Author: Jesse Yancy

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Oysters Johnny Reb

This wonderful old recipe is from Howard Mitcham’s classic, Creole Gumbo, and All That Jazz. Cover the bottom of a 10-in. gratin with finely-crumbed saltines mixed with pepper, paprika, chopped shallots, and parsley. Add a layer of oysters that have been rolled in the crumb mixture, then top with another layer of crumbs and grated Parmesan. Drizzle with only enough melted butter to moisten, then slowly pour heavy cream into the edge of the dish until oysters are just covered. Place in a very hot (400 or so) oven until bubbling and browned. These are even good cold.

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Crawfish Crepes

For two crepes, sauté 1 cup crawfish meat in butter with 1 tablespoon each finely-chopped shallots and scallions; season with salt, a dash of granulated garlic, and a bare sprinkle of cayenne. Add about a quarter cup of béchamel, a splash of dry white wine, and reduce until mixture is bound. Fill crepes and top with béchamel. Filling can be frozen.

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Salmon Patties

My father often cooked a big breakfast on Sunday mornings, and he always made salmon patties. He said his mother made them with jack mackerel, adding that we should be grateful he went to law school so we could afford salmon. I’ll not lie to you; these taste best when fried in bacon grease. If that makes you clutch your chest, use Crisco. Olive oil just isn’t right, and butter won’t take the heat. Most people I know make salmon patties with flour, but cornmeal gives a crispier crust and a better inside texture (flour tends to make it gummy).

One 16 oz. can of salmon makes 4-6 cakes. Drain fish, reserving a quarter cup of the liquid. If you’re a sissy, remove skin and bones. Mix well with one beaten egg, a little chopped onion, the can liquid, and enough corn meal to make a thick batter. Be careful with salt; I like plenty of black pepper. Brown in at least a quarter inch hot oil  on both sides and crisp in a very warm oven.

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Pickled Pepper Beef

Most recipes for this old buffet dish involve pepperoncini, though there’s no reason not to use pickled cherry peppers, banana peppers or another pickled vegetable such as okra or green tomatoes, but not cucumbers. I mean, think about it.

Marinate a lean cut of beef in the pickling solution or vinegar and water (2:1) overnight or longer if you like, place meat in a covered baking dish with the pickled vegetables, plenty of garlic, freshly-ground black pepper and enough water to cover half the meat; you shouldn’t have to add any salt to this at all. Cook in a slow oven (300) until the beef is quite tender, chop or shred, add reduced liquid and serve warm or cold with hard rolls, a mild horseradish sauce and/or a good mustard of your choice. It should go without saying that this is one of those dishes that’s better the next day, but I’ll mention it.

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Letter to a Young Scholar

Banner is a hamlet in Calhoun County some three miles north of Bruce, Mississippi. In 1975, Tom Yancy, a junior at Bruce High School, wrote a letter to Eudora Welty, who responded.

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Granny Potatoes

Many Southerners remember this dish from their childhoods; it’s true comfort food. Peel and cut red potatoes into more or less bite-size pieces, and boil until just done. You want a bit of firmness. Reduce heat, add a smooth flour and water mixture (1:2), bacon drippings, butter, or both, and stew until thickened. Season with salt and black pepper.

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Wilted Greens

Contrary to popular belief, Southerners don’t always overcook vegetables; we enjoy a wide variety either raw or lightly cooked. Take for example this recipe, which has been prepared since long before the word “Dixie” was coined.

Use the freshest mustard, turnip, kale/collard, or spinach. Wash thoroughly, strip stems, shred, and drain. For a half-gallon of greens, fry six to eight slices of bacon until very crisp. Remove bacon, add a quarter cup of corn oil, reheat, and add about a half cup of vinegar along with a tablespoon or so of a red pepper sauce. Sprinkle in a tablespoon of sugar, and toss well.

Drizzle the hot oil/vinegar mixture over greens, and toss with plenty of salt and black pepper. Top with thinly sliced white onions, crumbled bacon, and chopped boiled egg. Serve with a bowl of pintos.

