INDIVIDUAL ICED CAKES

The anticipation as the tiny smitch of Scotch tape was slit from its small closing, the crackle of the fluted paper as the lid was lifted from the bakery box, unmistakable waft of the vanilla-something scent of faintly-cooked sugar fondant---that’s an unforgettable little ritual, bespeaking a really fancy occasion. I can almost feel the crackly folds of a scratchy party-dress---the only proper attire to befit such a regal dessert.

The bakery in the big-town-two-over was a wonderland of lovely scents and fairy-colors---the windowfull of wedding cakes with their swoops of pink swaggings and the perfectly-formed pale roses grew stiff and forlorn in that Delta sun, but the allure and the awe never ceased. And to call and order up “Three dozen individual iced cakes,”---well, that was the rallying-cry for nothing less than the very best tablecloth, the never-used smallest forks from the silverware chest, and the borrow of Aunt Ninna's four-piece epergne.

Just calling in the order was a thrill---I remember my First Time, giving the directions to the clerk for several dozen, the exact pink of the rosebuds atop, and a pickup-time down to the quarter-hour. I could just smell them over the phone.

Other shopping was got out of the way early, and the import of pulling into that parking spot in front of Stowe’s was akin to arriving on the red carpet. The width of the box itself was impressive, with just a little sag to the center from the weight of cake and fondant. Three books-brought-from-home aligned in the far-back dip of the backseat to balance the contents, and super-careful driving so as to need no quick braking, we made our way home. A birthday cake from there was a must, but these little jewelbox creations---they were the next-best-fairythings to those immense sugar Easter eggs with the peekhole to tiny tableaux which I coveted with every longing of a girly-girl’s heart.

The party itself---a shower, an afternoon tea, a visit from the Exalted Grand Matron to the far-flung flock---that was an Occasion. The silver-polishing, the punchcup-borrowing, the napkin-pressing---having been delegated those make-work tasks for several years, I think I could have taken a post at Windsor when I was twelve.

It was a special time that no other kind of gathering promised---you wore those nylon stiffnesses, those white gloves, the one-pink-flower straw hat, and it was lovely.

Chicken salad was de rigueur, either in tiny crustless sandwiches or puff shells. A silver chafing dish of Chicken a la King with a silver basket of teensy thumb-pressed piecrust patty-shells alongside, some daintily-cut cucumber somethings with the bread pillow-stitched around the outsides, some toasted pecans, a slender silver compote of Richardson’s Butter Mints for most occasions, or made-to-match from the bakery for REALLY SPECIAL, and one of the favored punches of the day in the big frosty bowl—those were expected and arranged with the pomp and solemnity of setting out the Lord’s Supper set on Fourth Sunday morning.

The silver cakestand or wide repousse' tray, doilied within an inch of its life, with the small rustly-papered dainty cakes set just so in precise ranks, as the newspaper reported time and time again, “completed the table appointments.”I don’t know precisely what the allure of those things was---the small size, the how-did-they-do-that smooth shining fondant, the coveted pink frosting rosebud that tasted better than any candy in the Kingdom, the melty flavor of a vanilla fondant and tender white cake contrasted to the hearty yellow layers and homemade frostings of our own kitchen---there was just something about the magic of those small decorated rectangles that no macaron from Laduree’ nor even standing in the storybook realms of Pierre Herme’ could outshine in enchantment.

I didn't want to eat 'em. I didn't want anybody to eat 'em. It was enough that they just BE. They went beyond the ideal of cake and into sweet jewelry. I just wanted them to languish there in that box, available for an open-and-sigh, and didn't care that they would shrink into tiny patterns of themselves, like yellowed old ivory dominoes. They could have stayed forever, like Miss Havisham's wedding cake.

