A Southern Gallimaufry
Fry bacon until crisp, drain, and crumble. Add vegetable oil to pan drippings and stir in chopped cabbage with bacon. Toss/stir vigorously until cabbage is coated and just tender. Add pepper vinegar, black pepper, and salt to taste. Finely sliced sweet onions–cooked or raw–are a welcome option.
Dale Harper knows food, knows people, and will tell you in a heartbeat what will fly and what won’t. So when–in one of my frequent fits of ignorance–I told him a dish with oysters and bacon would go over like a lead zeppelin, he laughed, patted me on my head as if I were a schoolboy, and poured me another beer.
“Jesse,” he said, shaking a red beard longer than my forearm. “Your problem is you do not think! What you have are two ingredients that are simply made for one another! Consider the oyster, a creature of the seas, and while delicious on its own, is lacking in that one essential ingredient that is dear to the palates of us Homo sapiens.”
“Dale, you’re including me in “sapiens” when you just said I can’t think.”
“Be hush,” he said, swinging his beard around like a cricket bat. “You think, but you don’t think enough. You have to consider things in many lights and from many angles, in this case an examination of contrasts. The oyster lacks fat!” With that he plunged his forefinger onto the bar and then pointed it at me in a thoroughly superfluous gesture of accentuation.
Pat oysters dry and bring the bacon to room temperature before skewering. Season very lightly with black pepper. Broil or grill until bacon begins to crisp.
Aunt Bess was a woman of intrepid notions who did not let the world at large get in her way of doing what she knew was right. She found nothing wrong with locking Uncle Ewell in the corn crib to keep him from drinking and picking up loose woman in his baby-blue 1954 Buick Skylark, and just because her brother-in-law was the sheriff did not stop her from chasing him out of her house with a shotgun when he put ketchup on her fried chicken.
Bess lived in a big, ramshackle house with a wringer-washer on the back porch, and two swings out front. She kept a huge garden, almost an acre of corn and beans, okra and tomatoes, potatoes, cabbages, and two long rows of peanuts. When it came time to pull peanuts, her four nephews—niece Cindy was exempt because she was such a pampered little princess—would trudge up there on a weekend afternoon, and after Bess had used a garden fork to loosen them, we’d haul the plants out of the ground and hang them on the back porch. Later Bess would cut away the nuts and put them in a burlap tote sack.
This is how Bess parched peanuts. For a pound of very well-washed raw peanuts in the shell, dissolve a cup of salt in two quarts of water, bring to a rolling boil, and remove from heat. Add peanuts. Sink in the brine with a plate of a pie pan, and let them soak for a few hours. Drain, and spread on sheet pan. Roast at 350, stirring a time or two. Serve warm when shells are brittle, and enjoy the beautiful.
