Toss chicken legs in vegetable oil seasoned in equal amounts with black pepper, paprika, sage, and salt. Cook on a rack at 300 for about an hour, turning to brown evenly.
Yam Not
Okay, let’s straighten this out once and for all. Those big orange roots you find in the grocery store are not yams. Got that? As a matter of fact, it’s a good bet that most of the people who just read that have never even seen a yam.
Sweet potatoes came to be called yams because they’re kind of/sort of similar, both starchy/sweet root vegetables, but they’re quite distinct; a sweet potato is far sweeter and much smoother than a yam. The most important distinction is that yams don’t grow in the South, but sweet potatoes do, in glorious profusion.
Sweet potatoes have always been a staple of Southern tables as well as a reliable source of income. The sweet potato is the state vegetable of North Carolina, and the Sweet Potato Capitol of the World is Vardaman, Mississippi. (If tells you any different, they’re a double-dog liar who needs a solid ass-kicking.
Still and all, you’re bound to find cans of yams in many local grocers, but due to USDA requirements, you’ll find “sweet potatoes” somewhere on the label.
So there.
About Boiling Shrimp
In my experience, the best procedure for boiling shrimp does not involve a rolling boil, which will shrink and toughen the meat. Instead, raw shrimp are dropped into lightly boiling water to cover and stirred until the water comes back to a shimmer. At that point, the meat is cooked through, ready to drain, cool, and serve.
Potato Candy
Soften a stick of butter and eight ounces of cream cheese (don’t use the low-fat), mix with a tablespoon pure vanilla extract, four cups confectioner’s sugar, and a cup of grated coconut. Chill mixture for about an hour or until very firm. Dust your hands with powdered sugar and form into irregularly-shaped balls. Roll in or dust with cocoa (nothing’s keeping you from using paprika), stud the surface with nuts of some kind (of course I use pecan pieces) and freeze before serving.
Oyster Soup
This light soup is good cool on a warm afternoon or warm on a cool evening.
Add three cups chopped fresh or two cups well-drained frozen spinach and a cup of quartered artichoke hearts to about a quart of broth seasoned with thyme, parsley, chives, and a bit of garlic.
Add a half quart of drained oysters dusted with pepper. Bring to a simmer, and hold on heat for a quarter hour or so.
Love a Duck
If you don’t know a duck hunter, befriend one; they always seem to have an extra fowl in the freezer, and will invariably tell you how to how to cook them.
After all, they shot the damn things.
Hunters and fishermen who cook really well – like Billy Joe Cross, bless his soul – should be designated national treasures. Heck, if Japan can give a tofu maker a house, we ought to be able to buy people like Billy Joe a Cadillac.
Like many if not most game recipes, this one involves a marinade. Acidic marinades tenderize, and as a general rule are for larger game, but with duck breasts, the marinade is for flavor. For every pound of boned duck breast, use a mix of a quarter cup of soy sauce, two tablespoons each brown sugar and olive oil, a couple of cloves of minced garlic, and a dash or two of black pepper.
Marinate for three hours. Stuff each breast with sliced onion and jalapeno, wrap in bacon, and spear. Grill or broil.
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.
Banana Pepper Relish
Seed and dice a pound of sweet banana peppers (throw a hot one in if you like), a white onion, mix with a cup of shredded cabbage, a grated carrot, and two finely-minced cloves of garlic. Dust with salt and sugar (about 2:1), toss to mix well, pack into jars, and cover with hot white vinegar. Seal and store for a week before serving. This is great with grilled meats–particularly sausages–and spicy beans.
Culinary Jackson
Does Jackson, Mississippi have a distinct culinary signature?
The short answer is no. Even the city’s–somewhat recently distinguished–signature recipe, comeback dressing, has its roots not so much in restaurants here, but in diners across the South for the simple, practical reason that it’s easily made from on-hand commercial ingredients–ketchup, mayonnaise, Worcestershire sauce and pepper–easily stored, and versatile.
So as to a distinct culinary presence, well, no. What we have in Jackson is a cuisine typical of cities throughout the Mid-South: Herculean breakfasts featuring lard biscuits, grits and rice, eggs and pork, meals of meats, starches, and vegetables stewed in fats.
