Month: April 2025

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Poke Salad

In April, 2000, the Allen Canning Company of Siloam Springs, Arkansas processed its last batch of “poke sallet” greens.

John Williams, the canning supervisor at Allen, said, “The decision to stop processing poke was because we couldn’t finding people interested in picking poke and bringing it to us.”

Poke processing was never a significant item in their mult-imillion-dollar enterprise, but Williams mentioned that one of the best markets for canned poke was southern  California due to the Oakies.

Euell Gibbons lauds poke as “probably the best-known and most widely-used wild vegetable in America.” In Stalking the Wild Asparagus, Gibbons writes that Native Americans and early explorers were unstinting in their praise of this “succulent potherb.”

“They carried seeds when they went back home and poke soon became a popular cultivated garden vegetable in southern Europe and North Africa, a position it still maintains. In America it is still a favorite green vegetable with many country people and the tender young sprouts, gathered from wild plants, often appear in vegetable markets, especially in the South.”

In the lean years before World War II, poke salad–like ramps–was one of the first edible wild herbs to appear in the spring, lending welcome addition to a winter’s sustenance diet of dried beans, cornbread, and salt pork .

The only drawback to poke salad is that it’s poisonous. The mature parts of the plant and the roots contain significant amounts of a violent but slow-acting emetic, phytolaccatoxin. Having said that, you’re probably wondering why in the hell anyone would even consider eating it, but prepared properly, poke salad is safe and delicious.

Harvest only the youngest, tenderest sprouts of poke, no more than a foot or so. Wash, stem, and trim. Add to a pot of water, bring to a boil, drain, rinse, return to pot with water, and bring to simmer with oil, a slit hot pepper pod, and a big pinch of sugar.

Drain and use much as you would spinach. Euell has a poke salad dip in his book. I like it with scrambled eggs and onion, and it’s wonderful in an omelette or quiche.

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How to Write a Cookbook

Sooner or later, you’re bound to do something different and wonderful, and you owe it to yourself–and the rest of the human race, of course–to write it down and pass it on.

Do this even though once you’ve got a dish the way you want, you’re likely to find that no one will be able to replicate it to your or even their satisfaction. The secret might very well prove to be your cooking container (especially if it’s seasoned; woks are said to have their own signature) or something as ineffable as your own special touch, which might prove to be nothing more than a particular cooking method you consider unimportant enough not to write down. At very least provide base opportunity with ingredients and procedures.

By all means, include information apart from just the basics. For instance, mention if the dish was a favorite of a family member, or if you serve it every year on a particular holiday and garnish the dish with what other components were elemental, especially those involving heirlooms (your Uncle Earl’s china platter, or the centerpiece Millie made out of sewing scraps and pine cones), activities like having a breakfast on the morning presents were opened or memorable incidents (“Earl pulled a gun on Millie when she dropped the platter.”)

Such documentation not only enriches the book itself, but also provides fodder for short stories, novels, and off-Broadway plays.

Let me also encourage you to write recipes by hand in process for verrisimilitude. Handwritten pages also aspire to art when splattered with slopped liquids; it’s so Pollock. You just don’t get that with a laptop. Writing recipes by hand does require some precision, but don’t let getting caught up in the heat of the moment stop you. Later you can find another pen, more red wine, batter or chocolate syrup, and amend the entry.

As to what recipes to include, for once in your life, don’t worry about diversity. Put your best foot forward. If your forte is cakes, casseroles, or seafood, concentrate on those and don’t make any spurious attempt to fill in with recipes you simply copy from another place unless you actually try them out first. Bear in mind that this book should be as personal as you can make it, as reflective as possible of your personality and idiosyncrasies.

By all means, include recipes from friends and relatives, since those enrich your work by leaps and bounds, but always identify your contributor and provide details of them as well as a genealogy of the recipe itself. For instance, an entry in my book reveals that a recipe for chicken soup with corn and rivels came from a lady from Lancaster, Pa. who was 6’2”, a psychologist with a unibrow who got the recipe from her Quaker grandmother, the wife of a Lithuanian stockbroker.

Such seemingly irrelevant details make for richer reading than a dry recitation of ingredients and have the potential to approach the peripheries of art itself.

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Derogating the Delta: An Exercise in Reverse Hubris

When I was a boy, I won an essay contest sponsored by the local library committee in my hometown in the north Mississippi hills. The speaker at the awards presentation was a lady from some literary society in the Delta.

