A Southern Gallimaufry
Fry bacon until crisp, drain, and crumble. Add vegetable oil to pan drippings and stir in chopped cabbage with bacon. Toss/stir vigorously until cabbage is coated and just tender. Add pepper vinegar, black pepper, and salt to taste. Finely sliced sweet onions–cooked or raw–are a welcome option.
Dale Harper knows food, knows people, and will tell you in a heartbeat what will fly and what won’t. So when–in one of my frequent fits of ignorance–I told him a dish with oysters and bacon would go over like a lead zeppelin, he laughed, patted me on my head as if I were a schoolboy, and poured me another beer.
“Jesse,” he said, shaking a red beard longer than my forearm. “Your problem is you do not think! What you have are two ingredients that are simply made for one another! Consider the oyster, a creature of the seas, and while delicious on its own, is lacking in that one essential ingredient that is dear to the palates of us Homo sapiens.”
“Dale, you’re including me in the genus “sapiens” when you just said I can’t think.”
“Be hush,” he said, swinging his beard around like a cricket bat. “You think, but you don’t think enough. You have to consider things in many lights and from many angles, in this case an examination of contrasts. The oyster lacks fat!” With that he plunged his forefinger onto the bar and then pointed it at me in a thoroughly superfluous gesture of accentuation.
Pat oysters dry and bring the bacon to room temperature before skewering. Season very lightly with black pepper. Broil or grill until bacon begins to crisp.
Bars—for those of us who frequent them—provide insights of the most profound sort into the human condition. This I firmly believe is because bars combine by their very nature the easy-going, ruminative atmosphere of an agora with the somewhat less philosophical and contemplative aspects of a boisterous opium den, making them the perfect stages for a meeting of minds between people who have hitherto never set eyes on one another.
So it was that in a bar in St. Augustine, Florida, the waitress, after serving my fourth beer along with a pound of boiled shrimp asked, “Would you like to try our datil pepper sauce with these?” Intrigued as a Southerner, more specifically as a Mississippian and a pepper-head to boot, I replied in the affirmative and was served a fluted ramekin containing a creamy sauce flecked with black pepper. “It’s got a bite!” she warned.
And indeed it did, but not at all what I—a seasoned if not to say jaded veteran of salsa skirmishes—would consider fierce or fiery, but I had to ask, “What the hell is a datil pepper?” Of course, bless her heart, she was a newcomer from Missouri, so she marched off to the kitchen and came back with the chef, who was a proud native of St. John County, and a descendant of those St. Augustineans who came from Minorca as indentured workers in the late 1700s.
“The datil pepper,” he explained after hoisting himself–nimbly, I must add–on a stool beside me and ordering an O’Doul’s, “is a very hot pepper, a type of Capsicum—you say you know peppers, so you’ll recognize Capsicum (I nodded)—chinense–this he emphasized by holding up an index finger–that came to Spain, then to Minorca, from Cuba. My people brought them with us. What we have done here with our sauce is to combine the fiery datil—which is similar in taste and appearance to the habanero—with mayonnaise, which as everyone knows was invented in Minorca in ancient times and is named for the capitol city, Maó-Mahón. Do you like it?”
Of course I told him I liked it, though to be quite honest putting a spicy mayonnaise on shrimp ran somewhat contrary to my tastes, which tend to a pungent, horseradish-and-lemon juice infused tomato condiment. When I asked where I could get seeds, he stated emphatically that he could get some seeds for me at the end of the season, or I could contact the St. John County extension office. I gave him my address with many thanks.
So I finished my shrimp, ordered another beer and was sitting there in what some might term the glow of culinary discovery when this seedy-looking little skinny guy in a Dolphins jersey sidles over and says, “You’re not believing that crap are you?”
“Why not?” I said, my reverie reduced to embers.
“Oh, hell, that pepper’s just something one of them crackers found growing in a pile of horseshit behind the city hall, and they decided to make a big hoo-hoo about it,” he said. “They just tell you tourists that bull turkey so you’ll buy a bottle and take it home and brag about it.”
After all that, I had to ask him where he was from. “Key West,” he said smiling. “Where we grow those yellow limes.” I just grinned and bought him a beer.