These are the foods you’ll find all over Jackson, in restaurants and supermarket deli buffets for breakfasts and “meat-and-three’ (more often meat-and-two) lunches, dishes adopted from the home table that speak of place and past.
About Waiting
Anyone who prides themselves on their patience and understanding should wait tables for a week or so to find out just how patient and understanding they really are.
Many people are notoriously insensitive to workers in the food service industry; just ask any waitperson, bartender or cook. Any given one of them doubtless has several stories to tell of rude and insensitive if not to say vulgar treatment at the hands of a patron. The business of food and drink is a service industry, and it’s no coincidence that the word service comes from the Latin root servus, meaning slave. The food industry trains people to be servile, to cater to customers (and management) in an overtly deferential way because so much of a restaurant’s livelihood depends on steady patronage.
I’m not suggesting that anybody who works in the business is at the beck and call of every s.o.b. with enough money to buy a hamburger, but some people certainly seem to think so. These customers, either out of ignorance, stupidity, or a delusional sense of self-worth, will exhaust and demean a waiter, detracting not only from their own enjoyment of a meal but also (far more critically) from that of others.
In her autobiography, My Life as a Restaurant, Alice Brock, owner of Alice’s Restaurant, describes the situation well and offers a very human response:
I won’t stand for being treated like a piece of public property or a freak and I will never allow a customer to get away with giving an employee a hard time. The customer is NOT always right. Being a “service industry” makes people think we are just computerized slaves.
One of the high-lights of an evening is to hear of a customer bringing a waitress to tears…I rush out to the dining room, pull their plates off the table and point to the door: “OUT…OUT…GET OUT AND LEARN SOME MANNERS!” To try to please the “difficult” customer at the expense of my fellow workers is ridiculous. Some people just have an attitude. They upset the waiter or waitress, who in turn upsets me, who in turn upsets the whole evening. It’s not worth it to try to please or placate these bitter, unhappy people, better to put them out at the first sign of trouble.
This is something I have to be there to do…it’s hard to tell or expect someone else to do it. Sometimes I’m wrong, or the waitress is wrong, but better to lose a customer than a co-worker. (p.119)
Ms. Brock is a notable exception, since most managerial-type people treat their waitstaff as expendable. And, to be fair, most people who eat out frequently learn how to deal courteously with waiters, but I’ll be the first to admit that it is a learning process. Nowadays, dining out is almost always coupled with another experience (a movie, a play or some other sort of public entertainment) but at one time dining out itself was often taken as a singular occasion to be enjoyed on its own merits rather than as an appendage to another event.
This happy time was when restaurants were successful not merely on the basis of turnover, but more on the quality of the foods they offered, the comfortable atmosphere they maintained, and the genial clientele they accommodated. Great care was taken not only with the menu, which usually involved many courses designed to fit the season as well as the particular talents of the cooks and the general style of the restaurant itself, but also with the presentation, the service, the table, seating, lighting, and atmosphere. Such staging demanded a great deal of planning as well as much care in the execution.
I have seen some degree of return to this tradition, but it is still rare to find a restaurant that does not cater to some abominable god of expediency. I’ve often encountered difficulty when dining out and trying to take my time between one course and the next with a pause to have a bit of beverage and conversation because waitpersons tend to interrupt with an insistent, “Are you alright?” as if to say that by not yelling at them for not bringing the food immediately that they were falling down on their job. The reason for this is that waiters are trained to turn over tables as quickly as possible and since most patrons have had the “20% tip” rule-of-thumb drummed into their heads waiters are eager to get the tip and get you out in order to get the next. Me, I tip as well as I can; just want you all to know that.
Waiting is dancing with dialogue. I’ve known champion waiters from both sides of the kitchen doors, and I’ve been subject to the attentions of some world-class bartenders. (Incidentally, bartenders, as a general rule, just will not put up with a bunch of bullshit; trust me, I know.) Perhaps what I’m describing is simply an example of what is being called a decline in civility, but as Alice says, “Some people just have an attitude,” and in my book as well as hers such people require adjustment.
