A Love Affair with Southern Cooking (52 page)
Read A Love Affair with Southern Cooking Online
Authors: Jean Anderson,Jean Anderson
Blackberry Mixture
3 pints blackberries (see headnote)
1½ cups granulated sugar
¼ cup firmly packed light brown sugar
1½ tablespoons cornstarch
1 tablespoon dark rum or bourbon
1½ teaspoons finely grated lemon zest
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
Topping
¾ cup unsifted all-purpose flour
¾ cup unsifted
masa harina,
preferably white (see Note above)
½ cup unsifted stone-ground yellow cornmeal
1½ teaspoons baking powder
¼ teaspoon baking soda
¼ teaspoon ground cloves
¼ teaspoon salt
5 tablespoons butter, at room temperature
¾ cup unsifted confectioners’ (10 X) sugar
1 large egg
1 cup buttermilk
- 1.
Preheat the oven to 400° F. Butter a shallow 3-quart baking dish (it should be no more than 2 inches deep) and set aside. - 2.
For the blackberry mixture: Mix all ingredients in a large nonreactive bowl; set aside. - 3.
For the topping: Sift the flour,
masa harina,
cornmeal, baking powder, baking soda, cloves, and salt into a large mixing bowl and set aside. Cream the butter and confectioners’ sugar in a large electric mixer bowl at moderate speed for 1 to 2 minutes or until fluffy; beat in the egg. With the mixer at low speed, add the flour mixture alternately with the buttermilk, beginning and ending with the flour and beating after each addition only enough to combine. - 4.
Scoop the batter (it will be quite thick) into a pastry bag fitted with a ½-inch plain tip and pipe over the berries in a lattice pattern, spacing the rows 1½ inches apart. - 5.
Slide the cobbler onto the middle oven shelf and bake for 25 to 30 minutes or until bubbly and lightly browned. - 6.
Serve hot, or, if you prefer, cool the cobbler to room temperature before serving.
The inside was dim, and what light did come in the little windows and the door fell in beams through an atmosphere thick with the dust of ground corn.
—
CHARLES FRAZIER
,
COLD MOUNTAIN
TIME LINE: the people and events that shaped Southern Cuisine
1957 | | Mississippi-born Craig Claiborne becomes food editor of |
| | Promising quality food at low prices, Food Town opens in Salisbury, North Carolina. Known today as Food Lion, it operates more than 1,200 supermarkets throughout the South and mid-Atlantic. |
1958 | | Georgia-based Royal Crown Cola test-markets Diet Rite, America’s first diet cola. But only in the South. |
1959 | | The first of the Fat Boy’s barbecue chain is established at Cape Canaveral. |
| | Castro refugees swarm into Miami and soon create “Little Havana” on Southwest Eighth Street |
1960 | | Wilbur Hardee opens a little “walk-up” burger joint in Greenville, North Carolina. There are no tables and the menu is limited. |
WILD PERSIMMON PUDDING
MAKES
4
SERVINGS
I first tasted wild persimmon pudding when I was an assistant home demonstration agent in Iredell County, North Carolina, and I have loved it ever since. Back then, every farm woman had a pet recipe for this pudding and served it year-round even though wild persimmons were in season only from late September until Christmas. Whole families would go out and gather bushels of fallen fruit (the best indication that they were ripe and honey-sweet), prep them, and freeze the pulp (see About Wild Persimmons, Chapter 5). This particular persimmon pudding is adapted from a recipe given to my niece Linda by her friend Laura Frost, who was the chef at Sleddon’s, a “fine-dining” restaurant in Southern Pines, North Carolina—now closed, alas. Note:
If wild persimmons are unavailable, you can buy wild persimmon purée (see Sources, backmatter). You can also substitute the big orange Japanese persimmons for the wild. But the pudding will taste different.
1 cup unsifted all-purpose flour
½ teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon ground cinnamon
¼ teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
1
/
8
teaspoon ground cloves
2 extra-large eggs
¼ cup sugar
1 cup wild persimmon pulp (see headnote)
7
/
8
cup milk
1½ tablespoons butter, melted
Topping
1 cup heavy cream, whipped to soft peaks with 2 tablespoons confectioners’ (10X) sugar and 1 teaspoon vanilla extract (or 1 tablespoon Cognac)
- 1.
