Some people make a fool with yogurt or (Lord help us) instant pudding, but to make a proper fool, you must make custard.
For six servings, scald two cups milk. Cool and add a blend of two well-beaten eggs with a half cup sugar and a teaspoon vanilla. Pour into a double boiler. As it begins to thicken, add a tablespoon of corn starch blended very well in a tablespoon of milk. Once very thick, refrigerate until firm.
To two cups sliced fruit, add a quarter cup sugar and macerate for at least a half hour. Stir if you can think about doing so. Layer fruit and custard, top with stiff cream. Chill and garnish–a dust of nutmeg is a nice touch–before serving.
If, like me, you find sweet potatoes too sugary for many menus, this combination provides a semi-savory option.
Peel and slice on the thin side waxy white and sweet potatoes, layer in a lightly buttered casserole, gratin, or skillet–be artistic–with sprinklings of salt, pepper, and thyme.
Brush lavishly with melted butter and bake at 350 until the tops crisp and brown.
1⁄4 cup mung peas 1⁄4 cup azuki peas 1⁄4 cup lentils and/or split peas Cranberry beans – enough to cover bottom of kettle 1⁄2 bunch celery 1 lb. carrots 4 large yellow onions. 1 bunch bok choy 1⁄2 cup chard 1 medium potato Any vegetable to taste – solid ones first, leafy ones last 1 tomato 4 lb. sliced mushrooms 2 cubes of beef or chicken bouillon 1-2 cups red wine (any cheap, dry red goofy) Grated Parmesan cheese
Use a large kettle (can be picked up for about a quarter at most thrift shops) of 1 gallon or more capacity. Put enough water in the kettle to reach 2-3 inches up the sides. Pour in cranberry beans and other beans and peas, I sliced onion, and 3 stalks chopped celery, including leafy part. Season with liberal/radical amounts of salt, black pepper, celery salt, thyme, oregano. Season conservatively with bay leaves, allspice. Season fascistically with cayenne or curry powder. Season piggishly with chili powder.
1. Let this first part cook for 45 minutes to 1 hour. As it comes to boil, stir occasionally. 2. Now during the first hour of cooking, get away from the stove, sit down, roll one, have some tea, look out the window-relax. 3. After one hour begin adding vegetables-hard ones first-celery, carrots, potato, etc. 4. Put in leafy vegetables after the second hour. 5. Add mushrooms and tomato in the last 20 minutes, wine in the last 5 minutes. Sprinkle with Parmesan cheese before serving.
This dish was one of our more popular choices at the Downtown Grill in Oxford. Though a Creole mustard is used here, the recipe works well with brown, stone-ground, or Dijon, but hell, use yellow if that’s all you have.
Oil and line a skillet or sheet pan with parchment paper. Preheat oven to 400. Stir together 1 cup finely chopped pecans with about a quarter cup finely-crushed saltines; you can use Panko instead, but for some reason I never seem to have any Panko.
Mix ¼ cup mustard with 1 large egg and ¼ cup water. Beat very well. Dredge the fish through the mustard mixture and coat the tops of the fillets in crushed pecans. Bake at 400 for about 10-15 minutes, depending upon the size of the fillet.
Usually served over biscuits, rice, or grits, Bill Neale among others recommends it with fried chicken. I serve it with pork chops. Good summer tomatoes singed, peeled, and drained are best, but home-canned tomatoes run a (very) close second. Bacon drippings are traditional. Neale’s recipe uses chicken stock or water, while Robert St. John’s calls for stock and milk. If using canned tomatoes, always add a little juice.
2 cups chopped tomatoes 3 tablespoons drippings or oil 2 tablespoons flour 1 1/4 cups water or stock 1 teaspoon sugar 1 teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon pepper
Add salt, pepper, and sugar to chopped tomatoes, and mix well. Heat bacon drippings in a skillet, add flour to make a lightly browned roux. Add tomatoes, water/broth, reduce heat, and thicken.
