I like corned beef hash for breakfast, chicken hash for lunch, and beef hash (without gravy) any time. Such are are the rules of the universe in this modest sphere.
My hash is made with leftover/canned meats. Sometimes I’ll use leftover roast potatoes, but for breakfast hash, I’ll dice a small red potato and cook in oil until browned and done through. Don’t ask me why; if we’re incapable of the inexplicable, then we are nothing.
Sometimes I’ll throw in some onion, but I don’t belong to the bell pepper crew. Basic seasonings: salt and pepper, paprika; a little dry mustard is a nice touch.
Keep it simple. Anyone who tries to gussy up hash needs therapy.
If you’ve never enjoyed the sensation of going out to the garden, picking a beautiful, ripe tomato (of whatever variety) and eating it right there on the spot atop of God’s good earth with the tang of that tomato plant in your nose and the warm sunshine on your face, then you’ve never had a tomato at it’s best. If you have, then you can truly say, “I know what a tomato is,” for then you have achieved an existential union with tomato-ness.
(Or maybe that’s an essential union; I forget the distinction. I think I flunked existentialism at Ole Miss, though I’m not really sure I took it in the first place, which means I might have passed the course after all.)
Vegetables prepared for the table straight from the soil are a hallmark of great Southern dinners; a luscious home-grown tomato, simply sliced and served on a plate, usually with a fragrant cantaloupe and maybe a good, dewy cucumber (all slightly chilled with a mint garnish) is a signature addition to any summer meal.
I consider a ripe tomato the crowning glory of Southern vegetables, but everybody has their own favorite; some advocate summer squash, others favor fresh beans and peas, and still others extol sweet corn. Some eccentric souls even champion okra or eggplant. But even back in the Bad Old Days when most of the country ate out of a can or from the frozen food section, people in the South knew to get their vegetables from gardens, and if they didn’t have a friend or relative they could help out by weeding and hoeing for some of the returns, they could get fine vegetables from the truck gardens and produce stands along the byways.
So when you’re out on the road this summer and you see little produce stands with signs written on brown cardboard with a magic marker, do yourself a favor by stopping by and spending a little time and a little money getting to know the foods of the South and the people who make them.
If you’re of a certain age, such custards as this were the beginning of that ice cream churned when you were growing up. This recipe makes a sumptuous base for any home freezer.
Combine 1 cup sugar, 1 tablespoon cornstarch and a scant teaspoon salt in a saucepan. Gradually stir in a quart of half-and-half and place over low heat. In a large bowl beat together 2 large eggs and a tablespoon of pure vanilla extract until whites and yolks are thoroughly blended.
Slowly add eggs to the cream, stirring constantly and gradually increasing heat until thickened. It should have the consistency of eggnog. Stir in a pint of whipping cream and remove from heat.
Refrigerate for 45 minutes to cool, then add fruit, nuts and/or flavorings, place in freezer, and help make people happy.
Mix a fifth of light rum with a fifth of dark rum, 2 cups lime juice, 2 cups orange juice, 1 quart passion fruit juice, and a cup of simple syrup. Serve over crushed ice. Keep a pour spout bottle of grenadine near the ice bucket, and don’t even worry about garnishes unless you want to pick orange rinds and toothpicks out of the couch cushions.
When I was growing up in small-town Mississippi in the 1960s, TV dinners were a treat, something different from home-cooked, not better, by any means, just exotic, some indication that change was possible in the stagnant backwater of Bruce, Mississippi, if only by way of convenience foods.
Frozen pizza held a similar glamour.
For a little over a dollar, we could buy fried chicken, meatloaf, or turkey and dressing with a puddle of piped-in potatoes and neon peas in a space-age metal container, heat it in the oven, and eat them on the sheet-pan fold-away TV tables that became available simultaneously.
I remember eating one the first time I saw “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.” I was eight.
My favorite was the fried chicken, but brother Tom’s was Salisbury steak (as close as he could get to a hamburger). It’s named for James Salisbury, one of those impressive food faddists of the late 19th century whose ranks include Kellogg, Post, and Mary Grove Nichols (by far the coolest of the three.)
Salisbury advocated the same low-carb diet as Tarnower and Atkins (known now as paleo), his being very much meat-centered. Salisbury’s version of a “lean beef cake,” calls for meat “from the centre of the round” procured from “well-fatted animals that are from four to six years old,” but any lean is good.
For a pound of lean ground beef, add a quarter cup bread crumbs, and if you don’t have any of those little-bitty cans of tomato sauce, work in a generous squirt or two of ketchup along with a good dusting of black pepper. Don’t over-work the meat. Form into no more than four cakes about an inch thick. Cook in a low oven to medium well.
While this recommendation doesn’t fit the doctor’s diet, my optimal serving of Salisbury steak requires mushroom gravy (a light one), creamed potatoes with a little pitty-pat of butter, and green peas, just like Mother Swanson served.
Here in the Mid-South, we make three popular summer sandwiches with raw vegetables.
One is the cucumber sandwich, served on pretty little trays aside ewers of lemonade, iced tea, or gin and tonics on tables topped with linen adorned with silver, eaten by ladies smelling of lavender sachet and gentlemen of a certain persuasion in pastel seersucker suits.