Aunt Bess was a woman of intrepid notions who did not let the world at large get in her way of doing what she knew was right. She found nothing wrong with locking Uncle Ewell in the corn crib to keep him from drinking and picking up loose women in his baby-blue 1954 Buick Skylark, and just because her brother-in-law was the sheriff did not stop her from chasing him out of her house with a fly swatter when he put ketchup on her fried chicken.
Bess lived in a big, ramshackle house with a wringer-washer on the back porch, and two swings out front. She kept a huge garden, almost an acre of corn and beans, okra and tomatoes, potatoes, cabbages, and two long rows of peanuts. When it came time to pull peanuts, her four nephews—niece Cindy was exempt because she was such a pampered little princess—would trudge up there on a weekend afternoon, and after Bess had used a garden fork to loosen them, we’d haul the plants out of the ground and hang them on the back porch. Later Bess would cut away the nuts and put them in a burlap tote sack.
This is how Bess parched peanuts. For a pound of very well-washed raw peanuts in the shell, dissolve a cup of salt in two quarts of water, bring to a rolling boil, and remove from heat. Add peanuts. Sink in the brine with a plate of a pie pan, and let them soak for a few hours. Drain and spread on sheet pan. Roast at 350, stirring a time or two. Serve warm when shells are brittle, and enjoy the beautiful.
Stem, seed, and devein small sweet peppers. Season inside with salt, pepper, paprika, and granulated garlic. Stuff with slices of smoked Swiss or Gouda cheese wrapped in thinly-sliced ham or turkey. Arrange the peppers in lightly oiled muffin tins, and place in a very hot oven until cheese is melted through, about 15 mins.. Serve hot as a nosh or as a side with hefty pasta such as lasagna or cannoli.
Joyce Sexton was proud of her garden. It occupied the edges of her back yard along the fences; broad beds of perennials punctuated by flowering shrubs whose Latin names she had memorized; they sounded like an incantation as she recited them in her mind.
In the southwest corner was a short dead spruce stripped of twigs and leaves whose trimmed branches were adorned with brightly-colored glass bottles. Joyce enjoyed the way the glass caught the morning sun and reflected in the lights from the porch during the evenings. It had taken her months to find just the right bottles for the tree, and this morning she finally found the last one, a bright red bottle on top that seemed to glow from inside. She was admiring its light when she heard the front doorbell. She had invited her friend Sandra over for a drink.
“Well, it is pretty,” Sandra said later as they sat under the porch fans.
“At least you’ve got different bottles. I don’t like those with just one kind, especially those milk of magnesia models. They just send out the wrong signal, if you ask me.”
“I think it’s the best bottle tree in town,” Joyce said. “I know it sounds silly, but a bottle had to really say something to me before I put it on.” Sandra just stared at it with her arms crossed.
“You don’t like it?” Joyce said.
“Oh, like I said, it’s pretty, Joyce. And it looks good right next to the Lady Banks. But do you realize what those things are?’
Joyce laughed and said, “You mean that nonsense about trapping evil spirits? Cassandra June, your fanny hits a pew every time First Prez is open. And besides, you’re over-educated to boot. Surely you don’t believe that voodoo junk. ”
Sandra sipped her gin and tonic and smiled at her old friend. “Oh, you wouldn’t care if I were sacrificing stray cats in my basement, you’d still never get along without me.”
“If you were sacrificing stray cats, I’d bring you a few,” Joyce said.
“They kill the little birds, they yowl all night long and they beat up on poor Lucky.” A little terrier of dubious parentage under the table between them raised his head and thumped a raggedy tail.
“Okay, if you think its all stuff and nonsense, let me break one,” Sandra said. “Oh, don’t look so shocked. Admit you had fun looking for these bottles, and one of them’s bound to break sooner or later.”
Joyce thought about it. “Okay, you old witch,” she said. “But break one of the bottom ones. Use Glen’s putter. It’s over there on the corner.”
Sandra retrieved the putter, walked into the back yard and shattered a small green bottle on a lower branch. At the sound, Lucky jumped up and scrambled under the gate towards the street outside.
Before Joyce could gather the breath to summon her dog, she heard the screech of brakes and a choked, mournful howl.
. . . . . . . . . .
“Mother, it was just an accident,” Rachel said. “Sandra shouldn’t blame herself. That’s just silly.”
