You must use a quart of the clearest, richest broth thickened while hot with a thin paste of corn starch and water. To this add the yolks of at least two eggs which have been creamed with a pat of butter. Then add four more chopped hard boiled eggs (yolks and whites), the cooked and chopped livers and gizzards of the turkey as well as the hen you used for your stock (about two cups), but not the meat from the necks, which are superfluous and troublesome. I often add a half cup of chopped, sauteed celery for texture. Salt to taste and season with white pepper. Parsley is pretty, and a smidgen of thyme is a nice accent.
This is a nice autumn nosh, great for a Halloween party. Soften an 8-oz. block of cream cheese, blend with 1/2 cup packed brown sugar, and a teaspoon vanilla extract. Chill, and top with a cup of toffee bits or a finely-chopped Heath bar. Serve with sliced apples or snicker-doodles.
Vienna sausages—along with (it must be said) potted meat—are the South’s signature blue-collar noshes, indispensable companions to the purple worms and Little Rebels in your tackle box, but it’s the rare household of any ilk in this part of the country that doesn’t have one or two pop-top cans of these little meaty treats stashed somewhere.
Like most iconic American foods, Vienna sausages were brought to America by immigrants, and it should come as no surprise that they hail from German-speaking Europe. Sometime around the turn of the last century, “wiener”—from Wien, the German spelling of Vienna—came to be used interchangeably with sausages like hot dogs and frankfurters. Properly speaking, the Vienna or Vienna-style sausage (Wienerwurst) is a frankfurter-style mixture of meats sold in braided links, but in America it transformed into a canned sausage, becoming an early example of convenience food.
Commercial canning of sausage came about in the mid-19th century and became mechanized in the 1860s. At the turn of the century Chicago-based Armour, Swift, and Libby, along with Hormel in Minnesota, dominated the market. The term “Vienna” or “Vienna-style” referring to a canned sausage—skinless after the 1950s—cut into two-inch lengths, appeared around 1900. In the South, where canned meats appeared in the 1890s, the first commercial meat processor in Mississippi, Bryan Packing Company of West Point, unlike northern companies, began canning sausages in oil. It wasn’t long before Bryan “vy-ennas” became legendary.
Vienna consumption has declined since its heyday in the middle of the 20th century; Armour, which introduced the pop-top aluminum can, remains the industry sales leader. Viennas—like Spam—seeped into international cuisines through U.S. military bases. The sausages are used in Filipino pancits, and a popular Cuban dish consisting of Viennas cooked with yellow rice (arroz amarillo con salchichas) no doubt came about courtesy of Guantánamo Bay.
Brown a quarter pound of pork sausage in a quarter cup oil. Sprinkle in two heaping tablespoons plain flour, mix well, and cook until it quits bubbling. Stir in a cup each of water and milk. Reduce heat and cook down on the thin side; it will thicken when served.
Almost twenty years after Allison’s Wells burned in 1963, O.C. McDavid, former managing editor of the Jackson Daily News and a noted sculpture artist, was approached by Hosford Fontaine to assist in a book with recipes. In turn, McDavid enlisted Marilyn Bonney, who owned Press & Palette in Canton Mart, to print the 68-page book. According to Marilyn, “I printed it using paper plates which were a one-time use. I don’t remember the exact number printed, but it was probably1,000. The plan was not to sell it, but O.C. and Hosford gave it to people they knew, and I did the same.” In a similar spirit, with hopes of perpetuating Hosford’s wonderful work, here’s Allison’s Wells: The Last Mississippi Spa by Hosford Latimer Fontaine.
Not long ago a friend said that whoever ate the first eggplant was much more courageous than whoever ate the first oyster. I agreed with fervor. The eggplant, like Cher, must be gussied up quite a bit to be palatable. Eggplants have so little character that they’re a pliable basis for dozens of really good dishes such as caponata. This stewy concoction is good hot or cold, as a side or a spread. A friend makes vegetarian muffalettas with it, and while purists may wail, there’s nothing to stop you from using caponata instead of olive relish on a meat muffaletta. It’s simple to make, keeps well, and the flavor improves with age. This recipe makes about a quart.
Peel and cube one large eggplant, simmer in olive oil with a finely-minced clove of garlic and about half a cup each of chopped celery and sweet onion. This is one of the few recipes you’ll find me recommending a sweet onion; caponata is a sweet/sour concoction, and I prefer to use vegetables and dried fruit for the sweetness instead of sugar. You’ll add maybe a rind of smoked sweet red pepper (a ripe pickled cherry is a nice touch, too), a scant handful of chopped olives and a tablespoon or two of tomato paste to round out the (somewhat) savory elements along with a jolt of strong red wine for both you and the pan. For out-and-out sweetness, use a half cup of dried fruit, figs being excruciatingly appropriate, but don’t let that stop you from using whatever raisins, dates or apricots you have on hand. A heaping teaspoon of capers (the eponymous and ergo compulsory component) gives enough salt. and a measure of herbal vinegar will set the tartness. Season with a good Italian blend, but don’t overdo it; let the meld define the flavor.
