I CAN, I CAN!

My voice has always been of the South, in the old days and old ways, with visits to older kinfolks, one with his own still, another who ran a gristmill and supplied several counties with meal and grits. Years of Church suppers and small town showers and gatherings and preacher poundings and weddings and funeral feasts and looking after the new mothers by supplying their families with three meals a day til they were "back on their feet" have sealed my voice into a time and place that is mostly memory, mostly centered around kitchen and table, and all about Family. I'm the Peas and Cornbread voice, mostly, upholding the plain and the simple, because that's who I am and what I know.

My roots are firmly planted in that good black Mississippi gumbo; the old homeplace is still there, with the pear trees from which I 'd love to be boiling up some preserves this cool July day, the pecan orchard planted by my boys with Papa, their Great-Grandfather, when they were young, lining up the checker-board of trees, still heart-touchingly visible on GOOGLE MAPS as precise figures, measured and cornered with string so long ago in modern mimic of their generations-ago ancestors plotting the surrounding fields.

Southern Cooking IS what it IS, a rich parade of homemade, homegrown, home-canned, home-tested fare, with great steps out into the storebought world in the last few decades. Rattly blue boxes of Lipton soup and cans of Campbell 's Cream-a stand side-by-side with blue ribbon chow-chows and jars of Grandma's spiced canned peaches on the storeroom shelves. Recipes are gleaned from Southern Living, Taste of Home, The Food Network,   from little church booklets, word of mouth, and under the hairdryer are prepared with the fervor of a priest offering a sacrifice. Recipes have NAMES---Sock-It-To-Me, Sawdust Salad, Nevvah-Fail Poundcake, Miz Prysock's Dressing and Aint Maggie’s Lane Cake written right on the card and proudly passed on to the numerous cookbook committees churning out those little spiral-bound tomes. Ladies who whisper the title, Better than Sex Cake hesitate not at all to write it as the caption on their contribution to the latest edition.

Cookbook and even contest entries are sometimes as simple as, “Squirrel Dumplings: Make like chicken, but use squirrel.” All and sundry are printed up as gracefully and with the same welcome given to the long-sought and finally-parted-with recipe for Mrs. Pund's Peach Brandy, handed over grudgingly and with a blush for the impropriety AND the honor.

And with the life-instilled regard for the tender feelings of their friends and neighbors, editors of those little books often print recipes verbatim, errors and all, whether by oversight or ignorance of times, temperatures, and spelling. One that always comes to mind is a recipe for an old New Orleans favourite, submitted by a wealthy older woman, whose cook had been in her kitchen for all of her married life---she wrote out the recipe in her own lovely script as Birdie Mae dictated, and it was sent to the publisher “as is”---Greeyards and Grits. I’ve always wondered if the editors just didn’t know, or if they were just afraid to contradict her.

There are memories of turkey frying, squirrels I have known, abysmal cooks and absolutely wonderful ones who could bake a cake with the dust from a flourbag, an egg, and the paper off a Parkay stick. There are wedding repasts, kitchen paraphernalia passed down through the years, how I learned to cook several things, and from whom. I'm sure there's an endless flood of other kitchen and food-related stories in there somewhere, but it needs a nudge now and then.

And if this seems all about FOOD, it’s because this has been my venue for such a long time, writing about recipes and cooking and parties and gatherings, because I’ve done so much of it for so long. The places and the people that I write for and of are stove and kitchen and restaurant and home and family-table-centered, and thus much of my writing is of that subject, in all its definitions, uses and meanings.

I can make confit; I can roast and sear and preserve and make tapenade. There’s hardly a wild game I haven’t put on the table at one time or another---venison, squirrel, mallards in every form from gumbo to meatballs to old–fashioned duck ‘n’ dressin’, with the heavy dark meat richening both the color and flavor of the dish. We’ve been given elk and moose roasts by friends who trekked the northwoods. Friends who yearly drove the endless gravelly miles of the Al-Can, with ONE broken windshield a lucky minimum, brought us back shining silver tins of just-caught salmon, sealed safe in a pay-as-you-go cannery within sound of the rushing water they were caught in.

We’ve taken food from seed to table for more years than I can remember, working in that hot Delta sun to hoe the rows, keep the plants safe from predator, bug and errant livestock; we squatted, the children and I, in the beanrows with the heat beating down, picking for as long as the stories of knights and fairies and ogres held out. Hot Summer nights of sitting with busy, shelling hands, the pea-rattle into pan echoing beetle-thump against screen. Then the washing and steam-blanching and cooling, the final reward of filled freezer boxes and bags lined up on the counter in the wee hours of another morning, as the sun waited to blast another day beneath our eyelids.

