Within living memory, this simple dish was a staple on meat-and-three menus throughout the rural South. Juice from the vegetables stirred with oil and vinegar make a mild, flavorful vinaigrette best with beans or cold meats. I love to use it in the old three-bean-salad, and it’s great with fish or shellfish.
Use fresh vegetables; supermarket tomatoes don’t have enough of that wonderful gelatin surrounding the seeds, and those cucumbers are too watery. Sweet yellow onions spoil the bite, and red onions discolor the mix; white boilers are best. Cut vegetables into bite-sized pieces, place in a glass or ceramic bowl and toss with a generous salting and a good bit of fresh ground black pepper.
Resist the temptation to use garlic and/or herbs. Add enough white vinegar to cover the vegetables by half and half that amount of corn oil. Do not use olive oil, which will coagulate when refrigerated. Refresh the mix with vegetables, seasonings, and liquids as needed.
Women in any given society will assemble to sip, nibble, and talk about anything they want and anyone who isn’t there.
Speaking as an ardent fan of my opposite sex, I’ll be the first to say that the world is a much better place due to distaff parliaments. Civilization itself depends on feminine attentions if not to say machinations, and it’s usually in these gaggles that the most uninhibited deliberations between our sisters take place.
Men should understand and appreciate this phenomenon, since when it comes to gossip, the trickle-down theory actually works; you may not know that your boss is sleeping with your secretary, but it’s a fair bet that you have a better chance of finding out if your wife knows. And God help you if you’ve been fucking her as well.
The food served at more formal klatches of this type is delicate, often to the point of fussy. You’ll find salads with cold seafood or chicken, pasta, or seasonal vegetables alongside the obligatory crustless geometric sandwiches. Sweets, with the exception of a killer cake, are dainty and plentiful as are the drinks.
I’ll not go so far as to swear that food is primarily intended to buffer the effects of a Bloody Mary luncheon, but the theory has been broached.
In the South, pimento and cheese, chicken salad, deviled eggs and pound cake (lemon or poppy seed particularly) at a ladies’ luncheon seem mandatory now, but it wasn’t so long ago that holding one without serving tomato aspic would imperil your membership in the 20th Century Club, but because of recoil from the foods of the Sixties, congealed salads (like fondues) have become not only passé but proscribed.
This reaction is somewhat justified; on any given month between say 1960 and 1975 in any magazine devoted to food, you’ll find tons of recipes for gelatin involving practically every ingredient in the kitchen, more often than not canned fruit, citrus Jell-O and mini marshmallows.
But we shouldn’t abandon a good recipe because it’s showing its age, and this is a great dish: light, savory, easily prepared and attractive. Let’s hope tomato aspic is going through a trial period in popular tastes before it becomes not so much a novel legacy but a standard for our tables.
Tomato Aspic
3 cups tomato juice 2 packets unflavored gelatin 2 tablespoons finely minced white onion 2 tablespoons finely minced celery 1 teaspoon brown sugar 1 teaspoon black pepper 1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice Worcestershire sauce and hot sauce to taste
Warm tomato juice, add gelatin and dissolve. Stir in lemon juice, black pepper, Worcestershire and hot sauce (I like Crystal), add vegetables and chill until partially set, spoon or pour into individual (5 oz.) lightly oiled molds and chill until set. Plate and serve with boiled eggs, pickles, and olives.
The muse of fiction is a thirsty bawd, particularly in the South where the icon of a hard-drinking writer unjustly brushes even us most humble wordsmiths with a tar of dissolution.
Eudora Welty, every inch a lady, certainly did not fall into the rough-hewn writer category. Nonetheless, I have it on good authority that Welty and her friend Charlotte Capers, a Jackson historian, wit, and essayist, and various wafting guests were often found on the porch at Eudora’s home on Pinehurst with a bottle of Old Crow. (The same authority relays that Welty later became a convert to Maker’s Mark, which she took on the rocks with a splash of water.)
