“The cakes and pies and casseroles beckoned like gastronomic sirens, and there was no one to lash me to the mast.” ― Chris Fabry, The Promise of Jesse Woods
Drug of Choice-an excerpt from the book Food for Thought by Don Miller
While food is my drug of choice, “Food for Thought” is not a cookbook. There are some recipes, recipes from angels now gone, who with their hands, cast iron pans, dollops of bacon grease or lard, and a lot of love, created so much from so little. There are other recipes from those that still exist and come to you over the cable ways on such channels as the Food Channel or from the internet.
Primarily it is a book of memories and history, a Southern history if you will, chock full of pig parts, home grown ingredients, and possibly roadkill. No not roadkill but there might be a possum or a raccoon story to tell. It is stories of an elusive quest for the perfect biscuit, peanuts poured into an eight-ounce Coca Colas, dope wagons in the cotton mill, and why when we order a Coke we are asked, “What kind of Coke?”
There is diversity, lessons taken from Scot Irish Appalachia fused with Native American and African American food and combined into dishes that have culturally diffused throughout the United States.
There are also too many essays involving pig parts, pulled pork, liver mush, sausage, slow cooked ribs, I need to quit before I go crank up the smoker.
None of the recipes shared are mine. Some are old family recipes, others from Methodist and Baptist cookbooks handed down by previous generations in my family. Lastly, some came from the Food Channel and such and are noted and linked as such.
Really lastly, any beautiful photographs of certain dishes are not mine. My dishes rarely come out looking photograph worthy. To quote an old college chemistry professor I had, “Find your wife’s disasters and you will eat like a king.” Thank you Dr. Setzler. The proof is in the eating not in the looking.
Numbers to ponder, some humor, and a bit of Super Bowl history.
“The truth is the Super Bowl long ago became more than just a football game. It’s part of our culture like turkey at Thanksgiving and lights at Christmas, and like those holidays beyond their meaning, a factor in our economy.” — Bob Schieffer
Inflation be damned, according to one national news organization, Americans will spend some 1.6 billion dollars on their favorite team’s apparel, food, and drink as they celebrate this year’s Super Bowl. That’s Super Bowl LVII which translates to fifty-seven in numbers we recognize. Over one hundred million will tune in to watch the game, one in three Americans, the commercials, and the halftime extravaganza. It truly is more than just a football game and the jury is still out whether that is a good thing or not.
Here are some numbers to ponder. Americans will eat some 1.4 billion chicken wings during the Super Bowl Sunday festivities. It is predicted that we will consume some three hundred million gallons of beer to wash down those wings, and advertisers will get rich as they charge seven million dollars for a thirty second commercial.
If you are in the stadium, a beer will cost you $13-$19 dollars and a hot dog $5. Times have certainly changed.
Last year one billion dollars was wagered legally. It is estimated another six billion was wagered illegally.
The Super Bowl has grown into something Vince Lombardi would not recognize. I watched the first Super Bowl. I’ve watched all the Super Bowls. I guess, unless I go blind, I will watch them all until the “sands in the hourglass” run out.
The first one wasn’t called the Super Bowl. It was the AFL-NFL World Championship Game back then. Not only has the name changed, and you can blame Lamar Hunt for the moniker, but the game itself doesn’t resemble the first one.
More cameras than there are angles, scantily clad cheerleaders instead of pleated skirts, Bobbi socks and saddle shoes, commercials that were sometimes more interesting than the game itself, half-time extravaganzas instead of marching bands and different rules that the officials continue to blow. The only thing that hasn’t changed is me…laughing, are you?
Ticket prices for the first Super Bowl averaged $12, the game was not a sellout—the only non-sellout in the game’s history. The game drew 61,000 fans to the Rose Bowl and was televised to twenty-six million viewers by CBS and NBC. The cheap seats in Sunday’s Super Bowl will set you back $3000 by comparison.
Yes, the Super Bowl has changed, but my love for the game of football and the Super Bowl hasn’t changed…even though I don’t recognize it as the game I coached and played for three and a half decades. It is a more fun-loving, less brutal, still brutal game than the original “three yards and a cloud of dust “version. Much more fan friendly, I guess. Blame the old fun-loving, more offensive minded, pass-happy AFL.
