In a glass or ceramic baking dish, layer 1 (16-ounce) can refried beans (Blue Runner cream-style red beans are also great to use), 2 cups guacamole with the juice of two limes, 2 cups shredded sharp cheddar or a taco cheese blend, 1 finely-chopped raw red onion, 2 cups of sour cream seasoned with a packet of taco seasoning, 2 cups pico de gallo (recommended) or a very chunky salsa drained, 2 small ripe tomatoes diced, and 1 small can of sliced or diced black olives (optional, at least in my game).
Refrigerate—covered with foil or plastic wrap—for at least an hour. Top with finely-shredded lettuce, and serve with corn tortilla chips. This is the most basic recipe; feel free to improvise and revise. I like to add a little garlic to the beans, and if I add ground beef—which I rarely do, since the dish is quite substantial as is—it’s layered between the beans and guac. If you use a store-bought salsa, it’s important to drain it in a sieve beforehand, else it will make the mixture quite soupy. I also add minced jalapenos to the beans rather than sliced japs in the tomato/onion layer. Chopped green onions mixed with the lettuce adds more texture and zing.
It’s ugly, no damn good for you, and looks like a flaming asshole.
Take a pound of frozen tater tots (the brand doesn’t matter; a frozen grated potato is a frozen grated potato) and cook according to package directions. It’s best to use the “fry” option, since the more grease the better.
Fry a half-pound of bacon or cube a half-pound of ham, or do both. This recipe should include LOTS and LOTS of pork.
Stir the tater tots and pork together with a half cup mayonnaise and two cups grated American cheese or Velveeta. Grease a Bundt pan with lard.
Pack the tots, pig, and cheese into the pan. Bake for about forty-five minutes at 375. Invert and serve.
For thirty to forty, fry to a crisp and crumble 1 pound bacon, mix with a cup of mayo and 2 cups finely-chopped green onion. Season with Tony Cachere’s to taste, spread on rounds of bread and top with drained tomato slices dusted with salt and dill. These do not keep.
To each pound 90/10 ground beef, add a quarter cup finely diced onion, two minced cloves garlic, a tablespoon of salt, two of coarsely-ground black pepper and three of Worcestershire sauce. Form into patties, brush with light vegetable oil and refrigerate for at least an hour. Grill until just done; they should be pink in the middle. Top with smoked cheddar before serving.
Jake claims that I’m a terrible cook. If anyone else were to make such a statement, I’d have to pick up a fork, but Jake enjoys a considerable degree of latitude when it comes to reducing my self-esteem to dust, ashes, and other such lifeless substances.
After all, he has known me for a very long time, has seen me in various degrees of dishevelment and has I must admit choked down more than a few of my less-successful efforts at the stove. Though to avoid argument I acquiesce to his damnation of my kitchen skills, I’m here to tell you the statement is just not true.
Admittedly, Jake’s a good cook (see? I can be charitable!), and at any given time he’s in the kitchen, I’m comfortable with banging away at the keyboard and watching what he calls “black-and-white snoozers” on TCM. And I’m happy as a clam there. But once Jake begins cooking, I have to drop everything about every five minutes for consultations. Unless it’s something he’s cooked for a long time (a limited number of dishes, granted), he trots back and forth to where I’m sitting with a steady stream of questions.
“How much of (insert name of a spice or seasoning) should I use?” “Is it okay if I just use water to poach these meatballs?” “Do I have to use this ground beef? It smells weird” (everything smalls weird to Jake; he’s also colorblind.) “How thick should I slice these mushrooms?” “Where in the hell did you put the (insert name of kitchen commodity)?” Such intense grilling inevitably ends with, “Would you come look at this? I want to see if I did it right.” The results are always beautiful. Of course.
For baked chicken breasts, wash and pat dry split whole breasts of chicken. Brush with light vegetable oil infused with granulated garlic, dried minced onions, rubbed sage, black pepper and salt in a roughly 2:2:1:1:1 ratio. Arrange loosely on a baking sheet or in a large skillet and bake at 350) until the skin is crisp and juices run clear.
