Month: August 2023

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Charley Pride’s Baked Beans

As DA of Lafayette County in October, 1962, my father refused to sign a subpoena on the federal officers who guarded James Meredith at Ole Miss issued by a local grand jury for “disturbing the civil peace.”

He loved country music. He was raised on the likes of Jimmie Rodgers, the Carter Family and Roy Acuff; by the time I was ten, I knew damn near every one of Hank William’s songs by heart, and plenty of Loretta and Ernest as well. He also came to like a young singer named “Country Charley Pride” after hearing Pride’s first release in January 1966, “The Snakes Crawl at Night”.

Country music in the mid-1960s was–and largely still is–very much a white venue, so when my mother bought him an 8-track tape of Charley’s songs for him to listen to while he roared around in his new Mustang, she replaced the cover with one she made herself, something he wouldn’t look to hard at, a picture of a cowboy hat or something.

Then there came a day when they were driving somewhere or the other, and Daddy was singing along with Charley, and Momma  turned to him after the song was over and said, “Jess, did you know he’s black?” He snorted and said, “Oh, Barbara, don’t be silly. He’s a country boy from over in Quitman County.” Then she showed him the original label on the tape.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” he said.

Soon after that, Charley made headlines as the first black entertainer on the Grand Ole Opry since DeFord Bailey in 1941, and of course, Jess Jr. told everybody he had been listening to him for years.

Here’s Charley’s’s recipe for Sweet and Sour Baked Beans, which he probably got from a roadie. I found this recipe in Mississippi’s VIP Recipes. This cookbook was published by Phillips Printing in the Jackson area to support a local school; there’s no date and no mention of the school’s name, but the other 42 contributors include John Grisham, Faith Hill, Archie Manning, Walter Peyton, Jimmy Buffet and Mary Ann Mobley.

It’s nice to know our people help one another out even when they’re not at home.

Charlie Pride’s Sweet and Sour Baked Beans

8 bacon slices, pan fried until crisp, drained and crumbled
4 large onions, peeled and cut in rings
½ to one cup brown sugar (more if you like beans on the sweet side)
1 teaspoon dried mustard
½ teaspoon garlic powder (optional)
1 teaspoons salt
½ cup cider vinegar
1 one pound can green lima beans, drained
1 one pound can dark red kidney beans, drained
1 one pound can New England-style baked beans, undrained

Place onions in skillet. Add sugar, mustard, garlic powder and vinegar. Cook 20 minutes, uncovered. Add onion mixture to beans. Add crumbled bacon. Pour into 3-quart casserole. Bake in moderate over at 350 for one hour. Makes 12 servings.

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Side by Side: A Review

At the turn of the last century, north Mississippi was still for the most part a wilderness, little more than a network of villages and towns strung together along dirt and gravel roads, traveled by or with a horse, united only in proximity. The scars of the Civil War ran deep, and the adjusted system of laws in the newly-Reconstructed state were little more than the legal ramifications of military defeat.

Yet the state was growing, law had to be enforced and the cases of Will Mathis and Orlando Lester, grisly in detail, profound in ramifications, proved in to be a public circus ending in a lethal trapeze. Side by Side ‎ ( Pelican Publishing, February 19, 2016) is as much about race than it is of the reestablishment of justice in the South, an ongoing trial if there ever was one.

T.J. Ray’s story of the hanging of Mathis and Lester is one of those books you read and come away thinking, “Wow, that would make a damn good movie.” And it would. Fashioning a screenplay for Side by Side would be aided and enhanced by Professor Ray’s meticulous research, his informative narration that moves us through the court speeches with appropriate dispatch, his accounts of media coverage that enhance the drama now as it did then, and his descriptions of the badlands of Lafayette and Pontotoc Counties that set a sordid Yoknapatawphian stage for what ultimately is a squalid incidence of multiple murder.

Death as the circumscription of all human activity is also the Great Equalizer, uniting men of all stripes, but the hanging of Will and Orlando brought fate and justice together in a jagged gray crescendo.

 

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Jett’s Table

My Aunt Jett learned to cook from her mother, whose people settled a wilderness.