Trim fat from bone-in center cut chops, brush with (in this order) lime juice, corn oil, and freshly-ground black pepper. Marinate for about an hour, then broil or grill until well seared. Do not overcook. Serve with black beans and rice.
“The Masters pimento cheese must be the most famous sandwich in all of sport,” wrote journalist Andy Bull, and it was Nick Rango’s recipe for “the pȃte of the South” that made the Masters gallery snack iconic.
The pimento cheese Nick Rango sold from his store, Woodruff Drug in Aiken, South Carolina, was so famous that in the 1960s, Masters organizers dropped the husband-and-wife catering team they’d hired since the 1940s to make way for Rango’s. For 45 years, Rango and his two children, Billy and Stella, whipped up massive quantities of pimento cheese by hand to take to Augusta every April.
More than 20 years ago, the Masters chose not to renew Rango’s contract; afterward he refused to share the recipe, taking its secret to his grave in 2015. Ted Godfrey, Rango’s replacement, claims that the missing ingredient in Rango’s pimento and cheese came to him in his sleep, as missing things tend to do.
By the next year’s tournament, Godfrey had filled Rango’s shoes, and patrons were none the wiser. But Godfrey also withheld his recipe after the Masters replaced him with in-house catering in 2013.
When Rango lost the contract, the change of hands hardly registered with patrons, but when Godfrey lost the contract, patrons noticed—and so did the press. Wright Thompson, a writer for ESPN noticed, and he was directed to Godfrey, who spilled the beans. Thompson’s 2013 exposé—later known as “Pimento-Gate”—revealed a Masters’ operation that tournament organizers would’ve preferred stay shut.
The episode, Thompson wrote, “left the Masters concessions staff trying—and failing, in a rare moment of fallibility—to recreate the same recipe that generations of golf fans have enjoyed.”
Admittedly, until the unlikely event that a Rango relative shares the original recipe, the best we have is an imitation of an approximation created by lifelong Masters patron and Augusta food blogger, Gina Dickson. Since her family moved to Augusta in the 1970s, Dickson estimates she’s been to no fewer than 25 Masters tournaments.
A deft cook who’d eaten countless pimento cheese sandwiches dating back to the Rango era, Dickson says it took her several hours to reverse-engineer the ingredients and consistency. I recommend you add a grain of salt.
Masters Pimento Cheese Sandwich
2 cups sharp cheddar cheese, shredded 1 cup Monterey Jack cheese, shredded 4 ounces cream cheese ½ cup mayonnaise (“just don’t use Miracle Whip—that’s a Northern thing”) 4-ounce jar pimento peppers, drained and diced 1 tablespoon onion, very finely minced ¼ teaspoon garlic powder ¼ teaspoon cayenne pepper ¼ teaspoon salt ¼ teaspoon black pepper
Combine all the ingredients in a medium bowl and mix until smooth and creamy. Refrigerate the mixture for at least an hour to allow it to become firm. Serve on white bread.
In the introduction to her splendid Southern Hospitality Cookbook, Jackson epicure Winifred Cheney states that a signature dish is “a tribute in the field of cookery.”
Here Winifred misinforms. A signature dish is a recipe that identifies or is directly associated with an individual chef or a particular restaurant. For instance, one could say that blackened red fish is a signature dish of Paul Prudhomme’s, or oysters Rockefeller of Antoine’s.
Dishes named for people, either in honor of them—as in the Rockefeller—or made for them—as with Melba toast—don’t have a specific term of reference. They’re just recipes named for people, which are (predictably) created constantly. Winifred herself created two dishes in honor of her neighbor Eudora Welty: apples Eudora and squash Eudora.
Winifred is notorious for her tedious, voluptuous recipes with expensive ingredients. Such is the case with her apples Eudora, which she describes as “tart apples cooked in a delicious syrup, drained and baked in a rich custard, then filled with an apricot rum filling and topped with a dollop of whipped cream.” If that doesn’t wear you out just reading it, cooking it’s going to make you bedridden. Then she gives us squash Eudora, which is absolutely wonderful, and certainly somewhat less tedious.