Eudora lived to a ripe old age, garnering laurels all the way. In her youth, she worked for the short-lived (1935-39) Federal Writer’s Project. Thousands worked on the project, including several well-known authors, many of them women. Fieldworkers such as Welty made about $80 a month, working 20 to 30 hours a week, collecting stories, local histories and taking photographs. They also collected recipes for a project entitled “America Eats”, and most of these recipes and recollections of foods have been gathered together by Mark Kurlansky in his splendid Food of a Younger Nation. Welty’s contributions to “America Eats” are somewhat substantial, and from all over the state: stuffed apples, stuffed eggs, lye hominy, barbecue sauce, a seafood and an okra gumbo, court bouillon, beaten biscuit, Spanish rice, potato salad and, last but not least, a mint julep. Welty writes:
A collection of recipes from the Old South is no more complete than the Old South itself without that magic ingredient, the mint julep. In the fine old City of Columbus, in the northeastern part of the state, hospitality for many years is said to have reached its height in Whitehall, the home of Mr. and Mrs. T.C. Billups. “The drink is refreshing,’ Mrs. Billups says, needlessly enough, “and carries with it all the charm of the Old South when life was less strenuous than it is today; when brave men and beautiful women loved and laughed and danced the hours away, but in their serious moments, which were many, aspired to develop minds and souls that made them among the finest people this old world has known.’ The Whitehall recipe is as follows:
Have silver goblet thoroughly chilled. Take half lump sugar and dissolve in tablespoon water. Take single leaf mint and bruise it between fingers, dropping into dissolved sugar. Strain after stirring. Fill the goblet with crushed ice, to capacity. Pour in all the bourbon whiskey the goblet will hold. Put a spring of mint in the top of the goblet, for bouquet. Let goblet stand until FROSTED. Serve rapidly.
I once worked in a restaurant on the coast that regularly sold four roast rib loins in a day. During the tourist season, we would keep eight loins cooking literally around the clock. We’d take the loins to rare, and since the carving station was set up under a heat lamp next to the grill, where the meat would continue to cook in service, so we rotated sections of meat on and off the carving board.
If someone ordered prime rib well done—and, yes, such people do exist in this world—we’d drop a cut into the well of warm au jus we kept at the grill station until meat was grey and the tip and cap had peeled away from the eye. Smart customers who wanted a slice on the done side ordered an end piece.
Our menu called this beef dish prime rib, but we rarely used USDA Prime beef. We most often used a Choice rather than the much more expensive Prime grade, but rib roast is usually called prime on menus because it is, after all, from one of the eight prime cuts in a whole beef (brisket, shank, rib, loin, round, chuck, flank, and plate).
You can bet a rib roast can be expensive, usually from $12 to as much as $27+ per pound; the average is around $15-20. The price can be much cheaper during the major holidays, around $10 to $15 a pound. Bone-in roasts usually have three to seven ribs and are slightly more expensive. A three-rib roast can feed about seven people; figure 16 ounces of uncooked boneless roast per person.
For an evenly-cooked, rib roast, pat the roast dry, brush with oil, coat with sea salt and minced garlic, and place on a on a rack in a heavy pan. Cover lightly with foil and bring to room temperature. Preheat the oven to 500. Remove cloth, place the roast in the oven, wait a half hour, then turn the heat down to 250. In an hour, begin checking with a thermometer. When you get a reading of 130 in the thickest part of the roast, immediately remove the meat from the oven, and let rest about five minutes a pound before carving and serving.
The name beneath this recipe from Jackson’s New Stage Theatre’s Standing Room Only: Recipes for Entertaining (1983) is Ellen Douglas, but everyone should know that Ellen Douglas is the pen name for writer Josephine Ayers Haxton. Born in Natchez, she married composer Kenneth Haxton in 1945 and shortly afterwards moved to Haxton’s hometown of Greenville. There she befriended Shelby Foote, Hodding Carter, and other local literati.