Food was their only pleasure not subject to morals or religion. They sustained themselves and their families on corn and pork with whatever else they could grow or kill. They planted and picked, cooked and baked, dried and canned what they could, making the most of what they had season to season, year to year, generation to generation.

Jett always had something fixed for whatever company might drop in: stewed greens, limas, black-eyed peas, or snap beans, new or creamed potatoes, fried chicken, pork chops, or breaded steak. If it were summer, she’d have fresh sliced tomatoes, fried okra or corn on the cob.She served her meals with sliced onion, cornbread or biscuits and sawmill gravy with sweetened tea to drink; she seasoned with streak-o’-lean, salt, black pepper, and maybe a little cayenne and sage.

Jet’s cooking was simple, but not coarse; it had a balance and symmetry all its own, dictated by the teachings of long-ago voices set in concert with the rhythm of the seasons. Jett thanked God before we ate, and that too is elemental of our sustenance.

Aunt Jett (left) with her sisters Maude and Virgie.
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Brennan’s Eggs Chartres

Sauté a cup of finely chopped white onions in a stick of butter until clear; stir in 3 tablespoons flour. With grace and beauty, blend in a cup and a half of milk mixed with an egg yolk. Stir until smooth and thick. Remove from heat, add six sliced hard-boiled eggs, two tablespoons grated hard cheese, cayenne for heat, and paprika for color. Salt to taste. This recipe serves about eight people.

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Alice’s Salmon Mousse

In my book (which got another rejection this month (“Your approach to Southern cooking is mind-numbingly academic and disturbingly pugnacious.”), Alice Brock is a bazillion times cooler than Alice Waters. Brock’s humor and ill regard for bullshit establishes her biography, My Life as a Restaurant, as the hands-on-hips precursor to Bourdain’s somewhat more cantankerous Kitchen Confidential. Not only that, but Waters never had a decent song written about her, much less an anthem.

Alice and her staff up in Massachusetts had a thing with mousses/mooses. The drawing with this recipe has antlers, and they include a story of a moose falling into a vat of cocoa for the chocolate version. This fixation seems to be prevalent in New England where moose/mooses/meece live, but in this culinary reference, the homonym proves emphatic. This salmon mousse is great hot weather nosh and can be served either from your great-grandmother’s fish mold or if you’re just totally white trash in a bowl.

Put a quarter cup diced onion and lemon juice in a blender with an envelope of gelatin and a half cup hot water. Blend at high speed for one minute, then add a half cup of mayonnaise and 16 ounces of canned salmon. (Red is best, leftover homecooked is wonderful, and pink will do.) Blend/pulse this mixture until smooth. Add a tablespoon paprika and a cup of heavy cream. Blend for about a half minute, and cool for at least 6 hours before serving.

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Jake’s Baked Chicken

Jake claims that I’m a terrible cook. If anyone else were to make such a statement, I’d have to pick up a fork, but Jake enjoys a considerable degree of latitude when it comes to reducing my self-esteem to dust, ashes, and other such lifeless substances.

After all, he has known me for a very long time, has seen me in various degrees of dishevelment and has I must admit choked down more than a few of my less-successful efforts at the stove. Though to avoid argument I acquiesce to his damnation of my kitchen skills, I’m here to tell you the statement is just not true.

Admittedly, Jake’s a good cook (see? I can be charitable!), and at any given time he’s in the kitchen, I’m comfortable with banging away at the keyboard and watching what he calls “black-and-white snoozers” on TCM. And I’m happy as a clam there. But once Jake begins cooking, I have to drop everything about every five minutes for consultations. Unless it’s something he’s cooked for a long time (a limited number of dishes, granted), he trots back and forth to where I’m sitting with a steady stream of questions.

“How much of (insert name of a spice or seasoning) should I use?” “Is it okay if I just use water to poach these meatballs?” “Do I have to use this ground beef? It smells weird” (everything smalls weird to Jake; he’s also colorblind.) “How thick should I slice these mushrooms?” “Where in the hell did you put the (insert name of kitchen commodity)?” Such intense grilling inevitably ends with, “Would you come look at this? I want to see if I did it right.” The results are always beautiful. Of course.

