A Love Affair with Southern Cooking (46 page)
Read A Love Affair with Southern Cooking Online
Authors: Jean Anderson,Jean Anderson
PECANS
The Creeks store up the last [hickory nuts] in their towns…They pound them to pieces, and then cast them into boiling water, which, after passing through fine strainers, preserves the most oily part of the liquid…[the hickory milk] is as sweet and rich as fresh cream, and it is an ingredient in most of their cookery, especially homony [sic] and corn cakes.
—
WILLIAM BARTRAM
,
TRAVELS OF WILLIAM BARTRAM
,
ON A VISIT TO GEORGIA
, 1773
The pecan is a type of hickory and it’s possible that the nuts Bartram observed were actually pecans. Anyone who’s tried to crack a rock-hard hickory nut and pry out the measly bits inside knows that if pecans were growing in Georgia at the time of Bartram’s visit, the Creeks would surely have chosen them. One good whack shatters the shell and frees the meat.
Pecan
, according to
Sturtevant’s Notes on Edible Plants,
comes from the Indian (probably Algonquin) word
pecaunes,
which, I learned elsewhere, means “nuts requiring a stone to crack.”
We know that tribes up and down the Mississippi were using pecans just as Bartram describes. We know, too, that as early as the 1540s Cabeza de Vaca wrote of Indians wintering on pecan meal ground from nuts gathered along the great river and its tributaries.
Having found fossilized pecans in Texas and Mexico, archaeologists believe that this is where they originated millions of years ago. As for their abundance along the Mississippi and beyond, historians suggest that nomadic tribes carried them there.
The first person to write down the Indian word
pecaune
s (misspelled
pacane)
is said to have been a ship’s carpenter visiting Natchez around the turn of the eighteenth century. He was traveling with Pierre LeMoyne (Sieur d’Iberville), the young Canadian dispatched to complete LaSalle’s star-crossed exploration of the Mississippi.
In 1775 George Washington planted what he called “Mississippi nuts” at Mount Vernon and in 1779 Thomas Jefferson imported pecan trees from Louisiana for his gardens at Monticello.
Today there are more than 500 varieties of pecans, some of them named after the Indian tribes that grew them. Pecan farming is big business throughout the South but Georgia, according to the Georgia Pecan Commission, “leads the nation in pecan production.” And has for more than a hundred years.
Southerners can’t get enough of them. They bake pecans into breads, pies, cakes, and cookies. They freeze them into ice cream. Stir them into sides and salads. Spice them, sugar them, boil them into candy.
Recently, nutritionists have begun to recognize and appreciate the nutritional importance of pecans. They’re rich in largely unsaturated oleic acid (thought to lower LDL or “bad cholesterol”) and in addition, they contain phytochemicals that may (repeat
may
) help prevent heart disease as well as cancers of the colon and stomach. Pecans, moreover, are rich in vitamins B
1
and E, good sources, too, of magnesium, copper, zinc, and fiber.
Reason enough to enjoy pecans with a clear conscience.
GLAZED LEMON TEA BREAD
MAKES A
9 × 5 × 3-
INCH LOAF
One of the fresh-baked breads served at Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill, Kentucky, this one is as much cake as bread: fine textured and both sweet and tart. The recipe here is adapted from one that appears in Elizabeth C. Kremer’s
Welcome Back to Pleasant Hill: More Recipes from the Trustees’ House
(1977). Shaker Village, if you don’t know it, is an authentically restored nineteenth-century Shaker village located some twenty-five miles south of Lexington. I’ve visited many times not only because the purity of Shaker design epitomizes the best of American architecture but also because there are daily demonstrations in everything from quilting to coopering to broom making. The best part about Shaker Village is that you can stay in one of the former residences and enjoy Shaker dishes in the Trustees’ Office Dining Room. If you haven’t been to Shaker Village, by all means go and take the
kids. This is a slice of American history at its best.
