“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.
“I’m always sketchy of people who don’t like grits.” – Author: Jaycee Ford
I have many Yankee friends along with those from other parts of the country. Good folks are good folks no matter where they come from…except when it comes to food…or harping on perceived Southern backwardness which, unfortunately includes our Confederate past and the original sin of slavery and the Jim Crow that came after it. Don’t pontificate because Southerners authored the book on pontification and when you speak to me about fried food or our original sin you are preachin’ to the choir.
If it is backward to revere the callused hands of our forefathers then, yes, we are backward, but most of us are not the repressive, inbred, missing more teeth than we have, morons we are portrayed to be.
We have a gracious plenty of those repressive, inbred morons and I’m missing a few teeth myself, but for most of us, Southern identity has more to do with food, accents, manners, and music than our Confederate flag flyin’ past. I did date a distant cousin once upon a time but only because pickins’ were slim… The emphasis should be on distant and not on cousin. We did not inbreed, nor did we breed in the backseat of my ’63 Ford.
In my circle of friends, Southern identity is open to all races, a variety of ethnic groups, and people who moved here from above the Mason-Dixon. It incorporates more than “South” Alabama or Texas but includes Southern France, Southern Italy, Southern Asia, and any other country you can describe as “South” of anywhere. West Africa, which is south of the South, made an even greater contribution I should add especially when talking about food and music…or our original sin.
In all honesty, the repressive morons are just the most vocal as they watch their way transition to the chamber pot of life. They are not the most numerous. It’s just the rest of us are silent, sitting quietly thinking, “Well, bless your heart.” We should be more vocal and drown them out and the “bless your heart” in this case is a negative comment.
Still, my Yankee friends, there are limits to my Southern sensibilities, mostly those limits involve food…especially this time of year.
I am a day from the first of my three annual physicals and food is on my mind. October, the fright month, and I’m not speaking of the horror of Halloween and candy corn. I’m speaking about the blood work that will be done, the weigh-in, the blood pressure check, the electro-cardiogram with its ice-cold electrodes applied with Gorilla Glue, the body scan to see if any more skin cancer is eating me alive. It will be the yearly reckoning and one that has me tighter than a tick on a fat dog.
I’m a week away from “paying the piper” for a lifetime of excess. Platters of “Southern” fried chicken and catfish, oversized cathead biscuits smothered in creamy sawmill gravy, salty pork rinds, cigars, and brown liquor. Since my heart attack in 2006, my diet has been limited to mostly leaves and cardboard, the seasonings removed from the angelic hands of my ancestors and replaced with a bit of shaken Mrs. Dash.
Little fried, little creamy, little salty, limited cigars and little brown liquor…well, brown liquor can be used for medicinal purposes, and I light the cigar to smell it more than I smoke it. The keyword is little as in much less than I might wish, so, my sensibilities are affronted when my Yankee friends try to school me on “good” food.
It could be I’m just amid a bacon grease withdrawal. For instance, and in no order:
Throwing away the bacon grease instead of using it as a “flavorin’.” Blasphemy! Bacon grease should be stored in a coffee can right on the stovetop for easy access. Bacon grease is culinary “gold.” Eggs fried or scrambled in bacon grease, greens or beans sautéed in bacon grease and then cooked to death. Bacon grease cooked in bacon grease.
Biscuits and creamy sawmill gravy are most certainly a main course and biscuits running in butter and honey are a dessert. To say otherwise could end a friendship.
It is Duke’s Mayonnaise, or it is nothing. If I have a choice between Hellman’s or Miracle Whip, I’ll look for mustard to put on my tomato sandwich. Yuck. Sidenote, tomato sandwiches should be served on soft, white bread. Save your multigrain for Reubens and such.
Also, I am well-read. I know a tomato is a fruit and not a vegetable in every state of the union save one. It is a vegetable in South Carolina by legislative decree. As if my legislators have no better use of their time.
Don’t serve grits from those little brown packets that you microwave with water and then gripe about how bland they are. Grits are a blank canvas. They should be stone ground, cooked with cream, and at the minimum contain cheddar cheese and butter. And please, just serve me the box that the packets of “flavored” grits come in. Addendum: Grits should never be served with sugar.
I’ll drink water from a stagnant, primordial swamp before I drink unsweetened tea. It should be served sweet with lemon slices to sour it up. One more Southern paradox?
Instant tea? Just shoot me.
Chicken fried steak and country fried steak are not the same. Chicken fried involves egg batter, country fried a dusting of flour only. Note to prospective cooks, I’ll eat either and smile.
Don’t ask me to come for the barbecue and then serve hot dogs and hamburgers. That’s grillin’. A barbecue is not a place. Barbecue is slow-cooked pig parts over wood coals. Barbecue is a noun, not a verb. Note: If you want to serve some of those German sausages in addition to the slow-cooked pig parts that will be fine with me. Put it in a bun and you can pretend it is a hot dog and I’ll be okay. I’ll even eat one.
