Category: Mississippi

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Winifred’s Table

The culinary history of Jackson, Mississippi is filled with colorful characters, including one who exemplifies the genteel aspects of any Southern city in the early decades of the last century.

Winifred Green Cheney was born into a very old Jackson family; originally from Maryland, the Greens moved to Jackson in the early 19th century. Winifred was born in the second family home at 647 North State Street in 1913. She graduated magna cum laude from Millsaps with a bachelor of arts in Latin in 1933, and on October 25, 1934 (after a 7-year engagement) she married Reynolds Cheney, who became one of the city’s most prominent attorneys.

While Winifred, in almost every respect, was a model for a well-to-do woman of social standing in the mid-century South (active in her church and in social charities, etc.), in another she was not: Winifred was a writer. In the course of her life, she wrote (about cooking, mainly) for such well-known publications as The National Observer, The Rotarian, Southern World and, of course, Southern Living. She published two cookbooks (both by Oxmoor House), Cooking for Company (1985) The Southern Hospitality Cookbook (1976).

Winifred’s Southern Hospitality Cookbook is not only a treasure-trove of splendid recipes, but as a whole is a tutorial of upper-class cooking in the mid-20th century South. The recipes are rich and varied; the ingredients are often expensive, and the times for preparation are usually considerable. Indeed, one of the most frequent critiques of the book is how complicated, indeed “fussy” the recipes are, many often calling for minute amounts of several various ingredients and elaborate stage-by-stage instructions on their preparation. But this is the way Winifred and the women of her generation cooked; they had plenty of time on their hands, and more often than not enough money to spend on costly and hard-to-find ingredients.

Many of the recipes are heirlooms from Virginia and the Eastern Seaboard, as well as many from “my great-grandmother … from Lone Star Plantation in the Mississippi Delta, written in her fine Spencerian hand.” (“But there were no directions,” Winifred adds. “I found this to be true with most of the old ‘receipts’ in her walnut escritoire papeterie.”) She also includes recipes from dozens and dozens of friends and neighbors: Odel Herbert’s Carrot Casserole, Vivienne Wilson’s Asparagus and Carrot Escallop, Claudia Whitney’s Meat Spaghetti, Zollie Kimbrough’s Shrimp Casserole, Linda Lacefield’s Apricot Stuffing for Duck, Becky Voght’s Caramel Icing; and many, many more.

The Southern Hospitality Cookbook is a milestone in the culinary history of Jackson as well as the Middle South, but what takes it to a higher level is a short essay by her editor at The National Observer, David W. Hacker (“Savoring Miss Welty’s Wit at a Special Seafood Lunch”), and a preface by Eudora herself, “A Note on the Cook” in which she writes:

“The original Lady Bountiful was the invention of an Irish dramatist in 1707. Winifred exists as her own version. She makes her rounds with baskets and trays as a simple extension of her natural hospitality.In good weather, but especially in bad, splashing forth in raincoat and tennis shoes, carrying a warm cake straight from her oven, she sympathizes with you or celebrates with you by sharing her table with you.

When Jane Austen’s Miss Bates, attending Mr. Weston’s ball, is seated at the supper, she surveys the table with a cry, ‘How shall we ever recollect half these dishes?’ When I sit down to Sunday dinner at Winifred’s, I feel just like Miss Bates. What guest could not? But it now becomes possible for us to recollect the dishes we’ve dined on there. The cook herself has recollected the recipes for them in her own cookbook. It’s like another extension of Winifred Cheney’s gracious hospitality; she has added another leaf to her table.”

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The Warehouse’s Bloody Mary Mix

This recipe comes from Dr. Billie Baker Swift. I received it a few years ago, but somehow lost it among a lot of other messages, and I’m only now getting around to posting it. I’ve also lost track with Billie, so if any of you know her, please tag her for me.

I first met LW while working my way through school and working at the Abbey’s Irish Rose. L.W. and his friend Sean were often at the Abbey and I believe they were working on Master’s Degrees in English. As time and my education progressed, I ended up working as a bartender in most of the everchanging bars in Oxford; Beth Munday and I were the only females working as bartenders at that time.

Eventually I ended up at the Warehouse (I think the Peddler by then) with LW., where he perfected this Bloody Mary mix. We made this mix 2 or 3 times a week. It makes a mildly spicy mix which can be kicked up with more Tabasco for those who prefer it that way. Our measuring cups were bar glasses, highball glasses, the type for gin and tonics, probably 12 oz.;  I’ll leave it to you to come up with exact measurements. This makes a large quantity, and refrigerates well, a week at least.