This woman just radiated dignity and graciousness from the top of her pill-box hat cum veil to the bottoms of her sensibly modest heels. She even wore little white cotton gloves with mother-of-pearl buttons. The ladies on our library committee were just undone by this exotic creature (the local women’s apparel store sold out of teeny-tiny white cotton gloves the very next morning).

Being a brash thirteen years old, I was totally unimpressed; I just wanted to grab my $25 check and dash, but I had to sing for my supper by sitting through (poorly) selected passages from Lanterns on the Levee. Somehow, I don’t think our girls—who, I’ll remind you, played a big hand in the literary life of our little town—were listening; they had only one thing on their mind: “What all’s she got in that purse?”

But I listened, and as I did, it slowly dawned on me that this lady was proselytizing; she had set her beady, be-vailed hat towards bringing the gilded prose of Percy to us heathen hill folk with the flattest, longest, most drawn-out vowels possible with all the fervency of Luther bearing a hammer.

My Aunt Robbie Rae made me stay for the reception (cookies and Kool-Aid with a discreet splash of Evan Williams for everyone but me). The grande dame, to my mind, seemed just a tad bit patronizing to the other ladies. (They didn’t notice, of course; they were too busy pumping the old girl for the best places in Memphis to shop.) As our august speaker left, she came up to congratulate me, and even though I was as tall as she was, she patted me on the head.

To me that bit of petty patting summed up her whole attitude. By the time she left I was ready to lead the next revolt of the rednecks. I would have been willing enough to dismiss this exhibition of arrogance as an individual aberration until I met others from the Delta.

You see, I was so ignorant: I didn’t know that the Delta was as close to the celestial as geography gets and that its denizens were canonized at birth. I did not know that my forehead automatically slopes when I mention that I am from Calhoun County.

But now I know better; I know to speak of the Delta—”DAY-uhL-Tuh”–with some degree of acquiescence, and have come to acknowledge the exclusivity (if not quite the quasi/semi/demi divinity) of its children, many of whom (I hastens to add) I love with all my heart. Occasionally I slip and call them Bourbons, but they think that’s a slur on their thirst rather than their politics.

It’s not.

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The Grounds and the Fury

Dinners on the grounds were once held on rickety rough plank tables between the church and cemetery after the sounds of loss and remonstrance had faded. Food offered restoration, and though ostensibly polite pastoral get-togethers, these dinners on the grounds were and still are more often platforms for social clambering of the pettiest and most vicious sort.

Despite the communal reason for the food, an underlying competitive element dramatizes the affair. Food Network competitions pale in comparison to those rural stages of venomous culinary put-downs; knocking a recent wok wonder off prime time seems trivial when you’re dealing with decades of spite over a pound cake recipe. Every square foot of splintered table space was contested and every element of a good “spread” subjected to off-stage critique. Transgressors were damned for such cardinal sins as using Jell-O pudding mix instead of homemade custard, and if you brought fried chicken in that red-and-white cardboard bucket, you would not get any sympathy when your high heels got stuck in an ant bed.

The queens of these community catfights took inordinate pride in lording over the lesser. My distant Cousin Dora’s angel food cake was a marvel to see. She displayed it on her grandmother’s cut-glass (not crystal; her crystal did not travel) cake stand beside a bowl of macerated strawberries and sweetened cream that she had her husband Harvey whip on site after he had driven 50 miles wearing a tie the whole way. The cake, flanked by a vase with a fistful of her show-quality roses and fortified by something along the lines of a fudge divinity she just “threw together at the last minute”, was displayed on a creaseless, delicately-patterned white cloth.

Dora sliced it with a wooden-handled sponge cake fork and served it on Classic White Chinet. Everyone hated her airs, but took malicious comfort in knowing that Harvey had been slipping around with the choir director for at least fifteen years. Rumor had it that her sister-in-law, tired of her high-and-mightiness, snuck into her house one day while the cake was in the oven and slammed the door so it would fall. That, they said with a knowing look, was the year Dora broke a toe before the homecoming.

Adversity is a dynamic portal for new ideas, especially when it comes to recipes, and if it were a big occasion, the range of variations in a single dish was astounding. Staples such as fried chicken, baked beans and potato salad always proliferated, and those cooks who specialized in these dishes had their adherents and detractors, usually in equal numbers. You had those who preferred double-dipped or battered fried chicken and those who liked a much lighter crust. The dividing line with baked beans involved the use of brown sugar or molasses and with potato salad, creamed or chunky.

