A Southern Gallimaufry
Welty illustrated the cover for this musical piece written by her English teacher at Jackson Junior-Senior High School:
“O Mos-qui-ta, Mos-qui-ta,
you bi-ta my feet-a!”
(“Mosquito”, by Flo Field Hampton, arranged by Harry L. Alford.
Crystal Springs, Mississippi: Flo Field Hampton Publishing Co., c. 1926
Special Collections, University of Mississippi.)
Unlike some, I don’t remember my first oyster as epiphanic. That’s no reflection on the oyster, which I’m certain was good and plump, fresh from the Gulf, arguably among the best in the world, but I ate it on my first trip to Jackson, which was an altogether dizzying affair for a 7-year-old boy from a sawmill village in north Mississippi.
After the thrill of seeing the frothy Rez from the Trace, riding in a highway patrol cruiser (my last time in the front seat of one) and ogling at the Capitol dome, eating oysters at the Mayflower seemed pedestrian. The bouffants of the waitresses made far more of an impression than the shellfish, and when ours yelled at some idiot from Atlanta who ordered a poached egg, I tried to die three times. Out of sheer terror, I left her all the money I had–two quarters–because she glared at me when I asked for an extra straw.
Oysters enjoy a sex life that makes human sexuality totally lame, switching sexes according to a variety of environmental factors. If you’re a young oyster (a spat), one season ‘s Uncle Louie might be the next’s Aunt Louise. Not only that, but oysters reproduce by spewing their sperm and eggs into the water around them in an impregnating haze, the human equivalent of desperate yet sincere sex with someone on the other side of the Jacuzzi.
Eating a raw oyster is like stealing a kiss from the ocean: a wet, slightly salty, totally sensuous experience unbridled by any sort of fussy preparation. I’m firmly convinced that anyone who doesn’t enjoy oysters is a bad kisser, and I have centuries of documentation to back me up in this opinion. Oysters have enjoyed a reputation as an aphrodisiac for millennia. Now that I am well past the salad stage of life and forging steadily past dessert, I firmly intend to keep oysters a mainstay between courses, and God willing as my cordial.
I still like oysters with a dab of tart, horseradish-y cocktail sauce, but I also enjoy a lighter sauce that’s a bit more in tune with the sublime texture of the animal as it comes–quivering in its nakedness–to my lips.
Mignonette Sauce
Combine 1/3 cup wine vinegar, a finely-minced shallot, and a teaspoon of freshly-ground black pepper. Bottle, refrigerate, and shake well before dribbling over freshly-shucked oysters.
This editorial by Jay Wiener originally appeared in The Northside Sun Thursday, Sept. 11, 2025.
The Mississippi Department of Archives and History (MDAH) is reminiscent of Lyndon Johnson’s assessment of Richard Nixon, “He’s like a Spanish horse, who runs faster than anyone for the first nine lengths and then turns around and runs backwards.”
Or Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem,
“There was a little girl,
Who had a little curl,
Right in the middle of her forehead.
When she was good,
She was very good indeed,
But when she was bad she was horrid.”
It is difficult to reconcile a governmental department that accomplishes so much, extraordinarily well, with the entity that razed the city of Jackson’s flagship library.
The employees of MDAH are stellar individuals for whom I have utmost regard. Their probity is such that, if asked about book bans, they would agree that limiting access to books is indefensible. Nonetheless MDAH displayed no hesitation before eliminating a library housing countless volumes.
Why was the Eudora Welty Library razed? The flagship library was removed because its loading dock was conspicuous opposite the Two Mississippi Museums entry. (Please note the irony that the department overseeing the Eudora Welty House and the Eudora Welty Foundation destroyed the Eudora Welty Library.)
MDAH knew the location of the library’s loading dock before it broke ground for the two museums. They could have been entered on Mississippi Street or North Jefferson Street. A blind eye is turned toward that inconvenient truth as Jackson endures the absence of a flagship library, a crowning symbol of civic pride. Whenever Jacksonians lament the lack of a flagship library — as far as the eye can see — the penalty paid for serving as the state’s capital is inescapable.
Please do not take this critique to disapprove of public spaces shared by rich and poor alike. I am an advocate of public parks and prefer as many as possible, available in as many places as possible.
What I deplore, first and foremost, is that Jackson lacks sufficient funds to maintain city streets. MDAH could have constructed a state of the art public library, at state expense, in exchange for vacating the property sought. What occurred is as if one’s next-door neighbor bulldozed one’s home, refused recompense, and justified outrageous presumption, saying that the neighborhood was enhanced by the creation of green space.
The Northside Sun reported, on Friday August 22, 2025, that Jeanne Williams, Executive Director of the Jackson Hinds Library System, has informed Jackson’s City Council that the system’s board of directors recently “toured potential sites in an effort to re-establish the demolished Eudora Welty Library… ‘To renovate one of those sites would have been in the $12 million to $18 million range…’”
Second, state elected officials vociferously decry Federal Government overreach but, when the State Government overreaches, no conceivable dissembling is deemed excessive: When Thompson Field opened in 1963, it was built by the City of Jackson but, when the State of Mississippi sought control over our airport, the property was appropriated — once again without the citizens of Jackson being paid for the taking.
MDAH, given its focus on Mississippi history, is acutely aware of Mississippi’s troubling tradition of silencing dissent; running from town anyone saying what people in power do not want heard. I will not win friends among individuals fearful of realities being exposed that they prefer go unexamined notwithstanding the importance of pondering the pertinent problems implicated.