According to the author, she entered into a wager with her husband and a mutual friend on who could finish a novel in the least amount of time. She won the bet by writing A Family’s Affairs (1962), which is largely autobiographical in nature, requiring her to get her family’s permission to publish the narrative and resulting in her adoption of the pen name Ellen Douglas. The book not only sold well, but it also won the Houghton Mifflin Esquire Fellowship Award for best new novel and was named as one the year’s ten best books by The New York Times. Her second work, Black Cloud, White Cloud (1963), a collection of short stories, also won the Houghton Mifflin Esquire Fellowship Award, and her 1973 novel Apostles of Light was a finalist for the National Book Award. Other works include The Rock Cried Out (1973) and A Lifetime Burning (1982). Josephine Haxton died in Jackson in 2012.
Though Ayers was not Jewish, her mother-in-law Ellise Blum Haxton was the daughter of Jewish merchant Aaron Blum of Nelms and Blum department store in Greenville, and this recipe may have come from her kitchen. From my (demonstrably non-Jewish) perspective, fried matzos seem like just another variety of hushpuppy, though serving them with catfish—which is decidedly non-kosher—might be a bit rude. These make a great side for any number of meat dishes—baked chicken or fish, beef roast, what have you—but they’re also a great buffet nosh served with a sauce made with one part each grated horseradish, sour cream and mayonnaise seasoned with salt and cayenne to taste.
Soak two matzo crackers in water; drain and squeeze dry. Heat 2 tablespoons chicken fat, and sauté ¼ medium onion until golden brown. Add soaked crackers and cook and stir until the mixture “clears” the skillet. Cool. Add a teaspoon chopped parsley, a teaspoon salt, a quarter teaspoon of ground ginger, an eighth teaspoon both ground pepper and nutmeg, two lightly beaten eggs and enough matzo meal (about a quarter cup) to make a soft dough. Let stand for several hours to swell. Shape into small balls. Fry in deep fat (assumedly not lard, jly) until golden brown. The balls can be formed and frozen before frying. (This recipe makes about 20 balls.)
There walk among us those in which the spirit of rebellion is fierce and pervasive, scofflaws whose sense of outrage at any form of constraint extends even unto the kitchen-tested recipes printed on a box of cake flour box.
Honestly, the nerve of some people.
The following variant reflects the decadence and degradation–not to mention the unmitigated arrogance–of such an approach to existence. Here wholesome milk is replaced by debased beer, which the originator assures us gives a “lighter, somewhat more robust and yeastier” taste to the cake.
Yes, well, no doubt.
Mix one 15-ounce box yellow cake mix with 1/3 cup vegetable oil, 3 large eggs and one 12-ounce can lager like Budweiser or (God help you) PBR. Bake in bundt. Note this corruption extends even unto the icing, composed of 1 1/2 cups confectioners’ sugar mixed with enough of the same beer to make a glaze.
This Alice B. Toklas Cookbook recipe was omitted in the first American publication (1954) but was included in the second (1960). Here’s Alice’s recipe from the 1984 edition:
Haschich Fudge (which anyone could whip up on a rainy day)
This is the food of Paradise—of Baudelaire’s Artificial Paradises; it might provide entertaining refreshment for a Ladies’ bridge Club or a chapter meeting of the DAR. In Morocco it is thought to be good for warding off the common cold in damp winter weather and is, indeed, more effective if taken with large quantities of hot mint tea. Euphoria and brilliant storms of laughter; ecstatic reveries and extensions of one’s personality on several simultaneous planes are to be complacently expected. Almost anything Saint Theresa did, you can do better if you can bear to be ravished by un évanouissement revelle’.
