Month: February 2026

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Mississippi’s American Rivers

The Rivers of America is an important series of books that started in 1937 with the publication of Kennebec: Cradle of Americans by Robert P. T. Coffin and ended in 1974 with the publication of The American: River of El Dorado by Margaret Sanborn. For the most part, the editors were successful in bringing the regional folk life of America to focus through the lenses of her rivers.

Constance Lindsay Skinner, a Canadian writer and historian initially conceived the series in the early 1930s. She was also the first series editor. In an essay that was included in early volumes of the series, Skinner stated, “This is to be a literary and not a historical series. The authors of these books will be novelists and poets. On them, now in America, as in all lands and times, rests the real responsibility of interpretation.” Skinner lived to edit only six of the volumes, but her criteria for authors and the freedom she granted them—a policy continued by subsequent editors—guaranteed not only the success, but the importance of the series.

The series’ editors sought out a wide cross section of poets, novelists, historians, and illustrators to produce living literary portraits rather than historical tomes. The illustrators included many famous and soon-to-be-famous artists, including R.E. Banta, Ross Santee, John Steuart Curry, Nicolai Fetchin, John McCrady, and Andrew Wyeth. George Annand and Rafael Palacios were the series’ principal cartographers. Annand drew the maps for nearly half the forty-nine Rivers books published in the first eighteen years of the series, including the two “Mississippi Rivers” The Lower Mississippi and The Yazoo.

Skinner wanted the Rivers of America books to create popular literature reflecting the regional history of America. For Skinner, it was imperative to incorporate a Southern region into her work, partially to confirm that a distinct and vibrant population still resided in the South. As she wrote to a potential author during the series’ planning stages, “I had been sure there was this solid ‘backbone’, a sound folk-core, or the southern backcountry would have gone back to timber and wild animals.”

For the South to work in Skinner’s series, its character had to stem from the people’s relationship with nature, specifically with the natural history of the rivers of the nation. Cecile Hulse Matschat’s Suwannee River: Strange Green Land (1938) remains a best-selling volume, and Marjory Stoneman Douglas’s The Everglades: River of Grass (1947), a landmark in American environmental writing.

Of Skinner’s original vision of twenty-four volumes, three focused on Southern rivers, the Suwannee, the Arkansas, and the Lower Mississippi, designated to portray the Mississippi River south of St. Louis. (The Upper Mississippi: A Wilderness Saga, by Walter Havighurst, the second volume in the River series, was published in 1937). All told, however, only seven rivers in the South are covered in the series: the Tennessee—two books, both by Donald Davidson The Old River, (1946) and The New River (1948), inclusive of the profound changes wrought by the Tennessee Valley Authority—the Santee, the Arkansas, the St. Johns, the French Bend, and in Mississippi, the Lower Mississippi, and the Yazoo.

Skinner died in 1939. Nearly a year later, in 1940, the publisher, Farrar & Rinehart, announced the editors of the Rivers of America series, Stephen Vincent Benét and Carl Carmer. Four Rivers titles were published under their editorial guidance in 1940 (The Wabash, by William E. Wilson; The Arkansas, by Clyde Brion Davis; The Delaware, by Harry Emerson Wildes; and The Illinois, by James Gray). Three more titles followed in 1941, The Charles, by Charles Bernon Tourtellot; and the The Kaw, by Floyd Benjamin Streeter, and The Brandywine, by Henry Seidel Canby, which included the first illustrations of the young Andrew Wyeth.

The Lower Mississippi

A book on the Lower Mississippi is named on the first page of Constance Skinner’s “Rivers of America Journal,” a preliminary plan for the series, dated August 17, 1935. Written as “New Orleans & Lower Mississippi,” the author Skinner designated for the volume was Edward Larocque Tinker. Tinker today is best known as a scholar of Latin American culture, but he wrote several books about New Orleans, including Lafcadio Hearn’s American Days (1924) and Closed Shutters: Old New Orleans – the Eighties (1931), but for whatever reasons did not take on the Lower Mississippi volume.