And it was years before they began to be called petits fours, and hostesses were quick to mention the appearance of Peddy-Fours on their party table. Even the French appellation, re-constructed into local dialect, did not do them justice. The sheer rarity of such august occasions as to warrant such frivolous fare, when you could make up a whole batch of cupcakes yourself---the luxury of the thing was a great part of the charm.

Those small bits of cake and frosting were so special that they defined the import of an occasion, like Black Tie on an invitation conjures élan. And they still do, in my memory. Right now, just thinking of them, or seeing a tray in a picture---I can smell that enticing scent and feel that scratchy dress.

LEMON BARS

Few Southern Tea-tables are complete without a pretty platter or cakestand of Lemon Bars, and, as in most other phases of life below the M/D, there’s more than one camp: The tangy, translucent golden bars, redolent of juice and peel, which shine in the light of a Summer day like squares of sunshine. They seem to have a clarity and glow of their own, much like slices of lemon meringue pie.

Tangy Lemon Bars

Crust:
1 3/4 cup flour
3/4 cup confectioner's sugar (plus more for dusting)
2 sticks cold butter, cut into small pats
Finely-chopped macadamias (optional)
Sift, cut in, stir in nuts if desired, press into sprayed 9x13
Oven 350---20 minutes

While crust is baking:
Lemon filling:
1 1/2 cups white sugar
1/4 cup flour
1 tsp baking powder
4 eggs, slightly beaten
3 Lemons: Finely grate zest from one lemon; squeeze it and two more

Sift sugar, flour, and baking powder. Add beaten eggs, juice & zest
Pour onto still-warm crust.
Bake 20—25 til firm
Cool, cut into bars, sift powdered sugar atop on rack over pan
Keep in fridge; Garnish with paper-thin quarter-slices of lemon

AND:
LEMON/CHEESE BARS, also known as Lemon Cheesecake Squares, a.k.a. Ooey Gooey bars.

They have a personality removed from the decorous neat squares of their kin---they are rich and creamy and never-cut-quite-perfectly, thicker than the others, and with a delicacy of flavor that contradicts their slightly-rough exterior and countrified name.

These are like a heavy cheesecake, with none of the transparency or shine of the others---they’re more like Lemon ICEBOX Pie, the one with Eagle Brand to cloud the color and richen the texture and flavor.

We may make both. Can’t have too many lemon bars or too much chocolate.

Ooey Gooey Lemon Bars

1 Betty Crocker butter yellow cake mix
1 stick butter, melted
1 egg
1 c. finely-chopped macadamias (opt.)
Mix and press into sprayed 9x13. Preheat oven to 350.

Some people use lemon cake mix, but we prefer the yellow---the lemon mix has a definite flavor of extract, and interferes with the pure fresh lemon flavor of the filling.

Filling:
1 box powdered sugar (4 cups)
1 (8 oz.) cream cheese, softened
2 eggs
½ tsp. vanilla
2 T. finely-grated lemon zest

Beat cheese and eggs smooth with mixer; beat in powdered sugar 1/2 at a time, then stir in vanilla and zest. Pour over unbaked crust and bake 30—35 minutes.

May puff a bit, and will be thicker than the other recipe. Cool and chill. Cut into 6 portions, run a knife or spatula around edges of pan, and remove pieces from pan with wide spatula. Cut each one into 6 pieces, cutting straight down with thin sharp cleaver-type knife. Wipe knife with wet paper towel between cuts. Garnish with pouf of whipped cream, topped with quarter-slice of lemon or a raspberry or even an old-fashioned lemon drop.

These look even nicer if you make straight-down clean cuts all around the uncut edges, to even them up, for the sides will have crawled up the pan a bit. Keep refrigerated stacked between wax paper in Tupperware.

PUTTING UP CORN

It's not quite the season here, but the tassels are waving and the seas of green in the passing-by fields are swaying like iridescent satin. I love to ride along a road that's perpendicular to the crop, when the goldy-brown comb-partings between the rows flash past in a kaleidoscope of green/gold/green/gold like flashes of sun through a picket fence. Corn is beautiful from hard, chitinous seed to milk-swelled ears tender to the bite, to bowls of thick rich creamy perfection-of-corn, cut and scraped and cooked into the very essence of the seed's promise.

