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.
Purple hull pea hulls give a grape-flavored jelly, white crowder hulls a honey-flavored jelly, lady pea hulls an apple-flavored jelly, and if you mix the hulls of crowder, purple, whippoorwill, and lady peas, you get a for a plum-flavored jelly.
Wash 1 gallon pea hulls thoroughly, at least twice, then bring to boil in a heavy pan with enough water to cover hulls. Boil over low heat for 8 to 10 minutes. Save the juice, approximately 8 cups, and discard hulls. Combine juice with 2 pkgs. Sure-Jell in heavy saucepan and bring to a boil. Boil for 2 minutes. Add 8 cups of sugar and boil an additional minute. Pour mixture into glass jars and seal.
Willadeen Monahan and her sister Geraldeen used to sing on the local radio shows in north Mississippi back in the 1950s. They were pretty and could sing up a storm, but the act never went anywhere. In time they both married and settled down, Geraldeen in Kosciusko and Willadeen in Como, where I became her neighbor.
Panola County gets mighty cold in the deep Delta winter, and when the north wind came whipping down on us like a blue devil, Willadeen would call us up and say, “Y’all come on over and get some of this spoon bread to keep you warm. You know I make the best in the world!” And she did. Here’s her recipe.
Preheat oven to 400. Sift 1 cup cornmeal into 2 cups of lightly salted boiling water. Lower the heat and stir vigorously to a stiff gruel. Remove from heat and mix in a cup of cold milk or cream–this is best done with a whip.
Add 2 well-beaten eggs and 2 tablespoons melted butter. Blend until very smooth and ladle into a heated, well-oiled 8-in. baking dish. Willadeen used a skillet, which gives a nice crust. Bake until firm in the middle and nicely browned, about 40 minutes, less if you’re using cast iron. Serve hot from the oven with molasses or honey.
In my book, which got another rejection this month –“Your approach to cooking is mind-numbingly academic and disturbingly pugnacious”–Alice Brock is a bazillion times cooler than Alice Waters. Brock’s humor and ill regard for bullshit establishes her biography, My Life as a Restaurant, as the hands-on-hips precursor to Bourdain’s somewhat more cantankerous Kitchen Confidential. Not only that, Waters never had a song written about her, much less an anthem.
Alice and her staff up in Massachusetts had a thing with mousses/mooses. The drawing with this recipe has antlers, and they include a story of a moose falling into a vat of cocoa for the chocolate version. This fixation seems to be prevalent in New England where moose/mooses/meece live, but in this culinary reference, the homonym proves emphatic. This salmon mousse is great hot weather nosh and can be served either from your great-grandmother’s fish mold or if you’re just totally white trash in a bowl.
Put a quarter cup diced onion and lemon juice in a blender with an envelope of gelatin and a half cup hot water. Blend at high speed for one minute, then add a half cup of mayonnaise and 16 ounces of canned salmon. (Red is best, leftover homecooked is wonderful, and pink will do.) Blend/pulse this mixture until smooth. Add a tablespoon paprika and a cup of heavy cream. Blend for about a half minute, and cool for at least 6 hours before serving.
Our grocery deli serves these potatoes—along with two kinds of grits and rice—as sides on its breakfast buffet. Cube red potatoes and parboil until just firm. Drain, season with salt and pepper, then pan fry until done through and crusty.
This smart-ass from New Orleans—they’re all over the place down there, trust me—once asked me in a job interview (in Oxford, Mississippi in 1990, no less) if I knew how to make marchand. When I said no, the bastard actually curled his upper lip in an unctuous, condescending sneer. If I’d had heat vision, he’d have been char.
I got the job anyway because the guy who asked me to apply owned the joint. The asshole from New Orleans got fired four months later for stealing from the payrole and selling coke under the bar. This version of Brennan’s batch recipe makes about a quart and refrigerates well.
In a stick of butter, lightly brown a quarter cup of flour. Add a minced clove of garlic smashed and minced, three or four chopped green onions, and a cup of diced shallots. Alternately, whisk in beef stock and wine until smooth and somewhat on the thin side. Season with thyme, parsley, fresh black pepper, and reduce heat. Salt to taste before serving.