I often attended these gatherings with my grandmother Monette, who was not a cook herself. History and genealogy were her interests: according to her I was related to everyone between Grenada and New Albany. Monette stayed out of the fray, but she was a discriminating eater who from past experience knew the tables well.  “Be sure and get one of Alice Edmond’s fried pies,” she’d say, or, “Jane Early has that 8-layer caramel cake recipe from her mother Eugenia, a Hardin, my first cousin Dudley’s second cousin on his mother’s side, before she married Jane’s father, who gambled away the family farm in a lop-sided mule race. He had a glass eye that he used to take out and put in his iced tea when their preacher came over.”

Nowadays, store-bought collapsible tables have replaced the long lines of sagging and splintered pine boards beneath the blackjack oaks and sweet gums, but still anyone who brings Stouffer’s to a dinner on the grounds in Mississippi is going to get talked about, and not in a good way unless the’re just out of rehab.

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Prime Rib

I once worked in a restaurant on the coast that regularly sold four roast rib loins in a day. During the tourist season, we would keep eight loins in our big oven around the clock.

We’d take the loins to rare. The carving station was set up under a heat lamp next to the grill, where the meat would continue to cook in service, so we rotated sections of meat on and off the carving board.

If someone ordered prime rib well done—and, yes, such people do exist in this world—we’d drop a cut into the well of warm au jus we kept at the grill station until meat was grey and the tip and cap had peeled away from the eye. Smart customers who wanted a slice on the done side ordered an end piece.

Our menu called this beef dish prime rib, but we rarely used USDA Prime beef. We most often used a Choice rather than the much more expensive Prime grade, but rib roast is usually called prime on menus because it is, after all, from one of the eight prime cuts in a whole beef (brisket, shank, rib, loin, round, chuck, flank, and plate).

You can bet a rib roast can be expensive, usually from $12 to as much as $27+ per pound; the average is around $15-20. The price can be much cheaper during the major holidays, around $10 to $15 a pound. Bone-in roasts usually have three to seven ribs and are slightly more expensive. A three-rib roast can feed about seven people; figure 12 ounces of uncooked boneless roast per person.

For an evenly-cooked, rib roast, pat the roast dry, brush with oil, coat with sea salt and minced garlic, and place on a on a rack in a heavy pan. Cover lightly with foil and bring to room temperature. Preheat the oven to 500. Place the roast in the oven, wait a half hour, then turn the heat down to 250.  In an hour, begin checking with a thermometer. When you get a reading of 125 in the thickest part of the roast, immediately remove the meat from the oven, and let rest about five minutes a pound before carving and serving.

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Red Rose Sandwiches

This recipe is a riff on the sausage sandwiches sold at the Beatty Street Grocery and Big Apple Inn in Jackson, Mississippi.

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 (drained) slaw. Serve warm on Bunny burger or slider buns with black pepper and Crystal.

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Letter from Jackson

Darling Julia,

I should soon come home to Carolina, to the house you love, to the deep old woods I love, and to loving you, forever.

When I get back, I know you’ll ask me about Jackson, what it is like, what its people are like, how it looks, how they live, what makes the city what it is. I’m going to tell you now to clear my mind of it, leave it forever. Once home I do not want to think of it.

Jackson is a fractured collection of people in a city that has lost all sense of itself, a shattered glass best melt and recast. It’s an ugly place; there are few beautiful buildings, no streets of stately homes one expects to see in an old Southern city, just blocks upon broken blocks, mile upon miserable mile of buckling asphalt and falling buildings.

The city lacks grandeur, even faded grandeur, in any degree. Its main street is blemished by vacant shops and offices with dusty, empty, shattered windows like rotten teeth. Even its recent upgrade with roundabouts and verges doesn’t disguise the squalor.

Poverty and racial tension propel Jackson, a volatile combination that pulls back more than it pushes the social, economic, physical nature of the city. The political landscape is dominated by self-serving personalities motivated solely by a desire to stay in office in order to further their own ends. Inevitably, the lion’s share of federal funding finds its way to empower political objectives.

I can see you smiling as you read this, thinking, “You fool, it’s Mississippi; what did you expect?” Well, darling, I did expect more. I told you that before I came here. I expected to find people working together, a fellowship of stewards.

Tell me that’s why you love me, because I am a dreamer, and every night here, I dreamed of you in that old house in the mountains under a million stars.

All my love, my being.

