Haiti on Farish
Hats for Sale
Mississippi Old Capitol
A Southern Curry
This typically fussy vintage recipe for Country Captain comes from Winifred Green Cheney’s wonderful Southern Hospitality Cookbook (1976).
Winifred informs us that she copied it from Mildred Williams, food columnist for a Virginia newspaper, but the original recipe came from Mrs. W. L. Bullard of Warms Springs, Georgia, who often served her famous dish to Franklin D. Roosevelt.
“And once, when there wasn’t time for General George Patton to stay for dinner, he is said to have wired Mrs. Bullard to have the Country Captain waiting for him in a tin bucket at the train.”
2 frying-size chickens
2/3 cup all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon black pepper
1 teaspoon paprika
1 clove garlic, chopped
1⁄2 cup olive oil
1 cup finely chopped onion
1 bell pepper, sliced
4 3/4 cups canned tomatoes
2 teaspoons chopped parsley
1 teaspoon curry powder
1 teaspoon powdered thyme
1 teaspoon cayenne pepper
1⁄2 cup water
1 cup seedless raisins
2 1⁄2 cup toasted almonds
Melted butter
2 cups hot cooked rice
Fresh parsley (optional)
Cut chicken into frying-size pieces; split the breast, separate leg and thigh, and use the wings. Save bony pieces for stew. Flour chicken by shaking in a paper bag containing flour, salt, black pepper, and paprika. Make garlic oil by adding chopped garlic to olive oil and letting it stand until flavor is absorbed from garlic. Use 1⁄2 cup of hot garlic oil to brown chicken on both sides in a large skillet over high heat, turning pieces often so that it is golden but not dark.
Remove chicken to roaster and cover. Add onion and bell pepper to drippings in skillet; cook over medium heat until they are limp but not brown, stirring constantly. Add tomatoes, parsley, curry, thyme, and cayenne pepper; cook slowly about 5 minutes until blended. Pour over chicken, rinsing out skillet with water.
Cover and bake chicken in a preheated 325° oven for 45 minutes or until chicken is tender. Add raisins the last 15 minutes of cooking. Split blanched almonds in halves; brown lightly in a little melted butter. Arrange chicken in center of a large heated platter, pour sauce over it and pile cooked rice around edges. Sprinkle toasted almonds on top and garnish with fresh parsley, if desired. Yield: 8 to 10 servings.
Moon Lady
Roast Shoulder of Beef
Brown a 3 lb. blade-in beef shoulder with onion and garlic. Cover with water by half. Add a pound of potatoes and cup each of chopped celery and carrots. Salt lightly, flavor with black pepper, thyme, and bay. Cover and cook in a slow oven (300) until meat is tender. Save some broth for gravy.
Yulan Magnolia
Steak Diane
Use 2 6 oz. slices of beef filet, season with a smidgen of salt and plenty of freshly ground black pepper, dust with flour, and sauté in butter until lightly browned with two finely-diced shallots and a small clove of garlic. Set aside.
Working quickly, add a half stick butter to the pan, a hefty teaspoon of prepared mustard, and 2 cups sliced mushrooms. When cooked down, add cream, reduce, and stir in enough stock to make a smooth sauce. Spoon over beef. Serve with love.
Ars Voces: Wyatt Waters and The Great Out Here
I started painting when I was 2 years old; my kindergarten teacher taught me to read and to paint the story. She was really interested in art, and when I started school, she gave me private lessons. She’s probably the reason I started painting.
My dad fought in WWII, so his values reflected that: had to work, had to study. I can’t do just a little bit of something; I have to do a lot of it. I can’t do it for an hour and a half a day. If I don’t have a good immersion in it, it just isn’t going to happen. I went to Mississippi College, and we didn’t have aesthetics, but we had a creative writing class. It was so fun to be in that class: theme variations, tension, restraint; the big things. That was really my only aesthetics class, that and going to the truck stop to drink coffee after we’d dropped our dates off. You had to get your dates in by 10 p.m. back then.
I’m a dinosaur; I paint outside. I usually start to paint things based on what I call The Great Out Here, the reflected and atmospheric lights that are in the world. The more I paint, the more I look at something, the more it gets on my retina and creates an after-image when I look away from it. You know how a flash bulb goes off and you can still “see” this thing floating in your vision? Well, it’s that sort of thing. It’s why I work on location, because it happens when I’m working on location, and it doesn’t happen for me in the studio, at least not in the same way.
I carry a mirror with me. When I don’t know what to do, I look in the mirror, and the mirror tells me what it looks like to other people. It gives me some objectivity on what I’m seeing. And that probably is the trickiest thing that I use. Painting is considered kind of trick, you know, techniques and all that. I used to be pretty technique-y, but that takes the left-hand side of the brain and puts it on the right-hand side. When you’re writing something, and you come back to it the next day, it’s the same effect; you see how other people see it. When you’re close to it, you can’t tell what to do, so I use a mirror progressively as the painting develops. Like penicillin, I use it when I need it.
It’s also tied in to the idea that the real experience is a lost thing. We’re almost a virtual society now, and in a virtual kind of world, it becomes important for me to make a case for the real experience, or at least to be out there saying that here it is. So that’s what I do, paint on location, and let the real experience of being in front of something affect me, to let that to be my influence.
Invariably, though, when you’re working outside, all sorts of things are going to happen and you’re going to get into the zone, that hypnotic place, and you begin painting expressively. I try to let that happen; I don’t know how to make it happen, but when I paint, it seems to happen on its own. I’ve always loved how watercolor doesn’t do what you want it to do. It’s the only medium I can think of that moves while you’re painting; it drips and runs. It’s like dancing; It isn’t what you make it do, it’s taking advantage of what it’s doing in the first place. It’s like riding a horse. The horse knows something about the field; you don’t drive a horse, you listen to the horse.
I went to Paris, and here I was in one of the great centers of the art world, and I got really homesick. I figured out that the things I want to paint are all here. I didn’t think it would be that way, but all the things I want to do are here.