For baked chicken breasts, wash and pat dry split whole breasts of chicken. Brush with light vegetable oil infused with granulated garlic, dried minced onions, rubbed sage, black pepper and salt in a roughly 2:2:1:1:1 ratio. Arrange loosely on a baking sheet or in a large skillet and bake at 350) until the skin is crisp and juices run clear.

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Biscuits for Floozies

Making quick breads is such a basic culinary skill that at one time those persistent legions of people who spend their time minding other people’s business sniffed their disapproval of a newly-wed husband’s wife by saying, “He married a woman who can’t even make biscuits.”

Those were more genteel times. Nowadays, of course, those same people would just say he hooked up with a tramp and be done with it. For all you floozies out there who need a bonus the morning after–like a reputation–here’s how to make biscuits. And if you don’t carry a skillet with you, well, you’re on your own.

Like many short bread recipes, the one for biscuits is more technique than ingredients. Getting the biscuits to rise well is the key, and if you don’t follow a reasonable procedure, you’re going to end up throwing away a pan of hockey pucks.

Your ingredients work best if chilled. Biscuits shouldn’t be worked a lot; excess kneading makes the dough so dense that it won’t rise. Biscuits should also be cut out quickly while the dough is cool, and with a clean, sharp edge that will not pinch. Crowding the biscuits a bit also helps them to rise, but if you get them too close together the centers won’t bake through. Also make sure the oven is hot (450/475) before you put them on a rack in the upper third of the oven.

Buttermilk Biscuits

Take two cups of self-rising flour (I use Martha White) and sift in dry a scant teaspoon of baking soda; activated by the buttermilk, this helps the rise. Work thoroughly into this about 1/3 a cup of cold vegetable shortening or butter; shortening gives a lighter texture, butter a better flavor. Mix with the fingers until it has an almost granular texture. Then, working quickly, stir in enough cold buttermilk to make a sticky dough, about 3/4 cup.

Throw this dough out on a generously-floured surface, sprinkle with a scant more flour and knead a couple of times, enough to coat the dough with flour. Roll out to about a half-inch and cut into rounds. You can make them as big or small as you like, just be sure to cut them with a sharp edge: a Mason jar just won’t work.

Again, work quickly so that the dough doesn’t get warm. Place biscuits just touching in a lightly greased skillet and pop them into a hot oven for about a quarter an hour. You want them golden-brown and fragrant; brush lightly with butter while hot.

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Faulkner and Welty for Children

What compels great writers to write for children? For whatever reason, many do, and some titles are familiar: C.S. Lewis’ Narnia series, Tolkien’s The Hobbit, E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web, and T.S. Eliot wrote Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, a childhood favorite of composer Andrew Lloyd Webber.

More obscure are Joyce’s, The Cat and the Devil, Twain’s, Advice to Little Girls, Woolf’s, The Widow and the Parrot, Mary Shelley’s The Fisher’s Cot, and then we have these little-known children’s books by two of Mississippi’s brightest literary lights; Welty’s The Shoe Bird and Faulkner’s The Wishing Tree.

In 1927, Faulkner gave the story that was to become The Wishing Tree to Victoria “Cho-Cho” Franklin, the daughter of his childhood sweetheart, Estelle Oldham. Faulkner was still infatuated with Estelle and had hopes of her leaving her current husband and marrying him, which she did in 1929. Faulkner typed the book on colored paper, bound it himself and included a lyrical dedication:

        

 

                            To Victoria

     ‘. . . . . . . I have seen music, heard
Grave and windless bells; mine air
     Hath verities of vernal leaf and bird.

     Ah, let this fade: it doth and must; nor grieve,
   Dream ever, though; she ever young and fair.’

But Faulkner made copies for three other children as well, and when Victoria tried to publish the book decades later, copyright had to be worked out between the four. In 1964, Faulkner’s granddaughter Victoria, Cho-Cho’s daughter, got Random House to publish a limited edition of 500 numbered copies, featuring black-and-white illustrations by artist Don Bolognese.