Mac and cheese should not come from a little box that contains everything you need to make it taste like noodles and Velveeta and nothing else. Good mac and cheese is not orange in color. It is a cheesy crisp brown on the outside and at the corners and creamy and pale on the inside. It contains more than just mac and cheese. Addendum: It is also perfectly acceptable to list good mac and cheese on the vegetable menu of your local ‘meat and three.’
Side note: good cornbread doesn’t come from a package or a box and “nanner puddin'” should not be made with instant pudding.
Finally, viewing Southern food as only fried chicken, pork, or fish and biscuits is a great over-simplification. The Southern food of our forefathers was plant-based. Granted, many of those plants were fried or flavored with bacon grease or fatback and very well-seasoned. Staples included stewed okra and tomatoes, whole-grain cornbread, winter greens, corn, butterbeans, sweet potatoes, and both winter and summer squash. Fried meat, poultry, or fish served daily is a modern contrivance. Certainly, there are Southern dishes that are indulgent, but indulgent food is found in any cuisine. Beef Stroganoff anyone?
Postscript: My first battery of test came back great. My cholesterol was 121. Biscuits and gravy here I come. I’ve got a year to work it off.
I’m sure my grandmother is looking down from the great beyond and shaking her head. I’m guessing what is left of her earthly body is spinnin’ in her grave. As soon as she heard that can opener, I visualize a side eyed look below her furrowed brow. Not only am I cooking canned black-eyed peas I’m serving canned collards to go with them. If she were still alive, I’m sure I would be disenfranchised.
My grandmother, Nannie, was not known for her cooking. She wasn’t into exotic food…I don’t think I ate a pizza until I went off to college. Pizza…exotic? Cooter Stew was about as exotic as she got. But there were lines she would never cross and peas with collards from a can was a line in concrete.
Peas and collards fit right in with her idea of utilitarian food, with cornbread and a raw onion of course. Oh, and some of Aunt Alta’s chow chow. Bless my soul, I had forgotten that. Nannie’s meals were made to fortify you for a long day in the field. Exotic foods weren’t known to stick to your ribs.
In her small kitchen dried black-eyed peas from her fields would have been put in the Dutch oven to soak the night before, picked over to remove shells or gravel that might have “snuck” in. Drained and rinsed, they would have returned to the Dutch oven along with onions, ham hocks, and seasonings and allowed to slow simmer in water and get to know each other for the next four or five hours. When the ham hocks were tender, they would be removed, and the meat picked from the bone and fat and returned to the peas.
Well before the pickin’, fresh collards from her garden would have been washed and rinsed repeatedly, chopped awaiting placement into another Dutch oven. There they would join up with sauteed, in bacon grease, onion and chopped ham, some broth, apple cider vinegar, and red pepper flakes. These would hang together until cooked to death.
An hour before the meal was ready, a cast iron frying pan with a dollop of Crisco would be placed in the old stove to become screaming hot before corn bread batter was poured into it and put back in the oven to cook and brown. I can remember the sizzle the batter made when it hit the grease and have a mental vision of a tanned and creased, flour-streaked cheek. I also remember the corn bread to be a tad dry but something to mop the pot likker from my bowl with.
Tea so sweet it made your teeth ache or fresh buttermilk would wash down the meal.
All told, she spent the better part of half a day to get the meal on the table…which is why I will open a can. My bride will cook her special brand of cornbread, better than my grandmothers, moister at least…and I’ll mop up my pot likker with it. I’ll keep the collards and peas a bit healthier and a lot less tasty, all-in hopes of seeing another New Year’s Day or two. We may oven fry some pork chops…the other white meat.
It is about traditions, I reckon Southern traditions in this case. It is about honoring the past. As I have quoted before, William Faulkner’s line, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
Peas swelling as they cook for luck, greens for money, pork because hogs are always moving forward as they forage, and cornbread for gold is a long running tradition…as is cornbread running in butter.
In the South, how the tradition began involves two stories of note. Not sure either is true. According to one, during Sherman’s March to the Sea during the Civil War, “bummers” left behind peas and salt pork thinking it was nothing more than animal feed. Southerners gave thanks for having even that gracious little to get through the winter. I have my doubts about the story. It makes no sense to leave even animal feed behind. It does make for a good story and a reason to celebrate.
According to the second, and I find this more likely, black-eyed peas were a symbol of emancipation for African Americans who were officially freed on New Year’s Day, 1863 by the Emancipation Proclamation. As the story goes peas were all they had to eat, and it became a symbol. Again, I am unsure of the story but know former slaves initiated the idea for adding rice to the peas along with bacon, onion, and spices, giving us Hoppin’ John. That is a good thing whether the story is true or not and has become a favorite Southern tradition of mine.
Yes, the South does have traditions we are not likely to allow to die. Some I wish would. Peas and collards isn’t one of them even from a can. Be sure and eat your peas and collards.
I hope you have a healthy and prosperous New Year.
Ravings of a Mad Southerner 