The editors then committed to a contract with Lyle Saxon, writer and journalist who reported for The Times-Picayune in New Orleans, who had written Father Mississippi in 1927. However, Saxon apparently reneged on the project (likely because he was directing the Federal Writers’ Project Works Progress Administration’s Guide to Louisiana (1941). Carmer came to New Orleans to cancel the Farrar & Rinehart contract with Lyle Saxon for the Rivers book on the Lower Mississippi where he met a family friend, Betty Carter, wife of Greenville, Mississippi journalist Hodding Carter II. At the time, Carter was in New York City, working for the progressive newspaper, PM.

While he was at Harvard, in response to an invitation and subsequent encouragement from an editor at Alfred A. Knopf, Hodding Carter had written five chapters of a book which was to analyze the racial and political situation of the South. (Carter’s work was not accepted.) Showing Carmer the material Hodding had written for Knopf, Betty was able to interest Carmer in Hodding as the “perfect” candidate for the writing of the Mississippi work. In July, 1940, Hodding Carter signed the contract for Lower Mississippi, receiving a $400 advance. In September, he resigned from PM and returned to Greenville and his newspaper, the Delta Democrat-Times.

The Carters did much of the research for the book at the Tulane University library. In November 1940 the National Guard was called to active duty. Hodding’s regiment was moved to Florida, and he became a correspondent for the Democrat-Times. He had offers for such work from two other newspapers and from the Associated Press, but he concentrated on writing the Rivers book. Reviewing its early chapters, Carl Carmer observed that the book would be one of the two most significant volumes of the series. He advised Carter not to worry about the June 1, 1941 deadline established in the contract, noting that the book was too good to hurry. The Lower Mississippi was published in the fall of 1942 to favorable reviews.

Writing in The New York Times (Dec. 6, 1942), noted critic Horace Reynolds—who also took a strong interest in Faulkner’s first novels as well as the early publications of the Lomaxes—stated, “By responding to the realistic rather than the romantic aspect of his river, Mr. Carter has written one of the best books in the Rivers of America series. His astringent approach is fresh and welcome. He has dug below the surface ease and softness of the delta life to the savagery and pain which lie beneath them.”

“No river in America has been more over-romanticized than the Lower Mississippi,” Reynolds wrote. “Fiction, popular history and popular song have all combined to give it a personality which does not exist. The Lower Mississippi doesn’t look like the pictures or sound like the songs. It is a wilderness of muddy water and deep sky, with a thin wedge of flat land in between. Its great beauty is not easily discernible. To that beauty, which has been best described by Lafcadio Hearn, Mr. Carter is articulately sensitive. But he is no exploiter of the Southern tradition. A man of thought and conscience, he is troubled by the social problems of a section to the intensity of whose plight the phenomenon of a Huey Long is an index. His book cuts deep into the life of his valley.”

The book was illustrated by John McCrady. In a letter to the Carol Fitzgerald, author of The Rivers of America: A Descriptive Bibliography (1991), Matt Martinez, a friend of John McCrady’s widow, Mary, wrote that he had spoken to Mrs. McCrady about her husband’s role as illustrator of The Lower Mississippi: “To address your questions, Mrs. McCrady felt that Hodding Carter approached McCrady, but this was fifty years ago or so, so it’s a little hazy. Mr. Mc and Carter were boyhood friends in Hammond, Louisiana, in the late 19teens. and early 1920s…. I’m not sure of any causal information in terms of who approached who at that time, but the two men who are a big part of The Lower Mississippi had a personal history together that preceded their professional association.”