Tim

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The Red Zeppelin

It was mid-morning, late June, and Harlan’s truck was shaking, rattling, and rolling, knocking up dust on a snake-neck red gravel road two miles northwest of Big Creek, Mississippi, hauling ass over about a hundred square miles of nothing but hills and woods, heartache, hydrocodone, honky-tonks, bait shops and the occasional double-wide Baptist church perched next to a crumbling asphalt parking lot, making our way by fits and starts to the backwaters of Grenada Lake.

I was red-eyed from a blunt, grumpy and road-weary, but Harlan was ebullient behind the wheel, grinning like a Tartar, regaling me with his cynical and irreverent observations on the state of mankind and his critical assessment of my life as a microcosm thereof.

“I told you not to take up with that nigga Ricky, but did you listen? No, hell no, you had to move into that shit-hole duplex he shared with his sister.”

“People do stupid shit when they’re in love,” I said. “Case in point, what about that Miss Lauderdale County who threw the five-carat engagement ring you gave her out the window into Pontchartrain?”

He threw back his head and laughed, said she was worth every damn carat, and if he’d had any sense at all he wouldn’t had fucked her sister. Suddenly it occurred to me how little I knew him.

*****

Harlan is a tall, solidly-built man with a head full of thick, unruly greying red hair, a bright, lazy smile, and the kind of voice given to people who have little to say. He can talk his way out from between tiger’s teeth and gets his way into places most people won’t even go, like this farm in the middle of nowhere that grows the world’s most sought-after watermelon.

Harlan did a stint in the Navy, a PhD from Cornell and 32 years in USDA’s harness. Along the way he picked up enough knowledge to make him a recognized authority on watermelons, his consuming passion. He has traveled across the globe in search of rare ancestral varieties. On his farm in George County, Mississippi he grows a crop of Kalahari tsamma.

We were there because three weeks earlier, as Harlan explained it, “Some laid-back ass-lick who makes more money in a day than I see in a month working for a slick new regional called me up out of the blue and said he’d give me a dollar a word for an article about the Red Zeppelin.”

The fabled Red Zepp is a pearly green  oblong averaging some twenty-five pounds. It’s most distinctive characteristics are the pale, subtly shaded zig-zag lateral stripes that gave the melon an illusion of ribbing. The Zeppelin is also distinguished—indeed ennobled—by a dense, velvety flesh of surpassing succulence.

Harlan’s source for these watermelons is on a sloping red sand dune with an ever weeping spring in indenture on the ridge south of the Schoona River in a remote and sparsely-populated county in north central Mississippi.

We’d been on the road a long time, and I was just flat-out tired from the long drive up from Jackson, tired of the road and impatient with Harlan, who seemed alternately fidgety and distant. I just wanted to get there, get the Zepp, and get the hell out.

*****

The sun danced on the rim of the world and shone in random rays over a country sculpted by loggers  and downpours. The road looped over hills, plunged down hollows, and turn-rowed bottom-land crops, following the design of some sweaty, half-drunk supervisor to no rational destination whatsoever.

Then suddenly there it was, a gently sloping sandy hill, glowing and imposing, on the red side of gold, a washy bronze in the pale summer sun. as lyrically striated and undulating as a vineyard and punctuated by tiny glowing ovals situated like so many open whole notes up and down a page of symphonic notation.

As we grew closer I made out upon that terraced hillside a lithe figure in loose, faded red overalls with wearing a broad red straw hat with a billowing polka-dot ribbon gently hoeing a row of bouldered vines.

“That’s Royce,” Harlan said. “Let’s go on up to the house.”

The house was a solid dogtrot overlooking the broad Loosa-Schoona bottom  with a wrap-around porch sheltering high windows that framed dangling melded Mardi Gras bead disks, swinging strings, mandalas and figurines of colored glass. Each line, angle and corner of every room of the house, glowed in turn with ruby, topaz, purple, aquamarine, and a hundred dozen colors in between, bending light into blades, spears, and arrows.

As we stood in the foyer, Royce came in. “Hey, daddy,” he said.

“Hey, sugar-booger,” Harlan said, giving him a sloppy kiss and a pat on the fanny. “Where’s Owen?

“He’s on his way back from Grenada. He’ll be here around dark. Y’all come get something from the refrigerator and we’ll sit on the porch.”

The winds were warm and shifty, the gloaming sky a bowl of scattered dirty cotton clouds. Around dusk, a light breeze sprang from the bottom. We could see the cloud pushing it sailing north up the river from the backwaters of the reservoir. A little slipper of moon dangled over the fading sun. Soon, we heard a car horn beeping in the distance.

