My Two Souths

Dust Storm, Pampa Texas, April 14, 1935

     In my life, I've known two Souths.  The first I lived, the second, I learned from books.  My lived South was my two grandmothers. One was a from South Carolina family, but born in Texas. When I knew her, she lived in New York City.  The other was a Martha's Vineyard Yankee by way of Kansas City, Kansas.  When I knew her, she had retired to St. Michaels, Maryland.  

     

     The born Southerner was an ideal grandmother for a child whose parent's marriage was failing. Indulgent, physically warm, well-travelled and well-educated, her New York apartment was decorated with furniture and bibelot from her former residences and travels.  She couldn't cook, and let me subsist on Ritz Crackers, Wispride cheese and Coca-Cola when I visited from the suburbs.

     The Yankee grandmother had a vinegary mouth.  I couldn't seem to be well-behaved around her.  She lived in a white-pillared house on some 10 or 20 acres on a tidewater creek.  The grounds were maintained by what was called a colored, William.  The gardens, the fields and the barn were his kingdom. He grew the strawberries which the so-called colored cook, with my grandmother's assistance, preserved.  Lunch and dinner were eaten in the dining room. There was a buzzer under the table to summon the cook to serve.  

     I first knew the South as a place, as a child visiting St. Michaels.  The marshy, humid smells were layered with the scent of gasoline, clams, and crabs from the town dock adjacent to the property.  In the morning I could hear the engines of trucks and boats, and the voices of the watermen setting out for the day.  This and the mild weather made it a heavenly spot to visit from the snow-bound, and for me, lily-white North.

     In the years since then, I've made a point of visiting places associated with the Southern grandmother's family.  There's the almost deserted village of Cokesbury, South Carolina and the former cotton growing region around Waxahachie, Texas.  There's also the Texas State Asylum for the Insane in Terrell, where my grandmother and her sister confined, for a time, an eccentric nephew.  (A Texas lawyer got him released.)

     My last visit to the South, as an adult, was a visit to Pampa, Texas, on the fringe of the Dustbowl of Oklahoma.  I went to bury my born Southern grandmother's grand-niece, who wanted to be buried with her parents there.  I'd known her when we both lived in Washington, DC, which doesn't really count as a Southern city.  She didn't speak much about Pampa, saying only that the wind never stopped blowing.  She's still accurate about the weather.  Pampa today, to the dismay of many of its white residents,  has a large Mexican population.  It also has a Thai restaurant, owned and staffed by Laotian refugees who live in Amarillo.  

     My second South,  I've learned from books.  My father, a writer and only a generation removed from the South, had a curiosity about the region.  His guide was a New York Stater who'd written about his sojourn there as Stars Fell on Alabama; a volume not universally popular in the South. Together they took a river-boat down the Mississippi for Life Magazine, and met with other authors like Roark Bradford and Dubose Hayward in New Orleans.  Both would today be considered appropriators of Black culture.

     I learned much more about my Southern roots from genealogy.  In the course of research, I've seen the "Slave Schedule" from the 1860 census which shows my great-great-grandfather, Francis Ambrose Connor, as the owner of twenty-nine slaves.  I've seen the record of the litigation amongst his eleven children over the fate of those twenty-nine.  Presumably, it's the sale of his share that sent him to Medical School and set up his drugstore in Waxahachie.  There's a picture of my grandmother and her sister with their Black nurse, Hattie Hix, who is just a few years older than they.

     So there I am, an implicated sojourner.  I can't claim the South, I don't want to, but I can't disclaim it, either.

     

 

     

 

Pigeon du General Longstreet

     At the request of readers, Gourmet, in 1943, published a stream of articles written and illustrated by Stephen Longstreet.  Purportedly about his grandfather, each contains a recipe, sometimes several, from the erstwhile grandfather's notebook.
     Here's a breakfast dish featuring squab.
     "It's my own dish," Gramp would say, "but it needs a fancy title. Your aunt says we're related to some hillbilly general in Dixie, so I'm giving him credit for the dish."