Canning and preserving and freezing were as much a part of my life as breathing, the steamy kitchen redolent of spicy pickling brine or the rich, fruity aroma of bubbling jam, the tunck of jarlids sounding the ching of money-in-the-bank as our efforts filled the pantry, boxes, all the space beneath beds, the attic stairs. I couldn’t figure how ANYONE could cook straight out of the grocery store.

Our four-acre garden is a thing of the past; we are semi-cityfolks now, our tillage shrunk to the twenty-five-foot circle on which once rested a swimming pool, and that only yielding basil and marjoram and dill, and the determined mint bed which gives off Doublemint fumes with every sandal step.

Leah and I have been  members of quite a few of the online  food/recipe/restaurant/book review sites for some years now, and most of my writing in the wee hours has been in that venue: the day’s occupation around the stove, the shopping excursions for greens and seasonings and the things that we never dreamt of raising in that good black Delta gumbo. So my writings have been centered on the kitchen and table, since that’s the subject of the sites---lots of opinions and anecdotes and memories.

I seem to be the loudest voice in the Southern topics of the sites, with great long tales of childhood cooking and learning and the experience of long hot garden-gathering days, canning days over the stove, baking and preparing and cooking for our family and countless others over the years. And my memories are long but not too far-reaching---Southern tables and kitchens, with all the preparation and method and customs and the sheer preposterousness of some of the ideas and manners. I have not traveled much, and now live far from those roots, but they seem to stretch all the way to the here and the now of my life and of those in my chain of family and friends.   

But SHE, NOW---she is the finder and creator of so many new items and recipes and exotic spices and herbs and methods, such welcome flavors way past enchiladas or Naan.   Our house is often fragrant with za'atar and sumac, as she whirls the chickpeas for hummus, or nine kinds of inferno, with her choice of lethal new pepper varieties.

Past and present, and new visions always welcomed.

FLAGS, CHICKENS AND OLD TIMES THERE

In the one picture I have of Mammaw’s side of the family, my Great-Grandmother Roma is a solemn-faced woman, wrinkle-browed and worn by work and sorrow and the total responsibility of ten children born and a husband buried by the time she was thirty-five.

My Mammaw related, time after time, the story of the day her Daddy died---"Come in out of the field, drunk two dippers of water, and fell dead in the yard." That was 1904, and he was forty years old, with ten children, the youngest six months.  She always ended with her usual "It was the Fourth a' May and we didn't have a seed in the ground."   I can attest to those May temperatures, and Since-Daylight-plowing-with-a-mule must have been his morning's work, there in those red-dust hills of Yalobusha county, we agreed that it must have been sunstroke.   It certainly mustn't have been "heart trouble" because all but one of their children lived well into their seventies---with one lost to a lung problem in his twenties, with a wife and two babies.

She usually finished with a tribute to her Mama's two older brothers---Unca Taylor and Unca Fate, saying "I don't know what woulda become of us if not for them and the Mattress factory."   They had created quite a thriving mattress-tufting business, with a great talent for upholstery and even cloth-walling the elegant rooms of the more affluent denizens of the county.  Even back then, ladies would save fabric, or the skirt of an older "nice dress" and have fancy pillows made for their parlors.

Mammaw's four sisters were "dab hands" with sewing and quilting and such, and each earned a little money with the needlework to help out at home.  Mammaw did her part with the cooking and baby-tending while everybody else was in the field or at the factory.   I know that's where I got my Tend-to-People gene, for she had a way with sick folks, or tired folks, or some of the lovelorn young folks, feeling their way into adulthood with a cautious touch.  She could plant, tend and raise a garden to feed her brood, as well as take every item from seed to table, canning and later freezing her garden's bounty for free-handed sharing amongst the whole family.    

You know, I'm just realizing that I never once set foot in either of those uncles' houses---we just went on Sunday afternoons, driving out to visit the uncle and aunt who were the last dwellers in the family home.   Speaking of decoration, that little living room  had a couch up against what had been the fireplace, with an enormous red-white-and-blue CROCHETED American Flag----48 stars then, and at least 8x10----hanging down behind---can't imagine WHAT it was originally made for.  The weight of that heavy flag made it into a great curved swag like a curtain at the top, falling clear to the floor---I cannot imagine the time and weight of that project in a lap, and always thought they must have somehow made it on something like the quilting frames which were hung neatly in the ceilings of several of the houses--it was HUGE, and my imagination made it the work of several folks, sitting around that big rectangle, slip-stitching and chaining away in their respective areas. 

