A Southern Gallimaufry
These bobs are made from ground turkey (a recommendation) but you can use beef, pork, or chicken. Season lightly with salt and an Italian blend, form into balls, skewer with onion/pepper, and place in the freezer for at least an hour. Brush with garlic and black pepper oil before grilling or broiling.
My sister Cindy was a beauty, and a tremendous baton twirler as well, but for a county-level Miss Mississippi preliminary, my mother (a formidable woman who loved her children) decided that Cindy should forego twirling—which Mom considered trashy—and dance to the title tune from Thoroughly Modern Millie instead.
Cindy practiced her heart out, wore a really cute pink flapper outfit with a white feather and a ruby garter belt, but she placed first runner-up to a girl who belted out “Stand By Your Man” with such fury that the windows of the Calhoun City school gym rattled. The new Miss Calhoun County–who didn’t even make top 20 at finals–also attended MSU; Cindy was enrolled at Ole Miss. Later in the lobby, my Mother, in a pronounced state of righteous indignation, observed quite audibly that three of the five judges were State alums.
Cindy gave up competitions, but after hours of watching her rehearse, I ended up memorizing the soundtrack to Thoroughly Modern Millie, including a tune called “The Tapioca”. For the past thirty years (or so) this song was the closest I ever got to actually eating tapioca, but recently I’ve had a bee in my bonnet over it, and nothing else would do except for me to cook me some tapioca and eat it. Call it mental floss.
Tapioca isn’t something you typically find in Southern supermarkets; the only place I could find it was at Mr. Chen’s. You can get anything from Mr. Chen. Even frogs. Nobody cooks tapioca exactly the same way. The only thing everyone agreed on was that the pudding needed to be cooked at an even heat. I soaked a cup of large pearls in two cups of water overnight. In the morning they looked very much like cottage cheese. I put the drained tapioca in a heavy pot on a flame-buster over a low flame with 4 cups whole milk and 1 cup whole cream.
After two hours of occasional stirring, the tapioca had thickened considerably. I beat a whole egg with three egg yolks, tempered it into the mixture by adding warm tapioca to the eggs bit by bit until it could be added without curdling. When well-blended, I stirred in a half cup of sugar with a tablespoon of vanilla and let it sit a bit before serving.
1⁄4 cup mung peas
1⁄4 cup azuki peas
1⁄4 cup lentils and/or split peas Cranberry beans – enough to
cover bottom of kettle
1⁄2 bunch celery
1 lb. carrots
4 large yellow onions.
1 bunch bok choy
1⁄2 cup chard
1 medium potato
Any vegetable to taste – solid ones first, leafy ones last
1 tomato
4 lb. sliced mushrooms
2 cubes of beef or chicken bouillon
1-2 cups red wine (any cheap, dry red goofy)
Grated Parmesan cheese
Use a large kettle (can be picked up for about a quarter at most thrift shops) of 1 gallon or more capacity. Put enough water in the kettle to reach 2-3 inches up the sides. Pour in cranberry beans and other beans and peas, I sliced onion, and 3 stalks chopped celery, including leafy part.
Season with liberal/radical amounts of salt, black pepper, celery salt, thyme, oregano.
Season conservatively with bay leaves, allspice.
Season fascistically with cayenne or curry powder.
Season piggishly with chili powder.
1. Let this first part cook for 45 minutes to 1 hour. As it comes to boil, stir occasionally.
2. Now during the first hour of cooking, get away from the stove, sit down, roll one, have some tea, look out the window-relax.
3. After one hour begin adding vegetables-hard ones first-celery, carrots, potato, etc.
4. Put in leafy vegetables after the second hour.
5. Add mushrooms and tomato in the last 20 minutes, wine in the last 5 minutes. Sprinkle with Parmesan cheese before serving.
One large rutabaga, peeled and cubed into more or less bite-sized pieces, will serve four people easily. Coat the pieces in oil, sprinkle with salt, pepper, and granulated garlic. Bake at 350 in a well-oiled pan, tossing and turning occasionally to brown evenly. When they’re just tender, sprinkle with dried sage, rosemary, and thyme, add a few pats of butter, toss and cook until done through.