In his foreword to “John McCrady 1911-1968,” a catalog issued by the New Orleans Museum of Art in 1975, E. John Bullard, the museum’s director, observed, “During the 1930s John McCrady was recognized as the most important exponent of Regionalism working in the South. In his paintings, McCrady visually captured the unique aspects of rural Mississippi and Louisiana with the same authenticity and insight that Benton and Curry brought to their depictions of the Mid-West.” Life published a five-page spread on the artist and commissioned him to paint “the second in a series of dramatic scenes in twentieth century American history.” McCrady chose to paint the assassination of Huey Long and produced perhaps his best-known, and certainly his most controversial artwork.

The Yazoo

 

The second Mississippi river included in the Rivers of America Series is the Yazoo, However important the Yazoo seems to Mississippians—and the Yazoo Basin undeniably has the richest cultural heritage of any other section of the state—its choice as a subject for the Rivers series gives us some food for thought. Three other rivers, the Atchafalaya, the Tombigbee, and perhaps particularly the Red River (of the South) deserved consideration.

So why the Yazoo? The answer is Hodding Carter. Carter’s friendship—if not to say influence—with Carl Carmer, who by 1949 had become the principal editor of The Rivers of America, and would remain the series editor until the publication of the final book (The American: River of El Dorado, by Margaret Sanborn) in 1974. Carter must also have already had in mind Frank E. Smith as the author. Smith was managing editor of the liberal-leaning newspaper Greenwood Morning Call in 1946 and 1947. He was a legislative assistant to United States Senator John Stennis from 1947 to 1949 and was elected to and served as a member of the Mississippi State Senate from 1948 until 1950, when he was elected as a Democrat to the U.S. House of Representatives from Mississippi’s 3rd Congressional district.

In a June 1991 letter, Smith wrote, “I started on the Yazoo in 1947, when I was recommended to the editor by Hodding Carter, who had written Lower Mississippi a few years before. He was a friend and associate in newspaper work. I wrote two or three sample chapters, and Rinehart gave me a contract and a $1,000 advance.”

On January 7, 1948, Frank Smith signed an agreement with Rinehart & Company which called for delivery of a completed manuscript of The Yazoo in its final revised form on or before January 1, 1951. He was to receive royalties of 10% of the retail price on the first 5,000 copies sold; 121/2% on the next 5,000 copies. sold; and 15% on all copies sold thereafter. He was to be receive an advance on royalties of $750, $250 on signing the agreement, $250 on delivery of the manuscript, and $250 upon publication of the book.

“I forgot about the contract when I became involved in some personal endeavors,” Smith later wrote, “but was reminded of it in 1953, when Rinehart wrote telling me to produce the manuscript in three- or four-months’ time or return the money. I was busy at that time as a member of Congress, but I didn’t have the money to reimburse them, so I produced the manuscript, and it was published the next year with no revisions or deletions.”

Reviews of The Yazoo were overwhelmingly favorable. Reviewing in the Chicago Tribune, (May 16, 1954) Harnett T. Kane, author of Huey Long’s Louisiana Hayride: The American Rehearsal for Dictatorship 1928-1940 (1941) wrote, “The author is something of a rarity, a politician who can write. The 36-year-old Mississippi congressman had a role in the ending of Bilboism; he represents a new south. His style is non-lyric, non-emotional, almost matter- of-fact. a novelty in certain circles of regional writing.”

Fellow Mississippian Hubert Creekmore, reviewing in the New York Times (May 9, 1954) states, “Since Frank Smith is a Delta native and a Congressman, it is not surprising that his best passages are those dealing with political, and economic problems. His discussion of the sharecropper-commissary system is concise and understanding, and the survey of flood control and the touchy subject of the four dams on Yazoo tributaries is sensible.” Finally, Hodding Carter himself, in his review of The Yazoo in his newspaper, the Delta Democrat-Times (May 9, 1954), writes, “(Smith) is Mr. Yazoo, even Mr. Delta himself; attuned to and informed on its manifold problems.” Here it must be noted that both Creekmore and Carter take Smith to task, Creekmore “for the omission of a full and organized essay on the Delta planters” and Carter for Smith turning a blind eye to Parchman penal farm, “the nation’s worst such institution, where the lash, the convict trust system, and the lack of any real rehabilitation program conspire to breed worse criminals out of men who are to be returned to society.”

