A Love Affair With Southern Cooking_ Recipes and Recollections - Jean Anderson [10]
Shrimp grow fat and sweet in warm southern waters and this way of preparing them dates back to the days when there was no refrigeration: The acid in the vinegar kept the shrimp from spoiling as fast as they otherwise would. Nowadays, pickled shrimp are a picnic and party staple. Note: Once drained, they keep well in the refrigerator for two to three days.
4 pounds large raw shrimp in the shell
6 quarts boiling water mixed with 1 tablespoon salt
6 large silverskin or small yellow onions, thinly sliced
24 whole allspice
24 peppercorns
30 whole cloves
6 large whole bay leaves
1 small lemon, thinly sliced
6 blades mace (optional)
6 cups cider vinegar mixed with 2 cups cold water
1. Cook the shrimp in the boiling salted water for 3 to 4 minutes or until bright pink. Drain, rinse in cool water, then shell and devein.
2. Layer the shrimp and onions in a 1-gallon glass jar, sprinkling with allspice, peppercorns, and cloves as you go and tucking in, here and there, the bay leaves, lemon slices, and, if desired, the blades of mace.
3. Pour in the vinegar mixture, cover, and refrigerate for 3 to 4 hours.
4. Drain the shrimp well, discard the bay leaves and whole spices, and serve cold as an hors d’oeuvre. Good, too, as a main course.
Through there came a smell of garlic and cloves and red peppers, a blast of hot cloud escaped from a cauldron they could see now on a stove…At Baba’s they were boiling shrimp.
—EUDORA WELTY, NO PLACE FOR YOU, MY LOVE
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TIME LINE: the people and events that shaped Southern Cuisine
1513
Ponce de León explores “the island” of Florida.
1514
The Spanish Crown empowers Ponce de León to colonize Florida.
1520
Spaniards explore the Gulf of Mexico shore as far west as Texas and the Atlantic coast as far north as the Carolinas.
1524
Florentine navigator Giovanni da Verrazano finds grapes growing in North Carolina’s Cape Fear Valley. “Many vines growing naturally there that without doubt would yield excellent wines,” he notes in his log.
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LANCE SNACK FOODS
First came roasted peanuts in packets just right for one (1913), then the Peanut Bar (1914), then peanut butter “sandwich crackers” (1916), then my favorite, Toastchee Crackers (1938), two little Cheddar crackers sandwiched together with peanut butter. We called them “cheese nabs.”
Like a lot of Southerners, I grew up on Lance snacks. But for years I never realized that they were made in Charlotte, some 150 miles west of my hometown of Raleigh. They still are.
It all began back in 1913 when Philip Lance, faced with a wind-fall of roasted peanuts, decided to sell them in single-serving packets. An innovative idea. Barely a year later, a GI from nearby Fort Greene gave Lance and his son-in-law and partner Salem Van Every a recipe for peanut brittle. They turned it into the Peanut Bar—a best-seller more than ninety years later.
The peanut butter sandwich cracker (another first) was created by Lance’s wife and daughter in 1916 and my beloved “cheese nab” came along twenty-two years later. Shortly after World War Two, Lance began supplying restaurants with individually wrapped packets of soda crackers and before long was dispensing them via vending machine as well. But mainly down south.
In 1996 Lance’s “cheese nabs” zoomed into orbit aboard the space shuttle Columbia. And the very next year Lance snacks (now a variety of cookies and cakes as well as the original peanuts, peanut bars, and sandwich crackers) vaulted out of the South and landed as far afield as Aruba, China, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, England, Jamaica, and Western Europe.
Hardly peanuts.
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SHRIMP RÉMOULADE ON FRIED GREEN TOMATOES
MAKES 6 SERVINGS
In downtown St. Francisville, Louisiana, there’s a slightly spooky Victorian house set in a grove of live oaks that’s both inn and restaurant. I didn’t stay at the St. Francisville Inn, but I did eat there more than once. The dish I remember most is this shrimp-and-fried-green-tomato appetizer. St. Francisville, by the way, may