Preheat the oven to 350° F. Lightly coat a 1-quart casserole with nonstick cooking spray and set aside. - 2.
Sift the flour, baking soda, salt, cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves together onto a large piece of wax paper and set aside. - 3.
Beat the eggs and sugar in a large electric mixer bowl at moderately high speed until thick and pale yellow. Reduce the mixer speed to low and beat in the persimmon pulp and milk. Add the sifted dry ingredients and mix by hand until well blended. Finally, stir in the melted butter, mixing only enough to combine. - 4.
Pour the batter into the prepared casserole, spreading to the edge, then set in a baking pan and slide onto the middle oven shelf. Pour hot water into the pan to come halfway up the sides of the casserole. - 5.
Bake the pudding in the water bath for about 1 hour or until it pulls from the sides of the casserole. - 6.
Serve warm with a dollop of topping scooped over each portion.
SUGAR
The story of the Deep South’s sugar industry is bittersweet. Sweet for the planters who became “white gold” millionaires, bitter for slaves forced to work in unconscionable conditions.
The root of it all? A honey-sweet, bamboolike grass native to New Guinea that moved from Old World to New via a lengthy, roundabout journey. According to Alan Davidson in
The Oxford Companion to Food,
the Greek historian Herodotus knew sugarcane in the fifth century BC, and “in 327 BC Alexander the Great sent some back to Europe from India.” At about the same time (even earlier, some say), Persians were boiling and crystallizing cane sap into a coarse brown sugar much like the jaggery (palm sugar) of India.
Arab traders took sugarcane to Spain early in the eighth century and Moors taught the Spaniards how to crystallize it into sugar some three centuries later. Columbus, food historians agree, carried cuttings from the Canary Islands to Hispaniola on his second voyage there in 1493, though sugarcane didn’t reach Florida for another forty-two years. It was planted in the vicinity of Cape Canaveral (
Canaveral
is Spanish for
“cane field”
) but did not thrive.
By the time Florida’s first commercial crop was harvested in 1767 at the New Smyrna Colony, Jesuits had already introduced sugarcane to South Louisiana. That state’s first bumper crop, grown by Etienne de Bore of New Orleans in 1795, yielded 100,000 pounds of sugar.
In Lousiana, as in Florida, sugarcane proved to be a lucrative but unpredictable crop, subject to the whims of nature and susceptible to a variety of diseases. Then, too, wars decimated the fields of cane more than once down the years. Compare, for example, the 264,000 tons of sugar Louisiana produced in 1861 with the post–Civil War total of 5,971 tons. Moreover, the number of sugar plantations had shrunk from 1,200 in 1861 to a mere 175 in 1864. A catastrophic loss.
In the beginning, planters forced local Indian tribes to work the cane fields, and when they fled, slaves were imported from Africa. Indeed the sugar industry has been called “the engine that drove the slave trade.” Sugarcane is one of the most labor-intensive plants on earth. Cuttings must be laid flat in trenches at specific intervals and when ripe, the cane must be cut level to the ground with machetes and crushed under spinning millstones. The runoff is collected and boiled in giant cauldrons. There were accidents every step of the way, many of them fatal.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, sugar refining was being simplified, most of all by New Orleans native Norbert Rillieux, the son of a French planter and a slave mother. After studying engineering in Paris, Rillieux invented a revolutionary new evaporating pan that would shortcut the tedious process of crystallization. It was patented in 1846.
Still, sugar remained a boom-or-bust business—and does to this day. Florida now produces about a fourth of this country’s sugar and Louisiana isn’t far behind at 20 percent. Recent hurricanes have taken their toll in both states and threaten to do so in the future. According to sugar producers, however, there’s an even greater threat: CAFTA (the Central American Free Trade Act), which they insist will “rob” them of billions of dollars a year.
Time will tell.
GRATED SWEET POTATO–COCONUT PUDDING
MAKES
8
TO
10
SERVINGS
The South has an intense and ongoing love affair with sweet potatoes, perhaps because they grow well in most states below the Mason-Dixon. For whatever reason, good southern cooks have been dreaming up new ways to use sweet potatoes for years. This popular pudding, now nearly seventy years old, is one of the best. Tip:
If you grate the sweet potatoes directly into the milk, they will not darken. If you do so, stir the milk-potato mixture into the pudding batter as directed in Step 2. If not, fold them in after the milk is added.