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Black-Eyed Gumbo

My family’s New Year’s celebrations always included black-eyed peas as well as fireworks left over from my father’s superb Christmas collection, which contained the usual array of rockets, Roman candles, and sparklers, maybe a fountain to light in the side yard.

The peas, which we had on the table year-round, assumed an incandescence all their own that night as signatures of memory and rapport. Our freedom of worship brought many people to this country. Among the earliest were Jews who had endured centuries of barely tolerable hardships. Many Sephardic Jews settled in South Carolina, Georgia, and Maryland well before the Civil War, and they brought with them their tradition of eating black-eyed peas at Rosh Hashana.

In time, this custom spread to their New World neighbors who were already familiar with the bean (yes, a black-eyed pea is a bean) but doubtless confused as to why the Jews celebrated New Year so early and didn’t use a ham bone in their peas like everyone else did. Still, the tradition endures as evidence of the South’s many-layered and multifaceted culinary heritage.

This is another recipe I made at the Harvest Cafe in Oxford, a vegetarian restaurant on the corner of Jackson and South 10th. On the brunch shift, I’d make soup specials, which was always a challenge, because the black bean chili was outstanding and one of the most popular dishes.

Under duress, I rose to the occasion and in a memorable effort made a gumbo using black-eyed peas. This combination of peas and okra in a thickened, richly-seasoned stock with aromatic vegetables and tomatoes seemed a good combination for our clientele; most people who ordered soup wanted something warm and filling around Sunday lunch time, and this recipe seemed a good alternative to the favorite chili.

My idea received a guarded reservations; when my boss, John Anderson, asked me what he needed to put on the blackboard as the soup of the day, I said “black-eyed pea gumbo.” He blinked his eyes behind those big glasses he wears, slowly nodded his head and said, “Okay”, which in my experience with this gentle man I recognized skepticism of a profound and imponderable nature.

Jennie Lee, my co-worker, asked me if I’d lost my mind, but she’s from Charleston, was more perloo than gumbo. She didn’t sign my checks, either.

Besides, the dish was well underway. I’d made a good brown roux with vegetable oil and our lightest flour, added minced garlic, chopped onions, celery and bell pepper. This primordial goo I combined with a good base made with vegetable stock and seasoned with basil, thyme, oregano and bay. Not only that, but I’d been soaking the peas since happy hour the day before, and they were simmering on a back eye. I also had two packages of organic okra stashed in a refrigerator in the back; these were expensive contraband (imagine the price of a frozen package of organic okra in 1995 Mississippi), but essential to my enterprise.

The okra I rinsed under warm water before adding it to the pot to relieve it of ropy-ness. The peas I drained but kept the liquid. After adding the peas and okra to the pot, I started adding the liquid to achieve a good consistency (I like it thickish, but with a good juice) then added two small drained cans of diced tomatoes that I’d smuggled in from James’ Food Store. Once that was done, I began adjusting the seasonings, and finally put the gumbo in a serving pan on the line.

Of course, John ordered the first bowl. His critique was just as laconic as his first, but delivered with a smile, which I took as a positive sign. This interpretation was confirmed when the orders started coming in, many for the gumbo. This earned me a grateful nod from my co-workers, since pouring something in a bowl and sending it out the window is one of the less stressful acts you can perform in a busy kitchen.

Before the end of the shift, John came into the kitchen and said, “They loved your gumbo. How did you make it?”

John, here’s the recipe, sorry I’m late. Again.

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True Grits

I have before me an article out of one of those upscale magazines devoted to the South as an intellectual and cultural milieu. This magazine is printed on the finest paper, has photographs taken by talented people, and if you put it on your coffee table, you’re liable to impress someone with your je ne sais quoi.

Inside an article on Southern food (ever-so-quaintly called “fixin’s”) targets “a grand grits revival.” The author cites grits pilaf, grits croquettes, stone-ground grits with morels, Southern fried grits, grits crackers, Logan Turnpike grits (God only knows what that is), and sweetbreads with grits as evidence of this renaissance.