There's a "Putting Up Corn" tradition in our family which starts when one of the menfolks backs a pickup up into the shade of the backyard. He wheels that familiar vehicle with a masterful hand, past the lawnchairs and into just the right spot, though he can hardly see over the high green mass of roasin' ears piled into the truckbed.

He's been out in that dusty, smothery taller-than-he field since right at daylight, snapping those hot green pockets of corn from the waving stalks. It's field corn, white corn, not those yellow sweet ears for boiling and munching from the cob. This is starch-laden, thicken-in-a-minute, heavy white milk-swollen corn, made to be cut and stirred into custardy perfection.

He'll leave you the pickup; you gather whatever helpers you can. He's on to more important work...he'll go mount a tractor cab or another truck and carry on with his long, dusty day. It is time for whoever is in the house, or who can be called or commanded or coerced into gathering under those trees for corn duty. The whish of husks, the crisp snap of the stems, an occasional whack onto the grayed old picnic table to dislodge the frowning, disgruntled cornworm, and the pans of white ears grow fuller as the pile of greenery on the ground gains in height.

Smaller hands are handed brushes, to briskly "silk" the corn--Southern cooks are as finicky about cornsilks as they are about no dark meat in the chicken salad. They'd as soon find a bug in the pot as a cornsilk---that's just trashy.

Experienced hands take the corn into the kitchen, where the backsplash and several yards of counter and ESPECIALLY the oversink windows are lined with taped-on newspaper, fresh garbage bags, or paper towels, take your pick---just don't let that splash hit the counters. Why, when old Mr. Prysock was laid out at home, someone had to scrape all the dried corn-splashings off the windowsill before that kitchen was fit to serve in. The GCL didn't let on, but they never did look at Mrs. P's cooking the same again.

Great washings and splashings and laying out on kitchen towels---neat rows form pyramids, fresh damp cool of wrung-out towels cover the waiting mounds, and the cutting begins. Very sharp knife, dishpan in sink, corn held tipdown, and one neat cut sliced down, taking just the tip off each kernel. Then the blade is reversed, scraping the dull side down each facet in rotation until all the white milky nectar is released into the bottom of the pan.

Three or four hundred ears are prepared this way, then comes the "blanching" of pan after pan over LOW heat, flat-paddle stirring until the small bubbles rise--each bubble a gentle "puh" as the mass thickens. Quick cooling of pans set into icewater, quicker scooping into small square freezer boxes, and the chore is done.

There is no actual frying to the "skillet corn" of my family's recipe. The same black skillet which turned out equally brown-crusted cornbread and catfish and chicken served to cook my Mother's fried corn. She plopped a stick of Blue Bonnet into the skillet and stuck it into the heating oven to melt. Two or three of the quart containers, straight from the freezer, were dipped briefly into hot water to loosen the contents, then the frozen white blocks were clunked out into the hot skillet. A moat of water was poured around, salt showered across the top, then into the oven.

An occasional pull of the skillet out with one hand, as the other spoon-scraped the thawing corn off the tops of the mounds; when all had been melted and stirred into the water, the skillet went back in, to bake into a custardy, golden-topped creamy perfection unrivaled in taste and texture. Tiny crunches of the kerneltips punctuated the velvety bites; balance of salt and butter and crusty top made this the most memorable dish in my Mom's considerable arsenal of killer recipes.

Despite the starch-laden Thanksgiving table's having dressing, potatoes, sweet potatoes AND cheese and macaroni, the skillet of corn held precedence over it all, surpassing even the turkey in importance. There were center-spooners, savoring the silky creaminess; the crust-scrapers enjoyed the crunchy butteriness mixed into their spoonful. Nobody skipped the corn.