But ALL THOSE CHILDREN raised in that small, small-roomed, no-screens house, all of them coming up in the Mississippi hills with such a start, and all the wonders they achieved in those lives they lived!  I could never parse the rooms enough to know where they all SLEPT, and three meals a day for that brood must have meant a garden of several acres, and of course, their own milk and a few pigs, with what started as LOTS of chickens.  

She and Great-Grandpa (who did not live long enough to be a Grandfather) had had the felicity of having a full chicken-house as inheritance when they married, from a great wagon-full of chicks donated by family and community.  

It was the one and only Chicken-Shower I’ve ever heard of in the history of matrimony, but it really makes a frugal kind of sense. 

  Everybody had a flock of some kind---Reds and Domineckers and other barnyard breeds, and any chicken that hatched was a bonus one way or the other.  So when GG Roma and GG Earnest married, they were showered with a pot or pan or two, maybe a pair of homemade pillowslips from one of the older sisters, and a nice flock of chickens.

 

 

In the first couple of their married years, GG Romie would fry TWO on Sundays, for there was the go-home-with-you-from-church crowd of family, and even on their Sundays to themselves, they killed and cooked two, for Mammaw said, ”They had a-plenty then, and my Mama always said ONE chicken is just not enough for two people and some leftover for dinner next week while we’re in the field.”   Mammaw’s philosophy echoed that:  Why fry twice, when you can do a lot at one time.

 

That idea had its influence over our own family as I grew up, for though Mother might gingerly fry a chicken once in a blue moon, having to start off her Sundays for so many years in such a gruesome manner as killing and cleaning a chicken put her off eating it for life.   Oddly, the liver and gizzard were sacrosanct, reserved just for her (far removed from all the pluck and singe, I suppose), and she readily bought and cooked whole packages of those.

 

Mammaw always had a chickenhouse right there in their backyard, along with a fruit-house, an immense rose garden, a twice-as-big vegetable garden, and that little moon-doored necessary, and for many years they had a cow which I “walked” to and from the town pasture, from when I was about four.   Boss would see her friends already out there in the grass, grazing and gossiping, and she'd take off by herself while my little Buster Browns would pelt along in the dust alongside, trying to beat her to the gate. 

And when Mammaw and Grandpa were married in 1917, they took with them about a half dozen of the layin' hens and one rooster.   Those sufficed for breakfasts and GOOD cakes for many years, and still had a few descendants scratching out by the outhouse way up into my teen years. Mammaw's other dowry was a few cuttings from a huge pink floribunda rose which almost took over their small yard, with the cuttings I took to my new house in the 70s still thriving out there on the land of my second family.

 

Years later, when in Mammaw's own words, she was "gettin' on up there," the flock were layers only, but by then, I’d named them, and so rendered amnesty to the whole stupid, cackly, feckless bunch.  Had it not been for those immense, richly brown “yeller yawked” eggs which were the linchpin of those legendary Pineapple Cakes, she’d probably have swapped the lot for a card of buttons.

 

PAMINNA CHEESE TIME!

 

IT'S JULY, FOLKS!!   And I let THE FOURTH get on past without a mention of that Summertime Staple:    Pimiento Cheese. Pim-eee-en-toe is what that looks like. Perhaps pim-yen-toe.   No Fourth is the same without it. No outdoor celebration, picnic, cookout, Coleman-in-a-boat, campside or Lawn Tea can be complete until a plate of dainty little sandwiches, fine hearty ones, or a whompin' big bowl with a matching bowl of RITZ or Premiums beside is on that picnic check or white-tent Battenberg, as big as you please.    

But Paminna Cheese, the good old Grandma of all Southern spreads, is not of those pronunciations or provenance. It's not entered into lightly, not if you want the REAL stuff.

It's not my Mother's version, with mild or American cheese, little flecks of smushed-into-pulp pimiento, and chopped sweet pickles (in our case LIME pickles, a family standby since Mother tasted the canned version made by my first MIL, made one "making," and claimed it for her own).