Pigeon du General Longstreet

3 squab, cleaned and deboned,
     Set aside bones
     Set aside livers
1 small red onion, sliced
1 carrot, sliced
pinch of ground cloves
2 peppercorns
salt
1 shallot, sliced
3 slices ham, chopped fine
1 slice toast soaked in milk
2 Tablespoons butter
1/2 cup Sherry
1/2 cup Madeira
1 small white onion, grated

Place squab bones in small pot with onion, carrot, pepper, salt and shallot and simmer for one hour.  Cook livers in 1/2 of the butter. Chop. Preheat oven to 400 degrees.
In another small pot put livers, ham, toast, Sherry, Madeira and onion.  Simmer. When reduced, stuff into the birds.  Use steel pins to truss.
Pour bone broth and butter over the birds.
Bake for 12 minutes.  Reduce heat to 300 degrees and bake for an additional 25 minutes.  Just before removing from oven, raise heat again to 500, remove when glazed.

Gramps ate two, boy Stephen ate one.

(To understand squab and possible substitutions, see Zester's Battle of the Birds.)

The Star Cooks Mushrooms a la Andalouse

In her evening dress and hairdo.

     For Super-Bowl Sunday, I'm testing Stephen Longstreet's recipe, gleaned from his 1942 visit to Hollywood with an old friend from back-east who's now a star.

Mushrooms a la Andalouse

2 lbs. mushrooms, stemmed or sliced

2 oz. unsalted butter

1 oz. diced ham or pork belly

1/4 cup olive oil

1 cup sherry

1/2 cup port

Pepper

Salt

1/2 nutmeg, grated 

1/3 cup chopped pimentos

2 Tablespoons crushed parsley

Braise the mushrooms in the butter, olive oil and ham for 8 minutes.  Add sherry and port.  Stir for a few minutes more, until liquid begins to reduce. Spoon mushrooms into a casserole and allow liquid to reduce by a half.  Pour into casserole. Sprinkle with pepper, salt, nutmeg, pimento and parsley.

Bake at 375 degrees for one hour.

Serve spread on toast that lightly spread with any sort of forcemeat and the grated lemon rind.

Chef Chan's Idea of Lobster Bercy

   

All I need is 4 three pounders.

     In the winter of 1942,  a Mr. and Mrs. Oil Well invited Stephen Longstreet to be a guest at their villa somewhere on the coast between Hollywood and Big Sur. Their Chinese chef, Chan, prepared his idea of Lobster Bercy.  Longstreet thought it the best lobster he had ever eaten.  Asian-Fusion circa 1942?
     I'm assuming you slay the lobster before you extract its meat.  

Chan's Lobster Bercy 

4 three lb. lobster, meat sliced thin
1/2 cup butter
1/2 cup olive oil
2 shallot, finely minced
1 cup water chestnuts, sliced
1 cup bamboo shoots, sliced
1 cup chablis
1 cup sherry
1 cup heavy cream
5 eggs beaten with 1 Tablespoon lemon juice
1/4 cup chives, diced
8 or more slices toasted bread
Dash paprika

     In a large sauce pan, melt the butter and olive oil over medium high heat. Add the shallots, water chestnuts and bamboo shoots and brown.  Add the lobster meat and bring to sizzling hot.
     Add the wine and sherry and reduce.  Add the cream, beaten eggs and chives.  Lower flame to a simmer.  Stir slowly until mixture thickens.
      Serve on toast, dusted with paprika.

The Hero of "High Button Shoes"

     One of the most fascinating characters who has turned up in my Gourmet magazine research is Stephen Longstreet, who wrote the book for that venerable Broadway musical.  
     If you think creative non-fiction is a recent phenomena, meet this raconteur of mythical proportions, an artist and screen-writer who travelled all around the world.
      Even his grandchildren struggle to piece together what parts of his memoirs were real.
      There is always a recipe in his articles for Gourmet.  These he purportedly found in his grandfather Longstreet's notebook.  Longstreet was one of his noms de plume,  and the dimensions of the grandfather questionable.
      Are the recipes real?
      Unlike Julie, I'm not a skinny person, and am not prepared to test and presumably consume each of these dishes.
     I'm proposing to crowd-share this experiment.
     Each day I will post one of his recipes.
     If you are game?
     Pick one, prepare it and report back in the comments!
     Here's the first - - -Note that at this stage of Gourmet's evolution, recipes were not presented in the ingredients and method format we are now used to, so I've converted it, while keeping most of Longstreet's prose.