Joyce looked at her daughter. She and Glen had been surprised when her infant golden hair had not only remained gold, but had also matured into a mane that Rachel merely pretended to complain about. Today she had wrestled it back into a tawny mass that spilled in a shower over the back of her bright blue scrubs.
“I know,” she said. “But you know how Sandra loved Lucky. She brought him liver snaps every time she came over. I think she did it on purpose; they always gave him gas.”
Rachel brought her coffee to the table and sat next to her mother. “Mom, just ride it out. I know you loved Lucky, too. Hell, we all did; except Richard, of course.” They both made a face at each other and laughed. “Cliff Stevens told me he was still wearing an ankle bracelet in Chattanooga,” Rachel said.
Joyce sipped from her cup and wished Richard were much further away. She still ran into his parents at parties, his father formal, his mother always managing to snag Joyce away from the crowd and update his doleful story. (“He didn’t mean anything, Joyce. You know that.”)
Rachel glanced at her watch. “I’ve got to go, Mom. Joe Wright told me I could scrub in on a valve replacement this morning.”
Joyce kissed her daughter and took her coffee to the patio. She called Glen at his office, forgot he was in court that day and ended up talking to his secretary Cathy about the upcoming office party.
“Glen’s just a mess about it,” Cathy said. “And I do mean a mess. He can’t decide on a damn thing, and that puts me in charge of everything from food to felonies. Would you please try to sit him down for five minutes and nail something down for me?”
“Oh, just do what you did last year, Cathy. It’s not like he’s going to notice.”
“I know,” Cathy said. “He’s such an airhead.”
Joyce laughed and said goodbye, went and poured another cup and settled back on the porch to admire her garden. The azaleas had exhausted themselves long ago, and the Shastas were now coming into their own, as were the hostas she’d planted last October. Lucky’s grave by the holly was marked with a shaggy little stone dog and a weathered scattering of liver snaps.
The bottle tree glistened in the morning sun. One bottle caught the light extremely well, a beer bottle Joyce found behind the back fence that had a white and blue label. The light it caught dazzled. Joyce laughed, picked a hand spade from her garden shelf, walked up to the tree and shattered the bottle into hundreds of pieces. She was still smiling when she heard the phone ring.
. . . . . . . . . .
“Joyce?”
Glen knocked gently at the barely open door. Joyce lay on the bed, the golden afternoon light pouring onto the floor and casting shadows upon morning windows.
“Joyce?”
He moved into the room and sat on the edge of the bed. “Honey?”
“How did he get out?”
Glen turned, bowed and rubbed his hands together. “He’s been out.”
Joyce rolled over and looked at her husband’s back.
“It’s been eight years, Joyce. He was convicted as a juvenile. It was not a capital offense. He served five years, and then they put him in a rehabilitation unit. He was clean and sober; he had a job at a Walgreens. He was evaluated twice a month.”
“He just killed our daughter,” Joyce said.
Glen’s shoulders heaved and he began to sob. Joyce reached up and brought him to her and they lay there, crying, while the shadows grew on the wall.
. . . . . . . . . .
The summer office party was never conducted, but as the holidays approached, Glen suggested that the traditional year’s end celebration be held, and to his relief Joyce agreed. The firm had had a very good year, and Glen, as senior partner, always enjoyed giving out bonuses and promotions.
Predictably, it began on a muted note, but as the night progressed, the mood lifted and Joyce found herself enjoying being around friends. As they were driving home, she and Glen found themselves laughing about Cathy’s QVC jewelry and Jerry Wineman’s new toupee.
It was warm for a winter’s evening; wisps of fog were settling into the low places along the road, and the lights from the house glowed as they pulled into their drive.
Glen grabbed Joyce’s hand and said, “Let’s sit out on the back porch and have another drink.”
“No, Glen,” Joyce said, caressing his hand, “I’d rather not. Let’s just sit in the living room.”
Glen looked at her and said, “You used to love the porch. You used to love looking at the garden. What’s the matter?”
Then Joyce told him about the bottle tree, about Lucky, about Rachel. Glen sighed and said, “Oh, honey, you know that’s just ridiculous. What did they call it in college, synchronicity? Come on, let’s build a little fire in the fireplace and huddle up next to it on a blanket with a couple of beers.”
