Category: Food and Cooking

Posted on

Magic Pie

The Southern boomer table—for which, I might add, I barely qualify—is peppered with dishes fabricated in company test kitchens. Green bean casserole is likely the most conspicuous example, but there are dozens of others.

Many commercial dessert  recipes include the word “magic,” as if merely waving your hands over the ingredients would produce a cake, pie, or cookie. This recipe is from The Country Gourmet, distributed by the Mississippi Animal Rescue League in 1983. The book features a short forward by Eudora Welty, who writes, “Guarding and protecting, trying to save, all life on earth is a need we all alike share.”

Beat six ounces of whipped topping with a thawed can of lemonade concentrate and a can of condensed milk. Pour into a graham cracker pie crust and freezer one hour before serving.

Posted on

Aunt Jesse’s Slutty Atomic Brownies

Brownie Base

1 cup unsalted butter
14 ounces semisweet chocolate, coarsely chopped
4 ounces unsweetened chocolate, coarsely chopped
½ cup packed dark brown sugar
½ cup packed light brown sugar
½ cup granulated sugar
5 large eggs, lightly beaten
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
¼ cup milk
1½ cups unbleached, all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon salt
1½ cups coarsely chopped walnuts, toasted

Chocolate Drizzle

1/3 cup heavy (whipping) cream
3 ounces bittersweet chocolate, finely chopped
2 ounces semisweet chocolate, finely chopped

Heat oven to 350 degrees F. Combine the butter and chocolates in a large saucepan over low heat, stirring until mixture is melted and smooth. Whisk in sugars, eggs, vanilla extract and milk, blending until smooth. Add flour and salt just until mixture is combined, stir in nuts and spread into 13 x 9-inch baking pan lined with greased parchment paper. Bake for 25 to 30 minutes or so. Cool pan completely on a wire rack. Top with crushed Oreos.

For the drizzle, bring cream to a simmer in a medium saucepan. Remove pan from heat and add chocolates, whisk until smooth and cool until thickened. Pour over brownies, and cool in the refrigerator until firm before cutting into bars.

Posted on

Chocolate Gravy

Mamaw Onsby lived in a small two-room house set back from ours under a huge white oak with thick knotted roots that gripped the earth like the toes of Antaeus. She had come to live there after her husband of sixty-odd years had died, and she was perfectly content, rarely coming to our house to visit, usually sitting at home listening to the radio and reading her Bible. Daddy tried to put an air conditioner in her window, but she wouldn’t have it.

She was a tiny old woman, not much taller than I was at 11 when she died, and like many women of her generation who considered smoking unladylike, Mamaw dipped snuff (Garrett) and would make snuff out of cocoa and sugar for us to dip with twigs from the big black gum tree that grew near the road.

Her home was an early destination for me and her other great-grandchildren because she would make biscuits every morning, big, fat cat-head biscuits that she baked in an antediluvian skillet. Mamaw usually made sawmill gravy to go with the biscuits, but my brother Tom always asked her to make chocolate gravy. She’d look at him and say, “Oh, this thickenin’ gravy ain’t good enough for you, is it?”

My brotherTom, little devil he was, would say “NO!” as loud as he could, and Mamaw, with a mumble about him being “just like a damned Onsby” would make chocolate gravy. The rest of us to be polite always had a biscuit with regular gravy, but she made us have another with chocolate “so it won’t be wasted”. It never was.

Heat two cups whole milk with a pat of butter; mix very well three tablespoons cocoa, two tablespoons plain flour, three quarters of a cup of sugar, add to warm milk with a whisk, stirring vigorously to prevent lumping. Heat until gravy thickens. Some people add vanilla to this, but for the life of me, I don’t know why.

Posted on

French Silk

This old bake-off recipe from the “Ice Box Pie” category remains a Southern favorite. Basically a chocolate mousse in a crust, it’s an absolute bitch to make, but so damn worth it.

