Some Things That Have Been Said About Southern Food Ways

     I'm grateful to Cynthia Bertelsen's piece in New Salt. It set me the task of thinking hard about the history of a region which is half my heritage.  Consider this short essay the first course.

     A good place to begin tracing the influence of English food ways on Southern food is historian David Hackett Fisher's Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America. Published in 1989, it has been called one of the greatest works of American History.

    And it shows us that the diversity of Southern food has its earliest origin in the diversity of just one of the nations who sent colonists to what would become the South.
   
     Fisher follows the English  from four regions in England to four regions of the early colonies: East Anglia to Massachusetts, the South of England to Virginia, the North Midlands to the Delaware and the Borderlands of North Britain to the Backcountry.  Based on extensive research on both sides of the Atlantic, Fisher describes, in rich detail, the characteristics that distinguished each group.

     Food ways get special attention.  The sections on tidewater Virginia and the Backcountry or interiors of Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia and some coastal regions of South Carolina, cover two major regions of what we now call the South. We learn that English food ways varied by region, and carried into regional variations in food ways across the South.

     Virginia's culinary customs were highly stratified. Prosperous planters kept the same food ways as the gentry in southwestern England.  Roast beef was a huge favorite, as were asparagus and strawberries. The more humble folk ate one dish meals of greens with salt meat and hominy or corn porridge. Fisher observes that the 17th century diet of those of humble rank was both much like the diet of farm workers in the south and west of England, and similar to black "soul food" in the 20th. "Frigacy" or "fricassee" of chicken, veal or rabbit simmered in an open pan was favored by the middle and upper classes. Fried chicken was another favorite of the elites like the Byrds and Carters.
 
     Fisher concludes that this style of Virginia cooking became the basis for Southern food---highly seasoned, roasted, simmered or fried.  It is similar to the English cooking style called "Dorset fashion." However,  baking developed very slowly on the Chesapeake.  Another common feature of Virginia and the south and west of England was the observance of feasts at funerals, and holy days such as Easter Monday and Christmas.

     The North British Origins of the settlers of the Southern Highlands made for fundamental differences.  "Clabber, butter, fat mushy bacon, cornbread...they know neither beef nor mutton." Clabber or sour milk with curds and whey was the staple of both North Britain and the backcountry. The North Britons returned the potato to the Americas. The small cakes of unleavened dough, baked on a stone or circular griddle in an open hearth go by many names but are ubiquitous in North Britain and the southern backcountry.  True baking was not favored. The oats of the North were replaced by maize, and pig's flesh, boiled or fried, was despised in North Britain but in the backcountry replaced difficult to maintain sheep.  The favored Feast dish for community events in the backcountry was a "pot-pie" boiled in iron cooking pot over the hearth.

     The question perhaps is, of all this, what remains and why?



   



   

How Not To Write About Southern Food

     If you ever doubted that food is political, 'tis the season to be dis-abused of your naiveté.

Cynthia Bertelsen, a serious food scholar, reviewer, traveler and writer has taken to her blog to pen an essay: Juneteenth: Edna Lewis and the Myths Behind Southern Cooking. I'm half Yankee and half Palmetto State woman, but I feel like she might as well wave the Confederate flag and say The War wasn't about slavery. Ms. Bertelsen is an avowed champion for the English origins of Southern Cooking, and she's up in arms about claims of African influence on this cuisine. 

     Her argument begins with her labeling said claims as both myths and theories. Can something be both theory and myth? Worse, she can't decide if said mytho-theories are "accepted wisdom," or whether there is an argument to be had. From all the community cookbooks I've seen, I the "accepted wisdom" was that Steel Magnolias did all the Southern hospitality.

     It's unfortunate that she focusses her annoyance on Edna Lewis. As Lewis is dead, she can't explain herself. Why not choose to de-mythologize a living writer, like Toni Tipton-Martin or Jessica Harris or Michael Twitty?

    And then there's the paucity of her research on the background of said claims. Bertelsen cites Gourmet's 2008 article, Francis Lam's NYT 2015 essay and some of Lewis' cookbooks as her sources. (Note that Francis Lam tracked down surviving kin to expand his understanding of Lewis.) 

     The strangest sentence in Bertelsen's essay reads "According to the stories larding her books...she grew up on a farm in Freetown, Virginia, a settlement populated by freed slaves. Unfortunately, Freetown no longer exists..." As if the product of Reconstruction and Jim Crow should be preserved?  Rather than cast doubt on what Lewis wrote, why not check the census and other documents yourself?

      Bertelsen questions whether anyone can be 100% certain of Karen Hess' view that most recipes in What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking are in fact largely recipes gleaned by the writers from African American cooks, their own, and others. 

     She wants statistics, original sources, and signed recipes.  Here's what annoys me most about Bertelsen's essay: Anthropology and archeology, two sciences that explore both myths and theories, have been wrestling with this question since the 1940s. Melville Herskovits and Franklin Fraser debated African American cultural continuity and assimilation, and Lorenzo Dow Turner investigated Africanisms in Gullah.  

     In the 1940s the accepted wisdom was that the Middle Passage and slavery stripped away all culture and Gullah was just badly spoken English.  Herskovits and Fraser did the research and analysis to disprove this.  More recently, in the field of Linguistics, Creole and Pidgin studies have carried the research further, and archeologists have tested the remains of physical culture against the evidence from linguistics. 

     Cynthia, the evidence is there if you choose to search for and see it.  

     Her counter argument is that in 2016, Latin American cooks staff French and Japanese restaurants, and aren't creating something new.  I'd argue that this phenomena is only 50 years old, dating to 1965 Immigration law changes, and has already produced change. How does she think avocados got in California rolls or the fish in tacos?

     Instead she asserts that colonial and Federal cooking was influenced by the tastes of the British aristocracy for French food, and sea captains and merchants for exotic foodstuffs from the East.  She argues that slave ships, not slaves, brought African foodstuffs to the New World.  I ask, who knew what to cook with these foodstuffs? It is her argument that connections between contemporary West African cooking and Southern would cinch the argument for large scale culinary transfer.  Surprize: she didn't recognize many. But why would either remain static for 200 years?

     The strangest argument she presents is that North America received a small portion, 5%, of the slaves sent to the Americas, and that by 1810, 90% of slaves were born in America.

I cannot fathom why these facts should support her argument against African influence in the Colonies, as slaves were moved between the Caribbean and the Colonies; she believes that American birth would dilute, rather than concentrate, the influence of African foodways. 

     She ends by laying at Edna Lewis' feet the blame for an aura of nostalgia that permeates the new southern cuisine of the 1980s and the locally sourced cuisine of the contemporary South.  While it is true, as Anne Mendelson has pointed out, that the early years of Gourmet were saturated with reverence for the past,  the Edna Lewis feature belongs to the Gourmet of Ruth Reichl, whose writers, like John T. Edge, Francis Lam and Jonathan Gold investigated culinary change in process.

     It is Bertelsen who stands accused of nostalgia for Merry Olde England! 

     

     

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.