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Old Rain

Every childhood has a Radley house, a Boo around the corner that opens our eyes to a world that doesn’t appear or work the way we thought it does or will.

Old Rain spooked my little world. Some said he was a freakish child abandoned by a troupe of carnies, others said he was a lost baby Bigfoot come south. When he wasn’t brooding in a boarded-up house in Pittsboro, he haunted the woods and hollows feeding the creeks and streams that make the Skuna River. I don’t know why we called him Old Rain, but what else is the Skuna–or any other river in Mississippi–save rain that’s found its way from the hills to the bottoms and over-wintered in owl-hooted sloughs, distilled and aged, steeped in the character of the land, an inspiration of earth itself?

We bury imaginary monsters under the baggage of adulthood, so I folded Old Rain away after finding far more frightening things than whisperings, thumps, and shifting shadows  on lonely pathways, but I’ve grown to believe he was a faunus of the little river bottoms and low wooded hills that my Choctaw ancestors knew and loved. They would call him a thrower,  a poboli of the hidden people of the woods; my Welsh ancestors would call him a woodwose, both beings living vestiges of the vital, spirit of the old forests which were themselves a manifestation of divinity on earth.

Old Rain is now–in mind and memory–a companion in those places I still cherish most: bright spring hills, close, dark summer woods, and open fields in the clear cold horns of winter.

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Buttermilk Rosemary Bread

Dissolve one package quick-acting yeast and a tablespoon of sugar in a half cup each of warm buttermilk and water. When the yeast begins to work, add a quarter cup of vegetable oil, and blend in a mix of three cups flour (this loaf was made with Martha White), half a cup of grated sharp cheddar, and a quarter cup of fresh rosemary leaves. Knead until smooth, rise for three hours, punch down, and place in an oiled baking pan to rise until doubled. Bake in a moderate (350) oven until crisp and golden. Brush with butter.

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Barbecued Shrimp

This recipe comes from Howard Mitcham’s knowledgeable, rambunctious, and absolutely delightful Creole Gumbo and All That Jazz  (Addison-Wesley: 1978). Howard lived in New Orleans in what many consider a golden era, (1955-70) when the city was filled with talent not only local, but brought on board by the scintillating lures of freedom and indulgence.

One of the most delicious seafood dishes to come out of New Orleans is barbecued shrimp, and once you’ve eaten it, you’ll never forget it. Barbecued shrimp have been around for a long, long time, and they’ve been served at many restaurants, but they’ve been brought to a peak of perfection by Pascal’s Manale, up- town on Napoleon Avenue. People come from miles around to eat their barbecued shrimp, and on weekend nights the place is so crowded, you have to wait two or three hours to get a table.

It is said that Manale’s secret recipe for this dish is buried in the center of a two-ton concrete block under the office safe. A friend of mine, Mrs. Ivy Whitty, solved the riddle by hiring a cook who used to work at Manale’s. The cook could neither read nor write, but she had all the treasured secrets in her head. Working together, that cook and Mrs. Whitty perfected a barbecued shrimp recipe that may or may not be Manale’s, but it is sublime.

It’s amazing that such a good dish could be so simple, but there’s nothing in it except shrimp, butter, and black pepper. If you try to add anything else-herbs, spices, Worcestershire, whatever-you’ll spoil it for certain. It’s important to use fresh shrimp with their heads and shells on if you can find them. The tomalley inside the shrimp’s head, which is like the tomalley of a lobster, adds a real punch to the sauce in the pan. (However, if you can’t find fresh shrimp, frozen unpeeled shrimp with tails will make a dish that’s almost as delicious and better than almost any shrimp dish you could find in the average seafood restaurant.)

At first glance it seems that the recipe calls for too much black pepper, but you’ll discover later that it’s just right. The heat cooks out of it-well, sort of. Always open a fresh can of black pepper when making this dish so that it will be fully aromatic and pungent. The general rule for butter is one stick per pound of shrimp plus a stick for the pan.

Use a 16-20 count; pat shrimp dry and place in the bottom of a buttered baking dish, skillet or casserole. Drizzle with melted butter—one stick to one pound of shrimp—and top with excessive amounts of freshly ground black pepper. Place on the highest rack in your hottest oven for about 10 minutes (jly).

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Deviled Ham

Clarify a stick of butter; mix thoroughly with a pound of finely-minced/ground ham. Add a heaping tablespoon of dry mustard, a teaspoon of white pepper, a few heavy dashes of mace, and black pepper to taste. Options include granulated garlic and grated onion. Be stingy with the salt. Blend very well and refrigerate, the longer the better. Bring to room temperature and stir before serving with toast rounds, crackers, or as a sandwich spread.