Oil a glass pie pan. Drape crust over a rolling pin and ease it into the pan without stretching. Gradually work the crust firmly against the sides and bottom. Moisten your fingers, fill in the cracks, and trim the rim. Generously prick the crust on the bottom and sides to prevent bubbling. It helps to pop it into the freezer for five minutes or so to keep it from slumping. Line the inner edges with foil and bake for 10 minutes at 300, then remove foil and return to the oven to toast. Set aside to cool.

Whip a cup of heavy cream to stiff peaks, cover, and chill. Melt 8 oz. chopped bittersweet chocolate, stir until smooth. Take 3 eggs, add ¾ cup sugar, and a couple of tablespoons of water, and beat with an electric mixer 5 minutes, until pale yellow and thick. Place in a double boiler and cook, whisking continually, until the mixture is hot through and through. Remove from heat and continue beating until fluffy. (You want some serious fluff.) Add the melted chocolate, 2 teaspoons vanilla, a stick of very soft butter. Beat until very smooth. Now carefully blend in the whipped cream, just until you have a more or less even color; don’t over-mix. Cool..

Pour mixture into crust and spread evenly. Top with a half cup of whipped cream sweetened with a quarter cup powdered sugar and a teaspoon vanilla (or almond) extract. Some people add a little mocha powder. Spread over filling and chill very well before serving.

Posted on

Summer Vegetable Soup

The deli at our local grocery serves a wonderful vegetable soup that they discontinue for the summer, since “nobody eats soup when the weather is hot.” Well, you know what? Yes, they do. We’ve enjoyed summer vegetable soups for centuries in the South, and rightly so, since our gardens are the finest on the planet.

My recipe starts with two quarts diced canned tomatoes and juice. If you’re lucky, you’ll know an industrious gardener who cans summer tomatoes, and you will have their red gold in your larder. If not, Contadina will suffice. Sauté one large diced white onion with three or four diced ribs of celery and two cloves minced garlic in just enough vegetable oil to coat. Pour this into the tomato mix. To this add water to cover by an inch–I like to add V-8 as well–along with a cup or so of sliced, rinsed okra.

Find something industrious and enlightening to do for a half-hour or until the onions and okra have surrendered to the mélange. This is a savory base for beautiful vegetable soups throughout the season. Fresh peas and beans, even green beans, should be parboiled until tender, as should wax potatoes, but squash can be diced and added raw. As to herbs, I’m frugal; a pinch of thyme and a smidgen of basil do just fine. Add salt and pepper with care. And yes, you can serve this warm or chilled.

Posted on

Roast New Potatoes

Parboil potatoes  until just done, pat dry, and toss in oil with black pepper, minced garlic, and salt. Bake at 350 in a heavy pan, tossing occasionally, until coated and tender through. Great with grilled meats.

Posted on

Fresh Pimentos with Cheese

Before bells became the most popular mild pepper, everyone grew pimentos. These beautiful, thick-walled peppers work well in dishes across the main board. For this recipe, we used both green and red fruit. Halve and seed fresh pimentos. For two cups shredded sharp cheddar cheese use about a half a cup of diced peppers lightly sauteed in scant oil. Use enough mayonnaise to just moisten, a bit of granulated garlic, and chopped scallions or shallots. Salt to taste.

Posted on

Eggs Birmingham

This old egg-and-bread dish goes by many names. At my childhood table, it was known as eggs-in-a-basket. Later I found it was hens-in-a-nest, toad-in-the-hole by Brits, and one version simply called egg toast. But when I published a recipe for eggs-in-a-basket some time ago, Mississippi actress Susan McPhail pointed out that, “Tennessee Williams calls them ‘Eggs Birmingham’ in Baby Doll.”

Well, I’ll be damned (I thought). You’d think growing up less than 200 miles from Birmingham (Alabama), I’d know of eggs Birmingham; moreover, you’d think a Southern food writer with a degree in literature would have found this blip on his radar decades ago. But no. Fortunately, I happen to know a lot of people—like Susan—who are smarter than I am, which is bruising to my self-esteem, but provides me with some assurance of being well-informed, or at least the comforting illusion thereof.