Combine 2 large (46 oz.) cans of V-8 juice with 1/3 a highball glass (see above) each lemon juice and Tabasco (@ 4 oz,, jly) and 1/2 a glass of Worcestershire sauce (@ 8 oz. jlyi). Shake well. We garnished with whatever was handy; celery; lemons; pearl onions and olives.  These days I would put bacon on the garnish.

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Where to Eat in Jackson

Some time ago, I contacted a fellow living in Los Angeles named John Howe for help with an article I was writing. We corresponded for a while, then he said he was going to be driving through Jackson to visit relatives in Tallahassee. We agreed to meet at the grocery store near my home and to decide on a place for lunch.

When I got to the store, John was excitedly running up and down the lunch buffet asking questions about the food. The people in line were smiling at this tall skinny white man with brilliant red hair. I could tell that his excitement over the food they eat every day tickled them, and they happily explained to him what was on the steam table.

“Now, over here is the peas and snaps,” one lady pointed out. “You gotta let them stew a long time for them to be good. And them smothered chops, too, they take a long time.”

“What’s in those bread sticks over there?” John asked.

“That’s Mexican corn sticks,” a fellow in work coveralls said. “They got peppers in ‘em but not hot peppers. They go good with pintos.”

“Are those turnip greens?” John asked.

Somebody barked and said, “No, them’s collards.”

John was stupified by the pile of fried chicken. “Do you sell all that?” he asked the lady behind the counter.

“Oh, this is our second batch,” she said. “We make one in the morning for the folks who come in for breakfast.”

“Fried chicken for breakfast!” John’s mouth was literally dropping to his chest.

“Yessir,” she said. “And we got another batch frying now ‘cause we always have a bunch of people coming in during the afternoon to pick some up to take home.”

After his turn to be served, John joined me at the booth under the window. He had two Styrofoam containers full. One contained Fried chicken—a breast and a leg—with peas and snaps, lima beans, and a cornbread muffin. The other plate had smothered chops with rice and gravy, green beans with sliced potatoes, and Mexican corn sticks. He also paid extra for a side of stewed cabbage and a container of peach cobbler. When he sat down, he opened the containers and sat looking at them and smiling.

“I wanted to get three plates,” he said, “But I thought better of it. I want to get to Atlanta before dark, and I didn’t want to have to stop and eat.” Tell me about their breakfasts. Grits and fried chicken? I never thought of it.”

“Two kinds of grits,” I said, “white and yellow, and they offer two kinds of bacon, curly and flat, link, patty, and smoked sausages, scrambled eggs, and pan after pan after pan of buttermilk biscuits.”

John was smiling and shaking his head. “You know, Jesse, when I stopped in Abeline I pulled up information on the restaurants here, you know, those, ‘top listed’ and ‘most recommended.’ I even went to the local tourism and social media sites looking for a place that told me I was in Jackson, Mississippi.”

“I really didn’t see any,” he said. “I found some white tablecloth places serving the same things you find in L.A.:, liver pâté, osso buco, burgers with Tillamook cheddar, Japanese beef filets and piccatas out the ass.”

He looked at the people standing in line. “But here is where people should come to eat when they’re in Jackson. This place, these people, this f! It’s magical.”

When John returned to L.A. (he flew back), he wrote and thanked me again for “taking him to lunch.” I pointed out that I had merely met him at a grocery store, and that he had paid for the food. “But you brought me to a place I never knew existed. I learned. That’s what going somewhere is all about. Otherwise you’re just dragging the same stuff around all over the place.”

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Johnsie Vaught’s Brunswick Stew

When you’re the wife of a football coach, you often have to feed a crowd that includes a lot of big guys, and if you’re the wife of Johnny Vaught, you want a Southern recipe that everybody loves. Such is the case with Brunswick stew, a favorite dish for gatherings in the South since Daniel Boone barged through the Cumberland Gap.

Johnsie’s recipe lacks the game meats many consider requisite for a Brunswick, and the inclusion of pasta and rice would likely by that same crowd constitute nothing short of heresy. But her 10 yard stew is typical of those often sold for a dollar a bowl for fund-raising at small-town events—such as football games—in the rural South of her day to provide new uniforms or equipment either for the school’s sports teams or marching band.

By my reckoning, this hefty, carb-heavy recipe could easily feed either 25 people or the Rebel offensive line at one sitting.

