist who championed the protection and preservation of Mississippi’s rich natural environment. She led the campaign to create the Mississippi Department of Wildlife, Fisheries, and Parks, and its educational and research arm, the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science.

Fannye Addine Cook was born in Crystal Springs, Mississippi on July 19, 1889. By that time, Mississippi like most of the South was catastrophically denuded of the great virgin forests that stretched from east Texas to tidewater Virginia. In A Turn in the South, V.S. Naipaul spoke with a woman in Jackson who said, “When I was a little girl—say in 1915—they were still clearing (the forests). They would go and chop around these mighty oaks and they would then die and they would cut them. When they were going to clear out a field they would kill the trees. I never paid any attention to it. It was what they did.”

As James Cummins notes in his Preface, “the blackland prairie of eastern Mississippi had been cultivated to less than one percent of its former size, “White-tailed deer, Louisiana black bear, American alligator, wood duck, and other species were nearly eliminated by lawless exploitation. Streams and rivers were choked with eroding soil. The idea of caring for the land and its community of inhabitants, what writer and ecologist Aldo Leopold called a ‘land ethic,’ had not taken hold in Mississippi.”

That this biography of Fannye includes in its first few pages the following vivid documentation of passenger pigeons in Mississippi strikes a strong, graceful and resounding note against a bleak lack of consideration for the natural world. The passenger pigeon was once the most abundant bird, perhaps even the most abundant vertebrate, on the planet. Audubon once watched a flock pass overhead for three days and estimated that at times more than 300 million pigeons flew by him each hour.

But these birds were slaughtered unmercifully during the 19th century, and after a description of one massacre, Audubon wrote, “Persons unacquainted with these birds might naturally conclude that such dreadful havoc would soon put an end to the species. But I have satisfied myself, by long observation, that nothing but the gradual diminution of our forests can accomplish their decrease, as they not unfrequently quadruple their numbers yearly, and always at least double it.”

From this perspective, these numbers seem incredulously inflated, yet as the slaughters continued and the forests fell–particularly the great beech woods of the Ohio Valley–the passenger pigeon declined in number with proportionate rapidity, and their extinction was sealed by the death of the last known member of the species, a female named Martha (after the first First Lady) that died on September 1, 1914 at the Cincinnati Zoo.

Though many of Cook’s specimens at the old Jefferson Street museum were destroyed by water during the 1979 Jackson flood, her documents and other materials form the core of the 18,000-volume library in the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science. It was there I sought information about the last passenger pigeons in Mississippi. A long-time librarian at the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science, Mary Stripling, provided me with this information concerning passenger pigeons in Mississippi.

“Jesse,” Mary wrote, “You are grasping at straws looking for the last one sighted in Mississippi.” She then cited several primary resources for more information, and also gave me the last sight records in their collection, adding that they appear to be handwritten by Miss Cook herself.

Year:  1848; Observer:  T. J. Pierce; Place: Brookhaven – Bayou Pierre. “One fall the pigeons came one afternoon by the thousands. There were so many and they were so thick the sun could not be seen and they darkened the sky. They flew low, many of them only 10 or 12 feet, so low that they could be knocked down with brush. They settled in the trees just on edge of grandfather’s farm and weighted them down. Many men and boys went out and shot them to eat — meat dark about like guinea. Only this one time were they seen there.”

Year : 1878; Observer: G. M. Cook;  Place: Copiah County – Utica. “Still a good many pigeons in Pearl River swamp and on hills. Daddy killed several at one shot out of a flock of about 20 in the top of a big pine tree over 100 ft. high (short leaf pine). In 1858 very large flocks so large and so low that Daddy and other school kids would run thru them with arms spread. The birds moved out of their way just far enough to keep from getting caught by the children.”

Undoubtedly straggling bands of passenger pigeons survived in Mississippi for  perhaps a decade afterwards but were likely exterminated–well before the turn of the century. Yes, I was grasping at straws, but I knew where to look for the information I needed about the natural world in the state of Mississippi and thanks to Fannye Cook I found it. Whether you’re a hunter, a hiker or just someone loves Mississippi, buy this book, support local conservation groups, and care for your share of the planet.

And remember Martha.

 

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Roots Remoulade

Though the Larousse Gastronomique is considered by many the final court of authority on Gallic cuisine, that monumental work may not be without an occasional chink in its venerable armor.

One potential perforation involves its recipe for a remoulade, which calls for a cup of mayonnaise with two tablespoons mixed herbs (parsley, chives, chervil and tarragon), one tablespoon drained capers, two finely diced cornichons and a few drops of anchovy essence (optional). No doubt this mixture is savory, subtle and delicious, but note the Librairie Larousse was a Parisian publishing house specializing in encyclopedias and dictionaries, and as such I find it odd (I can’t quite call it inaccurate) that this recipe ignores the origins of the word “rémoulade” itself, which is derived from the dialectal French, rémola, with origins in the Latin word for horseradish, armoracea.

Given this (impeccable) classical precedent, I find it altogether appropriate if not requisite that any recipe for a remoulade, be it white, red or green (yes, children, a green remoulade: spinach) should include horseradish, but yes, anchovies are nice.

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Yancy’s Potluck Casserole

At some point in your life you’re going to impress the wrong person the right way and find yourself invited to a potluck supper, obliging you not only to be presentable and reasonably polite for up to two hours, but to bear food that everybody likes and won’t put the cheese tray in a bad light.

This dish fits the bill, doesn’t take a lot of time or money to make, works just as well for second weddings or canasta nights, and is always a big hit at cemetery homecomings. You’ll bring home an empty Pyrex whatever the occasion; it’s colorful, rich, buttery and, it must be said, “freezes beautifully”. This recipe provides a dozen or so 6 oz. servings.

Cook 1 pound extra-wide egg noodles, drain, drizzle lightly with vegetable oil, toss, and place in a large bowl. Add 2 cups diced and lightly cooked celery and carrots, 2 cups frozen green peas (you can add these right to the mix), 3 cups shredded chicken (canned white is really good for this) and 2 cups diced ham. Toss with 1 stick melted butter and 2 cups freshly-grated Parmesan cheese. Bake in a casserole at 300 for about 20 minutes.