Take 1 teaspoon black peppercorns, 1 whole nutmeg, 4 average sticks of cinnamon, 1 teaspoon coriander. These should all be pulverized in a mortar. About a handful each of stoned dates, dried figs, shelled almonds and peanuts; chop these and mix them together. A bunch of cannabis sativa can be pulverized. This along with the spices should be dusted over the mixed fruit and nuts, kneaded together. About a cup of sugar dissolved in a big pat of butter. Rolled into a cake and cut into pieces or made into balls about the size of a walnut, it should be eaten with care. Two pieces are quite sufficient.
Obtaining the cannabis may present certain difficulties, but the variety known as cannabis sativa grows as a common weed, often unrecognized, everywhere in Europe, Asia and parts of Africa; besides being cultivated as a crop for the manufacture of rope. In the Americas, while often discouraged, its cousin, called cannabis indica, has been observed even in city window boxes. It should be picked and dried as soon as it has gone to seed and while the plant is still green.
Take Port Clydes in oil, drain, drizzle with lemon juice and salt, and put them in the refrigerator to chill. Serve with gherkins, celery, onions, and boiled/pickled eggs. Dill toast is wonderful, but rye Melba will suffice, and saltines will do any time at all.
As a librarian in Tupelo, a colleague and I were in charge of taking books to those who couldn’t come to us. Every Wednesday we’d load up our trusty little station wagon and drive around the city dropping off new checkouts and picking up returns.
Our main destinations were nursing homes, and they were all, without exception, far from the dismal environments some people might imagine. As a matter of fact, those under care were often robust enough to elbow a neighbor out of the way to get the best Cartlands, Christies, or L’Amours, and if we didn’t have enough copies of the latest John Grisham potboiler, they’d fight over them.
We once had to disarm a dame wielding a plastic knife. During one of these feeding frenzies, a blue stocking with pink hair sniffed and said to me, “They shouldn’t have been taught how to read.”
My partner Beverly, a seasoned veteran, rarely instructed me on nuances, so the assignment was full of pleasant surprises and lessons. We often picked up returns at the nurses’ stations, which are always a nexus of activity. I remember once early on reaching a station just as a produce man was dropping off three bushels peas in the pod.
Being a fugitive kitchen grunt myself, I expected some surly person to appear, haul them in the back, and begin the tedium of shelling them, so I was astounded when at least a dozen ladies came out of the TV room, ripped a pea sack open in seconds, filled up their colanders, and retreated—just yakkin’ up a storm the whole time—back into the TV room.
I was trying to take it all in while Bev started packing up the returned books. Finally I tapped her on the shoulder and asked, “Bev, are they in there shelling peas?”
She looked over at the TV room door and said, “Oh, yes. They love watching soap operas and shelling peas.”
Sure enough, a squadron of ladies had settled into their seats with peas and bowls in their laps and paper sacks on the floor at their sides. They didn’t even look at the peas as they shelled them; their eyes were glued to the drama unfolding before them. The nurse on duty told me that the shelled peas were collected before dinner (I had a vision of some old lady trying to stash HER colander of peas in a bottom drawer), bagged and kept in the refrigerator until cooked or offered to visitors, but “sometimes there’s so much in there, we just end up taking some home to keep them from being wasted.”
Bill Neale suspected that the Lord invented porches and television to make pea-shelling easier. My mother Barbara, as a young bride, was out on her porch one afternoon sweeping when she saw her husband’s Aunt Bess walking down the road with a sack and crying her eyes out, going to her sister Ethel’s, who was Barbara’s mother-in-law. Not being one to impose (at that point), mother assumed the worst and started cooking. After about an hour, with two casseroles and a cake in the oven, she called up Daddy and said, “Jess, your Aunt Bess just went over to Ethel’s just bawling her eyes out. I think Uncle Ed’s finally died.”
So Daddy ran up to Ethel’s house, assessed the situation, came out sweating and said: “Barbara, Ed didn’t die, Bess is just all wrung out over some soap character dying—her and Momma both.” Then Daddy handed her a bag of shelled peas.
“Here,” he said. “I told them to come over for dinner tonight. You need to start watching ‘Days of Our Lives.’”