Wash but do not peel two pounds tender yellow squash. Slice thinly and parboil with a pat of butter until tender. Drain and season with black pepper and salt to taste. Drain and wash a half pound (8 oz.) livers, cut into halves and sauté in butter with a bit of Worcestershire.
Drain livers and set aside to cool, then mix with squash, about a cup of chopped green onions, a teaspoon curry powder, one egg lightly beaten and a half cup grated Parmesan. Spoon mixture into a shallow casserole, dust top with more Parmesan, and bake at 350 until firm.
Winifred says that you can substitute a pound of lump crab meat for the livers. If you’ve got the bucks, go for it.
Toss fresh berries, drupes, or pomes (in this case, peaches and cherries) with sugar and macerate overnight.
Mix well one and a quarter cup of plain flour, two tablespoons sugar, and a teaspoon of salt. Cut in a stick of cold butter until mixture is grainy, then add enough cold water and additional flour as need to to make a stiff dough. Form into a ball and refrigerate for no less than an hour. Roll out to a 12” circle. (It doesn’t have to be perfect) and move onto a lightly oiled sheet pan.
Drain fruit and mound in the center of the dough, leaving a 2” edge. Fold the crust over the fruit, brush the dough with a mixture of melted butter mixed with a little dark brown sugar or molasses. Bake at 375 on a middle rack until crust is browned and fruit is bubbling.
It’s difficult for us now to imagine mayonnaise as anything even approaching exotic, but Eudora Welty remembers its advent in Jackson, Mississippi as an event of near carnaval proportions.
Welty’s use of foods in her fiction brings two notable examples to mind; the “green-tomato pickle” in Why I Live at the P.O. and the shrimp boil at Baba’s in No Place for You, My Love, not to mention the groaning boards in her Delta Wedding. But she also wrote the introductions for three Jackson cookbooks: Winifred Green Cheney’s Southern Hospitality Cookbook (1976); The Country Gourmet (1982), put out by the Mississippi Animal Rescue League; and The Jackson Cookbook (1971), which was compiled by the Symphony League of Jackson.
Mark Kurlansky, in his The Food of a Younger Land (2009), includes an essay of Welty’s entitled “Mississippi Food” that he claims was “a mimeographed pamphlet that she wrote for the Mississippi Advertising Commission and which they distributed.” Kurlansky doesn’t provide a date for the essay, but it was doubtless written in the 1930s.
The introduction to The Jackson Cookbook, “The Flavor of Jackson”, is a savory dish of Southern culinary exposition, rich with Welty’s seasoned voice. Eudora’s essay is a finely-seasoned piece with a wonderful flavor all its own. Most of the city’s culinary history concerns home cooking, of course, since restaurants here were rather much a novelty until the mid-twentieth century, but Jackson’s storied hospitality has always featured a superb board. I’m including a part of the introduction here, specifically that section dealing with mayonnaise because it explains to a “t” just how exotic this now-prosaic kitchen item was then.
“As a child, I heard it said that two well-travelled bachelors of the town, Mr. Erskin Helm and Mr. Charles Pierce, who lived on Amite Street, had ‘brought mayonnaise to Jackson’. Well they might have though not in the literal way I pictured the event. Mayonnaise had a mystique. Little girls were initiated into it by being allowed to stand at the kitchen table and help make it, for making mayonnaise takes three hands. While the main two hands keep up the uninterrupted beat in the bowl, the smaller hand is allowed to slowly add the olive oil, drop-by-counted-drop.
The solemn fact was that sometimes mayonnaise didn’t make. Only the sudden dash of the red pepper into the brimming, smooth-as-cream bowlful told you it was finished and a triumph. Of course you couldn’t buy mayonnaise and if you could, you wouldn’t. For the generation bringing my generation up, everything made in the kitchen started from scratch.”
Welty elaborates by describing a typical Jackson kitchen in the twenties and thirties, and mentioning a great many people who made significant contributions to the local cuisine. If you can find a copy of The Jackson Cookbook, buy it, read about Jackson’s culinary history from a master of her craft and cook the superlative recipes. No wrong could come from it at all.