People, this is chic commercial jive operating under the auspices of promoting a naturally progressive cuisine. Southern cooking is progressive; as new ingredients become available they’re assimilated into traditional recipes, often with good results, and as far as cultural assimilation is concerned, Southern cooking itself is a brilliant hodgepodge of distinct cultural influences, Native American, West European, and African, the tripod which forms the basis of the cuisine itself, and as new peoples with different traditions move into the region over time the such basic elements as grits as we know them will reflect these changes in wonderful ways we can’t begin to fathom.

But a shotgun wedding with French cuisine (or any other cuisine, for that matter) is too artificial to be taken seriously. This effort seems more intended to get people to pay exorbitant amounts for a serving of grits than it is to create a compatible blend of ingredients. For better or worse, grits are versatile; they’re essentially starch, as are potatoes, rice, or pasta. But can you honestly claim as the author does that adding “innovative twists and fresh accents” such as morels and/or sweetbreads to grits that you have a dish that “reflect(s) the changing nature of the South”?

I think not. For one thing, these recipes are the products of commercial establishments, of upscale restaurants designed to attract diners who have the time and money to eat at high-end tables. Recipes such as these tend to be the brainchildren of down-home boys and girls raised on their mothers’ or grandmothers’ good Southern cooking who travel to France where they stay in Paris or Provence, sopping up the local hubris, naturalizing their schoolroom French and drinking themselves into a pixilated delusion of fraternity with the local Jaques Bonhommes on the local vin ordinaire.

While there, they of course become so enamored of le haute cuisine de la France that they decide to launch a personal crusade bent on transforming the cuisine bourgeoise of the American South into “exciting food.” This is to say, of course, food that people will pay a lot of money for because they are “infused with French accents . . . and render (sic) with some finesse.”

For another thing, these commercial recipes are subject to the whims of restaurants, which are notorious for posturing. They have to be. If such recipes reflect the changing nature of the South, then the reflection is of a superficial and ephemeral nature. If foods can indeed be considered a barometer for a region’s or a nation’s changing identity—and they very well can, if examined properly—then foods should reflect such profound and lasting changes as those brought about by shifting demographics and technology, bearing in mind that poverty is always the bottom line.

To be trendy and fashionable our dishes must be finessed. Is Southern food in, you say? Well, yes, but then it does need sprucing up a bit, doesn’t it? Let’s take that plain fried chicken and serve it on squash waffles with peach salsa. Black-eyed peas? Let’s puree them, pat them out into cakes and fry them in olive oil and serve them with an herb-laden tomato puree. Grits? Yes, with morels, sweetbreads and jalapenos, deep-fried and served with cranberry chutney. Catchy, perhaps, but hardly reflective of “the changing nature of the South,” unless you take into consideration that we now have among us those who will actually pay twelve bucks for a bowl of grits.

Our best foods are narratives embedded in time and place, told by people for whom food and cooking is a conversation, not a monologue from a flim-flam chef manqué.

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Theroux at Rowan Oak

Coming to Mississippi, enigmatic to others and more often than not  to we who live here, is objective enough for writers seeking an exotic literary locale within the United States. As one as such, Theroux joins V.S. Naipaul, Bill Bryson and Richard Grant. Without exception each have paid homage to the voice from Lafayette County, Mississippi that rings across the world.

Theroux reserves a passage for “The Paradoxes of Faulkner”, in which he provides a thorough analysis of the man and his works as well as observations on somewhat peripheral matters such as Blotner’s biography.  Theroux is a thorough writer, meaning he is considerate to detail, as is evident throughout Deep South: Four Seasons on Back Roads, which includes much that we should be grateful to have on record from a writer with an exceptional eye. The paradox of his title refers to Faulkner’s writing itself, which Theroux describes as either falling or flying, a critical encapsulation that might well describe any major writer with a significant volume of work, and Faulkner’s oeuvre spans generations.

It’s good to read the words others write about us, and it’s important that we read what others have to say about Faulkner’s twisted, frayed, and fallen South, however better perceptible by far in his own assessment than by any others.