And it's certainly not that pink Velveeta paste with a little mayo, served up and lurking in every Dairy Case in every Safeway, Sunflower, Winn-Dixie and Food Club below the Mason/Dixon. Those clear little round cartons, how they woo the unwary, how they call to the quick-minded hostess, the gotta-make-a-snack, the hasty-sandwich-platter people. That lifeless goo has appeared soft and comfy on Wonder Bread, on Ritz, and painstakingly stuffed into Bugles at more Bridal Teas, Preacher Poundings, Coke Parties, afternoon socials and garden club meetings than the most sociable of guests.

That stuff is a comfort food, of sorts; it is squishy and mild and bland, and a white-bread sandwich made with it is the Movie Extra of foods: there, and useful in its way, but just hovering in the background while the real action takes place.

REAL Paminna Cheese (always capitalized, and spelled like it sounds) is a lusty, tangy, splendid mouthful of bright flavors which delight your tastebuds and make you smile. It's the easy-to-put-together quick spread of all time---no eggs to boil, no creamcheese to bring to room temp and smoosh around, nothing to chop or measure (though I've become addicted to making it with just-minced whole roasted red peppers, usually Trader Joe's, as we always have them in the fridge, and I even throw in a little pour of the juice from the jar).

And I DO wish Kraft would catch on to grating the SHARP cheese into those little fine threads like they do some of the other flavors---I grew a great fondness for the PC of my first MIL, who ground the whole shebang through the finest little holes in her big ole clamp-it-on-the-counter sausage grinder---hers came out a bit like clay, and we probably coulda made little fruit and pink piggies out of the stuff, like marzipan.

The ingredients are simple, and can be changed according to anyone's taste; ramping up the tang is easy, with more mustard, more L&P; it can be rosier with all the peppers you like---two minced makes a fine combo with a six-cup pack of the cheese.

And this is a please-yourself recipe---get yourself several teaspoons out of the drawer before you start, and take a wee taste as you go. I always envision that people making this recipe take a spoontip and taste it, making that little tip-tip-tip sound, then clanging the spoon into the sink before adjusting the quantities and dimensions, grabbing another spoon for another smick, until the proper perfection is reached.

Lo, and BEHOLD!!! I just went to the fridge to verify the size of the package in the drawer, and it's FINELY shredded. Sometimes you can find it. It's the two-cup size (I buy whatever size is the best price total, even if I have to buy three small to make one big---that's Southern Kitchen math. Or perhaps just my own. Oh. Well).

Recipe:

A Two-Cup pack of Kraft SHARP, finely grated
One jar of pimiento, buy chopped or whole---cut them as you see fit
Squirt of French's Yellow
Coupla glugs of Lea & Perrins
Big spoondig out of the cute little Durkee's Sauce jar

Good-sized clop of Mayo---Duke's or Blue Plate for the REAL experience, but Kraft's OK
Several good grinds of the Pepper Mill

Stir it all up in a medium-sized bowl, and taste a teensy bite. Adjust any and all quantities to suit yourself. A lot of L&P will make it kinda tan, but still delicious. This fits perfectly into one of the flat Glad-Boxes, and seems to benefit from the close confinement, sorta all soaking up everything else's good natures and making the whole thing WAY good. Like a close-knit Sunday School Class or maybe Group Therapy.

For the authentic experience, serve it with Premium saltines, or Ritz crackers.

Makes a KILLER grilled cheese, especially on Sourdough or rye. It's also SPLENDIFEROUS on those asparagus roll-up things that were so popular about twenty years ago. And spooned over a fresh-off-the-grill sirloin burger, enclosed inside a buttered-skillet-sizzled bun---the Bleu Cheese proponents have no idea.

And ANYTHING served surrounded by Devilled Eggs is sure to be a hit.

Add on to mention:  There's a New Kid in Town.

If you're lucky enough to have an Aldi nearby, grab a couple of sticks of EMPORIUM White Cheddar---the size of a jumbo stick of butter, with the black label.   It takes Paminna cheese to a whole new elegant level, with only the addition of pimiento and mayo.   Classy and Fabulous.  

ASIAN MARKETS

 

I love shopping at the Asian markets, coming home laden with boxes and jars and frozen items, as well as quite a few fresh vegetables. The white mushrooms (can't find a pic online, and clerk couldn't name them for me) were a huge tender stem, with just a small blossoming top. We'll be having those as a little side dish, just to try their own flavor before mixing with other items another time.