After the publication of the first edition of the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, C. Vann Woodward suggested that the work deserved expansion. This affirmed what the editors knew already, that their initial effort, an 8-pound tome published in 1989, merely scratched the surface of the many-layered, multi-faceted South. The first volume of the New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, focusing on religion, hit the shelves 17 years later, quickly followed by others scrutinizing topics such as the environment, ethnicity and history.
This, the seventh volume, issued in August 2007, sets forth a cornucopia of lore and learning about a subject very close to the Southern heart: Food. In the general introduction to “Foodways” the editors state emphatically that this work is not an apologist tract for any perceived decline in Southern foodstuffs. “Instead, the entries that follow constitute an attempt to transcend the quips and stereotypes, to document and showcase southern foodstuffs and cookery . . . in all their diversity.” A subsequent essay, “Southern Foodways,” by Joe Gray Taylor and John T. Edge, sets the table.
The authors take a predictable but informative tour of the region’s culinary history, emphasizing the key roles of corn, pork and the “great triumvirate of southern vegetables”: turnips, cowpeas and sweet potatoes. They document the impact of cheap flour on the South during the late 19th century, which made “wheat flour biscuits as common as cornbread,” and maintain that food patterns formed on the southern frontier “persisted . . . until after World War II in many small towns and rural areas.”
They also note that the most basic change in southern foodways since the mid-20th century has been the explosive growth in “eating out” and the rise of “so-called fast foods,” a trend some might decry as an abasement of the cuisine, but the authors point out that “chicken and catfish . . . have been a part of the southern diet for over 200 years. Furthermore, they are still fried!”
Well of course they are. What follows this essay, the 148 encyclopedia entries proper, makes for a feast of information and diversion. Each entry comes supplied with a bibliography, the names of the contributors and their locations. Globalization has clearly set in: You have a guy in Spain writing about catfish and hot peppers, the “Civil War” entry is from Brooklyn and the ground zero on “Greens” is from (southern) California. Then you have Wiley C. Prewitt, Jr., a damn good writer from Lodi, Mississippi, who declares, “While folks in other regions of the country may have equated the consumption of wildlife with unsuccessful farmers and shiftless backwoods folks, southerners have generally exalted the hunting, cooking, and eating of game.”
Here Prewitt echoes a defensive theme first expressed in the opening paragraph of the introductory essay: “southerners have borne chips on their shoulders about all manner of our cultural creations,” a statement that might have bearing on the encyclopedia itself, its perceived purpose, and its audience. If for Southerners, then why, and if for others, then who? Well, for whoever wants to know, and for whatever reason, of course. That’s why encyclopedias exist, and the South deserves a great one, no apology needed.
It’s poignant that we need a primer of sorts for the likes of grits, Goo-Goo Clusters and Justin Wilson, but “Foodways” is much more than a textbook. The scholars, writers and occasional epicures who did the legwork on this volume deserve to put their feet up under any groaning board between Austin and Annapolis. The niggling geek in me wants a full bibliography at the end of the volume in addition to the citations below individual entries (we’ll assume a full bibliography for the entire publication is in the far future offing), but that’s nit-picking. On an even more personal note, I’m so, so glad that Ernie Mickler made the cut. He’d be so proud.
The thought and care that went into this volume of the New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture makes it an authoritative source on Southern foodways, pit, spit, whole hog, and hominy, a fun, lucid and occasionally eloquent record of our table.
The decline of breakfast as a substantial meal in American households can be traced back to a town on the Kalamazoo River in Calhoun County, Michigan.
The town’s name is Battle Creek, the hometown of John Harvey Kellogg. Kellogg, the tenth son of a broom-maker, grew up in the frontier town, went east to medical school and returned home to take charge of the Western Health Reform Institute. This institution was founded by a Seventh Day Adventist couple, Sister Ellen Gould White and her husband Brother James, to promote the pre-apocalyptic health-giving regimen an angel detailed to Sister White in a vision on June 6, 1863.