The illustrations in The Yazoo are by Janet Turner (1914-1988), a Missourian who graduated with distinction in 1936 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Far Eastern History. Her first postgraduate work was done at the Kansas City Art Institute, where she studied under Thomas Hart Benton and John de Martelly, the illustrator of The Wabash (1940), the eighth book in the Rivers series. In 1941, after five years of postgraduate work, she was awarded the Institute’s diploma. She attended Claremont College for two years, studying under Millard Sheets and Henry McFee, receiving a master’s degree in fine arts in 1947.

During her artistic career, Turner had more than two hundred one-woman shows, won more than a hundred awards, and saw her works displayed in every state of the United States and in more than forty foreign countries. Her works were purchased by prestigious museums and galleries around the world, including the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Biblioteque Nationale in Paris, the Smithsonian Institution, the Library of Congress, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Seventy of her prints were purchased by the United States Information Agency for display in U.S. embassies around the world, and more than two hundred of her prints and paintings are held in some eighty college or museum collections.

In the early 1950s, Turner was living in Nacogdoches, Texas, teaching at Stephen F. Austin State College. In 1952, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to experiment with prints of Gulf Coast flora and fauna. She was primarily a printmaker at this time, utilizing different printmaking techniques in new and unique ways. Given her illustration of the Greenwood Leflore Hotel (below), it’s almost certain that Turner came to Greenwood sometime in 1953, though Smith wrote that they never met.

 . . .

The first edition of The Lower Mississippi received four printings between 1942 and 1959 (1942, 1945, 1947, and 1959) ranging in price from $2.50 (1942-45), to $3.50 (1947) and $5 (1959). The number of copies printed is unknown, but according to WorldCat, the book is held in 887 libraries worldwide. Almost all are the first (1942) printing,

The Yazoo had an initial printing of 5,000 copies, and a projected reprint of another 5,000. How many copies Rinehart actually published is unknown, however WorldCat finds the 1954 edition in 507 libraries. The Yazoo was reprinted (in paperback) in 1988 by University Press of Mississippi. According to Frank Smith’s son Fred, University Press printed 1000 copies in paperback, and printed 50 special edition hardback copies, all of which were signed by Frank Smith and sold at Choctaw Books in Jackson, Mississippi.

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Nancy Reagan’s Viennese Chocolate Bar Recipe

Ronald Reagan appeared at the Neshoba County Fair in August, 1980. Many—including me—consider Reagan’s choice of an appearance in a locale with a bloody and brutal history in the struggle for civil rights as well as his speech, in which he stated, “I support states’ rights,” and promised to “restore to states and local governments the power that properly belongs to them” perpetuated Richard Nixon’s “Southern strategy,” a game plan that eventually made the Old Confederacy the Republican party’s home field.

Reagan defeated Carter by a landslide, winning every Southern state except Georgia, ushering in an era of tax cuts that enriched corporate interests and decimated the middle class with a profound recession, reduced wages, and the highest level of unemployment since the Great Depression. I seriously doubt if Nancy Reagan ever saw the inside of an oven in her life—more the pity—and this marginally homespun recipe most likely was fabricated by a giggly public relations intern. Mrs. Reagan, like her husband, had no interest in the public weal.

This recipes comes from the signature Giant Houseparty Cookbook put out by the Philadelphia-Neshoba County Mississippi Chamber of Commerce in 1981.

Cream 2 sticks softened butter with two egg yolks and a half cup sugar. Add 2 ½ cups flour to make a soft dough, and pat out to about a half inch on a buttered cookie sheet or baking pan. Bake at 350 until lightly browned. Remove from oven, cool, and top with a 10-oz jar of raspberry jelly or apricot preserves and a cup of semi-sweet chocolate bits. Top with a meringue made with 4 egg whites. Bake for another 20 minutes or until lightly browned.

