A Southern Gallimaufry
Poach boneless breasts of chicken in lightly salted water until tender. Shred, mince, and add to each pound of meat a four-oz. can chopped chilies (with liquid), juice of one lime, and enough sour cream to bind. You can add grated jack cheese if you like. Season with equal parts cumin, chili powder, and granulated garlic. Salt to taste. Roll in warm tortillas brushed with corn oil. Top with a rich queso.
In 1985, Craig Claiborne visited Bill Neal’s restaurant, Crook’s Corner, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and after sampling many dishes, asked Neal to prepare shrimp and grits for him in his kitchen the next morning.
Claiborne soon published the recipe in the New York Times, and the national craze for shrimp and grits was on. While the recipe has been replicated—usually with disappointing results—in restaurants across the country, this is Neale’s original:
6 cups cooked grits with cheese (I use a white cheddar)
Tabasco sauce
Freshly grated nutmeg
White pepper
1 pound (454 g) fresh shrimp
6 slices bacon
Peanut oil
2 cups sliced mushrooms
1 cup finely sliced scallions
1 large garlic clove, peeled
4 teaspoons lemon juice
Tabasco sauce
2 tablespoons fresh, chopped parsley
Salt and pepper
Season grits to taste, but lightly, with Tabasco, a very little nutmeg, and white pepper. Hold in a warm place or in the top of a double boiler over simmering water. Peel the shrimp, rinse, and pat dry. Dice the bacon and sauté lightly in the skillet. The edges of the bacon should brown, but the bacon should not become crisp. Add enough peanut oil to the bacon fat in the skillet to make a layer of fat about a quarter of an inch deep. When quite hot, add the shrimp in an even layer. Turn the shrimp as they start to color, add the mushrooms, and sauté about 4 minutes. Turn occasionally and add the scallions. Add the garlic through a press and stir around. Then season with lemon juice, a dash or two of Tabasco, and parsley. Add salt and pepper to taste. Divide the grits among four plates. Spoon the shrimp over and serve immediately.
For a long time I’ve been remiss about not getting beloved recipes from people who’ve since passed from my life. I came to feel those recipes were irreplaceable riches that had been swallowed by the maw of time, as indeed they are.
Yet this remarkable world goes around, and I’ve come to realize that getting recipes from others is important, perhaps even crucial in some larger scheme of things. So we must wrench the dishes we love from those who create them, even if we have to beat the holy hell out of them to do so.
It’s our duty as members of the human race.
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 2/3 cup wine vinegar, a small, finely-minced shallot, 2 tablespoons olive oil, and a tablespoon each freshly-ground black pepper and minced parsley. Bottle, refrigerate, and shake well before dribbling over freshly-shucked oysters.
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.
The lady who gave me this recipe said it came from the Ringling Estate in Sarasota, Florida, and while I have no reason whatsoever to doubt that it did, I wish she had known the history behind them.
Whisk together 2/3 a cup of cocoa, 2 cups plain flour, 1 ¼ packed cup brown sugar, a teaspoon each of baking powder and soda, and dash or so of salt. Set aside. Beat 2 large eggs into ¾ cup milk. Add 2 teaspoons vanilla extract and a slash of vinegar along with a melted stick of butter. Mix dry and wet ingredients. Blend just enough to ensure the moisture is evenly mixed; muffins don’t need a lot of work. Bake at 350 for about a half hour.
By peas I mean field peas and by snaps, green beans, which I call snap or string. Store-bought frozen blends tend to be heavy on the peas—maybe as much as 2:1—but I prefer it 50:50.
Add the peas to the pot, and liquid to cover by at least an inch (I use chicken broth, but there’s nothing keeping you from using salt water and pork. Bring it to a rolling boil for about five minutes before adding the beans and lowering the heat to simmer. Hold on stove for a half hour or so.
A lady whose full name I’ve forgotten shared sent this to me years ago. Now, to have Angelo Mistilis teach you how to cook onions is on the level of having Yo-Yo Ma show you how to tune a bull fiddle. Angelo has without doubt cooked more onions than anyone in the state of Mississippi over the years in his restaurant on College Hill Road in Lafayette County and served them up to generations of Oxonians, Ole Miss students, and other assorted riff-raff with hamburger steaks.
I once knew a woman who claimed to know the Sanders Original Recipe of “11 herbs and spices” because she had worked in a franchise outlet in Grenada, Mississippi for three months while her husband was in the local lock-up for beating up a used car salesman.
She didn’t really know the recipe, of course; her fried chicken tasted nothing like it, though it may have had to after her bottle of vodka. But Harlan Sanders’ original recipe was finally made public in August, 2016, when the Chicago Tribune reported that a nephew by marriage–by marriage, mind you–of Harland Sanders claimed to have found a copy of the original KFC fried chicken recipe on a handwritten piece of paper in an envelope–an envelope, no less–in a scrapbook of an assuredly familial nature .
As journalists of fortitude, integrity, and no small degree of puckish abandon, Tribune staffers tested the recipe before publication, and after “some trial and error” they decided that with the addition of an unspecified amount of MSG, the following seasoning mixture produced fried chicken “indistinguishable” from the fried chicken from a Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise.
By way of covering their ass, they recommended that the chicken should be soaked in buttermilk, coated once, then fried in oil at 350 degrees until golden brown.
Mix with 2 cups white flour:
2/3 Ts (tablespoons) Salt
1/2 Ts Thyme
1/2 Ts Basil
1/3 Ts Oregano
1 Ts Celery salt
1 Ts Black pepper
1 Ts Dried mustard
4 Ts Paprika
2 Ts Garlic salt
1 Ts Ground ginger
3 Ts White pepper
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.
