Category: Food and Cooking

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The Oyster and I

Unlike some, I don’t remember my first oyster as epiphanic. That’s no reflection on the oyster, which I’m certain was good and plump, fresh from the Gulf, arguably among the best in the world, but I ate it on my first trip to Jackson, which was an altogether dizzying affair for a 7-year-old boy from a sawmill village in north Mississippi.

After the thrill of seeing the frothy Rez from the Trace, riding in a highway patrol cruiser (my last time in the front seat of one) and ogling at the Capitol dome, eating oysters at the Mayflower seemed pedestrian. The bouffants of the waitresses made far more of an impression than the shellfish, and when ours yelled at some idiot from Atlanta who ordered a poached egg, I tried to die three times. Out of sheer terror, I left her all the money I had–two quarters–because she glared at me when I asked for an extra straw.

Oysters enjoy a sex life that makes human sexuality totally lame, switching sexes according to a variety of environmental factors. If you’re a young oyster (a spat), one season ‘s Uncle Louie might be the next’s Aunt Louise. Not only that, but oysters reproduce by spewing their sperm and eggs into the water around them in an impregnating haze, the human equivalent of desperate yet sincere sex with someone on the other side of the Jacuzzi.

Eating a raw oyster is like stealing a kiss from the ocean: a wet, slightly salty, totally sensuous experience unbridled by any sort of fussy preparation. I’m firmly convinced that anyone who doesn’t enjoy oysters is a bad kisser, and I have centuries of documentation to back me up in this opinion. Oysters have enjoyed a reputation as an aphrodisiac for millennia. Now that I am well past the salad stage of life and forging steadily past dessert, I firmly intend to keep oysters a mainstay between courses, and God willing as my cordial.

I still like oysters with a dab of tart, horseradish-y cocktail sauce, but I also enjoy a lighter sauce that’s a bit more in tune with the sublime texture of the animal as it comes–quivering in its nakedness–to my lips.

Mignonette Sauce

Combine 1/3 cup wine vinegar, a finely-minced shallot, and a teaspoon of freshly-ground black pepper.  Bottle, refrigerate, and shake well before dribbling over freshly-shucked oysters.

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Something By Way of a Philosophy

Food is a passionate issue for many people, and some foods are certainly controversial. Barbecue, for instance, is a highly inflammatory subject, but almost any food can become a flash point; I was once involved in a knock-down-drag out about how to make the perfect grilled cheese sandwich (Do you use mayonnaise? I don’t…).

Arguments over foods range from the sublime to the ridiculous, but unless you’re one of those self-styled and overly-promoted griddle Napoleons or oven Antoinettes you can get your fill of almost everywhere—or just an all-around jerk yourself—talks about foods and cooking tend to be cordial, albeit with the a measure of peppering. People who enjoy food and cooking are gregarious, open, and giving, and their activities revolve around food.

The best meals are home-cooked, and home itself must be one of the warmest words in the English language. Home entails more than place; the word implies security, comfort, congeniality and much, much more. Here in the South, the word has become infused with almost mystical connotations, evoking a sort of paradise, lost like all others. When we talk about home cooking, we’re talking about foods with a voice in the family and in the community, a cuisine that sings of time and place, a balm for the mind, a madeleine for memory. Foods without history and bereft of geography are just plain bad.

I grew up in north Mississippi, which is home to the cooking of the middle South, of the yeomanry, of the people who were the rule rather than the exception in the rural South of their day. My people are descended from small farmers who came into Mississippi from Virginia and the Carolinas, and the way my ancestors cooked still informs the state’s table. Theirs was not a light cuisine; it sustained people through long days of hard labor. They fed themselves and their families on the same basic foods the colonists at Jamestown ate: corn and pork augmented by whatever they could get to grow augmented by game and fish. Food was important to them because it was their only unadulterated source of pleasure. They planted and harvested, cooked and baked, canned and preserved, making the most of what they had season to season, year to year, generation to generation.

Recipes are dead words; it’s up to the cook to breathe life into them. It’s an unwritten law of cookery that the same recipe in the hands of, say, six or seven cooks will produce different (often surprisingly different) results. If you want to learn how to cook, then you must cook yourself. Once you’ve become more secure in your abilities and more confident of your results, then by all means be more creative. One of the glories of cooking as an art is that it lends itself easily to experimentation, but be “original, not outrageous,” as Alice B. Toklas cautions. Capote once said of writing that you must learn the rules before you can break them, and this is true of cookery as well.

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Three Bean Chili

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.

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Peas and Snaps

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 for at least a half hour. Reduce heat and hold on stove before serving.
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Pineapple Coconut Sheet Cake

Way back when, die-hard home cooks would sniff and curl a lip at a newlywed or (worse) single parent who brought a sheet cake to a bake sale. THEY, of course, brought an heirloom 8-layer caramel/German chocolate in a handmade paper mache decoupage box. Even worse, those die-hards naturally felt compelled to extract a timorous confession from the donor that a boxed cake mix was involved. Canned frosting was the coup de grace; admission to the bridge club would be ever afterwards inconceivable.

Granted, homemade cakes are a certified source of pride and satisfaction; given the time, they’re worth the effort. But if you’re losing you mind over at least a half dozen other things like the rest of us, use a boxed mix with homemade frosting and tell everyone to eat cake.

Combine 1 box Pillsbury White Supreme cake mix, 8 oz. sour cream, ¼ cup melted butter, 3 large eggs at room temperature, half of an 8-oz. can of crushed pineapple (drained and squeezed), and a can of cream of coconut (Coco Lopez). Mix on medium speed until smooth. Pour batter into a 9×13-inch pan greased with butter and lined with parchment paper. Place in a preheated 350 oven until toothpick-clean and firm in the middle, about 30 mins. Cool on a rack.