The Louisiana satsuma crop ripens from October until late November, and they’re the sweetest citrus you’re going to get all winter. Use satsumas like oranges, and if you’re feeling really froggy, here’s an ambitious recipe from “Louisiana Cookin.”
Satsuma Upside-Down Cake
3¾ cups sugar, divided
4 cups water
24 (¼-inch-thick) sliced satsumas
1 cup unsalted butter, softened
3 large eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
3 cups all-purpose flour
½ cup yellow cornmeal
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
½ cup whole milk
1 teaspoon satsuma zest
½ cup fresh satsuma juice
Preheat oven to 350°. Line the bottom of a 9-inch spring-form pan with parchment paper, and prep with baking spray with flour. Sprinkle ¼ cup sugar in bottom of pan.
In a large skillet, stir together 1½ cups sugar and 4 cups water. Add satsuma slices, bring to a boil, then turn off heat. After 15 minutes, remove fruit with a slotted spoon, and place on a wire rack to drain. Reserve the syrup. After 30 minutes or so, place slices in prepared pan, overlapping slightly.
In a large bowl, beat butter and remaining 2 cups sugar with a mixer at medium speed until fluffy, 3 to 4 minutes, stopping to scrape sides of bowl. Add eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition. Beat in vanilla. In a medium bowl, whisk together flour, cornmeal, baking powder, and salt; in a small bowl, whisk together milk, zest, and juice. Gradually blend flour and butter mixtures alternately with milk, beginning and ending with flour, beating just until combined after each addition.
Gently spoon batter over satsuma slices, cover with foil, and bake until a wooden pick inserted in center comes out clean, about 30 minutes. Let cool in pan for 15 minutes. Loosen edges with a knife, invert cake onto a serving plate, and remove parchment paper. Drizzle with ¼ cup syrup before serving.
When the nation began to recover from its bloody Civil War, and on into the early 20th century, timber became the South’s biggest cash commodity. Logging camps and sawmills sprang up like mangling mushrooms in the great forests stretching from the Chesapeake Bay to Galveston. The deforestation of the southeast was an ecological calamity of continental proportions, but it provided a defeated, dispirited people with sustenance.
In my homeland of the middle South sawmill gravy is a staple for breakfast. This recipe makes a gracious plenty. Many folks I knew as a boy would keep a covered container of left-over gravy with whatever meats and biscuits weren’t eaten that morning. More often than not someone would spoon it over a piece of cornbread or a scoop of rice sometime during the day, and many nights found another batch being made on the stove.
North Mississippi Sawmill Gravy
This recipe will give you a flavorful gravy that is light-years better than that library paste you’re used to being served on breakfast buffets or in fast-food restaurants. Purists will decry my addition of a light stock to the mixture, but if they prefer a gloopy sausage-flavored white sauce, that’s because they just don’t know any better. I’m a firm believer that starch needs unfettered water in order to bloom properly.
Brown about a half-pound pork sausage in a little oil (you can use bacon drippings if you like). Break it up very well. When quite done, sprinkle in about two tablespoons plain flour, and blend until smooth. When flour begins to brown, stir in about a cup of water. Mix well. To this add enough milk to make a thin gravy. Reduce heat and cook down to a good consistency, perhaps a little lighter than you want, since it will thicken off heat. Salt if needed. I like it with a heft of black pepper.
Sweet potatoes blended with a fool-proof New York-style cheesecake; fun to make, sumptuous results. The cheesecake filling is 16 oz. cream cheese, 2/3 cup sugar, 1 teaspoon vanilla and two large eggs. The sweet potato filling is two cups of “candied” sweet potatoes pureed and mixed with 1/2 cup whole cream, 1/2 cup sugar, two eggs and 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon. The crust is a box of graham cracker crumbs–adding crushed pecans is a nice touch–mixed with a stick and a half of melted butter, a cup of brown sugar, packed into an 8″ spring-form pan and refrigerated until firm. Drop both filling mixtures alternately around the crust, then take a spoon and swirl it around a little bit. Be artistic; think about finger-painting a wet mud pie. Bake at 350 for about 45 minutes, lower heat and cool for an hour. Refrigerate or better yet, put it in the freezer for at least an hour before slicing.