I have to depend on Farmers' Markets, and only recently have we again "put up" three hundred ears at one time, but I have the skillet and the know-how, and the taste lives on.

CHINOIS REVERIE

In a few more days, we'll fall off the cusp of Spring into the heated depths of Summer. Summers now are quite different from the ones before we moved here, as I was reminded with a jolt when I was sorting through cakepans in the pantry and ran across the bag holding my Mammaw's Chinois.

Neither she for all of her 79 years, nor I, until the past few, had ever heard it called that---it was the jelly drainer, or "that cone thing" for all those summers we picked plums and grapes and all kinds of berries, peaches and pears and cherries, all from our own fields and trees, or from the free-to-all roadside wild trees and bushes out in the hills where she grew up.

We would head out in the relative coolth of the dawn (85 degrees or so by 6 a.m.) and brave the thorns and snakes of the blackberry bramble, or the wasps' proprietary interest in all the plums and cherries. Later in the season, we'd pick all we could reach from the peach trees, then I'd climb carefully up into one after another, giving each rosygold velvet bubble a gentle fingersqueeze to check its readiness as she awaited below, holding a wide basketful of field grass to gently receive and cushion the fruit. No peach ever bruised in our care---we treated those miracles of juicy sweetness with the softest of touches, and besides, the time from tree to jellypot or cobbler was far too brief. And her avid pronouncement of "Elberders are the best for picklin'," was not to be disputed, especially as I stood, poking the required four cloves into each perfect, peeled globe before simmering them in the rich syrup.

For jam or jelly, the berries and plums and grapes were all crushed and sugared, to sit for a while in the porch shade until they gave up their fragrant juices. A white-rimmed-in-red enamel dishpan was set on the kitchen counter, the silvery cone thing set sturdily on its three rocket-feet in the center. The heavy, pointed wooden pestle (called a "maul" by Mammaw) was pressed and turned steadily until the rows of holes gave up the rich nectar, like hundreds of small faucets pouring forth melted jewels.

I loved being allowed to "turn the maul" and became quite proficient at quite a young age. It was lovely to see the pulp dropping into the whiteness of that shiny pan. A further squeezing in cheesecloth was necessary to make jelly, but jam went straight on the stove for cooking.

All the Mason jars went into a silver-weathered little old “junk house” for storage---shelves and shelves held the bounty of garden, fields, patch, brambles, roadsides. The scent of entering that screaky door, the dust motes dancing in the invading sunbeams, and the lustrous old melon-shell of my Mammaw’s wooden mandolin hanging high on one wall, are a great part of the memories.
So now I have the chinois; it hangs in my pantry on a hook, with the maul in a neat cloth bag. I walk beneath it every day, though I use it seldom in winter, save for soups or occasionally for ricing potatoes. Summer is its season, though summers here are a pale version of the burning, steamy days of those Mississippi summers of my childhood.

The Farmers' Market provides plums (though not the small golden ones which made Mammaw's jelly famous far and wide) and cherries and blueberries and all sorts of fruits of the season.They've all passed through that old jelly drainer at one time or another, and soon it will be time to take it down again, to smell the sweet juice cooking, and to remember those hot Mississippi days when we gathered up all of Summer in our hands, ran it through the Hell of an August kitchen, and put it in jars.

IN BETWEENS

Several items, all probably indigenous only to the South, are the in-betweens, neither sweet nor savory, but a delicious, unexpected combination of both. I’m thinking of having two at our party (one of which I’ll ask DS to make a couple of big pyrex pans of---“HIS” Pigs in Blankets. I can work for several days on a party, and when he walks in and sets down whatever he's bringing---it's like a vacuum, drawing all things to it. I just beam, 'cause I taught him).