We watched the busy shoppers bagging up burdock---I've seen it grow down South, but these were yard-long thin shoots, apparently limited only by the dimensions of their shipping box. There were greens aplenty, and several that I wanted to ask if they were for cooking as a dish, or herbs for flavoring another dish. The great stacks of boxes held baby bok choy, broccoli rabe, tiny pickling cucumbers, the shiniest of scallions whose ROOTS were even white and thick and pretty.

There were the fanleaves of all sorts of greens, and I was struck by the jewelly loveliness of the tiny turnips and daikons still attached to the neat sheaves, like dangly earrings on a deb. The slenderest of lavender eggplants, others of a mottled stripey pale green; small melons and limes and bunches of what looked like the daffodil sprouts punctuating our back garden---all were just sitting there, no refrigeration, just being gathered up as a daily fresh-shopping excursion which must occur for more families here than I realized.

We loaded up on a gallon of soy sauce, which I decant into a bottle for storing in the fridge door; big can goes into the cool storeroom. Jars and bottles of oyster sauce, aji mirin, sambal oolek, rice wine vinegar, coconut milk; fresh udon, a couple of packs of VERY firm tofu for the mapo another evening, bean sprouts, bamboo shoots and water chestnuts, a half gallon of medium Kimchi, and a pack of frozen squid as a treat for Leah, who likes them dusted with cornstarch and sizzled just a few seconds in peanut oil.

 I've never actually CLEANED any, but I figure it can't be harder than catfish. And these looked so nice, just 2" little fellows, lined up so symmetrically in their little styrofoam bed with their wee grabbers all curled up like pink babytoes.

No wonder so many Asian cooks seem to live ZEN. 

GOOSE CAVORTS

 

The "Toast" as we came to call it, began WAY in the Nineties, when we were first here on a Military base for "a few months" and has extended into 36 years because we loved it here, and had not such call to return to the HOT SOUTH.   We came for five months, with his coming in October of 1990, to begin, with plans to come home for Christmas and bring me back for the further three months.   Then came Desert Storm, and he could not "get leave," so he had a talk with his Colonel about going to bring me back---My silver-tongued sweetie could get gold from a stump.   Colonel said, "We're on Lockdown.  Have your A-- in a chair in the room on Monday.   That's all I've got to say."

So we had Christmas on Christmas Eve, with all seven of our children gathering down on the coast, and woke Christmas morning at four to kiss lots of sleeping faces and drive all day to get here.  His children had gone home after dinner to be with their Mother for the actual Eve and Day, and Leah and her brothers planned a nice dinner to cook together for the actual day.    

 He'd taken a tiny apartment in a nice complex, for such a short duration, and we were at the very back, with a whole parking lot and vast lawn of picnic tables.   Our Ground Floor windows, wide open to that Spring breeze, first became the target of a pair of mallards.  There were also DUCKS and GEESE in the central lake, and soon they caught on that there were goodies to be had around at #13.   They brought their kin and neighbors and babies, and finally we were visiting the "used bread store" twice a week.  

But before those little dinner visits turned into the Avian Tearoom, we began with a little couple, named Maurice and Velveeta.   They came to the bedroom window at 5 a.m., better than reveille, and chatted away til we brought breakfast.     THEN, they brought a Third Wheel---and MY, did she SQUEAK---not murmuring a bit til we woke, but with the abrupt WAAAAAAIKKK of a Klaxon on a clown's suit---we named HER Miranda, because we SO wished she'd remain silent.

And so it went, with the wee three becoming crowds, then flocks, then a drove of thirty or more, with the lake-scenery geese soon getting in on the action.   THEY were even louder than the ducks with their honking blares, and when two or several tied up out on the lawn---it was like a bar-room fight with a Pep Squad.   Not to mention their unmentionables---mating season was a surprise to our ears, with quite a lot of goose music day and night, and when one guest asked about the noise, Chris just said, "That's just the geese cavorting."

And so it became Goose Cavorts, which my sharp-wit sweetheart immediately proposed as a toast at our next gathering.    He raised his glass and said, "GOOSE CAVORTS!" and party-goers followed suit, to whatever inflection they thought they'd heard.    So many of them had served in Germany and all over Europe, lots thought it was one of those languages.    And still we say it from time to time, that long-ago silly misnomer of a TOAST:   GOOSE CAVORTS!!    and never explain.   Do say you'll propose it with no explanation!!  (never on a serious, somber occasion)  See if it will catch on.