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Ars Voces: Thomas Wilson

I was always interested in art, but it wasn’t until 2000, when I was in my mid-thirties that I began going to galleries and taking a serious interest in painting. When I was living in Monroe, La., a local college was offering a painting class through their community enrichment program, so I signed up for a course, six hour-long sessions, and I became hooked at that point. I completed one painting in that course, and after that put it down for a while. Not long after that I was driving through my neighborhood there and saw an easel set up in a window. I found out a lady was teaching a class there, so I took that. We painted from photographs of old masters and I didn’t like painting from a photograph even back then. I learned how to mix paints, some composition, and basic things.

Shortly after that, I moved back to Jackson, this was 2007, I was painting on my own, improving basically by trial and error, still painting from images and still life, but I wanted to be legit, I didn’t want to be just basically copying somebody else. My uncle, who had taken art from Bob Tompkins, saw my paintings and said I should go see Tompkins. He was very helpful; he just didn’t go as far as I wanted to go. I wanted to paint the landscape. I asked him about that once, and he said that he was a studio painter.

But I wanted to paint outside; the artists I was drawn to painted on location from life. So I took a workshop from Roger Dale Brown in Nashville, who is a very well-known plein air painter, and I learned a ton from him about painting outside. After that, I struck out on my own and simply painted what I saw. My still lifes were very tight, very realistic; but when you’re painting outside, you don’t have a lot of time to fuss around because you only have like an hour or an hour and a half before the light changes. The painting of Fenian’s was different for me. I wanted to try painting at night, which has never really worked out well, but I was riding around, saw the rain, found a good place to stand, and really the subject isn’t so much Fenian’s as it is the atmosphere, the feel of the street, the clouds, the telephone poles.

The one in Vicksburg is different because it’s earlier in the day than I usually paint; I rarely paint in the middle of the day. It was also cloudy, and I couldn’t find a sunny spot to paint, and I like to paint when there’s a lot of sun. I like light and dark and shadow. I wanted to paint with the sky as the subject, the main part of the painting. The sun had come out a bit, but the light wasn’t as intense as what I normally paint. I visited Wyatt Waters recently, and I asked him about painting things that don’t really inspire me. I asked him if he had a hard time finding something to paint when he’s not inspired, and he said, “Inspiration is for amateurs; you’ve got to get out there and start painting and the inspiration will come.” So I’ve been trying to make myself paint even when I’m really uninspired.

When I moved to Belhaven, I wasn’t impressed and thought about leaving, but I kept putting it off. Then I started painting outside, and I fell in love with it. When I first moved here, I was thinking I simply wanted to paint landscapes. I didn’t want any man-made structures in a painting. I wanted it to look like an old master painting with nothing modern in it at all. There’s a dictum in art about not painting anything that’s beautiful, that you really can’t improve on it, and I think there’s something to that. I like stuff that’s funky and gritty. Now I really don’t want to paint anything unless it has a city street or a sidewalk or a telephone pole in it. It all kind of came together moving here. Being immersed in a locale, you see more.

I’m not much for change, and I’ve stuck with the same basic palette Bob Tompkins taught me; I even still set it up the same way he showed me. But Jarrod Partridge was a big help to me developing my palette because he studied under the colorists, like a of Mississippi painters. Sammy Britt, Richard Kelso, John Pat Marbury all studied under Henry Hensche, whose lineage goes back to William Merritt Chase. Jarrod helped me with my color, and I need good color because I want to make beautiful paintings, but still the most important elements to me are the light and dark, the contrast. I think someone would say I’m a tonalist, working with light and dark. I’ve heard it said that if the light and dark are correct, that the colors will work no matter what they are, but I consider myself just someone who paints what he sees.