Diametrically opposite of this delicate denizen of elegant afternoon gatherings is the sweet onion sandwich, gnawed upon with audible gusto over kitchen sinks, and washed down with Miller or PBR by the likes of ATV enthusiasts and women’s sports columnists.
Then we have the tomato sandwich. Egalitarian, comfortable in any company, this summer staple of Dixie is found on the table just about any time of the day. For me, a good home-grown tomato sandwich is how a summer afternoon on the front porch ought to taste.
The essential components are bread, sliced tomatoes and mayonnaise. The bread soft wheat or white; for the garnish of memory, I use Wonder bread. The tomatoes should be the best your particular part of the world has to offer.
The mayonnaise (Blue Plate) should be slathered on the tomatoes as well as the bread, ensuring even moistness. Season with plenty of salt and a generous dusting of black pepper.
Adding bacon elevates the tomato sandwich from a mere concoction to poetry, but Joan Hess and I both agree that lettuce is superfluous and moreover annoying.
Anyone who bellies up to a Bible-Belt bar on a Sunday morning drinks in the certainty that their stool is just as comfortable and congenial as any pew.
Bartenders who work Sunday mornings know their customers well, and more often than not the hearkening faces at the rail know a thing or so about the bartenders, too. They’re always telling on one another, and if it’s a really friendly bar, they’ll do it aloud, especially when not that many people are in the bar and the music’s low. It’s a special sort of bonding ritual that you just won’t find along an aisle.
Jake and I enjoy basking in these secular exchanges. We manage to steer clear of most petty imbroglios; oh, we’ll put our two cents in on something especially outrageous (or at least I will), but most of the time we just talk to each other.
Jake grew up in upstate New York; I grew up in north Mississippi. He was probably pulling my leg when he told me that his parents once sent money to a charitable organization whose mission was to improve the lot of ignorant, parasite-infested Southerners, but I bristled anyway and reminded him that they did that once already (with taxes) and a less than charitable intent towards the majority of my ancestors.
He in turn reminded me that his folks came over on the Concorde and that his parents don’t pay taxes. At this point, I should have bolted, but bearing in mind Faulkner’s mandate of love despite faults, we both endured and have come to learn that we have much in common.
Take Vienna sausages, for instance, an iconic Southern nosh if there ever was one. Never in a million years would I have thought Jake knew of (much less ate them) as a child. But one Sunday morning at the bar he told me about penny eggs.
“My mother,” he said, “would take Vienna sausages, slice them crossways and put them in our scrambled eggs. She called them penny eggs.”
Suddenly I could hear a woman’s voice from a kitchen down a hall. “Do you want penny eggs for breakfast?” Or: “Hurry up or you’re going to miss your penny eggs.” What child would not be stirred? Little fists would begin to rub sleepy eyes, and soon the breakfast table would be surrounded by mouths eager for spoonfuls of eggs strewn with penny-like slices of mild sausage.
If I live for another 800 years, I don’t think I’ll ever feel anything as warm or hear anything as charming as that childhood memory coming to light in a dingy, musty bar on a rainy Sunday morning. Of course, he found nothing endearing about my Vienna memories, which involved fishing for crappie on Grenada Lake and untangling barbed wire from bush hogs that had run over an old fence.
“You were sweating,” he said. “They were like sodium suppositories.” After reminding him that we ate them, I tried to interject some romance into my remembrances.
“Jake,” I said. “Imagine that you’re in a leaky aluminum boat with a stuttering motor in the backwaters of a north Mississippi reservoir. It’s an early Saturday morning and sunny.
“You’re eight years old, fishing with a couple who have been married for forty years. You have your little baseball cap on, but your nose gets burned anyway. You catch one fish, a little one, to their twenty big ones. You get to drink all the Cokes you want, and pee off the side of the skiff. And for lunch, well before noon, you get saltines, a big piece of rat cheese, sardines if you want them, and a can of Vienna sausages.”
“Surrounded by venomous snakes no doubt,” he said. “And please tell me you didn’t eat the fish.” At this, I realized romanticizing barbed wire foul-ups on bush hogs was useless.
I keep Viennas on hand, but Jake, despite his admission of a childhood fondness for them, has consigned them to what the calls the redneck corner of the cupboard, where he puts my sardines, pink salmon, and saltines.
He lets me keep my red-rind cheddar in the fridge, bless his heart.
A friend from Texas—east Texas, mind you—now living in Maine said their neighbors considered pound cake Southern because the ingredients are cheap.
Well, dear hearts, those are the very reasons Americans have baked this cake well before Burr shot Hamilton. This recipe is a felony with fruit, a mortal sin with ice cream.
Preheat oven to 350 (a crucial step). Grease, line, and set aside a 10-inch loaf pan or Bundt. Cream 2 cups sugar with a cup of softened butter. Stir in two tablespoons of poppy seeds, a cup of buttermilk, 4 beaten eggs, and at least a tablespoon of vanilla extract.
Sift 3 cups of plain flour with a teaspoon each of baking powder and soda. Gradually blend with liquid mix until smooth. Bake for an hour, then turn the oven off and leave the cake in until the oven has cooled. Rest on a rack an hour before slicing.
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 much 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 Provençe, 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.
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.