As a young child, fall Sundays were reserved for church and a single football game on CBS. That’s correct…one football game and nine times out of ten it was a Redskin contest. We did have a thirty-minute highlight show of the previous Colts game. It came on just before the real thing, just after church and Sunday dinner, what we Southerners call lunch. I’m sure my father prayed that there would be no long alter calls on those football Sundays. and that any visitors would stay away till the game was over.
Still, I became a fan…of Sonny Jurgenson’s lasers and Billy Kilmer’s wobblers. It didn’t matter who was under center in the early sixties, victories were far and in between. At least I had those replays of Johnny U and the Colts…but they weren’t particularly good either, except in ’59 and ’64.
Most every Sunday, late in the game, my father would make the same observation about the Redskins, “I think they have shot their wad.” The Redskins would continue to shoot blanks until 1982 when they rode John Riggins to the victory in Super Bowl XVII. For clarification, shooting one’s wad related to old muzzle-loading muskets and not…your dirty mind.
In 1960 a new kid dared to approach the NFL block…an always snowy new kid led by AFL Commissioner, Joe Foss. We would attempt to adjust our Sears rotary antenna to distant Ashville hoping the ABC affiliate and AFL game of the week would come into view. Click, click, click, “Whoa! That’s too far, go back!” It didn’t matter, early September or late November, the games always looked like it was snowing in black and white on the old RCA. Later the league would move to NBC, a channel we could pick up without snow and no longer in black and white.
These were the days of the New York Titans, Dallas Texans, Houston Oilers, and a few names that would still be recognized today. No, the Dallas Texans were not the forerunners of the Dallas Cowboys or Houston Texans, but the Kansas City Chiefs, one of today’s Super Bowl opponents and one of the first Super Bowl’s opponents.
The Cowboys were the first NFL expansion team and were briefly known as the Steers. They opened their first season in 1960 as the Cowboys and continue to break their fan’s hearts at every opportunity…at least this century. Da Boys…maybe next year.
The two leagues would eventually merge but not before the 1967 AFL-NFL World Championship played between the Bart Starr led juggernaut Green Bay Packers and the upstart Kansas City Chiefs with Len Dawson under center. The score was close at half-time but a runaway by the end of the game. Green Bay’s smash-mouth brand of football won 35-10 and began fifty-six years of futility as I repeatedly pull for the wrong team. I doubt this year will be any different…nah. Congrats Philly.
I’ll watch to the bloody end. Maybe the score will be close, or the commercials good. Maybe the halftime won’t be controversial, but if it is I hope it is a “nipple gate” moment. I pray Chris Stapleton’s version of the National Anthem doesn’t draw the ire of Twitter fans who will type in capital letters, “JUST SING IT THE WAY IT WAS INTENDED!”
I’ll watch and heft a beer and toast my father…even eat a dozen wings in his honor. I’ll use his favorite phrase when watching a fourth-quarter pass fall harmlessly to the ground…” Well, looks like they’ve shot their wad.”
The only thing to be decided is who shoots their wad and how many of those beers I heft. Go Budweiser Commercial!!!! I miss the frogs.
Don Miller writes in multiple genres. His latest novel is a fictional historical novel that focuses on The Great Depression and the labor unrest it triggered in the South in 1934. The novel is “Thunder Along the Copperhead” and may be purchased in paperback or downloaded at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BJYQ3SSV
Shane Walsh: [about eating frog legs] When you get down to that last can of beans, you’re gonna be loving those frog legs, lady. I can see it now… [imitating Lori Grimes] “Shane, do you think I could have a second helping, please? Please? Just one?”
Lori Grimes: Yeah, I doubt that.
Shane Walsh: [to Carl Grimes] Don’t listen to her, man. You and me, we’ll be heroes. We’ll feed these folks Cajun-style Kermit legs.
Lori Grimes: I would rather eat Miss Piggy. Yes, that came out wrong.