“I’d rather have a martini,” Joyce said.
After they’d changed, Glen settled Joyce in front of the fire with her drink. “Glen, I know it’s just a bunch of nonsense, coincidences, like you said.”
“Of course they were, and I know it, but I don’t believe you believe it.”
“I do,” Joyce said, “And I’ll prove it to you. Is your 12-gage in the hall closet?”
“Sure.”
Joyce retrieved the gun from the closet, along with a box of shells. “Show me how to load it again.” Once the gun was loaded, Joyce slung it over her shoulder and headed out the back door.
“If you stand back about ten yards, you ought to be able to get all of ‘em,” Glen shouted. He smiled, took off his shirt and sipped his beer. Then, with a smile, he slicked back his hair and lay down on the couch. A shot echoed from the backyard.
When Joyce came running back in, she said, “Glen, I got them all! And the trunk is in splinters. I’ll have a hell of a time cleaning up all the glass. Glen?”
GLEN!
Rice Krispies Treats are the American version of marzipan, easily molded into such things as teddy bears, clowns, and the inevitable boobs and balls. This clever little innovation is fun to make, just cute as can be, and a great Halloween treat. Please read through this recipe first; you need to know what you’re doing before you make it.
For the outer yellow ring use 5 cups Rice Krispies, 5 cups miniature marshmallows, and a quarter stick butter with yellow food coloring; for the middle orange ring, 3 cups Rice Krispies, 3 cups miniature marshmallows, and a quarter stick of butter, with orange food coloring; and for the white center, 2 cups Rice Krispies, 2 cups miniature marshmallows, and a quarter stick of butter.
For each ring, combine marshmallows and butter, and microwave for about 3 minutes, stirring after a minute or so, until blended. Stir in food coloring; you don’t need much, only a few drops of yellow and a couple of yellow and red for the orange. Pour over the cereal, coat your hands with butter and mix the marshmallows into the cereal with your fingers until the color is uniform.
Working quickly, divide each color batch in two, then beginning on the outside of greased 8 in. cake tins, make your rings: yellow first, then orange, then the white center. Keep them an even width. Press the cereal/marshmallow mixture into the pan to ensure they stick together and make them a consistent thickness. Let the rings set for thirty minutes, then turn out on a cutting board and slice first in half, then into quarters, then into eight even wedges. Store with waxed paper between layers.
Charlotte Capers, long-time director of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History was—in stark contrast to her current successor—a woman of integrity, intelligence, and wit. This is an excerpt from a speech given before the Mississippi Historical Society in March 1972.
After its creation in 1902, the Department remained in the basement of the New Capitol until 1940, when more commodious quarters, but not much more, were provided in the War Memorial Building. Since Dr. Rowland’s day, the Department has acted as a clearing-house historical agency, and the Museum function was included in this. However, when the Department moved into the War Memorial Building, the collection housed in the New Capitol was, of necessity, abandoned. Certainly, there was no space in the north wing of the new building for a full-fledged museum. Thus, we left in the basement of the New Capitol, a mysterious and miscellaneous collection including an Egyptian mummy, the hip-bone of a North Dakota dinosaur, a pair of size 20 shoes worn by an Alabama Negro in World War I, and a toy snake from the Philippines.
The star of this collection was the mummy, who had enchanted visitors to Jackson ever since she had been acquired as lagniappe in a collection of Indian artifacts many years ago. A real mummy mystique had developed, and grandfathers brought their toddling grandchildren in to see the mummy that they had seen as boys. When the board of trustees quite properly adopted pieces in the Old Capitol Restoration, the collection was limited to items associated with Mississippi history. The mummy, an Egyptian, was plainly out of place. It fell my lot to separate the little Egyptian, known variously to her public as ‘The Little Gypsy Lady,” or occasionally as ”The Dummy,” from her admirers. I knew that such a move was to court disaster, for my generation, too, had visited the mummy on our way to Central High School, and we considered her as much a part of our American heritage as George Washington, Robert E. Lee, or Theodore G. Bilbo.
But, in what may have been my finest hour, I saw my duty and I did it. And I firmly withdrew ”The Little Gypsy Lady” whose connection with Mississippi history was tenuous at best, from the Museum exhibits. She was relegated to a collection file room in the old Capitol to be seen only on demand by her most avid admirers. Her admirers all turned out to be avid, and they continued to demand her until the day when a staff member, annoyed by constant calls for our most popular tenant, stated in a speech that he would like to bury the mummy.