Not unlike Martin Luther’s protest, “I cannot and will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. Here I stand, I can do no other, so help me God. Amen.”
Food is a passionate issue for many people, and some foods are certainly controversial. Barbecue, for instance, is a highly inflammatory subject, but almost any food can become a flash point; I was once involved in a knock-down-drag out about how to make the perfect grilled cheese sandwich (Do you use mayonnaise? I don’t…).
Arguments over foods range from the sublime to the ridiculous, but unless you’re one of those self-styled and overly-promoted griddle Napoleons or oven Antoinettes you can get your fill of almost everywhere—or just an all-around jerk yourself—talks about foods and cooking tend to be cordial, albeit with the a measure of peppering. People who enjoy food and cooking are gregarious, open, and giving, and their activities revolve around food.
The best meals are home-cooked, and home itself must be one of the warmest words in the English language. Home entails more than place; the word implies security, comfort, congeniality and much, much more. Here in the South, the word has become infused with almost mystical connotations, evoking a sort of paradise, lost like all others. When we talk about home cooking, we’re talking about foods with a voice in the family and in the community, a cuisine that sings of time and place, a balm for the mind, a madeleine for memory. Foods without history and bereft of geography are just plain bad.
I grew up in north Mississippi, which is home to the cooking of the middle South, of the yeomanry, of the people who were the rule rather than the exception in the rural South of their day. My people are descended from small farmers who came into Mississippi from Virginia and the Carolinas, and the way my ancestors cooked still informs the state’s table. Theirs was not a light cuisine; it sustained people through long days of hard labor. They fed themselves and their families on the same basic foods the colonists at Jamestown ate: corn and pork augmented by whatever they could get to grow augmented by game and fish. Food was important to them because it was their only unadulterated source of pleasure. They planted and harvested, cooked and baked, canned and preserved, making the most of what they had season to season, year to year, generation to generation.
Recipes are dead words; it’s up to the cook to breathe life into them. It’s an unwritten law of cookery that the same recipe in the hands of, say, six or seven cooks will produce different (often surprisingly different) results. If you want to learn how to cook, then you must cook yourself. Once you’ve become more secure in your abilities and more confident of your results, then by all means be more creative. One of the glories of cooking as an art is that it lends itself easily to experimentation, but be “original, not outrageous,” as Alice B. Toklas cautions. Capote once said of writing that you must learn the rules before you can break them, and this is true of cookery as well.
Heat a quarter cup of corn oil in a deep skillet. Add a large, finely chopped onion, 3 minced cloves of garlic, 2 diced poblanos, and a four ounce can of diced green chilies. Stir until onions and peppers are soft, then pour into a pot on low heat along with a can of diced tomatoes and liquid.
Add one each 15-oz. cans of red kidney, pinto, and black beans to simmering vegetables. You can drain them if you want, but I don’t. Season with 2 tablespoons each of ground cumin, smoked paprika, chili powder, and a teaspoon of black pepper. You can add oregano, but I don’t.
Stir well, and keep on heat to meld, a half hour at least. Serve with warm corn chips, pico de gallo, chopped cilantro, fresh avocado, onion, and jalapenos.
Mexico has almost six thousand miles of coastline—about half of the estimated total for the U.S.—but mollusks don’t seem to play a proportionate role in Mexican cuisine.
Kennedy includes a scallop cebiche in Cuisines of Mexico, but not a one for oysters. This is not to say that oysters and scallops aren’t eaten in the country, simply that you’ll not find them in cookbooks. Recipes for salt-water fish abound, and red snapper Veracruz (huachinango a la Veracruzana), a rich, colorful dish with tomatoes and chilies, is one of the most distinguished. This scallop recipe is a riff on that, lighter and more intense.
Thaw frozen scallops, squeeze and drain. Even fresh scallops are too watery for this dish, so sauté lightly until firm. Drain scallops, toss with pepper, a bit of salt and a light dusting of plain flour. Brown in the least bit of oil possible, then add by spoonfuls a pungent tomato salsa. Cook until scallops are well-coated. Serve with a squeeze of lime.
Way back when, die-hard home cooks would sniff and curl a lip at a newlywed or (worse) single parent who brought a sheet cake to a bake sale. THEY, of course, brought an heirloom 8-layer caramel/German chocolate in a handmade paper mache decoupage box. Even worse, those die-hards naturally felt compelled to extract a timorous confession from the donor that a boxed cake mix was involved. Canned frosting was the coup de grace; admission to the bridge club would be ever afterwards inconceivable.
Granted, homemade cakes are a certified source of pride and satisfaction; given the time, they’re worth the effort. But if you’re losing you mind over at least a half dozen other things like the rest of us, use a boxed mix with homemade frosting and tell everyone to eat cake.
Combine 1 box Pillsbury White Supreme cake mix, 8 oz. sour cream, ¼ cup melted butter, 3 large eggs at room temperature, half of an 8-oz. can of crushed pineapple (drained and squeezed), and a can of cream of coconut (Coco Lopez). Mix on medium speed until smooth. Pour batter into a 9×13-inch pan greased with butter and lined with parchment paper. Place in a preheated 350 oven until toothpick-clean and firm in the middle, about 30 mins. Cool on a rack.
Blend 8 oz. softened cream cheese with two cups confectioner’s sugar, (the other 4 ounces of crushed, drained, and squeezed pineapple, and a tablespoon coconut extract. If needed, thin to spreading consistency with milk, top cake, and sprinkle with 2 cups toasted shredded coconut or coconut chips.