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Spatchcocked Game Hen

An aromatic dish for small gatherings. These can be prepared on a sheet pan, but small skillets make a better presentation. Preheat oven to 400. Rinse hen, pat dry, and remove wing tips and backbone. Use scissors. Turn breast side up, open like a book, and whack it a time or two with your fist to crack the breastbone and flatten. Oil hen, season with salt and plenty of good black pepper. Line a well-oiled skillet with minced garlic and rosemary springs, place the bird on top, tuck the wings under the breast, and bake until nicely browned.

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Hosford’s Apple Cookies

You don’t see many Southern recipes for apple cookies. What apples do well here are made into sauces, pies, or cakes. A quick scan of Southern Sideboards, Bayou Cuisine, River Road Recipes, Vintage Vicksburg, Gourmet of the Delta, The Jackson Cookbook, and The Mississippi Cookbook turned up nary a one. But I did find a recipe in Hosford Fontaine’s Allison’s Wells: The Last Mississippi Spa, and it’s superb: rich, moist, and aromatic.

3 cups of unpeeled diced apples (I use Galas)
2 sticks butter, softened
¾ cup sugar
¾ cup brown sugar
3 eggs, lightly beaten
2 cups flour
1 tablespoon grated orange peel
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon cinnamon
A half teaspoon each ground cloves, nutmeg, and salt
2 cups rolled oats
¼ cup white raisins
¼ cup chopped pecans

Cream butter and sugars well, add eggs and flour mixed and sifted with spices and baking powder. Stir in apples, oats and nuts, then refrigerate dough for about 30 minutes, stirring once. Form dough into ping pong balls and bake on a lightly oiled cookie sheet with parchment paper at 350 or until lightly browned. Cool on a wire rack. This recipe makes about two dozen wonderful, chewy, cookies.

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Barry

I took Barry’s first class at Ole Miss as an undergraduate. The class was held in Bondurant East, second floor, overlooking the Williams Library. Donna Tartt was in the class as well, a very pretty young lady who turned in a wonderful short story about a woman held captive by a man whose passion was orchids. I turned in a brutal little story about a woman who had murdered her husband in front of her youngest child that Hannah found “just a little bit over the top, Yancy,” since the child later went on to commit suicide as an adult.

“Murder and suicide both in less than five pages?” he asked. He looked at me, shrugged and grinned.

Barry was drinking heavily at that time, and it wasn’t a week later before he showed up just as drunk as he could be. The entire class just sat in their seats, dumbfounded, as he rambled on about poetry, fiction and flying around the Gulf of Mexico shooting tequila with Jimmy Buffet. We were dismissed early.

My friend and classmate Robert Yarborough told me to stay after class and help him get Hannah home. I drove Barry’s car, Robert followed on his motorcycle. First stop was to a supermarket, where Barry gave me a wad of money and told me to buy a steak (“I need protein!”), then to the run-down duplex he shared with Robert on Johnson Avenue.

At the next class we were on pins and needles wondering if Hannah would show up, but of course he did, apologized, told us to forget about it, and delivered one of the best lectures on the craft of writing I’ve ever heard before or since.  Before the class, he had written POETRY across the blackboard. He never referred to it during the lecture, but we knew it was there.

“You’ve got to write, write, write” he said. “If you don’t use it, you’ll lose it.” Trite, I know, but when Barry said it with that raffish grin of his, he made it stick. He taught us to listen to ourselves, and that was a great and painful gift; the most important lessons learned under his self-appeasing wit made us aware of our limitations,

Later on that semester, I was sitting in the Gin having a few beers and scribbling on a pad when Hannah walked in. I nodded a greeting, and eventually he ambled over and we started talking. He asked about the short story I’d written. I told him I’d gotten the title (“A Roof of Wind”) from Faulkner,, and for some reason this infuriated him. I got the impression that he was sick and tired having his mule and wagon stuck in the Dixie Limited wheelhouse. Not knowing what else to do, I apologized and left posthaste. He never brought it up again, and I certainly didn’t.

Like Morris, Hannah was subject to the oozing fawning of fans, but while Willie reveled in holding late-night, dissolute salons where he was the center of the attentions of a cadre of hangers-on, Barry kept a somewhat lower profile and a more select company. I knew many people who traveled in those circles, and they enjoyed regaling those of us who weren’t members of said cliques with their second-hand wit and wisdom. Eventually the celebrity staled on everyone, and life in Oxford resumed its own accustomed glow.

On reflection, it wasn’t a good time for either Morris or Hannah. Neither published anything of matter those years; Barry began bottoming out with Ray, while Willie was churning out even worse froth in the form of Terrains of the Heart. But unlike Morris, Hannah pulled out of it, wrote, and wrote well. He had to, and he did. T

Hannah was the finest Southern writer of his generation, eye, ear, and voice. Oh, he was a bad boy to be sure; he had the witting arrogance to be vulgar when the situation presented itself, but Hannah was a singer.