They’re the usual tiny kielbasa-type sausages wrapped in neat strips of Pillsbury’s Crescent Roll dough, and then a honey/butter/brown sugar syrup poured around and amongst them before baking. They are crusty and crispy and golden on top, as usual, but the bottom part is almost like a sweet dumpling bubbled down in that lovely syrup. The combination of rich salty sausage and crisp bread and the luscious syrupy softness of the dough---it answers all the senses but hearing, I suppose, and you wouldn’t care if Bach were playing---live from Leipzig on your IPOD--- when you taste these.

SOOOOOEEEEET PIGS!
You pat out a pack of rolls, all into one sheet, finger-tapping the little perforations closed. Cut with a pizza cutter into small strips. Wrap each sausage with the ends showing, and with the overlap at the bottom (prettier that way, and more dough down in the syrup). Spray the pan---it should be one you can take to the table, because these need to be served "As Is" and As Soon As they come from the oven.

Mix 1 stick melted butter, ¼ cup honey and ¼ cup brown sugar. Drizzle in between all the rolls, and bake 375 for 18-20 minutes. Serve these directly from the dish---nobody minds when the taste is this good. And better make a pan for each 10 guests you expect, for most occasions, like brunch. Tea-time allows for a more dainty serving, but don’t always count on it.

I got this next recipe from a lovely Italian neighbor, along with the family recipes for ravioli (I was surprised when she sent me a half-gallon jar of the lovely little pillows in broth. It’s customary to make them that way when all the ladies of the family get together in one kitchen to make hundreds at a time. That way, each family can use their own recipe for sauce once they get them home). And the latugi---they used to send us great cardboard boxes of the wonderful crisp bows, tucked into themselves just so and deep-fried before being rolled in sugar or cinnamon-sugar.

She served an oddly-juxtaposed cheese dish at a wedding shower at her house, and I think we all took a dainty bit, then went back for seconds.

It’s grated sharp cheese, a nice garlicky aoli, and cracked black pepper, stirred well together and formed into a small ring in a Jello mold---somehow lots of Southern recipes are predicated on the idea that simply evvabody has an aspic mold. Then when it’s turned out to serve, you pour a jar of store-bought strawberry preserves or fig preserves into the center, and serve with melbas or Carr’s.

This last one is kinda like that conversation in Saturday Night Fever, when Tony says, “I made up that dance.” “You did?” “Well, I saw it on TV and then I made it up."

I saw Miss Paula make bowties and serve with chocolate sauce for dipping. I wanted a kinda betwixt/between, and on most of the occasions for these, we serve strawberries with hot fudge for dipping, so I decided to make them with the same egg wash for glue and glaze, but instead of just sugar sprinkle, I tried Turbinado, some almost-pretzel-salt and toasted sesame seeds, pressed into the dough after the glaze went on.

Line cookie sheets with parchment or Silpat. Roll the thawed puff pastry into a 12” square for 1”x2” bows, brush egg wash on top only, and sprinkle with dry mixture:

In a small bowl, mix:
3 T. turbinado sugar
1 tsp. Maldon salt
¼ c. toasted sesame seeds.
Sprinkle carefully over the entire top of the glazed pastry. Roll the pin back over the whole thing, pressing lightly, so the dry toppings will adhere. Press the edge of a ruler into the top to mark off 1”x2” sections, then cut with a zigzag pizza cutter into strips.

Pick up each one and give it two twists in the middle so the toppings are on top. It’s kinda messy, and you might want to pick up any spillage and press them onto the tops. Place bows in rows on cookie sheet, with a little room for spread.

Chill the whole cookie sheet of bows, then bake as directed on the puff pastry box. Makes 6 dozen. And whatever is stuck to the bottom side gives them a lovely something extra, like the crunch on a palmier.


The fried bowknots are wonderful, but I prefer not to be deep-frying when I’m getting ready for a pretty party, so these are perfect---they keep for three days, in an airtight container.

The combination of sweet and salt and the rich depth of the toasty seeds---a lovely bite, especially with tea or coffee as the twilight deepens and the party winds down.