Kidney Pie a la Winter Palace (Gourmet, February, 1943)

From Gramp’s notebook: “Russian kidney pie, imported from France to Russia by Peter the Great…goes back to a Dutch dish eaten after Lent.”

Water

Salt

Vineger

3 Veal kidneys

1 lb sirloin steak, cut in 1 inch squares

½ large onion, chopped

½ cup parsley

¼ cup chicken fat or suet

1 cup sherry

1 teaspoon white brandy

Bay leaf

Black pepper

Sea salt

1 pint button mushrooms

1 Tablespoon pickled red pepper

1 carrot, diced

Caraway seeds

Wash the kidneys the mixture of salt water and vinagar. Cut into inch squares and discard the hard tough muscles. Add the sirloin. Put kidney and steak pieces in a pan with fat, onions and parsley, sauté until amber brown.  Add sherry and brandy to cover, bayleaf, pepper and salt, simmer for almost and hour.  Add button mushrooms, pepper and diced carrot.

Pour into an ovenproof casserole, cover with simple pastry, sprinkle with caraway seeds. Bake in a 400 degree oven until crust is done.

Accompany with Dutch beer.

Nasi Lemak 2.0, Malaysia's Answer to the Question "What kind of Chinese Chinese Are You?"

     The above question is scholar/gentleman Warren Tom's favorite line from Wayne Wang's foundational food movie "Chan is Missing."  I was just finishing note-taking from on the Overseas Chinese from Sterling Seagrave's Lords of the Rim, when a plain white envelope arrived from Hong Kong.  It was the DVD of "Nasi Lemak 2.0." I had ordered in my ceaseless search for quotes from pivotal moments in the arrival of Asian food on our shores between 1941 and 2009.
     Malaysia has one of the most complicated histories in Southeast Asia, which is why its population is about 50% Malay, 25% Chinese, 11% indigenous, and 7% Indian in origin.  There is one official language, Bahasa Malaysia. Chinese speak one or two of six dialects. Other languages heard are Tamil, Telegu, Malayam, Panjabi and Thai.  Islam is the official religion.  Talk about identity politics!
     According to Seagrave, the Overseas Chinese, who have settled here since the 15th Century, have done very well.  Jealousy and resentment have flared over the years since Malaysia's independence from the U.K. in 1957.
     "Nasi Lemak 2.0" was made in 2009, so I'm not sure it counts, but it is worth discussing anyway.  Nasi Lemak with sambal, is considered the national dish of Malaysia.

Some of my favorite parts of the dialogue:

Let me tell you this

If you want to learn to make sambal

Please listen closely

I will say this once

Our ancestors interacted with the Malays many centuries ago…

And started communicating in Malay language

So our cuisine also tend to mix with Malay food

(It’s just like white people learning to cook Chinese food.  Chinese food becomes part of his culture too!  This is basically the same concept.)

Nonya people always cook without using measurements.

(Our cooking is based on estimation only)

Yes we use estimation only.

Stop Asking questions

You should try it.

Pimento Cheese and other Schmaltz

The Verdict on Interpretations of Southern cuisine staples, Pimento Cheese,  Cornbread and
Fried Chicken; Can a Yankee-born-Korean-American do it better?

It has been an exciting week in my kitchen.  My in-laws were visiting from Tennessee by way of North Carolina.  My husband accompanied them on NorCal adventures to the Wine Country and Google's galactic headquarters.  We ate at Greens overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge.

These folks have been on some kind of liquid diet since Christmas and have lost phenomenal amounts of weight.  They reveled in In-and-Out burgers, and not just because of the Biblical citations on every piece of packaging.  Ever in search of in-family approval, I decided to go all out on their farewell dinner.
   
Starters: a taste-off of pimento cheeses.  Edward Lee's, the Korean-American chef at 610 Magnolia in Louisville (that's Louvul),  versus Scott Peacock/Edna Lewis' Alabama/Virginia version.  Interesting results:  my husband, nephew and sister-in-law all went for the Peacock/Lewis version because it reminded them of their Aunt Ethel's.  My brother-in-law, bless his heart, went for Edward Lee's.  He felt it had a certain kick.  Men and hotness, observes I.
   