The angel instructed Sister White to eat two meals a day, to avoid meat, salt, cake, lard, spices, coffee, tea and tobacco, to rely on graham bread, fruits and vegetables, to drink only water, never to pay physicians and to trust in the healing power of God. They were among the country’s first health food nuts.
After Kellogg returned to Battle Creek—his education “back East” had been paid for by the Whites—he renamed the Institute the Medical and Surgical Sanitarium, and soon what had been a modest farmhouse was transformed into a six-story Italian Renaissance structure with a solarium, a gymnasium, half a mile of glassed-in halls containing palm and banana trees and an Acidophilus Milk Bar. Building on the work of Sylvester Graham, father of the graham cracker, and Dr. James Caleb Jackson, who in 1863 came out with a breakfast food made out of broken-up whole wheat bricks called Granula, Kellogg came out with his own cereal.
For some unfathomable reason, Kellogg called his concoction Granula as well. Dr. Jackson promptly sued and won judgment against Kellogg. So Kellogg renamed his cereal Granola, which was, admittedly, not much of a stretch. If nothing else a bold plagiarist, Kellogg did not learn the error of his bravura from this first legal fracas. C.W. Post, a local competitor, and once a patient at the Institute who had taken Kellogg’s cure without success, was eventually healed of his maladies by a Christian Science practitioner who told him to eat what he pleased came.
So Post established his own retreat—La Vita Inn—and in 1895 he brought out Postum, a coffee substitute made of wheat, bran and molasses. His first big success was with a product called Grape-Nuts. But when Post came out with Grape-Nuts in 1898, Kellogg promptly came out with Gran-Nuts. Post threatened court action and Gran-Nuts disappeared from the market.
By then, though, the ground had been broken, and soon, through their appeal to the health-conscious, their convenience, and their promotion by means of an aggressive, hugely successful marketing, cold cereals came to dominate the American breakfast table.
But before the advent of the cereal kings, America’s Lucullan breakfasts included tea and toast, eggs, fresh fish, ham, sausages, pigeons on toast (probably passenger pigeons, now extinct), and, of course, oysters. Again, here it must be noted that a substantial breakfast was important to a population that largely supported itself by physical labor of some sort.
This was especially true in the heavily agricultural South. Even after WWII, when the urbanization of the South really began and more and more white-collar jobs opened up, many if not most Southern households still ate a hot, substantial breakfast, and every Southern town supported a diner where you could go to get breakfast and a plate lunch. The breakfasts were of the traditional sort: ham and eggs, sausage, biscuits, red-eye or sawmill gravy and of course grits.
The anti-cholesterol craze that started in the 1970’s seems such a heaven-sent blessing for the breakfast cereals industry that a conspiracist might well believe that it’s a plot involving the AMA and Battle Creek. Americans were urged to abandon their sinful eating habits and to pursue the righteous path of low-fat cooking. “Low-fat,” “reduced fat,” and “lite” prepared foods proliferated. Cookbooks promoting a low-fat cuisine sold in the millions. Chefs radically altered their recipes to adapt to the changing market. Salt, too, came under attack as a leading factor in the promulgation of hypertension.
Soon many if not most Americans came to view a plate of country ham or sausage with fried eggs and buttered grits, lard biscuits and sawmill gravy as something of a cardiac time bomb. A bowl of cold cereal with a piece of whole-wheat toast, a glass of “fresh frozen” orange juice and a cup of decaffeinated coffee seemed an attractive alternative for a population hell-bent for senility.
Melt a stick of butter, add a quarter cup plain flour, and cook over medium heat, stirring until the bubbling subsides Whisk in a pint of whole milk and cook over low heat until thickened and smooth.
Stir in two cups fresh leaf spinach and a half-pound sauteed mushrooms. Artichokes are a nice option. Add white pepper and salt to taste. Prepare a pound of picked lump crab meat by heating with butter, lemon juice, and a little black pepper. Add to sauce.