That blew it. The wire services picked up the story and the shot went round the world. The public from all over arose to defend “The Little Gypsy Lady.” We got insulting mail and insulting telephone calls; and one concerned gentle man wrote from Germany about “das mumi,” calling us bigots for some reason. Offers of adoption for the mummy flowed in. An undertaker from Ohio wanted “‘The Little Gypsy Lady” as an example of his art. An archaeologist said that when he examined her he found her to be a young female offered her a home provided that her esophagus came with her (translate: sarcophagus).
The strife went on, I held my ground, the story of Mississippi, as you will see, is told in thirty-three permanent exhibits in this Old Capitol Museum, and the small foreigner slept on in a collection file room. Way back in Dr. Rowland’s day he had a seal designed for the Department with the motto ‘Veritas,” or “Truth.” Seldom in our lifetime, however, are we justified for taking an unpopular stand on the side of the truth. The mummy proved to be a heartening exception. In the 1960s a young medical student at the University of Mississippi asked for permission to x-ray the mummy. In the interest of truth, permission was granted. The startling results of this scientific investigation were reported in The Mississippi History Newsletter as follows:
“Our mummy, who has been the star of our museum for as long as we can remember, was exposed as a fake when Gentry Yeatman, an enterprising Ole Miss medical student x-rayed the little Egyptian princess and found her heart was full of nails. Further, she had a German language newspaper in her left foot, and her right arm yielded a copy of The Milwaukee Journal, 1898. Again we note that things are not always what they seem, and the mummy is a dummy after all.”
(The mummy received a proper entombment in the Old Capitol, and comes on display every Halloween.)
Navy bean soup has been a fixture on the menu in the U.S. Senate restaurant as far back as the administration of Grover Cleveland. In 1903, Senator Fred T. Dubois of Idaho brought to passage a resolution–written by Senator Knute Nelson of Minnesota–requiring that the soup be served every day to sustain the distinguished members of that august body through the vigorous throes of contentious deliberation.
The official recipe printed on the back of the Senate restaurant menu calls for “Michigan navy beans”, though Craig Claiborne (never one to leave well enough alone) wrote that the best bean for the soup is “a pea bean from California.” The more perspicacious John Edgerton argues that this soup is a Southern recipe, pointing out the inclusion of smoked ham hocks as conclusive proof.
“Does that sound like Michigan? California? Minnesota? Idaho? Of course not!” he declares, adding that it sounds more like North Carolina, Alabama, or Arkansas, where cooking with pork is a 400-year-old tradition.
“Any fair and honest person seeking the creators of U.S. Senate bean soup would ask not who the senators were at the time the soup was given official status, but who the cooks were,” and in the District of Columbia the cooks in the Senate kitchen, as well as almost any other institutional kitchen in Washington, were black men and women from the South.
“There ought to be a plaque somewhere in the capitol to honor those skillful citizens, their names now forgotten, who cooked bean soup in the Southern style with such a masterful touch that even the solons of the North and West came to realize that they simply could not do without it,” Egerton claims.
Fortunately for us sans sans-culottes, you don’t have to lie, buy, or storm your way into the Capitol to enjoy navy bean soup. Here’s my recipe; it’s not official by any stretch, but it’s wonderful, all the same. Pick through and wash one pound white (navy) beans, place in a pot with two smoked hocks, cover with water by half, and place in a low oven for about 2 hours.
Remove the hocks and cool; throw away the rind, de-bone, chop the meat and add back to the beans along with one finely-chopped large onion sauteed in light oil with two minced cloves of garlic. You can throw in a stalk or two of minced/grated celery if you like. Add water if needed, simmer until creamy, season with pepper and salt to taste. If you don’t serve cornbread with this, you’ll die and go to hell.
Immediately.
Whip into a froth two large eggs and a half cup each flour and whole milk. Season with salt and pepper and stir in a scattering of shaved onion. Pour into a hot buttered skillet and pop into a very hot oven until puffed and browned. Top with sliced onion and ham or bacon. Serve with grated hard cheese and sour cream.