Next was Ed Lee's Dark Braised Lamb Shoulder and his Lardo Cornbread.  Everybody went berserkers.  In my bro-in-law's family, they dip corn bread in milk for breakfast.  He was ecstatic.  Whatever my leftist, Yankee reputation may have been before last night, I am redeemed!
   
Side dishes and desserts were a collection of random recipes gleaned from my serious weeding of Gourmet back issues, and other snatches.  Not the same excitement.
   
The next Big Thing was the call from my son, reporting on the forced slaughter of a rooster in the mountains of Pennsylvania.  He didn't think he could do it, but when told that the dog-wounded fellow had to be put out of his misery, my son screwed his courage to the sticking place.  With the wrong end of the ax he stunned the bird, and with the proper end guillotined him below the ganglia, avoiding the dancing headless rooster act. (Was there some consulting of Google Search to find out the proper location?)  He felt rather virtuous until he found himself listening to "Mack the Knife."
   
I contemplated his chivalry as I begin separating two chickens into drumsticks, thighs and wings to make Edward Lee's Adobo Deep Fried Chicken on one hand, and cut-up breast pieces for Scott Peacock/Edna Lewis' brined and buttermilk-soaked-shallow-pan Fried Chicken on the other.  I did a terrible job.

Nothing like the third century BC butcher to one of the early rulers of China, a description of which, I had sent to the writer, Frances Lam, in honor of his pieces on the last Chinese BBQ chef and Dry Aging of Beef:

Cook Ting was cutting up an ox for Lord Wen-hui. As every touch of his hand, every heave of his shoulder, every move of his feet, every thrust of his knee — zip! zoop! He slithered the knife along with a zing, and all was in perfect rhythm, as though he were performing the dance of the Mulberry Grove or keeping time to the Ching-shou music.

“Ah, this is marvelous!” said Lord Wen-hui. “Imagine skill reaching such heights!”

Cook Ting laid down his knife and replied, “What I care about is the Way, which goes beyond skill. When I first began cutting up oxen, all I could see was the ox itself. After three years I no longer saw the whole ox. And now — now I go at it by spirit and don’t look with my eyes. Perception and understanding have come to a stop and spirit moves where it wants. I go along with the natural makeup, strike in the big hollows, guide the knife through the big openings, and following things as they are. So I never touch the smallest ligament or tendon, much less a main joint.

“A good cook changes his knife once a year — because he cuts. A mediocre cook changes his knife once a month — because he hacks. I’ve had this knife of mine for nineteen years and I’ve cut up thousands of oxen with it, and yet the blade is as good as though it had just come from the grindstone. There are spaces between the joints, and the blade of the knife has really no thickness. If you insert what has no thickness into such spaces, then there’s plenty of room — more than enough for the blade to play about it. That’s why after nineteen years the blade of my knife is still as good as when it first came from the grindstone.

“However, whenever I come to a complicated place, I size up the difficulties, tell myself to watch out and be careful, keep my eyes on what I’m doing, work very slowly, and move the knife with the greatest subtlety, until — flop! the whole thing comes apart like a clod of earth crumbling to the ground. I stand there holding the knife and look all around me, completely satisfied and reluctant to move on, and then I wipe off the knife and put it away.”

“Excellent!” said Lord Wen-hui. “I have heard the words of Cook Ting and learned how to care for life!”

No, for sure, I am a hacker.  I did carefully render some chicken fat for one of the side recipes.  But tomorrow, when the two methods of frying chicken are stacked up against each other, the cuts may not matter so much.

The guests and the event are what matters now.  Five years ago, we hosted an engagement party for this couple, who were married in San Francisco in that break-in-the-clouds when it was possible.  Here we are five years later, getting to celebrate the new DOMA-free-stability in their lives!  My own nephew will join us to be inspired by their pioneering efforts.

   
Did I mention that one of the guests is Georgia born, so able to do this Judgement of Paris thing on the chicken thighs and breasts?  Ed Lee's lardo cornbread, with some added kernels of sweet corn, Peacock/Lewis Tomato Gravy, Ed Lee's updated Ambrosia,  (No, Mom, no canned Mandarin Oranges.) and Ed Lee's Togarashi Goat Cheesecake will complete the menu.  And lots of champagne from that Napa Valley tour.

 
And all sent forth with the best of intentions.