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Shrimp Creole: Back to Basics

Make a roux with a quarter cup each of flour and oil—not butter, not olive oil, just a light vegetable oil will do fine. People from the boonies use a very dark roux for a Creole, but I prefer one two shades lighter than a Budweiser bottle. (They can talk about me if they want to.) To this, while still hot, add two cups finely chopped white onion, one cup finely chopped celery and a half cup finely diced bell pepper. Do not over-do the bell pepper! I firmly concur with Justin Wilson who said time and time again that bell pepper is “a taste killah”, and we both agree that you can never use too much onion. (Within reason.)

For a basic shrimp Creole to feed six people, sauté two pounds peeled shrimp–I recommend a 26-30 count–in a light oil with plenty of garlic, about four cloves crushed and minced, and a little pepper (do not salt). Add the shrimp (with the liquid) to the roux/vegetable mix, then immediately add two 14 ounce cans of diced tomatoes with juice. (In a perfect world, you’d use four cups of home-canned tomatoes, but I do not live in a perfect world, and I’ll bet you don’t, either.)

Add a little water to this if needed to give it the consistency of a thick soup, season with a two tablespoons dried basil, two teaspoons thyme and a teaspoon each of oregano and ground cumin. Understand please that these are relative ratios that you can adjust with neither guilt nor effort. When it comes to pepper, the best rule of thumb is to add just enough to make a statement and provide a good Louisiana hot sauce on the table. At this point, I put the mixture in a low oven (200) uncovered for about an hour to meld the flavors, stir it two or three times, then adjust the seasonings, particularly the salt and pepper before serving over  rice.

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A Mother and Child Reunion

When Paul Simon’s “Mother and Child Reunion” topped the charts in 1971, many people (me among them) assumed that he got the title from a chicken and egg sandwich—which in diner lingo is known as a Mother and Child reunion, but the title came from a meal he had at the Say Eng Look Restaurant in New York City. In a 1972 Rolling Stone interview, Simon said, “There was a dish called ‘Mother and Child Reunion.’ It’s chicken and eggs.”

Known as “mother/child/daughter,” variations of this combination  are common menu items at Asian restaurants. Another version—oyakodon: mother/daughter bowl—has been described as Japanese “soul food.” As with any basic dish, the reunion is made in as many ways as there are cooks to make it. Here’s my version, which varies with available ingredients.

Cube a boneless breast of chicken, dust with fresh pepper, and fry in vegetable oil with a a clove of garlic until browned. Poach  in chicken broth until tender; doesn’t take long. Drain chicken, reserving the broth, and stir-fry/saute with sliced onions, and whatever else you’re adding. I’ll throw in things like thinly sliced mushrooms, celery, carrots, and cabbage or kale of some kind cut in some form or fashion.

Add enough broth to cover the chicken by half, bring to a simmer, and dribble in two or three beaten eggs in sort of a figure 8. Stir gently, cover, and steam until the eggs have firmed and blossomed. Thicken slightly with a thin slurry of water and corn starch. Serve with rice and chopped onions.

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On Love and Food

Love is fraught with pitfalls, and food has the potential to be a more fundamental source of friction than ugly underwear or nasal hair.

For those among us with discriminating dietary habits, it’s a safe bet that if you meet someone special in a natural foods dive, they’ll feel much the same way about pork roast as you do (which is not to say that soy products might not eventually become a bone of contention). But if you meet a mate in a bar that serves hamburgers and patriot fries, well, you’re just wide open for surprises, and if simply adjusting to eating together isn’t enough, learning to cook in the same place can be heart-breaking as well: formerly favored cookware might be set aside to make room for an exceedingly exotic batterie. That rooster roaster you were once so proud of might find itself set so far back in a cabinet that you might never lay eyes on it again.

Be advised that condiments are highly controversial.

You might also, as I did, find your palate challenged in totally unexpected ways, as when a date sought to seduce me with something novel and exciting in the form of a carrot omelet. Fortunately, omelets are quite versatile; you can put damn near anything in them, though I will admit that carrots initially struck me as an unlikely ingredient. After all, most omelets are served as savory rather than as sweet dishes, and carrots are among those vegetables I place on the sweet side.