1½ cups sifted all-purpose flour
1½ teaspoons baking powder
¼ teaspoon salt
1
/
3
cup firmly packed vegetable shortening or 6 tablespoons butter
1 cup sugar
Finely grated zest of 1 large lemon
2 large eggs
½ cup milk
½ cup finely chopped pecans
Glaze
1
/
3
cup sugar blended with the juice of 1 large lemon
- 1.
Preheat the oven to 350° F. Spritz a 9 × 5 × 3-inch loaf pan with nonstick cooking spray and set aside. - 2.
Sift the flour, baking powder, and salt together onto a piece of wax paper and set aside also. - 3.
Cream the shortening, sugar, and lemon zest in a large electric mixer bowl first at low speed, then at high speed for about a minute or until well blended. With the machine at medium speed, beat the eggs in one at a time. - 4.
At low mixer speed, add the sifted dry ingredients alternately with the milk, beginning and ending with the dry and beating after each addition only enough to combine. Fold in the pecans. Scoop the batter into the pan, smoothing the top and spreading to the corners. - 5.
Bake the bread in the lower third of the oven for 45 to 50 minutes or until it pulls away from the sides of the pan and feels springy when touched. - 6.
Transfer the bread to a wire rack but do not remove from the pan. Pour the glaze evenly over the loaf, then cool to room temperature. - 7.
To serve, loosen the tea bread around the edge using a thin-blade spatula, turn out on the rack, then cut into slices about
3
/
8
inch thick.
Note:
This tea bread freezes well. Wrap snugly in plastic food wrap, overwrap with aluminum foil, date, label, and store in a 0° F. freezer. Serve within 3 months.
“HOT’NS”
MAKES ABOUT
1
DOZEN
Every Southerner knows what a “hot’n” is: a biscuit straight from the oven. The name, it’s said, dates back to World War Two when southern hostesses liked to invite soldiers stationed at nearby military bases over for home-cooked Sunday dinners. One hostess, passing a basket of buttermilk biscuits, said to the Yankee lieutenant on her left, “Have a hot’n.” And he, thinking that that was the name of the bread, inquired a little later, “May I have another hot’n?” The name stuck. There are dozens of biscuit recipes but this one is fairly classic. The preferred flour is soft and self-rising—White Lily, for example (see box, Chapter 5). And the shortening of choice is lard—hog lard with sometimes a bit of butter added—because it makes for extra-flaky biscuits and also adds subtle meaty flavor. Note:
If self-rising flour is unavailable (it was the whole time I lived in New York), substitute all-purpose flour and add 1
½
teaspoons baking powder and
½
teaspoon salt.
2 cups unsifted self-rising flour
½ teaspoon baking soda
½ cup firmly packed lard or vegetable shortening
1 tablespoon butter
¾ cup buttermilk
- 1.
Preheat the oven to 425° F. - 2.
Place the flour and baking soda in a large mixing bowl, add the lard and butter, then, using a pastry blender or two knives, cut the fat into the dry ingredients until the texture of uncooked oatmeal. - 3.
Drizzle in the buttermilk, forking briskly, then continue forking just until a soft dough forms. - 4.
Turn onto a lightly floured surface and knead lightly 5 to 6 times. With a floured rolling pin, roll the dough out until about ¾ inch thick. Cut into rounds using a floured 2-inch biscuit cutter and space about 1½ inches apart on a large ungreased baking sheet. Gather scraps, reroll, and cut as before. - 5.
Bake in the lower third of the oven for 15 to 18 minutes or until puffed and lightly browned. - 6.
Serve at once—and no stinting on butter (or gravy).
Sally went into the cupboard and took out a pottery crock of blackberry preserves, the mouth sealed with beeswax. She gave it to Ada and said, “This’ll be good on your leftover biscuits.”