Many gardeners in Mississippi are familiar with Jewels of Opar, though with varying degrees of fondness. While the plant—native to tropical America—isn’t a noxious invader, Talinum paniculatum seeds lavishly, and once established persists.
The plant was discovered on the “sea cliffs of Martinique and Santo Domingo” by Dutch botanist Baron Joseph von Jacquin during his travels to the Americas in the mid-18th century. Jacquin described the flowers as “small, numerous, red, and odorless,” likely the source of its common name in other parts of the world, “flame flower,” which brings us to our riddle. How did this modest little flower acquire a name so closely associated with one of literature’s greatest adventure heroes, Tarzan of the Apes?
Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar (1916) is a novel by American author Edgar Rice Burroughs, the fifth in his series of twenty-four books about the title character Tarzan. As conceived by Burroughs, Opar is a lost colony of Atlantis located deep in the jungles of Africa, in which incredible riches have been stockpiled down through the ages. Tarzan first visits Opar in Burroughs’ second Tarzan novel, The Return of Tarzan (1913), and returns to the city time and again to replenish his personal wealth, for the second time in The Jewels of Opar, again in Tarzan and the Golden Lion (1923) and Tarzan the Invincible (1930).
If Burroughs had described the jewels of the lost kingdom of Opar as “small, numerous, and red” we would have a more substantial link with the plant in my garden, but, alas, he only writes that Tarzan saw only as “a great tray of brilliant stones.” No mention of color, no mention of size, though he does say that some were cut, some not. Perhaps an enterprising nurseryman out to sell dozens and dozens of delicate little flowers that came up in his greenhouses just happened to be a fan of Edgar Rice Burroughs and bestowed the exotic name on them in an effort to make them more appealing to gardeners. Such things are known to happen.
I hope that the reason an insignificant flower collected on the volcanic slopes of Martinique became named for a “tray full of brilliant stones” from a fabled Atlantean kingdom remains rich for speculation.
Most other Americans seem to think that the quintessential Southern hot sauce is a Tabasco-type mash, but restaurants across the middle South usually offer pepper vinegar as well.
Many people find pepper vinegar essential for flavoring greens, and some—like me—like it on peas and beans. Any hot pepper can be used, but long cayennes and sports are most common. Make it in jars, and serve it in a shaker bottle. Prick the peppers; you don’t have to stem them. Pack the containers until the lid just mushes the fruit. Use white vinegar, full strength, salted, something like a tablespoon of salt per quart of liquid. Heat the vinegar until just simmering. Add a few drops of vegetable oil in with the peppers before pouring in the hot vinegar. This adds a little kick, and no, I don’t know the science behind it. Some people add sugar, but don’t.
Pepper vinegar ages well over several weeks and you can infuse the peppers with more vinegar–no heating required, but shake well–to stretch a jar.
The early October morning was warm; the afternoon was going to be hot. On the left of the produce stand piles of pumpkins, gourds, corn stalks and hay bales were somewhat artfully arranged in a semi-circle stretching across the parking lot. The bins were stocked full of peas, beans, squash, corn, and other fresh vegetables. People wandered to-and-fro, poking, picking, sacking, and asking questions of the woman in the center behind a register. When I reached the stand, my eye caught a basket of round, ruby-red, fuzzy fruit.
“Hey, Brenda!” I called out. “Where’d you get these late peaches?”
“Idaho!” She said. I couldn’t help staring.
“Don’t look at me like that!” she said. “I asked Rupert if he had any Carolina peaches left and he said, no, but I have some from Idaho, and I said I didn’t think they even knew what a peach is in Idaho and he just said take or leave, so I bought them because I wanted some peaches, and they’re better than nothing.”
“How are they?” I asked.
“Well, they’re peaches,” she said. “They ain’t the best I’ve had by far, but they’re probably not the worst. They’re peaches, take or leave.”
So I bought a half a dozen Idaho peaches, more for the sake of novelty than for any other reason. And they’re not the best, by any means, but firm and sweet nonetheless, with a deep yellow flesh around a blood-red center.
As I was checking out, Brenda pointed at a table of rattlesnake watermelons and said, “You’ll never guess where those are from”
“So tell me,” I said.
She rang up my total and said, “Nebraska.”