The Wishing Tree is a grimly whimsical morality tale, somewhere between Alice In Wonderland and To Kill a Mockingbird. Dulcie, a young girl, wakes on her birthday to find a mysterious red-haired boy in her room who whisks her, the other children, the maid Alice, and a 92-year old man through a “soft wisteria scented mist” to find the Wishing Tree. They wish, and they unwish, and at the end they meet St. Francis who gives them each a bird–a little winged thought.  The Wishing Tree is about the importance of choosing one’s wishes with consideration. “If you are kind to helpless things, you don’t need a Wishing Tree to make things come true.”

On April 8, 1967, a version of the story appeared in The Saturday Evening Post. Three days later, Random House released a regular edition, which went through three printings that year alone and no more. The book is now regarded as a literary curio from the man who put an Ole Miss coed in a cathouse in Memphis.

Eudora Welty finished what was to become The Shoe Bird in 1963 under the working title Pepe to fulfill a contractual obligation to Harcourt Brace—and to put a new roof on her house. She sent the final draft to Diarmund Russell in March, and he was enthusiastic: “totally charming—something all ages can read.” Eudora readied what was now entitled The Shoe Bird for publication in early 1964 with illustrations by Beth Krush, dedicating it to Bill and Emmy Maxwell’s daughters, Kate and Brookie.

The Shoe Bird is Arturo, a parrot who works in The Friendly Shoe Store “in a shopping center in the middle of the U.S.A.,” helping Mr. Friendly greet customers and bringing him a match for his end-of-the-day pipe. Arturo’s motto is: If you hear it, tell it. One day, a little boy who was leaving the store said, “Shoes are for the birds!” and after the store had closed Arturo, true to his motto, repeats the phrase and all the birds in the world—including a dodo and a phoenix—gather at the shoe store to be fitted for shoes. The Shoe Bird is a nice little story with lots of puns, but it’s heavy-handed with the moral of speaking for oneself instead of just repeating what others say.

Reviews in adult publications were “cordial but restrained,” while reception among children’s literature commentators was either negative or—as in the case of the influential Horn Book, nonexistent. Kirkus Reviews described the novel as uneventful and concludes: “the overly wordy result is so obscure that readers are likely to want to leave dictionaries as well as shoes to the birds.” An orchestral ballet was composed by Welty’s friend Lehman Engel and performed by the Jackson Ballet Guild in 1968. A 2002 choral piece was also commissioned by the Mississippi Boy Choir and composed by Samuel Jones.

As to what compels a writer to write for children, can it ever be as simple as to win over a childhood sweetheart or to roof a house? It’s never that simple, and never that easy.

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Angel Food Cake

You can find mixes for this in the store, but they cannot compare to scratch, and hot, dry weather is the perfect time to make it.

Preheat oven to 350. Separate a dozen eggs while cold, using caution to ensure no yolks make it into the whites. Bring whites to room temperature and stir in a tablespoon of water. Sift a cup of cake flour with a half cup sugar until it’s very light. (Yes, you can use plain flour.) You want to sift several times; some recipes say as many as five.

Beat the egg whites in a large, very clean, dry bowl. Start on a low speed. When the eggs are foamy, sprinkle in a teaspoon of cream of tartar. This acid helps stabilize the egg whites when they are whipped. Since most of the volume and structure of the cake comes from these egg whites, you’re not going to want to take the risk of substituting this ingredient. As the texture of the bubbles begins to even out, add a teaspoon or two of pure vanilla extract, and incorporate another cup of sugar bit by bit, about a tablespoon at a time.

Keep beating at a medium speed until the sugar is dissolved and the whites form stiff peaks. Then carefully FOLD in the flour while sifting it over the egg whites. Use a spatula, and turn the bowl; the key is not to deflate the bubbles. Make sure the flour is evenly combined throughout the whites, but don’t over-mix.

Gently pour the batter into a 10-in. ungreased tube pan; the cake has to cling to the sides as it rises, forming a bit of a crust. Bake for at least 30 minutes, until the top is crusty and springy.

Remove from oven and cool over a rack. You’ll find specially-made tube pans with legs for this cake. When cool remove by running a thin knife around the sides of the pan. You can buy a comb to slice this cake, otherwise use a serrated knife dipped in warm water.