—
CHARLES FRAZIER
,
COLD MOUNTAIN
TIME LINE: the people and events that shaped Southern Cuisine
1937 | | The first Krispy Kreme doughnuts are deep-fried and honey-glazed in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. (See Krispy Kreme Doughnuts, Chapter 6.) |
| | Two popular southern grocery chains—Atlanta-based Rogers and Norfolk-based Pender—merge with a combined total of more than 500 stores. Two brand new Pender-Rogers supermarkets open as “Big Stars,” one in Greensboro, North Carolina, and one in Griffin, Georgia. They are the first of many. |
1938 | | To raise funds, the Girl Scouts, founded 26 years earlier in Savannah, Georgia, begin selling cookies made by Interbake Foods of Richmond, Virginia. Earlier, they’d baked their own. |
| | Herman Lay buys the Atlanta firm whose potato chips he’d been selling out of the trunk of his car and renames it H. W. Lay & Company. Soon Lay’s Potato Chips are the South’s favorite. |
| | Lance introduces Toastchee |
WHITE LILY FLOUR
If it weren’t for White Lily, the South would never rise again…we’d be eating bagels instead of biscuits.
—Southern Cookin’ with Ron Williams,
www.gritz.net
Southerners
do
eat bagels but they’re not about to forsake their beloved biscuits, most of all those featherweight Angel Biscuits. These, I’ve heard (but can’t prove), were created at White Lily headquarters in Knoxville, Tennessee—sometime in the mid twentieth century.
For nearly 125 years this company has been milling the light baking flour Southerners insist upon for flaky biscuits and cakes so light they nearly levitate. It all began back in 1882 when young Georgian J. Allen Smith settled in Knoxville (“the soft wheat belt”), then, with the aid of four local businessmen, incorporated and reactivated the derelict Knoxville City Mills.
From the outset, Smith’s goal was to produce the finest flour available, and to achieve it, he built modern facilities and replaced the old grindstones with steel rollers. Seven times he rolled his wheat, and southern cooks were impressed. Not so Smith, who added multiple siftings and by 1896 had produced a flour so fine, so soft he named it White Lily (after his wife, Lillie).
Within six years, White Lily sales had zoomed past the million-dollar mark. Bulk-shipped in wooden barrels, the flour was now sold from Virginia to Florida. Soon flour sacks replaced the barrels, to the delight of frugal housewives, who could turn them into shirts and dresses (never mind that all of them were stamped with the White Lily logo).
Over time White Lily introduced self-rising flour and cornmeal, then an array of time-saving mixes. But none better than the light baking flour that had made White Lily an icon.
CATHEAD BISCUITS
MAKES
4
LARGE BISCUITS
“What you see there, Joe, is what we call the Cathead Biscuit, the gift of an all-knowing and benevolent God.” Thus writes Joseph E. Dabney in the bread chapter of his delightful book,
Smokehouse Ham, Spoon Bread, and Scuppernong Wine
(1998). Until he sank his teeth into a cathead biscuit at Berry College near Rome, Georgia, Dabney thought that no one baked better biscuits than his Scotch-Irish South Carolina mother. They were, he writes, “so satisfyingly stout and yet so fluffy and down-home delicious—particularly when she showed me how to dip them into breakfast coffee for what she called ‘coffee soakee’.” According to Dabney, southern mountain folk are particularly partial to Cathead Biscuits smothered with Sawmill Gravy. As for their unusual name, some long-ago someone said that these biscuits were as big as a cat’s head—“a medium-size female,” southern radio humorist
Ludlow Porch later joked to a listener who’d called in to ask about them. “They’re soft and fluffy and almost fall out of your hands into your mouth,” Porch added. I now realize that the giant biscuits our round-the-corner neighbor, Mrs. Franklin, made were Cathead Biscuits, although she didn’t call them that. Most afternoons after school, I’d race over to Mrs. Franklin’s hoping that she had at least one left from lunch that I could smother with gravy or dip into “pot likker” from the greens she’d cooked earlier. Even cold, they were wonderful. Mrs. Franklin made them with bacon drippings and that’s the way I like them because of their meaty flavor. Note:
With three ingredients only, these biscuits couldn’t be easier to make. Still, if they’re to be light and fluffy, you must use a good, soft southern flour like White Lily or Martha White and handle the dough as little as possible. Because of their size, Cathead Biscuits bake at a lower-than-usual temperature and never brown like conventional biscuits.
Tip:
If self-rising flour is unavailable, substitute all-purpose flour and add 1 teaspoon baking powder and
½
teaspoon salt.