½ cup granulated sugar
½ cup firmly packed light brown sugar
½ cup (1 stick) butter, at room temperature
¼ cup unsifted all-purpose flour
2 large eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
½ teaspoon salt
One 12-ounce can evaporated milk, plus enough whole milk to total 2½ cups
3 cups coarsely grated raw sweet potatoes (about 1 pound or 2 medium)
1 cup freshly grated or sweetened, flaked coconut
1 cup heavy cream, whipped to soft peaks with 1 tablespoon confectioners’ (10X) sugar and ½ teaspoon vanilla extract (optional topping)
- 1.
Preheat the oven to 350° F. Spritz a 9 × 9 × 2-inch baking pan with nonstick cooking spray and set aside. - 2.
Mix together the granulated sugar, brown sugar, butter, flour, eggs, vanilla, and salt in a large bowl to combine. Stir in the milk mixture (including the sweet potatoes if you grated them into the milk as suggested in the Tip above). Otherwise, fold in the sweet potatoes, then the coconut. - 3.
Scoop the mixture into the baking pan and spread to the corners. Bake uncovered on the middle oven shelf for 50 to 55 minutes or until lightly browned and set in the center. - 4.
Cool the pudding in the upright pan on a wire rack for 15 to 20 minutes, then spoon up and serve. Drift each portion, if you like, with the whipped cream topping or pass it separately.
OLD KENTUCKY HOME BISCUIT PUDDING WITH BOURBON SAUCE
MAKES ABOUT
8
SERVINGS
Thrifty southern cooks put yesterday’s biscuits to good use in this “bread” pudding. And if there are leftover raisins, they might be plumped with bourbon and tossed in. That’s the Kentucky way. This recipe is my approximation of a biscuit pudding I once enjoyed at Kurtz’s Restaurant in Bardstown, Kentucky. I failed to ask for the recipe—stupid me. If my flavor memory hasn’t failed me, I think this attempt to “crack” that recipe comes reasonably close. Even if I’ve
missed by a mile, the pudding is delicious. Note:
The sauce won’t cook fully; to be safe, use a pasteurized egg (see About Pasteurized Eggs, frontmatter).
Pudding
¾ cup seedless raisins or sultanas (golden raisins)
¼ cup bourbon
4 large eggs
1¼ cups sugar
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
¼ teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
2 cups milk
2 cups light cream or half-and-half
6 stale 3-inch buttermilk biscuits, coarsely crumbled (8½ cups crumbs)
Bourbon Sauce
½ cup (1 stick) butter
¾ cup granulated sugar
¼ cup firmly packed light brown sugar
¼ teaspoon salt
1
/
3
cup water
1 large pasteurized egg (see Note above)
¼ cup bourbon
- 1.
For the pudding: Plump the raisins in the bourbon for 3 to 4 hours. - 2.
When ready to proceed, beat the eggs, sugar, vanilla, and nutmeg in a large electric mixer bowl at high speed for about 2 minutes or until creamy. With the machine at low speed, gradually beat in the milk and cream. By hand fold in the biscuit crumbs, then the plumped raisins and any remaining bourbon. Set aside for 20 minutes. - 3.
Preheat the oven to 350° F. Butter a 2½-quart casserole well and set aside. - 4.
Stir the biscuit mixture and scoop into the casserole, spreading to the edge. Bake uncovered on the middle oven shelf for 60 to 65 minutes or until nicely browned, puffed, and set. - 5.
Meanwhile, prepare the bourbon sauce: Melt the butter in a small, heavy saucepan over moderate heat. Add the two sugars, the salt, and water, then cook, stirring constantly, until the sugars dissolve. Adjust the heat so the mixture bubbles gently, and cook uncovered for 5 minutes or until syrupy. Whisk the egg until frothy in a small, heatproof bowl; then, whisking all the while, drizzle in the hot syrup. Finally, mix in the bourbon. - 6.
When the pudding tests done, remove from the oven and cool for 10 to 15 minutes. - 7.
To serve, spoon the warm pudding onto dessert plates and ladle a little of the sauce over each portion.