A Love Affair With Southern Cooking_ Recipes and Recollections - Jean Anderson [128]
3½ dozen (about 1 pound) uniformly small mushrooms (no more than 1½ inches across)
1 cup finely chopped pecans
2 ounces (¼ cup firmly packed) cream cheese, at room temperature
¼ cup finely chopped parsley
2 tablespoons freshly grated Parmesan cheese
1 medium garlic clove, crushed
1 teaspoon finely minced fresh lemon thyme or ¼ teaspoon crumbled dried leaf thyme
½ teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon black pepper
1/3 cup half-and-half blended with ¼ cup heavy cream
1. Preheat the oven to 350° F. Remove the mushroom stems, wipe clean, chop fine, and reserve. Also wipe the mushroom caps clean and reserve.
2. Combine all remaining ingredients except the half-and-half mixture with the chopped mushroom stems, then pack firmly into the mushroom caps, mounding as needed.
3. Arrange the mushrooms one layer deep in an ungreased 13 × 9 × 2-inch baking pan, drizzle the half-and-half mixture over all, then cover the pan with aluminum foil.
4. Slide onto the middle oven rack and bake for 40 to 45 minutes or until the mushrooms are tender, basting once or twice with the cream in the pan.
5. Remove from the oven, baste once again with the cream, and serve hot as a vegetable. Or, if you prefer, cool to room temperature and serve as an hors d’oeuvre.
From the Radley chicken yard tall pecan trees shook their fruit into the schoolyard, but the nuts lay untouched by the children:
Radley pecans would kill you.
—HARPER LEE, TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD
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OKRA
A cousin of both cotton and hibiscus, okra is indigenous to Central Africa, probably to Ethiopia. Unfortunately no records exist to tell us exactly where it originated, no documents to note its arrival in Europe or Asia.
What is certain, however, is that okra arrived in the American South with the slave trade in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Some say New Orleans was the port of entry, even that the French—not the African slaves—introduced the finger-shaped pods still known there as gumbo or gombo.
I’m more inclined to believe culinary historian Karen Hess, who writes in The Carolina Rice Kitchen: The African Connection (1992): “Gumbo, or gombo… refers to the patois of the French-speaking Africans of the Diaspora, particularly in Louisiana and the French West Indies…”
Elsewhere in the South, particularly in the Lowcountry, where okra also appeared early on, it is called just that, its name, according to African expert Jessica B. Harris, an Anglicization of nkruma—the word for okra in Twi, a Ghanese dialect.
After all these years, okra has never become popular above the Mason-Dixon or west of Louisiana, perhaps because the truly tender, the truly fresh is rarely available. But down south in the Land of Okra, its popularity has never waned.
There would be no gumbos without okra (it’s used to thicken as well as to flavor), no Limpin’ Susan (an okra pilau), no crispy fried rounds dredged in cornmeal.
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OKRA PILAU
MAKES 6 SERVINGS
Often called “Limpin’ Susan,” this Lowcountry pilaf is best when made with fresh okra no bigger than your little finger. In researching the recipe, I was startled to discover that some people call red beans and rice “Limpin’ Susan,” also to note that Deep South cooks often add shrimp and tomatoes to this more familiar version. This old Lowcountry dish was created, I suspect, by a good plantation cook back when Carolina rice was king for she, better than anyone else, knew how to accentuate the crisp delicacy of okra and minimize the sliminess. She may have used chopped country ham in her pilau in place of bacon—by all means follow suit if you have it. Then use 2 tablespoons bacon drippings to cook the scallions and okra.
4 slices smoky bacon, cut crosswise into strips ½ inch wide
6 large scallions, trimmed and thinly sliced (include some green tops)
1 pound baby okra, stemmed and sliced