Baby Doll (1956), produced and directed by Elia Kazan and starring Carroll Baker, Karl Malden and Eli Wallach, was shot on location at the Burrus House near Benoit, Mississippi, which at that time was in a state of considerable decay. Williams wrote the script, which was nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay (Kazan claimed in his autobiography that Williams was only “half-heartedly” involved in the screenplay), drawing from his previous works 27 Wagons Full of Cotton, a 1946 one-act play that Williams referred to as “a Mississippi Delta comedy, and The Long Stay Cut Short, or, The Unsatisfactory Supper, a moving short drama about the turning out of an old servant, published in 1946 along with 4 other one-act plays in American Blues: Five Short Plays.

In 27 Wagons Full of Cotton, Jake, a middle-aged, shady cotton gin owner with antiquated equipment burns down the mill of the Syndicate Plantation, a rival in the cotton business where Silva Vicarro serves as Superintendent. Vicarro, who knows what happened but cannot prove it, gets revenge by raping Jake’s young and voluptuous but childlike and naïve wife Flora.

The Long Stay Cut Short, or, The Unsatisfactory Supper, depicts the story of Archie Lee and his Baby Doll Meighan (parallels of Jake and Flora in 27 Wagons Full of Cotton) who are reluctantly providing a home to Aunt Rose, an elderly relation who has been passed around among the family to house. An “unsatisfactory supper” cooked by Aunt Rose, who neglected to light the burner under the greens she’d put on the stove earlier. She offers to make eggs Birmingham to appease him.

ARCHIE LEE. What is eggs Birmingham?
 AUNT ROSE. Why, eggs Birmingham was Baby Doll’s daddy’s pet dish.
 ARCHIE LEE. That don’t answer my question.
 AUNT ROSE. (As though confiding a secret.) I’ll tell you how to pre- pare them.
 ARCHIE LEE. I don’t care how you prepare them, I just want to know what they are.
 AUNT ROSE. (Reasonably.) Well, Son, I can’t say what they are without telling how to prepare them. You cut some bread-slices and take the centers out of them. You put the bread-slices in a skillet with butter. Then into each cut-out center you drop one egg and on top of the eggs you put the cut-out centers.
 . . .
 ARCHIE LEE. (Roughly, his back still turned.) I don’t want Eggs Bir- mingham.
 BABY DOLL. He don’t want Eggs Birmingham and neither do I. But while we are talking, Aunt Rose-well-Archie Lee’s wondered and I’ve been wondering, too. . .
 AUNT ROSE. About what, Baby Doll?
 BABY DOLL. Well, as to whether or not you’ve—made any plans.
 AUNT ROSE. Plans?
 BABY DOLL. Yes, plans.
 AUNT ROSE. What kind of plans, Baby Doll?
 BABY DOLL. Why, plans for the future, Aunt Rose.

Rose, in despair, with characteristically Williamsian pathos, rushes to the yard to gather roses in an approaching storm: The blue dusk deepens to purpleand purple to black and the roar comes on with the force of a locomotive as AUNT ROSE’S figure is pushed toward the rose-bush.

In Baby Doll, “Aunt Rose Comfort” offers to make Archie Lee (Karl Malden) “my Eggs Birmingham” when he rejects her undercooked greens. Vaccaro (Wallach) offers to hire her to cook for him in her home and make eggs Birmingham for him there, a much more humane fate for Rose, but a move designed to needle Archie Lee, who asks, “Anything else around here you wanta take with yuh, Vacarro?” insinuating Baby Doll herself.

 

 

Posted on

Skillet Upside Down Cake

Oil and line a 9″ skillet with parchment paper. Drizzle in 1/4 cup melted butter, and layer with sliced pineapple and cherries. Sprinkle chaotically with light brown sugar. Pour in vanilla-flavored sponge cake batter and bake until sides have pulled in from the pan. Cool well before inverting on a plate. Refrigerate before slicing and serving.