“Here comes Owen,” Royce said, looking in the distance, and said to Harlan, “Where is she?”

Harlan exhaled, stretched, stamped his feet, and said, “In the back floorboard. I had a nice little box made, put a couple of photos in with her. One of us on our honeymoon in Daytona Beach. We both were wearing cut-offs. We were so happy. I put a picture of you in there, the one at the Sugar Bowl after the touchdown. She loved you, Royce. Don’t rob yourself of that.”

Royce smiled at him, and pointed to a faint star at mid-heaven. “There she is, Daddy. That little dot of light nobody can touch caught in the middle of the sky. Momma was a lightenin’ bug in a beer bottle, caught up in her own darkness.”

Royce leaned over and patted Harlan on the knee. “I’m settled with it, daddy. You ought to be, too. She always tried to keep herself pretty for you, even when she saw the end coming. Let’s go get her.”

Owen, dark and quiet, embraced Royce as we walked down the hill, the field around us shadowed under an open sky . We came to the east side of the hill; the crook of Leo embossed the heavens.

There in the shadows Harlan placed the glossy black box on a rough, flat red rock beside the weedy rill leading from the untidy spring. The wind rose.

“Bye, Momma,” Royce said. “Go home now. Don’t hurt anymore.”

Harlan began crying and we helped him back up to the house where we sat on the porch and drank and told stories about days we missed and days we didn’t until the noise of the night blanketed us, muffled our pain, and pushed us inside and abed.

*****

In the morning Harlan and I drove south under a blistering orange-red sun with a clutch of pearly rippled melons nestled in pine straw against the truck bed.

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Historic Dishes of Oxford, Mississippi Restaurants

Long before Oxford became a locus of Southern foodie hype, the busy little city fostered and  sustained a lively variety of restaurants. The dishes, the places, the times themselves are loved by thousands of people from Lafayette County and Mississippi, as well as unsung millions of Ole Miss drop-outs and alumni. This definitive list was hammered out in a bickering, nit-picking, back-slapping parley of current, former, and native Oxonians.

The Beacon: Big Bubba burger, “meat and three”
Busy Bee Cafe: oven-fried pork chop
Café Olé: cheese dip, chimichanga
Dino’s: salad dressing, pizza
Downtown Grill: Eli’s praline pecan ice cream pie
The Gin: fried mushrooms, Bernice burger
The Harvest: black bean chili, vegetable lasagna
The Hoka: hot fudge pie and cheesecake, Love at First Bite
Holiday Inn: grasshopper pie, hot fudge pie
Hurricane Landing: fried catfish, hushpuppies and fries
Jitney Jungle/James’ Food: chicken salad
Kream Kup: grilled chili cheeseburger
Marie’s Lebanese: Marie Husni’s Lebanese casserole, baklava
Mistilis: hamburger steak smothered in cheese and onions
Ruby Chinese: hot and sour soup, twice cooked pork
Sizzler Steak House: steaks
Smitty’s: tuna melt, breakfasts
Starnes Catfish: fried catfish with hushpuppies and fries
Ruth & Jimmies:  meat and three
Pizza Den: muffuletta, sub sandwich, stromboli
Warehouse: snapper en Mornay, steaks, salad bar
Winter’s Store: hamburgers
Yerk’s: Philly cheese steak

Glennray Tutor
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Cat Cora Serves It Up

During a segment of “Iron Chef”, when one critic told Cat Cora that he didn’t care for her dish, she unhesitatingly asked, “Then why did you eat it all?”

Cat doesn’t pull any punches. Why she invoked Barbara Gordon’s 1979 memoir in this 2015 biography is perplexing; Cora has her own story, which she tells simply and honestly, the story of an orphan from Greenville who grew up in a loving, understanding home in Jackson where food took center stage and become a groundbreaking culinary superstar. Such a Horatio Alger-esque narrative often provides occasion for self-indulgent whining, but we make with it because Cat is smart, funny, and resilient. She  rolls with setbacks, admits mistakes, and does what she needs to move on.

The details of her culinary education and career as well as behind-the-scenes at “Iron Chef” provide a lot of interest for foodies as well as fans, who will also enjoy reading her honest–sometimes painfully so–account of her own personal journey. In a work of such candor, I expected details that perhaps only I would miss, like what’s the  dyke bar near the New Capitol. I particularly enjoyed reading about Jackson’s wonderful Greek community.

Mississippians, Cat is our daughter, our sister, let us embrace and celebrate her. But no matter where you’re from, you’ll like this fun, informative read.