This delightfully warm and rambunctious account of a political barbecue in Mississippi was submitted to the Federal Writer’s Project in the early 1940s. It’s not such a stretch to imagine that the excoriating political jargon may well have been patterned after one of T.G. Bilbo’s more vituperative speeches. Finding that the cook and I share a surname was a pleasant surprise, but entirely coincidental.
Just as sure as taxes come due before the year is out, politics comes of age in Mississippi ere fall settles down. Our crop has been made and, plow-weary as the soil itself, we take to politics like some folks take to drink. It’s the only sure-fire emotional outlet we know.
An office seeker with his nose to the wind senses that this is the time to ply his trade. Being one of us he knows that the voting fruit is now growing in bunches and ready for the plucking. ware, too, that the common run of old-time picnics is as dead as last year’s boll weevil, he gathers his, cohorts about the conference table, calls for a pooling of resources, and schemes up a barbecue. For, voting year or not, Mississippi politics takes on the nature of an epidemic and we rely on the mass eating of barbecued meat as a counter-irritant.
Even the novice candidates are invited to show what they can do, but the cook and the principal speaker should be old hands, famous for miles around, for we have a long way to come and the fare must be to our liking. Certainly, if the candidate for high office is one of our most famous and able villifiers, and if the pit artist is Bluebill Yancy, we’ll be there.
Bluebill is a black man with a head like a cypress knee. They call him blood brother to the Ugly Man, but if he’s short on looks, he’s long on cooking, and barbecue meat is his specialty. Bluebill and his henchmen are hard at work when we arrive on the grounds so we know that the weather, at least, is favoring the candidates. For Blue bill works according to the stages of the moon and has been known to call the whole thing off at the slightest show of thunder on cooking night. We pass the time of day with Dicey, Bluebill’s wife, who isn’t allowed within smelling distance of the pit until she sees Bluebill sharpen up his knives for the carving; the meat can’t “breathe freely” with a woman cook around.
We pay our respects to Uncle Si Curtis who has already nailed a plank between two trees for his lemonade stand. Uncle Si is one of the best singing school leaders in the county, and when he swings into “Mercy’s Free,” where it says “Swell, oh, swell, the heavenly chorus,” he can be heard as far away as the old burnt schoolhouse. Using the same technique to drum up trade for his spring-water lemonade, he leans against a tree and opens up:
“Ice cold lemonade! Made in the shade, Stirred with a spade, Good enough for any old maid!”
Uncle Si’s crowd thins out as the preliminary speaking begins. We listen to the soaring oratory with one ear and the sizzling of Bluebill’s meat The beef has been cooking all night over the embers of green hickory wood and its peppery odor has had our nose twitching since we first drove up. Bluebill’s pit is a ten-footer with wire mesh stretched over a fire coaxed down to smokeless coals. We pace the pit with him on one of his endless rounds — up one side to turn the meat, down the other to baste it with his mopping sauce. As the moist, brown hunks of beef approach perfection, Bluebill continues his rounds, proud as a monkey with a tin tail.
While the main speaker is warming up, we move from one group of friends to another. The sonorous voice damns the tariff and the Republican party. We nod our head. He touches on the sacredness of the ballot, the virtues of Southern womanhood, and we are in accord. He promised to fight, bleed and die to keep the ship of state a float and we say “amen.”
He pauses for dramatic effect, and after mopping his perspiring brow, starts in to rant, abuse, belittle and attack the opposition. We edge closer because this is what we came to hear. The speaker describes his opponent as a “shallow-brained, slack-jawed liar; a bull ape of Mississippi politics; a grave baboon cavorting like a fat pony in high oats.” We push a bit nearer the speaker’s stand, anxious to hear every word, hoping he’ll let the hide go with the horns and the tallow.
“Like a parasite of the highest rank,” the candidate roars, “he has been feeding from the public trough for twenty years, fattening the bosom of his trousers. It is time that the voters of this commonwealth rise up in indignation and turn him out to pasture and elevate to office men who won’t jump down their throats and gallop their insides out.”
Whether we agree with the speaker or not, we admit it’s pretty pert language, We figure maybe he is right, but for the moment the mention of feeding has suggested something and soon we take ourselves over to the pits to see how Bluebill is getting along with the beef, which has been roasting over the hickory fire for fourteen hours. Taking his cue from the orator, Bluebill dabs on more hot stuff, dressing it down with the same vigor the candidate uses on his opponent.
There is always an outsider who doesn’t know any better than to ask Blue bill for his mopping sauce recipe. His answer is as evasive as it is voluble. He recites it like a grocery list: vinegar, bay leaves, lemon, paprika, pickling spice, onions and garlic. To make it “good and delicious” Bluebill says go heavy on the garlic and paprika. If he is really annoyed by the questioning, he will recommend the generous use of a butter substitute as the base for his concoction. If only mildly so he will suggest cow butter. Catch him off guard when things are going well in the pits, and Bluebill will admit that he, himself, uses nothing but chicken fat.