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The Edible South

If you care about the culinary history of America, then The Edible South: The Power of Food and the Making of an American Region by Marcie Ferris (The University of North Carolina Press; August, 2016) should be on your shelves. The scope and scholarship of this work provide a much-needed center of gravity for the study of Southern foodways as well as a panoramic portrait of the society and culture of the South on the broad canvas of its table.

Despite Ferris’s compelling voice, The Edible South can in no way be described as “bridging a gap between academic and popular writing” (c.f. Edge). It is a thoroughly academic work, not a book you pick up lightly and not without a solid grounding in American history, otherwise you will soon find yourself awash in a sea of dates and names, events and entities.

In her introduction (following four pages of acknowledgements) Ferris states that The Edible South is an examination of “visceral connections” involving the “realities of fulsomeness and deprivation” and the “resonance of history in food traditions”, and, in a riff on Zora Neale Hurston’s reference to food as an eyepiece for the examination of history, an “evocative lens” into the various aspects of Southern culture and society. The text is peppered with phrases such as “culinary exceptionalism”, “cultural conversation”, “historical interaction”, “Jim Crow paternalism” and “racial balkanization”, thoroughly saturated with information (as well as footnotes) and for the most part unrelentingly didactic, an almost incessant record of racism and misogyny, poverty and oppression in one of the most fertile regions of the globe.

The narrative is occasionally gruesome: the slaughter and cannibalization of a young pregnant bride at Jamestown; the torture of a slave by being suspended with a piece of pork fat over an open flame; and the rats, cats and dogs prepared for the table during the siege of Vicksburg in addition to constant accounts of hunger, malnutrition and want, evocative to be sure, but far more often of the darker aspects of the human condition.

Ferris is vigorous and precise, as befits a writer intending to inform (if not to say instruct). While she professes a passion for food, this passion is rarely evident in her prose; instead, it shines forth in her scholarship, which as noted is astoundingly thorough. The key word here is information, and The Edible South is informative on almost every level, but this is a social history (as opposed to political or economic history), focusing on the experiences of everyday people, resulting in “a ‘History from the Bottom Up’ that ultimately engulfed traditional history and, somehow, helped to make a Better World” (Johnson). The emphasis is on race relations, gender issues, inequality, education, work and leisure, mobility, social movements and the character and condition of the working class. This is to say that food is a raison for her larger agenda, which is an examination of the social history of the South itself.

While Ferris states her approach is not encyclopedic, her product is undeniably, mind-bogglingly comprehensive. The bibliography is exhaustive, beginning with three and a half pages of primary source materials from archival collections in fifteen cities spanning fourteen states (including Michigan, Massachusetts, Ohio and the District of Columbia), followed by forty pages of secondary sources. Somewhat surprisingly, Ferris mentions Zora Neale Hurston only in connection with the reproduction of her folk tale “Diddy Wah Diddy” (1938) in Mark Kurlansky’s excellent work, The Food of a Younger Land (2010), disregarding her longer non-fiction works. I should hope to find some agreement by noting the glaring omission of Wilbur Cash’s The Mind of the South (1929). While not genre-defining—John Egerton’s Southern Food: At Home, on the Road, in History (1987) practically established the genre—The Edible South is an authoritative reference.

The academic institutionalization of Southern food is if nothing else thorough. Southern foodways studies have kept university presses rolling in recent years: Andrew Haley, an assistant professor of American cultural history at the University of Southern Mississippi, was awarded the 2012 James Beard Award in the Reference and Scholarship category for Turning the Tables: Restaurants and the Rise of the American Middle Class, 1880-1920 (another product of the University of North Carolina Press); this past October, the University of Georgia Press issued The Larder: Food Studies Methods from the American South, edited by John T. Edge, Elizabeth S. D. Engelhardt and Ted Ownby; and this August the University Press of Mississippi released Writing in the Kitchen: Essays on Southern Literature and Foodways edited by David A. Davis and Tara Powell with a forward by Jessica B. Harris.

Certainly more has yet to be written, yet given the relatively narrow scope of this field, overgrazing seems imminent; one could get the impression that this glut of scholarship is evidence that the academic maxim of “publish or perish” is still solidly in place. While these works are undoubtedly conceived for those who are deeply interested in the culinary history of our nation, the general popularity of such publications must be called into question. That being said, The Edible South was included among the Southern Independent Booksellers Association’s 2014 Summer Okra Picks, along with Chris Chamberlain’s The Southern Foodie’s Guide to the Pig: A Culinary Tour of the South’s Best Restaurants & the Recipes That Made Them Famous, Beautiful at All Seasons: Southern Gardening and Beyond with Elizabeth Lawrence (by Elizabeth Lawrence) and Somewhere Safe with Somebody Good by Jan Karon.