Now, you can make a carrot omelet such as I was served, where the shredded carrots were sautéed in a little butter with green onions and a hint of garlic before being added to the egg mixture, and it would be (marginally) edible. But if I had been told that carrots were the only ingredient we had for an omelet (as it turned out, they weren’t; I later discovered a bar of cheddar in the butter tray), I might have suggested another method of preparation.

Dessert omelets are novelties nowadays, but anyone who has poured syrup over scrambled eggs can attest to their appeal. Sugar (a little less than two tablespoons) is added to two large beaten eggs and a teaspoon of water. While a bit of water is standard for most omelets, the added sugar makes for a nice caramel-type crust. Separate one egg white and whip to foam before folding it into the mix, but before you make your omelet á la Crécy, make candied carrots.

For two people: trim, scrub and peel two large carrots, slice on the bias, barely cover in simple syrup made with honey or brown sugar, simmer with three cloves and a pat of butter until the liquid is reduced and the carrots are done through. Remove the cloves and use carrots as you would any omelet filling; a classicist would julienne them, but I don’t. Sprinkle with powdered sugar, serve with a tempest in a teapot.

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My Father

Jesse L. Yancy, Jr. was a politician who served the people of Mississippi from 1956 until his death in 1970.

Born in Springville, Mississippi on Jan. 17, 1926, Yancy moved to Bruce ten years later, where his father, Jesse Lee Yancy, Sr. had established a general store. He graduated from Bruce High School in 1944, joined the Army Air Corps in 1945, and served overseas in the Pacific. He attended the University of Mississippi School of Business and School of Law, earning his J.D. in 1951. In 1952 he married Barbara Young. They had three children.

Yancy served as an attorney for the City of Bruce for 17 years. His most influential act in that capacity came in 1961, when Bruce had outgrown its fledgling infrastructure, and the city was badly in need of repairs and updates to its streets, water, and sewer systems. Yancy commandeered a grant of $25,000 for the city to hire Cook Coggin, an engineering firm in Tupelo, to conduct a survey of what repairs and improvements were needed. On completion of this study, the city secured a loan of $500,000 to fund the improvements. Yancy helped Bruce to grow into a clean, attractive town, appealing both to current and potential citizens as well as businesses and industry.

He was a president of the Bruce Rotary Club, the Bruce Chamber of Commerce, the Calhoun County Bar Association, and a founder and commander of VFW Post 5571. He served on the Pushmataha Council of the Boy Scouts of America, and taught Sunday school at the Bruce United Methodist Church.

In 1960, Yancy was elected district attorney for the Third Circuit Court District of Mississippi. During the Meredith Crisis at Ole Miss, Yancy entered the national spotlight when a Lafayette County grand jury issued an indictment against Chief United States Marshall James P. McShane, Meredith’s escort to registration at the University, for inciting a riot.

While serving as D.A., Yancy became president of the Mississippi Prosecutors Association. Elected to the Senate in 1968, during his first term Yancy, as chairman of the Senate Elections Committee, guided the state’s first Open Election Law to passage. A member of the Senate Commission on Appropriations, he wrote and gained approval for the Idle Funds Bill, which authorized the investment of in place funding for the state, a key piece of legislation that has garnered Mississippi millions of much-needed dollars for over four decades.

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Heart of Cream

For years I’ve been making a coeur a la crème using cottage cheese for convenience, but this year I’ve upped my game and made crème fraiche, which is not difficult, a little goes a long way, and keeps quite well. Now, you can make a simple crème fraiche by adding a packet of culture to store-bought dairy, but that’s a slacker’s option. Me, I trotted down to the Mississippi Farmer’s Market and bought lightly pasteurized  buttermilk and whole milk that retained enough lactic bacteria for the process. I mixed a cup of milk and a quarter cup of buttermilk along with a heaping tablespoon of (admittedly store-bought) sour cream for a bit of a bite.