Snappy Repertoire from The Walking Dead
Warning: This is not about The Walking Dead but about my addiction to cooking shows, food, and memories involving frog legs. They do taste like chicken.
Not that I’m ever going to prepare Chicken Kiev or Beef Stroganov, but I watch cooking shows allowing The Pioneer Woman to cause Pavlovian responses cooking brisket with cowboy baked beans featuring burnt ends or Giada De Laurentiis preparing anything. Just stand there Giada, just stand there. Another type of Pavlovian response.
My thoughts raced down a pig trail after a conversation with a Northern friend about what we might have eaten at a restaurant had it been named the “Roadkill Café.” Much of our banter centered around squirrels and possums along with my favorite saying, “flatter than a toad frog on a four-lane highway.”
I pointed out that I had grown up “country rich”, never having to resort to roadkill. I admitted to having been permanently scarred for life cleaning fish and turtles, plucking and gutting chickens, skinning squirrels, and slaughtering hogs to supplement the protein requirements of our diets. I feel fortunate my family drew the line at possum. I did occasionally eat frog legs, the subject of this rabbit hole I fell into.
Later in the day, as I looked for a recipe for fried frog legs, I stumbled across a YouTube video featuring one of the Duck Dynasty boys preparing frog legs. I watched it. Fifteen minutes of my life I’ll never get back. I realized frog legs may taste like chicken, but no one ever shows the nasty side…gigging and skinning little green Kermits or wringing little Henny Penny’s neck.
For some reason, the video reminded of a young lady whose bright light had burned out, who asked, “Why do people raise beef? We can go to the supermarket and buy it.” I’m sure there is a logic there that only she understood. I’m also sure one can find pre-skinned frog legs somewhere but somewhere else there is a frog walking on stumps.
I was first introduced to frog legs when I was quite young. An uncle home from college and a couple of cousins had spent the night gigging frogs…and I suspect, participated in activities my grandmother would have frowned upon involving distilled spirits. Still, they were sober enough to deliver a croker sack of frogs to my grandmother who skinned them and prepared them along with grits and eggs for breakfast.
I remember awaking to the smell of something I was unfamiliar with frying. Sautéing frog legs heavily peppered were literally twitching in butter in a big cast iron frying pan. They were twitching, I kid you not.
Gross alert, view at your own risk
Did you know that Mary Shelly was inspired by twitching frog legs while writing Frankenstein? Sorta inspired. The frog legs weren’t frying but according to the Smithsonian Magazine, Shelley was inspired by the concept of galvanism—the idea that scientists could use electricity to stimulate or restart life. Galvanism, using an electrical current, would cause frog legs to jump. Feel smarter? I wonder if they fried them afterwards.
The French consider frog legs to be a delicacy, but this, according to differing theories, has nothing to do with calling the French the derogatory term, Frog. It is more likely due to the Frog that was a part of the counter-revolutionary flag flown during the French Revolution. No matter what theory do not call a Frenchman a Frog. It’s not nice.
While I was in college, I went gigging with a couple of fraternity brothers and a chemistry teacher. In a flat bottomed jon boat, armed with gigs and flashlights, we paddled the perimeter of a small lake looking for little green eyes glowing in the reflection of our lights. We would paddle in close, gig the frog, and put him in our own croker sack. We might have partaken of some distilled spirits like my uncle but I’m not sure.
All was grand until a snake crawled into our boat. Instead of using an oar to stun the snake and put him back into the water, one of my frat brothers pulled a concealed pistol and put three bullet holes in the bottom of our boat.
The snake? Perfectly safe and still in the boat under the croker sack. The rest of us? Paddling for dear life to get back to the landing while avoiding the snake before we sank. Since that time, I’ve not gone frog gigging again and have only eaten frog legs on an all you can eat seafood buffet a hundred years ago.
It seemed safer to look online and inquire where I might find some preskinned frog legs. Ten dollars a pound plus shipping? Imported? Geez. I guess that is why they are a delicacy. Well since chicken also tastes like chicken, I think I’ll grill up some wings instead.
Ravings of a Mad Southerner 