Bluebill, having made what he calls his “politeness” turns to mopping his beef, and the bewildered recipe-seeker has to listen once more to the politician who, at this time, is working up to the climax punch. In a moment he will let us have it with both fists and leave us groggy and hanging on the ropes. Recoiling from the political punches, a neighbor asks us to have a drink of his best corn liquor, and we don’t care if we do. The candidates, wilted and weary from their efforts on the speakers’ stand, likewise have a good stiff one back in the bushes.
Meanwhile there is a mass movement toward the long table. Dicey paddles over from the edge of the clearing and gets there just as Bluebill draws a blade across the first outside piece. Some of our own women lay off cooing at the babies and line up behind the table to make the same woman-noise over the cakes and potato salad. For our part, we pass up all such trimmings. Armed with a slice of bread and a hand quicker than Bluebill’s knife, we aim for the outside piece, and make it.
The crowd gives way a little for the speakers to be served. After having bethumped each other with hard words, the candidates chat over their food as though it had miraculously brought them to terms. We ourselves share a dipper of spring water with a man we never liked and politics for the moment is forgotten. Even a Mississippi man just can’t keep on devouring barbecued beat and political speeches without gradually losing appetite. But we sorta have to stick around in the afternoon to hear our neighbors who are running for local office. We sit back to watch their antics and stay ready to have a good time if they work up a spat about something. Actually, what’s on our minds is the need for getting along home to see about the stock. It’s a far piece and we want to be there before first dark.
The dreadful reality behind chicken fried steak is that it’s best deep-fried after soaking in buttermilk, dipped in an egg wash made with the leftover milk, breaded in a seasoned mix of flour and corn starch, then stored in a warm oven before serving. All else is fantasy.
Mix 32 oz. of softened cream cheese with 1 1/2 cups sugar and two heaping tablespoons of cornstarch. Get it fluffy, then blend in 4 eggs beaten very well until you have a smooth batter. Pound 4 Oreos to teeny-tiny little pieces and add them to the batter along with a cup of Bailey’s Irish Cream. I always throw in a teaspoon of almond extract. Pour the batter into a 10 in. spring pan lined with a Graham cracker crust with chocolate chips and chopped nuts. Bake at 350 for an hour or so. Dust with cocoa. Indulge yourself; it’s been a tough year.
While browsing through my old Time-Life Foods of the World cookbooks, I ran up on a sandwich cake, or smörgåstårta, a Swedish buffet standard made by layering bread with savory fillings. It seemed just the kind of thing to serve for a little holiday get-together. So I called my Swedish friend, Sven Larsson, for advice on how to make a smörgåstårta.
I met Sven when he worked at the Swedish consulate in New Orleans, “Issuing passports to stupid Americans,” as he put it. We met at a wedding party in the French Quarter well over a decade ago, and found common ground as mutual devotees of A Confederacy of Dunces. The consulate is on Prytania, and Sven would often make the long walk to the theatre where Ignatius railed against Doris Day movies. He had since married a girl from Texas, divorced, and moved back to Stockholm, but we’d kept in touch.
When I got him on the phone, the first thing he said was, “You can’t make a smörgåstårta. You don’t have the right bread. All you have is that stuff, what do you call it? Ja! ‘Wonderful Bread!’ Like little Styrofoam.”
“But we have much better bread here now,” I said. “I can even get locally-baked loaves of rye and wheat.”
“Ach! And your beer!” he said. “Your beer is like a cat’s piss. UschI! How can you eat a smörgåstårta and drink that?” This is the way Sven and I always begin any conversation, but we always end up laughing.
Sven said a smörgåstårta can be as simple as three layers of rye with sliced cucumbers and smoked salmon as a filling, or it can be as elaborate as a wedding cake. Use a sturdy bread. Wonder Bread might be great for a finger sandwich, but it will turn into doughy mush in a smörgåstårta. The better the quality of your bread, the better your cake will hold up, and the better it will take. A sturdy rye, wheat, or sourdough is best. Remove the crust, then cut and slice your bread to the shape and size you like, round, square, or rectangle.
Use a seasoned whipped cream cheese spread for both filling and for a “frosting”; you can buy the Philadelphia blends, or make your own by thinning room-temperature cream cheese with sour cream. Do not use mayonnaise. Spread each side of your bread layers with a thin coating of the cream cheese spread. Be creative with your fillings: thinly-sliced vegetables, hummus, cold cuts, sliced cheeses, egg salad, tuna salad, chicken salad, smoked fish, pâtés, guacamole, sliced pickles, whatever you like, but vary your textures. Mix vegetables with your egg salad, add water chestnuts to your salmon; try to have a bit of crunch in each layer. Finally, coat with cream cheese, garnish lavishly, and refrigerate before serving.