Blend 8 oz. softened cream cheese with two cups confectioner’s sugar, (the other 4 ounces of crushed, drained, and squeezed pineapple, and a tablespoon coconut extract. If needed, thin to spreading consistency with milk, top cake, and sprinkle with 2 cups toasted shredded coconut or coconut chips.

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Delta Chinese Collards

This recipe comes from an article in The New York Times by Joan Nathan, “East Meets South at a Delta Table” (June, 2003) profiling the Sino-Southern cooking of the Chow family in Clarksdale, Mississippi.

Wash and trim three bunches of collards and cut into more or less bite-size pieces. Heat wok or a very large skillet, brown a teaspoon of salt, and add about a quarter cup of canola or peanut oil. When oil is hot, add 6 sliced cloves of garlic and stir until lightly toasted. Add greens and a dash of pepper, stir constantly until wilted and tender, then blend in 2 tablespoons oyster sauce and a scant teaspoon of sugar. Taste and adjust seasoning. Serve immediately.

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Crab Tchoupitoulas

This recipe is a riff on a dish served at Pere Antoine in the Vieux Carré. There, mushroom caps are stuffed with a creamed spinach-mushroom-crab mixture, then breaded and deep-fried. Here the stuffing is served en casserole, a superb addition to any event buffet.

Sauté a half pound of thinly-sliced fresh mushrooms in a stick of butter. Stir in two cups chopped spinach and a half pound lump crab meat (picked through!). Make a quart of cream sauce–use half-and-half–and add to spinach/crab mix along with a cup of freshly grated hard/sharp cheese. Work in a finely julienned sweet red pepper, a few tablespoons of grated onion, and a minced clove of garlic (or two).

Season to your taste; I like a good slash of white pepper and a teaspoon or so of dried thyme. Mix very well, pour into an oiled casserole, and top with a freshly-grated hard cheese. Bake at 350 until browned and bubbling. Serve with dry toast and fresh lemons.

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Jett’s Table

My Aunt Jett learned to cook from her mother, whose people settled a wilderness. Food was their only pleasure not subject to religion. They sustained themselves and their families on corn and pork with whatever else they could grow or kill. They planted and picked, cooked and baked, dried and canned what they could, making the most of what they had season to season, year to year, generation to generation.

Jett always had something fixed for whatever company might drop in: stewed greens, limas, black-eyed peas, or snap beans, new or creamed potatoes, fried chicken, pork chops, or breaded steak. If it were summer, she’d have fresh sliced tomatoes, fried okra, or corn on the cob.She served her meals with sliced onion, cornbread or biscuits, and sawmill gravy with sweetened tea to drink; she seasoned with streak-o’-lean, salt, black pepper (maybe a little cayenne) and sage.

Jet’s cooking was simple, but not coarse; it had a balance and symmetry all its own, dictated by long-ago voices set in concert with the seasons. Jett thanked God before we ate, and that, too is elemental of our sustenance.

Aunt Jett (left) with her sisters Maude and Virgie.
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Lucretia’s Beans

“I grew up poor! We were so poor! Rupert, tell them!”

“They were so poor they had to piss in a bucket a block away!” Rupert was on the back porch, working on the lawn mower.

“But we were proud!” Lucretia said. “My mother was old Creole blood. She sold the calas on Dauphine, her apron white as an old nun, stiff as a young priest, and she’d go, “Belles calas! Mo gaignin calas, guaranti vous ve bons! Belles calas, belles calas!” And all the girls who worked up in their rooms, they’d come down to get Mama Diart’s cakes for their gentlemen who were sleeping it off in the beds like they’d get the strong coffee from Monsoir’s. The bottle they had already.”

“We ate the rouge ser riz, all the time! If we were lucky, Mama would get the ham joint that Hector Monsoir had saved for her because you see he was secretly in love with Mama from a long time ago when she was so beautiful and slender like a dancer with her laughing eyes.”

“They were so poor, she had to share her brassiere with her sisters!” Rupert tried to crank the lawnmower, but failed and he cussed.

“But not like those beans they make now!” Lucretia shouted. “Pah! Those beans they make now they taste like those little wads of dough the Italians boil to put in that red gravy they make. Beans that have no bones, no flesh, no . . . spirit. They use those big long-nosed beans, those . . . what do they call them, yes, them kidney beans, the light-colored ones like a bean the white people in the country use to put on their meal bread.” She made a face like spitting. “And they should be pissed on! No, she used the little red beans she bought from old Helene on Magazine.”

“They were so poor, if her brothers didn’t wake up with bones, they didn’t have anything to play with!” Rupert pulled the cord and the mower cranked, coughing and spitting. He pushed it into the yard and began mowing.

“She would bring the beans home when she sold her cakes, put them in the big pot on the back of the stove with water enough over the joint and start the laundry for the ladies in the Quarter. All afternoon they’d soak, and she’d start the fire. She had the herbs, too, from the market on Decatur, and pepper.

When we all got home she made the rice, and we would eat while all around us we could hear music play and see shadows dancing in the pretty wallpapered rooms where the fancy ladies sprayed French perfume on the pink lampshades.”

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Brennan’s Eggs Chartres

Sauté a cup of finely chopped white onions in a stick of butter until clear; stir in 3 tablespoons flour. With grace and beauty, blend in a cup and a half of milk mixed with an egg yolk. Stir until smooth and thick. Remove from heat, add six sliced hard-boiled eggs, two tablespoons grated hard cheese, cayenne for heat, and paprika for color. Salt to taste. This recipe serves about eight people.