I kept the starter out overnight. By morning, it had thickened to a dense slurry. I added a half cup or so of this culture to a quart of whole cream from the supermarket, and it worked like a charm, producing a thick, tart crème. If you’re so inclined, the culture can be tended as you would a sourdough, and in time will mellow and deepen, but such a commitment is rarely practical for most home cooks.

As to the heart form itself, if you happen to frequent the kinds of stores that sell such things as stainless steel strawberry stem removers,  chromium banana slicers, and cast-iron hot dog toasters, then you’re likely to run into these cute little ceramic heart molds with holes that are made specifically for a coeur a le crème. Since I am most assuredly not the Williams-Sonoma-type, I went to the Dollar Store and found a purple plastic, heart-shaped container with Ninja Turtles embossed on the front (“Be My Bodacious Valentine!”). It was just the right size, about a pint.

I burned holes in the plastic with a hot nail, and lined the mold—for that’s what it had become—with damp cheesecloth, mixed one cup of the crème fraiche with six ounces of cream cheese, blended in two stiffly-beaten egg whites and a tablespoon of confectioner’s sugar. After filling the mold, I placed it uncovered on a plate in the coldest part of the refrigerator for several hours.

I inverted the mold onto a plate into a puddle of pureed raspberries, though any kind of berry would have been good, depending on your mood, even a stone fruit such as cherries. Be advised that bananas are tricky.

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Savory 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.

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Claiborne Peeled

Craig Claiborne, a culinary icon of his day and an avatar of ours, now seems overshadowed by his contemporaries, James Beard and Julia Child. Though described by Betty Fussell as more “accessible” than the vivacious Child or jolly Beard, by comparison the enigmatic, complex Claiborne remains now more than ever a shadowy–albeit Olympian–figure.

When it boils down to it, Claiborne might best be described as the right man in the right place at the right time. His hiring as the first male food editor of a major newspaper came about as the result of crass opportunism if not (as is hinted) outright chicanery, but The New York Times provided Craig Claiborne with the preeminent platform to fulfill his mission, which one authority (McNamee) describes as nothing less than “advancing the nation’s culinary culture”.

Claiborne’s trumpet for reform in his April 1959 column “Elegance of Cuisine is on the Wane in U.S.,” came at a time when the nation was ripe for unabashedly elitist change; within a year, Jackie Kennedy, designer clothing and a French chef were in the White House. Claiborne, with lavish finesse and training he received in Switzerland, set the tone of American culinary culture.

By the mid-Sixties Claiborne had become America’s unquestioned authority on the full culinary spectrum of foods and restaurants, chefs and cookbooks His columns went directly to print. His pervasive influence extended into the Reagan administration. In retrospect, his detractors–including John and Karen Hess, who wrote the seminal The Taste of America–seem nitpickers.

Claiborne wrote and co-wrote many best-sellers, first and foremost The New York Times Cookbook, to which he acquired rights while the Times editorial board was asleep at the wheel. More significantly, while he held the pulpit, he discovered and promoted chefs as cultural and media personalities – Jacques Pépin, Alice Waters, and Paul Prudhomme among many others – helped publicize the West Coast/James Beard movement and introduced Americans to nouvelle cuisine. Claiborne also reveled in a “pan-global eclecticism”, promoting the cuisines of China, Mexico and Vietnam (during that war), among others, and lived to celebrate a resurgence of great American home cooking.

Though McDonald’s Ray Kroc and other fast-food titans have influenced America’s diet far more than Claiborne, he established food as media culture, and his sheer adventurism still informs our attitude towards food and cooking. Yet for all that, while Claiborne’s ill-advised 1982 autobiography, A Feast Made for Laughter (Henry Holt: 1983), provides copious evidence that his personal life does not bear up well under scrutiny, he remains something of a sacred cow, so I wouldn’t expect a biopic or a Netflix series any time soon.