After reading The Edible South, some are likely to be left with the bitter aftertaste of an eviscerated region in an age of information. The apart-ness of the South brought about its distinctive culture, but the old demonic genius loci of Dixie has been exorcised by a new orthodoxy embracing secular capitalization and academic hermeneutics, where icons are relics and texts are subjected to a democratized version of the Scholastic method. A bell jar has descended, but life goes on, people will be people, and while by academic standards Southern culture has become a global phenomenon, for better or worse it remains rooted south of the Mason-Dixon Line, where a pork chop is, much to our relief, still more often than not just a pork chop.

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Diana Kennedy’s Chilies Rellenos

Diana Kennedy introduced Mexican haute cuisine to American tables with her landmark 1972 cookbook, The Cuisines of Mexico, introduced by Craig Claiborne. Kennedy recommended viable substitutes in an era when Mexican produce was unavailable, and provided significant procedural details. I have substituted corn oil for lard, diced, dried fruit for candied fruit, and canned tomatoes for fresh.

There is always an exclamation of pleasure and surprise when a cazuela of golden, puffy chiles rellenos sitting in their tomato broth is presented at the table. If you have eaten those sad, flabby little things that usually turn up in so-called Mexican restaurants in the United States as authentic chiles rellenos, you have a great surprise in store.

Here is yet another prime example of the fine feeling the Mexicans have for texture in their food: you bite through the slightly crisp, rich chile poblano to experience the crunch of the almonds and little bits of crystallized fruits in the pork filling. Then there is the savory broth to cut the richness of the batter. Assembling the chilies may seem like a long laborious task, but it is no more complicated and time consuming than most worthwhile dishes, and this dish is certainly worthwhile.

Cut 3 lbs. lean boneless pork into large cubes. Put them into a sauce pan with one large white onion, chopped, and two minced cloves of garlic, a teaspoon or so of salt. Cover with cold water, bring to a boil, lower heat and cook until just barely tender, maybe 45 minutes. Let the meat cool in the broth. Strain the meat, reserving the broth, then shred or chop it finely and set it aside. Let the broth get completely cold and skim off the fat. Reserve the fat.

Cook about a cup of chopped onion with 3 minced cloves of garlic in about a half cup of corn oil without browning. Add meat and let it cook for a few minutes. Add a tablespoon of freshly-ground black pepper, a teaspoon of ground clove, and a teaspoon of cinnamon along with 2 tablespoons slivered blanched almonds, 2 tablespoons raisins, and three or sour finely-chopped dates. Add two cups crushed tomatoes and increase heat. Cook until meat mixture is almost dry.

In a blender or food processor, puree two cups diced tomatoes with a half a white onion, coarsely chopped, and two minced cloves of garlic until smooth. the juice extracted from their seeds, with the onion and garlic until smooth. Place the fat skimmed from the meat broth to a pan, add the tomato puree, two bay leaves, a teaspoon coarsely-ground black pepper, and a half teaspoon each ground cloves and dried thyme.

Add 3 cups of the reserved pork broth, continue cooking on high heat for 15 minutes, then lower heat and simmer until slightly thickened. You don’t want a thick sauce, you want it brothy. Add salt as necessary.

Roast 6 large poblanos on an open flame or under a broiler until the skin blisters and burn. Make sure they don’t get overcooked or burn right through. Wrap the chilies in a damp cloth or plastic bag and leave them for about 20 minutes. The burned skin will then flake off very easily and the flesh will become a little more cooked in the steam.

Make a slit in the side of each chili and carefully remove the seeds and veins. Be careful to leave the top of the chili, the part around the base of the stem, intact. Rinse the chilies and pat them dry. Stuff the chilies until they are well filled out. Set them aside on paper toweling while you make the batter.

Separate 4 eggs. Beat the whites until they are stiff, but not too dry. Add a few dashes of salt and mix in the four egg yolks one by one, beating well after each addition. Pat the chilies completely dry (or the batter will not adhere) and sprinkle them lightly with flour. Coat them with the batter. Fry the chilies in hot corn or safflower oil, turning them from time to time, until they are an even gold all over. Drain the chilies on the paper toweling, place them in the tomato broth-it should come about halfway up the chilies- and bring them up to heat on a low flame.

You can prepare the stuffing and the sauce the day before, and skin and clean the chilies. But do not put the stuffing into the chilies until about 2 hours before cooking. You can coat and fry them just before your guests arrive and leave them on paper toweling in a warm spot until the last moment, when they can be just warmed through in the tomato broth. In Mexico they are served by themselves, just before the main course. But they make a very good main course in which case you could serve two small chilies.

If you have any picadillo left over it will freeze very well; reheated, it makes a very good filling for tacos. The tomato broth, too, will freeze and can be used for other dishes.