1 large hen
1 lb. lean ground beef
1 lb. lean ground pork
½ lb. butter
1 large bottle catsup
2 cans tomatoes
2 cans peas (green)
2 cans corn (cream style)
1 package spaghetti
1 cup rice
½ bottle tabasco
Salt and pepper to taste

Cook hen until tender, remove from broth, skin and bone, chop the meat. Return chicken to broth, add beef and pork. Cook for about 30 mins. Add butter, catsup, tomatoes, and simmer 1 hr. Then add spaghetti and rice. Cook 1 hr. Add peas and corn, being careful it doesn’t stick. (Note: cans are 15 oz., 16 oz. pkg. spaghetti)

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Didion in Dixie

What is the South?

The answer isn’t easy; hell, getting enough facts in a pile is hard enough, then you have to figure in observer, perspective, and perception. A dedicated minority of natives maintain that the South is a fluid, protean, shattered chimerical idea as well as just a place to hang your hat. This embracing grassroots duality is compounded (likely compromised) not only by Cash, Woodward, Foote, and their myriad lesser ilk, but also those from outside the South–the nation, the continent, the world–who come here to write about it.

Joan Didion, a product of New Journalism, is best known for her introspective writings on culture and politics, though her most acclaimed works are deeply personal; The White Album (1979), including the title essay dealing with a nervous breakdown and The Year of Magical Thinking, (2005), written shortly after the deaths of her daughter and husband.

It’s worth noting that her trip to the Gulf South was taken only two years after her critically acclaimed Slouching Towards Bethlehem, a gritty, myth-busting account of California’s counter-culture during the 1960s. The notes for South and West were published fifty years later.

Didion begins her excursion through Darkest Dixie in New Orleans registering images of procreation, death and decay:

“In New Orleans in June the air is heavy with sex and death, not violent death but death by decay, overripeness, rotting, death by drowning, suffocation, fever of unknown etiology. The place is dark, dark like the negative of a photograph, dark like an X-ray; the atmosphere absorbs its own light, never reflects light but sucks it in until random objects glow with a morbid luminescence. The crypts above ground dominate certain vistas. In the hypnotic liquidity of the atmosphere all motion slows into choreography, all people on the street move as if suspended in a precarious emulsion, and there seems only a technical distinction between the quick and the dead. One afternoon on St. Charles Avenue I saw a woman die, fall forward over the wheel of her car.”

Some might consider this an inauspicious beginning for a book about the Deep South, but then striking a gothic note isn’t out of order. Then her focus narrows:

“I could never precisely name what impelled me to spend time in the South during the summer of 1970. There was no reportorial imperative to any of the places I went at the time I went: nothing “happened” anywhere I was, no celebrated murders, trials, integration orders, confrontations, not even any celebrated acts of God. I had only some dim and unformed sense, a sense which struck me now and then, and which I could not explain coherently, that for some years the South and particularly the Gulf Coast had been for America what people were still saying California was, and what California seemed to me not to be; the future, the secret source of malevolent and benevolent energy, the psychic center. I did not much want to talk about this.”

Throughout the work, Didion interacts with prominent locals, including Walker Percy and (surprisingly) Stan Torgerson, but not Eudora Welty, stating that she dared not visit Welty in Jackson because she was certain that so near an airport, she’d catch a flight to the west coast. I find it telling that she couldn’t find Faulkner’s grave; perhaps it’s just as telling that she went looking.

In Meridian, Didion describes an audience in Mississippi watching an American movie “as if it were Czechoslovakian”; this is quite literally the purest form of projection, for it is Didion who is staring at a landscape, a region, without comprehension, driving through Dixie in a distracted daze. We should bear ear to her dispassionate observations, if only to see ourselves through her eyes.

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Winter Squash

My father was a lawyer in north Mississippi. On a day in late October,  he’d usher my sister, brother, and me into the car and drive out west from Bruce to the Ellard community where an old man and his wife lived on a small farm.

Across the road from their house, the slope of a hill was covered with yellowing vines bearing winter squashes. We’d go out there and gather all we could while Daddy sat on the porch with them, probably had some buttermilk and cornbread and a glass of tea and talked.

Once after we left, I asked him why he didn’t pay the man.

“Son, they wouldn’t take my money,” he said. “I tried to keep their out of prison. But I couldn’t, and they knew why. I never asked them for a penny. He said to come get what I want from his patch. You don’t turn down gifts from a man who doesn’t have much to give.”

The squash were acorns and yellow Hubbards; some were peeled, cubed, and parboiled for a casserole or pie. Others were split, seeded, usually scored, brushed with melted butter, sprinkled with brown sugar, and baked in a hot oven until soft and slightly singed.

Once on the table, we’d scoop out the flesh with a spoon, put it on our plates and mash it with a fork with more butter and black pepper.